by Mackenzi Lee
I want to know everything about my own self and never to have to rely on someone else to tell me the way I work.
I think again of abandoning my hope of working with Platt and where I have left to go from here, which, in short, is nowhere. No time to keep searching for schools, no money for apprenticeships, and not enough strength to hope that if I keep banging down doors, someday it will pay off. Not enough. The idea of working with Dr. Platt felt like my fingers scraping a star, but that flared out and faded into the darkness so fast. Or perhaps it exploded in my face and then laughed at me. That was more what it felt like.
I don’t know where to go from here. The panic caves inside me, like a paper curling in the grip of a flame.
I do not know where to go.
Across the room, Sim mumbles, “Something’s wrong with my arm.”
I look up as she raises her head, blinking hard like she’s still trying to rouse herself. I abandon my perch on the bench, already thumbing through possible complications—gangrene, infection, pain, discoloring in the skin that signifies decreased blood flow.
But she lets her head fall backward so she’s staring up at the ceiling and says, “I think I cut it.”
I stop on my knees next to her, then sit back on my heels. “To put it mildly.”
“I can’t move my hand.”
“I’m not surprised. Are you feeling any pain?”
“My ribs hurt,” she says. “It’s hard to breathe. Did I fall?”
“No, I think you were poisoned,” I reply. “It entered your body through the cuts upon your arm. Based on your symptoms, I’d wager it’s a paralytic that attacks the skeletal muscles.”
“You’re still here,” she says, her eyes still fixed upon the ceiling. “Why are you still here?”
“I had nothing better to do.”
Her eyes flick over to me, her gaze more focused. “You’re being sarcastic.”
“No, actually I was being flippant, but I can do sarcastic if you’d rather.” I smooth my skirt against my knees with flat hands. “Best keep a close eye on your arm, though. There’s still time for gangrene to set in, and I have never amputated a limb, so this would be a new experience for us both, and I can’t imagine it would be as neat as the stitches. Embroidering pillows doesn’t give you quite as much practice for amputations.”
“You didn’t have to help me,” she says, her voice very soft.
It feels like such an absurd amendment to gratitude that I respond with vinegar before I can stop myself. “You’re right; I didn’t. Why didn’t you tell me this a few hours ago? You would have saved me so much effort and worry.”
I expect she’ll bristle, my hard edges once again knocking someone away. But instead she grins. “I do like your sarcasm better.”
I laugh in surprise. “Well, it is with entirely no sarcasm—which is hard for me, I assure you—that I say I stayed because I wanted to be certain you were all right.”
“So why did Miss Hoffman stay?”
“Less noble reasons, though I assure you she was concerned for you as well. Johanna wants to speak with you about her mother’s work. I told her you may refuse, as you have a tendency to be stubborn and inscrutable.”
“Inscrutable?” She lets out a short breath of laughter. “Coming from the prickliest girl I’ve ever known.”
“Prickly?” I say. “I’m not prickly.”
“Felicity Montague, you are a cactus.”
“Debatable.” My knees are aching against the hard floor, so I stretch out on my stomach parallel to her, propping my chin on my hands. “My botanical equivalent would more likely be . . . what are those plants that shrivel as soon as you touch them? I’d be one of those.”
She pulls herself over on her side with a wince, her good arm curling under her head. “Not something medicinal?”
“Perhaps,” I say. “Though that’s a rather obvious answer, isn’t it?” I stack my fists atop each other and rest my chin upon them. “Or maybe I would be a flower. But a really tough flower.”
“A wildflower,” Sim says. “The kind that are strong enough to stand against wind, rare and difficult to find and impossible to forget. Something men walk continents for a glimpse of.”
I wrinkle my nose. “I’d rather not be glimpsed by men. Perhaps we can set up some sort of trap so that they fall off a cliff if they try to pluck me from the ground.” I stretch my hands out before me, making a study of my nails, which have grown long and filthy in our travels. Longer than I like to keep them, for practicality, though the thought makes me feel foolish. I’m not running a practice and being called upon daily to perform surgeries. It’s a needless routine that suddenly feels silly and aspirational. “But you’re right—whatever I am, there would likely be spines. Or thorns. They keep people away.”
Sim rolls onto her back again, her neck arching in a stretch. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
She looks sideways at me. “It wasn’t a disappointment.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have, except that Johanna disappeared the morning of her wedding and Dr. Platt recruited me to help find her in exchange for a job.”
“So you got what you wanted, then?” When I don’t say anything, she prompts, “You’re working for him.”
“I’m not. He’s . . .” I consider saying conspiring to kidnap me, but am too tired to explain, so instead I finish, “not what I expected.”
Sim does not seem moved. Her tone is the verbal equivalent of a shrug when she says, “So you’ll find someone else to teach you medicine things.”
“It is nowhere near that simple.”
“Because he’s your hero?” she asks.
“Because I’ve wanted to study with him for so long,” I say. “I’ve wanted to study. Full stop.”
“Who’s keeping you from that?”
“No one’s keeping me from it, but I can’t just read books forever. I want to work and learn and be taught by someone smarter than me. I want to help people. Which I am not allowed to do because I am a woman.” I sit up and dust off my elbows, cross that I left myself slip into familiar territory with Sim, for if I’m a cactus, she’s a very argumentative rosebush, and I’ve drawn my own blood again by reaching out. “Maybe I was foolish to let you seduce me away to Stuttgart and expect everything would miraculously fall into place for me. And maybe Alexander Platt wasn’t what I expected, but it’s not as though I have many chances to learn medicine.”
“Of course you don’t,” she says, pushing herself up on her good elbow. “You’re trying to play a game designed by men. You’ll never win, because the deck is stacked and marked, and also you’ve been blindfolded and set on fire. You can work hard and believe in yourself and be the smartest person in the room and you’ll still get beat by the boys who haven’t two cents to rub together.”
It’s the sort of sentiment that kept me awake in Edinburgh, long nights of sleepless panic that I was wasting my time trying, that someday I would wake up and find I was old and had wasted my life trying to wage war armed with only a great deal of indignance, which is about as useful as a bowl of cold porridge in battle.
But then Sim says, “So if you can’t win the game, you have to cheat.”
“Cheat?” I repeat.
“You operate outside the walls they’ve built to fence you in. You rob them in the dark, while they’re drunk on spirits you offered them. Poison their waters and drink only wine. That’s what Sybille Glass did.” The silence hangs between us, underscored by the last embers popping in the stove. From the shelves, wax ears eavesdrop. “I’ll talk to you and Johanna tomorrow,” Sim says suddenly. “Because you helped me. And because I want to see the map.”
“How do you know about the map?”
“It was a hope until you just confirmed it, so thank you.”
“Oh. I mean . . . what map?”
She rolls her eyes. “Are you going to keep a vigil over me while I sleep?”
“To ma
ke sure you don’t steal the map? If there is a map.”
“I meant to make certain I don’t die, but yes, let’s keep trust at an arm’s length.” She slides over on the pallet. “Come lie down with me. At least you’ll be warm.”
I hesitate, then lie down beside her and pull the quilt over both of us. She takes another deep breath with a steadying hand to her chest, then looks sideways at me and says, “Did I really seduce you to Germany?”
Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes, regretting I ever used the word. “It was a combination of you and Alexander Platt. And look: now you’re both the banes of my existence.”
“You need to be more discerning about who gets their talons in that brilliant brain of yours.”
I snort, louder than I mean to. “I’m not brilliant.”
She purses her lips with a soft humming sound. “You’re right, brilliant is quite a strong word. But you seem very bright. Or if not bright, you’re at least confident. And often people can’t tell those two things apart.”
I don’t feel confident—I feel like an actress, a pretender, someone who wears a brave face because the moment a strong-willed woman shows weakness, men will push their fingers into it and pry her apart like a pomegranate.
But I don’t correct her. I’m still afraid that, the first chance she gets, she might crack me open too.
15
Sim, Johanna, and I leave Quick’s the next morning for a coffee shop down the road to take breakfast. In the wake of the storm, Zurich is cold and bright. A thin-fingered mist sits above the streets, making the frost sparkle and the stones emanate light. Even my breath, white as it strikes the cold air, seems to shine. Down the road, a pot clangs as it’s slung over a cook fire. Chestnuts pop in a frying pan. A blacksmith’s apprentice strikes his anvil, a call to his master that the forge is hot. A dog barks somewhere out of sight. I’m surprised Johanna doesn’t go chasing after it.
Women are barred from English coffee shops—most institutions pride themselves on being havens for discourse and educated thought, though most of their clientele are men who slept through Cambridge regurgitating multisyllable words and proving they know who Machiavelli was. Here, the customers remind me more of the crowd that would frequent Callum’s bakeshop—working class, quiet and polite. It’s mostly men, but the sheet of rules posted beside the door makes no notations about sex. No one gives us a second glance.
We pay our coins for breakfast and take a table farthest from the door beneath a noticeboard and a stuffed crocodile with his jaws wide. I can hardly taste my coffee after I so thoroughly scalded my mouth the night before on Quick’s stew, but every swallow makes me feel warm and more awake. Johanna brought her mother’s bag and the leather case. She keeps the bag pinned between her feet under the table and the case over her shoulder, even though it requires her to sit on only half the chair, and every time she shifts, it smacks the back of her head with a crack.
Sim watches Johanna struggle, the corners of her mouth turning up. “Don’t worry. I’ve only got one good arm now.” She tugs on the sling around her neck. “You could fend me off.”
Johanna sighs with frustration, then reluctantly hangs the strap of the case over the back of her chair. “I still don’t trust you,” she says, but Sim just shrugs in reply, unconcerned.
We sit in silence for a long minute. Sim murmurs a prayer of “Bismillah” before she blows on her coffee through pursed lips, making the surface jump. I had expected she would be more reluctant to come with us, but thus far, she’s been suspiciously cooperative. I awoke this morning when she left our shared bed, certain she was running, but she was only rising to pray with Quick. She let me check her injured arm and tie the sling, then borrowed a scarf from Quick and wrapped her head again.
“So, who is going to speak first?” Sim says at last. “Or should we keep wasting time waiting on each other?”
Johanna and I look at each other. She doesn’t say anything, just tips her head toward Sim, like I am supposed to answer. Sim blows harder on her coffee.
“All right. I’ll start.” I clear my throat. “Where did you meet Sybille Glass?”
Johanna, who has been shredding a piece of cut meat between her fingers, startles and looks at Sim for the first time since we sat down. “You knew my mother?”
Sim sets down her mug and cracks the knuckles of her good hand against the edge of the table. “She was captured by my father’s men when she was mapping in our waters.”
“Mapping what?” Johanna says. “She was an artist on a scientific expedition, not a cartographer.”
“She was,” Sim replies, “and on the side, she was mapping the nesting grounds of dragons.”
“Dragons?” Johanna and I ask at the same time.
“Sea dragons,” Sim clarifies. “The ones you Europeans draw upon charts for decoration. All the dragons that are left nest and swim within my father’s waters, and we protect them. We keep invaders away from each other.”
“My mother was not an invader,” Johanna says.
“No,” Sim agrees. “She wanted to study the dragons. She was making maps tracking their migration patterns and trying to plot their nesting grounds. Not even my family knows that anymore. But my father was sure that any Europeans in our waters would mean extinction for the beasts and our fleet. She was alone, but she would bring more. He wanted her to destroy her map and agree not to take what she knew back to London. And she wouldn’t.”
“Did your father kill her?” Johanna asks bluntly. I almost choke on my coffee.
“No,” Sim replies. “But she died at his fortress. She was sick when we took her prisoner, but she refused our treatments because she was experimenting.”
“What exactly was she experimenting with if she was just making maps?” Johanna asks. “That seems like a very good story to cover up a murder.”
“The dragon scales,” Sim says. “They have a sort of . . . I’m not sure how to explain it. They elevate you.”
“Literally?” I ask.
“No, not literally,” she replies. “No one’s flying. It’s a stimulant.” She lets her hand fall into her lap. “Sailors used to carry them on strings around their neck and chew them before a fight for strength. They were taken once a day to ward off illnesses. Your mother”—she looks to Johanna—“was testing their properties on herself.”
“Lots of doctors do that,” I explain when Johanna still looks unconvinced. “If you can’t find a willing subject to try a new medicine or procedure, you use yourself. John Hunter gave himself gonorrhea to test his theory about its transmission.”
Johanna wrinkles her nose, then looks back to Sim. “If she was sick and you didn’t save her, you murdered her.”
“She wouldn’t take our help,” Sim replies. Her good hand is fisted upon the table. “She said she had to complete an experiment. She would only take the scales as treatment.”
“And you had them and wouldn’t give them to her?”
“My father has outlawed taking them in our holdings.” I can hear Sim grinding her teeth, and I’m tempted to put out a cautionary hand to Johanna. She has as much right as Sim to be angry, but Sim isn’t using her emotions like a cudgel the way Johanna is. “He won’t let them on his ships, because you don’t have to take them many times before it’s all you can think about. And when you strip the scales off the backs of the dragons, they don’t regrow. We didn’t let her die; she let herself die.”
Realization dawns suddenly upon me, and so I turn to Johanna. “Let me see your mother’s things.”
“What?” She snatches the bag up from under the table and presses it to her chest. “Why?”
“The vials, the ones we used yesterday,” I say, flapping my fingers at her. “Let me see them.”
Johanna roots around in the sack and comes up with the leather roll and unfurls it upon the tables. I unhook one of the remaining vials filled with the opalescent powder and hand it to Sim. “Is this them? The scales.”
She uncorks the vial with h
er teeth and takes a careful sniff before dipping her pinky in and scrubbing it against her thumb. “I think so. Though she didn’t have any of this with her when I met her.”
“It would have been on her ship. This is what saved your life yesterday. It worked as an antidote against the poison.” I unfold the other half of the leather skin so that the vials of labeled poisons are on display. “If Sybille Glass was trying to create a compound made from the sea dragon scales that worked against poisons, it would explain why she had a bag full of venomous samples. She wasn’t sick; she poisoned herself to test her theories. If Platt was on the expedition with her, do you think he knew about the dragons and the scales too? He’s going back to the Barbary States—maybe he’s hoping to follow her maps and find the sea monsters.”
“And then he takes samples back, and all your En-glish sailors come to my family’s territory and kill our beasties and us with them,” Sim murmurs. She’s still pressing those flakes of scale between her fingers, and I half expect her to touch them to her tongue. I wonder just how addictive it is.
“What if there were a way to duplicate the compound found in their scales?” I say. “Something man-made and nonaddictive that could be used medicinally? If it has anything close to the restorative powers we saw yesterday, it could help a lot of people.”
“But you’d first need the scales,” Sim says, “and my father would never allow it. Once these waters are open to Europeans, our fleet won’t survive. Particularly under its impending leadership.”
“You mean you?” I ask. When she looks quizzically back at me, I prompt, “I thought you were the legendary daughter of a legendary pirate king.”
“No one said legendary,” she replies.
“Quick did.”
“My father may be a legend, but I won’t be.” Sim jabs her knife at her egg. The yolk breaks, spilling gold across her plate. “I am my father’s oldest child, and I have claim to the Crown and Cleaver fleet when he dies. But he’d rather see his sons take up his title because I’m a woman. He’ll leave me something because the law forces him to, but it will be half of what my brothers get, if that, and it will not be the fleet. I have spent my whole life fighting for what would be mine without question if I were a man, and to be better at it than my brothers, because women don’t have to be men’s equals to be considered contenders; they have to be better.” She slumps down in her seat, rubbing her injured arm. “That’s the lie of it all. You have to be better to prove yourself worthy of being equal.”