Chapter 29 The Museum #2
“Is it here?” I interrupted. “Can you take us to it? It is most urgent.”
He rocked on his feet, thinking, then wandered off.
I hurried after him, excitement lifting hairs on the nape of my neck, and Rebecca and the colonel followed.
We passed through the public halls, several with exhibits that had been transferred to straw-lined crates, then through a narrow archway into an equally narrow corridor.
A door marked 1750–1766 opened into a crowded storeroom.
The curator stopped for a beat, then went to a stack of drawers and removed one, about the width and depth of my hand but long. He set it on a worktable.
“The Scottish flute,” he announced.
The drawer held a blackened, round tube the length of my palm.
“You have the wrong drawer,” I pointed out.
He examined the box. His finger tapped the round piece. “This is it.”
“There was a drawing.” The words felt awkward; my lips had gone dry. “An end-blown flute, like a recorder. Thirty inches long, at least.”
He beamed. “My artistic rendering! That was for the laypersons at the ball.” He took the blackened piece from the drawer.
“I had to imagine the intact instrument, but the scholarship is sound. You can see the mouthpiece is end-blown, and made of a rare wood, black bamboo.” He wagged a finger.
“Not native to Scotland! Hence my recommendation to move this to the Asian collection. We are having a tussle over it, but scholars’ arguments aside, it is a Chinese end-blown flute recovered in Scotland, which is what I drew.
They call it a xiāo. The Chinese that is, not the Scots. ”
He offered the mouthpiece; I took it numbly.
The wood was deeply charred in spots, smooth in others, and unusually dense.
It had not been broken off a longer instrument; the bottom ended in a narrower joint intended to slip into another piece.
Around the joint, a ring of symbols was inscribed.
Mechanically, I rotated it in my fingers.
Half the joint—half of the symbols—was burned away.
The top of the mouthpiece, where one would blow, was split. I could fit my little finger into the gap. Splinters pricked my skin.
Rebecca and the colonel had watched in silence. The colonel asked, “Could it be played? If one added a bottom tube.”
No.
The curator hmmed. “I am not a musician, but it seems unlikely.”
The mouthpiece was trembling violently, tied to my heart which pounded as if to flee my chest, every beat driving a pulse of pain in my temple. I had been so certain I had remembered something crucial.
I forced my hand still, turned the mouthpiece again, and touched the ring of symbols. “What are these? They are not Chinese characters.”
“They are no known language. Decorations. The flute’s design, however, is undoubtedly Chinese, a mouthpiece and body joined by an annulet. The acquirer noted the body was destroyed.” The curator frowned at me. “Are you well, Miss Bennet? Shall I take your arm?”
“No, thank you,” I replied, an automatic reflex. Men were obsessed with taking ladies’ arms.
The symbols did not look decorative; they did not repeat in a pattern. They were systematic, distinct marks placed to follow rules. I concentrated, committing them to memory. The shapes were unfamiliar, but the rules teased at something…
I closed my fingers around the mouthpiece and held it up as if to play. The splintered gap pinched my lip.
I whispered, “I did not know it was damaged.”
The feathery song draca whipped in through the open door. He circled the ceiling, then landed on my shoulder with a strident cheep.
The curator’s mouth fell open. He bent until his nose almost touched the song draca’s scaled muzzle. “You have a hitherto undocumented breed of draca on your shoulder.”
More song draca swarmed in. They settled on boxes and drawer handles, filling the room with flutters and alarmed churrs. The curator turned a full circle of amazement. He finished staring at me.
“May I take this?” I asked, holding up the mouthpiece.
“To save England?” he whispered. His eyes were wide.
I licked my dry lips, wishing to say Yes, wishing to believe that this ruined remnant mattered, but logic forbade the word.
Yes rationalized an error, rationalized my choice to pursue this wasteful quest that endangered myself and others.
Yes rationalized abandoning Georgiana. The pounding in my temple grew to a painful buzz.
Do not invent another self-aggrandizing delusion. Once was enough. Do what you are best at. Be literal. Be accurate. The flute is worthless.
The colonel was shaking my shoulder. Startled, I looked at him, and he shouted, “We must run! Do you not hear?”
The painful buzz in my temple was a deep, chopping whir. Low pitched enough to penetrate the walls of the museum. I felt it in my toes. Drawers were clattering in sympathetic resonance.
The colonel yanked Rebecca and me out the door. The curator refused, shaking his head and beginning some explanation. We abandoned him. The song draca—frightened, I realized at last—churned before and behind.
We reached the main exhibit hall, and the terrible whir ceased. In the hush, the colonel cried, “Which way was it?” Rebecca and I shook our heads. It had seemed to come from every side. He ran to the main doors and checked outside, then summoned us.
We hurried down the steps, the song draca skimming so close they made my hair float. They soared high over the courtyard, a large, paved square bounded on three sides by the museum’s main and side halls. So large, I did not at first notice the slim figure on the far side.
I saw her and stopped. Rebecca and the colonel looked back at me, then saw her as well.
La Demoiselle des Parfums had abandoned her token disguise of English clothes.
She wore an emerald gown of satin brocade, the collar raised, the bodice cut in the French silhouette that had driven English waistlines high.
Her neckline was French too, lacy and lower than an English lady would choose.
Thirty yards away, she stood alone, elegant and incongruous.
She smiled at me beneath her sweeping bonnet, the broad smile one uses to be visible at a distance, and started toward us.
“A friend?” Colonel Fremantle asked. He did not know her. A soldier might imagine a lethal woman, a temptress betrayed by pincer hands. It was another matter for a gentleman to meet a lady whose every tailored seam and refined pose announced her aristocracy.
“Mademoiselle Bennet,” she called from twenty yards as I said, “The perfumer.”
The colonel yanked his pistol from his holster, cocking the hammer with a sweep of his left palm while he raised it to arm’s length, sighting down the barrel.
Behind us, a high-pitched tone like the biting insects of the Thames marsh sharpened to a braying whip.
It stopped with a sodden thud, and the colonel’s head snapped forward.
He toppled, sprawling across the hard paving stones, the pistol clattering away.
The back of his head was collapsed in bloody ruin.
Shell-like fragments protruded, and four ripped, translucent wings quivered at crooked angles, ten or twelve inches long.
He had been struck by a flying crawler, kin to the swarm that attacked Georgiana and me at Pemberley but bigger and bullet-swift.
Rebecca grabbed my wrist with the strength of shock. My medical training, that bloody gauntlet of surgical amputations and childbirths, slammed into place, suspending my bodily reflexes—do not vomit; do not faint—even while mourning and panic overwhelmed my thoughts.
The perfumer had not broken stride. She stopped four steps away.
Cloying citrus and musk spilled through the air.
She frowned at the colonel’s body. “Quel dommage. I do not like to lose the flying ones, but your soldier was quick, and a sting is…” She waved a satin-gloved finger, hunting for words, then settled for, “not quick.”
“Salope,” I enunciated carefully, an obscenity I had never heard, only read in one of Georgiana’s cheaply printed French novels.
The perfumer tapped her palms together, an ironic clap muted by cloth. “Bon francais! But we are told always how English ladies are polite.” She looked past me at the museum doors. “The Great Wyfe visits the great museum. Why?”
I did not answer. Wild thoughts raced. Run—but Rebecca was petrified. Fight—but I had no concept how one fought. The pistol lay a few steps away. The hammer had closed, but it had not fired. I did not understand the mechanism well enough to know if it could be reset.
And the perfumer had killed a skilled soldier. Effortlessly. In a heartbeat.
“What is in your hand?” she asked, and pointed to the flute’s mouthpiece, clutched and forgotten. Childishly, I moved it behind my back. She arched an eyebrow. “I think we visit for the same reason.”
French soldiers were entering the courtyard, running single file in the concealing shadow of the west wing. More. Twenty. Thirty. An officer marched to the perfumer, stopping uneasily some distance away as if afraid of her scent.
“Cherchez à l’intérieur,” she told him.
“Do not harm the curator,” I said. “He knows nothing.”
The perfumer watched as the officer selected four men. They propped the museum doors wide and ran inside. The officer shouted flamboyant commands after them, a performance that allowed him to put several more steps between himself and the perfumer.
Be literal. Be accurate. The flute is worthless. I held it out to her. “I found the flute. You may have it.”
Strangely, that made her suspicious. She angled her chin toward Rebecca. “Qui est-elle?” Who is she?
“A friend,” I said. “I am helping her leave the city.”
Rebecca released my arm. I hazarded a look, and our gazes met. Her eyes narrowed as if to convey some message, but I had no idea what.