Read Online Blessed Isle by Alex Beecroft - Free Book Online Page A

punished with the utmost rigour, pour encourager les autres. The irony of it! All those years I had feared to reach out lest I bring disgrace on myself and here it was, inescapable. It seemed that should I not drown, then I must indeed be destined to hang.
Steam rose off us as we travelled onwards. Our coats dried on our backs. Garnet woke sunburned, his face flushed pink, staggered to the heads and then to the barrel of water to drink thirstily. When he settled himself to the tiller I did the same, then brought the bucket back and set it, upturned, between his legs so I could sit there, leaning back against his chest. He gave a snort of amusement, and pressed his smile to the crown of my head. “I like you better like this.”
“I find I no longer need worry about the propriety of a relationship with an officer of inferior rank. If I’m not hanged for incompetence when we get home, I’ll be turned before the mast for sure.”
“You think we’ll get home?” He placed a kiss on the tip of my ear, startling me into laughter.
“At this moment I don’t very much care.”
I felt his low, rich chuckle through the muscles of my back and it warmed me like the sun. Setting an arm around me, he idly unbuttoned my waistcoat from top to bottom, and though I eagerly wished to know whether he would move on to other buttons after, I fell asleep before I could find out.
Sometimes those first days come back to me in dreams as a glimpse of paradise. We were hot and cramped and thirsty, filthy, dishevelled, sick of hardtack, and the barrel of water grew staler by the day. Yet what I remember is the solid warmth of him in my arms, drowsing, peaceful and contented as we drifted onwards under the light of the stars. It was the first time I had ever been so purely happy.
We talked. I learned about his family; a mother and father so devoted to each other that the children had always known they came second. He detailed all their different ways of attracting attention, from the ostentatious perfection of the eldest, to Garnet’s waywardness. He too had nieces whom he adored. “I was bringing home the most beautiful packet of silk for Constance’s first ball dress. She will be coming out soon, and that shade of jonquil would have brought out the chestnut in her hair.”
His brows creased. We had unpicked his cravat and made a line, bent a pin into a hook and threaded on it the juiciest, whitest, most energetically squirming maggot we could shake out of the bread, and he was sitting dangling this impromptu fishing rod over the side. He shifted it into the other hand, rubbed his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut. “The silk is at the bottom of the ocean now. And I may never see her again.”
Something took the bait. I saw the line whip out through his fingers and lunged for it, catching it just before it hit the water, landing an ugly, widemouthed, warty creature, a toad of the fish world. “Yes!” I cried, elated at still being able to achieve something. “Yes. I got one! You nearly lost him, you sluggard!”
He had not re-opened his eyes. “My head hurts,” he said. “The light is too bright.”
I used to be a steady sort of man, but Garnet has always had this ability to tip me from overweening joy to despair and back again. I left the creature flapping in the bilges and pressed my hand to his face. He all but scorched me.
Savagely, I shoved back the wool of his coat, the loosened neck of his shirt, and saw the fierce red blush where no sunburn should be. There on the hot, smooth flesh stood out the little mottled circles of typhus.
I’m told Job in his trial never once sinned by being angry with God. I was not so restrained. I stood by the mast and screamed my voice hoarse at Him, shaking my fist at the heavens and dredging up every obscenity from my childhood I had ever carefully purged from my speech. There came no reply, and in the end Garnet had to beg me to stop, for I was making his headache worse.
I sat down again, squashed