The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs Read Online Free Page A

tragedy, had been asleep, and had awakened when he heard the ruckus. He reported that a fit was even then upon him. He found himself laughing hysterically at nothing and then reeling in sudden terror when his old uncle, dead three years earlier, dressed now in knickers and wearing a fright wig, descended the companionway, grinning fearsomely. In his terror the boy had rushed straight through the apparition and up the companionway to the deck, only to see the first mate and the captain, wrapped in apparently bloody pieces of sail canvas, dancing a hornpipe on the railing. The cook was beating time on an overturned tub, wearing a swab on his head, his face garish with rouge. Other members of the crew staggered about the deck singing and groaning, tearing their hair, jigging in place to the strains of a phantom fiddler. As the boy watched, the two dancing men lost their balance and pitched straight overboard into the sea. The cook, his eyes whirling, picked up the kettle and advanced upon the boy coquettishly, mouthing insanities and beating his head with an enormous galley spoon. His nankeen trousers and shirt were stained with bloody red streaks. The boy trod backward in fear, stepped into the open hatch, and plunged to the lower deck, where he was knocked insensible.
    When he came to consciousness he found that the entire crew had disappeared, although the boats were still aboard. His own fit had passed away, and the ghost of his uncle with it. The deck was scattered with trash and overturned kegs. The cook’s tub and most of the kitchen tools were thrown about, a cleaver imbedded in the mast. Someone had painted a grinning moon-face on the mainsail, making a general mess of the deck with red paint so that it appeared as if a bloody battle had taken place. Finding that the ship was adrift, the sails flapping, the boy did his best to take her into Brighton, but was at the mercy of the winds, and couldn’t manage it alone. The fates favored him, however, because the ship ran on up the Channel, going aground on sandy bottom without disaster. He made his way into Newhaven where he reported the incident, and was immediately taken up on suspicion of having engineered the thing himself. The following morning the drowned bodies of the captain and the cook washed ashore near Littlehampton, their costumes confirming the boy’s strange tale. It was a mystery comparable to the recent case of the Mary Celeste , and the maritime authorities were at a loss to explain it.
    “Well now,” Tubby said when Hasbro had finished reading the piece. “Here’s another outbreak of lunacy—the third. To my way of thinking the third of anything smacks of a plot, unless this contagion , as they call it, is carried on the wind and weather.”
    “Yes indeed,” St. Ives muttered ambiguously, and then he disappeared down into himself again and fell silent, apparently deep in troubled thought. “A plot,” he said a moment later. “Poor Alice.” Then he said, “A word with you, Hasbro,” and the two of them huddled together and spoke in low voices, Hasbro nodding in solemn acquiescence to whatever St. Ives was telling him. I could make out little of what the Professor said beyond his asking Hasbro whether he recalled the death not long past of Lord Busby, Earl of Hampstead, or the Earl of Hamsters, as the press laughingly referred to him. The rest of the talk was mere muttering. It seemed a little thick to me that I was left out of the conversation, although Tubby didn’t apparently mind, because he was asleep.
    The train soon arrived in Eridge, and we abandoned her for the Cuckoo line to Uckfield, all of us but Hasbro, that is. He mysteriously boarded a London-bound train without so much as a by-your-leave the moment that we climbed down onto the platform. The four of us were now three.
    “Hasbro is returning to Chingford to fetch along something that I hope we won’t require,” St. Ives said. I waited for the explanatory sentence that would