False Colors (15 page)

John tugged at his neckcloth, feeling sweat make its itchy way down his back to soak into the waistband of his breeches. With his head down and his large hat overshadowing his face, clad in his only suit of civilian clothes—an old fustian coat and dingy breeches—he hoped he was not recognizable as a naval officer as he leaned, falsely casual, against the broken fountain. Bright Jamaican birds hopped and squawked among the enclosed gardens which fenced this end of Kingston. He watched the men come down the street, towards the open door; watched them balk when they saw him, and either turn away or straighten up with a bright, fake innocence and pass him, talking loudly about trivialities.

For a while he thought that they were fighting their own consciences, as he was fighting his, but it gradually dawned on him that no, he was frightening them away.

Putting his hand in his pocket, he touched the little scrap of paper on which an untutored hand had scrawled this address. An end of voyage present from Billy, who had stopped him in the street as he was emerging from his newly rented lodgings. “What it is, sir, is that Simeon says you might like this. I says you’s a gent, you don’t need no invitation from the likes of us. Also you ain’t interested. But Sim, ’e says ‘give it him anyway’. So ’ere. Right exclusive club it is, nice and clean, you get me? Don’t take it wrong, like. It was Sim what said you might want to know.”

Though he had only a suspicion of what Billy had been talking about, the scrap of paper burned his hand. He felt its presence in his pocket as he went about the town, learning the layout of the place, tasting the humid air with its strange scents, marveling at the great houses and the markets that seemed to sell a thousand necessaries he had never seen before. The address itched more infernally than the many bites he discovered on himself next morning—wages of being haphazard with the mosquito netting.

The door was unprepossessing, a brown, dowdy thing with traces of green mold. No better nor worse than any other door in the street. Except that it opened on a regular basis and men came out, or—when they could nerve themselves to walk past John’s lurking presence—went in.

A man emerged now; a big man, burly as a blacksmith, with a fist-flattened nose and shoulders that strained the seams of his frock-coat. He came towards John, tapping a gnarled club against his gnarled palm. John took a firmer grip on his own cane and stood up to meet the threat.

“What d’you want, Mister? You gonna stand there all day?” The accent was straight from Grub Street, London. It seemed Billy had given him the name of a place reserved for the most vulgar sort of displaced working man, and indentured servants scraped straight off the streets of the capital.

“Nah, you see, that’s where you’re wrong. ’Cos this is private property, right. You come along in, or you move on.”
Resentful though he was of being given orders by some riffraff of the street, John had to acknowledge that the man was right. He couldn’t stay forever poised between inside and out, between yes and no. Sooner or later he would have to make a decision.
“I have… an introduction,” he said, handing the scrap of writing to the man. “What…what is the place?”
“Oh ho, it’s like that, eh?” The brutish, threatening look on the big man’s face transformed into a smile. On another man it might have been appropriate to say it “melted” into a smile, but the scars, the broken nose, and the missing teeth of this one made a smile almost worse than the frown. Shifting the club into his left hand, the man picked off John’s hat, leaving him exposed. He snatched it back, only to find that big hand coming to curve around his cheek, turning his face into the light.
A palm, rough as rawhide, scraped against his skin. John was appalled. It was like being caressed by a rhinoceros, he was sure. Repulsive! He wanted to run as far away as possible from the place; to follow his namesake’s voyages to the end of the earth. He wanted to find a mountain of ice and burrow into it. He did. So why he found himself moving his head slightly to better feel the pull of warm calluses against his chin, he couldn’t say. The devil in him, maybe.
“First time, eh? Not to fret. Come on inside, princess. I’ll look after ye. You just call me Bess, eh? Sweet Bess.”
This was a good moment for him to turn and walk away. He did not want to get involved with the kind of world where a man like this could call himself “Sweet Bess” and not vomit at the thought. He was not the kind of man, himself, who could live with being called “princess.” It defied reason, honor, every scrap of dignity.
“I don’t want—”
“Course you don’t,” said Bess, and despite everything there was a kind of sweetness to his eyes now—the gentleness of a big man who can afford it. “None of us wants it, do we? But we has to make the best of it. Tell you what, you come in an ’ave a drink, see ’ow the land lies. Don’t ’ave to do nothing less’n you want it. No crime in havin’ a drink now, is there?”
That was true enough. He could go in and see what kind of club Billy had invited him to. There was no harm in drinking, and finding things out.
And maybe watching.
His conscience stabbed him in tune with the flare of lust, but he was tired. He was so tired of the sleepless nights and the ache of miserable arousal and his damn torture implement of a body. He was tired of fruitless prayer, tired of failing and of half measures, and it was beginning to dawn on him that this was a fight he was not capable of winning.
“Just a drink then,” he said, and went in.
At first glance it was quite a disappointment. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected—some oriental palace of decadence, like the bath house he had once run from in shock and shame. But this was only a large room, arranged like any parlor, with a table at one end stacked with tankards and jugs of beer. Dazzled as he was going into the dark from the Jamaican brilliance of the street outside, he did not initially see the people.
They saw him though. He found himself surrounded by dim shapes, touched by scores of unseen hands, and though his mind and spirit quailed at the experience, his prick had quite a different opinion. The rank, tropical smell drenched him—too many sweating men confined together in one room, with smoke and beer and a hot undercurrent of sex. John’s heart hammered so fast he staggered, dizzy with it. He could have lain down right there and let everyone in the room have him, and the thought terrified him almost as it aroused.
“Bit of air, gents, please.”
As the darkness eased, “Bess” returned with two tankards of beer, his presence parting the crowd like Moses with the Red Sea.
Except,
John thought, full of hysterical laughter,
not
very
like.
He let himself be steered to a table, and when he could sit, with the board a welcome shield between him and the rest of the room, he felt a little more human. Clasping his hands around his drink, he watched circles of waves speed across its surface, betraying the trembling of his hands.
“Which the princess here is new,” Bess was saying. “Right? I promised him a quiet drink, so he don’t get bothered unless he asks. Understand? Or I’ll want to know why not.”
Bess sat next to him, and dropped a large, proprietary hand on his knee, the fingertips working their way beneath the cuff of his breeches, snagging on the silk of his stockings. With almost equal hilarity, John thought that in one respect his mother would approve. Her principles maintained that all men were equal. She might point out the salutary lesson here, where he—a gentleman—found himself under the protection of such a brute. He doubted if she would approve of anything else, of course. “You are very kind,” he said, imagining how dreadful it might have been had he walked in unannounced.
“Nah.” Sweet Bess shook his prize-fighter’s shorn head and grinned. His hand worked its way up to John’s thigh, dug into the trembling muscle there with a grip so strong it promised pain. Involuntarily, John gasped, closing his eyes and moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue. If asked, ten minutes ago, whether he would ever find a coarse blacksmith arousing he would have laughed. Now, however, he felt he would die if that ruthless hardness did not press itself against his prick and ease the devouring need, just a little. “One good turn deserves another, eh?”
Bess’s arm snaked across his shoulders, his hand curving about John’s neck, fingertips like dried, roughened leather catching on the small hairs of his nape.
This is,
he thought, dazedly,
the point where I should struggle,
and for a moment he was overwhelmed by the picture of himself fighting to get away, by the thought of this huge, rough man shoving him back against the wall, overwhelming him by force, crushing his resistance and just taking him, whether he would or no.
His skin flushed all over, he could feel the tickle of his woolen waistcoat against his chest, the rough plaster wall against his back. His prick, confined in the coarse linen breeches, nudged at the soaked waistband, and he hated it for turning him into this. He hated it, but he said, “Yes.”
Bess’s arms tightened, bringing John into the bigger man’s body, his hand slid up and cupped John’s aching yard, and the burst of need and bliss and sheer relief made him cry out sharply as if in pain. He pushed against the exploring fingers, closed his eyes, shutting the sordid reality out and surrendered to the darkness within and without. One armed, Bess lifted him out of his seat until he was draped across the bigger man’s lap, and the hard pressure of thighs beneath his, the mound of a straining prick against his arse, two layers of fabric notwithstanding, made him whimper with need. He didn’t wait to be asked but spread his legs and rearranged himself so he was riding the man’s lap as if it was a horse. Bess stroked him hard and pulled him further on, his own hips rising in little jerks that lifted John’s feet off the floor. With his eyes closed, John was not expecting the kiss, chapped lips and stubble, the taste of smoke and beer and a rotting tooth. He cried out again, but the noise was swallowed in the other man’s mouth, and what came out sounded piteous, pathetic.
“Fuck!” said Bess, pulling his stinking mouth away so that he could bite down the length of John’s neck. “Ain’t you never?...
ooh…
fuck!” He fumbled with John’s buttons, and then with his own, before getting his hand inside the flap of John’s breeches. John found himself grinding into the hot, moving pressure of a palm separated from his skin only by the thinnest linen shirt. Bess’s hand was so rough the friction was like being licked by a cat’s tongue, the scouring pull of little hooks, maddeningly intense, almost unendurable. His whole frame seemed to be drawing itself together, tensing, balls drawing up hard against his body, aching. Bess reached beneath him to stroke his own yard, his knuckles moving in the crease of John’s arse. When he tried to kiss John again John bit his lip hard and sucked the blood out. It occurred to him suddenly that there were a score of men in the room with him, watching him, and at that he abandoned his last shreds of shame and thrust into the encircling hand, fierce and wanton and completely debased.
“Ah! Aaah!” As though he had purged the devil in his come, darkness and dismay closed over him. He clung on to Bess’s neck, teeth gritted, his skin crawling as the big man thrust up against him, one hand clamped around his hips, pulling them for more contact, rough fingers still rolling John’s spent member painfully between them as aftershocks of pleasure turned into horror. John began to struggle in earnest just as his partner pushed up brutally one final time, almost unseating him, then clung on, shuddering. Hot dampness spread beneath him, soaking into his breeches, wicking up the material like another indecent caress between his thighs, meeting his own slick wetness.
The hand slid through the come on his belly, and he imagined it leaving trails of dirt. It probed backwards, beneath his balls, slid on, and he yelped in shock and revulsion as it touched the pucker of his arsehole. Stiffening in fear and horror, ignoring for the moment that his spent prick nevertheless twitched with interest and a new wave of nauseated need went over him, he grabbed Bess’s wrist. A febrile strength he didn’t know he had in him enabled him to force the hand away, though the bigger man resisted. Bess’s hand grabbed on hard to his cravat, half choking him.
“If you do not let me go at once, I swear I will rip out your balls and make you eat them,” John hissed, rage—never very far away—coming to his rescue now. He could see his own white face, drawn with murderous certainty in Bess’s widening eyes, then the man blinked, and he saw only the war of prudence and desire, and the slow trail of blood over the grimy jaw from the wound John had made on his lip.
“Alright, princess, no call for that.” Bess let go of his neck, took a covering swig of his beer and watched as John scrambled off, tidying himself away with shaking, clumsy hands. His coat covered the stains, thank God. “Weren’t gonna do nothing you didn’t want. Maybe next time, eh? You come back to Sweet Bess next time an’ we’ll try it then.”
“There will be no next time.”
Bess laughed and leaned back, spreading his legs; fully clothed but with the flap of his breeches down and his yard exposed for everyone to see. It was, John couldn’t help but notice, really quite substantial. “O’course, mate. Ain’t that what they all say.”

John fumbled the key in the lock, dropped it, and as he was trying to pick it up again, his landlady opened the door and looked down on his flaming face with what seemed to him to be a very knowing look. The moon was shining like a great open eye in the sky above him, watching, and as he bowed and stuttered out a nervous thanks, pushed past her and fled up the stairs to his room, he wondered if the skirts of his coat properly concealed the damp patch. He wondered if she could smell it on him, as he could smell it on himself. He wanted—badly wanted—a bath, but would not have the slaves awoken just because he was unclean.
Besides,
he thought, closing the door and leaning back against it, barricading the prying eyes outside,
at this hour it would advertise my shame to the whole house.

He dragged his sea-chest in front of the door, took off his coat and looked down at himself.
Oh God! He was a damn pervert!
He was stained.