The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

by Mackenzi Lee

  “They cannot, senyor,” Pascal says.

  “We will hear no protestations,” Bourbon snaps. “She will show me her face or be made to. They all will.”

  “They cannot because they are poxed!” Pascal cries.

  Bourbon, who had been reaching for the edge of the cushion cover currently doubling as Felicity’s veil, draws back. “Poxed?”

  Beside me, Percy, similarly swathed in bed trimmings, sways on his feet, though I’m not certain if he’s playacting or sincerely faint. I want to reach out to him, but I’m afraid of drawing the duke’s eye and exposing my distinctly mannish and unpoxed hands.

  “A strain from the Portuguese seas,” Pascal goes on. “We have quarantined them for the safety of the city. So long as they keep their faces covered and the scabs unexposed, there is no danger.”

  Percy’s definitely falling—he reaches out for me and I grab him, trying to keep him on his feet. The swaddling over my head starts to slip. The duke turns in our direction, but on the other side of the cabin Ernesta lets out a high-pitched wail and he whirls around. She seems to be really going for the theatrics, for she falls to her knees before Bourbon and clutches his boots, which successfully diverts his attention from Percy’s sincere collapse. Eva follows her lead, face pressed to the ground as she pleads to him in keening Catalan.

  Bourbon shakes them off, then signals to his men. They’re tripping over themselves in their haste to get back into the open air.

  In the doorway, we hear him say to Pascal, “You Spaniards are to be cleared out of here by tomorrow morning or you’ll be arrested. We will not have you cluttering up the river with your filth. And if we find you’re hiding these criminals, the punishment will be severe.”

  Pascal bows his head. “Yes, sir. We want no trouble.”

  As soon as they’re gone, Felicity is at Percy’s other elbow, and together we help him to the bed. He sits down hard on the bare mattress, then slumps onto his side and pulls his legs up to his chest. “Are you well?” Felicity asks, then asks again when he doesn’t respond, and for a cold, clenched-up moment, I think he’s going to have another fit and I almost take a step back. I’m not certain I’m stout enough to witness it again.

  But he’s nodding, though he’s breathing hard. “Yes. Yes, just faint.”

  I’m ready to strip this damn dress off as soon as the king’s men have gone, but no one else moves to do the same, so I suffer and sweat a while longer. When Pascal returns to tell us the soldiers have gone, I whip the veil off my face and take a gasping breath that’s mostly incense and immediately start to cough. Felicity slides off her headpiece and crumples it between her hands, shoulders quavering. “I’m so sorry,” she’s saying to Pascal, “I’m so sorry, your fair, your whole company, because of us, we’re so sorry.” And Pascal is trying to reassure her, though he looks pained.

  Someone puts a hand on my arm, and I look around to find Eva standing beside me. “Vosaltres passeu la nit amb nosaltres. Nosaltres farem la nostra pel matí.”

  “You stay the night with us,” Ernesta translates. “We go our own ways in the morning.”

  The grandmothers and Pascal go with some of the others from their company to clean up the mess of the fair. Felicity offers to help, but they decline in case any of Bourbon’s men spot us. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask.

  They return at dusk, and we have supper on the boat, the five of us on the deck while Percy sleeps in the cabin. He’s still ill and unsteady, and I’m starting to wonder how we’re going to move on if he can’t stand straight. Maybe we should stay in Marseilles and find Lockwood and forget all this nonsense after all.

  Some people from the other boats come join us, and we eat gathered around the iron stove at the prow. The lantern light pebbled throughout the line of canal boats glitters on the water, reflections the color of a daffodil cone bobbing amid the waves. After supper, Felicity excuses herself to see to Percy, leaving me sitting like a boulder displacing a stream in the midst of all these people who speak a language I don’t understand and live a life I understand even less.

  After a time, Ernesta comes and sits beside me. Her joints crack as she moves. “Would you like me to read for you?”

  I don’t understand what she’s asking until she slides a deck of tarot cards from a velvet bag slung at her hip. I almost laugh. “Don’t take this wrong,” I say, “but I think all that tarot-tea-leaves what-have-you is nonsense.”

  She shuffles the cards, and they make a sound like wind slithering through tall grass. “That does not answer my question.” She holds out the deck, and it feels like an invitation I can’t turn away, the calling card of a traveler far from home. Against my better judgment, I take the deck. “Shuffle,” she instructs, and I do, with significantly less grace than she, then return them. She fans the cards on the ground between us. “Choose your first.”

  I make a show of letting my fingers walk over the cards like they’re a pathway. To my great surprise, a warm hum quavers in my fingertips, and I stop, without quite knowing why, and touch one. “Five cards,” she prompts, and I select the rest of my set.

  Ernesta eases them ahead of the others. “The first is a representation of you,” she explains as she flips it. “The King of Cups. Emotional balance, stability, and generosity.” That sounds quite good until she pins on: “But, as you’ve drawn it upside down, you are the inverse. Emotional and volatile, a man whose heart rules his life. Confusion in love and relationships. A lack of control and balance.”

  Which is less good.

  She flips the second card, which is thankfully right side up so there’s no chance of her pulling that bait-and-switch again. “The four of cups,” she says. “A dissatisfaction with life.” She turns the next and clicks her tongue. “So many cups.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask, a bit more anxious than I mean to sound.

  “Cups are the suit of passion and love. The heart suit. Here, the eight of cups means leaving things behind. The heavy things that cling to us and weigh us down, but we grow accustomed to familiar weights and cannot let them go.”

  Ernesta turns the next card over. The lantern light jumps, glancing off the sketch of a skeletal head, upside down. “Death reversed,” she says.

  In spite of not believing in any of this, I’ve gotten rather wrapped up in it, and seeing that staring back at me is downright spooky. “Does that mean—”

  “You’re not going to die,” she says, like she read my mind, though I suppose it’s a common question when the specter is flipped. “Death reversed is a transformation. A new life, or a new view on the one you have.” She peels my last card from the deck without looking at it and sets it so it overlaps with the King of Cups. The King of Wands. The two drawings seem to look at each other, their eyes turned inward.

  She doesn’t explain the second king. Just stares at the pair with a scrutiny that deepens the wrinkles in her forehead. “In the east,” she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, “there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

  At last she looks up at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. “Because I want you to know,” she says, “that there is life after survival.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. My throat feels suddenly swollen, so I simply nod.

  Ernesta gathers up her cards and leaves me alone to mull the reading while I drink some sharp-edged spirits Pascal gave me that’s so acidic it’s likely meant to be medicinal. I tip my head back against the railing and look up at the stars. A firefly drifts from the bank of the river and lands on my knee, throbbing golden like it fell from the sky.

  Someone sits beside me, and when I look over, there’s Percy, his shoulder right up against mine. He pulls his knees up to his chest, a little stiff, like he�
�s still hurting, then glances over at me with his chin tucked. His lashes cast spiderwebs upon his cheeks.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask, before the silence has a chance to turn uncomfortable or I say something infinitely stupider.

  One of his hands strays absently to the spot on his arm where the fleam went in for the bloodletting. “Better.”

  “Good. That’s . . . good.” My own hand slips into my pocket and closes around the alchemical puzzle box. The dials shuffle beneath my fingertips. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

  He looks over at me. “I don’t want you to fight with me either.”

  I laugh—a short, sincere burst that catches even me off guard—and the moment feels so adjacent to ordinary that I loosen. Or maybe that’s the spirits, though I haven’t had much. I hold the bottle out to him. “Do you want a drink?” He shakes his head. I take another swallow for courage, but all I can think of is, Percy is ill, Percy is going to an asylum at the end of this Tour, and he didn’t trust you enough to tell you so.

  “I think we should go to Barcelona,” I say before I’ve really thought it out.

  “You want to return the box?”

  “Well, yes, but I was thinking about what Felicity said, and the grandmothers, about Mateu Robles. If he does work with alchemy and healing and . . . whatever that other word was.”

  “Panacea.”

  “Yes. That.”

  He’s there before I have to explain the rest of my reasoning. “I’ve tried alchemical treatments before.”

  “What if this is different? He may be able to cure you. I think it’s daft not to try, at least.”

  “Monty, I’ve been promised so many cures by so many doctors—”

  “But if you can find a way to be rid of your . . . illness, you won’t have to go to Holland. You can come home with me. We can go back.”

  He scrapes at his bottom lip with his teeth, staring up at the stars, and I can’t fathom why he isn’t meeting me with an enthusiastic yes yes yes let’s go to Barcelona and find someone who can make me well and keep me from an asylum. “I’d rather . . .” He trails off, pressing his thumb into his chin.

  “Please,” I say. His strange silence is feeding my desperation. Let me help you! I want to shout at him. I have failed you on this front for years without knowing it, so let me help you now! “What do we have to lose?”

  Before he can reply, Felicity slides down on my other side, her skirts puffed for a moment before they settle on the planking. “So,” she says, like we’re in the middle of a conversation already, “tomorrow we begin the search for Lockwood. Or at least attempt to secure some sort of lodging. If we can show them a promise from the bank, even if we can’t withdraw actual funds—”

  “I think we should go to Barcelona,” I interrupt.

  Felicity pivots to face me, executing an eyebrow arch so precise it looks penciled on. “Excuse me?”

  “Apparently it’s very important this box is returned.”

  “And how will we travel? We’ve no supplies and no transport and no money.”

  “We could try and get to some of Father’s.”

  Felicity is already shaking her head. “No, absolutely not. We’ve nothing to do with this box or the Robleses or any of it. We need to find our company and see that the box is returned to the king.”

  “It doesn’t belong to the king,” I say.

  “Yes, but there’s probably a good reason he had it. Perhaps it was given to him.”

  “Why give something to him in a box he couldn’t open? What sort of bastard does that? He stole the box and we should return it to its owner. And if we return it to Mateu Robles, we’ll be rid of it. Get the duke off our tail—we’re no good to him if we haven’t got it. Besides, if we find Lockwood now, we’ll be made to go home.”

  “Perhaps not,” she says. “You made rather a mess of yourself at Versailles, but if we rejoin him here, he might be so impressed by our resourcefulness and so glad we survived the highwaymen that he’ll let you carry on. Which will absolutely not happen if we go gallivanting to Spain alone. That’s going to put you on his not list for certain.”

  I hadn’t considered that. Bolting naked from the French palace seems like something my father might consider a permanent black mark upon my record—good news for the Goblin—but if Lockwood would consent to let us keep traveling, going home at the end of the allotted year with Versailles as a small side note to an otherwise successful Tour would significantly bolster my chances of holding on to my inheritance as opposed to being sent home because of it. Or at least I could work the look at the horrors we went through please don’t disinherit me after such an ordeal angle.

  But traveling for the rest of the year isn’t going to do a damn thing for Percy. He’d still be heading off to Holland at the end of it.

  “The man who owns this box is an alchemist,” I say. “And if he studies the cure-all side of it, like you heard at that lecture, he might know something that could help cure Percy. If we take him his box, maybe we could trade it for that information.”

  Her brow knits, and she looks to Percy. “Is that what you want?”

  Percy has this thumb to his mouth, chewing at the pad like he’s thinking hard. My heart seizes up a bit, mostly from the frustration that he isn’t entirely on my side about this. But then he says, “I think Monty’s right—we should take the box to Mateu Robles. It belongs to him.”

  I nearly throw my arms around him at those words, but instead I turn to my sister. “If you don’t want to come, we’d be happy to drop you at the school. Term hasn’t started yet—you won’t even miss the first day of your social conversation class.”

  She ignores me and instead says to Percy, “Are you sure this would be a good idea for you?”

  “I think it’s—” I start, but she snaps, “I wasn’t addressing you, Henry.” Then, again to Percy, she says, “Are you well enough to travel?”

  And I feel like an insensitive rake again for not thinking of that from the start.

  But Percy nods. “I’m all right.”

  Felicity sighs so hard her nostrils flair, like his wellness has ruined her plans. “Can we all agree that if we can’t secure some funds, we shouldn’t go? It’s already an absurd journey, but to undertake it with nothing is downright foolish. We’ll hardly be able to get out of the city unless we have coinage.”

  “Agreed,” Percy says, then looks at me. I was hoping the question of money might be something we three could collaborate on rather than a condition of our departure, but I nod.

  Felicity stretches her arms behind her head, then stands. “I want you to both know that in spite of the fact that I am going along, I think this is a terrible idea.”

  “Don’t pretend you aren’t interested in all this,” I say. “Alchemy seems right up your street.”

  “Medicine and alchemy are unrelated fields,” she says, thought she doesn’t do a particularly good job of concealing said interest.

  “Fine. Then consider your opinion noted.”

  “Fine.” She winds her hair into a knot. “I’m going to get some sleep before we go. Percy, do you want a hand?”

  “No, I think I’ll stay out,” he says.

  “Good night, then. Let me know if you need anything.”

  As Felicity disappears, picking her way across the narrow deck to the cabin, I look over at Percy again. He’s still looking up at the stars, the silvery light from the moon slithering across the water and stitching his skin. In the glow of it, he looks pearled and fine, a boy fashioned from precious stones and the insides of seashells.

  “I think we’re doing the right thing,” I say, sort of to Percy and sort of to myself.

  “At least we’ll know what’s in the box,” he says with a half smile. “Felicity’s right about Lockwood, though. If we go to Spain, he’ll probably send us packing as soon as we’re reunited.”

  “But maybe Mateu Robles will have something to help you and you can come home.”

  “
And maybe he won’t. You might be giving up your Tour for me.”

  “Worth it, that.” I scrub my hands through my hair. “Though I think . . . it’s mostly my fault we were being sent home early. So . . . I’m sorry. For that. Sorry about the box as well. That I picked it up.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I’m ill.”

  “I really wish you had.”

  He nods. I take another drink.

  “You’re my best mate, Monty,” he says suddenly. “And I don’t want to ruin that. Especially not now. I didn’t tell you I was ill because I didn’t want to scare you away, and if I didn’t have you—if I hadn’t had you for these past few years, I think I’d have lost my mind. So if things can’t be the same between us, can they at least not be terrible? You’re not permitted to be strange and uncomfortable around me now.”

  “So long as you don’t go falling in love with me.”

  I don’t know why I say it. Call it battlements around my helpless heart. Percy looks away from me fast, shoulders curling up. It almost looks like a flinch. But then he says, “I’ll try my best.”

  He seems like he wants to touch me, but we’ve both lost any sense of how men who haven’t kissed each other do that. He finally taps my knee, open-palmed and short, the way we used to try and hold our hands to candle flames without being burned when we were boys, and I wonder if there will ever again be a day when it doesn’t feel as though he might fly to pieces between my hands.

  12

  We part ways with Pascal and the grandmothers the next morning as the sun rises. Their fair has disappeared from the pier, and the first of the boats have already kicked off from their moorings and are drifting up the river, a flock of colored swans riding the current.

  Percy, Felicity, and I wander the city, searching for the French partner institution to the Bank of England. It’s hardly morning but the sun is already beginning to cook the stones. The heat rises from them in shimmering waves. Shops have their signs flipped and their fronts open onto the pavement, displays of produce and flowers and tailored clothes spreading out. A sharp gunpowder smell rolls from a blacksmith shop, along with the bell-clang of the hammer. A shoeblack with a stained rag stuffed into his breeches and a ball of sticky polish rolling between his palms wolf-whistles at Felicity from his perch on a coffeehouse stoop. I extend a tasteful finger to him as we pass.