She showed him the cross on the back.Both arms were of equal length.
“Saint George’s emblem,” he said softly, tracing the arms of the cross with a fingertip.
There were jewels embedded in the cross, but Una sensed that the man’s admiration was for the symbol itself.
She deftly touched the catch, opening it for him.Nestled inside was a fragment of interlinked metal, very finely worked.He took off his glasses.
“An actual piece of his chainmail?”he murmured breathlessly.
“As far as we can tell,” she said.
“This should be at the British Museum,” he said suddenly.
“Not the Smithsonian?”she asked in surprise.
“No,” he said, in a hard voice.Then his eyes met hers for the first time, and she saw that they were a light blue, and one of them had a curious fleck of black, like a piece of driftwood in the pale ocean of his iris.
He quickly replaced the glasses.
“Saint George is the patron saint ofEngland,“ he said crisply.
Una almost laughed at this obvious statement, but she bit her tongue for the sake of those poor, poor monks.Not to mention the Americans, so steadfast in their refusal of the comforts of tea.
“Is he really?”she asked innocently.Then she held out her hand for the reliquary.“May I?”
He handed it back to her reluctantly.What an odd naturalist!Did he expect to carry off the family relic?George would have swapped all the relics in England for a new species of gnat.
Una closed the reliquary, wrapped it again, and replaced it in the box, and locked it.
Meanwhile, she was thinking ahead.It was feeding time now—they would just be finishing feeding the dragons in the outdoor exhibits, and would be moving into the glasshouse.Which meant it was time to continue the tour.
“Shall we move on, Mr Anderson?”she asked, opening the door and moving outside.
He gazed about the room through his smoke-dark glasses, then back at her, and a chill went through her.
At that moment, a shout came from the gwiberary.She leaned out a crenellation to see what was happening.
From here, one could see directly down into the old kitchen gardens, which had been netted to provide an outdoor home for the species of Welsh flying dragons provided by the dragon-keeper family of the mountain community of Gwynedd in Wales.
“Is everything well, Thomas?”she shouted.
“Gwiber tried to nab a camera, is all,” the old servant called up from his bench.
When she turned around, Mr Anderson was standing near, one hand in his pocket.It made her jump.
“Oh, excuse me!”she said.Then, noticing he seemed tense, she added, “They do that sometimes.The Welsh dragons are attracted to shiny things.”
She locked the tower door and recommenced the tour as if nothing had happened.And as far as she could tell, nothing had.
Chapter four
London
MostpeopleassumedCrispinFairweather was perfectly content.Most of the time, he himself was one of them.
At only twenty-one, he had an interesting and respectable job at the Colonial Office, London.Specifically, he worked with maps, which he loved, and which invigorated him like sea breezes invigorated normal people.
Crispin preferred to encounter sea breezes as prevailing winds on charts prepared for His Majesty’s Navy, and provoked no immune reactions on his part.
