Powder, Pitch, and Rice Powder

Who leaves a pinch of genuine gunpowder beside a box of dried lavender unless they want someone to die in three-quarter time?

The question pulled me down the narrow companionway toward the props locker before First Mate Hollósy's heavy boots had even finished echoing across the gun deck above. In my pocket, the brass key he had surrendered felt like a lump of cold river gravel. On the painted crate behind me, the little sandglass stood upright, its narrow throat trickling dark red volcanic grains one second at a time toward our communal hanging off Shark-Tooth Spit. Forty-eight hours sounded generous only to men who had never tried to alter sixteen yards of watered silk in a single night.

The props locker occupied a cramped, wedge-shaped compartment tucked behind the aft stage flats, wedged between the starboard battery framing and the great rudder trunk. Down here, the smell of damp oakum and bilge brine fought a losing battle against theatrical clutter: bundles of tin foil swords, papier-mâché Roman helmets, wax melons, and three baskets of dried lavender intended to simulate fragrant smoke when the blunderbuss flashed.

I fit Hollósy's brass key into the padlock of the iron-bound munitions chest. The tumbler turned with a slick click that smelled of fresh linseed oil. That was the first offense. Csaplár, our master carpenter and fly-boss, hated oiling anything smaller than an eight-inch pulley block. If this padlock slid open without a rasping squeal, someone had greased the mechanism recently.

I lifted the heavy oak lid and let it rest back against the bulkhead.

The tray inside was partitioned into cedar cubbies. To the left lay six paper blank cartridges, each rolled from brown butcher parchment and tied off with yellow hemp thread. These were the standard stage charges: three drams of weak sporting powder capped with a tightly packed ball of coarse horsehair. When fired, they produced a loud bang, a pleasant puff of white smoke, and nothing more lethal than a flying wad that might singe a ruffle at ten paces.

I picked up the third cartridge in the row and weighed it in my palm. It felt slack.

Turning it under the lantern beam, I ran my thumbnail along the yellow tie-string. The knot had not been untied; the fiber was severed with a razor-clean slice, then retied with a crude granny knot. I pinched the parchment tube. Half the horsehair was missing. Inside, instead of light sporting powder, the granules shifted with a sharp, heavy scrape.

I tipped the tube into my palm. A single sphere of dark, irregular metal rolled out against my callused fingers.

It was an iron grape-shot pellet, roughly the diameter of a garden pea, pitted by salt air and heavy enough to crack a tooth.

I dropped the iron ball back into the palm of my hand and stared at it. Pálffy had not been killed by a careless stagehand grabbing the wrong ammunition from the ship’s gunner. Someone had sat right here on this cedar chest, cut open our blank cartridges with a needle-sharp blade, emptied out the harmless horsehair, and packed the paper with four ounces of naval scrap.

Beside the paper cartridges lay a wide earthenware pot of tallow, used for lubricating the trigger springs. A deep gouge scored the gray grease, as though someone had scraped out a generous scoop with a palette knife or a horn spoon.

A floorboard creaked above my head, followed by the dull, rhythmic thud of a marlinspike tapping against timber.

I locked the chest, dropped the brass key back into my apron pocket, and climbed the ladder to the scenery platform.

Mihály Csaplár sat upon an overturned grease keg beside the number-three counterweight capstan, hacking at a plug of foul, fermented dock-leaf tobacco with his pocketknife. He was fifty years old, shaped like an anchor stock, and smelled perpetually of turpentine, rancid mutton fat, and sheer contempt for the performing arts. His leather apron was blackened from twenty years of handling tarred hemp and iron sheaves.

"You're tracking sawdust across my stage deck, Gyöngyössy," he rasped without looking up, thumbing the black tobacco shreds into the charred bowl of a clay pipe. "Get back to your thread spools. The privateers are stamping on the planks, and I have three scenery borders to re-reeve before tomorrow’s tide."

"Pálffy is lying on a canvas sheet in the dead-room with four holes through his ribs, Mihály," I said, leaning against the timber frame of the fly-winch. "And you oiled the padlock on the munitions chest."

The carpenter’s knife paused half a hair's breadth from his thumb. He raised his rheumy gray eyes, glaring through thick tufts of grizzled brows. "I haven't oiled a lock since we cleared the harbor shoals. If the lock slides smooth, blame the humidity. Salt fog softens iron."

"Salt fog causes rust, you old badger," I retorted. "And it doesn't tie granny knots in stage cartridges. Who had the locker key during the second-act intermission?"

Csaplár struck a spark with a flint striker, blowing on the tinder until a curl of acrid blue smoke rose between us. "The key hung from the iron peg behind my workbench. The same peg it has hung from since we departed Trieste. Nobody touches it. My lads know what my rope-end feels like across their shoulder blades."

"Then explain why the number-four haul line has scorch marks three feet above the belaying pin," I said, pointing straight up toward the shadows of the fly gallery.

High above us, where forty sets of hemp lines vanished into the gloom beneath the upper deck beams, a blackened pine balk showed fresh charring. Even from down here, the greasy tang of burnt lard hung heavy in the warm, stagnant air.

Csaplár’s jaw tightened around his pipe stem. "A guttering lantern," he muttered. "The wick flared up."

"Lanterns burn whale oil," I said, taking two steps toward him until he was forced to tilt his bearded chin up. "That stench is rendered beef tallow. The exact grease that sits in the tub inside the munitions locker. You had a fire aloft during the intermission, didn't you?"

He blew a thick plume of gray smoke into my face. I did not blink.

"Ten minutes before the third act," he growled, the rough bluster draining from his voice into bitter irritation. "Someone dropped a ball of greased tow into the number-four sheave box aloft. Caught fire in two seconds. Smoke started billowing down across the canvas backdrops like the chimney of a bakehouse. If that hemp burned through, two hundred pounds of pig-iron counterweight would have come crashing down through the stage ceiling."

"And while you were climbing fifty feet of rope ladder with a sand bucket to save your counterweights," I said, "where were your apprentices?"

"Running for water barrels like headless pullets," Csaplár spat. He knocked the heel of his pipe against the iron winch drum with a sharp clang. "The whole lower deck was shouting. I was up in the beams for twelve minutes smothering the smolder with wet sacking. When I climbed back down, the grease fire was out, the curtain was going up, and Pálffy was already parading across the apron in his velvet cape."

"Twelve minutes," I murmured. "Twelve minutes with the workbench peg unguarded, the locker open, and the entire backstage empty because everyone was watching you fight a grease fire in the rafters."

"It was an accident," he snapped. "Some clumsy dancer knocked a grease pot."

"Dancers don't climb sixty feet up into the dark rigging carrying balls of beef tallow, Mihály."

I turned away from his scowling face and reached for the number-four haul rope, which hung secured around a heavy iron belaying pin at the rail. The coarse hemp rope was stiff with pine pitch and black boat-caulking, rough enough to shred bare skin on an unpracticed hand.

I gripped the fiber two feet above the pin and drew my hand downward.

A pale, velvety residue came away against my callused palm. I brought my hand to my nose.

It was not white steatite tailor's chalk. It was not pulverized quicklime from the reflector lanterns, nor was it flour from the ship's galley.

The fine dust smelled of dried iris root, almond oil, and crushed rose water.

It was French theatrical rice powder—the kind that cost six florins an ounce in Pest, imported specifically for women who refused to let coarse shipboard humidity spoil their porcelain complexions.

Someone had perched on the narrow fly-beams in the high dark, greasy tow in one hand and expensive Parisian cosmetic clinging to the other, waiting for the smoke to rise before slipping down to load the tenor’s doom.