The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(29)
Our journey from Calais to Stuttgart is done in crowded diligences that hop from city to city along rutted roads, close quarters our only barrier against the cold. I may wear holes in my cloak for all the scrubbing up and down arms I have done, and I fear for my already deteriorating posture, for with every passing mile I feel more and more concave, my shoulders pulling over my knees, my back in a half moon, with my cloak tented around me.
We sleep mostly on the coaches, only two nights in roadside inns, where Sim and I are forced to separate because of our respective skin colors, and while I am opposed to inequality in all forms, it’s the only time we have apart all the while we’re on the road, and it’s not unwelcome. Sim is a quiet companion. She doesn’t seem to need the company of books or chatter to find diligence journeys bearable. She doesn’t fill silence with conversation unless I initiate it. She lets me talk to most of the ticket clerks and innkeepers and diligence drivers, both of us knowing that most would be even less forthcoming to an African woman than they are to a fair-skinned one—and I have to field my share of questions about who I’m traveling with and where’s my chaperone and why it is I’m going anywhere with just a maid hardly older than me. I can see the hard line of her jaw tense every time I step up instead of her, but neither of us says anything about it.
When we reach Stuttgart—a quaint Germanic town with half-timbered houses crowded around squares, all draped in a gentle cloak of new snow—I get the Hoffmans’ address from the records office, while Sim finds a dressmaker who can fix me something that will be appropriate for wedding festivities but in a forgettable-enough color that no one will notice repeat wearings.
We start out on foot for the address several miles outside of town. The countryside is heavily wooded, but the austerity of winter has rendered the trees no more than rickety silhouettes, their tops wrapped in thorny mistletoe. We pass a farmhouse with a thin drizzle of smoke rising from its chimney and a stork nested against its shingles. The thin layer of snow coating the earth has been trampled to mud and turned to ice, so that the ground looks bruised and worn. It all seems a charcoal drawing of a landscape.
“How do you know her?” Sim asks as we walk. Her breath is coming out in short, white puffs against the air. “Miss Hoffman,” she qualifies when I don’t answer right away. “Because so far you’ve only spoken of the doctor she’s marrying.”
“We grew up together,” I reply, for it seems the simplest answer.
It does not satisfy Sim. “Were you close?”
Close seems too small a word for my single childhood friend; 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. Then Dr. Bess Hippocrates, when I started reading on my own. Then Dr. Helen von Humboldt. I had a hard time committing to a make-believe persona, but Johanna was always Miss Glass, the fearless adventurer who often had to be saved—usually from the grievous injuries her bravery and fondness for risk brought upon her—by my level-headed doctor, who would then advise her to act with more prudence before they set off on their next wild adventure.
“She’ll remember me,” I say to Sim.
I’m just not sure Johanna will remember any of those childhood games. They’re all obscured now by the long, lean shadow of our sour parting. The three years that stretched between then and now feel impossibly vast as we turn up the drive of the house.
Haus Hoffman is painted the bright pink of grapefruit pulp, with gold-and-white trimming and shingles in the same shades capping it like a crown. It looks made of cake and frosting, an extravagant birthday treat that will leave your teeth aching from the sweetness. The drive is split by a fountain, frozen in repose, the hedges rimming it bare as the trees but still imposing.
It has been so very easy to divorce Johanna from this scheme. I had enough to think about aside from her—Alexander Platt, whatever the crown and cleaver upon Sim’s arm means, and why she is so desperate for a spot in this house. But as we climb the drive, knapsacks thumping in time against our backs, I think, for the first time, of the next few weeks in their entirety, without skipping over the part where I must see Johanna again.
I don’t know what I’ll say. I don’t know if I want to apologize, or if I want her to.
We are a bedraggled pair that pulls the bell chord—far rougher around the edges than is likely to create a believable image of a rich English girl come from boarding school to her best friend’s wedding, attended by her maid.
“What’s your surname again?” Sim asks, both of us staring at the door.
“Montague. Why?”
“I’m going to introduce you.”
“No, let me do the talking.”
“It makes more sense—”
She breaks off as the door opens. A butler greets us, a tall, aging gent with more hair in his ears than atop his head. He looks wrung out and put out and like he’ll fall for nothing.
I have learned that men respond best to nonthreatening women whose presence and space in the world does not somehow imperil their manhood, and so, as much as it pains me, I put on a smile so big it hurts my face and try to think like Monty, which is infuriating.