The Gates of Sleep (22 page)

That, of course, was so easily done that Reggie didn’t
even trouble to comment on it. They hadn’t even begun to set up a
workspace here at Oakhurst, and at the moment, it was probably wiser not to
bother.

“I liked that little speech about your properties, by
the way, mater,” Reggie continued, watching her with hooded eyes. “It
was all the better for having the ring of sincerity.”

She had to laugh herself at that. “Well of course, it
was sincere. I don’t want or need Oakhurst. But you—”

“Which brings me to the next question, Mother Dear.
Are
we taking the marriage option?” There was a gleam in his heavy-lidded
eyes that indicated he didn’t find this at all displeasing.

“I think we should pursue it,” she replied
firmly. “There is nothing in any of our other plans that would interfere
with it, or be interfered with by it. But it does depend on you exerting
yourself to be charming, my sweet.” She reached out to touch his hand
with one extended index finger. He caught the hand and pressed a kiss on the
back of it.

“Now that I’ve seen the wench, I’m not
averse,” he responded readily enough. “She’s not a bad
looking little filly, and as I said, once your people have trained her, she’ll
be quite comely. So long as there’s nothing going on with her in that
area of magic that physical congress could complicate, once wedded and bedded,
we’ll have absolute control over her.” He looked at his watch. “Speaking
of which—”

“Indeed,” Arachne said warmly. “It is
your turn, isn’t it? Well, run along, dear; take the gig and the fast
horses, and try to be back by dawn.”

Reggie stood up, kissed his mother’s hand again, and
saluted her as he straightened. “I go, but to return. This little play, I
fancy, is going to prove utterly fascinating.”

Arachne studied the graceful line of his back as he strode
away, and felt her lips curve in a slight smile. He was so very like
her—it was a good thing he was her son, and not her mate.

Because if she had been married to him or had been his
lover—well, he was so like her that she would have felt forced,
eventually to kill him. And that would have been a great pity.

Marina had never felt so lost and alone in her life. Nor so
utterly off balance. Luncheon was an ordeal. And it was just as well that
Marina had no appetite at all, because she would have been half sick before she
actually got to eat anything.

The maid—or rather, keeper—led her to a huge
room with a long, polished table in it that would easily have seated a hundred.
It was covered at a single place with a snowy linen tablecloth, and she saw as
she neared that there was a single place setting laid out there.

But
such a
place setting! There was so much
silverware that she could have furnished everyone at a meal at Blackbird
Cottage with a knife, fork, and spoon! There were six differently shaped
glasses, and many different sizes of plates, some of which were stacked three
high immediately in front of the chair. With the maid standing over her, and a
manservant to pull out the chair, she seated herself carefully, finding the
corset binding under her breasts and under her arms as she did so.

And the first thing the footman did when she was seated was
to take away the plates that had been immediately in front of her.

After some fussing at a sideboard behind her—and she
only surmised it was a sideboard, because she thought she heard some subdued
china—and—cutlery sounds—he returned, and placed a shallow
bowl of broth resting on a larger plate in front of her. At least, she thought
it was broth. There was no discernible aroma, and it looked like water that oak
leaves had been steeping in for a very short time.

If this is what rich people eat—I’m not
impressed.
She picked up a spoon at random.

But before she could even get it near the bowl, the maid
coughed in clear disapproval. Marina winced.

Arachne had hammered her with questions about “could
she properly eat” all manner of things that she had never heard of. It
seemed that meals were going to be part of her education.

She picked up another spoon. Another cough.

At this rate,
she thought, looking at the other
five spoons beside the plated soup,
I’ll never get any of this into
my mouth…

The third try, though, was evidently the right one. Her
triumph was short-lived, however. She leaned forward.

Another cough sent her bolt upright, as if she’d had
a board strapped to her back. The cough warned her that a full spoon was also
de
trap.
Evidently only a few drops in the bottom of the bowl of the spoon
were appropriate, which was just as well, since she was evidently required to
sit straight-spined and look directly ahead and not at what she was doing, as
she raised the nearly empty spoon to her lips to sip—not drink—the
soup. The spoon was not to go into the mouth; only the rim was to touch the
lips. The broth, by now cold, tasted faintly of the spirit of the beef that had
made it. And it was going to take forever to finish it.

Except that after only six or seven spoonfuls, the footman
took it away, and returned with something else—

She blinked at it. Was it a salad? Perhaps—there
seemed to be beet root involved in it somehow.

A cough recalled her to her task—for it was a task,
and not a meal—and she sorted through silverware again until she found
the right combinations. And this time, coughs directed her through a
complicated salute of knife and fork before she was cutting a tiny portion
correctly.

Two mouthfuls, and again the food was removed, to be
replaced by something else.

In the end, luncheon, an affair that usually took no more
than a quarter of an hour at home, had devoured an hour and a half of her
time—perhaps two hours—and had left her feeling limp with nervous
exhaustion. She
had
gotten something like a meal, though hardly as
full a meal as a real luncheon would have been, but the waste of food was
nothing short of appalling! And there had been nothing,
nothing
there
that would have satisfied the appetite of a healthy, hungry person. There was a
great deal of sauce, of garnish, of fripperies of hothouse lettuce and cress,
but it all tasted utterly pale, bland, and insipid. The bread had no more
flavor than a piece of pasteboard; the cheese was an afterthought. Even the
chicken—at least, she thought it was chicken—was a limp, overcooked
ghost of a proper bird.

No
wonder Aunt Arachne is so pale,
she thought
wearily, as the silent footman removed her chair so she could leave the table,
if
she’s eating nothing but food like this.

Her headache had returned, and all she wanted was to go
back to that stifling room and lie down—but evidently that was not in the
program for the afternoon.

“Miss will be coming with me to the library,”
Mary Anne said, sounding servile enough, but it was very clear to Marina that
there was going to be no argument about it. “Madam wishes me to show her
to her desk, where she is to study.”

Oh yes… study.
After that interview with
Aunt Arachne, Marina thought she had a pretty good idea just what it was that
her aunt wanted her to study, and indeed, she was right.

Her keeper took her to the Oakhurst library; the house
itself was Georgian, and this was a typical Georgian library, with
floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all the walls, and extra bookshelves placed at
intervals within the room. There were three small desks and many
comfortable-looking Windsor chairs and two sofas arrayed about the room, and a
fine carpet on the floor. There were not one, but two fireplaces, both going,
which kept an otherwise chilly room remarkably warm and comfortable. Someone
cleaned in here regularly; there was no musty smell, just the scent of leather
with a hint of wood smoke. Placed at a library window for the best light was
one of the desks; this was the one Mary Anne brought her to. On a stand beside
it were several books that included
Burke’s Peerage
and another
on
Graceful Correspondence;
on the desk itself were a pen, ink, and
several sorts of stationery. And list. She supposed that it was in Arachne’s
hand.

She sat down at the desk; the maid—
definitely
keeper—sat on one of the library sofas. Evidently Mary Anne was not
deemed knowledgeable enough to pass judgment on the documents that Marina was
expected to produce. She picked up the list.

Invitations to various sorts of
soirees
to a
variety of people. Responses to invitations issued (in theory) to her. Thank
you notes for gifts, for invitations, after an event; polite little notes about
nothing. Notes of congratulation or condolence, of farewell or welcome. Longer
letters—subjects included—to specific persons of consequence.
Nothing, she noticed, to anyone who was actually supposed to be a friend…
but perhaps people like Arachne didn’t have friends.

As soon as she picked up the slim volumes on
correspondence, she realized that there literally was not enough information
here to perform this particular task correctly. And
that
was when she
began to get angry. Like luncheon, Arachne had arranged for defeat and failure.
And she’d done it on purpose, because she already knew that Marina didn’t
have training in the nuances of society, no more than any simple, middle-class
working girl.

But—
but
—Marina knew what that simple,
middle-class working girl didn’t. She knew how
to find
the
information she needed. For this was a library, and a very big one which might
very well contain other books on etiquette. Marina knew that her father’s
library had been cataloged, and recently, because Alanna had written about some
of the old books uncovered during the process, and how they’d had to be
moved under lock and key. So instead of sitting there in despair, or looking
frantically for somewhere to start, leafing through stationery or
Burke’s,
she got up.

Mary Anne looked up from her own reading, startled, but
evidently had no direct orders this time about what Marina was supposed to do
in here, other than remain in the room. When Marina moved to the great book on
the center table—the catalog—she went back to her own reading, with
a little sneer on her face.

Huh! So you don’t know everything, do you?
Marina thought with satisfaction.

Just as she had thought, because the person who had
cataloged the library was very thorough, he had cataloged every book in the
house and moved them here. This included an entire set of books, described and
cataloged as “juvenalia, foxed, defaced, poor condition” filed away
in a book cupboard among other similar items. No true book lover would
ever
throw a book out without express orders.
Besides, every true book lover
knows that in three hundred years, what was “defaced” becomes “historical.”

Presumably young Elizabeth Tudor’s governess had
boxed her ear for defacing that window at Hatfield House with her diamond ring.
Now no amount of money could replace it.

So, from the catalog, Marina went to the book cupboard
where less-than-desirable volumes were hidden away from critical eyes in the
farthest corner of the library. The cupboard was crammed full,
floor-to-ceiling, with worn-out books, from baby picturebooks to some quite
impressive student volumes of Latin and Greek and literature in several
languages.

She stared at the books for a moment; and in that moment,
she realized that she was so surrounded by familiar auras that she almost wept.

These were the books that Aunt Margherita, Uncle Thomas,
and Uncle Sebastian had been taught from! And her parents, of course. If she
closed her eyes and opened her mind and widened her shields enough to include
the books, she could
see
them, younger, oh much younger than they were
now, bent over desks, puzzled or triumphant or merely enjoying themselves,
listening, learning.

A tear oozed from beneath her closed eyelid, and almost,
almost,
she pulled her shields in—

But no! These ghosts of the past could help her in the
present. She opened her eyes.
Show me what I need,
she told the wisps
of memory, silently, and began brushing her hand slowly along the spines of
books on the shelves, the worn, cracked spines, thin leather peeling away,
fabric worn to illegibility. She didn’t even bother to read the titles,
as she concentrated on the task she had before her, and the feel of the books
under her fingertips.

Which suddenly stuck to a book, as if they’d
encountered glue.

There!

She pulled the book off the shelf and set it at her feet,
then went back to her perusal. She didn’t neglect even the sections that
seemed to have only picturebooks, for you never knew what might have been
shoved in where there was room.

When she’d finished with the entire cupboard, she had
a pile at her feet of perhaps a dozen books, none of them very large, that she
picked up and carried back to her desk. Mary Anne looked up, clearly puzzled,
but remained where she was sitting.

Good. Because these, the long-forgotten, slim volumes of
instruction designed to guide very young ladies through the intricacies of
society at its most baroque, were precisely what she needed.

That, and a fertile imagination coupled with a good memory
of Jane Austen’s novels, and other works of fiction. Perhaps her replies
would seem formal, even stilted, and certainly old-fashioned, but that was far
better than being wrong.

Her handwriting was as good, if not better, than Arachne’s;
there would be nothing to fault in
her
copperplate. And she decided to
cheat, just a little. Instead of actually leafing through the books to look up
what she needed to know, she followed the same “divination” that
had directed her to these books in the first place. She ran her hand along the
book spines until her fingers “stuck,” then took up that volume and
turned pages until they “stuck” again.