“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.
Even Paris itself is a cruel mistress—it’s a shithole of a place, with more people crammed into it than seems possible and truly incredible traffic. Twice as many carriages and handcarts and sedans crowd the streets as in London, and there are no footpaths to speak of. The buildings are taller than in London as well, the lanes weaving them together narrow, their stones weathered and slick. Sewage falls from the windows as chamber pots are tossed, and the gutters fester with it, great mastiff dogs roaming feral through them.
But Lockwood is aggravatingly delighted by the filthy enchantment of it all, and everyone else in our little band seems to be enjoying themselves with all this art and culture and the seeing of historical sights, and I start to wonder if perhaps I’m just too stupid to do the same.
Three weeks in, Percy and I still haven’t managed to escape the eye of our tyrant cicerone for a night out on our own. There’s hardly an evening we aren’t dragged to readings and concerts and even the goddamn opera (though not the theater, which Lockwood tells us is breeding ground for sodomites and fops, and as such sounds more to my taste), which, paired with the early mornings, leave me too worn down to work up much excitement for midnight outings. The first nocturnal excursion we’re blessedly excused from is a scientific lecture Lockwood badgers us to attend, entitled “The Synthetic Panacea: An Alchemical Hypothesis,” but Percy pleads an afternoon headache and I plead being entirely occupied with watching him have said headache, and Lockwood seems to trust Percy’s word over mine.
Instead of our usual communal meal in the dining room, we all sup at intervals. Percy and I take the meal in his room and then lie tangled upon his bed, drowsy and languid as the sky turns bruise-colored with sunset and smoke. The first time I rise all evening is to see if I can bully one of the staff into giving me some whiskey for his ague and my enjoyment. The lanterns haven’t been lit yet, and the hallway is so shadowy that I nearly smash into Felicity, who is pressed up against the wall with her shoes in her hand, wearing a plain Brunswick with the hood pulled up, like a bandit come to lift the silver.
I’ve done enough sneaking out in my lifetime to know precisely what she’s up to.
She starts when she sees me, and clutches her boots to her chest. “What are you doing?” she hisses.
“I could ask you the same,” I reply, far louder than is needed, and she flails a hand. In the sitting room, I hear Lockwood clear his throat. “Trying to escape undetected, are we?”
“Please don’t tell.”
“Are you meeting a boy? Or perhaps a man? Or have you been passing your nights as one of those dancing girls with the scarlet garters?”
“If you say one word to Lockwood,” she says, her face scrunched up, “I’ll tell him it was you who drank that bottle of port that he missed last week.”
Now it’s my turn to scrunch up my face, which isn’t a good look for me. Felicity crosses her arms, and I cross mine, and we regard each other through the shadows, stalemated. Blackmail is aggravating in normal circumstances, but far worse when it’s coming from a younger sister.
“Fine, I’ll keep quiet,” I say.
Felicity smiles, eyebrows sloping to a positively nefarious angle. “Lovely. Now be a good lad and go distract Lockwood for me so he won’t hear the door. Perhaps ask him to tell you something long and loud about Gothic architecture.”