Duty and Oysters: Epilogue

Rating: R overall

For: The Hhafterhours Secret Santa Challenge. Suzanna, requested Orrock, an Admiral’s daughter, Opposites, Oysters, sweet and steamy.

*****

"Delightful creature, Mrs. Bessamy, ain’t she? I tell you, Mr. Orrock, there was a time before Mrs. Reynolds that I would have liked to-- well, never mind." There was a smirk on Captain Reynolds’s face as he said the words, and Charles dearly wished to scrape it off, perhaps with his fist, but duty and respect stilled his hands behind his back. So he stood, eyes forward, in the East India Company offices, presenting the picture of a perfect, dutiful officer waiting for words of wisdom to spill from the lips of his Master and Commander. Normally he liked his Captain, and today Old Reynard was in an expansive mood. "Well," the Captain continued, "to business. The Honorable East India Company has been more than generous, indeed, and you’ve earned your liberty. Go enjoy Portsmouth. Your former fellows are at the Ivy-- I suspect you’ll want to find them posthaste. Report to Karen in three days. I know you’ll want to be there when the powder-casks are loaded."

It was true: Charles was a dutiful and valuable officer, a practical and capable one, and liked to oversee what he was asked to, to make sure all was right and tight. But join the rest of the Karen’s midshipmen? Not any more, no, for the delights of Portsmouth had palled since yesterday and that particular complement of young gentlemen were an especially wild bunch of whoremongering monkeys.

No, Charles no longer really belonged in their mess, but neither did he want to join the other lieutenants. He was neither fish nor fowl, belonging nowhere at the moment.

And he did not even have Jenkins to mope at any more. Righteous had been the perfect company for the drive back to Portsmouth, close-mouthed and not sly in the slightest. Charles had tried to make talk at first-- had asked the man if he’d been comfortable at Sandy-Lane Cottage. The answer had been Yessir. Nice little house. Nice people. So Charles had added, jocularly, well, man, are ye looking forward to your liberty in Portsmouth? Jenkins had only said, S’pose so. Likely my bed won’t be as comfortable. Sir. And that had been that.

No commiseration, no whoremongering. Only the smell of the salt again. Charles tromped from the East India offices to the docks, hoping to find the philosophy and fatalism he’d left there yesterday.

But there was only the sea, rolling in, and rolling out in an eternal procession, and the ships upon it. He saw the sea every day of his life, but on shore he hardly took the time to look at the water itself, to watch it with a fascinatedly morose eye. This time he did. The green sea-water lapped at the concrete of the dock, caressing it only to slip away, then dive back. Sea and land. He told himself again that he was neither fish nor fowl, land nor sea. Yet he suspected, deep down, that fish was more close to the truth. Duty called him there, and a deep, abiding love for the life, the freedom of a sailor.

Still, the waves whispered on, speaking to the shore, not to him. Three days. He could enjoy the life of a land-animal while he could, to the highest pitch it had yet offered him in this life; experience again the rapture of Delphine’s presence, even if only for three days.

But would that make it worse, in the end? To pursue something so completely out of his class, sure to end only in tears either way, when he was cast aside or when he was called by duty or nature to return to the sea, as he knew he always would be?

And what of Delphine? He hardly knew her, though that could change. But if he appeared on her doorstep without sending word, what would her reaction be? Gladness? Reservation learned in retrospect or regret? Still the rolling waves did not answer his silent questions.

He would just have to find out when he got there. Whistling, he ambled off to find a post.

***

"What else raises your blood, your spirits, your whole being, to the highest pitch, so that life is triumphant, or tragic, as the case may be, and so that every day is worth a year of common life? When you sit trembling for a letter? When the whole of life is filled with meaning, double-shotted?" Captain Yorke, The Fortune of War, Patrick O'Brian