Chapter 2
A VISIT HOME
MARY
Longbourn’s lanes were paved with a local white gravel suffused with tiny, ancient shells.
The distinctive crunch beneath our wheels plucked strings in my memory.
As a child, I had dashed across these stones to hide, first playing games with my sisters, then later to read in solitary shade when the press of people became too great.
The hollyhocks were my secret place. They were constantly overgrown, filling the crumbling remnant of an old stone-fenced paddock. Their leaves felt like feathers. Thinking back, it must not have been very secret—Mamma would come retrieve me if I forgot about dinner.
The flower gardens looked small after so much time at Pemberley. The vegetable gardens were larger. Longbourn was a practical estate, not a wealthy one.
“I feel at home, yet also like a visitor,” I said as the coach swayed to a stop. Unnamable emotions jostled in my chest.
“While you are being wistful,” Georgiana said, “I am fretting about your mother.”
I pulled my attention from the spring foliage of our elm trees. “Why fret? You intimidate Mamma.”
“I do not want to intimidate her. Mary, I have not seen her since the ball in London. We have not seen her, together, since then. What do we say about us?”
Irreconcilable rules collided in my brain: the imperative of truth; the prejudices and naivete of my mother’s generation; her reliable, if disorganized, love.
After futile seconds, I gave a despairing laugh.
“When we performed for the Prince Regent, I knew immediately what to say. But I have not the most remote idea what to say to Mamma.”
Georgiana sighed, but she smiled. “I suppose we shall improvise.”
I rang the doorbell. Whoever came would be a happy surprise: our housekeeper, or Kitty if she were in a frivolous mood and answered herself, or one of the maids.
Instead, the door was tugged open by a small boy, nine at most. He set his nose in the air and said officiously, “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” I said. “Who might you be?”
“I am the butler,” he piped. He lowered his nose to see me better, gave a surprised, shy smile, and ran down the hall.
We followed, peering into familiar but empty rooms, until we reached the parlor where Mamma was sound asleep in a chair, an embroidery hoop askew on her knee.
She woke with a start. “Mary! How those children wear me out. I only closed my eyes… Oh, Miss Darcy!” She stood hurriedly, straightening her skirt as they exchanged curtsies.
Mamma said, “Are you not pretty with those shiny buttons,” and Georgiana complimented her partially embroidered coif. Then silence fell.
“Have we hired a four-foot-tall butler?” I asked.
“That is the schoolchildren playing their games. Lizzy sent the London children to Jane’s, which is very sensible. Country living is much better for children. Although I think Lizzy was more worried about dragons. They quite destroyed the city. I suppose you know about that?”
I had been walking to Chathford House when Fènnù and Yuánchi fought above London.
The sky blazed, and I stopped in the street, face lifted to a skyscape of divine wrath.
Coal-dark plumes rolled to the horizon like black thunderbolts, stroke-by-stroke occluding the afternoon blue.
Unbearable sun-bright flares ripped in opposition, each an eruption of streaming gold.
The thunder shattered windows. Rained broken birds.
Then the dragons took their battle to the streets, and buildings toppled.
“You know I was there,” I said. “Only part of the city was destroyed.”
Mamma clucked and patted my arm. “Well, you are safe here, just like the children, and I am glad for both. Jane and Charles hold the school classes at Netherfield, and it is a fine manor, but the children do not all fit, so the littlest ones are here. It makes us very busy. I told Harriet we must have the teachers back, but she goes on about the war. Still, there is the wyvern.” I did not understand that last part, but I forgot it when Mamma asked, “Is there news of dear, sleeping Lizzy?”
We had simplified Lizzy’s situation for Mamma, not hiding the bizarre aspects of it—those could hardly be concealed—but conveying confidence that she would return soon.
“There is no news yet,” I said. “I devote all my energy to finding a way to wake her.”
“As does my brother,” Georgiana added.
That, I knew, was an understatement.
Mamma nodded, her age-thinned eyelids crinkled with concern. Her gaze narrowed as she examined my clothes, which were very London in style.
“I am afraid this must be a short visit,” I said. “We are on our way to Pemberley, but I wished to fetch a book.”
As if addressing the air, Georgiana observed, “I knew it would be a book.”
This was firmer footing for Mamma as well. “Nose buried again,” she scolded me. “How many times have I told you that a lady’s accomplishments must be in moderation?”
“It is lucky that Mary looks charming with her nose in a book,” Georgiana said with a brilliant smile.
Mamma blinked. “Is it in fashion?”
“Oh, it is!” Georgiana assured her and took her arm. “Shall you and I visit the schoolchildren until she is done?”
Papa’s library was how I had left it after visiting to deliver Jane’s daughter. The Longbourn business ledgers filled most of one shelf. 1786 through 1810 were labeled in Papa’s hand. 1811 and 1812 were labeled by Lizzy; secretly, she had managed our estate when Papa’s health failed.
Longbourn belonged to Jane and Charles now, but this year’s ledger, 1813, was labeled by me.
I flicked it open and saw only my spikey numerals, the digits’ columns exactly aligned.
I had caught up the bookkeeping while Jane recuperated, but Jane and Charles had added nothing since.
The optimistic explanation was that they consolidated both their estates’ accounts through Netherfield’s records.
More likely, they paid any bill they received if it came with a smile.
For no sound reason, I opened the 1812 ledger. Lizzy’s neat numerals and annotations awaited. Accurate. Prettier than mine. The image turned watery, so I closed the cover, then squeezed my eyes tight until my feelings settled.
Why would a member of Napoleon’s court think a Bennet could find the mysterious flute?
The Loch bairn journal, the reason for my visit, was shelved beside the ledgers. For generations, its title had been misread as “Longbourn,” even causing the misnaming of our estate. It recorded the history of the Bennet family, and it was old. The first entries preceded the Tudor era.
I drew it out, the aged leather soft and rough as velvet.
Faded embossing showed a wyvern clutching an empty chest. Lizzy had solved that riddle.
Gentry ladies, titled “wyfe” even before they wedded, had the right to bind draca on their marriage night.
But marriage gold, the wedding offering collected by the Church to ensure a binding, was meaningless.
Draca bound for love, not gold—to experience the human emotions they never felt.
Or did draca experience emotions, but fail to understand them?
That would be like my life, buffeted by feelings that others named with a wink or a shrug while in my breast they burned like unwatchable suns, or inscrutable gods even, overwhelming and enigmatic.
Save for a few I had come to recognize. The heat of love. The collapsing hollow of grief.
I riffled the pages. I had committed them to memory, but it had been many months, and even my recollection faded. Some of the oldest pages were not intelligible, and in my mind’s eye those were a blur—precise recall without comprehension was difficult.
The Frenchwoman said the third great item was an artifact of music.
I knew less about the third item than the other two.
I had held the dagger in my own hand; it was one of Fènnù’s ten-inch serrated teeth fitted with a leather-wrapped hilt decorated with a gold medallion.
And through Fènnù’s memories, I had glimpsed an ancient wyfe holding the amulet, a splash of scarlet on a golden chain—a scarlet scale from Yuánchi, whose Chinese name meant vitality and life.
If the flute was made from dragon claw, logically the claw came from a third dragon—the dragon of song. And the flute was for the wyfe of song, Georgiana.
I turned a page, and my finger alighted on the passage I had recalled:
For the Great Song, I knowe the three relicks, edged, chayned, and hollow. The Queene holds the edged and chayned, but not the thryd, the hollow relick of Musike bathed in tears of betrayal.
Before, that had seemed mere stylistic rambling.
Tudor authors enjoyed that; the Loch bairn journal, ostensibly our family history, was no exception.
But three relics could be the three great items. The dagger was edged, and the amulet, poetically, might be called chained.
A flute, the relic of music, would be hollow.
The reference to a queen, at least, was clear from the dates: Queen Mary the first, the great wyfe who gave golden touch pieces as blessings with her healings, sent her knights to steal the dagger Gramr, and eventually acquired the amulet as well.
I had no intention of giving the flute to the French. But if it related to our family, it might help Lizzy, or perhaps it led to the “great song” which might. And all three items mattered. They were made to heal the dragons’ broken song. Heal the growing blight that Georgiana saw in her visions.
The Frenchwoman had said a Bennet could find the flute.
The peculiarity of that struck me at last, and, foolishly, I found my gaze wandering Papa’s shelves.
But draca claws were a distinctive, lustrous black.
There was nothing made of dragon claw at Longbourn.
There was not even a flute. As a child, I had poked through every cabinet and crevice a hundred times.