The Dance of the Serpents by Oscar de Muriel

Author:Oscar de Muriel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion

25

I tried to get some rest, but my mind was swarming with qualms. The portrait, the encoded telegram, the fact that McGray and Caroline and Joan might never arrive … what might happen if we failed to find the York witches, or if they refused to help us, or if they were simply unable to commune with the late Prince Albert and we had to face the full wrath of Queen Victoria?

That last thought made me jump out of bed. I left the room, which suddenly felt suffocating, and after triple-checking that the door was properly locked, I went in search of the smoking room.

It was one storey below, its wide window looking over the road. The opaque, scratched panes further dulled the winter daylight, and the floating specks of dust made me feel as if I were stepping into a foggy marsh. The murky green of the frayed carpets and furniture enhanced the vision.

The only other person around was a chubby middle-aged man who’d fallen asleep clasping his newspaper, so I lounged at leisure.

There was a tall bookcase, as dusty as an Egyptian crypt, full of books with spines so faded I guessed they’d sat there for years.

I looked for something – anything – I might read, each title less appealing than the previous one, until—

I could not repress a gasp. My eyes fell on a tired copy whose gilded title read, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands.

I pulled it out and the front cover nearly fell off when I opened it. The title page confirmed what I expected:

QUEEN VICTORIA’S MEMOIR OF THE PRINCE CONSORT

This was the queen’s first published book!

It did not surprise me that even this drab hotel kept a copy. The self-indulgent, appallingly written little brick had sold in the thousands, the entire British Empire keen to fish out details of Her Majesty’s supposed affair with her Scottish manservant John Brown. Even Lady Anne kept second-hand copies in her properties – bought along with other assorted books by weight, since it was one of those once-famous books nobody had any interest in reading anymore.

The tome was hefty and falling apart, so I had to lay it on the table, where I could leaf through it with just one hand. I was almost certain it would offer me nothing, but at least it would keep my mind busy.

Busy, yet not happy. The oversentimental depictions of the landscapes, the palaces and the people dancing Scottish reels and polkas soon made me yawn. Particularly frustrating was her obsessive naming of every single lord and sir who’d ever lent her a carriage – most of them unknown demi-royals, completely irrelevant to the vast majority of the populace.

And the pipers! Oh, the endless pages she devoted to the bloody, bloody pipers. They very often played about at breakfast-time, again during the morning at luncheon, and whenever we went out … And she always named them with an uppercase ‘P’ as though they were citizens of a magical fairy land.

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