The Bartered Brides (Elemental Masters)

by Mercedes Lackey

  The old woman snatched the plate and cup away and turned back to the sink. Since there didn’t seem to be anything she could do here, she went back upstairs to see what the other rooms were.

  The first one she found was obviously where Jerry had spent the night. The bed had been made, but there was a man’s dressing gown flung over a chair, there was shaving stuff on the washstand, and when she peeked in the wardrobe, it was full of men’s clothing.

  The second room held a bed with no bedclothes on it, but three wardrobes and two chests. When she looked in the first, it was full of skirts and waists and dresses, all white. One of the chests was full of underthings. She perked up at that. She knew how to alter clothing. Some of these might already fit her, and if they didn’t, once she could find a sewing kit she could have more than one set of clothes! She didn’t mind wearing white. In fact, she liked it. It made her feel . . . elegant. Like someone who didn’t have to work or worry about getting dirty. She helped herself to two sets of drawers that looked like they’d fit, two sets of stockings, and two chemises. That way she could have one set on, one set clean, and one set drying all the time. She could wash the dirty ones up in the basin in the morning. She went back to her room and carefully put the stockings and underthings in the drawer of the wardrobe. Then she went back to her explorations.

  The fourth room was storage too, but of things like bed linens and curtains and rugs.

  There was a door that must lead to a staircase going to the third floor, but it was locked, so she went back downstairs to discover what was in the rest of the house.

  When she went out of the kitchen into the passage, she realized there was a second staircase leading up from the passage. That must have been the one that was blocked off and locked on the second floor. She went up it, only to discover another locked door on the landing, so she went back down again, disappointed.

  There were three doors off the passage itself. The nearest to the kitchen had a door that was slightly ajar. She peeked inside. The wizened maid was on her hands and knees, cleaning the rug in what looked like a parlor, so Mary just peeked in the door, and quickly went on to the next. That one was . . . disappointing. There was nothing in the room but a chair and a lot of books. She went on to the room nearest the street.

  That was better. This was how she imagined rich people lived, with a room like this, carpets on the floor, overstuffed furniture, and crowded full of interesting things to look at. Glass-fronted cabinets, display domes on tables, shelves, all crammed with things.

  And . . . these things all belonged to her husband! He was richer than anyone she had ever seen in her life. No wonder he had lied to Pa about going to Canada. If Pa ever saw all of this, Jerry would never be rid of him, always coming around looking for money.

  The things in this room were a funny lot enough, all right. Under the glass domes were monstrous little preserved creatures, looking very alive, posed in the act of eating other monstrous little creatures. Were these insects? Sea-life? Something else? She couldn’t tell. On the shelves were ranged crystals and odd little sculptures, some of which made her feel very queer indeed, and what looked like tiny models of buildings, and medallions with strange writing, and many more things of that sort. The crystals in particular attracted her; she kept picking them up and taking them over to the window to hold them up to the light and see them sparkle, or discover their colors. For some reason, she didn’t like to touch the medallions. And the sculptures—well they all seemed remarkably ugly, and she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want them around.

  Still, they were fascinating to look at.

  Finally she picked one up and peered closely at it. It looked a little like a human with a goat-head. And as she held it, it warmed to her touch—

  —it moved in her hand!

  With a squeal she dropped it, then got to her hands and knees in a panic, afraid she’d dropped and broken it. But it had fallen on the carpet and it was fine.

  Scolding herself for being silly, she picked it up and put it quickly back on the shelf, and rubbed her hand against the arm of one of the chairs to take away the strange feeling she’d gotten when she touched it.

  She was disappointed to discover that the glass-fronted cabinets were all locked, though they were full of things she wanted to pick up and peer at and play with. Jars and jars of seashells, polished stones, and different colored sands. Astonishing-looking insects mounted on framed boards. More jars full of clear liquid in which odd things floated. Tiny, beautiful little painted and glazed jars, and jars made of stone of every color, and vials of colored glass. And jewelry! All of it old and strange; necklets and necklaces, bracelets, rings, even what looked like two crowns! She wanted badly to take those out and try them on. She began to search the room for a key to the cabinet holding the jewelry, but in vain, and as she went back to the cabinet to stare at it all with longing, she heard a step at the door to the room and turned.

  The maid stood there, glaring. “Lunch on table,” she rasped, and turned and left.

  Mary had thought she couldn’t possibly be hungry after that breakfast, but she was, so she trotted along to the kitchen. The maid was nowhere in sight, but the same food as last night—ham, pickle, onions, cheese, bread and butter, augmented with a glass jar of glistening red jelly—had been laid out with a single place setting.

  Mary helped herself with suppressed glee. Biting into buttered bread spread thickly with sweet red jelly evoked a sensation of such visceral pleasure she shuddered. She had never tasted anything like that. In all her life she’d gotten a “sweetie” three times, all on memorable occasions; once a bit of barley-sugar at a church parish Christmas dinner for the parish children, once a peppermint a more fortunate child had dropped in the street that she had spotted before it got trodden on, and once a piece of licorice from a Salvation Army lady when she’d had a cough that wouldn’t stop. She’d made each last as long as she could, but the sensation of pleasure on sucking on the sweeties had been nothing compared to this. And people ate like this every day!

  She was going to eat like this every day!

  Since there was no one here to stop her, she had a second piece of bread and butter and jelly.

  She washed up afterward at the sink, since her hands were sticky from the jelly. The old lady had finished in the parlor and moved on to the room with the books, so into the parlor she went.

  There were none of the interesting things to look at here that there had been in the sitting room. In fact, this seemed to be a room intended for a man. The furniture was all covered in leather, there was a desk, two chairs at the fire and one behind the desk, a jar filled with what she discovered to be tobacco on the desk, and a rack of pipes beside it. The room smelled like tobacco and smoke, actually. And there were more books.

  She took one down and leafed through it, but the printing was all odd, and there were no pictures. She put it back, then decided to look through the desk.

  The middle drawer was locked. The ones on the right and left side, however, were not. In the top right she found a key that looked as if it would fit those glass cabinets, and in the top left, she found a door key. She picked that up with a tingling sensation of excitement. Would this fit the locked door on the second floor, or the one on the landing?

  She took it, leaving the smaller key for now. The cabinets could wait. She wanted to see the rest of the house. There might be more dresses. There might be toys. She’d looked with longing in at the windows of toy shops, knowing she could never have so much as a ball, much less a doll—and if Jerry wasn’t going to need her to cook or clean, then why shouldn’t she play?

  She thought about trying the door on the landing . . . but the old woman was on this floor and might try to stop her. So instead, after making sure the old woman was still cleaning the parlor (she was), Mary went back upstairs and carefully approached the locked door on the second floor.

  She put the key into the lock and turned it.

  It worked!

&nbs
p; With some vague idea of putting the old woman off the scent, she went back into the bedroom and packed a pillow under the blankets, as if she was taking a nap. Then she went back to the now-unlocked door.

  When she opened the door, she found herself on the landing of a staircase, as she’d thought. There were small, dirty windows in the outside wall at each landing, allowing some dim light to filter in. She closed the door behind herself, and went up the stairs, slowly, and as quietly as she could.

  She half expected another door at the top of the stairs, but there wasn’t one. She found herself in another hall, like the one on the second floor. But this hall only had two rooms on it. Two doors.

  She went to the nearest, put her ear to the crack, and listened.

  Silence.

  Good. That meant Jerry wasn’t in there. He must have gone off to whatever work he did. She put her hand on the handle, and turned it, opening it just the smallest amount. She peeked in through the tiny gap.

  It was dark. She couldn’t see anything.

  She pushed the door open a little more and stepped inside—

  And an iron-hard hand closed about her wrist and yanked her completely in. The door slammed, the hand pulled her tightly into someone’s chest, while another hand clapped a sickly-sweet smelling rag over her mouth and nose. She took in a deep breath to scream, and then a different sort of blackness descended.

  * * *

  She woke. There was light in the room, coming from a single lamp overhead. She was strapped down to a cold metal table, with heavy, wide straps holding her at the ankles, knees, waist, above her breasts, at her wrists, elbows, and a final strap across her forehead. Her mouth had been stuffed full of rags, with another rag tied around her head to hold the rags in place. The metal table wasn’t flat; her heels were significantly higher than her head. If the straps hadn’t been holding her skirt down, her skirt and petticoats would be up over her head. Terror engulfed her, and she started shaking.

  “Curiosity kills the cat,” said Jerry, somewhere in the darkness beyond the pool of light cast by the lamp. “Mind you, I was counting on that curiosity.”

  He’d lost his commonplace accent, she suddenly realized. He sounded educated now. Posh, even. She struggled with her bonds, but they were stout leather straps, and far stronger than anything she could break. She could hardly breathe, she was so frightened.

  He moved into the light. He was wearing . . . something strange. A long black dressing gown? No, this looked more like something a priest in a high-class church would wear, only without the white bit at the collar. Except it had things embroidered on it in dark red thread.

  “Are you still curious, my little wife?” he said, looking down at her impassively, although there was a sneer in his voice. “Don’t you want to know why you’re here? Of course, you didn’t have a choice in what’s been happening to you, after all. I wonder if your mother and father were still sober enough to notice the significant differences from the norm in our wedding ceremony? Probably not. I gave orders for them to have as much gin as they could drink. They should have been seeing double by the time they came upstairs.”

  At this point she couldn’t even think clearly. Her throat was too paralyzed to produce so much as a squeak.

  “Our ceremony bound you to me, little wife, forever. You are obliged to obey me in life—” he reached over his head, and turned up the lamp. “—and in death.”

  The light glinted off a row of bucket-sized glass jars on a shelf a few feet to her left, and now she let out a muffled, strangled shriek.

  Because each of those jars was full of clear liquid, and floating in that liquid, in each jar, was a girl’s head, their hair floating loose like seaweed. Their eyes were wide open and. . . . staring at her.

  Their lips moved.

  She thrashed, or thrashed as much as she could, and tried to scream again. But the restraints held her firmly, and the man who had married her looked down at her with no trace of feelings whatsoever.

  Then he pulled on the pins holding her hair on the top of her head, making no attempt to be gentle. When it was loose, he wrapped it around his left hand, and reached down with his right.

  “Remember,” he said. “You are mine, forever. You obey me forever. You can never leave me.”

  He raised his right hand. He was holding a butcher’s cleaver.

  She froze, unable to think, to move, to make a sound.

  “You are mine, forever,” he repeated. Then he smiled thinly. “Don’t worry. This won’t hurt for long.”

  3

  It was always too quiet in the flat when Suki was away. Even with the windows open and the street noise filtering in, it was too quiet.

  It didn’t help that Sarah was alone in the flat today, while Nan was out with Neville, seeing if they could find Suki’s attacker. Over the past year, Nan had gotten a bit of tutoring from Sherlock on disguises, and now she was able to present herself as quite a believable young man. In that guise, with her own knowledge of the bad back streets and her abilities at self-defense, she could go anywhere. And with Neville following her from above, hopping from roof to roof, she and Sarah were quite confident that she would be safe, especially in daylight.

  In fact, may heaven help anyone who interferes with her. If he’s lucky, she’ll just leave him unconscious in the street. And if she actually finds the perverted wretch that wanted to hurt Suki . . . he’ll wish the police had gotten him instead.

  Sarah doubted they’d actually find anything, especially not if the blackguard had crawled off to some hiding place where his wounds would fester and infect, but they both felt but it was worth going out on the chance that something would turn up.

  Meanwhile Sarah had something of her own to do. Work that didn’t need Nan, only Grey as an assistant; work that only she could do.

  It was not just places that could be haunted. Objects, too, could have a spirit attached to them. This was particularly true of those souls who had no attachment to a particular place, but had a particularly treasured object.

  There were a lot of reasons why a spirit would linger, halfway between the material world and the next. Sometimes, especially in the case of children, they were not aware they had died. Sometimes they left urgent business unfinished.

  Sometimes they feared what awaited them due to their own misdeeds, whether perceived or very real.

  But as a medium, Sarah felt it was her duty to send them onward. In some cases . . . whether they wanted to go or not. So when she and Nan were not actually working a case for Lord Alderscroft or with John and Mary Watson, she hunted out stray souls and did just that.

  She made a habit of scouring pawnshops for haunted objects and buying them, releasing the spirits to move on to the next world. But a few weeks ago, she had come across an anomaly: a very expensive piece of jewelry in a very humble shop.

  It was a haunted locket, quite a good one, in fact, and something of a surprise to come across in a pawnshop, especially at such a low price. She assumed it must have been stolen from the owner in her coffin before burial—or, perhaps, after, since medical students needed bodies to practice on, and corpse thieves were not unknown in London. She had sensed the spirit attached to it and bought it without asking any questions, intending to do as she usually did and send the spirit on. At the time, she had wondered if the reason the price was so low was because the pawnshop owner had encountered the spirit himself and was desperate to be rid of the piece, but in all the time it had been in the drawer of her bedside table, nothing had happened to her.

  Still there definitely was a soul attached that needed release. She was sure of that. And this would be a good time to do it, with Nan out of the house and Suki off at the school.

  Normally she would have waited until nightfall. Sunlight had a powerful effect on spirits. If you tried to invoke one with daylight coming in the windows, you might see it appear for a moment or two, but you would quickly watch it wash away in the light, as if it was a figure made of sugar dropped into
a rushing stream. Spirits just couldn’t hold their form against sunlight. However, if you excluded sunlight from a room, it was perfectly possible to invoke a ghost by day without any such problems.

  Sarah had made heavy pasteboard inserts for the window in her room, and already had thick drapes that would take care of anything leaking around the edges. She lit a small candle—she would need something to see by, but the less light there was, the better, so using the gaslight was not an option. She fitted the inserts into the window, pulled the drapes tightly closed and pinned them in the middle with a wooden clothes-peg, then shut the door and blocked the light coming in from the bottom with a rolled-up mat, while Grey watched with interest from her perch.

  When she was sure she had blocked out as much light as was humanly possible, she got the box containing the locket out of the drawer of her bedside table, opened it, and cradled the locket in her hand, preparing to invoke the ghost.

  Except—she didn’t have to.

  Even as the gold of the locket warmed to her hand, the spirit appeared before her.

  “My goodness,” the young woman said. “I thought you would never call me!” and she smiled.

  Like all ghosts that were able to muster the psychic energy to speak, her voice came as an echoing whisper, barely audible. The ghost herself was a young woman, simply but tastefully dressed in a neat lace waist and long skirt, with her hair done in a chignon on the top of her head. As ghosts always did, she looked like a chalk drawing painted in the air, tinted only faintly here and there with color.

  It was obvious immediately what she had died of—at least to Sarah, who had a great deal of experience in these things. She was thin, with a hollowness to her cheeks that spoke of consumption—although, had her clothing been poorer and the locket gold-washed base metal instead of solid gold, Sarah might have also suspected lead poisoning, as the young women employed to paint china often ingested fatal amounts of lead by licking their brushes to give them good points.