The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy Page 9

  She’s gentler than I expected. As soon as I think it, I feel guilty for imagining her to be rough and tug at my scalp. I can feel her hands combing through my ends, working with careful precision like it’s surgical thread she’s untangling. “I think I’ll have to cut it out.”

  “What?” I spring to my feet and whip around to face her. Her hands are still in my hair, and I feel the sharp pull of leaping without warning, my nerves searing.

  “It’s just a bit of hair,” she says. “You won’t even notice.”

  I reach back and touch the knot to make certain she isn’t bluffing. I can feel the impossible snarl. “With your knife?” I blurt before I can stop myself.

  “My . . . oh.” She reaches down into her boot, slowly and with her eyes on me, like she wants to be certain I don’t spook. “It’s not a knife. It’s a marlinespike.” She holds it up for my inspection, and it is, indeed, not a knife in the most traditional sense. It’s a long, tapering spike with a chiseled end, made from black iron and rough along its edges. “It’s a sailor’s tool,” she explains. “For sailing ropes.”

  It hardly matters what it was called—confidence is half of any bluff, and she had wielded it with the sureness and threat of a blade. “You still could have killed that man in the harbor with it,” I say.

  She looks sideways at me. I lift my chin. I want her to know that I know she’s dangerous and I’m here anyway. I want her to think me braver than I am, and just as dangerous as her.

  “Could I?” she says.

  I’m not sure if she’s asking sincerely or if she’s testing me. I’m also not sure I should tell her. “Had you pressed it down and hooked it below the clavicle bone, just here”—I tap my own over my cloak—“it would have gone into his lungs. Perhaps his heart, if you had the angle right. A punctured lung might not have killed him straightaway, but he didn’t seem like the sort who’d go running for a doctor. So it would have likely been a long, drawn-out death with a lot of wheezing and shortness of breath. And then there would still be the blood, and he could easily lose enough to prove fatal. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “How do you know all of that?” she asks.

  “I read a lot of books.”

  “By that man? The one we’re going to see?”

  “Among others.”

  She rolls the marlinespike between her hands, the patches rubbed silver by her fingers glinting. “You want to be a surgeon.”

  “A physician, actually. It’s a different license and requires more—it doesn’t matter.” I sit down again and turn my back to her, tossing my hair over my shoulder, though the wind immediately yanks it back across my face. “Go on then.”

  Behind me, she lets out a small, breathy laugh. “So spirited.”

  “I’m not spirited,” I say, sharper than I mean to.

  Her hand, which I had felt hovering near my neck, jerks away at the spark in my voice. “All right, easy. I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

  I cross my arms, letting myself sink into a slouch. “No one calls a girl spirited or opinionated or intimidating or any of those words you can pretend are complimentary and means it to be. They’re all just different ways of calling her a bitch.”

  Her fingers tug at the ends of my hair. “You’ve heard those words a lot, have you?”

  “Girls like me do. It’s a shorthand for telling them they’re undesirable.”

  “Girls like you.” She laughs outright this time. “And here I thought the spectacles were decorative.”

  I twist around to face her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The only girls who talk like that are the ones who assume there are no other women like them in the world.”

  “I’m not saying I’m a rare breed,” I reply. “I just mean . . . you don’t meet many girls like me.”

  “Maybe not,” Sim replies, fingering the marlinespike again. “Or maybe you just don’t look for them.”

  I turn back around with more of a petulant huff than I intend. “Just unknot my hair.”

  There’s a pause, then I feel her fingers against my neck, sweeping my hair over my shoulder so that she’s holding the knot on its own. “You’re right,” she says softly.

  “Right about what?”

  “I’ve never met a woman quite like you.” There’s a sharp pinch and a sound like ripping cloth, and then she touches my shoulder. “Here.” I hold out my hand, and she drops the knot into it. “No blood spilt.”

  “Thank you.” I run my fingers through my hair, trying to find the shorter strands. “I should wrap my hair like yours. It would be more practical.”

  “I’m a Muslim,” she says. “That’s why I wear it. Not because it’s practical.”

  “Oh.” I feel silly for not realizing it. Then wonder if I am permitted to ask any questions on the subject or whether that will only prove how ignorant I am on almost all matters of religion, particularly those outside of Europe. “I’ve heard Muslims pray quite a lot. Do you need . . . ?” I trail off with a shrug. When she goes on looking at me, I finish, “Somewhere private or incense or something?”

  She picks a few stray hairs off the end of her marlinespike, then holds them on her open palm for the wind to snatch. “Have you met a Muslim before?”

  “Ebrahim is as well, isn’t he?” I say. “From the Eleftheria.”

  “Most of their crew is,” she says. “Or were born into it. Not the Portuguese men, but the lads from the Barbary Coast.”

  The Barbary Coast pricks a vein inside my mind. I am not so foolish as to think there is only one kind of sailor that comes from the Barbary Coast of Africa, but there is a particular sort of ship that makes berth there, and most of them are in the business of piracy. And most are not the sort of cuddly pirates with career aspirations that we found in Scipio and his men. I remember the fear in the sailor’s eyes when Sim showed him her arm, too intense to be raised by a scratch or a scar.

  “What’s on your arm?” I ask before I can stop myself. I’m not certain if she can follow the complex footwork that led me to this conversational pivot, but I say, “I’m not stupid. You showed that man something, and suddenly he was willing to help us.”

  She doesn’t turn, just darts me another sideways glance—I almost miss it in the fall of her scarf. “It’s a mark.”

  “Like a mole?”

  I can hear her teeth grind. “No, not like a mole.”

  “Is it a crown and a cleaver?”

  She lets out a tense sigh, lips pursed so hard her skin pinks. “I didn’t think you heard that.”

  “How did you know it would frighten him?”

  “He’s got ink on him that means he’s sailed where frightening things happen to honest sailors who cross that banner.”

  “Are you one of the honest sailors?” I ask.

  “No,” she replies, and sticks the marlinespike hard into her boot.

  “Oh.” I turn forward. She straightens. We both stare out across the gray water, watching England disappear into the fog, and all I can think is that if she’s not one of the honest sailors, it may mean she’s one of the frightening things.

  Stuttgart

  7

  Our journey from Calais to Stuttgart is done in crowded diligences that hop from city to city along rutted roads, close quarters our only barrier against the cold. I may wear holes in my cloak for all the scrubbing up and down arms I have done, and I fear for my already deteriorating posture, for with every passing mile I feel more and more concave, my shoulders pulling over my knees, my back in a half moon, with my cloak tented around me.

  We sleep mostly on the coaches, only two nights in roadside inns, where Sim and I are forced to separate because of our respective skin colors, and while I am opposed to inequality in all forms, it’s the only time we have apart all the while we’re on the road, and it’s not unwelcome. Sim is a quiet companion. She doesn’t seem to need the company of books or chatter to find diligence journeys bearable. She doesn’t fill silence with conversatio
n unless I initiate it. She lets me talk to most of the ticket clerks and innkeepers and diligence drivers, both of us knowing that most would be even less forthcoming to an African woman than they are to a fair-skinned one—and I have to field my share of questions about who I’m traveling with and where’s my chaperone and why it is I’m going anywhere with just a maid hardly older than me. I can see the hard line of her jaw tense every time I step up instead of her, but neither of us says anything about it.

  When we reach Stuttgart—a quaint Germanic town with half-timbered houses crowded around squares, all draped in a gentle cloak of new snow—I get the Hoffmans’ address from the records office, while Sim finds a dressmaker who can fix me something that will be appropriate for wedding festivities but in a forgettable-enough color that no one will notice repeat wearings.

  We start out on foot for the address several miles outside of town. The countryside is heavily wooded, but the austerity of winter has rendered the trees no more than rickety silhouettes, their tops wrapped in thorny mistletoe. We pass a farmhouse with a thin drizzle of smoke rising from its chimney and a stork nested against its shingles. The thin layer of snow coating the earth has been trampled to mud and turned to ice, so that the ground looks bruised and worn. It all seems a charcoal drawing of a landscape.

  “How do you know her?” Sim asks as we walk. Her breath is coming out in short, white puffs against the air. “Miss Hoffman,” she qualifies when I don’t answer right away. “Because so far you’ve only spoken of the doctor she’s marrying.”

  “We grew up together,” I reply, for it seems the simplest answer.

  It does not satisfy Sim. “Were you close?”

  Close seems too small a word for my single childhood friend; Johanna an only child with an absent mother and father often abroad and I with parents who I was sure sometimes forgot my name, found a whole world within each other. We tore up the forest between our houses, made up stories about being explorers in faraway corners of the world, foraging for medicinal plants and discovering new species that we would name after ourselves. She was famous naturalist Sybille Glass, and I the equally famous Dr. Elizabeth Brilliant—even as a youth, my imagination was very literal. Then Dr. Bess Hippocrates, when I started reading on my own. Then Dr. Helen von Humboldt. I had a hard time committing to a make-believe persona, but Johanna was always Miss Glass, the fearless adventurer who often had to be saved—usually from the grievous injuries her bravery and fondness for risk brought upon her—by my level-headed doctor, who would then advise her to act with more prudence before they set off on their next wild adventure.

  “She’ll remember me,” I say to Sim.

  I’m just not sure Johanna will remember any of those childhood games. They’re all obscured now by the long, lean shadow of our sour parting. The three years that stretched between then and now feel impossibly vast as we turn up the drive of the house.

  Haus Hoffman is painted the bright pink of grapefruit pulp, with gold-and-white trimming and shingles in the same shades capping it like a crown. It looks made of cake and frosting, an extravagant birthday treat that will leave your teeth aching from the sweetness. The drive is split by a fountain, frozen in repose, the hedges rimming it bare as the trees but still imposing.

  It has been so very easy to divorce Johanna from this scheme. I had enough to think about aside from her—Alexander Platt, whatever the crown and cleaver upon Sim’s arm means, and why she is so desperate for a spot in this house. But as we climb the drive, knapsacks thumping in time against our backs, I think, for the first time, of the next few weeks in their entirety, without skipping over the part where I must see Johanna again.

  I don’t know what I’ll say. I don’t know if I want to apologize, or if I want her to.

  We are a bedraggled pair that pulls the bell chord—far rougher around the edges than is likely to create a believable image of a rich English girl come from boarding school to her best friend’s wedding, attended by her maid.

  “What’s your surname again?” Sim asks, both of us staring at the door.

  “Montague. Why?”

  “I’m going to introduce you.”

  “No, let me do the talking.”

  “It makes more sense—”

  She breaks off as the door opens. A butler greets us, a tall, aging gent with more hair in his ears than atop his head. He looks wrung out and put out and like he’ll fall for nothing.

  I have learned that men respond best to nonthreatening women whose presence and space in the world does not somehow imperil their manhood, and so, as much as it pains me, I put on a smile so big it hurts my face and try to think like Monty, which is infuriating.

  Be charming, I tell myself. Do not scowl.

  But when his eyes meet mine, I’m gut-stuck with the sudden fear that we shall be foiled before we’re even permitted to cross the threshold. I shall never meet Alexander Platt. I shall never escape Edinburgh and Callum and a future filled with bread and buns and babies. I shall always have to push myself aside to make room for others in my own life.

  But then I will also never have to face Johanna Hoffman. The scales tip.

  “Good day,” I say, right at the same time Sim does. We glare at each other. The butler looks ready to shut the door in our faces due to a lack of communication and decorum, so I say quickly, “My name is Miss Felicity Montague. I’m here for the wedding.”

  “I was not told to expect any more guests,” he says.

  I swallow—my mouth has gone very dry, as if all the moisture in the body was slowly sucked from me by the long walk—reaffix my best sweet, innocent-slip-of-a-thing face, which uses muscles that have grown stiff from lack of practice, and, Lord help me, the actual phrase What would Monty do? manifests like an unwanted houseguest in my mind. “Did my letter not arrive? Johanna—Miss Hoffman—and I are good friends from childhood. I grew up in Cheshire with her. I’ve been at school not far from here, and I heard she was to be married and I simply had to come. She’s the best friend I’ve ever had, and I couldn’t miss her nuptials.”

  Perhaps it was not the wisest play to show all my cards immediately upon arrival—I have just offered up the entirety of the story I am reliant upon to get us a place in this house in a single mouthful, and I’m not certain he’s swallowing it, so I tack on, for good, pathetic measure, “Did the letter truly not arrive?”

  Rather than answering, the butler simply repeats, “Miss Hoffman did not inform me to expect any more guests.”

  “Oh.” My heart hiccups, but this fight is far from over. I select the next weapon from my feminine arsenal—the damsel in distress. “Well, I suppose I could just . . . go back to the town and wait to see if you receive the letter.” I heave the weariest sigh I can muster. “Zounds, it was such a trip. And my girl has been limping on a twisted ankle since Stuttgart.” I give Sim a nudge, and she obediently begins rubbing her ankle. It’s a far less convincing performance than mine, but I turn back to the butler and attempt to bat my eyelashes.

  It must come off rather more as trying to rid my eyes of something irritating for he asks, “Do you require a handkerchief, madam?”

  I was hoping to elicit pity, but this ghoul of a man seems to have not a single drop of charity to be wrung from him. Simpering seemed the best method—simpering and simple, my two least favorite things for a woman to be, but the two things men like most—to approach a gentleman such as this fuzzy-eared sod, but he’s so obviously unmoved, and also I think I shall faint from the effort if I’m forced to remain this repressed. So instead, I change course dramatically, and rather than playing my brother, I play myself.

  I stand straight with my hands upon my hips, drop my dimpled smile, and adopt the tone I found most effective in ordering Monty about on our Tour when he was dragging his feet and moaning about his poor toes as though we had some other choice of how to travel and were simply holding out on him. “Sir,” I say to the butler, “we have come a great distance, as is obvious if you care to make any observation
of our current state. I am exhausted, as is my lady, and here I am telling you my dearest friend in the world”—I am unintentionally escalating the significance of my relationship to Johanna with each retelling, but I press on—“is to be wed and you will not even allow me to cross through your door. I demand first an audience with Miss Hoffman so that she can make judgments for herself to our acquaintance, and, should she decline to allow us to attend her wedding, you can at least have the decency to put us up for the night.”

  Which cracks him for the first time—the guardian of the grapefruit house rendered stunned and mute by how firmly and confidently I spoke to him. Sim, in contrast, looks rather impressed.

  Then the butler says, “I believe Miss Hoffman is dressing for dinner.”

  “Zounds, really?” I say before I can help it. It’s hardly midafternoon.

  The butler either chooses not to comment or his ears are so encased in hair he does not hear my aside, for he continues, “I will see if she is available for an audience.”

  “Thank you.” I take two fistfuls of my skirts and push past him into the entryway, thinking it will make me seem as impressive and authoritative as my tone led him to believe I am, only to then have to stop dead and wait for him to lead, as I’ve no idea where I’m going. He doesn’t offer to take my winter things. He doesn’t seem to think I’ll be staying long.

  Sim appears at my side and makes a big show of leaning over to unfasten my cloak while really using it as an excuse to hiss into my ear, “No snapping her head off, crocodile. You’re friends, remember?”

  “I’m not going to be cross with Johanna unless she’s as much of a stooge to me as her butler was,” I reply, then add, against my better judgment but compelled to defend myself, “And I’m not a crocodile. If I am to be an animal, I would like to be a fox.”

  “Well then, foxy.” She whips the cloak off from around my shoulders, then smooths the collar of my dress, her hands lingering on my breastbone. “You’ve only got one chance at this, so make it count.”