False Colors (33 page)

As the sun went down, seabirds settled on top of the ice mountain and roosted all over the
Albion
’s rigging, to the delight of the midshipmen and the purser alike. The boys combined skylarking with stalking, creeping up the shrouds and along the yards, crowing with laughter as they pounced and grabbed in an explosion of swirling, scolding birds. Their shouts made Alfie smile, as did the thought of barrels of pickled seagull. Oily and fishy though the meat was, it was better than nothing.

They rigged church immediately afterwards, lining up in divisions so far as that was possible on the slope. The sun lowering in the west threw the ship’s shadow, spiky and black, over cliffs of ice that seemed to glow like polished amber in a cloth of gold sea.

In the absence of a chaplain, Gillingham read the funeral service. The small body went over the side, splashed into the water, and the glory of sunset closed over it, the crew standing with their heads uncovered to the chill, tears freezing on their eyelashes. In a steady voice, Gillingham read out the names of those others found missing, now also presumed dead.

“‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ saith the Lord; ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’”

The parting guns boomed out, muffled with only half a charge, and the noise echoed and re-echoed from the crags. Easterly, the sea was choked with ice. A dozen bergs drifted amongst smaller boulders and flat sheets of it, snow covered, all gold and peach and fire in the sunset. Grumbling and booming muttered on around them even as the light faded. They clapped on their hats, grateful for the cover, and ran below.

Off duty, Alfie wormed his way into the center of the straw and blanket nest he had created in his cot. Pulling all his coverlets tight around him, he thought of finding his servant and sending the man off for hot toddies and warmed stones to set at his feet. But the galley fires had been doused for the night, and his personal stores had never contained more than three bottles of brandy—all now smashed.

Cold moved through him. His skin warmed, but his flesh felt brittle as glass. Exhaustion brought him close to the point of sleep again and again, only for panic to jerk him awake as he felt his blood slow.

Only a wall of canvas and battens separated him from John’s cabin. There he could hear the restless rustle and the creak of rope as John’s sleepless movements set his cot swinging.
What keeps him awake? A guilty conscience?

Alfie turned over, drawing the blanket, his boat cloak, tarpaulin jacket, and best dress breeches up over his head, then shivered at the blast to his kidneys.
Oh, for a down comforter!
Oh, for any excuse to take his bedding with him and go crawl in with John….

“What would you have to say for yourself, eh?” he murmured under his breath, the words pleasantly warm as they passed his lips. “Gibraltar I can understand. If anything, I knew what you’d do. I blame myself for coming out with it too early. Bad timing….”

A frustrated exhale of breath in the dark, almost a groan, and for a moment Alfie thought John had heard him. But no, the noise came from the other side—where the ship’s surgeon rested in his dispensary. A couple of grunts and a cut off, incomprehensible word of deep Scots Gaelic, and the breathing settled back into sleep.

Alfie lowered his voice until he could barely hear it himself, the warm mist of ghost words a strange sensory pleasure in his mouth. “But why aren’t you more guilty? You promised me aid, in prison. You promised, and then you disappeared. I thought you were more honest. Less of a coward.”

Perhaps he would put the question to John if ever they touched at England and found themselves in more private surroundings than these? It would be a day much like today. Cold. Silent snowfall outside the windows. The two of them would sit together in a room in John’s house, wherever that was, with fire glowing in the grate, brandy and gingerbread on little tables beside their deep armchairs. The servants would be bickering and laughing in the kitchen below, their voices forming a pleasant drone with the crackle and murmur of the flames.

They would talk, John and he, all through the short day, safe together away from the prying world. And then perhaps go upstairs together and make love all the long night. He could imagine that too. John’s bed would have crisp white sheets, and a heavy bed-rug covered in the same garish flowers as his banyan.
Something his mother had embroidered for him....
And it would smell of John—that faint cream, salt, and citrus smell that made Alfie think of royal creamed ice.

But at the thought of ice cream his surroundings returned to him in a trickle of shivers down the back. He could hear ice thickening on the water outside, grinding down the hull like a saw. Love and lust and disappointment were all nothing to it. If the wind picked up and the seas rose he could find all his ponderings cut short by the indifference of nature. Perhaps it would be better to reach out and snatch what was offered than to freeze into a block while mourning over lost illusions....

“Make ready to cast her loose!” cried Alfie. The drums rolled, their staccato tapping echoed back from distant caves as a deep, inhuman roar, as though the
Albion
rested in the land of the ice giants and— unwisely—kept shaking them awake.

Sailors poured up the companionways, the topmen running on, unpausing, up the shrouds, ice falling fractured from the ropes beneath their rag-bound bare feet. Teams of four men on each anchor cable stood waiting with axes to cut the cables simultaneously on his signal. All had been prepared for above a week now, but for the wind that had blown relentlessly on to the ice for day upon day. This morning, however, it had wheeled directly astern. There was a chance, now, that once the
Albion
was back in the water she might get clear.

“All hands lashed aboard?” Alfie tightened the rope about his own waist that held him to the binnacle, watched impatiently while the men on the yards secured themselves. Any moment the wind could wheel again, trapping them for another month with fuel for the galley running out and winter tightening its grip.

“Aye aye, sir!” the midshipmen of their divisions reported, passing a final line about themselves as they huddled about the main mast.

“Make fore and main topsail, mizzen topsail and mizzen staysail!”
As the topsails sheeted home, the sprung foremast creaked with a strange high pitched whine. The masts bent forward, rigging pulling taut as iron. The anchor cables strained. Alfie’s breath came fast and shallow.
“On my mark, loose the anchors. Three, two, one. Mark!”
The axes flashed like mercury through the air. The aft cable parted a sickening moment earlier than the fore and
Albion
’s stern began its slide an instant before her bow. Then the bow rope twanged apart and the whole ship went sliding sideways into the sea. With a great flume of bitter spray she plummeted into the waves and the sea surged aboard. Deep in her belly the pumps throbbed back into life. The yards twanged like longbows and the men tied to them yelled, clinging on with both hands. Alfie’s feet left the deck. The line around him drove up under his ribs as it caught him. He coughed and gasped out, “Let fall fore and main sail!”
Wind snapped in the wet sailcloth.
Albion’s
speed picked up and she began to move forward, driving herself through a sharpedged spume of floating ice. Blocks tipped up beneath her head and shattered on either side of her bow, drawing back together beneath her stern, fouling the rudder. Still she ploughed on, thrust onwards by the gale, the berg so close the men on the starboard studdingsail yards might have reached out and grabbed a handful of snow.
With a sick feeling of inevitability, Alfie saw the sails shiver at the edge and felt the wind behind him veer a point. Nothing significant at all if out at sea, but here it placed the berg to leeward. As they moved forward, he saw, they would drift sideways back into its facets, to inevitable grounding on sheet ice, hull split open like a fruit beneath the knife, bleeding warmth until she seized in place and snow covered all.
“We must claw off, sir!” Alfie yelled, throwing off the lifeline so that he could move again.
Gillingham, all his blankets clutched about him, nodded. “Yes, we must. Make all sail! Helm hard a larboard.”
The whole ship’s company hauled on their lines as if possessed by devils. The sails thundered out and drew taut, the water by her bow foaming up as her speed increased. The hole in the foremast twisted, gaping, but the mast endured even under the full spread of canvas.
Albion
began to turn slowly to port, even as the wind was still blowing her leewardly towards the ice mountain. Snow skirled away from the thing in plumes, leaving it bare to the sunlight. It glowed like a single huge sapphire in Alfie’s vision. Shadows moved in its heart—indigo and midnight surrounded by secret, nameless colors. Its cliffs and cleaver-sharp precipices shimmered emerald and aquamarine.
Helm hard about, all the sails set, they could do no more but wait. Wait and hope for the course to take them past before the ship’s leeway drove them onto the facets of the enormous gem. Alfie knew the silence aboard was awe mixed with fatalistic terror in the face of this deadly beauty, their own helplessness.
“Have everyone not on the braces stand on the center line,” Gillingham said to Alfie, quietly. “That will stiffen her a little. And then I think we may pray.” He smiled weakly at John, who had come silently to Alfie’s shoulder. “Something simple for the occasion, Mr. Cavendish, if you please.”
“Me, sir?”
“You and He are on more regular speaking terms than the rest of us. Isn’t that so?”
John glanced nervously at the ice, now cutting out the sun above them. Ghost lights shone around its edges, and from it there came a sharp cracking noise, like repeated lightning. Swallowing hard, his lips white, John closed his eyes. Alfie watched his face smooth out as he tried to forget death and disaster, concentrating on whatever still, small voice he heard. “Oh Lord, please bring us from darkness into light, from death into life. Amen.”
Like a candle coming out from behind its encircling hand, a beam of sun lanced past the far edge of the berg, then another. Soon after they could see sea ahead, a strip of it, the same strange milky blue as the ice. The crew leaned over the side, fending off the mountain’s skirt of floating boulders with oars and boathooks, and slowly
Albion
ground past and away. Too close for comfort, not quite close enough for disaster. As she sailed east towards the deeper water of Baffin Bay, the carpenters raced to plug the new holes in the hull, and the larboard watch replaced the starboard at the pumps.
Alfie, highly doubtful whether the Lord had anything to do with it—the course having already been set, and only inevitable mathematics in play from then on—nevertheless watched the ice dwindle behind him with a feeling of revelation.
From death to life? Perhaps I
have
mourned long enough.
He returned to the binnacle in time to see the final grains of sand slip from the top bulb of the glass to the lower. The Master bounded up the quarterdeck steps, ready to take his watch. The youngest midshipman skidded to a halt beside the bell and grasped for the hammer as eagerly as if it were a sugar plum. “Turn the glass and strike the bell,” Alfie said firmly, conscious of the symbolism. The sweet eightfold chime punctuated his life like a full stop, closing one day, opening the next.
Handing over to his relief, Alfie joined the rush of off-watch men pouring below. The wardroom’s damp heat billowed around him as he stripped off coats and mufflers, shaking off the ice into the pools of snowmelt on the painted floor. A brazier stood, surrounded by a tray of damp sand, in the center of the table, with a weary circle of officers around it, their faces stained red by the coals. Joining them, Alfie held out his hands to the heat, felt wires of pain draw themselves through his numb fingers; a blaze, an ache, and then an unbearable tingle as they returned to life.
Within, his heart unfroze with something of the same agony, as he thought about John. So John had proved disappointing? So John was not the paragon Alfie had hoped for? Well then, might this not be an opportunity for Alfie to be generous? He had willingly born so much ill usage from Farrant without more than a moment’s resentment. He could surely endure John’s faults in the same way, regarding him as a man injured by his own nature, worthy of pity.
Though he preferred to worship at the shrine of his lover, it might be interesting to try being worshipped instead. Suppose he went to John and said, “I forgive you. I forgive you for making me promises in jail that you could not keep. I know what it is to be frightened—I don’t hold it against you. Feel free to thank me now, if you wish.”
Would it not be splendid to be the target of so much inevitable gratitude?
Rubbing the last prickle from his fingertips, Alfie left the wardroom, brushed past the drying clothes in the corridor and scratched at the sliding door of John’s cabin.
He would say, ‘How about it?’ and John’s face would light up with thankfulness. Perhaps they could even squeeze into the corner between door and frame and he would let John bring him off with those narrow, delicate hands of his, John’s face tucked into the side of Alfie’s neck, his heaving breath, deliciously hot over the sore, chapped skin of Alfie’s throat….
The sliding door opened with a rattle. “Yes?” John backed up with a look of confusion as Alfie crowded into the narrow space between cot and wall, then slid the partition shut behind him. “Alfie, what is it?”
His diary was in his hand. He turned to place the book face down on his bed, and the quick, lithe movement made Alfie catch his breath, a yearning indistinguishable from anger heating his blood.
Oh yes, or he could pin John up against the wall and just rub himself against that back, that perfect curve of arse. Too cold and too dangerous to take any clothes off, and besides, it was all John deserved.
“I….” he tried, and found he had no idea what he wanted to say. It was all too much of a mess. He lifted a hand instead, drew two fingers up the line of John’s jaw; felt the rush of blood scalding against his fingertips as John blushed, the thunder of the pulse in his throat.
John gasped, moving closer. “This is not….” The words left his mouth half open. Looking both shocked and vulnerable, he gazed at Alfie with a mixture of hope and terror. The skirts of his coat swung forwards, grazing Alfie’s thighs as he leaned in. John’s warmth soaked slowly through Alfie’s breeches, a fugitive touch against Alfie’s stiffening yard, and Alfie gritted his teeth, wanting—not wanting—not sure…. “Alfie, this is….”
God, will he ever shut up?
Alfie lunged forward, slid that exploring hand behind John’s head, knotting it into his short, saltstiffened hair, and pulled John to him with all his strength. John stumbled, caught by surprise, and for a moment his hands came up to ward Alfie off, but Alfie just crushed John’s smart mouth to his and forced the clamped lips open with his tongue. He shoved John backwards against his desk. It clattered against the wall, stilled, then held tight as Alfie pressed himself full length against John, free hand slipping down to cup John’s arse, tug him ever closer.
Oh, the heat of him, and the way he trembles!
John’s fists, twisted in Alfie’s shirt, loosened, slid around behind his back, and clung there. His head tilted back, his mouth opening more fully to the plundering kisses. As his muscles softened in sweet, unconditional surrender, John’s body molded itself to Alfie’s trustingly. Alfie broke the kiss to look at John’s expression—the closed eyes, lashes trembling on his cheeks, the faint smile that drew up the ends of the full, bruised lips. John’s long throat tipped back, exposing itself to Alfie’s teeth and rippling as he swallowed.
For a moment Alfie forgot all the complications in sheer bliss, as he hitched John up until the man’s arse was on his desk, nudged his knees apart and ground himself against the one part of John that did not yield.
John’s arms went about his neck. He opened eyes full of amusement even as he gasped. “What? Why…?”
Amusement? The little bastard was finding this funny?
Shoulders heaving with the labor of drawing breath, his cock painful and his heart painful too, angrily aroused—aroused and angry— Alfie reached between them, wrenching at the buttons that held the flap of John’s breeches closed.
If only John would keep his mouth shut, just for three seconds!
Everything was perfect when