Read His Heart's Obsession Online

Authors: Alex Beecroft

Tags: #Romance, #Gay, #Fiction, #General, #Historical

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BOOK: His Heart's Obsession
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Chapter Eleven

At sea, off Martinique

Straps held Hal down, digging into his wrists. His heart thundered as terror choked him. The copper and meat reek of gore filled his mouth and nose from the blood that pattered from the ceiling like rain, splashing tepid onto his face. The doctor’s leather apron dripped with it and his hands, gloved in scarlet, gleamed stickily. He tightened the tourniquet around Hal’s leg so relentlessly that Hal struggled—scrabbling, panic bursting behind his eyes like lights—even to breathe.

“Shall we cut it off?” said the doctor, in Hal’s own voice.

“No!”

“Look at it, you fool, it’s killing you.”

Hands behind him tipped him up. He saw the broken mess—the bones sticking out from the skin, the gangrene, creeping like black worms through his blood. He shivered at the cold of it, the despair, the aching, chronic pain. For so long, he’d suffered, tried to walk on it, tried to pretend it didn’t hurt. Yet still, something deep within his soul revolted at the thought of giving it up. Being maimed. Being incomplete, forever.

“No!”

“Stubborn bastard! Would you rather rot?”

“No!” Hal strained once more against the restraints, desperately imploring the shadows of the room to part and show him help, to show him— “William!”

But even as he pleaded, he knew he was dreaming. He understood that Hamilton was the poison in him, the infection that needed cutting away. He had gone onto that ship to die, and now he was being given the choice in its starkest form.

Utterly vulnerable, poised on the scalpel of decision, Hal had to make up his mind. Live—deformed, the great love of his life excised—or die.

“Which will it be?”

He couldn’t feel the leg now. The tourniquet had done its work. Numbness soothed him, invited him to fall into hollowness and never suffer again. But faintly, as if from a great distance away, he thought he heard words, and a last impulse of life made him strain towards them, needing to hear.

“‘Let us live, my darling, let us love, and all the words of self-righteous old men, let them be nothing to us…’ That’s from Catullus, Hal. Please listen to him. Those old poets knew a thing or two. I only quote them because my own words don’t measure up. I don’t know what to say. Please…”

He thought suddenly of caramel-coloured eyes and laughter. He was twenty-three years old, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed. Would it not be wonderful if he could learn?

He watched the doctor’s fingers flex on the saw and, with a feeling of utter surprise and conviction, he realised that what needed to be cut out was not healthy flesh at all but a canker. Instead of being maimed, he was being offered the choice to be healed.

God, it would still hurt though. Acting before he lost his courage, he closed his eyes and said, “Do it.”

A hand on the mauled flesh. A burst of agony and loss.
Yes, Rob, I want to live. Damn it, William. I’m sorry, but I want to live.

* * *

Hal awoke to a Caribbean noon, wretchedly sticky. The heavy drowsiness of laudanum weighed down all his limbs. Its taste rotted like a dead thing in his mouth.

Nearby, someone snored with a deep reverberation like the creak of the capstan. Turning his head with some effort, he found Robert slumped in untidy sleep on a stool beside his bed. His bristly cheek nestled in Hal’s hand like a rolled-up hedgehog. Hal’s palm lay under Robert’s half-opened mouth, wet with drool.

Hitching over to see clearer, Hal studied the planes of Robert’s sleeping face with a feeling of tired tenderness that surprised him in its intensity. Here was proof, if he liked. He’d asked for honesty and Robert had given it to him, even though he hadn’t really wanted to hear it at all. He’d asked for hard work and sacrifice and devotion, and Robert had provided them and still was. It was he, after all, who crouched by Hal’s side now.

“Hughes?” It hurt even to whisper. When he tried to pull his hand away, a lancing, brilliant pain sliced across his chest. But Robert, startled as if he’d been struck, sat up at once and gave him a look more convincing than anything he had ever said, eyes bright with unshed tears.

Nice eyes. Hal marvelled at the fact. It no longer felt disloyal to notice the way that Robert’s nondescript brown eyes caught the sunlight and disclosed unexpected shades of warm amber, beautiful and rare.

“You…you’re…” Robert’s mouth hung open, a trail of saliva drying on his chin. He wiped it off, hid his face in his hands, his shoulders hunched.

Hal, who had felt like laughing at the rumpled, early-morning look, found himself asking instead, tentatively, “Hughes? Will you…?”

Whatever emotion Robert had been hiding was wiped away as he straightened with a smile that rivalled the sunlight. He twitched the blanket unnecessarily over Hal’s bandaged chest. “What can I do? Anything.”

“Count my legs?”

Robert’s lips quirked up. Hal braced himself to weather some cheerful, thoughtless remark that would leave him feeling stupid. But it didn’t come. Instead, sobering, Robert untucked the sheets and looked. “All present and correct,” he said, reassuringly. “Can’t you…can you feel them?”

One of the boys with whom Hal had entered the service had lost an arm soon after. He vividly remembered finding him sobbing, his nonexistent hand driving him insane with the need to scratch. But Hal felt too tired to attempt to explain the sensation that plagued him, the phantom absence of a morbid love. The scar, scabbed and healing, where it had been cut away. “I dreamed I’d had it amputated. It signified…never mind. Is the captain…?”

Robert turned abruptly away. His cheekbones and jaw stood out, made him resemble a heathen figure from Easter Island, ugly with jealousy.

Seeing it, Hal’s scattered thoughts ran together like sand in a furnace, becoming clear as glass. God! He knew what that felt like. Every time Miss Georgiana Tillyard had deigned to smile at William, every time William had gazed at her, that same jealousy had clawed Hal. Had he really tormented Robert the way William had tormented him—oblivious, stupid, self-absorbed, like his captain?

“Captain Hamilton is fine.” Robert sat down again with a small, worn smile. “He looked in a couple of hours ago, before Dr. McCready told him that if he didn’t rest willingly we’d buckle him down to his bed.”

Hal sighed, the wound waking up along with the rest of him. Trickles of red discomfort warned of worse to come, a pain he deserved. “Wanted t’tell him…” he tried, “to tell him he’s lost his chance. Ah, damn, Robert is there anything to drink?”

“A drink? Yes. I’ll get you something.” Robert lurched to his feet. He had reached the doorway before the first sentence registered and he stopped as though he had walked into the wall. “Wait. What did you say?”

“I am sorry.” Hal allowed himself to admire the vigour of Robert’s gestures, the constant, good-humoured smile, and the strong, masculine face. Experience had marked crow’s feet around Robert’s eyes, roughened his hands, led to the dedication with which he sat, bloodstained, bruised, stiff and hungry beside Hal’s bedside, so that Hal should not wake alone. To think, he had had all that within his grasp for years and had ignored it in favour of a phantasm. The thought intoxicated him. Love? Oh yes, please. He did so want to be loved. “I concede the point. I am convinced by your proofs.”

“Hal?” As he interpreted Hal’s gaze, Robert’s expression melted from mystified to terrified hope. He took a step, then he rushed forward and his hands enfolded Hal’s face. Their noses hit one another with a strange, twanged-ruler kind of pain.

“Ow! Fucking clumsy bastard!”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Did you mean…?”

Hal rolled his head out of range of any more nasal attacks. But he touched Robert’s cheek, explored the shape of it, possessively.
Mine. If I so choose.
“I meant that I believe you love me, and I…”

Robert bowed his head, letting him push his fingers into the bouncy resilience of curly, cocoa-coloured hair. The ribbon that tied it back brushed a collar from which ripped braid hung loose. Plaited gold swayed in front of Hal, unravelling. Hal linked his fingers round it, tugging gently. “I believe I’ve been a very great fool.”

Robert swallowed and gave what would have been a roguish smile had it not been topped by tear-bright eyes. “A fool? You, Mr. Morgan? Surely not.”

Hal would have smacked him, had there been power enough in his arm. Instead he whispered, “You look uncommonly rough.” The muscles across Hal’s chest cramped. He lowered his hand to the covers and tried to convey relief and reassurance with a smile. “Sleep. Afterwards we can have breakfast, and I’ll have my man sew that up. Yours couldn’t darn a sock.”

Noon change of watch thundered through the ship with drumrolls and a rush of feet. Robert sat beside him, took the fallen hand in his own and asked, “Are you trying to take over my life, Mr. Morgan?”

“If I’m still invited to?”

Clearly it was the grin that brought out the topaz in Robert’s eyes, because their beauty shone out, framed in that look of mingled delight and humour.

“I should tell you,” Robert confided, as if whispering a national secret, “it was your organisational skills which made me envy Hamilton first. The way you ran around, anticipating his every need. I wanted that for myself. A nubile young man waiting on me hand and foot? Who wouldn’t want such a thing?”

Hal sniggered. “You should go to the doctor to check that concussion.” And it all seemed somehow easier than he had feared. The lightning-bright intensity of what he had felt for William seemed more like obsession, a madness even, beside this revelation of ease and comfort. How delightful, to relax and exchange witticisms and know exactly where one stood. No more secrets. No more lies, no need for shame.

Robert leaned in to kiss him, but flinched at a noise outside the door and thought better of it. “True, I am so tired I can’t see straight. But there are a score of things I need to tell you. I thought I’d lost the chance forever and…”

The atmosphere of easy contentment shaded into embarrassment. Hal examined the stitching of his cot.

Robert fidgeted from foot to foot, tried to finish the sentence and failed. “And I’d better go and get you that drink first.”

* * *

Later, Hal lay propped up on pillows, watching the dazzle of light from the sea. Laudanum and weariness suspended him in a world without time, as he waited while Robert slept. With drugged lack of urgency, he considered his new lover, contemplated lips and legs and prick, the curve of Robert’s back, the nape of his neck, in a detached, almost asexual wonder. A pleasant exercise. He could have spent longer at it, except that, beside him, the book which Robert had brought with his grog lay unopened, and he felt he should show willing and at least read a few pages.

Laboriously, he edged the volume to the side of the cot, thumbed it open. Slipped into the water-stained pages he discovered a loose leaf, newly black with the sprawling, untidy results of Robert’s penmanship. The fresh ink smelled like vinegar and blackened his trembling fingers.

He read the poem, at first in disbelief and later in a kind of anguish of joy, blaming his injury for the tears it brought to his eyes.

Just as the dolphins frolic in the wave

Whose smiling faces seem to presage joy,

Immersed and lapped in all that they can crave,

With freedom and with laughter unalloy’d,

Or as the frigate, braced and running well

Before the wind, with ev’ry sail outspread,

Flings up the foam and dances on the swell,

With schools of flying fish about her head,

Just so my heart, when I behold your face,

Rises on gilded wings and rides the spray.

Yet, as I yearn, unmet by love’s embrace,

So my pure joy is drained into dismay.

Oh changing ocean, master of my soul,

Without you, love, I never can be whole.

It took a while before he could overcome the desire to weep, inexpressibly moved, and laugh instead. But laugh he did, at last, feeling that now the world had finally come right. Because here was the Robert upon whom a university education had been almost entirely wasted. Disconcerted and suspicious, Hal would not have believed any of it, had bad poetry not featured at all.

Chapter Twelve

Kingston, Jamaica

Hal had walked from the harbour up King’s Street unaided, but now he stood at the door of his lodgings, head down, trembling with the effort of holding himself up.

“He lives on the top floor,” said Hamilton, looking at Robert with that gentleness of his that made it, even now, so painful to know what contempt lurked underneath. “In a little garret of a room. I don’t believe he can make it up the stairs alone. But I am already late for—”

“It’s all right sir, I’ll take care of him.”

Hal’s head had tilted slightly, so Robert knew he was listening in. He wondered how much of the man’s scowl was mere physical exhaustion, how much still the poison of his love. As he watched Hamilton leave—his step more sprightly for being rid of the injured man—Robert took Hal’s arm and slipped it over his shoulder. “Come on, then. One more effort and then rest.”

It must have taken half an hour at least simply to climb the four flights of rickety wooden stairs. The landlady had been up twice while they rested on the first landing, taking up fire in a bucket, a pitcher of hot water, clean sheets.

“Just want to sleep now,” Hal complained, his body shuddering in Robert’s grasp as he trudged mute and suffering up the next flight.

“Not on the stairs, dear boy.” Robert had to laugh at the grimace that provoked. “You are a cross-grained crotchety bastard, Morgan, and ten years my junior, so I’ll call you a boy if I wish.”

Weary eyes closed to disdainful slits. “Not if you want to…you know.”

It was sweltering here in the little wooden passage, with the great heat of the Caribbean sun beating on the wattle wall, and Robert divested himself of his coat and wig, left them lying limp on the treads. The air was full of the smell of dust and sewage, his own sweat and Morgan’s, and he was happier than he’d been in years, with that arm around his shoulders, that golden head drooping against his shoulder. “I’d carry you if I could, but you’re a fucking weight. I’d fall, and we’d both end up broken at the foot of the flight.”

Hal breathed out—a long sigh as of a man receding into sleep. His voice too was a mere drowsy mumble. “You wouldn’t fall. Been thinking…I don’t know, don’t know why I didn’t see it, before.”

Robert eased his back and took a firmer grip on Hal’s wrist. “Didn’t see what?”

“You. You, here. Him not. You’re so much warmer. Don’t know what I saw…in him. You wouldn’t let me fall.”

It took Robert a second to catch up with this, but when he did, his heart gave a strange squeeze of joy—joy as pointed as pain. Hal’s plain speaking always seemed to put the Latin poets to shame.

He bit his lip to avoid crying on the stairs and alerting the landlady to his state of love-struck idiocy, but the ache in his cheeks told him he had not managed to subdue his smile. “Ah, well, let’s not put that to the test. Come on. One more flight.”

They made it to the room at last—half of the attic, the bed tucked under the sloping edge, so one could just about stand up straight near the door. Hal collapsed onto the mattress, curled up with all his clothes still on, and Robert knelt by him, slipped off his shoes, hauled him into a sitting position and peeled away coat, cravat and waistcoat with movements that attempted to be both gentle and brisk.

It was too much to ask of him. Privacy at last, and a bed, and Hal smiling at him with a look of fond exasperation.

The sounds of Kingston filtered through the wall—the cries of the marketplace, a ballad-seller, closer to them, singing in a husky-sweet soprano, hoofbeats on the street. Within, the shutters on the tiny window were closed, and dust danced gold in the blades of sunlight that sliced through the cracks between the boards. Stripes of light on the bare boards of the floor led his eye up to the bed, across the counterpane and to the hinge of Hal’s jaw. Without the cravat, his collar gaped, exposing the strong column of his throat, the smoothness of skin that had never seen the sun.

Robert attempted to be very heroic. “I should…I should let you—”

And Hal did something astonishing—something he had not done in all the years Robert had known him. He laughed, the sound of it rusty and unpractised, like a room in a fine country estate being opened up once more, all the dustsheets taken off and the fires lit in preparation for the family to come home.

“Don’t be an idiot, Hughes. Come to bed.”

Robert laughed himself then, that being the better option than allowing the tears of relief and joy that still pricked in his eyes to spill. Pulling his own clothes off in rough haste, he dropped them on the floor, rolled Hal to one side so he could pull the sheet out from beneath him, and got in, pulling the cover up over them both.

It made a little fabric world around them, inhabited only by themselves. In it, he felt sheltered enough, intimate enough, to take off even his shirt—to lie down quite naked next to Hal’s relaxed form. Hal smiled and wound a trembling hand around his neck, drawing Robert’s face down to his own. The kiss was weary, tentative, but oh so sweet, Hal’s lips dry and smooth against his own. Then they opened and he let Robert’s tongue into his mouth. Robert groaned and held himself back from rolling atop Hal, pressing him hard into the mattress. He wanted to possess him—to feel all Hal’s anger and passion unleashed on him, and ride it, tame it.

But that would come later, when he was well again. Here, now, they had to be gentle. Hal shifted accommodatingly to allow Robert to pull his shirt over his head, unbutton and slide his breeches down. The bandage on his chest was clean, unspeckled with blood despite the walk home, but it was enough of a reminder to calm Robert’s furious thoughts, make him lean over and kiss the patch of skin where the gauze passed over Hal’s shoulder, crawl lower and nip at the ribs and belly beneath.

Hal laughed again, a little more confidently this time, and cuffed Robert gently on the ear as he squirmed.

“Tickles!”

Hah!
Robert stored the fact away in his memory for future occasions, already grinning at the thought. Hal was the kind of man who would undoubtedly deserve retribution on a regular basis, and here he’d handed Robert the method on a plate. He kissed him again, Hal’s skin as pale as pouring cream beneath his lips. Then he rubbed the bristles of his beard there, making his lover wriggle again and choke back a noise of reproachful laughter. Three times now—not that Robert was counting—and the sound of Hal’s mirth was fast becoming his favourite sound in the world.

One of his favourite sounds, at least, because that little sob of surprise and bliss—the one he gave when Robert dipped his head further and slid Hal’s member into his mouth, laving it with his tongue—that was—huh—that was…

Touch and scent and taste washed his thoughts out of his ears, everything simplifying itself down to this—to worshiping Hal’s body with his tongue and his throat, feeling the ache of it transmuted by the alchemy of desire into tingling bliss beneath his skin. It took a sharp tug on his hair to make him unlatch, look up with some reproach at Hal’s blown pupils, his bemused and glowing smile.

“Up.” He tugged again, and Robert obeyed. “I want you to kiss me. Don’t just want…”

The memory of Hal’s first panicked rejection recurred and made Robert’s heart throb in counterpoint to his lust. Hal didn’t just want release. He’d made that clear enough. He wanted intimacy—proof of love.

Aligning himself hip to hip with Hal, Robert wound his left arm around Hal’s neck, pulled him closer, kissed again, while his right hand closed around both their pricks and stroked both together, wet and slippery with his own spit. Carefully, gently, they rocked together like that, the pleasure mounting with every thrust, Hal growing progressively wilder beneath his kisses, until he was thrusting back—demanding, shameless—pressing little bites along the length of Robert’s throat.

Robert came in a rush that broke him open and let out an emotion so strong it might almost have been grief. Hope, fulfilled after so long, felt…he didn’t know how it felt. He was hot and sticky and smelled, and he was thrumming with the need to do it again, better, harder, longer, forever.

Hal opened an eye crinkled at the edges with smiling. There was darkness in it still, but less than there had been, something new and fragile in its place. For a moment Robert hoped Hal would say “I love you,” but Hal only shifted so he could nudge his head beneath Robert’s chin and murmured, “You had better get used to me, Robert. Took breaking me apart to make me stop loving him. So it’s going to take death or more to prise me away from you.”

Oh, but there, Robert thought, watching a sunbeam move on the wall while Hal rested, but there it was. “I love you,” in almost as many words. And maybe it was early days and neither of them entirely believed it as yet. But if Hal wasn’t going anywhere, he certainly was not. Time would do the rest.

He dipped his head and quoted Wilmot,

“‘Kind jealous doubts, tormenting fears,

And anxious cares, when past,

Prove our hearts’ treasure fixed and dear,

And make us blessed at last.’”

Then he laughed, because even in his sleep, Hal had smiled at the verse. It seemed the hard-headed sea dog was as susceptible to poetry and sunsets as Robert was himself.

I knew I should have gone with Plan A from the start.

* * * * *

BOOK: His Heart's Obsession
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