Prologue
Ormdale, Yorkshire, 1896
Shedidnotlikebeing called Baby.
It made her feel small and useless.
Never mind that at only six years old shewassmall and useless.She did not intend to remain so.And she did not intend to be called by the long, horrid name that was written in the parish registry, the name that had previously belonged to an unlamented great-aunt.She could tell that name was ugly; it made her chest hurt to say it and her hand hurt to write it.She did not believe that even her father liked that name, and it was he who had chosen it.Her mother, she was told, had been too busy having the terrible sickness that took her to heaven to name the infant that was Baby.
Perhaps he had chosen it as sort of punishment, for making her mother weak enough to be carried way by influenza.
No, if she was not to be called Baby for the rest of her life, she must choose a name for herself—and soon.
There were not very many books about children in her house.The few the governess gave her were dreadful.The girls in those books were called Amelia, Charlotte, Anne, Jane, or Lucy, and they were always suffering terrible fates because their hands were dirty or their voices loud.
Her sister Violet, who was four years older, but whose hands were frequently dirty and whose voice was frequently loud, read them and laughed—over the children who fell into the fire or were crushed by cartwheels!
The girl called Baby could not imagine laughing over such things—not in four years and not in forty.It made her wonder whether some ancestral substance had been quite used up in producing her siblings, so that none at all remained to put into their youngest child.
The books gave her horrible dreams.Even looking at the outsides made her insides feel unsettled.She could not choose a name from that source.
Where was the youngest child of the squire of Wormwood Abbey to find a name for herself?
The fateful package was given to her at Christmas, sent up from their neighbours at Drake Hall.There was a whole village downriver as well as the tenant farmers dotted between, but none of those people were theirneighbours, she knew that, although she did not know why.
She had only half unwrapped it when Violet seized it.
“Has it got pictures?”Violet asked, paging through it eagerly.“Oh!It’s gotthemin it!”
The oldest sister, Gwendolyn, came quickly over to see.Gwendolyn was so grown up that she never really seemed like a sister, especially when she looked at her youngest sister like this, as she often did, with her forehead as wrinkled as Violet's pinafores.
All three Worms sisters looked into the book, the two dark heads and the one baby-fair head crowding together.
In the picture, a knight on horseback was poking a very long pole down the throat of a large dragon of indeterminate species.The creature only had two legs, so it must be a member of the wyvern family, she ascertained.
It was clear that whoever had drawn it had never got a proper look at a wyvern, because they had drawn the head all wrong, and given it furry lion’s feet, instead of scaly chicken ones.
A little further off, a crowned lady was kneeling, hands pressed together in prayer.She had probably tried to tell the knight that he wasn’t supposed to hurt the dragon, no matter how nasty it was, and he hadn’t listened, just like Baby’s brother never listened to any of his sisters.
There were three letters printed next to the lady’s knee: U N A.She wondered what they meant.
“Oh,” Gwendolyn said ominously, her eyes darting between the girls.
“What’s all this?”barked their father from his place by the fire.
Gwendolyn stood straighter.“It’s a storybook, sir,” she said.“The governess tells me they seem to…to give Baby nightmares.”
Percy laughed.He was the only brother, grown-up like Gwendolyn in body but not very grown up in behaviour.He leaned back in the comfortable chair that the girls never dared sit on and made puffs of smoke with his cigar, looking at it now and then tenderly, as if it were alive.It had been his Christmas present from Gwendolyn, and it had actually caused him to smile at his sisters for the first time Baby could remember.
“Baby indeed!”their father muttered.His eyes found his youngest daughter and only stayed there long enough to go hard, as they always did when they happened to fasten on her.Which was not often.Then he jerked his whisky glass towards her.“Give it to her.”
“But sir—” Gwendolyn protested.
“Enough!If she can’t bear a storybook monster, how will she bear life here?”He drained the glass, then looked into it as if he was angry at it for being empty.He muttered into it, but the child heard him clearly.“Welivein a nightmare.”
The smallest tremor went through Gwendolyn.Then her face smoothed and she handed the book to her youngest sister.
That night, the book sat on the toy chest at the foot of her bed in the nursery.The nursery was tucked close under the creaking, leaking eaves of the abbey, and shared by the two youngest members of the family.
