The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(7)
“Why’s Percy abed?” I follow Monty around the partition as Percy raises his head from where he’s burrowed into their mattress. He hasn’t become as dramatically waifish as Monty, though his dark skin hides any pallor. That, and Percy has been a stretched-out creature since youth, every suit a bit too short in the sleeves and his limbs thin with lean muscles jutting out like tangerines wrapped in burlap.
It occurs to me suddenly why the pair of them may be lounging in the middle of the day, and I freeze, blushing before I have confirmation of my suspicions. “Oh no. Am I interrupting something marital and romantic?”
“Felicity, please, it’s six in the evening,” Monty says with great indignance, then adds, “We’ve been fornicating all day.”
I resist using up my first eye roll of the visit this early. “Really, Percy, why are you in bed?”
“Because it has not been a very good week.” Monty sinks down at Percy’s side and nestles into his shoulder, his deaf side away from me.
Percy gives me a weak smile, his head listing against Monty’s. “Just a fit yesterday,” he says, and Monty wrinkles his nose at the word.
“Oh.” It comes out more relieved than I meant it to—I’m far more comfortable discussing epilepsy than fornication. Percy is an epileptic, temporarily incapacitated at periodic intervals by convulsions that physicians since Hippocrates have been attempting—and largely failing—to both understand and treat. After several years of his guardian aunt and uncle bringing a parade of so-called experts in to cup and bleed and dose him in attempt to lessen the severity, they finally decided upon permanent imprisonment in the sort of barbaric asylum that people with untreatable ills are confined to. It would have happened, too, had he not absconded with my brother—so dedicated were they to keeping his illness a secret for fear of the social embarrassment that neither Monty nor I knew of it until we were abroad.
I am tempted to ask after the paper I sent the previous month on homeopathy and the treatment of convulsive fits through quinine. But Percy looks drowsy and ill, and Monty will stop listening once I begin to talk of anything medical, so all I say instead is “Epilepsy is a son of a bitch.”
“Oh my, but Scotland has made you vulgar,” Monty says with delight. “What brings you down from those highlands to us? Not that this isn’t a delightful surprise. But it is a surprise. Did you write? Because you reached us before the letter.”
“No, this was . . . unplanned.” I look down at my shoes as a chunk of some unknown substance crumbles from the sole. I have never been good at asking things of others, and it sticks in my throat. “I was hoping you’d put me up for a bit.”
“Are you all right?” Percy asks, which should have been my brother’s first question, though I’m not shocked it wasn’t.
“Oh, I’m fine.” I try to make it sound sincere, for I am well in all the ways he’s concerned for. I’m feeling rather trapped between the foot of the bed and the partition—when I try to scoot back, I nearly knock the screen over entirely. “I can find somewhere else to stay. A boardinghouse or something.”
But Monty waves that away. “Don’t be absurd. We can make room.”
Where? I almost say, but they’re both watching me with such a thick undercoat of concern it makes me look down again at my shoes. Eye contact in return somehow feels both too vulnerable and too invasive, so I mumble, “Sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?” Monty asks.
I was sorry that my great plan hadn’t worked out. Sorry I was here relying on my brother’s Christian charity—what little he had to spare—because my plan for my future had lost its footing at every mile marker. Because I was born a girl but too stubborn to accept the lot that came with my sex.
“Felicity.” Monty sits up and leans forward with his arms around his knees, looking very intently at me. “Apologize for nothing. It has been made clear in many a letter you are always welcome with us. I was anticipating if you ever took us up on that offer, there would be some notice, so you’ll have to put up with our current states of invalidity and concern for said invalidity. But had you written, I swear to God our answer would have been ‘board the first coach south.’”
Thank God—something I can be indignant about. It’s far more comfortable than sentimentality. “Many a letter? Really?” When Monty gives me a quizzical look, I fill in, “You have not once written to me.”
“I write!”
“No, Percy writes me long lovely letters in his very legible penmanship and then you scrawl something offensive at the bottom about Scottish men and their kilts.” Monty grins, unsurprisingly, but Percy snorts as well. When I glare at him, he pulls the quilt up over his nose. “Don’t encourage him.”
Monty leans over and gives a gentle nip at Percy’s jaw, then presses a kiss to the same spot. “Oh, he loves it when I’m filthy.”
I look away, right at a pair of trousers tellingly discarded upon the floor, and resign myself to the fact that their affection is unavoidable. Particularly if I’m to be staying with them. “Are you two still nauseatingly obsessed with each other? I thought by now you’d have mellowed.”
“We remain completely unbearable. Come here, my most dearest darling love of loves.” Monty pulls Percy’s face toward him and kisses him on the mouth this time, sloppy and showy, and somehow he manages to look at me the whole time as if to convey just how smug he is about making me uncomfortable. That initial fondness I felt toward him has already begun to rot like an overripe melon.