The Stolen Lake Read Online Free PDF Page A

excellent, if it is well mixed—on shore, I must tell you, we combine it with a little orock—cane spirit, you know! Then, if at the same time you smoke a pipe or two of abaca—hangman's weed, that is—why, you could believe yourself a veritable pasha. I believe even the White Queen herself—"
    Then the captain's door was shut, and the two voices died to a murmur.
    "Jemima!" said Dido. "What a havey-cavey cove. He looks as if he'd sell his own ma for cats' meat. Don't you think so, Mr. Holy?"
    "Very likely his life is a lonely one," said Mr. Holystone guardedly. "The port of Tenby is a small place, cut off by a great forest from the interior, and the capital."
    "What's the forest called?"
    "Broceliande."
    "So how do we get through? If we're going to Bath to see the queen?"
    "By boat. Tenby lies at the mouth of a great river, the Severn. It is the captain's intention to hire a boat and travel by water."
    Dido was rather disappointed. Having been at sea for most of the last eighteen months, she had hoped for a spell on land. But Mr. Holystone assured her that there would be plenty of that. Halfway along its course the Severn River was interrupted by a formidable series of cataracts dashing down from the Andes Mountains in the west of New Cumbria; these falls were not navigable, and so the party must take to land at that point.
    The captain's bell rang, and Mr. Holystone went off to remove the bowls of mussel shells and replace them with fresh mutton and hearts of palm, brought out from shore in the pinnace. Dido, busy decorating a chocolate cake with babassu nuts, judged from the voices coming through the door that Mr. Brandywinde was becoming garrulous from drink and the unaccustomed company.
    "You ask what the queen is like? The White Queen? My dear sir, she's rum. Rum as they come. How do you do, sir, what's your game? Rum, Rum, Rumplestiltskin is my name," he caroled. "The White Queen, they call her. Because of her hair, you know. Et cetera, et cetera. Sits at her embroidery all day long. Says she's waiting. Waiting for what? you ask. And may well ask! But as to that, mum's the word. Both rum and mum. Her Royal Mercy ain't confidential."
    "If the queen is so unapproachable," persisted Captain Hughes, "does she have reliable ministers, advisers round her, to whom one may apply?"
    "Oh, ay, there are some villainous-looking old scalawags with beards down to their shins—the vicar general, the grand inquisitor, the accuser, the advocate of the queen's tribunal—each more slippery than the next, if you ask me. Besides them there is the queen's jester—or soothsayer, if you prefer the term—"
    "
Soothsayer?
What is
he?
" demanded the captain in a tone of disgust.
    But before Dido could catch the answer, Mr. Holystone emerged with a trayload of plates, and the door was closed.
    During the rest of dinner it remained shut, and no more of Mr. Brandywinde's disclosures could be heard. Dido—who had finished decorating the cake—was told to run up on deck and take the air. "For," said Mr. Holystone, "you have done more to help me than is fitting, though indeed I am very much obliged."
    "Oh, pho!" retorted Dido. "You know your conversation's always an eddication, Mr. Holy. I'm a-learning all the time I'm a-helping you. Deportment and manners too!"
    She put out her tongue at him teasingly and skipped out on deck with a small cake, which he had baked for her in a separate pan.
    Dusk had fallen by now, and large southern stars were beginning to twinkle out in the deep blue above the
Thrush,
though the Cumbrian coast and the snow-covered western peaks were still outlined against a sky of pale phosphorescent green.
    Earlier that evening Dido had, without asking permission, removed from the captain's cabin an exceedingly powerful telescope, which was one of his most valued possessions, for when carefully focused it had the power to render clearly visible objects which might be fifty or even a hundred miles off.
    "
He
ain't about to