Kenyon smiled, as though charmed by the thought of Summersgill dueling. True, he was not the most likely combatant, but there were some insults even the most peaceable of men could not endure. Honor would demand action, even from him.
“The captain would be quite within his rights to refuse a challenge,” Kenyon said softly, his voice rough. Frowning at the sound of it, he turned away to watch the sea. His hands were white on the rail, and there was a persistent tremor in the muscles of his arms. “It isn’t possible to maintain discipline in a ship where the officers are fighting duels over every trifling slight. We must learn to accept a certain amount of humiliation in the exercise of our duty, so the admiralty says. And if I were to fight him despite a refusal, not only would it be murder, but it could well precipitate the mutiny we fear.”
“Would that be such a bad thing?”
Kenyon laughed, ducking his head. The movement concealed his eyes but bared the spreading bloodstain on his collar. Summersgill looked away quickly, as he would from any obscenity.
“It has the potential to be very bad indeed. Yesterday I would have said I could hold the crew together through my own authority.” The half-hidden smile shaded into bitterness. “But you’ve seen what has become of that. And the authority of the other officers, with me. If we may be punished like ordinary men, why should we be obeyed like gods?”
“You’re saying it wouldn’t stop with the captain?”
“Exactly so.” Kenyon raised his head. With the sea shining behind him, only the small lines of endurance around his mouth distinguished him from the figure of a martial saint painted on a church wall. “I don’t think they would kill me at first—the stripes might save me for a few days, until they realized I wasn’t going to join them. I don’t think they would kill you or your wife…” He sighed. “But it would not surprise me either. They would certainly kill—possibly torment—young Hawkes and his messmates. Anderson, too, if he survives the surgery. And I hope I do not need to mention the fate that would be suffered by your ward and her maid. You have no conception, sir, of what these men are capable of when their blood is up.”
Peter shuddered. It was only a small, involuntary flinch, but from a man who faced Walker every day, it spoke volumes. Summersgill thought about Emily and the twelve-year-old “young gentlemen” and felt his throat close with dread. He drew out his handkerchief and pressed it to his lips, forcing himself to breathe in the calming smell of lavender.
“Sir?” said Kenyon, watching as Chips’s tie-mate, Boyd, made to shake his fist at the quarterdeck. The coxswain caught the arm, pulled it down and hurried him away, pressing a packet of tobacco into his hands. “If I can keep the crew together until we strike soundings in St. George, can you get the captain removed once we arrive?”
“I think I can.” Summersgill had not been thinking so far ahead, but now he thought about Admirals Sullivan and DeBourne who both had sons involved in minor smuggling activities. They would undoubtedly prefer the young men to be gently warned rather than prosecuted. “Yes, yes, almost certainly. If I write the letters today I can have him diverted into a career in the dockyards within a quarter…or perhaps better say a half year.”
Kenyon laughed again—a bark of appalled dismay. “Half a year! We will be lucky if there’s a week’s tolerance left in the men.”
He made an abortive movement as if to reach out and take Summersgill’s arm, and though his face was as composed as always, Summersgill had known him from childhood and discerned both an apology and a request for reassurance. The second touched him deeply. Such a splendid young man to be looking to him for help, and yet so young. So young to be bearing this burden.
“I hope you will forgive me, sir, if I say that my greatest concern is not our lives at all. We were sent to Bermuda to combat privateers, and the Nimrod is a floating fortress. There isn’t a settlement on the islands or another ship in these waters could stand against her.”
“That is a pleasing thought, surely?”
“It is. As long as she remains in the navy. But once the men are branded mutineers, then what? They’ll have this ship and nothing to lose. I dread to think of the damage they could wreak with it.”
Summersgill pictured it. Bad enough the fleets of cutters, sloops and brigs that flitted from isle to isle making it impossible for decent folk to live without fear of robbery or violence, but add the Nimrod and you would add terror. “Oh, I agree,” he said, appalled. “I agree. But what can we do?”
Kenyon gave him a smile of exceptional sweetness. “If the men do mutiny, and I can get down there myself, I intend to blow the powder magazine.”
Summersgill wondered suddenly why he had taken this position. He was a landed gentleman and a mathematician, not an adventurer. The realm of sudden death and glory had never appealed, not even when he was young.
“However,” Kenyon continued, “it’s more likely that the men will get the officers out of the way first, and if I can’t…”
Heroism at his age? His skin shrinking away from the vision of himself setting a candle flame to hundreds of tons of gunpowder, Summersgill swallowed. Would there be time for it to hurt? Time to feel the scalding flame, as though he swam in molten lead? Did his oath of allegiance absolutely require that? And if it did, would he really have the courage to go through with it?
Yet could he continue to live, knowing himself a coward? Hadn’t he said himself that sometimes honor demanded action? Well. Well, now it seemed he was called upon to live up to his own words.
“My family?” he said, fighting a need to weep at the thought of them, alone in this harsh world, alone on the treacherous sea. “Promise me you will put them into a boat. Promise me my wife and daughter will live.”
Glancing aft, Kenyon’s eyes lit on the group of midshipmen who were heaving the log to determine the ship’s speed, unnaturally studious and quiet for such young boys, their faces pinched with fear. “I mean to take Andrews into my confidence and give him the job of making sure all the youngsters get aboard the longboat. Bess should go too, this will be no place for her.”
Kenyon looked back with a rueful smile. “I would certainly have asked you to go and him to stay,” he explained, “if it weren’t—you understand I mean no disrespect—for the fact that Andrews is a better navigator and a better sailor than you, and so stands a greater chance of bringing them safe to shore.”
Unexpectedly, Summersgill found himself laughing. “Had I known the advantage of having such a trade I might not have taken so great a care to remain entirely ignorant all my life.” He took Kenyon’s hand and shook it, resigned. “Very well, Peter, should it become necessary to blow us all to kingdom come, you may count on me.”
Chapter Seven
“I think I can brush the stains from the inside of my coat. But the shirt is ruined.” Kenyon twisted the linen as though he was wringing a neck. The pressure squeezed out a trickle of blood that dripped onto the clean floor of their cabin. “My best shirt only fit for handkerchiefs, God damn him!”
Josh drew his gaze back to the dark mirror of his wine with a sense of pressing danger. The Nimrod had never been a happy ship, but it seemed to him that some special malevolence lay on this voyage. He could feel himself surrendering to it, growing listless, reckless, and this last blow had left him reeling. He had not thought it was possible to hate Walker more, but this…it was unspeakable.
He risked glancing up, meaning to say so, and caught Kenyon’s eyes. They were full of fire and fury, hotter by far than his words, and the look of implacable anger made Josh’s heart stall in delight. Such beautiful eyes. So fluid, so expressive, so very green in the gold of the lantern.
Control yourself! He should certainly not be leaning forward, gape-mouthed and entranced. Kenyon might notice. He might notice and understand. Then…then it could be Josh, hanging by his neck from the yardarm, slowly choking to death.
“The shirt is not the only thing in ruins.” Josh’s voice sounded unnaturally loud to himself. Walke
r had stepped over the line, and now he was just a little too angry to keep his mouth shut. “By God, sir, you might be his latest victim, but you are not his first—you’ve seen how he treats the men.”
“They cannot appease him,” Kenyon agreed and tried to lean down to mop the bloodstain away. His hiss of pain was soft and lay unacknowledged between them, for it was a mark of how far their friendship had come that he let himself flinch at all—a human weakness he would not have shown to another soul on board. “They run about furiously to look active but achieve nothing. I believe he’s afraid of them. But the more he tries to grind them down, the more just cause he has to be afraid.”
He’s afraid? Josh had never thought of it like that. He had imagined Walker merely loved the power. But if he was only a pathetic, terrified man trying to protect himself from those he believed were stronger than him, did he then deserve pity? No, I think not.
Kenyon shuffled gingerly forward to the edge of his cot and braced himself to slip off, so that he could kneel and clean the floor without bending. The movement took him from deep shadow into lamplight, baring his shirtless skin to Josh’s rapt gaze. Mother of God! Such arms he had, pale and strong, the yellow light pooling in their curves. His long neck and flanks and chest were sleek as cream and scarcely scarred. And his back, the elegant curve of spine brutally cut from waist to shoulders, swollen, bruised and oozing blood.
Josh made a noise, clapped his hands over his mouth to stifle it, and cursed his vivid imagination. It had chosen that moment to replay to him the scene of punishment on deck—the beautiful young man tied to the grating, the lash, Kenyon’s frown of pained concentration, the grunts of impact and the small involuntary gasps of his breathing.
I was appalled, I was! Oh Mary and Joseph, why must I be such a monster?
“Are you quite well?” Kenyon looked up with terrible innocence. Oblivious.
“Just feel…a little sick.” Josh drained his wineglass, filled it up again and drank half down before he felt collected enough to go on. “It looks painful. For all love, sir, lie down. I’ll swab the floor.”
The lieutenant retreated, easing himself down to lie on his stomach with his head propped on one arm. That was better, for now only his amused expression met the light, and even that was half-hidden behind the veil of his long dark hair. “I made the mess. I should clean it,” he said. Josh’s mother had had a similar saying, and the familiarity of it was a balm after that rush of paralyzing lust. Affection was safer.
“I know my place.” He smiled and began to relax over scouring the stain away, when the treacherous voice in his head added, On my knees for you. He choked again and scrambled back to his bottle. It was a difficult game he played with the wine—he needed it to knock himself out so that he neither lay awake listening to Kenyon breathing nor ran the risk of speaking out of his extraordinarily vivid dreams. But he paid in evenings of lowered inhibitions, the mortal dread of exposure, and lately a growing suicidal wish to confess all, to let the older man know what he really felt. Only the knowledge that it would be playing into Walker’s hands held him back, barely.
“I wonder if you do.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Is it the drink?” Kenyon watched him with a measuring, alert gaze that—to Josh’s muzzy thoughts at least—seemed gentler than any he had used before. “You seem seaman-like and efficient to me, bright enough, able to charm or daunt the men at will, and well able to command. What keeps you from passing for lieutenant? You cannot want to be a midshipman all your life.”
“On this ship? You, if anyone, should know what it’s like by now. I only wish I’d never been made acting lieutenant at all. It was that that made him notice me, and God knows how it’ll end.” He found the words pouring from him in a kind of ecstasy of relief. Years, it seemed, he had yearned for someone to say these things to, and to find that confidant in Kenyon was almost too good to be true. “I’m not totally without ambition. Were I out of his reach I’d qualify tomorrow, but that isn’t going to happen now, is it? So I wish I had damn well kept my head down and stayed unobserved and unimportant ’til I died.”
Their shared anger and the honesty felt more intoxicating than the wine.
“It is a far worse pain than the stripes to me,” said Kenyon softly into the private, swaying gloom, “to see so many excellent things go to waste. This is a beautiful ship, yet he makes her feel like a prison transport. In the right hands, this crew could be the equal of any in the fleet—and he treats them like dumb brutes, officers and men alike. And you… There are times I see a fine spirit in you, a fighting spirit. Then, of a sudden, it fails. Has he broken you, too? Is there nothing left that can be salvaged?”
“Are you calling me excellent?” Anger Josh understood and could navigate, but praise made him stop short, disbelieving and a little anguished. In drink, the thought of being called “excellent” made him want to weep, though sober he might have appreciated its irony. You would not think so, sir, if you knew what I wanted to do to you, what I wanted you to do to me.
“I am.” Kenyon looked at him with an open expression, almost nervously. There was a silence, and Josh’s heart beat against his throat like the wings of a bird. No one—starting with his mother—had ever thought him worth such praise. Even to God, whose loving kindness was supposedly infinite, Josh was nothing but an abomination to be wiped from the face of the earth with brimstone and fire. He was used to disdain, but he didn’t know what to do when faced with kindness. Taking in a harsh breath, he turned his face to the screen to conceal the threat of tears.
As if conscious that he had strayed too far on delicate territory, Kenyon hitched himself up to take another long drink of the several pints of rum which had been pressed on him in sympathy by the men, and changed the subject. “I have been hoping to uphold the present regime at least long enough for us to reach our destination, but now I wonder. Could I call him out?” His face hardened again. “Summersgill practically suggested it. He’d back me if I chose to, I think.”
“Challenge Captain Walker to a duel on his own quarterdeck?” Josh repeated, his spirit thrilling at this audacity.
“On land it would wear well enough. The world understands that a gentleman cannot be expected to bear such an insult.”
Did Josh really need to point out the hopelessness of this plan? The absolute authority of a naval captain that superseded any moral law? “But we’re not on land.”
“No… No.” Kenyon tried to turn over onto his side, but clearly his injuries had begun to stiffen, the bruises to bloom and the cuts to tighten, because he gave a startled hiss and lay back down, frowning wearily at the floor. “Some other reason would have to be concocted, and then I should need to be convinced that every man on board would be prepared to swear to the lie.”
This time the silence was one of enormity. Josh’s glass rang twice as he put it down, betraying the tremble in his hand. Swinging his legs over the edge of his cot, he let himself be seen, partly dressed and frightened as he was. “Isn’t that…mutiny?”
Kenyon smiled. It was, perhaps, the sweetest expression Josh had ever seen on a man’s face, with its perfect mixture of vulnerability and amusement, resignation and entreaty. “If I place my life in your hands,” he said softly, “it is because I know it’s safe there.”
If Josh had been fragile before, these words shattered him. For a moment he forgot how to breathe, how to think, as the storm overtook him, and he ran helpless before the swell of agony and denial. The words were out of his mouth before he had time to consider or regret. “You would not be so quick to trust me if you knew what I was.”
“What you are?” The gaze became quizzical, still light-hearted on the surface, but colored with shades of compassion and concern beneath. “I don’t…I don’t know what you mean.”
“If I place my life in your hands, will it be safe there?”
“To the utmost of my strength.”
Josh took a breath and tried to say it: “I…I…” Hi
s heart stuttered as wildly as his words, choking him. He looked at the wall, the floor, the lantern—they glared back, implacable, refusing to help. I will hang for mutiny or die at the hands of the crew. It made it easier to force himself out of the cot to crawl on hands and knees across the tiny space, the gulf which was all that separated him from that smile. If I’m going to be killed anyway…
Reaching out, he pushed his fingers into the thick darkness of Kenyon’s hair, the sensation pounding over him, drowning him. Stroking the errant locks out of the lieutenant’s face, he leaned down and touched his lips to the corner of a mouth that had opened a little in surprise. Flushed skin and sweat, and Kenyon licked his lips—perhaps nervously—but at the tiny flickering touch Josh couldn’t help himself. Both hands twisted wrist deep into that glorious hair—soft, so soft—and he lifted the older man’s face to his own, claimed the mouth full on, plunging deep, luxuriating in the taste and the firmness and Peter, oh, Peter. Oh, God, Peter!
Something breaking in his chest—his heart, probably—forced him away, forced him to huddle miserably in the middle of the deck with tears spilling onto his cheeks, waiting for the recoil, waiting to be punched and shunned. He didn’t fear death, for the lieutenant was a man of his word, but Josh was basely, burningly ashamed. And if he hates me… He wiped his eyes on his sleeves, looked up—best to know the worst at once—and was met by a look of plain astonishment, almost wonder.
“Ah,” said Kenyon uncertainly. Was he blushing? He was! Actually blushing, shy as a maiden. “I…didn’t know.”
“Are you not going to run to the captain and tell him you’ve discovered a threat to the ship?” Though his voice was thin and bitter as Tuesday’s soup, Josh was proud of himself for being able to speak at all. He had kissed the first lieutenant; no one could ever again say he lacked nerve.
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