Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
It turned out that when embarking on an unfamiliar vessel, en route to an unfamiliar destination, Why with Zero Persons was much, much lonelier than Why with Many Persons.
He thought of the last, painfully short glimpse of Vitya he’d had—the blond hair strewn over his beautiful, already-asleep face—and longed.
Xavier Mina was glad enough to grant him passage to Galveztown on his Caledonia.
The days of the voyage passed slowly. Everard resided within a cloud of a strange, muted kind of disbelief at what he’d done, at the impetus for it.
Nor did he understand why Alarie had wanted him in the first place, as he could not possibly stand as adequate replacement for V.
Varfolomey, Romilly René, and their seven flotilla ships.
Everard was just one man, one defector Navy captain out of a thousand, whose only distinctions were the Spanish fluency he’d been born to and a war injury that would’ve sent most into retirement years before. Frankly, he didn’t see the appeal.
He had considered, many times, Vitaliy’s comment about ironclad assurance, and wondered if Alarie was in fact snakelike enough to try to use their—previous, prior, anterior—connection to squeeze Vitaliy into compliance, secondhand; but he thought the fact that Alarie had reached out precisely when he and Vitaliy hadn’t been speaking to each other made this unlikely.
And surely, Alarie knew—as Everard now did, too—that beneath Vitya’s careful consideration lay a steel will.
When his mind had set, he was unbending, unyielding, ruthless.
No doubt the book he’d thrown at Alarie in the greatcabin had accompanied an insistence that no matter what happened to Everard in Alarie’s care, Alarie would never have Varfolomey.
After all, hadn’t Vitaliy proven himself, publicly and privately, quite unmanipulated in that way?
When it came down to it, Everard knew Alarie had merely settled for what he could. Lesser, but the best he could reach for, grasping at straws. Given his own life of late, Everard could sympathise.
But had jumping ship off the Netley to join a pirate meregildo felt like that? The best he could’ve reached for, under the circumstances? Desperation; helplessness?
No, it rather hadn’t. Not at all. It’d been a dream, a marvel. Unbelievable circumstance, fate undeniable.
Not even dining daily with the serious, studious Xavier Mina could raise his spirits significantly; and this was including that the two of them in fact had a fair amount in common.
Mina came from Pamplona, Navarra, a hop-skip from Catalonia and the mountain range shared with France.
He was enigmatic, impassioned, frightfully young to have led an army at nineteen and spent four years in a French prison.
He was black-haired like Everard, but short-statured, handsomer, with a square, boyish, small-mouthed face.
And although they looked nothing alike, to Everard it was disturbingly like having a magic mirror placed before him: showing what could perhaps have been, had he not been pressed by the Royal Navy and moulded into a pseudo-Englishman. Had he been less of a coward.
It was painfully plausible, too. Two of Everard’s four brothers had gone into the army themselves, another into the Armada.
He knew nothing of their records or honestly even if they still lived, but suddenly, absurdly, he was tempted to ask after them, minuscule though the chances were that Mina had knowledge of any of them.
After a long roundtable discussion of the potential of México, democracy, the plain ugliness of Fernando VII and his turn to despotism—the particular sticking point for Everard being the monarch’s dogged persecution of the free press—Everard pulled Mina aside and asked anyway.
He’d no longer any reason left to hide his heritage.
There, it was truly an advantage, to be a lynx among felinae.
“No,” Mina said easily, “I have never known men by that name, alive or dead. Forgive me. And I think surely I would have remembered a family name so… half-English.” He leaned back into his chair, crossing an arm over his lap, drink in his palm.
“But I could inquire without too much trouble, if you’d like?
There are liberales yet in Navarra.” He smiled.
“No,” Everard replied, “it was a passing chance. Thank you. I appreciate it.”
“Not at all.” He raised his tumbler. “La familia es todo.”
“Cierto,” Everard agreed. He looked down into his own wine, watched it swirl and make legs upon the glass.
His true family wasn’t in Spain; they were all still aboard the Sévère. How long before he didn’t know whether they, too, lived or died?
Good God, Everard realised with a start.
That moment had, in fact, already come and gone.
He didn’t know. Four days the Caledonia had been en route to Galveztown, and they were set to arrive tomorrow; plenty of time for anything to have happened to the Sévère.
Time for a hurricane to develop and strike, for another anti-revolutionary to overcome them, to shoot her through, for plague to wipe through… anything.
What had he done?
Everard stood. “Con su permiso,” he muttered thickly.
Receiving a raise of brow, a nod, and polite “Almirante” from Mina—who likely thought him suddenly grieving, and who wouldn’t be wrong—he bowed, pushed his way through scores of hearty laughter and rapid Spanish syllables, foreign now to his ears, and fled.