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

by Marie Brennan

  “Attend to your own research,” Lord Hilford said, very reasonably. “You may find something of use there; or if you do not, then every bit we know about dragons is one more bit we can use to protect them. But, ah—if I may shift us from one nerve-wracking topic to another—”

  It was enough to stop me pacing. I tried to remember the last time I had heard the earl so wary, and could not think of a single time. When I turned to look, he was chewing on the drooping end of his moustache. I waited, but he did not speak. “Oh, out with it,” I said at last, quite sharply. “My nerves are no less wracked for being forced to wait.”

  “Natalie,” he said, reluctantly. “Or rather, her family.”

  His granddaughter was not ordinarily a topic of any tension at all. Nor were her family, but—“Let me guess,” I said with a sigh. “They have decided I am not fit company for her. Well, everyone else in Scirland has come to the same opinion; I am not fit company for anyone.”

  “That isn’t precisely it. They think you eccentric, yes, but for the most part harmlessly so. The trouble is that an eccentric is not good company for an unmarried young lady—not if she wishes to change that state.”

  I frowned at him in surprise. “But Natalie is only—” My arithmetic caught up with my words, and stopped them. “Nearly twenty,” I finished heavily. “I see.”

  “Quite.” Lord Hilford sighed, too, studying the head of his cane far more closely than it warranted. “And so her family is quite adamant that she should not accompany you on this expedition. You are likely to be gone for six months at least, likely more; it would be ruinous to her marital prospects. Old maids and all that. I’ve argued, truly I have.”

  I believed him. Lord Hilford had progressive notions of what ladies might do, and he doted on Natalie besides; but in the end he was not his granddaughter’s guardian. “Have you spoken with her?”

  “She knows how her family feels. I was hoping you might approach her—woman to woman, you know—and see if you can’t reconcile her to the situation. They aren’t intending to shackle her to some brute.”

  If she did not look herself out a husband soon, though, she might have trouble finding anyone other than a brute. “I will see what I can do.”

  Lord Hilford sounded relieved. “Thank you. You’ll have to be quick about it, though. I was intending to write this afternoon, but now I can tell you in person: the schedule has moved up. Can you and Wilker be ready to depart in two weeks?”

  Had I been holding anything, I would have dropped it. “Two weeks?”

  “If you can’t, then say so. But it may be another delay otherwise. There’s going to be a changeover at the Foreign Office, and the incoming fellow is not very keen on travellers going to Nsebu, not with the unrest in the area.”

  “Unrest?” I echoed, my mother’s comments rising to mind.

  “Ah, yes—that hasn’t reached the papers yet,” Lord Hilford said. “I had it from our man in the Foreign Office. A group of Royal Engineers were ambushed while surveying the south bank of the Girama, which is territory that is supposed to be firmly in our control. It seems Eremmo has quieted sufficiently under the Ikwunde yoke for the inkosi to start looking outward once more. It has certain people rather worried.”

  As well it should, given the military success the Ikwunde had enjoyed in the last fifty years, under one warlike inkosi after another. Still, I had faith in our soldiers there; and besides which, the river region between Bayembe and Eremmo was clear on the other side of the country from Nsebu. “One scare after another,” I sighed. “I am beginning to think this expedition will never happen.”

  “It will, Mrs. Camherst, if we move quickly enough. Otherwise we’ll have to argue the new fellow around.”

  We had already spent months arguing the previous fellow around. I reviewed the state of my affairs, and suppressed the unladylike desire to curse. I had counted on Natalie to be my companion on this journey. Would it be worse to travel alone—with an unmarried man, no less—or to find some other woman on short notice? Or rather, would suffering the latter be worse than suffering the consequences of the former?

  Either way, I could not let it change my answer to Lord Hilford. “I can be ready, yes. You will have to ask Mr. Wilker yourself.”

  “I know what Tom will say.” The earl levered himself up out of his chair. “Two weeks it is, then. I’m sure you need to prepare. And in the meanwhile, I will look into the matter of this break-in.”

  THREE

  Natalie’s wings—The merits of a husband—Keeping promises—Ladies at supper—Lord Canlan

  “Miss Oscott is here,” the footman informed me when I returned home. “I believe she is in your study, ma’am.”

  Natalie. I would have preferred to delay my promise to Lord Hilford, but if I was to leave in two weeks, I simply could not spare the time. “Thank you,” I said, distracted, and went upstairs.

  My study had been my husband’s study, once. The servants had called it the study for a good two years after his death; it was not the sort of room women normally laid claim to. But eventually their speech had shifted. No doubt that owed a great deal to the amount of time I spent there, often in the company of Natalie Oscott.

  She was indeed there, tacking a sheet of paper onto the piece of corkboard we had hung for the purpose. “Oh, good heavens, Natalie,” I said when I saw the figure drawn on it. “That again?”

  “I’ve improved it,” she said, flashing a grin at me over one shoulder. “On advice from an enthusiast in Lopperton. He thinks I’m a lad named Nathaniel—I do a very good boy’s hand, when I put my mind to it. On account of falsifying my brothers’ workbooks, when they had not written the exercises our tutor had set. What do you think?”

  The sheet of paper bore a large diagram, whose predecessors I had seen several times before. A wing spread across the page, with measurements carefully marked out, and annotations I could not read from where I stood. Even at range, though, one difference was apparent. “Are the wings curved?” I asked, curious despite myself.

  “Yes, he thinks that would work better than a straight line. And he suggested an alteration to the harness, too, which he is going to try for himself as soon as he can get it built.”

  To be perfectly honest, I thought they were both mad. True, as I said in the previous volume of my memoirs, I had been obsessed with dragon wings since I was a small child, and the idea of being able to join them in the sky was attractive. But a human being cannot possibly achieve the pectoral strength necessary to fly by flapping artificial wings—that having been Natalie’s first notion. The best he (or she) can hope for is to glide, and even then, I had my doubts.

  But Natalie found the notion an intriguing challenge. For her, the puzzle was intellectual: was it possible to engineer such a thing? In pursuit of that question, she had taught herself a great deal of mathematics, most of which I understood not at all. She had also entered into correspondence with others, for she was not the only one with an interest in the matter.

  Natalie had not yet attempted to construct or test any of her designs, for which I was grateful. Although my husband had called me the queen of deranged practicality, putting into practice ideas others would never think to attempt, even I have my limits. Those limits may, as this narrative will show, lie further out than I claim (and honestly believe)—but I never know that until I pass them. And that, I invariably do under circumstances in which going further seems to be the only feasible course of action. It is only afterward that the “deranged” part of “deranged practicality” becomes apparent to me.

  Besides, I was less sanguine about others’ foolishness, and I should not like to lose my closest companion to a broken neck. Natalie had been a great source of comfort to me since Jacob died. It made my heart all the lower, thinking that I could not bring her with me to Nsebu.

  She saw my fallen countenance, but mistook the cause. “I promise you, Isabella—I have no intention of committing my own bones to the tender mercies of physics. At least
not until after Mr. Garsell has conducted enough tests of his own to assure me the design is sound.”

  “That isn’t it.” I sighed and went to my desk—Jacob’s desk, once—in front of the broad windows overlooking the back garden. The surface was cluttered with books and stray pages, my preserved sparkling Greenie standing guard over them all; I had forbidden the maid to touch anything there, even to dust. Maps of Eriga, travellers’ reports, a draft of an article I was considering asking Lord Hilford to submit for me, under his own name. The Colloquium would not accept a paper from a woman.

  Perhaps it was the reminder of the Colloquium’s requirements that made my voice more bitter than I intended. “I spoke with your grandfather today. About your family.”

  “Oh.” That one word might have been a valve, letting out all the air and vitality that had made her so animated.

  I lowered myself into the familiar leather of my chair. “You know, then. That they don’t want you to go to Eriga.”

  “They want me to stay here and find a husband. Yes.” Natalie turned and paced a few steps away.

  Her deficit of enthusiasm was plain enough that I could read it without seeing her face. “It needn’t be bad, Natalie. You have your grandfather on your side, and from what you tell me, your family has at least some understanding of your interests. My father consulted a matchmaker to obtain a list of unmarried men who might share their libraries with me. I am sure you can go further, and find yourself a husband who will support you in your work.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She did not sound convinced. Before I could muster the words to develop my argument, however, Natalie spoke again. “It is an untenable situation, and I know it. One way or another, I must be dependent upon someone. If not a husband, then one of my brothers, or—” She caught herself. “I cannot ask that of them. But how much less can I ask it of some stranger?”

  I had not missed that or. She had been about to list a third option, and had stopped herself. I could guess why. Rather than approach it directly, though, I said, “Do you not want a husband? Presuming you could get a good one.”

  She stood very still; I think she was considering my words. Then she turned to face me, and answered in the tone of one who had never realized her true reply until this moment. “No,” Natalie said. “I don’t.”

  “Not for security,” I said. At that time the Independent Virtue movement had not yet taken shape, but its arguments were beginning to be spoken, in hushed, half-scandalized whispers. If a woman traded her marital favors for financial support, did that not make marriage a form of prostitution? “But for companionship, or love, or—” Now it was my turn to stop shy of my final words.

  Natalie blushed, but answered me. “Not for any of those. I welcome the friendship of men, of course. But childbirth is dangerous, and motherhood would demand too much of my time; and I have no interest in the, ah, activity for its own sake. What is left?”

  Very little, really. Except, perhaps, for an end to her family’s nagging—and that could be gotten in more than one way.

  It would have been wiser for me to wait until I had examined the state of my own finances. But I was to leave for Nsebu in two weeks, and had no desire to waste my time or Natalie’s on the wrong preparations. “If you must be dependent on someone,” I said, “and if your conscience will permit it, then be dependent upon me. Widows often take on companions, and you have very nearly been mine these past few years; certainly you have been a dear friend. We might make it official.”

  The hitch in her breath told me I had struck my mark precisely. Still, she protested. “I could not do that to you, Isabella. If I do not marry, I will be a burden forever. What if you change your mind, two or ten or twenty years down the road? It might poison our friendship, and I would never wish for that.”

  I laughed, lightly, trying to ease the desperate tension in her eyes. “A burden forever? Piffle. Stay with me, and I will qualify you for a life of independent and eccentric spinsterhood, supported as you choose by your learning and your pen. Other ladies have done it before.”

  Not many, and few in the sorts of fields that Natalie had proven herself drawn to. Historical scholarship was more permitted to women than the designing of crazed glider-wings. But I had formed the resolution to live my own life as my inclinations demanded, and furthermore to do so with such zeal that society could not refuse me; it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to preach feminine obedience to Natalie now. She knew the obstacles and the cost: she had seen how I lived.

  By the growing light in her eyes, the obstacles were trivial and the cost not even worth mentioning. Her mouth still spoke protest, but only because of her commitment to logic. “My family will take some convincing, I fear. Possibly a great deal of it.”

  “Then you have two choices,” I said, rising from my desk. At this time of day, the light through the windows at my back would frame me with a kind of halo; I was not above using that for dramatic effect. “You may stay in Scirland and work on convincing them, and I will welcome you at my side once that is done. Or you can inform them of your intentions, leave for Nsebu with me in two weeks, and let them work through it on their own.”

  “Two weeks?” Natalie said, her voice going faint. “You are leaving in—oh, but—”

  I waited. My words were sincere; I would welcome her company whether she had to join me later, or wait for my return to Scirland. It would not be fair to importune her with my preference.

  Besides, I knew her well enough to guess her answer. Natalie’s shoulders went back, and her chin rose. “I had promised to come with you to Eriga,” she said. “A lady should keep her promises. I will inform my family at once.”

  * * *

  I had never thought Maxwell Oscott, the earl of Hilford, to be a sadist. His chosen method for smoking out the thief, however, had me reconsidering the matter, with conclusions not favourable to him.

  The symposium whose attendees comprised our most likely suspects was, as Mr. Wilker had said, scheduled to end that week. With the police turning up nothing of use in their examination of Mr. Kemble’s laboratory, Lord Hilford settled upon a more direct method of looking for the guilty party, which was to invite everybody to supper and see if anyone flinched.

  To this end, he arranged, on vanishingly short notice, to rent out the upper hall at the Yates Hotel, and made certain that all those we suspected would attend. His excuse for this event was that the Colloquium, which would be hosting a formal banquet the following night to mark the end of the symposium, did not permit women within their hallowed walls, and he was most determined that the gentlemen attending should meet various ladies of education and merit—chief among them, though he did not advertise this fact, the widowed Mrs. Camherst.

  I suffered Lord Hilford to put me in the limelight because it would aid in our efforts, but under my mask of cooperation, I was petrified. At that time, the only monograph attributed to my name was A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana, which was hardly a scholarly work; I had laid no claim to Concerning the Rock-Wyrms of Vystrana, being concealed in the small print line “and Others” that followed Jacob’s name. The few articles I had published regarding my research on sparklings had not gone to scholarly journals. Furthermore, I had been a confirmed recluse for going on three years. The prospect of attending a dinner party with a crowd of intelligent strangers made me so ill, I could hardly eat.

  But if my spine weakened, I had only to think of the dragons who risked slaughter if the secret of dragonbone preservation became widely known, and my resolve returned to me on the spot.

  The upper hall at the Yates blazed with candles that night, their light reflecting from polished wall sconces, crystal chandeliers and glasses, and the silver cutlery laid in precise ranks along the table. The men who filled the room were a mixed lot: northern Anthiopeans in their black-and-white suits, southern Anthiopeans in calf-length caftans, Yelangese in embroidered silk robes, Vidwathi with gems pinned to the fronts of their turbans.

&nb
sp; It was not a proper dinner party, such as Mrs. Gatherty would approve of; the gentlemen outnumbered us ladies by more than three to one. But Lord Hilford had done an admirable job, given the short timeline, of organizing female guests, so that Natalie and I were not the only women present. The noted ornithologist Miriam Farnswood was there, as was the mathematician Rebecca Norman; the others, regrettably, would mean little to a modern audience, as their work has not survived history’s forgetting.

  I pasted a smile on my face, took Lord Hilford’s arm, and sallied forth to see who flinched.

  He introduced me, one by one, to the individuals we considered to be possible culprits. Nicanor de Androjas y Reón (the “ratty Marñeo fellow,” whose nose did give him an unfortunately rodentlike profile), Bhelu Guhathalakar, Cuong Giun Vanh, Foma Ivanovich Ozerin. Mr. Wilker was with us throughout. None of us expected our interlocutors to have broken into Kemble’s laboratory themselves—that was undoubtedly the work of some hired criminal—but surely the thief would, by now, have glanced through Kemble’s notes. Both Mr. Wilker and I were mentioned in abundance. The connection between that work and our names could not be missed.

  Cuong dismissed me immediately as beneath his notice, directing all his conversation to Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker. Ozerin gave me more attention than I wanted, but entirely of the wrong kind; I extracted myself from that situation as soon as possible. De Androjas y Reón did indeed flinch, but he flinched at everything. (I daresay that man was even less comfortable in such a crowd than I was.)

  By far my best experience was with the Vidwathi chemist Guhathalakar, though not, at least initially, for any reason useful to our investigation. He was a younger man than the others, thirty at most, and of a type I have met countless times in my life, which I confess is one of my favourites: so powerfully interested in his subject that trivial considerations such as the sex of his conversational partner are quickly forgotten. I might have been an orang-outang, for all he cared; what mattered was that I showed an interest in chemistry, and could respond to his statements with intelligent questions (even if I did not understand the answers). It took no encouragement at all to get him expounding at length, his voice growing louder in his enthusiasm.