Miss Percy's Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons) (A Miss Percy Guide Book 1) Read online

  Miss Percy's Pocket Guide

  to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons

  Quenby Olson

  World Tree Publishing

  Miss Percy's Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons) is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 Quenby Olson

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 0-998101xxx

  ISBN-13: 13: 978-0-998101xxx

  Published in the United States of America by World Tree Publishing.

  First Edition: October 2021

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 WTEP B2143

  To my cat, Dog (Nermal, Jerkface):

  You peed on our things. You brought us mice and let them loose in the house. We constantly had to trim your rear end hair so you wouldn’t get poop caught in it. And the hairballs, oh my gosh.

  But there would absolutely and 100% be no Fitz without you.

  I love you and I miss you.

  Chapter One

  It was once a commonly-held belief that dragons were nothing more than creatures pocketed into the realm of myth and fairytale. But man also once believed the Earth to be flat, and that we sat with prim and unswerving confidence at the center of the universe.

  Now it is merely man himself who believes himself to be seated at the center of everything. And - oh! - what a precarious position to maintain when that previously dismissed realm of myth and fairytale chooses to kick your chair out from under you.

  -from the Prologue to Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons)

  * * *

  Great Uncle Forthright was dead, and Mildred’s toast had gone soggy on one side.

  It wasn’t the most pleasant of ways to begin one’s day. The death more than the toast, of course, though Mildred had only spare memories of her Great Uncle Forthright and the soggy toast rushed into the lead as an immediate impediment to her current happiness.

  But there was an edge to Diana’s tone as she read over the letter—Mildred’s letter, but her sister had plucked it up from the top of the pile and slit into it with her knife as if things like addresses and private communications were irrelevant—that had brought with it the news of Great Uncle Forthright’s more-than-timely demise. Her words dropped like pebbles into still water, creating ripples that would no doubt have an effect on the rest of Mildred’s day.

  Ah, well. Perhaps the soggy toast would have to relinquish its early victory.

  “Who is Great Uncle Forthright?” It was Belinda who asked, the only one of the Muncy children permitted to speak-without-being-spoken-to at the breakfast table.

  (Belinda was seventeen years old and on her way towards being engaged to marry one Mr. Bertie Sampson. That is, if Mr. Sampson could be convinced that his own future happiness depended not on the liveliness of various Great Uncles or the humidity of his morning baked goods, but rather on being permanently attached to a woman who may or may not have “accidentally” set fire to Cynthia Bowlin’s hair when the rumor went ‘round that Mr. Bertie Sampson planned on asking Miss Bowlin to dance two country dances with him at Mr. and Mrs. Carvin’s ball one month prior.)

  “An eccentric,” Diana said, her gaze still shifting from side to side as she read the second page of the letter. “Our mother’s uncle, wasn’t he?” She glanced up at Mildred, but her attention failed to linger long enough for Mildred to venture a reply. “Ghastly man. Never married, if I recall. Or if he did, there weren’t any children.” She turned over a page, her nose wrinkling. “Always in trouble for rambling about the countryside, spending all of his money on artifacts.” That last word spoken in a voice reserved for mentions of indelicate body functions or something called ‘the middle class.’ “Mother loved him. Familial ties, I expect. But I always thought he—oh!” Her lips tightened into a rosebud. Her gaze returned to Mildred. “You’re to receive an inheritance.”

  Mildred pushed her most recent bite of sausage from one side of her mouth to the other. “Me?” she managed to say without spraying half-chewed meat over her corner of the table. “But I hardly remember him.”

  “I guess that doesn’t matter to eccentric Great Uncles.” She looked at the letter again. “Doesn’t say what it’s to be. Money? Oh, wouldn’t that be a blessing. The girls could use some new gowns, and perhaps we could finally fix the remnants of that wall out past the east side of the garden.”

  “May I have a new fan if we’re to have more money?” Belinda’s dark eyebrows climbed high on her forehead. “Only Miss Lewis has an ivory one and mine’s only painted wood.”

  “We’ll see, we’ll see.” Diana’s words sounded distracted. No doubt she was already performing a few feats of basic arithmetic in her head.

  Mildred set down her knife and fork, wiped her mouth with her napkin, and drew in a deep breath. “May I see the letter, please?”

  Diana stared at her from the other side of the table, her eyes wide and unblinking. “Why?” She shrugged. “I’m telling you everything it says.”

  “But I should like to read it for myself.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Oh, very well. But let me finish first, there’s only a few more lines.”

  In her mind, Mildred reached across the table and snatched the two pages from her sister’s hand. It was a lovely daydream, one that made her sit up a little taller in her seat, as if the mere power of her imagination was enough to fill her with a confidence she would never dare to put into practice. But the vision buoyed her through the rest of Diana’s reading of the letter, so that Mildred was able to take it from her with a muttered “thank you” rather than a few choice words that remained locked up safe inside her head.

  “I expect it’s because you’re the eldest,” Diana said as she returned to her own breakfast, left to sit and congeal on her plate while she had been distracted by the letter. “Of course, if Great Uncle Forthright had given the matter the proper amount of thought, he would have left something directly to me or to the children. But you…”

  Mildred swallowed. She swallowed because the words “Oh, shut up you stroppy cow” were balanced on the tip of her tongue, threatening to grab a hairpin and pick the very lock that held them back.

  “This was dated three weeks ago.” She looked at the direction on the front, written in a near unintelligible scrawl. Astonishment rippled through her that the thing had even managed to find its way to her at all.

  “Hm. Well.” That was it. Diana had lost all interest in the letter, though no doubt its contents were still plinking about inside her head like coins in a purse.

  The letter was written in a neater hand than the direction on the front, but only by a little bit. Mildred couldn’t tell if it meant the missive was composed in haste or if the writer was possessed of abominable handwriting skills.

  There were several details stated in the letter that her sister had left out of the previous discussion. Apparently Great Uncle Forthright had lived to the ripe old age of ninety-four. He had died, not from some chronic malady or heart seizure, but from tripping over a tree root and falling into a hole he had dug in search of a lost Roman treasure supposedly hidden away by Boudica nearly two millennia before.

  There was also a line dedicated to his love of mutton hand pies. Mildred read through the rest of the letter searching for any particular relevance t
o that reveal, but found nothing.

  “It doesn’t…” she began, but faltered into silence when she realized that everyone else was already excusing themselves from the table, leaving only Mr. Muncy behind. (Diana’s husband, the sort who lived behind a newspaper or a book or any sort of reading wall that was meant to deter people from approaching in an oh-look-he’s-reading-I’ll-not-bother-him sort of way. This, of course, did not always work, as some people [re: Diana] took the presence of reading material to mean that the person reading was obviously bored and most likely pining away for the company of others [i.e., Diana when she was in need of a receptacle for her general complaints about life and motherhood] and would certainly have no compunction against setting aside their book with eagerness to listen.)

  “It doesn’t mention what the inheritance is,” she went on, to herself, and the back of Mr. Muncy’s newspaper. “Or why I’m to have it. Or how I’m to procure it.”

  She looked down at her plate. Her breakfast was only half-eaten. It was cold. Betsy had already scurried out from the kitchen to begin clearing the table. With a sigh that carried a lifetime’s weight of disrespect and disregard and several other words beginning with a similar prefix, Mildred picked up the last of her drooping toast and pushed her chair back from the table.

  She still held the letter as she walked up the stairs. The letter in one hand, the toast in the other. She munched on the toast as she returned to her room, that tiny little thing stuck under the eaves and where, after seventeen years of sleeping and dressing and bathing and hiding away, she still hit her head on the slanted ceiling and still bit out the same curse every time.

  Her room was cold when she opened the door and slipped inside. She had to slip inside as the door wouldn’t open fully because of the aforementioned ceiling. So she turned sideways and shimmied through the gap and breathed again once she was through. She then proceeded to stub her toe on the corner of the chest at the foot of her bed, and saved herself at the last minute from rearing up in pain and slamming the back of her head into the ceiling.

  But at least no one bothered her here, tucked away as she was like an old mop and bucket. The children didn’t play in this part of the house, and while the ceiling did leak in one corner, and while the view from the window was of a small compost heap beside the kitchen garden, it was still her own space.

  Well, her own space in her brother-in-law’s home. But it was better than nothing.

  Wasn’t it?

  Of course it was. At least she had a bed and clothes and warm food and books to read. At the end of the day, she didn’t really think she could give up a soft bed and a good book, even if her room did sometimes smell a bit mildewy on cloudy days.

  She opened the letter again and read over the two pages of meandering scrawl. Her Great Uncle Forthright…

  No, she didn’t remember much of him. He’d been old, the last time she’d seen him. But she’d been a child at the time and almost everyone older than her would’ve fallen into the category of “decrepit figure about to crawl into their coffin” to her young, unsullied eyes. She recalled white hair worn much too long, and a wiry figure that never seemed to stop fidgeting about. And he’d given her a coin. A small thing, with a hole cut into the center and words in a language she didn’t understand stamped around the edge.

  And then Diana had taken the coin and tried to spend it on some ribbon for one of her dolls and Mildred had never seen it again.

  She told herself she had forgotten that part of the story until just then. But she hadn’t, really. Her vexation at losing her precious coin had remained with her, the kind of stalwart reaction that only the very young seem capable of achieving with such implacability. Little good her stubbornness had achieved, except to harden that initial vexation from its tiny crumb of coal into a glittering diamond that occasionally caused her to catch her breath at random moments. A feeling like missing a step on the stairs, like her throat closing around that last morsel of food she thought she had swallowed properly. A feeling like…

  No, no. This was all silly. She folded up the letter and stuffed it into the top drawer of her dresser, tucked away with her stockings and gloves and other bits and pieces she had no place for. An inheritance from a Great Uncle she hardly remembered… Well, whatever it was, it wouldn’t be much. The man had not been rich, had he? Most likely only comfortable enough to be permitted a place in society as an eccentric, rather than carted away as a loon if he’d had less than a few coins to rub together. But certainly not rich. At least not prosperous enough that Diana had taken any pains to ingratiate herself with him in the hopes of acquiring a large legacy in the event of his death. Her sister was not the sort to allow the opportunities connected with affluent and superannuated relatives to so easily slip through her fingers.

  It was the thunder of footsteps that pulled her from these thoughts, as it so often was. The children had finished their breakfast and escaped the nursery again. Mildred gave herself one of those fortifying moments people often need before facing a task they know they will dislike but must endure anyway. Not really a girding of one’s loins, but rather something equivalent to a slight shift of one’s undergarments into a less chafing position.

  It was the same routine, day after day, varying only according to changes in the weather or if someone was feeling poorly. (If Mildred was feeling poorly, she usually kept such information to herself. An admittance of illness tended to instigate an odd sort of one-upmanship with her sister where Diana would begin to complain about all of the ailments currently plaguing her until she had already described the details of her death some days before and yet was still managing to grouse from amid the folds of her winding sheet. If Mildred needed help of the medicinal variety, it was often safer to go to one of the servants or circumvent the household entirely and pay a visit to the doctor herself.)

  First, she would herd the children back into the nursery. Then she would run through their lessons with them. (Reading, writing, and arithmetic only. Such superfluous subjects as music and drawing and languages were deemed unnecessary by the fact that Diana had done very well without any talent beyond a self-aggrandized competency at composing poems about flowers and summer days.) If the weather was pretty enough—that was, if it wasn’t storming in some Biblical fashion—then the children would be herded again outside to play. Somewhere in there a meal was acquired, usually eaten either in the aforementioned outside or in the kitchen. And then the day would unravel towards its inevitable end, Mildred feeling as if each minute was only crossed with the effort of pushing a boulder up the side of a mountain.

  (There were two children in addition to Belinda, the eldest: Matthew and Nettie, close enough in age that the difference really doesn’t bear mentioning. But the boy was short and quarrelsome and existed as little more than his mother’s pet. Nettie, instead of taking after either parent, chose to inherit her personality from a pack of rangy wolves. Though Mildred wondered if that might be unkind to the generally accepted character of wolves at large.)

  It was how this day passed, with its slow, steady ticking away of the hours. The cries and shouts of the children became inseparable from the soft ringing in Mildred’s ears, and the sigh that slipped out of her as she returned to her tiny room to change for dinner carried the victorious relief of a champion standing over the fallen body of his foe.

  She sat on her bed and stared at the wall for several minutes. Or perhaps it was an hour. It was often difficult to tell the passage of time without the wants and needs of children not her own pulling her from one end of the day to the other. Maybe, she thought, Diana could be convinced to hire a proper nurse or even a governess for the children should the inheritance from Great Uncle Forthright consist of something monetary in nature.

  Mildred had already come to terms with the truth that if this promised inheritance was worth anything, Diana would claim it for herself. No, no. That wasn’t quite true. No, she would claim it for the family. And didn’t Mildred want to help the family? W
asn’t she a part of the family, in her cupboard of a room and wearing the gowns her sister didn’t want anymore? Hadn’t they welcomed her into their home with open arms when she’d proven herself to be the spinster they always thought she’d be?

  Mildred gripped the edge of the bed. Silly thoughts. That was what she told herself when they began to overwhelm her. Not that the thoughts themselves were silly, but that it was silly to waste time with them as long as her circumstances remained as they were.

  And they would always remain this way, of course. She was forty years old. A difficult thing to believe most days, but she could not simply open the family Bible and shout at the date listed beneath her name and wait for the carefully calligraphed words there to rearrange themselves towards a more pleasing decade.

  A deep breath, and she stood. She would dress for dinner, and she would eat with the family, and she would go to bed with a book and a candle and give a prayer of thanks for eyesight that hadn’t failed her after all of these years of reading before bed with only a single flame to light the page.

  Her progress towards her corner closet was interrupted by a knock on the door. It wasn’t often that anyone bothered to knock on her door, both because she rarely had a moment of peace long enough for it to be interrupted, and because more often than not whoever was coming to interrupt that rare peace didn’t bother to knock at all. But there was a knock, and Diana poked her head into the room before Mildred could give her leave to enter.

  “Ah, I thought this was where you’d disappeared to.” There was that tone again, the one that carried a light enough measure of scolding that she could never be accused of the offense directly. “Now, you do remember we’re dining at the Lindons' tonight?”