All the men in the room were suddenly close to bursting from stifled hilarity.
In a matter of seconds things had tread very close to the edge of mayhem. Such was the exhilarating risk of spirited discourse.
“But, if you had a wish,” Mrs. Pariseau asked, with great, great patience, raising her voice slightly, “what would you wish for? I suppose that was my point, and I take responsibility for phrasing it poorly. Would you wish for something like... a thousand wishes? Or immortality? Something else?”
“But if people lived forever, would love exist? Would there be any need for it?” Keating asked.
Kirke’s lungs seized.
Another silence fell abruptly.
All eyes were on Keating in absolute astonishment.
“Oh no. Forgive me. I didn’t mean to...” Keating flushed. “Oh my goodness, please forget what I said.”
“No, do not apologize. I feel you have introduced a fascinating point, dear. Care to expound?” Mrs. Pariseau said gently.
“It’s just... that is... I just... change is also the thing that makes things more precious, isn’t it? Knowing that anything in life can end in a heartbeat, at any time for any reason, and that things may not always be the same? And if you know that you’re going to live forever, and if someone you love lived forever, would you not then take them for granted? Do we love things and people because we know they’re temporary? I... I just wondered.”
At once, Captain Hardy and Delilah and Angelique and Lord Bolt exchanged glances, their way of reassuring themselves of each other’s existence.
Kirke stared at Keating. He was amazed and oddly—reluctantly—spellbound. For it did notseem wise or safe to feel bound by her in any way at all.
But he knew these kinds of thoughts only originated from personal suffering. For these were the questions one asked when confronted with the mercilessness and unsolvable mysteries of life. As if there was comfort to be had in reasoning through it. For a certain kind of person, he supposed there was.
Others drank, or threw lanterns.
Bloody hell, but he loved a thinker. He felt one couldexhalearound a thinker, as though there was more room to simply exist.
His breath had gone oddly, painfully short at the thought of her struggling to find sweetness and sense in a world that had, and would again, take things she loved.
Her eyes were worried when they met his.
It suddenly seemed urgent to offer her something of value. But the truest thing he knew was that loving could be the most dangerous thing a human could do. She was right to question every single thing about it.
But he could not allow her to endure more silence in that room after she’d opened up her heart.
“I think...” he ventured slowly, for it was nothing he’d ever considered at length, and this he found more exhilarating by the moment. “If we lived forever... I have a feeling that we humans would instinctively create reasons for change, and separation. Rituals or rites of passage or seasons, like the one you’re enduring now, Miss Keating.” He smiled slightly. “For I believe we humans have learned that things like anticipation and longing and pleasures that are fleeting are the things that give life its dimension. Its poignancy. Its shadow and light.”
She took this in. “So it’s possible love could always exist.” Keating sounded relieved. “Even if we lived forever.”
He didn’t take this up. The surest way to discover that someone had not yet been in love was how casually they wielded the word in conversation. They would have more respect for it if they understood that it possessed mad, dangerous power, like a magic spell, or a curse.
“I like to view these sorts of questions—the kinds we can never hope to definitively answer—as a bit like... undiscovered continents,” he said. “We may not find precisely what we’re looking for as we seek answers, but the search may reveal to us other useful or beautiful things about ourselves and our world. In that way, ignorance is the beginning of not just knowledge, but wisdom.”
When she smiled at him, the tension left his body, as if he’d just performed a delicate rescue. He felt like a bloody sage.
“If we lived forever, things would get awfully crowded,” Dot reflected. “Imagine going to market if everyone lived forever. We might never get the best eels.”
“Perhaps people wouldn’t begin mating until they were three hundred and twelve years old, or thereabouts,” Mrs. Pariseau reflected.
Delilah and Angelique stirred at this observation, preparing to head things off if “mating” took the evening in yet another anatomical direction.
“One wish?” Mr. Delacorte mused. “I can’t think of anything I want that I don’t have, or expect I will have. Unless it’s a slice of cheese right now.”
“We can make your wish come true, Mr. Delacorte,” Delilah told him warmly.
“Betterthan genies any day,” Mr. Delacorte declared, gesturing to Angelique and Delilah, as if this proved some important point, and Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt nodded in agreement.
