They lay on fur and the tree whispered above their heads. “You’re getting strong,” said Giniw at last, his expression smug, though a little tentative.
“I walked today,” Josh murmured in agreement. “Only down to the river, but…yes. I’m feeling better.”
“One day we must do that when you are fully recovered. I will need to keep myself in training.” Giniw sat up, leaning against the tree, and pulled a limp and satisfied Josh into his arms. They lay as they had done at first, Josh propped up against his chest and encompassed by his arms. “You will marry me then? I am glad.”
“Oh!” Josh sat up, woken from his contented stupor as though he had had a bucket of cold water thrown over him. Had he just agreed to get married? Damn! He kept thinking of himself as an Irish sodomite and not as…whatever it was Opichi had called him. Did Giniw think of him as he would of a woman? Did he expect the same kind of chastity he would expect from a woman? The same kind of obedience?
And Opichi—she was expecting someone who would look after the babies and help around the house, keep respectful silence, and not feel hard done by when he lay awake in the dark and listened to his man make love to someone else. He wasn’t sure he could do that. Whatever they called him, in his mind he was a man. A man with his own career, with the memory of command and the love of battle.
“Y’see,” he tried to explain his reluctance, “among my people men like me’d be hanged if anyone found out about us. Marriage…we’re not allowed it. Though we pretend sometimes, everyone knows it isn’t real.”
“It is real here. We do not waste people like you white men do. We would go back to my village and hold a dance, and everyone would be glad for us. They would think I was fortunate, for an agokwa is a strong wife and an important person.”
Josh’s heart twisted within him again. He ran his hands up Giniw’s muscular arms and imagined a future of openness and respect. A family of his own, the baby and her brothers and sisters treating him as one of their parents. No more death, no more hiding, no more lies.
No more Peter. No more even the hope of him, even the glances snatched at a distance, even the moments of awkward, embarrassed friendship around someone else’s dinner table.
But how wise would it be to go back, to try and live off the crumbs from Peter’s table, to watch while he married and to remain a ravenous shadow by his side, slaking hunger in the back rooms of sordid pubs until he was finally beaten to death or hanged or died of a chance-caught pox, bringing disgrace on his friends?
No, he couldn’t go back to that. He would be mad to choose that over the prospect of peace and happiness. But still…Peter.
“You are frowning.” Giniw had leaned to one side to watch Josh’s expressions. Now he shifted so he could rub a thumb up the crease of Josh’s brow, like a potter trying to smooth out clay. His mouth thinned, and his eyes darkened as they narrowed. “The British always think they are too fine to marry us, look down even on our love. This I’ve seen. The French at least think we are human like them. But you—”
“No.” Josh scrambled to his knees, fast as his aches would allow, and held his rescuer’s face gently in his healing hands. “No, it isn’t that. You’ve been… I want to…” Taking a deep breath, smoothing the obsidian black hair away from Giniw’s face, he sorted through his thoughts. “I’m honored and touched beyond belief that you’d want me, but there’s someone else.”
“Then you should not have led me to believe you were free.”
Heartsickness came back like the taste of poisoned food. Josh pulled the robe about himself and sighed. “It’s not easy to explain.”
Yet it was. Like that moment when he knew he must die, when fear was too little to counterbalance the need for resolution, for doing something final. He knew he needed to have this over with, one way or another.
“I want to go back and ask him, will he take me? When he’s said no, then I can come back and marry you, but not before then. I need to know he’s never going to be mine, before I can be yours.”
Giniw reached out and turned the beads that lay against Josh’s throat, his touch delicate and warm, thoughtful. “I am to be your second choice?”
Josh took his hand and lifted it, so that he could kiss the knuckles. He couldn’t help but give a whisper of laughter. “Well, that’s fair. I’m to be your second wife, after all.”
Leaves above them rustled like the sound of gentle waves. The cool sun on the dark, soft sweep of Giniw’s hair brought out lines like blue diamond. The answering smile faded from his mouth. The day smelled of clean air and warm soil and a faint scent of sex from the blanket beneath them.
“You should be sure,” Giniw said at last. “We have been heading upstream to meet with my people for the winter. But they may be…uncertain at the thought of accepting you into the tribe. You, at least, should be certain.”
Josh pinched his eyes shut and clutched at his necklace. Giniw’s reaction—like everything this couple had ever done for him—was almost too generous to bear. Tears pricked at his eyelids. I don’t deserve this.
“I will take you back to Hudson Bay.” A tugging sensation made Josh open his eyes and look at the mingled sadness and determination on Giniw’s face. “But if the French are still there…”
Wanting to wipe the sadness away, it was all he could do to hold back the cry of No. No, I’ve changed my mind. I won’t go. He had to. He had to say goodbye at least to Peter and sever the man’s hold on him completely. Anything else was unfair to Giniw too.
“If they are, I’ll give up the attempt.” Josh leaned forward to wind his arms about Giniw’s neck, bury his face into the sleek silk and now familiar smell of Giniw’s hair. “But they won’t be. Commodore Dalby will have seen to that. I’ll find a merchant ship willing to take me to Bermuda easy enough.”
Though it made him a despicable coxcomb, he still could not help the flare of excitement and yearning at the thought. Going back. Seeing Peter one more time…
“It’s not a long journey.” He tried to smother the hope that—against all reason—Peter might ask him to stay. Tried very hard not to smile. “I can be back within three months.”
Giniw rolled a curl of Josh’s copper hair about his finger and tugged. His downturned mouth looked once more sullen as it had seemed when they first met. “Yet your people do not easily remember their promises. I will say goodbye now.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“You bloody parasite! Whose cock did you suck to get this whitewash pushed through? I know you haven’t stopped at that wizened little penpusher. It must be an admiral at least this time.”
Peter stopped and gaped, well aware of the crowds around him looking on. He had been adjusting his sword belt, feeling relieved and yet a little dazed that the verdict of the court martial was that he had done right in surrendering. Captain Joslyn’s account of the Seahorse’s sorry state when she was left alone to fight off the four remaining French ships made his own actions seem a little more tolerable to him than he had been allowing himself to believe, of late. The restoration of his sword and his rank had brought with them the first pleasant reflections he had been able to allow himself for months.
But it seemed he had been premature in supposing that his luck had changed, for here was Captain Walker with a face purple as a blood clot, shouting things that could not be mentioned in front of a crowd of Sunday strollers come down to take the sea air.
“Damne! When I heard you’d both gone down—you and that filthy little catamite of yours—I knew it was the work of Providence. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay.’ Trust our limp-wristed courts to bollocks even that up.”
Peter wasn’t sure whether it was the slight to Josh, or just an instinctive dislike for being shouted at, but he had drawn himself up and replied coldly, “You, sir, are drunk. You must be, for nothing else could excuse this behavior,” before he had time for thought.
“Do not try and come the moralist with me, you dirty sod!”
&nbs
p; Borne up on a tide of what certainly felt like righteous fury, Peter punched Walker in the mouth, dimly aware of the gasps of the spectators, but more viscerally aware only that Walker had had this coming for years. “How dare you!” Peter exclaimed in a voice of ice. “You will take this insult back immediately, or I will have satisfaction to the full limit of my power.”
Walker’s pale eyes gleamed, and he hunched forwards like a bear readying itself to strike. “That will suit me very well, Mr. Kenyon. I shall be glad to knock your brains out with my own hand. My second will be Reverend Jenson. Have yours call on him at any hour, but do not be tardy, or I will consider the vice of sodomy joined by that of cowardice.”
Peter was still fuming at dawn as he waited on the beach. The morning promised to be beautiful; the sun was rising in a faint gray haze, the breeze bringing scents of sugar cane and rum to sweeten the sea’s faint scent of seaweed and sharpness.
Joslyn stood beside him, in a civilian’s yellow waistcoat and a coat of brocade as if to clearly signal that this was a private, not a naval matter, though everyone present was of the navy, including Dr O’Connor, lately returned with the Nimrod. When Peter thought about it, he was touched that both men had been willing to come out on his side, for the accusation against which he defended himself was often enough in itself to lose a man his friends.
The sun slipped above the horizon in an arc of boiling gold. Bermuda’s harsh dawn chorus reached new levels of stridency. On the shining sea, just within sight, a merchantman rocking at anchor began to let down her sails, white as ice, and wing towards harbor.
Walker’s party arrived, and the two seconds went aside, smoothing an area of sand and marking out its limits with tape and small rocks, and it occurred to Peter, who had seen Walker fight before, that there wasn’t a great deal of hope that he would survive this match. He felt the thought should disturb him more, but it seemed inconsequential. After all, he had lost his ship and his friend, and if he died here, he would not have to go to Emily’s wedding this afternoon. A great deal of social awkwardness would thus be avoided.
Walker stripped off his coat and waistcoat, folded them neatly and placed them on a small rug that had been brought for the purpose. He received his sword from Joslyn with a glare of disapproval and the words “You too, eh?” But as Walker stepped over the line into the marked out area, his surliness transformed into a grin of anticipation. “Shall we?”
The sand was damp and firm. Peter stepped over the line and watched his opponent with a feeling of peace, everything falling away in the immediacy of the moment. There was a kind of joy in it, and he had time to wonder whether this was the feeling Walker had become addicted to, the moment he sought to attain in every deed of his life, driven as a man by the craving for opium or the bottle.
His mind quite clear, he saw the flutter as O’Connor dropped the handkerchief, read the intent in Walker’s muscles as the larger man lunged forward, and pivoted out of the way. But Walker’s lunge was a feint, and as Peter turned, he barely blocked the second stroke in time. Trying for a quick disarmament, he ran his hand-guard up the blade and twisted the lock at the top, but Walker’s grip was strong. Smiling, he punched Peter in the face with his other hand, stepped back and pulled his sword, metal shrieking against metal, out of the lock. As Peter was still reeling with surprise from the illegal blow, Walker stepped in and thrust the point of his sword straight through Peter’s left shoulder.
The pain, and the sheer injustice of it, broke Peter’s mood of calm. He could hear the seconds quarreling, Joslyn insisting that honor was satisfied, Jenson claiming that death would be a mercy. Blood dripped from his fingers onto the white sand of the beach as he danced out of Walker’s range. The man was a bull, and he knew it—his heaviness was a coating of fat on top of sheer muscle. He lunged again, and this time Peter was ready for the feint, leaped inside it and scored a long line of red along Walker’s upper arm. But the injury was cosmetic only, barely a scratch, and as Peter retreated again out of range, he felt the first wave of dizziness that comes with blood loss and understood that he had neither strength nor skill, nor—now—stamina over the other man.
Well, he could hope for luck. But at that thought he remembered he was fighting this duel in defense of a lie. He was a guilty sod. If God himself guided these contests to determine the right man won, He was surely guiding Walker, unless repentance counted for anything. Were not sins wiped out when you turned from them? He had put Josh aside, he had intended to marry, live a blameless life. Why would he be punished for that? He had done the right thing.
Blocking a swinging cut that came in overhead, his muscles burning as he tried to prevent Walker from pushing their joined blades into his face, he realized suddenly that he was tired of doing the right thing. He would be grateful when this was over and he could lie in death’s long sleep and never wake again. His grip faltered, his head bowing as he let Walker drive him backwards towards the ring of tape, defeat and dishonor.
“Sir!”
God! That voice! Far away and tiny with distance though it was. Oh, God, it sounded so much like… Distracted, he turned his head and Walker kicked his feet out from beneath him. As he tumbled there was a brief, confused glance of the distant merchantman now mooring in the harbor of St. George. He saw frantic movement on her deck, and a figure in scorched and battered Royal Navy coat, with hair as red as autumn. As he fell he was already twisting away from the vicious downward slice of Walker’s blade, disbelief and anguish and joy making him feel invulnerable, inhumanly strong.
His own sword cut the tendon at the back of Walker’s knees. Walker fell like a mountain, Peter only just rolling out of the way in time. Reason would have told him to stop—he did in fact hesitate—and then Walker, kneeling, stabbed him a second time in the same arm and his parry, wild, inaccurate, emotional, glanced off Walker’s collarbone and rebounding, severed the great vein in his neck. Walker dropped his sword, wrapped his fingers around his throat, trying to keep the blood in, gasping, his lips turning blue.
Then O’Connor pushed past Peter to try what he could do. Joslyn warily took the sword from Peter’s hand and guided him away. “To say this is a happy outcome seems disrespectful,” he said carefully, “but if not happy, it is unmistakable that you were aided by a greater hand than your own. No man here can have any doubt that the accusation was false.”
“I say it’s happy,” O’Connor interrupted. He was, as quite usual for a man of his profession, covered and sodden with blood, and his loose hair clung about his face as he smiled a most un-doctor-like smile. “The world is better off without him. Now let me see to that arm.”
Something, whether love or life returning, had buoyed him up, but when O’Connor stripped the shirt from the deep wounds in his arm, prodded them and took out a long needle and thread, Peter found the nearest stone to sink down on, shaky with amazement and shock.
“Was that our young friend from the Macedonian?” said Joslyn, echoing his own incredulity, as the stitches went in with a succession of piercing and tugging pains. “What an astonishing thing. And a delightful one. I wonder what it can mean.”
Peter also wondered. Delivered to his house by a fatherly Joslyn and directed to regain some of his lost blood through sleep and food, instead he took a careful bath and waited on tenterhooks for the knock on the door that surely must come. It surely must come. Josh would know, wouldn’t he, that the first thing he ought to do on returning home was come to Peter’s side. He would know that, wouldn’t he?
But Peter’s bath came and went, and he shaved, sent the housemaid out to buy a wedding present and a bottle of Josh’s favorite claret, donned his best dress uniform for the wedding and sat down to a solitary dinner. After which, feeling alternately certain that he had mistaken that glimpse and that Josh was still dead after all, and miserably abandoned if he was alive, Peter slept for an hour. When he woke it was time for the wedding, and as he left, he found a card had been delivered into the hall.
Fin
ding it hard to convince Commodore and Bank I am not dead. Have been invited to the dance, post wedding. Will speak to you then. I have something to ask you.
Andrews
PS. Condolences re Miss Jones.
Peter stood with his tricorn in one hand and this terse little note in the other and laughed. He laughed until the tears rolled, and if it was a somewhat hysterical laugh, well, there was no one else in the room to hear it and disapprove.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Light sparkled from the chandeliers, shedding rainbows on the peach satin gown, coral-wound blond head and swanlike neck of Mrs. Emily Robinson. She was looking particularly well tonight, Peter thought, as he led with the left foot, brushed past her right shoulder and triumphantly realized he had executed the complex figures of the Duke of Rutland’s Delight without faltering or failure. He was not unconscious that the exercise had lent a fine glow to Emily’s cheek, a sparkle to her eyes and a most becoming heave to her swell of white bosom, and the thought that these things now belonged to somebody else gave him a pang of unworthy regret.
The dance over, he tucked her small hand into the crook of his elbow as he escorted her back to her husband. Emily glanced at him, then away again, too well brought up or too indifferent to speak first, and he cast around for something to say. Unfortunately he had used “My congratulations, I hope you will be very happy” already. As the silence went on, he could feel a sort of ebbing away of her enjoyment, like a tide going out. I am in your debt for my rescue? Too embarrassing? I will of course pay your father back as soon as I may? Too mercenary?
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