The Gates of Sleep em-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  Then, more footsteps receding. The door opening and closing again. Silence.

  The state she drifted into then was not exactly sleep, and not precisely waking. She seemed to drift in a fog in which she could see and hear nothing, and nothing she did affected it. There were others in this fog—she could hear them in the distance, but she could never find them, and when she called out to them, her voice was swallowed up by the endless mist.

  It was, to be truthful, a horrible experience. Not at all restful. A deadly fatigue weighed her down, a malaise invaded her spirit, and despair filled her heart.

  Finally, true sleep came, bringing oblivion, and with it, relief from her aching heart, at least for a time.

  She woke with a start, the very feel of the bed telling her that yesterday’s nightmare had been no thing of dreams, but of reality, even before she opened her eyes. And when she did open them, it was to find that she was staring up into the ochre velvet canopy of a huge, curtained bed. She sat up.

  The room in which she found herself was as large as any four of the bedrooms in Blackbird Cottage put together. It had been furnished in the French style of a King Louis—she couldn’t think of which one—all ornate baroque curlicues and spindly-legged chairs. The paper on the wall was watered silk in yellow, the cushions and coverlet more of the ochre velvet. There was a fireplace with a yellow marble mantle and hearth directly across from the foot of the bed, and a woman with brown hair tucked under a lace cap, a thin-faced creature in a crisp black-and-white maid’s uniform and a cool manner, sitting in a chair beside it, reading. When Marina sat up, she put her book down, and stood up.

  “Awake, miss?” she asked, with no inflection whatsoever.

  No, I’m sleepwalking, Marina thought with irritation. The headache of yesterday in her temples had been joined by one at the back of her head, and whatever vile nastiness had been in the tea had left her with a foul taste in her mouth. But she answered the question civilly enough. “Yes, I am now. How long have I been asleep?”

  The maid allowed a superior smile to cross her lips. “You’ve slept the clock around, miss. It’s midmorning, two days after Boxing Day. But it’s just as well you were asleep,” the woman continued, turning and going to a wardrobe painted dark ochre, and ornamented with gilded scrollwork. “Madam has had her modiste here to make you some clothing fit to wear, and she only finished the first few items and delivered them an hour ago. You’re in mourning, after all, and you need mourning frocks. And those things you brought with you—well, they weren’t suitable.” A sniff relegated her entire wardrobe to something not worth using as rags, much less being fit to wear.

  But the maid’s words could only lead Marina to one horrified conclusion. “You didn’t throw them out!” she exclaimed. “Not my clothes!”

  The maid did not trouble to answer. Out of the wardrobe came a black velvet skirt, severely cut with a slight train, and a heavy black silk blouse, high-necked, and trimmed at wrists and neck with narrow black lace. Out of the drawers of a chest next to it came white silk underthings, black stockings, a corset, black satin slippers. All these were laid out at the end of the bed, and no sooner had Marina turned back the coverlet and stood up, then the maid pounced on her.

  There could be no other description. Before Marina could make a move to reach for anything herself, the nightdress was whisked over her head, leaving her naked and shivering, and the maid was holding up the drawers for her to step into.

  Marina had always wondered what it was like to be dressed by a lady’s maid, and now she was finding out with a vengeance. It was exactly like being a doll, and the maid was just as impersonal about the job as a woman in a toy-shop clothing one of the toys for display. In fact, the maid was ruthlessly efficient; before Marina had time to blink, the corset was on her, she had been turned to face the bed, and the woman was pulling at the laces with her knee in the small of Marina’s back! And she was pulling tightly, much more tightly than the dressmaker in Holsworthy.

  “Stop!” Marina protested, as her waist was squeezed into a circumference two sizes smaller than it had ever endured before. “I can’t breathe!”

  “You’ve never been properly corseted, miss,” sniffed the maid, tugging harder. “Or you’d know that a lady doesn’t need to puff and wheeze like a farm wench in a field. Shallow breaths, miss. A lady looks as if she isn’t breathing at all.”

  Giving a final tug, the maid allowed Marina to stand straight up again—indeed, the corset hardly allowed any other posture. The laces were tied; three stiff petticoats, the last one of rustling black silk, came next. Then a chemise. And finally, the shirtwaist and skirt.

  Feeling faint from lack of air, Marina was steered to a chair beside a dressing table with a mirror above it, both painted in dark ocher and ornamented with those baroque gold curlicues. The maid deftly unbraided her hair, brushed it out just as ruthlessly as she had done everything else and with a fine disregard for any pain caused when she encountered tangles, and proceeded to put it up in one of the pompadour hair styles that Marina had seen only in newspaper sketches. She had always longed to see her own hair like this—the arrangements looked so soft, and so very smart.

  She’d had no idea that getting her hair done up in the fashionable style would involve being stuck so full of sharp-pointed hairpins that she thought her scalp was bleeding from a dozen places before the maid was through.

  The maid fastened a jet cameo at her throat, and a matching jet locket on a slender chain around her neck. “There,” she said at last, implying now you’re fit to be seen.

  The person staring back at Marina from the mirror was no one she recognized. The face was drawn and very white, and huge violet eyes stared back at her, with faint blue rings beneath them. Her pallor was only accentuated by the black silk of her blouse. Her hair had been arranged in the upswept style most favored by the PBs, with their delicate heart-shaped faces. It didn’t suit Marina Roeswood.

  “I’ll take you down to meet your aunt now, miss,” said the maid. “I am Mary Anne, and I will be your personal servant here from now on.”

  Giving her no choice in the matter, apparently. Personal maid—or watchdog for her aunt?

  My own personal maid. Why does it seem as if she’s higher in consequence than I am?

  Perhaps, in this household, Mary Anne was.

  “What happened to my things?” she asked, in a small voice, cowed by the icy correctness of the maid’s manner. “My clothing—my books, my instruments, and my music—”

  Another of those superior sniffs, and the maid looked down her long nose at Marina. “Miss could not possibly expect to wear those—frocks—in public,” Mary Anne replied. “Madam said explicitly that they would not do, they would not do at all. Not the sort of thing miss would wish to encounter Madam’s friends while wearing. However, the rest of your things have been put away in your private parlor.” She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the door. “Now, if you will please follow me, Madam wishes to speak with you.”

  As if she had a choice.

  She followed the maid, who led her through that door and into a sitting room furnished in opulent reds, with a Turkey carpet on the floor, the whole done up in the style of the early part of Queen Victoria’s reign. Quite frankly, Marina couldn’t think of a pair of rooms less likely to make a Water Master comfortable. The bedroom produced a heavy feeling, the parlor made her feel horribly warm. Together they made her feel stifled, smothered. The ceilings in these rooms were high, they must have been twelve feet or more, and yet she still felt closed in and overheated. And there wasn’t a chance that she’d be allowed to redecorate, either. She longed for her wonderful little room in Blackbird Cottage with an aching heart.

  They walked for a good five minutes, going down a floor and all the way across a series of ever-more-opulent rooms. At the other end of the enormous house waited Arachne Chamberten, her new guardian.

  Mary Anne opened a final door and motioned to Marina to enter as she stood aside.
Still breathless, still feeling that her high collar was much too tight, Marina went in, and the door closed behind her.

  In the center of a (relatively) small red room, in the exact middle of a carpet figured in red and black that looked to Marina’s frightened eyes like a bed of hot coals, was a large, highly-polished wooden desk of ebony. Behind that desk sat a stunningly beautiful woman. Her hair was as black and as glossy as the heavy black silk-satin of her gown. Her skin was as white and translucent as porcelain. When she looked up, her black eyes stared right through Marina, her red lips smiled, but the smile didn’t seem to reach beyond those lips.

  She stood, and held out both hands. “Ah, my niece Marina, at last!” she said, in a sultry voice, warm as velvet laid before a fire. “You cannot know how deeply I regret the rift your parents saw fit to make with me; I saw you only once, at your christening, and never again. You have certainly changed greatly since that time.”

  Marina felt her lips move stiffly into a parody of a polite smile as she walked forward. She extended one hand, intending only to offer a mere handshake to her aunt, but Arachne drew her forward, captured the other hand before Marina could snatch it out of reach and guided her to a chair beside her own behind the desk. Having both her cold hands, with skin roughened by the work she did in the kitchen and around the house, imprisoned in Arachne’s warm milk-smooth ones, felt distinctly uncomfortable. She tried to stiffen her own spine, and confronted Arachne’s knowing eyes. “What do you mean when you say ‘the rift my parents saw fit to make with you?’ I never heard of any rift,” she protested.

  “And you never heard a word of me, did you?” Arachne countered. “That is precisely what I meant. Your father, who was my brother, and your Roeswood grandparents who were our father and mother, chose to cut me off from the family because of my marriage to Allan Chamberten. Perhaps it would be more charitable to say that it was my—our—parents’ fault, and poor Hugh, child that he was at the time, simply followed their example. So I bear him no ill will; I only wish that I had managed a reconciliation before this. But who could have foreseen that he and Alanna would come to such a tragic end?”

  For a moment, Marina thought that she would reach for the black silk handkerchief tucked into the waistband of her skirt in what could only be a feigned show of grief. For if she had been so totally estranged from Hugh and Alanna, how could any grief she felt be anything but feigned?

  But she did nothing of the sort. She only, sighed, and smiled, and squeezed Marina’s hands. “Well, you and I shall be remedying that wrong, will we not? I take my responsibility as your guardian quite seriously, you may be sure of that.”

  “But I had guardians!” Marina burst out, angrily. “I was very happy there! Why did you send those horrible men—and policemen!—to kidnap me away from them? They were the people my parents chose to take care of me, not you!” She tried to wrench her hands away, but Arachne’s grip was so strong it couldn’t be broken.

  Arachne bestowed the kind of pitying look on Marina that might be given a naughty child who had no notion of what she was saying. “My dear child, please. You are—at last—old enough to understand just how foolish your parents were—and how selfish.” She shook her head. “Just listen to me for a moment, please, and don’t interrupt. Are you under the impression that I don’t know what they did with you? Do you think that I am not aware that they simply deposited you in that hive of artists and left you there? That they never, not once, attempted to see you? That they never troubled to see to it that you received the kind of upbringing someone of your wealth and social position should have had? And why do you think that happened?”

  Since those very questions had passed through her mind more than once (though not, perhaps, phrased in quite that way), Marina was held dumb, hypnotized by the questions, and by Arachne’s eyes. She shook her head slightly.

  “Now, I do not know, not for certain,” Arachne said. “I know only what my inquiries have brought to light. Alanna is—was—sensitive. Overly so, perhaps. Certainly she was of a very nervous disposition, and your birth was hard on her—very, very hard. Something happened then that terrified her; I have been unable to discover what it was, but whatever the cause was, you, a mere infant at the time, were at the heart of it, and she sent you away, as far away from her as she could manage among her acquaintances.” Arachne shrugged, and the silk of her skirt rustled as she shifted in her chair. “I know that Hugh considered your artists to be friends, which was… something of a mistake, a social faux pas, in my opinion. I know that they were visiting at the time of Alanna’s fright, and I suspect that when the emergency occurred, your father would have given you into the keeping of whomsoever volunteered to take you. I do know you were literally shoved into Margherita Tarrant’s arms and sent away with whatever could be bundled up quickly into the cart that brought them here. I know this, because I have found witnesses among the servants who saw it happen. Presumably they were the only ones among the group that was visiting that were willing to accept the responsibility of an infant. For whatever reason, Alanna Roeswood could not bear the sight of you, and my brother chose his wife’s welfare over that of his daughter.”

  The words struck her as hard as a rain of blows from a cane Marina could only sit with her hands limply in Arachne’s. Her head spun; this made altogether too much sense.

  But what about those letters? All those letters?

  “He should have found someone to care for you more in keeping with your rank and station, but he didn’t.” Arachne’s lips thinned. “I am not one to speak ill of the dead, but my brother, I fear, must have been weak of will. He allowed our parents to override him in the matter of myself, and he allowed his wife to dictate to him in the matter of you. I am sorry, my dear, but he could not have chosen a worse set of people to care for you. Oh, I know that they were fond of you—I know they did their best for you! But they have allowed you to run wild, they never sent you to a proper finishing school nor got you a governess to teach you, and they exposed you to all manner of improper persons and impossible manners. In the matter of your wardrobe alone—” Her lips thinned even more with disapproval “—well, the less said about that, the better. Except that those so-called ‘artistic reform tea-gowns’ might have been the mode—in a certain circle—years ago, but they most certainly are not now, and the mere wearing of them would expose you to the utmost ridicule.”

  Marina dropped her eyes, her ears burning with embarrassment, torn between an instinctive urge to protest and the fear that her aunt was right. No matter what Elizabeth had said.

  “Fortunately, by the standards of society, you are still a child, and your reputation has not suffered the irredeemable damage it would have if you were only a year older,” Arachne continued. “I hope that my brother had the sense to realize that; I more than hope, I know—indeed, some of the things among his papers informed me that he had laid plans to bring you home before your eighteenth birthday. And certainly, by now even poor Alanna must have realized her fears, her terrors, could not be attached to a grown young woman. So, in order to carry out his wishes, I merely brought them forward—realizing as I did, once his men of business told me where you had been deposited, that you could not be left there a moment longer without terrible damage to your reputation.” Once again, she squeezed Marina’s hands as Marina stared down at them. Marina raised her eyes to meet her aunt’s again, and Arachne smiled as she had before. “I knew you would, you must object to this removal. I knew that the Tarrants would object as well—they could not be expected to see why they were so unsuitable, poor things. That was why I proceeded as I did, why I moved to obtain legal custody of your person, why I sent people to remove you so quickly, and why I did it in the rather—authoritarian—manner that I chose.”

  Authoritarian? That’s a mild term for kidnapping and drugging!

  “But I did it for your own good, dear,” Arachne concluded, as Marina had known she would. “I have been in society; you have not. Your former guardians may b
elieve that it is possible to live above or beyond the social laws, but it is not. Not unless you wish to live a lonely and miserable existence, estranged from your peers, shunned by your equals, despised by your superiors. If you don’t object to living here as a hermit on this estate for the rest of your life, well and good—but I should think that you would far rather find doors opening to you in welcome.”

  She couldn’t help it; for years now, Marina had read the social pages in the newspaper, drunk in the descriptions of the glittering parties, the events, the receptions. She had pored over the sketches and photographs, and wished that her sketch or photograph could be among them… not that she aspired to the status of a PB, but the exciting round of the social scene beckoned so beguilingly.

  Arachne chuckled, as if she could read Marina’s thoughts. “Well, niece, your parents might have shunned my company, but I can assure you that no one else looks askance at the source of my wealth. The day, thank heaven, is long past when those who were born to rank and wealth can sneer down their noses at those who merely acquired it through hard work. And let me put one more possible fear of yours to rest—I have no interest in your inheritance. I am probably worth twice what you are; I own three pottery manufactories outright, and am partner in a fourth. I am also accepted in the best company; and I have every intention of seeing that you are accepted there as well. But first—” she sighed theatrically “—it is just as well that you are in mourning and cannot be expected to appear in public for the next year, because you will need to work very hard before you are ready for that society.”

  Oh, really? Anger flared at her aunt’s assumptions, and Marina felt her chin jut out stubbornly. “I know Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and German, ma’am,” she objected, anger making her speak in a formal and stilted manner. “I am familiar with a wide spectrum of literature and enough science to satisfy a university examiner. I have read every London paper published for the past five years. I am hardly ignorant.”