Seven

The reading comprehension exercise was quite impressive.  The mate reckoned he’d been able to identify less than half the languages used, and he was only able to read English and legalese to a high standard.  The cook had fared no better.

The wolf griped and growled at their papers but then threw them back,

‘Acceptable.  Luckily for you most of the materials here are in English as as long as your enquiry is suitably mundane I will be able to give you an intelligible response.’

The wolf disappeared in to the stacks of books and papers.

‘We could run for it.’ whispered the Cook.  It was somewhat against the pirate code to run but the Cook had a dispensation from his physician on the grounds of craven cowardice and excellent meringues. 

The mate looked at the lift behind them.  It looked a clear run, but there were plenty of shelves for the wolf to be lurking behind.  The mate hadn’t become a health and safety officer without learning the hiding places of dangerous animals. 

‘No.  He’ll pounce and I’m sure our insurance won’t cover acts of Reference Wolves.’



The Wolf returned and handed them a reference enquiry form. 

‘123 pages.  Please complete in block capitals and don’t smudge.’

The mate and the cook began to leaf through the form.

‘Section 1 - Contact details, Next of Kin and Funeral Arrangements, Section 2 - Nature of Enquiry, sources previously consulted, dead summoned and oracles asked.  Section 3 - Copyright declarations, criminal record checks, masonic affiliations and Insurance details  Section 4 - To be completed by the librarian.’ 

‘This is going to be tricky.’ murmured the Cook. 

The mate nodded.  He turned to Section 2  ‘Nature of Enquiry, please complete a short essay detailing the nature of your enquiry and any previous difficulties you have had in acquiring the information.  Please remember that reference enquiries are a privilege not a right.  No enquiries that can be answered by the catalogue or by consulting the bones of the dead permitted.’

‘Is necromancy a common librarian skill?’  The mate asked. 

The wolf looked up and glared at him.  ‘Common enough.  What are card catalogues but the meanderings of the dead?’



The pirate Captain woke from a pleasant dream about mermaids with whiskers to find himself lying on the floor of an office.


The big ginger cat was looking down at him.  Hands clasped round an umbrella.

‘I’m afraid you hit your head when I threw you to the floor.  I doubt any damage to your brain will be noticeable.’

The pirate Captain decided it was better to pretend he’d not noticed the insult.  The pirate code was all well and good, but when you’ve just been defeated by a be-suited umbrella wielding hell cat it’s as well to exercise discretion.

‘Now.  If you’ve quite finished being impossible I was going to suggest that we might come to a mutually beneficial agreement.’

The pirate Captain looked at Mr Croft.  He suspected that they had wildly differing ideas about the word mutual.

‘You’ll get my Mate and Cook back?’

‘If they’ve not been eaten.  It’s very hard to extract people once Wolfy has had dinner.’

‘And what do I need to do?’

‘Nothing arduous.  I would do it myself, but I’m a lazy fellow.’

The Captain said nothing.  Lazy did not tend to produce the sort of skill which resulted on him falling on the floor at a push.

‘We have a mobile library.  Due to some trifling difference of management opinion it’s gone rogue.  I was hoping that you might track it down and offer an olive branch of sorts.’

‘An olive branch?’  The captain gave a wink.  He knew what that meant.  Pirates bearing olive branches were very much trojan horses.  Except without the element of disguise.   ‘I’m sure we can see to that.  Were you thinking of a simple pillaging or did you want burning and kidnap too?’

Mr Croft looked aghast.  ‘Of course not.  I want you to deliver a letter.’

 

 

Six

Miss Taciturn led the Captain and the Cabin Boy (leaving him alone with the deckhands was a violation of his apprenticeship agreement) to the lift.

She keyed in a four digit code and the lift descended with a speed which made the Captain stagger. 

‘Mr Croft doesn’t care for visitors.’ 

The Pirate Captain bristled ‘But he does care for pirate eating wolves.’

‘I think he would consider them the lesser of two evils.’

‘The lesser of two evils?  How can you run a library if your reference librarian eats people?   I consider myself a broadminded man  (This was true, the Pirate Captain had few prejudices and most of those he did have were against excise men, which was perfectly understandable given the excise men’s considerable prejudice against pirates) but I would never employ a pirate who eat pirates!  Tis’ madness!’

‘It’s in accordance with the library’s equal opportunities policy.  There have never been any complaints.’

‘Do complainers end up dead?’  The Pirate Captain could hardly fault the library if this was the case as he himself was known to have a rigorous policy of seabed relocation which he extended towards all who complained about his ship or crew, but it was a little alarming to find librarians with similar tendencies.

Thankfully for Miss Taciturn’s temper, which was in danger of forgetting there was still half an hour to go until closing time (at which point she would be well within her rights to brain the Pirate Captain with a handy book and claim it was an accident) the lift ground to a halt.

There was a non-descript foyer, done in that tasteful shade of grey which envelops any hotel foyer that’s been exposed to an interior designer for more than twenty minutes, with the standard issue ferns and a single chair.

On the chair, beside a door, sat a small brown cat, typing on a phone. 

‘These gentlemen wish to see Mr Croft.’ 

‘He’s busy.’  The brown cat didn’t look up.  She just kept typing.

The Pirate Captain had boarded many ships in his time.  No pirate had ever got anywhere by waiting politely for someone to let them on board.  No, they charged ahead with cutlasses drawn and risk assessment to hand and boarded regardless.

So faced with a door and a refusal he did what any pirate would do, he growled and barged ahead.  Admittedly the drama of his entrance was slightly undercut by the door being unlocked and so the Captain’s grand charge, shoulder to the ready, saw him falling through the door and landing on the carpet.

It was a very nice carpet.

The foyer might have been grey and uninteresting, but the room the Captain now found himself sitting in was a perfect example of a gentleman’s study circa 1890.  There were none of the handy room information sheets he might have found had this been a National Trust property, but the furnishings and fittings had clearly been selected by someone with as good an eye for detail as any retired NT volunteer.

‘Gentlemen.’  The voice was a threatening purr.  Sitting behind a desk the size of a small lifeboat, was a tall ginger cat.  He wore a dark purple three piece suit that was probably worth more than the Griddlebone and the Pirate Captain's pension fund combined.

‘Mr Croft’  Miss Taciturn’s tone was equal parts exasperation and fear and the Pirate Captain found himself scrambling to his feet in case he was called upon to defend her. 

‘It’s quite all right Miss Tiverton.  Don’t let me detain you.  I’m sure the Pirate Captain will be able to find his own way out when he leaves.’

‘If I leave.’  The Pirate Captain was back on his feet and had regained a little of his swagger.  A pirate’s swagger being the first line of defence against authority figures, the Pirate Captain adjusted his sash to a more rakish angle and stuck one hand firmly on his cutlass.   ‘Your wolf…’

‘Wolfy has apprehended some members of your crew.  The Mate and Cook.  If it were the deckhands you’d have accepted the vouchers and recruited some more before going on your way.’

‘Now, deckhands are valuable.’  The Pirate Captain wasn’t going to say how valuable.  He’d acquired the triplets as the payoff for losing a game of Go Fish.  It hadn’t been his finest hour.

 The ginger cat strode out from behind his desk.  He loomed over the Pirate Captain and regarded him with a bored expression.    ‘Yours aren’t.  Your jacket is old, repaired several times – but not by anyone trained with a needle, so they’ve no skill in tailoring.  Your boots have traces of tar from a deck that’s not been properly scrubbed and your Cabin Boy…’  The Cabin Boy hid behind the Captain for fear of being taken apart by Mr Croft’s prying grey eyes.   ‘Your Cabin Boy can’t even be left in their company.  Ergo they are not good deckhands and are probably not worth more than a dozen or so vouchers.  Now if you’ve quite finished…’

The Captain had had enough.  Professional development of the crew was his job as Captain and nobody was allowed to criticise the poor skill base of his employees unless they’d first completed the requisite management training.    He’d had enough enigmatic smiles and stupid deductions.  Running people through was the first choice of pirates in negotiations for a reason and he was damned if he was going to let modern ideas about politeness and the indelibility of bloodstains stand in the way of tradition.   He drew his cutlass and charged.

Five

It was a wolf.

A large grey wolf.

The Mate and Cook tried to hide behind each other, failed and stood, shivering slightly, as it paced around them.

‘Why are you here?’

‘Cookbooks!’  The Cook said.  ‘We were told….’

‘Why would there be cookbooks on the reference floor?’  The wolf stopped pacing and glared at them.  ‘Where are your forms?’

‘Forms?’  The Mate dug in his pockets.  ‘I’ve got tax forms, insurance forms, ship license, cabin boy NVQ evaluation forms, …’

‘You should have a reference enquiry form.’  The wolf growled.   ‘Access to the reference floor is restricted to users with bona fide reference enquiries as ascertained by completion in triplicate of a reference enquiry form.’

‘But we didn’t know that.’  Protested the Cook.  ‘We’re pirates we don’t go about filling in forms or checking signs. ’The Mate coughed rather resentfully at this and the Cook sighed. ‘Very well, most of us don’t go checking stuff.’

‘Thank you.’ Said the Mate.  ‘I’m sure we could fill in a set of forms for you Mr Wolf if you would be so kind as to provide them.’

‘You realise that an incorrectly completed form, or an enquiry which is not sufficiently complex to justify entry to this floor will result in me eating you?’

Mate and Cook looked at each other, and then back to the wolf.  He was a big wolf, much larger than either of them.  Of course a good pirate was perfectly capable of fighting off anything be it a Leviathan, Loch Ness Monster, or Godzilla, but that was at sea, on a ship.  Marooned in this strange dusty land of old books they felt much less confident about their ability to tackle a wolf.

‘Is that not against some sort of librarian ethical code?’ 

The Wolf grinned.  ‘I am a Siberian Reference Wolf.  In the frozen wastelands of the steppe there is no ‘ethical code’.  It is eat or be eaten. Banished from our native Russia the fiercest of us survive to make our homes amongst the reference materials of distant lands.  Now, will you fill in forms to prolong your pathetic pirate existences a little longer – or will you admit to having no business here?’

‘Forms!’  cried the Mate and Cook as one.

As the Captain and Miss Taciturn went to enter the lift to the first floor, they were stopped by a cavalcade of kittens, who tumbled into them.

‘Arrrgh’  cried the kittens on seeing the Pirate Captain.  ‘Another one!’  They made to run off, but 

Miss Taciturn caught on by the scruff of the neck and shook it hard.

‘No running, no shouting, no playing in the lifts.  Now, have you seen two other pirates?’

‘One with a spotted headscarf.’  Added the Captain. 

The kitten squirmed a little, but Miss Taciturn held firm, and its friends had long since run to the anarchic safety of the children’s library.  ‘Yes, yes.  We sent them up to Wolfy!’

‘Wolfy!’  Miss Taciturn dropped the kitten and turned to the Captain.  ‘Oh I am so sorry.  Your friends have very likely been eaten.’

‘Eaten!’  The Captain was shocked.  Everyone knew libraries were dangerous places, but surely being eaten was not amongst the normal hazards of such a place. 

‘You can have some free DVD vouchers to make up for it.’  Miss Taciturn hoped this would suffice.  Surely DVD vouchers were close enough to treasure that the Pirate Captain would accept them in lieu of his shipmates. 

‘DVD vouchers?  DVD vouchers?  Can a DVD voucher organise our tax returns, calculate wages and negotiate, at gunpoint, with insurance salesmen?  Can a DVD voucher bake a brioche loaf and brew the perfect pot of Earl Grey?’  The Captain drew himself up to his full height (roughly an inch shorter than Miss Taciturn)  ‘This is not acceptable!  I demand to see the manager!’

‘That won’t help.’  Miss Taciturn shook her head.  ‘It really won’t’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, partly due to the fact that our Reference Librarian is under the jurisdiction of the Siberian Library Authorities and they fully condone being eaten as an appropriate punishment for failure to comply with the regulations governing access to materials and partly…’

‘Yes?’  The Captain raised an eyebrow.

‘She’s a rabbit.’  Miss Taciturn shrugged.  ‘A very lovely, incredibly nice rabbit.  But still of no use whatsoever when negotiating with wolves.’

‘So there’s no one who could help?’ 

Miss Taciturn said nothing.  Technically the Captain’s question could be taken as rhetorical and she was damned if she was being dragged on a fools errand to the basement this close to closing time.  She shut her eyes and hoped the idiotic pirate man would just give up.

The Captain watched Miss Taciturn tense up.  She didn’t reply, not even to offer more vouchers.  He wondered if there was a formula for working out the worth of a pirate in DVD vouchers.  If there was the only one of the crew who would have known it was the Mate.  He opened his mouth to ask her about the vouchers when a thought occurred.  Librarians had to answer a question to the best of their abilities.  It was a code of sorts, though not one the pirate Captain approved off.  Lying was a core value of pirates and being around people who were honour bound not to do that was a bit like being a fish among bats.  But if Miss Taciturn couldn’t lie….

‘Who could help me and where are they?’  Miss Taciturn opened her eyes and glared at him.  The pirate Captain gave her his best rakish smile.   ‘I’m not just a pretty face girly.’

‘Huh.  The only person with the power to handle our Reference Librarian is Mr Croft.  He has rooms in the basement.’

‘And he won’t eat me?’  The Captain felt it wise to check on this point.

Miss Taciturn looked him up and down.  ‘I don’t think you're quite his type.’

Four

The pirates had arranged to meet up by the Enquiry Desk after an hour had past.

The Captain had assembled a towering pile of books – more than 6000 pages tall – and he was hoping that his book stacking prowess might impress Miss Taciturn.  The deckhands had three baskets full of dull looking grey and black books with ribbons and what not on the covers.

‘Fifty Shades of Grey?’ queried the Captain as he pulled one out to inspect it. 

‘Tis the authoritative tome on the use of Grey in interior decorating Captain.’ Said Ed. 

‘Aye.’  Chorused Ned and Ted.  ‘We was thinking the Griddlebone could do with a spruce up .’

‘Haven of Obedience?’  The Captain was fairly certain that the little black book was not about interior décor.  He opened it up, but Ted snatched it from his paws before he could read further. 

‘Dull stuff, Captain very dull.’ 

Ed and Ned nodded in agreement.  ‘Aye tis all about …’  the deckhands exchanged glances and then huddled together.  Always a bad sign, thought the Captain.  One day he would take a hand in the recruitment of crew and then there would be no more of this hiring of sets of triplets and twins.  They were just conspiracies in embryo.

‘Staff management!’  Ed declared triumphantly.

‘Yes, Captain.  Tis a tome on the proper respect due to a leader of an organisation and how happy workers are obedient ones.’  Ted added. 

‘Destined to Play?’  This one had a red ribbon on the cover, but the Captain supposed that might be the new trend in management book covers.  It was better than the beheaded ladies of the regency romances that the deckhands had stashed under their hammocks.

‘All work and no play…’ chorused the deckhands. 

The Cabin boy turned up, dragging a basket of Science fiction and fantasy novels behind him.  The Captain spared these a cursory glance – it would do no good for him to be letting his crew read books that were unsuitable – but otherwise left them alone.  Miss Taciturn was bent over her computer, and giving no sign that she’d seen the elegant tower the Captain had built with his own selection of books.  He wondered if adding the decorating, management, and genre fiction to it would result in the sort of edifice that she couldn’t ignore.  But then the genre fiction would lower the tone and it would not do for a Librarian to think a Pirate Captain so poorly read that he could manage nothing more than a light hearted fantasy romp and a galaxy spanning space opera.

The clock moved to five past the hour and the Captain counted up his crew.

‘Has anyone seen Mate and Cook?’

‘No Captain.’ 

‘They were going to look for cook books.’

‘First Floor.’  Said Miss Taciturn from behind her computer.

The pirates jumped and the deckhands pulled out their cutlasses at this sign of the mysterious powers of the librarian.

‘How would you know such a thing?’ Asked the Captain, whiskers bristling, ‘Our shipmates would not have confided in their plans with such as you.’ 

‘The cookbooks are on the first floor.  If your shipmates wanted them that’s where they would have gone.’

‘Do not trust her Captain.’ Cried the deckhands.  ‘No good ever came of a woman eavesdropping on the private councils of honest pirates!”

‘Honest?’  Miss Taciturn shook her head.  ‘I am sure you are many things gentlemen, but I doubt you are honest.’

‘We are honest according to the pirate code.’ Said the deckhands, who were mightily offended by this attack on their honour.  No pirate could hear such slander and let the speaker live, although in the case of Miss Taciturn the deckhands felt they might be willing to wave the mandatory keelhauling if she would only stop looking at them over her glasses in that nasty way.

‘Very well.  Would you like me to show where the cookbooks are?’  Miss Taciturn was not sure that letting a band of marauding pirates roam the library unaccompanied would be a good thing. 

‘Aye’  The Captain nodded.  ‘But the rest of you bilge rats can stay here and guard the books.’

The deckhands agreed eagerly to this, already calculating how many of the Captain’s books they could replace before he returned.

Three

‘What about names?’ asked the librarian.  She was focusing on her computer screen and trying to ignore the pirates bickering.

‘Captain Horatio Arthur Nelson Wellesley.’ Said the Captain.  His crew were trying hard not to snigger. ‘My mother was a great admirer of the navy.’ 

‘Aye.’ Said the deckhands  ‘and the navy were great admirers of hers.’

At this the Captain turned round and growled.  ‘My mother was a saintly woman.  Unfortunate naval inclinations aside.’

‘Aye aye Captain.’  The Mate glared at the deckhands.  ‘tis well known that Floozy Flo was a most hospitable lady.’

‘That nobody can deny.’ Agreed the Cook.  ‘Many a man was offered a bed for the night at Flo’s.  Often with Flo in it if it was a cold night.’

‘Gentlemen.’  The librarian interrupted in the hope of preventing the Captain from staining the library carpets with the blood of his crew.  Not least because if he killed his crew he’d have to recruit more, and she suspected that pirating paid much better than library assistanting.  No pirate Captain was stealing away her staff with the promise of treasure, books and grog.  ‘What are the rest of your names?’

‘Jack Every.’ Said the Mate

‘Henry Kidd.’ Said the Cook.

‘Bart Read.’ Said the Cabin Boy

‘Ed, Ned and Ted Morgan’ Chorused the deckhands.  ‘after Blackbeard, proper pirate names.’

‘And what be your name lass?’  The Captain leaned over the desk and winked his one green eye in what he hoped was an alluring fashion.

‘Miss Taciturn’ replied the librarian.  ‘and if you come any closer I’ll be forced to use these scissors on your whiskers.’

The Captain stepped back sharply.  His whiskers were very long and fine and he’d no desire to lose them to some demented female.  Why librarians were being allowed sharp objects was beyond his understanding.  They weren’t pirates – and surely the landlubbers were not so far gone that they were permitting females to have access to weapons or cutlery.

‘Your tickets.’ The librarian handed over seven small pieces of plastic.  The Captain gave these to the Mate, who filed them away in his ‘definitely not a handbag’.  ‘You can have up to twenty books for three weeks.’

‘140 books’  the crew cheered and then cheered a bit quieter when Miss Taciturn waved her scissors at them.  ‘tis a grand number Miss.’

The pirates spread out to find themselves twenty books a piece. 

Now the library of Brighton was a large library – spread over many floors.  The mate and cook quickly lost the other pirates among the fiction and headed for the lifts to find some cookbooks and investment advice (the mate was worried about the performance of the pirates pension fund).

They found the lifts full of kittens, who were riding up and down in them as though they were a fairground ride.  Which was no problem for pirate kitties.  They bared their teeth and claws and growled like sea monsters, till the children ran from the lifts.  The mate grabbed one by the scruff of his neck and gave him a shake. 

‘Where be the cook books?’

The kitten wailed and got another shake for his trouble.  ‘The second floor, the second.’

‘Arrgh,’  cried the mate for good measure before dropping the kitten.

The lift shuddered as it stopped at the second floor.  The Mate and Cook stepped out into a dark cavern.  There were bookshelves, crammed close together and without the neat Dewey numbers and strange genre pictograms of the ground floor.  The air was cold, and as they shivered in the gloom their breath formed clouds.

‘What manner of library is this?’  whispered the Cook.

The mate opened his mouth to reply, but there was a low growl from behind him.