Janushek winced and shifted in his seat.“If you keep reminding me how old I am, I will thank you no more, and I will not be sweet at all—I will be the crabbed and bitter old man you apparently consider me to be.”
Edith laughed a long, golden laugh.“You have no idea how much I look forward to seeing you in your rocking chair by the fire, surrounded by your descendants.Admitting at last that I’m right.”
He looked a question at her.
“That the heart that holds the universe together beats with love,” she said, looking straight at him.
“Now, now, Mrs Drake-Forrester,” he warned, holding up a chiding finger and using an old name for her.“Is that orthodox?”
Edith lifted her chin.“Need I remind you that I was raised a clergyman’s daughter, and that I can recite the articles of faith of the Church of England from memory?”
He winced.“I believe you’ve done it at least once before.I think it was while my daughter was taking so very long to be born.”
“Then you know it’s not an idle threat!”
“It happened only once that I assumed a threat of yours was idle, and I have never made that mistake again,” said Janushek, rising from his chair to go on his way.
Edith’s forehead wrinkled.“When was that?”
“The day we met.I tried to steal your dragon eggs and you threatened me—first with a large knife and then with an even larger river dragon.”
“Ah, yes,” Edith said.“Halcyon days.”
He turned back at the doorway.
“I’ll send Pip over, then?”
Edith nodded.“Why not?The villain won’t dare to show his face here again.And if Una feels safer with Pip about, it would be a kindness.”
Chapter twelve
Windsor Castle
SirGeorgeWorms,althoughhe was Dragon Master to His Majesty Edward VII, did not particularly enjoying finding himself in the corridors of power.
Currently, he was utterly lost among those corridors, and this was not merely a figure of speech—though Sir George was fond of those, having a passion for philology.
He had been summoned to Windsor to see the king before his royal trip abroad, but he suspected someone had forgotten him, because he had waited in a reception room for more than two hours.
He had not become fretful in the least, because, for George Worms, there was always prayer.
Since setting aside his clerical collar for dragon-mastery (with which no collar or other garb was associated) he had found to his surprise that he had—if anything—moretime for prayer than when he had been paid to do it.
So, upon finding himself forgotten, he had begun with the king and his queen.He even prayed for the king’s mistresses, which were, if the press were to be believed, practically new every morning.He then moved on to his advisers and staff.After that, he had prayed for the poor, the sick, the fatherless, the widow, and the stranger, and then he had begun on his Ormdale family.
He prayed for the small village school, and his wife’s part in it, and for the safe production of agricultural lime, in which industry many of the people of the dale were now profitably employed.He prayed for his wife’s safe return from her visit to the seaside.He had lost his first wife to sickness very early in their marriage, and perhaps due to this, he always found it difficult to be parted from his beloved Emily.
Nobody knew just how hard it was for George not to worry over the people he loved, for he refused to make his anxiety a chain to bind them.
And so he prayed.
It was while he was praying for his own family circle (including his daughter Edith, presently carrying her own child, and his son George, adventuring abroad) that he began to wander—bodily, about the corridors of Windsor Castle.
It was the books that stopped him.
He recognised the binding of a rare volume of Middle English poetry.Putting on his spectacles, he got it down from the shelf and was instantly welcomed into the arms of his mother tongue.
He began to read aloud for sheer beauty.
