“WELL.” Delacorte stood back and planted his hands on his hips. “I’d warrant that makes you a hero, too, you old sea dog!”
“No,” Tristan said.
That wasn’t entirely true—a street rat from St. Giles doesn’t rise to be an infamously effective, ruthless naval captain without someone bandying about the wordhero. The king himself had used it. Once. In a private conversation, granted.
It was just that the heartier Delacorte became, the more air he expended, the less air Tristan felt inclined to expend in the form of words, as if to maintain the balance of air in the universe.
Delacorte was silently contributing other things to the atmosphere, too. His enthusiasm for the food at dinner had begun expressing itself in other ways.
Tristan was hardly delicate. He’d spent a few years crammed on ships with hundreds of men and was well aware of how cheerfully disgusting they could be. It was just that he hadn’t had to do it in recent years. One of the privileges of being a captain was having his own quarters, in which he didn’t have to listen to snoring, gastric eruptions, weeping, night terrors, or surreptitious masturbation.
“Oh, I suspect you’re being modest, Hardy.”
“No one who knows me would ever suggest that.”
While this was true, Delacorte laughed heartily for no reason Tristan could surmise.
There was a lull, during which Tristan thought he could begin making inquiries, though it was difficult to imagine Delacorte as a smuggler, roaring away about cigars in a black boat slinking up the coast, or nimbly leaping ashore with purloined goods. There was nothing of subtlety in the man. He’d be hung with alacrity in no time if he were a smuggler.
“Hardy!” Delacorte whisper-barked behind his hand, pantomiming secrecy, even though they were completely alone. “Have one of these.”
He slipped his hand into his coat and withdrew, of all things...
... two cigars.
He wagged his eyebrows at Tristan by way of encouragement.
Tristan stared at them.
Slowly, wordlessly, Tristan accepted one.
Ran it beneath his nose.
The little hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
“You’ll love it, Hardy,” Delacorte enthused. “They taste like... a damp house made of chocolate and perhaps parsley or sage, in which two zebras have been fucking on a dirt floor.”
Tristan stared at him.
It might be the most profane thing he’d ever heard.
And he’d been asailor.
But Delacorte had lit it and he was studying it pensively, even beatifically, as smoke wreathed him, his brow wrinkled a bit.
“No—lionsfucking,” he amended, cheerfully. Satisfied with that conclusion, he sucked until the tip glowed. “And yet, it’s delicious, somehow. Most interesting thing I’ve ever smoked.”
Thiswas why women wanted to segregate the men for a time. One just never knew what they were going to say or do. For the same reasons one oughtn’t to keep an ocelot for a pet. He’d heard of a French aristocrat who had tried that once. It had humped the family dog and eaten the cat.
And they were bound to talk about all the things they’d smoked, eventually, because men had those kinds of conversations.
“I must regretfully decline at the moment, Delacorte, but thank you. Where did you get these singular cigars?”
“Bought them at the apothecary up the road on Courtland Street a month ago. Said they’d get more in but never did. Now they’re selling them for ten pounds each. Ten pounds! I ask you.” He shook his head mournfully. “Who has that sort of money to spend on cigars?”
“Did the apothecary say from whom they’d purchased the cigars?”
“Didn’t ask, my good man. Was selling him exotic concoctions and I didn’t want to remind him of another vendor at that delicate juncture.”
