Ormdale
Violetwalkedasifpossessed, clambering over rock walls, sending sheep scattering and angry lapwings protesting at her approach.
I wandered lonely as a cloud.
Were clouds lonely?she wondered.Aunt Emily had made them memorise that one; it ended with a bit aboutthrillsand daffodils.She hadn’t cared for the poem at the time, but she’d often found that it hummed in her head when she was at her wit’s end about something or waiting for something.
She had never been good at waiting.
Perhaps that was why her aunt had insisted on the poems.To give Violet’s mind something to run away with, when the rest of her was stuck.She would ask her, when she saw her again.
If she saw her again.How long would she last here, under Una’s gimlet eye?
Violet shook her head and kicked at a clod.What was she doing with herself?
Her eyes followed the rail tracks that led to the village, and the way Out.
It called to her, as it always had, but it was far less glamorous now.She had spent two years out there, so she knew that people were people everywhere—herself included.She needed to eat, and sleep, and be safe from the particularly bad ones.As they all did.
Violet groaned.It had been stupid indeed to bring back that newspaper, but in the days when the menagerie first opened, she and Una had eagerly kept all the clippings and pasted them in an album.There was a historic photograph of Her Highness Princess Louise (a friend of Edith’s Belmonte relations) snipping the ribbon on the gate, and another of her petting a wyvern.On the day, Una had been terrified that the wyvern would bite the princess, and Violet had told her if that happened they would be imprisoned in the Tower of London and tried for treason.
Aunt Emily had rebuked her seriously for this.
“She ought to toughen up, she’s too soft,” Violet had protested, echoing her father’s sentiment.
“And who are you to tell another person what they ought to be, Violet?”her aunt had said sternly.“Will you accept the same in return?”
Violet stopped dead.She hadn’t, in fact, liked it at all when Una had tried to tell her just now what she ought to be.
And it was far easier to think that Una was too soft than that she herself was too clumsy and harsh.
Violet was aware of a brown body the size of a badger pushing itself laboriously out of the ground nearby.It was the most common kind of dragon, native to the dale.Her cousin George had named it something in Latin or Greek, of course, but Violet couldn’t remember what it was.It would always be a ‘groundling’ to her.
Nobody paid much attention to them, unless they got into your garden or the woolshed and made a mess.They were retiring, with poor eyesight and strong jaws.This one had got itself trapped under a rock that had fallen from the nearby wall.
Violet’s father had disliked them for making the holes that occasionally caused his horse to stumble.She had even seem him squash one once, when he thought no one was looking.She had never told anyone of it.To harm any dragon was against their oath, most especially his as the Worm Warden.
She had never forgotten how easily it had been dispatched—how very soft the creature had turned out to be, in the end.
Violet stretched out her foot.The mud-brown dragon went completely still, using its colour to vanish.She suddenly knew why her father had squashed the grounding, and it had nothing to do with the holes it made.
It was because the groundling was soft, and he was angry.Perhaps something inside her father did not like softness because he had never been allowed to be soft.
Perhaps that same thing was inside her, too, and that was why she had pricked her sister like that.
Violet carefully pushed the rock aside with the toe of her boot, freeing the groundling.It scrambled away.
Violet’s fingers ran over the volumes in the new Ormby Lending Library, housed in a lime-washed one room cottage near the little school.The literary selection bore the unmistakable imprint of her aunt.But here and there, a more modern title surprised her.
“Here to borrow a book?”a familiar, accented voice inquired from the open doorway.
Violet jumped and spun round.
“Janushek!”she shouted into his shoulder.
She had flung her arms round him without thinking.As he patted her back pleasantly, two things occurred to her in rapid succession.One: she had learned it wasn’t advisable to go round embracing men who weren’t related to you; and two: Janushek was a wonderful exception to that rule.To every rule, really.
She fell back with tears in her eyes.
