Blessed Isle (11 page)

There were fourteen altogether. Fourteen souls whom I brought safely to landfall in Chile. There we parted with them. I do not know what happened to them after, but I notice with some satisfaction that neither does anyone else. They cannot have been caught, at least.
Pandora
herself—I learned later, long after we had settled into our present life—sailed at night onto one of the many reefs off Australia and was wrecked. These two things were a salve to my self-respect: I had brought at least this tiny crew alive to shore. I was not the only captain ever to lose a ship. These things I tell myself regularly, and they help a little, at least in the daytime.
I wind slowly down to my conclusion: having parted with our fellow deserters, Garnet and I— claiming to be brothers—signed up as crew members on the
Mafalda
, a Portuguese trading ship bringing Chilean muscatel to Europe, and
pisco
and
aguardente
to the miners of Brazil.
I believe it was a hard time for Garnet, who was used to being instantly recognised as Quality, and treated as such. To be tanned and calloused and coarse as a sailor of the lower deck was as abhorrent to him as the thought of exposure had been to me. He bore it well, however. And I experienced, in this return to my roots, another kind of relief. I do not like to lie, and it seemed to me that my efforts to become a gentleman had had some taint of falsehood about them all along. I was learning now to accept myself for what I was.
We docked at Rio and they paid us off with a handful of
réis
. To celebrate our hard-earned wages, we returned to the tavern we had visited when we first touched at Saint Sebastian. It was exactly as I remembered it, yet everything had changed. It was comparable to putting on a pair of spectacles for the first time. Inside one’s head, something shifts, and all the little cogs mesh together, functioning as they were designed. Everything becomes clear.
I drank too much, and let my mind dwell on the dances. Candlelight could not have been warmer or more golden than Garnet’s soft voice in my ear. The music slid between us like warm oil. He was full of smiles, and all the more so when I dragged him outside by the collar and had him, up against the wall in the moonshadow of Corcovado Hill.
I remember the scent of that evening: lime and salt, mudbrick and heat, and that peculiar throatclosing, acrid green scent of the deep, wet jungle. We clung to one another in the aftermath of passion, slid gently down to lie entwined. Scrub brush closed over our heads, and the drumbeat of the music filtered through the wall at our backs. I set my mouth to Garnet’s throat and his heartbeat pulsed in time.
“We’re not really going home at all, are we?” he whispered, gently as if he feared to break me. But I had been thinking the same thing. I had then no reason to suppose that the
Pandora
would not safely return to England. Once she did, all that would await us there was a trial for sodomy or desertion. Our families must have heard by now of our disappearance. They would have mourned and moved on, happy in the knowledge that we had died doing our duty. What good would it do to any, to return from the dead only to bring disgrace? To force our relatives to witness our hanging would be the utmost cruelty.
“No.” I wound my hand into his hair, worked my kisses up from throat to jaw and thence to his lips. “I’ve had enough journeying. I think it is time to stop.”
It is surprising what a man can give away and still remain himself. With that decision, we lost our family, our friends, and our country, but as I rolled onto my back and looked up at the stars, I felt as though I had in some small way received my island back. “No man is an island, entire of himself,” says John Donne, but two may be, together, needing nothing else.
I look up and here he comes, clad all in black velvet and silver lace. He has a silver-topped stick in one hand, and the whiteness of his linen bids fair to rival snow. I had meant to tell you of his daring rescue of Pedro de Lancastre da Silveira de Castelo-Branco Sá e Menezes, the Count of Vila Nova de Portimão, which set us on our present route to mild prosperity, but I find I can pass over it with a sentence. In our first month here, Garnet was fortunate enough to rescue this personage from footpads, and the Count, in gratitude, was instrumental in securing us our present employments.
Garnet has a downcast look. In the pavilion beyond, Maria Margarida Fernandes and her family sit eating ices. She is a lady of a certain age, a great fondness for gossip, and a large acquaintance, many of whom we have made our own over the last few years. He dips his hat to her, and I can tell by the meek cast to his face and the droop to his neck that he feels it is a good time to restage our one remaining piece of deception.
“You have the look of an errant dog slinking back to its kennel, sirrah,” I will say when I can no longer pretend not to have noticed him, and he will flare up, throw down his hat, and the subsequent conversation will go very much like this:
“What is that to you, brother?”
“You’ve been gaming again! I know the signs. How much have you lost this time?”
“I earn five times as much again as you. I wish you will not keep on badgering me about my few entertainments.”
“You may earn five times as much. You lose six times! What, have you reduced us to penury once more? And our savings? Damn you! How will either of us ever afford a wife?”
Such a pantomime! Garnet, of course, enjoys it, as he enjoys all theatrics from the grand opera to the Punchinello plays. I see the need. For our first year here, once we were respectably settled, we were much plagued by the attentions of unmarried women. Nowadays they merely ask me sadly why I do not wash my hands of my profligate sibling, and I shake my head and say in a weary tone, “What can I do? He’s family.”
I am resigned to the deception, but still I resent it. I would be honest if I could. I am an honest man, it is only the world that forces me to lie. But we stand at the turning of the century, and already the revolution to come is breaking out all over the world. The rights of Man. In the nineteenth century, perhaps the baseless persecution of men like myself may end and we too will join in
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, ou la Mort
.
To that end, I am sealing this completed diary and depositing it in my bank, to be released when we are both dead. I think of it as a message in a bottle, cast out into the seas of time. May the future reader know what we have not been permitted to say in the present: that we were happy. And that we were true to one another through the loss of all things. It is important to me that someone should bear witness to our love.
As for my own future, I foresee a staged argument, a time of austerity, sympathy from our neighbours, and Garnet’s amusement at a longstanding joke. I am content. And I think . . . I think I shall grow my hair.

Thank you to my editor, Sarah Franz, whose scrupulous eye for detail and wide ranging enthusiasm have both been invaluable.

Captain’s Surrender
False Colors
Shining in the Sun
The Witch’s Boy
Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon Under the Hill: Dogfighters

The Wages of Sin, in The Mysterious anthology By Honor Betrayed
His Heart’s Obsession

Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the

Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She studied English and Philosophy before accepting employment with the Crown Court, where she worked for a number of years. Now a stay-at-home mum and full time author, Alex lives with her husband and two daughters in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn't learned to operate a mobile phone.

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