The Gates of Sleep (24 page)

Moving silently, her feet freezing, she quickly made her
way back to her rooms, where she put her finds on the shelves in the sitting
room. She worked quietly among the ornaments she found on the shelves, putting
the books up without disarranging them, in the hopes of making it appear that
the books had always been there. She guessed that no one in Arachne’s
household realized that all the books had been collected in the library; Mary
Anne had seen her using books there this afternoon, she would assume that the
books were still there and not look for them here. She was still setting back
vases and figurines when the sound of the door opening made her jump and turn
quickly, guiltily.

But the person in the door wasn’t her aunt, nor the
supercilious Mary Anne; it was a young woman in a very much plainer version of
Mary Anne’s uniform—the black skirt, but of plain wool, the black
shirtwaist, unadorned—and a neat white apron, rather than the black silk
that Mary Anne sported. A perfectly ordinary maid—with a round, pretty,
farm girl’s face, and wary eyes.

“I come to see if you needed anything, miss,”
the girl whispered, as if she was not quite sure of her welcome.

In a response that Marina could not have controlled if she’d
tried, her stomach growled. Audibly.

And the little maidservant broke into an involuntary grin,
which she quickly hid behind her hand.

“I suppose it wouldn’t do any good to ask for
something to eat,” Marina said, wistfully assuming the negative. “I
don’t want you to get in any trouble with the cook or the—the
housekeeper? I guess there’s a housekeeper here, isn’t there?”
She sighed. From what she’d heard from old Sarah, the housekeepers in
great houses held the keys to the pantry and kept strict tally of every morsel
that entered and left, and woe betide the staff if the accounting did not
match.

The girl dropped her hand and winked. “Just you wait,
miss,” she said warmly, and whisked out the door.

Marina finished shelving her books, hiding the ones she
didn’t want anyone to find. By the time the maid returned, she was in a
chair by the fireplace with a book in her hands, having mended the fire and
built it up herself, warming her half-frozen feet. The girl seemed much nicer
than Mary Anne, but there was no telling if she was just another spy for her
aunt. Let her think that Marina had only been looking for something to read.

The girl had left the door open just about an inch, and on
her return, pushed it open with her foot. She carried with her a laden tray,
which she brought over to Marina and set down on the little table beside her.
Marina stared at the contents with astonishment.

“Mister Reginald, he likes a bit to eat around
midnight, so the pantry’s not locked up,” the girl said cheerfully.
“My Peter, he told us downstairs about your luncheon. And supper. And
Madam’s special cook—” she made a face. “Miss, we don’t
think much of that special cook. Only person that likes his cooking is Madam;
it isn’t even the kind of thing that Mister Reginald likes, so he’s
always eating a midnight supper. So I thought, and Peter thought, you mightn’t
like that cooking much either, even if you hadn’t got more than a few
bites of it.”

“You were right,” Marina said with relief at
the sight of a pot of hot chocolate, a plate of sliced ham and real, honest
cheese—none of that sad, pale stuff that Arachne had served—a nice
chunk of hearty cottage loaf—and a fine Cox’s Orange Pippin apple. “I
feel like I haven’t eaten in two days!”

“Well, miss, I don’t much know about yesterday,
but according to my Peter, you haven’t had more than a few mouthfuls
today at luncheon and dinner, and no breakfast at all. Just you tuck into that!
I’ll wait and take the plates away.” She winked conspiratorially. “We’ll
let that housekeeper think that Mister Reginald’s eating a bit more than
usual.”

Since Marina was already tucking in, wasting no time at all
in filling her poor, empty stomach, the little maid beamed with pleasure. “If
you really don’t mind waiting,” Marina said, taking just long
enough from her food to gulp down a lovely cup of chocolate, “You ought
to at least sit down.” She paused a moment, and added, “I’m
sure I oughtn’t to invite you, according to Aunt Arachne.”

“Madam is very conscious of what is proper,”
the maid said, her mouth going prim. But Marina noticed that she sat right down
anyway. She considered Marina for a moment more, then asked, “Miss, how
early are you like to be awake?”

Oh no—surely Madam wakes up before dawn, and I’m
supposed to be, too,
she thought, already falling into the habit of
thinking of her aunt as “Madam”—”Oh—late, if I’m
given the choice,” she admitted, shamefacedly. “No earlier than
full sun, seven, even eight.”

“You think that late?” the maid stifled a
giggle. “That Mary Anne, she won’t bestir herself before ten,
earliest, and Madam keeps city hours herself. We—ell, miss, what do you
say to a spot of conspiracy between us? Just us Devon folk—for we can’t
be letting Mister Hugh—” and here she faltered, before catching
herself, and continuing resolutely. “We can’t be letting Mister
Hugh’s daughter fade away to naught. I’ll be bringing you a proper
breakfast sevenish, and a bit of proper supper after that Mary Anne has took
herself off of a night. So you won’t go hungry, even if that Mary Anne
has got a bee in her bonnet that you ought to be scrawny.”

Marina was overwhelmed, and couldn’t help herself;
this was the first open kindness she’d had since she’d been
kidnapped—was it only yesterday? She began to cry.

“Oh miss—there now, miss—” The maid
plied her with a napkin, then ran into the bedroom and fetched out
handkerchiefs from somewhere, and dabbed at Marina’s cheeks with them.
Very fine cambric they were too, her aunt certainly wasn’t stinting her
in the matter of wardrobe. “Now miss, you mustn’t cry—Mister
Hugh and Missus Alanna wouldn’t like that—”

For a moment, Marina was tempted to tell her the truth, all
of it; but no, this girl would never understand. “I’m—alone—”
she managed, as the maid soothed her, sitting beside her and patting her hand.
That was true—true enough. Not the whole truth, but true enough.

She didn’t cry herself sick this time, and perhaps it
was the best thing she could have done, though it was entirely involuntary, for
by the time that she cried herself out, she knew that she had friends here,
after all. She also knew, if not everything there was to know about the “downstairs”
household, at least a very great deal. She knew that the maid was Sally, she
was going to marry the footman Peter one day, that Arachne had dismissed the
upper servants—the chief cook (replaced by her “chef”), the
housekeeper and butler, her own personal maidservant, the valet.

Of course, the maidservant and the valet were still
stranded in Italy, poor things. The other servants weren’t even sure they
would be able to get home, for Arachne had left orders that Marina’s
parents were to be buried in Italy where they had died.

“‘Where they so loved to live,’ that was
what Madam Arachne said. And it isn’t my place to say,” Sally
continued, in a doubtful whisper, “But it did seem to me that Mister Hugh
and Missus Alanna loved it
here.
This is where the family was all
buried, and I know Mister Hugh felt strong about his family.”

But Arachne couldn’t replace all the
servants—trained city servants weren’t very willing to move to the
country, not without a substantial rise in wages. So a substantial number of
the lower servants were the same as had served Marina’s parents, and they
remembered their kind master and mistress. Although they knew nothing about
Hugh’s sister, except that she’d fallen out with her parents over
her choice of husband, that counted more against her than her blood counted for
her.

And although they were very circumspect with regard to
Arachne and her son, they were all very sympathetic to Marina,
especially
after seeing the ordeals she was undergoing at the hands of Arachne and Mary
Anne.
She
was Devon-bred as well as born, almost one of them, even if
she did come from over near to the border with Cornwall. If they didn’t
know why she’d been sent away, at least she hadn’t been sent far;
she wasn’t a foreigner, and she didn’t have
any
airs.

And one and all, these downstairs servants hated Mary Anne.

“Fancies herself a superior lady’s maid, she
does,” Sally sniffed. “Too good to eat with us, has her meals with
the butler and housekeeper, if you please. And it isn’t as if Madam
Arachne doesn’t have her own maid, for she does, a French woman. Well,
things have changed for us.” She sighed pensively. “But miss, we’ll
take care of you, don’t you worry. If Madam Arachne wants you to be made
a lady like her, we’ll help you out, till there isn’t nothing you
don’t know. There’s Peter, he served with Lord Bridgeworth, and
he
knows all the right things—and it wasn’t as if Mister Hugh and
Missus Alanna weren’t gentry. We’ll help you, for you’re
ours, and we won’t ever forget that!”

Marina swallowed down another lump in her throat and a
spate of hastily suppressed tears with her hot chocolate.

“Thank you,” she said, hoping she put the
gratitude she felt into those simple words.

By the warm smile on Sally’s face, she did.

Morning brought Sally with a proper breakfast
tray—the kind of hearty breakfast Marina was used to getting at
home—from thick country bacon to hot, buttered toast. There was only one
thing missing, oat porridge, which was just as well, since she would have felt
homesick on seeing it, guilty if she hadn’t eaten it, and miserable if
she did. Sally waited while she ate, and whisked the tray away, leaving her to
go back to sleep again if she chose.

Which was a confirmation this was all being done in secret,
abetted by a conspiracy among the lower servants, the ones who remembered her
parents.

For some reason, they did not trust her aunt to treat her
properly. Why? She couldn’t think of any reason why Arachne would
mistreat her on purpose—she was clearly a very cold woman, but she seemed
determined to do her duty to Marina. Even if her idea of her duty was not what
Marina would have chosen for herself. She wasn’t stinting on wardrobe,
that was sure. The clothing that she’d had made for Marina was of first
quality and highest workmanship.

But servants saw and heard everything. Probably they were
only worried that she was so unhappy and was being bullied. In any case, life
was going to be much easier with the kind of help they had already offered, and
she was not going to betray them by any carelessness on her part.

So she made sure that there was no sign that anyone had
been in her rooms, and tucked herself back up in her bed, dozing until the odious
Mary Anne appeared to wake her by pulling back the curtains and making a great
clattering of noise with the breakfast-tray that
she
had brought.

It was breakfast for an invalid. A nauseated invalid. Or
someone afraid of getting fat. Weak tea, and four pieces of cold toast.

With a silent prayer of thanks for Sally’s foresight,
Marina drank a cup of the tea, but before she could eat more than a single
piece of the toast, Mary Anne insistently dragged her out of bed and into her
clothing. “Madam’s modiste is here, and miss must be measured again
and select fabrics and patterns,” the maid ordered. “Madam is also
selecting clothing, and miss must not monopolize the modiste’s time, nor
keep her waiting.”

This was said as Mary Anne was lacing up her corset, and as
Marina suddenly remembered a trick that one of the ponies used to employ, of
blowing himself up so that his girth couldn’t be tightened. And it
occurred to her at that moment that if she could just manage the same trick,
herself—

So she secretly took in the deepest breath that she could,
and instead of trying to draw herself up, hunched herself over, sticking her
stomach out as far as she could manage and obstinately tensing the muscles of
her midsection against the tightening of the corset-laces. Mary Anne tugged and
pulled, but to no avail; when she gave up and tied the laces off, tying a
modest bustle on the back of the corset and pulling the first of the three
petticoats over Marina’s head, Marina was able to straighten up without
feeling as if she was going to faint from lack of air. Her corsets were only a
little tighter than she would have tied them herself. Not as comfortable as no
corset at all but not a torture either.

There was nothing to show that Mary Anne had been doing any
rummaging about among the books that Marina had put on the shelves last night,
but that was not to say that she wouldn’t later. For now, the modiste was
waiting in the sitting room, a patient little woman with sad eyes and gray
hair, done up in a severe, but impeccably tailored, gray wool suit and matching
hat, modestly ornamented with a ribbon cockade. She had swatches of fabric
piled up beside her on one side of the couch, and pattern books on the other.
Her eyes brightened at the sight of Marina; perhaps she had expected another
martinet like Madam, or someone so countrified as to be impossible to outfit,
with freckles, gap-teeth, and enormous feet that had never seen anything other
than boots. In the midst of this florid room, the modiste looked like a little
pile of ashes.

For that matter, I probably look like an unburned bit
of coal.

“I will leave you with Miss Eldergast,” said
Mary Anne loftily, and turned to the modiste. “Miss Eldergast, you have
your instructions upon what is suitable for the young lady from Madam, so I
will return for you in one hour.”

Both of them looked reflexively at the clock upon the
mantelpiece, which was just showing half past ten. Then, as Mary Anne sailed
out of the room with a self-important air, Marina smiled at the modiste.