Chapter 14: Home Waters
James had the impression the answer was so obvious it barely seemed worth giving.
"I don’t know if there’s a knowing to it."
She had been watching the water. When she spoke, she turned only her head to glimpse him over her shoulder.
Her tone was slightly melancholic, "I’ve spent my whole life moving from one situation to the next before anyone bothered asking what I wanted. This is the first time nobody cares about telling me what I should be."
James watched her eyes drop a little, "Aye, but most people freeze when the choice finally comes. Doesn’t matter how long they’ve wanted one."
"I don’t have time to freeze."
Her fingers rested on the rail. "Else someone will make the decision for me. I just made mine first."
James stopped at that
It was better than most explanations he’d heard lately, including several of his own. That made him slightly curious about her past.
"Port Royal, aye? What was it like, growin’ up there?"
Meg sighed, "I was born there. A year after the sea decided it didn’t like where the town was and pushed most of it underwater."
She said it without drama, like she was pointing out a landmark.
"There were plenty of people there without family, money and a name. I was one of them."
"That’s a hard start."
"It’s the only start I had."
She looked down at the rail beneath her hands. "I had nothing to compare it to until later. Becoming what I became wasn’t somebody forcing me into it, no matter how much people like that version of the story."
James found himself watching her hands instead of her face. They were small, yet incredibly steady.
Meg continued, "It was the first real decision anyone ever let me make. Everywhere else, where I was born and what I was born as had already made the important choices for me. When this one showed up, I took it."
"And you don’t regret taking it."
She took a moment.
Then she shrugged, "It’s not a bad life. I choose who I work with, most of the time. I know how to avoid trouble, most of the time. And I like the work more than people expect me to admit."
Her voice never changed, which somehow made the admission feel more honest.
"The important part is that it’s my life now. I didn’t always have that."
James let that sit.
There was a simplicity to the way she saw things. She had taken necessity and built a way of living around it. The result was less like philosophy and more like common sense.
Eventually, James asked, one elbow resting on the rail, "If you could walk away from all of it. Go to Britain, to a quiet house in a quiet street. No one askin’ what an extra shilling gets them. Would you do it?"
She didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, she looked back toward the water.
For a few moments, she said nothing.
The wind pushed a strand of hair across her face. She ignored it. Her eyes stayed on the horizon, distant but focused, as though she were looking for the answer somewhere beyond the ship.
"No," she said at last. "I don’t think I would."
"No hesitation in that answer."
"There was hesitation. You just couldn’t see it from where you were standing."
She turned and met his eyes.
"Britain might be easier. It probably would be. But I was born here."
James had expected a different answer than that. A dry joke, perhaps, or dismissal. Instead, it felt like she’d already spent years thinking about it.
"I know what this place actually is instead of the story men invent after a few rums. It’s loud. It’s filthy. It’s crowded with more kinds of people than anywhere else I’ve ever heard of."
A corner of her mouth twitched. "And most of them don’t care what you are or what you choose to do with yourself, provided you’re not stealing from them at the moment."
James snorted at that.
That got the faintest hint of a smile out of her.
She continued, "I’d rather be exactly who I am, in somewhere like this than live in a quiet and stiff British hellhole, surrounded by people who think discussing the weather counts as a personality."
She glanced back toward the sea. "Now that just sounds miserable, being told who you are by people who’ve never had to survive a single day of your life."
James suspected she’d rather be shot.
"Can’t really argue with that."
"You could."
One corner of her mouth twitched.
"You’d lose."
James huffed a laugh through his nose.
"Terrifying thought."
Meg raised an eyebrow. "It should be."
James shook his head and looked back toward the water.
Her words kept turning over in his head even after she’d stopped speaking. The conversation was over, but the conclusion kept working at him.
He’d already drowned once.
Not literally this time.
The old life was what came to mind. The military dispatches. Watching his mother fade slowly while his father followed far too quickly. Returning to a flat that had stopped feeling like home the moment another man’s coat appeared in the closet.
None of it had gone away.
The loss. The anger. The things he’d never get back.
He just wasn’t carrying them everywhere anymore.
What he had now was different.
What he had now was different.
He had a ship that seemed to know how he moved before he did.
A quartermaster who spent half his day thinking James was an idiot and the other half making sure he didn’t accidentally prove him right.
A navigator no sane man would trust with a purse, a bottle, or a daughter, yet somehow the bastard could always find his way home.
Somewhere belowdecks, a boy was probably telling anyone willing to listen that he’d seen a sea serpent. By now, it had likely gained another head.
A surgeon who was almost always drinking and never quite drunk. James had stopped trying to work out where the limit was. The important thing was that the man could still put someone back together afterward.
And a crew who had hauled him away from a rail the night before while laughing the entire time.
For reasons that remained deeply suspicious, they seemed to like him.
Thirty-nine men whose names he knew.
Forty-one he had learned too late.
That left him with a problem.
Fortunately, problems were something he understood.
The sea ahead offered no answers. He watched it anyway.
It looked exactly like what it was.
More sea.
Meg bumped his ribs with her elbow.
The gesture was gentle enough that it took him a second to realize she’d done it on purpose.
"You’ve gone somewhere."
When he looked over, she was quietly watching him.
He realized he’d been staring out to sea for the better part of a minute.
"That’s an interesting look for someone listening to a story about Port Royal."
"Is it?"
"It is if half of it seems to be happening in your head."
He grinned and pushed away from the rail.
"Hard not to wander off a bit when a beautiful woman starts telling you about herself."
Meg didn’t answer.
James felt that was a victory.
He raised a hand without looking back and headed for the wheel. The deck shifted gently beneath his boots.
The Rose was still a day away from Nassau, wherever Nassau ultimately decided to put him.
He hadn’t solved that problem yet.
Not quite.
He knew there would be decisions waiting when they arrived. Plans to make, risks to weigh, questions he still couldn’t answer.
But as he crossed the deck, he realized something important.
For the first time since he’d opened his eyes in another man’s body, the future didn’t look quite so impossible.
