Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

...

Vimes knocked on the door.

An effort had been made to spruce up the Ramkin mansion, he noticed. The encroaching shrubbery had been pitilessly hacked back. An elderly workman atop a ladder was nailing the stucco back on the walls while another, with a spade, was rather arbitrarily defining the line where the lawn ended and the old flower beds had begun.

Vimes stuck his helmet under his arm, smoothed back his hair, and knocked. He'd considered asking Sergeant Colon to accompany him, but had brushed the idea aside quickly. He couldn't have tolerated the sniggering. Anyway, what was there to be afraid of? He'd stared into the jaws of death three times; four, if you included telling Lord Vetinari to shut up.

To his amazement the door was eventually opened by a butler so elderly that he might have been resurrected by the knocking.

“Yerss?” he said.

“Captain Vimes, City Watch,” said Vimes.

The man looked him up and down.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Her ladyship did say. I believe her ladyship is with her dragons,” he said. “If you like to wait in 'ere, I will-”

“I know the way,” said Vimes, and set off around the overgrown path.

The kennels were a ruin. An assortment of battered wooden boxes were lying around under an oilcloth awning. From their depths a few sad swamp dragons whiffled a greeting at him.

A couple of women were moving purposefully among the boxes. Ladies, rather. They were far too untidy to be mere women. No ordinary women would have dreamed of looking so scruffy; you needed the complete self-confidence that comes with knowing who your great-great-great-great-grandfather was before you could wear clothes like that. But they were, Vimes noticed, incredibly good clothes, or had been once; clothes bought by one's parents, but so expensive and of such good quality that they never wore out and were handed down, like old china and silverware and gout.

Dragon breeders, he thought. You can tell. There's something about them. It's the way they wear their silk scarves, old tweed coats and granddad's riding boots. And the smell, of course.

A small wiry woman with a face like old saddle leather caught sight of him.

“Ah,” she said, “you'll be the gallant captain.” She tucked an errant strand of white hair back under a headscarf and extended a veiny brown hand. “Brenda Rodley. That's Rosie Devant-Molei. She runs the Sunshine Sanctuary, you know.” The other woman, who had the build of someone who could pick up carthorses hi one hand and shoe them with the other, gave him a friendly grin.

“Samuel Vimes,” said Vimes weakly.

“My father was a Sam,” said Brenda vaguely. “You can always trust a Sam, he said.” She shooed a dragon back into its box. “We're just helping Sybil. Old friends, you know. The collection's all to blazes, of course. They're all over the city, the little devils. I dare say they'll come back when they're hungry, though. What a bloodline, eh?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Sybil reckons he was a sport, but I say we should be able to breed back into the line in three or four generations. I'm famed for my stud, you know,” she said. “That'd be something, though. A whole new type of dragon.”

Vimes thought of supersonic contrails criss-crossing the sky.

“Er,” he said. “Yes.”

“Well, we must get on.”

“Er, isn't Lady Ramkin around?” said Vimes. “I got this message that it was essential, she said, for me to come here.”

“She's indoors somewhere,” said Miss Rodley. “Said she had something important to see to. Oh, do be careful with that one, Rose, you silly gel!”

“More important than dragons?” said Vimes.

“Yes. Can't think what's come over her.” Brenda Rodley fished in the pocket of an oversized waistcoat. “Nice to have met you, Captain. Always good to meet new members of the Fancy. Do drop in any time you're passing, I'd be only too happy to show you around.” She extracted a grubby card and pressed it into his hand. “Must be off now, we've heard that some of them are trying to build nests on the University tower. Can't have that. Must get 'em down before it gets dark.”

Vimes squinted at the card as the women crunched off down the drive, carrying nets and ropes.

It said: Brenda, Lady Rodley. The Dower House, Quirm Castle, Quirm. What it meant, he realised, was that striding away down the path like an animated rummage stall was the dowager Duchess of Quirm, who owned more country than you could see from a very high mountain on a very clear day. Nobby would not have approved. There seemed to be a special land of poverty that only the very, very rich could possibly afford . . .

That was how you got to be a power in the land, he thought. You never cared a toss about whatever anyone else thought and you were never, ever, uncertain about anything.

He padded back to the house. A door was open. It led into a large but dark and musty hall. Up in the gloom the heads of dead animals haunted the walls. The Ramkins seemed to have endangered more species than an ice age.