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Chapter Text

1854

Finding it hadn’t been a problem. The village proper was far beyond even a modest thing; there would likely have only been one lieutenant or one Irving among its population to start, and certainly, there was no confusion when Solomon had asked about a Lieutenant Irving— though he had gotten looks, from a few. 

This was fair enough. He was far from the cleanest he’d ever been, and he’d had no uniform to speak of since his drumming out, and it was likelier than he cared to think that Solomon stank of whale oil and blood, even a month past season. It was the sort of smell that got into one’s hair, melted into the skin, and it was also the sort of smell that, four years on a whaler, Solomon had gone entirely noseblind to. It was plain he was not the sort to be looking for a lieutenant in a little nothing North Sea hamlet, years past the resignation of such a lieutenant’s commission, and particularly not for reasons that could in any way be construed as wholesome.

Who was to say what Solomon’s intentions were, anyway? Perhaps he would rob the lieutenant, and the disinterested barman who had pointed him in the direction of the property that evening would feel awfully guilty about showing Solomon the way later. Or maybe not. It was possible—probable even, if the scoffs Solomon had gotten when he’d first set at his rounds of inquiry were anything to go by—that like on Terror, Lieutenant Irving was not much thought of nor cared for up in his little seaside cottage.

“Good afternoon, miss,” he said at the door. “Is the lieutenant in?”

A housekeeper, or a sister perhaps. Solomon must have looked a fright, for the way she stared at him—half horror, half derision—and said in a soft voice, “May I inquire who’s asking?”

“Solomon Tozer,” said he, with a habitual click of his heels. “Off Terror, miss.”

Ah. The dawning of something which might have been recognition but which was perhaps also, less oddly, fear. It was not unlikely that Irving had told his staff about the man who stabbed him a dozen times in the chest, and the Royal Marine who had backed him up for it. It would be Solomon’s luck. 

The sister-housekeeper said, “He is not. You may come back in the morning, though, if it is important business.” And she made to close the door.

Panic flared in him. Solomon wasn’t a stranger to sleeping in ditches, necessarily, but it was cold—early November now—and the chill was seeping into his bones with every moment prolonged on the step. Solomon was sick to death of the cold. 

“All respect, ma’am,” said Solomon, quickly but not so much as to spook her. He smiled with all his mustered charm. (Women, against their better judgment, tended to like him, which was convenient, since Solomon liked them right back.) “Might I wait for him? It’s cold out here, you know, and with only the one room in town, I ain’t got a place to stay the night.”

The woman looked him up and down austerely. The collar of her plain day dress rustled against her throat. “You have a coat,” she said coolly, and Solomon couldn’t help it. He laughed: a short, shocked bark.

“Miss,” he said, though it wasn’t the turning away that surprised him, but rather the no-bones method of it. “That’s unkind.”

“Surely it is not—” She lifted a hand, extended it over the threshold in a gesture which was distinctly not an invitation for Solomon to touch her. He thought suddenly, anyway, of kissing it. A long dry spell, Sol had endured. He was in less danger of an official hanging for his sensual proclivities shipboard on a whaler, but he was also afforded none of the comfort of rank which had previously helped him conceal the matter of his tits and his cunt. And he hadn’t had a girl in—quite some time.

The girl in question turned her hand in the cold air, such that her palm reflected up to the darkening sky. “Surely it is not as cold as you’ve had before, Sergeant.” 

“Not a sergeant anymore, miss.” He tugged his forelock anyway. Turned. “Tell him I stopped by, would you?”

“Serg—Mister Tozer.” The woman didn’t close the door. Solomon hesitated on the step, looked back at her with a strained, polite smile.

“Don’t wish to trouble ye—”

“The lieutenant will be back tonight. I cannot speak to his willingness to meet with you at that hour, but perhaps—first thing on the morrow.” She frowned, looking Solomon up and down appraisingly. “Are you hungry?”

She cooked him supper. Nothing fanciful—some pan-fried fish, potatoes, a crust of bread and a bit of plum jam—but Solomon ate like the starving. This was a touch dramatic, since Solomon had actually been starving before, and had someone given him at that time a bit of plum jam to eat alongside a cut from Billy Gibson’s emaciated flank, he would undoubtedly have wept in joy—and yet. He had not eaten a hot meal in some time. He did not weep.

Irving’s girl watched him from a distance. Solomon could not parse whether she was sister or servant or wife. He did not think pious Irving was the marrying kind—which was to say Cornelius Hickey had not thought pious Irving the marrying kind, and Solomon hadn’t cared one way or another—though that was indeed the reason he had sought out Irving above the rest. It was simpler to ask a favor of someone with whom Solomon was on similar, if not equal, footing—made Solomon Tozer’s secrets easier to keep, on both their accounts, and made for pleasanter company besides—though a wife, wed in earnest or not, would complicate that. Not prohibit it flat out, but complicate it.

He resolved to call her Irving’s girl until she offered up something better. 

“I’ll go make up the spare room,” she said, when Solomon had finished his plate and began to return her studious gaze, with his hands unfurled gently on the table where she could see them. “Mister Tozer.”

It was dim in the room, and she might have been one of those who let it curl loose from the chignon about their ears, but Solomon thought her hair was as short as his. She was handsome, in a plain, minister’s wife way. Were the lieutenant inclined to girls, she would probably be Irving’s type.

“Want help?”

“No.”

“No harm meant by it.” Solomon lifted a palm off the table, pacifying. 

Irving’s girl looked at him long, and then swept from the room.

:

The lieutenant met him in the morning, as his girl had promised. Solomon had woken early, found someone had left him a basin by which to wash his face and to scrub the crust of sweat and grime from his skin, and when he made his way carefully down the hall afterward, he saw the table lit in pale winter sun with breakfast prepared upon it.

So too was John Irving there, looking nervous and wide-eyed with his Bible open before him, his full mouth pressed thin. Solomon stopped in the doorway—he hadn’t seen the lieutenant since they made England again, and Irving had still been a half-step from death then, hardly walking unassisted and with a tendency to start bleeding afresh from his breast at any sudden movement. Solomon Tozer, mutineer and maneater that he was, had not been given a shipboard audience with Irving to say anything at all. Any plea for forgiveness, had he been inclined to make one, was roundly denied him. 

“My apologies,” Solomon said now, thickly. “Lieutenant. I ought to have written first, but I didn’t have your address.”

“Good morning, Mister Tozer,” said Irving, assiduously ignoring that. There was something to his voice—a hoarseness like disuse, or like fidgeting grief—that gave Solomon further pause. He looked Irving in the face, and Irving averted his eyes. “Please. Eat.”

Solomon said, “Your girl make this?” and watched Irving flinch.

“My—no, Sergeant.” A grim twist to his mouth. “Tozer, I mean. I can, ah—cook for myself.”

Not the marrying kind, certainly then. Solomon sat. Spooned porridge from a bowl into his mouth and observed the gentlest curl of hair about Lieutenant Irving’s ears. He was clean-shaven. He touched his lower face repeatedly, as if he were self-conscious about the fact.

Solomon began: “Lieutenant—”

“I am not a lieutenant any longer, Mister Tozer.” Irving turned a page in the Bible. “I resigned my commission.”

“Well—yes. I heard.” Solomon dragged a hand across his mouth. “Mister Irving, then?”

This felt worse, somehow. The look on Irving’s face suggested that he agreed.

“That is fine.”

“Mister Irving,” said Solomon. “I’ve come to ask about work.”

:

Irving turned him out. 

Solomon had anticipated as much. Asked a lot, Solomon did, to go to the man whom Cornelius Hickey had attempted to murder and petition him for employment. Asked more, to request lodgings on his property along with it.

But Irving hadn’t been cruel about it, which Solomon thought possibly made the ordeal worse. He had looked frightened to begin with—imagining Solomon Tozer with unrestricted access to his home and to his flesh, no doubt—and then, when he had said I am afraid I simply don’t have work to give, he had looked aggrieved. Solomon hated pity more than anything. When Irving had offered him the spare room for a second night, while he arranged his travel south from Scotland, Solomon had stood up and left with but a frigid expression of his thanks.

He drank now, though it was foolish to do so alone when it only made him maudlin and when he didn’t have the pence to spare. He had drunk when he was cashiered too—strictly to make himself sick—and at port, to be companionable with men Solomon liked though not like that, when they put warm hands on his knees and his thighs and he brushed them off with grace and a carefully apologetic grin. He had drunk on the whalers too—though then only enough to stay warm.

He drank now to be drunk, and that was all.

He was making a good go at it. Halfway dizzy by his third cup, tongue thick and eyes rheumy by the time his coin ran out, when the barman leant over the bartop to Solomon and said, “So? How fares the mollycot, then?”

“Hm?” said Solomon, because he was not thinking of Irving. He was thinking of Billy Gibson, whom Solomon had eaten. He was drunk enough that he had begun to contemplate the meager meat between his thumb and his forefinger, which he had done often on the return trip aboard Investigator, testing it between his teeth until he felt the requisite rush of panic which accompanied any genuine attempt to bite through the side muscle of a soldier’s trigger finger. 

“The lieutenant,” elaborated the barman, like Solomon was thick. “Find him, then?”

“Oh. Yes.” Solomon tucked his thumb into his fist to remove the temptation and finished his drink. Said, because he was thick, mostly, and looking to argue over it: “Dunno ‘bout any mollycot, though.”

The man snorted. There followed a short silence in which it seemed to Solomon Tozer that he was being appraised, up and down.

“Doesn’t keep a girl,” the barman said, sullenly.

“He does.” Solomon frowned. Ran a finger along the raised lip of the bar, though he did not make too much a show of the grime collected there. “Do you?”

“Oi.” A laugh, though it was discomfited. Offense flitted across his face. “‘Course. Got one for cleaning and for face-making, though ‘ve yet to get her at both at once—”

“Seems inefficient,” agreed Solomon. He was out of money, but he pushed his glass back at the man for refilling. 

“You a sailor?”

He hummed. “Whaling.”

A top-off on his glass. “And before that?”

Solomon was drunk. “Marine.”

“Right. That how you know the—lieutenant?”

Solomon gestured vaguely. “Sure.”

“Not well enough he ain’t turn you out, though,” observed the man.

“Like I said.” Solomon scraped his knuckles into his left eye. “Got a housegirl already.”

“Mm.” Another long, sweeping appraisal, this time with a thin twist to his mouth. He set a broad hand upon the bartop, beside Solomon’s drink. “You looking to be somebody’s housegirl, Marine?”

:

It was a drunken lack of coordination, rather than any shortage of desire or will, that prevented Solomon from putting his foot through the door of the lieutenant’s little house that evening. He laid the side of his fist upon it and said, loudly: “S’freezing out here, Irving. Know yer home.”

It was the only reason he had found the cottage at all—stumbling over heath and hill with a traitorously dim memory of the way, at times marking the direction only by the sound of the sea to his right, at last catching a glimpse of pale candlelight reflected upon the windowpane, and pursuing it with a singlemindedness Solomon had not known in some years. He had put his ungloved hand in a hawthorn for his troubles, skidded hard down a slope which was more scree than greenery, to say nothing of—

“M’bleeding into the hedge,” he announced, slurring and furious. He swiped the thorn-bitten hand foolishly over his glassed cheek, bit back a curse. “You’ll have blood on yer step, Lieutenant—”

“Tozer.” The door had opened amidst his railing. John Irving stood just beyond it, hastily dressed and looking as if he contained all the divine fury of his God in the modest set of his shoulders. “Do you have any idea of the hour?”

Solomon did not; he’d pawned his watch in Dunbar. He shook his head. Said stupidly, “Late.”

Irving looked primed for a fit. “Were you fighting?”

More or less. “Was defendin’ myself—”

“From whom? The baker’s wife? The sheep?”

“Lieutenant—mean, Mister Irving—” Irving flinched twice, a one-two in short succession as if Solomon had hit him hard in both sides of the ribs. “Sorry. Can I come in?”

“No.” He sounded right certain of it, was the thing. Then Irving looked Solomon well in the face, and must have seen something there (if only just all the blood), because he sighed grievously and opened the door generously wider. Propped it open with his stockinged foot, and did not uncross his arms from his chest. “Well. If you must.”

Solomon sat at the dining table (a small, scuffed thing, his third occasion sitting at which did not make Solomon want any less to take stripper and stain to it) while Irving fussed. He filled and set a bowl of water before Solomon in peevish silence, laid a folded tea towel next to that; then Irving pulled the second chair from the table and sat beside him.

Solomon sought his reflection in the shallow bowl of water for some moments. Irving sniffed long-sufferingly.

“Mister Tozer.”

Right. Solomon shifted, tilted his chin up for Irving’s benefit. A second, frigid silence expanded between them; it seemed that Solomon had misjudged, and Irving had not at all intended to touch him. The water bowl and the tea towel had been set out for Solomon’s self-ministration, and Irving had only intended to observe. 

But it seemed also that embarrassment would force his hand. Frowning, blushing, Irving snatched up the towel and wetted it in the bowl, and applied it with some measure of callous haste to Solomon Tozer’s bloodied cheek. He scraped downward, and Solomon winced—a sliver of glass caught yet in the flesh of his face bit cruelly at the corner of his mouth—and Irving faltered: “Oh, did I—”

“S’glass in my face,” Solomon said, helpfully, jaw clenched. “Sir.”

Irving flattened a pale hand against the tabletop and said, small: “My apologies.” The tea towel hovered for a moment just before Solomon’s face, and then it thumped softly to the tabletop as Irving reconsidered. He wet his fingers in the bowl of water, rinsing them bloodless, and then brought them carefully to Solomon’s cheek. Waited for the requisite permission to touch.

“G’wed,” said Solomon, with a tight nod. He did not look at Irving, who was not the marrying type, and seemed to be remembering this about himself with some agony now. Irving’s face was pink; he worried the inside of his cheek quite obviously between his teeth. Solomon was too drunk, too dully aching, to imagine a polite way to presently inform John Irving that he had the wrong idea of it.

Cold, slick fingertips slid along his cheek, meeting a ragged torn skin-seam along the bone ridge forming the socket of Solomon’s eye. There was glass embedded there—he could feel the eyelash-long shards moving in the cut, and hear them too, crunching like crisp, hard snowtop—and Solomon was lucky, really, to not be currently bleeding from his eye instead. Quite lucky. He thought so, as Irving slid a trimmed fingernail along the seam of the cut, and dragged a sliver of glass out onto Solomon’s damp cheek.

And he missed Tommy suddenly, with a ferocity uncommon in the off season. 

Solomon missed Tommy most shipboard, where memory was most insistent and least avoidable, and he missed Tommy most when he was freezing (for sleep ceded way to miserable wakeful reminiscing, when Solomon was shivering), and Solomon Tozer was neither shipboard nor freezing now. But he missed Tommy regardless.

Tommy would have been sweet, like this. She would have sat astride Solomon’s lap to dig the broken glass from his face, would have folded a hand against the back of Solomon’s neck to keep him from flinching when she went rooting around with her fingers in his shallow open wounds. She’d blush—Tommy had always been blushing around Solomon, even when the relative warmth belowdecks hadn’t quite justified the bright flush of her cheeks—and hum. After, she would lick her bloodied fingers clean.

Solomon would let her rut against his thigh for her troubles, entirely clothed, tall back bowed and face tucked into the crook of Solomon’s neck to muffle her little sobs, and Solomon would card his hands through dark curls and promise Tommy a proper wifing when they returned to England. A warm stove, some chipped mismatched china, a set of stays (not because Tommy needed them for her trim waist, but because she was always so fascinated by Sol’s, and perhaps some proper-fitting ones would have granted Tommy her much-desired pert tits). It was not too greedy a list of demands, Solomon had thought. He still thought it, within the privacy of the most resentful, ungrateful corner of his mind. Tommy deserved to have made England again; God could snatch the breath from Solomon’s lungs and he wouldn’t stop believing it. 

He was distracted, missing Tommy. It did not occur to Solomon that the fingers at his throat were anything but imaginings, the slide of his braces from his shoulders and the fumble with shirt buttons anything but a rather efficient phantom of memory. John Irving said, “There is blood all down your shirt, Tozer,” and Solomon said, “Wait— ”

He had bothered with the corset less and less as autumn slid into winter, electing instead for light wrapping and a host of jumpers, which served to make Sol seem thicker in the shoulders than he was as well as compress his chest—but he had bothered with it today. It was likely at some fault for the increased soreness in his ribs; he’d been kicked at some point in the evening scrabble, and he’d certainly bruise a fine purple along the flexible snap of the whalebone. Probably, he should remove it now to allow for ease of both swelling and breathing—

Irving said, “Oh.”

Solomon stood abruptly, kicking the chair out from behind him as he did, and he said thinly, “Lieutenant,” without the damnedest idea of what he might say next. He was still quite drunk, and beyond that he was short of breath, traitorously faint now that it had finally occurred to him that he ought to be. He gripped the edge of the little table to fend off a swoon. 

Irving was looking rather stricken by the sight of Solomon’s open shirt and the lacing beneath it, or perhaps only by the flat press of his tits; it seemed he did not know where to look, and settled with obvious roiling inner torment on Solomon’s face.

“Tozer,” Irving said, very quietly, as Solomon sweated and panted before him. Irving did not stand, which was good; the former lieutenant was at least a head taller than Solomon, and Solomon feared the trapped animal of him would not react kindly to that at the moment. “Please sit.”

“I—Mister Irving—”

“Sergeant.” Solomon nearly resisted the snap to attention—no longer a sergeant, he shouldn’t yet be so easy to call to heel—but he was dizzy and frightened, and obedience was simple instinct. He looked at Irving with wide eyes, but a thinly set mouth. “Sit.”

Solomon Tozer sat. Irving waited a long moment, unmoving, and then he rose.

“I am going to fetch you a clean shirt,” said Irving, carefully. He had pinned his gaze somewhere distant above Solomon’s head, and did not free it. “If you would like to—remove that now, without an audience—I can take my time. If you would rather I did not return—” There was a brief, high waver to his voice, a tremor in his hands. “I will leave the shirt on the bed, in the spare room.”

But Irving did not leave. Solomon, who had lowered his brow to the tabletop, who was willing furious tears back into his eyes, realized that Irving was waiting for his dismissal.

“Yeah,” said Solomon, hoarsely. Nothing else.

Tentative: “Yes?”

“Leave it on—on the bed. Please.”

“Alright.” Irving’s exhale was ragged, aggrieved. Solomon wondered cruelly what right former Lieutenant John Irving had to feel aggrieved about Solomon’s tits, before he remembered that the man was doing him a kindness. Sought for, but unearned. Solomon ought to be more grateful, to express his thanks.

But he was not, and so he did not. Irving left him in the cramped kitchen with the water bowl and the tea towel, and they saw no more of each other that night.

:

He dreamed of eating Tommy.

This was unfair, perhaps, to Billy Gibson, whom Solomon had actually eaten. Unfair to Thomas Hartnell and James Fitzjames too, dead men Solomon hadn’t cared for half as much and had still eaten, as it was out of no abundance of affection that they had eaten anybody (except, perhaps, for Cornelius, and he would have never said so). Solomon had liked Billy enough as a man, before he had become simply an assemblage of ambulant, yet unbutchered meat to watch die far too slowly for anybody’s liking from across camp. Billy had been sharp, mean in a way Solomon liked, and he had loved Cornelius Hickey to the point of foolishness. That had been admirable, too.

Solomon had liked Billy, and he still hadn’t felt a damn thing eating him except for miserable satisfaction.

It was different, with Tommy. To begin with, she was alive when Solomon took the first bite from her flank, and she squirmed at the first touch of teeth and the first ragged tear. Solomon had her on the rumpled floor of their shared tent, fingers wrapped tight over her mouth and damp with her panicked breath. Solomon Tozer was ravenously hungry; Tommy Armitage, ever generous, had offered.

Yet it was a different thing, to offer to be eaten and then to experience being eaten. Certainly, it would have been kinder to take a knife to her throat beforehand, to empty Tommy of that thick red blood that showed so eagerly in her cheeks—Solomon could have drunk it then, all fresh warm iron, and done his damnedest not to vomit when his stomach turned over sour—but it would have been crueler too. Removing Tommy from the tableau so early, when it had been her idea (Solomon, even for all his practicality, would never have suggested it), when it was only fair to include her in the spectacle of her own consumption. She would allow Sol to eat her; it was only fair Sol let her watch.

At least, they had thought as much. But now Tommy was crying, and Solomon was feeling particularly beastly, because he had no inclinations to stop. He dragged a soothing hand up Tommy’s side, and said, “S’alright, pretty girl,” directly into her ribs, to which Solomon fastened his teeth and administered a starved, gnawing sort of kiss. Tommy shook beneath him. 

Hunger and terror had bestowed upon them both the long-lost benefit of ardor, and Solomon was wet at his cunt, and beneath the press of Solomon’s knee, Tommy was valiantly, prettily hard. She wouldn’t remain so, but it was flattering all the same: the next place Solomon affixed his mouth was beneath the waist of her unbuttoned trousers, to the hard-starved jut of Tommy Armitage’s hip. His teeth were loose in his mouth, and it was perhaps not the cleverest idea to begin gnawing on bone like a hungry dog, but Tommy’s hips kicked—protestingly, appreciatively—and that was worth the aching gums. Solomon chewed the bit of meat which he’d separated from her hipbone, suckled the blood from the wound, and Tommy said wretchedly against his palm: “Tozer.”

“D’ye want me to stop?” Solomon had no intention of it. He licked a stripe up her concave belly and degloved it, like a jungle cat, quite effectively of skin. Tommy thrashed weakly enough one might have misjudged the movement as a shiver, and Solomon removed his hand from her mouth.

“Alright, Tommy?” Blood on and in his mouth, Solomon rubbed his face into the trembling skinless plane of her belly. “Like it?”

Tommy sobbed. Solomon could hear the white shale clacking, even beneath several layers of coated canvas and ship blanket and discarded comforter, as she nodded. 

Solomon sought her hair with his hand, buried it deep in brown curls and stroked her bleeding scalp. He said, “Breathe, Tommygirl,” and sunk his teeth deep into her belly. Tore. Tommy did not even scream.

She was glassy-eyed, when Solomon pulled the meat from his mouth and bumped at her lips with his knuckles. She was also miraculously still hard; she opened her mouth obediently, looking at Solomon like he hung the moon as she did. Tears had cut pale lines in the grime on Tommy’s cheeks, but they were freezing on her face now. Her lashes tangled, iced her eyes near-shut.

“Eat.” Solomon fed Tommy her own meat off his fingers, and she didn’t complain about the waste. This was good, since Solomon couldn’t have justified it if he had been asked—feeding the so swiftly dying, when there were those of them who might still live on the dying’s rations. All he might have said was that he liked Tommy, and he wanted her to eat. “Good girl.”

“Yeah,” agreed Tommy faintly, with her own blood in her mouth. “Sol.”

“Gonna use the knife now.” Solomon flipped it in his hand, brought down the varnished handle on Tommy’s sternum with a quick, hard crack. Then another, and another, until he had split her ribs down the middle and could reach in between her lungs and cup her beating heart.

Softly—Solomon watched her naked lungs flutter as she did—Tommy said, “G’wed. Sol.”

Sol turned the knife in hand again, and set about cutting out Tommy’s heart.

Chapter Text

He slept poorly, with a guest.

It was a simple want of privacy. It spake no commentary on John Irving’s trepidation of this particular guest, his flightiness in general, the unfitness of the little cottage for the prying eyes of dispassionate observers. Certainly, it said nothing about the day dresses in the wardrobe, the ribbon upon the writing desk, the stockings in the chest of drawers. He locked his door against his houseguest all the same.

He put himself on his knees for a long while, and when he arose he was feverish, galvanized, but with less of a twitch to his spine. Sunrise broke; John paced the modest length of the room with long, frostbite-scarred hands pressed to his face, resolving that sleep was a lost cause.

There was no sound from the room in which Tozer had retired, when John crept past it. He made his ablutions, said his morning prayers, and began the process of preparing breakfast for himself and his guest. He did it in men’s clothes.

(To admit anxiety over the stockings would be to acknowledge wrongdoing in the keeping of them.)

Tozer tripped down the hall earlier in the morning than John expected, considering his conduct the evening previous. He wore John Irving’s shirt; his own, bloodied in last night’s scrap, lay washed by John’s hand and drying over the hearth.

“Lieutenant,” Tozer said, eyes downcast. John did his best not to look for the straight lines of the corset at Tozer’s chest and waist—covetousness, indeed, was a familiar trespass.

“Tozer,” said John. “Good morning.”

Tozer made a sound which suggested disagreement with such a judgment. But he sat at the table. Ate, with a sullen quiet. There was naught but the sounds of chewing and of Bible pages turning for several long minutes at the table.

“Tozer,” said John Irving, blandly, to disguise his tentativeness. He did not say Mister Tozer, like he would have the night previous; he did not know if that was appropriate, and he was loath to ask.  “Are you still looking for work, then?”

Tozer looked up from his eggs and his porridge warily. There came a mean flash of suspicion across his face. 

“Depends, sir,” he said, with an edge. A challenge in the hard, exquisite set of his jaw. “Depends on the manner o’ the work.”

John colored. He did not get self-righteous—I’m certain I do not know what you are insinuating, fixed easy on his tongue—but he did close his Bible. He said, “Handywork, mostly. I find I am—ill-suited to it.”

“Ill-suited,” repeated Tozer in a drawl. “Never taught a landsman’s trade, sir?”

Sailing had been John’s trade. (Sheep husbandry, for a briefly perilous time, too.) To neither was he very keen on returning. And labor was difficult now, with his weak lungs.

“I am…particular about my privacy,” said John. Then: “The house was unkept for some time, before me. It could use a proper steward.”

Tozer nodded. “Your spare room’s got a draft.”

“Oh.” John frowned. “I am terribly sorry—”

“S’no matter, sir.” Tozer’s expression was peculiar from across the table. “Like your housegirl said. M’used to cold.”

That had been cruel of John. He had repented for it two nights previous, and yet he shifted uncomfortably in his chair now. He thumbed the soft, fraying edge of the tabletop.

Tozer said, “Any rate, I’m not a glazier, but I reckon I can fix a draft.” He nodded across the table. The waning moon scar on his cheek drew John’s gaze. “With your permission, sir.”

Sir. John was seduced to fantasies of slamming his own fingers between the house’s heavy oak door and its jamb. He grimaced distantly, politely.

Tozer scraped his cutlery over the china. When John twitched at the sound—he had prepared a breakfast which required no knives, and had set none at their places—Tozer laid his hands flat, palms down on the table. He said, with perhaps the ghost of sympathy: “Your girl not about again, then?”

“She is—” John gestured helplessly, mouth dry. He wished he possessed the courage to have turned Tozer out again. He wanted to ask about the corset, about what lay beneath it. “Family matter. On leave.”

“Alright.” Tozer leaned back when John stood, allowed his host to collect Tozer’s plate without too much proximity between them. He did not say just us then, or any of the jovial, threatening variations which John had anticipated. He only watched—palms on the table, eyes on John Irving—as John set about heating water on the stove, measuring lye for the basin, and then plunging his bare hands into blissfully, terribly scalding dishwater.

:

In Edinburgh, some time before he took up the cottage on the coast, John Irving had acquired a pair of lady’s gloves.

He was not so depraved as to source them from the Irving estate—John would rather have died in the frigid North than wear his departed mother’s gloves—but he bought them from a dress shop, with a fabricated tale about a wife currently abroad in want of a new pair.

He was not a good liar, John Irving, and his voice had trembled throughout the course of the transaction, but if the shop proprietor had thought anything of it, he hadn’t said. He had wrapped the gloves in paper and satin ribbon for John’s imaginary wife, and John had kept the ribbon too.

He had felt absurdly hunted, spiriting away his kid leather gloves like a murderer with some body part trophy, and by the time he had arrived back at Lewis’s home John had been trembling, sick with fear. He had needed to sit at his writing desk to unwrap the package, unsteady on his feet as he was, and had slid a mournful hand over his face when his shaking had torn the paper wrapping.

He had wept, when his first attempt to tug the cream-colored leather over his cold-scarred hands had met with resistance at his knuckles, the wide breadth of his calloused palm. In his covetous haste, John hadn’t thought much of sizing.

But there were eyelets threaded with silk cord on the backs of the hands, and John fumbled with them like a boy’s first encounter with tackle. He could do nothing about the arrangement of the bones in his hands, but it had still been early days of his convalescence then, and there was little flesh to him. Loosening the cording allowed him to fit the glove over his knuckles, then the jut of his thumb, to thread the closure at the inside of his wrist, and by the time he had finished with the one hand, John’s heart had been fluttering so quickly he had feared he might faint.

The leather puckered unpleasantly over the back of his hand where the stitched points intended to taper to a slim wrist, where instead John had left the corded fastening loose and untied. It was no matter, he had told himself, giddy as any unrepentant sinner. Leather was meant to be broken in.

It was these same gloves he returned to nightly in the cottage. Indeed well broken in now, they slipped with little prim protest over his hands, fastened snugly both front and back at his wrists. They exhaled from their inner lining the comforting scent of lanolin, with which John ritually soothed his chilblained hands, and a touch of sweat. 

He heard Tozer moving about down the hall. He had caulked the window that afternoon, had done a tour about the house and enumerated to John the repair projects to be started. Rot in the cellar steps. Sagging timber in the rafters before the fireplace. Peeling paint inside the cabinets. The whole interior would benefit from a fresh whitewash. John had not permitted the survey to continue into his own bedroom, but had thanked Tozer for the consultation nonetheless.

It did appear that John Irving would be employing a handyman for the winter.

He considered this. It was good work, to share what John had, and good to share it with one who had so trespassed against John Irving. He did not expect that Solomon Tozer would maintain his Arctic habits in Scotland: John was in little danger of being cannibalized, nor, probably, of being shot in the face in the night (so long as John did not lose his mind first). Tozer had been an admirable Marine before the nightmare of Carnivale—took orders well, cared firmly for his men, always spoke politely to John even when deference to Terror’s third lieutenant was not in abundant supply. One could not, John thought reluctantly, be wholly condemned for his temptation by Cornelius Hickey, by hatred of death, by the promise of meat.

But John was still not a practiced liar, and with the kid gloves resting softly on his throat, he had to admit that his tolerance of Solomon Tozer’s presence in his home was not for these reasons alone—or even chiefly. It was founded primarily upon sick, desirous curiosity.

John Irving rolled over in bed, onto his belly, and pressed his gloved fingers into the sockets of his eyes until imagination fled him.

:

Solomon Tozer and his new employer saw each other only sparingly, in the first week.

Initially, this suited Solomon just fine. John Irving was of a sort beyond strange: overly prickly, stalking through the house in a fury when he did not creep about in apparent shame, rarely without his Bible or a ledger for some sail loft or another—which he supposedly balanced out of the sheer generosity of his heart—tucked under his arm. Irving took no pains to make himself more popular with Solomon than he had with the men on Terror (which was, to be fair, not exclusively what had gotten him stabbed in King William Land). Still, Solomon thought it a bold strategy for maintaining the help.

On the sixth day, Solomon came upon the former lieutenant tugging his boots on before the door. Solomon had yet to see John Irving leave the cottage for more than a quick turn about the naked garden—it was frigid out there now, and with the amount of frostbite scarring on Irving’s hands, it was a wonder he still had all his fingers, so Solomon expected him to avoid the elements—and the sight gave him pause.

Irving, hearing him stop to look at the threshold of the kitchen, did not raise his head, but rather said to the toes of his boots, “Going into town for the mail.”

“Alone?” said Solomon, and watched Irving grimace.

“Yes.”

“Walking?”

Tighter now: “Yes.”

Solomon wondered if his chest gave him trouble, bent over double like that. Irving’s face was steadily turning pink. It seemed unwise, to let him venture the long walk into the village by himself when it was clearly a test of physical fortitude just to speak and put his boots on simultaneously. 

“Snowing out.” It was, though only lightly. It was early enough in the morning that it was unlikely Irving wouldn’t be home again before dark. “Do you want company?”

“No.” The former lieutenant straightened with a scowl. “I am perfectly capable of making the trip by myself, Tozer.”

Irving had not called him Mister Tozer since the first night, since the corset discovery. Solomon resented that.

He clicked his heels. “Yessir.” (Irving looked pained about this, which felt only fair to Solomon.) 

“Do you require anything? From town?”

“No.” This time, Solomon left off the sir. Irving rolled his shoulders, winced only slightly, and said, “Right.”

(Solomon waited all of ten minutes after John Irving left before he tried the door of his host’s bedroom, and found it locked.)

Irving returned several hours later with a bundle of mail, consisting entirely of letters addressed to the lieutenant in excessively fine hands, which he left upon the little dining table and did not open.

:

The first time it woke him, Solomon Tozer thought the noise was his own.

He had been dreaming, as was typical, of Tommy. Nothing so terrible and exciting as the last time, when Sol had eaten her alive, but a simple thing. 

In the dream, Sol was sat upright in his hammock on Terror with one boot off, scraping the welt free of ice and grime. Tommy was knelt on deck with the heel of Sol’s other boot cupped firm in her left hand, working neatsfoot oil into the shaft with a greasy cloth. It was quite impossible that this was strictly a memory, without a touch of fantasy to it, as they were alone, and Tommy kept pressing her half-open mouth to the booted ridge of Sol’s ankle, and neither of them were cold. There was a nice flush to Tommy Armitage’s face regardless. 

Sol worked his hand into Tommy’s curls and tucked her face to his shin; Tommy made a pleased murmuring sound in response. 

“Sweet girl,” said Solomon, rough-voiced. “How’re your knees?”

“Mm.” Tommy’s mouth left a different sort of wet smear on his oiled boot. “Sol.”

“Tommy.” Sterner, now. Solomon pulled her off his shin, tilted her gaze upward via the hand in her curls. Her eyes had gone vague; Solomon hadn’t even put his mouth on her yet. She was quite devoted, his Tommy. “Your knees.”

“Ah.” Chastised, Tommy pondered this. Her brows pulled inward contemplatively. “Hurts, a bit.”

Couldn’t have hurt that bad, as Tommy had wrapped an arm around Solomon’s booted calf and begun, gently, drowsily, to rock against him. Solomon said as much.

“S’nice hurt,” said Tommy. Kneeling on deck as she was, there was no contact between Solomon’s bootsole and her prick; she looked vaguely troubled by this. “Gimme a frig?”

“No.” Solomon had no intention of not giving her a frig, and were Tommy less fuck-drunk, she’d have known it. There was simply an order to things, between Sol and Tommy. (That was how Tommy liked it, after all.) Still, Tommy frowned. 

Solomon gave her scalp a scratch. “Finish the boot, Tommygirl.” He didn’t need to say earn it. 

“Yessir,” slurred Tommy, which was so sweet of her that Solomon also gave her a rewarding tug on her curls.

Then there was a cry, and a sound like a body hitting the deck, dead-weight hard; Solomon startled awake with the thought that he had fallen, somehow, out of his hammock.

He thrashed, finding himself novelly tangled in bedsheets and eiderdown—he was in a proper bed, he recalled, on land, and Tommy Armitage was not here—and nearly did tumble out of bed himself. When his forearm thwacked hard against the headboard, Solomon swore, yanked both his hands to his chest, and went still.

Another sound, like a stifled tremulous wail, melted through the walls. Solomon’s head ached, as it frequently did now, where the back of his remarkably fragile skull had met the butt end of a rifle. He listened.

It was silent in the house for some time—then, the groan of floorboards, the whine of door hinges, as someone moved quietly from John Irving’s room down the hall. Solomon wondered if Irving sleepwalked nowadays, and resolved to get a lock for his door. 

He rolled over, and went back to sleep.

Things continued in this way for a week, then more. Sometimes Irving woke him with a soft cry and a noisy tumble out of bed, sometimes as he gave up on sleep and felt his way audibly down the dark hallway. Sometimes Solomon was already himself lying awake, having dreamt horrors of his own—monstrous bears and men in pieces, brains and entrails spilled onto ice, the insistent press of his own sharp bones through bruised, sore-patched skin. Tommy Armitage featured frequently. So too did Cornelius Hickey. 

During the short hours of the day, he painted Irving’s cabinets, reinforced the oldest rafters in the ceiling, and sorted his unopened mail. A Kate Irving had written twice in three weeks. George Henry Hodgson, from a French address, had written once. (Hodgson, also, was no longer a lieutenant; Solomon Tozer himself had testified at his shipboard court martial.)

In the evenings, Irving made supper. His girl never returned from her family leave, which did not surprise Tozer; the barman in town had of course been correct when he had said Irving kept no houseservant. Sol made no mention of it, and the giddy, anxious sense that Irving had gotten away with something hung consistently like fear between them. 

Irving remained haughty, but he became a touch more comfortable too. He fidgeted in Sol’s company, but he tolerated it without fleeing the room, as had been his initial custom. They made stilted conversation. Irving watched Solomon smoke in the evenings. Sol watched Irving knead his hands in the sheepskin, which was slung always over the armchair closest to the fire, while he read his Scripture.

A storm came in from the east, over the water, and Irving woke him wailing.

The suddenness of it frightened Solomon Tozer so badly that he was up and out of bed before he was entirely conscious, reaching for a rifle he was no longer issued beside a camp bedroll in which he had not been sleeping, and he swore. It had not been so long since he had last dreamt of killing John Morfin.

The wail broke abruptly into a sob of the heavy, chest-rattling sort that would without caution soon lead to sick—and ah, there was the retching, sounding somehow worse through two sets of walls. The spectacle as relayed through the stone and plaster might have been pitiable, were it not deeply, itchily disturbing: Solomon hated the sound of sickness now as much as he hated weeping, and he was certain he would not sleep tonight having heard it. 

Nor continuing to hear it, as it seemed Irving had no intention of stopping.

He did knock on Irving’s door. But the storm had whipped up quite noisily outside, and the knock came at the same time as a deep, shivery sob—swiftly followed by a gag—from within the room, and so Solomon did not bother to knock again. The handle turned when he tried it, the door moaning plaintively on its hinges (Irving had yet to allow Solomon near enough to his sleeping quarters to grease its fixtures), and admitted Solomon without ceremony into the darkened room.

Irving was on his knees, before the bed. There was a pronounced tremble to his spine, a labored hitch in his breathing. His face was pressed punishingly hard to the floorboards.

Solomon Tozer said, “Lieutenant.” Irving scrubbed his cheek against the wooden floor, like a miserable child might, and did not look up.

“Lieutenant.” Striding across the room, Solomon laid a hand against Irving’s right shoulder and squeezed once. “Irving.”

The reaction was immediate, dramatic. Irving gasped as if Solomon had only just woken him—roused him uncharitably from sleepwalking down the hall—and hurled himself back against the bedframe. He began a new fearful sound in his throat, a panicked sort of mewling, and with eyes as wide as china plates, he said, “Please. No.”

“Irving.” Solomon raised his hands, palms out, in a plea of innocence. “Irving, you’re awake.”

“Stop,” said John Irving, both pathetically and imperiously. His face was pale as death, blue as glacier  ice. “Do not—touch me."

“Won’t.” Solomon forced his hands to his sides. There was the sour tang of an anxious sweat in the air, but the room did not smell of sick, which was promising. Perhaps Irving hadn’t vomited at all. “You were screaming something awful, Lieutenant.” 

“I—” A violent shaking seized Irving then, knocking his shoulders against the bedframe. The whites of his eyes rolled bright in the dark. He looked in the throes of convulsive fit. “I—”

“Sir.” Solomon knelt. Against his word, he reached for Irving’s shoulder, grasped it again, if only to cease the rhythmic noise of his shuddering against the frame. John Irving made a sound like he had been struck.

“Do not—”

Something ivory flew between them, luminous in the dark, making surely to knock Solomon’s hand away—but the shape arrested in the space before Irving’s eyes, near enough to Solomon’s that he almost had to cross his own to behold it. 

The shape was Irving’s hand, sheathed in a creased lady’s day glove, tightened like stays with eyelets and cord across the back of the wrist. 

“Oh,” said Irving, faintly. “Oh, God.”

“Ah,” said Solomon, unwise, though this was of course the natural summation of John Irving’s secrecy, of the imaginary housegirl, of Sol’s continued lodging at the cottage after that awful second night. Hadn’t he suspected this very thing? Hadn’t he sought to be cruel about it, in a roundabout way, when he had accused Irving of offering to pay to fuck him at the breakfast table?

Irving had by now tilted entirely to the side, and at first Solomon thought the former lieutenant in a swoon, before he rolled onto his front, tucking the gloved hands beneath his belly and pressing his face again brutally to the floor. His mouth moved against the boards; Irving was praying, feverishly.

“Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin, for I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only—” Here Irving paused only to retch, bucking convulsively. “Against you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so you are right in your verdict and justified when—”

“Here now,” said Sol, though he did not touch his host again. “Irving. You’ll make yourself sick.”

Louder, now: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me, yet you desired—”

“Alright,” said Sol, feeling a bit as he did like he was on shore leave with a private who had gotten himself too soused, and like Sol was now resigning to watching him hurl in a ginnel. “Wear yourself out then, if it’s what ye want.”

“Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean, wash me and I will be whiter than snow—”

Solomon Tozer leaned heavily against the bed. He permitted Irving three turns of the prayer, though when he set in on the fourth choking recitation, Solomon interrupted. 

“Least sit up, Irving,” said he. “Won’t please God to watch you freeze on the cold floor.”

The hilarity of this—who was Sol to say that it wouldn’t pleased God to watch either of them freeze, seeing as they had done it for so long once before—was lost on Irving. Solomon watched the path of one ivory glove, smeared across the mouth.

“It isn’t—” Irving faltered, sitting up obediently. There was a distinct dreaminess to the former lieutenant’s countenance. “S’not what it looks like.”

Sol doubted this. But he also knew the look of a creature on the brink, and he wasn’t keen to see Irving shatter. Wasn’t keen to be the reason for it, either.

“Alright,” said Solomon. He patted the floorboards gently, for want of something nicer to touch. “No problem at all.”