But there was a reason he had joined the army rather than the navy.
The sickness had eased, at least. Praise be to heaven for that. Gates had begun to look at him as though he were nothing but a green-gilled nuisance. In the day since he had resumed somewhat-normal activities, he liked to think he had acquired decent sea legs. Well enough to see him through the next five to seven weeks, anyway.
“Did the ginger water help the seasickness, sir?”
Arthur let go of the rail with one hand and turned in the direction of the semi-familiar voice. The boy, called Scrubs by the crew, stood with a mop in hand, as he often did. So far as Arthur could figure, the lad could be no more than seventeen, with a shuttered face that made him seem older and a drawl to his speech that begged the question of from where he hailed. “Quite an improvement, yes. Thank you.”
Scrubs nodded, though nothing changed in his expression. “The captain gave me leave to bring you some morning and eve.”
“I daresay that would be wise.”
“Very well, then.” The boy turned away.
“Scrubs?” Arthur lifted a hand without quite knowing why he wanted to detain him.
He turned back around with not so much as a spark of curiosity in his deep brown eyes. “Sir?”
Arthur sighed. Perhaps it wasn’t Scrubs he wished to distract so much as himself. “Where do you call home, boy?”
He blinked. “The Falcon, sir.”
At that Arthur shook his head. “And before you joined her crew?”
Did Scrubs’s fingers tighten around the mop handle, or was it only Arthur’s imagination? He couldn’t be sure, but the lad’s chin lifted half a degree. Some indication, at least, of feeling. “Virginia, sir. Born and raised.”
Virginia. Arthur pressed his lips together, but only for a moment. Some questions demanded answers, no matter how insensitive. “You were impressed?”
“Three years ago, from my uncle’s fishing boat. Captain Yorrick claimed I was a runaway cabin boy from some British ship.”
“Were you?”
Scrubs turned again. “The only truth that counts on the Falcon is the captain’s.”
Arthur let the boy stride away. Sad as it was to see someone forced into service, ’twas a necessity. The fleet was dangerously low on manpower, with desertion a rampant if risky business. What choice did captains have but to stop and search other vessels for their missing men?
Yet he also knew they used that right as an excuse to take whatever men they needed, be they deserters or not, and who was to prove they were wrong? Scrubs was right about a captain’s word. It was more important than truth. It was law.
He turned back to the rail and the vast, open nothingness of water beyond it. Nasty business, this naval one.
“There you are, Sir Arthur.” Gates’s voice beckoned from the direction opposite Scrubs’s, and he looked that way to see the man approaching with the captain.
Yorrick nodded toward Scrubs’s retreating back. “Is he bothering you?”
“Nay. He only asked if the ginger water had helped.” He glanced from the captain to Gates, whose quirked brow questioned the truth of his claim. “And I asked him where he was from, as I could not quite place his speech.”
“Ah. I found him in the waters of Virginia, with a deserter of an uncle.” The captain clasped his hands behind his back and directed his face toward Gates. “He claimed he had never stepped foot off Virginia soil, but the uncle was a Scot, no question.”
Gates waved a hand in dismissal. “I would not question your tactics, Captain. The Americans may claim they are no longer under our rule, but they are naught but recalcitrant children left too long without the guiding hand of their parent.”
Arthur leaned against the rail until he remembered nothing lay on the other side to catch him. Straightening his spine, he said, “I daresay they disagree, Mr. Gates, having won a war for their independence.”
The man looked amused. “Just as a child of seven will insist he is able to care for himself after a scuffle in the schoolyard, but that does not mean he has the wisdom to do so. The American government is too young, too idealistic, too untried. It will fracture and fail, and then they will beg us to come set them to rights again, like a tot running for its mama.”
Captain Yorrick chuckled. “Just so. Why, they think because they claim a thing, it must be. That regardless of the laws that have been governing British citizens for centuries, they can grant someone exemption from them after a man spends a few years’ tenure on their soil. They have no respect for us, yet expect us to have respect for them.”
“As I say, they are children.”
“And so they need the rod taken to them.” Yorrick gave a decisive nod and motioned them toward the companionway. “Have you children yourself, Gates?”
The man gave a sigh that sounded soul weary. “I am afraid that blessing has been withheld from my wife and me.”