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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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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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?"
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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.)
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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.)
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.