The Gates of Sleep (46 page)

Madam hasn’t been there for
a year? How
could that be possible? That sinkhole didn’t have that sort of capacity,
and it must have been tapped off several times in the last year. Could Reggie
be tapping it?

Surely not
—”Of course, when things
happen like kilns blowing up, Mater wants to get right in there; in her nature,
you might say.

But the Exeter works are half mine, and she reckoned it was
a good place for me to get m’feet wet, get used to running things.”
He grinned at her, as pleased as a boy making the winning score at rugby.

Surely not Reggie
—

That sort of seething morass couldn’t be handled at a
distance—yet Madam couldn’t have tapped it. So if she wasn’t
tapping that unhealthy power, who was?

Surely not Reggie. Not possible. No matter what Shakespeare
said, that a man could “smile and smile and still be a villain,”
evil that profound
couldn’t
present a surface so—banal.

And besides, there was nothing, not the slightest hint of
power, evil or otherwise, about him! Nor, now that she came to think about it,
was there anything of the sort about Madam.

She had followed him out of the compartment at his urging
as contradictions overwhelmed her and left her confused and uncertain. The
touch of his hand on her elbow left her even more uncertain. There was
nothing
in that touch. No magic, no evil, nothing to alert her to danger. Perfectly,
solidly ordinary, and no more odious than the Odious Reggie usually was, in
that he took possession of her arm as if he had already taken possession of her
entire person and was merely marking his claim to her.

It was so baffling it made her head ache, and she sought
comfort in the familiar rituals of teapot and jam jar. Although the teapot was
heavy silver, and the jam jar not a jar at all, but a dish of elegant, cut
crystal, the tea tasted the same as the China Black from Aunt Margherita’s
humble brown ceramic pot with the chipped spout, and the jam not quite as good
as the home-made strawberry she’d put up with her own hands. Still, as
she poured and one-lump-or-twoed, split scones and spread them with jam, the
automatic movements gave her a point of steadiness and familiarity.

“… jolly fine deposit of kaolin clay under the
North Pasture,” Reggie was saying, showing almost as much enthusiasm as
he’d had for his flirtations with all those strange young women today.

“With Chipping Brook so deep and fast there, we’ve
got water-power enough for grinding, mixing, anything else we’d want.
Plenty of trees in the copse at the western edge for charcoal to fire the
kilns—plenty of workers in the village—the road to the railroad
or
going up north to the sea for cheap transport—there’s nothing
lacking but the works itself!”

Chipping Brook? North Pasture?
My North
Pasture?
Her scattered thoughts suddenly collected as she realized what he’d been
babbling about for the past several minutes.

Putting a pottery—another of those poisonous
blots—in the North Pasture beside Oakhurst. On her land. Spewing death
into her brook, her air—devouring her trees to feed the voracious kilns,
turning her verdant meadow into a hideous, barren scrape in the ground.

And taking the villagers, people I know, or their
children, offering them jobs and then poisoning them with lead dust and
overwork.

“I think I can do without that, Reggie,” she
said, attempting to sound smooth and cool, interrupting the stream of plans
from her cousin. “Your potteries are astonishing, and surely must be the
envy of your peers, but I haven’t the interest or the ability to run one,
and I prefer the North Pasture as it is. I certainly have no desire to live
next to a noisy factory, which is what I would be doing if you put a pottery in
the North Pasture.”

“Well, cuz, obviously you don’t have to live
next to it—there are hundreds of places you could live!” Reggie said
with a fatuous laugh as the train sped past undulating hills slowly darkening
as the light faded. “Why live at Oakhurst, anyway? It’s just an old
country manor without gas, much less electricity, and neither are likely to
reach the village in the next thirty years, much less get to the manor! A
London townhouse—now
there’s
the ticket!”

She winced inwardly. That much was true, too true. But she
wasn’t about to admit to him that she would very much have liked to have
the option to modernize within her own lifetime. “Nevertheless, Oakhurst
is my inheritance, to order as I choose, and I do not choose to have it turned
into a factory, so you can put that notion out of your mind,” she said
sharply—so sharply that he was clearly surprised and taken aback.

Oh dear.
She softened her posture immediately and
smiled winsomely. “Silly man! I haven’t even gotten to know the
place, and already you want to change it entirely! Haven’t you come to
know me well enough by now to know that given any other choice, I would still
live here? I like the countryside, and Oakhurst is particularly beautiful.
Surely there are cities enough where you can put another factory without
ruining my peace and quiet and my views!”

Reggie regained that superior smirk. “I forgot, cuz,
you’re just a little country-cousin at heart,” he said
condescendingly.

“I’m afraid so,” she admitted, lowering
her gaze and looking up at him through her lashes. “After my trip today,
I am only more confirmed in my notions, I must admit. Exeter was exciting
but—there were so many people!”

She might have despised herself for being so manipulative;
might, except for all that was at stake. She could not, would not allow another
diseased blight to take root here. She would fight it to the last cell of her
body.

“You’ll change your mind,” he said,
dismissing her and her concerns out of hand. “Especially when you’re
out, when you’ve had a real London season, when you’re going to
parties and balls and the theater—you’ll like cities so much you’ll
wonder how you ever thought a pasture worth bothering your pretty head about.
Heh—and when you start seeing how much of the ready it takes to buy all
those gowns and froofahs and things you ladies are so fond of, you’ll
realize just how much good a factory could do your pocket-book. Can’t be
seen in the same frock twice, don’t you know. You can’t support a
lively Town style on farm rents. It needs a lot of the ready to be in the mode.”

We’ll see about that,
she thought grimly. If
the choice was between fine feathers and the preservation of this
land—she would be willing to make a regular guy of herself in London. She
would do without that promised London season! No gown, no string of balls,
nothing was worth despoiling Oakhurst, raping the land, poisoning the waters.

The real question was—since she had no direct control
of her property, how was she to keep Reggie from plunging ahead with his plan
no matter what she wanted? She had no doubt that Madam would be only too happy
to give ear to this idea, and Madam was the one who was making the decisions at
the moment, where Oakhurst was concerned.

“Oh, Reggie, you can’t want to make me
miserable!” she pouted. “That pottery just gave me the awfullest
headache, and I just know I’d have nothing but headaches with one of
those things right in the next field!”

“But you wouldn’t be here, you’d be in
London,” he tried to point out, but she sighed deeply and quivered her
lower lip.

“Not all the time! And how can I have house parties
with a
factory
in the next field? People don’t come to house parties
to see factories, they come to see views, and to shoot—and oh, everyone
around here of any consequence will just hate us, for the shooting will be
quite spoilt for miles around!”

That actually seemed to get through to him, at last, and he
looked startled. Encouraged, she elaborated. “Oh, we’ll be a
disgrace! My season will be a disaster!
No one
will want to be seen
with the girl who had the audacity to drive all the game out to the moor!”

“Well—not to the moor, surely—” he
ventured, looking alarmed.

She turned an utterly sober gaze upon him. “I’m
the country-cousin, remember? Oh, do trust me, Reggie, all it will take is for
your factory to drive the red deer out of this neighborhood—or worse, the
pheasants!—and we will be entirely in disgrace and everyone who is anyone
will know what we’d done and who’s to blame! You just
wait—wait and see how your London friends treat you when shooting they
were counting on isn’t
there
anymore! Not everyone goes to
Scotland, you know—people depend on Devon and Surrey for their sport!”

That turned the trick; he promised not to do anything about
his plans until she knew she would want to live in London and not at Oakhurst,
after all—and until he had made certain that there were no notable shoots
anywhere around the vicinity.

“But you just wait, little cuz,” he laughed, as
he escorted her back to their compartment. “Once you’ve had a taste
of proper life, you won’t care if I blow the place up if it buys you more
frocks and fun.”

She settled herself in the corner under one of the
ingenious wall-mounted paraffin lamps that the steward had lit in their
absence. He dropped onto the seat across from her beneath the other and opened
his paper. She took out her poetry book and stared at it, turning the pages now
and again, without reading them.

“You won’t care if I blow the place up if
it buys you more frocks and fun.” Callous, unfeeling, greedy,
selfish—but
is
that
evil?
Evil enough to account for that
horror beneath Exeter? Or is it just plain, ordinary, piggy
badness? It
didn’t equate, it just didn’t—evil wasn’t bland. Evil
didn’t worry about ruining its reputation by running off the game. Evil
probably would be perfectly happy to ruin anything.

If not the son, what about my
first
thought,
the mother? She’s the only parent he’s had for ever so long, so she’s
had the only hand over him—he should reflect her.
Madam was cold,
yes. Selfish, yes. Utterly self-centered.
And she’s all business and
money and appearances. Still. That doesn’t add up to horror either.
Evil should slaver and gnash its teeth, howling in glee at the rich vein of
nourishment beneath Madam’s office. It shouldn’t wear stylish suits
and smart frocks and give one strenuous lessons in etiquette.

There was only one possible conclusion here. There had to
be something else behind the cesspit of vileness back there in Exeter.

And she would be hanged if she could figure out who was
feeding off of it. Or what.

My head hurts.
She felt a sinking sort of
desperation. Out of her depth, unable to cope. Too much was happening at once,
and on such wildly disparate levels that she couldn’t begin to imagine
how she was to deal with it all.
I am out, completely out, of ideas or
even
wild guesses.
She stared at her poem, unseeing, as the railway
carriage rocked from side to side.
Someone else will have to solve this
mystery. They
can’t
expect me to solve it—all they asked
me was to see if there was anything there, after all… come to that, they
never asked me, I volunteered to look.

She told herself to breathe deeply, and calm down. No one
was expecting her to do anything—except herself. And anyway, it wasn’t
her outlook to actually do anything about it either! Hadn’t Dr. Pike and
Mr. Davies virtually volunteered to be the ones to track this thing down to its
cause and eliminate it? She was only seventeen, after all, and no Master of her
element! She wasn’t anywhere ready to go charging off, doing battle with
vile magics!

They simply can’t expect me to do anything about
this! It would be like sending me out into the desert after the Mad Mullah, for
heaven’s sake—with only my parasol and a stern lecture to deliver!
At some point, Marina,
she continued, lecturing herself in her thoughts,
You
simply have to let someone else
do
things and allow that you can’t.

Well, there was one thing at least that she could
do—and that was to let the proper people know about the—the
vileness.

And another
—to
keep that poison away
from Oakhurst.

She didn’t have any more time to think about it,
though, for the train was pulling into the station, and Reggie was making all
the motions of gathering up their things.

Reggie opened the door and helped her out onto the
platform. The carriage was waiting for them, the coachman already taking up the
parcels from the shops and stowing them away as they approached; they were
inside and on the way within minutes. The coach rattled over cobblestones,
passing the lights of the town, then jolted onto a dirt road; a crack of the whip,
and the horses moved out of a fast walk into a trot. The coachman seemed in a
monstrous hurry, for some reason; perhaps he sensed yet another wretched March
storm coming, for he kept the horses moving at such a brisk pace that Marina
was jounced all over her seat, and even Reggie had to hang on like grim death.

“I’ll be—having a word—with our
driver—” he said between bounces. “Damn me! See if
I—don’t!”

But the moment he said that, the reason for the rush became
apparent, as the skies opened up and poured down rain.

This was a veritable Ark-floating torrent, and no wonder
the coachman had wanted them to get out and on the road so quickly. It drummed
on the coach roof and streamed past the windows, and Reggie let out a yelp and
a curse as a lightning bolt sizzled down with a crash far too near the road for
comfort. There was a sideways jolt as the horses shied, but the coachman held
them firm and kept them under control.

The coach slowed, of necessity—you couldn’t
send horses headlong through this—but they were near home now. The lights
of the village loomed up through the curtains of rain; not much of them, no
streetlights at all, just the lights over the shops, and the houses on either
side of the road all veiled by rain—a moment of transition from road to
cobbles and back again, splashing through enormous puddles. Then they were
past, the lights of the village behind them, and they were minutes from
Oakhurst. Over two hills, across the bridge, climbing a third—