[PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

[katabasis]

The bread that is over-baked so that it cracks and bursts asunder hath not the form desired by the baker; yet none the less it hath a beauty of its own, and is most tempting to the palate. Figs bursting in their ripeness, olives near even unto decay, have yet in their broken ripeness a distinctive beauty.

Comments

[katabasis]

The sound of a hoe clipping a stone rings with such clarity. In his dream it is like a shot fired from a pistol, a residual vibration in his hands where his palms are not the right kind of hard for this work. He had laughed about the first stinging blisters earned from the work in the field, flinching childishly from the cool rag applied to them in the low light of the bunk house. It has been funny then to think that any part of him was soft - or at least the way in which Thomas had tended to his palms had made it seem so. Let this work rearrange the hardest spots on his hands to be suited for a shovel instead of a sword, he had thought. Given time, they would have the same exact configuration of callouses.

TING! is the sound the of a shovel cracking a stone. TANGTANG! is the sound of the overseer's bell, so close to that of a ship's that for a time it seems only natural to obey it. Because the work is hard, but all work is hard; his back and shoulders ache, but his back and shoulders have always ached. It doesn't matter. The world and everything in it can do whatever the fuck it pleases.

Then a man named Benjamin who they have worked in tandem with is caught stealing from the smokehouse. Labor is paused. Every man in this field and the ones adjoining take a moment to gather in the heat of the day to watch as the foreman beats the thief with a cane across the back of his thighs like a boy. That's a little funny too - treating a stupid thief like a child. Benjamin yelps at the first crack of the cane. James lets his attention wander, fleeting out across the fields still waiting to be plowed and sown. He's sweating under his shirt. Crack, crack, crack. Benjamin has gone quiet now. James glances to Thomas, pauses, then looks back to where the cane rises and falls. Crack. Crack. Crack. Until Benjamin isn't silent anymore. Until the welts begin to bleed.

In the night, he rubs his thumb across the hard spots on his palm. During the day, while tightening the buckles of plow horse's harness, he asks Thomas without looking at him: "Are you happy here?"

[aletheian]

It is in this way that Thomas has learned the true nature of immortality. Of reincarnation. Life has ended for him over and over; he is the same man somewhere inside but fundamentally carved into something else. He thinks he is on his fourth life now. He is someone who the others come to when they're shaking apart for a calm word, he is someone that has an uncanny sense for which overseer is near - so many time's he's stopped speaking, shushed another, hidden a book, pushed someone back to work. It isn't fearful, it's observant-- the insight that made him so formidable in debate makes him a deft mediator here, slipping others around like pawns avoiding bishops. Benjamin thinks he's a prat.

"What?" This is his fourth life, because James resurrected him into a new realm. So he's relieved, just a little, that his love isn't looking at him when he asks, because blurting out What? is so unlike him. He hates looking at anyone askance. He knows what it is to be stared at as if insane. He'll never look at James that way when he can see it.

For a while, he's quiet.

"I am happy to have left Bethlem," he says after a while. "I am happy when I am with you." Wooden boxes creak as he puts them back to rights, full of stiff-bristle horse brushes and picks for shoes, old iron nails. He moves to stand at James' elbow, footsteps silent in a measured way that tells a story of a man who has reason to fear making noise. "Sometimes," he begins again, his voice muted, "I'm even happy when I get to read newspaper articles, or when it rains in the morning."

(What? he'd said, so quickly.)

[katabasis]

The horse shifts against his knuckles. It's quiet here in the barn's shadow, the morning fresh and bright beyond it where the path leads from the yard down through the fields and broad meadow to the wood and creek beyond it. The weather is good, clear enough that it will be sweltering by mid-morning, but in the moment as the dew scent evaporates and the chickens pick at worms in the stable yard it would be easy to forget the circumstances of this place.

It has been easy.

What? he says, so fast that James almost regrets asking the question. He focuses on shifting the lay of the strap across the horse's shoulder, then fixing every strap in its keeper even as Thomas draws close. The horse is between them and the rest of the world. James tips his face toward Thomas by a degree; he wills his hands to keep at their task. "That isn't what I meant."

As the man he'd been yesterday, he might have said 'I'm happy with you too' and leave it alone. Because of course that's true. He's said it a thousand times and is certain he'll say its like a thousand more. Instead, he hesitates for a split second. Then--

"Is this the place you want to be, or is it the one you're in because someone says you must?"

[aletheian]

There's work to be done in the morning, and the next, and the next. Taken without context of the wider world, it is almost hypnotic; it's easy to understand (if not accept) why men would prefer this to trying to leave. If one doesn't consider that there's anything better, and appreciates the shelter and food provided, perhaps puts value on humble living for God or some other damn thing, it's a life. Thomas rubs James's hands where they're tense, he speaks quietly about the identities of the other prisoners, he shares what little of the African language he's picked up that's spoken by some of the black slaves. In private. They are all of course forbidden from speaking it, or any other language besides English.

Once a week if a man wants a shave or to cut his hair, they're permitted - Thomas is 'allowed' to do this now, he explains, as his hair's got enough grey in with the blonde these days that there's no value in forcing him to grow it out again to be sheared off and sold. He leaves his still-short hair alone and shaves his beard off, and though he doesn't say so, it's not because he has any particular desire to (it's sort of a pain to keep up with, honesty), but because it's worth James getting a look at this part of the plantation and how unobserved they are with scissors and straight razors.

He muses that it's a miracle James hasn't ended up with his head burned; perhaps he needs a hat.

They're shuffled into a small and drafty room at the end of one of the barrack houses, with a door leading into the inner hallway of the structure and another facing out at the vegetable garden buffering the main house from the first of the fields. It counts as a family unit, though for the trouble, Thomas has been given the task of making sure Benjamin doesn't die in his sleep-- an infection in one of the wounds left by the whip has stricken him with a terrible fever, but the weather is too bad to fetch the doctor. Unconscious from sickness and laudanum, he's here deposited in a cot against the wall, breathing but dead to the world.

The rain is coming down so hard that the outside world is awash in blurry grey, even with the door cracked open to circulate the muggy air. The sound of it on the roof drowns out the rest of the men in their own crowded quarters, and if not for the third wheel, it could be just them existing here. Cut off and adrift, some world that ends when the water begins.

[katabasis]

After days spent tuned to the habits of those around them - the other prisoners, the African slaves, the overseers, the half a dozen deliveries coming and going from the plantation, the master of the house and his infrequent guests, the family's two children who are learning to ride up and down the lanes between the fields -, the insulation of the downpour feels like a respite from more than just the labor expected of them. It's not quiet, but it is restful (even with Benjamin, the poor bastard) and he can't help but be lulled by it. The air is dense, the damp smell thick, and as he runs his hand over the short bristle of hair across the top of his skull it occurs to him that this may be the first time they will be left to themselves for more than a moment. They'll be here for more than just the time it takes to fit a horse into harness or for the minutes they might be allowed to linger in the yard after nightfall before someone comes to see them tucked safely away. Excepting their friend on the cot of course, they're alone. God forbid he ever wish to have everything.

How closely do they count those razors after they've been allowed to use them?, a piece of him wonders. Who long would it take for someone to notice a pair of shears gone missing? What would he even need them for? Wouldn't it be better to slip away in the darkness or on a day like this one where the rain would mask their route? The rest of him shifts from the doorway, turning his attention from the weather making lakes and rivers of the garden and its paths to Thomas.

They should take advantage of the opportunity to speak where no one will hear them. If leaving here is the easy part (and he believes it will be), then plotting their course beyond the gate deserves more thought than figuring out how to slip away. They'll need horses or a wagon. They'll need supply and the coin to come by them legitimately unless they want to add horse thieves to runaway slave on their inevitable warrant. They must secure someone outside this place to supply them or, better, they must figure out a way to take whatever they need from this place before they leave it. Speak to no one. Trust no one but themselves. Put no man or woman in danger and leave no witness when they disappear.

It's a long list. It should be broached. Instead James drifts to Thomas. scuffing his fingers through his own beard as he goes. He'd neglected to use he razor either to shave his cheek or the prickle of hair on his head - the former seems like a lost cause and the latter will need to be grown out to avoid easy recognition from a distance - and now he's regretting it. He's sweat in these clothes. If he'd done more than wash and scrub his face, there might be less of him to smell like stale heat and work.

"How far is the doctor? When the weather clears - do you know how long it will take to send for him?"

[aletheian]

"They may well have sent someone already," Thomas says mildly, rising from his kneeling position next to Benjamin - making sure his airway's clear, and that he's still not conscious. It would be nice if he and James were truly alone, but it's not to be today. Still, this is a marked upgrade. "I can barely see the house." If a man on a horse went out the gate, there's no way they'd know from back here.

Satisfied that they're as alone as they're going to get, Thomas lays a hand on either of James's arms, slipping up to his shoulders. "An hour from the time someone is sent until the doctor turns. He lives at one of the neighboring plantations, though I don't know in which directions. I get the impression he's slow-moving, as he always arrives on a cart pulled by a mule to the tune of the overseers complaining about him. So perhaps not too far away."

There's something funny about the fact that he met James when his ginger hair was long and his face clean-shaven, and now this. Thomas finds him just as handsome, no matter how intimidating the effect; it doesn't exactly make James look friendly, but he can't imagine that was something Captain Flint was trying to aspire to anyway. He runs the thumb of his right hand over James's jawline.

"There used to be a better doctor who came, a younger man, who resided in the town we're east of. I'm not sure if he moved away or if a political disagreement finally came to an impasse. He was very Irish."

[aletheian]

The rains let up, aftermath a hellscape of mud and mosquitoes and never having clean clothes; Thomas writes words in the soft dirt and, occasionally, paints them on the inside of James's forearm with his fingertips and the wet earth that won't be banished, though the latter is all private whimsy. There is something of his old recklessness in the way he steals moments and cut corners in favor of James's head in his lap as he recites poetry from memory, of their fingers laced together, of speaking quietly in the dark. And there is some political wiliness, too, in the way he times things and slips them out of the trajectory of potential punishment. It's not just the overseers - this is a prison, after a fashion, of course, and most of them are not wrongfully incarcerated.

For a while, Benjamina Gunn seems to be on the mend, and then one day he isn't. There's no service - the near-flooding put everyone behind, and (so they're told) it would be a waste of time, and besides, it's not like he'll be buried anywhere respectable. A few of the men that night at dinner make noise about holding their own memorial, even just a few words, and it turns into an argument in hushed tones between those who'd like to and those who fear reprisal for further wasting time. Thomas doesn't weigh in, and the look he shoots James is one that suggests getting involved would be inadvisable. Not in a dire way, but a this will be a headache way.

Alas, their opinions are then polled directly.

"Anything you have to argue about is self-evidently a bad idea," Thomas says, and then as the lead agitator angrily gets in his personal space, "but you could have done it by now if you weren't. Sit down, Barnaby." --Barnaby takes a step back and sits down, looking half-confused at why he obeyed. (Thomas almost never tells any of them to do anything, but they're so used to the way he nudges people this way and that for their own good that on the rare occasions he does, they tend to comply.)

Thomas looks at James, a silent query.

[katabasis]

It is while limping between Je ne comprends pas and Parlez plus lentement, s'il vous plaît that he more fully considers the usefulness of Benjamin in his sickbed. A man given to one idiotic attempt at theft might be the type of man who could be convinced to be foolish again. Never mind the beating. Let him get back on his feet and enjoy a month or two of sweating in a field again and the immediacy of that would fade considerably. The fact that there's a distinct edge of cowardice to the idea doesn't stop him from thinking it, but it does keep him from mentioning it to Thomas. It would work for as long as they'd need it to.

--Or it may have had Benjamin ever gotten upright again. He doesn't and James finds himself absolved of any creeping sense of guilt. Thank god for dead men, he'd thought. As the murmuring creeps down the length of the table and Barnaby does exactly as he's told, it occurs to him again.

James licks the brine of salted pork from his thumb, meets Thomas's eyes sideways, then says to no one in particular and to no one's surprise, "He's right." Then: "Discussing it wastes more time than doing it. There's nothing wrong with saying a few words in each bunkhouse tonight. If you feel differently, don't speak. Then remember who did what so the same respect can be given him when he's buried and we'll never debate it again."

When. Not if.

In the shifting quiet that follows, he washes the salt from his mouth with a drink of water then resumes his meal. That evening in the hour of thin candelight afforded them to make their beds by, he's hardly begun to untuck his shirt before one of the men they share a room with stands up, clears his throat and quotes clearly from rote memorization as a boy, "'For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's.'" A punctuating pause. "That's Romans," he explains, then sits down at the edge of his bed.

[aletheian]

It is strange, but also bolstering in a surreal way, how the other men look at the two of them together. Some are inclined to find their relationship more revolting than they're bothering to say, but no one's forgotten that the former aristocrat is the only one among them who's tried to escape, and their curiosity about the pirate captain is a burning thing. He realizes, sitting there at dinner, that they could convince - hell, just instruct - most of the others to do just about anything, and that he knows exactly which ones among them would go along unquestioning.

The danger is that he knows which ones would never, too. But there's no time to exchange words between them, no scrap of privacy left in the evening; it would be too much to ask for that they not be shuffled between quarters, as Thomas suspects they're trying to keep the two of them specifically tired and wrong-footed until the staff have a better understanding of how to handle Captain Flint in the long run. Sitting on the edge of a cot in his nightshirt, listening to stilted scripture, he has an unbidden memory: I want you to talk me out of it.

James hasn't asked. Thomas doesn't think he will.

More men speak quietly, and Thomas feels a kind of wryness, almost bitter, that he usually denies himself. These men, two of which he knows to be child rapists, one who drowned his mother and sisters over money, one who delights in mutilation and to this day cannot be left alone with any of the animals... He isn't bitter that he's being forced to be on their level, no, he's long made his peace with that aspect, he's just. Something. Bible verses in the dark. Humans are incredible.

"Listen, I tell you a mystery," he begins. "We will not sleep, but we will all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When it is so, then the saying that it written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.'"

He knows more scripture now than ten years past. Reading material is limited. In the silence that follows Thomas leaves off the next verse that speaks of the glory of God, having no actual belief, and having no stomach to pretend. An older man who's expressed fondness for the couple's academic nattering (his words) in the past says, not unkindly, "Benjamin thought you were a cunt, Mister Thomas."

"He was allowed."

It wins a muted laugh from a few.

[katabasis]

This is a far more delicate beast than simply running away. It involves winning the trust and confidence of more than just one or two men. No, if this is to work they'll need nearly all of them - or enough to make up for the fact that they will be armed with coach pins and shovels, with hammers and garden spades. And while he doubts any man among them would take up arms against them when the time comes for fighting, he knows there's something intoxicating in safety while there's the illusion of peace to be had. Separating the wheat from the chaff of who is trustworthy and who is unreliable takes time - days of sweating in the fields - and patience - listening to the things people say in the dark - and spending time not glued to Thomas's side. The last one is the hardest and most necessary. There are particular kinds of men here who bend more willingly when they aren't being actively reminded of the softest parts of James, just as there are men who knew Thomas best as he was before James had materialized here out of the sea.

"How old is your sister, George?" he asks as he sets a walnut between his shoe heel and a flat stone.

George McNair goes still. It's Sunday and because the man who owns them is civilized about white men's place in the eyes of God, it means they have an hour of time in the afternoon after the reading of scripture to watch the African slaves do their their work.

(They will need them too, James thinks. But how to do it when they should barely speak to one another?)

"Thirty," McNair says. He doesn't flinch when James cracks the nut's shell with a pop. If he's surprised that James knows, it doesn't show anywhere except in how quiet he's become. "Why?"

"Forgive me, I just was told by one of the girls how pretty she is and the Bible makes me sentimental." It's a harmless statement from someone like him, isn't it? Maybe from a man who didn't spend every night in Thomas's bed McNair might mistake it for some kind of threat or joke. James splits the shell in half and shakes the debris out into his palm. "It's a shame. No one should be robbed of so much opportunity. --Walnut?"

McNair shakes his head. "All right," says James and makes his way back to where Thomas is sitting in the dappled sunlight.

There can be no midnight addresses. There can be no rallying the men. It must all be quiet conversation and the slow leveraging of personalities. If no one can be trusted with every part of this scheme, they must be confident that they will do the things asked of them when the moment comes anyway. He has no idea if it's working, then the scent of something acrid and heavy in the night air wakes him up from a dead sleep all at once. In the dark of the bunkhouse, he lifts himself up on his elbow beside Thomas and listens. Then James touches his shoulder-- "Thomas," -- and slips from the cot, crossing the space in the dark and pushing open the door. The barn is on fire, every stone between here and there illuminated.

For a split second, the possibility of New France occurs to him. Then he turns quickly, hauls the mean nearest the door from his cot, and adopts his best quarterdeck bellow: "Up and dressed and follow me!"

Let them discover exactly who can follow orders.

[aletheian]

Possessed of no sailor's training, Thomas is nevertheless composed at James's side in heartbeats.

"Jesus," is breathed out, looking at it. He thinks of the same - we could get out - but then he thinks of the other sleeping quarters, the owner's young children in the main house, people with no contribution to the horror of this place dying, burning. They're lucky the earth is still so damp beneath the surface and the air so humid, or it'd have already spread to other buildings. It still might.

Days from now, when he needs something to think on that isn't what's in front of his face, Thomas will remember James in his element, commanding. Right now, he is focused on the awful silence-- not from the crackle of the fire or the rising commotion as their bunkmates scramble up and hop to the pirate captain's orders, but from the main house. The bungalows where the overseers and other staff sleep. No lamps coming on, no alarm bell being rung. Every second that ticks by without it is a measure of how long emergency response might take for something else, and - something else. There should be two men on rounds overnight. What are the odds a fire started and grew to such a blaze at the perfect time to go unnoticed for so long?

Thomas breaks away, not to the water caches but to the black slave quarters adjacent the barn, the ones locked from the outside. He's only just reached the door with a shovel when the frantic metal clang of the alarm bell finally sounds. He doesn't hesitate to break the lock with brute force, and as the iron pad splits from wood he hears footsteps stomping up behind him-- "Shitting hell, have you got it open?" --Marshall, in his boots and smallclothes only, sees Thomas has the door in hand and bolts in the other direction, too frazzled to care about reprimanding anyone for not waiting for keys or instructions.

Thomas flings the door open and men and women rush out, eager to get out of the path of the breeze that sends smoke and brutal heat; horses shriek in terror, more and more voices raise in the near-chaotic effort to get buckets of water.

[katabasis]

Thomas isn't the only one to shear away. James barks and away go two men to throw open other doors and rouse more able hands from their cots. The rest are divided quickly and succinctly - half with McNair to one one of the interim sheds en route to the lower fields where there will be tools and buckets, and half with him: cutting out toward the main house and its kitchen with the buckets used for washing up after meals, the water pump at the edge of the herb garden, and through that black smoke toward the heat of the blaze. There he's finally met with a locked door, though the bolt separates from its home with one sturdy kick at the same time that the alarm bell begins to clang wildly.

Later, he'll think of how easy it was to get into the house. He'll think of the white kitchen maid who he believed to be sleeping near the burning embers of the hearth who he pulled upright and awake and told to go rouse the house. But in the moment they simply find what they need: buckets and pots and anything else half capable of carrying water, and then they're out again only to be met by a man running in from the bungalows. He stops - shocked maybe - and demands to know what they think they're doing. James knows his voice from that night with the storm and a hundred little droll, calculated remarks since. "Get the fuck out of the way," he tells him.

It's chaos in the yard - field slaves and convicts and overseers and here, finally, the house emptying itself. Screaming and shouting. The saw of the water pump's handle, water gushing from the spout after a few pumps and the howl of the fire. "Get these men in order, Barnaby. Two straight lines from here to there, water passed down them. And for god's sake man, water to the base of the fire." James pours the first bucket over himself, shockingly cold. Does the same with the second. "You--!" To whoever the man at his left is. "Under the water, then with me."

He crosses the yard soaking wet, hauling the neck of his shirt up over his face. The heat of the fire is incredible and the heavy bolt on the door - meant to keep animals in rather than people out - sizzles under his wet sleeve when he wrenches it back and hauls open the door. A frantic horse in the aisle immediately wheels and charges, running past out into the yard with the bolt it yanked from the wall clattering wildly at the end of its line.

[katabasis]

Tick, tick, tick.

He graduates from pressing ribbons to scrubbing shirts, from laundry at the fringe of the main house to washing floors and windows in the parlor. The first time someone puts a knife in his hand to skin a potato, he thinks: 'It's only been a few days,' and 'How far could I get with this?' Not very. Maybe that's the point. Or maybe the women in the kitchen are just short handed with Bes taken ill and his are just the convenient hands. So he does what he's meant to: skins potatoes without question and makes easy conversation with the women for what feels like (is) days on end.

Two things are readily apparent: the women are eager to press him with questions and are as shrewd as hawks by necessity. "A man must take with him into the world below an indestructible faith in truth and justice, lest coming upon villainy he do irremediable wrongs to others and suffer worse himself," is what he's in the middle of clumsily half-quoting by request when Mrs Oglethorpe finds her way to the kitchen in the heat of the day. She asks 'What was that, James? It was very lovely.' Charlotte, who claims to not grasp Plato, answers without hesitation, 'It's the Bible, mistress.'

When Mrs Oglethorpe is gone again, James fixes the young woman with a sideways look across the bucket they're both shedding pinwheels of potato skin into. "What part of the bible was that again?"

"Something from the gospel of Luke, I'd imagine," she says. He tells the whole thing to Thomas in the evening, pressing a kiss to the other man's fingers and chuckling against his knuckles.

The following day, he and three women are mending things on the step in the sun and watching as one of the horses is hitched to the cart when Oglethorpe himself steps out to meet it. He pauses when he spots them, asking to inspect the shirt James is patching. "You sailors are all so very industrious." Then-- "Tomorrow I should think you're well enough to go back to proper work though."

Then he's off to climb into the cart alongside the driver in a flurry of coat tails, hat perched neatly on his rigorously powdered wig. James stitches in silence as the sound of the cart's wheels grind away, away, away--

Annie takes the shirt from him. "The very bottom left drawer in the study's desk. Be real quick. Just take one or two," she hisses at him. "Mind that you're quiet," spits Hannah. Bettina says nothing at all, though her hands have paused in their works. She stares at him, dark eyes fixed.

Tick, tick, tick.

In theory, the small measure of candlelight afforded the convict slave quarters in the evening isn't meant to be read by. In theory, he doesn't have in his possession two letters out of two dozen written by Abigail Ashe. In theory, he doesn't give them to Thomas that night. In theory, nothing at all has changed.

"It would appear to be the same clock," he says.

[aletheian]

The master of the plantation is away, and standards have slipped; most of the overseers are drinking, and though they've still locked everyone here inside, they are less observed. Conversations held above whispers, low singing from the black slave barracks, and Thomas and James are wholly ignored where they are together. (Mister Browder had said, of the pronouncement that James would be returning to regular work, Thank God. I never thought I'd prefer you two mooning over each other all day, but the miserable looks on your faces at dawn and dusk are even worse. He is fond of Thomas.)

"I don't know that I understand," he says quietly. The papers between them, hidden easily from anyone's view, feel uncomfortably heavy. Not for an intangible reason of importance. Burning these will be too conspicuous; if James can't return them to their original housing, they'll have to eat them. It's a stupid thing to thing about. It's what they did in Bethlem, if anyone passed a note. He stares at the letterhead. Abigail Ashe. They have only snippets of the story but-- what other story can it be?

One is a simple, formal inquiry through her lawyer. The other is more personal and pointed, the fiery faux-politeness of someone very educated gritting her teeth against just demanding answers, trying to cajole information out of Oglethorpe about what her father was paying him for. How could the girls in the house know about this? Was there something else they sent James in to look for? Has Oglethorpe been complaining about Abigail where they could hear? --No. He has to have been complaining about Thomas, or they wouldn't have known to tell James.

"Peter's daughter sent him a clock that belonged to Miranda and I." Thomas lays a hand at James's upper arm, near his shoulder, still lightly even though he's made good progress healing. These bunks aren't wide enough for two people, they're cramped and too hot especially in the brutal humidity, but Thomas still hasn't slept better in ten years. "She can't know you're here, can she?"

He feels a little like he's being deliberately obtuse, but for whatever reason, the exact nature of it slotting together eludes him. He can feel it under his nails catching just so without letting him grasp on. Maybe it's simply because he has no experience with Abigail and cannot envision her so valiant. Maybe it's just that the outside world has become such a non-entity that he cannot parse it trying to reach in.

[katabasis]

"Not likely." He'd only had a moment to review the contents of the letters in the house, had plucked these two practically at random (that they reveal anything at all is either a small miracle or a testament to the contents and volume of the letters hidden away in Oglethorpe's desk drawer), but he's had hours of being aware of their existence tucked into the waistband of his trousers. Further, he's familiar with the writer - or at least feels like he is. Is Abigail Ashe the type of young woman to mercilessly hunt down money already long gone without some pressing reason? Surely he would've found the sheaf of letters telling even without the clock ticking away in the same room.

James shifts his weight on his side, trying to find an angle where his hip doesn't drive so hard into the bunk. From across the room there's a small bark of laughter from the cluster of men who've made a game out of seeing who can pull the longest intact straw from a mattress. "I'd say it's more possible she suspects her father was as dishonest about what became of you as he was about how much he valued his friendship with us. Maybe she feels she has some obligation to discover the whole truth."

Or maybe, given the sheer number of letters, it's something more than simple guilt driving her to write so diligently. Maybe somehow the young lady had performed her own miracle: becoming somehow marginally decent despite her upbringing. --Which might matter if she were here. But for now the only things which do is that Abigail Ashe is aware of this place, that they're not so wholly divided from the world that surrounds it, and that someone out there suspects Thomas is alive and in need of some measure of attention.

(If he didn't feel some fondness for the girl before, he might now.)

[katabasis]

This is how it happens:

A horse cart comes up the road and through the gate. Working in the upper fields, they all see from which direction it comes - marking Oglethorpe there in the cart with his companion and the lather on the horse's shoulder in the heat. Then the cart is gone behind the main house where it will be put away, the horse untacked, and finally the master of the house will retire to his own home after long days away. James finds he has slowed to watch the cart's progression until it disappears from sight, hoe idle in his hands for long enough that the man at the edge of the field with the cudgel in his belt notices and begins to bawl at him. "Captain, so fucking help me--"

Ting! James hacks the sharp edge of the tool down into the earth, turning it.

In the evening, the bunkhouses are quiet for the first time in as many days. All the lightness of children unsupervised has been swallowed up, the overseers fretting at reminding everyone on the plantation how to behave properly. There's no laughter, no singing. Yesterday, he and Thomas had spent the long hours of candlelight allowed to them discussing the fate of the Argonauts. He can't recall the lines in their entirety, just the shape they make: young men racing full jars of fresh water to the sea in pantomime of their ancestors. Tonight, there is just one hour of light and they speak of very little.

James leaves his clothes and his shoes on, stitching uneasiness in the room. When the candles are extinguished and the sound of the overseer walking in the yard moves away, a profound quiet finds the bunkhouse. It's as if a collective breath is being drawn. After a long minute, Mister Browder asks from the shadows, "Is it tonight?"

The floor of the bunkhouse murmurs under his weight when he stands, a blacker shape in the pitch of the single room. No moonlight reaches here. No candle burns. No ray of light under the doorway flung from an overseer's swinging lamp. James touches Thomas's shoulder in the dark where no one else knows it. He says, "In the next hour, that door is going to be opened to us and the slaves here are going to begin to tear this place down. We're going to help them. And then we're going to leave." There is something magnetic about this darkness and the low sound of James's voice in it. After an evening of distraction, his hand is so incredibly still at Thomas's shoulder.

"I can't say what will happen to anyone here who stays behind, so it stands to reason that it's in your best interests to get dressed and make ready. Barnaby, I'd like you to take three men to the box in the lower fields to fetch shovels and anything else there that might be used as a weapon. Can you do that?"

"Yes, but--"

"Good. Do it quietly."

The man grumbles - 'You could have told us all this before we dressed down for the night' -, but it doesn't change that soon there are soft sounds of the bunkhouse's occupants putting their shirts back on, finding their shoes under the edges of their cots. Only Mister Browder doesn't move from his bed, though he listens in silence and says nothing. It takes less than an hour for the door's bolt to slide back. They have no option but to be ready then, streaming from the black room into the moonlight.

[aletheian]

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.

The division is what it should be; George McNair is in the other side of the bunkhouse, with a number of other men who would not be cooperative. A hallway separates them, and a door that's been bolted so that no fights break out. No one pulls it free, silent collective understanding of what's come to pass. In the dark, some faces are terrified, pale and uncertain - potential problems, and as James stalks like the force of change he is, Thomas turns his head to take in the details around him.

Browder stays in the doorway and Thomas moves to him, hands on the older man's shoulders after they exchange lines too quiet for anyone else to overhear. In the deepest shadows of the dark wood building, slaves and convicts meet, and Thomas finds himself at James's shoulder again, catching him at the elbow when they're near enough to Liam. He points out three white convicts, protected in the gloom, and shakes his head. Weak points. He suspected as much, and a loyal conspirator who spends more time innocently among the others has confirmed it - even if it's past the eleventh hour. But Mister Browder's heart is soft; too old to be much use in combat and self-aware of the fact that he would be a hindrance on the run, he does not seem to be planning on moving from where he's stood.

('Go on, my boy,' he'd said to Thomas. 'Don't you let them catch you this time. Go on.')

There has been so little verbal planning, only significant looks and messages past between the women, that this war council must be brief and consisting of barely any words. "Gates can't be opened until we use them," Thomas says, hushed, between James and Liam and the few others pressed close, "or they'll send someone to another plantation. Lock in any of them still asleep." That he means overseers is clear-- barring the doors to the bungalows from the outside won't stop them forever, but it'll buy them time if noise wakes everyone up. Before voices can raise, Thomas picks names to barricade the main gates, setting the potential problems up with men he knows will turn on them the second things look questionable, and leaving the business of getting in shouting distance of the overseer sleeping quarters to the black slaves.

Barnaby and Romans are already back with armfuls of heavy wood and iron tools. Thomas looks at James. The main house awaits.

[aletheian]

Sunlight bleeds into the dark, through the jagged canopy of trees that thins to nothing irregularly, banishing the night and its chilly protection. Light brings heat without any dryness to mitigate the muddy undergrowth or exhausting, sweaty work of trekking on, and on. The girls do admirably though it must be misery - only Bes and Bettina ever worked in the fields, though Bes hadn't for very long, and Bettina had stopped before Thomas ever came to the plantation.

There's no conversation. The air's too thick for it, breath too precious to risk becoming winded. With every distant sound - a man's holler, a dog's bark, the eerie crack of a firearm being discharged - heads turn like frightened deer, but none dare slow. The only breaks are if someone needs to relieve themselves or if anyone stumbles, cargo being shuffled between fugitives, but they are rushed through silent, collective assent. By late afternoon there's a creek, but its banks are too bare to linger on, taking water and splashing overheated faces and washing telltale bloodstains before pushing forward.

Evening comes, and with it, a necessary halt. Still, the quiet reigns. Bettina wilts like a dying flower, asleep on the ground curled up with her bag of supplies as soon as watch is softly divided. Thomas stays awake, concern for James's lingering injuries apparent in the way he looks at him, sitting with his back against a tree and pulling the other man into his arms so he can rest with Thomas's hands at his shoulder, the back of his head, coaxing him to sleep.

The grey threat of dawn brings interesting developments: Charlotte and one of the girls they've had less contact with, Sophie, have both cut their hair off and changed into sets of stolen overseers' clothes. Richard ends up trading shirts, looking less ridiculous in something bulky, but with the right application of ties and rolled up sleeves they seem passable. Thomas has half a mind to suggest Bettina follow suit but decides against it; she's so striking in her prettiness that an attempted disguise may draw more attention than just a lovely woman.

And attention they must avoid. The next two days will be the most treacherous, avoiding the last plantation. They should be able to skirt around it without incident, but it's impossible to predict who might be out and about in the woods for any number of reasons.

Single file and careful. Thomas feels an animal unease, has for about a mile, but can't put his finger on why.

[katabasis]

It should be strangely sweet to wake up in the wood alongside Thomas of his own volition instead of by the strike of a bell. Rest should come easily and completely. The grass in the morning should smell crisp and clear and no cold should find them. But the reality is that he sleeps uneasily and his body hurts from the walking and the ground, and when he wakes it's with a sharp sensation of renewed-- not fear. Not really. Just the need to be moving, the certainty that they've lingered too long in one place already. He doesn't attend too long to Thomas for all the same reasons - because it takes time, because he either trusts he's pieced together enough or knows there isn't a moment to make sure he is. Things will simply have to hold until they're clear of this danger.

Come mid-morning, their line strung out and with only Bettina managing skirts, he hasn't yet shaken that sensation which demands progress. Keep going, says every scrap of him. If you keep moving, nothing will catch up to you. And in the bone still woods, that seems almost true. Even the animals are quiet, the morning pierced by only the rare call of a bird or the rasp of leaves as something small moves through it. Gone is any trace of shouting, the bray of a hound. The world has gone so still around them; it feels like they exist on the fringe of it, only he isnt certain whether they're straying toward or from it. Tick, tick, tick.

Once past the plantation, they'll have the luxury of moving under cover of darkness. But they cant risk it now - can't risk a light to see by, for one, and two or it will be better to make their moves during the oppressive heat of the day when workers should either be sheltered from the heat or bent of their tasks. When overseers should be tending their strings of slaves. When work needs doing more than runaways need hunting.

Their footfalls are the loudest thing in the forest. An hour or two ago he hadn't minded it. But now as they move through a shadowed thicket ride with dry grass and small breakable twigs, James finds it's the only thing he can think about. How far are they from the plantation? Not very. Near enough the the sound of them on the perimeter will carry? The overseers present will have dogs with them as they patrol the property lines now, wary of anyone crossing in and stirring trouble among their own property. Will those dogs smell them? Will they hear them? For fuck's sale, it might be possible to hear them coming from a mile away.

He wants to shorten his stride and catch his hand at Thomas's elbow. Instead, James plows ahead at the front of the line where he's deliberate about every footfall and razor sharp in his examination of the undergrowth to their Eastern flank. If there's anyone to be wary of, they'll come from that direction. He's sure of it.

[katabasis]

The Frenchmen do not follow.

For days, they make slow but uninterrupted progress trending toward the mark of Savannah on the map. Surely they leave even the fringe of the haunted plantation behind them. There is a considerable stretch of hours spent in that liminal space too distant from the place they'd come and the threat of civilization before them that might even be called perfectly idyllic - the weather clear, the walking relatively untroubled by difficult terrain, the comfort of food and sleeping dry and no sign of being followed any longer inviting a pleasant (foolish? inevitable?) level of idiocy. Sophie teaches Richard a song by speaking the lines to him, refusing to sing even a note but encouraging him to. Frances and Charlotte take to leading their straggling line with great pleasure, heads bent in conversation as they bent back low hanging branches to make it easier for Bes to be brought up behind them. There is talk of books and the sea and Scotland and how Frances speaks French so well and when the lay of the forest around then seems especially close, they keep a very small fire at night.

Tonight, James decides, is the last time they'll light one. Earlier in the day they'd spent a few hours at the edge of a clearing so Bes could rest her leg and James might reorient their position in relation to the map. A stick had been driven into the ground, its shadow under careful observation and marked at intervals with stones. He'd hummed to keep the time - "Each verse takes fifteen seconds," he'd said to Thomas while hammering the stick into the soft dirt. "Get through the song twenty times times and a the shadow will have moved east to west. Then we'll have our compass and at noon can find our longitude to know our exact position." - and laid beside Thomas in the long yellowing grass. Less to keep their profile low and more to simply share his company with only the sky and small insects in the grass, the rest of their number invisible in the treeline.

He's just finished checking their work against the evening sky. Around the small fire is a murmur of low conversation, the smell of wild apples being heated on a flat stone. He stands there for a time at the edge of their circle until the talk ebbs.

"The road into Savannah lies east of here and can be reached in a day at pace, three at the one we're travelling now."

Charlotte balks. "Do we have food for that?"

"No. Which, along with minimizing how suspicious we would seem if the eight of us appeared on the road, is why you, Richard, Frances and Sophie will go ahead of us tomorrow and make your way into the town on your own."

[aletheian]

All attention was on him to begin with, but it sharpens now collectively, tension immediate and palpable. Fear of the unknown, fear most of all of change: leaving the plantation has been such an adjustment, and they've all only just gotten used to this. Thomas feels eyes shift his way, half-panicked gazes trying to decide whether or not he knew about this ahead of him, and if it matters if he did.

It doesn't really matter. He's looking at James, his expression calm, if serious. Thomas has already privately removed himself from any kind of decision-making, all too keenly aware of his own ineptitude in these matters (any matters), and despite the cold lance that goes through his heart at the thought of separating, a moment's consideration sees the stark logic of it. The same must occur to the rest of them; Sophie's eyes well up with tears but she says nothing, and Charlotte's face twists into something like grief but she frowns through it, determined.

"Is it-- is it a straight shot? From here to the road?" her voice is thick, choking something back. On Thomas's other side, Frances lays her head on Bes's shoulder.

They have to discuss directions, and how they'll all meet once everyone is in Savannah - of course, none of them know any landmarks there, but all towns must have certain elements. Or so it seems. Thomas doesn't understand what they're speaking of, and spends this portion of planning sorting through one of the packs until he finds the papers Bettina had shoved into his possession the night the plantation burned. They are more than a little worse for wear from the weather and mileage, but still intact and legible. It takes him time in the dim firelight to sort which is which, to decide what to remove and what to fold back into the protected depths of their cargo.

(James is so smart - canny and brilliant in all things, Thomas thinks, admiring with almost staggering affection the way he knows how to orient their position. It must be an old method, sun dials and map-making predating magnetic compasses of course, but how many men have the details memorized? Could arrange it so finely and even explain it easily to a layman? It seems like-- like such a small thing to marvel at, if looked at with skepticism. Perhaps Thomas has none, when it comes to him. You always know where you are, he thinks, watching him, and there's something about it - to be able to look up at the stars and know them, to pinpoint a location on earth based on the heavens, at night with them or in the day by the sun, to have a communicable intimacy with the whole world.

It's the independence and authority of it that's so beautiful. He tries to imagine James in his place, gone, but it's like locking away a storm, a force of nature. Impossible. The world didn't notice Thomas's removal, carrying on without incident, but he doesn't think it would have suffered James's so peacefully-- he knew in London that if he could just cut the bonds restraining him, truly free him, that James would be unstoppable. And here it is, true. What awful wound lies where his shape used to be, out there in the Bahamas? Or is it a void, sinking in on itself? Thomas lays beside him in the grass, in the warm sunlight, and traces work-rough fingertips over the contours and angles of his face. He places his palm on his chest and feels the beat of his incredible heart that has withstood so much.

Forehead to his temple, chest against his shoulder, Thomas whispers to him, "I am so proud of you.")

In the grey light of earliest morning, the four youngest among them set off outfitted with wild apples, everything the remaining four won't immediately need, enough weaponry to make due in an emergency, and two letters from Abigail Ashe.

"I still don't know what you mean about a clock," Charlotte says to him, clutching Thomas's hands between them, staring down at the dirt under their nails with a frown - one that he's come to learn appears when she's burying some other emotion.

"Neither do I." A lopsided smile. "If you find her and she seems trustworthy... Just use your best judgement. You're good at it."

The girls hug everyone, Sophie longest of all-- she grips James around the middle and buries her face in his chest, sniffling. She's been crying on and off since the night before, even through Bes telling her she'll just give herself a headache (made less formidable by her own watery voice). Even Richard looks depressed, and Thomas knows it's not because they don't want to carry on - it's just hard. In this short time they've become so deeply connected to each other that walking away like this is like pulling out stitches too soon. But Charlotte is a formidable leader and Richard and Frances, at least, haven't been gone from the wider world long enough to be frightened by walking back into it. He remembers, unpleasantly but informatively, that sometimes to be set properly a break must be re-broken all over again.

"We're right behind you," Thomas says softly.

[aletheian]

Over ten years removed from London, and Thomas, even with his sharp memory, still experiences moments of mysterious disconnect; phantom scents and tastes popping up like stray thoughts, tugging at psychological cravings and nutritional deficits, floating things he was never able to identify in that muted gray expanse of time. It had just been too long, that life so removed and so different as to seem-- false, somehow. And now a link connected as easy as drawing a circle in the air, pressing fingertips against the tense surface of a glass jar filled with soap: olive oil and mint and roses, not precisely the expensive blend he had then, but near enough to match the memory together with the ghost of a half-taste that had appeared at the back of his throat - five months ago? Five years ago?

How strange, that soap is anything but hard, square pieces made of animal fat and ashes, stripping skin and smelling of something dead, and that he once used it. Stranger to be using it again. He had startled, earlier, touching the water in the basin of the washroom, having forgotten entirely the sensation of it lukewarm. He has not been this clean since London; he thinks there is probably dirt and sickness from Bedlam now in the bottom of that basin.

In the northeast sprawl of the town called Savannah, growing with stubborn, ill-advised determination in the poorly terraformed swamplands of Carolina Territory, there is a comfortably private cut of land, and in the middle of it, a large house built for nothing less than a Peer of the Realm. It does not belong to Abigail Ashe, but might as well for all that the owners have seen of it in some time - Mr and Mrs Ashford, good friends of the late Governor Peter Ashe, had returned to England six months ahead of the destruction in Charles Town. They've been happy to leave the estate in Abigail's care, having no desire to ever return to fever-plagued humidity and frontier justice, pleased with themselves for giving a traumatized young lady her own sanctuary.

What it's used for in their absence is none of their business, for all that they might be legally culpable if anyone of note were to discover it. A dead man and the most feared pirate of the Bahamas, navigating rough sponges for dirt and sweat, gentler salve for cuts and bruises. Thomas wonders if James will still taste of sea-salt; if it is in the marrow of his bones, intrinsic.

(Tomorrow, maybe the day after. Then there can be conversations with people who aren't the two of them, details of the others, plans for what comes next. Tomorrow, maybe the day after, or the day after that. Maybe they will sleep for a week. There has been no overwhelming presentation, no demand to answer for wreckage of lives already swept away, just - here, now, stay.)

Thomas is almost childlike in his complete bafflement of their accommodations - modest by all accounts of his former life, outlandish and impossible today. Standing in the center of a room they've been given, wearing a long pale nightshirt (so soft on his skin scrubbed raw, that for the first few minutes on he'd fought an odd impulse to recoil), he is drifting. But not drowning. Looking at the dark wood furniture, dressers and an ornate bedframe, soft mattress and softer bedding upon it, feeling the carpet beneath his bare feet, trying to make sense of it like weaving a ribbon through either side of a woman's stays. Drawing each together.

It isn't that captivity has warped him so thoroughly to find these things alien. It's the context of himself among them openly, not crawling through at some task, or standing still awaiting punishment. It's the knowledge that he is no transient guest glancing in only to be struck back, that he is permitted to stay here, touch the edges of polished wood, sit down on that bed, interact and take it in because this is neither dream nor memory. It's that the sound of soft footsteps in the room with him belongs to James.

He is real, and alive. And so is Thomas and, somehow, somehow, they are both in this room.

[katabasis]

There is still dirt under his fingernails. He'd first noticed it while trimming his beard and had spent a minute (five) scraping after it with the sharp point of the small scissors. There are traces even now, buried deep enough that it'll simply have to come away of its own accord. And while logically James knows it's nothing to worry about - everyone has dirt under their fucking nails in the colonies (don't they?) -, but it feels so much like they've gotten away with a trick that any trace reminder of the plantation on his person seems like begging for the universe to catch up with them. "Captain Flint!" Abigail Ashe had cried, so shocked by his appearance in the company of the convict slaves. Evidently well used to answering questions by the letter rather than the spirit, none of the others had thought to give a complete list of anticipated guests to their host.

(If there was ever any doubt that Silver had done what he promised to - erased any trace of him - her surprise would have dismantled it.)

So despite a clean shirt and a scrubbed raw face, skin smelling of something soft instead of stale bodies and brackish mud, he finds himself still absently trying to pick the dirt free even once he's told himself to forget it. Surely the world must rediscover them somehow. Not tonight, no. Maybe not in this room. But when it does, he must be in control of what they appear to be--

(He isn't so long removed from it that a warm bath and a bed to sleep in seem like anything more than a relief.)

The room they're given is very kind, though. No one invites them to separate either. Maybe that too will be something to modify, to pretend to correct. Tonight the carpet is soft underfoot and he is a decade worth of exhaustion. There are three books on one of the dressers; none of them are the Bible.

James turns them over in his hands, then huffs out a laugh, and carries all three into bed. The lamplight is just enough to read by. "I'm sorry to disappoint you. I don't think these are questionable enough to be banned by anyone."

He holds his hand out toward Thomas as if it's easy. Come here. For God's sake lay with him. As if it none of this is impossible.

(It isn't. He can believe that as fiercely as anything else.)

[katabasis]

One by one, sheets are laid across hedgerows in the garden to dry. The weather has no bearing on the eventual necessity of washing bedding and clothes for the atypically full household, but this is as good a day as there is likely to be on these latitudes at the muggiest end of summer. The air might almost be mistaken for dry as James and Charlotte twist excess water from the length of fabric between them, as Sophie and Thomas string their work out to dry, as the rest of them wash or scrub or run back and forth from the kitchen with hot water.

"Oh these must be lyed the next time," Sophie whispers to Thomas at one point, likely saying anything only because the lady of the house is doing business in town. "It really has to be done before the end of summer while the sun is reliably out to do the bleaching. Otherwise Miss Ashe will have everything in gray by spring. Someone must tell her. --Not you, of course. But someone should."

Abigail had taken the small horsecart into Savannah some hours ago in the company of Ida's brother, trusting entirely the combination of short memory and money ready to be spent to see them through purchasing a somewhat unreasonable amount of goods for such a small household.

"I assure you Mister MgGraw, there is nothing at all to worry about," she had told James while climbing up into the seat. She had sat very straight there, though had spent some minutes rearranging the reins in her hands before surrendering them to Ida's brother. "I find a young lady both in mourning and finding herself at some liberty in the colonies is afforded a certain degree of eccentricity. Further, it's Tuesday."

He'd fixed her with a narrow look, a question there in the faint tip of his head and the crooked line of his mouth - his hand a firm vice on the horse's bridle.

"I suspect," she'd said, very delicately. "A new packet of papers will have arrived for you to read."

There is no reason at all to be concerned over the way Abigail Ashe has been living for quite some time. Still, James finds his attention drifting at intervals toward the line of trees marking the road by which the horsecart must eventually return.

"--And now the other way," Charlotte is dictating, twisting the sheet drawn between them in the opposite direction just as James sights a flash of movement between the trees nearest the road.

He marks it immediately: a bay horse much like the one who had left this morning, though no cart behind it as it gallops up the lane. He throws the sheet into Charlotte's arms ("--Oh for God's sake--", she cries before she marks his direction) and moves immediately to intercept. He's all but running and viciously conscious of being unnarmed until he marks the rider's shockingly red hair as the horse drums it's way up to the house. --Then thinks it again once the immediate flash of relief evaporates.

What the fuck, he only just doesn't say.

Frances nearly topples from the saddle as the horse reaches the yard. She fights her feet from the stirrups and leaps to the ground. Her hair is sheared as short as it was in the wood and she's breathless, lunging to catch the horse by the head. "Where's Ida?"

[aletheian]

"Get back in the house," anyone else might have snapped, but Thomas just says, steady and low and somehow pulling even Charlotte's attention-- she's more inclined to frown at him, but goes along, staring hard over her shoulder as Sophie drags her by the hand up the porch steps. There's no argument because even if no-one doing laundry in this garden was an escaped slave, this is a lawless, wild territory, and only someone touched very strongly in the head wouldn't send women inside at such an abrupt turn.

By the time the door swings to shutter them away, Frances - who Thomas recognizes perhaps at the same time James does - is scrambling off her horse. He doesn't start off to meet them, just puts Charlotte's wayward sheet up (not very tidily in haste), and turns to head to the house himself.

"What's going on, is that Frances?" Charlotte is insistent, pushing the door open before Thomas gets there. Sophie is behind her, hands over her mouth.

"Go and fetch Ida," he says calmly. The Quaker matriarch is in the kitchen with Bettina and Bes, chores divided up equally, as usual. There is little commotion - they are all too used to the way the world can twist in a heartbeat from smooth to jagged. Thomas can hear hurried footsteps up the stairs, knows it's Bettina or Sophie running to throw things into a bag, the possibility of needing to flee too real and near to risk wasting even a minute to hear otherwise. Ida is in the main room now but Thomas holds a hand up to forestall her rushing out. Inside. They don't know if anyone's following Frances.

He only moves when James is near enough that they can make closer eye contact, and then Thomas goes to tie up Frances's horse at the trough at the far edge of the porch, letting her rush in quicker. He leaves the saddle cinch how it is, ignoring the animal huff of protest - not even an absent pat to its soft nose as he makes his way back, knowing someone might need to jump right back on.

He's not gone for long enough to miss but the first panted lines of France's message. "--getting a brigade together to go out and kill everyone there," she's saying as he closes the door behind him. "In three days. That's when they say the detachment from Charles Town should get here."

"Is it because of the fire?" Ida's voice is serious and her expression fierce, but there is no thread of panic despite the tension - in her and in everyone in the room.

"No, no one could have gotten there and back to give word this fast, it's been planned."

"Fuck," is Bes. "If we were still out there--"