Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The new day dawns like a yawning hole. Morning hangs in the air with the mist, heavy and bloated like a drowned corpse, bobbing to the surface as night sinks away.

His cot is empty, when Arthur wakes, and though it isn’t surprising or without cause, he can’t help the pang of disappointment he feels on finding himself alone. A guilty sadness lodges in his chest, and doesn’t dissipate despite the slew of coughs that rattle through him as he tries to clear his throat. Charles is an early riser - far too early, in Arthur’s opinion - and prefers the calm before most others awake, tending to Taima and the most pressing camp chores without the stress of other people. Still, Arthur touches his threadbare mattress as he sits and stretches, pulling up the crumpled towel they’d wrapped around themselves, and wishes for a morning spent with him. A lazy, bright morning, free of remnant storm clouds, humidity creeping up with the scent of rain, struggling behind the storm like a stray sheep.

His head is clear, despite a familiar exhaustion, a cloak of recognisable aches and pains as much residents of his body as his heart and lungs. Charles has collected his discarded clothes and either folded them or laid them out to further dry, and Arthur smiles at the half-packet of gifted cigarettes left atop his jeans, already halfway dressed by the time he realises his shoulder wound isn’t covered.

With a slight frown, he fastens the buttons of his union suit. The expression remains as he stands up. A clean shirt is fished from his trunk, and pulled on, suspenders stretched up over each shoulder.

Arthur frowns at his reflection in his shaving mirror. He rolls his shoulder. “Fuck it,” he mumbles, and the morning wades on.

It isn’t exactly early, he finds, just quiet. Most of the gang remain asleep, and will likely stay that way for some time yet, before waking to hangovers and dehydration. A strange calm pervades the swamp, only bird calls and the trilling insects disturbing the morning mist. Arthur creeps from his room. The floorboards wail at the slightest misstep, battered and bruised all the more after the storm, and he sidles around the staircase bannister as gently as possible, taking the stairs one at a time, breath held in his chest. Dutch’s door is closed.

Lenny and Javier are still asleep at the foot of the stairs, and Charles’ bedroll looks suitably tousled, to at least give the impression he’d slept there. The decrepit house is quiet, a gauzy shade to the sunlight as it streams through dirty glass and yellowed net curtains, the vibrant forest outside almost stripped of colour by the morning fog. Rain-bright green is diluted, wisps of lush foliage obscured and smudged by the haze, the light inside taking on an ethereal quality, like living inside an impressionist painting, the outside world made up of strokes of a brush, smeared oils, shining flatly with a translucent varnish.

Quiet follows him through the hallway, and only pauses when he reaches the second reception room, with the shattered side door leading out to the camp itself. A low murmuring comes from somewhere to his right. Arthur hesitates at the threshold, surrounded by sleeping people. Karen is face-down on the largest couch, her arm hanging off the cushions, fingers curled against the floorboards. She snores lightly, and Arthur refuses to acknowledge the sight of her bloomers and bare legs, feeling impolite to go any further than reassuring himself that she’s still alive.

Tilly and Mary-Beth sleep nearby, and Sadie has bedded down on another large sofa. Frowning, Arthur peers through to the second half of the room, at the front of the house, and finds the source of the sound.

Molly is tucked into the far corner, huddled on the floor. Her head is bowed, one knee brought up to her chest while the other leg is stretched out, a thin blanket grasped in one hand. It’d be easy to mistake the folds of fabric for some kind of dilapidated piece of furniture, were it not for her stricken expression and compulsive muttering, face white and stark against the rich blue of her neckerchief, the wild red of her hair.

“Lie to lie,” Molly mumbles, whispering to herself through her fingers, brought up to her mouth. It looks like she’s biting her fingernails, eyes unfocused with the telltale glaze of far too much drink. Several empty bottles litter the corner floorboards. “Make a fool outta me,” she says, and swipes at her eye, rubbing her face as though tired. It certainly looks as though she’s been awake all night, or close to it, circles beneath her eyes the colour of slate.

“Miss O’Shea?” Arthur murmurs, hesitating where an internal archway splits the room’s two halves.

“Always laughing at me,” Molly says, hissing, giving absolutely no impression she’s aware of her surroundings at all. “All the way across the Atlantic… Nearly as far as the Pacific…”

Grimacing, Arthur glances back to the other women, as if someone might offer to help him. “Molly?” he tries again.

“Always laughing at me! Lying to me and laughing at me.”

With a choked noise, Molly brings both knees up to her chest, and pulls at the blanket covering her, eyes wide and unseeing. “Just leave me alone,” she mumbles, and Arthur is almost certain she isn’t actually talking to him. He takes a wary step towards the side door, eyeing Molly like she’s about to catch fire. “All of you, leave me alone!”

Another sobbing noise, and Molly lets her head fall back against the wall, huddled in the corner like a terrified child. “Liars,” she manages, starting to cry. “You’re all liars!”

Arthur sets his teeth and drags his gaze away, feeling rather like he is intruding on something, witnessing some part of Molly she’s unable to give him her consent to see. He steadies himself with one hand on the wall, and makes his way to the side door as quietly as he can, only breathing when the morning hits, the humid air greeting him like a bucket of sweat thrown from a first floor window.

“Jesus,” he mumbles, and squints in the early sun.

He brews some coffee, happy for something to occupy his mind. The mist hangs around the oak trees, drifting from the bayou, so that even in the sunlight, the morning feels bleak and colourless, grey like a mouse. Heavy rain has turned the dirt to a slurry, the parked wagons sinking into the underbrush, mud sucking at the wheels. No one disturbs him, and he sees no one as he pours and finishes his coffee, traipsing through the deserted camp to haul a hay bale to the horses.

Both herds are bedraggled, and grouchier than usual for it, but none the worse for wear after the storm. Magpie and Belle approach to greet him, and he spares a thought for Kieran when he notices Branwen is absent from the group, most likely having found some shelter within the treeline. Or else having left for an early trip into town to buy every potential hangover cure in Lemoyne.

The chickens, too, are grateful for the offering of feed, and for the abundance of invertebrates the rain has persuaded out for the morning, barely pecking Arthur’s boots at all as he passes through.

Having not managed to find Charles, and still alone when he crosses to the house once more, Arthur keeps walking.

The creek has surged in the wake of the storm. Water floods the cattails and reeds, unnervingly still, only disturbed by insects landing on the surface, or the occasional fish passing through the fragments of light stretching through the cypress trees, no more than undulating scales beneath the water.

Arthur passes the stunted jetty, where the bodies of the Lemoyne Raiders sagged into the swamp, and wanders on, kicking through the overgrown grasses. The bald cypress are impressive, if strange trees. Draped in moss and trailing vines like tattered scarves, they guard Shady Belle’s eastern flank like forgotten soldiers, left manning some ancient abandoned fortress until the ivy reclaims them, roots submerged in the swamp, clinging only to the mud. Tupelo and oleander grow thick, clumped in patches of regular sunlight, while the ferns lurk in the shade at the cypresses’ base, hiding flag-iris and orchid flowers, delicate as glass amongst the muck and smell of the water.

Further down the eastern bank, a ramshackle boat launch juts out into one of the creek’s many meandering bends, lodged behind a half-sunken huddle of outbuildings. The mud is like paint, sucking at the main cabin’s foundation posts, and further flooding the forgotten graveyard just beyond, headstones scattered and dragged down into the swamp, names illegible. Whatever remains were buried in such a place are surely washed across Mexico’s northern shore by now, pulled out from the depths like the corpse of an unwary antelope, seized and wrestled into the water by an alligator.

Arthur scowls at the stagnant water, as though the gators might overhear his thoughts, keeping well away from the edge as he trudges on.

A figure waves to him as he nears the boat launch. Rotund and stout, shaped a little like a bowling pin with much less neck - undeniably the figure of Mr Pearson. He seems remarkably sober given the previous night’s festivities, perched on a crate at the end of the jetty, and Arthur has veered absently towards him before he properly scans the vicinity, failing to notice another figure barring the route to the launch.

The sun shining unsympathetically into his eyes, Arthur manoeuvres around a staked wooden fence, sidling past the outbuildings, and almost walks directly into Strauss, lurking around the corner like a fairytale goblin beneath a bridge.

“Herr Morgan,” Strauss says, and Arthur swears.

He stops, scuffing his boots on the deck boards as momentum attempts to topple him face-first to the ground. With a grunt, he clutches the rail of the fence beside him, and clears his throat, leaning heavily to his side. Strauss only stares at him.

A strange office space has been constructed in the gap between the two dilapidated cabins. Strauss’ belongings are unmistakable, furniture far too ornate for the sort of life they lead, richly varnished and conspicuously tidy, even the pages of his various ledgers pressed as neatly as a gentleman’s seam. A square table sits beneath the overhanging roof of the cabin - no more than some rusted metal sheeting and planks - and though there are only crates to serve as chests of drawers, books and folios are shelved as though they grace a clerk’s study, rather than the sump of a festering swamp, the deck boards holding them all above water so tinged with algae that the wood has turned green.

“Mister Strauss,” Arthur says eventually, turned out to look at the creek edge rather than the man next to him. “Still working?”

Strauss makes a short noise. The weight of his gaze feels like it sticks to Arthur’s temple, glued like slime. “Trying to wrap up our accounts before we leave, Mister Morgan.”

“So you’ll be joinin’ us in Tahiti?”

“I rather fancied Australia,” Strauss says, voice creaking with something Arthur assumes must be amusement. “A similar kind of people to us… Lots of opportunity.”

It’s spoken like a reptile might speak to an insect, lilting with unnerving implication. Somehow, Strauss lacks the smooth confidence of a common conman, yet retains the sly, crooked demeanour of only the best and most ruthless snake oil salesman Arthur can imagine, provoking the same ambiguous feeling of unease with none of the charm. His face is small in features, pallid, his complexion like that of a walnut and just as expressionless, so that Arthur can never truly pin down his true thoughts on any matter, only exacerbating the sense of discomfort left by words.

Searching the sodden shoreline for something to say, Arthur kicks weakly at the fence he’s leaning against, shrugging his good shoulder. “Dutch tells me we’re gonna be...ranchers, or somethin’.” Or something equally unlikely.

“Perhaps, but...so far we have not raised many cattle.”

“No.”

“So, Mister Morgan...”

Arthur shuts his eyes for a fraction longer than could be classed as a blink. He attempts to take a deep breath.

“Will you help me finalise our business here?”

His inhale trips in his throat, breath lodged in his upper chest as if squeezed. Arthur coughs, bringing his good arm up to cover his mouth, hacking on what feels like two lungfuls of grime attempting to escape his chest cavity. Like a pale lizard, Strauss simply eyes him, and moves imperceptibly backwards, brow creasing in a taut expression of distaste as Arthur coughs, vying for his breath.

Finally managing to find his voice amidst his spluttering, Arthur swears, and spits over the railing he clings to, dragging his sleeve across his mouth. “Shit,” he manages, rasping. He throws his right hand up, brandishing it towards Strauss and closing in, teeth showing as he continues to wheeze. “This is filthy work.”

Strauss makes another small noise. Arthur grits his teeth together. “We’ll need money in Australia,” Strauss says, and Arthur pushes away from the railing and turns, tempted to keep walking and leave. “For cattle and feed, I mean. Why flinch now?”

Shoulders tight, Arthur pauses, leaning heavily as he moves.

“You never have done before.”

“I don’t know.”

And it’s true. He doesn’t know why the work continues to dwell on him. Why it festers and hardens like the gnarled scar tissue breaking through his shoulder wound. There is no way for Arthur to articulate it to himself, much less to Strauss, like an inflated toad in his tweed waistcoat, watch fob in his buttonhole.

Strauss is unbothered by his glare, his tongue clicking in a dismissive tut. The swamp life answers with perpetual sound - croaking frogs and cicada whines, chirping crickets, calling birds - and Arthur thinks Strauss is not so out of place here as the rest of them, at ease amongst the restless crowds, the smells, the gaudy colour, like a cancer amongst a cluster of warts.

“Well,” Strauss says, when Arthur remains silent, clinging to the railing and glancing toward the still water below them, like a boat passenger unsure whether he might need to vomit over the bow. Plucking a book from his improvised shelves, Strauss scans pages of his own handwriting, long fingers prying at rows and rows of names until he finds the latest victim, and exclaims a small “Aha!”, like a cat finally having caught a spider, delighted to play with its life before it dies.

“Here they are. Some fisherman by the name of Davison. Algie Davison. Living in a place called Catfish Jackson, near Scarlett Meadows.”

With a taut sigh, Arthur looks at him. “A fisherman.”

“And...that’s it,” Strauss declares, shutting his ledger of names. “We’re a union built on debt, you know,” he adds, almost cheerful as Arthur finally decides to leave, mumbling a noncommittal reply.

The wooden boards creak and groan, Arthur’s boots clattering as he makes his way back towards dry land - or land, at least. He walks in a blind straight line once on shore, across the rear face of Shady Belle, traipsing through the clumped grasses, pockets of rainwater seeping into shallow streams and puddles across the plain, lying in his path like land mines. His weaker fist clenches and unclenches by his side.

There are a few figures milling about the camp, only visible as blurs of colour from his distance, disappearing between the wagons. A dog’s bark is just audible, the slam of a door, the clanging of pots and pans, and Arthur feels no drive to move any closer to the house, more comfortable on the fringes, where at least the sky is visible, and the air doesn’t feel thick with mould.

It would be easier to tell Strauss to shove his debt up his tweed britches. Arthur knows he won’t. And perhaps that simple certainty is why he feels the need to throw something. He will go to this wretched fisherman’s house, and break bones until the money appears, and he will hate the poor fool like he hated Thomas Downes, hate him so viciously that it won’t feel filthy to extort him. It will feel inevitable as nightfall, and the hairline fractures in his ribs will creak and twinge, and Arthur will feel nothing.

He’s such a goddamn disappointment.

Even his own actions feel hopelessly out of his control. The thunderstorm that had battered Lemoyne the previous night rages on within the confines of his skull, a whirling maelstrom of doubt and unease, and Arthur snorts as he laments the lack of alcohol in his system, the stupid haze he could’ve spent the morning in, with Charles’ touch aching in his flesh, rather than this grim clarity, the oleander flowers dazzling and deadly with the bright sheen left by the rain.

Wherever he intends to walk, he doesn’t get far before his name is called. There are more outbuildings across the grounds, even more rundown than those over by the creek, so much so that it’s impossible to guess what they were intended to be. Perhaps a barn, or some sort of store? Whatever the buildings are, they are now more firewood than function, great hands of ivy clawing at the timbers, pulling the walls into the marsh. Arthur pauses a short distance from one of the structures and looks up, hesitant, identifying the caller before he decides whether he can face the conversation.

Her dress bunched up in one hand, Tilly hurries out towards him, dressed all in yellow, like one of the irises growing amidst the grasses lining the shore. She smiles as she closes the distance, tiptoeing carefully around sodden patches of mud and marsh, but her expression remains guarded, as though the smile is a reflex, an automatic gesture separate from the rest of her.

Exhaling, Arthur adjusts the strap of his suspenders, and shifts in place, unable to find a reflexive smile of his own. “Mornin’, Miss Tilly,” he says, and thumbs awkwardly at his belt buckle.

“Mornin’, Arthur. How are you?”

“Oh, ain’t too bad, I guess. How ‘bout y-”

Arthur frowns. “What’s that look for?”

“I…”

With a short sigh, Tilly lets go of her skirts, and shuffles, glancing over her shoulder back towards the camp. “I told her last time you wasn’t havin’ nothin’ to do with her. God knows how she managed to find us again. Karen told her too, even Miss Grimshaw, and if she ain’t scared of Karen nor Miss Grimshaw then the Devil take her-”

“I’m sorry, who’re we talkin’ about?”

Lips pressed together, Tilly looks up at him. Her eyes flick to each of his. “Charles was on mornin’ watch. I came out just now and seen him talkin’ to some…feller from a mail wagon, gave him a letter.”

Still frowning, Arthur shakes his head. “A letter?”

“For you,” Tilly says, her tone careful, like her words are a poker hand, glimpsed and held close.

She holds out the envelope as though it’s offended her personally. And with only a cursory glance at it, Arthur can instantly see why, a coldness forming in the depths of his guts, so the jubilant flip of his heart is all the more noticeable and ten times as unwanted, clanging in his chest like a pick hitting ice. The handwriting is fluid and ornate, musical bravura on a blank paper stave.

It belongs to Mary.

Throat dry, Arthur swallows. He takes it from Tilly like it’s a death warrant. The script is as familiar as a beating to an abused dog, and settles in him in much the same way, heavy and grim and yet entwined with a dreadful, traitorous pang of joy, a wagging tail upon being offered a hand, despite the fact that only pain is ever received. It aches, a barbed knot in his gut, and part of him wants to rip the envelope in two and throw the scraps into the swamp, feed the writing to the alligators, hang the paper in the outhouse and let it be soiled.

He holds the letter tight enough that his thumb turns white.

“You don’t gotta open it, y’know,” Tilly says quietly, watching him.

“I know.”

“You don’t owe her nothin’. Not even attention.”

“Yeah.”

Arthur exhales, breath unsteady. “I know,” he says again, and clears his throat. “I’ll…uh… Thanks, Tilly. I’ll…think about it.”

Lips pressed together, Tilly looks up at him, eyes soft. She touches Arthur’s arm, gently squeezing his wrist before she turns, bunching her skirts in her hand again to lift the hem above the worst of the mud. “See you later, then,” she says, offering a guarded smile.

She’s walked a dozen yards before Arthur calls out, still rooted in place, the letter like a lead weight in his hand. “Oh- Tilly? Is… Is Karen okay?”

Tilly pauses, and turns back to look at him across the sodden grassland. “About as fine as she can be,” she calls back, hiking more of her skirts away from the wet ground. “Survivin’, I guess. Same as us all.”

“I’m…worried about her,” Arthur says, voice becoming gruff as he raises it, like a boot scuffed against gravel.

He clears his throat again. Tilly nods, gaze drifting to the grass beneath her boots. “Me too,” she says, and turns again with a half-hearted wave, picking her way across the mud, back towards camp.

Arthur watches her go. When the yellow of her dress disappears beyond the medicine wagon, he sighs, exhaling hard. The letter is heavy. His ears pound with the rhythm of his heartbeat, clanging like cavalry drums, and the rest of him seems unsure whether to charge or turn on the fore and run.

What does she want with him? He’d helped her brother, in New Hanover, and had thought that was the end of it. She had said as much upon leaving. Why write now? And how did she manage to find them?

Tilly was right - he doesn’t have to open it. He could let it fall into the mud and forget its existence, throw it in the Lannahechee, use it as kindling and cook up some breakfast on the flames. His heartbeat hammers.

Teeth clenched, Arthur swears. And shoves the envelope into his back pocket, marching back towards the house.