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“I love him,” she says, “but I am not in love with him. I think somebody should be.”
James has such a capacity for love, Miranda explains. She’s worried it’s going to waste, left out in the sun to blanch and blister.
Silver doesn’t know why she’s telling him this.
The sea stretches away from them to a far, wide horizon under a towering clear sky; the Walrus is nestled in the crook of the bay, seeming pleasantly still from a distance. A breeze rolling in from the water tugs at the loose strands of Miranda’s hair, rustles the palm leaves, and stirs the sand under their feet. Behind them they can hear voices and foot traffic from the little market; the wind carries the sounds over like smoke from a bonfire. It’s a small port on barely a spit of land, but it will make do to restock their fresh water supply before they reach Charleston. That’s what Flint said when they landed, and then he took off into town, jaw set and eyes forward.
The young Ashe girl is down by the shoreline, her shoes and stockings discarded and her skirts bunched up in her hands, as she dips her toes in the water. Ever inscrutable, Miranda bows her head and walks away down the beach to Abigail’s side, leaving deep, certain footprints in the sand.
“James,” Silver repeats, because he has never said it out loud before.
* * *
It’s already dark when Flint finds him, sitting in the same spot Miranda left him. He’s dug his feet into the sand; it helps him feel grounded under the vast canvas of night turning gently overhead. Even this little corner of the world seems larger than it should tonight––larger still when Flint comes to stand beside him, and although there are scarcely inches between them, Silver thinks Flint may as well be the horizon.
Silver remembers the stories he heard from the old women in Whitechapel who had grown up in the days when England still had wild country. They talked about the eldritch folk, and how to know something’s true name was to have power over it. They lowered their eyes and hushed their mouths when they caught John looking: it wasn’t for children to know. Now he looks up at Flint, whose face is spectral pale in the moonlight, and thinks: I spoke your name and summoned you.
“Everything all right?” he says at last, because he doesn’t like the silence.
Flint’s fingers twitch. He wants to fiddle with his rings, Silver knows, he’s watched him at it time enough. Poor, tired Flint. Can’t keep still, even when he stops. That mind of his always racing away to conquer some new boundary.
Conquer me something inside him calls like a wolf at midnight, and he wonders where that came from. I’m moon-struck over you.
“Get some sleep, Mr Silver,” the captain says, like he knows what he’s thinking.
Silver shrugs. “I don’t sleep well at sea. Never have.”
Most of the men say they like it well enough, the swell of the tide swaying them in their hammocks. Muldoon says it’s like being rocked in his mother’s arms. Well, Silver never had a mother to rock him, so what’s he to say to that?
“And you, Captain,” he ventures, “what keeps you awake at this hour?”
Flint sighs, and it’s a deep sound like hull timbers creaking on a dry day. For the longest while Silver doesn’t think he’s going to answer; he just watches him, Flint, this wight, staring out at the black sea with the moon in his eyes. Then at last, as though his tongue were made of stone and it’s all he can do to carve the words out, Flint says:
“I won’t be coming back this way.” He sighs again, and looks down at Silver in the sand. “And if I do I won’t be the same man that set out.”
“Like Odysseus?”
Flint cocks his head and peers at him through the gloom, and Silver thinks he catches a brief flash of teeth in the wicked light.
I did that, he thinks. I made him smile.
“Like Odysseus,” Flint echoes. “Perhaps.”
“But then who’s to be your Penelope?”
Silver gets up on his knees, and he knows he’s wearing a grin the captain would likely smack off his face if he were any other man, but he’s not any other man, he never has been.
“The comely Mrs Barlow, I should think?”
“Is that so?” and Flint’s voice is low and dark as the water. “But she wasn’t the one waiting for me here at the shore.”
The corner of his mouth quirks as though it’s considering a smile, and whatever Silver was going to say gets lodged in his throat.
“Get some sleep, Mr Silver,” Flint says again, and suddenly Silver wonders if that’s the first time he’s hearing it, and if the words that just past between them were ever real at all.
* * *
“You could have left.”
Silver sinks lower into the cushions on the window seat, wincing as what’s left of his leg throbs in protest at the sudden movement. “Could I now,” he mutters.
Flint settles into his carved-back chair, one elbow propped up on the arm-rest, cradling his chin in his hand. “I told you I wasn’t certain I’d be coming back. True, I couldn’t have predicted that particular course of events, but there was still the possibility that Miranda and I might…” He’s looking past Silver, out of the salt-fogged window at the empty horizon. It’s a pale, timeless day, and the cabin is flooded with watery light.
“You’re never one to pass up an opportunity,” he presses. “I was absent, and we were docked at a mainland port, one the Walrus was never likely to visit again. You could have taken your leave, disappeared into the night; started again, as far from the sea as you pleased. I half expected you to.”
Silver fiddles with the fraying hem of his blanket. Nearly a week he’s been stuck in here, and so far the only thing he’s found to occupy his time is slowly unravelling this coverlet, one fibre at a time.
“Well I can’t now,” he says, and the words taste bitter on his tongue. “Even if I wanted to.”
“You misunderstand me.” Flint leans forward in his chair. “You are a lot of things, Silver, but you are not a coward. When it comes to a fight you’ll bitch and whine, but I’ve never seen you run––”
Silver laughs, a vicious spike of a laugh. “And now you never will.”
“Dammit, John, I wanted you to leave!” Flint slams his hand down on the arm-rest and Silver quiets at once. “We had a plan, Miranda and I––I was finished, I was out of this, and I thought…” He pinches the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. “You could have gone inland until you could no longer hear the seabirds calling, or taste the salt in the air, and been rid of this life you told me once that you so loathed.”
Silver pauses, his fingers halting their undoing of the delicate blanket. “John,” he repeats, because he’s never heard him say it out loud before.
He sighs and draws up his good leg, tilts his head and rest his cheek on his knee, watching his own weariness reflected back at him in Flint’s face. “Penelope had 108 suitors,” he says.
“What?”
“Penelope. While Odysseus was away, there were 108 men vying for her hand, and she had to put them all off for twenty years. Now, granted, you were barely gone two days, and nobody was trying to marry me, but…” He can feel the beginnings of a smile tearing at the edges of his composure, and Lord isn’t it simple just to fall back into this easy charm with him.
I’m coming back to myself, he thinks. He spoke my name, and here I am.
“So, you see, I had to stay.”
Flint makes a low sound in the back of his throat that could be a laugh, if Silver squints. He leaves his chair and comes to sit on the window seat in the space where Silver’s leg should be. Gently, he reaches out and takes the hem of the blanket from him, and if their fingers touch neither of them say a word about it.
“And is this Laertes' burial shroud you’re weaving, Penelope?” he asks.
Silver scoffs. “Did you just make a joke, Captain?”
Flint says nothing, getting to his feet once again, and drawing the blanket up over Silver’s shoulders. As he leans down to tuck in the edges he presses a heavy kiss to the top of Silver’s head. Then, resting his forehead against Silver’s temple, he recites:
“And as when the land appears welcome to men who are swimming, after Poseidon has smashed their strong-built ship on the open water, pounding it with the weight of wind and the heavy seas, and only a few escape the grey water landward by swimming, with a thick scurf of salt coated upon them, and gladly they set foot on the shore, escaping the evil; so welcome was her husband to her as she looked upon him.”
Silver feels the curve of Flint’s mouth against his cheekbone, smells the sharp tang of the ocean embedded in his beard and his clothes. He settles into the warmth of his breath and his being, and feels his eyes closing as Flint says softly,
“Get some sleep.”