Wallace whistled to himself as they set off on foot from the Crown.
“You’re in a good temper,” Solomon remarked.
Wallace beamed at him.“I think I’m in love.”
“With that Naval fellow?You’ve certainly been seeing a deal of him recently.”
“As much as possible.”His eyes glazed over with a dreamy cast.“Have you ever been in love, Solomon?”
Solomon laughed.“No.”
“It’s a most pleasurable sensation.I like it.”Then his voice took on a more serious, thoughtful tone as he went on.“I like… steadiness.Stability.Not change.I’ve always wanted to… settle down with someone, you know.”
“There’s something to be said for that,” Solomon agreed, thinking it would be untactful to point out that Wallace had only known the man a few weeks.
He was, moreover, honest enough to admit to himself that a spark of envy had kindled in his breast.Not that he wanted or expected to ever fall head over heels, as Wallace seemed to believe himself to be.But it would not be unpleasant to have some steady companion, someone he knew and trusted.For a start, it might allow him to indulge those tastes that, with strangers, he generally preferred to suppress.
“Well, I wish you joy of him,” he said out loud.
After that, Hugo Vaughan was often to be found at the little Bermondsey alehouse on the same evenings as Wallace and Solomon.
Solomon liked him very much.At first, he’d been inclined to be wary of him.Vaughan was a gentleman, or close to one.Being sucked off by an anonymous gentleman in a dark alley was one thing; keeping company with him was another.But there was nothing supercilious about Vaughan’s manner.
He came from a little village south of London, son of an impoverished clergyman, and had been at sea for most of the past ten years.It was a great trial to him, he said, to find himself on land and on half pay.
“I’m between ships.”His lips twisted in a self-deprecating smile.“That’s the Navy for you.Not enough men and too many officers, even in war-time.”
He had not wished to return to his family—“I don’t like to be a burden,” he said—but preferred to remain in London, close to the Admiralty and to those captains who might soon get a ship of their own and offer him a berth.
“I do wish London life were not so ruinous, however.The Admiralty would have us believe that one may live modestly but comfortably on a lieutenant’s half-pay, but that has not been my experience.”
Neither Solomon nor Wallace had the slightest knowledge of the Navy, and they were highly entertained by Vaughan’s endless fount of amusing stories about life at sea, and the officers and men he had known.Sometimes, he had a cruel streak to his tongue, but as the people in question weren’t present to hear themselves mocked, there seemed little harm in it.
He told them about his life in London: haunting the Admiralty each morning, and talking his way into the gentlemen’s clubs popular with Naval officers in the hope that a friendly captain might arrange a lieutenant’s posting for him.
“Come, friends, you will know how to advise me,” he said one evening.“I am invited to Richmond Park with a party of gentlemen tomorrow.”
“I doubt you’ll find our advice to be of any use to you for that,” Solomon said with a grin.
“Ah, but you see, I must hire a horse to go riding with them.And like many men who have spent their entire life at sea, I know little of horseflesh.”
They told him where and how to go about hiring a horse without falling victim to an unscrupulous dealer.He was suitably grateful.
“It is dreadfully humbling sometimes,” he confessed.“At sea I am a Godlike figure, answerable only to the captain.But on land I am a mere babe.Tradesmen see me coming, and cry,Here comes a flat.”
It became a pleasant tradition, the three of them sitting around a table of an evening.Wallace blossomed under Vaughan’s attention.Other regular patrons of the alehouse began to refer to them as an established pair.Wallace spent every spare moment with Vaughan, whenever he could get away from the Crown.There was just one other evening he held sacred: choir practice at the Dissenting meeting house of which he was a member, to Solomon’s bemusement.He sometimes thought of asking Wallace how on Earth he reconciled the strictures of religion with the licentiousness and dissoluteness of their life in London—a conflict Solomon dealt with by tucking it away inside of him and ignoring it.
Several times, Wallace had tried to bring Solomon along to choir practice or Sunday morning services at this meeting house.But Solomon had always steadfastly refused.
One weekday evening, while Wallace was at choir practice, Solomon ran into Vaughan at their usual alehouse.
“I see dear Wallace has not managed to cajole you into joining his choir,” Vaughan said.“Is it the nonconformity you object to?Or have you simply a general aversion to religious assembly?”
When he left home, Solomon had vowed never again to set foot in church or chapel, but he didn’t intend to explain all that to Vaughan.He only said, “I en’t much of a church-goer.”
“Then perhaps we are kindred spirits.I’m afraid I am a lost sheep myself—to the dismay of my father.”
“He’s a clergyman, I mind?”
