What the Ship Remembers - 28. Chapter 28

A Hand at the Helm

Amber light fractured across the map-strewn table; the wardroom was hushed. The usual din of tea cups, log books, and easy chatter had not yet begun; only the faint creak of the hull and the sigh of sails overhead reminded them the ship was still, tethered in the calm waters off Barbados.

Lieutenant Vane sat alone at the far end of the table, one long finger tracing the lip of his tin cup. His eyes were on the letter.

It had been handed to him just moments before by a steward, freshly brought aboard with the other packet dispatches from the anchorage. The superscription was clear and damning in its precision: "To Lieutenant Edward Vane, HMS Absolute. Private."

Not 'official'. Not 'urgent'. But 'private', which in Admiralty parlance often meant something worse.

He broke the seal slowly, as if it might bite.

Whatever was inside did not require length to deliver its blow. The page was brief, neatly folded, written in a hand he recognised too well. His late wife’s brother, Sir Percival Harting, had a signature like an executioner’s flourish. The Admiral’s hand was absent, as ever, but Vane could feel the man’s presence in every carefully oblique phrase.

His face did not change as he read, but a tremor in his hand betrayed him.

A bead of sweat formed at his temple, though the wardroom was still cool from the night air.

He folded the letter again, far too precisely, and tucked it into the inside breast of his coat. Sat back. Closed his eyes briefly.

A door creaked behind him. Someone entered, the bosun perhaps, or young Gordon with the morning’s log. Vane didn’t look up. When he finally did, his face had settled into something colder. Closed. It did not speak of fear: It spoke of calculation.

He rose, smoothed his coat, and stepped out onto the passage.

Later

The change was immediate, and even the junior officers felt it. Vane returned to the day’s routine with methodical precision, but there was something glassy behind the eyes. He issued clipped orders, and watched the midshipmen with the quiet concentration of a man marking a target. He noted and filed away for future use exactly who never quite met his eyes: Morris; Avery; the surgeon, Turner; the midshipmen, Gordon, O'Brien and Douglas.

Most of all, he watched Blake. The one man whose gaze on Vane was so full and frank it bordered on insolence.

Not obviously. Never in a way that could be called out. But his gaze lingered a fraction longer when Blake entered the wardroom, when Blake spoke in the captain’s cabin, when Blake crossed the quarterdeck to report on signal practice. A little too long. A little too still.

More than once, he was found on the main deck at odd hours, seemingly inspecting rigging, but always with a line of sight to wherever Midshipman Blake happened to be.

Lieutenant Pitt noticed it too. He said nothing.

But his jaw set, once. And his hand curled tight on the rail.

Early Afternoon

The sunlight slanted through the open gunports in clean white bars, casting the navigation table in a warm glow. Charts lay unrolled across the scrubbed wood, corners pinned with lead shot, a quadrant and dividers resting beside a half-filled log book.

Blake stood at the head of the table, posture straight, one hand on the edge, the other gesturing as he spoke. A handful of midshipmen leaned in, Gordon scribbling notes, O'Brien watching with a squint of effort, Douglas already halfway to bored.

“Now, if we take our noon sighting and apply the observed altitude, corrected for dip and semi-diameter, we can enter the tables and find...”

“The wrong answer, if you're careless,” came a voice from the hatchway.

The air shifted.

Lieutenant Vane descended slowly, the heel of each boot ringing sharp against the companionway treads. He moved as if a verdict had been delivered and he had come to oversee it. No apology for the interruption. Just an assessing sweep of the room, and then his gaze fixed on Blake.

“Lieutenant,” Blake said stiffly, stepping aside. “We are reviewing noon sights, sir.”

“So I gathered,” Vane said, tone clipped. He didn’t look at the others. Only at Blake.

Blake forced a nod. “Of course, sir. We’ve just finished working through the correction tables.”

Vane crossed to the chart desk, picked up the dividers and turned them in his fingers. “If the declination tables are out of date, what then?”
A few of the men shifted in discomfort. Blake’s jaw flexed.

“With respect, sir,” he said, still formal, “I was focused on principle. I’d intended to review sources next.”

“Yes,” Vane murmured. “You intended.” He leaned down over the chart.

Blake flushed, but didn’t move.

Vane’s voice grew quieter, but sharper.

“A good officer doesn’t just recite lessons from memory, Mr. Blake. He commands. He earns trust. You might consider that the next time you choose to instruct.”

There was an ugly pause.

Blake shifted his stance, eyes still on Vane. Something cold settled in his gut.

Then: “That’s enough.”

The voice came from the far bulkhead, calm and low.

Lieutenant Pitt stepped forward, arms folded. He had been present the entire time, standing in the shadows behind the line of midshipmen, silent as rigging in a dead calm. Now he moved with deliberate slowness, placing himself squarely between Blake and Vane.

“Mr. Blake is conducting instruction under my direction,” Pitt said evenly. “If you have questions about the syllabus, sir, I invite you to bring them to me.”

Vane’s face remained perfectly composed, but his fingers tightened on the dividers. A second passed. Then another.

“Of course, Lieutenant Pitt,” he said smoothly. “Always a pleasure to observe your… mentorship.”

He turned away. But as he stepped up toward the hatch, he paused, hand on the ladder rail.

“Perhaps your loyalty,” he said, voice pitched just high enough to carry, “will steer you straighter than your bearing, Mr. Blake.”

The hatchway swallowed him a moment later. As the echo of Vane’s boots faded up the ladderway, the room seemed to exhale. Gordon shifted his slate. Douglas scratched behind one ear. O’Brien made an aborted movement toward the door, mouthing “God’s teeth” under his breath.

Pitt remained still.

Then, softly, so only Blake could hear, he said, “You held the line.”

Blake turned toward him, something startled and raw in his face.

Pitt met his eyes, steady and sure. “And you did it well.”

Blake swallowed. The air was suddenly thick.

He gave a single nod, quick, almost too slight to see. But it held.

Pitt nodded back, then turned away without another word, vanishing into the companionway with the quiet finality of someone who had said exactly what he could risk.

And Blake, still standing by the table with one hand on the chart, felt, for the first time that day, not alone.

Blake lingered a breath, then two, aware that he was closely watched by the other midshipmen, and not all with sympathy.

Late Afternoon

The corridor was stifling. Blake stepped out of the heat-drenched passage and into the midshipmen’s mess, blinking in the dimness. His shoulders ached from being held straight all morning. His palms still carried the faint imprint of the chart desk's edge where he had gripped it too tightly.

Inside, Charlie Gordon was seated with a ledger open across his knees, a lead stylus tapping idly against the margin. Archie O'Brien sat on a low bench nearby, one leg drawn up, a battered copy of The Haunted Abbey propped open against his knee. They looked up as Blake entered.

"Well," Gordon said, closing the ledger, "you survived."

Blake didn’t answer. He moved to the small shelf by the bulkhead and poured himself half a tin of water, drinking it in two swallows.

O'Brien set the book aside, not smiling. "You've been a good nurse, Jamie. But be careful you're not remembered more for that than for your seamanship."

Blake looked up sharply. "I don't know what you mean."

"Of course you do," O'Brien said, his tone quiet. "You just hoped no one else had seen it."

Blake opened his mouth, then shut it again. He turned to face them both fully, his jaw tight.

Gordon leaned back, his arms crossed loosely. He gave a faint sigh that was neither unkind nor mocking.

“It stirs like wind through cordage. And some take that for storm-sign. People notice. They see where your eyes go. And where his follow."

The silence pressed in, thick with things unspoken. Blake’s face had gone carefully blank, but a pulse beat fast at the side of his throat.

"Whispers from who?" he asked finally.

Gordon shook his head. "Does it matter? Men talk. Midshipmen even more. You know how quickly things grow legs aboard a ship. A look becomes a rumor. A rumor becomes a certainty. And someone like Vane only needs a suggestion to make trouble of it."

"I'm not afraid of Vane," Blake said too quickly.

"Maybe not," said O'Brien. "But Huxley has ears, and Huxley has friends. Don’t think your last conversation with him put the matter to rest."

Blake turned the tin cup in his hand. "He’s done nothing wrong," he said. He wasn't sure whether he meant Pitt or himself.

Gordon gave a small shrug. "Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn’t much matter in the end. What matters is how it looks. To those who want to see something.”

O'Brien stood and reached for his book again, softer now. “We’re not warning you to frighten you. Just to say you’ve got friends here. And we’d like to keep you among us.”

Blake nodded, but it felt mechanical. The space around him had narrowed. Even here, among those who had shared his bread and sweat, he felt the weight of a shadow he hadn’t fully named.

Gordon glanced at him once more and then returned to the ledger.

The only sound for a long moment was the quiet scratch of stylus on slate and the steady creak of timbers around them.

Dusk

The last light of day washed the quarterdeck in pale gold, softening the ship’s hard edges. HMS Absolute lay quiet at anchor, the motion of the sea gentling beneath her hull. The watch kept their distance. It was that rare hour between duty and dark, when the world seemed to pause and listen.

Jamie Blake stood at the rail near the stern gallery, one hand resting on the worn wood, eyes on the horizon. He didn’t turn at the sound of approaching steps. He knew them.

Pitt moved more steadily now, though he was still thinner than before, hollows still visible beneath the cheekbones. He came to stand beside Blake, not too close.

“Midshipman,” he said quietly, almost wry.

“Lieutenant,” Blake answered, without looking over.

They stood like that for a moment, the silence companionable but taut.

“I wanted to thank you,” Pitt said at last. “For staying. For... more than that.”

Blake’s gaze shifted, not toward Pitt but downward, to the glinting water below.

“You steadied me,” Pitt continued. “Not because you had to. Because you chose to. I know what it cost.”

Blake turned then, slowly. Pitt’s expression was bare, no irony, no shield. Just the plain truth of a man who had been brought close to the edge and was still reckoning with what had held him back.

“I didn’t want you to be alone,” Blake said softly. “That’s all.”

“It was not a small thing,” Pitt said. “You saw me through the worst of it. And not only the fever.”

Blake gave a faint smile, but it didn’t last.

“I chose to,” he said. “And because I chose to, I must also choose not to again. Not in that way again."

Pitt’s eyes narrowed slightly. “In what way, precisely?”

Blake looked at him fully now, and for once there was no youthful deflection in his gaze. Just quiet conviction.

“If it makes things harder for you. If it invites questions you can’t afford.”

Pitt flinched almost imperceptibly.

“There are those who raise eyebrows, sir,” Blake added. His tone was careful, even gentle. The words echoed Huxley’s too precisely to be coincidence.

Pitt looked away, jaw tightening, but not in anger. He leaned both hands against the rail, the silence between them shifting again, this time into something sadder.

“I don’t regret it,” Pitt said after a while. “Whatever they think.”

Blake nodded. “Nor do I. But what I do next.. I have to think about the whole of it. Not just what I want.”

Pitt closed his eyes briefly as though that could shield him from scrutiny, then opened them. “You’re right,” he said.

The breeze picked up slightly, brushing their coats.

Blake stepped back, just enough to reassert the line they had both now spoken aloud.

“Good night, sir.”

“Good night, Mr. Blake.”

And then they stood apart, the space between them full of everything unsaid, no longer avoidance, but understanding.

Near Midnight

The lantern in Vane’s cabin guttered low, casting long, shifting shadows on the paneled walls. The air was close and heavy with the smell of old rum and ink. Outside, the creak of the hull and the low slap of waves against the side were the only sounds.

Lieutenant Edward Vane sat at his desk, coat unbuttoned, cravat loose, a half-empty cup of rum in his hand. His eyes were fixed on the letter spread out before him, the wax seal already broken, the paper slightly damp from his fingertips.

He read it again, lips barely moving, the words now etched into his mind.

Our little enterprise may have attracted eyes in certain bureaus in Whitehall. This is not yet a crisis, but discretion is no longer a guarantee. A friendly warning, Edward, yours is the only signature on any documents.

...and with his name on the provisioning manifests sent from Saint Calyxta, there was no plausible deniability left.

His grip on the cup tightened. The rum sloshed slightly against the rim, then stilled. His face was calm, but the muscle at his jaw pulsed, and one finger tapped, lightly, relentlessly, against the desk.

He let out a low breath, half a laugh. “Of course,” he murmured to no one. “Only mine.”

He read aloud, half under his breath, " You understand, of course, that while certain friendships endure, so too do certain responsibilities. We trust you will not place anyone in the position of having to choose between them."

He leaned back, eyes roaming the dark corners of the cabin. The letter’s careful phrasing echoed louder in memory than on the page. He knew the voice behind it, a voice that had once promised protection, indulgence, and a future shaped by connection. The admiral’s friend. His late wife’s brother, Percival Harting, whose smile always looked like it had been practiced in a mirror.

But now? Now they were letting the wind in.

Worse than knowing was not knowing. Not knowing how far it had gone, who had seen what, or what might come next.

They had forgiven much over the years, his temper, his drinking, his silences, the rages that ended with broken glass or bruised knuckles. They had intervened after the shame that was his legacy during the taking of the Belle Therese. They had quashed concerns over his behaviour at the ruins of the sugar mill near Saint Calyxta. They had forgiven the man who woke soaked in sweat, still hearing cannon fire and screams.

But now they had something to lose. And he was not it.

He picked up the letter again and folded it carefully, deliberately, sealing it shut with a long, sharp crease. His hand lingered on it a moment longer.

Then he smiled, a small, cold expression, tight at the corners.

“If I hang,” he said aloud, “he’ll hang first.”

The cup touched his lips once more. And in the dark, with the letter tucked away, Vane’s eyes gleamed with resolve.

They think I don’t see it. But I do. And I’ll see them ruined, one by one.

He reached for a blank scrap of paper and dipped his pen. Slowly, deliberately, he began to write, the ink gall-black on the page.

Private Diary of Jamie Blake
At Anchor, near St. Lucia — 20 September

The light was lovely tonight. That strange hour where the world softens, even aboard a warship, when everything brittle or brutal is blurred just enough to be bearable. I stood aft, where the sea goes on uninterrupted, and for a moment I imagined we were nowhere at all. Just wind and water and sky.

Then he came.

I knew it was him before he spoke. I always do. Pitt walks differently since the fever, straighter in some ways, slower in others, like he's still measuring every step in case the deck falls away. He stood beside me, not touching, not commanding, just there, and that was nearly worse.

He thanked me. Not just for the hours by his bedside, not for the water or the cool cloths or the scrawled notes I left to make the surgeons pay attention, but for staying. For choosing to.

I told him the truth: that I didn’t want him to be alone. I still don’t.

But I also told him the other truth, that I cannot do it that way again. Not if it costs him more than he can afford. Not if every look brings questions, or if my nearness becomes something he has to defend.

That’s what it is now, isn’t it? A kind of defence. We speak in code. We meet in places too public to be private, and too quiet to be watched without fear.

He said he doesn’t regret it. Neither do I. But I know what it is to be a burden, even a beloved one. I saw it in the set of his shoulders tonight, the moment I stepped back.

This is the weight of our knowing: we have not betrayed the code. Not really. But we carry it as if we have.

I told him I had to think about the whole of it. The ship. The crew. Myself.

The part I didn’t say: that I think of him constantly, and that is part of the “whole” now too.

He accepted it. With grace, even. And that might be the cruelest kindness of all.

I wonder if he will dream tonight. I wonder if I will. I feel I am already halfway between sleep and some deeper thing, a watch of the soul.

The sun is down. The lanterns have been trimmed.

And I am still at the rail, writing by the last blush of light, pretending I can commit this to paper without shaking.

I do not think we are lost.
But I know we are not safe.

— J.B.