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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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Finally, silence. The men still restraining him ease up, anticipating release, then that order is given. He sees a man from the knees down, faltering in the process of having been reaching to release James. Must be Marshall - he must have left Thomas as soon as the last stroke fell. He'll consider the significance of that later, but now, all he can hear in his head is a twisted screaming like winds in a storm, what do you mean leave it, no, no.
"He's gonna be useless," says one of the men holding Thomas. The one who'd been laughing the most. (It doesn't take a certain kind of man to work a place like this, given the prevalence of slavery anyway, but sometimes it attracts true specialists.) Ogelthorpe's unconcerned response is, "Confine him for the duration, then, I won't have him be a nuisance."
Pulling Thomas away is a struggle.
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Then Thomas is gone and it's dark and someone's breathing sounds like a stone rattling in a cup. There's a stone pressing between his ribs. The sky is low, moonlight showing the heavy shape of clouds and no stars at all. A thousand small insect noises fill the night. Later there is a cool hand touching his temple; he wants it to be Miranda more than he wants anything - for her thumb to draw a soft line along his brow. 'James' she says with her dead mouth. 'Look how far you came for us.' Instead it's the white girl from the kitchen, her wheat colored hair a ghost's veil in the moonlight. She pours water over his mouth. She must leave.
In the dewy morning, three men from their bunkhouse are made to lever the bolt from the ground, to unshackle him, then haul him over into the shade of the walnut tree. His hands are freed. "Still alive, captain?" asks Romans.
Mostly, he thinks. The sun seems lurid over the trees. "Where is he?," he wants to ask, but the breath just croaks out of him.
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Numerous pairs of eyes observe him in varying degrees of sympathy, nervousness, and anger. (A mixed bag, that last one. So many potential reasons why.) Conversation is spotty and murmured, plenty of voices still too charred for more than a few words.
McNair doesn't look his way once.
It's Marshall who ends up fetching him, because of course it is. The man's looked stricken all day, but kept to his duties. Unbeknownst to any slave or prisoner, Andies has given him a measure of shit over being soft-hearted, and gotten his nose broke over it. Having a conscience is expensive and he knows it, but he's earned enough credit for one at this stage. He leads the battered pirate to the other side of the plantation, beyond the store rooms and secondary housing for black slaves, to where three freestanding wooden structures wait. Four foot square with a chained lock on the heavy door, one has a person inside, visible through the slats of the box.
The only thing Thomas can control in this situation is what he says, and so he hasn't said a word. Even though he resisted, even though he'd made some kind of tortured, animal sound at seeing James hurt. He's leaning against one side of the cage, the shirtsleeves and the front of him covered in dark, dried blood from his wrists tearing against iron, and bruises have bloomed over one side of his face. He doesn't stir when approached.
"Boss said he's in here 'til breaking mid-day," says Marshall. At that, Thomas turns his head, recognizing that he isn't the one being addressed. "I'll be back then. Don't be fucking stupid."
He leaves.
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There are three wooden boxes at the edge of the cleared grounds. For a second, James doesn't know what he's looking at, then he recognizes fabric and the shape of a figure through the slats. He hardly hears what Marshall says before he's moving to close the distance, his gait all crooked. His throat feels like he's trying to choke down a stone. There's blood on Thomas's shirt, he can see it from here
He puts his fingers through the slats, something hungry about his forehead pressed to the rough wood. There's still ash under his fingernails. Are you-- "--with me?" he asks, the front half lodged in his throat. He can't tolerate waiting for the answer though, sagging down to the ground beside the box - beside him. He tries to force his hand further into the space. "Thomas--" Speak to him.
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"James," is broken relief at seeing him alive and mobile, grief at seeing him so damaged, his voice underscored by the clink of metal as no one's taken the manacles off of him. For a moment he can't manage anything but that name, repeating it and feeling like he might cry, tension in his chest and behind his eyes shaking loose like lightning at the sight of him. "Oh, god." He exhales with a strange laugh that's almost hysterical for the emotion that's unwinding, joy and horror. Both hands cling to whatever of James he can through the spaces in the wood.
"I'm alright." It seems important to point that out, and bear repeating, "I'm alright." He looks it-- well, he sounds it. His face is bruised and the blood that's all over him is a frightening thing, probably, but compared to James it's superficial. There was no prolonged beating, and no one took a tool to him in attempt to do permanent damage, just dragged and kicked him into submission and into confinement; he'd gotten a blow to the face with a baton again that left him crumpled on the floor of the box, dazed, for some hours. He's exhausted and cramped but physical pain hasn't been something that really bothers him in many years; nothing he's experienced since Bethlam has been able to compare to what he endured there, and it's like a part of his brain just looks at the sensation and shrugs. Feeling it, but not caring.
What might kill him is watching it happen to this man.
"How are you? Has anyone looked at you?" Memories so fresh of Benjamin unable to recover from an illness that took over thanks to a beating collide with James collapsed on his knees next to him now and grip his heart with something awful.
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(Never again, he'd told himself after Charles Town. But--)
Instead he sets his face as as near to Thomas's as he's able. The only thing he has room for is this insane relief, so dense it's exhausting. He closes his eyes, willing down the knot in his throat and the stinging behind his eyes; that horrible grinding sound is his breathing. James forces it to regulate.
"I'll manage," he says. It's not the extent of what he wants to say, but he can hardly shape the words past all the unspooling panic, nevermind the ache in his chest. And: "No. Not yet."
What must he look like? Horrific, he imagines, if this is where they put Thomas to tear himself open over it. Maybe that's some piece of why prying conversation out of anyone at breakfast had been impossible. An ugly reminder would account for all that uneasy attention pinned between his shoulders as much as an order from an overseer.
That's what men like Ogelthorpe and the world they build rely on.
"They'll release you at mid-day."
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This should be the end. This, so easy from the men with power over them, done as nothing but a preemptive warning thanks to the actions of an unknown third party, should break the spine of their plans. It should put Thomas in his place, like it's meant to-- but all he can think is that this more than anything else is why they have to get out. He can't endure James living like this. Thomas has suffered and weathered so much worse, he can take near anything these men decide to do to him, but James has been living the past decade free and Thomas can't have him be here, not at all and not because of him. He can't. Bethlem couldn't drive him mad, this plantation couldn't drive him mad, not even watching Stephen and the tak tak tak of taking a chisel to his skull could crush Thomas's spirit completely, but condemning James inescapably to this will do it. He knows it, he can taste it in his mouth like blood, an iron awfulness that won't leave him.
"I'm so sorry, my love," he whispers.
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It is, despite all logic, a legitimate question - so honest that it isn't punctuated by the wheezing approximation of a laugh or even the surly quirk of the eyebrow. There is nothing Thomas owns to apologize for and no part of this feels like agony. Yes every part of him hurts, he can't fill his lungs, but the sensation is incidental. Thomas-- will survive. This place is made up of people who believe they know how to arrange the world so that they are invincible, but it is the narrowest conception of how men work and what sits beyond this valley. He's tasted England's old blood, and this infant place is something he feels in his tissue can be broken.
They're leaving. There's nothing but a few wooden slats between them - how mercifully close that is -, and he's going to ruin the men who made Thomas think the world could be this small.
What's there to be sorry about?
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For a while Thomas doesn't answer, long enough that it seems like he might simply not, letting it die as a moment of frantic grief.
But that would be cowardly, wouldn't it.
"I know now what England is, unequivocally, I know what the true dangers of the world are, and the thought that I may have gone on living a placid life never knowing the truth is abhorrent to me," he says, quiet. "I have no regrets. What I had with Miranda, what I had with you-- what we had together. I would suffer a thousand times for it, for even half of it." And I know you would, too.
In all those years, did James really never think of it? Did he rage at the whole world, did he and Miranda isolate themselves in their grief and anger, and never once...?
"But sometimes," he doesn't sound like sometimes, he sounds like a man who's lost days, weeks, months of sleep over it, who had years in the dark to be somewhere else in his head while he was tortured and experimented on, thinking of every mistake he's ever made, "I remember that I could have just listened to you in the first place."
And that this is my fault.
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James shifts his fingertips against him, finding himself studying the grain of the wood between them. He draws in a breath, feels the stab of it, then speaks anyway because it's necessary.
"I've wondered at the nature of the world where I never met you and Miranda - what that looks like and who must I be in it." If there's a part of what's been done to them in the last day that can be called the most cruel, it's the one that makes telling Thomas this take so damn long.
"Fundamentally altered, I think. That is a man Hennessey never knew to recommend, who never was commissioned, whose father never sailed before the mast." And if that's all true, at what point is the reality of this simply inevitable? He clears his throat. "Whether it means to or not, the world creates people who are meant to do this."
He breathes out, close to a laugh. "I was made to question your resolve and you were made to refuse so you could shape mine."
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(But he cares for James and Miranda so very much that when he has fevered dreams of angels coming to him saying We can go back, and remove you, and they'll be happy without ever knowing you he's haunted by the incomplete memories of his answers.)
James McGraw without the sea, the Navy, ambition. Would that even be the same man? Would he be just as colorless and half-formed as a Thomas Hamilton who was never challenged so? Would they both be pointless, never having the scales torn from their eyes?
It was meant to be. They were meant to be. Thomas phrases it I could have just listened to you but it's a misnomer, isn't it; he did listen, he just didn't buckle, because he couldn't. There is no path he turned away from, no point at which he almost acquiesced. Sometimes when he tortures himself over it that fact is one that scalds him but-- not James.
Thomas presses his forehead against James's fingers and thinks he might be crying. Relief, love, acceptance. Thinks because he's so unused to it - he was never much for crying even in London. His hands slip from the slats of wood, falling to his lap with a dull thud and sharper ring of metal and he says, "Oh," in faint surprise, having paid no attention to the strain of holding tired arms aloft with iron manacles attached.
It's a little bit funny.
"Remember how long you've been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you," he says after a while, after he's managed not to sound like he's sniffling like a child. "And you didn't use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return."
They're leaving. There's nothing but a few wooden slats between them.
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James make some low noise that must be both sympathy and affection - Thomas's face is so discolored -, and croaks out, "Exactly," in the space between the slats. It doesn't sound warm or bolstered, but God does he feel it. He hopes it translates through the soft shift of his fingertips on Thomas's tender skin or the way he can't bring himself to draw his hand from the box even if his arm is exhausted.
After some time, he tries again: "Your burn. How is it?" Getting off his knees to sit in the dirt like a sensible person takes almost as much effort.
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"I'm not sure," he admits, eyes tracking the other man's movements. He reaches out best he can once he's still, fingers near the ground to brush against his closest knee. He has to think about it to get his brain to catch up with the pain of it, and he shifts his wrists, shackles making an uncomfortable noise, trying to get a better look at the side of his left wrist. "It still hurts, I think I ripped the blister open." Mm. Clink, tilt. "It'll be all right."
He's infinitely more worried about James, as far as injuries go. Their plans are as inevitable as a landslide, but there can be no move towards significant progress until health is at an acceptable level. James wouldn't survive.
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James starts to lean his shoulder against the side of the horrible box - wouldn't it be nice to not be solely responsible for keeping himself upright? -, but the first brush of contact on battered skin reminds him why it's a bad idea. So: sitting as he is. Fine. It's bearable with Thomas's fingertips at his knee.
"You'll have to forgive me," he says, "For not getting you anything for it." And wheezes out a morbid little imitation of a laugh.
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In his best austere Lord of Whitehall: "I'll note the gracious admission of your oversight in your next review." Five years as a slave and five years a test subject still can't torture that Eton diction training out of a man.
Thomas feels just to one side of lightheaded, and he knows it's because he's in that post-anxious stage still, a strange kind of nearly euphoric. Sitting like this, laughing quietly, he feels as at peace as if he and James were patched up and curled around each other in a soft bed. It probably says something extreme about them. But that's what Thomas loves. He knows it's the same for James.
No one else is around; the nearest workers are planting seeds in the field behind them, their movements and voices muted and indistinct in the distance. Thomas can't get out and James can't get him out and so they've been left unattended, and it makes it the first time they've truly been alone in this place since that rainy day and Benjamin's suffering.
"Did I ever tell you about the first time Miranda and I shared a carriage?" he asks, sounding so at ease, and only a little bittersweet. "Probably not-- she once threatened to divorce me if I told anyone, though I don't think it's that scandalous of a story."
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"Go on." Being along in a carriage with Miranda Hamilton had felt like putting his hand in the mouth of a lioness - equal parts electric intrigue and terrifying. Had she always been so fully, brilliantly formed?
(It's strange too to be reminded of everything they'd been before him after ten years of nothing but the constant droning awareness of what the three of them had been and had and seen shattered. Just because they'd defined something for him didn't mean they hadn't known the meaning already - 'Que nunca fue desdichado amor que fue conocido,' the shape of Cervantes on the page as clear as if it were laid open there on his knee--)
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"It was when we were just becoming aware of each other," he says. "Trying to converse without supervision was impossible, and talking about anything of interest with supervision was this.. awkward nightmare." God, it was so long ago. He feels centuries old. He'd been in the worst fight with his father at the time over whether it was going to be Oxford or Cambridge (as studying in Paris was off the table, much to his consternation). He'd never been moved by a woman before, not really, and Miranda had captured his attention so effortlessly. A confusing, exhilarating time. "I'd made a deeply questionable decision about spending the night somewhere, and it became absolutely vital that I leave in the morning or - I don't know, I was so young then, I suppose I thought I would actually die." Everyone was a passionate mess at that age, even Thomas. Even James, he suspects, regardless of whether or not he'd been born with that serious set to his shoulders. "At just dawn, I was desperately trying to leave this man's summer apartment and not look like I was doing that very thing, and I walk into a courtyard and there's Miss Barlow. I was so panicked at the thought that she'd guess what I was doing I launched into this cheerful tale of long hours studying university proposals and how lovely it was to see her, what a pretty morning, goodness are you alone, would you like a ride back to your parents' estate. She says yes. We get into the carriage, and I'm still panicking, because now I've oversold this endeavour and we're in a carriage together, unchaperoned, before it's even fully light outside.
I sat there staring at her, with her staring at me, and in a single effort as though it was choreographed that way, we each begin to realize that our mutual nervous behavior isn't because we're scandalized at each other, but we're terrified of the same thing being noticed."
Thomas can still see her face so clearly, wide eyes and slightly flushed cheeks, the both of them socially fumbling around each other long before their near-telepathic language of significant looks and shorthand conversations had evolved.
"After this stretch of torturous silence I said, 'I certainly hope yours was a better time than mine was, that was mortifying'. She burst out laughing. It was--" Thomas exhales in a laugh now, remembering, "It was more emotion than I'd seen a lady ever express in my whole life, or at least I'd thought so in the moment, and a large part of me was in love with her just then. I don't know we didn't end up banished from society over it, honestly, we showed up arm in arm cackling like lunatics while her mother was still abed."
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How many time did they speak after before Thomas proposed their marriage? Or had it been a mutual arrangement? Or-- Or-- Or--? What a strange thing to not have the slightest answer to, given all the pieces of them he does know. He lifts his face from his arm, sluggish and pleased despite a hundred things but most especially the part where Miranda isn't here to be appropriately mortified over his husband's indiscretion.
-- (Only she is, somehow. She's in Thomas's laugh and the quirk of his mouth under the swollen skin of his face, his fingers curled at the wooden slat, under Thomas's fingertips, and in the shadow of a nearby tree moving opposite the sun to cast here while they wait for mid-day)--
"Did she tell you how she trapped me?" That can't have been a secret between them. Somehow he thinks he prefers it if it wasn't. He likes the idea of the two of them in concert, arm in arm and lovely.
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The frequency of Thomas's own extramarital affairs had decreased to nearly none by the time his career put him in a position to be given things like the Nassau project, content with Miranda - and too busy with work and too uninspired by other paramours, besides. But that never stopped he and his wife from discussing everything and everyone as they'd always done. It was especially engaging to hear about her liaising with his liaison. A man Thomas found so fascinating from the start, who he began to fall and fall and fall over.
(Someday, when they are not so crippled and Thomas's heart and blood can take the poignancy and stirring of the tales, he'll tell James about Miranda coming home from one of their torrid outings and putting his hands over the marks James left on her skin while she narrated.)
"As I understand it she just wanted to go see interesting artifacts."
Teasing. Where would they be without carriages - where would anyone be, honestly. He's sure half the population of every nation with an upper class has dabbled in their illicit use.
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"When we first came to Nassau--" James begins to say, then stops. The sun is warm here and he's so fond of the look on Thomas is wearing right this instant under the bruising and blood. There must be a breeze blowing through the yard to carry the smell of burning and horseflesh away, thinks some distant part of him. He wets his lips. Clears his throat.
"She bought a horse and cart." He can't remember what she'd sold to do it, just that he'd been incoherently angry at the prospect of her pearls or a silk dress like chum in the water of that place. "And we spent two days driving circles across New Providence because she wanted to see it."
There's more to tell - how before it they had reached a point where they were hardly speaking to each other (or anyone) and how after, it was as if the island of hills and scrub had reminded them both of something - but he doesn't know if that's really the kind story he means it to be or if his voice will hold to tell it in the way that would make it so. So instead James lifts his face to smile crookedly at Thomas, hoping that does the work for him.
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Thomas hopes it became a peaceful moment between them. He sees James's smile, feels his fingertips against his own, and sighs a humming noise, wishing he could lean closer to kiss him.
(It would probably hurt.)
"I prayed for nothing else but that you'd find some measure of happiness together," he says. "I tried to bargain with God that if it happened, I would believe in Him."
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"Well," he says. "Close enough." Sometimes. For all the obvious reasons.
He withdraws his fingers from between the slats and plants his hand in the dirt to steady himself. "After yesterday, we'll have fewer friends. But," --and he's as grateful for this as he is the fact that they are so isolated here-- "There will be no mistaking them."
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Good thing he knows so many Bible verses, Lieutenant McGraw.
And then: business. More silver linings, able to speak more or less freely. His fingers curl against the dirt, this thumbnail worries the edge of a splinter.
"We might be surprised," is after a moment's consideration. "Though I wouldn't look to the men among us for a showing of numbers. It'll be the African slaves who'll turn out more, and will be more reliable anyway." Frank opinions. Most of the white men have rationalized themselves half to death with at least not that comparing and contrasting how they're treated; watching James beaten and Thomas hauled away will unsettle plenty of them for that reason alone.
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"Then the question becomes how to coordinate an effort between us." He suspects that's entirely the reason they're kept loosely divided from the African slaves to begin with - to allow the white men their modicum of privilege, and to restrict the African slaves from believing they might find any support for an uprising in those men. Divide and conquer is so old a strategy that perhaps it's second nature.
Maybe Thomas's newfound connection with the Lord, god of heaven, will produce some miracle for them and they'll have no reason to muddle through this themselves.
James studies the distance to the field, the shape of the labor being done there. The wheeze of his breathing is irritatingly loud in his own ear as he turns his attention in the other direction - back toward the yard and the blackened husk of the barn, the garden and the main house. Nothing comes immediately to mind from looking at it, though he feels there must be something there. Maybe his brain just don't have the ability to link the pieces. Not today.
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They don't have as much contact, true, but the girls in the kitchen like Thomas - and by extension, James - and their bonds with their fellows surpass the white prisoners by a hundred miles. What's more, they remember that the black slaves who participated in that escape attempt got out, even while Thomas himself was dragged back, bloodied and tortured.
Nearly a martyr.
"And you're forgetting we don't yet know who started the fire."
That has to be one of the convicts, a house worker or - unlikely but still technically possible - an overseer. Thomas doesn't see this as grounds to scrap anything. Efforts worth their salt are always laden with setbacks. An initial proposal always has a different number of supporters than when it gets its first rebuttal, and different still is the number after debate truly begins. A proposal is amended, edited, postponed, taken on and off schedules for reworking and approval.
They have time. James can barely breathe, for god's sake.
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