Page 13 of Rears & Vices

Distantly he heard D’Arcy give a patient sigh, heard the assertive clack of high-heeled boots coming closer.

The dining room doors were six-panel windows that looked straight into Netley’s hold, the stairs that went up to the hatch, the crew hammocks; and somewhere just outside, the boy Jack hovered.

Nevertheless, Everard let D’Arcy pull him up and fold him into a hug.

“Soft as syllabub on the inside,” D’Arcy murmured, squeezing him tight. “I hope your damned pirate knows that.”

Six

“Sir” came whispered. “Cap’n, sir.”

The boy Jack. He was waking Everard with a shake to the shoulder.

Everard inhaled and sat up. But no bells? He shook his head. “What, Jack? No alarm? What’s amiss?”

“Nothing, sir,” the youth said quickly. “Just as you’re wanted abovedeck, like.”

“What?” Everard sighed. “A’right.”

It felt like he’d only just gone to bed. His head ached, and his missing fingers, too, like he’d used them to write instead of the right hand. D’Arcy and he had had supper in Kingston, and then Everard had come back to his quarters and sat alone with C’s letters, to choose which were best to use.

C—for Christian, his first real lover, who had in fact been a Lieutenant-Marine; and as several years’ distance had had to pass before Everard could think the man’s full name without pain, he was out of practice using it—was long dead. C had obviously not met Vitaliy Gray, but he wouldn’t have minded his words used in this way, Everard had thought. And he’d held onto the letters too long. Were their true forms not memorized— written upon his brain forever?

Two strong boiled coffees and many candles later, he had three supplementary letters, creased, stained, folded, and waxed, providing what he thought might give Vitaliy evidence towards a commuted sentence at least, if not a dishonourable discharge. At the very least, they would probably not recommend hanging, not with so much—forged, false—evidence to throw certainty of guilt.

Of course it had to be tonight there was some unfixable emergency what couldn’t wait ’til morning⁠—

Jack proffered to Everard his banyan, and he shrugged into it.

“Who needs me?” he demanded, sliding his left hand into the stuffed black glove. He reached for his boots, then reconsidered. The weather had been unreliable lately, but it was probably warm enough to go barefoot, he decided.

“It’s the cap’n from earlier, sir.”

D’Arcy? At—he tilted the clock on his desk into the stream of moonlight—two in the morning? When he had just been to supper, and said he couldn’t do anything further to help, but wished him all luck, and he’d see him in the morning?

“Probably not, Jack. You’re mistaken. That would be extremely unusual, even for him.”

“But sir—he said—” Jack swallowed and squirmed. “I’m not disloyal, sir, nor a thief,” he insisted.

“I believe you,” Everard said, because if he didn’t the boy wouldn’t be in his employ. “Go on.”

At last, after more discomfited squirming, Jack shoved a hand into a pocket and withdrew something, thrusting it at Everard like it burned his skin. “He said at four bells, bring you abovedeck.”

Everard stared at the heavy silver ring the boy had dropped in his palm. No wonder poor Jack was uncomfortable. It was cut sapphire, with a fleur-de-lis imprinted on the band interior, worth five years of Everard’s own salary, never mind a servant’s.

“Jesus,” he cursed.

D’Arcy removed the ring for two reasons, and one of them was something too obscene to do outside of a securely locked door.

Either someone had forcibly removed the thing from his hand and he was dead with someone impersonating him; or he really was on Netley’s tiny deck at two in the morning, in desperate need.

They want him very, very badly.

“Thank you, Jack.” He paused. “Thom,” he corrected, because that was the boy’s true given name on the muster. As an ex-ship’s boy himself, Everard knew what he had risked, taking that ring into his possession.

He opened the door carefully, peering out. He pulled off his sleeping cap, though it certainly wasn’t the first time the crew—or D’Arcy—had seen him in such nightwear.

If he were to be unceremoniously knifed as he went abovedeck, he wanted not to be wearing a nightcap. That was all. (The banyan was cerulean silk; he would happily be buried in it.)