by Mackenzi Lee
“Look here.” I direct Johanna’s eye to the plaque at the bottom of the frame—
Aquatic Life of the Barbary Coast
Dr. A. Platt
HMS Fastidious
17—
“That’s a lie!” Johanna cries, her voice so loud and in my ear that I almost lose my grip on the frame. “These are my mother’s; I know it! I’ve looked at her art my whole life. That’s her writing, and her sketching style. The Barbary Coast was her last voyage. That’s the same ship and the same year she died.”
“Here.” I hand her the weight of the frame, and while she searches it for any sign of her mother’s name, I fish my list of reasons to be admitted to medical school out of my pocket, the one Alexander Platt had scribbled his opinion all over. I hold it up to the sketches for comparison. “It’s not his writing.”
“Of course it’s not, it’s my mother’s!” she replies. “Why is his name on these? What does he have to do with any of this?”
“Did Dr. Platt know your mother?” I ask.
“It certainly never came up if he did. I know he’s been to the Barbaries, but he never mentioned it was on the same expedition as her. Which seems like something you would tell your fiancée.” We look back at the drawing together. At the top of the frame, two sea birds chase each other, one with its wings tucked and the other spread, a few delicate bones outlined beneath the feathers. “Aren’t they gorgeous?” Johanna says, the blade that had been in her voice a moment ago suddenly blunting.
“The drawings?” I had thought they were rather hasty, like the map of the human body I had done on my boardinghouse floor in Edinburgh. Not something I’d want hung in a gallery and presented as my best work.
“No, the animals. Look, they’re sandpipers. Tringa ochropus. They nest in marshes and pick food out of the swamp. And each variety has a different bill that allows them to dig in the mud to varying depths, so they don’t compete for nutrients. They all live together in harmony.” Johanna reaches out and presses a finger to the tip of the bird’s wing, leaving a smudge on the glass. “And the dolphins. I thought I saw dolphins when I crossed the Channel after my father died. It was most likely just very pointy seaweed, but I’d just gotten a letter from my mother about dolphins, right before she decided not to come home for me.” Her finger wanders down the sketch, stopping just below the bottom corner. “What’s that?” She pokes one of the drawings, and I have to tilt the frame so I can see past the glare.
“I don’t know.” It’s a serpentine shape, long and curled, with a barbed tail and frills along its belly. “It looks like a snake.”
“Aquatic life.” She taps the plate at the bottom of the frame.
“Birds aren’t aquatic.”
“Yes, but there are most certainly no snakes in the ocean. And look, it has little flippers.” She taps a nail against the glass, at the snake’s feathered stomach, then leans forward, like pressing her nose to it might give her a better idea. “What is this? It doesn’t look like a snake; it looks like a dragon.”
“That’s—” My attention snags on something in the same corner, just as, from below us, someone bellows, “Ladies!”
Johanna and I both jump. Below is the ticket clerk, his hands cupped around his mouth as he shouts, as though we are a great distance away from him. There’s a second man standing next to him, an anxious-looking fellow with a very shiny forehead. When he tips his head back to see us, his wig nearly slides straight off.
“You are not permitted to be up there,” the clerk calls, his hands still cupped around his mouth.
“Or touching the collection,” the man beside him says.
“Or touching the collection!” the clerk hollers, though we both heard the first time. “Come down at once!”
“Credit my mother for her art and I will!” Johanna hollers back.
“That work was commissioned by the collection and is our property,” the second fellow shouts, mopping his shining brow with his sleeve. “Come down now or we will call for the police!”
Johanna looks like she’s going to rip the painting off the wall and claim it, so I preemptively wrestle it from her, then let it fall back into place, bouncing on its wires. Both the clerk and his sweating companion gasp. As it falls, I get one quick glance of the sketch beneath the finned serpent, no bigger than my thumbnail: a crown hovering above a thin blade.
The crown and cleaver.
“This is your final warning!” the clerk calls.
I drag Johanna down the stairs and together we stalk past the clerk and the curator, who I suspect is the Herr Wagner we were not permitted an audience with. Making our plea for Sybille’s things now that we have broken every rule of the Kunstkammer seems futile, particularly when Johanna says “Shame!” very loudly in both their faces as we pass. The clerk follows us all the way across the lobby to make certain we leave, while the curator retreats through a door marked No Admittance behind the ticket desk. He opens it with such a dramatic flourish that I am offered one brief but impactful glance behind, into a set of rooms lined with glass cabinets. Surely this place must have bowels to hold its treasures not on display to the public, but I’m offered hardly a glimpse of them before the door is shut hard in our faces.
Outside, the snow has swollen into a blizzard. I pull my scarf up over my face—it reeks after days of me pushing my wet breath into it to keep my mouth warm.
Johanna is vibrating with anger. I swear the snow steams and melts when it strikes her skin. “How dare they?”
“Johanna.”
“They deny me what’s rightfully mine.”
“Johanna.”
“They refused to acknowledge her work.”
“Johanna—”
“They hang her renderings without any credit—”
“Johanna!” I step closer to her—the initial idea was to get her attention, but it’s so much warmer huddled together that I press myself into her side. The fur lining the hood of her cloak brushes my cheek. “Your mother and Platt must have been on the same voyage, and he must know about whatever she was working on when she died. If he got his name on those drawings, perhaps he’s trying to take credit for whatever it is she was researching. We need to make sure you get what she left behind, not him.”
“What’s your plan to make that happen, exactly?” She pulls her face down into her cloak, like a tortoise drawing into its shell. “They won’t give me her things.”
Sybille Glass and Dr. Platt are tied up together in this work somehow, and if we want to unravel it rather than just batting it around like cats with a ball of yarn, we need Sybille’s last effects. “If they won’t surrender them, then we’ll steal them.”
Johanna looks up at me. “What?”
“We steal them,” I say. “If we don’t, Platt will. Or he’ll convince Herr Wagner you’re married or find some other way to claim them. We’ve got to get them before he does.”
Johanna regards me, and I can’t tell if she thinks me reckless or inspired until she says, “Wasn’t Dr. Brilliant the one who was always telling Miss Glass to quell her reckless spirit lest she get herself killed?”
“Well, Dr. Brilliant isn’t here,” I reply, “just you and me. And I say if there were ever a time for recklessness, it’s now.”
She presses her fingers to her lips, surveying me as a slow smile spreads across her face. “I like Dr. Montague quite a lot better than Dr. Brilliant.” When I laugh, she adds, “I mean it. And it was a good list.”
“Oh.” I touch my pocket, where my medical school admission plea is again tucked. I hadn’t realized she had read it while I had been comparing Platt’s handwriting. “Thank you. It has been entirely ineffective thus far. Dr. Montague remains in the realm of fantasy with Dr. Brilliant.”
“Give it time,” she replies. “It won’t be a story forever.”
13
The cabinet is open to the public two afternoons a week, and while we are prepared for theft, I’m not certain we’re equipped for a full-scale dea
d-of-night bolted-doors-and-barred-windows break-in, so we have a single opportunity to get inside the following day before having to wait another six for the next. We decide that I will do the actually thievery, and Johanna will cause a distracting ruckus, as she has, in her words, a figure that is not made for sneaking. “Were I required to ascend one of those tight stairways again, but this time in a hurry,” she said, “I might be wedged.” Which we both agreed would not be particularly subtle.
I make my entrance first—thank God it’s a different clerk minding the desk than the one Johanna and I made a scene with the day before. I linger near the cloakroom, making a long affair of brushing the snow off my shoulders and also taking an assessment of the lobby. The door at the back of the room didn’t seem locked yesterday when the curator made his dramatic exit. Or if it was, he had left it unlatched when he had come out to shout at us. Which I’m hoping will happen again.
A few minutes after my arrival, the doors open, and in comes Johanna. If she had her way, she would have roped a feral dog from the streets, shined it up, and brought it with her on a lead to make a real meal of her distraction. Alas, feral dogs are reluctant to be roped anywhere, unless there’s some sort of steak involved, and we’re trying to save the limited coinage we have left. But even without the dog, her entrance is grand—her confidence blasts through the room like a wildfire, hot and bright and beautiful, but also the sort you want to watch from a distance. She does not look toward me but rather tosses her scarf showily over her shoulder and makes her way to the desk. The ruffles of yet another ridiculous dress whisper against the floor behind her.
Not ridiculous, I correct myself. Softness can be an armor, even if it isn’t my armor.
Johanna buys her ticket, trading a few sweet remarks with the clerk, who is as red as a beet by the time she floats off into the gallery, looking doe-eyed and helpless, a beautiful girl who knows it but pretends she is unaware. I count at least three men whose heads turn as she passes, and as she disappears from my sight, I feel a surge of confidence in our plan. These boys will be falling over themselves to come to her aid.
She’s been out of sight for a few minutes when there’s an enormous crash from one of the galleries—much larger than I expected. She must have gone for the articulated bird. Behind the desk, the clerk stands up, craning his neck like he might magically be able to see through the wall to the source of the noise and determine whether he needs to leave his post to attend to it. Then Johanna’s histrionics start—crying out and apologizing and shrieking. The clerk bolts from behind his desk and takes off at a run toward the commotion. Several other men follow, and those who don’t try to act like they all just happen to be making their way over to the ruckus at that exact moment.
The door at the back of the room bangs open, the same harried-looking curator from the day before poking his head out. Had he not appeared, I was ready to rush up to his door and make a zealous cry about a commotion in the gallery he needed to see to straightaway. He follows the noise, which has turned into wailing, then a gasp from the onlookers, which I imagine means that Johanna has fainted. I make a path across the lobby, like I too am chasing the excitement, then divert at the last second, catch the door the curator came through, and duck inside the offices.
I don’t know what trove I was expecting, but the room is disappointingly bare. The glass cases that reflected the light the day previous are full of books—which would ordinarily thrill me, but now is not the time. There are some skeleton bits sitting upon a table beside a magnifying glass as if they were abandoned midexamination, a filing cabinet, and a desk that looks to be merely somewhere to set paperwork. In one corner of the room a spiral staircase leads up to a second-floor gallery with smoking chairs and large windows overlooking Zurich, but the steps go down as well, under the building. I dart over, heft up a handful of my skirts, and start the descent.
The lower level is unfathomably dark, windowless, and thick with the smell of dust and old paper. Through the pale light leaking down from the stairwell, I can make out the long rows of shelves filled with a seemingly random assortment of skeletons and stuffed animals and feathers and eggshells and beaks and stones and sand samples in glass jars and glistening emerald beetles the size of my hand stuck through with pins and pressed between glass slides. Dried palm leaves fan out from beneath a stack of golden masks. A clock lying upon its side ticks away merrily, though it has no numbers and its hands are moving backward. The shelves seem to stretch infinitely before me and on either side, though I know it’s just a trick of the light. Or, rather, lack of.
I start to make my way toward the shelves, though I barely get far enough to step out from the direct light off the stairs before my body makes it known to me that it is not keen on this venture. My pulse elevates. Chest tightens. The room feels crowded with the darkness and so many strange things, like mourners at a funeral all whispering and morose, strangers to each other but here for a common purpose.
You are Felicity Montague, I tell myself, and the darkness, and my heartbeat, in an attempt to rein it in. You have climbed through catacombs darker than this, you escaped from a second-story window with only your bedsheets, and you should not be frightened of the darkness, but instead be sure that the most frightening thing in it is you.
I pick two shelves at random to walk between, making a slow study of some kind of preserved organs in milky liquid, a green snake stuffed and coiled up beneath a glass bell, its fangs in a jar beside it, a skull stuck through with a spearhead the size of my forearm, trying to discern any system for organization. I’m going to live out the rest of my life down here if I search each of these shelves for Sybille Glass’s last possessions without direction or truly knowing what it is I’m looking for. Maybe it is the snake.
I double back to where I was and examine the shelves again, hoping for some clue as to where I should be looking. There are large wooden letters that I missed the first time, nailed to the end of each aisle. The shelves nearest the stairs are labeled Aa–Ah, the second set Ah–As.
No woman on earth has been so delighted by alphabetization as I am in this moment.
I look down into the darkness—the G’s for Glass feel a long way away, though I remind myself I’m fortunate that Sybille’s surname didn’t begin with a zed.
It’s more and more difficult to read the alphabetical designations the farther I get from the stairs and the light. I have to reach up several times and trace the letters with my fingers to make certain I haven’t gone too far. When I find the G’s, I turn down the aisle and nearly smack face-first into an enormous ape, stuffed so that its body is reared back, arms stretched above its head, like it’s ready to claw at my eyes. I stumble backward out of the aisle, barely managing to choke back a scream. The tag attached to the foot reads Gibbon (Family Hylobatidae), from the island of Java, 1719, Capt. W. H. Pfeiffer.
“You furry little bastard,” I hiss at the gibbon. “Whoever placed you there is very cruel.” The gibbon says nothing in return—thank God, or else I might have sincerely shat myself.
And then, down the aisle, something moves.
Fear, according to Descartes, is one of the passions that originates where the body attaches to the soul. Having almost one hundred years and quite a lot more books at my disposal than Descartes, I’m not certain I believe this, for all my symptoms in that moment are purely physical. I go light-headed. My muscles seize, then begin to tremble. Sweat breaks out beneath my arms. And it’s only the clinical analysis of these effects that keeps them from knocking me over entirely.
There’s someone here, creeping around in the dark with me. Someone who must have been here all along. I don’t know whether to run or press forward, betting on the hope that the movement was a draft or a precarious arrangement collapsing. Perhaps it’s Platt, just as stuck as we are in his attempts to claim Sybille Glass’s effects and resorting to the same methods. I shrink backward, and my elbow knocks a flower lying upon the shelf, disrupting it. It doesn’t fall like a flo
wer. It drops hard and shatters.
There’s a very human gasp. Through the darkness, I can make out a silhouette, framed by the motes of dust. The figure raises its head, then begins toward me, stride picking up from a quick walk into a run.
I turn and run too, cursing my short Montague legs that give me no speed or advantage over the panther chasing me. I feel someone snatch at me, and I turn, flailing with my fingers tensed into claws and trying to find eyes or the soft meat at the throat or some part of the body that’s mostly thin tissue I can dig my nails into. But before I can, I’m grabbed around the waist and tackled into the gibbon, all three of us—me, my attacker, and the gibbon—crashing to the ground. My neck goes stiff, an instinct to protect my head from striking the floorboards, and I feel the wrench as I land.
My attacker is overtop of me, straddling me, and I can feel the tight material of a skirt pulled around my waist. She grabs my arms before I can move, pinning my hands to the ground at my side, then leans in close enough that I can see her face.
It’s Sim.
She looks as startled to see me as I am to see her. Her grip on my arms loosens, and had I not been so dazed by the fall, I might have had the foresight to pull free. But I can hardly breathe, let alone shimmy out. Between gasps, I manage to choke out a single word—her name. “Sim.” It does not come out as I intend it to, which is like a squirt of citrus into the eye. Instead, it’s a small, wretched mewl.
She’s far less winded than I am, which is embarrassing, for it was she who did the actual sprint and tackle—all I had to do was fall. “What are you doing here?” she hisses at me.
It’s not a question I feel the need to answer, so I retort with “Let me go!” It comes out a bit stronger than my previous statement. Not so much a kitten as an adolescent cat.
Sim lets my arms go, giving them a bit more of a shove into the ground than is really necessary. “Get out of here, Felicity. This hasn’t anything to do with you.”