The Gates of Sleep (7 page)

It wasn’t her business why Elizabeth had married him,
when all was said and done. Perhaps, besides a certain amount of affection, it
had been because he was so
very
incurious, so utterly without
imagination, that she could carry on her Magical Workings without rousing any
interest in him. That arrangement wouldn’t have suited
Margherita—but it was infinitely better than having to sneak about in
deathly fear of being caught. And if one couldn’t find someone to
love—society being what it was, a woman of Elizabeth’s position had
little choice except to marry—the best compromise was to find someone it
was possible to be friends with.

“I’ll write her,” Margherita said. “Unless
you want to use a dove to send her a message?” She cast a glance of
inquiry at Thomas. He shook his head.

“It’s not that urgent, not while Marina has
other things to occupy her. There’s plenty to do around here until the
end of harvest,” he said.

“I’ll
find
things for her to do,”
Margherita and Sebastian said together, then looked at each other and laughed.

“It’s settled, then,” Margherita said for
both of them, and felt a certain relief. That would be one more person here to
watch over Marina as well. One more pair of eyes—one more set of powers.

Most importantly, someone to help the child master the
powers that would protect her better than any of them could.

“And just
what is it that you are thinking about
that makes you frown so?”
asked the Undine. Her pointed chin rested
on her hands, her elbows propped on the bank of the brook. The faintly greenish
cast to her skin was something that Marina was so used to seeing that she
seldom noticed it unless, like now, she stopped to study an Undine’s
expression.

The Undines didn’t trouble themselves with individual
names; at least, they never gave
her
their names. Though that might
simply have been excessive caution on their part. Names had power, after all.

“Was I frowning?” Marina asked. She rubbed her
forehead; on the whole, she really didn’t want to discuss her internal
conflicts with an Undine that wouldn’t understand anyway. Undines didn’t
have parents, at least, not so far as Marina knew, just sisters. Marina had
never seen anything but female Undines. “Just concentrating, I suppose.”

“Well, at least you aren’t shouting your
thoughts anymore,”
the Undine replied, with a toss of her
green-blond hair.
“You ought to
stop
thinking and come have
a swim. It won’t be long before it’s too cold—for you,
anyway. Enjoy yourself while you still can.”

“You’re right,” she agreed, only too
pleased to leave the problem of her parents to sort itself out another day. The
Undine laughed liquidly, and plunged under the surface of the brook to
become—literally—one with the water. For all intents and purposes,
the Undine vanished in a froth of foam and a wave.

Marina followed the brook upstream, above the little falls,
to a pond the family waterfowl seldom visited. It stood in the midst of a water
meadow, and the verge was dense with protective reeds. An intensely green scent
hung over the pond; not the scent of rotting vegetation, nor the stale smell of
scum, just the perfume of a healthy watering hole densely packed with growing
things. In fact, the water was pure and clear, thanks to a fine population of
little fish and frogs. Herons came here to hunt, and the smaller, shy birds of
the reed beds, but never any people—if the folk of the neighboring farm
knew about this place, they didn’t think it held fish large enough to
bother with, and her own family left her alone here. This was Marina’s
summertime retreat by common consent, and had been since she was old enough to
come up here alone. It wasn’t as if she could get into any trouble in the
water, after all—even in the roughest horseplay, the Undines would never
permit her to come to harm in her proper element. She had been able to swim,
and be safe in the water, since before she could walk.

She slipped out of her dress and petticoat and underthings
and left them folded on a rock concealed among the reeds, where they would
remain safe and dry without advertising the fact that there was someone
swimming here to anyone who might be passing. This time of year there were
always strangers, itinerant harvesters, and gypsies passing through the
village. The villagers themselves might not come here, but the strangers,
looking for a place to camp, might happen upon it by accident. Not the gypsies,
though; the Undines managed to warn them off.

There hadn’t been anyone around the pond today, or
the Undine wouldn’t have invited her to swim. They might not understand
much about a mortal’s life, but they did understand that strange men
lurking about could be a danger to Marina.

She took a moment to tie her hair loosely at the nape of
her neck, then slipped into the sun-warmed water wearing nothing more than her
own skin.

Immediately she was surrounded by Undines wearing nothing
more than theirs, and an exuberant game of tag began. She was at a partial
disadvantage, not being able to breathe underwater, but she managed to
compensate with her longer reach. There was a great deal of splashing and
giggling as they chased one another. The warm water caressed Marina’s
skin like the brush of warmed silk; as the Undines slid past her, a tingle of
energy passed between them, a little like the tingle in the air before
lightning strikes. The pond was surprisingly deep for its small size, and as
she dove under to elude a pursuer or to chase her own quarry, she reveled in
the shock of encountering a cooler layer of water beneath the sun-warmed
surface. Other, lesser Elementals gathered to watch, chattering excitedly among
the reeds, applauding when someone made a particularly clever move. A family of
otters appeared out of nowhere and joined in the fun, and the game changed from
one of tag to one of “catch the otter” by common consent.

The otters took to this new game with all the enthusiasm
that they brought to any endeavor, and soon the pond was alive with splashing
and shrill laughter. Undines chased otters in every direction; slippery otters
slid right through Marina’s fingers, though truth to tell, she didn’t
try very hard to hold them. It was more fun watching them twist and turn in the
water to avoid capture than it was to try and wrestle a squirming body that
just might deliver an accidental nasty kick—with claws!—if you
weren’t careful.

Only when Marina was completely out of breath did she
retreat to her rocks and watch the Undines continue the game on their own. The
smallest of the otters evidently ran out of energy at the same time, and joined
her. After she combed out her hair with her fingers and coaxed most of the
water out of it, she stroked the otter’s smooth, dense fur and scratched
its head as it sighed with content and erected its stiff whiskers in an
otter-smile. It rolled over on its back, begging for her to scratch its tummy.
She chuckled, and obliged.

But the sun was westering; it was past teatime, and neither
the Undines nor the otters seemed prepared to give up their game any time soon.
They might be perfectly free to play until dark and afterwards, but she did
have things to do. Reluctantly, she donned her clothing
again—reluctantly, because after the freedom of being in the water, it
seemed heavy and confining—pulled her skirts up above her knees, and
waded back to dry land.

She stopped in the orchard long enough to retrieve her
basket of apples and her book. With the basket swinging from one hand, she took
her time strolling back to the farmhouse.

In the late afternoon sunlight, the gray granite glowed
with mellow warmth. When winter came, the stone would look cold and forbidding,
but now, with all the doors and windows open, flowers in the window boxes, and
roses twining up trellises along the sides, it was a welcoming sight.

Tea was over, but as she’d expected, Aunt Margherita
had left her scones, watercress sandwiches, and a little pot of clotted cream
in the kitchen under a cheesecloth. There was no tea, but there was hot water
on the stove, and she quickly made her own late repast. She arranged the apples
she’d brought in a pottery bowl on the kitchen table, and retreated to
her room to fetch her work. After her swim, she was feeling languid, and her
window seat, surrounded by ivy with a fine view of the hills and the sunset,
seemed very inviting. Uncle Sebastian would be fiddling with his
Saint
Joan,
working on the background, probably; Uncle Thomas was carving an
occasional table, a swoopy thing all organic curves. And Aunt Margherita was
probably either at her embroidery or her tapestry loom.

Her uncles expected a great deal of her in her studies;
they saw no reason why she couldn’t have as fine an education as any
young man who could afford the sort of tutor that Sebastian’s father had
been. Granted, neither Sebastian nor Thomas had attended university, but if
they’d had the means or had truly wanted to they
could
have. So,
for that matter, could Aunt Margherita. Perhaps women could not aspire to a
university degree, but they were determined that should she choose to attend
the single women’s college at Oxford regardless of that edict, she would
be as well or better prepared than any young man who presented himself to any
of the colleges there. She was not particularly enamored of the idea of closing
herself up in some stifling building (however hallowed) for several years with
a gaggle of young women she didn’t even know, but she did enjoy the
lessons. At the moment she was engaged in puzzling her way through Chaucer in
the original Middle English, the
Canterbury Tales
having caught Uncle
Sebastian’s fancy. She had a shrewd notion that she knew what the
subjects of his next set of paintings was likely to be.

Well, at least it will be winter by the time he gets to
them.
If she was going to have to wear the heavy medieval robes that Uncle
Sebastian had squirreled away, at least it would be while it was cold enough
that the weight of the woolens and velvets would be welcome rather than
stifling.

At the moment, it was the Wife of Bath’s Tale that
was the subject of her study, and she had the feeling that she would get a
better explanation of some of it from Aunt Margherita than from the uncle that
had assigned it to her. Uncle Sebastian was not
quite
as broad-minded
as he thought he was.

Or perhaps he just wasn’t as broad-minded with regard
to his “niece” as he would have been around a young woman who wasn’t
under his guardianship. With Marina, he tended to break out in odd spots of
ultra-middle-class stuffiness from time to time.

She curled herself up in the window seat, a cushion at her
back, with her Chaucer in one hand, a copybook on her knee, and a pencil at the
ready. If one absolutely
had
to study on such a lovely late afternoon,
this was certainly the only way to do so.

SEBASTIAN had gone down to pick up the post in the village;
no one else wanted to venture out into the October rain and leave the warmth of
the cottage. Marina was supposed to be reading Shakespeare—her uncle was
making good his threat to paint her as Kate the Shrew and wanted her to become
familiar with the part—but she sat at the window of the parlor and stared
out at the rain instead. Winter had definitely arrived, with Halloween a good
three weeks away. A steady, chilling rain dripped down through leafless branches
onto grass gone sere and brown-edged. Even the evergreens and the few plants
that kept their leaves throughout the winter looked dark and dismal. The air
outside smelled of wet leaves; inside the foyer where the coats hung, the odor
of wet wool hung in a miasma of perpetual damp. Only in the foyer, however.
Scented candles burned throughout the house, adding the perfume of honey and
cinnamon to counteract the faint chemical smell of the oil lamps, and someone
was always baking something in the kitchen that formed a pleasant counter to
the wet wool.

And yet, for Marina at least, the weather wasn’t
entirely depressing. Water, life-giving, life-bearing water was all around her.

If the air smelled only dank to the others, for her there
was an undercurrent of
potential.
She sensed the currents of faint
power that followed each drop of rain, she tasted it, like green tea in the
back of her throat, and stirred restlessly, feeling as if there ought to be
something she should do with that power.

She heard the door open and shut in the entranceway, and
Uncle Sebastian shake out his raincape before hanging it up. He went straight
to the kitchen, though, so there must not have been any mail for her.

She didn’t expect any; her mother didn’t write
as often in winter. It was probably a great deal more difficult to get letters
out from Italy than it was to send them from Oakhurst in England.

Italy.
She wondered what it would be like to spend
a winter somewhere that wasn’t cold, wet, and gray. Was Tuscany by the sea?

I’d love to visit the sea.

“I don’t suppose you remember Elizabeth
Hastings, do you?” asked Margherita from the door behind her. She turned;
her aunt had a letter in her hand, her dark hair bound up on the top of her
head in a loose knot, a smudge of flour on her nose.

“Vaguely. She’s that Water magician with the
title, isn’t she?” Marina closed the volume in her lap with another
stirring of interest. “The one with the terribly—terribly correct
husband?”

Margherita laughed, her eyes merry. “The
only
one with a ‘terribly—terribly correct husband’ that has ever
visited us, yes. She’s coming to spend several weeks with us—to
teach you.”

Now she had Marina’s complete interest. “Me?
What—oh! Water magic?” Interest turned to excitement, and a thrill
of anticipation.