"Why do you keep pushing me away with your jealousy and anger?" (Jealousy and Flirtation, oil painting by Haynes King 1831-1904)
CHAPTER 3
As Adrian neared home, Edward awaited his return at the Good Hope’s railing with as much love as jealousy in the heart of his brawny wrestler’s body. The quartermaster admired Adrian’s adeptness at commanding the crew, but he despised the gnawing hole in the life of his men made by the leader’s brief absence. All the talk centered around worry for Adrian’s safety, and Edward knew that his own departure would not engender the same measure of anxiety. Although they both held the highest positions on the ship, Adrian eclipsed Edward’s greater glory, or so he thought.
Edward so hated standing in the shadow of this well-loved man that the thought of it curled his full luscious lips into a sneer. It caused his beady black eyes, set too close together on his broad face to render him handsome, to throw out dagger-like lights as though a storm raged inside them. Cunningly, he directed his telling gaze away from the men and toward the water. With his head tilted forward, his mass of curly hair, the color of midnight, framed his splotchy visage, blemished by the sun and covered the distinct hairs shooting out of his ears. His lush beard brushed the deliciously thick hair on his chest revealed by the V-neck of his white, blousy shirt. Garnet pantaloons and shiny black boots hid the hirsute down, which feathered Edward’s entire muscular body, even all ten of his toes. The man exuded a sensuality that frightened the timid and aroused the daring. However, he did not elicit love from his men.
“Adrian! It’s Adrian,” disparate voices burst into the officer’s ruminations of envy.
“The light has returned,” Edward mumbled sarcastically to himself. He released his tightly clenched fists hanging at his side and lit up his scowl into a broad toothy smile.
Edward took care to mask his mixed feelings for Adrian. He believed that no one suspected the truth just as no one knew about the murder of Claudine Moliere, no relation to the popular playwright of Le Misanthrope fame. On the morning after Claudine’s death, the city of Paris whispered sighs and remembered her.
A ballerina, she carried her lissome body in a gentle, yet assured, way. There was nothing tentative about this woman. She harbored an inner knowledge, which shielded her soul and kept her safe from troubled intruders. Claudine’s contentment drew the nail-biting pianist, Babette Fontaine, to her and, Edward thought, away from him. Babette was his great love.
The two women found that they shared the same spirit; they breathed the same fantasies and fears. They grew to love each other like mother, daughter, sister, in a way which Edward sensed was freeing and which he could not approximate himself. The two were attuned to the welfare of the other. The deeper Edward mined his love for Babette, the more selfish he became. The singer, whose velvety bass wooed audiences, turned loving feelings ugly and destructive. He began to hate Claudine because of his insatiable need for acceptance.
After a long night of frantically searching for Babette, made wilder by stops at a café, where he drank his absinthe, Edward returned to his lover’s residence for the third time. He climbed the two stories to her room and was arrested at the jarred door by Claudine’s unmistakable scent of roses, familiar to him because he had been smelling it more and more on Babette. The dancer’s smothering fragrance sparked his smoldering fury.
With balled up fists, Edward slammed open the heavy door against the wall. With his hands still on the door, he twisted his head to peer into the room and grunted at the sight of disrupted serenity.
They sat on the edge of the bed, cowering. Claudine encircled the fragile Babette in her long arms. Their waist-length hair, Claudine’s dark and curly and Babette’s blond and wavy, tumbled down together like a waterfall. The startled women looked at him with fear glazing over their widened eyes. Through his drunken haze, Edward saw that he had broken the peaceful spell, which made him happy. Yet, his glare reflected not one glimmer of satisfaction. It cut deep into Claudine as he lowered his arms and turned his body round to face the couple.
“Why don’t you get a man?” Edward spat at her.
Neither woman spoke a word. Edward’s bloodshot eyes told them that he had been drinking, and they did not want to rile him further by saying the wrong thing.
“And you, Babette,” he said, slowly, while shifting his gaze. “Why don’t you keep your man happy?”
His cold accusation struck a tender spot in Babette’s true heart. Tears sprang to her soft, blue eyes. She was about to fade away in pain, but Claudine tightened her hug.
“I love you so much, Edward, so much,” Babette whimpered. “But you don’t believe it. How can you not believe it? I would do anything for you. Why do you keep pushing me away with your jealousy and anger? Oh Edward, why can’t we just love each other without all this melodrama? Why can’t we share a quiet, simple life?”
“Because of you,” Edward bellowed, grateful that he had been thrown some words with which to spar. “You’re destroying us with your self-indulgences. You never consider me.”
“That’s not true,” Babette said, her voice rising tall. “I try – “
Her defense drowned in her tears.
Claudine heard the desperation in her best friend’s confession of love and watched the fight punched out of her. Edward’s brutality knocked the fright from the darker woman’s face and inflicted it with a tortured but angry look. Never before had Claudine’s starry black eyes seen for themselves the monster in the man Babette described as generous with overtures of love but stingy with compassion. She had only heard of the maddening outbursts from Babette, who had confided minute details of the liaison to her. As Claudine’s imagination dwelled on the ritual abuse, she lost her temper.
“What gives you the right to barge in here and act like an ogre,” she demanded. “I won’t be bullied. By you or any other man.”
Speaking in an unusual soft tone, and as if Babette were not there, Edward said, “You are her lover, aren’t you?”
“What I am is none of your business, Mr. Ames,” she said, gently disengaging herself from Babette. “Your business is this woman whom you have become quite good at humiliating. I am leaving.”
Once they were left to themselves, Claudine foresaw Edward’s pleas for forgiveness and his repeated promises never to hurt Babette again. The musician’s worn-out pardon would be sealed with explosive lovemaking that would steer them into a sailing calm . . . until the next storm.
Claudine bent over and gave Babette a strong woman’s hug that conveyed a history and future of survival. Then, she straightened her slender, fluid body and glided across the room to the doorway, where she stopped and turned to Edward saying, “I hope you two work it out.”
“I do, too,” he said, donning a sheepish look. He seemed like a little boy whose wrong deeds had been found out. “I’ll walk you out.”
Claudine graciously consented to his accompaniment. He closed the door behind them, leaving Babette sprawled face down on her bed. The two walked to the head of the sweeping staircase, the silence thick between them. He offered his arm to her, and she refused it. Edward took it as a slap, as it was intended. How he despised this woman! Her independence, especially, rankled him!
Side by side, without touching, they began to descend the center of the staircase. One step, two steps, three. Edward extended his foot, tripping Claudine whose scream buried the sound of her thumping and Edward’s sigh of relief. The final jolt at the bottom of the landing hushed the stilled blur of purple.
The burly man dashed after her to confirm the end of the shrew and his troubles. He turned over the graceful dancer, now a crumpled heap. Her open eyes blared at him as rich blood oozed out of her gaping mouth. Her condition instilled guilt in him. However, when Babette rushed down, hysterical with shock and grief, this time it was Edward who comforted her. They were Edward’s arms which held her tightly and Edward’s words which soothed her. He thought that he had won the prize. With ease, he relinquished his remorse, and he rejoiced in his crime.
After her loss, Babette spent more time with Edward, not because she missed him but because she missed Claudine. The dead woman’s rooting presence suddenly swept from the earth left Babette forlorn and terrified. The seeds of bitterness grew quickly in Edward’s sweet victory after his lover found that she was still lonely when with him. The revelation deepened her sadness and sucked her love dry. Her partner was not spared changed feelings. He had Babette all to himself, but no longer did he want her. Claudine’s death was like a shattered looking glass whose thousand pieces relentlessly pricked the survivors, asserting her memory and placing a pall over them. The great love for which Edward had killed also died. He could not understand it. To forget his disappointment, he abandoned his life in Paris and sailed to the New World, carrying his bellyful of confusion with him. Like many others anxious to bury their past, he stumbled into buccaneering and went onto the account of the Good Hope.
“Adrian’s back. Splendid,” Edward shouted into the flurry of voices for the benefit of those whose hearts he wanted to win. He directed his men to help Adrian and the unconscious man up the ladder to the deck.
“Are you hurt,” Edward shouted down to him.
“No, but my friend here is,” Adrian answered.
“Don’t worry, Adrian. We’ll take care of him,” Edward said, consolingly. His heart lifted because danger’s arrow had whistled in Adrian’s ear. The quartermaster prayed that it would be only a matter of time before it would find its mark in the captain.
Despite Adrian’s exhausting ordeal on the burning ship, he sprang onto the deck resolute and strong. He shined bright with courage and honor. As soon as his feet touched the Good Hope, the ship was awash with his vitality. He bounded forward followed by two men struggling with the weight of his dueling partner but eventually, turned and directed them to take the man to his cabin. As Adrian and the rest of the crew stood and watched the bearers disappear below with the cumbersome load, Edward asked the captain, “Who is he? That Moor?”
“This isn’t Shakespeare, Edward,” said the actor, Robert, his round, translucent brown eyes twinkling in his warm nutmeg-colored face.
Syrupy laughter slipped out good-naturedly from the men, all except Edward. Undaunted by the quartermaster’s stony face, the sprightly man leapt onto the platform, where Adrian performed his evening concerts, and sustained the playful atmosphere by pretending he was center-stage.
“I doubt the man is Arab or Berber. And he’s probably never been to Spain or the Maghreb. Maybe he’s from here in the Caribbean like Trevor, our sailing master. Maybe he’s English like me. Or, maybe, we have nothing in common except the brown complexion of our skin.
Edward, you know that many people – most people – in this world cast a glow of a deep and rich hue from their outward appearance, whether it be amber or copper or metallic blue.”
“I know that, Robert,” the reproved man said, nastily. “Why are you making such a big deal out of this?”
“No big deal. Just a tiny reminder,” Robert said, maintaining the light air by jumping off the platform.
“And rightfully so,” someone yelled.
“You tell him, Robert,” said another voice.
Vexed that one of Adrian’s closest friends had embarrassed him in front of the entire crew but intent on solidifying his place in the intimate circle that also roped in Trevor, Edward smiled and said, “Your point is well taken.”
“Here, here,” cried out another voice.
Edward thought that he was being secretive about his feelings. However, these men, keen on survival, took notice of the details overlooked by people assured, in their minds, of their safety, people who, because of birth and circumstance, view life as fair, people who expect their world to be tomorrow what it was today, people who expect. Buccaneers knew better, they expected nothing. Marooned on their floating isle, they lived too closely with one another not to see the truth. Because they cooked, they ate, they slept, they rose, they shat, they fought within breathing distance of one another, they could not help but peer into each other’s souls when they bumped heads. As they observed Edward bristle at criticism of his narrowmindedness, they acknowledged his attempt to hide it.
Edward corrected himself as he rephrased his question to Adrian, “So, who is this man?”
“A survivor of an awful tragedy in need of medical attention. That’s all I know. Edward. Would you tell the good doctor to take care of him.”
The insecure man thought, “What does Adrian take me for? A dog he can shoo away at whim? An errand boy? He’s back no longer than it would take to walk round the deck and, already, he begins to order me around.”
However, he said, “Of course,” through a painted-on expression of urgency and left for Dr. Franz Wencel.
Trevor, a small muscular man who wore soft blue clothes the color of his eyes, which accented his brown freckled creamy skin and red wiry hair, made his way over to the captain, a palpable force pushing him.
“Forgive me for what I’m about to say,” he whispered. “If you’ll permit me to speak as a friend.”
“You may,” Adrian granted, directing his voice into Trevor’s ears and lowering his eyes to the ground.
“Edward resents you,” the confidence began. “He can be dangerous.”
“Not if I know he can be,” Adrian said, pensively twirling his moustache. “Underneath, he is really a good man.”
Adrian spoke the words that made him a good leader. Although not blind to the faults of others, he believed in the best in people and often brought out the best in them.
Trevor insisted: “I have a bad feeling about him.”
The captain retorted: “Sometimes circumstances make people what they are.”
Trevor tightened his lips about his presentiment as Edward searched for Franz down below. The robust man scrambled in the common sleeping area, where hammocks already would have been hung, cheek by jowl, if the crew had not been worried about Adrian’s dangerous mission. In a corner, Edward spotted the pale doctor sitting on the floor with his back pressed against the wall, his legs pulled in and a tome propped on his flaccid thighs. Thick blue veins showed clearly through a facial sheath of porcelain skin as the academic’s gray eyes pored over a Royal Society text on the flora and fauna of the Caribbean Sea. A profusion of open scientific journals and notebooks surrounded the young, frail man as a candle burning in a holder above him illuminated advice of the many uses of manatee skin and descriptions of a variety of mangroves.
“We need you in Adrian’s cabin right away,” Edward said, changing the captain’s order into his own.
“What is it,” Franz asked in his thin, reedy voice without looking up, irritated at the intrusion of the ship’s affairs into his research. He seemed intent on finishing a thought, a sentence, a page, before breaking his deep concentration which already had been assaulted.
“Franz,” Edward said sternly. He got no response until he explained, “Adrian brought back a survivor of the burning ship. He’s unconscious.”
The doctor changed focus, his scientific curiosity piqued because he had never seen a case of burns and smoke inhalation.
“I’d better examine him,” he said, pulling his stiff body into a standing position like a marionette at the start of a puppet show. He tugged at the sparse straight blond hairs on the crown of his oversized head as he abandoned his study with his limping walk. His eyes glowed with the feverish prospect of new medical findings.
Edward and Franz entered Adrian’s cabin to see the captain, Trevor and Robert hovering over the casualty stretched out on the narrow, sturdy bunk against the wall. Did they think that their throbbing life forces would thrust energy into his supine body and rouse him, Edward thought. The physician threw the Good Hope leaders over the one step between the door and the bed for privacy and room enough to examine his patient.
The smell of charred wood baptized the room with the stink of humanity’s misfortune – the desire for worldly gain and redemption at the cost of fraudulence and subjugation. Franz sucked his thin bottom lip with the lust for immortality. He would not spill blood himself, but he could detail the patient’s ailments in writing and publicize his observations. The doctor loved knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but he also craved recognition, so much that he had swapped his silk-lined environs in Amsterdam for unpredictable adventure on a ship headed toward the New World. Franz thought the utmost of his mind, endowing it with its own embodiment apart from the rest of him. He nearly fell on his knees to it, worshipping it as his god. His belief in the Almighty was in name alone. Only his faith in ambition ran deep. Yet, the arrogance of the alchemist could not transmute the flesh on his bones, which would crumble into dust after death, when no one’s brilliance or beauty hinders the inevitable progression toward specks so fine that the eye sees nothing.
With everyone gone but Franz and his patient, Adrian’s cabin was stark. An orange nail rusted by the sea air held up an ornate yellow-tinged map facing the door. On the sole decorative piece in the tiny compartment, two cherubs frolicked in the lower left-hand corner above an olive branch and the Gothic lettering of the word “Yucatan” as the heads of sea monsters surfaced above the scattered wavy lines representing the Caribbean and the South seas. Franz focused his attention below the map on the unconscious man. The patient wore a pair of filthy white pants which fell below his knees but left four inches of his disproportionate long legs bare, and his shirt of the same soiled color had sleeves which ended two inches above his wrists. Only his bright red and green moccasins cradled his feet comfortably. Franz carefully peeled off the man’s rags and tossed them on the floor for disposal overboard. Adrian’s trunk stashed under the bunk held a treasure trove of outfits, some of which he had taken from the bodies of dead adversaries. There was no lack of clothes on this ship of plunderers. A new suit of armor for the stranger would be found soon enough.
To Franz, this man’s sleek body appeared to be more powerful naked. The patient’s full length extended from the head to the foot of the bed. The contrast of his dark, silky skin with the white, coarse bedcovers underneath him made him seem more dominant than he was in truth. His thighs bulged with strength, but his calves, chest and upper arms lay undeveloped. His hands were as soft as the skin on his tight stomach, whose mahogany color was marred by a purplish stain knot. On his left side, he carried a similar bruise, whose color matched that of the prominent veins of his large, flaccid organ out of which spurts the stuff of life. The doctor merely made observations as he checked out his patient. He deduced that this man nearing thirty years did not hoist weight nor handle tools in his work. He had been born with a sturdy body, which life had not taxed and with which age had not caught up as yet. When Franz finished his examination, he retrieved the covers, which had been cast aside when the stranger was brought in, and arranged them neatly over him. Then, he sought out Adrian and the rest on the other side of the door.
“I’m done,” he told them.
“How is he,” Adrian asked, anxiously.
“His breathing is weak and irregular,” the doctor said. “I suspect that it has to do with the enormous amount of smoke he inhaled. The man also may be in shock, though I did notice two bad bruises, one on his abdomen and one on his side. It’s difficult to ascertain whether they contributed to his unconscious state. Maybe he got them in a fall.”
“I gave them to him,” Adrian said.
“You?” Edward, Robert, Trevor and Franz exclaimed in unison.
“Yes, men. Me. We dueled until I knocked him out.”
Adrian related the story of his meeting with the survivor. Edward thought, “So, this is how he treats strangers he rescues.” The others understood that he had done what he had to do.
“What do we do now,” Adrian asked the doctor.
“All we can do is wait,” said Franz, his final word sounding heavy with the slow and deliberate passage of time.
“Wait,” Adrian repeated in an impatient tone.
An intuitive man, Trevor evoked his deep voice from his compact body:
“You seem close to this man.”
“I am. I’ve made a big decision because of him.”
Trevor tried to coax Adrian silently with his calming, yet penetrating, eyes.
“This isn’t the time to talk about it. You’ll find out soon enough,” Adrian said to Trevor. Then, he turned to the others and dispersed the group. “It’s been a long evening and promises to be an even longer night for me.”
Trevor felt uneasy after Adrian shunted his mute inquiry, but he was not certain of the source of his anxiety. Although there was a twinge of hurt, he respected his friend’s wish. No, it was something else. The sailing master sensed that the stranger would be instrumental in orchestrating his fate. For now, the night had been exhausting. Trevor’s nerves were strained, and his body spent with fatigue. He shrugged off his gnawing feeling and took off on the fancy flight of sleep moments after his frame fit spoon-fashion in the hammock.
Franz cared nothing for social relations. He had never grabbed onto the strength of friendship and not knowing it, he did not miss it. Without a second thought, he retired for the night, soon losing himself in a dream of fear.
Robert nourished fondness for the stranger but could not say why. He also left and slipped easily into a fluid sleep.
Edward went to his cabin, the only other one on the ship, and sulked over his rivalry with Adrian, lowering himself into a nocturnal trance.
Only Adrian stared night square in the face. As the moon rose, he kept a keen watch on the stranger, scrutinizing him for signs for the better or the worse such as changes in breathing, a yawn, or a sniffle. He had to come back, Adrian thought, linking the recovery of the man with the success of the decision he had refused to reveal to Trevor.
Finally, when Morpheus demanded his due, Adrian claimed a spot on the floor behind the door, where he could peek at the person who resembled royalty wearing a white cotton gown in which the captain had dressed him. With love suffusing his heart, he fell away.
His sleeping prince soared on a huge, white bird as though it were a horse with wings. He hugged its slender throat with his arms and gripped its supple sides with his thighs. He transported the heavenly gift of fire and light to earth’s domain and into the soul of the captain. The stranger was merely a messenger; the treasure was the illumination, not the person who sparked it. Adrian, however, mistook the two.