The Wizard of London em-5

by Mercedes Lackey

  Nan could well believe that. And she also had no intention of telling Mem’sab about it.

  But she was going to find out what that shadow lady had been, and why she was at the bridge.

  No one had missed them by the time they got back, and evidently there was no sign of their misadventure clinging to them either. Nan and Sarah stood in the garden doorway for a moment, assessing the mood in the manor, and exchanged a look.

  “Think I’m gonna talk to th‘ kitchen maids,” Nan said thoughtfully. “If there’s gossip about, they’ll know it.”

  “I’m going to see if Robin was right about the Hunt being in books,” was Sarah’s answer. “There are a lot of oddish things in the library here.”

  With a nod, they separated, and Nan ensconced herself, first in the kitchen on the excuse of begging toast and jam and milk, then in the laundry, then in the dairy as the two dairymaids finished churning the butter out of the second milking, and turned the cheeses as they ripened.

  By that time, the bell had rung for dinner, and it was too late to talk to Sarah about what she’d found out. She could tell that Sarah was bursting with news, though, and so was she—

  The news had to wait. After dinner came the nightly chore Mem’sab had set Nan to doing, helping put the littlest ones to bed. And Sarah went to help Tommy catch fireflies—he had a scheme to put enough in a little wire cage he’d made to read under the covers by, but he couldn’t get the wire bars close enough and they kept escaping, much to the delight of the bats that flew in and out of their open windows at night—

  That had been something that had shocked Nan the first time it had happened.

  The children from India were all used to it; the same sort of thing happened in their Indian bungalows all the time. But Nan hadn’t ever even seen a bat before, and the first time one had flitted in the open window and fluttered around, she hadn’t known what it was. A lot of the maids hated them, and shrieked when they were flying around a room, pulling their caps down tight to their heads (because bats allegedly would get tangled in your hair). The bravest of them whacked at the poor little things with brooms, and all of them kept their bedroom windows shut tight all night long. But Mem’sab told the children that sort of behavior was silly, so they kept their own windows open to the night air. The children all rather enjoyed the tiny creatures, and eventually even Nan got to liking the way they swooped around the room, clearing it of insects, then flitting out the window again.

  Tonight the little ones were full of mischief, and each had to be put to bed half a dozen times before they actually stayed in bed. Weary, but relieved, Nan trudged up the stairs to the room she and Sarah shared, to find Sarah, Neville, and Grey already waiting for her. Nan changed into her nightgown and hopped up to sit cross-legged on her own little bed and looked at her friend expectantly.

  Sarah laughed. “You first,” she said.

  Nan coughed, because a great deal of what she had heard was not the sort of thing that you told a “nice” girl like Sarah. Country folk were earthy sorts, and they had no compunction about calling a spade a spade, and not an “earth-turning implement.” The maids had certainly filled Nan’s ears, particularly when the cook was out of earshot.

  “There was a gal down to the village that put on a lot of airs,” she said, heavily editing out a great deal. The whole truth was that this particular young lady was a lot like Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair; she wanted a husband with money who would let her buy whatever pleased her; if she could get one, she wanted a husband with a title too, and she was perfectly willing to use any and every means at her disposal to get it.

  “She set her cap at this feller, this captain, what showed up here at one of them hunting parties,” Nan continued. “Friend of a friend, the maids said, not some’un the master invited himself. Man didn’t make himself real popular; I guess he broke a lot of shooting rules right from the start.” The maids had been vague on that score; they didn’t understand the shooting rules either. What they hadn’t been vague about was that the shooting parties started forming up and leaving without the captain, as the guests tacitly organized themselves to be off when he was busy doing something else. Part of that “something else” had been to flirt with the ladies, and the maids had no doubt that if he’d had his way, there would have been more than just flirting going on. “There weren’t no single ladies at this party, an’ when he made himself unwelcome, he’d take himself down to the pub in the village sometimes, an’ that’s where this gal saw him and decided she was gonna get him.”

  And she hadn’t scrupled as to means either. According to the maids she had brazenly hopped into bed with him practically from the time he first appeared.

  “So she’s canoodling with this feller, an’ wouldn’t you know, next thing he’s caught cheatin’ at cards up here at the party. There’s a big to-do, an’ he disappears in the morning, an’ his friend don’t feel too comfortable here neither, so he leaves early, too, that same afternoon. Gal at village don’t find out about this till they’ve both been gone two days.”

  According to the maids, there had been a “right row” about that, too, complete with the abandoned girl in question storming up to Highleigh, demanding to see the master, claiming the captain had promised to marry her and insisting that the master of Highleigh make it all right.

  Except, of course, she never saw the master. The butler handled it all with an icy calm that intimidated even the girl. He had made it clear to her that the man in question—“no gentleman, young person, I assure you”—was neither a friend nor even a casual acquaintance of the master, and that the master had no idea where the cad was, or even if he had a right to the name and title he had claimed. “She got sent away with a flea in her ear,” the dairymaid had said maliciously. Nan had a feeling there had been some bad blood there…

  “So come Christmas, seems the gal has another problem, an’ by spring, she’s got a baby an’ no husband.”

  The maids had been full of stories of how the girl had tried to seduce her way to a marriage license with anyone at that point, but of course, everyone in the village knew by that time that she had a big belly and nothing to show for it, and not even the stupidest farmhand wanted himself saddled with a child that wasn’t his and a wife that wasn’t inclined to do a bit more work than she had to. She had the baby, and though her family didn’t disown her, they made it clear that she was a living shame to all of them and really ought to show her repentance in quite tangible ways…

  She hadn’t cared for being a housemaid. She hadn’t cared for the fact that the baby was the living badge of her disgrace, not to mention a burden of care that no one would help her with.

  “So the baby disappears, an’ everyone figgers she took it to th’ norphanage or the workhouse and left it there, an’ she gets to tryin’ to find herself a husband again—”

  “But she didn’t take it to the orphanage, did she?” Sarah asked somberly.

  Nan shook her head. “No. ‘Cause after some whiles, she was actin’ pretty peculiar, like she’s got somethin’ weighin’ on ‘er, an kept comin’ back to the river at the bridge. She’d come there in dead of night, an’ just stand there, starin’ at the water. Pretty soon she’s actin’ real strange, askin’ if people can hear a baby cryin’, an’ then before Christmas, she drownded herself. So they reckon she drownded it in the same place she done herself, poor mite.”

  “Real strange” was a gross understatement. She’d been caught once or twice trying to take babies out of cradles when the mothers in question stepped out of their cottages for a moment. She had covered herself in a set of tatty, head-to-toe black veils she found somewhere. And she had all but haunted the bridge. Everyone knew by then that she had murdered her own child, but without a body or a confession it was hard to do anything about her. There was some tentative movement by the village officials to get her sent to an insane asylum, but before anything could be done, she had already killed herself.

  Sarah shivered all over, and her
eyes got a little teary. “Poor baby!” she said finally. “What a nasty, wicked woman.”

  “But it does pretty much account for what we saw,” Nan replied. She felt obscurely sorry for the baby—but in her part of London, so many babies died all the time, that it was hard to get all worked up about one. Even the ones that were wanted died so easily that a mother was likely to bury four for every one she was able to raise. “So. Your turn.”

  Sarah nodded, and her sorrowful expression cleared. “There’s more than one version of the Wild Hunt,” Sarah replied, licking her lips thoughtfully. “I looked through a lot of books and Robin was right, there were several in the library here that talked about legends and magic and things like that. Had you noticed? There are a lot of odd books in that library.”

  Nan scratched her head. “Well,” she said finally, after a moment of consideration, “The feller what owns this house is somebody Mem’sab kind of knows. I don’t reckon he’s one of her toff friends from before she went to Indja. You know, mebbe he’s like one of us, and mebbe that sort of thing runs in the family? So the library’d be full of that kind of books.”

  Sarah nodded. “I think you’re right. In fact, you know I thought it was a bit odd that a house this old wouldn’t have a ghost, but maybe it doesn’t because the family that lives here has always made sure that ghosts moved on.”

  Nan nodded, and hugged her knees to her chest. “I reckon you’re right. So you found some books. What’d they say?”

  “Well, one says that the Wild Hunt is—like Robin’s people.” She lowered her voice to whisper, as if she didn’t like to say the words too loudly. “Elves. The Fair Folk. It says they come out of barrows at night to hunt the mortals that drove them out of their circles and groves. That one made it sound like these were bad Elves, though, and that they hunted people down at night for the fun of it.”

  Nan mulled that one over. “I don’t see how that can be right,” she said judiciously. “ ‘Cause they took that ghost. But Robin did call ‘em, so mebbe it is.”

  “Another couple of books said it was made up of ghosts, people who had lived violent lives and died violent deaths.” Sarah unconsciously pulled her covers a little closer around her. “And some of those books say that they’re trying to make up for what they did by going after bad people. Like they are getting a second chance to keep from going to the Bad Place.”

  She meant hell, Nan knew, though she couldn’t imagine why Sarah wouldn’t just come out and say the word.

  “But some other books say that they’re wicked people who are keeping themselves from going to the Bad Place by hunting down people and scaring them to death or chasing them until they die. And some say they are already from the Bad Place, and it opens up to let them out.” Sarah shook her head. “I just don’t know, because none of those seemed quite right.”

  Nan sucked on her lower lip. “Don’t seem quite right to me neither,” she said at last. “Like somethin’ is missing.”

  “Well, the last book I found said that they weren’t any of those things, it said they were gods.” Now Sarah’s eyes were bright with excitement. “It said the leader was a very old god, the Horned God of the Hunt, from back before the Romans came, and that being Hunted used to be the way they chose their kings and the way they punished criminals. So when he wasn’t being worshipped anymore or making kings, he just went on punishing criminals by Hunting them when he could. The things that ride with him are the souls of those that the Hunt caught.”

  Nan felt a sudden conviction that this was exactly the answer they had been looking for, though she could not have pointed to anything but feelings. “Well, Robin said he was the Oldest Old One, so it stands to reason he could call ‘em,” she said, thinking out loud. “An’ he said that he couldn’t call hell to take that ghost, an’ heaven wouldn’t have ’er, an’ she couldn’t go to that place ’e sent the little girl, but I reckon riding with that Hunt could be as bad as hell.”

  Sarah nodded soberly, her eyes gone very large and solemn. “If the book is right,” she said, “it could be worse. Because you get to see the living world, but you can’t do any of the things you want to do. You’re just stuck riding whenever the Hunter feels like taking the Hunt out.”

  “So what happens to you the rest of the time—”

  “The book didn’t say, except that it called them ‘tormented souls.’ Maybe just being able to see and be in the world you used to live in and never be able to touch it again is bad enough.” Sarah shook her head. “It also said the worst of them get turned into the Hounds, which would probably be horrible.”

  Nan thought about how the Hounds had sounded, and shivered. “I think,” she said aloud, “whatever happened to that ghost, she’s gettin’ what’s comin’ to ‘er now.”

  Sarah took a long, shuddering breath. “I’m glad Robin made us close our eyes,” she said finally. “Some of the books say that just the sight of the Hunt and the Huntsman is enough to drive you mad. Some say that’s not true, but that the Hunt is horrible to look at and is sure to frighten you to where your hair turns white. I’m glad Robin kept us from looking.”

  “Reckon he’d ‘ave let Mem’sab watch,” Nan said judiciously, “But I reckon he figgered we’re too young.”

  “Then I want to be too young for a long, long time,” Sarah said firmly, and got a bow from Neville and a soft “Yes!” from Grey.

  And Nan could not possibly have agreed more.

  13

  THE first experiments had been a success.

  Difficult as it had been to achieve the proper depth of cold to hold the bodies in suspension, Cordelia had succeeded in exchanging the souls of two children.

  She had acquired them from an orphanage, where they had been two of the scant ten percent that survived infancy and emerged into childhood. That had been an interesting visit in and of itself; she had never considered orphanages as a source of her little servants, but since she intended to let these two actually live so that she could continue to switch their souls from time to time, she had decided to create the persona of a fictional housekeeper looking for two little boys to serve as errand runners. Usually it was factories that came recruiting to the orphanages—very few couples were actually interested in adopting these waifs. After all, who would want a child whose mother was probably a whore, or if not, was without a doubt fallen from virtue? Such a child would have her bad blood, and possibly the equally bad blood of some drunken laborer, or good-for-nothing sailor, or—worst of all—a foreigner. No one ever considered, of course, that the fathers of such abandoned children might be their friends, their neighbors, or the sons of the well-to-do…

  Not, of course, that it mattered.

  The director of the place had trotted out the best he had to offer, and she had taken two little boys about eight years old, but small and looking five at most, with thin, half-starved faces and dull, incurious expressions. In height and weight, they were virtually identical. The main difference between them seemed to be that one hummed breathlessly and tunelessly to himself constantly and the other did not. They were not very intelligent and altogether incurious; this, too, was probably the result of being starved all of their lives.

  This was not what the director would have had her believe, but Cordelia knew better, both from scrying on these places from afar in preparation for selecting one, and from the stories children who had run from the orphanages into the street had told her.

  Food was scant, and poor. Generally as little as the directors of the places could get by with. Cordelia suspected that they were pocketing the difference between what they were allotted to feed each child and what they actually used to feed each child. Meat was practically unheard of, the staple diet was oatmeal porridge, thin vegetable soup, and bread. Infants were weaned onto this as soon as possible. The infants in orphanages were generally wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes and laid out on cots, as many as would fit on each cot, so that they looked like tinned sardines. In this orphanage, they were lucky,
their smallclothes were changed twice a day; in many other places, once a day was the rule. They were fed skimmed milk, or the buttermilk left after butter had been churned out of it; this was cheaper, much cheaper, than whole milk. They didn’t cry much; crying took energy, and these infants did not have a great deal of that to spare.

  It didn’t take very much to kill them either. A bit of the croup, a touch of fever, being too near an open window—nine out of every ten died, and were unceremoniously buried without markers in potters’ fields. They had entered the world noisily; they generally left it silently, slipping out of it with a sigh or a final gasp.

  Older children fared little better, though by the time they reached the age of three or four, all but the strongest had been winnowed out. And orphanages would have made fertile ground for Cordelia to hunt for ghostly servants without ever having to kill the children herself, except that these children were either wild creatures or so utterly passive that they made Peggoty look lively by comparison.

  However, with a bit of feeding, perhaps the passive ones could be enlivened to the point of becoming useful. It would be interesting to experiment with these two.

  She had been told their names were “Robert” and “Albert.” Virtually every other boy child in an orphanage was named “Albert,” in homage to the late Prince of Wales. Presumably, this was in an effort to get the children into someone else’s hands by appealing to their patriotism or sentimentality.

  Well, as of this morning, Robert, who was the one that hummed, was silent, and Albert, who had been the silent one, was humming. Proof enough that the transfer had been successful.

  She decided that she would wait to see which of the two developed the stronger personality over the next few days, with proper feeding and access to some second-hand toys and worn picture books she had indifferently purchased from a flea-market stall. Toys were supposed to be educational, and she didn’t want to be bothered with actually sending them to school. That would be the one she would use in the second experiment to displace the spirit of the other. The displaced ghost she would make into her servant if it looked as if there was anything there worth the saving, the other she would feed for a while longer to see how he turned out. Orphanages might well prove to be an additional source of servants, when her own efforts on the streets dried up.