SilverFlint and other things

«You? Who are you that I ought to pay you any mind?» ~ XXX. 🏴‍☠️~

For those of you who live to see tomorrow… know that you had a choice to see the truth and you let yourselves be convinced otherwise.

It isn’t utility that’s behind his investment in me nor necessity, nor dependency. This much is clear to me now. I have earned his respect. I have earned his trust. I have his true friendship…

Can that be enough and there still be trust between us?

If you leave him alive long enough, he’s going to make you pay for it. The crown does not divide. It cannot be shared. You know it. Do you see it now? Do you see it?

The number of times I have followed you blindly, backed you with the men blindly, put men in the fucking ground, good men, friends, because you said, “I know the way. Don’t ask me how. Just do as I say.” I may not have understood it, I may not have supported it, but I did it! And God damn it, right now you’re going to return the favor! We will find a way to put it all back together with whatever we have left at our disposal. But do not ask me to choose between a war and a wife. I do not think you’re going to like the answer. Whatever must be done to secure Madi’s release, I’m going to do it. I do not expect your understanding, but I demand your support. As my partner, as my friend. Do I have it?

- I’m sorry. I need you to know that I did everything I could to keep her safe. I… I don’t expect that to mean anything. - It wasn’t your fault.

I did not want this. Flint is my friend, but I know what he is. I have no illusions about it. But for all the dangers he presents, for all his offenses the one thing he’s never done is force me to choose between him and you. That, you did. But it isn’t too late to find a way to remedy it. You made a terrible mistake and you paid a terrible price. But we’re at war and you’re an asset. Despite what’s gone on, you are my friend. And the men out there have had their pound of flesh. And our men Billy… I could walk out there and tell them the sky is red and they’d believe me. That’s the power you’ve given me.

- He said the reason Flint’s fleet never got warning about the barricade in the harbor wasn’t because Mr. Featherstone didn’t relay it… it wasn’t because Max intercepted it… he said it was because you never sent it in the first place. - And they all believed him. - I don’t think that anyone actually believed it. You weren’t indicted based on the facts, or our suspicions of your motives. He just said it. I think no one had the balls to defy him.

The closer we get to the end of this journey, the more the contradictions will accumulate… confusing issues we once thought were clear. I suppose the good news is that’s how we’ll know we’re finally getting somewhere interesting.

We’ve come this far because when Flint and I are of the same mind, there’s no obstacle we’ve yet encountered that we cannot surmount. I don’t know why that is. He doesn’t know why it is. But it is. To elevate one of us over the other, even as a fiction, seems to me to be tempting fate in a most dangerous way… I know that Billy’s been looking for a way to remove Flint from our lives for months now. I’m sure that’s somewhere at the root of this. And I don’t like having him conscripting me into his cause without me even having a say.

I once thought that to lead men in this world, to be liked was just as good as feared, and that may very well be true. But to be both liked and feared all at once is an entirely different state of being… in which, I believe, at this moment, I exist alone. The men need to know they’re in good favor with me. They need it, and there is nothing they won’t do to make sure they have it.

- You said Anne is alive, did you not? I would argue as long as that is true, there’s a chance, however remote, that she will frustrate your efforts to send me off to my death. - Out of curiosity, how would she go about doing that? - Well, I have no idea. Everything and anything in her power, I imagine, up to and including walking out in the middle of the road ahead of us to be run over by your horses in the hope of slowing you down for even a moment.

My father was a tailor in Leeds. As was his father and his father’s father. Time was if a man on the Avondale Road asked where he might find the finest clothes in northern England, he was pointed toward the shop of a man named Rackham. Then the men who sell wool decide they’d prefer not to compete with the men who imported fine cotton. And as the men who sell wool have the ears of the men who make laws, an embargo is enacted to increase profits and calico disappears. And my father’s business that he inherited from his father and his father’s father begins to wither and die. And my father suffers the compound shame of financial failure seen through the eyes of his son and descended into drink. I’d sit beside him as a boy at the Sunday service as he shouted at the pastor, at the altar– at anyone who’d listen, really– at the injustice of it all. And I’d put my arm over his shoulder as the insults began, help carry him out of the church. God, the insults. At his funeral, our neighbors were kind enough to whisper them rather than call them out loud. So, I set to work, determined to rebuild what had been taken away. I was 13 years old. but I was determined… until a man arrived at my door claiming to hold debts belonging to my father. Debts accumulated as my father drank. Debts he claimed that now belonged to me. Debts I could not possibly have hoped to repay. Debts over which this man would have seen me imprisoned– imprisoned in a place where the debts would have been discharged only through hard labor. Hard labor with no wages, working at –wait for it– the production of textiles.

I suspect I’ll be leaving shortly. Don’t despair. Some other poor bastard’ll take my place soon enough. I wish I could assure you that he would be as generous as I with his scraps. Either way, you mustn’t settle for whatever refuse finds its way into this cell. There’s a whole world out there that every so often rewards ambition. Mark my words. Today the crumbs, tomorrow the loaf. Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie.

I cannot look weak. I cannot feel weak. I cannot be weak. Not in front of my men. Not in front of your men. Not at all. For some time now, I have been holding my entire world together with both hands, keeping my men in line, seeing to their needs, and the only way that endures is if I look the part. And I cannot look the part while being poked and prodded or while drooling through an opium haze saying who the fuck knows what. So I will endure this the way I have been enduring it.

You’re new to this, being responsible for men’s lives. But I know what the woman who leads this place is facing right now. The weight of her people’s welfare on her shoulders. She will not let us leave this place alive. She simply won’t permit it. We’ll all face certain death with our own kind of lie. Billy’s is that he can fight his way out of it. Yours is that you can talk your way past it. But for me… I don’t know that I have any more lies left in me.