The Gates of Sleep (48 page)

“Why not?” It had been a spur-of-the-moment
notion, but the more she thought about it, the better she liked it. “Why
not? It will show proper concern on our part—our poor little niece
collapsed and we send our own carriage out into the storm to get help for her!
The man isn’t local, no one will have told him anything about us, all he’ll
be concerned about is his fee. He can’t keep her alive long, no matter
how cleverly he force-feeds her, but the fact that we’re paying for him
to try will show everyone that we’re doing our best for her.”

“And if he brings her around somehow?” Reggie
countered stubbornly.

“How? With magic?” She laughed, a peal of
laughter echoed by the thunder outside. “Oh, I think not! And just in
case those meddlesome friends of Hugh’s manage to get wind of what we’ve
done, the sanitarium is the safest place she could be! No old servants to slip
them inside, and even if they manage to find where she is, hidden away amongst
a den of lunatics—there are guards, no doubt, meant to keep as many folks
out as in.” She shook her head with amazement at her own perspicacity. “Perfect.
Perfect. Take care of it.”

As he stared at her without comprehension, she repeated
herself.
“Take care of it,
Reggie,” she said sharply. “Rouse
the household! Get the carriage! I want that doctor here within the hour!”

“And just what will
you
be doing, Mater?”
he asked, with a particularly nasty sneer.

“I,” she said with immense dignity, “will
be having a truly operatic fit of the vapors. So if you don’t wish to
have your eardrums shattered—I suggest you be on your way.”

And feeling particularly sadistic, she did not even give
him enough time to leave the room before filling her lungs and producing the
shrillest and most ear-piercing
shriek
she had ever coaxed out of her
throat in her entire life.

She needn’t have told him to summon the household
after all—she was doing that quite well on her own.

Not that it was going to help Marina. Nothing was going to
help her now.

ANDREW Pike had thought to spend his evening in his study,
the room of burled walnut walls and warm, amber leather furniture that stood
triple duty as his library and office as well, but found he couldn’t
settle to anything. Neither book nor paper nor journal could hold his interest
for long, and he found himself staring alternately into the fire, and out into
the gloom, as the sun set somewhere behind the thick clouds. He felt both
depressed and agitated, and had ever since early afternoon. He had been a
Master long enough to know that, though he had no particular prescient
abilities, he was sensitive enough to the ebbs and flows of power to intuit
that there was trouble in the air. And the longer he watched and waited, the
more sure of that trouble he became.

He’d done what he could to cushion his patients from
whatever it was, and had strengthened the shields about the place, layering
walls built as solid as those of the Cotswold limestone, the red-baked brick,
the cob and wattle. Now all he could do was sit and wait, and hope that the
trouble would pass him and anyone else he knew by.

Moments like these were hard on the nerves of those who had
no ability to see into the future. The Earth Masters were particularly lacking
in that talent; their minds tended to be slow and favor the past and the
present, not the future. The past in particular; Earth Masters could take up a
thing and read its history as easily as scanning a book, but the volume of the
future might as well be in hieroglyphs for it was just that closed to them.
Water Masters were the best at future-gazing when they had that particular
gift, and even those poorest in the skill could still scry in a bowl of water
and be certain of getting
some
clue to what lay ahead. Air Masters,
known best for crystal-gazing, and Fire, who favored black mirrors, were twice
as likely at their worst as an Earth Master at his best to have the ability to
part the veils and glimpse what was to come. So with no more help in divining
what was troubling him than any other mortal might have, all Andrew could do
was wait for whatever it was to finally descend on them.

Teatime came and went with no signs other than an
increasing heaviness of spirit. Eleanor felt it too, though as was her wont,
she said nothing; he read it in her wary eyes, and in the tense way she moved,
glancing behind her often, as if expecting to find something dreadful
following. When he saw that, he increased the strength of the shields yet
again, and gave Eleanor orders to add sedatives to the medications of certain
patients that evening.

“Ah,” she said. “For the storm—”
but he knew, and she knew, that it was not the March thunderstorm she spoke of,
though the flickers on the horizon as the sun sank behind its heavy gray veils
and gray light deepened to blue warned of more than just a springtime’s
shower.

When the storm broke, it brought no relief, only increased
anxiety. The storm was a reflection of the tension in the air, not a means of
releasing it. This was no ordinary storm; it crouched above Oakhurst like a
fat, heavy spider and refused to budge, sending out lightning and thunder and
torrents of rain.

By now, Andrew’s nerves were strung as tightly as
they ever had been in his life, and he couldn’t eat dinner. He wondered
if he ought to prescribe a sedative dose for himself.

But as he sat in his office-cum-study, watching the
lightning arc through the clouds, and in the flashes, the rain sheeting down,
he decided that he had better not. He should keep all his wits about him. If
the blow fell, and he was needed, he could not afford to have his mind
befogged.

Having once shattered a fragile teacup and once snapped the
stem of a wineglass when feeling nervy, he had chosen a thick mug for his tea
this evening. His hands closed around it and clutched it tightly enough to make
his fingers ache, and had the pottery been less than a quarter-inch thick, he
was certain it, too, would have given way under his grip. As well, perhaps,
that he was no Fire Master—his nerves were stretched so tightly that if
he had been, the least little startlement might have sent the contents of his
office up in flames.

He stretched all of his senses to their utmost, searching
through the night, questing for any clue, or any sign that something was about
to fall on
his
head. It was dangerous, that—looking out past the
shields that he had set up around the walls of Briareley. But he couldn’t
just sit here anymore, waiting for the blow to fall—he had to
do
something, even if it was only to look! Every nerve in his body seemed acutely
sensitive, and the muscles of his neck and shoulders were so tight and knotted
they felt afire.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck practically outside
his study window—he jumped—and as the windows shook with the
attendant peal of thunder, another sound reverberated through the halls.

The booming sound of someone frantically pounding on the
door with the huge bronze knocker. Great blows echoed up and down the rooms,
reverberated against high ceilings and shuddered in chimneys.

This was what he had been waiting for. Or if not—at
least it was something happening at last—something he could act on instead
of just waiting. The tension in him snapped, releasing him as a foxhound set on
quarry.

He leapt to his feet, shoved back his chair, and headed for
the door; ahead of him he saw Diccon hurrying to answer the summons, and poking
from doorways and around corners were the heads of patients and
attendants—curious, but with a hint of fear in their eyes.

The pounding continued; there was a frantic sound to it.
Was there a medical emergency down in the village? But if there was, why come
here rather than knocking up the village doctor?

Diccon hauled the huge door open, and a torrent of rain
blew in, carrying with it two men wrapped in mackintoshes. The was no mistaking
the second one, who raked the entrance hall with an imperious gaze and focused
on Andrew.

“You! Doctor!” he barked. “You’re
needed at Oakhurst! Miss Roeswood has collapsed!”

Andrew folded his stethoscope and tucked it into his
pocket, using iron will to control face and voice. His heart hammered in his
chest; his expression must give none of this away. They must not know, must not
even guess, that he had ever seen Marina more than that once on the road, or
all was lost.

“This young woman is in a coma,” he said
flatly, looking not at poor Marina, so fragile and pale against the dark
upholstery of the couch she had been laid on, but at the impassive visages of
Madam Arachne and her son. Marina might have been some stranger with a sprained
ankle for all that they were reacting. Oh, certainly the Odious Reggie had come
dashing through the storm to drag him here—not that he’d needed
dragging—but now that he was here, Reggie merely watched with ironic
interest, as if he expected Pike to fail and was pleased to find his
expectations fulfilled. And as for Madam—he’d seen women evidence
more concern for a toad than she was showing for her own niece. In
fact—she seemed amused at his efforts to revive Marina. There was some
devilment here.

Was devilment the right word? If those wild surmises of his
were true, it might well be…

But he could do nothing here. Especially not if his guesses
were true. “She is completely unresponsive to stimuli, and I am baffled
as to the cause of her state. It might be a stroke—or it could have some
external cause. If she had been outside, I might even suspect lightning—”

There was a flash of interest at that. The woman seized on
his possibly explanation so readily that even if he hadn’t suspected her
of treachery, he’d have known something was wrong. “She was
standing right beside that window when she collapsed,” Madam said, and her
even and modulated tones somehow grated on his nerves in a way he found
unbearable. “Could lightning have struck her through the window?”

“I don’t know. Was it open?” he asked,
then shook his head. “Never mind. The cause doesn’t matter. This
young woman needs professional treatment and care—”

This young woman needs to be
out
of here!
he thought, his skin crawling at the sight of Madam’s bright, but
curiously flat gaze as she regarded the body of her niece. The hair on the back
of his neck literally stood up, and he had to restrain himself to keep from
showing his teeth in a warning snarl.
You are responsible for this, Madam.
I don’t know how, but I know that
you
are responsible.

He had to control himself; he had to completely,
absolutely, control himself. He daren’t let a hint of what he felt show.

And he had to say things he not only didn’t mean, but
make suggestions he did not want followed. “—for tonight, it will
be enough to put her to bed and hope for the best, but if she has not regained
some signs of consciousness by tomorrow, you will need both a physician and
trained nurses,” he continued, knowing that if
he
showed any
signs of interest in Marina, Madam would find someone else.
Devilment…
she’ll want indifferent care at the best, and neglectful at the worst. I
have to convince her that this is what I represent. And to do that, I have to
pretend I don’t care about having her as a patient.
“A
physician to check on her welfare and try methods of bringing her awake, and
nurses to care for her physical needs. She will need to be tube-fed, cleaned,
turned—”

“What about you?” Reggie interrupted, his eyes
shrewd. “What about your people? You’re not that far away, why can’t
you come tend her here?”

“We have a full schedule at Briareley,” he
replied, feigning indifference, though his heart urged him to snatch Marina up,
throw her over his shoulder, and run for the carriage with her. “I cannot
spare any of my nurses, nor can I afford to take the time away from my own
patients to—”

“Then take her to Briareley,” Madam ordered,
quite as if she had the right to give him orders. “There’s the only
possible solution. Where best would it be to send her? You are here, Briareley
has the facilities, and you have the staff and the expertise.” She shrugged,
as if it was all decided. “We want the best for her, of course. It should
be clear to you that no one
here
knows what to do, and wouldn’t
it be more efficacious to get her professional help immediately?”

“It would be best—the sooner she has
professional care, the better—” he began.

Madam interrupted him. “What is your usual fee for
cases like this?”

She might have been talking about a coal-delivery, and if
he had been what she thought he was—

He had to react as if he was.

He didn’t
have
a usual fee for cases like
this because he’d never had one—but he blandly (and with open
skepticism, as if he expected them to balk) named a fee that would pay for a
half dozen more nurses and two more strong male attendants for Briareley, a fee
so exorbitant that he was sure they would at least attempt to bargain with him.
But he knew that he dared not name a price so low they would think he was eager
to get Marina to Briareley—much less simply volunteer to take her without
being paid. He had to look as if he was exactly what Madam thought him; a quack
who was only interested in what he could get for warehousing the weak-minded
and insane. He was walking a delicate line here; he had to make them think he
was motivated by nothing more than money, yet he didn’t dare do anything
that might cause them to send Marina elsewhere.

Stomach churned, jaws ached from being clenched, heart
pounded as if he’d been running. Everything told him to
get her out
of here
—

“Naturally,” Madam said, so quickly it made him
blink. “Poor Marina’s own inheritance will more than suffice to
cover your fees, and as her guardian, I will gladly authorize the disbursement.”
The Odious Reggie made a sound that started as a protest, but it faded when his
mother glared at him. “I’ll ring for a servant; she can be moved,
of course?”