Book of Hesperia

In Barcelona, the sea was never far away.

It waited at the ends of streets. It glittered between apartment buildings and beneath the outstretched arms of cranes. Its salt gathered on window glass, on church stone, on the lips of lovers who had not gone near the shore. Even in the oldest quarters, where the alleys narrowed until the sky became a blue wound overhead, one could sometimes hear it in the silence after midnight.

Water moving against stone.

Water moving beneath stone.

An immense, patient breathing.

By day, the Mediterranean belonged to the living. Ferries dragged their white scars across it. Fishing boats returned beneath clouds of gulls. Tourists stood along the waterfront taking photographs of sunlight scattered over the waves.

By night, the sea recovered its other nature.

The blue drained away. The horizon disappeared. Beyond the last harbor light lay a darkness without streets or windows, a darkness into which men had sailed for thousands of years with their prayers, their cargoes, their beautiful names.

Not all had returned.

From the terrace of his family’s villa above Port Vell, Francis Joseph watched the harbor lights tremble on the water and tried not to count the number of times Lacey Underall had refused him.

There had been polite refusals. Amused refusals. A refusal delivered over coffee while she continued reading. Another outside a nightclub, where the red light above the entrance had made her mouth look bloodstained.

Once, when he had asked why she would not even give him a chance, she had looked at him with an expression he still disliked remembering.

“Because you think a chance is something I owe you.”

He had laughed then.

He had been embarrassed, and laughter was the instrument he used when he could not bear to let anyone see where something had entered him.

Tonight, he meant to do better.

Behind them, the villa glowed through its open doors. Music drifted out from a room neither of them occupied. Somewhere inside, a servant was clearing the remains of a dinner Francis had barely touched: silver cutlery, fish bones, a bowl of lemons cut into bright, obedient halves.

The terrace smelled of jasmine and warm stone.

Below, Barcelona descended toward the sea in layers of gold.

Lacey stood at the wrought-iron railing, one hand resting on its scrollwork. The wind lifted strands of dark hair from the nape of her neck and laid them across her cheek. She brushed them away without looking at him.

“You dropped out of university three months ago,” she said.

Francis rolled the stem of his glass between his fingers.

“That sounds accusatory.”

“It was meant to.”

“My father has already delivered the definitive speech on the subject. I can arrange a transcript.”

“Did it include the part where you’re twenty-two and have never worked a day in your life?”

“That was the introduction.”

“And the conclusion?”

“He said I was wasting every opportunity he’d given me.”

For a moment, something unguarded entered his voice.

Lacey turned her head.

Then he smiled.

“I told him I was creating opportunities for someone less fortunate.”

She looked back at the harbor.

“You’re impossible.”

“I prefer difficult to categorize.”

“You prefer whatever sounds expensive.”

Francis laughed.

He liked that she spoke to him this way. Or he told himself he did.

Most people approached him through the fact of his father’s money. They became agreeable before he had said anything worth agreeing with. They laughed at stories whose endings he had forgotten. Men twice his age laid hands on his shoulder and called him exceptional, though he had done nothing exceptional except be born.

Lacey was unimpressed by all of it.

She had seen the villa, the cars, the watch he had once left beside a restaurant sink because he disliked the feel of it against his wrist. None of these things seemed to alter her opinion of him.

“You could do something,” she said.

“I do things.”

“Something you’d still do if nobody were watching.”

He took a drink.

Below them, a boat sounded its horn. The note crossed the harbor, low and mournful, then faded among the buildings.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said.

“That’s never a comforting phrase.”

“My father’s yacht is in port.”

“I’m aware your family owns a floating hotel.”

“It’s fueled. Provisioned. Crew aboard.”

“Congratulations.”

“We sail tomorrow.”

Lacey turned fully toward him.

For an instant, he enjoyed the surprise on her face. It was so much better than the patient expression she wore whenever she suspected what he wanted.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“You and me.”

“No.”

“You haven’t heard where.”

“I’ve heard enough.”

“Greece.”

She shook her head.

“The Cyclades,” he continued. “Three weeks. No parties, no dreadful people asking what we do, no one explaining their investment portfolio over dinner.”

“No.”

“We could stop wherever you like.”

“No.”

“Delos.”

That earned him a pause.

He had remembered correctly.

Months earlier, in a bookshop, she had spent nearly twenty minutes looking through a volume of photographs of ruined sanctuaries. There had been one image she returned to: pale columns standing above a blue sea, their shadows thin and black on the ground.

At the time he had pretended to browse beside her.

In truth, he had been watching her hands.

“You said you wanted to see it,” he added.

“I want to see a great many things. That doesn’t mean I’m going to get on a yacht with you.”

“There’s a chef.”

“Francis.”

“A very good chef.”

“No.”

“A jacuzzi, if the weight of antiquity becomes oppressive.”

She laughed despite herself, and he seized upon the sound too quickly.

“There. You’re considering it.”

“I’m laughing at you.”

“Historically, that’s been the beginning of all our best moments.”

She folded her arms.

“Let’s say this plainly.”

He set down his glass.

“All right.”

“You’ve been trying to date me for two years.”

“Trying is a severe word.”

“It’s an accurate word.”

“Yes.”

“And now you want me to spend three weeks on a boat with you.”

“A large boat.”

“Francis.”

He lifted both hands.

“It will be platonic.”

She studied him.

The smile remained on his face, but it had grown careful.

“Do you actually understand what that means?”

“I believe the university covered it before I disgraced the family.”

“It means this isn’t a long, expensive argument.”

Something moved in his expression.

She saw it and continued.

“It means you don’t get to spend three weeks being thoughtful and then tell me I’ve misunderstood what we are. It means separate cabins. It means I’m your friend, and that is the whole of what I’m agreeing to.”

For once, he did not answer immediately.

Behind him, a curtain stirred through an open doorway, pale as something passing.

Then he nodded.

“Separate cabins. No arguments.”

“And if I want to leave?”

“We go into port.”

“Without a performance?”

He pressed a hand to his chest.

“You’re taking away everything I’m good at.”

“Promise.”

The word hung between them.

Francis glanced toward the harbor. Among the clustered lights below, he could make out the berth where his father’s yacht waited. From this distance, the vessel was only a narrow white shape, beautiful and still.

“I promise,” he said.

Lacey looked at him for another moment.

Then, against the judgment that had served her well for two years, she said yes.

The yacht was named Eurydice.

The name was written across the stern in gold.

Lacey noticed it the following morning as a deckhand took her bag. She stood on the quay beneath a sky bright enough to make every surface seem newly made, and read the letters twice.

Francis came down the gangway wearing sunglasses and a linen shirt he had not bothered to button properly.

“You look concerned.”

“It’s an interesting name for a boat.”

“My mother chose it.”

“Did she explain why?”

“She liked the sound.”

“Of course she did.”

He followed her glance toward the stern.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Now you have to tell me.”

“She’s the woman who almost gets out.”

Francis smiled.

“Almost gets out of what?”

Lacey looked beyond him, into the shadow beneath the yacht’s upper deck.

“The underworld.”

For a moment, neither spoke.

Then a gull screamed overhead, harsh and ordinary, and the spell of the words broke.

“Well,” Francis said, taking the smaller bag from her shoulder, “we’ll try to improve on the ending.”

The Eurydice was ninety feet long, white-hulled and immaculate. Her decks were laid in polished teak. Brass fittings caught the sun. Behind tinted glass lay rooms arranged with the serene extravagance of places maintained by people who were paid not to appear: cream upholstery, dark wood, fresh flowers in heavy vases, books selected to suggest that somebody aboard had time to read them.

The saloon smelled faintly of leather and citrus oil.

Her cabin was larger than she expected.

There was a bed fixed against one wall, a narrow writing desk, a wardrobe, and a private bathroom whose stone basin seemed absurdly heavy for something intended to float. On the bed lay a folded towel and a small bowl of figs.

Through the porthole, the harbor rose and fell by an inch.

Lacey set her hand against the doorframe.

There was nothing wrong.

She was on a beautiful boat. She had agreed to a holiday. There were other people aboard.

Still, she checked that the cabin door locked before she unpacked.

Above deck, Francis was laughing with the captain.

Captain Vidal was a lean, weathered man whose courtesy had the economical quality of long practice. He greeted Lacey, showed her where the life jackets were kept, and asked whether she had spent much time at sea.

“Not like this.”

“Tell us if you’re uncomfortable.”

“With the sea?”

“With anything.”

His eyes met hers briefly.

Then Francis called for champagne, and the captain excused himself.

They left Barcelona beneath a sky of liquid gold.

Lines were cast off. Water opened between hull and quay. The harbor slid past in a procession of masts, cranes, windows, faces.

Francis stood beside her as the city began to recede.

For once he seemed wholly happy.

No performance, no carefully arranged indifference. He watched the open water with the eager expression of a boy released from a room in which he had been expected to sit still.

“Worth coming?” he asked.

“We’ve been moving for six minutes.”

“I’m looking for an early endorsement.”

She smiled.

Behind them, Barcelona gathered itself into the land.

Ahead, the sea shone so brightly that it was difficult to look at.

For the first few days, nothing happened that could not later be mistaken for happiness.

They drank coffee on the upper deck while the morning was still cool enough to make the cups welcome in their hands. Francis discovered that Lacey became irritable if spoken to before she had finished her first cup, and for two mornings he observed this law with exaggerated solemnity.

On the third, she threw a piece of bread at him.

They swam in water clear enough to make the yacht’s shadow visible beneath them, a long dark body suspended over a depth they could not judge.

Lacey liked the moment after diving, when the world above closed over her and every noise became distant. Underwater, the light moved in trembling bands across her arms.

Once, surfacing, she found Francis already watching her from the bathing platform.

“What?” she asked, wiping salt from her eyes.

“Nothing.”

But he did not look away.

They played cards after lunch.

Francis cheated badly, then objected to the accusation with such elaborate injury that even the steward laughed.

They read in adjacent deck chairs. Lacey finished a novel and began another. Francis carried the same book for four days, its bookmark advancing only when she moved it to see whether he would notice.

He did not.

In the evenings, they ate beneath the awning while the last light spread across the water.

Away from the city, conversation came more easily.

He told her things she had not expected him to tell her.

That he had disliked university long before he left it. That he had chosen his course because his father had said it would be useful. That the prospect of entering the family business made him feel, in a way he could not explain without sounding ungrateful, as if his life had already happened somewhere ahead of him.

“It’s all waiting,” he said one night. “The office. The apartment. The people I’m supposed to know. Sometimes I think I could disappear for ten years and come back, and they’d just hand me the right jacket and tell me where to stand.”

Lacey rested her chin on her knees.

“Then don’t do it.”

He gave a short laugh.

“You make that sound very easy.”

“No. I make it sound possible.”

He looked at her.

Beyond the rail, the wake opened into darkness.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

That answer again.

She let it pass.

There were hours when she could imagine why she had stayed his friend.

He could be funny without cruelty. He noticed when she was cold and brought a blanket without making it an occasion. Once, after she mentioned missing the bread from a bakery near her apartment, she found the chef attempting something similar the next morning.

She thanked the chef.

Francis looked pleased anyway.

For a while, she allowed herself to stop measuring every kindness for the expectation concealed inside it.

Then she would turn unexpectedly and find his eyes on her.

Not passing over her.

Waiting.

It troubled her most when he did not seem to know he was doing it.

She would be reading, or tying back her hair, or leaning over a chart with the captain, and Francis would watch with a stillness that did not belong to the easy young man who joked through dinner.

At such moments, she felt less like a companion than something he had found and was afraid might be taken away.

Once, she looked up from her book and held his gaze until he smiled.

“Have I got something on my face?”

“No,” he said.

“Then stop.”

The smile thinned.

“I’m allowed to look at you.”

She closed the book over one finger.

“Not like that.”

He rose a moment later and went below.

When he returned, he was carrying drinks.

As they sailed east, the sea began to change.

At first, Lacey blamed the weather.

The blue deepened. Clouds gathered at the far edges of otherwise clear afternoons. By dusk, the water took on the appearance of dark metal, its surface rising in slow folds that seemed too deliberate to be waves.

The heat lingered after sunset.

Sleep became difficult.

In her cabin, she could hear the small, private noises of the yacht: wood adjusting under strain, water whispering along the hull, the distant hum of machinery. At times these sounds arranged themselves into something almost like footsteps.

She would lie still and listen.

Then a pipe would knock, or the engine’s vibration would change, and she would feel foolish.

One night she woke with the certainty that someone had spoken her name from the other side of the porthole.

She switched on the lamp.

The glass held only her reflection and, beyond it, absolute blackness.

At breakfast, she almost mentioned it.

Then Francis knocked over a glass reaching for the wine left from the previous evening, and the moment passed.

He had begun drinking earlier.

Not conspicuously at first. A glass with lunch. Another while the afternoon stretched hot and empty around them. Champagne because they were on holiday. Whiskey because he could not sleep.

The reasons changed.

The drinking did not.

He remained charming often enough that she found it difficult to identify the precise day she began to dread the sound of ice falling into a glass.

Small things became uncertain.

A question asked too lightly.

A silence held too long.

An evening when he was affectionate and funny, followed by a morning when he answered her without looking up.

Once, she suggested going ashore for a few days.

They were sitting over lunch, and the suggestion had not seemed important until she made it.

Francis put down his fork.

“Why?”

“Because I’d like to walk somewhere that isn’t a deck.”

“We’ll be in Greece soon.”

“We could stop before then.”

“Of course.”

But he said it without enthusiasm.

She waited.

He reached for his glass.

“I just thought you were enjoying yourself.”

“I am.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“I can enjoy myself and still want to go ashore.”

He smiled at last.

“There’s no need to sound as though I’ve imprisoned you.”

She had not used that word.

For the remainder of the meal, she could think of little else.

On the evening he told her he loved her, the sea was almost perfectly still.

Dinner had ended badly, though nothing had happened that could have explained the discomfort to anyone who had not been sitting between them.

Francis had interrupted her twice. She had corrected him once. He had apologized with a formality that made the apology unpleasant.

Afterward, she went to her cabin and tried to read.

The same paragraph waited beneath her eyes for half an hour.

At last she put the book down.

The passageway outside was softly lit. Somewhere forward, a door closed. She could hear voices from the crew quarters, indistinct and reassuringly ordinary.

She went up to find him.

Francis sat alone on the stern.

A bottle of whiskey stood beside his chair, half empty. He had taken off his shoes. One lay on its side beneath the table, the sole exposed.

Without the lights of a city to diminish them, the stars looked unnaturally numerous.

They crowded the sky above the mast. Their reflections trembled in the black water, breaking and assembling with each slow movement of the hull.

Lacey stopped at the edge of the light.

“You okay?”

Francis turned.

His smile arrived a little late.

“Perfect.”

“You don’t look perfect.”

“Cruel thing to say to a man on his own boat.”

“Your father’s boat.”

“There she is.”

He raised his glass toward her.

“The only honest woman in the Mediterranean.”

She did not smile.

“Have you had any water?”

He looked at the whiskey.

“There’s ice.”

“Francis.”

He set the glass down with exaggerated care.

For a while, they listened to the water.

Then he said, “Maybe I don’t look perfect because I’m in love with you.”

She closed her eyes.

Not in surprise.

That was almost the worst part.

“Francis.”

“No. Please.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“Just listen this time.”

“I have listened.”

“Not like this.”

“Yes. Like this.”

“No, you make a joke, or you get angry, and then we never actually—”

“I’m not making a joke.”

He stared at her.

She remained standing.

The empty chair beside him seemed suddenly deliberate, as though sitting would commit her to something she had already refused.

“I think about you all the time,” he said.

His voice had changed. The practiced ease was gone.

“When something happens, you’re the person I want to tell. When I wake up, I wonder whether you’re awake. I see something stupid in a shop, something you’d hate, and I want to buy it just so you can tell me how awful it is.”

She felt the familiar ache of being asked to receive a gift she had nowhere to put.

“I care about you,” she said.

He gave a small, wounded laugh.

“Don’t.”

“It’s true.”

“Then why is this so impossible?”

“Because caring about you isn’t the same thing.”

“You haven’t even tried.”

The words landed between them with a weight neither could pretend not to feel.

Lacey’s expression hardened.

“I don’t have to try.”

He looked down.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it?”

“I mean—”

He stopped and rubbed both hands over his face.

Behind him, something disturbed the surface of the water.

A small sound.

A soft closing.

Lacey glanced toward it, but the darkness beyond the stern was unbroken.

Francis was speaking again.

“I thought if we had time away from everything, if you could see what it would be like—”

She felt herself go cold.

“You promised.”

“I know.”

“You said this wasn’t what the trip was.”

“It wasn’t.”

“You just told me it was.”

“No. I said I hoped. There’s a difference.”

“For you.”

His head came up.

There it was: not anger yet, but the injury from which anger sometimes grows when a person cannot bear to keep it.

For two years, she had tried to be gentle enough that he would hear her.

Now she understood that gentleness had become another thing he could misinterpret.

“No,” she said.

He watched her.

The yacht’s engines murmured beneath their feet.

“Lacey—”

“No.”

His mouth remained slightly open.

She spoke carefully.

“I don’t love you. I’m not going to fall in love with you because we’re alone together, or because you’ve brought me somewhere beautiful, or because you’ve waited long enough.”

He flinched at that.

She wished he had not.

She wished he had let her tell him kindly the first time.

“I never asked you to wait,” she said.

For several seconds, nothing moved except the whiskey in his glass.

Then he nodded.

Once.

Then again, as though someone had given him instructions that were simple but difficult to follow.

“Right.”

“I want us to go into port tomorrow.”

His eyes lifted to hers.

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

For an instant she thought he would argue.

Instead, he looked past her toward the dark windows of the saloon.

Then he smiled.

It was a small smile. Embarrassed. Almost convincing.

“God,” he said. “I’ve made an absolute mess of this.”

Lacey did not answer.

“I’m sorry.”

She waited.

“You’re right. Of course you’re right.”

He reached for the bottle, reconsidered, and withdrew his hand.

The gesture loosened something in her chest.

“We can talk to the captain in the morning,” he said.

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Fine.”

The word came too quickly.

Then, more gently, “Fine. Whatever you want.”

She studied his face.

He looked tired now. Younger. A little ashamed.

She wanted to believe that shame would be enough.

“Get some sleep,” she said.

“You too.”

She turned toward the saloon.

“Lacey?”

She stopped.

For one unpleasant second, she expected him to begin again.

But he only looked at her and said, “I really am sorry.”

“I know.”

She was not certain that she did.

For a few hours, everything seemed ordinary.

Francis came inside. He drank water. He apologized again, this time with enough humor to make it easier for her to accept without discussing it.

They stood in the saloon while the steward cleared the last glasses.

The lamps shone warmly on the polished wood.

There was the quiet clink of crockery, the soft mechanical sigh of the air-conditioning, the reassuring evidence of a vessel carrying out its appointed passage.

Lacey said good night.

Francis did not try to touch her.

In her cabin, she locked the door.

Then she stood with her fingers still on the key, disliking the relief she felt.

She washed her face. Folded her clothes. Put her book into her bag, then took it out again because packing at midnight seemed melodramatic.

The porthole reflected the room in a small black circle.

Beyond it, there was no horizon.

She lay down without switching off the bedside lamp.

For a long time she listened to the engines.

Their vibration traveled through the mattress and into her bones, steady enough to quiet her thoughts. She began to drift.

Somewhere above, a chair scraped across the deck.

She opened her eyes.

Silence.

Then footsteps.

Slow, uneven, moving overhead.

She watched the ceiling until they stopped.

The engines continued.

She told herself he was only walking. People walked on boats. People who had drunk too much and embarrassed themselves stayed awake and regretted it.

Eventually, she slept.

Above her, Francis stood at the stern.

He had brought the bottle back out.

The night air had cooled, but he scarcely felt it.

He replayed the conversation, correcting it as he went. In one version, he had not said that he loved her. In another, he had said it better. In another, she had understood what it cost him to be so honest.

Each version ended before her refusal.

The real one would not.

He took a drink.

Far behind the yacht, the wake spread pale beneath the stars.

When he had been a boy, he had liked standing here because the disturbed water seemed proof that he was going somewhere. He could watch the trail lengthen and imagine that distance itself was an achievement.

Tonight, the wake looked like something being torn open.

He thought of Lacey asleep below.

He thought of tomorrow’s harbor, the bag over her shoulder, the moment she stepped off the boat and became once more a person who could leave him whenever she wished.

His grip tightened around the glass.

Beneath the hull, something struck once.

Not hard.

A patient touch.

Francis lowered his eyes.

The water was black enough to conceal anything.

For a moment, he saw only his own reflection broken among the stars.

Then a pale shape seemed to pass beneath it, too deep to distinguish, too slow to be foam.

He leaned over the rail.

The sea became still.

Somewhere below the polished decks, below the engines and the sleeping cabins, the darkness held its breath.

And Francis, who had spent his life confusing desire with promise, remained at the railing and looked down.

The name across the stern shone faintly above the water.

Eurydice.

Behind its golden letters, something moved against the current.

By morning, the promise made in Barcelona would be the least of what had been broken.