“Try not to look so surprised,” Monty says to Felicity over the top of my head.
“But I don’t think you really know me.” I press the heels of my hands against my eyelids so hard that stars pop through the darkness. Enough light to see by. “If you did, you wouldn’t think any of that was true.”
“If you get to tell me I’m brilliant, we get to tell you the same,” Felicity says with a governess’s sternness that I find impossibly endearing, scolding deployed for good.
“But I’m not, I’m not . . . right.” I drag my sleeve over my face. “If I can’t get rid of this—if I can’t do something about it—”
Felicity interrupts. “But those aren’t the same thing, are they? There’s a difference between curing an illness and recognizing that some things cannot be cured, but the symptoms can be managed in order to achieve a more comfortable life that is not defined by illness.” She pushes a stray hair from her face. It’s lost some of its curl away from the tropical climate of the Azores, but the two white stripes at each temple somehow stand out more, like the horns of an owl. “Sorry, that’s very medical phraseology.”
“You can be medical,” I say. It makes me feel less like a head case and more like an ordinary person with an ordinary thing wrong with them.
The wind tears another strand of her hair free from its arrangement, and Felicity battles with it for a moment before finally shoving the whole mess of it into the neck of her scarf. “For example,” she says, her tone like a friendly encyclopedia, and I think what a fantastic physician she must be—confident and thorough and knowledgeable, but not cold. “Percy has epileptic fits.”
“Your Percy?” I ask Monty.
He nods, then hesitates. “Well, if George gets to England first, he may not be my Percy any longer.”
“It’s not something he’ll likely ever be cured of,” Felicity continues, “unless there’s some enormous leap forward in medical research in the next few years. However, he’s worked with several doctors in London who are informed enough not to write him off as someone who can only be treated by commitment, and who don’t think epilepsy is indicative of demonic possession—stop me if any of this isn’t true anymore,” she says to Monty.
But Monty shakes his head. “No, you’ve got it in one. Though I don’t think we ever got demons as a direct suggestion—masturbation, yes. Though I suppose a lot of people think that’s demonic.” He ponders this. “Do you think all demons are the same, or are there elite demons whose specialty is inspiring masturbation? Like a concentration in university. Didn’t Michelangelo paint masturbating demons in the Sistine Chapel? I seem to recall one of the guidebooks I never read—”
“Monty, focus,” Felicity says, and he snaps back from The Last Judgment.
“Right, yes. Percy.”
“I didn’t know he had epilepsy,” I say.
“Well, you wouldn’t, not by looking at him,” Monty replies. “Honestly, you wouldn’t even know it by knowing him—lots of our friends aren’t aware. It’s not his defining feature.” A pause, then he adds, “His ass is.”
Felicity rolls her eyes. “God, you’re wound tight.”
“This is the longest we’ve been apart since I was sixteen!” Monty drags his hands down his face. “I’m going mad for a good pull. Frankly I’d welcome a masturbation demon at this point.”
I almost ask Monty why he and Percy aren’t married, as he seems faithful to the point of sexual frustration, if only because I promised George I’d bother him, though I’m starting to wonder for myself.
But then he stretches his hands over his head, wincing when his back pops. “Percy sees an acupuncturist at Saint Luke’s and a physician who helped him develop a routine for recovery after a fit, so he’s down for a day or so after and not a week. They’re not treatments he came to overnight, mind you—it took years of trial and error and theories that weren’t a lot of fun and them not working and him getting frustrated and angry and losing hope and then getting hopeful again, and then it gets worse and it gets better and you live with it.”
I laugh, my tears reappearing suddenly so that it comes out more of a gurgle. “God, is this going to take years?”
“It’s going to take your whole life,” Felicity says. “But it doesn’t have to be the defining element of it. You can find systems to put in place so that even when you’re at your worst, there are people around you who know how to help and don’t give up on you.”
It feels so daunting. I wouldn’t know where to start—there are so many things wrong with me, so many cracks in my foundation, that patching one will hardly help with the stability of the whole. One less corner where the cold seeps in doesn’t matter when the roof still needs fixing and the doors don’t sit right in their frames and why bother with one crack when the whole house is falling down around you? I’ll spend my whole life trying to repair myself and still die a broken person. It sounds exhausting.
The only model I have for any of this is my mother, but she wasn’t a lunatic. She had something else that manifested as a mania but was due instead to whatever it is that happened when she met the Flying Dutchman. Her actions left the seas in disarray. How could her own heart escape unscathed?
Felicity squints at me suddenly. “How are you feeling now?”
“Daunted.”
“I meant more your general state of mind. Forgive me for being blunt, but this is the longest I’ve seen you look either of us in the eye while speaking, and you seem a bit less”—she selects her next word very carefully—“unsettled than usual.”
I feel less unsettled, I realize. I’m not rattling the bench with my bouncing knee or tearing the seams out of my cuffs to release some of the nervous energy that always lives in my limbs, and though I realize I have been digging my thumbnail hard into my opposite palm, that’s small compared to the damage I usually do to my own body. I caught myself apologizing unnecessarily and stopped. I’m always second place in the foot race against my thoughts, but for once, it feels like I’ve been given a head start.
“Do you feel different?” she asks.
“Not really,” I say. “Maybe a bit less seasick. River-sick.”
“I need to write something down.” Felicity stands, pulling her skirts out from where they’ve bunched under her. “I’ll be right back, I promise, we can finish our nice family moment.”
“Felicity Fitzwilliam—” Monty calls after her, and she spins on him.
“For God’s sake, it’s Josephine Violet. Felicity Josephine Violet Montague. Are you pleased with yourself?”
Monty gives her a cheeky grin, his dimples popping out. “Terribly, thank you.” As soon as she’s out of earshot, Monty turns back to the riverbank, staring out at the next mountain castle, and says to me, “I truly don’t think I knew that.”
Amsterdam
25
In Amsterdam, the tulips have died in the window boxes, but the streets are lined with leafy trees, and their reflection in the water mixes with those of the bright-colored row houses, turning the canals into colorful ribbons that snake beneath bridges and along the pavement. Boats bob gently in the current, while gulls circle overhead, chatting loudly among themselves. The canal houses look perfect as gingerbread cookies, their windows frosted by the sun and framed in hard-candy shutters.