“Dorstenia,” he said. “It looks like a tiny tree, crowned with a shooting star. You do not have trees like this, in America. It is a cousin of the fig. Its flower isn’t soft and inviting …” Here, his finger traced all the way down to my hips, where they met my thighs, lingered there, then made its way back up. “Its flower is hard and standoffish. It is called a ‘shield flower.’ Its face looks like a wall of stone. But when you look more closely, you see the flower is made up of a hundred little blossoms, all closed off tight.” He had reached my shoulders again, spread out his hands, felt the strength of my back.

“Why do you tell me these things now?” I asked. “You do not speak like a lover.” I at least felt calm enough to tease.

“Because as my wife,” he said, “there will be a whole new knowledge to learn, to aid me, and we may as well begin now.”

His voice was light, so I opened my eyes and saw the shape of him roll above me, before I closed them again, still cowed by the waves.

“But what if I am too sick to remember?”

“I’m not speaking to you. The lessons are not for you. They’re for your body. She will remember.” And then I felt his hand again, in the middle of my back, drawing, I suppose, the flowers that made up the shield of a Dorstenia.

He touched me until his fingers trembled. I shut my eyes even tighter, pressed myself into the hay mattress of the berth. His fingers lifted, and then I felt him turn over, onto his own back. He breathed hard and heavy, as if he was at a gallop, and the sheet that covered us began to shake.

I opened my eyes, sat up on my elbows, and watched him.

A man touching himself is a peculiar thing. My mother had told me about women’s bodies but not men’s. I’d seen male members on barnyard cats before, and sometimes rude and red on a stray dog. I remembered, once, glimpsing one, folded over on itself in a nest of gray hair, between the legs of an old man whom Mama helped to dying. I’d been six or seven then, and Mama had had to ask me three times to hand her her bag, before she’d looked up and followed my gaze. She’d pursed her lips, pulled the man’s cloak over him, and said, “You shouldn’t make patients uncomfortable with staring, Libertie.”