And there sat Kenyon’s sea chest, as colorful, as neat and as large as life as the man himself. The man who might even now be heading here from the quarterdeck or the wardroom, to whom Josh would have to make polite conversation, while his mind raced and his pulse thundered from the glory. Josh could imagine—oh, how he could imagine—what it would be like to lie close in here with that tall, elegant form sprawled in the cot above him. Maybe an arm dangling down into his space, the scent of cologne and new linen, and himself lying beneath with a guilty conscience and an aching prick, wanting to feel the long fingers on his skin, suck each one into his mouth and…
Oh, now look. Damn it—that was all he needed. Could he not control his wandering thoughts at all? Think of something else! Perhaps living together would wear the edge off this infatuation. All he knew of Kenyon, after all, was that he moved like an angel. Suppose he snored, and his feet smelled, and his politics were abominable, and he never shut up? Suppose he was all flash and show, as Walker seemed to think? Being closely confined with him then might be a cure.
Would be a cure. Josh ignored the part of himself that clamored for some sort of fairytale ending. There was no hope that his affections could be returned. Even if he liked Kenyon, he would not be able to trust him. Not with such a secret as this. As Henderson could attest, such things did not happen to men like himself, particularly not when Captain Walker was stalking them. No. Josh was no man’s victim. He could not afford to hope for love. He wanted to live, and he would.
The wooden edges of his cot dug into his thighs, making his feet go numb. Through the gunport he could see Mr. Summersgill’s party making their final farewells, his wife clutching her many shawls and weeping with fright at the prospect of the voyage.
His ward, a fair-haired, vivacious girl—orphaned daughter of some cousin, if wardroom rumor was to be believed—gazed up at the ship with inquisitive intelligence, and Josh leaned forward to see better as Kenyon came up beside her. It was a thrill merely to watch him as he passed unawares along the quay beneath. He spoke. She laughed in return, and they walked up the gangplank, out of Josh’s sight, looking beautiful together. Josh clamped his teeth closed so tightly that pain lanced through his face and into his eyes as he tried to tell himself that this, too, was what he wanted.
It was better that love should die, rather than that he should. Better that Kenyon should be inaccessible, paying court to someone else. It was better for them all that this should end before it could even have been said to begin. Of course it was.
The decision made, lying heavily within him, he rubbed his eyes and was about to put his hat back on and return to work when there came a knock on the door, and the man himself leaned in, his eyebrows raised and his extraordinary eyes almost hazel in the between decks’ gloom. “Hello? May I come in?”
Josh scrambled to his feet, forgetting everything, even his name. He cracked his head against the reinforced beam above him, his sight going interestingly gray and silver for a moment. “Um…” he said. “I… Oh, I…” And Kenyon came in.
Chapter Two
Dearest Mother, Peter Kenyon wrote carefully—for the Nimrod was skipping through a stiff sea that made her massive bulk frisk like a spring lamb. You will be glad to know that we are three weeks out from Portsmouth and, although delayed by storms, are in hopes of catching the trade winds within a day or so. Should nothing very untoward happen, I hope to be in Bermuda by this time next month.
He paused, looked out of the gunport at the gray seas and the white spray blowing forward through the long, slanting rain, and honesty prompted him to add, Though, God knows, there is no certainty in this profession.
Mr. Summersgill and his wife, he went on, were just overcoming the seasickness when we hit the present seven-day blow, which prostrated them again. Doubtless, they would ask to be remembered to you if they could speak without groaning.
His practiced ear caught the slow scaling down of the wind’s note in the rigging, and the weather that came through the newly opened port contained more air than water now. The floor of the cabin was almost dry, and the once-soaked blankets of his bed were merely damp to the touch. But the storm eased last night and continues to abate, so I am in hopes that they will recover soon.
Dipping his quill, he wondered if he should be circumspect, but this was his mother. What she did not know, she would guess. Little point then in being coy.
I did not know that Mr. Summersgill had a ward, which seems a remarkable lack of perception on my part since I grew up within an hour’s walk of his house. Do I dare too much if I guess she is the “natural child” whose birth is still being talked of in hushed voices eighteen years later?
The smile grew wider as he thought of her. She had not been laid low by illness and, without supervision, had run a little wild, even to the extent of putting on Lieutenant Sanderson’s white duck trousers and climbing to the masthead. She had been so aglow with the experience that—with the enthusiasm bringing a pretty flush to her face, her golden hair streaming, and the thrillingly transgressive sight of her legs and her ass so flagrantly revealed by the close-fitting garments—he would be surprised if there was a single man on board who was not now her abject slave.
His own admiration, however, he felt was more rational. He was a third son, of no great account, and while his eldest brother, Charles, might be constrained to marry an heiress for the good of the estates, he himself could afford to choose who he wished. It was true that his fortune was yet to be made and he had no thought of supporting a wife on a lieutenant’s meager salary. But once he had made post captain, and was secure enough, why not wed the daughter of an old family friend? Whatever her mother’s status, if it secured him the continued influence and good wishes of the Comptroller of HM Customs and Excise in Bermuda, so much the better.
After a long pause to relive the mast-climbing incident and decide that it was something he did not wish to share with his mother, he went on. She is, at any rate, a most attractive and spirited girl and will have better prospects in Bermuda than if she remains where her shame is known.
A scuffle of feet above his head broke his concentration. He looked up but, of course, could see nothing more than the thick planks of the deck and the unlit lantern. A voice he had already learned to loathe called out. “You. You call this rope coiled? Boatswain, start this man. No, damn it—with some feeling in it!”
Even through two inches of mahogany planking, Peter could hear the snap and thud of a rope’s end hitting flesh. Then the mumble of “Beg pardon sir, but I was splicing the rope afore a coiling of it, on account of it got tore up something terrible during the blow.”
He found himself holding his breath, waiting for the answer, and when it came, he closed his eyes for fear of revealing, even to the darkness and the sleeping man who shared his cabin, the building contempt within him.
“By God, I will have no answering back from you! Take this man’s name. A dozen strokes to remind him who is the captain of this vessel, and I want to see every rope on this deck fit for an admiral’s inspection, or I will add another forty for slovenliness.”
There was a rustle, and he opened his eyes to find that Andrews had woken, raised himself on one elbow and was watching him. His softly curling red hair was flattened to his skull on one side and sleep grimed the corners of his onyx eyes, but his expression was alert enough. Peter recognized the look on Andrews’ face as the mirror of his own disgust. Silently, they shared a moment of perfect understanding. Then Peter looked down, and Andrews—who had rested barely five hours in the last seven days, on constant duty in the rigging—turned over to face the wall, pulled the blanket up over his ears and fell back to sleep at once.
I wish I could be equally enthusiastic about the ship, Peter paused, wondering if even his private correspondence was safe. It was a mark of how quickly he had learned to adapt to the atmosphere of paranoia on the Nimrod that he thought Walker might go through his letters. Though it was an unheard of thing to suspect, it wa
s also unheard of that a first lieutenant should be expected to share his cabin with a midshipman, no matter how senior. That had been an insult—a deliberate, calculated insult—and the fact that he could not challenge his captain did not mean he had forgotten or forgiven it.
To be fair to Andrews, one of the first things he had done—when, a week into the voyage, he finally got over his tongue-tied shyness—had been to offer to move out. It was to the young man’s credit that, though he had grown accustomed to the privacy, and faced a removal back into the fetid cockpit of boys’ practical jokes and nastiness that was the midshipmen’s berth, he had still offered it with such sincerity. No, Peter did not resent Andrews in the slightest for the arrangement. He knew perfectly well who to blame.
If you recall, we were told that Captain Walker ran “a taut ship”. Loyalty prevents me from saying much more than this: if matters aboard were any tauter, they would snap. I am thankful that for me this is but a temporary post, and my own command awaits me in St. George, but I am concerned for the fate of my current shipmates, who do not have that consolation.
The thought of another wardroom dinner was oppressive. He had tried his hardest to encourage conversation at the table, broaching every irreproachable topic from the weather to the perfidy of the French, and it had all met with murmurs of anxious agreement and then silence.
The second lieutenant, Lieutenant Sanderson, could be drawn out to admit to attending plays in London but would falter and look suspiciously down the length of the table when asked what they were about. Lieutenant Cole, his opposite in looks—a savagely dark, scrawny-looking man, who seemed to regard ship’s biscuit as something of an extravagance—shared the reluctance to commit himself to an opinion on anything. The other members of the wardroom, Stapleton, the sergeant of marines, Lieutenant Bendick, Lieutenant Harcourt, and Doctor O’Connor, no matter how pressed, had simply not spoken at all.
By the end of the first week, Peter was finding it difficult to get through his meals without losing his temper and flying out upon their dullness and their timidity. He had been made so peevish and so reckless by it, so disheartened by the lack of community, and—frankly—so lonely, that in his own cabin he had forgotten himself and made a cutting remark about being surrounded by ghosts and old women.
Which had been when Mr. Andrews—after a week of stuttering and running away—had suddenly begun to speak to him. “You do know, sir,” he had said quietly, “that the captain has his informers in every level of the ship, and no one’s sure who they are? He hears everything, and he pays back what he doesn’t like threefold. There isn’t one of us on board who isn’t afraid.”
“If a man does his job to the best of his ability, he should have no cause to be afraid,” Peter had replied indignantly, and Andrews laughed, a cynical little smirk replacing the blush and look of panic that had heretofore been his permanent expression.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Not on the Nimrod though, sir. We eat our own.”
This dark and rather Celtic observation—hovering ominously on the edge of meaning—came back to him now, less for its warning than for the surge of relief and delight he had felt at having finally discovered an ally on this unhappy ship. It was the first gesture of friendship that he had received on board, and he treasured it. He treasured it, indeed, so much that when Andrews had followed it up by offering to remove himself from the cabin, he had not had to think twice about saying no.
Resting the feather of his quill against his cheek, he looked up meditatively at the sleeping man, just as the rain eased and a slice of sunshine lanced unexpectedly through the porthole, making Andrews’ wavy hair blaze like copper and fire. Idly, Peter wondered why it was thought to be such an unattractive color, for he found it very pleasing. There was an unearthliness about it, perhaps, which made him feel as though Andrews existed partly in a different world from himself. A feeling that only increased when he discovered the midshipman had a large repertoire of Irish folk tales and could be persuaded to share them, late at night, when he was halfway through his second bottle of wine and thoroughly hidden in the darkness.
Peter dipped his quill and brought it to hover over the page, meaning to write, Nevertheless, I have been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a valuable young man, whom I hope soon to count as a friend. He is already an ally. But something persuaded him to hold off—a wish not to tempt fate, perhaps, or the conviction that his mother would not be interested in such small details.
Instead he laid the pen down in its place in his writing box, took out the silver and glass shaker, and shook sand over his letter, drying the ink. Once he had folded it, rather than put it in the box where it belonged, he set it inside a book and tucked the book into the center of a pile of neatly stacked stockings in his sea chest, feeling ridiculously cloak and dagger but unwilling to take the risk that anyone could find it. A man like Walker, who could flog a seaman for being diligent enough to repair damaged rope before coiling it, would not hesitate to use even the mild dissatisfaction of his letter as evidence of mutinous thoughts.
He closed the sea chest softly, as if that too might be a crime. Mutinous thoughts? As he set his wig carefully on top of his own black hair and his hat upon that, he almost felt he was drawing a cover over revolution, holding it down. For God’s sake! He had been aboard only three weeks—he could not judge in that time. Nor was it his business to criticize how a captain ran his own ship. A man’s ship was his kingdom, and if Walker’s was an unhappy one, what of it? It was no excuse for rebellion. How would the service operate without order, without obedience, without…tyranny?
Carefully, so as not to disturb Andrews’ well-earned rest a second time, he padded out into the wardroom, leaning back for a moment on the closed door as if he could trap the treasonous thoughts inside. Clearly he had been reading too much in the papers about the war in the Americas, and the colonists’ notions of self-rule and justice for all. He had been infected by revolutionary fervor, but it would not do. It would not do. Not in the navy. So he preferred a happy ship? What of it? If an unhappy ship worked as well, it was no business of his to contemplate overturning the established order. He was appalled at himself for even thinking it.
Truly appalled—for when he straightened up he found that his hands were trembling and his heart racing within him. His conscience felt tender and swollen, as though his guilt was obvious to all. Fortunately, however, those who were not needed on deck were asleep, recovering from the storm, and he had time to breathe deeply, smooth the creases of his cravat and gather himself, unobserved.
But, as first lieutenant, it was his business, he decided, to do what he could to minimize that unhappiness. He could set the ship in such good order that Walker would have no reason to tyrannize. He could protect the ship’s people by making them as perfect as it was humanly possible to be, and that he would do with all the strength in him.
The wardroom presented a post-storm squalor of half-eaten cold dishes of food, abandoned oilcloths, drowsing servants and drying pools of water. Lieutenant Harcourt was there, asleep in a chair with his head pillowed on his folded arms and a self-satisfied rat gnawing on a chicken bone by his hand. This, for a start, needed to be rectified. Peter woke the servants and set them to clean, woke Harcourt and sent him off to his cabin to sleep in private, and then went on deck to supervise the coiling of ropes and satisfy himself that no rational mind would see fit to order those extra forty strokes.
Peter Kenyon was not an inconsiderable officer. Indeed he believed himself to be extremely capable. He had a series of successes behind him of which he was justly proud, and he would do what he could. He only hoped it would be enough.
Chapter Three
Sunlight fell on the pages of Emily Jones’s book, surprising her. Putting it down on the side of her cot, she looked up. For the first time in days, the arch of the stern windows showed clear rain-washed skies, purple and charcoal storm clouds retreating towards a now almost mythical England, so far away.<
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Flinging her feet out of bed, the oilcloth-covered floor springy and warm beneath her bare feet, she caught sight of her father’s wife, buried under shaking blankets, and the feeble movements in the hammock where her father lay suffering, and—for their sake—refrained from dancing at the excitement of it all.
The wooden world in which they were all confined rose and fell with each wave, which she had expected. What she had not expected was the side-to-side roll and the irregular changes of speed depending on the wind. These three oscillations combined to result in the ship proceeding with a motion like a hesitant corkscrew—up, down, left, right and forward, all at the same time. Emily found this thrilling, like the motions of a country dance, but she could plainly see it was not so pleasant for everyone.
There was no sign of her maid, Bess, but after the girl’s heroic service, mopping, running about with malodorous buckets, administering wine and water, laudanum and cool cloths, Emily did not grudge her a morning off. It was easy enough to dress in an old gown and twist her hair into a plain bun beneath a firmly pinned hat.
With a glance of sympathy for the sufferers, she let herself out of the cabin and onto the quarterdeck. There the breeze attempted to fling her bonnet over the rail. She clutched it and looked up to where sunlight burst brilliantly on the concavities of white sail. The air smelled fresh after the cabin’s reek of sickness, and the deck beneath her feet was clean enough for a ballroom—lines of dazzling white wood and gleaming black pitch.
On either side of the great wheel, two men with checked shirts and Monmouth caps stood, gentling the huge ship on her course. Neither so much as glanced over his shoulder at the sound of the cabin door closing. But several officers turned to look at her forbiddingly. There was no echo to her hopeful smile in a single face, and despite the calm immensity of light, she felt an oppression such as she had experienced all too often among those who blamed her for her father’s immorality. The vinegar faces told her the captain was on deck, for they were none of them so unfriendly when he was below.
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