Chapter Text
Thomas’s world began and ended with the man in his arms. He felt hot breath on his neck, felt the rapid expansion and collapse of lungs where their chests were pressed together, where his hands had come to rest on James’s back, where James’s arms held Thomas so tightly that he should not have been able to breathe at all. There was a sort of numbness in the lower half of his body, so that even though he knew their legs were touching, he could not identify where. He pulled James close, and James pulled him closer. There was nothing else.
Until, eventually, there was.
Mr Oglethorpe was standing two rows over, squinting his eyes against the sun as he looked at them. He spoke, but Thomas did not hear him. All that his mind could comprehend was one simple, extraordinary statement of fact.
It is James.
He watched James’s face as Mr Oglethorpe spoke, catching every faint hint of a smile that passed over it when his gaze flickered to Thomas and noting with interest how quickly it returned to neutrality when he turned back to the plantation owner. His eyes were swollen with unshed tears and his face was drained of its colour, but James stood and absorbed the things that Mr Oglethorpe was saying to him, nodding along with his words, while Thomas was quite simply incapable of doing anything other than staring dumbly at the man who stood extraordinarily, impossibly within his reach.
It is James.
They walked through the fields toward the east gate and the main house, passing guards who openly stared and workers who only dared glance up at them for a moment. James paid none of them any mind; Thomas rather wondered if he noticed any of them were there at all. The only indications James gave that he spared any thought for his surroundings were one brief glance at the guard who nodded them through the gate and then, once they were through it, a long backward look at that gate and the sentry towers that sat atop the long, long wooden fence. After that, he resumed walking peaceably alongside Mr Oglethorpe, his pace measured and his attention ahead of him. Thomas ached to walk beside him, to see his face again, but he had Yardsley and Greene to either side of him, checking him closer than any two sheepdogs guiding one solitary sheep, and so he held his position.
It is James.
They walked along the path that curved slowly southward toward the main house and its kitchen yard. Thomas followed James past the stables, where men watched them with quiet interest, past the milkroom and the pantry, where no men worked at this time of day, past the chickens and goats, who paid them no mind, and into the shade of the great trees that grew behind the house, where Mr Oglethorpe came to a halt, turning around to face Thomas and his two guards. James stood still a moment and then followed suit, and Thomas’s heart skittered once again at the sight of him.
It is James.
Mr Oglethorpe said something; Thomas heard him, but he was watching James, who had stopped in one of the rare patches of sunlight that defied the otherwise heavy shade. He stood so still he might have been a portrait, staring into the middle distance, the afternoon sun striking the side of his pale head with its glittering earring, his wide belt, his high leather boots, his mind caught up in something Thomas could not see and did not know.
It was an image of James that Thomas would have welcomed at any other time and one he could easily have dreamed up himself in a moment of weakness, knowing full well that the real thing would never be returning to him. Were it only such an image, he would be able to dispel it. Such a task was never easy, but after all these years of practice it was within Thomas’s power to dispel these images, whether they be remembered or imagined, and return his focus to the present. If grief weighed heavily upon him in that moment, if he found himself grey and heartsick, then that was something that could be overcome in time, given sufficient discipline and dedication to the task.
Thomas could still feel the impression of James on his lips, his hands, his chest. After having had that, it was no longer anywhere near enough to only stand and look at him. Yet paralysis gripped Thomas now, and he found himself unable to move closer and reach out to James even as Mr Oglethorpe and his men left them, for fear that to move closer would be to shatter the illusion like a rock thrown into still water, for fear he would wake and once again find himself alone, with only the fading sensation of a ghost on his lips.
He wanted James’s attention on him, and he wanted it with an urgency that made his head hurt and his hands tremble. As he could not bring himself to move any closer he instead stepped toward the house, relieved when James’s eyes snapped toward him and even more relieved when he too began to move, following Thomas over to one of the low rough-hewn benches by the back wall. They sat down together, and James landed as heavily as Thomas did, taking a load off legs that were evidently in dire need of relief. When Thomas shifted to sit slightly closer to him, James did likewise so they were pressed together, Thomas’s right side to James’s left. Thomas released the breath he had been holding, and it came out ragged.
James stared now at the ground between his boots, taking long and deep breaths and holding himself so still that only by the rise and fall of his chest and the warmth of his body did Thomas know he was a living man and not a statue.
Thomas knew he should speak. He should say something, anything, to break this silence, but he was utterly captivated by the form of the man sitting next to him, so strange and yet so perfectly familiar. His mind was filled with the press of their shoulders, their thighs and their calves together, and he could not remember how conversations began and what precisely they were supposed to consist of. He had forgotten how to turn emotions into words, how to take his feelings and make them comprehensible to others. In this moment there was great joy and great trepidation, and they were, at their core, indivisible. Everything Thomas felt was centred on the existence and proximity of James McGraw. He had not felt, not like this, for so very, very long.
But James must be compelled to speak, lest Thomas begin to convince himself that he was lost not in a dream but in his own imagination, that he had summoned this silent figure out of a hungry, lonely mind and was sinking now into some kind of lunacy from which there could be no escape – a fate he had so narrowly avoided many years ago and which he was determined would never again come knocking on his door. James was here, and so Thomas would speak with him and so prove that he was real. It could not be put off a second longer.
“Do you remember when I first invited you to stay the night with me?” he asked, his eyes intent on James’s profile as he thought how impossibly long ago that night had been. That was the last time he could remember feeling this way: elated and unmoored and so dreadfully, desperately afraid. By the mention of it, perhaps James would gain some understanding of what roiled inside Thomas, and he might then reveal something of what was concealed by his own very deliberate reserve.
Indeed, James’s unnatural stillness came to its end after a moment spent considering Thomas’s words. He swallowed, frowned and sat up straighter. He took his left hand and held it out over Thomas’s thigh. When Thomas grasped it, he turned his head and gave his reply. “I do.”
His voice was hoarse but still so rich, so expressive, so James. Those two words filled Thomas’s heart completely, doing the work of a hundred sermons and a thousand poems. James’s grip on his hand was firm, and Thomas felt something come alive deep inside him that had not drawn breath in what felt like a lifetime.
Fine words usually came easily to Thomas. They rolled smoothly off his lips, sometimes racing even ahead of his mind, surprising him with sentiments he had not yet realised he possessed or connections he had never consciously made before hearing them for the first time out of his own mouth. He could so easily take any and all sides in an argument because he went where his words took him; he had accumulated so many of them and spent so much time in their company that he had given them the power to take him anywhere at all they might go.
James was intelligent and literate, perfectly capable of performing wit as and when it was required of him, but treatises could be written expounding on the shades of meaning he could give to the most meagre of sentences. There was something elemental about him, some deep understanding he had of the passions and the instincts of men that allowed him to bypass the medium by which something was communicated and see straight to the heart of it. That was why he had thrown his lot in with Thomas where others, rich and comfortable and interested only in the appearance of righteousness, had turned away. James had seen something in Thomas that he liked, something that lay behind the eloquence and the moralising and the lordly trappings, and he had had the courage to believe in it.
Someone, he had said, should be willing to defend it.
There had been no eloquence to those words. James had said, You’re a good man, the words ragged and rough, and he had meant it. It was an artless statement, honest and courageous beyond imagining, and Thomas’s world had tilted on its axis as he heard it, never to return to what it had been before.
James McGraw was a rare man indeed, who said the most extraordinary things – things like I support it, and But as your friend, and Not necessarily.
“As I recall it,” Thomas said, realising that it was his turn to speak and striving to return to the thread of the conversation, such as it was, “you never gave me an answer.”
James shot Thomas a wry look, the creases in his cheek a little deeper than Thomas remembered. He squeezed Thomas’s hand a little more tightly. “I think I made myself reasonably clear.”
Before he knew it, Thomas was fighting back tears. The impulse to laugh had come first, welling up inside him at James’s words, and then the very thought of laughter had loosened the shackles on every deeper, heavier emotion that he was holding in his body. It was too much. It was too much, far too quickly, after all this time. No constitution was built to withstand this sort of shock, Thomas’s least of all.
And yet now he faced it, so withstand it he must. There was nothing else to be done. James was here, sitting next to Thomas and holding his hand. Thomas could see him, he could feel him, and Lord knew he could smell him. James was here, and what Thomas needed more than anything else was to hear his voice again.
“There are a great many kinds of silence,” he said. “I never thought this one between you and I could ever be broken.”
“We thought you dead,” James said dispassionately, squinting his eyes and looking back into another time. The calmness of his voice brought Thomas back to himself a little, reminding him that a man could be master of his emotions even in the most extreme circumstances. He did not doubt that James was in turmoil; he felt it in the grip of his hand and saw it in his tense posture, in that very particular look in his eyes. Yet his voice was calm, even flat, when he said to Thomas, “Peter wrote to us and said you had taken your own life, mad with grief.”
“So I was informed at the time,” Thomas said, his mouth responding of its own accord while his mind shied away from the memory.
“We thought it murder.”
“I am so very sorry –”
“You have no reason to apologise,” James said, with a contemptuous twist to his mouth and anger in his eyes. “I was the fool for believing it. It is I who have done you the greatest of wrongs.”
No, Thomas wanted to say. No, no, no. Never think it. But his voice was stolen from him as his mind spun away to consider the vast array of questions it had been gathering without Thomas’s knowledge or his consent from the moment he had first seen James standing before him in the field. All these questions, many and varied as they were, developed from one key issue: how James could have possibly known he would find Thomas here. Now that the topic had been raised, albeit not directly, Thomas could no longer deny an enquiry into it.
If James had learned of this place from Peter, which seemed the only realistic explanation, it must necessarily have occurred some time before the sack of Charles Town, where Peter had found his end. Rack his brain as he might, Thomas could think of no other way for James to have learned the truth of his fate, not with the secret so carefully conceived and diligently kept and the Lord and Lady Hamilton so very long dead. James must have had it from Peter before his death, more than a year ago now, and yet he had not come to Thomas until this day. Something had kept him away between then and now: some illness, some injury, some dire and unavoidable circumstance. One need only look at James to know that he had been through some very recent ordeal; Thomas suspected that to describe it as such might considerably understate the matter.
And then, of course, there was the matter of We thought you dead and Peter wrote to us sitting heavy between them and growing heavier by the second. Thomas did not want to ask about the “we” or the “us”. He could not bear to ask. He could not bear not to ask.
More than that, he simply did not know how to.
“You know what I was like,” James said slowly, forcing the words out as though each one came at a great cost to him.
“Yes,” said Thomas, at a loss to pick up the train of thought. He was unsure whether it was uncharacteristic of James to speak vaguely and require Thomas to fill in so much context from so few clues, or whether it was simply that the trails Thomas had once easily followed him down had become overgrown and obstructed as they lay so long untrodden. Both possibilities disturbed him; both might very well be true.
James licked his lips and continued, frowning deeply. “Your death did not ... help matters.”
Thomas looked at James’s face, observing all that had changed upon it: the deep lines etched into his forehead, the faded scar over the bridge of his nose, the heavy shadows under his eyes, the deathly pallor underlying sun-scorched features. How very many years it had been, and what a toll they had taken on him.
“Miranda died at Charles Town,” James said abruptly then, as though he were unable to hold the words inside him an instant longer. Thomas felt himself physically rock back at the impact of them. He felt James’s hand slide out of his. He noticed the way his own hand lowered itself slowly to rest on his leg, graceless and unadorned, his fingernails ingrained with dirt. “We were trying to –” James swallowed thickly and started again. “Thomas,” he said, “I’m – I have been …” He sighed, closed his eyes and opened them again. “I was Captain Flint,” he said. “That is where I went, when you were gone. That is who I was and who I have been.”
“I wondered,” Thomas said, hearing his voice as if from a long way away – from all the way back on the Margaret, when he had first heard the name of Captain Flint whispered by the crew. He had wondered then, and he had told himself no, it could not be. He had decided most definitely that it could not be. Not enough time had passed for it to be possible. James would not have turned to such a trade. He could not have. “I wondered, when I heard his name was James. When I learned he sailed out of Nassau.”
James said nothing. Thomas’s thoughts turned back to Miranda, veered away again toward the menace of Captain Flint and then fled that as well, seeking safe harbour between those two spectres where there was none whatsoever to be found.
Miranda died at Charles Town. I was Captain Flint.
“Do you want to know?” James asked in little more than a whisper. “More?”
Thomas reached to fiddle with a ring he had not worn these last twelve years. He felt the shadow of Miranda’s presence at his back, her hand on his shoulder, her laughter in his ear. Thomas had married Miranda confidently, proudly, triumphantly. He had sworn to love and cherish her, with every intention of doing so until the day he died. He had offered her a life of freedom, an honest and mutually beneficial partnership in which she could live as Lady Hamilton in whatever way would bring the most happiness into her life. She had agreed to his proposal on those terms, and for the greater part of the years they had been together, they had been happier than Thomas could ever have dreamed.
But in the final reckoning, Miranda had lived in exile with James for considerably longer than she had been Thomas’s wife. She and James had lived together believing Thomas dead, and it had taken them to places Thomas could not have conceived of when he had drawn that final promise from her, in that dreadful moment where he had been taken from her and she from him and he had known that he would never see or touch or love James ever again, that they had already had their last moment together and neither one of them had had any inkling of it, that everything they had built between them was lost in the blink of an eye.
Thomas stood now at the boundary of a relationship he had once thought himself indispensable in, utterly ignorant of all that his wife and his life’s love had lived through without him. James offered to speak of it, and all Thomas could think of was the pain that such an undertaking promised to both of them: to Thomas in the hearing and James in the telling. How could Thomas ask that James recount such dreadful matters to him when Thomas’s own actions had played such a pivotal role in their futures unfolding in this way?
But, then again, how could he not? Thomas knew that he ought and he must. True, he was a prisoner in this place and an exile from his home country, had been institutionalised, abandoned, disowned and damn near destroyed by his own family, and he most certainly had been the downfall of those he had most dearly loved, but he was still a man. His duty was, as it ever had been, to be the best of men he could be. He would not shy away from the consequences of what he had done. He would not close his eyes to the truth. James had offered to tell it, and Thomas ought to know it.
So he took up the offer, freely made as it was, and asked James, “How did you live?”
The small flinch told Thomas that that was not the question James had been anticipating. He was no doubt thinking of Miranda’s death, having started there himself, but that was not where Thomas wanted to begin. He did not want Miranda’s death to come before her life. Hers was a life that deserved so much more than to be defined by its ending.
“We had a home in Nassau,” James said. There was a marked reluctance in his voice, but the words were steady. “We lived together those times when I came ashore.”
Thomas took James’s shoulder and turned him a little so they could properly face each other. He waited for James to look at him, and he held his gaze with more resolve than he had felt in an age. He would have this question answered and answered properly. He had committed to this course of action, and he would see it through. He asked the question again, slowly and precisely, so there could be no mistaking of his meaning. “How did you live?”
James’s mouth tightened with distaste, but he did not move or look away. “We were neither of us whole,” he said, “but we did what we could for each other. We found comfort in each other. We did what we could to not cause each other pain. I brought her books, and she grew a garden. She played the clavichord, and sometimes she would teach the local children to play their favourite tunes. She was lonely and ill-suited to the place, and she told me as much. She had some little correspondence, but it faded as time went by. She was a great deal alone.”
When I came ashore, James had said. Only then. Thomas tried to imagine Miranda living a rustic, solitary life, passing her days tending a garden, keeping a simple home and writing the occasional letter. Surely the lively, self-assured woman who Thomas had loved so dearly and understood so well would never have agreed to such a life. Indeed, she had married Thomas largely as a means of escaping it.
He did not have long to dwell on it. James, after a measured pause, resumed his account. “My notoriety reflected on her,” he said. “She had a reputation on the island as a witch, a devil-woman who was the source of my great and sinister power. We laughed about it, but I doubt she found as much humour in it when she was left to face it alone. She went by Mrs Barlow, and she was the only one to call me James. She was there far too long and I could not bring myself to leave.”
James’s gaze had shifted to look somewhere past Thomas as he spoke. When his words ran dry he looked back at Thomas in mute appeal, though Thomas did not know what appeal it was that he was making.
“She stood with you in the things you did,” said Thomas, discomfited by the lack of surprise he felt at that circumstance. But perhaps his capacity for surprise had been exceeded. The instant he had seen James standing there in the field and then those moments following, where his mind had caught up to the reality of it, surely those moments contained within them all the surprise any man could hope to experience in a lifetime. Now, after having learned of James’s second life and of Miranda’s death, Thomas had gone into deficit in it. It was quite possible nothing would ever surprise him again. “She knew of it all,” he said, trying to rouse himself to wonder and failing in the task.
“She did,” said James. “And she had her part in it as well.”
“And she died in Charles Town.”
“She did.”
“How?” Thomas’s mouth asked before he had had a chance to consider the wisdom of it. Once the question had been asked, then, it could not be retracted, however ill Thomas might feel at seeing the expression that had come over James’s face.
“We were making our appeal to Peter,” James said, terse and factual, once his face was again schooled to calm. “His daughter Abigail had been taken from the Good Fortune and was a prisoner in the fort at Nassau. A ransom of a quarter of a million pounds had been demanded of her father. We took her and returned her to Peter in Charles Town for no ransom at all, in the hope that he would give us his ear and endorse our proposal to restore Nassau to prosperity under colonial rule.”
All these revelations left little impression on Thomas, weighty as some part of him recognised them to be. Truly he had passed beyond the point of surprise. He committed each word to memory, to be reflected upon when, in time, he was able to properly do so. There was nothing to be gained from analysis, after all, of a story only half-told, so he pressed on.
“And?”
James’s mouth twitched in a ghastly shadow of a smile. “He had your clock.”
There it was again: four words said perfectly simply, yet carrying such heavy meaning, such fathomless and unbearable depths.
“Ah,” was all Thomas could say.
James sniffed and strove once again to set his face into something approaching neutrality.
“Peter came to me in Bethlem,” Thomas said, once he could draw sufficient breath into his lungs to do so. “He told me what he had done.”
A brief spasm crossed over James’s face. He fought it down and spoke, his voice low and dangerous. “And you gave him your full and true forgiveness?”
“I did.”
James snarled and turned away from him.
“It was mine to give,” Thomas said to the back of his head, loudly enough that James would not be able to ignore it.
“It was not,” James said. Thomas could see the angle of his cheekbone, his ear with its silver stud, a broad dark shoulder. He could no longer see his face, and he felt the loss of it as though something had been torn from his flesh.
“I believe, still, in man’s capacity for forgiveness,” Thomas said. He wanted James to turn back around, but he did not, so Thomas had no choice but to speak to his shoulder, difficult and distasteful though he found it. “Many things had been taken from me,” he said. “Forgiveness was something I still had to give and a means by which I could remain myself, in the face of –” he faltered, unable to continue speaking into the air, not knowing how to go about addressing this darkly-clad stranger whose face he was not permitted to see.
James’s head turned fractionally toward him, chin down, deep in thought. There was anger in the set of his mouth, though Thomas saw only a distant angle of it. “For your sake, then, I am glad that you did,” he said, though it sounded like it choked him. “I can tell you Miranda found no such charitable sentiment in her. After Peter’s man had shot her clean through the head for finally letting ten years of pain and grief and anger find its voice, for telling Peter no more than what he had long deserved to hear, I found man’s capacity for forgiveness lacking also in me.”
A great weariness came over Thomas, with what little remained of his presence of mind faltering in the face of James’s barely-contained fury. He felt a weakness in his heart and a ringing in his ears. “Peter’s man,” he managed to say, though his tongue was clumsy in shaping the words. “Through the head.”
James turned back around to sit straight on the bench. He clasped his hands tight together in an effort to still their shaking. “Thomas,” he said, and his voice had lost all its roughness and its grit. He spoke now in a voice both soft and open, a voice that Thomas had only ever heard before in the most private and intimate of moments. He was so transported by the sound of it and so confounded by the transition that he nearly missed the beginning of James’s next words. “I thought I worked on a world without you in it,” he said. “I lived in that world. I despised that world. Once Miranda was gone from it too…”
When Thomas made no response, James put his elbows on his legs and leaned down to rest his forehead on his clasped hands. He closed his eyes and appeared to enter into a meditative state, resuming his absolute stillness from earlier, now grey and faded where before he had gleamed in the light of the sun.
Everything Thomas could think to say or do seemed so hopelessly inadequate, yet continued silence and continued inaction was equally unacceptable. He did not know what to do about Captain Flint, about Miranda’s quiet life and her violent death, about how it all, in the end, came back to choices he himself had made. He did not have the luxury of stepping back from this and considering it dispassionately; he might never have the strength of mind to do so, for all the progress he had made in that respect in his time at the plantation. Even if one day he might find himself equal to that task, he certainly did not find himself so now. It was all here in front of him now, surrounding and encompassing him and threatening to bury him entirely.
When he had woken this morning, Thomas had anticipated a quiet day, as they nearly all were in this place. He had thought if he were assigned to the same field as John Lawrence, they could resume their customary debate about religious tolerance, which had been in an amiable stalemate since the middle of August. If Thomas were assigned within speaking distance of Martin Lawrence, he would share with him the passage in Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government that had been eluding his memory these past few days, until last night the words had come to him unbidden as he walked back to his cabin.
It would be madness to presume they will for the future be free from infirmities and vices, and if they be not, the nations under them will not be in such a condition of servitude to a good master as the poet compares to liberty, but in a miserable and shameful –
“Thomas,” James said, sounding tentative. “Do you –” He broke off, and when he spoke again he sounded a wholly different man, sharp and dismissive. “Yes?”
Thomas blinked and looked, and there was Adams standing before them, carrying a pile of folded clothing in one arm and resting his other hand lightly on the handle of his pistol. He was a tall, heavy man with brown hair, a reddish beard and one of the purest baritones Thomas had ever had the pleasure of hearing. Thomas had not the faintest idea where he had come from or how long he had been standing before them.
“You can’t wear that here,” Adams said to James. “And all the rings and everything.”
James stared at Adams as though he had no knowledge of the language with which he had been addressed, as if the words had gone right through him and found no foothold. He looked Adams up and down once, twice, and made no response.
Adams shifted his address to Thomas with no small measure of relief. “He’s going in with you,” he said briskly. “We’re moving Mortimer. You’re forgiven your duties for the rest of the day, but Mr Oglethorpe wants a meeting with … ah, with Mr – Mr Flint over –”
“It’s McGraw,” Thomas said quickly. “Mr McGraw.”
Adams acknowledged that with a brisk nod and carried on. “Mr Oglethorpe wants a meeting with him over dinner. You know, the welcome and so on. So once he’s out of those clothes and into these ones, I need to search him and give him the all clear, and then you’re in your cabin ’til you’re called for. Good few hours there you’ll get, I’d say.”
Thomas gladly turned his mind from the chasm that had been opening up before him and addressed it instead to that list of tasks, the simple practicalities of movement and action. He had developed an earnest appreciation for such things over his time on the plantation, finding the dual imperatives of productivity and health a vast improvement on confinement and distress in Bethlem Hospital or the interminable sea voyage under guard that had followed it. Whatever anyone might say about Thomas being indulged or naïve – or, from certain quarters, non compos mentis – he believed in hard work and always had. Idleness of the mind had always been anathema to Thomas; in this place, he had come to similarly abhor idleness of the body. Working methodically and consistently had its own satisfaction and reward. There was something monastic about it, something holy, for all that no chapter of Regula Sancti Benedicti provided for supervision by armed guard nor locked gate.
He wondered whether James would appreciate such a philosophy. One would imagine not, considering the proclamations made and deeds committed by Captain Flint and James’s decided resistance to such talk when Thomas had known him. Yet he had come here and surrendered himself into the custody of Mr Oglethorpe seemingly without resistance or complaint, surely knowing that there would be no leaving this place now that he had come. Had he done all that for Thomas alone, or did this mode of existence hold some appeal for James in and of itself? Could it not also be that years and years of the worst kind of violence, from the battle of La Hogue to the sack of Charles Town, had finally become too much for him to bear and now he sought the peace he had denied himself for so very, very long?
Thomas wanted to know the answer to all of these questions. He wanted to talk with James uninterrupted for days, weeks, years, covering every topic under the sun. He needed to understand James; he needed to reassure himself sooner rather than later that they still could understand each other as well as they had used to. But for now Adams was standing patiently before them and there was a process to be gone through: a physical movement in space, a change of attire, a private interlude the anticipation of which was doing unbearable things to Thomas’s insides, then an evening meeting with Mr Oglethorpe, and then the night, to be followed by another day, one nothing at all like any that had come before it.
“What happens to his things?” Thomas asked, forcing his mind to contemplate only the first steps, without which the rest could not follow. When he himself had come here, everything had long since been taken from him, and the same had been true for every other man Thomas had seen arrive in this place. Certainly none of them had come with rings on their fingers and earrings in their ears, wearing ornate belts and fine, tall boots. None of them had arrived dressed head to in clothing that would, from a distance, pass easily for black.
The shirt James wore, though, was purple. This close, you could see it.
Adams shrugged. “They’re forfeit. After that, what’s it matter. He won’t be needing them again.”
Thomas quite liked Adams. He was an honest and straightforward man, cautious despite his imposing physique and booming voice and almost always respectful toward the prisoners. If Thomas were to choose from among the guards one man to handle the transition of the notorious Captain Flint to an anonymous labourer on a remote prison plantation in the Carolina colony, Hugh Adams would be at the very top of his list. But the qualities that made Adams an ideal choice to carry out this task also meant he was not the sort of man to give a second’s thought to the metaphysical implications of the exercise, nor to indulge Thomas in doing so. It was highly unlikely that he would be interested in Thomas’s nagging fear that if you stripped James of his piratical accoutrements, there would be nothing left to hold him together.
Thomas took the pile of clothing when Adams held it out to him.
“Mr Morgan said he had a message for Mr – he said for Mr Flint,” Adams said then, his eyes flickering to James and back to Thomas, who did not know a Mr Morgan and thus had no answer for him.
James, though, looked more closely at Adams, taking in his size, his gun and the careful distance he had left between them. He said nothing, but Thomas could see him thinking, coming all the way into the present for the very first time since they had left the cane field.
“He said there was a final message once Mr – he said ‘Flint’, but –” Adams broke off, apologetic and uncertain.
“Go on,” Thomas said, noting James’s fixed attention, the near-imperceptible quickening in his breathing and the careful, shuttered expression he now wore.
“A final message for Mr Flint once he was here. He had it written down, but Mr Oglethorpe says I can’t pass the bit of paper, so –” Adams fumbled into a pocket and unfolded the note he found there. He looked at James and waited until he nodded his permission: the slow, imperious nod of a man well-accustomed and well-suited to command.
Adams cleared his throat. “It says, Who was my friend yesterday, and who is he today? Yesterday he was James McGraw, and today he may find himself again. It’s signed ‘John’.”
James looked away. His expression did not change, but something that had been taut in him slackened, and Thomas knew he had once again gone somewhere outside this moment, for all that he had only just roused himself to enter it.
Adams stood waiting a moment longer then nodded and folded up the paper again. “Take him around,” he said to Thomas. “I’ll follow you. Get him changed, and he’ll be searched and his things taken when you’re done.”
“Thank you,” Thomas said.
“I’ll be close by,” he said. “If I hear anything…” His voice trailed off. Thomas did not know – and he suspected Adams did not either – whether he was giving a warning or offering reassurance. There was no reason, he supposed, that the same words could not serve as both.