The Gates of Sleep (29 page)

But the spicy scent perfumed the air in a way that shook
her unexpectedly with memories of home, and suddenly, she couldn’t bear
to be there—among strangers—

“Have I left you with enough to occupy you, ladies?”
she asked, quickly, around a rising lump in her throat. “For I believe my
guardian will be expecting me back—”

By this time, the gossip was flying thick and fast as well
as discussion of fabrics and colors and stitches, but it stopped dead at her
question. The ladies looked at one another, and the eldest, old Mrs. Havershay,
took it upon herself to act as spokeswoman. “Thank you, Miss! We’re
ever so much obliged to you,” she said, managing to sound both autocratic
(which she was, as acknowledged leader of her circle) and grateful at the same
time.

“Oh, thank
you,”
she replied,
flushing. “You’ve no idea what a good time I’ve had with you,
here. I hope—”

But she couldn’t have said what she hoped; they
wouldn’t have understood why she wished she could join their sewing
circle. She was gentry; they were village. The gap was insurmountable.

As the others discussed projects, love affairs, and
business of the village, one of the younger—and prettier—of the
daughters helped her gather her hat, cloak, and gloves and escorted her to the
door. “Thank you, Miss Roeswood; we were all dreading what sort of
crack-brained notion the vicar might have had for us when he told us you were
going to show us your ideas for the booth,” she said, and hesitated, then
continued, “and we were afraid that he might be
letting—ah—kindliness—get ahead of him. He’s a kindly
gentleman, we all like him, but he’s never done a charity booth before.”

“He’s a very kind and very pleasant gentleman,”
she agreed readily. “And don’t underestimate him, because he’s
also quite intelligent. As you’ve seen, sometimes a new idea is better
than what’s been traditional.”

“True, miss, and even though some folks would rather
we had our old vicar back, well, he was a good man, but he’s dead, and
they aren’t going to get him back, so at least Mr. Davies is one of us,
and they ought to get to like him as much as us young ones, But
please—some of us—”

Marina gave her a penetrating look, and she seemed to lose
her courage, and blurted, “—we’ve been wondering about what
you think of our vicar, what with making three visits in the week, and—”

She clapped her hand over her mouth and looked appalled at
what she had let slip. Marina just chuckled.

“You mean, have I any designs on him myself, hmm?”
she whispered, and the girl turned beet red. She couldn’t have been more
than fifteen, and surely had what schoolgirls called a “pash” for
the amiable young man. Marina suddenly felt very old and worldly wise.

“My dear Miss Horn, I promise you that my only
interest in our good vicar extends to his ability to play chess,” she
said soberly. “And his ability to compose and deliver an interesting,
inspiring, and enlightening sermon,” she added as an afterthought.

“Oh.” The girl turned pale, then red again, and
ducked her head. Marina patted her hand, and turned to go.

The meeting with the ladies had taken less than an hour;
she hadn’t expected it to take much longer, truth to tell. The cold air
on her cheeks made enough of a distraction to get her tears swallowed down, and
she mounted her horse feeling that she had done her duty, in more ways than
one. If Arachne expected her back as soon as she finished, well, she was going
to take her time, and never mind the cold.

“And she believed it?”

Arachne smiled; Reggie’s expression could not be more
gratifying, compounded as it was of equal parts of astonishment, admiration,
and envy. He leaned back into his chair in her personal sitting room, a lush
and luxurious retreat furnished with pieces she had taken from all over the
house when she first arrived here, and smiled. “Mater,” he
continued, “That was brilliant! I never would have considered suggesting
to Marina that her mother was a candidate for a sanitarium.”

“It honestly didn’t occur to me until I was in
the middle of that conversation with her,” Arachne admitted. “But
the child is so utterly unmagical—and seems to have been brought up that
way—that when she was describing the letters her mother sent her about
the Elemental creatures in the garden I suddenly realized how insane such tales
would seem to someone who was not a mage.” Her hand unconsciously
caressed the chocolate-colored velvet of her chair. “Ah, that reminds
me—you
have
cleared out the miserable little fauns and such from
the grounds, haven’t you?”

Reggie snorted. “A lamb sacrificed at each cardinal
point drove them out quickly enough. All sweetness and light, was your Hugh’s
precious Alanna—the Earth Elementals she had around here couldn’t
bear the first touch of blood on the soil.”

Arachne smiled. “When we make this place ours, we
shall have to use something more potent than lambs. And speaking of
lambs—”

He quirked an eyebrow. “I have two replacements safe
enough, both with the magic in them, both just turned ten.”

“Two?” She eyed him askance.

He sighed. “Besides the one that I took off to die, I
lost a second that was carried off by a relative. Pity, that. She had just come
to realize what was going to happen to her with that much lead in her. Her
hands were starting to go. But the ones I’ve got to replace them are
orphans off the parish rolls, and both are Earth, which should bolster our
power immensely in that element.”

Arachne smiled. “Lovely,” she purred. “You
are a wonderful pupil, dear.” She raised her cup of chocolate to her lips
and sipped, savoring the sting of brandy in it.

“You are a wonderful teacher, Mater,” he
replied slyly, and her smile broadened. “Fancy learning that you could
steal the magic from those who haven’t come into their powers. I wouldn’t
have thought of that—” He raised his glass of wine to her in a
toast.

“It was others who thought of it before I did,”
Arachne admitted, but with a feeling of great satisfaction. “Even if none
of them were as efficient as I am.”

“That’s my mater; a model of modern efficiency.
You took one ramshackle old pottery and made it into four that are making money
so fast you’d think we were coining it.” He chuckled. “And in
another six months?”

“There is a fine deposit of porcelain clay on this
property, access to rail and water, near enough to Barnstaple for cheap sea
shipping, plenty of water…” She flexed her fingers slightly as if
they were closing around something she wanted very much. “And cheap
labor.”

“And it is so very quiet here,” Reggie prompted
slyly. “Well, Mater, I’m doing my part. I’m playing court to
the little thing, and I expect I’ll have her one way or another by the
summer, if your side doesn’t come in. Have
you
discovered
anything? Just between the two of us, I’d as soon not find myself
leg-shackled; it does cut down on a fellow’s fun, no matter how quiet the
little wife is.” He shrugged at her sardonic expression. “There’s
the social connections to think about, don’t you know. They don’t
mind winking at a bit of jiggery-pokery when a fellow’s single, but once
he’s married, he daren’t let ‘em find out about it, or they’ll
cut him.”

She smiled, but sourly. “Ah, society. Well, once
married, you needn’t stay married to her long.”

He frowned at that; the sulky frown he had whenever he was
balked. “I’d still rather you found a way to make that curse of
yours work,” he told her crossly. “Folk start to talk if a fellow’s
wife dies right after the wedding. And this isn’t the middle ages, you
know. There’s inquests, coroners’ juries, chemical tests—”

“That will do, Reggie,” she said sharply. “At
the moment, we have a number of options, which include you remaining married to
the girl. She doesn’t have to die to suit our purposes. She only needs to
sicken and take to her bed.” She allowed a smile to cross her lips. “And
no one would censure you very strongly for a little peccadilloes if you were
known to have an invalid wife.”

“Hmm. And if I had an—institutionalized wife?”
he ventured brightening. “A wife who followed—but perhaps, more
dangerously—in the footsteps of her mother?”

She blinked. “Why Reggie—that is not a bad
notion at all! What if we allowed some rumors about Alanna to spread down into
the village? What would Marina think, having heard of her own mother’s
fantasies, if she began seeing things?”

“A mix of illusions created by magic and those
created by stage-magic?” he prompted further, a malicious smile on his
lips. “Your expertise—and mine? Why, she might even be driven to
suicide!”

She laughed aloud, something she did so rarely that she
startled herself with the sound. “Ah, Reggie! What a team we make!”

“That we do, Mater,” he agreed, a smile
spreading over his handsome face. “That we do. Now—I believe I have
every detail set for tonight, but just go over the plans with me once again.”

The mare, whose unimaginative name was Brownie, was
probably the steadiest beast that Marina had ever seen. And she knew these
lanes and paths far, far better than Marina did. At the moment, they were on
the lane that ran along the side of another great estate called Briareley Hall,
a pounded—dirt track studded with rocks like the raisins in a cake, wide
enough for a hay wain pulled by two horses, with banks and hedgerows on either
side that went well above Marina’s head even when she was in the saddle.
The bank itself, knobby with the roots of the hedge planted on it, came as high
as Marina’s own knee. The road was in shadow most of the day because of
the hedgerows, and snow lingered in the roots of the hedgerow and the edges of
the road no matter how bright the sun elsewhere. Brownie knew that she was on
her way home, back to stable and oats and perhaps an apple, so her usual
shambling walk had turned into a brisk one—nearly, but not quite, a trot.
Marina was thinking of a hot cup of strong tea in the kitchen to fortify
herself against the insipid tea she would get with Madam. She had ridden this
route often enough to know that there was nothing particularly interesting on
it, as well. So when Brownie suddenly threw up her head and shied sideways, she
was taken completely by surprise.

Fortunately, the little mare was too fat and too indolent
by nature to do anything, even shy, quickly or violently. It was more like a
sideways stumble, a couple of bumbling steps in which all four feet got tangled
up. Marina was startled, but too good a rider to be thrown, though she had to
grab the pommel of the sidesaddle and drop the reins, holding on for dear life
and throwing all of her weight onto the stirrup to brace herself against the
sidesaddle. Her stomach lurched, and her heart raced, but she didn’t lose
her head, and fortunately, neither did Brownie.

When Brownie’s feet found purchase again, the mare
slung her head around and snorted indignantly at the thing that had frightened
her.

Sweet heaven
—it’s a
person
—it’s
a
girl!

A girl, huddled into the roots and frozen earth at the foot
of the hedgerow. And one glance at the white, terrified face of that girl
huddled at the side of the road sent Marina flying out of the saddle that
Brownie’s antics hadn’t been able to budge her from.

The girl, dressed in nothing more than a nightgown and
dressing-gown, with oversized slippers half falling off her feet, had scrambled
backward and wedged herself in among the roots and the frozen dirt and weeds of
the bank. Marina had never seen a human so utterly terrified in her life—

If her mouth hadn’t been twisted up in a silent
scream, if her eyes hadn’t been so widened with fear that the whites
showed all around them, she would have been pretty.

But she was thin, so very thin, and her skin was so pale
the blue veins showed through. Too thin to be pretty anymore, unless your taste
ran to the waiflike and skeletal.

All of that was secondary to the girl’s terror, and
instinctively, as she would have with a frightened animal, Marina got down on
her knees and held out one hand, making soothing sounds at her She heard
Brownie snort behind her, then the unmistakable sound of the horse nosing at
the sere grasses and weeds among the roots.

Good, she won’t be going anywhere for a while,
greedy pig.

“It’s all right, dear. It is. I’m a
friend.” she said softly, trying to win past that terror to some kernel
of sanity. If one existed.

From the way the girl’s eyes were fixed on something
off to Marina’s right, Marina had a notion that the child wasn’t
seeing
her,
but something else. A tiny thread of sound, a strangled
keening, came out of her throat; the sound of a soul certain that it was on the
verge of destruction.

Except, of course, there was nothing there. At least,
Marina thought there was nothing there.

Just to be sure, Marina stole a glance in the direction
that the girl was looking, and made
sure
there was nothing of an
occult nature there. Just in case. It was always possible that the girl herself
had a touch—or more than a touch—of Elemental Magery about her and
could
see
such things.

But there wasn’t; nothing more alarming than sparrows
in the hedges, no magic, not even a breath of power. Whatever this poor
creature saw existed only in her own mind.

Marina crept forward a little; even through the thick wool
of her skirt and three petticoats, she felt the cold of the frozen ground and
the pebbles embedded in it biting into her knees and the palm of the hand that
supported her. “It’s all right, dear. I’ll help you. I’ll
protect you.” Her breath puffed out whitely with each word, but the girl
still didn’t seem to notice she was there.

Then—all at once, she did. Her eyes rolled like a
frightened horse’s, and the girl moved her head a little; it was a jerky,
not-quite-controlled movement. And at the same time, her right hand flailed out
sideways and hit a root, hard, hard enough to scrape it open. Marina gasped and
bit her lip at the thought of how it should hurt.