Chapter 1
Chapter one
The child Una Worms would not have recognised herself at nineteen.
No longer small or useless, she had grown to a tallish stature for a woman, although she had never filled out as Violet had or acquired the commanding presence of Gwendolyn.
Her soft fair hair and widely spaced blue eyes tended to inspire protective impulses in the bosoms of those with whom she had to do.
Which was ironic in the extreme, since Una spent the largest part of her day either protecting the people and creatures around her, or worrying about doing so.
On this particular spring morning, Una was worrying about two things: the reputation of the Royal Menagerie of British and Foreign Dragons, and the American gentleman from the Smithsonian who was coming to Ormdale to inspect it.
Somewhat insensitively, he had wired them to inform them his visit would coincide with the menagerie’s first Open Day of the new decade.
Though perhaps one could not expect sensitivity from an American.
Although the Menagerie had been open every spring and summer since nineteen-five, Opening Day was inescapably a trying one. It was a jolt to go from Una’s fireside-life of books and music to managing the world’s only dragon menagerie.
To make matters much worse, this would be the first year Una was obliged to open to the public without her aunt, uncle, and cousin present.
Every day since the telegram had come about the visit had been spent in rigorous planning and the kind of methodical forestalling of threats that Una did best. But despite all of her precautions, Una was aware of approximately eight ways that things were likely to go wrong.
Nine, if she counted envenomation by a still-befuddled-from-brumation dragon, which wasn’t the threat it had been once, since they had a very effective antidote on hand.
Still, the American might take it badly. Being bitten by a venomous dragon was often taken badly, regardless of the victim’s nationality, and regardless of however innocently the dragon might have intended it.
“Una?” her violin teacher said, interrupting her thoughts.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Una said. “Is the lesson over?”
“I am not sure it ever began,” he said dryly.
“Oh! Please forgive me for being so absent-minded. I keep thinking about—“
“The long-awaited visit of the Smithsonian gentleman,” he finished. “I did tell you we might postpone our lesson, in honour of the day.”
“Thank you,” she said, as she carefully wiped down the violin bow with a cloth dampened with spirits, “but I like to keep to my schedule, you see. I like things to be tidy.”
“I’m shocked,” he said, glancing at the three perfectly sharpened pencils on her music stand. They were of the same length precisely.
“Cousin George says it is of the highest importance that the Americans appreciate the significance of what we do here,” Una said, loosening the bow strings preparatory to putting it away.
“And since he is abroad and his parents are away, I must make sure everything is absolutely ship-shape in their absence. It’s the least I can do. ”
He smiled his crooked smile. “One day I would like to see the most you can do.“ He looked at her thoughtfully. “I could stay? It’s my day off, you know.”
Una bit her lip. She would hate herself if she hurt his feelings.
She loved her teacher dearly, but he was a very unorthodox sort of person.
He had exactly the sort of colourful past one might imagine of a person from Poland, and though now quite middle-aged and a very happy family man, he still had odd ideas that came out when one least expected them.
Just the sort of person, in fact, that might offend an international visitor, of whose tastes and prejudices she knew nothing.
“I couldn’t face Lily if I took you away from her today,” she said at last, with a delicate shade of regret.
He chuckled as he snapped the case shut. “Very well, I will make myself scarce. But you know where to find me, if you need help rescuing the American.”
“Mightn’t it be me who needs rescuing?“ Una asked mildly.
He paused with his hand on the doorknob and chuckled. “No, little one. You are the last person in Ormdale I expect to need rescuing.”
Just then there came a kerfuffle at the other entrance to the room—the one with French doors. They were misted over from the humidity in the menagerie glasshouse, so all that could be seen was a flutter of wing and a scratch of claw.
“Wait, Oolong!” she called out.
As soon as her violin, score, and pencils were properly put away, she crossed the room and unfastened the doors. She stepped out onto the little balcony, breathing in the distinctive smell of tropical plants, humidity, and dragons.
The balcony was positioned at the topmost level of the glasshouse, and from it a wrought iron staircase spiralled down three floors to the bottom.
Una glanced down and repressed a shudder at the gappy ironwork of the steps. She had never descended that spiral staircase, preferring to make a more circuitous route through the abbey, where the stairs were made of solid wood.
But on days when Una felt secure enough, she would wrap her fingers around the banister and survey the whole thing from above, like a bird in its nest. She could watch all the creatures slipping in and out of the palms and ferns, swooping and snapping at insects, or fighting with their reflections in the glass panes of the glittering dome above.
Today, as on all visiting days, there was a tang of excitement in the air, heightened by the distant whistle of the little steam train which would bring the tourists up from the village of Ormby to the iron gates of Wormwood Abbey, from which they would explore the grounds, which were now devoted to carefully designed enclosures of various dragon species.
The rambling manor house had known many changes since its beginning as a place of prayer in the Middle Ages.
The abbey had become a private residence when Henry VIII threw out the monks in the fifteen hundreds.
It was then in danger of being given to one of that King’s favourites at court, but the last abbot had converted to the English Church and become the first squire—probably because cared more for his draconic duties than for any others.
This was a charge which might have been laid at the feet of the Worms family for all the intervening centuries, and one of which Una was acutely conscious.
As England’s dragons dwindled into myth after the Dissolution, Una’s family faded with them. Only within their hidden Yorkshire valley of Ormdale were they known and feared as Worm Wardens—Dragon-Keepers, bound to their duty to safeguard England’s last dragons by an ancient and fearful oath.
Outside of it, they were forgotten. Until ten years ago.
And now they were the opposite of forgotten.
A pudgy creature the size and shape of a Pekinese dog rose up and hovered at the height of her chin, its beady eyes fixed on her with an expression she knew to be one of profound affection, its wings beating in a coppery blur.
Its scaled body was the colour of steeped tea, and its wings glinted in the sunlight.
Once, Una had been afraid of dragons, but that seemed like a bad dream to her now. She had been nine years old when her father and brother had died suddenly, and a new Worm Warden, her uncle, had been summoned from the world outside.
Uncle George and Aunt Emily had shown their nieces a new way to live that wasn’t ruled by oaths and secrets and onerous duties.
There was still a part of Una that looked for the shadow behind everything.
It was to the credit of her uncle and aunt that in their kindness, at least, she could find none.
Una wrapped her arms around the Chinese dragon’s bumpy body. He puffed a breath into her ear and folded his wings. The tightness in her chest that always came to her in the mornings loosened a little.
“Did you really fly up all this way, darling?” she murmured. “How very strong you are getting, Oolong!”
He had never flown at all until the glasshouse was built.
Her cousin, also a George, said it was because flying used up an enormous amount of energy, most of which had been wasted in the creature’s body by staying warm in the uncongenial Yorkshire climate.
Una reached for her dragon-keeper’s belt for a treat to give him, then realised she had not yet put it on.
Una felt a jolt of displeasure at herself, and glanced back to where the belt lay on her neatly smoothed bed in the long, rambling room with the sloping ceilings and garret windows.
It was her old nursery, and Aunt Emily had questioned it when Una claimed it for her own—worried that Una would be lonely in a room so thick with childhood memories, and that the sounds of the menagerie might disturb her rest.
But Una found them reassuring, even at night.
Dragons, it turned out, could be managed.
Sisters could not.
“Come—there’s work to be done,” Una said briskly. This was no time to be thinking of Violet.
Not on Opening Day.
It was now two minutes past ten o’clock, she thought as she went back inside, Oolong drifting after her.
The Smithsonian gentleman had written that he would arrive on the one o’clock train—thankfully, this was after the most chaotic period of the day had concluded: dragon-feeding time.
A few members of the public were always selected to participate, and once the public were involved, things became something Una hated more than anything: variable.
This was especially onerous on Opening Day, when all of the family and staff had got out of the habit of coping with them and had to be slapped awake with their misbehaviour.
The British public could not be dissuaded from feeding dragons, and if appropriate food was not provided, the consequences were disastrous. Una had found herself treating dragons that had been fed with everything from peppermints and humbugs to cigarettes and sandwich papers.