‘—Whoa! No skipping of any parts!’ Everyone was nodding vigorously at Ben’s interjection.
Harry winced. ‘Not for present company, son.’
Tim said pointedly, ‘I can assure you there’s nothing that was done to Farrier that could shock your present company.’
Harry folded his arms and admitted dryly, ‘They both had red hot pokers thrust up their bottoms.’ Noting with some amusement thathisjudgement of his current audience was better than the good professor’s, Harry moved swiftly on. ‘But they’d racked him as well of course—pretty standard practice in The Tower—so he couldn’t stand when he got to the scaffold.’ Still picturing the other procedure, Aleksey wasn’t in the least surprised at this. ‘Being a traitor—or at least vaguely related to one—he was hung, drawn and quartered. But first, and you’ll all like this if you enjoyed the poker part, his pecker was cut off and burnt in front of him. I don’t think they made him eat it, but I’ve no doubt they would have if they’d thought of it. So, it’s no wonder he was ranting about being cursed and walking with the devil.’
‘Walking with? Not on his back?’
Harry nodded at Ben. ‘Well spotted. No, apparently Lucifer is…getting closer, engaging more as the generations pass. And so, speaking of the generations, two of Farrier’s younger sons die early at sea, nothing noteworthy there, but Thomas, the eldest, becomes a merchant sea captain.’
Aleksey huffed. ‘Wealthy and successful and then a horrible death?’
Harry gave a little bow to him. ‘Quite right, sir, you have spotted the pattern.’
‘Pirates?’
Ben offered this with inappropriate glee to Aleksey’s way of thinking and was amused when his face fell at Harry’s prosaic reply, ‘Syphilis.’
‘Damn. That’s a bit boring.’
‘Not in those days, Benjamin. First came genital sores—exactly. Then foul abscesses and ulcers over his whole body—stinking and rotten and incredibly painful. Agonising. Of course, the treatment he received would have caused any chap to go a bit bonkers. They locked him in an overly heated room and made him breathe mercury vapour, alternating that with arsenic and rubbing both on all his lesions. Poor man—almost makes his father’srelativelyswift death look preferable, as Thomas’s went on for years. He lost all his hair, became severely demented, and had no teeth by the end. Well, I think it’s time for afternoon tea—what say you?’
Much to everyone’s relief, Squeezy produced the remains of the Christmas cake. With mouthfuls of marzipan and icing, treasure hunting resumed being a distinctly pleasurable activity. Manifestly revived himself, Harry said, after putting down his cup, ‘I’ll skip Thomas’s son, suffice to say—’
‘Went to sea, made a fortune, died a disgusting death.’ Around his enormous bite of fruitcake, Ben’s contribution was slightly mumbled, but Harry nodded his assent.
‘So, we come to a beginning again, of sorts. Although I will just mention one salient fact about Edward, Thomas’s son: he went by the name Edward Frobisher, not Farrier, so something other than a location, a curse, and Old Nick was possibly being handed down between these sons and fathers. And that brings me to 1733 and one Charles Frobisher—Edward’s grandson. Sir Charles Frobisher founded the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth, and the rest, as they say, is history.’
‘Huh?’
The moron smiled at his boyfriend’s disappointment. ‘What Dad means is more wealth, more horrible death, more curses, more devils, until the naval college moves to Dartmouth, gets more organised—more than just a training ship—and guess who was one of the first cadets at the new Britannia?’
Tim’s eyes widened and he looked at Harry in admiration. Harry frowned. ‘This was 1859, Timothy.’
‘Oh.’
Harry patted his hand. ‘My part in the story starts in the next century. I wasn’t the first cadet, but I did become the captain of the college, as it was by then. But, here’s the answer to your earlier question, sir…’ He nodded to Aleksey. ‘I know all this because Dartmouth has a superb and very extensive library detailing the history of the British Royal Navy from its earliest beginnings. John Hawkins wrote his memoirs—the college has them. All the stories I’ve summarised for you here are extrapolated from the navy lists and the other various accounts or journals held there.’
‘So who has the curse now?’ This seemed a very relevant question to Aleksey, despite not believing in such things, obviously.
‘I don’t know, son. Charles, the founder, died cursed. But as Michael said, his great-great-grandson, Robert, was the first cadet up the gangplank in 1859. And he did very well. He actually won the top cadet award while he was at Dartmouth—the newly inaugurated Nelson Prize. Very prestigious. He married a local young woman from Salcombe during his training, and she was expecting their child, but during his first appointment at sea, on theShrewsbury, Robert just disappeared.’
Ben leaned forward. ‘He just winked out of existence? Like a portal thingy?’
Harry stared at him for a while, possibly attempting to formulate a response. ‘TheShrewsburywas presumed lost at sea—all hands.’
‘Oh.’ Ben wrinkled his nose, evidently disappointed. ‘But that’s the end of the devil and the curse then.’
‘I’m sure I don’t have to remind you what the Bible tells us:And the sea gave up the dead which were in it. They were found. In 2001.’
Squeezy murmured, ‘Year before,’ and Harry nodded before making a small gesture towards him.
‘Quite so. Your story now then, son.’
Aleksey narrowed his eyes suspiciously at the moron— someone who could argue entirely convincingly that the Earth was flat.
Squeezy returned a wide, intensely annoying, self-satisfied grin. ‘You, matey, need to be a tad less suspicious.’
