dead sailors sighing

Crozier exhales between his teeth, feeling the weight of himself in his hand; the memory of the day’s work is still rattling around inside him like a libidinous itch. He has had men flogged before, for drunkenness and similar infractions against good order, but none like this. As a boy he’d suffered the start of a boatswain’s rope, whenever he was found idle or his hands were clumsy with some piece of work — and at home he’d been on the receiving end of a thrashing more than enough to be accustomed to the notion of discipline —

Sir John Franklin has a portrait of his lady wife hanging over his bunk, ever-vigilant; Crozier has only a blank place on the wall where any image might have hung, and there is no woman’s eye to supervise him now. He lets his legs sprawl apart and rucks up his shirt.

The other lads had suffered with sobs and whimpers, and taken their blows across their backs as dutiful as children; they have served their part in this chamber-play of shipboard discipline, and they will be wiser for accepting their punishment with equanimity. They will surely sin no more, or at least no more than they otherwise might have kept clear of Mr. Hickey’s blandishments. But Mr. Hickey is more the sinner than ever now, and when flogged he had glowed with furious heat — his body had shimmered with sweat and tears and the roiling currents of pain. Crozier could feel the heat of such a scourging burn in his own cheeks, and he had felt no shame.

A shirker, a chiseler, a dirty Irish bugger content to scandalize the finest blue lights of Her Majesty’s Navy — what business has he, being in the possession of a beautiful body? Mr. Hickey had the temerity to suffer like Christ, as if he hadn’t the faintest notion of what he had done to offend. Crozier had feasted on the pitiful sight of that bent back, and the trembling of those smooth muscled arms, but it hadn’t been enough.

Francis would have scourged the flesh from those bones, he would have seen him bleed in gouts — would have taken up the cat himself, and used it until the cords snapped or his own arm gave way. If Crozier had his way he would make him writhe against the impromptu block, he would hear those proud lips plead.

Frustration takes him the rest of the way to his climax. Crozier spills between his fingers, hot and bewildered.

Once spent he lies in his shame, lacking even the motivation to go wet a handkerchief at the basin and clean himself up — utterly enervated and with teeth on edge, letting the spunk dry against his belly. Once the flush of hot anger is spent, all that is left is the dregs of self-disgust, without even the relief that might accompany a more polite purgation. Such brutal excitement should be enough to shame him out of entertaining any thoughts at all.