Free His Heart's Obsession by Alex Beecroft

I’ll never, never have the chance again and he’ll never know. Please, God, don’t let him be dead.
    Robert wanted to scream “No!” Wanted to run up, seize the body and hold it to himself, weeping. Instead, his knees seemed to dissolve beneath him. He quaked, unable to move or to tear his eyes away, waiting for the drop and the splash, picturing the waves closing over Hal’s face.
    But the men got a firmer grip on Hal’s limbs, passed him to waiting hands on the Swiftsure, who turned to take him below.
    “Hoon, Sullivan!” Robert croaked, finding his voice after two attempts. “Is Mr. Morgan…?”
    “Alive, sir. Dunno for how long. Getting him t’doctor now, if it please you.”
    “By all means!”
    Standing next to the rail, he wondered why he had always thought he would go first, simply because he was older. War didn’t spare the young, after all. He clasped his hands firmly together to still their shudder, leaned back against the rail for support.
    His mind fluttered like a startled moth. Hal…
    He should do something. Help others down to the orlop deck where the doctor had his station. But Hal…
    There was water in the well. The pumps needed manning. Prisoners needed locking away, the logbook retrieving, the butcher’s bill making up. Shot holes needed plugging, torn ratlines needed splicing…he should do that. Hal would want him to do that. But, oh God, if he might not run straightaway to hold Hal down for surgery, he wanted very much instead to stop the inevitable flow of time until the doctor finished his grisly work. That or a very large drink.
    “There you are, Mr. Hughes,” came Hamilton’s calm, unruffled voice. “Lower decks clear?”
    “Aye, sir.”
    Hamilton wiped his sword clean on the tail of a dead man’s shirt, sheathed it with satisfaction. His face glowed with the final embers of the exaltation of battle. “See to the prisoners, will you?”
    “Yes, sir,” Robert said and, because he couldn’t bear it any longer, “Morgan…”
    Hamilton sighed. A human expression came over his face, tentative and uncomfortable. “He’ll be fine, Hughes. He’s indomitable. Death himself would balk under the threat of facing Morgan’s temper.”
    Robert looked at Hamilton’s square-jawed, martial face, the mild concern and annoyance in his eyes at dealing with this passing nuisance. You don’t give a fig, do you? Unfair though it was—for he knew Hamilton was fond of Hal in a mild, paternal way—Robert reeled back in revulsion at the thought. You’d shed no more of a tear for him than for any man. Nothing near as much as he deserves.
    Fury braced him, like a burnt feather waved beneath the nose. He straightened up, trying not to growl. “I’m sure you’re right, sir.” Turning on his heel, he stamped away, taking out fear and anger on the unresisting deck.
    Later, he sat in the scrubbed and sun-drenched neatness of Hal’s cabin and watched the small rise and fall of Hal’s chest beneath the bandages. Mouth open, Robert breathed as softly as he could while he listened—in the post-battle stillness of the ship—for the faint whistle that would indicate the wound had opened, that air leaked from the pierced lung. Would Hal want to return to a world that offered him only second-rate comfort? Or would he relax into death gratefully, the way he had plummeted into sleep in Bridgetown?
    Robert paced the tiny room from end to end. He watched the wound fever, from its first healthy blush to the sweats, shakes and garbled, terrified outcries of delirium. Drawing up a stool beside the cot, he administered cool cloths and small dribbles of water until Hal’s raving ceased. In the weary quiet afterward, he leaned close to whisper some of the things he should have been brave enough to say from the start. Poems, translated so that Hal could understand them, and all that nonsense about sunsets and sweethearts he’d let mere embarrassment silence and, in doing so, had convinced Hal he had no