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

by Mackenzi Lee

With a chunk of his finger missing, Callum is the most interesting he has ever been to me.

“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 didn’t realize it would be so hard.” “To study medicine?” Yes, I think, but also to be a woman alone in the world.

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

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

My legs feel firmly planted under me for the first time in years. Maybe my whole life.

Platt knows who I am and will use me to find Johanna, and then plans to send me back to my father. All the while I’d thought us allies, I’d been no more than a pawn.

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.

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

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 take Sim by the waist, hoisting her good arm around my shoulder, then turn to the shopkeeper.

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 look at my own hands and know everything about the way they move beneath the skin, the fine strings that tie them to the rest of me and all the other intricate components that fuse together to make up a complete person.

I want to know how things go wrong. How we break and the best way to put ourselves back together.

“I’d rather not be glimpsed by men. Perhaps we can set up some sort of trap so that they fall off a cliff if they try to pluck me from the ground.”

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.”

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.

these dragons are not new to the world, only to our very small part of it.

“Max is all good.” “Max is a dog.”

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

But the point is moot as I don’t think it’s ever really going to be good because I just don’t seem to desire that sort of relationship with anyone the way everyone else does.

You are Felicity Montague, I tell myself. You are a brilliant cactus and a rare wildflower who survived capture and imprisonment and extortion, and you shall survive this.

“Felicity Montague, if you saw me dressed for Eid in my blue-and-gold kaftan, you’d faint dead away. You’d propose marriage to me on the spot. And maybe my kisses aren’t magic for you, but of course I’d say yes, and I’d treat you right and we’d be very happy together. You could have your house and your books and your old dog, and I would have a ship and sail for years at a time and only stop by to see you on occasion, so you’d never grow tired of me.”

I hope you live a life you’re proud of.