False Colors (25 page)

Trudging out of the Admiral’s office, John climbed up to the battlements and walked along the quarterdeck of the fort, passing the patrolling sentries with an unacknowledged nod. From here he could see out, over Port Royal’s small white storehouses—the town a disheveled shadow of what it must have been a century ago—to the blue curve of the distant horizon and the white flecks of a crowd of sail against it. Pulling himself up to sit in an embrasure, hand on the metal of the cannon’s stoppered mouth, he gazed out at the sea. A smell of warm brass polish and new red paint on the tompion surrounded the long gun. The ocean’s lift and glisten, the dappled patterns and differences in shade which showed where currents slid beneath the surface, calmed him like an old friend sitting sympathetically beside him.

Half an hour later, he wrenched up a deep sigh, bent his head into his hands, and pressed his fingers into his eyes. Then, turning, he looked down into the courtyard of the fort, seeing the square tower like that of a church, and the sturdy brick arches of the walls. Beneath them, sheltered in the centre of masonry and cannons, the tall, whitewashed offices had their blue-painted shutters open to the breeze. Behind them, in the scant shade of a sapling oak, stood the windowless brick building of the jail.

John’s spirit fluttered within him at the sight. He did not wish to go down and face confinement; darkness, chains. Just the thought had him breathing hard, leaning on the merlon behind as he fought off nausea. The reaction infuriated him more than his merely physical weakness, but he could not make it stop.

When he forced himself down, through the guarded door and into the gloom, however, he realized he was not the only one revisited by past torment. As an officer and a gentleman—and to keep him alive until trial—Alfie had been given the benefit of a cell of his own, away from the single great common room packed with malcontents and pirates. But as a result he was confined in a space in which he barely had enough room to lie down. He was separated from the common rout only by a hastily flung up grill of bars, through which they yelled and taunted, and pelted him with their filth.

Under the dirt Alfie looked healthy enough, but John could tell from the tilt of his head, from his gentle, ironic smile, that he was shattered inside. He had worn that same look those first weeks back from the slave pen—as though, dead within, he merely waited to decay.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he muttered in greeting. “A godfearing man like yourself. Don’t you know that if you touch pitch you too will be blackened?”

John dragged over a stool and sat, jammed tight to the bars. Alfie too dragged himself listlessly across the small space to be close enough to whisper a private conversation despite the eavesdropping and jeering of the crowd.

Twitching a little at the nearness of the rabble, at their hateful coarse voices and the mockery—so like…so very like—John made an effort and laughed. “I’m afraid that’s already happened, Mr. Donwell. Many things have changed since we parted. Tell me what I can do for you.”

Alfie laughed in return, and a glint of tired amusement flickered like a rushlight behind his eyes. “So I woke you up for someone else’s benefit? Story of my life.” Then it snuffed out. He bowed his head into his hands and mumbled, “Before they hang me they’ll let me speak. I’m almost looking forward to it. I’ve got a lifetime’s silence to make up for; a hell of a lot to say. I’m going to tell them I could have been the philanderer they take me for. I could have fucked every pretty boy that came my way, but I didn’t. I didn’t. I’m going to be proud to tell the world I’m hanged because he loved me. To say I died for love.”

“Alfie!”
The words struck John like shot, lodged in him, but in this battle—as in all battles—he did not have time to stop and consider his wounds. He wanted to shake the man, but refrained. “Please tell me you will not blurt out the whole story to the court martial. Continue to protest your innocence and I will find some way to force them to see it.”

“You can’t see a thing that isn’t there.”
“There must be something I can do! For God’s sake Alfie, this is not the time for you to play at martyrdom. There must be
someone
who can be bribed. Threatened…Tell me!
Think!”
Alfie raised his head and looked at John quizzically, as if he did not recognize what he saw—unsurprisingly, for John did not recognize this in himself either. But then, as if returning from a long way away, Alfie said “You could speak to Mrs. Shaw, the gunner’s wife. She said…but I don’t see…”
“I will find something,” John insisted. “As long as you don’t confess. I know you have no cause to trust me but I will find a way to save you. Storm the jail with pistols—as half
Britannia
’s crew have stopped by my lodgings this morning to suggest—if I must. I swear.”
Rats scuffled in the straw as damp trickled down the bars between them. Even with the pirates’ defiance and despairing gaiety in the cell beyond, the jail brooded over them, haunted with phantoms of the past. Outside, the fort’s clock struck noon with an incongruous silver jingling of bells. Within, the air pressed too close to breathe, hot and damp as the jungle and equally deadly.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Alfie choked out at last, a glimmer beneath his closed eyes as he leaned his head against the bars. John hauled in his jealousy, though the lines creaked with strain. This was not the moment to say “it was Farrant who brought you to this” or “he never cared for you the way I do. Do you know what I have given up for you?” There never would be a moment to say that last, no matter how the loss ached and burned.
“Time brings healing,” he tried instead, conscious of how badly they both needed it.
Flakes of rust peeled from the bars and dusted Alfie’s pale hair. Their faces tilted so close together their breath mingled as if in a kiss.
“Death brings it sooner,” Alfie said.

With a grating clash and clatter, the jailer shot the bolts of the outer door and pushed it open. The shriek of rusty iron hinges on rusty iron pintles woke Alfie from his feverish doze. A stripe of sunlight fell across the floor like a spill of burning oil, scorching his eyes. His head throbbed and his tongue lay stiff and dry in a mouth choked with sand. As air billowed in from outside, it stirred the fetid air within, and scents of piss-buckets, puke, and ordure washed over his face.

The marines’ cheerful crimson coats, stainless stockings, and the shining bayonets on the end of the rifles leveled at Alfie’s chest, seemed glimpses into a heaven of cleanliness inaccessible to sinners like himself. He scrambled to his feet, backed into a corner, and stood passively as the jailer’s servants unlocked his cell, took out the night-soil bucket, and locked it again.

“S’your lucky day, Mr. Donwell.” The jailer passed bread and a mug of weak breakfast grog through the bars. “I seen men rot away in here for years, waiting for a court. Yours is set already. Day after tomorrer, you’ll be out of here. One way or another, eh?”

While marines and lackies moved on to the communal cell, the man leaned his shoulder on the bars, buried his hand in his right hand waistcoat pocket and arranged his handkerchief to just peek out over the top.

Alfie received the sign with blankness, though it brought to mind some memorable occasions on park benches in the cruising grounds of London. That too was another world, shut away behind a closed door.

“’Tis the end of the war.” The jailer rubbed a hand over his bald spot, undeterred by this lack of reaction. “All the captains back on station ready to go home. There weren’t no problem finding five to make up a board for you. S’good, aint it? His Majesty’s hospitality not being what you might call Fiddler’s Green.”

Alfie swallowed a gulp of the grog, worked his mouth until it felt capable of getting out speech. Why had he never noticed before what a complex procedure it was? “Yes…it’s good.”

Beaming with pleasure, the jailer tucked his pocket handkerchief away and hitched up his threadbare breeches. “So, is there anything I can get you? You made a packet, from what I hear, on the
Britannia
. May as well spend it while you got the chance. Oysters and champagne? Doxies? Nice new suit for the trial? You name a preference, I can provide it, for a little finder’s fee.”

What did Alfie want? He found it hard to think of anything, his mind stupefied. Looking up he caught a dozen pairs of eyes watching him from the adjacent cell as the whores, thieves, and dockyard gutter trash listened in. “Privacy?”

“Can’t do that, sorry, sir. If you was to off yourself beforehand there’d be hell to pay.”
Death.
It seemed, all at once, a pleasant prospect. Farrant had found it a release from a problem, a life, he could not untangle though he tried. At the thought, Alfie breathed in sharp, bit his tongue until the blood flowed, coppery and warm.
“Water then, for washing. Clean clothes. I stink.”
“Can’t tell, in here.” The jailer lifted a dismissive shoulder, but looked downcast. “That’s all? How about a priest, maybe? Very comforting, a chaplain, in times of need.”
“What do I have to say to a priest?” Alfie untied his moist cravat and wiped his face on it, leaving a rusty brown stain.
Would a priest listen if I tried to tell him that love was the fulcrum of my

existence? That all I want is what any married man has; someone to share my life with. Someone into whose bed I can crawl at night. Someone to cherish and protect. He’d nod in sympathy right up until I told him the man’s name.

“Maybe you’re right.” The jailer sniffed, settled a little more solidly against the wall, squinting up with his colorless eyes. “You want to write a letter t’ your family?”

“I have none.”
“Cheery soul, ain’t you?”
Alfie gave the ghost of a laugh. “But I should make a will.

The jailer’s presence had been an irritation, but his absence left room for the endless round of recriminations, doubts, and self-examination to begin again. He had such dreams, and they did not seem particularly vile. He didn’t want to corrupt anyone’s children, ruin anyone’s life with bribery or blackmail. He didn’t want to make the whole human race like himself, only to find one other man of the same persuasion whom he could make happy.

Is it truly so terrible to set one’s heart on finding love?
John, with his Christian principles, should have an answer to that, but who knew
what
John thought, these days? Farrant had certainly tried to be what everyone had expected him to be; tried to be both the husband and the monster. But it had not seemed to give him a moment’s satisfaction.

Alfie pinched his eyes shut and dug the heels of his hands into them until the darkness was full of sparkles, as the thought of Farrant’s death broke over him again. Had he really meant to die, as Dr. Berkley implied? Had Alfie disturbed, somehow, the balance of his lusts and indifference, and brought the man to an impasse he could not solve in life?
Please no! Please say I did not.

If that was the case, it was in its small way John’s fault. If John had not flown out on him in such a rage that he feared for his life, he would never have brought his unwelcome presence back into Farrant’s life. If John had not been such an idiot as to get himself captured, Alfie would have known the wound was not healing, would have insisted on its being professionally handled. They might have caught the infection in time, if not for John.

And now John thought he could make it better with a word. Unconsciously Alfie licked his lips, trying to taste the kiss. The kiss like a punch in the mouth, unwanted, unwelcome, the pain of it staggering
. Self-satisfied, merciless bastard!

A prickle of tears wet the palms of Alfie’s hands. His shoulders shook. He sniffed to clear a suddenly blocked nose, but as he was softening into the embrace of grief a dead rat hit him on the back of the neck. He snapped upright again, hearing the laughter.

They had no call, any of them, to treat him like this. He didn’t deserve this. He’d done no one in the world any harm.
Except perhaps…

Imagination stirred slowly, suggesting that—if this was, as John said, a sort of martyrdom—there was still one last sacrifice he could make. When writing equipment arrived, he squeezed into the corner of the cage where the jailer’s lantern was most bright, steadied the folded paper on hat and knee, and performed the only act of penance he could feel was appropriate.

Lady Lisburn,
he wrote, the ink spattering from the badly cut nib as his hand shook.
Forgive my impertinence and allow me to present my condolences to you in this unhappy hour.
He was sure he could not be in more agony if he wrote the letter in his blood, but this needed to be said. While he could not see what was so evil in wishing to love, the truth was he was still not entirely innocent. He had hoped, after all, to separate a man who was—in his own way—a loyal husband from his loving wife.

Please allow me to take this opportunity to tell you there was no one in your husband’s heart but yourself. There never was any rival in his affections for you. All his thoughts and deeds were motivated by your welfare, and to my knowledge a more faithful husband never breathed.

John hesitated only for a moment in the doorway of Mrs. Shaw’s house before surrendering to the inevitable and finding himself drawn in and forcibly sat down in a small parlor. He’d never seen a room so full of knickknacks and linens. A gallery of watercolors hung on the walls, and occasional tables littered every free space, cluttered with scrimshaw trinkets. Despite the heat outside, a fire burned in the hearth, with a crewel-work fire-screen before it which matched the heavy embroidery of the tablecloths. Curtains of lace hung limply at the window, and rag rugs completely covered the floorboards in shades of jonquil and heliotrope.