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[PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes
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.
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So the fire is struck and the canvas is unpinned and folded and packed away. Bes tests her weight on the stick Richard carefully chose for her as the last traces of this camp are scattered - erased stone by stone and by scattered black ash until their night here has been rendered completely invisible. Then they too go - cutting East in accordance with that line Thomas and James had so carefully measured.
"Say something when you become tired," he tells her and Bes agrees, but is as silent as the other woman in their company all morning.
The quiet is so heavy for so long, punctuated only by the rasp of their footsteps in the vegetation. By birdsong. By the buzz of insects and the breeze bowing through the treetops. Fat clouds pass across the dome of the sky and a wilderness that yesterday seemed perfectly ordered now seems crooked, empty of figures he's become so accustomed to marking the position of. He spends the morning near enough to Thomas that their hands sometimes knock together. Eventually James says, "Christ, the four of them were loud," and Bettina laughs, as clear as a bell.
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The girls steady each other and Thomas's fingers find James's side while they're paused, tangling with the fabric of his shirt and tucked into his waistband there for just a moment. (When they get there-- they'll have to stop-- )
Aftermath of tension-breaking giggling lends itself to all sorts of things, the mood sloshing unevenly, waiting to catch on something; Thomas can see it in the way Bes sobers, questions of Do you think they're all right? hanging just there.
"We don't know what to do without quartermaster Charlotte setting the mood," he says.
Bes returns, "Surely that's you." Bettina's look agrees, gaze alighting on James from Thomas, in a silent Obviously of rank assignments.
"Certainly not," is his best Lord Hamilton, the same over-serious affect he would use in London when he was minding ever tedious manner to appease the gentry, that would make Miranda press her lips together to avoid laughing, "I'm much too busy embroidering pillowcases."
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"You can do both," he tells him, certain. Thomas can be both quartermaster and master of pillowcases all at once. As far as divided interests go, it seems exceptionally minor.
"What does that make Bettina?" Bes asks, levering herself up the minuscule incline one clunky step after another.
"Boatswain," James says without a second thought. Surely Bettina must still have rows of knives hidden flush against her stays. He touches his hand to the small of Thomas's back, feels the sinew of muscle from a thousand days in the field through the worn soft fabric of his filthy shirt.
"Do you hear that, Bettina? Captain Flint is putting you in charge of the boats," Bes gasps, pausing there at the top of the world's most insignificant ridge as if it's a victory.
(It is - isn't it?)
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Bettina seems content with her appointment, and she holds position at Bes's side, eyeing her cautiously in case she loses her footing. Thomas, too, is ready to dart out if she stumbles - they've been walking for hours now, and she has to be in paint at least where the stick is taking her weight, to say nothing of her leg.
"I'm afraid I don't know any further sailing positions," he says, doing a decent job of pretending he even knows what a boatswain is-- and belatedly aware sailing positions probably sounds like innuendo but finding himself disinclined to clarify. Needlepoint, honestly.
Is it insulting? Joking this way about the thing that James poured all his rage and fire into, these long years. On its face it seems like children playing at something they don't understand-- but they are all killers now, inciters of such destruction that surely cost dozens of lives, if not more. Bettina is a murderer. Thomas as well - twice over now, he thinks, recalling the man whose face he pushed into the dirt, ensuring his suffocation. (He does not recall the dog, deliberately.)
Life is so fragile. Little twists and flashes of metal, pops of sound, and it's over. He doesn't know how he's survived, sometimes.
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(Theirs is quiet and simpler and more desperate. Still real, but baser - something he didn't know what possible until it was.)
"Gunner," he says.
Bes shoots him a sidelong look; she bares her teeth at him. "That isn't funny."
He laughs, a low growling bark of a sound, and guides Thomas forward with his hand. He doesn't move his hand for some time, content to walk beside him with his fingers steady there at the waist of his trousers.
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(Bettina thinks it's funny, by the way.)
They walk until Bes can't anymore - she doesn't say so, but it's obvious and so Thomas makes them come to a halt even though it isn't in the most ideal location. It gives them time to fetch water from a stream not too far away, and change her bandages again; something clear and unpleasantly thick oozes around the edges of the burn and a crack in the middle of it, but Thomas knows that to mean healing. "At least the weather's been wet," he observes as he and Bettina pack more strips of re-purposed clothes on as bandages, "if that turns white we'll be able to find maggots to put in."
A thrilling silver lining to the prospect of potential infection. Bes announces she's going to vomit at that thought, but fortunately the cure for nausea is more walking. At least this is what Thomas (who is a doctor now, if she recalls her own endorsement) buoyantly informs her, immune to withering looks.
It's not too long before they stop again for the night, and by then Bes is exhausted enough to drop off into sleep almost as soon as they've gotten everything down, worry drained away. Charlotte and the others could - should? - be at Savannah by now, or close enough that lights of civilization would mark their path. There's always a chance they've decided to stay one more night nearby to arrive in the morning.
Not as tired as he could be, Thomas sits next to James with their shoulders and knees touching. Through snatches of barely-illuminated starlight through the canopy, he sees a tree trunk a few meters away thick with moss, perhaps casting an illusion of crawly movement. (Hah.) He's glad Bes is asleep. His hand finds James's thigh, easy. "I can stay up," he murmurs.
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But it's been a long day, minutes on every hour spent by his thoughts wandering helplessly before him: how far have the others gotten? Did they reach the road? Did they find trouble there? Did anyone question them? If they found themselves at odds with a stranger, would one of them know what to say or do to allow them to walk on? Will they reach Savannah and find them jailed, awaiting trial and hanging for the murder of so many good people, the wanton destruction of so much property, for inciting rebellion? Will they reach Savannah and not find them at all? So James doesn't turn. He's perfectly content to keep the two women in his eyeline. There are things that they don't need isolation from.
He has unloaded the rifle and is clearing it of the powder its carried for the day, unspent and prone to misfire if trusted for long. But he's in no hurry to reload, tending to the task slowly in the near perfect darkness. When he's finished, one of them will need to sleep. The day has been slow going; he can afford to lose a few minutes in exchange for company.
"Well I won't fight you for it," he says, quiet enough that it's a low rumble. The rasp of the ramrod is loud in the night and Thomas is so pleasantly warm beside him.
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He doesn't mind staying awake not only because he can, but because it allows him to let James lay down against him, rub some of the tension out of his shoulders as he falls asleep, leave a hand on his chest until morning.
When light once again filters down to them, grey then peach as the sun negotiates with the night's mist, there is a green inchworm making its way across the end of Thomas's boot. He watches it for a while before leaning forward, lifting it carefully with dirty fingers and attempting to encourage it to transfer to the tree next to him. It's more interested in trying to walk with all its myriad of feet back onto his hand.
He feels stirring beside him-- "Go back to sleep for a few minutes," is entirely dignified.
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He wakes only from a hand warm at his temple, thumb stroking through the prickly uneven crop of his hairline. "James," she says, the sound of her voice as a pleasant dream. Other things drip from her mouth, but the sound lays somewhere two days distant. He can hear nothing but Miranda murmuring the shape of his name like a sigh through the wood, like the sweet dew tang of morning coming, like a coal with just the ghost of heat left in it. Under her hand, he dreams of a meadow where the sail cloth is stretched out under them, stalks of tall grass bending in the breeze. His head rests there on Thomas's knee. Miranda wades down through the clearing to them in a dress the color of faded roses.
It is not England or Nassau or the clearing where he and Thomas measured the sun's shadow. It's a place entirely removed. He sleeps there too.
Go back to sleep for a few minutes he feels murmured more than hears. It wakes him completely from one moment to the next, though he doesn't start or sit upward. Instead James just stretches beside Thomas with an involuntary croaking grunt, and opens one bleary eye to observe the man and his stubborn charge as it inches back up the length of his palm toward his wrist. The morning is still gray and cold and no sounds beyond them stir here. James slides his arm around Thomas's waist and pretends for a minute (or two or three) to be asleep even if they both know it isn't true.
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At last he manages to catch the caterpillar on the end of his ring finger and redirect it mid-crawl to the bark of the tree. Absurd. He's stepped unwitting on dozens like it, killed dozens more prying their hungry forms off crops or garden vegetables.
Thomas settles back, his other hand laying over James's arm across him. Some impulsive spark makes him want to lean down, push him back and kiss him-- he doesn't, because the practical thought of straining his own tired muscles and risking tweaking his back outweighs the fanciful one. So he sets the desire aside - until later. When Bettina and Bes are just beginning to shuffle ahead of them after breakfast (better to eat parts of what little they have in the morning), before James has shouldered his pack, Thomas takes his face in both hands and kisses him, close-mouthed and gentle and devoted. It is so painfully at odds with their present-- both a mess, caked in layers of dirt and old sweat, uneven hair, filthy ruined clothes. They barely look like people.
It isn't until several hours on that their steady progress is frozen - shattered through by a sound, distant and nowhere near deafening but singularly unmistakable as a musket shot, heavy powder forcing heavier scattered iron. A quake of upset birds follows, equally faint, far enough away that no wildlife immediately nearby bolts.
"What direction was that from?" Bes asks, looking askance at the three of them. Thomas shakes his head. The trees are so thick and whatever-it-was so far away that it's a complete mystery, at least to his ear.
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The crack of the shot evaporates that ribbon of contentment, the sound of it reverberating for long seconds through the trees after. They've stopped on their tracks, poised and listening, silent agonizing seconds even after Bes voices the question that must be on all their minds.
It's a good one. James has no goddamn clue what the answer is.
"Likely just a hunter," he says, punctuating the heavy air. But for a moment there is an animal readiness to him, a deliberate quality to the twitch of his fingers and the sway of his shoulders. The set of his heel in the ground. He looks to Thomas (who is so sweat and dirt and bloodstained, cheeks rough and gray with the longest stubble James has ever seen on him), then the women, then moves forward on their route as if uninhibited.
"We should keep going."
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The girls look startled still, Bes unhappy and Bettina brittle, still holding onto a rifle. Thomas urges them on, smoothing the edges of his mood down, calm and steady. "We already know we're not alone out here," he says mildly. "No need to begrudge anyone else going about their business."
It doesn't concern them. This far away from the pyre of their torment, this close to colonial civilization, what are the chances that someone is looking for them specifically? Surely more than zero - much more. He remembers what feel like an approaching hurricane after them the time before, Peter Ashe's hand reaching out, all-powerful, authority unchecked in the Carolina colony, able to recklessly, spitefully hemorrhage resources into it. But he's dead now. Thomas is not endangering them just by being here. No one is left alive with personal investment in his imprisonment. Thanks to James.
Maybe there is no one. Maybe they are all being forgotten, too much trouble and not enough payoff to make anyone bother. He prays that it's true. Just let us go. Be satisfied with what you've taken already. Please, please...
They go untroubled by further gunshots or potential gunweilders for the rest of the day, though heightened awareness keeps them quiet. It's different than the quiet that prevailed when their party split down the middle; that was a kind of mourning, and this is the weight of reality reasserting itself. They are not safe. They never will be again. (What has become of the other four?)
Overnight, which Thomas only sleeps through half of, too restless and too used to the harsh hours of the plantation even though he stayed up the entire previous night, they can smell smoke. Just a little. Just enough to drill in the fact that others roam these woods, maybe even live out here, that they could stumble onto another camp or indeed a dwelling, be stumbled onto themselves, at any moment. No accompanying fire can be seen, no nearby tower of ash, merely a visitor on the breeze.
Bes swears she hears someone calling out in the early hours of the morning.
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"Get some rest," he tells Thomas after they have sat in silence for minutes. Hours. "You look exhausted." At least lie down, he thinks, touching his knee and his hip. At least close your eyes. Sleep comes so irregularly. They're all awake long before the grey pre-dawn is broken apart by the sunrise.
Collapsing the lean to in the morning should take only minutes, but today they are slow - methodical. James and Bettina wrap the canvas between them, pausing for long intervals when some breath of sound penetrates through the trees. He feels like he spends the first hours of the day trying to look in two directions at once - at Thomas and through the trees while his flesh crawls. "We need to find a place to wash," he says, low and as methodical as folding away the sail cloth. "We could reach the road today."
If they stagger across someone in the wood, they must appear to be human. They must pass themselves off as reasonable. They must seem like they belong and not that they've spent the last week battering through the woods and rain and mud. How do you stay away from the world and walk toward it at the same time? It's impossible. They are going to find their way to people and their survival depends entirely on them looking the part when they do.
He arms Thomas with the pistol from his belt - Andies's. And then they move again.
Don't come here, he finds himself thinking. Don't come here, don't come here, don't come here. As if they are a fixed point and the world is revolving to meet them.
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The quest to find a stream or something like it means consulting the map before they set off, fine lines and finer script, suggesting things that may or may not have dried up or swelled over between today and the making of the thing. The surest bet takes them swerving a mile or so out of their way there and back, but parallel to the road - meaning odds of running into other travelers or those living more isolated from Savannah will be higher. But the only other certainty is behind them, and backtracking that far would be untenable.
Thomas doesn't know what he's supposed to do with a pistol, though it seems pointless to say so, taking it anyway. He lacks the instinct to reach for it if in peril, and thinks he could probably only hit someone at point-blank range. (Isn't that how most people can hit anything? he wonders, having heard such uneven things about their potential trajectories and chances of actually firing.) He doesn't recognize it as having once been held between his eyes; every instrument from that place had been used to harm him or try to, and it doesn't matter.
Running water is audible before the stream comes into view, pushing well into the afternoon, light around them all orange and yellow through the trees. It is approached slowly, cautiously, and though there is evidence suggestive of other people - grass at the banks worn thin, rocks arranged just so at the other side - there is no one around. Might the other four have detoured this way?
"If you tell me I need maggots in my leg I swear I'll drown myself," is the loudest thing anyone says during the whole affair of washing and changing (clothes and bandages alike), and Bettina gives Bes a savage pinch for it before Thomas can say any exasperated thing. Fortunately for all involved, her wound still seems fine with nothing seeping beyond what's already tied in place, and Thomas leaves it alone.
When they're as presentable as they're going to get, Thomas looks over the girls and James and--
"We won't be mistaken for corpses just crawled out of covered graves, is my best endorsement." Wry, but a little fond, too. They look atrocious and he's sure he's even worse, the last shadow of bruises clinging to his face, skin on his left wrist strangely warped. "Perhaps our boat sank in Florida." His look to James is quizzical, honestly not knowing what kind of cover story would work. Maybe the world today would accept something wholly fantastic, maybe they need the most finite of details. He tries to imagine what he might think up ten years ago, but finds only the echoes of ornate hallways no longer familiar.
There's nothing for it. They make their way to the road.
What awaits them was never going to be glamorous, but what they find in the latest hours of sunlight surprises Thomas at first-- but then he thinks, well, of course. A wide expanse of leveled off dirt, raised only by coincidence at certain turns of the earth, and the season had already been so wet - trying to clean up might have been a futile effort, seeing the great waste of mud stretched out in either direction, riddled with puddles full of breeding mosquitoes, scratched with deep grooves of struggling wagons easily two feet deep, trampled pockmarks of horse hooves and human feet. Some bits have held up, uneven patches of solid ground like southern mesas, but overall: disastrous.
"How the fuck is it worse than in the woods?" Bes blurts.
"Ah.. trees, I think," Thomas ventures, "Covering it and holding the soil firm. Good lord."
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"It's better to know half a lie than all of one," he says, after they leave the river and Bes is still turning it over in her mind. "Just say as little as possible, then there can be no contradiction." It's fine. Should it become necessary, he trusts himself to keep a lie straight.
When at last they come to the road, bog-like and so foul smelling that they could taste it in the air before sighting it, he finds is bizarrely (insanely) reassuring. It's so fucking miserable, surely no one will have the energy to question their presence there. Standing there, face shadowed once again by the broad brimmed hat and the collar of his stolen coat turned high to hide the healing marks left by the rope on his neck, James is silent for a moment. He waves his hand to keep mosquitoes from landing, measures the treeline and the angle of the sun due to collapse behind it.
"Thank god we're on foot," he says, so dry it might not be humor at all.
Bes pokes ground with the end of her stick. It's reasonably firm at the exact point where they're standing, but that won't last long. "Speak for yourself. Can't we stay in with the trees and just travel parallel to the road? Wouldn't that be safer anyway?"
"No. If we're to appear legitimate when we reach Savannah, we can't come straight out of the trees. Better to be seen on the road than lurking alongside it." A pause, measuring the sickening thought that's occurred to him. He glances toward Thomas, the brim of his hat angled too poorly to really meet his eye though the urge to do so (and the impulse to consider his opinion) is obvious. He wants to change his mind. Instead: "If we see a cart, we should attempt to secure a ride. It's what anyone else in our position would try."
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No one with any sense is still out at this hour, too close to nightfall to make any practical progress and too miserable to bother anyway. They are quickly just about as muddy as they were before the stream, but Thomas thinks he still feels a little better for it - fractionally more human - so perhaps it wasn't a complete waste. He can't decide if he thinks this is petty of the universe, throwing marbles under the feet at the last minute, or if this should twig some sort of internal warning-- so many obstacles. Curls of burning ghosts, calls in the darkness. Some wild thing trying to keep them. Stay away, stay away. You don't belong there. You never did.
Even the very edge of the road is more exhausting than any trek so far; uneven steps, wet earth sticking to shoes, they end up reverting to helping Bes along shoulder to shoulder, and Thomas worries over fever from the clusters of puddle-born insects and the potential re-opening of her wound. The mystery of the solitary gunshot is solved; a horse, legs plainly broken trapped in the mud, put down by someone blowing its brains out, the smell of it and the sight of a gored-out section of its middle where a fox has removed a meal offering a grim but helpful warning about that particular stretch of road. They become more conceivably human as they put more wilderness behind them, like a child holding her hand over a parent's larger print; tracks from dozens of people fresh and older, hay beaten down into the soggiest patches of earth, planks of abused wood laid out to help even out surfaces, rocks pushed aside.
The road begins a weak incline, and brings drier, firmer dirt, but it also seems to sap energy. Strange, Thomas thinks, how the smallest shift uphill can have such an impact-- but it does, and he's privately relieved when they have to stop so Bes can sit down in trampled grass and catch her breath. He feels almost lightheaded, though he isn't sure if it's because of how tired he is or because they're close enough now to proper outskirts of town that, occasionally, a long shadow from up ahead moves as theirs do. There is no sand left in the hourglass.
Thomas reaches out, touches James's cheekbone, his jaw. Depleted as they are he is still beautiful to Thomas's eye, especially now in the firelike glow of the setting sun.
(There will be no shadowy arrests under false pretenses, no exiles. No more missteps and conspiracies. They will just be hanged.)
Noise from up ahead, and it's like lifting himself up from underwater, the rest of the world rushing into his perception. Thomas lets his hand fall, fingers skimming along James's arm as he does, lingering perhaps foolishly by his hand. In front of them Bettina has gone tense with anticipation. Maybe they'll cut a more sympathetic figure with Bes still seated.
Someone is whistling, but they must be heading away from them, because the sound of it fades. Thomas looks towards whatever's approaching, willing himself to feel nothing. Small figures in the distance, a cart or something like it behind them; he can't make it out now. Surely they won't progress much closer-- there's nowhere to go, with the road in such a state. They'll have to get Bes up and overtake them, see if there's any negotiation to be had. "Do we have any water left?" she asks, and they do.
Thomas watches the girls dig through Bettina's pack for the waterskin, and after a little while his gaze drifts back to the people in the distance. An uncomfortable feeling twinges in him when he realizes they have indeed progressed an awful lot closer, and he squints, trying to focus further and make out any detail. Three people, one out in front, a woman. He can't discern her features or much about her, not really. Dressed in black - they all are, by the looks of it - and wearing a flat cap (do women wear hats now? he doesn't know), he thinks it's even more conservative than what the girls at the plantation were made to wear. Which is an odd thing to note-- but familiar?
He doesn't know how long he stands like that, staring, an emotion he doesn't have a name for solidifying in his stomach that feels like nausea and hysterical laughter, and barely realizes that at some point, Bettina has straightened up beside him, her eyes fixed to the same woman.
The woman up the road slows, staring back at them with strangely mirrored curiosity. She raises an arm, hesitantly waving at them, and he hears Bettina make a choking sound like a sob. Thomas grabs James's hand, his other over his mouth. Bettina moves forward, towards the woman out there, who is waving in earnest now, shouting something.
"I don't--" I don't believe it, and Thomas really, truly sounds like he doesn't, like he might just topple over with some strange delirium.
Bettina all but collides with her; Bes beside them is asking what the hell's going on, of course she is, but Thomas can't find any words or make himself look away from the sight of the Quaker minister hugging Bettina.
When Ida reaches him, her eyes red-rimmed from emotion and her dark hair streaked with more white than he remembers, she throws her arms around his shoulders (heedless of the fact that he is still gripping James's hand as though it's what's keeping him alive), whispering fiercely, triumphantly, "I knew it. I knew it."
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'What is it that you want, James? What can possibly be the point to this now?' Miranda asks him across a rough hewn table in the house which was built for her. A pot of tea sits between them, its cups gone cold under their fingertips. All her hair is spills down around her shoulders and she reaches for him, one half curled hand that he can't bear to touch.
A letter had come by way of Jamaica, by way of a maid, by way of an old friend, by way of a colleague in parliament, by way of-- and the shape of it even now, weeks (months) later, sits between them. A ghost. It is the most concrete version of Thomas Hamilton to exist in the Bahamas and it is heartbreaking. His wife is so unhappy. James is so--
He can't answer her. He stares at the filled cup. The chair feels uneven. The world is so unbalanced that it shouldn't hold him. People should cling to window frames. The sea should be falling away.
James, please, she begs him. She doesn't cry. Maybe she's used all her tears while he's been away. Maybe she buried them between the floorboards, in the dirt of this island they must love by necessity. Maybe this is all there is. Maybe a person can be reduced to a box of things, to letters on a page, to a painting, to words in a book that only matter to two people in all of God's creation.
Eventually, he rouses himself. He circles the lip of the cup with his thumb and forefinger; the porcelain is so delicate and the small leaves painted there are so alien to these latitudes.
'I just wanted someone to know,' he says, mechanical. 'That's all.'
I did, her face had said. Isn't that good enough? Doesn't that matter to you?
It did. It does. It's so bewilderingly surreal that he can't bring himself to move as the woman closes to distance to meet them in the road. He feels removed from his body, a distant observer to the way the Quaker minister throws her arms around Thomas and the stricken, impossible look on his battered face in return. Thomas Hamilton, James thinks, is unspeakably beautiful. His grip, his trembling hand with his long lovely fingers, is so fierce that it hurts the small bones under it.
Every person in the whole world should love him this way, James thinks, and covers his eyes with his muddy free hand and cries into his fingers.