The Case of the Spellbound Child

by Mercedes Lackey

  So as long as Peter could say with truth that he had been undertaking a charitable task in the East End—and, not incidentally, came home sober and smelling of nothing more than a bit of sweat rather than gin—his parents would not care how late he arrived, nor what conveyance he arrived in.

  The growler pulled up in front of the girls’ flat. Sarah and Nan, birds riding sleepily on their shoulders, talons clenched tightly in the cloth of their gowns, got down first, allowing Suki to jump down after them.

  “Good night, Peter!” Sarah said, as their friend poked his head out the door of the growler to make sure they made it safely inside. The long habit of over-caution as Sherlock tracked down the last of Moriarty’s extensive gang was going to be a hard one to break . . . and the girls were not certain it was one that should be broken. There was nothing to be lost by investing in being alert and careful, after all.

  They moved quietly so as not to wake their landlady, Mrs. Horace. She was a treasure, and even Suki understood how much of a treasure she was. There were not many landladies in London who would let two unattached young ladies rent a flat from them. There were fewer who would have allowed those young ladies to adopt an urchin off the street. Fewer still who would tolerate comings and goings at all hours of the day and night without assuming the worst possible things about their virtue and honesty. And never mind tolerating the exceedingly odd pets of a Grey Parrot and a Raven.

  Then again, it was Lord Alderscroft who had arranged for this flat to be let to them, so, although the good lady had never implied that she had knowledge of Elemental Magic, or even powers herself, it could certainly be implied that she could, in the words of Kipling’s Puck, “see further into a millstone than most.”

  They tiptoed up the stairs to their flat and let themselves in.

  They found a single gaslight turned low, some bottled lemonade, and a nice selection of cheese and biscuits waiting for them on the table in front of their cold fireplace. Mrs. Horace, once again, making sure that they were being cared for. “Oh, bless!” Sarah said aloud. “I’m starving.”

  It appeared the others were as well. They all sat down without even taking off their bonnets—well, Suki did take off her cap—and even the sleepy birds woke up enough to accept a biscuit or two.

  But everyone’s clockwork was quickly winding down, now that the elation of a relatively painless “exorcism” of that vexatious spirit Alf was over, and when Nan volunteered to tidy up and put the tray out on the landing, Sarah was only too happy to accept.

  She was relieved to get out of her gown and into . . . well, as diaphanous a night-dress as she could sew. I suppose if I actually had any shame, I’d have been blushing when I bought this fabric, she thought with a soft laugh to herself. One could easily have used it for tracing paper. It certainly left nothing to the imagination.

  But the only other person who had ever seen her in this gown (without the much more opaque wrapper she’d made to cover it) had been Suki, who had seen things in her childhood that would have brought the blush of embarrassment to almost anyone. And even then, it hadn’t been Suki “in person,” it had been Suki spirit-traveling.

  Sarah arranged herself on her bed in a position best suited to catch the least breeze from the open window. In fact, it had been scarcely two months since Suki had startled her by appearing at the foot of her bed in the middle of the night, at a time when Sarah knew the child had to be tucked up in her own bed miles away at the Harton School, run by their good friends and mentors, Memsa’b and Sahib Harton. Suki had known exactly what she was about, too, for the first words out of her ethereal mouth were, “Gor blimey! I done it!” in tones of triumph.

  “And you go right back to where you came from too, missy!” Sarah had said. “You are not to pop into someone else’s bedroom without a by-your-leave!” But her tone had not been too harsh, and Suki had giggled, waved goodbye, and vanished.

  A breakfast conference with Nan followed, and an unplanned trip to the school later that morning had resulted in the acquisition of the following information: Suki was homesick. And she had been listening very carefully when the adults had been discussing spirit-travel over the course of several nights—a natural subject, since it had played such a large role in Nan and Sarah’s latest case with John and Mary Watson. The adults, of course, had had no idea that Suki was paying any attention at all—which, well, they should have known better. Suki was an information sponge, was utterly fearless, and wanted very badly to see her foster mamas.

  And on being asked, she had freely admitted she’d been trying for many nights to spirit-travel to see them.

  “Well, that djinn is not going back in the bottle,” Memsa’b had said with equal parts exasperation and admiration. So Suki was allowed to come home, Beatrice Leek had been sent for, and Suki had been put through a very strict, thorough, and proper course of training, right alongside Peter Hughs, and emerged out of it, in Beatrice’s words, “a complete natural.”

  And when the girls had been recruited to lay Alf’s ghost, it occurred to both of them that Suki could be their extra weapon—and that it would be an excellent chance for her to work alongside them for the first time. “We might as well let her,” Nan had said, practically, “since she’s going to turn up regardless, no matter how hard we try to keep her out of it. It’s not as if she hasn’t been doing risky work with the Irregulars all this time. And it’s not as if we weren’t doing equally risky occult work when we were her age.”

  Sarah would have liked to point out, one, that they’d had the help of Robin Goodfellow, and two, it wasn’t as if they’d been given a choice . . . but she really couldn’t, in good conscience. Because once you had talents and began training in them, it seemed that no one ever really had a choice, and trouble would find you, regardless. So Suki might as well get into her trouble under the supervision of adults.

  And she really had done very, very well tonight. Sarah was terribly proud of her.

  “Suki clever bird,” Grey muttered, as if she were reading Sarah’s mind. Which, actually, she probably was.

  “Yes, Grey,” Sarah murmured back, as sleep took her, “Suki is a clever bird indeed.”

  * * *

  “Well, that was pleasantly successful,” Nan said over breakfast. “I’m glad Beatrice put that particular ghost-laying in our path. It gave us a chance to see how all four of us can work together.”

  Sarah nodded, mouth full of toast.

  “Oi—” Suki began, and blinked at Nan’s admonishing glance. “I b’lieve I got the hit in just right.”

  Nan didn’t have to remind Suki why her pronunciation was so important. Like Nan, she was going to have to remember to cultivate two kinds of English—“proper” English, the sort you would speak around Lord Alderscroft and the Watsons, and the jargons of the street. The first would ensure middle- and upper-class people took her seriously. The second would cement her as “one of them” with the lower classes. The one and only time Suki had complained about how hard it was, Nan had pointed out, “Sherlock Holmes is a master of not less than thirty or forty English accents and dialects. Surely you can keep track of two or three.” Since Suki absolutely idolized Holmes, that had ended that argument right there.

  “You did, Suki,” Nan agreed. “You took my cue right when I gave it. You hit him just below his hips, as Gupta has shown you. You used just enough force to knock him off his feet and backward, and bounced off him to keep yourself out of his reach, should he have made an attempt to grab for you. It was textbook-perfect.”

  Suki beamed. She was an exceedingly pretty child; she made a handsome little boy, and an enchanting little girl, with her mop of black curls, enormous brown eyes, and cafe-au-lait complexion. Nan was not really sure what nationality or mix of nationalities she was; she had evidently been sold by one of her parents as a sort of slave to a disreputable faux-medium-cum-prostitute at a very young age, and attempts to trace her origi
n, even by Holmes himself, had failed. Nan and Sarah, to protect her, firmly claimed her to be Italian, and claimed she had been entrusted to their care by an impoverished, widowed gentlewoman of good character. She looked Italian enough for the story to pass, and even if Italians were held in scorn by most English, they were less scorned than other races, or a child of mixed blood. Nan and Sarah didn’t personally care if she was Italian, Hottentot, or a Moon Child, and Lord Alderscroft absolutely doted on her and would have spoiled her dreadfully if he’d gotten the chance, but she was going to have to make her way on her own one day, and the more protections that were in place for her, the better off she would be.

  Nan privately hoped that one day it would be Suki who would be the headmistress of the Harton School. She had a wonderful mix of empathy and hard-headed practicality that would be very useful in that position. But that would be a long time from now. And very likely Memsa’b will try to hand over the reins to us, first. She hoped that would be long in coming.

  “I want to do another,” Suki announced, after finishing her eggs—or rather, making them utterly vanish. “That felt—” She screwed up her little face to think very hard. “Useful. I like being useful.”

  “Well, I was actually thinking of something you could do partially on your own, Suki,” Sarah told her, refilling the child’s cup with half tea and half milk. “I was hoping you would befriend the Badger Court Twins and persuade them to go through the Portal for me.”

  The “Badger Court Twins” were not twins at all; the frail little spirits looked nothing alike and were not even of the same age, though they had perished in the same cholera outbreak. But they had found each other while bewildered by their own deaths, and clung to each other like desperate siblings, appearing only rarely and almost never to adults. The Portals frankly terrified them—Sarah said she suspected they had both been traumatized by awful stories of what happened to “bad little children” and unconsciously associated the fact that they had died with “being disobedient.” They were the last haunts of this neighborhood and Sarah had been trying with no success to get them to cross since the girls had moved here.

  Suki made a face. “They’s—they’re—a dead bore.”

  “Ghosts can’t all be exciting; in fact, most of them aren’t,” Sarah pointed out gently, as Grey nodded agreement. “But it’s our responsibility to help all the ones we can. And they won’t let me near them. They might respond better to you.”

  Suki heaved a huge sigh. “All right. I c’n try luring ’em.”

  “Hopscotch, or jacks, or rope-skipping,” Nan suggested. “You know how to make things out of nothing in the spirit world, and they don’t seem to be able to. If they see you playing in the street, they’re likely to come out. You can show them how to make playthings and befriend them that way.”

  “’Strue I don’t have girlfriends what ain’t—aren’t—at the school,” Suki admitted, brightening. “The Irregulars is top-hole, but—”

  “But as soon as you are in a dress they treat you like a hanger-on,” Nan finished for her, having seen that very thing for herself. It was as if the moment Suki donned skirts, she became a nonentity, barely tolerated. Then again, that was the way the boys at the Harton School often treated their female classmates—and generally, the girls let them. At the school, Suki wouldn’t tolerate that, but the Irregulars were a much more hardened lot. “You can make them feel happy and ready to cross, and have some fun at the same time.”

  “Right then.” The child nodded with decision. “I c’n start ternight.”

  Nan exchanged a wry look with Sarah. Oh, to have the energy of a child again! she thought. While working was certainly far more interesting than not working, she was not eager to jump immediately into a new task the way Suki was.

  If putting Alf to rest had been an assignment from Lord Alderscroft, or a task shared with the Watsons, the next move for the morning would have been to report their success. But Beatrice Leek had merely passed on the word that the denizens of the East End neighborhood had been desperately looking for someone to rid them of the pestilent haunt, and said, “And I’ll just let you get on with it, dearies,” after giving them the name and address of the Brownes. So there really was nothing to do this morning but have a nice, leisurely breakfast and contemplate possible activities involving Suki for the afternoon. Playing in one of the parks? A trip to the British Museum was always fun and educational, and Suki considered it a high treat. Not the zoo—it would be crowded with over-stimulated, over-tired children and increasingly cross nannies.

  But any plans went flying out the window when the doorbell rang downstairs, and Suki ran to the window and announced “message.” “Message” only meant one thing: the Watsons wanted them (and possibly by extension, Lord Alderscroft wanted them), and had sent one of the Irregulars bearing a summons.

  Sure enough, Mrs. Horace came tripping up the staircase to tap on the door and open it. “Message from the doctor, ladies,” she said cheerfully, handing over the envelope to Sarah, who got up to accept it. “Just leave the breakfast things, I’ll clear up for you.”

  “You know us too well, and spoil us too much, Mrs. Horace, and thank you for last night’s treat,” Sarah replied with a smile, opening the envelope. Mrs. Horace, far too good-mannered to wait around to hear what was in the message, dimpled, and closed the door, trotting back down the stairs. “Well, this is interesting. It’s going to be a bit of an expedition, and John is going to play the distraction while Nan and Peter investigate. His Lordship suspects some double-dealing at a private asylum—and John says the situation is far too complicated to go into in a note. We’re all to go—Suki, you’ll be up with Brendan as a horse-boy, so go find your livery and put it on. Sarah, we’re nurses.”

  That meant the unusual instance of an actual disguise, and in this case, one neither of them had used before, nursing-sisters’ uniforms supplied long ago by Alderscroft.

  The note specified that they should come in an hour, which was plenty of time to go by ’bus, so that was what they did, taking the short walk to Baker Street from where the ’bus dropped them. Alderscroft’s carriage was already waiting at the front. Suki greeted the coachman, Brendan, like the old friend that he was, but with immense respect, and would have hopped up beside him, but he indicated she should wait in the coach for a moment with Nan and Sarah. Shortly after they seated themselves, John Watson, Peter, and Mary Watson emerged, Mary Watson dressed in a suit as a young man. Nan felt a bit sorry for them; she and Sarah were dressed in white and light blue, cool cotton and linen. John, Peter, and Mary might have been in linen, but it was a sober black, and did not look at all comfortable in this heat.

  Once they were all seated, John tapped on the roof with his cane, and Brendan pulled away.

  “This is a very odd, and somewhat delicate matter, since it involves a cousin of a friend of Alderscroft’s,” John said, once the coach got into motion. “The friend is, of course, one of his Hunting Lodge here in London—who it is doesn’t matter, except that he daren’t meddle in this matter himself without opening himself to some ugly accusations.”

  “Hmm,” Nan said. “That sounds as if there is a lady involved.”

  “More than one,” John said. “He has an underaged female cousin whose father remarried, then suddenly died, leaving his widow in sole control of the fortune.”

  Nan frowned. “Is the death suspicious?”

  “Not at all; I’ve made some quiet inquiries and it appears the man was in poor health, knew it, and was hoping to provide his minor daughter with a responsible guardian until she came of age. On his death, the girl reacted with predictable grief—then there was some sort of major incident regarding her behavior. I have no details on that incident, only that it was ‘distressing.’ At that point the widow declared the child was uncontrollable and inconsolable and had her sent to a private asylum for ‘her health.’”

  “Hmm. We’ve h
eard that one before,” Sarah muttered.

  “Here is where things get tricky. The cousin managed to get leave to visit her recently, and he says that the girl is, without a doubt, behaving quite, well, mad. He immediately suspected that either the chief physician of the asylum is medicating her with something that causes strong hallucinations, or that grief has triggered latent Elemental powers and she is seeing Elemental Spirits and has no idea how to cope with the experience.” John paused, waiting for the girls to say something.

  “Or there is a third or fourth explanation. She is mediumistic and being thronged with haunts—many of these private asylums are in former manor-homes—or grief triggered telepathic powers and she is being overwhelmed with the thoughts of people who are genuinely mentally ill.” Sarah looked to Nan, who nodded. “So I assume we are to investigate all four possibilities?”

  John smiled. “It’s almost as if I were working with female Sherlocks. We have an appointment to tour the facility, arranged by Alderscroft, with a view to placing a patient there. Peter and Mary are my assistants. You are my private nurses. Suki, you will keep your senses sharp for anything that might be going on outside on the grounds—it has been noted that the girl sometimes gets worse after being taken out for air.”

  “What’s the complication that prevents the cousin from investigating himself, if he’s an Elemental Master?” Nan asked shrewdly.

  John flushed a little. “Before her father’s death, the girl confided to him in a letter that she was desperately in love with him, and asked him if he would consider marrying her.”

  “Oho,” Nan replied. “And if anyone else has gotten wind of this—”

  “Yes,” John nodded. “If he tries to interfere, there could be all manner of scandal, since the will stipulates that if she marries, her fortune comes to her immediately. The least of the possible scandals is that he could be accused of seducing an innocent girl in order to get his hands on the money. I know nothing about the stepmother other than the cousin’s suspicions, but if he is correct, and she put the girl away in the first place in the hopes of continuing to keep control of the fortune, she’d do anything to add disgrace to the charges of madness.”