‘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?’
Chapter Twenty-One
Lord Maundevyle experienced some further difficulty before he could be said to have gained full control over his physical state. Halfway through the aforementioned chocolate, which he downed with the gusto of a man dying of thirst, he snapped back into his draconic shape, so fast and so unexpectedly as to send the unfortunate cup flying.
The sound of its landing, and subsequent shattering, split the air, followed by a roar of frustration on his lordship’s part.
This setback proved temporary, however, for within two hours he was a man again; and his impromptu and involuntary transformations did not persist past the following day.
‘Your dear mama will be so relieved,’ Gussie offered, at dinner upon the day of Lord Maundevyle’s return to recognisable humanity.
He looked up from his plate of apple-roasted pork, but only briefly. It was his third such helping. ‘What has that to say to anything?’ said he.
‘I am sure she has been con
cerned for your welfare?’ said Gussie, without being sure of any such thing, but it seemed polite to say so in company.
Lord Maundevyle maintained an eloquent silence, and applied himself to a dish of fricando of veal. Only a slight raising of his eyebrows hinted at his opinion of his mother’s claims.
‘I hope you will accept the use of our carriage in returning to Starminster, Lord Maundevyle,’ said Lady Werth pleasantly. ‘Of course, you may wish to put your wings to use instead, but I cannot help thinking so long a flight must be fatiguing.’
Lord Maundevyle looked, wide-eyed, at her ladyship, and seemed uncertain of a response. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said at length. ‘I have not yet made any fixed plans as to the mode, or indeed the time, of my return to Starminster.’
If he were reluctant to go home, Gussie could not blame him for it. But nor was it within her power to extend his invitation to the Towers, and considering that the periodic intrusions of putative Werths had yet to wholly cease, she could not blame her aunt and uncle if they preferred to be rid of a difficult guest, either.
One such guest maintained a station near the bottom of the table, a vicar of the name of Cardwell, who ate with all of Lord Maundevyle’s gusto without having anything like his excuse. He was as rotund as might be imagined with such habits, and very red, with a loud barking laugh and manners sadly vulgar. Nobody could imagine him at all likely to possess any genuine Werth heritage, though of course it was impossible to be certain. The greater the variety of people turning up at the Towers — and the larger the number — the more Gussie wondered whether the ritual had not indeed misfired, and drawn in an assortment of visitors who were only Wyrded, and not necessarily Werth.
Some of them were proving difficult to dislodge. Indeed, a Miss-Horne-shaped ice sculpture still occupied Lady Werth’s favourite chair.
Mr. Ballantine, hitherto rather quiet, spoke up into the silence following Lord Maundevyle’s speech. ‘If you are not disposed to return home, yet, sir, I should be glad of your assistance.’
Gussie looked at the Runner in astonishment, as did most of the rest of the family.
‘Me?’ said Lord Maundevyle after a moment, surprised into a degree of incivility. ‘In what way may I be of use?’
Mr. Ballantine sat back, abandoning his emptied plate, and embarked upon explanation. ‘It’s to do with the work I was engaged in before I… happened to arrive here,’ he began. ‘Being already some few days delayed, I should be glad of a swift return into Suffolk.’
‘Are you asking me to take wing?’
Mr. Ballantine inclined his head. ‘The distance is not so very far. If we leave in the morning, we might be there before noon.’
Lord Maundevyle glanced about, as though enquiring of himself what reason he might have to draw out his days at the Towers. Coming up with none, apparently, he said: ‘Why not, indeed? Since it appears to be on my account that you were brought here, it is to some degree incumbent upon me to mitigate the damage.’
Mr. Ballantine smiled. ‘I shall be very grateful, sir.’
‘Being a novice dragon, if I should chance to pitch you off my back somewhere between here and Suffolk I daresay you will not regard it.’
Mr. Ballantine blinked. ‘I shouldn’t regard anything in that state, I should imagine.’
Lord Maundevyle gave the faintest of smiles, and returned to his dinner.
The Runner’s attention moved to Theo, who sat picking at a portion of iced pudding — and then to Gussie herself. ‘On a related note, I heard mention earlier today of an unusual book?’
Theo looked up, frowning, and exchanged a horrified look with Gussie. ‘It is nothing,’ he said curtly.
‘The doom of the Werths one of these days, was it not said?’
‘Lady Margery exaggerates.’
‘Let us all hope that she does. Lady Werth, however, mentioned something about lock and key, I believe.’
Her ladyship looked conscious.
‘I ask because,’ continued Mr. Ballantine, when nobody spoke (except Mr. Cardwell, whose bluster everyone was pleased to ignore), ‘I came into Suffolk pursuing the matter of a stolen book.’
Theo’s eyes narrowed.
‘A book?’ said Gussie, with a sideways glance at her aunt. ‘Is it at all a… an unusual book, sir?’
‘That is rather the question,’ said Mr. Ballantine. ‘You see, the theft did not go cleanly, one might say. It is a spell book, or said to be such, though as to the authenticity of its contents I couldn’t say. In the process of our unknown thief’s absconding with it, several people were left injured in strange ways, and I’ve been unable to account for the nature of the wounds.’
Gussie did not much want to ask about the “strange ways”. Nobody else did either, judging from the silence.
At last, Lord Werth mustered the courage. ‘What ways were those, Mr. Ballantine?’
‘I should say they were bite marks, if that made the least sense,’ said Mr. Ballantine. ‘And something else I cannot account for at all. Bruises shaped as though something long and thin had been wrapped around the limb, and pulled tight.’
Nobody spoke.
‘I had thought the theft must have been conducted either by form-shifters of an unusual type, or perhaps with the help of beasts I cannot picture in my mind,’ said Mr. Ballantine, undaunted. ‘And perhaps it may prove to be so. However, that there might be an altogether different explanation now seems possible, and I’d be glad to hear more about the book you find it necessary to keep securely locked away.’
Gussie could not feel it appropriate to speak openly of the Book in such mixed company, and her aunt was sure to object to the discussion of such questionable subjects as thefts, criminals, wounds and Wyrded monsters at the dinner-table. ‘Perhaps we might do better to show you, Mr. Ballantine, than to attempt an explanation?’ she suggested.
‘I look forward to seeing it,’ said Mr. Ballantine.
‘No,’ said Theo. ‘No, you really don’t.’
Mr. Ballantine, for the first time, looked faintly discomfited.
In the end, Lord Werth was obliged to take Mr. Cardwell on a tour of the churchyard, before he could be got out of the way. Gussie regretted that Mr. Ballantine had raised the subject of the book over dinner, but he could not be expected to understand why it had been unwise.
‘I hope your uncle will have sense enough to show Mr. Cardwell only the churchyard, and not its occupants,’ said Lady Werth, gathered at the top of the cellar stairs with Gussie, a pace or two behind Theo and Mr. Ballantine. The latter two were intent upon the door, and the stairs downward; Gussie heard Theo’s voice, pitched low, as he endeavoured to impress upon the unsuspecting Runner the supreme importance of taking care below. Mr. Ballantine did not appear sufficiently afraid, Gussie thought, but that would soon alter.
‘I don’t know that I agree with you, Aunt,’ said Gussie. ‘If anybody can get rid of Mr. Cardwell it must be Lord Felix. And promptly too, I should think.’
‘Very true,’ said Lady Werth, much struck.
‘Unless you would like to make a sculpture of the good vicar, too? He and Miss Horne might be shipped out together.’
Lady Werth was seen to blush. ‘I ought not to have lost my temper with Miss Horne.’
‘Nobody has in the least missed her, Aunt.’
‘How true. And how sad.’
‘I have not much sympathy to waste on so poor a specimen.’
‘Have you much sympathy for anybody, Gussie?’
Gussie dutifully thought about it. ‘I worry about Nell, on occasion. Such a quantity of children.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes, I believe that is all.’
Lady Werth smiled faintly. ‘I am sure it is very liberating.’
‘Wonderfully. Come, Aunt, you must acknowledge my upbringing to have been of some influence. The world in general has little sympathy for the Wyrded, and by extension the Werths. But none of us is at all in want of it, so what can it signify?’<
br />
‘A compelling argument.’
The conversation necessarily ceased here, for Theo and Mr. Ballantine had gone below and opened the stout door behind which the Book lay imprisoned. Gussie had wanted to accompany them, but upon encountering Theo’s fiercest frown, and more convincingly his arguments as to the impossibility of keeping an eye on his cousin and Mr. Ballantine at once, she had yielded to persuasion, and consented to remain a spectator. Her last visit was not forgotten. The welts on her arms had taken days to heal.
The usual sounds echoed up from below: the opening and slamming-closed of the door; a crash, followed by another; someone’s yelp of pain (Mr. Ballantine, Gussie concluded). A low, ferocious snarl (possibly the Book, possibly Theo).
The gentlemen did not remain long in the cellar. Soon the door was flung open again, and Gussie heard hasty footsteps pounding up the stairs.
Mr. Ballantine came into view.
‘My God,’ he panted.
‘I know,’ said Gussie.
‘Lord Bedgberry,’ he said, turning to stare wildly back down the stairs. ‘He had an axe—’
‘It is never wise to consult the Book unarmed,’ said Gussie, neglecting to mention that she and her aunt had more or less done so very recently. ‘Certainly not when it is roused, which it has been rather, of late.’
‘Roused,’ said Mr. Ballantine, somewhat recovering his composure. ‘That is one word for it.’ He winced as another, resounding crash echoed from below, and held up his right arm. The sleeve of his coat hung in tatters. Gussie recognised the pattern of red welts now adorning the exposed skin.
‘Do they match the wounds you described, sir?’ she enquired.
‘I believe they do, Miss Werth. Thank you. You have saved me a deal of trouble, I believe.’
Wyrde and Wayward Page 18