I have a very confusing conversation with the barman, who speaks only Portuguese, translated to Spanish by one of the tap boys and then from Spanish to fractured English by a woman sitting at the bar who, based on her apathetic tone, is either falling asleep or deeply annoyed by being dragged into this panto act. I’d be annoyed, if I were her. I’d also be annoyed were I the barman, when, after all the effort he went to understand me, I leave without buying a drink. I wait in a queue at what I think is an office for almost an hour only to realize it’s the queue to the front of a theater, when I catch a glimpse inside of a woman hanging naked from a trapeze.
I can feel the women on the porch of a cathouse nearby watching the spectacle of my humiliation as I try and fail to get information from the ticket taker, him calm and polite, me tongue-tied and near hysteria and also soaking wet from the rain, which is not actually falling that heavily, but after standing in it for so long I look like I went for a dip in the harbor. Maybe I’m sweating. My palms are slick. When I try to give him a coin in thanks for his lack of help, it shoots from between my fingers and nearly hits him in the eye.
When I finally fold and abandon the theater, I have a disorienting moment of panic in which I can’t remember the way I’ve come from. I’ve wandered so far down the pier I can’t pick our ship out of the throng of galleons bobbing in the water, or remember what pier we moored our longboat on, or where Sim and George have gone. My eyes start to burn, partly from panic, partly humiliation, but mostly from feeling like a great bloody failure again, incapable of something that would be simple for anyone else. I wish Louisa was here—partly because I’m just so much better in every sense of the word when she’s with me, and partly because she’s so much more brazen about talking to strangers than I am. She’d ask me to hoist her onto a bartop and shout at the patrons until they listened to her. She wouldn’t be ready to give up, or have forgotten where we had walked from, because her brain wouldn’t have been so occupied by her worries interrupting each other. If Lou were here, I wouldn’t be alone.
“You need a doctor?” someone calls in English, and I turn. One of the women on the cathouse porch is watching me, twirling a strand of her thinning and almost certainly dyed red hair around her finger. Her English is heavy with Portuguese vowels, her speech further garbled by the wad of tobacco wedged into her lower lip. She tips a spittoon toward her with the toe of a spattered boot and expectorates into it with such force it pings.
“One in particular,” I say. “A lady doctor. She may go by the name . . .” Oh God. Veronica or Felicity? I swallow. “Montague.”
“Ah, sim, sim! Senhorita Montague.”
I almost collapse in relief. “You know her?”
“She sees my girls. You walk one hour?” She holds up a finger. “I’ll tell you”—she unwedges something from her gums as she struggles to think of the word—“the path.”
I can’t imagine walking an hour alone in the dark on this strange island with nothing but cobbled instructions from a stranger with whom I only share about a fourth of a common language. Walk which direction? Down what streets? Into the hills? Off a cliff and into the water? It’s dark and raining and this city is practically Sodom and I’m alone. Any directions she could give me, I’d hardly be able to follow.
Then an idea occurs to me, and I ask eagerly, “Can I pay you for one of your girls?”
She perks up, smoothing her skirts and her hair in a quick loop. “What kind you like? I have Spanish, English, twins, big tits, small tits, no tits—do you like to stick it in or—”
I interrupt her before she can finish her catalogue. “Any girl who knows the way to the lady doctor’s.”
I mentally add another item to the list of reasons Monty can’t die and will him to hear it back on the ship—because I have to tell you the story of how I came to hire my first—and likely only—prostitute. I have a sense he’ll find it wildly amusing.
The girl sent with me is thin and dark haired, and looks very put out at the type of physical labor I’ve hired her for. I try to ask her name, but she either doesn’t understand me or doesn’t care to tell me, so I don’t tell her mine either. I’m out of breath within a block, but her pace is unyielding. As we leave the harbor, the sloping streets lead upward into the foothills. We follow a dark road as it turns into a path, barely a dribble of pebbles among the foliage, and thank God the woman sent her girl with a lantern.
When the gold glow of a small house appears on the cliffside above us, the girl stops and points.
“That’s it?” I ask. She doesn’t answer, but instead produces a pipe from her skirt and lights it with the flame of the lantern. As the tobacco glows, she puffs out a smoky breath, then waves to me before turning back the way we came. The message transcends our linguistic barrier. I’m on my own from here.
The hike up the cliffside is steeper than I expected, and the house much smaller once I reach it. I thought it would be a manor, this high on the hill and removed from the town, but it’s closer to the small white townhouses we passed on the edges of Ponta Delgada, picked up and transported to this hillside with its back to the sea. It even slants, as though it once had a neighbor to lean on.
I pull the bell cord, though I have little hope I’ll be answered. It’s late enough—early enough?—that any respectable person would be asleep. At the very least, I’ll be greeted by someone groggy and still in their nightclothes and furious at being woken at this ungodly hour.
To my great surprise, the door swings open almost at once, and I find myself face-to-face with a woman a few years younger than Monty, with dark auburn curls shoved haphazardly onto the top of her head, a pair of spectacles winking out from somewhere in the mess. She’s shorter than I am, and, in spite of the hour, not dressed for bed as I had anticipated but rather wearing a practical work dress, her sleeves rolled up and a dark liquid I’d rather not look too closely at dried in smears across her apron.
“Can I help you?” she barks, and I notice a pistol in one hand, only half-hidden in the folds of her skirt.
I step back, hands rising like that will somehow ward off a shot. I don’t know how to start. Do I introduce myself? Do I tell her it’s Monty? Or I’m with Sim? Will she slam the door in my face at the mention of the fleet? I’m sure Monty would have when we first met, had he been in better proximity to their back office door. But now I have a second chance to make a good first impression with a long-lost sibling—how many people are given that rare opportunity?
So of course, I ruin it by blurting, “My brother needs a doctor.” Without any relevant details.
Her brow creases, and I notice her finger shifts off the trigger of her pistol. “What?”
“We’ve just arrived, and he broke his leg on the voyage here—from Morocco—we came on a boat—a ship—more of a boat—it’s not very big—he broke it in a storm—I mean, it was crushed in a storm—and I think it’s infected and he’s sick and won’t wake or take any food and you’re a doctor.”
She blinks a few times, trying to make sense of the extraneous, seemingly random details I have just vomited upon her. “Is he in Ponta Delgada?” I nod again. She hangs the pistol casually in a holster draped over the coatrack beside the door. “Stay here. I need to change my shoes and get my kit.”