Chapter 16
Chapter
We sailed into London just after noon the next day.
I’d thought myself prepared. Buckland often brought me copies of The Times and The Morning Post, so between the accounts of London’s political scandals, innumerable murder trials, the new General Post Office, fire at the orchestra, and riots at the workhouse, I felt I understood the great city.
I was terribly wrong.
Lucy and I leaned over the railing, the wind cold on our cheeks.
We shared the fog-cloaked Thames with scores of other vessels, headed upriver and down—small fishing boats and trading sail ships and even two hulking, belching steamboats.
A small wood-hulled barge, its deck stacked with timber, passed below us, and her crew shouted obscenities that made my cheeks heat and Lucy laugh.
The river was hemmed by concrete embankments and wooden jetties onto which armies of dockworkers hauled brick, hay, and grain. Below, small figures—children, I realized—waded through the mud where low tide exposed the foreshore.
“Mudlarkers,” Lucy said and sighed, before I could ask. “Poor things are searching for scrap metal to sell.”
I watched the pack of grime-coated children and felt a warm spark of kinship for the mudlarkers hunting their treasures. Then I gagged as the wind carried up the smell of something rotten.
“You get used to the stench,” Buckland said cheerfully, as he joined us at the rail. Henry was with the captain, near the bow. I looked away quickly when he turned toward us. You will need more allies than Buckland, he said last night.
He wasn’t wrong; I would need to win other geomagicians to my cause if I wanted to earn my place in their ranks. But I knew Henry; he hadn’t offered out of the goodness of his heart. So what game was he playing?
Buckland rattled off the names of churches, customhouses, and municipal buildings whenever they emerged from the gray fog. Soon after we passed under the almost-completed new London Bridge—still dressed in wooden scaffolding—the Unity docked.
I went into the hold to transfer Ajax to a lidded wicker basket and clutched it to my chest as we disembarked. Buckland and Henry arranged for coaches, and Lucy sent word to Edgar. I stood awkwardly, whispering to Ajax, though it was more to soothe my own nerves than his.
I’d assumed we would go straight to Palmanaeus House, but Buckland insisted on his own home first. “Catherine and the girls can help you freshen up,” he said meaningfully, with an eye on my old dress.
But he would send notice to all London members, he said, for an emergency Society meeting this evening.
Buckland was a showman by nature, but he was also cautious. The combination had served him well.
I understood his calculation. An urgent missive and emergency meeting would build anticipation, and Ajax’s unveiling would be a true, revelatory spectacle, with no trickle of rumors to undermine the surprise. It would be the performance of Buckland’s career.
Henry’s elegant coach was soon drawn round, pulled by four prancing black geldings under the reins of a stiff-coated driver.
“I will see you tonight, then.” Henry’s eyes danced with some private amusement. I refused to smile back. “I hope you’re ready. There’s no going back now.”
The wheels rumbled and hooves clacked on the cobblestones, and Henry was gone.
And good riddance, too.
Buckland, Lucy, and I climbed into another coach—less grand than Henry’s, but still the finest I’d ever been in.
I kept the window shade open to watch as we joined the swell of carriages and carts, carrying humans and sheep and chickens, or barrels of ale and baskets of turnips, or pallets of wool and silk, and all of us caught in the churn of the city, tumbling down too-narrow roads, wheels dodging pedestrians and the occasional loose pig.
The uneven stone of the road shook the teeth in my skull.
“Easy. We’ll be there soon,” I said softly to Ajax, when he squawked indignantly from inside the wicker basket.
The scene outside the coach windows changed as we traveled away from the river.
We’d entered the wealthier neighborhoods; the houses stood in neat attached rows, in red brick or white stucco.
There were lush hedges on either side of the road, and I caught flashes of more green, from parks and back gardens, as we passed the narrow alleys that ran behind each sumptuous row of houses to their mews.
Our driver turned down one of these lanes, and Buckland announced that we were nearly to his house. I stuck my head out the window again.
A young girl, maybe five or six, was half dangled from an open black iron gate, peering intently at our coach. She was the spitting image of her father. I waved. That had to be Blythe, the youngest of Buckland’s three.
The girl squealed and darted up the steps as we pulled through the gate and into the back garden courtyard. Buckland’s wife and other two daughters tumbled out the back door after the little one, all talking excitedly as their husband and father bounded out of the coach and sent Lucy and I rocking.
“Father, Father! You’re back! Can we see the pterodactyl?”
“Hush, Blythe, you’re not supposed to talk about it, it’s a secret.”
“But they’re back now, what’s the harm?”
“Darling,” Catherine Buckland said, then grinned and kissed her husband. “The girls and I have missed you.”
Two footmen appeared out of thin air and took the luggage. One tried to take Ajax’s basket from my arms, and I yanked it away.
“This stays with me,” I sniffed.
“Oh, is it in there?” the middle girl—Jane, I recalled—breathed.
“Patience, darling.” Catherine Buckland laughed as she helped me down from the coach.
The garden was long and narrow, red-bricked walls on either side for privacy.
The beds running along the far wall were tidy and neat, even in their winter rest, and two leafless trees stood guard at each end.
The other wall, and part of the mews along it, had been converted into a menagerie, barred cages and covered doghouses and even a packed dirt pen with hurdles, something like a small-scale horse arena.
This was the smaller menagerie, I knew; most of the Buckland creatures were kept at their home in Oxford. I’d heard, through the years, tales of the hyena, and the eagle, and even a small bear that Buckland had kept until it escaped and ran through the Balliol garden.
“We only brought the guinea pigs and the prairie dog this time,” Catherine said, noticing my examination, “and those live indoors and sleep with the girls. Well, and Silky, too,” she said, gesturing toward the miniature horse, now craning its neck to see us over the half door of its stall.
“So, your pterodactyl will have plenty of space.” Catherine grinned her motherly smile. “It is so good to see you, Mary. I’ve told William for years that I would like you to visit us and meet the girls.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Catherine,” I said, as we embraced.
Catherine Buckland was an acclaimed scientific illustrator in her own right. In fact, she and Buckland were first introduced when Catherine was commissioned to illustrate one of his books.
In the early days of their marriage, back when I was a girl, Catherine accompanied her husband on most of his journeys down to Lyme Regis. But understandably, after they had children, she came less frequently, though Buckland always brought a trinket or sweet for me, courtesy of his wife.
The staff stabled the horses and put away the carriage as the rest of the introductions were made.
Elizabeth was the oldest daughter, at eighteen. She was tall and slim, with a heart-shaped face and wheat-warm ringlets.
Jane was next oldest, twelve and frowning, pulling unhappily at her skirts. The youngest, Blythe, was a whirl of perpetual motion, circling around our legs until her father swept her into his arms with a laugh.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you all,” Lucy said warmly, and Elizabeth Buckland blushed as she curtsied.
I had envied the Buckland girls, I think, since the day each was born. Those girls were the delight of their father’s life. Though I knew Buckland cared for me—and as much as I cared for him—it wasn’t the same.
I was a charity case, at first. A kind impulse, probably made to impress his new wife; I’m sure the truth was William Buckland never expected to see me again after our first interaction.
Only, he did. And then he was generous enough to keep buying my finds and, eventually, to teach me.
He had classes full of students back at Oxford, but he always took time to answer my questions.
To encourage my inquiry. He sent me articles and brought me books and connected me to his friends in the Society.
Over the years, we’d turned from mentor and mentee to friends.
And in my most secret of hearts, I had to admit that, yes, I sometimes thought of him as something like another father.
But I would never be his daughter. And maybe that wouldn’t have been so painful if I had never known what it was to be loved so dearly, and then have lost it so suddenly.
Buckland swung Blythe up to sit on his shoulders. She pulled off his top hat and put it over her own yellow curls.
I told myself not to be sentimental. I was a grown woman, and my father had been decomposing in the ground for twenty years now. No need to keep moping around about it.
“Well, shall I let him out now?” I said, probably more sharply than I’d intended. “The pterodactyl,” I clarified, needlessly.
“Yes!” shouted Blythe.
“I don’t see why not,” Catherine said, and her husband nodded. One of the servants trotted to shut the back gate.
“Then gather ’round, my dear ones,” Buckland said, with raised hands and spread fingers, “and let us behold the great miracle of our age. The ancient brought back to us. The great beast revived. The old made new. The prehistoric dragon returned!” he said, and threw open the top of the picnic basket.
The dragon raised his head and squawked pitifully.
“Oh, dear,” murmured Elizabeth.
Ajax was curled in his small towel, looking mostly like an aggrieved, brooding chicken.
“He’s awfully small for a dragon,” Blythe said.
“Is it sick?” Jane asked, peering over the side of the basket.
I plucked him out and clutched him to my breast. “No, he’s not sick. He’s just been stuck in boxes for far too long.”
The girls crowded around me eagerly. Ajax squirmed unhappily, so I let him climb to my shoulder.
Once situated, he rose, stretching, and spread his wings, one behind my head and the other past my shoulder. He swiveled his head, golden eyes roving over the gathered admirers, flashing his colorful beak in that toothsome grin. The girls gasped.
“You can touch him, if you’d like,” I said proudly. “He likes to have the top of his head scratched.”
Jane was bravest. “He feels like Gerald!” She giggled as she scratched between the ridges over Ajax’s eyes.
“Gerald is the caiman,” Catherine explained.
I let Ajax down to the ground to hop around, and Blythe and Jane shrieked with delight and chased behind as he explored the garden, poking his beak curiously under the hedges.
Catherine herded the rest of us inside for tea, but Buckland went straight to his study, since he had to coordinate couriers to send word to the Society members for tonight’s session.
He exchanged a quick kiss with Catherine, and I caught the flash of fear that slipped over Catherine’s face.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, love,” she murmured in her husband’s wake, before turning to us brightly. “Come, come. You must be starving.”
Her naked fear was sobering, and I turned it over as the hot tea settled in my belly.
It was a reminder of the danger to us all in presenting Ajax publicly.
I’d assumed Buckland’s insistence on secrecy was to keep from spoiling the surprise, but I understood, looking at the anxious lines of Catherine’s brow, that it was also a protective measure.
She and Buckland were worried. If things tipped poorly tonight, we could all of us be branded sorcerers and thrown into prison.
I watched out the window as my little demon stood on his rear claws and flapped his leathery wings. He opened his toothed jaw to let out a cawing shriek that sent the hair on the back of my neck pricking.
I, too, hope Buckland knows what he’s doing, I thought, and sent up an earnest prayer that I wouldn’t spend tonight in a cell.