The Case of the Spellbound Child

by Mercedes Lackey

  But today, as soon as they’d finished eating and drinking, the Dark One came abruptly back into the room, and Simon knew what that meant.

  The Dark Sleep.

  He whimpered with terror as the Dark One stood there, waiting for all of them to take their places on their beds. Even Jess and Deborah, because, like Sam, the Dark One left them with enough strength when the Dark Sleep was over to do their work—at least after a brief rest—but whatever it was the Dark One was taking from them, he wasn’t going to exclude the girls.

  When they were all in place, the Dark One raised its arms.

  And Simon dropped into blackness.

  It was awful. Like he’d been bound hand and foot and blindfolded, while something drained everything out of him. Energy. Life. Even thoughts. Everything was held in a suffocating paralysis, and all he could do was endure in a complete and utter panic, alone in the dark, with the sense that this time he would never come out of it. This time the blackness and the paralysis and the terror would go on forever and ever.

  But then, just as abruptly as it began, the Dark Sleep ended. He could move again. He could open his eyes. But as always, the Dark Sleep left him too drained to move much, head muzzy, impossible to hold on to a single thought for long. The Dark One stood there for a long moment, while a distant part of him wondered what it was thinking. Then it turned and left the room, pausing only long enough to pull Jess and Deborah out of their beds and drag them into the main room of the cot to start their work again.

  It knows where Mother and Pa are. . . .

  But then, he realized, that wasn’t true.

  He’d told the thing they lived in Sheepstor. But they didn’t. They lived well outside of Sheepstor on the moor.

  And with that realization, relief and real sleep came.

  Suki was up at the break of dawn, as she always was. Reasoning that if Suki could take care of herself on the streets of London, she could certainly take care of herself on the streets of a Devon village, Nan sleepily gave her permission to get dressed, get breakfast downstairs, and go exploring, but asked her to leave an order with the kitchen for food for the birds later. Hardboiled eggs in the shell for Neville and chopped veg for Grey would do very well for now, and Neville could always hunt mice and bugs for himself later if he craved meat. Suki was so quiet about getting dressed that Nan was asleep again before she left.

  She and Sarah both woke a couple of hours later, well in time to pick something as cool but not as delicate as a lingerie dress to wear for the day. Their white shirtwaists with the sleeves rolled up as a man’s would be for the sake of coolness showed probably a great deal more bare arm than Yelverton was used to, but they were visitors, and from London to boot, so Yelverton would probably gossip behind hands and show a polite face in public. It was the divided gray linen skirts that would cause a stir, if anyone noticed. Nan was always amused by that—the polite fiction that women were some sort of solid object from the waist down never ceased to give her the giggles.

  Neville and Grey were still on their perches, so they hadn’t felt the need to supervise Suki either. Nan and Sarah were dressed and ready to go down to breakfast when a polite tap on their door signaled the arrival of Mary Watson.

  Mary had quite sensibly donned a similar outfit to theirs, although hers had more modest sleeves, buttoning at the wrist. “John already got up and snatched a rusk and some tea and was off to the police station,” she said with amusement. “Where’s Suki?”

  “She went off to explore.” Nan paused a moment, and carefully sought for Suki’s mind. Hungry again? she asked, and got back a wordless affirmation. “She’ll join us for a second breakfast.”

  “Well, with luck, so will John,” Mary replied, and they all went down.

  Breakfast was served to order in the public room, and Suki and John both joined them at about the same time.

  They were all less interested in the food than they were in what John had to say, which was quite a lot, and very detailed, when it came to the case files the chief constable had been keeping.

  “So, that’s almost a full dozen missing children that he knows of,” Mary mused. “How did this happen?”

  “Why is no one up in arms, you mean?” John countered. “Oh, he reported his findings to his superiors, and they told him not to bother. Because all these children are children of the poor. One of them was only reported missing because the old devil that employed him as a shepherd was incensed that he’d ‘run off’ and left the sheep unwatched. The blackguard assumed that the lad had eloped—rather than assuming that something had happened to him!”

  Mary Watson’s brows knitted with disapproval. “Well, what about the couple that sent us the letter?”

  “So far as the chief constable knows, the children are still missing. So that’s a place to start. I’m afraid we won’t have much luck with any of the others; their parents are mostly gone from the area now, if they still had any. Several of them were orphans, and about to be sent to the workhouse, so there is no one that cares about them. And if they had any possessions at all that we could have used to try to trace them magically, those possessions were all on their persons when they went missing.”

  Sarah had been taking all this down in her neat hand, having pushed her plate aside.

  “Well, my news will cheer you. Holmes is in the village on a case of his own he thinks might overlap with ours. His involves young women, and I surmise from the little he told me that they are not missing, but have been . . .” she paused for delicacy, “. . . I’m going to guess, interfered with, given that he was concerned about their reputations. But it seems there are some outré elements to his case as well as ours. He finds it unlikely that there are two cases involving magic in the same area are that are not somehow related, and he wants us to keep him apprised, as he will us.”

  John perked up quite a bit. “By Jove, there’s luck! Did you encounter him when you took your walk last night?”

  “I did indeed,” Nan smiled. “Sarah will leave our notes for him to collect at the Post Office, and then—where do we go from here?”

  “Sheepstor, to interview the parents and let them know we are on the case. We’ll take advantage of our host’s offer of mounts,” John replied.

  John went off to make the arrangements, while Nan made sure the birds were fed and ready to travel, Sarah went to leave her notes at the Post Office for Sherlock to collect, and Mary Watson arranged for an abbreviated picnic lunch that could be packed by the horses. No packed, fancy hampers or leisurely lunch while they pretended to paint today—but after all, they were not here on a holiday. Nan was just glad she, Sarah, and Suki had all worn their divided skirts. She very much doubted that the horses that would be supplied by the inn would have sidesaddles.

  And she was right. The four horses and sturdy moor pony that were led out for them had ordinary astride saddles. The stableman looked more than a little shocked to see the three women and the little girl mount astride as easily as a man (and without using a mounting block) but Nan reckoned that was his problem, not hers.

  She was no judge of horseflesh, but the horse she’d been given didn’t seem inclined to shenanigans, and that was all she asked of a mount. Although she and Sarah seldom rode these days, both of them, like Suki, had grown up with the ponies provided by Alderscroft to the school, and by the time they were out of the village and following the track that led to Sheepstor, it all was second nature again—though her leg muscles were protesting, and she knew she would be paying for this by tonight.

  Once they were out of the village and on the moors proper, she suddenly understood how easy it would be to get lost out here. The moors stretched out on either side of the track, rolling hills covered with grasses, native moor plants and low bushes, occasional clumps of trees, and no roads, not even a path in sight. One hill or clump of rocks looked very much like the next to her eyes. She had thought that the
land around Criccieth in Wales was wild, but there, at least, if you looked hard enough, there was always some sign of human life in the distance. Here, there was nothing. And they were on what passed for a road!

  Grey and Neville flew in front of them for a bit, but soon got bored, and came back to ride on Nan and Sarah’s shoulders. Suki amused herself by seeing what she could make her pony do, without getting out of sight of them.

  But there was so much . . . space . . . out here. It was a little frightening, and at the same time, invigorating. And peaceful; she could see why people came here for walking tours, although for the life of her she could not imagine what they found to paint if they were artists.

  There was no wind; there were, however, larks overhead, singing their hearts out as they flew, as there had been in Wales. There was a lot of other wildlife as well—plenty of birds, though she mostly heard rather than saw them. Rabbits and hares crossed the track before and behind them. She was fairly certain she heard sheep in the far distance, and once a herd of moor ponies came briefly into sight before moving over the crest of a hill and out of view again. The air smelled faintly of flowers, strongly of grass warming in the sunlight, slightly of dust. The horses were content enough with the pace that John set, a brisk walk. He must have learned to ride in Afghanistan, she thought. If he hadn’t already known by then. It was curious, she tended to think of him as a creature of London, more at home on his own two feet or in a cab, and the sight of him on horseback was a bit disconcerting at first.

  She didn’t wonder if Sherlock could ride; she had yet to discover very much that man couldn’t do.

  Sheepstor wasn’t so much a “village” as two clusters of houses, one around the parish church, and a second cluster several hundred yards away, almost on the edge of a great reservoir. And there was a manor off to the opposite side of the church from the second cluster, also several hundred yards away. Perhaps two dozen families in all lived here, aside from whoever owned the manor. She couldn’t tell from the road if there actually was anyone at the manor, but there was activity all around the houses. Women were hanging clothing out, people were working in their gardens, or walking on the paths. As they rode in, the birds having alighted on the girls’ shoulders some miles back, John made the intelligent decision to head for the church and the rectory, since the parish priest would probably be the fount of all information here.

  They found him in his garden, assiduously picking caterpillars off his cabbages. He was an older man, with a head full of gray, curly hair, in dark trousers and a shirt and waistcoat—clerical collar and all—with his sleeves rolled up. Neville immediately flew down from Nan’s shoulder, and stalked down the row to give him a little “help” with his task. The priest looked up at the sound of hoofbeats to find himself staring directly into Neville’s black eyes, which were fastened on the caterpillar in his hand.

  “My word!” was all he could manage, when Neville hopped three times to reach him and snatched the insect out of his hand.

  “Good morning, padre,” John said, tipping his hat. “I’m Doctor John Watson; this is my wife Mary; and my good friends and helpers are the Lyon-White sisters, Sarah, Nan, and Suki, and—”

  “Doctor John Watson!” the elderly man exclaimed, climbing to his feet. “The Doctor John Watson? Intrepid companion of the late Sherlock Holmes? My word!”

  “Well—yes—” Watson began.

  “Are you here about the missing children? Helen and Simon Byerly?” the priest asked eagerly. “Maryanne Byerly told me she had written to Sherlock Holmes before I could tell her that he was, sadly, with us no more, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her Holmes had met his fate—”

  “That’s precisely why we’re here,” Watson replied with great relief. “This is making things much easier, padre. Can you tell us anything?”

  “Where are my manners?” The poor fellow really was flustered—probably as much by the unexpected visitors as by the fact that one of them was famous. “Please, come into the rectory. I’ll have my housekeeper make us some tea—I don’t suppose you’d care for anything else—”

  One look at the man’s somewhat worn trousers told Nan that the poor priest’s offer of hospitality would probably leave him with a gaping hole in his budget if they took him up on his offer, and John, student of Holmes as he was, had undoubtedly noted the same thing. “Actually, water would be preferable to tea on such a hot day,” he replied, and the priest’s relief at that made Nan feel great sympathy with him.

  “We have a lovely well, spring-fed,” he replied, and gestured toward his home. “Will your horses be all right tied up?”

  “They should be fine if you can spare some buckets to water them; we’ll tie them in the shade of that shed over there, well away from your garden for the sake of your cabbages,” John replied, and smiled. “And our pet raven is taking your place in ridding the garden of pests.”

  “My word, so he is! And he’s your pet? Remarkable!” Only then did he notice Grey. “And you have a parrot as well! Can she talk?”

  “I can talk, can you fly?” Grey replied, and laughed. The priest actually clapped his hands with glee.

  “Remarkable!” he said. “Remarkable! Please, let’s go in and be comfortable.”

  The housekeeper met them at the door, very much in a ruffle about the unexpected visitors, and fussing worriedly that she had nothing to serve them. John soothed her with his most professional manner—Nan could easily see why he was popular with his patients—and assured her that glasses of water would be just ideal.

  The reverend led the way into a parlor that was as scrupulously clean as it was austere: white-painted walls, with a few small pictures on them, plain woodwork, two braided rugs on the floor, an ancient brown sofa, a matching chair at the hearth, and a dozen rush-seated ladderback chairs around a large table, showing that the room was probably used quite often for meetings of various parish groups. The only luxury in it was an upright piano whose yellowed ivory keys were a testament to its age. The real ornaments were bouquets of common garden flowers in mismatched vases of varying age. The priest nodded at it as they chose seats—John and Mary side by side on the hard horsehair sofa, Nan and Sarah on rush-seated ladderback chairs, and Suki on a stool. He gestured apologetically at the piano. “This is a very poor parish, as you might assume. I took degrees in both music and divinity, so I play the organ as well as tend to all the other duties here. Oh, what I am I thinking! I never introduced myself. Father Donald Shaw, at your service.”

  The housekeeper brought in a tray of glasses and filled them from an ancient pitcher. They all shook hands, and the priest took a seat on a third ladderback chair. “Well now, I don’t know the Byerlys very well. Nobody in Sheepstor does, although that was not always the case. I knew Roger’s mother, Sally Byerly; she was still alive and in the cottage when I first came here. Everyone in Sheepstor used to come to her for remedies for their ailments and those of their animals. The old woman—Sally Byerly that was—had one of those freehold cottages built for her by all of her friends here in the village, on some fundamentally waste land that belonged to the manor—”

  “Excuse me—freehold cottages?” Nan said politely. “What’s that?”

  “It’s an old custom out here. If you can erect an entire cottage between sunrise and sundown without the owner of the land it’s on stopping you, it and everything you can enclose in a wall around it is yours,” he explained. “Obviously Sally and her husband were very popular, and when the squire turned them out of their old cottage here in the village to give it to his children’s old nurse, there was some hard feeling. So when he and his bailiff and all the people at the manor who would have put a stop to the doings were away, the villagers banded together and built a freehold for them. Obviously, they took land that wasn’t being used for anything, but the squire was that put out about it, though if you ask me, I must speak and say he only got what he had coming to him. Unch
ristian as that sounds—”

  “My aunt and uncle are missionaries, and they would agree with you,” Sarah replied, and the old man brightened and ran his hand over his crop of white curls. “It was wrong of him to evict someone else from their cottage. If he’d wanted to give a cottage to the nurse, he should have had one built specifically for the woman.”

  “Well, picking waste land and land they could build on without anyone noticing it until it was too late meant that they were quite far from the village, though, you see,” he continued. “So their son really was never part of the village; there was no one to apprentice him. As for farm work, the squire would never hire him out of sheer spite, and no one else dared to for fear of the squire, so once he was full grown, he went off to foreign parts to find a job in a factory.”

  “Foreign parts,” obviously, meant anywhere not here.

  “Then he had a terrible accident and lost a hand, and came back to live with his mother. Now that would not have set the village against him—well, not against him, exactly, but . . . well . . . when he brought back a wife who had a cultured way of speaking, and wasn’t from here, well, people thought he thought he was a cut above them, and kept their distance.” The priest ruffled his own hair again. “I heard she was a teacher somewhere, but they would never come out and tell me anything about her other than her name, Maryanne. Very close-mouthed, she is. Polite, oh my yes, but close-mouthed. They only had two children, the ones that are lost. Simon is eight, or thereabouts, and Helen is eleven. I understand she teaches them herself, and the few times I have seen them, I have asked them the usual catechism questions that they should be able to answer at their age, and they gave me the correct answers. They were quite bright and seemed as well-educated as the children here in the village. The entire family comes to services every Sunday like everyone else. Helen takes after her mother; dark, and very responsible. Simon is a little devil, I can tell he’s bursting to make mischief during services, but his mother keeps him under control.”