![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
'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.