A Tyranny of Petticoats Read online

  INTRODUCTION

  1710: BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

  Mother Carey’s Table – J. Anderson Coats

  1723: THE GREAT LAND

  The Journey – Marie Lu

  1826: NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  Madeleine’s Choice – Jessica Spotswood

  1848: SOUTHWEST TEXAS

  El Destinos – Leslye Walton

  1861: BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS; AND NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI

  High Stakes – Andrea Cremer

  1862: WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The Red Raven Ball – Caroline Tung Richmond

  1876: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS; AND CHEYENNE, WYOMING TERRITORY

  Pearls – Beth Revis

  1877: DEADWOOD, DAKOTA TERRITORY

  Gold in the Roots of the Grass – Marissa Meyer

  1898: SKAGUAY, ALASKA

  The Legendary Garrett Girls – Y. S. Lee

  1926: JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA; AND DALLAS, TEXAS

  The Color of the Sky – Elizabeth Wein

  1934: INDIANA

  Bonnie and Clyde – Saundra Mitchell

  1934: WASHINGTON STATE

  Hard Times – Katherine Longshore

  1945: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  City of Angels – Lindsay Smith

  1967: CALIFORNIA

  Pulse of the Panthers – Kekla Magoon

  1968: GRANT PARK, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  The Whole World Is Watching – Robin Talley

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I grew up right outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, site of perhaps the most decisive battle in the Civil War. My family and I picnicked on the battlefield and went for hikes there, pausing to read the historical placards. Later, in high school, my friends would play their guitars and we’d watch the sunset at Devil’s Den and try to take pictures of ghosts in Triangular Field. History wasn’t just a collection of dates I memorized from textbooks; it was tactile and ever present.

  When I was twelve, I read Gone with the Wind and fell in love with historical fiction. As an adult I can see the many ways in which the novel is problematic, but at twelve I was utterly enchanted by Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. My grandparents took me on a trip to Louisiana that summer, and we toured plantation museums and walked the streets of New Orleans. I came home and began writing a series of thinly veiled Gone with the Wind knockoffs about headstrong Southern girls, all set in Louisiana instead of Georgia. Those novels live in my closet at my parents’ house — deservedly so, because they’re terrible. But I still love reading and writing historical fiction. My first trilogy, the Cahill Witch Chronicles, is set in an alternate version of 1890s New England.

  One of the reasons I sought out historical fiction rather than reading straight-up history, the way my Civil War–buff father did, was because I wanted to read about girls. But their stories were mostly missing from textbooks and historical sites. Despite their many important contributions, women — especially queer women, women of color, and women with disabilities — have too often been erased from history.

  While on a writing retreat with my friends Andrea Cremer, Marie Lu, and Beth Revis, I mentioned that another friend had suggested I edit an anthology. I loved the idea of creating a collection of YA historical fiction; I couldn’t imagine any theme that would intrigue me more.

  “You should do it,” my friends said. “We’d all write stories for you.”

  How could I say no, with three terrifically talented New York Times best-selling authors on board? I am forever grateful for their encouragement and enthusiasm.

  “You need more of a theme than historical fiction,” my agent said. And I realized that what I really wanted was to edit an anthology of stories about clever, interesting American girls throughout history, written by clever, interesting (though not necessarily all American) women.

  Some of the authors I approached are dear friends and critique partners. Others I haven’t yet had the chance to meet but have long admired their work. Some of our contributors — Katherine Longshore, Kekla Magoon, Robin Talley, and Elizabeth Wein — are known for bringing real history — of the doomed wives of Henry VIII, the Black Panthers, 1950s Virginia during school desegregation, or female pilots during World War II — richly to life. Others — Marie Lu, Marissa Meyer, and Beth Revis — are trying their hands at historical fiction for the first time.

  It’s been such a joy to work with all of them.

  When I asked them to come up with premises, I suggested that we think diversely in terms of geography, historical eras, and our heroines’ races, sexualities, religions, and opinions on all manner of things. America is a melting pot. I hoped our fifteen stories could, in some small way, reflect that reality.

  And so our heroines are monsters and pirates and screenwriters and schoolteachers. They are brave and scared, uncertain and sure. They are white and Chinese American and black and Native American. They dress as boys if that’s what’s needed to get the job done, whether it’s robbing banks to feed their families or sinking a Spanish ship off the coast of the Carolinas. They kiss girls or boys or no one at all because they’ve got more important things on their minds, like catching spies. They debate marriage proposals, murder, and politics with equal aplomb. They are mediums and assassins, heiresses and hobos, bartenders and bank robbers. Their friends are faithless, their heroines die — perhaps some die themselves — but they carry on because there is a spark inside them that refuses to be extinguished. They are naive and world-weary, optimistic and sad, beautiful and terrible.

  Most of all, I hope you will find them interesting.

  From corsets to cutlasses and petticoats to pistols, we want to bring American history to life — from the viewpoints of strong, clever, resourceful American girls.

  Thank you so much for reading.

  JESSICA SPOTSWOOD

  MY FATHER SAYS HE’S SAVED MY LIFE nine times. Once at my birth, once when we fled master and overseer through rows of struggling tobacco beneath a sky choked with stars, and the other seven paid out over all our years before the masts of ten different ships.

  The oldest two I must take at his word, as I have no memory of either. The first of the seven was the time Pop shut me below when I thought to skip up the rigging to the topmost yard of the Barbry Allen in a near gale off Barbados, the decks awash and the sea yawning up before us. Six years into life and already I was full of the piss and vinegar he taught me to walk with. The kind he said would serve me well no matter what the tide.

  “Boys are all piss and vinegar,” he would say as he scraped his grimy razor over my scalp till I was bald as an egg. “It’s what keeps them alive, pet. On the sea or off.”

  Mostly I think I’ve saved my own life. I knew enough to listen to Pop from the first moment we stepped on shipboard and learn the ropes from anyone with something to teach. When we came upon the Golden Vanity a few months ago, the bosun handed me the ledger without so much as a look toward Pop, and I signed the articles on my own for the first time.

  I grinned at Pop hard enough to blind the sun. He smiled back, but when he thought I wasn’t looking he shook his head, slow and sad.

  Pop still thinks we chose poorly, joining the Vanity’s crew. “It’s a brig, pet. Moves slow, like an ox in molasses. We’ll never catch anything faster than a merchantman. We’ll never be able to outrun anything faster either.”

  I’ve given up trying to convince Pop that sloops and schooners might be quick but they can’t bring as many guns to bear. Besides, the Vanity’s old man has an eye for ships loaded down with plunder and swears the wind tells him things. And if you’re bold enough to ask what things, he’ll merely wink and say, “Things about things, lad.”

  Which is no answer at a
ll, but when you’re the captain and your name is Half-Hanged Henry, it’s an answer you can give a bold sailor who’s a little too curvy amidships to be an actual boy.

  We’re flying a Union Jack we stole from our last prize and lying in wait for the next behind a barrier island off the coast of Carolina. I’ll be on watch in another turn of the glass, but for now I’m up on the mainmast yard, my bare legs swinging, the salt-wind curling through my jacket and over my windburned face.

  A flurry of seabirds circle the topgallant yard, then dip and glide down to the waterline. But when they gather just above the spray, I flinch hard and grip the mast.

  Mother Carey’s chickens.

  They’re not proper chickens, not the kind you’d eat. They’re little seabirds, black at the wing with a white stripe across their tails. There are four, and they dance eerily over the surface of the water without ever landing.

  I wonder if I knew them. They were once men, and I’ve seen my share of floating corpses since I was a cabin boy. These birds are the souls of drowned sailors who’ve escaped the wife of Davy Jones and returned to warn seamen of storms. Even crews like us who use captured flags to lure prizes close.

  I shinny up the mainmast till I reach the topmost yard and can go no higher without becoming a bird myself. The sky is clear and gray. Not blue, but no angry clouds mount. The air doesn’t smell like a storm, and the wind promises naught but a good chase once the prey comes in sight.

  “Ha! Almost got that one!”

  Hanging over the rail near the bowsprit are Johnny and Black Tom. They signed the articles in Port Royal, no older than me and full of showy false swagger that lasted a single turn of the glass. Pop took pity on them and now they’re our messmates, two sons closer to the big family he always wanted.

  Black Tom flings a stone and it misses one of Mother Carey’s chickens by a handswidth.

  I’m down the mainmast in a trice and I haul those two coves collar and scruff away from the rail. They go stumbling and fall into fighting stance before seeing it’s me. Then they straighten and eye me warily.

  “What gives, Joe?” Black Tom has squinty pig-eyes and a constant white-boy sunburn. Johnny’s the one who’s blacker than me and Pop put together, with ritual scars like Pop remembers on his granddad.

  “Don’t you make Mother Carey angry, harming those birds.” I stab a finger at the feathery shadows tiptoeing across the water below. “Or else she’ll call up a storm so she can serve our drowned guts to Davy Jones for tea.”

  “You really believe that old yarn?” Johnny asks. “Them’s just birds. Souls go to heaven or they go to hell.”

  Eight bells rings, four sets of two peals, short and pert.

  These lads must stop. Killing even one of the little harbingers could bring us all to a bad end, and Pop’s grown attached to both Johnny and Black Tom, orphans like him, like he’s terrified I’ll end up. I want to smile at them, to use honey instead of vinegar, but Pop says nothing makes me look less like a boy than when I smile.

  “I do.” I say it over my shoulder as I head toward the mainmast. “And you’ll do best to believe it too, ’cause if you let them, they’ll save your life.”

  Still no sign of a storm. And we’ve been watching every bearing.

  Just after three bells, we weigh anchor. The old man’s got wind of a massive treasure ship limping her way up the coast of Spanish Florida, blown off course and separated from her warship escort.

  Prizes don’t get any more tempting than that, and Johnny and Black Tom lead the whooping and speculating.

  I’m trimming the staysail when the old man strolls past.

  “Joe, you’ll be in the boarding party, got that?”

  “Ah . . . beg pardon, sir, but I’m a topman.”

  Pop puts down a bucket and edges closer. I hate that I’m glad for it, but I am.

  The old man squints at me. “A big strong lad like you? How old are you, Joe?”

  I frown, reckoning, and Pop hisses, “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen, sir.”

  “And you’ve never boarded a prize?”

  “No, sir. I was a runner and a surgeon’s boy when I was little, then a powder monkey and now a topman.”

  The old man scoffs cheerfully. “Nah, you’re wasted up in the rigging, moving sails. See Davis after your watch. He’ll give you a blade.”

  “But I . . .”

  I can splice a line and take a sounding and play a passable hornpipe. I can fight like a bag of wet cats, but I know I can’t kill. Just the thought turns my stomach.

  But boys my age are well scarred like Johnny, like Black Tom. Boys of any age are full of piss and vinegar, and they’d be spoiling for a chance like this.

  “What is it, sailor?” The old man isn’t smiling anymore.

  I signed the articles. I took the ledger from the bosun and balanced it on my left forearm while inking a big shaky J beneath all the other names and marks. I could have handed it over to Pop, let him make a mark for us both and taken my half share like always.

  My father puts a hand on my shoulder. His voice is quiet but steady when he says, “Nothing, sir. Right, Joe?”

  “Yes, sir,” I mutter, and it’s to both of them, to the old man and Pop too.

  The bosun sends me aloft and I’m glad for it, but now I see Mother Carey’s chickens everywhere and I shouldn’t be seeing any when there are still no storms off any bearing. All I can do is wonder what the little souls are trying to warn us of, since birds of this kind never just appear.

  When eight bells ring out once more and I’m off watch, I head down to my rack below, snug among the guns. The canvas is still warm from when Pop slept in it earlier, and there’s a little packet of rock-hard ship’s bread waiting for me wrapped in his kerchief.

  Pop hasn’t given me his rations since I was nine and laid up sick and sweating with cowpox.

  The Golden Vanity runs on bells a lot tighter than most other ships Pop and I have sailed with, but Pop says the old man was in the Royal Navy before he turned pirate, and bells are what he knows.

  Pop says it in that voice he uses when he’s hopeful for something but doesn’t want to be. He’s hopeful for one thing, mostly — to crew a vessel that takes a prize big enough that he can retire on an able seaman’s share.

  Whenever he talks about it, I smile and nod like I’m eager to put on shoes and petticoats and sip tea in a drawing room, but I already know there’s no way I can follow him. I stopped being a girl that day on the Charleston dock when Pop signed the articles that first time, when he put his hand on my newly shaved head and told the old man of the Veracruz his son would make a fine cabin boy. Pop had no way to keep me unless I spit and swaggered and pissed through the curved metal funnel he made for me out of an old drinking cup.

  So even if we do hit a once-in-a-lifetime treasure ship — maybe like the one we’re sneaking toward now — even if Pop does land enough silver and gold to buy that little farm or the tall Boston townhouse he’s always on about, now that I’m old enough to sign articles for myself, I have no desire at all to leave the sea.

  But I can’t tell Pop that. Not after everything he’s done to keep me, starting with swinging me on his back that night he fled his future and mine — days beneath the sun and years beneath the lash.

  I must have drifted to sleep, for I’m jolted almost out of my rack by an insistent thudding that sets the bulkheads trembling.

  Black Tom’s at the head of the gun deck, pale beneath his sunburn, and he bangs on the bulkhead with a stick of kindling to the same wild clang as the ship’s bell.

  They’re beating us to quarters.

  We’ve come upon our prize.

  I’m awake in an instant, and I’m clearing hammocks and sea chests from the guns before I remember the old man wants to see me out on deck, blade in hand and ready to board and subdue the enemy ship. I shouldn’t like how the dagger Davis gave me feels in my hand — sturdy, heavy, menacing — but I do.

  As I step out on deck, P
op nods me near. He’s breathing in sharp little bursts as he grips his blade. Pop’s been in boarding parties before, but I’ve never seen this look about him.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say Pop was afraid.

  “That’s not a treasure ship,” Pop says in a low voice. “She’s riding too high. Look at the waterline.”

  I step to the rail and peer out. And pull in a sharp breath of my own. If the ship were loaded down with treasure, the deck would be only a fathom or so above the waves. Instead all the gunports are clear.

  Two whole rows of them.

  “She’s a warship, isn’t she?” I whisper.

  Pop nods.

  “And we’re trapped against the coastline, aren’t we?”

  This time Pop doesn’t reply because questions I know the answers to I shouldn’t have to ask.

  All she’s got to do is come broadside to us and fire. Two volleys and we’re sunk.

  We’ve hauled down the Union Jack, since England and Spain are still at war the last anyone’s heard, but flying no flag at all will draw every captain’s eye.

  His grapeshot as well.

  The bosun’s whistle cuts the clamor, and we fall silent as the old man swings onto the quarterdeck and waves his arms for attention.

  “She’s Spanish, all right,” the old man says, “but there’s not a single coin aboard her. We’ll never be able to outrun her, and we’re all dead men if we try to fight.”

  A rumble moves through the crew. Unease and discontent and more than a little raw terror. The wind has led Half-Hanged Henry astray.

  Pop steps closer so our shoulders are touching. Signing pirate articles means you’re always with a crew that’ll overwhelm an enemy, and any captain worth a damn never starts a fight he can’t easily win.

  But that vessel is a forty-gun frigate, and there’s no way we’re sailing past without being sunk or boarded.

  Pop and me and Johnny and others like us — we’re done for either way. Half-Hanged Henry and his lawless lot treat us like sailors so long as we act like it, and every seaman brown or white is the same to Davy Jones. But if we’re caught, we’re part of the plunder and hauled in chains to the auction block. We won’t get a show trial or even hang on the harborside gallows like the white pirates.