Page 76 of Go, Rogue

Chapter

31

McGann wakes in the middle of the night and feels the heat of a fever rising within him. Or maybe the heat comes from outside himself. He can’t tell. Nor can he feel any difference from the movements of the ship, except for a few quiet moments there in the dark when he thinks their forward progression has gentled.

Perhaps he has made it to port after all. Or perhaps he’s dying. He closes his eyes and thinks of Catherine, flipping through his catalog of her smiles in his mind: the sweet one, the mischievous one, the one that’s soaked through with heat and desire. If he is dying, his last dream might as well be a good one.

The next morning, when James brings him a worm-ridden biscuit, he can tell definitively that something has changed. He’s no longer cold; no longer shivering until his teeth clack together inside his head. And there’s humidity, too, the kind of wet blanket feel to the air he generally abhors but is more than grateful for right now because it means the heat comes from outside himself.

He isn’t dying of fever, despite the greenish, foul-smelling discharge that stains his trousers around his thigh wound.

“Get up.” A voice rouses him from his stupor. He wearily opens his eyes to find James lingering outside the brig.

“Nay,” McGann says.

“Aye. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get your lazy arse up. We’ve put in.”

“Where?”

“You know where.” That’s from Barclay. “It doesn’t become you to play dumb, brother.”

McGann pushes himself to his feet, and pain ratchets up his wounded leg and then explodes into the rest of his body. He limps forward to the bars of his little prison.

“Get me a doctor, Barclay,” he says.

“That’s ‘Your Grace’ to you, and I won’t remind you again. James, get him ashore. I’ve business to attend to.”

McGann grips the bars and holds on as best he can. Any movement makes the small enclosure spin around him, and he’s dismayed to find he needs those bars to hold himself upright.

He breathes in deeply and closes his eyes, commanding himself to stay on his feet. To balance.

“I need a doctor, Your Grace,” he says, swallowing back the sarcasm he’d like to imbue that address with. Barclay is the furthest thing from grace he can imagine. “You’ll never know where that key is if you let me die here.”

“Don’t be overly dramatic, brother. You’re not dying. Although,” he wrinkles his nose, “you do smell.”

McGann grips the bars until his knuckles are white. His brother is either an idiot or especially adept at believing whatever story he tells himself to make his actions more palatable. He wonders what story makes kidnapping his own brother and bankrupting his sister seem acceptable.

“What’s in it for you anyway?” McGann asks. “There’s nothing in that box to concern you.”

“Money,” Barclay says shortly. “The only thing that has ever been in it for anyone. And the only reason I would ever deign to spend my time with men of commerce. Perhaps you weren’t playing dumb after all. Perhaps you really are a twit.”

“Men of commerce?” McGann tries to hide his surprise. That isn’t what he’d been expecting his brother to say. But then he understands. “Do you work for the East India Company? Doing what? I never saw hide nor hair of you there.”

Barclay shrugs. “Let’s say I am employed in a rather informal manner. Dukes don’t work, but we do need a ready cash flow. It can be quite a predicament.”

McGann stares at his brother. If Barclay really is in the Company’s pocket, there’s no reason he wouldn’t have just handed over the box and let them deal with the key.

Or, he’d have killed McGann outright.

So why hasn’t he done either of those things?

“What do you do for them?” he asks.

“This and that. A vote in their favor when it’s needed. A whisper in the right ear at the right time. And I keep tabs on you, setting up shop with Crawford of all people,” Barclay sneers. “A marquess’s second son. You might as well have picked a baronet and been done with it if you were going to scrape the bottom of the peerage ranks. Although I suppose any member of the aristocracy that would partner with you wouldn’t be the sterling sort.”

“Enough,” McGann says.

He knows what his brother is about to say; the insults he’ll hurl are the same he’s been flinging at him for the last seventeen years. McGann has no need to hear them.