“Was that—was that—“
“Yes, that’s the famous quetzalcoatl.”
He pulled out a notebook and began to scribble in it, shaking his head and laughing.He didn’t seem to care that his shoes were getting wet or that he’d left his jacket behind.
Violet returned her attention to the cave.The music was fainter and had changed to the gently rocking metre of a lullaby.
Soon, she saw the beam of Iggy’s torch, and Una and the twins came out hand in hand, blinking.
“It’s gone back to bed now,” Iggy announced.“I told itschlaf gezuntlike Hanna tells us.”
“It was a lot easier to put to bed than you are,” Dolly said.“Iggy, do stop splashing me with your boots.”
Violet hovered with the violin case.She wanted to throw her arms around Una, but Una didn’t like that sort of thing.Una reached out for the case herself.
“I’ll have a cow delivered tomorrow,” said Una as she put her violin away.“The warm weather roused it, I suppose, and then it was hungry.Poor thing.”
A sound came out of the American.
Una jumped, noticing the stranger on the riverbank for the first time.
Violet gestured at him.“Behold, the genuine article!As if anyone could fakethat!I ran into him when I was fetching your fiddle.”
“Now, you must be Miss Violet!”the man declared, stepping forward eagerly.“George told me all about your gumption, ma’am.James Anderson of the Smithsonian,very muchat your service!”
While he seized and shook Una’s hand, Violet and Una looked at each other in consternation.
Then Una straightened her shoulders and spoke.
“Mr Anderson, my sister and I—we are very happy to welcome you to our Menagerie of Dragons.”
Violet stilled.Had her sister just saidourmenagerie?
More importantly, had she meant it?
Chapter thirty
Ormdale
Pipknewtherewassomething odd about the letter from the first.The paper smelled horrid and the handwriting looked wrong, as if the writer had tried to disguise it.There was no return address.The letter had been left at the scullery door of Wormwood Abbey, and Pip’s grandmother had passed it on to him when he had come to look at the fresco again and stopped at the kitchen for a cup of tea.
He took the letter with him to the Great Hall, where his charcoals and pencils and sketchbooks were spread out.He intended to make a complete sketch of the fading medieval fresco there.
He used his palette knife to open the letter.
If you want to know about your father, meet me at the Yorkshire Unicorn in Skipton next Friday.
Pip folded the letter again, sickened.How many times had he dreamed of finding a letter or a document in the attics of Wormwood Abbey which might prove his paternity?He’d even imagined some kind of miraculous legitimisation of his birth followed by his elevation to ancestral privileges, with Una and Violet dependent onhiskind generosity for a change.
But to meet an anonymous informant in a public hotel?It was shabby and shoddy.Pip felt sullied by it.But perhaps it was time to acknowledge that shabby and shoddy was all he ought to expect from life.
His time at art school—which he had once imagined as a ticket to fame and fortune—had been torture.
Life at school was a maze with no map; interactions between students a code he could not break.The more he changed things about himself—his accent, his hair, his clothes, even his taste in food and drink—the more endless the costly project of self-betterment became.
A gentleman must apply himself, but not too much.A gentleman must be friendly, but not chummy or eager to please; elegant, but not flashy; generous but not splashy; witty, but not caustic.Classics and literary allusions must be answered with a subtly corresponding quotation but always as if one didn’t care.
At first, he had found solace in the work itself, but gradually, the very colours and shapes that had beguiled his dreams had lost their power to transport.Art school became a litany of failures, and his work simply didn’t matter.
