The Gates of Sleep (44 page)

Not that it was going to be possible for years, even
decades yet. Electricity hadn’t come anywhere near the village, which
didn’t even have gas lighting either. It would be paraffin lamps and
candles for some time, she suspected.

“Electric lights,” she said wistfully. “What
a magical invention!”

“We’ve gas at the pottery,” Reggie said,
giving close attention to the electrical lamps, which burned away the gloom
with steady light not even gas could rival. “I wonder if this is more
efficient, though. I believe I’ll look into it.”

Since he seemed more interested in the lamps than in books,
she left him there, and penetrated deep into the recesses of the closely set
shelves. Bewildered, she was not, but dazzled, she was. It was one thing to
encounter a wealth of books in a private library like that of
Oakhurst—such collections were the result of the work of generations, and
(not to put too fine a point upon it) a great many of the resulting volumes
stored in such libraries were of very little use to anyone other than scholars.
Often enough you couldn’t, daren’t read them, for fear of them
crumbling away, the pages separating as you tried to turn them. But here were
twice or three times that number, all of them eminently readable, in modern
editions, brand new. A feast—that was what it was! A feast for the
mind…

It was consideration of how much she could carry and not
anything else that led her to limit her selection. She decided that since she
wanted some volumes anyway, there was no harm in feeding Reggie’s
assumptions about her. So in her chosen stack there was some poetry, and some
novels, and some very interesting volumes that Elizabeth had recommended, books
that raised an eyebrow on the clerk who was tallying them up. He didn’t
say anything though, and Reggie was deep in another flirtation with a lady
wearing one of those frothy confections of lace and velvet that made her wilt
with envy, knowing how silly
she
would look in it, at the front of the
store. And when he finally did make his way to the till, he picked one of the
books up and looked at the title with no sign of recognition, anyway.

“Madam Arachne Chamberten’s account,” he
said as usual. “Have the parcel made up with this young lady’s name
on it and send it to the station to catch the afternoon train to Eggesford. The
four-fifteen, that would be. Have the porter stow it in our compartment. And
here—” he handed over the hat- and glove-boxes. “Send these
along with it, there’s a good fellow.”

“All but this—” Marina said, taking one
of the poetry books out at random, mostly because it was small and fit in her
reticule. Just in case, she wanted to have something with her to read. Reggie
might choose to abandon her someplace for a while.

The clerk bowed, Reggie grinned, and she tucked the book
into her bag. “Yes, sir,” the clerk said, briskly. “Marina
Roeswood, Oakhurst, by way of the four-fifteen to Eggesford.” He wrote it
all down on a card that he tucked into the front cover of the topmost book, and
handed off the lot to an errand boy. Reggie handed the lad a half crown by way
of a tip as Marina bit her lip in vexation. The boy grinned and averred he’d
take care of it all personally.

Then there was nothing for it, but to let Reggie sweep her
off into yet another cab, which disgorged them on the premises of an hotel. The
Palm Court proved to be its restaurant, which must have been famous enough in
Exeter, given the crowds of people. Not merely middle-class people, either;
there wasn’t a single one of the ladies there who wasn’t be-gowned
and be-hatted to the tune of several tens of pounds, judging by the prices that
Marina had noted today. She felt so drab in her black—at the next table
was a woman in a wonderful suit of French blue trimmed in purple velvet, with a
purple silk shirtwaist and a huge purple velvet rose at her throat, cartwheel
hat to match. She felt raw with envy, even though you had to have a neck like a
Greek column to wear something like that flower at the throat, not an ordinary
un-swanlike neck like hers. Then Reggie spoiled everything when the waiter came
and he ordered for her, before the waiter could even offer her a menu, quite as
if she hadn’t a will (and taste) of her own.

Marina got a good stranglehold on her temper and smiled as
the waiter bowed and trotted away. “I’ve never had lobster salad,
Reggie,” she said.

“Oh, you’ll like it, all ladies do,” he
said vaguely, as the waiter returned with tea and a basket of bread and rolls.
He chose, cut and buttered one for her. Was this supposed to be gallantry?

She decided to take it as such, or at least pretend to, and
thanked him, even though it was a soft roll, not the hard sort with the crunchy
crust that she preferred.

She did actually enjoy the lobster salad when it came,
although it wasn’t the meal she’d have chosen on a cold day.
Fortunately, it turned out to be one of those things that she did know how to
eat, although she had waited for its appearance with growing dread, not knowing
if this meal was a sadistic ploy on Reggie’s part to discomfit her in
public. But Reggie was either inclined to treat her nicely today, or else had
been ordered to be on his best behavior, because other than taking complete
charge of everything but the actual choice of hats and books for the entire
day, he’d treated her rather well.

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t objected to
all those flirtations,
she thought, watching him exchange another set of
wordless communications with a lady two tables over, whom he evidently knew of
old.
There was the glover’s girl, the milliner’s apprentices,
the lady at the bookshop
—and
now here.
Whatever the
exchange portended, however, must not have been to his benefit, as the lady
shortly after welcomed another gentleman to her table with every evidence of
pleasure, and Reggie applied himself to his saddle of mutton with an air of
having been defeated.

The defeat must have been a very minor one, though, as he
was all smiles again by dessert.

“All right, m’gel,” he said, when the
bill was settled, to the waiter’s unctuous satisfaction, “It’s
off to work for us! Let’s collect our traps and hie us hence.”

All the pleasures of the day faded into insignificance at
that reminder of what she was here for in the first place. And as they
collected their “traps” from the cloakroom girl and piled into yet
another cab, Marina tried to prepare herself to hunt—even though she didn’t
really know what she was looking for.

Andrew Pike drummed his fingers on the desk-blotter, stared
into nothing much, and tried not to worry too much about Marina. After all, it
wasn’t as if she was going to open herself up to anything dangerous just
by passive observation. And it wasn’t as if they’d had any evidence
that either her guardian or the Odious Reggie (how he loved that nickname!)
were the ones responsible for the occult drain on Ellen. It was just as likely
that the pottery had been built on the site of some ancient evil, and that the
presence of someone with Ellen’s potentials had caused it to reach out
and attach itself to her. For heaven’s sake, it was equally possible that
she’d
done
something unconsciously that awoke the thing! It was
equally likely that one of her so-called gentleman friends had done it,
figuring the girl was ignorant, and perfectly willing to drain her and throw
her away when he was satisfied. After all, the rotters were equally willing to
do the same sort of thing physically.

Still.

Still, just because Madam hasn’t shown any signs
of otherworldly abilities, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them.

Andrew was not a Scot—he was from Yorkshire,
actually—but he had taken his medical degree in Scotland, where there was
a strong occult tradition—which was how he’d come to find another
Earth Master to teach him beyond what his Air Mage mother had taught him in the
first place. And up there, he’d encountered a number of—interesting
fragments. There had been rumors among the Scots Masters for centuries, for
instance, that perfectly ordinary folk, without any discernible magical
abilities, could
steal
magic from others by frankly unpleasant means.
Yes, and use that magic too, even though they were effectively working blind.
Some of those fragments attested that a cult of Druids were the ones who
practiced this theft, some that it was a splinter of the Templars that really
did worship the old god Baphomet as was claimed, and some—well, the
majority actually—said it was Satanists. A group of Satanists recruited
and taught by the infamous Gilles de Rais to be exact, who then came to England
when he was caught in his crimes and brought the teachings with them. The
trouble was, no one had any proof—and it was a difficult proposition to
track down what was essentially a Left-Hand Path magician when he didn’t
look like a magician, didn’t have shields like a magician, and could not
be told from ordinary, non-magical folk.

And as it happened, neither Madam nor her son looked like
magicians, had shields like magicians, or seemed in any way to be anything
other than ordinary, non-magical folk.

He had many questions that were bothering him at this
point, of which one was why, exactly, had Marina not been living here with her
parents? No one in the village knew—although there were stories that
something terrible had happened shortly after the child’s christening
that had sent Marina’s mother into “a state.” Coincident with
that, it seemed, the child was sent away.

Why was it that no one had seen or heard anything of this
sister of Hugh’s for years? Interestingly enough, it was common knowledge
that Madam had had a falling-out with her parents over her choice of husband,
and had not been seen at Oakhurst ever again until the Roeswoods died so
tragically. But why, after the parents were dead, had brother and sister not
made some attempt to reconcile? Unless Hugh Roeswood was of the same mind as
his parents about Arachne. But then, why not have a will, just in case, to
prevent Arachne from ever having anything to do with the Roeswoods? But if the
rift was so insurmountable, why had Arachne claimed the girl and taken her
directly into her household? Why not just leave her where she was, washing her
hands entirely of her? No law could force her to become Marina’s hands-on
guardian.

It was all fragments that instinct told him should fit
together, but which didn’t.

He wished that he’d had more uninterrupted time to
talk to her. He wished that Clifton Davies had discussed more of her past and less
of chess-moves and music with her. Merely mentioning her mother seemed to make
her wary, as if there was something about her mother that she didn’t much
want to think about.

Though what it could be—if there was
anything—he was hanged if he could imagine!

Well, old man, there is one route to find out what you
can about her that you haven’t taken.

Not that he hadn’t thought about it—but
magicians as he knew them up in Scotland were odd ducks. Insular,
self-protective, and inclined to keep things close to their chests. Those that
had formed groups tended to look a little suspiciously on outsiders, and if
anyone was an outsider here, it was definitely Dr. Andrew Pike, with Clifton
Davies from the Welsh Borders a close second. Still—

They’re sending their sick to me, and mage-born
children of ordinary parents when they find them in trouble. So I might not be
so much of an outsider that I can’t get information out of these Devonian
mages after all. It’d serve me right to discover that the only reason no
one’s told me anything is because I didn’t ask.

Fauns would be the best messengers, he reckoned. They weren’t
at all troubled by cold weather—didn’t go dormant to sleep until
spring like some Earth Elementals. They went everywhere there was a patch of
wildwood, and every Earth mage
he
had ever seen had a patch of
wildwood somewhere about. That was one reason why they didn’t much like
being in cities, truth to tell. When he got done sending out
his
messengers, he could get Clifton to send out—oh, Sylphs, he supposed.
They were the Air Elementals he was most familiar with, though perhaps there
was something else that was more suitable. Then… hmm. Who did he know
that he could trade on favors to help him with Water and Fire?

Oh, good Lord—two of the children, of course!
Naiads hung about Jamie Cooper like bees around a honey pot, and Craig Newton
was always talking to Salamanders in the fire. He couldn’t send
messengers from those two Elements, of course; the children didn’t
command anything at the moment, and now that he’d gotten them over their
fears that they were going mad, his main job was to shield them from the
nastier Elementals of their types until they could protect themselves. But he
could ask them to ask their Elementals to do the favor, and if the creatures
didn’t lose interest or get distracted by something else, they probably
would.

But—send out his own Elementals, first, and see where
that got him.

The one good and reliable thing about Fauns was that unlike
Brownies, they were pitiably easy to bribe with things from the human world.
Unfortunately, they were also scatterbrained. But as long as they could lick
their lips and taste the honey he’d give them, and as long as their
little flasks held the wine he’d offer them, they’d remember, and
they’d keep to the job.

After a quick stop in the kitchen for a peg of the
vin
ordinaire
that the departing family had deemed too inferior to take with
them or to try and sell, a big cottage-loaf, and a pot of honey, he bundled
himself up in his mackintosh and went out into the wet, tying his hood down
around his ears.

It was a wild day, one of the “lion” days of
March, full of wind and lashings of rain, and he was glad that there hadn’t
been two fair days in a row, for weather like this would doom any buds that had
been coaxed out before their time. He bent his head to the rain and trudged
down to the bottom of the garden, then beyond, into the acres that had once
been manicured parkland but had been allowed to fall into neglect. Near the
edge of the property he owned was a coppice that had grown up around what had
once been a tended grove of Italian cypress, and in the center of that grove
was still a marble statue of Pan in one of his milder moods—Pan, the
musician, boon companion of Bacchus, not Great God Pan of the wilderness and
Panic fear. Even without casting a shield-circle and doing a formal invocation,
such a setting was still potent to bring and hold the little fauns (and he
sometimes wondered if they were homesick for the warmer winds and cypresses of
Italy that they came so readily here).