by Mackenzi Lee
“Maybe I wanted the trouble.”
There’s a snap behind us as the latch of the library door clicks open. “Have a good evening,” someone calls, then the creak of hinges as it’s closed again. We’re out of sight, tucked between the shelves, but I can hear footsteps down the next aisle over, heading toward the fireplace. I nearly trip over myself in my haste to grab Sim and shove her out of the room. She tries to take the folio with her, but I slap it shut and shake my head. “No thieving.”
“I’m not thieving. I’m looking,” she hisses in return. “It’s not stealing just because you take something from where it belongs.”
“That is the actual definition of stealing,” I reply, my voice louder than I mean for it to be, for through the stacks, a man calls, “Is someone there?”
I usher Sim toward the door, but she’s already going, her slippers a soft tread on the rug. I straighten myself out as best I can in a dress that’s mostly dessert, toss my hair back over my shoulders so I will not be tempted to nervously fuss with it, then go the opposite way, toward the firelight.
Dr. Platt has taken off his wig and jacket and made a flop down in an armchair beside the mantelpiece. He kicks his feet up as he fishes in his jacket, emerging a moment later with the same snuff box he was fiddling with when I attempted to flag him down. He tips some of the powder into a cupped hand, crushes it with his thumb, and snorts it.
I have been lurking for too long to make my entrance anything less than invasive. I consider doubling back as silently as possible and then reentering the library loudly so as not to alarm him.
But then he looks up, and I’m standing there, and he startles, spilling snuff down his shirt, and I startle, and suddenly I remember there’s spiced wine all over my dress, and for some reason my brain decides clarifying that point is first priority, and I blurt, “This isn’t blood.”
“Goddammit.” He’s brushing the snuff off his front, trying to collect it into his hand and then tip it back into the box. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m so sorry!” I take a step forward, as if there’s anything I can do to help, but as soon as I’m properly in the firelight, he catches sight of my dress and yelps. “It’s just wine!” I cry. “I spilled wine. And fell into a cake.” I’m pushing my skirts behind me, like I might hide the stain from his view, but there’s not much to be done about the fact that I have just snuck up on him in a dark room and the first thing I did was assure him I’m not covered in blood. And here I thought nothing could be worse than our meeting after supper.
“Do you need something?” he asks, his voice clipped. He’s still trying to collect any of the spilled snuff that can be salvaged.
“Yes, I, um, I shouted at you earlier. In the hallway. After supper.”
“And now you’ve come to yell at me again?” He gives up on the snuff and slumps back down in his chair, running a hand over his cropped hair and looking around for something to do that will dismiss me. I’m tempted to ask him if I could excuse myself, take a good, deep breath, then reenter and try this entire encounter again but this time with my head on straight. And preferably no wine spilled down my dress.
“I’m sorry about the snuff,” I say, feeling like a kicked puppy that only wanted a pat on the head. “I can replace it.” He sighs, one leg bouncing up and down so that his shadow in the firelight jumps. There’s a smear of it still on his lapel, and against the dark material, there are flecks of incandescent blue hidden in it. “It is snuff, isn’t it?”
“It’s madak,” he says, the word presented in a tone of expectation that the other party will not recognize it.
But I do. “That’s opium and tobacco.”
He gives me the first proper look since I arrived. I wouldn’t say he looks impressed, but he’s certainly not indifferent. “From Java, yes.”
“There are more effective ways to take opium,” I say. “Medicinally speaking, dissolved in alcohol and drunk will move through the body much faster and more effectively, as it is the most direct route to the digestive system.”
He squints at me, and I immediately feel foolish for explaining laudanum to Alexander Platt. But instead he says, “Who are you, exactly?”
“I’m a great admirer of yours. Academically,” I add quickly. “Not . . . I know you’re getting married. Not like that. But I’ve read all your books. Most of them. All the ones I could get. Some of them I read twice so perhaps that makes up for the ones I missed. But I’ve read most. I’m Felicity Montague.” I stick out my hand, like he might shake it. When he makes no move to, I pretend that my intention all along was to brush something off my skirt. A large glob of dried pastry cream crumbles onto the carpet. We both look at it. I consider picking it up, but, having nothing to then do with it, I instead look back at him with a sheepish smile.
To my great relief, he returns it. “An admirer?” He pours himself a glass of whatever amber spirit is in the bottle on the mantel, then says, “My admirers are usually much older and grayer and . . . well, men. They’re usually men.”
“Yes, sir, that’s actually what I came to talk to you about. Not the men. But that I’m a woman. No, this is coming out entirely wrong.” I press my hands to my stomach and force myself to take a breath so deep I swear my ridiculous stays pop. “I’ve been trying to gain admission to a medical school in Edinburgh, but they won’t have me on account of my sex. When I made inquiries in London, I was given your name by Dr. William Cheselden.” I fish around in my pocket, unwrapping the calling card from my list and handing it to him. “He said you were in London looking for a fellow. Or an assistant. Or something, for an expedition. And he thought you might take me on.”
Platt listens without interrupting, which I appreciate, but he also keeps his face entirely unreadable, which I appreciate less, as I’m unsure what effect my speech is having upon him and whether I should press on with it until he says, “I’m not sure where Cheselden got the impression I was looking for a fellow, but I’m not.”
“Oh.” All the breath leaves my lungs in that single exhalation and yet it still comes out very small. I have to look down at my feet to make certain I’m still standing and not on my knees, for the world feels to have dropped away from me so suddenly, it’s like falling. I’ve never felt so foolish in my whole life, not being thrown from the university in Scotland or standing before the governors in London or when my mother presented me with enrollment in finishing school like she was making all my dreams for education come true. I’ve come all this way. I’ve bargained and begged and compromised so much. I didn’t realize how much hope I had pinned to this moment, and how little I had truly let myself consider the possibility of defeat, until it’s snuffed me out like a candle. My whole world reformed in a second by the dashing of a hope I have not just lived with, but lived inside.
My collapse must be more obvious than I hoped, for Platt turns Cheselden’s card over between his fingers, then says, “You really came all the way here to ask me about a position?”
“Yes,” I say, my voice just as small and just as kinked up with disappointment as before. I swipe the heel of my hand against my cheek, then add, “And I know Johanna. I’m not here entirely under pretense.”
Platt’s glass halts at his lips. “You do?”
“We were friends when we were children,” I explain. “We grew up together.”
“In England? What did you say your name was?”
“Felicity Montague.”
He takes a sip of the whiskey, regarding me over the rim, then hooks his foot around a stool and pulls it in front of him. “Come sit down.” I take a tentative seat, and he tips his glass at me. “Care for a drink?” When I shake my head, he takes another sip and says, “Why do you want to study medicine, Miss Montague? It’s not a passion one sees in many young ladies.”
I may not have gotten to use my answers on the Saint Bart’s board, but I’ve got them ready. I reach into my pocket before I can stop myself and pull out that battered list, now folded and unfolded
so many times in varying states of dampness that I can hardly read the words overlapping the creases.
“First,” I start, but Platt cuts me off.
“What’s that? Do you have to read off a paper to remember your own heart?”
I raise my head. “Oh, no, sir, I just had this prepared for—”
“Give it here; let me see.” He holds out a hand, and I surrender my list, biting back the temptation to snatch it back in embarrassment of both my penmanship and earnestness. Platt scans the list with a loud sip from his glass. Then he sets both glass and list upon the end table and begins fishing in his coat pocket. “None of this will get you taken seriously by physicians in London.”
“Sir?”
“All this nonsense about women contributing to the field? No one will listen to that argument. Don’t even mention you’re a woman. No one wants to hear about women. Act as though it’s no barrier and that you, as you so appropriately say, deserve to be here.” He finds a pencil nub in his jacket and crosses out my first point. I feel an actual lurch in my stomach when his pencil makes violent contact with the paper, like he’s scrubbing out part of my soul. “And while I appreciate the naming here, so what if you can read and write Latin, French, and German? Any idiot with an Eton education can do more. They don’t want to hear that, they want to see it in the way you carry yourself. The way you speak.” He makes a note, then his eyes flit down the list, one brow arching. “Did you really mend an amputated finger?”
“Yes, sir. My friend—”
“Lead in with that,” he interrupts, scrawling the point at the top of my paper. “Experience is everything. Say it is one of many instances, even if it is not. And tell them you’ll work for free, and harder than anyone else, even if it isn’t true. None of this nonsense about lady surgeons in history. You can’t name a lady surgeon from history because there aren’t any that matter to these men. You need to talk about Paracelsus and Antonio Benivieni and Galen—”
“Galen?” I laugh before I can help it, then immediately clap my hands over my mouth, horrified that I have just laughed in the face of Dr. Alexander Platt. But he looks up from my paper with a curious expression, and I press on. “He’s a man who wrote about the body without ever making an actual study of one. Half his theories were disproved by Vesalius and no one even took the time to prove the rest wrong because they’re so obviously idiotic. Paracelsus burned his books. Who reads Galen anymore?”
“Clearly not you.” Platt presses his fingers together, my paper between them. “You favor human dissection, then?”
“Strongly,” I reply. “Though particularly when that dissection is used in conjunction with your school of discovering the cause rather than the cure.”
“Ha. I didn’t know anyone thought of it as a school.” He makes another note on my paper. “Had you been granted hospital education, you would have found my theories as disregarded as Galen’s.”
“Prevention would decrease the business of hospitals and make it more difficult for them to exploit the poor, so I understand why they will not invest in it. With all due respect to the hospital boards in London.” I pause, then add, “Actually, no. No respect is due to them, because they’re all asses.”
He stares at me, and I fear I’ve spoken too boldly, but then he laughs, a burst like a bullet through glass. “No wonder those toffs in London didn’t like you. Where did you find all these opinions?”
“I didn’t find them, I formulated them,” I say. “From reading your books. And others.”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and I’m suddenly very aware of the fact that it’s just the pair of us, talking alone in a library at night. Which sounds far more like a scene from the amatory novels I used to pretend to read than the medical texts I was actually studying.
Platt wipes the corner of his mouth with his thumb. “You’re lucky the hospitals didn’t admit you. You’d be better off getting a venereal disease instead of a practical education. They’ll both make you unsuitable for jobs and undesirable to men.” He looks at me like he’s expecting me to laugh at that, but the best I can offer is not frowning. Perhaps I have placed too much hope in Dr. Platt being entirely divorced from the notion of a woman’s primary value being how much she’s desired.
“The hospital schools in London are populated by the sons of rich men whose fathers pay for them to sleep through their lectures and skip hospital rounds,” he goes on. “And then buy their way into the guilds. You would have been wasted there.”
“Then what would you suggest I do?” I ask.
He drains his glass, then sets it hard on the desk, like the end of a toast. “You take my suggestions and you improve your arguments and you try your petition with someone who would actually have something to teach you. Go to Padua or Geneva or Amsterdam. They’re more forward-thinking than we English.”
He returns my list to me, and I look down at his scribbled notes in the margins, his handwriting only slightly worse than mine. Platt is already settling back into his chair, pulling a foot up under him and reaching again for the bottle. And this may be the only chance I ever get, so I clear my throat—bit of a dramatic gesture—and start.
“Well then, sir, I would like to make a petition to you for a position.” He looks up, but I press forward before he can tell me this was not what he meant. “You may not be looking for an assistant, but you will not know how badly you were wanting for one until I begin. You will wonder how you ever got by without me. I will work harder than any other student you may have had, because this opportunity would be too precious to me to waste. I already have some practical knowledge, having completed successful surgical procedures on multiple occasions under situations of duress, in addition to the knowledge I have gained from reading books such as Antonio Benivieni’s De Abditis Morborum Causis, both of which will provide a strong foundation to be built upon. I am a supporter of human dissection and anatomical studies, which align well with the school you practice, and I believe that my contributions to your work, as well as the knowledge you could provide for me, would leave us both better for our partnership.”
I take a deep breath. It shakes a little more than I’d like. Platt hasn’t said a word the whole time I was speaking, nor did he try to interrupt me. He kept his head tipped to the side, swirling his empty glass between his thumb and first finger, but when I pause for that breath, he says, “Are you finished?”
I’m not sure if that’s an invitation to continue or a request to stop, so I just reply, “For now.”
“Well then.” He nods once. “Bravo.”
“Really?”
“It’s not the best argument I’ve heard, but you’re certainly fearless—I mean, my God, you came all the way here just to see me. And you’re willing to learn—that’s the most important thing.” He rubs his palms together like he’s trying to warm them, or perhaps scheming. It’s hard to say. Then he asks, “Will you be at the Polterabend?”
“The what?”
“It’s another one of the insane wedding customs here. Friends all come in fancy dress on the theme of fish and fowl the night before the wedding and smash pottery. Scherben bringen Glück—shards bring luck, that’s the saying. It’s all a waste of time and good china, but the bride must be appeased. Will you be there?”
I don’t love the way he speaks of Johanna. I also don’t say yes in case his next sentence was going to be an offer to skip the society party with him and instead bury ourselves up to our eyeballs in medical texts. “If I’m invited.”
“I’m inviting you.” He leans into a luxurious stretch, arms over his head and his back arched before he reaches again for his snuffbox. “We should find each other there and have a chat—I’m going to Heidelberg tomorrow to pick up a prescription, and I won’t be back until the party, but I’ll think while I’m gone over where a mind like yours might be best put to use.”
I don’t want to say no, but also I don’t want to wait. I don’t want to talk to him the night before his wedding—his a
ttention will be split between too many things, and that’s not enough time for any position to be secured before he departs. And there’s no such thing as a substantial conversation at a party.
“Dr. Cheselden mentioned you’re going to the Barbary States,” I venture, and he nods. “Are you leaving soon?”
“After the wedding. Miss Hoffman and I are honeymooning in Zurich for a week, and then I’ll depart from Nice.”
“Zurich. How . . .” I fumble for a word. It is not the ideal location for a romantic, postnuptial retreat. “Cold.”
“Not so cold. And not for long. I’ll be on the Mediterranean by the first of the month, and Miss Hoffman on her way to my home in London.”
“Do you think there might be a place—” I venture, but he cuts me off.
“My crew is already set. The work we’re undertaking is quite sensitive, so the ranks have to be monitored rather judiciously.”
“Of course.”
He snaps the snuffbox open and shut a few times, staring down into it like he’s thinking hard. “But come find me at the Polterabend. We’ll talk more, I promise.” I don’t quite know what that means, other than I now need to make certain I have a dress for the night that is not decorated with tonight’s dessert. As though he read my thoughts, Platt looks me up and down and laughs. “I’m a little disappointed it isn’t blood your dress is covered in. I would quite like to see a lady surgeon at her post.”
And that recognition, in spite of the irksome modifier, that pride and belief in his voice where usually I only find scorn, makes me feel seen, for perhaps the first time in my life.
9
I can hear the Polterabend carrying up the stairs and through my bedroom door, so grand and sparkling that it spooks me before I’ve seen the source. I would have had a book tucked into my skirt—and am truly still considering it—or chosen to not attend at all had it not been for Dr. Platt’s invitation to talk more at the party. Since our meeting in the library, he’s been absent from the house, only returning a few hours earlier and immediately being swept off by Herr Hoffman to make himself ready. And with the ceremony tomorrow, this is a precious final chance to speak with him.