The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

by Mackenzi Lee

  “Did the child say where the diligence was headed?” I shake my head. “Do you know where she would have gone? Or why?”

  My mind flits briefly to the night before, the letter clutched between us and Johanna furious and serious and entirely not herself. But there’s no proof that was due to anything other than her learning that I had set her up to be robbed. “No, sir.”

  He nods, tugging the sash on his banyan tighter. “I’ll have the staff search the house and grounds, to be certain, and alert her uncle. Let me dress, and then you and I can go to Stuttgart and see if we can find out where she’s gone.”

  Platt sends the butler to the chapel to let the priest know the service may be delayed, while I do my best to shake off the bridal attendants beginning to assemble in the parlor. By the time Platt and I depart for Stuttgart, Johanna’s uncle and the groundskeeper have his hunting dogs on leads, ready to launch a search of the woods that frame the house.

  Platt and I take a carriage from the house to the diligence stop in the city, where the clerk confirms that a young woman and her giant dog arrived early this morning seeking a departure. However, while the dog was sent back to the house with the girl due to not fitting comfortably inside the carriage, Johanna got herself on the first southbound coach this morning from Frankfurt to Genoa. The clerk counts out the next stops for us on his fingers. “Rottenburg, Albstadt, Memmingen, Ravensberg, Schaffhausen, Zurich . . .”

  Zurich. I can see it on the seal of the letter I tore from Sim. Did Johanna tell Platt about Sim? Did it matter at all to her? Did she dismiss it when he interrupted us because it didn’t matter, or because she didn’t want him to know? Do I have a hand in her sudden departure, or is it just a severe manifestation of nerves before a wedding and my betrayal was just an enormous coincidence?

  What were you thinking, Johanna?

  Outside the travel office, Platt slaps his gloves against his hands absently, blowing a long, milky breath into the air before he declares, “I’m going to send word to the chapel that we’re postponing the ceremony, and then follow the route. See if I can’t catch up with the diligence or find her at any of the stops. She can’t have gone far; she’ll miss all the comforts she’s used to within the day.”

  I’m not certain he’s right about that. Johanna Hoffman may seem like a girl who would be out of her depth in a mud puddle, but I don’t think she’d run without a plan. Or at the least, a very good reason, though I can’t fathom what that might be.

  “I think . . .” I start, but falter when he looks at me. His gaze is hawk sharp, and the chance of the letter I intercepted being in any way tied to her flight is so thin it feels likely to snap as soon as it’s tested. I take a deep breath. “She may be heading to Zurich.”

  “What makes you think that?” he asks.

  “Last night, I caught my maid robbing her. She tried to take a letter, and the seal was from Zurich.”

  “A letter? Do you have it with you?” I shake my head. “Do you remember anything about it?”

  “Kunstkammer Staub. That was on the seal.” I trip so badly over the pronunciation I blush, suddenly feeling foolish not just for my poor German but also for thinking this was worth mentioning. “It may be nothing.”

  “Or perhaps not.” He rubs a hand over his chin. He hasn’t shaved, and his cheeks are peppered with coarse stubble. “We should go to Zurich. I’ve a house rented there for our honeymoon, so at least we’ll have somewhere to set up.”

  “We?” I repeat.

  “Ah, yes.” He tucks his hands into his coat pockets with a smile. “I was going to speak to you of this last night, but we never found each other. I gave quite a lot of thought to how I might best use you, and I can certainly find space for you on my expedition staff.”

  It’s like the whole world shifts. The light gets brighter. The snow whiter, the sky glacier blue. The bitter wind clattering shop signs against their chains quiets. For one quiet moment, the world is still, and it is mine. My legs feel firmly planted under me for the first time in years. Maybe my whole life. Nothing has been ruined, no rift in the earth opened between me and the greatest living physician. I left out the damning details of how Sim got into their house, but either he didn’t notice or didn’t care. He still wants me.

  Platt pulls his scarf up over his nose, squinting down the street and seemingly oblivious to the fact that in one sentence he has given me a chance I would have cut off my own feet and eaten them raw for. “Though this damn expedition will never get off the ground if we can’t find Miss Hoffman.”

  The wind picks back up, and a spray of muddy snow splatters across the hem of my dress as a passing carriage strikes a rut. “Why not?”

  He’s pulled out his snuffbox and tipped a thimbleful onto the back of his hand, shielding it from the wind with a cupped palm, but he pauses, eyes flickering to me. Then he says, “What sort of man would leave the country while his fiancée is missing?” He takes a snort and shakes his head a few times. “Please come. You’re her friend; she trusts you. Whatever has inspired this hysteria, perhaps you can talk her down from it. Miss Montague, I need your help.”

  It was not quite the context in which I had imagined Alexander Platt would ask me for my help. In my fantasies, it was from the other side of an operating table, in a time of crisis, with everyone panicking over a tangled intestine no one could unravel until I stepped up. But I’ll take whatever scraps I’m thrown. No matter how tired I am of not having a seat at the table.

  “Let’s find Johanna,” I say.

  Platt wastes no time on public transport. He hires us a carriage and a driver and foots every bill for accommodations. Which is a vast improvement upon my original plan of limping back to England by way of public coaches and sleeping at the sheltered stops along the way. And though I am not particularly fussy and have done my share of sleeping in open fields with only my own two arms to pillow my head, I prefer beds and roofs and heated foot warmers in an enclosed carriage when they are made available to me.

  Platt is a gentleman. He doesn’t sit on the same side of the bench as I do and lets me ride forward while he sits with his back to the coachman. He takes quite a lot more snuff than I have ever seen a man ingest, and I lived with Monty—though of all his vices, Monty was never one for snuff. Platt snorts it like clockwork, a deep inhale through the nose every quarter hour, and when we stop for the night, he leaves our inn and ventures out into the frigid winter to purchase more. The next morning over breakfast, he adds laudanum to his coffee and complains of the poor quality of tobacco to be found in this town.

  It reminds me of my brother, who, before our Tour, would take brandy in the mornings after a night drinking himself sick at the clubs, smelled of whiskey more often than aftershave, and who, had he ever dueled, he would likely have been saved from a fatal bullet by the flask in his breast pocket. I know now why: after years of abuse at the hands of our father, he had felt himself unable to experience the world sober. It makes me wonder what demons Alexander Platt keeps barricaded away with that small box of shimmering powder.

  I am not certain how to speak to him, and so at first we do very little of that. I want to ask him everything—about his work, his research, the wards he’s walked and the ships he’s sailed on, what he thinks about Robert Hook’s presentation of artificial respiration before the Royal Society, whether he agrees with Archibald Pitcairne that fevers are best cured by evacuating medicines, because that had always seemed overly simplistic to me—but none of this seems appropriate to ask a man whose bride has fled the altar. Even if he is one’s hero.

  But one can only spend so long bookless in the company of another human before one feels compelled to make conversation. Particularly when one of those humans has just offered the other an opportunity that has her stoked as a just-fed fire.

  “So about the position.”

  I say it so fast and with so little grace that he looks up from notations he’s been making in a small book with a frown. “Pardon me?”

&nb
sp; I swallow. “I was hoping. Maybe. You could tell me more about the sort of work I’ll be doing for you.”

  “Work?” he repeats.

  “The position with your expedition.”

  “Oh, of course.” He closes his book around the pencil, marking his place. “While I’m away in the Barbary States, it would helpful to have someone at my office in London to keep track of my correspondence and finances, transcribe notations sent from abroad. I can’t pay you much, unfortunately—but you know how these things are, always so short on funds.” I don’t know, actually. I am not sure what things he’s referring to—medicine, or expeditions, or any position that’s held by a woman.

  “So I’d be your secretary,” I say.

  “Assistant,” he corrects. When I don’t reply, he adds, “You look disappointed.”

  “It’s not quite what I had in mind,” I say, as tactful a response as I can muster. “I was hoping for something more practical.”

  He’s fishing in his jacket again, and I expect to see the snuffbox, but instead it’s a handkerchief. He blows his nose, then, when he finds me still silent, laughs. “What more would you want?”

  “I’d like to study,” I reply. “And work. Not just take notes for someone who is.”

  He swipes a thumb over his chin, then folds his handkerchief with such precision it makes me want to scoot away from him, though there’s nowhere to go in this carriage. “Miss Montague,” he says, “let me be clear about something. You’ll not be given many chances for employment in this field because of the inferiority of your sex. I’m kind enough to offer you this when most physicians wouldn’t entertain the idea of a woman in their office managing their research. This is not an opportunity you’ll be offered again, from anyone.”

  It is a blunt battering ram of a tone. The sort that makes me suddenly aware that it is just the two of us in this small space on this empty country road. He leans back, kicking one foot up on the opposite knee with such grandness that his toe knocks into my shin. “Might I suggest some gratitude? It’s far more becoming.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I hate that I am apologizing to him when it is he who kicked me, he who has made me feel that I’m in the wrong for daring to ask for something. Not even something—for anything. He has me apologizing for asking for the minimum that is granted to most men.

  “You needn’t apologize for ambition,” he says, flipping his book open again and taking up his pencil. “Just know that most men will find it unseemly in a woman.”

  I turn away from him and stare out the window, watching the white countryside pass us by and trying to resist the urge to open the door, step out onto the road, and make my own way rather than spend a minute longer in this coach.

  “Once we get to Zurich,” he says, and his voice feels floating and far away, “you’ll help me find Johanna. Won’t you, Felicity?”

  “Yes, sir,” I reply, and the conversation between my hero—your hero, your idol, your favorite doctor, I remind myself over and over in time with the clattering carriage wheels—whittles into nothing.

  Zurich

  11

  The house in Zurich is ready for us when we arrive. Well, not us. Johanna and Platt. It’s a modest townhouse near the shore of the lake, not so close that you can hear the port, but not so far away as to be overly fashionable. The staff is just a cook, a housekeeper, and a valet, who all do an admirable job of hiding their surprise when Dr. Platt introduces me as Miss Montague rather than Mrs. Platt.

  We arrive late in the evening, the streetlamps already glowing and the lake a glassy reflection of the sky. The housekeeper takes me up to my room, brings me supper on a tray, and heats coals for my bed warmer before leaving me to sleep. I’m flattened from the traveling, but the house keeps me awake—perhaps it is just being unaccustomed to strange sounds of a strange place, and a strange city as well. Perhaps it’s the way I can hear Dr. Platt in the sitting room below me, his footsteps on the floorboards, the clink of a decanter against the rim of a glass more times than seems advisable.

  I drift off without realizing it, but I’m woken abruptly by the sound of my bedroom door opening, and the faint beam of a lantern being unsheathed, which disappears almost at once. There are a few rough footsteps, then my bedroom door bangs shut, and an unfamiliar male voice asks in English, “Who is that?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Platt hisses. “God, you didn’t have to barge in.”

  “I knew you were lying. I knew it.”

  “I didn’t lie—”

  “That’s not your wife, Alex.”

  I don’t move, debating whether they’ll be back, whether it is wiser for me to continue to feign sleep or to bolt suddenly awake. The intensity of their voices—and that they are two men and I a woman alone—sits deep in my bones like a bad fever.

  “So where is Mrs. Platt?” the stranger’s voice asks, farther away now. The stairs creak beneath their feet.

  Their voices peter out as they get farther down the stairs. I sit up, straining to hear. I am no dropper of eaves, but it seems in my best interest, and Johanna’s, to know what is being said about us behind closed doors. Or, rather, in the hallways outside them.

  I scramble out of bed and to the door, then ease myself out as quietly as possible and glide sock-footed to the top of the stairs. From that vantage point, I can see across the entryway and into a sliver of the sitting room where they’ve taken up residence. From where he’s seated on the couch, Platt’s shoulder and the back of his head are barely visible. “. . . in the city, somewhere,” he’s saying. “She’s also not Mrs. Platt yet.”

  “Dear God, Alex. I thought you could handle this.”

  “I can—I am. Handling it.”

  “What was wrong with taking her to Poland?” the stranger asks. His accent is English, with a crisp precision that reeks of hunting parties and Cambridge classrooms.

  “She would have suspected a proposition of elopement—” Platt starts, but the man cuts him off.

  “What do you do if she gets there before you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ll never let her near the archive. She needs me—”

  The second gentleman cuts Platt off with a growling sigh. He’s standing too far away for me to see him, but I get a brief view from the waist down as he crosses in front of the fireplace—a thick wool gray coat and tall boots crusted with salt. Sailor’s boots, but far too fine for a seaman. They look like pieces of a uniform.

  There’s a strangled silence. Platt is staring at the floor, his elbows on his knees. “I will fix this,” he says at last.

  “You’d best.” The decanter clicks again. Platt reaches out for the glass he’s offered. “So,” the second man asks, “who is the girl in your bedroom, if it isn’t Miss Hoffman?”

  My heartbeat jumps, and I lean forward just as Platt settles back into his seat, his elbow perched on the armrest at such a jaunty angle that some of the liquor sloshes out of his glass. “You won’t believe me if I tell you. Do you know Lord Henri Montague?”

  My fists close on the banister, the hard ridges of the wood jutting into my palm.

  “The English earl?” the second man asks.

  “The same.” Platt tips a finger over his shoulder, toward the stairs above which he thinks I’m sleeping. “That’s his child.”

  “What?”

  “His kidnapped girl in the flesh. His Lordship has been telling the whole peerage that his children were taken by slavers in the Mediterranean, but as it happens, they ran away.” He takes a loud slurp from his drink, then lets it dangle between his thumb and forefinger. “Can you imagine the scandal if the truth got out?”

  My palms start to sweat against the banister. Monty and I both wrote to our parents when we first resolved not to return home after our Tour, me to a stifled existence and a loveless marriage, Monty to likely the same, but with a good deal more damage from our father done to him along the way. And while we didn’t exactly send a forwarding address, Father’s lack of reply
had led Monty and me to optimistically agree that he had decided to quietly blot our names from the family tree, bet his estate upon the new baby son, and let us go our own ways. Apparently, he has taken a far more dramatic route, telling everyone we were taken by corsairs, and now Platt has the evidence to prove otherwise.

  In the parlor, I hear the second man say, “You’re going to kidnap the daughter of a lord and blackmail him?”

  “There is no kidnapping,” Platt replies. “She came willingly. Miss Montague will help me find Johanna and see us married. Then we collect Sybille Glass’s work and send the ladies back to England, and Montague’s help will keep us afloat and see Herr Hoffman paid for his ships. See? All in my control, Fitz.”

  I should be afraid—I’m certainly trembling. 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. And that has my vision spotting with anger. Anger for being used. For being thought foolish. For knowing that he’d likely never thought me capable of medical work; he’d just recognized my name.

  I need to leave this house at once and find Johanna and warn her that whatever love Platt professed to have for her is false, and the wedding is a sham. If it was Platt she ran from, I’ve led him straight to her door. She may think she’s safe until the moment his jaws snap closed around her, all because of me.

  The conversation in the parlor has moved to sailing, and if I do not leave now, I may not get another chance. I slip back into my room and change from my nightdress into my tartan skirt and bodice. They’re reeking from the travel, the hem muddied up to the knees and the material crusty with sweat that has dried and then dampened over and over again as we went from stifling carriages to frigid station stops. My cloak is in a closet below stairs, and I do not dare creep down for it, nor do I dare bolt into the cold without it. Instead, I strip the quilt off the bed and wrap that around my shoulders.

  Then, the much more complex task at hand: the actual escape. Ice on the window cracks when I shove it open, and a gust of wind pushes back so hard I almost lose my grip. The pelmet curtain is sucked out, and the shutters clap against the side of the house. Below is an unhelpful drop to the street—no footholds, ledges, or loose bricks promised me by every fiction book I have ever read. Not even a convenient hedge to drop into.