The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)

by Mackenzi Lee

  “What she cut herself on.” I make a careful extraction of the longest piece of glass in Sim’s arm and hold it up against the lamp. Beads of blood slide off a dried brown substance coating it. “Venom? Poison?”

  “And now it’s in her blood?” Johanna is looking at me for an answer, her face pale, and I realize she thinks she’s about to watch someone die. Someone who has given her quite a lot of trouble, but still a living, breathing being, slowly fading out before us like a shadow in the twilight.

  And all I can say back is “Yes.”

  Because I don’t know what to do. Nothing in any of the books prepared me for this, not a word of Alexander Platt’s doctrines on blood and bone even touched upon what it felt like to sit helplessly watching as death the vulture circles closer and closer. It didn’t mention how to think quicker than your panic, look fear in the face and hope it blinks first, steady your hand, and believe in yourself when you think there’s nothing you can do. Sim takes another heaving breath. I can still feel her heartbeat, but her lungs seem to be failing her. It wouldn’t matter if I knew what it was that had been in the glass; it’s moving through her too fast to do anything, and I don’t know how to get it out.

  Think, think, think! I scold myself. Keep calm and think!

  “Johanna, what’s in your mother’s bag?” I don’t know if there’s anything to be learned from it, but it’s something to do that isn’t helpless staring.

  She wrenches the bag open and starts shoveling the contents out in handfuls. There are artist’s tools, a palette knife and turpentine, along with a box of charcoal and watercolors, squares of color gone chalky with age. There’s a leather roll, which Johanna unfurls like a carpet. The top flap contains three unmarked vials, each full of shimmering powder in an opalescent blue the same shade as the shallows of the Mediterranean. Below, a whole row of vials, each containing a different substance, with their corks waxed shut. There are several missing, and one just a cracked rim and stopper clinging to its loop. I drag the lamp closer to me and squint at the vials. There is a word inked atop each, though most so small and cramped I can’t make them out. Except for one, which in clear block print reads HEMLOCK.

  It’s a pouch of poisons. Or rather, most likely all poisons. The top three vials with the crystal powder are the only thing that appears duplicated, and none of them have writing on their stoppers, though they’re marked with the mathematical symbol for infinity followed by a vertical line. I pop the stopper off one and sniff. It has a faint brine smell, like something collected from a beach.

  Sim’s hardly breathing now, and each gasp shudders through her whole body. I can feel it in the places we touch each other, my legs around her waist and her hand cupped in mine. The edges of her lips and eyelids are beginning to tinge blue.

  Infinity what? I think desperately, staring down at the vial. Why infinity?

  Unless it’s not infinity. I turn the vial horizontal to me, and the infinity is replaced by what looks like a number eight crowned with a single stroke. It’s an alchemical symbol, shorthand used by pharmacists and apothecaries, which I learned from Dante Robles in Barcelona. It means to digest.

  So this is not a poison. This may be an antidote.

  I pour the contents of the vial into my palm and press it to Sim’s face. Her breath is slow and infrequent, and I worry her lungs are too withered to take it in. But then a gasp, and when I pull my hand away, the powder is almost half what it was. A long, painful moment before her next breath, which takes in the rest.

  There’s nothing more I know to do but sit and listen to Sim’s gasping, trying to suck down lungfuls of air and hope. I stare down at her, my hips overtop hers and my own breath ragged inside me. I’ve two fingers pressed to the pulse point on her wrist, braced for the moment it stops. A piece of snow caught in my hair melts and drops down my cheek. Beside me, Johanna has her eyes closed, hands clasped before her. She might be praying.

  And then Sim’s breath starts to come easier. It still sounds like the gasping of someone who has been running, but it seems like less of a fight. Her pulse starts to slow, no longer working quite so hard to make up for the rest of her body failing. She blinks, once, then her eyes slide closed as she takes a steady breath. A slip from unconsciousness into sleep.

  “What did you give her?” Johanna asks, her voice hoarse.

  “I don’t know,” I reply, my fist closing around the tiny vial, now empty in my hand. Maybe it’s medicine. Maybe magic. Maybe it’s enough for a woman to cross an ocean to find. Enough to give your life to the study of. Enough to kill for.

  When I let the vial fall, the sweat from my palm has transferred the inky symbol from the glass to my hand.

  14

  The waxwork woman, who introduces herself to us as Miss Quick (most certainly not an actual name, but I don’t press), returns with a bucket of water and roots around the shop for the rest of my requested items. When she realizes I’m prepared to remove the glass shards with my bare hands, she offers a set of tongs the length of my palm from her kit. “I only use them on the wax,” she says, but I still wash them before digging into Sim’s arm.

  With the shards removed, I clean out the cuts and stitch them shut. Short of shredding Quick’s blankets or my own bodice, there’s nothing to use for bandages, so I unwrap the scarf from Sim’s head and use that for bindings. Beneath it, her hair is coarse and cropped close to her head.

  When I’m finished, I push my spectacles up onto my forehead and press the heel of my hands against my eyes. They’re stinging from doing such delicate work in poor light.

  “Is she going to be all right?” Quick asks from behind me.

  “I hope so,” I reply. “She’s no longer actively dying, which is a start.” I toss the towel Quick offered into the bucket of water, now brown and murky with blood. “Are you two related?” I ask her, then realize what an ignorant question it was, as it’s based entirely upon their shared skin color. “Or how do you know each other?”

  Quick laughs. “We know each other in the way everyone who sails under the Crown and Cleaver does.” She pulls up her sleeve, revealing a landscape of raised brands and scars and thick, ropey veins. At the inside of her elbow, she has the same inked illustration of a crown and a blade, hers much cruder and more faded into her skin than Sim’s, like she could have been born with it.

  “What’s the Crown and Cleaver?” Johanna asks.

  “A corsair fleet that makes berth in a fortress outside Algiers,” Quick replies. “And with one of the largest holdings in the Mediterranean.”

  My throat goes dry. In spite of my early suspicions since I met Sim, corsair rings like a rock dropped into a bucket. Next to me, Johanna pales. “You’re pirates?” she asks. “Both of you?”

  “Only if you ask the Europeans,” Quick replies.

  “Are you a thief too?” Johanna asks. “Just like her?”

  “If all the thieves in Zurich were hung,” Quick replies, “there’d be no one left.”

  “I’d be left,” Johanna replies.

  Quick picks at something under her nail. “Well, you’re English, aren’t you? You have the accent.”

  “How did Sim find you?” I ask.

  “Her father has his people in every city, if you know where to look,” Quick replies. “We watch out for each other if our paths cross. When she came to me, I put her up.”

  “So it’s true, then?” Johanna asks. “There is some kind of code among the pirates? Honor among thieves and all that?”

  I had been preoccupied watching Sim’s chest rise and fall with a steadier breath, but I realize suddenly what Quick has said. “Sorry, what? Her father? Who’s her father?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?” Quick picks up a handful of kindling from beside the stove and starts to pack it into the belly before reaching for a flint. “She is the daughter of Murad Aldajah—his only daughter.” When Johanna and I are clearly less impressed by this name than expected, she qualifies, “He is the commodore of the Crown and Cle
aver fleet. Hundreds of men sail under his command.” The kindling catches, and Quick shuts the door of the stove with a clang. “You want something to eat?”

  “We’re not part of your fleet,” Johanna says. “You don’t owe us anything.”

  Quick shrugs. “I like to help the less fortunate than me. And there aren’t many.”

  Even with the stove lit, the workshop is bloody cold. A necessity, Quick tells us, or else the waxworks melt. Johanna helps her assemble turnips and potatoes for a stew as I watch over Sim, though my gaze drifts along the walls to the wax forms lining them. “What do you make them for?” I ask, unable to look away from a set of organs cast in wax—a heart, a set of lungs, and a stomach on stands.

  “Some for curios,” Quick replies. “They have wax replicas of the royal family in England that move with clockwork, you know.”

  “Well, that will haunt my dreams,” Johanna mutters.

  “The Venuses are for medical schools,” Quick says, pointing with the tip of her knife to the body I’m staring at. “They commission them in Padua and Bologna and Bern and Paris, so they needn’t cut open cadavers to teach their students what the inside of a person looks like.”

  I press my fingers to Sim’s pulse point, an absentminded monitoring, and it is a strange duet to feel that steady thump against my skin while looking at a perfect model of a human heart, veins and arteries and chambers exposed.

  “How did you come to make waxworks if you were raised in a pirate fleet?” Johanna asks, only a tiny bit of judgment bleeding into the word pirate.

  “The same way any African comes to Europe,” Quick replies. “The ship I served on was captured. My crew was enslaved. I was purchased by Herr Krause the wax master and brought here to be trained.”

  “I didn’t know slavery was legal in Switzerland,” I say.

  Quick halves an onion with a single, neat cut. “It’s legal everywhere there’s money in the slave trade. And the bankers here have deep pockets.”

  Quick only has a single bowl for the stew, so we pass it among the three of us, handing the spoon back and forth and sometimes fishing out chunks of potatoes and cabbage with our fingers when the others take too long. Outside, the storm batters the shop, the planks moaning and the stove rattling as the wind whips down the chimney. Strong weather can make even the safest place feel haunted.

  My clothes are still damp from the snow, and the soup is so hot it scalds my tongue, but I keep shoveling it down until I can’t taste a thing; it just feels so good to be warm inside and full of food. I think of the crusty loaves of bread Callum would bake to pair with the winter stews that I learned to make using scraps from his pasty fillings. It was a process, and Callum put up with many nights of overly salted meat and broth so thick we had to chew it. Once, after a particularly miserable showing at venison and tomatoes, he said the bread deserved butter and I said he also deserved butter than the stew I had given him, and though I generally find puns to be the lowest form of humor, I said it because I knew Callum would like it. And he laughed, the sound as warm and round as a fresh loaf.

  Maybe that was love? Who knows?

  Quick lets us sleep in the workshop that night while she takes the loft above the stairs. Herr Krause, she assures us, left for Padua last week and isn’t due to return until the end of the month. There are no windows in this workshop, and as the fire starts to die and the threat of putting out the lamp grows imminent, the pieces of wax assembled around the room seem to grow more ghoulish. Not threatening, but present, like statues of saints in a cathedral keeping a vigil.

  I check on Sim again before returning to Johanna, who is sitting with her mother’s effects spread on the floor before her, her back to the stove and knees pulled up so that her skirt canyons between them. It’s a most unladylike way to sit, and it reminds me of childhood. I crouch down across from her. “Do you want to stay the night here, or go back to the boardinghouse?” When she doesn’t answer, I tap a finger against her shin. “Johanna.” She looks up. “What did you find?”

  She scrapes a hand through her hair, pushing a few errant strands out of her face. “Other than those vials, there isn’t much in the bag. Art supplies and toilette and a petrified piece of cheese.”

  I glance at the leather folio, lying untouched in front of her. “What about the papers?”

  “I haven’t looked yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because what if she was working on something awful?” She presses her hands to her face. “What if she and Platt were conspiring? What if she’s not who I thought she was? All my life, I was sure I could be whoever I wanted because my mother was herself in all things. But what if that was just an excuse for ugliness?”

  “Then let her be ugly,” I reply. “Because you’re not her, and you’re glorious.”

  “Even though I like shoes and lace and anything brightly colored?” She looks down at her hands, the fringe of her eyelashes casting smoky shadows down her cheeks. “Even though I’m not who you want me to be anymore?”

  Of course she wasn’t the same as she had been when we last parted. She was a brighter, polished version, silver purified in the belly of a crucible until it glinted star-bright. Beside her, I feel stale and molding and unchanged, because if I had not believed entirely in who I was and what I wanted, I’d never survive. Johanna had let the world change her, let the winds polish her edges and the rain wear her smooth. She was the same person I had known. Had always known. Just a version that was more completely her.

  “There’s no one I’d rather you be,” I reply.

  She runs her fingers along the edge of the folio, sucking her cheeks in, then carefully unwraps the string binding it closed. The hard leather snaps at the release, and Johanna and I both peer inside.

  The folio is stuffed with papers, some bound together with twine, others loose and weathered. Johanna and I both reach in, scooping out a handful of scraps of notes and sketches and mathematical equations with their answers circled. I skim a few, trying to read the splotched, frantic hand and make sense of anything I’m seeing.

  “Look here.” Johanna pulls a single page from the folio, double the size of any of the others and folded into quarters to fit inside. Johanna unfolds it, then she and I both take an edge and hold it up to the lamplight.

  It’s a map, though that’s all I know to say of it. It’s hand drawn like all the other pages but clearly meticulous, careful work. It is done in ink rather than pencil, thick, confident strokes, the sort one sits at a desk in good lighting and steadies their hands before beginning. There’s the start of an intricate border around the edges, and a compass in one corner. A few places are splotched with color, as though she hadn’t time to finish filling it in.

  “Was your mother a cartographer?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Though she lived in Amsterdam for a time.” When I look back at her blankly, she clarifies, “That’s where all the best mapmakers are. What’s it a map of, though?”

  I fish my spectacles from my pocket and smash them onto my face, nearly poking myself in the eye as one of my hands is occupied keeping the paper in place. “Look here, that’s Algiers.” I point. “And the Alboran Sea, so that’s Spain. There’s Gibraltar.” I trace my fingers along the fine lines inked over the water, the paper puckered slightly where she had begun to watercolor.

  “So what’s this here?” Johanna taps an island in the Atlantic, all the tides and current lines seemingly centering around it.

  “I don’t know. I saw a fair number of maps of this area when I was traveling, but I’ve never seen that before. It’s very small. Maybe too small for most cartographers to mark it.”

  “Or maybe that’s what she’s mapping,” Johanna says. “Maybe whatever she was looking for or working on—perhaps it’s there.” She glances up from the map. “Do you think she knows?”

  “Who?”

  “Your sailor pirate friend Sim.”

  “I think she knows something about it,” I reply. “More than we
do.”

  Johanna presses her teeth into her bottom lip, her fingers tracing the dotted lines of the map. “Maybe we could ask her.”

  “She may not tell us anything. Even if she does know.”

  “But this is what she was looking for, isn’t it? This map? She’s a sailor, and she wasn’t after my mother’s paintbrushes. It’s got to be this map. And if she wants it, she must know where it leads. And why it’s so valuable.”

  “So what are you saying?” I ask.

  “I think we should stay here,” Johanna says. “Frau Engel is paid for the night—she won’t mind if we aren’t sleeping in the beds so long as she has her coin. We can go tomorrow and get my things. But I don’t . . .” Her eyes dart over to Sim. “We need to talk to her. Zounds, I hope she’ll talk to us.”

  Johanna falls asleep before me, curled around the stove with her mother’s folio, carefully restuffed, for a pillow. I stay up for a while, sitting at the workbench, sort of watching Sim and sort of thinking about Sybille Glass’s map and that shimmering powder. I’m tempted to make a quiet rummage through the bag for another look, but I resist.

  But I want to know more. I want to know what it is and how it works and why it saved Sim. When all my indignance over inequality, the plight of women in the world, and the education denied me is boiled away, what is always left is that wanting, hard and spare and alive, like a heart made of bone. I want to know all of it. I want to look at my own hands and know everything about the way they move beneath the skin, the fine strings that tie them to the rest of me and all the other intricate components that fuse together to make up a complete person. The mysteries of how a system as delicate and precise as the human body not only exists, but exists in infinite variables. I want to know how things go wrong. How we break and the best way to put ourselves back together. I want to know it all so badly it feels like a bird trapped inside my chest, throwing its body against my rib cage in search of the strong wind that will carry it out into the world. I would tear myself open if it meant setting it free.