Chapter 8 #3
Vee. Vee. It didn’t sound right, didn’t look right… until Everard remembered, from his time off the Atlantic coast years past, one particular wanted advertisement. The centre focus of which had been—instead of the tiny, ugly caricature—an elaborate majuscule V.
ONE THOUSAND AMERICAN DOLLARS REWARD. Pirate Leader V. Varfolomey of the Pirate Ship SéVèRE, Menace of the Coast Atlantic, Gulf of Spain and Caribbean. ONE HUNDRED for INFORMATION, REST upon DELIVERY of ABOVE MENTIONED.
Everard remembered thinking it must have been meant as a copy of the pirate’s signature, thinking what a self-important pirate captain he must have been. Not much else.
“V. Varfolomey?” Little wonder they’d black-booked him, tried to arrest him; he’d only perjured himself for the single most famous pirate on the Atlantic. “But—but the print is nothing like you,” he protested. “Nothing like you at all!”
For one thing, they’d left out the beautiful mouth. Whoever had made that print clearly did not realise its value—in identification or aesthetics.
Vitaliy grimaced, lips flattening. “It is not as though I’ve sat for portraits.”
“You ought do,” Everard replied unthinking. “Er,” he revised, “were circumstances… different.”
Vitaliy blinked, and then smiled; a slight, boyish curve of corners that seemed to completely contrast with Everard’s idea of an infamous pirate, of who Vitaliy said he was.
V. Varfolomey: the man about whom no one could say for sure what the initial had originally stood for—vicious, or victorious, or violent—because Varfolomey was known to be all of those things.
Everard looked at that smile and thought: what if V was just Vitaliy? Vitya?
He put palms over his eyes, clenched his teeth against the threat of a high, desperate-feeling laugh. No wonder he could no longer read even D’Arcy. It seemed Everard had well and truly lost his bearings when it came to other men… if he’d ever had any at all.
He groaned. “Weapons. And how many ships in your flotilla?”
He hadn’t expected an answer, but Vitaliy politely said, “That I cannot say.”
Of course not. “How long have you been a pirate?”
“Lord God above,” D’Arcy muttered. “Oh, sorry, Bell.”
“Some years,” Vitaliy replied neutrally. “It depends whom you ask.”
“Or which government?” Everard pulled his hands away and began to pace from the connecting door to the exterior one. His own Atlantic service had ended abruptly in 1812 with the destruction of the Wanderer, and he’d surely seen the wanted notice repeated in the Gazette before.
“But if you are so famous, why would they hang you as Navy, under an assumed name? The Crown doesn’t need to court-martial a mere pirate!”
It was one question too many, or maybe mere had been the wrong choice to apply to a man with control over an entire flotilla. Vitaliy drew back, raising his chin. His lips set into smooth marble, the corners flat as his dark eyes.
But it was a reaction, and Everard relished it, stood still in the wake of it.
The man does feel his pride, after all.
“I owe you my life,” Vitaliy said. “And some kind of recompense for the implosion of your own. But though having fucked me seems to have motivated you to speak up for me, a mere pirate, it doesn’t entitle you to judge me.”
Vitaliy spoke like a king, a tired one who was unexpectedly virtuous and used to constant assumptions to the contrary. A high-handed one, too. Everard felt his color rising. Recompense.
Did Vitaliy think he wanted… money? He’d disdain saving his life for having shared his bed but would offer him money?
“Answers are all I want from you. Fucking’s got absolutely nothing doing. Is that all it was to you? Truly?” He pointed to D’Arcy, pale in his chair. “All that Preston’s done?”
“Oh, no,” D’Arcy said at this. He stood. “Don’t you involve me in this mutual-guilt crusade. Bell, another breakfast is in order, d’you think?” He gestured to Thom. “You too. Out, out.”
Thom protested, “But—” even as St. Clare dragged him across the doorway.
D’Arcy muttered in Everard’s ear as he left. “Don’t kill each other.”
Everard barely heard this, or the door’s latch snicking shut behind him.
Vitaliy opened his mouth, but Everard wasn’t done.
“I’m sorry it offends you I wasn’t able to leave you to hang.
And furthermore, did it for less motivation than you apparently deem sufficient.
I suppose a pirate such as V. Varfolomey has a wealth of avenues for escape; you didn’t need a once-upon, forgotten lover to hoist himself upon a pike for you. But it is what it is. It’s done.”
Vitaliy shut his mouth.
“Or d’you think I should have done it for somewhat else? For Varfolomey’s greatness?” Everard mused aloud. “Perhaps for the money I imagined you would offer me in recompense? Is that what should have motivated me instead?”
Vitaliy stared. He looked as though someone had slapped him with a satin glove and demanded answer, and no one had ever dared before.
“Is it what you want?” he whispered.
Everard believed it that no one had.
“God. No. Sant Jesús. Look, at risk of confirming everything terrible that you seem to assume of me: I truly don’t care that you’re a pirate—that you’re… him. Varfolomey. It has no bearing.”
No bearing, except that three years earlier, Vitaliy hadn’t said he was Varfolomey, hadn’t told him the whole truth. Absolutely no bearing.
He laughed. “Obviously it didn’t, because I hadn’t realised.
But you could have been any Jack Tar, the guiltiest man on deck, and I’d still have said what I did because it was you, Vitya.
I don’t understand in the least why you think sharing what we shared shouldn’t have influenced me in that way. It did. It has. It will forever.”
Vitaliy’s eyes were very, very wide.
“So, no. I don’t want money. Nor recompense. Nothing at all, except to know you’re not dead. But…” He sighed. “I do believe I am entitled to a few questions? Answers? Perhaps?”
“You—answers. The truth.”
“Yes.”
“That is it? All you want?”
“Yes.”
Vitaliy nodded. “You can have it. Ask me whatever.” He went back to the basin and rinsed his face, then dried each hemisphere with the towel Thom had left.
Of course then Everard couldn’t think what to ask.
“This—what I’ve done,” he began, after a moment, “it doesn’t tie us together irrevocably, regardless of motivation. You can of course go your own way, as you have done. You don’t owe me a thing, going forward.”
Vitaliy lowered the towel.
Everard thought: maybe it hadn’t been to evoke an angry response in Vitaliy that had thrilled him, but instead the simple fascination of watching the man think, watching emotion ripple across his face in degrees.
What settled there now looked like understanding—and resolve. Decision.
What decision? Everard wondered.
“Do you say what you mean?” Vitaliy murmured. He felt at his newly clean face with fingertips. “Because I also prefer truths. And I think what you mean is that you don’t wish to be left behind.”
Everard blinked, taken aback. It was a little too close of a hit. “Good God.” His face felt shot-hot again. “One doesn’t just declare what one feels!”
Vitaliy smiled, a mischievous curl. “But why not say what you want? It’s not a problem, wanting. And…” There, that resolute look again: wide-eyed and sincere. “You haven’t yet heard my proposal.”
“Proposal? Oh, ‘what after’?”
“Mm,” Vitaliy confirmed. “Are you hungry? The lieutenant had his breakfast already, but you have not.”
“He’s not my…” Everard waved. “Yes, I am.”
“There is a safe, and good, coffeehouse… unadvertised…”
“Safe for a pirate? Or safe, like…” Everard gestured between them.
“Safe, like that.” Vitaliy’s smile spread, broad and soft. “This time, we neither of us have hats.”