It’s several days before I take my first proper watch, nestled into a nook where I can see the stairs, but just out of sight and wishing there was something stronger than wine in the barrels sheltering me. The last drink I had was at the opera house, and I’m feeling the want of it like an itch in my lungs. Gray light creeps down the stairs from the upper decks, fogged by the dust that hovers in the air. On the deck above me, the sailors are shouting to each other. A bell begins to toll.
There’s a shuffle on the other side of the hold, and when I raise my head, Percy is picking his way through the crates toward me, his hair wound into a knot with a scrap of sailing rope and his bare shirtsleeves drooping around his elbows.
“Hallo, darling,” I say as he slides down against the wall beside me. The lacquer pulls at his shirt and drags it up so that I catch a flash of his bare stomach. I look away quickly, though I’d prefer to openly ogle. There’s not a thing on God’s green earth that has the power to disarm me quite like two inches of Percy’s skin. “You’re meant to be sleeping, you know. Don’t waste my time.”
“Can’t sleep. Got tired of lying in the dark. Do you want to? I’ll stay up.”
“No, I think I need to start pulling my weight as a watchman.”
“Mind if I sit up with you, then?” He leans down to rest his head upon my shoulder, but sits up again before I can get excited that we’re cuddling up. “You smell terrible.”
I laugh, and Percy shushes me with a meaningful look in Felicity’s direction. “Thank you, darling.” It is, by conservative estimate, several thousand degrees, stuffed up here in the hold. We’ve both shed our duds nearly down to our stockings and I’m still soaked through.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“Better. Didn’t throw up my supper, so I suppose that’s progress.”
“How’s your chin?” He takes my face in his hand and tips it into the dawn light tumbling down the stairway.
“Not the worst hit I’ve ever taken.” I smile at him, but he doesn’t return it.
His thumb brushes the bruise. “I wish I could do something.”
“Well, stop rubbing it, for a start.”
“I mean about your father.”
“Oh.” I drop my eyes, heart suddenly feeling heavy and swollen inside me. “Me too.”
“What are you going to do about him?”
What was I going to do? I had been doing my best to avoid looking head-on at my future, with my father breathing down my neck for the next few years. Even when I took over the estate in earnest, he’d still find ways to creep into my life like spiders rising up through the floorboards—I’d be living in his house, sleeping in his bed and sitting at his desk, and married off to a woman he’d chosen for me. That last one cankered inside me. I’d spend the rest of my life lonely, cruising Mulberry Garden for purchasable companionship and pining for the boy with dark freckles beneath his eyes. I can see them now, in that sliver of moonlight, as he tips his head.
“I suppose I’ll learn all about estate management and try to guard my face.” I scrub my hands through my hair, then add with more levity, “And then perhaps I’ll pay a sly call to Sinjon Westfall from my Eton days and see if he remembers me.” I look over for Percy’s smile, but instead his nose wrinkles. “What’s that for?”
“What’s what for?”
“That face.”
“I didn’t make a face.”
“You did, just now when I mentioned Sinjon. There, you did it again.”
He claps his hands over his eyes. “Stop mentioning him, then.”
“Why are you sour on poor Sinjon? You didn’t know him.”
“Felt like I did—you wrote me all those letters with him prominently featured.”
“Not that many.”
“Every week—”
“For a fortnight, maybe—”
“No, it was longer. Far longer.”
“Was not.”
“‘Dear Percy, I saw this boy across the dining hall with a dimple in his chin.’ ‘Dear Percy, his name is Sinjon and he has eyes so big and blue you could drown in them.’ ‘Dear Percy, blue-eyed Sinjon put his hand on my knee in the library and I thought I might lose consciousness.’”
“Well, that’s not at all what happened. I was the one who made the first approach, and it was certainly not his knee I put my hand on. Why waste time on the knees when he had far, far better—”
“Please stop.”
I glance over at him. He’s looking rather sincerely distressed, his face pulled up and his gaze pained. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. Tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell!”
“I’m going to pester you until you tell me.”
“How much longer do you think we’ve got before we reach France?”
“That was the worst attempt at a subject change I’ve ever heard.”
“Worth a try.”
“A poor one.”
“Your hair looks nice.”
“Better, but a lie.”
“No, I like it long and scraggly like this.”
“Long and scraggly. What a charmer you are.”
“I just meant the rugged look suits you.”
“You’re avoiding the question.” He groans, and I nudge his shoulder with my nose. “Go on, tell me.”
“Fine.” He rubs his temples, a bit of a sheepish smile starting about his mouth. “Those letters . . . wrecked me.”
That was not what I had been expecting. Too long or too mushy or Dear God, Monty, use less descriptors, how many shades of blue can be contained in a lad’s dreamy eyes? perhaps. But not that. “What?”
“Completely lost my mind. Half the time I couldn’t read them, just tossed them in the fire.”
“They weren’t that gooey.”
“Oh, they were plenty. You were moony.”
“So maybe I was. Why did that bother you?”
“Why do you think?” Percy looks at me quick, like he didn’t mean to say it and is checking for my reaction, then away just as fast. A slow flush crawls up his neck, and he scrubs a hand over the back, like it might be wiped away. When he speaks again, his tone is nearer to reverence, a voice for saints and sacred places. “Go on, you must know by now.”
My heart makes a reckless vault, flinging itself against the base of my throat so that it’s suddenly hard to breathe around it. I’m desperate not to let all my stupid hope fill the silence between us but it’s filtering in anyway, like water running through the canyons that longing has spent years carving. “I don’t . . . I don’t think I dare.”
“I kissed you in the music hall.”
“I kissed you.”
“You were drunk.”
“So were you. And you stopped it.”
“You told me it didn’t mean anything to you. That’s why I stopped it.”
When our eyes meet, his mouth rises into a smile, almost as though he can’t help himself, and then I’m smiling too, and then his goes wider, and it seems we might be caught in an infinite loop of beaming at each other like fools. And I wouldn’t mind it a bit.
“What are we arguing about?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”