False Colors (10 page)

Alfie leaned forward and tapped John on the arm, then pointed to the mouth of the bay, into which a Second Rate was sweeping like a stately queen. “I wonder who that is?”

Cicadas droned unnoticed. John took a sip of his coffee then brought his eyeglass out of his pocket, unfolding it. He watched in admiration as the ship drew closer. The prompt and even stylish way she handled her sails, the exactness of her slowing and furling, and the way she anchored with barely a splash formed a large part of his appreciation of her beauty. Though that was fine enough—her sails white, her hull red and canary yellow, her gingerbread work and cannons glittering in the sun. It was a joy to see so fine a ship handled with a smartness that befitted her.

He watched as the sailors lowered a gilded barge into the sea, and poured aboard it like a rush of white foam down the side. The oars raised like wings as the last man came aboard and sat down in singular glory—a king—in the stern. Only when the oarsmen began their stroke did John notice that they too must have been picked for their beauty. Golden light gleamed on tight white trousers and glistening muscles, on faces shaved to beardless perfection, and long hair curled loose on broad shoulders.

John’s admiration altered to a kind of horrified glee. He passed the telescope to Alfie, wanting to share the joke. “Whoever he is, he must be an excellent backgammon player.”

Alfie gave him a quizzical smile, as though he either had not understood the cant term for a sodomite, or simply did not believe John capable of making such a joke. Dusting icing sugar from his fingertips, he took the glass and looked.

Only a month ago, John might have missed the change that came over Alfie as he focused on the brightly braided gentleman John had pointed out. The lieutenant covered both the wince and the sudden drain of color from his face by ducking his head into the shadow of his hat. But after this past week, John could read Alfie’s expression from the turn of his tensed back, the white knuckles of fists he had never seen so tightly clenched.

“What is it?” he asked, taken aback. Reaching out, he curled his hand protectively about the other man’s wrist, and yes, it was trembling.

“Nothing at all, sir,” Alfie looked up, in what was clearly supposed to be a gesture of reassurance. It revealed his suddenly terrified look to John’s waiting gaze. Not quite meeting John’s eyes, Alfie wiped sweat from his upper lip, scrubbing both hands over it, one after another. This having given him no apparent relief, he launched himself to his feet, his back held as rigid as if it had been lashed. “I think it must be time for you to get back inside. You don’t want to overstrain yourself.”

“Nonsense! I feel better than I have for months. I could climb the rigging, even.”
“Well….” The terrace was ringed with planters full of trailing flowers. Alfie fled to the nearest one, and returned, in a pointless dance of agitation that made John’s stomach clench. “Well…I’ve had enough of the sun. It gives me a headache. Wish you good day, sir, but I must…I want to go inside.”
Returning to their rooms, John watched with concern as Alfie faded before his eyes; from a vibrant presence with a luscious, deep brown voice—a sharp witted, sharp tongued, fiercely intense presence—to something not far from nothingness. He fell into the seat in front of all John’s paperwork; the chitties and reports, logbooks and lists that made up a captain’s day to day work, on ship or off. The table had been placed close to the window, to have the light for longest, but after a moment’s sitting with his head bent, Alfie moved it back into the shadows, complaining about the heat.
“Alfie,” John began, a hollowness inside him worse than the axe wound, “what’s wrong? Tell me!”
“Is that a command, sir?” Terrified guilt met his gaze as Alfie looked up.
“No. No, of course it isn’t—”
“Then please leave me be.”
A knot of rage drove John out of the room, leaving Alfie alone in their shared quarters with the shutters closed. Returning to the café to settle the account, John glared down at the Second Rate. The captain’s barge now nodded against the dock. The man himself stood on the wharf like a beau at a ball, ready to be admired. From the diamond cockade of his hat light lanced out in a shameless star.
John clenched his fists and turned away, setting off downhill towards the Admiralty offices, determined to discover the truth at once.

“We’re friends, Mr. Donwell, aren’t we?” John asked. Returning to their lodgings with the twilight, after an afternoon of discreet enquiry brought him the kind of news that made his blood curdle in his veins, he found Alfie watching the door, with a book lying closed on his lap and his hand on his small-sword.

Under that threatened, tense regard, John wondered if it was true. This...whatever it was...they’d been engaged in over the past few months, so intimate, so skirting the bounds of propriety— was it really friendship?
But if not, what then?

Alfie raised his head and gave a quick, defensive smile; a ridge of white teeth in the dimness, and his smoky eyes unfathomable. “How can I tell the friend without the captain finding out?”

“I may have already guessed,” John murmured, heavily. “You were on his ship, weren’t you? Did he...?”
John’s breath came hard as he primed himself to fight even the horrible suspicion. He had sworn never to think this again. If he could just keep it at bay—a formless dark monster on the edge of his mind—he could challenge it, defeat it, and neither of them would ever have to think about it again.
“No, I don’t need to know,” he answered himself quickly. “No one has to know.” Throwing open his sea chest, he delved inside for the box at the bottom. Laying it on the bed, he opened the clasp and lifted out one of the brace of pistols; long, heavy and comfortable in his hand. He couldn’t afford enemies, particularly not this one—a Post Captain and a nobleman of a most distinguished family—but the monstrous suspicion combined with something bright and fearless in his heart, and for a moment he wanted blood more than he had ever desired anything in his life.
He stood on the edge of a razor, above a hell in which that man abused the boy who was to grow up to be his friend, and he would take steel and fire to that vision and make it go away, for Alfie’s sake and his own.
I understand you wouldn’t be able to face him. Let alone bear being dragged before a court of inquiry. But it doesn’t have to come to that. I can find another excuse to call him out. I can kill him. If you want me to, Alfie, I’ll kill him, for you.

How bitter—Alfie put down book and sword, rising to throw open the window—to see all that deadly beauty arrayed in anger for his sake. Twilight touched John’s face with shades of silver, and if by day he looked like Octavian Caesar, by the light of the moon he was an elfin knight, delicate as a crystal of arsenic.

This should not be happening!
Alfie had fled in panic from Charles Farrant—Captain Lord Lisburn, first son of the Duke of Alderley—in order to stop this from happening. But it seemed his impulsive action had betrayed him. If he had only kept his head and stayed where he was! The flight itself had alerted John to the fact that something was wrong, and now, unless he wished John to become a murderer on his behalf, he had to speak. It was too early to speak—the ground unprepared, still arid with winter chill. Any seed sown there would rot before it saw the sun. That was clear enough from John’s panicked rejection of his careful advance during the bath. If there ever could have come a time when it was safe to make everything plain, that time was not now. But speak he must, because nothing else would stop the blind, holy fool from charging to a rescue he didn’t need, and Farrant had not deserved that of him.

“I’m touched,” he said, surprised he could still sound so casual. Would John denounce him, accuse him, see him pilloried and driven from the service? He was almost certain that John would not see him hang, though the man was pious enough, devoted to his duty enough, to force himself even that far if he believed it was required of him. But hanging aside, this was the end of it. Alfie had gambled and lost; hoped to win John’s heart and thereby to bring the rest of the body along later. Now he dreaded to speak; dreaded John’s virtue as if it was a thousand stinging spines.

“But you have it wrong, sir.” He forced the words out in short, painful bursts. “Lord Lisburn was my first captain. I adored him with all the ardor of my romantic little childish soul.” As with stepping off a precipice, the first move proved the hardest. Once made, it was almost a relief to fall.

“I did everything I could to make him notice me, sir. Everything I’ve done with you. I used to treasure every word, and lie in wait for him in corridors, just to hear him say ‘out of my way, Mr. Donwell.’ He…anyone can tell his tastes run to men, so I thought it certain that one day he would notice my devotion and reward it. My hopes were high.”

Looking back, Alfie recalled his younger self’s tender, undefended heart opening in the flower of first love, still remembered what it had all felt like. No wonder it had taken him years to find the nerve to try again.

“One night—after I had been particularly obvious about this, the captain called me to his cabin. I was overjoyed! I spent what seemed hours in front of my glass, in equal parts nerves and lust, trying to make myself look pretty for him. But he didn’t even invite me to sit down. He just gave me a pitying smile and said; ‘I know what you’re doing, son, but you’re wasting your time. I require a certain standard, and you don’t reach it.’”

Alfie laughed, because even now—especially now—it hurt too much to do otherwise. “I was crushed.”
The past had given him many lessons; or perhaps the same one, over and over, which he had simply refused to learn. Looking at John’s face now, he remembered his family. Even he had had a family once, until his father caught him kissing the stableboy under the hawthorn hedge. It had only been a bet—exploration, a bit of fun—he hadn’t expected it to be the end of the world. But long after the beating healed, the snick of the door closing in his face remained in his nightmares, desolate and terrifying. He still dreamed of standing outside his home, beating on the wood and demanding, cursing, pleading to be let back in, while the night deepened around him and the rain fell.
After that, the Royal Navy became his family for a while— best of all the options of a homeless boy. Recognizing John’s shock, the slow dawning of righteous disgust, he knew what was going to happen now. He bowed his head and studied the floorboards, to avoid watching the fondness and friendship in John’s face be wiped away. Of course he was no longer the man who had fought at John’s side, and nursed him back from death; no longer a shipmate, a flute player, an interesting conversationalist, a welcome defender at one’s back. Now, all he was was a pervert.
He had no desire to see any of that reflected in the silver grey mirrors of John’s eyes. Having been through the slave pens and survived the bastinado, he still believed there was no form of torture worse than what those you love can inflict.
“John…?” Whether he asked for forgiveness or just for mercy he didn’t know. Possibly just for an end to the silence.
“No!” John’s out-flung hand cut into his small field of vision. Looking up, he found exactly the look he expected on the carved face; the look of a man who has only just realized he has stepped in dog-shit. “I…” John withdrew the hand that had commanded Alfie to silence. It balled by his side into a fist, and for a moment Alfie hoped wildly that John would hit him. That, he could still see working—he would hit back, and they would fight, knocking over washstand and table and books. There would be blood and bruises and biting, and sooner or later John’s animal nature would rise up in him and demand that ruthless rutting he so badly needed.
But John’s temper held. “No,” he said again. “I don’t want to hear it.” Snatching up his coat he turned his back, slammed the door behind him and was gone.
Alfie looked at the door.
Shut in, shut out, it amounts to the same thing.
He stood for a while quite still, then smoothed the coverlet of the bed and sat, looking out the window. Out there he could see the sea, the great shimmer of it, salty and wet as tears.
He should never have spoken, never have dared hope; should have tried to remain content with being a friend, valued for his skills and not his heart. Now even that was over. There were philanderers and adulterers aplenty in the officer’s mess, but no sods.
God forbid!

I thought I knew the man, and all this time we were strangers.
John strode up the steep hill to the silence of the distant
maquis
, his lungs laboring at the unaccustomed exercise, his side throbbing with red fire as he ignored fatigue and wound alike, borne up on fury. The paved path gave way to a thread of white limestone through tangles of rosemary and rue, lizards soaking up the last of the day’s heat on tumbled stones. Further on, under the mass of olive and laurel trees, night had already fallen, but here in the open the sky still shone pale silver-blue. Out of the town’s enclosing walls, with nothing between himself and God but that luminous evening, he stopped, the driving anger draining away. Dizziness swept over him and he reeled to the nearest boulder to sit upon, looking back.

The town lay like a spill of sugar cubes below, and the harbor retained the day’s sun, shining against the dark indigo sea like an aquamarine dropped into a cask full of sapphire. Gasping and faint, John shut his eyes and waited while the pain subsided. A warm breeze, full of the scent of thyme and lavender, stirred the pigtail of his wig and made his damp shirt feel cool. Behind him a small troop of Gibraltar’s apes contentedly scratched one another, huddling close. But the evening’s tranquility could not penetrate beyond the surface of John’s skin.

I thought I knew the man! I thought we were friends! And all this time he played me for a fool. God damned liar!
Alfie had lied—lied by omission, keeping this...
thing
that he was to himself. Playing games only he understood.
Gulling me; gaining my affection under false colors. All of it a lie!