We walk without seeing any sign of our carriage or an end to the trees or even a sliver of road until the sun is nearly set, and then it’s an empty road that we find, not a light or a house in sight. Percy is the first to suggest what we are all thinking, which is stopping to sleep, since it doesn’t seem likely we’ll find anywhere to stay before we collapse. Summer is peaking like whipped meringue, and the night is thick-aired and damp. Crickets strum from the underbrush.
“This is altogether a different sort of evening than I was hoping for,” I say as we spread ourselves in the warm shadow of a white-barked poplar tree.
“Disappointed?” Percy asks.
I’m gasping for a drink—it’s all I’ve been thinking of for the last several hours, trying to calculate the best-case scenario for getting alcohol in me fast. But I just laugh.
Percy stretches out beside me, which makes my skin stand on end until he puts his violin case deliberately between us. I take that as my sign to stay away. Felicity lies down on my other side and curls up with her hands pillowed under her head. “If you keep rubbing your hand like that,” she says to me, “you might actually break it.”
I hadn’t realized I was. “It bloody hurts!”
“Should have been better at punching.”
“How was I supposed to know there was a correct way to do it? On that subject, how do you know?”
“How do you not know?” she counters. “That can’t be the first time you’ve hit someone.”
“With any degree of seriousness, yes.”
“You hit me once at the pond,” Percy says.
“Yes, but we were boys. And it was more of a smack. And you were teasing me because I wouldn’t put my head under the water, so you deserved it.”
“What about when you came home all black-and-blue from Eton?” Felicity asks.
I try to laugh, but my throat closes up around the sound and it comes out a bit more like I’m drowning. “That wasn’t from a fight.”
“That’s what Mother told me.”
“Yes, well. Parents lie.”
“Why would she lie about that?”
“Hm.”
“I think you’re lying to me.”
“I’m not.”
“I think you got in a fight and that’s why they expelled you. You came home so bashed up—”
“I remember.”
“—you must have done something nasty enough to get one of the other boys to put his fist in your face.”
“No.”
“You’re not one to start fights, but I assumed you’d at least have swung back.”
“It wasn’t another boy, it was Father.”
Silence drops upon us like wet wool. The trees whisper as the wind rakes through them, leaves moon-stained and glittering. Between the branches, I can see the stars, so bright and thick that the sky looks sugared.
Then Felicity says, “Oh.”
My eyes are starting to pinch, and I screw up my face against it. “Good old Father.”
“I didn’t know that. I swear, Mother told me—”
“Why are we talking about this?” I laugh again, because I don’t know what else to do. I want a drink so badly I’m ready to sprint to the next town for it. I press my fists against my eyes and suck in a sharp breath as pain shoots down my wrist. “My hand is absolutely broken.”
“It’s not broken,” Felicity says, and the exasperation behind her voice makes me feel better.
“I think it might be.”
“It’s not.”
“We should sleep,” Percy says.
“Right.” I turn onto my side and find myself face-to-face with him. In the moonlight, his skin looks like polished stone. He smiles at me, so sympathetic it makes me shrivel up. Poor Monty, it says, and I want to die when I think of him pitying me.
Poor Monty, with a father who beats you until you bleed.
Poor Monty, with a fortune to inherit and an estate to run.
Poor Monty, who’s useless and embarrassing.
“Good night,” Percy says, then rolls over, away from me.
Poor Monty, in love with your best friend.
As it happens, there is no way to get comfortable on the ground, as it’s primarily composed of dirt and rocks and other sharp things that there’s a reason no one stuffs their mattresses with. I’m bone weary from the day, an ache left over from the panic still lingering in my limbs, but I lie for a long time on my back, then my side, then my other side, trying to cozy up and fall asleep and think about something that isn’t how hard it is to be stone-cold sober or my father beating the shit out of me after I was expelled from school. It’s running circles in my mind, all the vicious details of that week—my father’s face as the headmaster explained what had happened. The way that, after a while, he’d been hitting me for long enough that I heard more than felt the blows landing. The exquisite discomfort of the carriage ride home, my ribs rattling around in my chest every time we hit a rut and my head packed up tight, like it was full of cotton. All the things he called me that I’ll never forget.
I had woken at home the next morning in the worst pain of my life, so sore I could hardly get out of bed, but my father made me come to breakfast and sit beside him. My mother didn’t say a word about why I’d arrived home looking like I’d run face-first into a stone wall at top speed, and the idea of Father being the reason I was swollen and bruised would have been so absurd to Felicity it apparently never crossed her mind.
Halfway through breakfast, I excused myself to go vomit in the back garden, and when no one came after me, I stayed there, lying on the lawn beside the pond with no strength to get up. It was the same sort of day as when we left for our Tour—gray and stifling, the air sweating from a storm the night before and the sky threatening to tear open again. Patches of the garden path were still dark, and the grass was so damp that I was wet to the skin in minutes. But I didn’t move. I lay flat on my back, staring at the clouds and waiting for rain, shame rattling around inside me like a marble in a jar.
After a time, a shadow fell across my face, and when I opened my eyes, there was Percy, silhouetted against the bright sky as he peered down at me. “Christ.”
“Hallo there, darling.” My voice broke on the final word, because of course I needed this moment to be more humiliating than it already was. “How was your term?”
“Jesus Christ. What happened?”
“Eton threw me out.”
“I heard. That’s not what I’m concerned about right now.”
“Oh, this?” I waved a hand vaguely at my face, trying not to wince as I felt the pull in my ribs like the tightening of a violin string. “Don’t I look dashing?”
“Monty.”
“Piratical is perhaps a better word.”
“Please be serious.”
“Took a dozen men to bring me down.”
“Who did this?”
“Who do you think?”
Percy didn’t say anything to that. Instead he lay down next to me, our faces side by side but our bodies pointing in opposite directions. A bird swooped low above us, chittering merrily. “So why’d they toss you out?” he asked.
“Well. I had a bit of a gambling enthusiasm.”
“Everyone at Eton has a gambling enthusiasm. It’s not enough to expel you.”
“It was enough for them to search my rooms. And there was found some incriminating correspondence between myself and that lad I wrote to tell you about. Which was rather enough.”
“Oh God.”
“In my defense, he was very handsome.”
“And they told your father about them, did they?”
“Oh, he got to read them all. And then throw them back at me. Literally. Some of them he read aloud to punctuate . . .” I swiped a hand across the side of my face that felt less like an open wound. Percy pretended not to see. “So now he’s going to be home more, to keep an eye on me. Not so much time away in London, and that’s entirely my fault. I’m going to have to see him all the time and be around him—all the bleeding time, and it’s not going to change anything.”
“I know.”
“If he could beat this out of me, I would have let him long ago.”
The clouds shifted and churned above us, spreading like blood across the sky. At the edge of the lawn, the pond tested its shores. Harpsichord music drifted through the parlor windows, heavy-handed scales played at top speed. Felicity practicing with great indignance.
“I wish I were dead,” I said, then closed my eyes—or rather eye, one being out of commission—so I wouldn’t have to see Percy look at me, but I felt the grass prickle my neck as he shifted.
“Do you mean that?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it—wouldn’t be the last either, though I didn’t know that then—but it was the first time I’d said it aloud, to anyone. It’s a strange thing, to want to die. Stranger still when you don’t feel you deserve to get away so easily. I should have fought myself harder, kept it all better penned. Shouldn’t have wanted to act on my unnatural instincts. Shouldn’t have felt so grateful and relieved and not alone for the first time in my life when Sinjon Westfall kissed me behind the dormitories on Saint Mark’s Eve, and so certain no one could ever make me ashamed for it. Not the headmaster, or my friends back home, or the other boys in my year. The whole while between being found out and waiting to be collected, I’d felt so defiant and righteous, unshakable in my surety that I’d done nothing wrong, but my father had knocked that straight out of me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Yes. Maybe.”
“Well, don’t . . . don’t do that. Don’t want to be dead. Here.” Percy nudged me with his shoulder until I opened my eyes. He had his arm extended straight above us, fingers splayed wide. “Here are five reasons not to be dead. Number one, because your birthday is next month and I already have something really excellent for you and you don’t want to die before I give it to you.” I laughed a little at that, but I was so near tears it ended up sounding less like a laugh and more like a slurp. Percy didn’t comment. “Number two”—he was ticking them off on his fingers as he went—“if you weren’t around there’d be no one who’s worse than me at billiards. You are so rubbish at billiards it makes me look quite a bit better than I actually am. Number three, I wouldn’t have anyone who would hate Richard Peele with me.”
“I hate Richard Peele,” I said quietly.
“WE HATE RICHARD PEELE!” Percy seconded, so loud that a bird took flight from the hedgerow. I laughed again, and it sounded more human this time. “Number four, we still have never managed to slide all the way down the staircase at my house on a serving tray, and without you there, the inevitable victory will be hollow. And five”—he folded his thumb into his fist and pressed it up to the sky—“if you weren’t here, everything would be the worst. Abso-bloody-lutely awful. It’d be dull and lonely and just . . . don’t, all right? Don’t be dead. I’m sorry you were expelled and I’m sorry about your father but I’m so glad you’re home and I . . . really need you right now. So don’t wish you were dead because I’m so glad that you’re not.” Silence for a moment. Then Percy said, “All right?”
And I said, “All right.”
Percy climbed to his feet and offered me a hand. He was gentle about it, but I still winced as he pulled me up, and he had to steady me with a soft touch to my elbow. He’d gotten taller since I’d seen him at Christmas—somehow he suddenly had a good five inches on me—and he’d broadened out a bit as well, not so lanky and knobby and ninety percent knees like he’d always been, growing up. His limbs didn’t seem too long for his body anymore.
When I look back on it now, I realize that must have been the first time, in all the while we’d known each other, it occurred to me that Percy might actually be rather handsome.
Perspective is a goddamn son of a bitch.