Captain's Surrender

by Alex Beecroft

  “But this is terrible!” Jenson mashed the good food before him with his fork, pushed it to the side of his plate, untasted. Walker’s feeling of unusual beneficence wore off at the sight; he did dislike a stingy, stringy, falsely abstemious man. It was an affront against hospitality to treat his dinner with such disregard.

  “No wonder we are troubled with rebellion in our Colonies,” Jenson went on. “If what you say is true—and, my dear sir, believe me, I have no doubt of it—we are being justly punished by God for our depravities. If we put them behind us, grubbed their dark roots from our land, so to speak, what might that not do to turn the tide of affairs in the Americas? We would surely bring them to a proper submission once more, once God approved the righteousness of our spirits.”

  “We are of one mind.” Captain Walker raised his glass with only a little effort. Reverend Jenson’s heart was in the right place, whatever might be said for his stomach, and parsons, of course, could not be expected to behave like real men. “I suggest we begin by rousing up popular opinion against it. The example of Sodom and Gomorrah, the unquenched spreading of the pox, the danger to our innocent sons. And then we may prove that the great days of the societies are not over by going after these abominations with extreme zeal, confident that a population educated in the dangers they pose will not interfere with ill-judged pity.”

  “My text today is taken from Genesis, chapter nineteen, verses one to twenty-nine.”

  Peter’s attention was drawn back from the ceiling by the tension in Josh’s arm, pressed against his in the overcrowded pews set aside for the gentlemen of the navy. He looked down and saw Reverend Jenson dwarfed by the giant eagle of the lectern, looking like a rather withered choirboy beneath the crimson glory of his chasuble. Seeing nothing to disturb him there, he glanced at Andrews, whose back had straightened until it rivaled the oak of the pews and whose face was perfectly emotionless in a way that Peter had learned to associate with fear.

  Bending his head, as if in prayer, he whispered, “What is it?” and Josh gave him such a look—such a look of indignant terror, as if to say, “Shut up! Shut up, don’t draw attention,” that he had to concentrate on the sermon in an attempt to escape its unsettling effects.

  But the sermon did not help. “Before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter:

  “And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, ‘Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them.’”

  It was like the wind of a cannon ball—the shot passed by and left him physically unscathed, but within, all his vitals were thrown into disorder and he gasped for breath. Instantly, he felt as though there was a string of signal flags above him pointing him out to the crowd as a guilty man. A man as bad as those who so long ago tried to rape God’s angels, a man whose vice was vile enough to call down brimstone and sulfur from heaven, to induce a merciful God to obliterate him and his city together.

  “For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the fact of the Lord; and the Lord hath send us to destroy it.”

  Oh, he knew the story well enough. He had merely avoided connecting it to himself, found something else to think about, falsely reasoned that making Joshua happy was better than ruining the lives or reputations of any young women.

  “What can we learn from these verses?” said Jenson’s polite Anglican voice over Peter’s suddenly bowed head. “Firstly, I think it is clear enough that God detests this sin above all others. For no other sin has he utterly destroyed a people, leaving even the land on which their city was built as a desolation, salting the ground so that nothing should grow there ever again.”

  Peter’s legs were stretched out beneath the pew in front, thigh to thigh with Josh’s, their calves touching. Instinctively, he moved until there was an inch of empty space between them and saw Josh’s head bow out of the corner of his eye. Around him, other men were doing the same, tucking their coat tails more firmly in, looking uncomfortable, but he felt still that the very air between himself and Josh was charged with visible guilt.

  “Secondly, we can learn to fear the presence of such men in our midst. I have reliably been told that there is a den of this vice on Silk Alley in our very own town. Now you may say to yourself that is very far from being all the men of St. George’s, both young and old. Will not God—looking at our city—be able to find at least ten righteous men, and thus spare us?

  “Folly, I say, for how can the toleration of this vice count as righteousness? And in this sin, every one of us is complicit. While there remains such an establishment permitted in our city, there is not an innocent man in it, and that is quite apart from the patrons of such a sink. It is of no avail to say, ‘Oh, this is a problem of others, none of my acquaintance would sink so low’, for does not the Bible tell us that both young and old, all the men of Sodom were implicated? It spreads, my children, like the yellow fever, until it consumes all. Indeed, it is a very sickness of the soul, and as we fumigate our hospitals with sulfur, so God purges this disease from the land.”

  Disease, thought Peter, wishing he could escape, feeling exposed and humiliated as he had felt when lashed to the grating. No, this was worse, for there he had had the internal certainty that he was wronged, that he was a victim of sin, not the perpetrator of it. It could be a disease. He could have caught it from Allenby in his youth, been reinfected by Andrews, one in a long line of victims until he became a carrier himself.

  “With this certainty, we may reexamine our current peril,” Jenson was saying, still with the clear voice and clear conscience of a man who has never even felt tempted to this sin, who congratulates himself on his feelings of disgust. “Many have asked how we could lose the Americas. Why the colonists would wish to separate themselves from their own homelands and their families left behind in Britain. Many of you, I know, have asked yourself whether we were safe here on this little island, with so small a naval force protecting us, or whether we will suffer invasion and dispossession and death.

  “Well, I say to you that our safety does not depend on navies, not even on distant kings, but on the direct protection of God. How long can we go on angering him and expect to remain secure?”

  There were stern and frightened faces about him now, some serious looks and nodding, and he felt each one as an accusation. More than that, he became aware of the darkness above him in the vault of the roof, the heavy stones, the bells above, and everywhere he looked he seemed to find condemnation, as though the very stones cried out against him.

  The service passed in a blur of hot self-awareness. When it ended, he found himself filing out, expected to shake the vicar’s hand. He felt the light should expose him and the touch detect his trembling.

  “How refreshing it is,” said Josh before him, taking the man’s hand with a bravery that humbled Peter, “to hear a man condemn a sin in which he has no part. With what joy one can join in its persecution, knowing that one has no share in it. No fellow-feeling for the sinner.”

  Reverend Jenson clearly did not hear the rebuke in this remark. He nodded and smiled, and seeing him so fooled, Peter was able to shake his hand with some confidence, but it was still an escape when he turned the corner into Duke of Clarence Street and could no longer feel the presence of the church behind him.

  He fell into step with Josh, and they walked together down towards Ordnance Island and along the causeway, sea on either side, the Macedonian tied up against the quay, and the Seahorse out in the bay, her racing lines silhouetted against water as burningly bright as a sheet of mercury. All the time, he felt a stranger in his own body, a prisoner in his own mind, unable to know what to do. He had been in a kind of Eden before the serpent, somehow unaware on a conscious level of what he was doing. But now he had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and knew that he should be ashamed.

  Peter had always been a good boy, dutiful,
responsible, truthful, willing to work hard for himself and for others, and he had never had a great deal of experience of guilt. It came upon him now as a calamity.

  “We should talk.” He finally broke the silence that had lain between them for the last two miles.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” said Josh with some of that same bitter, black humor he had used on Jenson. He raised his head and smiled the smile of a condemned man. “The time had come anyway. This thing between us had run its course—it was time to move on, regardless. Was it going to be ‘we can still be friends’? Or ‘perhaps we’d better make it a clean break’?”

  The dreadful, cold mockery of this added another level of pain and shame to the whirlpool in Peter’s breast. “Josh!” he cried, feeling shocked and a little betrayed—as it was Josh himself who had given him the impression he expected nothing from him beyond the occasional recreational fuck.

  “I’m sorry.” Josh’s voice shook suddenly, making repentance and pity stab through Peter’s confused heart. “You’re right. I knew this was coming, and I’m glad.” He turned his back, but not before Peter had seen the twist of his brows, the compression of his fine oval mouth that gave the lie to his “gladness”.

  “I’m sorry, too.” Peter hardly knew what he said in his desire to make everything right at once. “I shouldn’t have…I shouldn’t have begun something with you had I known it would cause you such pain to end it. I shouldn’t have been so inconstant. Forgive me?”

  Josh walked away, back to the steps that ran down to the beach. The white sand was strewn with rubbish, and he stopped, his head turned towards a straggle of nets, his back to Peter. But Josh’s back was eloquent, and its cowed tension told Peter that he would have done better not to speak at all.

  “Are you telling me you regret there was ever anything between us?” Josh asked.

  “If it provoked you to disappointment. If it made you feel as I feel now, then, yes. I would not have given you such pain had I not thoughtlessly used you to satisfy my own curiosity, my wanton need.”

  Josh laughed—a cynical sound—but did not turn round. Even the animation of anger was gone when he next spoke, his voice weary and dull. “I could only wish you were sorry for finishing with me, rather than for ever starting.”

  Damn him, why did he always have to take everything wrongly? A small part of Peter considered the fact that it might not the best time for apologies—while he was guilt-stricken and overemotional, terrified of God, man and himself. Sighing, he rubbed the bridge of his nose, walked close enough to see Josh’s mobile face gone shuttered and unreadable.

  “I don’t think you understand, sir,” said Josh in a quiet, charged voice. “The world doesn’t allow men like me to hope for constancy. I never expected it. You’re going to marry. I did expect that. And I’ll be glad to see you happy.”

  He walked down onto the sand, Peter following, torn between the certainty that he must go through with this, and the certainty that if he let Josh go—if he lost Josh, he could not survive it.

  “I don’t have any claim on you, Peter. I never asked for your fidelity. I only want…” Josh’s breath hitched, betraying some of the misery concealed behind that blank expression. The dark eyes glittered for a moment, then shut, concealing tears. “I want whatever’s left over. I’ll take anything. Friendship, if that’s all your conscience will allow. But I don’t…I don’t want you to tell me you regret ever having known me at all.”

  “It’s not…” Touching his arm, Peter chased after the right words, frustrated with his own stupidity. “Not what I meant. Oh, damn it…you know I’m no good at this stuff. Give me an enemy in my sights and a blue-water chase, and I’ll know what to do, but I… Oh I am hopeless when it comes to love.”

  Caught in the act of ducking into the shadow of the pier, Josh’s step faltered, his mouth and eyes rounded in wonderment, and he stood dumbstruck. It was such a rare occurrence, that even in his half-coherent state, Peter knew he must have said something extraordinary. He worked out what it was just at the point when Josh’s expression became a rather dazzled smile.

  “Love?” Josh whispered, while his spirit seemed to have caught the fire of the sun, gone golden and remote.

  “I suppose it is…was…is,” said Peter, wearily marveling at the way joy made Josh’s rather nondescript face look bright and fierce, lending him an inner radiance, a sort of beauty. Such a little thing—surely he must have said it before? And perhaps it would have been better left unsaid at that, for it solved nothing. “But a forbidden love. It was not wrong to love you, but we did wrong to express it as we did. If I am married, and we are in separate ships, I will still love you, for I have never had a worthier friend.”

  It was cool in the shadow of the pier, and the wet pylons around them smelled sharply of oak and salt, and there boiled up from Peter’s imagination the picture of him taking Josh’s face between his hands and kissing him soundly, laying him down on the cool, damp sand and showing him with all the force in his body exactly what love was.

  The picture left as swiftly as it had come, leaving him shaking, hard, and determined that if either of them were to escape the noose, separate ships were a vital necessity. “But perhaps you were right, earlier, and we should find ourselves lodgings apart—to make it easier to set this sin aside, lest we prove each other’s ruin.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “There’s someone alive in there!”

  Josh could hear it too, as sparks poured into the air, smoke and flame turning the whole night into a yellow amber confusion that smelled of unbreathable reek and burning flesh. Above the roaring of flame a man’s voice shrieked, inhuman, desperate, and Josh broke through the line of prostitutes and their customers, passing pitchers and chamber pots of water from the well to the fire. He tore off his cravat, dumped it in a basin of water and, wrapping it round his face, he ran up the steps to number four Silk Alley and into its spacious reception hall.

  Velvet curtains hung in rags of black ash against walls that smoldered beneath the plaster. The room was so full of smoke he could see the stairs only because they were burning, pulling away from the walls, threatening to collapse on the heads of the few men who had made it this far. At the top of the impassable staircase, the screaming grew raw, frantic and agonized. Josh tried to force himself onto the inferno that was the stairs, closed his eyes, ran for it, and was pulled back by powerful hands.

  “Nothing we can do, cully.” The man who had his right arm was a carpenter, and bizarrely, a man he had known in London. A silent look of recognition and complicity passed between them. “I hope the fucking bastards are proud of themselves, that’s all I can say. C’mon before it gets us too.”

  The man on his left looked up, just as the bestial, bubbling scream was mercifully cut off, and Josh was amazed to see that it was Adam Robinson, soot streaks through his blond hair and his eyes red with smoke.

  Outside it felt cold. They joined the lines of folk laboring to quench the fire before it spread to the neighboring houses, and when the roof finally fell and the bonfire began to eat itself from within, Josh—moved by the impulse of shared danger—touched Robinson’s arm and said, “Let’s find some breakfast.”

  Robinson looked up at where the sun’s early rays were turning the charred skeleton of building from the overpowering monster of the night into a sad and sordid wreck. “I…” He coughed the racking early-morning cough of a heavy smoker. Around them a hundred other people were doing the same. “I am not sure I…”

  It was something of a comfort to Josh to find a man who seemed to be suffering even more than he himself was. Pleasant though it might have been to find all his cares resolved and his heartache mended, it was a good second place to feel that he might be of assistance to someone else. His sharp eye caught the frayed cuffs of Robinson’s suit and the gauntness of his face, and he added quickly, “You must allow me to buy you breakfast, both for saving my life in there and in celebration of my good news.”


  The exaggeration made the man laugh, his anxious look becoming a smile of great charm. “I hardly saved your life, Lieutenant.”

  “I was fully determined to climb those stairs.” Josh shivered at the memory. “You brought me to a consciousness of how foolish it would be. I have no doubt, that if you had not been there, I would have been consumed.” Partly because I would not have cared enough to live. “Besides, sir, you mistake my rank. It is captain now.”

  “No!” Robinson’s surprise and unfeigned pleasure brought a smile to Josh’s face, but he was conscious that it was not wise for either of them to be seen here. He tucked the man’s arm under his own and began walking them both away, turning into Aunt Peggy’s and then up Old Maids Lane to the inn at the top of the hill. “A captain?”

  Josh ducked his head and lied with the ease of long practice. “I was looking for a pretty strumpet to celebrate with when I saw the fire.”

  “Do you think it was the molly house of which Reverend Jenson spoke?” Robinson asked with a naivety that made Josh glad he had lied. “I thought it was a gambling den.”

  “If it was, I’m still not sure how Christian it was to burn that man alive.” Some of the nagging sense of injustice made its way unwisely out in that remark.

  But Adam stopped on the steps of the inn. “You’re right. I had not thought it, but to excuse murder in the service of God, well… It’s not what I was taught at my mother’s knee.”

  “Indeed.”

  The inn had been built in a native style, with many pillars and balconies. Cool air from the sea swept up into it, and the flagged floors were almost chill at this early hour. Josh’s shouting for service brought out a yawning young woman from the kitchen, who looked at their soot-stained faces and gave them a brilliant white smile, amused to see them looking as black as she was herself.

  Later, washed and with the smoke brushed from their coats, they sat down to a meal of gammon and eggs, slabs of white bread spread with new butter and ale drawn up cool from the cellar. Josh drank more than he ate, the beer soothing a throat he had not realized was so raw. But Robinson ate like a man starving and eyed what he could not eat with regret.