Chapter 8
Eight
The Widow Bess—of the eponymous boarding-house in Kingston—was, in Everard’s estimation, a saint of a landlady.
She was tiny, unassuming, discreet in all senses of the word, with a winding knot of curly silver hair and a spine of Sheffield steel; no person alive would dare cheat her rent.
Her rooms were rat-free, and her savory scones were light and served with butter and her own chicken-and-leek stew.
Everard paid her a whole year’s worth for the four months the Netley was laid up in winter dock, and considered it a bargain investment.
But even a saint of the Widow Bess’s calibre would balk at receiving four large, wet, injured, and exhausted ex-officers into her parlour at quarter-five in the morning.
Everard stood on his wobbly land legs and stared up at the backside of the neat two-story brick building, thinking even one wet, bedraggled ex-officer might be too much. Could he really bear another casualty? Drag another down weighted into the deep beside him?
“No,” he panted. “It will have to be Maud’s, I think.”
He glanced over to Vitaliy, who leaned barefoot against the brick alleyway, shoulders bowed and arms crossed, impassive. His fine-silk hair was already drying, as he’d lost the tie for it somewhere in the water, and white-blond wisps swept across the sharp bones of his face.
For him, Everard had thrown away his uniform, his reputation, his career, the Netley, and the respect of a hundred crewmen. All in a blink, and he’d do it again.
But the loss of Bess’s seemed worse than all of the rest combined.
No surprise, really, as it meant warmth and food and home away from home, and Everard was both tired from swimming and exhausted from his sudden conversion of personal values.
Surely, if he’d had a true home, he didn’t deserve to go back there.
And Vitaliy wouldn’t even—hadn’t yet, anyway—said so much as a thank-you. Everard was afraid if he confronted the man, he’d get the same as he had before: a short rebuff. You’ve done enough.
And then, God forbid, Vitaliy would simply walk away.
D’Arcy held his coat out over the cobblestone with one hand; the other he had upon the shoulder of his sunburnt, ginger-hackled tagalong, who was apparently named Bellingham.
“C’mon, Ev. The coat’s wool, you’ve ceased dripping, and you’ve somehow retained your boots. No one is going to notice you’re wet.”
Everard was momentarily offended.
“It’s not that. I mean, it is. Of course people shall notice. But…”
It wasn’t that he cared about his own appearance precisely, but rather what his hatless, damp, wrong-rank appearance of five in the morning would do for the Widow Bess.
Or rather, what it would not do. Hers was an officers’ boarding-house.
To approach it, and be seen like this by the wrong person, could bring its reputation—and, correspondingly, Bess’s—lower than he could bear.
And a woman’s reputation, he wanted to say, was more tenuous than wet paper cloth.
But he found himself too tired to explain. Why didn’t D’Arcy—a full-blood gentry—simply understand this?
“No,” he said at last. “I’ll write for Thom in the morning, and he can meet us as he chooses. If he chooses.”
“Oi!” came a bellow; they all jumped.
“Shite-on-a-stick.” D’Arcy laugh-groaned. “The watch.”
Another bellow. “Oi, there!” A shrill whistle.
“Gad, I haven’t done this in decades,” D’Arcy said. “Run!” Laughing like a loon, he tugged on Bellingham’s hand, shoved at Everard. “Run, run!”
Everard ran. He didn’t look to see if Vitaliy followed.
Maud’s was notorious. It was also immaculate, well-lit, and—miracle of miracles—smelled of chicken pie and baked goods. Being tavern and boarding-house, it was larger than Bess’s at nearly three storeys; its south, red-brick side was thickly enlaced with summer ivy.
Maud herself turned out to be Matilda Liliana Inocente de Guzmán-Delaney, who was already up at such an ungodly hour due to some mysterious inner workings of the tavern kitchen. When D’Arcy knocked at the alley-side door, she peered a dark eye through a viewfinder before yelping.
She embraced D’Arcy, damp and all, and they were then all four of them pulled before the massive cook hearth, being beaten by towel and apron alike. In rapid Spanish she berated them for their carelessness against la gripa, el tós, que les iban a poner muy mal y ni ella ni Dios sabía de que más—
Within the space of the two apologetic sentences in Spanish that Everard offered in return, she’d sussed out Everard’s faint Català—which no one had done since he was twelve.
She continued her reprimands in the said-same language, and Everard, dumbfounded and with skills shamefully rusted, enquired in his mother’s tongue that he was much gratified to know her anew, but did she not have dispensable to them a room—for sleeping?
In the end, she had two rooms, and miraculously so because it was not a short-term hotel that she ran, it was to be very clear, but D’Arcy was family, although he did not keep yearly accommodation; and since the war had only just ended, there were still many sailors and their agents coming and going in Kingston, so she was nearly full up; lucky they had come when they had.
Desayuno was at seven and supper a la misma hora, but of the night, and lunch was to be on their own terms, but there were bollos available at any hour for the asking.
“Yes, ma’am,” Everard said to this trilingual barrage, knowing there was no other possible response. “Very many thanks. I—we are indebted to you.”
D’Arcy was grinning, but of course his sailor’s Spanish was passable for comprehension.
Bellingham looked as though he had not the slightest idea what had just gone on, and didn’t care; in shirtsleeves with hands clasped before him, the vicaresque impression remained.
Vitaliy was stoic at the door, arms crossed, his skin still pink all over from the rough drying.
Everard enquired after the bollos—to be sure it was in fact the sugar-encrusted bread and not a euphemism for genitalia towards which he had no affinity—and Maud put a quantity of them in a cloth and tied it.
She led them up the stair to the second floor, before a six-panel door likely older than herself.
This opened onto a curtained four-poster bed flanked by two windows, an armoire, and a sitting table and chair beside the red-brick fireplace.
The second room was identical, she explained, connected through the left-side door, as the pair of rooms were meant for husband-and-wife apartments.
She dimpled knowingly. Everard wondered precisely how discreet D’Arcy was—or wasn’t—there.
Probably not very. He was beyond caring.
With a warning against crumbs in the bedsheets, Maud left them.
Bellingham St. Clare sat on the edge of the first four-poster, spine straight. A moment later, he gasped and scrambled up—because he was undoubtedly still damp.
D’Arcy laughed. “That’s your side, Bellingham.
” He untied the sack of bollos, pulled three forth onto the table napkin.
“Ever? You want to…?” He jerked his head left, to the connecting apartment, and made significant eyes towards Vitaliy, who was peering out the curtain to the dawn-lit street below.
Everard was too tired to even pointedly ignore him. He merely clutched fingers around D’Arcy’s wrist and pulled him towards the connecting door.
“Oh? Hey, you don’t need to—ow! All right, I’m claimed, I’m claimed—”
There was no way in hell he was leaving D’Arcy with the traumatised tagalong before he could properly question the man about his intentions. D’Arcy, not the marine.
On Vitaliy’s behalf he worried not at all.
The second room was as promised: identical except with blue bedcurtains instead of maroon, and three windows instead of two. He nearly slammed the door shut behind them, like a child in temper—but the thought of Maud’s kind dimples stopped him.
“Sit,” he demanded.
D’Arcy sat at the duplicate spindle-leg table. He’d kept the napkin of bollos; now he bit into one. “Going to miss these,” he said thickly. “You don’ wan’ any?”
Everard sighed. “No.”
“What d’you want, then?”
Primarily, sleep. But first: “May I undress?”
“Wha—” D’Arcy coughed on sugar. “By all means,” he croaked, waving the bread. He hummed. “Preferably a slow means.”
Everard tugged off the shirt and, after a moment of indecision, laid it over the fireplace screen. The utterly ruined boots came next. He stood these in the breeze of the open window.
D’Arcy watched, rapt, chewing.
The breeches were fawn leather, and their wet abrasiveness while running had made his legs feel as though they had been lightly scrubbed all over. A wonder he still had hair there. He unbuttoned, peeled them down, inside out.
“Why are you on given name terms with a private-marine?” Everard asked.
D’Arcy swallowed the last bit of bollo and twitched his fingers delicately free of sugar. “That’s none of your concern.”
Though he’d unbuttoned the knees, the breeches had taken the stockings with. Ah, well—the things had holes anyway. On to drawers.
“You shot a man point-blank for name-calling. If not for the Ontario, I’d still wear his blood.”
“I don’t see any now,” D’Arcy agreed with a wolfish grin.
Everard pushed open all four blue bedcurtains—a four-poster was brilliant in an Upper Canadian winter but stifling in summer—then turned down the sheets, and climbed in.
“It was murder, Preston.”
“Because we neither of us has ever done that, while in the service.”
He had a point.
D’Arcy stood. “It was a horrific name. And he was a prick. Do you mind if I also…?”
Everard raised up on elbows to see over the footboard. He intended nothing. That didn’t mean he couldn’t watch. “Not at all. Do you?”
D’Arcy gestured southward. “Obviously not.” He did not take slow means; the waistcoat fell fast despite a dozen buttons. Then the pantaloons—linen, lakewater-stained. No drawers, and D’Arcy plainly did not mind being watched.