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

by Mackenzi Lee

Fortunately, I have never been a girl overbothered with aesthetics. I would have happily tucked in to buns far uglier than these.

“We hardly know each other!” “We’ve known each other almost a year,” he replies. “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?’”

“I have to see my brother there; he has . . .” I pause too long for my next word to be anything but a lie, then say, “Syphilis.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Monty.

“I know it’s shit,” he says before I have to come up with a compliment that is actually a lie.

Thank God for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.

I nearly laugh, but then he’ll be pleased with himself, and if I have to see those dimples this early, I might punch him.

Flanked as they are by busts of the governors before them and loomed over by all those names along the walls, I feel generations of men who have kept women from their schools staring me down. Men like this never die—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.

“I’m talking about menstruation, sir!” I shout in return. It’s like I set the hall on fire, manifested a venomous snake from thin air, also set that snake on fire, and then threw it at the board.

Maybe everyone has hunger like this—impossible, insatiable, but all-consuming in spite of it all. Maybe the desert dreams of spilling rivers, valleys of a view. Maybe that hunger will one day pass. But if it does, I will be left shelled and halved and hollowed out, and who can live like that?

“Please don’t compliment me on my morals; it makes me feel very obsolete.”

This is a bad idea, and I know it. Humans have instincts specifically for situations like this. Everything in me is saying there is danger lurking in this forest, eyes bright and hungry through the dark.

I have challenged fate to chess and am now attempting to keep all my confidence from puddling in my boots.

When she looks at me, I am disarmed. “Well then,” she says, and I don’t know how I shall survive these next few days without drowning in her. “Lucky you’re not me.”

There’s a knot of women standing by the dressing room staring at me, and when I look back at them, they all duck and giggle, and I hate these girls. I hate them so much. I hate the way they giggle, and look at me when I don’t, and then it feels as though I’m being laughed at and they’re all in on it and I’m not. It’s my whole childhood, being sneered at by watery girls for a joke I didn’t understand because I was reading books they could never understand. For a woman who boasts that she doesn’t give a fig what anyone thinks of her, I certainly have a lot of party-related anxiety.

Because I used to know Johanna like she was another version of myself—I had forgotten just how intimate our friendship was until I saw her again. The hollow spaces in my shadow, the second set of footsteps beside mine.

It’s a queer thing, to have a vacant space inside you and not know what it is that carved out the absence.

Cleanliness is clearly not a prominent water feature in the courtyard of his life, as he seems to have nothing in his wardrobe and everything upon the floor.

But one can only spend so long bookless in the company of another human before one feels compelled to make conversation.

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.

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.

But even without the dog, her entrance is grand—her confidence blasts through the room like a wildfire, hot and bright and beautiful, but also the sort you want to watch from a distance.

you should not be frightened of the darkness, but instead be sure that the most frightening thing in it is you.

“Has anyone told you,” she hisses, her breath damp and warm against my neck, “that you are tenacious?” “Thank you,” I reply. “It wasn’t a compliment.”

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.

I want to know it all so badly it feels like a bird trapped inside my chest, throwing its body against my rib cage in search of the strong wind that will carry it out into the world. I would tear myself open if it meant setting it free.

“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 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.

I realize that, in that single moment, like a flash of heat lightning over a bare moor, all three of us are in control of our own futures. Our own lives. Where we go now. Maybe for the first time.

I feel strange suddenly, the old itch of fear that I am a feral girl in a domesticated world, watched by everyone with pity and concern. There are men like Monty, with perverse desires, but they find each other and carve out small corners of the world, and likely women too who find themselves only drawn to the fairer sex. And then there’s me, an island all my own. An island that sometimes feels like a whole continent to rule, and sometimes a cramped spit of land that sailors are marooned upon and left to die.

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

“Yes, well, turns out arguing a lot with someone can make you rather fond of them.”

“Is it too late to be unrescued?”

In the company of women like this—sharp-edged as raw diamonds but with soft hands and hearts, not strong in spite of anything but powerful because of everything—I feel invincible.

I’m learning there is no one way for life to be lived, no one way to be strong or brave or kind or good. Rather there are many people doing the best they can with the heart they are given and the hand they are dealt. Our best is all we can do, and all we can hold on to is each other.