As soon as her violin, score, and pencils were properly put away, she crossed the room and unfastened the doors.She stepped out onto the little balcony, breathing in the distinctive smell of tropical plants, humidity, and dragons.
The balcony was positioned at the topmost level of the glasshouse, and from it a wrought iron staircase spiralled down three floors to the bottom.
Una glanced down and repressed a shudder at the gappy ironwork of the steps.She had never descended that spiral staircase, preferring to make a more circuitous route through the abbey, where the stairs were made of solid wood.
But on days when Una felt secure enough, she would wrap her fingers around the banister and survey the whole thing from above, like a bird in its nest.She could watch all the creatures slipping in and out of the palms and ferns, swooping and snapping at insects, or fighting with their reflections in the glass panes of the glittering dome above.
Today, as on all visiting days, there was a tang of excitement in the air, heightened by the distant whistle of the little steam train which would bring the tourists up from the village of Ormby to the iron gates of Wormwood Abbey, from which they would explore the grounds, which were now devoted to carefully designed enclosures of various dragon species.
The rambling manor house had known many changes since its beginning as a place of prayer in the Middle Ages.The abbey had become a private residence when Henry VIII threw out the monks in the fifteen hundreds.It was then in danger of being given to one of that King’s favourites at court, but the last abbot had converted to the English Church and become the first squire—probably because cared more for his draconic duties than for any others.
This was a charge which might have been laid at the feet of the Worms family for all the intervening centuries, and one of which Una was acutely conscious.
As England’s dragons dwindled into myth after the Dissolution, Una’s family faded with them.Only within their hidden Yorkshire valley of Ormdale were they known and feared as Worm Wardens—Dragon-Keepers, bound to their duty to safeguard England’s last dragons by an ancient and fearful oath.
Outside of it, they were forgotten.Until ten years ago.
And now they were the opposite of forgotten.
A pudgy creature the size and shape of a Pekinese dog rose up and hovered at the height of her chin, its beady eyes fixed on her with an expression she knew to be one of profound affection, its wings beating in a coppery blur.Its scaled body was the colour of steeped tea, and its wings glinted in the sunlight.
Once, Una had been afraid of dragons, but that seemed like a bad dream to her now.She had been nine years old when her father and brother had died suddenly, and a new Worm Warden, her uncle, had been summoned from the world outside.
Uncle George and Aunt Emily had shown their nieces a new way to live that wasn’t ruled by oaths and secrets and onerous duties.There was still a part of Una that looked for the shadow behind everything.It was to the credit of her uncle and aunt that in their kindness, at least, she could find none.
Una wrapped her arms around the Chinese dragon’s bumpy body.He puffed a breath into her ear and folded his wings.The tightness in her chest that always came to her in the mornings loosened a little.
“Did you really fly up all this way, darling?”she murmured.“How very strong you are getting, Oolong!”
He had never flown at all until the glasshouse was built.Her cousin, also a George, said it was because flying used up an enormous amount of energy, most of which had been wasted in the creature’s body by staying warm in the uncongenial Yorkshire climate.Una reached for her dragon-keeper’s belt for a treat to give him, then realised she had not yet put it on.
Una felt a jolt of displeasure at herself, and glanced back to where the belt lay on her neatly smoothed bed in the long, rambling room with the sloping ceilings and garret windows.
It was her old nursery, and Aunt Emily had questioned it when Una claimed it for her own—worried that Una would be lonely in a room so thick with childhood memories, and that the sounds of the menagerie might disturb her rest.
But Una found them reassuring, even at night.
Dragons, it turned out, could be managed.
Sisters could not.
“Come—there’s work to be done,” Una said briskly.This was no time to be thinking of Violet.
Not on Opening Day.
It was now two minutes past ten o’clock, she thought as she went back inside, Oolong drifting after her.
The Smithsonian gentleman had written that he would arrive on the one o’clock train—thankfully, this wasafterthe most chaotic period of the day had concluded: dragon-feeding time.A few members of the public were always selected to participate, and once the public were involved, things became something Una hated more than anything:variable.This was especially onerous on Opening Day, when all of the family and staff had got out of the habit of coping with them and had to be slapped awake with their misbehaviour.
The British public could not be dissuaded from feeding dragons, and if appropriate food was not provided, the consequences were disastrous.Una had found herself treating dragons that had been fed with everything from peppermints and humbugs to cigarettes and sandwich papers.
As Una shut the door behind her, she cast a regretful look over the peaceful nursery.Aunt Emily was quite wrong about Una feeling lonely.She had the dragons, especially Oolong.
And if she stayed here, at the heart of the whole business of keeping and exhibiting dragons, she would be the first one to know when things went terribly wrong.
And then she would do whatever she had to do to fix them.
The first thing Una had not expected was the presence of a carefully dressed young man with combed dark hair in the kitchen.She stopped abruptly and Oolong bumped into her, losing his equilibrium.Una caught him in her arms.
