Mary. I tended to forget that she led a prominent London society. “Please see Miss Woodhouse and Miss Smith to a quiet room. They have had a trying day. I will look for Mary.”
Darcy and I followed excited echoes up two flights of stairs and found at least fifteen ladies chatting while poring over sheets of music spread on tablesand the lid of a pianoforte. The missing footmen were here as well, being directed by Mary as they settled a four-foot-long wooden box on a table.
“Gently!” Mary cried when the wood clunked. “You will throw the tuning—” She saw me and gave a radiant smile. “Lizzy! We have moved the salon to Chathford. Come meet the society. Here is Jane Savage. It is her virginal we are unpacking.”
I greeted a gray-haired, pleasantly matronly woman. “Mrs. Rolleston,” she clarified. “But we use our musical names. I publish under my maiden name. Better for sales if they imagine a doe-eyed maid penning music in a gothic attic.”
I managed a fleeting “I see” before I was whirled through more introductions: Maria Parke, whom I had heard sing at the Argyll Rooms; Harriet Browne, a confident girl no more than fifteen; and Sophia Dussek, a happy Scot with long, wavy hair and a ferocious brogue who ran a music school.
“Mary, slow down!” I said. “I shall not remember. Are they all composers?”
“Of course,” Mary said, as if nothing could be more natural in a room full of ladies. “Wait and see who attends next month. We are having an international gathering. Maria Mozart—she is like royalty. I cannot understand why people fuss over her dead brother instead. The Baroness de Bawr will stage herSuite d’Un Bal Masque. And I am corresponding with Charlotta Seuerling, who is the fashion in Sweden, but she is blind which complicates travel.”
“I suppose,” I said, looking around the room. Darcy was conversing with two well-dressed wyves. Perhaps he knew them. Georgiana was celebrated as a performer, and the Darcys had moved in musical circles for years. To my chagrin, I had not even known that Mary composed until Georgiana informed me at Jane’s wedding.
“Mary, could I take you from your salon for a few minutes?” I said. “I have serious news.”
We moved to another room, and I described the events at the river.
“That is sad and highly disturbing,” she said when I was done. Her eyes roamed behind her round lenses as she thought. “The wyfe was alone?”
“Yes, alone but terrified. I do not think she understood she could escape.”
“There is more evil here than crawler venom. Venom creates dependency and induces mania, but her captors must have thought their control absolute if they trusted her with the pendant.”
“You think the pendant important?”
“I thinktheythought it important. But they were foolish. It is superstition to believe metal and gems are magic because a jeweler gives them a pretty shape.And they were reckless as well. It was a royal artifact. We can discover who owned it.”
I leftMary to her salon. After such a disturbing day, we scattered to private activities—that is, until several large wardrobe chests arrived from Surrey. Then I joined a suspenseful unpacking as Emma and Harriet discovered what clothes had been sent by Emma’s Hartfield maids. The ladies’ happy smiles and mock despair lightened everyone’s mood.
That evening, we served Chathford’s first supper in six years—only for family, Emma, and Harriet, as the salon members had finally departed, swishing embroidered hems and hauling decorated albums filled with supportive notes and copied music. Dinner was winter fare: roast duck, onions in mustard, shepherd’s pie, and a hearty dish of pumpkin and beans because Mary did not eat meat. That practice had become a fad with health-obsessed, wealthy Londoners, which was a trial for Mary as she had to balance philosophical support against disdain for their motives. She considered this a matter of ethics.
Harriet became happily talkative, telling stories of her life at Mrs. Goddard’s. We compared memories of the shopkeepers in Highbury village and Meryton, finding amusing quirks shared by the two distant towns.
When Darcy excused himself, the ladies moved to a drawing room. Harriet and Emma had dressed in simpler white muslin for dinner, although Emma’s was beautifully worked, lace-edged and accompanied by a spencer that covered her shoulders with scalloped fringes and cords. When she stood by the fireplace, a jade shawl draped behind her arms, she was eerily perfect, even the shawl hanging symmetrically.
I smoothed my own sleeves—either self-conscious or considerate, I was not sure which—and joined her.
“I said I would share the secret of Darcy’s and my binding,” I said. “Will you walk outside with me? It is cold, but the dark is better for privacy. And he must be let out for the night.” I smiled at that. It sounded like I was caring for a poodle.
“Will I be astonished?” she said seriously.
“You are meeting him, and he is meeting you,” I said. “I feel both are significant.”
I put on a coat and mittens. Lucy retrieved Emma’s long pelisse, ruby-redand fur-trimmed at the collar and cuffs. We went out the side entrance carrying a lantern.
The sky was the sullen black of thick cloud at night. The air bit my nose and eyelids, and smelled of frozen leaves. I closed my eyes, casting my mind toward the river and finding a brilliant but diffuse awareness. “He is asleep. Perhaps that is good for a first glimpse. He is very large.” Emma did not reply. I was not sure why I did not say “Come see a dragon,” but my tongue tied at the thought. I gave an encouraging smile instead, and we walked side-by-side to the boathouse, sharing the light.
Emma’s steps slowed. Five paces short, she stopped and whispered, “I am afloat in a sea of scarlet.”
I lifted the lamp enough to see her face. Her eyes were wide, her pupils huge in the dark. “Should we go back?” I asked. She shook her head. “Wait here.” I went and opened the door, repaired and level on new hinges, then held the lamp past the threshold to illuminate the interior. “This is Yuánchi. A dragon.”
Emma’s hand, gloved in red leather that matched her coat, grazed her cheek, her fingers spread in wonder. She walked through the door. I followed and set the lamp on a shelf.
Yuánchi’s breath was rumbling through an endless exhalation. He lay on his side, blanketed by a folded scarlet wing that could have hidden a carriage, his ankles protruding and crossed so the higher foot dangled, relaxed as a cat’s paw—if that cat had ankles thick as tree trunks and ten-inch claws like ebony pickaxes. We were facing his chest and the muscled trunk of his neck. The rest of his neck curled away from us. His head lay by his feet, and the tip of his tail was draped rather comically over his nose.
“Do you sense anything?” I whispered.
