The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

by Mackenzi Lee

  Johanna, still oblivious, continues with that goading smile that wrinkles her nose. “Go on, do you remember?”

  “Sybille Glass,” I say, and I hear it in my head in Platt’s voice. “Was that your mother’s name?”

  She nods with a wistful sigh. “I wanted to be just like—”

  “Johanna, I overheard Platt just now,” I say, “talking to some English bloke about Sybille Glass and collecting her work.”

  She almost drops the lamp. “Platt is in Zurich? You brought him here?”

  “No, he brought me,” I explain. “The cabinet will only surrender her things to a male member of your family, yes? Do you think that’s why he wanted to marry you—so he’d have legal claim to whatever it is she was working on?”

  Johanna sucks in her cheeks hard, mouth puckering. Then she lets go a breath laced with “Son of a bitch.”

  It is not a situation for laughing, but I do anyway—in her lilting soprano it’s like hearing a curse in a homily. “He can’t get them, so long as you aren’t wed.”

  “Doesn’t mean he won’t try.” She presses a fist against her chin, thumb tapping in rhythm to her thoughts. “I’m going to go to the Kunstkammer tomorrow to see if they’ll give me my mother’s effects.”

  “No, you have to get out of here before Platt can force a ring upon you,” I say. “The effects are legally yours, so long as you don’t marry him—he has no claim. Come back to England with me. We can figure things out there—about him and Sim, if you think she’s after them too.”

  “Are you encouraging me to run from a fight?” she says, and it almost sounds like a challenge. It’s too dark to properly tell what kind of smile is flirting with her lips. “I thought you were the brave one out of the pair of us.”

  “What? No—no fighting,” I say, then add, “And you were the intrepid explorer in our games, remember? I was the levelheaded tagalong.”

  “Yes, because make-believe is most fun if you can pretend to be something you’re not. It took me until the night before my wedding to leave because I’ve been so afraid to be alone.” She scrapes a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face. “Maybe I shouldn’t have run. Maybe there was another way, or I should have asked for help or not acted so spontaneously. But I’m here, and I am determined, and I am going to the museum tomorrow and—”

  “You don’t have to defend yourself,” I say quickly. “Not to me.”

  “Oh. Good. Well, I’m possibly still making defenses in my own head.” She smooths out her nightdress between her fingers, then looks up at me. “Do you need money?”

  “Money?” I repeat.

  “To get back to England. I don’t have much, and I can’t say I feel particularly obligated to give you a comfortable way home if I’m paying.”

  Home. I have nowhere to go. No Platt, no Sim, no family. No lifelines. I cut my ties and am drifting alone, a lifeboat in a windless surf.

  “Could I come with you?” I ask. Johanna looks up sharply, and I add, “I already paid for a night, and I can’t go back to Platt, so I might as well stay here. And I’m not . . . I mean there’s no hurry . . .” I peter into a shrug and a toe scuffed against the floor. Or, rather, an attempt at a scuffed toe, for the floor is so sticky that it’s more of a squelch. I don’t dare look at her for fear she’ll say no, so before she can, I take my pieces off the board. “Sorry, never mind. You probably don’t want a thing to do with me. I mean, if you want me to come, I thought maybe I could. But you probably don’t, so I’ll leave first thing.”

  “Are you having a conversation with yourself?”

  “No. I’m conversing with you.”

  “Then give me a chance to answer, will you? You can come. If you’d like. Though I can’t imagine Dr. Platt will look favorably upon any of his future protégés conspiring against him.”

  If I join Johanna, I will give up on any chance of working for Dr. Platt. Even after overhearing his conversation back at the house and knowing he’d use me ill, it is such a large thing to let go of. Staying with Johanna means I’m betting on nothing.

  Except her. And her mother. And myself.

  “Well,” I reply, “good thing I’d rather not be any man’s protégé.”

  12

  The Kunstkammer is located on the Limmatquai, its back sloping into the river. The water froths fast and dark in the miserable weather. The sky is gray, and it snows with intermittent strength as we make the trek across the city, and when Johanna and I arrive at the collection, we are both soaked through our cloaks, mine borrowed from Johanna so I don’t damage our already shaky credibility with dodgy outerwear. A layer of snowflakes dust our shoulders like sugar atop a bun. Johanna made a valiant attempt to arrange her hair before we left that morning, and at her insistence I made a valiant attempt to help her, though was dismissed from my responsibilities when I stabbed her in the back of the head with a pin so hard it drew blood. In her flight from her father’s home, though she couldn’t bring her dog, she did bring a trunk’s worth of extravagant dresses, and a pink skirt hemmed with mint-colored ruffles peers out from under her cloak. In my plain Brunswick, I’m much more likely of the pair of us to be taken seriously by the men who dart behind the exhibits of bugs and stuffed animals here.

  “I wish I had Max,” Johanna says as we cross the entryway of the cabinet to the ticket desk, eyeing the stuffed form of some kind of devilish-looking wild cat rearing over us from a pedestal in the center.

  “I don’t think he’d win against that,” I say with a nod up at the cat.

  “You’ve never seen him really go after a slipper,” she replies.

  We step up behind a woman paying for admission for herself and a tiny boy with beautiful blond curls that have somehow thwarted the snow and remained perfectly ruffled. Johanna takes a long, tight breath, one hand pressed against her stomach. “I just always feel better with my dog.”

  “Don’t be nervous,” I say. “You’ve got right on your side.”

  “When has that ever mattered?” she murmurs.

  The woman and the blond boy move away from the desk, and Johanna and I step up to the attendant. “Good morning,” Johanna chirps, and I immediately cringe at how high her voice is, how pitchy and giggly she sounds, and how silly that pink dress looks. “I was hoping I might speak to the curator, Herr Wagner.”

  The clerk, who had been prepared only to take our money and write the date upon our admission tickets, looks up very slowly, his brow creased. “Were you invited?”

  “Herr Wagner and I have been corresponding.” Johanna peels a letter out of the carpetbag she brought along—a bit optimistically hoping she’d be leaving the Kunstkammer with it full of her mother’s final effects. The bag fared no better than we did in the snow, and the letter emerges as damp as the rest of her. The ink has become splotchy and streaked. When she leans forward to hand it to the attendant, a lump of snow slides off her hood and lands with a plop upon his desk.

  The clerk frowns as he reads the letter, then holds it up for us to see, as though we hadn’t had a chance before. It’s pinched like a dead mouse between his thumb and forefinger. “This says the presence of your husband or father is required.”

  “My father’s dead,” Johanna replies.

  If she hoped to elicit pity, her effort is entirely ineffective. “Where is your husband, then?”

  “He has . . .” Johanna and I look at each other, and then she says, “Venereal pox,” at the same time I say, “Business.”

  The clerk’s eyebrows slope. “Then Herr Wagner will meet with your husband when he is available.”

  “But I’m here now,” Johanna says, pressing herself against the desk so that her breasts make a seat of its surface. “It will only take a moment, I swear. If you could just tell him Johanna Hoffman—”

  “Girls,” the clerk says, and the word sets my teeth on edge, “Herr Wagner is a very busy man. He doesn’t have time to meet under pretenses.”

  “It’s not a pretense,” Johanna says. �
�I have business with him.”

  “Then go fetch your husband, and it can be completed.”

  I step in. “Sir, I’m not sure you understand.”

  “Young lady,” he starts, and that’s as far as he gets before I snap back at him, “Really? First girls, and then young lady? That’s how you feel it is appropriate to refer to us? Like children?”

  “Your current comportment is excessively so,” he replies.

  “And your current comportment doesn’t give me much reason to believe your brain is your best asset,” I reply. “Will you please tell Herr Wagner that he has left the daughter of one of this century’s greatest naturalists standing in his lobby dealing with a ticket monkey who doesn’t recognize a legend when she drops snow upon his desk?”

  I hope I might at least get him quaking with the threat of disrespecting a legacy. No matter how overdrawn that legacy may be. I would have thrown in Johanna’s mother’s name except that I don’t think naming that naturalist to be a woman would help our case against this pile of moldy pudding formed into the shape of a man.

  He blinks once, slowly, then says with spiteful deliberateness, “Ladies, I must ask you to leave. You are causing a scene.”

  I’m ready to spin on my heel and stomp out, well and truly making that scene we have been accused of, but Johanna says with shocking cheer, “No, thank you, sir. If we’re not to be permitted to see Herr Wagner, we’d like to see the Kunstkammer.” Then she smacks her coins upon the table and gives him that devastating smile of hers.

  He stares very hard at the coins, as though he is hoping they are actually crackers or buttons or something that will give him a legitimate reason to refuse us. Finally, he places his palm overtop and slides them along the desk toward him, their edges making a hair-raising scrape against the wood grain that’s far more of a scene than we were causing. Men are so dramatic. He hands us two admission tickets, then Johanna takes me by the arm and we stalk, dripping and indignant, into the gallery.

  “Well, that went about as expected,” she says at the same time I say, “What a disaster.”

  We cross into the first room of the exhibition, a collection of items from the South Seas. The walls are lined with glass-fronted cabinets, and there’s a massive skeleton of some sort of long-necked bird articulated in the center of the room. We stop side by side in front of the first wall, where polished gemstones in iridescent turquoise and green are laid out upon dark velvet. I can feel Johanna’s carpetbag knocking against my knees, heavy as a history book in its emptiness.

  “That’s what you were expecting to happen?” I ask her.

  She shrugs, hefting her bag into the crook of her elbow. “I hoped it would go differently. I thought I might charm him.”

  “I think I might have ruined that.”

  “Yes, thoroughly.” She glances sideways at me with no attempt to conceal her frustration. “Charm has never been a flower that blooms in your garden, has it?”

  Charming is not a word I’d use—or ever want used—to describe me, but the way she says it prickles me. It’s the sort of thing I feel entitled to say disparagingly about myself, but from someone else, it feels blunt and unkind. “Well, you’re hard to take seriously in that dress,” I retort, and then move on to the next case, to examine a set of poison-tipped arrows.

  Johanna chases after me, her heels—zounds, she brought heels on her escape!—clacking on the tile. “What’s wrong with this dress? It makes me feel pretty.”

  “It’s very feminine,” I say.

  “Is there something ridiculous about being feminine?”

  “To men there is.”

  I keep walking. She keeps following. I don’t even stop at the next case, just barrel forward into the second gallery, hoping she’ll grow weary of chasing me in those ridiculous shoes and relent. “But you’re the one who said it to me, and you’re not a man,” she says, somehow still at my elbow. “Would you ever wear this dress?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Answer it anyway.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  She steps in front of me, trapping me with my back against a cabinet of pinned butterflies, which is a rather metaphorical display to be cornered in front of. A few people are already staring. The woman who was in front of us in line has taken that beautiful blond boy by the hand and led him from the room at a quick trot. This is feeling far too close to the argument that cracked us apart back home. Me cornered and her demanding. Both of us lashing.

  Johanna puts her hands on her hips and tips her chin at me. “You think this dress is ridiculous, and you are afraid of looking ridiculous.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Do you think it’s ridiculous?”

  “You’re talking too loud.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Yes, fine, all right?” I snap. “I think it’s a stupid dress, and I think if you keep dressing like that and speaking in that voice and smiling all the time like a fool, no one will ever take you seriously. You think you could present in front of the Royal Society dressed like that and anyone would listen? Men won’t take women seriously unless we give them reason to, and that dress is not a reason to. It makes us all look pathetic. Can we please go now?”

  She stares me down for a moment, then says, her voice no longer loud but prickled as a rosebush, “Now I remember.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Ever since you showed up, I’ve been thinking, Felicity is so funny and kind and clever, why did I ever stop being her friend? But thank you. I just remembered.” Her head tips to the side, regarding me. I want to look away. “It’s because when I stopped running around with my petticoats hiked up to my waist and started enjoying the social scene and caring about what I wore, you never stopped taking shots at me for it.”

  “I never took shots,” I protest. “It was you who decided you couldn’t bear to be seen with me because I was so embarrassingly unfeminine. You abandoned me. You tossed me out for prettier friends.”

  “Felicity, I never abandoned you. I made a choice to remove myself from our relationship because you thought that me liking pearls and pomade meant you were superior to me.”

  “I did not.”

  “Yes you did! Every time you rolled your eyes and every little smart remark you made about how silly it was for girls to care about their looks. You refused to let me—or anyone!—like books and silks. Outdoors and cosmetics. You stopped taking me seriously when I stopped being the kind of woman you thought I had to be to be considered intelligent and strong. All those things you say make men take women less seriously—I don’t think it’s men; it’s you. You’re not better than any other woman because you like philosophy better than parties and don’t give a fig about the company of gentlemen, or because you wear boots instead of heels and don’t set your hair in curls.”

  I’m not sure what it is that I’m feeling. Something like anger, but with far more shame attached. Anger as a means of defense, anger I know is completely misplaced. But I still snap at her, “Don’t tell me how I feel.”

  “I’m not telling you how you feel, I’m telling you how you make me feel. I felt so silly for so long because of you. But I like dressing this way.” She spreads her arms. “I like curling my hair and twirling in skirts with ruffles, and I like how Max looks with that big pink bow on. And that doesn’t mean I’m not still smart and capable and strong.”

  I am combing back through my memories, those last few weeks before Johanna and I ruptured, trying to remember what I had forgotten. But I hadn’t forgotten a thing. I had just always cast myself in the role of the misunderstood and sympathetic heroine, Johanna the traitor who had buried a knife in my side and abandoned me for girlier pastures. But Johanna and I had parted ways because of me, and because I thought survival meant stepping on others.

  I want to apologize. I want to explain that I had felt then like I was losing the only person who knew me and still liked me, had tried to keep her unchanged because while all the o
ther girls were growing out of their childhood fancies, mine were starting to root in my soul, leaving me strange and unruly, but Johanna made me feel natural. I want to tell her I’ve spent my whole life learning to be my own everything because I had parents who forgot me, a brother who never lifted his face from his drink, a parade of maids and governesses who never tried to understand me. I have spent so long building up my fortress and learning to tend it alone, because if I didn’t feel I needed anyone, then I wouldn’t miss them if they weren’t there. I couldn’t be neglected if I was everything to myself. But now, those fortifications suddenly feel like prison walls, high and barbed and impossible to cross.

  Johanna starts to turn away from me, but then lets out a small gasp and instead grabs my hand. I panic, thinking that she has spotted Platt or Sim or some other threat to our well-being that managed to sneak up on us while we were reliving our childhood traumas, but she’s staring at the framed pages hanging from the upper gallery. “Those drawings.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re my mother’s.”

  They’re so high above us, it’s hard to see them, but Johanna rushes up as close as one can get, and when I join her, we stand below, our necks craned. “This must have been the work she was doing for the Kunstkammer when she died,” Johanna says.

  “Come on.” I take her hand, drag her over to the tight stairway that leads to the bookshelves in the upper galleries, and step over the rope keeping the public off them, and we squash ourselves upward. These stairs were clearly designed for men, for the tight spiral isn’t compatible with so many petticoats. Johanna has to turn sideways so that her wide hips will fit.

  We dart along the gallery until we are above the paintings, then together grab the wire and haul the first one up so we can see it better. There’s a generous layer of dust along the top, and it sticks like frosting to my fingers. The drawings are of dolphins and sea birds, though they look more like hasty sketches, not finished prints to be delivered to a patron. The artistic style and the handwritten notations remind me of the portfolio I saw Sim examining in the Hoffman library.