Free First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women by Eric McCormack Page A

I’ve visited Stroven myself.”
    Before I had a chance to ask him when or why he’d been there, he began to speak in a very formal voice, his eyebrows bristling.
    “Andrew Halfnight,” he said. “You’re a good lad. Thank you for telling me about yourself.”
    Then, as though we’d reached the conclusion of some ritual together, he reached out across the drifting books and shook my hand.
    “May life be good to you.”

Chapter Thirteen
    I T WAS HARD TO distinguish day from day, and the ocean had no milestones. But if I don’t remember the exact order of the things that happened on the voyage, I do remember the things themselves. On one of those indistinguishable evenings in Harry Greene’s cabin, he asked me more about my stay in Glasgow before embarking.
    “You said you’d spent some nights in the Hochmagandie,” he said. “Why did you go there?”
    “Doctor Giffen arranged it,” I said. “The clerk put me in the room he stays in when he’s in town.”
    He asked me to describe Doctor Giffen, and I did.
    “Sure now, I know the man,” he said. “A tidy little squirrel of a man.”
    I smiled at his description.
    “I’ve spent many a night at the Hochmagandie myself when we’re in port. I have … friends there.” He glanced at me and I couldn’t help thinking he meant those women in the bar. “Captain Stillar’s a regular visitor, too,” he said. “I suppose you know that.”
    I didn’t say anything, especially not about seeing the Captain through a crack in a door.
    “Yes,” he said. “It has to do with his painting. Sure now, didn’t you know he was a painter? Come and I’ll show you.”
    I followed him out of his cabin and we went for a long walk below decks, along a maze of passageways and narrow stairwells, moving ever forward, till we arrived outside a storage compartment low in the bows of the
Cumnock
. Harry Greene slid the door open and flicked on overhead lights that were very bright.
    The compartment was quite large but had no portholes. In the middle was a metal table riveted to the steel floor, and on it were tins full of tubes of paint and dozens of brushes. The metal floor was stained with paint. An easel with a cloth flung over it was also fixed to the floor near the table. Along the walls, behind a rope lattice, dozens of canvases of various sizes were stacked facing the hull.
    Harry Greene seemed very familiar with the room. He pulled one of the larger canvases out and turned it over.
    “Here, have a look at this,” he said.
    It was a painting of a woman whose body was made to look like a lizard.
    He pulled out other canvases and let me see them.
    “Look,” he said. “Always the same subject.”
    He was right. The women were of every shape and size,and on their bodies the Captain had painted that lizard image, like a transparent costume.
    Harry Greene talked while I looked at one painting after another. I must admit I couldn’t help trying to make out the bodies under the paint.
    “It all began with his wife,” Harry said. “She was a woman from Aruvula. ’Tis an island in the Pacific near the Oluban Archipelago. He used to call in for a cargo of copra and that’s how he met her. He only knew her for a few weeks, then he married her and brought her back home with him.”
    While he was talking, I was figuring out the Captain’s method. First, he’d paint the naked body of a woman onto the canvas in a very lifelike way; then he’d paint the lizard on top of her the way he did with real women in the hotel.
    “I saw his wife only one time,” said Harry. “She was wearing a long dress with long sleeves, and her face was covered with a veil. Under it I could just make out the tattoo. Sure now if you didn’t know better you’d have thought ’twas some kind of skin disease. All of the women of Aruvula are tattooed with the lizard.”
    “Why?” I asked him.
    “Well now, I don’t know for sure,” he said. “But I think ’tis because they believe there’s