Elementary

by Mercedes Lackey

  “A Water Master,” Sophia said. “While he was spending all his time with your father and you, your powers apparently hid his.” Or, more likely, completely overwhelmed them. Two strong Fire Masters and one untrained Water Master . . .

  “So you know about me.” Eleanora folded the letter carefully and slid it up her intact sleeve.

  “Yes, El. I know you’re a Fire Master. I know that your father, Sir Nicholas, raised you as a boy and taught you magic, and I know that you helped him in his medical practice. Father Pearce at Christ Church is my brother, and he’s very concerned that, despite years of training, you lost control and burned four inches of candle all at once when all you were supposed to do was light it.” Sophia smiled briefly. “The ladies of the altar guild are still arguing over who put out such obviously mismatched candles, but he doesn’t feel it would help matters to tell them what really happened.”

  “They’re a bunch of stupid old biddies,” El said crossly. “They’re always nagging us so a boy can’t even play a harmless practical joke. And Father Pearce said I could be one of them when I’m old enough!” Her expression was somewhere between disgusted and betrayed.

  “He asked me to apologize to you for that,” Sophia said. “He says you’re the best acolyte he ever had, and he’d be delighted to have you back if he could be sure the Bishop wouldn’t find out that you’re female.”

  “But the Bishop doesn’t know!” El protested.

  “He would find out pretty soon, no matter what else happened. You’re supposed to be confirmed next year, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, all the younger acolytes were studying for it. Does being a girl mean I can’t even be confirmed?”

  “Not at all, and I’ll arrange for you to finish your studies here. The problem is that in order to be confirmed, you have to produce your baptismal records, and the Bishop would notice that Eleanora Victoria is not a boy’s name if he were asked to confirm you with the rest of the acolytes. Do you know the words the Bishop uses when he confirms you?”

  El shook her head.

  “‘Defend, O Lord, this thy Child with thy heavenly grace, that he may continue thine for ever. . . .’ In the case of a girl, he substitutes ‘she’ for ‘he,’ and many bishops insert your name after ‘this thy Child’—I remember having to write mine in large print and hold the paper on the altar rail in front of me so the Bishop could read it.”

  “Does your brother have magic?” El demanded.

  “Yes, he’s a Water Magician—in fact, he’s Albert’s teacher. I’m a Fire Magician, which is why the old boys’ club in London sent me here to continue your training.”

  “The White Lodge?” Apparently El had heard that nickname, too. “So you’re not here to teach me embroidery?” she asked hopefully.

  “I’m going to teach you enough needlework to keep your mother from asking what else I’m teaching you. It’s camouflage, like a salamander hiding in the hearth fire. There are things we need to keep secret from your mother, and the easiest way to do that is to playact so that she thinks she’s getting what she wants.”

  “I don’t want to be a girl!” El said petulantly. “Why does Mother think it’s so great to be a girl, anyway?”

  “Because it’s all she’s ever known.”

  El frowned in thought. “You’re saying that she’s spent her entire life in a cage, so she never noticed the bars.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I do see the cage.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

  • • •

  When she found El at breakfast in the nursery the next morning, Sophia got a chance to see both what she had looked like when she was first dressed yesterday and what someone, probably her mother, considered suitable clothing for a female child staying at her grandfather’s country estate. Granted, the grandfather in question was a duke, but even so . . .

  El picked at her breakfast with the scowl that was becoming her habitual expression. “I can’t eat in all this clothing. I can barely breathe.”

  “I believe you. Are you wearing a corset under that dress?”

  “Of course she is,” Nurse said indignantly, “but it’s laced so loosely it could almost fall off. She has to learn to be a proper young lady!”

  Sophia suppressed her first reaction, which was to say “Not right now, and maybe not ever.” Instead, she smiled at Nurse and asked if she had been nurse to Lady Mary.

  “That I was. She’s a beautiful lady, but I’m sure we’ll be able to make you just as beautiful, poppet,” she said to El.

  “I don’t want to turn out like my mother!” El snarled. “She’s pathetic! Did she really have her lower ribs removed?”

  “Young ladies do not discuss things like that.”

  “I’m not a young lady; I’m an apprentice physician,” El retorted, “and I know how harmful it is to remove ribs—and it’s done for simple vanity! There’s a reason she spent most of my life in a sanitarium in Switzerland. She doesn’t have enough lung capacity to survive even a month in London. That’s why Father sent her here.”

  From the look on Nurse’s face, Sophia suspected there was more to it than that, but all that Nurse said was, “Don’t worry, dearie. I’m sure she’ll be well enough to be there when you make your curtsy to the Queen.”

  “Aaargh!” El flung her spoon into her porridge and ran from the room. Sophia quickly followed. As she went, she sent a mental message to the salamanders that tended to hang around her, asking them to lurk in the household fires—especially in the rooms where the servants were likely to gossip—and pass on to her what they heard.

  • • •

  She caught up with El by the lake. “Nurse,” El said bitterly. “Torturer would be more like it.”

  “She means well,” Sophia pointed out. “She just doesn’t understand. At all.” She looked out at the lake. “This is artificial, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” El said. “Grandfather had it built. It’s odd; water should bother me, because it’s my opposing Element, but this feels soothing. Maybe it’s because it reminds me of Albert.”

  “Water doesn’t bother me much, either,” Sophia admitted. “Perhaps the fact that our brothers both have Water Magic either gives us an immunity to the galloping collywobbles most Fire Magicians get, or maybe we have some small amount of Water Magic as well. Do you know how to swim?”

  El shook her head. “It’s one thing to sit here and look at it, but I have no desire to trust my body to it.”

  “Fair enough,” Sophia said, “but you will need to learn to ride if you’re going to be living in the country, which means you’ll need more practical clothing.”

  “Please!” El said with heartfelt sincerity. “Maybe we can get Grandfather on our side. Did you know he’s a Water Magician?”

  “The Masters in London told me,” Sophia replied. “Is he likely to be any help to us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who really runs this household?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who has the power to get things done or changed? Who can modify the official rules or help you slide around them? It’s not always the Master or the Mistress; sometimes it’s a key servant, like the butler or the housekeeper.” She thinks of herself as a physician. “If this were a disease, what are your resources for fighting it?”

  “I hear that Grandfather likes chess,” El said thoughtfully. “Do you know how to play, and can you teach me?”

  “Yes, yes, and that sounds like a good place to start. In the meantime, we’ll work on mollifying your mother. Young ladies are supposed to know how to dance, play the pianoforte, sketch, do needlework, and speak French and Italian. Did you study languages other than Greek and Latin at school?”

  “No. Father taught us German, because there are medical books in that language. We picked up some French and Italian,
but . . .”

  “You learned it from patients at the charity hospital?”

  El nodded.

  “We’ll do a quick run through the textbooks and work on your accent. Both French and Italian have a lot in common with Latin, so you shouldn’t have trouble with them. We might be able to persuade your mother to help with the accent; that way she’ll feel she’s contributing, and if she’s been in Switzerland, she’s probably been speaking either French or Italian for years.”

  “Don’t they also speak German in Switzerland?”

  “Very good. Yes, they do, but I don’t see your mother as a German speaker. She may, however, understand some of it, so don’t try to use it as a secret language. If you don’t want most of the household to understand you, use Greek.”

  “Do you speak Greek?”

  “Is my brother a priest?”

  “Yes . . . Oh. You studied with your brother, too?”

  “Not officially; I didn’t get to go to school with him. But we studied together when he was home, and Papa was willing to teach me. He was the vicar in a small town north of Weymouth, and he was willing to teach me anything I could tie in with Bible studies: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, history, geography. . . . Mother made certain I learned all the ladylike accomplishments, so that I could either marry well or be a good governess. So far, I have not met a gentleman I wish to marry.” Sophia stood up. “Let’s go see what we can find in the way of language texts.” As El fell into step beside her, Sophia added, “Instead of embroidery, I think I’ll start you with needlepoint. It’s not fussy, and it can be soothing; I know several men who do it for relaxation.”

  • • •

  Over the next few weeks, El got better at pretending to be a young lady when her mother was around. Fortunately, this wasn’t often. Lady Mary saw them for an hour at teatime, during which El wore the dresses her mother had picked out and either read French poetry to her or sat quietly and did needlepoint if Lady Mary had other company. Lady Mary was so impressed with the improvement in her daughter’s behavior that she authorized Sophia to buy more clothing for Eleanora. Sophia, who favored the opinions of the emerging Rational Dress movement, got dresses that were much simpler and more comfortable and did not require a corset.

  From the salamanders and from her own observations, Sophia was getting a better grasp of the household. The most shocking bit of information was that Lady Mary had not come home from Switzerland because she was cured. She had taken a lover there, and her father had promptly ordered her sent home to her husband, who had sent her back to her father. Word was that the Duke was furious with his daughter, but since he kept to his own rooms, Sophia didn’t know this firsthand.

  El’s other lessons were going well, too. She had, after all, been a trained Fire Mage for several years now. What they were working on most was reestablishing the control that the complete disruption of El’s life had shattered.

  Unfortunately, there was no way to make El unlearn the things she had learned during the tenure of Sophia’s predecessors. Neither Sophia nor El mourned the loss of the wooden paddle that had hung in the schoolroom for generations; that was, it hung there until it suddenly burst into flames when someone with a “firm hand” tried to use it on El. That governess had fled the house shrieking in terror, and she hadn’t been the only one. Then there was the governess who had tried for a gentle approach, including stories about beautiful princesses rescued from dragons by handsome young knights.

  Unlike that misguided lady, Sophia did not expect El to identify with the useless princess. Indeed, she considered it a sign of progress that El had not identified with the knight. But that left the dragon, considered by El to be misunderstood and beleaguered. Sophia consoled herself with the thought that El’s newfound ability to breathe actual fire showed excellent control, and wondered if the departed governess would dare to tell anyone about this. She suspected not. Bedlam was an unpleasant place to reside.

  On the surface, everything seemed to be going well, but Sophia knew better. She often found herself fingering the glass vial that she had worn around her neck ever since El’s father had given it to her. She tried to prepare herself mentally for the crisis that was bound to come. She hoped she wouldn’t need the dose in that vial, but if she did, it was going to be right at hand. And El seemed to be getting, well, twitchy. She was restless, her mood was erratic, and she was frequently downright snappish. Sophia knew what was coming but couldn’t seem to find a way to discuss it with El. At least the girl knew how a woman’s body functioned, and after years of assisting her father in surgery, she wasn’t likely to have hysterics at the sight of blood.

  • • •

  Unfortunately, the morning El woke up and found her own blood on the sheets of her bed, she did have hysterics—not because she didn’t know what was happening to her, but because she did. Sophia was nudged awake by an uneasy salamander who flashed her a series of images starting with El’s awakening and ending with El’s bed on fire. With El in it.

  Grabbing her least-flammable dressing gown, Sophia belted it firmly over her nightgown as she ran toward El’s bedroom. She ran past a group of hysterical housemaids and through the footmen throwing water on the bed in an unsuccessful attempt to extinguish the fire, reached into the flames to pull El out of bed, and poured the dose from the vial down her throat. El went limp. Sophia rolled her on the floor to extinguish the flames on her clothing while she used her own magic to make El’s hair stop burning. With El unconscious, the footmen were able to put out the rest of the fire, although Sophia suspected that the bed was going to be a total loss. Certainly all the bedclothes were.

  She supervised having El bathed, dressed in a clean nightgown, and put to bed on a cot in Sophia’s room. Then she sent a salamander to El’s father to tell him that she needed another dose for the vial. And she sent another one with an urgent message to her favorite doctor. She needed Dr. Sarah Clarke’s help, for more than one reason.

  • • •

  The good news was that Lady Mary had taken to her bed in hysterics and been dosed with laudanum, and Nurse was looking after her. The possibly not good news was that the Duke “desired Miss Pearce to wait upon him at her earliest convenience.” Sophia shed her charred dressing gown, bathed quickly, used magic to dry her hair, and dressed to look as proper as she could.

  The butler led her to the Duke’s rooms and turned her over to the valet, who conducted her to the Duke. He was seated in a wheeled chair, contemplating a chessboard, but his eyes were sharp when he looked her over. He pointed to a chair across the chessboard. “You, sit,” he said. He looked across the room at his valet and added, “You, out.” The man bowed and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  “What happened?” the Duke barked at Sophia.

  “May I speak plainly, Your Grace, or do you prefer ladylike circumlocutions?”

  “I get enough of those from my daughter. Just tell me what’s going on. How did my granddaughter’s bed happen to catch on fire?”

  Sophia sighed. “Oh, El did that.”

  “She deliberately set her own bed on fire while she was in it?”

  Sophia nodded.

  “In heaven’s name, why?”

  “She had just discovered she had become a woman, and she doesn’t want to be one.”

  “So she tried to kill herself?” the Duke asked incredulously.

  Sophia considered that possibility as well as the damage she had sensed inside El’s body, then shook her head. “I don’t believe she was thinking straight, but she appears to have been trying to give herself a hysterectomy.” At his blank look, she added, “A surgical operation that removes a woman’s womb.”

  “What? But that would ruin her chances of making a good marriage!”

  “Why on earth would you think that she wants to make a good marriage—or any marriage at all? She’s a person, and ever since her mother got home,
she’s been treated like breeding stock!”

  “I know her father dressed her as a boy, but surely she knew she was a girl.”

  “No, she wasn’t just dressed as a boy; she was raised as a boy. Tell me, Your Grace, do you like doing embroidery?”

  “Of course not! I don’t even know how—boys aren’t taught it. It’s for girls.”

  “Precisely. Eleanora doesn’t know how to embroider, either, and she has no desire to learn. What your daughter is insisting upon is essentially forcing a twelve-year-old boy to become a girl—no, worse, a young lady. And while she has a girl’s body, she has a boy’s experiences. Boys are expected to grow up to be somebody, while girls are expected to marry and become an adjunct to their husbands. Your daughter is asking Eleanora to become less than she is now, and Eleanora knows it. This would be difficult for anyone, but for a Fire Master, it’s a potentially fatal disaster.”

  “Particularly when she’s just coming into her magic,” the Duke said grimly.

  Sophia looked at him in horror. “Didn’t anyone from London contact you about this situation?”

  “I’m afraid they’ve pretty much ignored me since my legs gave out and I retired to the country.”

  “Merciful heavens,” Sophia breathed, almost in prayer. “The White Lodge trained me for this assignment and sent me here precisely because at least a few of them have enough imagination to predict something like this. El is not ‘just coming into her magic.’ El is a trained Fire Master; her father has been working with her, both magically and in his medical practice, for several years. She’s stronger than I am and possibly stronger than you are. The old boys’ club is furious with your son-in-law because they were planning to bring her into the lodge in the next few years. Now they can’t—unless they decide to admit women. They sent me here to be her governess because they’re terrified that she’s losing control of her magic due to the major changes in her life.”

  The Duke’s jaw tightened. “They sent an unstable Fire Master into my home and didn’t do me the courtesy of informing me?”