Run Afoul Read online

  Wiki watched the procedure abstractedly, thinking about those letters M.R.C.S. Then he said, “Member of the Royal College of Surgeons?”

  “You can call me Dr. Olliver,” the other generously said.

  “You’re a surgeon with the fleet?”

  “I’m a naturalist, mostly with the plants.”

  “One of the scientifics?”

  “For my sins.”

  “Yet, judging by your accent, you are English.”

  “You are a very perceptive young man.”

  “I thought only Americans were allowed scientific positions with the fleet?” Wiki himself would never have been given the job of linguister if he had not been half Yankee.

  “When visiting friends in Washington, I happened to mention that I’d been helping Charles Darwin classify the specimens he brought to Cambridge from the Beagle exploring voyage, and the powers that be in the Navy Department couldn’t recruit me fast enough.”

  “You know Charles Darwin?” Wiki was impressed.

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Of course,” said Wiki, but then was distracted by the sight of the steward coming out of the pantry in the forward part of the dining room, carrying two plates and two mugs. He was a portly, middle-aged man, whose habitual expression of prissy sulkiness became evasive when he encountered Wiki’s incredulous stare.

  “My God—you!” said Wiki. The steward did not bother to answer. Instead, he slammed down the dishes and mugs and went away, leaving Wiki to contemplate his plate, which held a slice of cold, almost raw, salt pork, a weevilly ship’s biscuit, and a pile of half-baked beans. The coffee in the mug was boiled to black bitterness, and had a slimy scum on the top.

  The surgeon said with lively interest, “You know that man?”

  “It’s Jack Winter,” Wiki said moodily. “He was one of the eight sealers we rescued from Shark Island—their steward.”

  “If you rescued him from a place with a name like that, he ought to love you. But he don’t?”

  “He most certainly does not,” Wiki agreed, examining his meal with disgust. “And now it looks as if he’s trying to poison me off.”

  “He often threatens to poison off the rats—of which, as I must warn you, we have a biblical plague,” the surgeon said. “And as for the food, it is always that awful—it was revolting before he came, and remained horrible after he replaced our old steward. We wouldn’t even notice it if he added poison to the terrible mix—practiced on people before he moved on to rats, as it were.”

  “The food is always this bad?” Wiki was appalled.

  “Blame the navy. Each and every one of us has a weekly allowance of meat, bread, flour, and so forth, which the steward draws on Mondays. He stows them in his storeroom and pantry, where the rats sample them at their leisure.” The naturalist waved a meaty arm at a door alongside the pantry, presumably indicating the storeroom, and, as if on cue, three fat rats ran out from under the door, scuttled along the skirting, and disappeared under the dresser. “And out of that, three times a day, he prepares a dish, takes it to the foredeck galley to be cooked by the nasty old peg leg, and then dumps the result on the table and calls it a meal. It’s not pretty viewing, but it ain’t actually his fault. The coffee, however,” he added thoughtfully, “is entirely his responsibility.”

  “Dear God,” said Wiki. He was wondering if he would ever eat again.

  Then, with utter disbelief, he watched the fat surgeon attack the dreadful meal as if he expected to enjoy it, keeping his fork in his left hand and his knife in his right, and plying them with mincing movements, as neatly as a cat. Between forkfuls, he put down his knife, picked up his glass, and gulped wine—to take the taste out of his mouth, Wiki guessed.

  Then, as if struck by a sudden thought, Dr. Olliver looked up, and Wiki found himself the object of his bright scrutiny again. “How odd,” he mused aloud, “that there are things you should know that you don’t know, while at other times you demonstrate unexpected understanding.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I wouldn’t have expected a Kanaka to know about Charles Darwin.”

  “Why not?” Wiki queried. “People in South American ports have been gossiping about Darwin for the past five years, ever since he arrived on the Beagle to explore the coasts and hinterlands—he’s the stuff of myth and legend.”

  “Ports?” Dr. Olliver looked animated. “You’re a seaman?”

  “A whaleman—for my sins,” Wiki dryly replied.

  “Aha!” said Dr. Olliver, with even more enthusiasm. “You’ll find a kindred soul here—Captain Couthouy.”

  “He’s a whaleman?”

  “He commanded merchant vessels out of Boston, though I would strongly advise you not to call him ‘captain’ in Captain Wilkes’s hearing.” The surgeon stabbed a fat finger in the direction of a door sited next to the big chartroom, evidently indicating Wilkes’s cabin.

  “Why not?” said Wiki, more puzzled than ever.

  “Captain Wilkes gets emotionally upset when shipmasters more experienced than he happen to be in his vicinity.”

  “So what is Captain Couthouy doing here?”

  “He got the mad idea that he wanted to sign up with the Deplorable Expedition, shell-collecting being his passion—he informed President Jackson that he would ship before the mast, if necessary, which entertained Jackson so first rate that he shipped him on the spot as a scientific.”

  It didn’t surprise Wiki that a Boston shipmaster should be an avid collector of shells, exotic seashells in good condition being worth a pretty price in the right market, but Couthouy sounded interestingly eccentric. He said, “Where is he?”

  “Somewhere where he can keep clear of Wilkes, just the same as Wilkes is somewhere keeping clear of him.”

  “They don’t like each other?”

  “Wilkes don’t like civilian scientifics as a species—reckons that they will grab all the credit when the ships get home, relegating his officers to the subcategory of hewers of wood and drawers of water. However, he reserves a special antipathy for Couthouy—on account of the fact that Couthouy has accumulated a lot more sea time than he has. Wilkes wanted to eliminate the civilian corps completely, you know,” Dr. Olliver confided. “And he would have done it, too, if he could’ve located navy officers with the skills to take their places, but there ain’t even a common gardener to be found in the U.S. Navy. Not that a man on the breast of the stormy wave has the chance to develop much interest in gardening,” he added with a surprisingly womanish giggle.

  Wiki had sailed with quite a number of whaling skippers who, to all appearances, were more interested in their boxes of flower plants than in the set of the sails, but he didn’t comment, instead inquiring, “So what was your reason for agreeing to come along on the Deplorable Expedition? A passion for plants?”

  “A passion for curious phenomena, Mr. Coffin! And what could be more curious than an expedition founded on the premise that the world is hollow?”

  “What?”

  “Goodness gracious, you really don’t know much, do you? A few years back, a fellow named Symmes reckoned there were holes at the poles, and that the earth is habitable inside. If you could locate the holes, he said, you could sail into the bowels of the world—down a kind of waterfall, I suppose—and find a fertile paradise. A harmless fellow, quite amiable, they say. My grandfather was rather like that,” Dr. Olliver reminisced, contemplating his wineglass as he topped it up yet again. “He reckoned that the sun has a temperate climate—that it stood to reason that the sun is tepid at the surface, because most of its heat is dissipated in our direction. If we could only get to the sun, he said, we’d find it a capital place to live. He and Symmes of the hollow globe would have got along first-rate.”

  He took a few sips while Wiki watched him unseeingly, lost in a dreamlike vision of sailing to the top of the world, arriving at the North Pole, instructing the crew to brace up a bit, and then plunging into the center of the earth. When Dr.
Olliver picked up the decanter again, having reduced his wine to the halfway level, he finally said, “And people listened to this nonsense?”

  “People traveled for miles to listen to my grandfather’s crackpot theories abut the sun—and to John Cleves Symmes, as well. The latter staked his fortune on the premise that inside the earth there is a rich and tax-free land—warmed by volcanic fires, no doubt, though I do wonder how it is illuminated—and lots of people fell for it, including a newspaper editor by the name of Jeremiah N. Reynolds. Like Symmes, Reynolds thought that all that was needed for the United States to become a premier nation was to mount an expedition to locate one of those holes at the poles, only he reckoned that instead of going north, the ships should steer south to where the seals and whales roam.”

  “Ah,” said Wiki, beginning to grasp where this was heading. “So the administration took an interest?”

  “And Connecticut sealing interests, too.” Dr. Olliver, after taking another little swallow of wine, wobbled his chins in the direction of the pantry, and said, “Those sealers you rescued, were they steering in the direction of the Antarctic?”

  “Aye.”

  “Then that explains why they’ve been co-opted into the expedition.” Dr. Olliver paused, and when Wiki shut his sore eyes and cautiously revolved his shoulders, he remarked, “You don’t look too chirpy, young man.”

  “I’ve spent the past five days tumbling about the ocean in a thirty-foot cutter. We got here just today.”

  “Then you must be fearfully constipated. I’ll prescribe a draft.”

  “I’d rather get some sleep,” confessed Wiki, rising to his feet.

  He was foiled, however, because just as he was about to ask which room might be his, one of the doors on the other side of the corridor opened, revealing a formidable figure. Though he was not large in physique, the newcomer’s immense russet-colored beard fairly bristled with all the confidence of a shipmaster who expected his orders to be obeyed, by God, and so it was not hard to guess that this was Captain Couthouy.

  The room behind him was equally remarkable, being packed with boxes, chests, books, and scientific gear, stacked tightly above and below a cramped sleeping space, and held in position with a spiderweb of ropes lashed to cleats in the beams and the floor. A tiny table set by the head of the bed had still more paraphernalia stowed underneath, while racks holding specimens of coral and seaweed were bolted to the bulkhead above it. Dead birds swung from strings in the roof—very ripe dead birds. Wiki could smell them. Because of the dampness of the ship, he deduced, they had gone rotten instead of drying.

  The newcomer slammed himself into a chair, nodded briefly when introduced to Wiki, and remarked, “So you were one of those who were forced to come away from Shark Island in the cutter? That was a damn long passage, and you were bloody lucky to find us.”

  “We were very relieved to raise the ships,” Wiki admitted.

  “Well, it was a close-run thing,” Couthouy informed him. “Against my most strenuous advice, Wilkes gave instructions to make all haste for Rio, the Peacock being in such dire need of the attentions of a shipyard. We were smartly on our way when he changed his mind, and issued orders to retrace our steps.”

  “He’d remembered us?”

  “He’d realized we’d lost the Porpoise.”

  “What?”

  “One minute she was there, and the next she was not. We passed a large Dutch ship in the dark, and the theory is that the officer on watch mistook the Dutchman for us, and followed the wrong ship. The Peacock was sent on to Rio, but the rest of us are sitting here waiting for the Porpoise—and, incidentally, your cutter—to find us again.”

  “Is Captain Ringgold still in command of the Porpoise?”

  “That he is.”

  “Then he’s in for a reprimand.” Wiki felt sorry about that, because he liked Cadwallader Ringgold, who ran a taut, happy ship, and right now he felt a profound empathy for anyone who was likely to be the butt of Captain Wilkes’s overwrought tongue.

  Then Couthouy, having poured himself a mugful and taken a cautious sip, exclaimed, “This coffee is disgusting, almost as foul as the food. When is Wilkes going to fire that bastard of a cook who takes good grub and ruins it? By God, he wouldn’t have lasted a day on board any of my ships!”

  “I absolutely agree with you, Mr. Couthouy,” said Lieutenant Lawrence J. Smith with a smirk, as he trotted around the corner of the credenza into the saloon. He was flushed, and his tubby figure pushed out the front of his vest even more than Wiki remembered. “And so I have arranged to have him replaced. Good evening, Wiremu,” he added, using the Maori version of Wiki’s English name, William. It was meant to prove how cultured and knowledgeable he was, but instead Wiki found it highly irritating.

  Wiki didn’t bother to speak. Not only had Lawrence J. Smith told Captain Wilkes lies, which rankled, but he was the reason Wiki had been reassigned to the Vincennes. And as well as that, he had always deeply disliked the pompous little prawn.

  Captain Couthouy said hopefully, “Who is the chosen man?”

  Smith smiled, and said, “I’ve requisitioned the cook we rescued from the stricken sealer. Unfortunately, he was inadvertently left behind when the Flying Fish sailed, but now that Lieutenant Forsythe has brought him to the fleet—”

  Wiki interrupted with horror, “You can’t mean Robert Festin!”

  “Why not?” Dr. Olliver inquired with an air of interest.

  “He doesn’t even understand English!”

  “Why, where does he come from?”

  “We can only guess,” said Wiki. “All we could learn from the sealers was that when they shipped him in Rio de Janeiro he’d been suffering so much from the aftereffects of something like a knock on the head that it was a wonder he even remembered his name. Since then, we’ve learned very little more. He talks a weird mixture of antique French and Abnaki Indian, so the theory is that he hails from some remote village in Labrador that was forgotten when the British threw the Acadians out of the country.”

  “If so, he’s bound to be a fine seaman,” Captain Couthouy said. He had the knowledgeable air of a man who had shipped many sailors from the northern maritime regions in the past.

  Wiki shook his head with a private grin, remembering how Festin had been obstinately and constantly seasick, to the discomfort of them all, for the whole of the five-day passage in the cutter. Before he could speak, Dr. Olliver demanded, “So how the devil did he get to Rio?”

  “We haven’t the slightest idea.”

  “None of this matters,” Lieutenant Smith said crossly. “What does matter is that he’s a superb cook.”

  Dr. Olliver said to Wiki, “Is that right?”

  “Aye,” Wiki allowed grudgingly.

  Smith said reminiscently, “On the brig, I had the pleasure of being regaled with a particularly delicious steamed concoction of pastry and chicken.”

  “Pastry?” echoed Dr. Olliver. “Chicken? My God!” he exclaimed. “I don’t care if he talks Hottentot—let’s have this Robert Festin!”

  “Robert Festin?” cried Jack Winter, coming back into the saloon. “You don’t mean to say that Festin is being shifted to our galley?”

  “We’re assured he’s a master chef,” said Olliver.

  “But he’s under suspicion of murder!”

  Three

  Wiki was woken from a dead sleep the next morning by loud halloas from out on the deck. For a long moment he couldn’t work out where he was, save that he was in the upper berth of a double bunk, just as he would have been on board the brig Swallow. Obviously, this was not the brig, because his berth there had a bookcase full of favorite books, a lamp, and various other little luxuries that he had fixed up himself. However, thankfully, he was not on the jouncing, backbreaking cutter, because this ship was lying relatively still.

  Then he remembered the portly surgeon—Olliver—pointing out the door closest to the drafting room, and telling him that it was vacant, because the two draf
tsmen who had lived here had been banished to the Porpoise by Captain Wilkes, on account of the noise they made. “I believe some poor creature of an instrumentmaker from the Porpoise is removing here,” he’d said. “But in the meantime it’s all yours.”

  Wiki had requisitioned the upper berth, so that he would not have a foot in his face every time his unknown companion got in or out of bed. Now, he dropped lightly to the floor, having regained his natural agility sometime in the night, briskly dressed, and headed out to deck.

  When he arrived in the bright sunlight, it was to see the gun brig Porpoise bracing up off the stern of the Vincennes, white foam streaming off her bows, her men cheering from her yards as they took in sail. Even though she was still hauling aback, a boat was being hastily lowered with the captain and another man in the stern sheets. Wiki had to step aside hastily as a reception committee of marines scurried up to the gangway, to get there before the boat arrived, and deduced that Captain Ringgold was anxious to get the dreaded interview with Captain Wilkes over with as fast as humanly possible.

  No sooner had the marines shuffled themselves into a neat squad than to everyone’s confusion they found themselves inadvertently saluting a short, squat, swarthy-featured man who sidled off the ladder and over the gangway. A boat from the Swallow had arrived alongside, Wiki instantly deduced, because this was none other than Robert Festin, the Acadian cook with the shadowy past.

  First, the Acadian’s head appeared at the top of the ladder, then his bulky shoulders and torso, and finally his spindly little legs. He was not alone, as two massively muscular brown-skinned seamen arrived close behind—Sua and Tana, Wiki’s Samoan shipmates, one with Wiki’s sea chest on one brawny shoulder, and the other heaving along a basket of fish.

  “Kia ora e hoa ma,” Wiki exclaimed, striding around the squad of marines. Being Polynesian, and not pakeha or papalagi, he and Tana and Sua greeted each other with hugely enthusiastic hugs, instead of hammering each other meaninglessly about the arms and back. When Festin rushed forward and joined the fun by throwing himself into Wiki’s arms, it was rather disconcerting, however. Wiki already knew that the cook was the emotional type, but hadn’t expected him to be so obviously delighted about shifting onto the Vincennes. Then he suddenly realized the reason—that Festin was overjoyed at the prospect of being on the same ship as Lieutenant Forsythe, whom he adored, though the Virginian would have drowned the Acadian like a cur if he had suspected it.