Chapter Note:
Please heed the following trigger warning for this chapter:
There is a brief description of a panic attack due to fear of being buried alive. If this bothers you, please skip the passage beginning with Through his mounting confusion... until the end of the chapter.
You will find a trigger-free summary of this passage in the chapter end notes.
Please take care of your mental health!
Need to Know
'
A millisecond's odd mixture of panic and distress flashed across the captain's face before his calm demeanour reasserted itself.
"Come, Mr Hornblower," McKinley invited cordially, "join me in my day cabin. This tale needs relating in a less formal setting and over a good bottle of wine. In fact, I have a special one saved for just this occasion." The hopeful, imploring look was so very much Archie in a nutshell that Horatio momentarily forgot his irritation. Granting no time to acknowledge or deny his request, the smaller man led the way next doors, infuriatingly certain that Hornblower would follow.
The blond captain made a show of decorking the bottle and pouring two glasses of heavy red wine with a flourish, handing one to his dark-haired guest. Horatio quietly rolled his eyes at the man's fancy antics of sampling the extraordinary bouquet and reverently sipping from his glass. He might not be a connaisseur of fine wines but he certainly recognized stalling when he saw it. His friend had always been a master of evasion if he did not feel in a particularly sharing mood.
"Now, out with it!" Hornblower blurted, patience wearing dangerously thin. "How are you alive?! And what's with the charade?"
"No charade," McKinley countered defensively, "and no deception; at least not on my part. I swear it!" The previously immaculate veneer of outward calm was slipping, and a hint of nervousness crept into his voice. To his astonishment, Horatio noted the white-knuckled death-grip the other had on his wine glass and the minutely trembling hand as he indicated a comfortable-looking chaise-longue. "Please sit. I will tell you everything I know or have deduced of what happened."
January 1802 – Kingston, Jamaica
Commodore Sir Edward Pellew spear-headed a solemn procession aboard. Laying one of his crew to rest was never an easy task under any circumstances, no matter how many deaths he had already witnessed in his long naval career. Men dying under his command were an inevitability in His Majesty's service but although his face only ever showed a dignified mask of composed detachment, every single death bore down heavily on his soul as a personal failure. And by God, he hoped that would never change!
These circumstances, however, were anything but usual. With his actions, the commander of the HMS Impetueux had betrayed the memory of a young man in his care who was deserving of every honour. And yet, the lad had not only been stripped of his identity and dishonourably interred in a nameless grave but would be mourned by few and quickly forgotten. Neither life nor death were ever fair!
Yet wasn't the young man he sought to save equally worthy of every honour he had to bestow, maybe even more so for his unerring loyalty and noble sacrifice?! Though well aware that one life's worth could never be weighed against another, his duty was first and foremost with the living, not the dead, even if he was irreversibly damning his soul in the process. He knew with absolute certainty, Archie Kennedy deserved better than an unmarked grave on the other side of the world!
Naturally, Pellew's self-appointed mission required utmost secrecy. Neither the newly commandeered local doctor nor the two burly sailors carefully carrying the canvas-enshrouded body to the ship's sick berth knew of the man's identity. The only other person besides himself, who was knowledgeable about the mere existence of such a plan, was by necessity HMS Renown's weaselly surgeon Dr Clive.
The commodore wholeheartedly regretted having to involve this despicably untrustworthy man, whose honour was as short-lived as his word. Nevertheless, the doctor was the only person with ready access to the dying man. Only he had been able to stealthily dose Kennedy with the tincture that had convincingly mimicked a state of death. The surgeon's silence on the matter was bitterly procured and tenuous at best, for the less than eager accomplice had been entirely flabbergasted at Sir Edward's questionable intentions of trying to save Kennedy's life. The irony, though, of first personally condemning the young lieutenant to death and then moving heaven and earth to save his life, was not at all lost on him, Pellew reminisced grimly.
Out of the corner of his eye, the commodore detected a slight movement from inside the canvas, followed by a barely audible moan.
"Hell and damnation!" Pellew muttered under his breath, knees becoming suspiciously weak. Of all the instances Kennedy had demonstrated a rather impeccable sense of timing, this certainly was not it.
Archie floated on a tranquil wave of exceeding peacefulness. Apart from his last gasping moment when pain and asphyxiation had finally overwhelmed him and cancelled out his awareness, dying had not been so bad after all. He had made his peace with his dearest friend in the world, and most of all, he had not been alone.
Now however, a growing sense of disquiet crawled through his mind as he drifted towards a new kind of alertness. His thought processes felt as immeasurably sluggish as wading through molasses, and his bones seemed heavy enough to sink to the centre of the earth. Incomprehensibly, he slowly became aware of jostling movement, eliciting ever more persistent jabs of pain in his abdomen that increasingly impeded his capacity of drawing breath.
Wait, what?!
Through his mounting confusion, he noticed there was something covering his face, some type of rough cloth, which further obstructed his ability to breathe. How could he worry about breathing if he had already died? Unless…
Oh, God! Against all odds, he was not yet dead, and they were going to bury him alive!
All-consuming panic clouded any rational thought and he desperately willed his feeble, near unresponsive limbs into action. As he started fighting in earnest, he took no heed of the gentle but insistent hands trying to restrain him or the urgent, inexplicably soothing voice that sounded so curiously like his former captain. Archie dimly registered an escalating amount of pressure on both sides of his neck and felt a growing sense of light-headedness wash over him. Then he knew no more.
'
to be continued...
Chapter End Note:
Trigger-free summary:
Archie comes to on the way to HMS Impetueux's sick berth. In his confusion, he panics but is quickly rendered unconscious again by the doctor.