False Colors (27 page)

Afterwards, John took a flask of brandy to the cliffs and sat with the sea hundreds of yards beneath his feet, picking once more at the skein of his tangled thoughts. A year ago he would have been horrified by his behavior today, the idea of tampering with the course of justice an anathema to him. Now he only wished he could be sure he had done enough.

Unearthing a pebble from the dirt by his hand he flung it out in a wide arc of flight, clean and mathematical against the sky. The surf closed over it. He might have said that it disappeared, but reason told him that it had not. It settled on the white sand and shell of the ocean bed, blending with its new surroundings. Time would tumble it in the tides, wear off its sharp corners and leave it indistinguishable from any rock of the sea. Change came, arbitrary and yet inevitable.
A cure…
Suppose there could be a cure for his desires? Suppose he could be made normal.
What then?

In his father’s house, John had clung to Biblical certainty as to everything his father did not represent. He remembered a sweet childhood floating about the fens in his own little skiff, drifting on water so still he might have sailed in the heavens, reeds hissing, waterfowl paddling and peeping about him. The great churches of Ely and Sutton on their islands above his head like some fantastical cross between angel and gargoyle. Long days of loneliness and peace. Then he would come home and find his father’s party arrived from London, actors, courtesans and fops in every room, laughing at his country ways; his mother shut in her study, weeping.

All the sensual world had seemed to him then only an excuse for cruelty. The cruelty of a man who loved his wife’s money but not her person, who went out of his way to shock and humiliate her, moving his mistresses into her house, into her bedroom.

John, seeing her alone in the rout of contemptuous strangers, had always run to her, his sense of justice as well as his love outraged. His father would look wearyingly on them both, hugging one another for comfort against the invasion, call John a pious milksop, a disgrace to the name of manhood, and pass by, calling for his guns.

Alfie’s grief in prison, that brief “I can’t believe he’s gone,” reshaped the stone of John’s soul like an ocean. How could anyone say that such love, such sorrow, was somehow less worthy than the hell on earth of his parents’ marriage? How could anyone think such love required a cure?

Above the sea, bands of orange light streaked the sky, and the sun was a ruby. The brandy tasted like the sunset, and John weighed good and evil, love and lust on the scales of his understanding; lust such as his father’s which only brought misery, love such as Alfie seemed to have felt for his unworthy captain.

The great cabin looked heartbreakingly familiar to Alfie as he stood in irons by the starboard door, flanked by two marines. He tried to keep his eyes fixed on the bustle of small craft outside the stern window, bum boats going out to newly arrived merchantmen and warships with everything from melons to whores on board. A party of them indeed, half clad, with their breasts hanging out of their stays, sailed close enough to throw rotten fruit at the
Britannia’s
great gallery. Orange pulp dried into a small sunburst on one leaded light.

But the novelty of having things thrown at him had long passed. He was more moved by the green velvet cushions of the stern lockers, remembering how they had felt against his back that one time when…

The very table beneath the hands of the five judges must cry out against him. There was a black hilarity about the way that Post Captain Bentick, when he was annoyed, had a habit of rubbing his thumb across a certain flaw in the polish. Alfie could have given him some information about that stain which would cause him to go home and wash his hand until it bled, and there were times he could have laughed with despair.

Beyond the window a slave ship came in, trailing its reek of death and human dung, and as he watched the cargo being disembarked, too weak to move, he felt glad to be leaving this ugly world behind.

“Mrs. Shaw,” announced a marine by the door as the next witness arrived. Alfie drew back his attention with a start seeing her come in, in a vulgar dress of pink tulle and a starched bonnet of nun-like rigidity around a face like a side of ham. One could not lose oneself in dreams while Mrs. Shaw was in the room. If Newton was to be believed, she exerted a gravity of her own.

Even Bentick seemed impressed. Rodney, at the center of the table, took snuff to numb his nose to the smell of the slaver, and looked imperturbable. Beyond the open doors of the cabin a press of onlookers milled on the ship’s upper deck, craning their necks to see inside, the ruin of a man by sexual scandal being a fine spectator sport.

The Judge-Advocate rustled his papers. “You are the Gunner’s wife on the
Britannia
, and serve as a laundress, I understand? You washed the officers’ linen?”

“Yes, sir, your honor.” Mrs. Shaw curtseyed deeply, continuing with some pride, “Had me own barrels and rigged up a trap for rainwater, so as not to have to use salt. I’m not one of them young women what raids the ships’ drinking water to wash me smalls. I shares your lordships’ horror for such larks.”

Bentick bowed his head to conceal his reaction, but the smirk lay reflected on the tabletop for everyone to see. From a chair pushed back against the curving wall came a flash of golden light as Dr. Bentley took off his glasses, wiped them on his handkerchief. Alfie noticed him draw in his feet as if to stand, his mouth opening, and then he balked. His adam’s apple jerked as he swallowed, then he subsided.
Need to piss?
Alfie thought.
I hope you choke on it.

“That’s as may be, Mrs. Shaw,” the judge-advocate said, gathering himself. A colorless little man, no doubt accustomed to sifting through filth, he was the only one in the cabin who didn’t wince when he asked, “What can you tell us about Captain Lord Lisburn’s sheets?”

Mrs. Shaw bristled like a boar. Alfie’s amused detachment was squashed anew under another wave of revulsion for how sordid this all was. Though intellectually he did not believe he needed to be ashamed, it was hard not to be cowed with a courtroom of fine gentlemen picking over his stains.

In the embarrassed, disapproving silence Admiral Rodney leaned forward, gesturing with fingers like frost-covered twigs. “Mrs. Shaw, may I remind you that while you serve on a ship of the line, you are as answerable to His Majesty’s courts martial as any man. Do not treat this tribunal with contempt.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, your honor, sir.” Mrs. Shaw raised her watery blue eyes to the heavens. “I know’d the captain had a reputation, but as God is my witness, sir, I ain’t seen nothing of it on board. I can’t swear to what he did on land, but the
Britannia
was a clean living ship, and you won’t find a one of her crew willing to say otherwise.”

“As we have been finding, indeed.” Captain Bentick rolled his eyes. “And the complaint brought against Lieutenant Donwell…?”

“Malice, sir. Sheer malice. You’d be above knowing this kind of thing, I’ve no doubt, but there’s men what’ll make a good living from threatening to call an honest man a sod. Asking for money off of him to not go through with it. This is something of that sort, I’ve no doubt. And Mr. Donwell there, well, o’course he wouldn’t stand for that. Knowin’ ’imself innocent, like.”

“You make a good case, Mrs. Shaw,” said Bentick after a pause. “I presume you have no other information pertinent to the case?”

“No sir, except to say that if it was that Bert Driver what laid the charge, everyone knows the little shit—begging your pardon—has been cherishing a resentment against Mr. Donwell since that time Mr. Donwell had to take his name for unclean behavior in the hold. Icy it was that day, and Bert pissing in the ballast rather than go to the heads. And Bert never was one that liked to be taken down.”

Alfie listened to this exchange with a creeping of the skin at the back of his neck as though a goose had walked over his grave. Such a plausible liar, she made! So forthright, so guileless.
By God, if I get through this, if I only live, Mrs. Shaw, I’m going to give you such a kiss!

Sunlight poured in through the window and the air reeked of beeswax polish, damp woolen uniforms, sewerage and slaves. The judge-advocate cleared his throat with a dry scratching sound, having already raised a disapproving eyebrow at Bentick’s tendency to take over the running of the court. He looked down at his list, mumbling into the paper, “Very well. I call Bert Driver.”

The usual stir and head turning in the crowd. Alfie rolled his shoulders, trying to ease them down from around his ears. The thought of Bert Driver testifying against him was like a wasp sting between his shoulder blades: he could try to ignore it, but it would still burn.
Come on
, he thought,
come on, just get on with it!
Life or death—anything but this sweat-choked, disapproving silence.
Come on!

“Not present, sir.” The marine in charge of witnesses delivered this with a certain theatrical pleasure, a gleam in his eyes that only brightened when Alfie couldn’t stop himself and lurched forward a half step, manacles clinking. Outside the door the audience fluttered, humming with rumors. Within, Dr. Bentley gave a gasp and clutched at his bob wig as if it had bitten him.

Time stopped again while the judge advocate’s pen scratched over the surface of the record of the trial. Ink dripped into the inkwell. A petal fell from the vase of red flowers, so incongruously gay in the center of the long table. Alfie bit down on the urge to scream, to lay about himself with the chain of his irons, to just smack one of the self-satisfied bastards across the face before they shot him down. He clenched his hands in front of him, breathed in deep, trying to slow his racing heart.

The judge-advocate swept the cabin with a rheumy gaze, as if he half expected Bert to be crouched beneath one of the chairs. When it proved not to be so, he sniffed disapprovingly, made another note in the record, and said, “I call Dr. Theodore Bentley.”

Bentley rose, the color in his face so drained he looked like a black and white print of a man. “I…might I ask for an adjournment, for a moment? I need to…I have something I would like to convey in private to the gentlemen of the court.”

At that moment an unusually large wave lifted the anchored
Britannia,
and as the onlookers on the deck fell against each other, laughing, Bentley too lurched for the back of his chair. A burst of clannish smugness and superiority went through every sure-footed naval officer at the sight, Alfie included, drawing them together against the civilian world. There was more than a touch of condescension in Rodney’s shrug. “As you wish. The Court will adjourn.”

Taken out onto the quarterdeck, Alfie scoured the crowd, then craned his neck to look down onto the jetty, barely allowing himself to admit he was hoping to find one particular face. The absence of John Cavendish squashed that hope like a spider underfoot. All his fine words and what did they count for? Nothing at all. It would have been
something
to be able to look into that mob and see one face not baying for his blood, not lit with gleeful contempt. But John failed the test, yet again.

Marines took Alfie’s arms and turned him in the direction of the companionway, taking him down to be kept watch on, in the cavernous cool of the hold. There, with the sea pressing on the timbers all about him; underwater, in the dark, he wrapped his arms around himself as far as the chain would allow, and shivered. He’d thought he was resigned to death—he’d almost been looking forward to it, as the end of all the struggling, all the pretence. But now he could feel his own heart beating beneath the hard knot of dread in his chest; he could see his breath come in clouds of gold against the dark, and feel blood move through his fingertips. Even the pinch of his best breeches at the knee felt precious, sharp against the void.

It was a flawed, impractical, ugly world, but it was better than the alternative. His mind filled with the picture of the last hanging he’d seen;
some poor little bastard with the rope around his neck winched up to the yardarm by the throat—too light to strangle quickly. In his struggles he had got the knot under his chin, so that the pressure meant to mercifully stun him ended up as one more torment….
At the memory, panic raced in a torrent through Alfie’s body, shaking him.
No! No! I can’t! I can’t!

“Up you come then.” Some time during this attack of terror word had come down from the court. The marine on Alfie’s left hauled at his arm to make him stand upright. The man’s face was covered with gnarled pustules around the rotting mess of his nose—the pox having written its signature on him. “Don’t look like that, son. There’s worse things than dying fast, ain’t there? I should know.”

“You think…” Alfie tried, strengthening his trembling legs with what pride he could muster. “You think they’ll find me guilty?”

The spray of hot red hibiscus flowers on the courtroom table fell shriveled around its vase, dropping petals onto Alfie’s sword, which lay in its scabbard in front of the judges, hostage to his fate. The great blaze of the stern gallery ran across the silver hilt and the gold braid tassel as if to make a point.

It stood for his life’s work—the hard but worthwhile work of setting himself as a defense between his countrymen and their enemies. It stood for his status as an officer and a gentleman— the duty, the unwavering stoicism and willingness to kill, but also the educated refinement of his nature, the gentility and gentleness that should coexist with military prowess. It stood for the ideal he thought he had met in life in the shape of John Cavendish. The perfect, beautiful, and deadly symbol of what it was to be a man. And he wanted it back.