The Gates of Sleep

by Mercedes Lackey

  I must have been more tired than I thought. I just looked at these things last night, saw the Queen’s head, and thought they were coins. Or maybe it was just that I was working by the light of one candle. Oh, conkers. I’m back where I started.

  She sighed. She’d have wept, except that with Madam and Reggie still gone, she had plenty of things to leaven her disappointment. She had a real breakfast, Miss Mary Anne had been told that in absence of any tasks that Madam had left for Marina to do (there were none, since Madam had left in such a hurry) Marina was going out to ride this morning and this afternoon.

  Mary Anne sullenly attired her in her riding habit and left, ostensibly on some other task that she had been assigned. In reality since no one seemed to have authority over Mary Anne but Madam, that was unlikely. Marina strongly suspected that the girl would be back here to snoop as soon as her putative mistress was gone, though. She’d probably go through every bit of Marina’s belongings while she had the chance.

  Well, I’d better dispose of these… She put them in the very bottom of her jewel case. If Mary Anne found them, she would assume that they were further evidence of Marina’s faithful church-going, which was all to the good; church activities were high on the list of appropriate things for young ladies of even the highest ranks to do.

  A quick note on menu-paper to the cook took care of luncheon, tea and dinner, and Marina was out into the cold, flinging her cloak over her shoulders, her hat pinned jauntily on her head at an angle that was quite out of keeping with one in mourning.

  This time, instead of placid old Brownie, Marina asked the groom to saddle the iron-mouthed hunter Reggie usually rode, an extremely tall gelding named Beau. She had a notion that he was all right, despite Reggie’s assertions that “he’s a rum ‘un,” and to make sure she started off on the best of terms with him, she brought a bread crust smeared in jam from breakfast. He laid back his ears when he saw the groom approaching with the saddle, but pricked them forward again when it was Marina, not Reggie, who approached.

  She held out the crust, which he sniffed at, then engulfed with good appetite, using lips more than teeth. That was a good sign. As he chewed it, she ventured to scratch his nose. He closed his eyes and leaned into the caress, then made no fuss about being saddled and bridled. He stood steady as a rock beside the mounting-block (he was so tall she needed to use one) and then stepped out smartly when she barely nudged him with a heel. She hadn’t even got halfway down the drive before figuring out that although his mouth was insensitive, he neck-reined beautifully. And his manners were impeccable.

  “Well, you’re just every inch the gentleman, aren’t you?” she asked, as his ears swiveled back to catch what she said. He snorted, quite as if he understood her, and bobbed his head.

  He had a silken fast walk, and because his legs were so long, a surprisingly comfortable trot. No odds that’s why Reggie bagged him, she thought. I ought to see if I could teach him to “bounce” on his trot; that’d serve Reggie right.

  Ah, but Reggie would probably just take it out on the horse, which wouldn’t be fair to Beau.

  She had a particular goal in mind for this morning, while Madam was still away; she had gotten Sally to tell her the way to Briareley, and she was not going to wait for Dr. Pike to decide whether or not he was going to contact her at the vicarage. She was going to come to him. This would probably be her only opportunity to go to Briareley ever; Madam might be back this very afternoon, and would never permit Marina to make such a visit. It would be highly improper—they hadn’t been introduced, Briareley was no longer a place where one might ask for a tour of the house, she should not be visiting a man unescorted. The notion of paying a visit to a sanitarium where there were madmen—well, a daring young man might well pull such a thing off on a lark, but no woman would even consider such a thing. Marina was breaking all manner of social rules by doing this.

  But this was not a social visit—this was Magician to Magician, and as such, did not fall under any of the chapters in Marina’s book of etiquette.

  I did look, though, she thought whimsically, I tried to find even a mention of Magician to Magician protocol But there wasn’t anything there on the subject. So the “Young Lady’s Compleate Guide to Manners” isn’t as complete a guide as it claims to be.

  The hunter trotted along briskly, while she was engrossed in thought. Etiquette aside, she needed to be very careful with what she did and did not say and do around this man. After all, she knew nothing about him, except that he had a good reputation in the village. Now, that was no bad thing; the village saw a great deal and gossiped about it widely.

  But that didn’t mean that the village saw everything; the fact that he hadn’t betrayed himself as an Earth Master proved that.

  Magicians were only human, as Elizabeth had been at pains to point out. They could be brave—or cowards. Noble—or petty. Altruistic—or selfish.

  Marina had a long talk with Sally over breakfast; she knew already that Doctor Pike had more than charity patients—he catered to ladies of wealth and privilege who suffered from nervous exhaustion. Treatment for these special patients amounted to a bit of cosseting, flattering attention to their symptoms, some nostrums, and being left undisturbed—or pampered—as their whims dictated. And these women were probably paying a great deal of money to have that much attention given them by a sympathetic, handsome, young physician. So, whatever else Dr. Pike was, he was clearly willing to pander to them in order to get those handsome fees.

  Not the altogether altruistic and idealistic physician he might have seemed from his treatment of the runaway girl.

  Caution is in order, I think, in how much I believe about him. And caution in how much I tell him about myself. But if nothing else, I will make arrangements to help him with that girl.

  The hunter’s head bobbed with effort as he climbed a hill; at a walk, not a trot; this was a steep bit of lane. She could just imagine the hay-wains laboring up here—the poor horses straining in their harness as they tried to get themselves and their load up to the top of this rise. Add to that the rocks and ruts, what a hideous climb it must be.

  Or perhaps not; it wasn’t quite wide enough for a loaded wain, which must have relieved quite a few farm horses over the years.

  And then they reached the top; the horse paused for a breath, and she reined him in, looking around for a moment. And paused, arrested by the view.

  On her left, the hill dropped steeply away from the lane, giving her an unparalleled view of the countryside. The top of the hedge along the edge of that field was actually level with her ankle, the slope dropping off steeply at the very edge of the lane and continuing that way for yards. The hills and valley spread out below her in a snow-covered panorama, ending in distant, misty hills, higher than the rest, blue-gray and fading into the clouds on the horizon, that might be the edge of Exmoor.

  Now, it was to be admitted that no one traveled from across the world—or even across England—to see the views of Devon countryside. There was nothing spectacular here in front of her, no snow-covered peaks, no wild cliffs and crashing waves, no great canyons, wilderness valleys. But spectacle was not always what the heart craved, although the soul might feast on it. Sometimes you don’t want a feast. Sometimes you just want a cozy tea in front of the fire.

  She rested her eyes on the fields below, irregularly-shaped patches of white bordered by the dark gray lines of the leafless hedges, like fuzzy charcoal lines on a pristine sheet of paper. The wavering lines were sometimes joined, and sometimes broken, by coppices of trees, the nearer looking exactly like Uncle Sebastian’s pencil-sketches of winter trees, the farther blurred by distance into patches of gray haze, containing the occasional green lance-head of a conifer. Some of those white patches of ground held tiny red-brown cattle, scarcely seeming to move; presumably some held sheep, although it was difficult to make out the white-on-white blobs at any distance. Sheep on the high ground, cattle on the low, that was the rule. Farmhouses rose up out of
the snow, shielded Protectively by more trees, looking for all the world, with their thatched roofs covered in snow, and their walls of pale cob or gray stone, as if they had grown up out of the landscape. Thin trails of white smoke rose in the air from chimneys, and in the far distance, barely discernible, was the village, a set of miniature toy-buildings identifiable by the square Gothic tower of St. Peter’s rising in their midst.

  There was a faint scent of wood smoke from those far-off hearth fires; a biting chill to the air that warned of colder winds to come and a scent of ice that suggested she might want to be indoors by nightfall. The blazing sun of early morning was gone; muted by high mare’s-tail clouds with lower, puffier clouds moving in on the wind.

  Jackdaws shouted metallically at one another from two coppices, and a male starling somewhere nearby pretended it was spring with an outpouring of mimicked song. So had this valley looked for the last two hundred years. So, probably, would it look for the next hundred, with only minor additions.

  It slumbered now, beneath its coverlet of snow, but Marina did not need to close her eyes to know how it would look in the spring when it came to vivid life. Green—green and honey-brown, but mostly green—would be the colors of the landscape. The vivid green of the fields would be bisected by the dark-green lines of the hedges; the farmhouses would disappear altogether behind their screening of trees—or would, at most, look like mounds of old hay left behind after harvest beneath the graying thatch. When walls showed at all, the cob would glow with the sunlight, the stone pick up the same mellow warmth. The hillside fields would be dotted with the white puffs of sheep, the valley fields holding the red-brown shapes of cattle moving through the knee-deep grass, heads down, intent on browsing as though the grass were going to vanish in the next instant. And everywhere would be the song of water.

  For although there were few lakes, and fewer rivers, this was a land of a thousand little streams, all gone silent now under the snow, but ready to burst out as soon as spring came. They burbled up out of the hills, they babbled their way across meadows, they chuckled along the lanes and laughed on their way to join the great rivers, the Tamar, the Taw, the Torridge, the Okement, the Exe.

  And over and around the sound of the waters would be the songs of the birds—starling and lark, crow and wren, jackdaw and robin, bluetit and sparrow, nightingale, thrush—all of them daring each other to come encroach on a territory, shouting out love for a mate or desire for one. Between the songs of the waters and the birds would be the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, and all the little homely sounds of farm and land made soft by distance.

  The sky would be an impossible blue, gentle and misty, with white clouds fluffy as newly-washed fleeces sailing over the hills on their way to the next valley.

  And the air would be soft with damp, full of the scent of green growing things, of moss and fern, and the sweet fragrance of fresh-cut grass and spring flowers. It would touch the cheek in a caress that would negate the knife-flick of winter’s wind, the unkindly wind that knew no softness but that of snow.

  Marina heard all of these things in her memory, as she saw them in her mind’s eye, as she felt them, as sure as the ground beneath her horse’s hooves, his muscular, warm neck under her gloved hand. In all seasons, under all weathers, she knew this land, not so different from the place where she had grown up, after all—its waters flowed in her blood, its stones called to her bones. Not sudden, but slow and powerful, she felt that call, and the answer within her, to protect, to serve, and above all, to cleanse.

  Not that this land needed any cleansing.

  Unbidden, the answer to that thought came immediately.

  Yet.

  For there was a girl poisoned, polluted, lying sick in a room not a quarter mile from here, representative of how many others? And worse, of how much poison pouring into the air, the water, and the soil? And where was that blight? It couldn’t be far; if Ellen was a charity patient, the relative who had brought her to Andrew Pike must be poor as well, and unable to afford an extended journey. Would it spread? How could it not? Disease, cancer, poison—all of them spread, inexorably; it was in their nature to spread. Some day, the poison would touch this place.

  She clenched her jaw, angry at her aunt, at all of the shortsighted fools who couldn’t see, wouldn’t see, that what poisoned the land came, eventually, to poison them. What was wrong with them? Did they think, in their arrogance, that their money would keep them isolated from the filth they poured out every day? Was their greed such that the cost didn’t matter so long as it was hidden? Or were they willfully not believing, pretending that the poison was somehow harmless, or even beneficial? She’d seen for herself how some people had eagerly bought the copper-tailings from the mines and the smelters to spread on their garden paths because what was left in the processed ore was so poisonous that no weed could grow in it. It never occurred to them that the same gravel was poisonous enough to kill birds that picked bits of it up—or babies that stuck pieces of it in their mouths to suck. Willful ignorance, or just stupidity? In the end, it didn’t matter, for the damage was done.

  But it wasn’t difficult to keep land and water and air clean! Any housewife knew that—if you just took proper care—and took it all the time.

  But the people responsible for Ellen’s condition didn’t care for the wisdom of the housewife; that much was clear enough. Theirs was the wisdom of the accounting book, the figures on the proper side of the ledger, and never mind a cost that could not be reckoned in pounds and pence.

  For a moment, her heart sank, but her resolve strengthened. I will do what I can, she vowed silently, though to what, she wasn’t sure. I will do all that I can. Because I must.

  If anything answered, there were no dramatic signs, yet she felt as if something had heard her vow, found it good, and accepted it. And she turned her horse’s head away, down the hill, and toward Briareley, determined to begin that endless task with one single girl.

  There was no stableman at Briareley, no servant arrived to hold her horse and take it away when she rode up the drive toward the imposing front entrance—Georgian, she thought, with four huge columns holding up the porch roof—at the top of a long staircase of native stone made smooth as marble. A Georgian front, Tudor wings? and heaven only knew what else behind them. And no servants for all of this pile.

  This, however, was not unexpected; from Sally, she had heard that the doctor cut as many corners as possible, and keeping a stablehand about just to care for a horse and two ponies was a great waste of wages when a man-of-all-work was what was really needed. So Marina sat up in her saddle and looked carefully at the drive; saw the wheel-ruts leading off to the side of the house, and followed them. As she expected, they led her to a wide doorway into a square courtyard open to the sky. Along two sides were stalls for horses, along two were bays for carriages and other vehicles. There was, thank heavens, a mounting-block in the center.

  She made use of it, then led the horse to an unoccupied stall. It was also utterly bare; she couldn’t do much about the lack of straw on the ground, but she did take off his bridle, throw a blanket over him, and leave him a bucket of water. He’d had his breakfast before she rode out, and if Dr. Pike was as careful with money as he seemed to be, she didn’t want to pilfer oats or hay without permission.

  She considered going around to the kitchen entrance—but this was a formal visit, after all, and she wasn’t an expected and casual arrival. So, patting her hat to make sure it was still on straight, she walked back around to the front.

  She felt very small as she trudged up the staircase, wondering what long-ago ancestor of the original owners had deemed it necessary to cow his guests before they entered his home. Someone with a profound sense of his own importance, she reckoned. Compared with this place, Oakhurst, which had seemed so huge when she first arrived, was nothing.

  When he gets staff for this hulk, and has it full of patients, he’ll bowl over people who come to see if this is where loony Uncl
e Terrance should be put.

  It was a pity that a place like this, absolutely overflowing with history, should have to be made into a sanitarium. But what else was to be done with it? Let it molder until the roof fell in? Turn it into a school? Who else would want it? People like Arachne, with new money out of their factories, built brand new mansions with modern conveniences, and didn’t care a tot about history. There were only so many American millionaires about, and most of them wanted fancy homes near London, not out in the farmlands of Devon. What was the point (they thought) of having money enough to buy a huge old castle if there was nobody around to see it and admire it?

  Except, of course, the local villagers, who had seen it all their lives.

  And what was the point of living out where there was nothing to see and do? Nothing, as American millionaires saw it. They loved London, London sights, excitement, theater, society.

  It came as no surprise to her that there was no one in the entrance hall, although there was a single desk set up facing the doors there. The enormous room, with magnificent gilded and painted plaster-molding, cream and olive and pale green, ornamenting the walls and ceiling. She paused to listen, head tilted to one side, and followed the echoing sounds of soft voices along the right side of the building.

  I thought this place was supposed to be in poor repair? That was the first thing she noticed; none of the signs of neglect that she had expected, no stains on walls or ceilings betraying leaks, no cracks, no rot or woodworm. In fact, although gilt was rubbed or flaked off from plasterwork here and there, and paint and wallpaper fading, the building appeared to be sound.

  She walked quietly—she’d had practice by now—but her footsteps still echoed in the empty rooms. Not even a scrap of carpet to soften the wooden floors!

  Perhaps the financing of repair work is where all the Doctor’s money is going. If that was so, she was inclined to feel more charitable, it would take a great deal of society money to pay for repairs to a place like this one.