Pitt provided an ice bucket, and they went through the Dom Perignon before the main entree and finished the meal with the Gruet brut during dessert. Perlmutter was mightily impressed with the sparkling wine from New Mexico. "This is quite good, dry and crisp," he said slyly. "Where can I buy a case?"
"If it was only `quite good,' you wouldn't be interested in obtaining a case," said Pitt, grinning. "You're an old charlatan."
Perlmutter shrugged. "I never could fool you."
As soon as Pitt cleared the dishes, Perlmutter moved into the living room, opened his briefcase and laid a thick sheaf of papers on the coffee table. When Pitt joined him, he was glancing at the pages, checking his notations.
Pitt settled in a leather sofa beneath staggered shelves that held a small fleet of ship models, replicas of ships that Pitt had discovered over the years. "So what have you got on the renowned Dorsett family?"
"Would you believe this represents a shallow scratch on the surface?" Perlmutter replied, holding up the thick volume of over a thousand pages. "From what I've researched, the Dorsett history reads like a dynasty out of an epic novel."
"What about the current head of the family, Arthur Dorsett?"
"Extremely reclusive. Rarely surfaces in public. Obstinate, prejudiced and thoroughly unscrupulous.
Universally disliked by all who remotely come in contact with him."
"But filthy rich," said Pitt.
"Disgustingly so," replied Perlmutter with the expression of a man who just ate a spider. "Dorsett Consolidated Mining Limited and the House of Dorsett chain of retail stores are wholly owned by the family. No stockholders, shareholders or partners. They also control a sister company called Pacific Gladiator that concentrates on the mining of colored gemstones."
"How did he get his start?"
"For that story we have to go back 144 years." Perlmutter held out his glass and Pitt filled it. "We begin with an epic of the sea that was recorded by the captain of a clipper ship and published by his daughter after he died. During a voyage in January of 1856, while he was transporting convicts, a number of them women, to the Australian penal colony at Botany Bay, an inlet south of the present city of Sydney, his ship ran afoul of a violent typhoon while beating north through the Tasman Sea. The ship was called the Gladiator, and she was skippered by one of the most famous clipper captains of the era, Charles `Bully' Scaggs."
"Iron men and wooden ships," murmured Pitt.
"They were that," agreed Perlmutter. "Anyway, Scaggs and his crew must have labored like demons to save the ship from one of the worst storms of the century. But when the winds died and seas calmed, Gladiator was little more than a derelict. Her masts were swept over the side, her superstructure was destroyed and her hull was taking on water. The ship's boats were gone or smashed, and Captain Scaggs knew his ship had only hours to live, so he issued orders for the crew and any convicts handy as carpenters to dismantle what was left of the ship and build a raft."
"Probably the only option open to him," Pitt commented.
"Two of the convicts were Arthur Dorsett's ancestors," Perlmutter continued. "His great-great grandfather was Jess Dorsett, a convicted highwayman, and his great-great-grandmother was Betsy Fletcher, who was given a twenty-year sentence to the penal colony for stealing a blanket."
Pitt contemplated the bubbles in his glass. "Crime certainly didn't pay in those days."
"Most Americans don't realize that our own colonies were also a dumping ground for England's criminals until the Revolutionary War. Many families would be surprised to learn their ancestors landed on our shores as convicted criminals."
"Were the ship's survivors rescued from the raft?" asked Pitt.
Perlmutter shook his head. "The next fifteen days became a saga of horror and death. Storms, thirst and starvation, and a mad slaughter between the sailors, a few soldiers and the convicts decimated the people clinging to the raft. When it finally drifted onto the reef of an uncharted island and went to pieces, legend has it the survivors were saved from a great white shark by a sea serpent while swimming to shore."
"Which explains the Dorsett hallmark. It came from the hallucinations of near-dead people."
"I wouldn't be surprised. Only eight of the original 231 poor souls who left the ship staggered onto a beach-six men and two women more dead than alive."
Pitt looked at Perlmutter. "That's 223 lost. A staggering figure."
"Of the eight," Perlmutter went on, "a seaman and a convict were later killed after fighting over the women."