False Colors (3 page)

Four hours of watch ended in as much peace as they had begun. Alfie handed the quarterdeck back to a sleepy Armitage and went below to the wardroom, where Mrs. Harper, the Doctor’s loblolly girl, was laboriously serving tea from the mess’s big brown pot. Her arthritic knuckles were twisted and bleached as driftwood. Her hands trembled, and tea spattered over the tablecloth. It did not give him great confidence in her ability to hold down a shrieking sailor for amputation. But he said nothing and accepted a half full cup with thanks, while the wardroom servant brought in a breakfast of hard tack fried in slush, and a glorious dish of bacon from the galley.

From the gun-deck, further forward, separated from the officers’ mess only by a canvas screen, came the homely sound of spoons scraping on wooden plates, and a periodic roaring of laughter as the off-duty watch shoveled up their porridge.

Slumped in a chair by the door, filling the room with the scent of stale rum and staler smoke, the Master punctuated his snoring with retching coughs, but did not wake. The Boatswain haunted the deck already with his mates, looking for someone to hit, and Hall—the Purser—would not rise for another three hours, thank God.

It is a good time to be here,
Alfie thought, listening to Mrs. Harper’s account of the various accidents of the night—two bursten bellies and a wrenched wrist caused by almost falling from the rigging. With no one but the pleasant old relic for company he could forget the shortcomings of his other colleagues and concentrate on his own thoughts.

Cavendish will be getting up around now.
Alfie wondered about the man’s routine; did he sleep in his uniform in case of emergencies, or in a nightshirt? Did he mumble into his pillow and rise groggy, having to be revived by coffee, or was he one of those cheery souls who hummed an aria while they shaved?

Alfie wanted to know. He wanted to know if John Cavendish preferred Handel to Bach, if his parents were alive and whether they were close, if he had had a puppy as a child and if so, what it was called. Where he had been schooled, what made him laugh, which books to read to engage his mind, how he could bring back that furtive but unconscious smile, and broaden it.

“You look happy, Mr. Donwell.” Mrs. Harper pushed away her plate to make room for a ghastly pickled thing in a glass jar, just as her husband dithered his way through the door and favored all three of them—the two humans and the tadpole-like creature with a human head that swam in its bottle between them—with a near blind but benevolent smile.

“I am,” Alfie agreed. “I’ve put a right hard horse of a captain behind me, and I love the beginnings of things; when it’s all to do, and you can believe this time... this time it’s all going to work out fine.”

“Ah,” Harper gave him a dusty smile, “the optimism of youth.”
“But sometimes it does go well, my dear.” His wife rose to give him the brush of an age-worn kiss on his cheek, her hair white and shining as his powdered wig. “Sometimes it does.”
Alfie’s heart twisted, seeing what he wanted, so close and yet—for him—so seeming unattainable. A life-long love. Even if he could take advantage of Cavendish’s innocence to seduce him, how likely was it still that the man would want
him
to grow old with?

Passing through the straits of Gibraltar into the heat of a Mediterranean summer, the
Meteor
left behind the fog and cloud where the North Atlantic current met the coast of Morocco. After a morning spent trimming the sails to catch every elusive breath of breeze, John leaned against the rail of his small quarterdeck and decided to allow the men to enjoy this last day of peace before Algiers. There would be tension enough tomorrow. For today, let them drift easily and gently east on the warm African current.

Over the past weeks, sailor-like, he had achieved a certain detachment from the future. Today’s tasks demanded attention today, whether or not there would be a tomorrow. The period of grace thinned. It drew to a close. If he let himself, he could imagine the future as a reef and feel the breakers surge towards it. Yet even now there was nothing at all to be done to mend the situation. Over the past few nights he had studied his maps and pondered until sleep overset him, left him slumped over his plank desk, hair-ribbon in the ink. He knew the disposition of the harbor, the currents, reefs, rocks and even the color of the sea-bed in exhaustive detail. He had done all he could. Worrying would not achieve any more.

Setting aside the problem of Algiers until such time as he could act on it, he fetched a crowbar from his cabin and decided to check the provisions which Hall, the purser, had suspiciously condemned. How likely was it that all the beef brought aboard— the beef that had weathered three months patrolling with little more than a change of color—should have become inedible overnight? More likely the man intended to sell it and line his own pocket as soon as they made port.

Meteor
trotted through the seas like a well-bred horse. Even at this relaxed pace, with a following wind, she dug her head into spray with each wave. Beneath their lashed tarpaulins the mortars glistened like basking seals by her bow. In a cabin below decks someone played a flute. A thread of music wound its way up the stairs. So quiet at first, it could have been the
Meteor
herself given voice, echoing with breathy woodwind sweetness in the hollow spaces of her hold.

Resting his crowbar on his foot, John listened, enchanted, as the melody bundled together the sunshine and the spray, ran up into the sky with them and burst in a firework of notes. When the passage ended, John’s cheeks ached with a smile.
Thank you
, he addressed the empty horizon, and the Spirit who rested between earth and sky, God and man, life and death.
Thank you for this moment; for the knowledge that you are here with me.

He’d thought the piece ended, but now it came again; a rush of notes like a dryad shaking out the leaves from her hair. Even the impulse to pray deserted him in the desire to laugh aloud for joy. Only the knowledge that the men would think him insane restrained him from doing so. Instead he padded down on carefully silent feet onto the
Meteor
’s one gun deck, stalking the music.

Tables hung from the deck above on ropes, and with the offduty watch drinking their grog, smoking their pipes, and telling tall tales, the long room had something of the look of a summer pub scene. Reflections from the sea dazzled through the open gun ports, through which fresh air also streamed, cutting through the usual reek of wet wool and unwashed sailor. The sound of the flute—louder now—trailed from aft, high and sweet—complex with a mathematical perfection that John’s navigationally trained instincts sensed with delight. He continued his pursuit.

Donwell’s door stood slightly open—it had to, for sitting on his sea-chest, he couldn’t fit his outstretched legs into the tiny room otherwise—but his eyes were closed and he frowned with concentration as he played the rosewood flute. Charmed, John drifted closer until he could prop a shoulder against the frame of the door and settle into silent appreciation.

With a strong love of music, but raised in perfect ignorance on the subject, he could not think of anything intelligent to say. Nor would he have wished to interrupt the piece’s transcendence with mere speech. But its rushes of notes, and the long, strong passages in between, resonated through him like the power of a full spread of sail. As always, his ignorance and the enchantment combined to open up a world of light beneath John’s breastbone, to fill him with awe and incompleteness combined. A sweet torment; for if he was seeing angels dancing, he had not the wings to join in.

Donwell’s wig lay crumpled on the mattress, beside a book, an old shirt and a half eaten ship’s biscuit. Brilliant sunshine gave the whole scene the oil painting vividness of a Dutch masterpiece, outlining Donwell’s hands, the turn of his throat, his messy flaxen hair as though they were numinous.

As everything paused on a high note, clear and perfect, John’s delight escaped in a gasp of breath, and at the sound Donwell’s eyes snapped open. With a convulsive heave backwards, he drew the flute to his chest as if to protect it, slamming his heels into the sea-chest and scrabbling to rise. “Oh! Oh, I’m…I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know you were there!”

“No need to apologize, Mr. Donwell.” John smiled, not only the music making him radiant. It was pleasing to have the upper hand for a change; to wrong-foot his over-bold lieutenant. “Rather I should ask your pardon for disturbing you in the middle of a performance. I have a most untutored reaction to music. What was it, may I ask?”

“Surely you know Telemann, sir?” Donwell’s sandy brows arched with surprise as he straightened up, freeing space enough for John to walk in. In his new mood of confidence, John did so, and found it pleasant to revert to the comradely visiting he had done on board the Admiral’s first rate. There, they had been in and out of one another’s cabins all the time, borrowing books and stockings, taking a cup of coffee or a glass of wine with each other. It had been, indeed, a little too sociable for John’s tastes, but now, after a fortnight of solitude, he thirsted for company.

“It is not possible to underestimate what I know about music.” The canvas partition wall creaked beneath John’s weight as he cautiously leaned against it. A small part of him quailed at opening the details of his family life to such a stranger, but Alfie’s honest, good-humored amusement encouraged him. Whatever else he felt—this itch of over-awareness which made every conversation a little too intense—distrust was not part of it.

Indeed, the desire to put Donwell on the next ship to China weighed equally against the desire to tell him all and keep him close. If it puzzled John which instinct to trust, he thought he should probably choose the more humane. “My mother did not approve of it. ‘Snare of the devil,’ she said. It was not played in our house.”

“Your mother did not approve of
music
?” Donwell had clearly been very startled indeed; his face only now began to change from boyish openness to the urbanity of an adult. In all the layers thus revealed, John was startled to see pity.

Instantly his temper flared. “Why should she? Is it not used to set the scene for debaucheries? Balls, where young people may lose their innocence. Theatre and opera and dancing that dazzle the senses and make the heart forget true morality? It would be a more steadfast, sober world without music.”

In his zeal, John stepped forward. Donwell did not retreat, but stood there, apparently relaxed, his thumb moving gently over the curve of the flute. “And a poorer one.”

Fists tightening almost against his will, physical fury swept through John, clear and glorious as the music. Breathing hard, he could almost feel the smack of his knuckles into Donwell’s mouth, where a small, startled smirk turned in the end of the man’s lips. Infuriating!
How dare he? How dare he laugh at me?
They stood so close he could feel the warmth of Donwell’s thigh against his own.

Watching that little knowing smile light up Donwell’s smoky amber eyes, John breathed in sharply and turned away, fighting down the urge to wrap his hands around the other man’s neck and choke some reason into him.

What the…?
Where had such violence come from? Shame flooding him, he stepped back, head bowed, appalled at himself. It wasn’t even as though he didn’t agree.

“Forgive me. ‘And a poorer one,
sir
.’” Donwell too retreated, hopping up to sit on his cot, ceding John the two paces of floor and the sea-chest seat.

For a man who has given in, he looks altogether too triumphant,
John thought, sitting down on the chest with trembling legs and a tender conscience. “You might be right.” As his racing heart slowed, he attempted a reassuring smile. God alone knew what Donwell must think of him! He himself had no idea. “Though it shows a filial impiety in me to allow it.”

John’s mother disapproved of many things in which he himself could not see the harm. Had the music not—only a moment ago—made him feel closer to God? Prompted him to worship? How then could anyone say it was a snare? It disturbed and grieved him that she made her life more unhappy than it needed to be, but at times it was hard to avoid the thought. “I do sometimes fancy it is ungrateful—in our quest for purity—to disallow ourselves the things which were created to give us joy.”

Alfie licked his lips. Cross legged, sheet music bundled in his lap to hide his inappropriate state of arousal, he tried to get his breathing under control. Just for a moment there, he’d thought…. Oh! How glorious to find that the captain’s uncertainty covered such passion. Misdirected passion, true. But that could be remedied. “I couldn’t agree more,” he said at last. “Would a good God

have created an appetite within us and then forbidden us to satisfy it? Would he have given us no choice but to hunger and then demanded that we starve? I think not.”

“My mother would say the appetite itself was debased.” John looked up. The blaze had died from his eyes; they were now dark grey as his wig, from which all the powder had been blown by the morning’s breeze. The right hand side-curl unraveled, strands hanging down to brush his jaw. “‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.’”

Alfie tugged his shoes off and dropped them over the side of the bed. He wriggled his toes in luxurious freedom, digging them into the coarse wool of his blanket and smiling at the tickle. The cot bumped against the hull as his movement set it swinging, and he wrapped his hands around the supporting ropes to still it. From here he was looking down on Cavendish, which was also an amusing luxury.
What a man!
Nervy and sharp and on some deep emotional level just aware enough of what was going on to react against it with terror. A pox on it, but he’d set himself quite a task here! If he had any sense he should give up now. He really should.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But then again man does not live by the word of God alone, but also by bread. She was very religious then, your mother?”