miranda!

wildehacked:

1. 

Mr. Hamilton asks her to marry him so often it becomes a game. “Marry me, Miss Barlow,” he’ll say when they step together in a dance, smiling at her as the dance separates them. 

“I couldn’t marry you today,” she’ll reply when the music joins them again, and his palm presses lightly against hers. “You will note the stormclouds.” 

“The rain would not do,” Mr. Hamilton will agree, hers for a few more measures. “Perhaps next week, when the weather clears?”

“Certainly not,” Miranda will say, and caress his thumb briefly with her own, risking the scandalized eye of Lady Heyward. “I could never marry under clear skies.” 

2. 

James books their passage under the names of Mr. and Mrs. McGraw, and although she understands the necessity–she won’t be parted from him, any more than he’ll be parted from her, and not even the relaxed atmosphere of a merchant vessel bound for Port Royal will allow Mr. McGraw and Mrs. Hamilton to share a cabin–she hates it. James is not her husband, although she’s never loved him more than she does now, the way misery loves grief. 

She’ll never have a husband again. 

1. 

Miranda refuses to marry Mr. Hamilton twice at the opera with the Dudleys, much to their amusement, but she takes his arm and arranges things so the two of them are side by side in the Dudleys’ box. He murmurs softly to her for the duration of the play, clever and wicked by turns, and she had him only the day before, on his knees in Duke R––’s library, but she’s already desperate to have him again. 

“Oh, marry me, Miranda,” he says with amused frustration when the night is over, but the conversation is not. “Come home and talk with me until we’ve put Caccini thoroughly to bed.” 

“Perhaps tomorrow, Mr. Hamilton,” Miranda says gently, and hopes that her eyes are promising him what she cannot, in their company–that she will give him whatever he likes in private, but she is clever enough to recognize the jaws of marriage, its unyielding bite. She has a few years yet before she must step into the trap. 

2. 

On the ship from Port Royal to Nassau, no one cares what their names are, or who shares her bed. She lies in the living dark of the ship at night–the men at watch walking above her head, the groaning communion of the ship and sea an endless chorus–and smooths her hand over James’s hair, mindless and repetitive. He’s awake, but quiet, his breath warm on the bare skin of her stomach. 

The last thing Thomas said to her was Take care of James. 

“I love you,” she says to the man in her bed. 

1. 

“I would never trap you,” Thomas swears in her bed, tender and relentless. “Would you trap me?” 

“Never,” Miranda says, pressing a brief kiss to his knuckles. “But it would not be the same. You would always have power over me.” 

He looks at her, very serious. “Would you like power over me?” he asks. 

2. 

James Flint murders a man at her word, and then returns to her, like an animal at the end of its chain. 

He tells her that Alfred Hamilton begged for his life. He tells her that her mother-in-law was there on the ship, too, and he did not spare her. His voice shakes in the telling, and she kisses him for it. 

Thomas died alone, in a cold, dark place. Captain Flint is bloodstained and grim in her arms, and she loves him, she loves him, she loves him. 

1. 

Thomas gives her a ring, a household, the promise of a title, and a small bundle of letters that would ruin him utterly if they fell into the wrong hands. He places them in hers with terrifying ease. “Come live with me,” he says, grinning like he’s won, like she’s won, like they’ve triumphed over an enemy together, “and be my love.” 

A year into their marriage, Miranda throws the letters into the fire. 

2. 

James comes home after a two month voyage and kisses her clumsily at the door, purple shadows under his eyes. She manages to get him to take off his boots before he falls into bed, but he’s too exhausted to remember his belt, or his coat. He’s asleep almost as soon as he lies down, and she sits down beside him, feels a rush of affection so strong it feels like fury. 

Oh, she thinks, looking down at the wounded face she knows as well as her own. You are all I have in the world. 

The affection dims under the weight of the thought.

The fury never leaves her.