Chapter 1 #2
While they spoke, I studied the tykeworm, who had padded close to investigate the lace trim of my petticoat.
Lizzy’s scarlet binding could not be with this tyke.
The color I sensed from a binding was the color of the draca themselves, and the tyke was brown and orange. To my knowledge, no draca were scarlet.
I addressed the tyke, mock serious. “Which wyfe is yours?” Gleaming black eyes turned up to consider me. I felt the stirring of his binding, but weak. Distant.
“He is bound to my aunt,” Lizzy answered, and the tyke switched his attention to her.
“Today he is my companion. My aunt’s legs tire, and he is high-spirited, so when I come to London, I take him out.
” She bent to him. “You are my loyal guardian.” He sat back on his haunches, chest flung out and for all the world appearing proud. All three ladies laughed.
Although the event was for ladies, two gentlemen entered.
One was dark skinned, and my gaze caught on him.
Black men were common in port cities like London, often sailors from the Caribbean who had settled, and Black gentlemen were mentioned in the society papers, but I had never met one.
Our small Surrey village of Highbury had only a Black farmer and Harriet.
This man was elegant and poised, his charcoal coat fitted to a strong, tapered torso. He wore no gloves and gestured while he spoke. His hands were strikingly expressive. I wondered if he had passed the men shouting that England should resume the slave trade.
“Who is that?” I asked Lizzy as the man bowed to a pair of fashionable young ladies.
“Mr. Knightley. He is prominent in the London musical establishment. I have been looking forward to meeting him.”
A cough echoed through the room.
I spun, unsure where it had been. Lizzy gave me a surprised look. I grasped for an excuse. “Such a pretty salon.”
Who coughed? The compulsion bit like a demon, curling my fingers.
I dragged a smile onto my lips. “Harriet, if I may…” I smoothed the ribbon on her collar, explaining, “Harriet will warn you. It is my favorite project to keep my friends’ clothes neat.”
The ladies laughed. But the ribbon had not been enough. Pestilent, colorless miasma curled around our feet. My fingers crooked.
“I have a challenge for your clothing project,” Lizzy said. Her friendly smile became intimate as she took the hand of an approaching gentleman—the fair skinned one, although he also had dark hair. He was very tall. “Mr. Darcy, may I introduce my new acquaintances, Miss Woodhouse and Miss Smith.”
I shook hands, relieved by the distraction. When Mr. Darcy’s glove touched mine, the Darcys’ scarlet binding flashed. It was rare to sense anything from a husband, and this was strong, like touching a wyfe, although nothing to the raw power when I had touched Lizzy.
Beside me, Harriet managed a wordless bob, her eyes wide at Mr. Darcy’s bearing and social consequence, or perhaps his broad shoulders.
“Do you see your challenge, Emma?” Lizzy said, an eyebrow cocked in amusement.
At first, I hardly heard her. My eyes were searching his clothes, my fingers itching. Men’s clothes were better—concealing, snugly buttoned—but also worse because touching required elaborate contrivance.
But the compulsion faded. I recalled now: the miasma was a fancy of my mind. It was not real.
“He is perfect,” I said, then laughed and corrected myself, “Your clothes, Mr. Darcy, are quite perfect.” Relief left me giddy.
“It is his most annoying habit,” Lizzy said. “I am overmatched in any dressing contest.”
“My habit is in remembrance of my mother,” Mr. Darcy said. He had a resonant baritone that suited his height.
“What?” Lizzy said, turning to him. “I did not know that.”
“My mother was distressed by imperfect clothing,” Mr. Darcy said. His eyes had not left me. Attention from gentlemen was familiar, but this felt odd. Was he suspicious? Impossible. I was too practiced at concealment.
The other draca in the room were a roseworm and a broccworm. To sense the Darcys’ binding so strongly, one draca must be theirs. Bindings were stronger when the bound draca was near. Could a roseworm feel scarlet? That seemed unlikely.
“Which is your bound draca?” I asked.
Silence.
Mr. Darcy replied, “Regrettably, my wyfe and I were unable to bind.”
He had lied. I felt their binding.
I offered the traditional, vacant sympathies.
Lizzy stared at the floor as if shamed by their failure—deserved or not, blame fell on the wyfe—but her pose was unconvincing after her frank grief for her deceased sister.
Mystified, I braced myself and grazed her gloved hand again. Her binding flashed scarlet in my mind.
Why would a bound wyfe pretend she had failed to bind?
Here is my second secret. I sense the bindings between wyves and draca.
This secret is not illusion; bindings are real.
But only I can sense them. It is a strange skill, and harmless, but I conceal it.
A gentleman and wyfe bind draca through the passion of their marriage night.
That makes curiosity about binding improper, but my skill is even more troubling—too much like the powers claimed by sinful crones who peddle binding charms to desperate brides.
These first two secrets are a dangerous pair. One senses truth but must be concealed. The other fills me with false terrors I must ignore or be declared a madwoman.
Hand-in-hand, the pair of fashionable ladies left the larger group and crossed the room to join us. The remainder of the group quieted, every eye following. These were the salon hosts and influential in London society.
“Mary!” Lizzy said as they arrived. “Imagine my surprise when I discovered my name printed in your program.”
Miss Mary Bennet was an intense young woman in an unremittingly black gown, her only jewelry circular gold spectacles and a delicate gold musical note hanging on a hair-thin necklace.
Her brown hair fell straight to her shoulders, a peculiar style but one shared by several guests. Some trending London fashion.
“The male aristocracy has conspired to restrict binding to gentry,” Mary replied, her words so rapid they were almost staccato.
“You should be the speaker, as you made me aware of it.” When Lizzy seemed taken aback, Mary adjusted her spectacles—inexpertly; they must be new—and added in painstaking tones, “Our theme is society’s conventions that disempower women. ”
“I did not intend to give a public speech on the matter,” Lizzy protested.
Mary squinted through her spectacles. “Why not?”
“Did you not even ask her?” said the woman beside her. She was younger yet but blooming into a beauty, black-haired with ocean-blue eyes, although slim as a reed. She wore an unembellished, exquisite blue watered-silk gown. Around her neck hung a twin to Mary’s musical note necklace.
The three women launched into overlapping claims and counterclaims, all delivered with the happy annoyance of loving family. Harriet and I exchanged an amused look.
Mr. Darcy’s powerful voice intervened. “Miss Woodhouse, Miss Smith. May I present my sister, Miss Georgiana Darcy, and my wyfe’s sister, Miss Mary Bennet.”
Miss Darcy was the young beauty. She greeted us with unselfconscious grace, her hand elegant as a duchess and her voice a song. Behind her back, Miss Mary Bennet traded sisterly scowls with Lizzy before shaking my hand distractedly.
While Harriet listened to the ladies debate the merits of public speech, I stole a glance at Mr. Darcy. He no longer watched me. His gaze hung on his wyfe, enthralled. They were very obviously in love. That was by no means the rule for a gentry marriage.
I examined his snow-white waistcoat. It fastened with a single column of seven oyster-shell buttons. Each button had grooves dividing it in quarters. All the buttons were oriented identically, one groove precisely vertical. I exhaled a long breath as the last crawling twinges of my panic cooled.
This could be a good day. A day with no need for deception. London might be more tolerable than I thought.
A sharp motion drew my gaze to the salon’s doorway. The dour maid had her arm extended, blocking the entrance of two rough men in leather cloaks. I recognized the stubbly man from the protest on the street.
One man grabbed the maid and dragged her aside, his hand stifling her mouth. The other man strode into the unaware crowd.
“Mrs. Elizabeth Darcy!” he shouted. “Where is she?”
Shocked faces turned to him, but also to Lizzy. The man’s gaze followed, and his eyes narrowed. He drew his hand from his coat pocket. Steel and brass gleamed as he pointed his arm at Lizzy. He held a pistol.
Mr. Darcy wrapped his wyfe in an embrace that drove her against me. We stumbled sideways in a tangle. The pistol flashed dirty-orange with an ear-thump of sound, blowing a ragged hole in the wall a foot from my shoulder. Plaster dust stung my face. Settled on my eyelashes.
Mr. Knightley charged at the gunman. They collided with a yell, then pushed across the room to slam the wall. A painting fell, and they fell on top of it, wrestling and shouting. Mr. Darcy ran to help.
Like a choir after a synchronized breath, a chorus of ladies’ screams sounded. Pastel and print dresses retreated to press walls and chairs. The center of the room emptied other than the sulfurous smoke from the pistol shot.
The second man stood unnoticed by the entrance, the silenced maid struggling in his arms. He shoved her viciously, banging her head into the doorframe, and she collapsed, skirts askew. He strode across the room, his eyes on Lizzy.
Lizzy was beside me, her gaze on her scuffling husband. I shouted, “Lizzy! Run!”
Her eyes turned to me, then she saw the other man. Her empty hand rose, a finger outstretched as if to point.
Authority hammered my awareness. Command drove the air from my lungs. I had never felt this. I did not understand what I felt.
The man reached the abandoned center of the room. He pulled his cloak aside and reached for a huge pistol on his belt. The barrel was flared like the blunderbusses favored by coach drivers.
The broccworm ran forward and gaped its jaws, throwing a raging wall of blue flame between the man and us—inches from the man’s hands and so hot that it scalded my face a half-dozen yards away.
The man fell backward, his arms flailing.
The edge of his cloak swung through the flame, and the heavy leather crisped and blew away like paper in a bonfire.
The man sprawled hard onto the floor, and the broccworm’s fiery breath stopped. The ceiling above flashed into a sheet of orange fire, then extinguished itself to oily smoke.
Lizzy walked forward to stand over the man. Smoldering curls of burnt paint fell around her like black snowflakes tipped with sparks. They alighted on her hair and dress, cooling and staining her shoulders with ash.
The broccworm jumped onto the man’s chest, snarling. Unnatural blue flame flickered with each growl.
The man drew his pistol, but the tykeworm ran from Lizzy’s side to catch the man’s wrist in obsidian-black teeth. The tyke was small, no bigger than a Yorkshire terrier, but even the smallest draca has teeth sharper than razors and harder than steel.
“If you wish to keep your hand,” Lizzy said, “you should drop that.”
The man splayed his fingers, and the pistol clattered to the floor.
Even the scuffling men by the wall had frozen at the spectacle. Now, Mr. Darcy rolled their cowed opponent onto his belly. Mr. Knightley produced a coil of peculiarly fine string from his pocket and wound it around the man’s hands.
Mr. Darcy joined his wyfe. He kicked the discarded pistol across the floor. The broccworm, tyke, and roseworm spaced themselves around the terrified man’s head.
“Are you hurt?” Mr. Darcy asked, his voice tight with concern.
Lizzy looked up. She seemed impossibly calm. “I am unhurt, but…” She turned to a window. To the north. “Yuánchi heard me. He comes. I must stop him.”
Scarlet flared and faded in my mind. This time, I felt the thread of their binding stretching far, far to the north. How could a distant draca feel so powerful? And there was something more… a vitality in the binding that tugged at my soul. A familiarity that drew me.
Roiling, acrid smoke swirled through the room. Women coughed and sobbed. Harriet was comforting a crying woman beside me.
I remembered the maid at the door. I had seen her injured. I saw her fall.
I ran to the entrance. The miasma flooded the floor, clutching at my shoes with every step. The maid, a woman of forty or fifty, was a senseless heap in the doorway. I knelt by her, my hands trembling.
I had to help her. Save her. I placed my gloved fingers on her unconscious brow, as useless as when I had comforted Papa.
But here, the Darcys’ scarlet binding glimmered around Lizzy, tantalizing and potent. My soul reached for it, but it was ungraspable. Claimed by another.
The miasma surged, colorless pestilence that drowned the world. Awareness fled.