The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(44)

Max is barking. He’s also dancing around us with his haunches in the air and his front paws upon the ground like this is a game, cementing his status as the least effective guard dog of all time.

“We had a deal,” I say to Sim, my words coming out in short, sharp gasps. “Nothing . . . stolen.”

“Let go of me.” Sim is trying to claw her way to the doorway on her stomach, but I’m still attached to her waist and doing my best to snatch that letter from her. I manage to get my hands around one end, and I pull, hoping it might come free, but instead it rips. I’m thrown backward, half the letter—including the seal—crumpled and slobbery in my hand. Sim’s chin cracks the ground hard, but she’s up so fast it seems like she bounced. I’m still dazed from the fall as she opens the bedroom door and slips out.

I sit up, immediately greeted by a hard butt on the forehead from Max, who still thinks this romp is for his entertainment. I push him off, struggling to my feet, and smooth the scrap of my letter out against my dress. Between my damp hands, violent grip, and the fact that I am in possession of only half of it, the letter is entirely unreadable, but the seal has held well enough that I can make out the words Kunstkammer Staub, Zurich.

I don’t know what else she would have taken had I not walked in on her. But she was taking things. She is a thief. I let a thief into Johanna’s house. Doesn’t matter what she’s after or what she wants; I brought her here. From the moment she pulled the marlinespike on the sailor in London—perhaps even sooner—a part of me suspected it. But the bigger part of me ignored that entirely. She could have told me from the first word that she was here to slit someone’s throat in the dead of night, and I likely would have gone along with it because I would have turned a blind eye to anything for the chance to meet Alexander Platt. Primum non nocere. First, do no harm, that’s the oath. I can’t start down a path with those words in hand knowing that I stepped on Johanna to get there.

I need to warn her. I was a fool to bring Sim here. A fool to think she’d hold up her end of a hollow promise. But ambition can infect your sensibilities and poison them like a well. There’s a reason most geniuses have failed marriages and no friends.

I leave Max in the room and dash down the stairs. The Polterabend is spilling outside from the grand parlor in the back of the house. There are tables stacked with china to be ceremonially smashed, guests retrieving their dishes to be broken upon the stones outside. There is an excess of lamps to illuminate the cards and dice being played around the room, though hands are starting to be dropped and parties shuffled outside toward the traditional smashing, now that the bride has arrived. There’s a quartet playing in one corner. The violinist has legs too long for the small stool he’s been confined to, and they’re folded under him at an awkward crimp, one foot twisted almost impossibly around for balance, like an unstrung marionette that has landed in a tangle. I think of Percy and suddenly want to be home so much it hurts. Or not home so much as . . . I don’t know what I’m missing. It’s a queer thing, to have a vacant space inside you and not know what it is that carved out the absence.

There’s the crash of a dish prematurely broken out on the veranda, and a few people begin to howl with laughter. I follow the sound into the night, feeling so hot a cloak would have been redundant until the winter air gets its teeth in me and I shiver. Above me, the sky is murky with clouds, stars scattered between them like seashells on a beach.

On the veranda, everyone is wrapped in furs and velvet, some of them masked with feathers and scales painted or pasted over the frame. Others have the same feathers and scales pressed straight onto their faces like pox patches. Women have whole birds in their hair, wings attached to the sleeves of their dresses or the hems of their cloaks. The servants carrying lanterns are dressed in black feathers so that the lights look like they’re floating. The light flashes off the pottery everyone is holding, glazed and shimmering like cupped fireflies between their hands. Everything feels overwrought and overdrawn, too bright and too loud and too disorienting. No one looks like themselves, or even truly human.

I should be looking for Platt. He asked me to be here, told me he wanted to talk about my work and study. I should be thinking of myself and my future and my career.

But all I want to do is find Johanna.

I spot her talking to a man with octopus tentacles woven into his wig and a wineglass in each hand. In the silvery light of the lamps on the snow, she looks like a mermaid, or the figurehead of a ship, the sort of plump, heavenly siren that would have sailors throwing themselves into the sea at just a crook of her finger. The feathers sewn onto her dress move slowly in the breeze, like kelp underwater, and when she turns toward the faint light spilling from the house and tussling with the stars, the powder on her skin makes her cheeks sparkle.

She shrieks with delight when she sees me coming, like this is the first time we’ve seen each other all night—or perhaps simply as an excuse to abandon the man trying to force one of the glasses upon her—and holds out a hand for me to take. “Felicity! I’ve been looking for you! I’m sorry I left you with the dog; he didn’t give you any trouble, did he? Oh no, what happened to your dress?”

I pull the wilted sleeve up over my shoulder. It slips down again at once. “I need to talk to you,” I say. “Alone.”

“All right. I’ll be back, my Lord; don’t make a move until I return.” She taps the geriatric kraken’s nose with her fan, then lets me drag her away, up onto the porch and out of the circle of lantern light. “Do you think it looks all right?” she says as we go, trying to turn to get a look at the back of her dress. “I don’t think anyone can tell, but I can’t stop worrying about it.” I halt so abruptly she steps on the heel of my shoe and I almost stumble out of it. “What is it? What’s wrong?”