CHAPTER 6.
Favian’s harlot was a long-legged free octoroon named Zenobia, whose infectious giggle, widely spaced, faintly Egyptian eyes, and smooth, delightfully cool skin, lighter in color than his own sun-burnished flesh, kept him entranced until dawn. She spoke with the lovely cadences of the West Indies and said she came from Nevis. There was a minor cut on one brown shin, presumably from bumping into a piece of furniture while making a nocturnal professional visit to a strange house. She was altogether as enchanting a young whore as he had ever found, in all his lifelong journey through the bordellos of the world.
“You’re too skinny,” Zenobia said, in a pause between carnal interludes. Her practiced fingers outlined the hollows between Favian’s ribs. “My hipbones are going to give you bruises.”
“I shan’t mind,” he said.
“I’ll see if I can fatten you before you go.”
Favian was vaguely surprised to discover that she was succeeding, rather sooner after their last encounter than he’d expected, in fattening at least a part of him. It was not long before her wandering fingertips discovered this as well, and with a cry of wonder and surprise she bent over the phenomenon, and began to nurture, with a series of playful experiments, its growing tumescence, after which Favian laughingly tumbled her onto her back and thoroughly, protractedly possessed her.
It was one of the many contradictions by which Favian lived that as one of the elite of a republic dedicated to the expansion of personal freedom, he, personally, experienced so little liberty. If there was, in his mind, a conscious intention to appear to the world nothing other than a conscientious, dutiful, professional officer, reflecting nothing but those ideals and enthusiasms to which an officer might aspire, so there was also an equally conscious intention to seek out those blissful, well-deserved moments when the whole intractable burden might be let slide and he could relieve himself of propriety and consequence. Wrapped in Zenobia’s brown limbs, he could forget, for the span of a few hours, all the tedium, frustration, and rigor of his profession.
“My God,” Zenobia wondered some moments later. “What do they do to you in those boats?” Her fingers slid over his back, ran up to the gathering of muscles at his neck and shoulder, probed carefully. “I felt so much tension here when you came in. It’s mostly gone now.”
Favian wandered mentally over the last few months— the long voyage across the Atlantic, the battle, the struggle to get the prize home, his illness, the long, endless ride through the mud. What do they do to you? she’d asked. He laughed. There was no place to begin.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“We have all night.”
“It’s a story longer than one night.”
It was strange, this reversal of the usual question. He had learned, from whores encountered over the years, that the one question most asked by their customers was also the most obvious: How had they found themselves in such a profession? Favian had never asked it, for he had always known the answer. They had found themselves in brothels for the same reason Favian had found himself in the Navy, through a series of irrevocable mistakes. The details differed, from prostitute to lieutenant, but the dismal outline was the same.
And now Zenobia was asking him for his history, instead of the other way around. He didn’t mind; he felt talkative, enjoying his moments in bed with this long-legged, brown-eyed, agile woman, his hands wandering over the delightfully female form of her body, the compact, proud breasts, the chocolate nipples, the taut, admirably smooth curve of her belly. She had laughed, earlier, when he’d asked her simply to walk around the small room, and let him watch; she hadn’t realized that, locked away for months in close quarters with four hundred fifty other men, he might possibly forget what women looked like, how they walked— so refreshingly different from men— how they smelled, how they moved their arms, talked. Favian felt exhilarated, unfettered, the exhaustion of his long horseback journey melting away with his tension.
“You got a girl back home?” Zenobia asked.
“Yes.”
“What’s she like?”
Favian thought of Emma Greenhow, her slender form, pale blond hair, her long, aristocratic nose, green eyes, translucent pale skin.
“She’s a little like you, I think,” he said. Very little.
“You fuck her?”
Favian laughed at the unexpected question. “No,” he said. “I most certainly do not”
“Why not?” Her limber hands massaged his nape, working at the tension remaining in the hard muscles. “It would do you good, here,” she said, digging a thumb into his clavicle. He winced. “Do her good, too,” she said.
“You haven’t been to New Hampshire, I can tell,” he said.
“No. Is that where you’re from? You talk like you’re English or something.”
“I’ve been told that.” The story of Jehu Markham’s English education and his English wife was too lengthy, and too irrelevant, to go into, or how Favian had been carefully raised to keep his speech free from the New Hampshire dialect, which his parents considered graceless.
Her thumbs stabbed him again. “So why don’t you fuck your girl?” she asked.
“Because New Hampshire girls do not— because that’s not how things are done in New Hampshire society.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. It’s the way of things. The Lord did not consult me when he made New England.”
“Are you going to marry this girl?”
“I think we have an understanding.”
Zenobia began to giggle. “That’ll be some wedding night, boy,” she laughed. Favian felt a bubble of amusement rising in him, bursting from his throat. For some reason he began to cackle, trying breathlessly to speak through torrents of laughter.
“Are you— are you, madam,” he whooped, “speaking with dis—disrespect of the venereal abilities of Miss Emma Greenhow, son of the Honorable Nicholas Greenhow, state assemblyman, of Spanish Farm, New Hampshire?”
She kicked her legs in midair, helpless with laughter. He buried his head between her neck and shoulder and kissed her, and her arms went around him. They panted breathlessly in one another’s arms, and Favian found himself ridiculously at peace, all anger and resentment gone, evaporated in a burst of helpless laughter. Was peace for hire, he wondered, so easily purchased from a Washington bawd?
“I didn’t understand the gentry on Nevis, either,” she said. She raised a hand to scratch her knee, the sound of a leafy twig on paper. He rubbed his chin over her smooth shoulder. Emma Greenhow. He hadn’t written her since before the battle. There just hadn’t been time. Of course he couldn’t expect her to understand that. There would have to be apologies.
What do they do to you in those boats? Zenobia hadn’t really wanted to hear his answer. And if she had heard it, she wouldn’t have believed it. No one would.
In September 1801, Favian had made his second cruise to the Mediterranean in the new schooner Vixen of twelve guns, Captain John Smith. Commodore Dale’s blockade of Tripoli was not being carried out with any degree of thoroughness— this was before Preble had infected the young service with his uncompromising determination— and Vixen’s course took her on a sort of tour of the Spanish coast before joining the squadron, showing the gridiron flag in every harbor. In Barcelona they moored near a big forty-gun xebec-frigate that acted as guardship, and when Captain Smith went ashore to present his credentials to the authorities, the xebec-frigate fired a broadside of eighteen-pound guns over his head and demanded that he come aboard. Smith ignored the command and rowed placidly to the shore to complete his errand, roundshot howling overhead; but the first lieutenant was incensed, and had a boat dropped into the water for the purpose of seeing for himself whether Spanish arrogance and contempt extended to lieutenants.
It was a Spanish challenge to the collective honor of Vixen’s crew and, by extension, to the American nation. The Spaniards were trying to show that Vixen was composed of cowards, gaining in honor at the expense of the Americans; it was a rather typical Spanish trick, in fact, and the Americans supposed it had to do with the fact that the Spanish had won precious little naval honor thus far in their battles with the British. There was only one possible answer. When another volley of shot splashed around the first lieutenant’s boat, he rowed to the xebec-frigate and went aboard, but only to denounce the officers of His Catholic Majesty’s navy as curs, cowards, and honorless rascals. He denounced them, knowing all the time that he left them little option.
No rum was drunk in Vixen’s gun room that night; no one wanted unsteady hands or eyes in the morning. Captain Smith and his Spanish opposite had no official knowledge of the next step: better so. At dawn the next morning, the first lieutenant, Vixen’s five midshipmen, and a surgeon’s mate were rowed to shore and marched outside the city walls to an orange grove, meeting the first lieutenant of the Spanish frigate, five guardiamarinas, and a Spanish surgeon. They all wore black collars and cravats, blue trousers, and black gloves so as not to show white and make targets of themselves.
Vixen’s lieutenant had carried a challenge from every one of the schooner’s officers to an equal number of Spaniards. The latter, outnumbering the United States officers, had drawn lots for the honor.
Favian still remembered the scent of the orange grove, the strange intensity of sound and color, the feel of the turf beneath his feet. He had not been afraid, this seventeen-year-old Favian, until after the moment when the seconds— the xebec-frigate’s second officer and Vixen’s master— began pacing over the ground, running through the checklist required by ritual: no unfirm ground, the rising sun in no one’s eyes, the pistols loaded carefully in front of the seconds. Then the parties separated, stood in a huddled circle around separate trees, and voided their bladders, to avoid medical complications in case anyone was hit in the abdomen. It was then, in that absurd situation— six young men standing about an orange tree and pissing onto the blackening bark— that the deadly purpose of it became clear to Favian, striking him cold like a handful of snow on his neck.
Twelve people were meeting in an open field, following an ancient ritual designed so that neither side should have an unfair advantage as they met for the express purpose of killing each other. Fairness! There were no tactics; there was no skill; there was no advantage given intelligence over stupidity. Nothing that Favian had learned in his career could help him. Two lines of men would fire at one another at the drop of a handkerchief, and it would be purely the gods of chance who would determine who was hit and who was not.
And when Favian found himself opposite his opponent, the outrageous unfairness of it all struck him. The guardiamarina was a tall, gawky creature in his mid-teens, with a nervous tremor in one pustuled cheek and at least the intelligence of a prize ox. Every midshipman’s berth had a specimen: willing to learn but somehow unable, in whose mind the rudiments of navigation swam helplessly in a whirlpool of insensibility, whose arms and legs perpetually thrust hairy wrists or perpetually barked shins from outgrown uniforms— one of those incredible creatures with no necks who found buttoning their jackets a challenge and who wounded themselves during sword drill.
And one of these incompetent gecks was standing fifteen paces from Favian, holding a pistol, commanded to kill at the drop of a handkerchief. Favian felt like throwing down the pistol and screaming in outrage. Why couldn’t it have been swords? Favian would have carved his opponent like a side of mutton. This lowbrow imbecile could kill him! Kill him by accident! And dueling was supposed to be fair. That was the purpose of all the pacing, all the ritual, all the bickering about the position of the sun.
Anything that gave an ox an equal chance with a human being was not in the least fair, in Favian’s fervently held, but unvoiced, opinion. But meanwhile he took his position and tried to assume the stance of the duelist: right side toward the enemy to narrow the target, left arm dangling behind the body where it couldn’t be hit, left leg shadowed by the right. The right arm was bent at a peculiarly uncomfortable angle, bent to shield the body from a shot, which brought the pistol almost to Favian’s eye. His hand was shaking so wildly that he could barely distinguish the figure of his opponent over the dancing, unsighted barrel. His own breath rasped in his lungs. It was only through the most extreme effort that he could prevent his teeth from chattering. The scent of the orange grove threatened to smother him. Somewhere in the distance Spaniards were singing.
Why had he joined this absurd service? He was going to get killed in an orange grove without ever seeing the war he had come to fight. His first captain, Daniel McNeil, had been a lunatic. And now this. He had been misinformed by a cadre of official liars. He wanted to throw down his gun and make a protest. Eloquent phrases sprang to his mind. Let the captains fight their own duels!
“Garde à vous!” The Spanish second lieutenant was calling out the traditional commands in French, a neutral language. It was all worse than absurd. The sound of peasants singing was abruptly cut short, as if a band of orange pickers had suddenly seen a peculiar apparition in their orchard: men in neat, somber uniforms trying to murder one another.
Vixen’s master raised the handkerchief. Favian tried to line the neckless figure of his opponent over the barrel of his gun. The pistol was absurdly heavy; it seemed to require all of Favian’s strength to keep it raised. What if it slipped from his sweaty palm at the last minute, and fell— would they have to go through the whole procedure again? Elbow cocked. Left arm out of the way. Stomach sucked in to narrow the profile. What had he forgotten?
The handkerchief dropped and the grove echoed to the sound of gunfire. Favian fired his pistol without conscious command, simply as a reflex of that white signal billowing in the light morning breeze. The recoil almost put out his eye. And then he stood there in the gunsmoke, his knees suddenly gone rubbery, blinking in astonishment. He caught a reflection of his own gaping wonderment in the face of his opponent. Both had missed. The air was full of smoke and screams. It seemed Favian had forgotten to breathe. He let the air out and almost fell, darkness swimming before his eyes. Perhaps his heart had forgotten to beat as well.
The Spanish lieutenant was down, and would take a long time dying, with a bullet in his belly. On Favian’s immediate right, one of Vixen’s midshipmen had fallen with a ball in the leg and was screaming: a boy of Favian’s age, who might as well have been Favian as far as chance and the fates and the orange grove were concerned. No one else seemed hurt. And suddenly Favian’s guardiamarina sprawled on the grass. Perhaps he’d been hit after all, and it had taken his slow nerves a few seconds to realize it. But no. He rose, blushing scarlet, having simply tripped over his own elephantine feet.
Nothing was ever said about the matter aboard Vixen until many weeks later, but it was noticed that there was an increase in pistol practice among the midshipmen. The wounded boy, missing a limb, was sent home, his career over but his honor intact. None of them realized they had stepped over an invisible line, the first of many such lines over which they were to pass, the lines that separated the United States elite from the citizens they served. They had risked their lives for their country’s honor; the first test had been met.
It was not until Vixen’s course carried them to the American squadron, and Favian saw for the first time the white walls of Tripoli and the brown, monotonous coast of Africa mottled with scrub and olive plantations, that one of Favian’s fellow apprentice officers mentioned their fellow, the one whose leg had been forfeit to honor in the orange grove. “He never would have stood it here. Imagine! Screaming like a woman when he was hit!” And suddenly the midshipman was sprawling on the planks, Favian’s fists having struck out, left-right-left-right, eye-nose-eye-chin, a combination Favian’s father and boxing instructor had taught him years before, and Favian in his rage was shouting, “He stood the enemy’s fire, damn you!” There was almost another duel, but a hastily convened court of honor, headed by Vixen’s lieutenant, had determined that each should apologize to the other. Both apologies were given and accepted gracefully. The boy whose eye Favian had blacked lost his life a year later, trying to sail one of Thomas Jefferson’s leaky, unseaworthy gunboats across the Atlantic to join the blockade of Tripoli, and so became one of the honored dead, having passed the ultimate test, the final proof honor and the Navy’s mythos could demand. It could have been any of them, just as the amputee invalid sent home could have been any of them, just as the typhus that carried off Vixen’s lieutenant, later on that blockaded shore, could have fallen on any of them. The line could be crossed by any, at any time. It was a realization that had served to temper them.
A few practical lessons had also been learned. When Favian fought his next duel, with an American merchant master who had smugly insulted the Navy within the hearing of Favian’s epaulet, he made damned certain it was with swords. He’d run the drunken bully through both lungs and walked away without great regret, but that had been just after his return from his third voyage to the Mediterranean, in the Constitution under Preble, when he’d had his fill of hand-to-hand combat leaping aboard Tripolitan gunboats in the face of waving scimitars— compared to that one sodden merchant captain more or less hadn’t seemed to matter.
What do they do to you in those boats? Nothing much. Nothing but point out a few sour realities that most people rarely have to face, and force you to face those realities for every minute of every day that you wear the uniform. Those epaulets were heavier than they looked.
But there was nothing he could really say. Zenobia could not be expected to understand. She could only sense his need for relief, for the simplicities of bed and laughter and musk, and these she was willing enough to provide. She even provided breakfast, true to her promise to fatten him, disappearing sometime after dawn and returning with a tray that brimmed with eggs, toast, fried potatoes, butter and marmalade, with coffee and a jug of beer to wash it down— all the rich fare that kept the whores plump and happy and frisky.
She shared the meal with him, brushing crumbs energetically from the sheets. Her body was the color of rich honey in the dawn light, her belly creasing wondrously as she bent over the tray. She was an artist, this Zenobia; she had accepted Favian’s jibboom with a knowing smile and a low chuckle, and had taken a seeming delight in arousing him repeatedly. “You’re a nice change,” she’d explained. ‘‘Most of the men who can afford this place are old.” A creature of happy carnality, Zenobia, a princess of her profession. So much better than Favian’s last harlot, that pink, plump, and somehow unsatisfactory Messalina for whom he had paid good silver dollars in Boston.
He finished his breakfast, and as Zenobia put the tray aside found that refreshment had awakened his desire. Zenobia’s tongue tasted of butter and honey; he winced at the touch of her hipbones— he would have bruises there, by Neptune!— but that did not matter. He had time to be slow and tender. It was too early in the morning to be hasty.
Zenobia’s fingers played running games on his spine, cupping his scapulae, caressing his nether cheeks. Blast it, there were still crumbs in the bed. His morning bristles made music against her neck.
Prostitutes, by constant practice of their trade, have developed muscles that most women do not realize they possess. Favian was soon agonizingly aware that Zenobia had brought most of these into play, and that her satisfied, cooing moans, which he had been pleasantly listening to all night, had begun to develop an uncontrolled, slightly hysterical whine, the prelude to unfeigned bliss. Favian barely had time to enlarge his self-esteem— he was pleasuring her, by God! It’s not in the contract, but it’s nice when it happens— and then the gallop began, a harrowing, mad steeplechase over hedge and gate and bouncy turf, rider and mount synchronized to each leap, each panting breath, swapping, somehow, their roles several times, rider becoming mount and back again, before the final spill at the final gate, horse and jockey, whose duties had by then become unutterably confused, tumbling headlong at the last obstacle, and into the shimmering, mirrorlike pool that reflected the final stretch, the green, the waiting steeple with its blank clock face.
They were both breathless and a bit crosseyed afterward; it took some time for things to come into focus. The bed was a chaos of sheets and pillows speckled with crumbs. The sun seemed very high. Favian had to go, to get back into uniform and stagger weak-kneed to his meeting with Captains Hull and Stewart. He seemed very tender inside his tight breeches and wondered if he was going to walk splay-legged for days. He shrugged into his uniform coat. Zenobia smoothed the bedsheets and brushed crumbs from the downy backs of her arms.
“You’ve almost circumcised me, by God,” Favian said, still breathless. She came into his embrace, her breasts pressing against his double row of buttons. Her thumbs prodded his neck.
“All you did was put on the coat and already I can feel the tension here,” she complained. “All my good work gone to waste.”
“Never to waste.” He kissed her. She swayed giddily, hanging from his neck.
“What’s your real name, O Egyptian princess?” he asked.
“Sally Mathews, your honor,” she said, and imitated a curtsey.
He grinned. “There’s a gun on my ship with that name.”
Her eyes rolled as she tried to think of a lewd pun having to do with naval artillery, but neither of their minds seemed to be working at proper capacity. Too early in the morning, perhaps.
He adjusted his neckcloth and strapped on his sword. Zenobia combed his hair with her fingers. Ouch!— he was very tender in his tight trousers. It was good that whores did not get excited with all their customers, otherwise you could tell their clients from their gait. Before he left, he asked her price, and calculated that if he watched his pennies he could afford another visit.
She rang the bell, to clear the corridors and stairs of any customers who did not wish to be seen by any other customers; he kissed her again and descended.
There was something a bit sad about brothels in the morning, Favian reflected: sleepy-eyed whores, their hair piled carelessly, their paint flaking, wearing patched lingerie and showing too much thigh as they munched their breakfasts, while the air smelled of soap and steam as sheets were washed... But this particular back stair was very discreet, opening into an anonymous alley, and Zenobia waved from her second-floor window. He went into the stable for his horse, discovered it was impossible to fit the saddle without agony, and so lengthened the stirrups and rode to Blodget’s standing in them: bad form, but only sensible under the circumstances.
He had a few hours’ rest at his hotel— one could not call it sleep— and then had the porter bring him hot water for washing. It was still unspeakably luxurious, hot water, after all those weeks of washing and shaving in seawater. He washed his face, neck, and hands, and, with one of his seven razors, each marked with a day of the week, scraped off his bristles. The sun was past its zenith. Time for his visit.
Favian preferred attending his bordellos incognito; wearing his uniform was a risk he rarely indulged. But last night had been special; there had been something to celebrate. In the Navy’s midshipmen’s berths, a fork was stuck in the table at four bells of the evening watch as a signal for the junior mids to clear out, so that the senior midshipmen and warrant officers could safely bring up the subject of depravity without fear of corrupting the innocent. Usually the juniors left under protest. Favian, during his spell as a junior, had never objected to his banishment, and was thought of as a prig. The real reason he had never minded was that he had precious little left to discover, having been well schooled in vice during his time at Harvard, when he had squandered his comfortable allowance at a plush brothel in Charles Town, beneath the shadow of Breed’s Hill or Bunker Hill— along with the rest of Massachusetts, he was confused as to which was which.
When Favian finally become a senior, he’d been disappointed in the fork talk: even the senior warrant officers, grizzled men who had fought in the Revolution, seemed curiously vague about elementary female anatomy (about which Favian had taken pains to inform himself) and otherwise held some of the most surprising notions. Sailors seemed to be true innocents on certain matters.
Of how his fellow officers went about the business of correcting such errors, if they ever did, Favian was ignorant. He himself went about his venereal activities with perfect discretion. Dressed in a civilian coat, he would yawn to his fellows about being invited to some uninteresting dinner— “at the house of a Mr. Pillow— or was it Hillock? A merchant, I believe”— then take himself to the most elegant sporting club in the town, about which he had taken pains to inform himself by a few well-placed inquiries. He never visited the waterfront dives, or the bourgeois places where women tapped coins ostentatiously in the windows; they turned his lust tepid at once, with their bored, often shapeless, often undesirable women, with bruised thighs and mechanical smiles, who grew annoyed if one dawdled, who yawned at awkward moments, who rarely bathed, and who always seemed to have leering pimps, eager to extort more coins, lurking about some corner.
Favian preferred the carpeted corridor, the bells that warned the discreet, the sanitary precautions that were maintained, the perfumed air and good cellar of the expensive stables, places that maintained pretty young women with straight teeth who at least knew enough to smile, and who were coached well enough to feign enthusiasm even if the hour was late and the customer’s reflexes slowed by wine... It was a difficult habit to maintain on his lieutenant’s salary, but sometimes servicemen were given discounts, and in any case he had few other expensive hobbies. These places catered to gentlemen, of supposedly refined tastes and allegedly courtly manners, and it pricked Favian’s vanity to consider himself among them; he had been raised genteelly, and though he could not afford to support himself in the mode of a gentleman, he was at least one by law. He had attained his status by act of Congress, and had fought duels to prove it.
There was something sad, however, even about these well-appointed palaces, something a bit brutal about his relationships with these women, which Favian tried to assuage by gifts, by tipping its well as he could afford, and by adopting an aura of languid sophistication. But still there was a tang of melancholy revealed, like sad little lines around the women’s eyes, in the light of dawn, and that lurked in the strained partings. Few encounters were as satisfactory as that with Zenobia. There was a residue of exploitation that Favian found he could not entirely get rid of— something nasty, like the taste of whale oil on his tongue.
But somehow it seemed more comfortable than the alternatives. Favian maintained proper relations with a number of respectable females of his own station, but he had never taken any of them to bed, even when a few of the less respectable ones, widows or wives or someone’s petted daughter, had dropped some oversubtle hints over their sherbet. There was something Favian had never quite reconciled about how such affaires were supposed to work, about how to avoid complications: the missing monthly that would set everyone sweating, because a lieutenant could not support a bastard on his pay; the husband who could never quite be fit into the picture; the rash and discharge that confirmed the fact that one was not alone in one’s misery; the brothers or fathers who had gloves to crack across one’s face, and bright new pistols that shot such uncomfortable lead. New England had not entirely gotten rid of the stocks, either. Positive examples were hard to come by, and negative ones hard to ignore, what with bawds being stuck in the pillory while strumpets cursed the merry crowd from their ducking stool. It was better to let these matters be taken care of quietly, in sanitary conditions, beneath colored lamp shades and accompanied by the sound of bells. So much less anxiety altogether.
It had been different, no doubt, in his father’s day. Arranged marriages were more common, and the partners looked for love elsewhere. The Revolutionary generation seemed a bawdy lot by contemporary standards, the women more free than their daughters. Favian’s uncle Malachi had merrily sowed bastards from one end of the watery globe to the other, and it was a family nightmare that these would show up in a body, white and mulatto and, for all anyone knew, half-Chinese, to claim their share of the patrimony. But, to the best of Favian’s knowledge, that particular complication had not yet arisen.
And of course there was Miss Emma Greenhow. It was taken for granted that she and Favian would marry, as soon as Favian managed to acquire enough of a fortune to assuage her father’s fiscal objections. Nothing formal had been arranged; no announcements had been made. But Favian and Emma had known each other for years; they had been raised in the same circles, and they understood one another well enough. It was a pity that Favian had been raised in genteel circumstances that his lieutenant’s pay could never equal, but he could always hope for war and prize money, and in any case Favian’s father, sooner or later, would leave him a share of the family money. Miss Emma seemed content to wait and, in the meantime, had turned away a number of other suitors with better prospects than young Lieutenant Markham’s.
Favian supposed that in the matter of Emma Greenhow he had little to complain about. There were no formal commitments, but then Favian was scarcely in a position to expect any. A man who might at any moment be thrown ashore on half-pay was in no position to enforce a demand that a woman pledge herself to him for life. Now that he could expect a few thousand in prize money— more than he’d ever made in his life, a fortune as far as his naval pay was concerned— perhaps he could begin moving in the direction of matrimony. The prize money could easily pay for a house and furnishings, and perhaps a small carriage. Outfitting a marriage was at least as complicated as outfitting a ship, even if the former contained only two people and the ship hundreds. Yet both wife and ship were necessary to the brand of success demanded by Favian’s circles, and he had never been a man to swim against the tide. He would acquiesce to necessary destiny. As he had all along.