Work Text:
Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me,
From mine own library, with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
The Tempest , I.ii.193-195
.
These days there is little cause for homesickness. Home is not a place, but a person, but even if it were, Thomas Hamilton cannot conceive looking upon London again with any notions of fondness. Years have weathered his skin, eroding the blemishes of the lash or the shackles till all that is left is the fine filigree whiteness of his scars, finer than even the grey hairs the litter the blonde—but still, some scars are bone-deep.
The closest Thomas ever gets is when the heavens open. Today, the sky above the island is stained as if by the maladroit hand of a child wielding charcoal. A vicious wind wails through palm trees that bend like beggars against the storm. He recalls the shit-sodden streets of the city, and how foul the weather erred even in the height of a heady summer, and muses how terribly apt it is that the place which evoked such cruelty should be so plagued by this tangible melancholy.
Besides, the storms which lash their island are little like the slate downpours of England. Refreshing is too forgiving an epithet for the tropical tempests that toss a tumult across the beaches, sending the little fishing boats careening about like kites. On these days, Thomas is not certain whether the soddenness of his shirt is from rainwater or sweat, for the humidity still issues in waves. Thus on such occasions he keeps himself confined to the home he and James have built, far from prying eyes.
Perhaps ‘confined’ is too unkind a term for it, for he has known internment and this is nothing of the sort. Shelter, then, and it is a fine one. Today, Thomas has tasked himself with the Sisyphean labour of setting order to their bookshelves.
Once, the enterprise of rebuilding his library seemed vertiginous, but neither he nor James are in the business of giving in. Indeed, James possesses such a stubborn streak that Thomas dares to feel grateful he is otherwise occupied at the moment with the carpenter, for whom he works diligently in the town below. In those early days after their flight from Savannah, both had been industrious in their efforts to settle here without shame, but it was James alone who had looked upon the white-washed walls, and the shutters that clattered whenever the wind picked up, and, most damningly of all, the bookshelves which yawned emptily, as though each were Parnassus to be mounted.
The shelves are less lonely now. Thomas has copied fastidiously books borrowed from Mr Langhorne, whose printing business he has found himself quite ingrained in, and James—Well. James does not yet appear to have liberated himself from the piratical impulse to return home with prizes, though Thomas, simply grateful that his winnings are books and not great frigates, studiously avoids questioning precisely where he acquired them.
Besides, their covers are among the stateliest they own and Thomas, though it has been decades now since he was ripped from the brocade of the city, retains his own sin: an abiding interest in fine things.
One of these tomes, slim but well-bound, is The Tempest, the spine of which his fingers brush now, with the gales billowing outside.
The sky it seems would pour down stinking pitch.
Thomas blinks. Miranda, was that? Miranda—
It is said that the sun never sets on this vast empire, but by that end, nor does the rain ever cease. The storm that upends itself upon London on the occasion of Miranda’s birthday is dour and ferocious, as if to make a mockery of their plans, at first glance a natural presumption to make for mid-July, to picnic in the park. Thomas’s visions of reading to her beneath the swelter of the midsummer sun are washed away by the great currents that gush down the gutters.
But the parlour is warm and dry, and it is there that he makes a gift of Shakespeare’s First Folio, a fine ribbon demarcating the spot where her eponymous heroine resides.
More than any fine jewels or dresses, Miranda is delighted with the book. She presses a dozen kisses to his lips, his cheeks, his chin, gratitude tinged with promise.
“It was my mother who named me Miranda; my father was appalled by the suggestion,” Miranda tells him later, in their bed. The book lies between them, propped alongside her head on his chest, opened somewhat ironically to Prospero’s urging of Ferdinand against th’fire i’th’blood. “To hear my mother tell it, he thought the name would tempt my fate.”
Thomas lifts an eyebrow at the crown of her head. “But you, O you, so perfect and so peerless?”
“I daresay he hadn’t actually read the thing.”
“Perhaps it is the singularity of her amongst an island of hapless men that had him fretting. Does she not challenge Prospero’s power? Does she not choose Ferdinand: what I desire to give; and much less take what I shall desire to give …?”
“Or perhaps he was afeard some foul Caliban would take my maidenhood first.”
“Is that what he thinks of me?”
Her laugh is a bright peal of bells; the swat of her hand against his belly is twice as cheerful. “You are certainly no Ferdinand. What white cold virgin snow is upon your heart?”
“O brave Miranda, how you suffer me,” says Thomas, laughing, as he pulls her to sit astride his hips as a queen would her throne. “O fierce Miranda, who would, had she been any god of power, sunk the sea within the earth—her father with it?”
“Sir, I do not recall her ever saying quite that. You appear to be as ill-read as said father.”
“No, but would she not have, if only given the chance?”
“Perhaps,” Miranda says, haughty, but a tug of a smile bullies the corner of her mouth. She draws his hands to her, adding, “Tell me more. Let me hear thy soul speak, fool Ferdinand, of my noblest grace.”
Her husband, then, with a heart as willing, sets about it.
After that, the remainder of the shelves stand abandoned. Thomas reads cross-legged on the floor, till his beleaguered back aches and till long after the encroaching night snuffs out the light.
By then, Thomas is reflecting on who, if either of them, is Prospero, or Ariel, or even ardent Ferdinand. He knows of one who would remark himself Caliban, ever the monster, and James returns sodden when he steps in that evening, shedding boots in the porch like leather weighed down to lead. It is a silly, insidious thought, that either of them should have bewitched or ensnared the other, and Thomas is so seized by shame that he has stoked a small fire and is boiling water for tea when his love squelches in from the hall.
“This fucking weather. I would scarcely be more drenched if I had gone overboard,” James grumbles.
His hair has grown since the plantation, as long if not longer than his Navy years and bound neatly at the nape of his neck, for which Thomas is glad, privately regarding the shorn head to give the air of a convict. Thomas has always been a great advocate of James’s body in its entirety, but if pressed, he would regard the deep red of his hair, like a blazing sunset spilled out upon the horizon, with particular fondness.
It is soaked as if to a dark brown now, errant strands of grey curling around his temples, and when he shakes his head free, James gives the impression of an Irish Setter shaking dry his fur after a dunk in the river.
“Must you?” Thomas bemoans, swatting James toward the crackling flames.
“Sorry. Is that tea?”
“Yes, yes—but you can only have some if you stop dripping half of the Atlantic on my papers. Get out of those wet clothes, would you?”
James’s head shifts upward minutely, bemusement alighting in his expression, but Thomas, electing a suitable punishment for the spray of rainwater that has smeared ever so slightly the ink on one of his latest copies, merely bustles on with the cups and tea leaves.
He is rewarded by a grumble and the uneven hopping of James attempting to peel himself out of his sodden breeches, pride dictating this one-legged dance instead of propping himself up against a stool.
Silence sits comfortably between them for a moment, dislodged only by James’s faint curses and, always, always, the hammering raindrops upon the roof and against the glass. In company, the feral storm, unbound and unpredictable though it is, strikes Thomas as distinctly less perturbing. They are home, both of them, in this lee against the storm, and even should a tree winch itself out of the sand and cleave its way clean through the house, he is quite certain that they would be safe from the elements. He recalls thinking the very same some years ago, on a blustery day in London with a book propped between them—
“If by your art, you have put the wild waters in this roar,” James says, and gives Thomas such a start that he nearly drops the tea-kettle.
“What?”
“The book,” and when Thomas turns, James is in naught but his damp shirt-sleeves, holding aloft the play Thomas had rested on the mantelpiece not long before James’s return. He’s met with a crooked grin. “I assume it’s you we have to thank for this godforsaken tempest.”
“Oh. Yes, quite.”
James blinks; the arm with the book sags minutely. “Is something the matter?”
“No, no,” Thomas insists, returning his attention to sorting the tea. But perhaps something is the matter, and James knows it, for there is a pregnant silence which leadens the unanswered gap, so he adds, “It is nothing. I found it when tidying the bookshelves and it reminded me of Miranda, that’s all. I gifted her a folio one birthday, on a day quite like this. You know how many of those there were in London.”
“Admired Miranda,” James quotes, and Thomas need not turn to witness the fondness in him.
“My mistress, dearest,” he answers, then: “Anyway, I recall I had very grand ideas of boating on the Serpentine that day, but we would have been entirely swept to the sea, I’m certain. We read it at home, and she told me all about her father’s monstrous misinterpretation of a great many plays.”
“And she ended up getting swept to sea, anyway. I’m certain it would have been a finer fate if you had rowed her.”
Thomas scoffs. “Not likely. If it were up to me, I’d row us in circles, before we ended up running aground somewhere off the coast of… Oh, Tangier.”
It is a poor joke when Thomas knows very well that this is not what James means. Their conversations about that time are cursory and infrequent enough that it remains a sore spot, Miranda’s death, though they make a concerted effort to speak frequently and fondly of her living moments.
Thomas is mulling over a tale of inebriated parlour games and a stumbling rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Miranda had performed a spectacularly mischievous Puck, when James speaks up again.
“I brought Miranda a binding of the comedies from one of my first prizes,” he remarks. His back is to Thomas, the lines of it as regimented as though he were on parade, and his neck is bent over the book.
Thomas has many questions, but knows that it is rare James freely offers anything from his pirating days and has learned patience to eke it out of him. He senses there is more here, unexcavated. His only answer is the rush of boiling water from the spout; he pours two cups and is gratified that, when James speaks again, it is with faint, self-deprecating bemusement.
“I told her that we needed something throughout all the wretchedness to laugh at. In retrospect, it was callow of me.”
Thomas matches this revelation with a huffing laugh of his own, which is largely swallowed by the continued, strident clatter of raindrops against the window-pane. “Perhaps. Likely correct, though.”
“She mentioned the same birthday you did. I’m afraid I was a brute about it. Leaving London—you—was quite… fresh.”
Ah. Thomas sets down the tea on the mantelpiece and draws his arms around James’s back, still bent over the book. They are quiet, again, as he presses his face into the softening bracket of James’s nonetheless broad shoulders.
“She would have understood, you know.”
“She did,” James agrees, sounding entirely miserable about it, “but it is no excuse.”
“I am quite certain that you made it up to her, regardless.”
Thomas feels rather than hears the rattle of James’s half-laugh. “I brought her books from every prize after that. She might have set up her own public library in Nassau, if she’d been of a mind. And if any of that lot could actually read.”
“And now you bring them to me, instead.”
At that, James turns; Thomas is pleased by the sight of a smile hooked in his beard, a comma inviting more.
“It is an entirely selfish pursuit. Perhaps I was hoping you would read them to me next.”
“Have you consorted for so long with pirates that you’ve forgotten your letters?”
“Do you wish to play my school-master?”
Thomas thumps James’s chest for that. “Oaf,” he laughs, though he’s quite aware he started it. “Change out of that wretched shirt before you lure us both into the clutches of pneumonia.” He pries the book from James’s hands. “I could deign to read to you, as long as you don’t expect me to imitate the voices.”
For once, James seems inclined to do as he is told, for he is already halfway toward their bedroom when he calls over his shoulder, “Pity, and here was I so looking forward to your drunken Stephano,” in a voice that would otherwise have surely been swallowed by the burgeoning rains, had Thomas not ever found his ear reaching for it.