There is a single merchant xebec departing the following day that will dock first in Marseilles, then in Genoa, before moving to the open waters of the Mediterranean. The boatswain, a stocky cove with wiry hair and pox scars spat across his cheeks like holes in a cribbage board, lets himself be sweet-talked by Felicity and agrees to take us on so long as we pay in France. We don’t elaborate on the particulars of how that payment will occur—I hardly think we can pop in on Lockwood, collect some coinage, then dash out the door again, nor do I expect he’s been twiddling his thumbs in Marseilles all this while waiting for us to turn up.
Or rather, the boatswain’s willing until he realizes it’s Percy and me who will be traveling with her.
“Who’s this?” he demands, pointing a finger at Percy that halts us as we start up the gangplank.
“Your passengers,” Felicity replies. “I did say there were three of us.”
“Is he yours?”
“He’s his own.”
“No.” The boatswain is shaking his head. “I’ll not have Negroes on our ship.”
“You have colored men on your crew!” Felicity replies, flinging a hand up toward the deck where two dark-skinned men are hauling cargo.
“Don’t like Negroes we don’t own,” he replies. “Can’t control them. Free Africans get big ideas about their own grandeur. I don’t want him on my ship.”
Percy looks horrified. Felicity looks as though she’d like to skin the boatswain alive, but she puts on at least a pretense of politeness and attempts to elicit some sympathy. “He’s not African, he’s English, same as we are. We’re from highborn families, all. Our father”—and here she scribbles a hand between herself and me—“is a peer of the realm. He’s an earl. We can pay you whatever you ask. We’re stranded here without means, sirrah, please, have a bit of compassion.”
The boatswain is maddeningly unmoved. “No free colored men on board.”
So Felicity abandons compassion and whips out the law. “Slavery is illegal in this kingdom, sir.”
“And we make berth in the Virginia colony, madam,” he replies, then mutters under his breath, just loud enough for her to hear, “Bitch.”
For a moment, it seems a real possibility that Felicity is about to shove him off the gangplank and into the sea. Good luck for the boatswain that he chooses that moment to spit into the brown water, then stalk past her and down the dock. Felicity gives his back a murderous look.
“I’m sorry,” Percy says, his voice hoarse.
“It’s fine,” Felicity says, though she’s clearly mourning the collapse of her plan.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again.
“Nothing to be done about it.” Felicity’s attention has been commandeered by two men shuffling up the gangplank past her, dressed so gentlemanly that they must be passengers. She watches them go, her fingers drumming against her folded arms, then starts to follow.
“What are you doing?” I hiss at her, making a snatch for her sleeve and missing so spectacularly I almost pitch into the water.
She halts midway up the gangplank and turns back. “We have to get there somehow. And he did agree to take us.”
“So we’re going to, what—stow away?”
“The next ship to Genoa doesn’t leave for a fortnight. So unless you have an alternative, this is our only choice.”
Neither Percy nor I follow her, but, undeterred, she continues upward. “Felicity,” I hiss after her, casting around to see where the boatswain’s gone. “What if they catch us?” I’m keen on getting to Venice, but the risk affixed to this stratagem seems far too high. If we’re caught, that would put a knot in our itinerary that could take a long while to untangle. Our beloved island would likely be a sunken thing by the time we reached it.
She turns back yet again, looking rather vexed, which is unfair since she’s the one being unreasonable here. “What will they do? Throw us into the ocean? Maroon us in a dinghy for African pirates to scoop up?”
“What if he catches me?” Percy asks.
She considers that for a moment, then says, “We won’t get caught. Now step lively.”
As she stalks up the gangplank, walking with such confidence that I half believe she belongs there, I take Percy by the arm. “We don’t have to,” I tell him. “We can wait for the next boat.”
“It’s fine,” he says, casting another glance over his shoulder for the boatswain. “Let’s just go quick before he comes back.”
Felicity doesn’t bother to try blending in with the few passengers skirting about—we’re far too vagabond-looking to shuffle unnoticed among the half-dozen gentlemen in their wool traveling suits, and she seems to be the only lady on board. Instead she goes straight below—a few of the sailors deal her curious looks, but no one stops us—all the way down to the nether regions of the ship where the cargo is stored, haphazard shelves of wooden crates protected from the pitching sea by the grip of rope netting. Most of it has already been loaded. The air is thick and stifling, hazy with the smell of packed goods and rotted wood. The only light comes from the sunbeams filtering down from the deck two levels above us, and a lonely tin lantern wavering on its hook. From somewhere in the rigging, the ship’s bell is tolling in warning of departure.
Felicity squeezes herself into a hollow space between rows of barrels stamped with the tangled “VOC” of the Dutch East India Company, her back against the wall. Percy and I follow, Percy with a bit more discomfort due in part to his beastly long legs. He drags his fiddle case after us.
“Not quite the view I was hoping for,” I say once we’re all wedged tight.
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” she replies, with an eye roll that’s far more dramatic than I was being. “It’ll be a quick jaunt to France—seven days, depending upon the weather—then another week to Genoa, after a few days docked.”
“That’s near two weeks,” I say, “and then there’s the time overland to get to Venice, which will be another five days at least. The duke is going to be waiting there if he decides to give chase.”
“Do you think they’ll follow us?” Percy asks.
“They must know where we’re going,” I reply. “Now that we’ve got the key, there’s only one conceivable place. I can’t imagine Helena is the sort to sit back and let—”
“Hush,” Percy hisses, and I fall silent. There are heavy footfalls on the stairs, then the thwack of a load being dropped. The floor trembles. None of us makes a sound, and a moment later the footsteps retreat up the stairs again, the lantern going with them, and we fall into a darkness filigreed by the dust motes and faraway snatches of sunlight.
Felicity shifts her weight and her foot slams hard into one of the barrels. It might be my imagination, but I’m almost certain I hear her curse under her breath. “Comfortable?” I ask.
She scowls at me. “Once we’re out to sea, we’ll be able to move around a bit more.”
“You mean walk all the far distance to the other side of this hold?”
“We can still disembark, if you’re inclined to be moaning all the way.”
I look from her to Percy. He’s got his elbows on his fiddle case and his chin resting upon his hands. “No,” I say. “We’ve got to get to Venice somehow.”
We spend what I imagine is close to five days in the cargo hold of the xebec, and though we aren’t wedged quite so tight all the while as we were those first few hours, we can’t risk much movement. We’ve barely left Barcelona before my knees begin to feel as though they’re going to snap like brittle sticks. My stomach still isn’t quite back to its good-natured, gin-swilling self yet and I spend a not-insignificant portion of the time feverish and nauseous, trying not to be sick as the ship rolls, since there’s nowhere to do so conveniently. It’s uncomfortable enough already, the three of us in such close quarters with nowhere to go for privacy. The farthest we can venture is the other side of the hold, which is hardly any distance at all.
I have little interest in food, but Felicity and Percy are both maddeningly unmoved by the pitching, so we crack into a few of the crates in search of provisions. They’re mostly raw Dutch wares—Holland linens, blocks of nutmeg and black tea leaves and tobacco, crumbly sugarcane in amber cones, and cacao nibs that are so bitter and sharp they make us all gag when we chew them. The barrels yield little-better spoils—the first two we open are syrupy molasses, another flax oil, which sloshes over the rim when the ship rolls and soaks through all our shoes, leaving us skating the planking. The final barrel we try is a cask of dark wine, and we drink it from cupped hands like the philistines we have become.
We rest in staggered shifts, with one of us always on watch in case crewmen decide to make a spontaneous visit to the hold. The lingering effects of the belladonna have me sleeping more than is my fair share, but Felicity and Percy are kind enough not to chastise me for it. Felicity still looks at me like she’s petrified I might start sobbing again with no warning, and Percy’s sharp attention to my every movement is making me feel like an invalid.
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.”
My heart is sending tremors through me, a frantic flail like a bird landing on water. I can feel the ripples all the way to my fingertips. Maybe . . . maybe . . . maybe. It makes me brave, the sudden chance of it tying stones to the fear and loneliness of one-sided wanting until they sink out of sight. So I take a breath and say, “It meant something to me—that kiss. That’s what I should have said. I didn’t, because I was stupid and afraid. But it did. It does.”
He stares forward into the darkness for a long while, or perhaps it’s not long at all, but I swear those few silent seconds seem to last half my lifetime. In the end, he doesn’t say a thing. Just reaches over and puts his hand upon my knee. A burst goes through me, like teeth breaking through the skin of a summer fruit in its prime.
Knees, as it turns out, can be rather grand.
I put my hand overtop, fingers fitted between his. His heart is beating so hard I can feel it in every point where our skin meets. Or perhaps that’s mine. We’re slamming, both of us. Percy stares down at our stacked hands, a deep breath trembling in his shoulders. “I’m not going to be the most convenient mouth around when you’re drunk and lonely and missing blue-eyed Sinjon,” he says. “That’s not what I want.”
“I don’t want Sinjon. I don’t want anyone else.”
“You mean that?”
“I do,” I say. “I swear to it.” I touch my nose to his, a fawn-soft brush, and his breath presses against my mouth as he exhales. “What do you want?”
Percy hooks his bottom lip with his teeth, eyes flitting down to my mouth. The space between us—what little is left—grows charged and restless, like a lightning strike gathering. I’m not certain which of us is going to do it—close those last, longest inches between us. I touch my nose to his again, and his lips part. Breath catches. I close my eyes.
And then, on the deck above us, a cannon goes off.