A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent

  Miss Oscott put on a look of airy innocence, and we all laughed. Then, not wanting to impose more than I already had on the earl’s time, I bid them a good evening and made my way once again through the crowds of Renwick’s.

  Locating Jacob took some time. When I succeeded at last, I found him in a foul temper, owing to unspecified fraternal antics. It put something of a damper on my bubbling enthusiasm; this was clearly not a good time to bring up Lord Hilford and his expedition. Instead we made our departure from the hall, and went to the house Jacob kept in town, where we stayed on our Falchester trips. Feeling somewhat deflated, I prepared for bed, then lay for nearly an hour in the dark, staring at the ceiling and thinking of Vystrana.

  FIVE

  Advantageous correspondence — An unwise request — I speak my mind — An unproductive morning — The risk of lunacy — What other people might say

  Judging by the number of letters we received at our house over the next two months, Lord Hilford was more than happy to correspond with my husband about his lecture and everything else under the sun. Jacob read bits of these out loud to me, mostly anecdotes of natural history, but occasionally the earl’s biting observations about the trials of spending time with family. I gathered that he was glad for the excuse to closet himself away from them for an hour or two and engage his mind with the questions of a colleague.

  I cultivated that connection with every wile I possessed, for I had awoken the morning after Renwick’s utterly possessed by a single notion: that Jacob should join the expedition. By now I had every confidence that we would hear all the details, not merely those digested for lectures and articles; but it was not enough. Jacob must go, and I could live the experience vicariously through him.

  Or so I thought at the time.

  Over a quiet dinner one night, I found I had achieved my goal. “Isabella,” Jacob said during the main course, “would you object if I went abroad?”

  I did not drop my fork, though my hand forgot to mind it for a moment. “Abroad?”

  “Lord Hilford’s planning an expedition—” Jacob stopped himself mid-sentence and eyed me across the tureen of stewed carrots. “But I don’t need to remind you of that, do I? You’ve orchestrated it very well, I must say.”

  “Orchestrated?” I made a valiant attempt at an innocent expression. “Lord Hilford had that expedition in mind long before I met him.”

  “But not that I should be a part of it. Admit it, Isabella; you’ve been nudging me toward him and his Vystrani escapade, since—when? Certainly since the beginning of summer. As far back as Renwick’s?”

  “Not that early,” I said, avoiding a lie by the narrowest of margins. The hour of sleeplessness after Renwick’s did not count as at Renwick’s.

  “It can’t have been long after that. I can’t say I object, precisely; Hilford’s fast become a good friend. You could have been more open about it, though.”

  I studied my husband at the other end of the table and replied with more honesty than I’d intended. “Would you have listened, had I been blunt? Had I told you from the start what I had in mind—that you should deliberately seek out and befriend a peer of the realm, for the purposes of worming your way into his foreign expedition?”

  Jacob frowned. “When you put it like that, it sounds dreadfully presumptuous.”

  “Precisely. And it would have been presumptuous, had you had any such intention—which means you probably wouldn’t have done it at all. Therefore, I approached it more subtly.”

  The twitch of his eyebrow said he was not persuaded by my logic. “Meaning you had that intention on my behalf.”

  “Isn’t that a wife’s duty?” I offered him an innocent smile.

  My husband put down his fork and leaned back in his chair, gazing at me in bemusement. “You’re outrageous, Isabella.”

  “Outrageous? Me? Do you see me wearing scandalously low-cut gowns to the opera, like the Marchioness of Priscin? Do you see me publishing books of poetry and pretending they aren’t mine, like Lady Hannah Spring? Do you—”

  “Enough!” Jacob laughed and cut me off. “I’m afraid to hear what other pieces of Society gossip you may have picked up. Since you have admitted to your meddling, I imagine you would not object to me going abroad with Hilford.” He looked rueful and picked his fork up again. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you booted me out the door.”

  “And risk damage to my shoe?” I imitated the tone of the most vapid beauty in Society. Jacob smiled, and ate in silence for a few minutes. The footman came in and cleared away the plates, then brought in the pudding.

  For once, I had little appetite for it, and the heavy bread sat like a raisin-studded lump in my stomach. I picked at it for a little while, not really eating much, while across from me Jacob dug into his own.

  When I realized the source of my suddenly dismal mood, it escaped my lips before I could stop it.

  “I want to go with you.”

  Jacob paused, a forkful of pudding already in his mouth, staring across at me. Slowly, he drew the fork out, and laid it on his plate while he chewed and swallowed. “To Vystrana.”

  “Yes.” I wished I had kept silent. If there were any chance of success, it would not come this way, with my desire stated so bluntly.

  Jacob’s expression showed me I was not wrong. “Isabella … it’s out of the question, and you know it.”

  So I did, and yet …

  “Please,” I said. The word came out softly, and heartfelt. “I’ve been fascinated by them since I was a girl. You know that, Jacob. To sit idly at home, while others go and see them in person—”

  “Isabella—”

  “To see real ones, I mean; adults instead of runts. Adult dragons, living in the wild, not chained in a pit for the king’s favourites to gawk at. I’ve read about them—you of all people know how much—but words are nothing. Engravings give the illusion of reality, but how many of the engravers have even seen the subjects they depict? This might be my only chance, Jacob.”

  I stopped and swallowed. The pudding I had eaten felt like it might come back up again, did I relax my guard against it.

  “Isabella.” His voice was also soft, but intense. I could not look up at him, staring fixedly at my plate instead. “I know your interest, and I have sympathy for it—believe me, I do! But you cannot ask me to take my wife abroad in this manner. A tour, certainly, going to civilized places, but the mountains of Vystrana are not civilized.

  “You’ve read about it, I know. Try to imagine what you’ve read made real. The peasants there eke out their existence; do you think they will have a comfortable hotel for us to stay in? Servants who are more than local girls hired on for our stay, who—who actually understand how to care for people rather than for sheep? It will not be a pleasant existence, Isabella.”

  “Do you think I care?” I slammed my fork down, heedless of the scene I was making. “I don’t need luxury, Jacob; I don’t need pampering. I’m not afraid of dirt and drafts and—and washing my own clothing. Or yours, for that matter. I could be useful; would it not be advantageous to have someone to make accurate drawings? Think of me as a secretary. I can keep your notes, organize your papers, make certain that you and Lord Hilford have what you need when you go out to observe.”

  Jacob shook his head. “While you sit in the rented cottage, content to be left behind?”

  “I didn’t say I would be content.”

  “And you wouldn’t be. I’d find you out there in boy’s clothes, masquerading as a shepherd, before a fortnight was done.”

  Heat stained my cheeks. It might have been anger, embarrassment, or a little of both. “That is not fair.”

  “I’m just being pragmatic, Isabella. You’ve made headstrong decisions before, and they got you hurt. Don’t ask me to stand by and let you be hurt again.”

  I took a deep, slow breath, hoping it would calm me down. The air caught in my throat, raggedly. I would not cry. Why was I crying?

  “Please,” I repeated, knowi
ng I had said it already, but unable to avoid repeating it. “Please … don’t leave me behind.”

  Silence followed my words. My gaze had drifted downward again, and I could not bear to lift it, to look at him while I said this. “Don’t leave me here alone. You’ll be gone for months, a year perhaps—and what will I do with myself?”

  His answer was gentle. “You have friends. Invite one of them to come stay with you for a time. Or go visit your family; I am sure they would be glad to have you.” A soft sound that might have been a laugh. “Continue your work with sparklings, if it makes you happy.”

  “But it doesn’t! It isn’t enough. Jacob, please. I don’t blame you for going away so much when I was in my depression, but if you go away for so long, I’ll feel—”

  The words stuck in my mouth. No matter how hard I tried, I could not bring myself to enunciate it, to tell him the depth of fear and inadequacy the prospect of his absence created in my heart.

  More silence, while I tried to breathe. Then at last Jacob spoke, in level, almost grim tones.

  “I did not mind when you set out to snare me in Falchester, Isabella. And I did not mind when you put me in Lord Hilford’s path. But I will not let you maneuver me into this one—especially not with that.”

  All desire for tears vanished in a surge of white-hot rage. My gaze snapped up to meet his, and my chair skidded backward on the rug as I stood, palms flat on the table, feet widely braced.

  “Don’t you dare,” I spat, not caring how loud my voice became. “Don’t you dare accuse me of using this to maneuver you. I spoke my heart, and nothing more. Have you any concept what it feels like, to endure the loss I have? You may not blame me, but others do; whether you think of it this way or not, they whisper that I have failed as your wife. If you leave, what will they say then? How will we feel toward one another, when you come back? Can you promise me it would not create distance between us? And while you’re gone, I will be sitting here, trying to keep myself occupied with frivolity and artifice, an endless round of dances and card games and things I don’t give a damn about, knowing all the while that my one opportunity to see true dragons has come and gone, leaving me behind.”

  My words exhausted, I stood, panting, staring at Jacob’s white face. That face blurred alarmingly, and I could not think of anything to say in the aftermath of my tirade, anything that would begin to atone for the anger I had just shown him. A lady, quite simply, did not speak so to her husband.

  There was nothing I could say. Nor could I bear to remain there in silence.

  Turning sharply, almost stumbling over my chair, I fled the room.

  Jacob did not pursue me, nor did he come to my bedchamber that night. (We had slept apart since my miscarriage, that I might not trouble him with my restlessness.) I rose at my usual hour the next morning, but dressed slowly, not eager to go downstairs and face him after my outburst of the previous night. My state was not helped by my uncertainty as to how I felt about that outburst. I did not know whether to regret it or not.

  My cowardice eventually lost out to my will, and I went down, only to discover that Jacob had gone riding, and the servants could not tell me when he would return. This did nothing to improve my mood.

  I sat down to answer correspondence, but my handwriting was atrocious, a reflection of my feelings that day, and I soon gave it up in disgust. The day being fine, I went out into the garden, but as I have said before it was a small place, and not one that could keep me occupied for long. At length I went down to the shed where I kept my sparklings and my notes, though I was not much in a mood to work.

  Once inside, I sank onto a stool and gazed sightlessly over the neat ranks of my vinegar-soaked sparklings. Each stood on a card labeled in my tidiest handwriting, recounting when and where it had been collected, its length, its wingspan, and how much it weighed. They were organized into categories based on my research, grouped according to the subtypes I was beginning to identify. One stood on my working-table, submerged in a jar of vinegar, awaiting my latest effort at dissection. I picked up the surgeon’s scalpel I had been using for that task, and put it down. Hardly a pastime for a lady.

  Yet it was the closest thing I could arrange to the work I truly wanted to be doing. My childhood obsession, buried for years after the incident with the wolf-drake, had put up shoots during the tour of the menagerie, and now those shoots had burst into full flower. I wanted both to see dragons, and to understand them. I wanted to stretch the wings of my mind and see how far I could fly.

  I wanted, in short, the intellectual life of a gentleman—or as close to it as I could come.

  I picked up a sparkling, my fingers gentle despite my frustration, and studied the minute perfection of its scales. The tiny head with its ridges, no less fierce for being so small, and the elegant wings. They did not look precisely like dragons, but they spat infinitesimal sparks: the origin of their name and, I thought, a means of attracting mates, much like a firefly’s glow.

  That thought made me lower than ever, and I put the sparkling down, turning to a book I had left open. It showed an anatomical drawing of a wyvern, which I believed might be a larger relative of the sparkling—a notion which, if true, would make them not insects at all.

  A shadow fell across the page, obscuring the diagram.

  It might have been a servant, but even before the silence stretched out long past the time when a servant would have announced his business, I knew it was not. I recognized my husband’s step.

  “I thought I might find you here,” Jacob said after a brief silence.

  “You almost didn’t,” I replied, my voice pleasingly steady despite the turmoil inside. “I was about to go inside and make another attempt at answering letters.”

  I heard Jacob move a few steps around the interior of the shed, and suspected he was studying my shelves. “I had no idea you had collected so many.”

  I could not think of a response that would not sound antagonistic, and so I kept quiet.

  Jacob, I think, had been hoping I would make small talk, perhaps help him find a graceful way into the conversation we could not avoid. Faced with my silence, he sighed. “I’m sorry for what I said last night,” he told me, his voice heavy. “The implication that you were … using our loss against me, as a way to get what you wanted. I should not have said that.”

  “No, you should not have.” My words came out harder than I meant them to. I sighed, echoing him. “But I forgive you. It’s true; I have maneuvered you before.”

  My husband came forward to lean gingerly on the edge of my working-table, careful not to disturb anything on it. He gazed down at me, and when I made myself look up, I could not read his expression.

  “Tell me truly,” Jacob said. “If I go to Vystrana without you—with travel time, it will take the better part of a year. What will you do?”

  Go mad in white linen … but I would not say that to him. Though true, it was not the sort of answer he deserved. I considered it for a moment, then said, “I would likely visit my family, at least to start. I would rather be in the countryside than engaging in empty rounds about Society. Here, I would have to endure too much gossip and false sympathy, and I fear I would hit someone and make a true disgrace of myself.”

  The corner of Jacob’s mouth quirked. “And then?”

  “In truth? I don’t know. Go to the coast, perhaps, or see if I might convince you to finance a trip for me somewhere foreign. People would think it less strange if I went to a spa for my health. But that would not keep me occupied; it would just remove my boredom to somewhere further from the public eye.”

  “Are you that bored?”

  I met his gaze directly. “You have no idea. At least when men visit with friends, it is acceptable for them to talk about more than fashion and perhaps the occasional silly novel. I cannot talk to ladies about the latest lectures at the Philosophers’ Colloquium, and men will not include me in their conversations. You allow me to read whatever I wish, and that spares my sanity. But b
ooks alone cannot keep me company for a year.”

  He absorbed this, then nodded. “Very well. I’ve listened to your side. Will you hear mine?”

  “I owe you at least that much.”

  His eyes roved across the ordered ranks of my sparklings as he spoke. “You would be thought odd for going on an expedition to Vystrana; I would be thought a monster. I care little for those who would tell me I should keep my wife in line; I have not made a habit of keeping you on a leash. But there are others who would ask what sort of gentleman would subject his wife to such hardship.”

  “Even if your wife volunteered for it?”

  “That does not enter into it. It is my duty to protect you and keep you safe. Protection and safety do not include ventures of this sort.”

  I folded my hands into my lap, noting irrelevantly that I had begun biting my nails again. It was a habit I have spent my life trying and failing to break. “Then the question, I suppose, is how much those criticisms concern you.”

  “No.”

  I glanced up at Jacob again, and saw the quirk in his mouth grow to a rueful smile.

  “The question,” he said, “is whether that concern is important enough to warrant making my wife miserable.”

  Hardly daring to breathe, I waited for him to go on. Whatever else he might say, I knew one thing: that I had been luckier than I knew, the day Andrew invited me to go with him to the king’s menagerie. How many other gentlemen would even have made such a statement?

  Jacob’s hazel eyes fixed on me, and then he shook his head. My heart sank, though I tried not to show it.

  “I am the greatest lunatic in Scirland,” he said, “but I cannot bear to deny you. Not with you looking at me like that.”

  His words took a moment to sink in, so convinced was I that I had lost my case. “You mean—”

  Jacob held up a cautioning hand. “I mean that I will write to Hilford. The expedition is his; I can’t go adding people on my own whim. But yes, Isabella—I mean that I, at least, will not stand in your way. On the condition—!” His words broke off as I surged to my feet and threw my arms about him. “On the condition,” he continued when I released him enough to breathe, “that you promise me, no mad antics. No putting yourself in the path of a hungry wolf-drake. Nothing that will make me regret saying this today.”