“Be careful I don’t make you eat it!” muttered Bee. “Where on earth did you learn those crude verses?”

He brushed his lips as if he were grooming up the corners of his grin. “That’s a story! Do you remember when you sailed with the general and I was left behind with Brennan Du and Professora Kehinde Nayo Kuti? I discovered they have houses here in Europa where all they do is pet all day and all night!”

“You can tell us another time, Rory,” I said quickly.

Bee and I retreated to the kitchen. I prepared a nourishing porridge from oats and pulse while she cleaned the fish and baked it plain, with only salt. Shockingly, we discovered a cache of actual sugar in a glass jar that had been shoved behind a small butter churn in the pantry. When Rory had finished bathing and clothed himself in a towel wrapped around his waist, I set him to watch the porridge while Bee and I bathed. We washed each other’s hair in a bucket, as we always used to do, then traded washing in the tub and rinsing with buckets of warm water from the stove. Afterward, we washed our underthings.

“I miss the shower and plumbing at Aunty’s boardinghouse,” I said. “This seems so awkward now. Think of the faucets in the town house where the general lived!”

“I do think of them,” said Bee with a melancholy sigh. “Even that was as nothing compared to the magnificent plumbing in the palace in Sharagua.”

With towels wrapped around us, we returned to find the porridge ready to eat and Rory picking slivers off the cooked fish. We dug in.

Bee paused to watch me. “The way you’re eating, are you sure you’re not pregnant?”

“I am quite sure!”

“She’s not pregnant.” Rory brushed his face alongside my head. “I have a very sensitive nose. She’s not pregnant. Nor is she at the moment fertile.”

“How can you know that?” demanded Bee.

His affronted expression made her laugh. “Didn’t I just say I have a sensitive nose? I know when females are fertile, or not fertile. You human women aren’t like the females of my own kind. You are fertile more often, and yet never seem to know it, so it’s fortunate I can tell.”

Bee and I stared at him for so long, mouths dropped open, that his brow wrinkled.

“How can you not tell? I would think it would be something you would want to know.”

“Goodness,” I murmured as heat crawled up my cheeks.