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

by Mackenzi Lee

“A year is nothing!” I protest. “I’ve had dresses I wore for a year and then woke up one morning and thought, ‘Why am I wearing this insane dress that makes me look like a terrier mated with a lobster?’”

He reaches out, like he might pat my hand, but I pull it off the table, for I am not a dog and therefore need no patting.

My brother, always one for histrionics, has made his fall into poverty as dramatic as possible.

When stripped of the illegalities and the Biblical condemnation, their attraction is no stranger to me than anyone’s attraction to anyone.

an adorably misshapen cap that I like to imagine Percy knit for him.

I roll over onto my back and let the silence settle over us like a fine layer of dust before I say, my face to the ceiling and not entirely certain Percy’s still awake, “I’ve missed you. Both of you.” I can hear the soft smile in his voice when he replies, “I won’t tell Monty.”

Percy sees me off at the door with more affirming words but no hug or even a pat upon the shoulder. Thank God for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.

“That hat is idiotic.” “I know,” he says. “Percy made it for me.”

“I didn’t know Percy knew how to knit.” “He doesn’t,” Monty replies, and the brim of the hat falls in front of his eyes as though in emphasis. “I’m glad you’ve got Percy,” I say. “So am I.”

“Love has made you terribly soft, you know,” I say to him without looking. “I do,” he replies. “Isn’t it grand?”

I feel generations of men who have kept women from their schools staring me down. Men like this never die—they’re

they’re chiseled in marble and erected in these halls.

You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men.

We may have both left home. Defied our parents and our upbringings in favor of our passions. But there are rocks in my road Monty can’t understand how to navigate, or even conceive of being there in the first place.

The problem: avoiding Monty, who is paying careful attention to everyone boarding the ship to Calais. The resources at our disposal: little to nothing. Sim, me, my knapsack, which is mostly mittens and books and underthings. Though I suppose throwing a book at his face and then running aboard would not be a bad distraction. That or just shout something about menstruation and watch the entire dock erupt into chaos—it worked so effectively with the hospital board.

“He’s got ink on him that means he’s sailed where frightening things happen to honest sailors who cross that banner.” “Are you one of the honest sailors?” I ask. “No,” she replies, and sticks the marlinespike hard into her boot. “Oh.” I turn forward. She straightens. We both stare out across the gray water, watching England disappear into the fog, and all I can think is that if she’s not one of the honest sailors, it may mean she’s one of the frightening things.

I thought I had long ago cut Johanna from me like a cancer, but you cannot simply hack yourself apart in hopes of healing faster.

It’s remarkable how being around books, even those you’ve never read, can have a calming effect, like walking into a crowded party and finding it full of people you know.

Your beauty is not a tax you are required to pay to take up space in this world,

It reminds me of my brother, who, before our Tour, would take brandy in the mornings after a night drinking himself sick at the clubs, smelled of whiskey more often than aftershave, and who, had he ever dueled, he would likely have been saved from a fatal bullet by the flask in his breast pocket. I know now why: after years of abuse at the hands of our father, he had felt himself unable to experience the world sober. It makes me wonder what demons Alexander Platt keeps barricaded away with that small box of shimmering powder.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I hate that I am apologizing to him when it is he who kicked me, he who has made me feel that I’m in the wrong for daring to ask for something. Not even something—for anything. He has me apologizing for asking for the minimum that is granted to most men.

There’s a strangled silence.

I brace my feet against the casements and rescue myself.

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

“Charm has never been a flower that blooms in your garden, has it?”

“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 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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

Everyone has heard stories of women like us—cautionary tales, morality plays, warnings of what will befall you if you are a girl too wild for the world, a girl who asks too many questions or wants too much. If you set off into the world alone. Everyone has heard stories of women like us, and now we will make more of them.

As I watch the other passengers, it’s hard not to notice that Johanna and I are some of the only fair-skinned Europeans aboard, and the three of us are some of the only women I can see. I have often been the only girl in the room, but I can’t think of a time I was in the minority like this. It must be daunting for Sim to travel Europe knowing that everywhere she goes, she won’t be around people like her. Of course, I’d thought of this before—particularly while on the road with Percy—but there’s something about being here, curled up on this deck with her and Johanna, that distills the loneliness of it for the first time. In that moment, the sky feels closer than home.

It’s dark enough, in only the light of the talon moon, that I almost don’t realize she’s moved until I feel her hand upon my cheek, and when I turn to meet her, she presses her lips against mine. It is entirely different from kissing Callum. It is, for a start, significantly less wet. Less impulsive and frantic and out of control. It feels bold and shy both at once, like giving and taking. Her lips are chapped but her mouth is soft as milkweed silk and rimmed with salt water from the cold spray kicked up against the side of the boat. When they part against mine, I open my mouth in return. Her thumb skims my jawline, feather-light. But beyond the physical observations, it’s nothing. Not wholly unpleasant, but neither something I’m anxious to repeat. Just a thing people do. She pulls back, her hand still upon my cheek, and looks at me. “Did that work any sort of magic?” “Not really.” “That’s a shame.” She settles back into our little nest of cloaks, pulling the collar higher around her face. “It worked for me.”

It is radical, I think as I watch Johanna, both of her arms submerged to the elbows as she strokes the dragon’s head, the compassion she has for this thing. Most natural philosophers don’t carry this sort of tenderness for the things they study. Most doctors don’t. The hospitals in London are proof of that. The beetles and lizards and bats hunted for collections and then stuck with pins to a wall behind glass are proof of that. Men want to collect. To compete. To own.

I do not need reasons to exist. I do not need to justify the space I take up in this world.

The sun has traveled farther than I expected. It sits just above the horizon, the yolk of a broken egg tipped out along the edge of the sky. The water is beginning to bronze beneath the spill.

And silhouetted against that syrupy sky is a massive warship, sails pulled in, anchor dropped and longboats lowering into the water.

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.”

“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.”

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.

“I’m so pathetic,” she says, and I can’t tell if she’s laughing or crying. “I’m soft and selfish and sentimental.” “You’re nothing of the sort, Johanna Hoffman,” I reply. “You are a shield and spear to all the things you love. I’m glad to be among them.”

“A kindness?” I repeat with a wild laugh. “You think yourself kind to me? Is that what you tell yourself so that you can sleep at night?” “Your ambition will eat you alive,” he replies. “Same as it did Miss Glass. I cannot let that happen to you.” Zounds, does this fool actually think he’s saving me? Another storybook hero to swoop in and rescue a girl from a dragon or a monster or herself—they’re all the same. A woman must be protected, must be sheltered, must be kept from the winds that would batter her into the earth. But I am a wildflower and will stand against the gales. Rare and uncultivated, difficult to find, impossible to forget.

“Imprisonment?” Someone says from the doorway. “That’s very dramatic. Will she make this much of a theater about everything?” For a moment, that voice in this house with my stomach calcifying in slow despair is so out of place I’m certain I am imagining it. Or if not imagining it, I am at the very least mistaken. I almost don’t dare look for fear of breaking the spell and resigning myself well and truly to my fate. Hope in any form feels fragile as spun sugar. But there he is, swaggering into the room in a way that would have been ridiculous had he not been so good-looking, all scruffed up and mussed like he’s been weeks on the unforgiving sea. Had he not lost that ear, he’d be far too pretty to pass as a convincing sailor. It’s Monty.

Monty points to me. “That one’s got a squint like she reads too many books.” I shall break into a thousand pieces with the effort it requires not to roll my eyes at him. He’s taking such great pleasure in his clandestine crowing that he’s going to give us both away.

Monty offers me a hand on the stairs, so steep they’re practically a ladder, and I take it, careful not to catch a toe in my skirt and unravel all our hard work on my petticoat. When he extends the same hand to Johanna, not only does she not take it, but she leaps unaided the rest of the way down to the lower deck, then deals Monty a sharp kick between the legs. He buckles like a hinge. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” Johanna cries, smacking him across the back of the head with her muff. “You are a terrible man for accepting money to deliver human cargo who are obviously taken against their will. You’re no better than a slaver and a pirate!” “Johanna—” I reach out for her, but she bats me away with the muff. “I don’t care what he does to me! I don’t care what any of these bastards do! There’s nothing left to take from me, and I just want to hit something!” She swings her muff at Monty again, nearly clipping Ebrahim as well, who stops just in time on the stairs. “Johanna, stop!” I seize her by the arm and pin it to her side. “Stop it, he’s not going to hurt you.” She squirms, trying to pull free of me. “Well, I want to hurt him!” “Stop it, Johanna. He’s not a sailor. This is my brother.” “What?” She stares at me, then pivots sharply to Monty, still doubled over. “Henry Montague?” Monty groans in affirmation, straightening slow as if he were thawing out. He places his hands carefully over his most vulnerable areas, then says, “Miss Hoffman.” Her voice is nearly as high ...

I’m nearly knocked flat as Percy wraps the entirety of his long limbs around me. “Dear Lord, Felicity Montague,” he says, and somehow he holds me even tighter. “I’ve been sick over you.” I don’t say anything, just press my face into his chest and let myself at last be held. Behind me, I feel Monty’s arms wrap around the pair of us, the long-ago threatened Monty-Percy sandwich manifested, and I don’t mind it. It feels safe, and good to have been missed after so long thinking I had no one to return to.

“And you know that you have driven us absolutely mad since you left. I swear to God, Felicity, I’m never letting you out of my sight again.” “That I have some objections to,” Monty says from behind me.

Don’t look so surprised. We’d move heaven and earth for you. Unless of course there is any actual heavy lifting involved, in which case, I’ll abstain, but don’t believe that in any way tarnishes the sentiment.”

“My . . . who?” “Your pirate paramour,” he says. “The one you made that bargain with. She showed up with a group of very brawny gentlemen who had no qualms about leaving their shirt sleeves unfastened—” “Careful,” Percy says, but Monty butts his forehead against Percy’s shoulder. “Please. You were looking too.” “I wasn’t.” “How could you not? It was like some very lascivious god sculpted them all with a very generous hand—” “Monty, focus,” I snap. “Ah, right, yes, your pirate girl.

“I accept your terms. Now show us your map.” Johanna looks over at me and nods. A small smile tugs at the corner of her mouth, victorious and conspiratorial. I reach down and start to pull up the hem of my skirt, and all the men in the room make a protestation as one—Monty does an exasperatingly dramatic throwing of his hands over his eyes and exclaims, “Dear God, Felicity Montague, keep your clothes on.” “Like you’ve never seen the outline of the female form before.” I pull up my skirt to my knees, careful to keep myself as covered as possible lest one of these brawny gentlemen need a couch to faint upon, and manage to untie the petticoat from my waist.