"They?"

"The Americans, my lord. It will not go down well with them."

"But do they share quarters with their servants? I am sure they do not."

"They do not, but they believed that you did and they liked you for it. Now it would embarrass them to see the man cast out. It would strike a nerve, as we say. It would seem aristocratic to them and they would take it ill."

"Are you sure of this, sir? It seems very strange to me."

"We are to be two months at sea, and I can assure your lordship it is better to be all good fellows."

He filled my glass again, and I thought, I cannot wait to tell Blacqueville this nonsense.

"Sir," I said, "it is my belief the scoundrel drugged me and brought me aboard."

"Indeed," said Mr. Peek, and raised an eyebrow. "Your lordship has suffered much."

"Alas, Mr. Peek. I lost my best friend in all the world."

Mr. Peek cocked his head at me and then, impulsively, poured the contents of his glass into mine. I dared not reject such crude kindness.

"A word of advice, your lordship, from one who admired you from the moment you spoke?"

"But yes, of course."

"Be a good fellow sir. Play the democrat. We will have rough justice for the servant when we step ashore. I am in a position to make a promise I can keep."

He poured back half of my remaining champagne and before we clinked our glasses in a toast, Mr. Peek winked, and having finished his draft looked down his nose at me, as sly and solemn as a magistrate.

"What did we drink to, sir?" I asked.

"To deep dark prisons," said he.

Oh, Blacqueville, you would not believe it. I raised my glass to my American and he said it was as well I had met him for he was a trustee of the board of the new House of Refuge for Delinquent Minors and could introduce me to the governors of Wethersfield and Sing Sing which latter edifice-he was the first but not the last to tell me-had been built by its own prisoners in complete silence.

Of course, I had no more interest in prisons than did my poor scarred parents who would never escape the time of Robespierre. I said I was pleased to find so intelligent a man on board.

He said he was similarly pleased-there were so many of his fellow countrymen among the passengers that it was already clear our voyage would suffer from a want of intellectual tone.

I asked him how so dire a situation had occurred in a nation so resplendent in so many ways.

"The want of intellect? Principally," he said, "it is the inheritance law."

And with this he filled my glass again, this time from the bottle, and the champagne frothed excessively but was not, for that, unwelcome.

"I can still remember," said Mr. Peek, and settled himself in a manner which gave warning of a lengthy disquisition. "I can still remember a time when my country was peopled with rich proprietors who lived on their lands like the English gentry. They cultivated the mind, and followed certain traditions of thought and manners. High morals and distinction of mind then existed among this class of the nation. But all that is gone," he said. "The old estates are being divided. Now a man will mostly own what he has bought himself. As for leisure, there is none."

I thought, What am I condemned to? I asked, "Then how do the wealthy classes take such a state of affairs?"

"What offense?"

"Affairs," I said and was once again reminded that I must speak more slowly if I was to be understood. "State of affairs. How do the wealthy classes regard this state of affairs?"

He grimaced so wildly that the whole of his upper lip was reduced to a single pencil line beneath his haughty nose. "They bear it," he said. "For instance, the plutocrat and the lowly worker shake hands in the street. Ha-ha," he cried. "You like that, no? Good morning, good to meet you."

At that moment the captain rushed in like a wet dog.

"Ah Captain," I cried, relieved to see him. "We have a matter to settle."

He looked at me bleakly.

"No, no." My companion restrained me, allowing the captain to continue on his course. He bowed and twisted while walking backward.

"It will pass," my new friend said, meaning what I did not know. "Before we know it we will be in civilization."

I feared that most unlikely.

ONE DAY BLED into the next. I lay in my coffin, assaulted by the screams of ducks and geese being slaughtered upon the deck, the cries of passengers, the push and bustle, the plates and bottles crashing to the floor of the main cabin. So close was my pillow to the dining table that my ears were soon poured full of gravy, the voices, opinions and histories of Mr. Peek and his wife and two daughters, of Mr. Hill, and of Mr. Defenpost, and what they thought of Mr. Eckerd and his actress, and all of this got mixed up with my ear wax and my nausea, so I was sick of them a week before they shook my hand. Driven from my bunk by hunger, I was in time to see my raving mad Mathilde emerge from her cabin, frail as eggshell, in a sweeping gray skirt and a simple white blouse with a high collar a la chinoise. She had her hair pinned high to show the Americans her tiny ears.

The captain had finally judged it safe to set more canvas but my paramour and her mother were the only ones-excepting Mr. Eckerd and his pigeons-to brave the deck. I had seated myself by a doorway and Mathilde's skirt brushed my knee. I smelled her. Her jasmine. It was intolerable she would ignore me still. To be so separated from she whose thighs I had seen shining with desire, who had opened herself to me so ardently that I knew the crying tunnel of her mouth, the secret teeth, the tiny tonsil, and my own hard body shivering as she slapped the bed and cried Don't stop, to be separated by no more than the brush of a wing was an agony. My salty lover, transformed, as cold as halibut.

As for the old lady, if she knew what secret wound had opened in her daughter's heart, she dared not say. And what had I ever done but love her offspring and herself? And was I not Mathilde's model in a way that would have made another man's balls shrivel up and drop like rotten plums among the summer grass. For I loved her without limit and therefore would most happily play the vanquished male, drained lover, sucked of his juices, laid out on the sheets and dead of love and loving.

And was she not, aboard the Havre, still the recipient of my largesse-for what reason had Monsieur accommodated her on board at such expense? That she was mine. I loved her to death. I might have held her, screeching like a hard-eyed indignant sea bird, lifted her squirming angry body high above the rail and smashed her down into the green-glass waves. There-she drowns.

She thought she knew me. My awful scars invisible. In any case, she had already found some new protectors, and before too many hours had passed I saw that the elder Miss Peek was teaching her English. This Miss Peek was a tall winsome girl with fine flaxen hair and pale, pale blue eyes, a glass of water a man might drink in a long slow draft. The two of them, dark and light, buxom and lithe, woman and girl, remained at table long after the last plate had broken and the final duck bones been removed, and then, when the lanterns were swinging back and forth, the girl helped the woman with her English lessons. In short the French beauty made herself their pet, and I could not escape her, not even with my pillow pulled across my ears.

Lord Migraine dictated a whining letter to his mother, and then, having no more need of my services, acted as if I was not born. The little bastard occupied our narrow cabin with a lack of modesty that should not have surprised me, given the gross slanders he made against me in his letter to the Comtesse de Garmont. In any case, it meant nothing for him to display his member in full and proud erection every morning, its surprising size not diminishing until he had managed to pee into his pot. I never saw such bad behavior in a boardinghouse.