The Gates of Sleep

by Mercedes Lackey

  She sensed the doctor probing what she was doing at one point when she was so deep into her task that she wouldn’t have noticed a bugle being blown in her ear. He was very deft—and he made a brief attempt to join his personal energies to hers. But it came to nothing, as she had already known would happen, and he withdrew, turning instead to the task of healing what he could of the harm done to Ellen by the poison.

  Then she lost herself in the intricacy and sheer delight of the task—she had seen Margherita similarly lost in the intricacy of a tapestry or an embroidery piece, and supposed it must be much the same thing. Some to make and some to mend, her aunt had always said when she lamented her inability to create. Well, there was joy enough in both.

  Then, as ever, she felt her strength run out, and came back to herself with an unpleasant jarring sensation. At almost the same moment, she felt the two sets of shields come down again. She opened her eyes, and took away her hand, and was pleased to see that now there was some faint color in Ellen’s cheeks. But she didn’t get to admire them for long, because the girl struggled to her feet with Dr. Davies’ help, and was out the door as Marina sagged back into the comfort of the old wingback. Poor Ellen! She hoped the vicarage had an indoor WC.

  “About that cup of tea,” she suggested, feeling very much in need of it.

  “We can manage a bit better than that,” Davies said, and held up his hand when she opened her mouth to protest. “Now I know you are reluctant to be a drain on my larder, but there are two things you don’t know about the state of it. First, I am a single man living here, not one burdened with a family, and although a country parson doesn’t see much in the way of monetary help, he is certainly well-endowed with the gifts of the farmers in his parish. And they have been granting me those as if I did have an enormous family, and would take it very hard if I were not to make use of it. Second, Miss Roeswood, I am a single parson—singularly single, as the saying is. Not a day goes by when some young lady or other—equally single—doesn’t gift me with a little offering that is, I must suppose, intended to impress me with her kitchen skills.” He chuckled. “If I ate all of these things I should be as round as a Michaelmas goose, and a good corn-fed one at that. My housekeeper would probably be mortally offended at this unintended slur on her skills, if she wasn’t so pleased that she hasn’t had to do any baking herself since Christmas. Some of this supplies the Parish groups with refreshments, but by no means all of it. So, the long and short of it is I can and will provide the means for a sumptuous high tea every time you bring Miss Ellen here.”

  She held up both hands. “I yield to the honorable opposition,” she said, and he went off to some other part of the house, returning with Ellen leaning on his arm.

  The housekeeper arrived after Ellen had been settled back in the bed, with an enormous tray stacked with plates of sandwiches and cakes, and Marina’s mouth began to water at the sight of it all. This was not ladylike fare! Good, honest ham, egg, and cheese sandwiches, and decent-sized cakes, just like she used to eat at the cottage when Margherita made a high tea!

  “Doctor, will you pour?” Davies asked genially. “I know that’s supposed to be the lady’s job, but frankly, the lady’s hand is shaking too much and I don’t want tea slopped all over my saucer. Now, what will you have, Miss Roeswood?”

  “For starters, I’d like to dispense with the formality, at least while the four of us are together,” she replied, telling her protesting stomach that it did not want one of everything. “Marina, please, from now on, vicar. And the same for you, doctor. Other than that—some sandwiches, tea with two, and milk, please.”

  “Then it will be Andrew and Clifton,” the doctor said, handing her a cup of good strong tea, with plenty of sugar and just a touch of milk. “At least in private. We don’t want to give rise to any of those rumors you warned me of—and quite properly too—at Briareley.”

  “Hmm.” The vicar made up a plate for Marina at her direction. “A very good point,” he said, handing it to her. “Your guardian mustn’t be given any excuse to forbid our meeting. Ellen, I am afraid it is beef broth and milk-pudding for you, my child.”

  She accepted both with no sign of discontent. “I’d only lose anything stronger,” she said with good humor. “Oh, I feel so much better, though! I know I’ll feel bad again, but—”

  “But it won’t be as bad as it was before,” Andrew told her. “And every time we do this, it will be a little better, until we’ve purged all of the poison out of you and I’ve healed what I can.”

  Ellen smiled, but the smile faded. “Pardon my asking, but—then what?” she said reluctantly. “What’m I to do then? Go back to painting?”

  “Good gad, no!” the doctor and the vicar exclaimed at the same time. Andrew made a “go ahead” motion to the vicar.

  “You’ll come to work for one of us, Ellen, if you want to,” Davies said. “I must warn you though, that it’s no gilded life here. You’d live here and eat here, but I couldn’t afford much in wages, and it is likely to be hard work.”

  Ellen was shaking her head. “I got no skill at it, sir, begging your pardon. I never been trained in service.”

  “Then you’ll work for me—which is very little better, but you can start training as a nurse little by little as you get healthier,” Andrew told her. “Like Eleanor—you see, nurses are readily come by, but nurses who are Sensitives, or even magicians, are far, far, rarer. I could use you to work with the children. Would you like that?”

  Ellen brightened immediately. “That’d suit me, yes it would! That’d suit me fine!”

  “It’s settled then.” Both men seemed satisfied with the outcome, and certainly for someone who was a Sensitive, there really was no better place to work than Briareley, however poor the wages might be.

  Well—Blackbird Cottage. But she’d have to do heavy work, just like Jenny, and I doubt she’ll ever be able to do that again. But Marina made a mental note to talk seriously with Margherita when she finally got back in touch about supplying a place or two for other former charity patients of Andrew’s who were more robustly built.

  “If that doesn’t work for you, I expect I’ll need a lady’s maid eventually, Ellen,” Marina put in. “I’d rather have someone who I know that can learn what to do than have someone who might be beautifully trained but whom I don’t know that I’d have to trust. But—” she sighed. “That will have to wait for three years, until I’m of age. Until then, I have less charge over Oakhurst than you do!

  Madam has charge of everything. Including me.” She finished the last bite of an exquisite little Bakewell tart, and grimaced. “I don’t even get to say what I have for tea—which is why I have made such a disgusting pig of myself over the sweets today!”

  Ellen put her empty bowls aside. “Miss, I’ve been wondering—who’s this Madam? Why’s she such a hold over you, miss?”

  “She’s my guardian, worse luck,” Marina sighed, and began to explain her situation to the girl. Which, of course, ran right counter to everything she’d seen in etiquette books, or been taught by Arachne. Ellen was a mere factory girl, an absolute inferior; Marina a lady of privilege. Marina should have addressed her by her last name only, and really, should not even have noticed her, much less be laying out her entire life for her scrutiny.

  Madam would have the vapors. If Madam ever does have the vapors. Which I doubt, actually.

  She got as far as her first interview with Madam, when Ellen interrupted her. “Now, miss—I know your Madam Arachne! I wondered, when I first heard you call her that, and I do! ‘Twas her pottery I worked at, in Exeter! ‘Twas there I got poisoned by all the glaze-dust, or at least, that’s what Dr. Pike says!”

  Up until this moment, Arachne’s potteries had been nothing more than an abstract to Marina—something that hadn’t any real shape in her mind, as it were. Oh, she had thought, if she had thought at all, that they were—like a village pottery, only larger. She hadn’t even had a mental image, nor put together Andrew’s rant
about the lead-poisoning with what made her guardian’s fortune. Now, though—

  “Good gad,” she whispered.

  Ellen held out her trembling hand and frowned at it. “She’s real particular, Madam is. Picks her paintresses herself. And she does make sure that the girls is taken care of for when the shakes start. Gives us a lay-down room so we can take a bit of a rest and still get the quota done. And she sees to it other ways. If you know what I mean.” She looked more than a little embarrassed, when the vicar and Marina shook their heads dumbly.

  Andrew saved the girl from having to answer. “Let me handle this, Ellen.” He turned to Clifton and Marina. “I think I might have told you already, but if I haven’t, well—the lead kills the girls’ appetites and has an effect on the complexions. Ironically enough. their skin becomes as pale and translucent as porcelain—well, just like Ellen’s is now. So, they are thin and pale, ethereal and delicate, they have to stay clean and neat because they’re on show for visitors.”

  “Madam gives us a wash-up room, and she gets a second-hand clothes woman who gets stuff from the gentry to come around and give us good prices,” Ellen put in. “And if we ain’t got enough, she has it laid by for us, and takes a shilling a week out of our wages.”

  Andrew made a helpless gesture. “There you have it. Clean, well-gowned, and if they had any looks at all before, they become pretty. If they were pretty before, they become beautiful. Men who are looking for—companionship—”

  Clifton turned beet-red. Marina tilted her head to the side; wide and uncensored reading, and Elizabeth’s influence had given information on what came next, if not personal experience. “Men looking for pretty mistresses may go looking among the paintresses, you mean? Ellen, is that what you meant when you said that Madam sees that the girls are cared for?”

  Ellen nodded. “She lets visitors come right in the painting-room,” she admitted. “Lets ‘em palaver with us girls, and so long as the quota gets done, nobody says anything. So when they can’t paint no more, they’ll have maybe someone as is interested in other things they can do.”

  “Monstrous!” Davies burst out, red-faced now with anger. “Appalling!”

  “Well, what else are they supposed to do? Petition Madam to take care of them?” Andrew looked just as angry, but tempered with resignation. “Good God, Clifton, what would that get them? Nowhere, of course—she’s the one who’s poisoned them in the first place! What relations are going to care for them? Ellen’s second-cousin is the only person that has ever brought one of these paintresses to the attention of a doctor, and that is in no small part because the cousin discovered Ellen’s magical potential was being drained away from her by a person unknown. That is one case, out of how many potteries?”

  “Quite a few, I would venture to say,” Marina offered, feeling an odd sort of dislocation—ethically, she was as appalled as the vicar, emotionally she was as horrified. But intellectually—she couldn’t find it in her heart to blame any girl who took such a step toward ensuring whatever future she had was comfortable. “But I suspect that would be because those doctors are disinclined to see a patient without being paid. Actually, Andrew, that’s not quite true—Madam and Reggie were discussing something about a female doctor, a suffragist, who was campaigning on behalf of the paintresses at one of her potteries. But I don’t know which pottery that was, so I can’t tell you if there’s anyone trying to do anything about the place where Ellen worked.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, but it’s irrelevant to the situation we were discussing,” Andrew pointed out. “So Clifton, what exactly are these girls to do with themselves before they die? Eke out the remaining miserable days of their lives in the poorhouse? Or spend them in comfort by selling their bodies while the bodies are still desirable?”

  The vicar hung his head, his color fading. “I don’t know, Andrew. A hard choice, in a hard life.”

  “They say that Madam letting them men in, makes sure all the paintresses gets a chance to get set up—and they do just go off, sometimes without giving notice,” Ellen observed, with a hint of sardonic amusement at the vicar’s reaction. “Girls get a lot of men coming ‘round. We all figured soon or late, you get one as is willing to take care of you proper. And until you do, you get nice presents, lovely dinners, get taken to music-halls…”

  Marina had a good idea that Ellen must have had her share of those things from the way she spoke of them, wistfully, even knowing what she knew now, with regret.

  It isn’t just their bodies that Madam is poisoning, she thought, suddenly. She locked gazes with both Andrew and the vicar, and saw that they were thinking the same thing.

  But it was still hard to believe. The immediate thought was that surely, surely, Arachne Chamberten didn’t actually know what her pottery was doing to the girls who worked there. Surely anyone who did would change things!

  But then she remembered that discussion—that most “unacceptable” discussion—over the dinner-table. No, Arachne knew. She might pretend that she didn’t, but she knew. And Arachne didn’t seem to think of the lower orders as being—well—human. She didn’t care what happened to them, so long as there was a steady supply of them at cheap wages.

  When their hands start to shake, she’d rather have them out selling their bodies anyway, to make room for new ones.

  “Difficult as this may seem to you, Ellen’s situation is worse yet, Clifton,” the Doctor said grimly. “Or was. One of the reasons that her cousin whisked her away from that vile place so quickly was that besides being poisoned, she was being drained, magically.”

  “What?” Marina and the vicar exclaimed together, aghast. “But—how? Why? By whom?” Davies had the wit to ask, as Marina just stared.

  “I don’t know. There definitely was some sort of tie to her when she was brought to me, something that was acting as a drain on her personal and emotional energies, but one that I didn’t recognize, and one I couldn’t trace back.” Andrew shrugged. “Not that I didn’t want to, but I was too busy trying to save her life at the time. I just cut it, cauterized it, and dismissed it from my mind. Now, though—” He paused. “Clifton, you can work through the Church to see that the physical aspects of this disgusting situation are dealt with—but if there is an occult aspect to it, I think we ought to look into it. There was only myself before—frankly, trying to get other Masters to help in something as vague as this would be like persuading cats to swim.”

  “Now you have two more of us,” the vicar said, with a lifting of his chin and a touch of fire in his eyes. “And Ellen is going to be all right—”

  “If you don’t mind helping us with this,” Andrew replied, slowly— “The only problem I can see is that the tie isn’t there anymore.”

  Ellen gave him a stern look. “Don’t be daft,” she said, forthrightly. “Begging your pardon, but the only places I ever went was the pottery and out with—men. And them men came to the pottery. So?”

  “QED,” Andrew said ruefully. “You’re right, Ellen. The place to look is the pottery. If this business involves more girls than just you, it could be the symptom of something much worse.” He scratched his head ruefully. “This is where I have nothing to go on but vague premonition—”

  “But the premonitions of an Elemental Master are as important as an ordinary person’s certainties!” Marina and the vicar said in chorus—then looked at each other—and at Ellen’s puzzled expression—and chuckled weakly.

  “All right. If you agree that my premonition is not nonsense—well, I just think that this is important.”

  Something I can do! Finally, something only I can do! “And—” Marina said, with a sudden smile. “I think I can get in there. Easily, and with no one suspecting a thing. There’s just one problem.”

  “What is it?” Andrew asked immediately. “I’ll help you with it!”

  “I wish you could, but you are the last person who would be of any use,” she replied, with a rueful laugh. “The problem is, to do so I’ll have to spend a
t least two days in the inescapable company of the Odious Reggie!”

  And at the sight of his expression, she could only shake her head.

  Chapter Seventeen

  SEQUESTERED in her office, with orders not to be disturbed, Arachne fixed her son with an ice-dagger stare. “What,” she asked, in the coldest voice she could muster, “are you doing about winning that girl?”

  For a long while, the only sound was that of the fire in the fireplace behind her, crackling and popping. Arachne licked her lips, and thought she tasted the least little hint of blood on them.

  She didn’t have to elaborate her question; there was only one girl that he was supposed to be winning, after all. He squirmed a little in his chair; not a good sign. Reggie only squirmed when he was trying to be evasive. When he was lying, he looked directly into your eyes, and produced his most charming of smiles. When he was telling the truth, he didn’t smile, he looked completely sober, and didn’t try to charm. She wondered if he realized that. Perhaps not; he was not as experienced as she was in reading expressions and the nuances of behavior.

  “She’s a bore, Mater,” he said, sideslipping the topic—or trying to. “She’s a bluestocking and a bore. I wrack my brain to tell her amusing stories, and she talks about literature; I try to make love to her, and she asks me about votes for women or politics.”

  She frowned. “That is not what I asked. The girl is normal enough. She certainly has a craving for fine feathers, she’s young, and I’m sure you can turn her head with flattery if you exert yourself; she’s not that different from the little trollops you amuse your idle hours with. You ought to be able to charm her without thinking twice about it.”