The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(31)
“I’d make it count even if I had twenty, thank you.”
“And you wonder why I worry about you charming your way into a wedding party,” she murmurs, and I truly cannot tell if she’s about to smile or grimace.
The butler returns before I can reply, leaving Sim aggravatingly with the last word. I’m escorted into a sitting room off the entryway and seated upon a sofa. I try to neither settle too far back upon it nor sit too close to the edge, wishing for perhaps the first time that I actually had sat a lesson at the finishing school my father was determined to send me to just to better create the illusion of ladyship. There are so many invisible layers to decorum that you don’t think of until you’re staring them down across a fancy parlor. I have never done any sofa sitting in my life that felt as though it mattered as much as this.
There are footsteps in the hallway, and I stand, expecting the butler, but instead in prances a dog the size of the sofa, gangly limbs and swinging jowls and a coiffure of a tail that bobs above him like a feather in a jaunty cap. His coat is shiny with care, blemished only by the bubbles of saliva gathering in the folds of his lips.
The dog bounds over to me and presses his head into my knees with such enthusiasm that I promptly sit down again on the sofa, which only delights him further, for it makes my face more accessible to his mouth. He leaps at me with what I guess from his tail and perked ears is joy at the prospect of a new friend, but he’s overly zealous and comes at me with his enormous jaws gaping wide. I shriek without meaning to, though in my defense, what rational being wouldn’t when approached by an open mouth in which your whole head could fit?
“Maximus, down! Off, get off her! Max, come here!”
The dog is wrangled off me, our only connection the long strings of drool that run between his mouth and my shoulders.
“Sorry, sorry, he’s harmless. He’s such a big love; he just wants to be chums with everyone and doesn’t seem to realize he’s bigger than they are.”
I look up, and she looks up at the same time from where she’s crouched on the floor with her arms around the neck of her dog, and there is Johanna Hoffman.
It is not so long that we have been apart, but in this moment, our two years of separation feel more enormous than all the years we spent together. The difference between fourteen and sixteen feels like centuries, time the greatest distance that can stretch between two people. There is no chance I would not have recognized her, but somehow she’s a different person from my memories. Her hair is the same brown, so dark it’s almost black, eyes hooded and deep green, but it’s like she’s better settled into her own skin. She was a round child with spotty cheeks adolescence wasn’t kind to, but either time or expensive milk baths or a very well-laced set of silk stays has made her into a Renaissance muse, shapely and curved in a way my stocky, geometric frame never will be. Even under the wide panniers at her waist, her hips swing. Her face is powdered white with just the faintest hint of rouge, as though she has been caught in a maidenly blush.
Or maybe she’s blushing in earnest to see me. I might be as well. For even as I look at her, in a bright, dreamy blue day dress with an embroidered bodice and a tiered skirt and two strings of pearls around her neck, all I can think of is the girl who used to walk barefoot with me in streams, never caring if her hems muddied, who grabbed a snake by the throat and carried him off the road to save him from being bisected by a carriage. Who went with me to the butcher’s shop to watch them empty entrails from the pigs and cows and helped me understand how everything inside of a thing wound together. Johanna Hoffman had never minded dirt under her fingernails, until suddenly she had, and that was when she had left me behind in favor of company she had decided was more appropriate for her new self.
A part of me, I realize as she stands, one hand resting upon her massive dog’s head (the only sound is him panting like a windstorm), had hoped that I would find her with muddy knees from running through the grounds, shoes worn through at the toes, her hair studded with twigs and her pockets full of the baby birds she’d rescued when they fell from their nests.
But instead, with her hair curled and her breasts pushed up, she’s the cream puff that I cut all ties with.
“Felicity,” she says, and zounds, I had forgotten how high her voice is—it was a singsong soprano even when we were children, but in that excessive dress, it feels put on, like she’s playing up the girlish simper. I scrunch up my forehead without meaning to, then remember I am trying to win her over. I am trying to remind her we were friends.
Dear Lord, were we?
“Johanna,” I say in return, and I make myself smile, because she is marrying Dr. Platt, and I want to work for Dr. Platt, and there’s no chance I’ll ruin that by making a bad impression on the person who likely has the most influence over him. Or rather, I’ll try not to ruin things any more than I did two years ago. “It’s so good to see you.”
She does not return the smile. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m . . . what am I . . . that’s actually rather a good story. So since we last saw each other . . . or rather, since you left . . . your father died, which is . . . I’m . . . Sorry, is your dog all right?” I’m trying not to stare at the saliva foaming upon his lips, but it’s impossible not to. “He’s breathing rather heavily.”
Johanna doesn’t look away from me, nor does she uncuff the beastie. “He’s fine. That’s just how he sounds.”