Page 1 of Rears & Vices

One

HM Schooner Netley

Kingston Harbour, Upper Canada

HIS MAJESTY JOHN BULL AT FORT YORK:

DEADLY SELF-SABOTAGE!

Everard glared down at the Rochester Spy’s front page in disbelief.

“Self-sabotage—? Jesus sainted Christ!”

He threw the thing. But thanks to Upper Canada’s lakeshore humidity, the three-year-old Yankee paper was damp, and heavy, too, so it merely hit the edge of his desk with a pathetic, protesting thump and tumbled down.

Everard stood from his cot to resume pacing his cabin. It served him right, looking for old gossip about pirates.

But the editorialising! It was just as well he was no longer in printing. He had a mind to⁠—

“Sir?” The ship’s boy, from the companionway. “Gig’s ready, cap’n.”

Right. No need for more newspaper hearsay, anyway; he’d soon see this pirate for himself.

“Presently!”

Everard plucked up his hat, shoved it on. Courts martial were full dress, which meant buttons—eighteen of them—but he had, at least, his own bicorn: satin-trimmed, beaver felt, nonregulation. He hoped someone might take its notice and that that someone might be admiralty, for it was as close as he’d ever get to giving that institution a certain finger.

Everard opened the door. “Jack?”

The boy jumped. “Yessir?”

“Please return these before you take your liberty ashore.”

Jack eyed the three crates of newsprint with some trepidation, caught himself, and quickly stared ahead to the panelling. “Yessir.”

Everard bit his tongue against a thank-you—it was neither called for nor appropriate, and please had been bad enough of a slip—and went above deck. His most recent lieutenant met him at the gangway, saluted with two hooked fingers. Everard nodded in return.

“She’s yours for the day, Mr. Spicelay.”

The bo’sun piped him off the side with a shrill whistle, and when he’d sat down aft, piped the boat off, too. Everard cast his focus away from Kingston Harbour and across the sealike Lake Ontario. It was hot today, unusually so for June, and the water was calm, waves smoothed and set sparkling by an uninhibited sun. There was a light breeze in from the west, gentle enough that he’d no reason to fear for his favourite hat.

The Lakes Service had few advantages. Water that one could scoop straight into one’s mouth was foremost.

Another was that, compared to his saltwater contemporaries, Everard had judged relatively few courts martial over the past three years. Today, though, he didn’t have much choice in it. It was 1816, and the wars with the Yanks and the French had ended. There was a glut of officers. His twenty-four-year career clung to nothing more than a few bits of unwound rope: courtesy, rank, and his lingering—more like withering—reputation. As much as he hated passing judgment on his fellow seaman, obliging the admiralty was unavoidable.

Slowly, the little gig pulled up to the shiny black-and-white hull of HMS Brigitte.

Trials were held on the largest deck to be had in-harbour. A fifty-eight-gun, three-masted, fully rigged frigate, the Brigitte certainly qualified; she was the biggest freshwater ship left not laid up in Upper Canada.

Everard stood, hand on his sword, and looked up as he waited to be piped aboard. Captain of a schooner he may have been, but still a captain.

The whistle blew for his ascent. Everard couldn’t keep in grunts of effort as he climbed the unending hull. His left hand—with the one thumb, two knuckles, and not much else—relied on the strength of his arm below it, and required he wrap his wrist on every pull. Rope handholds were a bit slow going, a struggle some would call undignified. He called those someones fucking bastards.

“Everard!” a voice greeted him as he crested the railing. “About time!”

Everard’s two good sea legs were his only saving grace as he stepped down the gangway and untwisted his uniform sleeve.

Preston D’Arcy, Post-Captain, looked precisely the same as Preston D’Arcy, First Lieutenant had: wild, red-brown curls, fashionably cropped and haphazardly greased. Long dark lashes. Just enough French extraction for a profile too pouty to be truly stern. Handsome, and far too aware how to leverage that fact.