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An hour after the steamer departs from Berlin, Narancia appears in Trish’s cabin with a dress the color of sunlight. Well, Trish supposes that it isn’t strictly her cabin—Bucciarati will be sleeping on the upper bunk, and among the suitcases across the steel floor Narancia has laid out a bedroll—but by virtue of her being the only occupant when he comes, it’s hers when he comes.
“I, uh,” he says, clearing his throat and holding the garment up by the sleeves. “I bought this for you back in town.” Then he adds, seemingly for clarification, “It’s a dress.”
“I can see that,” Trish says.
She’s cross-legged on the lumpy mattress. Until a moment ago she’d had her elbows resting on her knees and her cheeks resting on her fists, which she doubts Bucciarati would approve of as far as aristocratic poses go, and had been bent over the sheets of paper in her lap, assorted tidy family trees Bucciarati wants her to memorize by tomorrow afternoon. Uncle this, great-grandmother that; this one born in Verona, that one buried in Turin, back when Sardinia was a kingdom and not a tragic little island out in the Tyrrhenian.
They’re hardly even names anymore. They look less and less like ones the more she tries to beat them into her skull. She’s starting to suspect that she is not named Beatrice, that no one has ever been named Beatrice. The dress is a welcome distraction.
“Actually,” she says, crabbier than she intends, “it looks more like a tent.”
Narancia clicks his tongue. His loafers click on the floor when he strides over to her bedside. He throws the dress over one arm, closes his eyes, and bows deeply, extending it to her like he’s a maître-d’.
The crabbiness retreats, just a little. Trish sits up, her chin rising out of her now-open hands, and gazes at Narancia for a moment, then at the dress, draped across his elbow.
It’s not particularly her style, save for the color. There’s a white Peter Pan collar, and the sleeves are puffy. It’s nothing a little modification wouldn’t fix, but… she isn’t sure that Narancia wouldn’t be insulted by something like that.
“Why?” is the first question that she thinks to ask, being presented with such a pretty gift.
She could come up with better questions than this for the young man who spoke to her on a train about homes, who shyly kissed the back of her hand in a forest in Achenwald—who faltered at the sight of her in the abandoned Neapolitan palace, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, and said, in an awed and quiet voice that she had yet to fully understand, “I know you.” She could ask him so many things about living and growing, and about who she is, and about who he is, and about whether or not those things will ever be as close again as they are now, a hand’s breadth apart—but she doesn’t.
Narancia tilts his head, opening one eye. Despite his neutral face, his ears look redder than usual.
“You don’t like it?” he asks in a mumble.
Trish sets the papers aside on the blanket and twists around, swinging her legs off the edge of the bunk. Her tights with the hole in the right toe make no sound when they land on the floor.
Even when she stands, Narancia keeps his head down. She can’t tell if he’s doing it to be funny or not. Trish’s eyes linger on the nape of his neck, exposed above his shirt collar, tangled with black.
“I just,” she says, “don’t really understand.” And she supposes that’s true enough.
“Wh-What’s there to understand?” Narancia says gruffly. “It’s a dress, you should have one. Just take it, will you? My back’s starting to hurt.”
Trish thumbs the fabric tentatively, rubbing it between her fingers. Linen.
At last she slips it off of Narancia’s arm and he rises again, gratefully. She wanders over to the mirror above the sink, holding the dress up to her chest. It looks like it will fit, and the color is flattering.
Suddenly it’s not just a skinny little nobody staring back at her in the grimy glass. It’s someone else. Someone with a name.
“Just—put it on, okay?” Narancia says behind her, all bluster. “If you hate it, you hate it. But Bucciarati—” He seems to catch himself. “Never mind. Come up to the deck when you’re done.”
Trish turns around, still holding the bodice to her chest, in time to see him walking out the door, throwing his hands up at either side of his head for a moment. Just before he disappears around the corner, he turns fleetingly back, sees her watching him, and moves faster out of sight.
Trish rummages in her knapsack for her old sewing kit and makes do with what she has. She detaches the collar and uses it as cuffs for the sleeves, rips out the ruffles along the skirt and hems what’s left. It isn’t the best—it isn’t fit for a coronation—but it’s better than before. She pulls it over her head.
When she reaches the deck, the sun is going down. Fugo and Bucciarati are playing chess on a crate of olives. Mista is napping on top of a lifeboat, ankles crossed, hat pulled down over his face. Starboard, at the railing, Narancia is watching the horizon.
Bucciarati tells her that this evening’s lesson will be the waltz.
“Narancia is our most capable dancer by far,” he says, “so he’ll be your partner.”
Narancia had come away from the railing at Bucciarati’s call, and now he glances furtively at Trish, as if to evaluate a reaction. His jacket is gone now, and the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up to the elbow. Trish’s eyes catch on a row of tiny scars on his right forearm, each perfectly vertical.
When she looks back at Bucciarati, accusatory for reasons she can’t quite pinpoint, she swears she spots something like a twinkle in his eyes, but it’s gone again before she can be sure. When Bucciarati has expressions, they tend to be fleeting.
Narancia turns awkwardly to face her, and she takes one tentative step forward, hands tangled at her stomach. She’d tried to do up her hair, but she isn’t sure how good it looks. Narancia has a sort of faraway look on his face, though, eyes wandering slow over her dress from hem to neckline, and although Trish can’t quite describe the look in his eyes she knows that it makes her flush all over.
He clears his throat, clicks his heels together, and bows, offering her his right hand. Stifling a laugh, she takes it.
“With my count, now,” Bucciarati says—countries away, in Trish’s estimation. She lets the weight of her other hand settle into Narancia’s left palm. “One-two-three, one-two-three…”
Trish has never waltzed before. It had always seemed so simple in books, but there’s something deceptively complex about the turning of the feet, the pivoting, the swaying—the eye contact most of all. An unnameable emotion strains in her chest the longer she holds Narancia’s low-lidded gaze, a tick between dizziness and longing—though what it is she’s longing for, she can’t say.
Narancia doesn’t seem like the sort of person she’d expect to see in glittering ballrooms or grand palaces, but he moves like he could be. Maybe this, too, is a talent he’d acquired for survival.
“You’re not bad at this, you know,” she hears her voice say as they go. She’s beginning to wonder if they could dance like this all night and never run out of deck or breath.
A fragment of a smile bunches up at the edge of Narancia’s mouth. His eyes flit down to their feet.
“You think?” he asks shyly.
Trish nods, one brisk movement. A princess’s nod, or so Buccellati keeps telling her when he balances books and plates on her head and tells her to cross the room, do a curtsy. She wonders if it comes through, the regal and unbreakable figure she wants more than anything to believe that she is. She wonders if it’s the sort of thing that Narancia would bow to of his own accord.
“That’s two things I know about you now,” she says, and folds away a laugh when he lifts his arm to gently spin her. She holds to one side of her skirt. “You’re from Naples and you’re a good dancer.”
“That’s all?” Narancia says, bringing her back. Trish’s hand lands easily on his shoulder as if it had never left. “Two weeks and two countries and that’s the best you can do?”
“You’re one to talk,” Trish says, but she’s smiling, almost absentmindedly.
There’s so much to see on Narancia’s face. She’d never realized just how much. A tiny scar splitting his right eyebrow, another under his lip. Dark moles here and there, a fading bruise on his cheek—from the train? A bump on the bridge of his nose, as if it had been broken long ago.
“What do you mean?” Narancia retorts, turning his head away, and even though his smile hasn’t left, there’s something flustered about the action. “I know a lot about you.”
“Oh?” Trish laughs. “Like what?”
Narancia spins her again. Bucciarati isn’t even counting anymore. The rhythm is implicitly understood. Trish wonders, fleetingly, if when it comes time for them to stop she’ll be able to walk again, if her body will comprehend any movement that isn’t waltzing with Narancia at eventide on a boat bound for Paris. She wonders if she would even want it to.
“I dunno.” Narancia’s voice has grown low, so low that something new and strange in Trish begins to ache at the sound. The infinite sky winds on behind him. “You like the ocean, and sour salad. You wake up early. You don’t let anybody boss you around. You want to know who you are.”
Trish opens her mouth around a word, and swallows it, and whispers in its place, “Doesn’t everybody?”
Narancia shakes his head. “Not me,” he murmurs. “I already know.”
“You seem to know a lot of things.”
“Not really. Not anything important.”
“I think who you are,” Trish says, “is pretty important.”
“Maybe,” Narancia says. “I don’t know anything about history, though. Or… where to put silverware.” Then a flicker of amusement, almost teasing, almost— “That’s all you, Vostra Altezza.”
“Me and the books,” Trish says with a shake of her head. “And Bucciarati.” Her voice softens. “And you.”
Narancia inhales, quick and shallow, like something’s just dawned on him—but he doesn’t speak again. Trish can no longer track the presence of the deck under her feet. She swears they must have been dancing like this for a lifetime.
“I’m feeling a little,” she says, searching for the word, “dizzy.”
“Me too,” Narancia answers, and slows to a standstill. Trish does, too.
The dance hadn’t been strenuous at all, but both of them are breathing with some labor, mouths open. Haltingly, he starts to lower their hands.
“Maybe we,” he says, and swallows, “should stop.”
Trish’s whisper is so thin that she can barely keep it intact: “We have stopped.”
“Trish,” Narancia murmurs, suddenly familiar and dear in the gathering evening, “I…”
And at once Trish decides that she would like nothing more than to kiss him.
She isn’t sure which of them closes their eyes first. It may happen simultaneously, a shared movement from heart to synapse, hardly planned or intended at all. She leans closer, curling her fingers over the plane of Narancia’s hand, and feels the slightest shivering breath touch her lips, heralding a touch.
Her heart stutters away inside of her, dizzying. Narancia’s other hand grazes the slope of her hip, going still at her waist, trailing warmth behind it. Underneath the linen, Trish’s body feels like it changes.
Then a hesitation. But not hers.
She opens her eyes in time to catch the barest flicker on Narancia’s face of a starving, defeated thing that she belatedly realizes is sadness. His dark eyes are staring at her as if she’s encased in the frailest glass, a cage so thin and so delicate that he hadn’t even seen it until he’d come this close.
That look is there for a moment only. By the time it’s gone, so is he.
He takes one small step back, raising Trish’s hand and chastely, awkwardly patting it. He lets go of it afterwards, and Trish can’t seem to let it fall, hovering in the space where his had held it.
“You did good,” he says, and after remaining frozen for a second longer he hooks his thumbs into his suspenders. He’s facing her still, but his eyes are on the sky. “You’re really cut out for this, y’know?”
And Trish doesn’t even know what that’s supposed to mean—but before she can ask after it Narancia has bowed and brushed past her, making for the stairwell to the cabins.
This time, he doesn’t look back.
Trish stays where she is, half-reaching into the empty air as if to pull him back. Confusion and a vague, shapeless hurt wring at her mind.
“Ah,” she thinks she hears Bucciarati say quietly behind her—but at some point Fugo and Mista had gone down to bed, so he can only be talking to the turtle. “I should have known better, Coco Jumbo. I never should have let them dance.”
In the quiet of the dark hallway, Trish fists Narancia’s nightshirt in her hands and says brokenly, “I keep seeing faces, Narancia.”
Only a few minutes ago, Narancia had woken up from his fitful sleep on the cabin floor to find that Trish’s bunk was empty, all of the sheets spilling out, discarded. He hadn’t had to look for her for very long. She’d been huddled out in the hallway in the dark, hugging her knees. Shivering.
She’d looked at him almost wildly when he’d approached, as if she hadn’t recognized him. It had been intense enough to stop Narancia in his tracks. Then a sliver of clarity had returned, as sure and sharp as the edge of a knife, and she had buried her face in her knees, unspeaking, as he had come to sit beside her.
He doesn’t know what it was that had spurred her into grabbing onto him like this, pinned against his chest, burying her face where he can’t see it. What he knows is that her body is cold, and not much larger than his own, and that in spite of the circumstances it feels so right pressed up against his that he forgets the instinct to run.
He doesn’t think he’s ever let anybody this close. He wonders if Trish is the same.
“I don’t know who they are, but I—but I do, I do,” she whispers, muffled against his chest. “They keep saying my name. And when they do, I… I want to answer more than anything. But I can’t.”
Narancia’s body, tensed to the point of snapping a moment ago, now slackens. It’s strange to hear Trish’s voice cracking in such crucial places. Bucciarati would know the right thing to say, the perfect union of resolution and comfort, the thing that would bring her off the floor—but Narancia doesn’t.
All that he can do is stay on the floor with her. He hopes that’s good for something.
“Sounds like you just had a nightmare,” he says as she draws away, speaking as softly as he knows how. “World’s full of faces, Trish. You’re bound to remember a few.”
But Trish shakes her head. She slumps against the wall beside him, drawing her knees close to her chest. Her eyes are rimmed in red, and impossibly tired.
“It’s not just them. It’s these… flashes of fire. Screams.” She closes her eyes tight. “I’m so tired of bad things. I want something good. Something that’s mine. But all I have are…”
Unthinking, Narancia starts to reach toward her with the inexplicable intention of cupping her cheek. He manages to stop himself halfway, his hand flinching in the air beside her shoulder. He pulls it back in, unnoticed.
“Something good,” he murmurs, eyes drifting to the floor, to his and Trish’s cold bare feet, side by side. “Something good, huh…”
“Tell me something,” Trish says, and when Narancia lifts his head to look at her unsurely she looks back. “Something that’s yours.”
Narancia hasn’t had something that’s his in a long, long time. He’s made his way by taking and gone to sleep wanting, wanting, wanting. But something in Trish’s eyes—arresting like a portrait in an old, abandoned place—commands him to look deeper. What does he remember? His mother’s hands. The palace kitchen. The gulls out on the docks. Breaking a loaf of bread in his small, dirty hands. The sunsets in Naples.
It comes to him, then: a memory, worn down from the remembering but still there, still persisting. He packs it into the words that he knows, as insufficient as they feel. There wouldn’t have been any getting around it, anyway. When Trish wants, he gives. That’s just the way things are now. He’d give her anything.
“It was June,” he says softly. “I was ten. There was this parade, see, in the Piazza Municipio. The whole city was there. Thousands of ’em. And in the parade there was a… a girl. She was only eight, but—sitting up there, she looked like a queen. It was her birthday. Everybody was cheering and bowing, but all I could do was stare. I thought, I guess it’s good that she’s gonna be in charge someday, because I’d follow her anywhere.”
Trish has started to lean closer, her shoulder brushing his in the small space between them. She’s watching Narancia’s face more raptly than anyone ever has.
“And,” he continues, “when the parade started moving past, I don’t know why, but… I started running. And yelling her name. I sounded like a real idiot. ‘Princesa! Princesa!’” He shakes his head, breathing out a laugh against his teeth. “But… when I made it through the crowd, you know what happened? She saw me. Looked right at me. And she—” The vision of it rings through him, edged in ticker tape and sunlight. “She smiled.”
Back then, he hadn’t yet worked in the kitchens of the palace. He had just been a boy running through the streets of Naples, trying to live.
“You can use that, if you want,” he tells her, nudging his knee gently into hers. “Make it part of your story. I don’t mind.”
Trish starts to shake her head. “Narancia, I—”
“Really,” he says, and hopes that she can tell how much he means it.
Trish gazes at him for a while longer, eyes shining, as inscrutable and beautiful as ever. She sniffles faintly, wiping at her nose with her first finger, and turns her head away again, closing her eyes.
“A parade…” Narancia says.
“A parade.”
“In the Piazza Municipio.”
“In the Piazza Municipio. It was hot. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I was with my family, and they were very excited, but—I was so bored. I wanted to go home and… walk through the gardens. But then I saw a boy. One boy,” she says, and as she does the tenderest smile breaks on her face, “in a crowd of thousands.”
Narancia swallows over the sudden lump in his throat. “Good. That’s real good.”
“He was skinny,” she says. “And a little dirty.”
Narancia elbows her, but it’s with a laugh. Trish laughs, too, just for a moment—wet and weak, but genuine.
“There were guards, but he dodged past them—” She mimes the motions, ducking to and fro. “—and started running, through the sun and the heat… and he kept calling, ‘Princesa, princesa!’ And he came right to me. Right…” She extends an arm, sleeve rustling. “Right there. And I tried so hard not to smile, but I did. And then he—”
Narancia turns to look at her when her voice breaks off. At the sight of her expression he sits forward, frowning. All measure of ease has vanished from her face, jolted into a sudden, ashen shock. Her eyes are wide.
“He,” she rasps. “He bowed.”
Narancia’s breath catches in his chest. That’s right. That’s right. He had bowed, hadn’t he? He hadn’t known what else to do. He’d gone as deeply as he could, clutching his hat in both hands, blushing so fiercely that it had felt like a sunburn. And overhead, the princess had let out a melodic laugh and said—
“W-Wait,” he stammers, turning until one leg drops to the floor, turning until he’s facing Trish all the way. “Wait. I didn’t—I didn’t tell you that part.”
“I know,” Trish says, covering her mouth with one hand. “I know, I—Narancia—”
She looks him in the eye at last and says, in the quietest trembling voice: “I remember.”