His Heart's Obsession (4 page)

“It puzzles me that everyone should think I’m such an expert pilot in these waters.” A frown scored Hal’s forehead with two parallel lines. “I’m every bit as single as the rest of you.”

The candles flickered, the gold and brown dusk of the room filling up with their sweet honey scent. Robert worried his lip between his teeth. Sure though he was of Hal’s inclinations, at this final pinch the terror of exposure burned its way down his backbone like a live ember creeping its way down a slow-match
. I know I’m not wrong. But if I am…?

Glancing up, he found Hal watching him with a look of wary despair, as if he too held back some all-or-nothing confession. The intimacy, it seemed, was encouraging a very different reaction to that for which he’d hoped, other secrets trembling on the brink of exposure.

The end of the world, it seemed, was nigh, and what would come afterward? Heaven or hell?

“Hughes, I… Please. I need to tell you something.”

The words came just as Robert’s pent-up eloquence burst its banks. He couldn’t stop the flood until it was all out. “I’ve loved this young person for years now, unrequited. I believe my beloved thinks of me as a friend. A good friend, I hope. But it’s…it’s… For romantic purposes, I might not exist at all.”

Hal’s lips disappeared as his mouth drew a clamped line of pain. His fingers tightened on his mug. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.” He stood up to take off his coat and, once he had folded it over the back of the chair, he abandoned its discomfort and—as planned—drifted slowly over to sit next to Robert on the bed, looking concerned. “You should tell her. Is she someone I know? Perhaps I should talk to her for you.”

Almost from his first week on station Hal had attracted the young ladies of Jamaica as a flowering tree attracts hummingbirds. With his bright good looks, physical grace and, most of all, his air of romantic tragedy, he remained their darling years later, to the envy of the other officers. An excellent camouflage for his true nature. Robert could have told him that his throng of female admirers was the reason the squadron had a tendency to ask him for romantic advice. Yet how very abandoned he must feel—the unwanted centre of that whirl of intrigue and desire. Surrounded by love’s young dream, condemned himself to loneliness.

Robert ached for Hal with a fierce, hot pain. He put a carefully casual hand on Hal’s knee, feeling the roughness of the heavy linen. The warmth of Hal’s flesh, seeping through it, travelled up his arm like flame eating along a fuse. So far, so good, and yet Hal had been about to tell him something. After all these years of being held at arm’s length, he had been about to confide in Robert as though he considered Robert a true friend.

That was new. The plan could surely wait half an hour while he showed himself worthy of Hal’s trust. “Forgive me. You had something you wanted to tell me and I interrupted.”

Robert refilled the brandy—splash of liquid, reeling pepper-hot smell—and raised his eyebrows enquiringly. “I’m at your service.”

Hal looked away. “It isn’t important.”

“It seemed grave enough to me.”

The refusal ached a little—had the moment passed so quickly? But Robert took the chance to lean forward and slide his hand, in a friendly sort of way, up onto Hal’s white-clad thigh. Hal’s head came up, his eyes dark and startled. For a fleeting instant, Robert thought he saw realisation, understanding, until Hal gave a shudder and dropped his gaze to the surface of his liquor.

“I have a moral dilemma of my own.” Setting his back against the wall, Hal pulled his knees up and wrapped an arm around them, seeming to huddle close inside his own skin against the cold of the outer world. “To tell the truth, it’s wearing me out. I…I am almost at the stage where any outcome, however unfortunate, would be preferable to continuing as I am. But if I were to tell you what troubles me, I don’t think you’d accept my help after.”

Oh, God bless you.
The splinter of heartache beneath Robert’s breastbone stabbed him again, joined to a joy almost equally sharp. He had guessed the secret—unaware of Robert’s nature, Hal was obviously nerving himself up to make the sort of confession that could lead to death. “Tell me, Morgan. You can trust me.”
What will it be? “Hughes, old chap, you’re pouring out your problems to a filthy sod. Don’t hurt me…please don’t hate me…”
“Whatever it is. Nothing you say could damage my respect for you, I swear.”

Robert smiled encouragingly, slipped his hand farther up Hal’s thigh. He hooked his thumb into the flap of Hal’s breeches and pulled it a little open. If the confession proved too hard, all Hal needed to do now was to nod.

But Hal reared back, startled. His eyes rounded, wide and puzzled. “What…?”

“I’ll tell you my secret if you tell me yours.”

Robert leaned in until his nose scraped in the blond stubble of Hal’s cheek. He smelled salt and ambergris and the faint clean scent of Hal’s skin. Cupping Hal’s confused face between his hands, Robert tilted it and kissed him. Hal gasped, his lips parting in surprise, and Robert licked his way into Hal’s open mouth, tasting brandy and apples. Caught off guard, Hal’s first reaction was everything he’d hoped for, his hands coming up and gripping Robert’s arms, pulling close. Hal’s tongue touched his, tentatively, and the flicker of interest poured like fine liquor down his throat, pooled in liquid fire in his belly and groin.

Warmth pulsed beneath Robert’s fingers from Hal’s furious flush. He slid one hand around the nape of Hal’s neck, fingers tangling in silk-sleek hair as he dragged the younger man closer. The other he dropped to Hal’s breeches, worrying the first button through the stiff material. Pleasure vibrated through him in a chord, his whole body singing like a plucked string. Oh, this was all going so very…

Then Hal’s mind must have caught up with what his body was doing and reacted violently against it. He bit down hard on Robert’s tongue. Robert’s mouth exploded with pain and, when he recoiled, Hal shoved him away.

“What the hell are you playing at?” Hal shouted.

Robert swallowed, wincing. His tongue throbbed. The copper taste of blood mingled with the apples. His yard, once stiff and sore with wanting, drooped sadly at the pain and disappointment. “Was there any call for that?” He dabbed at the cut with the back of his hand. “There I am trying to tell you I love you, and you bite my damn tongue off. I have to say it’s not what I hoped. A man could feel hurt.”

Hal slammed his fist down on the window ledge, scrambled off the bed and launched himself to his feet, where he stood gaping at Robert like a fish. A very angry fish. “You—you—I don’t know what to make of you! Are you mocking me? Because…” His fists clenched and he bared his teeth, but furious tears glimmered in his accusing eyes. “Don’t! So you guessed my shameful secret already? Well, you can have me hanged if you will. You can cut me dead if you will. But don’t
laugh!
”

Robert dabbed at his tongue again, the sting of salt from his fingers a distraction from the sensation of having thrown the dice badly and lost everything on the gamble. What was left except honesty, naked and inadequate though it was? “I’m not laughing, Morgan. This person I’m in love with? The one who doesn’t have the faintest idea of what I feel? It’s you, you fool. Didn’t you know? It’s always been you.”

“No!” Hal punched the closed shutters. His knuckles split, and blood mixed with the flying flakes of paint and rust. “You can’t take anything seriously, can you? You’d laugh at your own mother’s funeral. I did hope this at least might be worthy of your considered attention, but no, you have to pull some strange prank. It isn’t funny. It never has been funny.”

“I know. I know that. You love Hamilton. I love you. It’s not terribly amusing for me either.”

These words at least struck home. Hal raised his hands as if to cover his mouth and froze solid for a moment. A bead of blood welled, pooled and ran down his fingers, before he slumped against the wall. “What are you talking about?”

Robert sighed, leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the pulse of desire slowing as he grappled with the attempt to convince a man who had suffered from his practical jokes in the past that this time he was sincere. Perhaps he should have taken this a little slower, convinced Hal of his friendship first? But that would have meant allowing the present misery to go on even longer, and he didn’t think he could have borne that.

“You’ve had enough. I’m right, aren’t I? Enough chasing, enough eating your heart out over a man who doesn’t know you exist, and to whom you would not dare speak if he did. You’ve had more than you can stand, and you thought ‘I’m sick of the pretence. Sick of monitoring every word and gesture in case they betray me. I’ll tell Hughes what I really am. It doesn’t matter if he sends me straight to the gallows because I honestly don’t care to live anymore. I just need one person in this whole damn world to talk to without having to lie.’ That’s it, isn’t it?”

Hal froze again as though a freak arctic breeze had turned the blood in his veins to ice, barely even breathing, as though he could not think and be at the same time. Then his shoulders slumped and he admitted, very quietly, “Yes, that’s it.”

“Is it impossible to believe I might feel the same?”

Hal trudged to the chair, pulled it to himself and settled with a groan. It rocked on its uneven legs beneath him, tapping out a disapproving tattoo “Is it impossible to credit that you’re an invert like myself? God love you, Hughes, but I’ve known you say worse things in jest. Still, I can’t imagine you’d insist on it if it weren’t true, though it’s a shock. I never suspected.” The beaten softness in his voice took on a note of tension. “But love? Is it possible to believe you love me? No. No, it is not.”

“Why?” Robert asked, gripping his new bedspread hard. Creases radiated out from his palm like cracks in ice.

“What is this?” Hal waved a contemptuous hand at the carefully shuttered windows, the suspiciously large brandies, the sabotaged chair. He rose and knocked it to the ground, his lip twisting with disdain. “You know what I feel about Hamilton? The hopeless purity? The daily martyrdom? If that’s love, what’s this? What has love to do with luring a man to your room with sympathy and then getting him so drunk he forgets how to say no? Love? I should want a great deal of proof before I even accept that you know what the word means.”

Grabbing his coat from the floor, Hal stormed out, slamming the door so hard behind him that flakes of plaster fell from the wall. The front door closed with a second violent bang. Sinking down on the bed, Robert ran a hand comfortingly over the crumple in his new counterpane. Then he tossed back the brandy in both cups and began on the bottle.

Chapter Four

Kingston, Jamaica

That…that horse-faced, canting jackanapes!
Hal hurled himself down the stairs and out into the night. Its faint coolness did nothing to soothe his temper—he carried disbelief and insult and outrage under his breastbone like a tiny world of agony, and his mouth burned and ached with a touch-memory as intense as if he’d bitten into a chilli fruit.

His fury drove him along Parade Street, under a moon like a coin dug out of an old grave. The trickle of the gutter in the centre of the street, where Kingston’s foul water swept away down towards the harbour, looked pure in this light—quicksilver and dark. Along the outer edges of the street, daisies nodded in their grass banks, little white flowers furled up tight as they slept. It was a respectable district—the sailors and their whores who laughed and danced down at the docks, and who would be dancing and fucking `til dawn, might have been a world away, not merely a few streets.

Hal thought of joining them, taking off his uniform and finding a tavern where he could get drunk and sing shanties and drown out his incessant regret with animal pleasures. There must be a sailor, somewhere, who’d pin him up against a wall and fuck him, given drink enough and assurances that no one would know. Maybe that would chase away the unwelcome heat Hughes had set into his bones, let him purge it and be done.

But if he was going to settle for that, why not go back and put Hughes to the test? Why not go back and call his bluff—find out exactly how far he had been lying, the bastard! The fucking bastard!

His hurrying steps brought him out into the great emptiness of Kingston’s central parade square. Here, where no lamps hung before the houses, the swathe of stars above him shone out undimmed, cooling his temper. His steps slowed, and departing anger took with it his sense of purpose.

Fucking Hughes.
Why would he keep intruding himself on Hal’s mind and heart when Hal was trying so hard to be pure for William, to think of nothing but William, as a man in love ought to do? Why did he have to work so hard to hate the man? It should come naturally, after everything he’d suffered at Hughes’s hands.

He remembered when they first met. “We’ve been given the honour of receiving a man of learning,” Hamilton had said, with that small, ironic tilt to one eyebrow that in him passed as amusement. “University educated, and polished in mathematics and navigation in the King’s School. I will have to give him to you to din some practicality into him. I’m sure you can show him the ropes.”

“Of course, sir,” he’d said, unimpressed, but already making plans to turn the man into the best sailor he could. “Though I do not see how such a man deserves to come aboard as a lieutenant. How can he have served his sea time? How can he know how to gauge the temper of the men, or to read the sea and the ship—to feel her life through the soles of his feet? How can he be fit to command without those things?”

Hamilton sighed. “There, I have no answer for you. I trust you to teach him these things also. He is your chick, to be raised as you will…” The captain lowered his head into his hand and pinched the bridge of his nose. “But, Morgan, it says here that he is to be received into the
Swiftsure
as first lieutenant.”

Even now, Hal could feel again the outrage like the taste of blood in his mouth. “
I
am first lieutenant! I have earned it, I have served my time. How? How can that be?”

Hamilton had actually reached out and closed his hand around Hal’s fist, and that too he could feel to this day, as though the touch had entered under his skin like ink in a tattoo. “His father had his name entered on the books of several ships even while he was in actuality ashore. He has, on paper, more sea time than you do, though he has never set foot on a ship before today.”

“That is—”

“I know. And I will fight this for you, Morgan. I shall not see you disadvantaged thus by some Admiralty lickspittle. But in the meantime, consider, this is what the Army must face all the time—rich young idiots buying their commissions, foisted on fighting men who know better. At least I know I may trust all my other officers, and I know I may rely on you to bring this one up to scratch also. Will you accept the task?”

To train my own replacement?
Hal wondered now if that had been the day when the fiery, beautiful thing he felt for Hamilton had begun to turn sour. It was unfair to blame Hughes for that too, but he was not feeling like being fair tonight. “Of course, sir,” he had said, resentment like a splinter in his throat, and gone out at Hamilton’s side to look at the prodigy, already with a view to criticise.

The young man blessed with such an accommodating father had been standing in a posture that on Hamilton would have looked elegant—one foot turned out, hand on his sword, just as though he was posing for his portrait. On him it looked pretentious. He had an equine face, and smiled over-easily, familiar and insinuating.

“I understand you have taken my seniority, Mr. Hughes,” Hal had said. “But I nevertheless expect you to take my instruction from now on until I deem you fit to command.”

And perhaps it had been a slightly aggressive way to begin, but Hughes’s coffee-coloured eyes did not have to light up with mocking laughter, and he did not have to reply
“Di immortales virtutem approbare, non adhibere debent,”
and grin like a hyena while Hal was standing dumbly, feeling stupid and small, resentful and very hard done by.

Fucking Hughes.

In the centre of the parade square, four great wells went down deep into the earth and a chill air came off them, so that it was pleasant to sit there, or to lean one’s arms on the lips of the wells and look down. Ferns grew in their depths, and at noon one could see the sun reflected like a shield of gold hundreds of feet down. Tonight he could not make out the stars on the still water, but the cool, damp breeze eased some of his irritation, allowed him to stop moving for a while, sit down and draw breath.

It took an unconscionably long time for him to calm himself, sitting with his fingers pressed to his mouth, where he thought he could still feel the graze of bristle in a stinging tingle along his upper lip. When he did finally manage to stop the voice of panic in his head, other less comfortable thoughts came crowding after it.

For if he hated Hughes, pure and simple as that, why had he gone to him with this terrible confession? Why, for that matter, did Hughes still fret him so after years of serving together? Any other man he would have grown used to by now, learned to tolerate his foibles and work around them. Only Hughes got under his skin so, left him feeling raw and exposed, and
visible
in a way no one else did.

And with all this, despite the hint Isobel had given him that she would prove a safer confidant, he had still gone to Hughes to blurt out his tale of obsession, in the hope of being comforted, or at least understood.

He bowed his head into his hands and tried to rub away the incipient headache. What exactly had just happened? He’d run from it as though the world were cracking open and a devil scrambling out of the abyss to chase him. But why? What was so very intolerable that he dared not stay to hear it? Had fucking Hughes really said “I love you” to him? Was it at all possible that he could really mean it? That it wasn’t all a cruel joke?

The wind, blowing from the harbour, brought a carillon to his ears as the anchored ships struck eight bells in the first watch. Over on the other side of Parade Square, a well-dressed young gentleman walked his pale horse past the city graveyard, looking like a ghost himself in his silvery-grey suit beneath the moon.

Hal breathed deep of the damp, cool air, trying to shift the clenched fist that—these days—had taken up permanent residence in his chest. He had a feeling that if he reached in and prised the fingers apart, he would find the pressure had turned his heart to black ooze. “Lift up your hearts,” they said in church, and he always saw himself holding up a double handful of stinking tar.

He should be grateful. The thought struck him with a feeling of surprise. Hadn’t he just been wishing for a confidant? For someone to talk to who would not have to be lied to? And here he had one, close at hand, in the very next cabin to his. Wasn’t that a boon? Ought he not to be glad?

Well, yes, he thought, the anger turning like the tide and flooding back. If only it hadn’t been Hughes. Hughes, who he couldn’t trust to keep his mouth shut. Hughes, who was clearly every part the predatory monster the pamphlets claimed of his kind of man. Hughes—to whom he could not confide anything without fearing it would later find itself immortalised in bad poetry and drinking games.

He could have coped with horror. If the man had allowed him to confess his inclinations in the sober and guilty way they deserved, and had leaped up to denounce him, he could have accepted that. He’d been prepared to throw the dice, even if they landed on death. He just hadn’t been prepared for…whatever that was. And what had it been? Some kind of opportunistic ambush? A bet? No—for who would have bet on the outcome of such a criminal activity?

Hal sighed again. His shoulders ached with tension, and no matter how often he reminded himself to drop them they rose again up to his ears, made his neck and head ache.
Suppose,
he thought again, grudgingly,
Hughes actually meant it? Suppose he’s in love with me?

He scrabbled a stone out of the dirt and hurled it with force down the well. The hollow plunk as it hit the water was not loud enough to express his anger at that thought.
If he is, wouldn’t that be the greatest joke of all?
Fucking Hughes, who still couldn’t take his job seriously, who had to be watched at every step to be sure he wasn’t larking about with the midshipmen instead of paying attention to his own duties. Fucking Hughes—Hal’s greatest failure, because after five years’ careful tuition he still seemed to think you could reason with a storm or laugh in the face of the sea.

He was nothing at all like Captain Hamilton—like the kind of man Hal admired—and he expected Hal to fall into his bed out of what? Gratitude that he’d taken an interest? A lack of other prospects? Well, if Hughes thought all he had to do to win Hal’s affection was to crook a finger at him as though he was some kind of manservant, he could choke on it. Hal had his pride and his own right hand, and he’d rather go to hell alone than be with a lover he despised.