Chapter 29 The Museum
THE MUSEUM
MARY
“Mary,” a woman’s musical voice sang while a cracked cello buzzed and whined.
An ill-favored dream: Georgiana struggling, her slight body shrouded in frost-rimed music scores longer than bed sheets.
I clawed at the freezing bonds, found I held a fistful of woolen blanket, and woke to blink owlishly at a hovering, blurred face.
I felt for a nonexistent dressing table—no, not Pemberley—then retrieved my spectacles from the shelf above the bed and slipped them through my tangled hair.
Rebecca Spoon’s pretty, serious face came into focus, a delicate twenty-two-year-old woman with wispy eyebrows and bones as fine as the clavichord music she composed.
“Did I startle you?” she said. “The maid would have done it better…” She gave a helpless shrug. Her maid had fled. “You said an hour of sleep, but I could not make you stir. Colonel Fremantle said to wait. It has been two hours.”
The window behind glowed dull gray. I found my watch. Three o’clock in the afternoon.
Yesterday, the colonel and I walked until jammed refugees and sightings of Blackcoats forced us to detour eastward, finally entering London at Stratford.
It was dark by then. The cobblestones were strewn with broken carts and luggage.
The omnipresent nighttime poor fought over the abandoned goods while distant cannons rumbled and nearer gunshots barked.
We ran, hid, and retreated until the morning light drove away the scavengers, then I spotted a familiar street and followed it west to Rebecca’s residence, the Marys’ emergency shelter in north London.
Exhausted, we thumped on the door at noon, and Rebecca herself answered.
“Has your brother returned?” I asked now. This was his home; a single lady did not reside alone in London.
“No,” she said, an awkward chirp as if she meant it lightly but her throat could not sustain the sound.
I had slept in my clothes, having nothing else, so I dragged a few knots from my hair and followed Rebecca into the parlor.
Colonel Fremantle, washed of the worst road dirt, was looking out another window. “Did it wake you?” he asked. “That infernal sound.”
“The buzz? I only dreamed of it.”
“Like nothing else on earth,” he muttered. “A roaring whir like a monstrous machine. It means the perfumer has come. She is in London.”
“La Demoiselle des Parfums has a machine?” Steam-powered machines were fiddly, heavy contraptions. They had ruined many honest professions, but I could not imagine machinery being useful in war.
“She is a demon, not a demoiselle, and I do not know what the roar is, only that it is unnatural. None who see her live to speak of it.”
I rubbed sleep from my eyes. “More reason to reach the museum and be done with London.”
“May I come?” Rebecca asked suddenly.
“You are safer here,” I said.
“I do not think so. Robbers broke into the home beside us yesterday. My brother has been gone for two days. He said it would be an hour. Something horrible has happened, I know it. There are no markets, no food…”
Rebecca was one of the ladies of good family abducted last autumn by Tinsdale and his slaver allies.
The slavers had sought a potent wyfe to raise the black dragon; Lizzy and I had rescued her but after vicious maltreatment.
She was a brave woman and recited her litany without tears, but each word frayed some thinning restraint within her.
Feeling clumsy and a poor friend, I blurted, “Yes, you should come. But after the museum, we will need to plan. Perhaps another shelter house is staffed. I must return north with the flute, and the trip here was… I would not wish that on you.”
She nodded, blinking, her arms crossed and her hands clutching her elbows.
Carrying valuables would draw thieves, so Rebecca fit a few coins and mementos in her reticule, then the three of us set out, sharing the last of a bag of stale cobnuts.
The streets, sparse of traffic before, were utterly deserted.
A humid haze veiled spires and bridges, draping us in uncanny, pastoral calm.
For luck, I whispered a line from Virgil, “Incipe Maenalios mecum, mea tibia, versus”—Flute, sing with me Maenalian songs.
The loyal song draca flapped to my shoulder, a sapphire gleam in the city’s grime.
A handful more followed as we set off at a hurried walk toward the museum.
“It is good to be out,” Rebecca said. Her imprisonment had been in a dark, sealed cellar. Since her rescue, she always proposed meeting under open sky, even when the weather was foul.
A half mile banished the illusory calm. Raucous ravens whirled as we entered a rundown district called Bagnigge Wells, the subject of futile and heated debates on civic improvement.
The junction was a scene macabre. Eleven English soldiers lay in painful poses, their skin livid with death and picked at by the birds.
Colonel Fremantle muttered a prayer, the religious observance at odds with his angry tone. “I have seen this in the south. The perfumer’s work.”
“It is a large war,” I said, kneeling by one of the bodies, a slender, fair-haired man. “She cannot be everywhere.”
The colonel’s head swiveled as muskets sounded to the south. “We should move. Ministering to the dead is a swift path to join them.”
“I wish to know why they are dead. They were not shot.” Rigor had peeled back the soldier’s lips like he was shouting a final warning.
Behind his rigid jaw, the exterior jugular vein bulged, distended and cyanotic.
I lifted his collar and saw twin punctures an inch apart, the skin torn as if struck in passing.
“A sting. This could have been any of the enemy with a captive wyfe to control crawlers.” But the torn skin was unlike other stings I had seen.
“Or the perfumer,” Colonel Fremantle repeated. Through the frenetic night, he had been collected and professional. Now he twitched at every sound. “She has killed hundreds. They say she is as beautiful as an angel, but under her clothes, she is half crawler and has pincers for hands.”
This must be how myths begin. “Her hands are perfectly normal—”
“Mary, rise slowly,” Rebecca said. “There is a crawler behind you.”
Not at all slowly, I scrabbled to my feet. A thick-bodied crawler was squirming out from under one of the bodies. Its sharpened feet scraped for purchase while the soft, slug-like horns on its head extended to scent the air.
Colonel Fremantle drew his pistol, but I signaled to wait. “Too loud. Let me try something.”
I took one of the syringes from my reticule, this time careful to remove every scrap of sealing wax. I squinted to aim and pressed the plunger. Draca essence splashed over the crawler’s head and body, and it spasmed and curled into a heap.
We formed a cautious triangle, looking down at the shivering creature.
“What is that liquid?” the colonel asked.
“Draca essence. I have two left.” I offered him one of the syringes, but he shook his head, patting the butt of his pistol. I gave it to Rebecca. “Break off the wax first.” She examined the tip as if it were a novel embroidery needle.
Colonel Fremantle raised his boot and, before I could protest, crushed the crawler’s head. Perhaps that was for the best. He would have argued if I said the crawler was blameless, a pathetic distortion of draca, while we were surrounded by the dead.
The British Museum was as still as the streets we had passed through, but the sounds of war were nearer, a more disciplined and deadly chorus than the cacophony of the night.
The museum’s main entrance was unattended, the doors ajar.
The colonel, a gentleman even here, held them for us with a brief bow.
The song draca flew away before I entered.
The museum’s foyer, abandoned, felt even larger than usual. The ceilings were cavernous, the pillars looming.
“Where now?” the colonel asked, peering into the first, large exhibition room.
“I hoped to have help.” Loudly, I called, “Is anyone here?”
There was a metallic, ringing bong followed by a man’s dismayed exclamation. We headed that way and found a tremendously thin, young gentleman, one of the curators and the precise person I had hoped to meet. I was not surprised. He either worked day and night or lived here.
He looked up while snatching at a rolling brass pitcher on the floor. “Miss Bennet!” He straightened with a smile, then began brushing at the smears of heavy dust on his disarranged coat. He appeared to be packing the exhibit into a crate. “Whatever are you doing here?”
“I could ask the same thing. However, I am only happy you have stayed. Is there no one else?”
“They all left,” he admitted. “A soldier came to say the French are close. But I am sure the Prince will send troops to protect the museum. He is very fond of the Egyptian collection.” He noticed Colonel Fremantle’s uniform. “Is that why you are here?”
“No,” the colonel said. “The English army is stretched thin, and I have other duties. You should depart as well.”
“Not yet,” I interposed hurriedly. “First, I need your help.” Inspired, I changed that to “The Prince needs your help. We must save not only the museum, but all England.”
“Oh,” the curator said, straightening his shoulders.
“You remember the museum ball, the night when the black dragon rose? You showed me notes for a lecture on the dagger Gramr. There was a catalog number…” I closed my eyes, visualizing the sheaf of papers in my hand.
Images of pages flickered, most with the nondescript blur of material I had not actually read, but the drawing had caught my eye, and the caption beneath returned in a crisp, mental reconstruction of the curator’s scholarly hand. “1756-1-3-17.”
He nodded. “The Scottish flute. That is a museum number, not a catalog number. Although that particular classification is contested. The acquisition notes proposed moving it to the Sloan collection, as he was present on the expedition, but I am proposing the Asian collection—”