Wicked at Heart (20 page)

She backed
water, allowing him precious seconds to haul himself up over the gunwales.  Then,
gasping and dripping, he grabbed both oars, his powerful arms sending the boat
knifing across the harbor and toward the safety of
Kestrel
.

She grinned at
him, her teeth white in the darkness.  "Cutting it a bit close, aren't
you?"

He looked at her
and did not smile.

~~~~

It was hard to
think with the damned noise outside.

Another prisoner
had escaped the night before  The morning newspapers were ablaze with the news,
the ship was in turmoil, and even now the prisoners, roused to fever pitch by
yet another Black Wolf raid, were cheering and yelling loud enough to wake the
dead, making the very timbers of the ship throb with their uproar.

Damon had no
wish to deal with it.  He assigned Lieutenant Radley to the task and shut
himself in his cabin, picking at his breakfast of fried pork and black coffee
as he went, with no small degree of annoyance and disinterest, through the
untidy pile of paperwork and ledgers left by his predecessor.  He could think
of a hundred things he'd rather be doing, but he wanted to be prepared for his
meeting with
her
— even if it was so that he wouldn't appear as
apathetic as he felt.  There were receipts for food, receipts for clothing,
receipts for this, receipts for that, and here a note from the Transport
Board.  It was stained with tea and he had found it shoved up inside the corner
of the desk drawer:

I am directed
by the Board to desire that you will immediately forward to this office by
coach a loaf taken indiscriminately from the bread issued to the prisoners on
the day you receive this letter . . .

He tossed it
aside.  So, the navy had been "testing" the bread, making an effort —
at least on paper — to see that the prisoners were being fed something edible. 
Damon wondered, contemptuously, how many times the "indiscriminate"
sample had been pronounced unfit to eat.  He wondered how many times action had
been taken to make what was supposed to be bread "made of whole wheaten
meal actually and bona fide dressed through an eleven shilling cloth"
consumable.  He wondered what had prompted the government even to look into the
matter, and wondered why the hell he was sitting here on a bright, breezy
morning, troubling himself about something in which he had no interest, about
which he could do nothing anyhow, when he could be out petitioning the Powers
That Be to give him a command he deserved.

Now, Lady Simms
. . .
she
was something in which he most definitely had an interest.  And
a prurient one at that.

Pain shot
through his skull.  The headache had started when he got up, and at the thought
of the hellcat, it forked out from his temples and stretched pain across his
forehead.  Cursing, Damon closed his eyes and cradled his head in his hands. 
He pressed his knuckles against his temples, hard, wishing he could just push
the bones together until they met in the middle, thereby putting a quick end to
the agony.

Outside and
belowdecks, the noise continued.

Leaning on his
elbow and propping his brow in the cradle of thumb and forefinger, he turned
several more old, yellowed pages, his gaze skimming over notes made by his
predecessor, his mind a million miles away.  What he wouldn't give to be out on
the sea right now, commanding a dashing frigate, a man-of-war, even a little
sloop.  Anything but a
prison hulk
, for God's sake.

Angrily he
turned another page and came across an advertisement to contractors regarding victualing
on prison ships:

Sunday.         
1 1/2 lb. bread

Monday.        1/2
lb. fresh beef

Tuesday.       1/2
lb. cabbage or turnips

Wednesday.  1
½ lbs. bread, 1 lb. good sound herrings, 1 lb. good sound potatoes

Thursday.    1
ounce Scotch barley

Friday.      
1 ½ lbs. bread, 1 lb. good sound cod, 1 lb. potatoes

Saturday.    1/3
ounce salt,  1/4 ounce onions

The rations
seemed adequate enough.   
So why, then, are the prisoners so damned thin?

Gambling away
their food?  Rejecting it as some sort of protest?  Disease from within?

What, then?

The
contractors.

The headache was
getting worse, beginning to pound against the inside of his skull like a
carpenter's hammer, and the noise coming from outside made him want to bang his
head against the table until he knocked himself senseless.  The fact that he
had to meet the hellcat at two o'clock for their scheduled visit to the
clothing contractor did nothing to ease the pain.

With a muttered
curse he shoved the whole mess aside.  He did not want to deal with Lady
Gwyneth Evans Simms, he did not want to deal with this mountain of records,
orders, and receipts, and he did not want to deal with those cheating
scoundrels who supplied clothing and food to the prison ships.  At the moment he
didn't want to deal with
anything
.  His palm pressed to his forehead as
though to hold in his aching brain, he pulled out the bottle of pills the
ship's doctor had prescribed for his headaches.  He tossed two of them into his
mouth and chased them with a swallow of black coffee.  It was lukewarm, now, disgusting. 
He threw the cup against the bulkhead, coffee and all.  A whiff of stench
drifted in from the decks below, and a wave of nausea slithered up his throat.

He looked down
at his hands.  They were shaking.

Get the
Peterson's
.

He was just
retrieving the tome from his bookcase when a knock came at the door.

So much for
seeing whether he was going to live or die.

Unexplainably feeling
guilty, Damon snatched his hand back and straightened up, locking his fingers
together behind his back.

"Enter,"
he commanded tensely.

Young Toby
Ashton came in.  He had been bathed — the rinse water requiring three changes,
so Radley had complained, before finally it had run clear — issued a fresh set
of clothing, and given a healthy portion of the same food that was now growing
cold on Damon's plate.  His ginger hair was neatly combed and parted, new shoes
gleamed on his feet, and he had been given a fresh pair of spectacles to replace
his cracked ones.  Yet the frame from which those clean clothes hung was barely
more than a skeleton, and no amount of soap and water could wash away the
despair and grief in those haunted brown eyes.

Raw guilt sliced
Damon's heart like a knife.  Peter Milford had told him the boy had been the
object of much abuse belowdecks, with the French prisoners stealing his food
and making sport of his meekness, his size, his propensity for tears.  Given
his own personal experiences with abusive mothers, Oxford undergraduates, and
unfair naval politics, Damon knew damned well the pain and ostracism the boy
must be feeling.  He felt what little heart he had going out to him.

Damn it to
hell.

It had been so
much easier when he'd been ignorant of what really went on belowdecks, when
he'd been able to think of the prisoners as
the enemy
and hadn't spared
them a second thought.  But it was hard to remain detached when you could smell
the truth wafting in through the open window.  It was hard to ignore the things
you'd been forced to face when they repeated themselves in your nightmares. 
And it was hard to think of the prisoners as a cold and calculating enemy when
one of them, a pitifully starved and sickly little thirteen-year-old, was
standing there in front of you, his eyes dark with suffering, pride, and grief.

It was all Lady
Gwyneth Evans Simms' fault.  She'd been the one to bring him face-to-face with
reality.  He'd been fine until she'd come into his life and forced him to look
at things he was better off ignoring.  Now he knew only guilt and pain and
regret.  He hadn't had any of this when his heart had been successfully
hardened, when he'd walled himself in with ignorance, anger, and self-pity. 
But those walls were unsteady, and now the mortar was beginning to crumble.

There was
something getting inside them now, something called
feeling
.

And it
frightened him.

Frightened him
beyond his mother, beyond the reality that he was going to die unloved and
unappreciated, beyond anything that had ever haunted that huge ancestral
bedroom at Morninghall.

Who are you
to complain about your lot in life, your failure to find glory and admiration
and affection, when there are people beneath your feet who are dying every day
from malnutrition and disease?

Damon felt sick,
angry, and violent, especially toward Lady Gwyneth Evans Simms, who had forced
him to go belowdecks and witness those unspeakable horrors for himself.

The innocent
brown eyes before him were waiting silently, dark with suffering, all the worse
because those eyes were those of a child.

Damon sat down
heavily and put his head in his hands.  "What is it, Toby?"

"Radley
told me to tell ye to expect company."

"Who?"

The boy's gaze
slid toward the window.  "An officer."

"'
Bloody
hell.
"  Damon sent his chair crashing back and ran to the stern
windows.  Sure enough, there was a boat heading toward them, and in it was Bolton,
his iron gray hair blowing in straggly wisps around his stark face, his gaunt
frame so stiff that it looked as though it had been driven straight down into
the seat with a giant hammer from above.

Oh, he was in
trouble this time, but suddenly, he didn't care.

He began to
laugh.  Richly, helplessly, insanely.

"Lord
Morninghall?"

Damon turned
from the window, the image of that boat knifing through the sparkling water
still emblazoned across his brain.  That a reprimand was coming, he had no
doubt.  That Bolton was furious that the Black Wolf had humiliated the navy
once again, he did not care.  Let Bolton and his damned high-ranking friends
gnash their teeth and make eternal public vows about how they would soon snare
the elusive thief of the night.  Let them threaten him with a court-martial, a
firing squad, whatever they damned well pleased as punishment for his
incompetence and insubordination.  It was all quite amusing really.  After all,
the navy had let him down, hadn't it?  The navy had stripped him of
his
pride, swept him conveniently under the rug, and humiliated him by putting him
in charge of this disgusting hulk.  It was about time the shoe went on the
other foot and the navy got a taste of what it so enjoyed meting out.

Humiliation.  Damon
laughed and laughed while poor Toby eyed his enigmatic benefactor with
dubiousness and distrust, thinking he'd surely come unhinged.

Toby backed
toward the door.  "Will there, uh, be anything else, sir?"

Morninghall
threw himself into his swivel chair with boyish abandon and poured a generous
measure of amber liquor into a glass.  He looked at Toby, his lips still
twitching, his eyes gleaming with private amusement.

"Anything
else?" Another short burst of laughter, then he turned his profile toward
the window, the glass still raised in his hand.  "Oh, yes.  To our friend
the Black Wolf.  May he continue to humiliate men like Bolton, may he continue
to humiliate the navy, and may he never get caught!"

Yes, definitely
unhinged, Toby thought, eyeing him distrustfully.  Or foxed.

He backed out of
the door and silently shut it behind him, the marquess' laughter following him
down the short corridor to the deck beyond.

~~~~

Bolton's mood
was as foul as the stench that came creeping across the waves from the prison
hulk.  He sat rigidly upright, lips pulled back in a severe line, fury burning
through his blood.

Damn that
blasted, incompetent Morninghall!  He had made a laughingstock out of him
and
the navy one too many times with his inability to contain his lot of war wretches. 
Something had to be done.  Bolton had had it up to his epaulets with this Black
Wolf nonsense and Morninghall's dismal failure to put an end to it.

He stared up at
the prison hulk before him.  He could just see Morninghall on the deck, looming
over a cowering midshipman. 
Foyle.
  Bolton lifted his telescope for a
better look.   From what he could tell, the bastard wasn't just talking to Foyle,
he was giving him a damned good dressing-down.  He couldn't see the marquess'
face, but he could see the midshipman's, and it was taut with fear and
resentment — as most people's are who find themselves the recipients of an
unfair and unwarranted attack.

Still picking
fights with people, the surly bastard. 
I see you haven't learned a thing,
have you.  I'll get you for being so damned arrogant.

Adam's dear face
rose up in his memory.  Adam, his beloved son, lured to his death and murdered
by that very wretch who was even now reprimanding Foyle.  It had been a duel, an
old-fashioned, cold-blooded, pistols at dawn, duel.  Two shots, one from each
man, and Adam had fallen to the dewy grass, dead.  Morninghall had calmly
lowered his pistol, wrapped a handkerchief around his bleeding arm, and walked
away.  That had been the end of it — and the end of Adam.

"You may
have escaped justice from the courts for killing my son, Morninghall, but
you'll not escape it from me.  I'll get you.  You just see if I don't."  Bolton
ground his fist into his palm as the smoky hull of the prison ship reared up
out of the harbor before him.  "You knew my Adam never had a chance, you
privileged, arrogant bastard.  If you were to drop dead before my eyes, I'd
laugh.  I'd bloody
laugh
."