The Gates of Sleep em-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  Well, at least it will be winter by the time he gets to them. If she was going to have to wear the heavy medieval robes that Uncle Sebastian had squirreled away, at least it would be while it was cold enough that the weight of the woolens and velvets would be welcome rather than stifling.

  At the moment, it was the Wife of Bath’s Tale that was the subject of her study, and she had the feeling that she would get a better explanation of some of it from Aunt Margherita than from the uncle that had assigned it to her. Uncle Sebastian was not quite as broad-minded as he thought he was.

  Or perhaps he just wasn’t as broad-minded with regard to his “niece” as he would have been around a young woman who wasn’t under his guardianship. With Marina, he tended to break out in odd spots of ultra-middle-class stuffiness from time to time.

  She curled herself up in the window seat, a cushion at her back, with her Chaucer in one hand, a copybook on her knee, and a pencil at the ready. If one absolutely had to study on such a lovely late afternoon, this was certainly the only way to do so.

  Chapter Three

  SEBASTIAN had gone down to pick up the post in the village; no one else wanted to venture out into the October rain and leave the warmth of the cottage. Marina was supposed to be reading Shakespeare—her uncle was making good his threat to paint her as Kate the Shrew and wanted her to become familiar with the part—but she sat at the window of the parlor and stared out at the rain instead. Winter had definitely arrived, with Halloween a good three weeks away. A steady, chilling rain dripped down through leafless branches onto grass gone sere and brown-edged. Even the evergreens and the few plants that kept their leaves throughout the winter looked dark and dismal. The air outside smelled of wet leaves; inside the foyer where the coats hung, the odor of wet wool hung in a miasma of perpetual damp. Only in the foyer, however. Scented candles burned throughout the house, adding the perfume of honey and cinnamon to counteract the faint chemical smell of the oil lamps, and someone was always baking something in the kitchen that formed a pleasant counter to the wet wool.

  And yet, for Marina at least, the weather wasn’t entirely depressing. Water, life-giving, life-bearing water was all around her.

  If the air smelled only dank to the others, for her there was an undercurrent of potential. She sensed the currents of faint power that followed each drop of rain, she tasted it, like green tea in the back of her throat, and stirred restlessly, feeling as if there ought to be something she should do with that power.

  She heard the door open and shut in the entranceway, and Uncle Sebastian shake out his raincape before hanging it up. He went straight to the kitchen, though, so there must not have been any mail for her.

  She didn’t expect any; her mother didn’t write as often in winter. It was probably a great deal more difficult to get letters out from Italy than it was to send them from Oakhurst in England.

  Italy. She wondered what it would be like to spend a winter somewhere that wasn’t cold, wet, and gray. Was Tuscany by the sea?

  I’d love to visit the sea.

  “I don’t suppose you remember Elizabeth Hastings, do you?” asked Margherita from the door behind her. She turned; her aunt had a letter in her hand, her dark hair bound up on the top of her head in a loose knot, a smudge of flour on her nose.

  “Vaguely. She’s that Water magician with the title, isn’t she?” Marina closed the volume in her lap with another stirring of interest. “The one with the terribly—terribly correct husband?”

  Margherita laughed, her eyes merry. “The only one with a ‘terribly—terribly correct husband’ that has ever visited us, yes. She’s coming to spend several weeks with us—to teach you.”

  Now she had Marina’s complete interest. “Me? What—oh! Water magic?” Interest turned to excitement, and a thrill of anticipation.

  Margherita laughed. “She certainly isn’t going to teach you etiquette! You’re more than ready for a teacher of your own Element, and it’s time you got one.”

  The exercises that Uncle Thomas had been setting her had been nothing but repetitions of the same old things for some time now. Marina hadn’t wanted to say anything, but she had been feeling frustrated, bored, and stale. Frustrated, because she had the feeling that there was so much that was just beyond her grasp—bored and stale because she was so tired of repeating the same old things. “But—what about Mrs. Hasting’s family?” she asked, not entirely willing to believe that someone with a “terribly—terribly correct husband” would be able to get away for more than a day or two at most, and certainly not alone.

  “Elizabeth’s sons are at Oxford, her daughter is married, and her husband wants to take up some invitations for the hunting and fishing seasons in Scotland this year,” Margherita said, with a smile at Marina’s growing excitement. “And when the hunting season is over, he intends to go straight on to London for his Parliament duties. Elizabeth hates hunting and detests London; she’ll be staying with us up until Christmas.”

  “That’s wonderful!” Marina could not contain herself any more; she leapt to her feet, catching the book of Shakespeare at the last moment before it tumbled to the floor out of her lap. “When is she coming?”

  “By the train on Wednesday, and I’ll need your help in getting the guest room ready for her—”

  But Marina was running as soon as she realized the guest would arrive the next day. She was already halfway up the stairs, her aunt’s laughter following her, by the time Margherita had reached the words “guest room.”

  Once, all the rooms in this old farm house had led one into the other, like the ones on the first floor. But at some point, perhaps around the time that Jane Austen was writing Emma, the walls had been knocked down in the second story and replaced with an arrangement of a hall with smaller bedrooms along it. And about when Victoria first took the throne, one of the smallest bedrooms had been made into a bathroom. True, hot water still had to be carted laboriously up the stairs for a bath, but at least they weren’t bathing in hip baths in front of the fire, and there was a water-closet. So their guest wouldn’t be totally horrified by the amenities, or lack of them.

  It would be horrible if she left after a week because she couldn’t have a decent wash-up.

  She opened the linen-closet at the end of the hall and took a deep breath of the lavender-scented air before taking out sheets for the bed in the warmest of the guest rooms. This was the one directly across from her own, and like hers, right over the kitchen. The view wasn’t as fine, but in winter there wasn’t a great deal of view anyway, and the cozy warmth coming up from the kitchen, faintly scented with whatever Margherita was baking, made up for the lack of view. Where her room was a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy, this room was altogether conventional, with rose-vine wallpaper, chintz curtains and cushions, and a brass-framed bed. The rest of the furniture, however, was made by Thomas, and looked just a little odd within the confines of such a conventional room. Woolen blankets woven by Margherita in times when she hadn’t any grand commissions to fulfill were in an asymmetrical chest at the foot of the bed, and the visitor would probably need them.

  She left the folded sheets on the bed and flung the single window open just long enough to air the room out. It didn’t take long, since Margherita never really let the guest rooms get stale and stuffy. It also didn’t take long for the room to get nasty and cold, so she closed it again pretty quickly.

  Fire. I need a fire. There was no point in trying to kindle one herself the way that Uncle Sebastian did. She was eager, almost embarrassingly eager, for their visitor to feel welcome. When Elizabeth Hastings arrived, it should be to find a room warmed and waiting, as if this house was her home.

  Marina solved the problem of the fire with a shovelful of coals from her own little fire, laid onto the waiting kindling in the fireplace of the guest room. She might not be able to kindle a fire, but she was rather proud of her ability to lay one. Once the fire was going and the chill was off the air, she made the bed up with the lavender-scented sheets a
nd warm blankets, dusted everything thoroughly, and set out towels and everything else a guest might want. She made sure that the lamp on the bedside table was full of oil and the wick trimmed, and that there was a box of lucifer matches there as well.

  She looked around the room, and sighed. No flowers. It was just too late for them—and too late to gather a few branches with fiery autumn leaves on them. The bouquet of dried straw flowers and fragrant herbs on the mantel would just have to do.

  She heard footsteps in the hall outside, and wasn’t surprised when her Aunt pushed the door open. “You haven’t left me anything to do,” Margherita observed, with an approving glance around the room.

  “Well, really, there wasn’t that much work needed to be done; that tramping poet was only here last week.” The “tramping poet” was a rarity, a complete stranger to the household, who’d arrived on foot, in boots and rucksack, letter of recommendation in hand from one of their painterly friends. He’d taken it in his head to “do the Wordsworth”—that is, to walk about the countryside for a while in search of inspiration, and finding that the Lake District was overrun with sightseers and hearty fresh-air types, he’d elected to try Devon and Cornwall instead. He was on the last leg of his journey and had been remarkably cheerful about being soaked with cold rain. A good guest as well, he’d made himself useful chopping wood and in various other small ways, had not overstayed his welcome, and even proved to be very amusing in conversation.

  “You can’t possibly be a successful poet,” Sebastian had accused him. “You’re altogether too good-natured, and nothing near morose enough.”

  “Sadly,” he’d admitted (not sadly at all), “I’m not. I do have a facile touch for rhyme, but I can’t seem to generate the proper level of anguish. I’ve come to that conclusion myself, actually. I intend to go back to London and fling myself at one of those jolly new advertising firms. I’ll pummel ‘em with couplets until they take me in and pay me.” He’d struck an heroic attitude. “Hark! the Herald Angels sing, ‘Pierson’s Pills are just the thing!’ If your tummy’s fluttery, hie thee to Bert’s Buttery! Nerves all gone and limp as wax? Seek the aid of brave Nutrax!”

  Laughing, Margherita and Marina had thrown cushions at him to make him stop. “Well!” he’d said, when he’d sat back down and they’d collected the cushions again, “If I’m doomed to be a jangling little couplet-rhymer, I’d rather be honest and sell butter with my work than pretend I’m a genius crushed by the failure of the world to understand me.”

  “I hope he comes back some time,” Marina said, referring to that previous guest.

  “If he does, he’ll be welcome,” Margherita said firmly. “But not while Elizabeth is here. It would be very awkward, having a stranger about while she was trying to teach you Water Magic. Altogether too likely that he’d see something he shouldn’t.”

  Marina nodded. It wasn’t often that someone who wasn’t naturally a mage actually saw any of the things that mages took for granted—that was part of the Gift of the Sight, after all, and if you didn’t have that Gift, well, you couldn’t See what mages Saw. But sometimes accidents happened, and someone with only a touch of the Sight got a glimpse of something he shouldn’t. And if magic made some change in the physical world, well, that could be witnessed as well, whether or not the witness had the Sight.

  “Now that the room’s been put to rights, come down with me and we’ll bake some apple pies,” Margherita continued, linking her arm with Marina’s. “There’s nothing better to put a fine scent on the house than apple pies.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Marina laughed. “And besides, if you give me something to do, I won’t be fretting my head off.”

  “Teh. You’re getting far too clever for me. It’s a good thing Elizabeth is coming; at least there will be someone here now whose habits you don’t know inside and out.”

  That’s a lovely thought. One of the worst things about winter corning on was that she was bound to be mostly confined to Blackbird Cottage with people she knew all too well—loved, surely, but still, she could practically predict their every thought and action. But this winter would be different. Oh, I hope it’s very, very different!

  As usual, it was raining. Uncle Sebastian had intended to go to the railway station in the pony cart, but Aunt Margherita had stamped her foot and decreed that under no circumstances was he going to subject poor Elizabeth to an open cart in the pouring rain. So he had arranged to borrow the parson’s creaky old-fashioned carriage, which meant that there was enough room for Marina to go along.

  Marina peered anxiously out the little window next to the door; the old glass made the view a bit wavery, and the rain didn’t help. Finally Sebastian arrived with the carriage, an old black contraption with a high, arched roof like a mail coach, that looked as if it had carried parsons’ families since the time of the third George. The parson’s horse, the unlikely offspring of one of the gentry’s hunters and a farmer’s mare, a beast of indeterminate color rendered even more indeterminate by his wet hide, looked completely indifferent to the downpour. The same could not be said of Sebastian perched up on the block where he huddled in the non-existent coachman’s stead, wrapped up in a huge mackintosh with a shapeless broad-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes.

  He shouldn’t complain; he’d have been just as wet on the pony cart.

  Marina, her rain cape pulled around her and her aunt’s umbrella over her head, made a dash across the farmyard for the carriage and clambered inside. The parson’s predecessor had long ago replaced the horsehair-covered seats with more practical but far less comfortable wooden ones, and as the coach rolled away, she had to hang on with both hands to guard herself from sliding across the polished slats during the bumps and jounces. When the coach was loaded with the parson’s numerous family, the fact that they were all wedged together against the sides of the vehicle meant no one got thrown against the sides, but with just Marina in here, she could be thrown to the floor if she didn’t hang on for dear life. The coach creaked and complained, rocking from side to side, the rain drummed on the roof, and water dripped inside the six small windows, for the curtains had long since been removed in the interest of economy as well.

  Poor Elizabeth! She’ll be bounced to bits before we get home!

  The station wasn’t far, but long before they arrived, Marina had decided that their guest would have been far more comfortable in the pony cart, rain or no rain.

  But then I wouldn’t have been able to come meet her.

  She’d thought that she’d be on fire with impatience, that the trip would be interminable. It wasn’t, but only because she was so busy holding on, and trying to keep from being bounced around like an India rubber ball from one side of the coach to the other. It came as a welcome surprise to get a glimpse, through the curtain of rain, of the railway station ahead of them, and realize that they were almost there. She didn’t even wait for the coach to stop moving once they reached the station; she flew out quite as if she’d been launched from the door, dashing across the rain-slicked pavement of the platform, leaving her uncle to tie up the horse and follow her.

  She reached the other side of the station and peered down the track, and saw the welcome plume of smoke from the engine in the distance, rising above the trees. As Sebastian joined her on the platform, the train itself came into view, its warning whistle carrying through the rain. Marina remembered not to bounce with impatience—she wasn’t a child anymore—but she clutched the handle of the umbrella tightly with both hands, and her uncle smiled sideways at her.

  It seemed that she was not the only one impatient for the train to pull into the station. There was one particular head that kept peeking out of one compartment window—and the very instant that the train halted, that compartment door flew open, and a trim figure in emerald wool shot out of it, heedless of the rain.

  “Sebastian!” Elizabeth Hastings gave Uncle Sebastian quite as hearty an embrace as if he had been her brother, and Marina hastened to get the um
brella over her before the ostrich plumes on her neat little hat got soaked. “Good gad, this appalling weather! Margherita warned me, and I didn’t believe her! Hello Marina!” She detached herself from Sebastian and gave Marina just as enthusiastic a hug, with a kiss on her cheek for good measure.

  “You didn’t believe her about what?” Marina asked.

  “Oh, the rain, of course. She swore that in winter, this part of Devon got more rain than the whole of England put together, and I swear to you that it was bright and sunny a few miles back!” She took the umbrella from Marina, as a porter hauled her baggage out of the baggage car onto the platform behind them. “Not a cloud, not a sign of a cloud, until we topped a hill, and then—like a wall, it was, and just a wall of clouds, and most of them pouring rain!”

  “That’s what you get for not believing Margherita when she tells you something,” Sebastian said, with laughter in his eyes. “You should know the Earth Masters by now! They don’t feel it necessary to exercise their imagination unless it’s in the service of art. When they tell you something, it’s unembroidered fact!”

  “Oh, you tiresome thing, I told you that it was my own fault!” She shook her head, and little drops of rain flew from the ornaments on her bonnet as she laughed. “Come along with you, let’s get my things into whatever contraption you’ve commandeered to get me, and get ourselves home, before we all drown!”

  “You’re a Water Master,” Sebastian teased, a grin creasing his face. “You can’t drown. Now me, if I don’t find myself drowning in this antagonistic Element, I’m probably going to perish of melancholy.”

  But as the train pulled away from the station with a whistle and a great rush of steam and creaking of metal, he rounded up the stationmaster’s boys and got Elizabeth’s baggage fastened up behind and atop the coach. There was quite a bit of it; three trunks and some assorted boxes. But she was staying for weeks, after all, and given the weather, couldn’t count on regular washdays.