“Which is . . . remind me.”
“Strong spirits and loose women.”
“Sounds instead like it’s going to be weak wine with dinner and handling yourself in your bedroom after.”
“No shame in that. If the Good Lord didn’t want men to play with themselves, we’d have hooks for hands. Still, I’d rather not be keeping myself company from now until next September. God, this is going to be a disaster.” I look to him, hoping for some sort of despair that is at least on a comparable level with mine—I thought we were all operating under the same understanding that this year was to be for Percy and me to do as we pleased before he goes to school and I load stones in my pockets and throw myself into the ocean—but instead he’s looking aggravatingly pleased. “Hold on, are you keen on all this cultural shite?”
“I’m not . . . not keen.” And then he gives me a smile that I think is supposed to be apologetic but instead looks very, very keen.
“No, no, no, you have to be on my side about this! Lockwood is tyranny and oppression and all that! Don’t be seduced away by his promises of poetry and symphonies and—Dear Lord, am I to be subjected to music for the entirety of our Tour?”
“Absolutely you will. And the only thing you will hate more than listening to Lockwood’s selected music will be listening to me talk about said music. Sometimes I’ll talk to Lockwood about music and you will hate it. You’re going to have to listen to me and Lockwood using words like atonal and chromatic scale and cadenza.”
“Et tu?”
“Aw, look at you using your Latin vocabulary. Eton wasn’t a waste in its entirety.”
“That was Latin and history, so take that—I’m highly educated.” I turn my face to his—or, more accurately, up to his. Percy’s taller than most, and I’m unencumbered with excessive stature, so though I swear there was a time we were the same height, it’s ancient history—he’s got the aerial advantage over me these days. Most men do, and some ladies as well—Felicity’s nearly as tall as I am, which is mortifying.
Percy tucks a piece of my collar that’s been blown asunder back into place, his fingers brushing the bare skin along my neck for a second. “What did you think this year was going to be? Gambling halls and cathouses the whole while? You will grow weary of that, you know. Fornication with strangers in piss-rank alleyways loses its bittersweet charm with time.”
“I suppose I thought it was going to be you and me.”
“Fornicating in alleyways?”
“No, you dunce, but . . . the two of us. Doing what we wanted.” Perfecting my phrasing without betraying my heart is starting to feel like a complicated dance. “Together.”
“Still will be.”
“Yes, but I mean, the last year before you go to law school and I start working with my father and we won’t be seeing each other so much.”
“Yes. Law school.” Percy turns his face to the coastline again, a thin-fingered breeze rising off the water and pulling a few strands free from the ribbon tying off his queue. He’s been talking for months about cutting his hair short so it’s easier to get under a wig, but I’ve made it clear I will murder him if he does, for I quite adore that unruly mop of his.
I press my face into his shoulder to make him pay attention to me again and give a theatrical moan. “But bloody Lockwood and his bloody cultural outings have wrecked that.”
Percy twists a lock of my hair between his fingers, a soft smile teasing his lips. My heart kicks again, so hard I have to catch my breath. It’s unfair that I can nearly always tell when someone’s making eyes at me, except when it comes to Percy, as we’ve always been rather hands-on with each other. Impossible now, after so long, to ask him not to be without admitting why. Can’t seal up a conversation with a casual Oh, by the way, could you perhaps not touch me the way you always have because each time it puts fresh splinters in my heart? Particularly when what I’d really like to say is Oh, by the way, could you please keep touching me, and perhaps do it all the time, and while we’re at it, would you like to take off all your clothes and climb in bed? They’re both weighted alike.
He gives a tug on my hair. “I have an idea of how we will survive the year. We shall pretend that we are pirates—”
“Oh, I love this.”
“—storming some sort of city fortress. Sacking it for gold. Like we used to.”
“Remind me of your pirate alias.”
“Captain Two Tooth the Terrible.”
“Threatening.”
“I was six, I only had about two teeth at the time. And it’s Captain. Captain Two Tooth the Terrible.”
“Pardon me, Captain.”
“So insubordinate. I should have you locked in the brig.”
As the packet skips forward with its nose to France, we talk for a while, and then we don’t, and then we do again, and I am reminded of how exquisitely easy friendship with Percy is, equal parts comfortable silence and never lacking things to say to each other.
Or rather it was easy, until I ruined it by losing my bleeding mind every time he does that thing where he tips his head to the side when he smiles.
We’re still there, holding court at the prow, when the sailors begin to scamper about the deck and, high above us, the bell peals, a low, somber note in continuum. Passengers emerge from below and cluster at the rails, moths drawn to the fool’s gold shine of the approaching coastline.
Percy rests his chin on top of my head, his hands on my shoulders as we too turn our faces to the shore. “Did you know—” he says.
“Oh, are we playing the did you know game?”
“Did you know this year is not going to be a disaster?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It is not going to be a disaster,” he repeats overtop of me, “because it is you and I and the Continent and not even Lockwood or your father can wreck it completely. I promise.”
He nudges the side of my head with his nose until I consent to look up at him, then does that tipped-head smile again, and I swear to God it’s so adorable I forget my own damn name.
“France on the horizon, Captain,” I say.
“Steel thyself, mate,” he replies.
Paris
4
Before the end of our first month in Paris, the violent biblical deaths we are seeing immortalized in paintings and hung in an endless procession of private collections are beginning to look rather appealing.
In spite of Percy’s assurance otherwise, the days are a succession of dull disasters. I have lived most of my life as a devotee of the philosophy that a man should not see two sevens in one day, but most mornings Lockwood sends Sinclair in to wake me hours before I want to be woken. I am then stuffed into suitable attire and shoved into the dining room of our French apartments, where I’m forced to sit through a civilized breakfast and not put my head down on my eggs or stab my bear-leader in the eye with the cutlery.
While Felicity stays behind at the apartments, Lockwood takes Percy and me out most afternoons, sometimes for meaningless strolls to soak up the city like a stain, sometimes for formal gatherings, sometimes for visits to various sites that are meant to be intellectually stimulating and instead have me considering feigning some sort of debilitating illness just to be allowed to withdraw. The galleries all start to look the same—even the Louvre Palace, still full of art the French royal family left there when they abandoned it for Versailles, doesn’t hold my attention for long. The collectors themselves are the worst—most of them my father’s friends, all rich men and variations on him. Conversing with them makes me tense and twitchy, waiting for someone to mock me if I say the wrong thing.