Captain's Surrender (2 page)

Josh had been at sea since he was thirteen, had not mixed in the most refined company, and did not believe in love at first sight. More than that, he had never heard that sodomites were capable of love. Since childhood, he had heard that he was a beast, driven by perverted appetites, not a rational being whose heart could be moved by beauty or lifted by a smile. He was not
worthy
to love this fine young officer, not even to admire him from afar.

But—Mary and Joseph—suppose it
was
love! How fitting to fall in love in the shadow of the gallows. Watching Henderson finally settle into stillness on the end of his rope, he tried to resist the urge to look back at Lt. Kenyon as he might have tried to resist the urge to breathe. When he gave up, allowed himself a stealthy glance, he found that Walker was watching him with the gleam of triumph in his eye.

The steady world fell out from beneath his feet. For such a long time he had been sure of his self-restraint, certain that whatever the captain suspected, he could prove nothing. Now Walker was watching him with the pleasure of a fisherman who has finally discovered the right bait.

"Well, Mr. Kenyon," Walker said in a more amiable tone, "you are very welcome. Since Comptroller Summersgill and his household are to travel with us, I have ceded him the Great Cabin and taken the first lieutenant's cabin myself, but I'm sure we will find somewhere to lodge you where you will be appreciated as you deserve. Do not hesitate to call on me if you find anything ... irregular. I like to run a clean ship."

Noting the limpness of Henderson's corpse, Walker swept the assembled company with a glare, calling them to attention. "We sail with the tide. On board, the lot of you. Dismissed."

Josh turned to run back to the ship with the other boys, hoping to get away, just for a few moments, just for enough time to collect himself. But he was certain in the pit of his stomach that he would not be allowed.

Stopping, he concentrated on looking innocently surprised. "Take Mr. Kenyon's dunnage to your cabin, Andrews. I'm sure you will have no objections to him as a bedfellow, eh?"

Don't blush. Do not dare
! But he could feel it, flooding up his fair skin from neck to brow like the mark of Cain. Please, God, let Kenyon only think it was a reaction to the innuendo. He did not dare to look. "Aye, aye, sir," he said instead, and with the help of Kenyon's footman, he got the sea-chest off the ground and up the gangplank to the ship.

Josh's cabin was larger than the fourth lieutenant's coffin of a room by virtue of having one of the great guns inside it. The cannon was a familiar presence, tied up tight to the wall and used as a clothes horse. When he had put down Kenyon's sea-chest as snugly beside it as was possible, and had removed his spare shirts and his shaving gear from its top, the cabin no longer looked so homely. The blue painted chest—silhouettes of three frigates carefully drawn in roundels on its sides—was disconcertingly real. Touching it again, he revealed that it was as solid as ever, and that its owner, therefore, must also have some reality beyond Josh's nervous imagination.

Sending one of the boys to request a second hanging cot, he sat down on his bed and stared at the box, his mind in turmoil. How could this be happening? They would be a month at sea, if not longer, and he would be shut in here every night with a man who had already made him betray himself worse than he had managed to do in the whole of his seven year service. Josh had no illusions—having tasted one success, Walker wanted Josh's neck in the noose next and was counting on Kenyon as the way to achieve it.

And there sat Kenyon's sea-chest, as colorful, as neat and as large as life as the man himself. The man who might even now be heading here from the quarterdeck or the wardroom, to whom Josh would have to make polite conversation, while his mind raced and his pulse thundered from the glory. Josh could imagine—oh, how he could imagine!—what it would be like to lie close in here with that tall, elegant form sprawled in the cot above him. Maybe an arm dangling down into his space, the scent of cologne and new linen, and himself lying beneath with a guilty conscience and an aching prick, wanting to feel the long fingers on his skin, suck each one into his mouth and...

Oh, now look! Damn it—that was all he needed. Could he not control his wandering thoughts at all?
Think of something else!
Perhaps living together would wear the edge off this infatuation. All he knew of Kenyon, after all, was that he moved like an angel. Suppose he snored, and his feet smelled, and his politics were abominable, and he never shut up? Suppose he was all flash and show, as Walker seemed to think? Being closely confined with him then might be a cure.

Would
be a cure, Josh ignored the part of himself that clamored for some sort of fairytale ending. There was no hope that his affections could be returned. Even if he liked Kenyon, he would not be able to trust him. Not with such a secret as this. As Henderson could attest, such things did not happen to men like himself, particularly not when Captain Walker was stalking them. No. Josh was no man's victim. He could not afford to hope for love. He wanted to live, and he
would
.

The wooden edges of his cot dug into his thighs, making his feet go numb. Through the gun-port he could see Mr. Summersgill's party making their final farewells, his wife clutching her many shawls and weeping with fright at the prospect of the voyage.

His ward, a fair haired, vivacious girl—orphaned daughter of some cousin, if wardroom rumor was to be believed—gazed up at the ship with inquisitive intelligence, and Josh leaned forward to see better as Kenyon came up beside her. It was a thrill merely to watch him as he passed unawares along the quay beneath. He spoke. She laughed in return, and they walked up the gangplank, out of Josh's sight, looking beautiful together. Josh clamped his teeth closed so tightly that pain lanced through his face and into his eyes as he tried to tell himself that this, too, was what he wanted.

It was better that love should die, rather than that
he
should. Better that Kenyon should be inaccessible, paying court to someone else. It was better for them all that this should end before it could even have been said to begin. Of course it was.

The decision made, lying heavily within him, he rubbed his eyes and was about to put his hat back on and return to work when there came a knock on the door, and the man himself leaned in, his eyebrows raised and his extraordinary eyes almost hazel in the between decks' gloom. "Hello? May I come in?"

Josh scrambled to his feet, forgetting everything, even his name, cracked his head against the reinforced beam above him, everything going interestingly gray and silver for a moment. "Um..." he said, "I ... Oh, I..." And Kenyon came in.

Chapter 2
Dearest Mother,
Peter Kenyon wrote carefully—for the
Nimrod
was skipping through a stiff sea that made her massive bulk frisk like a spring lamb.
You will be glad to know that we are three weeks out from Portsmouth and, although delayed by storms, are in hopes of catching the trade winds within a day or so. Should nothing very untoward happen, I hope to be in Bermuda by this time next month.
He paused, looked out of the gun-port at the gray seas and the white spray blowing forward through the long, slanting rain, and honesty prompted him to add;
Though, God knows, there is no certainty in this profession.
Mr. Summersgill and his wife,
he went on,
were just overcoming the sea-sickness when we hit the present sevenday blow, which prostrated them again. Doubtless, they would ask to be remembered to you if they could speak without groaning.
His practiced ear caught the slow scaling down of the wind's note in the rigging, and the weather that came through the newly opened port contained more air than water now. The floor of the cabin was almost dry, and the once soaked blankets of his bed were merely damp to the touch.
But the storm eased last night and continues to abate, so I am in hopes that they will recover soon.
Dipping his quill, he wondered if he should be circumspect, but this was his mother. What she did not know, she would guess. Little point then in being coy.

I did not know that Mr. Summersgill had a ward, which seems a remarkable lack of perception on my part since I grew up within an hour's walk of his house. Do I dare too much if I guess she is the "natural child" whose birth is still being talked of in hushed voices eighteen years later?

The smile grew wider as he thought of her. She had not been laid low by illness and, without supervision, had run a little wild, even to the extent of putting on Lt. Sanderson's white duck trousers and climbing to the masthead. She had been so aglow with the experience that—with the enthusiasm bringing a pretty flush to her face, her golden hair streaming, and the thrillingly transgressive sight of her legs and her ass so flagrantly revealed by the close-fitting garments—he would be surprised if there was a single man on board who was not now her abject slave.

His own admiration, however, he felt was more rational. He was a third son, of no great account, and while his eldest brother Charles might be constrained to marry an heiress for the good of the estates, he himself could afford to choose who he wished. It was true that his fortune was yet to be made and he had no thought of supporting a wife on a lieutenant's meager salary. But once he had made post captain, and was secure enough, why not wed the daughter of an old family friend? Whatever her mother's status, if it secured him the continued influence and good wishes of the Comptroller of HM Customs and Excise in Bermuda, so much the better.

After a long pause to relive the mast climbing incident and decide that it was something he did not wish to share with his mother, he went on.
She is, at any rate, a most attractive and spirited girl and will have better prospects in Bermuda than if she remains where her shame is known.

A scuffle of feet above his head broke his concentration. He looked up but, of course, could see nothing more than the thick planks of the deck and the unlit lantern. A voice he had already learned to loathe called out. "You! You call this rope coiled? Boatswain, start this man! No, damn it—with some feeling in it!"

Even through two inches of mahogany planking, Peter could hear the snap and thud of a rope's end hitting flesh. Then the mumble of "Beg pardon sir, but I was splicing the rope afore a coiling of it, on account of it got tore up something terrible during the blow."

He found himself holding his breath, waiting for the answer, and when it came, he closed his eyes for fear of revealing, even to the darkness and the sleeping man who shared his cabin, the building contempt within him.

"By God, I will have no answering back from you! Take this man's name. A dozen strokes to remind him who is the captain of this vessel, and I want to see every rope on this deck fit for an admiral's inspection, or I will add another forty for slovenliness."

There was a rustle, and he opened his eyes to find that Andrews had woken, raised himself on one elbow and was watching him. His softly curling red hair was flattened to his skull on one side and sleep grimed the corners of his brown eyes, but his expression was alert enough. Peter recognized the look on Andrews' face as the mirror of his own disgust. Silently, they shared a moment of perfect understanding. Then Peter looked down, and Andrews—who had rested barely five hours in the last seven days, on constant duty in the rigging—turned over to face the wall, pulled the blanket up over his ears, and fell back to sleep at once.

I wish I could be equally enthusiastic about the ship,
Peter paused, wondering if even his private correspondence was safe. It was a mark of how quickly he had learned to adapt to the atmosphere of paranoia on the
Nimrod
that he thought Walker might go through his letters. Though it was an unheard of thing to suspect, it was also unheard of that a first lieutenant should be expected to share his cabin with a midshipman, no matter how senior. That had been an insult— a deliberate, calculated insult—and the fact that he could not challenge his captain did not mean he had forgotten or forgiven it.

To be fair to Andrews, one of the first things he had done— when he finally got over his tongue-tied shyness—had been to offer to move out. It was to the young man's credit that, though he had grown accustomed to the privacy, and faced a removal back into the fetid cockpit of boys' practical jokes and nastiness that was the midshipmen's berth, he had still offered it with such sincerity. No, Peter did not resent Andrews in the slightest for the arrangement. He knew perfectly well who to blame.

If you recall, we were told that Captain Walker ran "a taut ship". Loyalty prevents me from saying much more than this; if matters aboard were any tauter, they would snap. I am thankful that for me this is but a temporary post, and my own command awaits me in St. George, but I am concerned for the fate of my current shipmates, who do not have that consolation.

The thought of another wardroom dinner was oppressive. He had tried his hardest to encourage conversation at the table, broaching every irreproachable topic from the weather to the perfidy of the French, and it had all met with murmurs of anxious agreement and then silence.

The second lieutenant, Lt. Cole, could be drawn out to admit to attending plays in London but would falter and look suspiciously down the length of the table when asked what they were about. Lt. Sanderson, his opposite in looks—a savagely dark, scrawny looking man, who seemed to regard ship's biscuit as something of an extravagance—shared the reluctance to commit himself to an opinion on anything. The other members of the ward room, Stapleton, the sergeant of marines, Lt. Bendick, Lt. Harcourt, and Dr. O'Connor, no matter how pressed, had simply not spoken at all.

By the end of the first week, Peter was finding it difficult to get through his meals without losing his temper and flying out upon their dullness and their timidity. He had been made so peevish and so reckless by it, so disheartened by the lack of community, and—frankly—so
lonely
, that in his own cabin he had forgotten himself and made a cutting remark about being surrounded by ghosts and old women.