False Colors (5 page)

“You ain’t gonna leave him there.” Higgins brought in a ridiculously elegant tea tray complete with green and gold trimmed white pot, water jug, milk jug, sugar basin, tongs, Sevres porcelain cup delicate as sea foam, and a pewter spoon that John remembered seeing last in the doctor’s jar of leeches. Despite the fact that livery would make him look like a performing ape, Higgins fancied himself as a footman and had made up for John’s poverty by persuading various members of the wardroom to donate their treasures for the captain’s use.

“I am not.” John took a cup of tea, poured in milk and sniffed. “The goat’s settled then?”
“She’s champion. Two pints this evening and she ate the ribbons off Jack Nastyface’s trousers, the darling. The boys are saying we’re gonna sail back in tonight and flatten the bloody Casbah.”
“The ‘boys’ have not taken the trouble to consult me,” John replied mildly.
“Ah well, they did ask me to come up and see how the land lies. We’re none of us too pleased at being shown the finger by the likes of them Barbary pirates.”
John looked down at the map he had spent all evening drawing. Jotting down a line of figures, he did the calculation in his head then marked the final arc of fire on the paper. He felt…blank, empty. “Why do they do it, do you suppose?”
With the lines and angles of fire of each of the harbor’s batteries plotted, John dipped his pen again and marked a tiny cross in the centre where all the arcs of fire just failed to intersect.
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“Why force a confrontation when we might have talked? For that matter, why steal slaves from Britain, when the African nations are all too willing to sell them? Does he expect us to swallow this insult and simply leave? Or can he really think I’m going to come crawling to him, begging for the return of my man?”
Higgins did his best to look deep for a moment, then turned away to pick John’s folded coat from the back of the chair and stow it in a newly repaired stern locker.
“I think not,” John answered himself, straightening up. “Bring me the Greek brothers, Dion and Cosmo Macronides. Also Duman Naftali and the other Duman—the one with the eye patch. Black Jacob too, if he thinks he’d be safe. Anyone who can pass as not being British.
“Aye sir.”

The great cabin filled with nervous tars. Acrid with fear, their reek seemed to touch the walls. Crowding together in the center of the room, they looked at John with painfully false innocence, obviously wondering what they had done wrong.

“Men,” he began, standing up too, in an effort to put them at ease. “I understand your desire to make the Dey regret he ever chose to treat with us thus. But if we sail into the harbor now and set it alight, the result will be death for Mr. Donwell. First things first. We will get him back, and
then
we will make them pay.

“You will be landed just to the East of Cape Matafou. From there—passing as Turks—you should proceed on foot into the city, where you will make every effort to discover the whereabouts of the Lieutenant. I imagine—after that debacle this morning—it is a popular source of conversation in the marketplace.

“The
Meteor
will stand in to shore every night. Once you have him, or know where he is to be found, return to the cove where we set you down and signal with a lantern. The pinnace will pick you up. Any questions?”

Dion, a young man who tried to hide his startling beauty beneath an aggressive beard, looked up with cunning eyes. “We will need money for bribes.”

“I understand,” said John, a slow thud of heartbeat breaking through his white calm. Nausea swept over him unexpectedly and his skin prickled with cold sweat. “You may draw upon Mr. Hall for five hundred pounds. If he objects, send him to me.”

Ten days…
John’s nib spattered blots over his diary as his hand shook. He frowned at it, rolling his shoulders to try and unwind the sinews that kept him on edge—tight as an ill-tuned violin just before its neck breaks.

And no signal. It was a fight just to get the mission underway: Hall assured me the seamen would just take the money, spend it on liquor and whores, and then desert. Such a greasy fellow! Were he to swim in the slush he could not be more slippery. I represented to him that I could have him discharged for corruption, and he released the money with no more protest. It troubles my conscience to thus blackmail him, but I conceive it to be necessary under the circumstances.

The same tea-pot stood on the table, the same water jug next to it, John’s reflection looking strained and wild in its side. The same sunlight lay in the same arc across the newly painted oilcloth of the floor. Ten days of standing out to sea in the day, gently, cautiously sliding in to shore at night. The shadow of the headland falling over them as they worked the sails by starlight, commands whispered, footsteps dulled, until they felt like the ghost of a ship, eternally imprisoned by an impossible vow.

“Money thrown away upon untrustworthy tars and foreigners,” Hall called it, and though I thought him meanly pinched at the time, I must begin to ask myself if he was right. To prevent the Devil from making work for idle hands, I have exercised both watches on sail drills until they are almost fit to serve aboard a First Rate Man of War. Both sides can now run out, fire, and reload their guns in under two minutes. But the crew resents the delay, the sight of land on which they may not set foot, and above all the many Barbary ships we could have taken as prizes, but had to let slip so that the Dey would not be alerted to the fact that we were still here. I do not think the men’s temper will bear much more waiting. Yet then what? Do I return to the harbor and risk us all meeting the same fate? Or can I….

He told himself that his emotion was quite disproportionate to the loss of a single officer; that he should pass over it with the sang-froid of Saunders waving aside McIntyre’s death. The echo of remembered flute music would not leave him, though he stuffed his fingers in his ears to try and keep it out.

Or can I leave him here and sail away? The thought oppresses me with far greater power than it should. I cannot reconcile myself to it, and I do not know why not.

Turning his own glass on the spot John could see it, a strange yellow star fallen on the edge of the sea. It dimmed, went out, and returned, twice.
Thank God! Oh thank you, God!
“Man the pinnace! Kelley, Higgins, with me. Armitage, the ship is yours until I return.”

A shallow, murmuring swell carried the little boat to ground over coarse sand. Dion ran out to catch the thrown rope, his big grin rivaling the moon for brightness.

“He is found,” the man panted. “Many Greeks in the Janissaries.
Paidomazoma—
taken as tax by the child gatherers…They are not all traitors. But it takes slowly, slowly to find out…to arrange to make work. We go now! We have brought clothes.”

The scarf around John’s face chafed as his breath came fast, dampening it. As they strode out on the long walk into Algiers he could see very little through the long wound cloth and hood that concealed him. Glimpses of white buildings glimmering under moonlight, lattices and mellow windows whose panes were the shape of tiny stars. Colored lanterns lit tea-shops where men lounged, smoking their hookahs and playing trictrac, laughing. They seemed convivial as they might be in any coffee-house in England, though less drunk than the English.

Young boys, sitting among the men, fluttered their long eyelashes at Dion as he passed, making him laugh and wink back. John, trying not to trip over his flowing robe, while the hand on his sword hilt slipped with sweat, almost wished they would be challenged, so that he could fight someone, anyone, to take the edge off his anxiety

Down into the marketplace they went. A shadow beneath an archway moved, became an emaciated creature in a wrapped ochre garment made for someone thrice his size. His waxed, pointed beard and the jaunty red fez that sat atop his turban gave the impression of a man either intent on rising from his natural place, or in the process of falling from it. His right hand fingered the pistol thrust through his sash, and keys dangled on a ring from his left. “Nesim.”

There was a brief exchange of what sounded like pleasantries even to John’s ear, unfamiliar with whatever dialect of Arabic or Ottoman Turkish was spoken here. Then Nesim unlocked the door behind him and lead them into the slave pens. Walking silently past the bound and wretched forms of his countrymen— and worse, his countrywomen—their eyes raking narrow trails across his skin, imploring him for help, John half drew the sword twice before prudence drove it back each time. Horror started as a prickle on his lips and a weight on his limbs, drove inwards with every breath of the rank hot air, until it squeezed his heart like the dark pressure at the abyssal depths of the sea.

“Nesim is in debt,” Dion whispered, falling back for a moment to walk beside John. “They will chop off feet of him, if he does not pay.”

Pressing the hated headdress against his nose, John nodded. The huge pens stank. Within them, prisoners lay crammed together in their own ordure, sharing their misery and whatever comfort they might give one another. That was horrible enough, but then John noticed the edges of the pens were ringed with tiny cisterns in the shape of ovens. “The bad slaves, they go in there,” Dion explained. “No room. Very hot.”

Cursed with a vivid imagination, John could almost feel it himself: the claustrophobia, the itching insanity of being unable to sit or stand, not even to move an inch; encased in a clay oven with the African sun crushing down like a tide of molten lava.

From one of these cells a hand and arm had been thrust out into the comparatively cooler air of the main pit. With a wheedling speech in a tone that mixed servility with arrogance, Nesim smacked his stick down on top of a collection of other bruises visible on the pale arm. Dion said something in reply, and grudgingly the man unlocked and pulled the bars away, allowing them to lever out the semi-conscious form of Alfie Donwell.

Stripped of most of his clothes, the thin shirt did not conceal the all encompassing burns. His face was so swollen from heat and thirst, so black with bruises that he could not open his eyes. When John stepped in and tried to get an arm over his shoulder, pull him upright, Donwell buckled in pain, whining like a kicked dog. Looking down, John saw that his beaten feet were leaving prints of blood on the sand.

Nesim protested, violently slashing both Donwell and John himself with the cane. Turning to shield his lieutenant, John caught Higgins’ eye. As Nesim’s attention flickered between John and Dion, Higgins moved with cat-footed stealth behind the jailer’s back. “He say he did not know we meant this one,” Dion translated, his lip curling at the obvious lie. “He say he have some pretty young boy, just for you. Sweet like apricots. But for this one three hundred is not enough. He wants one thousand.”

As Donwell leaned limply on him, John could feel the heaving breaths through his own ribs. The man’s burned skin was feverish against his own. He could feel too the thinness of the wrist he held, the skeletal lightness of the chest beneath his other arm. Donwell’s hair and ten day growth of beard stood out in heavy spikes, stiff with blood. John’s heart smoldered in his chest like one of the ovens, but the smoke of fury mingled with a perverse pride.
They couldn’t tame you, could they? I thought as much.
“Higgins,” he said.

As Higgins’ pistol nudged him in the back, Nesim stiffened comically. “Explain his position to him, if you please,” John said. “I believe he has misunderstood my terms.”

In the end it was far easier than John had feared. Clasping Nesim in a brotherly embrace that kept the concealed pistol pressed meaningfully into his spine, Higgins’ dumb eloquence proved persuasive.

“Out through the graveyard, I think,” John instructed, lifting the long robe from Naftali’s shoulders and wrapping it around Donwell to conceal him. “There, he looks like just another dead slave. Nothing to worry about. Kelly, Naftali, you carry him. Dion, scout ahead. If the pistol in his back is not argument enough, I will also cover Nesim. Please tell him that if he opens his mouth, even to breathe, I will shoot.”

Donwell made a terribly convincing corpse as they walked out of the pens as unchallenged as they had entered. Tension crushed John’s back and shoulders as he waited for an outcry that did not come. A smell of cinnamon and sweat drifted from Nesim, whose cheek glimmered wet in the moonlight.

The tension wound to a pitch as they passed the pit where the city’s dogs dug and fought over bones. Sordid little monuments topped with spat out date stones loomed, crumbling, in the night, and still silence followed them. As they crossed to the parks and silent, cube-like mausoleums of the well-to-do, shadows moved as vagrants laying in the well-tended doorways scrambled out of their way. Despite the lack of pursuit, fear, primeval and irrational, made John’s spine tingle cold in the sweltering night.

The locked gate of the city wall yielded to a crowbar. He shut it behind them with sweaty hands and led the rescue party on its long, burdened walk back to the cove, the threat of discovery padding behind like a hunting lion.

They left Nesim on the beach, fingering a small bag of gold and looking like a man who feels a change of career coming on. Then, dawn rising on their left, they sailed out for two hours, until—half way to Tizi Ouzou, it seemed—a glass showed the off-white triangles of the
Meteor
’s sails coming to meet them.

Sunrise’s bright citrine light danced on the water. Armitage’s face, for once open as he reveled in being left in charge, looked over as they hailed.

“A rope here!” shouted John, making it fast under Donwell’s arms to pull him on board. As he did so, Donwell stirred, leaning into him, gingerly settling his swollen face on John’s shoulder.

“Captain?” His small whisper, dry and cracked as picked bone, plucked at John’s heart.
“You’re safe now, Lieutenant.” A wave of pity and strange tenderness washed over him. Then he stirred himself, made the rope fast with a hitch, and signaled for the crew on deck to pull the man on board. By the time he had run up the side himself, they had lowered Donwell down into the main hatch, and all he saw was the lace on Mrs. Harper’s bonnet, white as the spray, disappearing after him.
John straightened up, looked at the grim faces that surrounded him, and grinned. The expression spread, until finally the ship’s crew put him in mind of a pool of piranhas gently holding station as they watched the descent of an unwary foot.
“We will bend on the red sails,” he said. “And then you may clear for action.”