Amongst pirates, Wicks and Poole discover more about one another.
A little bit of adventure, romance, and queerness in the 18th century Mediterranean!
An adaptation of my TweetFic, Gerald Poole & the Pirates. This part is 9k in length.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
Content warnings: consent issues throughout for sexual threats, violence, period-typical racism and homophobia, self-esteem and identity issues.
In this chapter, in-depth discussion of institutionalized racism typical of the period, discussions of homophobia, and ableism`- specifically in this chapter there’s a scene where one NT guy roughly explains ADHD to another, and his explanation is accepting, but extremely blunt and couched in language that’s not especially kind.
That night, Gerald slept against the barrel chest of Second Lieutenant Jack Wicks, and found that he let out such stupendous heat he might as well have been a furnace.
It was divine.
He was frustrated, somewhat — since he went to sea he’d scarcely had a moment truly alone to comb his hair, let alone bring himself off, and it seemed as though Thwaites got a good deal of pleasure from winding him up, only to delight in watching as he went absolutely nowhere at all.
Like this, it was worse, feeling the heat of Wicks’ body, the rise and fall of his great chest, one of his hands underneath Gerald’s shirt so as to rest on the small of his back, and as for what laid between Wicks’ legs —
It was safe to say that his loose trousers bulged significantly with the morn.
Gerald had never been made to lie so very, tantalising close to something he couldn’t partake in in all his life, and felt rather must like Eve must have, if she’d been made to sleep in the damned tree with its fruit poking up against hers.
To his relief, once he was out of bed, Gerald was not made to sit in silence again: the next day he went about with Creed once more, and he saw that Wicks, too, was working, had fallen in amongst the sailors on the top deck.
He couldn’t help but wonder if Wicks enjoyed the work as he did — if he enjoyed the ache in his bones that came after, if he enjoyed how the work occupied the whole busy thrill of his mind and shut everything else entirely out, so that he felt calm and focused and consumed with the rhythm of it. Or, did Wicks do it only because he felt it was what he had to do?
Thwaites wasn’t making him work, and had told him several times that if it pleased him, he was welcome to to sit aside with a book and read instead — had said, even, that if he wanted to keep a weather eye on Gerald, that he might do so above decks, or from the rigging.
Was he working only to watch Gerald? Did working help his mind quieten, let him relax where he couldn’t before? Did he work because he felt it was fair, because Gerald was working — did he work because he felt it might help their chances? Because the work was there, and he couldn’t concentrate on reading anyway?
Or because the work was sailing, and Wicks was a sailor to his core, and it was only right that he should sail, no matter the circumstances?
It was impossible to have any idea of how Wicks thought about anything, or what processes went on in his mind — he was not forthcoming with any of them, no matter how often or how much Gerald asked, or the manners in which he asked. Wicks wasn’t forthcoming with anything at all.
The days passed in this manner.
It was not that Thwaites ceased to tease because he continued with aplomb: twice, he caught Gerald below decks and pinned him against the wall, kissed him as he slid his knee between Gerald’s legs before pulling back, walking away, and leaving him heavy-breathing and faint.
Several times, he smacked Gerald’s arse as he walked by, or greeted him by tugging his head back by the hair to kiss his neck or bite at his ear.
For all these casual movements at seduction, attempts to enter the captain’s cabin were met with laughter and certain refusal, and no matter that Gerald flirted with other sailors on the Lamia, none of them would indulge him.
“I feel I am being tortured,” he said over dinner one night.
“Darling thing, I’ve not even begun to torture you,” said Thwaites, and squeezed his backside, but pulled his hand away when Gerald tried to lean into him. “Have you been torturing him, Wicks?”
“I’ve been sleeping,” said Wicks plainly.
“All night?” asked Thwaites, arching one eyebrow.
“All night.”
“Tut tut, Second Lieutenant.”
Land showed the next day on the horizon, and Gerald stood at the edge of the deck and looked out as they approached.
Wicks, who had come up beside him, asked quietly, “What if your family don’t pay the ransom?” and Gerald lashed out so suddenly he wasn’t aware of what he was doing before his hand slapped against Wicks’, making him lean back in surprise.
“What? How dare you! Of course they will!”
Wicks, faltering, looked out to sea, and said, “Seems convenient is all.”
“Convenient?”
“If you’re a — if you’re a liability, I mean,” said Wicks slowly. He spoke almost falteringly, as though he were careful to judge his words — and he didn’t at all sound as though he were saying this with any cruel intent, which if anything, made it worse. “If they think you’re liable to be tried for sodomy at any moment, and suddenly you die at sea, that’s a big problem solved for the family’s respectability.”
Gerald was aware he had tears in his eyes, very suddenly overcome with a terrible fear indeed. It was not one that had occurred to him even for a moment, and on Wicks’ face there was an expression of surprise, as though he expected Gerald not to be affected.
“Oh,” he said, “Poole — “
“Up for a game of Whist, lads? We — Oh,” said Cotton, when Gerald turned around.
“I don’t know what you’re all saying oh for,” said Gerald fiercely, wiping so hard at his eyes he was liable to wake tomorrow with new bruises. “It’s only salt water. You’re surrounded by it all the livelong day!”
“What in Christ’s name did you say to him?” Gerald heard Cotton ask as he walked furiously away.
Wicks’ reply was too quiet to make out as he stormed in the direction of the stairs below deck, but he heard Cotton’s response: “Jack, lad, you are stupid.”
When Gerald fell over Thwaites’ lap, Thwaites adjusted his chair, but kept on writing, one of his hands resting on Gerald’s lower back as he continued to note his calculations in his diary.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what’s wrong?” asked Gerald in a miserable voice, aware of the vulnerable indignity of his position, straddling the captain’s lap, his hands around his neck and face buried in his shoulder, the chair creaking under their combined weights.
With little interest, Thwaites asked, “Did Wicks say something quite blunt and tactless and seem surprised that it upset you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought it might be something along those lines.”
“You’re just going to let me sit here?”
“The air is cooling as the night sets in,” said Thwaites, neatly blotting his page. “Had you not arrived, I’d have called the ship’s cat, and as well as being quite a bit smaller than you, she bites from time to time, and her arse isn’t nearly so nice as your own.”
“What about her whiskers?”
“Her whiskers? Posh, I think only of yours.”
“Her tail?”
“Who needs one?”
“Her ears?”
“Ah, there you have me. Pagoda does have quite charming little ears. Let me see…” Thwaites dragged his teeth over the shell of Gerald’s ear, making him shiver. “Hm, no, no,” said the captain in mild tones. “I think yours do win out.”
“Captain,” said Gerald, “if my family don’t pay the ransom, will you kill me?”
“You think they won’t?”
“I thought they would. They always have before, every time, except for the occasions when I rendered a ransom unnecessary — it never occurred to me they wouldn’t. But Wicks says it’d be very convenient for them if I died.”
“I’m sure he didn’t say it quite like that.”
“But it’s how he meant it.”
“Hush,” said Thwaites, and adjusted him. “I need to concentrate on my sums.”
Gerald, disconsolate, fell half-asleep, and melted into the weight and muscle of Thwaites’ chest.
* * *
Jack, powerless, stared after Poole as he stalked away, eyes streaming with tears. He didn’t know what it was about Poole’s tears that rendered him so powerless — he’d never known a man to cry so easily as Poole did, and didn’t think he’d ever known a woman intimately enough that he should witness her crying.
It didn’t seem that Poole did it on purpose, even, because every time he seemed so embarrassed.
“What in Christ’s name did you say to him?” asked Cotton beside him.
In barely more than a murmur, Jack said, “I asked if perhaps his family wouldn’t want him back. For the ransom, I mean.”
Cotton sighed, shifting his arm almost as if he was going to reach up and pat Jack’s arm, but he didn’t. He just said, “Jack, lad, you are stupid. Come with me, now, help me set one of the new covers over the dinghy and we’ll replace the one as has gotten ripped.”
It was a relief to be occupied.
A ship was a ship was a ship, and no matter that he was amongst pirates, that he was amongst a crew unlike any navy or collection of merchantmen in the world, this philosophy carried even here upon the Lamia: the work remained the same, and occupied the mind as much as it did the body, allowed him to give himself over to something greater than himself, and allow the rhythm of the work to take him over.
It wasn’t that he was made for the work — he had learned to become a sailor just as he had learned to become anything, and although he felt it was right he should sail, because his father sailed, because his father’s father had sailed, and his father too, because it was in his blood, it wasn’t what his blood was made of.
He sailed because there was nothing else he could do, should do — and even were it the case he had the desire for another position, who would give it to him? At least within the navy, his father’s name counted for something, his father’s influence — and he hated how he had to rely on it, despised how he had to count on his father’s position in order to justify his own, but he needed some position for which to make a name, a reputation, for himself, and then —
And then.
He’d never be an admiral, not like his father, wasn’t foolish enough to believe it might be possible for him to attain that rank, and he didn’t really allow himself to hope for command of his own ship, but he didn’t need command.
He didn’t yearn for command — command was difficult for any man to aspire to, because to command meant to understand one’s men, not just in their individual persons, but in their intersections with one another, and those hundreds of combinations, how they acted as groups and tribes and collectives within the crew, and then there was the beast of the crew itself.
A crew could so easily turn against their captain, and if Jack ever managed to take a captaincy in the first place, if he ever managed to get a crew who respected him, who thought him worthy of his position, which would be near impossible, their respect of him would be like as not to turn upon a penny, and be lost almost as soon as it was gained, as soon as weather turned average, let alone poor, and the barest hardship was imagined.
It wasn’t command he wanted.
He wasn’t so arrogant or so stupid as to believe that even if he went to sea and single-handedly sunk every pirate ship along the Barbary Coast, sent the misbegotten profits of all these predatory crews back to the Royal Treasury, it would never overcome the fact of what he was in most men’s eyes: Black-skinned and of impure blood, plainly an African heathen, no matter that he was as Christian as any of them, and had never left England until he’d joined the navy to serve the King.
But he didn’t need command — all he needed was some renown, some bare renown to carry him through on the strength of his own deeds, and when he retired in ten years, in fifteen or twenty, they would serve enough to allow him enough to barter for a sense of privacy, or barest legitimacy.
He’d never live as his father did, as ignorant as his father was of the fact at times, but he could be comfortable, he thought. He would sail until he didn’t have to any longer, until his deeds at sea would pay his way on land, and with all the pay he’d carefully saved, he would get lodgings for himself, position himself somewhere — he’d find a wife for himself, and he’d make use of his expertise in advising other sailors, maybe, or write some sort of memoir.
Wouldn’t this business be tremendous fodder for that, if he only survived it?
“He’s a stupid, self-centred lad,” said Cotton, and Jack looked up from the canvas the two of them had been unfolding, watching the other man. Cotton and Thwaites, Cotton had mentioned to him, were really quite alike in age, but Cotton looked the senior of the two of them.
Where Thwaites, tall and handsome, was only showing the most dignified beginnings of silver at his temples, and a few shining silver strands amidst the beautiful sheen of his black hair, his brown skin smooth and barely marked by sun or age, only by the occasional nick of the sword or a tattooist’s needle, Cotton wore his age in the beleaguered and resigned way many men wore their clothes.
He was creased and sun-stained, the colour in his hair no longer to be relied upon — Cotton himself had had dark hair, once upon a time, a sort of chestnut brown, Jack wouldn’t wager, but now it was turning to grey in great patches, and his beard was marked with dozens of shades of colour. Even with how ever many years he’d served sailing, his skin was not especially brown: his skin was naturally pale, and tended to turn red instead of bronzing, although it seemed the man didn’t much burn.
“He’s rich,” said Jack. “And air-headed. His like is ten a penny. If we started prosecuting them, there’d not be a gaol with any space left.”
Cotton laughed, shaking out the canvas piece and taking up a rope to fasten it in place. “Wasn’t suggesting we put him before a court, though there’s men who’d do that to fools like him. I was saying it because he doesn’t know what the fuck you’re at with him — doesn’t know what the fuck people at with himself, even.”
“You think me disloyal, I suppose,” said Jack, uncertain, and Cotton laughed at that, too, tipping back his head, and then he shook it. Thwaites’ eyes were hypnotising, hazel in a way that caught the light, showing flecks of green and gold when he was in the sun, but Cotton’s eyes in their own way were striking — although he had darker hair, his eyes were lighter, a shining blue that looked all the bluer for how red his cheeks tended to be.
“The fuck do you have to be loyal to?” he asked. “Wait, wait, I know,” he said, putting up his hand when Jack opened his mouth, “they told you to look after him, I know, but that’s not what I mean. You two barely fucking know one another. Am I right?”
“What purpose does this interview serve?” asked Jack.
“Interview,” said Cotton, shaking his head and chuckling to himself. “Purpose. God save me from lads with educations.”
“You’d rather I not be educated, sir?” asked Jack coolly.
“Have all the education you like, just keep it to yourself,” said Cotton, and Jack, surprised despite himself, huffed out a sound he didn’t want to admit was a laugh, and Cotton grinned at him. “What I’m trying to say to you is that it’s not just that he’s rich. Oh, he’s rich, yes, privileged little cunt raised to sit on his arse and manage other people rushing about, and pale as milk for all that, a delicate little white Englishman.”
Jack didn’t let himself frown, didn’t let himself react, but he did look at Cotton askance, not quite sure what to make of the way he was talking, what was coming of it.
Cotton saw him looking, and said, “Yeah, I know. Ship like this, comes to be you notice the differences a man’s colour makes with how people treat him, and how different they treat you. Many’s a time we have to think of strategy when it comes to selling our gear on — see if we send someone a merchant thinks he can take advantage of, someone he wants to try to undercut, or a white man if he feels alone with no other whites around, wants to feel superior. Ced’s a master of knowing who’ll suit best, use it to our favour.”
“Criminals are criminals,” said Jack. “I would have thought they’d be happiest with their own, no matter what colour their criminal companions.”
“Crime, aye,” said Cotton. “We steal bales of silk from some fuck merchant, and there’s crime — a navy steals men, decides he should be made to slave away, and there’s the law.”
“Am I not labouring at your behest this moment, Mr Cotton?”
“Is there not a promise of freedom, when your ransom is paid?” was the easy reply. “How many men taken get that luxury?”
Jack was silent a second, the two of them working together, passing the rope back and forth in neat, criss-crossing motions. “It’s not a just world, Mr Cotton,” said Jack. “And none of us can make it so — the best we can do is survive.”
“It’s not a just world,” Cotton agreed. “Your lad don’t know that, you know. He’s… simple. You get that, don’t you? You understand that?”
Jack blinked, not sure what to make of that at all, and he frowned slightly at Cotton, at his blunt tone, his plain expression. Cotton sighed, chuckling, as he kept at his work, and said, “S’not any failing on the lad’s part, well, I don’t think, anyway. He reminds me of Ced, when the two of us were that age — you can control yourself, discipline yourself. He can’t. He’s like a ship with full sails but no command of his rudder — goes right fast, when the winds are good, but when they’re not, loses control and comes apart. Wind at the wrong angle, when he can’t turn his way around, are liable to rip his ropes from their moorings, send him keeling over as fast as he can blink. And he’s simple, in the head.” Cotton tapped the sides of his temple. “Understands only what you say, what you mean underneath, that’s a fucking mystery to him. You want him to understand what you mean to say to him, you have to say it. I know it’s not very English, but anything but frank speaking will have you at a loss with him.”
“I feel Mr Poole’s faculties are not quite as defective as you make out,” said Jack sceptically, and Cotton grinned to himself, passing the other side of the rope over to Jack so that they could pass it between them to lash the canvas down.
“He’s not defective,” said Cotton, softer now, with a fond smile pulling at his mouth — thinking of Thwaites, no doubt, and not Poole. “But he’ll cry like that, from time to time, over what seems like fucking nothing — and it will be nothing, ‘cept he’ll overflow with it.”
“You mean to tell me your Captain Thwaites cries behind closed doors?” asked Jack.
“If only,” said Cotton. “It’s the best I can do when he overflows to keep him from setting fires.”
Jack sniggered, and he cut it short, pressing his lips tight together, clenching his jaw, trying to raise his head and be dignified. Cotton, still smiling, kept on working the rope between their hands.
“Not saying it to excuse him when he drives you doolally,” said Cotton. “Don’t mean you shouldn’t tell him when he’s wrong — if anything, you should do it more, state it plainly. But you just think of him flouncing us all at cards, and taking it for granted that we were all making up calculations, same as him.”
“Again, I must question what prompts you to give me this advice,” said Jack. “From the goodness of your heart?”
“Ain’t no good in my heart,” said Cotton. “But the thing about birds, lad, is they can recognise when they’re of a feather.”
“And how similar in hue our feathers are,” remarked Jack, making Cotton chuckle, but he didn’t flinch away or draw himself back, didn’t even seem surprised.
“Not pretending to know how you’ve got it, or have experienced anything like it,” said Cotton. “Even men the same colour as me, lads like Poole, I wouldn’t pretend to know how he’s lived his life or how it’s run over him. But he don’t play by the rules, see, that’s his problem — even when he sees the rules unspoken, which is no guarantee, he can’t control himself enough to follow them. He gets overwhelmed or overexcited or over some man’s handsome face, and then he does as he does, and doesn’t even realise he’s done wrong until after he’s flogged for it.”
“He’s never been flogged,” said Jack, and Cotton laughed.
“You’re a fucking literal one, I’ll give you that,” he said. “The two of you are fine matched.”
Jack pressed his lips tight together. He wanted to say that he wasn’t like Poole, wasn’t like Thwaites, that he wasn’t like that, but would that hurt their chances of survival? Was it the case that they’d only been allowed to live so far because Thwaites and Cotton, with whatever strange perversion of marriage they had toward one another, saw themselves in what Jack and Poole were feigning — what Jack had been trying to feign?
Not that it mattered, he supposed.
Poole was already abandoning it in favour of begging for Thwaites for any attention he could, and a part of that grated although he ought be grateful in a way. Jack thought of the way Poole slept with him in the bed, the way he crammed his body against Jack’s as though he were some cat or rabbit, certain he would freeze to death and desperate to leech any warmth he could, and yet there was something so peaceful in it, so impossibly enticing.
Times were that once or twice, in moments of quiet today, that Wicks had wondered distantly what it might be like to go on like this forever, to feel Poole’s weight on top of his chest, his arms wrapped around Jack’s body, his heart beating steadily, his breathing even, making soft sounds in his sleep.
There was something precious in it, and yet more than that, there was something protective in it — it was a ridiculous thought, that Poole might protect him from a mosquito, let alone a real threat, and yet with Poole as his blanket, he almost felt safer than he ever had before, as though there were something right in the world he’d never considered before might be wrong.
It was stupid, of course.
This was stolen time, and they were stolen men, and if they made it out of all this alive, it was possible Wicks’ life would be stolen too.
He kept oscillating, he knew, between wild hope and what he felt might be optimism and cynical certainty that all was already lost, and he hated that he didn’t know which instinct he ought trust, because there had never been consistency in what the universe had thrown at him thus far, except that he should suffer for things he was, rather than things he’d done.
“When you asked him if his family’d pay ransom,” said Cotton, tying off the boat, “and said it’d be better for them to let him go? I bet you were wondering about his family, right? I bet you were thinking — and rightly — about what rich people like them are like, thinking of things in terms of money, willing to fuck over anybody alive, so long as more money comes of it.”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“What he heard,” went on Cotton, leaning back on his heels, “is that you think he isn’t worth paying for.”
“That’s not what I told him,” said Jack. “That’s not… that’s not even remotely what I said.”
“I know,” said Cotton. “And I bet no one ever told him people play cards by working out the odds so precise in their heads neither, but it’s what he thought was the case — just like he thinks every other man wants to fuck him, or would fuck him if they had the chance, because he’s not been proved wrong, just like it hasn’t occurred to him a lot of men would do him harm just because it suited them, for no reason at all, ’cause that’s not how he thinks. He’s naive, for certain, and simple, as I told you. How do I explain it?” The older man sighed, putting his hands on his hips and looking out over the bow, out to the blue skies, the land that was growing closer and closer on the horizon. “Thwaites and Poole, they see the world the way you or I’d see it through a telescope. Up close, and they see the details we don’t, but they miss a lot of the stuff outside it — and it doesn’t occur to them that we should see things any differently than they do, unless they’re specifically reminded.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Jack, and Cotton laughed the hardest yet at that.
“Aye, lad, they’re ridiculous,” he said, gearing up to walk away. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
That night, Jack stirred in the middle of the night to the sound of Poole’s voice, and he blinked in the gloom as Poole said again, his voice soft and small, his chin resting on the cushioned flesh over Jack’s sternum, “Jack? Are you awake?”
“What?” asked Jack.
“Would you pay a ransom?” asked Poole. “If someone kidnapped me from you?”
He was half-asleep, and half-certain he was dreaming as he turned them over, lying on his side and pulling Poole up against him, burying his nose into the softness of Poole’s hair. His mouth moved without his permission, and he wanted to regret it, but he was asleep too quickly again to remember to do so.
“I’d pay the world for you,” Jack mumbled sleepily, and Poole curled closer into his chest.
* * *
The ship was brought into some hidden bay, miles and miles away, it seemed to Poole, from almost anywhere, where there was a secreted little dock and the Lamia’s sails were quite obscured unless someone actually followed inside.
There were caves here, dozens upon dozens of them, and Gerald watched as some of their cargo was secreted within, parted and parcelled and set into hidden shelves and alcoves, covered over with netting, as Thwaites oversaw this unloading with Cotton, and made notations upon a board.
Gerald had been ushered out of the way when he’d tried to assist in unloading things, had been told he was too small and to get out of the way, but somehow it hadn’t felt unkind, as it sometimes felt when he was being bothersome — he preferred to be told frankly than not told at all, and Creed had gotten hold of him and bid him come back up the gangplank — which Gerald now walked with ease — and to help the cook scale fish for supper.
Gerald was untroubled by this work, liked its rhythm and its complexity, and he laughed with delight when one of the sailors brought in two octopus that they’d trapped in the rocks, and the cook had shown him how to piece them apart and remove their beaks.
Later in the afternoon, when the sun was still warm but beginning its descent, they ate their dinner upon the shore, and many of the sailors were sitting all across the beach or up under the trees further up from the sand.
In the warm, shallow water of a small natural pool, the captain reclined naked, and Gerald, who had not bathed in warm water for what felt like centuries, had stripped off to join him. The pool was empty of small creatures, but for some limpets and a slimy algae that smoothed out the few rough edges of the sea-washed rock under their backs, but the nearby pools were not.
The smaller ones were awash with life, and Gerald laid alongside the captain, watching little fish and crabs hop between the smaller pools beside them. It was fascinating, the way they moved, the darting little ways the fish jumped between algaes and one another, startling each other, and when he watched one of the crabs, it sat back and very calmly snipped off the tiniest pieces of algae with its little pincers, like a gardener pursing topiary, except that as far as Gerald knew, gardeners regularly put their offcuts between their mandibles and devoured them once snipped away.
“Is that a shark bite?” asked Wicks, and Gerald looked up at him.
Wicks, standing at the foot of the pool Gerald and Thwaites were lying back in, was of course still fully clothed, although he had deigned to remove his jacket, so that Gerald could see the way the powerful muscles of his arms and the weight of his chest threatened to burst out of the shirt.
Cotton was sitting at the edge of the pool, and although he didn’t get in with them, nor take off his clothes as Thwaites had, he had rolled up his trousers and his feet rested in the water with waters lapping up to his ankles. His feet and Thwaites regularly touched against one another, and Gerald felt a sense of distant jealousy at the casual intimacy of it, although he and Thwaites rested both of them nude and shoulder to shoulder.
The thought occurred to him that it perhaps wasn’t Cotton precisely that he was jealous of, but the connection he shared with Thwaites.
Wicks, of course, was scowling with disapproval down at Thwaites and Gerald both, but now and then his gaze would flit over their bodies, as if he was pretending not to do it. Thwaites’ leg had lifted out of the water, and Gerald looked at the bitten circle of toothy marks there. The mouth that had bitten him had been too large to leave a complete ring, and the individual bites showed that the teeth had been quite large indeed.
“Ah,” said Thwaites, gesturing vaguely with one handsome hand. “Yes. It’s not an interesting story.”
“It’s fucking funny though,” said Cotton.
“Haven’t you inventory still to oversee?” Thwaites asked coldly.
“I’m overseeing it right now,” said Cotton. “It’s paddling in a pool and bothering a hermit crab.”
Gerald gently put the crab back.
“The captain, as I’m sure you’ve observed,” said Cotton to Wicks, putting on a funny, more clipped and cultivated voice that Gerald could distantly recognise as modelled on Thwaites’ own, “is a man who would set a fire just to see what it burned.”
“I have observed this, yes,” said Wicks cleanly, in a voice like Gerald’s, and Gerald wrinkled his nose.
“He is curious beyond sense or reason.”
“This matches with my estimates of his character thus far.”
“He is a voyeur, a tease, and a machinator of all manner of oddities.”
“I see the defendant,” said Wicks, “and find him guilty on all three counts.”
Gerald stifled his giggle when he saw Wicks’ mouth twitch, because he was trying not to smile, and Thwaites looked at him from the side before crossing his arms over his handsome, naked chest and then looking between Cotton and Wicks. “Are you two quite finished?”
“If you’d like to tell the story, Captain,” said Cotton innocently, spreading his hands, “be my guest.”
“Who has need of a story?” said Thwaites. As well as Thwaites’ tattoos of constellations, and a few others that Gerald had come to regard as staples amongst sailors — over one thigh, a mermaid that shimmied when he bent the joint of his knee, and over his chest, skulls and crossbones and maps and gemstones — he had two sharks banding the top of his upper arm. When he moved his arm now, gesturing one more, the sharks moved as though the muscle were their water, and it made him smile. “It is as simple as that I like sharks.”
“So you let one bite you?” asked Gerald.
“Why not?” was Thwaites’ retort, keeping his gaze. “It’s how you show you like men.”
Cotton, smirking, said, “Captain — “
“Yes, yes, Mr Cotton,” grumbled Thwaites, leaning back with the sun-warmed water washing over his skin. Sighing, he folded his hands over the flat of his belly. “We were all young once,” said he. “And with youth comes foolishness and foolhardiness. When I was but a stripling youth, somewhat younger than Poole here…” He trailed off a moment, and his glittering eyes, dark pools all full of emeralds and gold, looked to Gerald, to Wicks, and then to Cotton again. “Paul,” he said. “Do you really think — “
“I do,” said Cotton firmly.
“It was my first long voyage at sea,” said Thwaites. “I was not yet anointed with blood to this vilest of arts, the art of piracy: I was with a merchant vessel, like my father before me. I had been educated, of course, and schooled very keenly, but even the keenest of educations does not prepare one for what comes after. Ever did I marvel at the wonders I saw upon the oceans.
“We came upon, of all things, the great carcass of a sperm whale — it was too old to be of much use, and all its oil had mostly spread out in the water in a rainbow sheen. It smelled quite awful, and made a few boys ill. But upon a whale so great as this one supped some great sea creatures.”
“Great indeed,” intoned Cotton, and Thwaites splashed water at him, making him laugh.
“Your father vouched for you to go to sea?” asked Wicks.
“He did, but my father was not well-liked,” said Thwaites, his voice very casual and easy. “He was corrupt, but not intelligent — it is a fine thing to be corruptible, but if one is too stupid to carry it off, he is bound for a life of quotidian insignificance if he is lucky, and death by murder or his own clumsiness if he is not. I found my way onto this particular ship by bartering and blackmailing my way aboard. I was as well-treated as any of the darling petty officers, and seeing how well-treated I was, they naturally assumed I was some manner of secret prince or otherwise. I used that assumption quite carefully going on — there’s some about who still think me an undisclosed Yuvaraja, in line for a foreign throne.”
“That’s treacherous,” said Wicks.
“So too are the seas, darling man,” said Thwaites. “Do you scorn them for your nature as well?”
“Blackmailing your way through ships and sailing life,” said Wicks, “yes, perhaps I would.”
“Why shouldn’t I have taken what I wanted, when I found it was so easy to grasp hold of, and take? Those stupid men would have mistreated me, believing themselves superior because they had their English blood and their white skin, where I had half of one and none of the other — you think me wrong for disproving their prejudice? Did I not simply outplay them at their game, without letting on that I knew their rules?”
Wicks curled his lip, and gave Thwaites such a foul look that Gerald shivered. “Your mother taught you this?”
“My mother taught me poetry and song,” said Thwaites softly. “She taught me beauty, and grace, and how to treat others — taught me so well, in fact, that I command all these fine gentlemen, not a gentleman among them, and know how to treat them well, that each of them feels respected and a part of this crew, as well he should. It was my father who taught me treachery — having better brains than he did, I simply improved on his technique.”
Having been growing impatient for some few moments, Gerald said a little louder than he intended to, “The whale, Captain.”
Thwaites laughed, and curled his fingers in Gerald’s hair, and Wicks stiffened, looking down at him with his mouth twisted. “Oh, I’m sorry, darling, are you bored? Yes, the whale. We had to lay anchor anyway, so we stopped a while, and I spent some time observing the carcass, the fish that came to nip at it, and the birds that swooped down to perch atop it before they would fly away. And the sharks, too.”
“Sharks?” repeated Gerald, delighted.
“Oh, yes.”
“Of course there’d be sharks,” said Wicks irritably. “He’s got a bite from a shark. It wasn’t going to be a squid, was it?”
Gerald tossed a handful of seaweed at him, which Wicks deftly sidestepped.
“Most of them,” said Thwaites placatingly, “were smaller things. Sharks from the reef below, dog fish, nothing impressive, not at first. But then… Then, a great shadow moved in the water, some three times the length of me easily — a white shark, a lamia, a beast of the oceans deep. Her fin jutted from the water, and in rising, she parted the waves.”
“Like Moses,” offered Gerald.
“Exactly like Moses,” agreed Thwaites. They both laughed, Cotton too, when Wicks rolled his eyes.
“I was fascinated with the creature,” said Thwaites. “She was the first to arrive, having smelt out the whale in the water, and I sketched her a few times, and kept peering down at her to see her black eyes, the roundness of her snout coming down to the point of her mouth, the shape of her fins, her huge tail. I had only ever, before now, seen them harpooned or half-gutted. I never realised before that moment how quickly they moved in the water, nor really grasped how they moved. That great tail of hers moved from side to side to propel her through the brine — have you ever seen a man use a rope saw to fell a tree?”
Thwaites made movements with his hands, putting out one hand before he drew it back and pushed forward with the other, completing this motion several times. “That is the motion of their tails, the shark’s, a great push and pull. So delighted was I by the very sight that I… Well.”
Thwaites stopped, and Cotton began — that was their nature by now, Gerald supposed.
“I,” said Cotton, “was a rigger on this same vessel. So when one of the fancy petty officers comes to me, little rich prick in his fancy coat who’s only just learning the sea, and says, “Mr Cotton, I’m going up the rigging, you don’t you mind me,” I says, “Yes, sir, as you like sir,” and think nothing of it.”
Thwaites chuckled, looking sheepish and strangely bashful in a way that made Gerald’s chest feel warm and full.
“How old are you?” asked Gerald curiously of Cotton, who frowned at him.
“Never you fucking mind.”
“Older than Captain Thwaites.”
“By three years,” said Cotton. “I’m no octogenarian.”
“Oh,” said Gerald, frowning and looking at Cotton with renewed interest. “I didn’t realise you were so close in age. You look — “ Thwaites laid a hand on Gerald’s chest and looked at him meaningfully, and somewhat lamely, Gerald amended his sentence to finish it with, “ — very well for it, I’m sure.”
Cotton worked his jaw a moment, his hands on his knees, and then looked to Thwaites. “May I kill him, Ced?”
“You may not,” said Thwaites. “You may whip him, if you like, but I expect he’d like it too.”
“Like as not I would,” agreed Gerald.
“So,” said Wicks, clearing his throat, “you were in the rigging.”
“That I was,” Thwaites agreed. “You see, with the whale so large as it was, I couldn’t always see the shark, turning over and over the corpse as she was to bite at the best bits, and with all the whale’s oil in the water, it was difficult to get a good look without the sun’s shine above reflecting everything. I wanted a better look.”
“Into the jaws of death,” said Wicks dryly.
“into the jaws of nature and her mysteries,” corrected Thwaites in a prim voice, and Gerald laughed.
“The whale being on our starboard side, I climbed up the net and shimmied along the stays — I sort of leaned against the sheet of one of the mail sail, just over the clew. I’d shimmied along to rest over the mast tip where it stretched out over there — quite safe and secure I was, and from there, I had a bird’s eye view of both shark and her meal.”
“Until you fell,” said Wicks.
“Until I fell,” said Thwaites. “A sudden shift in the wind caught the sail at at an odd angle, so that a corner of the sheet was caught by the wind and slapped me in the face — with the ship anchored, we only turned a bit, but it caught me off my balance. I pitched, caught enough of a grip on the stay a moment to cry for help, and fell.”
“Into the water?” asked Gerald.
“Onto the whale, first,” said Cotton. “Made a sort of rubbery splat.”
“It was quite unpleasant,” said Thwaites. “I don’t know how whaler men do it — and they get inside the things to scrape out their brains, not just stand on top. Anyway, I tried to keep my balance upon the corpse, but it was unbalanced and unsteady.”
“You managed it a while,” said Cotton. “A few minutes at least you kept your balance, because we were nearly ready with a ring and rope.”
“It didn’t feel like long,” Thwaites said. “In any case, the whale shifted beneath me and I slipped back into the oil-filmed brine.”
“Quite a splash he made, too.”
“Yes, thank you, Paul. I, of course, was quite terrified, and didn’t know whether to splash about or what — I’d no idea where the shark was, and with all the oil in the water I couldn’t even dip my head to look. I can’t even describe to you the intensity of the stench, no doubt made all the more powerful by the fact that my eyes were closed. I heard the splash as they threw the ring into the water, and blindly, I swam.
“I don’t know how fast I went, but it was as fast as I knew how, and just as I was about to grab the ring, my fingers brushing it, I felt this great, wrenching tear on the back of my leg as I was pulled under. It took me by such surprise that I screamed, gasping in sea water and spermaceti, a combination no man desires in his mouth or his lungs, I can assure you.”
“He pulled you under?” Wicks asked, aghast.
“That she did,” said Thwaites. “The pain in my leg was impossible, so much so that I thought she surely must have taken the whole thing with her, but she let me go a moment later and I rushed for the ring to be pulled aboard.”
“But didn’t your blood in the water send all the sharks there into a frenzy, all of them eager for a taste of man?” asked Gerald.
“Perhaps not all sharks share your proclivities,” said Wicks, and this time when Gerald threw it, the seaweed hit him in the thigh.
“I don’t believe so,” said Thwaites. “Seems to me our lamia took a bite of me to see how I tasted, and found whale blubber to be a choicer meal — she didn’t even take much flesh off me really, only what clung to her teeth. You can see from the scarring that there’s not a great chunk missing, far less than you might expect. If I had fins, I’d use my mouth to look at things too, I bet.”
“You don’t have fins, and you do do that,” said Cotton. “A fine picture you looked too, doused in sperm oil and sea water, coughing it up, bleeding all down your leg, and all you could say was how rough she felt when she came past you in the water.”
“Such a rough skin,” said Thwaites, his gaze far away in the memory, his tone marvelling. “So roughly textured I thought it might pull the skin off my palm, and all the power under that skin… I expect they’d be excellent to ride, sharks, if you could only convince them of the thing.”
“We washed him off and the surgeon had a look at his leg,” said Cotton when Thwaites trailed off again, looking wistful and dreamy. “He said he’d been very lucky our white pointer had such a pleasant meal in front of her, and that he posed so little interest. And he was whipped for it.”
“For being bitten?” asked Gerald, and Cotton scoffed.
“For dangling from the mast like an idiot and falling in.”
Thwaites chuckled regretfully, reaching down and idly brushing his fingers over the scarred flesh. “I’d do it again,” he said. “She was quite gentle, really.”
“You are mad,” pronounced Wicks.
“I’d like to see a shark that big,” said Gerald.
They sailed onwards, soon enough, and for all the work was pleasing, Gerald found he was overcome with anxiety. It distracted him from all his waking hours and interrupted his sleeping hours too, so that he frequently rolled out of bed with Wicks or woke up to Wicks irritably patting him for him to be quiet and still.
He struggled to imagine it, and yet for Wicks to say it so confidently, it had to be done all the time. Wicks was a sailor some years his senior, after all, a man of the world — he knew better than Gerald what the world was like.
His father had been furious about the most recent occasion, the second time in as many months he’d been pulled aside from some improper place and rushed aside before anyone might burst in to make some arrest. Gerald had never been before a magistrate, had been spared that humiliation thus far, but his father had seemed quite intent on the idea that he should be soon.
How the man had snapped at him, how he’d shouted, but —
But his family were better than most, he thought.
He was the second youngest of four children, and not once had his father suggested he should get married if he didn’t want to, and nor had any of his brothers pushed the thought, either, and no one had ever threatened him, or said anything unkind to him or very cruel, not family members.
And his aunt, she was a nice old woman, really, who couldn’t care less that he should be in a nice house she owned if he wanted it, and his family weren’t like most people’s families, weren’t like most people.
And he didn’t think most people, didn’t think anyone, would, but of all people, his family, they wouldn’t just… They wouldn’t, would they? Just let him die?
“My father,” said Thwaites beside him where Gerald was looking out over the bow, making him jump, “tried to kill me.”
“Really?” asked Gerald in a small voice, not bothering to ask how Thwaites had read his mind.
“Oh, yes,” said Thwaites. “He tried to run me through with a blade, and then a poker.”
“Why?”
Thwaites offered his cigarillo to Gerald, who shook his head, before he took a drag, blew out some smoke, and tapped the ash over the side.
“I tried to kill him first,” he said. “Some words of anger passed between him and my mother, and he went to beat her over it. I saw red, wouldn’t stand for that. If he’d hit her before, it had never been in my presence. I was ready to tear him limb from limb.”
“You killed him, then?”
“Yes, but not that year,” said Thwaites. “I only only twenty-eight, that year — I killed him three years back, the month before my fortieth birthday.”
“Because he beat your mother?”
“Mm, no, no, of course not. My mother had long since left him by then and gone back to Madras, I sailed her and my sister home myself. She remarried, actually, her husband is a librarian or an accountant or a bookbinder or something, extremely dull man, but she seems to like him very much. No, I’d gone to visit for something or other, just to check he was alive, and he went to kick the dog. I wanted to ensure he didn’t remarry — I didn’t think there was a huge risk, but you know.”
Gerald thought about this a moment, and then asked, “Is the dog still alive?”
“I think so. She was only a puppy, some sort of sheep dog thing. I gave her to the local smith. Very cute it was, too, sitting in that room, lit by the forge, and she sat on top of one of the cold anvils, sort of perched there, and tilted her head almost all the way around as she watched him shoe a horse.” Thwaites tapped his fingers against the side’s edge. He had waves tattooed on the backs of his knuckles, Gerald saw amongst the rings, and when he tapped his fingers, it was like they were swelling and moving. It was a fine day, and very hot in the forge, as you would expect, but I felt cold to my bones. I really hadn’t wanted to kill him, and I’d like to say I did it in a rash of anger, but it really wasn’t that. I knew what I was doing, and did it with cold calculation, because I didn’t want him to harm anybody more than he already had. He’d done more than his fair share of damage to those who didn’t deserve it.”
Thwaites did not sound especially sad as he said it, only thoughtful, speaking with a sort of distance that Gerald knew he could be capable of, at times — the sort of distance that got him told off, and told he was being monstrous over, even when it barely even mattered.
But then, Gerald had never killed a man, let alone his own father — he couldn’t imagine doing such a thing in all his wildest nightmares.
“I sat there for quite some time,” said Thwaites. “Waiting for the smith to finish his work, watching him shoe the horse, same as the dog. His name’s Robin, the smith, and when I was a little boy I used to do the same thing, sit and just watch him work. He used to say he wished his sons would show the same interest, until he realised I had no interest in actually picking up the hammer and tongs, just that I liked to observe their workings. He helped me bury my father, and I left that town for the last time. Nothing tethers me to England any longer, my father dead, my mother, my brother, my sister, all departed, and Paul’s family live in Oslo.”
“He doesn’t look Norwegian.”
“According to you,” said Thwaites, “he barely looks alive.”
Gerald chuckled.
“He isn’t, but his sister married a Norwegian, and when she went over to Norway, their father went with them.”
Gerald nodded, and then looked down at the way the ship cut through the water, making it white and streaked by the separation. They were like a shark, he thought, but in reverse, cutting from above instead of below.
“Do you think I’m handsome?” he asked.
“I do,” said Thwaites. “When certain stars are in alignment I plan to fuck you within an inch of your life.”
“Not tonight?”
“Not tonight.”
“Lots of men think I’m handsome,” said Gerald. “I don’t see why there has to be such secrecy and reticence about it. The way I see it, I’m very good-looking, and witty, and quite up for it, and the men I take up with are up for it too — I’d never try to trick a man into fucking me that didn’t want to, nor force the matter even if I had the strength. Seems like half the men who’d hang me for it are just jealous they can’t fuck me themselves, but they could, if they weren’t such cowards.”
“Not all the world’s bigotries, young man, revolve around the enticement of your cock and finely-fleshed thighs, but I am sure your assumption applies to a not insignificant portion of them.”
Gerald reached up for the cigarillo, taking it gently from Thwaites’ hand, and took a puff.
“Still want to pick olives?” asked Thwaites.
“Yes, I’d like to try,” said Gerald. “I hear you take a great big sheet and beat the trees, and all the olives fall into the sheet, and it makes a big racket, and all the cicadas sing.”
“They don’t sing,” said Thwaites. “It’s a sort of rattling scream.”
“Oh,” said Gerald, and handed the cigarillo back. “What now?”
“We sell our goods first, and then we make for a little island east of Sicily, in the middle of the Ionian Sea.”
Gerald frowned. “In the Heptanese?”
“Not that far east,” said Thwaites. “When I said in the middle, I rather meant in the middle. It’s not an island, I’d wager, that you’ll find on any of your maps — Paul has a knack for finding these undiscovered places. Don’t worry, we’ll send your family very accurate coordinates, that they not get lost.”
Gerald nodded his head slowly, feeling a sort of grim and uncertain terror settle like a tree taking root in the pit of his stomach. He wondered if the tree would grow out of him, and break his ribs from the inside, and make him burst.
It felt like it might.
“You could have run away, you know,” pointed out Thwaites in a soft voice like spun silk. “At our last port — you and Wicks both.”
“Oh,” said Gerald softly. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Come,” said Thwaites, and put his hand on Gerald’s back, guiding him to follow. “Let’s play a game of Whist.”
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