The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy Read online

  It will be two weeks of travel to Stuttgart, then the wedding festivities provided we manage to weasel our way into the household. If the position with Dr. Platt comes to fruition, I don’t intend to return to Moorfields, particularly not as a dependent houseguest. Neither do I intend to return to Edinburgh. On my way to the harbor, I drop a three-line missive at the post office to Callum, saying that I will be staying in London longer than planned, as my brother’s syphilis/boredom is more serious than anticipated, leaving out any mention of the fact that I am going to the Continent with a stranger to make a future for myself that will not include him.

  I have challenged fate to chess and am now attempting to keep all my confidence from puddling in my boots. What if I’m the only one betting on myself because everyone but me can see I am not suited to play at all?

  You are Felicity Montague, I say to myself, and touch the paper in my pocket listing my arguments, which, if all goes according to this impossible plan, will now be made in some variation before Alexander Platt. Dr. Cheselden’s card is nestled in its folds. You have stowed aboard a ship and traveled forty-eight days with a single outfit. You are not a fool, you’re a fighter, and you deserve to be here. You deserve to take up space in this world.

  The harbors are perhaps the vilest part of a vile city. The ground is slick with a foul combination of fish intestines, yellow spittle, gull droppings, vomit, and other fluids I’d rather not give too much thought to. Even at this early hour, the narrow docks are packed, every person certain their business is most important and therefore that snapping at others to get out of their way is justified. The wind off the water picks up a spray from the fetid Thames and spews it in my face as I search the crowd for Sim. I find her lingering near the end of the queue of passengers waiting to board the packet, and when she sees me coming, she steps into the line in earnest. She’s swapped her sailing duds for a muslin dress and unembroidered shawl tucked into the stomacher, topped with a heavy wool cloak.

  When I join her, she forgoes a greeting and instead says, “You look upset.”

  “And your scarf has a hole in it,” I snap. “Oh, look, we’re all making observations.” She doesn’t reply, and perhaps I imagine her shifting her weight so she’s facing away from me, but I press my hands to my face and give my head a good shake to clear it. “I’m sorry. I’m anxious, that’s all.”

  “About leaving?”

  “No, more about the fact that . . .” It seems unwise to tell her that no one knows where I am, so instead I say, “My brother’s an ass. That’s all.”

  “So are mine.”

  “Your what?”

  “My brothers. They’re all asses.”

  “Brothers plural?” Had I been forced to grow up in a household of multiple Montys, I would have got myself to a nunnery just for some quiet. “How many have you got?”

  “Four.”

  “Four?” I nearly swoon. “Older or younger?”

  “All younger.” She grimaces. “All very loud.”

  “Are they sailors too?”

  She nods, adjusting her grip on her bag. “Or they will be. The littlest one is only eight, but he’ll be at sea soon. All my family are sailors.”

  “What sort of sailors?” I ask.

  But Sim is already turned away from me, instead peering ahead to the front of the queue, where boarding cards are being checked before we’re allowed on the deck, and though I know she’s heard me, she doesn’t answer.

  “That’s fine,” I say. I’m more annoyed at her silence than I likely should be, but in my defense, it has been an exceedingly stressful few weeks and all my emotions seem to be operating at a higher level than usual. “We needn’t exchange any personal information—we’ll only be together constantly for the next several weeks; I’d rather remain strangers in proximity.” I push myself up on my toes, trying to see over the heads of the other passengers. “This is taking too long.”

  “Maybe you’re impatient,” Sim says, still aggravatingly calm.

  “I am not impatient. I just know how long things should take.”

  She blows into her hands. “Then maybe you’re opinionated.”

  “Well, my opinion is that you shouldn’t pass judgments upon me.” I cross my arms, turning away from her and the line to instead look around the harbor. The sails of the moored ships flutter in the wind, smaller boats flitting between them with punters digging their poles into the bottom of the Thames. The ropes of a sledge crane nearby have snapped, and a merchant in a fine suit speckled with salt is shouting at a group of boys about the damage to his goods. Several planks down from us, there’s a mess of raw fish spilled and trampled into the boards. A porter slips on the guts and drops the trunk he’s carrying, grabbing on to a stranger beside him for balance. A stranger in a ridiculous hat.

  It’s Monty.

  “Oh no.”

  Sim looks up from her hands. “What?”

  I pivot sharply, my back to Monty, though that will hardly be a hiding place for long. “My brother’s here.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “I didn’t . . . I didn’t tell him I was leaving. I mean, I did, but he wasn’t thrilled about that, so I lied and said I wasn’t, but in the process gave him just enough details that if I was to disappear in the middle of the night, he’d know where I was going.”

  “And you disappeared in the middle of the night?”

  “Not the middle of the night,” I protest. “The very early hours of the morning.”

  Sim must spot Monty as well, for she ducks down at my side. “He’s coming this way.”

  Of course he’s coming this way—we’re standing in line for the ferry to Calais, the first place to seek out your sister fleeing to the Continent. “Come on.” I pull Sim out of the line, up the dock, and then out of sight behind the cargo dropped by the crane. I turn to her, my knapsack knocking me hard in the small of the back. “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know; he’s your brother,” she replies.

  “He’s also a human man, which I assume you’ve had dealings with in the past.” I press my face into the collar of my cloak, trying to examine the situation as though it were far more scientific than it is.

  The problem: avoiding Monty, who is paying careful attention to everyone boarding the ship to Calais. The resources at our disposal: little to nothing. Sim, me, my knapsack, which is mostly mittens and books and underthings. Though I suppose throwing a book at his face and then running aboard would not be a bad distraction. That or just shout something about menstruation and watch the entire dock erupt into chaos—it worked so effectively with the hospital board.

  We do not have time to wait for another ship. The sky is clear today, and winter weather is an unpredictable horse to bet upon. Tomorrow might be stormy, the channel so chopped up that no ships can break through it. The wind may be too strong, the air too cold, the water too treacherous with chunks of ice. Our window to get to Stuttgart is so narrow there’s a chance we might miss the wedding even with everything running on time. We have to be on that boat, whether Monty is in the way or not.

  “We have to distract him,” I say. “He hasn’t got a boarding card, so he can’t follow us onto the boat, so we only need occupy him long enough to make a run for it. And probably wait for the queue to die down. We’ll have the best chance right as they’re about to cast off.”

  “How are you going to distract him without him seeing you?” Sim asks.

  “We get someone else,” I say, trying to sound more confident and not like I’m making this up on the spot. “We pay someone.”

  “We can’t afford to pay someone.”

  “How much money do you have, exactly?”

  She screws up her lips, then says very carefully, “Enough to get us to Stuttgart.”

  “Brilliant,” I grumble.

  “If you want to pay someone to go punch your brother in the face, that can be your share for dinner tonight.”

  “I don’t want someone to punch him,” I pr
otest, then add, “I mean, I do. But not right now. But we need some kind of distraction . . .”

  Had I more time to think this through, I could certainly come up with a more elegant plan. But time is not on our side. I set out from behind our hiding place, Sim chasing me down with a yelp of surprise at my sudden movement. Away from the water and the ships, the dock is teeming with sailors and deckhands, some of them working, some of them huddled around smoking braziers, warming their hands over the flames. There’s a bakery window selling cakes and mulled wine, the kind where you help yourself and drop some coins into the box on your honor. Having more crisis than honor, I take a mug without paying and start toward one of the clusters of men, but Sim stops me. “Tell me what you’re doing.”

  “Asking a man to distract my brother long enough that we can board the boat.”

  I expect she’ll argue—not only is it vague, but most of my plans are talked back to by participating parties. But she just nods, then scans the groups of sailors closest to us.

  “You think that will work?” I ask, my voice peaking on the last word. I am unaccustomed to being trusted so absolutely, and Sim is not someone I had expected to offer up that trust easily.

  “It will certainly do something. Ask that one.” She points to a man huddled alone against the wall of a dock office. I can smell from here that he’s in his altitudes, or perhaps coming down off a binge the night before. His skin is withered from the sun; the strips poking out of the too-short sleeves of his coat are covered in blue ink. Several other drawings crawl up from his collar and along the back of his neck. He does not look like the sort of man I want to trust my escape to.

  But Sim put her faith in me. The least I can do is the same.

  I stride up to the gentleman, careful not to spill my mug of hot wine. He looks up from his pipe as we approach, regarding us with a squint though the sun has hardly risen. “Good morning, sir,” I say. “I would like to offer you this drink.”

  “All right, then.” He’s reaching for it before I’ve finished my sentence, and I have to snatch it away, nearly dumping it all over Sim.

  “Wait—first, you must do something for me.”

  “Don’t want to do anything for you,” he replies, tucking back into his pipe packing.

  “It’s very simple,” I say. “Do you see that man over there by standing by the dredge? He’s short and has his hair cut, scars on his face.”

  The sailor glances up. “The one with the adorable hat?”

  Damn it, Monty—now I wish our distraction was punching him in the face. “That one exactly. I need you to go over to him and pour this drink down his front, but make it seem like an accident, and then take a good long time telling him you’re sorry and helping him clean up.”

  “Then I don’t get the drink,” the man says slowly.

  “Well spotted,” I reply. “But you don’t have to pour all of it.”

  He stares at us, his head weaving, though I can’t tell if that’s because he’s actually considering the offer or about to tip over. Then he hawks a ball of spit at the boards and sticks his pipe in his mouth. “No, thanks.”

  I’m ready to move on and try another, dafter sailor, but Sim steps forward. “Come here,” she says, crooking a finger at him. “I want to tell you something.”

  The man runs his tongue around his mouth, eyes flashing as he leans in. Sim grabs him by the collar and yanks him to her, a long, black knife drawn from her boot and pressed against the soft meat of his throat. It is, if the throat is to be slit, not technically the best place to approach from—she’d have better luck going in from the side, stabbing into the carotid artery, then moving forward and down to the vocal cords to ensure silence and letting out both major blood supplies to the brain simultaneously.

  But I’m less concerned about that and far more concerned by the fact that first, Sim has a knife in her boot that she brought along with her for unknown but likely unsavory reasons, and second, she is about to use that knife to slit a man’s throat.

  The sailor gurgles with fear, his eyes bulging in his head. Sim tosses back her sleeve, and I watch the man’s eyes travel from her knife to her forearm, and somehow he looks even more afraid. “You see this?” she says to him, and he nods.

  “You sail under the bleeding Crown and Cleaver,” he says, his voice higher than a moment before.

  Sim presses the knife harder, though not enough to draw blood. The man lets out a whimper. “You know what that means, do you?” She looks pointedly at the ink on his neck, and he doesn’t nod this time—the knife is pressed in too deep to risk any sudden movements. “You do as she says,” Sim says, then shoves him into the wall. She replaces the knife in her boot, then straightens and nods me toward him. I don’t know if she’s expecting me to acknowledge my gratitude for her help, but my throat has gone dry. The instinct to step back from her, to pull away and run and unknot myself from our alliance rises inside me, primal and animal, the compass of my heart pointing straight to flee. That knife and that threat has confirmed the very likely truth that I have avoided looking in the eyes since Sim dropped her proposition upon me at the Minced Nancy: I am likely taking up with a dangerous person, who might hurt me or the people to whom I’m exposing her. If someone in the Haus Hoffman is to have their throat cut in their bed, she might take me as well, just to ensure my silence.

  Below us, the sailor asks, “Can I have the drink?”

  I take a deep breath and turn to him, trying to look less shaken than I am. “You may hold it, but you may not drink it. And do not move until I signal you.” A harbor bell begins to toll the hour, and one of the sailors on board our ship shouts down to the man on the dock checking the manifest. “Signal,” I say, yanking our man to his feet and shoving him forward. “Go make yourself a nuisance.”

  Sim and I watch together as he makes a halting stagger through the crowd, tracking his progress with our own path along the dock and back toward the ship, ducking behind every crate and cart and barrel that will hide us. The gent moves much slower than I had hoped he would move. The harbor bells are finishing, and the sailors about our packet are pulling in the gangplank, and Monty is starting toward the man at the end of it, like he might ask after the names on the manifest to see if I’m listed there. Our drunken friend veers sharply, raises his glass in the most theatrical of gestures . . .

  . . . and pours it over a complete stranger.

  Which certainly causes a commotion, though among the wrong people. I curse under my breath, ready to just run for the ship, but Sim grabs my arm. I flinch without meaning to, still thinking of that knife, but she’s only directing my eyes. The commotion is close enough to Monty that he has to dodge out of the way to avoid the ruckus, and he glances over at our sailor, right as the sailor realizes his error and looks back at us as if we might be holding some kind of sign with printed directions of what to do now. Monty follows his gaze, and, across the harbor, our eyes lock. My stomach drops.

  He starts toward me, and I’m ready to run, but then our sailor, clearly afraid of Sim’s wrath should he fail, throws himself at Monty and tackles him. The sailor is a fair bit bigger than my brother, and the force of the hit knocks him more sideways than I imagine was intended, because both Monty and the sailor plummet over the edge of the pier and into the rancid, freezing Thames.

  “That works,” Sim says, and I feel her hand on my back, pushing me forward. “Go now.”

  I almost don’t. Partly because there is a chance real harm has been done to my brother—exactly the thing I had hoped to avoid with drink-pouring rather than face-punching as a distraction. And more than partly because of Sim’s bright icicle of a knife and the fear in the man’s eyes when he recognized her.

  If you’re going to run, this is the time. Do it before you leave London, before you’re far enough from home that you’d never get back on your own.

  I glance down the dock, to where a few kind souls are fishing my brother and our sailor out of the river. They both look unharmed. No v
isible blood or limbs pointing the wrong direction. They’re sopping wet and shivering, but Monty will be a bloodhound after my scent as soon as his feet are on dry land again.

  Last chance, I think, staring forward up the gangplank. Last chance to run. To change your mind. To find another fight, or surrender altogether and trade in whatever danger undoubtedly lies ahead for a cozy bakeshop and a kind baker back in Edinburgh.

  But I’m not giving up on a spot with Alexander Platt. If I’m going to place a bet, it’s going to be on me and my ability to outfox and outrun Sim, should the need arise.

  You are Felicity Montague, I tell myself. And you are not afraid of anything.

  And when Sim sprints down the dock and up the gangplank of the packet, I follow her.

  It’s a day on the water to Calais. If the sky stays clear and the channel cooperative, we’ll be in France by sunset. We don’t take a cabin, and below deck is frigid and wet and smells foul, so we sit upon the benches lined against the rails, where the air is cold but fresh. The hood of my cloak refuses to stay up, and the wind has its way with my hair, twisting and whirling it out of its pins and into thick clumps that I try to untangle with my fingers, even though I know it’s pointless.

  At my side, Sim watches me struggle with a snarl at the back of my head, her own hands clamped over her headscarf to keep it in place. “Do you want help?” she asks.

  “I’m fine,” I say, then give a hard pull that pricks all the way to my eyes. The knot remains maddeningly knotted.

  “You’re going to rip your hair out of your scalp.”

  “I think I almost have it.”

  “You don’t. Here, stop.” She stands up, brushing her hands off on her skirt before climbing over the bench so she’s behind me. “Let me.”

  I don’t like this. I don’t like turning my back to her, letting her put her hands in my hair, her wrist brushing my neck. I’m thinking of that knife against the sailor’s throat and how easily it could be against mine at any moment but especially this moment, with my eyes forward and my skin exposed.