The Gates of Sleep

“It would fit the facts,” Arachne said, as if musing to herself. “My brother’s refusal to see, speak, or even write to me, their reclusiveness, the fact that he sent you away. He could have been protecting you—from her.”

It was a horrible thought. And one which, as Arachne pointed out, did fit the facts.

And it would explain why the uncles and my aunt wouldn’t tell me why I’d been sent away. And why the reason was never, ever brought up in those letters.

Now, Marina knew that the little whimsical creatures that her mother had described really did exist—and had lived in her garden. But just because an Elemental Master was able to work magic and see the creatures of her element, it did not follow that she was sane… in fact, Elemental Masters had been known to become deranged by the very power that they wielded. Especially after a great stress, such as a death, an accident—or childbirth.

So what if that had happened to Alanna? Then Hugh would have wanted to get the infant Marina as far away from her as possible—he was protected against anything she might do, magically, but a baby would not be. And who better to send her to than the Tarrants, whose power could block Alanna’s?

It all made hideous sense. “I have to wonder if you are right, Madam Arachne,” she said slowly. “It does explain a number of things. In fact, it is the only explanation that fits all of the facts as I know them.”

She felt a horrible guilt then; here, all this time, she had been blaming her parents for sending her away, when they were protecting her, and in the only way possible! And those letters, filled with anguish and longing—had they come from a mother who dared not bring her child home lest she harm it? What worse heartbreak could there be?

Without Marina realizing it, Arachne had bent forward, and now she seized Marina’s hand. “It is only a theory, child. Nothing more. And I know—I know—that if nothing else, your mother must have been quite well and in her full wits when they went to Italy this year. I am certain, as certain as I am of my own name, that your parents intended to bring you here after your eighteenth birthday. Everything that I have found in their papers points to that.”

When I would be able to protect myself, even if mother wasn’t quite right yet. She nodded. “I think, from the letters I got, that you are right.”

Arachne released her hand. “I hope I haven’t distressed you, child. I didn’t intend to.”

“I’m sure not—” Marina faltered. “But you have given me a great deal to think about.”

Arachne made shooing motions with her hands. “In that case, dear child, perhaps you ought to go to your room where you can think in peace.”

Marina took the hint, and rose. “Thank you. I believe that I will.”

But as she turned to leave, she caught sight of her aunt’s expression; unguarded for once.

Satisfaction. And triumph. As if she had won a high wager.

Chapter Twelve

MARY Anne did not ride. Mary Anne was, in fact, afraid of horses. It was all very well for them to be at one end of a carriage, strapped in and harnessed up, while she was at the other, but she could not, would not be anywhere near one that was loose or under saddle. And for once, not even Arachne’s iron will prevailed. When confronted with the order to take to saddle, Mary Anne gave notice. Arachne rescinded the order. Or so Sally had told Marina, in strictest confidence.

Supposedly a groom was detailed to ride with Marina for her safety. Supposedly, in fact, a groom was to lead her horse (as if she was a toddler on a pony) in a parody of riding. In actuality, the stableman took one look at her firm and expert seat, her easy control of the reins, and the way in which she could handle every beast in the stables (not that there were any horses that Marina would call troublesome) and snorted with contempt at the very idea. “I’m shorthanded enough as ‘tis,” he said, “‘thout sending out one on fool’s errands. The day Hugh Roeswood’s daughter needs to be in leading-strings is the day they put me to pasture.”

So Marina (whether or not Arachne was aware of it) rode alone, and for the last week, she had gone out every day for at least an hour.

She was learning the paths and the lanes around Oakhurst slowly, for the horse that the stableman assigned to her was a placid little mare, disinclined to move out of a walk unless there was a powerful incentive. But the old hunter that Marina used to ride at Blackbird Cottage was the same, and on the whole, she would rather ride a sedate and predictable horse than a spirited, but unpredictable one.

She took great pleasure in her riding habit, of black wool and trimmed with fur, not the least because it came with a riding-corset that allowed her almost as much freedom as going uncorseted. She needed it; she needed her riding-cloak as well, for it was cold, with snow lying deeply on the fields, and especially in the lee of the banks and hedges. There might be more snow some time soon, though for now, nothing much had come from the cloud-covered sky.

Her rides had taken her down to the vicarage on two visits so far—not too often, and only by invitation, which Mr. Davies had been punctilious about sending up to the house after his teatime visit the Monday afternoon following her foray to church. In fact, she would be going there today on a third visit, this time with a peculiar bag slung over her shoulder.

She’d seen this bag in the gun room—dragged there by Reggie so that he could boast about previous triumphs in the field—and rather thought it was a falconer’s game bag. Whatever its original purpose in life, it was now a carryall when she went riding, as it sat very nicely on her hip and was large enough to carry almost anything. Today it held copies of her embroidery patterns, tracing paper, her spare pricking-wheel, and pounce bags of chalk and charcoal.

Whenever Margherita (or Sebastian, at her behest) had created an embroidery pattern, Marina had made a copy; she had an entire portfolio of them now. The vicar had asked for her suggestions for items for the parish booth at the annual May Day Fair on her first visit. She suspected that he hoped for items from Oakhurst for the jumble table, but she knew that her mother had contributed a great many white elephants over the years to little purpose. Marina had a better idea, and had asked him to gather the materials—and people—she needed to make it work.

When she arrived at the vicarage, she left her horse tied up at the gate, for she didn’t expect to be very long. At her request, the vicar had gathered the women of the Parish Society together, and at her entrance into his rather bare parlor, a dozen pairs of curious eyes turned toward her. She smiled, and received some smiles, some nods, and one or two wary looks in return as he introduced her.

Following her instructions, he had arranged for a worktable in the middle of the room, and supplied some scrap fabric, which lay atop it. The worktable looked to be purloined from the kitchen and the ladies of the parish sat around it on a motley assortment of chairs, none new, most ancient. A cheerful fire in the fireplace warmed the air sufficiently that they had dispensed with their coats and cloaks, but all had kept their bonnets on, and a wide variety of hat ornaments bobbed in her direction.

“Good afternoon, ladies!” she said cheerfully. “I’m sure you know that I’m Marina Roeswood. I hope you don’t mind my putting myself forward like this; Mr. Davies thought, because I was fostered with the Tarrants of Blackbird Cottage, who are well-known artists, I might have some original ideas for the goods for this year’s parish booth—and as a matter of fact, I do.”

With no further preamble, she took her supplies from the falconer’s bag and proceeded to show the women how a professional seamstress, embroideress, or modiste transferred an embroidery pattern from paper to fabric. They watched with amazement as she ran the pricking-wheel over the penciled design, then laid the now-perforated paper on a piece of fabric and used the pounce-bag along the lines of the design, tapping it expertly and firmly on the paper.

“There, you see?” she said, removing the paper to show the design picked out in tiny dots of white chalk. “Now, the last step is to baste the lines of the design before the chalk brushes off, and there you are! On dark fabric, you use a chalk-bag; on light, a charcoal-bag. And this system allows you to use the pricked pattern over and over, as many times as you like, doesn’t mark the fabric, and is a great deal less fussy than sewing over the paper pattern.”

The vicar proclaimed himself astonished. The women—the wives and daughters of the shopkeepers and the well-to-do farmers—were delighted. As with most amateur embroideresses, they had either stitched through a paper pattern, forcing them to use it only once, or had drawn their patterns inaccurately on the fabric itself when the fabric was too dark or thick to use as tracing paper. Many a fine piece of cambric or silk had been ruined this way when the marks made by the pencil wouldn’t come out—many lovely designs had been executed off center or lopsided.

“And these are all very new and fashionable designs, similar to the ones that Messrs. Morris & Co. is producing, but quite original,” she told them, spreading out the sheets of patterns before their eyes. “My Aunt Margherita Tarrant is known all over England for her art-embroidery, and has produced lovely things with these designs for some of the best homes in London and Plymouth.”

That won them over, completely, and with these new designs and tools, there was great excitement over what manner of things might be made. Marina helped them to parcel out patterns, tracing them so that more than one copy could be dispensed, and running the wheel over them since there was only the one wheel to share among the lot of them. As they worked, they were happily discussing fire screens, cushions, antimacassars, and any number of other delights. No one else would have anything like this in the three other parish booths from the churches that regularly had booths at the May Day Fair. Every one of these ladies would make something that she would like to have in her own home. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise Marina in the least to discover that each would make two projects at a time—one to sell and one to keep. As that cheerful fire further warmed the room, the ladies warmed to Marina—who had, of course, seen exactly the items that had been originally made with these patterns, and was ready to offer advice as to materials and color schemes. Mr. Davies beamed on them all impartially; from the scent of baking, his old housekeeper was making ginger biscuits to serve the ladies for tea.

But the spicy scent perfumed the air in a way that shook her unexpectedly with memories of home, and suddenly, she couldn’t bear to be there—among strangers—

“Have I left you with enough to occupy you, ladies?” she asked, quickly, around a rising lump in her throat. “For I believe my guardian will be expecting me back—”

By this time, the gossip was flying thick and fast as well as discussion of fabrics and colors and stitches, but it stopped dead at her question. The ladies looked at one another, and the eldest, old Mrs. Havershay, took it upon herself to act as spokeswoman. “Thank you, Miss! We’re ever so much obliged to you,” she said, managing to sound both autocratic (which she was, as acknowledged leader of her circle) and grateful at the same time.

“Oh, thank you,” she replied, flushing. “You’ve no idea what a good time I’ve had with you, here. I hope—”

But she couldn’t have said what she hoped; they wouldn’t have understood why she wished she could join their sewing circle. She was gentry; they were village. The gap was insurmountable.

As the others discussed projects, love affairs, and business of the village, one of the younger—and prettier—of the daughters helped her gather her hat, cloak, and gloves and escorted her to the door. “Thank you, Miss Roeswood; we were all dreading what sort of crack-brained notion the vicar might have had for us when he told us you were going to show us your ideas for the booth,” she said, and hesitated, then continued, “and we were afraid that he might be letting—ah—kindliness—get ahead of him. He’s a kindly gentleman, we all like him, but he’s never done a charity booth before.”

“He’s a very kind and very pleasant gentleman,” she agreed readily. “And don’t underestimate him, because he’s also quite intelligent. As you’ve seen, sometimes a new idea is better than what’s been traditional.”

“True, miss, and even though some folks would rather we had our old vicar back, well, he was a good man, but he’s dead, and they aren’t going to get him back, so at least Mr. Davies is one of us, and they ought to get to like him as much as us young ones, But please—some of us—”

Marina gave her a penetrating look, and she seemed to lose her courage, and blurted, “—we’ve been wondering about what you think of our vicar, what with making three visits in the week, and—”

She clapped her hand over her mouth and looked appalled at what she had let slip. Marina just chuckled.

“You mean, have I any designs on him myself, hmm?” she whispered, and the girl turned beet red. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, and surely had what schoolgirls called a “pash” for the amiable young man. Marina suddenly felt very old and worldly wise.

“My dear Miss Horn, I promise you that my only interest in our good vicar extends to his ability to play chess,” she said soberly. “And his ability to compose and deliver an interesting, inspiring, and enlightening sermon,” she added as an afterthought.

“Oh.” The girl turned pale, then red again, and ducked her head. Marina patted her hand, and turned to go.

The meeting with the ladies had taken less than an hour; she hadn’t expected it to take much longer, truth to tell. The cold air on her cheeks made enough of a distraction to get her tears swallowed down, and she mounted her horse feeling that she had done her duty, in more ways than one. If Arachne expected her back as soon as she finished, well, she was going to take her time, and never mind the cold.

“And she believed it?”

Arachne smiled; Reggie’s expression could not be more gratifying, compounded as it was of equal parts of astonishment, admiration, and envy. He leaned back into his chair in her personal sitting room, a lush and luxurious retreat furnished with pieces she had taken from all over the house when she first arrived here, and smiled. “Mater,” he continued, “That was brilliant! I never would have considered suggesting to Marina that her mother was a candidate for a sanitarium.”

“It honestly didn’t occur to me until I was in the middle of that conversation with her,” Arachne admitted. “But the child is so utterly unmagical—and seems to have been brought up that way—that when she was describing the letters her mother sent her about the Elemental creatures in the garden I suddenly realized how insane such tales would seem to someone who was not a mage.” Her hand unconsciously caressed the chocolate-colored velvet of her chair. “Ah, that reminds me—you have cleared out the miserable little fauns and such from the grounds, haven’t you?”

Reggie snorted. “A lamb sacrificed at each cardinal point drove them out quickly enough. All sweetness and light, was your Hugh’s precious Alanna—the Earth Elementals she had around here couldn’t bear the first touch of blood on the soil.”

Arachne smiled. “When we make this place ours, we shall have to use something more potent than lambs. And speaking of lambs—”

He quirked an eyebrow. “I have two replacements safe enough, both with the magic in them, both just turned ten.”

“Two?” She eyed him askance.

He sighed. “Besides the one that I took off to die, I lost a second that was carried off by a relative. Pity, that. She had just come to realize what was going to happen to her with that much lead in her. Her hands were starting to go. But the ones I’ve got to replace them are orphans off the parish rolls, and both are Earth, which should bolster our power immensely in that element.”

Arachne smiled. “Lovely,” she purred. “You are a wonderful pupil, dear.” She raised her cup of chocolate to her lips and sipped, savoring the sting of brandy in it.

“You are a wonderful teacher, Mater,” he replied slyly, and her smile broadened. “Fancy learning that you could steal the magic from those who haven’t come into their powers. I wouldn’t have thought of that—” He raised his glass of wine to her in a toast.

“It was others who thought of it before I did,” Arachne admitted, but with a feeling of great satisfaction. “Even if none of them were as efficient as I am.”

“That’s my mater; a model of modern efficiency. You took one ramshackle old pottery and made it into four that are making money so fast you’d think we were coining it.” He chuckled. “And in another six months?”

“There is a fine deposit of porcelain clay on this property, access to rail and water, near enough to Barnstaple for cheap sea shipping, plenty of water…” She flexed her fingers slightly as if they were closing around something she wanted very much. “And cheap labor.”

“And it is so very quiet here,” Reggie prompted slyly. “Well, Mater, I’m doing my part. I’m playing court to the little thing, and I expect I’ll have her one way or another by the summer, if your side doesn’t come in. Have you discovered anything? Just between the two of us, I’d as soon not find myself leg-shackled; it does cut down on a fellow’s fun, no matter how quiet the little wife is.” He shrugged at her sardonic expression. “There’s the social connections to think about, don’t you know. They don’t mind winking at a bit of jiggery-pokery when a fellow’s single, but once he’s married, he daren’t let ‘em find out about it, or they’ll cut him.”

She smiled, but sourly. “Ah, society. Well, once married, you needn’t stay married to her long.”

He frowned at that; the sulky frown he had whenever he was balked. “I’d still rather you found a way to make that curse of yours work,” he told her crossly. “Folk start to talk if a fellow’s wife dies right after the wedding. And this isn’t the middle ages, you know. There’s inquests, coroners’ juries, chemical tests—”

“That will do, Reggie,” she said sharply. “At the moment, we have a number of options, which include you remaining married to the girl. She doesn’t have to die to suit our purposes. She only needs to sicken and take to her bed.” She allowed a smile to cross her lips. “And no one would censure you very strongly for a little peccadilloes if you were known to have an invalid wife.”

“Hmm. And if I had an—institutionalized wife?” he ventured brightening. “A wife who followed—but perhaps, more dangerously—in the footsteps of her mother?”

She blinked. “Why Reggie—that is not a bad notion at all! What if we allowed some rumors about Alanna to spread down into the village? What would Marina think, having heard of her own mother’s fantasies, if she began seeing things?”

“A mix of illusions created by magic and those created by stage-magic?” he prompted further, a malicious smile on his lips. “Your expertise—and mine? Why, she might even be driven to suicide!”

She laughed aloud, something she did so rarely that she startled herself with the sound. “Ah, Reggie! What a team we make!”

“That we do, Mater,” he agreed, a smile spreading over his handsome face. “That we do. Now—I believe I have every detail set for tonight, but just go over the plans with me once again.”

The mare, whose unimaginative name was Brownie, was probably the steadiest beast that Marina had ever seen. And she knew these lanes and paths far, far better than Marina did. At the moment, they were on the lane that ran along the side of another great estate called Briareley Hall, a pounded—dirt track studded with rocks like the raisins in a cake, wide enough for a hay wain pulled by two horses, with banks and hedgerows on either side that went well above Marina’s head even when she was in the saddle. The bank itself, knobby with the roots of the hedge planted on it, came as high as Marina’s own knee. The road was in shadow most of the day because of the hedgerows, and snow lingered in the roots of the hedgerow and the edges of the road no matter how bright the sun elsewhere. Brownie knew that she was on her way home, back to stable and oats and perhaps an apple, so her usual shambling walk had turned into a brisk one—nearly, but not quite, a trot. Marina was thinking of a hot cup of strong tea in the kitchen to fortify herself against the insipid tea she would get with Madam. She had ridden this route often enough to know that there was nothing particularly interesting on it, as well. So when Brownie suddenly threw up her head and shied sideways, she was taken completely by surprise.

Fortunately, the little mare was too fat and too indolent by nature to do anything, even shy, quickly or violently. It was more like a sideways stumble, a couple of bumbling steps in which all four feet got tangled up. Marina was startled, but too good a rider to be thrown, though she had to grab the pommel of the sidesaddle and drop the reins, holding on for dear life and throwing all of her weight onto the stirrup to brace herself against the sidesaddle. Her stomach lurched, and her heart raced, but she didn’t lose her head, and fortunately, neither did Brownie.

When Brownie’s feet found purchase again, the mare slung her head around and snorted indignantly at the thing that had frightened her.

Sweet heaven—it’s a person—it’s a girl!

A girl, huddled into the roots and frozen earth at the foot of the hedgerow. And one glance at the white, terrified face of that girl huddled at the side of the road sent Marina flying out of the saddle that Brownie’s antics hadn’t been able to budge her from.

The girl, dressed in nothing more than a nightgown and dressing-gown, with oversized slippers half falling off her feet, had scrambled backward and wedged herself in among the roots and the frozen dirt and weeds of the bank. Marina had never seen a human so utterly terrified in her life—

If her mouth hadn’t been twisted up in a silent scream, if her eyes hadn’t been so widened with fear that the whites showed all around them, she would have been pretty.

But she was thin, so very thin, and her skin was so pale the blue veins showed through. Too thin to be pretty anymore, unless your taste ran to the waiflike and skeletal.

All of that was secondary to the girl’s terror, and instinctively, as she would have with a frightened animal, Marina got down on her knees and held out one hand, making soothing sounds at her She heard Brownie snort behind her, then the unmistakable sound of the horse nosing at the sere grasses and weeds among the roots.

Good, she won’t be going anywhere for a while, greedy pig.

“It’s all right, dear. It is. I’m a friend.” she said softly, trying to win past that terror to some kernel of sanity. If one existed.

From the way the girl’s eyes were fixed on something off to Marina’s right, Marina had a notion that the child wasn’t seeing her, but something else. A tiny thread of sound, a strangled keening, came out of her throat; the sound of a soul certain that it was on the verge of destruction.

Except, of course, there was nothing there. At least, Marina thought there was nothing there.

Just to be sure, Marina stole a glance in the direction that the girl was looking, and made sure there was nothing of an occult nature there. Just in case. It was always possible that the girl herself had a touch—or more than a touch—of Elemental Magery about her and could see such things.

But there wasn’t; nothing more alarming than sparrows in the hedges, no magic, not even a breath of power. Whatever this poor creature saw existed only in her own mind.

Marina crept forward a little; even through the thick wool of her skirt and three petticoats, she felt the cold of the frozen ground and the pebbles embedded in it biting into her knees and the palm of the hand that supported her. “It’s all right, dear. I’ll help you. I’ll protect you.” Her breath puffed out whitely with each word, but the girl still didn’t seem to notice she was there.

Then—all at once, she did. Her eyes rolled like a frightened horse’s, and the girl moved her head a little; it was a jerky, not-quite-controlled movement. And at the same time, her right hand flailed out sideways and hit a root, hard, hard enough to scrape it open. Marina gasped and bit her lip at the thought of how it should hurt.

The girl didn’t react, not even with a wince. Exactly as if she hadn’t even felt it.

There’s more wrong with her than I thought. There’s something physically wrong with her. As if it’s not bad enough that she’s seeing monsters that aren’t there!

She heard a horse trotting briskly along the lane, coming from the direction in which she’d been riding. Purposeful sounds; whoever was riding or driving knew where he was going.

Good—maybe that’s help.

A light breeze whipped a strand of hair across her eyes and chilled her cheeks. She didn’t take her eyes off the girl, though. There was no telling whether or not the poor thing was going to bolt, or try to, any moment now. And dressed as she was, if she ran off somewhere and succeeded in hiding, she wouldn’t last out the night. Not in no more than a nightgown, dressing gown and slippers.

The hoofbeats stopped; Marina risked a glance to the side to see who, or what, had arrived. Even if it isn’t help—surely if I call out for assistance, whoever it is will help me try to catch her.

A horse and cart waited there, just on Marina’s side of the next curve in the road. A tall, muscular gentleman, hatless, but wearing a suit, was walking slowly toward them, looking entirely at the girl. But the words he spoke, in a casual, cheerful voice, were addressed to Marina.

“Thank you, miss, you’re doing exactly the right thing. Keep talking to her. Her name is Ellen, and she’s a patient of mine. I’m Dr. Pike.”

Marina nodded, and crooned to the girl, edging toward her as Pike approached from the other side. As long as they kept her between them, she didn’t have a clean escape route.

Marina tried to catch the girl’s eye again. “Ellen. Ellen, look at me—”

The wandering eye fell on her, briefly. Marina tried to hold it. “Listen, Ellen, some help has come for you, but you mustn’t run away. Stay where you are, Ellen, and everything will be all right.”

The newcomer added his voice. “Ellen! Ellen, child, it’s Doctor Andrew—I’ve come to take you back—” the man said. Marina risked a longer look at him; he was rather… square. Square face square jaw, blocky shoulders. He’d have looked intimidating, if it hadn’t been that his expression, his eyes, were full of kindness and compassion. He made the “tch-ing” sound one makes to a horse to get its attention, rounded his shoulders to look less intimidating, and finally the girl stopped staring at her invisible threat. Her head wavered in a trembling arc until she was looking at him instead of her hobgoblins. He smiled with encouragement. “Ellen! I’ve come to take you back, back where it’s safe!”

Now at this point, Marina was ready for the girl to screech and attempt to flee. By all rights, that “I’ve come to take you back” coupled with the appearance of her own doctor should make her panic. “I’ve come to take you back” was the sign that one was going to go “back” into captivity. And in Marina’s limited experience, the doctors of those incarcerated in such places were not regarded as saviors by their patients. She braced herself, and prepared to try to tackle the girl when she attempted to run.

But evidently that was not the case this time.

With a little mew, the girl lurched out of her position wedged against the roots and stumbled, weeping, straight toward the newcomer.

It was more apparent than ever that there was something physically wrong with her as she tried to run to him, and could only manage a shambling parody of the graceful movements she should have had. But the thing that struck Marina dumb was that the girl did regard her doctor as a sort of savior.

She tumbled into the doctor’s arms, and hid there, moaning, as if she was certain that he and he alone could shelter her from whatever it was she feared.

Marina could only stare, eyebrows raised. Good gad, she thought. Good gad.

As gracefully as she could, Marina got back up to her feet and walked—slowly, so as not to frighten the girl all over again—toward the two of them.

The girl hid her face in the doctor’s coat. The doctor’s attention was fully on his patient; Marina got the distinct impression that an anarchist could have thrown a bomb at him and at the moment he would have only batted it absently away. She was impressed all over again by the manner in which he soothed the girl, exactly as any sensible person would soothe a small child.

He looked up, finally, as she got within a few feet of the two of them, and smiled at her without a trace of self-consciousness. “Thank you for your help, miss,” he said easily, quite as if this sort of thing happened every day.

She sincerely hoped that was not the case.

“I don’t know how I could have helped you,” she replied, with a shrug. “All I did was stop when my horse shied, and try to keep her from running off down the lane. I was afraid that if she found a stile to get over, she’d be off and hiding, and catch her death.”

“You didn’t ride on and ignore her, you didn’t rush at her and frighten her further, you actually stopped and got off your horse, you even went down on your knees in the road and talked to her carefully. If that’s not helping, I don’t know what is. So thank you, miss. You did exactly as one of my own people would have done; you couldn’t have done better than that if I’d trained you myself.” He smiled warmly at her, with gratitude that was not at all servile. She couldn’t help smiling back at him, as he wrapped his own coat around the girl. “I’m Andrew Pike, by the way. Dr. Andrew Pike. I own Briareley Sanitarium just up the road.”

Now she recognized who and what he was—her mother had written something about the young doctor the summer before last—how he had spent every penny he owned to buy old Briareley Hall when it came up for sale, and as much of the surrounding land as he could afford from young Lord Creighton, of whom there was gossip of high living in London, and perhaps gambling debts.

So this was the doctor who had benefited by Lord Creighton’s folly. His intention—which he had fulfilled within the month of taking possession—had been to establish his sanatarium for the treatment of mostly mental ills. He apparently hadn’t been able to afford most of the farmland, which had been parceled out; he still had the grounds and the gardens, but that was all that was left of the original estate.

According to her mother, Dr. Pike, unlike too many of his ilk who established sanitariums as warehouses for the ill and the inconvenient, actually attempted to cure people entrusted to his care. And it seemed that he had had some success at curing his patients. Not all, but at least some of the people put in his hands walked out of his gates prepared to resume their normal lives after a stint behind his walls.

“I have heard of you, Dr. Pike,” she said, as these thoughts passed through her mind in an eye blink. “And I have heard well of you, from my late mother’s letters.” She gave him a look of speculation, wondering what his reaction was going to be to her identity. “Since there’s no one here to introduce me, I trust you’ll forgive my breach of etiquette, even if my aunt wouldn’t. I am Marina Roeswood.”

She watched as recognition and something else passed across his face. Sympathy, she thought. “Miss Roeswood, of course—may I express my condolences, then? I did not know your parents beyond a nodding acquaintance.”

Somehow, she didn’t want his sympathy, or at least, not on false pretenses. “Then you knew them better than I did, Doctor Pike,” she said forthrightly, sensing that this man would be better served with the truth rather than polite fiction. “As you must be aware, or at least, as you would learn if you make even casual inquiries in the village, I was raised from infancy by friends of my parents, and I knew them only through letters. To me, they were no more real than—” She groped for the appropriate simile.

“—than creations of fiction?” he suggested, surprising her with his acuity and quick comprehension. “Nevertheless, Miss Roeswood, as John Donne said in his poem, ‘No man is an island, complete in himself—’“

“And ‘Every man’s death diminishes me.’ Very true, Dr. Pike, and well put,” she bowed her head slightly in acknowledgement.

“And I do mourn for them, as I would for any good folk who were my distant friends.”

But not as much as I mourn to be separated from my aunt and uncles. She couldn’t help the involuntary thought; she wondered, with a pang of the real despair that she couldn’t muster up for her own parents, how long it would be before she could even get a letter to them.

The girl Ellen made an inarticulate cry of horror, turning to point at nothing off to the side of the road, and any reply he might have made was lost as he turned to her. And then came the next surprise.

She watched in astonishment as a glow of golden Earth magic rose up around him, a soft mist that clung to him and enveloped both him and his patient. And when she looked closely, she was able to make out the shields layered in a dozen thin skins that enclosed that power cocoonlike about them.

She felt her mouth dropping open.

What—

Brownie snorted into her hair, startling her. She snapped her mouth shut before he could notice her reaction.

Good gad—an Earth Master! Here! Why had Alanna never mentioned that the doctor was an Earth Master?

Because she didn’t know?

Had her parents ever even met Dr. Pike face-to-face? She didn’t recall a mention of such a meeting, if they had. But surely they would have noticed another Earth Master practicing his magics practically on their doorstep!

Maybe not. Those shields were good ones, as good as anything Elizabeth Hastings was able to create. Maybe better; they were like thin shells of steel, refined, impeccably crafted. So well-crafted, in fact, that she hadn’t actually seen them at first.

I’m not sure I’d have seen him raising power if I wasn’t used to seeing Earth Masters at work.

And Alanna seldom left Oakhurst, except on errands to the poor of the village. It wasn’t likely she’d have encountered Dr. Pike on one of those.

She heard more horses approaching, as the girl responded to the healing power of the Earth energies Doctor Pike poured into her by sighing—then relaxing, and showing the first evidences of calming.

Another cart, this one slightly larger and drawn by a pair of shaggy Dartmoor ponies, stopped just behind Dr. Pike’s; and three people, two men and a woman, carefully got out.

They were perfectly ordinary, and what was more, they didn’t seem to notice anything different about Dr. Pike as they approached him. If they had been mages themselves, they would have waited for him to dismiss the energies he had raised before reaching for the girl—which they did, and Marina had to stifle a call of warning.

“Wait a moment,” he cautioned, just before their fingertips touched the outermost shield. “Let me get her a bit calmer first.”

Let me take this down before you do me an injury, you mean, Doctor. But he was as quick to disperse the unused power as he had been to raise it in the first place, and within moments, his shields had contracted down to become one with his very skin.

Oooh, that’s a neat trick! I wonder how he does it?

“Here, Ellen, look who’s come to take you back home,” he said, carefully putting two fingers under her chin, and turning the girl’s face toward the attendants.

Once again, although Marina would have expected her to react with fear, the girl Ellen smiled with relief and actually reached out for the hands of one of the men and the woman. More than that—she spoke. Real words, and not animal keening or moans.

“Oh, Diccon, Eleanor—I’m sorry—I’ve had one of my fits again, haven’t I?” There was sense in her eyes, and although her hands trembled, her words indicated that whatever had turned her into a mindless, fear-filled creature had passed for the moment.

“Yes, Miss Ellen,” the man said, sorrowfully. “I’m afraid you did.

And we was stupid enough to have left you alone with the door unlocked.”

Her tremulous laugh sounded like it was a short step from a sob. “Well, don’t do that again! I’m not to be trusted, remember?”

But Doctor Pike patted her shoulder, and said admonishingly, “It isn’t you that we don’t trust, child. It’s the demons in your mind.”

Ellen only shook her head, and allowed herself to be bundled into blankets and a lap robe in the cart and carried off.

Doctor Pike watched them go, then turned to Marina.

“That poor child is one of my charity patients,” he said, and his voice took on a tinge of repressed anger. “Her cousin brought her here—the poor thing worked in a pottery factory as a painter, and she’d been systematically poisoned by the people who make their wealth off the labor and deaths of girls just like her!”

For a moment, she wondered why he was telling her this—did he know about Arachne and her manufactories?

But how could he? The villagers didn’t know; they all thought, when they thought at all, that Arachne must own something like a woolen mill. Surely Dr. Pike had no idea that she had heard about the dangers of the potteries from the other side of the argument.

And I’d believe the doctor a hundred times over before I’d believe Madam.

The doctor continued, the angry words spilling from him as if they had been long pent up, and only now had been able to find release. “They use lead-glazes and lead-paints—the glaze powder hangs in clouds of dust in the air, it gets into their food, they breathe it in, they carry it home with them on their clothing. And it kills them—but oh, cruelly, Miss Roeswood, cruelly! Because before it kills them, it makes them beautiful—you saw her complexion, the fine and delicate figure she has! The paintresses have a reputation for beauty, and they’ve no lack of suitors—” He laughed, but there was no humor in the laugh. “Or, shall we say, men with money willing to spend it on a pretty girl. They might not be able to afford an opera dancer, or a music hall performer, but they can afford a paintress, who will be at least as pretty, and cost far less to feed, since the lead destroys their appetite.”

She shook her head, sickened. Yes, she knew something of this—because her Uncle Sebastian had warned her about the danger of eating some of his paints, when she was a child. And there were certain of them, the whites in particular, that he was absolutely fanatical about cleaning off his hands and face before he went to eat.

Yes, she believed Dr. Pike.

His voice dropped, and a dull despair crept into it. “Then it destroys everything else; first the feeling in their hands and feet, then their control over their limbs, then their minds. And there is nothing I can do about it once it has reached that stage.”

No, he can’t heal what has gone wrong when the poison is still at work inside the poor thing! But—what if it was flushed out? Can Water magic combined with Earth do what Earth alone cannot? She felt resolve come over her like armor.

“Perhaps you cannot,” she said, making up her mind on the instant. “But—perhaps together, you and I can.”

With that, she raised her own shields, filled them for just a moment with the swirling green energies of water. Then she sketched a recognition-sigil that Elizabeth had taught her in the air between them, where it hung for an instant, glowing, before fading out.

And now it was his turn to stare at her with loose jaw and astonished eyes.

Chapter Thirteen

MARINA moved back to Brownie and pulled the reins out of the hedge where she’d tossed them. A small hail of bits of twig and snow came down with them. She took her time in looping the reins around her hand and turning back to face the doctor.

He bowed—just a slight bow, but there was a world of respect in it. She was very glad for a cold breeze that sprang up, for it cooled her hot cheeks.

“It seems I must reintroduce myself,” he said, then smiled. His smile reached and warmed his eyes. “Andrew Pike, Elemental Master of Earth.”

She sketched a curtsy. “Marina Roeswood, Elemental Mage of Water,” she replied, feeling oddly shy.

Now he looked puzzled. “Not Master? Excuse me, Miss Roeswood, but the power is certainly within you to claim that distinction. And forgive my asking this, but as one mage to another, we must know the strengths of each other.”

“The strength? Perhaps. But not, I fear, the practice,” she admitted, dropping her eyes for a moment, and scuffing the toe of her riding boot in the snow. “I only began learning the magics peculiar to my Element a few months ago, and then—” She looked back up. “Doctor Pike, this is the first time since I was taken from the place that I considered my home that I have been able to even think about magic without a sense of—well, nervousness. I can’t think why, but there is something about my aunt that puts me on my guard where magic is concerned. I thought it was only that I didn’t know her, and I am chary of practicing my powers around those who are strangers to me, but now I am not so sure.”

He regarded her thoughtfully, holding out his hand, but not to her—a tiny glow surrounded it for a moment, and she was not surprised to see his horse pace gravely forward until its nose touched, then nudged, his hand. He caressed its cheek absently.

“I don’t know anything about the magicians of this part of the country,” he admitted. “Is she, perhaps, the antagonistic Element of Fire?”

“She’s not a magician at all, so far as anyone can tell. I have never seen anything about her that made me think that was not true. And again, I thought that might be the reason for my reluctance, because I have been taught to be wary around those who do not have the gifts themselves—but even in the privacy of my own rooms, I cannot bring myself to summon the tiniest Elemental.”

“Still—if she is the antagonist Element, but has been equally reluctant to practice around you because of possible conflicts that could only complicate your situation with her?” he persisted.

She frowned at him. “Possible, but there are no signs of it, none at all. As for the antagonistic Element, I’ve lived with my Uncle Sebastian all my life, and the worst clash we ever had was over which of us got the last currant bun at tea.” She tilted her head to one side, as his expression turned thoughtful.

“In that case—could it simply be that you resent your aunt’s interference in your life?” he hazarded, then shook his head. “You must forgive me again, but I am accustomed to asking very uncomfortable questions of my patients. Very often the only way for them to begin recovery is to confront uncomfortable, even painful truths.”

“I thought of that, but—” she would have said more, but the sound of another horse’s hooves approaching from the direction of Oakhurst made her bite off her words. Curse it—she thought, knowing immediately that it must be one of the servants, or Reginald, or even Arachne herself come looking for her. “Dr. Pike, I spend every Wednesday afternoon with the vicar playing chess,” she said hurriedly, thinking, All right—it was only one Wednesday, but surely I can turn it into a regular meeting. And she had no time to say anything more, for around the corner came Reginald, riding one of the hunters, a big bay beast with a mouth like cast iron and a phlegmatic temperament. Riding easily, too, which she would not necessarily have expected from someone she thought of as a townsman. His riding coat and hat were of the finest cut and materials, but she would not have expected less.

“Marina!” he called, his voice sounding unnecessarily hearty, “I thought I would ride down to meet you. Is there anything the matter?”

“Nothing at all, Reggie,” she said smoothly. “This is Dr. Pike of the Briareley Sanitarium. We’ve had a chance encounter—Dr. Pike, this is my cousin, Reginald Chamberten.”

“It was something less convenient for Miss Roeswood, I am afraid,” Doctor Pike said, as cool and impersonal as Marina could have wished. “One of my patients took unauthorized leave, and Miss Roeswood here was kind enough to detain her long enough for my people to arrive, persuade her that all was well, and take her back.”

Reggie’s eyebrows assumed that ever-so-superior angle that Marina had come to detest. “Well, Doctor, you’ll have to do better about keeping control of your patients! Dangerous lunatics running about the neighborhood—”

But Pike interrupted him with an icy laugh. “What, a little girl, frightened out-of-doors by a loud noise? Hardly dangerous, Mr. Chamberten. I do not keep dangerous patients, only those whose delicate nerves are better served by pleasant surroundings in the quiet of the countryside. And, sadly, a few who are, alas, in no condition to take notice of anything, much less leave their beds.”

“Hmm.” Reggie looked down his handsome nose at the doctor, and seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in being his arrogant worst. “Still, patients escaping—frightening young ladies—”

“I was hardly frightened, Reggie,” Marina objected, suddenly tired of her cousin’s little games. “I was far more concerned that the poor child didn’t run off into the fields and come to grief. Even Brownie was more indignant than startled when she popped up under her hooves.” Reggie’s eyes narrowed, and she decided that it was politic to say no more. Instead, she put her foot in the stirrup and mounted before either man could offer her help. No small feat in a corset and long skirts—and into a sidesaddle; delicate young ladies accustomed to fainting at the least exertion couldn’t do it. She thought she saw a brief flash of admiration in Dr. Pike’s eyes before he returned to his pose of cool indifference.

“Still, letting your patients run off like that strikes me as careless,” Reggie persisted.

“When the patients are themselves unpredictable, it is difficult to imagine what they are going to do in advance,” the doctor replied in a tone of complete indifference. “That is one of the challenges of my profession. And if you will excuse me, I had better get on with my business so that I can get back to them. Thank you again, Miss Roeswood. A pleasure to meet you. Good day, Mr. Chamberten.” With that, he hopped into his little gig and sent the horse briskly down the road toward the village.

“The cheek!” Reggie muttered, glaring after him.

“He’s a doctor, cousin,” Marina retorted, tapping Brownie’s flank with her heel, and sending the horse back toward Oakhurst. “I believe arrogance even to the point of rudeness is required of them, like a frock coat. Otherwise they lose that air of the omniscient.”

Reggie stared at her for a moment, then burst out with a great bray of a laugh, startling his horse. “Oh, well put, little cuz,” he said, in tones that suggested he would be patting her head if he could reach it. “Now, the reason I came down here in the first place was because the mater and I had an early tea, and we’re going to be going off for a day or two. Not more than three. Business, don’t you know, a bit of an emergency came up—we’ll be taking the last train tonight. Mater’s left orders with the servants to take care of everything, and Mary Anne has been put in charge of them, so you won’t have to trouble your pretty little head about anything.”

She turned wide eyes on him. “That is very kind of her,” she said, wondering if she sounded as insincere as she felt. The only possible benefit to all of this was that Mary Anne might consider it enough to oversee her behavior at mealtimes and leave her alone the rest of the time. She thought about asking whether she would still be allowed to ride out, and then decided that she wouldn’t ask. If she didn’t say anything, Arachne might forget to forbid her.

Reggie smiled down at her from his superior height. “I suppose that old pile of Oakhurst seems rather overwhelming to you, doesn’t it, cuz?” he laughed. “Bit different from that little cottage in Cornwall.”

“It’s not what I was used to,” she murmured, dropping her eyes to stare at Brownie’s neck.

“I should think not. Well, you just let us take care of it all for you,” he said in that voice that drove her mad. She made monosyllabic replies to his conversation, something that only seemed to encourage him. Evidently, despite direct evidence to the contrary, he considered her timid.

But at least his monologue gave her plenty of information without her having to ask for it. Something had come up in the course of the afternoon that required their personal attention having to do with the factory near Exeter; they had called for tea and ordered the servants to pack, then Reggie had been dispatched to the Rectory to fetch Marina back. The carriage would take them to the nearest station to catch the last train, and there was some urgency to get there in order to make the connection. It sounded as if there hadn’t been time for Arachne to issue many orders; in order to get to the station in time, they would have to leave immediately.

So it proved; when Marina and Reggie rode through the gates the carriage, the big traveling one that required two horses, was already at the door, and one of the grooms waited to take Reggie’s horse. Arachne seemed both excited and annoyed, but more the former than the latter. “Amuse yourself quietly while we’re gone, Marina,” she called, as Reggie climbed out of the saddle and into the carriage. “We’ll be back by Saturday at the latest.”

Then the coachman flicked the reins over the horses, and the carriage rolled away before she could issue any direct orders to Marina or anyone else.

For a moment she sat in her saddle as still as a stone. She was quite alone for the moment. She was on a fresh horse. And the two people with authority to stop her from leaving were gone. I could ride right down to the village and past. I could go home—

Oh yes, she could go home. But if she did that, it would be no more than a week at most, and probably less, before Arachne appeared again at Blackbird Cottage with her lawyers and possibly more police, and she would be perfectly within her rights to do so.

I could only make trouble for Margherita and Sebastian and Thomas. The police, at the least, would not be happy, not happy at all.

What could Marina claim, anyway, as an excuse for escaping from her legal guardian? That her aunt was somehow abusing her with the lessons in etiquette, and the bizarre meals they shared? Arachne ate the same food, which was presumably wholesome, if unpalatable. And as for the etiquette, it could be reasonably argued that Marina was ill-educated, even backward, for her position in life. She had never gone to school, never had a proper nurse, nor a governess, nor tutors. She had never been exposed to the sort of society that her parents moved in. She was certainly ill-equipped to function in the social circles in which Arachne moved. That she didn’t particularly wish to function in that social strata was of no purpose—her inherited wealth and rank as a gentleman’s daughter would require her to do so. Anyone in authority would see Marina’s rebellion as a childish tantrum, the result of having been spoiled by her erstwhile guardians, a reaction to the discipline that she badly needed.

This could be in the manner of a test on Arachne’s part to see if she would behave herself when left on her own.

So instead of turning Brownie back out the gates and away, she guided the horse toward the stable and allowed the groom to help her down. As she expected, Mary Anne was waiting for her right inside the door.

“You need to change for tea, miss,” the maid said, with her usual authoritarian manner, quite as if nothing whatsoever had changed. But something had—Mary Anne no longer had the authority of her mistress to back her. And—perhaps—had not been given any directions.

So we will start with something simple, I think, as a test.

“Did Madam leave any orders about what my meal menus were to be?” she asked, in a calculated effort to catch the maid off guard. She tilted her head to the side and attempted to look cheerful and innocent—not confrontational. She did not want to confront Mary Anne, only confound her.

“Why—no—” Mary Anne stammered, caught precisely as Marina had hoped.

“Ah. Then before I change, I had better take care of that detail for the rest of the day, or the cook will never forgive me.” She smiled slightly, which seemed to put the maid more off balance than before. She detoured to the library, and quickly wrote out a menu for high tea, dinner, and for good measure, breakfast in the morning. And not trusting to Mary Anne, she took the menus to the cook herself, with the maid trailing along behind, for once completely at a loss. Only then did she permit the maid to bear her off to her room to be changed into a suitable gown. But Mary Anne was so rattled, she forgot completely to exchange the riding corset for a more restrictive garment, and the tea gown, designed to be comfortable and loose-fitting, went on over her petticoat and combinations without any corset at all. Marina was almost beside herself with pleasure by the time she sat down—in the empty parlor, of course—to the first truly satisfying meal that she had eaten since she arrived.

And thanks to her books and the other help she had been getting from Peter, despite Mary Anne’s glum supervision, she poured selected, and ate with absolute correctness. Good strong tea to begin with, not the colored water she had been drinking. And real food, with flavor to it. Oh, it was dainty stuff, for a lady, not the hearty teas of Blackbird Cottage—but it was such a difference from what she’d been having with Arachne.

It was probably exactly the same food that downstairs ate for their tea, just sliced and prepared to appear delicate—dainty little minced-ham, deviled shrimp, and cheese sandwiches; miniature sweet scones, clotted cream and jam; and the most amazing collection of wonderful little iced cakes and tartlets.

And those hadn’t been conjured up on the instant. But they certainly hadn’t been making appearances at the teas she had been having.

Arachne’s been eating on the sly, that’s what. She has that miserable excuse for tea with me, then goes off to her own sitting room and has a feast.

Well, Arachne wasn’t here to complain that her cakes were gone, and the cook could make more. Marina sipped her tea and nibbled decorously while she watched birds collecting the crumbs that the cook scattered for them in the snow-covered garden outside the parlor windows, ignoring the silent presence of Mary Anne. Left to herself, of course, it would have been a book by the fire, a plate of cakes, and a pot of tea—but she conducted herself as if she had company. There would be no lapses for Mary Anne to report; there was not a single scornful cough. At length, she rang for Peter to come take the trays away and Mary Anne went off to her own splendidly solitary tea while Marina remained in the library with a final cup of tea, a book, and the fire.

Dinner was delightful, though it required a change into corset and dinner gown. And Mary Anne was so rattled by then that she retired without even undressing her charge. Marina just rang for Sally to help her with the corset, then sent everyone away. So, attired in a warm and comfortable dressing gown and her favorite sheepskin slippers, she should have been ready to settle down beside the fire for a night of reading.

But two things stopped her. The first was that this absence gave her an unanticipated opportunity. She could write letters tonight without the fear that she would be caught at it. She sat down at her desk in her sitting room, and laid out paper, envelopes, and pen and ink—then stopped.

How to get them delivered? There was still that problem; she hadn’t had so much as a single penny of money since she arrived here, and she had the distinct feeling that if she asked for any, Arachne would ask her what she wanted it for, since all her wants and needs were supplied.

She chewed on her lower lip for a moment. There were probably stamps in Arachne’s desk and more in the one in the room used as an office for the estate manager.

But she counts them. I know she does. She’s the sort that would.

The same probably held true for the pin money kept in the desk in the estate office. Probably? No doubt; pin money would provide an even greater temptation to staff than stamps, and Arachne had no real hold of loyalty over most of the servants, as demonstrated by their quiet support of Marina, and there was no trust there. So, she probably counted it out three times a day; no use looking for postage money there.

But—I wonder—does it need to be by a physical letter?

Arachne was not here—and if ever there was a chance to contact Elizabeth by means of magic, this would be it—

For a moment, excitement rose in her—if she could call up an Undine or a Sylph, she could get messages to Elizabeth directly. Perhaps even within the hour!

But, suddenly, she knew, she knew, that was wrong. That if she tried, something horrible would happen. It was just like the night she thought she had dreamed, when the Sylph gave her that warning, when she had been so very frightened. If she used magic here even though Arachne was gone—it would be bad.

No. No.

A chill swept over her at the mere thought of invoking an Elemental here. She suddenly felt unseen eyes on her.

It might not be Arachne—it might be someone else entirely. But now that Marina was out of Blackbird Cottage, she was out from underneath protections that Thomas, Sebastian, and Margherita had spent decades building. It might only be that whoever or whatever was hunting for her now knew where she was and was watching her because she was living openly at Oakhurst, and with only the personal magical protections she herself had in place. Watching her—why? She was beginning to have an idea why Arachne might want to isolate her from all her former friends, but why would some stranger be watching her?

Well, that made no sense. Not that anything necessarily made obvious sense unless you had all the facts. Still, I cannot imagine why some stranger would wish to spy on me, much less wish me harm.

Ah, but thinking of Arachne, there might be another explanation for the feeling of an unseen watcher about. What if Madam is a magician after all? Just—not the kind of magician I know about?

She wondered. Elizabeth had told her to trust her instincts, and right now, those instincts warned her that she was not unobserved. If Arachne was a magician, Arachne would be able to tell if she worked magic. At the moment, the only magic that Marina was practicing was passive, defensive, protective; not only would it not draw attention to her, it was designed, intended, to take attention away from her.

She could have left something here as a sort of watchdog. And if I arouse the watchdog’s interest… she’ll find out what I was up to, and she’ll discipline me for it.

Arachne would only have to forbid the servants to give her access to riding to punish her, and it would be a terrible punishment from her point of view. And as to why Arachne might want to keep her away from all her former friends—that was simple enough—

Marina was not so naive as to think that Reggie was devoting so much of his time to her because she was attractive to him. Maybe Arachne didn’t need Oakhurst or Marina’s fortune, but a fashionable man—about—town like her son was an expensive beast to support. Granted, Reggie did seem to have some interest in working at the potteries, but still…

On the other hand, if Arachne could get Marina married to her son, it would be her wealth that he was playing with, not Arachne’s. And if he wrecked someone else’s fortune, Arachne would not particularly care. In fact, it might be a way of bringing him to heel—if he overran himself and had to come to his mama for financial help, Arachne could impose all sorts of curbs and conditions on him.

The only way for Arachne to be sure that Marina would fall into her plans, would be to keep her niece here, completely under Arachne’s thumb, until Reggie managed to wheedle her into matrimony.

So it will have to be real letters. For which I need postage. There must be another way of finding the money for two stamps!

If only—so many little boys were inveterate collectors of stamps—if only the uncles or her father had ever been remotely interested in such things, she would probably have found a stamp-album among the old school books with one or two uncanceled specimens among the ones carefully steamed off of the letters that arrived at the house!

Then it occurred to her; this house had a nursery that hadn’t been touched since the five children left it, except to clean out the books from the schoolroom. And little children tended to collect and hide treasures. With luck, she could find them—heaven knew she had hidden enough little treasure boxes herself over the years. And with further luck, there might be a penny or two amongst the stones and cast-off snakeskins and bits of ribbon.

The thought was parent to the act; she put the writing implements away and got resolutely up from the desk.

This entailed an expedition armed with a paraffin-lamp, but now she knew approximately where everything was, courtesy of Sally. After opening a couple of doors that proved to open up onto disused rooms other than the old nursery—the nurserymaid’s room, a linen closet, and the old schoolroom—she found El Dorado—or at least, the room she was looking for. Aside from being much neater than any five real children would leave such a room it was pretty much as it must have looked when they were still using it. She put the lamp on the nursery table and went to work. She found six caches before she decided that she was finished: one inside the Noah’s Ark, two under the floorboards, two out in plain sight in old cigar boxes and one in a cupboard in the doll-house. When she’d finished collecting ha’pennies, she had exactly fourpence. Quite enough to buy postage for two letters. But by that point, it was very late, she was chilled right through, and she decided to take her booty and go to bed. Must make sure and ask that they send more postage in their return letters, she told herself sleepily, as she climbed into her warm bed after hiding her “treasure” in a vase. I think like the rest of the mines in Devon, my copper-field is exhausted… though at least I haven’t left any ugly tailings.

Arachne stared out the window of their first-class carriage into the last light of sunset, and wondered how wretched a mess awaited them when she and Reggie got to Exeter. She prided herself on her efficiency, but there were some things that no amount of efficiency could compensate for.

Such as an accident like the one that had just occurred at the Exeter pottery.

Right in the middle of her discussion with Reggie, a telegram came. One of the kilns had exploded that morning. At the moment she didn’t know what the cause had been, although she intended to find out as soon as she and Reggie arrived.

The railway carriage swayed back and forth, and the iron wheels clacked over the joins in the rails with little jolts—but the swaying and jolting was nothing compared with the discomfort of the same trip by carriage, and this first-class compartment was much warmer.

An explosion. These things happened now and again; water suddenly leaking into a red-hot kiln could cause it, or something in the pottery loaded into it—or sabotage by anarchists, unionists, or other troublemakers. If it was the latter, well, she was going to find that out quickly enough, and it wouldn’t take clumsy police bumbling about to do so, either. A few words, a little magic, and she would know if there was someone personally responsible. If there was, well—whoever had done it would wish it had been the police who’d caught him, before he died.

The main problem so far as she was concerned was that the kiln had been one of the ones where the glazes were fired, and three of her paintresses had been seriously injured, two killed outright.

Reggie would take care of the physical details tomorrow, but tonight—he and she would have to salvage what they could from the three injured girls.

At length, long after sunset, the train lurched into the Exeter station, and came to a halt with a shrieking of brakes and a great burst of steam. Reggie opened the compartment door, but the cachet (and money) attached to a first-class carriage got them instant service—one porter for luggage, another to summon a taxi. Little did he guess he would need to summon two. Their luggage went to the hotel with orders to secure them their usual rooms, but they went straight to the pottery.

At the moment, Arachne’s sole concern, as they rattled along in a motor-taxi, was the tiny infirmary she kept for the benefit of the paintresses. If the other workers wondered about this special privilege, they never said anything, perhaps because the paintresses were given the grand title of Porcelain Artist and got other privileges as well. They needed the infirmary; after a certain point in their short careers, they grew faint readily, and this gave them a place to lie down until the dizziness passed off. Being paid by the piece rather than by the hour was a powerful incentive not to go home ill, no matter how ill they felt.

She’d telegraphed ahead to authorize sending for a doctor; if the girls could be saved, it would be better for her plans.

The taxi stopped at the gates, and Arachne stepped out onto the pavement without a backward glance, leaving Reggie to pay the fare. She went straight to her office; from the gate to the office there was no sign that anything had gone wrong; the sound of work, the noise of the machinery that ground and mixed the clay, the whirring of the wheels, and the slapping of the wet clay as the air and excess water was driven out of it continued unabated under the glaring gaslights—which was as it should be. Accidents happened, but unless the entire pottery blew up or fell into the river, work continued. The workers themselves could not afford to do without the wages they would lose if it shut down, and would be the first to insist that work went on the moment after the debris was shoveled out of the way.

The main offices were vacant, and unlit but for a single gaslight on the wall, but her managers knew what to leave for her. Her office, a spacious, though spartan room enlivened only by her enormous mahogany desk, was cleaned three times daily to rid it of the ever present clay-dust. This occurred whether she was present in Exeter or not, so that her office was always ready for her. Reggie caught up with her as she entered the main offices and strode toward her private sanctum. By the light shining under the door, someone had gone in and lit the gas for her; she reached for the polished brass knob and pulled the door open, stepping through with Reggie close behind her.

The doctor—one she recognized from past meetings, an old quack with an addiction to gin—stood up unsteadily as she entered. He had not been sitting behind the desk, which was fortunate for him, since she would have left orders never to use him again if he had been.

A whiff of liquor-laden breath came to her as she faced him”Well?” she asked, shrewdly gauging his level of skill by the florid character of his face and steadiness of his stance. He wasn’t that bad; intoxicated, but not so badly as to impair his judgment.

He shook his head. “They won’t last the week,” he told her. “And even if they do, they’ll never be more than bodies propped in the corner of the poorhouse. One’s blinded, one’s lost an eye, and all three are maimed past working, even if their injuries would heal.”

He didn’t bother to point out that they probably wouldn’t heal; the lead-dust they ate saw to that. The lead-poisoned didn’t heal well.

She nodded briskly. “Well, then, we’ll just let them lie in the infirmary until they die. No point in increasing their misery by moving them. Thank you, Dr. Thane.”

She reached behind her back and held out her hand. Reggie placed a folded piece of paper into it, and she handed the doctor the envelope that contained his fee without looking at it. He took it without a word and shambled off through the door and out into the darkened outer office. She turned to Reggie, who nodded wordlessly.

“We might as well salvage what we can,” Arachne said, with grudging resignation. “Tomorrow I’ll find replacements. I’ll try, at any rate.”

“We’re using up the available talent, Mater,” Reggie pointed out. “It’s going to be hard to find orphans who can paint who are also potential magicians—”

She felt a headache coming on, and gritted her teeth. She couldn’t afford weakness, not at this moment. “Don’t you think I know that?” she snarled. “Of all the times for this to happen—it could take days to find replacements, they probably won’t be ideal and—” She stopped, took a deep breath, and exerted control over herself. “And we can burn some of the magic we salvage off these three to help us find others. We might as well; it’ll fade if we don’t use it.”

“True enough.” Reggie led the way this time, but not out the door. Instead, a hidden catch released the door concealed in the paneling at the back of the office, revealing a set of stairs faced with rock, and very, very old, leading down. “After you, Mater.”

They each took a candle from a niche just inside the door, lit it at the gas-mantle, and went inside, closing the door behind them. The stairs led in their turn to a small underground room, which, if anyone had been checking, would prove by careful measuring to lie directly beneath the infirmary.

At the bottom of the stairs was a landing, and another door. Arachne took one of the two black robes hanging on pegs outside the door to this room, and pulled it on over her street clothing. Only when Reggie was similarly garbed did she open this final door onto a room so dark it seemed to swallow up the light of their candles.

She went inside first, and by feel alone, lit the waiting black candles, each as thick as her wrist, that stood in floor-sconces on either side of the door. Light slowly oozed into the room.

It was a small, rectangular room, draped in black, with a small altar at the end opposite the door; it had in fact been a chapel, a hidden Roman Catholic chapel that dated back to the time of the eighth Henry, before it became what it was now.

It communicated with an escape tunnel to the river—the doorway now walled off, behind the drapery on the right—and its existence was the reason why Arachne had built this factory here in the first place. It wasn’t often that one could find a hidden chapel that was both accessible and had never been deconsecrated.

It still was a chapel—but the crucifix above the altar was reversed, of course. This place belonged to another form of worship, now.

Arachne went to the wall where a black-painted cupboard waited that held the black wine and the special wafers, while Reggie readied the altar itself. She smiled to herself, in spite of their difficulties; if it was rare to find a chapel of the sort needed for a proper Black Mass, it was even rarer to find someone who was willing to go through the seminary and ordination with the express purpose of being defrocked just so he could celebrate it.

Clever Reggie had been the one to think of going to the Continent and lying about his age, entering a Catholic seminary at the age of fifteen, being ordained at eighteen—and being defrocked in plenty of time to pass his entrance examinations and be accepted at Cambridge with the rest of the young men his age. It had taken an extraordinary amount of work and effort. But then again, Reggie had enjoyed the action that had gotten him defrocked quite a bit. Enough that he hadn’t minded a bit when it had taken him several tries to actually be caught in the act by the senior priest of his little Provence parish.

He had made quite certain there could be no forgiveness involved. Bad enough to be caught inflagmnte delicto with a young woman of the parish. Worse, that the act took place in the sacristy, with her drunk and insensible. But when the young woman was barely pubescent—and feeble-minded—and especially put in his charge by her trusting parents—and to cap it all with defiance of the priest, saying boldly that it was no sin, since the girl wasn’t even human—well.

The old man had excommunicated him there and then, and had gone the extraordinary step of reporting his behavior to Rome to have his judgment reinforced with a papal decree.

Had all this happened by accident, it would have been impossible to hush up, and would have ruined Reggie.

But he and Arachne had been planning it from the moment he was old enough to understand just what it was that his mother was doing in her little “private bower.” He had gone to France under an assumed name. No one ever knew he had even left England.

As for Arachne, she had been planning to somehow find a true partner from the moment she found those old books at the sale of the contents of a Plymouth townhouse.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and savored the memory of that moment. Those books—they might have been waiting for her. It had only been chance that led her to be in Plymouth that day, to go down that street to encounter a sale in progress. Had her parents known what she’d brought home, hidden among the poetry books, they’d have died from horror. Or else, they’d never have believed, magicians though they were, that anything like the Black Mass truly had existed, far less that their daughter, their pitied magicless daughter, was learning how to steal what she had not been born with.

That Reggie was only too happy to fall in with her plans had been the keystone that had allowed her to realize her plans in a way that fulfilled all her hopes and the wildest dreams she had dared to imagine.

And this had brought them both prosperity built from the beginning on the power drained from her poisoned and dying paintresses; power that no Elemental Mage would ever detect, for it was so far outside the scope of their experience.

She had gone beyond anything described in those books, in no small part because the Satanists who had written them had been so lacking in imagination. Yes, the potential power gained by sacrificing children was great—but their souls were lost to the Opposition, which was a loss as great as the gain. Why sacrifice infants, when the power generated by girls just at adolescence was so much stronger? Why sacrifice those whose souls were clean when one could engineer the corruption of potential victims, and gain not only the power from the death, but from the fall, and the despair when, at the last, they realized their damnation?

And why “sacrifice” them by knife or garrote or sword, when one could still be the author of their deaths by means of the way in which they earned their livings, and do so with no fear of the law? It was the slow, dull blade of lead that killed these sacrifices, making them briefly beautiful and proud (another sin!) and then stealing strength, intelligence, will, even sanity. And no one, not the police, not her social peers who gathered at her parties, not the government, not even the other workers, guessed that she was slowly and deliberately murdering them. In fact, no one thought of her as anything but a shrewd businesswoman.

Sometimes, now and again, she wondered if other, equally successful industrialists, were pursuing the same path as she. Certainly the potential was there. So many children, working such long hours, among so much dangerous machinery—the potential sacrifices were enormous. Weaving mills, steel mills, mines—all were fed on blood as much as on sweat. She wondered now and again if she ought not to expand her own interests.

No, I think I will leave that to Reggie. This is what I know. She decanted the black wine into the chalice; arranged the black wafers on their plate.

But her ways were so much more—efficient—than the hurried slaughter of the unbaptized infants purchased from their uncaring, gin- or opium-sodden mothers in some slum.

Not that she hadn’t done all that in the beginning. It was all she had been able to do, until she had married Chamberten, seen his pottery firsthand, and realized the other uses that could be made of it. And now and again, at the Great Sabbats, she had gone back to the traditional ways. But it was always better to be on the right side of the law whenever possible; it made life so much less complicated.

“Ready?” Reggie asked. She smiled again. And turned to face her priest and son, with the instruments of their power in her hands, ready and waiting, for him.

Chapter Fourteen

ANDREW Pike arrived back at Briareley in a moderately better mood than when he had parted from the Roeswood girl and her insufferable fiance. He assumed the man was her fiance. He couldn’t imagine any man acting so—proprietary—if he didn’t have a firm hold over a woman.

He’d been so angry at the blighter—Reginald. Reginald Chamberten. What does she call him? “Reggie, dear?” He looks like a Reggie—money, looks and arrogance enough for five—that he had just driven poor little Pansy at a trot most of the way on the long way around to Briareley’s front gate. He couldn’t have turned her, of course; there wasn’t enough room on that lane to turn a cart. But the bright sun, the cold wind in his face, his own good sense, and the unexpectedly positive outcome of his anxious chase after poor Ellen put him back in an equable mood by the time he reached the last crossing and made the turn that would take him to the gates. Pansy sensed the change in his mood and slowed to a walk.

He stopped being angry, and allowed himself to laugh at the foolishness of even bothering to be angry at the arrogant young jackanapes. Why should one overbearing idiot with delusions of grandeur get his temper aroused? No reason, of course. What was he to Reggie, or Reggie to him? Nothing.

So those are the neighbors. The girl was all right. No, that was being ungenerous. The girl was fine. Look at how she had stopped and managed to soothe Ellen—and she’d practically volunteered herself and her magic to help him with her.

Earth and Water… the problem I’ve had is that if I could get that damned poison confined in lumps, I could get it out of her. And I could heal some, at least, of the damage. But I can’t suck it out of her blood, and that’s the problem. But a Water Master can actually purify liquid—and blood is a liquid.

The girl—Marina. Must put the name to her—had said she wasn’t a Master. Yes, but she was the one who’d said she could help. So she must be able to do that, at least, and for his purposes it didn’t matter if she thought she was a Master, so long as she had mastered the aspect of her Element that would let her clean out the poison. She had the power to do whatever she needed to; that much was very clear. Perhaps it was the will that was lacking to make her a Master; she certainly hadn’t stood up to that arrogant blockhead who’d turned up to claim her. With a touch on the reins, he guided the gig between the huge stone pillars at the head of the drive, past the open wrought—iron gates. Pansy’s head bobbed as they came up the long graveled drive. The jolting of the gig ended as soon as the wheels touched the drive—hundreds of years of graveling and rolling went a long way toward making a stretch of driveway as flat and hard as a paved street in London. He looked up and caught sight of the house through the leafless trees.

House? What a totally inadequate word for the place. It was an amazing pile of a building, parts of it going all the way back to Henry the Third, and it was no wonder that its former owner had let it go so cheaply. If it hadn’t been for magic, he would never have been able to make the place habitable. But it was amazing what a troupe of Brownies could and would pull off, given the reason to.

Odd little beggars, Brownies. Lady Almsley claimed they must be Hindu or Buddhist, the way they worked like the very devil for anyone who really, truly deserved the help, and were off like a shot if you tried to do something to thank them. “Building up good karma, or dogma, or whatever it is,” Lady Almsley said in her usual charming and deceptively muddle-headed manner. “I get rather confused with all those mystical things—but it just quite ruins it for them, steals all of it away, if you pay them for what they do, or even try to thank them.”

Of course, they couldn’t abide Cold Iron, not the tiniest particle of it, and he’d had to remove every nail and iron hinge in the place before they could move in to work. Thank God most of the place was good Devon stone, and the woodwork had mostly been put together the old-fashioned way, with wooden pegs instead of nails. Even so, he’d spent all of his time moving one room ahead of the busy little beggars, pulling nails and whatnot, and hoping what he took out didn’t mean parts of his new acquisition were about to come tumbling down on his head.

Hearing what it was he was going to do with it though—that had pretty much insured that every Brownie not otherwise occupied on the whole island of Logres turned up to help. One month; that was all it had taken for the Brownies to do their work. One single month. Two months of preparation by him just to give them a place to start, and the one month keeping barely ahead of them. He never would have believed it, if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

He suspected that they had had help as well; Brownies weren’t noted for forge-work, and every bit of ironmongery had been replaced with beautifully crafted bronze and copper. They didn’t do stonework so far as he knew, but every bit of stone was as good or better than new, now. All the wet rot and dry rot—gone. Woodwork, floors, ceilings, roof, all repaired. Every draft, hole and crack, stopped. Chimneys cleaned and mended. Stone and brickwork retucked (and who had done that? Gnomes? Dwarves? Surely not Kobolds—though not all Kobolds were evil-minded and ill-tempered). Slates replaced, stones made whole, vermin vanished. He’d asked one of the fauns how they did it, he’d gotten an odd explanation.

“They remind the house of how it was, when it was new.” Though how one “reminded” a house of anything, much less how that could get it repaired, he could not even begin to imagine. Sometimes the best thing that an Elemental Master could do was to bargain with the Elementals themselves, then step back and allow them to determine how something was accomplished.

All right, none of it was major repair, it was all just little things that would quickly have required major repair if they’d gone on. The problem was, with a mismatched barn like this one, there were a great many of those little things; probably why the original owner hadn’t done anything about them. When the money got tight, it was always the little bits of repair that got put off and forgotten. Tiny leaks in the roof that never gave any trouble became gaping holes, missing slates let in hordes of starlings and daws, cracks widened, wood rotted—then gave way.

Thank heavens I was able to step in before the trickle of small problems turned into a flood of disaster.

He could never have paid to have it all done in the normal way, no one could have. Not even one of those American millionaires who seemed to have pots and pots of money to throw about. It hadn’t been just his doing; every Earth Master he knew had called in favors, once word had gotten around of what he was up to. Bless ‘em, for they’re all going to be doing their own housekeeping for the next ten years, doubtless.

For that was what Brownies usually did; household repair was just part of that. Mind, only the most adamantly Luddite of the Earth Masters still had Brownies about—people who lived in remote cottages built in the Middle Ages, genuine Scottish crofters, folk on Lewis and Skye and the hundred tiny islands of the coast. Folk who cooked with copper and bronze pots and implements, and kept—at most—a single steel knife in the house, shielded by layers of silk. Now they would be doing their own cleaning and mending for a time.

And by the time their Brownies returned, they’d probably had gotten used to having Cold Iron about, and all the conveniences and improvements that Cold Iron meant, and the Brownies would never come back to their homes. The price, perhaps, of progress?

Makes one wonder. I cannot even imagine doing without Cold Iron, steel. Well, think of all the screws and nails, the hinges and bits and bobs that are absolutely integral to the building alone! Let alone iron grates in the fireplaces, the stove and implements in the kitchen all the ironmongery in the furniture! It was only this one time, for this one reason, that I was able to. And very nearly not even then. It had been an exhausting three months, and one he hadn’t been entirely certain he would survive.

Already there was so much Cold Iron back in the place that the creatures who were most sensitive couldn’t come within fifty miles. Small wonder few people saw the Oldest Ones anymore, the ones the Celts had called the Sidhe; there was no place “safe” for them on the material plane anywhere near humans.

He drove Pansy around to the stables—ridiculous thing, room for twenty horses and five or six carriages in the carriage house—driving her into the cobblestone courtyard in the center of the carriage house to unharness her, getting her to back up into the gig’s bay so he wouldn’t have to push it into shelter by hand. Another advantage to being an Earth Master, his ability to communicate with animals.

With the gig’s shafts resting on the stone floor of the carriage-bay, he gathered up the long reins so that Pansy wouldn’t trip on them and walked her to her stall in the stables. He supposed it was ridiculous for the chief physician—and owner!—of the sanitarium to be unharnessing and grooming his own horse but—well, there it was, Diccon was still in the manor, probably looking after some other chore that needed a strong back, and he wasn’t going to let Pansy stand about in harness, cold and hungry, just because he was “too good” to do a little manual labor.

And Pansy was a grateful little beast. So grateful that she cheered him completely out of any lingering annoyance with that arrogant Reggie Chamberten.

But how had a girl like that gotten engaged to someone like him? They were, or seemed to be, totally incompatible personalities. Unless it was financial need on her part, or on her familys. Stranger things had happened. Just because one owned a manor, that didn’t mean one was secure in the bank. Look what had happened to Briareley.

He went in through the kitchen entrance—a good, big kitchen, and thanks to the Brownies, all he’d had to do was move in the new cast-iron stove to make it perfect for serving all his patients now, and the capacity to feed the many, many more he hoped to have one day. Right now, he had one cook, a good old soul from the village, afraid of nothing and a fine hand with plain farm fare, who used to cook for the servants here. Red-faced and a little stout, she still moved as briskly as one of her helpers, and she was always willing to fix a little something different, delicate, to tempt a waning appetite among his patients. Helping her were two kitchen maids; a far cry from the days when there had been a fancy French cook for upstairs, a pastry cook, and a cook for downstairs and a host of kitchen maids, scullions, and cleaning staff to serve them.

“Where is Eleanor?” he asked Mrs. Hunter, the cook.

“She’s still with that poor little Ellen, Doctor, but Diccon recks the girl will be all right. He’s took up a hot brick for her bed, and a pot of my good chamomile tea.” Mrs. Hunter beamed at him; she approved of the fact that he took charity patients along with the wealthy ones—and she approved of the fact that he was trying to cure the wealthy ones rather than just warehousing them for the convenience of their relatives. In fact, Mrs. Hunter approved of just about everything he had done here, which had made his acceptance by Oakhurst village much smoother than it would have been otherwise. Not that the folk of Devon were surly or standoffish, oh, much to the contrary, they were amazingly welcoming of strangers! During his early days here, when he’d gotten lost on these banked and hedged lanes time and time again, he’d found over and over that when he asked for directions people would walk away from what they were doing to personally escort him to where he needed to go. Astonishing! So much for the stereotype of the insular and surly cottager.

Not in Devon. In Devon, if one got lost and approached a cottage, one was more apt to find oneself having to decline the fourth or fifth cup of hot tea and an offer of an overnight bed rather than finding oneself run off with a gun and snarling dogs.

But nevertheless, there was a certain proprietary feeling that villagers had for the titled families of their great houses and stately homes. They tended to resent interlopers coming in and buying out the families who had been there since the Conquest. Mrs. Hunter smoothed all that over for him.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hunter,” he said, and passed through the kitchen after a deep anticipatory breath redolent of rabbit stew and fresh bread. That was one good thing about buying this place. It wasn’t poaching when you set rabbit wires on your own property. It wasn’t poaching when you had your own man shoot a couple of the red deer that came wandering down into your back garden. There was some lovely venison hanging in the cold larder. Frozen, actually, thanks to the cold winter. Every little bit of money saved was to the good at this point. Money saved on food could go toward the wages of another hand, or perhaps even having gas laid on. At this point, electricity was not even to be thought of; there wasn’t an electrified house in the entire village. Someday, perhaps, the wires would come here. And just perhaps, by the time they did, he would have the money put away to have the house wired.

First, though, would come extra wages for extra help.

Because until he could afford to hire another big, strong fellow like Mrs. Hunter’s son Diccon, he didn’t dare take potentially dangerous patients.

From the downstairs he took the former servants’ stair upstairs, into the house proper.

What the family hadn’t taken or sold in the way of furnishings, he had mostly disposed of as being utterly impractical for their purposes. A pity, but what was the point of having furnishings too fragile to sit on or too heavy to shift?

Damned if he was going to tear down woodwork or paint anything over, though—even when the effect was dreadful. Some day, someone might want to buy this barn and make it a stately home again. Too many folk didn’t think of that when they purchased one of these places and then proceeded to cut it up.

Besides, for all I know, the ghosts of long-gone owners would rise up against me if I touched the place with impious hands. When you were an Elemental Master, such thoughts were not just whimsy; they had the potential to become fact. Having angry spirits roaming about among people who were already mentally unbalanced was not a good idea.

Particularly not when those people were among the minority who were able to see them as clearly as they saw the living.

Andrew had elected to make diverse use of the large rooms on the first floor. The old dining room was a dining room still, a communal one for those patients who felt able to leave their rooms or wards. The old library was a library and sitting room now, with a table for chess and another for cards; the old music room that overlooked the gardens was now allotted to the caretakers, where they could go when not on duty for a chat, a cup of tea, or a game of cards themselves. But the rest of the large rooms were wards for those patients who need not be segregated from the rest, or who lacked the funds to pay for a private room, or, like Ellen, were charity cases. Needless to say, the patients ensconced in the former bedrooms upstairs were the bread-and-butter of this place.

He checked on the two wards before Ellen’s carefully, since it was about time for him to make his rounds anyway, but all was quiet. In the first, there was no one in the four beds at all, for they were all playing a brisk game of faro for beans in the library. In the second, the patients were having their naps, for they were children. Poor babies. Poor, poor babies. Children born too sensitive, like Eleanor, or born with the power of the Elements in them; children born to parents who were perfectly ordinary, who had no notion of what to do when their offspring saw things—heard things—that weren’t there. He looked for those children, actively sought for them, had friends and fellow magicians watching for them. If he could get them under his care quickly enough, before they really were mad, driven to insanity by the tortures within themselves and the vile way in which the mentally afflicted were treated, then he could save them.

If. That was the reason for this place. Because when he began his practice, he found those for whom he had come too late.

Well, I’m not too late now. Here were the results of his rescue-missions, taking naps before dinner in the hush of their ward. Seven of them, their pinched faces relaxed in sleep, a sleep that, at last, was no longer full of hideous nightmares. They tended to sleep a lot when they first arrived here, as if they were making up for all the broken unrest that had passed for slumber until they arrived here, in sanctuary at last.

He left them to their slumbers. It wasn’t at all the usual thing for children to be mental patients.

Then again, he didn’t have the usual run of mental patients; when his people were “seeing things,” often enough, they really were seeing things.

That was why he’d had no difficulty in getting patients right from the beginning. Once word spread among the magicians, the occultists, and the other students of esoterica that Dr. Andrew Pike was prepared to treat their friends, relations, and (tragically) children for the traumatic aftermath of hauntings, curses, and other encounters with the supernatural, his beds began to fill. He got other patients when mundane physicians referred them to him, without knowing what it was they suffered from but having seen that under certain circumstances, with certain symptoms, Andrew Pike could effect a real cure.

It wasn’t only those who were born magicians or highly sensitive who ended up coming to him. Under the right—or perhaps wrong circumstances, virtually anyone could find horror staring the face. And sometimes, it wasn’t content just to stare.

There were a few of the adult patients who were under the indicious influence of drugs designed to keep them from being agitated which tended to make them sleep a great deal; those were the ones back in their beds after tea. The rest of the patients were in the parlor, reading or socializing. He didn’t like drugging them, but in the earliest stages here, sometimes he had to, just to break the holds that their own particular horrors had over them.

Ellen was on the third ward, and was fast asleep when he got there. Eleanor, the female ward nurse, was with her, sitting beside her bed, and looked up at the sound of his footsteps. She kept her pale hair pulled tightly back and done in a knot after the manner of a Jane Eyre, and her dark, somber clothing tended to reinforce that image. Eleanor seldom smiled, but her solemn face was not wearing that subtle expression of concern that would have told him there was something wrong.

Well—more wrong than there already is.

“She’ll be fine for now, Doctor,” Eleanor said without prompting. “She got chilled, but I don’t believe there will be any ill effects from it. We got her warmed up quickly enough once we got her back here.” She stroked a few stray hairs from Ellen’s brow, and her expression softened. “Poor child. Doctor, we mustn’t allow that boy Simon Ashford around her. She can see what he sees, of course; they seem peculiarly sensitive to one another. That’s what frightened her. I’ve already told Diccon not to let the child near her, but not why, of course.”

“I’ll make a note of it.” Eleanor was invaluable; one of his former patients who had decided to stay with him as a nurse and assistant when he’d helped her out of the hell that her inability to shut out the thoughts of others had thrown her into. Pike had been the only doctor at the asylum where she’d been who had understood that when it sounded as if she was answering someone that no one else could hear—she really was speaking to another person, or trying to. She was another of those cases of extreme sensitivity to the thoughts of others that came on at puberty—and thank heavens, one he had gotten to in time. It had been getting worse and before very long, all of the voices in her head would have driven her mad.

For a time, she had been in love with him. He had allowed it long enough to be sure that her cure was permanent, then he had used just a little magic, the opposite of a love charm, to be certain that she fell out of love with him again. A very useful bit of magery, that charm, for it was inevitable that most of his female patients and even a few male, fell in love with him. In fact, there was one school of thought among the Germans that such an emotional attachment was necessary for the patient’s recovery, that only someone who was beloved could be trusted with the most intimate secrets. Whether that was true or not, Andrew wasn’t prepared to judge; it was his duty to see that he did everything humanly possible to cure them, no more, and no less. Let others formulate theories; he worked by observation and used what was successful. He had more than enough on his hands, balancing magic and medicine, without worrying about concocting theories of how the mind worked!

He wished, though, that Eleanor could really find someone for herself. The regret that she hadn’t came over him as he watched her with Ellen; she was a nurturer, and she loved the children here. She seemed very lonely; well educated, she would have probably become a teacher had she not her unfortunate background.

“Who was that girl?” Eleanor asked, rising and smoothing her pearl-gray apron as she did so. “The one that helped us, I mean.”

“That, it seems, was the young Miss Roeswood that the village has been buzzing about.” He raised an eyebrow at her, and she made a little “o” with her mouth. Eleanor was a Methodist by practice, so of course she went to chapel, not church, and had missed the exciting appearance of the mysterious young heiress at Sunday services two weeks ago.

“But—what a kind young woman she is!” Eleanor exclaimed. “Not that her parents were bad people but—”

“But I cannot imagine, from what I heard of her, seeing Alanna Roeswood on her knees in the snow, trying to keep Ellen from running off into the fields,” Andrew replied with a nod. “Visiting the sick with soup and jelly, yes. Delivering Christmas baskets. Sending bric-a-brac to the jumble sale. But not preparing to tackle a runaway madwoman to keep her from freezing to death in the woods.” He thought about asking Eleanor if she had seen anything of Marina’s magic, but realized in the next instant that of course, she wouldn’t. She wasn’t a magician, only a sensitive. If she wished to, she might be able to hear the girl’s thoughts, but only if the girl herself dropped the shields that she must have had to have avoided immediate recognition by Andrew himself.

This Marina Roeswood might claim she wasn’t a Master, but all her shields were as good as anything he had ever seen.

“If Ellen is well enough,” he suggested, “Why don’t you help me finish the rounds?”

Eleanor got to her feet without an objection. “Certainly, Dr. Pike,” she replied. “Will I need my notebook?”

“I don’t think so,” he told her, and smiled. “I certainly hope that young Ellen is our last crisis for a while.”

With Eleanor following behind, Andrew finished checking on the patients in the other wards, and took a quick look in on the library. The card game was still going briskly, and Craig, one of his little boys who was very close to being discharged, had engaged Roger Smith, one of the oldest patients, in a spirited chess match. Andrew and Eleanor exchanged a quick smile when they saw that; Roger was going to be discharged tomorrow, and he loved chess as much as Craig disliked it, so this must be Craig’s idea of a proper farewell present for the old man.

Craig was one of the few children here who was an “ordinary” patient, brought here by a parent because of a life-threatening breakdown brought on by strain. Young Craig had been a chess-Prodigy; his father had trotted him around Britain and three-fourths of Europe, staging tournaments in front of paying audiences with the greatest of chess masters, before his health and mental stability collapsed under the strain. He’d literally collapsed and it was a good thing he’d done so in Plymouth, and that for once, his mother had been with him as well as his father. She took over when the father simply tried to shake the boy into obedience—and consciousness!—again. When Craig couldn’t be awakened, the father vanished, and she started looking for someone to help her child.

Small wonder Craig hated chess now—and, in fact, on Pike’s suggestion was going to pretend that all of his knowledge of the game had vanished in his breakdown. His mother, on recommendation from one of Andrew’s colleagues, had brought him to Briareley, hoping to find someone who would treat her son as a child and not a broken machine that needed to be fixed so it could resume its job.

But it was a measure of how much he had recovered that he was willing to treat the old man who had read him fairy tales to send him to sleep every night for the past six months to the game that gave him such pleasure.

“He’s a good boy, Doctor,” Eleanor said softly.

“Yes,” Andrew replied, feeling a warm smile cross his lips. “He is. God willing, that beast that calls himself a father will leave him alone now.”

They took the wide, formal stairs up to the second floor, and the private rooms.

Here, the patients were a mix in the opposite direction from the ones in the wards. Most of these folk were not magicians or extraordinarily sensitive. Andrew’s establishment was slowly gaining a reputation among ladies of fashion as a place to recover from nerves.

And “nerves” was an umbrella that covered a great many things.

Now, Andrew would not accept the sort of nerves that came from too much liquor, or from indulgences in drugs. For one thing he could not afford the sort of round-the-clock watching such patients required. For another, their problems would make life difficult for his other patients. For a third, well, he’d need half a dozen Diccons to make sure everyone was safe.

Nor did he accept—although it was always possible that a set of circumstances would occur that would cause him to make an exeption—the sort of nerves that produced an inconvenient infant in nine months’ time.

But if too many debutante-parties and the stress of being on the marriage-market sent a young lady into hysterics or depression—if too many late nights and champagne and tight corseting did the same to her mother—if the strain of too much responsibility sent a young widow into collapse—

Well, here there were quiet, well-appointed rooms, simple but delicious food, grounds where one could walk, lanes where one could drive, and no one would bother you with invitations, decisions, noise, bustle, or anything else until you were rested. A week, a month, and you were ready to go back to the social whirl.

And no one acted as if your problems were so insignificant that you should feel ashamed of your weakness. And if Andrew’s establishment was doing no more than providing a kind of country spa rather than real treatment for serious problems for these women, well, why not? Why shouldn’t he have the benefit of their money?

If, however, there was a serious problem, unlike a spa or other fashionable resort, Andrew was going to spot it, and at least attempt to treat it.

So he and Eleanor completely bypassed one wing of guest rooms that had been converted into patient rooms. The ladies housed there had no need of him or his services; they were quite satisfied to see him once a day, just after a late breakfast.

He did stop at several other rooms, though. Three were cases of real depression, and aside from seeing that they got a great deal of sunlight (which seemed to help), and slowly, slowly seeing what healing magic might do, there wasn’t a lot that seemed to make a difference to them.

At least he wasn’t dousing them with cold water baths six times a day, or tying them to beds and force-feeding them, or throw them into those horrors called general wards.

There were four cases of feeble-mindedness, one of who could barely feed himself. Two unfortunates who had fallen from heights onto their heads, who were in similar case. One old demented woman. All of these could have been warehoused anywhere, but at least they had family who cared that they were treated decently, kept clean, warm, and well-fed, and that no one abused them. For this, they paid very well indeed, and Dr. Pike was very grateful.

And he had one poor soul who really was hearing voices in his head that didn’t exist, not on any plane. He didn’t know what to do with that fellow; nothing he tried seemed to work. There was something wrong in the brain, but what? And how was he to fix it, even if he could discover what was wrong?

That man, though he had never shown any inclination to violence, was locked in a room in which the bed and chair were too heavy to move, and in any case, bolted to the floor so that he couldn’t use them to break the window. There was an ornamental iron grate bolted over the window on the inside. And the poor man was never allowed a candle or an open fire; there was a cast-iron American stove in the fireplace in his room, and Andrew could only hope that the voices in his head would never tell him to try to open it with his bare hands.

He was the last visit this afternoon; all was well, and Andrew heaved a sigh of relief as he always did.

“Have your tea, Eleanor,” he told her. “I’m going to go help Diana Gorden with her shields.”

She smiled faintly. “Very well, Doctor. Don’t forget to eat, yourself.”

“I won’t,” he promised.

And of course, promptly did.

Chapter Fifteen

MARINA stared at the four small objects in the palm of her hand; there was no confusion about what she was seeing, as sunlight flooded the room. In her hand lay what were supposed to have been four ha’pennies that she had just poured out of the vase. Well, she’d thought they were ha’pennies last night when she’d put them in the vase.

But when she’d tilted them out this morning, it was painfully clear that they were nothing of the sort. They were, in fact, four “good conduct” medals of the sort given out at Sunday School, sans ribbon and pin. They were copper, they did feature the Queen’s profile, and they were the size of a ha’pence. But not even the kindest-hearted postmaster was going to exchange these for a stamp.

I must have been more tired than I thought. I just looked at these things last night, saw the Queen’s head, and thought they were coins. Or maybe it was just that I was working by the light of one candle. Oh, conkers. I’m back where I started.

She sighed. She’d have wept, except that with Madam and Reggie still gone, she had plenty of things to leaven her disappointment. She had a real breakfast, Miss Mary Anne had been told that in absence of any tasks that Madam had left for Marina to do (there were none, since Madam had left in such a hurry) Marina was going out to ride this morning and this afternoon.

Mary Anne sullenly attired her in her riding habit and left, ostensibly on some other task that she had been assigned. In reality since no one seemed to have authority over Mary Anne but Madam, that was unlikely. Marina strongly suspected that the girl would be back here to snoop as soon as her putative mistress was gone, though. She’d probably go through every bit of Marina’s belongings while she had the chance.

Well, I’d better dispose of these… She put them in the very bottom of her jewel case. If Mary Anne found them, she would assume that they were further evidence of Marina’s faithful church-going, which was all to the good; church activities were high on the list of appropriate things for young ladies of even the highest ranks to do.

A quick note on menu-paper to the cook took care of luncheon, tea and dinner, and Marina was out into the cold, flinging her cloak over her shoulders, her hat pinned jauntily on her head at an angle that was quite out of keeping with one in mourning.

This time, instead of placid old Brownie, Marina asked the groom to saddle the iron-mouthed hunter Reggie usually rode, an extremely tall gelding named Beau. She had a notion that he was all right, despite Reggie’s assertions that “he’s a rum ‘un,” and to make sure she started off on the best of terms with him, she brought a bread crust smeared in jam from breakfast. He laid back his ears when he saw the groom approaching with the saddle, but pricked them forward again when it was Marina, not Reggie, who approached.

She held out the crust, which he sniffed at, then engulfed with good appetite, using lips more than teeth. That was a good sign. As he chewed it, she ventured to scratch his nose. He closed his eyes and leaned into the caress, then made no fuss about being saddled and bridled. He stood steady as a rock beside the mounting-block (he was so tall she needed to use one) and then stepped out smartly when she barely nudged him with a heel. She hadn’t even got halfway down the drive before figuring out that although his mouth was insensitive, he neck-reined beautifully. And his manners were impeccable.

“Well, you’re just every inch the gentleman, aren’t you?” she asked, as his ears swiveled back to catch what she said. He snorted, quite as if he understood her, and bobbed his head.

He had a silken fast walk, and because his legs were so long, a surprisingly comfortable trot. No odds that’s why Reggie bagged him, she thought. I ought to see if I could teach him to “bounce” on his trot; that’d serve Reggie right.

Ah, but Reggie would probably just take it out on the horse, which wouldn’t be fair to Beau.

She had a particular goal in mind for this morning, while Madam was still away; she had gotten Sally to tell her the way to Briareley, and she was not going to wait for Dr. Pike to decide whether or not he was going to contact her at the vicarage. She was going to come to him. This would probably be her only opportunity to go to Briareley ever; Madam might be back this very afternoon, and would never permit Marina to make such a visit. It would be highly improper—they hadn’t been introduced, Briareley was no longer a place where one might ask for a tour of the house, she should not be visiting a man unescorted. The notion of paying a visit to a sanitarium where there were madmen—well, a daring young man might well pull such a thing off on a lark, but no woman would even consider such a thing. Marina was breaking all manner of social rules by doing this.

But this was not a social visit—this was Magician to Magician, and as such, did not fall under any of the chapters in Marina’s book of etiquette.

I did look, though, she thought whimsically, I tried to find even a mention of Magician to Magician protocol But there wasn’t anything there on the subject. So the “Young Lady’s Compleate Guide to Manners” isn’t as complete a guide as it claims to be.

The hunter trotted along briskly, while she was engrossed in thought. Etiquette aside, she needed to be very careful with what she did and did not say and do around this man. After all, she knew nothing about him, except that he had a good reputation in the village. Now, that was no bad thing; the village saw a great deal and gossiped about it widely.

But that didn’t mean that the village saw everything; the fact that he hadn’t betrayed himself as an Earth Master proved that.

Magicians were only human, as Elizabeth had been at pains to point out. They could be brave—or cowards. Noble—or petty. Altruistic—or selfish.

Marina had a long talk with Sally over breakfast; she knew already that Doctor Pike had more than charity patients—he catered to ladies of wealth and privilege who suffered from nervous exhaustion. Treatment for these special patients amounted to a bit of cosseting, flattering attention to their symptoms, some nostrums, and being left undisturbed—or pampered—as their whims dictated. And these women were probably paying a great deal of money to have that much attention given them by a sympathetic, handsome, young physician. So, whatever else Dr. Pike was, he was clearly willing to pander to them in order to get those handsome fees.

Not the altogether altruistic and idealistic physician he might have seemed from his treatment of the runaway girl.

Caution is in order, I think, in how much I believe about him. And caution in how much I tell him about myself. But if nothing else, I will make arrangements to help him with that girl.

The hunter’s head bobbed with effort as he climbed a hill; at a walk, not a trot; this was a steep bit of lane. She could just imagine the hay-wains laboring up here—the poor horses straining in their harness as they tried to get themselves and their load up to the top of this rise. Add to that the rocks and ruts, what a hideous climb it must be.

Or perhaps not; it wasn’t quite wide enough for a loaded wain, which must have relieved quite a few farm horses over the years.

And then they reached the top; the horse paused for a breath, and she reined him in, looking around for a moment. And paused, arrested by the view.

On her left, the hill dropped steeply away from the lane, giving her an unparalleled view of the countryside. The top of the hedge along the edge of that field was actually level with her ankle, the slope dropping off steeply at the very edge of the lane and continuing that way for yards. The hills and valley spread out below her in a snow-covered panorama, ending in distant, misty hills, higher than the rest, blue-gray and fading into the clouds on the horizon, that might be the edge of Exmoor.

Now, it was to be admitted that no one traveled from across the world—or even across England—to see the views of Devon countryside. There was nothing spectacular here in front of her, no snow-covered peaks, no wild cliffs and crashing waves, no great canyons, wilderness valleys. But spectacle was not always what the heart craved, although the soul might feast on it. Sometimes you don’t want a feast. Sometimes you just want a cozy tea in front of the fire.

She rested her eyes on the fields below, irregularly-shaped patches of white bordered by the dark gray lines of the leafless hedges, like fuzzy charcoal lines on a pristine sheet of paper. The wavering lines were sometimes joined, and sometimes broken, by coppices of trees, the nearer looking exactly like Uncle Sebastian’s pencil-sketches of winter trees, the farther blurred by distance into patches of gray haze, containing the occasional green lance-head of a conifer. Some of those white patches of ground held tiny red-brown cattle, scarcely seeming to move; presumably some held sheep, although it was difficult to make out the white-on-white blobs at any distance. Sheep on the high ground, cattle on the low, that was the rule. Farmhouses rose up out of the snow, shielded Protectively by more trees, looking for all the world, with their thatched roofs covered in snow, and their walls of pale cob or gray stone, as if they had grown up out of the landscape. Thin trails of white smoke rose in the air from chimneys, and in the far distance, barely discernible, was the village, a set of miniature toy-buildings identifiable by the square Gothic tower of St. Peter’s rising in their midst.

There was a faint scent of wood smoke from those far-off hearth fires; a biting chill to the air that warned of colder winds to come and a scent of ice that suggested she might want to be indoors by nightfall. The blazing sun of early morning was gone; muted by high mare’s-tail clouds with lower, puffier clouds moving in on the wind.

Jackdaws shouted metallically at one another from two coppices, and a male starling somewhere nearby pretended it was spring with an outpouring of mimicked song. So had this valley looked for the last two hundred years. So, probably, would it look for the next hundred, with only minor additions.

It slumbered now, beneath its coverlet of snow, but Marina did not need to close her eyes to know how it would look in the spring when it came to vivid life. Green—green and honey-brown, but mostly green—would be the colors of the landscape. The vivid green of the fields would be bisected by the dark-green lines of the hedges; the farmhouses would disappear altogether behind their screening of trees—or would, at most, look like mounds of old hay left behind after harvest beneath the graying thatch. When walls showed at all, the cob would glow with the sunlight, the stone pick up the same mellow warmth. The hillside fields would be dotted with the white puffs of sheep, the valley fields holding the red-brown shapes of cattle moving through the knee-deep grass, heads down, intent on browsing as though the grass were going to vanish in the next instant. And everywhere would be the song of water.

For although there were few lakes, and fewer rivers, this was a land of a thousand little streams, all gone silent now under the snow, but ready to burst out as soon as spring came. They burbled up out of the hills, they babbled their way across meadows, they chuckled along the lanes and laughed on their way to join the great rivers, the Tamar, the Taw, the Torridge, the Okement, the Exe.

And over and around the sound of the waters would be the songs of the birds—starling and lark, crow and wren, jackdaw and robin, bluetit and sparrow, nightingale, thrush—all of them daring each other to come encroach on a territory, shouting out love for a mate or desire for one. Between the songs of the waters and the birds would be the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, and all the little homely sounds of farm and land made soft by distance.

The sky would be an impossible blue, gentle and misty, with white clouds fluffy as newly-washed fleeces sailing over the hills on their way to the next valley.

And the air would be soft with damp, full of the scent of green growing things, of moss and fern, and the sweet fragrance of fresh-cut grass and spring flowers. It would touch the cheek in a caress that would negate the knife-flick of winter’s wind, the unkindly wind that knew no softness but that of snow.

Marina heard all of these things in her memory, as she saw them in her mind’s eye, as she felt them, as sure as the ground beneath her horse’s hooves, his muscular, warm neck under her gloved hand. In all seasons, under all weathers, she knew this land, not so different from the place where she had grown up, after all—its waters flowed in her blood, its stones called to her bones. Not sudden, but slow and powerful, she felt that call, and the answer within her, to protect, to serve, and above all, to cleanse.

Not that this land needed any cleansing.

Unbidden, the answer to that thought came immediately.

Yet.

For there was a girl poisoned, polluted, lying sick in a room not a quarter mile from here, representative of how many others? And worse, of how much poison pouring into the air, the water, and the soil? And where was that blight? It couldn’t be far; if Ellen was a charity patient, the relative who had brought her to Andrew Pike must be poor as well, and unable to afford an extended journey. Would it spread? How could it not? Disease, cancer, poison—all of them spread, inexorably; it was in their nature to spread. Some day, the poison would touch this place.

She clenched her jaw, angry at her aunt, at all of the shortsighted fools who couldn’t see, wouldn’t see, that what poisoned the land came, eventually, to poison them. What was wrong with them? Did they think, in their arrogance, that their money would keep them isolated from the filth they poured out every day? Was their greed such that the cost didn’t matter so long as it was hidden? Or were they willfully not believing, pretending that the poison was somehow harmless, or even beneficial? She’d seen for herself how some people had eagerly bought the copper-tailings from the mines and the smelters to spread on their garden paths because what was left in the processed ore was so poisonous that no weed could grow in it. It never occurred to them that the same gravel was poisonous enough to kill birds that picked bits of it up—or babies that stuck pieces of it in their mouths to suck. Willful ignorance, or just stupidity? In the end, it didn’t matter, for the damage was done.

But it wasn’t difficult to keep land and water and air clean! Any housewife knew that—if you just took proper care—and took it all the time.

But the people responsible for Ellen’s condition didn’t care for the wisdom of the housewife; that much was clear enough. Theirs was the wisdom of the accounting book, the figures on the proper side of the ledger, and never mind a cost that could not be reckoned in pounds and pence.

For a moment, her heart sank, but her resolve strengthened. I will do what I can, she vowed silently, though to what, she wasn’t sure. I will do all that I can. Because I must.

If anything answered, there were no dramatic signs, yet she felt as if something had heard her vow, found it good, and accepted it. And she turned her horse’s head away, down the hill, and toward Briareley, determined to begin that endless task with one single girl.

There was no stableman at Briareley, no servant arrived to hold her horse and take it away when she rode up the drive toward the imposing front entrance—Georgian, she thought, with four huge columns holding up the porch roof—at the top of a long staircase of native stone made smooth as marble. A Georgian front, Tudor wings? and heaven only knew what else behind them. And no servants for all of this pile.

This, however, was not unexpected; from Sally, she had heard that the doctor cut as many corners as possible, and keeping a stablehand about just to care for a horse and two ponies was a great waste of wages when a man-of-all-work was what was really needed. So Marina sat up in her saddle and looked carefully at the drive; saw the wheel-ruts leading off to the side of the house, and followed them. As she expected, they led her to a wide doorway into a square courtyard open to the sky. Along two sides were stalls for horses, along two were bays for carriages and other vehicles. There was, thank heavens, a mounting-block in the center.

She made use of it, then led the horse to an unoccupied stall. It was also utterly bare; she couldn’t do much about the lack of straw on the ground, but she did take off his bridle, throw a blanket over him, and leave him a bucket of water. He’d had his breakfast before she rode out, and if Dr. Pike was as careful with money as he seemed to be, she didn’t want to pilfer oats or hay without permission.

She considered going around to the kitchen entrance—but this was a formal visit, after all, and she wasn’t an expected and casual arrival. So, patting her hat to make sure it was still on straight, she walked back around to the front.

She felt very small as she trudged up the staircase, wondering what long-ago ancestor of the original owners had deemed it necessary to cow his guests before they entered his home. Someone with a profound sense of his own importance, she reckoned. Compared with this place, Oakhurst, which had seemed so huge when she first arrived, was nothing.

When he gets staff for this hulk, and has it full of patients, he’ll bowl over people who come to see if this is where loony Uncle Terrance should be put.

It was a pity that a place like this, absolutely overflowing with history, should have to be made into a sanitarium. But what else was to be done with it? Let it molder until the roof fell in? Turn it into a school? Who else would want it? People like Arachne, with new money out of their factories, built brand new mansions with modern conveniences, and didn’t care a tot about history. There were only so many American millionaires about, and most of them wanted fancy homes near London, not out in the farmlands of Devon. What was the point (they thought) of having money enough to buy a huge old castle if there was nobody around to see it and admire it?

Except, of course, the local villagers, who had seen it all their lives.

And what was the point of living out where there was nothing to see and do? Nothing, as American millionaires saw it. They loved London, London sights, excitement, theater, society.

It came as no surprise to her that there was no one in the entrance hall, although there was a single desk set up facing the doors there. The enormous room, with magnificent gilded and painted plaster-molding, cream and olive and pale green, ornamenting the walls and ceiling. She paused to listen, head tilted to one side, and followed the echoing sounds of soft voices along the right side of the building.

I thought this place was supposed to be in poor repair? That was the first thing she noticed; none of the signs of neglect that she had expected, no stains on walls or ceilings betraying leaks, no cracks, no rot or woodworm. In fact, although gilt was rubbed or flaked off from plasterwork here and there, and paint and wallpaper fading, the building appeared to be sound.

She walked quietly—she’d had practice by now—but her footsteps still echoed in the empty rooms. Not even a scrap of carpet to soften the wooden floors!

Perhaps the financing of repair work is where all the Doctor’s money is going. If that was so, she was inclined to feel more charitable, it would take a great deal of society money to pay for repairs to a place like this one.

And it appeared that the huge rooms here had been made into wards. As she entered the third, this one featuring painted panels of mythological scenes up near the ceiling, she found people there. A modern cast-iron stove with a fireguard about it had been fitted into the fireplace, rendering it safer and a great deal more efficient at producing heat, and two folk who were not in their beds dozing sat in a pair out of the motley assortment of chairs around it. There were roughly a dozen beds, three occupied, and one brisk-looking young woman in a nurse’s cap and apron and light blue smock who seemed to be in charge of them; when she saw Marina, she nodded, and walked toward her.

“I beg your pardon, miss,” the nurse said, as soon as she was near enough to speak and be heard, “But the old family no longer owns this home. This is Briareley Sanitarium now, and we do not give house tours, nor entertain visitors, except for the visitors to the patients.”

“I know that,” she replied, with a smile to soften it. “I’m Marina Roeswood, and I’m here on two accounts. I would like to speak to Dr. Pike, and I would like to enquire about the poor girl who was—”

How to put this tactfully?

“—out in the snow yesterday. Ellen, I believe is her name?”

“Ah.” The young woman seemed partially mollified. “Well, in that case, I suppose it must be all right.” She looked over her shoulder, back at the patients. “Miss, I can’t leave my charges, and there’s no one to send for to take you around. I shall tell you where to find the doctor, or at least, where to wait for him, but you’ll have to promise to go straight there and not to disturb the patients in any way. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly.” Again she smiled, and nodded. “It’s possible that one of them might approach me; would it hurt anything if I try to soothe him and put him back in a fireside chair? I think I can feign to be whomever I’m thought to be.”

“We don’t have many as is inclined to delusions, miss, but—yes, I think that would be the thing to do,” the nurse replied after a moment of thought. “There isn’t a one as is dangerous—or we couldn’t be as few of us for as many of them as there is.”

Marina thought she sounded wistful at that. Perhaps she had come from a larger establishment; Marina hoped she didn’t regret the change.

“Now, you turn right around, go back to the hall, across and to the back of the room. Go through that door, and keep going until you find the Red Saloon, what used to be the billiard room. It’s Doctor’s office now, and you wait for him there. He’ll be done with his rounds soon, and I’ll try to see he knows you’re here.”

“And Ellen?” she asked.

“Not a jot of harm done her, poor little lamb,” the nurse said sympathetically. “But that’s what happens, sometimes, when you take your eyes off these folks. Like little children, they are, and just as naughty when they’ve got a mind to it.” She looked back over her shoulder again, and Marina took the hint and turned and went back the way she had come.

Following the nurse’s instructions, she found the Red Saloon without difficulty, complete with medical books in the shelves and empty racks where billiard cues had once stood. It still boasted the red figured wallpaper that had given it its name, and the red and white marble tiles of the floor, as well as a handsome white marble fireplace and wonderful plasterwork friezes near the ceiling. It was not hard to imagine the billiard-table and other masculine furniture that must have once been here. Now there was nothing but a desk, a green-shaded paraffin lamp, and a couple of chairs. She moved toward one, then hesitated, and went over to the bookshelves to examine what was there and see if there was anything she could while away her time with.

Medical texts, yes. Bound issues of medical journals. But—tucked in a corner—a few volumes of poetry. Spencer. Ben Jonson. John Donne.

Well. She slid the last book out; the brown, tooled-leather cover was well-worn, the pages well-thumbed, the title page inscribed To Andrew, a companion for Oxford, from Father.

She took it down, and only then did she take a seat, now with a familiar voice to keep her company.

She looked up when the doctor came in, and extended her hand. “Well, we meet again, Dr. Pike,” she said, as he took it, and shook it firmly. “I won’t apologize for visiting you without invitation, although I will do so for borrowing this copy of one of my old friends.”

She held up the book of poetry, and he smiled. “No apologies necessary,” he replied, and took his seat behind his desk. “Now, why did you decide to come here?”

She took a deep breath; as she had read Donne, encountering with a little pain some of his poems on the falseness of women, she had determined to be as forthright and blunt as she dared. “You know, of course, that I’m not of age?”

He raised an eyebrow. “The thought had occurred to me. But I must say that you are extremely prepossessing for one who is—?”

She flushed. “Almost eighteen,” she said, with a touch of defensiveness.

“It is a very mature eighteen, and I am not attempting to flatter you,” he replied. “Do I take it that this has something to do with your age?”

“I have a guardian, as you may know—my father’s sister, Arachne Chamberten. My guardian would be horrified if she knew how much freedom I am accustomed to,” she said, wishing bitterly it were otherwise. “Furthermore, my guardian doesn’t know that I’m here and she isn’t going to find out. She and her son have gone to deal with a business emergency in Exeter, and they can’t be back until this evening at the earliest. Madam Arachne has very, very strict ideas about what is proper for the behavior of a girl my age.” She couldn’t help herself, she made a face. “I think she has some rather exaggerated ideas about how one has to act to be accepted in society, and the kind of people that one can and can’t know.”

“Ah?” he responded, and she felt her cheeks getting hotter.

“I mean, she thinks that if I fraternize with anyone who is absolutely on the most-desired guest-lists, I would be hurting my future.” Her blushes were cooled by her resentment. “I think she’s wrong. Lady Hastings doesn’t act anything like Madam, and I’m sure she is in the best circles.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Dr. Pike said dryly. “I don’t move in those circles myself. Oh, they may come to me when they need me, but they wouldn’t invite me to their parties.”

She felt heat rushing into her cheeks again. “The point is, I did promise to help you with that girl, and since my guardian is probably going to have my wretched cousin riding with me at any time I’m not going to church or the vicarage, this was the only time I was going to be able to arrange things with you. I think, if you can manage it, that we ought to bring her there. I think the vicar would understand, he seems a very understanding sort—”

The doctor seemed, oddly enough, to fix first on what she’d said about the odious Reggie. “Your cousin? Don’t you mean, your fiance?”

She stared at him blankly. “What fiance?”

“The gentleman who came to get you—”

Reggie. He thought she was engaged to Reggie. What an absolutely thick thing to assume!

“Good gad!” she burst out. “Whatever possessed you, to think the Odious Reggie was my fiance? I’d rather marry my horse!”

He stared at her blankly, as she stared at him, fuming. Then, maddeningly, he began to chuckle. “My apologies, Miss Roeswood. I should have known better. I should have known that you would have more sense than that.”

She drew herself up, offended that he had even given the thought a moment of credence. Not one ounce of credit to my good sense, not one. Couldn’t he see from the first words out of my mouth that I would have less than no interest in a beast like Reggie?

He probably thought that, like any silly society debutante, she would be so swayed by Reggie’s handsome face that she’d ignore everything else. “I should hope so,” she said, stiffly. “I should think anyone but the village idiot would have more sense than that. Now—”

She was irrationally pleased to see him blush.

“—perhaps we can talk about your patient, and how I am to be able to help her after today.”

“I think that you are right, if getting away from your—escort—is going to be so difficult. The vicarage is the only solution, Miss Roeswood,” the doctor replied. “And I believe that we can manufacture some sort of reason to bring you and Ellen together there on a regular basis. But first, well, I would like to see if you can do anything for her, before we make any further plans.”

She nodded; that was a reasonable request. “Why not now?” she asked. “I came prepared to do just that.”

“Come along then,” he replied, waving his hand vaguely toward the door.

“I have her in a ward that has other Sensitives in it,” he told her, as she followed him. “We won’t have to hide anything.” Now with a patient to treat, he was all business, which was a great deal more comfortable a situation than when he was assessing her personally. She was not altogether certain that she liked him—

But she didn’t have to like him to work with him.

“That should make things easier then,” she replied, just as they reached Ellen’s ward, this one in an older part of the house, wood-paneled and floored with parquetry-work, with only six of the austere iron-framed beds in it. The poor thing looked paler than ever, but she recognized Marina easily enough, and mustered up a smile for both of them.

The doctor looked around and addressed the other four women currently in the ward. “Ladies, this young woman is another magician,” he said softly, just loud enough to carry to all of the people in the room, but not beyond. “She is going to help me try a new treatment for Ellen, so don’t be surprised by anything you see.”

One looked fearful, but nodded. The other three looked interested. Marina surveyed the situation.

“Shields first, I think,” she said, and with a nod from the Doctor, she invoked them, spreading them out as she had been taught from a center-point above Ellen’s bed.

“Hmm,” the doctor said, noncommittally, but Marina thought he looked impressed. “Why shields?” he asked, so exactly like Sebastian trying to trip her up that she felt her breath catch in memory.

“Because, Doctor, not every Elemental is friendly,” she replied Nor are all other magicians, she thought, but did not say. “Now, if lead-poisoning works like the arsenic-poisoning I treated some birds for, it will take more than one go to get the filth out of you, Ellen,” she continued, deciding that she was not going to make conversation over the girl’s head as if she wasn’t there. “I don’t know, but I think that the poison is in your blood and the rest of you as well, and when I flush it out of your blood, some of it comes out of the flesh to replace it. So this will take several treatments.”

Ellen nodded. “That makes sense,” she ventured; a quick glance upward at the doctor proved he was nodding.

“I think you’ve gotten things damaged; that’s something I can’t do anything about. All I can do is try and force the lead out. And the first thing I want you to do—is drink that entire pitcher of water!” She pointed at the pitcher beside the bed, and Ellen made a little gasp of dismay.

“But miss—won’t I—” a pale ghost of a blush spread over the girl’s cheeks.

“Have to piss horribly?” she whispered in Ellen’s ear, and the girl giggled at hearing the coarse words out of a lady. “Of course you will, where do you think I’m going to make the poison go? And I want it out of you, without causing any more harm. So, water first, then let me go to work.”

Ellen drank as much of the water as she could hold without getting sick; Marina groped for the nearest water-source and found one, a fine little river running along the bottom of Briareley’s garden too strong for the ice to close up. And with it, a single Undine, surprisingly awake and active. A wordless exchange flashed between them, ending with the Undine’s assent, and power, like cool water from an opened stopcock, flowed into her in a green and luminescent flood.

Ah. She drank it, feeling it course through her, filling her with a drink she had missed more than she knew. With fingers resting just over the girl’s navel, Marina closed her eyes, and went to work.

It was largely a matter of cleansing the blood, which looked to Marina like a polluted river with millions of tributaries. But it all had to go where she lurked, eventually, and she was able to “grab” the poison and send it where she wanted it to go, whether it wanted to or not. It didn’t want to; it was stubborn stuff, and wanted to stay. But she was not going to let it, and the green fires of water-magic were stronger than poison.

About the time that Ellen stirred restlessly and uncomfortably under her hand—needing to empty out all that poisoned “water,” before she burst—Marina ran out of energy—the personal energy she needed to control the Water Energy, not the Water Magic itself. Reluctantly, she severed the connection with the little stream, and opened her eyes.

“I think that’s all I can manage for now,” she said with a sigh.

“I know ‘tis all I can—” Ellen got out, and Marina was only just able to get the shields down before the girl was out of bed and staggering towards a door that probably led to a water closet.

I hope it leads to one quickly—poor thing!

“Poor Ellen!” Dr. Pike got out, around what were clearly stifled chuckles.

“Poor Ellen, indeed,” Marina said dryly. She didn’t elaborate, but she had noted a distinct lack of comprehension among the male of the human species for the female’s smaller… capacity. It had made for some interesting arguments between Margherita and Sebastian, arguments in which the language got downright Elizabethan in earthiness, and which had culminated in a second WC downstairs in Blackbird Cottage.

“Allow me to say that was quite what I wished I could do for her,” the Doctor added ruefully. “It was quite frustrating. I could see the poison, but I couldn’t make it go away; it was too diffuse, too widely spread through the body, and nothing like a wound or a disease.”

“Well, we Water powers have to be good for something I suppose,” she replied, feeling cautiously proud of herself. “How long—?”

“Just about an hour and a half. I would like to invite you to luncheon—” he began, but stopped when she shook her head.

“I would very much like to accept, but even I know that is behavior that is simply unacceptable in a single girl my age,” she said regretfully. “And Madam would be certain to hear of it. Servants cannot keep a secret like that one—for you know, if there is any appearance of familiarity between us, it will be blown out of all proportion and gossiped about interminably. So long as my only ostensible reason for being here was to look in on Ellen, all’s well.”

He grimaced. “I suppose you are right—and if you are to get to your own luncheon without enraging your cook by being late, you should leave within the quarter-hour. How often are you at the vicarage?”

“Every Wednesday for chess, but—” she hesitated. “I suspect that you and the vicar can contrive more occasions. He knows that I play instruments; perhaps he could ‘arrange’ practices with the choir or a soloist? Or I could even teach a Bible class.” She had to laugh at that. “Though I fear I know far more Shakespeare than the Bible!”

“How often do you think you could contrive to get away, that’s the real question, I think.” He folded back the blankets on Ellen’s bed, and held out his hand to assist her to stand. “At most, do you think you could manage Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?”

“Possibly. Let’s try for Friday, at first. Madam always seems to be extra busy that day.” She was glad of his hand; she was awfully tired. Though that would pass, it always did. He smiled at her, quite as if he understood how tired she must be.

Well of course he does, ninny, he does all this himself! What a relief to have someone with whom she could discuss magic openly.

“I suppose it isn’t going to hurt anything to tell you that I’ll be able to let the vicar in on the real reason why I’ll bring Ellen down on Friday,” he was saying, as he let go of her hand so he could escort her to the front door. “He’ll tell you himself, soon enough. He’s a Clairvoyant Sensitive, and a bit of an Air Magician. Not much—and it mostly gives him that silver tongue for preaching, more than anything else.” He chuckled at her startled glance. “Oh, you wouldn’t know it, not just to look at him. His shields are as good as or better than yours; they have to be.”

“But that couldn’t be better!” she exclaimed. “Oh, thank goodness we aren’t going to have to concoct some idiotic excuse like—like you and Ellen wanting me to teach you Bible lessons!”

“And trying to come up with a reason why it had to be done in private, in the vicarage—yes, indeed. Next time, though, the vicar and I will save you a bit of work and we’ll do the shield-casting.” If she hadn’t been so tired, she’d have resented the slightly patronizing way he said that.

Bit of work, indeed! Oh, I suppose it’s only a bit of work for a Master!

But she was too tired to sustain an emotion like resentment for long, and anyway, she could be over-reacting to what was, after all, a kindly gesture.

“Excellent,” was all she said, instead. “The more of my personal energies I can conserve, the longer I can spend on Ellen.”

By this time, they had reached, not the front door, but the kitchen. “This way to the stables is shorter,” he said, hesitating on the threshold, as a red-cheeked woman bustled about a modern iron range set into a shockingly huge fireplace (what age was this part of the house? Tudor? It was big enough to roast the proverbial ox!) at the far end of the room, completely oblivious to anything but the food she was preparing for luncheon. “If you don’t mind—”

“After all my railing on the foolishness of Madam’s society manners?” she retorted.

He actually laughed. “Well struck,” was all he said, and escorted her across the expanse of spotless tile—the growling of her stomach at a whiff of something wonderful and meaty fortunately being swallowed up in the general clamor of pots, pans, and orders to the two kitchen-maids. Then they were out in the cold, crisp air and the stable was just in front of them.

It turned out to be a good thing that Dr. Pike had escorted her when they reached the stall where she’d put Beau, she was feeling so faint with hunger and weariness that her fingers would have fumbled the bridle-buckles, and she would never have been able to lift the sidesaddle onto the gelding’s back. But he managed both without being asked, and then, without a word, put both hands around her waist and lifted her into place!

She gaped down at him, once she’d hooked her leg over the horn and gotten her foot into the stirrup. He grinned back up at her. “I’m stronger than I appear,” he said.

“I—should think so!” she managed.

His grin broadened. “I’m glad to have surprised you for a change,” he told her, with a suspiciously merry look in his eyes. “Now, you’re near-perishing with hunger, so the sooner you can get back to Oakhurst, the better. I’ll look forward to seeing you at the vicarage; if not on Wednesday, then you’ll get an invitation from the vicar for something. Fair enough?”

“Perfect,” she said, feeling that it was a great deal more than excellent. If the man was maddening, at least he was quickly learning not to assume too much about her! And she had the sense that he could be excellent company, when he chose. She finished arranging her skirts, and tapped Beau with her heel. “I’ll be looking forward to it, Doctor!” she called, as he moved out at a fast walk, evidently as ready for his own stable and manger full of hay as she was for her luncheon.

“So will I!” she heard with pleasure, as she passed out of the yard and onto the drive. “That, I promise you!”

Chapter Sixteen

MARINA had thought that she could predict what Arachne was likely to say or do, but Madam was still able to surprise her. “I have ordered more riding habits for you,” Madam said over breakfast, the day after she and Reggie returned on the afternoon train.

A telegraph to the house had warned of their coming yesterday morning, and gave orders to send the coach to the station, giving the entire household plenty of time to prepare for their return. Which was, sadly, before supper, so Marina had needed to go to the cook and ask her to prepare Madam’s usual supper. And she appeared at that meal dressed, trussed up, coiffed, and entirely up to Madam’s standards. But she had eaten supper alone; Madam had gone straight to her room and did not emerge that evening.

She was summoned to a formal breakfast, though, and steeled herself for rebuke as she entered the dining room. Madam, however, was in a curious mood. She had a sated, yet unsatisfied air about her, The moment that Madam opened her mouth to speak, Marina had cringed, expecting a rebuke.

Instead—just a comment. A gift, in fact! Marina wasn’t certain whether to thank Arachne or not, though.

She decided to opt for muted appreciation.

“Thank you, Madam,” she murmured.

Arachne nodded, and made a vague, waving motion with on hand. She spoke very little after that initial statement; Reggie not at all, until finally Marina herself decided to break the silence.

“I hope that you put things to rights in Exeter, Madam?” she said, tentatively. “I am sure that you and my cousin are able to cope with any difficulties.”

Reggie smirked. Madam, however, turned her head and gave her a measuring look. “I believe that we have set things in order” she said, “And I trust you have kept yourself in good order as well.”

“In absence of tasks, Madam, I went riding, for it is marvelous good exercise, and healthy,” she replied demurely. “And I read. Poetry, for the most part.”

“Browning?” Reggie asked, between forkfuls of egg and grilled sausages. “Keats?”

“Donne,” she replied demurely.

“Mary Anne informed me of your rides,” Madam said. “And I fear that you will soon look shabby in the same habit day after day. This is why I have ordered more, and I believe we will try some different cuts. Perhaps Mrs. Langtry can become famous and admired for wearing the same dress over and over again, but I believe no one else could.”

“Mrs. Langtry is a noted beauty, Madam. I should not presume to think that I could follow her example.” She applied herself to her breakfast plate, grateful that there was very little that Madam’s orders could do to ruin breakfast foods—and that, by its nature, breakfast was a meal in which there were no courses as such to be removed. So with Peter attentively—but quietly—seeing to her plate, she was actually enjoying her meal.

Except for the tea, which was, as always with Madam, scarcely more than colored water.

“I understand that you are planning to visit the vicar this afternoon? Something about a Bible-study class?” Madam continued, with a slight, but very superior, smile. “You must take care that you are not labeled as a bluestocking.”

“There can be nothing improper about taking comfort in religion,” Marina retorted, hoping to sound just the tiniest bit stuffy and offended. Reggie thought she wasn’t looking, and rolled his eyes. Madam’s mouth twitched slightly.

“Not at all, my dear.” Madam chided. “It may not be improper, but it is—” she hesitated “—boring.”

“And of course, one shouldn’t be boring,” Reggie said solemnly, though there was no doubt in Marina’s mind that he was laughing at her behind his mask. “I’m afraid it is an unpardonable social crime.”

“Oh.” She did her best to appear chastened, and noted the satisfaction on both their faces. “Then I shan’t mention it to anyone. It won’t matter in the village.”

“The village matters very little,” Madam pronounced. “But I believe your time would be better spent in some other pursuit.”

Marina contrived a mulish expression, and Arachne sighed. Reggie didn’t even bother to hide his amusement.

“You’re going to turn into a laughingstock, cuz,” he said. “People will snicker at you behind your back, call you ‘the little nun’ and never invite you to parties. Turn it into a Shakespeare class instead—or a poetry society. Try and instill some culture into these bumpkins. People might think you’re mad, but at least they won’t call you a bore.”

She set her chin to look as stubborn as possible. “Perhaps I shall,” she said.

Reggie laughed. Madam hid a smile.

Marina had to pretend to be very interested in her plate in order to hide her own triumph. Madam hadn’t forbidden her to go to this “Bible study class” and that was all that was important. Let Reggie laugh at her; the more that he thought she was a bore, the less time he’d spend with her.

“No riding off this morning, though, cuz,” Reggie reminded her, Wagging a finger at her. “Dancing lessons. You’re shockingly behind. You might be invited to parties even if you’re a bluestocking as long as you can dance.”

She escaped with a sigh of gratitude after luncheon, and claimed Beau.

The closer she got to the village, the lighter her heart became. When she was within sight of the vicarage, she felt—

Almost normal. Being dragged away from Blackbird Cottage hadn’t been the end of the world. Madam was a tyrant—and a terrible snob—but there were advantages to being under her care.

The wardrobe, for one. She had never had so many fashionable gowns. Granted, they were all in black, but still—and being all in black, it would be a fine excuse next year, when her year of deep mourning was over, to order another entire wardrobe!

Then there were the half-promises of going to London. The theater—the music—and the amusements of society. The things she had read about in the social pages of the Times and wished she could attend them herself.

And there was the matter of a coming-out ball. She would never have had a coming-out ball with Margherita—for one thing, their village wasn’t exactly the sort of place where one held coming-out parties, and for another, the Tarrants weren’t the sort of people who held them. But given Madam’s near-worship of society, there was no way that the Chambertens would not hold a coming-out ball for their ward. If they didn’t, it would look very strange indeed. They would probably put it off until next year, rather than this, because of her mourning, but she would need that long to get used to all of the clothing and the manners, not to mention learning the dances.

A coming-out ball! Just like all the ones she had read about! The prospect was almost enough to make up for everything else.

As for the everything else—things were by far and away not as wretched as they had first seemed. Now that she had a safe place away from Oakhurst where she could work magic, she could send a message to Elizabeth and to Sebastian, Margherita, and Thomas. She didn’t need a stamp; all she needed was time and energy.

Now that she knew that she could contact them, the frantic feeling the fear that she’d been completely uprooted, was fading. This was more like—well, rather like being away at school, with a horribly strict headmistress. And the same wretched food that all the books like Jane Eyre described! But there were none of the other privations, and if Jane could survive her school, surely Marina could sort this experience out without immediate help.

Besides, I’ve been here for weeks now, and there hasn’t been a single Undine or Sylph that has tried to speak to me—so they must be certain I’m all right. Even if the others couldn’t raise Air or Water Elementals to send to her, Elizabeth certainly could. Perhaps they had scryed, discovered she was all right, and decided to wait for her to contact them.

But what if they hadn’t? What if they thought she had forgotten them once she had some inkling of the social position she held, the wealth she would eventually command? What if they thought she was ashamed of them? Madam seemed to think she should be, after all—

—perhaps I can ask the doctor or the vicar to help me. After all, once I make them understand my situation, we could use letters, as I planned. They can send me postage. Oh, what a ridiculous position she was in! A wardrobe worth hundreds of pounds, and she hadn’t a penny for a stamp! Looking forward to a coming-out ball, yet so strictly confined she might as well be in a convent!

Riding about on the back of a high-bred hunter, and knowing that if I took him farther than the village, I’d be so close-confined that a convent would be preferable.

She shook the mood off; there was work to be done.

There would be no leaving Beau tied up at the gate today, not since she was planning on spending at least two hours working on Ellen. Instead, she brought him around to the rear of the vicarage where there was a little shed that held the moor pony that the vicar hitched to a cart to do his errands. There was a second stall with just enough space in there for Beau as well, although she had to take his tack off him outside, since there wasn’t enough room for her in the stall too. Beau gave her an incredulous look as she led him in, as if to object. Strongly. She couldn’t understand animals the way Uncle Thomas could, but she could almost hear him speaking. “You intend for me to lodge here? Me? A hunter of impeccable bloodline? Next to that?”

“Don’t be as much of a snob as Madam,” she told him severely.

He heaved a huge sigh, and suffered himself to be led into the stall and offered hay. It was perfectly good hay, as good as he’d get in his own stall at Oakhurst, but he sniffed it with deep suspicion.

“Now don’t be tiresome,” she scolded, and shut the half-door on him. “If you can’t learn to enjoy the company of ordinary folk, I leave you to the Odious Reggie’s good graces from now on, and we’ll see whom you prefer!”

She left him sighing over his hay, and went around to the front of the vicarage to tap on the door.

To her immense surprise, it was Dr. Pike who opened the door of the vicarage at her second knock. “Good gad!” she blurted. “What are you doing here?”

He laughed, looking much more amiable than he had at the sanitarium, and held the door open. “That’s a fine greeting! Where else should I be but here at the appointed time?”

She blushed, then got annoyed with herself. Who was this fellow, that he made the color rise in her cheeks so often? But it was a rude thing to say.

I really have to be more careful. Having to curb my tongue around Madam is making things break out when I’m around anyone else.

She apologized immediately. “I beg your pardon—I’m always just bleating out whatever is in my head without thinking about it. What I meant was, your horse and cart are nowhere to be seen—”

“That’s because my poor horse would hardly fit in there with that monster you ride and that little pony of the vicar’s. My horse and cart are doing the weekly errands for the sanitarium, the good Diccon having carried Miss Ellen in here for me, and will return for us at a quarter before five.” He grinned. “That will give us time for you to rest after helping Ellen, and have a nice strong cup of tea.”

She moved into the little white-wainscoted hallway and he closed the door behind her.

Then, unexpectedly, he shook his head. “What am I saying? My dear Miss Roeswood, I intend to assist you to the level of my strength, and as your partner in this enterprise, I will be as much in need of that strong cup of tea as you. Probably more, as I have often noted that my female patients seem to have more stamina than the male.”

As my partner in this enterprise! Feeling pleased and immensely flattered, Marina followed him into the vicarage.

“How is Ellen coming along?” she asked anxiously, as he led the way past the parlor that the Ladies’ Friendly Society had used, past what appeared to be a study, and into the back of the house.

“She was much better for a little, then relapsed—” he said, looking back over his shoulder at her. “Ah, I see that you are not surprised.”

“That is what happened to the arsenic-poisoned birds I treated,” she replied. “But I don’t know why. I had to purge them several times before they got better and stayed better.”

“I believe that I do, or I have a good guess. You purge the blood of the poison, which causes the victim to feel better. But that creates a—a kind of vacuum in the blood, so the tissues release some of what they hold back into the blood again, and the patient relapses.” He flung open a door on a narrow little room, painted white, and hung with prints of country churches, with white curtains at the tall, narrow windows. “And here we are!”

Ellen lay in an iron-framed bed much like her own back at Briareley, propped up with pillows like a giant doll. She smiled to see Marina. “Lord love you, Miss, I wasn’t sure you’d be able to come! That Madam—”

“Is a terror, but she thinks this is a Bible-study class,” Marina interrupted, getting a startled laugh from the girl “So, I suppose we had all better have the vicar expound on a verse before we all So home again, so that it isn’t a lie.”

“Then I will take for my text, ‘Even as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me,’“ said Davies, who was kneeling beside the fire and putting another log on. “And for an original and radical interpretation, you may wax eloquent on the point that I feel—quite strongly—that the text means actions both for good and ill.”

“Oh my—have we a reformer in our midst, Clifton?” asked the doctor, taking Marina’s cloak and draping it over a peg on the wall beside his own.

“You do. But on the whole, I prefer to be a subversive reformer. They get a great deal more accomplished than the ones who shout and carry placards and get themselves arrested.” Mr. Davies stood up, and smiled, quite cheerfully. “Which is one reason why, for instance, that I am providing a space for you and Miss Roeswood to work in.”

“We can talk all about subversion and theology when I have no more strength to spare for magic,” Marina said firmly. “It is always possible that Madam will send to fetch me at any point on some pretext or other—she didn’t forbid me, but she did not altogether approve of my interest in Bible studies.”

Doctor and vicar turned astonished expressions on her, but it was the vicar who spoke first. “Whyever not?” he asked. “I should think it would be entirely proper for a young lady of your age.”

“She says it is because I will turn into a bluestocking and a bore,” Marina replied with relish. “Although it is possible that she has got wind of those radical opinions of yours, so I believe I will not voice them, if you don’t mind, vicar. Well, shall we to work?”

Ellen made a face, and began drinking water—Dr. Pike must have remembered everything from the last time, for there was a full pitcher on the little table next to her. There were three chairs of faded upholstery, indeterminate age and much wear in this room besides the bedside table and the bed; Marina was offered the most comfortable-looking of the three, and took it, on the grounds that she was the one who was going to be doing most of the work. And besides, she was burdened with corsets; they weren’t. She closed her eyes, and put her right hand out toward Ellen. The girl took it, and laid it on the covers over her stomach, folding her own hands over it.

“Shields please, vicar,” she heard Dr. Pike say, and heard the vicar whisper something in Latin. His voice was too soft to make out the words, but she rather thought it was a prayer. Then his shields swept smoothly through her—she felt them pass, like a cool wave—and established themselves, settling into place with a swirl and a flourish, into ever-changing and fluid shields that looked much like Elizabeth’s, except for being a slightly deeper shade and blue instead of green.

A second set spun up at that perimeter, very like Uncle Thomas’ craftsmanly constructions, but more organic and alive. This variant of Earth was the living Earth, a tapestry of intertwining life, rich and flavored with the feel of sun on a freshly-turned furrow, the taste of (oddly enough) warm milk and honey, and the scent of new-mown hay. But it was the same rich, golden-brown of Uncle Thomas’ magic, and the shields rose up like a powerful buttress behind the fluidity of the vicar’s.

She sighed; they were perfectly lovely things, and she wished she could study them. But time was passing; she needed a source of power.

And found it immediately, a spring that supplied the vicarage well. There were lesser Elementals here, though no Undines—not surprising, really, since it was directly below a human-occupied building, and despite the lovely shields, she could tell that Clifton Davies was not really strong enough to attract the attention of powerful Elementals. She tapped into it, and let the full force of it flow into her hands and out again.

She sensed the doctor probing what she was doing at one point when she was so deep into her task that she wouldn’t have noticed a bugle being blown in her ear. He was very deft—and he made a brief attempt to join his personal energies to hers. But it came to nothing, as she had already known would happen, and he withdrew, turning instead to the task of healing what he could of the harm done to Ellen by the poison.

Then she lost herself in the intricacy and sheer delight of the task—she had seen Margherita similarly lost in the intricacy of a tapestry or an embroidery piece, and supposed it must be much the same thing. Some to make and some to mend, her aunt had always said when she lamented her inability to create. Well, there was joy enough in both.

Then, as ever, she felt her strength run out, and came back to herself with an unpleasant jarring sensation. At almost the same moment, she felt the two sets of shields come down again. She opened her eyes, and took away her hand, and was pleased to see that now there was some faint color in Ellen’s cheeks. But she didn’t get to admire them for long, because the girl struggled to her feet with Dr. Davies’ help, and was out the door as Marina sagged back into the comfort of the old wingback. Poor Ellen! She hoped the vicarage had an indoor WC.

“About that cup of tea,” she suggested, feeling very much in need of it.

“We can manage a bit better than that,” Davies said, and held up his hand when she opened her mouth to protest. “Now I know you are reluctant to be a drain on my larder, but there are two things you don’t know about the state of it. First, I am a single man living here, not one burdened with a family, and although a country parson doesn’t see much in the way of monetary help, he is certainly well-endowed with the gifts of the farmers in his parish. And they have been granting me those as if I did have an enormous family, and would take it very hard if I were not to make use of it. Second, Miss Roeswood, I am a single parson—singularly single, as the saying is. Not a day goes by when some young lady or other—equally single—doesn’t gift me with a little offering that is, I must suppose, intended to impress me with her kitchen skills.” He chuckled. “If I ate all of these things I should be as round as a Michaelmas goose, and a good corn-fed one at that. My housekeeper would probably be mortally offended at this unintended slur on her skills, if she wasn’t so pleased that she hasn’t had to do any baking herself since Christmas. Some of this supplies the Parish groups with refreshments, but by no means all of it. So, the long and short of it is I can and will provide the means for a sumptuous high tea every time you bring Miss Ellen here.”

She held up both hands. “I yield to the honorable opposition,” she said, and he went off to some other part of the house, returning with Ellen leaning on his arm.

The housekeeper arrived after Ellen had been settled back in the bed, with an enormous tray stacked with plates of sandwiches and cakes, and Marina’s mouth began to water at the sight of it all. This was not ladylike fare! Good, honest ham, egg, and cheese sandwiches, and decent-sized cakes, just like she used to eat at the cottage when Margherita made a high tea!

“Doctor, will you pour?” Davies asked genially. “I know that’s supposed to be the lady’s job, but frankly, the lady’s hand is shaking too much and I don’t want tea slopped all over my saucer. Now, what will you have, Miss Roeswood?”

“For starters, I’d like to dispense with the formality, at least while the four of us are together,” she replied, telling her protesting stomach that it did not want one of everything. “Marina, please, from now on, vicar. And the same for you, doctor. Other than that—some sandwiches, tea with two, and milk, please.”

“Then it will be Andrew and Clifton,” the doctor said, handing her a cup of good strong tea, with plenty of sugar and just a touch of milk. “At least in private. We don’t want to give rise to any of those rumors you warned me of—and quite properly too—at Briareley.”

“Hmm.” The vicar made up a plate for Marina at her direction. “A very good point,” he said, handing it to her. “Your guardian mustn’t be given any excuse to forbid our meeting. Ellen, I am afraid it is beef broth and milk-pudding for you, my child.”

She accepted both with no sign of discontent. “I’d only lose anything stronger,” she said with good humor. “Oh, I feel so much better, though! I know I’ll feel bad again, but—”

“But it won’t be as bad as it was before,” Andrew told her. “And every time we do this, it will be a little better, until we’ve purged all of the poison out of you and I’ve healed what I can.”

Ellen smiled, but the smile faded. “Pardon my asking, but—then what?” she said reluctantly. “What’m I to do then? Go back to painting?”

“Good gad, no!” the doctor and the vicar exclaimed at the same time. Andrew made a “go ahead” motion to the vicar.

“You’ll come to work for one of us, Ellen, if you want to,” Davies said. “I must warn you though, that it’s no gilded life here. You’d live here and eat here, but I couldn’t afford much in wages, and it is likely to be hard work.”

Ellen was shaking her head. “I got no skill at it, sir, begging your pardon. I never been trained in service.”

“Then you’ll work for me—which is very little better, but you can start training as a nurse little by little as you get healthier,” Andrew told her. “Like Eleanor—you see, nurses are readily come by, but nurses who are Sensitives, or even magicians, are far, far, rarer. I could use you to work with the children. Would you like that?”

Ellen brightened immediately. “That’d suit me, yes it would! That’d suit me fine!”

“It’s settled then.” Both men seemed satisfied with the outcome, and certainly for someone who was a Sensitive, there really was no better place to work than Briareley, however poor the wages might be.

Well—Blackbird Cottage. But she’d have to do heavy work, just like Jenny, and I doubt she’ll ever be able to do that again. But Marina made a mental note to talk seriously with Margherita when she finally got back in touch about supplying a place or two for other former charity patients of Andrew’s who were more robustly built.

“If that doesn’t work for you, I expect I’ll need a lady’s maid eventually, Ellen,” Marina put in. “I’d rather have someone who I know that can learn what to do than have someone who might be beautifully trained but whom I don’t know that I’d have to trust. But—” she sighed. “That will have to wait for three years, until I’m of age. Until then, I have less charge over Oakhurst than you do!

Madam has charge of everything. Including me.” She finished the last bite of an exquisite little Bakewell tart, and grimaced. “I don’t even get to say what I have for tea—which is why I have made such a disgusting pig of myself over the sweets today!”

Ellen put her empty bowls aside. “Miss, I’ve been wondering—who’s this Madam? Why’s she such a hold over you, miss?”

“She’s my guardian, worse luck,” Marina sighed, and began to explain her situation to the girl. Which, of course, ran right counter to everything she’d seen in etiquette books, or been taught by Arachne. Ellen was a mere factory girl, an absolute inferior; Marina a lady of privilege. Marina should have addressed her by her last name only, and really, should not even have noticed her, much less be laying out her entire life for her scrutiny.

Madam would have the vapors. If Madam ever does have the vapors. Which I doubt, actually.

She got as far as her first interview with Madam, when Ellen interrupted her. “Now, miss—I know your Madam Arachne! I wondered, when I first heard you call her that, and I do! ‘Twas her pottery I worked at, in Exeter! ‘Twas there I got poisoned by all the glaze-dust, or at least, that’s what Dr. Pike says!”

Up until this moment, Arachne’s potteries had been nothing more than an abstract to Marina—something that hadn’t any real shape in her mind, as it were. Oh, she had thought, if she had thought at all, that they were—like a village pottery, only larger. She hadn’t even had a mental image, nor put together Andrew’s rant about the lead-poisoning with what made her guardian’s fortune. Now, though—

“Good gad,” she whispered.

Ellen held out her trembling hand and frowned at it. “She’s real particular, Madam is. Picks her paintresses herself. And she does make sure that the girls is taken care of for when the shakes start. Gives us a lay-down room so we can take a bit of a rest and still get the quota done. And she sees to it other ways. If you know what I mean.” She looked more than a little embarrassed, when the vicar and Marina shook their heads dumbly.

Andrew saved the girl from having to answer. “Let me handle this, Ellen.” He turned to Clifton and Marina. “I think I might have told you already, but if I haven’t, well—the lead kills the girls’ appetites and has an effect on the complexions. Ironically enough. their skin becomes as pale and translucent as porcelain—well, just like Ellen’s is now. So, they are thin and pale, ethereal and delicate, they have to stay clean and neat because they’re on show for visitors.”

“Madam gives us a wash-up room, and she gets a second-hand clothes woman who gets stuff from the gentry to come around and give us good prices,” Ellen put in. “And if we ain’t got enough, she has it laid by for us, and takes a shilling a week out of our wages.”

Andrew made a helpless gesture. “There you have it. Clean, well-gowned, and if they had any looks at all before, they become pretty. If they were pretty before, they become beautiful. Men who are looking for—companionship—”

Clifton turned beet-red. Marina tilted her head to the side; wide and uncensored reading, and Elizabeth’s influence had given information on what came next, if not personal experience. “Men looking for pretty mistresses may go looking among the paintresses, you mean? Ellen, is that what you meant when you said that Madam sees that the girls are cared for?”

Ellen nodded. “She lets visitors come right in the painting-room,” she admitted. “Lets ‘em palaver with us girls, and so long as the quota gets done, nobody says anything. So when they can’t paint no more, they’ll have maybe someone as is interested in other things they can do.”

“Monstrous!” Davies burst out, red-faced now with anger. “Appalling!”

“Well, what else are they supposed to do? Petition Madam to take care of them?” Andrew looked just as angry, but tempered with resignation. “Good God, Clifton, what would that get them? Nowhere, of course—she’s the one who’s poisoned them in the first place! What relations are going to care for them? Ellen’s second-cousin is the only person that has ever brought one of these paintresses to the attention of a doctor, and that is in no small part because the cousin discovered Ellen’s magical potential was being drained away from her by a person unknown. That is one case, out of how many potteries?”

“Quite a few, I would venture to say,” Marina offered, feeling an odd sort of dislocation—ethically, she was as appalled as the vicar, emotionally she was as horrified. But intellectually—she couldn’t find it in her heart to blame any girl who took such a step toward ensuring whatever future she had was comfortable. “But I suspect that would be because those doctors are disinclined to see a patient without being paid. Actually, Andrew, that’s not quite true—Madam and Reggie were discussing something about a female doctor, a suffragist, who was campaigning on behalf of the paintresses at one of her potteries. But I don’t know which pottery that was, so I can’t tell you if there’s anyone trying to do anything about the place where Ellen worked.”

“I’m glad to hear that, but it’s irrelevant to the situation we were discussing,” Andrew pointed out. “So Clifton, what exactly are these girls to do with themselves before they die? Eke out the remaining miserable days of their lives in the poorhouse? Or spend them in comfort by selling their bodies while the bodies are still desirable?”

The vicar hung his head, his color fading. “I don’t know, Andrew. A hard choice, in a hard life.”

“They say that Madam letting them men in, makes sure all the paintresses gets a chance to get set up—and they do just go off, sometimes without giving notice,” Ellen observed, with a hint of sardonic amusement at the vicar’s reaction. “Girls get a lot of men coming ‘round. We all figured soon or late, you get one as is willing to take care of you proper. And until you do, you get nice presents, lovely dinners, get taken to music-halls…”

Marina had a good idea that Ellen must have had her share of those things from the way she spoke of them, wistfully, even knowing what she knew now, with regret.

It isn’t just their bodies that Madam is poisoning, she thought, suddenly. She locked gazes with both Andrew and the vicar, and saw that they were thinking the same thing.

But it was still hard to believe. The immediate thought was that surely, surely, Arachne Chamberten didn’t actually know what her pottery was doing to the girls who worked there. Surely anyone who did would change things!

But then she remembered that discussion—that most “unacceptable” discussion—over the dinner-table. No, Arachne knew. She might pretend that she didn’t, but she knew. And Arachne didn’t seem to think of the lower orders as being—well—human. She didn’t care what happened to them, so long as there was a steady supply of them at cheap wages.

When their hands start to shake, she’d rather have them out selling their bodies anyway, to make room for new ones.

“Difficult as this may seem to you, Ellen’s situation is worse yet, Clifton,” the Doctor said grimly. “Or was. One of the reasons that her cousin whisked her away from that vile place so quickly was that besides being poisoned, she was being drained, magically.”

“What?” Marina and the vicar exclaimed together, aghast. “But—how? Why? By whom?” Davies had the wit to ask, as Marina just stared.

“I don’t know. There definitely was some sort of tie to her when she was brought to me, something that was acting as a drain on her personal and emotional energies, but one that I didn’t recognize, and one I couldn’t trace back.” Andrew shrugged. “Not that I didn’t want to, but I was too busy trying to save her life at the time. I just cut it, cauterized it, and dismissed it from my mind. Now, though—” He paused. “Clifton, you can work through the Church to see that the physical aspects of this disgusting situation are dealt with—but if there is an occult aspect to it, I think we ought to look into it. There was only myself before—frankly, trying to get other Masters to help in something as vague as this would be like persuading cats to swim.”

“Now you have two more of us,” the vicar said, with a lifting of his chin and a touch of fire in his eyes. “And Ellen is going to be all right—”

“If you don’t mind helping us with this,” Andrew replied, slowly— “The only problem I can see is that the tie isn’t there anymore.”

Ellen gave him a stern look. “Don’t be daft,” she said, forthrightly. “Begging your pardon, but the only places I ever went was the pottery and out with—men. And them men came to the pottery. So?”

“QED,” Andrew said ruefully. “You’re right, Ellen. The place to look is the pottery. If this business involves more girls than just you, it could be the symptom of something much worse.” He scratched his head ruefully. “This is where I have nothing to go on but vague premonition—”

“But the premonitions of an Elemental Master are as important as an ordinary person’s certainties!” Marina and the vicar said in chorus—then looked at each other—and at Ellen’s puzzled expression—and chuckled weakly.

“All right. If you agree that my premonition is not nonsense—well, I just think that this is important.”

Something I can do! Finally, something only I can do! “And—” Marina said, with a sudden smile. “I think I can get in there. Easily, and with no one suspecting a thing. There’s just one problem.”

“What is it?” Andrew asked immediately. “I’ll help you with it!”

“I wish you could, but you are the last person who would be of any use,” she replied, with a rueful laugh. “The problem is, to do so I’ll have to spend at least two days in the inescapable company of the Odious Reggie!”

And at the sight of his expression, she could only shake her head.

Chapter Seventeen

SEQUESTERED in her office, with orders not to be disturbed, Arachne fixed her son with an ice-dagger stare. “What,” she asked, in the coldest voice she could muster, “are you doing about winning that girl?”

For a long while, the only sound was that of the fire in the fireplace behind her, crackling and popping. Arachne licked her lips, and thought she tasted the least little hint of blood on them.

She didn’t have to elaborate her question; there was only one girl that he was supposed to be winning, after all. He squirmed a little in his chair; not a good sign. Reggie only squirmed when he was trying to be evasive. When he was lying, he looked directly into your eyes, and produced his most charming of smiles. When he was telling the truth, he didn’t smile, he looked completely sober, and didn’t try to charm. She wondered if he realized that. Perhaps not; he was not as experienced as she was in reading expressions and the nuances of behavior.

“She’s a bore, Mater,” he said, sideslipping the topic—or trying to. “She’s a bluestocking and a bore. I wrack my brain to tell her amusing stories, and she talks about literature; I try to make love to her, and she asks me about votes for women or politics.”

She frowned. “That is not what I asked. The girl is normal enough. She certainly has a craving for fine feathers, she’s young, and I’m sure you can turn her head with flattery if you exert yourself; she’s not that different from the little trollops you amuse your idle hours with. You ought to be able to charm her without thinking twice about it.”

He couldn’t meet her eyes. Her frown deepened.

“Clearly, you have gotten nowhere. Clearly, you are not even trying,” she stated. “Reggie, this is important. You have to get that girl under your control. You have to win her; it’s imperative to have her your creature.”

“It’s damned hard to flatter someone who isn’t listening,” he muttered, casting a resentful glance at her from under long eyelashes that most women would sell their souls for. Though there seemed to be plenty of women who would sell their souls to have Reggie himself. Just—not the one that mattered, it seemed. “Furthermore,” he continued, “I should think it would make more sense for you to work on that curse of yours. After all, if the little wretch just dies, the problem will be solved.”

If she answered that, she’d be on the defensive—and it was always her policy to be on the offensive, not the defensive. She glared at him, the “it’s all your fault” look. “Try harder,” she ordered. “Put some imagination into it, instead of using all the tricks that work on girls with more sophistication. She might be intelligent, but she is not sophisticated. You might take her somewhere, show her some sight or other. From all I can tell, she never ventured out of that tiny village of hers—take her to Exeter for an excursion!”

Reggie groaned. “Damn, Mater, what the hell is there in Exeter worth looking at?”

“That’s not my business,” she told him, exasperated at his willful lack of imagination. “It’s yours. Find something. A conservatory. Theater—there has to be a music hall, at least. The shops—the cathedral—a concert. Even a pantomime is going to be something she’s never seen before!” Her eyes narrowed. “She’s spending every Wednesday and Friday at the vicarage, and I’m not entirely certain that it’s chess and piety that take her there. That vicar is young and single. Did it ever occur to you that he might be your rival for her affections?” She raised an eyebrow. “He certainly seems to be setting the hearts aflutter in the village.”

“A vicar?” To her great annoyance, Reggie snorted. “Not bloody likely! Not that vicar in particular—he looks like a bag of bones, and he’s all prunes and prisms. Miss Marina may be a bore, but I’ve never seen a bore yet that didn’t have repressed passions seething under the crust. No stick in a dog collar is going to be my rival for her.”

Arachne’s exasperation overflowed. Arrogance was one thing, but this—this was blind stupidity itself. “Then do something about those repressed passions! Rouse her somehow! Go take her slumming and tell her it’s the fashion to do so, I don’t care, as long as you impress her.”

“Yes, you do,” he said sullenly, his eyes smoldering with things he didn’t dare express, at least to her face. “If I were to take her slumming and she managed to slip away from me and back to those artists of hers, you’d have my hide.”

He was right about that, at least. “Yes,” she replied grimly. “I would. And don’t think that you can get out of this by helping her on her way, either. Don’t even give her the chance to acquire a single stamp. Because the moment she gets in communication with them, they’ll tell her enough about me—and you, by extension—that she won’t trust us. No matter how circumspect they are, they can still make the case that Alanna sent her away to hide her from me, and there were six witnesses there to back them up.”

“Even without talking about magic?” he asked skeptically.

“Especially without talking about magic. Elizabeth Hastings can turn black into white if she puts her mind to it, and all they have to do is send the girl to her. Then where will we be? Damn it, boy, all they have to do is smuggle her over to the Continent and hide her there until she’s twenty-one for her to have complete control of her property, unless you manage to get her married to you! Do you want her property or not?”

She did not want to consider what would happen with Marina on the Continent, and it wouldn’t take waiting until she was twenty-one, either. If the curse didn’t take effect by the time Marina was eighteen—and if Arachne herself was not in physical contact to nullify or even cancel it—it not only could backfire against the caster, it would. She had worked that much out, at least. Not that she was going to tell Reggie any of that. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t use for leverage against his mother. He was getting altogether too independent lately.

No, the blasted Tarrants wouldn’t have to hide the girl until she was twenty-one; the eighteenth birthday would suffice. Shuttling her around France in company with a gaggle of schoolgirls would do the trick—she’d never be able to find one schoolgirl tour among all the ones traipsing around Provence and Paris.

“I had intended,” she said smoothly, “to use the girls from the Exeter works to make the curse work again. I tried to do that. The accident put paid to that plan, rather thoroughly. They were too damaged; there wasn’t enough power in them. None of the others are strong enough or ripe enough, nor will they be for at least a year.”

Reggie shrugged, striving to look indifferent, and managing only to look arrogant. He was getting altogether too like his mother for her comfort. Altogether too like. Ambitious, manipulative, sly… “Do what you did to set the curse in the first place. Find me a sacrifice. The proper sort.”

“I’ve tried,” she admitted, nettled that she’d needed to admit anything. “A single virgin child of Master potential is difficult enough to obtain; it was only a fluke that I managed to get my hands on four and only because they were all from the same family! And if you had any notion how long I waited with that curse heavy on my hands, until Hugh got himself an heir—”

Now it was Reggie’s turn to frown, and his brows knitted in confusion. “Four? You shouldn’t need four, not for enough power to reinstate an existing curse. A single child should do, so long as it’s mage-born and virgin. His Infernal Majesty should—” At her dubious expression, his frown deepened, and he blinked, slowly, as if some entirely new thought had crossed his mind. “Mater, don’t you believe?”

He sounded—shocked. As shocked as any good Christian would have been to learn that she was a Satanist. Well, now it was coming out; her son, whom she had raised and trained to be her helper, had finally grasped the idea that his mother was a skeptic. How had he missed it? How had she raised a believer? “I have never seen anything to make me believe—or disbelieve,” she said reluctantly. “The rites give me power; that was all I have ever cared about. It’s power I take from the weaker creatures that I sacrifice, so far as I can tell, and not from any other source; what odd’s that? It’s still power, it works, and it gives me what I want. Belief doesn’t enter into it, nor does it need to.”