katabasis | [PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

[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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Liam is all too happy to rally his people toward the overseers with a low click of his tongue and a jerk of the head. Before he goes, he says, "Make sure them in the house get taken care of - Annie and Hannah and the whole number, you send them out while you settle your business." Taking one of the heavy wooden slats from bundle under Romans' arm, motions for his fellows to do the same and then they're gone: dark shapes slipping through the walnut trees, cutting long lines toward the bungalows with their handful of lit windows yet remaining. Maybe the doors will be barricaded. Maybe not. Maybe something else will happen there.

James draws a hoe very like the one he'd been using that afternoon. He tucks it under his arm, an easiness in his wrist that looks like he could be walking to put the thing where it belongs. "Cuthbert, take whoever you trust to start raiding the smokehouse and granary. Better if you can find bags too. Everyone will need something for when they go."

And then there's nothing else to do but make their way in reverse up the path they'd taken down to the bunkhouse after dinner. It's him and Thomas in this pale silvery light, the stand of trees between them and the main house casting inky, spidering shadows. Three men follow - two white and one black (probably at the behest of Liam, who likely doesn't trust convict laborers any more than is sensible). The rest of them dissolve in their intended directions, consumed from immediate vision by the night.

There is a pistol somewhere in that house and he means to have it. He wants to look at all of Abigail's letters too, but know he can't afford the indulgence. If someone found them on the desk or out of order in the drawer, it might give up their intent. Instead, he tells himself he'll be satisfied with some small piece of money, bundling the children and the house slaves out, then setting the whole thing burning down to the ashes alongside the half rebuilt barn.

Across the yard they go, the cord on the brass bell stirring in small circles in the breath of breeze. The herb garden too shifts softly as they cut up through it, sparse foliage rasping against each other and long spindly stems swaying. There's no kicking in the door this time. It comes open under his hand as if it were meant to. Clearly someone's left it and the door connecting to the passage leading to the main house open for them to pass through.

The door to the main house opens, a pale figure peering her head out before anyone can become startled, Bettina hunched over and holding something in her arms that, for a perverse moment, looks like a swaddled baby - she slips back inside and leaves the door like an ominous beast's mouth open, waiting. Inside, she's crouched low, and what she's carrying is revealed as what must be every single knife from the kitchen wrapped in a towel. She cautiously lays it down and holds her index finger against her mouth after, eyes hard.

Listen, she seems to say. (Along with shut up.)

They settle, ears adjusting to the unnerving quiet of the house, and then Thomas hears it: on the other side where the bedrooms and sitting room are, muffled voices, one high and whining. He can just make out 'I had a bad dream, Mama, I don't want...'

Thomas squeezes James's forearm in silent communication of It's fine before he backs up, snagging one white convict with him (Ainsley, Jacobite prisoner) so that they're out of the hall that might risk an echo of a whisper. The man (wisely? unnervingly?) grabs a knife before he follows, the both of them silent. Whatever Thomas says to him goes unheard, but he doesn't return to the house, instead slipping away on the errand Thomas has sent him on.

This complicates things. Not to the point of aborting the operation, but they must be very careful. Thomas closes the door when he's back in the hall, unearthly quiet, practiced in his ability to be so. Bettina is pointing this way and that to James, explaining silently - which she'd have to be even if she did speak normally - the layout of the house, the number of people, and where they are.

There's something about the murmur of voices in the other room that brings the sound of blood up into his ears where a moment ago - while they'd crossed the yard and even when he'd been standing in the darkened bunkhouse - the fever of this hadn't yet found him. It isn't being unnerved. He doesn't particularly need Thomas's hand there at his forearm. But something unspecified in him shifts. He's going to kill that girl's father, he decides so suddenly and absolutely it's as if he's been planning it for the weeks they've been turning this over. As if that's why they came to the house at all.

Carefully and quietly, James unseats the hoe from under his arm and leans it against the wall with just the faintest noise. He's careful to place it well out of the way, needing to be sure it won't come underfoot or find its way into a desperate, grasping hand-- Equally carefully, he replaces it with a knife from Bettina's collection as he studies the gestures of her hands. When she's finished, he shifts very close so he can ask her a question. The woman twitches away from him - an head shy animal twisting away from the shadow of a raised hand -, but then she closes her eyes. Modulates something. Tips her ear to him.

She shakes her head in answer to whatever question he puts to her, though the murmur of it is so low that it might as well be the house shifting in the uncommon breeze. When he straightens, he tips his head toward the door - a clear indication that she go. Bettina stares back up at him in the dark, her hands splayed over a dozen knife handles, then she looks to Thomas. Sets her jaw and passes a knife up to Liam's eyes in the hall with them with the clear indication that she intends to stay.

In the dark of the corridor, James rolls his eyes to Thomas then touches his elbow. Fine. She can do what she likes. And then he moves: heel to toe, super conscious of his weight on the floorboards as he creeps down the hall.

Thomas can walk quietly and close doors silently, but what does he know about sneaking around with murderous intent? He's along for ... some purpose, surely; at no point in the slim discussions he and James have had was there ever a notion of separation entertained, so perhaps he's just here because James is, because being apart in a moment like this would be too maddening for the both of them, even if there's probably a good argument for him to be back with Mr Browder or waiting at a gate.

Bettina is determined. Some motive and goal propelling her. She's a catalyst in a real way, and they cannot deny her. Thomas almost startles when she touches his hand then presses the handle of a knife in it-- whatever she finds in his expression in the dark must be too weak for her liking, because she grips his fingers in a crushing curl, forcing him to take hold. He does.

Around the corner, another voice - louder this time, familiar. Hannah taking the young girl from Mrs Oglethorpe, assuring her she's got it under control, asking her if the lady of the house is well... she isn't shouting, but there's thread of breathlessness to her voice that makes hair on the back of Thomas's neck stand up. She's trying to make just enough to noise to cover for them, assuming they'll be in or near the house by now, having likely seen Bettina off from the kitchen.

"Let me take her," Hannah is saying, "then I'll go make you up some tea with milk, mistress." Assent, footsteps. The distant sound of a woman humming, a bedroom door opening and closing. Mrs Oglethrope will be alone, the children all put up-- Hannah will have locked them in, at least for now.

Do we spare his wife Thomas is wondering, but Bettina has already vanished around the corner, pale hair trailing after her like the white shadow of a ghost. His thoughts change to Oh, Jesus, because it occurs to him that he has no notion of what humiliations they've endured at the hands of the lady of the house, or what she's permitted or ordered them to suffer.

They're here to secure the house, to see that the master and mistress of the plantation are secured for the time that it takes them to destroy this place to its foundation - burn the fields and slaughter the animals, make this land into a scar - then disappear into the night. It doesn't require murdering anyone. If he reached out and lengthened his stride, he could catch Bettina as she passes. But James lets her go down the hall so dark that there's no trace of light to glint off the blade of the knife in her hand.

He does quicken his stride then, footsteps going from oppressively silent to shatteringly loud in the night. Hannah appears at the end of the hallway, hissing at how loud he is and--

The sound of Mrs. Oglethorpe's scream raises every small hair. Hannah freezes in the hall. The tenor goes from shocked to visceral, curdling - a horrific shape which melts into the imported wallpaper, the hallway runners, the painting frames on the walls. It's in every chip of paint, every fleck of dust. It must pass farther than this house, melting into the dirt. If the bungalows aren't barricaded by now, there will be problems.

"Mary?" says a voice from the neighboring room and then James is there forcing the door open before the master of the house can leap from his bed.

All the flesh in the world peels back at the sound of that woman's wet screaming. It happens more and more and more as James catches Oglethorpe's shirt in the dark and throws him to the floor with a clatter of bones.

It doesn't require murdering anyone just like saving Nassau wouldn't have required hanging anyone. In a perfect world they could take everyone hostage, gather supplies, hide weapons, and melt away. But in a perfect would there are no slaves at all.

What does it make this?

Mary Oglethorpe shrieks, a death-wail worthy of waking spirits from beyond to say nothing of every overseer, convict and child still abed, and Thomas does not startle, having been waiting for it since-- even before he saw the look on Bettina's face, he thinks. Before tonight at all. He stands in the entryway to the sitting room and watches as Bettina's hand comes down again, driving the kitchen blade into the woman's neck, scarlet pouring over her dim white clothing; so easily dirtied, the things they're made to wear, modest and old-fashioned and uncomfortable. All the better to keep them humble.

Hannah, too, is transfixed, one hand outstretched as if to stop her sister but moving no further, lacking the will to follow through. Screaming shudders to wheezing, gurgling sounds, and Thomas thinks of the man he'd killed. It seemed like it had taken significantly fewer strikes, but then, Thomas has a stronger arm than Bettina, and the young woman continuing to viciously jab the knife into her abuser is particularly motivated.

The children crying and banging on their locked bedroom doors sound so feeble, bits of irrelevant background noise, but it still pulls Thomas away from the sight, attention swinging around to where James is toppling her husband. So easily.

"Bettina! Oh-- Bettina-- Mr Thomas--" Annie has her hands over her face, eyes wide, expression horrified behind her fingers. Thomas closes the distance between them and takes her by her upper arms, guiding her back and away. "Go get the children and quiet them," he tells her. "Take Hannah, both of you go and stay with them."

The last line of his instruction is swallowed up by the sound of a musket being fired somewhere outside and his head jerks, startled for the first time. Somehow it feels out of order, but that's good. It means Ainsley got all the bells down. The two men remaining with them rush towards the back door and the sounds of a fight.

If there was any pleasure in this, James would put his boot on Olgethorpe's throat and bear down. He'd tell him to listen to the sound of his wife being murdered and his children shrieking behind their bedroom doors. Does he know what kind of men he keeps here like animals? Does he understand what some of those men are capable of? What kind of men he and Thomas have counted themselves happy to work alongside in this out of necessity? What will happen to your children after you're gone, a real monster might ask.

He doesn't do any of those things.

Minutes later, he's in the hall again and rolling his sleeve to keep it as clean as is possible. Breathing hard, but not yet aching. "We shouldn't waste time going through the house." The sound of his voice, even and practically conversational, is shockingly loud over the muffled wailing of the children. "Let someone else bicker over it. But we need a pistol, whether it's from here or somewhere else." He touches his temple without thinking, transferring some dark smudge there. "Hannah--"

Half barked, like he expects the girl to materialize. When she doesn't, there's just the faintest breath of hesitation. His attention finally strays to Thomas there in the hall - the particulars of him standing there slashed with darkness, knife wrapped in his hand. "There's firewood in the kitchen," he says. "Starting the fire there in the sitting room might be best."

There are already embers there in the fireplace, not yet gone completely to ash.

Somewhere on the long journey between his privileged existence in London and here, Thomas lost something - or is it gained something? - that now leaves him able to watch Oglethorpe be carelessly dispatched through the shadowy doorway, listen to his last gasps, and feel nothing. He has known since the first moment he laid eyes on James McGraw that a darkness lurked within him. Even in London he saw the bruises and cuts on his knuckles, and seeing him walk towards him that first time in the field, so clearly a creature of real and terrible violence, Thomas knew him.

This should be frightening. A production would be less chilling, because it would not be so casual and ordinary, something James is used to. Thomas looks at a deeper shadow that must be pooling blood and he does feel something, then.

Every righteous lecture, every imperious word and look, the justifications, the punishments, the lengths to capture him again, the conspiracy with Peter. The sound of a chisel in Stephen's skull. Like Hannah unable to look away from the mess Bettina made of Mrs Oglethorpe, Thomas's attention is locked to the body of her husband on the floor, though everything about him is calm. The man would have wanted it to be a significant moment carved into the rest of Thomas's life like a guilty nail driven through Christ's palm. He would have wanted to cry and pray and be holy. But there he is, cast thoughtlessly aside like a dirty rag.

(Satisfaction, is what he feels.)

His empty hand find James, fingers curling into the front of his waistband for no purpose other than for its own sake. There is nothing intentionally bracing or comforting about it, it just is. As casual as James ending that monster's life. He looks at him. "I'll make sure they have the children out."

Bettina, blood-soaked, moves past them to stand in the bedroom doorway and stare at the master's corpse. She steps over it and heads somewhere Thomas can't make out but that she must know from pure familiarity, and the sounds of drawers being hauled open filter through. Buried treasure, or just a change of clothes that'll see her blend in on the outside, impossible to say. And it's not like she will.

Thomas squeezes James's side and goes to do as he said he would, still careful in the way he walks down the hall. The back door hangs ajar and moonlight spills in, shockingly bright but casting strange shadows as it bumps up against the dim glow from the fading fireplace. It's quiet, and something about it - in the speed of a heartbeat - suddenly feels wrong. An animal part of Thomas's brain recognizing things too fast for the rest of it to process. A bedroom door open where it shouldn't be, no muffled sounds that might be children, and sudden movement.

The last time he felt the world slow like this as it was moving too quickly, he'd been watching Ida be struck. He doesn't know what it means. Psychological compensation, the mind unable to handle the speed of it or the sudden chemical-hormonal terror, or both. He has Hannah by her wrist and is dragging her back, shoving her behind him, recognizing distantly that they're both going to end up bruised from how rough he's being but she wasn't moving quick enough, couldn't get away fast enough, and he sees them now backlit by starlight, the shape of Annie and two children clinging to either side of her at the back of the last bedroom, and Andies advancing on him, pistol raised level with Thomas's eyes.

The man's mouth is moving. Shouting insults, damnations, obscenities. Thomas doesn't hear them. In his peripheral vision he can make out a figure slumped on the grass outside, past the open back door, identity unknown. Annie must have her hands over the children's mouths. Andies's hand looks so tense, his fingers curling hungrily against the trigger. One step. Another. Thomas is still moving backwards until he and Hannah collide with the wall. Her hands dig into his arms, fingernails biting deep. She screams a name. Not his.

Edited 2017-09-01 08:29 (UTC)

He should be away by the time it happens - toward the kitchen and its stacked firewood or through the doorway of the sitting room and around the mistress's body to the fireplace. There's plenty there that could burn instead - curtains torn from windows, the painting of some English hillside from over the mantle, the knitted throw on the chair where the dead woman's body is splayed. But he'd lingered there in the hall - watched for a moment as Thomas moved away so easily and felt some rancid uneasiness crawl from out of the night. This is dirty work. He doesn't regret it (the man on the floor or his slaughtered wife or their terrified, weeping children), but for a second the thing that should have found him under those trees weeks ago does now.

('All you've done is spared me having to ask you to do it,' he'd said and it should have sounded like something to grieve over. Thomas Hamilton in his beautiful London house from which the world had been a solvable puzzle and they had been happy would never have wanted this.)

There's no time to be stricken by it. James loosens his iron grip on the knife handle, having resolved himself to--

It doesn't matter what he's resolved to. The house transforms around them with the first clattering foot fall, the first bark of noise from the adjoining room. Every disparate piece locks sharply into place, a machine of muscle memory and driving, violent instinct. The knife must still be in his hand as he comes barreling down the hallway; it's the fastest he's moved in days. And Andies is either so loud, so focused on what's coming out of his own mouth and the possibility of punctuating it with a killing shot, or he's equally stupid with adrenaline. The moment he crosses out of the bedroom after Thomas and Hannah, James is on him like a wild animal.

CRACK!, the report of the pistol is so loud. Hannah screams like she's dying. The floor rushes up to meet them in a clatter of boots. James rides the man to the ground, a knee planted on his chest, the knife in his hand materializing from the darkness to drive wherever he can reach. Stabs once, is rewarded with a hacking noise and the spent the pistol being clocked against the side of his skull, staggering him as Andies thrashes.

It isn't the first time Thomas has had a gun fired near his head - not the first time one's been pointed at him so close. It still hurts his ears, which he hates, and if this were any other time, an overseer shoving the muzzle of a pistol up to his head to fire beside it and laugh and sneer at the following disorientation and gunpowder burns, he might even notice. Thomas is frozen for a moment longer than he should be, suddenly so terrified for James, lacking in any vicious instinct that might help him. He forces himself to move and herd Hannah back to Annie and the children, hears himself tell them to stay there as he closes the door.

He realizes he's dropped his knife, probably when he first grabbed Hannah, and tries to see it somewhere on the floor so Andies doesn't grab it. The overseer, wheezing, is clawing at James and trying to coordinate hitting him with the pistol like a club, but drawing breath is a foaming, bloody struggle. He's still strong, though, and fucking furious. Thomas finds his knife and skids it back under one foot, standing at the edge of the fight with no idea how to aid or--

More gunshots outside from the other end of the plantation, distant voices. One rings clear, shouting directions, and he's slightly amazed to recognize it as Charlotte's.

Please, he thinks, of James, and does not remember the time when he was frightened of the possibility of escape due to what it would require of his love. Does not remember the intuitive sense that he needs so desperately to leave behind the violence or the desire in himself to spare him from going back down this very path. Those things still exist in his mind, but he can't touch them now.

This must be seen through.

He doesn't hear the shouting carried through the night or smell the smoke drifting in from the lowest fields, already beginning to burn or the rasp of the knife scraped along the floor under Thomas's foot. He hears a ringing in his head from the blunt blow of the pistol, feels Andies kicking wildly and for a moment tastes a real, vulnerable kind of fear that the man will squirm away from him or the gun will find his face again or Andies's spare hand will find something more useful to do than claw at his knee.

Go for the knife in his side maybe, which James tries to wrench out of him only to have his hand slide on the handle. He makes some horrible animal sound of frustration for it, all the bile in his body coming up through his teeth as Andies flails with the gun again and bucks hard, spitting wordless and bloody and frightened and angry. James catches his wrist and bears down all his weight in his knee and his bloody mess of a hand on the man's thick neck. Slams Andies's hand with the gun against the floorboards until his fingers come open. And there's that other hand now, punching James in the chest so hard he can imagine something popping even if it doesn't.

It's easier to beat downward with a pistol that up. James strikes the man two or three or half a dozen times until he stops punching him, until he stops snarling, until his squirming becomes some involuntary convulsion. Breathing hard, James throws the pistol away. Takes his hand from Andies's neck and quickly unrolls his sleeve down over his hand so he can wrench the knife from the overseer's heaving side. Opens his throat with it, then tosses the knife aside too so he can crawl free of the body.

Only after does he realize how close Thomas is. "Are you hurt?" he asks, an insane quality to the immediacy of the question coming from a man covered in someone else's blood on his knees in a dark hallway. He starts to push and pull himself up to his feet, fumbling his footing twice before he manages it.

This is it. The should-be-unnerving thing. Or is it the opposite? Thomas is having a difficult time focusing. For a moment he feels like gravity is no longer working, that he is being pulled between two places in time, that this dark hallway is another dark pit, that he is sweating from illness and exhaustion instead of the humidity, that the sounds of a man dying are the muffled too-close sounds of torture. Even though no one in Bethlem was beaten with such lack of subtlety, even though at no point in that place did he have the strength to stand. He didn't even have shoes.

No. He won't. He is of no significant use in this mission but he won't, he won't be a hindrance-- Thomas has to choke whatever thing inside him is trying to panic, hold it by its fragile neck and stop.

"No," Thomas says, a mirror of his thoughts, sounding more strangled than he'd like. His hands find James in the dark, helping him right himself even if he doesn't need it. "James," he hears himself say, plaintive, like a simple Are you? is beyond him.

It's one thing to know what has to happen and know the significance of how performative one thing or another is, and it's another entirely to see it. He can feel stupid later. There isn't time right now. But he's clutching at James, refusing to let himself be swept away by terror over the thought that he might be wounded while at the same time being unable to completely let it leave him. This is something he excels at wars with He's not fully recovered and Thomas doesn't know how to catch the winds in a sail if everything is going in a dozen directions.

Stop it. You're fine. He's fine.

"--Jesus, Bettina," is abrupt and startled as she comes around the corner and nearly gives Thomas a bloody heart attack. Her arms are full with a great bundle of clothes and supplies shoved into a bag, and she is indeed wearing a proper, if still modest and work-worthy, dress. She looks at him with wide eyes, having become human again in the minutes they've been apart. With one hand she fishes in the front pocket of her skirt, and thrusts out a bundle of letters towards him.

He's more grateful for the hand up than he knows how to be in the moment, clutching heavily at Thomas's arm as he hauls himself upright. His empty hand reaches to catch against the wall, leaving a horrible mark there on the wallpaper alongside the delicate little painted birds and foliage print. There's no opportunity to say Fine, before Bettina materializes out of the dark. He starts, as much for the sharp intake of Thomas's voice as for her appearance, and takes a moment to just steady himself against the wall and Thomas and feel the shape of his breath in his own chest and not think aboit the soubd of Thomas's voice--

"Help Annie with the children," he says after a long handful of seconds. He can't parse what Bettina's just passed over and there's still shouting happening beyond the house. He'd do it himself - just go take the girl and boy under each arm and haul them from the bedroom into the yard -, but there's something too unspeakable about being the creature that comes out of the night covered in their father's blood to steal them from their nanny. "I'll--"

James nods back toward the sitting room and the vague idea of what they'd come here for. Or Thomas can stay in the hall with Bettina. Or he can come help him. Or-- but all at once he can't tolerate being still in this house for a second longer. Their business here needs to be seen through so they can get away from it. If those fires spreading in the fields are anything like what they smell like, they're bound to draw attention. The night's so black and surely there's someone close enough that might notice the glow.

A touch to Thomas's side, which he realizes belatedly marks the worn soft fabric. They'll need fresh clothes too at this rate. "We should go out through the laundry," he says, already lurching back down the hall. If Andies had come up through that back door, it would be better to leave the house in a different direction entirely.

It's a heart-wrenching thing to let James go, and surely he can feel the struggle in it as Thomas forces himself to, hands then fingers then nothing, aching with the absence of him. He can't do this-- this being fall apart like a child, and Thomas takes whatever Bettina is handing him and stuffs it in his shirt without looking. He can't read anything right now.

He gets the girls and the children, assisted by Hannah's brother who's finally made his way up at a dead run, panting and sweating, having heard her screaming. "Make sure you save a horse for them," Thomas murmurs. "We'll have to send them on a road towards the nearest neighbor." It gets easy agreement, which is a relief; no one is going to tolerate killing children tonight. The younger man spits on Andies's brutalized body on the floor and claps Thomas on the shoulder.

"I'm impressed."

"No, it was--"

"Captain Flint?"

"Yes."

Why are they talking. Thomas feels like he might scream. Hannah and Annie are bundling up the children and he abruptly turns away, going through the house without really thinking about what he's doing, stopping in Oglethorpe's study and... and.

(Maybe that's who he really meant to watch die, he thinks, glass giving way under fingertips, bitten into by points of finely shaped metal. Peter.)

He knows where some things are, in this house, from the times he's been inside of it, from overhearing discussion about it, and the intuition of someone who's run a household before; he is somewhere else mentally as he moves, thinking only of catching up with James but knowing with a near-panicked sense of suffocation that this is the last opportunity to scavenge supplies. When he does find him he's holding a pillowcase full of a few things, but his attention is all for James.

Set the fire.

It's the singular goal that carries him from the hallway into the sitting room, to the fireplace where he fetches one of the irons and uses it to force the curtain rod from its cradles. If he's pointed about this - the process of stripping the heavy curtains and carrying them to the hearth stone then the rest of it - the ache in his sides, the frantic murmur of conversation, the younger Oglethorpe child sobbing in someone's arms as he carried away from the violence of his home, the pop of gunfire that's both too close for comfort and too distant for concern - can be ignored.

It takes some time to coax the embers back. He does it mechanically, lugging chips of firewood from the box beside the fireplace and tossing them in as fuel. For some minutes, a muffled kind of silence finds the room as he stirs the heat back, as the clatter of footsteps drift from the hall, as the urgency of this task is out on hold by the simple logistics of convincing fire to burn. The sharpened point of his attention drifts and eventually finds Mrs Oglethorpe watching him from her chair, staring eyes dark as pits.

The firelight doesn't quite yet reach her there. And for a moment, he doesn't want it to. Let her stay there in the shadow, a vague lolling shape where the black of her nightdress might be anything. What did you expect? isn't a question he asks himself. He knew this part was coming. But maybe someone else asks it: a murmur from some shadowed corner in his peripheral vision where something else might still have some hook in him.

Thomas is in the doorway.

James stands straighter by reflex, eyeline swinging from the corpse to him. Thomas looks so pale there in the dark, something uneven in-- every part of him. But just the shape of him there eases the density of the room, transforming it back into nothing more than a box. A thing to be left behind.

The glow of the fire touches Mrs Oglethorpe's slippers now. He hooks the bulk of the curtain with the fire iron and hoists it in to touch the edge of flames.

"Ready?"

Will he miss this place? The place that spared him dying in Bethlem, that forced his physical recovery, that sheltered him from the world? That brought him James? Will he mourn for the people who could have been so much worse, and who did not have to run this experimental plantation in the first place?

No.

Every piece of this is a link in the chain that England has coiled around the earth. To have softness for one is to have it for the whole thing, and Thomas refuses. Because when he closes his eyes for too long he can sometimes feel needles in him, someone else's hands on him, taste laudanum, hear laughter and the sound of a cane striking flesh. Because every so often, over a decade later, his nightmares are scored the sound of Miranda's screams as she was pulled away from him. Because he's standing here now.

Thomas holds a hand out towards James. Yes, he's ready.

There's no room for the kind of tenderness that would see them walking out of this plantation holding hands serenely. But they can have a slim moment while the room burns and they find their way through the laundry. Together, as they were born to be.

(What's in the pillowcase? Two pistols; Andies' dropped one and a finer one from beneath Oglethorpe's bed, along with the pouch of powder and shot that had been in the box. Matches. Paper money. A pen, a knife, and three candles.)

He's happy to leave the room behind, to take Thomas's hand and be led through the house to a place where he can strip out of bloodspattered clothes and change quickly into something adjacent to respectable. He's glad to trade the iron and smoke stench for the sharper, denser air of the night - the dark of the house for the pitch of the moonlight and the glow of the burning fields, the burning slave quarters, the burning bungalows.

There are dark shapes in the night, irregular clusters of men and women finding their bearings in the haze. Less than he expected to see - clearly there have already been runners to the fence and tree lines. Liam is at the head of a group, seeing to it that each of them has a bag and drawing some diagram on the ground with a stick that he shortly strikes from the dirt with his heel. A woman runs across the yard to him; from this distance, James can't make out who she is, only that they fall into immediate conversation. A whistle from the western fields. Liam returns it.

For a second, every piece of him wants to lead Thomas across the yard to them as they sling their bags across the shoulders, knives into belts, rifles and cudgles across their shoulders and turn from the yard. Where are you going. What are you doing. How near is the next plantation. What if-- what if-- what if--?

Instead he turns for the road, a compass needle in the direction he'd seen Oglethorpe's horse cart come from that afternoon. They'll cross the roadway and part into the hills beyond it, shadowing it all the way back to where it must reach something. Savannah, likely, given the length of the master's time away. Searches will be committed to the wood. Best they stay out of it, just like best he forget that he'd wanted to bring half a dozen women with them when they went.

(They're nowhere to be seen now and there's no point to waiting and hoping they will be. Sensible people - which he knows they are - have began to splinter away already.)

"James." His voice is rougher than he expects - from the smoke or something else? he's not sure - and Thomas has to try again to be heard above the increasing storm of destruction around them. He squeezes his hand. "James. The gates don't match the roads. Let's see if Liam or Bettina picked up the map from the office. I didn't see it when I looked."

This place is built to be disorienting. Thomas knows because he's been outside the plantation before, huddled and hiding for days on end as he and his ill-fated party slowly made their way from the wilds down to Charleston. It should have been far enough away, the search should have been centered on only Savannah, but god, had he ever underestimated this place. And Peter.

It would be very convenient if they could just melt into the night by themselves and vanish into a new life.

Someone yards away shouts Thomas's name, beckoning he and James over to a structure built in the wake of the barn's destruction. Not yet on fire, and it's downwind, meaning they won't be choked by smoke if they head over. He hesitates, but the call sounds pointed, and they really can't go running off into the woods only to get shot or drowned immediately.

It's Barnaby and Cuthbert with a few others and--

"God," is not who else is with them but a startled exclamation when Thomas realizes that the small group of of men has another on their knees, hands shackled. Overseers, some beaten and bloody, most in their nightclothes. Marshall is on one end.

"These ones gave up," Barnaby tells him, sounding uncertain. "I dunno, should we execute 'em? Perry ain't ever been to bad, was he? And Thompson's got kids."

There's a mad split second where he resists the course change - where some flicker of heat that has nothing tk do with Thomas and everything to do with this place and what it requires sweeps through his chest and he thinks, That didnt warrant mentioning earlier? Then the thought folds over and over, compresses into a knot that unravels. He lets Thomas steer him around, lets himself be led, to follow the call when it comes for them.

He doesn't know what he expects to find in the temporary shed. Bags of grain and flour and apples maybe, given the task he'd last set these men to. A string of bloodied overseers on their knees isn't it. Mostly, he thinks, he's surprised any of them have been left alive at all. That no one stove their skulls in on sight. There's only one - Hunt - that's nursing a more serious wound, broken arm clutched awkwardly across his chest and wrist clearly shattered if the black bruising of his fingers is any indication.

Somewhere between the yard and here, James's hand came unravelled from Thomas's. It's fine. It's a temporary state of affairs.

His attention sets on Marshall there at the end of the string for a moment before his eye slides to Thomas. There's something in the lines of James's face then: a look that might be a question. Your opinion? or maybe just looking for a long enough hesitation to say his own.

Edited 2017-09-08 01:58 (UTC)

There will be many moments like that, big and small, in the days to come. Thomas may be more practical than he was in London, but the changes to him have not been made in any effort to be more industrious or self-sufficient. He knows this about himself, and of the others, too. What do they know about survival? Surely some of the men knew how to shoot or hold a sword before having their lives erased, but Thomas didn't, and certainly wasn't being given fencing or tracking lessons here.

He knows a little about the area. He's used to the climate. He can go a few days without sleep and still be functional; when they're walking, he'll probably be able to go the longest without rest, and his feet won't hurt, or he won't notice if they do. As far as his usefulness goes that's the breadth of it - there's no more room in the world for someone like him the way he was. Even the way he is. He doesn't want to be a burden on James or make this harder, so he'll adapt, he has to, or...

They're all looking at him. Why me. Liam and the few remain with him personally - Hannah and her sister, more of the girls behind them - are approaching, like this is some twisted court.

"How many of them went headhunting when I got out?" Thomas feels a flare of aggravation at the silence that follows, unsure if they don't understand or if they can see where this line of questioning - perhaps the worst thing he's ever said - is going. "When I got out, with Stephens and Clinton and Hector, I know they were all offered an up-front cash bonus to go looking, and more if we were found. Who took it?"

"Hunt didn't," says Barnaby, sounding strange. "I remember him staying. Complained about being too sick."

"So he wanted to." Thomas's voice is dull. Strangely authoritative despite it. "Who else."

"Adams didn't." Gravely and a little wet, Marshall sounds like his nose has been broken. He spits watery blood. "Quit after for a while. Just ain't much work around here." He pauses, and whether or not he's looking at Thomas is hard to say. In a tone that says You already know this, but, "Neither did I."

"And you never said why."

Silence in return. Beside them, Liam is loosing a machete from his belt, as if he's already figured out where this is going. One of the overseers on his knees has, as well, and begins to struggle. Thomas feels ill.

Something closes - a bolt in a latch, a sword hilt snapping gently against the metal guard at the top of its sheath. The urge to step forward and say something differently must live behind it. He can feel it there in his chest, but doesn't know what it looks like or what shape it might take if it was allowed to come through. For a long time he's as silent as he can be, breathing rattling again from the effort and smoke and all the desire not to be here - fixed on the thin measure of distance between his shoulder and where Thomas stands.

It's ruinous. And so is this place and everything that belongs to it. The men on their knees and the sound of the man there in the middle twisting against the hand on his shoulder as Liam meets them. They can't be allowed to live because they'll come for them. There must be one or two that won't be afraid the minute they're not under a blade. This place, with its blood and misery and cruelty driven by some phantom intention to do good, is a deep, dark pit and here they are at the edge of it all untethered.

Thomas looks wrong, a hundred familiar lines rattling toward some broken shape and an old nightmare drags itself forward through the night. Thomas alone in the black horror of Bedlam, every right piece of him being stripped away until--

(The letter had come in the summer; Miranda had been stark as a sheet when he'd arrived in her doorway. What is it? I'll make some tea. Followed by a thousand small aborted lines of conversations where she grew to look stranger and stranger, frightened and remote all at once. James, I need to tell you something and you must listen to everything I have to say. Of course. Anything. James,-- like she means to say anything but what she does-- Thomas is dead. He killed himself.

There's more. What does she say after? Something must fill that blind space on the porch in Nassau's summer with all the heat ast the back of his neck. Why not have the conversation inside? Why not to the moment he'd arrived? Why not sitting beside him instead of across a table with a thousand smaller, more delicate things between them?)

James clears his throat.

"Bind the ones who went hunting here and leave any who didn't. Killing them like this would bring along every dog in the colonies after us." Never mind the bodies in the yard, the fields, the family in the house. The fire will disguise Bettina's handiwork. It might do something for the rest as well.

"The fire will come along soon enough. The free men," he says, with a glance toward the end of the line where Marshall is quiet and still. His eye slides toward Thomas, ear deaf to the stress of the overseer under Cuthbert's hand and blind to Liam's machete in his belt. "Can take care of themselves and anyone else how they please."

Thomas feels like he is standing nowhere, in nothing; a void, blackness all around them in every direction, this scene just a set-piece like a bit of theater. If anyone steps too far this way or that they'll vanish. As he thinks about it, the world compresses. He hasn't had to make a real decision in over ten years. Has he done anything of his own free will in ten years? He feels dizzy. With James, he has, in this weeks (months?) together. Unless that's all just been responding to him, editing himself to work with him like he's cut away pieces of himself to survive through everything else.

For a moment he's so angry it has to be apparent, the broken line of his shoulders, the tension in his face. No one has moved yet because they're waiting for him to say something, to acknowledge what James is saying and confirm or deny it, because-- he doesn't know why, surely not because he has any actual say, about this or anything.

Marshall is staring at him like he can read his mind, like he can hear Thomas thinking you should all die screaming for what you've done.

"He's right."

Anger leaves him. James is correct and adding the weight of determined vengeance to those who will come after them on top of what mayhem is already being wrought is dangerous; besides, they don't have time. Marshall is saying something. Directing them to where to pick up laundry meant for the overseers, saying they'll be easily mistaken at a distant look, and that 'some of you fuckers definitely need hats'. He looks like a beaten dog that doesn't want it's owner to leave, and Thomas doesn't know how he doesn't shout at him. What did he think. That they were friends.

Bettina, Charlotte, and a few of other other girls are near them now, watching with expectant looks, laden down with bags like pack animals. They stand behind James and Thomas looks over at them, at him, and wants to reach for his hand again but also wants to--

He's fine.

"We'd better get a hat for you and go," he manages.

It isn't a relief. It isn't anything but necessary. Thomas's anger and the unraveling of Cuthbert's grip and the uneven, rocky feeling in his chest all get left here whether or not it's satisfying. Barnaby is already loping off to fetch some rope and James turns from the overseers (Marshall included) as easily as breathing. There. Sorted. On to the next thing that requires his attention.

He takes two of the bags from Charlotte, slinging them across his shoulders with a grimace, and is already moving to follow Marshall and Thomas's direction. The women - Charlotte and Bes and Bettina and two of the other girls from the laundry are already following. One of them breaks out ahead at a run, crying back that she'll find them things to wear.

James, washed along by the wave of young women, isn't really that far behind her.

But before they can stray far - or before Thomas can follow too closely - Hannah catches Thomas by the elbow. "Mister Thomas--" She might take him by the hands if there were time to do so. Instead she just anchors briefly to his sleeve, mindful of his scarring forearm. She holds him there for just a moment as the women are swallowed up by trailing smoke and ash smell, devolving into darker shapes in the orange streaked night as they cut across the yard for the laundry and James follows after.

"Take care," she says. Not Thank you for saving me or Thank you for all you did. She says: "You're a good kind of man, Mister Thomas. Goodbye."

Then she looses him from her grip, hoists her bags on her shoulders and turns to join her brother and Liam.

"Don't look back."

What a thing to say.

He doesn't know why.

Bettina does indeed have a map, it turns out, and Marshall wasn't lying about where to collect clothes - he's uncharacteristically quiet as he shoves a pair of boots at Thomas with the kind of mulish intent that says he'd be shouting at him to take them if he could cough anything up. He continues to glare at him until he can't, and sets about showing one of the girls where a rifle is, apparently knowing better than to pick up a weapon right now. Bes shoulders it and lets Thomas have her bags, after he's changed out his shoes. He stares at himself after and almost pulls them off, realizing he'd done what a fucking overseer wanted him to while the plantation is burning. Maybe James sees the blank expression on his face and the look of disgust and horror that flashes there before he returns to normal.

Men are being burned alive at the other end of the field. He wonders if one is Mr Browder.

Marshall tries to say something to James - there's a look on him that means it's important, but whatever it is he just can't make himself get it out.

If he had another minute, perhaps. But they have to go, they have to go right now, and Thomas does have James's hand this time, heading towards the far end of the plantation that'll take them north. There's only one other farm that way, too wild and unsettled still for conquerors of the New World. They'll loop around, one way or the other, but the main roads will be too dangerous right now - to be sure, plenty of men running water to and fro in frantic hope that it doesn't catch the trees and spread to their own property will ignore runners in favor of damage control, but some won't. Some will take pot shots in the dark, some will have dogs.

They have to disappear while they can.

Getting everyone over the damaged fence is easy, somehow, even laden down and most of them in skirts; between the time they leave Marshall and the time they leave the plantation they've attracted one more, a Jacobite named Robert with blood streaked down the side of his face and a pack full of food. He was one of the maybes, and one of the younger convicts. They're five meters out, then ten, and Bettina makes a sound like a sob. Thomas holds her arm and she staggers against him, trudging forward despite her choked crying. Their heads bent together Thomas tells her, "He wanted you to leave. He did. He'd only forgotten."

She doesn't slow.

Sturdy shoes, a hat, a coat. They aren't the only good things had out of Marshall, but they're certainly the last. They likely count for more than anything the man might have had to say; should it be disturbing how easy James finds it to leave him behind in favor of anything else, everything else, or does it just go without saying that Marshall should understand himself as owning some strange, complicated form of his gratitude. It would've been easy to kill the man, James doesn't think. That should be enough for anyone. He isn't going to say Be well or Thank you to anyone who helped pin Thomas thrashing to the ground. To anyone who had any part in making Thomas so angry, so disparate, so hacked open. He doesn't have the capacity to even think of it.

Bes uses a kitchen knife to cut three strips from a dark shirt. She uses one to tie around the knife's handle and secure it to her apron string, tucking the blade neatly into her pocket. The others she gives to James; he knits them together for a belt, tucking Andies' pistol against his hip. From a distance, he knows the lot of then might almost be mistaken for people. It seems like a strange conclusion to draw, though. Even after they've cut across the firelit landscape and climbed over the fence, passing into the underbrush where the stench of smoke and burning doesn't hang so heavily in the air, it doesn't feel as if anything has shifted like it has.

It's the same night here as it was in the yard. The glow of fire burns through the trees and they are not radically different people from the ones they were forty meters ago. Again and again and again.

Then they plunge North into the deeper wood, Thomas's hand in his in the midst of women and a young man who can hardly grow his beard, and they see that place for the last time.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

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