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.

zounds, I can’t believe I know exactly what type of pastry this is and how important it is to let the flour mixture cool before whisking in the egg. All this baking nonsense is taking up important space in my head that should be filled with notations on treating popliteal aneurisms and the different types of hernias outlined in Treaties on Ruptures, which I took great pains to memorize.

I wear practical shoes and can run very fast.

my grip so unenthusiastic I imagine it must be akin to cuddling a filleted fish.

the idea that men often get in their heads when a woman pays some kind of attention to them: that it was a sign I want him to smash his mouth—and possibly other body parts—against mine. Which I do not.

“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.

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.

I don’t want pastry beneath my fingernails and a man content with the hand life has dealt him and my heart a hungry, wild creature savaging me from the inside out.

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

I have never aspired to impressive stature, based primarily on Monty’s example—we are both of a solid, hard-to-knock-over stock that sacrifices height for shoulder width—but I’ve had to let the hem of my skirt out since summer, and in my heeled shoes and him in stocking feet, I could put my nose to his forehead. Pettiness must die a very slow death indeed because, in spite of that momentary pinch of fondness, I’m delighted to be officially taller.

They run raised and red, like a splatter of paint across his forehead and in patches down to his neck, made more visible because he’s cut his hair short, though it somehow still has that effortless tousle to it, like someone’s sculpted it to look rumpled just so.

“Oh.” It comes out more relieved than I meant it to—I’m far more comfortable discussing epilepsy than fornication.

“Epilepsy is a son of a bitch.” “Oh my, but Scotland has made you vulgar,” Monty says with delight.

Because I was born a girl but too stubborn to accept the lot that came with my sex.

“You have not once written to me.” “I write!” “No, Percy writes me long lovely letters in his very legible penmanship and then you scrawl something offensive at the bottom about Scottish men and their kilts.” Monty grins, unsurprisingly, but Percy snorts as well.

If there is a piece of this flat that isn’t playing skip rope with the line between habitable and condemned, I have yet to see it.

Anyone who put up with my brother certainly would not be doing it unless they really, sincerely loved him. And Percy’s the sort of decent lad who actually might. When stripped of the illegalities and the Biblical condemnation, their attraction is no stranger to me than anyone’s attraction to anyone.

“Could I . . . ?” He opens his eyes. I suddenly feel very small and meek, a child begging to crawl into bed with her mother when she’s woken at night by frightful dreams. But I don’t even have to ask. He tosses back the quilt and slides over to make room for me. I kick my boots across the floor and strip off my coat, but leave my jumper on, then lie down beside him, pulling the quilt over us both. 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.”

wrapped in a battered dressing gown that looks as though it was made in the previous century for a man half his height.

Monty is still asleep, now spread over the entirety of the bed like he was dropped there from a great height.

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,

The light is a slick sheen over the muddy streets like the scales of a herring.

All this grandeur seems like appalling waste.

You are Felicity Montague, I remind myself as I take another porridgy breath. You have sailed with pirates and robbed tombs and held a human heart in your hands and sewn your brother’s face back together after he got it shot off over said human heart. You have read De Humani Corporis Fabrica three times, twice in Latin, and you can name all the bones in the body, and you deserve to be here. You deserve to be here. I glance down at where it’s written upon the top of my list. You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men.

the concessions that would have to be made so the male students would not be distracted by the presence of a woman,” one of the other men adds, and the rest of the board nods in support of what an excellent, nonsense point he has made.

“Well then, you might consider covering up table legs lest the mere reminder of the existence of the female form send your students into an erotic frenzy.”

snow off the hospital wall and deposits it on the back of my neck. It feels greasy and clogged with soot, but I let it melt in a slow trickle down my spine, imagining each vertebra as it passes, counting bones with every breath.

We look at each other. The city boils around us. I want to strike flint and set it aflame. Burn everything from the sky down and start the world over.

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, and I was stupid to think it could ever be anything more than that, and don’t you dare try to hug me.” His arms, which had been rising, freeze midair, and he lets them hover there, like he’s carrying something large and round and invisible. “I wasn’t going to.”

It’s an approximation of looking presentable, though he still looks less like a gentleman and more like the raw ore mined to create one.

“My anatomy is excellent,” he replies. “Yes, it is,” Percy adds, pressing his lips to Monty’s jawline, just below his earlobe. “Dear God, stop.”

“Am I interrupting your sulking?” she says at last. “I’m not sulking,” I reply, though I very clearly was. “So your posture is always that terrible?”

“No one overheard it,” she says. “We just heard it. Your brother speaks very loudly.” “He’s deaf,” I say, then add, “and obnoxious.”

“If you’re going there to, say, as what I hope is an extreme example, murder someone, or set the house on fire, I’d rather not be complicit in that.

“I’m not murdering anyone.” “And yet you’re silent about arson.”

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.

I don’t like this. I don’t like turning my back to her, letting her put her hands in my hair, her wrist brushing my neck. I’m thinking of that knife against the sailor’s throat and how easily it could be against mine at any moment but especially this moment, with my eyes forward and my skin exposed. She’s gentler than I expected. As soon as I think it, I feel guilty for imagining her to be rough and tug at my scalp. I can feel her hands combing through my ends, working with careful precision like it’s surgical thread she’s untangling.

Behind me, she lets out a small, breathy laugh. “So spirited.” “I’m not spirited,” I say, sharper than I mean to. Her hand, which I had felt hovering near my neck, jerks away at the spark in my voice. “All right, easy. I didn’t mean it as an insult.” I cross my arms, letting myself sink into a slouch. “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.”

Johanna an only child with an absent mother and father often abroad and I with parents who I was sure sometimes forgot my name, found a whole world within each other.

We tore up the forest between our houses, made up stories about being explorers in faraway corners of the world, foraging for medicinal plants and discovering new species that we would name after ourselves. She was famous naturalist Sybille Glass, and I the equally famous Dr. Elizabeth Brilliant—even as a youth, my imagination was very literal.

Which cracks him for the first time—the guardian of the grapefruit house rendered stunned and mute by how firmly and confidently I spoke to him.

I shriek without meaning to, though in my defense, what rational being wouldn’t when approached by an open mouth in which your whole head could fit?

My bulbous shoulders feel likely to burst free at any moment.

She catches my eye and gives me an obligatory smile over her champagne. I look away, am then mortified that was my reaction to being smiled at, and say too loudly and without introduction, “I like your eyebrows.” I had spun a mental wheel and picked the least flattering feature to compliment a woman on. She looks surprised. As any person would at such a bizarre statement so loudly uttered. “Oh. Thank you.” She purses her lips, looks me up and down, then says, “Yours are also nice.” “Yes.” I stare at her for a moment longer. Then I nod too vigorously. Then I ask, “How many bones in the human body can you name?”

Of course, the moment I get around other females my own age, I end up socializing with the dog.

“You’re normal.” “I’m not.” I feel like a wild animal in a menagerie, ragged and feral and unsocialized among all these women who don’t tip over in heels or itch the powder off their face.

The room is warm and smells like dust, and just the presence of so many books makes it easier to breathe. 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.

“I’m cleaning it.” She swabs a sleeve along the nearest shelf without looking at it. “There. All clean.”

there’s not much to be done about the fact that I have just snuck up on him in a dark room and the first thing I did was assure him I’m not covered in blood.