Almost no structure in Dieppe Bay Town can be called old. Ramshackle, occasionally. Weather worn? Absolutely. But not aged, built as the town is on the skeletons of itself: ruined first by the Spanish, then by the sea, then by fire, then by-- That there's anything there at all is either a small miracle the kind of which is only ever possible at the edge of the world or proof for how unkillable empires must be.
Not that Dieppe Bay is so particular about the company it keeps today. Across Saint Kitts in Basseterre there might be trouble found from sailing straight into port as if they belonged. But not so here as men and slaves and sugar and ships hemorrhage toward the kinder southern landfall. Or maybe the north end of the island has traded hands enough times that it knows the value of turning a blind eye to all kinds of undesirable visitors as long as they bring commerce and coin with them. The Walrus sits at anchor just there beyond the coral reefs, a black shape against the running tide, and all of Dieppe's great guns have long since fallen away into the sea.
There should be no reservations about taking on fresh water and victuals here. And yet, the familiarity of other shipping in the area had kept Flint lingering over the possibility of St. Johns for some time before committing themselves here. Travel over a thousand nautical miles only to find Charles fucking Vane waiting for him. Naturally.
No matter. He decided hours ago not to care. If, after orchestrating the effort to take on water, Flint has found his way to the last place on the island Vane is likely to be, then it must simply be a coincidence.
Of the dozen shops left clinging here in Dieppe Bay, only one has a books. They're tucked up in a loft space, the main floor dedicated to far more useful miscellany (charts and maps and mail packets, silks and faintly chipped china - so far removed from the sale of flour and sugar and fruit as to be useless to a ship looking to re-up its stores). Disappointingly, most of the books are in French and useless to him. But he's committed to combing through the small collection anyway, spending long minutes by the upstairs window with its nearly complete view of the bay trying to parse enough of the text in a likely looking volume to decide if it's worth taking back to someone who can read French well enough to digest it.
The creak of weight on the stairs brings his attention up from the page.
Perhaps it was an error in judgement to let slip the fact that Thomas speaks French; rust slow to clear and his accent still wince-worthy to proper Parisians, he nevertheless has a long list of ship's business items to attend to in Dieppe Bay Town that are split between translating other peoples' meetings and handling his own work. At least it releases Gwenaëlle from service for a fair bit of their stay. In his opinion, she's rather earned the break (and it means one of them can go book hunting).
For a while he stands on a wooden overpass between buildings and watches that other ship - the one he saw the first time they anchored in Nassau - slip its way into position by the reef. Looming across from the Ranger in a way that could easily seem so friendly, but thanks to Vane's less than positive response to the sight (and to Thomas's attention on it), turns regretfully menacing.
It's still lovely. He doesn't know why.
Taking stairs at speed in leather boots is so much easier than navigating anything in wooden heels. If there is a real selling point for piracy, surely the wardrobe is it: no wigs, no fifteen layers of brocade, no hose or knee buckles. Just sensible base garments and flamboyant decorations to high heaven-- or to the devil, maybe that's more appropriate. Thomas himself is still largely unadorned even though Gwen's threatened to find him earrings, and is currently rushing to keep up with a surprisingly speedy short Frenchman and his gossip about English privateer patterns.
Wounds between empires are fresh, here, steeped in bitter grudges, and Thomas is cognizant of this being the right time to put out feelers for the information he's still obligated to turn into profit. It's fine. Fuck England, anyway.
Back and forth and around he keeps pace with this man, getting a tour of what must surely be the whole town, until he is finally released with the implication of a meeting the next day. Good enough. Thomas finds the crowded tavern for want of water and the distant thought that he should eat something (he forgets, still-- thirst he notices a little easier, but hunger and tiredness are elusive sensations, remaining dormant until he's abruptly at the edge of collapse). A man he thinks he passed more than once on the wild goose chase to and fro is sitting at a table near the bar, glaring down at a ledger, and Thomas ends up half-shoved against the edge of it (the table, not the ledger) as people crowd in.
"Excuse me," he says in French, assuming. His accent is palpable, and he makes a face, throwing the expression over his shoulder. Could any of you behave, no, probably not.
He's never been good with the books. The crew and the brokering, juggling the Guthries and the victualing and the up and down temperament of the men, he manages just fine. He believes it takes a particular kind of person to existing on the strange middle step between the main deck and the greatcabin on a pirate vessel and he swings it. Most days he does. All of that's a hundred times more complicated than piles of numbers in a cramped hand between a series of wobbling lines. And yet.
Christ, they need someone to manage the books. Much more of this and he'll jump at the first deserted rock he sees as they cut their way North. Or he'll shake Flint until all his brains turn to liquid and ooze out the man's ear.
Hal Gates is nursing his second drink in the vain hope that it will do something to improve his arithmetic - if that's their tonnage of rice and rum (and he knows exactly where and how it sits in the Walrus's hold, and he knows roughly the value of the above when they last left Nassau, he just needs to calculate their consumption versus the percentage of what Eleanor Guthrie and then parse that by man and reconcile the-- when the press of bodies in the tavern shoves a man into the edge of his rickety table. It bumps it's short leg from the shim keeping it even, setting the table to wobbling precariously enough that Gates feels compelled to rescue his glass. The ledger can do whatever it likes though.
(It doesn't fall from the table. Shame)
"Jet t'en prie," is said equally automatically, ear marking the accent before his mouth catches up with his brain. His own delivery is markedly non-native, though perhaps the shape of the words rings truer here than Thomas's would even were he well practiced. Gates knows his sparse pieces of French from a Bahamian mulatto and sounds it. He follows with, "You might as well take a seat. The girl serving the room is faster than the man behind the bar anyway."
Thank god they've at least put in somewhere with interest. Imagine if he had to do this with nothing but some rocky cove for scenery.
The woman who appears in view is a slight thing of only sharp edges, the skirt she's wearing with blouse and bodice not connoting much harmlessness when paired with sheathed blades and rings that, with one exception, look suspiciously as if they've been set with human teeth, liquid metal poured over the top. Plenty of the Ranger crew saw her pick them up, after she knocked them out of his head; she might not have chosen to explain her new adornments, but there aren't many questions about their nature among the people to whom she doesn't need introducing.
And if he's been listening, then Flint might be one of them - posh French cunt and her posh, bookish Englishman (who she dislikes leaving unattended, as a rule, but he's not unattended, he's working, she'll bring him back a gift), even before she speaks or casts too-familiar a glance over the shelves, something in the way that she carries herself, still. The way she holds her chin. The level gaze that settles on him, the only other person up here. Not a lady any longer, but if it was easy to beat things out of Gwenaëlle then she probably wouldn't be standing here, now, wouldn't have lasted this long. Perfect posture simply now paired with the willingness to lunge for someone's fucking throat--
She doesn't do that. It's fine.
"Œuvres poétiques," she says, when that gaze drops from man to book. "Peletier. Later edition. Are you buying it? Is there another?"
His hesitation is not outwardly evident, only considering turning it down for the small amount of time it takes to decide the man's probably right, and that if he's dangerous then oh well, everyone here is dangerous. (Except Thomas, probably.) "Thank you," he says, only distantly wondering if manners are the way to go here or ever, anymore-- but it's likely he'll be beholden to them automatically until he's dead.
Thomas steadies the little table before he sits down, prying a rickety chair over from a neighboring knot of people with one foot, relieved they're deep enough in their cups not to notice the gentle thievery. There is something about him as he settles across from the stranger that screams of origins of some kind of station, despite the generic nature of his clothes and the way salt and sun have ground deep enough to nearly be in his bones by now. The sea, he's come to learn, is not coy about claiming anything, or anyone. It makes him think of--
"Has your journal bitten at your fingers?" is an easy inquiry.
Surely it's caused some offense, to be on the receiving end of such a look.
If it hadn't been given away already - by the sun in her skin or the smart appointment of her boots, the knives at her belt - then the molars set into her rings would dismiss all possibility of mistaking the woman for the shopkeeper's wife. And even if he hasn't been listening, it's obvious what she is and to whose crew she must belong. Surely there are only so many pirate ships at port in Saint Kitts, one of which he knows for a fact to be happy enough about carrying along the type of knife sharp woman who decorates in human body parts.
Standing in the window with the book open there on the sill to take advantage of the light filtering through the dusty glass, he regards her with a frank look then drops his eye back to the page under his hand. Peletier seems familiar, but he can't place whether it's for good reasons or not. The fact that the woman he's sharing the attic with who stands so straight knows the title quite nearly on sight suggests the former. At the very least, it's something different. Miranda must appreciate that.
"I wasn't aware your captain sailed with anyone literate."
There's a small noise from the man wrestling with the ledger that's close enough to 'You're welcome' as to be very nearly polite. Gates straightens the book on the table between them, making no effort to obscure the page from his new companion. If he can read - and the line of the man's shoulders suggests he must despite everything else about him, including the haggard look of recent fever in his face (landowner, Gates suspects. Or was before the French came again) -, he'll have to do so upside down. If anyone can read his writing from that direction, more power to him.
"Taken a spike to my eye is more like it," he says, punctuated by a generous drink. "Unfortunately, I'm apparently surviving long enough to have to deal with the problem." Tattooed fingers and the the tar at his sleeve might shout sailor, but in a place like Saint Kitts there must be dozens of those that have nothing to do with piracy - even ones who speak English first and slide so comfortably into conversation with perfect strangers.
When the girls crosses near to the table, Gates waves her down with a "Mademoiselle," that's only marginally stumbling.
Eyebrows lift in a wry display, equal flavors of incredulity for the expression and understanding of his struggle. He is, Thomas assumes, a pirate, if only because the universe has dictated everyone he encounter in the Bahamas must be so. There are other occupations for him to have, of course, but the particular aesthetic and the way he isn't at all concerned with the traffic around him speak to a certain kind of confidence he's found to be recognizable.
Further recognizable are the same lines of tortured inventory he spends his days intimately familiar with. Even upside down in chicken scratch with details indecipherable. But then there's the attendant to speak to, and Thomas asks for water and whatever she suggests to eat (sparing anyone the labor of trying to overhear a menu recited from memory). His comprehension and vocabulary are just fine even if his pronunciation is mired in the empire he's been severed from.
"I hope it's just a matter of tedium," he says, of the problem worthy of being likened to losing an eyeball, "and you aren't mid-economic collapse."
He huffs out a laugh, lifts both eyebrows and hefts the glass by a degree. "Not so bad as that. But you'll have to forgive me for not going over the particulars." There's a joke in there somewhere about how it's because he doesn't yet know them, but it's also as simple as things like ship books being halfway sensitive. Not that he's too worried about the interests of the man across the table conflicting with his own. Sorts like that are the ones given cause to be concerned by him, not the other way around.
Anyway. He's done torturing himself with this.
"Far from home, are you?" He thumbs back to the front of the ledger - the scrawl on the page changing hands a handful of times the farther forward he goes, most irregular and crooked with the exception of a few steady markups written in the margin - and snaps it shut with a thunk of its heavy cover.
Thomas should be concerned by everyone, lately. But here he is. Either an oblivious fool or, impossible to guess, a man too jaded by months of close work with Charles Vane to find other potential dangers worth worrying over.
(Could he recognize handwriting, after five years? If he really saw it, read it, traced his fingers over it, would he realize they're meters away, separated by quickly reconstructed walls and little more? That they could just reach out--)
There's no point in carrying on conversation about the ledger, as his business is his own, so Thomas just says, "Not anymore." A little dry. England is not home, and hasn't been since he was taken to Bethlem. Maybe it wasn't even before; it's not hard to look back now and wonder how he wasn't expelled sooner, a clear outsider.
Where would he say is home, if asked? The Ranger? Nassau? Somehow both seem a little presumptuous despite having signed articles - what would Gwen say. Probably both. There's no stopping the way she's growing into this life.
What a rude thing to say about Jack Rackham, she thinks, fleetingly affronted on his behalf. Having a very nice coat isn't license to be a prick. He probably also has a very nice ship somewhere, which sort of is, a thought that's enough to stay impulse; he looks somewhat harder to hit in the face with a stick than Hamund had been, and potentially a more difficult problem to solve afterwards. Jack would perhaps not thank her for that.
Something of that train of thought translates into the flat, animal unfriendliness that settles in her long look back at him when he fails to answer her questions helpfully. Rude and unhelpful. ('Pirate', her mind supplies, slightly more helpfully, and the corner of her mouth tugs unwillingly sideways with private amusement.)
"I wasn't aware anyone's captain let them sail without a grasp of what's necessary to run a ship," like, you know, someone with an at least basic grasp of literacy and numeracy - Thomas is arguably overqualified for the position he now occupies, on that basis, "we are all learning things today."
Her smile has a drawing room's close-mouthed polish. It does not reach her eyes as she passes him to investigate the possibility of more Peletier for herself. Its presence is at least promising for the quality of the collection.
Then you really must be new at this, is the thought that crosses his mind but doesn't dare leave his mouth. The fresh ones - particularly the ones who promptly stud themselves with human teeth - tend to be prickly and raw, prone to excess in the name of being someone. He has business here in Saint Kitts and doesn't need the responsibility of bloodying a woman in a shop attic on his plate along with everything else.
His flat look has nothing of pretense to it - no distant echo of breeding or practiced smiles - but there's a quality there that bores like a drill. That for a moment must somehow absorb the air in the room while Flint passes his hand over the book before finally shutting it. He could go now, pay for the thing and be away without any further commitment. He doesn't need to know anything about the Ranger crews new additions. Not in detail. Not here, where poking at it might very well be like sticking his hand in a fucking beehive for no reason at all. Things change too quickly to be interested in a single unfamiliar face before the mast.
"Right place to get away from it," he agrees, a flash of good humor in his big face. "Though you've landed yourself in a place where you're outnumbered, haven't you? What's an English gentleman left doing here with so many French?" Because that's exactly what Thomas looks like - some man who once knew money washed up with one of the hurricanes or earthquakes that plagued the island and left here with his good posture and crooked pronunciation. It's a good thing he's dressed so nondescriptly or someone might get the idea he was worth robbing.
(That too seems as unlikely as half a dozen things which are actually true. Maybe later Gates will say something to the effect of 'Damn, I should have checked his pockets.')
From the look on his face, it's clear Gates knows it's an intrusive, barreling forward kind of question - better thought than said given the chilly reception of the first. Equally so, that he means nothing by it. If there's a point to being somewhere less familiar than the back of his hand and sitting down with a stranger that isn't making conversation, he doesn't know it. And if the company doesn't like it-- Well. There are other tables where he can go practice his French.
"Irritating so many French with my accent," is quick, a little dry but not offended-- casting into doubt any perception of a chill. Hard to tell with English gentlemen, proper diction and table manners favoring a certain aesthetic over emotional displays. Thomas is at ease.
Two things occur to him: he has no reason to be coy about what he does now, in this place, in front of this man, and that it's a little dazzling to be at ease. When he thinks about it, anyway. Sometimes when he wakes up from one night terror or the other, there's a moment of panic, but the state of things on the Ranger is so unlike any other he's experienced that he's pulled into reality immediately. What would it be like instead to attempt to readjust somewhere more generic? Would he fall apart with nothing but silence and soft 'recuperation' to fence him in all over again? How much worse would his nerves be? Absently, he touches touches his thumb to the cheap, ugly ring he bought in Nassau, worrying it in absence of another. It is calming.
"I was rescued, actually."
Why not go with the truth. It sounds like a lie.
"From a shipwreck. And as I have nowhere to return to and no ransom value, here I am."
Another long look, considering whether or not to answer, what it's worth to answer, why he fucking cares. What makes her mind up is nothing more than the fleeting impulse that had made her address him in the first place; he had looked interesting, before he looked like someone who was rude about her (friend, as long as she never says it to him he can't tell her otherwise). He looks like a pirate out of a storybook, the sort she had imagined and been charmed by when her life was regimented and ruled by the men to whom she belonged, who tolerated her flights of fancy until they did not.
So he's conceptually charming, if not specifically, which is probably in part why she stumbles over tenses-- "I have - I had," a swift correction, "a copy of his translation of Ars poetica that I was very fond of and it's my opinion his proposed language reforms were under-appreciated. I wrote a suite of poems once that used it, for a challenge, when I was more familiar with his work. Œuvres poétiques was his first collection, though."
No unusual French spelling besides that all French spelling is fucking unusual.
There's no keeping the surprise from his face - or it's as much for show as any of the half dozen words he's said. Either way, it's easy to mark the moment where she catches him sideways. His eyebrows climb and the line of his mouth goes crooked under the waxed corners of his mustache. Really - wrote an entire suite of poems, did she?
How many of them featured human teeth, he wonders. How far exactly has she strayed from home? (And what does she think she's playing at here?) A man he guesses could grow bored and end up in a place like this calling themselves a pirate, but not with the end point of falling in with the likes of Charles Vane's crew. No one picks that, especially not a woman. Particularly not a woman fond of writing her own poetry.
He makes no move from the window and doesn't soften his hand across the closed book. It's his; he's already decided. "Unfortunately, I can't say I'm familiar with him or his reforms. My French is patchwork." At best.
Spanish and the look of someone who doesn't belong though, he knows.
"Why do you want it?" he asks after a still moment. The book. The Ranger. Any of it.
Work and weather and more consistent meals have molded her into something more human than what had crawled out of that shipwreck in chains, but even now -
he is never between her and the door. Her fingers trace books, but her eyes track him and the set of her shoulders says she's acutely aware of where he is when it's impossible to look at both him and the titles of the books she's turning over in her hands. She did not learn these instincts in the drawing rooms that taught her how to smile and speak; they are not where she found the scars mostly hidden under her clothes, her wrists still faintly marked when her hands lift and her sleeves slide for the elbow. Whatever made her what she is today was crueler than boredom, her falling in a harder landing.
"Thomas's French needs a little work, he's out of practise," she says, because it's the book he's asking after, obviously. "And he appreciates poetry. It'd be nice for us to have - to introduce to him something I loved. He brings me this ring," the only one on her hand that doesn't feature Hamund's teeth, a wide copper thing with blue and green, "and I'll bring him books."
He's doing the translating, today, and a more than serviceable job; now that there's no one to beat them for doing it, they can often enough be heard chattering or murmuring to one another in her mother tongue. And maybe he's read her favourite humanist before, or maybe he hasn't, it would have been nice to - well, Captain Storybook is unlikely to give it up now, but she's picked up one or two things so far that are promising, too, so that's fine. It will make for a story. The book that got away, with a rude man from a fairytale.
Her fingers tap restlessly on the book in her hands. She thinks some people deserve soft things, but even in her head it doesn't sound like something that should be said out loud, so she doesn't. She says, "You understand writing your own story," instead, with a gesture to him.
A loft in Saint Kitts with a few dusty bookshelves behind barrels of sugared fruit and bolts of cotton is so far removed from particular studies in London (which must still exist, even if it seems unimaginable) that it seems unfair to expect him to be so prepared for a stranger to wrench the latter forward in time and across an ocean.
A moment ago, 'languid' wouldn't have been the word to describe him there. Then the easiness in his shoulder, the angle of his wrist, his elbow hooked there at the window ledge evaporates so completely that it must have been. It's as a steel plate being snapped shut or the reflex of snatching fingers from heat. A blunting of his attention on her, curiosity snapped over the knee. He goes from lit by the light from the window to a shadow blocking it in an involuntary instant.
(Miranda isn't why he's here looking after books, but there's no denying a shared language or the people it's been spoken with. Maybe he should've been ready to be stuck between the ribs like this here.)
He's so removed from what she's saying, but theres almost no pause between her last word and his next. So clipped he might as well be interrupting her. "That kind of ambition is blood in the water to a crew like your captain's. But I imagine you know that already." A look to her rings - all but the copper one. "He won't be impressed by it."
Or her poetry. Or how sharp her eyes are, used so.
The time when that blow would have landed wasn't so long ago - but times change fast. The argument they'd had in Nassau, the mess with Hamund, her own bloody-minded certainty of purpose; she thinks only that it's interesting he wanted it to.
"You shouldn't take it so personally," she recommends, mild as a little lamb, since no part of that denied the accuracy of her observation.
He could, instead, consider first the flaw of being the sort of man to draw someone into conversation for the purpose of ridiculing and disparaging their answers. That's what pricks under her skin now - not what he says, when the ground feels so much firmer under her than it did before, but that she fell so readily into the trap, that some now-embarrassed part of her hadn't been expecting the dismissal. Had wanted to talk about poetry and stories more than she'd been wary of why she was being asked.
Even after he'd already been rude. What the fuck had she been expecting?
She folds her slim hands over her books - there was an Ars poetica, so - and moves for the staircase.
"Neither should you," he says from the window, far less gently. The part where he's done nothing but pick at the people surrounding her from the moment she climbed the stairs. It's a common trait among pirates - cutting their teeth in the direction of anyone with an insult for a ship, a crew, a captain. Best to either get used to letting it lie or better at parsing who warranted biting.
(Under any circumstance - say, the one where the Ranger isn't lurking out there in the bay and she's come straight from it; the one where her friend has any other name or she'd simply neglected to use it - they might have actually found themselves on conversation long enough to make the shopkeeper anxious and smooth the raw seam there between them. He might have gone on his way with his Œuvres poétiques and she with her Ars poetica with something like rare contentment.)
Instead, Flint passes the book from the sill into his hand. He offers it out with a flat look, but makes no move to intercept her (that too would be easy - it's a shorter line from here to the staircase than the one she must take). "Take it. It's of no use to me."
Miranda won't know the difference for weeks yet. And God help him if he deprives anyone on the Ranger of an education.
Registering first that he doesn't intercept - and it would be easier - she regards him for a moment with unflattering surprise that doesn't have much to do with his evidently unplanned generosity. That, too, a beat later when her gaze drops from man to book. Oh.
It isn't hesitation, just the time it takes to process and for her face to stop doing that thing - she takes the book. Of course she does. She might've decided she was too proud and didn't want it any more, but first of all that would do Thomas no good and second of all she's not and she does. Far be it from her to look a gift horse in its answer-for-bloody-everything mouth.
(It becomes apparent, the longer one spends in her company, that the flatness doesn't speak to subtlety. She's expressive to a fault, and that look is just a different tell.)
Save that detail it would just be a pretty story, wouldn't it. Something for a wretched English gentleman to say to pass the time and either to make himself a more appealing conversation partner to some old sea salt, or because sure - why not? And sure any privateer, merchantman, or child in a bloody dinghy could peel someone from a sandy beach. But ransoming? Well, it's either the most salacious version of this lie told to the wrong ear or, wildly, true.
He laughs, a delighted inhale across the lip of his glass. And then again, louder and truer and even more vibrant. Because there are only two pirate crews in Saint Kitts today and he would've noticed if they'd sidestepped into the rescuing business. Because the idea of this man and Charles Vane in the same hemisphere is funny, but the same ship is fucking hilarious.
Would you look at the pair of them - all stillness and flat looks that betray more than they're meant to.
"Then I'm sorry not to have met him," he says, punctuating it with a smile that's too toothy and a pointedly raised eyebrow. It feels fractionally artificial, a thing he does with his face because it's what men in close proximity with women who think they know better do. Or is that just the story he's telling her: that he is selectively wolfish, that he cares more about what she thinks of him over a book than some other alternative vulnerability.
(Some weaknesses are easier than others.)
He hooks his elbow back on the window sill. "Mind in which direction you bare those teeth next time, won't you."
Clear blue eyes widen a little in what could be faux-scandal, chin now propped up on the flat of his knuckles, free hand splayed on the table. (His shirtsleeves are long enough to cover the rings of scars. Thankfully.) "Do I seem like someone who would barrel right into telling lies?"
Probably, yes. Everyone does when you know humans at least a little, and more specifically, Thomas looks like someone clawing back to life after fever and god knows what else, who may indeed being spinning outlandish stories to win a free meal off someone who ends up entertained. Even highborn men can twist words with the best of them.
On the other hand, he seems so nice.
The girl running about the tavern floor shows up with a bowl of something edible and a mug of fresh water, and he thanks her with a grateful smile. Could be a lie, he's not even drinking alcohol to numb the pain of his reality. Could be the truth, who wants to be tipsy around Charles Vane?
It's a small concession to make, one calculated on that story he's decided to tell that what she finally says, hugging all of her books to her chest, is: "He'll be sorry to have missed someone else telling me."
It can come as no shock, probably, that Flint is not the first person to tell Gwen to be more careful. Even on this brief acquaintance - especially. She should listen. She does try to listen. It's just that this is really all her teeth fucking do--
Her crooked, closemouthed smile is a knife palmed inward; "You are all, I think, a bit late with it."
That was almost friendly, if the punchline weren't look what they already did to me.
(Thomas doesn't want to remake her, though. He just wants her to survive throwing herself so headlong into what she makes of herself - for his sake, sometimes, she thinks before she lunges.)
"My name is Gwenaëlle Tavington," her hand on the rickety banister. "I think 'the French cunt' is more common, you can always add 'with the books' for yourself, but that's my name."
Still chuckling, Gates gives him a sideways look that's all crooked smiles and a good natured implication of Ha ha, don't think I'll take the opportunity to make myself look dumb later by committing one way or another now. He takes a drink, then sets his glass on top of the happily forgotten ledger. Does it really matter whether he's being told stories? Not in the slightest.
"In that case," --the one where his new friend is either lying fabulously or telling the most ridiculous truth-- "Excuse my French, but what the fuck has the Ranger got you at because I know it isn't working aloft or hauling lines."
Those sleeves don't hide the fact that Thomas looks about as fit as a half drowned cat.
He wonders at the weight of each - is it more ridiculous that he may have been signed to a pirate crew at all, or just Vane's? Or is it both, with one amplifying the potential absurdity of the other? He's almost dressed the part, and there are aristocrats in the profession, he's aware. Surely everyone starts somewhere, and the Ranger has hosted green crewmates before.
"There have been threats of being taught," he admits, because what else is that to someone who isn't a sailor besides a threat. Thomas participates in grunt work same as anyone, when he can. But:
"Bookkeeping."
Which is funny, see, because you're beside yourself over yours.
Then there's nothing at all similar about her Thomas to--
It's a relief, one that sits on top of everything else as a drop of oil in a cup of water. Remote by design. He doesn't think about it as a balm because it would require considering the thing stung (even if examination might make him more sympathetic to her, to the marks on her wrists and all the reasons why she could be here in a place she can't have chosen that must, at the end of it all, come down to the same reason anyone else is).
He lifts his chin a degree from his post at the widow, half acknowledgement and half something else. Gazing down the length of his nose at her out of habit or practice. It's the look of a man used to standing at the rail of a quarterdeck while sure it's where he belongs.
"James Flint of the Walrus, though I hear Captain is more common."
Her sudden scrutiny, the honest frankness of her immediate assessment - "I imagined you taller," when he is still quite a bit larger than she is, but people talk about Flint as if he's eight feet fucking tall - it is rather of a piece with her apparently inspiring such concern in everyone she meets who isn't trying to kill her. How has she lasted so long with such a mouth; maybe partly because she avoided speaking at all for quite some time.
Still. She tilts her head til, manages to look as if she's finding a frame for him despite not lifting her hands, finally settles on, "No. I see it."
"That lucky bastard. Here we are sailing from one end of the West Indies to the other with an eye for someone with half a brain and the Ranger just fishes an accountant out of the sea." Couldn't he be keeping the books of an inn or tavern or a fishing boat? It'd make it easier to steal him away in the night. "I don't suppose you're looking to jump ship. Our money's good and it's been a while since we lost one of our own down a hole."
The joke is all of it. The ship, the crew, the circumstances, the pitch, the part where he's heard about Hamund but not about this. Everyone starts somewhere, but aristocrats do so with a feather in their hat and a ship under their command.
"Oh, you haven't met Captain Vane?" is cheerily conversational and an oh-so-obvious nod to him telling the truth after all, because only someone who's spent time with Charles would know so intimately the suicidal foolishness of abandoning his vows on the Ranger for another crew-- but most of all the Walrus. The history of animosity between the two entities is a complete mystery to Thomas, but the fact that it exists is plain as day.
In short, he is In on the The Joke. But he's going to gloss over the hole bit, because that's not anyone's business-- and he wouldn't want to discuss it even if it were. Which is perhaps telling, being so unmoved about that incident, whatever it was.
(He eats what cooked vegetables he can find first. Carefully picking what has the best cross-section of easily digestible and most nutrition, in the event his insides rebel before he gets very far in the meal. It still happens sometimes.)
Edited (decided to add more flippancy AND THEN forgot half of what i wanted to write don't look at me ) 2017-09-06 04:33 (UTC)
There's a flicker in his face, though it finds its way to the corners of his mouth. That grin still has too many teeth, but it reaches into other parts of his face now even of it doesn't penetrate farther. Something true for some fragmented reason. "Good," he says.
Storytellers, she thinks, satisfied. He knows. And maybe he thinks she won't be as good as him, but that's fine. He can be wrong with everyone else who's ever said she can't do, won't succeed. Look how far she's got. Look how much she's already lived.
If he can do it, she can do it.
"En échange," she says, produces from somewhere tucked on her person a flattened piece of paper, handwritten. She doesn't try to give it to him - and risk having him rebuff it when they're very nearly ending on a positive note? not likely - but lays it flat on the nearest shelf for him to take or leave when he takes his own leave.
It isn't Peletier, but it is a French poem. He will have to have it translated to find out how many human teeth it features; she doesn't linger any longer.
He shrugs, so broad a gesture that it says Worth trying all on its own. Honestly, even if the man wanted to crawl aboard the Walrus over such a flimsy pitch, it'd take a long conversation with Flint to convince him of the need. To balance the inevitable retaliation with their shortage of a good man (Flint's urge to dismiss Vane as irrelevant while snapping in his direction given any opportunity).
With a wave of the hand, Gates brushes away the whole concept. Nevermind then. He's right - not worth the blood on either deck. Better to drop dead over balancing the books alongside Flint than from the stress of managing both him and Vane.
Instead, he nods to the bowl and takes his drink back up. "How is it?"
No point in asking about the Ranger - how he finds that, how those books are, where he came from prior to being dumped into the sea, a thousand other possible questions that will just get (rightfully) talked around.
There's more he could say. That he travels with a woman and it's non-negotiable, that Vane is - and here's where someone chokes on his rum - enlightened in a way that's been unexpected. He permits women to sign articles if they can hold their own, he does not deal in slaves or any form of human trafficking, he puts up with the likes of Jack Rackham and he did not slit Lord Hamilton's throat and dump him overboard when intelligence returned to indeed prove him a useless ransom. All things Thomas understands are far from universal for pirate captains.
He is still violent and unpredictable and engaging in a lifestyle of mayhem and crime. But Thomas is all too familiar with the things that go on in civilized society, and honestly, it's all the same-- at the worst. At best, piracy is honest about the awfulness, and done on a micro level, opposed to the macro kind of wiping out whole civilizations. After what he's been through he has to pick his battles - and accept that he's harder to morally distress, these days.
"Very acceptable," of the food. Does Thomas even remember what fine food tastes like? Can he remember what his favorite dish was in London? There was a time when the starvation was at its worst, and he found his mind consumed with thoughts of everything, anything, to the point of near-hysteria, but after the first time it became so distant. Everything is quite lovely, anymore.
"I have to admit I'm curious." Treading back to subjects there are no point in discussing. "Why Vane bristles at the very outline of that other ship in anchor."
There are men who wouldn't answer that question with anything resembling honesty - particularly not from an able hand he's unabashedly envious of (ask again later if he's still alive in six months, some background part of Gates is already thinking) -, but he isn't that type of quartermaster and wasn't that type of man before he had his votes. What's the point in hiding the obvious, what anyone with eyes could see if given the misfortune of witnessing the two of them stuck in the same room together. Besides, there's a kind of pleasure to talking shop with someone who might not know any better.
"Have you ever seen two dogs square off? Not ones being set on each other, just similar sets of teeth deciding to get sharp at the other." He lays his thick forearm along the edge of the table and rests the glass bottomed cup on his wrist. "I believe your captain and mine share a fundamental difference of the spirit. They could set themselves at the same task for the same reason and find something to bark at each other about. Simple as that. Only of course being on the account makes disagreement a prickly business."
A sharp business. Occasionally a bloody one.
"But it isn't anything that isn't usual. Hunting similar game, dealing with similar people and getting different results. We takes a prize that pays, someone gets shirty over it and fights, which then comes back to those telling them what to do. My captain gets along with Miss Guthrie; yours--" Well. Different kind of getting along.
He shrugs affably-- "Bookkeeping." --and takes a drink.
Thomas listens, skims his consciousness between the lines as if to lift implications of probably non-existent details from the chosen imagery. He wonders in exasperation at himself-- the fact that Bedlam hasn't managed to destroy all the romance in him after all, sitting here having a hard time thinking of these pirate captains as fighting dogs. Surely Vane is something more wild than that. Less able to be trained. A tiger or a lion, and what does that make the mysterious Flint? A bear or, heaven forbid his flights of fancy, a dragon?
Growling and barking at each other, though, that he can imagine. Territorial and snappish. There's so much unchecked masculinity in this realm, it's not surprising to think that alone might be the crux of the grudge. Could it be deeper? Possibly. Even probably. But where might one find a straight answer.
Thomas smiles. (Blue eyes and the emotive crinkling around them; years ago he might have even been handsome.) "I suppose some people just don't work out, no matter how similar they are." A beat. "Or because of it."
What a thing to say. Fortunate that neither are in earshot.
He hums, a small noise that falls perfectly between debating the point and agreeing with it. That's part right, Gates thinks. Neither of those men like being told what to do; it's an unarguably shared trait. But the fact that Vane's accountant is willing to say as much is-- funny? Interesting? Says more about Charles Vane than Flint would ever give him credit for, that much Gates is certain of. But he's certain it's not something most of the Ranger crew would say neither.
"I've heard that about some people," he says, as magnaninous with his good humor as he is with gossip.
He finishes off his drink, then fishes after the pouch on his belt. "So tell me, since you don't find the work objectionable," -- if he did, the rail thin man would be halfway across the island by now. Or have tried it. Pressed men with objections always try once -- "Is all this anything like how you thought it was?"
Thomas has yet to come down on the dark side of his captain's anger, but he doesn't scare easy as a rule, for starters, and for further mileage, he did just weasel the whole Ranger out of being over a barrel with regards to their cargo. They shall see how things fall if he spies his accountant fraternizing with The Enemy; perhaps Thomas will regret this whole conversation.
"Mm," he says, of objectionable work. What else is a dead man to do? Not that anyone is aware he's a dead man.
"I don't know what I thought it would be like. I thought mostly about the men involved, I suppose, if I thought about it at all. I figured there would be those with very personal reasons to be doing it, and those who simply found it to be work, because people are people. And as it turns out, that's correct. I believe I've met more honest people in the Bahamas than in London, which I don't think is actually a surprise, either. But honesty is neither good nor bad."
Perhaps this man is asking after the violence, and not the philosophy. Alas.
Nonsense. He's asking after the man's opinion. That it has nothing to do with violence (of which he knows for certain the he's seen something of his the rumors are right) says as much as anything else. A good quartermaster knows a thing or two about what men don't speak of as much as what they do. And Gates is, he thinks, comfortable in that role. Comfortable enough anyway. God help him of he didn't know how things worked after this long at it.
Which is why he doesn't ask what he'd like to know of the Ranger - how long it's due there in the harbor and her heading when she goes. Nevermind Charles Vane. If he knows Jack Rackham, that won't be something the bloody accountant has any grasp on.
"Well. I can't say that's a ringing endorsement, but I suppose I didn't ask for one." He'll take honest though. As the gebtleman said - it's not bad and Gates hasn't the constitution to be a pessimist. The work's exhausting enough as it is.
He shills a few coins out onto the table for his drink and the accountant's meal. A little money in the right direction never hurt a new friendship. "If nothing else, I'm glad enough to hear there's another level head to be found over there." Then he offers his hand across the table. "Hal Gates. Quartermaster of the Walrus."
The violence is what most everyone seems preoccupied with, when they realize he was once highborn; fascinated with a man who came from a world rumored to be cloistered from it, eager to shake severed heads and oozing wounds in his face to see if he squirms. It had exasperated him at first, but then - painfully - it reminded him of James and the gallows. And he's tried to take each instance since as a learning experience.
This, too, is educational, filling out his opinion of pirates are just men pleasantly - Hal Gates is temperate man, and interesting. (For as gracious as Thomas is concerning pirates, there is unsurprisingly little variety aboard the crew he's a part of. Rackham and Bonny are the standouts for puzzling uniqueness, but mostly, it's a lot of violent idiots.)
"That's very kind of you," he says, of the coin. Thomas takes his hand, his own free of ink but littered with small scars (god knows what) and callouses (adjusting to work?), grip firm. "Thomas Barlow." He just about doesn't waver on that one. Private self-congratulations. And uh, oh. Right. "Ranger."
Gates' handshake is as credible as the rest of him - sturdy, off the cuff, nothing at all to prove. Most importantly, there's no moment of hesitation over the man's given name - not in his grip anyway. Maybe his head cocks by a degree, the shape of a question shifting just out of sight there under the surface-- not Are you sure?, but maybe Are you fucking with me?. The trace of it evaporates faster than it appears though, there and gone as he reaches for the ledger.
Coincidence, probably. There's no rule in the world that a name can't be shared (tell that to the two Matthews they've on board at this very moment). And what does he know of the woman Flint keeps on New Providence, really? (Enough to be certain that James Flint will want to know about a shipwrecked English gentleman who calls himself by the same name currently working the account under the Ranger's flag, is how much.)
"Good to know you, Mr Barlow," he says. It is - never hurts to be able to identify most of a room when he walks into it. "Now unfortunately, as much as I'd prefer to sit here all afternoon in conversation it seems I've quite the list ahead of me. You'll have to pardon my running off to see to it. Keep that offer in mind though, won't you?" He flashes Thomas a grin. It's a joke and it isn't one. "Should you care to jump ship the next time we share a berth, I guarantee we could keep an accountant hidden for the time it'd take tempers to cool."
Years ago, Thomas would have been able to catch that split-second glimmer - and maybe he'll be able to again, someday - but now, holding himself together through sheer stubbornness and staying awake for days on end, he misses it entirely. (And honestly, Thomas can sound so awkward, so out of practice being a human, would he think anything of it if Gates did look at him strangely?)
"I'll remember," he says easily, and he will-- though only to laugh about it with Gwen later, perhaps, after she tells him about meeting Captain Flint. Certainly not kept in his mind with any seriousness. Thomas has no ambition for himself in this raw and bloody profession, and wouldn't even if he didn't have Gwenaëlle. His future is no so potentially promising that it's worth risking crossfire over, no matter how strangely lovely that ship continues to strike him.
(And being rescued leaves a powerful impression on a person's psyche. Thomas is aware some of his loyalty to Vane is thanks to that animal imprint, but awareness doesn't make it go away.)
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Not that Dieppe Bay is so particular about the company it keeps today. Across Saint Kitts in Basseterre there might be trouble found from sailing straight into port as if they belonged. But not so here as men and slaves and sugar and ships hemorrhage toward the kinder southern landfall. Or maybe the north end of the island has traded hands enough times that it knows the value of turning a blind eye to all kinds of undesirable visitors as long as they bring commerce and coin with them. The Walrus sits at anchor just there beyond the coral reefs, a black shape against the running tide, and all of Dieppe's great guns have long since fallen away into the sea.
There should be no reservations about taking on fresh water and victuals here. And yet, the familiarity of other shipping in the area had kept Flint lingering over the possibility of St. Johns for some time before committing themselves here. Travel over a thousand nautical miles only to find Charles fucking Vane waiting for him. Naturally.
No matter. He decided hours ago not to care. If, after orchestrating the effort to take on water, Flint has found his way to the last place on the island Vane is likely to be, then it must simply be a coincidence.
Of the dozen shops left clinging here in Dieppe Bay, only one has a books. They're tucked up in a loft space, the main floor dedicated to far more useful miscellany (charts and maps and mail packets, silks and faintly chipped china - so far removed from the sale of flour and sugar and fruit as to be useless to a ship looking to re-up its stores). Disappointingly, most of the books are in French and useless to him. But he's committed to combing through the small collection anyway, spending long minutes by the upstairs window with its nearly complete view of the bay trying to parse enough of the text in a likely looking volume to decide if it's worth taking back to someone who can read French well enough to digest it.
The creak of weight on the stairs brings his attention up from the page.
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For a while he stands on a wooden overpass between buildings and watches that other ship - the one he saw the first time they anchored in Nassau - slip its way into position by the reef. Looming across from the Ranger in a way that could easily seem so friendly, but thanks to Vane's less than positive response to the sight (and to Thomas's attention on it), turns regretfully menacing.
It's still lovely. He doesn't know why.
Taking stairs at speed in leather boots is so much easier than navigating anything in wooden heels. If there is a real selling point for piracy, surely the wardrobe is it: no wigs, no fifteen layers of brocade, no hose or knee buckles. Just sensible base garments and flamboyant decorations to high heaven-- or to the devil, maybe that's more appropriate. Thomas himself is still largely unadorned even though Gwen's threatened to find him earrings, and is currently rushing to keep up with a surprisingly speedy short Frenchman and his gossip about English privateer patterns.
Wounds between empires are fresh, here, steeped in bitter grudges, and Thomas is cognizant of this being the right time to put out feelers for the information he's still obligated to turn into profit. It's fine. Fuck England, anyway.
Back and forth and around he keeps pace with this man, getting a tour of what must surely be the whole town, until he is finally released with the implication of a meeting the next day. Good enough. Thomas finds the crowded tavern for want of water and the distant thought that he should eat something (he forgets, still-- thirst he notices a little easier, but hunger and tiredness are elusive sensations, remaining dormant until he's abruptly at the edge of collapse). A man he thinks he passed more than once on the wild goose chase to and fro is sitting at a table near the bar, glaring down at a ledger, and Thomas ends up half-shoved against the edge of it (the table, not the ledger) as people crowd in.
"Excuse me," he says in French, assuming. His accent is palpable, and he makes a face, throwing the expression over his shoulder. Could any of you behave, no, probably not.
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Christ, they need someone to manage the books. Much more of this and he'll jump at the first deserted rock he sees as they cut their way North. Or he'll shake Flint until all his brains turn to liquid and ooze out the man's ear.
Hal Gates is nursing his second drink in the vain hope that it will do something to improve his arithmetic - if that's their tonnage of rice and rum (and he knows exactly where and how it sits in the Walrus's hold, and he knows roughly the value of the above when they last left Nassau, he just needs to calculate their consumption versus the percentage of what Eleanor Guthrie and then parse that by man and reconcile the-- when the press of bodies in the tavern shoves a man into the edge of his rickety table. It bumps it's short leg from the shim keeping it even, setting the table to wobbling precariously enough that Gates feels compelled to rescue his glass. The ledger can do whatever it likes though.
(It doesn't fall from the table. Shame)
"Jet t'en prie," is said equally automatically, ear marking the accent before his mouth catches up with his brain. His own delivery is markedly non-native, though perhaps the shape of the words rings truer here than Thomas's would even were he well practiced. Gates knows his sparse pieces of French from a Bahamian mulatto and sounds it. He follows with, "You might as well take a seat. The girl serving the room is faster than the man behind the bar anyway."
Thank god they've at least put in somewhere with interest. Imagine if he had to do this with nothing but some rocky cove for scenery.
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The woman who appears in view is a slight thing of only sharp edges, the skirt she's wearing with blouse and bodice not connoting much harmlessness when paired with sheathed blades and rings that, with one exception, look suspiciously as if they've been set with human teeth, liquid metal poured over the top. Plenty of the Ranger crew saw her pick them up, after she knocked them out of his head; she might not have chosen to explain her new adornments, but there aren't many questions about their nature among the people to whom she doesn't need introducing.
And if he's been listening, then Flint might be one of them - posh French cunt and her posh, bookish Englishman (who she dislikes leaving unattended, as a rule, but he's not unattended, he's working, she'll bring him back a gift), even before she speaks or casts too-familiar a glance over the shelves, something in the way that she carries herself, still. The way she holds her chin. The level gaze that settles on him, the only other person up here. Not a lady any longer, but if it was easy to beat things out of Gwenaëlle then she probably wouldn't be standing here, now, wouldn't have lasted this long. Perfect posture simply now paired with the willingness to lunge for someone's fucking throat--
She doesn't do that. It's fine.
"Œuvres poétiques," she says, when that gaze drops from man to book. "Peletier. Later edition. Are you buying it? Is there another?"
Also, 'hello', or something, probably.
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Thomas steadies the little table before he sits down, prying a rickety chair over from a neighboring knot of people with one foot, relieved they're deep enough in their cups not to notice the gentle thievery. There is something about him as he settles across from the stranger that screams of origins of some kind of station, despite the generic nature of his clothes and the way salt and sun have ground deep enough to nearly be in his bones by now. The sea, he's come to learn, is not coy about claiming anything, or anyone. It makes him think of--
"Has your journal bitten at your fingers?" is an easy inquiry.
Surely it's caused some offense, to be on the receiving end of such a look.
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Standing in the window with the book open there on the sill to take advantage of the light filtering through the dusty glass, he regards her with a frank look then drops his eye back to the page under his hand. Peletier seems familiar, but he can't place whether it's for good reasons or not. The fact that the woman he's sharing the attic with who stands so straight knows the title quite nearly on sight suggests the former. At the very least, it's something different. Miranda must appreciate that.
"I wasn't aware your captain sailed with anyone literate."
Tell that to Jack Rackham.
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"Taken a spike to my eye is more like it," he says, punctuated by a generous drink. "Unfortunately, I'm apparently surviving long enough to have to deal with the problem." Tattooed fingers and the the tar at his sleeve might shout sailor, but in a place like Saint Kitts there must be dozens of those that have nothing to do with piracy - even ones who speak English first and slide so comfortably into conversation with perfect strangers.
When the girls crosses near to the table, Gates waves her down with a "Mademoiselle," that's only marginally stumbling.
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Further recognizable are the same lines of tortured inventory he spends his days intimately familiar with. Even upside down in chicken scratch with details indecipherable. But then there's the attendant to speak to, and Thomas asks for water and whatever she suggests to eat (sparing anyone the labor of trying to overhear a menu recited from memory). His comprehension and vocabulary are just fine even if his pronunciation is mired in the empire he's been severed from.
"I hope it's just a matter of tedium," he says, of the problem worthy of being likened to losing an eyeball, "and you aren't mid-economic collapse."
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Anyway. He's done torturing himself with this.
"Far from home, are you?" He thumbs back to the front of the ledger - the scrawl on the page changing hands a handful of times the farther forward he goes, most irregular and crooked with the exception of a few steady markups written in the margin - and snaps it shut with a thunk of its heavy cover.
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(Could he recognize handwriting, after five years? If he really saw it, read it, traced his fingers over it, would he realize they're meters away, separated by quickly reconstructed walls and little more? That they could just reach out--)
There's no point in carrying on conversation about the ledger, as his business is his own, so Thomas just says, "Not anymore." A little dry. England is not home, and hasn't been since he was taken to Bethlem. Maybe it wasn't even before; it's not hard to look back now and wonder how he wasn't expelled sooner, a clear outsider.
Where would he say is home, if asked? The Ranger? Nassau? Somehow both seem a little presumptuous despite having signed articles - what would Gwen say. Probably both. There's no stopping the way she's growing into this life.
"I don't miss the cold."
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Something of that train of thought translates into the flat, animal unfriendliness that settles in her long look back at him when he fails to answer her questions helpfully. Rude and unhelpful. ('Pirate', her mind supplies, slightly more helpfully, and the corner of her mouth tugs unwillingly sideways with private amusement.)
"I wasn't aware anyone's captain let them sail without a grasp of what's necessary to run a ship," like, you know, someone with an at least basic grasp of literacy and numeracy - Thomas is arguably overqualified for the position he now occupies, on that basis, "we are all learning things today."
Her smile has a drawing room's close-mouthed polish. It does not reach her eyes as she passes him to investigate the possibility of more Peletier for herself. Its presence is at least promising for the quality of the collection.
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His flat look has nothing of pretense to it - no distant echo of breeding or practiced smiles - but there's a quality there that bores like a drill. That for a moment must somehow absorb the air in the room while Flint passes his hand over the book before finally shutting it. He could go now, pay for the thing and be away without any further commitment. He doesn't need to know anything about the Ranger crews new additions. Not in detail. Not here, where poking at it might very well be like sticking his hand in a fucking beehive for no reason at all. Things change too quickly to be interested in a single unfamiliar face before the mast.
And yet-- "How do you know it? Peletier."
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(That too seems as unlikely as half a dozen things which are actually true. Maybe later Gates will say something to the effect of 'Damn, I should have checked his pockets.')
From the look on his face, it's clear Gates knows it's an intrusive, barreling forward kind of question - better thought than said given the chilly reception of the first. Equally so, that he means nothing by it. If there's a point to being somewhere less familiar than the back of his hand and sitting down with a stranger that isn't making conversation, he doesn't know it. And if the company doesn't like it-- Well. There are other tables where he can go practice his French.
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Two things occur to him: he has no reason to be coy about what he does now, in this place, in front of this man, and that it's a little dazzling to be at ease. When he thinks about it, anyway. Sometimes when he wakes up from one night terror or the other, there's a moment of panic, but the state of things on the Ranger is so unlike any other he's experienced that he's pulled into reality immediately. What would it be like instead to attempt to readjust somewhere more generic? Would he fall apart with nothing but silence and soft 'recuperation' to fence him in all over again? How much worse would his nerves be? Absently, he touches touches his thumb to the cheap, ugly ring he bought in Nassau, worrying it in absence of another. It is calming.
"I was rescued, actually."
Why not go with the truth. It sounds like a lie.
"From a shipwreck. And as I have nowhere to return to and no ransom value, here I am."
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So he's conceptually charming, if not specifically, which is probably in part why she stumbles over tenses-- "I have - I had," a swift correction, "a copy of his translation of Ars poetica that I was very fond of and it's my opinion his proposed language reforms were under-appreciated. I wrote a suite of poems once that used it, for a challenge, when I was more familiar with his work. Œuvres poétiques was his first collection, though."
No unusual French spelling besides that all French spelling is fucking unusual.
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How many of them featured human teeth, he wonders. How far exactly has she strayed from home? (And what does she think she's playing at here?) A man he guesses could grow bored and end up in a place like this calling themselves a pirate, but not with the end point of falling in with the likes of Charles Vane's crew. No one picks that, especially not a woman. Particularly not a woman fond of writing her own poetry.
He makes no move from the window and doesn't soften his hand across the closed book. It's his; he's already decided. "Unfortunately, I can't say I'm familiar with him or his reforms. My French is patchwork." At best.
Spanish and the look of someone who doesn't belong though, he knows.
"Why do you want it?" he asks after a still moment. The book. The Ranger. Any of it.
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he is never between her and the door. Her fingers trace books, but her eyes track him and the set of her shoulders says she's acutely aware of where he is when it's impossible to look at both him and the titles of the books she's turning over in her hands. She did not learn these instincts in the drawing rooms that taught her how to smile and speak; they are not where she found the scars mostly hidden under her clothes, her wrists still faintly marked when her hands lift and her sleeves slide for the elbow. Whatever made her what she is today was crueler than boredom, her falling in a harder landing.
"Thomas's French needs a little work, he's out of practise," she says, because it's the book he's asking after, obviously. "And he appreciates poetry. It'd be nice for us to have - to introduce to him something I loved. He brings me this ring," the only one on her hand that doesn't feature Hamund's teeth, a wide copper thing with blue and green, "and I'll bring him books."
He's doing the translating, today, and a more than serviceable job; now that there's no one to beat them for doing it, they can often enough be heard chattering or murmuring to one another in her mother tongue. And maybe he's read her favourite humanist before, or maybe he hasn't, it would have been nice to - well, Captain Storybook is unlikely to give it up now, but she's picked up one or two things so far that are promising, too, so that's fine. It will make for a story. The book that got away, with a rude man from a fairytale.
Her fingers tap restlessly on the book in her hands. She thinks some people deserve soft things, but even in her head it doesn't sound like something that should be said out loud, so she doesn't. She says, "You understand writing your own story," instead, with a gesture to him.
Fucking look at this guy.
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A moment ago, 'languid' wouldn't have been the word to describe him there. Then the easiness in his shoulder, the angle of his wrist, his elbow hooked there at the window ledge evaporates so completely that it must have been. It's as a steel plate being snapped shut or the reflex of snatching fingers from heat. A blunting of his attention on her, curiosity snapped over the knee. He goes from lit by the light from the window to a shadow blocking it in an involuntary instant.
(Miranda isn't why he's here looking after books, but there's no denying a shared language or the people it's been spoken with. Maybe he should've been ready to be stuck between the ribs like this here.)
He's so removed from what she's saying, but theres almost no pause between her last word and his next. So clipped he might as well be interrupting her. "That kind of ambition is blood in the water to a crew like your captain's. But I imagine you know that already." A look to her rings - all but the copper one. "He won't be impressed by it."
Or her poetry. Or how sharp her eyes are, used so.
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"You shouldn't take it so personally," she recommends, mild as a little lamb, since no part of that denied the accuracy of her observation.
He could, instead, consider first the flaw of being the sort of man to draw someone into conversation for the purpose of ridiculing and disparaging their answers. That's what pricks under her skin now - not what he says, when the ground feels so much firmer under her than it did before, but that she fell so readily into the trap, that some now-embarrassed part of her hadn't been expecting the dismissal. Had wanted to talk about poetry and stories more than she'd been wary of why she was being asked.
Even after he'd already been rude. What the fuck had she been expecting?
She folds her slim hands over her books - there was an Ars poetica, so - and moves for the staircase.
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(Under any circumstance - say, the one where the Ranger isn't lurking out there in the bay and she's come straight from it; the one where her friend has any other name or she'd simply neglected to use it - they might have actually found themselves on conversation long enough to make the shopkeeper anxious and smooth the raw seam there between them. He might have gone on his way with his Œuvres poétiques and she with her Ars poetica with something like rare contentment.)
Instead, Flint passes the book from the sill into his hand. He offers it out with a flat look, but makes no move to intercept her (that too would be easy - it's a shorter line from here to the staircase than the one she must take). "Take it. It's of no use to me."
Miranda won't know the difference for weeks yet. And God help him if he deprives anyone on the Ranger of an education.
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It isn't hesitation, just the time it takes to process and for her face to stop doing that thing - she takes the book. Of course she does. She might've decided she was too proud and didn't want it any more, but first of all that would do Thomas no good and second of all she's not and she does. Far be it from her to look a gift horse in its answer-for-bloody-everything mouth.
(It becomes apparent, the longer one spends in her company, that the flatness doesn't speak to subtlety. She's expressive to a fault, and that look is just a different tell.)
"I'm sure he'd thank you very nicely."
Dry. She doesn't.
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Save that detail it would just be a pretty story, wouldn't it. Something for a wretched English gentleman to say to pass the time and either to make himself a more appealing conversation partner to some old sea salt, or because sure - why not? And sure any privateer, merchantman, or child in a bloody dinghy could peel someone from a sandy beach. But ransoming? Well, it's either the most salacious version of this lie told to the wrong ear or, wildly, true.
He laughs, a delighted inhale across the lip of his glass. And then again, louder and truer and even more vibrant. Because there are only two pirate crews in Saint Kitts today and he would've noticed if they'd sidestepped into the rescuing business. Because the idea of this man and Charles Vane in the same hemisphere is funny, but the same ship is fucking hilarious.
"Oh, please tell me you're being honest."
It'd make his month.
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"Then I'm sorry not to have met him," he says, punctuating it with a smile that's too toothy and a pointedly raised eyebrow. It feels fractionally artificial, a thing he does with his face because it's what men in close proximity with women who think they know better do. Or is that just the story he's telling her: that he is selectively wolfish, that he cares more about what she thinks of him over a book than some other alternative vulnerability.
(Some weaknesses are easier than others.)
He hooks his elbow back on the window sill. "Mind in which direction you bare those teeth next time, won't you."
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Probably, yes. Everyone does when you know humans at least a little, and more specifically, Thomas looks like someone clawing back to life after fever and god knows what else, who may indeed being spinning outlandish stories to win a free meal off someone who ends up entertained. Even highborn men can twist words with the best of them.
On the other hand, he seems so nice.
The girl running about the tavern floor shows up with a bowl of something edible and a mug of fresh water, and he thanks her with a grateful smile. Could be a lie, he's not even drinking alcohol to numb the pain of his reality. Could be the truth, who wants to be tipsy around Charles Vane?
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It can come as no shock, probably, that Flint is not the first person to tell Gwen to be more careful. Even on this brief acquaintance - especially. She should listen. She does try to listen. It's just that this is really all her teeth fucking do--
Her crooked, closemouthed smile is a knife palmed inward; "You are all, I think, a bit late with it."
That was almost friendly, if the punchline weren't look what they already did to me.
(Thomas doesn't want to remake her, though. He just wants her to survive throwing herself so headlong into what she makes of herself - for his sake, sometimes, she thinks before she lunges.)
"My name is Gwenaëlle Tavington," her hand on the rickety banister. "I think 'the French cunt' is more common, you can always add 'with the books' for yourself, but that's my name."
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"In that case," --the one where his new friend is either lying fabulously or telling the most ridiculous truth-- "Excuse my French, but what the fuck has the Ranger got you at because I know it isn't working aloft or hauling lines."
Those sleeves don't hide the fact that Thomas looks about as fit as a half drowned cat.
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"There have been threats of being taught," he admits, because what else is that to someone who isn't a sailor besides a threat. Thomas participates in grunt work same as anyone, when he can. But:
"Bookkeeping."
Which is funny, see, because you're beside yourself over yours.
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It's a relief, one that sits on top of everything else as a drop of oil in a cup of water. Remote by design. He doesn't think about it as a balm because it would require considering the thing stung (even if examination might make him more sympathetic to her, to the marks on her wrists and all the reasons why she could be here in a place she can't have chosen that must, at the end of it all, come down to the same reason anyone else is).
He lifts his chin a degree from his post at the widow, half acknowledgement and half something else. Gazing down the length of his nose at her out of habit or practice. It's the look of a man used to standing at the rail of a quarterdeck while sure it's where he belongs.
"James Flint of the Walrus, though I hear Captain is more common."
But surely that's no surprise.
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Still. She tilts her head til, manages to look as if she's finding a frame for him despite not lifting her hands, finally settles on, "No. I see it."
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"That lucky bastard. Here we are sailing from one end of the West Indies to the other with an eye for someone with half a brain and the Ranger just fishes an accountant out of the sea." Couldn't he be keeping the books of an inn or tavern or a fishing boat? It'd make it easier to steal him away in the night. "I don't suppose you're looking to jump ship. Our money's good and it's been a while since we lost one of our own down a hole."
The joke is all of it. The ship, the crew, the circumstances, the pitch, the part where he's heard about Hamund but not about this. Everyone starts somewhere, but aristocrats do so with a feather in their hat and a ship under their command.
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In short, he is In on the The Joke. But he's going to gloss over the hole bit, because that's not anyone's business-- and he wouldn't want to discuss it even if it were. Which is perhaps telling, being so unmoved about that incident, whatever it was.
(He eats what cooked vegetables he can find first. Carefully picking what has the best cross-section of easily digestible and most nutrition, in the event his insides rebel before he gets very far in the meal. It still happens sometimes.)
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What would be the point otherwise.
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If he can do it, she can do it.
"En échange," she says, produces from somewhere tucked on her person a flattened piece of paper, handwritten. She doesn't try to give it to him - and risk having him rebuff it when they're very nearly ending on a positive note? not likely - but lays it flat on the nearest shelf for him to take or leave when he takes his own leave.
It isn't Peletier, but it is a French poem. He will have to have it translated to find out how many human teeth it features; she doesn't linger any longer.
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With a wave of the hand, Gates brushes away the whole concept. Nevermind then. He's right - not worth the blood on either deck. Better to drop dead over balancing the books alongside Flint than from the stress of managing both him and Vane.
Instead, he nods to the bowl and takes his drink back up. "How is it?"
No point in asking about the Ranger - how he finds that, how those books are, where he came from prior to being dumped into the sea, a thousand other possible questions that will just get (rightfully) talked around.
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He is still violent and unpredictable and engaging in a lifestyle of mayhem and crime. But Thomas is all too familiar with the things that go on in civilized society, and honestly, it's all the same-- at the worst. At best, piracy is honest about the awfulness, and done on a micro level, opposed to the macro kind of wiping out whole civilizations. After what he's been through he has to pick his battles - and accept that he's harder to morally distress, these days.
"Very acceptable," of the food. Does Thomas even remember what fine food tastes like? Can he remember what his favorite dish was in London? There was a time when the starvation was at its worst, and he found his mind consumed with thoughts of everything, anything, to the point of near-hysteria, but after the first time it became so distant. Everything is quite lovely, anymore.
"I have to admit I'm curious." Treading back to subjects there are no point in discussing. "Why Vane bristles at the very outline of that other ship in anchor."
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"Have you ever seen two dogs square off? Not ones being set on each other, just similar sets of teeth deciding to get sharp at the other." He lays his thick forearm along the edge of the table and rests the glass bottomed cup on his wrist. "I believe your captain and mine share a fundamental difference of the spirit. They could set themselves at the same task for the same reason and find something to bark at each other about. Simple as that. Only of course being on the account makes disagreement a prickly business."
A sharp business. Occasionally a bloody one.
"But it isn't anything that isn't usual. Hunting similar game, dealing with similar people and getting different results. We takes a prize that pays, someone gets shirty over it and fights, which then comes back to those telling them what to do. My captain gets along with Miss Guthrie; yours--" Well. Different kind of getting along.
He shrugs affably-- "Bookkeeping." --and takes a drink.
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Growling and barking at each other, though, that he can imagine. Territorial and snappish. There's so much unchecked masculinity in this realm, it's not surprising to think that alone might be the crux of the grudge. Could it be deeper? Possibly. Even probably. But where might one find a straight answer.
Thomas smiles. (Blue eyes and the emotive crinkling around them; years ago he might have even been handsome.) "I suppose some people just don't work out, no matter how similar they are." A beat. "Or because of it."
What a thing to say. Fortunate that neither are in earshot.
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"I've heard that about some people," he says, as magnaninous with his good humor as he is with gossip.
He finishes off his drink, then fishes after the pouch on his belt. "So tell me, since you don't find the work objectionable," -- if he did, the rail thin man would be halfway across the island by now. Or have tried it. Pressed men with objections always try once -- "Is all this anything like how you thought it was?"
He asks if genuinely curious. And maybe he is.
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"Mm," he says, of objectionable work. What else is a dead man to do? Not that anyone is aware he's a dead man.
"I don't know what I thought it would be like. I thought mostly about the men involved, I suppose, if I thought about it at all. I figured there would be those with very personal reasons to be doing it, and those who simply found it to be work, because people are people. And as it turns out, that's correct. I believe I've met more honest people in the Bahamas than in London, which I don't think is actually a surprise, either. But honesty is neither good nor bad."
Perhaps this man is asking after the violence, and not the philosophy. Alas.
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Which is why he doesn't ask what he'd like to know of the Ranger - how long it's due there in the harbor and her heading when she goes. Nevermind Charles Vane. If he knows Jack Rackham, that won't be something the bloody accountant has any grasp on.
"Well. I can't say that's a ringing endorsement, but I suppose I didn't ask for one." He'll take honest though. As the gebtleman said - it's not bad and Gates hasn't the constitution to be a pessimist. The work's exhausting enough as it is.
He shills a few coins out onto the table for his drink and the accountant's meal. A little money in the right direction never hurt a new friendship. "If nothing else, I'm glad enough to hear there's another level head to be found over there." Then he offers his hand across the table. "Hal Gates. Quartermaster of the Walrus."
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This, too, is educational, filling out his opinion of pirates are just men pleasantly - Hal Gates is temperate man, and interesting. (For as gracious as Thomas is concerning pirates, there is unsurprisingly little variety aboard the crew he's a part of. Rackham and Bonny are the standouts for puzzling uniqueness, but mostly, it's a lot of violent idiots.)
"That's very kind of you," he says, of the coin. Thomas takes his hand, his own free of ink but littered with small scars (god knows what) and callouses (adjusting to work?), grip firm. "Thomas Barlow." He just about doesn't waver on that one. Private self-congratulations. And uh, oh. Right. "Ranger."
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Coincidence, probably. There's no rule in the world that a name can't be shared (tell that to the two Matthews they've on board at this very moment). And what does he know of the woman Flint keeps on New Providence, really? (Enough to be certain that James Flint will want to know about a shipwrecked English gentleman who calls himself by the same name currently working the account under the Ranger's flag, is how much.)
"Good to know you, Mr Barlow," he says. It is - never hurts to be able to identify most of a room when he walks into it. "Now unfortunately, as much as I'd prefer to sit here all afternoon in conversation it seems I've quite the list ahead of me. You'll have to pardon my running off to see to it. Keep that offer in mind though, won't you?" He flashes Thomas a grin. It's a joke and it isn't one. "Should you care to jump ship the next time we share a berth, I guarantee we could keep an accountant hidden for the time it'd take tempers to cool."
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"I'll remember," he says easily, and he will-- though only to laugh about it with Gwen later, perhaps, after she tells him about meeting Captain Flint. Certainly not kept in his mind with any seriousness. Thomas has no ambition for himself in this raw and bloody profession, and wouldn't even if he didn't have Gwenaëlle. His future is no so potentially promising that it's worth risking crossfire over, no matter how strangely lovely that ship continues to strike him.
(And being rescued leaves a powerful impression on a person's psyche. Thomas is aware some of his loyalty to Vane is thanks to that animal imprint, but awareness doesn't make it go away.)
"Good luck."