The Gates of Sleep (32 page)

“Did Madam leave any orders about what my meal menus
were to be?” she asked, in a calculated effort to catch the maid off
guard. She tilted her head to the side and attempted to look cheerful and
innocent—not confrontational. She did not want to confront Mary Anne,
only confound her.

“Why—no—” Mary Anne stammered,
caught precisely as Marina had hoped.

“Ah. Then before I change, I had better take care of
that detail for the rest of the day, or the cook will never forgive me.”
She smiled slightly, which seemed to put the maid more off balance than before.
She detoured to the library, and quickly wrote out a menu for high tea, dinner,
and for good measure, breakfast in the morning. And not trusting to Mary Anne,
she took the menus to the cook herself, with the maid trailing along behind,
for once completely at a loss. Only then did she permit the maid to bear her
off to her room to be changed into a suitable gown. But Mary Anne was so
rattled, she forgot completely to exchange the riding corset for a more
restrictive garment, and the tea gown, designed to be comfortable and
loose-fitting, went on over her petticoat and combinations without any corset
at all. Marina was almost beside herself with pleasure by the time she sat
down—in the empty parlor, of course—to the first truly satisfying
meal that she had eaten since she arrived.

And thanks to her books and the other help she had been
getting from Peter, despite Mary Anne’s glum supervision, she poured
selected, and ate with absolute correctness. Good strong tea to begin with, not
the colored water she had been drinking. And real food, with flavor to it. Oh,
it was dainty stuff, for a
lady,
not the hearty teas of Blackbird
Cottage—but it was such a difference from what she’d been having
with Arachne.

It was probably exactly the same food that downstairs ate
for their tea, just sliced and prepared to appear delicate—dainty little
minced-ham, deviled shrimp, and cheese sandwiches; miniature sweet scones,
clotted cream and jam; and the most amazing collection of wonderful little iced
cakes and tartlets.

And those hadn’t been conjured up on the instant. But
they certainly hadn’t been making appearances at the teas she had been
having.

Arachne’s been eating on the sly, that’s
what. She has that miserable excuse for tea with me, then goes off to her own
sitting room and has a feast.

Well, Arachne wasn’t here to complain that her cakes
were gone, and the cook could make more. Marina sipped her tea and nibbled
decorously while she watched birds collecting the crumbs that the cook
scattered for them in the snow-covered garden outside the parlor windows,
ignoring the silent presence of Mary Anne. Left to herself, of course, it would
have been a book by the fire, a plate of cakes, and a pot of tea—but she
conducted herself as if she had company. There would be no lapses for Mary Anne
to report; there was not a single scornful cough. At length, she rang for Peter
to come take the trays away and Mary Anne went off to her own splendidly
solitary tea while Marina remained in the library with a final cup of tea, a
book, and the fire.

Dinner was delightful, though it required a change into
corset and dinner gown. And Mary Anne was so rattled by then that she retired
without even undressing her charge. Marina just rang for Sally to help her with
the corset, then sent everyone away. So, attired in a warm and comfortable
dressing gown and her favorite sheepskin slippers, she should have been ready
to settle down beside the fire for a night of reading.

But two things stopped her. The first was that this absence
gave her an unanticipated opportunity. She could write letters tonight without
the fear that she would be caught at it. She sat down at her desk in her
sitting room, and laid out paper, envelopes, and pen and ink—then
stopped.

How to get them delivered? There was still that problem;
she hadn’t had so much as a single penny of money since she arrived here,
and she had the distinct feeling that if she asked for any, Arachne would ask
her what she wanted it for, since all her wants and needs were supplied.

She chewed on her lower lip for a moment. There were
probably stamps in Arachne’s desk and more in the one in the room used as
an office for the estate manager.

But
she counts them. I
know she
does. She’s
the sort that would.

The same probably held true for the pin money kept in the
desk in the estate office. Probably? No doubt; pin money would provide an even
greater temptation to staff than stamps, and Arachne had no real hold of
loyalty over most of the servants, as demonstrated by their quiet support of
Marina, and there was no trust there. So, she probably counted it out three
times a day; no use looking for postage money there.

But—I
wonder—does it need to be by a
physical letter?

Arachne was not here—and if ever there was a chance
to contact Elizabeth by means of magic, this would be it—

For a moment, excitement rose in her—if she could
call up an Undine or a Sylph, she could get messages to Elizabeth directly.
Perhaps even within the hour!

But, suddenly, she knew, she
knew,
that was wrong.
That if she tried, something horrible would happen. It was just like the night
she thought she had dreamed, when the Sylph gave her that warning, when she had
been so very frightened. If she used magic here even though Arachne was
gone—it would be bad.

No.
No.

A chill swept over her at the mere thought of invoking an
Elemental here. She suddenly felt unseen eyes on her.

It might not be Arachne—it might be someone else
entirely. But now that Marina was out of Blackbird Cottage, she was out from
underneath protections that Thomas, Sebastian, and Margherita had spent decades
building. It might only be that whoever or whatever was hunting for her now
knew where she was and was watching her because she was living openly at
Oakhurst, and with only the personal magical protections she herself had in
place. Watching her—why? She was beginning to have an idea why Arachne
might want to isolate her from all her former friends, but why would some
stranger be watching her?

Well, that made no sense. Not that anything necessarily
made obvious sense unless you had all the facts.
Still, I cannot imagine
why some stranger would wish to spy on me, much less wish me harm.

Ah, but thinking of Arachne, there might be another
explanation for the feeling of an unseen watcher about.
What if Madam
is a
magician after all? Just—not the kind of magician I know about?

She wondered. Elizabeth had told her to trust her
instincts, and right now, those instincts warned her that she was not
unobserved. If Arachne was a magician, Arachne would be able to tell if she
worked magic. At the moment, the only magic that Marina was practicing was
passive, defensive, protective; not only would it not draw attention to her, it
was designed, intended, to take attention away from her.

She could have left something here as a sort of
watchdog. And if I arouse the watchdog’s interest… she’ll
find out what I was up to, and she’ll discipline me for it.

Arachne would only have to forbid the servants to give her
access to riding to punish her, and it would be a terrible punishment from her
point of view. And as to why Arachne might want to keep her away from all her
former friends—that was simple enough—

Marina was not so naive as to think that Reggie was devoting
so much of his time to her because she was attractive to him. Maybe Arachne
didn’t need Oakhurst or Marina’s fortune, but a fashionable
man—about—town like her son was an expensive beast to support.
Granted, Reggie did seem to have some interest in working at the potteries, but
still…

On the other hand, if Arachne could get Marina married to
her son, it would be her wealth that he was playing with, not Arachne’s.
And if he wrecked someone else’s fortune, Arachne would not particularly
care. In fact, it might be a way of bringing him to heel—if he overran
himself and had to come to his mama for financial help, Arachne could impose
all sorts of curbs and conditions on him.

The only way for Arachne to be sure that Marina would fall
into her plans, would be to keep her niece here, completely under Arachne’s
thumb, until Reggie managed to wheedle her into matrimony.

So it will have to be real letters. For which I need
postage. There must be another way of finding the money for two
stamps!

If only—so many little boys were inveterate
collectors of stamps—if
only
the uncles or her father had ever
been remotely interested in such things, she would probably have found a
stamp-album among the old school books with one or two uncanceled specimens
among the ones carefully steamed off of the letters that arrived at the house!

Then it occurred to her; this house had a nursery that hadn’t
been touched since the five children left it, except to clean out the books
from the schoolroom. And little children tended to collect and hide treasures.
With luck, she could find them—heaven knew she had hidden enough little
treasure boxes herself over the years. And with further luck, there might be a
penny or two amongst the stones and cast-off snakeskins and bits of ribbon.

The thought was parent to the act; she put the writing
implements away and got resolutely up from the desk.

This entailed an expedition armed with a paraffin-lamp, but
now she knew approximately where everything was, courtesy of Sally. After
opening a couple of doors that proved to open up onto disused rooms other than
the old nursery—the nurserymaid’s room, a linen closet, and the old
schoolroom—she found El Dorado—or at least, the room she was
looking for. Aside from being much neater than any five real children would
leave such a room it was pretty much as it must have looked when they were
still using it. She put the lamp on the nursery table and went to work. She
found six caches before she decided that she was finished: one inside the Noah’s
Ark, two under the floorboards, two out in plain sight in old cigar boxes and
one in a cupboard in the doll-house. When she’d finished collecting ha’pennies,
she had exactly fourpence. Quite enough to buy postage for two letters. But by
that point, it was very late, she was chilled right through, and she decided to
take her booty and go to bed. Must
make sure and ask that they send more
postage in their return letters,
she told herself sleepily, as she climbed
into her warm bed after hiding her “treasure” in a vase.
I
think like the rest of the mines in Devon,
my
copper-field
is
exhausted…
though at least I haven’t left any ugly tailings.

Arachne stared out the window of their first-class carriage
into the last light of sunset, and wondered how wretched a mess awaited them when
she and Reggie got to Exeter. She prided herself on her efficiency, but there
were some things that no amount of efficiency could compensate for.

Such as an accident like the one that had just occurred at
the Exeter pottery.

Right in the middle of her discussion with Reggie, a
telegram came. One of the kilns had exploded that morning. At the moment she
didn’t know what the cause had been, although she intended to find out as
soon as she and Reggie arrived.

The railway carriage swayed back and forth, and the iron
wheels clacked over the joins in the rails with little jolts—but the
swaying and jolting was nothing compared with the discomfort of the same trip
by carriage, and this first-class compartment was much warmer.

An explosion. These things happened now and again; water
suddenly leaking into a red-hot kiln could cause it, or something in the
pottery loaded into it—or sabotage by anarchists, unionists, or other
troublemakers. If it was the latter, well, she was going to find
that
out quickly enough, and it wouldn’t take clumsy police bumbling about to
do so, either. A few words, a little magic, and she would know if there was
someone personally responsible. If there was, well—whoever had done it
would wish it had been the police who’d caught him, before he died.

The main problem so far as she was concerned was that the
kiln had been one of the ones where the glazes were fired, and three of her
paintresses had been seriously injured, two killed outright.

Reggie would take care of the physical details tomorrow,
but tonight—he and she would have to salvage what they could from the
three injured girls.

At length, long after sunset, the train lurched into the
Exeter station, and came to a halt with a shrieking of brakes and a great burst
of steam. Reggie opened the compartment door, but the cachet (and money)
attached to a first-class carriage got them instant service—one porter
for luggage, another to summon a taxi. Little did he guess he would need to
summon two. Their luggage went to the hotel with orders to secure them their
usual rooms, but they went straight to the pottery.

At the moment, Arachne’s sole concern, as they
rattled along in a motor-taxi, was the tiny infirmary she kept for the benefit
of the paintresses. If the other workers wondered about this special privilege,
they never said anything, perhaps because the paintresses were given the grand
title of Porcelain Artist and got other privileges as well. They needed the
infirmary; after a certain point in their short careers, they grew faint readily,
and this gave them a place to lie down until the dizziness passed off. Being
paid by the piece rather than by the hour was a powerful incentive not to go
home ill, no matter how ill they felt.

She’d telegraphed ahead to authorize sending for a
doctor; if the girls could be saved, it would be better for her plans.

The taxi stopped at the gates, and Arachne stepped out onto
the pavement without a backward glance, leaving Reggie to pay the fare. She
went straight to her office; from the gate to the office there was no sign that
anything had gone wrong; the sound of work, the noise of the machinery that
ground and mixed the clay, the whirring of the wheels, and the slapping of the
wet clay as the air and excess water was driven out of it continued unabated under
the glaring gaslights—which was as it should be. Accidents happened, but
unless the entire pottery blew up or fell into the river, work continued. The
workers themselves could not afford to do without the wages they would lose if
it shut down, and would be the first to insist that work went on the moment
after the debris was shoveled out of the way.