Chapter 1 Perfume
MARY
The broken glass from the bookshop windows had been swept away. The few jutting shards left in the sills glistened like teeth. Inside, rows of neatly labeled bookshelves stood empty behind a sign that read: CLOSED DUE TO WAR.
“They moved,” I said. It was only a shop, but every vacant shelf was a hole in my heart. I had come here since I was a child. “The books were not ransacked. They are just gone.”
“I am sorry, Mary.” Georgiana slipped her arm through mine and rested her temple on my shoulder—a lover’s touch discreet enough for public display.
We had visited nine London bookshops in the last few days. Six were closed. The other three had no scholarly works on draca, only children’s fables or hastily printed melodramas where handsome colonels drew their sabers to challenge dragons.
Real dragons had fought in London’s skies.
A shadow of this roofline was burned onto the street; the flash from Yuánchi’s fire had scorched the cobblestones.
A half mile away, Westminster Palace lay in ruins, frozen by Fènnù’s black breath.
Challenging a dragon with a saber was as far-fetched as any children’s fable, entertaining only if one had not beheld their power.
But sabers killed soldiers well enough. The Sussex front was twenty miles south of us. Wounded and dead arrived regularly.
“Shall we try another shop?” Georgiana asked. Her words were supportive. Her tone, somewhat less.
“You think I am foolish,” I said.
“I did not say that. We both want Lizzy back.”
An image of Pemberley lake filled my mind’s eye: a winter memory, gray waves and frosted shore.
My sister and her scarlet dragon had battled Fènnù there and fallen, grievously wounded, into the water.
Vanished and lost, but alive. Trapped in the strange, water-bound sleep of draca, which lasted for decades or centuries—a sleep I sought to interrupt.
“I need knowledge to save Lizzy,” I said. That sounded stubborn, so I mocked myself: “How hard can it be? I only seek to raise a dragon.”
Georgiana turned me from the broken window. Her irises were steady sapphire rings behind her long lashes. “Yuánchi and Lizzy fell together. They will rise together. What if all this was meant to be?”
Trust. Have faith. That frustrated me. Patience did not breach barriers. Georgiana, one of the three legendary great wyves, had fantastic power in the realm of draca—not to mention growing up wrapped in wealth. She inhabited a world that bent to her wishes. My world was stacks of dusty books.
But even a bookworm could miss a sister, and Lizzy’s absence was an endless pang. Stubbornness felt good. “I will not sit and wait. I do not care if this is beyond me.”
“I did not say that, either!” Georgiana protested. “Your sister raised a dragon, and you share her blood. I am advising patience because you could succeed. We must respect what nature intends.”
She was sincere, yet… “Why did you not argue while I dragged you around London yesterday?”
“I am practicing a speech to my brother,” she admitted. “At least you want to understand. He is a bold Darcy. He only argues when I say we should wait.” She scowled, thinking. “My brother is why we can find no references. He emptied these bookshops of draca lore years ago…”
And then his books were stolen.
Her scowl became thoughtful. “What about the museum?”
“That is an idea.” They would not release documents, but they had an overeager scholar of Tudor queens and dragons. I added, “Thank you.”
Georgiana smiled triumphantly. Her dress was amber sarsenet silk, square-shouldered with brass buttons; the wartime fashions had mimicked military uniforms. She rose on her toes and whispered in my ear, “I am a bold Darcy,” which left me heated and flustered.
Our driver called in his thick northern accent, “Miss Bennet. We should not linger.” He was seated atop our battered hackney coach, purchased second-hand four days ago.
The coach was a disguise, chosen to be less conspicuous than one from Chathford House, the Darcys’ London home.
The driver was a constable, an unlikely friendship I formed when we argued nose-to-nose during a sweltering street protest last August. Impressively burly, he satisfied Mr. Darcy’s insistence on security.
London was dangerous, particularly for Darcys and Bennets.
I turned to go, but Georgiana caught my elbow.
A black-clad young woman was hurrying across the street. She arrived breathless and passed me a folded page. “Mary! Another crawler sting. They called for you.”
The front of St. George’s Hospital, groomed and pretty, faced the park.
The alley behind it was for workers, and our coach followed that to stop by the wooden outbuildings: stables, stores, and the privy vats, thankfully covered until night collection.
An entire yard was hung with wet cloth steaming in the morning air. Hospital laundry was a Sisyphean chore.
Between the cobblestones, bright blades of grass had sprung. Yellow dandelions stuffed every untrod corner. London, freed from the dragon Fènnù’s unnatural, punishing winter, reveled in spring.
Georgiana watched from the open coach door. “Shall I come in with you?”
“No. Rebecca will meet me. Stay with the coach. I am less likely to be noticed alone.”
The constable was snooping down the alley. I called to him, “Can you wait at Hyde Park Corner? I will come there when I am done.”
“Aye, Miss Bennet,” he answered, clambering back into the driver’s seat. “You be careful. Those Britain Awake thugs are all about.”
The coach rolled away. I hurried toward the hospital, wrinkling my nose at a strange fragrance like sweet, rotted citrus, then I was stymied by the laundry lines. I ducked under one, clean drops splashing my neck, and spotted a hand waving above the linen. A woman’s voice called, “Mary!”
I followed an aisle framed by washed towels and sheets to the rear entrance.
Miss Rebecca Spoon waited for me. Another musician, she had survived abduction by the Blackcoats—Lizzy and I rescued her near death from a stinking cellar—and then overcame the deadly addiction caused by her captors’ drugs. She celebrated by publishing Inviolata, a defiant clavichord composition.
Rebecca’s black clothes, styled to mimic mine, were lost in the shadow. A gray-haired woman in a nurse’s blue uniform stood with her. The nurse squinted at me, curious.
“Are you sure it is a crawler sting?” I asked.
The nurse said, “There’s no question, ma’am.”
“The third woman this week,” Rebecca added. “They are lucky you are in London.”
“They were not all lucky,” I said. The second woman I had saved. The first I reached too late.
The nurse opened the door, but I said, “Wait a moment,” and whistled a few notes from my first composition, a fantasia titled “Not One Word From Her.” That had become our summoning tune.
An iridescent blue, robin-sized form winged overhead, flicked a turn that skimmed the hospital’s bricks, then soared to a perfect landing on my shoulder.
He was a song draca, the first I met, dazzling me in a London park with his peacock-bright feathers and gem-scaled muzzle.
He was my devoted companion, and his claws, hooked and razor-edged, dug into the leather pad I had sewn beneath my dress shoulder—literally to save my skin.
The nurse’s eyes popped when she saw the draca land. She curtsied, almost kneeling. “Great Wyfe.”
“Not here,” Rebecca hissed. “The Great Wyfe must not be recognized.” The nurse straightened hurriedly.
I glared at Rebecca; I had told her many times I was no great wyfe.
She shrugged, unrepentant. Our network of women in the city—who copied my black clothes and called themselves “Marys”—revered the legends of great wyves.
They did not know that actual great wyves lived: Georgiana, Emma Woodhouse, and my lost sister, Lizzy.
Inside, we descended a narrow, whitewashed corridor to the less used basement.
The sour putrescence of illness tinged the air, but it was fainter than the healthy scents of soap and boiled cotton.
A wooden door in need of paint led into an examination room.
Rebecca stayed outside to watch the corridor. I entered with the nurse.
A woman of thirty and some years lay limp on the table in street-worn, rumpled clothes. Her eyes were closed, her complexion sallow and beaded with perspiration, her breath labored.
A well-dressed man was taking her pulse, his eyes on his pocket watch.
Surprised, I stopped. No doctor had been present for my other visits. The Marys received their clandestine summons from the nurses, or even from washerwomen when the poorest women, prostitutes or beggars, were denied a nurse’s visit.
“The doctor asked for you, ma’am,” the nurse explained.
He may have asked, but he was as surprised as I. His gaze fixed on the shimmering draca perched on my shoulder. The draca cheeped and whistled another bar of the fantasia.
“I am Miss Bennet,” I said. An introduction was required, and I preferred a name to grandiose titles.
“Doctor James Barry,” he replied, and bowed. He was smooth-cheeked and slight-shouldered, his voice contralto. Young. An apprentice physician, perhaps; St. George’s was a teaching hospital. “This woman was found delirious on the hospital steps. Stung, I estimate an hour ago.”
He drew the woman’s skirt aside. Her left ankle had punctures from a foul crawler’s sting. The twin pricks were separated by the width of my little finger, so it was the small variety. Red streaks climbed her calf, inflamed and grossly swollen.
I lifted my gloved hand to my shoulder. The little draca hopped onto my palm, and I held him near the sting. His muzzle darted close, and he gave a chittering growl, his needle obsidian-black teeth bared. Not good. I gave him a light toss, and he fluttered to perch on a cabinet at a safe distance.
“Are you a surgeon?” I asked the gaping doctor while I drew off my gloves.