“No. No cure. None of the treatments have worked.”
“Oh. Well, that’s . . . too bad.” His mouth pulls tight, like he’s going to say something to correct me, but then he just nods, and I want to turn to sand and slip between the boards. “So you, um, you have these . . .”
“Fits.”
“Yes. All right, yes. That.”
“You can say it.”
I really don’t think I can. “How long have they . . . ? How long has this been happening?”
“Every few months—”
“No, I mean, when did it start?”
Percy is still turned to the wall, and before he answers, he twists even farther from me. His face is almost out of sight. “Right before you came home from Eton.”
“Eton?” I gape at him. “Percy, that was two years ago. You’ve been ill for two years and you never said anything to me about it?”
“No one knows, all right? Only my family and some of our staff.”
“When were you going to tell me?”
“I was sort of hoping I’d never have to. I’ve been lucky so far.”
“Lucky?” I’ve shifted from meek to spitting-with-fury on the other side of a second. “You kept this secret from me for two years, Percy, two goddamn years. How could you not tell me?”
At last, he raises his head. “Are you really trying to make this about you?”
“I want to know!”
“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”
“Yes, because you have to. Because I had to watch—”
“Well, I’m sorry you had to watch.” The venom rises in his voice suddenly. “How hard for you to have to watch.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He clenches his hands into fists around the blankets, face set, then says, “Fine, you want to know why? Because at the end of this year, I’m not going to law school, I’m going into an asylum.”
We stare at each other. It takes a long moment for me to grasp what he’s said—it’s so horrid and utterly unbelievable that I’m certain I must have heard wrong. “You’re . . . what?”
“There’s a place in Holland. A sanatorium. For the . . .” He squeezes his eyes tight and finishes very carefully. “For the insane.”
I don’t know what to say. I’ve heard stories of Bedlam in London—black, poisonous rumors no one speaks of in polite company. Asylums aren’t hospitals or spas, they aren’t somewhere you go to get well. They’re somewhere you go after everything else has been tried. Somewhere you’re hidden away and forgotten, bound to your bed and starved and emptied of your blood. They’re somewhere you go to die. If Percy goes into a sanatorium, he’ll never come home. We won’t see each other again.
My chest is so tight I can hardly get words out. “But you’re not insane” is all I manage to say.
“Perhaps I am. This isn’t ordinary, is it?” He tips his chin, staring down with his cheeks sucked in.
“Is that what you want? Go to Holland and die in a madhouse?”
He winces a bit, and I wish at once I hadn’t spoken so bluntly, but I don’t retreat from it.
“Of course not.”
“Is this your uncle, then? Is it his idea to send you away?” I am starting to speak so fast I can hardly understand myself, grasping frantically at any thread of a way to fix this. You can’t, I am thinking. You can’t be ill because I need you and you can’t go away to die in some asylum because what am I supposed to do without you? “You have to tell them no. Tell them you won’t. You can’t go. Just tell them you won’t!”
“I haven’t got a choice. My family won’t care for me any longer.”
“Then go somewhere else—anywhere!”
“How?” he snaps. “And how could you possibly understand any of this? If anyone found out, my whole family would suffer for it, and I’m not going to weigh them down any more than I already have.” He’s kneading the blanket against his legs, veins in his hands standing out like bright threads beneath his skin. “My aunt thinks that this is God’s way of punishing me. The family’s bastard Negro boy has convulsive fits—it’s appropriate. She still won’t be disabused of the notion that I’m possessed by the devil, and my uncle keeps telling me that I need to stop being hysterical and overcome it.”
He tips his head backward, and when the lantern light catches his eyes, I realize he’s crying. Or rather, he’s trying very hard not to cry, which is even worse. I don’t have a clue of what to do. I feel like a loon for sitting still and not doing anything to comfort him, but my limbs hardly feel as though they belong to me. I can’t remember how to touch him.
Percy keeps talking, his face skyward. “My little cousin still won’t sit near me because he thinks it’s catching. He’s got to be coaxed into being in the same room. It took a year to find a valet who was willing to stay on after he knew he’d have to serve a dark-skinned boy who had convulsions without warning. I have been cupped by savage barbers and exorcised and blessed and I haven’t eaten meat in a year and a bloody half and it’s not going away, so I have to. Monty, are you listening to me?”
I am, but I’m not hearing it. Or it’s not going through my brain. I’m hearing without understanding a word. This feels like a nightmare, a dream of being buried alive that I thrash against but can’t wake from, and everything he says is another spadeful of dirt pressing down on my chest. All this pain in him I’ve never noticed.
“Monty.”
“Yes,” I say faintly. “Yes, I’m listening.”
He takes a long breath, one hand pressed to his forehead. “So let’s find Lockwood and see if we can convince him to let us keep traveling. We’ll see the Continent and have all the good times we planned and then I’ll go to Holland and—”
I stand up, so fast my foot catches on the blanket and I stumble. “No. No, just . . . just stop, Percy, stop.” He looks up at me, his mouth tight to stop the trembling. I feel like crying too—feel like falling down into the bed next to him and sobbing. I’m shaking and dizzy, emotion distilled into physical symptoms, and all I manage to say is “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you’re a wreck! Complete shambles. I’ve spent years chasing you around, making certain you didn’t drink yourself to death or pass out in a gutter or slit your own wrists—”
I’m right there on the edge of tears. I can feel them round and hot and clogging my throat, but I am not going to cry.
“—and I know you’ve had a rough go, with your father and being thrown out of school, but you’ve not been yourself. Not for a while. And I couldn’t have you making this worse. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t.”
Another spade of earth hits me. “But you didn’t even give me a chance,” I say. My voice comes out very, very small. “I thought we told each other everything.”
“This isn’t about us.”
“It’s always going to be about us.”
“No, you want this to be about you. You care about what happens to me because of what that would mean for you. You are the only thing that matters to you.”