A Menagerie of Dragons (The Gilded Age of Dragons #1)

Prologue

She did not like being called Baby.

It made her feel small and useless.

Never mind that at only six years old she was small and useless.

She did not intend to remain so. And she did not intend to be called by the long, horrid name that was written in the parish registry, the name that had previously belonged to an unlamented great-aunt.

She could tell that name was ugly; it made her chest hurt to say it and her hand hurt to write it.

She did not believe that even her father liked that name, and it was he who had chosen it.

Her mother, she was told, had been too busy having the terrible sickness that took her to heaven to name the infant that was Baby.

Perhaps he had chosen it as sort of punishment, for making her mother weak enough to be carried way by influenza.

No, if she was not to be called Baby for the rest of her life, she must choose a name for herself—and soon.

There were not very many books about children in her house. The few the governess gave her were dreadful. The girls in those books were called Amelia, Charlotte, Anne, Jane, or Lucy, and they were always suffering terrible fates because their hands were dirty or their voices loud.

Her sister Violet, who was four years older, but whose hands were frequently dirty and whose voice was frequently loud, read them and laughed—over the children who fell into the fire or were crushed by cartwheels!

The girl called Baby could not imagine laughing over such things—not in four years and not in forty. It made her wonder whether some ancestral substance had been quite used up in producing her siblings, so that none at all remained to put into their youngest child.

The books gave her horrible dreams. Even looking at the outsides made her insides feel unsettled. She could not choose a name from that source.

Where was the youngest child of the squire of Wormwood Abbey to find a name for herself?

The fateful package was given to her at Christmas, sent up from their neighbours at Drake Hall. There was a whole village downriver as well as the tenant farmers dotted between, but none of those people were their neighbours, she knew that, although she did not know why.

She had only half unwrapped it when Violet seized it.

“Has it got pictures?” Violet asked, paging through it eagerly. “Oh! It’s got them in it!”

The oldest sister, Gwendolyn, came quickly over to see. Gwendolyn was so grown up that she never really seemed like a sister, especially when she looked at her youngest sister like this, as she often did, with her forehead as wrinkled as Violet's pinafores.

All three Worms sisters looked into the book, the two dark heads and the one baby-fair head crowding together.

In the picture, a knight on horseback was poking a very long pole down the throat of a large dragon of indeterminate species. The creature only had two legs, so it must be a member of the wyvern family, she ascertained.

It was clear that whoever had drawn it had never got a proper look at a wyvern, because they had drawn the head all wrong, and given it furry lion’s feet, instead of scaly chicken ones.

A little further off, a crowned lady was kneeling, hands pressed together in prayer. She had probably tried to tell the knight that he wasn’t supposed to hurt the dragon, no matter how nasty it was, and he hadn’t listened, just like Baby’s brother never listened to any of his sisters.

There were three letters printed next to the lady’s knee: U N A. She wondered what they meant.

“Oh,” Gwendolyn said ominously, her eyes darting between the girls.

“What’s all this?” barked their father from his place by the fire.

Gwendolyn stood straighter. “It’s a storybook, sir,” she said. “The governess tells me they seem to…to give Baby nightmares.”

Percy laughed. He was the only brother, grown-up like Gwendolyn in body but not very grown up in behaviour.

He leaned back in the comfortable chair that the girls never dared sit on and made puffs of smoke with his cigar, looking at it now and then tenderly, as if it were alive.

It had been his Christmas present from Gwendolyn, and it had actually caused him to smile at his sisters for the first time Baby could remember.

“Baby indeed!” their father muttered. His eyes found his youngest daughter and only stayed there long enough to go hard, as they always did when they happened to fasten on her. Which was not often. Then he jerked his whisky glass towards her. “Give it to her.”

“But sir—” Gwendolyn protested.

“Enough! If she can’t bear a storybook monster, how will she bear life here?” He drained the glass, then looked into it as if he was angry at it for being empty. He muttered into it, but the child heard him clearly. “We live in a nightmare.”

The smallest tremor went through Gwendolyn. Then her face smoothed and she handed the book to her youngest sister.

That night, the book sat on the toy chest at the foot of her bed in the nursery. The nursery was tucked close under the creaking, leaking eaves of the abbey, and shared by the two youngest members of the family.

If you pushed your face between the bars on the window, you could just glimpse the gaping gargoyles on either side, though only Violet cared to do that. She had got her head stuck once, and they had only got her out by slicking her cheeks very thoroughly with soap.

The girl called Baby was presently trying not to cry, for Violet had promised her a doll if she kept the secret about the gunpowder Violet had taken from her father’s gun case to make fireworks for bonfire night (and it hadn’t done anything but make a horrible sound, in the end, and no pretty colours at all).

But she had kept the secret faithfully, even when her ears hurt from the gunpowder and her father’s shouting, but there had been no doll under the tree. Only a book of monsters, and Baby was sick of monsters.

“Wake up, Baby!” Violet said, lobbing something at her which was wrapped up in a handkerchief that was not clean.

The younger girl sat up and quickly discarded the handkerchief to reveal an almost human-shaped Thing, with a face that was not quite a face, just an arrangement of features, and smelly clumps of sheep’s wool already peeling off its bald head.

Their last governess had been a chapel-goer and had given them terrifying passages from the prophets as copywork, probably as a revenge for being employed in a place where there was no place of worship fit for her. The worst of them came back to her now, and made her shiver.

Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts.

“See! I remembered!” Violet crowed, leaning on her sister’s bed, grinning. Her heavy brown hair was already escaping its half-hearted plait. “Pip wanted to help me with the face, but I did it myself.”

“Thank you, Violet.”

The little girl slid the creature under her coverlet bravely, positioning it so that no part of it touched her.

Violet pointed at the book. “Do you want to hear this?”

“Is it very frightful?” the girl asked faintly. She was curious about the praying lady, who had seemed so very serene, despite the unfortunate misunderstanding between the knight and the wyvern.

You could tell she would not have minded a bald Thing in her bed.

Violet’s face went serious, and she patted the bulge in the bed. “Poppet will keep you safe from monsters. You needn’t worry about them ever again.”

Perhaps Violet was right. Perhaps none of the monsters in Ormdale were as frightening as the creature under her coverlet.

“Ohh, listen!” she said, reading aloud: “In the distant kingdom of Fairyland stood a splendid city named Cleopolis, built by one of the elfin kings, and surrounded by a golden wall. Here dwelt the graceful and beautiful Queen of the Fairies, Gloriana…”

Gloriana! Now, that was a beautiful name! But rather long. It would take too long to write. And it did not sound well with her family name, which was Worms. Glorying in worms did not seem right.

Violet kept reading. “Once upon a time there arrived at the palace a royal maiden named Una, the only daughter of a king and queen.”

The little girl started.

Violet groaned and buried her face in the book. “You listened all the way to the end with that one about the girl whose fingers fell off because she played in the snow without her gloves. For goodness’ sake, Baby!”

“That’s not my name,” came the reply.

“What?” said Violet, staring at her younger sister.

“Una. My name is Una,” the girl said, very firmly. Then she lay down and pulled the coverlet over her ear, to stop it getting cold. “Read the rest, please.”

Violet shut her mouth with a little snap.

“Una,” Violet repeated curiously. “Una Worms. All right. Una it is.”

“Read, please, Violet,” Una said.

Violet read.

“In this fortress they had lived four years, not daring to venture out, lest they should be swallowed up by the dragon, who lay in wait outside.”

Yes, this Una knew all about the things that waited outside the sheltering, maternal abbey to bite, poison, and swallow, just like the storybook Una.

Perhaps if she listened, she might find out how to become a different sort of person entirely.

The sort of person who could be quite calm when people were being stupid and wrongheaded about things.

“At last the princess, full of pity for the unhappy state of the country, managed to leave the castle unperceived by the enemy, and, after a long and toilsome journey, reached the court of Fairyland.”

That night, Una did not dream of monsters, or children falling into fires. She dreamt of Fairyland.