The Captain's Rival

It is dawn on the Channel, and the Mercury's rigging is groaning above the deck like a wounded animal. Nathaniel Lockwood's first officer wants him to ease off before the mast comes down. Nathaniel wants the French brig running for Cherbourg. *We're asking politely. There's a difference.* He takes the brig. He also finds, standing on her deck with a pistol to the French captain's head, the one man in the service he least wanted to see again. Julian Croft testified at Nathaniel's court-martial. Not against him, exactly. He told the board that Captain Lockwood *acted with commendable aggression, but perhaps with insufficient caution*, and let them draw their own conclusions. Nathaniel has worn the stain ever since; his current first officer, Samuel Press, took the post only because the previous one asked for a transfer rather than serve under him. The admiral orders the two of them to share command of the prize. Then he sends them hunting together through the Windward Passage for the French privateer La Foudre and her captain, Marie Bonnet. On the Mercury with them are Nathaniel's brother William, eighteen and a midshipman by the grace of their father's name; a crew that splits over the chase; and Press, a stocky, jowly man with small eyes that never stop moving. When Julian steals the logbook and reads it by a guttering candle, he finds what he was never meant to see: scraped ink, rewritten times, a watch entry doctored so a signal that had been received and acted upon would look missed. Press did not merely stand by at Nathaniel's ruin. He built it. And proving it means Nathaniel mustering forty-seven men on a sun-bleached quarterdeck to defend Julian in the open, after which Julian tells the whole ship's company something he has spent his career hiding: *I was born Julian Ashworth-Croft. Second son of the Earl of Ashworth.* What follows is a storm, a flooded cave, a poison out of Martinique, a kiss in front of the entire crew, and an admiral who offers Nathaniel his career back on one condition. Let Croft go. *The Navy is not kind to men who love other men, Lockwood.* A historical romance between two men, set aboard a Royal Navy ship on the Channel and in the Caribbean, in which two rival captains discover that the disgrace standing between them was manufactured by a third, and then have to decide what rank, pension and uniform are actually worth. The romance is closed-door.