After seven days at sea, the Eleftheria makes port in the small, mountainous island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea. Its cliffsides are canvased in cave houses burrowed into the volcanic stone and whitewashed buildings domed in cobalt blue. Thatch-roofed windmills jut between them, their blades like rays of the sun. The sun itself is a vivid thing, brighter in this crook of the Continent. The whole world looks somehow brighter.
Scipio and his men stay with their ship, but he helps Felicity, Percy, and me find a flat on the cliffs above the sea, with its own cobalt dome and stone floors and a landlord friendly with the captain and willing to take our Italian lire. The rooms are sun warmed and clear, the courtyard crowded with fig trees around a small, laughing fountain. The sea seems everywhere.
The first few days feel packed and frantic, full of learning the land and selling the cargo and arranging supplies and repairs for the ship and looking for a proper doctor who speaks at least one of the languages we do and who can take a look at my face. It’s mostly been Felicity tending to me while we sailed from Venice—my hearing seems to have no inclination to return, and along with the bullet clipping my ear, I caught the discharge from the gun, which left thick speckled burns in random patches from my hairline to my collarbone. I haven’t seen myself in a glass yet, but I have a suspicion that the right half of my face will be off-colored and scarred for the remainder of my life.
My best feature, ruined.
“I don’t think you can claim your entire face as your best feature,” Felicity tells me. “You’re meant to be a bit more discerning.”
We’re at the table in the courtyard, Felicity unwrapping the bandages from my head so she can get a look at how everything is healing. When the Greek doctor came, every instruction he gave was met by a “Yes, I know” from Felicity, though Scipio didn’t translate those for him. He also complimented Felicity on her stitching, which she’s been crowing over ever since.
“Well, it’s difficult to choose when you have so many good options.” I swipe my hand at my right side, forgetting momentarily that the empty buzz that has replaced all other sound isn’t an insect I can swat away. “Fortunately my right ear was the less handsome of the pair.”
“Fortunately, or else you’d be devastated.”
A few months ago, I might have been. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t mourning the loss a wee bit. But we’re all still alive, and still together, so instead it feels strangely like luck.
Felicity lets the bandages fall into her lap atop her surgical kit, then does a careful inventory of my disfigurement. “It looks . . . better.”
“Your telling pause disagrees.”
“It does! The swelling’s gone down, though we need to watch for infection. Let’s leave the bandages off for a bit so it can breathe.” She squints for a moment longer, then says, with a bit of a smug smile, “That stitching of mine is rather impressive.”
“I’d say you’re quite good at this physician business as a whole.”
She looks up from packing her kit, eyes narrowing. “What are you doing? Oh no, are you trying to get along with me? Do we have to get along now?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Thank God.”
“Get along. Don’t be absurd.”
There’s a rap on the courtyard gate and Scipio steps into the garden, a coat thrown over his seaman’s duds though the heat is livid. “Good morning,” Felicity calls, sliding down the bench to make room for him. “We were just about to breakfast.”
“Where’s Mr. Newton?” Scipio asks as he joins us.
“Still abed,” I say. “How’s your darling ship and your cutthroat crew?”
“The crew and the ship are both anxious to be off,” Scipio says. He takes a mug from the spot waiting for Percy and pours himself lime-flower tea from the jug.
“You want to leave?” I ask as Felicity looks up.
“And we’d like you to be with us,” he says. “We’ll take you home, to England, and if Thomas Powell can indeed be persuaded to exercise his influence, collect our letters of marque. We’d like to sail with some legitimacy.”
“Home?” I ask, unable to keep my voice from pinching the word like a creased napkin. Here I was beginning to grow accustomed to this optimistic sunlight and exile-in-Eden business, and now we’re packing it in yet again, this time Britain bound. Back to Father. “How long before you go?”
He shrugs. “Four days. Before the week’s out, at the latest.”
“Can’t we stay a bit longer?” I ask. “I’ve just suffered a grievous injury, after all.”
Felicity’s eyes flick to mine. “Oh, you’re fine. I cleaned you up so well that not only will it heal, but the missing ear will do wonders for taming your ego.”
“Ho, there—” I must be sufficiently recovered, because Felicity has begun to feel it appropriate to begin needling me again.
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.”
“As goes Henry Montague, so goes the nation.”
Now that I’m steady, I think he’s going to pull away, because the last time we toppled into each other it ended in shouting. But instead he puts his arms around my neck, and though my vision has settled, we sway together as a wave strikes us, soaking the knees of our breeches. It’s something like dancing.
When I can’t think of anything else, I say, “It’s gorgeous here.” Then immediately wince because, oh God, have we reached such a barren spit of land in our relationship that I’m reduced to making observations about the surroundings just for conversation? And if so, I’ll have to find a sharp shell upon the beach and slit my wrists right here.
But Percy just smiles. “The Cyclades weren’t really on our itinerary.”
“Oh, I think we’re well off track now. We’ve had an adventure novel instead of a Tour.”
He reaches up and pushes a loose thread of my hair behind my ear. “What will everyone say, do you think? We’ll be the shame of our families.”
“Oh, I think my father holds that title. Turns out, I’m rather a bastard.” When Percy gives me a quizzical look, I supply the details of my father’s abandoned French bride. “If anyone knew, he’d lose everything,” I finish. “The estate, the title, the money, his standing. Probably be jailed as well. Even a rumor of it would wreck him.”
“So, what will you do?” Percy asks.
A flock of seagulls take flight from the beach and settle upon the sea, bobbing like sailboats upon the current as they complain to each other. I’ve been thinking about it a good deal in the space between Venice and Santorini, this question of what might happen if I turned up the bodies my father has buried in our garden. The damage I could do to him, fitting retribution for the years he’s spent beating me down.
“Nothing,” I say, because I’m not the only one who’d have to live with those overturned graves.
“So, you’re just going home? Like nothing’s changed?”
“Well, I was thinking . . .” I swallow hard. “I was thinking about not going back. At all. And maybe you and I could go somewhere together instead.”
His eyes drop from mine. “You don’t have to say that.”
“I want to—”
“Wait, listen. I shouldn’t have asked that of you—running away together. That was too much. Asking you to throw away your whole life on a whim like that. I just got excited that we might have similar . . . sentiments about each other and there might be a chance for me to not be put away and see if perhaps those sentiments might play out into something. But it’s all right. I promise. I know it’s too much to walk away from. It’s your whole life.”
“But I would. For you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to. I mean it. Let’s run away.”
He smiles, though I’m not certain he believes I’m in earnest. “All right. Where will we go, then?”
“London, maybe. Or move to the country. Live like bachelors.”
“Drive the local girls wild?”
“Something like that.” The wind catches the strand of my hair Percy pushed away and pulls it over my forehead again, right across my burns. It stings faintly. “Though I think first I should sober up a bit. Stop mucking around so much and get my head on straight.”
“That’d be good.”
Percy smiles again, and I turn my face away from his, toward the sea and the spotty fishing boats gathered at the horizon. A few tall ships with their bowsprits pointed to the Aegean cant in the cradle of the waves. “Why’ve you stuck by me?” I ask. “I’ve been such a mess for a while now and . . . Holy Christ, Perce, I could hardly stand to be around myself. It’s still really hard some days.”
“Because that’s what you do when you . . . for your friends.” He flinches a little, a crease appearing between his eyebrows, then amends, “When you love someone. That’s what I meant to say. When you love someone, you stand by him. Even when he’s being a bit of a rake.”
“More than a bit.”
“Not all the time.”
“For the better part of the last few years—”
“Perhaps, but you had—”
“I would have left me long ago. Kicked me into a ditch and been done.”
“Monty—”
“Stopped answering the door, at the very least—”
“Shut it, will you?” He nudges the side of my head with his nose. “Just take it.”
I put my cheek to his shoulder, and he rests his chin against the top of my head. We stay like that for a while, neither of us speaking. The Aegean presses us together, the water sun-warmed and soft as court velvet.
“You don’t have to come with me,” he says quietly. “If you think you have some obligation to me because—”
“It’s not an obligation. Perce, I love you.” It trips out of me, and I can feel my neck start to burn, but I’m in this thick now, so onward I press. “I love you, but I don’t know how to help you. I still don’t! I’m an emotional delinquent and I say wrong things all the time, but I want to be better for you. I promise that. It doesn’t matter to me that you’re ill and it doesn’t matter if I have to give up everything, because you’re worth it. You’re worth it all because you are magnificent, you are. Magnificent and gorgeous and brilliant and kind and good and I just . . . love you, Percy. I love you so damn much.”
He looks down into the water, then back up at me, and it lifts my heart like a rising tide. His gaze makes me feel brave.
“And I need to know,” I go on. “I need to know where your head’s at. I don’t care what the answer is—if you want me to walk away now and leave you be, I can do that. Or if you want a bachelor flat together with separate bedrooms, or if you want . . . more than that. I know it would be hard—because we’re both lads and we’d be starting with bleeding nothing—but if you’ll run away with me, let’s run. I’m ready.”
He doesn’t say anything for what is likely only a minute but seems to drag across several years. His hands slide from their loop around my neck and down my arms before they finally settle upon my wrists, and it feels suddenly like he’s edging away, the waves pushing us apart. Dread begins to snake through me like smoke between floorboards, because this determined avoidance of my eyes is looking like the prelude to a very kind no, thanks. I missed my chance in that rain-slick alley in Venice.
I brace for my heart to be shot from the sky, but then he says, “Monty, I will always care for you. I hope you know that. Perhaps if we had been more forthright with each other, or perhaps if we had trusted each other more, it could have been something sooner. But we weren’t. So now we’re here.”
Good Lord, I think he’s trying to let me down gently and instead it’s like he’s starting my execution by pulling out my fingernails. I’d take the bullet again over this. I’d catch that bullet with my teeth a dozen times over this.
He’s still not looking at me. He’s staring at the ground, winding up to break my heart, and I can’t stick it any longer, so I interrupt, “Just say it, Perce. Please don’t drag it out, just say that you don’t want me. It’s all right.”
“What?” He looks up. “No. No! That’s not what I . . . I’m trying to tell you I love you, you sod.”
My heart takes a wild vault. “You . . . what?”
“Dammit.” Percy tips his face to the sky with a moan. “I’ve had this whole speech worked out in my head—I’ve been planning it for weeks, waiting for a moment on our own—”
“Oh no, did I wreck it?”
“You completely wrecked it.”
“I’m sorry!”
“And it was so good!”
“I’m so sorry!”
“Couldn’t keep your fat gob shut for two minutes. Dear Lord.”
“Well, that was a rubbish way to start it! I thought you were angling in the other direction and I panicked.”
“Yes, well, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, well, I know that now.” We’re both red faced, both of us laughing, though we sober at the same time and trade a look that feels like silk against my skin. I tap his side with my elbow. “Say it anyway.”
“In its entirety?”
“At least the important bit.”
“The important bit was that if you go behind my back, I swear to God, I’ll skin you alive—”
“I won’t—”
“—murder you, then alchemically raise you from the dead so I can murder you again—”
“I won’t, Percy. I won’t, I won’t, I promise you, I won’t.” I put my hands upon either side of his face and pull him to me, standing on my toes so we are a breath apart. “Now say the rest.”
His face goes shy, eyes flitting down, then back up to mine. “Yes, Monty,” he says, and he smiles on my name. “I love you. And I want to be with you.”
“And you, Percy,” I return, touching my nose to his, “are the great love of my life. Whatever happens from here, I hope that’s the one thing that never changes.”
My hands are upon his face, mirror to the spot where I’ll carry red, puckered scars for the rest of my life. In his gaze, they seem to matter less. We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.
“May I kiss you?” I ask.
“Abso-bloody-lutely you may,” he says.
And so I do.