The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(11)
I don’t know who I am without this. That’s the truest thing I could say. Half my heart is this hunger. My being is constructed by an aching to know the answers to every mystery of the frail ligaments that connected us to life and death. That wanting feels a part of me. It has seeped into my skin like mercury injected into a vein to trace its shape through the body. One drop colored my whole being. It is the only way I can see myself.
This, I remind myself, is a fresh start. A new city. Another place to try again and prove that I deserve a spot in this world.
I write that at the top—not for the board, but a reminder to myself. You deserve to be here.
There’s a crash and a curse on the other side of the partition. I startle so fantastically that I accidentally poke the tip of the pencil all the way through the paper, skewering the final e in here. “Monty,” I hiss, peering out from behind the partition with my candle raised. I make out the shape of my brother, bent double massaging his kneecap, which, judging by the clatter, he slammed into the stove.
“This flat’s a bloody death trap,” he says, words fizzing through his clenched teeth. “What are you doing? It’s four in the morning.”
“I’m . . .” I look down at the paper mashed between my hands. “Thinking.”
“Can you think in bed with the light out so that I can sleep?”
“Yes, sorry.” I crease the paper and shove it into the pocket of my skirt hung upon the partition.
Monty watches me, one hand still rubbing his knee. “What were you writing?”
“Nothing of consequence.” The list suddenly feels silly and small, the sermon of an idealistic missionary who has yet to accept that no one cares about her gospel. “Just some notes for my appointment.”
“Are you nervous?”
“Of course not,” I reply. “Just wanted to be prepared.” I blow out the candle and return to bed before he can ask further. I can hear him rooting around the flat for several minutes longer, dressing for bed. He pauses on the other side of the screen, and I hear the crunch of unfolded paper. There’s a silence, then another rustle as it’s returned to its place.
I don’t get up, and he doesn’t say anything to me as he gropes his way to bed through the darkness and curls up on Percy’s other side. He’s snoring in minutes, but I lie awake for hours longer, counting the beats of my heart and repeating to myself over and over You deserve to be here.
When I wake again, the morning light flitting in through the cracks in the wall is the warm gold of a soft-boiled egg. At my side, Percy is curled up with his knees pulled to his chest and Monty’s head—still swathed in that ridiculous slab of a hat—resting on his chest. It’s the same way we sometimes slept on our Tour, the nights we all three shoved ourselves into lumpy beds in dodgy inns or laid out beneath the white poplars in farmer’s fields blushing with lavender.
I try to make my rising quiet, though the floorboards render that impossible. The whole flat seems to be conspiring against me, for I immediately run into the screen, and it nearly collapses. It’s a testament to how exhausted they both must be, for Monty continues to drool into Percy’s nightshirt, and Percy doesn’t stir.
There’s no room for true privacy in the tiny flat, and though I’ve shared tighter quarters with these two lads, I’m not about to strip to my skin in the middle of the room and pretend as though my modesty is as easy to put out of sight as it was when we were stowed away together in the bowels of a xebec. I manage to change into fresh underthings on the other side of the screen without disrobing entirely, though I bang my elbow hard at least three times on three separate things and almost tip over like a falling tree when I catch my toe in a hole in my petticoat. When I tie my pockets around my waist, I check to make certain the list is still there. It is, though in the right, rather than the left where I placed it. Monty remains a terrible thief.
The stove is still warm from the night before, but nowhere near enough for it to do anything useful like boil water for coffee or thaw me under my jumper. I throw on a pair of logs and blow until they catch, then wrap myself in my brother’s coat before crouching with my back to the belly of the stove, waiting for the heat to become too much to sit so close and listening for chimes down the road, though I know from the light it’s still early. But it’s more comfortable to worry about being late to the meeting than to worry about the meeting itself.
There’s a creak behind me, first from the bed ropes, then the floorboards, and Percy comes around the screen, wrapped in a battered dressing gown that looks as though it was made in the previous century for a man half his height. His hair is puffed up on one side and flat on the other, and his face is heavy, like he’s still waking himself. “Good morning,” he says. I press a finger to my lips with a meaningful look at where Monty is still asleep, now spread over the entirety of the bed like he was dropped there from a great height.
Percy waves me away. “He’s lying on his good ear. He’d sleep through the end of the world.”
“Oh. Well then. Good morning. Better today?”
“Much.” He sits down cross-legged in front of the stove, his shoulders curled toward its warmth. “Why are you up so early? I thought your meeting wasn’t until eleven.”
“Just gathering my thoughts.” I resist the urge to reach into my pocket for my list again. “You?”