The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

by Mackenzi Lee

  “Are you Miss Felicity Montague?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you scheduled this appointment to discuss a financial donation you wished to be made from a late relative’s estate?”

  “Yes, sir, but that was a pretense in order for the board to see me.”

  “So there’s no money?” the chops man whispers to his neighbor.

  The chairman folds his hands and leans forward over them, his eyes narrowing. “You felt the need to seek refuge in a pretense?”

  “Only because I have made appeals to several different boards at several different hospitals and not been granted permission to make my plea.”

  “And what plea would that be?”

  I resist the urge to glance down at my paper, just for somewhere to look that isn’t into those hawk-black eyes of a man who has never been denied anything in his life. “I would ask the board’s permission to be granted a chance to study medicine at the hospital, with the intention of obtaining a post and license to practice.”

  I had expected laughter from the board. Instead, they’re looking back and forth at one another, as though questioning whether the others are also seeing this terrier of a girl who dares to ask them for the moon, or if she’s simply a figment of their pre-luncheon hunger pangs.

  “I can show her out, sir,” Higgins says, and I jump—somehow he’s snuck up to my shoulder without my noticing and is already reaching to take me by the arm.

  “Not yet,” the chairman replies. My fist closes involuntarily around my notes, crushing them. That yet raises my hackles, as though my being thrown from this room is merely a matter of time. “Miss Montague,” he says, his tone the auditory equivalent of looking down his nose. Which he is also doing, as he’s seated higher than me. “Why do you think you have previously been denied a chance to petition a hospital board on this matter?”

  It’s a snare of a question, one that I know I have to walk into or he’ll lead me in circles until I trip it, and I’d rather not be led anywhere. My chin rises—if I raise my head any higher, they’ll be staring up my nose—and I say, “Because I am a woman.”

  “Precisely.” He looks down the bench and says, “So, that’s our recess, gentlemen. We’ll reconvene here at two.”

  The men begin to stand up, reaching for their cloaks and gathering their cases and papers and all talking at full volume. I feel Higgins behind me, closing in to make good on that yet. He actually gets his bony little fingers around my arm this time, but I shake him off before he can get a good grip. I take a few steps forward and say as loudly as I can without shouting, “You haven’t heard my case.”

  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. “There’s nothing more to hear. Your case is contained within that single statement. You are a woman, Miss Montague, and women are not permitted to study at the hospital. It’s our policy.”

  I take another step toward the bench. “That policy is antiquated and foolish, sir.”

  “Antiquated is quite a large word, madam,” he says.

  So is patronizing, I think, but bite my tongue.

  Most of the board is listening again now. I have a sense that, more than anything, they’re hoping to have a good story to share at the pub, but I’ll take any attention I’m offered.

  “Have you previously studied medicine at a hospital or academic institution?” the chairman asks.

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you had any kind of formal schooling?”

  He’s baiting the water again, and the best I can do is sidestep. “I was educated at home. And I’ve read quite a lot of books.”

  “That isn’t healthy for you,” one of the other men interrupts. “Reading in excess causes the female brain to shrink.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I burst out, my temper snatching the reins. “You can’t actually believe that.”

  The man leans backward, as though I’ve frightened him, but another leans in to add, “If you’ve read so many books, why do you need a hospital education?”

  “Because a hospital education is required in order to obtain licensure and establish a practice,” I say. “And because reading Alexander Platt’s treaties on human bones is not adequate preparation for setting a broken leg when the wound is bloody and the bone has splintered under the skin and already starting to fester with gangrene.”

  I had hoped Dr. Platt’s name would conjure something closer to adoration among the men, but instead, a low murmur ripples through them. A man on the end with a pointed chin and tufts of coarse blond hair sticking out from under his wig raises his eyebrows.

  “Then let a man set that bone and let the woman see the injured has a good meal and a bed,” the chops man murmurs, loud enough for everyone to hear. There’s a smattering of laughter from these men with clean fingernails who hardly know the color of blood.

  The chairman flicks his gaze in their direction but does nothing to silence them. “Miss Montague,” he says, his eyes returning to mine, “I have no doubt that you are very bright for a young lady. But even if we were to consider admitting a female to our student ranks, the cost of necessary arrangements for her—”

  “What arrangements, sir?” I demand.

  “Well, to begin, she would be unable to attend anatomy dissections.”

  “Why? Do you think my nerves so weak and fragile that I could not handle the sight? The women on the streets of London witness more death and dying in a single day than you likely have in your lifetime.”

  “I have yet to meet a woman with a stomach for the sort of dissections we undertake,” he says, “not to mention the nakedness of the male form, which would be inappropriate for you to see outside the bonds of marriage.”

  He glances over my shoulder at Monty, who raises his hand and says, “Brother,” as though that’s the most important matter to set straight here.

  I resist throwing something over my head and hoping it catches him in the nose, and instead remain focused on the chairman. “I can assure you, sir, I would not become hysterical.”

  “You seem hysterical now.”

  “I’m not,” I say, annoyed that my voice pitches on the second word. “I’m speaking passionately.”

  “Not to mention 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.

  It takes every ounce of strength in me not to roll my eyes. “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.”

  “Madam—” the chairman begins, and I can feel Higgins right over my shoulder again, but I press on, using my argument as a plow this time.

  “Women make up more than half the population of this city, this country, and the world. Their intelligence and ideas are an untapped resource, particularly in a field that claims such a commitment to progress. There is no proof women are unequipped to study medicine—quite the contrary, women have been practicing medicine for hundreds of years and have only been excluded in recent history as surgery became regulated by institutions run by men. Institutions that are now so bogged down in bureaucracy that they have ceased to serve even their most basic functions for those in need.” I hadn’t planned to say that, but the stink of the hospital wards is still in the back of my throat. The chairman’s eyebrows have risen so high they’re about to disappear under his wig, but I press on. “You make money off the poor and the sick. You charge them to take up space in your hospital wards. You make them work to earn their keep so less salaried staff is required. You charge absurd amounts for treatments you know don’t work so that you can fund research you refuse to share with those who need it.”

  It is perhaps not the wisest thing to insult the institution in
which I’m standing, but I’ve so much rage bottled up inside me about so many things, and it’s all pouring from me in a spurt, like shaken champagne violently uncorked.

  “In addition,” I say, “there are elements of feminine health that male physicians are not equipped to address and have made no attempt to understand or improve treatments for. Would you deny your mothers and sisters and daughters the most effective medical care?”

  “There are no treatments women are denied because of their sex,” the chairman interrupts. “We treat female patients here, the same as we treat men.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a lack of any research to provide relief from the debilitating pain that regularly restricts the most basic tasks of daily life for women.”

  “I don’t know what you’re referencing, madam,” the chairman says, his voice raised over mine.

  “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. The men all erupt into protestations and a fair number of horrified gasps. I swear one of them actually swoons at the mention of womanly bleeding. Higgins snatches his hand back from my shoulder.

  The chairman has gone bright red. He slams a book against the desk, trying to cram a lid over the Pandora’s box I have flung open. “Miss Montague, we’ll hear no more protestations from you. Based on your insubstantial and, frankly, hysterical case made before us today, I could not in good conscience allow you to enroll as a student here. You can see yourself out, or I’ll have Higgins escort you.”

  I want to stay—I want to keep fighting them. I want to be allowed to finish the points upon my list. I want to tell them how I stole medical treaties from the bookshop in Chester because the seller wouldn’t let me buy them, how I cut the pages out so carefully and reconstructed them into the binding of Eliza Haywood’s amatory fiction to hide what I was actually reading after my mother found a copy of Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals in my bedroom and thrown it in the fire without a word to me. How sometimes the only reason I feel like I belong to myself and not the world is because I understand the way blood moves through my body.

  I also want to cry, or shout that I hope all their genitals sprout wings and fly away, or perhaps travel back in time to the start of the meeting and go about this whole thing differently. I want to shut up the small, nasty voice in my head whispering that maybe they’re right and maybe I am unsuited for this and maybe I am hysterical, because even though I don’t think I am, it’s hard to be raised in a world where you’re taught to always believe what men say without doubting yourself at every step.

  Before Higgins can at last get a good grip on my arm, I push past him, not waiting for Monty or looking backward at the governors or the Great Hall. I’ve never wanted to be away from somewhere so badly in all my life.

  Outside, the winter air is a welcome slap across my burning face. I plow through the hospital courtyard, past the line at the dispensary and the nurses emptying sludgy buckets into the gutter, until I’m through the gates and out on the street. The cold has pried the tears from my eyes, though it’s easier to blame them on the winter than humiliation. I stop on the pavement so suddenly that I force a sedan to redirect its course. A dog on the lead of a vagrant growls at me.

  I pull my sleeves up over my hands and press them against my face, my nails digging hard into my forehead. A gust of wind carries a sprinkling of 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.

  Running footsteps slap the stones behind me. I drop my hands from my face as Monty comes barreling out of the gates, stopping short when he realizes I haven’t made it any farther than that. My cloak and muff, abandoned back in the Great Hall, are slung over his arm. He extends them to me, and when I don’t move to take them, he makes an awkward toss of the cloak around my shoulders. He starts to wedge the muff in between my elbows, rethinks it when he realizes how close this puts him to accidentally grabbing my breast, and instead lets his hands fall, the muff hanging limp at his side.

  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.

  “Well,” Monty says at last, then again, “Well. That didn’t quite go as planned.”

  “It went exactly as I planned,” I say, my voice a snap like a rib cracking.

  “Really? That was your ideal scenario?”

  “I said what I wanted to.” I snatch my muff from him and shove my hands into it. “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, 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.”

  I swipe the back of my hand over my eyes, knocking my spectacles askew. I want so badly to be away from here, but I’ve got nowhere to run to. Not back to their flat, too small for me to have a good, private cry. Even the fact that it’s their flat reminds me how much more together my brother’s life is than mine. Not back to Edinburgh, into the arms of a man who smells like bread and aniseed and says he likes me for my spirit but wants it broken just enough that he can take me out in public. Not back to my parents’ house, where I grew up unacknowledged by anyone unless it was to voice some disapproval for the way I dressed and spoke and brought books with me to parties. For all my efforts, I haven’t even a bed of my own to throw myself upon and sob.

  “Miss Montague,” someone says behind me, and I turn too quickly, for a tear rips itself loose from my eye and sets a course down my cheek.

  One of the governors is standing behind me—the man with the ill-fitting wig who gave me an eyebrow wiggle at the mention of Dr. Platt. His cloak is thrown over his arm and he’s breathing fast, a bit of a wheeze to his lungs that sounds like a lingering winter cold.

  I can feel that tear sitting against the corner of my mouth, and I’m not certain if wiping it away will make its presence more or less noticeable, so I leave it there. “Good day, sir.”

  He scrubs his hands together, an uncertain gesture that seems to be both an attempt to generate warmth and also just something to do. “That was quite a scene,” he says, and my heart sinks.

  “You don’t have to put it like that, mate,” Monty interrupts. He’s reaching out for me again, like he intends to put a protective and brotherly arm around my shoulders. I glare at him, and he turns it into brushing some invisible dust off my arm.

  “My apologies.” The governor extends a hand to me. “Dr. William Cheselden.”

  “Oh.” In spite of how sour I’m feeling toward all men in medicine, I go a bit light-headed at hearing the name. “I’ve read your paper on lithotomy.”

  “Have you?” He looks surprised, as though my entire presentation in the Great Hall was a fabrication. “What did you think of it?”

  “I think your method is undeniably better for removing bladder stones,” I reply, then add, “but I wonder why you wouldn’t devote more energy to the study of how to reduce their occurrence altogether rather than removing them once they’ve already caused pain.”

  He stares at me, his mouth slightly open and his head canting to the side. I’m ready to turn and walk away, nursing the satisfaction that I was able to tell off at least one of the Saint Bart’s governors. But then he smiles. “You subscribe to Alexander Platt’s school of preventative medicine?”

  “Empha
tically,” I reply. “Though I’ve had very little chance to apply anything practically.”

  “Of course.” He slaps his gloves against his palm, then says, “I wanted to offer my apologies for the ungentlemanly way you were treated just now. 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. So first, my apologies.”

  I nod, not sure what more I can say other than “Thank you.”

  “Second, I wish to offer you a few suggestions.”

  “Suggestions?” I repeat.

  “If your heart is set upon studying medicine, you might seek an apprenticeship with an herbalist or a midwife.”

  “I’m not interested in either of those subjects.”

  “But they are”—he drags out his thought with a hum through pursed lips, then finishes—“adjacent to medicine.”

  “So is body snatching, and yet you aren’t suggesting I become a grave robber.”

  The tip of his nose is going red from the cold. “Perhaps employment as a nurse at the hospital, then. They’re always looking for young women here, and at Bethlem. I’d be happy to put in a word.”

  I fold my arms. “You mean spooning soup into mouths of invalids and sweeping up the wards after the surgeons walk through it?” I had not woken today thinking I would get in an argument with a famous physician, but if I wanted to cook for men, I’d have stayed in Edinburgh and married Callum. “I don’t want to be a midwife. Or a nurse.”

  “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.”

  He sighs, though it comes out round with a chuckle. “It’s a shame you weren’t here a few weeks ago, Miss Montague. I would have handed you off to Alexander Platt. You two would get on famously.”

  Even knowing that it is anatomically impossible in relation to my continued state of living, I swear my heart actually stops. “Alexander Platt . . . as in the author of Treaties on the Anatomy of Human Bones?” As in Alexander Platt, my idol, the working-class surgeon among all these wigged fops who man the hospitals. Alexander Platt, who was discharged from his post as a navy surgeon for his tireless campaign for anatomical dissections to better understand what killed men on the sea. Alexander Platt, who cut his teeth and dirtied his hands walking hospital wards in the French Antilles before he ever was allowed to set foot in an Edinburgh hospital. Alexander Platt, whose work on arsenate poisoning earned him a spot as a visiting lecturer in Padua when he was just twenty-two. Alexander Platt, who had proved one did not need money or a title to be a physician—just a good brain and a determination to use it.