Page 4 of Rears & Vices

Two

It was plain: Everard should not have worn his favourite hat. There really was nothing like a summer on the Ontario.

The ship’s boy had made perhaps his umpteenth round of bucket ladle to the Brigitte’s crew audience. They were beginning to show serious signs of wilt; some had even sat down. Nobody had the heart to tell them otherwise, even the admiral.

Everard thought of the pirate, as yet to appear before them, and hoped the ship’s boy had got round to him at some point, too: it would be suffocatingly hot belowdecks.

Then he remembered. Gagged. It was enough to make him sit straighter in his chair.

The admiral’s new secretary did indeed have a quicker hand than his predecessor, and appeared to know a good deal of shorthand, thank God; but everyone was still obliged to pause, silent, as he scratched down every word that was said in the proceedings.

Two deserters. A crew of mutineers, five in number. A thief. Charges proved on all.

Finally it was time for the pirate.

Heat forgotten, the Brigitte’s crew revived themselves and stood. Intent. Everard felt mildly sick. Was it that the prisoner was a pirate that had their attention rapt? Or was it the last-minute sodomy charge?

He knew what made the newsprints.

Three marines carried the pirate up through the hatch. This was absurd in itself. One marine had lost his hat, and little wonder: the pirate kicked, though his legs were shackled; he bucked, pale broad shoulders twisting in strain; he screamed and swore, the King’s English identifiable from the biting rhythm even through the gag. He was blindfolded, linen tight over his eyes and knotted behind a long rope of braided blond hair that was un-matted and surprisingly clean-looking.

After days in the hold, in this heat, a prisoner ought to have been rendered limp and delirious. At the very least, he should have been resigned to his fate. This man was none of those things. He was spitting with rage. It made Everard’s face burn to watch them struggle to drag him, as though he took on the man’s own indignity.

The marines wrested the man down, until he fell to his knees with a thump, the sound as heavy as dropped cannon shot; Everard winced. They pulled his ironbound, biceps-tied arms back and knotted them to his ankle shackles, so that he was spread out, ribs splayed before them, as though someone would cut out his beating heart to splatter on the decking.

“Jesus,” D’Arcy muttered.

Once, one particularly hot summer—hotter than this, even—they’d had to upend a bucket of water over a swooned prisoner to wake him; legally, he had to stand and give his defence. And that had been bad.

But Everard had never seen anything like this.

The prisoner had stopped cursing by now. Other than his harsh breaths, there was a stunned silence.

The admiral cleared his throat and began to read the man’s charge sheet.

What pirate had skin so milk-white, untouched by the sun? What sailor, for that matter? Could they have got the wrong man?

“… not limited to desertion, mutiny, sedition, piracy, and unnatural offences against his fellow seamen,” he finished.

There it was. Unnatural offences.

D’Arcy made a distinctly discomfited noise.

Everard glanced over. Though D’Arcy still leaned lazily, ear to palm, he had recoiled into his chair as far as he could go, and his left hand had shoved itself deep into his breeches pocket, seeking shelter from trembling.

Preston D’Arcy, Post-Captain of His Majesty’s Navy, with a fifty-eight-gun frigate-of-war and a crew upwards of 250—some of whom he was obliged to stripe—was far from a squeamish man.

Everard found he, too had hunched his own shoulders in reflexive sympathy for the prisoner’s wrenched ones, and had hands in pockets, though he didn’t tremble. His stomach rolled instead, frothing bubbles liquifying his insides.

Even knowing the sodomy charges were likely unfounded, it still turned his stomach. It wasn’t commonplace to be arrested for fucking men, especially as an officer, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. It didn’t mean that he or D’Arcy wouldn’t find themselves someday court-martialled under the very same charge, just for being the way they’d always been. If the wrong person found out, cared too much, paid a witness…

The admiral, unmoved, waved at his face with a chicken-skin fan, eyes narrowed with contempt and impatience as his secretary laboured over the transcription of the long charge sheet.

At the point where Everard hoped he was near the end of it, the man pitched over the ink pot with a trembling pull of his quill. He groped frantically to stop its roll. And then—Everard opened his mouth to warn too late—the whole stuck-hinged writing desk fell straight over onto the deck, landing with a bang.

It startled damn near everybody, but had an extraordinary effect on the pirate: he flinched hugely, went as hunched as he could go in restraints. A pause; a frisson of clear relief shuddered down like liquid over his skin. The braided head slumped for the first time.

It didn’t matter that a fallen desk sounded nothing like a shot’s echo over lake water and decking; to a bound, blindfolded man it must have been close enough. What mattered were those relieved, trembling shoulders, the strained breathing. Pirate or no, the man had seen gun battle and suffered for it.