Page 33 of Escaping Pirates
He let out a breath of laughter, followed by another round of coughing. “You didn’t trample the flowers, did you?”
“I replanted them. I didn’t have time to install a waterfall feature like mine, though. Your butler wouldn’t hear of it when I made the suggestion.”
“I shall have words with him immediately,” Harlan said solemnly. He turned to address one of the rats scampering along the walkway beyond our cell. “Fritz, you were out of line. If you want to continue your employment, you will never say such things again.”
I laughed. After my stomach being knotted from neglect and anxiety for so long, the motion felt like a foreign sensation, but the most welcome sort. “Are you feeling any better?”
Harlan lay down on his bunk, which I’d neatly made up with all the blankets and pillows and things that Harsh’s daughters had sent for him. “A little I suppose, but I couldn’t get much sleep today. Between the girls squabbling and their father warning them that I might be feigning illness tocatch them unawares, it made for a slow recovery. This helped, though.” He held up the tiny cork. “And I basically live in a palace already. You didn’t have to clean all this, you know.”
“I wanted to. I couldn’t do much to help you, but I could do that.”
Harlan’s hand crept through the bars separating us and his fingers sought out my own. “You do more for me than you know.” Our fingers touched, and Harlan’s thumb, still hot from his fever, traced the creases on my palm.
“My hands are a lot rougher than they used to be,” I said apologetically. “The only time I had calluses before this was a summer when I was about nine. One of our maids had a daughter my age, and she and I used to sneak out and climb the support beams under the bridge over a nearby pond.”
Harlan sucked in a breath. “Wasn’t that dangerous? How high was the bridge?”
“Not high. Only six or so feet above the water. Sometimes we fell, but we would splash down and swim back to dry off so we could try again.”
“That wouldn’t work in Berkway,” Harlan told me. “There are arched stone bridges that support aqueducts that run from the mountaintops to provide running water for the entire country, so many are high enough to easily kill someone if they fell.”
“Oh no, nothing that high. I can’t even imagine anyone building something so tall. Can you imagine having to walk along the top to do maintenance? Who does that?”
“We have a team who constantly monitor the network and repairs breaks. They’re well paid for the risk. Tell me more about your childhood.”
I told him about the times Father would take me and my two younger siblings to a shipyard, and all the differentlessons Mother enrolled me in. “She said they weren’t going to send me to finishing school since they cared more about me taking over the family business than securing an advantageous marriage. I thought it gave me a good head for business, but based on my current circumstances, I wonder if finishing school would have been the better option.”
“I think they made the right decision. If they had done anything else, we wouldn’t have met, and I’m glad we did.”
I propped myself up on my pillow to see Harlan better. “What about you? Tell me something from when you were young.”
He thought. “I tried to run away from home when I was about seven. I’d found some fancy, expensive porcelain dish and remembered one of my teachers who said that some dishes are unbreakable.”
“Oh no,” I laughed. “I can see where this is going.”
“I threw it at a stained glass window…”
“Oh no!”
“In the chapel.”
“Harlan!”
“In the middle of a church service.”
My mouth hung open and I laughed. “How awful!”
His laughter turned into a coughing fit. “I know, I know, I was a naughty kid. Anyway, I got into a heap of trouble so I tried to run away, but I didn’t get far. I just went and sat at the top of my favorite climbing tree because I didn’t know where else to go. They didn’t find me for the whole afternoon though. It was getting dark.”
I groaned. “I’m sure your parents panicked when they realized you were gone.”
Harlan grinned, but his voice was growing weaker the longer he talked. “I think they had everyone in the entire town looking within the hour. I kept watching them from upin the tree, but they kept screaming my name and I knew that I would get in trouble if I climbed down, so I kept hiding until I was more hungry than scared.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters? Were they worried, too?”
“Just one younger brother, but he was a baby at the time.”
“What’s his name?”
