False Colors (12 page)

Frances and George continue well, and desire me to write to you of their achievements; Frances on the harpsichord and George on his first pony. But I wish instead to urge you to come home; to see your children’s small triumphs for yourself. They do not miss their father, and that seems to me to be a terrible thing.
I, however, miss him very much. Do come. Take us all away from here. To England, perhaps, where James can find more wholesome recreations, and where the specter of the yellow jack will not cloud my eyes every time I look on his face. But if not England, we could live aboard ship with you, until the outbreak is over. I am not afraid at all of the perils of the sea so long as you are with me. It is the perils of the land I fear.

Pushing the letter away, Farrant looked down into his own eyes, reflected with a russet sheen in the polish of the dining table.
But that…no
, he looked away, planting his elbows and bowing his head into his hands. “
The children do not miss their father
.” He heard a rustle as Bentley picked the letter up and walked to the stern windows, holding it to his face, as though he was sniffing it.

“I will take your drugs.” Farrant closed his eyes and in the darkness fought that part of himself that screamed protest. “For her, for them, for you. If you will tell me one thing.
Is there
any chance of a cure? Must I stay half-dead forever?”

Bentley placed the letter on the table and sat down opposite him. When Farrant looked up, it was to see the smooth white face looking almost kind. “I’m sure of it, Sir. This talk of vice is superstition. Lapses not withstanding, I have seen you struggle with it too long and hard for that. Do you remember Fryett, haunted by a ghost I was able to cut away with a scalpel? Or Pattemore, whose aggression I cured by trepanning? If I had more test subjects, I could make a more rapid progress, but I am confident that in time I will locate the source of your affliction and excise it.” A shy smile. “If you could try and avoid getting yourself hanged in the meantime, that would be very helpful.”

Bentley rose, pushed his glasses up and glided as if on gimbals back to the door, opening it just as Nyman, on the other side, raised his fist to knock again. Nyman, well trained, did not flinch; merely allowing his raised hand to divert to the scar beneath his eye, as if it ached. “Beg pardon, sir. There’s a young man asking permission to come aboard. Says you’ll know him. Lieutenant Donwell, sir.”

As he stood in the entry port of HMS
Britannia
, watching her First Lieutenant report his presence to the captain, Alfie tried to reconcile himself with the idea of a new beginning. This pain was only the kind of pain—brief, fleeting, soon forgotten—that starts a new life. He had always loved beginnings—early mornings, first smiles, first kisses—mistakes left behind and the certainty that it was still too soon for everything to turn sour. Why should he not now feel that fresh hope again? He should. He
would
, when the deed was properly done and the cord cut.

Casually,
Britannia
’s deck-crew thinned as the men not required on the upper deck sauntered innocently below. Those unable to disappear evaded his eye, “accidentally” turned their backs to him. Without any insubordination whatsoever, he received the strong impression that he was not welcome.

Something of the same hostility, closing up around a guilty secret, flavored the sour-faced disapproving look on the First Lieutenant’s nightmarish face when he returned. Though Alfie had been on the inside of the clannish defensiveness of a crew before, it was unexpectedly daunting to feel himself its target. “Come with me. The captain will see you.”

Seven risers in the quarterdeck stair—Alfie counted them, his heart thrumming more urgently with each step. Trying not to remember; not to be thrown back to the pudding-faced ungainly child he had once been, he took off his hat and bowed with what felt like an audible crackle of nerves. He still hadn’t looked, his gaze on the tips of the captain’s shoes, but as he straightened to salute he had to—had to drag his focus upwards and meet Farrant’s eyes.

A rushing, disorientated moment, as a force reached out of the past to pull him back into an earlier, unformed life. He breathed in sharply, just managing to suppress a gasp. For, though the world had altered around him, it had not touched Captain Lord Lisburn. It was as though he had reached maturity and simply frozen there, the square, strong face no more lined now than it had been ten years ago. Farrant’s blue eyes were authoritative as ever, as blue as ever—a forgotten, speedwell blue whose vividness astonished.

Alfie swallowed, bit the inside of his cheek, and said, “Alfie Donwell, sir. I served with you on the
Mercury
. Recently passed for lieutenant. I wondered if you might have a place available.”

“I remember you well, Mr. Donwell,” Farrant’s smile was too cynical to be called friendly. He shared a sidelong look with his first lieutenant, who was hovering by Alfie’s elbow as if providing the captain moral support. “You had no tact as a child either. Running in where angels fear to tread.”

It was strangely, bitterly amusing; how well Farrant knew him, how little he’d changed from that impulsive boy. Alfie smiled back. “An unexpected attack may carry the day, sir, before your opponent knows what you’re about.” He bowed his head. “But I must admit I’ve had no real success with the strategy.” Studying the grain of the deck planks, he wound the topmost button of his coat round and round until it would move no more. “I would do anything to be taken aboard, sir. I hope you can imagine why I would wish to serve with you again.”

Farrant dug his hands into his pockets. “I can think of several reasons. You made something of a nuisance of yourself on the
Mercury
, if I recall, Mr. Donwell. One of the least promising little squeakers it’s ever been my displeasure to know.”

“Sir…” Alfie cursed himself for the note of distress that shook his voice, but it had not occurred to him until this moment that Farrant might say “no.” Though the captain might dislike the sight of him, he’d expected some fellow-feeling, some recognition that they were on the same side against the rest of the world. But suppose he did say “no”, and Alfie was left behind to face Cavendish? The very best that could happen would be him being turned off the
Meteor
with no character and no real prospects of ever getting another berth. The worst was hanging. But more than that—worse than that—he could not face the look on John’s face again. He couldn’t.

Raising his head in a spray of light from the diamond cockade of his hat, Farrant looked at him keenly. “Are you bringing me trouble?”

But Alfie knew, for all his power, for all his influential relations, and for all his apparent carelessness over what others might think of him, Farrant too must need to be cautious. Suppose Alfie brought John’s condemnation with him. Did John have the zeal in him to go to the Admiralty office and say, “That man runs a floating Molly house, he’s just given refuge to the most despicable man of my ship”?

He couldn’t see it. John had a powerful temper—a temper you hardly suspected at first, so meek he seemed, until it burst out like a volcano erupting—but he was not malicious. Having solved his own problem, Alfie did not think he would go out of his way to destroy anyone else.

“I’m running from it, sir. But I don’t believe it will follow me here.”
Farrant strolled slowly forward and began to pace in a small, pondering circle around Alfie. A rush of self-awareness lifted goosebumps on the skin of Alfie’s arms, as he remembered that running for protection to his first love might make sense to him, but to Farrant it would look very different. Risking his own reputation by sheltering the sub-standard, annoying brat he had to forcibly brush off last time? Why on earth should he?
Standing so straight that his back cramped with the effort, he tried to wordlessly convey the message that he would be no trouble at all, that he knew his place, that he would be ever so grateful.
“Mr. Nyman?” Completing his circuit, Farrant turned to his first lieutenant. “I understand our fourth has been expressing reservations about the culture of the ship. Tell him that if he gets up here packed and ready to leave in the next five minutes he may have a transfer to the…?”
He raised an eyebrow at Alfie, who said “
Meteor
, sir!” in an embarrassingly fervent voice.
“Oh…” A tone of realization, and then the captain said dismissively, “I’m sure our Mr. Teach will find a ship captained by an Aminadab more to his liking. Sour faced, canting capons, the both of them.”
Alfie broke attention to look straight at Farrant, startled. “Do you know Captain Cavendish, sir?” He shouldn’t care. Fascination, hope, a painful lifting of the heart should form no part of his sucking whirlpool of betrayal and hurt. He should not feel, in the slightest, jealous at finding out that Farrant knew as much about John as he did. He should not need—want—to know any more.
Farrant gave him a slow, suggestive smile and said, “Dine with me tomorrow night. You can ask me all about it then.” He turned away to shout, “Bring Mr. Donwell’s dunnage aboard,” to the tars loitering on the gangplank, leaving Alfie so confused he almost missed the breath of relief that went through the watching crew.

Britannia’s
wardroom table, spread with a white cloth, glittering with glass and cheerful with blue and white stoneware dishes, would not have disgraced a gentleman’s country cottage. The roll and pitch of the ship—now underway to the West Indies—slid the gravy clockwise around Alfie’s plate. The servant assigned to him kept his glass filled with red wine, which gently rotated in his glass, tasting of vinegar and lead. After he had cut his meat into smaller and smaller pieces for the better part of half an hour, listlessly acknowledging his mess-mates’ introductions, the Gunner’s wife, Mrs. Shaw, cleared her throat deliberately and asked, “You’re eating with the Cap’n tomorrow?”

Looking up, he was struck by the distaste on every face, making all the separate physiognomies match, like a set of tableware.
Oh, so it is
that
kind of dinner, is it?

“Yes,” he said into the tense silence.
“The captain is…” First Lieutenant Nyman leaned forward. He should have been a ferocious looking man, with the cutlass scar across his cheek and jaw, the empty socket of his left eye. But the anxiety in his remaining eye made him seem only fragile; a discarded paper of news that begs not to be torn any further. “He has…”
“He has his little ways,” Mrs. Shaw went on. A well-fleshed, jolly looking woman with chapped red hands and an impeccably starched bonnet, she seemed a great deal more robust than the lieutenant. “Which those of us what sails with him has to put up with, eh? He’s a toff, ain’t he, and they ain’t like the rest of us.”
“I took from your conversation that you were a boy when you sailed with him before?” Nyman asked, not quite meeting Alfie’s eye as he poured himself a drink.
“I was, sir.” Alfie had caught the drift of this conversation already, and managed a slight, cynical amusement despite the feeling of emptiness. It did nothing to work this barbed hook out from beneath his ribs; to help him find the half of himself that John seemed to have taken away with him. But it distracted from the pain, at least. “I served aboard the
Mercury
from thirteen years of age. Transferred to the
Swiftsure
as acting lieutenant three years later. I recall the
Mercury
as a happy ship. Well run, efficient, fought several smart actions off the Gold Coast. I thought her captain lucky, and fair, a good patron. Though I own he is a vain man—dresses like a macaroni.”
“Yes, well…” The second lieutenant, Mr. Carver, had an awful squint, so at first Alfie could not tell who he was addressing. “You do well to use that word. Damn it all! There’s no delicate way to say this, but I believe we would all like to remind you that if you expose the captain, you expose us all to a great deal of ridicule and shame.”
“It’s a bloody disgrace!” burst out the marine sergeant, trembling with indignation. His pipeclayed white belts squeaked against his coat buttons as he leaned forward. “If I was that bloody doctor of his, I’d put him out of his misery soon enough!”
“Sergeant!” Nyman’s knife clattered against his plate. “You forget yourself. Four years aboard, you are no longer in any position to criticize. Besides, Mrs. Shaw is correct, it is not our place to pass judgments on the future Duke of Alderley.”
Alfie looked around at the nervous, indignant faces, and was half tempted to be honest with them.
I offered him
anything
to be taken aboard. He’s quite right to assume that includes sex on demand.
He nudged the little weighted roll of cloth that kept his plate from sliding to and fro with each wave, and took as deep a breath as he could force into his aching chest.
Maybe I
want
something uncomplicated. If Farrant’s changed his mind and thinks I’m good enough now, I won’t be the one to say no.
But honesty had not worked out so well with John, and it was easier to slip back into the old, well worn pretence. “I’m sorry? I don’t seem to be following….”
Mrs. Shaw patted Alfie’s hand, then leaned back and passed him the plate of chops. “No more you should. But just in the course of things, remember; more’n one reputation’s at stake, eh? You do what’s right by the ship ’n we’ll do what’s right by you.”
If he had felt better, he might have found it hard not to laugh. But as it was, he was evidently miserable enough to convince them of his innocent dread. They smiled at him encouragingly and urged him to eat.

John, cravat untied, waistcoat lying over the end of the bed, wet clothes kicked into a soiled little heap in the corner, opened the door. The courier, a young man with a case of acne so severe his entire head looked like a boil, sniffed disapprovingly at the mess and said “Port Admiral wants to see you, sir. At your earliest convenience.”

“Very well.” Long practice allowed John to tie a perfect bow, shrug on a new waistcoat and resume his wet coat—it being his best—in less than ten seconds. Regretting the absence of Higgins, who would have done a better job of it, he doused his wig in white powder, shook off the excess and settled the wig over his damp hair. Buckling on his sword, impeccably dressed, he closed the door behind him moments later, looking imperturbable. But, as he followed the man down to Government House, he half expected each footstep to break him into a thousand splinters; within, he felt fragile as Venetian glass.