Free Legend Of The Highland Dragon by Isabel Cooper

slept any longer if she’d polished off a bottle of laudanum. Professor Carter was all right, MacAlasdair had told her that morning, but he had nothing for her yet.
    She couldn’t go out.
    She didn’t need to. MacAlasdair’s house was large enough for any amount of exploring.
    Mina began with the servants’ hall, although that didn’t take very long. The bare walls and wooden floors weren’t particularly interesting, and she was hardly going to enter anyone’s bedroom. Even if she’d been willing to pry, which she wasn’t, it would only have been another room like hers, except perhaps smaller. There was no attic room at the top of this house, no imprisoned wife like the ones from Florrie’s imagination.
    The thought made Mina smile. Then, descending the stairs, she wondered if MacAlasdair might not have a wife after all. Not a mad one, of course, but it was common enough for even normal men to take a house in the city and leave their wives and children in the country, if they were rich enough. MacAlasdair was.
    Perhaps his kind kept their women locked up, as a rule.
    That line of thought brought up several other questions: just what kind of women were these hypothetical wives, anyhow? It didn’t seem likely that dragon-men just grew on trees, though Mina supposed it was possible. Who did they marry, then? Mortal women? Did that…work?
    Mina was glad nobody was around, since she could feel her cheeks burning. The memory of MacAlasdair with his shirt off came to her unbidden, and a small unwelcome voice in the back of her head said: He certainly looked like a man then.
    “Well, it’s nothing to do with me,” she said aloud, and hurried into the next hallway.
    Mostly, this one held more bedrooms, all of which had clearly been vacant for a while. The doors were unlocked, the blinds drawn, and the furniture covered with white cloths. In the dim light, the draped sofas and chairs made Mina think of ghosts. In truth, the whole place had a spooky feel to it, of places meant for people and action and life that now held only stillness.
    Maybe all big houses felt like that when the family wasn’t about. She’d have to ask Alice after all of this was over.
    Hunting scenes and landscapes hung on the walls. Mina saw one of a castle somewhere green, at sunset. Shadows flew across the background. To a casual observer, they might have been birds.
    The picture looked like something out of a book of fairy tales, like it should have had a knight in armor at the bottom of the castle and a princess leaning out a window at the top. Or maybe those were sensitive subjects to dragons. Mina giggled, then heard herself and stopped. In the empty room, she felt conspicuous, as if she’d laughed in church.
    The ground floor should have been more familiar after four days, but Mina paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked around with the same uncertainty that she’d felt upstairs. She knew the drawing room where she and MacAlasdair ate breakfast; she knew the kitchen; she was passingly familiar with the rooms between them; and otherwise she’d kept to her room or Mrs. Hennings’s like…
    Well, there was that image of a mad wife again.
    She turned right and started off boldly, though she made sure that she was heading away from the room where MacAlasdair kept himself. Curiosity was one thing, foolhardiness quite another.
    She opened a door and found a library, shelves covering three of the four walls. The books on them ranged from red-leather-bound volumes that looked almost new to haphazard bundles of peeling binding and crumbling papers. She lingered there for a while, testing the inviting armchairs in front of the fireplace and flipping through a few of the hardier- looking books.
    When she opened the next door, she found the room where she’d broken the window.
    Mina paused in the doorway for a few seconds that felt much longer, then stepped inside and pulled the drapes apart. The window was whole again—that could have been