False Colors (13 page)

Sitting in the Admiral’s waiting room, in a patch of sunlight that made his shoulders steam, he watched the flies bash themselves repeatedly against the closed sash window.
Poor creatures!
He knew well how they felt, his own thoughts trying to escape into the light, being constantly thrown back by some obstacle he could not see.

What did I miss?
Yes, he had liked Donwell, but no, that made no difference. Was he not morally obliged to condemn such an unmanly, unnatural vice, wherever he found it?
Yet don’t I also have some obligation of friendship?
Didn’t these past months when he had thought Alfie to be the best man on God’s earth…didn’t they count? But
what
did they count for?

The man clearly had self control enough to avoid assaulting me, but….
The bath returned to his mind, along with a loathsome wash of pleasure that had him angry again, launched him to his feet and made him pace. But Alfie hadn’t—hadn’t gone any further than suggestion. In his condition at the time John could hardly have stopped him had Alfie decided to press his suit by force, but on finding it unwelcome he had stopped himself, to his own regret.

And was that really so surprising, considering John’s reaction now?
“Come through, please.”
Port Admiral Turner looked as uncomfortable as John felt, but the young man with him—the young man in the pristine new uniform, whose sword-hilt was covered with sapphires—smiled urbanely, with the easy charm of someone who is used to life delivering its sweets on demand to his palm.
“Commander Cavendish, this is Lieutenant Sir Eustace Foulkes.” Admiral Turner nodded in the youth’s direction, a slight inflection of weariness in his battle-roughened voice.
“I’m honored, sir.”
“I hear you’ve had a transfer of lieutenants,” the Admiral continued. “At least, an ex
Britannia
has been through my office already this morning, explaining he’s to replace your Mr. Donwell.”
John’s already unsettled nerves jumped at the name. So Alfie had run to his old captain for protection, not merely deserted. And he had seen to it that the
Meteor
was not left undermanned in the process. There was something horribly touching about that. So very efficient, so very much like the man, even in fear of his life.
Here was John’s opening to explain why. He could not now claim to have been too busy to find an opportunity to speak. He could not claim ignorance. He must now tell all or forever know that he too had concealed the truth; the truth that would get Alfie hanged. “I…yes,” he said, and swallowed, trying to clear his suddenly constricted throat. “I….” He could not do it. For all his repugnance, he could not really bring himself to think the man deserved death.
Let him go and be among his own kind, and good riddance.
“Lt. Donwell had served under Captain Lord Lisburn before, sir, and desired to return to his patron. I could not see any harm in it.”
“Very well.” Turner too cleared his throat, shuffling the papers in front of him. Behind him, a pair of amber and black beeeaters squabbled on a tree-branch, a wing brushing the window, their chatter loud in the moment of silence. “We’re not here to discuss that. The war is drawing to a conclusion, and Foulkes here is eager to be in at the kill. I have been directed to find him a ship as soon as may be.”
John linked his hands behind his back in an effort to stop them balling into fists.
“I assume you know what I am about to say.”
“Sir.” After last night’s shock, this was like the withdrawal of the bullet—the surgeon cutting open the hole and rummaging about inside for the shot. Grief compressed John’s chest until he could barely force the air in. The
Meteor
…his ship…. She had become so dear to him. She had done so well against such impossible odds.
Such
odds! “But why, sir?”
“Why?” Turner sprang to his feet, the quarreling birds behind him whirring away in a flash of white barred wings. “
‘Why!’
Goddamnit man! What do you mean ‘why’? In the middle of a war, you take it into your head to firebomb the major port of a neutral nation? Consider yourself lucky you’re not being hanged!”
“But sir!”
Piracy…slavery…kidnapped children
…. “I was under Admiral Saunders’ orders, sir!”
“Were you?” Turner held out a hand, its palm grey in the creases with accumulated tar. “Let me see them.”
Closing his eyes, John struggled with the spun-glass pieces of his composure. They would hold. They would hold at least until he got out of this room. He would not have thought it of Saunders—this duplicity, this behind-hand politicking. “My orders were verbal, sir.”
“How convenient.” Turner looked away, flipped open the top of his inkwell and flipped it shut again, his gaze never quite meeting John’s. John straightened, choking back the furious cry of “
Are you calling me a liar?”
But it must have shown in his face. Foulkes turned away, ostensibly to examine the books on the bookshelf, and Turner’s tanned cheeks flushed dark. “I am taking your ship, Mr. Cavendish, and giving it to Sir Eustace. You are to consider yourself officially reprimanded and punished. You will remain here on half pay until we can find another situation for you. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well then. Dismissed.”
“Thank you sir.” John’s thoughts felt like a tangle of razor sharp wire; he bloodied himself trying to hold them in. But hold them in he did, and bowed again. “Sir Eustace.” Holding very still against the ruin, trying to become steel throughout, he turned, walking away.
His footsteps took him as a matter of habit to the café, where he sat at a table amid the tubs of flowers, in a scent of thyme, and drank strong coffee until he was all but vibrating in place. But it was too heartbreaking to sit here alone, at the same table he shared yesterday with Alfie. So he threw down a shilling on the tablecloth and attempted to calm his overstrung fibers with another long walk down to the harbor. Better to spend the morning knocking on the doors of squalid lodging houses until he found Higgins, still abed, with a square-faced, Rubinesque young woman, who squeezed her ample figure into stays, scraped her lead-blackened hair beneath a cap and cooked eggs and bacon for breakfast, cheerfully unflappable.
“Didn’t expect to see an officer in my humble abode, captain.” Higgins pulled on a pair of trousers while this was going forward and rolled the bedding away into a kitchen cupboard, his ginger hair standing up like tongues of fire. “Good to see you on your feet again, sir.”
“I’m come to tell you I’ve been turned ashore, Higgins.” John nodded gratefully as a plate was lowered to the table in front of him. Tempted to fix his eyes on the fork, he distained the cowardice of such an action and looked up at his steward’s leathery and confused face.
“Turned ashore?”
“Indeed.” John stabbed the bacon with unnecessary fervor, feeling his face heat with humiliation. “And my finances are not such as would allow me to keep a servant.”
“But for why, sir? We damn well showed them—begging your pardon. They sent us in like a dog against a bear and we brought him down good and proper! Never was such a piece of glory, and us living to tell the tale. You should get a medal! We should all get a reward….” His flow of indignation faltered in horror. “What about our prize money? Thirty or forty ships we sunk! Are we going to get paid for them?”
“I understand the Admiralty’s position is that it was a regrettable misunderstanding.” John worked it out himself as he spoke. The men would know soon enough, when their money did not arrive; they were owed at least an explanation. “As such, they cannot pay prize money for any vessels destroyed. I don’t know if they intend to recoup the costs from me. Admiral Turner made no mention of it.
“But that aside, it seems to me that—now the tide is turning against the French—we were sent to provide an excuse for war with Algiers. Parliament is concerned at the extent of Barbary raids on England. I believe the Admiralty thought we would be sunk; a shipful of martyrs to rally public support. Our survival must have been inconvenient. And our triumph…our triumph is politically disastrous, for it gives the pirates the moral highground—makes us seem the aggressors.”
And Saunders has probably already denied any responsibility or even knowledge of it. I would never have thought him capable of such duplicity.
Higgins’ face was purple as a bruise. He pushed his food away untouched. John folded his hands around his pint of small ale, and cursed himself. Everything he seemed to do this week was ruinous. He had been thinking aloud, and forgotten his company, the possibilities of mutiny and desertion. Fortunately Higgins, sturdy as an oak, also had all the thinking capacity of an oak. “Me and the boys, we sat down and worked it out, three hundred and forty-eight pounds, five shillings and sixpence each, we reckoned. ‘Fiddler’s green,’ I thought. Me and Evie here was going to buy a pub, settle down.”
Evie gave an eloquent shrug of one rounded shoulder and snagged the last slice of bacon for herself. John sighed. “I’m sorry, Higgins.”
“And they turned you ashore?”
“Turner did say I should consider myself lucky not to be hanged.” John smiled, struck by the thought that this morning he and Alfie could both be swinging gently in the breeze from either end of the mainmast yard. It was, after all, something to be still alive. He caught Higgins’ eye, and the amusement leapt across the connection like a spark.
“’Alf of the crew ain’t been sober since we dropped anchor. Lor’ they ain’t going to be happy!”
“Poor Sir Eustace!”
Higgins snorted beer out of his nose, and for a moment everything went away as they laughed until their eyes streamed.
“Who?”
“Your new captain. Seemed an open, cheerful sort. I don’t think I’m leaving you in the hands of a tyrant, at least.”
Falling silent, Higgins drew a clove hitch on his plate with the yolk of his egg. John ate a piece of bacon in the increasingly embarrassed pause, conscious that he should say something; some thanks for all those years of nurture. Some acknowledgement of regret. “Still, we wiped the Dey’s eye,” he said at last. “He won’t forget us in a hurry.”
Standing up, John offered his hand, and after a moment’s surprise Higgins rose and took it. “I wish you well then, Higgins, and hope we serve together again in kinder circumstances.”
“You need me sir, you just ask.”

A melancholy morning of saying farewell to the other
Meteor
’s segued into a melancholy afternoon of going through the ship’s books with Sir Eustace. But when—after they had shared a meal too fine for him to eat—he left the new captain in possession and returned to his lodgings in the evening, he found that the business of the day had been a blessed distraction from his real thoughts. They mobbed him anew as he shut the door, saw again the bareness of a room that until now had been so comfortably, comradely cluttered.

Retrieving tinderbox and candle—the light draining out of a cold gray sky—he wondered,
Is it truly only one short day since yesterday? How quickly the world could be destroyed.
He set the candle in its carved wooden stick on the desk, took journal and writing slope from his chest, and trimmed a quill. As the night darkened, black behind the window, he could see his own reflection in the glass. He closed the curtains, dipped his pen.

I ask myself; am I being punished? Was I wrong to deal with Mr. Donwell as I did? I cannot resolve which way I should have acted; whether I was unjust in using too much mercy, or too little. Should I have removed the threat to society? Or should I have removed the plank in mine own eye before daring to pay attention to the speck in my brother’s?

I have seen many answers to prayer. I have seen men speak the words of God, His Spirit bursting from their mouths in fierce and fearless delight. But today I can perceive no presence to guide me at all. I remain lost in the labyrinth of my thoughts.

Perhaps indeed I could have….But no, I could not have asked for my orders in writing! I disdain to be that kind of grass-combing sea-lawyer. The service runs on trust; zeal and trust. Confidence in those above, loyalty to those below. And perhaps that is that what I transgressed; my loyalty towards Lt. Donwell? If so, it is an elegant punishment. But my thoughts return again in horror to the fact that he was a sod, an abomination. I wonder if it was my loyalty to the Lord which failed; because I did not denounce him, because I kept quiet when I should have condemned?

My mind will not be still; will not settle on any one answer. God knows how I am to sleep. I pray constantly for understanding; to be shown of what exactly I should repent. But no answer comes.

Alfie sipped his wine and watched the lantern light slide gently from one side of the highly polished table to the other, and back. He felt…he didn’t know what he felt. Resentment, perhaps? Misery, certainly.

The light picked itself up and ran honey-slow over the palm of Farrant’s hand, which lay open on the table. Alfie’s gaze traveled up the blue-clad arm and was caught by Farrant’s knowing smile.

“Thank you,” he said. “I hope I am better in all things. Including my taste in men.”
Farrant laughed and topped up his glass. The wine was very good, its sweetness not yet shaken out of it by the sea. “Lord, how bitter! And is mockery enough to content you?”
“No, sir,” Alfie admitted, drinking deep. “Far too little. But far too little seems to be all I can manage at present.”
“God’s teeth! If we’re going to be maudlin we need to be more drunk.”
“Yes.” Yet there was some comfort in this; being with a man before whom he didn’t have to hide what he was. To be able to talk without deceit. To be able to shed for an hour that suffocating blanket of lies. Alfie knocked back the new wine and was about to ask for something stronger when Farrant unstoppered the brandy and filled his glass again. “You said something about Captain Cavendish being a Quaker? Is that public knowledge, or are you acquainted with him, sir?”
Farrant took off his wig and put it on its stand, hung his coat beneath it, and returned not to the head of the table, but to pull out a chair next to Alfie, dropping an assured, possessive hand on his knee. “I would prefer it if you were thinking about me.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I…but do you know him?”
“I know his type.” Farrant bent his head to watch as he slid both hands up Alfie’s thighs until they rested at his hips, thumbs just touching Alfie’s balls. He made a slow, gentle circle with them, and Alfie gasped and licked his lips after, tasting the rush of desire like copper in his mouth. His thoughts stopped sharp, like a horse refusing a jump, leaving him with the sickening feeling of falling.
“He was sneaking about the Admiralty yesterday.” Farrant unbuttoned the flap of Alfie’s breeches, one warm hand sliding down to cup his balls and gently knead them, while the other pulled up his shirt to expose his suddenly eager cock. “Asking questions about me. I had one of my men return the favor. He’s a nobody, a little shit. I don’t want to hear anything about him from you again, understand?”
“Nnh!” said Alfie, months of yearning and self-restraint coalescing into angry need
. Oh, that was good!
God, it was good to know that
someone
wanted him, even if that someone couldn’t be John. Even if that someone was the cynical, heartbreaking bastard who’d rejected him a lifetime ago. Maybe even because of that. Let one mistake wipe out—just for a moment—the memory of the other.
His prick throbbed, painfully full, and fire gathered at the base of his spine. He rocked his hips up in offering, closing his eyes. “Why…?” he managed as Farrant changed hands—his left hand slightly less adept, rougher. Wonderfully, amazingly rough. “You, I’m not—you said…. Why?”
His answer was a rustle of cloth. Farrant laughed again, in a murmur hardly louder than that of the water against the hull. Alfie jerked as a rush of delight transfixed him like a spear, as Farrant’s hand, slick with butter, closed over the head of his prick and stroked firmly down. His eyes flew open as his thighs were trapped between Farrant’s and the captain lowered himself down onto Alfie’s prick, taking it in with one long, firm push.
“You arrived like an omen, just when I was sick and tired of being told what I can and cannot do.” Farrant’s eyes were unfocused and his face fierce. He took Alfie by the shoulders and pulled himself up, almost off, before he rammed them back together again, back arching and breath hissing between his teeth. The hot, tight slide was fantastic, unbelievable, maddening as hell. “And I can’t…can’t get this from a man who doesn’t want it.”
“I want it.” Alfie grabbed Farrant’s bare arse, fingers digging in hard, pulled him down as he thrust up, and for a moment it was all sweat and flesh and demand. “I want it.”
Farrant muffled his cries by biting down hard on Alfie’s neck, and Alfie came explosively within the older man’s body, transfixed by anguish and relief.
He sat for a while with Farrant in his lap, arms about his neck, Farrant’s face tucked into his throat as he trembled into stillness. Then Alfie’s leg cramped, and in the struggle to soothe the stabbing pain Farrant pulled himself off and stood, picking up his fallen breeches from the floor.
“Well, that’s taken the edge off,” he said, gesturing with graceful, patrician courtesy towards his sleeping cabin, “but I daresay you want your turn. Shall we?”
Alfie went in, without question. Brandy and sex; it was hard to say which was better at taking his mind off John. Neither was having very much success. It seemed such a shame that Farrant couldn’t have turned to him earlier, when he would eagerly have died for the man’s love. In those days this would have felt like a triumph, with trumpets and angels singing. Now it seemed only a temporary solace for the pain, like downing a pint of rum and passing out.
In the small sleeping cabin, the line of white wake behind them threw back a watery, dappled starlight over the hands that were slowly unwinding the cravat from about his throat. Farrant’s short hair was also silver, unearthly and beautiful, and Alfie felt as though he had stepped in a fairy ring, been taken away to another world whose rules did not make sense.
A sixth sense told him that somewhere in the world, John was thinking of him, and he wondered if, one day, he would ever be forgiven. Did that matter? It was all over now. A different dream was coming true.
With his eyes closed, Alfie could smell the smoke of the Great Cabin’s many lanterns; beeswax and turpentine on the polished table; the warm, red smell of port wine. In here—against the hull of the ship—was the scent of oak, and tallow from a bedside candle; the ever-present mildew of a life at sea. The partition wall smelt of paint, and the captain smelt of pomade, and ambergris, and the faint, hot scent of desire. Alfie’s mind returned to John, summoning his scent of tar and ink, and the honey he spread on biscuits when he couldn’t get toast. These were John’s hands on him, John’s slender body covering him, John’s cock for which he spread his legs and begged. It was dream-John into whom he nestled, afterwards, and slept. But it was Farrant beside him whom he awoke.
“You called me ‘John.’” Farrant, reclining on his elbow beside Alfie, smiled down at him in obvious amusement. “And after I forbade you to mention him again! I hope you will not disobey all my commands so readily.”
They lay together companionably in the little bunk. Its edge dug into Alfie’s arse, making him squirm closer to Farrant. But it was the ever present pain that made him put an arm around the older man’s waist and turn his cheek to rest against the sparse silver hairs of his chest. There
was
a mute, visceral comfort in this; hearing a firm heartbeat beneath his ear, being damp and warm, shirts tangled around their waists, glued together by drying semen.
“I loved him,” Alfie murmured, soothed too by being able to speak to someone who understood every nuance—understood even the words he did not say. “He despised me for it.”
Farrant’s hand curved around his jaw, turning Alfie’s face up to look at him. The captain’s expression was exasperated, but kind. “Let me give you some sound advice,” he said, as his other hand toyed idly with Alfie’s hair. “Stop this. Stop chasing love. Love is not for men like us. We share a deviancy we must pay for with lives of exemplary duty. That’s all. You will get yourself hanged if you try to think otherwise.”
Alfie smiled, and for a moment all the unhappiness left him, as he felt how ridiculous it was for Farrant to lecture him about avoiding suspicion. The man flaunted his vice in the face of the whole world. As a boy it had been one of the things Alfie most admired. He traced the collarbone beneath the man’s skin, touched scars and freckles and the wrinkles around the thin, saltchapped mouth. As he did so, it came to him that Farrant was not the powerful god he had once thought. Just a man, like himself, made of fallible flesh and breakable spirit, like his own. Sometimes mistaken. Perversely lovable in his rebarbative way. And like Alfie himself, very, very alone.
Whether he had wanted to or not, Farrant had rescued Alfie from the intolerable position his mistake with John had put him in. Farrant had distracted and soothed him when he most needed relief from the heartache. Surely it was only fair now to offer whatever he could to make Farrant’s life better?
“Yet I could love you, I think. If you gave me a little time to forget.” Alfie pulled Farrant to himself, kissed him, letting him feel the promise of affection, of intimacy beyond the mere sharing of lust. Farrant was hesitant at first, but for just a moment he melted and in the darkness beneath their closed eyes they seemed to touch, closer and more intimate than any embrace of flesh. Then his hands tightened painfully on Alfie’s hair, pulling them apart. He wrenched himself away.
“My poor boy!” he said coldly. “So eager to give your heart? Yet no one wants it.”
An echo of the rejection ten years ago. But Alfie wasn’t a child anymore—he knew from the inside the bitterness that aimed such barbs. For so many years he too had been afraid to reach out to anyone. He too had slaked desire wherever he could find a willing body, and not hoped for anything better. It was almost a relief to think that Farrant’s dismissive sarcasm had been, all along, just a defense against heartbreak.
Farrant’s face was turned away from him now, making him guess at the expression, but it seemed there was a glimmer beneath his shut eyelids. A shadow of silver stubble gleamed over a curving line on his jaw. Surprising himself, Alfie leaned in and kissed the half-moon a blade had left on that aquiline face. He understood what it was to be scarred.