The Pursuit Of… Read online

  “Personally, I find that conversation works much better when two are involved. Haven’t you anything to say?”

  Hunter’s eyebrows went down in contemplation, as if perhaps, he did have something—one thing—to say.

  “Here,” Henry said. “I’ll give you some space to think.”

  “You will?”

  “Of course!” Henry did his best to do something entirely unfamiliar: He tried to shut up.

  Their strides lifted dust along the road, little plumes of light brown. Light brown. Now that was a nice color. Months ago, he’d marched through something red and claylike. It had caked his boots and stained his trousers—permanently, it turned out—thus ruining all hope he had of keeping his sharp appearance in the field. He wondered if that clay would make a good dye. Possibly. Probably. Definitely, if one could apply the stain evenly. He’d heard about dyes once. In fact—

  “Did you know that beetroot—”

  “That wasn’t even a minute!” Hunter was laughing.

  “Oh damn. I forgot! I was waiting for you to respond. You were going to do it this time, too!”

  “What could I have said to any of your conversation earlier? I don’t know much about piquet,” Hunter finally said. “I’ve not had so many opportunities to play cards for money.”

  “In the infantry, you haven’t? Well, good heavens. No wonder Britain was defeated. The Continental Army possesses far more discipline than I thought possible.”

  “I’m not precisely representative of the entire army.” Hunter rolled his eyes. “As a personal matter, I choose not to risk what I have.”

  “Look at you, all reasonable and conservative with your funds.” Henry drew back to punch the other man in the shoulder.

  Hunter looked back at him repressively.

  “Ah, right. You don’t like that. I’d forgotten.” He let his hand drop. “I’ll try to remember. Definitely. If I can.”

  “Mmm. At least try to make it believable when you say it?”

  Henry shrugged and made a mental note to definitely try to remember. “Ah. Well. So let’s not talk of piquet. What topic of conversation would you introduce?”

  Mr. Hunter frowned.

  “You can answer ‘no conversation,’ but then I shall just choose whatever flits into my head, and I have to tell you, that’s a dreadfully mixed bag.”

  “I can’t make you out,” Hunter finally said. “When we first…ah…met…?”

  “You mean when you tried to kill me?”

  Hunter grimaced.

  “Was it impolite to bring that up?” Henry tilted his head. “Oh dear. We can’t let that come between us. You were doing your patriotic duty, and—as an observer who had more than a little reason to care about the outcome—I must say that up until the final moments, you did a commendable job of doing me in. Very good. You were very good at killing me.”

  “Not good enough. Are you capable of having a straightforward conversation? One that starts at the beginning and continues on in a straight line to the conclusion?”

  Henry considered that. “Yes,” he finally said, “but it has to be a very short line.” He held up two fingers a raisin’s width apart to demonstrate the precise duration of his focus. “I do tend to go off a bit. My father always used to shake me by the collar when I was young. ‘Focus!’ he’d shout in my ear. Then I’d forget everything altogether. But what were we talking about? Killing. Patriotism. Oh—right—you started by saying that you couldn’t make me out. Good heavens. I was an utter cad in response. You introduced a perfectly acceptable topic of conversation, one about which I have particular knowledge, and I just went straight off onto some other ridiculous thing, as if I were a horse spooked by a spider.”

  “Are horses spooked by—no, never mind.”

  “Yes,” Henry said consolingly. “You’re getting the picture. It’s best not to ask questions around me if you don’t actually want them answered, I’m afraid.”

  “I have always been accounted a fast learner.”

  “So let us return to your original question. You wanted to ask about me. This is an excellent conversational theme. I know almost nothing about arachnids, not that I would ever let that stop me from expounding on them, but I know a great deal about me.”

  “I thought you were…” Hunter bit his lip, searching for a word. “That night, I thought you were despairing, perhaps. And yet here you are. I would almost call you…an idealist, maybe. You hardly seem the sort to want to die. Why didn’t you want to go back to England?”

  A cold shadow touched Henry’s heart. He smiled brightly through that shadow and reached for the first semiplausible explanation that came to mind.

  “You can’t be that fast a learner,” he scoffed instead. “I would have thought my reason to be obvious. That would be the treason.”

  “The what?”

  “The treason,” Henry repeated. “You know. Treachery? Aiding the enemy? The complete opposite, on my part, of the patriotic duty that you seem to have in such abundance? The treason is why I do not want to go back to England.”

  Hunter was staring at him. “I don’t understand.”

  Henry didn’t have the words to explain everything in his heart, and so he reached for easier words, ones he could utilize.

  “It’s not that difficult a concept. Think the consequences through for a moment. The treason would be such a bloody mess. Trials, beheadings. Blood everywhere. My mother would weep, my family would be launched into scandal, my sister’s husband would become even more of a bore—which I would not have thought possible, but every time I think he’s reached the utter zenith of monotony, he exceeds the physical limits of tedium once again. You know. Treason is just damned hard on everyone all around.”

  “I understand that,” Hunter said. “But…treason?”

  “What do you think I was doing at the redoubt? Following orders?”

  “Well…”

  “No. I thought to myself that it was an excellent night for a siege. Then Fusiliers Redoubt went up, and I thought it was an excellent night for a feint, too. I was afraid I was going to blurt it out in front of everyone, so I went to hide.”

  John looked at him. “Why?”

  “You are not seriously asking why I thought I might say anything flitting through my head after this many days in my company, are you?”

  “No—why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Oh, that. After I read the circular, I had to do something, even if the something I did was nothing. Up until that point, I’d managed to hide my treason in incompetence. ‘Oh, you meant that left’ works once, and ‘didn’t you say advance at three drum strokes?’ I ran the most inept company in the entire British army, and my men loved me. We so rarely saw battle.”

  “You…didn’t want to fight?”

  “I told you it was treason.”

  “Well, but…”

  “Technically, I’m not sure it was actually treason—possibly, my behavior at the moment was just a cause for court-martial—but purposefully evading orders and absconding from my position still brings us back around to willful disobedience and desertion. Which means weeping, scandal, boorish husbands, et cetera and so forth.” Henry swept his arms wide. “I use the word ‘treason’ as a sort of shorthand for all of that. I prefer to live, all things considered, but if death is inevitable, I’d rather my family think me bravely, stupidly heroic.”

  If anything, Hunter looked more confused. His eyebrows drew together in a dark line. His mouth squished up.

  “You are an incredibly odd individual.”

  “I know,” Henry said. “It’s my saving grace. People tell me all the time I’m a queer fellow, but if I’m going to talk as much as I do, I might as well give them something interesting to listen to, don’t you think?”

  “Mmm.”

  “My father hated it. He always wished I would keep my mouth shut. Stand in one place. Stop chattering about everything, or he’d knock me—” Henry stopped talking. Pasted a smile on his face.
“Good thing I was a second son and he didn’t have to actually succeed in reforming me! They tried me on all the second son things—law, church, you name it—and finally gave up and tossed me into the army. He’ll be glad I’m dead.” He considered this. “Honestly, I’m glad to be dead, too. The best solution to an awful mess; I had thought so for months, but hadn’t quite figured out how to die without actually dying, a disfavored outcome, until you came along.”

  “That—it seems—perhaps excessive?”

  “Ah, you’d agree if you knew him. He’s a terrible father. The absolute worst. You couldn’t imagine.”

  Hunter looked at him. “The man who fathered me owned me and my mother. He never beat me, but he did sell my mother when he gambled himself into a hard spot.”

  Henry felt his mouth go dry. He thought of his father yelling at him. Telling him to focus. Telling him to make something of himself, goddamn it, and…

  “You win,” he said. “You win. That is definitely worse.”

  “I had not realized we were playing a game. Do I get a medal saying ‘You didn’t try’ now? Had I any choice in the matter, I assure you this is not a game I would strive to succeed at.”

  “Had you any choice in the matter, what would you have done, if not soldiering? If you were allowed to choose? Would you have gone to university?”

  Hunter stared at him. “Are you completely ignorant of the world?” he finally asked. “I mean this honestly. Is something wrong with you? Did your father hit you too many times? University? In what world could I choose to go to university?”

  Henry wasn’t going to flush. He wasn’t going to feel stupid—even though, apparently, he was an idiot of the most gargantuan proportions. “Ah. Um. This…hypothetical one, now? Where you could choose anything you wanted? Anything at all?”

  Hunter rolled his eyes. “Good. Then I choose to be independently wealthy.”

  “An excellent choice, if I do say so myself.”

  “Nobody would sell my family.” That was said on a growl. “I wouldn’t ever have to worry about where they were, what they were doing, if they were alive.”

  “That seems like a…very good start. What would you do with all your wealth, though?”

  Hunter looked at him.

  “It’s just a question! You could, I suppose, allow it to lie in a bank and make interest of some kind, or you could use it for…oh, I don’t know, saving starving dogs? Educating orphans?”

  “Is that what fancy British officers do with their wealth?” Hunter asked.

  Latham felt himself flush. “I wouldn’t know,” he lied. “My father was…a…tailor.”

  Hunter raised one eyebrow at that rather obvious lie, and just shook his head. “Well.” There was a pointedness to his words as he spoke. “If I were born a second son—and I suppose, in a sense, I was, although my father’s first son would never have acknowledged such a thing—with all the attendant wealth that came with that, I would have gone into trade.”

  “Into trade.” Henry felt dazed. “You’d have gone into trade.”

  “Of course.” Hunter gave him a nod. “I grew up in a shipyard in South Carolina, you know. I used to listen to the traders talk in the shipyard—they never did notice me, even when I was right there—talking about their money and where it came from and where they’d get more of it. They’d find people in Africa, bring them to the Caribbean or the South, where they’d trade them for rum or sugar or cotton. Back to England, where they’d sell that for manufactured goods… It always made me think.”

  “You wanted to trade people?”

  “No. They all seemed to have a want of imagination—trading the same things as everyone else. I wanted to show you didn’t have to trade in human flesh, or the products of human flesh. I used to lie in bed at night and imagine a world where I stole one of the ships and made more money than the rest of them doing the things they’d failed to imagine.”

  “That sounds like a noble aim,” Henry managed to say. Nobler than anything he’d ever thought of.

  “Noble, ha.” Hunter pressed the fingers of his left hand to his forehead, shutting his eyes momentarily. “I’ve learned long since to hope for smaller things, attainable things. I want my sister to be well. I want her husband not to be enslaved. I want to live with my family and not be separated from them except by my own choices.”

  The light in his eyes dimmed somewhat, but the fervor in his voice deepened. “I ask for what I can get. There’s no room for childish dreams in my life.”

  “But those aren’t childish dreams. I rather liked them.”

  Hunter wrinkled his nose as if annoyed that he’d spoken. “They’re childish. Do you think that anyone would do business with someone who aimed to rewrite the way trading was done in its entirety?”

  “Maybe,” Henry said earnestly, “if you picked the right name. You could fool everyone. Pick something grandiose sounding, and they might not notice. Something like…”

  “‘Just the Usual Sort of Traders, Don’t Mind Us’ lacks a certain ring.”

  “No, something simple and ridiculous-sounding, like ‘Lord Traders.’ Who would think that they would be up to anything sneaky?”

  Hunter sighed. “Forget I said anything.”

  For a moment, Henry tried. He looked over at Hunter, walking along at a regular clip. His injured arm was still bound to his chest in a sling; they’d checked it every night, and every night, Hunter hissed in pain when he attempted motion. Maybe his dreams were childish. Maybe they should be set aside. Still, it had sounded better than any idea that Henry had ever had thus far, and Henry had a great many ideas.

  “Sorry. I can’t. You see, we are…very, very different, of course. But I think we are of a similar bent.”

  “Oh?” Hunter was better at looking dubious than any man Henry had ever met. He could communicate disbelief in one syllable, with just a tiny hint of emphasis.

  Henry was even better at ignoring those signs. “You ought to have asked me why I was committing treason. It wasn’t on a whim. I speak on a whim; I commit treason with deadly seriousness.”

  Hunter just raised an eyebrow, and that absence of suspicion was more than enough invitation to expound.

  “You see, around one year ago, I found this paper. It was trash. Some revolutionary rubbish that someone had nailed to the walls of a barn to annoy us. I made the mistake of reading it.”

  “I can imagine what it was like. Bombastic. Full of derision for your sort.”

  “No, no. It wasn’t, that’s the thing. It’s still in my pocket,” Henry said softly. “I memorized the parts that mattered to me. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.” Those words had shattered him. He’d read them over and over, again and again, shaking them up and down inside his head. They had hurt, making his head ache as he tried to put them in their place. He’d tried to drown them out with chatter. With other ideas.

  But that was the thing about Henry’s mind. It never settled on any one idea for any length of time, but it always came swirling back to the thoughts that could seduce him day after day. Night after night.

  All men are created equal, they’d whispered. All men are created equal. Even you.

  Hunter flicked a look at him. “That sounds like the Declaration of Independence. It meant something to you? It shouldn’t have. It’s just a string of pretty words.”

  “It’s not,” Henry said hotly. “Those are ideals.”

  A dismissive wave of the other man’s hand. “Thomas Jefferson owns people. He no more thinks that all men are equal than the King of England does. It’s all just words. That Declaration is nothing but ink on parchment, put there to make poorer men risk their lives so that Jefferson can pay less than his damned share of taxes.”

  “Well, they may be words, but they worked.” Henry folded his arms. “An ideal set in motion is a dangerous thing. You can’t control who believes it, or whether they take it to heart. ‘All men are created equal.’ Think of the power of that phr
ase.”

  “I have,” Hunter said curtly. “‘All men.’ Ha. Tell me, when you were mulling over the equality of men up in your redoubt, did you ever imagine a man like me?”

  Henry raised his head. He looked into Hunter’s eyes—dark, in the warmer brown of his face. Fierce. Unrelenting.

  He swallowed. He wanted to lie. To say that of course he had thought of all men. But… He was many, many things. Including a liar. He was definitely a liar. But lying now wouldn’t just be pointless babble. It would be wrong.

  He shut his eyes. “No. I didn’t.”

  Hunter just shrugged. “Of course not.” He said it quietly, with no bitterness.

  He should have been bitter. He should have been angry. When people talked about all men, they should think about him.

  And that made Henry think. And think. And think. And think some more.

  Chapter Four

  The impossible had happened: Henry Latham had shut up.

  John hadn’t thought such a thing would ever happen, but there he was—quiet for hours. He didn’t speak when they stopped at a stream, dipping tin cups into cold water that tasted like stone and moss. He didn’t speak throughout their late afternoon snack of dry bread and hard jerky.

  Instead, he fiddled with an iron ring that he’d pulled from his pack, turning it around in his hands over and over.

  Consider the equality of the black man, apparently, was a mental exercise that had left even Latham tongue-tied. No surprise; most people were easily befuddled when their cheerful principles overran their prejudice.

  He didn’t speak again until they came up on an inn just before twilight. Then, as John didn’t spare a glance to the stone chimneys whose wisps of smoke promised heat, he stopped in the road.

  “It’s been a while,” he said. “We’ve been sleeping on the ground for almost two weeks. Have you ever thought about halting somewhere for a night?”

  Oh, Latham was so naïve. He was pretty, in the way of pretty men who knew they were pretty: high cheekbones, flushed from the day’s exertion; smooth, bright hair pulled back in a fashionable club. His eyelashes flashed at John—not in so much as a bat but in the desperate entreaty of a tired man.