False Colors (23 page)

Despite torture and revulsion, John was suddenly overcome with a picture of himself sitting on Alfie’s lap as he had done with Bess; Alfie’s hands on him, soaking up the feel of Alfie’s skin as he had soaked in the reviving sunlight.
I wouldn’t bite Alfie. I wouldn’t stop Alfie from…

He breathed in sharp. His heart fluttered in his throat and his mouth dried. Healing skin tingled as the blood rushed to his face and prick. It was jarring to find he was still alive, still faced with this same problem, still without any kind of idea what to do about it.
A second chance!
Dear God, he had a second chance to put things right, and no more idea what “right” was than at first.

“Both of us?” he said in a strangled voice and caught Alfie’s quizzical look with shame.
“The captain means to share the prize money between the
Albion’
s and the
Otter’
s, and as you’re the only
Otter
left…”
“Why?” John didn’t want this; didn’t want to feel indebted to Farrant. True, he already owed the man everything, but this extra generosity felt like a challenge, like the claim that the captain was a better man than he was. A magnanimous man. A capable man who did not need to rely on others to rescue him like some swooning maiden. A king, handing out largess to his subjects. “I want no pity or charity from him.”
Alfie reeled back as if he’d been slapped. The wind, freshening, flattened the shirt to his chest and made his hair and its black silk ribbon stream.
Beautiful
, John thought unbidden. But his mobile face took on the expression of a man who smells something rank. “Christ almighty! Captain Farrant was right about you from the start.” Alfie looked over to where Farrant stood on the quarterdeck. “You
are
a jumped-up little nobody who doesn’t have the wit to understand him! If you can’t recognize a great man when you are in his presence, then do us all a favor and
shut up.”
There was a long pause. Long enough for John’s instant flare of anger to turn into shame. He grasped about for words and could not find them. Alfie looked astonished at himself, and then mulishly obstinate as though he waited to receive an apology which he intended to spurn.
A sharp flapping broke the silence, as though a thousand swans were beating their wings above them. Sailors both, they turned to watch the sails; the wind had hauled forward and the sheets shivered at the edges with a clapping sound. John watched Lord Lisburn look up sharply, open his mouth to bellow “trim the main course,” and stop, catching his breath on a high-pitched inward gasp of surprise. The heat in the man’s face was now so crimson he too might have been painted with blood. He staggered, eyes rolling back in his head. Fighting to stand, he grabbed the helm for support. There was a choked noise by John’s side, and Alfie sprinted across the quarterdeck in time to catch him as he fell.
It felt like the end of the world.

“And you tell me he had this all the time, and did not want to ‘trouble me’?” Dr. Bentley’s mild, civilian face was as awful as any Admiral’s as he stripped off the makeshift bandage on Farrant’s thigh to reveal the black, inflamed wound. Alfie tried not to breathe in, for the thing stank, moist and putrefying. Ribbons of black wormed their way under Farrant’s skin from the wound down his leg and up into his vitals. Alfie had to look away to the man’s sweating face, and then out of the window to the sea before he could speak.

“He said it was fine…” Alfie’s voice was dry. “Just a scratch.” “And you noticed nothing when you and he had congress?” Even in these circumstances, Alfie did not like the doctor’s

tone. Didn’t like the clinical discussion of his private life as though he was a corpse to be anatomized for the benefit of students. He clenched his fists and said, mildly enough, “We did not…not at all. Since we rescued the
Otters
.”

“No? And you didn’t question that?”
“No,
sir.”
Stung by grief and guilt, Alfie rounded on the man. He should know better than to poke at an open wound. “No, sir, I did not ‘question that.’ The captain is not a man who tolerates being questioned.”
Bentley uncapped a jar of leeches and began to place them on Farrant’s thigh, where they fastened with enthusiasm and began to suck. “Besides…” Alfie quailed afresh at the sight, “I thought…”

I thought that, knowing my feelings, he refrained from respect for me. I thought he took account of my distress over John; because my thoughts were full of John. If he had not—if John had not been here—perhaps we would have, and I would have noticed.

“Well, it is too late now for your thoughts and regrets to be of any moment.” Bentley shook his head, and his stern professional look flicked briefly to something human, gone before it could be guessed. “I’ve no doubt it would be a comfort to him to know he brought it on himself, the stubborn fool. And perhaps that was his intent.”

He measured out a variety of pills while Alfie stood dumb with shock. But when he placed the dish beside the captain’s table, Alfie reached out and grasped him by the wrist. “What do you mean?”

“Let me go, Mr. Donwell. You will find your influence much declined now. You do not wish to offer me insult.”
“I don’t wish to offer you anything.” Alfie did not let go. “What do you mean?”
Bentley drew himself up to his full five feet two. The light ran across his glasses like spilled water, and then away, and Alfie found himself looking into the eyes of a man who knew death and human weakness better than any of them. If he, John, and Farrant had fought their individual battles for survival, Bentley had fought, lost, and won many thousands of times. His gaze was chilly with eternity. “I mean, Mr. Donwell, that the captain had a…an unfortunate condition. One, I may say, that you have exacerbated. This may be, for him, a solution to an intractable problem.”
“You cold bastard!” Despite the warning, Alfie could not keep a rein on his temper. “Don’t talk as if he’s already dead!
Do
something! You’re a doctor, aren’t you?
His
doctor. So cure him!”
Bentley twisted his wrist in Alfie’s grip, with a look of disdain that made Alfie very aware that he—a six foot tall military killer— was menacing the civilian dishonorably. He dropped it, and Bentley coolly took out a handkerchief and polished his glasses. “I am Captain Lord Lisburn’s personal doctor,” he agreed. “I owe him a great deal. I owe you nothing. But I will tell you this; the man is dead. Against an infection this severe there is nothing I could do but amputate. And the wound is too high for that. The corruption is already in his vitals. Even if I took his leg off at the socket—a procedure, I may say, I have never known a patient to survive—it would do no good.
“If you care for him—and I must suppose, from your behavior today, that in your diseased way you do—I suggest you prepare yourself. This cannot be a happy outcome for you in many ways.”
Alfie floundered among miseries, unprepared to find such hostility in a man he to whom he had scarcely given a second thought, but above all unprepared to find Farrant ill. To find him mortal as any other man. It was an unnatural thought. “Are you threatening me?”
“Warning, rather.” Bentley took a vial of laudanum from his bag and mixed a dose into wine. “You are new on board the ship, Mr. Donwell, and possibly not aware of the jealousies which surround you. Not that you have made any attempt to become aware of them; trailing the captain’s favor as if it were your inalienable right. But…well, let us not argue over him as though he were already a corpse. Go. Go and do whatever it is that you do, and allow me to do my work here. We will all be feeling the chill soon enough.”
Stumbling on deck, Alfie felt the many eyes on him, the curious gazes. After Bentley’s enmity it was hard not to feel them as hostile. The ship, which had begun to feel like home, took on a strange unreality, and when the lookout shouted “land ho!” from the masthead there was a moment in which Alfie did not understand the words and could not make himself move. Then the needs of the sea returned to him and he checked helm and wind, and called out, “Port your helm, four points south south east.” The ship responded, the crew moving out of their shocked stillness with relief, and a smattering of voices began to stitch the silence back into a more human garment.
They turned into Kingston Harbor four hours later, and with the salute to be fired, the bustle of mooring, the notes to the Admiral, the fuss of finding anchorage enough for the huge string of prizes, the paperwork to be completed, and the loading and unloading of seachests and men, fear and sorrow had no time to interrupt.
“I wanted to say,” John had disentangled himself from the crowd piling into the boats and stood before Alfie, holding out his hand, “thank you. And I’m sorry.” But Alfie was watching the infirmary’s invalids being lowered in canvas slings into the barge as Bentley secured Farrant to the harness. Drugged with laudanum, Farrant had not woken, though slits of eyeball gleamed beneath his half-open lids. His head lolled out of the sling and Bentley had tied his wig on, with a handkerchief beneath his chin. Alfie’s preoccupation dissolved like fog at the sight, leaving the landscape of his heart revealed.
Farrant could not leave the ship looking like that—not ridiculous, anything but that—he would hate it. Every little vanity in his heart would revolt from being seen with his wig tied on like a country bumpkin at a hunt. Not so much ignoring John’s outstretched hand as not even seeing it, he crossed the deck at a run, untied the wig, and stuffed it into Bentley’s pocket. The doctor took a breath of outrage, then stopped, standing a moment in thought. Eventually he nodded then followed Farrant down into the boat, and Alfie watched them row away with the feeling that all the bolts holding him together had rotted beneath the waterline; the slightest breeze and his whole frame would peel apart, sink suddenly, irrevocably into the depths. For the moment though it held. It held, barely.
Alfie turned and found that John too had gone, taking his action as a dismissal. His hands trembling, he stared wildly about the deck, and met the one-eyed, worried gaze of Lt. Nyman.
“Is the captain—”
“Dying, Bentley says.” Saying the words made a great black bubble of grief well up through Alfie’s tumultuous thoughts, pushing his ribs out with the pressure of it. His eyes prickled and filled, Nyman’s face floating distorted through tears.
It cannot be true! It can
not
.
Farrant was an immortal, larger than life, like a Greek hero, Jason or Odysseus, a wanderer on the sea, blessed by strange gods. He couldn’t die,
stupidly
, of an infected wound like an ordinary man. It wasn’t possible.
Nyman’s thoughts had gone in another direction. “I fear for the ship,” he said, “in that case. He has built up, by his manner of living, such a fund of condemnation! I may hope that the hatred will follow him to his grave, but I fear it will turn out otherwise. More likely, with the protection of his rank and birth withdrawn, the admiralty will find some excuse to punish us for tolerating him so long.”

Farrant’s butler quivered with indignation, his eyes like two pins set point-upright in a sheet of leather. He raked them over Alfie once more as if to draw blood, and sneered.

At the end of a long graveled drive, Farrant’s house nestled into the Jamaican hillside. Against the cool, tranquil shade the grey stone stood classical, elegant. Stables curved in a block behind an archway over which bougainvillea trailed like droplets of blood. An inner courtyard lit the hall beyond the butler with airy sunlight, and the music of a distant fountain.

“The Master does not wish to be bothered by business at present. And there can be no other reason for your presence.”
“I…” Alfie looked at the man, standing like a mummified bog body in the midst of this picture of rational peace. Upstairs lace curtains billowed at the windows, and to Alfie’s sea-adapted sense of balance the whole place lurched and heaved nauseatingly. A lie; a damn pretty, fine expensive lie.
I am the one who ought to be with him. I am the one he most nearly loves. I should be holding his hand, sitting by the bedside. His children may all be squabbling over who shall inherit what, and you be waiting impatiently for the passing, so you can parade your self importance in your best black suit. But I…
He had been too numb, too distracted by things that needed to be done, and he had stood by and done nothing as Bentley stole the captain away from him to deliver him into this prison. He hadn’t said the things he should have said.
I didn’t tell Farrant…
And he wanted to be there, to soothe the fever and comfort the pain, and to let Farrant know that he was loved before he died. Not to let him die in an atmosphere of cold reproach.
“I wanted to say goodbye.”
“This is a Christian household, Lieutenant.” The imperfectly concealed disgust on the butler’s face blazed out into a white fervor. He raised his chin so high he seemed to be looking at Alfie with his nostrils. “Your sort are not welcome here.”
Stepping back, he clicked the door shut, firmly, pointedly, in Alfie’s face. Instinctively, Alfie, caught between this and another nightmare, flung himself at it. Solid wood jarred his shoulder. Decorative nail-heads left a pattern of flower-shaped bruises on his arm as he took a couple of steps back and did it again, the door rattling in its frame at the impact. Gravel crunched behind him on the drive, but he ignored it, balled his fists, and punched the solid oak. His knuckles split, and the wave of pain blazed red in his darkness, urging him to do it again, and again, until someone finally let him in.
But he’d been through this before. He knew it wasn’t going to happen. He could rage and scream until he exhausted himself, and the door would stay shut. Breathing hard and trembling all over, he stopped himself, leaned hands and forehead against the door for a moment, and then straightened up and turned.
Two black footmen in bright turquoise livery watched him warily from the drive. Sent, he supposed, out from the kitchen door to be sure he left. Well, if Lady Lisburn or her butler wanted to provoke him to violence, they would be disappointed. He hoped he had enough self control, at least, not to pick a fight with Farrant’s servant outside the man’s home while he lay dying.
Straightening his wig and pulling the creases out of his coat he gave them both a bow and walked away, feeling their eyes on his back all the way down the long tree shaded ride to the road. He would find the
Britannia’
s
.
Some of them were sure to be mourning too; Bert at least, if not all of the young Adonises on the launch crew. He could surely find someone to have a drink with him, and laugh and curse the world, in honor of Charles Farrant.