By Honor Betrayed
By Alex Beecroft
1748
Lieutenant Conrad Herriot and Seaman Tom Cotton have been master and servant for over a decade, and friends for
almost as long. When Tom is injured during a skirmish, Conrad forgets himself and rushes to Tom’s side, arousing
suspicion about the true nature of their relationship.
All Tom wants is the chance to consummate their love and embark on a new life together, outside the law that condemns
them. Yet he fears Conrad won’t risk his career and his honor to become Tom’s lover.
Conrad believes his lust for Tom will damn his soul. There’s also their difference in class—a gentleman doesn’t socialize
with a common tar. As Conrad struggles to refute the gossip on the ship, he must decide whether to commit the crime
the crew’s already convicted them of, or part from Tom for good to save both their necks…
25,000 words
Dear Reader,
What do you get when you cross summer with lots of beach time, and long hours of traveling? An executive editor who’s
too busy to write the Dear Reader letter, but has time for reading. I find both the beach and the plane are excellent places
to read, and thanks to plenty of time spent on both this summer (I went to Australia! And New Zealand!) I’m able to tell
you with confidence: our fall lineup of books is outstanding.
We kick off the fall season with seven romantic suspense titles, during our Romantic Suspense celebration in the first
week of September. We’re pleased to offer novella Fatal Destiny by Marie Force as a free download to get you started
with the romantic suspense offerings. Also in September, fans of Eleri Stone’s sexy, hot paranormal romance debut novel,
Mercy, can look forward to her follow-up story, Redemption, set in the same world of the Lost City Shifters.
Looking to dive into a new erotic romance? We have a sizzling trilogy for you. In October, look for Christine D’Abo’s Long
Shots trilogy featuring three siblings who share ownership of a coffee shop, and each of whom discover steamy passion
within the walls of a local sex club. Christine’s trilogy kicks off with Double Shot.
In addition to a variety of frontlist titles in historical, paranormal, contemporary, steampunk and erotic romance, we’re
also pleased to present two authors releasing backlist titles with us. In October, we’ll re-release four science fiction
romance titles from the backlist of C.J. Barry, and in November four Western romance titles from the backlist of Susan
Edwards.
Also in November, we’re thrilled to offer our first two chick lit titles from three debut authors, Liar’s Guide to True Love by
Wendy Chen and Unscripted by Natalie Aaron and Marla Schwartz. I hope you’ll check out these fun, sometimes laugh-
out-loud novels.
Whether you’re on the beach, on a plane, or sitting in your favorite recliner at home, Carina Press can offer you a
diverting read to take you away on your next great adventure this fall!
We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your thoughts, comments and questions to
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Happy reading!
~Angela James
Executive Editor, Carina Press
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Dedication
To Andrew
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my editor Deborah Nemeth, without whose skill and encouragement this wouldn’t be half the story it is.
And thank you to Essayel for all her advice on pirate lore and for introducing me to Captain Cobham and Maria.
Contents
Chapter One
Off Cap Gris Nez, France, 1750
The sea had gentled overnight. The pirate ship rose from its pewter surface like a hole in the world, black against the stars.
She was anchored in the protection of a headland on the French coast, and beyond the grey line where surf met shore, a
score of campfires shone yellow as dandelions where half of her crew were making merry with the locals.
“Right, Jones,” Conrad whispered. “Off you go. Good luck to you.”
Lt. Conrad Herriot, of His Majesty’s sloop-of-war Valiant, tried to wet his dry mouth by swallowing. He’d been entrusted
with both the planning and the execution of this operation, and the responsibility lay heavily on him. Having led the
convoy of boats around from the other side of the headland, where Valiant lay hidden, waiting for his signal, he watched
Jones and his men pull away. Oars muffled, dark coats and black-painted boat all but invisible in the night, they
disappeared fast as they swung around, intending to appear to the pirates as if they were rowing out from the coast.
From aboard the pirate ship—a captured man-of-war the Valiant had no wish to engage in a plain fight—came the sounds
of pistol shots, laughter and the stuck-pig shriek of a man screaming in agony. A faint, shrill pipe and the rhythm of a fife
and drum blew in snatches on the wind. The pirates must have been dancing while their victim sobbed. Just behind
Conrad, Tom muttered in horror and Conrad had to reach out and squeeze his arm to hush him.
They’d been forever holding station in the winter chill when at last a smoky orange blaze kindled beyond the pirate ship,
streaking the sea with amber. Something aflame, moving against the tide, came drifting towards the bow of the man-of-
war. The lookout had seen it too. The sound of the fife choked off midnote, and Conrad’s little fleet of black boats pulled
hard and quiet on the oars.
Up on deck, the pirates were crowding to the heads, running for poles to fend off the strange floating fire. Jones and his
men chopped boarding axes into the ship’s hull, tied their boat to them and swam for the main chains, leaving the tar
barrel in their boat to set all alight.
Meanwhile Conrad had reached the stern of the ship and was swarming up, his men behind him, Tom—as always—at his
shoulder. They reached the rail, exchanged a glance—if we don’t make it, it’s been an honour fighting beside you—and
rolled silently over.
Barefoot, clad in black, they’d blacked even the blades of their knives with soot. The pirates, bunched up together, staring
out at the bright light, didn’t see them coming until the first rank had fallen with their throats cut. Then the lookout
regained his night vision, saw them and yelled. The next rank were turning, drawing weapons when they were
butchered—it was less clean this time, long knives hacking at protecting arms, slashing and wounding.
Surprise lost, Conrad dropped his knife and drew his pistols. He fired twice, taking out two men and giving himself space
to draw his sword. Then it was close combat, a ringing blur of panic and steel. No time for thought, only for jabbing,
reacting, seeing spaces and moving into them, with the luxury of knowing that his back was covered. Tom was next to him,
and together they were invulnerable.
He was peripherally aware that the men from the boats behind his had cut the anchor cable, were labouring on the
mainsail to put it before the wind. It sheeted home with a thunderous rumble and creaked full. The man-of-war
ponderously inched forward out of the harbour, and the pirates—seeing the shore recede with their mates on it—
redoubled their ferocity.
Just got to hold them back. Got to hold them back until…
The night split open with fierce light. Jones had sent up the flare to signal the Valiant. To Conrad’s battle-heightened
senses, the scalding brilliance seemed to go on forever, picking out harsh faces, matted beards. It made the side of Tom’s
mouth shine, and the sight filled Conrad with exaltation.
Then something bright, as blazing silver as solid lightning, lunged from a dark shape seen out of the corner of his eye. God!
A sword! And the blade hit Tom on the temple, swept him off his feet. He flew backwards, tangled with a peg-legged man.
Crying out, they both fell and were trodden on.
Darkness returned and Conrad fought as though he’d fallen into the sea. He was drowning, could not touch bottom, could
not find a thing to hold on to. His night vision was shot, and his mind darkened. He battled on like a berserker until there
was no one left to fight, and Jones took his arm and shook him, bewildered, into a world of inexplicable peace.
The Valiant had reached them and lay alongside, her guns easily sufficient to annihilate the pirates on the shore. At some
point, while Conrad was mopping up the last pocket of resistance, Captain Fortescue must have come aboard. Now he
beckoned Conrad to join him, a rare broad smile beaming on his usually composed features.
“Mr. Herriot, congratulations on the success of your endeavour. A job well done.”
The words made no sense. Irrelevant. Conrad shook his head, shook them off and said, “Tom. Tom! Oh God, where is he?”
Fortescue took a step back. The smile winked out. Jones dropped Conrad’s arm as if it had bitten him, and Conrad
stumbled and lurched among the dead, turning over bodies in a growing, pointed silence, not stopping until he had found
him.
He pushed the peg-legged man’s body away. Tom lay on his back, his eyes closed. Conrad reached, touched his mouth.
Warm. But he still would be warm, wouldn’t he? It hadn’t been that long. A scream tried to tear its way out of his throat.
He was filling his lungs to give it everything he had when he felt breath on his fingertips. “What…?”
Fortescue stepped up beside him, head angled as he considered what he saw. “That’s a bruise, Mr. Herriot, not a gash.
The man must have caught the flat of the blade, rather than the edge, and been knocked out. Lucky for him. Bar a
headache I’m sure he’ll be none the worse.”
Alive? Alive! Thank God! Relief rolled Conrad flat for a moment and then restored him to normality. A normality in which
Fortescue was observing him the way the learned gentlemen of the Royal Society might look at a mouse in a vacuum
chamber as they slowly pumped out the air. “Perhaps you might now spare me a moment, Lieutenant?”
Suddenly conscious of the magnitude of his mistake—ignoring the captain in favour of a mere tar—Conrad scrambled to
his feet and stood to attention. “Of course. Of course. Forgive me, sir. I was…”
“Overcome. So I see.” Fortescue steepled his very clean hands beneath his nose. “Well. Mr. Jones, you may take
possession of the prize.”
A flash of indignation roared like the muzzle-flare of a cannon in Conrad’s chest. It had been his plan, his expedition, his
leadership. It should be his reward. But the protest died unsaid at the expression in the captain’s eyes.
“Mr. Herriot, I can see that you have overexerted yourself. We will manage without you for the present. Get some sleep,
and I will discuss this with you and with…Cotton, isn’t it? Your servant? Immediately after your next watch.”
Behind the captain, Tom coughed, rolled himself to one side, holding his bruised head. Then he pushed himself up to
hands and knees and looked around wildly. When he found Conrad watching, relief went through him as visibly as
another flare. His smile added an inappropriate happiness to the turmoil of Conrad’s mood, telling him something about
himself he did not wish to hear.
Stifling it with a practised hand, he saluted. “Aye, aye, sir. I will return to my cabin at once.”
As he scrambled down from the man-of-war to the Valiant’s lower decks, Conrad looked back, saw Tom taking down the
blood-drenched sack that dangled from the mainyard arm, and gently laying out the captives who had been strung up
there and used for target practice. Behind Tom, the red tinge to the sky and the metallic taste to the wind spoke of a
squall coming, and Conrad turned away and went below with the feeling of having been dislodged, left rudderless to run
before the storm. Or sink in it.
Chapter Two
Conrad’s dream rushed and bucked around him, a continuous blur of fast-moving grey, an impression of water and high
speeds, then a pressure on his shoulder, warm and bright. The pressure increased, shaking him more gently than the
storm, and gradually all his attention moved to that spot, drawing in the comfort of a firm touch, the warmth of fingers
through his soaked nightshirt. As he woke, the welcome burr of a deep voice coalesced out of the general impression of
chaos. Words became recognizable.
“Wake up, sir. Show a leg, you slug-a-bed. It’d be as easy to rouse a sleeping log.”
Conrad smiled, still in his half state between sleep and waking. The battering outside, of which he’d dreamed, continued
as the Valiant pitched and tossed her way through a winter squall. He tried to sit up just as the wind heeled the masts
almost into the sea. His cabin threw itself sideways, wall becoming floor. His cot clattered against the hull, and a torrent
of seawater washed across the upper deck and flooded like heavy rain through the gaps between the planks above his
head.
“Good morning,” he said. I’m so glad you’re not dead. “It’s a sprightly one today, Tom.”
“It is that.” Tom grinned, hugging the covered jug of water he carried under one elbow. He had jammed his foot into the
rope handles of Conrad’s sea chest, itself lashed to a ring in the deck. With the other hand he held tight to the rail of the
cot, and he was currently at forty-five degrees to the horizontal, his long brown pigtail hanging down to trail over
Conrad’s shoulder. The end insinuated itself inside his nightgown and dragged like an artist’s brush across the damp, cold
skin of Conrad’s chest.
Not that it was cold, after that.
The ship righted itself, and Tom took the chance to assemble Conrad’s washstand and secure it to the door-frame with a
twist of rope. He jammed the pot of water into its holder and looked up just as Conrad was peeling the wet nightshirt
from his goose pimples.
Tom did that a lot, Conrad thought in the moment of intimacy that followed. He watched his master in the manner of a
dog begging a treat. But he said nothing, and Conrad was afraid to take a gamble on the thoughts left unspoken in those
soft brown eyes.
He was a brown man all over, Tom, with thick hair that in the sunlight disclosed hints of chestnut, and devoted eyes,
warm and sweet as chocolate. He had the outdoor tan of his profession, and on him it seemed a sign of good health. A
nondescript-looking young man, otherwise, with a pleasant enough face, a Roman nose and cheekbones too prominent
for beauty. Far too strong-boned for the smooth, boyish oval of the masculine ideal, but not without his own rough-and-
ready charm.
Conrad became aware that he too was staring. He had caught Tom’s gaze and had not broken it. They were, therefore,
sitting here gazing at one another like sweethearts. With a wrench of effort, as though snapping a stout twig between his
hands, he pulled away from the connection, cleared his throat. “Give me the shirt I had on yesterday. No sense in bringing
out clean stuff in this weather.”
Tom opened his mouth as if to speak. He had not taken the hint or looked away, and Conrad could feel his gaze over
every inch of skin. It dragged like that fleeting touch of his hair, soft, almost worshipful, leaving trails of heat.
Conrad’s breath roughened, and he shifted amongst his blankets. Pleasure and panic drove in like a pin through the small
of his back, echoed and amplified by his indecision. He wanted, very much, to hear what Tom had to say. At the same
time, he was terrified to move the friendship they had—so comfortable, so well-worn a harbour—out into the open sea.
This potentiality between them could be managed, surely, whereas any venture into the actual would be a disaster
ruinous to them both.
He twisted the moment and strained to break it again, interrupting Tom’s thoughts with a command and a question. Each
time, the turning away was harder. One day, perhaps, it will be beyond my strength altogether, and what will become of
us then? “Pass me my small clothes, Tom. How long to the change of watch?”
“A half bell yet, sir.” Tom wrung as much salt water out of the shirt and drawers as he could and, when he passed them,
took the chance to catch and hold Conrad’s hand. “You could rest awhile longer if you want.”
The possibility that he was only imagining the invitation in the faint smile, which lit Tom’s face more effectually than any
lantern, seemed remote. Over the course of a decade they had been sounding one another out, talking around the
central fact until its shape could be guessed by the absence of everything else, like a bubble of air beneath the water.
Tom still hinted, invited, waited for Conrad to gather his nerve and ask. But despite the touching shyness of his manner,
he was a very manly fellow. He would not play the woman’s part and wait forever for his lover to speak. One day, soon
perhaps, he would grow tired of that game and make a decisive move himself.
That, Conrad dreaded. To be asked to choose between love—yes, he could admit love—and everything else, to save his
heart and lose his soul? Or save his soul and lose his heart? What kind of a choice was that? One, surely, you should never
put before yourself in the first place. One that should be staved off whenever it hoved into view.
Conrad withdrew his hand without comment, hopped out of bed and wriggled into shirt, breeches and stockings stained
grey with salt water—damp, clinging and bitter chill.
Lantern light ran like a merry-go-round around the white-painted wooden walls of Conrad’s cabin, gilding the falling
water. Outside, the wind in the rigging shrieked and whooped, and if the Wild Hunt had passed in the riot beyond the
firmly closed gunport, they could not have made the gale bay louder.
Valiant heeled to port, bow digging down as she passed the crest of a mountainous sea. Tom, who had chosen an ill
moment to stoop to pick up Conrad’s waistcoat, was sent bowling into the partition wall, where his impact dented the
flimsy wood. As the head came up again, he ricocheted off, flailing for a handhold, and Conrad caught him before he
could stumble over the sea chest or smack his head into the knee of the deck above.
It felt as if he had been struck by something much heavier than the yielding body of another man. He tightened his hold,
caught on to the hammock ropes, and they clung together, waiting for the roll back to place, for the brief moment of calm
and stasis before the opposing heave.
Tom was broad about the shoulders from a lifetime of hauling on lines. He wore an old cambric waistcoat with faded
ghosts of blue-and-white stripes. His shirt was as soaked as Conrad’s, so that, as they pressed together, the two layers of
linen seemed to melt away. The texture of the skin beneath could be felt through the fabric. Warmth blossomed between
them.
The storm might have whisked itself away to the other side of the world. Conrad saw and heard none of it, aware only of
the broad back against his chest, and the curve of Tom’s arse that nestled into the cradle of his hips so perfectly. And had
he really thought “not beautiful” about Tom? He was a fool, then, if he had not been able to appreciate that curve,
outlined in white sailor trousers, strong and firm and confiding. All at once he wanted more than anything in the world to
touch it. To feel the shape of perfection through his fingertips and maybe his lips. It would be worth anything that could
be asked of him, wouldn’t it?
There was a tiny looking glass in the back of his washstand, and as he shifted closer, bowed his head so that the tip of his
nose touched the elegant line of vertebrae at the nape of Tom’s neck—a scent of heat, salt and tar, and the tannin tea
smell of oak wood-shavings—his own reflection rebuked him. What the hell were they doing, standing so snugged
together that mere lust threatened to make his choice for him? God in heaven, he would not be dictated to by his body
thus. If he ever did lose this battle, make the decision, take that step into the abyss, it would not be because he was led
by the balls like an errant billy goat on a string.
His reflection caught his eye, blue eyes wild in a face shaped for brooding. Guilt written all over it. Snatching up his brush,
he attacked his coal-black hair as if it were responsible for all of this.
A charged silence, uncomfortable as a rebuke, as Tom took up the soap and worked it into a lather. Then he sighed deeply
and set to work to shave Conrad without lopping off an ear.
It was soothing at first, the shaving soap slippery-soft against his skin, warm water instead of cold, and an excuse to settle
his head back against Tom’s chest and close his eyes. But Tom’s hands, like the hands of all tars, were deeply calloused on
finger and palm. When he curved them about Conrad’s cheek to angle his face this way and that, it was like being licked
by the hot roughness of a cat’s tongue, and the calm transmuted to an excitement that made him shiver all over.
He would not be dictated to by his body, but it did make a very convincing argument on one side of the scale.
Breath hot on the tip of his ear, and he dared not move, the wicked open blade so close to his lips. Even that—oh God, he
was the most perverse creature that ever lived—even that was a delight. Unmoving, he waited forever for Tom to lean
farther down and kiss him on the side of his very willing mouth. Why not? Why not make the experiment? It would not
have to be repeated. They could do it just once and no more…
But instead Tom set his hand on Conrad’s shoulder, watched him open his eyes and frowned at what he saw there,
revealed. The sense of thunderbolt and promise withdrew until Conrad was able to contemplate how it felt having won
another hollow victory over his desires.
“You look perished through and through, sir. If you’ll hold on for the both of us, I’ll do them buttons. There’s coffee and
skillagalee a-waiting for you in the wardroom—I set ’em up on the gimballed stove, so they should still be warm enough.”
Tom’s smile was wider than the shy thing he’d worn when Conrad woke, but it had the air of a falsehood, and that was
new. Never had there been any need for secrets between them, but for this one great mystery, and on that they had
seemed to feel alike—reluctant and confused. Was it his duty, he wondered suddenly, as the officer, to bring the question
into the open and force them both to choose between a hell that felt like heaven, or a heaven that felt like hell?
“Truly, you’re a man without peer,” he said, because that was true enough, and it was as much as he could force himself
to say out loud. Even that had to be followed by a short laugh, so Tom could laugh it off as a joke, if he wished.
Hot coffee? he could say. I could kiss you.
Tom, who never backed down from a challenge, would answer, “Do your worst!” Jocular. All friends together. Just boys
having fun.
Then Conrad could lean in and do it. But if he did, he’d never know—not really—whether it was Tom’s wish or not. What
if Conrad was wrong even about the hints? Seeing only what he wished to see? If he took a kiss, not offered, Tom might
feel he’d been given an order.
An officer, rejected, could make a mere able seaman’s life unbearable. Asking, suggesting, letting him know that Conrad
had a desire, could act like force upon a good servant, making him feel pressed to satisfy it. And Conrad would not for an
instant wish for Tom to suppose himself anything other than free.
So, if it was indeed his duty to guide them both, then he must conclude that silence was still their best option. Let them
tread still, carefully, this twilight road of indecision that lay between the steep and narrow path and the wide. Let them
take sips of delight, like this morning’s small intimacies, but never slake their thirst. Perhaps this liminal state could last
forever, if they managed it well enough.
Crisis put off once more, Conrad fitted his arms through his waistcoat, held on to the ship with one hand and Tom with
the other and watched as Tom closed each buttonhole from the bottom to the top, hands ending beneath the bow of
Conrad’s cravat, the fingertips resting briefly in the hollow of his throat.
Tom looked up. “You’d be the only one to think it, sir.” And his smile was so very full of mirth and joy that it restored
Conrad to bliss. He should praise more often, if this was the result.
Outside, the ferocity of the storm had at last begun to diminish. Tom helped him into his lieutenant’s coat and brushed
imaginary dust from the shoulders. Just for a moment, everything was as warm and simple as it had been when he awoke
to the sound of a welcome voice.
But then Tom sucked a considering breath through his teeth and said, “Ah, and…uh…did you remember that the captain
wants to see us both in the great cabin after your watch?” and Conrad’s uncomplicated pleasure went down again under
a wearisome broil of anxiety and guilt.
Chapter Three
On deck and, although it was clear at once that the storm’s fury was fading, the scene still resembled Conrad’s rushing
dreams. Above, the topsails and stay sails were lashed tight, only the shortened main courses keeping her flying before
the blast. Grey sails—for they had been out patrolling the Mediterranean for the greater part of a year—against a
lightening grey sky. The weathered oak of the decks was a darker grey, and the sea a darker yet, except when it broke
over the bows and washed the waist of the ship in a carpet of silver, then flowed foaming back out of the scuppers, white
and cold as snow.
Conrad kept his head down against the wind, checked quickly to be sure that all was in order, and accepted the change of
watch from Lieutenant Harcourt. The mizzen backstay showed signs of strain. That would have to be spliced as soon as it
was safe to do so. The wind had settled into a steady northeaster, and the decks were empty but for a skeleton crew on
the masts, himself, the midshipman of the watch and a dozen tired seagulls drowsing on the yards and recovering from
the violence of the storm. They too were white and grey. It was a monochrome world this morning.
By his own watch change, the force of the wind had slackened enough for him to hear the sweet double note of the bell.
A hunched shape in an oversized oilskin emerged from the gun deck and proved to be Tom, prompt to their summons.
Conrad handed the quarterdeck off to Lieutenant Van Wylen and knocked at the door of the great cabin.
It opened on warmth and colour. The captain’s steward took their sodden coats and hung them above a tray to catch the
water. Within, the captain, resplendent in blue and gold, sat at a deep red mahogany dining table and ate his breakfast
from plates of brass so highly polished they might have been gold.
The oilcloth on the floor was painted with a classical scene of nymphs and shepherds, though Conrad knew their time was
short. The captain intended to have them ripped up and auctioned off. Only his abstemious habits—not wasting what he
could sell—had saved them from being painted over already.
Captain Fortescue was new to the ship, and the sporting pastoral doxies with their pink draperies were more in the taste
of its previous commander. More in Conrad’s taste too, for the glowing green and spangled flowers, the flesh and smiles
he trod underfoot, were one more thing that gave the great cabin the aspect of another world. So different from the
bleakness outside that its doors might have been the pearly gates, if heaven were likely to contain three lanterns and a
tiny spirit stove, and the scent of bacon and eggs.
He tucked his hat under his arm and saluted, conscious of Tom beside him. There was a fold to the edges of Tom’s eyes
that veiled them, made them hard to read. As he knuckled his forehead in salute, his face was perfectly opaque, none of
his thoughts visible through the all-purpose look of wary respect.
Conrad wished for the same impassiveness. It was hard to think of any reason they would both have been commanded
here that did not stir his guilt. But we have no guilt. We have done nothing wrong.
Captain Fortescue placed his elbows on the table amid his cutlery and propped his chin on his fingers. He was a spare man
in whom this gesture looked spidery, considering. Despite the storm, he was, as always, impeccably powdered and shaved,
in fresh linen, snowy as the wave caps and smelling of rosewater. His smooth face did not dare to show wrinkles, and his
personality was as carefully starched as his linen. He was a God-fearing captain, and in him it seemed that the rewards of
virtue were evident in copper-bottomed health and perpetual frozen youth.
“No need to look so grim, Lieutenant.” Fortescue smiled and gestured to the silver pot steaming on the stove. “You’ll take
a cup of coffee to drive away the chill?”
“Please.”
“Sit.”
This did not seem the behaviour of a man about to denounce a hideous crime. Conrad’s back, wound tight enough to
ache, eased slightly as he perched on the lip of the leather upholstered chair. Tom came up behind and rested his hands
on the back of it, removing them fast at a look from the captain. But whether it was the intimacy or the possibility of dirt
that concerned the man, Conrad could not tell. He accepted the cup from the steward, drank half and passed the cup
back so that Tom could have the rest.
Fortescue’s eyes followed the gesture. Despite his mildness, he too was a hard man to read. One had the sense of being
carefully watched, evaluated for signs of irregularity, of perpetually disappointing. “I won’t detain you long from your
duties, Mr. Herriot, but I understand that Cotton here is by way of your personal servant?”
I have done nothing wrong. Conrad wound his fingers together in his lap and sat straighter. “Yes, sir.”
Silence. The look of disappointment deepened fractionally. The stern windows rattled in their casings and then settled.
More was wanted, so he provided it.
“He was assigned to me by Captain Lestock of the Barfleur, sir, when I was a raw midshipman of thirteen years of age.
Though Cotton was scarcely older himself, he’d been at sea all his life, having been born on the Barfleur’s gundeck in the
battle of Cape Passaro, when Admiral Byng trounced the Spanish. He was therefore an old hand and could teach me the
ropes. We suited very well, and when I left the Barfleur to take up my lieutenant’s commission, I took him with me. We’ve
been together ever since.”
Fortescue’s smile did not falter. Behind Conrad, Tom breathed even and deep like a prize horse being discussed by its
buyers, and Conrad had a strange flash of indignation on his behalf. Why was he required to stand when they might sit?
Why could he not have a cup of his own, instead of supping, or not, by Conrad’s charity? Was he not as good a man as any,
and well able to speak for himself?
Perhaps Fortescue sensed that thought, for he switched his attention to Tom and said, “You spent part of yesterday
helping Chips with the repair of the spirketting. You’re trained as a carpenter?”
Tom’s hand returned to the back of the chair, hidden behind the bag of Conrad’s wig. “Yes, sir. My dad, he was carpenter
on the Barfleur. I was brought up to it, so.”
“I should have been told of this.” The rebuke was gentle enough, accompanied by a slight incline of Fortescue’s ageless
head. The captain waved off blame and reproach, along with the possibility of giving an explanation. “Be that as it may.
Because of your long association, I have thought it gracious to tell you, Mr. Herriot, that I am taking your servant from you
and reassigning him. Cotton, you may report to the carpenter immediately. I will rate you as mate. And Mr. Herriot, I will
assign one of the boys to take over the duties of a body servant for you. You shall not be incommoded.”
They spoke together, he and Tom, as though they shared one spirit and were outraged as a single person.
“Forgive me, sir. May he not do both?”
“Sir, I can do both right enough.”
The hand behind Conrad’s back crept up a little, the fingers touching the nape of his neck. A light touch, like that of a
butterfly come to rest, but the effect, skin on skin, was galvanizing in that formal, quiet room, beneath the gaze of those
formal, quiet eyes.
The captain withdrew a snuff box from his waistcoat pocket and, opening it, took a pinch of reddish powder. The scents of
tobacco and oranges added to the wet wood and breakfast perfume of the cabin. Outside the water-streaked stern
windows, the clouds parted enough to allow a faint lemon suggestion of sunshine. It was all warmth and colour and
beauty, and Conrad felt bleaker within than he had before dawn in the howling cheerlessness of the deck.
“Cotton, you are dismissed,” Fortescue repeated, still with no more intonation than he would use remarking on the
weather. “Report to the carpenter at once.”
The fingers on the back of Conrad’s neck dragged in an apologetic caress across his skin and then withdrew as Tom
knuckled his forehead and left. He could not, of course, have done anything else, but it still felt like being abandoned.
Conrad thought of being reduced to a life in which he saw Tom only as often as he saw any of the other tars. No more
content awakenings. No more happy torment and distraction. No more talks of an evening, or shaving in the same water,
or supping from the same cup. It was, absolutely, the solution to his dilemma—the best way of making sure nothing ever
did happen between them. It was the road to heaven made real with all its briars, and at the prospect it struck Conrad like
a bolt how very little he wanted to take that path.
He refused it. “Sir, I am accustomed to him. I would go so far as to say we are friends. And I—”
“Yes.” Fortescue sniffed up the second pinch of snuff, snapped the box shut and wiped his hand and nose with a
flawlessly white handkerchief. He pressed his lips inwards with his fingertips, as though he wished he could seal them
against what he was about to say.
“Let me speak plainly. It is your friendship which concerns me. Your reaction on the prize, your panic on believing him
injured, was so disproportionate to your respective ranks that it drew my attention. What I have observed since then has
confirmed me in my disquiet. You speak to him like an equal. You seek him out in preference to those of your own kind.
Nor am I the only one to have noticed. On my enquiry, the officers of the wardroom have remarked to me that you would
rather spend your time in conversation with a man who is coarse, illiterate and of no consequence or breeding than you
would with them. They wonder what can lie behind it.”
Conrad was outraged a second time. He’d spent the dullest evening of his life only three days ago playing the same shanty
on the violin over and over so that Jones could learn the tune on his German flute. Did that count for nothing? “They are a
pack of old women with nothing to do but gossip! How dare they pass remark upon how I deal with my servants?”
“And your father, Admiral Herriot? Do you tell me that he approves?”
“I do not form my friendships to please my father.”
“Evidently not.” Fortescue rose to his feet as though his chair had grown spikes, and paced away to set an arm against the
stern transom and rest his cheek on it. But there was still nothing more in his voice than a slight note of weariness and
warning. “Do not force me to make my hints more specific, Mr. Herriot. What is said cannot be unsaid.” He sighed, still
pretending to look out at the wake, though the patch of glass in front of him was misted over from his breath. “I may say
that I wish you had reacted differently to my little test, for neither can what is thought be unthought. Your very
vehemence convinces me that I was right, and that action is needed at once to rescue you both from temptation.”
The magnitude of Conrad’s anguish caught him by surprise. How could virtue feel like this? How could it feel like death to
follow the commands of a God who had promised him the fullness of life, a cup running over? How could it feel worse
than the prospect of damnation? It made no sense.
His finger ends were cold, and his lips too. If my soul offends me, should I rip it out? He wished frantically and vainly for an
argument, a decision, to be able to find the words. “But, sir, I do assure you—”
“You are dismissed, Lieutenant.”
“It is only that we—”
Fortescue did not raise his voice—he had no need—the emphasis, gentle and remorseless, was enough. “You are
dismissed.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” There was nothing else to say. Against both the accusation and the protection he had no
defence. He bowed, put on his hat and submitted to being rescued as he would have submitted to being held down and
beaten.
Chapter Four
The sky shone Arctic-blue and a strong sun dazzled on the white cloth of the wardroom as the Valiant beat slowly upwind
into the Channel. Flakes of snow danced past the curve of the stern windows to meld with the diamond brilliance of the
wake, and cold, bitter as wormwood, settled in the bones and made the flesh feel brittle as glass.
Conrad kept his head down at dinner, could not think of an anecdote or easy comment to add to the stories thrice told
and the anticipation of turning into port, seeing home again. It was hard to bear up, knowing what they were thinking of
him. Harder yet because he had still not resolved in his own mind whether they were right to do so.
The dog watch changed, Harcourt left for his watch in a sound of thunder, as a hundred pairs of feet poured up the main
companionway, and a moment later the second watch came hurtling down. Then there came the rout and laughter,
scrapings and shovings of the off-watch settling down to their messes for dinner. Oatmeal today and peas, bread and
beer.
Conrad picked at his shirt cuff, where the rolled hem of the ruffle had snagged on a splinter and begun to unravel. He
should call back his new servant and insist on having it repaired, but the boy looked frightened enough of him as it was,
and he had rather do it himself.
He was conscious of something building in him, like the piling up of thunderclouds on the distant horizon that presages an
oncoming storm. The choice refused to be taken out of his hands by the captain’s action. It still waited to be made,
haunting his days and hag-riding his nights.
“Sounds like trouble.” Reverend Ashby, the chaplain, gave him a sympathetic look made watery by his weak eyes beneath
their cylinders of glass.
Conrad wondered for a moment if the man had read his mind, became conscious only slowly that the noise from the gun
deck had changed its character—a lower, ominous roar, punctuated by shouting. He leaped to his feet, bowed, “Your
pardon,” ducked into his cabin for his cane and went to intervene.
It was warmer on the gun deck, hanging tables packed close with bodies and centred on the great galley range. The coals
of the roasting racks still smouldered red, and the ruddy light gave a hot tint to the men’s eyes as they stood on their sea
chests and on the bowsed-up cannon to see a fistfight. Conrad pushed through the crowd with elbows and cane, aware of
the boatswain coming the other way, the sharp smack of his rope starter carving him a path.
A ring of onlookers was cheering avidly around the fight, unaware of him.
“What’s going on here?” Conrad demanded, cold authority in his tone. “Let me see.”
While the men startled and began to draw apart, he thought there wasn’t the alacrity in it there had once been. They
didn’t fail to obey—that would have been unthinkable—but they obeyed with a surly, even mocking air, slow as they
could get away with. To one who had grown up around men like this, the change in attitude was clear as day; they no
longer respected him as they used to.
He felt as though all this week he had been swallowing rifle shot, and the lead balls lay in his stomach, rolling together,
cold and heavy. He swallowed and tasted iron, smacked his cane across the forearm of the slowest. “Move aside and let
me see, damn you!”
Tom was the centre of the knot. Of course. His face was bloody and his lip split, nail gores down the side of his neck and
the sleeve ripped from his shirt. He had his opponent down, a bruise on his forehead where he had broken the other
man’s nose with his skull, and he was now—with some success—trying to strangle the other sailor with his own pigtail.
“Lover boy to the rescue, eh?”
The metallic weight in Conrad’s gut exploded into rage, simple and comforting. Even the boatswain stepped back at the
look on his face, clutching the end of his rope truncheon as if for comfort. “Boatswain, get these men apart. The rest of
you…who said that?”
Stupid, downcast faces all around him, eyes on the deck below. Lots of murmuring—“no one said nothing, sir, don’t know
what you mean”—as they fell back on the defence of the lower decks. We’re just beasts. We’re too stupid to mean harm,
too unimportant to punish, and if he’d thought he could get away with it he’d have ordered them all flogged on the spot,
because they vexed him and he could. But the dumb solidarity worked, as it so often did. Without a clear culprit, his fury
had nowhere to go but back upon himself.
The boatswain grabbed Tom’s opponent, put him in an armlock, more to hold him up than to restrain him. The man was
blue about the lips, his broken nose spread sideways over one cheek. Tom had got to his knees, was panting, head down
in the same cowed, subservient posture as the crowd, and suddenly Conrad didn’t give a damn about reputation or folly.
He reached down, yanked Tom to his feet by the neckcloth. “Boatswain, take your man to the sickbay. The rest of you,
back to your meals.” He shook Tom roughly, had no idea himself whether it was punishment, frustration or a caress. “You,
you’re coming with me.”
It was a different world in his cabin, bracing cold, white-painted, orderly and full of sunshine, but Tom sat on his sea chest
like a schoolboy banished to the dunce’s stool, back curved despondently, head still bent.
“Look up.”
Nothing. Conrad slammed the cot against the wall, shuffled through the boxes in his locker and flung one open, scattering
the contents on the floor. Tom made a noise that he thought was a protest, but when he looked back he saw it must have
been a reluctant laugh.
Tom was watching him again, and the swollen, bloodied lips were quirked in a smile. “This ain’t going to help, sir. You,
dragging me off to your cabin like a tuppenny whore. What about your reputation now, eh?”
Conrad’s anger seemed to catch its foot in a coil of rope, trip up and go sprawling—he had the same sensation of upset
and surprise, and then it was gone as though it had never been. “We haven’t done anything! This is so unjust.”
“Ain’t the intent a sin?”
It was a direct gaze now, man to man. In fact, Conrad had the impression he was being humoured—a beloved child whose
slowness made his teacher fond.
“The intent may be a sin, but it is certainly not a crime. It is against no Article of War. It does not deserve to be punished
like this.” He watched Tom dab at the cut on his lip with fingers furred by wood-fibre embedded in tar, picked up the
patent remedy from his medicine chest and stayed the man’s hand, fingers around his wrist. “You’ll dirty it. Let me.”
As he unstopped the bottle and poured a few drops of Mackay’s Elixir into a clean handkerchief, Conrad was conscious
that he had said something important. The realization sat on his shoulder and whispered in his ear. He turned away from
it, discomforted, and dabbed the cut as his mother used to do for him. Leaning down to see better brought him close
enough to smell the hot scent of exertion and victory that clung to Tom’s purpling face like his sweat.
Why did the man smile so, as though this disaster were a triumph? And why would he speak with that low, rough whisper,
the breath of which touched the back of Conrad’s hands and stroked his wrists like warm feathers?
“So you’re saying you do have the intent?”
“What?” Conrad pulled back, with the sensation of having stood in a mantrap. Its jaws closed about him. Oh, God, yes.
After his decision to be silent, after the captain’s warning and separation, when all it would have taken to squash the
rumours was a ribald laugh, here they were with it out in the open at last, the question raised and begging for an answer.
He busied himself replenishing the handkerchief. Spreading his hand over Tom’s cheek, he turned the bright brown gaze
away from his, ostensibly to angle his head so that he could get at the fingernail scores beneath his jaw and on his throat,
in reality just because he couldn’t say this while anyone was looking at him, not even Tom.
“Do I have the intent? I don’t know.”
Disappointment pulled Tom’s lips downwards, made the beading blood spill again, and Conrad couldn’t bear that either,
knew he was being tardy, slow, cowardly.
Tom’s smile returned, forced. As he sighed, the fine tremble and exaltation of victory faded from him. One eye was
already sliding closed as the lid reddened and swelled. “Must be hard,” he muttered, “being virtuous all the time. An
example to us. I seen any number of admirals feign to be disgusted with the whoring on the lower decks and then go
home to their mistresses, like fornication on silk sheets were better than on straw. But you, you take these things serious.
You think them through. You ain’t no canting hypocrite. I like that about you.”
Conrad shook his head, wanting to believe he was worthy of such praise. Not believing it. “You don’t understand what I’m
trying to tell you. You see, I don’t know if I have the intent, but I certainly have the desire. I have it so strong sometimes I
cannot breathe for it, cannot think…”
It was present even now, even in this moment when confession had ripped the mask from his face and left him naked for
the world to mock. Still desire flowed up his veins from the hand pressed to Tom’s skin, made his lips tingle and his loins
ache.
“But I’ve always had it, Tom. Since first we met, when you were the lithest, merriest sprite that skylarked like a bird in the
rigging, and I was a buttoned-up little squeaker with no more idea of what to do in my life than please my elders and keep
my mouth shut. I’ve always had it, yet I still don’t know what to do about it.”
Tom looked stricken. He reached up and grabbed Conrad’s arm, holding his hand in place, as if he feared the gesture
would be taken away the moment Conrad was allowed. “You want me, true?”
“Yes.”
“Even though I’m a coarse man and illiterate, and not fit to be friend, let alone sweetheart?”
“Surely you never believed any of that?” Conrad’s turn to be aghast. “I always thought you to be certain of your worth—
the kindest and most loyal of friends a man could desire. More naturally sensitive than half of the blockheads who share
my rank. Nothing but a want of education prevents you from being more worthy of the title of gentleman than any of
them.”
It was curious, he thought with that part of his mind that constantly watched and judged himself, how the pressure of
emotion forced out from him unbreakable truths, refining the puzzle of his situation, crushing what could be crushed until
only the diamonds remained. These things he should have realized a long time ago.
“I didn’t know it, sure.” Tom had closed his eyes, bitten down on something that looked like pain.
Conrad hated himself more than ever at that moment, wanted to make it right, to apologize. “I wish I were not such a
coward—so slow, so indecisive. I would not—on my oath—have had you think I did not value you above…above anything
else in the world.”
A glimpse of clarity, like the North Star seen through fog. He steered towards it, reckless, surrendering doubt for one
more tiny certainty. “I’d do anything for you, Tom. I swear it. Ask me for something. Anything. Whatever you want.
Command me, Tom. Tell me what to do.”
Chapter Five
Tom laughed, the flash of his teeth white in the broadening light, his lips still very red. “Oh no, sir,” he said, “you’re not
doing that to me. I’m not your keeper, nor your conscience, and I ain’t making your decisions for you.”
“Then why force this now?” Conrad closed the gunport hatch to ease the draft, decided the cabin was too dark and
opened it again. How very apt the action was to the inside of his mind. Taking one step forwards and another back,
leaving him exactly where he was, but wearied with effort.
“Because I reckon we don’t have much more time,” Tom said seriously. He looked barbaric, grazes striping his face with
red lines, the purpled eye now fully swollen shut, and his deft carpenter’s hands split on the knuckles from fighting. He
looked every bit the brute Captain Fortescue claimed. If only one did not look into his eyes and see the thought there, the
calm and meditative thought of a craftsman. “I reckon the rest of the crew’ve drawn their own conclusions about us
already. We got to decide now what to do about it, before we gets hanged for something we ain’t even done. I ain’t keen
to swing for nothing.”
Conrad bowed his head and studied the hand on the porthole, trying not to see where this conversation was going. He
failed of course, and panic welled out of the place within him where emotion resided—it felt as though it was a spot just
under the breastbone. His lungs froze. “So you think we should either commit the crime or submit to the separation and
allow our association to end?”
Tom gave him a kind look, blotted his bleeding lips again on Conrad’s handkerchief. “That’s about the size of it.”
“I’m not…” God, he was a coward. He was no real man at all. And perhaps that ought to be taken into account? Perhaps it
was an indication that to yield in this would be to follow the path of his own nature. But then must he despise himself for
the rest of his life? “I’m not ready to make that decision.”
Tom got up and pushed a notebook beneath the door, wedging it shut. When that was done, he came to Conrad’s side
and cautiously—waiting for rebuke—he slipped his arms around Conrad’s waist. At the touch, Conrad felt as though all
the strength melted out of him. The ice in his backbone thawed, and he found himself yielding, surrendering to the
embrace. He wound his own arms around Tom’s sturdy back and tucked his face into the man’s neck. It was warm and
solid and felt like home.
Tom reached up and slid his hand behind the tail of Conrad’s wig, his fingers hot and rough and gentle on the back of
Conrad’s neck. “I know you ain’t. I wouldn’t have pushed it, sir, I promise. I know how hard it is for you—”
“To make up my mind? Yes, dear God, and what kind of an officer does that make me? What kind of a man?”
Tom laughed and turned his head just a little so that his lips were resting on Conrad’s temple. Conrad felt he could
pinpoint the spot to the minutest degree. Just overlapping the edge of his eyebrow, a soft touch like that of snow but hot
as a glede in this chill, and heat spread from it, down the side of his face and across his frozen chest to heart and loins. He
knew it was a decision of sorts, but he shifted his weight, stood straighter, so that the kiss slid inexorably towards his
mouth. He felt the quirk of a smile against his cheekbone and the happiness that welled out of his bones to meet it was
also an answer, in its way.
“Makes you a cautious one.” Tom’s voice was like being wrapped in brown velvet, affectionate and soft, with a purr
beneath it like that of a contented lion. “I know you, sir. You make decisions slow, but you make ’em well. Thorough, like.
You ain’t never got a reason to change them after, ’cause anything that could change your mind, you’ve already thought
of. I know that, sir. Why d’you think I’ve waited so long? Why d’you think I’m still waiting now? ’Cause I know you. You
decide for us, because you make the best decisions. I know that.”
Conrad understood at once why Tom had received his praise with a look of anguish. It hurt, strangely and gloriously, to
find himself so valued. All those things about himself which he most abhorred turned around and revealed themselves in
the light of Tom’s gaze as virtues. Even knowing me as he does, he still loves me.
Could he really let that go? Having found a man whose gaze turned the dross of his character into gold, could he throw
the gift away? Was life without Tom really a better choice than death with him?
The sense of a secret catch giving, puzzle pieces moving into place, easy when you knew the trick—impossible otherwise.
He had made up his mind like this before, when the chaos swirled, changed, turned into crystal and rang true.
Of course. He did not have to choose between honour and reputation, duty and truth, friendship and society, salvation
and damnation. He had only to ask himself whether he would rather go to hell with Tom or to heaven without him. The
answer to that one was easy.
“He should have said nothing,” Conrad said. When had his eyes slipped shut, so that he stood, swaying with the ship, and
all his senses narrowed down to the compass of Tom’s arms? “The captain, I mean. Had he said nothing, we could have
gone on, undecided, inoffensive, perhaps forever.”
“I think…” Tom’s hand slipped from his waist and, very daring, strayed across his lower back to settle on the upper curve
of his arse. So small a touch, so almost chaste, and yet what a riot of sensations followed it. “I think this were coming to a
head regardless.” He paused, pressed his lips a little more firmly to Conrad’s cheek and stroked that hand farther down.
Involuntarily, Conrad’s body writhed beneath the touch like a petted cat.
“Seems to me you’re not moving away.”
Away was a frozen sea and a bleak grey sky. How could sailing into that, deliberately, be anything other than a kind of
death of the soul, against which the death of the body was scarcely to be feared at all?
Full of lightness, of relief, Conrad moved. He raised his head and took hold of Tom’s long plait, twisting it around his wrist.
Leashed together, he angled Tom’s head, tearing him away from that maddening half kiss, the chaste little butterfly
touches that weren’t enough, that weren’t a definite enough answer. He had no need of half measures now.
Unmindful of Tom’s split lip, he crushed their mouths together, felt Tom’s gasp of shock and pain through the chest
pressed against his. Tom’s skin burned beneath his fingertips, and his blood tasted copper-sweet, slick between their lips.
The power in his work-hardened body was a challenge and a delicious threat. Conrad wanted to overcome it, to be
overcome. Either. Both, and be damned to the law and the captain and the hangman.
Tom wrenched his face away, but his arms tightened, the hand on Conrad’s arse drawing his hips against his own, the
other insinuating itself beneath Conrad’s powdered wig and tangling in the short-cropped curls beneath, making all the
little hairs on the back of Conrad’s arms stir and stand on end in a full-bodied shiver of pleasure. “That’s a yes, then?”
“It’s a yes. But, Tom, it changes everything.”
Tom raised a shoulder, frowning. He was not convinced. “Just got to be a bit careful, that’s all. Stay apart on ship. That’s
fine now I know I’ll have you on land.” He broke into the widest grin Conrad had seen on him since he was sixteen and
taught the purser’s parrot to swear. “And that don’t take no waiting on this occasion. We’ll be rounding the Lizard any
time now. Then there’ll be shore leave, and Christmas, and you in a feather bed, and I’ll do you like I was making my
masterpiece. Careful, thorough like, and your legs are going to shake so, you won’t be able to walk for a week.”
Conrad laughed, even as everything that was in him leaped and glowed at the thought. “Tom, you sweet-tongued devil.
Let’s do it just as you say.” And let the consequences come as they may.
The second kiss was sweeter, slicker, and had the drums not rolled for “all hands on deck” just as he was unbuttoning the
flap of Tom’s trousers, they might not have made it as far as port without giving the new arrangement a trial run. As it
was, he ran up into the frigid air feeling on fire, conscious of the place where Tom’s hand had slipped around to cradle his
cheek, sure that it stood out hot as a brand on his skin.
The crew had all been watching him before. They watched him still. The only difference was that now he didn’t care.
Chapter Six
“A word with you, Mr. Herriot.” Captain Fortescue strolled up to him where he stood on the outskirts of the mob of men
waiting to go down the side to the boats. Tom, standing by Conrad’s elbow, gave him a worried look and made to put
down the portmanteau he carried in order to be ready to follow.
“Not you, Cotton. In His holy name, I ought not to have to separate the pair of you like this. Be about your business.”
Conrad followed the captain up the quarterdeck stairs, looked out on the splendid sight of the Hamoaze, full of ships,
each one freshly painted for the occasion, goldwork glittering and white sails furled tight. In the deepwater channel a
three-decker had anchored, and her men were pouring down her side into their own boats, looking neat as pins in their
best shore-leave clothes—dazzling white trousers trimmed with ribbons, short jackets and straw boaters with the names
of their ship embroidered in gold thread on the band.
Their own ship looked positively puritan by comparison, and that was down to the captain’s influence. Not a bad man, nor
a harsh one, but not a man who believed in splendour or excess or saw any need for rejoicing beyond the words repeated
in daily prayer. Captain Fortescue managed to make the naval uniform, with its accents of glittering gold, look austere.
Certainly the expression on his face as he looked at Conrad was tight and grey, joyless. “You are leaving the ship together?
Despite my warning.”
It was easier to do this now that he didn’t care about it so much. Conrad thought he’d never faced an enemy in his life
who held him back like his own mind, and that was now settled. “The boy you assigned me is returning to his home on
leave, sir, and Cotton has been my servant all my life. My parents will expect him to accompany me. I do not suppose you
wish to explain to Admiral Herriot why he has been kept back.”
Captain Fortescue took a step towards the rail and set a hand there as if reassuring himself that the dimensions of his
kingdom had not changed. His grey eyes narrowed. The wind tried to toy with the end of his ribbon, but it was too tightly
tucked into the military wrapping of his queue. “Have a care of your tone, Mr. Herriot. I do not take kindly to levity from
one in so precarious a situation.” He compressed his mouth with one knuckle, sighed. “I had hoped you would take my
warning to heart and take steps to protect yourself from a damaging rumour. I am disappointed to see it has merely
hardened you in your vice.”
A cutter with ochre sails and a red hull slipped almost furtively behind the three-decker. Conrad could not have said quite
what it was about her that gave him the impression of sneaking—so few men on deck, perhaps? The nervous precision in
her steering? Too many cannon for so small a boat? Or the net, tangled and dangling over her stern, so that the name
written there could not be read? Any and all of these things made him sit up and wonder what her business was, and
conclude it was something of which she did not want the navy to inquire.
“It seems to me, sir,” he said, coldly, while his gaze and his thoughts followed after the swift sailing vessel with vital
interest, “that much is drawn from flimsy evidence. It’s true that the man is my servant and my friend, and that alone is
enough—I should have hoped—for me to display some concern for his well-being, and some…yes, I will say it…some
loyalty, sir. If you and the crew wish to read more into my actions than a gentleman’s loyalty to his friend, then I am quite
willing to defend my honour with whatever weapon you may specify, at any time you please.”
“Are you challenging me?” Both hands went to the mouth, as though one was insufficient to hold in astonishment. The
lineaments of the captain’s face had frozen so solid, Conrad had a fancy that if you tipped him over he would shatter.
Conrad’s own soul seemed to be suffering something similar, for he couldn’t find an echo in himself of the remorse he
ought to feel at his own words. So quickly a decision, once made, could turn a man into a different person. He wasn’t sure
he thoroughly approved of it, but for the moment it was a relief.
It was also going too far. Looking at Fortescue’s outrage, he thought of shore leave, only a few moments away, and of the
Christmas he and Tom had promised themselves. Two or three carefree days in an inn, and then home to the manor and
his own bed, and all the excuses he could think of for needing his servant to watch over him while he slept.
Best not to be so blasé as to endanger that. He bowed his head. “No, sir. Forgive me. But how else should a man react
when groundlessly accused of such a thing? It is an accusation that must raise any man’s temper who rightly abhors such
things as I do. But at the same time I have a duty to my servant. I cannot abandon a man who trusts me just because
someone is spreading false rumours about us. That too would be a gross injustice and a sin.”
It gave him a qualm to lie, but it was a greater thrill. You forced me into this, Captain. Forced me to decide to live outside
the law. Now reap what you have sown. He bit his lip and managed to bring tears to his eyes, even while Fortescue’s look
of outraged anger was softening towards doubt.
The cutter turned, about five miles down the coast and slid behind a headland. She did not come out again—must have
entered a harbour too small for the great ships of the line.
“I…” Fortescue thrust his hand into his waistcoat—unbuttoned for the purpose—and leaned forwards to peer more
intently into Conrad’s face. “Something has happened to you since we last spoke, Mr. Herriot. You are a changed man. Yet
do you not see that I treat with you like a father with his son? For a captain is a good father to his people, if he is anything.
Speak to me therefore like a father, and tell me why you no longer tremble when we discuss these terrible things.”
There was no cant in it, no hypocrisy, and Conrad felt a brief ache for the man, knowing that he was by his own lights only
doing what was right. How fortunate for him that what was right came so easily to him.
“I no longer tremble, sir, because I have had time to examine myself in the light of your warning. I have discovered that
my conscience is clear. I am not guilty of anything of which I need to be ashamed.”
Fortescue’s turn to break the gaze and look away to where the ship’s boat awaited, fully loaded now, and with every man
aboard looking up impatiently at the quarterdeck, eager to be let go. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Go
then. What you say has some merit. But I wish it did not trip off your tongue so easily.”
There was a muffled cheer when Conrad finally made it to the boat, sat down in the stern and let them push away from
the ship’s sheltering sides into the winter winds and chop of the harbour. He drew his oilskin tighter around himself, held
on to his hat and watched the rowers haul with everything they had, a party mood evident in their bright eyes. Their clean
and carefully shaven faces glowed pink in Plymouth’s winter grey light.
The coxswain was nearest him on the starboard side, a wiry ferret of a man rumoured to have been pressed from a sloop
caught smuggling tea and brandy into Georgetown. Conrad touched him on the sleeve, felt he should have a shield to
ward off the gaze, sharp as a dagger, he received when he asked, “What’s the port five miles along the shore from here?
Not marked on any charts that I know.”
The coxswain sucked a breath through the gaps in his brown teeth. His hand came up to rub the side of his mouth where
a scar stood like a pink worm on his cheek. Long practice in judging men told Conrad that he was debating with himself
whether or not to lie. “That’d be Under Mousehole, sir. Nothing there but two or three fishing smacks and a pub. Why’s
that, then?”
“No reason.”
At a nudge from his neighbour the coxswain bent to his oar once more, but that clever, considering eye didn’t leave
Conrad’s face. “You don’t want to go there, sir. Leastways not in uniform.” And that told him everything he wanted to
know.
Chapter Seven
It was a fine inn. They had visited Conrad’s prize agent first, withdrawn as much money from him as he would advance on
Conrad’s share of the prizes. Together with their portion of the gold captured from the pirates, they had a small fortune
between them and could afford the best.
They ate supper together, despite the landlady’s insistence that Tom would be more comfortable in the kitchen with the
other servants. Disapproving looks and good dinner alike had been muted, had slid aside from the clear and smooth
edges of this thing between them—the knowledge that when the winter sun had long set and the brief evening been
negotiated, there was but one bed upstairs, waiting for them.
Conrad put down his fork and drained his glass of claret. He looked up and met Tom’s gaze, and they rose together,
heading for the stairs. Whether the company stilled at the movement or it was only Conrad’s imagination, he didn’t know.
He felt their intention must be written on their foreheads, on his at least, hot with unruly blood and anticipation. His
limbs moved awkwardly, and time seemed to stretch as it did in battle, voices distorted and muffled around him, his
consciousness of himself amplified until the movement of his clothes over his flushed skin was an irritation and a nagging
delight.
He didn’t remember the stairs at all, or the passageway at the top of them, lit by hanging lanterns. They were a mere
smudge in a mind that sharpened again into almost frightening clarity as soon as he closed the door behind them.
He locked it, left the key in the keyhole so that no one should be able to spy through it, felt guilty and dangerous at the
very thought. Tom, by the window, was closing and latching the shutters. A fire smouldered amber-red in the fireplace,
and without the light from the corridor he could see only umber shapes against darker brown shadow.
And that wasn’t enough. He wanted to see Tom. Wanted to undress him and survey his kingdom inch by inch, with eyes
and hands and lips. “Is there…” His throat was blocked. He had to cough. “Is there a candle?”
“A basket of them.” Tom’s voice, always soft, with that little catch of roughness that came from too much hollering over
the noise of the lower decks, had grown softer still. The roughness in it had deepened to a growl. He bent to the fire, and
his face was outlined for a moment in ruby, and then—as the candle flame caught—in gold. Not a beautiful face, perhaps,
but strong. An open, capable face. A face that—Conrad admitted it again, clearer now—he loved.
Love did not solve all things. Love did not make this any less a crime. But it slid into the room like honey pouring from the
spoon, and filled it up with a kind of awe, terrifying and wonderful. In its almost solid presence, Conrad breathed out, at
peace with his decision. He had chosen to sacrifice all for love, and that was the right choice.
He shrugged out of his greatcoat and his jacket and smiled at Tom’s indignant look where the man stood, candlestick in
either hand, before the flames.
“That’s my job. Undressing you. Don’t start without me.” Tom set the candles on the mantelpiece, where they framed an
old, smoky mirror that reflected his smile. “Come here.”
Conrad tossed the coats onto the blanket chest at the foot of the bed—and, oh yes, that bed, how it did dominate the
room! He made the long trek across the floorboards, awkward until the moment when he could reach out and touch the
coarse material of Tom’s red neckcloth. The warmth of the coal fire soaked into his flushed skin and made him feel as
though he had swallowed the sun. The knot of the neckcloth gave way. He pulled it off and celebrated the victory by
pushing Tom’s collar open and fastening his lips on the throat thus revealed.
The most peculiar sensation travelled from his mouth to his whole frame—a combination of ravenous need, finally
unleashed, and utter, swooning relief. A chronic pain had finally ended. He put out his tongue and licked the fresh sweat
from the hollow of Tom’s throat, feeling the gasp and tremble through his open mouth and thence through the marrow
of his bones.
Tom wore a short waistcoat over his shirt. A very fine garment that snugged his trim waist and showed off his wide
shoulders to perfection. Conrad had often admired it, but today he detested it for its six stiff buttons and the way it did
not melt away at a thought, as it had done in dreams. It was worth it, though, when he got his hands underneath and
Tom responded to his touch by driving him up against the wall, yanking at his hair to pull his head up and fastening onto
his mouth in a kiss that left their first one in the dust.
He thought he could come from that alone, pressed up against an unyielding surface, breath smothered out of his lungs
by Tom’s weight and strength, the slick and wet invasion of Tom’s tongue in his mouth sweet, and the tug on his hair
adding just a spice of pain. Shoving Tom’s shirt up, he felt—oh thank God—the hot silk resilience of skin, the lift of ribs as
Tom gasped again. Hair on Tom’s chest and belly tickled, dragged against his palms as he found hard nipples and scored
them gently with his fingernails, making Tom whine and wrench at the fastenings of Conrad’s breeches.
A button popped, and the waistband of the thin linen drawers beneath, rotten from being soaked over and over in salt
water, tore in two.
“Have a…care of my linen, clumsy wretch.” Conrad laughed. There was a joy in him like the head on the top of beer that
would keep frothing up amid the need.
“You can complain the day you mend it yourself.” Tom pulled him away from the wall and shoved him with a hand in the
middle of the chest towards the bed. Deciding that undressing had gone from a treat to a hindrance, Conrad chose to
expedite it, drew his waistcoat still unbuttoned over his head and flung it on the floor, leaned down to unlatch the
buckles at his knee and let the torn breeches fall, leaving him in stockings, garters and shirt, his cravat still impeccably tied.
He caught a glimpse of himself and Tom in the mirror, mussed and wild-eyed, glowing in the dim twilight of the room, and
then Tom shoved him again and he fell, willingly, into the nest of down comforter and rough blankets atop the bed. Tom’s
turn to strip, and at the body thus revealed, Conrad’s hand of its own will crept down to his yard and soothed the
demanding ache with a slow, appreciative stroke.
“I said not to start without me.” Stripped to his shirt, Tom joined him on the bed, replaced his hand with his own broader
one, and if the rough callus of his palm had teased Conrad through linen, now, on his most sensitive part, it was nearly
too much to bear, almost tipping over from maddening pleasure to discomfort.
He whimpered in half protest, half invitation, rolled over onto his stomach, letting his legs sprawl wide, and inside he was
more than half-appalled at himself for letting any vulgar commoner touch him like this, use him like this. It was a disgrace,
a humiliation, and that made it all the better.
Tom too must have felt a wrongness in it, for he hesitated, drawing back his big hands and stroking Conrad’s naked arse
with them. He bent down and kissed him on the base of the spine, and the stubble of his cheek scratching over the tender
skin made Conrad push down into the too-soft surface of the bed, trying to drag his aching prick against the bedclothes.
“You sure now?”
“I will personally remove your bollocks with a spoon if you don’t fuck me right now.”
Tom laughed and bit him hard on the curve of his arse, smacking the mark for good measure. The sting made what little
blood had not already flown to the area flood there at once, and Conrad’s fingers tingled as he knotted them in the
sheets. He groaned out loud. “Oh God!”
“Ssssh!”
How could Tom possibly say “sssh” to him, when he had dipped his fingers in the melted tallow of the candle by the
bedside and was sliding them in, one by one? Conrad moaned again, a little louder, out of perversity and
bloodymindedness, and the knowledge that when he did Tom’s thighs tightened behind him, and the man’s cock nudged
wetly up his cleft.
Another smack, and it dawned on him with some delight that he could make Tom do that whenever he wished. He yelped
and waited for retribution.
It didn’t come in the shape he expected. Tom leaned forwards and pulled Conrad’s neckcloth until it loosened. Then he
slid it into Conrad’s mouth and tied it tight. It was an imposition, an insult, and he fucking loved it.
Tom took his fingers away, replaced them with his cock, blunt and huge. When he pushed in, Conrad’s teeth met in the
gag. Hurt, hurt, hurt, oh God! It seemed to go on forever, breaching him, driving in, tearing him apart, pain and blackness
behind the eyes, and still he wanted it, the soreness and the completeness of it.
They lay panting for a moment, fully joined, as the scraped throb of pain began by degrees to become a glow of pleasure.
His back and legs yearned, and his neglected prick cried out for the return of Tom’s calloused hand. He pushed back, and
everything surged in him with blind, black, wordless demand.
They had hit the perfect tide when something fell in the room with a metallic clatter, and Tom stiffened, listening. Conrad
tried to say, “I don’t give a fucking damn. Just finish this, please!” but could not free his hands, twisted into the sheets,
fast enough to take down the gag.
A moment of something terrible, suspended. Conrad, furious with frustration, made a strangled sound of protest behind
the gag, and then Tom’s hand was around his face, over his mouth, fingers squeezing his nostrils shut. His heart had been
hammering and his breath coming short as it was. Now he needed to breathe. He didn’t understand. With a furious sound,
he bucked under the pressure of Tom’s body. Tom, I need to breathe!
His blood roared in his ears. Perversely, it felt strange, fantastic, making his mind flower like a black rose, but this was not
what he wanted, not what he’d asked for, felt like a betrayal. He freed his hands and tried to pry Tom’s fingers away.
What are you doing? What are you doing? Tom, you’re hurting me!
His lungs were burning now. Silver stars swam on the edges of his vision, and the thud of his heartbeat almost drowned
out the scraping noise. Then he heard the door crash open. A flood of light, and someone was pulling Tom off him. Shouts
and the shattering intrusion of three presences with clubs.
He got his knees under him, pushed and fell off the edge of the bed, landing in a heap. Tearing at the gag with shaking
hands—it was damp and stiff with his spit—he got it out and breathed for a blessed moment, long, agonised breaths,
involuntary tears spilling down his cheeks.
When he looked up, it was straight into the face of Captain Fortescue, and the cold, disgusted expression was like falling
through ice into Arctic water. He thought his heart stopped with the shock.
One of the thief takers behind the captain had Tom in an armlock, though Tom’s head was resignedly bent and he was not
struggling.
“Well, my lads,” said the second thug, in a voice as glutinous as porridge, “I hope you enjoyed that, cos it’s the gallows for
you two for sure.”
Chapter Eight
Fortescue and the second man came closer to Conrad, the bruiser kicking him hard on the inner thigh, drawing back to try
again, higher. The captain—very self-contained, holding himself tight as though he could thereby avoid contagion—
looked down at Conrad’s huddled form, and a frown made an exclamation mark between his eyes.
“Leave him alone!” Tom lurched out of his captor’s grasp, had to be caught again by both men, one to each arm. He wore
only his shirt, still, but there wasn’t an ounce of shame or embarrassment in him. He looked, Conrad thought, like a
righteous man judging sinners, as though the captain and his bully-boys should be the ones who were ashamed. His
brown hair was wild about his flushed face, and his eyes sharp as steel. “He’s suffered enough.”
“I beg your pardon?” Fortescue pivoted on his heel and looked at Tom as if he was seeing him for the first time.
“I wanted him. I took him, but I won’t let him swing for something he didn’t want. Poor bastard. He tried his best to fight
me off.”
Fortescue’s head whipped round. He focussed on Conrad again, and Conrad could feel the gaze track him from head to
foot, taking in the tears, the crumpled way he’d fallen and not tried to get up again. The examination moved on to the gag
he’d seen for himself Conrad struggling to remove.
Oh, Tom!
And he’d seen Conrad fighting, trying to pry Tom’s hands off him, trying to buck up and dislodge him. The explanation
came to Conrad whole and brought fresh tears to his eyes. Tears of admiration and despair. For that metallic noise must
have been the sound of the key falling where it had been pushed out of the keyhole. When he heard it, Tom must have
realised in that instant that someone was looking through, watching them. And immediately he’d done what he could to
make it look as though Conrad were an unwilling victim, as though he were fighting him every step of the way.
Fortescue watched the horror come over Conrad’s face, paced away to pick up his torn breeches, look wordlessly at the
drawers rent almost in half. “There are certainly evidences of a struggle, but…”
“You saw it yourself.”
“But he encouraged you. On board ship. Coming to seek you out after I separated the pair of you.”
Tom’s smile was mirthless, a mere baring of the teeth. He had stopped tugging at the restraining arms and no one could
have disbelieved the fervour of his confession. “He didn’t believe you. What you said. He’s a gentleman. My gentleman,
and a bit of an innocent…”
The magnitude of his choice overshadowed Conrad in wings of lead. His first and most basic instinct was to say, “Don’t be
ridiculous, of course he didn’t force me. I intend to go to the gallows with him proudly, and you will have to hang us
together with one rope.” But as always, he could feel the pressure of other alternatives behind the first, and they stopped
his throat.
“And he didn’t believe no harm of me. But I knew if you was set on keeping us apart, this might be my only chance. So I
took it, whether he would or no. But I won’t let him swing for it, God help me.”
There was a moment when they were all looking at Conrad, all four of them. Fortescue’s face had softened into cautious
pity, and Conrad knew he was willing to believe it—a good man, a God-fearing man, who preferred not to think ill of his
subordinates if he could possibly avoid it, presented with a way out and more than willing to take it. He handed the
breeches to Conrad, as though they were a lifeline. “Is that true?”
All of them looking at him, only he watching Tom and seeing his look of pride crumple into entreaty, seeing him mouth
the word please.
Conrad put his head in his hands, and behind their shield he thought furiously. He couldn’t let Tom take the blame,
couldn’t let him die alone. He’d already accepted that this was the price he might have to pay, and though terror was a
crawling parasite beneath his skin, he didn’t want to think it was mere fear that made him hesitate now.
No, if Tom died then he would get up on the scaffold and hang beside him. But if Conrad was made out to be a victim, left
free and at large, surely he could do something to save Tom? There must be a way, mustn’t there? And Goddamn him to
an eternity of torment if he was thinking this just to save his own sorry neck. Oh, Tom, you clever, heroic, wonderful lad,
sharp as mustard and selfless as a saint.
“Mr. Herriot? Well? Is it true?”
The tears came again easily as he raised his head, hoped against hope that Tom knew he wouldn’t just take the safety
offered and walk away. God, this felt so like betrayal. But it wasn’t! It wouldn’t be. “Yes, sir. It’s true. I’m sorry I didn’t
listen to you. Never thought it would come to this…”
“He forced you?”
A look of disbelief from one of the magistrate’s men, corrosive as quicklime.
“Yes, sir.” Conrad parted ways with the last of his honour, and scarcely noticed the pain of it amidst the despair as they
took Tom away.
He felt lighter for the loss of it a day later. As he headed down the narrow footpath towards the cove where he’d seen
that cutter come in, he felt pared away, the thin thing that was left scarcely recognizable to him as himself.
He’d spent the evening signing statements, watching as Fortescue’s doubts manifested themselves in a ridiculous see-saw
between pity mixed with solicitude on the one hand, and suspicion mixed with disdain on the other.
The clerk who took Conrad’s statement, and the jailer to whom he’d given Tom’s clothes, a hastily bought pie and
blankets, had not had the same struggle and had settled for contempt almost at once.
Conrad was glad to be rid of them all, as he negotiated this slope of wet chalk in the chill spray of the pearl-coloured sea,
amid short-cropped grass covered in guano, and under the sharp eyes of a couple of boys. These two ragged fellows had
been pretending to watch over a “flock” of three goats, but they disappeared soon after Conrad began on the downward
track, and he strongly suspected they had gone ahead to warn the village that an unknown visitor was on his way.
Certainly when he reached the bottom of the cliff and found a small paved area around which four houses and an inn
clustered, white-painted and with their woodwork silvered by age and salt, he was alone. No one worked on the
foreshore or was visible behind the houses’ shuttered windows.
He sighed out the burden of anger that had begun to seethe, unquenchable, in his breast, thought about trying the inn
but was in no mood to be lied to. He could surely find the mooring of a largish cutter by himself, without having to
enquire of locals who made their money from its crew and cargoes.
The single street of the village ran out into a litter of lobster pots, floats and old nets. The shallow beach of pale sand
merged into a pale sea, wheeled over by grey-backed gulls. A darting wind whipped up chill spray and, over where the
headland stood out into the estuary of the river Plym, the jagged mouth of a cave gave back an echoing hoooooo to the
boom of the sea.
Conrad tucked his hands into their opposing sleeves and hugged himself, sure that the concealed villagers were watching
him. There might even now be a musket trained on the back of his neck. His skin itched as though it felt gunmetal there.
The rocks piled against the headland looked impassable, but he didn’t believe that for a moment. He set his head down
against the drizzle and began to climb, looking for a path. A couple of false trails later, scrambling across seaweed, his
leather-soled shoes slipping, both feet wet to the ankles and his right hand bloody from having to catch himself above a
fall into an angry tidal pool, he found it. A little sliver of white sand, wide enough for a single foot, twisting and winding
among the boulders, its entrance concealed behind a scrubby elder that grew out of the cliff side.
He set foot on it, and at the same time someone called him from the village, making him laugh. Oh, so now you’ll talk to
me? Ignoring it, he walked on.
Sound of feet behind him—someone who knew the way very well, sure-footed as one of their goats, and then the voice
again, nearer and clearer. “You stand right where you are. I got a gun.”
Conrad turned, and as he did so, a rock cracked down by his foot, falling from the cliff to his left. He glanced up and saw
the silhouette of one of the boys, dark against the overcast sky. Someone behind him passed him another stone.
It came home to him forcefully how easily a man—standing where he was—might be “accidentally” killed by a rock fall.
How easily his body might disappear in the sea, and nobody know he had ever been here at all.
How easily he might leave Tom to die, believing himself betrayed.
Conrad held up his hands to signal surrender, peered into the shadow of the cliff to try and make out the man who had
spoken to him. But the winter light hadn’t the strength to illuminate his pursuer. He saw just a shade with the collar of a
dark coat folded up to cover his nose and mouth, and a black tricorn tipped down to conceal his eyes. The musket in his
hands was clear enough, though, as were the two cutlasses that belled out the skirts of his coat.
“I’m in search of a ship and a crew.” Conrad had been on the other end of too many pirate weapons in his time to be
overly impressed. He’d survived them all, why not this one too? Additionally, the drizzle was rapidly turning into heavier
rain. It seemed highly unlikely any black powder would catch in this wet.
“Oh, aye? Well, you’re out of luck. There bain’t be nothing here but fishing skiffs. Unless that’s what you mean?”
“You know it isn’t.”
The man raised his head. A brief glitter of dark eyes beneath heavy dark brows, and Conrad heard the step behind him
just as a second man lunged forwards, grabbed his coat and—yanking it open—seized the hilt of his sword and withdrew
it. They were good at this, he thought, half pleased and half dismayed.
“This is an officer’s small-sword,” said the man behind him. A more cultured voice, the Cornish burr scarcely noticeable.
“And you stink of officer. Now I suggest you tell us, quickly, what an officer of the Royal Navy wants with this hypothetical
ship and crew, because we’re private men in this village, and we begrudge having that privacy violated.”
Conrad took off his hat, the better to convince them of his sincerity, and then didn’t know what to do with it, so he
settled for tucking it under his arm as if he was on the quarterdeck. He turned a little on his heel, but could not see more
of the man behind him than an empty sleeve pinned up around a missing arm.
“It’s true, I’m a lieutenant in the navy.” They hadn’t been as sure of that as they had sounded. The confession made them
both hunker down like cats preparing to spring. Conrad raised his hands higher, allowed some urgency to flavour his voice.
“But I’m not going to retain that position for very long. A friend of mine is in jail in Exeter, waiting to appear before the
Quarter Sessions in two weeks’ time. When that happens, the court will condemn him to hang, and I intend to rescue him.
Since that will put me beyond the law also, I’m looking for men I can trust to help me. Or at least to provide us both with
a method of escape. We will need to leave the country as soon as we possibly can.”
It sounded outrageous, now it was out. And yet he’d accomplished harder things in his time in the service. Cutting out
and stealing moored ships with their crews still aboard them. Landing invasion forces to take fortresses and small towns.
He could surely do this too. Simply because the law forbade it did not mean that it would inevitably be more difficult.
“What makes you think we’re not law-abiding men who’ll take you straight to the local magistrate for that?”
“Because I saw a pirate cutter come into this bay. Because I think if you lowered her topmast you could anchor her in that
cave and use this path to transport her cargo into the back of the inn. Because I think, sir, that if you did not have
something to hide, I would not now be your prisoner. I am a wealthy one, I may mention. I would not ask you to help me
without being paid handsomely for it.”
“Ah, now that’s more like it,” said Eyebrows, with the touch of a smile in his voice. But One-Arm moved from behind him
and showed him the pale, refined face of a gentleman under a slouch hat from which the rain slid in showers.
One-Arm was not impressed. “We are not for hire. And if we were, you could not afford us.”
Conrad clamped down on the flare of anger, did not lose his temper, but his voice was tight with the effort of restraint
when he said, “You mistake me, sir. I am offering you my services, and those of my friend—when he should be rescued. I
wish to sign on with your crew.”
“Oh indeed. And we’d take an ex-navy man, why?”
“Because I can hand, reef and steer, I can navigate by chart and by stars. Because I’m a crack shot and a good hand with a
blade. Because my friend is a ship’s carpenter. And because we come with a dowry of a thousand pounds.”
“You’ve got the money here?” Eyebrow held out his hand, resting his musket in the crook of his elbow.
The instinct of hand-to-hand combat, honed over ten years at sea, suggested that Conrad should seize and pull that
outstretched hand. The man would drop the musket and he could pick it up, be armed against them both.
Instead he wiped some of the rain from his hair and put his hat back on. “I’m not a fool, despite the measures I am forced
to by desperation. The money is in my bank. You will have five hundred pounds if you but turn up at the hanging and
cause an affray. The other five hundred I will send by packet ship to Bermuda, and you may have it there when I and my
friend arrive safely. By that time I hope we will have proved to you that we are useful crew members and, having
overcome your natural desire to slit our throats and throw us overboard, we may continue as shipmates.”
“Thought of everything, have you?” One-Arm’s eyes did not soften—they were flat and grey as sharks’ eyes, incapable of
compassion—but the rest of his face smiled, as if amused.
“I hope so, yes. Thinking things through is a speciality of mine. For example, I should mention that once I have performed
the rescue, you need have no fear of my going to the authorities with your names. By that time I’ll be as wanted as you
are.”
“You don’t have our names to tell.” One-Arm pushed him in the centre of the chest with his own sword, cutting his new
coat. The blade pricked cold over his breastbone but did not break the skin. He took that as a hopeful sign.
“No, but I can have, given half a day’s gossiping in the taverns of Plymouth.”
“And so we had best kill you now.”
They came to the point, at last, and Conrad’s calm held as it would have held in battle—a calm with something fey behind
it, even joyous. “Yes,” he said, holding that fishlike gaze. “Kill me for the trinkets in my pockets or help me for a thousand
pounds. Your choice.”
He had been pushed back until there was nowhere left to retreat or recoil. He was as dangerous as a bear at bay before
its den, and perhaps it showed, for One-Arm gave a falsely jovial smile and grasped him by the wrist.
“Not my choice at all, my lad. But I’ll take you to the captain. You can put your proposition to him. I dare say he will be in
a good mood. ’Tis his wedding day, after all.”
The windows of the inn were running, inside, with condensation as heavy as the rain. With the heavy doors closed behind
him, damp smoking from his shoulders before the establishment’s parlour fire, Conrad waited under Eyebrow’s gaze
while One-Arm invaded the snug. Sounds of drunken singing, out of tune, and a woman’s voice, raised scolding shrill,
escaped the inner door as he returned with a tall young buck in tow.
Fresh-faced, a little younger than Conrad, with his best suit on and his hair powdered white, the newcomer didn’t look
like a ferocious villain. But his blue gaze was full of intelligence, lancet sharp. “Now, sir, why do you think you can
interrupt my wedding with your petty troubles? Or offer me—me!—so small a bribe?”
The inner doors trembled and swung open. A deep fug of tobacco smoke and kipper-smell and wet wool billowed through
the gap, followed by a figure that struck Conrad dumb. Cascading black ringlets loose on her narrow shoulders, her
breasts and hips all the more noticeable for being crammed into a naval midshipman’s uniform—the blood of its original
owner not fully washed from its collar—she set herself foursquare in front of the captain, hands on hips, and harangued
him.
“Eric Cobham, I was promised a proper wedding, with a proper wedding breakfast after. And now there ain’t no music,
and none of them can sing better’n a scalded cat, and where’s my dancing I was promised? You said—”
Cobham’s face was a picture of contrition. “I’m sorry, my love. The fiddler got away. Jumped overboard when we sighted
Plymouth. I thought you knew.”
“Course I knew. I just bleeding well thought you’d do something about it!”
Conrad could have laughed for relief. Instead, he cleared his throat, loud. “Excuse me, ma’am? I play the violin. Would
that help?”
“You’re fucking hired,” she said. “Eric, see to it.”
Chapter Nine
Conrad folded his uniform coat into as small a bundle as he could and laid on top of it a letter for his mother. Discarded,
the coat would tell the admiral everything, but he hoped it would ease the old man’s heart a little to know he had sent it
home, rather than wearing it in ignominy.
There weren’t words enough in the English language to explain himself to the admiral, but to his mother he had to at
least try.
By now, the letter went, almost as though it were a message from the dead, you will have heard of my disgrace and
dismissal from the service. I regret exceedingly the distress this must cause you, but I want you to know that I could not
live with myself if I had acted otherwise.
You once told me that the greatest thing in the world was the companionship and affection that a marriage afforded, and
urged me not to be so set on glory that I missed out upon love. Being now forced to choose between the two, I have
chosen as you advised.
I do not know if you will ever receive me again into your house, nor where I will be in future, nor how you will reach me if
you so wish. Please send no more parcels of comforts, nor any more letters to my ship.
He smoothed the letter, the wax that sealed it still warm beneath his fingers, folded a sheet of brown paper over it and
began to tie the parcel tight.
She had said, last time she had come down to the docks to wave goodbye to him, “I do not grow accustomed to these
partings. Every time you go, I fear you may not return.”
And now he would not. Perhaps the letter would provide some comfort, at least. It ended:
I will contact you when I can, to reassure you that I am still alive, and to ask that you continue to think of me as
your affectionate son,
Conrad.
A vain hope, possibly, but to this too he had resigned himself before he ever allowed Tom to kiss him, and therefore this
too he had chosen.
It took him three tries to address the parcel, his hand shook so, and when he passed it to the waiting boy he had to blow
his nose before he could speak. Being prepared for a thing did not make it hurt less. “Take this to the post.”
A second parcel, containing food and candles, he addressed to Tom. “And this one to the castle jail. It’s for the prisoner
who’s to be executed tomorrow. I want you to wait and be sure he gets it.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy bowed over the two shillings in his outstretched hand and beamed when they were topped up by a
third.
“And find me a doughty porter to take my sea chest out to the Mermaid Tavern in Under Mousehole. I need it done at
once.”
“Yes, Mr. Blake.”
He was a lively lad, and an employee of Conrad’s new lodgings, which he’d taken in civilian clothes and under another
name. So easy it was to slip moorings from one’s past—to cut the cord and arrive newborn in a completely different life.
It felt strange, uncomfortable, unsettled. The road to hell was not so smooth as he had been assured.
“What about all these other parcels ’ere? D’you want that I should come back and take them too, once you got them
written?”
“No!” A little too much emphasis on that. Conrad gentled his voice. “I will take them with me in the morning when I
depart. I shall be going very early, so I’ll settle with your mistress now, so as not to disturb the household when I leave.
You may tell her on your way out that I should be obliged if she would draw up my account.”
“O’ course, sir.”
He left Conrad in the twilight of the bare room. Beyond the leaded window, Exeter’s pavements and sturdy, new-built
tenements shone silver-blue under a coating of ice. Above, the needle points of a million unknown stars pressed down
over the shivering roofs. Smoke rose straight up in white pillars from the many reeking chimneys.
Conrad looked up for a long while, while the boards of his room darkened around him, and the hangings of the bed
stiffened in the cold. Instinctively, at the fall of shadows, he reached for a tinderbox to light the recently laid fire. Catching
himself, he shoved it back into its alcove with horror, moving the bags and parcels of which the boy had spoken farther
away from the grate.
The air still smelled sulphurous to him, and when the moon rose it lit a fine blue haze of gunpowder in the air. He had
spent the morning buying a barrel of black powder from a chandler whose name had been whispered in his ear by Maria
Cobham, and the afternoon making it up into bundles of firecrackers tied on long fuses.
The copper tang of the night tasted as though it would be cold and clear, and the day ahead of him dry. He prayed
fervently that it would stay that way.
Getting into bed fully clothed, he hugged his knees for warmth, leaned his cheek against the bedpost and thought about
Tom. Who would be colder still, lying on a stone ledge, looking out of unglazed bars at the same stars.
“Don’t lose hope,” Conrad had said, able to visit now that the trial was over, but unable—with the guard at his shoulder—
to speak more plainly or pass a note. “Doesn’t it say in the Good Book, ‘Behold, thy salvation cometh in the morning’?”
It had been so dark in there, vaulted stone greasy with the soot of hundreds of years of torches, that he wondered if he
had imagined the little leap of hope in Tom’s eye.
Tom was clever. Better officer material than Conrad, in truth. Surely a man who had grasped the whole situation at the
sound of a single key falling, instantly come up with a plan and executed it flawlessly, would know it made no sense to try
and rescue him from behind prison walls and wardens? Not when tomorrow he would be out in the open, free but for
fetters and guards and the crowd.
But the hope had gone by the time the jailer rattled his keys in the lock, and Conrad’s departing glimpse of Tom had been
of a man so compressed with fear, one could see it eddy around him like a spill of oil. The drawn, sickened expression was
so wrong on that face made to laugh. Conrad had wanted to turn around then, fasten himself into the cell too, spend this
dreadful night curled up together, holding life like their love close between them—a wildfire that kindled wherever they
touched.
But he had come away instead, and there was now a mile of distance and frost between them like a solid rock, and he
couldn’t think for Tom’s despair, driven like a pickaxe blade through his own heart.
He arrived at Heavitree Drop on horseback before the birds began to sing. The gallows stood at a three-way crossroads a
distance outside Exeter, and but for the large public house on the corner, surrounded by a scattering of cottages, he
might have been in open country. Ice was glassy on the ground, hardening the dirt of the roads until it rang beneath the
hooves of his hired nag. Pins of hoarfrost clustered on the trees and made the gallows glitter, silver-gilt. The air was too
cold to hold a scent.
Dismounting at the trough in front of the inn, Conrad tied up his horse and looked around himself, getting his bearings.
From here, the most direct route to Topsham—where Cobham’s cutter lay at anchor in the tide pool just below the
weir—should stretch out over the fields SSW of the crossroads.
A light kindled in the lower window of the inn and grew to a steady yellow glow, illuminating a covered gateway in the
direction he wanted to go. Folk were stirring. He hadn’t much time.
Beyond the gate, the felons’ graveyard lay in an unquiet huddle of mounds and dirt, where bags of quicklime were
sheltered under sacks and rough hurdles—used for carrying the bodies. Conrad picked a way through the rubble and
weeds to the far corner where a dry stone wall, knee height, separated the boneyard from the empty fallow fields.
Unsure of the horse, he spent a little time lowering the wall, and then returned to dispose his firecrackers on the ground
wherever there was grass or dirt to conceal them.
By the time he’d finished, brought the fuses to a single end next to his horse, dawn was turning the eastern sky white as
the earth. All the windows of the inn and the cottages around it were alight, and a company of muffled-up men were
already to be seen on the road, coming towards him.
Conrad pulled his collar up and sank his nose into it, concealing his face. But they were too busy about their own business
to trouble themselves about him, and there was that about the voices that said they had already taken a nip or two of
something to warm themselves against the day.
“I’ll look around. You get the drinks in.”
“On the guild?”
“Of course! Has to be some advantages, don’t there?”
Conrad tagged himself on the back of the group as its leader hammered on the inn door. “All right, Maggie-May. Open up.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s me. Bill.”
“I don’t know no Bill—”
“Bill Turvey of the Honourable Company of Exeter Tailors, and the boys, come for to inspect the burial yard afore the
execution. God blind me, Maggie. You should know to expect us by now.”
The door opened. A frowsty woman with wood ash in her uncombed hair let them all in. “I expect you all right,” she
complained. “But I don’t expect you before cockcrow. Come in then, if you must, there’s a fire alight in the parlour.”
The Honourable Company of Tailors bought drinks all around. A fat man whose face shone red with broken veins slid a
blackjack in front of Conrad, as he stood pinched before the fire, wishing that the waiting would be over and the time to
act be upon him.
“You’ve come for to see the execution? Drink with us then. It’s a grand thing to be alive, don’t you think?”
It was, and he’d thought the same at other executions. Even now he recognised the celebratory atmosphere as something
he had enjoyed himself. Life was never sharper than in the shadow of death, and this—for civilians—must be the closest
they came to the exaltation of battle. He hadn’t thought of it, before, as having a tint of the obscene, but when it was
Tom’s death they took so lightly, it turned his stomach.
“Thank you.” He took the ale and turned to watch the door, where the outliers of the holidaying crowd had already begun
to turn up, cold and thirsty and clamorous. So many happy faces, it was hard to like humanity this morning. Some had
brought their children as a special treat, and an apple-seller, coming early, cleaned out of her stock before Maggie had
time to hustle her back out of doors.
A faint rumble brought them all to the window to throw it open, lean out and see the solid wheeled tumbrel trundling
towards them, in the midst of an escort of six guardsmen armed with pistols. Two of the prisoners inside were listening
intently to the priest who rode with them, their expressions like those of scolded children. The third was Tom, and Tom
was watching the crowd, searching faces. He was coatless in this killing weather, and pale as his shirt, his big bright eyes
looking bigger still against his pallor.
As the tumbrel drew to a halt outside the inn, Conrad joined the rush of folk trying to get out of the door. But the guards
were escorting their prisoners—stiff and stumbling in the icy air—down from the cart and inside, and an influx of the
crowd pushed him back within. There the tailors brought guards and prisoners alike as much beer as they could drink.
Conrad found himself in the strange position of being barely a hand’s breadth away from Tom. One amid the many
voyeurs watching him drink, studying the way he turned his face to the fire in a bliss that was also a farewell.
Then Tom opened his eyes, spotted Conrad in the crowd and dropped his cup.
It was a near thing, another of those disastrous impulses that had made his choice inevitable, in the end. Conrad almost
stepped forwards, took Tom’s manacled hands and tried to breathe some warmth into them.
But the red-faced man misinterpreted his interest, nudged him, saved him. “Once a year, every year, we does this—buys
drinks for ’em all. Our Christian duty, so. Little gesture of kindness for the poor bastards. I don’t think there’s a man that
deserves to go sober.”
“It is a laudable mercy.” Conrad held Tom’s eye, tried to think of a way to tell him not now. Soon. But his smile must have
been ambiguous, for Tom only looked puzzled and downed his drink in one, asking for more.
Don’t get drunk. Conrad shook his head faintly. Where are… And the door opened again, letting in Kemp and O’Sullivan of
the crew of Cobham’s Pickerel. Finally, he thought, took the new pipe he had bought yesterday from his pocket and bent
to pick a glede from the fire with the fire tongs and light it.
Tom, who knew Conrad didn’t smoke, rightly took this as a sign. He put his second tankard down unfinished, readying
himself. But at that moment the clock on the sideboard chimed, and the guards got up as one man.
Conrad could see Tom brace himself to fight, and he shook his head again. Not in here, where their escape would be
hampered by the press of crowd. This time Tom obeyed him, allowed himself to be seized by both arms and hustled back
through the door and away. After the first few seconds he even remembered not to look over his shoulder nor follow
Conrad with his eyes.
As they led Tom to the gallows, Conrad elbowed his way back to the horse, pretended to have dropped his garter, and
knelt down, feigning to retie it.
An official, dusty-looking man mounted onto the gallows platform and began to read the charges. His wig was so over-
powdered it had snowed on his shoulders. The prisoners stood curiously passive beneath his shadow—a sheep thief, a
petty highwayman called Jack Jeffries, and Tom.
With a quick darting glance, Conrad swept the crowd. O’Sullivan and Kemp had taken up their places in front of the
cemetery gateway. The edges of the crush jostled for a position in which they could see clearer, and there sunlight
jangled off gold braid, gold buttons. Oh, God! Conrad looked down fast, angling his hat to better cover his face. Fortescue
had come, seeing it through to the last—a gesture of decency, or thoroughness, or respect. Too far away and too hidden
amidst the press of bodies, Conrad couldn’t see his face, but he had no doubt it would be composed and certain. Faintly
regretful but not greatly troubled.
He picked up and untangled the nest of fuses with a feeling of dark premonition and dread. Just let him keep out of this.
Please. I know I chose hell with Tom rather than heaven without, but don’t let me have to do murder for it.
Conrad wondered who he was praying to, why he was still trying to hold on to the edges of the pit, could not resign
himself to letting go and falling all the way down. For a moment the sense of rushing wind and water replayed in his head
as if he dreamed once more in the midst of a storm. But why? He’d made his decision. Things should have settled into
their new shape. Why would they still be malleable and chaotic about him, untamed as an ocean?
Whatever the reason, this was not the time to brood. The sheep thief had lost the ability to walk and had to be dragged,
mulish as one of his animals, up the steps to the drop. The hangman fitted the noose around his neck, adjusting the knot
for a swift strangulation.
Two guards shuffled and yawned on the platform with him. Then came the rattle of the trap door falling, and the choke,
the hammer of his heels against the gallows upright. The crowd watched, avid and silent, and then the highwayman
began to scream. “No, no, no, no! Let me go!”
Three of the remaining guards closed in on Jeffries, and Conrad touched his lit pipe to the ends of the quick-burning fuses
and watched sparks snake away across the hard ground, between the forest of shoes.
He untied his horse, leaped up into the saddle and began urging it through the crowd towards Tom. “Sorry, ma’am. Sorry,
sir. Got to…”
Across a packed square of merrymakers he could sense Fortescue’s gaze, curious, suspicious, on the inch of his chin
between hat brim and collar.
The first set of firecrackers cracked and boomed into life over by the cemetery gate like a volley of musket fire. As the
crowd started and strained to see, Kemp gave a scream and fell, clutching the bladder of pig’s blood he had brought
beneath his shirt. It burst and the stain spread and dripped between his fingers.
For a seasick moment the silence swung from awed enjoyment to terror. Then a woman screamed, and the crowd moved
like a flock of birds erupting from a tree, the skirts of it breaking and running to the fields, the centre pressing in upon the
relative safety of the gallows.
The two guards atop the platform levelled their rifles at Conrad, who turned and pointed behind himself. “They’re coming
from over there! I saw them! Five of them, they say they’re coming for Black Jack Jeffries. You have to stop them before
they kill us all!”
He could feel the power of the crowd behind him, reacting to the tone of command, hearing the sound of a man
accustomed to taking charge, to being obeyed without thought. And this was not a moment for thought. The guards
leaped down, began tracing their way through the jostling bodies, looking for Conrad’s entirely hypothetical attackers.
Fortescue was trying to come the other way, shouting something that could not be heard amid the yells and protestations
of the crowd. In the centre of the road back towards Exeter he was working against the tide of those who had decided
this sport was too dangerous for their liking and were taking themselves away.
“Over here too!” O’Sullivan had brought a dozen cobblestones with him, and when the next round of firecrackers went
off, he threw them, smack, into the closest backs. Convinced they had been shot, the men shouted out, fell, and the
crowd broke and panicked all around them.
The red-faced man grabbed one of the four remaining guards by the collar. “Do something, damn you! Don’t just stand
there!” Twisting him, he shoved him towards the danger. Meanwhile, the highwayman—face alight at the thought that
someone had come to rescue him—made a second attempt to escape, succeeded and fled into the crowd, pursued by his
warders.
That left only one man to restrain Tom. The guard barely had the chance to look up at Conrad’s face in horrified
realization before Tom had knocked him on the head with his fetters, reached up and been hauled onto the horse. Tom
passed the chain of his manacles over Conrad’s head, so that he could snug both arms around him, and though there was
no time for Conrad to properly appreciate the feeling, a sense of invulnerability came over him with the touch.
Conrad turned in the saddle to give Fortescue a grin of triumph, found the man had just finished priming a pistol. A
glimpse of white smoke, a tongue of red flame, and Conrad bowed himself half-over as the shot whistled by his ear.
Pulling his own musket from his pocket, he fired it above the heads of the crowd. Thoroughly spooked now, they
scattered out of his path, letting him give the terrified horse its head. It got its heels under itself and took off like a rocket.
Across the crossroads, under the arch, through the gateway and over the wall, wind freezing his teeth, and Tom laughing
like a loon behind him.
A rifle shot shattered flint from the wall beneath the horse’s back hooves, and it fairly flew, straight across the rough
furrows, half over, half through the hawthorn hedge on the other side and down into a shaded lane.
They covered three of the four miles to Topsham at a breakneck speed, Conrad clinging to the horse’s headstall, and Tom
to Conrad—for neither of them were particularly gifted horsemen—before the poor creature outran its fear and
remembered its age. Then, in a flat field of turnips that surrounded a copse of dispirited larches and holly, it stopped and
could not be made to take another pace either by whipping or pleading.
Dismounting and pulling it, they got it in among the trees, where it began to strip the holly of its leaves, giving them a
look equally prickly. Tom patted it on the nose and said, “Leave it be, poor thing. It’s done us proud.”
His cowed look had altogether disappeared, and his face shone to rival the pale winter sun. When Conrad snuggled back
into his arms, he wormed his fingers beneath Conrad’s greatcoat and jacket, and the touch of them was like being
branded with ice. Shaking off his coat, Conrad draped it over Tom’s shoulders and they stood so, embracing, their
foreheads pressed together and their eyes closed, wrapped in a single garment, until Tom’s deathlike flesh warmed, and
Conrad’s breath came easy. Then Tom raised Conrad’s face to his and kissed him, thumb beneath his chin and the
bracelet of the manacle pressed against his collarbone.
“I thought you wouldn’t come,” he whispered after, confessing as to a sin.
“Always, Tom. I’ll always come for you.”
Tom had still not opened his eyes, holding in the bitter words and thoughts of his time in jail. “I’m sorry now, I forced it.
Aboard ship, I mean. I didn’t mean it to lead to this.”
It was warm between the two of them, just as Conrad had imagined, and the sunlight filtered down all around them in
watered gold darts, no one but crows sharing the field with them. He pulled away reluctantly and slapped on the horse’s
dusty shoulder to get its attention. It gave him a dirty look, but allowed him to mount without trying to bite him more
than twice.
“I knew this was, if not inevitable, then very likely,” he said, helping Tom struggle aboard. It was hard for Tom to hold on
to Conrad and the coat at the same time, with the chain of the manacles making it impossible for him to put his arms
through the sleeves. “It was something I had to decide to accept before I could freely choose you. But I did accept it. I’m
not upset, Tom. This is what I expected all along.”
“What d’I tell you, about you and thinking things through? I didn’t get to this point until this moment, and you had it all
planned. You did ought to think better of yourself, you know.”
“Perhaps. But for now we have a tide to catch.”
Chapter Ten
Topsham was like all ports. Another wharf-side and another new-built public building doubling as office and tavern. The
hostler examined them narrowly as they pushed through the door, his eyes lingering on the coat draped false-casually
over Tom’s arms, concealing the manacles. “You want to go into the stables there,” he said gently, nodding towards the
back of the house. “I’ll have the farrier take a look at that.”
“What kind of place is this?” Tom asked, trying to keep his head down, the desire to examine everything without being
caught looking manifesting itself in him as a suspicious, darting expression.
“Custom house.” The barman carried on polishing the gleaming black tar inside of a leather beaker.
“But we…”
The darkness in the far corner of the long room stirred, and Cobham cast it off and emerged into the firelight like a
hunting cat. He still wore his hair powdered, his face dusted into pallor, but a bandolier of cartridges spoiled the line of his
dove-grey waistcoat. The butts of a brace of pistols protruded from his belt, and the scabbard of a cutlass knocked the
table behind him, emerging from the skirts of his frock coat. Maria was on his heel, her long hair tied back and her lips
painted crimson to match the bloodstains on her cuffs.
Tom gaped and recoiled towards the door. “You’re pirates!”
Cobham gave a glint of steely humour, thin as his lips. “Oh and you think you’re better than us, do you? Think what, that
you should be hanged on a better class of gallows? I’d kill you now, if it wasn’t that I’d already gone to some trouble to
keep you alive… No need to thank me for that, by the way. You can work off the obligation.”
The look of shock and betrayal on Tom’s face bored through the bottom of Conrad’s satisfaction and riddled it with holes.
He had been feeling pleased with himself—glad that the plan had worked so well, enamoured of the heady thought of
being outside the rules, free in a way that men seldom achieved. Surely it had occurred to Tom that he was a wanted man
now, a felon on the run? Surely he’d known their options no longer included the luxury of a conscience?
“I ain’t going for a pirate. Me, what was born a true son of a gun on Old Byng’s flagship? It’d be like spitting on my old
mum.”
“Tom!” Conrad exclaimed in dismay.
Tom had said this openly, loud, with instinctive naval fervour. And yes, it was good that he was so undamaged by his
imprisonment and condemnation as to think himself above his company. Conrad could have happily rejoiced in the
undamaged pride, if the faces around them had not just closed tight in threat.
“Tom, remember yourself. You told me I should make this decision for us, remember? That you would go where I lead.
They’ll hang us both now if they catch us! Where else is there, for us? It is with the outcasts and outlaws that we belong.
You told me you trusted me. Don’t do this to me now. Not now, after everything.”
“Pretty speech.” While Conrad’s attention had been on Tom, Cobham had drawn and loaded his pistols, and now one
black mouth was centred on Conrad’s forehead, one on Tom’s. “I’ll have that five hundred pounds now, shall I, and you
can decide if I take you with me to earn the rest, or I kill you on the spot. But think fast. I paid the Revenue officer to stay
away ’til four, and I want to be out on the open sea by then. That gives you—” he glanced at the dusty clock behind the
bar, “—oh, half a minute. Make up your minds then, boys.”
Conrad debated going for his sword, but the barman had picked up a dragon from beneath the bar, and the rattle of
misshapen shot was jagged on his nerves as Maria put down a long knife on the table and loaded a blunderbuss.
“Tom,” he pleaded, “we’ll go to Bermuda. Change our names, make our fortune, and in a couple of years we’ll be able to
buy our way back into society. Buy a country, maybe, far away in the Caribees. We’ll be kings of our own little kingdom.
Better than death! Better than hell. I know I chose it but I don’t want to go there yet.”
Tom frowned at the floor, made a small, irritated movement with his bound hands that set the pendant chain between
them a-jangling. “What d’you mean, chose hell?” The expression in his eyes was harder and more resolute than Conrad
had ever known Tom to be. “I didn’t choose hell, or piracy, or to be an outlaw. I do think you’ve taken that too far. You
need to work that out again.”
Conrad’s heart failed him as he understood for the first time what it meant not to be an officer any more. It meant having
no power over Tom other than love. He had expected obedience, as though he had marines to command. As though the
love they had never spoken of, the ten years growing up together, came with his rank and authority built in. He had taken
Tom’s acquiescence to this plan for granted.
“I asked for you, sure enough,” Tom continued. “I don’t think that’s wrong. ’Tis my body to do with as I please. But I didn’t
give away my dignity with it, nor my morals. Was that what you thought I was asking of you? ’Cause I never.”
He should have talked to Tom. The thought was a broadside of heavy shot, pounding into him. He had treated Tom as
Fortescue had, expecting him to stand silent in the background and do whatever Conrad chose to command him to do.
Hadn’t thought of discussing things with him. More, hadn’t thought that Tom might have wisdom that he himself needed
to hear.
Kemp and O’Sullivan eeled through the door just as he was trying to choke back an inarticulate cry of pain, replace it with
a more convincing apology. They both paused, a step inside the room, caught in the sphere of Tom’s choice. Time
stopped with them, leaving Conrad free to imagine in vivid detail what would happen next.
The tiniest movement and Cobham would fire. Conrad would dive and roll, come up shooting. Tom would drop the
bundled coat and swing the iron manacles down on the barman’s hands. Then a storm of fire would sweep them all away
in blood and shot and splinters. And if only Tom spoke true in believing hell was not inevitable—that would not be a bad
way to go for a pair of Royal Navy lovers with no other place in the world.
But he hadn’t come this far to let death win now. Desperation gave him eloquence, gave him words like grapeshot. “You
saved my life, Tom. And I saved yours. For what? To be gunned down now because of your damned pride?” He shoved
Tom in the chest, making him stumble back, out of the barman’s line of fire. “Do you think it was easy for me, playing the
victim? Standing there meekly under everyone’s scorn, and worse, their sympathy, while I could practically hear them
wondering how I could bear to live with the shame? Do you think that sat well with my honour?”
The second shove took Tom farther as the fight went out of him. To judge from his widened eyes, the sudden look of
horror, he hadn’t thought of that, concentrated as he had been on the terror of the noose.
Conrad sensed victory, drove home his point. “Goddamn it, Tom, if you wanted us to die together, why did you put me
through that? I gave up every scrap of my pride for you, and you will not humble yourself an inch for me? Is that all your
affection is worth?”
Silence, even the pirates holding their breath around them like onlookers at the climax of a play. Tom’s look of realization
clouded, smoothed out into regret. He dropped the chain he’d bunched between his hands as a weapon and sighed. “I’m
that sorry,” he said. “I hadn’t thought on it enough. And I may not want this, still, but it’s only fair if you give up
everything for me that I do the like for you. I always said I’d go wherever you go. Time for me to prove it, I reckon.”
O’Sullivan laughed. “Sure, that’s the sweetest thing…” and Cobham eased the half-cocked hammers from his pistols,
wedged them back in his belt. “But, Captain,” the Irishman continued, “there’s a man coming in this direction in the devil
of a hurry on horseback. I’m thinking we’d all be better off aboard.”
Outside the inn, the boats at anchor in the estuary creaked and fretted against their moorings. The tide was turning.
Conrad and Tom found themselves hustled down slimy green steps cut into the harbour side, shoved at the rowing bench
of the little jolly boat they found at the bottom. Captain Cobham, Maria, Kemp and O’Sullivan sat themselves down in
attitudes of repose around them and grinned.
“You’re new hands now. Lowliest of the low. So get rowing, Mr. High-and-Mighty Officer, sir.”
Kemp laughed and nudged Conrad hard with the heel of his boot. It bruised, but he knew better than to yelp. He lowered
his head and pulled at his oar, feeling Tom’s indignation beside him like a banked galley fire. The hoofbeats O’Sullivan had
mentioned rang now in his own ears, he could hear the change from the soft thud of the country lanes to the bell-like
clamour of iron on stone.
“Stop that boat!”
Over the course of the morning, Conrad’s pleasure in his own cleverness had smothered and died beneath the
crystallization of what he had chosen. His heart felt like a stalactite, encased in a first fragile layer of stone. He might not
have noticed it but for Tom’s horror, Tom’s protest that it didn’t have to be this way. Now, at the commanding boom of
Fortescue’s voice across the water, his breath came short as he felt again that he was suspended between two futures—
that he was being given his decision back and asked to reevaluate.
He looked up. Yes, there the man was, leaning down from his horse to shake an onlooker by the shoulder. Too far away to
hear a low conversation, Conrad guessed the captain was asking for a boat to hire. Raising a hue and cry to come after
them even now.
Putting up his oar, Conrad stood. No. Not now. He would not be stopped now, when freedom was barely a cable’s length
away, where the Pickerel’s crew were ready at the capstan, preparing to weigh anchor the moment they got aboard.
He pulled the pistol from his belt and aimed it at Fortescue’s heart. They locked eyes, the two of them alone together on
the brink of death. There was no fear in Fortescue’s face, and even now a part of Conrad respected him, thought of him
as a man to emulate. Wished for his praise. He was a straightforward man, an unbending one. He would be received in
heaven with decorum and not an iota of surprise.
“You will break your father’s heart,” Fortescue called. Conrad’s finger tightened on the trigger just as Tom grabbed his
wrist and wrenched it aside. The shot kicked up a white splash of seawater. Kemp and O’Sullivan dived for the oars and
pulled with all their might. The side of the pirate cutter came gradually closer to loom like a wall over them.
On the dock, the man whom Fortescue had shaken leaned down to pick up a coil of rope, began to haul, hand over hand,
a little rowing boat from where it had drifted into the centre of the channel.
“Don’t you lay any of this on him!” Tom braced himself against Conrad’s shoulder and balanced against the swell. His
certainty echoed off the smooth surface of the water as he yelled at Fortescue. “’Tis your fault, all of it. D’you think we
want to be here? You put us here, ’cause you couldn’t stand to leave well alone. You didn’t give us no other choice but
this.”
Conrad caught the bottommost rung of the ladder that ran up the Pickerel’s side, and then the flung hook. Grappling the
boat onto its divot, he watched Fortescue’s reaction to the words. The captain’s look of probity, of a man certain of his
own righteousness, rewrote itself in Conrad’s head. It was not the look of integrity at all, but the cold purity of a Pharisee,
the gleam of a whited sepulchre.
“You judged us, when you were told you must not. Now you brought the like down on yourself. I hope you can stand
before God’s judgement perfect. Never put a foot wrong, never had an impure thought, never left undone something you
ought to have done, never hounded two loyal sailors over to the bad… You going to stand in court now for that and get
the same mercy that you showed us. I hope you’re ready.”
The skin of stone around Conrad’s heart fractured at the words. It beat again.
Fortescue dismounted. His helper had reeled in a boat to the foot of the step, and Conrad saw him gathering followers,
sober-minded men and the kind of roaring boys eager for a scrap, heedless of the reason for it.
Cobham pushed past and ran up the side of his ship, disappearing aboard. An instant later and the sound of the capstan
turning growled through the air. The anchor chain grew taut, and then the waves bulged beneath them as it parted from
the sea-bed and began to rise.
Conrad grabbed Tom and pushed him in front of himself as they scrambled aboard, rolling over the rail and into the
probing stares of twenty men, all of them wary, looking for weakness. Conrad swallowed, and Tom whispered, “They
don’t look too different from the lower decks of any ship I been on, truth to tell.”
Then Cobham shouted, “You two to the headsails. Staysail haul,” and they were too busy with the rigging, feeling the
wind catch in the canvas and the deck beneath their feet begin to thrum with purpose, to do more than look back once at
Fortescue, left behind in the tide pool, forlorn amid a laughing mob of the Pickerel’s well-wishers and friends.
Later—much later, when they had cleared the Channel and come out into the deep water, only seagulls in sight from end
to end of the purpling sky—their watch changed. Conrad straightened up from hitching his line to its belaying pin and
wiped his bleeding hands on his handkerchief.
Cobham ambled towards him, hand on his sword. As always, Maria was beside him, as poised against the roll of the ship
as any sailor.
Anxiety tried to skitter up Conrad’s spine and failed. He was far too tired to care. If Cobham chose to kill him now and
dump him overboard, at least he would get to rest. But when he dug five hundred pounds in notes from his pocketbook
and passed them over, Cobham just tucked them in his waistcoat and nodded.
Maria looked from Conrad’s face to Tom, who was in his accustomed place by Conrad’s shoulder. “Have the pair of you
drawn up a contract of matelotage?”
“A contract of what, ma’am?”
Cobham rolled his eyes, but half of his thin face smiled. “Never mind. Ask your mess mates.”
Maria took her husband by the arm and kissed him on the cheek, leaving a smear of crimson. “Oh, but, Eric, pair of
sweethearts turning up on our wedding day? It’s a blessing, ain’t it?” She raised her voice, to be heard by the onlookers.
“He’s my good-luck fiddler, he is. And I hope as the crew will make you welcome, Blakey-boy, or I’ll be having words with
them.”
Cobham’s smile spread to both cheeks, though there was something chill still about his glacial eyes. “You can eat now,
then I will require you to sign the ship’s articles.”
That seemed to be it for introductions. There was salt beef and hard tack for dinner, just as there would have been at
home.
Summoned to the great cabin afterwards, Conrad felt recovered enough to sense the weight of anxiety in his stomach
when Cobham brought out the leather-bound booklet that contained the ship’s laws and the signatures of her crew.
Conrad read them out slowly for Tom’s benefit, conscious that Maria with her blunderbuss stood behind the captain, that
behind Tom stood the first mate with a pistol, and his own back was open to the shot of Wiley, the quartermaster, a
ruddy-faced blond man with a missing eye, who sat against the wall with a musket across his knees.
He could feel Tom’s reluctance fill the scrubbed and bare room like steam. It got under his own skin and made it prickle
with cold when he read the rule forbidding them from leaving the ship without permission. Here too it seemed Tom, by
instinct, had reached a truer conclusion than Conrad’s intellect had achieved. He had thought he was ready for a life of
piracy, but now he was faced with it, he found he had no appetite for it at all.
Wetting his lips, he considered the consequences of refusing—instant death. Then he smiled. Leaning down, he took the
pen from Cobham’s outstretched hand, dipped it and signed “Conrad Blake.”
Beside him, there came a little pause while Tom figured out the letters and then he made a sibilant sound, half sigh, half
laugh. Taking the pen from Conrad he spelled out, with some difficulty, “Tom Carpenter” in block capitals and added an x
for his mark.
The atmosphere in the cabin changed at once. It was all smiles now as Cobham sanded the ink to dry it and tucked the
parchment back into its drawer. “Good. Welcome aboard then, lads. I’ll expect you to forget you ever had another life.
You give everything to this ship, and I will be good to you. You cross me, and you’ll plead to be sent back to the hangman.
Understand? Very well. Wiley here will show you where you can sling your hammocks.”
The Pickerel was a small vessel, but still there was more space belowdecks than Conrad had ever seen, the Royal Navy
being accustomed to take as many men as required to sail the ship, an additional ten men per cannon and—where they
could—half again over complement to be prepared for the inevitable deaths. He would have expected a similar level of
overcrowding on a pirate ship, at least one with a successful and well-liked captain, and he wondered what the bareness
signified. Was it a sign of mismanagement or simply ill luck? It explained, at least, why Cobham had not been more
reluctant to take them on.
“It’s a wonder they don’t get lonely,” Tom said, looking at the wide spaces between hammocks. “At home you’d be
touching the next man. Companionable, like. Warmer too.”
Wiley laughed, stopping in the forepeak, where the sea broke most heavily over the bow and trickled through the planks
above. The stink of the heads filtered through the wet wood and lapped them in its miasma. “This is you. Don’t get any
ideas of complaining—everyone starts here. You have to earn the more comfortable spots. But you can lash your
hammocks together if you like. Plenty of your sort in the brethren, and it’ll make folk happier to see you ain’t above your
company. Just no caterwauling. You wake anyone up, you pay the price.”
Wiley’s retreating lantern lit a row of three sleepers ten yards away, dwindled to a smoky yellow star as it rose up through
the deck above and finally snuffed out as he set down the hatch. For a moment it was utterly dark, and then Conrad’s
eyes adjusted enough to pick out the pared-lead light of the moon filtering in stripes through the distant grating. Tom was
little more than a succession of rustles at his side. He felt the fabric of the hammock tense and try to swing as Tom got in.
He held it still, taking his first deep breath since the arrest, feeling relief and weariness overcome him. Then he shucked
off his coat and shoes and climbed in after him.
It was already warmer in here, warmer than he’d been for weeks. Though he was worn out and aching with
unaccustomed physical toil, burrowing close to Tom soothed all. As he had imagined in his cold and lonely bed in Exeter,
everywhere they touched heat welled up like the radiance of a hearth fire. His muscles unwound, left him floating in a
drowsy Eden of security, slumber and bliss.
Tom’s shoulder was warm and resilient against his cheek, their arms and legs tangled. Pressed this close together, even
the smell was of smoke and oak and flesh, overriding that of the ship. The anxiety with which Conrad had been living
these past weeks slowly seeped through his pores and dissipated, leaving unaccustomed content to take its place. He
tilted up his face and touched the edge of Tom’s smile with his lips.
“D’you think they can hear us?” Tom whispered, working an arm between their bodies so he could slowly roll the buttons
of Conrad’s breeches through their buttonholes.
He was not too tired, evidently, to catch alight like a slow-burning fuse at the thought. “I should like it if they did. I want
them to know what they’re missing.”
Falling water glimmered about them like dim stars, but there was barely enough light to show him Tom’s expression. He
guessed it from the tone of shocked delight. “My, you are a wicked one. I didn’t know. Well, I don’t need to shush you
here. You go right ahead and shout my name as loud as you like.”
Conrad dropped his voice, wriggling to allow Tom to push his loosened breeches off. He had something to say but it was
hard to think at the feel of that calloused hand possessive on the sensitive skin of his arse. “I…yes. Not the real one,
though.”
“You sure they can’t hear us?”
“Not if we’re quiet.”
“That was clever.” Tom worked his own trousers open, pulled up the tucked shirt and then stopped, just as Conrad was
most eager for the touch of flesh. “I thought for a moment you meant it, going for pirates. Now I see you had an escape
route in mind all along. For you wouldn’t break your written word and escape if you’d put your own name to those
articles. But there ain’t no Conrad Blake and there ain’t no Tom Carpenter, so we can do as we will. Stay, if they ain’t too
bad, or jump ship again if we can’t live with them and our own consciences. I should have known you were five steps
ahead of me all along.”
Conrad got one leg out of his breeches and celebrated by fighting through the bedclothes so that he could straddle Tom,
roll over on top of him. The whole thing gave him time to think, and thought dampened his ardour, briefly.
“You give me too much credit. The truth is I did think I was losing everything.”
“Mmm?”
“I did think I had to forfeit my soul, Tom. I thought I had to obey all the rules—that if I broke even one I was condemned
beyond redemption. Nothing else to lose. I was ready to kill Fortescue, ready to leave all notions of morality and self-
respect behind. I thought I had to choose, you understand, between heaven and you.”
“And you chose me.” Tom opened an eye to smile, content as a big cat in a patch of sun, and joy came over Conrad
suddenly, like a flame catching on candlewick and growing up strong.
“I did. I gave everything up for you. But then you gave it all back.” Quiet for a while, as he fought to pin down what it was
that he had only just understood. “I thought he was right, you see. That he represented everything that was good. That in
rejecting him, I was rejecting all morality, the straight and narrow way.”
Tom breathed out through his nose in what Conrad took to be a laugh.
Conrad wondered what it meant, for he’d been altogether wrong in the past when he mistook Tom’s easygoing good
nature for a lack of thought. “You taught me different. If he hadn’t rejected us, we could have still been serving our
country, fighting and dying for her. The only thing that’s wrong in our love is that people like him won’t make a place for it.
It’s he who has failed in his goodness, not us.”
The gentle touch on the back of his neck might have been a benediction. “‘Cursed be them what tries to live by the law.’
That’s what Reverend Ashby used to say, right enough. He were talking about Oliver Cromwell, mind you, but I took it to
heart even so.”
Conrad felt the ocean rock him like a mother’s hands. “Well,” he murmured, “the main thing is that we are alive and
together. That we have a future, at last. We’re men of enterprise, and we’ve already foiled the king’s navy and his justice.
If these pirates do not suit us, we can surely deal with them too, now we have each other.”
Tom laughed again, a little louder. “Ah, but I ain’t had you yet.”
More practised in the art of moving around in the swaddling of a hammock, he lifted Conrad by the hips and turned them
both—a moment of mad swaying and the slither and bunch of bedding—and Conrad found himself with the cradling
roughness of canvas under his back, pinned beneath Tom’s sprawl of limbs. With a great leap of excitement he had to
agree that the time for philosophy was well past.
“You’d better put that right at once.” Conrad couldn’t keep up the teasing tone. He wormed his hands under Tom’s shirt,
pushed it and his own up together and welcomed the heat, the weight of bone and muscle and skin pressing him down.
Desire too felt less the fiery, flighty thrill of doing the forbidden, and more solid, more real for what they had been
through together.
He filled his senses with Tom, all of his skin becoming more sensitive because of the other man’s touch. In the bare light,
they were shadows together, but it only made the drag of skin, firm and warm over his own, a hundred times more
intense. He closed his eyes and opened his lips against lips he couldn’t see, and all the attention that would have gone to
sight rushed into taste as he dipped his tongue into Tom’s welcoming mouth. Weariness gentled the edge of their play.
He spread himself with his own fingers and felt Tom enter slow, spit-slick, careful.
Scarcely any pain this time as the combination of pleasure and safety unwound every clenched muscle in his body and left
him utterly yielding, pliant and so lapped in sensuous enjoyment that he couldn’t bring himself to care if it was unmanly.
“Tom!”
Sweetness gave way by degrees to urgency. Below him, the waves rolled upwards, pushing him to meet Tom’s thrusts,
and in his mazed, half-asleep bliss it was as though the sea itself gave its blessing. The ropes creaked.
Later he would be grateful that no one could see his legs hooked over either side of the hammock, feet bared to the
falling water. For now he was just glad of the extra purchase, the chance to speed things up, start pushing back as the full
feverish glorious drive seized him and hurled him blindly to the little death. He might have screamed at the last because
Tom laughed through his climax, with a sound of possessive joy.
“Did I ever thank you for rescuing me?” Tom mumbled a little later, as they subsided towards sleep.
“There’s no need. You saved me from much worse.” Undecided to the last, Conrad fought slumber, wondered if perhaps
they could do that again. Wasn’t it his turn now? He got his head down under the blankets so that he could suck Tom’s
flattening nipple back to a peak. “I love you, Tom. And everything else—well, we can deal with that when we have to.”
Tom gave a deep growl of appreciation, sat up with a jerk that made the hammock ropes squeal against their hooks, and
almost instantly afterwards a flung boot sailed out of the darkness and hit Conrad in the ribs. “Randy sods, shut the fuck
up and let us sleep!”
They caught the glimmer of each other’s gaze and laughed, for it was an unconventional paradise they’d found. An
outcasts’ heaven. In the dark, in a quiet but unashamed whisper, Tom said, “Love you too,” and, unconventional or not, it
was for that moment perfect.
About the Author
Alex Beecroft was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the Peak District. She studied
English and philosophy before accepting employment with the Crown Court where she worked for a number of years. Now a stay-at-
home mum and full-time author, Alex lives with her husband and two daughters in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid
being mistaken for a tourist.
Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has lead a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid,
and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.
Where no great story goes untold.
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ISBN: 978-1-4268-9255-4
Copyright © 2011 by Alex Beecroft
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to
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or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written
permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to
anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to
the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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