The Gates of Sleep (49 page)

“Of course,” he agreed, then did a double take,
“You mean, you wish me to take her now? Tonight?”

“In the Oakhurst carriage, of course,” Madam
replied breezily. “I should think it would be the best thing of all for
her to be in the proper hands immediately. We know nothing—we might make
errors—she could even come to some harm at our hands.” The woman
gazed limpidly up at him. “You understand, don’t you, doctor? There
must be no question but what we did the best for her
immediately.
No
question at all.”

He shook, and strove to control his trembling, at the
implications behind those words. That this creature was already calculating
ahead to the moment when—she expected—Marina’s poor husk
would take its final breath, and Briareley would boast one less patient. If
nothing else would have told him that Madam was behind this, the cold
calculation in her words would have given him all the proof that he needed.
This had been planned, start to finish.

“Well,” he said slowly, concentrating very hard
on pulling on his gloves, “I can have no objection, if you are providing
the carriage. And-ah-I can expect my fee tomorrow? I bill for the month in
advance, after all.”

“Of course,” Madam agreed, and rang for a
servant.

Not one, but three appeared, and when Madam had explained
what she wanted, they disappeared, only to return with heavy carriage-rugs,
which they wrapped Marina in carefully. Then the largest of the three picked
her up.

“My people will show you to the carriage,”
Madam said, needlessly.

The first two servants beckoned to him to follow, and the
third carried Marina, following behind Andrew to the waiting carriage, his face
as full of woe as Madam’s was empty of that emotion.

The rain had stopped; they stepped out into a courtyard lit
by paraffin torches, puddles glinting yellow, reflecting the flames. A closed
carriage awaited, drawn by two restive horses; one of the servants opened the
carriage door, while the other pulled down the steps. Andrew got into the
waiting carriage first, followed by the giant carrying Marina, who took a seat
across from him, still cradling the girl against his shoulder. “Ready to
go, sir.”

Andrew blinked. He had expected the man to put his burden
on the seat and leave.
Madam didn’t order this.

But the look in the man’s eyes spoke volumes about
what he would do, whether or not Madam ordered it.

Good gad. She has the servants with her. No wonder
Madam was worried about appearances.

He cleared his throat as the carriage rolled forward into
the damp night, the sound of the wheels unnaturally loud, the horses’
hooves even louder. “When Miss Roeswood collapsed—did you see or
hear anything—ah—”

“Peter, sir,” the giant supplied.

“Yes, Peter—have you any idea what happened to
Miss Roeswood?” He waited to hear what the man would say with some
impatience. “Was she, perhaps, discussing something with Madam Arachne?”

“No, sir,” the young fellow sighed. “I
was polishing the silver, sir. Didn’t know nothing until Madam started
shrieking like a steam-whistle, sir. Then I came running, like everybody else.
We all came running, sir. Madam was standing by the fire, Miss was on the
hearth-rug in a heap, Master Reggie was running out the door.”

Interesting. “Madam screamed?” he prompted.

“Yes, sir. Said Miss Roeswood had took a fit and fell
down, sir, and that we was to send the carriage with Reggie to get you, on
account of that you have to do with people’s brains. Said it was likely a
brainstorm, sir.” The young man’s voice sounded woebegone, choked,
as if he was going to cry in the next moment. “I moved her to the couch,
sir, thinking it couldn’t do her any good to be a—lying on the
hearth—rug. I hope I didn’t do wrong, sir—I hope I didn’t
do her no harm—”

He hadn’t seen any sign that anyone had hit Marina
over the head—hadn’t seen any sign that she might have cracked her
own skull as she fell—so he was able to reassure the poor fellow that he
hadn’t done wrong. “This could be anything, Peter—but you did
right to get her up out of the cold drafts.”

“Sir—” the young man’s voice
cracked. “Sir, you
are
going to make her come out of this? You’re
going to fix her up? You aren’t going to go and stick her in a bed and
let her die, are you?”

Good Lord.
His spirits rose. Whatever devilment
Madam and her son had been up to at Oakhurst, it was clear that Marina had the
complete loyalty of the underservants. With that—if there were any signs
of what they’d been up to, all he had to do was ask for their help. And
then there would be a hundred eyes looking for it at his behest, and fifty
tongues ready to wag for him if he put out the word to them.

“I swear I am going to do my best, Peter,” he
said fiercely. “I swear it by all that’s holy. But if there was
anything going on—anything that Madam or her son were doing that might
have had something to do with what’s happened to Miss Roeswood—”
He groped after what to ask. “I don’t think this is an accident,
Peter. And I can think of a very good reason why Madam would want something
that
looks
like an accident to befall Miss Roeswood—”

“Say no more, sir.” Peter’s voice took on
a fierceness of its own. “I get your meaning. If there was aught going
on—well, you’ll be hearing of it. Hasn’t gone by us that
Madam’s to get Oakhurst if aught was to happen to Miss.”

He couldn’t see the young man’s face in the
darkness, but he didn’t have to. This young man was a stout young fellow,
a real Devonian, honest and trustworthy, and loyal to a fault. And not to
Madam.
Allies. Allies and spies, of the sort that Madam is likely to
disregard. By Heaven
—

“Thank you, Peter,” he said heavily, and then
hesitated. “There might be things you wouldn’t know to look
for—”

“Cook’s second cousin’s your cook,”
Peter interrupted, in what appeared to be a
non sequitor.
“And
your cook’s helper’s my Sally’s sister, what’s also her
niece. Happen that if someone were to come by the kitchen at teatime, just a
friendly visit, mind, and let drop what’s to be looked for,
well—the right people would find out to know what to winkle out.”

Good
God. Country life… connections and
connections, deep and complicated enough to get word to me no matter what.
“I may not know anything tomorrow—perhaps not for days,” he
warned.

“No matter. There’s always ears in kitchen,”
the young man asserted, then seemed to feel that he had said enough, and
settled back into silence for the rest of the journey, leaving Andrew to his
own thoughts. Thoughts were all he dared pursue at the moment. He didn’t
know what had been done, and he didn’t want to try anything magical until
Marina was safely inside triple-circles of protection. He certainly didn’t
want to try anything with the girl held in a stranger’s arms, a stranger
who might or might not be sensitive himself.

All he could do was to monitor her condition, and pray.

Andrew rubbed at gummy eyes and started at a trumpet call.

No. Not a trumpet call. He glanced out of the window behind
him, where the black night had lightened to a charcoal gray. Not a trumpet
call. A rooster.

It was dawn, heralded by the crowing of the cook’s
roosters out in the chicken—yard.

He turned his attention back to his patient, who could too
easily be a mannequin of wax. Marina lay now, dressed in a white nightgown, like
Snow White in the panto-face pale, hands lying still and cold on the woolen
coverlet, in a bed in a private room at the back of Briareley, a room triply
shielded, armored with every protection he knew how to devise. And she lay
quite without any change from when he had seen her at Oakhurst, silent and
unmoving but for the slight lift and fall of her breast. She lived—but
there was nothing
there,
no sense of her, no sense of anything.

No poison was in her veins, no blow to the head had sent
her into this state. In fact, he found no injury at all, nothing to account for
the way she was now. In desperation, he had even had one of the most sensitive
of his child-patients awakened and brought to her, and the boy had told him
that there was nothing in her mind—no dreams, no thoughts, nothing. “It’s
like she’s just a big doll,” the child had said, his fist jammed
against his mouth, shaking, eyes widened in alarm. “It ain’t even
like a beast or a bird—it’s just
empty
—” and
he’d burst into tears.

Eleanor had taken the boy away and soothed him to sleep,
and Andrew had known that he wouldn’t dare allow any more of his patients
to sense what Marina had become. He racked his brain for a clue to his next
move, for he had tried every thing that he knew how to do—ritual cleansing,
warding, shielding—his medical and medical-magic options were long since
exhausted. As the roosters crowed below the window, he sat with his aching head
in his hands, pulling sweat-dampened hair back from his temples, and tried to
think of
anything
more he could do. The fauns? Could
they
help? Would growth-magic awaken her? What if—

Someone knocked on the door, and opened it as he turned his
head. It was Eleanor, whose dark-circled eyes spoke of a night as sleepless as
his own. “There’s someone to see you, Doctor—” she
began.

“Dammit, Eleanor, I told—” he snapped,
when a tall and frantic-looking man with paint in his red-brown hair and
moustache pushed past her, followed by another, this one dark-haired and
tragic-eyed, and a woman who could only have been his sister, eyes red with
tears.

“God help us, we came as soon as we could,” the
man said, “We’d have telegraphed, but the fauns only found us last
night—and they were half-mad with fear. So we came—”

“And we felt what happened,” said the second man,
as the woman uttered a heart-broken cry and went to her knees beside Marina. “On
the train. Christ have mercy—how could we not have!”

“Fauns?” Andrew said, confused for a moment. “Train—”
then it dawned on him. “You’re Marina’s guardians?”

“Damn poor guardians,” the tall man said in
tones of despair. “Sebastian Tarrant, my wife Margherita, her brother
Thomas Buford. Lady Elizabeth’s on the way; we left word at the station
where to go, but half the town already knows Marina’s here, and the other
half will by breakfast—oh, and she’ll sense us, too, no doubt.”

“It’s the curse,” the woman said, lifting
a tear-stained face. “It’s the curse, right enough. Damn her!
Damn
her!” and she began to cry. Her brother gathered her to his shoulder,
trying to comfort her, and by the look of it, having no success.

“Curse?” Andrew asked, bewildered by the
intruders, their sudden spate of words that made no sense—the only
sense
he had was that these people were the ones he had sought for, Marina’s
guardians. “What curse?” There was only one thing he needed, needed
as breath, to know. “What’s
happened
to Marina? I’ve
tried everything—”

“Stronger Masters than you have tried everything, and
the best they could do was to warp that black magic so that it sent her to
sleep instead of killing her,” Sebastian Tarrant said gruffly, and patted
him on the shoulder awkwardly. He glanced at the bed, and groaned. “And
there’s nothing we can do in the next hour that’s going to make any
difference, either.”

Andrew shook his head, and blinked eyes that burned as he
squinted at the stranger’s face, trying to winkle out the sense of what
he was hearing. A curse… a curse on Marina.
But—who—how—why? The man’s eyes shone brightly, as if
with tears that he refused to shed. “You look done in, man,” Tarrant
continued. “Come show me the kitchen and let’s get some strong tea
and food into you. I’ll explain while you eat; you aren’t going to
do her any good by falling over.”

Sebastian Tarrant’s will was too strong to be denied;
Andrew found himself being carried off to Briareley’s kitchen, where he
was fussed over by cook and seated at the trestle table where a half dozen
loaves of bread were rising, a mug of hot black tea and a breakfast big enough
for three set in front of him. He ate it, untasted, as Sebastian Tarrant
narrated a story that—if he had not seen Marina—would have sounded
like the veriest fairy tale. A tale of a curse on a baby, an exile to keep her
safe, and all the plans undone. A tale of blackest magic, sent from a bitter
woman who should have had none—

“And now I’m sorry we didn’t follow her
here, and damned to Madam,” Tarrant said, the guilt in his face so
overwhelming that Andrew didn’t have the heart to take him to task over
it. “But we were afraid that if we showed our faces in the village,
Arachne would take her somewhere we couldn’t follow, or worse. At least
while she was here, we figured that Arachne hadn’t worked out a way to
make her curse active again, and we knew she wouldn’t dare try
anything—well—obvious and physical in front of people who’d
known and served Hugh and Alanna. And the child didn’t write, so we had
to assume that Arachne was keeping too close a watch on her for us to try and
contact her that way.” Tarrant rubbed at his own eyes, savagely. “Dear
God, how could we have been such cowards, such fools?”

“But—what is this curse?” he asked
finally. “How on earth can something like that do what it did?”

“You tell me how someone without the least little bit
of magic of her own could create such a thing,” Tarrant countered, wearily,
running his hands through his hair and flaking off a few bits of white and
yellow paint. “Not a sign, not
one
sign of the Mastery of any of
the Elements on Arachne or her son—so where is the magic coming from? And
how are they able to channel it, if they aren’t Masters and aren’t
sensitive to it? But it’s there, all right, if you know what to look for,
or at least
I
saw it—the curse-magic is on Marina, like a
shield, only lying right under her skin, a poisonous inner skin—a
blackish-green fire, and pure evil—”