The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee

Author:Mackenzi Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

12

The Kunstkammer is located on the Limmatquai, its back sloping into the river. The water froths fast and dark in the miserable weather. The sky is gray, and it snows with intermittent strength as we make the trek across the city, and when Johanna and I arrive at the collection, we are both soaked through our cloaks, mine borrowed from Johanna so I don’t damage our already shaky credibility with dodgy outerwear. A layer of snowflakes dust our shoulders like sugar atop a bun. Johanna made a valiant attempt to arrange her hair before we left that morning, and at her insistence I made a valiant attempt to help her, though was dismissed from my responsibilities when I stabbed her in the back of the head with a pin so hard it drew blood. In her flight from her father’s home, though she couldn’t bring her dog, she did bring a trunk’s worth of extravagant dresses, and a pink skirt hemmed with mint-colored ruffles peers out from under her cloak. In my plain Brunswick, I’m much more likely of the pair of us to be taken seriously by the men who dart behind the exhibits of bugs and stuffed animals here.

“I wish I had Max,” Johanna says as we cross the entryway of the cabinet to the ticket desk, eyeing the stuffed form of some kind of devilish-looking wild cat rearing over us from a pedestal in the center.

“I don’t think he’d win against that,” I say with a nod up at the cat.

“You’ve never seen him really go after a slipper,” she replies.

We step up behind a woman paying for admission for herself and a tiny boy with beautiful blond curls that have somehow thwarted the snow and remained perfectly ruffled. Johanna takes a long, tight breath, one hand pressed against her stomach. “I just always feel better with my dog.”

“Don’t be nervous,” I say. “You’ve got right on your side.”

“When has that ever mattered?” she murmurs.

The woman and the blond boy move away from the desk, and Johanna and I step up to the attendant. “Good morning,” Johanna chirps, and I immediately cringe at how high her voice is, how pitchy and giggly she sounds, and how silly that pink dress looks. “I was hoping I might speak to the curator, Herr Wagner.”

The clerk, who had been prepared only to take our money and write the date upon our admission tickets, looks up very slowly, his brow creased. “Were you invited?”

“Herr Wagner and I have been corresponding.” Johanna peels a letter out of the carpetbag she brought along—a bit optimistically hoping she’d be leaving the Kunstkammer with it full of her mother’s final effects. The bag fared no better than we did in the snow, and the letter emerges as damp as the rest of her. The ink has become splotchy and streaked. When she leans forward to hand it to the attendant, a lump of snow slides off her hood and lands with a plop upon his desk.

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