Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
It was worse than Everard could’ve imagined.
“It had to be real,” D’Arcy stressed, for perhaps the third time. “Real bruises, real blood—pirates are too known for their theatre and falsehood. They’d see through pig’s blood and paint.”
Everard clung to D’Arcy’s hand and couldn’t breathe. Harder to leave a man alive than to kill him by accident.
“No,” he muttered, disbelieving. “Vitya… couldn’t have.” It couldn’t have been him. Gentle but ruthless Vitya— “No.”
“He enjoyed it about as much as I did,” D’Arcy went on quickly. “Which is to say not at all. If that helps.”
“No.” Everard shook his head. “No, it doesn’t.”
“He asked if I’d broken anything, and I told him about my rib—from the Wanderer, you remember?—he insisted on avoiding it, though I told him you’d maybe see it and wonder…it seemed so conspicuous after…”
Everard jerked away, pushed his forehead into the heels of his hands, and keened. D’Arcy put a tentative palm on the curve of his back.
“No one else could do it, Ever. René knew—knows—but she wasn’t strong enough. No one else knew, not even Stephan. And it had to look like several men.”
Fists, boots, a belt or two. A strong arm around his throat, holding back his arms… One man.
“But why? And when…” Everard gulped. “You weren’t actually drunk, the day of the San Telmo.”
D’Arcy chuckled uneasily. “We-elll… as I had to look rather unconscious…”
Vitaliy, shaking after; Everard, comforting him, thinking it to be normal, commonplace battle shock. Vitya, lying to him, every moment of the past fortnight.
Everard moaned. “… I am going to be sick.”
D’Arcy had anticipated this somehow, although they were at sea, and Everard had never, in his memory or anyone’s, been sick at sea—he pulled a sawdust bucket close. Cedar and oak and fir shavings floated up into Everard’s nose as he was thoroughly sick, and sneezed, and was sick again.
D’Arcy was there beside him as he shook. He pushed hair back from Everard’s brow, carefully wiped his mouth with his handkerchief.
“I don’t want—can’t hear any more of how,” Everard said weakly, after. “Only… why.”
“All right,” D’Arcy said softly. “To make a long tale short, it was necessary to keep Alarie’s mounting suspicion off my back. He knows about Vee—that he’s American, and up to his ears in it with Madison—but not me, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Alarie knows… I don’t know! What’s to know?”
D’Arcy nodded. “I am—and have been—agent for the Americans. Occasionally the French.”
“You what?” Everard stood abruptly, conking his head on the upper bunk, also accidentally stealing the handkerchief; he clutched it over his mouth in horror as he backed away. “Sodding—ow. Agent... spy. For how long?”
D’Arcy looked uncomfortable. He made to stand. “I’ll wake Vee—”
Everard snatched away the handkerchief to enunciate. “Sit down,” he ordered; D’Arcy complied. “How bloody long?”
“Since I’d met Vee. Thereabouts.”
“Which was—certainly, that was York, three years ago?” Anger flared. “You were turned under my goddamn nose in the middle of war?”
D’Arcy shook his head.
“Then how bloody long ago!”
“Eighteen-oh-eight. Eighteen-oh-nine? I hardly remember. It was the West Africa Squadron in infancy. We were posted to the same frigate.”
Everard staggered. “Vitya was a marine. And you—and he—and you— He was a marine!”
D’Arcy grinned weakly, scratched at the nape of his neck. “I like a red coat on a man?”
“Idiota, idiota, puto tontorrón. I am such the idiot,” Everard said emphatically.
“Hey, now,” D’Arcy protested, “slurs are uncalled for.”
“Have you two been… this whole time?”
“No!” D’Arcy put up his hands and waved. “No, no, no. Not until”—he smiled crookedly—“the other night. I swear to you, Ever. Vee and I weren’t— We were never suited, and just he and I in bed, it’s… You maybe saw a bit of it. But he loves you; he’d do anything for you.”
“Anything, except not put his fists to the face of the other man I love,” Everard said bitterly.
D’Arcy’s face worked, conflicted. “Everard, neither of us was prepared for the extent of your reaction. I’m sure if he’d known… hell, if I’d known…”
They hadn’t known I loved him.
“I thought you were dead,” Everard muttered, stunned and shamed to his marrow. “Even if you’d just been my lieutenant… I’m responsible… Of course I would care.”
“No, you aren’t responsible,” D’Arcy said firmly. “I’m sorry. It was really only bruising. The rest was feigned. And I was very drunk, which made it easier. Then”—he chuckled—“we both thought he maybe hadn’t done enough. Especially when Stephan stayed vigil all of an hour.”
Everard made a nauseated groan, put his hands over his face. “Enough? Please—it’s too much.”
“You’re not responsible for it, Everard. And neither is Vee, not truly. You mustn’t blame him. Blame me alone, if anyone.”
But how is that possible? Everard thought. It’d been Vitya’s fists, his boots, his careful, meticulous touch. Thanks to sharing combat with the man, Everard could see it there in his mind, just as well as he could not ever, ever imagine it. Vitaliy making a fist, drawing back—
Everard groaned, and was obliged to lean and be unexpectedly sick again, saliva and desperation the only things left in him.
D’Arcy reached an arm around, pulled Everard deep into his sturdy, warm shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he murmured in litany. “I’m sorry.”
So was Everard. Vitaliy would always weigh principles and ways against any one man’s welfare, no matter whom that one man happened to be to him. The result, the goal was what mattered.
He knew this, had seen it borne out again and again; there was the proof.
Against D’Arcy’s neck, Everard breathed in bitter almond, sea salt, the man’s own sharp scent, and quietly went to pieces. D’Arcy squeezed him tight, as though they floated, vessel-less, on the open sea, and would be parted if he dared let go.
Eventually, Everard raised his head and asked, “Tell me how he turned you.”
“The usual way,” D’Arcy said, nonchalant; but the thickness of his voice gave him away. “In bed.”
Everard managed a playful thump, straight onto the man’s chest. “God.”
“No, no. He didn’t. Vee’s good at speechifying his causes—I know you know because you’re nearly as bad—but I was already a turn-coat in Philadelphia by that time. It was I who reached out initially.”
This surprised Everard not at all.
“But… why?” Not why D’Arcy had reached out, spy to spy—he suspected that carried other implications he wasn’t yet being told, besides that D’Arcy was sometimes irreconcilably reckless. “Why America?”
“Don’t think that I harbour the same conviction Vee carries,” D’Arcy warned, “I don’t. There’s only too much French in me.”
Everard snorted.
“… too much romance and risk-seeking, too. I hated my father with a blistering passion.” He shrugged. “What else would a boy need?”
“A survival instinct?” Everard put forth. “A distinct desire not to be drawn and quartered? Even sons of earls aren’t spared in cases of treason—and the scandal… Do not you have a sister recently come out?”
“Last season, yes. Or perhaps two seasons. Three?” He paused.
“The idea was not to get caught. And scandal”—he dimpled down—“Princey’s accomplished that on her own.
Went to an American ladies’ school, you know, that’s plenty.
And even if she hadn’t, I daresay my tying up and gagging a port-admiral already ranks pretty bad for society.
” He eyed Everard with mild suspicion. “You haven’t ever asked after Little Prince before. ”
“I’ve a new understanding of what it’s like to find oneself dependent, that’s all.”
D’Arcy pinched him. “Do you, now? Really? Christ, sometimes you’re so offensive, it’s almost endearing. No wonder Vee goes goggle-eyes at you. You’re a challenge wrapped up in a pretty scowl—”
“I beg your pardon.”
“—with a large prick attached.”
“Hmph.” Everard pushed away with a sniff. “I hadn’t meant to be offensive. But tell me more of Philadelphia. It sounds awfully secretive.”
“And shall remain so, I’m afraid.”
This struck Everard as particularly unfair. “But—”
“No. I won’t say, and Vee can’t. Not under any circumstance.”
“So, within this… secret strata… I am to understand you are his superior?”
“More or less,” D’Arcy said cheerfully. “Did you think he called me Lieutenant because of you?”
“Yes, of course I had,” Everard said, bewildered. “In irony. In jest.”
D’Arcy smirked. “The world does ever turn around you.”
“And what else would I have thought, pray?” Everard stood, and began to pace. “You were my first lieutenant four years, Preston. And so far as I understood, the bridge between you and he was only myself. Not some bloody Order of Bizarre Fellows.”
D’Arcy chuckled. “Good guess. ’Tisn’t that one, though, sorry.
I’m teasing you,” he admitted. “It was a perfectly reasonable assumption. But, Everard, I tell you this only so that you understand where the blame lies here. Vee didn’t have a choice in this.
I couldn’t hit myself, and no one else could be trusted. ”
“Of course he had a choice. Still, we’re speaking of the same man? Vitaliy Gray? V. Varfolomey, egalitarian, abolitionist pirate? That man takes orders from you? And fulfilled them for the sake of…” Everard gestured wildly, “… some unknown duty?”
“Again with the disbelieving!” D’Arcy said, but he grinned.
“Orders as you and I were used to, they aren’t.
That’s to say, they didn’t come from me directly but were more to ensure an essential status quo that Vee’s sworn to uphold.
But he owed me more than a favor for York, and my not being discovered as spy benefits everybody involved in any case—”
Everard seized on that. York—where they had supposedly met Vitya? “York… when?”
“You do make a good distraction, Ever, even if you have a tendency to step in and tread over my plans at regular intervals.”
Everard could only utter a weak “Have I?”