Sebastian heaved a theatrical sigh. “No, thank you, Elizabeth,” he said, and reached up, grabbing the rail at the side of the box, and climbing up onto his perch. Elizabeth closed the umbrella and handed it to Marina, then climbed inside. Marina followed her and laid the umbrella at her feet. It would end up there anyway.
“Good gad, he borrowed the parson’s rig, didn’t he?” Elizabeth exclaimed, as she settled herself on the hard wooden bench across from Marina. “I’d almost rather he’d brought the pony cart!”
The coach swayed into motion, and they both grabbed for handholds.
“Your lovely hat would have gotten ruined,” Marina protested weakly.
“Yes, and all the rest of my turnout as well,” Elizabeth agreed ruefully. “I fear I’ve cut rather too dashing a figure for this weather of yours. Well, no fear, my dear, I haven’t come laden like a professional beauty; this is about as fine a set of feathers as I’ve got with me. And there’s a certain relief in being among the savage Bohemians; you don’t feel required to attend church every Sunday, so if the weather’s foul, neither shall I! And at long last, I’ll be able to get through a day without changing my dress four or five times!”
Marina laughed. She had forgotten how outspoken Elizabeth was, and—to be honest—how very pretty. She could easily be a professional beauty, one of those gently-born, well-connected or marginally talented ladies whose extraordinary good looks bought them entree into the highest circles. The PBs (as they were called) had their portraits painted, sketched, and photographed, figured in nearly every issue of the London papers, and were invited to all important social functions merely as ornaments to it. And even to Marina’s critical eyes, educated by all of her exposure to art and artists as well as the press, Elizabeth Hastings, had she chosen to exert herself, could have had a place in that exalted circle. She must be nearing forty, and yet she didn’t look it. Her soft cheeks had the glow that Marina saw on her own in the mirror of a morning; her green-green eyes had just the merest hint of a crow’s-foot at the corners. That firm, rounded chin hadn’t the least sign of a developing jowl; the dark blonde hair was, perhaps, touched a trifle with silver, but the silver tended to blend in so well that it really didn’t show. And in any case, as Marina well knew, there were rinses to change the silver back to gold.
“Remarkably well-preserved for such a tottering relic, aren’t I?” Elizabeth asked, the humor in her voice actually managing to get past the gasps caused by the jouncing of the coach.
Was I thinking loudly again? A rush of blood went to Marina’s cheeks. “Oh—bother!” she exclaimed, as she felt tears of chagrin burn her eyes for a moment. “Lady Hastings, I apologize for—for being so—”
But Elizabeth freed a hand long enough to pat her knee comfortingly. “Please, dear, you are a Water child, and a powerful one—anyone of the same Element would have picked up the train of your thoughts no matter how much energy you put into those basic shields Thomas taught you.”
Marina shook her head. “But I wasn’t really trying hard enough—”
“Perhaps, but he hasn’t taught you how to make those shields effortless and unconscious; well, I can’t fault him for that. It isn’t as if Earth Masters are often called on to work combative magics.”
“What has that to do with my being rude?” Marina asked, the flush fading from her cheeks.
“That is what you will learn for yourself. And it’s Elizabeth, my dear. Or Aunt Elizabeth, if you prefer. I am one of your godparents, after all.” Elizabeth smiled into Marina’s astonished eyes. “You didn’t know? I should have thought someone would have told you.”
“No, Aunt Elizabeth,” Marina said, faintly. “But—”
Elizabeth chose to change the subject, bending forward to peer out one of the dripping windows. “I will be very glad when we’re all safely in Margherita’s kitchen, dry, and with a hot cup of tea in front of us.” The coach hit a deep rut, and they both flew into the air and landed hard on their seats. “Good heavens! When was this coach last sprung? For Victoria’s coronation?”
“Probably,” Marina said, torn between laughing and wanting to swear at her bruises. “The parson hasn’t much to spare, what with having all those children; his hired man fixes and drives this rig along with all his other duties—”
“Well, I hope that the parsonage ladies are considerably more—” the coach gave another lurch “—more upholstered than we are.”
Marina’s laugh was bitten off by another bump, but it was very clear to her that she and “Aunt” Elizabeth were going to get on well together. Heretofore, Elizabeth Hastings had been something of an unknown quantity; like the artists that arrived and left at unpredictable intervals, she was the friend of Marina’s guardians, and hadn’t spent much time in Marina’s company.
Oh, Marina had certainly had some interaction with Elizabeth in the past, but there had been that distance of “adult” and “child” between them.
Between that last visit and this, that relationship had changed. For the first time Elizabeth Hastings was treating her as an adult in her own right, and Marina was discovering that she liked the older woman. Certainly Elizabeth was making it very easy to become a friend; inviting friendship, welcoming trust and offering it.
Without knowing she’d been worried about that, Marina felt a knot of tension dissolve inside her. So, as well as they could amid the bouncing of the coach, they began to learn about each other. Before very long, it almost seemed as if she had known Elizabeth Hastings all her life.
Sebastian brought the coach as close to the door as he could, and a herd of flapping creatures enveloped in mackintoshes and rain capes converged on it as soon as it stopped moving—Uncle Thomas, Sarah, and Jenny, with Aunt Margherita bringing up the rear. Elizabeth was ushered straight into the kitchen by Margherita; Marina stayed outside with her uncles and the servants just long enough to be loaded with a couple of bandboxes before being shooed inside herself.
She shed her rain cape and hung it, dripping, on its peg, then brought her burden into the kitchen. Elizabeth had already divested herself of hat, coat, and jacket, and Marina found herself eyeing the fashionable emerald trumpet skirt with its trimming of black soutache braid and the cream silk shirtwaist with its softening fall of Venice lace with a pang of envy. Not that she didn’t love the gowns that her Aunt Margherita made for her, but… but they weren’t fashionable. They were lovely, very medieval, and certainly comfortable, but they weren’t anything like fashionable. Plenty of magazines found their way here, and Marina had been known to peruse the drawings in them from time to time, gazing with wonder at the cartwheel hats, the bustle skirts, the PBs in their shoulder-baring gowns and upswept hair. The village was hardly the cynosure of fashion; most of the people who came to stay at the cottage were of the same ilk as her guardians. Only Elizabeth Hastings came in the feathers and furbelows of couture, and Marina’s heart looked long and enviously at its representative. She wanted an emerald suit, an ostrich-plumed hat.
But you’d have to wear corsets! a little voice reminded her. Look at her waist—think about how tight you’d have to lace them!
But oh—replied another side of her—it would be worth it to look like that, to wear clothing like that.
She shook herself out of her reverie and joined them over their hot tea.
“—and no, I am not going to prance around your farmyard in a ridiculous rig like this!” Elizabeth was saying as Marina took a seat at the table. “Honestly, if you must know, the reason I tricked myself out like a PB on a stroll through Hyde Park was so I would be treated with disgusting servility by the railroad staff. A woman traveling alone needs all the advantage that perceived rank and wealth gives her. I wanted porters to present themselves to me without having to look for them. I wanted instant service in the dining car and no mashers trying to seat themselves at my table. I didn’t want to find myself sharing my compartment with some spoiled little monkey and his or her nursemaid; in fact, I didn’t want to share it at
all, and I couldn’t get a private compartment on that train. The best way to ensure privacy is to dress as if you’re too important to bother. It’s what I do when I go to suffrage meetings. No one raises his hand or voice against me when I’m dressed like this. I may get surly looks, but they’re deferential surly looks, even from the police.”
Margherita shook her head. “I can’t picture you as a suffragist, somehow.”
“I only go often enough to make it clear where my sympathies are. And I supply money, of course,” Elizabeth replied matter-of-factly. “But frankly, the Magic takes up so much of my time I can’t give the Cause the physical support I’d like to.” She shook her head. “Enough of that; if you really want to know about it, I’ll talk about it some evening with you. Now, I want you to know clearly that—exactly as last time I visited—I’m not expecting any more service than any of your other guests. I can take care of myself quite nicely, thank you, I don’t need to be waited on hand and foot by a maid, and not dressing for dinner is going to be something of a relief.”
Aunt Margherita broke into a gentle smile that warmed her eyes. “You know, I think that I had known that, but it’s good to hear it from your own lips. We’ve never had you for longer than a long weekend, you know, and a weekend guest is very different from a long-term guest.”
“True enough.” Elizabeth drank the last of her tea, stood up, and picked up her hat and jacket. “Now, since the bumping and swearing in the staircase has stopped, I think we can assume that the men have finished hauling my traps up the stairs, and I can change into something more appropriate.” She dimpled at Marina. “Then you will stop treating me as if I didn’t want to be bothered.”
All three of them laughed. “I’ll show you your room,” Marina offered, and took the lead up the stairs, the bandboxes in hand.
“Oh lovely—you gave me the other kitchen-room!” Elizabeth exclaimed as soon as she recognized what part of the house she was in. She breathed in the scent of baking bread from below appreciatively. “These are the best rooms Blackbird Cottage has in the winter.”
“I think so too,” Marina said, as Elizabeth hung her jacket up in the wardrobe and bent to open one of the three trunks. Then, suddenly shy, she retreated back down to the kitchen to help her aunt.
Elizabeth came down to join them in a much shorter time than Marina would have thought, and the plain woolen skirt and shirtwaist she wore were nothing that would be out of place in the village on a weekday. Marina couldn’t help a little pang of disappointment, but she tried not to show it.
Then came a supper that was astonishingly different because of a new face and some new topics of conversation around the table. This time, though, Marina was included in the conversation as a full equal. There was no discussion; it just happened, as naturally as breathing.
And one of the new topics was magic…
“The Naiads and I had to drive a River-horse up the Mersey, away from people,” Elizabeth said over the apple pie, as light from the candles on the table made a halo of her hair. “We don’t know where it came from, but it seems to have been retreating from the poisoning of its stream. You haven’t seen anything of water-poisoning around here, have you, Marina?”
She shook her head. “No. After I cleaned out all of the mess that had been left from before we took the land, I haven’t had any trouble.”
“It’s probably just some disgusting factory then,” Elizabeth said with a frown. “Honestly! You would think that when fish and animals begin to die, the owners would figure out for themselves that the poison they’ve dumped in the water is going to spread!” Her eyes flashed with anger. “How can they do this?”
“But it never spreads to where they live,” Sebastian pointed out dryly, though anger smoldered in the back of his eyes as well. “That’s the thing. If it was their children that suffered, coughing out their lives in black air, dying from poisoned water, it would be different. It’s only the children of the poor, of their workers. And there are always more children of the poor to take their places.”
“It’s doing things to the magic.” Elizabeth’s frown deepened. “Twisting it. Making it darker. I don’t know—if I were able to find a Left Hand Path occultist behind some of this, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised. But I haven’t, and neither has anyone else.”
“Then it has to be just a coincidence,” Thomas said firmly. “Don’t look for enemies where there are none. We have enemies enough as it is.”
Elizabeth let out a long breath. “Yes, and I should be concentrating on—and training our newest Mage to deal with—those existent enemies, shouldn’t I? Well said, Thomas.”
Enemies? We—I—have enemies?
“The least of the many things you need to teach her, and I am profoundly grateful that you are here, my dear,” Thomas replied with a smile. “I hope I have given her a thorough grounding, but your teaching will be to mine as university education is to public school.”
It is? The thought of enemies evaporated from her mind.
“Which leads to the question—when do you want to start?” Margherita asked.
“Tomorrow,” Elizabeth replied, to Marina’s unbounded joy, though for some reason, there seemed to be a shadow over the smile she bestowed on her new protegee. “Definitely tomorrow. No point in wasting time; we have a lot to share, and the sooner we start, the better.”
Chapter Four
BREAKFAST was a cheerful affair, despite the gray clouds outside. The rain had stopped at least, and one of Margherita’s favorite roosters crowed lustily atop the stone wall around the farmyard. Sarah did the breakfast cooking. She excelled at solid farm food, and her breakfasts were a staple at Blackbird Cottage. Everyone ate breakfast together in the kitchen, including little Jenny the maidservant, with Sarah joining them when she was sure no one else would want anything more.
This morning there was a new face at the table when Marina came down: Elizabeth, with her hair braided and the braid coiled atop her head, a shawl about her shoulders, cheerfully consuming bacon and eggs and chatting with old Sarah.
The cook was one of those substantial country women, once dark-haired, but now gone gray in their service. She was seldom without a shawl of her own knitting about her shoulders; plain in dress, plain-spoken, she had mothered Marina as much as Margherita, and usually was the one to mete out punishments that the soft-hearted Margherita could not bear to administer.
What she thought of the strange guests that often stayed here, she seldom said. Certainly she was plied for information about her employers whenever she went down to the village, but if she ever gossiped, no harm had come of it. And she was the perfect servant for this odd household; she was the one who found the new maidservants (usually from among her vast network of relatives) when their girls were ready for more exacting duties (and higher pay) in larger households. The hired man John was one of her many nephews. Sarah was the unmoving domestic center of the household, the person who made it possible for all three artists to get on with their work without interruption. She trained the succession of maids—Jenny was the eighth—and made them understand that the free-and-easy ways of this household were not what they could expect in the next. Thus far, the girls had all chosen to move on when places in wealthier households opened, but it looked as if Jenny might stay. She was timid by nature; they all treated her with consideration for her shyness, and Sarah had confided to Marina one day that the idea of going into a Great House was too frightening for Jenny to contemplate. Sarah had seemed pleased by that; Marina thought that their cook was getting tired of the continual succession of girls, and would welcome an end to it.
“Oh, bless you, mum,” Sarah said, in answer to some question of Elizabeth’s that Marina hadn’t heard. “E’en when this table’s crowded ‘round with daft painterly chaps, I’d druther be workin’ for Master Sebastian.”
“And why would that be, Sarah?” Thomas asked, grinning over a slice of buttered toast. “Could it be that our company is so fascinating that y
ou would be bored working for anyone else?”
“Lor’ help you, ‘cause none of you lot ever wants breakfuss afore eight.” Sarah laughed. “Farmer, now, they’re up before dawn, and wants their breakfuss afore that! As for a Great House, well e’en if I could get a place there, it’d be cooking for the help, an they be at work near as early as a farmer. Here, I get to lie abed like one of th’ gentry!”
“You are one of the gentry, Sarah,” said Margherita from the doorway, her abundant dark brown hair tumbling down around her shoulders, shining in the light from the oil lamp suspended above the kitchen table. “You’re a Countess of Cooks, a Duchess of Domestic Order.”
Sarah giggled, and so did little Jenny. “Go on with you!” Sarah replied, blushing with pleasure. “Anyroad, as for going on to a Great House, like I says, my cooking’s too plain for the likes o’ they. And I’m not minded to fiddle with none of your French messes. Missus Margherita can do all that if she wants, but plain cooking was good enough for my old mother, and it’s good enough for me.”
Margherita took her place at the broad, heavy old table and Sarah brought over the skillet to serve her fresh sausages and eggs.
Marina poured more tea for herself and her aunt. She wanted to ask their guest what they were going to start with, but she was constrained by the presence of the two servants.
“I think I’ll borrow one of your workrooms for my visit, Margherita,” Elizabeth said casually. “The little one just off the library. I’d like to organize the notes I brought with me, then get started on my project.”
“Project, ma’am?” said Sarah, who was always interested in at least knowing what the guests at Blackbird Cottage were about. Perhaps in any other household, she’d have been rebuked or even sacked for her curiosity, but curiosity wasn’t considered a vice here, not even in servants.
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