[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.

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[katabasis]

They're unlikely to meet any sailors on the road - a sunken boat will earn them fewer sensible questions than claiming to come from some failed farm or little inlet village, of which they know absolutely nothing. He can string together the fiction of a ruined small craft, dashed so severely in poor weather than nothing could be recovered. That Bes's leg had been broken in the wreck. That Bettina's husband had drowned ('Don't look at me like that; no respectable young lady would be sailing around with the likes of us without one.'). So fine: they are shipwrecks, walking now to a place where Bettina might seek out an old friend to ask some favor of. It's hardly an iron clad cover story (what storm? why was your boat there? to where were you headed?), but god willing it won't be necessary.

"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."

[aletheian]

The idea of mingling with others, with English colonists, out here on the road - no matter the state of it - stirs a sensation in Thomas and he wonders if it's fear; he had such a torrent of anxiety in the woods with their accidental benefactors, but it was different. That was different. He wonders if James feels the same instinctive unease, looking at him that way. Magnetic, his hand comes to rest at the back of James's elbow, steadying against the drifting tide. "We'll see," he says. It's logical, but people aren't. Maybe they will find someone kind; maybe they'll find someone who makes uncomfortable intuition slip up Thomas's spine. We'll see.

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."

[katabasis]

It comes out of a dream.

'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.