tree that formed a convenient bench. They sat side by side, shoulders touching.
They were dancing around the issue. He had always known that Martin was his dearest friend, but lately it had come to seem that dearest and friend didn’t come close to explaining what they were to one another. And that was with the two of them as chaste as nuns; he didn’t know what happened if anything sexual were added to a friendship like theirs. Martin wasn’t Jonathan—a friend with whom he could blithely fall into bed. Will didn’t know how to go to bed with somebody he was willing to lay down his life for. Worse than that, he didn’t know how to go to bed with someone he knew he’d never walk away from. He felt like he had been dealt into a card game with stakes he didn’t know and couldn’t afford.
“He stopped by because he wanted to give me this,” Will said, reaching into his coat pocket and bringing out a folded paper. He handed it to Martin and watched him open it.
“Is this—The Bride of Malfi?” Martin asked, staring at the playbill and then grinning at Will without a single trace of his earlier irritation. “And it’s opening in two weeks? I’m going. I don’t even care if the city is blanketed in smoke and awash in a foul miasma of disease. I need to see it. I’ll sit in the pit and wear a disguise so my aunt won’t recognize me. A false nose. A gray wig. A plague doctor’s mask.”
Will laughed and grabbed Martin’s hand. Seized by mad impulse and pure affection he brought Martin’s hand to his mouth and kissed his knuckles. He heard Martin’s sharply indrawn breath, saw his eyes go wide, and nearly did it again. He could imagine letting his lips linger just a little, brushing across the back of Martin’s hand. But he couldn’t—he shouldn’t.
Instead of trying to say anything, instead of doing anything that might make it worse, Will shifted his grip on Martin’s hand so their fingers were laced together, then rested their joined hands on his thigh. It felt like a bridge, personal and intimate but not necessarily sexual; he wanted to show Martin that he was offering—maybe not more, but everything he had.
“Is that . . . all right?” Will asked, not even completely sure what he was asking about.
Martin didn’t say anything, and he turned his attention back to the bluebells, but Will felt a brief squeeze on his hand.
“I think I’ll always be jealous,” Martin said several minutes later, but as if he were continuing their previous conversation. “I envied your shipmates, William, in case you wonder how perverse my jealousy can be.”
Will let out a burst of shocked laughter. “That might be the first time anybody envied a single soul on the Fotheringay.”
“I envied that they were near you, not anything else, obviously. Just that they were near you. I made Father hire a French tutor because I was jealous that your mother could speak to you in a special language.”
That was so ridiculous that Will couldn’t keep a straight face. “You must have been eight years old.”
“Possibly seven. I started early on my path toward maniacal jealousy.” Martin spoke lightly, but Will could hear the self-reproach beneath.
“But, Martin. That’s—it’s darling.” He remembered Martin at that age—tiny and imperious—and could picture him furiously studying his conjugations.
“I feel certain you shouldn’t think so.” Will didn’t need to turn his head to know Martin was blushing. “You’re really a terrible judge of character.” The air was heavy with the scent of bluebells and the weight of everything they were almost saying.
“I thought of you every day,” Will said quietly. “Sometimes I thought you had to know, even from the other side of the world.” He swallowed. “I had your letters all but memorized.” He thought of that packet of letters, and how he had clung to it like a talisman to a dead God, like a latchkey to a home that had burned to the ground. Sometimes, if he stopped to wonder what had happened to that carefully folded and refolded stack of papers, tied and retied until the string broke, he thought his heart might break. “I don’t mind you being jealous,” he finally said.
“You ought to. It’s the sort of thing my father would do.”
“No, your father would take it out on the person he was jealous about. You were properly civil to my friend, then sulked for two