Nothing in England was exactly as Jack remembered it. The weather was colder, the villages smaller and poorer, the people less friendly to strangers. One inn Jack remembered as being kind to wayfarers had burned down. At another, they were overcharged and glared at because Tory and Alphonse looked "foreign."
Tory wondered what they must make of Alphonse Belair, a Negro man not above four feet tall with a trace of West Indian spice in his cultured English speech. Or herself, a tall Yankee female of mixed blood with the dubiously dark hair and eyes inherited from her Mohawk mother. But if England would colonize the world, she must expect to reap a harvest of displaced strangers. Only Jack belonged here, Jack Dance, as he called himself now, as dark as a Spaniard and weathered from the sea, but English to the bone. He had grown up in parish villages and country towns just like these, tumbling at fairs and playing at provincial theatres all over England. He swore they could make a living here. An honest living.
But Jack had not reckoned on the unseasonable cold and early November frosts of 1826. Village market days were sparsely attended and no one wanted to linger outside to watch acrobatics and recitations. This morning they had come to a crossroads on the coach road above Portsmouth, their port of entry.
"We might toss a coin," Alphonse suggested. "If we still have one."
"And leave the choice to chance?" said Jack. "No, Dame Fortune got us out of the islands alive; we dare not ask too much of her or we’ll spend all our credit." He gestured up the road before them. "This would take us to London, eventually, and the coaching inns might offer their yards to strollers."
But Tory did not suppose Jack was eager to return to London, the scene of his most ignominious departure from this country almost ten years earlier, as a lad of nineteen.
"But we’re short of funds and have no connections in London." Jack sighed. "Poverty is one thing out here in the counties; there’s fresh air and open country and church wardens to apply to as a last resort. But starving in the middle of the grimy metropolis in the dead of winter is an altogether different proposition."
"What lies that way?" Tory nodded to the road that bore east.
"Chichester and Brighton. There’s a grand playhouse in Brighton, but that’s a cheerless place in winter, unless the Prince Regent — the King, I mean — comes down for Christmas. But any theatre will have engaged their players by now and won’t consider anyone else without some extraordinary novelty to exploit in the bills." Jack shook his head. "It’s a pity we missed the fair season, but they’ll all be over, now, but for some mop fairs in the northern counties. I’ve starved in the north before and I don’t recommend it."
"It’s a great comfort to know you’ll find us a really suitable place to starve," said Alphonse.
"Oh, aye, and I know ‘em all!" Jack grinned. "The farming south is best. Not as bountiful as the Indies, but even in winter you’ll find an occasional row of cabbages or turnips left out for the sheep."
"Is there any place in England where you have not starved?" asked Alphonse. "Perhaps we should begin there."
Jack thought it over. "I was never . . . unhappy . . . in the West Country."
Tory knew that somewhere in the west lay the ghosts of the foster parents Jack had loved and abandoned so long ago. Ghosts he might not yet want to face. But they started west for Southampton, as the days grew steadily colder and their accommodations meaner.
Only the sudden jolt of waking told Tory she had dozed at all. The high, fluting wheeze of the traveler in the next bed continued unabated, as did the snoring of his companion, rattling like a coach over a rutted road but for the odd moments when it ceased abruptly, leaving a silence twice as thunderous.
Jack’s hand burned like a brand through the two shirts Tory wore tucked into her trousers, which were not yet thick enough to cushion her from the itchy lumps in the straw-filled lodging house mattress or the hard wooden slats underneath. But Jack’s light touch and the warmth of his body curled behind her agitated her even more. It was all she could do not to roll over in his embrace and hold him fast until summer came. She had been struggling all night against this urge and was more exhausted now than when they had first come to bed.
It had been Tory’s idea to put on male clothing, remnants from their previous life together, their life at sea. If she passed herself off as a lad, they could take cheaper lodgings, a common bed for the three of them. It was too cold to sleep outside, apart from the danger of footpads and brigands, and Tory was tired of being shunted off into ladies’ common rooms. If she must share a bed, she would damn well share it with Jack. If only she could shut down the traitorous longing of her flesh.
"Don’t even think about it, Rusty," Jack murmured, behind her. She might have known he’d be lying awake in the dark, reading her mind.
"I’m sorry, hombre. I thought this would be a good idea."
"It is. I can't sleep at all without you."
Tory listened for the low rumble of Alphonse’s breathing from Jack’s other side and slid her hand backward over the curve of Jack’s hip, trying to ignore the severity of bone she felt through his clothing; he was long and lanky, but not usually so thin. Jack pulled the musty blanket up more snugly over them both and nestled closer under the brown plaid woollen cloak he’d bought for her from a peddlar in the last market town, reciting himself hoarse in taverns when it was too cold to play outside.
"I hope you're keeping my account up to date," Jack murmured into her hair, scarcely more than a vibration in his body through the layers of clothing that separated them, he was so skilled at modulating his voice. Or perhaps he hadn't spoken at all; she might have merely heard his thoughts.
"I am," she breathed. "But you're racking up interest at an alarming rate."
"Never, ever, have I been so eager to pay a debt."
A warm sigh on the back of her neck, and Tory's hunger quickened. She snuggled back irresistibly into Jack's body. His hand tightened on hers.
"Let me give you something on account," he whispered. His long fingers moved gently down below the curve of her belly, feathering lightly against rough fabric that could not conduct sensation enough as Tory twisted beneath it. Jack shushed her softly as his hand slid into the slit in her trousers.
Tory bit her lip to stifle her moan; it wracked her body instead, and Jack smiled behind her. She could feel it.
"Easy, easy, easy," he chanted like the stirring of a breeze, while his teasing drove all possibility of ease out of her fevered body.
Tory grimaced around clamped-shut lips so as not to rouse the sleeper in the next bed, only inches away, although the louder he snored, the less likely they were to be heard. She pushed out her own scanty breaths in concert with that relentless sawing, what few breaths she could muster as Jack's slow, tender touching commanded her body, playing her as skillfully as a pipe, sensible to all her stops and frets, oh. Whose speech was that? What play? Oh. God.
"Hombre." It was scarcely a groan as another small seizure of pleasure took her. She sent her own roving hand backward again, over Jack's arm across her hip, but found only the twill and worsted covering him; her hands were less clever than his. "I can't . . . return the favor."
Jack chuckled softly against her back. "Keep purring like that, Rusty, and I am well sated. For now."
A blast like the trumpeting of an outraged goose erupted so suddenly out of the next bed that Tory had to bite back a surge of laughter. Jack muttered something dire behind her.
"Oh, Rusty, I should never have brought you here," he murmured.
But they both knew why they were here. Half a world away from the Indies, where the ghosts of what they had been could never follow them. Could they? She drew his arm more tightly around her.
"This is your home," she reminded him. "And now it’s our home, too. We’re alive, all of us, and we’re together. Nothing else matters."
If only it were true.
Top: Portsmouth the Sailors Highway by Thomas Rowlandson (1814)
Above: Old Roadside Inn by Edward Charles Williams (1850) (detail)
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