Chapter 28 #2
“Yes, though I can’t fault you for it, since it’s inadvertent. D’you know Vee abandoned me at the market that day?”
Everard’s heart sank. “No?”
“He was my American contact. I had to get up at two in the morning and meet him again after; would you believe the nerve?”
“Two in the… I cannot believe you. No.”
York. Where Everard hadn’t been plucked straight from the crowd. Where Vitaliy hadn’t made an extraordinary risk, hadn’t taken really any risks at all; D’Arcy had been a sure, known thing to him, since they had… had already shared some kind of intimacy, unknown.
It made Everard just… an option. Distraction. Maybe a slightly intriguing one—Vitaliy hadn’t feigned wanting him; he knew that much—but an option nonetheless.
“Of course you were worth it, but…” D’Arcy rolled his eyes. “Impulsive bastard.”
Everard marvelled that there could be still so much antagonism between two men who’d had Everard between them—in every possible sense—for almost every night of the past week.
Was Everard just a kind of reconciliatory glue? A stepstone transition?
Perhaps he was merely in the way.
“What else?” he croaked. “What else have I… trod upon? Were you going to throw Vitya’s court martial, in Kingston? Was that planned, too?”
D’Arcy stood, took Everard’s hands gently in his.
“No, I swear. That wasn’t planned. That’s not to say I would’ve let him hang—I would’ve done what I could once that blindfold came free and I saw who it was, even if he wasn’t…
yours. But that day was all you, Everard, every bit of it.
Your bravery and selflessness and love. Yours. ”
Everard felt his brow furrow in his skepticism.
“It wasn’t but selfishness. Vitya didn’t want me to have done it.
Probably because it royally trod upon your…
mutual what-have-you agenda. Mayhap you had him brought to Kingston specially, to free him yourself.
Perhaps you have that influence. I don’t know, because you haven’t said the extent! ”
D’Arcy let out a long breath.
Everard said, “D’you see? How can I possibly believe any of it?”
“Believe it if you can,” D’Arcy said wearily. “I can’t ask more of you. I don’t know how to make you believe, as I can’t prove it. But it’s all true, I swear it. Vee will too, once he’s more solidly conscious. And—we ought go see if he is by now, don’t you think?”
“Not yet, no.” Everard shook his head. “We’ve known each other seven bloody years, Preston. To think that even before York, you were turned. I cannot…”
He tried to turn away from D’Arcy’s hazel sincerity, couldn’t.
Every memory was suddenly in question. He wanted to go back, spin through, revisit; revise appropriately, if he could.
He wasn’t sure even his memory worked that way.
It was extraordinarily faithful, but of a certain kind: a faithfulness to the one and only perspective he’d had to look through at the time.
A tainted, hopelessly na?ve perspective.
“I can see you thinking,” D’Arcy said. “Your career was your own, Everard. Nothing I informed on directly affected you.”
“That cannot be anything but a bald lie. It’d have made you a useless spy.”
D’Arcy crossed his arms, hunched his shoulders. “Thank you,” he muttered sarcastically. “Yes, well, it’s true.”
“Even the Wanderer?”
“Especially the Wanderer,” D’Arcy emphasised. A tiny, hopeful twitch crept into the corners of his wavering smile. “Am I absolved?”
“Sant Jesús,” Everard cursed vehemently. “I don’t…”
Three years. Three years during which the other two had known not only each other but had shared knowledge, and values, and bodies—and, on top of all that, had shared some kind of secret so large that neither of them had been able to trust Everard’s own intelligence and discretion and mutual damned values enough to divulge it.
Three years, leaving Everard out in the cold.
D’Arcy reached forward. “Ever.”
Everard flinched back. “No. No.”
Oh, he found. But he was angry after all. So very angry.
D’Arcy’s smile dropped off his face. Hazel eyes flashed wide. He’d seen it too.
“Ever…” he pressed.
“Preston, I cannot.”
“You can’t… what?” D’Arcy laughed bitterly.
Everard couldn’t look at him.
“So, you’ll run,” D’Arcy said, flatly revelatory. “Oh, my God. You’ll leave. Run straight to Alarie. Won’t you.”
Everard couldn’t see what else was left to him. They’d already expected it of him.
“I… Given the circumstances, what choice have I? I can’t trust Vee, not after he’s done what he did.”
His fists, his boots, his arms, restraining, bruising.
“And yet you can trust Alarie? I told you it wasn’t Vee’s fault!”
“I don’t…” Everard sighed. “Look, it doesn’t matter; you plainly can’t trust me. I am the last to know anything, it seems.”
“Everard, that is wholly unfair! I’m being as forthright as I can—more than I should!”
“And Vitya trusts neither of us. Where does that leave us?”
D’Arcy pointed to the floor. “It leaves us here, on this ship,” he said, and even stamped once; sawdust flew from beneath his foot.
“Together, regardless.” Then, to Everard’s horror, D’Arcy’s voice began to warp and thicken.
“Will my letters even be read this time? Shall I even bother sending a one? Not every—” D’Arcy’s voice broke entirely then.
“Not everything can be said in a letter.”
“Oh, Preston.”
“I forgive too easily,” D’Arcy went on, waveringly, “and you don’t forgive at all.
You want to know why I’ve kept this from you so long?
It isn’t that you couldn’t keep the secret, or would or wouldn’t defect from the Crown, Everard, it’s this: the fear that you would walk away if I told you even a fraction of the truth.
It’s this that you’ve held anvil over my head.
This, and the three years of utter and undeserved silence you put me through. ”
“So, you went and made my decision for me.”
I did not think you would ever want to be pirate, it turned out, was just the same as I didn’t think you’d ever defect from the Crown. I didn’t know you loved me.
“Well, and here you are, making it.” D’Arcy swiped at his damp face.
“I’ve apologised for those years already,” Everard managed. “And we never… we never had an understanding, you and I.”
“Horseshit,” D’Arcy spat. “We’ve had as much of an understanding as men like us can. From practically the moment we met. Whatever else would ‘Where you go, I go’ mean? I said I loved you, put it straight at your feet—you merely chose not to acknowledge it!”
“You’ve never asked me for anything!”
“I hadn’t need to. But it doesn’t matter. Even if I had…” He nodded to Everard’s right hand, the one with Vee’s wide golden ring on the fourth finger. “…you’ll abandon it regardless.” He raised his chin. “Will you wake him to say goodbye? He deserves at least that.”
Everard considered ripping the ring from his finger. Imagined handing it to D’Arcy, imagined his delivering it to Vitya.
No. He wouldn’t be so cruel as that. Even more selfishly, he couldn’t bear to part with the thing. Couldn’t even think what goodbye would look like. No.
“He does,” Everard agreed. “But I shouldn’t wake him.”
D’Arcy cursed viciously. “And I should’ve confessed all this when we floated in the middle of the goddamned Atlantic.”
Everard nodded. “Maybe. That probably would have been best. Yes. I’m sorry.” He began to back away, pull at the latch of the door.
“Jesus Christ.” D’Arcy stormed forward, collided with Everard, almost pushing him bodily into the door, stopping just before.
“You goddamned bloody hypocrite.” He grasped Everard by the nape of his neck, and shook him, forth-back, ’til Everard was stunned and limp like a hare, and they passed violent, sharp breaths between them.
Vitya would never—
But Vitya had—
With D’Arcy’s consent, Everard thought dizzily. His insistence. A claim of debt. An order, for the greater good.
Still.
D’Arcy leaned in, halted. Leaned in again, halted. The faintest streak of ochre remained under one furious, wet-lashed eye.
“Preston,” Everard whispered.
D’Arcy kissed him, not gently: like fighting. Kissed him like fucking, scrapes and biting, slippery impatient thrusts. Claiming.
Then he pulled Everard away and back, out of his grasp. Everard had to catch himself against the door.
“Go, then,” D’Arcy breathed.