The Bartered Brides (Elemental Masters)

by Mercedes Lackey

  “That’s . . . a very good idea,” Sarah replied slowly. “A very good idea indeed.”

  “Of course it is,” Nan replied with a smirk. “I’m the one who had it, after all.”

  8

  Spencer reclined in his very comfortable overstuffed armchair, a glass of excellent brandy in hand. Today had been most satisfactory in every possible way. He had added that pathetic little creature whose name he did not even recall to his collection. The memory of her stricken face still amused him, the expression not unlike that of a rabbit who has suddenly discovered that the wolf that was “protecting” it has finally decided to eat it. One of Moriarty’s minions who rejoiced in the moniker of “Geoff the Elf” had made the salubrious suggestion that “If it’s girls ye want, old Don, what runs th’ Splendid ’otel in Cheapside c’n get ye all the Chinee gels ye want. An’ ’e don’ care wut ’appens to ’em. Just tell ’im yer gonna use ’em up.”

  He was appalled that he had not thought of this before—but then again, his tastes did not run to cheap Chinese whores, and he really had no notion of where to find their procurers until Geoff told him. There would, of course, be the matter of getting them to understand that they were going to be married to him, but that should only require learning a rote phrase or two in Chinese. And what a relief that was going to be! No more hunting in filthy taverns for men willing to sell their daughters, no more coaxing and courting those dreadfully dull wenches from the workhouse! Just a simple transaction: pay the man, convince the girl with a charming demeanor and the right sentence that she was going to be his actual wife, the quick ceremony, and the dispatch. It could all be done in an afternoon.

  And Hughs was coming along well. He was dreaming away at this very moment on what was technically Spencer’s own bed, although Spencer rarely used it himself, which meant he was indifferent about having a stranger in it. Before he had taken to opium to the point of now eating it daily, he had been strong and athletic, and if he left off the drug this moment, he would not have lost much of that strength. He could probably go six months, or even a year at this rate before he was in the shape that the last candidate of Spencer’s choice had been. But of course that would not be necessary. It would not be long now until he had enough brides to provide him with the power to do anything at all that he cared to do, and certainly enough power to ensure that even if Hughs suddenly developed unexpected backbone, Moriarty would be able to force him out of his body and inhabit it.

  Not that he expected this. Hughs now considered him enough of a friend to emote in Spencer’s presence. And oh, what a wet mess Hughs was . . . really. depriving him of a body he got no pleasure out of and was not putting to any good use was doing him a real, genuine favor. He wouldn’t even go to hell for committing suicide, which surely would have been his fate if Spencer hadn’t run into him. How someone who had as many advantages as Hughs had could manage to so thoroughly muck up his life was totally beyond Spencer’s understanding. Literally all he had needed to do was to go into some respectable line, and just dabble in his stupid poetry on the side, and he’d have had a life any man of any sense would envy.

  On the other hand, Hughs’ family was wealthier than Spencer had suspected; no breeding, of course, but quite a bit of manufacturing money—which was why dear Mama could supply her wayward son with enough to live on out of her own pocket. This situation actually had some promise.

  He planned to discuss this with Moriarty this evening, after sundown, when it was easier for the living to enter the spirit plane. Meanwhile, he would watch over Hughs until the opium wore off, then send him home in a hansom driven by one of Moriarty’s minions to ensure he came to no harm. Not Geoff; Geoff would rob his own mother if he thought he could get away with it. No, this was just a reliable cabby who rarely had to do anything more sinister than take someone like Hughs home, though he did keep a cosh in his pocket in case of trouble.

  And meanwhile, he had the company of a good book from his own small library here, and a truly excellent brandy.

  * * *

  “Chinee gels?” said old Don. The man lounged against the front desk of his “hotel,” an establishment in which rooms were rented by the hour rather than by the night. The front looked like every other cheap hotel in Cheapside; faded, paint chipping, sign barely legible. The inside was more of the same. The front desk was little more than a tiny counter with a dim gaslight over it, behind which was a rack of keys. There was no book to sign in. Spencer tried not to show his contempt.

  “Old Don” wore an ill-fitting suit that had never seen the hand of a tailor over a body that bulged beneath it and strained it at the seams, a tie in school colors he had no right to wear, the entire ensemble spotted with grease stains. Beneath this travesty of a suit was a shirt that was indifferently clean. He was clearly half-bald, but had contorted his remaining hair into a bizarre pompadour, so stiff with pomade it looked like an arrangement of brass wire, in an attempt to conceal that fact. He had teeth like a horse, a voice like a mule, and to top it all off, his skin was a strange shade of orange. Spencer suspected him of taking some outré patent medicine in an attempt to maintain his virility, but could not imagine what quack nostrum would have the side effect of coloring someone like a carrot.

  “I was told by Geoff the Elf you could put me in the way of some,” Spencer said casually. Why Geoff went by the moniker of “the Elf,” Spencer had no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he looked like one of St. Nicholas’s helpers—a cheerful, harmless face that had conned many into thinking he was friendly and harmless. Or at least, right up until the moment when Geoff coshed them and left them half-naked and penniless in an alley.

  “Oh, that’d be th’ lad w’ th’ bettin’ shop,” said old Don, casually.

  “No, that’d be the lad with the cosh in his back pocket,” replied Spencer, just as casually. A test, and a stupid one of course. Any undercover policeman or reported would have known the right answer. Then again, old Don certainly was not a man of intellect. He was barely a man who knew how to put two sentences together.

  Having established his bona fides, old Don happily got right down to business. “Fresh or second-’and?” he wanted to know, taking out a stub of a pencil from one of his pockets and a greasy notebook from another. He licked the pencil, a habit Spencer found revolting.

  “Either, it doesn’t matter. But I’ll be using them up,” Spencer replied, with the casual manner of a man buying fresh chickens. Which in a sense, he supposed, he was.

  “’Ow often?” asked Don, noting the fact.

  “Every three days?” he ventured, having no hope that Don could supply girls that often, but giving his most optimistic request anyway.

  “Cain’t do three,” Don declared. “Four’s all roight, though, at least, fer th’ next month. Got three ships due in wi’ cargo, an’ that means a pretty ’igh turnover i’ th’ stews. Arter that, though, cain’t promise.”

  Spencer tried not to show his elation. One month would certainly see the completion of his battery, even if the Chinese proved to be an inferior product. “That will do for a month, and after that, we’ll make another arrangement.” He had to count on the fact that the girls only lasted so long before they faded and he had to release them, but as long as he had a steady supply of replacements, he could keep the battery going indefinitely.

  Don did some more calculation, then flipped the page and wrote a single number on it. He turned the notebook around to display that number to Spencer. It was considerable . . . but the cost was by no means outlandish. When you added up the price to fathers, the price to workhouse supervisors, and all the time wasted in courting the wretched girls, he was going to come out ahead. “Done,” he said,

  “’Arf in advance,” Don said shrewdly. “Then th’ rest on delivery.”

  “Done,” Spencer repeated, taking out his notecase and pulling out the exact amount by feel, without allowing Don to see how much he actually had in there. No point in exciting the blackguard
’s greed to the point where he’d try to hire Geoff the Elf to cosh him and steal the rest of what was in there. Geoff knew what side of his bread was buttered, of course, but he’d demand an equal amount not to cosh Spencer, and that would be tedious as well as expensive.

  He knew he had made the right decision when he saw Don’s eyes light up as he enveloped the money in his undersized hand. “Pleasure doin’ business wi’ ye, gov,” Don said, stuffing the notes into one of his suit pockets. “Be ’ere in two days, I’ll hev th’ fust one for ye.”

  Spencer nodded with satisfaction. Two days should be sufficient to learn enough Chinese for his purposes. Moriarty was an expert in it, which was no surprise given how brilliant the Professor was, and browbeating Spencer into the precise pronunciation of the notoriously difficult language should give the Professor something to do besides concentrate on his rage.

  He had taken no chances on the sort of cabs one could catch in Cheapside; another one of Moriarty’s henchmen was on the box of the one waiting for him as he exited the Splendid. He snorted, observing the sign, whose red and gold had faded to pink and dun. It had better have been named “Squalid.”

  “Home,” he said, climbing in.

  Mrs. Kelly had already gone home, but she had left a note. Dinr in ovin. She had no real reason to linger when he didn’t have a girl in residence, although he had no idea what she did when she wasn’t taking care of his household. Some Earth witchery or other, he supposed. It wasn’t as if she needed to tend to her own house; he’d bound enough brownies and other Earth Elementals to her to clean a palace. And she preferred to do her own cooking, so she didn’t need Elementals for that.

  There might be some way she could be making money from them—he had no idea how, but Kelly was cunning, though not exactly clever. But if there was such a way, he was sure Kelly would find it. That was no matter; Kelly could feather her nest as much as she liked as long as she kept his house clean and his meals on time.

  It was bangers and jacket potatoes, which kept well enough in the warmth of the oven. Supper finished, he decided that he had enough to report that he might as well speak to Moriarty. It had been a good day, after all.

  When he entered his workroom, he felt the despair from his girls. The new one had agitated them all. He smiled with deep satisfaction, as he sensed the power and energy flowing into the bank of obsidian spheres situated in stands beneath the jarred heads. He had hit on obsidian spheres to use as his storage device, and they performed brilliantly. He heard the girls wailing faintly in the depths of his mind.

  Taking a seat facing the table, he uncovered the talisman, and moved himself into the spirit world with the ease of long practice.

  The Professor was waiting for him, looking sinister and somehow spiderlike. “Where have you been?” Moriarty snarled.

  “Doing your work,” he replied mildly. “The poet is coming along nicely. He’s becoming more suicidal every time he emerges from his opium haze, and more eager to return to it. And on that head, I have discovered a bit more about him. His parents are in trade, and have amassed a very tidy fortune. They have few aspirations when it comes to joining Society themselves, but they want the patina of respectability for their children. A good marriage for their daughter, and for their sons, something like the law, medicine, or—” he paused significantly “—a position as a recognized scholar, in some solid, sensible field. A Professor, perhaps, of something eminently respectable. . . .”

  “Such as mathematics, perhaps?” Finally, finally, Moriarty smiled.

  “It occurs to me that, although Professor Moriarty was not even remotely poor, it is going to take you some time to arrange matters so that the funds you once commanded are yours once again in this new body,” he pointed out. “And I do not think that it will take you very long to arrange for academic credentials for your new persona.” He pursed his lips. “I am not certain how one can establish one’s self at a university, say, but Hughs is young, and you would not need to possess a degree yet to fulfill the familial ambitions. Then—bona fides in hand, you can easily make a reconciliation with the father and in no time you will be back in the well-padded familial bosom with access to their money.”

  “It will take some clever work,” the Professor pointed out, but his faint smirk told Spencer that he was already devising plans.

  “It also occurred to me that tragedies can befall the best of families,” he said, lowering his eyelids. “A gas leak . . . a cream soup past its prime . . . the injudicious selection of mushrooms . . . even a terrible street accident. Any of these could leave poor Hughs—that is, you, in sole possession of a considerable fortune.”

  “I do enjoy seeing the seeds of my tutelage blossom in a fine brain,” the Professor purred. “Pray forgive me for doubting you, Spencer.”

  He waved a hand. “Think nothing of it, it is forgotten. But I do have a request to make of you, Professor. I need you to instruct me in Chinese.”

  “Mandarin or Cantonese?” The professor raised an eyebrow.

  He was nonplussed for a moment. “Cantonese, I suppose? I cannot imagine that girls brought in to fill the brothels of Chinatown would speak Mandarin.”

  “You might be surprised. But in general, you would be correct. And I congratulate you on having hit on a faster way to staff the ranks of your brides. I shall teach you both.”

  As he had expected—indeed, hoped—the Professor was an exacting teacher. He learned several things that evening that he had not known before. That Chinese was a language that made use of tone and inflection as well as the sounds of a word. That the slightest change in tone or inflection could entirely change the meaning of a sentence. But by the time the evening was over, even Moriarty was satisfied with how he could say , and “yes.” That should cover all of his needs.

  He had the feeling he was going to hear those phrases ringing through his dreams tonight, although that was not a bad thing. It would mean more practice, and practice in this case was something he could not get too much of.

  He was about to leave the spirit plane, when his brides fell silent for a moment. Since weeping and wailing meant power and energy flowing to his storage spheres, he turned back to glare at them.

  One of them—he never could remember their names, once he had installed them—fixed him with an imploring gaze. “Please,” she begged, her eyes brimming with tears. “Let us’ns go! Please!”

  It was the first time they had directly addressed him; he took that as an extremely positive sign. It meant they were still sane enough to recognize him as the author of their captivity, and able to think enough to assume that he might grant them mercy. Of course, if they were actually thinking rationally, they would know that a man who wooed them and chopped their heads off was not someone with anything like a single particle of mercy in his entire body, but that hardly mattered.

  He smirked. “No,” he said, simply. “And what is more, I am about to make more of you, out of the lowliest of Chinese whores. Filthy, sluttish, ignorant, heathen Chinese peasants. You’ll get to share your chains, and the honor of being my brides with them. You’re all alike to me.”

  As he had assumed, the mere idea of having Chinese girls among them offended even the stupidest and poorest of them, girls who had never even seen a pair of shoes until he’d dressed them for their weddings. The wailing and cursing that ensued was music to his ears, and he left the spirit plane, laughing.

  * * *

  Old Don had his girl, all right, and she had probably been a pretty little thing before someone had beaten her black and blue and left handprints on her throat. She was small, scarcely bigger than a child, and dressed in what he would have termed “pyjamas,” a baggy tunic and trousers of some faded material whose original color he could not discern. But the bruises didn’t matter, and neither did the dull way she looked at him. He paid Don for her—the filthy lout smirked knowingly as Spencer handed over the money—took her by the elbow and led her, stumbling, to the cab. That was where he spoke the first of
his three phrases to her.

  “Wǒyào jià gěi ňi,” he said. I am going to marry you.

  The effect on her was startling. From a dull-eyed, broken-spirited thing she transformed into a creature that was alive with hope and incredulity. A torrent of Chinese burst out of her; he silenced her with a gesture and a stern headshake. But although she did not speak for the rest of the drive, her bruised face kept turning toward him, her expression vibrating between dread and adoration. Now he smiled charmingly at her. He was very good at a charming smile. It was an infinitely useful expression.

  The only conceivable thing that could go wrong would be if one of his neighbors saw him bringing a Chinese girl into his house, particularly in this condition. His neighbors were used to seeing girls turning up. He had explained to one gossipy neighbor some time ago that he was an exacting man, and that his housekeeper was even more so, and servants rarely lasted long in the household. After that, nobody cared; in this part of London, the people who lived in these houses were up-and-coming men with wives kept busy giving them perfect households they could display to superiors or clients. No one cared about the fussy man who was some sort of intellectual, and since Mrs. Kelly made it very clear to the other servants in this neighborhood that she had no time for gossip, there was no back-fence scuttlebutt about him either.

  Two things aided him here; when it was he who was bringing a girl in, he could cast a spell of short duration that caused anyone in its vicinity to look elsewhere for a moment. So to outsiders, the servant turnover did not appear to be unduly high. The other was that most people never really looked at servants, even the ones in their own households. He knew for a fact that there were people who never bothered to learn a cook’s name, always referring to her as merely “Cook,” and addressed all girls as “Mary,” regardless of what their real names were. So for all anyone else knew, the many girls they might have caught a glimpse of were all the same girl.