Abigail had been quite startled by the man’s appearance in the kitchens – and from the look of him, he hadn’t been prepared to meet with her, either. She glanced behind her for a moment – keeping an eye on the man in case he tried anything – and determined if need be it wouldn’t be too hard to catch Miss Anne’s attention. A simple shout, and this would be put in hand rather swiftly – but if violence could be avoided –
Turning back, Abigail made her way down toward him, careful to appear nonthreatening. “I’m afraid Mister Jack won’t take too kindly to thievery,” She couldn’t let him think he would be allowed to get away with this frequently after all, “But if you want to give me a hand for an hour or two, I can send you off with a meal and some bread you can take home, and we can keep this little secret between us – that sound alright?”
Abigail observed Billy’s work intently, holding in her lap a small coil of extra rope from which to practice matching his motions, and perfecting the knots he was showing her. In truth she could not say how long they had been at it now, though she did know the sun was much higher, and a great deal hotter than when they had started.
The terror that had sparked this little lesson was wholly forgotten by now, and likely would remain so provided she wasn’t in close proximity to the men who had seen fit to scare her for sport. Something told her they meant nothing malicious by it – rather like school boys delighting in mischief and screams, but never meaning to actually hurt anyone.
Perhaps if she were a little less trusting of their leader, and had a less sound friend in Billy, she might not have been so easily convinced of such a thought, let alone thinking it without prompting. As it was, her alarm had fallen away, and she was thoroughly engrossed in her lessons. Her hands worked over the rough rope, and though she had not been at it very long, they were red and sore from her efforts all the same – chafed in ways they were far from used to. She had some callouses from working in the kitchens, but not nearly enough to protect her from rope burn.
“I think I missed – something,” She admitted, showing her knot in comparison to his to try and figure out on her own where she’d gone wrong, “Here?” She guessed, pointing to where she’d doubled when she should have run it over a third time.
After the blanket had been wrapped around her, Abigail curled her legs up and looked at Billy thoughtfully from within the rather impromptu nest he’d settled her into for the evening. She had no intention of retiring while the stars were so bright, but she was terribly grateful for the blankets.
“Thank you,” She offered, before tilting her head curiously, “Won’t you join me?” It seemed almost wasteful to have this much blanket just for herself, and she knew he had to be up for hours yet. There was no reason for him to be cold the whole while, especially not when he was making certain nobody else would be.
Abigail’s brows rose up at the display before her, though it was Billy’s conspiratorial whisper that tugged her lips into a smile. Leaning over, she laid a delicate hand on his arm and patted it understandingly, unable to resist such an easy opening.
Abigail lowered the glass she had admittedly stolen from Captain Flint’s desk in order to better track the stars, gazing still at the unusually bright light of Venus as she considered his words. She’d been melancholy these last few days – a necklace of hers had gone missing, one of the two she had managed to keep all this time, which had been a gift from her mother. She supposed her mood in context with the loss of something pretty might have been mistaken here.
Rather than reveal the truth of the sentiment behind the piece however, Abigail decided to tease her friend by deliberately misunderstanding him. Minimizing the glass, she turned and handed it over to him as she replied, “I am well aware that thievery is not lady like captain, but then neither is piracy I dare imagine. You hardly need to remind me I am behaving boorishly for a girl of my background.”
She let that hang between them a moment before she smiled, letting him know she was only teasing. “If you do happen to find the culprit, please let them know I am not angry – I would simply like to trade them my other one. That necklace holds more value to me in sentiment than I could ever get for it in gold, that’s all.”
“Yes, yes, I see you!” Abigail assured, harried enough to be quite done with politeness, “I’ll be with you in a moment – “ She eyed him up and down quickly, registering his uniform, and concluding briskly, “Officer,” before rushing off to tend to the rowdy lads at the back of the bar who were giving Georgina a hard time.
“Honestly,” She breathed to the blonde woman, stepping back just in time to avoid being splashed when the man her friend was managing suddenly tipped over on his bench and crashed to the ground to an uproar of laughter. Georgina looked at her innocently, but Abigail had seen her yank one too many men down to fall for it, “Well seeing as you’ve got this handled,” She shoved the tray she’d been carrying into the other woman’s arms, earning an unrepentant grin, “I’ll take care of the others shall I?”
“Give em hell love,” Georgina agreed, lifting the tray above her head in time to keep mead from being snatched by a man who had already clearly had too many. Shaking her head, Abigail hiked her skirt and stepped over the still dazed sailor to make her way back to the officer she’d brushed off – honestly, but she could do without the big ships coming into town! Frigates brought with them a ton of business – but that certainly meant a great deal of devilry as well, particularly when officers did not see fit to control their men!
“Now then,” She huffed, painting on a smile for – from what she could tell – just such an officer. “What can I do for you today Mister….?”
“Stop,” She could not bear yelling, even now after so long and far away from how she was raised, it rankled against everything that felt proper to raise her voice any higher than it was now – and maybe that was the problem. Maybe if she did let herself yell – maybe if she did opt to exorcise her demons in some unholy scream of fury she might feel better.
But the last woman to do that had ended up dead on a dining room floor, so maybe it wasn’t propriety that chained her voice after all.
Taking a shaking breath, she eased herself farther away from him – needing space, needing to breathe without feeling as though each fill of her lungs was taking in more poison than clarity. “I don’t need you to tell me how to feel.”
Was she really addressing him? Or the ghost inside her mind that still sounded ever like her father? Opening her eyes, she made herself take in the man before her. A wide, mismatched gaze that did not beseech as much as it insisted, an abortive motion of a calloused hand that sated itself by furling and unfurling it’s fingers at a side that was too still by contrast. A beard that did nothing to hide the twisting twitch of his lips, but rather framed them in a way that made each flicker all the more notable. He was nothing like her father – and that alone was enough to banish the last lingering whisper of the man’s ghost, for now.
“There is nothing that I can say right now that won’t be hurtful in some way. You understand that, don’t you? That you’re the last person I can talk to about this? About missing him? Regardless – regardless of everything he did to you – he was still my father.” And there were days when she hated admitting it. Hated that such a man had raised her – and how much she still loved him.
Worse – there were days when she hated the felt like she felt she should have to hate him.Days when she wished she had never gone with Eleanor Guthrie, and had just waited for her ransom to be paid, because then she could have gone on seeing pirates as blackguards with no interests beyond their own personal gains, rather than human beings as flawed as any other – and more willing to show the truth of their ugliness. She would never know the kind of man her father truly was – and it would be terrible, but blissful, in a manner only ignorance could provide.
“Please – just. Go.” She just needed some time today. It would pass. It always did. Birthdays only came once a year, and all the memories and regrets that came with them would fade in the light of tomorrow.
Her heart is still racing in her chest, the violence of the moment rendering her immobile in all but the pounding behind her breast, as if her heart were a bird trapped in a cage, desperate to escape the cat perched upon the sofa. Red stains the pages of her work, bleeding the ink and drowning demons in it’s wake, an eerie and poetic sight in the face of the one her words had summoned.
She hadn’t heard him coming up the stairs – hadn’t heard the door open, either. When the ink fell from her quill so readily, the words forming faster than she could pen them down, the whole world shut itself off. She lost track of where she was, of who she was with – and today, she lost track of reality itself.
It hadn’t been Captain Flint that entered her room – nor had it been James McGraw. When she heard his voice, she’d gotten up so fast she’d knocked over the wine – forgotten from dinner – and contronted Redbeard without thought. He was so alive in her mind, in that moment, that who else could it have possibly been?
Now, as the world came back to her, she found herself at a loss. His words were profoundly painful, in the light of her story – but in the shadows of the day they held deeper and more personal meaning. She took a shuddering breath, and after a moment of regaining herself, she thought back on what she had asked her character.
“What would you say to her if you could?”
She took another breath, closing her eyes and willing her heart to slow down, to beat in silence rather than raise all this painful noise in her chest. Opening them, she faced him again – all of him. The man who lost her – the demon who walked beside her – the character who lived with her only in the stories fashioned by a young woman who had barely known any of them. The man, the demon, or the woman.
Lifting her chin, she addressed them all, on behalf of herself only for the fact she could not bring voice to a dead woman without a pen, and would not dare to try even if she could.
“How long will you focus on what you lost, in pursuit of what you now have?” She stepped forward, beseeching his pain, and bidding him to let it go before it consumed him in ways not even Thomas could heal. “When will you say, I won’t lose what I have, instead of, look what I lost to get it?”
Sometimes people could say the most insensitive things, thinking that it was meaningless, or that it was acceptable because they were friends with whomever they said it to. As though by being friends with someone, you no longer needed to respect their feelings – because surely, they would understand your intent was not to be harmful and therefore you could be as dismissive and unkind as you pleased and it wouldn’t change anything.
It wasn’t meant to hurt and so, to claim that it did was to be oversensitive. Or worse, to be seen as angry with a friend who had said cruel things because they were troubled by their own demons. There was no scenario that Abigail knew of where it was permissible to tell someone dear that they were being unkind – it was only to be done when one did not care if they were seen as too sensitive, or when one did not care if that confrontation would cause the instigator pain in return.
Although Abigail knew Georgina had been jesting, that she had only said those words because she’d been fending off advances from drunken sailors for hours with little assistance from the men who were meant to be buffering such situations due to the fact two of them had been drawn off to assist some men to the town’s surgeon after that awful brawl that had broken out – they still resonated so deeply in Abigail’s chest she thought they might well shred her throat to pieces and leave her worthless on the floor, barely able to breathe but too stupid to die from the pain.
She had not meant to start crying as soon as she walked through the door – in fact she had only meant to be there for a few minutes, to deliver a book she had seen that she thought the two men living here would enjoy. No sooner had she stepped in, did the familiar scent of her father’s favorite tea hit her, and the next thing she knew she’d pressed her back to the door and placed a hand over her mouth to stifle any sound.
She was so blinded by the heat of her tears she hadn’t even seen him until she was gathered up in his arms, and some part of her wanted to scream at him. Some wild, dark, horrible part of her wanted someone else to hurt just as badly as she did – and who better than the man who had torn everything familiar from her? But it was no good. She hated that part of herself – hated the idea she was capable of being so cruel – and just as she couldn’t tell Georgina she had been awful tonight, she could not bring herself to tell James how horrible it was to walk into his house and have it smell like the home he had razed to the ground.
So she stood there, weeping impotently against the frustrations raging on inside of her, until her body was too tired to carry on, and the hurts were numbed by the energy they had stolen from her. She had a headache from the pressure of it all, and she wanted nothing more than to run away somewhere and hide, to sleep until it all fell away, and she could wake up feeling like she could face the day again.
Instead, she took in a shaky breath, and stepped back – holding up the book by way of explanation for her presence, and gently pushing it toward him, at once unable, and unwilling, to make herself speak as to what had happened to make her break down in such a disgusting manner as she had. She hated it with every fibre of her being, but as there was nothing to do about it unless she wanted to make herself vomit from the sheer disastrous disarray that her humors had aligned themselves into by pushing them further into chaos, she saw no point in thinking too much on the crime she had just committed.
Demons had haunted her steps for so long, she had learned to find friends in the shadows. She held her hands out to them, welcomed them at her side and gave them voices through her pages – but there were some that wanted more from her. Some that wanted her voice, and left scouring wounds wherever they touched. There were some she simply could not control, and last night she had been visited by the worst kind – a demon who had stepped off the pages and back into the world itself. It had only been a moment, but she could have sworn that she saw Ned Low at the back of the pub. The man had looked right at her, and the whole world had come to a screeching halt.
When the cacophony finally quieted, Abigail had found herself blinking toward the ceiling in the cellar – she had jumped to her feet so fast, she didn’t even see Georgina as she ran for the door, yanking on it with the expectation of entrapment. The door swung open even as her friend grabbed her shoulder and hauled her back, closing the door against her cry of terror. She had spent the remainder of the hour in her friend’s arms, soothed without question as the world righted itself and at last, Abigail had been able to step back into the pub, if only to cross it so that she could leave early for the night.
Against her will, her eyes had turned back to that corner – the man sitting there looked vaguely like Low – but was by no means an exact likeness. Shame had gripped her as she was escorted home, and her sleep had been restless the whole night through. The shadows under her eyes could have passed for the effects of a broken nose by the time she got into work, and it was three hours before Georgina started her shift and immediately hauled her aside to conceal them better.
Everything seemed out of order, and her world still hadn’t felt right by the time Flint arrived, nearer to the end of a shift that had gone by on sheer muscle memory alone it seemed. It had felt, for one wild and incomprehensible moment, as though her muted terror had summoned him from the ashes of Hell itself to banish the last lingering traces of Low’s visage in her mind.
Propriety had been little more than a distant memory for long enough now that she did not hesitate to turn to him, and rely on his solid strength against unwelcome phantoms. He had played a role in freeing her from Low, even if it had just been in liberating her from the man who had stopped Low and his crew entirely. It stood to reason then, that he might be what she needed to liberate herself of the memories.
He seemed to understand, to some extent, and for a time she simply afforded herself the comfort of knowing he was there. Eventually though, she did step back and force herself to breathe, to focus beyond the hollow inside of herself that echoed with her despair and to instead frame the words necessary to describe her plight. He alone would know, with the least amount of words, what had caused her so much distress. She wondered if perhaps he had been summoned by Georgina, rather than by some otherworldy sense of wrongness – strange as it might be to think, Abigail could find truth in either possibility.
“I thought I saw Captain Low yesterday.” She took a slow breath, then, “But while I know that to be impossible – I wonder if what Captain Vane assured me was true.” Her gaze hesitantly sought out the strange mixture of his own – another call toward the fae and fell stories that surrounded him. Needing to know, to hear from someone she had no reason to doubt, that all of her demons existed only in her mind. “Captain Low – and his crew – they are dead, aren’t they?”
Ocean Archive 