“Please don’t go to Holland,” I say.
His mouth tightens, and he turns away from me again. Against the sky, the stars crown him, marking the edges of his silhouette like he is a constellation of himself. “What am I supposed to do, Monty?”
“Just . . . just don’t! Go back home and tell your aunt and uncle you won’t. Or run away—stay abroad or go to university and get a town house in Manchester and forget them.”
“That wouldn’t—”
“Why wouldn’t that work? Why can’t you just go?”
“Well, think it through. My uncle won’t fund a life beyond an institution. And the way I look, most places won’t employ me without his reference. And I can’t live alone for . . . obvious reasons. Running isn’t an option. Not alone, anyway.” He looks over at me quickly, then away again.
The smoldering end of my cigar crumbles, a fleet of falling stars between my fingers before they’re extinguished against the slate. “I think Mateu Robles is going to have something that will help stop your . . . You just haven’t found it yet! But we will, and then you’ll be better, and then you won’t have to leave. Don’t you want that?”
“I’d rather it didn’t matter. It’s not good, being ill, but I live with it. I wish my family cared for me enough to love me still. Not in spite of it. Or only if it went away. Maybe if they hadn’t already had to deal with me being dark-skinned . . .” He presses his fingers into his chin, then shakes his head a few times. “I don’t know, doesn’t matter. Can’t change it. Any of it.”
“I could say something to your uncle.”
“No.”
“Why not? If he won’t listen to you—”
“I know you think you’re being helpful when you say things like that, and when you defend me, and I appreciate it, I really do, but please, don’t. I don’t need you to stand up for me—I can do that.”
“But you don’t—”
“You’re right, sometimes I don’t, because I’m not the light-skinned son of an earl so I haven’t the luxury of talking back to everyone who speaks ill of me. But I don’t need you to rescue me.”
“I’m sorry.” It comes out soft and meek, like the bleat of a lamb.
Percy looks over at me, his face veiled by the twilight and impossible to read. Then he folds his hand into a fist and presses it against my knee, like a slowed-down punch. “Come here.”
“I’m here,” I say, so quiet I almost don’t hear myself.
“Lie down with me.”
My heart hurtles, beating like frantic wings against the base of my throat. I stub out my rolled tobacco and toss it off the roof, then stretch out beside him. My knees crack rather spectacularly as I go. The tiles are still sun-warmed, and I can feel the heat through my coat, all the way to my skin.
My head’s higher than his, but we’re close enough that I can see the freckles beneath his eyes. If I had to pick a favorite part of Percy’s face—which would be impossible, really, but if held at gunpoint and forced to make a selection—it would be that small star-map across his skin. A part of him it feels as though no one else but me is ever close enough to see.
Percy shifts his weight on the tiles, sliding toward me in a way that I will myself not to be fooled into thinking is intentional. “Maybe someday you will be able to look at me and the first thing you think of won’t be watching me have a convulsive fit.”
“I don’t think of that,” I say, though that’s a lie.
He must know it too, because he says, “It’s all right. I suspect it’s a hard thing to forget.”
I press my head backward against the shingles, arching my neck. “At least you’ll never have to run an estate.” I realize what I’ve said as soon as it’s left my mouth, and I fumble. “Wait. No, I’m sorry, that was . . . Damnation. Sorry. That was a horrible thing to say.”
“Is managing your father’s estate truly the worst thing that could happen to you?”
“Aside from the obvious things like famine and pestilence and losing my looks? Yes.”
“So maybe it doesn’t seem like the best thing right now, fine. But someday you’re going to want to settle down, and when you do, you’ll have a home. And income and a title. You won’t want for much.”
“That’s not really what troubles me about it.”
“So, what is it?”
I feel suddenly like an even greater ass than before for all the while I’ve spent moaning to him about my champagne problems while he’s being shipped off to a sanatorium, and yet here he is, lying beside me and pretending our futures are comparable. “Nothing. You’re right, I’m very lucky.”
“I didn’t say lucky. I said you won’t want.”
When I look over at him, he’s still got his eyes on the sky. We’re the inverse of each other, I realize, Percy desperately wanting to go home and not feeling he can, me wanting to be anywhere else but with nowhere to go. Perhaps he can’t understand it, the way that house will always be haunted for me, even if my father were gone from it. I can’t imagine living in it for the rest of my life, throwing parties in its parlors and filling the cabinets with my papers, all the while ignoring the dark spot on the dining room floor that’s never washed away, where I tore my chin open when my father knocked me to the ground with a single well-swung fist; or the hearth that chipped my tooth when I was thrown into it. There are bodies buried beneath the flagstones of my parents’ estate, and some graves never green.
I flick a scale of tobacco off my breeches. “Lucky me. Someday I will have everything my father does. Perhaps I’ll even have a son of my own I can beat the shit out of.”
“If I ever see your father again, I swear to God, I’m going to knock him out.”
“Aw, Perce, that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I mean it.”
“Hypothetically defending my honor. I’m touched.” I close my eyes and press the heels of my hands against them until my vision spots. “I shouldn’t complain.”
“You aren’t complaining.” He lets his head tip sideways so it brushes my shoulder. Not quite resting there. But not quite not, either. “You aren’t like your father. You know that, don’t you?”
“Course I am. A more imbecilic and disappointing version.”
“Don’t say that.”
“All boys are their fathers. Looking at your parents is akin to seeing the future, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” He smiles. “Perhaps that’s how I’ll know mine someday, then.”
“Better than a fiddle.”
He raises his head. “You’re nothing like your father, Monty. For a start, you’re far more decent than he is.”
I’m not sure how, after all the terrible things I’ve done, he can possibly mean that. “You might be the only person left on earth who thinks me decent.”
Between us, I feel his knuckles brush mine. Perhaps it’s by chance, but it feels more like a question, and when I spread my fingers in answer, his hand slides into mine. “Then everyone else doesn’t know you.”
Barcelona
14