“Miss Wu, I know you’re not a floozy,” Penny said apologetically, “but I’d quite like it if you took me to an opium den.”
“For your paper?”
“Oh, no!Because it would give my brothersucha turn.”
“Your brother in the police?”Miss Wu asked as they climbed the curved staircase onto the top level of the electric tram.
Penny felt obscurely pleased by theDaily Mailadvertisement plastered across it.
“Oh, that was a fib,” Penny admitted.“Actually, my brother makes maps at the Colonial Office.He has a little pot and brush and paints everything with imperial pink.He’s harmless, really.”
Miss Wu gave her another side glance as they sat together.“Course he is.Harmless—just like you.”
“Oh, no!”said Penny.“We’renothingalike.”
Chapter thirty-seven
Ormdale
Unapeeredattheunderside of a wyvern foot.The small operation in which she was occupied had to be performed quickly while the patient was distracted by the floral offering she had placed before it.Otherwise it was liable to givehera nasty nip, in place of the cowslips.
“Miss Una,” called an inconvenient voice.Una recognised it as belonging to one of the village boys who helped collect lost things at the menagerie.
“Not now, Tommy!”Una whispered.The wyvern wouldn’t tolerate this much longer.
“Found a fancy camera, left behind by mistake,” the boy said.
“Take it to Mrs Alfred,” Una whispered.
Just as her tweezers grasped the embedded pebble which had been causing the two-legged dragon to limp so piteously, Una heard a warning honk.
Claiming the pebble with a gasp of triumph, Una backed away as fast as she could.
The creature gave her the kind of deeply suspicious, side-eyed look that only a wyvern could, then went back to pecking at the cowslips, swishing its barbed tail.
Una wiped the tweezers and returned them to her belt pouch, then unclipped the little skirt-lifter keeping her frock out of the dirt.
Una was thankful that wyverns did not show the propensity to bond with humans that some dragon species did.She would have derived little pleasure from an affectionate wyvern following her about, with its spurred claws and chickenish, bipedal gait.
A wyvern was nothing like a Greater Welsh Dragon, an animal with the inborn potential to form a lifelong attachment to its trainer.
Edith had bonded secretly with her own dragon, Cariad, while a guest of the Welsh dragon-keeper family—about which family the less said, the better, at least as far as Una was concerned.Indeed, that visit had turned spectacularly sour, and Edith had been forced to steal the beautiful golden dragon to escape their mountain stronghold.Though Edith had sent Cariad back to her home, the dragon had refused to be ridden or trained by anyone else afterwards.
Later, the Welsh dragon-keepers had sent Cariad to Ormdale as a peace offering.That had been the beginning of an uneasy alliance between the dragon families.
Today, Una could not stop running the story about Cariad through her head, like tangled threads in her fingers.Might there be something there that would help Violet here?
Una pressed a lavender-scented handkerchief over her nose and headed for the cellars.
“Tell me about the day you left Ormdale two years ago,” Una demanded, as soon as she found her sister hard at work shovelling manure, dressed in an old shirtwaist and bloomers held up by a pair of suspenders that looked uncomfortably familiar.She had probably taken them off the servants’ washing line without asking.
“The day I left?You mean two years ago?You ought to bag this stuff up and sell it, you know,” Violet observed, blowing hair out of her eyes.“Thomas says it makes the pumpkins big enough for Cinderella, and Gwydion told me dragon waste is how they keep themselves in vegetables year-round up in Gwynedd.”
“Enough about Cinderella!”snapped Una.The air was not fresh and Una was anxious to get back outside as soon as possible.“My question is, did you say goodbye to Elfed just before you left?”
“Yes, but not that day.It was the night before.”
“The night before?Are you sure?”Una repeated.
