They went to Llechrhyd, the nearest settlement they could find, and bought her a sheep from a small cottager, who told them that the village, by some lucky chance, had not been raided. ‘Flew off east, all of them, this morning,’ the old woman told Laurence, while Elsie discreetly ate her dinner behind the stable, ‘like a plague of crows. It was dark for half an hour, with all them passing over and us sure they would fall on our heads in a moment; more than that I can't say.’

‘Hollin,’ Laurence said, when he had turned away disheartened, ‘I cannot tell you what your duty is; we have no very good intelligence, I am afraid, and if he is flying to feed himself, we cannot well imagine where he may have gone.’

‘Well, sir,’ Hollin said, ‘they said to bring you back with him, so I suppose those are my orders until I hear otherwise. Anyways, I dare say we will find him tomorrow, first thing or as good as. It's not as though he's so easy to miss.’

But this course did not reckon with the confusion of dozens of beasts flung out upon the countryside at once. Certainly, dragons had been seen everywhere – dreadful marauding beasts – and no one knew what things were coming to when they were just allowed to go flying around loose. But as to one particular dragon, black with a ruff, no one had anything to say.

One farmer thirty miles on, belligerent enough to be brave, had not hidden in his cellar during the visitation, and swore that a giant dragon had eaten four of his cows, informing him they were being confiscated for the war effort and he should be repaid by the Government. He even showed them where the dragon had scratched a mark in an old oak tree for his reimbursement, and for a moment Laurence entertained hope. But it was not a Chinese mark, only an X clumsily carved through the bark, with four scratches below. ‘Red and yellow, like fire,’ the farmer's oldest boy had said, peering at them from over the windowsill of the house, despite his mother's restraining hand, which sank them completely.

In Monmouthshire, ten dragons had stopped to drink at the lake in the grounds of a stately house, the housekeeper told them, anxiously, and had also eaten some of the deer: ten neat Xs were marked in the ground by the lakeshore. ‘I am sure I could not tell you if they were black or red or spotted green and yellow, it was all I could do to keep breathing, and with half my staff fainted dead away,’ she said. ‘And then one of the creatures came to the door and asked us through it if we had any curtains. Red ones,’ she added. ‘We threw outside all those from the ballroom, and then they took them and went away.’