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Jack Aubrey had failed to account for the parrot.
He had thought everything well arranged and under control when, after four months at sea with barely a shred of privacy, they headed for port to refit and restock. He had been most pleased indeed when Stephen had secured rooms at a guest-house well off the beaten path under the name “Esteban Domanova”. All through the long, long day of overseeing repairs, watering, and victualling, his anticipation had built. Tomorrow promised more of the same, and the endless attendant paperwork, but in between, there was the lovely, warm, fragrant tropical night….
By the time he arrived at their lodgings, he could hardly contain his excitement: many weeks had passed since they could share an evening without the company of several hundred shipmates packed together to the point where barely a snore, sneeze or fart went unheard. So prodigious was his eagerness that he scarcely noticed the green parrot sitting hunched in a corner that muttered “whey-faced nestlecock” at him in a disagreeable croak as he hurried through the main rooms.
No sooner had Jack raised his hand to the door than it swung open. “My joy!” exclaimed Stephen as he stood in the entrance. The expression on his dear friend’s face, eager and shining with affection and desire, mirrored his own.
They held each other’s gazes for a moment, and then Jack was through the door, Stephen just managing to turn the lock before Jack’s hands were plucking at his neckcloth, his own fingers pulling at the black ribbon securing Jack’s queue, and then their lips and their bodies were crushed together in a passionate embrace. If there had been a flapping of wings or a flash of green, neither of them would have paid it the least mind; nor did they recall that the window was slightly open to let in the warm nighttime breeze.
****
It was not much before daybreak when they finally fell into a delicious and sated slumber, and the sun was already well above the horizon when Stephen called for their breakfast. Despite the work awaiting him, Jack allowed himself to enjoy a leisurely meal with Stephen, and they talked of nothing in particular. He was just reaching for the last slice of bacon when he froze in an indescribable, disbelieving horror, as he heard a voice just outside the room, not completely unlike his own, rasp “Oh yes, my Stephen, yes, harder Stephen I beg, ohhh just so, very well thus. . .” He had thought himself to have been at least reasonably quiet, and now his face turned such a shade of red, bordering on purple, that Stephen looked at him in alarm, certain that his contubernal was going to drop from an apoplexy directly.
The parrot repeated itself and Stephen, who had just taken a sip of his coffee and was stretching out his arm to squeeze Jack’s shoulder, actually heard what the bird was saying. He spluttered, snorted, coughed, nearly sprayed coffee across the table, and then started to make a series of high-pitched, squeaking sounds. His eyes streamed and he held his sides in creaking scarlet-faced mirth. “Oh, oh,” he gasped, “oh, Jack, I beg your pardon, it’s just too. . .” and he dissolved into squeaks again. Jack gave him a look that had caused the hearts of many an enemy captain to quail; but Stephen took several more minutes to compose himself, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief and wheezing as he attempted to regain his breath.
Jack scowled, then blanched as he heard the sound of an altogether different human laughing somewhere down the hall as the parrot cried out in passion once again. It occurred to him that he had quite possibly been less mortified during his hour in the pillory. “Oh G*d, Stephen, how am I to show my face in there ever again?” Stephen smirked and shrugged his shoulders, then started giggling again.
“Well, Doctor, I am glad you find this all so amusing. Perhaps if it was your voice he was mocking, you’d laugh out of the other side of your face,” Jack grumbled disdainfully.
“Well, Captain, I have proved my ability to stay quiet, whereas it appears you are quite lacking in that regard: I’d not be surprised had they heard you back aboard ship.”
In the end, Jack exited the lodging-house by squeezing his sixteen-odd stone through the window, sacrificing the remaining shreds of his dignity for an anonymous escape and drawing yet more hilarity from Stephen.
The doctor, by contrast, strode down the hall and out the front door, utterly composed. Upon meeting a still-flustered Jack a little way down the road toward the harbor, he said, “I suppose, my plum, that we shall have to take different lodgings for the duration of our time ashore. Pity: it was most comfortable, and the food was superb.”
“Stephen, dear,” muttered Jack, “pray find us one that is not also home to a parrot, if you would be so good, soul?”
Stephen’s reply was as near to a guffaw as he could produce; but the reaction was softened by a nod and a squeeze of Jack’s arm. “Of course, my dearest Jack, with all my heart.”
The End