Scipio surveys Felicity over the rim of his mug, then asks suddenly, “You want a job? We could use a surgeon on board. Gangrene got our last one at the end of the winter.”
“Hard not to see the irony in that,” I remark.
Felicity laughs, though he looks earnest. “Good jape.”
“None intended,” Scipio replies.
“Your men would take a woman among them? That’s hardly appropriate for either party.”
“Plenty of women take to sea. My mother sailed the African coast with her father when she was young. Have you heard of Grace O’Malley? Or Calico Jack? He had two ladies aboard with him.”
“And they both would have swung with him if they hadn’t pled their bellies,” Felicity finishes. “Yes, I’ve heard that story.”
“Difference being, if you all make good on your bargain, we won’t be pirates long. You wouldn’t swing.”
She laughs again. “I can’t be a surgeon! I’ve had no training.”
“You’d learn.”
“On you and your men.”
“We’ll all have to strive to injure ourselves often for your educational benefit.”
She looks astonished—an expression Felicity so rarely wears that it’s rather alarming. “I will . . .” she starts, but instead of finishing, she says as she stands, “I was going to make breakfast.”
Scipio stands too, trailing her into the kitchen. “Just think it over, Miss Montague,” I hear him say as they go. “You needn’t decide until we reach England. The boys are useless, but I’d take you on.”
I would have done a dramatic drop of my face into my hands at the news that we’re going home, had I not recently parted ways with a good piece of that selfsame face. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen at the end of all this, but somehow it wasn’t a return home. Or at least not so soon. I don’t know what Percy’s going to do—if he’ll come with us, or if he’s still going to Holland. In spite of how much we’ve been together since we quit Venice, I haven’t been well enough or alone with him long enough to have a proper talk.
Scipio and Felicity make busy in the kitchen as I sit on the terra-cotta step into the courtyard—truly the only benefit of my near-death experience is that it has temporarily disqualified me from all chores. Soft conversation floats through the open window, first just Scipio and Felicity trading light japes about women aboard a pirate ship, then Percy’s voice as he joins them. Scipio relays the same message to him as he did to us—the leaving news. My heart kicks.
There are footsteps on the walk behind me, and I shuffle out of the way, but it’s Percy, half dressed and still wild-haired from bed.
“Good morning, darling,” I say as he sinks down at my side, his bare toes curling around the scrubbed fingers of grass growing up between the stones. “Ack, don’t sit on that side of me. Can’t hear anything.” It pricks a strange vein of grief inside me to say it aloud. I wonder if it will ever stop being strange, that empty whistling on one side of my head, or the way anything but conversation had face-to-face is near impossible to decipher. Felicity says I’ll grow accustomed to it in time, though she also keeps sneaking up on my deaf side and scaring the shit out of me.
“Forgot. Sorry.” Percy slides from the step so that he’s sitting in front of me instead, knees pulled up to his chest and arms looped around them.
I resist the urge to scratch at the torn-up side of my face. Burns, as it turns out, get beastly itchy once the pain retreats.
“Don’t touch it,” he says suddenly.
“I’m not!”
“You were thinking about it.”
I sit on my hands. Consider wrinkling my nose at him as well, though I’m afraid it might fell me. “This is going to significantly hinder my future romantic prospects.”
“Not necessarily.”
“It will certainly discourage initial approach. I’m going to have to start relying on nothing but my personality. Thank God my dimples survived.”
“Thank God. Because you’ve nothing else in your favor. And how do you know what it looks like? You can’t see it.”
“I have a sense, as it’s my head, and I can tell it’s going to be a great ugly scar no one will ever be able to look away from.”
“It’s not.”
“Not what?”
“Not ugly.” He catches my chin in his hand as I turn away from him and tips my face up. I can feel the sun upon my skin like a second set of fingers looped with his. He traces my jawline with his thumb, then smiles widely, his head canting to the side. “You’re still gorgeous, you know.”
There’s a clatter from the kitchen, a tin plate dropped on stone, and Percy and I both jump. His hand falls from my face.
“Are you steady enough to go walking?” he asks.
I’ve been rather shaky on my feet since I parted ways with my hearing—apparently those two things are related in a way only Felicity understands. “If we go slowly. Anywhere in particular you care to walk to?”
“I’ve an idea, if you’ll trust me.”
“I trust you,” I say, and he pulls me to my feet, my hand in his.
Percy leads me on through town to the edge of the cliffs, where we take the steep, snaking path down to the beach. We don’t say much beyond the occasional good-natured moan about what a son of a bitch this mountain is going to be to climb back up. I stay on his right side, and he keeps one hand at my elbow, resting there but not quite touching, and ready to grab me if I pitch over.
From a level eye with the sea, the Aegean is almost too radiant to be real, the vivid turquoise of the speckles on a robin’s egg. There’s not a soul about this stretch of sand but us—no one else daft enough to make the trek down the cliffs, I suppose—so Percy and I both take off our jackets and waistcoats and leave them to crease in a heap on the beach. I make a show of kicking off my shoes in a high arc and letting them lie where they land, which makes Percy laugh. He’s much more civilized about pulling his off and then bundling the socks into the toes before he walks into the sea. I follow, skirting the edges of the waves and dancing out of the way each time one gets too near.
“Come into the water,” Percy calls from where he’s standing up to his knees in the sea.
“No, thanks. I’m wounded, remember?”
“Come on, you coward. I’m not going to make you swim.”
He stumbles back up the beach toward me, sand caving under his feet as the waves take it, and makes a snatch for my arm. I dodge, so he gets the back of my shirt instead and drags me after him until the sea and I meet and I am forced to wet my toes. I make to wriggle from his grasp, but a wave of dizziness knocks me asunder. I stumble, but Percy catches me, his hands suddenly harboring my waist while I grab a handful of his shirt. Our faces swoop close.
“Steady on,” he says.
I blink hard a few times, trying to clear my head. “I’m ready for these spells to be over so I can get on with being partly deaf.”
“Perhaps you can buy a handsome ear trumpet once you get home.”
“And then this time next year, everyone will be carrying one.”