Chapter 18
Chapter
McGann feels his guts clench. The goddamnable East India Company. He’d thought he was free from them. He hadn’t heard a whisper from that lot during the four years he’d been in London.
But he’s not in London now, is he? He’s back on the water, where he’s vulnerable. Where accidents happen that kill disposable men every day. An accident at sea is—goddamn it all to hell—so easy.
He should have been prepared for this. He should have seen it coming. But he didn’t, and she’s paying the price.
He looks at Catherine over the dinner table and guilt racks him. He’s put her in danger. Foolishly. Stupidly.
Eejit.
He gulps down his wine while she holds his stare.
“Andrew,” she says, “tell me what’s happening.”
“Aye, Menace.”
He sighs. He wants to tell her about the East India Company and how he only just escaped Jamaica with his life. About his father, who turned from him and Esmee the moment he remarried. How, by the time his brother was born, he was an orphan in practice if not in fact.
And how, as they grew, his brother never missed a chance to remind him that he was worthless. No better than the dirt beneath Barclay’s ducal boots.
But here, in this room, he still hesitates. He doesn’t know how to tell Catherine about this storm raging inside him. How it’s been there ever since he was a child. Or how it connects to the East India Company and the key and the entirety of his mixed up, messed up, heart.
“Andrew,” she says quietly, interrupting his swirl of thoughts, “just start at the beginning.”
He snorts but does as she asks. “My mother,” he begins, “was born in Jamaica.”
He stares at her, waiting for a reaction, but she makes none. No gasp of horror nor yelp of surprise.
He goes on, “and my grandmother was brought there in the bottom of a ship. Not unlike this one, I imagine.”
He looks at her again, as she realizes what he’s telling her. His grandmother had been enslaved. His mother was Black. Which makes him a half-Black, half-Scottish bastard.
He expects her to push herself up from the table. Or at the very least to turn her eyes away from his in horror or embarrassment or pity, but she only looks at him, steady and expectant.
And he suddenly finds he’s run out of words. He’d always thought that would be the end of the conversation.
“What was she like, your mother?” Catherine finally prompts when he’s gone too long without speaking.
“I don’t know. I never met her. She died just after I was born. A matter of days, Esmee said. My sister knew her a little. Her mother was a consumptive and my father moved the family to Jamaica in the hopes the warm air would help her lungs. He hired my mother to be Esmee’s mother’s nurse.”
He stops again, his insides twisting. His father was a Scottish plantation owner and his grandmother an enslaved person. For a man who had literally set fire to an East Indiaman ship for the atrocities the company committed in Punjab, he couldn’t hold these two truths at once.
And yet they are the truths of his body. Of his history and his blood. And they have been ripping him apart slowly for as long as he can remember.
“I see,” Catherine says, although there’s no way for her to. Not yet. Not until he finishes this story. But he doesn’t know how to do that and still keep his dignity; how to keep his heart in his chest where it belongs instead of serving it up to her on a platter.
“And then one day,” he says with as much flippancy as he can manage, “I met a lass in an alleyway after a rainstorm while some cur was holding a knife to her throat.”
She smiles at him so gently, as if she might break him with anything else. “I think you’ve left some pieces out,” she says. “But you don’t have to tell me until you’re ready. Tell me about the key instead.”
He sees that misdirection for the kindness it is; the same kindness he’d given her when she’d said she had no one to fight for her.
Both of our fathers, he thinks, can go straight to hell.
And he wonders what might happen if they ever manage to tell each other the whole of their truths instead of the bits and pieces they let dribble out over time.
But what he says is, “Aye, the key.”
And then he tells her briefly about the East India Company and what he’d done there.
How he’d burned that vessel in Kingston Harbour so the Company could collect the insurance on the ship and the goods he’d sold off.
How he’d kept up his end of that bargain but they’d hired a man to jam a pistol into his side anyway.
“And then,” she asks when he finishes, “how did you escape?”
So he begins to tell her that, too.
Port of Kingston, Jamaica
September 1849
Four Years Ago
The man with the pistol in his side drags McGann to the cellar of a roadside inn on the outskirts of Kingston. He searches McGann and, finding no evidence on his person, shoves him down a short set of stairs to the cellar. A different man is seated at a table there, waiting.
“Well then, Mr. McGann.”
This man, the one at the table, is well-accented, unlike the other pistol-equipped one. Well-accented means well-bred and well-educated. Odd to find his kind here.
McGann can’t see much of him because it’s dark in the grim little cellar where they’ve brought him, but he can make out an arrogant, beaked nose and a ridiculous mustache.
One that hangs down too low over the man’s upper lip such that McGann wonders if the arsehole regularly catches pieces of his breakfast in it.
He hopes he does and that it’s bloody embarrassing.
“I do expect you to cooperate, Mr. McGann,” the mustache says.
“That’s Captain McGann.” He squares his shoulders against whatever’s coming next.
The floor beneath his stool is dirty and the little room stinks like garbage and stale, days-old ale. This is the kind of place you bring a man to kill him, not to negotiate with him.
So why the well-bred bloke then? The dim-witted one with the pistol can pull the trigger just as well as this one can.
“I believe you know the terms of the deal you struck with the governor general?” the mustached man says. “I should not think I’d need to repeat them.”
“Nay, laddie. Dunnae think you would.”
The mustache twitches and McGann smothers his own smile.
He enjoys playing the blustery Scot when it suits him.
It suits him now because he knows what men like this think of him: that he’s a bastard nobody from the wilds of Scotland.
The kind of man no one will miss if they sink a bullet into his flesh and leave him here in this stinking cellar to die.
Because he’s a nobody, and nobody misses nobodies.
“You were meant to provide proof,” the lips beneath the mustache say.
“I did do. Your proof just finished burning out in Kingston Harbour. The whole of Jamaica saw that ship go down. You’ll get your insurance money.”
“And we are just to believe that all of your…” he pauses and the mustache twitches again, “documentation went down with it?”
McGann only shrugs. “Don’t see how that’s provable.”
“We have a problem then, because the deal you struck was for proof and you have not provided any. You have not kept to the agreement.”
McGann leans forward, his bulk making the stool scrape across the floor.
“I have done, but that’s of no consequence to you is it?
I signed your papers that said I held your lot in the highest regard and that I’d never seen hide nor hair of wrongdoing from you.
I collected all the evidence to the contrary, including my own records and photographs and I set them alight out there in the harbor, just as I said I would.
You’ll get the money from that fire, and nothing I could say about you now would hold any weight without evidence.
That was the deal and it’s done. All of it. ”
The mustache leans back in his chair and McGann swears he looks nothing but pleased with himself at his next words. “You know better than most what the Company does to men who do not hold up their ends of bargains. I recall you had several daguerreotypes to remind you?”
McGann shifts his weight again so the stool creaks and groans in protest. He could attack, taking his chances that the mustache isn’t holding a pistol somewhere on his person. But those are not good chances.
And even if this one isn’t armed, the one that dragged him here certainly is. And although that man isn’t here in this cellar, he’s surely still about somewhere, ready and waiting to use that pistol.
“Why have you not shot me already then?” McGann asks.
“It’s funny,” the mustached man says, “that you wouldn’t remember your betters.
But I remember. Perhaps that’s why I am your better.
Or one of the reasons, anyway. I went to Eton with your brother, you know.
Came home with him once on holiday, after your father passed.
You were there, living in some little shanty on the outskirts of the property.
It was kind of Barclay to put you up, but you’ve never even once thanked him, have you?
For doing the right thing by you when he needn’t have done anything at all? ”
“You haven’t shot me because of my brother?” McGann asks, incredulous.
“Your brother is a handy man to have as a friend.”
Barclay, his fucking arsehole of a brother, wouldn’t thank him for keeping McGann alive, but McGann isn’t about to say that now.
He sighs instead. He hates who he is and who his family is and the power they wield in the world.
But if that power is the reason his heart is still beating, he’ll take it. Just this once.
“You’ve searched me and found nothing,” McGann says. “Because I’ve got nothing.”
He sends up a little prayer of gratitude to Elphame then, that he’s already seen his grandmother and given her the daguerreotype and the diary for safe keeping. “So, unless you plan to kill me anyway, you’d best let me go.”
The mustached man leans in close. “If I hear any inkling you have not been truthful, I will find you and I will kill you. Do you understand me?”
“Aye,” McGann says, already rising. “I do.”
Transatlantic Crossing, 1853
Four Years Later
McGann looks across the table at Catherine, hating what he’s just told her. He closes his eyes against his own words, not because he has any real moral objection to lying when he needs to to save his skin but because he doesn’t want to lie to her.
He doesn’t want to, but he just did anyway, omitting the conversation about his brother entirely from his story. And what’s worse—he’s about to lie again.
“So then,” he says, “I waited for my moment, and I clocked the bloke hard on the head. And then I snuck outside and did the same to the one who held the pistol. And then I made my way to the ship I’d secured passage on earlier that day, The Swiftsure.
Dawn was already breaking, and I was due aboard at first light to go back to London.
And there I stayed for the next four years. ”
“And the key?” Catherine asks.
“The key fits a lockbox my grandmother gave to me. It was my mother’s and holds her few possessions.
I put a few things in it as well, my diary from the time of the East India Company and a single daguerreotype I kept as my own insurance.
I’d gotten it and a few others from a Scot I met in India.
He’d been in America and worked with a bloke over there who made these kinds of pictures, portraits and the like, with their own darkroom they could move about.
Took it outside even, from what he said.
He’d brought the thing to India, and he’d some pictures of the governor general and the man’s military brass that were—hell, Menace, they were awful.
Posing like hunters in front of the people they’d killed.
Not just the insurrectionists, either, not that they’d think of themselves as such, but civilians too. Women and children.”
He shakes his head. “I’d like to say I’d never seen anything like it, but I’m a Highlander. I know well enough what the English are capable of.”
“Why did you keep it, Andrew? You must have known they’d come after you for it.”
“Aye. If they knew I’d done it, but I didn’t think they did. And even so, it was worth keeping. At least one of them, anyway.”
“It must be,” she says. “Or they wouldn’t have troubled themselves to come looking for it.”
“It makes a difference, what one sees with their own eyes instead of just hearing second-hand. It’s harder to brush a photograph under the rug than it is a story someone told you that they heard from someone else.
With a photograph, you can see what the Company is doing around the world. You can see the consequences of it.”
She nods. “Where is the box now?”
“Where I left it in Jamaica, I hope. With my grandmother. I’ve no idea how they learned about it or even if it’s what they’re after.
” He glances up at her, seeing the purple that lines the underside of her eyes and the sallowness of her white skin.
“But I am sorry you were hurt because of it. And, in that light, you ought to sleep.”
“Can they open the box?” she asks, making no move to go to the bed, “without the key?”
“Nay. It’s a steel lockbox. Even if they knew what was in it, they’d not be able to open it without the key.”
“Is there a reason they’d wait until now to try and get it from you?”
“I’m sure there is one but hell if I know what it is.”
“It just doesn’t make any sense, Andrew—”
“Menace,” he cuts her off. “You need to rest.”
“I know,” she says. “I will, I promise. But, Andrew, you had that key with you the whole four years you were in London, did you not?”
He turns to look at her. “Aye.”
“And no one ever came looking for it then?”
He pauses. “Aye. Perhaps they did.”
There had been occasions when he’d come home exhausted from a long day of work and…
not thought something was wrong, exactly.
His feelings were never that clear. He’d just had an inkling, a whisper, that something was amiss when he’d opened the door to his rented flat.
He’d never been able to put his finger on exactly what it was, and the few times he’d searched his rooms after, he’d come up with nothing.
They looked exactly as he’d left them, so he’d stopped bothering.
And there had been a single incident as soon as he and Crawford opened the shipping offices. A break-in, nothing stolen or broken except the lock on the door. They’d chalked it up to a miscreant needing a place to lay his head at the time, but now… goddamn it.
“Well?” Catherine asks.
“Well, I’m the arse-end of stupid,” McGann says. “Now to bed.”