Chapter 10 A Significant Meeting
A SIGNIFICANT MEETING
LIZZY
We left the school, and Darcy hailed a pair of coaches. He returned to stand beside me, stiff and chagrined.
It was early afternoon, not even two, but the light was dwindling faster than nightfall. Cold, yellowish fog rolled up from the river like a rising tide. The low clouds had the same peculiar hue, churning through brass, then bronze, then corroded copper.
Mr. Knightley took the first coach. He would meet Georgiana at the salon and escort her to Chathford.
The second coach pulled up, and Harriet found a seat. Emma followed her friend, her pale lashes lowered and a blush locked high on her cheeks.
Darcy gave directions to the driver, then offered his hand to me, somehow managing to be simultaneously rigid and cringing, and I decided to put an end to this nonsense.
I drew him away from the coach door and laid my palm on his heart.
“Love, you are indulging in vanity.” His surprised dark hazel eyes met mine as I continued, “Only a silly wyfe would think a touch is betrayal. I hope I am not that. But you are behaving like a penitent nun and unjustly embarrassing Emma. A woman died. If that is not sufficient perspective, I felt the strength that surrounded us on that river. Emma was a scarf blown in a gale.” I looked up at the stormy, orange sky.
My sense of the draca world seemed to tremble with the chilling air. “I think we all are.”
His shoulders straightened. “You are right. I will apologize to her.”
“Go in. I require a minute.” Darcy entered the coach and pulled the door just shy of latching.
The driver called down, “Are you not comin’, ma’am?”
“I will. I am greeting a guest.” I had sent a summons, and the answer approached.
A lindworm, the heaviest of quadruped draca, was loping down the street and drawing stares—draca in London usually lolled out-of-sight in their draca houses.
She settled eagerly at my feet, twenty-five pounds of stout muscle, wide-chested as a bulldog but equipped with a squat, lizard-ish tail and sheathed in moss-brown scales.
I bent, staring into her black eyes and wondering how to express the future tense. My affinity let me share the silent mental speech of wyverns and dragons, but other draca breeds communicated more simply, with images and emotions.
I spoke aloud for focus and concentrated on images to convey my words.
“Men wish me harm. Your strength would be welcome. If you travel with us, I will ensure you are returned to your home.”
The lindworm nodded her head in a sneezy huff that left a smoky odor, then looked up at the top of the coach. I had pictured her seated there, having no other inspiration for a draca traveling by coach.
She tensed, powerful muscles bunching in her hips and legs. “Do not—” I began, but she had already leaped an astonishing eight feet up and was scrabbling into the spare seat beside the driver.
“Bloody hell!” the man shouted and jumped clean off the far side of the coach, which was almost as impressive.
“Wait!” I called, running around the back of the coach.
“She will not hurt you.” The lindworm trotted across the driver’s bench to peer down at the driver, who was spouting excited oaths.
Wait, I thought to her as well. If she jumped after him, I would be chasing the two of them across half of London.
Ignoring Darcy’s shouted “What was that?” from the window, I finished circling the coach and affixed a smile. The driver had a teen’s wispy beard, but his arms were burly—a young man who had driven horse teams for years. He propped his fists on his hips and gaped up at the draca occupying his seat.
“She is quite tame,” I said. “Here, for your trouble.” I opened the drawstring on my reticule and held out a shilling. “There will be another if you bring her back to this street after.”
“Back? Her?”
“Yes. Her home is there.” I pointed to a stone draca house outside a terrace home on the next street.
He exhaled the long, doubtful sigh of a tradesperson indulging insanity, then took the shilling. “All right, then.” He climbed up, and the lindworm made room, turning a dog-like full circle before settling on her side of the bench. Perhaps she was admiring the view.
I climbed into the coach. Emma looked exhausted but no longer mortified. Harriet was watching Darcy with ill-concealed awe. Darcy himself looked slightly smug. Doubtless he had enjoyed a dramatic speech brimming with ethics and remorse.
Gravely, he turned to me and drew a preparatory breath. I raised a restraining hand—gently, I hoped. “My pulse has raced enough. Tell me when I have had a cup of tea.”
At Chathford, we joined a line of three coaches waiting to discharge passengers. Darcy banged on the roof and called up, “Find out what is happening.”
There were curt, professional shouts, then the driver called down, “Music, sir.”
I watched ladies disembark from the coaches before us, then we climbed down. The driver took his extra shilling and rolled off, the lindworm beside him and peering at every passing sight.
Inside, Mrs. Reynolds curtsied to us, then waved a despairing hand—high drama by her standard. “A dozen guests already! And the footmen are missing. Madam, I must ask Lucy to help serve.”
“Of course,” I said. “But whose guests?”
“Miss Bennet. She is mad with music!”
Mary. I tended to forget that she led a prominent London society. “Please see Miss Woodhouse and Miss Smith to a quiet room. They have had a trying day. I will look for Mary.”
Darcy and I followed excited echoes up two flights of stairs and found at least fifteen ladies chatting while poring over sheets of music spread on tables and the lid of a pianoforte.
The missing footmen were here as well, being directed by Mary as they settled a four-foot-long wooden box on a table.
“Gently!” Mary cried when the wood clunked. “You will throw the tuning—” She saw me and gave a radiant smile. “Lizzy! We have moved the salon to Chathford. Come meet the society. Here is Jane Savage. It is her virginal we are unpacking.”
I greeted a gray-haired, pleasantly matronly woman. “Mrs. Rolleston,” she clarified. “But we use our musical names. I publish under my maiden name. Better for sales if they imagine a doe-eyed maid penning music in a gothic attic.”
I managed a fleeting “I see” before I was whirled through more introductions: Maria Parke, whom I had heard sing at the Argyll Rooms; Harriet Browne, a confident girl no more than fifteen; and Sophia Dussek, a happy Scot with long, wavy hair and a ferocious brogue who ran a music school.
“Mary, slow down!” I said. “I shall not remember. Are they all composers?”
“Of course,” Mary said, as if nothing could be more natural in a room full of ladies.
“Wait and see who attends next month. We are having an international gathering. Maria Mozart—she is like royalty. I cannot understand why people fuss over her dead brother instead. The Baroness de Bawr will stage her Suite d’Un Bal Masque.
And I am corresponding with Charlotta Seuerling, who is the fashion in Sweden, but she is blind which complicates travel. ”
“I suppose,” I said, looking around the room.
Darcy was conversing with two well-dressed wyves.
Perhaps he knew them. Georgiana was celebrated as a performer, and the Darcys had moved in musical circles for years.
To my chagrin, I had not even known that Mary composed until Georgiana informed me at Jane’s wedding.
“Mary, could I take you from your salon for a few minutes?” I said. “I have serious news.”
We moved to another room, and I described the events at the river.
“That is sad and highly disturbing,” she said when I was done. Her eyes roamed behind her round lenses as she thought. “The wyfe was alone?”
“Yes, alone but terrified. I do not think she understood she could escape.”
“There is more evil here than crawler venom. Venom creates dependency and induces mania, but her captors must have thought their control absolute if they trusted her with the pendant.”
“You think the pendant important?”
“I think they thought it important. But they were foolish. It is superstition to believe metal and gems are magic because a jeweler gives them a pretty shape. And they were reckless as well. It was a royal artifact. We can discover who owned it.”
I left Mary to her salon. After such a disturbing day, we scattered to private activities—that is, until several large wardrobe chests arrived from Surrey.
Then I joined a suspenseful unpacking as Emma and Harriet discovered what clothes had been sent by Emma’s Hartfield maids.
The ladies’ happy smiles and mock despair lightened everyone’s mood.
That evening, we served Chathford’s first supper in six years—only for family, Emma, and Harriet, as the salon members had finally departed, swishing embroidered hems and hauling decorated albums filled with supportive notes and copied music.
Dinner was winter fare: roast duck, onions in mustard, shepherd’s pie, and a hearty dish of pumpkin and beans because Mary did not eat meat.
That practice had become a fad with health-obsessed, wealthy Londoners, which was a trial for Mary as she had to balance philosophical support against disdain for their motives. She considered this a matter of ethics.
Harriet became happily talkative, telling stories of her life at Mrs. Goddard’s. We compared memories of the shopkeepers in Highbury village and Meryton, finding amusing quirks shared by the two distant towns.
When Darcy excused himself, the ladies moved to a drawing room.
Harriet and Emma had dressed in simpler white muslin for dinner, although Emma’s was beautifully worked, lace-edged and accompanied by a spencer that covered her shoulders with scalloped fringes and cords.
When she stood by the fireplace, a jade shawl draped behind her arms, she was eerily perfect, even the shawl hanging symmetrically.