Chapter Text
Prologue
June 1705
London in early summer: steel-grey sky, fine misting rain, smooth wet sheen over the cobblestones. Smoke scudded across the clouds out of chimney stacks. The Earl of Ashbourne's carriage was making its way from the Earl's townhouse out of the city, towards the Royal Dockyard at Deptford.
The mizzling rain had slowed to a stop by the time the carriage turned onto the street leading up to the dock. The sun was beginning to wink out from behind a cloud, a breeze was ruffling the water, herring gulls shrieked from the masts of ships at anchor in the river. Sailors and stevedores were strolling up and down the dockside as Thomas alighted from the carriage, throwing up sprays of rainwater as they went.
Thomas made his way against the flow of the crowd towards HMS Kingfisher, sitting with her wings folded in the harbour. She was a fourth-rate ship, who dwarfed the launches and supply boats shuttling back and forth across the water, and who was dwarfed in turn by the first-rate men-o'-war sitting beside her. Thomas did not know anything about her, except that James would be on board overseeing her refitting, straight-backed and severe and his hair neatly combed back into its queue. He began walking faster. He felt loose-limbed and light. He had to fight to keep a smile from spreading itself over his face.
When he came to the Kingfisher he found a midshipman lingering by the gangplank, and asked for the commander's permission to come aboard. The boy ran off, and came running back again a moment later to say that His Lordship had it, and His Lordship would, if it please His Lordship, find the commander on the quarterdeck. His Lordship sprang up the gangplank.
Thomas stepped down onto the ship and saw James standing just as he had imagined him, surveying the men scurrying like ants over the gun deck below. The weak sunlight had caught and tangled in his hair, turning it a bright poppy-red. Thomas stopped and stood for a moment by the gunwale, admiring him. It was June, and pleasantly warm—the recent good weather had begun to draw out the freckles across the lieutenant's nose. Even from here Thomas could see him frowning, strict and domineering. The men all looked terrified of him. Thomas had never been so in love with anyone in his life.
Eventually James saw him, too, and he had to tip his hat politely in greeting and make his way to the quarterdeck with something like an air of aristocratic indifference. When he smiled and nodded and shook James' hand, his expression was as far from adoring as he could get it. He knew by James' answering smile that he had not got very far.
Safest not to look at James at all. He turned to stand at his side instead, and pretended to be interested in the activity on the deck below. Not very long ago it would have been easy enough to find something to catch his attention on a ship full of men exerting themselves in the summer sunshine, but now all he could think of was James. He had to swallow the urge to laugh at himself.
This was not to say that he wasn't enjoying the view, and by the glint he could see in the corner of James' eye James knew it. They stood silently together for a while, taking pleasure in their shared secret. The sun against their backs grew hotter.
'She's a handsome ship,' Thomas said, after several long indulgent minutes. Being totally ignorant of ships, he had no idea if this were true.
James snorted softly. 'She's decrepit, she ought to be hulked.' But he smiled fondly as he said it.
'This is the ship you're to take to Nassau?'
James nodded, and looked her over again, cool and critical and commanding. He seemed satisfied with what he saw. 'She's fast enough, and she was built for disguise—we can pass her off as a merchantman if we need to. And,' he smiled agian, a little cynical and self-deprecating, 'no one's going to miss her.'
The sun was out in earnest now. 'Will you be all right with just one ship?'
'The Admiralty can hardly spare any more. And it's not as though we're planning on getting into trouble. It's just a reconnaissance mission.' He turned his head to meet Thomas' eyes and smiled, more sincerely this time. 'I'll be fine, my lord.'
'If my father's interfered with your efforts to secure a ship, perhaps I can–'
'Thomas, it's fine. She'll do well enough for our purposes. We'd be better off saving whatever goodwill we have with the Admiralty for the plan itself. It may only be two ships, but we are asking them to spare two ships of the line in the middle of a war with Spain. I'd like to make sure we get our pick of them and not the Admiralty's, if possible.'
The sun at their backs began to grow oppressive. Thomas was uncomfortable, sweat prickling against his skull and pooling in the small of his back. His throat was sore. His armpits were beginning to itch. He surveyed the sad old ship again, and no longer thought it handsome. It looked ready to sink into the silt at the bottom of the river. Thomas felt himself responsible for the state of the ship—more responsible, certainly, than the men straining to get her seaworthy in the summer heat. It was not James, after all, of whom the Admiralty thought so little. The sweat along his brow stung.
To Thomas' surprise, James spoke again before he could. 'My father sailed on this ship.'
James so rarely volunteered information about himself that for a moment Thomas didn't know how to respond. Eventually he settled on: 'Oh?'
James had not taken his eyes off the men on the deck. 'When she sailed against the Algerines in the Mediterranean, in '81.'
He offered no more than this—just one small impersonal scrap of his father's life. Thomas wondered if even knew any more than that. 'That must have been only a few years before he died, no?' He said it gently.
James nodded, apparently unmoved. 'Mm. But he wasn't on the Kingfisher then. He died while we were serving on the Essex.'
One of the gulls above their heads bean to shriek. 'I didn't realise you were with him.'
'He took me to sea with him after my grandfather died. Fell off the yardarm on the Essex while she was being repaired a few months later.'
'I'm sorry.'
James gave a careless one-shouldered shrug. 'Just bad luck. That's how I first met Admiral Hennessey, actually: he was captain of the Essex then.'
'And he felt sorry for you, a poor orphan boy? Took you under his wing?' He had meant it almost as a joke, though it didn’t quite sound like one when he said it aloud.
'More or less. I had to fend for myself for a while.' James turned at last to meet Thomas' eye, that endearing lopsided grin transforming his already handsome face. 'Lucky for me that he did, really. Otherwise I'd probably have ended up getting tossed over the side.'
'Does the Navy usually do that to its ship's boys?' Thomas asked lightly, glad he hadn't ruined James' good mood.
'Well,' here James turned a little rueful, 'actually, Hennessey only really took an interest in me after I started getting into fights with the other men.'
Thomas smiled. 'Fights? You?'
James' own smile flickered and dimmed, but he managed to force a laugh. 'Me, my lord. In truth, I'm sure you would've found me an uncivilised little terror.'
Thomas tried to imagine meeting him then: when he was twelve, bored of spending his days indoors with his tutors preparing for Eton, and James was perhaps ten, already well used to running around the deck of a warship and entirely alone in the world. Not being able to say what he thought, Thomas swallowed the lump in his throat and said nothing at all. The gull overhead went on screaming into the summer air.