The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics Read online

  ‘Paedocracy, phengophobia, philately . . .’ Mary ticked off the subjects as they went. ‘Ah, here we are: two oh four . . . ooh! It’s the philosophy section.’

  She darted forward, running her finger along the shelves.

  ‘Two oh four one oh four . . . Here it is!’ She pulled out a large book, and coughed as a cloud of dust billowed up from the cracked old binding.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mary, peering at it. ‘That’s not really what I was expecting at all.’

  There, picked out in fancy gold lettering, was the title:

  The Complete Works of Plato

  ‘A-ha. Plato,’ said the Captain knowledgeably. ‘He’s the one who thinks reality is somebody making dinosaur shadows on the wall of a cave, isn’t he? Or is he the one who’s always jumping out of baths because he’s trodden on a corkscrew? I get muddled.’

  ‘He’s the dinosaur-shadows-in-a-cave one,’ said Mary.24

  The Captain gave the book a shake, hoping that a treasure map would fall out, or maybe a really nice bookmark. He didn’t think a bookmark would really count as ‘the key to every heart’s desire’ but sometimes in life you have to take what you can get.

  ‘Hang on a second,’ said Mary, grabbing the book back, and flicking to near the middle. ‘Look here! There’s a whole chunk missing!’

  ‘Probably weevils. We get them on the boat and they’re hungry little devils. If you leave a plate of ship’s biscuits out and so much as turn your back, they’re gone in ten minutes flat. Apart from ship’s pink wafers. The weevils aren’t so keen on those.’

  ‘I don’t think this is the work of weevils. Someone has got here before us! Do you think it can have been the shadowy figure?’

  ‘Not very likely,’ said the Pirate Captain, eyeing the book carefully. ‘You see, one perk of my frankly poor domestic regime is that I’m a bit of an expert at dust accumulation rates. And I should say this book hasn’t been touched for at least a hundred years.’

  Mary scratched her ear thoughtfully. The Captain realised that even her ears were attractive. Usually ears freaked him out a bit, because of the way they went all the way to your brain, but he could imagine spending a lot of happy evenings staring at Mary’s ears without any difficulty at all.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she sighed, at a loss. ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘I’m afraid the trail has gone cold,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘In my books, this is a point where the hero thinks that the adventure is over and they’d better give up and go back to architecting or catching rats, depending on which day job I’ve chosen for him. It’s what I call a moment of crisis.’

  ‘We don’t really have day jobs in the Romantics,’ said Mary. ‘And your job is having adventures.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘When the trail goes cold I always have a character walk into the room and shout the next clue. So, given that art imitates life, I suspect we just need to wait.’

  Mary and the Captain waited. Mary started to hum a little tune, and the Captain did his best to will another strand of her hair to come loose, so he could try his brushing-it-back-into-place trick again, but nothing seemed forthcoming. They waited some more.

  ‘On the other hand,’ said the Captain eventually. ‘Sometimes my books do just sort of stop in the middle.’

  ‘. . . So then we returned here and I ate this bacon,’ said the Pirate Captain, finishing off his story and his bacon. They were back aboard the pirate boat, and everybody was sat round the kitchen table listening to the Captain’s account of his and Mary’s trip to the library. Obviously he’d left out the stuff about Mary’s secret love of monsters, and the business with his hand turning to jelly.

  ‘What was a dinosaur doing loose in the Bodleian?’ asked Babbage.

  Though he had also added a few extra bits to make it more exciting.

  ‘Never mind about the dinosaur,’ said Mary. ‘Take a look at this!’

  She plonked the book down on the table and flicked to the contents page. Shelley and Byron stared at where she was pointing for a moment and then gasped in unison.

  ‘Keats’s teeth!’ said Byron.

  ‘But – it can’t be! Can it? I thought it was a myth!’ said Shelley.

  ‘Apparently not!’ said Mary.

  ‘You’ll have to enlighten the crew I’m afraid,’ said the Pirate Captain, not seeing anything very obviously remarkable about the contents page. ‘Some of the lads aren’t quite as worldly as the rest of us. Hard to get them to concentrate on philosophical subjects, because it doesn’t really suit the piratical personality type.’

  Mary jabbed at the title of the missing bit of book. ‘ “On Feelings”!’ she said. The pirates went on looking blank-faced.

  ‘It has always been said that Plato once wrote a great, lost Socratic dialogue. The legendary “On Feelings”,’ said Shelley, taking up the story. ‘Plato’s subject was the nature of love itself. Supposedly his uncanny treatise unlocked the very mysteries of the human heart to any who read it.’

  ‘Some even say,’ said Byron, hunching forward over the table, ‘that Plato had discovered a way of impressing a lady so much, that once you knew his secret there wouldn’t be a single girl who could resist you, no matter how set in opposition to the idea her heart might at first be.’

  The Captain’s eyes widened. Though ‘heightened’ might be a better term, because actually their width remained pretty static. ‘You mean to say . . .’

  ‘Yes!’ roared Byron. ‘It was said to turn any dating situation into the legendary Sure Thing.’

  ‘Neptune’s biscuits,’ said the Pirate Captain, trying to take it all in. He slumped back in his chair, a bit overwhelmed. The pirate with a scarf fanned him with his hat. ‘Could it be possible?’

  ‘Nobody has ever been able to find out! The only copy of “On Feelings” was supposedly destroyed back when the Library of Alexandria burned down in 391 AD. But there have been all sorts of stories about it since then. Translations popping up here and there over the millennia, only to vanish again. Accounts of scandalised monks trying to conceal the potent secret contained within. All that kind of stuff.’

  Shelley paced feverishly up and down the length of the cabin.

  ‘Oh! This is so frustrating! I feel like a caged animal!’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the Captain. ‘Though not a wolf or a bear or anything like that. I’d say you were more of a wan dormouse.’

  Shelley punched his own palm. ‘To think that we’re on the brink of such a discovery, yet here I am, trapped on this confounded boat because I’m too much of a threat to the Establishment.’

  ‘Also, don’t forget that someone tried to kill your girlfriend. You don’t seem particularly concerned about that,’ said Jennifer. She mouthed a word that Victorian women aren’t supposed to know.

  ‘Of course. Thanks for saving her life and everything, Pirate Captain. Very noble of you.’ Shelley put an arm around Mary. ‘Anyhow! My mind is made up! It’s time Percy Shelley turned his full searing intellect to the matter. I shall plunge my head directly into the lion’s maw!’

  ‘The ship’s lion wandered off last February,’ said the pirate with gout, apologetic.

  ‘According to this,’ Shelley continued, indicating where a list of names was pasted into the front cover of the book, ‘the last person to borrow the book, some hundred and fifty years ago – was an undergraduate at my old College. Perhaps that might give us a lead. I shall steal in there, and find out what I can.’

  Mary started to put on her coat, but Percy held up an imperious hand.

  ‘No, Mary. I welcome your eagerness, but there are some things a man must do alone.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘A few lines about a woman’s “pale and anxious brow” aren’t much use against a bookshelf-wielding maniac.’

  ‘True, Pirate Captain, but I’m simply too idealistic to let danger get in the way of our prize. Now, I will be requiring some sort of disguise. Ideally something in green, to g
o with my skin tone.’

  The Pirate Captain stroked his beard and crossed over to the dressing-up box.

  ‘Well, let’s see what we’ve got. Tourist? No, bit obvious.’

  ‘Wealthy benefactor?’ suggested the pirate with a scarf.

  ‘Visiting matador?’ said the pirate in red.

  ‘Polar explorer?’ said the pirate who didn’t really listen to conversations but couldn’t resist contributing anyway.

  ‘Here we go,’ said the Pirate Captain. He pulled out a set of dirty overalls and a long hooked pole. ‘Drain Technician! Wear these, stick your arms down a few drains and nobody will look twice at you.’

  Ten

  The Haunted Teeth

  While Shelley was gone, everybody else decided to check out the shops and museums of Oxford. They all agreed that although the Ashmolean had a nice display of Etruscan forks, the Pitt Rivers was the best museum by far, mainly because of the shrunken heads. After their trip they stopped off at a little café in Jericho. There was quite an academic air to the party now, because most of the pirate crew had bought themselves university scarves and mortar boards, and the pirate with a hook for a hand even sported a gown that identified him as a Dean of Divinity. Everybody drank their coffee and had an intellectual discourse about what the best way to shrink a head would actually be. Byron thought the best way to shrink a head would be to use some sort of Egyptian curse. The pirate with gout thought you could probably do it by soaking the head in vinegar and then leaving it out in the sun for a while, like a conker. And Babbage thought you should either use a macaque’s head in the first place, or simply remove the skull and then bury the skin in hot sand, because he was the only one who had bothered to read the museum’s information card. Before anybody could test their various theories out on one of the cabin boys, the tinkling of the café’s bell and a sudden strong smell of drains alerted them to Shelley’s return.

  ‘Hello, Percy,’ said Byron. ‘Any joy?’

  Shelley sat down, unbuttoned his overalls, did a little flourish with his hand, and pulled a winsome face. ‘Some say there spirits of the air swoop unseen / Amongst humanity’s fever’d press to learn.’

  ‘Ye gods. Spare us the verse,’ said Babbage, looking at his pocket watch.

  Shelley’s face went from winsome to cross.

  ‘Sorry. I forgot we’ve got a philistine in the room who, instead of a heart has a chimney belching logic to an uncaring sky! Fine. It was only an introductory passage anyway. But all right: I will confine myself to the bare facts.’

  Shelley’s Account

  There are times when it behoves a man to look back on his youth, to revisit the wending path that led to his current station. This was such a time! Please note, I shall occasionally employ the myth of Orpheus to illustrate my passage into the academic underworld. I realise that you pirates may not be familiar with the classics, so I’ve brought along some copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Share if there aren’t enough to go around. No, there aren’t any pictures. Yes, it’s in Latin. What? You can’t read Ovid in translation! Well, just listen then.

  As I stood on the threshold of my alma mater, I gazed through the portal of ancient Oxford stone and saw reflected back the very depths of my soul. Some of you may have dismissed me as the theoretical, intellectual type who shies away from direct action. You would be mistaken. I am more than capable of launching myself into vigorous gestures. Oft are the occasions when passions must triumph to galvanise the spirit. Yes indeed! ‘Shelley’s a man who knows what needs doing and when,’ they’ll say, ‘I swear he’s a human spark. How we got him wrong!’

  As I contemplated my inherent dynamism for a short while, several urchins loitering near the college threshold made chicken movements with their arms, for reasons I could not fathom, perhaps some childish craze. I readied a withering retort, but fortunately for the urchins, a passing pie seller jostled me with his cart and I fell sprawling into the college. A lucky escape for them. I was in!

  When Orpheus entered the Underworld, he faced Cerberus the triple-headed hound. No less fearsome was the countenance that manifested itself now. While I was confronted with two fewer heads and it was built with more emphasis on ‘whey-faced undergraduate’ than ‘fearsome canine’, here too was a barrier every bit the equal of a mythical dog. Despite a welcoming smile this hellish guardian wore the invisible cloak of hegemony and a shiny badge with the college name written upon it. He told me it was two pennies to get in and for an extra penny I could have a brief history of the college in leaflet form. There were other offers. I am not a man who is easily shaken, but this approach disarmed me. I quite forgot my adopted profession of drainage technician and soon found myself ambling into the sunlit quadrangle clutching a ticket, a leaflet, and a voucher for a penny off at Benny’s Chop House on the High Street. Though this had not been my plan, I congratulated myself, and wondered how my Cerberus might feel to know that he had just allowed a dangerous radical into college.

  Pardon? The voucher? Yes, you can have it. No, there isn’t a menu. I don’t know, presumably chops? No, I don’t know what kind of chops. Cow chops? There’s no such thing. Can we hold questions until the end? Thank you.

  Where was I? Ah yes! The quadrangle. It was just as I remembered. Shafts of bright sunlight, Mother Nature’s lifeblood, illuminated motes of scholarly dust. When the younger Shelley took these same tentative steps, he expected to acquaint himself with like-minded souls. ‘Let us gather in these places to talk of philosophy,’ he had thought. ‘Let us speak of a new humanity.’ But what did he find? Timid curates-in-waiting, desiccated scholars, mindless milksops and brainless rowers who would rather mock a man’s perfectly elegant new trousers than overturn a bankrupt culture. But I had infiltrated my way in! Who’s the ‘pale idiot’ now? ‘Shows little promise’ eh, Professor Gilliard?

  My reverie was interrupted. ‘Hoy! We don’t want the likes of you in here!’ barked an uncouth Oxford accent. ‘Clear out!’

  A porter! He prodded me with a stick.

  Here was my second obstacle – my River Styx. Page forty-two. This required cunning and guile. I transformed my countenance, adopted a menial expression that does not come naturally to me and eyed a nearby drain.

  ‘Good morrow. I am but a humble drain cleaner with the filth of civilisation foremost in my mind. Behold my rude attire! Savour, if you will, my drainy aroma. Think of me as an uneducated Heracles, tasked with clearing the Augean stables.’ Then I turned the full force of my cunning to bear. ‘My assignment? To cleanse the drains ’neath the college records, preferably those that date back to the seventeenth century. Guvnor.’

  The rubicund visage scrutinised me for a moment, then split asunder into a broad grin.

  ‘Master Shelley! Why, we haven’t seen you in years! I was saying only this morning to Bert, I was saying “we haven’t seen Master Shelley in some time, have we?” I did used to enjoy his company. Always a good boy, I said. Never any trouble.’ He looked at my outfit. ‘Is it Rag Week already? Very good costume.’

  Disaster! My innate air of cultivation, so impossible as it is to conceal, combined with the Captain’s frankly shoddy disguise – that would be hard pressed to bamboozle a sea-cucumber – risked all. My thoughts were like quicksilver. ‘Master Shelley? Be he the poet on everyone’s lips? I hear his views are too shocking by half.’

  The impudent porter reached out and tweaked my cheek. ‘Bless you! That’s what you were always saying! Look at your little face, you haven’t aged a day! Why, I’ll bet you still don’t need to shave.’

  I only tell you this to emphasise his idiocy. Whether a man needs to shave or not is neither here nor there. Some men are just naturally less hirsute. The ancient Assyrians recognised it as a sign of advanced thinking, I’m informed. I make no comment.

  ‘Be told, man! I am but a simple drain cleaner.’

  I received a stagey wink in return. ‘Right you are, Master Shelley. Now, you said something about the college records? You’ll be want
ing the College Secretary’s office, through there and up the second staircase. Oh it is nice to see you.’

  Rising like a tiger, I stole across to the staircase and crept upwards with a rough-and-ready working-class tread. Upon entering the College Secretary’s office, I bowed and waved my drain-cleaning stick.

  ‘Drain technician!’

  ‘Master Shelley!’ said the College Secretary. ‘I thought you left us after that misunderstanding with the pamphlet? No matter. Have you returned? How lovely! Is it Rag Week already?’

  Here was my Hades! Like Orpheus confronting the Lord of the Underworld, I dropped all artifice and fixed him with a look that said I was not a fellow who would take any nonsense.

  ‘How can I help you? It’s always nice to see one of our alumni returning. You probably realise that at this time the college is suffering from something of a shortage of funds. We’ve had to stop serving pheasant for breakfast to the undergraduates altogether. Just five groats a month could ensure a law student receives fresh plover’s eggs delivered to his rooms every morning.’

  I bargained with him and, by means which I shall not disclose, extracted the following eerie tale. I will now attempt to impersonate his voice.

  The College Secretary’s Account

  It was many centuries ago, a dark time of tights and unflattering haircuts. One Count Ruthven came up to the college during a thunderstorm. He was unremarkable, didn’t mingle much, spent rather more time in the library than one would expect from a student. Then after a term, something changed. He became a seducer! It is said that he impregnated half the city’s young women within the week. Naturally the University authorities couldn’t stand for that sort of behaviour, and he was sent down forthwith.

  Yes, he did sound that ‘growly’. No, he wasn’t Geordie. Nor Welsh. Fine, so I can’t really do accents. It’s not a talent I envy in others. Can I carry on? Good.