False Colors (24 page)

John thought at first it was just the torrential, tropical rain thundering on the cobbles outside. His rooms were on the ground floor of Mrs. Milton’s establishment, and his desk shoved up against the wall beneath the window, for the light. Only when a brick smashed against the window, bending the leads inwards and shattering two of the panes across his papers, did he realize that there were figures running out there, that some of the flashes were not lightning but pistols.

Old instincts threw him to his feet, had him scrambling in his sea-chest for his own gun. He slung the cartridges in a waxed waterproof bag around his neck, buckled on his officer’s smallsword, picked his boat-cloak from its hook at the back of the door and stopped as if he had run into a wall. The door was shut, but behind it there were angry men and screaming and violence. In his unseeing eyes the firelight of two months ago glowed like a glimpse of hell, and he could hear the sobbing. His muscles spasmed, rigid, and pain cut across his back.
Pain
—
God!—the pain!

He couldn’t get past the doorway; found himself standing there, trembling, his bones like water.
Damn you!
he thought, watching himself with contempt.
Damn you, you coward!
He would not submit to this—would not be unmanned like this by something that was long over. If a boy fell from the horse, one should put him back on at once, bleeding or no, or he would be afraid the rest of his life. This must be no different. Forcing himself, step by tiny step, he put the boat cloak around his shoulders, raised the hood. That feeling of concealment helped a little. Now to open the door. He reached out, laid his hand on the latch….
‘Hows about we kiss it better?’
Fuck you!
And opened it. One foot forward, shift his weight, and then the other. And again. He was outside. Shutting the door firmly on the idea of retreat he stood and panted for a moment, while the rain beat on his shoulders and poured in gray streams from his hood. Then he took a deep breath and launched himself into the street. Sword in hand, he followed the skirling, shouting figures down to the docks, wet rats running about his ankles. The grip of terror loosened as he recognized the rioting men as British sailors, not pirates—though at times it was hard to tell the difference. Stepping over unconscious bodies, he worked his way down into the thick of the scrum. Among the warehouses the fighting was positively Homeric in its ferocity.
Crouching behind a barrel of dried peas John saw a boy he knew—Ned Jupp of HMS
Albion
—his ginger hair still luminous and distinctive despite the downpour. The tot was hurling halfbricks into a fighting knot of men. “What’s going on?” John demanded, seizing the boy by the collar.
There was a brief scuffle as he evaded the boy’s snakelike writhing and flying fists, before Ned finally looked at his face. Then the boy straightened to attention comically. “Oh, it’s you sir!” He knuckled his forehead, leaving a streak of mud. “It’s the fucking
Britannias
’ fault, sir, begging your pardon. We was all ’aving a drink up at the Royal Oak. Us
Albions
was just laughing with them, friendly like, and they kicked off.”
Lightning sliced the night in two, and in an instant of shock and horror, the fighting men were picked out white against the night. The picture of Alfie Donwell, blood spattered black down his white waistcoat, pale distorted face and bitter eyes, giving the boatswain of the
Albion
a good thrashing, imprinted itself on John’s memory. Seared there by thunderbolt.
The crew of HMS
Britannia
cheered him on, clustered around the fight like children about a scrap on the schoolyard. Like the pirates in their leering circle around the stake. John didn’t know what drove him through that circle of hatred. Indignation? Outrage? Sheer possessiveness? Whatever it was, it was stronger than his fear; he felt lit up from within as though the lightning had passed through his mouth and now inhabited him.
“Mr. Donwell!” he shouted over the roar of the rain, his voice ringing with command. He had been Alfie’s captain once. He could again. “Control yourself! Control your people! For Christ’s sake, man, you’re an
officer!
You think
this
the epitaph your captain would want?”
Alfie’s fist tightened in the boatswain’s neck-cloth, holding him off the ground, shaking him, not seeming to register the limp man’s lack of threat. “They have it coming.”
John shivered. Alfie’s eyes were not entirely sane as they looked at John, pleading for something. He had remembered Alfie wrong—he realized it with a start of fear and unwelcome lust. Somehow he had treasured a picture of litheness; a teasing, mischievous, lighthearted creature. It came as a surprise now to notice that Alfie’s pleasant face could be brutish, that he towered over his companions, powerful and dangerous as a young bear.
“Farrant’s not yet cold in his grave and
they
said—”
I bet they did,
John thought, drawing breath to shout above the thunder. “I don’t care
what
they said,” he yelled.
And if they did, whose fault is it? The man flaunted his infamy.
“Get your men under control
now
or I will see you disrated for this!”
The storm flared in Alfie’s eyes. A storm raged about the two of them. Lightning cracked overhead and the prickle of it made John’s hair stand on end, stirring like a live thing. His skin tightened with shock and static, his heart thundering. He was a galvanic rod, fully charged and set opposite its mate. Any moment the spark would leap, and until then the tension mounted and mounted. He felt alight with power and perhaps it showed, for Alfie surrendered.
“Alright, lads, leave it now. That’ll do.”
They worked together, shoving at the fighting knots of men, shouting at their respective crewmembers, bringing down the lash of rank and arrogance against the mob. For all it was terrifying—being once more in the dark, the focus of all that violence—watching the rioting sailors fall back, daunted by his command, lit the fuse of something wild in John. He found himself grinning, choking back laughter. See, he was not totally unmanned after all! Not useless, not laughable. Men obeyed him, were daunted by him as they always had been.
Thank God! Oh, thank God!
The roar and crackle of lightning were in his bones and his body felt so sensitized towards the other man he could feel Alfie’s movements as if they were his own.
On the cluttered front of an empty warehouse, its great doors gaping wide, white flashes of lightning lighting up dangling chains, the last group of men parted before them and ran. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the rain, suddenly alone.
John turned, saw Alfie watching him; pale hair eerie in the night, wide eyes gold. Rain trickled down Alfie’s face, streaking through the blood and dirt. He licked his lips, panting, his mouth open slightly, gleaming with water. “John, I….”
The look of shock, vulnerability, was just the same as he had worn that day John walked in on him when he was playing the flute. Off balance, taken unawares, and he was so…oh so beautiful.
Why not? After all, why the hell shouldn’t I?
Seizing Alfie by the wrist, John hauled him into the warehouse’s private darkness, shoved him up against the wall and kissed him—desperate, demanding, furious. The storm crested and broke in him as he forced his way into Alfie’s mouth. Warmth, and rain trickling off their hair onto his lips, and Alfie’s solid body trembling against him, and for a lightning flash he had no thought at all; abandoned to sensation like an animal. Only slowly did he recognize the shaking of Alfie’s pinned arms, the shudder of his chest, and the low, irregular gasp of his breath for what it was. Head back against the wall, eyes closed, he was sobbing very quietly, stripped of his authority and broken at John’s touch.

The spirit stove in John’s rooms sighed and guttered, damnably slow. All the time it struggled to heat the water, Alfie sat at the table with his head in his hands, rain, blood, and mud dripping off him onto the clean floor. He took the teacup with numb fingers and did not drink, cradling it, bent over the steam.

There was so much John wanted to say. Principally, “I’ve been an ass. I’m so sorry. I don’t dare ask for your forgiveness but tell me what I can do now, to mend you. Please. Please don’t carry on like this. I can’t bear it.” But he couldn’t force it out. “You’ll catch your death,” he said instead. “Come, let me lend you some dry clothes.”

Alfie looked up, his gaze as bleak and bedraggled as his clothing. He made to speak, but as he did so, there came a sudden, shocking hammering noise. They both flinched. Then John put down the linen towel he had been using to dry his hair and opened the door. Light shone out across a self-important, down at heel, middle-class man and the two bruisers with cudgels who lurked behind him.

“Certain accusations have been made concerning the late Captain Lord Lisburn,” the man said, unconsciously patting his own belly. Indeed, he looked almost pregnant with satisfaction.

“What is that to me?” said John coldly, trying inconspicuously to stand in the man’s line of sight. It did no good, he merely stepped to one side and looked past John, straight at Alfie.

“Some very serious matters have come to light about the captain’s...ahem...
relations
with one Lieutenant Aelfstan Donwell. I have been directed to take the gentleman in, for questioning. Enquiries at the harbor indicated he was last seen with you. So I came here. I presume this is him?”

John froze. So it had come to this after all; the death they had both been courting had found them here in his own rooms. He considered lying, considered drawing his sword and taking all three men down, hiding them somewhere. But as his soul revolted at the thought, Alfie slowly dragged himself to his feet. “Yes. Lieutenant Donwell at your service. What can I do for you?”

“Hand your sword to me and come with us.”
“Alfie,” John whispered, aghast. Alfie reached out and squeezed his wrist—he thought reassuringly, though it was hard to tell through the explosion of pain. His thin, new skin parted beneath the touch.
Alfie frowned at the blood on his fingertips as if he couldn’t work out what it was. “Goodbye then, John. Pray for me.”

“The man was notorious, a disgrace to the service.” Admiral Rodney turned from gazing down at the harbor to fix John with that penetrating look of his, eyes like blued steel, aquiline face as finely drawn as a razor. “You are something of a celebrity at the moment, Lieutenant, for your suffering, and your sudden acquisition of a great fortune.” He pushed the papers on his desk into a neat pile and tapped the edges. Then he lined up the writing slope and scroll of charts into a more parallel row.

Behind him his servants struggled with the heavy velvet curtains, hauling them down. The walls behind them, less faded by sunlight, were stripes of emerald against the sage green of the paneling. Rolling up the red and gold Turkey carpet behind the desk, the servants worked with their heads turned away, making a good pretense of not listening. Rodney’s physician, Dr. Gilbert Blane, however, watched John with professional interest from his seat by the window.

If it could be allowed that so successful a hero looked frail, Rodney did; over slender, and with a translucent complexion that seemed half made up of cobwebs. But his eyes were extraordinary. “Yet your luck is as changeable as an Orkeney squall, Mr. Cavendish. And in deference to that I feel it necessary to urge you to leave this sordid matter be. You will spill your present good fortune before you have begun to drink it.”

“I wish with all my heart, sir, I could walk away from this.” John had begun to shiver so obviously that Blane motioned a servant to bring him a seat. Caught between gratitude and consciousness of the impropriety he looked inquiringly at Rodney who said, “For goodness sake sit. I have fought many a battle from a chair. I won’t begrudge you it.”

“Thank you, sir. I cannot walk away because…” After this kindness, so unexpected from an Admiral he had heretofore found fierce, John felt less able to speak than ever. He had to lie. A night spent sleepless, praying, and wandering about his rooms until his healing frame would bear it no longer, had lead him inexorably to the conclusion that he should lie—that Alfie deserved this sacrifice of his personal honor. More, that honesty might require execution but justice could not possibly do so. That it was therefore somehow morally right to lie.

But this conclusion was so foreign to John’s nature that, despite the cause, guilt burned in every blood vessel like a course of mercury when he said, “Because I know Lieutenant Donwell to be innocent, sir.”

Blane snorted, disbelieving, and Rodney put hands like eagle claws down on the desk and stared.
“I have no doubt Captain Lord Lisburn was guilty,” John clarified. “But Lieutenant Donwell had served with him only as a child. He regarded the captain in the light of a father. I know Lisburn’s behavior was...suspicious, but Donwell would hear nothing against him. Refused to believe it. Could not understand why his innocent admiration could be taken in such a way. Confessed himself utterly in the dark as to the captain’s conduct with others. For God’s sake, sir, if every man who’d ever shared a bed with another was to be suspected, you’d have to hang us all.”
Rodney picked a tailor’s bill from the top of his pile of papers, shuffled it to the bottom, leaving an innocent dispatch on view. “What do you want of me? I cannot let the man go. An accusation has been made, and a court martial is being convened. I can no more stop these things than I can stop the tides. And would not if I could. If your friend is as innocent as you say, it will be apparent then. If not….” Rodney still wouldn’t meet John’s gaze. He cleared his throat before continuing. “Well, as I say, you might discover it would have been better to distance yourself from the affair.”
“I heard you were leaving, sir.” John looked about at the half packed up office in confirmation. “And I…It’s well known, sir, that with you gone, the presiding officer must be Captain Cordingly of the
Wasp
.” He bent his head, toed a dropped pencil back under the desk, leaving a broad smudge of lead on the floorboards. Recollecting that Rodney, like Fortune, favored the brave, he looked up once more into that cold aristocratic gaze as he criticized a superior officer. “Captain Cordingly has been known to hang on rumor alone.
“You recall the case in ’59, sir, when he hanged a married tar on the evidence of an accuser who later confessed to have dreamed the whole incident in a stupor of gin? Forgive me my presumption, but I cannot let my friend’s life ride on the decision of a man like that. I say nothing of the captain’s fitness to command, sir, but he is no proper judge in a court martial on this offense.”
A snort from the corner diverted the Admiral’s wrath. He glared at his physician, but Blane kept his head down, turning the pages of his newspaper with a decided, humorous crackle. Gratefully, John took another breath, plunged on. “You, on the other hand, sir, are a champion of the common man, not letting a fellow’s birth or low state detract from his merits. Mr. Donwell is a plain man, without influence in the world, and I fear that Captain Cordingly would take his lack of family to be evidence of guilt. You, sir, would not. All I ask for him is a fair trial without pre-judgment, and that I believe only you can provide. Please stay, sir. You are a hero of England. No one could doubt your verdict one way or another.”
Rodney’s dark brows lifted in a skeptical flick at this eloquence, as though he had heard the like before from too many professional courtiers and toadies to be impressed. John waited out the practiced examination with patience, knowing that the Admiral would see nothing but sincerity in his gaze. He
was
sincere. His admiration for Rodney at least was no lie—the man had a genius for the sea; for turning the circumstances of any battle to his own advantage. His dash and enterprise were as sudden and awesome in action as the stoop of a hawk. Nor did he hesitate to recommend the lowliest for the best positions; and if his judgment was a little flawed in picking out his followers, it did not negate the principle.
Of course, Rodney’s debts were also legendary, and his cupidity one of the few stains on a character otherwise entirely admirable. But John had cause to know, now, that no man was so entirely free from sin that he could afford to be too nice with his admiration. He held his head up beneath Rodney’s cynical gaze, and at length the Admiral turned aside to lift his silver-topped sand shaker and set it gently back inside its baize lined box.
He capped the inkwell, slid it into place beside the sand, then rubbed his long fingers on a handkerchief, in a gesture John found disturbingly reminiscent of Pontius Pilate. “Lieutenant Cavendish, I believe I have told you that, in my opinion, the Navy owes you a debt of thanks?”
“You did, sir.”
“And is it in consequence of that, that you are emboldened to make this application?”
“No, sir. I do not consider my own merits at all, trusting entirely to your regard for justice.”
Blane huffed behind the sanctuary of his paper. John lifted his chair so that the servants could draw the carpet out from under its feet. Rodney took off his neat wig, revealing a head of sleek, dark brown hair that made him look full twenty years younger. He paced away to drape the wig over the bust of Emperor Hadrian that graced the window ledge.
“You’re a man who appreciates honesty, yes?” He looked out of the window, down into the courtyard, until John said “yes.” Then he turned and came back to lean a hand on the back of his chair, the other balanced on his sword hilt. “Then I will be honest and tell you that I have you down as my choice for captain of HMS
Boreas
in the unhappy event—which I am told is now inevitable—of her present captain’s death from the fever.”
The floor surged up beneath John as if it had crested a wave. Just for a moment he felt sunshine and a glory of bright silver spray against a clear washed sky. A fair wind on his cheek, blue water beneath his keel, and freedom. His own ship?
His own ship!
Poor
Meteor
flashed to mind. How much he had loved her! Handing her over to another man had been like handing over his first born child. The pain, even now, in memory, went close to choking him. On its heel came desire, ravenous, black desire like salt in his mouth. His own ship....
To be captain again.
“I should be more than happy.” The uprush of glory tipped over the edge, went racing down into the hollow dark. Mountains of water cut off the wind and sun, and he shivered, becalmed, in the trough. It took no special talent to hear the “but” in the Admiral’s cut-glass Harrow-educated tones.
“But the Navy, Mr. Cavendish, prefers not to have its ships captained by fools, and if you genuinely believe this young man to be innocent, then you are a fool. If you want him spared and you are no fool, then you are something worse. Something that must never be permitted to tread a British quarterdeck. Are you following me?”
John shut his eyes for a brief moment of self pity. When would the world stop hurting him? This was becoming more than he could very well endure. “Yes, sir.”
“You are owed one favor, Mr. Cavendish. One. If you ask me, I will stay. But I strongly advise you—for your own sake—to take the ship and let this filthy business go.”