Page 9 of It Takes Two to Tumble
He wanted to go back to his ship so he didn’t have to think about any of this. He wanted to return to a time and a place far away when he could imagine his family safe and small on a tiny green island across the globe. Things were so much more manageable at a distance. But here, so close, he had to confront the fact that he didn’t belong; his presence at Barton Hall would do none of them any good, he feared. He would never do anyone any good; these were the thoughts that assailed him in his blackest moods.
“Goddamn it, Caroline,” he said, looking at her portrait. It had been commissioned on their betrothal, a lavish present from her wealthy father. She had been one and twenty when they married, which seemed frightfully young to look so palpably self-assured. “What the hell would you have me do now?”
Perhaps if he had been slightly less drunk he might have noticed that the door leading from the terrace had opened. As it was, he was bleary-eyed and didn’t notice anything until he heard the sound of a throat being cleared.
Slowly, he turned his head and saw Sedgwick standing in the open doorway, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a lit cigarillo. Phillip could make out the burning tip, glowing red in the darkness.
Vicars definitely weren’t supposed to smoke cigarillos. A pipe by the fireside, perhaps. But not a cigarillo and not out of doors. But vicars also weren’t supposed to look at other gentlemen the way he had caught Sedgwick looking at him over the breakfast table, so perhaps Sedgwick was simply a terrible vicar. Phillip found that thought comforting. He thought he could coexist with a terrible vicar better than with a godly one who would judge his failings and see all the ways he fell short as a father, a husband, a man.
“Coming back from a midnight rendezvous?” How unvicarly. Phillip pulled out his watch to check it. It wasn’t even half past ten yet, so perhaps Sedgwick had only been sweeping out the church or whatever vicars did in their spare time. Disappointing. Also, how could it be so early? He had been in Kirkby Barton for less than thirty-six hours and it felt like approximately three weeks. Time was passing in a hellishly slow manner here. On board a ship, time was crucial. It was tied up with location, and distance, and speed, and all the other things that were paramount at sea and irrelevant standing still on land. He wasn’t moving, so perhaps the hands on the clock had just given up.
“I saw the light on in the library and thought I’d see if you needed anything,” Sedgwick said.
Phillip was about to tell him how presumptuous this sentiment was, but got distracted by the sight of the vicar taking a last puff on his cigarillo before dropping it to the ground and extinguishing it with his boot, the sound of leather on stone somehow as loud as a whip crack.
Before Phillip could quite grasp what was happening, Sedgwick entered the room and came to stand before him. They were about the same height, and stood close enough for Phillip to discern the solemn expression on the vicar’s face. Sedgwick put a hand solidly on Phillip’s shoulder, and for a mad moment Phillip thought he was about to be kissed. The room, the whole world, was reeling crazily around except for that one point of contact where Sedgwick touched him, and there it burned.
Chapter Five
Ben knew straightaway that it had been a mistake to stand so close to the captain, and an even worse mistake to touch him.
He was trying to do right by the man, trying to do his duty. Dacre was drunk, alone, and staring at his dead wife’s portrait. It was quite clearly the right thing to go to him, to be with him, to offer whatever small solace he could. Any clergyman and indeed any decent human being would recognize this; Ben had to listen to his conscience rather than the voice that warned him not to get closer to temptation.
Because this man was temptation incarnate. If Ben had ever let himself imagine a man beside him during the furtive nighttime releases that he never thought of in the light of day, that man might have looked very much like the captain. Lean frame, wide mouth, eyes that seemed to know things Ben couldn’t even dream of.
Feeling his face heat, Ben did his best to clear his mind of these unwelcome thoughts, to focus on duty and not on the heat emanating from Captain Dacre’s body, the solidity of the muscles under Ben’s hand.
“I apologize for having assumed the worst of you when you arrived,” Ben managed. “Being here must dredge up all your grief.”
The captain stepped backward, dislodging Ben’s hand. “Grief!” he sputtered. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. And you can sod right off with your priestly rubbish, so spare it for someone who cares.”
Ben automatically glanced at the portrait of the late Mrs. Dacre. He had only seen her a few times before her death. He had buried her, just as he would soon bury Mr. Farleigh and just as he had escaped burying Alice. “It’s true that I’ve never had that kind of loss, but if you like I can—”
“I’m not grieving my wife, you fool.” Captain Dacre sank into a chair. His words were slurred and Ben knew any confidence he was about to receive would be regretted when the captain sobered up. “I resent the hell out of her for dying, and it’s utter...” He gestured futilely with his hands before dropping them to the arms of the chair. “It’s utter shit that she won’t get to see the children grow up. But I’ve finished grieving her.”
There was something about the way he put the stress on the last word that gave Ben pause. “But youaregrieving,” he said.
For a moment Ben thought the captain wouldn’t answer. “I lost my lieutenant fourteen months ago.”
Ben didn’t know whether it was the precise measure of time or the magnitude of sorrow in the wordlostthat clued him in to exactly what Dacre was getting at. “I see,” he said.
There was scorn in the captain’s eyes. “I don’t think you do, vicar.”
Ben could have managed a platitude, something about friendship and loss. He could have extricated himself from this situation without giving up any of his own secrets. But that would be a betrayal of his own conscience; the right thing was to let the captain know that he wasn’t alone, that his secrets were shared. This, he told himself, was why he searched out the brandy decanter and poured himself a glass. Nobody liked to drink alone, he reasoned. This was why he settled into the chair opposite the captain’s. It was all to give the captain comfort and companionship, not because Ben desperately longed to talk to another man who shared his own... proclivities.
“I do know,” Ben said after taking a sip of brandy. “I’m not unfamiliar with the way men can become close when living in proximity.” Oh, that was so primly euphemistic, so desperately inadequate, as the captain’s bleak laugh made clear. He tried again, measuring his words carefully. “When I was at school—”
The captain cut him off with an impatient wave of his hand. “Every schoolboy knows about having the convenient sort of friendship where you toss one another off and never speak of it in the light of day.”
That was indeed so close to Ben’s only experiences that he was momentarily speechless to hear it dismissed out of hand. He silently sipped his brandy and tried to look like a man who wasn’t perilously out of his depth in this conversation.
“The worst of it is that maybe that’s all it was to McCarthy. Perhaps for him, during a long sea voyage, beggars couldn’t be choosers. But now he’s dead and I’ll never know.” Dacre looked up at him with barely focused eyes, as if only now recalling that he was not alone. “I’m very drunk and I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
Ben couldn’t argue with that. “If you’ll pardon me for saying so, you already have.”
Something like a smile whispered across Dacre’s face. “Point taken.”
“You’re grieving your...”Friendwas wrong.Loverseemed an invasion of privacy. But what else was there? “Your Lieutenant McCarthy,” he finally said. “He was important to you.” Ben knew how to have this conversation, this repetitive reassurance that grief can take its own time and shape. But that had been grief for parents, children, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives. Neat categories of valid relationships that everyone understood, phrases of belonging that could be etched concisely onto tombstones: beloved son, devoted wife. There were even rules for how to grieve people in each category, how many months to wear a black armband and whether one could dance. Captain Dacre didn’t have any of that, and Ben felt his heart twist in his chest at what that must cost him.
