Chapter 19 #2
He’d brought her a dozen paces inside now, far enough that the roof of the tunnel had begun to dip, and he had to bend his head.
They were sheltered from the wind, and from the light too, and it was easier to say the words now that she was shadowed.
Now that he could not make out the blue-gray scalpel of her gaze.
He raised his hand, meaning to put it to her waist, but he could not do it. He couldn’t touch her and tell her what he needed to say. He placed his palm against the cool, moist surface of the stone instead and felt his body tilt toward her, a satellite in her orbit, a plant turning to the sun.
“I used to be a captain,” he said again. “And before that, a privateer. I talked my way into command when I was far too young and stupid to know any better, and I did it because the money was good and because—”
His voice cracked, and he froze, trying to hold himself together, trying to keep inside the old grief that threatened to break the surface of his skin.
“Tell me,” Ruby said gently, and she did not touch him, and he was glad. He did not think he could’ve withstood the soft press of her hand.
“We were almost in the workhouse.” The ice on his mother’s cup, the gnawing pit of hunger in his belly—the memories felt inches away, as though he could reach out and touch them, separated by the thinnest scrim of glass.
“My mother and me. I was a bastard, and she had no husband, and she was sick. Brave as hell, and tooth-grindingly tough, and—sick.”
She had always been sick. She’d been a maid when he was a boy, and he could still remember the scent of furniture polish, the books her mistress had let her borrow, the pages too clean for his fingers to touch.
But she’d lost that place and then the next—lost position after position because sometimes she woke glassy-eyed and fevered, because sometimes she could not bend to clean the grate.
He had not realized the precarity of their lives, not at first. She had made it seem an adventure—an endless chance to explore new homes, to see how well they could mend their clothes, to stuff her shoes with rags and make them fit on his own too-small feet.
She had been playful and clever, and everything he loved about the world had come from her.
He felt the condensation on the tunnel’s stone wall, damp and cold beneath his fingers.
“I was six or so when I realized I could lie. When I realized that no matter what I said, I could smile and people would believe me. I brought her home stale bread and spring bulbs I filched from a churchyard, and books. She loved stories.” He remembered her hands—red and swollen, hot to the touch where they covered his on the fine cloth-covered boards.
“I told her that someone had given them to me, when the truth was I pretended I was an errand boy and stole them straight off the shelves. I couldn’t—tell her.
I couldn’t tell her any of it, and when I was twelve years old, I got caught. ”
He clenched his jaw to hold back—
He scarcely knew what he wanted to hold back.
All the memories. All the painful, precious arc of his childhood: blue delphiniums in the black earth, and a small square room, and his mother’s hands on the fresh-cut pages of a book.
“I was—in jail. When she died. She didn’t even know where I had gone. ”
“Malcolm,” Ruby whispered. She reached up: he sensed the movement more than saw it, in the tunnel’s dim light.
He took her hand and pressed it against the stone, locking his fingers between hers.
“I was . . . lost after that. I scarcely knew—” He cleared his throat. “I joined the first ship that would have me, and I worked my way up through recklessness and hunger and big, foolish talk that I was too stupid not to believe in myself. And then I met Jack Penney and everything changed.”
Penney had not been admiral, not yet. That had come later: the mad charges into battle, the scream of shattered wood and cannon shot, the hot scent of tar. The death and fear and victory, again and again and somehow again.
“He was the making of me. He vouched for me, despite my prison sentence, though he had no reason to do so. He taught me to speak like a gentleman, to turn my rough twaddle into perfect gilded company talk. He told me he would make me an officer, if only I followed his lead, and I did. I would have followed him straight off a cliff. And then—”
He laughed roughly. He could smell the amber scent of Ruby’s skin, and a ghost of wind blew her hair against his lips. “And then I did.”
Her hand twitched beneath his. “What do you mean?”
“We were in the Mediterranean Fleet. He was in the flagship, the Victorious. I captained the Swallow. We were raiding the coast—he had taken down half a convoy himself before he called for our aid. It was raining. He—” Archer swallowed.
His throat was dry, and the stone was wet beneath his hands, and his ears still rang, sometimes, with screaming.
The way they were doing now. “We collided. We lost seventeen men. Penney—he didn’t see us.
It was dark, we were straight on ahead of his bow, and the rain—”
It had been raining so hard.
“He hit your ship?” Ruby said. “With his own?”
“We collided,” Archer said again, although that had not been what he’d reported. That had not been the phrase he’d used aloud. “I was discharged. Stripped of my rank and pension. I cannot call myself a captain, not really. Not any longer. Not when it counts.”
Penney hadn’t even seen it happen. He’d argued with the sailing master—they’d both been belowdecks, in Penney’s cabin, and they shouldn’t have been, not in that weather, not with a bosun untried and the fleet converging.
The Swallow had been so much smaller than the Victorious; the wrench of wood and cold slap of water that had torn Archer’s ship in half had barely rocked the flagship.
Ruby’s voice caught hold of him in the dark. Brought him back. “I don’t understand. If Admiral Penney hit your ship, why did you—”
“I did what I was good at,” Archer said. His voice cracked again. “I lied. I said it was my fault. My error. My carelessness.”
He could feel Ruby’s body, her chest rising and falling, the warmth of her like succor, like the dream of home.
She was shaking her head. “I don’t understand. Why would you do that?”
“I couldn’t let them court-martial the admiral.
The fleet needed him more than it needed me.
But I . . . my crew, they—” He ran his thumb against Ruby’s palm, soft, gentle, aching.
“They knew it hadn’t been my fault. They refused to stay in the fleet.
They would not let me go. They were—stupid. Loyal. Idiots.”
“And he allowed it?” Ruby asked. She sounded appalled. “Penney ordered you to lie for him? He made you take the fall?”
“He did not make me. I chose it.”
In the years since he’d lost the Swallow, he’d almost convinced himself that the disaster had been his fault.
He’d told the story a dozen times, again and again, to all the officers and government men who’d interviewed him when he’d made his stunned and hollow journey back to England.
He’d said it so often, he’d almost come to believe it.
He could not have chosen anything else. When he closed his eyes, he still saw Penney’s face white with agony, his hair damp from rain and blood. Counting the bodies in the water, anguished, disbelieving. And sorry—so sorry for his mistake.
“I don’t understand,” Ruby said again.
Archer licked his lips. “The fleet couldn’t go on without him. The war, the men—everyone needed him. I needed him. I needed him to be the man at the wheel, and I . . .” He hesitated, searching for the words. “I owed everything to him. This was my chance to pay him back. But Ruby—”