“Did you say there would be fireworks?” he asked, with a feeling of achievement.
“Oh yes.” She removed her hand from his arm and smiled. “Mr. Summersgill felt that as I was the only child for whom he would have to provide a dowry, I should be sent off in style. He is a good man.”
“He is.” Peter smiled at her, glad that on this one point they saw eye to eye. It was a small start to what might become a friendship, but it eased some of his anxiety over whether he had treated her shamefully or not. One could not say, “I hope you do not resent me for my unsuccessful pursuit,” but this was a welcome indication in that direction.
“Captain.” Of the two of them, Adam looked the more glowing, as release from his own anxiety made him seem again the exuberant, amiable man who had embarrassed Peter with his praise so long ago on the Nimrod. “I was excessively glad to hear of the results of the inquiry and to have Captain Andrews unexpectedly return from the dead… Well, we feel very blessed. Perhaps unfairly blessed.”
“Not at all.” Peter shook the outstretched hand with real good will. “The best man won.”
Turning to observe the dancing, Peter saw that Josh was joining the set with a scrawny, underfed creature on his arm. The glossy blackness of her coiffure was rubbing off on her collar. Her looks seemed to guarantee that this was the only time in the evening she would be asked to dance, and while he admired the gallantry of it, Peter was a little worried that Andrews was raising expectations he had no intention of fulfilling. It would be hard for her to resist falling in love with the tall, young captain with the wicked smile and lively dark eyes. Josh, too, was looking particularly fine tonight.
It is so good to have him back. The world shone brighter with him in it, spiky opinions, brilliant smile and all. That had not changed, though the man himself had, in some way Peter had not been able to pinpoint. He found himself constantly watching, trying to work it out, alternately fascinated and guilty at being so obsessed. Jealous—in case this confidence was a sign that Josh had someone new to love—and ashamed at his jealousy. He wished Andrews every happiness—of course he did. Had even hoped he would find someone who suited him better, but still the suspicion made him itch beneath the skin, made him want to find this new lover and punch him in the teeth because Josh was…
Was not his. Not any more. Shaking his head, annoyed, Peter reminded himself that he was here to enjoy the evening, praise the music and perhaps to look for a wife. Not to lose himself in reverie over a relationship which had been ended for months and had never been legal nor moral in the first place. Something he should remember with abhorrence, not fondness. Certainly not with yearning.
Admiring the grace with which Josh moved, the way his dress uniform fit from good strong shoulders to well-shaped calves in smooth, strokeable white silk stockings, he made the mistake of looking up, straight into the man’s eyes. There was the snap of a connection. Laughter, then sudden surrender and heat—a giving everything up, an invitation. Peter’s mouth went dry and his heart pounded as the diffused sexual delight of the past hour focused itself upon a willing target. Then Josh looked away, smirking, his head high and his step triumphant, and Peter came back to himself, feeling delirious and weak willed and lost.
The floor had cleared for Governor Bruere and Lady Emelia Wooton, Dowager Duchess of Salisbury, to dance the latest minuet in a stately, exquisite parade of control and grace, when Peter at last managed to hunt the elusive Andrews to ground. Deprived of his endless stream of partners, he was sitting at a small card table, lounging against the back of his chair. He raised his eyebrows as Peter approached, and Peter found himself caught and held in a gaze dark and sweet as treacle. The side of Josh’s mouth lifted in a mischievous smile, and Peter tried not to notice the way his fingers slid up the stem of his wineglass, his thumb gliding gently over its curve. “Join me for a smoke, sir?”
“Glad to.”
Outside it was blissfully cool. They lit their cigars at the sconces by the door and then took a turn into one of the garden’s long shaded walks, where starlight slipped in bluish dapples through the white stars of jasmine. In the comparative privacy, Peter took off his hat and wig, ruffled his fingers through his hair, sighing as the night breeze blew through it.
Amber light gilded Josh’s face for a moment as he breathed in, his eyes closed, luxuriating perhaps in the burn of smoke in his lungs, perhaps in the peace. “So.” He exhaled a silver cloud into the moonlight. “She married someone else. How are you holding up?”
For a moment, Peter was overcome with the sensation that everything in the world had come right at once. An instant of perfection, sharp as the strike of the hammer against a bell, and even after it passed, the bustling gardens resonated with its harmonics, wringing fresh sweetness from the cool air, the scent of jasmine and the sea. “It would do no good to tell you I’m having a miserable time, would it?” Peter smiled.
Josh cocked his head to one side and gave Peter a considering look, before his mouth drew up into an infuriatingly smug smile. “Not pining away for love of her?”
There was no conscious decision behind it—it just felt natural to reach out and trace that smile with his fingers—it quirked up a little more beneath his touch. Feeling the realness of Josh’s mouth, the warm skin and firm lips, Peter sighed. Josh was not dead. In a strange, confused way, that must mean that Peter, too, was free to be alive once more.
“I think on the whole I’m relieved,” he said.
The look in Josh’s onyx eyes was speculative, amused, as though he was weighing up an opponent at sea, guessing from small clues how his mind worked. Then he tilted his chin up a little and gently kissed Peter’s fingertips.
“Captain Andrews!” Peter snatched his hand away and watched Josh’s pleasure die with something of the same feeling he had had when they lowered the Seahorse’s colors. But this was not…not the place, not the time. Suppose someone saw?
“I was going to say how very relieved I was myself,” said Josh, his eyes dark and soft and reproachful, “but am I to guess my interest wouldn’t be welcome?”
Before Peter could reply the ballroom began to empty, and for a while all either of them could decently do was to bow and smile at various acquaintances as they slowly meandered past. Taking Josh’s elbow, he steered him out of the current of people. “Not here,” he said. And then, when they were well out of the crowd. “You know Walker accused me…us. He said in public that you were my catamite.”
Josh’s look of pathos became almost a parody of surprise.
“I killed him,” Peter said, “but you know the power of rumor.”
The surprise gradually settled into an expression of deep inward unease, as Josh looked to one side, his eyelids crescents over downcast eyes. “I do. I’m sorry—I’ll be more careful in future. But you haven’t answered my question.”
They turned onto a path that led uphill to the carefully groomed “wilderness” beyond the formal gardens. At the top there stood a small folly, its pillars white in the starlight and its curved back gleaming with mother of pearl, imitating the huge, moving glimmer of the ocean that lay behind it.
Catching sight of it, Peter felt a great yearning for the cleanness of life at sea—dangerous at times, but simple. Not like this tangle in which he found himself. Oh, his own hand might have woven it, but it had long since become too complex for him to unravel.
Sitting down heavily in the crystal-studded “cave” beneath the “temple” provoked a great burst of scent from the chamomile bench, too sweet for the bitterness that seemed to have lodged in his chest. The wound in his shoulder gave out a thin, wearing pain like that of his heart. “I don’t understand,” he admitted. “Why are you starting this between us again? Didn’t you tell me yourself that you expected me to leave you, to find a wife? Was that not what you wanted? Why would you say that to me if it was not what you wanted?”
“Because you could escape.” Josh’s tone was characteristically earnest. “You could leave the
underworld completely behind and be free. The last thing I wanted was to drag you down into the mire with me.”
“Damn it!” Peter was stung by the thought as if by a mosquito. He had known this from the moment, in the hold of the Seahorse, when he worked out that Josh’s silence was an attempt to shield him from his own actions. When had he forgotten that? When it became convenient to do so? Was he such a cad? “Damn it! I want your honesty, not lies. I’m not a woman. Stop trying to protect me.”
“I’m not a woman either, sir. Which is, I venture to suggest, the problem.”
The little dry remark stopped Peter’s anger in its tracks, made him chuckle despite himself—despite the frustration and the terrible, nagging sensation that he had been an utter bastard and hadn’t even noticed.
“So…” Peter said carefully, “…you didn’t want me to leave at all. You only said so because you wanted to see me safe, none the worse for a youthful folly, now left behind?”
Sitting down beside him, Josh twisted his face into a grimace. The skirts of his coat fell over Peter’s knee, the touch startling, making his blood jump, then race. “That’s a little too Jesuitical for me, sir. I did want you to leave because I wanted to see you safe. I wanted you to leave because only a monster would want to be responsible for destroying and damning a good man like you, and I…I didn’t want to be a monster.”
“My God!” Peter was shocked at his own insensitivity, at not seeing and responding to the depths of his own lover’s distress. He had said he wanted to give affection—insisted upon it—and then never once attempted it. “I failed you in every conceivable way, didn’t I? I used you like a whore. I made promises you at least knew I never intended to keep, and I fulfilled your every low expectation, confirming you in the belief that you had the right to nothing at all.”
What could he say? There simply weren’t words enough to make this right. So he bent his head back to watch a flight of brilliant red and green fireworks and groped for Josh’s hand, feeling its warm solidity with a jolt of desire and doubt. “All the time I believed I was doing what you wanted—what everyone wanted, and the truth was I was merely caving under pressure. Protecting myself at your expense. I wonder that you came back. What have I ever given you but grief?”
Josh smiled a lopsided smile. “When I told you what I was, I thought you’d do as everyone else had done. I was sure you’d despise me. Will I tell you what my expectations really were? Hatred and the noose. It was a revelation that you’d still talk to me, let alone be my friend. Never would I have dared hope we’d be lovers. But you—you gave me every last dream but one—and that one I fought tooth and nail not to tell you, in case you destroyed yourself trying to give me even that.”
Peter fought for composure as he wriggled backwards to lean against the dry, knobbly wall of the cave. Josh’s shoulder pressed against his as he too made himself comfortable, neither of them looking at the other, both well aware that they were now touching in several places.
“Tell me your last dream,” he said, “and let me see if I can risk it.”
Josh was silent. Only his breathing lifted the chest pressed against Peter’s arm. They stayed that way a long time, and then Josh said slowly, “Let me tell you about the Macedonian’s destruction and my rescuers first, or you won’t understand how I came to change my mind. Why I’ll speak now when I wouldn’t then.”
“Oh yes. The fire ship. My God! I’ve never seen anything so splendid or so appalling. You deserve to be made post for that—or to be horsewhipped, I can’t decide which. How did you come through it alive?”
“Well, sir, I’m not so sure.” Josh rested his head against the wall. “All I remember was fire and then something went ‘boom’, and the next thing I know, I’m being dragged out of the water by a red Indian brave and his wife. Giniw and Opichi. Better friends I never had. They looked after me, and when I was recovered they asked me to stay. And d’you know what?”
His gaze slid sideways to rest on Peter’s face, and he raised his eyebrows slightly, challengingly. Amused, Peter obediently retorted, “What?”
“Giniw asked me to be his wife.”
“No!” Peter made a face of astonishment and snorted indecorously into his hand, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “What a farce. But, I mean—he must have known?”
Josh’s mouth pulled into a line of disapproval, almost a flinch. Peter was conscious of having made a dreadful mistake. What he had interpreted as an outrageous tale of foreign perversity must clearly have meant something quite different for Josh. Something important. “I’m sorry,” he said at once. “I shouldn’t laugh. Of course he must have known.”
“Yes. He did.” For a moment Josh’s whole body expressed the same beaten, cowed misery he had carried as a midshipman when they first met, when he first told Peter what he was. “And I had the devil of a time explaining to them both why it shocked me so. You see…” Josh’s mouth thinned further but his shoulders straightened. He raised his head, and Peter found himself on the end of a glare threatening as a cocked pistol. There was a glow in those dark eyes like the muzzle flash of a cannon, and Peter was forcibly reminded that he was no longer facing an inferior—in rank or in anything else.
“You see, sir, he would have been proud to have such a wife. Their people—the Anishinabe people—would have honored him for it, because they think men like me are holy. Different, yes. But not abominable.”
His voice shook with disappointment and anger. Launching himself to his feet, he strode out into the dark. Peter’s heart lurched with loss, and he was halfway out of his seat in pursuit when Josh returned, braced himself belligerently against the grotto. “They think we’re holy. A bridge between man and woman, man and God. Here’s an outrageous thing: they think that God made us like this because God wants us like this. And I thought…I thought perhaps they were right.
“Maybe I don’t have to bring you eternal torment as a price for my love. Maybe I’m not a poison I have to protect you from. What if I, too, could be a blessing? What if I could make you happy? I’m sorry, sir…” His nostrils flared and he gave Peter a withering look of contempt that made Peter’s breath catch in his throat. “I’m sorry that you find the idea so very funny.”
For a moment all Peter could feel was relief—that Josh had come back, that he was still there, not exactly shouting, but doing as good an impression of it as was possible without raising one’s voice. Relief gave way to astonishment, to a warm burst of something bright in his heart and his belly as he began to understand that this tirade was a declaration of love. It was only when these two pleasures had ebbed a little that he had space to realize he hadn’t yet tried to apologize. “Josh…”
But Josh was in no mood to listen. “No.” He cut off the explanation with a sweep of his hand. “You’re going to hear me out. I waited ’til we were here to tell you. I wanted dancing, fireworks, darkness, I thought it would be romantic. Don’t laugh! And you royally fucked that up, sir, but I’m going to say it anyway. You want to marry? So do I. And you might be a total bastard at times, but I love you. So marry me.”
Oh! Peter thought. Oh God! And there was a pause, like the pause—infinitesimal and yet so very long—between the order to fire and the first broadside of a full fleet action. “I’m sorry?”
“With all due respect, sir,” said Josh, close examination revealing, behind the threat of his expression, a thrumming of nervous hope, “you heard me the first time. Peter Kenyon, will you marry me?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
A pause.
Peter thought, aghast, that it was no wonder Josh had defeated a French ship of the line. His head for unorthodox tactics was frightening. “If we went to church and asked the priest to marry us, we would end up being hanged in one noose.” He felt both affronted at being put in the woman’s place in this and yet dimly, shamefully relieved. “So you cannot be suggesting that. I am not assuming again that I know what you mean. Elaborate.”
“Yes, sir.” Josh s
napped to attention, faintly ridiculous given the circumstances. “As I see it, there are three options. One, I persuade a captain I know, of my persuasion, to marry us under our own names at sea. Two, we travel to Giniw’s country and marry by their rite.” He flashed an aggressive smile—daring Peter to laugh. “I’d consider that pretty unfeeling towards my rescuers, frankly.”
“And three”—the smile softened and warmed—“and this is my favored option, you give me your word before God to forsake all others, to cleave to me until we die, and I swear the same by you, and that’s enough for me.”
Peter rubbed the bridge of his nose. This was not something to be treated lightly. He no longer had the excuse of simply not having thought about the issues. It would not be a youth’s rash impulse—throwing his life away upon a whim. It would be a man’s decision, fully thought out and acceded to by body, mind and soul. A frightening thought. “What would you do if I said no?”
“With respect, sir, you do not need to take that into consideration. The issue is what you want. If you do not think the game is worth the candle, it is enough to say so. The consequences to me are not your concern.”
“Humor me.”
Josh turned away, bowing his head slightly, slumped shoulder and rounded cheek in shadow. “I would grieve. Of course. But then I’d go back and marry someone who did want me.”
Peter laughed, concealing how uneasy that remark made him feel. It hadn’t occurred to him before tonight that Josh might have other options than merely to wait for his pleasure. He supposed he had been relying on Josh to be there—a certainty held in reserve. The thought of having to turn his back on that, of ruling a line under this affair and meaning it this time, was as frightening as the thought of rejecting the laws of God and man to embrace it.
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