False Colors (4 page)
“Still is, as far as I’m aware.” Now they were unable to touch one another, some of the tension in the room ebbed. John relaxed enough to lean back against the hull, and a softer side of him shone out as he looked up at Alfie with a wry smile.
“I didn’t mean…I’m sorry,” Alfie said, unused to thinking of parents in the present tense.
“She is a member of the Society of Friends,” John admitted, unexpectedly, scratching his jaw. Taking off his wig, he looked with faint distaste at the state of it, winding the horse-hair around his finger before pushing it back into its curl “And believes in silence, sobriety, hard work and the scriptures.”
A Quaker?
Alfie looked down at the bent head and rueful smile, the chocolate-dark hair modestly, severely cropped. Oh, but that made a lot of sense—restraint, restraint and restraint, all their passion channeled into one stream, making their piety roar like a mill race. “Yet you plainly admit you love music yourself,” he said. “Are you then terribly lapsed?”
The wig on his knee like a sleeping cat, John rested a hand on it. He scrunched his face together, pulling his generous mouth into a grimace that conveyed how difficult it was to explain. “My father,” all the lines hardened for a moment, implacable, “is Church of England, naturally. And so in theory am I. In truth, however, I am some mixture peculiar to myself. If one can lapse from the most permissive church in the world, my father managed it. It isn’t given to every son to be embarrassed by the ridiculous behavior of his parent.”
Alfie put down the music gently, no longer needing its shield. He recognized the look on Cavendish’s face—the steel and ice in those gray eyes. No pain in the world equaled that which your family could inflict.
I should say something, but what? What could I say that would not be trite? ‘I understand’? But I don’t. He is at least still in possession of parents.
“Yet,” John interrupted his musing with a sudden smile, “when he brought his whores and actresses to the house, and I was still a child, I would creep from my bed, downstairs, to listen to the music through the closed doors of the ballroom. And if I would be switched soundly for it in the morning, all that achieved was to give it a certain illicit thrill. I could not be stopped.”
“I can picture it.” Alfie smiled, seeing in his mind’s eye the small form of a barefoot boy, draped in a white nightgown, like a stained glass saint, trapped between cheerless piety and cruel mirth. The thoughts conjured up as a result gave him a pang. “Should you like to sing?” he asked, feeling his way between the two extremes. “This is a
cantata.
I’m told it’s very suitable, sacred music. I can’t aver it positively, though—I don’t understand a word.”
John’s eyes widened. He drew himself together, very prim and contained, but Alfie didn’t miss the flickering glance at the stacked white pages on his cot. Picking up the top sheet, Alfie raised his head and sang the melody in his own inadequate bass, then held it out in offering. “It’s a hard piece—it’s not within anyone’s range of course, because….”
Standing up, solemn as a choirboy, John breathed in and sang, and Alfie’s apology stopped mid-sentence. For a moment he floated, born up like a petrel on a storm, for the captain’s voice—untrained, unsure—rang out in perfect counter-tenor, plumb square within the middle of the range for which the piece had been written. An inhuman voice; all the sweetness of a woman’s combined with the strength of a man’s. If there truly was a music of the spheres, this perfect, sexless cadence was it; honey and swords, snow and summer, male and female alike reconciled into a sound more complex and beautiful than either. Speechless, Alfie fumbled for the flute, picked up the golden thread and wound about it his own more earthy notes. Bodiless for a moment, reduced to glorious sound.
Then John struck a flat note, coughed, and the world settled itself back into the mundane. “I cannot remember how it goes on.”
Certain that the cabin should be glowing, the water-stained brown canvas walls and the grey wool blankets of his bed washed clean and covered with white seraphic feathers, Alfie gave a shaky laugh. “By God, you’d be a sensation in Italy, sir. The girls’d be running after you down the street, ripping into one another behind your back to be the first to demurely say ‘good day’ to you, clipping little pieces out of your coat for souvenirs, and offering to bear your children whether you would or no.”
“I thank Providence I’m not in Italy, then,” John laughed, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “But you exaggerate, Mr. Donwell. It is a weak, unmanly voice, unsuitable for an Englishman.”
“I’ve never heard the like.” Alfie’s tact rose to the occasion; he did not mention that the counter-tenor voice was so prized on the continent that—being in nature so rare—men emasculated themselves to achieve it. He doubted the argument would have an encouraging effect. “May we practice the piece, though? Tomorrow, perhaps? If you have the taste you claim to have, you must have heard how incredible that was.”
Sitting down again, John studied his hands, frowning. Wondering what moral scruple afflicted him now, Alfie was not prepared when, after a brief silent struggle, he looked up and said quietly, “I would be glad to know there would be a tomorrow. For us, at least.”
“Sir?”
“The Admiral has sent us to find a way of dissuading the Dey of Algiers from engaging in the time-honored piracy he regards as a divine right of his nation. A piracy—preying upon the Infidel—he undoubtedly feels is his religious duty. We must put it to him that Britain wishes him to stop his sovereign activity on the sea. And we must represent this to him, while having under arms approximately eighty men, boys, and one old woman, and in the proud possession of one rather elderly bomb ketch.”
Having been momentarily displaced, Alfie’s stomach caught up with him, lurching into place as though he had just jumped a high wall on horseback. “Oh…best not to make plans then?”
“Indeed.” But John’s small smile had elements of amusement and even triumph. “There are some consolations in religion after all, Mr. Donwell. Whatever happens, I have no doubt it will all work out for the best.”
The Casbah, Algiers
“You will come with us please.” The Janissary officer was one of the most opulent things Alfie had seen in his life. He might have been inclined to laugh at the tall, white, wimple-like hat, and the sweep of scarlet robe with—God love him—an embroidered apron on top, had not the man’s heavily bearded face been grave and proud and very obviously accustomed to command.
“I’m not at liberty to do so, sir,” he said, putting down the bread he had been haggling over and drawing himself up, with unconscious respect, one soldier to another. “If the Dey has finally agreed to a meeting, then I am obliged to him. I will return to my ship and tell my commander at once.”
He didn’t like the way the troops surrounding the red-coated man eyed him. They too might have looked amusing in a painting, with their dome-like turbans and ballooning pantaloons, but Alfie had seen enough strange things in his life to recognize the look of a well-drilled and trained body of killers, no matter what they were wearing. With a nervous glance, he searched the market for his own men. Armitage had been buying sweets, his fingers sticky with rose-flavored jelly, his sullen eyes all the darker when Alfie called him to heel. Alfie didn’t know if he should be furious or relieved to find the youth had disappeared again. Hopefully he would have the sense to lie low and avoid whatever trouble this looked like becoming.
Mr. Hall, the purser—trying to buy enough green-stuff to stave off scurvy for eighty hungry men—had also mysteriously melted from view. But Kelly, one of the tars he had brought with him to carry burdens, stood in the sharp shadow of the awning, with a peach in one hand, a plum in the other, plum juice down his chin and fingers, and a sudden worried look that must, Alfie thought, be the mirror of his own.
The soldiers closed in, not comical at all any more, their hands on their long, curving scimitars, their faces grim.
“My captain will gladly talk to the Dey or his representative,” Alfie tried again, keeping his voice from rising into a squeak of panic with some effort. If half of what everyone “knew” about the Turks was true, then placidly going with them was the last thing he wanted to do. “He said as much a fortnight ago and you’ve done nothing but fob him off since. I do not have the authority to negotiate for him, and I am under orders to report back at once if the situation should change.”
His answer was the nudge of a rifle in his back. “I also am under orders,” said the officer, with a gleam of cold humor, “and your captain must be taught that the Dey has better things to do than to jump at the command of every British Lieutenant with nothing but a gunboat and his arrogance to his name. We can make this point peacefully, or with bloodshed. It is your choice.”
Alfie licked his lips—his mouth suddenly dry as the desert sand on which he stood. Not for the first time he damned John’s Admiral; the one who expected miracles and provided a pittance to achieve them with. This Janissary officer was right, Admiral fucking Saunders should have sent more than one little ketch to do this job. From the Dey’s point of view it must look like an insult, and from his own it looked like suicide. “I’ll come then,” he said, even as two of the janissaries got him by the arms and made the agreement moot. “But you’re making a mistake. You don’t insult the British Navy and get away with it. If you don’t treat with
LEX
B
EECROFT
33
Meteor
, next time it’ll be fourteen ships of the line and there won’t be anything left of your city.”
“We too are a proud maritime nation.” Beneath the extravagant mustache the officer’s smile twisted with anger. “We were a proud maritime nation when you British were painting yourselves blue and hunting heads like savages. Enough!” He gestured, and the guards’ grips on Alfie’s arms shifted to press tendon to bone. He swayed, knees almost buckling with the pain, and struggled long enough to lock gazes with the able seaman, who had dropped both fruit and stood with fists clenched.
“Kelly! Tell the captain!”
“Aye sir!”
As he fled, one of the janissaries raised his rifle and sighted. “No, Abdy.” The officer pressed the barrel down. “Let the
That told me,
Alfie thought, filled with ridiculous, terrified laughter as they dragged him away.
You don’t reason with dogs. But what do you do with them? What are they going to do with me?
The Algerian ship—a long, sleek galley, her great banks of oars beating like a fish’s fins—turned to cut across the
Meteor’s
course. She maneuvered like a fish, John thought, nimble and fleet.
Or more like a shark.
Barely a hundred feet of sea separated him from his counterpart on the enemy deck. He could feel the mouths of a score of muskets trained on his face, see the pirate gun crews mustered about their cannons, standing ready, slow match smoldering in their hands. The Algerian captain made a gesture with his forearm that required no translation and the laughter of her crew floated over waves stained red with sunset.
“Fucking rag-head,” Sergeant Richardson muttered with indignation beside John. “One mortar, sir. Just the one, that’s all I’d need if we aimed it right.”
Behind the galley he could see the
Meteor
’s pinnace tacking for another attempt to slip past. Hall was just visible in the bow, clutching a writhing goat to his buff waistcoat, his powdered face whiter still with fear. A net full of chickens squawked at his feet among the baskets of oranges and green-stuff, eloquent of a successful reprovisioning trip now gone horribly wrong.
“They’re playing with us.” John ground his teeth with a little squeaking noise. “I am so tempted to do as you suggest, Sergeant. But if it’s war they want, let them start it themselves. I’ll not be goaded into ceding the moral high ground.”
The wind veered. Kelly, in the pinnace, put her about in a flash and surged past the stern of the galley, the little craft heeling so that the boom almost trailed in the sea and water ran clear like varnish down her port gunwale.
“Stand by to haul those men aboard. Lively now!” cried John, watching the scramble on deck with a slow inward burn of annoyance. By the time the boatswain had whipped some order into the brawl of over-eager hands the pinnace lay alongside and the galley had turned about her centre, coming straight for them. Bleating and kicking on the end of a rope the goat swayed in mid air, and men hauled hand over hand to bring the pinnace aboard, Hall and the boat crew scrambling up the side like reckless monkeys. Closer now, oars beat against the water as the beakhead of the galley drove like a spear at the
Meteor
’s head.
“All aboard!” Armitage shrieked.
“Go about!”
Turning away from the harbor, John put the
Meteor
before
the wind, spreading all the sails she would carry. For ten long, humiliating minutes, the galley kept pace, but then even her seasoned oarsmen began to flag. The ketch—still gathering speed— pulled away.
Running away
, John thought sourly, out into the safety of the open sea. Not a shot had been fired, but it was plain from the crew’s ugly faces and bitter whispers that they too felt the sting of defeat.
Wondering if he could call honor satisfied now, head to the rendezvous at the naval base in Gibraltar and report to Saunders that he had tried—and failed—John looked down into the waist of the ship. The goat
baa
-ed at him indignantly then made herself universally beloved by butting the boatswain. Hall brushed himself down with a sniff of distaste, while Armitage put his hand in his pocket and quickly pulled it out again, sticky pink jelly coating his fingers.