Chapter 3
THE SHRINE
MARY
Five hours out of Longbourn, our coachman, a military rifleman discharged after losing an eye, rapped on the front panel and called down, “Trouble.”
I pushed my head out the side window. Two farm carts had blocked the road. Four men lounged beside them wearing long, belted black coats, their cheeks shaven and hair cropped.
“Blackcoats!” I shouted up. We had been warned of raids.
The driver cursed and snapped the reins.
The horses surged sideways, cranking the coach a quarter turn and into the fields, wheels bouncing over the rails of a fallen fence.
That seemed reckless—we could have broken an axel—until I saw the second group of Blackcoats running up behind us, muskets in hand.
A gunshot rang out, and the horses leaped to a gallop. The coach banged and rocked, hammering across furrows of sprouting wheat. I leaned farther to see the men chasing us, and the doorframe cracked the side of my head, knocking me half out the window.
Dazed, it took a moment to understand why I did not fall.
Georgiana had caught my flailing arm in her stretched hand, her other grasping the far door white-knuckled.
She hauled me back through the open window.
We fell in a tangled mess, then held on—to each other, to the seat frame, to the door handle.
The horses veered parallel to the furrows of wheat, and the motion changed to seasick swaying. A bullet passed, its whine dropping a perversely perfect octave, then a gun bellowed over our heads, the footman’s blunderbuss.
The coach banged again, almost knocking us airborne, then the wheels were rushing on gravel as the horses found their stride on clear road. “We’re past, ladies,” the driver shouted. “We’re safe. They’re not mounted.”
“Keep your head inside next time,” Georgiana whispered.
Late the next afternoon, our coach rolled into the valley below Pemberley House. The four-horse team was tired, having drawn us since morning, but the clop of their hooves quickened. They were Pemberley horses, stabled in Derby on our trip out and eager for home.
I was eager as well. Pemberley was safe.
Usually the valley was quiet, but today a crowd was gathered beside the lake. Carts and horses lined the road. Two massive, industrial wagons had been wheeled near the shore, and fifty feet onto the water, a strange, square barge floated, topped with heavy lumber trusses and busy men.
Georgiana called to stop the coach, and we made our way through the crowd. Most were Britons from the Pemberley hills. Welcoming “Miss Darcys” and “Miss Bennets” trailed us.
Mrs. Reynolds, the Pemberley housekeeper, was at the front. She met Georgiana with a concerned frown and said, “This is unnatural madness, to be sure!”
“Where is my brother?” Georgiana asked, puzzled.
Mrs. Reynolds pointed outward. And downward. A stream of bubbles was bursting beside the barge.
“Mr. Darcy is underwater,” answered a white-haired, stooped gentleman, seventy years old if he was a day but beaming with boyish pride.
He rolled on in a Scot’s brogue. “James Rennie, machinery maker, at your service. Mr. Darcy is testing my improvements to the diving bell.” At our stunned expressions, he added, “He is quite safe.”
On the barge, a man waved a pair of small flags. Mr. Rennie squinted and translated, “The bell is at five fathoms. Mr. Darcy has ‘pulled twice’ through the signal rope. That means ‘all is well,’ and he wishes to descend to seven fathoms.”
Georgiana’s arms folded into a knot. “Is that deep?”
“Five fathoms is thirty feet. Well within design capabilities. See the force pump?” Mr. Rennie pointed to the barge where four men strained to turn a huge, horizontal crank.
They looked like oxen turning a mill. “That drives air into the bell. In the laboratory, I have measured two atmospheres of pressure, sufficient for ten fathoms. But five fathoms is enough for today.”
Mr. Rennie made a chop motion with his hand. An assistant picked up a pair of flags and signaled back. On the barge, ropes were lashed. Different cranks turned. A dripping hawser wound onto a shaft.
“Was he on the bottom?” I asked. That was hard to conceive.
Mr. Rennie’s buoyant confidence sank a notch.
“The barge is anchored in fifteen fathoms. At the lake’s center, our sounding line did not reach bottom.
It is a hundred fathom line, so the lake exceeds six hundred feet.
” His mood bobbed back up. “However, Mr. Darcy is extremely… that is, he has offered to fund development.”
Six hundred feet. Could Lizzy be so far? Emma had sensed that Lizzy and Yuánchi remained bound, proof that Lizzy had survived her plunge into the lake. Anything more was conjecture.
My mind filled with myths of Amphitrite hiding in the depths, pursued by her Poseidon.
A massive metal bell, open at the base and big enough to conceal a man, rose ponderously into view.
A wooden boom swung the bell over the barge, and two crewmembers helped a tall man crawl from the bottom while lake water sheeted down.
They wrapped a blanket over his sopping black tailcoat and dripping neckcloth.
I snorted. That could only be Mr. Darcy. His hat was likely in the lake.
Mr. Rennie was bouncing on his toes with delight. He was exactly the sort that Lizzy adored, a gentleman inventor remaking the world without a thought for the damage to humanity or nature. I imagined her peppering him with questions, and I muttered, “Lizzy would love this.”
“Tell my brother I am returned,” Georgiana announced icily. She was angry—at my words, or at Mr. Darcy. She strode off, her steps scattering pebbles, not toward the coach but along the water. I went after her, puzzling.
A hundred yards from the crowd, we reached Lizzy’s memorial, a life-sized, granite statue. Gentle waves sloshed a few feet shy of the base.
I thought I understood Georgiana’s anger now, but my explanation stumbled. “I meant how Lizzy admires inventions. She loves bolts and hoses…”
Georgiana pointed at the statue, sculpted as if Lizzy were stepping from the lake. “This is what I have seen. This is how she returns. What Fitz is doing… it is all wrong.”
I caught her outstretched wrist, and we faced each other, her eyes bright, the lakeshore breeze flattening the brim of her bonnet.
“You have seen her?” I said. When Georgiana played or sang, her power—occasionally—provided visions. Once, she tried to show me one and failed. Many times, she tried to describe them and frustrated us both.
With Emma, naturally, she had shared one effortlessly.
“I have not seen her, exactly,” Georgiana admitted, “but I have seen her melody return. Mary, you must know what Fitz is doing is wrong. Lizzy was ill, and Yuánchi was terribly wounded. Blinded. Their rest—their sleep together—is a gift, not a vault to be pried open. It must not be interrupted. It is how they heal.”
Lizzy had been worse than ill. She was in the last throes of meningeal consumption, a ruthless killer.
When she and Yuánchi vanished into the lake, she had, at best, a day left.
If Lizzy had survived five months since then, it was a miracle—but that was nonsensical.
Lizzy was submerged. Five minutes was a miracle.
“You tell me this now?” I heard the burr of accusation in my tone. “You know I am trying to raise her, too.”
“But you have not done anything!” Georgiana cried.
I dropped her wrist—I recoiled—and she lifted her hands in frustration.
“I do not mean it like that! It is just… you will think before you act. Fitz does not.” Her cheeks flushed in the breeze.
“Yuánchi will rise as all draca rise, summoned by love and need. Not by ropes and hooks. He must choose when they are ready. He will bring her to us.”
She was beautiful in her certainty, and she had gifts I did not comprehend. But she did not understand. “He may sleep a hundred years. A thousand. The last wakings of dragons are lost in myth.”
“Then… then we shall not be here to greet her when she returns.” Georgiana’s voice caught but cleared with a singer’s hard-won control. “I am not despairing. Or saying we cannot help. But this has happened for a purpose.”
My shoulders were shivering. To disagree with Georgiana was to plunge a knife into my own heart. And I believed her. Every word. But knifed or not, my heart could not agree.
“I miss my sister, not her dragon,” I said.
“Lizzy has been gone five months. Soon it will be a year, then it will be ten. Her life is in our world, and it is passing her by. I will not let her return abandoned and alone. Yuánchi may rise when he wills, but my sister has a will, too, and it is a will of iron. Whether I need a flute or a song, if I can reach her—if I so much as make her stir in her sleep—she will choose whether to rise.”
The breeze pressed Georgiana’s clothes to her slender body. For once, she looked unsure. She was so much more poised than me, her gifts so remarkable, I sometimes forgot I was the older of us. She would turn eighteen next month.
She stepped to me and slipped her arm through mine. Deliberately, she turned us to face the memorial.
The base of Lizzy’s monument had always held mementoes and remembrances. Bunches of field flowers. Notes from the household and the Britons in the hills…
Now, it was a shrine. Flowers tumbled in drifts two feet thick.
Burned candles rested in wax puddles. Bark chips held offerings: an edge of bread, a sliver of cheese, a spoonful of grain.
More unsettling yet were the rusted knives sunk among the blooms. And atop it all, several feet long and woven of sharp holly and hawthorn, a woman’s figure slept, violent with spikes and thorns.
“She may choose to rise,” Georgiana said. “I do not think she should.”