by Mackenzi Lee
The truth is that Percy has always been important to me, long before I fell so hard for him there was an audible crash. It’s only lately that his knee bumping mine under a narrow pub table leaves me fumbling for words. A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.
If the whole of England were sinking into the sea and I had the only boat with a seat for a single person more, I’d save Percy. And if he’d already drowned, I probably wouldn’t save anyone. Probably there wouldn’t be much point in me going forward either. Though I would hang on because I’d likely wash up in France, and from what I remember from the summer my family spent there when Felicity and I were young, there are some lovely women in France. Some handsome boys as well, many of whom wear their breeches very tight, though I wasn’t clear where I stood on that when I was eleven.
As we sail across the Channel toward Calais, this is what I’m thinking of—Percy and me and England sinking into the sea behind us, and also French lads and their tight breeches and, zounds, I can’t wait to get to Paris. I am also maybe a tiny bit drunk. I nicked a bottle of gin from a bar before we left Dover, and Percy and I have been passing it between us for the last hour. There are still a few swallows left.
I haven’t seen Felicity since we boarded the packet, nor much of Lockwood either—he spent most of our time in Dover as we waited for a storm to pass fussing over luggage and customs and correspondence. Then, once the boat left the harbor, our bear-leader became occupied with being sick over the rail, and we became occupied with avoiding him, and those two activities were perfectly compatible.
Beyond the prow of the packet, the water and the sky are the same ghostly gray, but through the fog I can make out the first signs of the port winking at us—a link of golden lights gilding the invisible coastline like a chain. The waves are rough, and side by side, with our elbows upon the rail, Percy and I keep bumping shoulders. When we strike a rough patch and he nearly loses his footing, I seize the chance to grab him by the hand and haul him upright again. I have become a veritable scholar in seemingly innocent ploys to get his skin against mine.
It’s the first time we’ve been properly alone together since Cheshire, and I’ve spent the whole while filling him in on the tyrannical restraints placed upon us by Lockwood and my father. Percy listens with his fists stacked atop each other on the railing and his chin resting upon them. When I’m finished, he wordlessly hands me the gin bottle. I snatch it with the plan to drain it, only to find he’s beat me to it. “Bastard.” He laughs, and I pitch the bottle into the gray water, where it bobs for a moment before the bow of the packet sucks it under. “How is it that we’ve landed the only bear-leader for hire who’s entirely opposed to the true purpose of the Tour?”
“Which is . . . remind me.”
“Strong spirits and loose women.”
“Sounds instead like it’s going to be weak wine with dinner and handling yourself in your bedroom after.”
“No shame in that. If the Good Lord didn’t want men to play with themselves, we’d have hooks for hands. Still, I’d rather not be keeping myself company from now until next September. God, this is going to be a disaster.” I look to him, hoping for some sort of despair that is at least on a comparable level with mine—I thought we were all operating under the same understanding that this year was to be for Percy and me to do as we pleased before he goes to school and I load stones in my pockets and throw myself into the ocean—but instead he’s looking aggravatingly pleased. “Hold on, are you keen on all this cultural shite?”
“I’m not . . . not keen.” And then he gives me a smile that I think is supposed to be apologetic but instead looks very, very keen.
“No, no, no, you have to be on my side about this! Lockwood is tyranny and oppression and all that! Don’t be seduced away by his promises of poetry and symphonies and—Dear Lord, am I to be subjected to music for the entirety of our Tour?”
“Absolutely you will. And the only thing you will hate more than listening to Lockwood’s selected music will be listening to me talk about said music. Sometimes I’ll talk to Lockwood about music and you will hate it. You’re going to have to listen to me and Lockwood using words like atonal and chromatic scale and cadenza.”
“Et tu?”
“Aw, look at you using your Latin vocabulary. Eton wasn’t a waste in its entirety.”
“That was Latin and history, so take that—I’m highly educated.” I turn my face to his—or, more accurately, up to his. Percy’s taller than most, and I’m unencumbered with excessive stature, so though I swear there was a time we were the same height, it’s ancient history—he’s got the aerial advantage over me these days. Most men do, and some ladies as well—Felicity’s nearly as tall as I am, which is mortifying.
Percy tucks a piece of my collar that’s been blown asunder back into place, his fingers brushing the bare skin along my neck for a second. “What did you think this year was going to be? Gambling halls and cathouses the whole while? You will grow weary of that, you know. Fornication with strangers in piss-rank alleyways loses its bittersweet charm with time.”
“I suppose I thought it was going to be you and me.”
“Fornicating in alleyways?”
“No, you dunce, but . . . the two of us. Doing what we wanted.” Perfecting my phrasing without betraying my heart is starting to feel like a complicated dance. “Together.”
“Still will be.”
“Yes, but I mean, the last year before you go to law school and I start working with my father and we won’t be seeing each other so much.”
“Yes. Law school.” Percy turns his face to the coastline again, a thin-fingered breeze rising off the water and pulling a few strands free from the ribbon tying off his queue. He’s been talking for months about cutting his hair short so it’s easier to get under a wig, but I’ve made it clear I will murder him if he does, for I quite adore that unruly mop of his.
I press my face into his shoulder to make him pay attention to me again and give a theatrical moan. “But bloody Lockwood and his bloody cultural outings have wrecked that.”
Percy twists a lock of my hair between his fingers, a soft smile teasing his lips. My heart kicks again, so hard I have to catch my breath. It’s unfair that I can nearly always tell when someone’s making eyes at me, except when it comes to Percy, as we’ve always been rather hands-on with each other. Impossible now, after so long, to ask him not to be without admitting why. Can’t seal up a conversation with a casual Oh, by the way, could you perhaps not touch me the way you always have because each time it puts fresh splinters in my heart? Particularly when what I’d really like to say is Oh, by the way, could you please keep touching me, and perhaps do it all the time, and while we’re at it, would you like to take off all your clothes and climb in bed? They’re both weighted alike.
He gives a tug on my hair. “I have an idea of how we will survive the year. We shall pretend that we are pirates—”
“Oh, I love this.”
“—storming some sort of city fortress. Sacking it for gold. Like we used to.”
“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 h
e 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.”
“They’re going to throw you out of school if you behave this way.”
“Well, it took Eton years to catch on to your larks, and I’m a fair amount cleverer, so I’m not concerned.” She smiles again, and in that moment, all my childhood instincts come out, for I’d like nothing better than to give her hair a good tug. “Enjoy your evening,” she says, then glides to the door, stocking-footed on the stone so she hardly needs lift her feet.
Lockwood is settled in an armchair before the fireplace, unwigged, with a banyan loose over his waistcoat. He looks up when I enter and his brow creases, as though the sight of me alone is cause for consternation. “My lord. May I help you?”
Out in the hallway, I hear the soft click of the front latch.
And if Felicity is sneaking out, it’s about damn time Percy and I did so as well. “I think we’ll be attending that lecture tonight after all,” I say.
“Oh. Oh!” He sits up. “You and Mr. Newton both?”
“Yes,” I say, offering Percy an internal apology in case his headache was real. “We’ll get a coach to Montparnasse, so you needn’t come—you’re nearly dressed for bed. And we might have some supper after. So don’t wait up.”
And bless his little cotton socks, he must truly believe in the transformative power travel can have over a young man, because he swallows it.
As it turns out, it’s hardly even a lie—we do get a coach to Montparnasse, and we do have supper. It consists of a pint of baptized beer downed standing up in the corner of a smoky boxing ring, then spirits at a music hall after.
The boxing is my choice, the music hall Percy’s—his condition for coming out with me in spite of the headache that was apparently very much real was that at least half of the evening would be spent somewhere men weren’t brutalizing one another and we can hear each other without shouting. But the music hall is packed and nearly as loud as the fights. The walls are plastered in moldering velvet and golden fringe, the ceiling painted with an elaborate mural of cherubs frolicking with naked women in foamy clouds—the cherubs seem to be there purely to keep it from being pornographic. Candles on the table
s—sheathed in red glass—rouge the light.
We spend our fights’ winnings on one of the private boxes in the top gallery, looking down upon the crowd and above the haze of pipe smoke. Tournaments of backgammon and faro are being played all about, shouts going up over piquet and lottery, but Percy and I keep only each other’s company. It’s bleeding hot with so many people packed so tight, and the box is private enough that we both shuck down to our shirtsleeves.
We finish near a Scotch pint of spirits between us before the interlude—Percy’s drinking more than he usually does and it’s making him giggly. I’m feeling it too—giddy and bold, coquettish at being out and alone in Paris with him and sitting on a belly of gin and warm whiskey.
Percy leans over from his chair to rest his chin upon my shoulder, one of his feet brushing my shin as it bounces in time to the music. “Having fun?”
I give a nip at his ear—meant to just lean in, but I misjudge the distance and decide halfway there to commit to it. He yelps in surprise. “No, but you are.”
Music is not an art I claim to understand or enjoy, but Percy looks so happy in that moment that I feel happy too, a sudden swell of delight to be alive and here with him. Though snatching at the heels of that is the thought of the hourglass attached to these last days before Percy and I part. Our Tour suddenly seems like an impossibly short time.
For a moment, I toy with the idea that, at the end of it all, I could not go home. Run away to Holland with Percy. Or perhaps just run. Which would leave me stuck with nothing. No money and no skills to earn it. I’m too useless to make a life on my own, no matter how odious the one selected for me is. I’m well shackled to my father, no way to escape or want things for myself.
