False Colors (36 page)

No wonder I have also finally disgusted Alfie. He is a man of the same sort; impulsive, at ease with the things of the flesh. Luxurious. I might have let him teach me some of his joy in life. Instead I have repeated in small my mother’s mistake; withholding forgiveness, comforting myself with my own piety.

The “e” of blame faded into the paper. He put down the dry pen and picked up his watch. It was now five minutes past the hour. A new year had arrived, and Alfie had not come.

Indeed, why should he have come? He meant nothing of the sort. He was speaking generally. That I have twisted it into some sort of promise says more of my own powers of self-deception than his intent. The incident in my cabin must have been mere revenge, after all, and not an invitation to begin again.

A damp wind tugged at the windows, rattling them against the frames, as the scent of sugar cane and furnaces, the sewers of the streets, filtered in through the cracks. John stood, stretching out knots of tension, wincing as pain lanced from his stiff neck to the small of his back.
Yet, if I told him…?

He stooped to the fire. If he was admitting defeat—going to bed alone—it should be raked apart, allowed to gently die. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t, not yet. Something fierce moved through him, made his hand shake as he scooped up a shovel of coal and poured it on.

What, I should tell him he owes me his life? I should force him to come to me out of debt. Out of obligation? No!
The petty, whining creature in his secret heart—the infant demon responsible for his devouring jealousy, his outbreak of martyred anger—whispered that it made no difference how he conquered the prize, so long as he won. But honor revolted.

The shovel must have been half full of dust and clinker—the fire smoked and sputtered. His shadow reeled drunkenly over the walls, inconstant, almost alarming in the brown dusk of the single candle. As the coal settled, it fizzed and clicked. He jumped away just as a lump burst apart, hurling glowing cinders out onto the wooden floor in a smoldering fan of embers. As he stamped them out, he thought of Algiers, for here in miniature was the firebombing of the harbor. He could just taste the wind on his face, imagining the glorious chase after. Back when he still thought he could achieve anything to which he set his hand.

Yet had he not done just that? Sent to take on the pirate fleet of Algiers in a single elderly ketch, had he not snatched victory from inevitable defeat? Warned not to interfere in the course of justice by no lesser a person than Admiral Rodney himself, had he not rescued Alfie’s life whole out of the noose? If he had wrought his will on the might of the Barbary corsairs, and foiled the authority of King George’s courts, why was this last task beyond him? Was he now to be defeated by the mere memory of a rabble of pirate scum? Despite their best efforts, he was alive, and they dead. Their ghosts could not now make a coward of him unless he allowed them to, and he would not.
Damn them! I will not!

Shaking the reverie away, he raked the coals together, covered them with the stoneware curfew, and walked into the hall, taking his wig from its stand on the sideboard.

Tomorrow, perhaps, he would write to his father and attempt some sort of reconciliation.
But now….
Why was he sitting, brooding and waiting for a lover to call, like a polite country miss after her first ball? So Alfie had not come to him? Very well. Then he would go to Alfie. If there was one night of the year on which Alfie
must
be in one of Kingston’s numerous ale-houses, this surely was it. John would check every one until he found the man, and he would not leave him until they had had this out one way or another. He would not blackmail, but surely he could woo?

With the wig jammed on securely, he pulled his stockings up, tightened the garters and buckled the knees of his breeches over them. Winding a light muffler about his face to keep out the unhealthy night air, he opened the door just as someone pealed on the doorbell as though the French were invading. Dark shapes in the porch sang something Gaelic in not quite harmony. As they lurched towards him, he suppressed the desire to flinch.

Jamaica’s tropical moon sailed out from behind the clouds and showed him a riot of Irishmen, unstable, bright eyed and grinning. Even as he watched, a shape just outside the porch raised his arm in a toast—the elbow angular and black against the pewter sky—tossed back a dram, and fell straight backwards into the struggling box-hedge.

Everyone laughed, John too, some of the inebriation passing to him by sympathy.
“Can’t take the strain, the poor wee man.”
“We hate to leave him t’ye sir. But sure he can’t lay out here in the street for the thieves to pick over ’til dawn.”
“No, no.” Joy rose to John’s head like champagne. He had to fight not to clap both hands over his mouth to keep his giddy spirit in. “That is perfectly fine. Bring him inside and lay him on the chaise. I’ll sober him up and send him home. I’m afraid I have no whiskey, but will you have rum?”
For what seemed hours, his hall seethed with men. He tensed at first against the laughter and the crowd, and the stench—hot unwashed bodies, smoke and liquor—but the rough voices and camaraderie were so like the lower deck of a well-run ship that he soon found himself at ease. Passing out tots of rum and pieces of gingerbread all round, he received a lump of coal in return, and a thousand blessings.
“Please,” he offered happily, after emptying out the roundbellied bottle and running down to the cellar for two more, stopping off in the kitchen on the way back. “Take the bottles, and this cake. May the new year be a good one for you all!”
By the time he had separated himself from the protestations of eternal devotion which greeted this generosity, shepherded the more drunk into the arms of the lesser, and shut the door on them all, his face ached from smiling. For a moment, in the silence they left behind, he felt their boisterous, animal joy still glowing in the walls, rivaling the pale moonlight which slanted through the fan window of the door.
Stripping off his coat and muffler, he placed hat and wig back in their accustomed spots, almost afraid to turn around in case all this happiness was proved only an illusion caused by darkness and too much desire. But, when he turned, the limp body was sprawled on his floor, still dead drunk and never more welcome—Alfie Donwell, the lightweight, who couldn’t stand the pace.
In the important task of hospitality, John had overlooked the fact that they hadn’t dragged Alfie any further than the hall. He lay now on the cocoanut matting, with the side of his face pressed against the skirting board, hat trapped in the door and wig askew to reveal his shaggy mop of curly hair.
Hanging up his coat, John returned to kneel next to the unconscious man. The effervescent sparkle of his spirits quieted, mellowed. The desire to stride about the room to walk off the dangerous pressure dwindled, as he allowed himself the rare luxury of a moment just to look. What an absurd thing a sleeping human being was! How vulnerable, how infinitely to be treasured.
Without the vivid life pulling it into strange shapes, Alfie’s face was surprisingly handsome; oval and regular, with strong brows and a generous mouth. His eyes turned slightly downwards at the corners, which should have made him seem permanently sad, but did not, adding instead a faint exoticism. The fan of his pale eyelashes against bronzed cheeks looked boyishly innocent, but a tiny mole just above his top lip on the right seemed an invitation to kiss here first. Altogether it was a quirky, unique face which John could not imagine himself ever growing tired of watching, fascinated and charmed.
“But I had other things in mind for this evening than holding the bowl while you vomit,” he said at last. “Come on then.” Picking up the sadly flattened hat and wig, he placed them with his own. After considering angles and leverage for a while, he took Alfie’s wrists and hauled the man into a sitting position, got his shoulder into Alfie’s belly and staggered to his feet. “Let’s get you to bed.”
Lifting an unconscious drunkard, solidly made as he was, lying heavy and limp over John’s aching shoulder, should not have been an erotic experience. But perhaps it had been a mistake to allow the ideas of Alfie and bed to coexist in his mind. No amount of stern inward admonishment could stop him from finding the hip pressed against his face distracting. He closed his eyes, shifted a little so he could feel the hollow and the swell of buttock against his cheek. The coarse linen of Alfie’s breeches rubbed the wrong way through John’s midnight stubble and the tickling scratch made the hair stand up along his arms as his body prickled all over with delight.
Would it really be terrible to slide his hands up the thighs around which they were currently clamped?
Not with any evil intent, obviously, just…just to feel the shape of them.
His thumbs moved by themselves, sweeping in restless, needy circles as if they could burrow through to skin beneath the coarse linen. He checked them, sternly, frowning at himself.
Yes, it
would
be terrible.
He was no pirate, not to give a fig for consent.
He pulled his cheek away, took in a deep, strengthening breath, and almost choked on it when the belly pressed against his neck trembled with laughter. Alfie’s dangling hands came alive, stroked up John’s thighs, leaving a riot of pleasure in their wake, and cupped, shameless and wanton around John’s arse, kneading.
“I thought you’d never ask.” Upside down and gleeful, Alfie giggled like a schoolboy.
Under this onslaught and indignity, the surprise and the lust, not to mention Alfie’s not inconsiderable weight, John’s knees gave out. He lurched into the wall, his waistcoat buttons scoring white scars in the peeling paint as they slid down it together, both laughing, scrabbling for purchase to stop the slide from becoming a fall. Too distracted by the bump and slide of each other’s bodies to break apart, they end up tangled in a sprawl of limbs on the dusty matting of the hall corridor. The chaise in the withdrawing room might have been a hundred miles away. John could not bear the thought of unwinding himself from Alfie long enough to walk there.
They lay on their sides, facing one another, shoes scattered across the hall, John’s leg trapped between Alfie’s, his calf and ankle—
his ankle, for God’s sake!
—lighting up his every vein with molten heat as Alfie stroked him with silk-stockinged toes.
“You’re drunk,” John gasped, even his own voice strange to him, gone thick as pouring cream. Alfie’s careless, smug look made him seem again the wicked, predatory presence he had been so long ago on the
Meteor
. So much pain it had taken to teach John what he wanted! It had been too long since Alfie had looked so very pleased with himself.
“I must confess I am.” Mouth half open, tongue pressed in the corner, Alfie concentrated on undoing John’s buttons. “After I was such a coxcomb to you on the voyage home, my courage, if not my other parts, needed a little stiffening.”
John wanted to say, “No, no, I understand. God knows, my own actions have not been particularly consistent. I’m sorry, Alfie. Sorry I was such a prig. Sorry above everything that we could have spent this year together, but I condemned us both to go through hell. Is this…are you…do you forgive me?”
He wanted to say this, but he was too busy pulling up Alfie’s shirt. Acres and acres of shirt, warm from body heat. He thought of the words and then there were buttons, his fingers fumbling with the buttons of Alfie’s breeches, and—
ooh, God
—Alfie’s hand beneath his own shirt, on his skin, hot, slightly rough, not enough!
There were words, there were—the little noise of encouragement and pleading that was all he seemed to be able to make stood in for so many more eloquent phrases. He might have found them, if all his being was not poured into his exploring hands. Alfie raked fingernails gently across one of his nipples, his other hand pushing aside John’s neckcloth so that he could pepper John’s throat with little bites.
“Nnh!”
John managed. His trapped cock hurt, bent and straining against the heavy, harsh fabric of his breeches. Wriggling, he tried to push them off, his fingers too clumsy to undo the buttons. “Damn! The stupid….” Alfie’s mouth was on his and sweet fire pulsed down his backbone as he opened to Alfie’s questing tongue. Gathered up in both arms, his head back, astonished and all the more aroused by his own deep surrender, he felt Alfie’s knuckles dig hard into his back as the man snapped the tapes at the back of his waistband and shoved the suddenly loosened breeches down to his knees.
John’s hand scrabbled at the wall as Alfie’s full weight came down upon him, pressing him into the carpet. Prickly matting rubbed against his naked arse, skin dragged against his skin, sweat mixing slippery between them. He thrust up, Alfie’s prick painfully hard against his own, and ecstasy gutted him. Surprised, he arched half off the floor, crying out something sharp. Remembering he had hands, he dug them into Alfie’s arse, pulled him closer, and did that again, a hundred-score wet dreams coming true at once. He tasted salt and copper, then Alfie reached up, tugged him by the hair, and stopped the cries with another ruthless kiss.
Words melted in the wet heat. His heartbeat pulsed in throat and yard. His chest filled to bursting with a dark, erotic ache as the weight and kiss combined stole the breath from him. He tore his mouth away just as the fire reached the charge, exploding through him like the discharge of a cannon. His fingernails dug deep into Alfie’s back, and all the things he meant to say coalesced into one frantic cry. “Oh God yes! Yes!
Alfie!”
Chest heaving, slowly recognizing the little whimpers of shock as his own, John came back to himself, sticky, faintly uncomfortable, his back grazed by the matting. Alfie’s sodden weight sprawled all over him as if to finally pin him down, but it was no longer so pleasant not to be able to breathe. He pushed at a shoulder still regrettably clothed in its prickly woolen uniform waistcoat. Obligingly, Alfie rolled onto his back, his eyes closed, his mouth lax as his breathing slowed and settled. John pulled his fallen muffler over by the tassels and used it to wipe up the mess.
Button-shaped bruises marked a trail down John’s belly. He pulled his shirt further up to look at them, and pressed a thumb on the dark spot over his sternum. The little ache that resulted was pleasant as a kiss, and he frowned at it.
Is this really the sort of thing one could be happy about? Surely….
Drawn like a needle to the North Pole he put the cloth aside, and lay back down, nestling into Alfie’s side. Slipping his arm around Alfie’s broad chest, resting his cheek in the hollow of his shoulder, John thought surely soon the horror would hit him. Perhaps in the next heartbeat it would come on him as it had in the Molly house. Shame. Shame for his need, shame for allowing Alfie to use him so, shame for the very marks of his debasement. Soon the full realization of his own vileness would return, just as it had after Bess.
Perhaps with the next breath….
But moonlight seeped in under the door, the silence filled up with their shared breathing, and it did not seem to come. What came instead, filling him up until he felt it would spill from every pore in visible radiance, was happiness; warm, golden, heavy happiness that gilded even the ridiculous and messy act of sex with a strange beauty.
Finally he abandoned his wait for condemnation, pushed himself up onto one elbow and began to undo Alfie’s white waistcoat, telling off each button opened like the bead of a rosary. Alfie lay still as a medieval knight on an unusually explicit tomb, breeches round his crossed ankles, his face relaxed in a sphinx-like smile. “If this is a sin,” John said quietly, “is it wrong for me to cherish hopes that it will go on forever?”
“Is it wrong,” Alfie opened an eye to smile at him, then shifted on the coarse fibre matting, “for me to hope there might be a bed in it somewhere?”