The Case of the Spellbound Child

by Mercedes Lackey

  It also had a stable. This part was crucial, because Holmes had met Anglin at a point between Yelverton and the Gatfer’s cottage riding a moor pony of his own, as if he had just come from something—what, Nan had no idea, but Holmes was inventive, and his stories were always sound. Whatever that something was, it would have put plenty of shillings, even pounds, in Holmes’ pocket, and he would invite his good friend Anglin to share in the bounty. And not at their usual workingman’s pub, but at the Drake, which was renowned for its beer, and which also had a stable to house their mounts while they drank.

  That was the plan, at any rate. . . .

  And about half a mile from the Drake, the sound of hoofbeats behind them prompted Nan and Suki to move off the road. And trotting on past—tall, lanky Holmes looking absurd on the little pony, especially when riding beside the much shorter Anglin.

  Nan got a good look at the man as the two passed them while they waited on the verge. And a more pathetic-looking specimen of humanity she could not have imagined. In her mind, he had loomed large: tall, muscular, saturnine, with a roughly hewn face and thick black brows.

  In reality he was small, weedy, with narrow, stooped shoulders, a childish, petulant face, prominent ears, and weak eyes and a weaker, pointed chin. He looked like a children’s caricature of a brownie or some other, minor elfin creature. Though he was not old, he was already balding, and his attempt to disguise this with a workman’s cap was not succeeding. From the thin, ginger-colored fuzz on his chin and upper lip, Nan got the impression that he was trying—and failing—to grow a proper beard and moustache. He and Holmes were talking, and even his voice sounded querulous and petulant. Nan could scarcely believe it. This was the monster who had made so many lives a misery?

  . . . and rats can bite, and bite hard. Never underestimate a rat.

  He was on the pony with no saddle, and just a bit of rope for a bridle, and the pony was foaming with sweat, which told Nan the man was coercing the beast against its will. There was a leather sack slung behind Anglin, with a bit of dark-colored material sticking out of it. And that solved the last mystery of how he maintained his guise as the Dark One without the children discovering his real identity. Anglin would change his clothing and drop the illusion on his face once he was past the forest in front of his cot and out on the moor. Once away from the cottage he’d go from the fearsome Dark One to . . . his true and rather unimpressive self. And then would do the same when he came back.

  No wonder he creates a terrifying illusion. Not even children would be afraid of that little weed.

  They soon outdistanced Nan and Suki, and as soon as they were out of earshot, Suki looked up at her guardian with a confused face. “’E looks like a sickly monkey,” she said, scorn dripping from her voice.

  “He does, doesn’t he?” Nan replied. “But don’t forget, monkeys bite, even sickly ones.”

  By the time they crossed the bridge over the Dart and reached the Drake, there was no sign of the pair. The Inn was right on the road on the other side of the bridge. Suki ran ahead and dashed inside first, followed by Nan.

  It was a whitewashed, two-story building with a slate roof. There was an imposing church behind it, an interesting neighbor for an inn. The plank door was right on the street, about halfway down the middle of the place. When Nan pushed open the door, she was met with a wave of warmth, the aroma of beer and good, solid food.

  The public room was larger than the one at the Rock, but it appeared smaller, because it was long and narrow, and because it was crowded with wooden trestle tables and benches, with a very few smaller tables with proper chairs near the hearth. Sarah was sitting at one of the smaller tables, sipping a glass of what looked like wine, but was probably a local cordial, and picking at the remains of a supper. John was at the bar, and had already made friends with a couple of men who were dressed not dissimilarly from him. Professional men from Plymouth, more likely than not. At the other end of the bar were Anglin and Holmes, already well into what looked like their second or third pints. Pints? No, those were smaller glasses in front of them. Something much stronger than pints. It was a clear liquid . . . gin. Oh, well done, Holmes. You’re getting him drunk, giving him bottle-courage, and making him careless. The more bold and careless he is, the better off we are.

  The bar was about half occupied.

  Not crowded enough, Nan decided, and decided to wait until the after-supper crowd came in. She mentally said as much to her co-conspirators, and sensed their agreement.

  Meanwhile she seated herself at one of the big tables, right at the door, and near the rack where people could leave their walking sticks. She noted that there were already two in it; good, because she might need one of them. She ordered a pint for herself, and bread and soup. Just enough to justify her staying there, not so much as to be out of place with her costume.

  And Suki was ghosting around the place, never getting in the way, like any child who was somewhere he ought not to be, but was not making enough of a nuisance of himself to warrant the adults chasing him out. Suki managed to charm some bread and cheese out of the barmaid for a penny and tucked herself out of the way to bide her time.

  Meanwhile, Holmes kept drawing Anglin’s attention to Sarah, sitting alone and apparently deserted by her heartless spouse. Sarah kept consulting her (Nan’s) watch, which was Nan’s great pride, as it had been a gift, not from Alderscroft, but a Christmas present from Peter, and was a very fine object in a gold case. Peter had given Sarah a lovely cameo brooch just as fine as the watch, and had joked when Nan had opened her present that he wouldn’t have dared give her anything that wasn’t practical and pretty.

  Sarah looked especially attractive; she’d taken great care with her blond hair, putting it up in a loose pompadour, from which a few charming tendrils escaped. Holmes kept whispering to Anglin, looking first at Sarah, then at John, and probably pointing out the pretty young wife and the older, seemingly neglectful, certainly complacent, older husband with her. Anglin kept nodding and smirking, as the bar and public room filled with what appeared to be mostly locals.

  Think the bar is full enough now? Nan thought at Holmes.

  My experience would say yes. Find your targets and alert everyone.

  Nan eyed the crowd. There was a fat fellow right behind Anglin who was just at the “jolly-tipsy” stage, at which everything had become a bit foggy. He kept addressing the barkeeper as “George,” which always elicited a roll of the eyes. He should do nicely.

  Get ready, Suki, she told her protégée. The fat man.

  Sarah, Holmes is ready. The fat man, she told her friend.

  She surreptitiously secured a walking stick from the rack. Now, Suki! Her heart began to pound and her head to ache with anxiety and nerves. Even drunk as Anglin was, this would have to be timed perfectly. No one should have even a moment of suspicion that what they had planned was a ruse and a trap.

  Suki squeezed herself through the crowd, right past Sarah. Even though she was watching, Nan didn’t see a thing but a small boy squeezing his way past the tables—but now Suki had the gold watch that Sarah had been consulting so frequently. Then, as Sarah got up and moved toward the bar, giving every indication that she was going to speak to John, Suki wriggled her way into a place near enough to Anglin and Holmes to strike.

  It all happened in a single moment. Sarah “tripped,” and stumbled into the fat man, who was drunk enough not to realize he hadn’t been jostled by one of his fellow barflies. He shoved back with a slurred “Watcher self, mate!” and Sarah went stumbling on into Anglin, who “steadied” her, then predictably put his hands where they should not have been.

  But instead of the reaction he was probably expecting from a well-bred lady—blushing, shrinking back, and certainly not making a scene, he got something else. A full-armed slap across his face that cut through the din of conversation and silenced the entire bar, and a scream of “How dare you touch
me, you dastard!”

  Every head in the place except Nan’s and Suki’s swiveled in her direction. Those nearest drew back in an automatic reaction of shock.

  And then, with the attention of the entire room on them, and a sudden space formed around them, she patted her waist, screamed again, and pointed straight at him. “My watch! He stole my watch!”

  Suki escaped out the door. She, of course, had taken the moment of the slap to slip the watch into Anglin’s back pocket.

  The bar erupted with cries of “Thief!” and “Hold him!”

  And . . . something happened.

  Nan did not have enough magic in her to do more than sense it: two spells cast, one after the other. The first was probably Anglin’s panic-stricken attempt at . . . well, no telling what, but if it had worked, it probably would have given him a precious few seconds to escape the hue and cry.

  But it didn’t, because Sarah’s counter-spell to dispel any magic cast in that moment, learned from John, and fueled by all the hoarded power she had collected from released spirits, shattered his.

  Nan would treasure forever the dull look of shock and incomprehension that went over Anglin’s face as he turned to flee, and realized he wasn’t going to be able to.

  Holmes seized Anglin’s arm, delaying him just enough for the other bar patrons to surround him.

  Stupidly, he fought back.

  He might have gotten away with it, if the only patrons were the sort like John. But there were plenty of farmers and working men here now, and they reacted to his aggression by swarming him.

  Then it was mere moments before they beat him into near-unconsciousness, searched him, and found Sarah’s watch. “Here ’tis!” cried one lad triumphantly, holding it aloft. “’Twas in ’is pocket!”

  He looked to Sarah, who cried out, “It says, To Nan, from Peter!” Then she burst into tears. “Nan is my sister! She let me borrow it, and he tried to steal it!”

  The fellow examined it. “So it do!” and handed it over to her, while half of the rest of the patrons secured Anglin with a rope brought from somewhere behind the bar, and the other half tried to console Sarah with everything from a handkerchief to a beer.

  Once Anglin was being pummeled, Holmes slipped out of the scrum and away, leaving Nan to put back the walking stick—no longer needed to trip the bastard in case he had made it to the door, and Sarah and John to wait for the constables to arrive and take Anglin away.

  Every constable in Yelverton and the surrounding area seemed to converge on the Drake at once, which was scarcely a surprise, since this was probably the most exciting thing to happen in the village that evening. Every one of them but the two that took Anglin into custody whipped out a little notebook and began taking statements. Nan secured herself an extremely young fellow, who nervously licked the end of his pencil before beginning and looked at her as if he expected to hear a long and rambling tale that would somehow feature her mother, sisters, cousins, and aunts before she got to the point.

  But Nan gave him a short and concise account, and finished it with, “An’ Es know that aller. Es won’t go aneest ’en. A right devil, an’ if ’ee was t’ go an’ search ’is cot, reckon ’ee’d find a mort o’ thin’s ’e’d got no business ’avin’.”

  The young constable perked up at that. “Ow’ll Es find yon cot, then?” he asked.

  “Gatfer Cole,” she said promptly. “Ol’ Gatfer warnet me ’gainst ’en. Gatfer c’n tell ’ee.”

  And with that, she left.

  It was just sunset, and as she hurried across the bridge, she was met on the other side by Suki, who was dancing from foot to foot with impatience. “It all went to plan,” Nan assured her. “Now all we need to do is gather up again and wait.”

  “Waiting!” Suki exclaimed in tones of complete disgust. “Why do we always have to wait?”

  * * *

  It was almost ten by the time Sarah and John arrived, with a great deal of attention and fanfare, in the chief constable’s private chaise. So they hadn’t had to walk after all. By this time the entire village was abuzz with the gossip that the young friend of that famous Doctor Watson had been robbed by the ruffian Anglin, and everyone had some sort of story about what a ne’er-do-well he was and always had been, and how the speaker had always known he was going to end up at the end of a rope.

  Nan and Suki had gotten to the Rock well ahead of the gossip, and slipped inside and changed, and were alerted to it by a servant rapping on their door to tell them “summat ’appened t’ tha’ friends!” It was all that Nan could do to keep a properly alarmed expression on her face until more accurate word arrived in the person of one of the constables.

  And of course, by the time the chaise arrived, their host was waiting impatiently, now thuroughly alarmed at the idea that anything untoward had happened to the Elemental Magicians that Lord Alderscroft himself had placed under his roof.

  So the gathering turned out to be—again—in the private parlor of Harold Linwood.

  The first thing that John did was beg Linwood for a bowl of water, with which to communicate with his wife. It was enough to make Nan want to scream with impatience to watch him bend over the bowl muttering for what felt like hours (but was probably only minutes) before finally setting the bowl aside with a sigh of relief.

  “Linwood, the man who tried to steal Sarah’s watch is the same that has been kidnapping children to use as a source of Elemental Power,” he said. “We hatched a scheme to get him caught red-handed in theft in order to get him locked up so that the children could be found by the authorities. It’s a complicated tale, and I’ll tell you as much of it as I can, after I deliver the rest of my information to my friends.”

  “Eh, what?” their host gasped.

  And while Linwood was trying to get his mind wrapped around this, John turned to the rest of them. “The children were all there, drained, desperately drained, with two of them missing a fingertip, but otherwise unharmed. Enough of them knew Gatfer Cole well enough to get the rest to trust him, and he and Mary have got them settled to wait for the police in the morning. The children have been told to tell the police that Anglin was using them as slave labor, hunting for valuable scrap in played-out mines. They have no problem with telling this story. One of them said to Mary that no one would believe them if they told the truth about the witchery anyway. It looks as if two of the girls were made to substitute for Helen Byerly after she escaped, held by the same means as Helen was. Mary found the fingertips and got the girls to knot them into their petticoats until we can figure out how to break the spell. Mary just told them that the police have their captor on a charge of theft, and they all know enough about that to know he is not leaving gaol. Gatfer is going back to his cottage as planned, to lead the police out to the cot in the morning. Mary is on her way back here.” He turned back to Linwood. “And now . . . as I promised, the whole of the story.”

  Leaving out Sherlock’s role in it all, in part by making a few things up out of whole cloth, Watson showed why he was such an excellent author by giving Linwood a relatively concise narrative of what they had discovered, and why they had taken the steps to secure Anglin that they had. Linwood was not stupid; though his brow creased many times as he tried to follow the story, by the end, he was nodding, and he heaved an enormous sigh of relief when John was done.

  “Eh, well, that’s as good a yarn as any that ’ee put i’ the Strand, Doctor,” he exclaimed.

  “Well, you are going to have a part in it as well, Linwood,” Watson told him. “I would like you to pop over to the station as soon as you can and tell the chief constable that you’ve long suspected Ansel Anglin to be pilfering things from the guests at this establishment, and that Gatfer Cole warned you about him. Then add that Gatfer Cole knows where the man’s cot is, and that a search of the place will probably turn up a wealth of stolen goods.”

  “I’ll do thet now! Stati
on’ll be in a pother anyway till midnight over this row. Make yerselves comfortable ’ere, I’ll be back right quick. There’s a bit yet I’d like t’ have words with ye about.” Linwood was as good as his word; he pulled off his apron, grabbed his hat from the hook on the wall, and was off, coatless, with his shirtsleeves still rolled up.

  “Well,” Nan said into the silence. “Now what?”

  John grimaced. “Now comes my least favorite part of a case.”

  “Which is?” Sarah asked.

  “Cleaning up all the loose ends. And this case has a great many loose ends.”

  20

  THE first of those loose ends that had to be dealt with was Helen Byerly. While the police were on their way to the cot—and to their credit, after Harold Linwood’s statement that added to “Nan Bullen’s,” the chief constable led a crew of three out there at the crack of dawn—Nan got a horse and headed for Maude Rundle’s cottage, while Sarah did the same and headed for Sheepstor.

  Poor Maryanne must have been watching for someone to come up the trace every single day since their first visit, as she came running out of their cottage, with hope and fear flickering across her face as soon as Sarah came within view.

  “We found them!” Sarah called as soon as she was in earshot, and Maryanne let out a scream, and collapsed on the ground, sobbing. Sarah dismounted and went to the woman, helping her to her feet and leading her and the horse back to the cottage.

  Once the horse was tied up, she got Maryanne inside, got her a cup of water, and explained as briefly as possible. “Simon is probably being found by the police at this moment,” she said. “Helen is too sick to move, but I can take you to Maude Rundle’s cot if you want, as soon as you want.”

  “But she’ll be all right?” Maryanne sobbed.

  “She should be fine. Maude is an excellent healer and has some Earth Magic to help her. Helen is an incredibly brave and very smart girl. When the police come to tell you they’ve found Simon, but not Helen, you are to tell them that Maude came over the moor this very morning to tell you that she has Helen and Rose, and that Helen only last night recovered enough to tell her who she and Rose are, and where you live.” That was the story the lot of them had worked out last night, and that Nan was riding to Maude’s to impart to the reclusive healer even now.