The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons)

by Marie Brennan

  I wanted to set my mother down in no uncertain terms for harboring such thoughts, but forbore. Not so much because of the sheer inappropriateness of having that conversation in public, but because it occurred to me that Mr. Wilker and I were engaged in two matters of business, of which the Erigan expedition was only one.

  Judith, fortunately, waved Mr. Wilker on before I could burst out with my questions unbidden. “By all means, Mr. Wilker. Or is your message private?”

  I would not have taken the message privately for a hundred sovereigns, not with such suspicions in my mother’s mind. “Please,” I said. “What has happened?”

  Mr. Wilker blew out a long breath, and the urgency drained from him in a sudden rush, leaving him sagging and defeated. “There’s been a break-in at Kemble’s.”

  “Kemble’s … oh, no.” My own shoulders sagged, a mirror to his. “What did they destroy? Or—”

  He nodded, grimly. “Took. His notes.”

  Theft, not destruction. Someone knew what Kemble was working on, and was determined to steal it for their own.

  I slumped back in my chair, ladylike dignity the furthest thing from my mind. Frederick Kemble was the chemist Mr. Wilker had hired—or rather I had hired; the money was mine, although the choice of recipient was his—to continue the research we ourselves had stolen in the mountains of Vystrana, three years ago. Research that documented a method for preserving dragonbone: an amazing substance, strong and light, but one that decayed quickly outside a living body.

  The Chiavoran who developed that method was not the first one to try. What had begun as a mere challenge of taxidermy—born from the desire of hunters to preserve trophies from the dragons they killed, and the desire of natural historians to preserve specimens for study—had become a great point of curiosity for chemists. Several were racing to be the first (or so they thought) to solve that puzzle. Despite our best efforts to maintain secrecy around Kemble’s work, it seemed someone had learned of it.

  “When?” I asked, then waved the question away as foolish. “Last night, and I doubt we’ll get any time more specific than that.” Mr. Wilker shook his head. He lived in the city, and visited Kemble first thing in the morning every Selemer. This news was as fresh as it could be, short of Kemble having heard the intruder and come downstairs in his nightclothes to see.

  I wondered, suddenly cold, what would have happened if he had. Would the intruder have fled? Or would Mr. Wilker have found our chemist dead this morning?

  Such thoughts were unnecessarily dramatic—or so I chided myself. Whether they were or not, I did not have the leisure to dwell on them, for my mother’s sharp voice roused me from my thoughts. “Isabella. What in heaven is this man talking about?”

  I took a measure of comfort in the irreverent thought that at least she could not read any hint of personal indiscretion in the message Mr. Wilker had brought. “Research, Mama,” I said, pulling myself straight in my chair, and thence to my feet. “Nothing that need concern you. But I’m afraid I must cut this visit short; it is vital that I speak to Mr. Kemble at once. If you will excuse me—”

  My mother, too, rose to her feet, one hand outstretched. “Please, Isabella. I’m dreadfully concerned for you. This expedition you intend…”

  She must be concerned indeed, to broach such a personal matter before a stranger like Mr. Wilker. “We will speak of it later, Mama,” I said, intending no such thing. “This truly is a pressing matter. I’ve invested a great deal of money in Mr. Kemble’s work, and must find out how much I have lost.”

  TWO

  Frederick Kemble’s—Synthesis—The symposium—Lord Hilford—Natalie’s prospects—Two weeks

  Being a recluse is not good for one’s conversational agility. I was accustomed to thinking over my words, revising them, and writing fair copy before sending the final draft of my letter to its recipient. My comment accomplished its intended purpose—she let me go at last, with Judith’s polite farewells to fill in the awkward gaps—but my satisfaction faded rapidly as I went out into the street. “I fear I will regret that,” I admitted to Mr. Wilker, pulling on my gloves.

  “I don’t think you’ve lost much of your money,” he said, raising his hand to signal a hansom on its way to the nearest cab stand.

  Sighing, I drew his arm down. “My carriage is across the street. No, I don’t mean the investment; I don’t regret that in the least. Only that I said anything of it to my mother. She is determined to see bad judgment in everything I do nowadays.”

  Mr. Wilker did not respond to that. Although we were on more cordial terms by then, we were not in the habit of sharing our personal troubles with one another. He said, “All is not lost, though. Kemble took his current notebook upstairs with him last night, so that he could read over his thoughts as he prepared for bed. His wife may deplore the habit, but in this instance it’s been a godsend.”

  (To those of my readers who flinch at minor blasphemies of this sort: I must warn you that there will be more ahead. Mr. Wilker restrained his language around me in our Vystrani days, but as we grew more comfortable with one another, he revealed a casual habit of naming the Lord. If I edited his language here, it would misrepresent his character, and so I pray you pardon his frankness, and mine. We were neither of us very religious.)

  Mrs. Kemble was no resentful housewife; she worked alongside her husband, handling the practical matters of ordering and measuring chemicals, while he spent hours staring at the wall and chewing on the battered tail of his pen, mind lost in theoretical matters. But she believed in a separation of work from daily life, and I—who, you may have noticed, am more of Frederick Kemble’s mind—blessed her failure to break him of his habits.

  I said as much to her when we arrived at Kemble’s house and laboratory in Tanner Fields, and got a dry look that did not entirely hide the nervous aftereffects of the intrusion. “I appreciate that, Mrs. Camherst, but I’m afraid it didn’t save the glassware.”

  “May I see?” I asked. Mrs. Kemble led us into the cellar, presently in a state of half gloom, the only light coming in by the street-level windows. It was enough to show the destruction: shattered glass everywhere, measuring instruments bent and smashed. A chemical stink flooded the air, despite the open windows and a boy outside cranking a device to ventilate the room. They had not merely taken Kemble’s notes; they had also done what they could to delay his further progress.

  I held my handkerchief over my nose and said, “Mrs. Kemble, I am so very sorry. If you send a letter to my accountant, I’ll see to it that you’re reimbursed for what you’ve lost. It can’t restore your peace of mind, but—” I gestured helplessly. “It can at least replace the glassware.”

  “That’s very good of you, Mrs. Camherst,” she said, mollified. “Kemble is upstairs; I needed him out from under my feet while I sort out what’s broken and missing. Lucy will make you some tea.”

  Mr. Wilker and I went obediently up to the parlour, where we found Frederick Kemble scribing furiously onto a loose sheet of foolscap. Others like it were scattered across the table and the floor, and Lucy, the Kembles’ remaining unmarried daughter, was trying to find a clear space to set down a tray containing not only tea but a stack of blank paper. She saw us come in and touched her father’s elbow. “Papa—”

  “Not now—let me—” He jerked his head in a motion I thought was meant to stand for a wave of his hand, his actual hands being occupied in note-taking.

  Lucy retreated to our side. “What is he doing?” I asked, not daring raise my voice above a murmur.

  “Writing down as much as he can remember,” she said. “From the notebooks that were taken.”

  After three years’ work, the process for preserving dragonbone must have been engraved on the inside of his eyelids; I had it memorized, and I was not even chemist enough to understand what most of it meant. As for the rest—“Mr. Wilker said the most recent notebook was not taken, yes? So long as we have that, the older notes do not matter half so much.” Most of them w
ere obsolete by now, documenting failed experiments.

  Lucy spread her hands. “He says even the old notes are important—that he likes to look over them from time to time.”

  She went off to fetch more teacups, and then Mr. Wilker and I settled in at the far end of the parlour to hear Lucy’s account of the break-in and the investigation thus far. By the time she finished, Kemble was ready to pause in his work and acknowledge the rest of the world.

  “If they’d come before the Sabbath…” he said, clearly grateful they had not. His daughter presented him with a cup of tea, which he took and drained absently. “I was looking back through the old notebooks during lunch on Eromer, and something there caught my attention. Last year, I—”

  Mr. Wilker, who had long since learned to recognize the warning signs, cut him off before he could descend into a thicket of scientific language I would not understand in the slightest. The body of our collective knowledge has grown so rapidly in my lifetime that although I am accounted an extremely learned woman, there are whole fields I know very little of; chemistry is one such. It was not a part of young ladies’ curricula in my youth, and my self-education had gone in other directions. Mr. Wilker therefore diverted our chemist to the points he knew I would care about. “You said something about that this morning, yes. It gave you an idea?”

  “I think so,” Kemble said. “It’s only a thought so far; it will take a great deal of testing. But I may have an idea for synthesis at last.”

  Had that not been the fifth time I heard those words from his mouth, I would have been more excited. It was, after all, the purpose for which we had hired Kemble. We knew how to preserve dragonbone; that was no longer a challenge. But Mr. Wilker and I, discussing the matter three years ago, had seen the peril in that knowledge.

  Quite apart from the desire of hunters to preserve their trophies, and the desire of natural historians to study their subject at leisure post mortem, the qualities of dragonbone made it attractive to other kinds of person. Its mechanical properties were far superior to those of iron and steel, being both lighter and stronger—and as the easily accessible iron deposits in Anthiope and other parts of the world began to run dry, the value of any alternative grew by the year.

  I could enumerate at length the drawbacks to the industrial use of dragonbone. Indeed, I had an article already prepared on the subject, ready to send at a moment’s notice to all the reputable publications. Dragons were even rarer than iron, and while it was true that they reproduced (which ore was not known to do), any widespread demand for their bones would lead to mass slaughter, perhaps even to extinction. The irregular shape of many bones rendered them less than ideal for the construction of machines, which would result in a great deal of waste. The expense and hassle of harvesting them from dead dragons (many of whom lived in locales as foreign and distant as those still rich in iron) rendered the prospect less than entirely profitable. It went on for pages, but the entire thing was flawed in its basic assumption, which was that people would consider the matter rationally before making their decisions.

  The truth was that the idea would bring speculators flocking like vultures to a dead horse, ready to pick the bones clean. And if I tried to persuade myself that I was exaggerating—that such a doom-filled scenario would never come to pass—I had only to consider the Erigan continent, where the lure of iron had led several Anthiopean states to involve themselves in the affairs of the nations there. If Thiessin was willing to conquer Djapa, and Chiavora to encourage revolution in Agwi, and Scirland to insert itself between the Talu Union and the military might of the Ikwunde, for the sake of being able to build new steam engines, we would not hesitate to sacrifice a few dumb beasts.

  I sighed and drained the last of my tea. “With all due respect, Mr. Kemble, I would almost welcome another set of eyes on the matter. I have every confidence that you can solve this riddle, given sufficient time—but that, we may not have. Sooner or later someone will figure out Rossi’s method, even without your notes. If we are to avert chaos, we need a way to satisfy the demand for this substance that does not involve butchering dragons.”

  “I doubt we’ll be that lucky,” Mr. Wilker said, sounding bleak. “With the eyes, that is. How many people will go to the amount of effort you and I have, just to spare animals? We already butcher elephants for their ivory and tigers for their skins, and those are only decorative.”

  He was likely right. Sighing, I said, “Then we had best hope the police recover the notebook—small hope that it is. Do we have any notion who took it?”

  By the grim silence that fell, the answer started with “yes” and got worse from there. Mr. Wilker replied obliquely. “You know about the symposium, I think.”

  A gathering of scholars, hosted by the Philosophers’ Colloquium, the preeminent scientific body in Scirland. Mr. Wilker had not been invited to attend, because he was not a gentleman. I had not been invited to attend either, because although my birth was gentle, I was not a man.

  But we knew someone who met both of those requirements. “If it was one of the visitors, Lord Hilford might be able to find out.”

  “He won’t have much time,” Kemble said, coming out of the reverie into which he so frequently lapsed. “Doesn’t that end this week?”

  It did, and the scholars would be returning to their homelands. “Indeed. Then I suppose I know what I am doing with my afternoon.”

  * * *

  I was at the door to Lord Hilford’s townhouse before I remembered that I had promised to pay a visit to my relatives by marriage. I knocked on the door anyway, thinking to ask the earl whether I might send them a note. As it transpired, he was not yet home from a lecture, and so I had more than enough time while I waited for him in the drawing room.

  If you find yourself thinking that I had enough time to make good on that promise, you would be more or less correct. The Camhersts lived not far from Lord Hilford, in Mornetty Square, and it would not have taken me above twenty minutes to get there and back. But I did not know how long they would keep me, and it was of the utmost importance that I warn Lord Hilford about the intruders at Mr. Kemble’s as soon as possible. If any of the visitors to the symposium were behind this outrage, we had limited time in which to find out—even more limited time in which to do anything about it.

  So I told myself, at least. The truth is that, although I had told my mother that Matthew, my brother-in-law, had agreed to take in little Jacob while I was gone, I had neglected to mention his lack of enthusiasm for the entire plan. His wife did not mind the addition of a temporary child, but Matthew minded very much the possibility of keeping him permanently. He might have even been the one who spilled the secret of the Erigan expedition where my mother could hear. Drained by my morning confrontation and by the dreadful news of the break-in, I was not minded to face anyone I did not consider a good friend.

  I therefore wrote out an excuse and had Lord Hilford’s boot-boy run it to Mornetty Square. Then I linked my gloved hands together and paced, and worried, and made a hundred different (and useless) plans, until Lord Hilford came home.

  When I heard his booming voice in the front hall, I did not trouble to wait in the drawing room. He saw me as I came to the door, and the white tufts of his eyebrows rose. “Not that it is anything but a pleasure to see you, Mrs. Camherst—but I judge by your expression that whatever has sent you here is not good.”

  “It is not,” I confirmed, and explained while he divested himself of overcoat and hat. His cane he kept; over the years it had become less of an affectation, more of a necessity, as his rheumatism worsened. Lord Hilford followed me into the drawing room and lowered himself into a chair with a sigh.

  “Mmmm,” he said when I was done. “Makes me wonder if someone has been to Vystrana. I’ve heard nothing from Iljish in Drustanev, but you know what the post is like. And someone might have slipped past them.”

  The villagers were supposed to protect the nearby cavern from curiosity-seekers. It was the preserved dragonb
one in that great cemetery which had given the first clues to the role of acid in that process. “We said nothing of it in the book,” I reminded Lord Hilford, referring to the monograph we had published after our expedition. “Only that the dragons tore apart their deceased kin and took the pieces to a certain cave. No one could assume preservation from that—nor could they find the cave.”

  The flapping of the earl’s hand reminded me I was saying nothing he did not already know. “Still, it’s a possibility, and one we have to consider. Another possibility: Kemble talked.”

  “If he had talked, would they have smashed up his laboratory?” I said indignantly. Then I saw the flaw in my own logic. “Ah. You are not accusing him of selling the secret—only of letting slip some hint that might have allowed another to guess what he’s doing.”

  “Any of us might have done it,” Lord Hilford admitted. “Including me. I’d like to think I’m discreet, but—well. Scholars drink a great deal more than anyone thinks, and I don’t hold my liquor as well as I once did.”

  I thought that I, at least, was unlikely to have betrayed our secret. Not out of any particular virtue; only from lack of opportunity. I hardly spoke to anyone who didn’t already know. But it would do no good to say that, and so I said only, “Is there anyone among the Colloquium’s visitors that you would suspect? Or among its members, I suppose.”

  Lord Hilford grunted. “Several, unfortunately. There’s a ratty Marñeo fellow I don’t trust in the slightest; he’s been accused of passing other people’s research off as his own. Guhathalakar openly admits he’s working on the issue of preservation. No one in the Bulskoi delegation is, but they have more opportunity than most to go poking around in Vystrana. The Hingese … I’m sorry, Mrs. Camherst, but without more to go on, all I can do is guess.”

  “Well, Mr. Wilker is still at Kemble’s, and they’ve spoken with the police; we can hope for some kind of lead.” I got up and paced again, fingers twisting about one another. “I wish I could do something to hurry the research along. Money is only helpful to a point; it cannot make Frederick Kemble’s brain work faster.”