by Mackenzi Lee
I have never been in possession of any particular acrobatic skills and, having the proportions of a corgi dog, do not anticipate a burst of natural athleticism to manifest just in time for me to scale the side of a building.
I drag the windows shut, then take a breath and an inventory. Resources at my disposal: very few. The sparse furnishings of this room, which would only be valuable if they could be subtly pushed out the window to create some sort of precarious tower. My knapsack full of nothing useful—stockings and underthings and a few books. I open the cupboard in the corner and find additional bed dressings and towels.
The only idea seems to be taking up the role of the towered princess who grows weary of waiting for a knight: a rope made of her bedroom’s drapery.
The sheets tear quietly and braid easily—years of keeping my hair in a long plait has finally done more than garner ire from fussier peers. I tear, braid, and braid again, then tie a firm knot around the rod hammered into the wall to hold the pelmet over the window. I sling my knapsack over my shoulder, test my weight upon the rope to be certain I won’t fall to my death if the plaster is ripped from the wall (well, death is rather grand—perhaps fall to my two broken ankles, more accurately). Then I brace my feet against the casements and rescue myself.
In the shelter of the bowing streets, the city is warmer than the countryside, and in spite of the snowfall, I’ve sweated through my scarf by the time I arrive at the diligence stop where the carriage from Stuttgart comes in daily. I pay the linkboy lighting lamps for me with coins left over from supper the night before and then stand alone on the side of the street, the sludgy snowflakes trickling through the clouds making lace trimmings on my eyelashes, trying to think where I would go if I were a girl alone in a city, likely coming in in the dark and the cold.
Which I am, I realize. But I try not to linger too long on that lest my fear swallow me whole.
I think of Johanna. Everything I know of her. Where I would go if I were her.
I would go home to Stuttgart and my giant dog and my frilly dresses, is the first thing I think, but the Johanna I knew back in Cheshire had once slept for three nights in her father’s stables in winter in hopes of seeing the snowy owl she suspected had made its nest in the rafters. Had fallen through ice on a pond and pulled herself out before anyone could help her. A girl who had survived without a father, and a mother who wouldn’t come home when she lost him. Perhaps she is still made of that stone foundation I watched her build as a child. Perhaps it has not eroded with time but grown stronger. And been draped in silk and dog saliva.
If I were Johanna, I think, I would want somewhere Platt wouldn’t find me. Not somewhere he’d expect her to stay, a guesthouse along the river with polished floors and silk sheets. I’d want to hide. I’d want somewhere tongues didn’t wag and runaway girls weren’t noticeable and men were not allowed. Somewhere like the boardinghouse I had called home in Edinburgh. And, if I had a trunk in tow, somewhere nearby.
The streets of the old town are steep and winding, a combination of cobbles so slick with snow it’s almost necessary to take them upon all fours and rough stairways just as treacherous, but with more sharp edges when fallen upon. The diligence stop shares its corner with a trinket shop advertising tarot readings, shut up and looking as though it hasn’t been opened in weeks, a cobbler with faded velvet slippers in the window, and a café spilling violin music and the soft clink of a night that’s crowded but not busy.
I make my way inside, picking through the tables populated with drunk artists staring into the bottom of gin bottles and painted ladies swooning around them. The man behind the bar is wiry and thin, with a thick mustache and a weathered kerchief tied around his neck. He’s missing two teeth on the bottom, and he greets me with a rasping, wet cough before asking in a gritty voice, “You want something to drink?”
“No, sir, actually . . .” I make a big show of swallowing, willing myself to get tears in my eyes, just for fullest effect. “It’s my sister.”
“Your sister?” he repeats.
“She’s run away from home because our father is a tyrant who would see her shipped off to an asylum just for being a girl who reads books.” I am poaching a bit of everyone’s life story for this lie, but I press on. “She’s come here to Zurich and I know she’s just arrived and I’m trying to find her and I think she came in here a few days ago and please, sir . . .” The damn tears just aren’t coming—I’ve spent so many years training myself to not show any sort of weakness, even under desperate circumstances, that my face seems utterly confused about what it is I’m asking it to do. I’m screwing up my nose and snuffling and I think it looks more like I’m about to sneeze than trying to cry, for the bartender just looks confused. “Please, sir,” I squeak, trying to put a teary wobble in my voice and overshooting so it instead sounds like I just inhaled a mouthful of pepper. “If you know anything . . . of where she might be . . . I just want to find her.”
He gives me a heavy-lidded look, still wiping endless circles around the glass in his hand. I likely could have told this bartender that I was looking for Johanna so I could murder her in cold blood and he wouldn’t have cared—he doesn’t seem to give a fig about my tragic, albeit fake, story or my similarly-tragic-though-only-because-of-their-fakeness tears. “Why would I know?”
“Surely you see unfortunates in here begging for your help.”
“Unfortunates are the only kind we see here, madam.” He coughs again, this time pulling up the kerchief around his neck to cover his mouth. The material is wet and worn, the striped pattern faded into pilled cotton around the edges, like he often pulls it up. There are no blood stains, though, so if he’s coughing into it often, it’s not a consumptive hack. This close, I can hear his lungs cracking every time he takes a breath, like the spine of a book opened for the first time.
“Do you suffer from asthma, sir?” I ask before I can stop myself.
He pauses in wiping down glasses and, for the first time, seems to pay me attention. “Do I what?”
“Asthma,” I repeat, and hope I’m pronouncing it correctly—it’s a word I learned from reading Dr. John Floyer’s treaties and I’ve never said it outside my own head. “A respiratory condition that causes labored breathing and chest contractions.”
“Don’t know,” he replies.
“Do you often have trouble breathing deeply?”
“Most days. I take laudanum for it.”
“Have you tried tar water and nettle juice instead? They’re much better for a constricted throat, and there’s less risk of dependency. Less expensive too. Some quacks will tell you that boiled carrots help the lungs, but tar water has proved the most effective treatment. Any pharmacy should carry some, or make it up for you.”
He stares at me, trying to decide whether I’m making a joke, then coughs again, this time with his mouth closed so that his cheeks puff out.
“It’s remarkable the difference a good deep breath can make,” I offer.
He huffs, presses his fist to his chest, then says, “She’s really your sister, is she?” When I nod, he says, “We get lots of unsavory types in here looking for girls who don’t want to be found.”
“Do I look unsavory?”
“You’ve got no cloak.”
“That makes me unfortunate, I should think.”
He huffs again, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “When we get girls wandering in, I send them to Frau Engel’s near the chapel. She’s a boardinghouse for waywards. The only one you can walk to from here. Your sister may be there.”
“Do you remember a girl with—”
“We get a lot of girls,” he interrupts. “And I send them all to Frau Engel.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I start to leave, but he calls to me, “What was it? Tar juice?”
I turn in the doorway. “Tar water and nettle juice. I hope it helps.”
He nods. “I hope you find your sister.”
Frau Engel is similarly unmoved
by my tragic story, though she has no illness I can diagnose to soften her heart. I make no attempt at tears this time. “Could be anyone,” she says. She’s in her nightdress and cap, but the lit clay pipe between her teeth assures me I didn’t wake her. Her large frame occupies most of the door. “I get a dozen girls in and out of here each day. I don’t know them all.”
She looks as though she’s about to close the door in my face, so I throw out a preemptive arm against the frame, in the hope that she will at least have enough pity in her heart not to crunch my fingers, and say, “Please, you must remember.”
She shrugs, her clay pipe bouncing between her teeth. “All girls are the same. You want to pay me for a bed, you can wander around and try to find her yourself, but make the decision quick so I can get back to bed.”
I give her all the coins I have left without a clue of what she’s charging. I’m fairly certain it’s too much for a single night, but she doesn’t offer me anything back. Just harrumphs, then gives me a tin plate, a cutlery set, and a blanket made of rough ticking that smells as though it were last used to rub down a horse. “Two girls to a bed, three if you can’t find a spot. Washroom’s on the second floor.”
“I’m not actually staying, I just want to find my sister.”
“Still two to a bed,” she says, drawing back so I can pass, then adds, “And don’t run off with my blanket.” She says that like the withered carcass of material would have any value. There are so many holes it seems like it would not even serve the most basic purpose of blanketness. “And don’t wake me again,” she calls as she galumphs back to her room, a thin finger of smoke from her pipe lingering behind.
The boardinghouse is packed above stairs and smells of mold and wax. Large pieces of the wallpaper are peeling away, leaving raw patches of damp wood that splinter when I brush them. I wander the second- and third-floor bedrooms, feeling invasive and downright criminal as I peer at all these sleeping girls, squinting through the darkness to see if any of them is Johanna. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I find her—wake her or sit beside her bed and keep vigil until morning or perhaps lie down beside her and sleep myself, though the question is rendered irrelevant as I finish my lap and find her nowhere.
Most beds are full, and most with more than two girls. I see four knotted up together upon one small, stiff mattress, the littlest no more than twelve and all of them curled around each other like kittens. They’re all thin and pale. One girl keeps coughing into her fist, trying to stifle the sound. Most are asleep. A few are gathered in one corner, whispering around a lamp and a deck of cards that they’re using to tell fortunes. Another is sitting naked and shivering as she stitches up a seam in what must be her only dress. I almost give her my horse blanket to cover herself, though that feels as if it may do less good than my intentions would merit.
On the third floor I find two girls wedged into the windowsill, looking out at the snowfall and giggling as they press their lips together. When they notice me in the doorway, one of them starts hissing in French I can’t understand simply for all the extra air in her words. When I don’t reply or react, she unpeels herself from her friend and starts coming for me. I bolt, stumbling over the end of a bed and dropping my blanket-cutlery bundle with a clatter that jolts half the room awake, and then there are more than a few girls who seem to want to skin me alive. I dash back into a hallway, down the rickety stairs, and smash headlong into the girl coming out of the washroom so hard that I nearly knock the lamp from her hand.
“Felicity.”
It takes me a moment before I recognize her. “Johanna.”
Without powder, pomade, or cosmetics, she looks a different person. Her skin is cratered with scars—I had forgotten she had measles when we were ten—and blotched with dry spots from the harsh winter air. Her hair is loose and falls to her waist, kinked from its plaits and lank with the sweat of a long journey.
We stare at each other through the darkness, the thin beam of Johanna’s lamp bathing us in a rosy glow.
“What are you doing here?” she hisses.
There are footsteps on the stairs, the two kissing girls likely leading their floor in revolution against me for waking them. Johanna’s eyes flit over my shoulder, and I worry she might try to escape me before I’ve had a chance to explain, but instead she grabs me around the wrist and drags me into the washroom, bolting the door behind us. The lantern in her hand bobs like a drunkard.
I stumble into the washroom, the backs of my legs connecting painfully with the washbasin. Johanna stands with her back to the door, facing me. The washroom is hardly big enough for the two of us, and my shoes cling to the sticky floor. “How did you find me?” she demands, her voice still absurdly high even when hissed through a clenched jaw.
“Did you think it would be hard?” I retort.
“Yes, I thought it was quite a good flight.”
“Oh, please. You tried to take your elephant of a dog on a diligence with you.”
Her frown turns inward, disappointment in herself rather than me. “Yes, that wasn’t as sneaky as I wanted. But I couldn’t leave Max! You didn’t bring him, did you?” she adds, her voice brightening for a moment before she remembers she’s furious with me. “Wait, no, tell me why you’re here.”
“I’m here to warn you.”
“Warn me? About what?”
I take a deep breath. “I have reason to believe that Dr. Platt’s intentions with you are not noble.”
I expected her to gasp, step back, and press a hand to her chest in the sort of theatrical shock ladies often indulge in. At the very least, a whispered “No!” Instead, she crosses her arms and gives me a withering stare. “Really? That’s the revelatory information you came all this way to deliver?”
I nearly execute the step back and hand press I had been so ready to judge her for. “You knew?”
“Knew what? That he’s a crook and an addict and a degenerate? Of course I did. He’s laid out more often than he’s sober, and all his business with my uncle is done on credit because he’s spent a fortune on opium.”
“I thought you were in love with him.”
She laughs, a brittle sound like a step upon thin ice. “You think I’m so stupid that a strange man shows up at my door asking for my hand and I just swoon and say yes?” I don’t say anything, which only confirms that I do think her shallow enough to fall so hard and so fast for the first man she met who could fill a pair of breeches.
“So why were you going to marry him?” I ask.
“Because I didn’t have a choice,” she replies, sinking down so that she’s sitting on the edge of the tub, then immediately standing again and wiping something off her nightdress. “My uncle was forcing me, and I didn’t know how to escape him. I was scared.”
“So you ran away to honeymoon on your own?”
“No, I came to Zurich because that letter your maid stole—it’s from the cabinet of curiosities my mother was working for when she died, and they have all her effects.”
“Effects?” I repeat.
“Everything she had with her,” Johanna explains. “The idiot curator will only give them to a male member of my family. When you told me your maid or friend or benefactress or whatever she was had tried to snatch the letter, it was enough of a push to finally do the thing I had been afraid to and come here myself, to get them before she could.”
“You think Sim’s after your mother’s effects?” I ask. I had been so focused on Platt, trying to use Johanna’s story to fill in the gaps I’d overheard in his, that I’d forgotten Sim.
“Why else would she care about that letter? I think it likely she convinced you to bring her to my home because she assumed we had already collected them and hoped to steal them, but then learned from that letter they’re here in Zurich, at the Kunstkammer Staub.”
“I think Platt’s after them too,” I say. “I overheard him talking about his voyage, and he said something about the archive and a cabinet. Did he ever mention that to you?”
“What work was your mother doing that’s so valuable to both him and Sim?” I can’t come up with something that would wed their two worlds.
“I don’t entirely know,” Johanna replies. “She was working as an artist assistant to a naturalist on an expedition to the Barbary Coast. One of many journeys.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“My father said he’d send me to a plantation in Barbados if I told anyone. He was so embarrassed by her. To have a wife literally run from your home in the middle of the night to sail with unspeakables?” She runs her fingers through the ends of her hair, pulling at the knots. “But she wrote to me on all her voyages. Sent me such strange things.”
“All your stories,” I say, realization dawning suddenly upon me. She looks up. “When we were children, you always had such great adventures we would pretend to go on. Those were from her letters.”
“You remember that?”
“Of course I remember that! Those were . . .” The lamplight jumps against the wall, making skeletons of our shadows. “Those were the best days.”
“They were, weren’t they?” Her nose wrinkles up into a sly smile. “Dr. Brilliant.”
I roll my eyes. “Ha, ha. I was only six. I had not yet peaked creatively.”
“No, it’s sweet.” She laughs. “Everyone should give themselves an aspirational fake name.”
“Well, what about you, famous naturalist—” Were my revelation any more sudden, it would have knocked me flat. I actually have to reach back and steady myself against the basin, I go so lightheaded.