Chapter Text
Woodhull leaves close to midnight.
Robert listens to the self-important jaunt of Abraham's steps down the stairs, a swift and light tread that bothers very little with silence as he goes, fading into obscurity as a cart rattles down the street after him. As to his purpose, Robert has no doubt it is a depraved one: backalley spying or whorehouse eavesdropping - nefarious pursuits that reek of underhanded desperation, stinking of the futility of one man against an empire of millions. It does not matter that he is Washington's spy, because here, caught in the cloying folds of a suffocated York City, he is alone.
Or so Robert tells himself. Woodhull has no allies, not in this town and certainly not in his boardinghouse, and so his decision to let the man down is an easy one. He himself was not made for conflict, and he was not made for war. He was made to skirt along the edges and keep to his faith; to weather this storm like any other that spilled over this land, and he will not break his mold simply because of one rogue agent.
It means nothing that they have two more games to play: it means nothing that Robert lies awake long into the night, staring at the wood-cracked ceiling and waiting for the familiar intrusion of Woodhull's footfalls to find their way up the stairs again. The war will end or the madman from Setauket will grow weary of failure and vacate his room for good - one or the other must come sooner or later, and patience is a virtue he is staunchly determined to uphold.
-
As it is, morning crawls back before anyone else does.
Robert dresses with some strange, stiff anxiety, readying for the day feeling like an actor playing a tired part for too long. He slept badly and brokenly, waking at the return of drunkards and soldiers, but not once hearing the former farmer. He drifts past the man's room forcing his air of usual apathy, pausing only to rap on the door twice. He knocks again with bated breath, ears piqued for the rustling of bedsheets or the scrawling of a quill and the shifting of papers, but there is nothing: absolutely nothing, and the silence seems deafening as he turns from the threshold and makes his way downstairs.
There are the common frequenters, there are new tenants and his father, but there is no Woodhull.
He busies himself with serving breakfast to his patrons, going about it with more formal rigidity than usual, putting it down to his poor rest. There is nothing among the conversation amidst the tavern that speaks of anything amiss. All he hears is lewd talk of women and the latest privateer's illegally shuffled goods from ransacked Whiggish homes in Connecticut, none of it meriting the attention he finds himself wanting to give. It's only when his father draws him aside that he realizes he has served several meals to the wrong lodgers - shoddy service that he himself would never tolerate.
"You keep looking to the door," his father says once they are alone in the kitchen. His gaze is furtive and subtle, and yet there is a knot to his brows that speaks of strain. "But I don't believe he's coming back."
Robert's mouth goes very dry, fighting to manage an unconcerned: "Who?"
It is a pretense of dispassion that his father won't tolerate, and an act that has him jerked gently by the shoulders once as if to wake a late sleeper. "You may play games with Mr. Woodhull, my son, but not with me. He's been out all hours with nothing but the clothes on his back - do you truly think he would leave that evidence of his unattended in the daylight?"
Robert swallows carefully, refusing to meet his father's eye. There is porridge cooking over the hearth for a hungry captain, but he finds he cannot move to keep it from burning. Samuel releases the heaviest of sighs and goes to finish the man's order for him, leaving his son frozen by the silverware. Woodhull could be bleeding in an alleyway, robbed of his coin and life and they wouldn't know it. He could be in a cold rebel cell, he could be on the scaffolding beneath a hanging tree - he could be anywhere dead or dying, and they would not know.
"Our erstwhile guest," Robert finally forces out between clenched teeth, "is probably traipsing around a fish market right now waiting for a decent catch of soldiers' talk - or he could be seeking to break his fast elsewhere. Perhaps he's finally lost his appetite for those eggs of his."
This time he catches his father's glance, and the disapproval in it stings as much as it did when he was young, bloodied and beaten by the village boys because he had refused to fight back. Samuel had been the one to break up the bullying; he had been the one to patch up his wounds, gentle in his ministrations but unable to understand why he had not defended himself. I won't be like them, Robert recalls choking out past the humiliated burn in his throat. I won't.
"I think we both know that boy will never lose that appetite," his father says sternly, but there is a sad gleam to his eye that burns too bright. "Dead or captured - I doubt they could tear it from him even then." And here he takes a pause, his shrewd glance making the manipulation clear before it comes, and yet Robert still finds it strikes as a blow when he hears: "If only I had raised a son with such conviction."
Having dealt his say, Samuel Townsend leaves Robert with the muffled sounds of the dining room without and the silence in his heart within, his pulse frigid in its beat. Magistrate Woodhull would disagree with his father, of that he is certain, and yet such rationalization makes the heaviness pressing over his chest all the worse. I used to be just like you, Woodhull had hissed in his ear, and it sickens me now.
The echo of those words grow louder as the day persists, and the memory pushes him to Abraham's empty room come the idle hours of the afternoon. He slides the key in and half-expects the man to be hunched over the desk with his schemes spread out beneath him and a laughable excuse on his tongue, but the chamber is still, nothing but still smoking ash spread in the hearth. Something in his gut aches too much like disappointment, but Robert pays the foolish sentiment no mind, shutting the door behind him carefully and observing, then, whatever may be left.
There is a stillness over the furnishings that makes him angry, and he wonders if he looks at a dead man's belongings - if he is folding up a dead man's nightshirt and opening a dead man's rucksack. It bothers him more than it ought to, and he begins to methodically pack away Woodhull's belongings, making some order out of the chaos he'd left it in. There are crumpled up papers scrawled with nonsense; a quill hastily set down near a teetering pot of ink. He lowers down to sit on the unmade bed to read through the discarded parchment, and a picture of the fool's late night activities begins to slowly piece itself together.
There is enough evidence here to hang a man, and Robert holds it in his hands once again, this proof of the desperation he'd heard pitched high in Woodhull's voice before he'd been told a frank no. It is incrimination held between his fingertips just like the browned egg; it is incrimination that is soon being fed to the flames of a newly stoked fire, soon as gone as the man who wrote them.
Below the creaking floorboards he can hear patrons gathering for supper, boisterous laughter and conversation meaningless to him. His father is clinking around with the pots, and the smell of chicken roasting on the spit is wafting in through the crack in the door. He waits until the embers of parchment have dwindled down to dust, and then takes every single one of Woodhull's personal effects and brings them to his own room.
He hides the man's secrets in a chest of his own, stuffing it down beneath linen and dust. Woodhull may not return, but others will: if not the law, then his family - his father, the wife Robert knows him to have. And if any one of them wishes for the truth, they will not get it from him.
-
"He did nothing but ask for it," Robert says two nights later, some hours after Cunningham's men have come and gone. They sacked Woodhull's room and found nothing. They questioned both Robert and his father and found nothing, but a lack of evidence has never been enough to keep one from the hanging rope. If anything, it's a reason for it - to smother ambiguity and save his Majesty's coffer another shilling. It was by sheer luck - negligence, perhaps - that they did not think to check the innkeeper's room or his son's. Samuel Townsend had put on such a startled show that it was difficult for even Robert to believe the old man had a stake in the spy's game in the first place, his pretense over the horror of a rebel spy in their midst nearly amusingly convincing. But here, surrounded by naught but the hush of midnight and the silence of a boardinghouse asleep, the truth in his grief can be seen on every wrinkle on his father's face.
"Then I do the same," his father says, resting wearily on his cane and staring into the last hearth still lit. He is silent while that light flickers weakly, and Robert gives his attention to his ale until he feels the weight of his father's gaze on his own, measuring and studying. For all the expertise he has in hiding from the world, there is very little he can obscure from those knowing eyes. Meaningfully, his father leans forward, something suspiciously like pride in his voice when he again speaks. "As do you."
Setting down his goblet, Robert stares at the draughts set in front of him, unable to keep himself from remembering the glinting danger in Woodhull's eye when he'd challenged him to their first match. "I do nothing but ask for the peace to run this business of ours," he says, smiling briefly and painfully in a dark slant of humor. "Or as near to peace as these troubled times will allow."
"I'm certain that's true, my boy," his father says far too indulgently, the tone treading mockery Robert would find insulting if he wasn't so damnably tired. "But that isn't quite what Woodhull believed. It isn't what I believe." His voice lowers a pitch as he makes to hobble into rising, his hand falling to Robert's shoulder to squeeze. "I expect you'll be wanting to move his belongings somewhere more inconspicuous - come morning I'll see what we can do about that."
Robert lets his lids drift shut as his father makes his way up the stairs, following the sound of his footsteps until the creaking of the bedstead heralds a quiet dark and deep. His eyes sting with he tells himself is weariness alone as he opens them to look at the vacant chair in front of him, the game between them sitting suspended. Reaching forward, he deliberates for a moment and then makes the turn he owes, putting an ordinary piece well in the grasp of Woodhull's king.
There, predictably, is no one there to take it.
It is nearly dawn by the time Robert stands, his aching head protesting at the movement, exhausted joints giving him no mercy. He wonders how cold the rebel prison is. He wonders if Woodhull is regretting his choices or if he is resolute in it. He wonders if the man is prepared to pay the price for treason - and he wonders if he himself could ever be prepared to do the same.
Watching the weak winter morning light pour over the tables, Robert listens to the city come alive again, waiting, still, for the door to open upon a face he doesn't know if he hopes or dreads to see. But there is nothing but the bustle of peddlers with their wares bustling over broken cobblestone melding with the early drills of the King's men, and so it is to an empty room that he turns his back on, his heart heavy and hollow to leave a worthy game unplayed.
-
Of Woodhull, nothing is heard for weeks.
The days pass in the dull monotone of winter, Christmas and Epiphany celebrations quiet and subdued in the occupied city. Robert himself finds he is trapped in what seems a persistent melancholy, missing his sisters and missing the windswept freedom of the Sound's shorelines. He and his father do not observe the festivities in accordance with their faith, but Samuel barters pork for the occasion, an indulgence that would have Friends at the Meeting lifting their nose at. Robert himself serves much and eats little, his appetite having been chased out with Woodhull. The man is never quite far from his thoughts busy as they are - every time the bitter wind howls he thinks of the shoddy walls of old sugar houses turned to prisons; with every regular stationed in the boarding house he feels his heart contract in disgust that was never quite present before. Even after each trace of Abraham's belongings are gone and stored in the family home at Oyster Bay (save for the most damning item of all, of which he keeps for himself; a small vial he still scoffs to think could be the fabled invisible ink), the memory of him is a lingering ghost that haunts. It would be easy - realistic, even - to think the man dead, but an Irish warden dispels that fear of Robert's one January evening.
He at first doesn't realize the soldier is a guard: he is in civilian clothing, ragged and careworn, the shadows under his eyes lined deep. He asks for a meal and board and Robert grants it to him, they the only two in the dining room at the hour of eight. His company hunches down in his jacket and shovels the weak broth and scraps of sow meat left, his stare soon growing glassy with drink. Robert pretends to be working on the ledger when watching him warily from the corners of his gaze, knowing full well how men can get when far in their cups, even those solitarily lost in their misery.
"Innkeeper," calls out the Irishman drunkenly as the night grows dark. His head is resting to the side on the table, and Robert rises to tug his dirtied plate out from under the man's hair with distaste. An unsteady hand pats the wood next to his emptied mug, a blatant enough request for more.
"I doubt you'd notice the difference," Robert says flatly, returning behind his counter with the dish and tankard both. "I'd find your bed were I you, sir."
The man is quiet for some time - so long that Robert thinks him asleep - but his chair soon scrapes against the floor and he rises, making a stumbling show of an advance. Robert doesn't look up even when work-weathered hands slam against his papers, shielding the comforting order of those numbers and letters from view. It's not the first time he'd dealt with an aggressor, but before Woodhull he always retreated to skulk away in the shadows. Now, for reasons he cannot yet explain, he does not.
"What gives you a pass, eh?" the drunkard asks, so close he can smell the stench of rum on his breath, a commodity he must have poured down his throat before coming here. "You're of an age to fight - for the crown, for the rebels, for yourself. Anything, anyone, and yet here you are, tucked in away from the horrors of this blasted war. Men I know would kill to be in your tidy little boots. I know I would."
Robert maintains a studied picture of blankness on his face, refusing to give the man an inch. Woodhull wasn't a soldier, but no, he is coming to believe that hadn't made him a coward. "Will that be all, sir? Or shall I let your room out to someone else?"
The soldier is so stiff and still that Robert believes him to be poised for an attack, but it never comes. The man laughs instead, thumping the counter once and then leaning back. It's only then that he notices the glint of gold at his ring finger, a well-made and simple band, engraved somewhat clumsily as another given name was inscribed over the original: Abraham in place of Thomas, Mary enjoining it. The man is a fool to be wearing it so deep in the city, but then so was its owner.
"Where did you get that?"
The question is sharper than he means it to be, but the man is so inebriated that he hardly seems to notice the edge. He follows Robert's gaze to the ring, spinning it about his finger with a swiftly distracted air of satisfaction. "From one of the poor sods I stand watch over. He didn't need it where he was going," the man states, no longer quite so threatening. "I'm going to sell it tomorrow and make a pretty pence for passage out of here. The sooner I leave these miserable colonies, all the better for-"
"You rob the dead, do you?" Robert interrupts him impatiently, every muscle in his frame tightly bound up, his stomach a sudden storm of dread. He shouldn't care. He doesn't care, damn him, but -
"No," one word - one word is all it is, and the weight of it is enough to make his knees tremble, his heartbeat pounding loud enough to nearly drown the man out as he goes on. "No, not yet, but soon, God willing. That one's got the jailer in a right mess - he's a spy, that's plain as day, but he's claiming the oyster major of Setauket set him up on such a mission. His father's got no idea what he's on about, the Major himself is missing, and the shite won't do us all a favor and die. Consideration these days is so scarce, y'see." He pauses, chuckling once without humor, staring into a point of space Robert cannot see, something haunted in that bleak regard. "...What a terrible time we've come to, waiting on men to keel over and leave the world. My mam would be right horrified, she would."
Throughout the course of his speech the man has gone from elated for his riches to miserable at the reminder of his acquiring of it, and Robert steps in the back but briefly to open a barrel of port. The guard has a conscience, and that - that, as Woodhull taught him, is something to be taken advantage of.
He fills up the man's mug this time with a richer brew and pours one for himself, earning what appears to be his intoxicated respect. "Please accept my apologies, sir. I'm meant to be partial in accordance with my faith, but I cannot but help to see how men like you are necessary in this conflict. To see the humanity amidst the struggle, why, I toast to that." Raising his glass, Robert gives the Irishman a tight-lipped smile, grateful indeed that it is likely he won't recall a whit of this encounter come morning. "Now tell me, where do you find your employment? I like to avoid the stench of such places, you see, and I am certain you more than understand that..."
-
The prison keeping Woodhull is halfway across York City from his own establishment, a ghost of a sugar house established north of the Commons used before the war to store dry goods. Robert's path traces the remnants of rebel fire that had scorched his prior lodgings and all of his belongings there, the grinding marks of canon retreat melding into the snow dirty with ash and waste. The air is brisk and more enlivening than its ever been, perhaps because of the enormity of the risk he is taking. Death has always lingered everywhere and anywhere in the shadows, but he is seeking it out openly now.
Moving through the streets with a bible held to his chest and his clothes as dark as a clergyman's, he is allowed to pass largely unmolested and unbothered, being a man of God the only shield worth pretending in a city like this. He is a liar, and likely a damned one, but not a soul he crosses believes it of him. His father had claimed shortly before his departure through the back end of the alley that he was doing no more than following his inner light: he was seeking the truth even if it was through dishonesty, and any true Friend would forgive him for a transgression taken in the name of their faith.
Robert thought the old man's reasoning horse shite then and thinks it horse shite now, but the decision remains his own: he'd needed no God or no father to tell him what to do after the drunken guard had told him the whole of it, and that much he has made peace with.
He is permitted through the guarded gates merely on his word, and it is all he can do to keep from retching once within the confines of the prison. The stench is unbearable, an unholy mixture of unwashed bodies and sickness, madness and blood. The man he is taken to is a detestable character, slouched back with the disgust for his position and his prisoners written plainly enough on his pinched face.
"What could a man of God," he asks with a mean laugh around his words, "possibly want in a pit of Hell?"
"I am charged," Robert begins with humbleness not his own, "by magistrate Richard Woodhull to bring his son the Lord's counsel. I am certain he told you of this wish before departing on his last visit."
The one named Yates raises a single brow, looking unperturbed otherwise. "Woodhull said nothing about a reverend. He said his son needed God, but-"
"He meant he needed me," Robert cuts in, and at least in this he knows he does not lie. "I met Magistrate Woodhull on his return back to Setauket, and he was concerned-" Lowering his voice and bowing his head, his hand shifts over the back of the unassuming bible in his grasp. His mother's: the only belonging of hers he'd allowed himself to keep after she was gone, and by God he hopes she is looking out for him now. "He was concerned, sir, that to read the man his last rites would be prudent. His son's health, I am told, is fragile."
Yates scrutinizes him for a long moment, likely seeing the holes gaping wide open in such a sad tale, but too burdened with other duties, Robert prays desperately, think into it further. He waves a hand towards the stairs below, the incline of which is steep, the darkness at the foot brooking no light. The man looks all too smug to relinquish him to it, and Robert understands that this mercy isn't mercy at all - it is the desire to see a sheep tossed down to the wolves.
Robert turns his back on him, finding he can stand no longer to look at that insufferable smirk, and descends into the devil's den before he can change his own mind.
If he thought the odor above overpowering, this is worse: it is not just the scent of frozen filth, but of death and the dying, of defeat and the rancor of life at it's end. It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the dark of the cells, but once they do, he sees only hoards of shadows, men huddled in scattered groups or sulking on their own, one rocking back and forth on the haunches of his feet, his hands pressed over his ears. The cold is devouring even for one fully clothed, and Robert thinks it no wonder that the Irishman had been scarred so. He, strictly adhering to the tenets of his faith, had never largely considered the concept of Hell the warden claimed this place to be, but this, he imagines, is the closest he will get to such a netherworld in the land of the living.
A hand struggles to grip at his sleeve, and Robert stills the urge to flinch in his bones. At his side is no more than a boy, hardly old enough to grow a beard. He has a bruise on his jaw and a tooth knocked out in the front, a swollen eye and a skewed smile. "Could you read me a psalm, sir? It's dark in here, see, and they took away my own Bible, the text of which I am faithfully devoted, so-"
"Oh, give it up, Weaver. Pick the man's pockets and be done with it, little good though it'll do you here," a voice rough with sick calls out from the back of the room, and Robert knows it. For the first time since leaving the illusory safety of the boardinghouse, he falters. It is a foolish thing he has done, but no one and nothing can save him now.
Drawing a hard loaf of bread from his pocket, he hands it to the boy, knowing full well the eyes of every prisoner have latched onto that morsel of food like the guts of a pheasant to the nose of a bloodhound. Guilt is churning in his stomach, a frequent enough occurrence now that he cleanly ignores it and steps back, allowing the riot he's all but incited to run its course. The loaf is snatched from the boy's grasp and passed between at least ten pairs of hands before a fight breaks out, all gathered in a crowd of violence save for one. Robert turns and he is there, the tormentor of his conscience before him, a slight shivering wasted mess, the recognition not on the weary lines of his scruffy face but in the glazed light of his eyes. He is alive: he is alive, and it takes longer than Robert likes to find speech again.
"Mr. Woodhull - we've met once before," he says lowly, tone full of implication and doublemeaning only the man before him will understand if he has wits enough. "Through your father, I believe, long back in Oyster Bay. I've come on his behalf."
His index finger taps at the cover to the bible still held to his chest once, taking Woodhull's singular attention to it. The man seems to barely be able to speak, and Robert is struck to see streaks of wetness cutting through the grime on his cheeks, an uncomfortably vulnerable show of bewilderment creasing at his brows. He is nearly afraid Woodhull will give them both up here and now - he does not look well, and hasn’t weakness always lent itself badly to subtlety?
"...Robert?" Woodhull croaks out, so hoarse that he prays the guard intervening in the squabbling behind them did not hear. Robert takes himself a step closer, some measure of pleading, he hopes, visible enough on his neutrally arranged features. Don't dare to crumble yet.
"I'm afraid you're mistaken," he says quietly and carefully, knowing at last that here - in this ungodly cesspool where the consequences of man's flaws are cast in light for him to see - he has found some measure of the truth, as his father had said he would. In the tremble of Woodhull's hands and the dark bruises beneath his eyes is the clearest sign he has set sight on yet: God would not sanction this war; the divine did not mean for such suffering. Creation was not made for this.
"It's Culper." Robert nearly whispers the words, but the slackness to Woodhull's jaw all but confirms he has not gone unheard. He's read what Woodhull left behind between the bound pages of his law books - he's scoured the scrawled text for sense, he's studied everything between the lines and unraveled what he could of this man's web thread by thread. There had been a name written on one dog-eared page of a treatise with a mark of a question beside it, and Robert knew then it was his. Drawing a breath before giving the decision that perhaps has already ruined him, his pointed gaze finds Woodhull and for once, he is brave.
"Culper Junior," he murmurs, "as you wished it."
Washington, surely, would shudder at the name being spoken in an avenue so public, but the din around them swallows the confession out. Woodhull seems, for once in his accursed life, lost for words, some strangled noise making its way out of a throat sounding parched for water, thickened with emotion that would ignite pity in any living being's soul. A rustle by Robert's shoulder saves them both, and a guard - one, maybe, who'd replaced the fled Irishman - steps in between them, eying Woodhull with a healthy dose of mistrust.
"Sir - I don't know what Yates was thinking, letting you on down here, but-"
"I've come to give Mr. Woodhull spiritual counsel, as per magistrate Woodhull's request," Robert informs him, gesturing to the shaking creature before them both. "Isn't that right, sir?"
Woodhull gathers what is left of his wits and stands straighter, nodding furiously along with the game. "I know the reverend," he confirms, breaking off to cough into his dirtied sleeve. "I - I'd like to speak with him, if we could be given a space quieter than this."
The guard visibly hesitates, but Robert catches at his sleeve before his doubts can go further, guiding the man to turn with him away from Woodhull. So very lowly, as if wanting to shield the prisoner away from the uglier truth, he proposes: "Should he confess to his crimes, you and I could both stand to reap the reward."
It is not what a devoted man of God would say, but corruption has planted its seeds everywhere, and the guard knows it. Deliberating it for the second it likely takes to imagine a fat pouch of coin in his hand, he nods sharply, jerking his head towards an entryway in the back. Leading them both to it, Robert enters with the rasp of Woodhull's breath and the drag of his feet at his back. The guard departs with an incline of his head, his gaze shifting surreptitiously between the potential makers of his fortune before the rickety door shuts behind him. The room is sparse and chilled, the shackles on the wall speaking of a far less savory use for its space otherwise. Through the walls of stone seeps the winter wind, though Woodhull's shoulders don't hunch against it - save for the tremors wracking that frame of his, he seems all but numb to its severity. A silence falls, broken only by the dwindling disputes outside. Woodhull appears to attempt to speak and then stop himself several times, approaching and then falling back, his hand pressed up to his face and then raking back through his hair. Robert stands still all the while, having never been one to make the first play.
"Robert," Abraham breathes out, "what - what is this?"
He knows very little of what to say now that he is here, and words, for a prolonged moment, are at a loss on his tongue. He knows what he came here to decide, but not what he came to do.
"I'd appreciate if you did not call me that here," he says, looking up towards the singular window perched high amid the rafters, for he thinks the sight may pain him less. "As I already run the risk of being questioned and recognized."
"You run the risk-" Woodhull begins to echo, but then the man is on him in a second, his quivering fingers gripping at the sleeves of his coat, jerking him forward and back again with surprising force for one so threadbare. The bible drops from his startled hands, its pages splaying out on the near frozen ground between them. "Robert, why the hell-"
He breaks off in a torrent of coughs, his shoulders heaving and his harsh grasp loosening as he turns his face away, hacking until he is left shaking and gasping for breath. Robert understands very little of the force that guides him to keep Woodhull steady, but his hands have found the man's shoulders, bearing what weight he cannot.
"Stop," Robert hisses more failed speech stumbles on Woodhull's tongue, all nothing more than broken wheezing. "Stop."
He follows Woodhull as he sinks to the floor in a crouch, fingers that are much thinner than he recalls clutching at the sleeves to his coat, his ragged face turned to the side until the fit ebbs. Woodhull heaves in as much breath as he can take, and it's then when Robert takes out a skein of water from the folds of his jacket, holding out a shred of mercy to a sick fool whose hands tremble too much to hold it steady. Water trickles onto his thin garments and onto the dirty ground, a waste until Robert swats those crooked digits away and saves them both the trouble.
"Don't be an idiot," he says quietly yet firmly, and the stubborn defiance in Woodhull's eyes fades into something he cannot read as he tips the pouch back to the man's lips, dropping the gaze affixed upon him shortly after. Woodhull drinks like he's never before seen water, and Robert allows him to until all he'd filled from the muddy well this morning is gone. Even when he lowers the skein away the space between them seems no less suffocating; he can almost imagine the draft is Woodhull's breath against his cheek, and the fingers at his arm tighten into a grip Robert thinks he'd have little luck pulling away from even if he wished to. Woodhull is staring, but Robert does not return the regard, afraid of what he'll see there if he does.
"Robert," Woodhull says lowly, in that same tone he'd used in Robert's own bedroom; desperation just barely within control. "I'm going to ask you again - what the hell is this?"
"You know what this is," Robert returns brusquely, disliking the rawness to his own voice that betrays the flat edge he'd prefer to keep. "I've come to hear your confession."
Abe's grasp on his arms jerks Robert closer, so near that their foreheads meet. "No," Abe insists, his palm reaching for the back of Robert's head, not seeming to care that the touch is met with visible bristling. "No, no more games, remember? I think you've come to give me yours."
He has toiled upon the middle ground for too long.
He knows it. His father knows it. Abe knows it, and the world around them does too. Robert has always counted one of his own virtues as being a man of logic and sense; of sound thought and pragmatic principles, but those very morals have failed him in this instance, and worse, failed the man in loose chains before him.
"I've come to do what you wished for me to do. Your little spy game; I'll cast my lot and my life into it, I'll be your man in New York City: that is my confession, and now you have heard it. Is that not enough for you?" Robert shoves at Abraham’s shoulders as he hisses the words out, but Woodhull's own grip refuses to relent, proving to be as obstinate as the man himself. He is staring still, and Robert's gaze strays to those mad, overbright eyes, finding it difficult to look away. Woodhull has changed, and not just by the new sharpness of an already lean face - if the wardens thought his stint in this miserable place would have broken Abraham, they are wrong. Instead they have wrought themselves something much more dangerous; a wounded animal not willing to go down without a fight.
"Why?" Woodhull demands quietly when their mutual study of one another is broken, leaving Robert to wonder what he could have so foolishly left open on his features for the other man to see.
"Why?" Robert starts impatiently, "I've told you-"
"No, no - you haven't, all right?" Woodhull's voice has taken on a new rawness, revealing weakness that Robert no longer wishes to use against him. "I know what changed my mind, Robert, and that was blood on my hands. Now what's changed yours?"
Robert ceases his attempts in trying to push Woodhull, his hands growing still at the cuffs of his filthy shirt. The answer to Woodhull's question is all around them; it is in the grime of the floors and the packed chamber of shivering, starving men to their left - it is in the tattered shreds of this boy who once played at being a man, who once played at being a spy. Robert thinks that game of his is over; that the pretender has at last, in a stroke of brilliant irony, become what he feigned to be.
"Blood," Robert says thickly, despairing of the waver in his voice Woodhull will surely hear, "on my hands."
Woodhull laughs hollowly, perhaps imagining awful events that could have transpired in his absence to fuel a pacifist so: a father's death, a sister's, a cousin, a child - when it is likely the last person he may expect. "Whose?"
"Yours."
"Mine." Again Woodhull laughs, this time unable to comprehend the truth. Abe's hands shift to his face, taking it between his two palms regardless of how Robert stiffens, his fingers going to the man's bony wrists. It is a desperate, plying grip Woodhull has him in, his chains clinking with the movement, creaking with the very reminder of where they are.
"I," Woodhull says very slowly, shaking him by the slightest as if to drive the point within, "am not dead, Robert. I've kept up my cover here to come back for you - do you understand what I have done to-"
"You'd not be here at all," Robert cuts in, "if I had agreed to your terms in the first place."
That is a fact neither of them can dispute, but Woodhull visibly does not blame him for it. What Robert reads in the silence is understanding, and what he sees in the tired pits of the other man's eyes is a soft kind of sympathy. That frightens him, perhaps, far more than any recrimination would, but before he can pull himself out of Woodhull's hold, those hands grip him nearer. I used to be just like you.
"You're here now, Townsend," Abraham says, and beneath the pads of his fingers, that chilled skin turns warm. The corner of Woodhull's mouth lifts by just the slightest, the smile touched by a sadness Robert can't reach. "I'd say that's what matters now, wouldn't you?"
The answer isn't an easy one, not when Woodhull could just as likely die here as he could one day walk free: Robert could leave this place today and never see him again, living with the haunting assurance for the rest of his life that he was an instrumental piece in one man's downfall. That, in part, is why he does not outright shove him away when the touch comes.
The frigid hands on his face begin to stroke over the bones in his cheek and trace the line of his jaw, and Robert's thumb presses to the underside of Woodhull's wrist likely to the point of pain, a warning, a question. He wants to believe the man is delirious to dare caress him so, but awareness is present on every line of his face, a concentrated crease to his brow. Robert allows him this, having no strength within him to refuse one who lives now on borrowed time, his body kept rigid and still until one of Woodhull's fingers crosses over his lips. Robert's gaze cuts to him so sharply that the touch falls away, leaving his stomach lurching not unpleasantly without knowing the reason why.
"I don't know what it is you're starved for, Woodhull," Robert says, his voice strange and hoarse. "But you'll not get it from me."
Woodhull is quiet, watching him, searching doubtlessly for signs of disgust or revulsion when he will find none of that, and it does not escape Robert's notice that there is still a palm cupping his neck, thumb warmly positioned to brush over his pulse point. He has a wife at home. A child too he assumes, but Robert has little idea why his mind is suddenly supplying these paltry facts. Temptation is a terrible thing, and he has done his best to avoid those sinful talons every day of his devout existence, but Woodhull is dragging him into a world in which there are no scruples or boundaries or limits. This - the hands on his face, the thumb at his mouth - is just yet another inch of darkness cast upon the shadow Abraham is engulfing him in. And it will, admittedly, be a long while before he questions why that darkness feels so much like light.
"All right," Woodhull gives him, his voice hushed, placating, as if it's comfort he means to grant. Comfort to not his redeemer but the very source of his damnation, and a persistent lump rises in Robert's throat, all too miserably aware of his own regret, so much that he chokes out a hollow laugh when Abraham carries on with his assurances, voice pitched low. "All right, Robert. All right."
The man moves to take his hands away, and yet Robert catches his palm between his own, cradling the chilled skin there without an ounce of self-awareness as to what it is he is doing. What could he say? What could he possibly say that would last in this barren place, that would hold any miniscule value of promise when he is gone? Fumbling with his words and avoiding the gaze on him that suddenly burns, Robert draws an unsteady breath and releases it, staying like that for what feels a very long time. Chains clink outside the door, some men groaning and others jeering, curses and low conversation heard over their own silence. They must have minutes left, at best, seconds at worst. The warden would not allow such solitude to go on a suspicious length, no matter how high the promise of coin in the end.
"I'll return here," Robert finally brings himself to say, feeling the shiver in Abe's lithe fingertips as they grip onto his, his knuckles surely bonier than they were when he was brought here first. "I'll bring you food, water, anything that you-"
"No," Abe is quick to insist, "No, you'll not come back here again, not when I know Yates must have his eye on you as it is. My wife, Mary, she-" He cuts off abruptly, his features wavering in something like grief so soft that Robert wonders if he truly does love her - if this woman in Setauket was indeed worth it. A stone settles in his stomach then, a weighty one, and he does not understand it. "She sends provisions every week without fail. You needn't worry there."
There is partial dishonesty etched across his face, and he can guess easily enough what it is. Whatever food and clothing received is not given to Abraham; it is likely sold to the highest bidding privateer, those proceeds then spent as the man upstairs pleases. For all Robert wants to dispute Abe's insistence, he sees the potential wisdom in it. If the jailer himself makes a profit from Abraham's existence, it is at least a hollow excuse to keep him alive if the chill of winter doesn't take him first.
"I wasn't worried." Robert lies through his teeth, attempting to place distance between them that is no longer there. "I-"
"Robert," he hears Abe reason even if his gaze has fallen away, disheartened in a way he cannot put to speech. It may very well be that he will never see Woodhull again after this: it may be that his own contrariety has as good as condemned a man to death, and he never thought guilt could weigh so heavily on any soul. "Listen to me - once I'm freed from this place, I will come and find you. Do you understand?"
Robert does not say yes; he will not lie to him in this, but it is the murmur of authoritative voices out the door that has him spurring into action, raising those hands he clasps until a fierce and furious kiss is given to cold knuckles. Later, he may regret that, but action here might just speak louder than word. "Live." The command is given on a broken breath, and one look at his face confirms Abraham is too shocked by the impulsive contact to speak at all. "Live through this, and I will be waiting. You have my word on that, Abraham, you-" He moves to stumble to his feet when the sound of the unbarring of the door sounds, taking the Bible in one hand and Abe's wrist in the other. The man sways a little when they are upright and onto him, his shackled hands trapped between them at Robert's chest. Abe's buries his face into his neck for the briefest of moments, his scruff tickling skin and the brush of lips tingling at his throat.
"I will have my eyes and ears open," Robert whispers close to his ear, steadying him and placing the Bible between them. This is what the guard will see: a man on the verge of a confession, though he will never know whose. "And you and I will see this war through."
He only catches a glimpse of Woodhull before the warden looms in the doorway, but there is a light in his eyes, then: the sort that burns in his memory the second he sees it. Hope. It is hope, and Robert prays to the as-yet silent God above that it will be enough to save both their souls.