There’s no room for true privacy in the tiny flat, and though I’ve shared tighter quarters with these two lads, I’m not about to strip to my skin in the middle of the room and pretend as though my modesty is as easy to put out of sight as it was when we were stowed away together in the bowels of a xebec. I manage to change into fresh underthings on the other side of the screen without disrobing entirely, though I bang my elbow hard at least three times on three separate things and almost tip over like a falling tree when I catch my toe in a hole in my petticoat. When I tie my pockets around my waist, I check to make certain the list is still there. It is, though in the right, rather than the left where I placed it. Monty remains a terrible thief.
The stove is still warm from the night before, but nowhere near enough for it to do anything useful like boil water for coffee or thaw me under my jumper. I throw on a pair of logs and blow until they catch, then wrap myself in my brother’s coat before crouching with my back to the belly of the stove, waiting for the heat to become too much to sit so close and listening for chimes down the road, though I know from the light it’s still early. But it’s more comfortable to worry about being late to the meeting than to worry about the meeting itself.
There’s a creak behind me, first from the bed ropes, then the floorboards, and Percy comes around the screen, wrapped in a battered dressing gown that looks as though it was made in the previous century for a man half his height. His hair is puffed up on one side and flat on the other, and his face is heavy, like he’s still waking himself. “Good morning,” he says. I press a finger to my lips with a meaningful look at where Monty is still asleep, now spread over the entirety of the bed like he was dropped there from a great height.
Percy waves me away. “He’s lying on his good ear. He’d sleep through the end of the world.”
“Oh. Well then. Good morning. Better today?”
“Much.” He sits down cross-legged in front of the stove, his shoulders curled toward its warmth. “Why are you up so early? I thought your meeting wasn’t until eleven.”
“Just gathering my thoughts.” I resist the urge to reach into my pocket for my list again. “You?”
“My quartet is playing at a luncheon today, and I actually think I might make it through the entire concert without vomiting.”
“Oh. Good.” I don’t mean to sound upset, but it comes out with a bit of a wilting end. It isn’t that I expected him or Monty to come along with me—the most they could offer is silent encouragement from the back of the room. And I’ve always known I would be doing this alone. Everything I’ve done up to this point has been alone. But disappointment still knocks against my rib cage. “That’s all right.”
Percy looks up. “Hm?”
I had waited too long to say it, and also he hadn’t been apologizing for anything. I shove down that annoying disappointment, chiding it that it has no business being here. “Nothing.” I smile at him, then push myself to my feet. “Let me make you coffee before I go.”
I give myself an hour to walk to Saint Bart’s, though it’s only a mile, in addition to a half hour to sit anxiously in the hallway before the scheduled time of the appointment. Percy sees me off at the door with more affirming words but no hug or even a pat upon the shoulder. Thank God for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.
I’m already on the street, hood pulled up and hands jammed into my muff and trying to remember to breathe, when I hear the door to their building slam behind me. I turn as Monty stumbles down the stoop, trying to lace one of his boots while still moving forward and doing neither effectively.
“Sorry,” he calls as he staggers toward me. “I swear, I was going to be up on time, but I didn’t think you’d be leaving so goddamn early.”
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He gives up on the boot and jogs to catch me up, laces dragging in the mud. “I’m coming with you. Someone should make certain you don’t get arrested.” He’s still got that little tea cozy of a hat on, and he reaches up to pull it down so it’s covering his scars as much as possible without it impeding his vision. He notices me staring at it and asks, “Should I have worn a wig? This seems now like it might be a wig-wearing sort of gathering. I’ve got one upstairs—I can go fetch it. But it’s been growing mold since the fall, and I assumed that wasn’t the sort of impression—”
“Thank you,” I interrupt.
He pauses. “For not wearing my moldering wig?”
“Yes. Definitely for that. But thank you for coming.”
He scrubs his hands together and gives a short puff on them for warmth. “Percy would too, if he could. But he’s missed too many shows this week, and epilepsy is, in professional medical terms, a son of a bitch.”
I nearly laugh, but then he’ll be pleased with himself, and if I have to see those dimples this early, I might punch him.
We fall into step together—or rather, as into step as a pair can on these ragged roads. I dart around a puddle of what I’m fairly certain is piss gathering in the frozen rut of a wagon wheel, then duck around Monty so I’m not on his deaf side.
“You really think I’d let you do this alone, you goose?” he says as we walk. “It’s a lot to take on by yourself.”
“I’ve taken on a lot by myself,” I reply.
“I’m not saying you’re not capable. But it’s nice sometimes, to have someone to cheer you on. Metaphorically,” he adds quickly. “I promise I won’t do any actual cheering. Even though it’s tempting because of how much it would embarrass you.”
I glance sideways at him, and he looks at me at the same time. The corners of his mouth start to turn up in the sly triumph of having caught me in a moment of sentimentality, but I toss my head back so my hood shields my face before he can say anything. “That hat is idiotic.”
“I know,” he says. “Percy made it for me.”
“I didn’t know Percy knew how to knit.”
“He doesn’t,” Monty replies, and the brim of the hat falls in front of his eyes as though in emphasis.
“I’m glad you’ve got Percy,” I say.
“So am I.” As we cross into the square, the caving tenement houses open into gray sky. The light is a slick sheen over the muddy streets like the scales of a herring. “And don’t be cross with me for saying this, but I wish you had someone too. I worry about you.”
“You do not.”
“I do.” He dodges a stream of brown water dumped from a high window, and our shoulders bump. “Ask Perce. I wake up in the middle of the night in panic about my lonely sister up in Scotland.”
“I’m not lonely.”
“I didn’t think I was either.”
I shrug so my cloak falls closed in front of me. “Do you want me to marry Mr. Doyle because you think I need a man to protect me? Or complete me? I’ll pass on that, thank you very much.”
“No,” he says. “I just wish you had someone cheering for you all the time, because you deserve it.”
We stop on a street corner, waiting for a flock of sedan chairs to cross the road ahead of us, their footmen calling greetings and japes to each other as they pass. “Love has made you terribly soft, you know,” I say to him without looking.