Almost a Scandal (16 page)

It was time for the inmates of the cockpit asylum to revolt, in more ways than mere matters of health and hygiene.

“He isn’t going to bother you anymore,” she promised Ian. “Even if he’s as mad as a hornet, I promise he’ll leave you alone. I’ll see to it. We’ll rid ourselves of him yet.”

“The only way we’ll ever get rid of him is if he dies, or gets passed for lieutenant,” Marcus Beecham muttered.

“Never happen,” Charles Dance spoke quietly. “The chances of the French putting a hole through him are greater than him passing for lieutenant, and the Frenchies will never make it out of the blockade.”

“There’s a better way to be rid of Mr. Gamage.” Sally included them all under the umbrella of her smile. “I’m going to poison him.”

Only Ian Worth dared venture into the silence that greeted her remark. “And his grog. He likes that well enough. Can you poison that, too?”

“Nothing easier,” she assured him.

“You’ll get us all in trouble,” Charles warned. “Especially Pinkerton. He’ll be blamed if there’s aught amiss with the food. I don’t want any part of that.”

“No chance of that. I’ll make sure Pinky is quite safe. And I’ll not kill him, only teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget.”

“What do you plan to do?”

Sally held up a cautionary hand. “You leave it to me. The less you know the better, for you can’t tell what you don’t know, but it should be simple enough with the way Gamage likes to help himself to our food.”

She had tried, by arranging with Pinky, to feed them all heartily from their stock of fresh eggs and fish whenever the arrangement of the watches took Gamage away from their mess, but Gamage still managed his predations, simply by reaching over and taking the food off another’s plate, or appropriating another’s glass of wine.

“Stealing our food and drinking our drink,” Ian had groused with his chin in his hands and his elbows propped on the table. “A man shouldn’t have to put up with that.”

Sally was as fed up with it as the rest of them, and she was more than keen to see Gamage get his due, if only to put some spark and confidence back into her friends. She crossed to her sea chest, and pulled a small twist of paper and a dark bottle out of its depths. “Here we have it, gentlemen. Two small pieces of retribution.”

Eight bells rang out, signaling the end of the afternoon watch, and the hands were piped to supper. In another few short minutes Gamage stalked in, and the others, hiding their wary looks behind their hands, slouched out of his path, the way they had gotten used to. Sally did the same, both from the need not to give away her plan with another name-calling set-to, and from her desire to avoid another mastheading from either Captain McAlden or Mr. Colyear.

But there was Pinky, his usual brisk, cheery self, bringing the heavy wooden tray of food to their end of the table—well away from Gamage’s spot at the head. He dished up the stew and poured out glasses of slightly watered wine, for with their limited stores, Sally and Pinky had determined on the sacrifice of quality over quantity. The boys fell to the meal, a fragrant, steaming ragout, in their usual omnivorous manner, crouching round their bowls, as if they were in prison and had need to defend themselves.

Sally took her bowl from Pinky and, with a deft turn of her wrist, emptied the twist of heavy spice into one side of the bowl. Once at the table, she uncorked the dark bottle of red wine vinegar and poured its ruby contents into a partially filled glass of watered wine. And then she sat to eat, pretending to eat in the same manner as the other boys, but giving the spice time to dissolve and meld into the ragout. The others all kept their heads down, with the occasional feral look of apprehension at Gamage, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. Even so, Sally made a point of trying not to be caught watching Gamage and give away the game.

Patience, she chided herself, patience. Gamage was a creature of habit, and when presented with an opportunity to act, he would do so predictably. All she needed to do was have patience.

Soon enough, Gamage reached his long arm across the table for Sally’s unprotected wine glass.

Sally pretended to try and stop him. “Devil take you, Gamage!” she cried, snatching it away from his reach. “You can’t have that!”

But Gamage was Gamage, and was already hooking his finger over the lip of her now undefended stew bowl and drawing it toward him with a sneer of triumph. “I’ll take whatever I want.”

“Devil take you,” she cried again, and stood. “I demand you give that back.” But she also left her glass out, enticingly near to Gamage’s hand.

Gamage didn’t notice, and spooned down her meal with satisfied relish. “Don’t tell me what I can,” he began around a mouthful of the ragout, “and can’t—”

There was a breathtaking silence, as everyone watched Gamage swallow hard and lick his lips, first repeatedly, and then convulsively. He began to gasp for air and grabbed up Sally’s goblet of vinegar-laced wine and swilled it immediately down.

And then he exploded.

There was nothing else to call it. He spewed the entire contents of the goblet across the table and grabbed for his throat.

“I’ve been poisoned! You’ve poisoned me.” And he fell to his knees at the edge of the table, rubbing, almost clawing at his mouth, in some desperate bid to rid himself of whatever poison he thought he had ingested. His face had grown as red as a blister, and water was pouring down from his eyes and nose—he looked to be in the most awful, acute distress.

The midshipmen had all risen to get a better view of their erstwhile tormentor suffering torments, but with the unperturbed curiosity and callous indifference particular to boys, they did nothing to help.

It was Gamage’s servant, Tunney, who answered his master’s calls of distress. “Mr. Gamage? Mr. Gamage! Help me! Send for the surgeon, quick.” He turned from the immobile midshipmen and appealed to Pinky. “Quickly now! Pinkerton, send a boy for the surgeon. Mr. Gamage is poisoned.”

“Oh, my! Tha’s right terrible, it is. What ’ave you been feedin’ ’im?”

“Send for the surgeon!”

“Right away, then. Right away.” Pinky’s face was polished red with anxiety and he scurried away to the door, calling loudly for Mr. Stephens, the ship’s surgeon, to come down from the gunroom.

Sally went to Tunney’s aid and helped prop Gamage up. But when the servant tried to give Gamage more wine, he made a spasmodic, gasping sound and flung it away from his lips, dashing what was left in the glass to the floor. Disposing of the vinegared contents, from Sally’s point of view, quite neatly.

As amusing as it was to watch Gamage turn alarming colors, their private revenge was turning public. The small space in the cockpit was filling up with people, crowding in to see Mr. Gamage be poisoned.

Mr. Stephens, the surgeon—called from his own supper in the gunroom, if the state of the linen napkin dangling from his waistcoat was any indication—came to the prostrate man, and observed him sweating and weeping from every orifice, and took up his wrist to feel for his pulse.

And in another heartbeat, Mr. Colyear was there, too. The way cleared for him automatically, the sea parting in deference to Moses. Sally looked up from where she crouched on the floor next to Gamage to find his relentless eyes boring into her in unspoken question. She held her countenance and let him look. If he and the captain had decided not to help them deal with the problem that was Gamage, she would not feel the slightest bit guilty for helping herself and her fellow midshipmen.

“What did this man eat?” asked the surgeon.

“Here is the food, sir.” Sally stood up, and picked up the offending bowl. “It was my supper, sir, that Mr. Gamage took.”

Mr. Colyear turned his slow eye first upon her, and then upon them all in turn, but Sally was astonished to see that not one of the midshipmen so much as blanched or turned coward. They widened their eyes, or looked grave and everything astonished at Mr. Gamage’s turn.

“A fit. That’s what he’s had,” said an anonymous voice at the back of the room.

“Nah,” muttered another voice she couldn’t see. “Divine retribution, that’s what that is.”

“Silence,” Mr. Colyear said quietly, though Sally noticed he did not ask to take the man’s name. Nor did he take his eyes from her face.

She stood and willed herself to remain still and untroubled. Gamage was in the wrong. He had taken her food.

In another moment Mr. Stephens rose and said, “Remove him to the sick bay.”

Mr. Colyear motioned to Tunney and another man by the door, who carried the writhing Gamage out. But Mr. Colyear also stopped the surgeon when he would have followed.

“Mr. Stephens, if you please.” Mr. Colyear reached over and took the bowl from Sally’s hands, before he passed it to the surgeon.

Mr. Stephens put up a hand in protest. “I’m a surgeon, not an apothecary. I know nothing of poisons, sir.”

So Col held it up to his nose himself and sniffed carefully.

“If you please, sir,” Sally spoke quickly to keep him from any further exploration. “It wasn’t poisoned. I was eating from it myself, until Mr. Gamage took it from me.”

“Is that so?” Mr. Colyear said gravely, proffering the bowl and its remaining food to her. “And would you eat from it again? Now?”

Sally widened her eyes and made a show of swallowing hard, but she took the bowl. “I don’t see why not. I was eating it first, same as him.” And slowly, she picked up her fork and dished up a piece of the ragout. And slowly, so slowly that Sally was sure every person stuffed into the crowded room leaned forward, she opened her lips, put it in her mouth, and ate.

She chewed the food slowly, as if fearful she might suffer the same fate. But when the first piece was swallowed with no symptom of poison, she took another. And then she sat and consumed the rest of the stew as she had been at the beginning. And then, just as if they wanted to prove their innocence as well, the rest of the boys resumed their suppers, some of them eating where they were standing.

Sally felt as if her face would split in two from the pride and the love she felt at such loyalty, and from the necessity not to smile at the sheer genius of having pulled it off.

But Mr. Colyear had not been born yesterday, and he knew one way or another how to get the inmates of the cockpit asylum, as he had dubbed them that first day, to fall into line. “That will do, Mr. Kent. But I should nevertheless like a
word
with you.” He gestured to the door. “If you’d be so kind.”

A glance around the cockpit told her this quiet request had produced the effect that all of Mr. Colyear’s stony looks could not. Both Will Jellicoe and Charles Dance stood, and would have stepped forward to confess, she was sure, if she had not made a small, and she hoped, subtle movement of her hand to wave them back.

“Aye, sir.” After all, there was no longer any proof. Whatever evidence there might have been had long since been consumed.

But as soon as Mr. Colyear’s back was turned to exit through the door, she took a big gulp of Dance’s unadulterated wine to mask the smell of pepper on her breath.

Mr. Colyear walked with his usual deliberation from the companionway all the way up to the taffrail at the stern of the vessel. There was only Mr. Horner, who was the officer of the watch, nearby, but he moved forward, to give Mr. Colyear privacy.

Mr. Colyear was not one for speaking abruptly. He was the sort of man who looked, and listened, and thought, and let other people make fools of themselves while they waited for him to speak. It gave weight to his words. The same weight that loaded his brows down with gravitas. It made him a man worth listening to.

She was perfectly happy to wait him out. She could stand as unperturbed as Joan of Arc before the fire, confident that she had done the right thing.

“Do try and look chastened, for God’s sake, Mr. Kent,” he advised in his sooty, dark tones. “See if you can manage it for my sake, if not for your own.”

There was that wry humor, hiding just below the surface of the granite exterior, like the dark shadow of whiskers beneath his skin. “I will do, Mr. Colyear.” She transferred her gaze to her toes and wondered if it was humor or the sunset that lit his eyes such a brilliant green.

“Well, Kent. That was interesting.” He let another pause lengthen out between them before he asked, “I have to assume that you were the one to orchestrate that extraordinary scene?”

“Actually, Mr. Gamage did, with his predatory ways. Nothing would have happened if he had kept to his own supper.”

“So it was perhaps divine retribution,” he agreed. “In the form of a Scotch bonnet pepper, if I’m not mistaken. Something you Kents eat as regularly as an Irishman eats his potatoes.”

Sally couldn’t stop the flush that betrayed her any more than she could stop herself from admiring Mr. Colyear’s perspicacity.

“Yes.” He nodded as he watched her face heat. “You might want to consider that Matthew Kent didn’t come up with all of his own pranks, Kent. He often had help.”

And then David St. Vincent Colyear smiled.

The smile was all in his eyes, in the upward cast of the corners and the rare warmth that lit the chalcedony depths, as if that stone had been melted into liquid. When he smiled everything else was forgotten. Everything that seemed stern and forbidding in him metamorphosed into friendship and comfort. It was a smile of such warmth and sly humor she felt a burst of reckless joy break loose inside her.

“Ah. Then I will thank you for the inspiration.” She knew she was smiling back at him like a looby. But she didn’t care.

“You’re welcome.” He shot a glance sideways at her. “It was the Scotch bonnet, wasn’t it?”

“It may have been. I did have some dried Scotch bonnet pepper spice, before all my stores were stolen, so I can’t be too sure. It seems entirely possible that Gamage is the one responsible for poisoning himself.”

“Entirely possible,” Mr. Colyear conceded with that same wry half-smile. “What a day, divine retribution and all.” He turned and leaned his hips back against the taffrail and crossed his feet. He looked almost … casual. Except Mr. Colyear didn’t have a casual bone in his body.