Cutthroats of the Coast

Chapter 31 - Making Plans

"So you ate well?"  Ramsbottom said, scooping chickpeas into his mouth and spraying remnants of his last mouthful.

"Well enough," I replied.  I had eaten well at Levi's but the life of the galley slave is a life governed by hunger.  There is never enough to eat and if chance should provide a surfeit, the inclination was to eat even more in case dearth should return.  Accordingly, I crammed as much into my mouth as Ramsbottom was doing.

We were sat in huddle in the courtyard of the bagnio, sharing our meagre rations of bread and chickpeas from a communal platter.  With us was Hassan, who though largely ignorant of English, was picking up the more colourful of Jack's and Ramsbottom's cursing.  He sat watching us with round eyes, snatching at food as if he doubted whether Jack would let him sit with us.

"Bastard!"  Ramsbottom snarled and ineffectively slapped my hand away from our rations.  "You're clean too and got new togs! How'd you pay for that then?  Your arse?"

I had become accustomed to his low jests as we slaved in the quarries but now I found them tiresome.   The boy needed to learn to be wary of me as much as he was of Jack.

"No, Jonah.  I merely had to cut a hole in a man's skull and sort through his brains."  At this I reached into my satchel and drew out my prize.  I cast it before the boy.  "There you are! If he lives he'll always have a hole the size and shape of that."

Ramsbottom held up the square piece of chiselled skull,  still blood red in the cut edges, that I had retrieved at the end of the operation.

"That's disgusting!"  he said but all the same he could not help turning it back and forth, admiring the neatness of the form.

"How did you cut that out then?"  Jack said, his attention held by the miraculous relic.

It was my opportunity to regale them with my triumph.  Not just the trepanning, mind, but also my conquest of Doctor Levi.  I dare say that at the end of my tale even Jonah Ramsbottom looked impressed, and so he should have, the misbegotten leavings of a Haymarket bawd.

"Did you bring anything else back?"  Jack said at last.

"Some meat.   I had to hide it from Abu.  When things are quiet, we'll eat more."

"Did you see Jones then?   We heard him howling in at the doctor's house yesterday," Jack said, his face pulling grotesque contortions as he struggled with our gritty sustenance.

"Aye," I mumbled through a mouthful of hard bread, attempting to contain my excitement at my overnight discoveries.  "Though I rather think that he thought he was conversing with some phantasm."

"Phantasm?"

"A spirit of evil purpose."

Jack chuckled and spat out the husk he had been trying to extricate from between his teeth.  "If I were there, he would have surely been right about evil purpose!"

"Perhaps then it is a good thing that you were not.  I am not sure that Jones knows what is real and what is some fantasy induced by his fever.  However, if you had taken a blade to him, I think he would have woken from his dreams right quick."

"And why would we not want that?"  Ramsbottom said.

As I paused to think on Ramsbottom's question, I remembered something that Abu had said on my return earlier that day.

I had entered a largely empty bagnio after Dr Levi had released me to my surly abid escort that morning.  Apart from a few sickly individuals, the slaves had already departed to their labours and I had been left in the care of the repellent Abu ibn Ibrahim, our gaoler.  He had mocked me in the most sordid way, rather like Ramsbottom would do later in the day, intimating that my new jellaba had been paid for with unnatural coinage.  However,  he had soon settled down after one of the abid had a hurried and hushed conversation with him.