The Case of the Spellbound Child

by Mercedes Lackey

  “You’re in an uncommonly good mood this morning,” Sarah said.

  “I’m sensing either that we’re going on a paid holiday, or that we’re not going on a holiday we have to pay for ourselves,” Nan laughed. “In the case of the latter, I think we can find ways to keep ourselves cool and entertained until the end of August.”

  “Peter alone can do that, although he’s as full of mischief these days as a monkey house,” Sarah replied, replacing the last cushion. “Well, that’s that. If we go, we come back to a clean flat. If we don’t go, we have a clean flat.”

  Mrs. Horace tapped on the door with her foot with their luncheon, and surveyed the morning’s handiwork with approval. “You young ladies have earned your meal this morning, and that’s certain,” she said with a decisive nod of her head. “I couldn’t have made a better job of it myself.”

  “High praise!” Nan laughed, and the three of them fell to with a good appetite.

  When the dishes were cleared onto the landing, Nan turned back to the others. “Well, we haven’t—” she began, when her words were interrupted by the bell. Suki stuck her head out the window.

  “It’s Tommy!” she cried, and waved. Presumably Tommy waved back, but Nan was already on her way down the stairs to see what had brought the lad.

  Mrs. Horace was just closing the door with a note in her hand. Nan took it from her as Sarah and Suki stuck their heads out of the door to the flat.

  “Get your hats and pack up the birds,” Nan said. “And make up overnight kits. We’re going to the Lion’s bungalow.”

  Within the hour they were on the train, bird carriers in one hand, small suitcases in the other. In the summer Lord Alderscroft followed the example of every other person of means who didn’t have to be in the city, and left for a summer residence. This one happened to be on the grounds of his former manor, which he had deeded over to Memsa’b Harton and her husband for their school. Nan was not sure how he had divided the property, but he still apparently held a goodly portion of it, more than enough to surround his Indian-style bungalow with beautiful gardens and plenty of cool, green woods to ride through when he cared to.

  A carriage was waiting for them at the station, with ginger-haired Paul Sterling, his Lordship’s second coachman and permanent driver for the bungalow up on the box. Paul knew them all very well, as they knew him. “Let them pore birds out uv captivity, miladies,” he said as he handed them up into the coach. “They mun be fair weary uv bein’ in there.”

  “Lemme out!” shouted Neville, and laughed wickedly.

  “As if I wouldn’t, you pirate,” Nan scolded fondly, and opened the door to his leather carrier. He and Grey popped out like rabbits out of burrows as the coach rolled away; Neville took up a perch in the open coach window while Grey sank her claws into the horsehair upholstery of the seat next to Sarah for a more secure grip.

  The bungalow was closer to the station than the school was, and it wasn’t too long before the coach was rolling down the beautifully smooth drive to Lord Alderscroft’s summer residence.

  Much, much newer than the manor that now housed the school, the bungalow was built in the style of those that wealthy officers and businessmen in India would construct in the hills in order to escape the summer heat. It had been built over a stone-walled cellar and had two stories above that; it sprawled over quite a lot of square footage, and had seven guest bedrooms on the first floor to allow his Lordship to do the requisite entertaining, as well as ample servants’ quarters. And since it had been built so recently, and since his Lordship was always further modernizing it, it had all the latest conveniences: real bathrooms such as the girls enjoyed, shared between pairs of bedrooms with hot and cold water on demand, gas lighting, and a telegraph in the butler’s pantry. Many of the original servants from the manor had moved to work here as soon as Alderscroft finished it, and his chief cook swore the kitchen was so good she would die in it rather than leave. The rooms all had punkah-fans, to be brought into play if the breeze died and the heat became oppressive. In India these would be powered by a small boy; here it was by an ingenious clockwork mechanism on the wall which kept the great blade gently wafting to and fro. But the chief jewel of the house was the enormous veranda that wrapped around four sides of the house and served as a sort of outdoor sitting room, where one could lounge and enjoy the cool breeze in the worst of the summer heat.

  They were met by John Watson—and two of the footmen, of course. From here they could see his Lordship and Mary Watson (who was wearing something cool-looking and white) sitting at their ease on comfortable rattan “peacock” chairs, up on the veranda. Mary waved to them, and the birds immediately took off to join her—doubtlessly in anticipation of treats.

  “Traitors,” Nan chuckled, and turned to John. “I see you beat us here.”

  The footmen took possession of their luggage and the bird carriers, and whisked it all off into the house as John replied. “By several hours. The Lion has some details he’d like to discuss with you. Come on up.”

  They followed him up the stairs and around the veranda to where Alderscroft and Mary were sitting. Sure enough, the birds were being treated to digestive biscuits—Grey had considerately broken Neville’s up into smaller pieces he could gulp down as he stood on the veranda floor, while she sat on the back of an empty chair and held an entire biscuit in one claw and was nibbling it around and around the edge, taking neat little divots out of it.

  All three of them took empty chairs, and an attentive servant appeared as if by magic to ask if they would like something to drink. When they were all settled, Alderscroft turned to Sarah.

  Lord Alderscroft resembled his nickname remarkably well, with a great mane of tawny hair kept unfashionably long and unfashionably full, and strong, leonine features. He wore a cream-colored linen suit in concession to the heat, and in further concession, had hung the jacket on the back of his chair (probably to the dismay of his valet) and sat back in his shirtsleeves and crisp waistcoat. Watson had taken similar liberties with his wardrobe. Mary was wearing a white muslin teagown that looked. . . . suspiciously brand-new. And Nan realized at that moment with both amusement and a touch of dismay that his Lordship had probably had all their bedrooms stocked with brand-new clothing he’d had run up just in case they might be persuaded to visit this summer.

  We needn’t have packed at all. . . .

  We won’t allow him to shower us with presents, so he is getting around that by presenting them in this way.

  On the other hand, this was good planning, if instead of a visit, they ever had to come here as an escape from danger in London.

  “Now, are you fatigued, or can you undertake an experiment for me?” Alderscroft asked without preamble.

  Since he was looking at Sarah at the time, Nan kept her mouth shut.

  “A short train journey and an even shorter trip by comfortable coach is hardly going to fatigue us,” Sarah replied with amusement. “We’re here to be at your disposal.”

  “In that case—” Alderscroft picked up a folded square of silk from the rattan table that lay between them and extracted a by now familiar piece of paper from it. “When you were examining this letter, I know you were concentrating on the sense of Earth Magic, which came from the husband. But did you do any attempt to learn anything about the letter writer herself, his wife?”

  “I—no, I didn’t, actually,” Sarah admitted, with deep chagrin. “I suspect that may have been a mistake?”

  “Let’s just say, an understandable omission, given the circumstances.” He handed the letter to her. “Rather than exercising your new abilities as a Spirit Master, I would like you to exercise your psychical gift as a reader of the history of objects. Indulge me, please.”

  Sarah took the letter from him, held it carefully between her palms, and closed her eyes. Fleeting emotions passed over her face for the next several minutes as she probed where the
letter had been and tried to glean facts about the writer.

  Finally she opened her eyes, and . . . from her expression, Nan was pretty certain she was annoyed with herself. She confirmed that with her opening words.

  “Sherlock would certainly have given me a good scolding,” she said, biting her lip. “At the time the letter is postmarked, the children had been gone for three days. They never stayed out even overnight before; the writer actually spoke about just that to her husband as she was writing the letter. The woman was frantic with worry, but doesn’t know how to express her fears without coming off as hysterical, so she restrained herself. She was also laden with guilt because she sent the children out of the house to forage after they ruined the little there was for dinner in the course of romping about their cottage. There are no near neighbors to ask for help, but even if there had been, she knew she was regarded with suspicion by the people living around them because she is from a town and is much better educated than they are. And—” Sarah held up a finger, “—after the letter was sealed and the stamp put on it, she learned that her husband’s enquiries at the village of Sheepstor suggested that at least three or four more children have gone missing this summer. I say at least, because itinerant worker families and Gypsies and Irish Travelers have been passing through, and some of them were missing children as well, though how many, neither the woman nor the man know.”

  “I’ve sent salamanders to my Earth Masters in the vicinity, as they are the most likely to pick up on signs of dark powers at work,” Alderscroft said. “So far today I have gotten two replies in the negative. But even if they all reply in the negative—”

  “The absence of a sign does not mean there is not something nefarious going on,” John said, frowning.

  “In the absence of Sherlock Holmes, I would like you four—five if you take Suki, and six if Peter can get free—to investigate, once we have gotten all the information we can remotely gather. You have resources the local constabulary won’t; you can nudge them in the right direction if you learn anything.” He frowned fiercely. “If something is going on beyond a lot of extraordinarily careless parents and a combination of children running away and terrible accidents, we cannot let it persist. Since Sherlock is no longer with us, we must carry on his work.”

  Nan had never loved Lord Alderscroft more than at that moment. The missing children were all lower class, even despised classes, and yet, here he was, fiercely declaring that something must be done if there was someone preying on them. There was not one man in a thousand of his rank or wealth who would have given a burnt matchstick about the lives of those children.

  “It will take at least a day, and probably more, before I am ready to send you, if I send you at all, rather than merely putting the force of my rank behind a local inquiry with the police,” he cautioned them. “John, I’ll give you and Mary the tokens to contact the Air and Water Masters of the area arcanely, I’ll send salamanders to the Fire Masters, and we can all begin doing that tonight. Nan and Sarah, is there anything you can do from this distance?”

  “Possibly,” Sarah answered for both of them. “We’ll try. And you’re right, while we have all the possible tools, arcane, mundane, and psychical, all here in this one spot, it’s best to learn what we can before we venture into the unknown.”

  “My Lord, I am beginning to suspect you are turning into a socialist,” John said, with a smile.

  Alderscroft shrugged. “You could as easily say I am following in my aristocratic ancestors’ footsteps and taking noblesse oblige seriously. We have great powers, John. It is incumbent on us to use them when and where they are needed. In a situation where mundane authorities are clueless or helpless, honor requires that we step in.”

  “Well said!” Nan enthused.

  “Meanwhile, you, Nan, and Sarah and Suki are sharing the lavender room. John and Mary are across the hall in the cornflower room. Would you like to go up and unpack and freshen up, then return to discuss all of this in more detail?”

  “I think that’s a capital idea,” Sarah agreed before Nan could answer. Nan had the feeling that this was more because Sarah had already guessed there was an entire new wardrobe waiting for them up there, and wanted to see it.

  Alderscroft summoned a servant to take them there, since they hadn’t ever been past the sitting room of the bungalow before.

  The lavender room was exactly that; the wallpaper was patterned with pale sprigs of lavender, the oriental carpets were lavender, the furnishings were upholstered in lavender brocade, the twin beds and the truckle under one of them were decked in lavender counterpanes, and even the china was lavender and white rather than blue and white. And the bouquet of flowers on the dresser was mostly lavender.

  As Nan had expected, Sarah went straight to one of the three wardrobes in the room, opened the doors, and began laughing. It was obvious why. The wardrobe was packed full, and the clothing they had brought with them was absolutely unnecessary.

  Nan opened one of the bureau drawers and was unsurprised to see brand-new underthings. Silk, and the particularly delicate cotton that was nearly as expensive as silk.

  “Well, at least we know we won’t have to go back to the flat if we are sent out from here,” Nan said with a sigh as Suki ran to the child-size wardrobe to crow over cool linen sailor suits and lace-trimmed little-girl versions of tea gowns. “We might as well change, so we don’t embarrass the Lion with our normally shabby selves.”

  But once she, Sarah, and Suki had changed, she realized that Alderscroft’s generosity had not been merely to indulge his own whims. She felt energized, exceedingly comfortable, and ready to face this potential problem head-on, not overheated and muddle-headed.

  And it’s just as well, she thought, as they rejoined the others on the veranda. Now we can keep our minds completely on our job. Every bit of advantage may be crucial. Because it certainly looked as if John Watson’s instincts had been right and hers had been wrong. And the game, as Sherlock would say, was almost certainly afoot.

  9

  A FOOT in her side jarred Ellie out of sleep so deep she woke not knowing where she was for a moment. “Op,” commanded that too-familiar, harsh voice. “Start chores. Tine door behin’ ’ee.”

  Without even stopping to scrub the sleep from her eyes, Ellie obeyed, stumbling into the other room and closing the door behind her—and only once the door was closed did she realize that she had closed the Dark One in with the other children.

  Simon! she thought, fear clutching at her throat, and tried to open the door again.

  But it was stuck fast. Not locked, because there was no way to lock it from the other side. But stuck fast in the doorframe, as if it was all one solid piece and not a door at all.

  For a moment, she dithered, not sure what to do, as silence reigned on the other side of the door. But what could she do, really? She couldn’t get in from here—

  The window! There was the window into the room from the back of the cottage! Maybe she could see what was happening! She groped her way hurriedly across the main room and opened the door, creeping out into the gray light and around the cottage wall until she came to the back, where she cautiously tried to peer in through the crack between the shutters.

  But all she could see was the tall, black figure of the Dark One standing in the middle of the room. Just standing, doing nothing else.

  But the silence in that room sent chills down her spine. She had never heard a silence quite like that before—it was a silence that had weight, and cold; it filled the room and spilled out to where she was standing, and she started shaking. The other children were always making some sort of sound; whimpering, whispering, coughing—but now she couldn’t even hear them breathing.

  It won’t kill ’un, she told herself, trying to quell her rising panic. It wants ’un . . . what’d Robbie say? She thought she remembered the others saying something about a kind of sleep, a sleep that th
ey dreaded, that frightened them. . . .

  Robbie had said the Dark One ate their magic when it put them to sleep, that was it.

  So they’re just sleepin’, like, she reassured herself. They’ll wake up, an’ be all right.

  She had to believe that. Because . . . she just had to.

  But her feet dragged a little in the dirt as she made her way back and got started on the chores, and she had a hard time concentrating on the work. That heavy silence on the other side of the prison door weighed on her heart like cold stones.

  By the time the Dark One unstuck the door into the prison room and emerged, she had already swept the outer room, made up its bed, laid out everything for its breakfast, and turned the chickens loose. And—the chickens hadn’t liked what was going on in the prison room either. They’d gone to the front of the garden and huddled against the wall together, only pecking at things as an afterthought, and mostly staring at the cot with suspicious, beady eyes. The sun was halfway to noon, and she’d been in a mire of worry the entire time the creature had been in there.

  When it came out, there was something different about it, something that Ellie couldn’t quite put into words. It seemed stronger somehow, or more alive. “Change buckets,” it whispered. “Sweep oop. ’Ee’ll nae need t’ feed ’un till they waket.”

  She stumbled over her own feet in her haste to do as it ordered, and when she entered the room, the thick, cold, and above all, uncanny silence made her heart stop.

  She ran to the back of the room where her brother’s bed was. “Simon?” she whispered, putting a hand to his shoulder and halfway expecting him to be cold and dead.

  But he wasn’t. He was cold and clammy when she put the back of her hand to his forehead, but he was alive and breathing.