pent in walls of glass

“When did you sail the Mersey, captain?”

“Before I sailed on Fury, I patrolled the rivers on half-pay. I spent one last great spree up and down Park Lane before I shipped out to the Pole. Half-thinking I wouldn’t get another chance, I imagine.”

“My mother always said my real father was a Merseyside sailor. Said it was why I was so ill-behaved.”

The bed is too narrow for two; canted at such a sick angle it scarcely accommodates one, but they’ve snugged in close between its edges like a couple of paupers. Hickey’s head rests against Francis’ shoulder. His fox-colored hair smells like the bottom of a coal bin; it always does when he comes to his master’s cabin, and it cannot be helped. Ordinarily, he combs it back behind his ears with a matronly primness. Crozier had taken a great hank of it in his fist during the act gone by, and it still hangs lankly separate, heavy in its grease.

“Your people are from Limerick, you said.” Francis is a drunken man, but not so drunk that he has forgotten how they first met, how they first spoke. Sobriety creeps up on him like a thief.

“My mother went back to her mother’s house to deliver her child. There was some business about her father. We were back in Liverpool before I was old enough to speak. and gone before I knew it. Haven’t set foot there since.”

“Is that so? Where did she live before all that?”

“Park Lane, as it happens.” Hickey drums his narrow fingers against Crozier’s sternum.

“Not much of a place to raise a child in,” Crozier says. The weight of Hickey’s body against his chest and the fresh exertion has left his voice thick and cracked, like an old man. It isn’t a neat lie; a man who knew the terrain better would specify a more plausible location. No alumnus of Park Lane ever went on to any trade but theft and whoring.

“It was a magical land for me, sir. Heaven for a boy. Do you remember all the gingerbread-sellers on Castle Street?”

“Christ, what I’d do for a slab of that now. You make me feel like an old man. The last time I set foot in Liverpool would have been Easter 1821. I was only a midshipman, and the same age then as you are now. I expect you’d have been a babe in arms then…”

Fully half a lifetime; Francis’ head aches too much for numbers and dates. So long ago, yet he can remember now that it was Easter season because he was all in a knot over where to attend services in town – funny, the things you remember and the things you don’t. It had seemed like a terribly significant choice at the time, one laden with frightful import, and it had really meant nothing at all.

“Not even that. I don’t mind that you are old,” Hickey says. He strokes the outer edge of Crozier’s forearm, gentling the coarse coppery hairs into running all the same direction. “You’re a clever man, and if you were any younger, you wouldn’t be a captain. You and I wouldn’t know one another. Do you remember the girl they all called Sweet Nancy, captain? Sweet Nancy Cuffe, the hazelnut-seller’s girl.”

An image blinks into mind, like a portrait drawn on wet paper. Crozier laughs.

“Oh, I knew her well. Sweet lovely Nancy, the sailor’s sweetheart, like the song says. I should think half the river patrollers knew her at one point or another; she was a game one when she wasn’t quarreling.”

“She had a temper even then, did she?”

“Like a hellcat. How did you know little Nan, Mr. Hickey? Don’t tell me she’s still there doing her business, then I really will be an old man.”

“Cuffe was my mother’s maiden name,” Hickey says pertly.

The next words follow some small consideration. “A sister, then, or–”

“No one calls her Nancy any more, sir. She’s plain Ann, now.”

“Ah.”

“That’s lucky then, your knowing her, isn’t it? You could have been my father, in another life.”

Coy and coaxing. What a filthy thing to say, filthy beyond believing. They have freshly fucked, when Hickey tells him this – the spunk is drying on his belly. It is not the right time to say such a thing, not even in jest.

“Christ.” Crozier shuts his eyes, shifting apart even when it sends him bumping against the sharp bedrail. There is a pain in his throat, some throbbing artery. “You know how to turn a man’s stomach, Cornelius. I think you’d better go.”

Francis does up the buttons on his waistband, fumbling in lieu of further remark. Jopson would be dismayed to see the state of his clothes, stained as they are with worse things than spendings, but there are things in life that would curl Jopson’s hair and such are the habits of his captain.

Hickey sits sulkishly on the edge of the bed, bending to slip his shoes back on. There is a deep groove down his spine; it suggests a subterranean level of bone that soft muscle cannot conceal. At his low back, there are soft dimples bracketing the crease of his buttocks. Crozier wants to reach out a hand.

What had she been like, the girl in Park Lane, what had been her real name? Slim as a reed, a pretty little woman, with soft high breasts and a rat’s nest of red hair. He’d had her from behind, he’d stuffed himself inside her and felt the stiff resignation running through her white backside and white thighs like a line under tension. She couldn’t have wanted him; Crozier is old enough now to know that women go along with sailors from hunger and not from wanton joy.

There was little about him worth wanting then – green as grass, with a complexion like a nutmeg grater and an unpleasant accent, a pair of rough groping hands always feeling for something soft and warm to bury themselves inside. He’d known it even then, and it was only that she said such things, things that made him feel wanted– how clever he was, and how kind. She’d let him take her any way he wanted, up against an iron fence or with her back to an alley wall, practically in the street – they couldn’t have done it in that rathole she lived in with a dozen other creatures, not unless he wanted to come away with vermin. He had wanted only a release from desire, and the sound of a woman’s voice – a woman’s kindness, paid for one shilling at a time.

Mr. Hickey does not bend easily beneath him, he does not give himself over to idle talk – but he watches and listens, he waits on Crozier’s every word the way other young men once doted on Sir John, with shining eyes. His company is bought and paid for another way. It had all been too smooth and too obliging, a pair of countrymen engaging in fraternization of the most meaningless kind – a hand of cards, a glass of spirits drunk slowly, and soon enough a frigging. The caulker’s mate is only a fool, a common sailor of the very commonest type: hopeful, merry, intemperate as a child and sullen when rebuked. It is almost enough to provoke pity.

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” Hickey shoots back over his shoulder as he does up his shirt buttons. “You can do the sums yourself if you don’t believe me, forty-seven less twenty-one.”

“What an ugly mind you have, Mr. Hickey. What in God’s name would make you say such a thing?”

Drink has dulled him, but disgust has sharpened him up again, it has raised in him a keen awareness of the absurdity of the scene. Hickey fumbles himself into a sloppy sort of order in the corner; he even scrapes the dirt from under his fingernails, but the scarlet flush of sex has left his cheeks and nose clownish-pink. Such a man is beneath even contempt. Francis should have known – what kind of man could find Crozier admirable? A laggardly malcontent and a bugger.

How has he fallen this far? His mouth is dry, his throat is tight, his arse is sore. Francis doesn’t know where his boots have gotten to, or where his jacket is in the jumble of charts and blankets. He doesn’t know the hour of night, nor what he came here to do. Was it a pretense, or some errand in earnest–

Hickey pauses for a moment, illuminated in profile by the sooty lamplight. His hollow eye searches Crozier’s face for recognition; his nostrils are flaring. There is nothing in this man’s face to suggest an affinity between them, the bones beneath the skin bear no resemblance to Crozier’s own. Witness the long jaw and teak-colored whiskers, the pronounced nose – they are nothing alike unless perhaps it is something to do with the smallness of the eye, the crooked gash-set of the mouth. Perhaps the lad takes after his mother.

“I knew I was special from the day I was born,” he says, in a confiding tone that is nauseating – as if he is speaking to his own biographer. “I remember everything, did you know that? I remember the smell of my mother’s breast. I remember the house where I was born. I remember the house where you found her, sir.”

This is too much. She’d smelled like wet earth and burnt husks, she was young – she was young and it was a grievous sin, what Crozier did with her. But he did come back, he came back to that filthy warren on Park Lane and found her small body waiting, the next night’s leave and the next after that –

“I wasn’t the only man who found her there,” Crozier says, forcing himself up straighter. “She was a common whore. I’d quite forgotten her.”

“Oh, but you knew her better than most, I’ll reckon.” Hickey bares his teeth; they are queerly white. “You needn’t be worried she’ll trouble you now, sir. She was transported to Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Hydery for the receiving of a silver brooch and ring.”

“And what became of you after that?”

Hickey only smiles; his lips are red as cherries. Crozier coughs his disgust.

“You could have a thousand different fathers, for all I know, and none of them me. I don’t want to think of it.”

The poor bed down together like pigs, and they live like pigs. A half-dozen persons asleep in one bed – the poor mingle indiscriminately, brothers with sisters and fathers with daughters. One feels sorry for bastard children, but there’s more than one rating aboard this foundering vessel who’d come to be on the wrong side of the blanket. The condition hardly warrants such vicious conjecture.

Hickey turns sharply to face him full-on; his waistcoat hangs open and loose over his sweat-brushed body, and his hands flex into purposeful fists against his thighs. For the first time, Crozier feels a prick of fear.

“What would you have done, if you knew you had a bastard son in a Merseyside gutter with nothing to eat and no schooling? No trade?” Hickey’s chin juts provokingly; he rakes back his hair from his forehead with his fingernails. Those fingernails have raked Crozier’s hide bloody. They have left scarlet lines down his freckled shoulders, they have caught punishingly at his nipples. The marks are still on his body, and the memory.

I remember everything, Mr. Hickey had said–

“I couldn’t have known,” Crozier says. His nausea is a solid weight in his chest, and it is terribly cold; he presses a hand to his face, then makes a fist of it. “I never knew her. I sailed with Parry not long after.”

What is this man to Crozier now? A dreadful liar, a cast-off and a waif – sinned against and sinning, both. They’ve sinned together. Such postures of slighted pride are absurd between men who have fucked and sucked each other senseless. Hickey is not his son, any more than he is his sweetheart.

“Would you have put him up and housed him? Taken him with you to sea?”

“I would have done the decent thing.” The knuckle of Crozier’s thumb presses in below his lip; he tightens his fist. “Why should I listen to anything you say? Christ, I would have done what was decent.”

“I don’t think I know what’s decent in this case. Do you, sir?”

“This is only a story. You’ve drawn it up to hurt me. I should never have touched you – you’re not the man I thought you were, Mr. Hickey, and I want no more of you. What you’ve told me now is cause to reconsider your character. If we were nearer to shore, I’d have you dismissed for it.”

Crozier expects some smart remark, like I don’t think you would, sir, or closer to where, sir, but Hickey draws himself up to his full height, with his waistcoat flapping open and his neckcloth balled up in one hand. He is not a tall man.

“You should be more charitable about my mother, you know. She was a generous spirit. She’d never refuse anyone a penny. I once saw an old beggar-woman kiss her very hand for her kindness. And she looked after me as well as she was able. Can you say the same, captain?”

“You’re only torturing me now.”

He gestures with the limp cloth in a rather homely fashion. “I am telling you the truth, and that’s more than any other man will do. I know who my mother was, and where she got me. You know where you were, and who you bellied with.”

“You should be drowned in a sack for saying these things.”

Hickey should hang for this, and Crozier too – for the whole of it. He deserves to hang for the whole affair from the moment it was conceived. Crozier is immobilized by his self-disgust, he is trapped and trammeled in it. It’s as though Francis has been idly playing with some poisonous serpent, letting it pass its coils between his fingers, all unwitting of its sharp teeth.

Those awful eyes fix on him with a greedy softness. He does not want money, no, or anything else but what Crozier is least equipped to give him–

“You don’t see yourself in me? I am ambitious and vengeful. I stand apart from the others. We are made for better things than this, you and me.”

“Better things?” Crozier says the words with mordant deliberation, and sees the flinch of hurt in Hickey’s features; what comes roaring back is smarting indignation.

Hickey has begun to raise his voice. “Is that not providence, that we should meet like this? That I should go to sea, and you with me? Don’t send me away now, Francis, I couldn’t bear it.”

This is punishment; he is being punished. Crozier chokes with joyless laughter and yanks the blankets about himself. “You call me by that name again, I’ll knock you down.”

Hickey’s small body sags, and the tension is gone between them as instantly as a gust of cold air might puff out a candle.

This man is nothing to him; he is only a convenience, he is a set of hands to do the work that Crozier wearies of. He matters less in Crozier’s heart than any other man, Francis rates him lower than a stranger. The pair of them are going mad. Crozier slumps with his backbone to the ship’s groaning side, feeling the ache of his old bones piercing through the postcoital slackness of their coupling. Not half an hour previous they had been buried in one another, and now a handful of words have changed all that – a certain street, a certain port, an amphitheater girl with red hair. Coy hints piled one on another. Had Cornelius wanted him to guess?

Here they are, a couple of strays. His pistol rests in its pretty presentation case, but a single shot will not do for both of them – that’s a madman’s thought, Crozier thinks, that’s an ugly fancy. He hates what he hears because he knows it is true – or that it may be true, it may have been true once and nothing but the perversity of fate has brought Crozier’s sins to light.

Hickey comes to him, quietly now, and kneels on the boards to lay his head in his lap. Crozier rakes through the lad’s hair with stunned fingers, like a man might pick oakum, mechanically. The lad is nothing to him, nothing, nothing. He means no more than a flutter of ink on the muster rolls. A month’s sporting.

“Christ, you should never forgive me.”

Hickey’s voice is muzzy and philosophical. “It’s all past now. I’m glad, sir, that we are together.”