The Case of the Spellbound Child

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I can use my powers,” she told them. “You’ll just have to use your powers of observation.”

  “The only thing we need to observe is whether or not we find a possible candidate for Alderscroft’s target,” Peter said pertly. “Then we find you and you tell us what the devil is going on here.”

  Nan tsked. “Lazy. I’m sure you could adduce plenty, if you would learn to apply Holmes’ methods. All right, let’s take to our respective wings. We might as well look for other irregularities while we’re at it. More ammunition for Alderscroft’s guns will be useful if I do uncover double-dealing.”

  Nan had the South Wing. The first floor contained only absolute invalids who could not leave their beds—which, when she reflected upon it, was sound management. You didn’t want people who could wander off on their own on the first floor. Every room she inspected was clean and cheerful, with a fresh bouquet of fragrant garden flowers near at hand, even when the tenants of the beds clearly were not particularly aware of their surroundings. The couple of aged people who actually were alert, despite their invalid status, had been supplied plentifully with books and at least one other pastime within easy reach. One old lady was happily occupied with crocheting yards of intricate lace with a hook scarcely bigger than a needle, and very fine thread. An old man was engaged in cutting intricate silhouettes out of black paper with nothing more than a tiny pair of scissors. One of the nursing sisters came to check on him, patiently whisked up the scraps, and praised his work so extravagantly that he blushed.

  This place was, to be quite honest, something of a revelation. So many establishments like this one were run with the intent of warehousing the sick until they died, or serving as a means of confining inconvenient relatives, that to see one run properly gave Nan a bit of pause. And still she could not shake off her cynical suspicions that she was only seeing a pretty veneer over a rotten base.

  And yet—no one knew she was there. To achieve a deception of this magnitude seemed impossible. This was not a show concocted for her benefit. The director would have to have known that Watson’s crew was coming, and when. He would have had to have known of Nan and Sarah’s abilities. And then he would have had to arrange for the entire establishment to erect and maintain this facade, somehow, until he could be certain they were gone.

  On the second floor she found genuinely ill people—no few of whom were yellow-faced men who from all appearances had done their level best to destroy their own livers with drink. Most of these were marginally ambulatory, and several of them were sitting in chairs at their windows. Once again, bright, clean, cheerful rooms met her critical gaze. But she found no sign of a young girl.

  It was on the third floor that she struck gold.

  Two of the nursing sisters were conversing as she passed by them in the hall, evidently discussing a patient. “. . . and if it was me,” said one of them crossly, “I’d be slapping her until her cheeks were bruised instead of coddling her with milk diets and poetry books.”

  The other sniffed, and nodded. “Crying herself into being sick, making ugly messes for us to clean up, and no sooner is she clean and sweet-smelling again but she’s in hysterics and starting a new round. I tell you, when my old dad went up to Heaven, God bless his honest soul, there was no fainting and wailing and carrying on for me! No, it was off to work like any other day, and I might have dropped a tear or two in someone’s bath, but never did I dare to let them see it.”

  Well, that sounded promising! It fit all the parameters, especially that the patient had plunged into melancholy on the death of her father. So—hysterics and tears—it sounded as if all she needed to do was follow the sound of weeping.

  Nan concentrated until she heard it, faintly.

  And so she followed the sound, all the way to the end of the corridor, and what was clearly a “superior” room. On the corner of the wing, it boasted two windows instead of one, carpets on the floors, cheerful landscapes on the walls, and all the amenities of a fine hotel room. While the furnishings were not ornate as in the current fashion, they were of high quality, and made with an eye to comfort. Upholstery was not harsh horsehair, but pleasing velvets in the fashionable color of mauve, harmonizing with wallpaper of mauve cabbage roses. The bed—well, at first sight, the bed made Nan a bit envious: not one, but three featherbeds, a luxurious pile of pillows, and a coverlet of velvet to match the rest of the furnishings.

  And in the bed, huddled up in one corner, was a girl in the throes of inconsolable grief, or so it appeared, at least. She had been dressed in a cambric nightgown with deep lace ruffles, the sort of gown that Nan had never actually seen before, only surmised from the elegant fashions worn by women in Lord Alderscroft’s lofty circles.

  Her dark hair was damp, and had been braided into a single tail down the back of her neck. She looked thin to Nan, and her face was a blotched mess, eyes swollen, cheeks raw. A pile of crumpled handkerchiefs beside her testified that she’d been at this for quite some time.

  Her sobbing certainly sounded overwrought to Nan, and she could see where it would easily have been taken by a bachelor, unfamiliar with the ways of young girls, as madness.

  But there was one thing above all else that literally hammered at Nan as she ghosted into the room. A single thought, so drenched in despair it brought tears to her eyes for a moment.

  He doesn’t love me! He never loved me!

  Never, not once, in all her life, not even when she was living on the street with her gin-soaked mother and often went so hungry she’d suck on a stone to try to stave the pangs off, had Nan ever felt that depth of inconsolable agony.

  And yet . . . the emotion seemed just as contrived and cultivated as it did crushing.

  Oh no. You don’t drag me down into your morass, my girl.

  Ruthlessly, she walled herself off from the emotions accompanying that thought, and took Neville up on her hand. I’m sending Neville to guide you all, she thought to her teammates, and felt their assent. “Go get the others,” she instructed the raven. “I think this must be the girl.”

  With a bob of his head, Neville flew off through the wall, leaving her alone with the sobbing mess in the corner of the bed. She considered her next move. First order of business, she decided, was to find out who “he” was—though from the information she had, a good guess would be that “he” was her cousin.

  Now that she had insulated herself from the girl’s hysterics, she felt vaguely sorry for her, but only because it seemed to her that the child had built up a romantic air-castle for herself that had ultimately proved to be founded on foam and had crumbled beneath the weight of reality. It was the same sort of thing she felt about Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The tragedy was not in their love and suicide. The tragedy was that they had thrown their lives away before they ever had the chance to understand what real love was—and that it was not the mad passion they’d shared. As Friar Lawrence had tried to point out . . . and of course, neither of them had paid attention to him.

  At least this little idiot hadn’t killed herself.

  So let’s just see what you’re thinking. Just in case the girl was a sensitive, she eased herself back into the girl’s thoughts, ghosting in softly, silently, and with luck, undetectably.

  And found herself rocked back on her heels.

  Because instead of the image she had expected . . . the one attached to “he” was that of a roguishly handsome fellow in the scarlet uniform of an army officer!

  “Bloody hell!” she muttered to herself, withdrawing for a moment. She was fairly certain that if the “cousin” had been an officer in the Army, Alderscroft would have mentioned that fact!

  Therefore. . . .

  “Well, aren’t you the darkest of horses,” she said aloud, just as Sarah and Grey turned up. “And you have been up to some very impressive mischief, I fear.”

  At Sarah’s inquisitive look, she held up her hand. “This
is the girl, and the situation really is so different from what we expected that . . . I’m more than a bit taken aback. I need more information, and I want to wait until everyone is here before I say anything.”

  Sarah nodded, and Nan plunged back into the chaotic stream of the girl’s thoughts, which were all of a muddle, to say the least.

  But at the forefront of everything was the scene she kept obsessively reviewing in her mind.

  She slipped out of the walled garden into the orchard, using the door she’d found hidden under the ivy. She saw him immediately in his scarlet uniform, pacing back and forth between two apple trees. He must have heard that her father was dead—

  Well, now she was free. Now they could flee to Scotland and get married, just as he’d promised. He must have come to tell her to pack a bag, that they would leave tonight once the house was asleep—

  “Robert!” she cried, and flung herself at him.

  And found herself roughly shoved away, so that she stumbled and fell to the ground. “Robert!” she cried, shocked. “What—”

  “You stupid bint,” he snarled at her. “You swore to me that everything was going to be fine, that all we had to do was run off and get married! You swore the will left everything to you! Couldn’t you have managed one sick old man better? Couldn’t you at least have taken the time to look at the will before you had me wasting my time on a silly little slut like you?”

  She gaped at him from the ground. Her expression only enraged him more. “I bribed a clerk in the law office, and a damn good thing I did, too. Idiot! Even if your stepmother approves of a marriage, and you damn well know she won’t approve of me, you don’t get anything until you turn twenty-one. Years! And if she doesn’t?” He made the sign of an explosion with his left hand. “PFFT! It’s gone. It all goes to her, you stupid cow!”

  “B-b-b-but money doesn’t matter! I don’t mind being poor with—”

  “But I mind being poor, you fool! Why do you think I’ve been dancing to your tune all this time? Because of your looks? Because I was in love with you?” He laughed, harshly.

  “But I’m going to have your—” she choked.

  “And I don’t care. Don’t try to put that on me, as free with your favors as you were with me, you probably have been distributing them randomly with the stablehands, the gardener’s boy, and the lad that delivers the groceries. I don’t love you. I never loved you. The only reason I sent for you was to warn you not to tell anyone about me. If you do, it’ll be the worse for you.”

  He laughed, nastily. The shock of his declaration left her speechless.

  “I’m going now. My regiment’s being sent to India. I’ll never have to look at your pudding face or pander to your fragile sensibilities again. Thank God.” And with that, he strode away, leaving her half lying in the grass, which was where her maid found her, hysterically weeping.

  That memory led to another: a meeting at a party, a waltz in the arms of this handsome, fascinating officer. She shouldn’t properly have been there. She wasn’t exactly old enough . . . but her family also was not of the social class where she’d ever have a Coming Out, and her father got a great many invitations and didn’t like to see her “sitting at home like a spinster.” So there she was, and there he was, and it was just like a glorious romance when he began to court her in secret. . . .

  And then do quite a bit more than “court” her. Somehow he had access to a cottage near her home. It was secluded, it was easily reached on foot, and all she had to do was say she was taking a walk. Not even her stepmother, a distant relative of her mother, seemed to think anything about it. But then, the stepmother was occupied with nursing her father, and it was trivially easy to get away whenever she liked. No one even questioned when she “went for a walk” on days that threatened bad weather, and when she returned dry after a downpour, no one seemed to think it odd.

  Nan resolutely blocked herself from the memory of what had gone on in that cottage, but there was absolutely no doubt that the girl had been a complete idiot. Not only had she tried to tell “Robert” that she was pregnant, there was yet another searing memory.

  The sly little maid who had been her confidant, carrying messages to and fro, and who knew about all of this, giving her a bottle of something that tasted like bitter mint, and the resulting, frightening rush of blood and the feeling her insides were tearing themselves loose. And that had led to the first fit of absolute hysterics that had brought her here.

  It took the better part of a quarter of an hour to sort through all the memories, by which time all four of them were in the room—and the girl was well into sobbing herself into another round of vomiting. Which was, pretty much, what she’d been doing since she arrived here.

  “Well,” Nan said, as the last piece fell into place, “I don’t know whether to laugh or throw up my hands in disgust. Here we were prepared to run to the rescue of a persecuted innocent, and instead I find a domestic disaster worthy of Jane Austen.”

  She paused for a moment to put her own thoughts in order, and after the silence had gone on too long, Sarah shook her finger at her. “Go on!” Sarah urged. “You can’t just leave us hanging after a statement like that!”

  “It appears that the fair innocent is neither innocent nor fair,” Nan said bluntly. “While her papa was slowly fading, unbeknownst to him or the stepmother that was spending every waking moment at papa’s bedside, she was canoodling in the shrubbery with a soldier-lad!”

  Peter gaped at her. Sarah’s mouth fell open. Suki just laughed. “Nor better nor she should be, aye?” the little girl crowed and tugged at Nan’s ethereal skirt. “Well, go on then!”

  “They met at a party. I am pretty certain the meeting was intentional on his part, and that the fellow had his eyes on her fortune and intended to elope to Scotland with her as soon as papa was conveniently out of the way. He discovered there are more entanglements as laid out in the will than would make that possible. By bribing a law clerk when the poor man was dead, if you please. He found out if she marries without her stepmother’s permission, she’s cut off.”

  “That makes sense,” Peter agreed, shaking his head.

  “The long and the short of it is that papa went to his reward, and our little fountain of tears here met up with her lover and informed him she was pregnant. In the meantime, he had found out the terms of the will, because instead of the response she expected, he told her bluntly he’d never loved her, he doubted the child was his, and in any event he was being sent to India, goodbye.”

  Sarah winced. “Cold,” she said.

  “As the glaciers of Norway,” Peter agreed. “She’s a silly goose, but he’s a cad.”

  “She threw herself at him, he shook her off and beat a hasty retreat, and left her in hysterics in the garden, which is where her stepmother found her,” Nan concluded.

  “I think I can fill in the rest,” Sarah said. “She’s going to have a baby without benefit of father or clergy, so the first thing she thinks of is to declare her love to her unattached cousin in hopes of getting him properly shackled before it’s too late.”

  “And when that hope fails, more hysterics followed by a miscarriage arranged by the maid she’d involved in her affair.” Nan shook her head. “At that point, having no idea what was going on, her stepmother sent her here, where she has nothing but time to brood on her lost love, weep, and vomit.”

  “I . . . really don’t know what to say,” said Peter. “Or, more importantly, what to tell his Lordship.”

  “Arsk th’ Watsons,” Suki said wisely. “Or tell ’em, rather, an’ leave it up t’them.”

  “Probably the best solution,” Sarah agreed. “Should we do anything about—” she waved her hands at the room, and the sobbing girl.

  “What can we do?” Peter asked. “We don’t have any proof of any of this. So we certainly can’t tell the doctor what’s going on with his patient. The
only thing we can do is just wish him well and leave him to it.”

  Nan shook her head. “The girl got herself into this mess, and I wish I could tell the doctors here what is really going on. But the best we can hope for is that he prescribes a course of dark rooms and a bland diet. She’ll get tired of agonizing over the wretched man eventually.” She clenched her jaw a little. “And that maid knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s going to be blackmailing her mistress with this until one or the other of them is dead. In fact. . . .” She paused. “You know, this might have been a scheme cooked up between her and this ‘Robert.’”

  “Do women really do that sort of thing?” Peter asked in fascination. “Betray each other like that?”

  “Same as men do,” Sarah replied. “And for the same reasons.”

  Grey made a rude noise. “Money,” the parrot said, wisely.

  “Grey’s right.” Nan cast a glance at the huddled figure on the bed that was anything but sympathetic. “Well, with the girl locked up here, the maid won’t have a chance to extort anything from her for a while.”

  “I find it impossible to care,” Sarah said in disgust. “Let’s go back to the Watsons.”

  The return to their bodies was as instant as their departure, though they had to take a few moments to orient themselves before Nan unburdened herself of the sordid little tale.

  The Watsons listened in stunned silence; Nan suspected that they had been coming up with all manner of suppositions, all of which included anything but the actual truth, and had been preparing a variety of plans to extricate the wretched girl from the facility. Without a doubt, the real story struck them with the same sense as a physical shock.

  “Let’s have dessert,” Nan suggested, as the silence that followed her revelations stretched on and on. “I know that I could use something sweet to negate the sourness of what we found.”