False Colors (11 page)

Now every sweet memory—every note he’d ever sung, which seemed at the time so blessed—was tainted; the tenderness he’d felt when Alfie turned to him for protection at Algiers; the glory of fighting together, like one soul in two bodies, invulnerable; the month of pain in which Alfie’s presence had been his loadstar—
all of them
were tainted with this new knowledge.
The bath! Oh God, the bath!

His skin crawled. He tried to get up and walk away from the complex of hurt and betrayal, from the touch. It seared, indelibly marked into his skin. Surely it must show; through layers of shirt and waistcoat and coat, it must show. People must be able to see it on him, like a stain. But even if they did not, he felt it himself—the pleasure, the lust—
oh God!
But he would never…he would
never…
if he had known. He had tried so hard not to know.
Damn Alfie Donwell! Damn him to hell for lying, for being a lying fucking bastard and invert!
John had treasured his friendship so much, and now it seemed clear there had never been any friendship at all. Just a plot. It had all been just a plot to lure him into sin.

Far below, in the harbor, a twinkle of gold winked at him, where the gilt-work of the First Rate caught the final rays of the sun. Slumping back onto the wall, John frowned at it.
How dare it look so splendid! How dare it look like the epitome of glory, the embodiment of all that made the Royal Navy great?
This was all the fault of its captain. Only half aware that his jaw ached and threads of pain had begun to run up from his tight clenched teeth to his temples, John made a valiant attempt to shift all the blame onto Lord Lisburn.
What message must an impressionable child get, after all, when his captain surrounded himself with Ganymedes?

John himself had been lucky enough to have had a captain who molded him with a firm but kind hand, encouraging his excellence with praise and rebuking his faults with understanding. That was what a captain should be; a steadying influence on the boys and an example of personal morality.
Not a blatant sod!
Was it Alfie’s fault he turned out wrong, with such a pattern to follow?

Night drew in; the gold drained from the light and by slow degrees the landscape turned from green to blue. John’s thoughts darkened in sympathy. For there were other children to protect. In addition to the midshipman, Mr. Armitage, whom John could not see inspiring passion in
anyone
, there were three powder monkeys and two boys under fourteen serving as topmen on the
Meteor
. Someone had to think of them. As captain, that responsibility fell to him.

Whatever shaped Alfie into what he was, however much John might have come to appreciate the irreverent wit, the spark, the fire bright intensity Alfie brought into a room with his mere presence, if he was a threat to the safety of the boys he would have to be stopped.
Stopped before his affliction spreads, before he ruins other young lives…
.

Could he really do it? Suppose he found out that the children had been interfered with—could he really go to the magistrate and turn Alfie over? He
had to
, didn’t he? Just because the man was personable, and John had liked him, did not mean he was not a threat to the fabric of society. In truth it made no difference if he had not forced himself on the boys.
If he had been…
John’s thoughts faltered as he approached the impossibility of this idea…if he had been stalking John himself, as he implied, it did not alter the fact that his mere existence was a blot on the world that could only be erased with death.

The light dimmed further and early stars pierced the graying sky. The wind at John’s back, cooler now, made his fever-weakened muscles tighten and ache. But he could not face going back to their shared room; could not conceive of talking, or being silent, or even breathing the same air as Alfie while these thoughts were in his head. So he gingerly levered himself down from the stone and sat among the chickweed and campion in the warm windbreak, rock radiating the day’s heat in a comforting glow across his shoulders.

Despite the turmoil of his thoughts, his convalescing body demanded its due. Half lying on the springy herbs, with the heat soothing his aches, penetrating through his skin to relax over strained and trembling muscles, he drowsed. In the twilight state between sleep and waking, his cravat seemed to become a noose;
he could feel its harsh fibers scratching his throat, and the knot pressing against his spine; darkness outside his eyelids and within, waiting for him to sink, waiting to choke him….

He clawed his way back to consciousness, gasping, the imaginary noose tight about his throat. No, he couldn’t give up the man who had nursed him through this last month to be jeered at by an angry crowd, spat at by prostitutes, to become the target of every curse and flung stone and then to die by the rope. He couldn’t do that to Alfie. It must surely be more merciful to challenge him. They could take the pistols to some private place and let God decide between them. A crack shot, John knew he could best any man in a duel. He could make it instantaneous and clean. A death with honor, a little private sacrament for the two of them.

Sleep claimed him again as he was thinking of it, and he dreamed….
Early morning mist, a shadowed cove, as they met on the shore. The smell of the sea. Everything falling away but for the two of them; Alfie’s face eager and bright as it was in battle, all his formidable concentration leveled at John as he brought up his pistol. The weight of his own gun in his hand and the little sensory shock as the hammer pulled back, clicked into position. They fired together, and John felt his own heart stop even as a rose of blood opened on Alfie’s chest. Somehow there was no distance between them—they were holding on to one another for support, watching each other’s faces as the pangs of death pierced through them, sinking together into oblivion, lying tangled together, Alfie’s head on John’s shoulder, blood mingling warm between their sprawled bodies….
John shuddered, crying out, enchanted and appalled, and woke once more to find himself lying in a thin rain, thoroughly soaked, chilled to the bone, and bitterly weary. Slowly and laboriously—fighting a myriad of pains—he pulled himself to his feet and looked out to the East, where the sky was already turning a spiritless grey. He felt wretched. The thought that he had to question the boys on this unsavory subject seemed more than he could face, and his desire for any kind of death or vengeance—for having been so thoroughly taken in—waned to ashes after the climax of that dream.
Death had lost its enchantment that morning. Everything had lost its enchantment. Dawn’s light grudged broadening, and the path back down the hill, perversely, tried to trip him with every step. The houses he passed, with their washing hanging out of the windows, and bleary-eyed sleepers emerging half dressed to feed the chickens before breakfast, seemed disheveled, unwelcoming. He was acutely conscious of the stares as he passed, sure the sordid state of his soul must be visible to all.
When at last he found his weary way back to Castle Street and unlatched the door of their shared room he still had no idea what to do, what to say. His thoughts would come together when he saw Alfie again, he believed. He hoped he would know how to act then.
So it was a different kind of death to open the door and find the room empty; the floorboards bare, all Alfie’s stuff gone, his mattress unmade and rolled beneath John’s bed. Cleared away so thoroughly there was no sign left that he had ever been there at all. John stood, swaying, amid the emptiness, feeling stabbed to the heart.

“You are the only man on this ship who needs to count my heartbeats to come to that conclusion.” Farrant pulled his arm away from the cool grip with a sense of revulsion. Turning slightly, to put the doctor at his shoulder, rather than directly in front of him, he folded his arms, looked out at the bustle of the harbor beyond the
Britannia
’s stern gallery, and fumed.

“I am the only one,” Bentley said, closing his watch to tuck it back into his waistcoat pocket, “who goes beyond animal instinct into science.” His black enameled watch-chain hung, gleaming slightly, over his super-fine black wool waistcoat, beneath his super-fine black wool frock-coat. His linen and stockings, by contrast, were an arctic white. Gibraltar’s sunshine turned the lenses of his glasses into circles of gold.

“Pedantic penguin,” said Farrant. “
You’d
be disturbed if you’d been cut. Snubbed!
Me!
Before the whole gaggle of Admiralty sycophants and hangers on.” He relived the smug blandness on the face of the flunkey:
“The Port Admiral is not taking visitors at present, sir,” as the door closed in his face. The carefully averted gazes and smirks unsuccessfully hidden behind newspapers, as he stormed back out of the waiting room. The overheard conversation and laughter that had greeted him outside—some jumped-up nobody of a commander having been round earlier, stirring up the gossip.
“I’ll break them all! I’ll have them all cashiered. It’s about time the Duke did something to warrant my filial obedience.”

Pushing his distance glasses down, Bentley fumbled in his waistcoat pocket for the set of reading glasses that had been crushed beneath falling boxes in the recent storm. Coming up empty-handed, he blinked at Farrant with soft, unfocused eyes, dark as ink, impersonal as his touch. Bending down, so close to the book that nose and pen touched the page together, he made a note in his journal. “Your mode of life should have accustomed you to insults, my Lord.”

Scratch, scratch went the pen, like the claws of rats scrabbling against the hull. “Even dampened by the laudanum,” Bentley talked on, “your libidinous disorder displays itself in visible symptoms. You should transfer Bert Driver at the very least. The man spends your money ashore in ways that expose you to infection.” Tucking the book away, he walked over to the long, polished mahogany dining table which filled the center of the great cabin. With a hand steady as the harbor wall, he measured out twenty drops of colorless liquid into a tiny cup. “Your father can do nothing if you continue to behave with flagrant indiscretion. Sometimes, indeed, I believe you make a deliberate show of it. If you reap the results of that now, well....”

Anger, and the walk to and from the Port Admiral’s office, had lifted the gray fog this morning’s dose of laudanum had smeared over Farrant’s world. When he looked out now, he saw beauty everywhere—that stevedore’s jaunty walk, that sailor’s long pigtail, the end of it flicking enticingly just above the rise of his buttocks. The men’s raw beauty seemed to spill out of them, to add meaning to the sails of the ships departing, to fuel his awe and wonder at the Rock of Gibrlatar itself; breathtaking on a wholly different level. Did lust truly underlie his whole world, so that his eyes could see nothing to admire when it was taken away? Or was it just that in cutting out this vice, so central to his existence, he cut out the greater part of his soul with it?

“We had success with the tincture of opium at first.” Bentley offered the little glass. “No incidents for almost a year. Your recent relapse suggests that you have become habituated. I have doubled the dose, and we’ll see what that achieves.”

“It takes away from me everything but a kind of dull resentment.” Accepting it, Farrant looked down on the poisoned chalice with distaste. “It fills my head with soiled rags, and the dreams...my God!”

“
Dreams
, sir,” Bentley took off his glasses, straightened up. He was, Farrant thought, younger than his manner always led one to believe; attractive in a chilly way. Though making love to a marble figure would surely be more rewarding. “Dreams do not place your life in danger, nor contribute to the ruin of your career, nor the misery of your wife and children. You have a disease and, until I can affect a cure, I must address the symptoms. I hope you do not propose to be recalcitrant?”

Snubbed, turned upon by his brothers in arms, Farrant had returned to the
Britannia
as to his own kingdom. But here Bentley stood, their spy in the camp, their jailer. Farrant wondered for a moment what the doctor would do if he ordered two of his tars to deposit the man ashore.
Write to wife and father, no doubt,
suggesting Farrant be consigned—for his own good—to Bethlem Hospital for the Incurably Morally Disordered.

As if the thought of letters had summoned him, Lt. Nyman chose that moment to knock discreetly at the door. “The Packet Ship from Jamaica is in, sir. Shall I leave your post outside the cabin?”

Farrant put the laudanum down next to the carafe of drinking water and strode across the checkerboard floor with a sense of reprieve, throwing open the door with such vigor that the frame trembled. “I’ll have them now, please.”

As he returned to the table, breaking open the wax-paper wrapped parcel of mail, pulling out the bundle of sealed letters, where Isabella had continued to write, and to cross, even the outermost sheet, Bentley reached out and gently touched the letters with his long paper-white fingers, as though they were holy. “Letters from your wife?”

“Indeed.” Farrant smiled, avenged, just a little. “That will be all, doctor.”
Almost human for a moment, Bentley turned away in confusion, laid his hand on the door knob, then paused. “I will wait to see you take your dose.”
My beloved husband
, said the first letter—Farrant had broken open the seal with a thumb, scattering wax, and sunk down on a hard mahogany seat to read—

I hope we will see you soon. There is illness in Spanish Town, and the first cases have been reported here only this week. James insists on visiting friends, or so he calls it, in the old capital, and I fear for him. He pursues his studies like a madman, and all the estate staff speak highly of his management. But he is pale, and has become thin. I fear… I know not what I fear. Either he is wearing himself down in revelry, damaging his constitution and making himself susceptible to the yellow fever, or he has some unsuitable love. I’m sure it must be unsuitable, for I know of no eligible girls in our entire acquaintance.