Chapter Text
He returns to Charlestown a few months later. In the governor’s house, he stands in front of the clock that marked the moment everything went to ruins the second time. He wonders how he didn’t notice it when she did. God knows he spent enough time, a lifetime ago, casting furtive glances at its face, willing the hands onwards toward the point where everyone else would have left, and he’d be alone with Thomas.
Charlestown is ghostly. Or it would be, if this were a different land. The heat is sweltering, the sun bright in a cloudless sky, and if there are ghosts, they will surely all be lounging together in the deep shade of some tree a bit further inland, where the air is cooler and the light less blinding.
His ship is anchored in the bay, the crew tense and sullen, although they didn’t make their feelings all too well known. They have a new respect for the Flint that came out of the ashes of Charlestown. Something made it immediately clear to them, that day, that whatever it had been that had made him vulnerable, fallible before, was gone. Perhaps it’s his wordlessness, and what little he says when he does speak. There are no more speeches, and perhaps they recognize that for what it means: the idealism is drained out of his motives, his world is stripped down to the bones, a skeleton of simple facts, and he treats it as such. Steal, fight, kill, oppose. It requires little argument, and brooks none.
Still, this journey doesn’t sit well with them, and they certainly would have protested if he still were the Flint of some weeks ago. The window is a narrow one: between the smoke clearing and the British returning to the ruins of Charlestown. There’s a chance the Navy will happen upon them, and the risk is hardly justifiable.
There is nothing left here of any value. The British cleared the ruins not long after Vane’s men set the town ablaze, and they would have taken anything of value, and buried the dead. But James didn’t come because he thought he’d find anything here. Or anyone. And even if he could have still found Miranda, she would have been only bones and dust.
And yet, in the end he couldn’t help it. He feels that at the very least, he needs to be here once more and say good-bye to her properly. Not running, cannonballs blasting the town apart around him, blood on his hands (again, always) and rage in his heart. A calmer, quieter farewell won’t wash his sins away, nothing will, and Miranda might not care anymore about one such as him, what he has finally become, paying his respects to her, but perhaps their history never did or will stop counting for something, so he’ll offer her what he can.
As he walked through the streets, he kept his eyes trimmed on collapsed walls and caved-in roofs, not the ground. The ground is spattered and mottled with dark brown. Faded with the rains that have passed through since the day it hailed cannonballs, but still there, clear as writing. Innocent blood, and he swears he can smell it even now, and taste iron on his tongue.
The governor’s house is half gone, half holding its breath. He treads carefully, but the floor is solid enough, and he finds the clock still where it was that day. It survived the destruction, although it isn’t wholly unscathed. Moisture has warped the wood, and some of the inlaid work has fallen out, puzzle pieces on the floor. The door is ajar and he tries to push it closed again on impulse, but it only bounces back and creaks open wider than before.
There’s a bundle of documents at the bottom, tied together with string, the paper stiff and blotchy with humidity. James holds it in his hands for some minutes, torn between just dropping it there, and looking through it. It seems like a pointless effort. Peter Ashe is gone and whatever business he had that warranted a hiding place, has no bearing on James’s present. He feels unspeakably tired, and the papers feel unreasonably heavy. He smells the damp wood, and the sea on the wind, and feels the familiar sense of mute, weary disbelief that comes with the realisation that, yes, this is real, this is the present moment. Even though it shouldn’t be, and nothing in the world seems right.
In the end, he unties the string and unfolds the papers, one after the other; the first is illegible. Billows of pale grey and spots of brown. The second, faint lines, too blurry to decipher. The third is words, faded, but clear enough on the page. James frowns, and can’t quite breathe for a moment, and then it passes; just until his eyes catch on the date, and he stops breathing altogether.
He would recognize Thomas’s handwriting anywhere, he doesn’t need to check the signature at the end of the letter, even though he does stare at it for minutes, trying to make sense of what he has in his hands. The date on the letter is just over two years ago.
*
He writes a letter, and spends a week of rest- and sleeplessness on New Providence. Half the days in Miranda’s empty house, with only rum for company, and the rest in Nassau, giving his crew every reason to conclude he’s finally lost his mind for good.
His mind turns the same thing over and over and over. He can’t understand why Peter didn’t tell them. He can’t comprehend how wrong everything went that day.
James isn’t one to think what if. Perhaps he used to be, a long time ago, sitting up beside Miranda on a voyage that seemed to take an eternity; every bone in his body and every one of his heartstrings straining backwards toward the horizon, beyond which England had vanished into a leaden sky. Imagining he were there, not on a ship bound for the Caribbean; imagining being with Thomas, no matter how. Then in Nassau, he imagined returning. Planned, and worked tirelessly, and imagined. He stopped the day the only letter Peter ever sent them, arrived.
But now he’s falling back on old habits. What if he hadn’t been too caught up in the moment, the realisation of what, to notice the colonel come back into the room, and raise his weapon at Miranda. What if they had sat down again, and Peter had told them Thomas was alive. Thomas died in a cold, dark place—But he didn’t. What if Peter had sent a second letter, two years earlier, just on the off-chance it would still find its way to James McGraw and Miranda Hamilton. I had word from Thomas today. He asks if I know where you went. I told him I believed you still in Nassau. I expect he will look for you there.
James has given up pouring the rum into a cup and drinks it straight from the bottle. He reads Thomas’s letter over and over, as if by doing so, he might find out if Peter ever did reply. If he ever did write the words, They went to Nassau. To the best of my knowledge, they are still there. And then he gets caught up in Thomas’s words instead, their easy eloquence, and the proof of Peter’s claim so clear in them that James doesn’t know if it’s shame or anger that he feels most.
Thomas did forgive Peter. It’s a letter to a friend.
The rum is beginning to burn on his lips and his gums, so he takes another swig, and pinches the bridge of his nose, and tries to stop remembering all so clearly the kindness and empathy with which Thomas treated everyone around him, or feeling all too keenly how far he has removed himself from the things that Thomas might have loved in him.
He can’t believe how wrong it all went. For all his imagining, he can’t cast the last ten years of his life into a shape that he could believe Thomas would view with understanding as well. Perhaps it isn’t even all the lines he’s crossed. But some of them. And most of all those one or two deep inside his heart that he stopped holding sacred in the months since Charlestown.
Sometimes he’s sure he’ll never be able to get up from the floor of Miranda’s house, or the chair in Eleanor’s tavern again, but then he thinks he’ll bear ten times the weight of everything he’s done since he became James Flint, and being judged for it all if he must, but he will find Thomas and tell him the two things he was certain he’d never get to say, except to the emptiness of the night. I’m sorry I left you. And, I love you.