The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy Read online

  I am tempted to ask after the paper I sent the previous month on homeopathy and the treatment of convulsive fits through quinine. But Percy looks drowsy and ill, and Monty will stop listening once I begin to talk of anything medical, so all I say instead is “Epilepsy is a son of a bitch.”

  “Oh my, but Scotland has made you vulgar,” Monty says with delight. “What brings you down from those highlands to us? Not that this isn’t a delightful surprise. But it is a surprise. Did you write? Because you reached us before the letter.”

  “No, this was . . . unplanned.” I look down at my shoes as a chunk of some unknown substance crumbles from the sole. I have never been good at asking things of others, and it sticks in my throat. “I was hoping you’d put me up for a bit.”

  “Are you all right?” Percy asks, which should have been my brother’s first question, though I’m not shocked it wasn’t.

  “Oh, I’m fine.” I try to make it sound sincere, for I am well in all the ways he’s concerned for. I’m feeling rather trapped between the foot of the bed and the partition—when I try to scoot back, I nearly knock the screen over entirely. “I can find somewhere else to stay. A boardinghouse or something.”

  But Monty waves that away. “Don’t be absurd. We can make room.”

  Where? I almost say, but they’re both watching me with such a thick undercoat of concern it makes me look down again at my shoes. Eye contact in return somehow feels both too vulnerable and too invasive, so I mumble, “Sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for?” Monty asks.

  I was sorry that my great plan hadn’t worked out. Sorry I was here relying on my brother’s Christian charity—what little he had to spare—because my plan for my future had lost its footing at every mile marker. Because I was born a girl but too stubborn to accept the lot that came with my sex.

  “Felicity.” Monty sits up and leans forward with his arms around his knees, looking very intently at me. “Apologize for nothing. It has been made clear in many a letter you are always welcome with us. I was anticipating if you ever took us up on that offer, there would be some notice, so you’ll have to put up with our current states of invalidity and concern for said invalidity. But had you written, I swear to God our answer would have been ‘board the first coach south.’”

  Thank God—something I can be indignant about. It’s far more comfortable than sentimentality. “Many a letter? Really?” When Monty gives me a quizzical look, I fill in, “You have not once written to me.”

  “I write!”

  “No, Percy writes me long lovely letters in his very legible penmanship and then you scrawl something offensive at the bottom about Scottish men and their kilts.” Monty grins, unsurprisingly, but Percy snorts as well. When I glare at him, he pulls the quilt up over his nose. “Don’t encourage him.”

  Monty leans over and gives a gentle nip at Percy’s jaw, then presses a kiss to the same spot. “Oh, he loves it when I’m filthy.”

  I look away, right at a pair of trousers tellingly discarded upon the floor, and resign myself to the fact that their affection is unavoidable. Particularly if I’m to be staying with them. “Are you two still nauseatingly obsessed with each other? I thought by now you’d have mellowed.”

  “We remain completely unbearable. Come here, my most dearest darling love of loves.” Monty pulls Percy’s face toward him and kisses him on the mouth this time, sloppy and showy, and somehow he manages to look at me the whole time as if to convey just how smug he is about making me uncomfortable. That initial fondness I felt toward him has already begun to rot like an overripe melon.

  I can resist the eye roll no longer, though I fear for my vision as soon as I look to the ceiling—it seems to be peeling off in chalky lumps. If there is a piece of this flat that isn’t playing skip rope with the line between habitable and condemned, I have yet to see it. “I will leave.”

  When they pull apart, Percy at least has the good sense to look sheepish about the show. Monty just looks obnoxiously pleased with himself. Somehow his dimples are even jauntier than I remember them.

  “He’s showing off,” Percy assures me. “We never touch each other.”

  “Well, please don’t start for my benefit,” I reply.

  “Come here, darling, and we’ll give you a cuddle as well.” Monty pats the bed between them. “A proper Monty-Percy sandwich.”

  I give him a sweet smile in return. “Oh, darling, I’d rather set myself on fire.”

  It has taken me, admittedly, a time to reconcile the idea that Percy and Monty seem to have found honest affection for each other in what I was taught was the sin of all sins. Perhaps the distance helped, or at least gave me space to ponder it and make my peace with it and move from cringing tolerance to something nearer to understanding that their love is probably truer than most of the pairings I saw growing up. Anyone who put up with my brother certainly would not be doing it unless they really, sincerely loved him. And Percy’s the sort of decent lad who actually might. When stripped of the illegalities and the Biblical condemnation, their attraction is no stranger to me than anyone’s attraction to anyone.

  Percy nudges the side of Monty’s head with his nose. “You should get to work.”

  “Must I?” he replies. “Felicity just arrived.”

  I perk up in a way that I’m certain makes me look more squirrel-like than is flattering, but I can’t resist a taunt. It’s owed him after that clogged drain of a kiss. “I’m sorry, Percy, I’m not sure I heard right, because it sounded as though you said work, which would imply that my brother has tricked someone into employing him.”

  “Thank you, I have been consistently employed since we arrived in London,” Monty says. Percy coughs, and he adds, “Somewhat consistently.”

  I follow Monty around the partition, perching myself at its edge so I can keep them both in my conversation as Monty starts pawing his way through the trunks. “May I guess what sort of employment you’re rushing off to? You’re a horse jockey. No, wait—a nightclub performer. A bare-knuckled boxer. A brothel bully.”

  From the bed, Percy laughs. “He’d be smaller than most of the tarts.”

  “Ha, ha, ha. I won’t have you two ganging up upon me while you’re here.” Monty surfaces from a trunk with a jumper that looks like it was vomited up by an aging housecat and wrestles it over his head. “I’ll have you know,” he says as he fights to get his hands through the sleeves, “that I have a respectable position in Covent Garden.”

  “Respectable?” I cross my arms. “That sounds fake.”

  “It’s not! It’s very respectable, isn’t it, Percy?” he calls, but Percy has suddenly become occupied with a thread coming undone from the quilt.

  “So tell me what it is you’re doing respectably in Covent Garden,” I say with an eyebrow arched over the neighborhood.

  As a newly monogamous man, he pretends to not understand my emphasis on the notorious cruising grounds he once frequented. “I play cards for a casino.”

  “You play for the casino?”

  “I stay sober but pretend to be drunk to play against the men who actually are tipsy and win their money and give it to the house. They pay me a portion.”

  I let out a bark of laughter before I can stop myself. “Yes. Respectable is the first word that comes to my mind when I hear that.”

  “Better than making plum cakes with your little plum cake,” he returns with a sly grin.

  And suddenly none of it is fun or funny any longer—it’s the savage sniping of our youth, both of us jabbing gently until someone presses a little too hard and it draws blood. Monty might not sense the change in the weather, but Percy does, for he says sternly to Monty, “Be nice. She’s only been here twenty minutes.”

  “Has it only been twenty minutes?” I mumble, and Percy swats his hand at me.

  “You have to be nice too. That road runs both ways.”

  “Yes, mother,” I say, and Monty laughs, this time less at me than with me, and we trade a look that is, shal
l we say, not hostile. Which is good enough.

  It takes Monty an excessively long time to dress. There’s the jumper, mostly obscured by a jacket and an overly large coat, then heavy boots and fraying gloves, all topped by an adorably misshapen cap that I like to imagine Percy knit for him. It also takes him half a dozen false starts before he actually manages to reach the street—first he has to come back for his scarf, then to change into thicker socks, but most times the thing he comes back for is one more kiss with Percy.

  When Monty finally leaves in earnest—the whole building seems to tip a bit more westward when the door slams behind him—Percy smiles at me and pats the spot on the bed beside him. “You can sit down, if you like. I promise I won’t try to cuddle you.”

  I perch myself on the edge of the bed. I’m assuming he’s going to dive face-first into an interrogation on the subject of why exactly I have made my bedraggled appearance on their doorstep begging for shelter. But instead he says, “Thank you for the paper you sent.”

  I was so prepared to make protestations that my surprise visit to London is not a sign of an impending crisis that I turn a bit too hard into this subject. “Wasn’t it fascinating? I mean, it’s annoying that he calls it Saint Valentine’s Malady the whole bleeding paper, but it’s brilliant how many physicians are advocating alternatives to bloodlettings and surgeries. Particularly for a disease like epilepsy where we still don’t have much of a real idea where it originates. And his footnote about the unlikeliness of epilepsy having any relation to illicit sexual desires was gratifying—that isn’t often acknowledged. But the whole idea of a consistent preventative dose of pharmaceuticals rather than treating in a moment of crisis—preventative rather than prescriptive—for a chronic illness that doesn’t manifest every . . .” I trail off. I can tell Percy is struggling to follow so many words spouted so quickly and with so much vigor. “Sorry, I’m rambling.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I wish I had something intelligent to offer in return. Maybe when I’m a bit more . . .” He waves a hand vaguely to indicate his current invalidity.

  “Have you tried anything suggested? He makes a good case for quinine.”

  “Not yet. We don’t have the money right now. But the Royal Academy of Music here in London will be looking for violinists in the fall, and one of the lads in my quartet is a student of Bononcini and said he’d introduce me—I’m hoping something will come of that.” He leans back against the headboard as he studies me, legs curling into his chest so that his toes are no longer hanging off the end of the bed. “Are you all right?”

  “Me? Yes, of course.”

  “Because we are very happy to see you, but your arrival seems rather . . . unplanned. Which would cause a concerned party to wonder if you had left Edinburgh in some kind of distress.”

  “It would give cause, wouldn’t it?” I hope my casual tone might stall him, but he goes on staring at me, and I sigh, my posture sinking into a very unladylike slouch. “Mr. Doyle—the baker, you know, the one I work for.” Percy nods, and I continue with great reluctance. “He has expressed an interest in someday making a proposal of marriage to me.”

  I expected some fantastic start, the same sort of surprise that struck me when Callum made the actual ask, but Percy’s face hardly changes. “How very clinical.”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “Should I be? Were you?”

  “Yes! How did you know?”

  “Because of everything you wrote about him! Unmarried gentlemen don’t pay young ladies that sort of attention unless they have long-term plans. Though I suppose you Montagues are first-rate at not noticing when someone is smitten with you.” He might mean for it to make me laugh, but instead I take a strong interest in picking at the pills of wool on my skirt where my rucksack rubbed. “You don’t sound very excited.”

  “Well, considering that after he asked me, I immediately booked a carriage here and wrote to Saint Bartholomew’s about an appointment with the hospital governors’ board, I can’t say that I am.”

  “I thought you liked Callum.”

  These woolly little bastards are really clinging. I catch the ragged edge of my thumbnail in the grain of the material and pull up a loop of thread. “I do. He’s kind, and he makes me laugh—sometimes, if the joke is clever—and he works very hard. But I like a lot of people. I like you—doesn’t mean I want to marry you.”

  “Thank God, because I’m spoken for.”

  I’m resisting the urge to fall face-forward into the bed—I would have been more likely to indulge had I not been concerned that the mattress would offer no give and I’d be left with a broken nose. “Callum is sweet. And he’s helped me. But he thinks he’s saving me from all my ambition when really I can’t see any future scenario where I come to be as interested in Callum as I am in medicine. Or interested in anyone that much. Or interested in doing anything other than studying medicine.” I release a long breath, fluttering the fine hairs escaping my plait. “But I could do much worse than a kind baker who owns a shop and worships me.”

  “In my experience, it’s less gratifying for both parties if that worship is single-sided.” Percy rubs a hand over his face. I can tell he’s getting drowsy, and I think he might beg to retire, but instead he says, “Not to abandon this subject entirely, but can we return to something for a moment? What was that about the Saint Bart’s Hospital board?”

  “Oh.” The subject inspires in me an entirely different sort of anxiety than talking about Callum. “I requested an appointment with the hospital governors.”

  “To be admitted as . . . a patient?”

  “No. To make a petition to study medicine there. Though they don’t know that’s what I want to talk to them about. I may have implied the meeting would be to discuss a financial donation I wanted to make to the hospital.” I scrape my teeth over my bottom lip. It sounds far worse when I say it aloud. Particularly to Saint Percy. “Should I not have done that?”

  He shrugs. “You could have picked a less dramatically different reason. They’re all going to wrench their necks from the shift in topic.”

  “It was the only way I could be sure they’d see me. Nowhere in Edinburgh will have me as a student—not any of the hospitals or the private physicians or teachers. I’d have to leave eventually if I want schooling and a license.” I let my head fall forward so that it’s resting against the headboard of the bed. “I didn’t realize it would be so hard.”

  “To study medicine?”

  Yes, I think, but also to be a woman alone in the world. My character was forged by independence and self-sufficiency in the face of loneliness, so I assumed the tools for survival were already in my kit, it was just a matter of learning to use them. But not only do I not have the tools, I have no plans and no supplies and seem to be working in a different medium entirely. And, because I’m a woman, I’m forced to do it all with my hands tied behind my back.

  Percy shifts his weight and flinches, a shudder running up his arm and twisting his shoulder. I sit up. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m sore. I’m always so sore after a fit.”

  “Did you fall?”

  “No, I was asleep when it happened. In bed. Maybe I wasn’t asleep.” He presses the heel of his hand into his forehead. “I don’t remember. Sorry, I was feeling awake but I’m getting fuzzy again, and I can’t remember the last thing we talked about.”

  “You should sleep.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.” I stand up, smoothing out my skirt where it’s gotten rucked up over my knees. “I am more than capable of entertaining myself. Do you need anything?”

  “I’m all right.” He burrows down into the blankets, the bed frame letting out an ominous creak. The weight of the day settles through me: exposed to the freezing winds as I rode the imperial of the coach down from Scotland, reeking of the horses relieving themselves and the man next to me asking again and again for my name, where I live, why won’t I smile? I’m weary, and cold
, and Percy is a soft place to land.

  “Could I . . . ?”

  He opens his eyes. I suddenly feel very small and meek, a child begging to crawl into bed with her mother when she’s woken at night by frightful dreams. But I don’t even have to ask. He tosses back the quilt and slides over to make room for me.

  I kick my boots across the floor and strip off my coat, but leave my jumper on, then lie down beside him, pulling the quilt over us both. I roll over onto my back and let the silence settle over us like a fine layer of dust before I say, my face to the ceiling and not entirely certain Percy’s still awake, “I’ve missed you. Both of you.”

  I can hear the soft smile in his voice when he replies, “I won’t tell Monty.”

  3

  The appointment at Saint Bart’s is confirmed for a week after I arrive in London—somehow the address in Moorfields didn’t tip them off to the fact that I haven’t any spare coinage to be tossing at their establishment. I have a half-hour slot, just before they recess for lunch, so they’ll all be hungry and irritable and disinclined to rule in my favor.

  I sleep as well as a girl can hope to the night before a meeting that could change the course of her life. Which is to say, I do not sleep at all, but rather lie awake for hours, mentally reviewing the process of lancing boils, like they might quiz me on that one very specific thing I just happened to study, and trying not to let my thoughts spin into hypotheticals of where I would live if they did admit me, or how I’d pay the fifty pounds tuition, or what I would do if my tutors did not subscribe to an anatomist philosophy. When I do fall asleep, it’s into dreams of missing my meeting time, or my feet turning to stones as I race toward the assigned room, or the board asking me why I should be allowed to study medicine and I cannot come up with a single coherent reason.