A Ruined Brocade Waistcoat

Dying dramatically on stage was standard practice for Tenor Pálffy, but he usually managed to stand back up for his curtain call instead of bleeding all over my Lyon silk brocade.

The moment his chest took a spray of genuine naval grape-shot instead of dried lavender petals, my quiet Sunday afternoon dissolved into sulfur smoke and ruined tailoring.

I stood four paces off in the prompt corner of the Kócsag, wedged between a stack of pine flats and the starboard fly-capstan. Through the slit in the green baize curtain, I had been watching Pálffy murder the final cadenza of The Corsair's Dowry. His arms were flung wide, presenting a silhouette of magnificent vanity to the three dozen privateers crowded onto the lower gun-deck benches. He was forty-two years old, built like a well-fed hog in a powdered peruke, and wearing twenty-four mother-of-pearl buttons that I had sewn on with double-waxed linen thread only three hours before the overture.

The libretto called for his treacherous quartermaster to level the brass blunderbuss, pull the lanyard, and fire a pinch of blank priming powder wadded with crushed flower heads. Pálffy was supposed to clutch his breast, spin twice on his Cuban heels, and deliver seven lingering bars about unrequited love and coastal tides before collapsing onto a horsehair mattress.

Instead, the brass barrel belched orange fire and four ounces of jagged iron scrap.

The concussion shook the deck timbers under my slippers. Canvas scenery tore with the shriek of ripping sailcloth. Ten yards of painted Venetian harbor went down in shredded tatters as the iron slugs chewed through hemp battens and pine battens alike. Pálffy did not manage his seven bars. He gave one sharp, wet grunt, his chest caving inward under a wet blot of dark crimson, and crashed face-down across the proscenium footlights.

Two oil lamps shattered. Whale oil caught on the dry spruce planking, licking up toward the drop curtain in quick blue tongues.

From the benches below, three dozen privateers leaped to their feet with a roar of confusion and drawn cutlasses. From the backstage wings, Gizella Nyáry hit a high C that could have cracked a rum puncheon, clutching her velvet mantilla as if the devil had crawled out of the bilge.

"Quiet, you shrieking crows!" I snapped, dropping my prompt book onto the stool.

I grabbed the wool blanket kept beside the prompt desk for stage fires and smothered the oil flames before they could reach the drapery hems. Canvas is seasoned canvas aboard a frigate; if the drops caught fire, the entire upper deck would become a chimney in forty seconds flat.

Through the drifting reek of saltpeter, a skinny boy from the chorus dropped the smoking blunderbuss onto the floorboards and scrambled backward on his hands and knees.

"I didn't load it!" the lad wailed, his eyes white with terror. "Mistress Gyöngyössy, on my mother's grave, I drew the blank charge from the prop bin! It was only lavender and thistle fluff!"

"Get behind the capstan and shut your mouth," I said.

I knelt over the weapon before anyone else could touch it or kick it down an open hatchway.

The blunderbuss was an old shipboard piece, its bell-shaped brass muzzle still warm enough to sting through wool. I lifted it by the balance point behind the trigger guard, keeping my fingers clear of the hammer. The muzzle bore smelled of genuine coarse-grain ordnance powder, not the fine, fragrant saltpeter we mixed with lavender for stage blanks. Down the throat of the barrel clung gray residue and three greasy threads of hemp oakum used to wad maritime canister shot.

Someone had not merely made a mistake. Someone had systematically swabbed the prop, charged it with half a cartridge of combat powder, and packed it with iron grape.

I turned the weapon in the gray light filtering through the starboard cannon ports. The lock was a heavy goose-neck flintlock, pitted by sea salt. Then my thumb touched the top jaw of the cock, right beneath the leather pad that clamped the flint.

A smudge of powdery white came away on my skin.

I held my fingers to my nose. It was not pulverized chalk from the ship's carpenter, which smells of chalky lime and tallow. It was French steatite: compressed tailor's chalk, unscented, dry, and pure.

Someone had rubbed tailor's chalk into the jaw's screw threads and along the bevel of the flint. On a worn lock, dry chalk prevented the flint from slipping loose under recoil, ensuring that the spark struck true on the very first drop of the cock.

I possessed the only block of French steatite within three hundred nautical miles. It lived inside my leather sewing kit in the wardrobe locker.

A pair of heavy sea boots hammered down the companionway ladder. The oak deck rattled as six armed mariners shoved their way through the backstage flats, muskets leveled and bayonets fixed.

At their head marched First Mate Gedeon Hollósy.

Hollósy looked like he had been chiseled out of black basalt by a sculptor who despised merriment. His coat was plain gray wool without a single brass button to catch the sun, and his skin had the yellowish leather tint of a man who spent forty years staring into trade winds. A heavy brass-barreled sea service pistol rested cocked in his right hand.

He halted three paces from where Pálffy lay bleeding across the proscenium. He did not check for a pulse. One glance at the ragged hole through the tenor's breast told every veteran on board that Pálffy was already beyond mortal surgeoncy.

Instead, Hollósy's cold gray eyes fixed on the puddle of dark blood soaking into the white pine planks.

"Murder," Hollósy said. His voice was flat and hard, like gravel sliding down a chute. "On a vessel commissioned under privateer articles."

Gizella Nyáry dropped to her knees, trembling with operatic fervor. "An accident, Master Hollósy! A cursed mechanical failure! The gun was an innocent prop!"

"Innocent props do not scatter nine ounces of iron ball through a man's ribs," Hollósy said. He swung the muzzle of his pistol toward the huddled actors. "The articles of the Kócsag are clear to every vagrant who took passage in Pest. Any act of sabotage, insurrection, or bloodshed against ship's company is punishable by hanging from the foreyard."

"He was not ship's company," Csaplár the fly-master muttered from the shadows of the rope loft, spitting tobacco juice into a bilge scupper. "He was a singer. Half the crew would have strangled him for nothing three days out of port."

Hollósy did not blink. "The captain took your guilder notes to carry thirty painted fools between ports. He did not agree to harbor a murderer in his hold. We drop anchor off Shark-Tooth Spit in forty-eight hours to water the casks."

He took one step forward, planting the heel of his boot right on the hem of my curtain drapery.

"If the soul who loaded this iron is not bound in irons and delivered to my quarterdeck before our anchor touches bottom," Hollósy said, "I will swing the lot of you by the neck from the yardarm until the gulls have your eyes. The women go ashore on the bare rock with two ship's biscuits each."

A chorus of shrill wails erupted among the dancers. Mariska Bánhegyi, our celebrated prima ballerina, collapsed against a painted pillar in a cloud of white swan feathers and crinoline petticoats, burying her face in her hands.

I did not faint. I did not scream. I rose from my crouch with the brass blunderbuss resting across my forearms, wiped the chalk dust from my fingers against my apron, and looked Gedeon Hollósy straight in his cold, colorless eyes.

"Move your boot off my silk, Mister Hollósy," I said. "And leave the gun where it belongs."