Fic : This Other Eden
The Navyboys Challenge inspired the "Uncle Philemon" agony column in which the good Captain Pellew, incognito, found somewhat to his chagrin, that he was answering queries from distracted young men of his own ship! It was a smut!fail and turned out rather differently from the intention of anteros_lmc and self imagined. However it did rather suggest to me that it might be time I gave attention to what would happen if "Confused" and "Unrequited" took their captain's advice.
So this is a first time fic - and presented with due awareness of all those who have written with skill and beauty in that line before me.
Title: This Other Eden1
Author: Nodbear
Rating: R
Word length: approx 4,130
Pairings and characters: Horatio/Archie, and with book-end appearances by the quarterdeck triumvirate and mention of Serjeant Henry Ince2, who was a real Gibraltar hero, and Richard the innkeeper, who is not real, though Sandy Bay is very real.
Spoilers: None, more or less PWP - a particular point in time.
Summary: Horatio and Archie get extended shore leave when the ship is in Gibraltar. They are intending to try to take the advice of Uncle Philemon...It is told in several sonnets by Archie, extracts from Horatio's private journal and some third person narrative.
Thanks to the very splendid anteros_lmc for beta, and encouragements many and various.
~1~
Shortly after “Uncle Philemon’s” sage and practical advice the Indefatigable had put in to Gibraltar for minor repairs and to await some dispatches and a replacement for two marines who had been transferred.
Mr Kennedy and Mr Hornblower had been pre-empted in a request they both intended to make by the fact that Captain Pellew practically ordered them to take shore leave, and instead of the usual 48 hours he informed the wide-eyed Horatio and the subtly amused Archie that they would be granted five days in all. He added that Mr Bowles had obtained for them a room at the inn kept by an old sea-going mate of his on the remote bay beyond the Genoese fisherman’s village which was really quiet and lovely. He ended by saying that Mr Bracegirdle wanted to see them too. This proved to be because the latter wanted to offer them a ‘loan’ of a few extra pounds he insisted they accept - and in the end they did. Archie could spot a conspiracy when he saw one and remarked to Horatio how lucky they were to serve on such a ship. Horatio had answered eagerly - “yes, we are aren’t we?” but in such a way that made Archie smile at the slightly wondering tone which made him decide not to tell Horatio about the little pot of Mr Cookworthy’s 3 No 4 salve that had been handed to him with the gruffly expressed advice that ill-concealed considerable affection and the instruction: “take care of yourselves, I, this ship needs you both in one piece, sir, remember that.” Horatio would not, as yet anyway, understand why it was that Archie was entrusted with this and not he, and would be more than a little stunned at just how practical and how - er - earthly minded a man his beloved captain could be.
~2~
Archie was being fluent, part elation, part well-hidden terror. Elation because there was just the beach, wide and empty in the sun, the shining water - and Horatio. Terror because everything told his fine tuned instincts that to be this happy was to court disaster. Elated that all he most wanted could be here, and terrified that Horatio would still not want...or that fear of the past would catch up on him and - horror - he would be the one to pull away. But if this was not Arcadia quite, nor Eden, it was as near as. Archie would let elation win.
~3~
Horatio’s journal, headed: The second day. Morning.
This is a journal you might read one day if I am brave enough to show you and so it talks as if to you, about you, for you. What else is there that will ever be so great a subject as you? And I have no skills as a poet so I have to love you as I can - and as a mathematician I have counted and there are eight - no nine now- yous in this paragraph - and still it is not to say it often enough. You. You are always the one for new words - and you were using them last night to banish fear. Always clever with words as I am not, “discalced” indeed - you are most articulate when you are afraid. It is a way to find your brave self.
You who are different from me - to whom the poetry does not come, but then you are so different We are different, as night and day - though you would say that’s an old and tired metaphor. You are all burnished gold and blue and - well, being a mathematician again I’d say in quite lovely proportion and I am brown. Indeed someone told me once, like a pool among bracken, and I don’t know even now if they meant that as a compliment; and I have an awkward lanky stride and I look silly when I blush. And yet you are full of poetry again and of me you say something of grace. Me, graceful? But you check my reply before utterance, your mouth being better employed now. And what I had intended to say - oh, who knows or still less who cares? You always kiss like you mean me to remember nothing else. And yes, you moved me from hesitation into acceptance and thence head long into the death of “I”. The death if anything that wasn’t “us”. To understanding that here surrender is the choice of victory. And just then I stopped being able to think - and logic deserted you and words deserted us both. Only the sun was witness to the love that followed, clumsy - well, I was, at least, and unpractised and utterly sublime. That creation story, in Genesis chapter 1 - in the image of God he created them, that you tell me is such great poetry, it says it took seven days to make the world. We have only five but we will remake the world. And this is the morning of the second day. The second day of the rest of our lives.
~4~
To Mr HH, on the sweet privilege that is his unclothing.
Discalce? Your feet, by habit shod and neat,
I loose to run with mine on sea-damp sands.
I both address and undress you, and meet
prevarication with a kiss, the while my hands
further with gentle and determined skill
their appointed course to divest you. Heart
and head as much as garments fall, yet will
you yield me all your glorious self? No part
reserved, recalcined and remote? I see
With every limb revealed, the gift of grace
and suddenly am still, awed; just to be
here, now and stripped of artifice. Your face
is mirror true to mine. Then two are one
and love lies open, and envious is the sun.
Archie Kennedy, Sandy Bay, Gibraltar
~5~
Archie was being dried. At least his naked self, wet from the sea, was swathed from head to toe in towels and muffled laughter issued from the figure lying prone and content on the sand as Horatio rubbed wide circles of fabric-baffled tenderness. Internally, Archie delighted in enumerating Horatio’s progress. Damp head: he rejoiced at the lovely massaging fingers; shoulders: he flexed them under Horatio’s ministrations; his side: the ticklish bit that jumped despite his best efforts, which provoked the laughter; the small of the back: ahhh, Archie in his towelled twilight sighed contently; his buttocks: oh yes, please ...Archie wriggled appreciatively, and then...Archie’s face was suddenly turned round framed in its hood of white cotton, and his smile several degrees more beguiling than ever.
“Horatio, I know you are madly and deeply and insanely in love with my arse but it doesn’t need three times the drying - and my legs are cold!”
Freeing the illusion of the hood from Archie’s head, Horatio retorted, “ Such coarse language, Arch!” And then “There! You looked like a monk, I can hardly think of anything less appropriate."
Archie managed a slightly shaky air of hurt resignation, something else altogether dancing in his eyes. “Not so - I have now been celibate for - oh, about twenty three minutes and counting, …whereas you were obviously indulging in utterly lascivious thoughts about my arse. It won’t do.”
“Shall I unthink them then, or did you mean just thinking is not enough?” Horatio queried, aligning himself over Archie’s still swathed form, the long lean face suddenly a little hawk-like and predatory in anticipation.
“I see two remedies for your poor cold legs,“ he continued, consenting now to rub them with great gentleness and admittedly with much of the licence to stroke elsewhere which Archie had just ascribed to him. Gradually his clever fingers were burrowing beneath the towels, never acknowledging that fact though and never taking his eyes from Archie’s glowing face.
“Yes?” Archie’s acting skills did not extend to keeping expectation out of his eyes at this offer.
“Well, one is get dressed and go and eat a vast meal at the inn back over the headland.”
“Hmmm, and the other?”
Horatio grinned a lust-laden grin, unknown till a few days before. Both hands had now dispensed with all covering but continued their hypnotic journey everywhere on Archie’s lower body (before, behind, between 4 Horatio knew the text as well as Archie by now.)
“Is to do that just as above - but afterwards.”
“Mmmmm, I think the latter, don’t you?“ Horatio’s mouth had joined his hands and Archie gave up thinking.
His legs stopped feeling cold moments later. Obscurely he had a coherent if potentially blasphemous phrase running in his head - except, he felt, he meant it with intentional holiness:
And it was evening and it was morning and it was the third day of the remade world.
~6~
To Mr HH, co-creator of the demi-paradise 5
Not yet Arcadia, not yet Eden bright;
not far from both, as we both love and love.
Paradise is here, held within the sight
your beauty brings, the heart whose all you give
to mine. Though both are bruised and shy of trust
Love has within it faith, and ours is love
enough to shape a world new-made, which must
raze past harm to dust, and yet may move
grief’s mountain, levelled by honest open
speech. There is in you such strength of will, in
me of hope. Together much is spoken
of how we change the world. For us to win
each other is to win the whole. Your heart,
my world, mine yours, elation every part.
Archie Kennedy, Sandy Bay, Gibraltar
~7~
Even in Arcadia6 pain found its way - and in Eden the serpent had reared its subtly evil head, so it was perhaps inevitable that on the evening of the fourth day the dream interrupted things.
Archie, finally having succumbed to admitting he was tired, had been asleep for an hour or two. Horatio had been content to let him sleep but was himself awake and peaceful to a degree he thought he had not known since childhood.
But then Archie, dozing into the late afternoon, was suddenly hot beside him, and still asleep, thumped his hand fiercely into the mattress and began to twist and turn as if distressed and after a moment to mutter a few phrases disjointedly and not fully audibly but certainly sounding fearful. Horatio, who had been reading the poetry that Archie had copied from Captain Pellew’s copy of John Donne into a bound journal, had been watching the sleeping figure idly and adoringly, given that the object of the open worship could not see him to tease or mock. He sat up and put a hand on the hot forehead, but Archie twisted away from him - at least not from him but from whomever his nightmare told him this was.
After calling his name several times in a voice he knew to have worked before, Horatio was relieved to see Archie roll over on to his back, eyes opening and then meeting his. Then at first awareness and then frustration rolled over him; the face hardened and the voice that emerged was the bright brittle one that Horatio had learned to dread, even as it had become far less often heard.
“Being noisy was I? At least you will not be able to say your bed mate for shore leave gave you a dull time...”
Horatio gulped, for he saw what was probably coming - something like:
“Archie..."
“Don’t do it!”
“Do what?”
"Start looking after me - I don’t want it! I don’t want…”
“And so what do you want, Archie?”
And on and on and too hurtful. Please no - not here.
Horatio’s often-solemn face looked so bewildered that somewhere in Archie’s rush of angry and shame-filled fear, that he had ruined their idyll, he heard a warning bell and heeded it. And as he answered that internal summons, there came the realisation that the dream did not have to win. There were other conscious choices he could make, as he had chosen on coming here, elation could and must storm the side and take fear prisoner, and subdue all resistance at least for the moment.
The expression in Archie’s face softened and Horatio took his chance, breathing inwardly a grateful sigh.
“Would you like some water?” At Archie’s nod, Horatio sprang off the bed and Archie, reflecting on the long, lean lines of a body he was coming to know, at least in part, as well as his own, found an unexplored dynamic of the love that had overtaken them taking root in his mind. Accepting the water he drank it fast and then held out the glass, saying “Just leave it and come back here”.
Horatio was not taken aback by being pushed down on his back and had the sense to curb the question: “Are you sure you are alright?”
What did surprise him was that, between each slow movement of their kisses Archie began to speak, as Horatio had already learned he sometimes would. Fond endearments, fragments of Donne, silly and bawdy words of their own coining, but now, in doing so, he coaxed Horatio to touch with deliberate intent the scars that hitherto he had tended to guard, giving slightly breathless instructions that he wanted Horatio to explore. Asking with strangely quiet passion to be touched, finally allowing the adoration that Horatio was only too willing to give, to have free reign even in the legacy of Simpson’s torture.
Laying his mouth gently on the long scratch mark on Archie’s back and then, following the urging of the impatient voice, less gently, Horatio moved from one faded welt to another. His own reaction to the combined requests and sounds of guttural satisfaction Archie produced was a transformed and relieved sense that nothing was beyond their reaching. Maybe not yet and hardly without setbacks, but they would conquer. As Archie’s insistent hand pushed his own towards that cruel and jagged mark on the very sensitive skin of his right inner thigh, Horatio was imploring something - someone - “let me get this right, please let me not hurt him." But he did not speak, trusting rather blindly in the instinct that almost overtook all sense in him. Wordless both, there was more to this than mere speech, and somewhere in their frantic exchange, the shadow of the past took one more step into oblivion.
A while later, contemplating the likelihood that they were both hungry, Horatio disentangled his legs and feet from around Archie’s and looked at the peaceful face beside him, “Hungry now, Arch?”
“Starved - its all this exercise you insist on ‘Ratio, I’ll waste away at this rate.“
But Archie showed no sign of such frailty as they both dressed and went to devour everything offered to them by the curiously generous landlord. (Or less curious had they known of the briefing their host had received from his old friend Thomas Bowles, “they look tired out, the both of them and they haven’t two shillings to bargain with, hardly, and likely they will be so wrapped up in one another they won’t think to eat. But I know I can rely on you to take care of them, Richard...”)
~8~
Horatio’s journal, headed: The evening before the fifth day.
You had a nightmare. I was reading those amazing words of Donne you have taught me and trying to let you sleep. Difficult, since asleep you look like an angel of God, or at the very least a grown up and very naughty cherub, without the puppy fat and with that perfection of muscle and sinew that makes me feel my gawkiness still.
It was just occurring to me to abandon restraint for the umpteenth time, when your nightmare began - was it that bastard Simpson again? Not for the first time I blessed both the eagle eye and steady hand that had killed him, even whilst I wished it had been mine. Damn his evil that even here he should haunt you, sleeping in the bed that is ours alone.
Can I somehow not follow you into your dreams and take that pain away even as I try to when you are awake?
When you woke I feared his victory even in the waking world - in the brittle sadness in your eyes and the shake in your limbs that preceeds those terrible moments of your illness. But I reckoned without the depth of your courage and suddenly there you were, offering me that most hurt side of yourself, managing to make it suddenly of us and somehow worthy of passion. I would have worried to show you any desire that focussed on your past pain and yet to have you of your choice reach for me and to that end…
How shall I ever get the measure of you and the depth of your courage? Maybe I never will.
Tomorrow is our fifth and last day - and yet the first day of all that is to be. When you get to read this, shall I need to tell you again, I love you?
~9~
Horatio was being cautious - there were still three hours to their rendezvous with the cart that would take them back through the Genoese fishermen’s village and up under Sergeant Ince’s famous life saving holes in the Rock, a memorial of courage and ingenuity, but he thought they ought to be going. They had dressed each other - not without squeals of laughter and rather more slowly than would be thought possible, but then as Archie said, getting one another dressed was something they needed much more practice at, and anyway he had not been so precipitate, thinking there was time for one more swim.
“Lets at least walk on the sand once more,” said Archie. A fatal request as it turned out, since there was a warm east wind blowing and it constantly teased Archie’s more than sun bleached hair out around his face and Horatio was no proof against that - or against any lure of Archie’s loveliness. And so ere long it was Archie who had his way and the beach witnessed two uniforms piled as neatly as the desperation induced by it being the last day ashore would allow, and the sea welcomed two enthusiastic bodies revelling in the waves, the warmth and each other.
But they had come without towels this time, and wriggling a damp body into the King's Uniform does nothing for sartorial elegance and it was in fact two sadly crumpled if otherwise tellingly radiant young officers who returned in the jolly boat, and whose salute to the quarter deck was as smart as their appearance was not.
The salute was returned by two watchers whose faces - both the mild blue-eyed one, whose benign expression belied his shrewdness about all things and most of all the passions of junior officers; and the penetrating stare of the other in which only inappropriate closeness could have detected a very faint gleam that betrayed a covert delight, not least at the split second glance the two below gave each other. Neither face gave anything away of what they really thought. Which was actually a fervent prayer, unspoken by either aloud, but none the less earnest for that, that this tremendous gift that lay in these two lives be kept safe for as long as ever might be. What was said aloud was this:
“Mr Hornblower, Mr Kennedy! I am gratified and glad to see your sense of time has not deserted you along with your sense of proper dress for officers on duty. You have till next watch to improve the latter. And then you may report to my cabin if you please...”
As they scurried below, Bracey turned round to his captain with a look of mild and concerned surprise which the latter replied to with a reassuring smile. “Think I mean to embarrass them John? Not so, and you may be present too, if you like, just to keep me in check. Just want to utter a few words of caution in private, for their own safety. Otherwise,just think of it, their faces will be like a signal to the entire fleet and we can’t tempt fate like that. There are predators out there and they are both too beautiful and too honest for their own good.”
Bracegirdle heard both the spoken wisdom and the unspoken love and nodded with a grin. “Aye, Sir, it’s good to see “Uncle Philemon” follows his advice through..”
For which he was rewarded with that rarest of sights - the huge smile that transformed that face, in which pride and vulnerable affection, and not a little parental anxiety, were mixed and for which occasional privilege Bracey was prepared to endure much.
Below, off the wardroom a few moments later, Bracegirdle made rather an unnecessary amount of noise descending the companion and so met with nothing more compromising than two alert and slightly anxious pairs of eyes.
“Come on, both of you , let’s see what we can do to make you more presentable shall we?”
Horatio and Archie, one glorious Edenic lifetime over, realised that other joys remained to them, of which the protection and nurture they were offered here was no small one indeed. They followed their senior lieutenant meekly enough, confident that he did not see behind his bustling back, their briefly joined hands - or that if he did, he would not let on.
~Notes~
1. From Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1.
2. Serjeant Henry Ince, of the 2nd Foot, hero of the great siege of Gibraltar in 17 when he invented a way of firing down on the Spanish batteries at what is now La Linea, and thereby broke the deadlock of the siege. The gun holes blasted in the rock are called Ince’s Notch to this day. He also has a theatre named after him. He was also a Methodist lay preacher and it was in his house that the first Methodist society began to meet from 1793 and in a real sense he is the founder of Methodism in Gibraltar.
3. By the time that Edward Pellew recommended Mr Cookworthy’s prescriptions in reality to his son Pownall and in fiction to Archie and Horatio, William Cookworthy had sold out of the pharmacy side of his business - he was chemist, porcelain maker and many other things. But the pharmacy traded under his name till 1974 when the last owner died. And - er- the usages to which the preparations were put in the story and for which the practically minded Pellew recommended them are not necessarily that for which Mr C designed them - and no 4 is my invention!
See: http://www.rpsgb.org.uk/informationresources/museum/exhibitions/themotherofinvention/cook.html
4. From John Donne: the whole passage here underlies both of Archie’s sonnets and is what Archie has been teaching Horatio:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below,
O My America, my new found land
My Kingdom, safliest when with one man manned...
5. From the same passage in Richard II as the title phrase.
6. Et in Arcadia ego, I am even to be found in Arcadia - this phrase is famously used in two paintings by Poussin and shows shepherds reading it on a tombstone in the paradisiacal Arcadia. The common understanding is that even in paradise death and therefore sorrow is present. The classical source of the phrase if there is one is unknown.
So this is a first time fic - and presented with due awareness of all those who have written with skill and beauty in that line before me.
Title: This Other Eden1
Author: Nodbear
Rating: R
Word length: approx 4,130
Pairings and characters: Horatio/Archie, and with book-end appearances by the quarterdeck triumvirate and mention of Serjeant Henry Ince2, who was a real Gibraltar hero, and Richard the innkeeper, who is not real, though Sandy Bay is very real.
Spoilers: None, more or less PWP - a particular point in time.
Summary: Horatio and Archie get extended shore leave when the ship is in Gibraltar. They are intending to try to take the advice of Uncle Philemon...It is told in several sonnets by Archie, extracts from Horatio's private journal and some third person narrative.
Thanks to the very splendid anteros_lmc for beta, and encouragements many and various.
~1~
Shortly after “Uncle Philemon’s” sage and practical advice the Indefatigable had put in to Gibraltar for minor repairs and to await some dispatches and a replacement for two marines who had been transferred.
Mr Kennedy and Mr Hornblower had been pre-empted in a request they both intended to make by the fact that Captain Pellew practically ordered them to take shore leave, and instead of the usual 48 hours he informed the wide-eyed Horatio and the subtly amused Archie that they would be granted five days in all. He added that Mr Bowles had obtained for them a room at the inn kept by an old sea-going mate of his on the remote bay beyond the Genoese fisherman’s village which was really quiet and lovely. He ended by saying that Mr Bracegirdle wanted to see them too. This proved to be because the latter wanted to offer them a ‘loan’ of a few extra pounds he insisted they accept - and in the end they did. Archie could spot a conspiracy when he saw one and remarked to Horatio how lucky they were to serve on such a ship. Horatio had answered eagerly - “yes, we are aren’t we?” but in such a way that made Archie smile at the slightly wondering tone which made him decide not to tell Horatio about the little pot of Mr Cookworthy’s 3 No 4 salve that had been handed to him with the gruffly expressed advice that ill-concealed considerable affection and the instruction: “take care of yourselves, I, this ship needs you both in one piece, sir, remember that.” Horatio would not, as yet anyway, understand why it was that Archie was entrusted with this and not he, and would be more than a little stunned at just how practical and how - er - earthly minded a man his beloved captain could be.
~2~
Archie was being fluent, part elation, part well-hidden terror. Elation because there was just the beach, wide and empty in the sun, the shining water - and Horatio. Terror because everything told his fine tuned instincts that to be this happy was to court disaster. Elated that all he most wanted could be here, and terrified that Horatio would still not want...or that fear of the past would catch up on him and - horror - he would be the one to pull away. But if this was not Arcadia quite, nor Eden, it was as near as. Archie would let elation win.
~3~
Horatio’s journal, headed: The second day. Morning.
This is a journal you might read one day if I am brave enough to show you and so it talks as if to you, about you, for you. What else is there that will ever be so great a subject as you? And I have no skills as a poet so I have to love you as I can - and as a mathematician I have counted and there are eight - no nine now- yous in this paragraph - and still it is not to say it often enough. You. You are always the one for new words - and you were using them last night to banish fear. Always clever with words as I am not, “discalced” indeed - you are most articulate when you are afraid. It is a way to find your brave self.
You who are different from me - to whom the poetry does not come, but then you are so different We are different, as night and day - though you would say that’s an old and tired metaphor. You are all burnished gold and blue and - well, being a mathematician again I’d say in quite lovely proportion and I am brown. Indeed someone told me once, like a pool among bracken, and I don’t know even now if they meant that as a compliment; and I have an awkward lanky stride and I look silly when I blush. And yet you are full of poetry again and of me you say something of grace. Me, graceful? But you check my reply before utterance, your mouth being better employed now. And what I had intended to say - oh, who knows or still less who cares? You always kiss like you mean me to remember nothing else. And yes, you moved me from hesitation into acceptance and thence head long into the death of “I”. The death if anything that wasn’t “us”. To understanding that here surrender is the choice of victory. And just then I stopped being able to think - and logic deserted you and words deserted us both. Only the sun was witness to the love that followed, clumsy - well, I was, at least, and unpractised and utterly sublime. That creation story, in Genesis chapter 1 - in the image of God he created them, that you tell me is such great poetry, it says it took seven days to make the world. We have only five but we will remake the world. And this is the morning of the second day. The second day of the rest of our lives.
~4~
To Mr HH, on the sweet privilege that is his unclothing.
Discalce? Your feet, by habit shod and neat,
I loose to run with mine on sea-damp sands.
I both address and undress you, and meet
prevarication with a kiss, the while my hands
further with gentle and determined skill
their appointed course to divest you. Heart
and head as much as garments fall, yet will
you yield me all your glorious self? No part
reserved, recalcined and remote? I see
With every limb revealed, the gift of grace
and suddenly am still, awed; just to be
here, now and stripped of artifice. Your face
is mirror true to mine. Then two are one
and love lies open, and envious is the sun.
Archie Kennedy, Sandy Bay, Gibraltar
~5~
Archie was being dried. At least his naked self, wet from the sea, was swathed from head to toe in towels and muffled laughter issued from the figure lying prone and content on the sand as Horatio rubbed wide circles of fabric-baffled tenderness. Internally, Archie delighted in enumerating Horatio’s progress. Damp head: he rejoiced at the lovely massaging fingers; shoulders: he flexed them under Horatio’s ministrations; his side: the ticklish bit that jumped despite his best efforts, which provoked the laughter; the small of the back: ahhh, Archie in his towelled twilight sighed contently; his buttocks: oh yes, please ...Archie wriggled appreciatively, and then...Archie’s face was suddenly turned round framed in its hood of white cotton, and his smile several degrees more beguiling than ever.
“Horatio, I know you are madly and deeply and insanely in love with my arse but it doesn’t need three times the drying - and my legs are cold!”
Freeing the illusion of the hood from Archie’s head, Horatio retorted, “ Such coarse language, Arch!” And then “There! You looked like a monk, I can hardly think of anything less appropriate."
Archie managed a slightly shaky air of hurt resignation, something else altogether dancing in his eyes. “Not so - I have now been celibate for - oh, about twenty three minutes and counting, …whereas you were obviously indulging in utterly lascivious thoughts about my arse. It won’t do.”
“Shall I unthink them then, or did you mean just thinking is not enough?” Horatio queried, aligning himself over Archie’s still swathed form, the long lean face suddenly a little hawk-like and predatory in anticipation.
“I see two remedies for your poor cold legs,“ he continued, consenting now to rub them with great gentleness and admittedly with much of the licence to stroke elsewhere which Archie had just ascribed to him. Gradually his clever fingers were burrowing beneath the towels, never acknowledging that fact though and never taking his eyes from Archie’s glowing face.
“Yes?” Archie’s acting skills did not extend to keeping expectation out of his eyes at this offer.
“Well, one is get dressed and go and eat a vast meal at the inn back over the headland.”
“Hmmm, and the other?”
Horatio grinned a lust-laden grin, unknown till a few days before. Both hands had now dispensed with all covering but continued their hypnotic journey everywhere on Archie’s lower body (before, behind, between 4 Horatio knew the text as well as Archie by now.)
“Is to do that just as above - but afterwards.”
“Mmmmm, I think the latter, don’t you?“ Horatio’s mouth had joined his hands and Archie gave up thinking.
His legs stopped feeling cold moments later. Obscurely he had a coherent if potentially blasphemous phrase running in his head - except, he felt, he meant it with intentional holiness:
And it was evening and it was morning and it was the third day of the remade world.
~6~
To Mr HH, co-creator of the demi-paradise 5
Not yet Arcadia, not yet Eden bright;
not far from both, as we both love and love.
Paradise is here, held within the sight
your beauty brings, the heart whose all you give
to mine. Though both are bruised and shy of trust
Love has within it faith, and ours is love
enough to shape a world new-made, which must
raze past harm to dust, and yet may move
grief’s mountain, levelled by honest open
speech. There is in you such strength of will, in
me of hope. Together much is spoken
of how we change the world. For us to win
each other is to win the whole. Your heart,
my world, mine yours, elation every part.
Archie Kennedy, Sandy Bay, Gibraltar
~7~
Even in Arcadia6 pain found its way - and in Eden the serpent had reared its subtly evil head, so it was perhaps inevitable that on the evening of the fourth day the dream interrupted things.
Archie, finally having succumbed to admitting he was tired, had been asleep for an hour or two. Horatio had been content to let him sleep but was himself awake and peaceful to a degree he thought he had not known since childhood.
But then Archie, dozing into the late afternoon, was suddenly hot beside him, and still asleep, thumped his hand fiercely into the mattress and began to twist and turn as if distressed and after a moment to mutter a few phrases disjointedly and not fully audibly but certainly sounding fearful. Horatio, who had been reading the poetry that Archie had copied from Captain Pellew’s copy of John Donne into a bound journal, had been watching the sleeping figure idly and adoringly, given that the object of the open worship could not see him to tease or mock. He sat up and put a hand on the hot forehead, but Archie twisted away from him - at least not from him but from whomever his nightmare told him this was.
After calling his name several times in a voice he knew to have worked before, Horatio was relieved to see Archie roll over on to his back, eyes opening and then meeting his. Then at first awareness and then frustration rolled over him; the face hardened and the voice that emerged was the bright brittle one that Horatio had learned to dread, even as it had become far less often heard.
“Being noisy was I? At least you will not be able to say your bed mate for shore leave gave you a dull time...”
Horatio gulped, for he saw what was probably coming - something like:
“Archie..."
“Don’t do it!”
“Do what?”
"Start looking after me - I don’t want it! I don’t want…”
“And so what do you want, Archie?”
And on and on and too hurtful. Please no - not here.
Horatio’s often-solemn face looked so bewildered that somewhere in Archie’s rush of angry and shame-filled fear, that he had ruined their idyll, he heard a warning bell and heeded it. And as he answered that internal summons, there came the realisation that the dream did not have to win. There were other conscious choices he could make, as he had chosen on coming here, elation could and must storm the side and take fear prisoner, and subdue all resistance at least for the moment.
The expression in Archie’s face softened and Horatio took his chance, breathing inwardly a grateful sigh.
“Would you like some water?” At Archie’s nod, Horatio sprang off the bed and Archie, reflecting on the long, lean lines of a body he was coming to know, at least in part, as well as his own, found an unexplored dynamic of the love that had overtaken them taking root in his mind. Accepting the water he drank it fast and then held out the glass, saying “Just leave it and come back here”.
Horatio was not taken aback by being pushed down on his back and had the sense to curb the question: “Are you sure you are alright?”
What did surprise him was that, between each slow movement of their kisses Archie began to speak, as Horatio had already learned he sometimes would. Fond endearments, fragments of Donne, silly and bawdy words of their own coining, but now, in doing so, he coaxed Horatio to touch with deliberate intent the scars that hitherto he had tended to guard, giving slightly breathless instructions that he wanted Horatio to explore. Asking with strangely quiet passion to be touched, finally allowing the adoration that Horatio was only too willing to give, to have free reign even in the legacy of Simpson’s torture.
Laying his mouth gently on the long scratch mark on Archie’s back and then, following the urging of the impatient voice, less gently, Horatio moved from one faded welt to another. His own reaction to the combined requests and sounds of guttural satisfaction Archie produced was a transformed and relieved sense that nothing was beyond their reaching. Maybe not yet and hardly without setbacks, but they would conquer. As Archie’s insistent hand pushed his own towards that cruel and jagged mark on the very sensitive skin of his right inner thigh, Horatio was imploring something - someone - “let me get this right, please let me not hurt him." But he did not speak, trusting rather blindly in the instinct that almost overtook all sense in him. Wordless both, there was more to this than mere speech, and somewhere in their frantic exchange, the shadow of the past took one more step into oblivion.
A while later, contemplating the likelihood that they were both hungry, Horatio disentangled his legs and feet from around Archie’s and looked at the peaceful face beside him, “Hungry now, Arch?”
“Starved - its all this exercise you insist on ‘Ratio, I’ll waste away at this rate.“
But Archie showed no sign of such frailty as they both dressed and went to devour everything offered to them by the curiously generous landlord. (Or less curious had they known of the briefing their host had received from his old friend Thomas Bowles, “they look tired out, the both of them and they haven’t two shillings to bargain with, hardly, and likely they will be so wrapped up in one another they won’t think to eat. But I know I can rely on you to take care of them, Richard...”)
~8~
Horatio’s journal, headed: The evening before the fifth day.
You had a nightmare. I was reading those amazing words of Donne you have taught me and trying to let you sleep. Difficult, since asleep you look like an angel of God, or at the very least a grown up and very naughty cherub, without the puppy fat and with that perfection of muscle and sinew that makes me feel my gawkiness still.
It was just occurring to me to abandon restraint for the umpteenth time, when your nightmare began - was it that bastard Simpson again? Not for the first time I blessed both the eagle eye and steady hand that had killed him, even whilst I wished it had been mine. Damn his evil that even here he should haunt you, sleeping in the bed that is ours alone.
Can I somehow not follow you into your dreams and take that pain away even as I try to when you are awake?
When you woke I feared his victory even in the waking world - in the brittle sadness in your eyes and the shake in your limbs that preceeds those terrible moments of your illness. But I reckoned without the depth of your courage and suddenly there you were, offering me that most hurt side of yourself, managing to make it suddenly of us and somehow worthy of passion. I would have worried to show you any desire that focussed on your past pain and yet to have you of your choice reach for me and to that end…
How shall I ever get the measure of you and the depth of your courage? Maybe I never will.
Tomorrow is our fifth and last day - and yet the first day of all that is to be. When you get to read this, shall I need to tell you again, I love you?
~9~
Horatio was being cautious - there were still three hours to their rendezvous with the cart that would take them back through the Genoese fishermen’s village and up under Sergeant Ince’s famous life saving holes in the Rock, a memorial of courage and ingenuity, but he thought they ought to be going. They had dressed each other - not without squeals of laughter and rather more slowly than would be thought possible, but then as Archie said, getting one another dressed was something they needed much more practice at, and anyway he had not been so precipitate, thinking there was time for one more swim.
“Lets at least walk on the sand once more,” said Archie. A fatal request as it turned out, since there was a warm east wind blowing and it constantly teased Archie’s more than sun bleached hair out around his face and Horatio was no proof against that - or against any lure of Archie’s loveliness. And so ere long it was Archie who had his way and the beach witnessed two uniforms piled as neatly as the desperation induced by it being the last day ashore would allow, and the sea welcomed two enthusiastic bodies revelling in the waves, the warmth and each other.
But they had come without towels this time, and wriggling a damp body into the King's Uniform does nothing for sartorial elegance and it was in fact two sadly crumpled if otherwise tellingly radiant young officers who returned in the jolly boat, and whose salute to the quarter deck was as smart as their appearance was not.
The salute was returned by two watchers whose faces - both the mild blue-eyed one, whose benign expression belied his shrewdness about all things and most of all the passions of junior officers; and the penetrating stare of the other in which only inappropriate closeness could have detected a very faint gleam that betrayed a covert delight, not least at the split second glance the two below gave each other. Neither face gave anything away of what they really thought. Which was actually a fervent prayer, unspoken by either aloud, but none the less earnest for that, that this tremendous gift that lay in these two lives be kept safe for as long as ever might be. What was said aloud was this:
“Mr Hornblower, Mr Kennedy! I am gratified and glad to see your sense of time has not deserted you along with your sense of proper dress for officers on duty. You have till next watch to improve the latter. And then you may report to my cabin if you please...”
As they scurried below, Bracey turned round to his captain with a look of mild and concerned surprise which the latter replied to with a reassuring smile. “Think I mean to embarrass them John? Not so, and you may be present too, if you like, just to keep me in check. Just want to utter a few words of caution in private, for their own safety. Otherwise,just think of it, their faces will be like a signal to the entire fleet and we can’t tempt fate like that. There are predators out there and they are both too beautiful and too honest for their own good.”
Bracegirdle heard both the spoken wisdom and the unspoken love and nodded with a grin. “Aye, Sir, it’s good to see “Uncle Philemon” follows his advice through..”
For which he was rewarded with that rarest of sights - the huge smile that transformed that face, in which pride and vulnerable affection, and not a little parental anxiety, were mixed and for which occasional privilege Bracey was prepared to endure much.
Below, off the wardroom a few moments later, Bracegirdle made rather an unnecessary amount of noise descending the companion and so met with nothing more compromising than two alert and slightly anxious pairs of eyes.
“Come on, both of you , let’s see what we can do to make you more presentable shall we?”
Horatio and Archie, one glorious Edenic lifetime over, realised that other joys remained to them, of which the protection and nurture they were offered here was no small one indeed. They followed their senior lieutenant meekly enough, confident that he did not see behind his bustling back, their briefly joined hands - or that if he did, he would not let on.
~Notes~
1. From Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1.
2. Serjeant Henry Ince, of the 2nd Foot, hero of the great siege of Gibraltar in 17 when he invented a way of firing down on the Spanish batteries at what is now La Linea, and thereby broke the deadlock of the siege. The gun holes blasted in the rock are called Ince’s Notch to this day. He also has a theatre named after him. He was also a Methodist lay preacher and it was in his house that the first Methodist society began to meet from 1793 and in a real sense he is the founder of Methodism in Gibraltar.
3. By the time that Edward Pellew recommended Mr Cookworthy’s prescriptions in reality to his son Pownall and in fiction to Archie and Horatio, William Cookworthy had sold out of the pharmacy side of his business - he was chemist, porcelain maker and many other things. But the pharmacy traded under his name till 1974 when the last owner died. And - er- the usages to which the preparations were put in the story and for which the practically minded Pellew recommended them are not necessarily that for which Mr C designed them - and no 4 is my invention!
See: http://www.rpsgb.org.uk/informationresources/museum/exhibitions/themotherofinvention/cook.html
4. From John Donne: the whole passage here underlies both of Archie’s sonnets and is what Archie has been teaching Horatio:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below,
O My America, my new found land
My Kingdom, safliest when with one man manned...
5. From the same passage in Richard II as the title phrase.
6. Et in Arcadia ego, I am even to be found in Arcadia - this phrase is famously used in two paintings by Poussin and shows shepherds reading it on a tombstone in the paradisiacal Arcadia. The common understanding is that even in paradise death and therefore sorrow is present. The classical source of the phrase if there is one is unknown.