False Colors by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online

newly painted oilcloth of the floor. Ten days of standing out to sea in the day, gently, cautiously sliding in to shore at night. The shadow of the headland falling over them as they worked the sails by starlight, commands whispered, footsteps dulled, until they felt like the ghost of a ship, eternally imprisoned by an impossible vow.
    “Money thrown away upon untrustworthy tars and foreigners,” Hall called it, and though I thought him meanly pinched at the time, I must begin to ask myself if he was right. To prevent the Devil from making work for idle hands, I have exercised both watches on sail drills until they are almost fit to serve aboard a First Rate Man of War. Both sides can now run out, fire, and reload their guns in under two minutes. But the crew resents the delay, the sight of land on which they may not set foot, and above all the many Barbary ships we could have taken as prizes, but had to let slip so that the Dey would not be alerted to the fact that we were still here. I do not think the men’s temper will bear much more waiting. Yet then what? Do I return to the harbor and risk us all meeting the same fate? Or can I….
    He told himself that his emotion was quite disproportionate to the loss of a single officer; that he should pass over it with the sang-froid of Saunders waving aside McIntyre’s death. The echo of remembered flute music would not leave him, though he stuffed his fingers in his ears to try and keep it out.
    Or can I leave him here and sail away? The thought oppresses me with far greater power than it should. I cannot reconcile myself to it, and I do not know why not.
“A light, sir!”
    Turning his own glass on the spot John could see it, a strange yellow star fallen on the edge of the sea. It dimmed, went out, and returned, twice. Thank God! Oh thank you, God! “Man the pinnace! Kelley, Higgins, with me. Armitage, the ship is yours until I return.”
    A shallow, murmuring swell carried the little boat to ground over coarse sand. Dion ran out to catch the thrown rope, his big grin rivaling the moon for brightness.
    “He is found,” the man panted. “Many Greeks in the Janissaries. Paidomazoma— taken as tax by the child gatherers…They are not all traitors. But it takes slowly, slowly to find out…to arrange to make work. We go now! We have brought clothes.”
    The scarf around John’s face chafed as his breath came fast, dampening it. As they strode out on the long walk into Algiers he could see very little through the long wound cloth and hood that concealed him. Glimpses of white buildings glimmering under moonlight, lattices and mellow windows whose panes were the shape of tiny stars. Colored lanterns lit tea-shops where men lounged, smoking their hookahs and playing trictrac, laughing. They seemed convivial as they might be in any coffee-house in England, though less drunk than the English.
    Young boys, sitting among the men, fluttered their long eyelashes at Dion as he passed, making him laugh and wink back. John, trying not to trip over his flowing robe, while the hand on his sword hilt slipped with sweat, almost wished they would be challenged, so that he could fight someone, anyone, to take the edge off his anxiety
    Down into the marketplace they went. A shadow beneath an archway moved, became an emaciated creature in a wrapped ochre garment made for someone thrice his size. His waxed, pointed beard and the jaunty red fez that sat atop his turban gave the impression of a man either intent on rising from his natural place, or in the process of falling from it. His right hand fingered the pistol thrust through his sash, and keys dangled on a ring from his left. “Nesim.”
    There was a brief exchange of what sounded like pleasantries even to John’s ear, unfamiliar with whatever dialect of Arabic or Ottoman Turkish was spoken here. Then Nesim unlocked the door behind him and lead them into the slave pens. Walking silently past the bound and wretched forms of his