Page 35 of Scandalous

“I would like the book bound in brown calfskin. There is also a small walnut box. Could you bring me a pair of spectacles? I’m afraid I need them for reading very fine print.”

The box contained three pairs of spectacles. “Which pair?”

“They are all the same. I ruined my eyes when I was a boy by too much reading in the dark. It is most maddening how the functions dance on the page, and I soon get a terrible headache if I try to read without them.”

Sarah stared at the spectacles, a thought in her mind. “May I borrow a pair? I’ve noticed lately it is something of a strain to read for very long.”

“Take a pair and keep them. I find selfish comfort in the fact that I am not the only one on board with an old person’s vision.” He opened the book and placed the silver-framed spectacles on the bridge of his fine, aquiline nose. “See here,” he said, pointing to a page filled with inexplicable figures and numbers.

Sarah listened to his enthusiastic chatter with only part of her mind. Instead she thought of the small circles of glass and fine metal, trying not to hope.

* * *

Martín was in the process of cleaning his pistols—an activity he enjoyed attending to himself—when there was a knock on the door. He squinted at the ornate timepiece on the desk. It was half past nine.

“Come,” he said, expecting Beauville or Daniels. Instead it was the woman. Sarah, as he now thought of her. Which he did more often than he would have preferred, even though he was no longer closeted with her for several hours each morning.

He put the oiled pistol back in the case, watching her face as he did so. A flush spread across her cheekbones as she looked at the guns.

“Have you come looking for my pistols, mademoiselle?”

She cocked her head at his mocking tone and cut him a look that caused a powerful pounding in his chest. When had she begun to appear so attractive to him?

“What can I do for you, Mademoiselle Fisher?” he asked, sounding rather sharper than he’d intended.

She closed the door behind her, and Martín’s eyebrows rose. They had never been in his cabin with the door closed all the way. Except for that first night.

She reached into the pocket of her hideous brown frock and extracted something wrapped in a bit of gauze. “Here, put these on.”

Martín glanced at the object in her palm and then up at her. “Spectacles?”

“Yes, it came to me this morning when Mies, that is Captain Graaf,” she corrected, coloring up, “said he’d ruined his vision by straining his eyes. I thought maybe you might have strained yours at some point. Perhaps being at sea so much? I have noticed I get a headache when I am on deck and stare at the water too long.” She unfolded the delicate metal and held the spectacles out. “Go ahead, try them on.”

Martín looked from her face to the spectacles, several times. When he was certain she was not offering him the glasses in jest, he took them from her, hesitant to put them on. He’d always thought spectacles were hideously disfiguring.

“Put them on,” she repeated, snatching a book from the shelf and placing it before him, tapping her toe with impatience.

He frowned at her. What was she up to?

She rolled her eyes and laughed. “You are as vain as a peacock.”

Warmth crawled up his neck as he realized the truth of her words. He was, indeed, worried how he would appear.

“It is only I who will see you. Please, just for a moment.”

He sighed irritably and placed the glasses on his face, having to push the frame all the way up the bridge of his nose so the earpieces would clasp behind his ears. He blinked at her blurry face.

“Not me, the page.”

Martín glanced down at the book she’d placed on the desk and gasped. “Merde,” he muttered without thinking. He could see them! The individual letters, the ones she’d been forcing him to write and learn but which he could never see in the pages of a book. There they all were, arrayed on the pages before him—m’s and d’s and s’s and a’s—all of them. He traced a wondering finger over the page and looked over the top rim of the spectacles and met her un-blurry face. She was holding her breath, her eyebrows arched, her eyes wide and expectant.

Martín fought the urge to grab and squeeze her. And kiss her. “I can see them all,” he admitted gruffly, fighting the grin that was threatening to take over his face.

She gave an ear-piercing scream and jumped up and down like a little girl. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!” She grabbed him in an awkward embrace, still jumping up and down as she held onto his shoulders.

Martín closed his eyes at the feel and smell of her, rocked to the core by something he could not immediately identify. A warm, soothing sensation that made him feel cherished and secure.

It was a feeling he’d experienced only once before in his life, the night he’d jumped from the second-story window of Madam Sonia’s brothel. The same night he’d killed his master.