Page 14 of Rears & Vices

The hold appeared calm, hands snoring and farting in usual form.

Everard paused in the doorway. He turned to Jack—Thom. “Stay here,” he ordered. “Don’t come out ’til I return.” He hesitated. “Unless I don’t return at all.”

Thom’s eyes went wide and luminous as he nodded. “Yessir.”

As Everard stepped onto the night-quiet deck, the watchman in the foretop straightened and acknowledged him with a faraway salute. Thankfully, it wasn’t all that unusual for the crew to find their captain walking the decks at night, especially in-harbour, with half the men on twenty-four-hour shore leave. Maybe two o’clock was a bit much, but he was a known restless sleeper.

Everard took a careful circuit of the schooner, stern to bow and back again, all seventy-two feet of her; it didn’t take long. Despite his slow steps, his heart beat drums in his chest. Where was D’Arcy?

All around, lake water lapped, the calm sound undisturbed by the telltale tap-tap of a boarding boat brought alongside. A cold, dry fog had curled into Kingston Harbour to sleep; Everard put his finger through frost gathering on the stanchion rail and wished he’d put boots on after all. Such sudden cold after such heat was bizarre for June, even this far north.

Fog or no, there was no gig he could account for at all. And none of the men sleeping between-guns on deck seemed like they’d been disturbed since lying down. But then, not much disturbed a sleeping sailor but guns and the bo’sun’s whistle; that was what the watch was for.

Absolutely no boat. Had D’Arcy swum aboard?

Everard made another slow pace round, controlling his breathing, wishing he smoked a pipe so as to have more solid an excuse than stargazing. In a fog.

D’Arcy had to have swum it, he decided.

So, where was he? Clinging to a rope? Hanging off a gun port? A schooner had very few hiding places. Everard rested elbows on the forecastle railing and listened hard for the sounds of a man treading water, perhaps scrabbling against an algae-slick hull.

Nothing.

Then: plink-plunk, in the water to starboard. It could have been a trout—but no. It sounded like something small and pebblelike had fallen into the water… from above.

Instinctively Everard looked up, to the foretop—and jerked upright in alarm.

D’Arcy sat there on the platform, head slumped back against the foremast, legs dangling through the lubber’s hole. Everard spun carefully round the mast, mindful of guns and men, so as to get a better look.

D’Arcy was hatless and out of uniform, soaked through; he looked rather as though he’d had the fight of his life with the water and barely survived. But no, not with the water: beside him on the platform—Good God—a body lay limp and still.

Everard would have gasped, but he was surrounded by sleeping crew.

Instead he leapt to the starboard ratlines, swung himself through, and climbed up and up and up, as he had thousands of times before. He pushed aside D’Arcy’s legs and hauled himself onto the platform as quietly as he could manage.

The first thing he checked was that D’Arcy was alive—he was. The second thing he checked was if the other man was dead—he was. By way of the limp garrote still round his neck. The wooden ends of it swung.

Furthermore, he was not Everard’s own watchman, the reliably nocturnal Marley; but someone unknown, unfamiliar, and apparently unfriendly. Jesus sainted, foreign agents on his little Netley?

“Preston,” he said, leaning close, “How badly are you?”

“Ev,” D’Arcy said, and giggled. “D’n’t recognise me up here? Waved atchu.”

Everard quickly covered his mouth with his right hand. God, but the foretop was no place to be delirious with a one-handed man as rescue crew.

He thought, perhaps a hammock to sling him down, and then imagined the time he’d sat down wrong in one, and flipped arse-over-head—no.

“Ev,” D’Arcy said, rumbly against his palm, “… you climb the rattlin’s in a silk banyan? S’cold!”

“Yes,” he said, straight into D’Arcy’s ear. “And I’m sorry, you’re going to have to climb down.”

D’Arcy glared. “I know,” he said waspishly, after pulling the palm away. “Been working myself up t’it, s’all. Bast’d hit me. I’m still seeing… birds.” He flapped one hand.

Everard caught it, pulled the sapphire ring from his pocket, and pushed it onto its proper home.

“Shoot them down. Let’s go.”

“Ugh.” D’Arcy shook himself, once, twice, and that was all it took.