The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

by Mackenzi Lee

  I didn’t realize he had woken, but he grabs onto me, like he thinks he’s falling. “Monty!”

  “Right here, Perce.” I’m trying to keep the shudder out of my voice, and failing. “I’m right here, it’s . . .” I’ve got no clue what I’m supposed to say. “It’s all right.” God, I sound so daft.

  “It’s bright,” he murmurs. His voice is muzzy and slurred—he hardly sounds like himself—and his eyes still aren’t focused. Seems he’s having a hard time keeping them open at all—he keeps squinting like he’s looking into the sun. His hands are clamped around my coat, so tight his knuckles are blotched, and when I sit him upon the bed, he clutches me tighter, his voice pitching. “Don’t leave me!”

  “I won’t.”

  He seems so distressed that I don’t want to peel him off, so I stoop there, my hands around his, trying to convince him to lie down, with my voice shaking. His shoulders slump suddenly, head falling forward against my chest, and I think he’s going to let me go, but then his fingers go tight and he tries to stand again. “I need my violin. Where is it? Where’s my violin? I need it now.”

  “I’ve got it, Percy.” Felicity appears at my side, prying Percy’s fingers off my coat and guiding him down onto the bed. “Try to relax, it’s all right. You’re safe now, relax.” On the other side of the cabin, the apothecary pulls a medicine chest from a shelf and begins rummaging through its drawers, bottles clinking together in a soft chorus from inside.

  I can tell that I’m useless, so I slink backward, onto the deck and into the cool night air. Above the water, the stars are spread in smudgy handfuls across the twilight. I can still hear the music of the fair, and closer by a slow tune plucked out upon a mandolin, one lonely string at a time. On the bank, crickets are purring. I sit down with my back to the railing, turning my face to the sky and letting the shaky fatigue settle through me.

  Turns out, panic is rather exhausting, and I fall asleep without meaning to, my head tipped back against the railing of the boat, before anyone has come out.

  9

  It feels like I’ve hardly closed my eyes when Felicity is shaking me awake. Sunrise is a spilled glass of wine across the horizon, stars fading back into imaginary things. Someone put a blanket over me while I slept and my knees are aching after so long folded up to my chest.

  In spite of the night we’ve had, Felicity looks very awake. Her eyes are wide and alert, and she’s undone the pins from her hair and woven it into a plait that swings over her shoulder as she leans toward me. I, in contrast, feel like a washed-up carcass of myself. My eyes are crusty, and a thin line of spittle has run down my chin while I slept. I swipe it away. I haven’t shaved in a week and I’m starting to get fuzzy.

  “Are you well?” Felicity asks.

  “What—me? Yes. How’s Percy?”

  She looks down at the deck and my heart seizes up. “Sore and weary. He’s trying to rest but he’s been too agitated to stay asleep for long. He’s going to be fine,” she adds, for I must look stricken. “Only a matter of time.”

  “Sorry, I should have . . . I should have stayed up with him. With you.”

  “You were tired. And there wasn’t much to be done. Pascal bled him and he took some mugwort, so we’ll see if that has any effect.”

  “Pascal?”

  “The apothecary. The man you found.”

  “Does he know what’s wrong with Percy?”

  Felicity slides to her knees in front of me, one hand on the rail. “I think you’d best speak to Percy.”

  “What do I need to speak to him about?” I ask, dread creeping around me and tightening like a noose.

  “He’s got something to tell you and I don’t want to be the go-between.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, I should probably go speak to Percy, then,” I say, like it was my idea, and pull myself up. Felicity doesn’t reply. She takes my spot on the deck as I descend the few steps into the belly of the boat.

  The cabin is still dark, but they’ve lit a few more lanterns and the shadows sway as the current rocks us. It feels like being drunk, a little tipsy and unsteady, but with none of the warm, comfortable buzz. The air smells of incense and seawater, and there’s a cup of tea resting on the floor beside the bed, steam rising from the surface and threading its fingers with dust motes drifting through the pale light.

  Percy is curled up in the corner of the box bed, stripped down to only rumpled breeches and a clean shirt, the translucent material clinging to his skin with sweat. There’s a violet bruise beneath his eye like a crack in a glass windowpane, and a thread of bandage tied off in the crook of one elbow. A small blush of blood has seeped through it. He looks more tired than I’ve ever seen him. His hair is undone from its queue, and it falls in long coils around his face.

  I ease myself down on the opposite corner of the bed, one leg pulled up under me, and Percy opens his eyes. “Morning,” I say quietly. Percy doesn’t reply. The sound of the sea kicking against the side of the boat fills the silence.

  I’m swallowing the urge to say something daft because I hate this taut band between us. It feels like the walls are closing in. Say something, Monty. Be a friend, be a gentleman, be a human being. It’s Percy, your best friend, Percy who you’ve gotten foxed with, who plays you his violin, who used to spit apple seeds at you from high up in the orchard treetops. Percy who you kissed in Paris, who looks so damn beautiful, even now. Say something kind. Something that will make him stop looking so alone and afraid. But I can’t come up with a damn thing. All I want to do is dash out of reach of whatever it is he’s about to say.

  Percy presses his forehead to the wall. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. His voice has a drowsy tint to it.

  “For what?”

  “For what happened.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Perce. You couldn’t have done—”

  “It’s epilepsy,” he says, and I stop.

  “What?”

  “Epilepsy,” he repeats, then covers his face with his hands so it comes out muffled when he says it again. “I have epilepsy.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I blurt, “Well, so long as that’s all it is.”

  I hope it might make him laugh, but instead he lets out a tense sigh through his teeth. “Can you please not be yourself right now?”

  I look down at the bed, my hands worrying the worn stitching of the blanket. “So you . . . you’re ill.”

  “Yes.”

  “Epilepsy.”

  “Yes.”

  I know almost nothing about epilepsy. Devils and possession and insanity, those are the sorts of things I’ve heard of, but they’re the stuff of horror stories that end with the moral “Thank God each day for your health.” And besides, this is Percy, the best lad I know. None of those things can be right.

  “And there isn’t . . .” I halt, and I swear I’m so rotten at this that even the silence winces. I’m not sure what I’m allowed to ask and what I shouldn’t and what questions I’m comfortable hearing the answers to.

  Is it contagious?

  Does it hurt?

  When will you be well again?

  Are you going to die?

  Are you going to die?

  Are you going to die?

  I wish we could go back to the moment before he told me and I could just keep not knowing. “Is there a cure? Or treatment, or anything?”

  “No. No cure. None of the treatments have worked.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s . . . too bad.” His mouth pulls tight, like he’s going to say something to correct me, but then he just nods, and I want to turn to sand and slip between the boards. “So you, um, you have these . . .”

  “Fits.”

  “Yes. All right, yes. That.”

  “You can say it.”

  I really don’t think I can. “How long have they . . . ? How long has this been happening?”

  “Every few months—”

  “No, I mean, when did it start?”

  Percy is still turned to the w
all, and before he answers, he twists even farther from me. His face is almost out of sight. “Right before you came home from Eton.”

  “Eton?” I gape at him. “Percy, that was two years ago. You’ve been ill for two years and you never said anything to me about it?”

  “No one knows, all right? Only my family and some of our staff.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I was sort of hoping I’d never have to. I’ve been lucky so far.”

  “Lucky?” I’ve shifted from meek to spitting-with-fury on the other side of a second. “You kept this secret from me for two years, Percy, two goddamn years. How could you not tell me?”

  At last, he raises his head. “Are you really trying to make this about you?”

  “I want to know!”

  “I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, because you have to. Because I had to watch—”

  “Well, I’m sorry you had to watch.” The venom rises in his voice suddenly. “How hard for you to have to watch.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He clenches his hands into fists around the blankets, face set, then says, “Fine, you want to know why? Because at the end of this year, I’m not going to law school, I’m going into an asylum.”

  We stare at each other. It takes a long moment for me to grasp what he’s said—it’s so horrid and utterly unbelievable that I’m certain I must have heard wrong. “You’re . . . what?”

  “There’s a place in Holland. A sanatorium. For the . . .” He squeezes his eyes tight and finishes very carefully. “For the insane.”

  I don’t know what to say. I’ve heard stories of Bedlam in London—black, poisonous rumors no one speaks of in polite company. Asylums aren’t hospitals or spas, they aren’t somewhere you go to get well. They’re somewhere you go after everything else has been tried. Somewhere you’re hidden away and forgotten, bound to your bed and starved and emptied of your blood. They’re somewhere you go to die. If Percy goes into a sanatorium, he’ll never come home. We won’t see each other again.

  My chest is so tight I can hardly get words out. “But you’re not insane” is all I manage to say.

  “Perhaps I am. This isn’t ordinary, is it?” He tips his chin, staring down with his cheeks sucked in.

  “Is that what you want? Go to Holland and die in a madhouse?”

  He winces a bit, and I wish at once I hadn’t spoken so bluntly, but I don’t retreat from it.

  “Of course not.”

  “Is this your uncle, then? Is it his idea to send you away?” I am starting to speak so fast I can hardly understand myself, grasping frantically at any thread of a way to fix this. You can’t, I am thinking. You can’t be ill because I need you and you can’t go away to die in some asylum because what am I supposed to do without you? “You have to tell them no. Tell them you won’t. You can’t go. Just tell them you won’t!”

  “I haven’t got a choice. My family won’t care for me any longer.”

  “Then go somewhere else—anywhere!”

  “How?” he snaps. “And how could you possibly understand any of this? If anyone found out, my whole family would suffer for it, and I’m not going to weigh them down any more than I already have.” He’s kneading the blanket against his legs, veins in his hands standing out like bright threads beneath his skin. “My aunt thinks that this is God’s way of punishing me. The family’s bastard Negro boy has convulsive fits—it’s appropriate. She still won’t be disabused of the notion that I’m possessed by the devil, and my uncle keeps telling me that I need to stop being hysterical and overcome it.”

  He tips his head backward, and when the lantern light catches his eyes, I realize he’s crying. Or rather, he’s trying very hard not to cry, which is even worse. I don’t have a clue of what to do. I feel like a loon for sitting still and not doing anything to comfort him, but my limbs hardly feel as though they belong to me. I can’t remember how to touch him.

  Percy keeps talking, his face skyward. “My little cousin still won’t sit near me because he thinks it’s catching. He’s got to be coaxed into being in the same room. It took a year to find a valet who was willing to stay on after he knew he’d have to serve a dark-skinned boy who had convulsions without warning. I have been cupped by savage barbers and exorcised and blessed and I haven’t eaten meat in a year and a bloody half and it’s not going away, so I have to. Monty, are you listening to me?”

  I am, but I’m not hearing it. Or it’s not going through my brain. I’m hearing without understanding a word. This feels like a nightmare, a dream of being buried alive that I thrash against but can’t wake from, and everything he says is another spadeful of dirt pressing down on my chest. All this pain in him I’ve never noticed.

  “Monty.”

  “Yes,” I say faintly. “Yes, I’m listening.”

  He takes a long breath, one hand pressed to his forehead. “So let’s find Lockwood and see if we can convince him to let us keep traveling. We’ll see the Continent and have all the good times we planned and then I’ll go to Holland and—”

  I stand up, so fast my foot catches on the blanket and I stumble. “No. No, just . . . just stop, Percy, stop.” He looks up at me, his mouth tight to stop the trembling. I feel like crying too—feel like falling down into the bed next to him and sobbing. I’m shaking and dizzy, emotion distilled into physical symptoms, and all I manage to say is “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you’re a wreck! Complete shambles. I’ve spent years chasing you around, making certain you didn’t drink yourself to death or pass out in a gutter or slit your own wrists—”

  I’m right there on the edge of tears. I can feel them round and hot and clogging my throat, but I am not going to cry.

  “—and I know you’ve had a rough go, with your father and being thrown out of school, but you’ve not been yourself. Not for a while. And I couldn’t have you making this worse. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t.”

  Another spade of earth hits me. “But you didn’t even give me a chance,” I say. My voice comes out very, very small. “I thought we told each other everything.”

  “This isn’t about us.”

  “It’s always going to be about us.”

  “No, you want this to be about you. You care about what happens to me because of what that would mean for you. You are the only thing that matters to you.”

  I can’t think of anything to say, so I settle for the second-best thing to a witty retort and storm out. But even that gets botched when the boat suddenly tips and I’m pitched into the wall.

  I straighten myself out, stomp to the door, and don’t look back.

  10

  Felicity is still on the deck when I return, her chin to her chest and her eyes closed, but she looks up as I slump beside her. If she were Percy, I’d bury my head in her shoulder and moan, but she’s not, she’s Felicity, and the only person I want to talk to about my fight with Percy is Percy. Which just seems unfair.

  “So, what did you two talk about?” Felicity asks lightly.

  “Percy’s ill.”

  “Yes.”

  “Epilepsy.”

  “He told me.”

  “When? Two years ago when he first found out?”

  “No. About an hour ago, before you woke up.”

  “He’s . . .” I mash my fingers into my forehead. I’m not certain if he told her about the sanatorium, and I’m afraid that giving voice to it is going to make it feel even more sickening and real than it already does, so I say, “He’s not possessed.”

  “No, he’s not,” she says, and the firmness in her voice surprises me. “And his doctors are backward quacks if any of them told him so. If they’ve been keeping up with any recent research, they should know it’s been proven that epilepsy is nothing to do with demonic possession. That’s all dark ages nonsense.”

  “So, what causes it?”

  “The Boerhaave School published a pamphlet—”

  “
The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “No, tell me. The—that thing you said. The school thing. What does it say?”

  She lets out a little sigh through her nose. “It simply claims there are many reasons someone might develop epilepsy, but no one truly understands any of them. It’s all speculation.”

  “Can it be cured?” Because if there’s a cure, if there is anything that could possibly make him well, he won’t be sent to Holland and I won’t lose him.

  But Felicity shakes her head, and my lifeline slips out to sea.

  I press my face into my knees. The first rays of the sun are starting to creep across the back of my neck. It’s maddening that the world is so quiet and still and completely unchanged from the moment before I stepped into the cabin of the boat.

  Percy’s ill.

  It’s seeping through me like a poison, leaving me jumbled up and numb. Percy’s ill and will never be well again and is being sent away to die in a sanatorium because of it. And, close on its heels, a second thought that leaves me nearly as cold—Percy didn’t trust me enough to tell me so.

  “Felicity, am I a good person?”

  She looks sideways at me, one eyebrow ascending. “Why? Are you having some sort of crisis?”

  “No. Yes.” I scrub my fingers through my hair. “Percy didn’t tell me.”

  “I know. That wasn’t very good of him, but I sort of understand it.”

  “Why? What’s so wrong with me that you both seem to think I couldn’t handle knowing?”

  “Well . . . you’re a bit of a rake.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “You can’t behave the way you do and then be surprised when someone tells you so.” She massages her temples with the tips of her fingers, her mouth pulling into a frown. “I do not pretend to understand the passionate friendship you and Percy have always sustained—you’re important to each other, there’s no questioning that. But I don’t think you can blame him for not telling you. Your attention is usually elsewhere, and when hard things come up, you . . . drink, you sleep around. You run away.”