Chapter Text
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
-Victor Hugo
In the twilight, the trade ship, too small to be properly seagoing, passed up the river settlements in silence. The cities passed along the river banks like the vertebrae of a spine, formless masses on the water, still hunkered with winter beneath the vast grey sky. Alasdair sat on a barrel, one ankle resting on his knee and watched, praising God he'd had the wisdom to wear breeks and boots instead of the great kilt packed in his trunk. His pipe was deep in the recesses of his luggage, but clouds billowed from his mouth when he breathed. Frost had clung to his clothes upon waking. There is something cursed about this place, he thinks. Francis has gone and created a life where so many had already existed.
That life was Francis's work taken form, as their kind tended to do when ideas became concrete enough to live. This idea, this lad who held all this vastness inside him, was roped to the ship by his wrists. Matthew was preternaturally still and more resembled the willows that tumbled into the shallows of the river at rounded off joints, thin, pale and utterly, utterly still.
Alasdair has spent a night and a day on this deck, watching the wine-dark water of the river lick the hull of the boat behind the sharp thin line of the lad, waiting for something. He didn't know what. The wee pink-cheeked lad he'd met a near-century before was now half-grown and utterly unrecognizable. Before he'd possessed some spirit to him, the insatiable nervous curiosity that seemed to engulf even shy, quiet children when they grew to know newly introduced adults. That lad had flipped through Alasdair's books with a cheerful boldness. The sort born of being used to the cold and having to act with purpose and efficiency to survive. As a wee thing, Matthew had curled up against his back by a fire without being told.
Now, Alasdair saw nothing of that child in the form before him. Matthew was more a wraith than a lad, a grey dead-eyed mask without even Francis's curls to identify him. He keened his ears to listen, to search for sound as he searched the lad's face for a sign of the sweet-natured toddler Francis had born into the world. There is only distrust and ice. There should be breath, a shift of bones creaking, stiff from kneeling for a day and a night. There is nothing human. There is only the groaning of the oak hull and wind that doesn't carry the fury of winter but the joyless sigh of the sullen Canadian spring. It's as if this place is loath to give way to warmth. The sails lowered above their head snap and strain, rope creaked. But Matthew does not say a word. Then—
A click. Teeth clamping shut against chattering teeth. It is the first sign of life he's seen. And all at once, he saw that Matthew, under the serene face, was freezing. Alasdair could see it now, if not in his face. It was there in the tremble in the yoke of his shoulders and the grey cast to his face that could not all be attributed to winter stores burned and blasted away by English cannon. He clung to the rails of the ship, thin hands as knotted into the rope as the flax itself was, trying to keep the strain off his wrists. The lad huddled into the side of the boat kept low as if trying to keep the wind from scouring off his hide.
Matthew watched with hollow, hooded eyes as the forests of the St. Lawrence valley passed as they made their way upriver. Alasdair watched him. Arthur, too busy tending to his own precious, spoiled Alfred, had requested Alasdair to retrieve the new ward. He was to fetch Francis's bastard, who'd grown from wee cherub to a soldier. A child soldier fearsome enough to have blasted Arthur's breast from his body with a musket at the Plains of Abraham. He'd expected to retrieve the lad from a cabin, maybe a barrack bunk with the other Frenchmen waiting for deportation to France. But Matthew, as Canadien as the earth itself here and just as stubborn as his winters, had made himself enough of a nuisance to be confined to a cellar. Soldiers had driven an anchor into the wall and chained him to it. The trap door above his head had been weighed down by a barrel heaped with scrap lead. Alasdair had laughed at the English captain as he'd pried the cellar open. What did anyone have to fear from a wee slip of a child? But the captain had told of a phantom with a blade that had clung to the forest edge for nearly a year. The ghoul, this child had harassed supply trains as they wove their way up the island to the fortress city from the docks. He'd killed and stolen shot and powder from the corpses of soldiers. Even after being shackled, he'd bitten the guards, took a finger off a sergeant like a wolf pup before they'd managed to lock him into a stockade.
Alasdair considered untying him; sure he could handle the half-starved welp if he had it in him to make trouble. But something in the lad's face reminded him too much of highland families who had taken to the hills and crevasses and starved rather than leave their crofts after Culloden. There was too much frigid water around and too much blank despair on Matthew's face to untie him.
Finally, they pass Tadoussac, clinging to the Atlantic. The lad moves, his head slowly rotating to follow the lights of the last village on the river as first it laid ahead, directly near and then behind, fading into the fog as the river curled out into the Atlantic and left the rest beyond the stern like a thick black snake.
The lad's face changes, and it's almost unnatural to watch like ice has to break at his jaw and eyes to move, to make the sounds of language. At this age, still less than two centuries old, he shouldn't struggle with humanity. But the sounds he makes are more Canada than Matthew, groaning ice and shaking trees. Matthew clears his throat and it sounds like the first thaw on the River Clyde as the water begins to flow and cleave Glasgow in two once more for the summer, creaking and not unnatural, because it is the most natural sound in the world but not one that should be made by a human body. Alasdair stares at the horror of it. He licks his ruined lips, sets his narrow shoulders under the mouldering coat and speaks.
"You were—"
He manages two words before he coughs like English chokes him to speak. It's an agonizing sound but less wild. Not human yet, but less of the great wild beyond. Less shattering ice and more the notes of a garden gate coming loose after decades of being rusted shut. He coughs again, and Alasdair winces but takes down the ankle resting on his knee and sets himself forward, putting his palms on his thighs. He tried to look the way Brigid did when Alfred was wee and still had the streak of sweetness to him that made stories and songs a joy. He thinks of his sister, flashes of green eyes, verdant and fierce and loving where Arthur's are bilge-dark and foul. Thinks of her hands in his hair, when they were children, the way she was musical and gentle when she wanted to. Even when Arthur had destroyed her harp, he had never been able to stop her music. He hasn't her music, but he thinks maybe he can find that gentleness, if only for a motherless child who has never had a Brigid.
"I speak French, lad," he said and switched to the tongue he has used in Francis's bed over long centuries and did not belong in the mouth of this child wraith.
Alasdair would swear ice cracks at the line of Matthew's throat as he nodded. Matthew shifts against the restraints on his knees and supplicates himself before Alasdair as best he can, having to twist himself against the ropes now certainly biting into his thin wrists.
"You were kind to me when I was small," he said like he still isn't all but a child.
The words are stiff and courtly. It's a strange sentence, coming from this filthy child who looks more a well-flogged cabin lad than he does one of the proud, sturdy limbed Canadiens who have made this land their home and have given this lad life. He inhales, and his hand twists into his trouser leg. He is suddenly unsettled by the lad's heavy grey-eyed gaze on him, less horrific than a moment before but more terrifying for its just restrained desperation. They're the eyes of a man ready to beg set into the face of a lad more dead than alive.
"What is it?" Alasdair said, against his better judgment. The image of a round, pink-cheeked cherub in doeskin clothes tugs at him. Matthew, the wee French child, had possessed spirit. A sweet face the shape of a snowy owl's and golden curls and a voice that had politely, but very excitedly pointed to the letters on pages he wanted to read. He had bounced on his toes as the church bells rang for mass and pointed out every living creature. He had walked among the trees, treating wolves and fantastic, strange beasts Alasdair had never before seen as if he was only having a stroll through the eiderdowns.
Matthew swallows, and he is shaking in fear now, and Alasdair hates his brother for making him a part of this. He hates Francis for letting it come to this.
"I would like to die here," he said, very softly. "Where I have lived."
Alasdair stares, hands clawing into his clothes. The pause is long, and he is speechless. The lad expected death. He intended to die at Alasdair's hand, or maybe after a long sea voyage back to England. Perhaps he fancies he'll be hung and displayed as an enemy of the crown, or caged and paraded through the streets of London like a tiger in a Roman victory parade—
He returned from his thoughts to his senses and watched the lad's mouth move, though he can't hear the words. Alasdair understood all of a sudden that this lad has no delusions of grandeur. He can only sit back, hands limp at his sides as Francis's only son bows his head, further lowering himself, utterly humbled. The knit cap falls away, and Alasdair saw the lad's hair, his one vanity, had been shorn away and barely regrown. There were cuts along the nape of his neck. A careless pair of hands have dragged the scissors along the skin as well as the hair. Francis's son. Francis's bonny golden lad. The most incredible mercy this child can imagine, the only hope he has—is to be killed on his own soil.
He has not asked for a Christian burial or the last meal or to be killed cleanly. He has requested that when his blood spills, that it be spilled for the last time in the only place this lad has ever called home. Alasdair's chest aches, like Arthur's arrows have found his ribs for the first time in centuries and he has to lift himself from the barrel.
He took a step forward, pulled his dirk from its sheath on his belt and swung it down. The lad's eyes close as if contented with his last request but the ropes fall away, cut free and he blinks, and the freed hand lifts to his chest as if he is shocked there is no blood or wound. Alasdair pulled off his cloak, wrapped it around him and pulled him by the upper arm back towards the mast of the boat. Planks creak underfoot, and Matthew's legs don't hold his weight, ill-used as they are by God himself only knows how long in a cellar he couldn't stand in. Alasdair puts himself back on his barrel and pushes the lad onto the trunk. He's no choice but to rest his back, cold and hard as a corpse, against Alasdair's legs, his head just at his knee. Close enough there's no way Alasdair won't be able to hold him fast if he wants to jump. The grey eyes look larger now, more alive and more ill than the deadened lead of a moment before. He's staring up, scared and confused and wide-eyed.
"You're not going to die, lad," Alasdair said, as gently as he can.
All at once, he's irritated with the softness in his chest and unsettled by the eyes staring at him. Fussing with his pipe lets him do something, anything but watch the icy corpse of a moment before change into a painfully human child that trembles, wracked with silent weeping. The lad curled into the layers of the plaid, painfully quiet except for a hollow rattle of shuddering breath. He is a wee one. The very same that Alasdair had held on his knee and sounded out the English alphabet with a century before at a Hudson Bay fort. He is thin and ill and shattered, but it is the same child.
He lights his pipe with a twist of paper and disgust for Francis boils in his guts as he puts a hand on the lad's shoulder. Children among their kind were precious, rare things. Alasdair remembers the Roman invasions, and in his entire life, there have only been a handful. And Francis has given his own son up for a sugar colony. He doesn't doubt Matthew has been a handful, judging by the reports of throat-slitting and gut slicing. But Alasdair too has taken great joy in shooting Englishmen for sport. He gives Matthew a fond pat.
When he's smoked a pipe and a half and banished the sour stain of horror from himself, Alasdair can lift him a bit, settle him against his legs and push the cap back on his ruined hair and clasp his arms around the narrow of his chest. After a long time, Matthew settles a bit. The quaking in his shoulders stills. His body is still cold through the cloak. Alasdair buttons himself into a coat and places two more blankets over narrow shoulders, if only to cover him up, hide more of that grey skin from view.
"What's going to happen to me?" Matthew asked as he nestled deeper in the blankets as if the answer can't hurt him if Alasdair can't see him cry.
"What have they gone and told you?"
"Just that I lost," Matthew said. Alasdair tried not to hear the pain there. "That I didn't fight hard enough. There was a treaty."
"Aye, lad," Alasdair swallowed.
"There were treaties before," Matthew said. "But Papa came."
"This one was different," Alasdair's hand found Matthew's arm and he squeezed it.
"And Papa's not coming this time."
"Aye, not this time," Alasdair agreed. He expects tears again, but there's only a weak nod. The wind picks up, and Matthew huddles against his legs.
"What's going to happen to me?"
"I don't know what's going to happen next," Alasdair admitted. "But you know Francis isn't—that you belong to the British Empire now?" And the English fool at its helm, Alasdair thought to himself.
"I know," Matthew nodded. "Versailles made it clear decades ago I was worthless."
"You aren't—" Alasdair is taken aback with the ferocity and self-loathing from him. He wants to say the boy isn't worthless, but before he can open his mouth again, Matthew speaks.
"What did he trade me for?" Matthew said bitterly. "What was it? Sugar or ships?"
"I—"
Alasdair sank onto his haunches and decided the child wasn't too big to be held. "It doesn't matter. Francis—politics has always been fickle. That Papa of yours..." He sighed again and rubbed the lad's arms, trying to find some warmth in his frozen body. How did he explain to a child, even one with a century and a half of life behind him, that love and fatherhood were politics and not what Francis felt?
Except—that was a lie. He hadn't been at Versailles for the treaty, but he knew Francis's silence was not the void of despair. Fathers with children that were wrenched from their arms, fathers who lost sons they loved, that they wanted—they were never silent. Not like this. He draws Matthew closer.
"It doesn't matter. We'll take you to Halifax, get you fit again and then we'll figure out what happens next, all right?"
There was only shaking. He'd meant to console Francis's wee moody lad, but instead he'd done something worse. And he doesn't know what.
"Matthew?"
The lad's face contorted in horror and the faint tremble now turns to a quaking. His shoulders folded up around his ears and he looked suddenly as young as he should, the grey feral face collapsing into panic and sorrow. He wasn't expecting that. He wasn't sure the lad had emotion left in him, but suddenly there's a bolt of it, the same desperation as before.
"Please," he said, swallowing a sob like it costs him everything. "Please don't make me go there."
"They removed everything off me—flayed me from that island. Please don't make me go there! It was me and then they put them all on ships and it's not—it hurt. Please don't make me—Please if I'm meant to be punished just…"
Matthew is on his feet. The boat is large enough it doesn't pitch but he's throwing down the cover. Alasdair leapt after him but he wonders sometimes if the centuries are showing in his reflexes now. Matthew is half starved and still somehow anticipating and dodging the movements of both Alasdair and the scowling English sailors who attempt to snatch him up. He avoided blows and hands that sought to snatch at his clothes like a sapling wavering in the wind.
"Matthew—" Alasdair said, hands out, placating. The wind is louder now, rushing in his ears, as if this very place has risen to meet the desperation of the slender child who could never be enough to fill this place. "Matthew, I won't let anyone hurt you."
"It's already hurt me!" The lad cried and it is indeed a cry, there are tears and a pain in his face that should not belong but are already a part of him. "They ripped that place from me. They put them on boats and sent them away. I screamed. It's not mine. I'll die before I go there!"
Alasdair frowns at him. Tries to understand. The movement of people, the push of the Acadians away from Nova Scotia. The making of Nova Scotia. Have there been so many? So much pain? To gauge a reaction such as this? But maybe this newest thing is only…the most recent misery in a life that has been a painful and short existence. This is a child who has lost everything.
He remembered the way Mary, his last independent queen, had wept for her only son when they took him from her arms. Francis had shed no such tears for the welp before him, teetering backwards as Alasdair approached. There had been no screaming, no horror, no fighting. Matthew is a child who no one fought for, who had no hope before him and the mercy of death had been denied. Alasdair swallowed and remembered the straight-backed king that baby of hers had become. The hope in his soul for the child before him. Surely Mary Queen of Scots had felt such a yearning for her son? The lad will live, survive and be made kin and Kirkland. Arthur wants him, if only in an abstract way, if only in a possessive way. But he can stay, he can be loved.
"You'll live, lad, you'll live," he tries to look earnest and gentle and all the things a child needs to see on the face of someone they should trust. For a moment he thinks Matthew is listening, that he's building hope in the heart that beats under a wasted chest.
But Alasdair could only dimly recall the push of the Gaels in where the Pict had once painted his heart blue. And this child, this wee motherless thing who had done nothing but try, he could remember, and clearly. He's miscalculated. In a moment, emaciated legs have put themselves over the rail, dragged through the ropes. The wind rises, and Matthew falls into the water, with only a hiccup of bubbling to promise he was ever there at all.