Chapter 12 #4
There was nothing of revulsion in the way Vitaliy’s closed lips pressed sweetly against Everard’s, the way his hands bracketed Everard’s face, the way his fingers curled into Everard’s hair.
The ship began to roll again. Vitaliy pulled back. “I’ll come up in a moment. Don’t forget to tie yourself down.”
Twelve-ish hours later, they’d made it through.
The storm hadn’t been a hurricane, thank God; it had come in from the west, a land storm that’d strengthened over the warm water of the coast before it reached them; but it had been fierce, hard enough to push the Sévère to the edge of a loop current.
Now she had been put hove to, with most of her sheets tied up, made into a floating village once more; almost every watch took a well-deserved meal and rest.
At sunset, fresh off his own turn at a short but badly needed nap below, Everard climbed the hatch and gratefully took in the scent of a light wind coming off a calm Gulf sea. And then, with almost more gratitude, he took in the sight of Vitaliy Gray.
The man was perched in the starboard-side foremast shroud, a dark silhouette against a purple-orange dusk.
He was alone, coatless, unusually shirtless—he almost never bared his skin to the daylight—in belt, breeches, and boots.
His left knee bent at a right angle to the one beside it, and his arms were slung behind his back, elbows hooked over lines.
A classic sailor’s pose, for a rare moment of rest, of observing a beautiful post-storm sunset.
Everard almost didn’t want to disturb him. But while Vitaliy clung high enough to take in a decent view—six or seven lines up from the rail—he was also still within spoken earshot. Accessible.
And sure enough, he heard Everard coming. He turned his head in profile, greeted him before Everard tried to say anything.
“Matelot.” Though Vitaliy’s voice was roughened from hours of yelling, retching, inhaling salt spray from the storm, the word sounded lovelier in his fur trader’s French than it did in others’ workaday Jackspeak. Ma-te-lou.
“Vee,” Everard replied with a smile, though he wished he could call Vitaliy by his name and not the moniker. He touched his hat out of habit, remembering too late that Vitaliy didn’t care for deference.
Vitaliy looked tired and strangely wary. Everard felt his smile falter. He didn’t like feeling that Vitaliy was reluctant to see him, though it was certainly understandable if he was.
But he pressed on. A man wanting to be left totally alone would’ve climbed higher, out of reach.
“Calm at last.”
Vitaliy nodded once. Then, quietly, he said, “Yes.”
Everard, heartened by this small effort, said, “Will you not take a rest shift?”
Vitaliy looked over in surprise. “Now?”
“I hope I haven’t kept you from it.”
Vitaliy stared down, still and intense, saying nothing.
“I wanted to make you aware there’s no hesitation on my part,” Everard said, “in sharing your bed. To sleep,” he clarified hastily. “I would wake you whenever… whenever is needed. That is, if you would trust me to do so. If not, I can easily find other—”
“It’s not that,” Vitaliy rasped. “You can sleep where you like, with me, with whomever. Or not sleep. But look: the water is too blue.”
A crystal-blue sea. Deep, deep water; it meant they were well into the Gulf.
“Smack on ninety degrees west,” Everard agreed.
Their latitude, too, was concerning. The storm had pushed them into the deeper waters southeast of Louisiana—the most dangerous area of the Gulf, and not only because it was August and nearly hurricane season. They were directly placed along Jean Lafitte’s well-known routes.
“It is farther east than I’ve been in some time,” Vitaliy said.
“Kingston was seventy-six degrees west,” Everard pointed out.
Vitaliy slid him a patient look. “Farther east than I’ve brought the Sévère in some time,” he corrected. “I cannot rest. I must keep watch.”
Earlier, when the storm had ceased and the wind had died to almost nothing, the sun was pulled to the horizon in the sextant, and they found she’d run much farther than they’d thought.
Vitaliy had clicked shut the hack watch—his gilt pocket watch, temporarily put into service keeping Greenwich Mean—and cursed.
“You were right.” A natural navigator, his mind worked maths and maps the way Everard’s did the written word, and easily time, distance, and speed came together to confirm their charting. “Ninety degrees west, forty-one north.”
Everard yawned. “Halfway to Florida. Should we have kept her hove to instead?”
“No, no. I agreed to run her.” Vitaliy gestured to León, the bo’sun, straight-backed at his side. “Heave to, but keep a full watch after the first rest,” he ordered. “Everyone is to keep a sharp eye. The sharpest,” he emphasised.
“Senor.” León nodded, and Everard could tell he approved. Time to come out of hiding.
Not just well liked, Everard realised then. A true captain, Varfolomey hardly ever had to say any order twice.
Now Vitaliy looked up to the topsail. “Hoist the Spanish, while we’re at it?”
The Spanish flag; an almost impenetrable alias, given that the meregildo was Spanish-built.
“It may be advisable, so close to Florida,” Everard said. “Unless she is too well known for subterfuge?”
Vitaliy shook his head. “Eh, no. Not if we don’t raise the black. There are six of her, identical. One with the British, too, I believe? I will nail the disguise myself.”
The disguise in question was a thin, curved, and cleverly painted piece of hull, meant to attach to the quarter gallery and rename the Sévère as her sister-meregildo doppelganger, the Reina Luisa.
“Yourself?” Everard said. “Have the carpenters do it, for God’s sake; they weren’t abovedecks all night, in the spray.
You’re so tired, you’ll kick through a window, like as not.
” He thought of Vitaliy with lead and glass shards stuck in his ankle, his calf, his thigh, slicing through the femoral—they’d got through the storm intact and now this—
Vitaliy’s eyebrows rose a fraction, increasing the depths of the hollows around his dark, dusk-lit eyes. “Am I?” he said mildly.
“Well, I was about that tired myself, anyway.”
Vitaliy shrugged.
“Look,” Everard said, “I’ll leave you the cot, if that’s the issue. I can bunk with Preston, wherever he is. But you should re—”
“Sail!” came a cry.
Vitaliy swung himself down to the deck. No longer than a second with a glass to his eye—produced from apparently nowhere—and he had relaxed.
“It is Milly, and the Birch.”
Everard startled. The Birch was meant to have come from Belize; to already intercept the Sévère when she had been thrown by the storm was an impressive feat. “So soon, and with the storm?”
“The Birch makes six knots,” Vitaliy said, climbing the ladder to the quarterdeck two steps at a time.
“We’re back on trajectory, and there’s nobody better at a dead reckon than Romilly.
Especially the Sévère’s.” Everard followed, trying not to stare.
Vitaliy’s shoulders gleamed moon-white in the slanting sunlight.
There was not a single scar upon his back—the tell of having been beneath a good former captain, or perhaps only that Vitaliy had kept a low profile during his time with the Marines—but he did have a spread of densely packed freckles, twin wings across the shoulder blades. Fascinating.
“She must know the ship quite well.”
“Very,” Vitaliy said bluntly. He called to León with cupped hands. “Signal her to fall back—to come alongside at dawn!”
“Oh, indeed?” Everard said.
Vitaliy nodded. “We took her together. She named her.”
And then you made me your matelot, and gave half of her to me?
Romilly René was a close and faithful second; that much was clear.
She’d kept the flotilla afloat and intact and crewed the entirety of Vitaliy’s absence, no small thing.
But to what precise degree of close and faithful, Everard was afraid to ask, for fear of what he’d find.
Had she been expecting what he had given to Everard? Partnership? Inheritance?
Women are more than lovers or wives, he reminded himself. They’re ruthless, too. This one was second-in-command to a pirate fleet.
“But in the end she preferred the Birch. All-women crew, you see,” Vitaliy added.
“The Birch?” Everard startled. A select crew. “I didn’t know. How odd.”
“Is it?” Vitaliy murmured. He put the glass back to his eye and cursed. “Ah, damn. She has Louis-Michel with her.”
Louis-Michel. Very informal, that.
“Oh, Alarie?” Louis-Michel Alarie: the incumbent governor of Galveztown, appointed under authority of revolutionary México. From what little Vitaliy had said of him, the man fancied himself a nation-state maker of the likes of Washington. “What has his own navy?”
Despite how disdainfully Vitaliy, the man, had spoken of Alarie, Everard got the impression that Varfolomey, the pirate, was wary of him—or at the least, held him in careful consideration.
“Aye.” Vitaliy handed him the glass. “He’s been a privateer, too, in his own right. But call him governor to his face. He has a temper.”
The Birch was quick, even in the post-storm calm, for she was a galley frigate, with sail, oars, and a full rowing crew—of women, apparently, who knew—at her disposal.
She was close enough that Everard could in fact see Romilly René standing at the bow, her tall column of dark curly hair, and a man close at her side: shorter, but standing slim and proud and regal in what looked like impeccable emerald satin.
“They’re making good time.” Everard raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t mention Alarie was a dandy.”
And handsome, too, he didn’t say.
“He’s French,” Vitaliy said shortly, as though this explained away it all. “And he can wait until the morrow.” He jogged down the quarterdeck ladder, disappearing below.
Hmm. Left with the glass, Everard raised it once more. Louis-Michel Alarie: temperamental filibuster, dandy, privateer, commodore of the Galveztown navy.
More judgment than that, Everard would reserve.