A Study in Sable

by Mercedes Lackey

  The Railway and Bicycle Hotel was a real hotel built of cream-colored stone and red brick; the biggest lodging place in Sevenoaks, although it was small by London standards, and nothing like the capital’s grand hotels. It was located very near the railway station, which certainly made things easier for all of them. It had two floors of guest rooms over the pub; their rooms were on the second floor. Nan and Suki were established in one room, and the Watsons next door in another. Suki was mightily curious about the lack of a bathroom, but there was an advantage to having been a London street Arab; she was quite well acquainted with, and not offended by, the fact that she was going to have to use a privy in the stable yard.

  Nan let Neville out the window between their beds to scout, settled their belongings in the dresser at the foot of her bed, and established a perch for Neville on her iron bedstead by lashing the tin cups from the carrier to the footposts and spreading newspaper beneath. The maid would probably be astonished, but Lord A was supplying enough money that the maid’s astonishment would be tempered, if not suppressed completely, by a shilling or two.

  Some chicken left over from luncheon and some digestive biscuits broken up would do for Neville’s supper, and there was fresh water in the pitcher for the other cup. And that was assuming he didn’t manage to catch himself some mice while he was out. Nan had long ago convinced him to suppress his instincts and leave baby birds and wild bird eggs alone, but she had given him carte blanche to catch and eat mice.

  Suki immediately set to exploring every bit of the little room, even to the underside of the bed, and was voluble in her astonishment at finding that it had ropes supporting the mattress rather than bedsprings as they had in London.

  It’s like traveling with a monkey, Nan thought with amusement.

  The room itself was just big enough for the two narrow beds, with a scoured wooden floor with a rag rug between them, a dresser, a low table with a bowl and pitcher of water for washing up and a tiny mirror over it, a small table with a candlestick on it between the beds under the window, flowered curtains on the single window that overlooked the main street of Sevenoaks, a metal matchbox fastened above the head of each bed so that one could find matches in the dark, and a framed picture of the Queen on the wall, which was covered in a rather plain wallpaper of yellow and ochre stripes. She suspected that, as the married couple, John and Mary had gotten a much better bedchamber.

  Still, this wasn’t bad. And the air coming in the open window was absolutely delicious. Even Suki finally noticed it and went over to the window to lean out, breathing in huge gulps of it.

  “Wot’s thet loverly smell?” she asked, finally.

  “Flowers of some kind. I’m not good enough at plants to tell you what they are by scent,” Nan admitted. “Roses, probably, though. Everyone in the country seems to grow roses. Are you hungry yet?”

  “Perishin’!” Suki said decidedly.

  “Then let’s go find John and Mary, and we’ll all go down to dinner,” she held out her hand for Suki’s, who scampered away from the window and took it.

  “Why’ve we gotter go down fer dinner?” she asked, as they left their room and tapped on the next door. “Missus ’Orace gives us meals i’ our rooms.”

  “Because we’ll be eating with everyone else here in this hotel, and probably some local people, and travelers that might be staying elsewhere, in that big room downstairs,” Nan explained. “Downstairs is a pub. Like a tavern or a pub in London.”

  “Niver been in no tavern,” Suki observed, just as John opened the door to a room which, as Nan had suspected, was much nicer than the one she shared with Suki. It was at least twice the size, and wallpapered in a much more fashionable pink, cream and green stripes with a pattern of cabbage roses between the stripes. It had at least three braided rugs, a wardrobe, two dressers, a toilet table with a magnificent china bowl and matching pitcher, a huge mirror over the bowl rather than the miserly little book-sized one in their room, an absolutely enormous four-poster bed that looked at least a century old, with a beautiful quilt and plump pillows atop it and bed-curtains around it, three chairs, and a couch. From the thickness of the mattress, Nan also suspected it was a featherbed atop a horsehair mattress, rather than the tufted wool mattresses on the beds in her room. On the walls were more framed prints, all of the Royal Family.

  “Cor!” said Suki, gazing with big eyes at the lofty featherbed.

  “Go jump on it,” Mary said with a twinkle in her eye. Nothing loath, Suki raced across the room and flung herself on the bed, disappearing in an instant.

  “Cor! ’Slike a cloud!” came her muffled voice from somewhere in the center.

  There were also three chairs—they didn’t match in style, but someone, probably whoever did the leatherwork on carriages and furniture hereabouts, had carefully upholstered them in a dusty-rose canvas that matched the sofa and wallpaper. “Are we too early for dinner?” Nan wondered. Suki wasn’t the only one who was hungry.

  “I don’t think so. People keep country hours here,” Mary pointed out. “We can eat and have a walk around the village and get our bearings before bed.”

  The pub appeared to be quite popular; the beer was excellent, the fare was limited, but the serving girl promised them that the main offer changed every night. Tonight was stewed rabbit, and Nan knew enough of country life not to enquire too closely about the origin of the rabbits.

  Suki was uncharacteristically quiet and watched everything around her with big eyes. She was not allowed beer, nor, despite begging, the scrumpy that Nan ordered, but the serving girl did bring her a big tankard of unfermented apple juice. John finished first, had a word with both the landlord and the girl who would be their chambermaid about Neville, and came back.

  “The girl was a little apprehensive about a raven, but when I pressed a couple of shillings into her hand and told her that if he was in the room, all she had to say was ‘Go in the box, Neville’ and he’d go in the carrier, she seemed more at ease. The landlord is going to get the cook to save him chicken offal and meat scraps.” John smiled at Nan, and she grinned back.

  “I couldn’t have arranged better myself. And really, Neville is likely to be out from sunup to sundown, so she probably won’t encounter him.” She looked down at Suki, who was valiantly trying to eat the very last scrapings of her apple tart and cream and blinking sleepily. “Do you want to walk with us, Suki, or go to bed and read?”

  “Read, please,” Suki said with an enormous yawn.

  “Then you may be excused. Leave the window open for Neville, please,” said Mary. She was doing a very good job of pretending to be Suki’s mother, at least in Nan’s estimation.

  Suki climbed off the bench where they were sitting and trotted over to the stairs and up out of sight. “I don’t think she’s going to read for very long,” Nan observed. “We had a long, long day yesterday, and this was another.”

  “I’d be very surprised if she read more than a page,” John said dryly. “Let’s go take a stroll and get our bearings.”

  The village turned out to be surprisingly large; really it qualified as a market town, because it had two markets a week. That was why they had several flourishing hotels; the Royal Oak, the Railway and Bicycle, and the Sennoke—which John said he thought was probably local dialect for Sevenoaks. The walk to the edge of town was quiet and pleasant. It took a bit of walking before John found the spot referenced on his crude little map, drawn from memory by the young mage who had reported the altar in the first place—the spot where the walking path he’d taken began just off one of the main streets.

  By this time, it was dusk. The three of them strolled back, with Neville landing on Nan’s shoulder when they were about halfway back to the hotel.

  “Mice,” said Neville, with satisfaction.

  “I know,” Nan replied. “I can smell them on your breath.”

  Neville gave an indignant quork.r />
  He lifted off just as they reached the hotel, and with a few heavy flaps of his wings, reached the open window and ducked inside.

  Nan bade Mary and John goodnight; they arranged that whoever woke first should wake the others, and she opened the door of the little room to find Suki asleep with her arms wrapped around her book and Neville sitting with one foot up on the foot of her bed.

  “Comfortable? Or should I pad it with a bandage or a towel?” she asked him.

  “Good,” said Neville, and, relieved of his duty to play sentry over Suki, tucked his head under his wing. Nan took the book away from Suki and put it down on the little table between the beds. She changed quickly into her nightdress, blew out the candle, and got into bed. She didn’t expect to fall asleep soon, both because of the strange bed and the strange country sounds coming in the window, but no sooner had she put her head to the pillow than she felt herself drowsing.

  Must . . . have been . . . the scrumpy, she thought. And the next thing she knew it was morning, and Mary Watson was tapping on the bedroom door.

  • • •

  Nan was very glad she had packed sturdy boots for herself and Suki; these country paths, as she knew from her time in Cornwall, were no joke to be hiking over in city shoes. Suki was doing a fine job of keeping up, and Neville performed yeoman’s duty as an aerial scout. Although it was likely thought by people outside the city that Londoners took cabs everywhere, the fact was most people in London did a great deal of walking, and the four of them were no exception.

  Because this was a market town and right on the railway, there were a lot of strangers coming and going. They attracted no attention at all. And a lack of attention was exactly what they wanted. People probably assumed they were going to visit the famous “country house” of Knole, one of the largest houses in the country; the fact that John was carrying a picnic basket packed for them by the staff at the hotel reinforced that. And it was possible that the altar they were seeking lay within the heavily wooded parklands belonging to the house.

  It didn’t take them very long to find the path marked on the rough map that Lord Alderscroft had sent John. At first, they walked mostly through meadows dotted with sheep and a few cattle, with Neville soaring overhead, occasionally uttering a quork to urge them to keep up. The path took a turn between two planted fields, then plunged into a wooded valley. That was where Neville joined them, changing his flight style from gliding above them to short flights along the path, keeping just ahead of them and serving as a sort of scout.

  Suki was enraptured. She had adored the overgrown garden at Hampton Court Palace, but this was her first real experience of woodlands.

  The trees were enormous. Not that Nan was any stranger to enormous trees, but not growing so closely together as these. There was a deep sense of age under the cool of their thick branches. Would Puck appear? Nan thought probably not; he didn’t know John and Mary, and he was likely to be cautious around them. But in addition to hearing and getting glimpses of wildlife under these trees, she was hearing and getting glimpses of the other life in this protected place.

  Here, a rustle and a glimpse of a tiny thing scuttling away from the path, a creature that seemed as much made of twigs and leaves as flesh and blood.

  If Earth Elementals have flesh and blood . . .

  There, a brief flash of eyes and hair, which faded into a tree trunk. The drumming of tiny hooves—a lamb? A kid? Or a faun? A momentary flurry of faint color overhead—that was surely a sylph.

  Suki led, romping along the path, stopping to crouch and look at something in the grass or turning and running backward to make sure they were keeping up. John walked a little ahead of Mary and Nan; Mary kept glancing over at Nan, with a quizzical look on her face.

  “Can you see them?” she asked, finally. “The Elementals, I mean?”

  Nan nodded. “Fauns, dryads, some little gnome-y things, things that fairy-tale books Suki reads call ‘elves,’ although I don’t believe they are using the word correctly. Sylphs, I think. I wouldn’t expect to see Fire Elementals out here, nor Water, unless we happen across a pond or a brook.”

  Mary glanced at Suki, who was bent over and talking to something in the grass. “And now she can see them, too. It must be some sort of spell.”

  “Probably. Although if what Lord Alderscroft has told us about the Great Elementals is true, he could simply have willed the ability to us. Puck also gave Sarah a charm that protects her against harmful ghosts, although at the time he said that even harmful ones don’t have much power, and warned her not to depend on it against anything that wasn’t a ghost.” Nan half-smiled. “That’s why we didn’t use it on the Shadow Beast. That, and we wanted the Shadow Beast to think we were helpless so we could be proper bait.”

  They had been walking along a line of twisted, gnarled, very old trees for some time now. The fact that they were at least twenty-five feet high testified to their age. A line that was as perfectly straight as if someone had planted the trees deliberately. Trees that . . . now that she came to think of it . . . looked all alike.

  She looked over at Mary. “What are these trees?” she asked, waving her hand at the row.

  “Hawthorn,” Mary said. “Why?”

  Hawthorn! She looked at them again. But they were so tall! The hawthorns she had seen in Cornwall hadn’t been nearly this tall; most, in fact, had been hedges. It was the size that had fooled her; this was a line of the “thorns” of “oak, ash, and thorn,” the trees of Puck’s magic, and—yes, sure enough, on the other side of the path were equally ancient oaks and ashes. Those weren’t planted in a straight line, and they were mixed with limes, beeches and yews, but they were certainly there. This meant something. She didn’t know, what, yet, but it surely meant something.

  The stretch of woodland through which they were walking ended abruptly up ahead; Nan could see sunlight beating down on meadow grass up there. Suddenly, she didn’t want this to end. It was so very peaceful, walking beneath these forest giants, birds everywhere, in the close, still, cool air beneath their canopy. This was a fairy-tale forest, and every breath she took in it was scented with magic.

  The path broke out from under the trees into an irregular patch of meadow; their appearance startled a herd of deer, who all looked up at them in alarm and dashed away. The path went on through the meadow and into another patch of younger woodland, but Nan looked uphill and saw that the top of the hill was crowned with oaks just as ancient, if not more ancient, than the patch of forest they had just left. And she knew, although she did not know how she knew, that their goal was there.

  “Up there,” she said, pointing. Neville flew to her shoulder and regarded the oaks, then nodded once. Then he flew off and vanished into the trees, and from somewhere ahead they heard him calling.

  Suki edged closer to her and took her hand. John nodded, and took Mary’s, indicating to her that she should take the lead.

  Neville continued to call at intervals, modulating his voice to his normal quorks as they drew closer to him. There was a dense thicket of younger hawthorn—a hedge almost—around the base of the oaks, and she couldn’t see any way to get in. But she followed the sound of Neville’s voice and, just when she least expected it, she all but stumbled into the gap in the hedge that let them all inside.

  And there was another, moss-grown path, leading off to the right, curving gently between two walls of thick growth. She looked back at John.

  “This fits the description Lord Alderscroft relayed to me,” he replied, and gestured that she should continue to lead.

  The path was barely wide enough for a single person, so Nan put Suki behind her, between herself and Mary Watson, with John Watson bringing up the rear.

  The path seemed to go on, and on—for far longer than it should have, since they never started downhill again, only up. It was John Watson who finally said, “I think we are going in a circle.”


  “Easy enough to tell,” Mary replied, and pulled off the pretty ribbon she wore at her throat instead of a necklace. They all stopped while she tied it to a twig, then they went on, leaving the bright bit of color hanging limply in the still air.

  Nan counted off the paces as they walked. When she got to a hundred, she heard Mary call out. “I see the ribbon! Look through the hedge to the right.”

  At first Nan couldn’t imagine what Mary thought she saw, but then she moved her head, and got the flash of bright blue on the other side of three feet of trees and underbrush.

  “Not a circle then, a spiral,” John grumbled. “I wish Lord Alderscroft’s informant had given us that little detail.”

  “The boy probably had more hair than wit,” Mary muttered. “Wandering about the Downs composing odes to ferns, no doubt.”

  Nan smothered a laugh, and said over her shoulder, “Air Magician?”

  “Head full of air, more like,” John retorted. “Yes, I believe he was Air.”

  Mary laughed aloud. “Sadly, my love, Air Magicians cannot all be as level-headed as I. Well, the stone we are looking for must be at the heart of this spiral, and it is a good way to conceal such a thing. Press on, Nan.”

  Try as she might, Nan could not sense anything sinister at all about this place. On the contrary, it seemed solemn, as if she was walking down an aisle in a little green church.

  She glanced back at Suki, who had been remarkably quiet since they entered this grove, and saw in the child’s face some of the same solemnity that she felt. There was nothing of the smoldering repression Suki sometimes showed when she was being “quieted” against her will. It appeared more as if she felt she was in the presence of something that required silence and attentiveness.

  And then, without warning, the path ended in a clearing.

  It was about twenty feet across and open to the sky, full of flattened grass, as if deer came in here to lie down on a regular basis. In the center was a great stone slab, propped up on four rough-cut stone legs. The rest of the clearing was nothing but grass and flowers, hundreds, thousands, of clover flowers. The still air was full of their faint scent. Nan quickly moved out of the way so the others could enter.