His Heart's Obsession (5 page)

Chapter Five

Kingston, Jamaica

With Plan B foiled, Robert licked his wounds for a day before deciding that he needed to solicit more expert advice. Notebook and pencil in his pocket, he called on Miss Isobel Kent at home, found her bored to tears of her harpsichord, and offered to take her and her young sister Annabel to afternoon tea at the Assembly Rooms.

It took very little art to persuade Annabel to run to the window, kickshaw in either hand, and stand with her nose pressed to the glass, watching the horses and the sailors, the slaves with their wary eyes and the free men of all colours and nations mingled in the marketplace.

Recognising an attempt at intimacy, Isobel chose to sit at a table far across the room from her sister, where she could turn away gossip by being seen, but could not be overheard.

Robert approved and said so. “It’s clear to me why Mr. Morgan admires you so, Miss Kent.”

“Because I play the games that all society ladies must play?”

“Because you play them well.” He poured lemon shrub for them both and toyed with a Maid of Honour while he wondered how best to broach the subject. She seemed like the sort to appreciate subtlety, but his own talents in that direction were limited. Eventually he decided to put the problem to her, in a disguised form. “It is about Mr. Morgan that I wished to speak to you.”

She was clever, no doubt about it. But possibly a little too clever. Something about having her shrewd gaze narrowed on his face made him fidget, break the little tartlet in two with his fingers and drop the creamy filling onto his plate where it would have to be scraped up with a spoon. He cleared his throat and forged on, regardless. “There is a young lady who admires him. One, I believe, who would make him happier than he is at present. But his eyes are fixed on someone he cannot possibly attain. He is my friend—or at least I am his—and his unhappiness recently has begun to plague me. I want it to stop, and I want the best for him. If he could love someone who returned that love, he would surely be of better content. What should I advise this young lady to do, in order to encourage him to notice her?”

Miss Kent ate a ratafia biscuit in silence before looking up and skewering him with a penetrating look. “Your friend is a hardworking and competent young person, I hope? Mr. Morgan respects that. Without that she stands no chance at all.”

Taken aback at the thought that Hal might expect his wife to work—and the resulting suspicion that Miss Kent knew more than she should—Robert dropped his spoon. As she tossed her head in amusement at this, a small enamelled sloop with unrealistic sails glinted in her hair.

“But also,” she went on, “while his heart is taken, there is no hope for anyone else. Mr. Morgan is a man of admirable constancy. Hard to win, but once you have him, immovable. It seems to me that, if this person is serious in their affection, they cannot achieve anything without first convincing him of the futility of his present love.”

“She is very serious.” Robert nodded, solemnly. “But that seems cruel. Might he not, instead, hate her for breaking his illusions?”

Miss Kent broke her own Maid of Honour daintily in half. At the table beside them, a gentleman in a mustard coat stopped speaking midsentence to watch her bite into the confection and delicately lick the cream from her top lip after, and Robert knew he was being heartily envied there.

From her impish look, Miss Kent knew so too. “Fortune favours the brave, Mr. Hughes.”

Chapter Six

Aboard
HMS Swiftsure,
off Dominica

A hot wind belled out the sails into such dazzling half-moons, it might have blinded a man to look at them. It smote Hal just behind the right ear and flicked the queue of his wig over his shoulder, drying the sweat on his neck. As he stood next to the helm, drunk on the pleasure of a fine following breeze and a full spread of canvas, a voice behind him, molasses sweet and full of amusement said, “Tell me, what do you see?”

When he turned it was to see Captain Hamilton in trousers as white as the sails and a thin, open shirt, wigless and informal. Smiling.

“At the moment, sir?” Hal smiled back, knowing that Hamilton would misunderstand him, relying on it. “Perfection.”

“Indeed. And I have you to thank for that.”

The reply felt too much like a fantasy—a nighttime mockery that dissolved in the morning into despair. Hal winced as the moment of peaceful pleasure filled up with old, familiar regrets. He tried hard not to show his sudden descent back into the pit. “I did order the weather up specially, sir. But…”

“Ah.” The wind flattened the shirt against the lithe lines of Hamilton’s back. Once, almost six years ago now, Hal had loved the sight as a painter loves the mountain peak, with a joyous but disinterested appreciation. Some of that lingered, like sugar in a cup of poison, but behind it there came the accompanying misery of wanting far more, and having far less than would ever satisfy.

“You’re not looking at what I am looking at,” said Hamilton. “Tell me what is wrong with this scene.”

Following his gaze, Hal peered down into the waist of the ship, where the eighteen pounders rode like polished gold, flames of sunshine incandescent about them. He narrowed his eyes, saw men industriously polishing; no one was slacking, no one chewing, no one spitting tobacco. The boys’ heads inclined together over a slate as they puzzled out the noon reckoning. The falls of each rope lay in spirals fit for an admiral’s inspection. Robert—on watch—gazed up judiciously at the trim of the sails.

Disconcerted, Hal checked again and came up a second time with the picture of a well-run, happy ship. “I can’t see a thing wrong.”

“Exactly.” Hamilton walked over to the windward side of the quarterdeck. He motioned with a small jerk of the chin for Hal to follow. There, in the sacrosanct hush of the captain’s private space, Hamilton said quietly, “Mr. Hughes tells me you had a word with him. You were unhappy with his performance, he said, and he is intent on proving that he can do better. To speak such a word to a friend in the interests of the service is hard, and to receive a reprimand from a man so much younger than himself, and act on it, is also hard. I confess I am impressed with you both.”

Hal almost laughed at the painful irony of this. To be praised for scolding like a bitter wife? How ridiculous. “The truth is, sir, he made one of his jokes. I had taken too much drink and I flew out upon him. If he chooses not to resent it, it’s greatly to his credit. But not to mine.”

“I must congratulate anything that redounds to the better working of the ship,” said Hamilton, his smile warm. “I know you have thought ill of him in the past.”

“He prates like a scholar.” Hal’s tone sounded surly even to himself, and he didn’t know why he was harping on about this. It had been a long time since he’d really resented Hughes’s book-learning, so little use it was at sea. “With his Oxford education. As though ten years’ cribbing from books gave him any kind of advantage! He brings me these bizarre ideas, full of enthusiasm, convinced he knows how things ought to work. It’s like kicking my lapdog to have to explain, yet again, that they don’t in fact work like that.”

“I admit his perspective is a little skewed,” said Hamilton to the foaming sea that creamed along the hull beneath his propped elbow. “But he’s shaping up, finally. And a skewed perspective can at times show us things we’ve grown so used to overlooking, we now find invisible. But quite apart from that, this improvement is dramatic. Whatever you said to him must have struck home. Do keep it up.”

Piles of paper waited in Hal’s cabin for his perusal and signature, and he meant to examine the spare suit of sails for mildew while the main suit dried in this splendid breeze. But he paused a little longer before going below and looked at Robert, who leaned on the taffrail, chatting with Lieutenant Collins. Could this new efficiency really form part of the proof of love he had demanded? Could even Robert have the effrontery to send him such a message through Hamilton’s innocent and uncomprehending praise?

Hal’s need for William was a slow drip of acid down his soul, a pain so chronic he barely remembered life before it. He frowned thoughtfully at Robert. Would it hurt less to love someone who loved you back? Would it recombine the pieces of his heart that seemed already eaten away?

Sunlight bronzed Robert’s unfashionable tan, making him look like a common sailor—cheerful and capable—and not at all like the kind of lubber who would ambush a man with unexpected Latin quotations. Admittedly, that bony face, with its high cheekbones and strong jaw, was never going to be fashionably beautiful, but its liveliness was appealing when he smiled, and he smiled a lot. His figure had a compact, muscular grace that made watching him a pleasure. Particularly when, as now, he was swinging himself up into the rigging, ascending easily—a fine view from below.

A kind of panic snapped Hal from that tangle of thoughts, making his heart pound and his palms sweat. He was not the kind of man who would even
look
at anyone else while his heart was caught up and given in painful sacrifice on the altar of true love. He was not!

But fairness made him concede that Hughes’s character was not so vicious as he had tried to tell himself. He did take a joke too far, he was lamentably unpunctual and lackadaisical in his duties, but his incessant cheerfulness brightened the wardroom, made all the other officers smile. And if perhaps he did gossip, Hal had recent cause to know he could keep a dangerous secret so safely it didn’t show that he knew it at all. On balance it was not so terrible a picture.

Many people might imagine the vice they shared was his worst attribute. But for Hal that must be counted as a virtue. With Robert he would be able to speak freely. No more lies and half-truths and deeper meanings concealed in jest. He could be honest.

He could be—if Robert would deal honestly with him in return. And there was the rub, for he didn’t believe for a moment that Robert would.
Love,
he thought again, bitterly, comparing Robert’s conduct with his own helpless obsession with William.
Love is being broken on the wheel. Love is silence and pain. It does not take advantage of its object’s misery to trick him into infidelity. It does not lay traps.
Shaking his head, he turned his back on Robert and went below to handle something he could understand.

But in the sail locker, with the coxswain’s team unfolding the heavy canvas of each sail for his inspection, he found himself unexpectedly touched. When he had challenged Robert to give him proof of love, he had not expected the man to actually take him up on it. Bad sonnets at the most. Even—knowing Robert—gifts of amusingly shaped vegetables. But thoughtfulness and hard work? He had to admit to being, perhaps, a very tiny bit impressed.

Chapter Seven

Bridgetown, Barbados

Robert took his notebook from his pocket and read again the points he had jotted down after his conversation with Miss Kent.
Item 1: Diligence at work. Item 2: Attack love for H. Item 3: Bravery.

He closed it and rubbed his thumb thoughtfully over the brass cover while he watched dinner being set out in the parlour of the Cat and Fiddle. He could see the need, the vital need, for steps two and three, but it did not make it feel less cruel.

The street door opened on a tropical night. Hal and Hamilton ducked through, deep in conversation. In the light of the lantern over the door, Hal’s hair blazed amber and his big grin gleamed like a new moon. Hamilton smiled back, punctuating a joke with a jabbed finger. Hal ducked his head in the noiseless gesture that passed as his laugh, and the thought of cruelty dissipated and rose from Robert’s anger like steam. Why should Hamilton have the priceless gift of which Robert dreamed? He hadn’t the wit to value it.

Slipping the notebook back inside his pocket, Robert attracted their attention by getting up. “Dinner is on the table, gentlemen. I thought I should have to eat it all myself.”

“Gannet!” Hal gave him the dregs of the smile poured out on Hamilton. “We aren’t more than half a minute late.”

“Nevertheless—” Hamilton took off his tricorne and tucked his wig inside it, “—perhaps we should go in.”

He and Hal had been to a council of war with Admiral Stourbridge aboard his ship, the
Fearnought,
anchored out in the bay. They had left Robert to oversee the taking on of water and enough greenstuff to stave off scurvy during the second leg of the cruise. Over the course of the meal, they filled Robert in about the admiral’s plans to harry the harbour at Guadeloupe, to test the strength and temper of the French fleet in the hopes of mounting an assault on the island.

Their mutual excitement over the idea, the high spirits and pleasure with which they capped one another’s ideas and finished one another’s sentences, goaded Robert to interrupt. “Sir, might I take a moment to ask you an unrelated question?”

On the other side of the table, Hal bent down to tempt the tavern’s elderly dog to take a piece of mutton fat.

Hamilton pushed away his plate and leaned back, propping a foot on the sturdy footboard of the table and cradling his wine in one long-fingered hand. “Certainly. What is it?”

Robert told himself firmly not to waver.
Bravery, remember? Get it out now, before Hal sits up.
“I wondered, sir, if you would give me your opinion on sodomites in the navy.”

For a second, Hal stopped—frozen and crystalline as he had been in Robert’s room. A long second, like the indrawn stillness of the world between looking down at the stab wound and feeling the pain. Then at last he moved. He patted the dog with a jerky, heavy-handed pat and sat up. The front legs of his chair rapped with a sharp smack on the ochre tiled floor. Wiping his fingers on his napkin, he fixed Robert with a gaze so sharp it would have cut through steel.

“What a filthy topic to discuss over dinner.” Hamilton also straightened, his ease disappearing into prickly discomfort. “Must you speak of it?”

“I must, sir. There is a young man I know, whose inclination I suspect. It is his ambition to join the navy and I would value your advice on what to say to him in return.”

Lowering his glass into the puddle of ruby port, where he had drawn an impromptu map, Hamilton leaned forward. “You must tell him no, Mr. Hughes. I wonder that you need to ask.”

“Merely that to my knowledge we’ve never hanged anyone for it. I thought perhaps you took a lenient view.” Robert tried to weigh how much he needed Hamilton to betray himself—to shock Hal out of his obsession—against how badly he did not want the captain to suspect the truth. Fortune might favour the brave, but that seemed small comfort to the dead.

Hamilton’s clear gaze clouded slightly. “I admit the punishment is extreme.” He pinched the brow of his nose and sighed. “If I had my way, I would only drum them out of the service. Such an inclination certainly deserves the pillory, but death? I’m not sure.” He took a deep breath, as though the subject weighed on him, tired him out. “On land I would say ‘Let them live.’ But in the service? No. Imagine if you had to share a cabin with one. Think what the men would feel! Lying packed so close, they must touch one another as it is. The thought of rubbing up against a man of that sort while you slept! Do you not feel the instinctive revulsion of the thing?”

Robert couldn’t help himself; he glanced nervously at Hal. The younger man’s white, bloodless face stabbed him with remorse.
Yes, Hal, I know I’m cruel. Forgive me?
“To tell the truth, sir, I don’t. If they keep themselves to themselves, what harm does it do?”

“The shame to the ship! A happy ship is a place where every man can trust his mates to be there for him. Where he does not have to wonder about ulterior motives and double meanings and unsavoury goings-on in the dark. And the boys! What parent would send their sons into the service if it became known we tolerated such obscenity?” As he pressed the point, Hamilton’s voice sank into an angry, embarrassed whisper. He shook the thoughts away. “No,” he said, more strongly. “I thank God that there are no men of that kind in my fleet, and if I have my way there never will be. Don’t you agree, Morgan?”

Silent to this point, and unmoving, perhaps hoping that stillness would lend him invisibility, Hal was goaded at last into a response. He looked up from his plate with a sneer of contempt. “I find the whole subject distasteful.” Pushing back his chair, he folded his napkin with an aura of repressed violence and shot to his feet. “I have quite lost my appetite. Wish you good night, sir. Hughes.” He sketched a mocking bow and escaped.

Hamilton rose too, and so perforce did Robert. “Forgive me, sir,” he said, before Hamilton had a chance to go away and think about what had just happened, “for raising such an unsuitable topic at the table. Since this acquaintance of mine spoke, it has weighed on my mind. He is a remarkable person, otherwise.”

“Can any number of virtues make up for such a vice?” Hamilton put on his hat as if jamming on the helmet of salvation, but he offered a fleeting, unconvincing smile nevertheless. “Morgan is right, you know. You’re a good man, Hughes, but you have some strange ideas. Whatever unnatural theories they debated in your college, do try and remember that you are not at Oxford anymore.”

“I will, sir.” Careful to look on the funny side of this patronising kindness, Robert managed to grin. He had hoped for poison, after all, deliberately tipping it into Hal’s cup, so that he might come after and provide the purge. There was no sense in regretting the success of the manoeuvre now. “I do apologise for ruining a good meal.”

Hamilton’s smile strengthened, and the relaxation extended to his hands, which unclenched and rested lightly on the back of his chair. “Think nothing of it,” he said. “Though you may have your work cut out in soothing Morgan’s ruffled feathers. I understand you’re sharing?”

“Yes, sir. There isn’t a single room to be had for love nor money, but for yours.”

“There’s another reason. Imagine, if one had a sod for a shipmate, one might be forced by circumstances to share a bed with him. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“You could sleep on the floor, sir. Or rather, you could make him sleep on the floor.”

Hamilton laughed, and Robert wondered, for one suicidal instant, what would happen if he said, “Would it alter your opinion if I told you that you had served with two of us for the past five years?” But even he would not bet on such odds. So he wished his captain good-night, put his plate down for the waiting dog, and lingered over buying a bottle of rum. Then, biting the inside of his cheek, he nerved himself to go up and face the firing squad.