“The two of you should stay,” Stephen said, “and take the carriage back. I’ll hire a cab easily enough.”
“But—” Mina began.
He had no wish to hear the offer that she’d surely make, well-meant as it would be. “No, I insist,” Stephen said. “I’ll make better time on my own. Colin, you’ll join me when you can.”
Meeting Mina’s eyes only briefly, he touched his hat to both of them, then strode off toward the exit.
Thirty-one
She’d written down the wrong word. Again.
Mina swore quietly into the silence of the library and swiped her pen through the offending line. Far more forceful than it needed to be, the motion carried her arm past the paper and into the inkwell, which tipped over. Black ink poured over the desk, the record Mina had been working on, and her skirt.
“Oh,bugger!”
She grabbed the inkwell and righted it, then mopped frantically at the pool of ink, first with the now-ruined page of notes and then with her handkerchief. Most of the ink came off the table, thank goodness. She didn’t wish to spend her hundred pounds replacing it, and she had a feeling the entire sum wouldn’t go very far.
Her skirt was a lost cause.
“Ah, hell,” she said in more resigned tones and wiped the remaining traces of ink from the desk, then wiped off the inkwell itself. At least she could manage that much without disaster.
This was what came of losing her temper, Mina told herself in an inward voice that sounded remarkably like her mother’s. Now her skirt was ruined. She’d have to buy another, and although this one hadn’t been anywhere near her best, it hadn’t come cheaply. Getting out to buy clothing wouldn’t be easy in her current situation, either, and at least one of the MacAlasdairs was likely to do something stupid and chivalrous and embarrassing like offer to buy her another, which she couldn’t accept, and they wouldn’t understand why she couldn’t accept without even more embarrassing conversation. She could have avoided all of that if she’d just taken a little more time and care with her work.
The lecture didn’t help. Mostly, it gave Mina the urge to kick something, an urge to which she would have succumbed except that everything in the room would cost more money to replace than she’d had in her entire life, and hadn’t she done enough property damage for one day?
Instead, she sank back into her chair and sighed.
What was wrong with her tonight? Her accounts and her typing had been full of mistakes, and she’d taken none of her usual satisfaction in sorting out a jumble of unordered books or finding a new and interesting volume.
She’d finished the rest of the diary, which hadn’t been very enlightening. Toward the end, George the dragonhadtalked about his namesake a little and about the other dragon’s possibly tragic end.
Some do speak of other ways to mend such cases, he wrote, such as might be witchcraft, or the sacrifice of a white deer, and others yet say that having true affection among men may yet draw a man whole from his monstrous shape, but I think, as I have been taught, that there is no change and nothing for such unfortunates but death or exile.
Cheerful stuff.
She could have chosen another book from the shelves. There were plenty that looked interesting, and even a few that might deal with magic, but Mina couldn’t muster enough interest to get past the first page of anything she’d tried. She kept finding reasons to put her work aside and walk across the room or to go look out the window.
It wasn’t as if there was even anything—or anybody—to see out there.
Stephen and Colin would come back to the house in dragon form, the same way that they’d left. Unless something went horribly wrong, they’d be far too high to see from the window. But nothing was going to go horribly wrong.
They were dragons, after all. And they wereflying—what was going to attack them, a flock of angry pigeons? The image did make Mina giggle, but it didn’t change her mood. She still felt aware of every second that passed.
Right, then. She wasn’t getting her work done one way or the other. Maybe a walk and a bite to eat would settle her mind. Mina stood up, glared down at the ink spot on her skirt—which had helpfully taken the form of some two-headed beast—and headed out into the hallway.
With the servants away and the lamps economically turned down, the hall was very empty and very large. Mina’s footsteps echoed on the floor, steady counterpoint to the light brush of her skirt. She shivered.
Shewasin a mood, and that despite getting to see the exhibition that evening. Mum would have had a bit to say about ungrateful girls with the vapors. Mina knew she herself would have said similar things if she’d been looking on from outside.
Darkness and empty houses made a good mood hard to keep, though. So did waiting up to hear news.
From the foot of the stairs, the clock ticked steadily, like a heartbeat. Its face was pale in the gloom.
Mina swallowed, told herself that she was being silly, and opened the kitchen door.
She screamed.
She didn’t mean to, and she felt completely foolish even as the sound died away, but Emily’s shriek had jarred her, for a moment, out of all pretense at rationality. She leapt and yelped just as readily as the scullery maid.
