Hook's Tale Read online

  I entered the barn to stow my knapsack before dining. Three of the four horse stalls were occupied, but the smallest one nearest the door was free, and I arranged the straw piled there into a comfortable bed. Suddenly, as I was pillowing the hay, I found myself pushed to the barn floor and the weight of another person pressing down on top of me.

  “Are you beggar or thief?” rasped a harsh voice. The owner’s breath was foul, and I wrinkled my nose in disgust.

  “Neither, sir,” I returned. “I’m a weary traveler who has no gold to buy a place to sleep. As a Christian I beg you, sir, allow me this small comfort.”

  Rough hands turned me over to lie on my back. His face was that of a pimply youth missing his lower front teeth. It hovered horribly but a few inches above mine.

  “No gold? What’s this then?” he asked, and his grubby fingers clutched at my mother’s locket, which I now wore around my neck. He brought it close to his eyes.

  “It belonged to my mother, who is dead. Please, sir, ’tis the only image I have of her.”

  “No it’s not,” said the pimple-faced footpad. “Cause now I have it.” He laughed as he yanked hard at the chain. For a moment I thought he would strangle me. Then the chain broke free from my neck.

  “Give it back!” I shouted and scrambled to retrieve it. He kneed me with malicious force. The pain took away my breath.

  “You’re welcome to sleep here, boy. Consider your room well paid for. Go into the inn and get my ma to feed you whatever slop she has for the pigs. Tell her Scroff sends you.” Smiling, he backed off as he pocketed the locket and chain. “And thank me while you’re at it. I’m a Christian too.” He laughed and stepped out into the night.

  * * *

  Once I regained my breath I entered the inn looking for something or someone on which to beat out my fury. A large blowsy woman stood behind the bar. She too was missing her lower front teeth, and I assumed she was Scroff’s ma. But before I could approach her and accuse her son of thievery, I was pounced on by a tall muscular man who handed me a pint and dragged me to a corner table. Undeniably voluble and friendly, he plopped a small plate of sausage and mash before me without my even asking. I needed to gain some strength before confronting Scroff or his ma, and so I devoured the meat and potatoes, thanking him with mouth stuffed, then quaffed the beer. As soon as one pint was empty, another full one was placed before me, and I (who had never allowed strong drink to pass my lips, and very little beer) drank my fill. This will give me courage, I remember thinking, and the next thing I knew I was tumbling face-forward onto the dinner plate and thence into darkness.

  Whether I lost consciousness because of my wounds, my starvation, or my inebriation, or because the beer was doctored with an opiate, matters little. I know only that I awoke in a ship’s hold, pressed into service by the tall muscular man (whose name was Starkey) and Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. A few other hapless young men from the inn were lying beside me, equally confused and groggy. I staggered to the top deck, where I instantly emptied the contents of my stomach overboard. No land was in sight.

  One piece of good fortune was that my pillowcase-knapsack had made it on board. Without it the tale that follows would be brief and woefully uneventful.

  Starkey soon hauled the rest of my kidnapped companions on deck, where he gently mocked us as a sad passel of “lost lads.” He would make men of us, he said, for we were now bound to serve the Queen for several years at sea, and he waved a piece of paper before us containing scrawled signatures that we were too ill to examine closely. I was the youngest of his “lads,” and was soon to celebrate my fourteenth birthday in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean without ceremony.

  The ship was dubbed Victoria Gloriosa, a three-masted noncombat vessel of the clipper variety. She was bound, in this time of peace, to the West Indies with a hold full of sundries and provisions to be exchanged for rum. Her captain was named Styles, a man for whom the word emotion was but an unhappy description of the weakness of others. The ship’s doctor was a Doctor Flynn, though the sailors referred to him as Doctor Gin, since that was his most oft-prescribed medication as well as his own drug of choice. He was overly fond, I was told, of amputation, and the sailors joked that his solution to the common cold was the removal of the sick man’s nose. It was Gin’s assistant, however, whom I came to know best, a soft round Irishman of uncertain age whose head was a billiard ball surrounded by soft fuzz and whose heart was equally soft and fuzzy. He resembled, I like to think, one of those rotund men of snow I occasionally built as a child in the Kensington Gardens, whose head was but an orb smaller than his middle, and whose middle was but a globe smaller than his hips. I no longer remember his given name; I only know him by the name I came to call him.

  I was tired and I was ill and I was dispirited, and so without a will to protest I bent to my seaman’s chores. They were slavey’s chores mostly, hauling and cleaning and serving and polishing. It was in my second week aboard, pointlessly scrubbing the deck in the middle of a soft winter’s snowfall (Starkey liked to keep us busy, even when there was little work to be done), that I collapsed with a fever. My forehead was beaded with sweat and my Eton wounds had festered, and when Doctor Gin had the pants off me and was examining the half-healed scars on my thighs, now red with infection, he loudly declared that the best way to treat them was to have both my legs off at once. I protested and struggled, but I was weak in limb and half-delirious with fever, and he had the bottle of gin to my lips and as much of its contents as he could manage down my throat before I could escape. I saw him sharpening his flensing knife as I passed into sleep.

  When I drifted back to consciousness, I expected to find myself but half a boy. My legs, however, were still attached, and a soft hand pressed itself to my forehead. “Rest, boy, rest” came a gentle voice. My sight was blurred, and when I asked who it was who spoke, I heard only the words “It’s me” in a soft Irish brogue.

  When I opened my eyes again, hours or days later, he was still standing over me, his billiard ball of a head atop his round middle and hips. “It’s me,” he said again, and from that day onward I called him what I thought he called himself: Smee.

  Smee had saved my legs, and most likely my life. He had distracted Doctor Gin by plying the thirsty fellow with the very medication with which I had been doused. Soon Gin was snoring away, and Smee spread a disinfectant of his own concoction on my wounds. When the doctor awoke and staggered to his feet, Smee declared that I had taken a miraculous turn for the better, thanks to the good doctor’s timely ministrations. Gin shrugged and returned to his bed.

  I never learned the composition of Smee’s medication. It had something of fish in it, and something of plant oil, and something of his “dear granny’s secret solution for suppurating pustules.” I healed at last and took my place once again under Starkey, with this difference: I now had a friend. Indeed, when I told Smee of my naval ancestry, he forever after jokingly called me Cap’n.

  One Sunday morning, when we had been over a month at sea, I lay in my cot with a few moments of time to myself. Styles was a religious man (as long as any religious expression had nothing of emotion in it), and we were allowed a few hours of our own to Keep Holy the Lord’s Day unless there were something to be done on the Lord’s Day that would prove advantageous to Her Majesty’s Commerce. Sitting on the edge of my cot, I realized that it was my fourteenth birthday. I blinked back tears as I remembered my mother and her terrible end. I regretted the loss of the locket more than ever. Fortunately I still kept the wedding ring, for I’d had the foresight, before absconding from Eton, to sew it into the cuff of my trousers. I felt for it now and thought of the words Eternal Love inscribed within its circle. It was still in its hiding place, and the relief I felt turned my mind to pleasanter things. I reached into my knapsack and pulled out my father’s History. Perhaps some moisture from the sea air had penetrated the binding, because I noticed for the first time a thickening beneath the front cover’s leather. One corner of the frontispie
ce had loosened, and, peeling it away, I discovered a scrap of sailcloth hidden beneath.

  It was a map of the Western Atlantic. The island of Bermuda was marked, and to the southwest of the island stood a crimson X, followed by the designation N 31° 44' 48" W 67° 3' 37" and a crudely drawn creature that resembled a dragon. An unmarked island? I wondered. A treasure?

  Beneath the map was scribbled a phrase in Latin. My Eton schooling helped but little in its translation. The word star was there, and I half-recognized a word that I took to mean “lesser.” The rest of the phrase remained a mystery.

  Whatever else it was, the map and its contents seemed to be some kind of message from my late father, a birthday gift as I entered my early maturity. But being fourteen and still quite young, and not knowing to whom I could turn for advice, I turned to Smee. The man is all kindness, true, but as an intellect he has a long way to travel. When I showed him the map, he suggested I share it with the captain, for if this was indeed a treasure map, the only way to take our ship to the marked latitude and longitude was through his orders. So I gathered my courage, and that evening after dinner I nervously knocked at the captain’s cabin door. He bid me enter. I stuttered when he demanded the reason for my visit, until finally I held out the map and explained its source. He looked at it and laughed.

  “You’re a fool, boy,” he said. “The ocean is deep there, with no land in sight. If a treasure is sunk in that spot, it is too far beneath the waves for any man to retrieve it.” I asked him kindly for a translation of the Latin phrase. He studied it, looked up a word, and said that it referred to a “lesser star to starboard,” which was pure nonsense. He laughed again and sent me away.

  I reported this to Smee, who could not stop dreaming of the treasure. “He may be wrong,” he said of the captain. “Nay, he must be wrong. I have an idea.” He told me nothing more but that he had to “ruminate.” I should have known better than to trust Smee’s “ideas” and “rumination,” but the man had saved my legs and life, and so I let him be.

  One night within the week I was shaken awake by Starkey. “Give it here, lad,” he ordered, meaning the map. Smee had told him of my discovery. Had I known where this request would lead, I would not have handed it over. I would have told him I had tossed it overboard, or had dreamed it in a fevered sleep. But instead I showed him the document, and as he perused it I saw the greed a-glimmer in his eyes and I knew I had made a grave error.

  Sweet as sugared molasses, he begged leave to borrow the map for a short while. I nodded—what else could I do?—and he thanked me. It was two days later that the mutiny took place, and my destiny changed forever.

  A handful of seamen, led by Starkey and armed to the teeth (I later learned), burst into the captain’s cabin at midnight. Styles was hauled to the top deck in his nightshirt, after which the entire crew (myself among them) was roused. There Starkey declared himself captain, explaining that this change of command was due to a certain treasure he had learned of, a treasure that Captain Styles meant to keep to himself rather than share with any aboard. All who sided with himself, Starkey announced, would share equally in that treasure, which would prove without question to be unsurpassed in the history of treasures. Those who sided with Styles would meet a fishy end. Naturally the majority of seamen agreed to join with Starkey, whether from avarice or from fear I do not know. Because I was young, I agreed too.

  Those who were loyal to the captain voiced their protest, and Starkey and his band turned on them with horrid results. Swords were drawn, blood was spilled, and the sharks of the Western Atlantic were well fed that night. Styles himself was forced to walk a narrow plank and, when he refused to leap of his own volition, was shot in the back. He fell to the water below, shouting, “D—n ye for being such a—” His curse remained unfinished when he struck the waves.

  We set sail directly for the coordinates marked on the treasure map, and Smee—who was handy with needle and thread—sewed us a new flag to replace the Queen’s colors. This flag was black with a human skull stitched in white. Such a flag had not been flown for many decades, but the Victoria Gloriosa—now redubbed the Roger (after Roger Starkey)—flew it once again.

  We reached the map’s coordinates within two and a half days, for the wind was with us. Styles was right. There was no island, no treasure, nothing but a fierce storm descending quickly from the west. We too were bound for our graves, I feared, for the gale attacked like a pride of hungry lions. It tore the sails from the masts, being wilder than any storm I have experienced since, and for a time I believed that Styles’s curse—whatever it might have been—was coming true. Several men were lost. Nearly all turned to prayer. When night descended we could not determine: the hurricane was so fierce it was as if a black cloud had enveloped us, making “day” and “night” immaterial. Then quite suddenly it stopped. We had entered the hurricane’s eye, Smee said, adding, “ ’Tis but a false respite, Cap’n, before Death deals its final blow.” But the respite continued, and when the sun rose we found ourselves in a calm sea with a palm-covered island off to port. The weather was warm. Nothing seemed familiar.

  The Latin phrase on my father’s map, I later learned, was more accurately translated as “second star to the right.” Those of you familiar with my enemy’s tale know its meaning.

  Chapter Two

  My enemy. I refuse to write his name, though it is a name well known, oft-illuminated by the gaudy lights of money-raking theatrical houses, where it is exploited for glamour and gain. Wherever his name is lauded mine is hissed. We are forever linked. The same audiences who pretend to save a supercilious fairy’s life by applause either laugh at me as a piratical clown or sneer at me as the Devil Incarnate. Children cast the least popular child to play me in the nursery, while their professional counterparts hire histrionic overachievers to portray me. Heavens, what villainy! And all because of a lying tale told by a dour Scotsman that casts him as Hero and me as the Dastardly Villain who would stop at nothing to see him dead.

  Well, perhaps at one time I would, but it’s his own d—mnable fault. I loved him as a brother once. But I race ahead of my tale.

  I promise you this, dear reader: I will not lie about him as he (and his biographer) did of me. Allow me to name but a few of these slanders, if only to defuse my wrath before I continue with my story.

  I will begin with my name. It is Cook, it has always been Cook, I was christened Cook, confirmed Cook, and Cook I shall remain. The Scotsman says so himself in his description of me: “Hook was not his true name.” But because of the wicked attack that maimed me for life, I will be forever called by that other name, as Doctor Flynn became Gin, as Headmaster Carlyle became Old Carlyle: a joke, a simple rhyme, a reference to an unfortunate physical burden. Potential publishers, I’ve been warned, may insist on naming this history with the very nickname I despise (possibly using the word pirate, which I never was, somewhere in the book’s description), because “it will sell better, old man, and you can gripe about it all the way to the bloody bank.”

  And for some inexplicable reason, possibly having to do with the undeniably pompous actor who first portrayed me professionally, I will always be depicted as bearing an unfortunate likeness to King Charles II. Frilly shirts, long curly hair, high-heeled pumps (ye gods!) are my affected wardrobe in all depictions of the Pirate Moi, though I have never dressed as such in my entire life. True, my hair is black and has grown to some length, but I do not curl it. Nor do I sport a beauty mark on my cheek (or anywhere else for that matter, although my eyes are indeed a lovely periwinkle blue). I have (sadly, but for the eyes) nothing beautiful about me; my face is ordinary, and my costume consists of ordinary seaman’s garb perfumed with an ordinary seaman’s fishy smell. I have (to my inestimable sorrow) exchanged expressions of sincere devotion with only four women in my life thus far (the first one being my mother), a list that doesn’t begin to compare with the notorious harem of King Charles. I bear neither undue admiration nor disapproval toward that Good Sovereign
, but I am not him! Though I do like a dash of color on certain celebratory occasions.

  Nor was I (I’ve said it before and say it once more) “Blackbeard’s bo’sun,” as the Scotsman claims. Another lie! That pirate’s morals were beneath contempt; besides, he lived a century and a half before me.

  And as for that duplicitous fairy, not to mention sweet Tiger Lily—bah! In time, my good readers, all will become clear. Until then, permit me to return to the predicament in which Cabin Boy Cook found himself at the end of the terrible storm.

  * * *

  Those of you familiar with my enemy’s account already may have made an educated guess as to the identity of the sunny island burning less than a mile to the Roger’s port side, but you would be wrong. It was but one of a dozen islands in this tropical archipelago, the largest of which you know as Neverland (there—I’ve said it!), a fanciful title that makes absolutely no sense once one has set foot on that very real oasis. No, Neverland has mountains and jungles and wild animals, while this isle was flat and sandy and sported but a few palms to shade it from the burning sun. We called it Long Tom, after the sailor among us who first hailed it. It was, I suppose, relatively Long, but had nothing Tom-ish about it.

  By midmorning, a boat was launched to explore the island. Volunteers were requested, and I readily raised my hand. Four of us were lowered in the ship’s longboat, and we began to row vigorously.

  My heart leapt at the possibility that here was the treasure my father’s map had promised. As we neared, I, positioned at the rudder and thus facing the island, believed I saw a marker of some sort. Could the spot be so obvious? As soon as we four waded ashore I identified, sticking out of the hot sand near the base of an extremely tall palm tree, the handles of two shovels marking (I hoped) the treasure’s grave. I raced toward it, followed eagerly by the other three. Long Tom (being one of them) nearly outdistanced me, for his legs defined his name, but my excited enthusiasm gave me the energy to pull ahead, and it was myself who tripped over the human leg bone lying semiconcealed in the dunes.