The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy Read online

  Dedication

  For Janell, who would have loved this

  Epigraph

  Don’t tell me women

  are not the stuff of heroes.

  —Qiu Jin

  A highly dowered girl was faced by a great venture, a great quest. The life before her was an uncharted sea. She had to find herself, to find her way, to find her work.

  —Margaret Todd, MD, The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake

  Map

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Edinburgh: 17—

  Chapter 1

  London

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Stuttgart

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Zurich

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Algiers

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Gibraltar

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Books by Mackenzi Lee

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Edinburgh

  17—

  1

  I have just taken an overly large bite of iced bun when Callum slices his finger off.

  We are in the middle of our usual nightly routine, after the bakery is shut and the lamps along the Cowgate are lit, their syrupy glow creating halos against the twilight. I wash the day’s dishes and Callum dries. Since I am always finished first, I get to dip into whatever baked goods are left over from the day while I wait for him to count the till. Still on the counter are the three iced buns I have been eyeing all day, the sort Callum piles with sticky, translucent frosting to make up for all the years his father, who had the shop before him, skimped on it. Their domes are beginning to collapse from a long day unpurchased, the cherries that top them slipping down the sides. Fortunately, I have never been a girl overbothered with aesthetics. I would have happily tucked in to buns far uglier than these.

  Callum is always a bit of a hand wringer who doesn’t enjoy eye contact, but he’s jumpier than usual tonight. He stepped on a butter mold this morning, cracking it in half, and burned two trays of brioche. He fumbles every dish I pass him and stares up at the ceiling as I prod the conversation along, his already ruddy cheeks going even redder.

  I do not particularly mind being the foremost conversationalist out of the pair of us. Even on his chattiest days, I usually am. Or he lets me be. As he finishes drying the cutlery, I am telling him about the time that has elapsed since the last letter I sent to the Royal Infirmary about my admission to their teaching hospital and the private physician who last week responded to my request to sit in on one of his dissections with a three-word missive—no, thank you.

  “Maybe I need a different approach,” I say, pinching the top off an iced bun and bringing it up to my lips, though I know full well it’s too large for a single bite.

  Callum looks up from the knife he’s wiping and cries, “Wait, don’t eat that!” with such vehemence that I startle, and he startles, and the knife pops through the towel and straight through the tip of his finger. There’s a small plop as the severed tip lands in the dishwater.

  The blood starts at once, dripping from his hand and into the soapy water, where it blossoms through the suds like poppies bursting from their buds. All the color leaves his face as he stares down at his hand, then says, “Oh dear.”

  It is, I must confess, the most excited I have ever been in Callum’s presence. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited. Here I am with an actual medical emergency and no male physicians to push me out of the way to handle it. With a chunk of his finger missing, Callum is the most interesting he has ever been to me.

  I leaf through the mental compendium of medical knowledge I have compiled over years of study, and I land, as I almost always do, on Dr. Alexander Platt’s Treaties on Human Blood and Its Movement through the Body. In it, he writes that hands are complex instruments: each contains twenty-seven bones, four tendons, three main nerves, two arteries, two major muscle groups, and a complex network of veins that I am still trying to memorize, all wrapped up in tissue and skin and capped with fingernails. There are sensory components and motor functions—affecting everything from the ability to take a pinch of salt to bending at the elbow—that begin in the hand and run all the way into the arm, any of which can be mucked up by a misplaced knife.

  Callum is staring wide-eyed at his finger, still as a rabbit dazed by the snap of a snare and making no attempt to staunch the blood. I snatch the towel from his hand and swaddle the tip of his finger in it, for the priority when dealing with a wound spouting excessive blood is to remind that blood that it will do far more good inside the body than out. It soaks through the cloth almost immediately, leaving my palms red and sticky.

  My hands are steady, I notice with a blush of pride, even after the good jolt my heart was given when the actual severing occurred. I have read the books. I have studied anatomical drawings. I once cut open my own foot in a horribly misguided attempt to understand what the blue veins I can see through my skin look like up close. And though comparing books about medicine to the actual practice is like comparing a garden puddle to the ocean, I am as prepared for this as I could possibly be.

  This is not how I envisioned attending to my first true medical patient in Edinburgh—in the backroom of the tiny bakeshop I’ve been toiling in to keep myself afloat between failed petition after failed petition to the university and a whole slew of private surgeons, begging for permission to study. But after the year I’ve had, I’ll take whatever opportunities to put my knowledge into practice that are presented. Gift horses and mouths and all that.

  “Here, sit down.” I guide Callum to the stool behind the counter, where I take coins from his customers, for I can make change faster than Mr. Brown, the second clerk. “Hand over your head,” I say, for if nothing else, gravity will work in favor of keeping his blood inside his body. He obeys. I then fish the wayward fingertip from the washbasin, coming up with several chunks of slimy dough before I finally find it.

  I return to Callum, who still has both hands over his head so that it looks as though he’s surrendering. He’s pale as flour, or perhaps that is actually flour dusting his cheeks. He’s not a clean sort. “Is it bad?” he croaks.

  “Well, it’s not good, but it certainly could have been worse. Here, let me have a look.” He starts to unwrap the towel, and I qualify, “No, lower your arms. I can’t look at it all the way up there.”

  The bleeding has not stopped, but it has slowed enough that I can remove the towel long enough for a look. The finger is less severed than I expected. While he sliced off a good piece of his fingerprint and a wicked crescent of the nail, the bone is untouched. If one must lose a part of one’s finger, this is the best that can be hoped for.

  I pull the skin on either side of the wound up over it. I have a sewing kit in my bag, as I have three times lost the button from my cloak this winter and grew tired of walking around with the ghastly wind of the Nor Loch flapping its tails. All it takes is three stitches—in a style I learned not from A General System of Surgery but rather from a hideous pillow cover my mother pestered me into embroidering a daft-looking dog upon—to hold
the flap in place. A few drops of blood still ooze up between the stitches, and I frown down at them. Had they truly been upon a pillowcase, I would have ripped them out and tried again.

  But considering how little practice I’ve had with sealing an amputation—particularly one so small and delicate—and how much it slowed the bleeding, I allow myself a moment of pride before I move on to the second priority of Dr. Platt’s treaty on wounds of the flesh: holding infection at bay.

  “Stay here,” I say, as though he has any inclination to move. “I’ll be right back.”

  In the kitchen, I bring water to a quick boil over the stove, still warm and easily stoked, then add wine and vinegar before soaking a towel in the mixture and returning to where Callum is still sitting wide-eyed behind the counter.

  “You’re not going to . . . do you have to . . . cut it off?” he asks.

  “No, you already did that,” I reply. “We’re not amputating anything, just cleaning it up.”

  “Oh.” He looks at the wine bottle in my fist and swallows hard. “I thought you were trying to douse me.”

  “I thought you might want it.”

  I offer him the bottle, but he doesn’t take it. “I was saving that.”

  “What for? Here, give me your hand.” I blot the stitching—which is much cleaner than I had previously thought; I am far too hard on myself—with the soaked towel. Callum coughs with his cheeks puffed out when the vinegar tang strikes the air. Then it’s a strip of cheesecloth around the finger, bound and tucked.

  Stitched, bandaged, and sorted. I haven’t even broken a sweat.

  A year of men telling me I am incapable of this work only gives my pride a more savage edge, and I feel, for the first time in so many long, cold, discouraging months, that I am as clever and capable and fit for the medical profession as any of the men who have denied me a place in it.

  I wipe my hands off on my skirt and straighten, surveying the bakery. In addition to every other task that needs doing before we close up for the night, the dishes will need to be rewashed. There’s a long dribble of blood along the floor that will have to be scrubbed before it dries, another on my sleeve, and a splatter across Callum’s apron that should be soaked out before tomorrow. There is also a fingertip to be disposed of.

  Beside me, Callum takes a long, deep breath and lets it hiss out between pursed lips as he examines his hand. “Well, this rather spoils the night.”

  “We were just washing up.”

  “Well, I had something . . . else.” He pushes his chin against his chest. “For you.”

  “Can it wait?” I ask. I’m already calculating how long this will leave Callum useless over the ovens, whether Mr. Brown will be able to lend a hand, how much this will cut into my time off this week, which I had planned to use to begin a draft of a treaty in favor of educational equality.

  “No, it’s not . . . I mean, I suppose . . . it could, but . . .” He’s picking at the edges of the bandage but stops before I can reprimand him. He’s still pale, but a bit of the ruddiness is starting to return to the apples of his cheeks. “It’s not something that will last.”

  “Is it something for eating?” I ask.

  “Something of a . . . just . . . stay there.” He wobbles to his feet in spite of my protestations and disappears into the kitchen. I hadn’t noticed anything special when I was mixing the wine and vinegar, but I also hadn’t been particularly looking for it. I check my fingers for blood, then swipe a clean one over the iced bun I had previously targeted. “Don’t strain yourself,” I call to him.

  “I’m not,” he replies, immediately followed by a crash like something tin knocked over. “I’m fine. Don’t come back here!”

  He appears behind the counter again, more red-faced than before and one sleeve sopping with what must have been the milk he so raucously spilled. He’s also clutching a fine china plate before him in presentation, and upon it sits a single, perfect cream puff.

  My stomach drops, the sight of that pastry sending a tremble through me that a waterfall of blood had not.

  “What are you eating?” he asks at the same moment I say “What is that?”

  He sets the plate on the counter, then holds out his uninjured hand in presentation. “It’s a cream puff.”

  “I can see that.”

  “It is, more specifically, because I know you love specificity—”

  “I do, yes.”

  “—exactly the cream puff I gave you the day we met.” His smile falters, and he qualifies, “Well, not exactly that one. As that was months ago. And since you ate that one, and several more—”

  “Why did you make me this?” I look down at the two choux halves with whorls of thick cream sculpted between them—he’s never this careful with his craftsmanship, his loaves and cakes the kind of rustic you’d expect to be made by a big-handed baker of good Scotch stock. But this is so deliberate and decorative and—zounds, I can’t believe I know exactly what type of pastry this is and how important it is to let the flour mixture cool before whisking in the egg. All this baking nonsense is taking up important space in my head that should be filled with notations on treating popliteal aneurisms and the different types of hernias outlined in Treaties on Ruptures, which I took great pains to memorize.

  “Maybe we should sit down,” he says. “I’m a little . . . faint.”

  “Likely because you lost blood.”

  “Or . . . yes. That must be it.”

  “This really can’t wait?” I ask as I lead him over to one of the tables crowded in the front of the shop. He carries the cream puff, and it wobbles on the plate as his hand shakes. “You should go home and rest. At least close the shop tomorrow. Or Mr. Brown can supervise the apprentices and we can keep everything simple. They can’t muck up a bread roll too badly.” He makes to pull the chair out for me, but I wave him away. “If you are insistent upon moving forward with whatever this is, at least sit down before you fall over.”

  We take opposite sides, pressed up against the cold, damp window. Down the road, the clock from Saint Giles’ is striking the hour. The buildings along the Cowgate are gray with the twilight, and the sky is gray, and everyone passing the bakery is wrapped in gray wool, and I swear I haven’t seen color since I came to this godforsaken place.

  Callum sets the cream puff on the table between us, then stares at me, fiddling with his sleeve. “Oh, the wine.” He casts a glance over at the counter, seems to decide it’s not worth going back for, then looks again to me, his hands resting on the tabletop. His knuckles are cracked from the dry winter air, fingernails short and chewed raw around the edges.

  “Do you remember the first day we met?” he blurts.

  I look down at the cream puff, dread beginning to spread in my stomach like a drop of ink in water. “I remember quite a lot of days.”

  “But that one in particular?”

  “Yes, of course.” It was a humiliating day—it still stings to think of it. Having written three letters to the university on the subject of my admission and received not a word in reply for over two months, I went to the office myself to investigate whether they had arrived. As soon as I gave my name to the secretary, he informed me that my correspondence had indeed been received, but no, it had not been passed on to the board of governors. My petition had been denied without ever being heard, because I was a woman, and women were not permitted to enroll in the hospital teaching courses. I was then escorted from the building by a soldier on patrol, which just seemed excessive, though it would be a lie to say I did not consider sprinting past the secretary and bursting through the door into the governors’ hall without permission. I wear practical shoes and can run very fast.

  But, having been unceremoniously deposited on the street, I had consoled myself at the bakeshop across the road, drowning my sorrows in a cream puff made for me by a round-faced baker with the figure of a man to whom cakes are too available. When I had tried to pay him for it, he’d given me my coins back. And as I was finishing it, at this
very table beside this very window (oh, Callum was truly digging in the talons of sentimentality by sitting us here), he made a tentative approach with a mug of warm cider and, after a good chat, an offer of employment.

  He had looked then like he was trying to lure a snappish dog in from the cold to lie beside his fire. Like he knew what was best for me, if only my stubborn heart could be enticed there. He looks the same way now, earnestly presenting me that same sort of cream puff, his chin tipped down so that he’s looking up at me through the hedgerow of his eyebrows. “Felicity,” he says, my name wobbling in his throat. “We’ve known each other for a while now.”

  “We have,” I say, and the dread thickens.

  “And I’ve become quite fond of you. As you know.”

  “I do.”

  And I did. After months of counting coins with my side pressed against his in the cramped space behind the counter and our hands overlapping when he passed me trays of warm rolls, it had become apparent that Callum was fond of me in a way I couldn’t make myself be fond of him. And though I had known of the existence of this fondness for a time, it had not been a matter of any urgency that required addressing.

  But now he’s giving me a cream puff and recollecting. Telling me how fond he is of me.

  I jump when he takes my hand across the table—an impulsive, lunging gesture. He pulls away just as fast, and I feel terrible for startling, so I hold my hand out in invitation and let him try again. His palms are sweating and my grip so unenthusiastic I imagine it must be akin to cuddling a filleted fish.

  “Felicity,” he says, and then again, “I’m very fond of you.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Very fond.”

  “Yes.” I try to focus on what he’s saying and not of how to get my hand out of his without hurting his feelings and also if there’s any possible scenario in which I can walk away from this with that cream puff but without having to do any more than hold his hand.

  “Felicity,” he says again, and when I look up, he’s leaning across the table toward me with his eyes closed and his lips jutting out.