Chapter 6
Six
“Sir” came whispered. “Cap’n, sir.”
The boy Jack. He was waking Everard with a shake to the shoulder.
Everard inhaled and sat up. But no bells? He shook his head. “What, Jack? No alarm? What’s amiss?”
“Nothing, sir,” the youth said quickly. “Just as you’re wanted abovedeck, like.”
“What?” Everard sighed. “A’right.”
It felt like he’d only just gone to bed. His head ached, and his missing fingers, too, like he’d used them to write instead of the right hand. D’Arcy and he had had supper in Kingston, and then Everard had come back to his quarters and sat alone with C’s letters, to choose which were best to use.
C—for Christian, his first real lover, who had in fact been a Lieutenant-Marine; and as several years’ distance had had to pass before Everard could think the man’s full name without pain, he was out of practice using it—was long dead.
C had obviously not met Vitaliy Gray, but he wouldn’t have minded his words used in this way, Everard had thought.
And he’d held onto the letters too long.
Were their true forms not memorized— written upon his brain forever?
Two strong boiled coffees and many candles later, he had three supplementary letters, creased, stained, folded, and waxed, providing what he thought might give Vitaliy evidence towards a commuted sentence at least, if not a dishonourable discharge.
At the very least, they would probably not recommend hanging, not with so much—forged, false—evidence to throw certainty of guilt.
Of course it had to be tonight there was some unfixable emergency what couldn’t wait ’til morning—
Jack proffered to Everard his banyan, and he shrugged into it.
“Who needs me?” he demanded, sliding his left hand into the stuffed black glove. He reached for his boots, then reconsidered. The weather had been unreliable lately, but it was probably warm enough to go barefoot, he decided.
“It’s the cap’n from earlier, sir.”
D’Arcy? At—he tilted the clock on his desk into the stream of moonlight—two in the morning? When he had just been to supper, and said he couldn’t do anything further to help, but wished him all luck, and he’d see him in the morning?
“Probably not, Jack. You’re mistaken. That would be extremely unusual, even for him.”
“But sir—he said—” Jack swallowed and squirmed. “I’m not disloyal, sir, nor a thief,” he insisted.
“I believe you,” Everard said, because if he didn’t the boy wouldn’t be in his employ. “Go on.”
At last, after more discomfited squirming, Jack shoved a hand into a pocket and withdrew something, thrusting it at Everard like it burned his skin. “He said at four bells, bring you abovedeck.”
Everard stared at the heavy silver ring the boy had dropped in his palm. No wonder poor Jack was uncomfortable. It was cut sapphire, with a fleur-de-lis imprinted on the band interior, worth five years of Everard’s own salary, never mind a servant’s.
“Jesus,” he cursed.
D’Arcy removed the ring for two reasons, and one of them was something too obscene to do outside of a securely locked door.
Either someone had forcibly removed the thing from his hand and he was dead with someone impersonating him; or he really was on Netley’s tiny deck at two in the morning, in desperate need.
They want him very, very badly.
“Thank you, Jack.” He paused. “Thom,” he corrected, because that was the boy’s true given name on the muster. As an ex-ship’s boy himself, Everard knew what he had risked, taking that ring into his possession.
He opened the door carefully, peering out. He pulled off his sleeping cap, though it certainly wasn’t the first time the crew—or D’Arcy—had seen him in such nightwear.
If he were to be unceremoniously knifed as he went abovedeck, he wanted not to be wearing a nightcap. That was all. (The banyan was cerulean silk; he would happily be buried in it.)
The hold appeared calm, hands snoring and farting in usual form.
Everard paused in the doorway. He turned to Jack—Thom. “Stay here,” he ordered. “Don’t come out ’til I return.” He hesitated. “Unless I don’t return at all.”
Thom’s eyes went wide and luminous as he nodded. “Yessir.”
As Everard stepped onto the night-quiet deck, the watchman in the foretop straightened and acknowledged him with a faraway salute.
Thankfully, it wasn’t all that unusual for the crew to find their captain walking the decks at night, especially in-harbour, with half the men on twenty-four-hour shore leave.
Maybe two o’clock was a bit much, but he was a known restless sleeper.
Everard took a careful circuit of the schooner, stern to bow and back again, all seventy-two feet of her; it didn’t take long. Despite his slow steps, his heart beat drums in his chest. Where was D’Arcy?
All around, lake water lapped, the calm sound undisturbed by the telltale tap-tap of a boarding boat brought alongside.
A cold, dry fog had curled into Kingston Harbour to sleep; Everard put his finger through frost gathering on the stanchion rail and wished he’d put boots on after all.
Such sudden cold after such heat was bizarre for June, even this far north.
Fog or no, there was no gig he could account for at all. And none of the men sleeping between-guns on deck seemed like they’d been disturbed since lying down. But then, not much disturbed a sleeping sailor but guns and the bo’sun’s whistle; that was what the watch was for.
Absolutely no boat. Had D’Arcy swum aboard?
Everard made another slow pace round, controlling his breathing, wishing he smoked a pipe so as to have more solid an excuse than stargazing. In a fog.
D’Arcy had to have swum it, he decided.
So, where was he? Clinging to a rope? Hanging off a gun port? A schooner had very few hiding places. Everard rested elbows on the forecastle railing and listened hard for the sounds of a man treading water, perhaps scrabbling against an algae-slick hull.
Nothing.
Then: plink-plunk, in the water to starboard. It could have been a trout—but no. It sounded like something small and pebblelike had fallen into the water… from above.
Instinctively Everard looked up, to the foretop—and jerked upright in alarm.
D’Arcy sat there on the platform, head slumped back against the foremast, legs dangling through the lubber’s hole. Everard spun carefully round the mast, mindful of guns and men, so as to get a better look.
D’Arcy was hatless and out of uniform, soaked through; he looked rather as though he’d had the fight of his life with the water and barely survived. But no, not with the water: beside him on the platform—Good God—a body lay limp and still.
Everard would have gasped, but he was surrounded by sleeping crew.
Instead he leapt to the starboard ratlines, swung himself through, and climbed up and up and up, as he had thousands of times before. He pushed aside D’Arcy’s legs and hauled himself onto the platform as quietly as he could manage.
The first thing he checked was that D’Arcy was alive—he was. The second thing he checked was if the other man was dead—he was. By way of the limp garrote still round his neck. The wooden ends of it swung.
Furthermore, he was not Everard’s own watchman, the reliably nocturnal Marley; but someone unknown, unfamiliar, and apparently unfriendly. Jesus sainted, foreign agents on his little Netley?
“Preston,” he said, leaning close, “How badly are you?”
“Ev,” D’Arcy said, and giggled. “D’n’t recognise me up here? Waved atchu.”
Everard quickly covered his mouth with his right hand. God, but the foretop was no place to be delirious with a one-handed man as rescue crew.
He thought, perhaps a hammock to sling him down, and then imagined the time he’d sat down wrong in one, and flipped arse-over-head—no.
“Ev,” D’Arcy said, rumbly against his palm, “… you climb the rattlin’s in a silk banyan? S’cold!”
“Yes,” he said, straight into D’Arcy’s ear. “And I’m sorry, you’re going to have to climb down.”
D’Arcy glared. “I know,” he said waspishly, after pulling the palm away. “Been working myself up t’it, s’all. Bast’d hit me. I’m still seeing… birds.” He flapped one hand.
Everard caught it, pulled the sapphire ring from his pocket, and pushed it onto its proper home.
“Shoot them down. Let’s go.”
“Ugh.” D’Arcy shook himself, once, twice, and that was all it took.
Everard went first, looking up anxiously every other step, but they both made it eventually; twenty years at sea counted for something. And with no watchman looking over him, Everard gave up all pretence, crossed the decks arm-in-arm with D’Arcy, and pulled him down into the hold.
Thom, bless him, had followed orders. He looked shocked to see D’Arcy so bedraggled; Everard wondered just how long he had been in possession of that expensive ring, if it had been even since before supper.
“Good lad,” D’Arcy said sincerely, staggered over to the bunk, and curled up shrimplike around Everard’s pillow.
Everard barred the door. “Don’t fall asleep, Preston.”
“M’not,” came a muffled reply. “Smells good.”
Everard shot an uneasy look towards Thom.
“He, er… hit his head.”
The youth’s expression was carefully neutral; probably he was wondering why his captain was bothering to explain anything to him at all.
Well, Everard thought tiredly, he’d trusted him thus far.
D’Arcy rolled over, squashing the pillow beneath his chin. “I didn’t hit my head,” he said genially. “It was bashed in.”
There was a glug of liquid, a clink of glass, and like magic, Thom proffered two glasses of brandy. D’Arcy brightened instantly.
“Good lad,” he repeated, sitting up. “I don’t know how you do it, Ever. I have two, two-fifty men”—he took a sip—“not a one as loyal as this.”
Everard ignored this plain untruth.
“I don’t think we have much time. Or am I mistaken, and you killed that watchman for nothing?” He caught Thom’s startled jerk from the corner of his eye, and added, “Not Marley. Another. None of ours.”