Unnatural Issue

by Mercedes Lackey

  Clearly it was different here. The two of them had their own little beds. Back at the Manor, Prudence and Patience had to share a bed not much bigger than these were.

  Outside, it was just dusk; dim blue light filtered in their window, which Polly left open to the breeze. The pretty muslin curtains fluttered as Susanne turned on her side to watch. Polly was asleep in moments, but Susanne still had too much to think about to get to sleep just yet.

  This place—it was unbelievable. How could she ever have fallen into a situation so perfect? She would have been suspicious of some sort of trap, except that the magic didn’t lie, and this place was—good.

  But above and beyond all that . . . was Charles Kerridge. He was the handsomest man she had ever seen in her life. The way he had immediately sensed her panic and moved to calm it when she first woke to find him looking down on her—

  I’ve never met anyone so handsome or so kind, she thought dreamily. She hadn’t had much time to think about him until now . . . but now that she did, the memory of those mild gray eyes looking down on her was enough to give her shivers. And she knew that she would have taken a far worse position than dairymaid in order to be near him.

  And with that, and vague daydreams of how she could—somehow—gain his attention, she at last fell asleep.

  10

  “SO, the new dairymaid is an Earth magician?” Michael Kerridge asked, buttering his toast as he lifted an eyebrow at Peter and Charles.

  The windows on the garden were wide open, and birds of every description were singing their hearts out. Peter could not help but reflect that this was one of the things that made him—briefly—regret living in London. The part of town where he lived might be genteel, but it could never give him birdsong with toast.

  “It would seem so, oh Pater Familias,” Charles replied. “And very closemouthed she is about it, and herself. She hasn’t come out and declared herself even to young Polly, and Polly hasn’t done anything to hide what witchery she is doing in the dairy.”

  The servants were all being their willing spies on the new girl; it was Polly who had first seen that the girl was helping her own magic along, told Cook, and Cook who had set the others to find out what they could. Peter thought this was an estimable system, one that could be put together only in a place like this, where literally everyone had magic, or something as compelling, in common. Common good, and commonality.

  Alas, it seemed that most people were more interested in conflict than commonality. Especially—

  He wrenched his thoughts away from the increasing tension across the Channel and back to the subject at hand.

  Elizabeth came in on that last. “I can only tell you that Polly told Cook, who told me, that the new girl is helping her, strengthening her spells but not in any way that Polly has actually caught. Under other circumstances I would admire her circumspection, but at the moment it is rather aggravating.” She joined them at the table. “She’s been just as silent on the subject of where she came from before this. I’ve no notion who could have trained her in the first place, although it is entirely possible it could be someone we never encountered, some irascible old hermit who has no use for other people. Earth mages do tend to bury themselves in the countryside. It might even be the old man she claims she was the servant to. But on that subject, she has given no details at all, which makes me begin to doubt this old skinflint hermit ever existed. I don’t doubt that she is a decent young woman,” Elizabeth added hastily. “I merely am concerned that she might be running from something.”

  “Something that might follow her here and cause trouble?” Richard replied with a frown.

  “I’d suggest an abusive husband,” Peter said slowly, “Except that I didn’t catch anything like that about her, and—well, let’s just say I’ve seen girls who’ve been running from that sort of thing before. They tend to be skittish ’round the lads, and this one ain’t. It’s a trust sort of thing. When the fellow you thought you loved turns out to betray you, you rather lose trust in all fellows.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “It could be anything from a debt she can’t pay, being turned out of her home by her parents, losing her parents and having nowhere to go, or running from an unwanted suitor to, well, running from someone really dangerous. And . . .” she hesitated a moment. “It is just barely possible it could be that she encountered the necromancer you are looking for, at least recognized that he was dangerous, and fled. I know that if I were all alone and knew no other magicians, that is what I would do. I would run as fast and as far as my legs would take me.”

  The breeze coming in from the garden seemed, for a moment, to grow colder.

  Peter pursed his lips. “You know, that could be the answer. The necromancer must be working far from others to avoid being uncovered. You don’t have any guesses as to where this girl is from, so she, too, would have to be from some isolated place. As circumspect as she is, she would probably uncover him before he uncovered her. Getting the young woman to confide in us could solve my problem and hers in one go. If we can get her to tell us who and where he is, we can deal with him and protect her at the same time.” He considered this while eating thoughtful bites of buttered toast. “The question is, how to get her to talk.”

  “Polly has tried, according to Cook,” Elizabeth offered. “Cook herself tried. The young lady is remarkably self-contained. Another reason why it is unlikely she has fled from an abusive spouse. Also, Polly says that she has no sign of injuries to her body.”

  “Hmm. That is telling. Of course, a country girl like Polly would have no squeamishness about examining her fellow worker, now would she? And being in the same room, and washing together, it would be difficult to hide such things. Well, it’ll be no use calling her in and questioning her like a Scotland Yard detective,” Peter observed. “That would only ensure she won’t talk. And we can’t befriend her and try to get her to speak in that way.”

  “Certainly not,” Michael agreed. “We’re egalitarian here, but only to a point. Say what you will, Peter, but our sort and hers just do not mix. In the ordinary course of things, we wouldn’t even be aware she exists. She’d just be one of the girls in the dairymaid uniform at the end of the line when we hand out Christmas treats.”

  Peter restrained his wince. But he also wondered . . . he considered Garrick perhaps his best friend. But how did Garrick feel about it? Was there that great a gap between master and servant?

  Well, this was all not to the point. The question was whether or not the young lady herself felt that gap, and as near as he could tell, she did.

  So they would have to deal with this according to her sensibilities. “I wonder . . .” Peter sipped his tea and breathed in the steam. “It could be we’re approachin’ the wrong end of this horse. I wonder if she isn’t the sort of young woman that simply wouldn’t confide in another woman. We’ve decided she ain’t afraid of men. Well, what if a man came along and acted like a friend?”

  They all turned to look at him, in varying degrees of surprise. He shrugged. “I’m the sort that women like to confide it. They think my unprepossessing face and mild manners mean I’m ‘safe,’ and my monocle and Oxford manner mean I’m intelligent.”

  “Well, you can’t befriend her, either,” Charles pointed out. “Your rank is even higher than ours.”

  “Not as myself,” Peter agreed. “But I have a knack for disguise and a positive genius for mimicry.” He cleared his throat, and tried out the accent and idiom he had secretly been practicing ever since he arrived. He had been less than honest with Alderscroft; drop him into any situation where he knew the basic language, and within three weeks he would have the accent and the local vernacular. “How d’ye do. I’m Peter. I know tha’rt Missus Elizabeth, and Marster Michael, and Marster Charles. I come lookin’ for work. An’ I can keep secrets. I’m keepin’ secrets all th’ time. Eh! How could I not?”

  Their eyes got wider and wider with every word in broad Yorkshire he spoke.

  “Good lord,” C
harles said at last. “You’re better than a parrot. That’ll do, lad, that’ll do. What did you think you’d impersonate?

  He’d already thought this out, in case he needed to get even closer to folk than Garrick could. “I noticed you haven’t a gamekeeper—”

  “That’s because we wouldn’t want to put that kind of onerous duty on anyone from among our own people, and there’s no one we trust enough from outside,” Michael told him. “Any of our folks would be getting tremendous pressure to allow them to poach more than we’ll stand for from his friends, and anyone from outside wouldn’t understand the game management system I use where we look the other way a certain amount of the time.”

  He was delighted to hear that. He had no compunction about laying down the law in that manner and was perfectly prepared to handle the inevitable fool that had some notion that the “understandings” would not apply to him. “So, gamekeeper it is. Garrick and I shall hie away, and I’ll return as your new gamekeeper. I very much doubt she’ll remember my phiz from when we found her; I’m eminently forgettable. I assume there’s a gamekeeper’s cottage somewhere about?” At Michael’s nod, he beamed at them. “I believe I shall have Garrick impersonate one of those desperate scholars that goes about collecting every single version of every folk song ever sung. We can make a bachelor nest of your cottage, and he can see to it that we’re snug.”

  “Oh, poor Garrick!” Charles laughed. “You are pitiless, Peter.”

  That sense of rightness he always got when he’d found the correct plan to follow settled in. “Yes, well, it won’t be the first time he’s used that ruse, he’s used to it.” Peter smiled. Garrick was tone-deaf, and it didn’t matter how badly someone sang, Garrick couldn’t tell. The worst part was probably the tedium of getting through the four hundred or so verses of the local version of “Matty Groves.”

  “Well, since the last gamekeeper was married with a swarm of children, it is a very nice cottage,” Elizabeth observed. “One bedroom down, one up. We’ve made sure it was kept up, kept relatively up to date, and kept clean. One never knows when one will need a retreat for a visitor. Quite cozy for the two of you. I’ll send a couple of the maids and one of the boys out to clean it and air it out.”

  “And I shall tell Garrick to make preparations for our immediate departure,” Peter said with satisfaction. “Shall we say, three days time?”

  “Three days will be plenty to ensure that we’ve got the place fit to live in. Should I stock the larder?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Please do. Garrick will remember the luxuries, but I’m not sure he knows the makin’s for soup.” Peter felt a great wave of pleasure coming over him. This was the sort of thing he was best at. This, more than playing at being a painter and running the same spell over and over again, was what he was the best at. Real investigative magic, real detective work, real combat magic.

  “And you do?” Charles laughed. “You? Cook? Keep house?” Peter fixed him with an admonishing glare.

  “I will have you to know that I once lived entirely on my own in a Tuscan goatherd’s hut for an entire month,” he replied with just a touch of acidity. “These fair hands are good for more than just a handshake, limp or vigorous as the occasion calls for. I do not need Garrick to make my toast, thank you very much. Am I allowed to poach?” he added, turning to Michael.

  The elder Kerridge spread his hands wide. “You will be the gamekeeper, who will there be to stop you?”

  “Glorious! There’s some variations on snares I’ve been itching to try.” He couldn’t keep the glee out of his voice, so he didn’t try.

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes, but smiled at him fondly. Evidently she found the fact that he could make soup to be charming. “Honestly, Lord Peter, if I didn’t know better, I would think you were eager to get away from us.”

  “Fortunately, you do know better,” he chided. “I’m just as pleased as a schoolboy at the start of the Long Vac because we’ve finally got something to work with and because getting a nice young lady to talk to me is more in my line than making hideous messes with paint.” He didn’t trouble to hide his self-disgust at the last.

  “Oh, they weren’t that bad,” Charles replied, grinning. “Not that I know anything about art, but they weren’t that bad.”

  Peter shuddered. He was quite the connoisseur of fine art, and what he had been producing had grated on his soul. “They were not that good, either,” he replied. “Thank you, my dear friends, for your generous and varied hospitality. When the Old Lion assigned me to this task, I was at my wits’ end. If it had not been for you, I do not know what I would have done.”

  Michael just waved the thanks away, and Charles laughed. “Thank us when it’s over,” Charles advised. “The girl might prove more stubborn than you think. You might find yourself still living in that cottage at Christmas.”

  The dairy was cool—not too cool, but enough that working hard wasn’t making her sticky. Susanne plunged away at her churn, well into the rhythm of the job, waiting for the changes that would tell her that the butter was starting to come together. She was happily oblivious to anything else around her. It was strange, but for the first time in her life she was comfortable. She was in a place where people took magic in their stride. She knew her place among the servants, rather than being not enough of a servant and not enough of gentry to fit in; she was among people who, if they had their frictions and quarrels among themselves (as who didn’t?), considered themselves to be something of a family and seemed to be prepared to accept her into that family. She was working hard, but she was not overworked.

  Maybe some other girl would have been unhappy here, but until her father had singled her out, she had never really felt like gentry, so she really didn’t feel as if she had come down in the world. If anything, it felt as if she had finally found a place where she belonged.

  Even this, the rhythm of the work under her hands that connected her to the land, to the animals that had given the milk, to her fellows, to the magic that they all worked at—this was completely right.

  So she took in great lungfuls of lovely, fresh air that wasn’t tainted by that faint aura of blight and sorrow, listened to the birds (who wouldn’t come anywhere near the blighted area), and felt whole.

  There was a twinge of guilt—that she was no longer able to “do” for the land around Whitestone Hall. But perhaps faced with her flight, her father would come to his senses and resume his duties. Or perhaps Robin would find someone to take her place. But it was as clear as anything that it simply would not have been possible to remain in that place, not a moment longer, and she was certain had she told Robin what her father’s plans were, he would have been furious.

  But the guilt was easily submerged in the rosy haze that enveloped her whenever she thought about Charles Kerridge.

  If there was one thing that was not utterly perfect, it was that Charles Kerridge was not a fellow servant. Or that she was not anyone he would ever notice, barring a miracle. The fact that he had probably forgotten her right after he sent her to Cook to be given a place did not for one moment keep her from dreaming about him as she fell asleep, or thinking about him whenever she had an idle moment, or trying to get a glimpse of him, wishing that the miracle might occur, that he would turn and look into her eyes and realize—

  She sighed.

  Oh, it was foolish, something right out of a silly romantic story, the kind that was serialized in the papers, and she knew that. She also knew that nothing had ever made her quite so happy as just catching a glimpse of him. Her logical side knew without a doubt he had probably forgotten her the moment he sent her off to Cook; that didn’t matter to the part of her that kept on dreaming. She still went off into a happy daze if she saw him; she could nurse that feeling for hours.

  She’d gone off into a slough of despondence for almost a whole day when she learned he was the only son, and thus the heir to this entire estate. Branwell was . . . just so enormous. You could easily have fit four Whitestone Halls into
it and still had room, and that didn’t even begin to cover all the outbuildings, the Home Farm, and the estate lands. She had been absolutely certain that he must be engaged to some daughter of rank and privilege by now. Had things been normal at Whitestone, she certainly would have been married at his age, and Whitestone wasn’t even a fraction of the size of this place!

  Then, when she discovered he was neither married nor engaged, she had gone off into such transports of joy that she’d had to exert every bit of her self-control not to go dancing around the dairy, which surely would have puzzled poor Polly no end.

  It was foolish of course. Utterly, completely, ridiculously foolish. She was just a squire’s daughter, and, as her father had taken pains to point out, she was utterly uneducated even in the things she should have known, and never mind the things that the girls that Charles was used to being around knew. She had no notion of clothing, or manners, or any of the things that her father seemed to think were important for a properly brought up girl. And when you added in all the sorts of things that she read about in the society news in the London papers—

  Balls? She couldn’t dance. Card parties? She didn’t even know how to play Patience. Tennis, archery, croquet, riding, shuttlecock? Complete mysteries to her. Visiting for high tea? What did you talk about? Politics? Fashion? Gossip about other people in your circles? She was utterly ignorant. She didn’t know how to manage a household of this size, how to address people by their correct titles, how to—

  Well, the list of what she didn’t know how to do was endless.

  She didn’t think that having magic would make up for that ignorance, assuming that the Kerridges themselves actually knew what was going on here. It could all be a gigantic conspiracy on the part of the servants, to keep the knowledge from their masters. Even at Whitestone, the servants had had their conspiracies. Cook gave the skimmed milk and some of the food out the back door to some poor relatives of hers. Martha helped herself to the furnishings and linens in the closed-up rooms to use in her own quarters. Whitestone didn’t have nearly the lands that Branwell did, but everyone poached them. Old John, who took care of the two horses and four cows, ran a little carting trade with the horses and farm cart on the side. So it was not out of the question that the Kerridges had no idea that there was magic going on right under their noses.