by Mackenzi Lee
“We left it behind,” Johanna says. She has her elbows pulled into her, hands balled over her stomach. “It’s back in Algiers.”
Platt’s eyes flash with panic, but then he swallows hard. “You’re lying. You wouldn’t go all the way to Africa to leave it behind. Did you meet with someone? Did you sell it? Did those pirates make a deal with you?”
“How do you know about the pirates?” I ask.
He laughs, a savage, raw sound. “Because the Crown and Cleaver owns every inch of water we sailed in. We were paying them taxes just to be allowed into their territory. And her mother”—and here he thrusts a shaking finger at Johanna—“used the voyage for her own gain. She was mapping her way to these monsters’ nests and then she was going to take that information to return to England and make a name for herself. If she hadn’t been certain this discovery would make her impossible to ignore, she wouldn’t have cared about these beasties. Miss Sybille Glass would have done anything for attention.”
“So how are you any different?” I shoot back. “You can’t claim noble intentions either, after you just stripped a corpse.”
“For resources,” he replies, his jaw clenched around the final word. “Resources that the corsairs who own that land would have let wash back out to sea and waste. They rob the world of valuable substances by keeping them hidden.” He’s groping around in his coat. He looks manic and wild, his hands shaking as he paws for his snuff box in his inside pocket, but when he flicks it open, it’s empty. He lets out a low growl and instead takes up the rolled leather case fallen from Sybille’s bag and unfurls it, fumbling for one of the vials of powdered scale.
The back of my mouth burns at the sight of that glistening powder, my lungs suddenly very aware of how light my breath is, how much stronger than me Platt is. I want to reach out and snatch it from him but instead I say, “Don’t take that. It’s addictive.”
“You think I don’t know that?” he snaps. “Not all of us are born as privileged as you, Miss Montague. We don’t learn about addicts in our medical treaties, we are born to them and raised by them and we’re hooked from the moment we first breathe.”
“That’s what you’ve been taking all this time,” I say. “It’s not snuff or madak or opium. It’s those scales.”
His hand fists around the vial, so tight his knuckles turn white. I’m shocked it doesn’t break. “Your mother,” he says, jerking his head toward Johanna, “roped me into her experiments. Poison and antidote and poison and antidote, all treated with the powdered scales she found in black markets and bought off pirates. She told me it was a drug that could end sickness. Asked me to take it regularly and promised it would get me off opium. Said I could go back to England a sober man and get my medical license back and she’d credit me for my help. It was a wreck of a ship, a damned voyage paid for as cheaply as possible by that man who wanted a collection but had no idea the lengths it took to get one. We were all sick from the rot and the rats and the food. We thought we’d sink before we got to the Barbary States. Every man on board that boat was only there because he had no other options. Your mother was no different.”
“No one wanted to work with her because she was a woman,” Johanna argues.
“No one wanted to work with her because she was a bitch,” Platt says, and Johanna cringes. “She used anyone who could give her a step up. Used them and then discarded them.”
“She had to fight for recognition,” Johanna says. “You’re the one who took credit for her work in the cabinet.”
“It was my work too—it ruined my whole damn life, and if she hadn’t gotten herself killed, she wouldn’t have given me an inch,” he replies. “Your mother was ruthless. Just as much of a degenerate addict as I am. She was a slave of her ambition, and that made her a slave of her drug.”
He can’t get the seal broken on the vial, and with a growl of frustration, he cracks the top off against the edge of the desk and empties it into his hand. “Don’t!” I grab his hand and the powder spills, blossoming in a cloud between us before settling upon the desk, the floor, down the front of both our clothes, no speck salvageable.
I look up at Platt just as his hand connects with the side of my face.
It’s a stunning pain, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. The bright sting reverberates through me. My vision goes blurry and I stumble backward, sitting down so hard that I feel the shudder through every inch of my spine and popping in my neck.
Johanna shrieks. I blink hard, trying to clear my vision and the ringing in my ears.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Platt is saying, his voice ragged and breaking. He’s bent over the desk, his shoulders shaking. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You’ve lost your mind!” Johanna shouts at him.
There’s a knock on the cabin door, then the man who visited Platt in Zurich enters. “What the hell is going on here?” he snaps, pushing the door shut behind him with one of those expensive boots, their toes speckled with sand from the beach. “We’re loaded, and we need a heading. Good God, Alex?”
Platt motions wordlessly to the gent, and the two of them stagger out onto the deck, the door clapping shut behind them.
As soon as Platt is gone, Johanna is beside me. “Are you all right?” she asks, brushing away the tears the slap pried from my eyes with a gentle touch that still stings. “Zounds, I can see his whole handprint on your face.”
“It’s fine.” I spit out a mouthful of blood from biting my tongue, but all my teeth are still in my head and a quick exploration of my face with my fingers confirms no bones broken. Outside the door, I can hear Platt and the other man arguing. Forcing myself to ignore the pain, I motion to the door, and Johanna and I both crawl forward and press our ears to it.
“. . . losing your head,” the man is saying. “Where’s the map?”
“She has it, Fitz,” Platt replies, his voice cracking. “I know she does.”
“But you haven’t seen it?”
“I . . . no.”
“Is it stashed somewhere on the beach? Or back in the city?”
“We have to take her back to England and then to court. They’ll force her surrender.”
“We don’t have time to return to England and get a court to pry documents out of her hands,” Fitz snaps. “Without a marriage certificate, your legal claim is tenuous at best. And by the time a judge has heard your case, you’ll not have any investors left.”
“But—”
Fitz presses on overtop of him. “The moment this case shows up in court, we lose our only asset in this expedition. Our first claim. By the time we have the map, someone else will have discovered your nesting grounds.”
Silence, but for the sound of Platt taking several deep, strained breaths. The door creaks as he leans against it. “What about the Montague girl?” he asks at last.
“If you think you can extort money out of her family, we’re going to need that. Send her back to England with a letter to her father.”
“We don’t have another ship.”
“I’ll find someone for you.”
Every word tightens like a fist around my chest, making it harder and harder to breathe. I should have stayed in Edinburgh with Callum. I should have settled for life with a baker who would have tolerated me. I should have known I wasn’t a forest fire, but a small flame that could be snuffed out easily by the first man who turned my way with a heavy breath. There is no winning for women in this world. I was foolish to think there ever could be for me, and now it’s like pouring salt in a wound to know that I spent so long sustaining myself on such misplaced hope.
You are Felicity Montague, I think, trying to force some courage into my heart, but all I can think is, You are Felicity Montague, and you should have settled for a simple life.
“Right now,” Fitz continues, “we have samples, but they can be easily dismissed. That won’t secure a charter, but it will get every other naturalist in London to put their nose to the ground and sniff out these creatures
before you can. You need the map, you need the island, and you need to return to England with eggs. So tell me: What’s our heading?”
A pause. Both Johanna and I hold our breath. “Gibraltar,” Platt says at last.
Beside me, Johanna lets out a small squeak, one hand flying to her mouth. Gibraltar? I mouth at her.
“English soil,” she replies. “He’s going to marry me.”
It will be at least a week at sea before we reach the lone spit of British soil at the tip of Spain. The blessing of a small ship ill-equipped to hold ladies who are not quite brig-worthy prisoners but who are also most certainly not to be left to their own devices is that Johanna and I are locked together in the cabin, with big glass windows that look out across the ocean billowing behind us. It seems at first foolish for them to leave us with such an easy escape until I, in truly thinking out the logistics an attempt through the windows would take, realize that it’s no exit at all. The windows do not open, and even if we smashed through enough panes that we could climb out without lacerating our flesh on the shards or drawing attention to the noise, there is nowhere to go. Above is a ship full of men. Below the vast, unforgiving sea. Aside from a plan of leaping overboard with a pocket full of hardtack and the hope of being scooped up by someone with more noble intentions than our current captors, we’ve no relief.
Once we’re certain Platt has left us alone, I ask Johanna, “Do you have the map?”
“Of course I do.” She pats her stomach.
I may have been hit harder than I thought, for I stare blankly back at her. “You ate it?”
“No, it’s laced under my corset. I was worried someone might snatch the bags while we traveled, or we’d lose it or something terrible would happen. Something like this.” She gestures around at our cell. “And I assumed that if we did find ourselves trapped by men who would want it, none of them could get a corset unlaced if they tried. Or even think to look there.” She tugs at the bodice of her dress, trying to shake off the sand that has dried along it in clumps. “Though it won’t do any good. If he marries me, he could rip all my clothes off and steal it and force himself upon me and still be protected by the law.”
I shudder. As soon as the vows are exchanged, anything Platt wants to do to her would be within his rights. And while I don’t think that’s where his head is at, I’ve learned from years of stories passed in whispers that men have needed much less of a reason to do much worse to a girl.
“We could destroy the map,” I say weakly. Johanna closes her eyes, a crease appearing between her eyebrows, and I feel the same twist inside me, like a cloth wrung dry. Destroying that map would mean giving up on my last chance of escaping a life with Callum. A life on my own terms, with Johanna and a ship and something to study. Work I could own, that would make me impossible to ignore.
“You saved Sim because of the dragon scales,” Johanna says. “We can do good things with this.”
“Can we? Or are we just going to use them the same as Platt?”
“You mean Platt and my mother?” Johanna flops down upon the cabin bed, her loose hair tumbling in snarled ribbons over her shoulder. “We should have let Sim take the map. At least then Platt couldn’t have it.”
“Yes, but if that had been suggested to you before we knew he’d found us, you would have led a mutiny. And I’m not certain Sim has as much goodwill toward us as we do her.”
“I thought you didn’t have any, what with all your goading each other.”
“Yes, well, turns out arguing a lot with someone can make you rather fond of them.” I cross to her trunk and begin to rifle through it, hoping there will be something there that will give us some comfort or hope of escape or maybe even a box of those macarons from Stuttgart so we can do a proper sorrow-drowning in some excessive decadence. It’s mostly a tangle of dresses and overskirts and bodices. Muffs and black stockings. A bottle of melon water and a case of tooth powder. A tiny miniature with a sketch of a woman who must be Sybille Glass in one frame and a lock of hair pressed into the other side. A sewing kit.
“You were very prepared,” I say as I sift through.
“I wasn’t intending to go back,” she says. “At least, not for a long while. That’s far less than I wanted to take. I planned to bring Max, remember?”
I toss a drawstring bag of hard biscuits onto the desk. “I can see that.”
“Do you think Platt was right?” she asks.
“About what?” I say without looking up.
“That she wasn’t . . .” She scrapes her heels against the floorboards, prying sand off the soles. “That my mother wasn’t what I thought her to be. I’ve spent my whole life looking up to her, this brave woman who left an unhappy marriage to work in the field she loved. She left me, but that could be forgiven because she did it for the work. But maybe she did it for herself. And she used Platt. Probably others too. And maybe she didn’t care for these creatures at all. She would have done anything to be noticed.”
I glance up. She’s unraveling the embroidery along her bodice, a flower coming unstitched petal by petal between her fingertips. “You can’t believe what Platt told you.”
“It’s the only thing anyone has ever told me of her,” she replies, her voice breaking. “Except for the letters she wrote me herself. And she’d never cast herself a villain.”
“I don’t think she was.”
“She wasn’t a hero, either.”
“So she can be both.” My fingers scratch the bottom of the trunk, pulling up the brocaded paper lining it. I stare down at it, absolutely throttling my brain to come up with something—anything—that would get us out of this without having to destroy the map entirely. That would be the right thing to do, and we both know it. But it’s also a surrender. A surrender as self-serving as anything Platt or Glass ever did.
“We could make a copy of the maps,” I offer, though it’s hardly a suggestion. In anticipation of our imprisonment, the room has been stripped. Every desk drawer is empty or locked. All they’ve left us are bedclothes, towels, and a washbasin. Nothing that we could make any use of in map duplication. The most promising method would be carving it with our teeth into the single bar of soap.
“We’re not going to be able to make a copy,” Johanna says. She jerks the undone thread on her stomacher and it unfurls in her hand.
Which is when an idea occurs to me. “What if we stitch it?”
“Stitch what? A copy of the map?” When I nod, she looks down at the thread tangled around her fingers. “You mean embroidery?”
“Why not? I had scads of lessons, didn’t you? We could embroider a copy, then destroy the actual paper version. Throw it in a fire and let it burn beyond anything Platt could fish out. If you don’t have the map, he has no reason to want to marry you. You can refuse to give it to him, and he can search forever and never find it because it’s gone. Then we walk away with a copy he doesn’t even know exists.”
“What do we stitch it on?” she asks, her eyes darting around the room. “We can’t very well go carrying the bedsheets away with us without raising some sort of suspicion.”
“You’ve got petticoats, don’t you?” I say. “No one will see those.”
She chews on her bottom lip for a moment, then says, “No, not my petticoats. Yours.” She bounces off the bed, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “He’ll be less likely to suspect it from you.”
Johanna does not have an overabundance of thread in her sewing kit, which was meant only for tasks like sewing a button back on, and as my fingers are smaller and more suited to tiny stitches than hers, she assigns herself the task of carefully unpicking thread from all of her dresses from the trunk, as well as the bedclothes, while I begin our meticulous copy of the map on the inside of my petticoats, stitch by single stitch.
It’s no small project. Even with my spectacles, my eyes are stinging by the end of the first morning and my fingers are sore by night, knuckles cramping and pinched. Johanna and I swap positions, though the muscles in m
y hand are so prone to random contractions that I’m a liability to our limited supply of thread. I’m more vigilant after those initial days of arthritic pain to stretch my muscles, pulling my fingers back until I feel the strain to keep them limber.
We can’t afford to waste precious time—the distance between Algiers and Gibraltar suddenly seems to be nothing more than a few quick strides—so though I’m likely going to end up with stiff joints before I’ve even reached the appropriate age to call myself a spinster, there’s not time to wait for the pain to subside. Johanna knows how to read a map better than I do, so she tells me what pieces can be left out, what numbers and angles are most critical to get right. We use the ribbons from her dresses to measure the distances between points on her mother’s chart and mark them with pins upon our fabric.
By the time we reach Gibraltar, we’ve made an almost complete copy of the chart upon the underside of my petticoat.
Gibraltar
19
Boarding a ship in Africa, the farthest from home I’d ever felt, and then stepping off in Gibraltar to find a tiny slice of Britain is nearly as disorienting as trying to get my land legs after our time at sea. Though we see even less of Gibraltar than we did of Algiers—we hardly get a view of the Rock before we’re taken straight from the ship to a second cell, this one a captain’s house along the waterfront, manned by a staff so aggressively English that, although we were clearly brought here against our will, tea is delivered to us in our rooms as we are locked inside them. The staff addresses Fitz as Commander Stafford, and he seems master of the house, though I’m not sure whether he owns it or it’s a navy holding.
Johanna and I are kept here, confined in separate apartments for several days. The map is again tucked inside her stomacher and laced tight against her stays. We are very nearly finished with our copy, but not quite enough to destroy the original with confidence. Johanna wanted to see it through before we made landfall, cut our losses and set it aflame from the lamp in our cabin, but I had insisted not. Any hasty decisions could compromise this plan entirely. Our embroidered map is impressive, but nowhere near as detailed as Sybille’s.