The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(6)
I could do much worse than a kind man.
The scent of sugar and wood smoke starts to return to the room as Callum smothers the ovens, drowning out the faint hint of blood that still lingers, sharp and metallic as a new sewing needle. I do not want to spend the rest of my life smelling sugar. 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.
Fleeing to London had truly been a fiction, but suddenly it begins to unspool in my head. London isn’t a medical hub like Edinburgh, but there are hospitals and plenty of physicians who offer private classes. There’s a guild. None of the hospitals or private offices or even barbaric barber surgeons on the Grassmarket have allowed me to get a toe in their door. But the hospitals in London don’t know my name. I’m smarter now, after a year of rejection—I’ve learned not to walk in with pistols drawn, but rather to keep them hidden in my petticoats with a hand surreptitiously upon the heel. This time, I will approach stealthily. Find a way to make them let me in before I ever have to show my hand.
And what is the point of having a fallen gentleman in the city for a brother if I don’t take advantage of his gentlemanly hospitality?
London
2
Moorfields is a stinking, rotting neighborhood that greets me like a fist to the teeth. The noise is fantastic—sermons of preachers damning the poor from street corners argue with screams from the brothels. Cattle bellow as they’re herded through the road to market. Tinkers call for pots to mend. Vendors sell oysters, nuts, apples, fish, turnips—new wares every few steps, all of them oily and all of them shouted about. I’m ankle-deep in mud all the way from the stagecoach stop, the thick, greasy sort that traps carts and steals shoes. Dead cats and rotten fruit bob up from the quagmire, and the thick haze of smoke and gin makes the air feel gauzy. It’s miraculous that I do not have my pockets picked on the walk and will be equally miraculous if I ever manage to scrape all the mud and offal off the soles of my boots.
My brother, always one for histrionics, has made his fall into poverty as dramatic as possible.
Even as I mount the stairs of his building, I’m not certain what emotion is most strongly associated with the impending reunion with Monty. We parted on good terms—or if not good, at least good-adjacent—but only after a lifetime of sniping at each other like feral foxes. And fencing for soft underbellies is a hard habit to break. We’ve both said enough unkind things to each other that would justify a reluctance on his part to greet me with warmth.
So it is unexpected that my first reaction upon seeing his face when he opens the door is perhaps closest cousin to fondness. This miserable year apart has made me terribly soft.
What he offers back is shock. “Felicity.”
“Surprise!” I say weakly. Then I throw my hands in the air like it’s some sort of celebration and try not to regret coming here at all. “Sorry, I can go.”
“No, don’t . . . Dear Lord, Felicity!” He grabs my arm as I turn, pulling me back to him and then into an embrace, which I don’t know what to do with. I consider trying to pry myself free, but it will likely be over faster if I don’t resist, so I stand, stiff-armed and chewing the inside of my cheek.
“What are you doing here?” He pushes me back to arm’s length for a better look. “And you’re so tall! When did you get so tall?”
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.
His hug prevented me from getting a good look at him until he stepped backward to assess my height, and I examine him in return. He’s gotten thinner—that’s the first thing I notice. Thin in a way that can no longer be described as willowy, but rather the sort that comes from not having enough to eat. He’s paler as well, though that’s less alarming—the last time we saw each other we’d just finished a stretch in the Cyclades islands so we were both of us brown as nuts. The short, bleak days that populate London in the winter have made it impossible not to notice the scars on his face, far more livid than I expected. 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.
“Here, come inside.” Monty ushers me into the flat, floorboards protesting more loudly than I feel they should while still maintaining structural stability. I haul myself and my knapsack over the threshold.
The flat is crowded as a party. There’s a washbasin balanced atop a set of trunks stacked on each other that seem to be functioning as both storage and a dining table, bumping knees with a sooty stove that looks like it’s pushing down the floor. I consider taking off my boots but decide I’d rather not risk trodding these boards sock-footed for fear of a splinter impaling me.
Monty steps into the middle of what can be generously termed the front room, though there’s only a thin partition to designate its edges. “I know it’s shit,” he says before I have to come up with a compliment that is actually a lie. “But it’s our shit. So long as we pay the rent. Which we have. Mostly. Only one close call so far. And we have a stove, which is grand. And there are significantly fewer cockroaches than there were in the summer. More mice now, but fewer cockroaches.” He does a little victorious gesture with his hands clasped above his head. “Here, Percy’s in bed. Come say your hallos. I think he’s still awake.”