The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

Turns out arguing a lot with someone can make you rather fond of them.

There is a unique sort of agony to entering a party alone.

The room is warm and smells like dust, and just the presence of so many books makes it easier to breathe. It’s remarkable how being around books, even those you’ve never read, can have a calming effect, like walking into a crowded party and finding it full of people you know.

Thank God for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.

I do not want simple. I do not want easy or small or uncomplicated. I want my life to be messy and ugly and wicked and wild, and I want to feel it all. All those things that women are made to believe they are strange for harboring in their hearts. And I want to surround myself with those same strange, wicked women who throw themselves open to all the wondrous things this world has to offer.

In the company of women like this—sharp-edged as raw diamonds but with soft hands and hearts, not strong in spite of anything but powerful because of everything—I feel invincible. Every chink and rut and battering wind has made us tough and brave and impossible to strike down. We are mountains—or perhaps temples, with foundations that could outlast time itself.

That oil slick of a smile spreads over her lips, and I want to touch a candle to it and watch her smolder, this dangerous, gorgeous, wildfire of a woman.

I wrote to Monty before we left Zurich, informing him I was safe and in, if not good, at least neutral company, and that I would not be back in London as soon as I’d planned. I did not mention that there was a good chance I might be running off to join a pirate expedition to protect sea monsters. I have a sense that would get his breeches in a twist.

“I have spent my whole life fighting for what would be mine without question if I were a man, and to be better at it than my brothers, because women don’t have to be men’s equals to be considered contenders; they have to be better.” She slumps down in her seat, rubbing her injured arm. “That’s the lie of it all. You have to be better to prove yourself worthy of being equal.”

“You need to be more discerning about who gets their talons in that brilliant brain of yours.”
I snort, louder than I mean to. “I’m not brilliant.”
She purses her lips with a soft humming sound. “You’re right, brilliant is quite a strong word. But you seem very bright. Or if not bright, you’re at least confident. And often people can’t tell those two things apart.”

You’re trying to play a game designed by men. You’ll never win, because the deck is stacked and marked, and also you’ve been blindfolded and set on fire. You can work hard and believe in yourself and be the smartest person in the room and you’ll still get beat by the boys who haven’t two cents to rub together.

“Or maybe I would be a flower. But a really tough flower.”
“A wildflower,” Sim says. “The kind that are strong enough to stand against wind, rare and difficult to find and impossible to forget. Something men walk continents for a glimpse of.”

Softness can be an armor, even if it isn’t my armor.

I like curling my hair and twirling in skirts with ruffles, and I like how Max looks with that big pink bow on. And that doesn’t mean I’m not still smart and capable and strong.

Johanna sucks in her cheeks hard, mouth puckering. Then she lets go a breath laced with “Son of a bitch.”
It is not a situation for laughing, but I do anyway—in her lilting soprano it’s like hearing a curse in a homily.

It’s a queer thing, to have a vacant space inside you and not know what it is that carved out the absence.