Page 45 of Go, Rogue

Chapter

18

McGann feels his guts clench. The goddamnable East India Company. He’d thought he was free from them. He hadn’t heard a whisper from that lot during the four years he’d been in London.

But he’s not in London now, is he? He’s back on the water, where he’s vulnerable. Where accidents happen that kill disposable men every day. An accident at sea is—goddamn it all to hell—so easy.

He should have been prepared for this. He should have seen it coming. But he didn’t, and she’s paying the price.

He looks at Catherine over the dinner table and guilt racks him. He’s put her in danger. Foolishly. Stupidly.

Eejit.

He gulps down his wine while she holds his stare.

“Andrew,” she says, “tell me what’s happening.”

“Aye, Menace.”

He sighs. He wants to tell her about the East India Company and how he only just escaped Jamaica with his life. About his father, who turned from him and Esmee the moment he remarried. How, by the time his brother was born, he was an orphan in practice if not in fact.

And how, as they grew, his brother never missed a chance to remind him that he was worthless. No better than the dirt beneath Barclay’s ducal boots.

But here, in this room, he still hesitates. He doesn’t know how to tell Catherine about this storm raging inside him. How it’s been there ever since he was a child. Or how it connects to the East India Company and the key and the entirety of his mixed up, messed up, heart.

“Andrew,” she says quietly, interrupting his swirl of thoughts, “just start at the beginning.”

He snorts but does as she asks. “My mother,” he begins, “was born in Jamaica.”

He stares at her, waiting for a reaction, but she makes none. No gasp of horror nor yelp of surprise.

He goes on, “and my grandmother was brought there in the bottom of a ship. Not unlike this one, I imagine.”

He looks at her again, as she realizes what he’s telling her. His grandmother had been enslaved. His mother was Black. Which makes him a half-Black, half-Scottish bastard.

He expects her to push herself up from the table. Or at the very least to turn her eyes away from his in horror or embarrassment or pity, but she only looks at him, steady and expectant.

And he suddenly finds he’s run out of words. He’d always thought that would be the end of the conversation.

“What was she like, your mother?” Catherine finally prompts when he’s gone too long without speaking.

“I don’t know. I never met her. She died just after I was born. A matter of days, Esmee said. My sister knew her a little. Her mother was a consumptive and my father moved the family to Jamaica in the hopes the warm air would help her lungs. He hired my mother to be Esmee’s mother’s nurse.”

He stops again, his insides twisting. His father was a Scottish plantation owner and his grandmother an enslaved person. For a man who had literally set fire to an East Indiaman ship for the atrocities the company committed in Punjab, he couldn’t hold these two truths at once.

And yet they are the truths of his body. Of his history and his blood. And they have been ripping him apart slowly for as long as he can remember.

“I see,” Catherine says, although there’s no way for her to. Not yet. Not until he finishes this story. But he doesn’t know how to do that and still keep his dignity; how to keep his heart in his chest where it belongs instead of serving it up to her on a platter.

“And then one day,” he says with as much flippancy as he can manage, “I met a lass in an alleyway after a rainstorm while some cur was holding a knife to her throat.”

She smiles at him so gently, as if she might break him with anything else. “I think you’ve left some pieces out,” she says. “But you don’t have to tell me until you’re ready. Tell me about the key instead.”

He sees that misdirection for the kindness it is; the same kindness he’d given her when she’d said she had no one to fight for her.

Both of our fathers, he thinks, can go straight to hell.

And he wonders what might happen if they ever manage to tell each other the whole of their truths instead of the bits and pieces they let dribble out over time.