Chapter 3
Three
Three Years Earlier
King Street
York, Upper Canada
It was quarter-nine of the morning, on a Saturday, in the midst of the coldest fucking April that Everard had seen yet in York. Arm-in-arm with him on the road, Lieutenant Preston D’Arcy was not only still suppertime levels of sheets to the wind, but also… singing.
“To market, to market…”
In the smack middle of wide King Street. Nursery rhymes, no less.
“To buy a fat p… riiick…”
Worst of all, he was loud.
Everard dug his fingers into D’Arcy’s sleeve and resisted the urge to shake the man ’til his teeth rattled. “Jesus sainted, Preston,” he muttered. “You’ll have us both swinging the yard.”
“Admiralty don’t hang officers,” D’Arcy said. “Not as we’re at war with the Yanks.”
Everard grumbled. “I don’t aim to be the exception.”
D’Arcy waved this off lazily. But then, he was gentry. Everard pushed him away so that he was forced to bear more of his own weight.
“And,” he added, “you’ve got the rhyme wrong, you utter sod. It’s to buy a penny bun.”
He knew he was right, too. Pages appeared, flash-powder white in his mind, as though he held the book in his palms.
Songs for the Nursery, Tabart and Co., London, 1805. Price 6d without Plates, 1s 6d with Plates, 2s 6d with Plates beautifully Coloured.
Even without his memory, he ought to know; those particular plates had been his own work. Between wars, children’s books had been about the only steady pay for a twenty-five-year-old Navy lieutenant-turned-satirist.
There, plain on page 8:
Hey my Kitten, my Kitten… Ride a cock-horse to Banbury-cross…
To market, to market, to buy a penny bun,
Home again, home again, market is d—
“Ah!”
D’Arcy had pinched him.
“That’s for calling me sod.” He whistled, carrying the nursery rhyme’s melody on—thankfully now wordless—and they ambled round the corner, nearly onto York’s Market Square.
Aptly named, the market was a squarish mud lot near water’s edge, at the corner of King and New streets, all edged by a whitewashed fence.
Within this neat delineation, one could buy any manner of things: eggs, white, green, brown, or speckled; chickens, similarly feathered; butter and freshly wrapped cheeses; whiskered catfish, yellow pickerel, and rainbow-scale trout; new spring onions, rhubarb, and last year’s cabbages; apple-blossom honeycomb to layer on fresh bread—
D’Arcy belched softly into a fist. “Anyway, they’d never convict you, Ev, on account you hardly qualify.”
Everard stiffened, produce forgotten, though they were nearly there. “I beg your pardon. Qualify?”
“Un-natch-rul offences,” D’Arcy said, in an accent not his usual. “Too uptight. Never any witnesses. Never any fucking. Therefore.”
Everard couldn’t remember the last time there had been witnesses. Well, that was not strictly true. However… “Preston, how’re you still this drunk?”
“I’d be less drunk,” D’Arcy swayed, “if last night you’d taken proper advantage and proper-ly fu—”
Everard stopped dead. “Don’t.” He looked quickly round, over to the market, to be sure none was close enough to overhear.
But he didn’t meet D’Arcy’s eyes. He stared at his nose instead.
“We’ve spoken of this,” he said quietly.
“At length. Our relations were neither appropriate, nor ethical with me as your captain, nor, dare I say it, legal—”
“Oh.” D’Arcy snorted. “Legal’s the impediment. I see— Oi!”
D’Arcy broke the link of their arms and attempted to shove off a man who had run straight into him. He failed, sputtering, “For fuck’s— Excuse your ar… se…”
D’Arcy trailed off into a sharp breath as their interrupter stepped back.
The man was tall, white, blond, in shirtsleeves only, hatless like some disrepute, but he carried himself with the straight spine of a marine at watch, and wore a French musket.
He was also—in a word—large. If he wasn’t a sailor, the kind that climbed swaying rigging like it were so much solid-rock cliff, Everard would eat his (second-favourite, undress) hat.
“Sir,” Everard greeted, hoping that the man would go on his way, and that he hadn’t overheard.
But no. The man didn’t move. He slung his hands into his breeches pockets and regarded them: glanced over Everard’s coat with epaulettes, and D’Arcy’s one without.
“Begging pardon,” he said, looking not at all sorry. He had a soft, carefully defined voice, and the vowels of a Russian. He saluted briefly, two hooked fingers, and leaned in. “But I hope we were not serious about buying of pricks.”
The man had heard! Dear God, D’Arcy had finally gone and done it, his loud mouth would get them both hanged—
The man continued quickly. “Because the sale of one’s fellow man I cannot abide, and if that is the case, we will have words.” He smiled again, as mild as you please; Everard sensed that words were not the only thing he would have.
“But if it is companionship only you are wanting…” Vahnt-ing, it came out pronounced. His gaze focused on Everard, and went up and down, frank and fearless.
Everard almost stepped back. Had he just been propositioned? He, Everard? On King Street, York? In broad bloody daylight, on a Saturday?
D’Arcy was faster to recover. He laughed in an airless sort of way.
“Right,” he declared, ruefully. “I’ve definitely not drunk enough for this. Buy me a bird in the market, Ev.” He snickered. “If you make it there.” Then, with a wobbling spin, he walked in the direction of the coffeehouse.
“Preston!” Everard hissed after him.
D’Arcy waved. “Don’t disappoint, Captain!”
Disappoint whom?
Everard stared at his lieutenant’s blue wool superfine, retreating back, waiting for him to turn round.
He did not.
D’Arcy wouldn’t really leave him with a—hatless whomever he was, an unknown—would he? An unknown that apparently wanted—
Wanted him?
“Considerate fellow,” the blond man remarked. He came to stand beside Everard, hands still in breeches pockets. “Observant, if loud.”
Everard turned.
“I’m… not what he says I am,” he attempted.
The man leaned back on heels to regard him. Tawny eyebrows rose.
“Disappointing?” Another look, up and down. “Or uptight? I have doubt of both.”
Everard flushed. “A—a man who— Oh, never mind.” It seemed useless to deny it; he didn’t want to say it out loud. And so Everard, for the first time in a great long while, let himself take a good look of a man.
He was very attractive. His accented speech seemed to perfectly suit him, as sharply defined as the rest of him: from the cheekbones shadowed with curly blond sideburns, to the narrow, chiseled nose, the profile that belonged in a bright, light-soaked rendition of Lucifer—beautiful lips, full and firm and heart-shaped—
Everard was not really an artist. He’d never felt an affinity towards anything more glamorous than pencils, and block prints were, in his opinion, mere technical skill; cartoon, not artistry.
But suddenly he felt pencil wouldn’t be enough, and even if he could chisel out that face into relief and reproduce it onto a thousand broadsheets…
“A man who…?” the man prompted, and gave a slow, amused blink. There were faint remnants of pitch-black kohl around his heavy-lidded, blue, blue eyes. “No need exchange names, Captain. If you do not want.”
The devil knew it, too. Knew that he had only to crook a finger, and a person would nod and follow, consequences be damned. With that beauty turned towards him, Everard wasn’t even resentful of it; it was just fact, expected as the sun.
This hadn’t happened to Everard before, not ever. No one had picked him out of a crowd like a prize and said, Yes, I think him, I want him—unless one counted twenty years past, when he’d been plucked from Barcelona’s docks and shoved into a Navy ship’s hold.
It was a queer sensation, being so openly pursued. But he liked it. And singing or no singing, the man had taken an extraordinary risk in being so frank. He liked that, too.
“You have no hat,” Everard protested at last.
“No,” his new companion agreed. “One less thing to remove.”
There was absolutely no denying it now.
And it had been a very long time.
Don’t disappoint.
“Indeed,” Everard said.
The man’s answering smile was small, but victorious nonetheless. “Good,” he said. He pulled free a pocket watch, flicked it open. It gleamed, golden with a glass face, filigreed all over; much too expensive for a shipman’s pay, even an officer’s.
Knowing hit Everard like a cold thrill. Not just a sailor: pirate. That’s what those kohled eyes and lack of uniform said. Pirate. He sucked in a breath. Perhaps if he turned away and—
The man looked up, and Everard wasn’t walking away, oh, no.
“Nine of clock,” the man murmured. “Tell me, Captain… how many hours of shore liberty remain?”