The Gates of Sleep (35 page)

He left them to their slumbers. It wasn’t at all the
usual thing for children to be mental patients.

Then again, he didn’t have the usual run of mental
patients; when
his
people were “seeing things,” often
enough, they really
were
seeing things.

That was why he’d had no difficulty in getting
patients right from the beginning. Once word spread among the magicians, the
occultists, and the other students of esoterica that Dr. Andrew Pike was
prepared to treat their friends, relations, and (tragically) children for the
traumatic aftermath of hauntings, curses, and other encounters with the
supernatural, his beds began to fill. He got other patients when mundane
physicians referred them to him, without knowing what it was they suffered from
but having seen that under certain circumstances, with certain symptoms, Andrew
Pike could effect a real cure.

It wasn’t only those who were born magicians or
highly sensitive who ended up coming to him. Under the right—or perhaps
wrong circumstances, virtually anyone could find horror staring the face. And
sometimes, it wasn’t content just to stare.

There were a few of the adult patients who were under the
indicious influence of drugs designed to keep them from being agitated which
tended to make them sleep a great deal; those were the ones back in their beds
after tea. The rest of the patients were in the parlor, reading or socializing.
He didn’t like drugging them, but in the earliest stages here, sometimes
he had to, just to break the holds that their own particular horrors had over
them.

Ellen was on the third ward, and was fast asleep when he
got there. Eleanor, the female ward nurse, was with her, sitting beside her
bed, and looked up at the sound of his footsteps. She kept her pale hair pulled
tightly back and done in a knot after the manner of a Jane Eyre, and her dark,
somber clothing tended to reinforce that image. Eleanor seldom smiled, but her
solemn face was not wearing that subtle expression of concern that would have
told him there was something wrong.

Well
—more
wrong than there already is.

“She’ll be fine for now, Doctor,” Eleanor
said without prompting. “She got chilled, but I don’t believe there
will be any ill effects from it. We got her warmed up quickly enough once we
got her back here.” She stroked a few stray hairs from Ellen’s
brow, and her expression softened. “Poor child. Doctor, we mustn’t
allow that boy Simon Ashford around her. She can see what he sees, of course;
they seem peculiarly sensitive to one another. That’s what frightened
her. I’ve already told Diccon not to let the child near her, but not why,
of course.”

“I’ll make a note of it.” Eleanor was
invaluable; one of his former patients who had decided to stay with him as a
nurse and assistant when he’d helped her out of the hell that her
inability to shut out the thoughts of others had thrown her into. Pike had been
the only doctor at the asylum where she’d been who had understood that
when it sounded as if she was answering someone that no one else could
hear—she really was speaking to another person, or trying to. She was
another of those cases of extreme sensitivity to the thoughts of others that
came on at puberty—and thank heavens, one he had gotten to in time. It
had been getting worse and before very long, all of the voices in her head
would have driven her mad.

For a time, she had been in love with him. He had allowed
it long enough to be sure that her cure was permanent, then he had used just a
little magic, the opposite of a love charm, to be certain that she fell out of
love with him again. A very useful bit of magery, that charm, for it was
inevitable that most of his female patients and even a few male, fell in love
with him. In fact, there was one school of thought among the Germans that such
an emotional attachment was necessary for the patient’s recovery, that
only someone who was beloved could be trusted with the most intimate secrets.
Whether that was true or not, Andrew wasn’t prepared to judge; it was his
duty to see that he did everything humanly possible to cure them, no more, and
no less. Let others formulate theories; he worked by observation and used what
was successful. He had more than enough on his hands, balancing magic and
medicine, without worrying about concocting theories of how the mind worked!

He wished, though, that Eleanor could really find someone
for herself. The regret that she hadn’t came over him as he watched her
with Ellen; she was a nurturer, and she loved the children here. She seemed
very lonely; well educated, she would have probably become a teacher had she
not her unfortunate background.

“Who was that girl?” Eleanor asked, rising and
smoothing her pearl-gray apron as she did so. “The one that helped us, I
mean.”

“That, it seems, was the young Miss Roeswood that the
village has been buzzing about.” He raised an eyebrow at her, and she
made a little “o” with her mouth. Eleanor was a Methodist by
practice, so of course she went to chapel, not church, and had missed the
exciting appearance of the mysterious young heiress at Sunday services two
weeks ago.

“But—what a
kind
young woman she is!”
Eleanor exclaimed. “Not that her parents were bad people but—”

“But I cannot imagine, from what I heard of her,
seeing Alanna Roeswood on her knees in the snow, trying to keep Ellen from
running off into the fields,” Andrew replied with a nod. “Visiting
the sick with soup and jelly, yes. Delivering Christmas baskets. Sending
bric-a-brac to the jumble sale. But not preparing to tackle a runaway madwoman
to keep her from freezing to death in the woods.” He thought about asking
Eleanor if she had seen anything of Marina’s magic, but realized in the
next instant that of course, she wouldn’t.
She
wasn’t a
magician, only a sensitive. If she wished to, she might be able to hear the
girl’s thoughts, but only if the girl herself dropped the shields that
she must have had to have avoided immediate recognition by Andrew himself.

This Marina Roeswood might claim she wasn’t a Master,
but all her shields were as good as anything he had ever seen.

“If Ellen is well enough,” he suggested, “Why
don’t you help me finish the rounds?”

Eleanor got to her feet without an objection. “Certainly,
Dr. Pike,” she replied. “Will I need my notebook?”

“I don’t think so,” he told her, and
smiled. “I certainly hope that young Ellen is our last crisis for a
while.”

With Eleanor following behind, Andrew finished checking on
the patients in the other wards, and took a quick look in on the library. The
card game was still going briskly, and Craig, one of his little boys who was
very close to being discharged, had engaged Roger Smith, one of the oldest
patients, in a spirited chess match. Andrew and Eleanor exchanged a quick smile
when they saw that; Roger was going to be discharged tomorrow, and he loved
chess as much as Craig disliked it, so this must be Craig’s idea of a
proper farewell present for the old man.

Craig was one of the few children here who was an “ordinary”
patient, brought here by a parent because of a life-threatening breakdown
brought on by strain. Young Craig had been a chess-Prodigy; his father had
trotted him around Britain and three-fourths of Europe, staging tournaments in
front of paying audiences with the greatest of chess masters, before his health
and mental stability collapsed under the strain. He’d literally collapsed
and it was a good thing he’d done so in Plymouth, and that for once, his
mother had been with him as well as his father. She took over when the father
simply tried to shake the boy into obedience—and
consciousness!—again. When Craig couldn’t be awakened, the father
vanished, and she started looking for someone to help her child.

Small wonder Craig hated chess now—and, in fact, on
Pike’s suggestion was going to pretend that all of his knowledge of the
game had vanished in his breakdown. His mother, on recommendation from one of
Andrew’s colleagues, had brought him to Briareley, hoping to find someone
who would treat her son as a child and not a broken machine that needed to be
fixed so it could resume its job.

But it was a measure of how much he had recovered that he
was willing to treat the old man who had read him fairy tales to send him to
sleep every night for the past six months to the game that gave
him
such pleasure.

“He’s a good boy, Doctor,” Eleanor said
softly.

“Yes,” Andrew replied, feeling a warm smile
cross his lips. “He is. God willing, that beast that calls himself a
father will leave him alone now.”

They took the wide, formal stairs up to the second floor,
and the private rooms.

Here, the patients were a mix in the opposite direction from
the ones in the wards. Most of these folk were not magicians or extraordinarily
sensitive. Andrew’s establishment was slowly gaining a reputation among
ladies of fashion as a place to recover from nerves.

And “nerves” was an umbrella that covered a great
many things.

Now, Andrew would
not
accept the sort of nerves
that came from too much liquor, or from indulgences in drugs. For one thing he
could not afford the sort of round-the-clock watching such patients required.
For another, their problems would make life difficult for his other patients.
For a third, well, he’d need half a dozen Diccons to make sure everyone
was safe.

Nor did he accept—although it was always possible
that a set of circumstances would occur that would cause him to make an
exeption—the sort of nerves that produced an inconvenient infant in nine
months’ time.

But if too many debutante-parties and the stress of being
on the marriage-market sent a young lady into hysterics or depression—if
too many late nights and champagne and tight corseting did the same to her
mother—if the strain of too much responsibility sent a young widow into
collapse—

Well, here there were quiet, well-appointed rooms, simple
but delicious food, grounds where one could walk, lanes where one could drive,
and no one would bother you with invitations, decisions, noise, bustle, or
anything else until you were rested. A week, a month, and you were ready to go
back to the social whirl.

And no one acted as if your problems were so insignificant
that you should feel ashamed of your weakness. And if Andrew’s
establishment was doing no more than providing a kind of country spa rather
than real treatment for serious problems for these women, well, why not? Why
shouldn’t he have the benefit of their money?

If, however, there was a serious problem, unlike a spa or
other fashionable resort, Andrew was going to spot it, and at least attempt to
treat it.

So he and Eleanor completely bypassed one wing of guest
rooms that had been converted into patient rooms. The ladies housed there had
no need of him or his services; they were quite satisfied to see him once a
day, just after a late breakfast.

He did stop at several other rooms, though. Three were
cases of real depression, and aside from seeing that they got a great deal of
sunlight (which seemed to help), and slowly, slowly seeing what healing magic
might do, there wasn’t a lot that seemed to make a difference to them.

At least he wasn’t dousing them with cold water baths
six times a day, or tying them to beds and force-feeding them, or throw them
into those horrors called general wards.

There were four cases of feeble-mindedness, one of who
could barely feed himself. Two unfortunates who had fallen from heights onto
their heads, who were in similar case. One old demented woman. All of these
could have been warehoused anywhere, but at least they had family who cared
that they were treated decently, kept clean, warm, and well-fed, and that no
one abused them. For this, they paid very well indeed, and Dr. Pike was very
grateful.

And he had one poor soul who really
was
hearing
voices in his head that didn’t exist, not on any plane. He didn’t
know what to do with that fellow; nothing he tried seemed to work. There was
something wrong in the brain, but what? And how was he to fix it, even if he
could discover what was wrong?

That man, though he had never shown any inclination to
violence, was locked in a room in which the bed and chair were too heavy to
move, and in any case, bolted to the floor so that he couldn’t use them
to break the window. There was an ornamental iron grate bolted over the window
on the inside. And the poor man was never allowed a candle or an open fire;
there was a cast-iron American stove in the fireplace in his room, and Andrew
could only hope that the voices in his head would never tell him to try to open
it with his bare hands.

He was the last visit this afternoon; all was well, and
Andrew heaved a sigh of relief as he always did.

“Have your tea, Eleanor,” he told her. “I’m
going to go help Diana Gorden with her shields.”

She smiled faintly. “Very well, Doctor. Don’t
forget to eat, yourself.”

“I won’t,” he promised.

And of course, promptly did.

MARINA stared at the four small objects in the palm of her
hand; there was no confusion about what she was seeing, as sunlight flooded the
room. In her hand lay what were supposed to have been four ha’pennies
that she had just poured out of the vase. Well, she’d thought they were
ha’pennies last night when she’d put them in the vase.

But when she’d tilted them out this morning, it was
painfully clear that they were nothing of the sort. They were, in fact, four “good
conduct” medals of the sort given out at Sunday School, sans ribbon and
pin. They were copper, they did feature the Queen’s profile, and they
were the size of a ha’pence. But not even the kindest-hearted postmaster
was going to exchange these for a stamp.