Page 18 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
“I misled you about Hartfield. I did call, but I was not received, merely dismissed on the doorstep in a desultory manner.” I opened my mouth in dismay, but he waved that aside. “My dismissal was by your brother-in-law, John.”
John. I could imagine it. Easily. I could practically hear his self-satisfied sneer.
When I did not speak, Mr. Knightley said, “He has declared himself master of Hartfield.”
“I understood you.”
I was an idiot not to have realized. My letters to my housekeeper, unanswered. My letters to his London residence, requesting my living allowance, returned unopened. Was my fortune lost, too? As good as gone, certainly. He might dole out enough to appease my sister’s feeble appeals but never enough to provide me with resources. What little power I had to counter him came from holding Hartfield.
“What will you do?” Mr. Knightley asked.
“Go to Surrey and claim my home,” I said. “Thank you for trying to spare my feelings. Please do not do that again. A woman alone cannot afford to be fragile.” Mr. Knightley looked distressed, so I said, “I am not angry. Just… not again. Excuse me, I must speak with Georgiana.”
She stood alone beside the black and brass of the telescope. I approached her. “I am sorry my departure upsets you.”
“It is not you. Not really. It is… this disagreement on how to help Lizzy. And the news of soldiers dying. We say that so casually, but I know soldiers who died. They were all so noble and so young.” She meshed her fingers, stretching the way keyboardists did, her gaze on the windows and the darkening north sky. The evening star had emerged. “I will stay here for a while. I wish to observe marvels that make our world’s trials seem small.” She knelt and released a bronze brake on the telescope’s platform, then spun the handle on a complex clockwork. The telescope, slowly, lifted toward the sky.
I rejoined the gentlemen, but the three of them had moved on to bluff, masculine opinions about risks and routes.
Instead, I looked at the crawler pincer. It had repulsed everyone, a corruption of nature.
I drew off my glove and touched it. The surface was cool and smooth. It was inanimate, but before, it had lived. So I waited, stilling myself the way I had when touching Nessy to sense her disease.
A feeling formed. I expected to be overwhelmed by abomination, but instead of revulsion, I felt… pity. Like I had touched someone desperately ill who needed to be saved.
7
DEPARTURE
EMMA
The sun climbedabove the hills, and I said my farewells outside Pemberley’s tall front entrance.
A coach waited, not iron barred but solidly built of heavy oak. It looked almost nautical, with narrow windows and brass locks on the doors. I suppose iron bars were little use against Blackcoats with muskets.
Mr. Knightley was overseeing the loading. He had brought two mid-sized leather cases. I had two travel chests, a large carrying case, and two hatboxes, and that was after ruthless sorting. The rest would wait at Pemberley to be shipped later, or, if I found the amulet soon, I could collect it when I returned.
Mr. Darcy assessed our piled baggage with a careful eye, then went into the house and returned with a polished wooden box, narrow and long. He opened it to show Mr. Knightley a gun of burnished walnut and steel.
“A Baker rifle,” Mr. Darcy said. “I do not hunt with it—I found it unsportingly accurate—but your circumstances are different.” He pointed to a folded paper tucked by the powder horn and gleaming lead bullets. “Loading instructions. It is more involved than a musket. You have pistols?” Mr. Knightley nodded.
Mr. Darcy turned to me. His attire was always perfect, but there were signs of extra care this morning—an involved fold for his neck cloth, and coattails so crisp I suspected he had not sat on them once.
“You have been very kind,” I said. For Mr. Darcy, that was sufficient. More would be maudlin.
He accepted that with a slight bow. “I owe you thanks as well. You brightened Pemberley through a dark time.” He spoke with extreme seriousness, and I remembered when Lizzy fell and I pleaded with him to turn back from the lake’s depths, both of us deep in the freezing water.
He assessed me, rather like how he examined our baggage, and I wondered if I would be offered a gun. Instead, he passed me a hand-sized notebook bound in mauve cloth—his mother’s journal where she had noted her experiments in managing her condition.
I pressed it back into his hand. “That belongs with you. Besides, I have read it twice. If I wish to fall asleep, I shall ask Mr. Knightley to recite the dangers of Surrey. I have heard that twice, too.”
“Take this, then,” Mr. Darcy said. From the notebook, he removed a plaited red lanyard that marked the page. “This was significant to my mother. A symbol of her marriage and binding. Perhaps it will be a talisman.”
Georgiana shooed him aside so she could embrace me. She whispered, “I will sing of you.”
Mary simply studied me, her spectacles shining amid her hanging brown locks. She folded her arms and said, “Be careful.”
Lucy curtsied. I laughed and pulled her in for a hug, then held her at a distance to admire her. “You are growing into a young lady. Will you come visit me in Surrey?”
