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

by Mackenzi Lee

“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. My character was forged by independence and self-sufficiency in the face of loneliness, so I assumed the tools for survival were already in my kit, it was just a matter of learning to use them. But not only do I not have the tools, I have no plans and no supplies and seem to be working in a different medium entirely. And, because I’m a woman, I’m forced to do it all with my hands tied behind my back.

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

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.

The chairman tosses his cloak over his shoulders and gives me a smile that he likely thinks is kind, but is, in fact, the smirk of a man about to explain something to a woman that she already knows.

“Every point I made is irrefutable. Their exclusionary policies rest entirely on the fragility of their own masculinity, but it doesn’t matter because they’re men and I’m a woman so it’s not even going to be a fight and it was never going to be a fight. It was always going to be them walking all over me,

Some men seem to think that if a lady behaves in a way that they consider unbecoming of her sex, they are justified in speaking in a way that is unbecoming of theirs.

“You’re so determined to become a lady doctor then,” he says. “No, sir,” I reply, “I’m determined to become a doctor. The matter of my sex I would prefer to be incidental rather than an amendment.”

The only reason I’m not crying is that I’m so aggravated by the fact that I’m almost crying again.

He’s not going to understand. It crystalizes for me in a moment. We may have grown up in the same house, two restless children with contrary hearts, but our parents sought to sand down our edges in different ways. Monty suffered under the hand of a father who paid far too much attention to his son’s every movement, while mine was a youth of neglect. Unacknowledged. Unimportant. While Monty might have someday run the estate, the best that could be hoped for me was I’d leave it in the arms of a wealthy man.

there are rocks in my road Monty can’t understand how to navigate, or even conceive of being there in the first place.

“No one calls a girl spirited or opinionated or intimidating or any of those words you can pretend are complimentary and means it to be. They’re all just different ways of calling her a bitch.”

I’m escorted into a sitting room off the entryway and seated upon a sofa. I try to neither settle too far back upon it nor sit too close to the edge, wishing for perhaps the first time that I actually had sat a lesson at the finishing school my father was determined to send me to just to better create the illusion of ladyship. There are so many invisible layers to decorum that you don’t think of until you’re staring them down across a fancy parlor.

What I would like to say is that I remember when she aspired to more than a rich husband and domestic bliss. I remember how she audaciously declared that she would be the first woman to present before the Royal Society. That she would go on expeditions. Bring new species home to England to study.

It’s hard to focus on the meal when I’m thinking about Dr. Platt, and when I can’t properly breathe, and also every time Johanna laughs, my heartbeat stammers. How is it, I wonder, that the brain and the heart can be so at odds and yet have such a profound effect upon the functions of the other?

“Prevention would decrease the business of hospitals and make it more difficult for them to exploit the poor, so I understand why they will not invest in it. With all due respect to the hospital boards in London.” I pause, then add, “Actually, no. No respect is due to them, because they’re all asses.”

Your beauty is not a tax you are required to pay to take up space in this world, I remind myself, and my hand flits unconsciously to my pocket where my list is still tucked. You deserve to be here.

suddenly want to be home so much it hurts. Or not home so much as . . . I don’t know what I’m missing. It’s a queer thing, to have a vacant space inside you and not know what it is that carved out the absence.

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.

“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 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 other 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.

“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.”

“That’s the lie of it all. You have to be better to prove yourself worthy of being equal.”

“Protecting these creatures isn’t the same as simply not destroying them.

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.

I do not need reasons to exist. I do not need to justify the space I take up in this world. Not to myself, or Platt, or some hospital governors, or a pirate ship full of men with cutlasses.

“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.”

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.

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.”

“But we can control the cost if we accept that change is coming. We cannot fight the turning of the world, but we can prepare for it. And we can prepare our world for it.”

“I think she likes you,” he says. I roll my eyes. “Just because you and Percy live in unholy matrimony doesn’t mean every same-gendered pair also wants to. And we only kissed once, and that was more an experimentation to see if kissing can be an enjoyable experience for me. And the answer is no, though I’d say she’s the best I’ve had. 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. But just because she kissed me doesn’t mean she likes me. I once saw you necking a hedgerow.” Monty blinks. “I meant likes as in begrudgingly respects, but my word, how long have you been bottling that up, darling?”

all I can think is, This can’t be how this ends. It is not what I had expected to think as I stared death in his hungry eyes. It’s not hopelessness, it’s just pure stubbornness. Not even so much a will to live as a refusal to die.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “But there are always consequences. Even in standing still. And I’m tired of stillness.”

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 do not want simple. I do not want easy or small or uncomplicated. I want my life to be messy and ugly and wicked and wild, and I want to feel it all. All those things that women are made to believe they are strange for harboring in their hearts. And I want to surround myself with those same strange, wicked women who throw themselves open to all the wondrous things this world has to offer.