Yang could not face Maya.

He could not look at her, he could not bear her to look at him. Not because of what Isaiah had forced them to endure – never that – but out of the sheer horror of what he’d done. The meat Isaiah had fed Yang – to assume it were animal would be a crime against the dead man’s memory. He’d eaten her. His Maya. He had eaten her and he had not questioned it when he should have known.

She looked at him, sometimes, as if to say – with her eyes – that she had done the same to him. Perhaps it were fair ­– the word was thought of with disgust – but it did not diminish the barbarity of what had happened between him. He found it difficult to be with her. He loved her – there was never a doubt of that – but could he live with his love for her?

They returned to the house, however briefly, before Isaiah’s absence was noted, and regrouped. A feeling churned in the pits of his stomach when he saw the house reappear, when he entered. A feeling that left a bitter flavour on his tongue and sweat on his hands. Yang packed his things, few as they were, into a small bag, and in the centre Grosvenor Square on a sunny day, he went out with Maya, their things hidden beneath the folds of her gown. Things were different now. Maya could not speak. She tried to write him notes, scribbling furiously with her quill when she’d gotten to her room. She gave the paper to Yang, and he stared at her with despair. She could not speak and he could not read.

Still, he would not abandon her.

He looked at her, and pain blossomed in his heart each time he did. The scalpel digging into his stomach once more. The pain still echoing as though only a moment had passed. He looked at her, and despite the sharp pain and heavy regret, he still loved her. The love was not happy or bright, it was desperate and pleading. A sole thread holding a shirt together – one tug and it would all unravel around them. Their love kept them together, the burden of obligation, the bond of survival.

Maya had no place in Society, and Yang could not bear to stay. With every moment, he saw the English in a harsher light. They mocked his nationality, they celebrated hypocrisy, they preyed on the dead and feasted on the flesh in hopes of health. Each minute he spent in England wrought a new fact, each one uglier than the previous. He would not miss this place. The dreary weather, the grey sky, the constant rainfall – none of it appealed to him. He vowed to leave. He vowed never to return.

Maya and her letters – her only speech – had organised them passage on an East India Company ship to the coast of Surat. Passengers were few and far between and the captain warned them, they would share beds with the empty boxes of cargo. Yang devoted his time to learning to read – but his efforts were futile, the time too short, the trauma too fresh. He stared at the words, each script so different. The words penned by Maya’s hand were thin, and took swirling shapes. The words stamped on the sides of the ships and on the cargo, were thick and faded and stood straight to attention instead of bending to imagination. He knew they were the same – but his mind did not seem to be able to comprehend that. For all their similarity, they looked too different. And when his hand slipped into the leather of his satchel, and his fingers bumped into the smooth cover of the children’s book Maya had given him some many eons ago, the writing within that was different too. Yang – for all his persistence – gave up.

They left, hand in hand, unable to truly communicate. At the dock, Maya pressed silver into a tall man’s hand (he did not look like the captain of the vessel that kidnapped Yang; he looked to be a man in his mid-thirties, with a weather-beaten face, creased with worry and dirty flannel clothing. The sailors addressed him as ‘Captain’ but to Yang, he rather resembled an old dock worker than trader) and they scurried on board. Yang kept his head down – he spotted Carlisle amongst some of the patrons, organising trade. Carlisle did not see him – perhaps Yang’s only bit of luck in a very long time – and carried on arguing with a merchant holding a roll of yellow silk in his grubby hands.

Two weeks had passed since Isaiah’s death, and questions had arisen. Where was the earl? And why would his sister not utter a single word? Yang and Maya knew they could linger any longer. With haste, they boarded The Catriona, and set sail for India. Yang would not miss England, or Harland or anything of this place – he had with him the only true positive of his time on the other side of the Continent.

It was a five-month journey if the sea was kind; some nights it was, others it was not. Yang stayed below deck. The sight of the tumbling ocean roiled his stomach, and when he slept at night, he began to grit his teeth – from nervousness, from fear, from horror. One night he awoke, tossed from one end of the ship to the other. The ocean was angry, punishing them with heavy, crashing lashes of waves and salt. Yang’s body had been beaten blue by the time the wind reached a point of tranquillity.

If things are too good to be true, they probably aren’t, Maya had once said. Sometimes Yang thought back to that moment, when staring at the wheezing ocean that coughed stringing salt water. Then he would look at Maya and think: where things really that good?

Maya stayed huddled by his side on most nights. His only comfort. She ventured above and brought down tasteless gruel and warm water for them to feast on. The sailors called her mute – and they speculated why she had turned that way with the wildest stories. She had seen something horrific – not far from the truth – she had lost her tongue – true, in fact – she vowed herself to the worship of the Lord, becoming a silent nun – Yang didn’t understand this one – she believed herself above them, or she had nothing at all to say.

Despite being clothed in filth and dirt and sweat and misery, Maya was still beautiful. Or perhaps Yang had simply come to appreciate more than a woman’s clean-cut features and colourful fashions. He shared something that went beyond the appreciation of appearance with Maya – he could not bring himself to care whether she wore rags repurposed from old sacks or fine Parisian gowns; she was still his Maya and that stood for so much more than what was visible on the surface.

Love is different when you see the worst of someone. It is no longer pure and shimmering chastely, it is no longer fierce and passionate – it is honest and ugly and strong. It does not burn brightly – it is a silent simmer beneath your fingertips, constant and certain. It has nothing to hide and nothing to reveal, it is its entirety. It is not beautiful as people would like to believe – it is raw and painful…it is real. Love was not about thumping hearts or hitched breaths or stammered syllables, Yang realised, love was about the molten determination it inspired. It was about empowerment.

The clouds cried on most nights, flooding the decks, and so did Maya. Buried against Yang, her tears soaked his shirt until he shivered from cold. He still held her tight, he still refused to let go. Their love was different. It was about survival, about partnership, about escape. Happiness was a child’s daydream, and they would not delude themselves into believing it was within their reach.

Dragons were revered in Chinese culture. On the rare days he climbed to the surface to seek sanity in the sunlight, he imagined himself as a dragon, swimming in the sky above. He would dive between the clouds and resurface between the stars. The sky was an ocean above man – said the tales of Chinese folklore. Then Yang’s eyes would fall and rest on the ocean he was actually on. An ocean that was heavenly blue beneath the sun, and an unearthly luminous beneath the moon. An ocean that both loved and battled – an ocean, on most nights, he feared with swallow him whole. Yang’s dreams of swimming in the sky as a dragon vanished instantly, and he resolved to believe land was the best place for his feet.

Although Isaiah was gone, Yang still could not rest. Purple circles formed beneath his eyes, and the muscles in his back pulled from discomfort and exhaustion. Isaiah was dead. Yang knew that – every time he felt warmth, he remembered the heat of Isaiah’s running blood on his hands.

“We will survive,” Yang whispered to himself, to Maya. She listened to his chanting, his forced faith with a solemn silence, and when he stopped speaking, she would tug on his arm until he started again – even if he blubbered nonsensical nonsense, she still longed for the sound. So, he spoke to her, until his throat was dry and hoarse, and when sleep embraced her, he whispered to himself that he would survive.

He was Tian Yu Yang – farmer’s son, a mere dock worker from the blistering Canton, and he had suffered poverty, shame, the English nobility and a mad surgeon. There was nothing he was not capable of. He would survive.