Captain's Surrender (13 page)

It was hard to listen to this when she should know that he loved her. Had he not just proposed? What more proof of his regard did she need? What more did she expect from him? And yet as she broke off and turned partly away to conceal the gulping down of tears, another part of him was furious at himself for hurting her, for making her look like this. He stepped forward and reached out to take her hand, but she wrenched it away and turned fully, leaving him to converse with the nape of her neck, and even that seemed to radiate affront, as if to tell him that he was not wanted here any more.

"You are just as bad as all the rest of them," she hissed. "If I am to be treated as a possession no matter what I do, I do not know why I should not sell myself to the highest bidder. If you will not let me earn my own bread and have my own choice, how are you different from my father and Kenyon?"

With her back turned, she missed the flush of anger that Adam could feel scald into his face, driving out thoughts of how hurt she must be to say these things, replacing them only with thoughts of how little she must care for him to want to wound him so.

"If I must be a prize, why should I not marry Kenyon? He would at least give me a carriage and servants and a comfortable life and be gone to sea three months out of every four, so I might have my freedom in his absence."

"Oh, is that your answer indeed?" Adam resisted the urge to throw his hat onto the ground and trample on it by instead pulling on his cuff until the lace separated beneath his fingers. He had to tear something, and the strip of linen made a gratifying struggle before ripping.

"As you wish! Then I offer you joy of my own absence, since that is the freedom you seem to crave. By all means marry where you see fit. I am only sorry that you are so repulsed by my own offer as to hurl yourself into the arms of a man you professed to dislike. But perhaps—as with your affection for me—your dislike for him will prove strictly temporary. I hope your future life is to your satisfaction, Miss Jones. Good day."

She did not turn back to watch him walk away, and he, striding out with the ferocious energy of anger, had reached the entrance to Water Street before he realized that she was not going to follow. Pausing there, his better nature urged him to go back, to speak gently to her and have her smile at him again. But pride forbade him. He had nothing left but his pride, neither ship nor stores nor—now—hope, and he refused to allow any of it to make him crawl.

Chapter 15
The light of the hot tropic sun flooded through the windows of the orangery and glinted from the rope of pearls which Emily had wound into her corn gold hair. Peter uncrossed his ankles and looked for inspiration at the tawny surface of his tea, trying to think of something to say. Miss Jones was in wonderful looks today, with a very attractive blush glowing on her cheeks, but she seemed less outspoken than he had known her to be before. He could not conclude in his mind whether this was a good sign or a bad.
"So tell me again about your latest acquisitions," said Summersgill, rising to help himself from the plate of sugared fruit which sat on the table between them. Summersgill had a more rounded look to him now. It seemed that the punishing climate suited him. "I understand it was the thirty-two which was smuggling arms?"
Peter blessed him for his tact. As he had already been through the exact cargo manifest and the potential contacts at either end of the trade route with Summersgill in his professional capacity, this could only be a rescue from the way his mind went blank when expected to be witty and entertaining.
"The
Macedonian
, yes," Peter said. "I had a tip off from one of the men at the docks—I took his brother on recently as cook, and in gratitude, he suggested the ship should be watched. We intercepted it a little over fifty miles off shore from Boston, and when we made our signal, rather than prepare for inspection, they bolted for shore.
"But the
Seahorse
, as you know, is a fine ship for sailing close hauled, and had fully two points on her. We came up close into the wind, caught her within three miles and gave her a raking broadside, stern to stem. She surrendered at once, and once we got on board it was clear why—powder barrels five deep on every deck. The wonder of it was that she hadn't gone sky high with our first shots."
The warm, bright room became, in his mind, the cool brilliance of his quarterdeck. He could almost feel the life of the ship beneath him, hear the cheers, see again the berserker joy on Josh's face as he returned from the boarding party with a bruise on his face—where the
Macedonian's
captain had tried fighting back with a crowbar—and a blaze of fierce beauty in his brown eyes.
Thinking of Josh, Peter smiled to himself, proud that the young midshipman had proved not only an exemplary first lieutenant, but shown himself, on this trip, more than capable of captaining a ship of his own.
Though that thought had its own bitterness. If the
Macedonian
was brought into the service, he knew he should recommend Josh for her commander. But at the thought, Peter suddenly understood why his lover had been so needy recently. Time had reached the point where it would be natural for them to part; to purchase houses of their own, to captain ships of their own, to speak to one another only on those rare occasions when they were both on shore together.
He didn't know why this came as a shock. Nor why it should suddenly strike him now, here of all places. It had always been meant as a strictly temporary arrangement, of course. But he had somehow also managed to avoid the thought of it ever ending, to avoid the thought that he might one day have to choose to give Josh up in order to take a wife and remain faithful to her.
For he couldn't have both. Could he?
A tap on his knee, and he looked up, startled to find Summersgill's eyes trained on him in some concern and Emily watching him with a new born curiosity.
"Are you well?" Summersgill asked gently.
"I'm sorry." Peter shook his head and tried out one of his more polite smiles. He looked at Summersgill's kindly face, and then the subdued beauty of his daughter. Emily's expression was quite composed, but her fingers were pulling the petals from one of the table dressings, scattering them on the tablecloth like huge drops of blood.
No
, he thought, looking at her and seeing for the first time some sort of discomfort, nobly borne, he could not have both. That would be unfair to both, and besides, damaging to his own honor.
Even so, he didn't want to think about it yet. There were some weeks ... months ... perhaps even years yet before the decision would become impossible to put off any longer, and with that comforting thought, he roused himself to be civil and make an effort.
"Do forgive me; I must be excessively dull today, unable to talk about anything but battles. Tell me, Miss Jones, did you finish reading
Julia de Roubigne
? I hoped its abolitionist sentiments would appeal, even if Mackenzie's language is a little ... affected."
Emily looked up with surprise and gave him a smile that, by its sweetness, set into contrast the forced gestures she had used towards him previously. It almost made him wonder if, perhaps, she had not liked him before, which was a sobering sentiment. But if that was so, he consoled himself, she did seem to be coming around. The pleasure of putting delight on Summersgill's face, and of raising Emily's subdued spirits to something more like their usual pitch, made him forget Josh once more and exercise his mind upon literature for the rest of the visit.
He left with a promise to return and a feeling of satisfaction that everything was going very much to plan. * * * *

"Reverend Jenson," Captain Walker welcomed his guest to dinner and fed him on turtle soup, beef and lamb, roast and stewed and flavored with spices, a brace of birds he had shot with his own gun, plum duff, figgy dowdy, jellies of lime and oranges, and a resplendent pineapple, accompanied by tea and coffee, madeira, claret, Nantes and Aguardiente. They were alone for the meal—except, of course, for the phalanx of servants—and he did not scruple to talk business over the meat.

"I hope you will not mind if I address a delicate topic? It is a scandal, sir, how our reluctance to even think about this sin is our greatest hurdle to dealing with it, but I know of you as a man of principle. I read eagerly in the
Times
of your prosecution of that villainous fellow Franklin."

"Oh," Reverend Jenson put down his knife and fork and nodded with an air of understanding, "now I see why you did not extend your invitation to my wife. Yes, it is a topic from which the ladies should be protected with the greatest care. That they should not know it exists at all has always been my ideal, but I take your point. Our reticence should not become a shield behind which these disgusting practices can shelter.

"I remember," he continued, his face glowing with pride, "that in my father's day, the Society for the Reformation of Manners used to prosecute hundreds of the creatures by the month, but ever since the societies were disbanded—perhaps, as you say, through an excess of delicacy, or as I saw it, the sheer fatigue of wading through such dirt for so long—they have thought themselves safe."

"Indeed." at the slight tilt of Walker's head, a servant rushed up to replenish the food on his plate. He kept them well trained or not at all. "Did you know," he said, slicing his meat into small pieces and chewing one before dabbing his mouth with a fine linen napkin and continuing, "there is even a molly house on Silk Alley in St. George's itself."

London?"
"God's truth." Walker raised his hand as if swearing an
oath, and found himself feeling unusually content—oh,
certainly the docklands job was an insult, and there were
many feuds on his hands which he had not yet prosecuted to
their utmost, but it was pleasant to sit and eat a good dinner
with a man who was not always criticizing, either by words or
looks. One who was appropriately conscious of the condescension paid him by being enlisted in this enterprise at all. "I have seen the place myself and had one of my tars feign to be a bugger himself and infiltrate the place. I know of
what I speak."
"But this is terrible!" Jenson pushed the good food in front
of him about with his fork and—perhaps in horror—did not
eat. Walker's feeling of unusual beneficence wore off at the
sight; he did dislike a stingy, stringy little falsely abstemious
man. It was an affront against hospitality to treat his dinner
with such disregard.
"No wonder we are troubled with rebellion in our Colonies,"
Jenson went on. "If what you say is true—and, my dear sir,
believe me, I have no doubt of it—we are being justly
punished by God for our depravities. If we put them behind
us, grubbed their dark roots from our land, so to speak, what
might that not do to turn the tide of affairs in the Americas?
We would surely bring them to a proper submission once
more, once God approved the righteousness of our spirits." "We are of one mind," Captain Walker said, raising his
glass with only a little effort. Reverend Jenson's heart was in
the right place, whatever might be said for his stomach, and
parsons, of course, could not be expected to behave like real
men. "I suggest we begin by rousing up popular opinion
against it; the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, the
unquenched spreading of the pox, the danger to our innocent
sons. And then we may prove that the great days of the
societies are not over by going after these abominations with
extreme zeal, confident that a population educated in the
dangers they pose will not interfere with ill-judged pity." * * * *

"My text today is taken from Genesis, chapter nineteen, verses one to twenty-nine."
Peter's attention was drawn back from the ceiling by the tension in Josh's arm, pressed against his in the overcrowded pews set aside for the gentlemen of the navy. He looked down and saw Reverend Jenson dwarfed by the giant eagle of the lectern, looking like a rather withered choirboy beneath the crimson glory of his chasuble. Seeing nothing to disturb him there, he glanced at Andrews, whose back had straightened until it rivaled the oak of the pews, and whose face was perfectly emotionless in a way that Peter had learned to associate with fear.
Bending his head, as if in prayer, he whispered, "What is it?" and Josh gave him such a look—such a look of indignant terror, as if to say, "Shut up! Shut up, don't draw attention!" that he had to concentrate on the sermon in an attempt to escape its unsettling effects.
But the sermon did not help. "Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom, both young and old, surrounded the house. They called to Lot, 'Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.'"
It was like the wind of a cannon ball—the shot passed by and left him physically unscathed, but within, all his vitals were thrown into disorder and he gasped for breath. Instantly, he felt as though there was a string of signal flags above him pointing him out to the crowd as a guilty man. A man as bad as those who so long ago tried to rape God's angels, a man whose vice was vile enough to call down brimstone and sulfur from heaven, to induce a merciful God to obliterate him and his city together.
"...we are going to destroy this place. The outcry to the Lord against its people is so great that he has sent us to destroy it."
Oh, he knew the story well enough. He had merely avoided connecting it to himself, found something else to think about, falsely reasoned that making Joshua happy was better than ruining the lives or reputations of any young women.
"What can we learn from these verses?" said Jenson's polite, Anglican voice over Peter's suddenly bowed head. "Firstly, I think it is clear enough that God detests this sin above all others. For no other sin has he utterly destroyed a people, leaving even the land on which their city was built as a desolation, salting the ground so that nothing should grow there ever again."
Peter's legs were stretched out beneath the pew in front, thigh to thigh with Josh's, their calves touching. Instinctively, he moved until there was an inch of empty space between them and saw Josh's head bow out of the corner of his eye. Around him, other men were doing the same, tucking their coat tails more firmly in, looking uncomfortable, but he felt still that the very air between himself and Josh was charged with visible guilt.
"Secondly, we can learn to fear the presence of such men in our midst. I have reliably been told that there is a den of this vice on Silk Alley in our very own town. Now you may say to yourself that is very far from being all the men of St. George's, both young and old. Will not God—looking at our city—be able to find at least ten righteous men, and thus spare us?
"Folly, I say, for how can the toleration of this vice count as righteousness? And in this sin, every one of us is complicit. While there remains such an establishment permitted in our city, there is not an innocent man in it, and that is quite apart from the patrons of such a sink. It is of no avail to say, 'Oh, this is a problem of others, none of my acquaintance would sink so low', for does not the Bible tell us that both young and old, all the men of Sodom were implicated. It spreads, my children, like the yellow fever, until it consumes all. Indeed, it is a very sickness of the soul, and as we fumigate our hospitals with sulfur, so God purges this disease from the land."
Disease
, thought Peter, wishing he could escape, feeling exposed and humiliated as he had felt when lashed to the grating. No, this was worse, for there he had had the internal certainty that he was wronged, that he was a victim of sin, not the perpetrator of it. It could be a disease. He could have caught it from Allenby in his youth, been re-infected by Andrews; one in a long line of victims until he became a carrier himself.
"With this certainty, we may reexamine our current peril," Jenson was saying, still with the clear voice and clear conscience of a man who has never even felt tempted to this sin, who congratulates himself on his feelings of disgust. "Many have asked how we could lose the Americas. Why the colonists would wish to separate themselves from their own homelands and their families left behind in Britain. Many of you, I know, have asked yourself whether we were safe here on this little island, with so small a naval force protecting us, or whether we will suffer invasion and dispossession and death.
"Well, I say to you that our safety does not depend on navies, not even on distant kings, but on the direct protection of God. How long can we go on angering him and expect to remain secure?"
There were stern and frightened faces about him now, some serious looks and nodding, and he felt each one as an accusation. More than that, he became aware of the darkness above him in the vault of the roof, the heavy stones, the bells above, and everywhere he looked he seemed to find condemnation, as though the very stones cried out against him.
The service passed in a blur of hot self-awareness. When it ended, and he found himself filing out, expected to shake the vicar's hand, he felt the light should expose him and the touch detect his trembling.
"How refreshing it is," said Josh before him, taking the man's hand with a bravery that humbled Peter, "to hear a man condemn a sin in which he has no part. With what joy one can join in its persecution, knowing that one has no share in it. No fellow-feeling for the sinner."
Reverend Jenson clearly did not hear the rebuke in this remark. He nodded and smiled, and seeing him so fooled, Peter was able to shake his hand with some confidence, but it was still an escape when he turned the corner into Duke of Clarence Street and could no longer feel the presence of the church behind him.
He fell into step with Josh, and they walked together down towards Ordnance Island and along the causeway, sea on either side, the
Macedonian
tied up against the quay, and the
Seahorse
out in the bay, her racing lines silhouetted against water as burningly bright as a sheet of mercury. All the time, he felt a stranger in his own body, a prisoner in his own mind, unable to know what to do. He had been in a kind of Eden before the serpent, somehow unaware on a conscious level of what he was doing. But now he had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and knew that he should be ashamed.
Peter had always been a good boy; dutiful, responsible, truthful, willing to work hard for himself and for others, and he had never had a great deal of experience of guilt. It came upon him now as a calamity.
"We should talk," he said, finally breaking the silence that had lain between them for the last two miles.
"I know what you're going to say," said Josh with some of that same bitter, black humor he had used on Jenson. He raised his head and smiled the smile of a condemned man. "The time had come anyway. This thing between us had run its course—it was time to move on, regardless. Was it going to be 'we can still be friends?' or 'perhaps we'd better make it a clean break'?"
The dreadful, cold mockery of this added another level of pain and shame to the whirlpool in Peter's breast. "Josh!" he cried, feeling shocked and a little betrayed—as it was Josh himself who had given him the impression he expected nothing from him beyond the occasional recreational fuck.
"I'm sorry," said Josh and his voice shook suddenly, making repentance and pity stab through Peter's confused heart. "You're right. I knew this was coming, and I'm glad." He turned his back, but not before Peter had seen the twist of his brows, the compression of his fine oval mouth that gave the lie to his "gladness".
"I'm sorry, too," said Peter, hardly knowing what he said in his desire to make everything right at once. "I shouldn't have ... I shouldn't have begun something with you had I known it would cause you such pain to end it. I shouldn't have been so inconstant. Forgive me?"
Josh walked away, back to the steps that ran down to the beach. The white sand was strewn with rubbish, and he stopped, his head turned towards a straggle of nets, his back to Peter. But Josh's back was eloquent, and its cowed tension told Peter that he would have done better not to speak at all.
"Are you telling me you regret there was ever anything between us?" Josh asked.
"If it provoked you to disappointment. If it made you feel as I feel now, then, yes. I would not have given you such pain had I not thoughtlessly used you to satisfy my own curiosity, my wanton need."
Josh laughed—a cynical sound—but did not turn round. Even the animation of anger was gone when he next spoke, his voice weary and dull. "I could only wish you were sorry for finishing with me, rather than for ever starting."
Damn him, why did he always have to take everything wrongly? A small part of Peter considered the fact that it might not the best time for apologies—while he was guiltstricken and overemotional, terrified of God, man and himself. Sighing, he rubbed the bridge of his nose, walked close enough to see Josh's mobile face gone shuttered and unreadable.
"I don't think you understand, sir," said Josh in a quiet, charged voice. "The world doesn't allow men like me to hope for constancy. I never expected it. You're going to marry. I did expect that. And I'll be glad to see you happy."
He walked down onto the sand, Peter following, torn between the certainty that he must go through with this, and the certainty that if he let Josh go—if he lost Josh, he could not survive it.
"I don't have any
claim
on you, Peter. I never asked for your
fidelity
. I only want..." Josh's breath hitched, betraying some of the misery concealed behind that blank expression. The dark eyes glittered for a moment, then shut, concealing tears. "I want whatever's left over. I'll take anything. Friendship, if that's all your conscience will allow. But I don't ... I don't want you to tell me you regret ever having known me at all."
"It's not..." Touching his arm, Peter chased after the right words, frustrated with his own stupidity. "Not what I meant. Oh, damn it ... you know I'm no good at this stuff. Give me an enemy in my sights and a blue water chase, and I'll know what to do, but I ... Oh, I am hopeless when it comes to love."
Caught in the act of ducking into the shadow of the pier, Josh's step faltered, his mouth and eyes rounded in wonderment, and he stood dumbstruck. It was such a rare occurrence, that even in his half-coherent state, Peter knew he must have said something extraordinary. He worked out what it was just at the point when Josh's expression became a rather dazzled smile.
"Love?" Josh whispered, while his spirit seemed to have caught the fire of the sun, gone golden and remote.
"I suppose it is ... was ...
is
," said Peter, wearily marveling at the way joy made Josh's rather nondescript face look bright and fierce, lending him an inner radiance, a sort of beauty. Such a little thing—surely he must have said it before? And perhaps it would have been better left unsaid at that, for it solved nothing. "But a forbidden love. It was not wrong to love you, but we did wrong to express it as we did. If I am married, and we are in separate ships, I will still love you, for I have never had a worthier friend."
It was cool in the shadow of the pier, and the wet pylons around them smelled sharply of oak and salt, and there boiled up from Peter's imagination the picture of him taking Josh's face between his hands and kissing him soundly, lying him down on the cool, damp sand and showing him with all the force in his body exactly what love was.
The picture left as swiftly as it had come, leaving him shaking, hard, and determined that if either of them were to escape the noose, separate ships were a vital necessity. "But perhaps you were right, earlier, and we should find ourselves lodgings apart—to make it easier to set this sin aside, lest we prove each other's ruin."