His Heart's Obsession Read Free Page B

chest was taking the strain of tons upon tons of cold iron.
    Thank God you at least made no sign of what you really felt. He knows no more than he did. A man like that—you knew all along he was too perfect to be what you are. You would have thought worse of him if he was. Now at least he still thinks you are his friend. That is honour enough.
    I don’t want to be his fucking friend!
    But if it is all I can have?
    “You will let me tell you a little about her?” Hamilton’s eyes were without guile, oblivious, still as clear as water. “And then perhaps you will give me some advice in how to win her? If anyone can charm the maidens to his hand, it is you.”
    Hal forced a smile and stood up straighter, neatening the fall of his coat. He no longer felt so very hot now that the cold deadweight of despair was back, chilling his blood from the inside. “Of course, sir. Whatever I can do to help or please you. You only have to ask.”
    Sometimes it was clear enough he was born to be damned. They said, didn’t they, that there were only a chosen few singled out for salvation, and it became clearer and clearer that he was not one of them. How strange, though, that a good God would do so repugnant a thing as to create a man already destined to burn. It were better, surely, that he had not lived at all.
    But if it was his destiny—inescapable—to go to hell, he wasn’t sure it could hurt any more than this. It would be a relief, perhaps, to have it over with and the hope gone, for it was the hope, the possibility of happiness held out and then snatched away again, that was cruellest of all.
    He thought, madly, while he listened to the man he loved praise the virtues of the woman he loved, that it would be good to confess. If only he could tell someone the truth of what he was, stop this endless pretence. If only—just once—he could be open about his true desires, it might almost be worth the inevitable condemnation.
    If he looked into the future, he saw only more of this. Or the gallows. And the gallows was beginning to look like the better choice.

Chapter Three
    Aboard HMS Swiftsure, off the Virgin Isles
    “You bastard son of a maggot and a weevil!”
    Startled at Hal’s bellow by his ear, Robert jerked. The sextant slipped from his grip. With a wild lunge, he snatched the instrument out of the air before it fell over the ship’s rail into the green ocean, and turned to see what could possibly be wrong now.
    They had been at sea two days since the last landfall—the worst of this West Indies station was the island-hopping involved. No blue-water sailing at all, no months at sea, where the soothing rhythm of day upon day of naval routine might quiet a crew’s restiveness and weld them into a unit. No, the West Indies station was all small journeys interrupted by anchorage, and even those journeys were as likely as not to be fretted by encounters with the French and the Spanish and the Dutch, and pirates of every nation. The tension took its toll. And Hal—Hal had been vibrating with it ever since they left Kingston.
    Robert’s quick look disclosed no enemy ship on the horizon. The trouble was on board then. Swiftsure ’s deck gleamed the silver-white of well-seasoned oak, ruled, like a child’s copy book, in perfectly straight black lines of pitch and oakum caulking. Under this infernal heat the pitch melted, bleeding tacky black liquid across the carefully scrubbed planks. As Robert moved, his shoe stuck to the nearest line. He yanked his foot free, scowling, and looked up at the dangerous tangle of the sails.
    Below the main yard, the mainsail had escaped its gaskets and unfurled. With a sound like a bone breaking, it snapped in the wind, slamming into one of the ship’s boys, sending him flying. While sailors picked up and soothed the child, Hal—fists clenched and the veins in his neck bulging—bellowed at the mainmast crew. “If I was to get the doctor to saw open your heads, we’d be a fortnight