The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy Read online

  Why are you here, Miss Montague? they ask, and I can’t reply because my throat is clamped shut and my head is empty. Why should you be admitted here when you’re just a girl, when you’re just a child, when this is all just a silly passing fancy?

  The third time I wake from this particular dream, I get up. Monty isn’t home yet, and Percy is dead asleep beside me with his head all the way under the blanket, so I risk lighting a candle from the smoldering ashes of the stove. I retrieve my book of Platt’s treaties from my knapsack and rip out the final blank page. Then, with a pencil from Percy’s music stand, I sit cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the bed and begin to make a list.

  Reasons I Should Be Allowed to Study Medicine at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital

  First, women comprise half the population of this city and the country and have unique afflictions of their sex that male physicians are incapable of understanding or treating effectively.

  Second, the perspective of a woman on the subject of medicine is an untapped resource in a field dedicated to progress.

  Third, women have been practicing medicine for hundreds of years and have only been excluded in this country in recent history.

  Fourth, I can read and write Latin, French, and some German, in addition to English. I am schooled in mathematics and have read widely on subjects related to medicine. My favorite writer is Dr. Alexander Platt, and if you were to present me now with pen and paper, I could draw you a map of the bronchial tree from memory. Also I recently mended a gentleman’s amputated finger with no prior schooling on the subject, and he is expected to recover entirely.

  Fifth, I want nothing else in the world so much as to know things about the workings of the human body and to improve upon our knowledge and study of them.

  I frown at the last one. It’s a bit overly sentimental and will do nothing to make a case for the stout heart of a woman. It is also not entirely true—I do not want to know things. I want to understand things. I want to answer every question ever posed me. I want to leave no room for anyone to doubt me. Every time I blink or breathe or twitch or stretch, every time I feel pain or awake or alive, I want to know why. I want to understand everything I can about myself in a world that often makes no sense, even if the only things to be known for certain are on a chemical level. I want there to be right answers, and I want to know them, and myself because I know them.

  I don’t know who I am without this. That’s the truest thing I could say. Half my heart is this hunger. My being is constructed by an aching to know the answers to every mystery of the frail ligaments that connected us to life and death. That wanting feels a part of me. It has seeped into my skin like mercury injected into a vein to trace its shape through the body. One drop colored my whole being. It is the only way I can see myself.

  This, I remind myself, is a fresh start. A new city. Another place to try again and prove that I deserve a spot in this world.

  I write that at the top—not for the board, but a reminder to myself. You deserve to be here.

  There’s a crash and a curse on the other side of the partition. I startle so fantastically that I accidentally poke the tip of the pencil all the way through the paper, skewering the final e in here. “Monty,” I hiss, peering out from behind the partition with my candle raised. I make out the shape of my brother, bent double massaging his kneecap, which, judging by the clatter, he slammed into the stove.

  “This flat’s a bloody death trap,” he says, words fizzing through his clenched teeth. “What are you doing? It’s four in the morning.”

  “I’m . . .” I look down at the paper mashed between my hands. “Thinking.”

  “Can you think in bed with the light out so that I can sleep?”

  “Yes, sorry.” I crease the paper and shove it into the pocket of my skirt hung upon the partition.

  Monty watches me, one hand still rubbing his knee. “What were you writing?”

  “Nothing of consequence.” The list suddenly feels silly and small, the sermon of an idealistic missionary who has yet to accept that no one cares about her gospel. “Just some notes for my appointment.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Of course not,” I reply. “Just wanted to be prepared.” I blow out the candle and return to bed before he can ask further. I can hear him rooting around the flat for several minutes longer, dressing for bed. He pauses on the other side of the screen, and I hear the crunch of unfolded paper. There’s a silence, then another rustle as it’s returned to its place.

  I don’t get up, and he doesn’t say anything to me as he gropes his way to bed through the darkness and curls up on Percy’s other side. He’s snoring in minutes, but I lie awake for hours longer, counting the beats of my heart and repeating to myself over and over You deserve to be here.

  When I wake again, the morning light flitting in through the cracks in the wall is the warm gold of a soft-boiled egg. At my side, Percy is curled up with his knees pulled to his chest and Monty’s head—still swathed in that ridiculous slab of a hat—resting on his chest. It’s the same way we sometimes slept on our Tour, the nights we all three shoved ourselves into lumpy beds in dodgy inns or laid out beneath the white poplars in farmer’s fields blushing with lavender.

  I try to make my rising quiet, though the floorboards render that impossible. The whole flat seems to be conspiring against me, for I immediately run into the screen, and it nearly collapses. It’s a testament to how exhausted they both must be, for Monty continues to drool into Percy’s nightshirt, and Percy doesn’t stir.

  There’s no room for true privacy in the tiny flat, and though I’ve shared tighter quarters with these two lads, I’m not about to strip to my skin in the middle of the room and pretend as though my modesty is as easy to put out of sight as it was when we were stowed away together in the bowels of a xebec. I manage to change into fresh underthings on the other side of the screen without disrobing entirely, though I bang my elbow hard at least three times on three separate things and almost tip over like a falling tree when I catch my toe in a hole in my petticoat. When I tie my pockets around my waist, I check to make certain the list is still there. It is, though in the right, rather than the left where I placed it. Monty remains a terrible thief.

  The stove is still warm from the night before, but nowhere near enough for it to do anything useful like boil water for coffee or thaw me under my jumper. I throw on a pair of logs and blow until they catch, then wrap myself in my brother’s coat before crouching with my back to the belly of the stove, waiting for the heat to become too much to sit so close and listening for chimes down the road, though I know from the light it’s still early. But it’s more comfortable to worry about being late to the meeting than to worry about the meeting itself.

  There’s a creak behind me, first from the bed ropes, then the floorboards, and Percy comes around the screen, wrapped in a battered dressing gown that looks as though it was made in the previous century for a man half his height. His hair is puffed up on one side and flat on the other, and his face is heavy, like he’s still waking himself. “Good morning,” he says. I press a finger to my lips with a meaningful look at where Monty is still asleep, now spread over the entirety of the bed like he was dropped there from a great height.

  Percy waves me away. “He’s lying on his good ear. He’d sleep through the end of the world.”

  “Oh. Well then. Good morning. Better today?”

  “Much.” He sits down cross-legged in front of the stove, his shoulders curled toward its warmth. “Why are you up so early? I thought your meeting wasn’t until eleven.”

  “Just gathering my thoughts.” I resist the urge to reach into my pocket for my list again. “You?”

  “My quartet is playing at a luncheon today, and I actually think I might make it through the entire concert without vomiting.”

  “Oh. Good.” I don’t mean to sound upset, but it comes out with a bit of a wilting end. It isn’t that I expected him or Monty to come along with me—t
he most they could offer is silent encouragement from the back of the room. And I’ve always known I would be doing this alone. Everything I’ve done up to this point has been alone. But disappointment still knocks against my rib cage. “That’s all right.”

  Percy looks up. “Hm?”

  I had waited too long to say it, and also he hadn’t been apologizing for anything. I shove down that annoying disappointment, chiding it that it has no business being here. “Nothing.” I smile at him, then push myself to my feet. “Let me make you coffee before I go.”

  I give myself an hour to walk to Saint Bart’s, though it’s only a mile, in addition to a half hour to sit anxiously in the hallway before the scheduled time of the appointment. Percy sees me off at the door with more affirming words but no hug or even a pat upon the shoulder. Thank God for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.

  I’m already on the street, hood pulled up and hands jammed into my muff and trying to remember to breathe, when I hear the door to their building slam behind me. I turn as Monty stumbles down the stoop, trying to lace one of his boots while still moving forward and doing neither effectively.

  “Sorry,” he calls as he staggers toward me. “I swear, I was going to be up on time, but I didn’t think you’d be leaving so goddamn early.”

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  He gives up on the boot and jogs to catch me up, laces dragging in the mud. “I’m coming with you. Someone should make certain you don’t get arrested.” He’s still got that little tea cozy of a hat on, and he reaches up to pull it down so it’s covering his scars as much as possible without it impeding his vision. He notices me staring at it and asks, “Should I have worn a wig? This seems now like it might be a wig-wearing sort of gathering. I’ve got one upstairs—I can go fetch it. But it’s been growing mold since the fall, and I assumed that wasn’t the sort of impression—”

  “Thank you,” I interrupt.

  He pauses. “For not wearing my moldering wig?”

  “Yes. Definitely for that. But thank you for coming.”

  He scrubs his hands together and gives a short puff on them for warmth. “Percy would too, if he could. But he’s missed too many shows this week, and epilepsy is, in professional medical terms, a son of a bitch.”

  I nearly laugh, but then he’ll be pleased with himself, and if I have to see those dimples this early, I might punch him.

  We fall into step together—or rather, as into step as a pair can on these ragged roads. I dart around a puddle of what I’m fairly certain is piss gathering in the frozen rut of a wagon wheel, then duck around Monty so I’m not on his deaf side.

  “You really think I’d let you do this alone, you goose?” he says as we walk. “It’s a lot to take on by yourself.”

  “I’ve taken on a lot by myself,” I reply.

  “I’m not saying you’re not capable. But it’s nice sometimes, to have someone to cheer you on. Metaphorically,” he adds quickly. “I promise I won’t do any actual cheering. Even though it’s tempting because of how much it would embarrass you.”

  I glance sideways at him, and he looks at me at the same time. The corners of his mouth start to turn up in the sly triumph of having caught me in a moment of sentimentality, but I toss my head back so my hood shields my face before he can say anything. “That hat is idiotic.”

  “I know,” he says. “Percy made it for me.”

  “I didn’t know Percy knew how to knit.”

  “He doesn’t,” Monty replies, and the brim of the hat falls in front of his eyes as though in emphasis.

  “I’m glad you’ve got Percy,” I say.

  “So am I.” As we cross into the square, the caving tenement houses open into gray sky. The light is a slick sheen over the muddy streets like the scales of a herring. “And don’t be cross with me for saying this, but I wish you had someone too. I worry about you.”

  “You do not.”

  “I do.” He dodges a stream of brown water dumped from a high window, and our shoulders bump. “Ask Perce. I wake up in the middle of the night in panic about my lonely sister up in Scotland.”

  “I’m not lonely.”

  “I didn’t think I was either.”

  I shrug so my cloak falls closed in front of me. “Do you want me to marry Mr. Doyle because you think I need a man to protect me? Or complete me? I’ll pass on that, thank you very much.”

  “No,” he says. “I just wish you had someone cheering for you all the time, because you deserve it.”

  We stop on a street corner, waiting for a flock of sedan chairs to cross the road ahead of us, their footmen calling greetings and japes to each other as they pass. “Love has made you terribly soft, you know,” I say to him without looking.

  “I do,” he replies. “Isn’t it grand?”

  4

  At eleven o’clock, Monty and I are shown into Saint Bartholomew’s Great Hall by a spotty adolescent clerk with too much powder cracking along his hairline. It’s a high-ceilinged, gold-leafed room with two levels of windows framed by dark wooden plaques, the names of donors painted in long, neat rows. Men. All of them men. A portrait of Saint Bartholomew hangs over a marble mantelpiece, his blue robe one of the only spots of color in the dark room.

  It would be more impressive if we had not walked through the filthy hospital ward, where haggard nurses shook lice out of gray linens, buckets of waste were carried about by patients forced to work to earn their keep, and a man I assumed was a surgeon screamed at a woman about using the name of the Lord in vain, to get here. The hallways reeked of sickness, intertwined with the sharp, metallic tang from the meat market it adjoins. All this grandeur seems like appalling waste.

  But I’m here. My heart hiccups. I am about to speak to a board of hospital governors. I’ve never made it this far before.

  There are a few rows of chairs lined up before a tall wooden bench, behind which sit the governors. Them I do find impressive, though aside from their wigs and fine clothes, it’s likely to do with the fact that they are men in a large group, which always ignites a sort of primal fear in me. Flanked as they are by busts of the governors before them and loomed over by all those names along the walls, I feel generations of men who have kept women from their schools staring me down. Men like this never die—they’re chiseled in marble and erected in these halls.

  Monty settles himself in one of the chairs and puts his feet up on the one in front of him. The clerk nearly faints. I consider chiding him, but I would rather my first impression with these men not be that of a stern governess correcting her overgrown man-child on his manners. While I, in tartan and wool and work boots, am in no place to be casting judgment upon anyone’s fashion, his trousers have more holes than I noticed on the walk here, one distressingly near a sensitive area. He could have gone to a bit more effort not to look waifish.

  I lay my winter things over the chair beside him, fish my notations out from my pocket, and resist the urge to wear out all my anxiety on its corners as I take my place before the board, none of whom look at me. Rather, they’re speaking to one another, or going through the forms in front of them. One of them is discussing what he’s going to eat for his luncheon today. Another laughs at a joke from his fellow about their horse-racing bets.

  I feel small enough without being made to wait for them to decide they’re ready to address me, so I speak first. “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  Perhaps not the best strategy, but it gets their attention. That, and Monty hisses a hush from the back like we’re in school. I almost turn to glare at him—so much for the promise of not embarrassing me—but the men are starting to look my way. They’re all old, all of them fair skinned and robust. At the center of the table, the gentleman with the largest wig folds his hands and surveys me. “Miss Montague. Good morning.”

  I take a breath and it sticks in my throat like cold porridge. “Good morning, gentlemen.” And then I realize I have already said that and nearl
y turn on my heel and dash from the room in panic.

  You are Felicity Montague, I remind myself as I take another porridgy breath. You have sailed with pirates and robbed tombs and held a human heart in your hands and sewn your brother’s face back together after he got it shot off over said human heart. You have read De Humani Corporis Fabrica three times, twice in Latin, and you can name all the bones in the body, and you deserve to be here.

  You deserve to be here. I glance down at where it’s written upon the top of my list. You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men. My heart begins to even itself out. I take a breath, and it doesn’t stick. I push up my spectacles and look at the board.

  And then of course I say “Good morning” one more time.

  One of the governors snorts—the same mutton-faced man who was boasting about the chops he was about to eat as soon as they’re finished here—and it sets off a flare inside me. I square my shoulders, raise my chin, and say with as much confidence as I can muster, “I have come today to petition the board on the matter of granting me permission to study medicine at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital.”

  I glance down at my notes again, ready to launch into my first argument with only a small reminder of what that argument is, but the wigged chairman who seems to speak for the group interrupts. “I’m sorry. I must have the wrong appointment.” When I look up, he’s flipping through his papers. “I was told that this was to discuss a donation. Higgins!”

  “No, sir, that’s right,” I say, nearly knocking Higgins the clerk out cold as I throw up an arm to halt his scurry forward from the back of the room. The chairman looks at me, and I amend, “I mean, it’s not right.”