False Colors (7 page)

By now the Dey would have repaired what could be repaired. Nor could it be assumed that all his fleet had been in the harbor to be destroyed. Undoubtedly his greater ships already patrolled the Sicilian Channel with a detailed description of the
Meteor
and a burning desire for vengeance. So John had given orders to change the
Meteor
’s color-scheme. Instead of black with a faint red stripe, she gloried in a spring-like green, with port-lids like squares of pressed daffodils against her verdant sides.

The mortars he had ordered unbolted from the deck and brought below, since every last bomb had been fired. The rigging of the main mast he’d overhauled entirely, giving her a square main sail. With the addition of a new name painted on the stern they no longer looked like the bomb ketch
Meteor
, but like an entirely different class of vessel—the innocent brigantine
Aetna
, sweeping for small pickings off the shores of Sicily.

Although he nodded with satisfaction at the evidence of industry, the last thing he wanted was for some inquisitive tar to lower himself down and watch this interview through the windows
. Gossip all over the ship!
The strains of so small a community magnified any dissention out of all proportion. Hall’s unpopularity with the crew meant the rebuke he
had to
administer to Donwell would be all the more resented by the people. He could just imagine the factions forming, the ill words and blows, as the ship’s company that had so recently and so splendidly come together fell apart as men lined up behind captain or lieutenant, taking sides.

Putting the brandy glass carefully down, wedged between the logbook and a roll of charts, he closed the shutters over the diamond panes of the stern lights, shutting out Mediterranean sun and bright water.
Let them see through planks of wood!

Yet his conscience quailed a little at the result, for the cabin seemed smaller, softer, more intimate in the smoky amber light that remained, still air filling with the smell of beeswax candles. When the expected knock came at the door he pulled at his neck-cloth nervously, feeling stifled. “Come!”

The door opened and at once Donwell’s presence filled the dim light. Beams of sunlight, finding their way around the edges of the shutters, striped his healed face and blazed from the bayonets and the silver buttons of the marines on either side of him.

Feeling his own pulse thud hollow and heavy in his throat, John recalled the patient hours they had spent together while Alfie recovered. Music, some idle talk and some mere sitting, watching one another, as if they expected a revelation which never came. He remembered how easily he fell into the habit of reading aloud from whatever book was to hand, while they both made wry comments about the story, more amused by each other than by the author.
Did you have to make me become the tyrant?
thought John with resentment.
Why will you keep on pushing beyond what I can well ignore?

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said to the marines, as they took up stations by the door. “You may go.”
“But sir—”
Lifting his chin a little, he allowed some of his outrage to show. Did they dare question him? Did they think he could not defend himself from an invalid and a friend? “You may
go,
Sergeant O’Halloran.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if you catch anyone listening, including yourselves, you are to take their names for punishment.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door closed behind O’Halloran with a firmness which made the flimsy wall shake. John breathed in and felt the muscles of his belly tremble. He had become quite used to the godlike position he now occupied, with all men jumping at his slightest command, but into that serene universe Donwell fitted like a blade into a bubble.
Stillness came over the cabin. Donwell stood as paradeground straight as one of the marines, his hands clasped behind his back. The ship creaked, her planks working in the slow swells, her rigging humming with a low, pipe-organ note that John felt in his feet and his breathless chest. It might have been years that he stood in the shared silence, watching his lieutenant’s face; fascinated and perplexed.
“How long have you been in the Service, Mr. Donwell?” he said at last in a quiet tone suited for the atmosphere of smoky tranquility.
“Since I was thirteen, sir. That’d be a little under eleven years.”
“You should know, then, that an officer does not brawl like a tar. You’re fortunate he is not your superior, or you might even now be hanging for mutiny. What can possibly have come over you to establish such a precedent on my ship?”
Donwell breathed in, and from the sound of it John could hear the shake no longer concealed by his layers of coats, his firmly clasped hands. “You know what he said to me, don’t you, sir?”
“I do not. I do know, however, that half of the money we had to pay to get you back came out of Mr. Hall’s own pocket. I won’t deny a certain amount of pressure was required to make him disgorge it, but still… . Your bizarre eccentricities towards me I can just about tolerate, but
this
? Damn it, man! What were you thinking?”
“He insulted me in a manner no man of spirit could abide,” said Donwell, swaying a little. The sulky look made his face seem boyish; a child chided for not paying attention in lessons, and John bit down on the sudden desire to slap him across the downturned mouth and tell him to buck up his ideas.
“What did he say?”
“If it please you, I’d rather not repeat it.”
“It does
not
please me, Mr. Donwell.
You
do not please me. Frankly I’m considering having you court-martialed for insubordination. Are you listening to me?”
Donwell looked up. His shoulders tightened and his mouth thinned; he caught John’s gaze with eyes that in the dusk of the cabin looked tawny as a lion’s. “Hall alluded to the use they made of me in Algiers,” he said, brittle as a rain of glass. “He made certain implications.…”
“Oh?” said John, not understanding at first, and then “
Oh!
” as the realization dawned and fear and shameful excitement swept across his body in a tide of hot blood. He looked away. “Oh. In that case I regard it in the light of inevitable consequences. If you wish to call him out, I offer my services to act as your second when we reach land. In the meantime, however, the minimum inevitable consequence of your brawling on board will be that you will have your grog ration stopped. If you will act as though you crawled up through the hawse hole, Mr. Donwell, you will be treated accordingly. I expected better from you. Do you understand me?”
“I do, sir,” Donwell bowed, hiding his angry eyes, and yet managed to make even this sound ominously suggestive. “Thank you, sir.”
A pain stabbed like a needle into John’s cheek as he realized he was grinding his teeth again. “That will be all.” He turned his back, the gesture less convincing when he faced a blank wall of shutters rather than the majesty of the sea. “Dismissed.”

By nightfall they had turned back towards Gibraltar, sailing into the straits normally patrolled by the Dey’s rapacious fleet.
Sailing back towards the slave markets and the pens….
When John crawled into the warm salt damp of his sheets he fell asleep with his imagination full of chains.

He dreamed red dreams. Frustrated fury flowed through his limbs, making him snarl into his pillow, thinking of Donwell’s mocking smirk and hot temper; dreaming of the smack of his fists into that smile.
He could feel the breath on his fingers, the mouth splitting like fruit, and in his dream he lunged forward, caught the little wound between his teeth and bit. Blood on his tongue, hard hands grappling him, tearing his clothes, the buck and press of that big body crushing him into the wall, and he could half feel the pain of the cane on his own belly as he dug his nails into Donwell’s open wound….

Biting, blood in his mouth, hair tangled between his clutching fingers, he fought to teach the cocky bastard who was in charge here, teach him a lesson he would not soon forget, a lesson marked into his flesh like the mark of the lash. He’d chain the bastard down if he could, spread him across the desk, cane him like a midshipman with the stick on his bare arse, breeches round his feet, see if he’d be so very…insubordinate then.

But in his imagination Alfie was smiling—still smiling that sphinx-like secret smile. John hit harder, his arm aching, close to tears with fury and frustration, but could not wipe the smile away; he needed more, needed to get closer, stronger, needed more….

He woke, heart pounding and skin itchy with anger, grinding against the hard board of the mattress.
So close…so close, damn it!
His hand closed over his shaft, rough, half asleep, and for a moment he dreamed it was a bigger hand, burnt, the fingernails missing. He came in a rush like the gout of blood from a cut throat, lay half awake, panting. The dream came apart as he tried to recall it, fading into nebulous wisps of yearning and denial. By the time he fell back into sleep he could not remember it at all.

“Sail two points off the port bow!” the lookout shouted just as they rounded the cape of Bon, the sun coming up behind them, throwing their shadow before them onto the grey sea. “She’s a big xebec, sir, under a full spread.”

Alfie cursed the sudden weakness that dissolved his bones within him and hauled himself laboriously up to the main top, aware that everyone on deck was watching him for signs of fear. Once there, he took his own glass and focused it where the boy indicated. He could see only mist for a moment, peach and pink, curling into the sky in the level beams of the rising sun. Shaking the dew from his coat, he rubbed the glass, tried again and saw it; a brighter white smudge against the cloud. Something coming out from Tunis, with the lean, triangular profile of a xebec; the Barbary corsair’s warship of choice. With her narrow hull, built for speed, and her oars which allowed her to beat directly into the wind, she was by far the handier ship.
And to be seen at this distance her size must be…. H
is heart seemed to freeze into a lead ball and choke him—she must carry at least three hundred men to the
Meteor
’s eighty.

“Set boommainsail and trysail!” he shouted, thoughtlessly grabbing the backstay of the mast and sliding down it, arriving on deck with his newly healed hands torn open once more. “Put her before the wind. Kelly, rouse the captain!”

“No need.” Cavendish was on deck, in his nightshirt, barefoot, with his steward trailing behind him indignantly carrying slippers and a banyan. The captain put them on absently, listening to Alfie’s account, and frowned. “Well, we’ll run,” he said after some thought, “but you may clear for action regardless. I’m not persuaded it is such very bad news, after all. The Admiral did direct me to return with prizes.”

Alfie wondered if he had had such confidence, before Algiers, and looking at Cavendish’s highly strung eagerness, the light of battle which had already transformed his face from classical elegance to something sharper, he wished he might have it back. But then he thought of the Dey’s men dealing with the captain as they had done with him, and a heat began just beneath his breastbone, spreading into his trembling limbs and overcoming the weight of his heart. He would not allow that. Some things were sacred, and John, unshaven, with his hair flattened at one side, holding his hideous floral banyan closed about his threadbare shirt in the early morning chill, he was one of them.
They should not touch him….

Almost as though he had sensed that flash of protectiveness, John turned and gave Alfie a sudden fierce smile. “May I?”
He held out his hand and Alfie passed him his telescope, indicating the direction. John watched the distant cloud of sail for a moment, “She’s definitely turned to intercept us. Whether she recognizes us or not, I won’t attempt to speculate, but I don’t think we can afford to be caught.” Collapsing the instrument, he handed it back. “Come to breakfast,” he said. “No point in dying hungry. The men may eat too. Then we’ll see.”
He ducked back into his cabin, and Alfie saw to it that both watches were fed before knocking on the flimsy door himself and hearing a muffled “come.”
The scent of coffee welcomed him, and Cavendish, dressed and drying his newly shaved face, emerged out of the night cabin just as Alfie handed his hat and greatcoat to the steward. Alfie thought he caught a flash of something other than professional interest through John’s quicksilver eyes, just for a moment, but it disappeared before he had time to speculate on what it meant.
Having sat at table with his previous captain, Farrant, Alfie was far from impressed by the pewter plates and stoneware jugs of Cavendish’s tableware. The food too hardly improved on the men’s rations, though a good black pudding, and a Cheshire cheese, salty and crumbly, went down well. Alfie drank coffee gratefully, feeling the chill of the dawn watch, when the world stopped and the cold seemed to pierce the marrow of his bones, slowly ease its grip. He thawed into flesh and blood once more.
“If we can keep sufficiently ahead of her through the channel,” John produced a roll of charts which he flicked open and pinned to the tablecloth with salt cellar and milk jug, “I think we can lose her in among the isles of Sardinia. When we have the weather gage on her, we come up behind, shoot out rudder and a few sails—see if the Ordnance Corps can’t heat us some shot to possibly set her on fire—and then take her by boarding.”
“You make it sound easy.” Alfie could not help but smile, though the contempt of the Janissary officer who had captured him in Algiers had made a deep impression on his soul.
‘We too are a proud maritime nation. We were a proud maritime nation when you British were painting yourselves blue and hunting heads like savages.’
“They do know what they’re about, you know, sir. They’re not like the Spanish, who can build fine ships but cannot sail them.”
“I understand that.” John’s certainty made something lurch in his chest, like a piece of buried shrapnel trying to work its way out. “But we are better.”
“God, I hope so, sir.”
“Mr. Donwell.” John’s voice softened a hair, but the captain’s look of disappointment and sympathy was harder still to bear. “Once you would not have doubted. You must not doubt now. The men need you to be bold, fearless. You know that.”
“I do. Some wounds take longer than others to heal, that’s all. But I can swear to you that none of the men will have cause to suspect anything wrong from my conduct.”
He was absolutely sure there was nothing but friendship behind the impulse which made John reach out and press his hand where it lay, palm up, on the table. The salt of John’s fingertips made the rope burn smart, and Alfie withdrew it and let it rest in his lap, treasuring the sting. “Maybe if we asked them they’d take Hall away for us, though I can’t imagine he’d fetch the price of a goat on the open market.”
John laughed. “Don’t tempt me.”