Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [55]
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Dean, a large calm man, smiled at us, and settled back comfortably in his chair. ''Whitebait!" he exclaimed. "I'd run a mile a day for a platterful, but I've got a mate who cheats fisher-boys out of nearly all they can netmakes a small fortune selling it to taverns for ten times what he pays for itso there's never any left over for me. Yes, I'll stay with pleasure, Charles, and you ought to put your chopped pickle in sour cream if you want a proper sauce."
I shook hands with Captain Dean, and my father got up to look at Neal Butler, who made him the politest of bows and held out his poke of whitebait-filled sacking.
When my father fumbled in his pocket, Swede Butler stepped forward and touched his hat. "Sir," he said, "my boy and I ask you to accept it in place of a fee."
"This is Swede, Neal's father," I explained. "He asked me whether you'd trade him some advice in return for Neal's catch. He wants the advice for Neal. Neal's a good boy, and I told Swede you would."
"You did, did you?" my father asked. "That's the value you put on my advice, is it? A sack of minnows?"
"No," I said. "I thought you might earn two people's affection, and some entertainment as wellif Neal recites his Italian epilogue for you. That's fairly good pay, isn't it?"
My father put his hand on Neal's shoulder. "I'm mighty pleased with your whitebait," he said. "I'll ask you to take it to the kitchen and give it to Mrs. Buddage. She's our cook. She'll rinse your piece of sacking, so you can have it to use again. Oh, and could you remember to tell her that Captain Dean says to make the sauce out of chopped pickle and sour cream?"
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"And just a little chopped onion," Captain Dean said.
"Sour cream, chopped pickle, chopped onion," Neal repeated, and somehow he enunciated the words in such a way as to make my mouth water.
He marched obediently toward the kitchen, and even his manner of walking, though unaffected, was a pleasure to the eye.
"Quite a boy," my father said to Swede.
"Yes, sir," Swede said. "I don't know where he gets it. Maybe from his mother. She'd have been a player herself, and a good one, too, if a gallery hadn't fallen on her when we were playing the Angel InnDuke of Norfolk's servants, sir. I couldn't bring up a baby, Mr. Whit-worth, so I left Neal with his grampa and granma outside of Norwich and took to the Army. Then I tried the Navy and got to be captain of the foretop on the Minerva till a French musket ball caught me in the shoulder and put me in the hospital yonder." He nodded in the general direction of the palaces on the water-front.
"What's your problem, Mr. Butler?" my father asked.
"Well, sir, here it is," Swede said. "This boy has something I've never put to proper use. I've taught him to read and write: he's the quickest study I ever saw, and I've seen some good ones. If I could be in the theatre with him, I wouldn't mind so much; but I'm too banged up to be any good to a young man like Penkethman. So Neal's going it alone in the theatre, paid about half the time if he's lucky, and nothing much ahead of him but getting to be a beggar, depending on benefit performances, which is charity, no matter how you look at it. I know the end of itwork a fifth of the year, and never save a penny: get
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spoiled by the women and the men, too, and wind up in rags or drudging for some rat like Langman."
Captain Dean leaned forward. "What's that? What about Langman."
"Oh," Swede said, "he's a mate on one of these merchant vessels. She's laid up for repairs. He weaves nets for boys to catch whitebait with: then he collects