False Colors (29 page)

He found Alfie in a cove so steep-walled its water lay in eternal shade, cool and quiet, though opening out into the Caribbean’s uncompromising light. Strange orchids, flowers like purple-winged bees, and white, hairy shaving brushes rooted in the nooks of the rock and hung down, scenting the air with peppery sweetness. In the middle, between day and night, Alfie stood waist deep in water, facing the sun.

John slid from his horse as gently as he could, recognizing that he had come as a trespasser into a sacred space. Looping the bridle around a rock, he left the horse grazing and began to scramble down the narrow path into the cove. Shale slithered beneath his leather soles, so he sat on a ledge half way down, startling a mass of black and yellow butterflies into wheeling flight, and took off his shoes and stockings. It seemed appropriate, and reminded him of Moses approaching the burning bush, until he began to pick his way down again, and he remembered that Moses did not have to walk on sliding shale with edges like razors.

But this was a good pain. Self-inflicted, self-chosen, and well within the possibility of even his broken spirit to endure. When he reached the softer beach beneath he felt both as though he had done a penance—cleansed—and as though he had proved something to himself. The sting, as he waded into water so clear he could hardly see it at all, was more like the soaring tingle of ecstasy, than like torment. He waded through healing.

Which might have had more to do with the man now turning to watch him, than the water. For such a long time he had looked at Alfie and seen only what he expected to see, reflected. Now, for the first time, he felt he saw the real man. Alfie was beautiful. Not with John’s mere surface, accidental beauty, but beautiful in his youth and strength. Beautiful in the open honest way his soul seemed to show in his face. Tall and sturdy, he moved like a dancer, as though every step was a pavane. Arrested by the perfection of the angle between Alfie’s shoulder and neck, John stood and looked, and found he had no words.

“John.” Alfie laced his fingers together and brought them up so that the knuckles brushed his lips. “They didn’t kill me, and I didn’t say any of it.”

“You said it to me.” John reached out and closed his own hands around Alfie’s. It was like finding a rope to save him when he was lost overboard in a storm, and he held on with something of the same desperation. “I heard you. You told me you loved him.”

Jealousy provided a thousand bitter words.
You didn’t give me a chance! You were gone before I had time to think. You knocked down the foundations of my world and then disappeared! What did you expect of me?
And more base than that—a petty cry of pain of which he was ashamed, but could not silence:
Do you know how much I’ve given up for you?
Swallowing, he pushed them back down into the darkness, concerned instead for the man before him. Alfie’s every gesture spoke of endurance, empty of joy. He stood patient in the limpid light, quiet, placid as a horse well broken to the bit. Words died on John’s tongue, inadequate.

There was no prudence in the way he worked his fingers into Alfie’s fists. When they opened, obediently, he lifted them, one after the other, to kiss the palms. Pure folly, a risk to name and fame and life itself, but oh, it felt so right. He hauled down the false colors under which he had been sailing all his life, and exchanged them for true. “I wish I had not been such an infernal prig, that night in Gibraltar, and driven you straight back to him.”

“Is that an apology?” Alfie’s fleeting smile recalled the cockiness of his earlier, more rakish days. Standing this close, touching him, John was alive with sensation—the lap of the waves against his flanks, the small changes of cold and warmth in the water. Air moved the fabric of his shirt against his flushed skin. Soft-beaten linen fluttered maddeningly against nerves he had scarcely known he possessed ere now.

Water curled about his loins, gently stroking, and he recalled with sudden urgency how Alfie would, at one point, have been watching for this opportunity. He would have stepped forward, turned his hands in John’s grasp and pulled the two of them together, and the cool embrace of the sea would have turned into honeyed heat.

John craved that touch; thirsted to make the first move, but after the disaster of the kiss at the warehouse he didn’t trust himself to do so without inflicting more pain. He wanted to say
Alfie, now’s your chance
, but settled for babbling. “It is. Yes. I was a coward, and did not understand a thing about myself. It came upon me like a lightning strike. Blinded for a moment, I reacted without thought. But since then I have turned the matter over and over, searched its meaning so diligently, and….”

Alfie’s expression glazed over. He was not listening. In falling silence, the
sssssh
of the sea on the shingle spoke like a command. Alfie’s pulse rocked against John’s encircling fingers, the only thing about him to give evidence of life. A droplet, like an errant diamond, slid across the bunched muscles of his jaw and pooled in the hollow of his throat, making John want to lean in and lick the little “v” clean of its salty taste. His mouth watered at the thought and that discovery aroused as much as it alarmed him. Perhaps this was not the time to attempt an explanation of his moral and theological self-questioning after all. Something more basic was required. “Please forgive me?”

Pulling his hands away, Alfie turned them over, examined his palms as if for incriminating stains. “I don’t know,” he said at last, his voice muffled and thick. “I don’t know if I can.”

He raised his head, his tawny golden eyes cold and grim as a hunting lion’s. “I have no idea what to make of you any more, Cavendish. And until I’ve decided, I’d be obliged if you didn’t assume I’m yours for the asking. You had your chance, and you chose to shut the door in my face. When I turned to you for help…t
wice
I trusted you and you let me down. Farrant, God bless the bastard, never did. He never did!”

A surge of water clear as air rushed in as Alfie wrenched himself aside. Beneath the waves the bay’s little coral fish whisked away, startled, into cover. Alfie covered his eyes with one hand, thumb and fingers digging into his temples. John had to speak, he
had to
speak, the need to justify himself came crawling up from prick and belly, joined with heartbreak, pushed itself out like a long splinter of oak up his throat. And honor stopped it there. No. Alfie owed him nothing. Never would.

“Maybe I’ve learned the lesson you chose to teach me, Mr. Cavendish,
sir
,” Alfie went on quietly. “Maybe I’m going to ‘amend my life,’ so that
I
can look down on
you
. Now if you don’t mind, I want to be alone.”

“Sir! Lieutenant, sir!” The door shuddered in its frame as Alfie raised his aching head from the pillow. Something sharp dug into the side of his face as he moved. He brushed off hardened breadcrumbs and flung his feet out of bed. Panting fur sent a shock of revulsion through him as his toes landed on an enterprising rat. With an indignant squeal it wiggled out from beneath his sole and scuttled back to the refuge of the disintegrating mudbrick walls.

“Mmn?” he said, pulling his foot back and rubbing it to remove the sensation of damp rat. “What is it, Emmie? End of the world?”

“Might be for you if you don’t get your sorry arse out of bed Mr. Lieutenant, sir. Hoo! When this captain see you in your state, him turn straight back round, walk out again.”

Shooting to his feet, Alfie flung open the door. “Captain? There’s a captain downstairs?”
Emmie—owner, housemaid, and kitchen girl of this fine establishment—looked him up and down with a wide smile. Her headscarf tormented his hangover with swirls of angry red and yellow, and her amusement made him conscious of his frowsy, unwashed state, bare legged, tousle-haired and abominably unshaven.
“Uh-huh.” She rocked back on her heels, folded her arms, and lifted her chin at him in the manner of exasperated women everywhere. “He’s set down in the garden with a jug of beer. You got maybe three, four minutes—”
Alfie shut the door with one hand, and reached for the breeches slung over the bedpost with the other. As he hopped on one foot to get them on, tucking in his shirt and buttoning, trying to remember if he had a clean pair of stockings and if so where he had put them, she carried on, voice raised, unperturbed.
“…before he think to himself what a lazy good for nothing you are and go away. And maybe that be your last chance of a ship gone. Yes?”
“Yes!” He scraped his face with an unstropped razor in a basin of cold water, thankful that a lifetime’s practice on tossing seas made the exercise swift and only marginally dangerous. “Please go and tell him I’ll be down directly. All being well, I’ll pay my bill at the end of today.”
Emmie chortled. “I add extra for playing messenger.” But as he was shrugging into his coat, he heard her red-heeled shoes go snapping down the rickety staircase. Straightening everything, he rubbed the sheet over his own shoes to give them polish, checked his reflection in his hand-mirror—a little red and sore around the cheeks but nothing to signify—and hurled himself down, two steps at a time, after her.
From the angle of the sun, which hit the wall of beans direct, making their orange flowers glow with an almost painful intensity, Alfie realized it must be almost four bells in the fore-noon watch.
Ten o’clock in the morning!
No wonder Emmie had seen fit to be so scathing.
Still, the eastern wall, climbed over by trained fruit trees, sliced off the solid weight of sunshine above their heads. In the shade beneath it, the day remained tolerably cool. There, on a bench made of biscuit barrels, sat a whey-faced man, whose waistcoat gaped at the buttons over a substantial paunch. His laced cocked hat sat on the bench beside him, revealing a foppish wig, the two long queues of which reached to his waist.
The super-fine wool of his coat, instead of falling in elegant folds, drawing attention to broad shoulders and a narrow waist— as intended—merely emphasized his bulges, combining vanity and extravagance to create a particularly undesirable result.
Farrant had worn such a coat,
Alfie remembered, swallowing hard.
But on him it had looked magnificent.
Sweeping off his hat, remembering at the last moment to turn the crown towards his guest, Alfie made a leg. “Alfie Donwell, sir. Forgive me for causing you to wait, I…um…”
The captain’s jowled face lifted, his expression softer than seemed possible for a man of his rank—like a scene blurred by an out of focus spy-glass. He picked nervously at the lace on his cuffs, their wide band of tarnish proclaiming this a constant habit. A reprimand would have reassured Alfie that he was in the hands of a man of some authority, but this captain half rose from his seat, reconsidered, and sank down again, thankfully.
“This terrible plague!” he said, apropos of nothing.
“I’m sorry sir?” Behind the captain something moved among the row of pumpkins. Alfie had the impression that one of the vegetables had stretched itself. Wedging his hat beneath his armpit, he clasped his hands behind his back, pinched the webbing of one finger between his nails, trying to look attentive and trustworthy as he did so. It seemed unlikely behavior even for foreign fruit.
The look of mild anxiety on the heavy face became a look of mild enquiry. “You seem taken aback, lieutenant? Am I to assume Cavendish has not informed you of our state? That seems very unlike him. I declare I am normally exhausted by his efficiency.”
Alfie licked his lips, the bewildering rush of yearning and disappointment almost a physical taste in his mouth. If he could have bitten it, it would have been salty-sour like rancid stockfish. “Mr. Cavendish has proved himself no friend of mine. He could not have been quicker to distance himself at my trial. Not a peep from him did I hear and I saw neither hide nor hair, though I had hoped he at least would stand by me.”
This must be Gillingham then, John’s captain, of whom he had heard much—all of it accompanied by a mocking snigger. “He’s full of fine words, Captain Gillingham, but test him and he rings hollow every time.”
“Oh.” Gillingham picked a damselfly out of the beer jug by the wings, and set it on the edge of the bench to dry off. “Do you think so?” He frowned down at the half-drowned creature’s attempt to right itself, brought out a pencil from his pocket and separated its fragile, black-veined wings. It looked up at him with bulbous, blood colored eyes, and Alfie decided that next time he heard someone mock this captain, he would knock that man down.
“You see, he was very eloquent about your merits to me. Assured me you were a highly superior officer, and there was absolutely nothing in the charge. Urged me to take you on at once, what with this terrible—positive
epidemic—
of the yellow jack and good officers dropping like flies. Seemed to think I would steal a march on the opposition by the deed.” He looked up and smiled like an absent-minded country vicar. “And are you now telling me that you feel you have fallen so far out of friendship that you could no longer work with Mr. Cavendish? That you must—in principle—decline the berth?”
Lost for months in fog and storm, unsure of his position, the sentence was a glimpse of land. Alfie dropped all other concerns at once and steered towards it.
“No sir!
No, sir. Not at all.”
A ribbon of orange wound its way sinuously down from the pumpkin, sliding across the liana that connected the vegetable to the ground. In his current state, Alfie would have happily believed some part of the pumpkin itself migrated, but when he bent forward to see closer it proved to be a centipede. A centipede the size of his forearm, with red-tipped yellow legs and a mouth like a pair of tweezers.
“Oh good God!” he exclaimed without thought. “Anything to get away from this place, sir!”
Twisting round, Gillingham caught sight of the little monster, and, recoiling, struggled to his feet with a grunt of effort. But then a look of morbid curiosity came over his face. He leaned forward to peer at it, picking up a discarded pea-stick and motioning as if to nudge the beast into further movement. As the shadow fell on it, however, it lunged, and buried its mandibles in the stick. Gillingham dropped it and sprang back, hands clasped over his heart.
“It looks as though it could swallow a rat, don’t you think? And
poisonous
, I have no doubt. I sometimes think the whole island is poisonous and resents our presence here. What a place!”
During the short conversation, the sunlight had slid off the wall and onto the ground. The shade shrank and warmed. Alfie’s scalp prickled under his wig as sweat and horsehair mixed. The smell of leaves, bean flowers, sweet peppers hanging red and glossy like newly plucked-out ox-hearts on their bush, fought a losing battle against the stench of the latrine.
“I could bring my dunnage to the ship in less than fifteen minutes, sir. I’d be perfectly willing to sleep aboard.”
Gillingham laughed, but he retreated to the house, waving Alfie before him and shutting the door behind them both on Jamaica’s less attractive fauna. “I see we think alike. But is there no one you should inform first? Your old ship, for example?”
That was an interview he didn’t wish to recall.
Britannia
’s new captain had made certain things abundantly clear.
“If you had any shred of decency you would leave the navy of your own accord,”
not being the worst of them.
“You will never set foot on another deck.”
“The crew of the
Britannia
, including her officers, sir, has been broken up and dispersed among several ships. Her new captain does not wish me back on board.” It had been an expected blow. Admiral Rodney, after all, was not stupid, and if he could not punish the sod, he could at least send the principle liars into other berths, where they would not have the comfort of their mutual support.
“No, well….the rumors…you understand.”
“It is a bitter thing—” Alfie paused before opening the street door, the hall’s gloom almost blinding him after the bright garden, “—to be thus dogged by a reputation I have not deserved. I was falsely accused, and yet they treat me as though—”
“So Mr. Cavendish said, in almost the same words.” Gillingham laughed, though the sound trembled like a cable parting under stress. “Would you not now consider thinking better of him? As you see, he has not been entirely idle in your cause. If I may be permitted to say so, but for his persuasion, the rumors might have counted against you in my eyes also. It isn’t enough?”
The taste of something sweet, gone bad. A piece of sublime music, played flat. Part of Alfie wanted to forgive—to at least try friendship again. Part, with the dumb loyalty of a dog who sits by his master’s grave until he dies, felt any civility to John would be a betrayal of Farrant’s memory. And a final, powerful part just wanted to hurt John as John had hurt him. If John, knowing the decision of the court, knowing there was no longer any danger to himself, had thrown him a sop, what of it? It was almost more of an insult than not acting at all.
“It isn’t enough, sir. I counted on him and he failed me.”
The double queues of Gillingham’s wig swung out and tapped Alfie’s arm as the captain turned to leave. It was the closest thing to a reprimand Alfie had received from him, despite being late, ill-shaven and over familiar.
“Just so.” Gillingham inched up the corners of his mouth in a smile, then allowed them to fall again. He fixed an anxious, mildly stern gaze on the door frame just to the side of Alfie’s shoulder and rubbed a thumb along the braid of his cuff. “Nevertheless, this will be a long voyage—the better part of a year—and I need you to assure me you will not bring any animosity on board. No challenges, no backbiting in the ward room, no forming little cliques and setting the ship at odds with itself. I don’t feel that I can usefully demand friendship, but I do feel, quite strongly, that I must insist on courtesy.”
“I can manage courtesy, Captain.” The words left a lurch in their wake. Everything within him rattled and swung in a moment’s inward seasickness.
Serving with John, on the same ship once more! This would be kill or cure!
Screwing his hat down firmly on the wig, shaking off a little snow of orris-scented powder, Gillingham’s face settled again into a look that might have graced a pet linnet in its cage as it confronted the house cat. “You haven’t had yellow jack at all?”
“I did, sir, yes. In the year ’fifty-nine. A mild dose, I’m told, though I puked for four days straight. The inside of my nose might have been scraped off by a carpenter’s file.”
At this cheerful description, Gillingham brought a lozengeshaped silver vinaigrette from his waistcoat pocket, snapped open the cover and sniffed. The scent of lavender-infused vinegar lit up the morning briefly before he closed it and tucked it away. “Then you won’t mind coming with me to the hospital? I have two lieutenants and three score of my people on their death beds with the disease. Though I really have no desire to visit them, I feel I should. I feel I owe it to them.”
“I’m willing to go wherever you most need me, sir. But does this mean…?”
“Yes, yes. Pathetic though it sounds, I don’t like to go alone. All that misery. Cavendish will be there too. Afterwards, if I am content with how you conduct yourselves with one another, you may send a couple of the people to move your dunnage into the
Albion.
And we will get away from this ill-favored place, to somewhere more fitting for Englishmen.”
“We’re going home?” Alfie could have hugged the man, if he had not known how that would be taken.
“Not quite. To the Arctic.”