Chapter Twenty

The aforementioned Lord Werth, together with his wife, his sister, his niece and his guests, gazed upon the dragon — or the dragon’s head, that being all that could then be seen — in speechless amazement. One might hold an arcane ritual with the intention of summoning a dragon, but one did so without in any great degree expecting success.

And unlike Lord Maundevyle, this dragon spoke.

The reigning silence was broken only by the thin shrieks of Miss Horne, who, prostrate upon the floor, appeared to be trying to inhale the contents of her pungent phial, much good it would do her.

The dragon flicked out her tongue, and tasted Miss Horne’s leg.

‘I might eat her,’ said she conversationally, ‘if only to put a stop to that horrible noise. But I am afraid she does not taste at all inviting.’

‘You may eat her with our goodwill,’ said Gussie, recovering herself. ‘No one much wants her, I assure you.’

Mr. Ballantine, roused to activity by this exchange, stepped forward. ‘Ah — nobody’s to eat anybody upon these premises, please.’

The dragon bowed her elegant head. ‘I shall confine my dining activities to the gardens, as is only proper.’

‘At least,’ added Gussie, ‘Pray do not eat anybody who is supposed to be breathing. If you should happen to find Lord Felix attractive as a dinner prospect, I dare say nobody should object to that either.’

‘I—’ began Mr. Ballantine.

Lord Werth here intervened, by stepping forward, and bowing rather low. ‘Lady Margery, I presume?’

‘You are Lord Werth?’ she said, without refuting this, which Gussie took for assent.

‘I am the present Lord Werth,’ her uncle agreed.

Lady Margery looked him over. ‘Hm,’ she said, and withdrew her head.

When she did not reappear, the assembled Werths exited the hall in a rush, and found her curled up in the driveway. She was not quite so large as Lord Maundevyle, but the difference must be so minimal as to be immaterial. ‘I declare,’ she said, as the family streamed out into the sun, ‘the Towers grows smaller every year.’

‘Perhaps you are growing bigger,’ said Gussie, but then thought better of it. ‘But I would not be surprised if the house were to be so obstreperous as to shrink. It has been taking its cues from the Book, perhaps.’

‘Is the Book, then, still in existence?’ said Lady Margery, in a tone of mild interest. ‘I had thought someone must have put it out of its misery long ago.’

‘We have often been tempted,’ said Gussie.

‘Do not delay. That Book will be the doom of the Werths one of these days, I am sure of it.’

Lady Werth said, ‘We keep it under strict lock and key, Lady Margery.’

‘I suppose that might do.’

Nobody, it seemed, wanted to admit that the Book had been the means of Lady Margery’s own summons.

‘Well,’ said the second dragon briskly, after a moment’s silence. ‘And why am I here? I see you have procured yourselves another dragon at last. I saw him on my way in. Must he crouch in the shrubbery like that? It is most unbecoming.’

‘We have not been able to convey much of anything to him,’ said Lord Werth. ‘He is a reluctant dragon.’

‘And sadly inept,’ said Gussie. ‘For he cannot even speak to us, as you do.’

‘Not?’ said Lady Margery. ‘Well! That is easily mended.’ With which words, she spread her great wings and leapt into the air.

Her departure signalled an immediate exodus from the driveway into the shrubbery. Gussie arrived there to find Lady Margery landed near the profusion of lavender bushes within which Lord Maundevyle still dwelt, drawn up to her full and regal height, and addressing his lordship in bracing tones.

‘Come, come! This behaviour is not befitting of a dragon. You are not a Werth, I perceive, and so there is only so much that can be expected of you. But I am sure you would wish to make some address to the family, at least? To maintain such a silence is the very height of rudeness, is it not?’

Lord Maundevyle appeared electrified by the presence of another dragon, and had, at long last, drawn himself up, and out of the slumped posture he had for some time maintained. But Lady Margery’s words could not please him. He made a choked, snarling noise which Gussie at first interpreted as an objection — possibly even a threat; but soon discovered to be an attempt at speech. The crimson dragon spat sounds from between his long teeth, and perhaps they were intended to be intelligible syllables, but they emerged as growls and stifled roaring, punctuated by puffs of pungent smoke.

‘Oh,’ said Lady Margery. ‘That is the way of it, hm?’

And to Gussie’s horror, she abandoned her attempts to scold Lord Maundevyle into speech in favour of a more aggressive approach. Her elegant head darted towards his lordship — her bright teeth flashed — and she retreated again, her jaws stained with blood, and a small but nasty-looking wound blooming red upon the reluctant dragon’s long throat.

Lord Maundevyle said, quite clearly, ‘Ouch!’, the most human expression he had yet achieved; though he did lose his grip upon it a moment later, and gave a shattering, draconic roar.

‘It was for your own good,’ said Lady Margery, unmoved.

Gussie did not at all see what good biting his lordship could have done, though she did not blame Lady Margery for the impulse that had spurred her to do it, for a sorrier, more lachrymose creature she could not imagine.

But the next sounds emerging from Lord Maundevyle’s throat comprised considerably less snarling, and something that almost resembled words.

Upon his third attempt, he produced noises as incomprehensible as before, but much more human; more the sounds the original Lord Maundevyle might have made upon dropping a heavy object upon his own foot.

‘See?’ said Lady Margery. ‘It is the shock of it,’ she said, apparently to the gathered audience of Werths. ‘Everybody has the same response to unexpected pain. We all make our lamentations in our own birth-tongue, do we not?’ She lifted her voice, and said: ‘Underneath, sir, you are still whoever you were before, and if you had forgotten it, then I urge you to remember it now.’

And at last, Lord Maundevyle produced words, thickly uttered and without elegance, but comprehensible. ‘Madam,’ he said with a growl, ‘after several days in a row of eating raw sheep for my dinner, I find it impossible to believe that I was once civilised, or that I ever shall be again.’

Lady Margery snapped her teeth together in annoyance. ‘Why, then, have you been eating raw meat? It is an indecorous habit. I keep an excellent cook, and I do not at all see why you could not do the same.’

Lord Maundevyle stared at her in astonishment. ‘A cook?’ he repeated.

Finding this too fatuous to merit a response, Lady Margery spread out her glittering wings. ‘If that is everything,’ she said, presumably to Lord Werth, ‘There is an excellent venison ragout awaiting my attention, and I believe Francois has made me a coffee-pie to follow.’

‘You brought your cook with you?’ said Gussie, obscurely impressed.

‘Naturally,’ said Lady Margery with a sniff. ‘What could possibly move me to travel without Francois?’

Gussie, assailed by visions of Lady Margery putting up at some country inn, and insisting upon installing her own selected chef in the kitchens, knew not what to enquire about first.

‘Wait!’ said Lord Maundevyle, rearing up. ‘How do I cease to be a dragon?’

‘Cease?’ Lady Margery, paralysed with horror, could only stare.

‘I do not believe that it suits me,’ said Lord Maundevyle stiffly.

‘You are quite right,’ she said, recovering herself, and casting an eye of cold disdain over his lordship. ‘It does not in the smallest degree suit you.’

‘Then help me to be rid of it!’

‘I cannot,’ she said. ‘You must rid yourself of it, if that is your desire.’

‘But how?’

She gave a draconic shrug, her emerald-scaled wings catching the sun. ‘You have remembered human speech. I dare say you can contrive to remember the rest.’

She was gone a moment later, soaring into the sky without another word for his lordship, or anybody else either. Gussie’s shouted questions went unanswered, and within minutes the dazzling emerald dragon was a diminishing speck upon the horizon.

‘I cannot help thinking she rather enjoys herself than otherwise,’ Gussie offered.

Lord Maundevyle did not reply. He had taken up a mouthful of lavender, ripped from the bush in a fit of temper, and now spat it out again in disgust.

‘You have gone off course already, sir,’ said Gussie. ‘That was not at all a human thing to do.’

‘It wasn’t a very draconic thing to do, either,’ said Mr. Ballantine.

‘Something of the enraged feline about him, do you not think?’ said Gussie to the Runner.

‘Aye. Any moment I expect him to begin grooming himself.’

Lord Maundevyle’s response was a glance of withering — and rather human — contempt. He spat another sprig of lavender from his massive jaws, and sat in silent thought.

‘I would like,’ he said shortly, ‘to slam a few doors.’

‘That would be excessively human,’ Gussie said, by way of encouragement. ‘And ill-tempered, but we shall not mention that.’

‘Tear my cravat from around my throat and hurl it at something,’ he continued, ignoring this. ‘A wall, say.’

‘Then you might find some unoffending subordinate at whom to hurl a few curses,’ Gussie suggested. ‘That would be very lordly.’

‘I was never much in the habit of it,’ said Lord Maundevyle, with a huff of smoke.

‘What were you in the habit of?’ said Gussie.

‘Long walks in the grounds at Starminster,’ said the dragon. ‘Not in search of something to eat. Mornings in the library with a book. My favourite coat.’

‘Is that the dark green cutaway?’ said Gussie.

‘The very one. Cups of chocolate before breakfast, brought to me upon a tray in my own room. Clarissa’s needling and Charles’s sour remarks. My mother’s lamentations about the Wyrde, and her lack of daughters-in-law. Avoiding country-dances and balls. Pastilles au chocolat at supper time, with brandy.’

Lord Maundevyle talked on, and Gussie listened to this narration of his personal habits and tastes with great interest — at least for a time. When she noticed that his lordship appeared to be — well, shrinking, she could spare no attention for anything else.

Her aunt appearing disposed to comment upon it, Gussie waved a hand in hopes of dissuading her, for Lord Maundevyle’s soliloquy ought not to be interrupted.

The assembled Werths watched in breathless silence as Lord Maundevyle steadily talked himself smaller, and then less crimson, and finally a great deal more human than he had been for many days.

He did not appear to notice the alteration at first, which Gussie wondered at. But then, gesturing over his enjoyment of hunting during the appropriate season, he caught sight of the limb with which he had expressed his emphasis: no longer a red, scaled collection of claws, but a pale human hand.

He stopped.

Gussie lamented Lady Margery’s abrupt departure afresh, for she might gladly have kissed the irascible old Werth. Lord Maundevyle beheld his restored arm in silence for some moments, and a bright sheen to his eyes suggested he did so in a state of heightened emotion.

Then, in a voice rather tremulous, he said: ‘If it is not too much trouble to your cook, Lady Werth: would somebody please bring me a cup of chocolate?’