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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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"I must admit," he says, edging on dry, "that of all the tales to come through these gates, Captain Flint and Thomas Hamilton may be the most theatrical. And I don't even know every angle."
("Who am I to be angry at?" sounds a bit rhetorical. "Whomever lit the fire? Whomever blamed the inspiration for it on the person I care most for in the world?" His voice is soft. She knows, he's very certain, how much more agonizing it is watching someone you love be hurt than it is to be hurt yourself.
"They're trying to survive, too."
Feeling human doesn't mean he feels pacifistic. It doesn't mean he doesn't also feel shattered, in pain, or heartsick. He just feels, he's still capable of it and he and James are still capable of laughing with each other, fingers touching through the slats of a cage. Some men can't be broken. Like he did when he first fell in love, he understands more about himself and more about the world when he's with James.
"How I feel about this place and those who keep us here," and now his voice is even quieter, his low murmur barely audible over the rough sounds of the bristle brushes but no less steady, "has not changed since the first day I arrived."
'Angry' is an empty word, in comparison. 'Hateful' pales. Thomas doesn't think he has one in English, or Spanish, or French. This place is not a farm, it is where men and women are brought to be annihilated; not mercifully killed or uncreatively tortured, but to have every facet of themselves worn down into something different, erased and warped, changed. Left inhuman.
Thomas has existed in the smallest of spaces, in the dead air gaps between the awfulness of this reality. He is not a fighter or a military strategist, he is only himself, who has spent months in silence, who has learned how to time authority, who dedicates his attention to ushering others - white and black, male and female - out of the way of the all-seeing eyes when possible. He escaped. Only for a moment but he-- he had it, beneath his hands, and when he was dragged back he didn't let it end him.
He smiles so nice and thinks about the end of this place. At any cost.)
"But I shall tell you my angle, James." Did you know that you are the child here, being remade, did you know that I am the total authority, that 'mister' and 'captain' are titles to mock you. "It is this: for all Thomas is important to my work, he is not more important than the stability of this place. I will not allow you to destabilize, or provoke, or inspire any one man - him, or anyone else - into the same destabilizing behavior. If I find cause to so much as suspect you again, every inch of it comes out of Lord Hamilton."
Just so.
"If that becomes necessary, it will not be a state of endurance. It will be once, and if you press the issue, I will arrange to send him, and only him, to the hospital in Williamsburg. It will pain me, but I won't have myself cornered."
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(The line of her arm doesn't falter, scrubbing just as aggressively now as a moment ago. But she looking at him, ear tipped toward the low murmur of his voice between them. "Good, she starts to say, nearly jumping out of her skin when the door at the end of the hall opens to the outside.)
"I won't back you into one," says Flint. It tastes true. He'll murder the man in the open if that's what it takes to make this moment honest. He won't give him the opportunity to find a corner to hide in, he thinks.
There's a bang from the hall like a clap of thunder.
(Bettina McNair takes three steps into the hall, the bucket of fresh water for the scrubbing weighing hard on her arm. When she looks up and recognizes Thomas, all the blood drains from her face and her grip slips. The bucket cracks against the floor, upturns, and sends a wave of water flowing down the length of the hall to soak the folded carpet and their knees.)
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brings the hallway and the study into the same reality once more. Thomas does not jump out of his skin, even nearly, attention recognizing someone walking in before he looks up-- which he does, at the sound. Bettina, who doesn't speak, who lives in the house and is a good girl. Hannah beside him has one hand over her chest, feeling her heart race and giving the white woman at the end of the hall a look of consternation, but Thomas's gaze is more concerned. Silently worried she's hurt, and seeing that she isn't, worried at what might have spooked her so.
He waits to push to his feet until he hears the door open and Andies's rough inquiry, knowing better than to appear like he's had any moment to conspire with someone who's made a loud noise. (Of all the things. Still.) "It's all right," he says to her quietly, and kneels down a beat before she does to right the bucket. Her hands scramble, unsteady, and Thomas extends one of his as if wanting to check and see if she's harmed - she limply extends one of hers, and he turns it to see the indent of the handle on her palm, but nothing more.
Bettina who doesn't speak and lives in the house, who is well-behaved and trusted, whose brother would do anything for her.
"It's all right," he repeats. Looking at her this time.
"What the fuck?" demands Andies, stuck at the opposite end of the hall for fear of tracking dirt through the water and making mud, a sure-fire way to infuriate his employer.
Thomas looks over his shoulder and Hannah is looking at him, expectant now, knowing she can't speak up if he's there to do it for her. A hierarchy like another set of chains. Calmly, "Gravity got the best of her, is all."
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Andies barks at him to 'Sit down until you're told otherwise', but James - pulse high in his throat and boiling resentment turned abruptly to something bitter and unreasonable - has a hard time following the direction. He drifts back to the chair but can't bring himself to sit down.
(Thank Thomas's God that he didn't reach across the desk and fetch up the letter opener right there in plain view; but he won't be caught again. He won't be pinned that way again without the ability to do some damage on the way down.)
"Don't just stand there and stare at me," Andies growls at Hannah. "Get this cleaned up - the two of you, take that carpet outdoors and hang it where it can dry."
Bettina, hands trembling and avoiding Thomas's eye entirely, hurries to brush past him to fetch up the edge of the water sodden rug closest to Hannah. It allows for a split second where the two women can share a look between them. Hannah starts to open her mouth to protest that she's stronger and would do the work faster than the white woman. Bettina nudges her with the toe of her shoe and simply turns an expectant, inarguably mortified look on Thomas.
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Thomas, meanwhile, looks past Andies at James, fighting the instinct to reach out to him-- for what purpose, he's not sure, but the look he glimpses on the man's face before he's barked at to step back from the door makes an impulse rise in him to say I'm fine, look, it's all right. His gaze twitches back to the overseer, letting himself take a moment to react; it would look like too-competent acting, otherwise.
Something he's beginning to see the shape of is happening with Bettina. He goes to her side and helps her with the carpet, exchanging a look with Hannah neither of them really know what to make of.
"I'll get some towels," she says, and they part ways, Hannah further into the house and Thomas and Bettina outside. Andies drifts back into the study, letting the doors thunk closed behind him.
Different worlds once more.
Breezing past the interruption, Oglethorpe says, "I'm glad we understand each other. Now, for a few days, you'll do work in the kitchen and laundry. I don't want a repeat of Benjamin."
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"Of course not," he says, raw and more abrupt than he really means. James searches after the sharp edge of how angry he'd been seconds ago and finds it's gone crooked. Too stitched through by something else - the jangling buzz under his fingers and the ache in his skin - to keep together here.
He make some vague motion toward his throat after; maybe it'll be taken as a reasonable excuse. "Anything else?" 'Sir' should go after that. Let Oglethorpe think he's too off-footed to realize it.
(Is he?)
(No. Fuck him.)
What else could there possibly be to say? Certainly Bettina isn't saying it, steadfastly mute as she and Thomas would the sodden carpet out into the muggy heat of the day. The garden fence is an acceptable place to hang the thing and she pins all her focus there. If she thinks on the task hard enough, it will be as if someone perfectly anonymous is helping her with it.
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That's all, just an ordinary man-to-man exchange. Andies wastes no time herding Flint out of the room, taking them on a route the other way out the back of the house to avoid the wet floor. Thomas's fate for the rest of the day undeclared, at least to the two of them. There's plenty of work to be done in laundry, less laborious than in the fields but no less tedious, and no less seemingly eternal. The lady of the estate isn't unkind, but she takes her work seriously. A divinely ordained mission. Pious and insufferable like her husband.
In the garden, Thomas searches for the right words. If there are any.
"No-one's going to hurt you just for being next to me," he tries, but intuition tells him that's not quite right. He presses the heavy roll of carpet, water squelching out. Maybe it'll dry in a bloody week, with how humid it is. "...James pushed your brother. I know. I'm sorry."
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In the garden, Bettina follows Thomas's example: squashing the water out from the carpet and then smoothing it over over the fence line. It won't ever smell the same, but the only people putting their noses in the carpet can't be allowed to be bothered by any tang of mold. As long as it appears acceptable maybe it doesn't matter that it'll become rotten.
What she doesn't do is look at him or say anything. Instead she focuses entirely on scraping the water from the rug with the angled side of her hand, eyes bright enough that she might be on the very edge of tears and jaw clenched so hard it's visible. Bettina McNair doesn't speak, but fear and frustration and the stitch of something like anger is a kind of language they must both be fluent in.
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"If you want me to leave you touch my hand," he tells her. He doesn't know why she doesn't speak - if she won't, or if she can't - and hopes that's not a patronizing way of communicating. He's spoken to her before, he's read to her in small pieces, exchanged smiles and sat quietly for long hours in kitchen work. They have a history as best anyone can in this place.
The carpet hangs limply, looking like the sad skin of a dreary animal.
All at once, Thomas feels like an idiot.
"Thank you. For bringing him water." He watches her reaction very closely.
Later, after the rest of a long day for which Thomas is deemed fit enough to return back to work properly, and James is released from his modified duties, Thomas thinks he might actually collapse. Spending the night in that cramped box, the horror of watching James go through everything-- the toll feels unreal. But he waits, accepting sympathetic looks and noting who avoids him. (And it is noteworthy.)
They can't talk at night in the bunkhouse with so many waiting ears, they're locked in as anticipated, and they can't sleep curled up together on a too-small bed with James's injuries. Thomas sleeps beside him with an arm outstretched over the gap, fingers hooked against his hand. It's still like that when they awake.
Waiting until midday rest is a trial.
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In his dream, someone is driving a metal post into the middle of his back - pinning him to the dirt. 'Stay down,' someone pleads. 'I'm begging you.'
Come morning his shoulders and back are stiff enough that the women take some pity on him and give him the task of ironing ribbons and shirts because he can do it mostly one handed, trading from one arm to another when the first begins to ache. The youngest Oglethorpe daughter sits in the room under the eye of her mother and reads aloud from the bible while they work. It reminds him of being a boy and pressing his father's clothes while his mother is bedridden, the man in question there only for as long as it takes him to find another merchantman (anything to avoid being the navy - even another three years at sea).
They're turned loose in the hottest part of the day. He waits for Thomas in the shade of some shedding tree along the path between the slave quarters and the main house, sitting on a chip from the wood pile discarded here. When Thomas comes up from the fields, James holds out an apple to him. He's already had a bite from it.
"Annie's asking about your arm."
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"Hasn't fallen off yet," he says lightly, and extends it for James to see, flexing his wrist. Still hurts (good thing), the cuts from the manacles haven't helped (less good), but he's kept everything clean and it should be on its way to healing. He sits down at his pirate's feet, just looking at him for a moment.
It's been... it's been.
What a week already.
On a delay, "Tell Annie thank-you for thinking of me." He puts one hand on James's knee, and takes a bite of the apple. A number of questions are swirling in his head, and things to tell him, but-- just for another minute, merely sitting here with him. If finding an unbruised inch wouldn't be an uphill struggle he'd lean to kiss him.
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He'll need to tell him what was said in Oglethorpe's office (even if it doesn't change anything; even if the things the man had to say that had caught him unawares had nothing to do with the present state of this particular knife's edge they've chosen to walk). But for a moment he's content to just sit. To be still in the heat of the day.
That's true for at least a few seconds. Then the pressing need to say or do something catches up to him, needling through his skin.
'Oglethorpe's evidently writing to the new Governor of the Carolinas,' is where he might start - the part of the threat with the least bite. Instead he asks, "How long has the clock in the study been there?"
Would it be a relief if Thomas has no idea what he's talking about?
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"That's so strange," he says after a moment, looking up him. "I kept thinking the ticking sounded familiar, yesterday, after I went back in to help Hannah clean up for a while. I chalked it up to exhaustion."
He rubs his nose with his other hand-- the state of his face makes it itchy and uncomfortable to much as emote anything, and he's slightly regretful of having shaved, leaving him with this in-between state contending with bruises. He looks a mess.
"But I have no idea. I didn't see it, and I don't think I've been in that study in... a year and a half, maybe. Why?"
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James takes the apple back and sets his teeth to it as a wheel turns in his mind, cranking some measure of uneasiness out of him. It's a good question. Clearly Peter had some kind of relationship with this place and the man who oversaw it, but how close must it have been for a piece of his home to end up here after the ravaging of Charles Town and his death? Was it really the same clock at all, or had the circumstances just so forcibly reminded him of another place that it was easily confused? Why bring it up at all? It does nothing for them or their situation here. It means he has to talk about Charles Town and maybe could regret asking the question on that basis alone.
He passes the apple back.
"When we--" A low noise. He should clarify. "When Miranda and I went to Charles Town to arrange for making reparations there was a clock in the Governor's parlor that seems very similar to the one in Oglethorpe's study now." He isn't sure. He can't be sure. By the time he might have had cause to study the thing, it'd been too late to give it a second glance. "Miranda identified it as one of the same that had been in your house. In London." His hand has wandered to his beard, smoothing the stiff hairs at the corner of his mouth. Running his thumb meditatively under his lip.
"It doesn't matter. But how did it come to be here, I wonder?"
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Peter had a clock from his home. Of course he did. Thomas's fingers twist on the apple, betraying an ill feeling that his face has become too schooled in ten years to display. He takes a bite, makes himself feel thankful for it. Sometimes, when he needs grounding, he forces himself to recall the feeling of starvation set alongside what is given to him, now. The shock of having to be grateful about slavery usually snaps him out of it.
Peter had a clock from his home. And now it's here.
"If it was ours," he says eventually, "Oglethorpe doesn't know it, or else he'd have made a point to show it to me. But I don't know why he wouldn't know. If Peter left it to him, he would have made sure the man knew. It was very important to him that I remember at all times who put me here."
Thomas's hand on James's knee has gone awfully tense. He relaxes it by sheer willpower, and somewhat mechanically, passes the apple back.
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Though, even if there's some meaning to be taken from it, what good does it do them here? Who cares what Peter Ashe may or may not have willed? Who cares how he had known this place or its master, or how he'd come to decide that the best thing to be done for the man he'd once called a friend was to take him from the first prison he'd help throw him in and stuff him in another? Why labor over it when Peter is dead and there's nothing to be earned from any of it? When Miranda is dead and the clock is just a clock and the only two people in the entire world left to care about the particulars are sitting here now.
Only that he wants to know. Or needs to. Or that he can't stomach the possibility of something true slipping between his fingers. He brushes his thumb across Thomas's knuckles, takes a last bite and then trades what's left of the apple away. After a long moment of contemplation across the discoloration of Thomas's battered wrist, he says:
"What the fuck."
What was the point? Of keeping this secret when he and Miranda had appeared on the doorstep. Of saving Thomas from the hang man's noose. In any of it.
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Thomas lets out a huff of laughter that isn't actually laughter. What the fuck, indeed.
With a desperation he tries and fails to hide, Thomas laces his fingers with James's, feeling like he needs an anchor in this sudden tide, his gaze unfocused past them. If he starts talking about Peter, he doesn't know where he'll stop. He doesn't know what he'll say, what it'll dredge up in his memory, how he'll feel about it. He's not sure he wants James to see some of that in him-- it's not that he doesn't trust his love with all of himself, but Thomas doesn't want to remember some of it. He just wants it to be dead.
"I don't know exactly when it was that he first came to see me," Thomas says after what must be a long while. "Keeping time in that place was difficult. Over a year. More, maybe. They put me in this strange room I'd never been in before, I thought they were going to." Thomas doesn't so much as stop short as experiences his voice vanishing, like it's stolen away by the wind. For a moment he doesn't continue, simply sits there.
It doesn't matter what he thought they were going to do.
"We sat across from each other and he confessed everything he'd done. His hands were shaking, and he was near tears, and he could barely look at me. I don't think it was from guilt."
He thinks it was because he looked like a monster. A wraith. A physical embodiment of Peter's betrayal; gaunt, starved, covered in bruises and sores, his hair too long and matted, skin sickly sallow, his bright eyes dulled. It had taken everything Thomas had to remain sitting upright but he'd done it-- ramrod straight, perfect posture, watching Peter through an imperious gaze and refusing to give him a reaction. Denying him everything, because that was all Thomas had.
"He begged me for my forgiveness. Like he was the one who needed comforting. And I forgave him so that I could see the look on his face, watch the realization dawn that he was groveling in hell, begging absolution from this--"
Inhuman. Dead man.
Thomas shakes his head, tips it back with his eyes clothes, breathes deep.
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James listens, attention a fixed point as the lines of his face slowly compress around the picture Thomas paints him. It's like a darkness swimming up from the corner of his eye, a black shape on the periphery that could be in the dimensions of a hundred different things - Peter Ashe or Woodes Rogers or a man with an iron leg or the ghost of England coming up from the ground they're sitting on. It's a blinder on a horse's bridle: forcing his eye forward to look only at the man before him. He is here against every possible contingency of Peter Ashe's or the Earl's or the world's or the sea's.
The means something too. More than a ticking clock does. More than whatever the fuck a man like Peter might have thought or said or done.
(He believes that. He has to. There are bodies he put in the ground that he has no intention of regretting.)
"He held on to that. Defined himself by it." At some point, Peter must have decided to not be horrified just like he'd decided what he'd done in London had been somehow acceptable. What else could the Governor of the Carolinas have used to legitimize every piece of this business to himself? James finds himself leaning forward where he sits, his grip on Thomas's hand equally firm. He growls, voice low and rhythmic and as insistent as the the tide coming in:
"That's the power you held over him. Even from there. He was never scared of me," --not until those last moments-- "But he was terrified of you."
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It's taught Thomas a hard lesson. About the shocking, crippling potential of being kind. He saw his father's cruelty so plainly, he saw the imbalances and unfairness of society like Belshazzar seeing the hand of God writing, but Peter's smiling determination and keenness to be his friend came for him as a knife in the dark. And now what? Now he looks askance at everyone who reaches out to him with that softness first. How he thinks of Miranda and James and their challenges and holds onto that, onto the truth of it. He hears Oglethorpe talking about what a mercy his work is and thinks I would see you screaming, I would see your eyes torn out of your skull, for all the good they're showing you.
James speaks to him like a storm.
Hand still clutching the other man's he mirrors that lean, using his presence like a tether to return to the present until he's close enough to touch their foreheads together. His pulse is frantic, and it takes a long moment for it to still, and for the images of a darker place to stop pulling at the edges of his mind. Let it be washed away.
"Is that why he couldn't kill me, I wonder," is a little harsh, strained as Thomas unwinds. Stumbling back from the brink dissociation and panic. It's been a while since he's had one of these.
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"People kill the things they're frightened of all the time. Every day. The reason he couldn't kill you is the same reason no one does now." It's why he's not a corpse in the ground on an island of ghosts. "Because he thought he benefited from you being alive. Killing you would have stripped him of his illusion of decency."
If there's a way to say it better, he doesn't know it. It's not a sentiment possible to gentle or to make comforting. But his hand is sturdy and present and there's something to be said about seeing the harsh lines of a thing in daylight - to recognize that the story Peter Ashe had spent ten years telling himself and anyone who might listen had been weaponized to kill him. To know that--
James makes a low noise, his lips twitching back from his teeth. It's an ugly kind of smile. "Miranda robbed it from him. Everyone saw her do it and knew it."
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Which James knows how to give him, somehow. Thomas worries about the implications of kindness and James rips the stitches out.
Breathing comes incrementally easier.
Words fail him, for a time. He feels slightly dizzy after brushing against panic, but he is anchored. He doesn't wonder or worry about seeming like he's lost his mind, because he has faith that James will sit with him for as long as he needs - or at least, for as long as they have until someone shoos them back to work. But it won't take such a time. He squeezes James's hand and hopes it communicates his gratitude. Honesty is rarely beautiful or comfortable, but it is lifeblood, isn't it.
Miranda robbed him of it. This doesn't surprise him. Miranda could see through anything, no matter how obfuscated or tangled. The smartest person he's ever met, man or woman, before or since. He wishes she could have known how much it means to him to know she's the one who saw it.
At the cost of her life.
"She was your wife, too."
I'm so sorry.
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"She was."
He was her husband. It had been an uneven, irregular partnership - the two of them a house on sand with a cracked foundation where sometimes the only good thing between them was insensible and angry and spitting and the fact that they weren't alone with it. And sometimes they had been happy. Sometimes all the cut ends had set flush together. What would she make of them now?
Stay down, is a voice in his ear, but he's certain it isn't hers. Not in this place. Maybe for whatever comes after (it occurs to him that they haven't gotten that far again, that the last time they spoke about the where instead of the how had been before they'd committed to leave this place only after it's been wrecked).
He's aware of how thick his voice has gone around just those two words and makes an effort to clear his throat. "In any case, I can't imagine Peter Ashe has any further relevance to us."
It's the cruelest thing he can think to say about the man.
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Pain is worth it. Thomas sits forward and kisses him, apple core at their feet between them, bruises protesting. Do you know what it makes us, he doesn't say. Later.
When he sits back, he feels almost back to normal. His other hand covers James's, and they must make such a picture sitting here in the shade, practically curled up together. It's so improbable that they're both still alive, and that they'd have grown in ways that make them so understanding of the other. Always reaching for each other in the dark, even if they didn't know it.
"I think Bettina started the fire."
By the way.
"George McNair's sister."
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Was that her? isn't a question he needs to ask. Instead he goes with, "Did she do something to make you suspect her?" As intent as he'd been on Thomas in the hallway the day before, he'd hardly gotten a look at the woman but maybe he can trace the resemblance between the woman and her brother. The shape sharp chin. A similar color to their hair--
He pauses, hand shifting reflexively between Thomas's. "There was a woman in the kitchen when we broke in. I thought she'd been sleeping there." He'd hardly seen her then either, incandescent with adrenaline and hungry to say a word and see it followed. But there are only so many white women at work here.
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"I don't think she turned them towards you. Andies had no reaction to her in the hall, or me speaking to her."
But there is someone here who'd do anything for her. Such a hypothesis is on weaker legs than his one about Bettina starting the fire, but it does seem plausible that her McNair may have made a preemptive move if he knew about what she'd done, if he'd been thinking about what James was nudging him towards and decided it's safer for her here, if Bettina wants to leave more than her brother does.
If, if.
Quieter, "The women are handled gentler, but it's the same reality." They're all slaves.
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