“Dragons? Great heavens!” gasped Mrs. Harvey. “I will not have—”

“There’s nothing to fear, Mrs. Harvey,” said Mr. Darwin, eyes flashing a warning to me beneath low brows. “There is a species of reptile known as a Komodo dragon. It is kept at the London Zoological Society. That is what Covington was referring to.”

I pinched my lips together. Could I be wrong?

Mr. Darwin stood and smoothed the dust from his knees.

“I will contact the Zoological Society immediately. Covington, watch the hatchling, make sure it doesn’t escape the chest. Mrs. Harvey, I’m going to need you to find a temporary cage for our new guest. Here—” He wrote something on the notepad he kept in his pocket and handed it to her.

He fell silent.

“Looks to me like the poor little demon needs feeding,” said Mrs. Harvey.

“They eat fish,” I blurted.

“I’ll mix a pap from bread crusts and milk,” said Mrs. Harvey, ignoring me as she usually did. “You’ll need to feed them from a spoon. As a girl, I raised a fallen chick from a nest—”

Darwin interrupted her. “Mrs. Harvey. Please make haste before we have lizards overrunning the apartments.”

“Well,” she huffed as she pulled off her apron and smoothed her hair back under her cap. “If you are going to feed them the mackerel I’d planned for supper, then it will be cold cuts again this evening.”

“If you could just leave the mackerel out, thank you, Mrs. Harvey.”

“You’ll choke them to death if you feed it to them whole. It will need cutting and mashing, no bones—”

“Please do not bother yourself, Mrs. Harvey. Covington here is rather an expert on these … lizards.”

The eggs hatched one by one over the course of the following month. Farthing slept with them, curled in a mass of green scales inside the chest, and just before each egg hatched she would fetch me from the study. I fed them with mashed mackerel on a tiny spice spoon.

There were at least two days between each hatching; a couple of the eggs took three. This was something Mr. Darwin had never witnessed before. He now thought it possible that I was right, about Farthing being a sibling to these newborns, maybe even from the same clutch. His colleagues visited and were also surprised. Clutches of eggs always hatched in one go. Well, not these eggs.

Not so surprising to me. After all, no one had ever come across a clutch of dragon eggs before.

But on that point I kept my mouth shut.

My room had become the lizard nursery while a special enclosure was being built for them at the Zoological Society. They slept and ate a lot. And they grew. They grew quickly. The first to hatch was now almost the size of Farthing.

But one egg was left in the chest by the stove. One. And it had been five days since the last hatched.