Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

Wee sayled out from Sluys & othere portes of Hollande a scourge to the Spanish shipping from the German Sea to Biscays Bay & took many a vessel & slew many Spanish & some French & also ran in to England by night & landed cargoes of silks, spices, wines & spirites under the noses of the coste guardes. Meantimes whilst wee layde in port I made perfect my fancie of a distance-quadrant, having a man in Rotterdam fashioun one out of brasse, the lines cut in with aqua fortis upon the quadrantes with thereto a little mirroir so one could see through bouth sightes at one glance. With this set upon a raile wee then laded all oure gonnes with such quantitie of poudre as would carry shotte a certayne distance, I will saye eight hundred yards. Thus ready I peer into my device set with the angle before-figured to that distance on the moveable arm & peering down the sight I wait until the target appears in both mirroir & plain sight & there you have your range exact & give the order to fyre & all balles striking home all at once without warning or casteing shottes they are surprized & overcome & we board & take them easie.

Soe two yeares on the seas & I have 80 sovereigns in gold that I left with a Jewe of Sluys to keep. For the crew spent all in drink & whores but not I. In the Yeare Nine as all knoweth a truce wase signed between the King of Spain & the Dutch & the Stadthouder orders no more robbyng of Spainish shippes. But Van Brille says wee are not ordered to stoppe smuckling as that is no affayre of the Stadthouder d-mn his eyes. So we continued in this wise but I was uneasey & one daye I went to my Jewe & he writes me a bill of paper saying that what Jewe soever I should shew it to from Portugale to Muscovy will give me suche a sum in gold. Wee went over to England one night & whilst wee were ashore a-trading oure stores with certayne men of Plymouth I walked off into the darke & was done with smuckling or so I thought.

In Plymouth some daies passed at the Anchor Inn thinking upon what I should do when comes a man seekyng mariners & others for the voyage of the Admiral Sir Geo. Somers to Virginia in the New World & I thought me this be a sign what I should do & I says to hym I am a gonner afloat or dry & can take the starres in sight by crosse-staff or back-staffe to tell latitudes & can make survey if required. & he says canst walk upon water too or need you a boat, & all there assembled laughed: but he bade me come with him to see Mr Tolliver the master of the flag-ship Sea Adventure. He greetes me kindly & askes I show him my mettel: soe I doe & he being well-satisfied I can doe all I profess with passynge skille I sign as maistre gonner 1s 4d diem.

We sayled on second June the Yeare Nine. After the Groene Draeck I find the ship like almost the palace of some lord so spacious was it & well-appointed & the food far better, no Dutch cheese & fish & hock wine but goode beer & English beefe: soe I wase well contente. I fell in friendlie with Mr Tolliver & learned from him more of the art of the compass & use of the back-staffe & how to figure longitude from the starres, a thyng most difficult to doe well. He was a most strange man his lyke I had never met before this, for he did not credit Gods grace & thought there wase not a farthing to chuse between the papist superstitioun & the reformed faith: for he believed God had made the worlde & then left it to be what it might, like a wyfe setting cakes out to cool & cared not for us creatures a whit. Wee would argue such matteres on the night watch til dawn brake: but it booted little for wee never did agree as he would not accept the authoritie of Scripture at all. Wast thou there he sayde when it was took down? Nay? Then how know you it is Gods word & not wrote by some foole such as yoursen? He had no feare of Hell-fyre neither, sayde he had never seen a devil nor an angel nor had hee ever met one fellow (saveing a few mad) who ever had. He thought church could doe no harme for the moste of mankynde & went glad enough o’ Sunday but cared not what was the service or the sermon: if the Kinges grace should saye worshipe a mere stone or else the Pope he wold be content to doe it. It was all one to hym: & I was amazed at this for how could all the world think these thynges the most grave of all thynges & hym not: & hym yet a goode, kynde man with all his wittes?

Crosetti’s mother, Mary Margaret Crosetti (Mary Peg as she was universally known), possessed a number of personal characteristics useful for both a high-end research librarian and a mother, including a prodigious memory, a love of truth, a painstaking attention to detail, and an industrial-strength bullshit detector. Thus, while she tried to give her son the privacy suitable to the adult he was, the ordinary business of life in a smallish Queens bungalow produced enough mother-son interactions to give her a good idea of his interior state of being at any particular moment. Ten days ago this state had been extraordinarily fine. Al tended to the dour, but she recalled that for a day or so he sang in the shower and glowed from within. He’s in love, she thought, with the mingling of joy and trepidation that this perception raises in most parents, and then, shortly thereafter, came the crash. He’s been dumped, she concluded, and also that it was an unusually quick end to what had appeared to be an unusually intense joy.

“I’m worried about him,” she said on the telephone to her eldest daughter. “This is not like Albert.”

“He’s always getting dumped on, Ma,” said Janet Keene, who besides being her mother’s chief coconspirator was a psychiatrist. “He’s a nice guy with no smarts about women. It’ll pass.”

“You’re not here, Janet. He’s moving like a zombie. He comes home from work like he spent the day in the salt mines. He doesn’t eat, he goes to bed at eight-thirty-it’s not natural.”

“Well, I could see him…,” Janet began.

“What, as a patient ?”

“No, Ma, that’s not allowed, but if you want a second opinion.”

“Look, darling, I know when my children are crazy and when not, and he’s not crazy-I mean not crazy crazy. What I’m going to do is this Saturday I’ll make a nice breakfast, I’ll sit him down, and I’ll get it out of him. What do you think?”

Janet, who in her wildest professional fantasies could hardly imagine having her mother’s ability to make people spill their guts, produced some noncommittal affirmative remarks. Affirmative remarks were what were required when Mary Peg called to ask for advice, and Janet did her duty. She thought the main thing her baby brother needed was a girl, a decent job, and to vacate his mother’s roof, in ascending order of importance, but she declined to pursue that line of argument. She and her two sisters had bailed out at the earliest opportunity: not that they didn’t dearly love their mother, but she cast a good deal of very dense shade. Poor Allie!

Mary Peg always felt better after soliciting professional advice from Janet and was pleased that this accorded so well with her own instincts. She was one of seven children of a subway motorman and, unusually for one of her class and culture, had succumbed to the lure of the ’60s and gone the whole countercultural route-rock band groupie, communard in California, a little drugging, some casual sex-and then the semishame-faced resumption of real life in the form of a B.A. from City College and an M.S. in library science. Her own parents had known nothing of the wilder part of this history, for she was not one of the many of that time who were naughty to get back at the folks; naughtiness for its own sake had been quite sufficient. But she had always felt a bracing Catholic guilt at deceiving them and had resolved, when she came to have children of her own, that intergenerational deception was not going to be part of the deal. She occasionally thought that this was why she had married a cop.