The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(32)
“Consumptive?”
“Alpenmastiffs have a lot of excess skin to breathe through.” She reaches down and swipes a handful of slobber ribbons from under his mouth, and for a moment, there she is—my best friend who loved animals and feared no mess. But then she looks around for something to wipe her hand upon and, finding nothing, waves it about with her fingers splayed until the butler appears with a handkerchief.
Then we’re alone again, staring. Each a ghost to the other.
“May I sit down?” I ask.
She gives me an indifferent shrug, so I resume my perch upon the couch. Max lunges forward, my face once again at the perfect angle for examining it with his tongue, but Johanna catches him by a roll of back fat—so many folds and so much hair I lose sight of her hand for a moment—and pulls him over with her to a chair, where she wraps her arms around his neck and rests her chin upon his head, pinning him in place. “What are you doing here?” she asks again, her eyes fixed on me.
“I’m here for your wedding.”
“I thought you might write.”
“I tried, but your gentleman said it didn’t arrive, so I expect a week after you’re wed you’ll get my missive about coming to your wedding—”
“I don’t mean about the wedding,” she interrupts. “I thought someday you might write to me. As a friend.”
A vein splits open inside me, guilt and hurt spilling out in equal measure. “I did,” I say. “About the wedding.”
She looks away, the tip of her tongue jutting out between her teeth. “How did you hear I was getting married?”
“Oh, you know, things travel around. Gossip and . . .” I stop. Johanna licks her lips. Max also licks his, tongue wrapping all the way around his nose. “I’ve been at school,” I say, which is the lie I decided upon, for it most closely aligns with what I am currently supposed to be doing—it’s unlikely that Johanna, so far from home, would have heard about my disappearance during my Tour, and even unlikelier that, had she known, she would have run to my father and put an X upon the map for him to mark my location. Most unlikely of all that he would care. But lies are easiest to believe—and to remember—when they bump against the truth. And school is a good excuse for my limited wardrobe.
“School?” She smiles, and it is the first time she’s looked like herself. “You finally got to go.”
“I mean, it’s not quite . . . yes.” It’s not worth digging into the injustice of the fact that the school I should currently be attending is one for manners and not medicine. “Yes, I got to go to school. And you . . . have a giant dog! And you’re getting married! That’s . . . a thing that is happening and that’s wonderful for you, it’s so wonderful. Just . . . wonderful. That we both got . . .”
“Got what we wanted,” she finishes for me.
Did we? I want to shout at her. Because once we wanted to go on an expedition together and collect previously unknown medicinal plants and species and bring them back to London to be cultivated and studied. I thought I had long ago cut Johanna from me like a cancer, but you cannot simply hack yourself apart in hopes of healing faster.
Best not to have friends at all, I remind myself. Best to explore the jungles alone.
I am unraveling, and Johanna is still staring at me like I’m a spider crawled up from the floorboards and inching toward her. What I would like to say is that I remember when she aspired to more than a rich husband and domestic bliss. I remember how she audaciously declared that she would be the first woman to present before the Royal Society. That she would go on expeditions. Bring new species home to England to study.
“I can’t wait to meet your fiancé!” I blurt. “Dr. . . .”
I fake a fumble for the name, like he hasn’t been a saint to me for years and like he’s definitely not the reason I’m here.
“Platt,” Johanna finishes for me. “Alexander Platt. You don’t have to pretend.”
“Pretend what?”
“That you don’t know who he is. You love his books.”
“You remember that?”
“You wanted me to name that kitten I found under our house Alexander Platt, even though she was a girl.”
“Alexander could be a . . . gender-neutral name.” I scratch the back of my neck. The collar of my dress feels very tight. I was hoping she had forgotten my obsession with Alexander Platt so that she could have no leverage against me. Knowing how much I want to meet him, how much I admire him, means she knows where to wound me. She knows how savage it would be to turn me out now. “How did you two meet?”
“He and my uncle are in business together.” She mashes her thumbs behind the dog’s ears, and he closes his eyes in bliss. “Dr. Platt is organizing a scientific expedition, and my uncle is providing the ship for the voyage. He came over for dinner one evening to discuss finances and I was just . . . smitten!” She throws her hands up in the air like she’s tossing confetti.
I wonder if it’s appropriate to ask how soon they’re leaving and what research he’s working on. All I want to ask about is Platt.
But then Johanna pulls in her cheeks too hard and bites down upon them so that she looks like a fish. It’s a nervous habit from childhood, one she used to do so often in the presence of her father that the insides of her cheeks would bleed. And for a moment, I’m ten years old again, and I know her as well as I know the sound of my own voice. As much as I had told myself over and over that I wasn’t here for Johanna, she didn’t matter, I am here only for Platt and don’t care what she thinks of me anymore, I suddenly find myself blurting, “I should have written.”