False Colors (30 page)

The “hospital”—a warehouse emptied of its slaves and supplied, by the good will of the town, with straw mattresses and the occasional blanket—crouched among the fetor of the wharves. Men lay there in heaps, vomiting, lying in it, their skin yellow, blood trickling from nostrils and ears.

An orderly, with his cravat wound about his face like a mask, paced through the arched darkness swinging a burning thurifer of brimstone. Yellow smoke billowed about Alfie, biting at his eyes and scouring the inside of his throat. Taking his own cravat off, he wrapped it over his nose and mouth. It mellowed some of the burn.

Gillingham coughed protractedly, sweat standing out on his brow and his reddened eyes watering. Blinking back the tears, he bore it with more fortitude than Alfie would have expected; silent, staggering only when he tripped over the patients. Alfie took his elbow and clung on, pretending to offer comfort, but taking it in equal measure as they waded forwards through hell on earth.

The sharp snap and thud of a rope’s end on flesh punctuated the moans of the sick. As they picked their way on through the stinging clouds, stepping over the dying, a gang of slaves parted for them. Dark gazes rested like weights on Alfie’s back as they straightened from their brooms and buckets to watch him pass. The stench of lime and vinegar in the washing water almost made him gag, but their flesh peeled with it, hanging in strips from their legs.

“Sodding animals! Get back to work!” Encouraged by a driver with a heavy starter of rope, the slaves bent back to their toil, stopping only to hack up sputum and spit it in glistening gobs into the drainage channel of the floor.

Eternity had already passed by the time Alfie caught sight of John, a basin under his arm, crouched by the bedside of a darkhaired youth, whose pimples stood out purple against a skin waxy and yellow as a lemon. John was mopping sick from the boy’s face with economical movements; distantly tender. Nodding a greeting, rather than breathe in this murk enough to speak, he indicated a large jug of beer and a cup that stood on a small table by the opened iron bars of the door. His demeanor revealed nothing—neither resentment nor pleasure, not even discomfort— upon meeting Alfie again. Perfectly polite. Perfectly meaningless.

A channel built into the center of the room—
cell, rather,
Alfie corrected himself—drained the swabbing water, blood, piss and vomit out into the corridor, where it joined a deeper runnel of filth, making him glad of the brimstone. Manacles, hanging from their hasps buried deep in the stone walls, fitted themselves into his memories of Algiers. As John poured the stinking water out of his bowl into the gutter on the floor, Alfie picked up the end of one of the chains, pulling it taut with a rattle and clash of metal. “This is fucking obscene!”

Gillingham flinched then applied himself to fiddling with his vinaigrette once more. John stilled, head bent over his jug as he dipped it in a barrel of fresh water. “Fresh” was something of a euphemism, for the liquid had the oily, greenish look of water which had lain in rotting barrels in a ship’s hold as it traveled twice around the world. A man would have to be crawling the borders of death from thirst before drinking it would become appealing, but for cleaning the clogged blood from the noses of patients, and the sick from around the edges of their mouths, it was well enough.
Stirring once more, John refilled the basin. The quiet, musical lilt of pouring water threaded through the sounds of hell. Then he looked up. As their eyes met, a shock seized Alfie from his balls to his throat. He swallowed, leaning back as he fought an almost physical tug forward. With a shock of recognition, he saw again the incandescent
something
for which he had left his ship and his career, lifetimes ago in the Bay of Biscay. After betrayal and heartbreak, here it still was, pulling on him like a magnetic pole to a needle. At times it seemed this thing between them was the only fixed point of Alfie’s compass, whether he steered away or towards.

John’s face, hollowed by shadows, looked gaunt as the faces of the dying. He had unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves, and each wrist bore livid scars that might have fitted the cuffs of the manacles exactly. Still holding Alfie’s gaze, he nodded, politely. But the expression said
I know.
We
know
,
the two of us. But this is not the time. Stand down, lieutenant.

Almost involuntarily, Alfie’s lips twitched. He stepped forward, responding at a level beneath thought to the urge to challenge—to crowd John against the wall, test his authority and see how deep it went. A rush of thick heat in his stomach…and then away in the darkness someone screamed like a stuck pig. The incantation, holding the ugly world away from Alfie, popped like a bubble. He flung the manacles against the wall—where they knocked a further splinter from the deep furrow they had already gouged there—and glowered, disappointed now not only with John, but also with himself.
How can I fall for this a second time?

John’s silver gaze slid away. He turned his face aside, his shoulders drooping. Then he braced them up once more, motioned with his chin, and Alfie followed him through one holding cell after another. Sulfur and brimstone settled like wig-powder over them all, making them gleam yellow as their patients.

They soon established a wordless rhythm. Alfie waited until John had washed each man’s face. Then he took each one by the soiled linen over their bony shoulders, hauled them up, and helped them drink. Gillingham followed behind, the vinaigrette pressed beneath his nose by one gloved hand, the other clenched in the fastenings of his waistcoat, like a child holding tight to a protective blanket. Speaking halting words of painfully sincere encouragement and comfort, he passed down the line of diseased sufferers without touching, suffering ravings, accusations, and sometimes pitifully grateful tears.

It wasn’t much to give; one symbolic gesture per man. But the
Albion
’s people were far from home and did not deserve to die unknown and nameless, in the harried and over-busy hands of strangers.

Burning powder settled on the sick men. Torches flared greasily in the long central corridor, and their smoke hit the ceiling above them, spilled down in darker arabesques through the smog. Moving through their fitful light, Alfie looked back at the room from which they’d emerged and it seemed to him a field of shallow graves.
A corpse jerked, scrabbled convulsively upright, and lurched towards him. “Help me! Help me! Take me with you!” it cried. He froze up. Nightmare images of the thing falling to pieces as it touched him, screaming from a tongueless mouth, its eyes gone, made his stomach twist like a cold eel….

He lurched away from the creature just as John stepped in front of him, took it by the arms, and leaned close to calmly speak to it. It sagged into his support, turning—to Alfie’s shamefaced gaze—from a revenant to a frightened boy whose nightshirt was embroidered at the shoulder with his initials. As John lowered the youth back to his bed, Alfie punched the wall. The sting across his knuckles felt clean, as nothing else in this place could, no matter how hard John swabbed.

Kneeling down by the next sufferer, Alfie got an arm beneath his shoulders, lifted him slightly from the floor, and set the cup to his mouth. The man retched over Alfie’s fingers. Blood and sputum curled into the beer, dripped from Alfie’s hand, burned like acid in the new grazes, running beneath his cuff, up his arm to the elbow. He cursed, dropped the cup in the patient’s lap, and watched the wet stain spread with hopeless fury as he scrubbed and scrubbed at his hands, plunging them deep into the jug of beer. A chuckle sounded behind him. He spun, ready to lash out, and saw that it was Dr. Bentley, thin-lipped and smiling. “No rest for the wicked, eh, Lieutenant? Yet it will get easier once they begin to die.”

Alfie shook his head. The man had become his own personal demi-urge. Should Death ever visit him, take down its cowl before the final swing of its scythe, he swore it would look like Bentley. The same gentle, remorseless chill. Eyes pinched closed as if, unseen, the doctor would vanish like a fever dream, he pressed his hands over his nose and mouth, and did not notice John’s approach until he felt a firm touch on his arm.

“Go home, Mr. Donwell. Take the captain with you. I’ll deal with what needs to be done here.”
“I…” Alfie wanted to be angry. Surely he should want revenge for what Bentley had done to him? He should not feel this mere hollow desire to be out, out, away, where he need never see another doctor’s face. Most of all, he did not wish to need protection; to have his endurance called into question, or his pride insulted yet again. But whatever his wishes, he wasn’t sure he could bear this another moment.
He looked from John to Gillingham, carefully not watching Bentley turn away with a smirk. The captain was all but transparent now with distress, having to hold a thumb beneath his chin between each bed to keep his teeth from chattering.
Seeing the wavering look, John pressed on quietly. “This is too much for him. He means well, but he is weakening himself with every breath. If he carries on like this he will catch it himself. Please. Take him away.”
Someone had clutched at John’s wig—the palm print was clearly visible in smudges of dirt and blood—pulling it out of its stiff binding on one side. The ribbon sagged, unraveling. Yellow dust coated John’s bottom lip. His sinewy arms were gloved in a layer of dried blood. Obedient to Alfie’s will, they had not spoken since the incident in the cove, and all those unsaid words swirled about them both like heavy falling snow.
Alfie thought, again, how terribly thin John was; a dry reed, waiting to be snapped. Of the three of them, he, barely recovered from torture, must be most at risk. “Come too,” he said, moved by an empathy deeper than his resentment. “These men, they don’t know we’re here. You’re risking your life for nothing.”
“If so, it’s mine to risk,” John bared his teeth in a gesture that was either smile or defiance. At times it did not seem possible for him to be so much himself, and still to be the wretch Alfie thought him. He was a dissonance that made Alfie’s head ache.
“But you impute me too much goodness. If anything, I am being selfish. This work—I’m finding it healing.”
Alfie nudged the dropped cup with his foot. On the other side of the brick wall from the cells a woman’s voice screamed on a high pitched note. A chorus of piercing howls rose to meet the sound, as one lamentation set off another like wolves following their chief into song. The hair on Alfie’s arms and over the back of his neck rippled and stood up as he realized that, in the cells adjacent, this same scene repeated among the women of Kingston. Reluctant as he was to accept John’s pity or his help, horror infested him like weevils in hard tack—one tap and he would crumble to dust.
“I’ll do as you ask, then, and take Captain Gillingham away. But Cavendish….” A “thank you” was stuck in Alfie’s throat.
Thank you for allowing me to escape from this place. Thank you for speaking to your captain and finding me a berth.
No amount of careful breathing could dislodge it. Weighed in the balance against John’s sins, this little mercy was no more than a grain of sand.
“Don’t forget we sail with the tide.”

Snowflakes settled on the deck of the
Albion
. Her rigging stood taut and grey with ice. Each footstep crunched with a squeak into a layer of pristine pallor. White as her name, as she ghosted through the night she seemed another cloudbank, another eddy of the thin, interminable snow.

The final handful of sand gathered above the waist of the hour-glass, tumbling towards the end of the middle watch. Almost four o’clock in the morning. Alfie crouched down, slipped his hands inside his shoes and warmed his numb toes back to aching life. No one was watching, after all.

Captain Gillingham lay in his cabin with all the gaps in windows and doors plugged with rags. Since the Davis Strait he had been so securely swaddled in every layer of clothing he owned or could borrow, that Alfie couldn’t help but wonder if he relieved himself at all, or if he was holding it all in for extra warmth.

A week ago Boatswain Creevy had harpooned one of the white bears that paced along the ice-locked shores of Bylot Island and handed out teeth as souvenirs to the ship’s boys. With only minimal reluctance he gave the ill-cured, crackling, frozen skin to the captain, who had worn it ever since, flesh side outermost, looking—when he came on deck at all—like the massive grey larva of a particularly unappetizing moth.
Standing up once more, Alfie minced gingerly down the shining quarter-deck steps. Clinging with one hand to the manropes as he went, he paced the length of the ship, hoping to force some warmth back into his feet. His shoes pinched, stuffed with caulking, and bitter frost pierced the hand on the rail through glove and two layers of turned down cuff.

The main course creaked. A sparkling, crackling rain of crystal fell tinkling from the yards. The wind on Alfie’s cheek bit so deep he could scarcely tell if it froze or burned. Coming up to the bow, checking each of the lines, belayed around their wooden pins, he looked over.
Albion
drifted forward under enough sail for steerage way and no more, barely rippling the milk white sea.

Cold in his hand became pain, sung up his arm, caught in his chest, settled deep in the marrow of his bones. He set his back to the mizzen mast, tugged off his gloves and curled his fingers about the dying warmth of the brass hand-warmer he had borrowed from the Master. The puffs of his breath made smudges of snow in the black sky.

In the waist of the ship the enterprising midshipmen had built a small hut of rolled up hammocks. A changing pattern of gold and red light stabbed through the cracks, and a plume of steam blew forward from it. Inside, the deck crew huddled around their brazier, smoking. Heather-and-tannin-scented pipe-smoke gusted over him. Out in the darkness where veil of snow met sea, something grumbled with a chill, inorganic voice. Trembling as he was in every limb with cold, Alfie laughed for the first time since prison—laughed for mere joy, intoxicated.