Page 25 of Claws and Contrivances
Practical details were not the point of Rose’s feelings, but her eyes still stung with sudden heat. Her older sister had always been so good at cutting the most impossible of situations down to a more manageable size ... but now Elinor herself might be in the worst trouble of her life, if Griff’s vision had been true.
How could Rose worry about propriety when her sister’s future hung in the balance?
But how could she forgive herself if she ruined Mr Aubrey’s?
“Just be quiet and careful and no one else will ever know,” she whispered. Both dragons cheeped softly at her feet in apparent agreement.
It was indeed a plan that made perfect sense ... until a door clicked shut above her and footsteps came hurtling down the staircase at high speed.
“Watch out!” Rose leapt away from the banister just in time, while the dragons at her feet chortled frantically with panic.
“Rose?” Serena clattered to a halt, her dark eyes shadowed under the hood of her cloak and one pale hand still holding the banister for balance. There was no candle in her free hand. She must have trusted to instinct and familiarity in the dark ... or been even more afraid than Rose of being discovered in her expedition. “What are you doing here at this time of night? Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
“Shouldn’t you?” Rose frowned at the cloak. “Are you going outside? It’s rather late for wandering around the ruins, isn’t it?”
“Oh, my poor cousin.” Serena sighed as she shook her head. “You’re still so dreadfully fettered by convention! But I had to escape. I was being suffocated in my room! If you only knew the tortures I suffer from being confined when my heart is aflame and my soul tormented by ...” She stilled, her hands halting mid-dramatic gesture. “Good heavens. Is that a second dragon behind you?”
“Well ... yes.” There was no point denying it, although Griff was making his best attempt at pretending to be a statue of panic behind Rose’s skirts. “Mr Aubrey brought two. He’s letting me look after both of them. Aren’t they darling?”
“Mr Aubrey? Really?” Serena frowned, her hands lowering. “Oh, that’s right. You’re betrothed! And you’ll have to explain all of that to me sometime very soon—but no, I still don’t understand how that first dragon could be his. He didn’t arrive until long after you’d found it.”
Drat. Serena might not always choose to use her wits, but that didn’t mean that she was actually lacking in them. This was definitely the wrong moment for her to start thinking sensibly. “That was only a mischance. She had escaped his carriage, you see, so he lost a good deal of time in searching for her along the way.”
“But then—”
“Why don’t you tell me what set your heart aflame this time?” Rose said hastily. “Were you lying awake longing for a season in Bath again?”
“A season in Bath? Ha!” Tipping back her head, Serena let out as pitying a laugh as if she hadn’t spent hours over the past weeks discoursing on the joys of the musicales, theatres, bookshops, and assembly rooms to be found in that glorious city for more fortunate young ladies. “Oh, cousin. Are your own dreams truly still so small?”
Rose set her teeth together with a click. Glancing away from Serena’s face to regather her composure, she caught a sudden and unexpected glimpse of white: one edge of a folded piece of paper peeking out from her cousin’s closed left hand.
Wait. She’d seen that paper earlier tonight, hadn’t she? Serena had been hiding it from Aunt Parry as she’d left the parlour after the reading ...
... After whispering with Miss Thomas, Sir Gareth’s niece.
Rose’s mouth fell open. “Serena, is that a private letter, by any chance? From a gentleman?”
Even the most indulgent of families would never allow such an illicit correspondence. Knowing her cousin, Rose was prepared for furiously melodramatic denials and wounded looks for days, regardless of the truth of the matter.
Instead, a positively feline smile lit up Serena’s face. “Oh, Rose.” She hummed a note of wordless delight and gave it a rippling, operatic vibrato in the darkness. “Isn’t tonight just full of infinite possibilities?”
Darting forwards, she brushed a quick, soft kiss against Rose’s cheek and then was gone, hurtling down into the darkness beyond the candlelight while Rose was left gaping after her. The heavy wooden latch on the back door creaked its release moments later, and the door shut behind Serena with a thump so heavy, it shook crumbs of ancient plaster loose from the ceiling to shower over Rose’s hair and shoulders like dusty snow.
Ugh!
She couldn’t follow Serena herself without losing her chance to find out from Mr Aubrey whether Elinor was in danger. Beth wouldn’t dare follow Serena into the darkness. Georgie would be so loudly irate about Serena’s foolishness that she would accidentally wake up everyone ... and as Rose hesitated, torn between conflicting obligations, a pair of indignant sneezes sounded by her feet.
“Oh, dear. Did plaster land on you two, as well?” Sighing, Rose knelt down on the steps to wipe as many dry, white crumbs as she could off the dragons’ warm scales with her free hand. The task was made even more challenging as they swarmed around her legs, seeking reassurance and strokes, and eagerly clambering across her until she was fighting down laughter even as she struggled to hold her candle safely out of reach. Their small circle of light in the middle of the big, dark staircase felt like a private island in a sea full of perils.
“Still, we do need those answers,” she told them, and she forced herself to rise to her feet and hurry as quickly as she could the rest of the way down the staircase.
Serena might spend her night dancing around the ruins, thinking deeply romantic thoughts and sighing over her scandalous letter ... but Rose had an illicit meeting to attend, and she was already late.
Fortunately, Mr Aubrey had found himself a distraction. When Rose opened the door to the old converted chapel, which now functioned as both an offshoot library and a makeshift gallery for her uncle’s collection of draconic art, she found him sitting in a threadbare red velvet wing chair by the painting of Sir George slaying a particularly small and irritable-looking dragon. Even the sound of the opening door didn’t shift his attention from the thick book he was frowning over. Three more books waited, stacked on the side table beside him, next to a brace of candles that looked as if they had been burning for some time.
The tall, arched windows of the room, which always filled it with bright natural light during the day, were pure black at this time of night, showing no hint of the medieval ruins – or Serena – beyond. In this small, discrete piece of the vast, rambling house, they were utterly alone, and Rose shut the door behind the dragons with relief.
“Finally!” She pitched her voice loud enough to wake Mr Aubrey from his book, and his head lifted in response.
