Chapter 13
Thirteen
It became immediately too dark to risk the Birch coming alongside safely, but her captain seemed content with the signal of wait-for-dawn. She pulled back to a comfortable distance, her own raised Spanish melting into the orange sunset.
But her looming presence nonetheless caused Vitaliy’s vigilance to wane slightly.
He declared it a holiday of leisure due the storm, and had rum and port wine and gin pulled up from the stores, to great enthusiasm.
Petty gambling in card games was temporarily allowed—which Everard thought was unwise but refrained from saying so—and drums and music made enclaves of merriment wherever one went throughout the three-decked ship.
Subtlety was not required of the Sévère, even in enemy territory. Most captains, even pirate ones, would pause at attacking a galley frigate and her meregildo escort.
Despite all this, Vitaliy himself still insisted on standing watch in the ratlines, in the tops.
Everard attempted initially to keep him company, but León the bo’sun, high on victory against the sea, pulled him beneath his arm and dragged him into a round of chanties on the weather deck before he could insist otherwise.
And one round turned into several, and fingers of liquor, hands of cards…
They gathered their breath in the dining parlour: León in search of more rum, Everard in search of where the hell D’Arcy could’ve got to. A whole port wine cask brought up a half hour since, and Everard hadn’t had eyes on him since the return of the seas to tranquilidad—
“Oye, ten.” León handed him a tin tumbler. Everard clutched it to his chest, then handed it abruptly back.
“No, mejor no.”
León was the Sévère’s impressively bearded, brown-complexioned bo’sun of two years: by his own definition, half Indigenous Mexica, half Spanish Criollo.
The language of the Sévère was broadly French, but with him, Everard found himself slipping into Spanish that was less and less a sailor’s neutral Castilian and more his own childhood, rural patois.
León apparently found the lack of distinction between Everard’s s’s and c’s endlessly amusing; and for some reason after the revelation of el seseo, he’d that night stopped calling Everard Spaniard, which Everard appreciated profoundly.
He felt still too recently arrived and, if not detached from, then still other to the crew; to be accused of not only Navy man but Spaniard…
The problem was Everard felt more unsure of his place there than he’d ever been aboard a ship, undefined as his role was as Varfolomey’s matelot—and he’d never possessed an easy camaraderie with anyone in the first place.
Well, excepting D’Arcy, but Preston had given them no option but to be intimate, like it was and had been forever inevitable between them.
… perhaps a thought for a soberer Everard. But—where was he?
León stood at the bottom of the ladder, waiting patiently. He really was very friendly, and very attractive, and very skilled at the upkeep and scheduling of a pirate meregildo.
“Thank God the Birch crew was held off ’til dawn,” Everard mused to the man as they unsteadily surfaced to the weather deck.
“?Y eso porqué?” León asked amusedly.
“Erm. Because on the Birch they’re ladies. Lady pirates. Women.” He belched. He had not been quite this affected by liquor in some years. “They should not… It will begin to get… It is already a bit brutish here. Really, no, thank you,” he said, to the proffered rum.
León handed the mug to a grateful passersby. “Brutish?” His eyebrows rose. He chuckled. “I forget. You haven’t met Romilly’s women. I dunno if you have seen what rowing does to the physique…”
He made a suggestive noise, and gave Everard a warm, encouraging look over his mug, one that was clearly meant to be reciprocated. Or appreciated. Perhaps he wanted Everard to appreciate women’s physiques?
Either way, León possessed an appealing, soul-deep sensuality that Everard was not at all used to being on the receiving end of. He certainly seemed easy to say yes to. And the fact that he was seeking yeses—at the very least Everard’s encouragement—beneath Vitaliy’s nose seemed quite bold.
Almost literally beneath Vitya’s nose now.
Everard put his hand on the stanchion rail, looked up. Vitya was still there in the foretop, leaning on elbows, hair loose and blown back by Gulf breeze. Tireless.
“Ya veo como es.” León sighed. “Vale. Best I go.” He put a hand on Everard’s elbow, drew him back away from the rail. “Don’t climb the shrouds as you are, friend. You will not convince him to come down tonight, anyway.”
“What is he vigilant for?” Everard muttered. “Men overboard? Jean Lafitte? It’s two in the morning.”
León laughed. “Sometimes he is just like this, man.” He saluted. “Drink water. Sleep. Find your lieutenant, maybe. Vee will see you at the rendezvous.”
He was probably correct. He’d had it from Vitya’s own mouth.
Sleep where you like.
After some enquiring, leveraging social clout he didn’t feel he possessed, and a little outright bribery, Everard eventually found D’Arcy: asleep in the old teniente’s quarters two decks below.
How the devil D’Arcy had acquired the use of an officer’s apartment on a ship of two hundred pirates he didn’t know but didn’t care, so long as it didn’t harbour fleas.
Everard crawled in top and tail; D’Arcy murmured his name and curled a hand contently around his left knee; and that was that.
Until: the hand on his leg tightened, and fingers wiggled underneath, scritch-scritched in the soft hollow.
“Gah.” Everard squirmed sideways. “D’you mind?”
D’Arcy laughed huskily. “You’re drunk,” he whispered. “How novel.”
“You’re not,” Everard retorted. “How novel.”
“Mmm.” Less amused.
“Why not join in?”
“I’ve watch at eight bells. Also, didn’t feel like it.”
“You and Vee both.”
“That surprises me not at all.”
Everard frowned to the darkness. “You’re still angry with me.”
A pause. A long breath. “Yes, rather.”
Everard made a hesitant noise, a squeaky, beginning-of-sentence noise.
“No,” D’Arcy interrupted him. “Not right now, Ev. Sleep it off.”
Everard was still for a moment. Then:
“Budge over?”
D’Arcy sighed. “We’re not nineteen, Everard—this is a single-wi— Oof.”
Everard hummed happily. D’Arcy didn’t wear drawers or a nightshirt to bed; he was sleekly fuzzy absolutely everywhere.
“I hate when you’re tipsy,” D’Arcy whispered, resigned. He put a hand up to Everard’s head, left it gently there, curved over his skull.
“No, you don’t.”
Sometime in the night, D’Arcy had maneuvered them into opposite positions, so that Everard was to the outside, one arm hanging, and it was D’Arcy who was squished against the apartment panelling, draped halfway over him.
Everard lay awake in the dark predawn, sober, sweating all over, with silken curls in his face and drool on his shirt.
“Preston,” he whispered.
“Mmn.”
“Preston, you’re angry with me.”
“Recently?” the man breathed, into Everard’s left pectoral. “Yes. Right now? ’m asleep. So should you be. Some of us have responsibilities to get to in the morning.”
Everard was silent. It was a fair point.
He… didn’t, not really.
He’d worked as much as he could without stepping on anyone’s toes; ships always needed something done, and after twenty-four years of sailing, there was nothing he didn’t know how to do, even on a meregildo.
But Vitaliy had said—at least implied—he keep his head down, and León hadn’t given him anything on which to focus.
He had no position. No outlined duties. Nothing.
The one contribution he’d made was shave a good thirty seconds off the gun drill, and even then, it wasn’t significant; 110 guns at a firing rate of a ball every two minutes was…
obliteration, in no uncertain terms, to almost every other ship upon the sea.
Not to mention there was no formal gunner nor gun crew; in keeping with Vitaliy’s egalitarian policies and rotating schedules, his pirates were generally unspecialised.
Rather anti–Adam Smith of him. Well, he thought, anti-Smith, except where it gave the pirates the potential to specialise themselves where they wanted, instead of being obliged to, say, haul lines for years on end…
In either case, most of them knew how to call a cadence and load powder and shot already; and anyway, they weren’t truly a warship. Everard was, on a whole, unnecessary.
“All right, sorry.” He wriggled free, ignoring D’Arcy’s soft grunt, and slid over the side, lowered himself onto the floor. He grabbed his boots and his hat and his coat. “I will let you sleep.”
As he closed the door behind him, he heard D’Arcy’s low cursing, scrabbling as he rolled himself over the wooden side of the cot. “Oh, for fuck’s… Everrr,” he groaned. “Wait—”
Outside the apartment threshold, Everard bent to replace his boots. D’Arcy caught up with him, barefoot and bare-legged in a billowing shirt.
“I didn’t mean take yourself off,” he muttered, putting his forehead on the doorway. “I meant… Wait. I thought you’d something to say to me?”
“I don’t. I did. I don’t know.”
“Of course.” D’Arcy blinked sleepily, squinted one eye. “Sure you’re sober?”
Everard sighed. “Yes. It was only… Yes.”
D’Arcy waited.
“I’m sorry,” Everard blurted. “I wanted to… I feel as though I must apologise.”
D’Arcy lifted his head. His curls were spiky and wild from shared humidity and using Everard as a pillow. He looked astonished. “For what? For waking me? Or…”
Everard blew out a breath. “For—everything, I suppose.”
“Ooh.” D’Arcy held up a palm, a boy about to receive a sweet, and then wiggled his fingers. “Which encompasses...?”
Everard crossed arms over himself and glared at the hand. “Not answering your letters. To start.”
“Aha.” D’Arcy reached out to Everard’s elbow. “I like this. This is worth the getting up.” He nudged Everard closer, pulled with a single rough finger. His eyes were very dark. “Go on, what else?”