#flintbarlow

dastaan - e - om shanti om / flintmiranda

Sneak Peek

James McGraw and Lady Miranda Hamilton arrive on New Providence Island on a Tuesday in March of 1706. Somehow, their voyage has been free of pirates, sickness, or any of the many disasters that can trouble a ship at sea; James had half expected something to go wrong aboard the merchant ship Blue Concord, whose captain seemed half-drunk and his crew only a touch better. His decision to go to Nassau solidifies with every nautical mile they sail, for if this is what it is like to sail aboard a merchant ship, he has no taste for it.

He still misses the navy like an amputated limb, misses the routine and the discipline, the feeling of belonging and the idea that he—the grandson of a fisherman and the son of a carpenter’s mate with no blood or name to speak of—might make something of himself.

But that life is gone.

He and Miranda cling to one another, to their love, weeping and raging in turn over what has happened to Thomas. One particularly bad day, he breaks two chairs in their cabin, flinging them into a wall as Miranda shouts at him that they made the right choice; trying to break into Bethlem would only get him killed or worse. When he settles a little, James repairs the chairs. His father learned his skills at his own father’s knee, and James first rated in the navy as a carpenter’s mate…and he does not want to waste what funds Miranda could steal from her father-in-law by paying Blue Concord’s weasel of a captain for their repair.

An hour after they arrive in Nassau, they see two women kissing in the street. No one comments. A little while later, he sees two men together, pirates—he assumes—and again, no one comments. There are others, even groups of three in various combinations, going on about their lives happily and together…freely. By the end of the first day, the crushing realization hits: in this place, in the place they fought to come to, he could have been together with Thomas and Miranda openly.

He thought her dead… He's proved (gladly) wrong when she comes to free him and Thomas from their imprisonment in Savannah and to burn the plantation down.

For the: ✦ @ julybreakbingoevent - I Thought You Were Dead [ALT 6] 6x6 Card