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The weight of uncertainty lifts from Miranda’s shoulders as she watches James walk up the path, half-drunk and over-weary, the soft light of the moon making his red hair appear less like fire and more like a fox lurking, dirty and starving, among her garden. She admires the slinking motion of him stepping lightly around her planters and the discarded farming tools she left out earlier today when the sun grew too hot and her nerves once again dug into the flesh of her shoulders. She had spent half the day looking away from her cooking and cleaning and gardening to peer along the coastline as if she could see the Walrus anchoring just off her front porch.
There are many men on Nassau who think that Captain Flint is a wild thing, unable to be tamed by men or by seas. She pleasures herself with the thought as he sidles up to the doorway and stands under her inspection, and as she watches his face lean into her hand when she reaches up to cup his cheek, his sunburnt skin pressing into her palm, chasing her fingers as she starts to pull away.
Captain Flint is not untamable, it is just that none of them hold his leash. He will never be pacified by another - not by men, not by the seas, not even by shackles around his wrists and ankles if he ever (god forbid) is caught up to by the British Crown.
No, she muses, not even Thomas controlled him the way Miranda does. James had loved Thomas with the same ferocity that he stole from ocean-bound merchants - two men of the same kind, caught up in an emotional riptide that eventually drowned them both. Miranda was not another victim of the tides, nor was she his life raft - she was the lifeguard, to whom the rule’s enforcement was assigned and to whom James had deferred, to whom he still deferred. Even from the depths of the anger and self-hatred where he finds himself, he still tilts his head at the surface, awaiting her instruction.
He killed Alfred Hamilton for her, and though she imagines there is no love lost between the two of them any more than there is with her, she remembers his face as he walked back into her home after the deed was done. A war waged behind his eyes, the embers of his own self-hatred that had smoldered since they lost Thomas a blazing fire of hurt and bottomless, bottomless rage. But beneath it was hunger. It was the same hunger the men saw, only she knew its name.
She had kissed him harshly, pulled his head to rest upon her breast, and told him that she was thankful, told him that he had done what she wanted. Only then did he rest.
She was not able to take much with her, when she left Thomas's estate. Only the things she could carry: Books. Her wedding band, considered frivolous even in the affluent crowds they ran among in London. And, most importantly, James, or the scarred and vicious and angry thing he has become.
She swipes a thumb over a spatter of blood on the peak of James’s cheekbone, and she watches his eyes tracking the movement, before reaching up to hers, and there is something in them, something harsh and haunted and downright exhausted, and she knows she will not be able to get the tales of his journey across his lips tonight, so she settles for moving her hand away from his face to interlock their fingers, pulling him into her home and towards her bedroom.
They never fucked like this, back in England. Sure, there had been a passion, but never the sense of urgency she feels as he kisses her desperately after he crosses the bedroom’s threshold, as she allows him to press her into her mattress. The knowledge that every time he leaves her, he is just as likely to come again as he is to never be seen again, the last remembrance of James McGraw lost as Captain Flint’s body sinks, bitter heart unbeating, into the furious waves.
She is never quite sure if he loves her the way a man is meant to love a wife, even in moments when they do what only men and wives are meant to, and she takes comfort in that - she had been a wife, before, and she knows that she cannot bear to be someone’s wife again any more than James could bear to be a husband, whether either of them knows how to be husband and wife without Thomas to show them the ropes. Romance was a frivolity left in England, left with the dinner parties where Thomas used to seek out her eye across crowded rooms; where he used to sneak a hand against the small of her back, risking scandal; where they used to share between them the pretty young things that crossed their parlor. The last shred of it lies in the memories she and James shared, in the easy way they had passed her husband between their bed chambers, before her husband was locked in Bedlam and her wedding band was locked into the top drawer in her armoire, never to grace her finger again. What she and James have left is necessity - an inability to be parted, bound so tightly they cannot be undone, but none of the whirlwind and romance and love that Thomas had afforded.
Sometimes, when she wakes before James after the journey home from a particularly hard prize, she takes a moment to drink in his sleeping face, unguarded in her heedful care. Sometimes, he looks like the man her husband fell in love with, all open features and naive dreams and foolish ambition.
But then he wakes, and the years set on his shoulders again. Even in those moments, he is still not Captain Flint, the barbaric pirate of myth. He never is with her. That man only exists when others are watching. But he has hardened past the man that was once James McGraw.
Then again, she is hardly Lady Hamilton anymore.