Chapter 10
Ten
He was going to say yes.
Of course he would.
He shouldn’t.
The hot morning had turned into sweltering, oppressive afternoon, with another of those strange fog hazes so frequent this year.
On the return walk to Maud’s tavern, he walked side-by-each with Vitaliy, discreetly spinning the gold band on his right hand.
It fit well enough but also displaced his second and fourth fingers in a way that felt heavy.
Odd. From the weight and thickness of the gold, it was a significant piece, which made him uneasy, as he was sure that he’d never taken something so expensive into his possession before.
Vitaliy had asked Everard to be his matelot, his inheritor in case of death. His business partner. His everything partner. His husband—in name.
There was just one thing that gave Everard true pause.
It seemed Varfolomey was a wealthy pirate. So, if he said yes, barring the signing of proper papers, that was what Everard would become. Wealthy.
Everard didn’t like owning things. Showing wealth.
Having wealth. Despite having been an officer for a decade and more, with wars against several nations and a fair few prize ships under his belt, by choice he was of little circumstance.
With his own room and board and meals taken care of aboard his ships, Everard had lived cash-poor, with few possessions: nothing that couldn’t fit in his sea chest. It’d always been more than enough.
What monies he’d received surplus of this he’d sent over time to Catalonia in care of his madre; the rest went to voluntary associations.
His mother had enough now to buy coal and swine and mountain-calves unto the end of her days, and not be beholden to Anderson Calicoes for a single peseta more.
He’d simply assumed the Navy would keep him on in perpetuity, at half-pay at least, with pension afterward. It wasn’t even an outlandish assumption. It was what was done, once one made post. It was commonplace.
Unless, of course, one had given one’s name as witness to a weapons-smuggler pirate and had nearly been arrested for it.
Everard’s memory might have been spectacular, but his ability to plan for a future that didn’t include service to the Crown had, he realised now, been a bit lacking.
He looked down at the ring again. He shouldn’t have put it on.
He should go and do what he should’ve six months past, as the admiralty wanted—except now, unlike before, he had no pension awaiting.
Not that he cared about that for his own sake.
No; he ought to go back to Catalonia, beg his brothers’ forgiveness and reconciliation and ask for a spot as a manager.
Or a clerk. Anything gainful. They likely wouldn’t care who or what he’d been for the British, even with his having been on the wrong side since the beginnings of the First Coalition.
Twenty-four years, though. They wouldn’t even recognise him. He wouldn’t recognise them.
And Vitaliy had been exactly correct. He did not want to be left behind. More so now he knew who—what—Vitaliy truly was.
Wealth notwithstanding, why not tie himself irrevocably to a large, blond, and very attractive pirate who paraphrased David Hume? He was fatally curious to see firsthand what sort of pirate Vitaliy Gray had made himself into.
“How did they detain you?” Everard asked now. “A thousand dollars on your head, and you don’t have an idea who was motivated to betray you?”
“I have several ideas,” Vitaliy said. “It doesn’t matter who was it. Thanks to you, they did not succeed.”
“It doesn’t matter?” Everard laughed. “A surfeit of options for betrayers, I suppose that’s being a true pirate.”
Vitaliy shrugged. “Anyone may arrest me, and call it fortune. You, even, this minute. Why should I count opportunists?”
You, even, this minute.
Everard couldn’t even feel indignant at the jest. Vitaliy had plainly said it only because he believed it untrue. Believed it, had for the moment taken it into himself as a true thing that Everard would not betray him, that Everard wasn’t an opportunist, that Everard would support him.
Everard squinted down at his worse-for-lakewater boots as they stepped over the cobblestone pavement.
Between Vitaliy’s belief in him and thanks to you, he felt much the same as he did watching sunlight reflect in jewellike bits off a calm sea: content and at peace.
The feeling that things, for the moment, seemed all right.
Perhaps it was the coffee.
“Well, I want to know who if you don’t.”
Vitaliy ducked his head. He smiled. “Please, always say what you want.”
Everard returned the smile. “Let’s assume it wasn’t an opportunist,” he said, “since you are humouring me. What were you doing when arrested?”
“I was in Philadelphia,” Vitaliy said easily. “Acquiring a press.”
“A… press?” Everard shook his head. He had imagined heists on a massive scale; a sea battle worthy of addition to A General History of the Pyrates; a duel set for ambush; a midnight assignation gone terribly wrong. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Nor I,” Vitaliy said with a laugh.
“What happened? You couldn’t find a bent print shop? In Philadelphia, the city of liberty? Last I was there, one could not turn the corner without getting a face full of paste and broadsheet.”
“Oh, no. The printer was an honest one, or I thought him so.” Vitaliy slung his hands in pockets.
“But while I knew hardly anybody was successful getting a press to the Americas, I did not realise the Spanish were willing to do violence to anyone to prevent it.” He frowned, and despite their being in plain air and on the street and hatless, stopped and rucked up his shirt high, and twisted enough for Everard to see a pink-black, ridged scar on his lower back, quite near where one would aim for the liver.
“Déu meu,” Everard cursed.
“Yes. And it was almost my mother in my place—she knew the printer.” He let the shirt drop, not bothering to re-tuck. “A dangerous thing, ink on paper.”
“Absolutely,” Everard agreed. “All this and you don’t care to find out who betrayed you?”
“No. It had nothing to do with Varfolomey.”
“Hmm.” Everard wasn’t convinced.
“It was the first time I’ve used personal connections for pirating. It will be the last.”
They walked on.
Everard asked, “But where did the Navy come in, arresting you?”
“They came in on the Delaware.”
“Funny.” Everard smiled despite himself.
Vitaliy shrugged. “A ship pulled me out; they were Navy.”
“And someone just happened to recognise you?”
“It does happen, time to time,” Vitaliy said. “You see? No conspiracy. No plot.”
But what if someone had somehow connected the two anyway? Clearly, Vitaliy had taken pains to keep his identities separate; but what if?
“It surely looks that way. Or was meant to look that way. But who recognised you? What ship pulled you up?”
Vitaliy grunted. “That none of it matters.”
“Hmm.” Everard couldn’t tell which: if Vitaliy honestly didn’t care or if he was merely keeping things close to the chest. He let it drop for now. “Who in the Gulf wants presses?”
“Everyone,” Vitaliy said frankly. “But especially México. New Granada. Ha?ti. Those previously controlled by the Inquisition, mostly. They seek uncontrolled presses to publish something beyond scripture.”
“What kind of press were you for? The new Stanhope? Columbia? A standard Gutenberg? And London-manufactured or American?”
Vitaliy cocked his head. “It was a press. It was expensive. It came in many crates. More than that…ehh?” He made an unknowing, dismissive noise, very Slavic. “You were in printing?”
“I was. Haven’t been, for many years.” Everard paused. “The past three in particular.”
“Ah,” Vitaliy said, thoughtful. “Left-handed.”
A heated flush of memory: Everard’s left hand round both their pricks, slick and hot against the snow-damp, Canadian spring air. Groans and gasps and bitten lips.
“Er… yes,” Everard said wryly. “I get on all right with the other now. Though there was some accommodation involved.”
The look that Vitaliy shot him said he hadn’t missed his meaning—or the memory. “I’m sure. What did you produce? Books? Pamphlets? Handbills?”
Everard hesitated. If there had been any one thing, besides fucking other men, and before rescuing a criminal, that would’ve got him court-martialed and cashiered, it was his political plates and writings.
His alter ego as an anti-monarchy, anti-capitalist writer and satirist wasn’t something he’d admitted to anyone except D’Arcy.
It did contrast rather strongly with twelve years’ officer’s service to the Crown, after all.
But if he said yes, they were pledged matelots. If Vitaliy was fucked, then so was he; he imagined the reverse was true as well. And a pirate wasn’t likely to be threatened by a handful of borderline legal scratchings, was he?
“Some books. Children’s, a frontispiece or two; I’m no William Blake. I did the simplest sort of block print. Newsprint, broadsheet, cartoon.”
“Cartoons.” Vitaliy frowned. “You were a propagandist?”
“No,” Everard said quickly. “A satirist. Quite different.”
But Vitaliy had withdrawn: physically, and in his enthusiasm, too. He put his hands behind his back. “Quite the same,” he insisted softly. He sounded disappointed.
Everard stopped dead on the pavement, turned to face him, though they were within sighting distance of Maud’s already. “Difficult to please, aren’t you? What do you know of it, sir ‘comes in many crates’? It isn’t the same, not at all. Have you seen proper satire?”
For the second time that day, Everard noted that when Vitaliy was challenged, his eyes became large, observant, and unblinking. “What I have seen of cartoon generalises cultures, whole races, whole peoples, into caricature and farce.”
Everard harrumphed, turned away, and walked on, agitated. Vitaliy followed, more calmly.