Terciel and Elinor (9780063049345)

by Nix, Garth

  He no longer looked the picture of the confident medico but rather a slightly apprehensive middle-aged man whose side whiskers were quivering.

  “So I am most anxious to get considerably farther south myself before nightfall. I am sorry I cannot offer you any greater certainty or any relief for your mother, Miss Hallett. Good day!”

  He was out the door before Elinor had a chance to even thank him, or offer any parting words. She followed him more slowly, only half listening as he clattered down the main stairs, strode swiftly down the gallery, and went out the front door like a jack-in-the-box, shouting for his coachman, who was to take him posthaste to the station and the soonest possible train southward.

  Chapter Two

  What did the doctor mean by the ‘oddities of the locale’ and ‘the North’?” asked Elinor as she and Mrs. Watkins sat down for their afternoon tea, brought to them in the drawing room by Maria, who was the sole remaining indoor servant apart from Cook, the others all having left over the years and not been replaced, though again Elinor didn’t know whether this was from miserliness or necessity.

  “Oh, these city folk,” said Mrs. Watkins vaguely, picking up the pot. “I do need a cup of tea.”

  Her hand shook slightly as she poured, almost spilling tea in Elinor’s saucer.

  “You seemed to know what he meant,” said Elinor firmly. The tea spilling was a familiar distraction technique. “He was frightened of the wind being from the north. So are you. And what does it have to do with Mother?”

  “Your mother would not like me to . . . to . . . discuss local superstitions,” said Mrs. Watkins. She spoiled this firm utterance by glancing out the bay window at the leaning poplars and this time unintentionally splashed tea into her own saucer as she overfilled the cup. The wind was still blowing from the north. Not fiercely but a steady breeze.

  “My mother is . . . my mother . . .” Elinor stopped, took a breath, and continued. “Whatever is happening to my mother, she is not in a position to stop you, Wattie. Please, I’m no longer a child. Tell me.”

  Mrs. Watkins lifted her cup and took a rather surprising gulp of tea. Elinor blinked at this, as she could not count the number of times the governess had recited, “ladylike sips, Elinor, ladylike sips.”

  “Mrs. Hallett told me I’d be dismissed without a character if I talked about any of this,” the older woman finally said. “Sent away, Elinor!”

  “No,” replied Elinor with considerable alarm. How could anyone send Mrs. Watkins away? It was unthinkable. She reached across the table and gripped the governess’s gloved hand. “I wouldn’t let her send you away.”

  “It wouldn’t be up to you,” said Mrs. Watkins with a sniff. “She warned Ham as well, and everyone else.”

  “But why?” asked Elinor.

  “I can’t tell you,” said Mrs. Watkins. She took her hand from Elinor’s grasp and fidgeted with a napkin. “And I may have done something else that will get me dismissed anyway.”

  “What!”

  “I don’t know what came over me,” said Mrs. Watkins. She stared down at her empty cup, as if hoping to see some explanation in the faint swirl of tea leaves at the bottom. “I really don’t . . .”

  “What did you do?” asked Elinor slowly. She couldn’t imagine Mrs. Watkins doing anything that would require dismissal, or even anything that would be more than slightly annoying. Like when she fussed over Elinor’s clothes.

  Mrs. Watkins shook her head slowly, still gazing into her teacup.

  “When I went into the village to send your telegram to Dr. Branthill, I remembered I’d sent another one three weeks ago, when Mrs. Hallett was first taken ill,” she said. “But I had no recollection of it until then. She must have made me do it, put it in my head long ago!”

  “Who?” asked Elinor, now totally bewildered. “My mother? What other telegram? To who? What do you mean, ‘put it in your head’?”

  Mrs. Watkins didn’t answer.

  “Wattie . . .”

  “No, no. I can’t tell you, not without your mother’s permission,” muttered Mrs. Watkins. “Maybe it won’t matter.”

  She looked out the window again. The poplars had steadied, and the wind was ebbing, perhaps even changing direction.

  “Yes, it won’t matter,” she said. But she spoke in the tone of someone trying to convince themselves that some dread future would not arise, knowing full well it probably would.

  They sat in silence, drinking tea for the next five minutes. Usually Mrs. Watkins would crack under this treatment. She couldn’t bear it when Elinor wouldn’t talk to her. But this time she remained silent as well, and it was Elinor who finally broke.

  “Why did the doctor say he wanted to get away before nightfall?”

  Mrs. Watkins looked out the window again.

  “I’m sure it won’t matter,” she said finally. “The wind has eased and swung around.”

  “But what is that to do—”

  “Never mind, Elinor!” replied Mrs. Watkins, in as close to a snap as she’d ever managed. She raised one fluttering hand to her temple and added, “Perhaps it is time we attended to your autumn clothes. I think the yellow poplin will need to be recut—”

  “I’m going back to the greenhouse,” interrupted Elinor. “To throw knives with Ham.”

  Even this did not provoke a response from Mrs. Watkins. She merely nodded and poured herself more tea. The dregs from the pot, almost solid tea leaves, splashed into her cup because she had forgotten to place the strainer.

  Elinor stared for a moment, then turned away, disturbed even more by this totally uncharacteristic behavior from her governess than by her mother’s illness. The latter had always been remote and absent. Having her upstairs in bed made little difference to Elinor’s life. But Mrs. Watkins behaving like this was entirely new, and very upsetting.

  Perhaps Ham would tell her what his niece would not, Elinor thought. She raced up the steps to her room, intent on changing into her comfortable clothes as quickly as possible. As always, her greenhouse theater represented a safe refuge, where she could forget her cares and lose herself in the immortal works of Charlotte Breakespear, Henry Eden, or the more recent farces of the continental playwright Tontaire.

  But Ham was almost as closemouthed as Mrs. Watkins.

  “Nah, nah, young lady,” he said as he threw a knife underarm at her. “We’ve no need to talk of the north wind and the like down here. We’re more than fifteen miles south of Bain, and it’s another twenty-five or maybe even thirty miles north from there to the Wall.”

  “What’s the distance from here to the Wall got to do with anything?” asked Elinor, who had caught the knife and sent it spinning around with two others. In a moment she would catch all three and throw them back.

  She knew about the Wall, of course, from various lessons. It was some sort of ancient ruin that marked the border between Ancelstierre and the neighboring country to the north, the Old Kingdom, which was a backward place of little interest. Or so she had been taught . . . though it now occurred to her that the paucity of information about the place was odd. Her geography textbooks were full of information about Ancelstierre and the countries across the channel and beyond. She’d had to learn the names of the capitals by heart, and their key products and other useless facts. But she’d never heard the name of the capital of the Old Kingdom, or even seen a map that showed anything beyond the border with Ancelstierre. Admittedly, geography classes were far from her favorite, and as with many other lessons, she’d usually been reading a pocket edition of a play set carefully inside a larger textbook while Mrs. Watkins read aloud and hoped her student was following along . . .

  She threw the knives at Ham, following them immediately with another question.

  “What’s so special about the Old Kingdom?”

  Ham caught the knives but didn’t throw them back. He looked at her, his craggy face worried.

  “Why all these questions, Miss Elinor?”

  “The north wind,” sa
id Elinor. “My mother’s illness. Mrs. Watkins is behaving so strangely. I feel it’s all connected. I feel . . . I feel odd. As if something is going to happen. And I don’t know whether to be afraid or excited. I need to know, Ham.”

  “It’s not my place to speak of such things,” said Ham. “When I first came here, Mrs. Hallett was very firm. She told me then I mustn’t speak of things . . . things farther north.”

  “My mother’s dying,” said Elinor, and knew it to be true. “Everything is going to change.”

  Ham nodded. But instead of answering, he threw the knives again. Elinor caught them instinctively, sent them whirling about her head and threw them back, adding a ball from her pocket. The old man sent knives and ball back again, adding another ball, very fast, right on the edge of what Elinor was able to handle.

  Forced to completely focus her mind on the rocketing, spinning projectiles, Elinor thought that Mrs. Watkins’s uncle was also a capable hand at distraction when he didn’t want to talk.

  After juggling practice, Ham withdrew immediately, muttering something about “duties,” which, since he didn’t really have any now that they no longer had any horses, apart from occasionally helping out with odd jobs, was also clearly to avoid Elinor’s questions.

  After he’d gone, she somewhat half-heartedly entered into planning her next production, Breakespear’s Love Laments Loss, which would require extensive repainting of her cutout characters and the addition of a new one, since the dyed sheepskin she’d used to create bear fur for A Vintner’s Tale had got moldy and so had to be replaced.

  But her heart wasn’t in it, and she hadn’t got much beyond muttering and moving pieces around the stage when the bell rang in the house for supper. Hoping that it might be something nice and not merely bread and dripping, Elinor skipped across the courtyard. She paused partway to note that the weather vane continued to vacillate, and the wind, though not a true northerly, was tending to shift between southeast and northeast, which was still unusual.

  Unfortunately, it was bread and dripping again. Elinor complained, and Cook answered that she’d had no housekeeping money that month and what did she expect, and Mrs. Watkins tried unsuccessfully to keep the peace. In the course of this conversation, Elinor was alarmed to discover that none of the servants had been paid for two months, their salaries in arrears even before Mrs. Hallett had taken to her sick bed.

  The mention of housekeeping money and staff payments, or the lack of them, made Elinor thoughtful. After supper, she detached herself from Mrs. Watkins and made her way up to her mother’s room. She didn’t like visiting, particularly now, but clearly something had to be done.

  The paraffin lamp in her mother’s room was lit, but it did not seem to shed the normal amount of light. The corners of the room were shadowed, and Mrs. Hallett lay in gloom. Elinor thought Maria must have dimmed the lamp after she’d finished for the evening, but the wick was set to burn high. Elinor frowned. The lamp probably needed a new wick, or perhaps her mother was economizing with a lower grade of paraffin.

  She went to the side of the bed. Her mother lay as still as before, when the doctor had visited. Now, in the night, it felt to Elinor even more like she was looking at a dead person.

  “Mother,” she said hesitantly. “Mother. I don’t know if you can hear me. I . . . we . . . need a little money for housekeeping and to pay the servants. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but I wondered if I might look in your bureau? For any ready money, I mean.”

  There was no answer. Elinor hadn’t expected one. She waited, though, feeling it was important to show respect. Her mother didn’t move, and there was no sign of the strange, momentary frost Elinor had seen or thought she’d seen before. It was quiet, and there wasn’t even a hint of the humming noise she’d heard before, or thought she’d heard.

  Mrs. Hallett’s bureau had long ago been some merchant’s traveling cabinet, a vast portmanteau that when set on its end could be opened to reveal a writing slope, a rack of pigeonholes for correspondence, and numerous small drawers. It had been set up, open, against the wall next to the much larger wardrobe, an heirloom of flame mahogany.

  Elinor opened the first drawer like a thief, as quietly and surreptitiously as possible. She couldn’t help but look over her shoulder, back tensing in expectation of a sudden, cold outburst from her mother, to be followed by a lecture on how Elinor was failing to meet the most basic expectations a mother might have for her daughter.

  But there was no sound, no movement from the bed. The drawer was full to the brim with unpaid bills, many stamped with “Second Demand” or “Payment Appreciated,” others with handwritten amendments insisting that at least some of the outstanding amount must be remitted or the matter would be referred to solicitors or debt agents or action taken in various courts. The bills went back several years.

  The second drawer was full of letters from solicitors in Bain and Cornbridge (the closest large town to the south) and even from the capital, Corvere. Elinor skimmed through them, an awful cold sensation rising up her stomach to clog her throat. Most referred to court judgments already won against her mother. “Erris & Daughters, Seamstresses v. Mrs. Hallett,” “Gordon the Grocers v. Mrs. Hallett,” “Levett’s Bank v. Mrs. Hallett.” None were for trifling amounts.

  The third drawer contained even more solicitors’ letters, but these were all from Gwenyth Lord or her nephew Barnabas Lord of Lord, Lord & Lord in Corvere, who Elinor vaguely knew had looked after her family’s business affairs for generations. These letters were a mixture of calm regret and urgent calls to action, none of which appeared to have had any effect. The most recent letter, on top of the pile, contained a deadly phrase that immediately attracted Elinor’s eyes.

  Despite your recent, unexpected remittance in gold and its application against the first mortgage, I regret to advise your debts are still far greater than your remaining assets. We have received formal notification from Morrison’s Bank, who hold the second and third mortgages upon Coldhallow House, that they have begun the process of foreclosure, which will be complete within the month. You should prepare yourself for bailiffs to be placed by Morrison’s and other creditors, who will take inventory and will also remove for sale all portable property in advance of any auction.

  The letter was dated slightly more than a month previously.

  Elinor replaced the letter very slowly and closed the drawer. Her hand was shaking. Though she had thought about what might happen if her mother died, those thoughts had not been very deep ones. Elinor had let herself imagine that whatever happened to her mother, she would be able to continue living as she had always done. Performing plays, even if they were only staged for herself and Ham and sometimes Mrs. Watkins and a bunch of discarded dolls. Hiding away from other people, keeping her branded forehead secret, avoiding the derision it would attract.

  To some degree, though she did not want to acknowledge this even to herself, Elinor had thought her life might be better if her mother died. Amelia Hallett had only ever been a critical presence. She didn’t do anything positive for her daughter. Certainly she never showed her love, or gave her any encouragement for anything.

  But if the farm had to be sold . . . her home had to be sold . . . to pay the family debts, then what was she going to do?

  Mechanically, Elinor opened the fourth drawer. It was full of small, empty velvet bags. She pushed them flat, and in doing so, found one in the corner that was not entirely empty. She pulled it out, undid the drawstrings, and reached inside. The bag contained two gold coins, of unfamiliar design. They were not Ancelstierran unites, or any continental currency she could identify. There was no writing on them at all, but they were very finely detailed and well struck. One side had two female figures in loose robes standing back to back, and the other a design of a dozen stars in a pattern, which looked like it was part of some larger heraldic device. The coins were heavy. Elinor, remembering a story about pirates, bit one and her teeth left an indentation. They were definitely pure gold
, or close to it, and so worth quite a lot.

  But not anywhere near enough to cover the debts Elinor had seen listed on the demands for payment. If all the empty velvet bags in the drawer had been full at one time, there had once been a small fortune here. But no longer.

  A faint noise made her turn around in alarm.

  Her mother was motionless. The house was still. Elinor kept absolutely silent, listening. For a few seconds she thought she must have imagined it. Then she heard the sound again. It was very faint, two or three sustained notes with several seconds of silence between each one.

  She moved closer to the bed and leaned over. The sound was coming from her mother, but Amelia’s mouth was closed. Elinor bent down so her ear was close to her mother’s face, but it seemed to make little difference. The three notes were so faint, it sounded as if they came from far away, but at the same time were somehow emanating from Amelia’s closed mouth.

  Puzzled, Elinor straightened up. She looked down at her mother and leaned in again. The strange ice was forming across her skin, a layer so thin and delicate that in the dim light she might have missed it if she wasn’t so close. She reached out and touched her mother’s cheek with the very tip of her finger. It was ice; her finger came away wet and very cold.

  The window suddenly rattled, making Elinor jump. The wind was rising again, gusts gripping the window frames. She walked over and looked out, but it was too dark to see which way the poplars were swaying or to get any sense of the wind’s direction.

  Elinor looked back at her mother and for a second thought she’d woken up. Her eyes were reflecting the lamplight, though they were strangely red, as if tiny flames burned where her pupils should be. Elinor looked at the lamp, expecting to see it smoking, the light turned red, but it hadn’t. Though dim and low, its light was the usual soft yellow. Elinor slowly turned back toward the bed. The strange red light in Amelia’s eyes was gone. When she crossed the room to look more closely, her mother’s eyes were shut. The strange sound had also stopped, and the ice had disappeared. Elinor gingerly touched Amelia’s face again. Her skin was cool, but not cold.