Scales and Sensibility by Stephanie Burgis

Chapter 19

“My dragon?” Elinor repeated. She didn’t look away from Miss Armitage, but she still sensed Sir John stiffening in his seat beside her and heard his bitten-off curse as he spilled sherry across his leg.

Sir Jessamyn noticed, too. Seated on Elinor’s left shoulder, he was only a foot from Sir John’s furious stare. He pressed himself against Elinor’s neck, shivering.

Elinor put one soothing hand to Sir Jessamyn’s back. “I can’t think what you mean, Miss Armitage. What exactly do you think has changed about my dragon?”

“Well…everything!” Miss Armitage said. “Of course he is a completely different dragon, to begin with. Whatever happened to your last one? I thought he was quite an attractive creature, and he looked perfectly healthy when I saw you riding in the park with him last week.”

“And at the Rothershams’ rout,” Gavin Armitage added. “You’re right,” he said to his sister, “I hadn’t noticed until now, but of course it isn’t the same dragon at all.” He turned back to Elinor. “Your last one was a sort of reddish colour, wasn’t he?”

“Like mine,” Miss Armitage said helpfully, “but with pink rather than silver trimmings.” She laughed, lowering her eyelashes. “You can see that I pay a good deal of attention to dragons, can’t you? I confess, I find them fascinating. Far better than the ordinary run of jewelry as an accessory. I can’t imagine disposing of one who was still so young and striking.”

Elinor’s hand tightened over Sir Jessamyn’s back as, for a moment, panic mutated into anger. “Perhaps,” she said, “that is because, unlike other fashionable accessories, dragons are living, breathing creatures with sensibilities.”

“Oh, but they can be trained until you’d never guess it,” said Miss Armitage. “Your new one is lovely, although I can see you haven’t finished training him. He looks quite wild with nervousness now, doesn’t he? Is he not yet accustomed to company?”

“Your new one,” Sir John repeated, ominously. He set down his glass and leaned forward. “Mrs. De Lacey, you told me this morning, to my face—”

“He is not new,” Elinor said. “He is my second dragon. Because he is not yet used to company, I haven’t taken him about with me in London. But as I was coming to spend time in the countryside—”

“Of all the nerve!” Penelope’s outraged gasp was almost a shriek, and it turned Sir Jessamyn’s light shivers into ripples that threatened to knock him off Elinor’s shoulder. He began to chitter unhappily at the back of his throat as Penelope said, “If you think just because we live in the countryside, we aren’t worthy of your best dragon—!”

Elinor raised her own voice to cut across her cousin’s rising fury. “I merely thought that as it would be quieter here—”

“I think,” said Sir John, “that I have seen that bloody dragon before. That is what I think!”

He pointed a beefy finger at Sir Jessamyn.

“I think that’s my daughter’s blasted dragon!”

Sir Jessamyn unmistakably chuckled.

Elinor leaped to her feet. “That is quite enough!” she said. “If anyone utters one more word—”

But it was too late. Sir Jessamyn had lost control all over the back of her gown.

“Well,” said Lady Hathergill brightly, “I’ve certainly seen that dragon before!”

Penelope fell back against the couch and began to scream. Gavin Armitage began to laugh. Sir John lunged to his feet, sputtering incoherently. Miss Armitage turned away, not quite in time to hide her amusement.

Mr. Aubrey turned the page of his book with a frown of perfect concentration and settled deeper into his armchair.

Hot dragon slime drenched the back of Elinor’s gown. Her head whirled with panic. Sir Jessamyn had plastered himself so tightly against her neck, her throat was half-constricted. Even if she could have thought of what to say, she couldn’t have forced the words out.

But before she could even try, Benedict Hawkins was at her side. “Won’t you take my handkerchief, Mrs. De Lacey? Terrible habit these young dragons have,” he added to the room at large. “I haven’t met a single one that didn’t do that when people made them nervous.”

Penelope stopped screaming, but her breath came in short bursts as she glared at Elinor through narrowed eyes. “My dragon—my dragon always did that! Every day!”

“Your dragon did it too?” Benedict said. “I’m not surprised. Puppies are just the same, you know. No control when they get frightened. Wouldn’t you confirm that, Miss Armitage?”

“Well…” Miss Armitage looked as if she were exerting superhuman control to hold back her laughter. “My dragon did it only once,” she said. “It is part of the training process, you know—teaching them to be calm in all circumstances.”

Sir Jessamyn let out a barely audible chitter of fear as he snaked his neck around Elinor’s throat and then tucked his head so tightly underneath her chin that he nearly overbalanced her.

“Never mind,” Elinor rasped to him, through her constricted throat. “You’ll learn soon enough.”

Miss Armitage’s dragon gazed past Sir Jessamyn with cool indifference, as if the other dragon’s panic was a sight far too embarrassing to even witness. Elinor gritted her teeth, held Sir Jessamyn steady with one hand, and struggled to reach around her back with the handkerchief Benedict had given her.

“Allow me.” He took it from her and wiped carefully across the back of her shoulder. “Can we summon a maid to clean the rest of this up?”

“Oh, the maids won’t do it anymore,” said Lady Hathergill. “They utterly refuse.”

His hand paused a moment in its work. “Then who—?”

“Elinor always did it, of course! But now…” Penelope’s lower lip pushed out sullenly. “I didn’t know that other dragons were just as bad.”

Elinor bit her lip hard to repress her reaction.

Then she thought: Why?

Carefully, she nudged Sir Jessamyn’s head clear of her neck so that she could speak more easily. She kept one soothing hand under the little dragon’s chin as she looked at Penelope with all the fury she’d had to repress for six long months.

“Your dragon was not ‘bad’ to be afraid of you, Miss Hathergill,” she said. “You heard Miss Armitage—even her dragon lost control once, when he was young. The only difference was that she was careful not to frighten him again as she taught him self-control. My dragon would not have panicked now, either, if he hadn’t been shouted and shrieked at in an outrageous manner.”

“I beg your pardon?” Penelope’s voice soared upwards. “Are you actually trying to claim that my dragon’s behavior was my fault?”

“Penelope…” Sir John held out one hand, frowning. He turned to stare at Sir Jessamyn. “Are you quite certain that that is not my daughter’s dragon?”

Elinor looked at him with every bit as much haughty contempt as the real Mrs. De Lacey could ever have summoned. “Have I not said so clearly enough?”

“My niece always did think Penelope unkind to her dragon,” Lady Hathergill remarked. “It wasn’t worth the effort to agree with her, of course, but I must say Penelope did shriek at him a great deal. But then, she’s never had the patience for anyone else’s problems but her own.”

“Mother!” Penelope’s lips quivered with a visible mixture of fury and hurt. “How could you? When you know how much I’ve suffered—”

“You see?” Lady Hathergill said, to the rest of the company. “It never seemed worth the trouble to admit the truth when Sir John would certainly support her no matter how badly she behaved. But do you know…” She smiled sunnily. “I feel quite energetic at the moment. Why, for once I’m not bothered at all by my daughter’s hysterics.”

“Oh!” Penelope jumped to her feet. “You are all being completely impossible. I hate you!”

She ran from the room in a whirl of sprig muslin, sobbing noisily. Sir John turned on his wife.

“Mary! What in God’s name has come over you today?”

She shrugged, still smiling. “I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s been years and years since I last said what I truly thought. It is quite unlike me, isn’t it? But I’m finding it rather liberating.”

Benedict’s hand stopped moving on Elinor’s shoulder. For a moment, he stood perfectly still behind her. Then his warm breath rustled against her throat as he whispered, in a bare thread of sound,

“I wish to know. What does your mother really think?”

It was a sentence that made no sense, coming from him. Until…

Elinor’s breath stopped in her throat. She knew those words. They were the ones she’d uttered that afternoon, just before Sir Jessamyn had breathed his flame and changed her aunt.

She held desperately still. Her pulse beat against her throat. She felt Benedict’s hand on her shoulder, warm through the handkerchief and her slime-soaked gown. She wished she could see his face.

Sir John stared at his wife in fulminating silence for a long moment. Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

“Gone after Penelope, I expect,” said Lady Hathergill with a sigh. “That was why I gave up on instilling any discipline in her when she was a child. What purpose was there, when her father would only give her whatever she wanted, no matter what I said? Ah, well.” She patted down her skirts. “She’s pretty enough, and with such an enormous dowry, I’m certain she’ll make a good match anyway and be off our hands soon enough. I expect you two gentlemen are both here for that now, aren’t you?”

Benedict didn’t speak.

Gavin Armitage said, “Your ladyship, your daughter’s beauty and charm are—”

“Yes, yes,” said Lady Hathergill. “I know. Gentlemen do tend to go foolish around girls like Penelope. Just as well, really. Her cousin, now—Elinor was a sensible girl. I always thought she would make a good wife, if any man was clever enough to see it. But no gentlemen would ever marry her, not after her father lost all her money—and Sir John would never allow me to sponsor her in Society, anyway. Penelope couldn’t have borne it.”

Elinor was glad that Benedict stood behind her. She didn’t want to see his face, not now.

Miss Armitage was the one who spoke. “Lost her money? How did that happen?”

“Oh, one of those terrible fraudulent investment schemes.” Lady Hathergill waved a dismissive hand. “All about the import of rare Brazilian dragons, or some such nonsense. It all sounded very promising at the time, according to my sister’s letters. And the tricksters who persuaded my brother-in-law to settle all his funds on the scheme were extraordinarily persuasive. I believe they generally are.”

“Tricksters?” The word emerged as a croak from Elinor’s throat. “There was more than one?”

“Oh, it was a married couple,” her aunt said carelessly. “They seemed terribly respectable, you see. That must have been part of their appeal. They claimed the wife’s father was in Brazil himself, directing all the operations, while the husband in England collected all of their investors. They dined with my brother-in-law and the wife charmed him, the husband was convincing…”

She sighed. “And so the money was all stolen. My sister and her husband were killed in an accident before they could come up with any salvation for the family, and the only way I could persuade Sir John to take in even one of the girls was to promise her as a sort of maid-of-all-work to Penelope.” She shook her head. “But of course, without Penelope’s looks, and without any dowry of her own, my niece would never have found a husband anyway. What more could she hope for than shelter in our household, even if she was treated poorly here?”

Miss Armitage’s voice was warm. “I think it sounds as if you were very generous indeed, Lady Hathergill. What more could any girl expect in her situation? I do feel sorry for her, I confess, but really—what could she have been thinking to run away like that for no reason at all?”

“Indeed.” Mr. Armitage’s golden hair glinted in the candlelight as he shook his head regretfully. “I’m afraid she threw away her own chances there. A pity, I’m sure, but that is how life works, is it not? What do you say, Mrs. De Lacey?”

“Quite,” Elinor said colourlessly. “She must have been very foolish indeed.”

Behind her, Benedict Hawkins said nothing at all.