Chapter 1 #2
He started, then patted a leather medical bag on the table. “I was certified at Edinburgh. But I have heard the nurses talk about you. I hoped you could save the leg.”
“We can, but I need your help to administer a tincture.” I drew a corked bottle from my reticule. “Venom remains in the wound. We must drain it and infuse this, then give an oral dose as well.”
He took a scalpel from his bag, and it was done in a minute, a curt partnership of “Cut here,” “Squeeze,” then “Steady her” when the pain penetrated the woman’s delirium. The doctor had a confident hand, unhesitating but careful, better than the heedless butchery of some surgeons.
I applied the tincture and bandage, then measured the oral dose. The doctor administered it in trickles, stroking the woman’s throat to encourage swallowing.
“What is this tincture?” he asked.
“The common name is draca essence. It is brewed from a flower pollinated by draca. It grows only in the north.”
“These crawler attacks are becoming frequent. The hospital should have a supply.”
“I have sent for a shipment to distribute. It is overdue.”
He nodded; shortages were routine since the war. Then he reached for the bloody cloth that had mopped the wound.
I caught his hand before he touched it. “Have the nurse burn it. A man can be killed by a fraction of the venom tolerated by a woman. You should wash your hands with soap and hot water.”
He drew back, though he seemed unalarmed. “Thank you, Miss Bennet.” I turned to go, the draca flapping to my shoulder, and he added softly, “Great Wyfe.”
Rebecca and I exited through a workers’ door and entered the laundry maze.
“Three stings in as many days,” she said. “I like spring weather, but if it wakes those vermin…” Her voice petered out, and she looked back at me.
I had stopped. The song draca was purring a woodwind whistle into my ear. The tone rose and fell, an eerie siren, and a strange sense within me resonated in counterpoint. Hairs tingled on the nape of my neck.
Most of the laundry yard was obscured. Ropes as heavy as ship’s rigging were laden with boiled bandages and dripping smocks. A breeze labored among the wet fabrics, revealing glimpses when the swaying gaps aligned.
“Miss Darcy is at Hyde Park Corner,” I whispered. “Hurry there and ask her to send the coach and driver.” Rebecca’s gaze was concerned, but she nodded and rushed away. Strange times had taught us to honor strange requests.
When she was gone, I called loudly, “Who is here?”
A young woman’s voice answered. “I sought a meeting, Mademoiselle Bennet.” Her accent was French, Parisian, and, as best my ear could judge, aristocratic.
Napoleon’s invasion of southern England had halted travel between London and France. A few French remained, dislocated or emigrated, but they strove to Anglicize their speech. This woman spoke with the careless amusement of a baroness indulging foreign consonants.
I separated a pair of tangled wet towels and stepped an aisle closer. “You know my name, madame. Will you share yours?”
“Perhaps. If I approve of you.”
I dodged below a row of flapping bandages as she stepped into the same aisle.
A few yards separated us. She wore an English dress, bonnet, and spencer of slate gray, all expensively edged with lace, but she had tied a white silk fichu around her neck in the French fashion.
With her flamboyant accent, it was a poor disguise, if disguise was her intent.
She studied me as well, her head tilting.
The song draca’s claws pricked through the shoulder pad of my dress, and his purring growl deepened to a thrum that vibrated my jawbone. With a silent swoop, a second song draca alighted on the laundry line to my right.
“So, it is true,” the Frenchwoman said, inspecting the draca. “Les présages”—she made a pretty moue while hunting for the English word—“the harbingers follow you.” Her gaze traced my dress. “Black clothes. You mourn your sister?”
Lizzy and Yuánchi were entombed countless fathoms deep. After they fell, two dismal months had passed before Emma sensed Lizzy’s survival—sensed Lizzy’s unbroken binding to Yuánchi. But our family hid that revelation. To the world, Elizabeth Darcy was dead.
“My family is no concern of yours,” I said. Was this a spy sent to discover the fate of England’s scarlet dragon?
“Your family is Bennet. You are a Bennet. Bennets are important.” She tapped a slim finger to her lips. “Our glorious Emperor, Napoleon, has divorced Marie Louise, the Austrian pretender. He will choose a French Empress. One who proves she can bind a great draca.”
I had heard nothing of Napoleon divorcing, although he had done so before, but a different question came to mind. “Bind? There are no draca in France.” There had been none for centuries, one of the mysteries of draca.
She dismissed that with a pitying glance, then smiled.
“I met one of your sisters. Ly-di-a.” She stretched her mouth, mocking the English vowels.
“Then, I was only une demoiselle du palais, a lady-in-waiting, and Lydia was powerful. Now, I am changed. And you…” She pointed her index finger at each draca—one, two—then at me, three. “Vous êtes formidable.”
“Why are you in England?”
Outside the laundry yard, a clop of hooves and clatter of wheels drew up. The coach had come.
She spoke swiftly. “I seek something old and valuable. You are a Bennet. You know where it hides.”
Did she mean the dagger? That was lost with Lizzy. I tried to list other possibilities, but my mind felt fuzzy. Sticky, as if honey-laden. “There is no purpose to riddles. Of what do you speak?”
“The great flute made from dragon claw. The flute is of music, and you”—her finger stabbed at me—“you compose music.”
Fang, scale, and claw. Then death, they saw. Those were the three fabled items of the great wyves. The fang was the dagger Gramr, sunk in Pemberley lake. The scale was mounted in an amulet; the last historical reference to that was centuries ago.
About the claw I knew nothing. I had not even known it was a flute. “You are mad if you think I will discuss this with you.”
“Non. Not mad. You search London for books. Were books taken from you?”
My heart leaped into my throat. I swallowed to force my voice flat. “Lydia stole books from the Pemberley library.”
“Oui. Have you a need for these? You seek the great song.”
The Darcy library of draca lore had been unequalled in all Britain. Regaining that knowledge might save my sister. But…
“What is the great song?” I asked.
She pursed her lips. “If you ask that, you know nothing.”
I forced a shake of my head. “I do not have the flute.”
From the alley, the constable’s voice rose. “Is that you, Miss Bennet?”
The Frenchwoman heard. She cocked an eyebrow. “A Bennet can find the flute. It is a relic of the third dragon. Of music. So, I come to greet you and make this offer. Find the flute—or learn where it is—and I shall return your books.” As if in punctuation, her finger brushed her lips again.
Some part of my brain had been fiddling with a puzzle, and now a piece slid into place. “You poisoned those women to draw me here.”
“Oh! You are clever.” Her eyes widened in a mockery of concern. “Will this one live?”
Until now, distrust had made me wary. Anger severed that restraint. I strode forward, uncomfortably close. I was taller, so she lifted her chin to meet my gaze, her smile deepening.
It was her eyes that I studied. Lydia, my dead, traitorous, and little-mourned sister could command foul crawlers by consuming their venom. But this woman’s pupils were normal—tiny dots in the morning light. She was not dosed with crawler venom.
The ridges of her cheekbones glittered as if dusted with sugar crystals. Her lips glistened with an oily sheen.
“Will she live?” the woman repeated.
“The first did not,” I said. “This one will.”
“Bien joué.” She tapped a finger to her bonnet in playful respect. “You earn your name, Great Wyfe. My name is also earned. I am la Demoiselle des Parfums.”
Lady of Perfumes. She spoke it as a title. I became aware of the bloom of scent around her, musk heavy and citrus-sweet. Insidious and potent.
“A constable is here,” I said. “You will be arrested for murder.”
Her laugh was scornful and very French. “You think a man frightens the Emperor’s lover?”
A soft scrabble like tapping pins passed my feet. I looked down and saw an armored, segmented worm the length of my hand vanish toward the alley, dozens of legs flicking.
I lurched back and shouted, “Stay away! She has crawlers!”
The scent of crawler venom, bitter almond and sour orange, flooded the air, burning my nostrils.
The tiny draca on my shoulder screeched and tumbled.
I reached for him, a fumbled reflex that half-broke his fall before he struck the stones, wings taut and convulsing.
The other song draca landed a few feet away with a pathetic thud, twitching.
Distantly, I heard, “Au revoir.” Our aisle of flapping cloth was deserted. I yanked a sheet off the line. The next aisle was empty as well.
I knelt and gathered the song draca. They twitched in my hands, small handfuls but dense, not fragile like holding a bird. I could feel the bumps of scales on their throats and the racing hearts in their chests.
I shouldered through sodden rows of cloth. A two-inch, segmented shape skittered by. The gleaming olive-brown head of another crawler squirmed up between the stones. I ducked under more cloth and reached the alley.
The constable was perched on the coach step and swearing, his ruddy complexion pale. At least ten crawlers the length of a lady’s finger scuttled over the cobblestones. At the alley’s edge, the verdant strip of grass and weeds had putrefied to a black, rotted smear.
“Did a woman in gray run past you?” I asked.
“A woman?” He grabbed the doorframe and leaned dangerously, peering both ways down the alley. “Not that I saw.”
Georgiana ducked out the door, beneath his arm, and jumped lightly to the ground. A startled crawler reared its paired stingers. Carefully, she crushed its head under her bootheel, then she rushed to the song draca I held. “What happened to them?”
“Stunned by venom scent.”
She caught my fingers in hers, cradling the draca between us, and sang a wordless tune.
I felt the power of the great wyfe of song rise, shining like the spring sun, and the draca stirred and shuddered.
Softly, she sang, “Be calm, little ones,” and they flapped and scrambled to perch on my wrists, flight feathers fluffing in annoyance.
The draca hopped from my wrists to the ground.
The new arrival, a female, cocked her head like a robin hunting a worm, then ran to a small crawler.
I feared she would eat it—surely that would be deadly—but instead she breathed a thin streak of blue fire from her jeweled muzzle, crisping the writhing crawler to a crackling mess.
The two draca began chasing about, burning the crawlers, their nearly invisible flame flaring crimson where it seared moss and lichen from the stones.
“I wish they did that earlier,” I said.
“You smelled venom?” Georgiana asked. Behind her, a burned crawler shell popped like a roasted chestnut.
I nodded. “I do not know how. Small crawlers do not spray. They only sting. The Frenchwoman must have spread it.”
Her brows lifted. “What Frenchwoman?”
“A woman from the French court. She said Napoleon has divorced. He plans to remarry and bind.”
“Bind? That cannot be good. He will marry in the occupied south?”
That explanation had not occurred to me. Why were my thoughts so muddled? “The Frenchwoman is a perfumer. She has a court title, la Demoiselle des Parfums. Her scent…” I tried to recall it, but unlike words and images, I had no gift for scent memory. “Sweet and dark, like buckwheat honey…”
Georgiana’s eyebrows climbed higher. “You smelled her?”
“She was very close. It may have been on her lips.”
“Her lips!” Georgiana straightened.
I touched her shoulder and felt slender muscles as tense as wire. “Be patient with me. My mind is recovering from… an intoxication. A chemical effect. It is fading.”
“I see,” Georgiana said testily, but she relaxed.
“The Frenchwoman is Napoleon’s intimate. His lover. She aspires to be his Empress. She wants me to help her find one of the great items, a flute made from dragon claw.”
Georgiana gave an incredulous laugh. “And I thought Darcys were bold.”
“She offered a bribe. The books that Lydia stole. She said they would explain ‘the great song.’ Do you know what that is?”
“I have never heard that phrase. You should ask Fitz. But draca live in song. Their names, their thoughts… it is all music. Their song is around us, even now.”
I was reviewing my meeting. “The perfumer possesses an unrivaled library of draca knowledge, and yet she thinks I can find something she cannot. Because I am a Bennet.”
“My Bennet,” Georgiana said firmly. “I dislike this perfumed lady who offers bribes.”
“We are wasting time searching for books,” I decided.
Georgiana clutched a hand to her breast and gasped, “You are poisoned!”
“No—” I began, then realized it was a joke.
“I have been searching for books because… because that is what I do. But scholarly histories do not matter. This Frenchwoman thinks I can find the flute because I am a Bennet. You said it too, in another way: I share blood with Lizzy.” Georgiana was serious, listening, and as my mind cleared, a memory clicked.
“I have heard of ‘the great song.’ If I can save Lizzy, it will be because the secret lies with my family.”