False Colors (16 page)

Panting and moving frantically, he stripped off his shirt, damp breeches, shoes and stockings and stood naked in the moonlight. In the barren light he examined his hands, his body, and hardly knew them. Whey-colored in the light from the window, his skin gleamed, bleached and ghost-like. There was silver in the palm of his hands, like Judas’ ten pieces of silver, and he felt equally appalled at himself. If he could have flung it away he would have done so, but it was only his own guilty sweat, glistening with a lunatic light.

A jug of cold water stood by his bedside. He dumped his cravat into it, then washed himself down as well as he could, imagining the soot from Bess’ hands burrowing into his pores, scrubbing everywhere he had been touched, and breathing raggedly, on the edge of tears. After, he set kindling in the grate, slowly ripped up his soiled clothes, and burned them.

The ritual calmed him. Halfway through he found his jumbled thoughts had begun to resolve themselves into prayer; to slow and become something coherent.

Forgive me, Lord. Forgive me. I know that you take away sin. I know that you can make this as though it never happened. Cleanse me Lord and I shall be clean….

For he was not, after all, the only man who had ever sinned, and if he was abject and unable to resist the demands of his fallen nature, well, that was the very reason God had intervened in history.
Grace is enough. Your grace is enough for me.

It was a strange lesson nevertheless. One he probably deserved for being so damn proud of his own chastity.
A fine thing to congratulate yourself for not lusting after women, when you are made without the attraction.
The moment his attention was called to a sex he did desire, he had proved himself no worthier, no stronger than any other man. What a self-righteous little bastard he had been!

With the linen burnt and the room full of the acrid reek, he got up from his knees and put on his nightshirt, sighing as it covered up his guilty flesh. How he wished he had known what he knew now, when Alfie needed him to know it. It was a sobering lesson, but if only it could have come at the right time. He should not then have been so merciless.

Stirring himself to light a taper, thinking that perhaps he should write to Lavinia Deane, who would at least find this amusing, he caught the gleam of golden buttons on his lieutenant’s uniform coat, folded in his open sea-chest. Lighting a candle, he picked the coat up. It lay heavy, scratchy and unchanged in his hands, and he thought that, after all, she was still wrong. He had sinned, and he would never, never want to repeat such an experience. He knew now what he was missing, and it was nothing. He still had king and country.

“He’s looking better,” Isabella said, pressing the cane of her parasol against her cheek as she watched her husband run beside George’s rotund pony. The pony, a shaggy little creature made lazy by the heat, trotted across the landscaped lawn at a pace Farrant could easily match, and they were laughing, father and son, as they passed into the shade of the beeches on the drive. “Less like a man who has awakened out of a heavy sleep, and drags it around in a cloud over him all day long.”

She smiled as the two burst from shade back into sunlight; George with a look of ferocious determination, bouncing in the saddle in an effort to go faster, Farrant keeping pace with an easy lope. Not a tall man, but so well put together that he made all others seem overgrown. How she loved the vigor in his gestures, the sturdy strength in his limbs, the vivid, masculine grace. “I hated to see him so…dazed.”

“I cannot think it an improvement, my lady.” Bentley’s flat, parson-like hat cast an even shadow over his face, so that on a cursory glimpse he looked headless, a ghost of some quiet, formal young man who had never quite dared to live. “This rise in animal spirits…he says he is taking his dose, but I note he has become very furtive about it.” He raised his chin, and the sun flashed from his glasses like the unexpected fervor in his voice. “I am not his nursemaid, ma’am. I cannot tip the drug down his throat and hold his mouth shut until he swallows.”

On the terrace a small table had been set out. She let Bentley pull out the chair and sat, a breeze from the sea fluttering the ribbons of her hat, cooling her sticky, flushed face. After a moment of whispered debate in the shade of the house over who should go first, the housekeeper appeared at the head of a procession of servants, bearing tea and cakes, arrack, lemon shrub and barley water for the children. A plucked arpeggio floated silvery sweet from the drawing room where Frances was practicing her party piece, and from a bedroom above came an indignant skirling shriek in the Irish language as one of the indentured servants cursed at the chimneys.

“I did not…” said Isabella, feeling ungrateful—she had so much, why was it she could only think of what she lacked? “You promised me a cure. I did not agree to keep my husband perpetually half dead.”

“There is some purpose to a stallion which will stand to a mare,” Bentley commented as he sat down beside her. He took off his hat revealing the long, dark tail of his hair, silken as the blue ribbon which carefully tied it back. “But if it refuses, then it is of more use to society as a gelding.”

Bentley choked on his tea, his eyes watering. His cup clattered against the saucer as he gasped in a roughened, regretful voice, “I did not mean….” He gave her an imploring look, eyes huge beneath their lenses.

She sighed.
Poor Bentley, poor boy.
“So your cure is as far off as ever?”
“He is recalcitrant.” The doctor fingered the enameled black fob of his watch, his soft round face heavy as dough. “He finds excuses not to see me, not to give me the information I need. He has become increasingly private, and I must say there are….” Fixing his gaze on the cut steel buckle of his shoe, he fell silent.
“There are?” she prompted, both wanting and not wanting to know. Was she not beautiful? Bentley liked her well enough, in his quiet, puppyish way. Farrant had courted her; danced, flattered, laughed at her timid witticisms, bore her parents’ fawning thanks with grace. He loved his children—doted on them, even, with none of the stiff unease she noticed in her friends’ husbands. And he came to her, when he had to, with his eyes closed, trying hard not to look as though he’d rather be doing his accounts.
“Bad influences aboard,” Bentley said reluctantly. “Perhaps if you could speak to him; recall him to his obligations?”
She closed her gloved hands over her face abruptly, so he would not see the ugly twist of her brows, the wobble of her lip as grief erupted from her pretense of calm. “I am
not
an
obligation!
”
A cool butterfly touch alighted on the inch of skin between the lace of her sleeve and the silk of her glove. She looked up and found her own grief mirrored, amplified, in Bentley’s worried eyes. “There is some cognitive defect in him if he cannot see how fortunate he is in you. But I will…I will find some way to make him see.”
Isabella thought for a moment that he might go down on one knee and pledge it, like a knight of old. Then she could give him her handkerchief as a token. Giving a shaky laugh she poured another cup of tea.
A more unlikely knight errant I have never seen.
But she herself, lined about the face with age, and about the belly with the marks of three children, was no fairytale queen.
“There are many women who would envy me,” she said instead. “I will be Duchess of Alderley; rich, powerful. I have only to name a thing and he will buy it for me. I just…I…What is that noise?”
Running feet rapped a tattoo on the marble of the passageway. Farrant tossed George into the air, caught him and landed him gently on the grass, turning towards the door with bright, alert eyes. Isabella gasped, as Myers, the butler, burst from the archway, straightened his wig and said, with his most poisonous precision, “My Lord and Lady; Lieutenant Nyman of the
Britannia,
and Prince Tamane of Tobago.”
Lieutenant Nyman she knew already. She saw with aching resignation that he had brought a parcel of orders. The Admiralty was sending her husband away again, and he had barely been home a week. But the familiar distress was overwhelmed by the sight of Prince Tamane. A red-skinned youth, in breeches and frock coat, a plug of what looked like bone through the septum of his nose, and white streaks of paint on his face like the whiskers of an enormous cat.
She stood up. He smiled, and she felt morally certain that his teeth would be filed to sharp points; was faintly disappointed to find out they were not. Farrant, though striding rapidly forwards, was still yards away, so she swallowed nervously, glad to see that one of the Irish maids was blocking the door and keeping Frances inside. Holding out her hand, curtseying, she forced a smile. “Welcome to our house, your highness. Will you take a dish of tea?”

Two days later, Farrant sat at his dinner table in the
Britannia
’s great cabin, with his orders unsealed and spread out on the polished wood about him. But there was nothing in the orders to demand his attention—a simple request to aid one native ruler against another and thereby strengthen the position of Britain against that of France. Tamane had told him more in the first hour: the prince had escaped a French invasion of Tobago in a canoe, and had made his way to Jamaica to ask for intervention from the British. He had been sent back with the
Britannia
as translator, liaison, and native guide. Since then a relentless swell had confined the poor prince to his cabin with a bucket. Still, Farrant had already a provisional plan which could not be improved without more information, and he was filling in the extra time with brooding.

Next to him, his hat swung dangling from the shoulder of one of the chairs. Meadows would have a thing or two to say about him bending the crown out of shape, so he picked it off. The diamond cockade glimmered coldly at him. Idly distracted, he moved the spray through the rain gray light of the great gallery, watching reflections and fleeting colors slide shyly through the centre of the stones. They looked so clear, they shone so beautifully, and yet they were hard and cold. Sometimes he wondered whether he too had folded in, folded up, bent and buckled and made himself small under pressure, until in the darkness and the oppression he had turned to stone.

The cabin door opened and damp blew in, bringing with it a shape cloaked in a long black boat-cloak, cold, graceful, and silent as the Grim Reaper. Farrant’s melancholy invested the sight with a dark cloud of horror. Superstitious as any sailor, he rose and backed slowly away. Even when Bentley put down his hood—revealing himself as a very genteel Death—something of the unearthly lingered about him.

Bentley paused in the act of extracting his new close-vision glasses from his pocket and blinked at Farrant in confusion. “I must take your vitals.” His notebook, placed on the table, fell open on a long list of measurements: heartbeat, temperature, bowel movements, frequency of congress; attempts at graphs, correlations of factors, snatches of private conversations. Life reduced to ink and paper, to mathematics.

“Taking my vitals,” Farrant repeated, nauseous. “What a good description of your activities, Dr. Bentley. I am minded of a leech, or one of those Prussian vampires. Who gave you permission to come into my cabin without knocking?”

Naked without his glasses, Bentley’s soft, unfocussed eyes narrowed. “This anger…. You are not taking your dose, are you? It is a purely chemical anger, I assure you, occasioned by withdrawal from the drug. You do not mean—”

“Do not presume to tell me what I mean, sir!”
“Your grace—”
“Not yet. And if you wish to ever become Doctor to the

Duke, so you can top it the nob with your scientific friends in London, as I’ve no doubt has been your ambition since we met—”

“You wrong me, my Lord.” Carefully putting down his bag on top of the journal, Bentley hooked his glasses around his ears and brought out a pamphlet from the asafetida-scented depths. He held it out, his hand untrembling, but his mouth thin. “A man of ambition would have left you long since.”

Farrant took the little yellow booklet, its coarse paper rough as the straw from which it was undoubtedly made. A glance at the cover showed him enough—himself drawn ridiculously thin, mincing and effeminate, with a simpering expression and in a wig two feet tall, along with the words “Duke of Al—y” and “infamous practices”.

“As you see, it is not a great recommendation to be in your service. There is a limit to how long the tide of public opinion can be held back. There is a limit even to your father’s tolerance for this filthy moral disease of yours. While your openly sodomitial behavior attracts satire like this from Grub Street hacks, making you a laughing stock of the rabble and an embarrassment to your family, my practice and reputation suffer daily by continuing in your service. But if we can effect a cure, then— even then—all may be rectified. You must allow me to examine you, my Lord. More than your own life depends on it.”

Returning to his seat, Farrant thumbed open the pamphlet, a cheap little gossip-mongering paper, designed to be bought by all those who delight in scandal. Its salacious outrage seemed somehow all the more sordid in its smug, heavy, black lead type. There were a great many exclamation marks. Opening the front of the nearest lit candle-lantern, without reading any more, he burned the thing entirely.

Thoughtfully, he took a pinch of snuff from its golden box, laid it on the back of his hand and sniffed it up, the burst of citrus and cinnamon like the sparkle of a diamond, but the later burn of the tobacco a more substantial warmth. Ingrained politeness led him to offer it to Bentley, who waved it off as he always did.