“Not ill fortune, surely?” She roused herself to tease him. He smiled with appreciation at the effort.
“Perhaps not ill. Good fortune, somewhat slowed down.”
“Long enough for you to catch up.”
“Indeed.” He sighed. A bargain sale of the Clara Bush’s cargo had just about covered the cost of the repairs to her hull, but the bonus for the men of the Nimrod had emptied his savings from the bank, and there was nothing left with which to repair her splinted masts and torn rigging, let alone to buy a new cargo with which to begin again. He recently had to brick up the window in the garret he lived in, to avoid window tax, and the future looked bleak.
“If I could only get her seaworthy again, there are men who would sign on for a share in the profits without wages, and I could perhaps go into debt enough to finance a trip to the Slave Coast. It’s a business in which a man can make an easy fortune, and yet…”
“You are aware of my feelings on that.” Emily unhooked one of her earrings and looked at it, rather than at him, and though panic was a nearer companion than Adam dared admit, he still found her idealism warming.
“I do,” he said, “and I share them. But Emily, I would marry you now if I could support you. Are you not impatient for that day?”
“I hardly know you,” she said with a smile that took the sting from the words, but she reached out and fingered the fraying edge of his cuff. So light a touch, and yet he felt it in every particle of his body, like the press of sunlight. “Oh, Adam,” she admitted, “if only my father were content for me to live the life I grew to adulthood in. I have no real desire to be the landed lady he wants me to be. With the money he spent on new clothes for me when we arrived, I might have opened a little shop and be now independent, free to marry who and when I chose. But would you wish to marry a shopkeeper?”
“I would wish to marry you if you were as penniless as myself,” he said gallantly, “but I could not support the idea of living off your labor. I want to lay the world at your feet, not burden you with concerns that you are too fine to bear.”
Emily’s mouth compressed at this, as if she had bitten into a lemon, but she said nothing, and he concluded that, like him, she was oppressed by the hopelessness of the situation. He supposed he should have withdrawn his suit at once when he discovered that she was not the nobody she claimed, but was in fact the daughter of one of the most powerful officials on the island. But by that time it had been too late; his affections were fixed.
As for hers, he noted how—despite her claim to dislike the man her father so clearly intended for her—she had now rejoined Bess on the harbor wall and was watching the doings of his ship. Adam took the record of repairs achieved and repairs still outstanding from the hand of his carpenter, tucked them into his partly buttoned waistcoat and joined her.
The two prizes had dropped anchor and rocked gently in the bay. The captain’s barge was lowered over the rail of the Seahorse, everything looking freshly painted, smart and bright beneath the blazing sky. The shrill sound of a whistle, and a small figure climbed fluidly down the side and into the boat, which rowed over to the thirty-two and collected a second figure, whose coat sparkled less brilliantly, but whose progress down the side seemed even more enthusiastic.
“I should invite him to dinner,” said Emily doubtfully. “He will wonder, else, what I am doing here, and then I will come in for another interrogation as to why I will persist in being seen in your company, and why I will not think of my good name and prospects. If I go home and tell Father I came down to the harbor to invite Captain Kenyon to tea, however, he will be delighted enough not to ask more.”
“Of course,” Adam replied, jealousy curdling in his breast. It would be easier perhaps if his rival was ugly and stupid in addition to being successful. But the boat was close enough now that he could see Kenyon, with his patrician looks, the snowy perfection of his linen and the blaze of his gold braid. Worse, the man was deep in animated conversation with his first lieutenant, Mr. Andrews, and his normally stoic expression showed fierce pleasure, pride, and a consciousness of his own worth that Adam found intimidating. How long would any woman prefer so unheroic, unsuccessful and unenterprising a man as himself to that?
As he thought this, Kenyon looked up and saw Emily watching. Extraordinarily, his first reaction seemed to be a flinch. The smile fell from his face. Between one breath and the next, he presented once more the perfect mask of civility he had worn on the Nimrod. Was that merely the startled delicacy of a military man who had grown up among men and did not know how to behave towards women, Adam wondered. Or was that the recoil of a guilty conscience? Of a profession for whom “out of sight, out of mind” was a daily reality?
No. No, it was unfair of him to make such an assumption simply because he wanted very much to believe this paragon had some human faults, would prove himself the worse man in the end. As a penance, Adam walked a little away, sitting on an abandoned coil of cable and shaking out his carpenter’s report—so that Emily and Kenyon could meet in some semblance of privacy.
It did seem, as the man ran up the harbor steps to bow to Emily with an expression of shy, delighted warmth, that he had misjudged.
“I… Oh.” Kenyon took his hat off, looking out to sea as though an appropriate topic of conversation might be floating there. It was not. “Miss Jones.”
“Captain.” She dropped him a small curtsy, but cruelly left him in the lurch where conversation was concerned.
There was a long silence.
In it, Adam looked up again and caught the eye of Lieutenant Andrews, who stood perfectly rigid behind Kenyon. It was a shocking moment—it almost seemed to Adam that there was a physical snap as his own resentment of this meeting met that of the other man. Andrews’ obsidian eyes seemed dark as the pit of Hell, and though his face was appropriately expressionless, Adam could not hold his gaze. Adam looked away as if he had seen murder done, as if he had seen his own reflection and discovered a monster. It was deeply unsettling. Almost more so than watching the amused smile spreading on Emily’s face.
“You will come to tea with my father and I? Not today, obviously, I see you have a great deal to do, but this time next week? I know he would be delighted to see you.”
Kenyon’s own smile answered it, a light and small expression, but on that narrow face ridiculously touching. “I should…I should be very honored, Miss Jones. My thanks.”
The pit of Hell, Adam thought. Yes, that was exactly what it was like.
The pit of Hell was occupying Captain Walker’s mind also. As if it wasn’t enough to feel as though a carthorse had kicked him in the back, or to be so weak he could not lift a hand long enough to write a swingeing letter to the Admiralty. No, on top of all of this, the thought that they had taken his ship away from him, and they had gotten away with it, was nigh unendurable.
While he was still half-lucid, in a state where reality and opium dreams mixed, Commodore Dalby had visited to tell him the Nimrod had sailed for England under the temporary captaincy of Dalby’s cousin, and that when Walker was well enough he was to be offered instead a place administering the dockyard. At the time he had thought it a fever dream, too appalling to be real. They knew he was a fighting captain. Rodney himself had praised his fearlessness and drive; Sir George Brydges Rodney himself had recommended him for his captaincy—what the Devil’s business did some paper-pushing beau in London have taking it away?
But once he had recovered enough to make his voice heard, he found it was no dream. Summersgill’s recommendation, Doctor Harding said, sharing the gossip that had made its way down into the officer’s club. The gentleman had made a remarkable impact at the Customs Office, and Governor Bruere already thought a great deal of his judgment. Enough to invite Commodore Dalby to dinner at Government House and make the “request” to him to have Walker deprived of his ship.
At the thought, Walker was filled with such rage he almost felt well again. Summersgill? As if that cringing little civilia
n could be behind anything. But Summersgill’s protégé? Walker was not blind to the affection in which Summersgill held Kenyon. Talking and plotting together all the way from Portsmouth! Kenyon had been trouble from the start, with his dramatics and his “more perfect than thou” attitude. It was surely no coincidence that the threat of mutiny had never been more prevalent than on this last voyage with that poisonous young man as first lieutenant.
Now Kenyon had a ship, and his string of prizes was the talk of the hospital. He and Andrews, that sick little pervert, were getting rich, while Walker himself lay bereft and disgraced with nothing but a small sugar plantation and a few hundred slaves, and a job at the dockyard, for pity’s sake, like an invalid or a tradesman. It could not be borne.
Andrews! He had had that abomination’s neck practically in the noose. He hadn’t forgotten the look of terror on the boy’s face at Henderson’s hanging. It was one of the few pleasant things he had to meditate on in this place. And now the midshipman had become a first lieutenant, raking in prize money and glory, with the world entirely ignorant of his disgusting little secret.
Why had Kenyon not discovered it yet? Was he too blind, as some over-genteel country bumpkins were, to recognize what he saw? Was he corrupt enough to overlook it, as were some of the effete men of the town?
Or was he… Walker took in a long breath of realization, gasped at the pain, then coughed and coughed, eyes streaming and the dull ache in his back woken up into red-hot agony once more. Damn this injury! Damn this place of sickness where he felt as effectively imprisoned as he might in a French cell. When the fit wore off, he lay down, trembling, and finished the thought with a smile.
Or was he implicated? Kenyon didn’t look like a filthy bugger, but then so few of them did. If they were at it together, then a few encouraging words and coins offered to the disaffected members of the Seahorse’s crew should have them both.
Walker drifted off to sleep to visions of the two of them, tied back to back, one noose around both throats, slowly throttling together in the busy naval bustle of Ordnance Island, on the gallows, looking out on a fleet glad to be cleansed of them. Such a satisfying dream. He woke smiling.
Chapter Thirteen
“That was encouragement.” Peter smiled at his own reflection in the small mirror he had propped against his sea chest in the corner of their attic room, while Josh—still painfully jealous—pretended not to have heard him.
The landlady came grumbling up the stairs with a couple of jugs of warm water and poured one into the basin before Peter, then smiled a fox’s smile. “Nice to have you back, gents. I did hear you was come into a small fortune on account of that thirty-two was stuffed with guns for the rebels. Wish you joy if that’s so, and have you thought of taking the larger room downstairs?”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hodges,” said Josh, once he realized that Peter was too taken up in his own thoughts to reply. “I’m sure Captain Kenyon will consider it, when he has had time to wash the salt off and isn’t so perished with hunger.”
“Ah, as to food.” She pretended not to look as Peter took off his wig and placed it on the stand. “How it stands as far as to food is this…”
Josh wasn’t in the mood to listen to another improbable litany of bad luck that would end with them having no dinner. “We will dine at the Cat and Fiddle,” he interrupted, with the firm voice he had cultivated to command the prize crew on the thirty-two, “and speak to you about accommodations afterwards.” Hopefully to say we are moving out. Pointedly, he held the door open.
When she had gone, he crossed over to his side of the room, took off his own wig and put it in its box. Folding his coat over his sea chest, he unbuckled his breeches at the knees and sat down on his mattress, hugging himself for comfort.
“Meeting me at the harbor,” Peter insisted in a dreamy, contemplative voice. “It was encouragement.”
Josh tried to concentrate on the way the reinforced stitching around his knees pressed into his cheek as he reminded himself that Peter was not a cruel man. He was not doing this in order to hurt Josh, whatever it might feel like. No, Peter was not cruel, but he was, at times, horribly oblivious, and it could amount to much the same thing.
Peter looked worried now at the lack of response. Josh could feel the gaze on his bent head like two searching points of light. He could tell that some of his own misery had finally penetrated that noble but thick head from the almost silent way Peter unfolded himself to standing, took the two steps that separated his domain from Josh’s, and knelt, hand on the mattress next to Josh’s stockinged foot, his knee next to it, bowing the bed and tilting Josh towards him.
“What is it?” said Peter, genuinely at a loss.
And after all, Josh thought, could Peter really be blamed for misunderstanding, when Josh had deliberately tried to mislead him? It was irrational to hope that somehow Peter would read in the silences all the words Josh refused to speak. I don’t want you to love her, I want you to love me. I don’t want you to leave me. Stay with me forever!
Stupid words that could never be said. It was wrong of him to even cherish them in his heart, five hundred times worse to say them. He should rejoice that Peter at least could leave this sin behind, go forward into a welcome respectability, with a wife to love him and children to connect him to the future. He did not have the right to want to take all that away, imprison Peter forever in a world of lies and shame. He should be a better man than that.
“It’s nothing, sir,” Josh said at last, when he had successfully fought down the clawing protestations of his own selfishness. “I’m just a little out of sorts.”
He thought of Mr. Robinson, with whom he had shared a brief but intense moment of jealousy, and wondered whether he should pour a more rational restraint on the rejoicing. Should he say, “But do not get your hopes up, I think she has another admirer, and perhaps a more favored one?” For Kenyon had the blindness of privilege. Obstacles removed themselves from his path, and he had not yet learned how to see them.
Josh did not want to be the man who taught him. If Josh had his way, he would be the force that leveled Peter’s path ahead of him and removed the stones, so that he did not even bruise his feet on his journey to greatness. But Josh wondered if that too was selfish. He wondered, often, whether it might be better for Peter, and the world, if Joshua Andrews was removed from it. But always when the knife was in his hand, he would pause and think of the torments of Hell, and fear held him back. Better to sit here, with the attic windows open and the whitewashed garret filled with light, trying to enjoy Peter’s closeness without hoping to possess it, than to cut it all short for something worse.
“What can I do”—Peter’s long-fingered hand closed on his ankle, then slid gently, teasingly up his calf, rolling the silk down and repeating the operation on skin—“to make you feel better?”
At the touch, bitter lust came boiling up from within him. Josh gulped a great breath against the tightness in his chest, raised his head and rested it against the wall, closed his eyes so that Peter would not see the anguish—for even he was not that blind—and reached out. His fingers tangled in newly brushed hair, pointed with dampness, and he pulled the hair ribbon out so that black silk strands would sweep forward and enclose Peter’s face.
Peter gave a soft, small chuckle and leaned in, his lips gentle on Josh’s forehead and his closed eyes, less gentle, less chaste as they worked their way down the angle of his jaw and to his neck. Josh’s entire soul seemed to be concentrated in the patch of skin beneath Peter’s mouth. Everything else hurt. It hurt to think, his chest felt as though the veins were severed and every beat of his heart was filling it with blood, and he whimpered, undoing Peter’s cravat and shirt buttons with silent desperation, as if Peter’s skin could heal him.
Peter laughed again and drew away. Josh opened his eyes to find the man walking over to the door, locking it against prying visitors. Josh feasted his hungry gaze on the sight of that strong, slender back, the dark hair falling to
a point between his shoulder blades, the light of the windows sifting through the finely woven shirt, hinting at the planes of Peter’s chest. Josh breathed in again, his own skin waking up, feeling the press of his clothes like a tantalizing caress that did nothing but make him itch for more. His fingers tangled in his neckcloth, pulling the bow into a knot, and he yanked it savagely before abandoning it and tearing his shirt off without it, the cloth still knotted about his neck.
“You’re always so…eager,” said Peter with a smile, as though this was praise. It seemed it was. “I love that.” He took hold of the neckcloth and pulled Josh’s face to his own, and Josh, who wanted the kiss to take away the feeling that he was bleeding to death, drowned in it gladly.
“Shirt off,” Josh demanded, pulling at it impatiently while Peter wriggled his wrists out from the lace cuffs. When it was thrown into the center of the room, he could finally lock his arms around Peter’s back and pull the man down on top of him, wanting to be crushed by the weight. Every inch of skin that touched Peter felt alive, every part that did not was a howling wilderness, and he trembled between them, feeling that he would break apart with the need and the anguish and the joy of it.
Catching his fever, Peter knelt up to unbutton both pairs of breeches, shove them down, before lying down again, bare prick hard against Josh’s. Josh cried out, some part of his purgatory escaping his control in a pleading little whine of need, and he hated himself for this, he hated… He thrust up against Peter, witless and instinctive, his eyes closing from the wave of pleasure, the bliss and horror of it. Sensing Josh’s mood, Peter bowed his head and bit Josh’s shoulder, and the spike of pain mixed with the stroking, building pulse of pleasure, where they slid together, making it feel honest, permitted, real.
Wordlessly, Josh spread his legs, asking for more, the knowledge that this might be the last time winning out effortlessly over the reluctance to beg, and when Peter tried to reach for oil, Josh panicked and would not let him, winding himself around the man, holding on as hard as he could, until Peter, moved by some instinct more aware than his reason muttered, “Shh, I’m not going anywhere,” and slicked himself with spit instead.
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