Thomas pulls the main log out from the pile of papers on the desk and wedges his thumb into it, prying it open to the different-textured stack of loose sheets that make up the manifest pinned inside. He holds it out to Flint. The cheap tin ring he wears, looted by its lonesome from a Dutch trader, winks a cheerful blue as he moves.
"Haven't found any shadow manifests yet."
But, hangs unspoken, evident in the overwhelming amount of shit out on the desk alone. Though nothing about Thomas' demeanor says he's stumbled into anything shady so far. About the cargo tally, at least. But this man has kept every shred of paper he's received since he was born, so perhaps there is one in here somewhere.
He doesn't ask what's going on. He has a mild suspicion and rather hopes he's wrong. Morley asks, "Something fucked about it?"
A sharp look cows further questions from Morley's particular corner, which is all the time he has for the Welshman. Flint flips through the manifest, juggling the loose pages - wood staves, linens, rice, two crates of fine porcelain which will be worth less than shit anywhere but Kingston, and--
With a low, irritated exhale, he tosses down the collection of papers. "He's armed them. And apparently found the right thing to say to discourage them from firing on him directly."
A stab of the finger. There are twelve lines on the open pages - twelve names, men and women between the ages of twenty two and forty; Bishop and Kerns and Howell.
"There's bound to be sentencing papers in there somewhere." Transportation is a well documented business.
I doubt there were such papers when I was transported
is not appropriate, and not actually funny. Thomas does pause, but it's not drawn out; the fact that Morley is staring at the two of them with renewed intensity is incidental. To react it so be human, and none are more human than those who live without restraint in the margins. Having an idea of what he's looking for, Thomas bends down to find another book, hauling out more and flipping quickly through. At least the official ledgers are organized.
"Here."
If Morley weren't still hovering he'd come round the desk and read it over Flint's shoulder, but instead he just stands there.
Get the fuck out, he doesn't say to the man lurking at the fringe of this. There are two dozen men tentatively being held in submission by little more than half their number, and another thirteen at minimum stowed away with God knows how many pistols and shot. The last thing anyone can afford is being asked questions.
Irritatingly, Morley knows this as well as anyone else. Maybe that's why he says nothing further as Flint pages through the ledgers and produces a thick bundle all signed and sealed by the appropriate hands. Jacob Pellumb, 32, nine years for petty larceny - and here, all the receipts of his contract and jail fees and the very name of the house where he'd been held prior to sentencing. It is a well tailored beast, a creature made for chewing through bone and sinew and leaving the shape of people behind. Harriet Kerns, 27, fencing. Jacob Bragg, 37, exporting wool to France.
Flint goes through a handful of the dozen, then folds the sum back into the ledger.
"I'll talk them out. In the mean time," --this to Morley-- "Help bring those stern chasers around and see what can be done to bring them to bear on the merchant crew should they react poorly. Load up with grapeshot and draw our men back to the rail."
Convict transportation is not a new concept, though the contracts for it are newly minted in ways Thomas hadn't seen before leaving - simply before. He remembers it as a 'merciful' alternative to the death penalty at the state's discretion; that it is now a thriving business and a handy way to thin out overcrowded debtors prisons is unfortunately not a surprise, given how slick an operation slave trading has become.
Alone at last, how romantic. Thomas considers a number of things to say, though none of them with any seriousness. (Do you think you'll sink this ship?) (Do you want me to speak to them?) (Pity you don't have any women on your crew after all.) (I suppose it's an especially good thing your crew's taken this lead, now, I think Charles would have just killed everyone already.)
Instead he sighs as he pulls another drawer out and says, "Fuck."
Is as succinct a way of putting it as any other - in fact, encompasses quite enough sentiment that for a moment (for two), nothing further occurs to him. Certainly there's very little that comes to mind to fix any part of this, though there is no doubt in his mind that it demands repairing.
There are only two ways this goes: they pull those people from the hold, or they burn the merchantman to the waterline with them still in it.
(There's no illicit profit to be made in transportation, thinks a smaller more blunted piece of him. As far as their business goes, it's wasted space.)
The scrape of the drawer in its housing seems very loud in the closed cabin.
"The good news is they haven't killed anyone yet." There'd be no coming back from that.
"Mm, you've said it." Yet. Thomas looks up, a smile on his face that hasn't been there in some days. That quiet, warmly knowing one only James and Miranda truly see. Fate is funny. They walk such a treacherous tightrope here - needing to maintain total secrecy of their truth for new reasons as well as old ones. This is the first time they've attempted this arrangement and God only knows how it's going to go, and while Thomas has preemptively made peace with whatever outcome will tumble through, he hadn't expected this sort of moral punchline. Well played, universe. (You asshole.)
He has to crouch down to pry out a heavy leather binder full of - aha, letters. Hm. Partially obscured he says, "I exist in forced neutrality between the brutal necessity of encouraging this encounter to its end as quickly as possible to further a broader goal, and the empathetic human - personal - desire to deliver each of those people to liberty away from the tyranny that's set them in chains. And,"
Thomas brings up a stack of letters-to-be-sealed. He looks at Flint. "I must of course lodge a formal complaint, owing to representing a ship whose code explicitly forbids entertaining peaceable action against any who deal in human cargo."
Is there something perverse about presenting Charles Vane's arguments in absentia as one might argue in London?
"That's out of the way. As always: please do nothing out of your ordinary on my account."
A huff of a laugh, a half turn as if to commiserate with some audience that isn't there: ordinary?
"Right. I'll do that."
With a deft motion, he sets the ship's ledger against his thigh and tears the problematic page from it. Nevermind his earlier thought. Would that the transports had actually shot what they'd meant to. It'd make this simpler.
"Good hunting," he says, turning and then shifting back. Changing his mind mid-stride to even that extent is irregular enough to disorient. "--if you can't ingratiate yourself with anyone, at least set a chair against the door."
Thomas says nothing for a moment, which is unusual enough to be strange; he should have a remark for that.
A few beats too late he scrapes together, "I'm sure I've ingratiated myself to the captain," which would be funnier for its deliberate banality if Thomas weren't also clearly sidestepping something else.
He shrugs at James and holds his hand out to take back custody of the ledger, as he'll need it. Later.
(There are strange, too long instances of quiet that linger like offset margin spaces in poorly printed books - not so extreme as to ruin, but somehow just crooked enough for the eye to recognize.
And he wonders in passing: how different have I become, and doesn't have an answer which satisfies. There's no change to the person, only the circumstances. Or it is all too reasonable to track the point at which their present selves diverge from others. Or--)
But its easy to set somewhere else, and to instead simply pass back the ledger. It's a broad book. Their hands do not touch in the course of its passage.
"If the guns begin working, stay here until they finish."
Perhaps in another life that goes even worse, improbable as that sounds presented against the horrors inscribed in their recent histories, Thomas Hamilton has cause to believe I am broken in this way because you are, because if we were not both twisted beyond recognition of who we were, then we could not recognize each other as we are, and we must.
It is much the same anywhere, anytime. I recognize you in silence, in the dark.
"Of course."
Yeah sure he'll totally hide, no problemo.
"If anyone speaks German--" he makes a vague sound, bending back over the desk already to pour through papers. "Some of these are that or Dutch. It may not mean anything." But he doesn't know that it doesn't. He's only been in here a few minutes. There's a corpse on the floor.
Mr Barlow does not put a chair up against the door, but he does poke his head out to critique off-tune whistling. It turns out to be Reinforcement, who, free of Morley's skeptical watch, is happy to swan back into the cabin and chat up this odd fellow from the Ranger. The door stays unlatched, swaying sometimes with the expanding breath of the sea, and they talk about cards and fingernail infections.
And in the ship's dark lower decks, a pirate captain is addressing men and women by their names. They're read from a torn sheet of paper, but there's no telling that part in the dense, humming dark. Anything is true. England is a distant shape here, made mute through any other possibility.
"I'll be more than happy to honor your request," he says, standing well back from the dark edges of the grate over the orlop hatch. "You only have to decide whether you prefer to live free here, or at your master's will in Jamaica."
That's the thing with voices in the dark. If someone were to lie, would either party ever know? And what else sits alongside in the pitch?
When the guns begin again, it's first with the crack of a pistol way down there in the dark. The shot burns down there somewhere. A woman screams, What did you do?'
Nine men and women are shepherded to the upper deck. They're stripped of their weapons and kept lashed to the length of chain strung between them. The merchantman's captain is not among their number, and once all parties in question resurface ten Walrus men are sent into the tops to begin stripping the ship of her sails.
It is interesting, that Thomas felt no mortal fear when Lieutenant McGraw was out on assignment, and that he has progressed past the days of gripping Gwenwhereistheumlaut's wrist and silently begging her not to participate, but his stomach still drops when the pistols start up and he knows Captain Flint is down there like a fox stuck deep in a hole with a flock of dogs upon it.
New experiences, he thinks, doing an admirable job of not looking stricken while Reinforcement is staring at him. Life is endlessly varied.
Should have seen that one coming. He does the next, at least, left alone only long enough for Hal Gates to shove the door open and say he's to come and go through the cargo alongside their own accountant.
"You've hired a new one?" he asks, adjusting the strap of a leather satchel full of papers across his shoulder. He has left the nicer one for purposes of someone fencing it; the one he's liberating for his own purposes looks like it's been used as a saddlebag on a very sad horse for many sad years. His gaze catches the line of newly present figures drifting by in their binds, and he feels an asphyxiated pang he's swallowed in the next heartbeat. "Did you hide someone under a bench this whole time, or will it be you and I and an abacus?"
Ingratiated is not the word for Flint's second, but he doomed himself to a friendly rapport with this resurrected radical when he made noise early on about having met him in a social capacity, thus preemptively ensuring nothing suspicious about them speaking informally. Thomas wonders sometimes if he wishes he'd never looked at him twice at Saint Kitts.
"That's funny," says Hal Gates, exactly in the tones of a man who has recently uttered the words No you cannot just shoot the prisoners. Why? Because I fucking said so, that's why. "No, no abacus today. The three of us--"
Here, a pause in which Gates realizes his new friend has been waylaid at the door. He makes a firm gesture of One Moment Please, then turns back to tell the interceding hostage taker to Kindly fuck off and find something better to do or I will find a job for you myself and you will not like it, at which point the temp hire in question is at last allowed past and remanded into the room.
"Mister Barlow, meet Mister Dufrense. Mister Dufresne here claims to read German."
Mister Dufresne's hands are not bound, but he does have the washed out and squinting look of a man who has recently seen more of a dark hold than the ship's deck. His hands tremble slightly as he removes a pair of glasses from the pocket of his battered vest. "Some. I said I read some German," he clarifies.
"Don't say that. We were just starting to get along."
i don't remember where i was going with the german stuff sorry
"Why Mr Dufrense, with only a little more effort you'll look worse than I did on my first outing aboard. Chin up, we'll muddle through." It would be very easy for such words to be warm and friendly, but Thomas makes no such effort. Dry and with just a hint of distant British chill; the kind of thing most men here find more off-putting than a drooling maniac running at them with a knife. Dufrense, conversely, looks like he'd be most comforted by a good dressing down from nanny about his attire. His lordship will just have to suffice. "You can read and write in English though, yes? Of course you can. See if you can't scrape up the broad strokes of this one."
He hands over a journal before moving to open the itinerary ledger for Gates, poking one long finger towards the entry preceeding the scheduled stop this vessel will never make. For helpful reference. "It looks like business as usual with no apparent obsfucation, to me, but I leave it to your more experienced eye. If everything saleable is still intact it won't be the payout my captain was hoping for, but nothing was ever going to be."
They could bring in a Spanish warship full of gold and Vane would still complain about it having Flint cooties.
"I have the feeling your captain will be just fine, seeing as he's being accommodated twice over." Helpfully, in case there was any question as to how they might be doing more than their fair share in this arrangement: "Not that I have any doubt Captain Vane enjoys your company."
It's truly amazing how that flat look Gates employs as he leans over to get a look at the ledger can turn a barb into good humor.
(Somewhere in the background of all this, Mr Dufresne is taking to the task set before him with admirable speed. Under different circumstances, given the comparison of no other company, it's the sort of thing that might impress someone enough to matter.)
"I won't be knocking off anything in the final tally for nanny services," he says, "though you've been very attentive."
Captain Vane likes him just fine and is despairing in his absence, he doesn't need anyone to mind him for a week to give the man a break. The Ranger is perfectly serene at all times, no one on the crew is neurotic, and Thomas adds nothing to the atmosphere of poorly-contained chaos. This is all true.
"To say nothing of hospitable." Twofold. It's a show of trust, outwardly, that Thomas hasn't brought along anyone else from his crew to act as a bodyguard. (His bodyguard is Captain Flint, hopefully no one is looking so closely at such an angle.) And the convicts. Their ultimate fate may not yet be decided, but it's looking better now than it did before the ship was overtaken, in Thomas' opinion.
There are tedious numbers to go through, books to match to the actual product in shadowy holds, inspections to be carried out, would-be bookkeepers to observe out of the corners of eyes. Sometimes piracy is an awful lot like running a large house; women would fare better at captaincy - or at least quartermastery, he's sure - than men, Thomas reflects privately. It's a wonder young Eleanor manages the inventory juggling she does, raised as she was like a boy. Interesting.
Dufrense gets stuck holding a lantern below, with a man Thomas doesn't know the name of pointing at the corner of a stack of containers, insisting on evidence of rats.
"Reach your hand in there and get it, then," Thomas says, an idea that's met with indignation but not outright refusal, since it sounds like a dare.
"I seen a man get his finger chewed off by a rat before."
"Do you need all your fingers for something?"
At this logic, a hand is surrendered, slithering in blindly to search for vermin. And then he screams.
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"Haven't found any shadow manifests yet."
But, hangs unspoken, evident in the overwhelming amount of shit out on the desk alone. Though nothing about Thomas' demeanor says he's stumbled into anything shady so far. About the cargo tally, at least. But this man has kept every shred of paper he's received since he was born, so perhaps there is one in here somewhere.
He doesn't ask what's going on. He has a mild suspicion and rather hopes he's wrong. Morley asks, "Something fucked about it?"
no subject
With a low, irritated exhale, he tosses down the collection of papers. "He's armed them. And apparently found the right thing to say to discourage them from firing on him directly."
A stab of the finger. There are twelve lines on the open pages - twelve names, men and women between the ages of twenty two and forty; Bishop and Kerns and Howell.
"There's bound to be sentencing papers in there somewhere." Transportation is a well documented business.
no subject
is not appropriate, and not actually funny. Thomas does pause, but it's not drawn out; the fact that Morley is staring at the two of them with renewed intensity is incidental. To react it so be human, and none are more human than those who live without restraint in the margins. Having an idea of what he's looking for, Thomas bends down to find another book, hauling out more and flipping quickly through. At least the official ledgers are organized.
"Here."
If Morley weren't still hovering he'd come round the desk and read it over Flint's shoulder, but instead he just stands there.
no subject
Irritatingly, Morley knows this as well as anyone else. Maybe that's why he says nothing further as Flint pages through the ledgers and produces a thick bundle all signed and sealed by the appropriate hands. Jacob Pellumb, 32, nine years for petty larceny - and here, all the receipts of his contract and jail fees and the very name of the house where he'd been held prior to sentencing. It is a well tailored beast, a creature made for chewing through bone and sinew and leaving the shape of people behind. Harriet Kerns, 27, fencing. Jacob Bragg, 37, exporting wool to France.
Flint goes through a handful of the dozen, then folds the sum back into the ledger.
"I'll talk them out. In the mean time," --this to Morley-- "Help bring those stern chasers around and see what can be done to bring them to bear on the merchant crew should they react poorly. Load up with grapeshot and draw our men back to the rail."
no subject
Alone at last, how romantic. Thomas considers a number of things to say, though none of them with any seriousness. (Do you think you'll sink this ship?) (Do you want me to speak to them?) (Pity you don't have any women on your crew after all.) (I suppose it's an especially good thing your crew's taken this lead, now, I think Charles would have just killed everyone already.)
Instead he sighs as he pulls another drawer out and says, "Fuck."
no subject
There are only two ways this goes: they pull those people from the hold, or they burn the merchantman to the waterline with them still in it.
(There's no illicit profit to be made in transportation, thinks a smaller more blunted piece of him. As far as their business goes, it's wasted space.)
The scrape of the drawer in its housing seems very loud in the closed cabin.
"The good news is they haven't killed anyone yet." There'd be no coming back from that.
no subject
He has to crouch down to pry out a heavy leather binder full of - aha, letters. Hm. Partially obscured he says, "I exist in forced neutrality between the brutal necessity of encouraging this encounter to its end as quickly as possible to further a broader goal, and the empathetic human - personal - desire to deliver each of those people to liberty away from the tyranny that's set them in chains. And,"
Thomas brings up a stack of letters-to-be-sealed. He looks at Flint. "I must of course lodge a formal complaint, owing to representing a ship whose code explicitly forbids entertaining peaceable action against any who deal in human cargo."
Is there something perverse about presenting Charles Vane's arguments in absentia as one might argue in London?
"That's out of the way. As always: please do nothing out of your ordinary on my account."
no subject
"Right. I'll do that."
With a deft motion, he sets the ship's ledger against his thigh and tears the problematic page from it. Nevermind his earlier thought. Would that the transports had actually shot what they'd meant to. It'd make this simpler.
"Good hunting," he says, turning and then shifting back. Changing his mind mid-stride to even that extent is irregular enough to disorient. "--if you can't ingratiate yourself with anyone, at least set a chair against the door."
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A few beats too late he scrapes together, "I'm sure I've ingratiated myself to the captain," which would be funnier for its deliberate banality if Thomas weren't also clearly sidestepping something else.
He shrugs at James and holds his hand out to take back custody of the ledger, as he'll need it. Later.
no subject
(There are strange, too long instances of quiet that linger like offset margin spaces in poorly printed books - not so extreme as to ruin, but somehow just crooked enough for the eye to recognize.
And he wonders in passing: how different have I become, and doesn't have an answer which satisfies. There's no change to the person, only the circumstances. Or it is all too reasonable to track the point at which their present selves diverge from others. Or--)
But its easy to set somewhere else, and to instead simply pass back the ledger. It's a broad book. Their hands do not touch in the course of its passage.
"If the guns begin working, stay here until they finish."
no subject
It is much the same anywhere, anytime. I recognize you in silence, in the dark.
"Of course."
Yeah sure he'll totally hide, no problemo.
"If anyone speaks German--" he makes a vague sound, bending back over the desk already to pour through papers. "Some of these are that or Dutch. It may not mean anything." But he doesn't know that it doesn't. He's only been in here a few minutes. There's a corpse on the floor.
Mr Barlow does not put a chair up against the door, but he does poke his head out to critique off-tune whistling. It turns out to be Reinforcement, who, free of Morley's skeptical watch, is happy to swan back into the cabin and chat up this odd fellow from the Ranger. The door stays unlatched, swaying sometimes with the expanding breath of the sea, and they talk about cards and fingernail infections.
no subject
"I'll be more than happy to honor your request," he says, standing well back from the dark edges of the grate over the orlop hatch. "You only have to decide whether you prefer to live free here, or at your master's will in Jamaica."
That's the thing with voices in the dark. If someone were to lie, would either party ever know? And what else sits alongside in the pitch?
When the guns begin again, it's first with the crack of a pistol way down there in the dark. The shot burns down there somewhere. A woman screams, What did you do?'
Nine men and women are shepherded to the upper deck. They're stripped of their weapons and kept lashed to the length of chain strung between them. The merchantman's captain is not among their number, and once all parties in question resurface ten Walrus men are sent into the tops to begin stripping the ship of her sails.
no subject
New experiences, he thinks, doing an admirable job of not looking stricken while Reinforcement is staring at him. Life is endlessly varied.
Should have seen that one coming. He does the next, at least, left alone only long enough for Hal Gates to shove the door open and say he's to come and go through the cargo alongside their own accountant.
"You've hired a new one?" he asks, adjusting the strap of a leather satchel full of papers across his shoulder. He has left the nicer one for purposes of someone fencing it; the one he's liberating for his own purposes looks like it's been used as a saddlebag on a very sad horse for many sad years. His gaze catches the line of newly present figures drifting by in their binds, and he feels an asphyxiated pang he's swallowed in the next heartbeat. "Did you hide someone under a bench this whole time, or will it be you and I and an abacus?"
Ingratiated is not the word for Flint's second, but he doomed himself to a friendly rapport with this resurrected radical when he made noise early on about having met him in a social capacity, thus preemptively ensuring nothing suspicious about them speaking informally. Thomas wonders sometimes if he wishes he'd never looked at him twice at Saint Kitts.
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Here, a pause in which Gates realizes his new friend has been waylaid at the door. He makes a firm gesture of One Moment Please, then turns back to tell the interceding hostage taker to Kindly fuck off and find something better to do or I will find a job for you myself and you will not like it, at which point the temp hire in question is at last allowed past and remanded into the room.
"Mister Barlow, meet Mister Dufrense. Mister Dufresne here claims to read German."
Mister Dufresne's hands are not bound, but he does have the washed out and squinting look of a man who has recently seen more of a dark hold than the ship's deck. His hands tremble slightly as he removes a pair of glasses from the pocket of his battered vest. "Some. I said I read some German," he clarifies.
"Don't say that. We were just starting to get along."
i don't remember where i was going with the german stuff sorry
"Why Mr Dufrense, with only a little more effort you'll look worse than I did on my first outing aboard. Chin up, we'll muddle through." It would be very easy for such words to be warm and friendly, but Thomas makes no such effort. Dry and with just a hint of distant British chill; the kind of thing most men here find more off-putting than a drooling maniac running at them with a knife. Dufrense, conversely, looks like he'd be most comforted by a good dressing down from nanny about his attire. His lordship will just have to suffice. "You can read and write in English though, yes? Of course you can. See if you can't scrape up the broad strokes of this one."
He hands over a journal before moving to open the itinerary ledger for Gates, poking one long finger towards the entry preceeding the scheduled stop this vessel will never make. For helpful reference. "It looks like business as usual with no apparent obsfucation, to me, but I leave it to your more experienced eye. If everything saleable is still intact it won't be the payout my captain was hoping for, but nothing was ever going to be."
They could bring in a Spanish warship full of gold and Vane would still complain about it having Flint cooties.
no subject
It's truly amazing how that flat look Gates employs as he leans over to get a look at the ledger can turn a barb into good humor.
(Somewhere in the background of all this, Mr Dufresne is taking to the task set before him with admirable speed. Under different circumstances, given the comparison of no other company, it's the sort of thing that might impress someone enough to matter.)
no subject
Captain Vane likes him just fine and is despairing in his absence, he doesn't need anyone to mind him for a week to give the man a break. The Ranger is perfectly serene at all times, no one on the crew is neurotic, and Thomas adds nothing to the atmosphere of poorly-contained chaos. This is all true.
"To say nothing of hospitable." Twofold. It's a show of trust, outwardly, that Thomas hasn't brought along anyone else from his crew to act as a bodyguard. (His bodyguard is Captain Flint, hopefully no one is looking so closely at such an angle.) And the convicts. Their ultimate fate may not yet be decided, but it's looking better now than it did before the ship was overtaken, in Thomas' opinion.
There are tedious numbers to go through, books to match to the actual product in shadowy holds, inspections to be carried out, would-be bookkeepers to observe out of the corners of eyes. Sometimes piracy is an awful lot like running a large house; women would fare better at captaincy - or at least quartermastery, he's sure - than men, Thomas reflects privately. It's a wonder young Eleanor manages the inventory juggling she does, raised as she was like a boy. Interesting.
Dufrense gets stuck holding a lantern below, with a man Thomas doesn't know the name of pointing at the corner of a stack of containers, insisting on evidence of rats.
"Reach your hand in there and get it, then," Thomas says, an idea that's met with indignation but not outright refusal, since it sounds like a dare.
"I seen a man get his finger chewed off by a rat before."
"Do you need all your fingers for something?"
At this logic, a hand is surrendered, slithering in blindly to search for vermin. And then he screams.