False Colors (17 page)

Was it possible that the Duke’s power might be forfeited, Farrant wondered, watching the pamphlet burn. Might his father withdraw his protection—throw him to the dogs of the street? The old devil had as much as told him that he didn’t care where Farrant found his diversions, as long as he married well and sired the next generation. As long as he kept out of his father’s sight— in another country, preferably—so that the family need not actually associate with him. A career at sea had been Farrant’s own choice, despite Article Twenty Eight of the Navy’s law code, the Articles of War that said in no uncertain terms:
If any person in the fleet shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery and sodomy with man or beast, he shall be punished with death by the sentence of a court martial.
At least at sea he could do something useful with a life so evidently regretted by those who had given it to him.

And at sea, Captain of his own ship—given, under those same articles
absolute
authority—he was the undisputed king of his own small country, whose rules were dictated by himself. He was, he hoped, a benevolent dictator. Those who could not bend their necks to his easy yoke were not encouraged to remain. Those who seemed vinegar enough, zealous enough, fanatic enough to cause him trouble were not accepted aboard in the first place.

Yet still they made their demands.
Pulling open the draw in the center of the table, he took up the miniature that lay there, its sweet, powdery colors as fresh as when they’d had it painted, he and Isabella. It brought back Venice; the clear English-spring sunlight of winter in Venice. Rosalba Carriera in her studio, painting tiny brush-strokes on ivory, while outside the waters lapped at the walls and boats full of oranges cried their wares to the overhanging windows.
In those days he really had hoped it would work; Isabella and he. Love! He had tried to give it to her. Fond of her, liking her, he had been faithful in his way—taking no man to his bed for whom he cared more than he cared for Isabella. If he could not love her, he had determined that he would not, at least, love anyone else better.
But it had been a cold decision, even when he had hope that it was temporary.
These days….
Closing the portrait back in the drawer, he swept the ashes out of the lantern, rubbed the smuts from his fingers with a handkerchief and looked up. “I don’t believe in your cure.”
“You must!” Bentley cried, groping in his pocket for his watch, as he did when he approached a strong emotion. “You
must.
What else is there?”
“This affection in me, this attraction towards my own sex? I cannot separate it from my deepest nature. It appears to me that it is a part of my soul I cannot do without. You ask me to believe you can cure it—that you can make me desire Isabella as a man should desire his wife, but the thought of it….” He wanted to knock the lantern over, settled for clamping his fingers tight around the hot metal lid, relishing the scorch as something real in this world of shadows. “I don’t believe I truly
want
to be changed. Can you cure a man of his own soul? The thought of it feels to me exactly like despair.”
“No sir!” Bentley reached out, closed his hand around Farrant’s wrist, practiced fingertips digging for the pulse. “Please, calm yourself! This is nothing but an acute attack of the disorder. It will pass and you will remember that it is hope—it is hope I offer you. Hope of being well again; of no longer having to be ashamed. You must understand that.”
“Must I?” All he felt at the thought was a weariness he could not distinguish from defeat. Surely it would be better to accept himself for what he was—to build a new life around the truth, whatever the cost?
Oh, but the cost would be so high!
“Go away, Bentley. I despise the sight of you.”
Not waiting for obedience, driven by the deep volcanic pressure of the world’s disapproval, the need for an ally, Farrant picked up the
London Chronical
from the dispatches and strolled out on deck.
There, a thin drizzle beaded the front of his coat with droplets. Fog and grey spray rolled gently over the starboard watch—sullenly huddled into their oilskins, awaiting the next order. As they ran well before the wind, he felt it drive the damp into his right cheek. Water trickled beneath his collar as he turned to see Alfie Donwell jump down from his seat on the capstan and stiffen to attention.
“Captain on the Quarterdeck!” shouted Midshipman Hervy, belatedly, making Alfie unsuccessfully struggle to swallow a smile. Only a small smile perhaps, but progress. And the man was made for smiling. Farrant wouldn’t have looked twice at him, sober-faced, but with that little grin he became a point of light and warmth in an otherwise dingy universe. A man who did not want him to be anything other than what he was.
“As you were,” Farrant said. “Mr. Hervy, have Meadows bring us some tea, would you? You’ll take tea, Mr. Donwell?”
“Thank you, sir,” Alfie took his hands out of his pockets and blew on them. “It’s deceptive—the weather—it seems too fine to trouble you, and then before you know it you’re soaked to the skin.”
For a little while after he had come on board, despite invitations to the Great Cabin that inevitably led to vigorous and— Farrant hoped—mutually satisfying couplings, Alfie had remained taciturn and professional outside the bedroom. Farrant imagined that John Cavendish must run the kind of ship where everyone was afraid to speak, where chit-chat and idle human contact was frowned upon, and enjoyment of any sort strictly rationed and preceded by prayer. He was glad to see the boy relax into the more informal style of his own command. It wasn’t that he was competing with a pious little nobody like Cavendish—frankly the man was beneath his notice—but Farrant was human enough to be glad his lover smiled.
Lover?
Oh Christ!
He shook himself sternly, almost dropping the paper in shock at his own thoughts.
No, not that. Never that.
“Are you well, sir?”
At the solicitude, the delicate, melancholy care on Alfie’s expressive face, Farrant’s exasperated rage came snarling once more out of the shadows where it was chained. Trapped, trapped like a bear in a pit and beset on all sides by the little yapping forms of other people’s needs—needs it was impossible for him to meet. A million open mouths he could not feed. Why would they not shut up and let him be?
How dare the boy assume his concern was needed? How dare he assume he could contribute anything to Farrant’s carefully, rationally compartmentalized life? How dare he try to become yet another person in Farrant’s life whom he would have to disappoint?
“Are you my doctor, Lieutenant? When I wish to discuss my health I generally do it with him.”
“Yes, sir,” Alfie said, bending his head. Behind him, Farrant saw Bert Driver watching, smiling with malice.
God’s teeth!
A jealous malcontent tar; that was all he needed. Why had he come out here at all, to stand in the seeping rain next to a man who— though improved—had still become no beauty? Why had he sought out a mere lieutenant? And worse, why for a moment had he felt better simply for standing next to him?
A thrill of interest and dismay transfixed him at the thought. Love? Could it have crept up on him unawares, while he was hunting it elsewhere? Well, he didn’t want it. He was too old for it. Too old to disturb his life, his wife, his aged parents and dependent children by developing a ridiculous infatuation with a penniless plebian of no particular talents or birth. But there was a perilous sweetness to the thought nevertheless.
“Set a course for Tobago,” he said. “It seems the French have captured King Cardinal, in an effort to make his people give up their lands. His Queen is organizing a resistance, and we are directed to help.” Catching Bert’s eye he beckoned him over with a jerk of the chin. “My cabin, Bert. If you please.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Bert gave Alfie a poisonous look of triumph and deliberately loosened his neckcloth before walking over to the door. He opened it with a cocky tilt to his head and an assumption of ownership that did not sit well with Farrant at all. Alfie blanched, saying nothing. Feeling a complete heel, but certain that this was necessary to re-establish the delicate balance of indifference on board, Farrant re-folded the newspaper and handed it over, in lieu of his heart.
“Three months old but still the latest edition to reach Jamaica. It might interest you, Mr. Donwell. Enjoy the tea.”
But he wondered, as he ducked back inside and looked at Bert, who was—despite his commonplace name—the most perfect Adonis, why he felt so little enthusiasm for the beauty, so much regret over the sacrifice of that one lopsided wry little smile. Closing the door behind him and shrugging out of his own coat, annoyed rather than aroused by Bert’s eager help, he found himself facing this as though it were a chore.
Too old indeed!
It was laughable, but if he had known that things would become so complicated, he would never have allowed the boy back on board.

Alfie spread the newspaper out over the damp barrel of the capstan, accepted a cup of tea from Farrant’s steward, the ancient and imperturbable Meadows, and curving his hands about it, he hid his face in the steam. He had been put in his place, and he felt it, like a prone soldier feeling the boot that drives him into the mud. Farrant was right—he was not wanted. He persisted in trying to find someone for whom he could care, and that, rather than his vice, was what blighted his life. God knew he could find willing bodies enough if he chose to frequent the molly houses and the cruising grounds. He could pick up a guardsman or soldier or anonymous young tradesman for a quick fuck in the bog-houses of London and the colonies—and with a modicum of caution and luck he could get away with it. But it wouldn’t…it wouldn’t fill the emptiness he carried in his breast like a winter night.

It hurt to look at Farrant and see the strain in his face; to see him isolated and lonely by his own choice. But it
was
his choice—it must be. For he had only to ask and Alfie would gladly lavish him with care, hoping that the act would help him seal up the wounds in his own heart. He wanted more than just sex; he wanted to find someone in whose arms he could fall asleep without fear. Someone who would comfort him and laugh with him; someone who would share his thoughts as well as his bed. But Farrant—well, he could not accuse the captain of ever having misguided him into thinking it could be him. The captain had been quite firm from the very beginning that he wanted none of those things.

If only he looked more happy about it.
Sighing at his own foolishness, Alfie looked up blankly at his replacement on watch, took the tea and the paper down the companionway to the center of the gun deck, where the galley was throwing out a welcome heat. He stood next to the red coals in the roasting racks for awhile, drying out the soggy sheets of the
Chronical
.
Mrs. Shaw, bent over a tub of steaming water, gave him an encouraging smile. “Easy sailing, long rainy afternoon, and you down here, Mr. Donwell?” she said, thrashing the clothes in the tub with a heavy, bleached dolly, big as a stool on the end of a stick. Her dress lay over a chair, to spare its sleeves, and her brawny arms were bare almost to the shoulder, though in her stays and many layers of petticoats she was decent enough. “Is the captain unwell?”
“He has…company.” Alfie turned over another page of the paper, busying himself with laying it flat, and hoping the flush would be set down to the influence of the fire.
“Oh well, that’s good, ain’t it?” she said. “One less unpleasant duty, eh? That’ll please Sgt. Peterson. It weren’t right anyway, asking a well-bred young gentleman like yourself to do something more fit for the tars.”
“Could we at least pretend ignorance!” he burst out. “It is not something of which I have any desire to speak.” It needed embarrassment.
Mrs. Shaw patted him on the hand with a fist full of soap bubbles, put her homely face on one side and said, “Don’t take it to heart, sir. If you don’t mind me saying so, there’s not many stains as don’t wash straight off.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” Having finished toasting the paper, Alfie folded it, watching the steam rise from his sleeves. “I only wish the rest of the world were of the same opinion.”
“Oh,
them!
” Mrs. Shaw wrung the water out of a shirt and hung it up on a cord to dry by the galley. “What do they know, anyways? Us
Britannias
, well, it’s not like we wouldn’t all suffer if anyone was to find out. Don’t you worry about that.”
Alfie wondered how far her sympathy went—if she would still reassure and comfort him if she knew he mourned the loss of the captain’s affection, rather than the shame of possessing it at all. But though he would have liked to talk to someone, he did not dare speak openly to her. He had been to enough hangings, seen enough mollies stand in the pillory to know that it was in general the women who cursed them loudest and threw the sharpest stones.
Slightly warmed in flesh if not in spirit, he retired to his own cabin to change into dry clothes. It was as he was tying a new neck-cloth, head tilted to one side as he struggled with an uneven knot, that the name caught his eye. He had thrown the
London Chronical
, haphazardly folded, onto his cot. Now he reached out for it warily as if it was a snake. The name struck out at him again, piercing him through the eye with a pain as sharp and vivid as a serpent’s tooth. It lanced out from a jumble of war news; a small paragraph on the launching of a new frigate, fresh off the blocks in Portsmouth and on her maiden voyage.
HMS
Albion
, to be posted to the West India station. Officers include
…a long list of strangers…
and Lt. John Cavendish
.
Fingers shaking, Alfie tore the paragraph out of the paper. After standing reading and re-reading it, he stuffed it into his pocket where he might continue to feel its crinkle between his fingers.
The West India station. John was on his way to Jamaica. Might even have already arrived. God above!
They might…on some street in Kingston, by chance, under a heavy saturated sky and a sun like a branding iron…they might meet.
He returned from somewhere terribly distant to find he had crushed the paper between his hands, was hugging it to himself like a long lost friend. Backing away from it, he sat down on his sea chest before he could fall.
Was it possible that Farrant, who must have read this first, was—in his harsh way—being kind? That he had meant for Alfie to see it and suspected he would react like this? Frankly, did it matter what Farrant did or expected?
No, it didn’t very much matter because, for the first time since coming on board, the fog about Alfie opened. A stab of winter sunlight, icy cold but bright, shuddered through him, intense as pain. As he put his hand protectively over the name in his pocket, over the talisman, he felt it again, like the slap on a baby’s back that shocks it into breathing. He did not know whether he hoped or feared, only that he felt suddenly alive again, and it hurt.