Page 92 of Rears & Vices

Perran the carpenter estimated the San Telmo’s repairs would bite two days from their journey, no more. Meanwhile, the Sévère would have to stay close and be tied alongside for ease of transport.

Everard had watched Romilly René’s face carefully as news of this decision was made to her, but nothing showed there—not impatience, not frustration, not anger. Only mild acceptance and slight concern, as one would expect from the goods and wages distributor for a fleet of pirate ships, who now had to consider the resource sinkhole of another massive man-o’-war—even one with few surviving crew.

Because she’d assured there were vastly fewer mouths to feed, hadn’t she?

Everard, on deck repairing braces he’d helped dismantle, now watched the last keg of the five-eighths-divided rum roll across the amidships gangway to the Sévère and be received into Bellingham St. Clare’s waiting arms. The young man waved, and Everard waved back half-heartedly, swallowing down his jangling nerves.

Where was D’Arcy? If he was too drunk…

Having two ships-of-the-line tied alongside was one of few situations that continued to grate on Everard. It was in a similar way that his Wanderer been lost, in ’12: her mast had been toppled with shot, her bow spun round as a result, and then she had entangled so thoroughly with the Americans, unable to flee and unable to be repaired, that she’d been obliged to surrender. Then she’d been fired, sunk to the bottom of the sea.

It was the only sword Everard had ever given up as captain, so of course it was the one he had been court-martialed and made known for.

So, Everard made a few necessary suggestions. He made sure they offset all six masts apart from one another, in case of listing and collision; long gangways were pushed between the hulls so they wouldn’t scrape. It would be only two days of cooperation, after all, and there was not a cloud in the sky to threaten a storm.

But now sundown was approaching. Battle fatigue was setting in, and with it, as always, reality and regret. Soon, Everard’s body would make the decision for him, and he’d sleep whether he had something soft beneath—or a somebody beside—him or not.

He turned to Vitaliy: still there aboard the weather deck of the San Telmo, sat down with pen and paper and the nigh-impossible decision of which crew to allocate to their betrayer’s new ship.

“She had better take Perran’s first mate, just to be sure,” Vitya said, “though he won’t thank me.” He stretched, arms splaying wide, and groaned. “Has her cook not been spared? Her doctor?”

René shook her head, and Vitaliy was silent.

Of course not—no quarter. But every one of the others saw it as a victory, a prize, nothing more. They hadn’t seen Vitaliy shake and tremble below.

“She had no doctor,” Stephan put in, standing from his crouch before the line of injured survivors upon the weather-deck—the frightfully small one. He wiped his pale palms clean with a cloth. “From what I saw. Mess of a surgery, let me tell you.”

“Mmm.” Vitaliy tapped fingers on his thigh. “No captain, no doctor, no master. And she was meant to have come from Spain?”

“Did she come from Florida, perhaps?” Everard suggested.

Vitaliy nodded. “Florida… or Louisiana. She could have taken the Loop and doubled back.”

“But no gens de couleur among them.” Stephan gestured to his patients. “White men all.”

This, too, seemed an entirely intentional doing, and lent to Everard’s theory that the person who had orchestrated this knew Vitaliy all too well.

It was partly why Vitaliy had spent so long in the shrouds, silent and observant against the San Telmo: to confirm she had no slaves, no coerced men of color fighting for Lafitte for him to defeat, to kill.

For that was how Vitaliy viewed what they had done in battle that day: murder.

Everard privately agreed. But then he had never attempted to place justice or righteousness onto such a thing. He had only seen it for what it was, which was death; for him, the presence of means or motivation made no difference upon the scales. It was still, strictly, killing.

Murder aside, it had been a necessary distinction for the Sévère to make in all her engagements. Any slave labor, any hint of human transport seen through Varfolomey’s glass, pirate or no, and the Sévère, Vitaliy had explained, would turn away from her prey, from confrontation. Slavers would rather force souls overboard than be overcome and taken in by hunters. The time between hailing a ship and raising the black was too vast, and the window for rescue towards a drowning person too small—that is, if they were offered the chance of the water at all.

Heard of third-hand, at the distance of Upper Canada, this practice had horrified Everard. Had been horrified by the lengths of depravity that profit would drive humanity to. The lengths of cruelty. He’d wondered how any slavers were apprehended at all.

As a result of these horrors—which Vitaliy resolutely would not say whether he’d experienced firsthand—the Sévère’s ripples were political and financial instead of literal, her violence second-hand rather than direct, her aid channeled and veiled in secrecy. It was a tightrope line.

And someone—someone there, on this weather deck, beside them—had exploited that fact, exploited Vitaliy’s care to their own gain. Had brought the conflict to him; had pushed him forward and not held out a hand.

René fiddled with the pen, glanced Everard’s way. “That is all officers accounted for, Vee. Who shall be leading her to Haïti?” she asked. “After all, we swim in capitaines.” She grinned and winked. “Too bad they are Navy.”

Everard looked away, too exhausted to even pretend to appreciate her false, friendly manner. There to his right, Louis-Michel Alarie leaned against the larboard braces, pulling a swig from a bottle of brandy. Damn him, too, for being a distracting, conspicuous donkey. He had got himself a sabre slash across the face—exactly parallel to the wide jaw—which although beginning to swell and pinken along the edges, turned his features appealingly rakish. It would make a handsome scar.

“Swimming in Navy,” Alarie agreed, with a touch of irony and an unselfconscious nod to Everard. His firm lips curved around the bottle’s rim, and Everard considered asking for a pull himself, even if drink would hasten his trajectory towards a pillow. “But that makes us lucky, see. Bolívar, too, is asking after paid English, Irish, German, for his cause in Amérique du Sud. And they are only mercenaries, infantry such as these crétins.” He toed at the body of a dead, towheaded man who awaited only to be sewn up in a hammock. Then, noting Everard’s glare, he drew back his boot, sheepish. “Not, hmm, experienced sailors.”

Everard shifted to face the Sévère, as Alarie was suddenly unbearable too. D’Arcy was still nowhere to be seen on the deck.