False Colors by Alex Beecroft Page A

new uniform, and going to visit Lieutenant Donwell.
    By dint of moving the canvas panel of the wall to include cannon number seven–Roaring Jack–Alfie’s cabin had been enlarged. Under doctor’s orders, the gunport stood open to let fresh air into the cabin, revealing dawn’s light just turning from pink to pale, and smooth, green seas, their rounded backs swelling and creaming into foam down the Meteor ’s sides. The cabin smelled of sunlight and fresh paint. Reflections from the water swept rhythmically about the walls.
    By contrast to all this glory, Donwell himself looked terrible; a shape mummified in bandages and curled protectively into the furthest corner of the room. Mute, white and bloodstained, he watched Dr. Harper with wary eyes, tracking every movement.
    “Well enough to speak for himself, I think.” Harper picked up his bag and packed away a variety of blue glass bottles, radiant as sapphires in this light. He looked about vainly for his glasses, which perched on top of the cannon, one arm shoved into the touch-hole. Taking them from John’s offering hand he tried to put them into a pocket, scraping them against the hideous screw end of a trepanning iron which poked out, cutting edge up, from the flap.
    Once he had collected all the doctor’s items together and ushered the man out, John felt quite exhausted and doddery himself. He sat gratefully on the gun-carriage and hoped the light and silence would calm his almost physical anguish of pity.
    Donwell sighed, uncurled a little, hesitant, as though he feared to offend. “There’s…pills,” he whispered. “Here under the…He can’t read his own writing.”
    Getting up, John felt under the board and thin mattress of the cot. He fished out a double handful of pills and a dust of herbs and simples where more had been crushed. Shaking his head in exasperation over the wasted medicine, he put it out of the gunport nevertheless. Doctor Harper was a good man, no doubt about it, but—too old and absent minded to be relied upon—he had already been known to mistake arsenic for antimony with unfortunate results. It might be the captain’s job to ensure his people took physic when needed, whether they wanted to or not, but in this case he felt he might make an exception.
    “I ought to rebuke you, lieutenant, except that I should have done the same myself. How are you?”
“I could get back on duty, sir, if you’d give me a couple of fellows to lift me up and down to the deck. Let me serve in a chair. I know you’ve needed… .”
Donwell’s spurt of energy ran out mid sentence. Closing his eyes, he leaned his head back against the wall and seemed about to fall asleep, jerking awake with a frantic, frightened look just before John thought of tiptoeing away.
“I won’t say we haven’t needed you.” John took the excuse to come closer, so that he could examine Donwell’s face—now a patchwork of green and purple bruises, red, angry burns, and cuts that had healed into black scabs. It was at least no longer swollen; he could see the lineaments of the man he knew there once more. And the voice, though weak, had regained some of its harmony—like an oboe whose shattered reed still draws at least one or two notes. “But we have managed, Mr. Donwell. You are not yet completely indispensable.”
Donwell flinched and looked away. Though the cabin was full of cool light, his eyes retained the fetid darkness of the slave pits. “I learned that, sir. I learned it very well.”
“You misunderstand me!” It occurred to John that he didn’t know the man at all; that a few charged encounters, a moment of sublimity shared, did not amount to very much. “You are not indispensable—quite the opposite. We went to great trouble to get you back as we knew that leaving your troublesome person among the Turks would constitute an act of aggression far more grievous than bombing their fleet.”
Obligingly, Donwell raised the ends of his mouth at this witticism.