The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

by Mackenzi Lee

  Then the carriage door bangs open and the business end of a hunting knife is thrust in. “Out!” a man yells in French. “Sortez! Get out!”

  I’m shaking like mad but I’ve got my wits about me enough to obey. Outside, I count five men, though I think there may be more on the other side. They’re all dressed in greatcoats and spatterdashes, their faces covered with black kerchiefs, and they’re armed with an impressive array of weaponry, though most look fancier than I would have expected from bandits. If the situation weren’t so dire, I’d comment on how quintessentially highwayman-ish they look, as though they borrowed the outfits from the theater.

  Across from the carriage door, Lockwood is on his knees with his hands on his head, one of the well-costumed highwaymen holding a pistol to the base of his skull. Our coachman is spread-eagled in the ditch, the soil around his head dark. I’m not sure if he’s dead or just insensible, but the sight stops me in my tracks.

  “On the ground!” a highwayman shouts at me. I have a history of reacting poorly when shouted at, particularly by men with French accents, and I freeze, stuck halfway out of the carriage, until Percy presses his fingers into my spine from behind. I stumble forward and fall to my knees, hands rising without my meaning them to.

  Our luggage has all been gutted and the contents are strewn across the ground like a down of autumn leaves. I spot Lockwood’s toilet case, drawers all wrenched open and bottles smashed into glittering sand. Pieces of our backgammon board are scattered amid stockings and garters and snarled neckwear. One of the men kicks a pile of Felicity’s petticoats and they blossom like upside-down tulips.

  One of the highwaymen shoves Percy to his knees at my side, Felicity on the other. Another ducks into the cab where we were just sitting. I hear him clattering around, then the toothy snap of a knife splitting upholstery, before he emerges with nothing but Percy’s fiddle case, which he tosses onto the ground and kicks open.

  “Please, it’s only a fiddle!” Percy cries, reaching out like he might stop the man. I can see his hand trembling.

  The highwayman handles the instrument gently, even as he shucks out the felt and tears open the rosin drawer like he’s looking for something. “Rien!” he calls to the man behind me.

  “Please put it back,” Percy says quietly. “S’il vous plaît, remettez-le en place.” And, to my great surprise, the highwayman does. Either he’s the most respectful bandit of all time, or he wants to keep it in good shape for when he pawns it.

  There’s one man standing in the middle of it all who seems to be in charge, with a pistol hanging loosely at his side and the other men frantic around him. A gold signet ring on his finger catches the light. It’s large enough that, even from a distance, I can see it’s inscribed with a crest bearing the fleur-de-lis in triplicate. He’s staring hard at me, and above his kerchief his eyes narrow. I flinch. Someone grabs the collar of my coat from behind and hauls me up, but the leader calls, “Attends, ne les tue pas tout de suite.”

  Don’t kill them yet.

  YET? I want to shout back at him. What do you mean, yet, like our murder is the inevitable ending to this scene? We’re all more than willing to cooperate if they’d just take our things and let us be.

  The leader jerks his pistol in my direction and all the fight in me evaporates. “Où est-ce?”

  Felicity has her head down, fingers knit behind her head, but she glances over at me. I can’t make my brain remember a word of French after the declaration of our impending death, so I stammer, “What?”

  “La boîte. Ce que vous avez volé. Rendez-le.”

  I translate a few words this time. “Where’s what? Où est-ce quoi?” I’ve no idea what volé is.

  “La boîte volée.”

  “What?” I look wildly to Felicity for some sort of linguistic assistance. Her face is white.

  “Il n’y a rien!” one of the men calls from the other side of the carriage.

  The man holding me flings me to the ground so I’m on my back, looking up. The sunlight blots as the highwaymen’s leader steps over me, pistol swinging lazily at his side. My panic is a living thing. “C’est où?”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying!” I cry.

  He takes a step forward, his heavy black boot landing straight on my hand and easing down. My bones start to protest. “Do you understand me now, my lord?” he says in English.

  And I wish in that moment that I were brave. I wish to God I were. But I’m shaking and terrified and out of the corner of my eye I can see our coachman’s body on the ground, blood seeping from his forehead, and I don’t want to die or get my fingers broken off like dry tree limbs. I haven’t a courageous bone in my body—if I knew what they were looking for, short of it being my own damn sister, I would have handed it over without a thought. But I’m clueless and helpless, and as the highwayman presses his foot down on my fingers, all I can think is, Nothing bad has ever happened to me before. Nothing bad has ever happened in my whole life.

  “Stop it, we don’t know what you’re talking about!” Felicity cries. “Nous n’avons rien volé.”

  The highwayman steps off my hand, but he keeps addressing me as he walks backward to Felicity. “What if I rip her fingers off? Perhaps you’ll tell me then.”

  He jerks a knife out of his belt, but suddenly, in a feat of unexpected heroics straight out of an adventure novel, Percy grabs his fiddle case from the ground and swings it like a brickbat. It connects with the skull of the leader and he topples to the ground. Felicity seems to take her cue from this, for she snatches up one of her petticoats from the soil, flings it in the face of the man with his gun on her, then slams her elbow between his legs, so he’s down for the count. I scramble to my feet and start to stagger away, not certain where I’m going other than getting the holy hell away from here, but one of the highwaymen grabs a handful of my coat and jerks me backward. I choke as my collar cinches around my neck. My first instinct is to faint with fear, but everyone else is being brave, and that makes me feel courageous too, so instead I whip around and throw my first-ever punch straight at his chin.

  And it bloody well hurts. No one warns you that knocking a man across the jaw probably hurts you as much as it does whoever’s getting your fist to their face. He and I both cuss at the same time, and I double over, just as a gun fires and a bullet goes flying over my head. I feel the whistle against the back of my neck. So perhaps throwing an incredibly inept punch saved my life.

  “Run!” I hear Lockwood shout, and Percy grabs me by the wrist and drags me off the road and into the trees, Felicity on our heels. She’s got a fistful of her skirt hoisted nearly to her waist, and I get a view of a good deal more of my sister’s legs than I ever wished to see. There’s the crack of another gunshot, and something knocks me hard in the back of the head. I think for a minute I’ve been shot, but then I realize it was Percy swinging his violin case around to use like a shield.

  Behind us, I hear the horses scream, then the clatter of the coach wheels. I don’t dare look to see if Lockwood and our company are making their escape as well—I’m too afraid of catching my foot on something and falling, and I can hear the bandits chasing us. The underbrush is crashing and there’s another gunshot, but we keep running. I don’t know how long we can go for. I am somehow feeling both as though I could sprint all the way to Marseilles fed only by fear, and as though my pounding heart is getting in the way of my lungs, making it hard to breathe deep enough. My throat is starting to feel raw.

  “Here, here, here!” Felicity cries, and pulls me over a ridge slick with leaves. I lose my footing and sit down hard, tripping Percy so that we both tumble down the slope like demented mountain goats, simultaneously trying to regain our footing and keep moving forward.

  “Over here,” Felicity hisses, and we clamber after her, behind a great rock jutting from the roots of a massive ash tree, and press ourselves up against its back side. I hear the highwaymen crash by us. Their shouts waft behind them, fading to echoes like birdcalls
flitting between the trees.

  We sit for a long time, all of us gasping and trying to make no noise beyond that. We’re breathing so hard it seems a miracle that that alone doesn’t give us away. I can feel Felicity shaking next to me and I realize suddenly that she’s clutching my hand. I can’t remember the last time I held hands with my sister.

  We hear the highwaymen retreat, then come back in our direction, but never close enough to be a threat. Eventually, the noise of them fades into silence, and the forest is nothing but the crackle of the trees.

  The rush is starting to fade and a swell of pain goes through my palm. I peel my fingers from between Felicity’s and shake my hand out a few times, wincing. “I think I broke my hand.”

  “You’ve not broken your hand,” Felicity says.

  “I should know, it’s my hand.”

  “Let me see it.”

  I pull it up against my stomach. “No.”

  “Let me see.” Felicity grabs me around the wrist, then mashes her fingers into my palm. I yelp.

  “It’s not broken,” she says.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s hardly swollen, and I can feel that the bones are all still intact.”

  I don’t know how Felicity knows what bones are meant to feel like.

  “But don’t tuck your thumb into your fist next time you punch someone,” she adds.

  I’m also not clear how Felicity knows the best way to throw a punch.

  I look over at Percy. He’s got his violin case pressed to his stomach, two fingers stuck into the pair of bullet holes now etched into the edges, as though he’s plugging a leak. “What do we do now?” he asks.

  “Go back to the carriage,” I say. It seems so obvious.

  Felicity’s brow puckers. “Do you think we could find it again? We’ll get lost. Or ambushed.”

  “They’re highwaymen,” I say. “They want money and then they run. They’ll be long gone by now.”

  “I don’t think those were highwaymen. They were looking for something. Something they thought we had, and they seemed rather determined to murder us for its possession.”

  “Is that what they were saying? I was sort of . . . panicking.”

  “Do we have it?” Percy asks.

  “Have what?” I say. “We don’t know what they’re after.”

  Felicity flicks a leaf off the hem of her dress, then says, “If any of us is smuggling, now would be the time to come forward.”

  And then they both look to me.

  “What?” I protest.

  “Well, out of all of us you seem the most likely to have picked up something,” she replies. “Did anyone drop something in your pocket while she had her tongue down your throat?”

  I am about to complain, but, rake that I am, that tasteful phrasing on Felicity’s part pricks a sudden vein of memory. One hand strays to my pocket, tented around the outline of the trinket box I took from the Duke of Bourbon. I had forgotten entirely that it was there. “Oh no.”

  Percy looks sideways at me. “Oh no what?”

  I swallow. “I’d first like it to be noted that I am most certainly not a smuggler.”

  “Monty . . . ,” he says, my name sopping with dread.

  “And,” I continue overtop him, “I’d like you to both remember just how much you adore me and how dull your lives would be without me in them.”

  “What did you do?”

  I pull the box from my pocket and hold it flat on my palm for them to see. “Stole this.”

  “From where?”

  “Ah . . . Versailles.”

  Felicity snatches the box from my palm, dials clacking together like teeth when her fingers close around them. “Henry Montague, I’m going to murder you in your sleep!”

  “This can’t be what they were looking for. It’s puny—it’s just a trinket box!”

  “This”—Felicity waggles it before my face—“is not an ordinary trinket box.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s some sort of puzzle, right?” Percy says, taking the box from Felicity. “When you put the letters in the correct alignment, it opens. There’s a word or cipher you have to spell.” He spins the dials a few times, then makes a trial of the latch, like his first guess might be right. Nothing happens. “Obviously it’s meant to hide something or keep it safe.”

  “And so Monty thought that might be the best thing to take—something clearly valuable,” Felicity says.

  “It wasn’t clearly valuable,” I protest. “It looked plain in comparison to everything else there.”

  “It was in the palace! Why were you stealing from the king at all?”

  “It wasn’t the king’s! We were in someone else’s apartments.”

  “You stole from someone important.”

  “Yes, but why would highwaymen be after something belonging to a duke?”

  “Enough,” Percy interrupts. He presses the box back into my palm, then says, “Monty took this. Nothing we can do about that now, so we should try to find the road and join back up with our company, if they got away.” That if hangs very heavy. It makes me squirm to think that if those highwaymen truly were after the box and if any of our company didn’t escape them, that would be on my shoulders. “How far do you think we are from Marseilles?”

  He looks to me, but I can’t remember, so I just stare back blankly.

  “Lockwood said it would take a week,” Felicity offers. “We’ve been traveling for five days, so we must be close. I think our best strategy would be to find the road, start toward Marseilles, and hope Lockwood escaped and we can join up with him.”

  “How?” I ask. “We don’t know where the road is.”

  “Monty, why don’t you worry about making certain your hand isn’t broken?” Felicity says. It’s the verbal equivalent of tossing me something shiny to hold my attention while the adults talk. I glower at her, though she’s gone swivel-eyed through the trees and doesn’t notice.

  “We go south.” Percy traces the sun’s path across the sky with his finger, then points. “Toward the sea. The road was heading south.”

  “So,” Felicity says, “we walk south until we find a road, then see if we meet up with Lockwood, or else find a carriage or a wagon that will take us the rest of the way. Our equipage will be in Marseilles soon—unless Lockwood and our men didn’t . . . didn’t make it.” She swallows, then scrubs a hand under her nose. “I think it’s best to assume they did, and plan for any eventualities only if we find evidence to the contrary.”

  Percy nods, and they both seem so certain about it that I feel like the stupidest person there.

  “Well, then,” I say, like I was a critical part of the planning, “that’s decided.” I try to rise, but I’m shakier than I expected and my legs go straight out from under me. I end up slumping forward into the brush, soaking my knees in the damp soil.

  “Don’t stand so fast,” Felicity instructs from behind me. “And take a deep breath or you’re going to faint.”

  I think about arguing, but she actually seems to know what she’s talking about. I roll onto my back and stare up at the sky, wide and open above us like a tossed picnic blanket shaken from its folds.

  “At least Percy saved his violin,” I say, and Percy lets out a grateful, breathy laugh.

  7

  We walk without seeing any sign of our carriage or an end to the trees or even a sliver of road until the sun is nearly set, and then it’s an empty road that we find, not a light or a house in sight. Percy is the first to suggest what we are all thinking, which is stopping to sleep, since it doesn’t seem likely we’ll find anywhere to stay before we collapse. Summer is peaking like whipped meringue, and the night is thick-aired and damp. Crickets strum from the underbrush.

  “This is altogether a different sort of evening than I was hoping for,” I say as we spread ourselves in the warm shadow of a white-barked poplar tree.

  “Disappointed?” Percy asks.

  I’m gasping for a dri
nk—it’s all I’ve been thinking of for the last several hours, trying to calculate the best-case scenario for getting alcohol in me fast. But I just laugh.

  Percy stretches out beside me, which makes my skin stand on end until he puts his violin case deliberately between us. I take that as my sign to stay away. Felicity lies down on my other side and curls up with her hands pillowed under her head. “If you keep rubbing your hand like that,” she says to me, “you might actually break it.”

  I hadn’t realized I was. “It bloody hurts!”

  “Should have been better at punching.”

  “How was I supposed to know there was a correct way to do it? On that subject, how do you know?”

  “How do you not know?” she counters. “That can’t be the first time you’ve hit someone.”

  “With any degree of seriousness, yes.”

  “You hit me once at the pond,” Percy says.

  “Yes, but we were boys. And it was more of a smack. And you were teasing me because I wouldn’t put my head under the water, so you deserved it.”

  “What about when you came home all black-and-blue from Eton?” Felicity asks.

  I try to laugh, but my throat closes up around the sound and it comes out a bit more like I’m drowning. “That wasn’t from a fight.”

  “That’s what Mother told me.”

  “Yes, well. Parents lie.”

  “Why would she lie about that?”

  “Hm.”

  “I think you’re lying to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I think you got in a fight and that’s why they expelled you. You came home so bashed up—”

  “I remember.”

  “—you must have done something nasty enough to get one of the other boys to put his fist in your face.”

  “No.”

  “You’re not one to start fights, but I assumed you’d at least have swung back.”

  “It wasn’t another boy, it was Father.”

  Silence drops upon us like wet wool. The trees whisper as the wind rakes through them, leaves moon-stained and glittering. Between the branches, I can see the stars, so bright and thick that the sky looks sugared.