The Butler

Short story. The captain’s steward used to be a butler.

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The captain’s steward made some members of the crew uncomfortable, and set them ill-at-ease.

He was a man of effeminate nature, not merely in his appearance — his eyelashes overlong, his lips a dusky pink, his face rounded at its edges, and he was plump with slender, delicate hands — or in his manner of speech and expression — he was soft-spoken with a naturally high voice which lilted musically — but in the very way he moved, the way he occupied a space. Where many men aboard stood with their hands clasped at the small of their back, keeping their shoulders back, and where others took on the same position with their hands over their lower bodies, he held his hands higher, often resting them on top of his belly instead.

He had a habit of clasping one hand over the other like a choirmaster preparing to address his flock of altar boys — he was a Papist, and before he came to sea, he had been a junior butler for two years at a fancy manor house.

“Why’d you leave that behind?” Lupin had asked him once while he was helping clean up after dinner one evening.

“Why did you,” Belrose corrected him. “Wide is an adjective, Mr Lupin.”

“Right,” Lupin had said sourly. “Well?”

“Somewhere to get water from.”

“Mr Belrose,” Lupin had complained, scraping slops into a bucket for the pigs. It was a warm night, and he was in no mood for this back and forth, had only wanted a bit of chatter to make the task go by faster. “Why did you leave behind being a butler?”

“I developed an intolerance of wine,” Belrose had told him. Another man might have primly shrugged his shoulders, but Belrose had had such things as shrugging beaten out of him or trained out of him or whatever it was they did to butlers in training — Belrose had merely met his gaze a moment, lowered his brows slightly, raised them up again.

“You can’t drink wine, so you can’t be a butler?”

“Butler comes from the Old French, boteiller. A butler is in charge of a household, of its keys, but first and foremost, he is in charge of its wine cellar — the soul, therefore, of its hospitality. A butler who cannot drink wine cannot understand his inventory; a butler with no palate is not merely ill-equipped for his position, but entirely worthy of scorn and humour.”

“And you don’t like humour.”

“Do not,” Belrose had corrected him.

He’s not correcting Lupin right now. Lupin had followed him into the captain’s pantry and nudged the door closed, and now Lupin has him with his big shoulders against a cask of wine that he can’t drink, Belrose looking down at him.

“Now, Mr Lupin,” says Belrose softly. “We might well be accused of impropriety, the two of us crammed into a tight little cupboard like this one.”

“Hannity called you womanish earlier,” says Lupin, and for some reason he breaks Belrose’s gaze, not able to look him in the eyes as he says it, a kind of twisting occurring low in his gut. He reaches out and fixes the set of Belrose’s jacket lapel, catching the corner of it and flattening it out, smoothing the fabric beneath his fingers. “Called you a sodomite.”

“I am aware, Mr Lupin. I am in possession of two ears of my very own.”

Mr Belrose is Welsh — he says “ears” as if there’s a y at the beginning of the word, and for some reason, it makes Lupin’s cheeks burn.

“Are you — alright?”

Belrose stares down at him, unblinking in the dark, his lantern blocked by Lupin’s shoulders so that the two of them are standing facing one another almost in darkness.

“Am I alright?” Belrose repeats in his soft, lilting tones.

“Yeah. Are you alright?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Well, he — He called you a sodomite in front of everybody. That in’t right, is it?”

Belrose opens his mouth, and Lupin shoves him before he can say it.

“That is not right, is it?”

“It is,” says Belrose.

“… Eh?”

“Insulting it may be, Mr Lupin, but I would hardly call Mr Hannity’s accuracy into account. I am indeed a sodomite, as anyone aboard this ship and off it can tell to look at me. I make no great secret of it, merely that my impropriety occurs in private, behind closed doors, and never within the workplace.”

Lupin stares at him.

“Is this little meeting over, with that made clear?” asks Belrose mildly, with the slightest upward quirk of one eyebrow. He makes a lot of little jokes, really, just that a lot of them are clever, or subtle, or he makes them while not moving his face at all so that you think he can’t possibly be joking with what a humourless fuck he is. “Shall you write the minutes, and I’ll proceed with my own duties?”

“I’ll,” repeats Lupin scornfully.

Belrose exhales, and he’s about to say something more, but Lupin interrupts him before he can. “So am I.”

Belrose stares at him, and Lupin wonders if for once he’s actually caught the bastard by surprise. He doesn’t show it like some men do, he supposes, or he isn’t obvious — he isn’t pretty or effete or graceful or poetic. He’s just a man, him, and the mollies are surprised, sometimes, that he comes for them instead of the girls. There’s as many like him as not amongst the sodomites of anywhere, though. “Is that why the two of us are sharing this cupboard together?”

“I just wanted to say, is all. It’s not just you.”

“This is a sailship, Mr Lupin. One hardly goes without half a dozen buggerers and catamites aboard.”

“You don’t fuck in the workplace?”

“I do not.”

“The whole ship’s your fucking workplace.”

“Quite correct.”

“So, what, you only fuck on leave?”

“Mr Lupin, I have an inventory to complete.”

“You’re really alright?”

“Why would I be anything otherwise?”

“Hannity’s a big man,” says Lupin. “Frightening.” He’s more muscle than anything else, like as not has muscle in place of a brain, and he’s an angry sort — angry enough that he might take it on himself to knock Belrose about, no matter than Belrose is a big man himself. Lupin doesn’t want that to happen to him, doesn’t want to see Belrose bruised or beaten, or even embarrassed.

Hannity makes a show of his disgust for all manner of habits he thinks to be dirty or ill-mannered — he likes to find excuses to pick on other crew members, likes to beat them down to show how important he is.

“Are you frightened of him?” asks Belrose softly, his brow furrowing. “Of Hannity?”

“Of course I’m fucking frightened of him, Belrose, he’s the size of the mainmast with hammers for fists.”

“Oh,” murmurs Belrose. “Spare it no further thought, Mr Lupin. I am more than capable of protecting you.”

Lupin feels as if he’s been dropped into a hot bath, he’s warm all over, sweat prickling on the back of his neck, his jaw dropped.

“You don’t, you don’t,” Lupin starts, “you can’t, I’m, you really, that’s not — ”

“You know I hardly care for abbreviations, Mr Lupin,” says Belrose softly, his hands alighting on Lupin’s shoulders as he turns him around. Lupin keeps stammering, keeps trying to say that he wasn’t asking for that, that Belrose can’t possibly, that he doesn’t need to, that it’s ridiculous, that he’s a grown man and doesn’t need the captain’s steward protecting him.

Belrose opens the door, and nudges him out of the cupboard.

“I’ll protect you,” he says again.

“I’ll,” Lupin repeats faintly.

Belrose smiles down at him, the expression astonishingly warm, before he closes the door in his face.