Free The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics by Gideon Defoe Page B

us! Do you think it can have been the shadowy figure?’
    ‘Not very likely,’ said the Pirate Captain, eyeing the book carefully. ‘You see, one perk of my frankly poor domestic regime is that I’m a bit of an expert at dust accumulation rates. And I should say this book hasn’t been touched for at least a hundred years.’
    Mary scratched her ear thoughtfully. The Captain realised that even her ears were attractive. Usually ears freaked him out a bit, because of the way they went all the way to your brain, but he could imagine spending a lot of happy evenings staring at Mary’s ears without any difficulty at all.
    ‘Oh dear,’ she sighed, at a loss. ‘So what do we do now?’
    ‘I’m afraid the trail has gone cold,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘In my books, this is a point where the hero thinks that the adventure is over and they’d better give up and go back to architecting or catching rats, depending on which day job I’ve chosen for him. It’s what I call a moment of crisis .’
    ‘We don’t really have day jobs in the Romantics,’ said Mary. ‘And your job is having adventures.’
    ‘Not to worry,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘When the trail goes cold I always have a character walk into the room and shout the next clue. So, given that art imitates life, I suspect we just need to wait.’
    Mary and the Captain waited. Mary started to hum a little tune, and the Captain did his best to will another strand of her hair to come loose, so he could try his brushing-it-back-into-place trick again, but nothing seemed forthcoming. They waited some more.
    ‘On the other hand,’ said the Captain eventually. ‘Sometimes my books do just sort of stop in the middle.’
     
     
    ‘. . . So then we returned here and I ate this bacon,’ said the Pirate Captain, finishing off his story and his bacon. They were back aboard the pirate boat, and everybody was sat round the kitchen table listening to the Captain’s account of his and Mary’s trip to the library. Obviously he’d left out the stuff about Mary’s secret love of monsters, and the business with his hand turning to jelly.
    ‘What was a dinosaur doing loose in the Bodleian?’ asked Babbage.
    Though he had also added a few extra bits to make it more exciting.
    ‘Never mind about the dinosaur,’ said Mary. ‘Take a look at this!’
    She plonked the book down on the table and flicked to the contents page. Shelley and Byron stared at where she was pointing for a moment and then gasped in unison.
    ‘Keats’s teeth!’ said Byron.
    ‘But – it can’t be! Can it? I thought it was a myth!’ said Shelley.
    ‘Apparently not!’ said Mary.
    ‘You’ll have to enlighten the crew I’m afraid,’ said the Pirate Captain, not seeing anything very obviously remarkable about the contents page. ‘Some of the lads aren’t quite as worldly as the rest of us. Hard to get them to concentrate on philosophical subjects, because it doesn’t really suit the piratical personality type.’
    Mary jabbed at the title of the missing bit of book. ‘ “On Feelings”!’ she said. The pirates went on looking blank-faced.
    ‘It has always been said that Plato once wrote a great, lost Socratic dialogue. The legendary “On Feelings”,’ said Shelley, taking up the story. ‘Plato’s subject was the nature of love itself. Supposedly his uncanny treatise unlocked the very mysteries of the human heart to any who read it.’
    ‘Some even say,’ said Byron, hunching forward over the table, ‘that Plato had discovered a way of impressing a lady so much, that once you knew his secret there wouldn’t be a single girl who could resist you, no matter how set in opposition to the idea her heart might at first be.’
    The Captain’s eyes widened. Though ‘heightened’ might be a better term, because actually their width remained pretty static. ‘You mean to say . . .’
    ‘Yes!’ roared Byron. ‘It was said to turn any dating situation into the legendary Sure