The Gates of Sleep (30 page)

The girl didn’t react, not even with a wince. Exactly
as if she hadn’t even felt it.

There’s more wrong with her than I thought. There’s
something physically wrong with her. As if it’s not bad enough that she’s
seeing monsters that aren’t there!

She heard a horse trotting briskly along the lane, coming
from the direction in which she’d been riding. Purposeful sounds; whoever
was riding or driving knew where he was going.

Good—maybe that’s help.

A light breeze whipped a strand of hair across her eyes and
chilled her cheeks. She didn’t take her eyes off the girl, though. There
was no telling whether or not the poor thing was going to bolt, or try to, any
moment now. And dressed as she was, if she ran off somewhere and succeeded in
hiding, she wouldn’t last out the night. Not in no more than a nightgown,
dressing gown and slippers.

The hoofbeats stopped; Marina risked a glance to the side
to see who, or what, had arrived.
Even if it isn’t help—surely
if I call out for assistance, whoever it is will help me try to catch her.

A horse and cart waited there, just on Marina’s side
of the next curve in the road. A tall, muscular gentleman, hatless, but wearing
a suit, was walking slowly toward them, looking entirely at the girl. But the
words he spoke, in a casual, cheerful voice, were addressed to Marina.

“Thank you, miss, you’re doing exactly the
right thing. Keep talking to her. Her name is Ellen, and she’s a patient
of mine. I’m Dr. Pike.”

Marina nodded, and crooned to the girl, edging toward her
as Pike approached from the other side. As long as they kept her between them,
she didn’t have a clean escape route.

Marina tried to catch the girl’s eye again. “Ellen.
Ellen, look at me—”

The wandering eye fell on her, briefly. Marina tried to
hold it. “Listen, Ellen, some help has come for you, but you mustn’t
run away. Stay where you are, Ellen, and everything will be all right.”

The newcomer added his voice. “Ellen! Ellen, child,
it’s Doctor Andrew—I’ve come to take you back—”
the man said. Marina risked a longer look at him; he was rather… square.
Square face square jaw, blocky shoulders. He’d have looked intimidating,
if it hadn’t been that his expression, his eyes, were full of kindness
and compassion. He made the “tch-ing” sound one makes to a horse to
get its attention, rounded his shoulders to look less intimidating, and finally
the girl stopped staring at her invisible threat. Her head wavered in a
trembling arc until she was looking at him instead of her hobgoblins. He smiled
with encouragement. “Ellen! I’ve come to take you back, back where
it’s safe!”

Now at this point, Marina was ready for the girl to screech
and attempt to flee. By all rights, that “I’ve come to take you
back” coupled with the appearance of her own doctor should make her
panic. “I’ve come to take you back” was the sign that one was
going to go “back” into captivity. And in Marina’s limited
experience, the doctors of those incarcerated in such places were
not
regarded as saviors by their patients. She braced herself, and prepared to try
to tackle the girl when she attempted to run.

But evidently that was not the case this time.

With a little mew, the girl lurched out of her position
wedged against the roots and stumbled, weeping, straight toward the newcomer.

It was more apparent than ever that there was something
physically wrong with her as she tried to run to him, and could only manage a
shambling parody of the graceful movements she should have had. But the thing
that struck Marina dumb was that the girl did regard her doctor as a sort of
savior.

She tumbled into the doctor’s arms, and hid there,
moaning, as if she was certain that he and he alone could shelter her from
whatever it was she feared.

Marina could only stare, eyebrows raised.
Good gad,
she thought.
Good gad.

As gracefully as she could, Marina got back up to her feet
and walked—slowly, so as not to frighten the girl all over
again—toward the two of them.

The girl hid her face in the doctor’s coat. The
doctor’s attention was fully on his patient; Marina got the distinct
impression that an anarchist could have thrown a bomb at him and at the moment
he would have only batted it absently away. She was impressed all over again by
the manner in which he soothed the girl, exactly as any sensible person would
soothe a small child.

He looked up, finally, as she got within a few feet of the
two of them, and smiled at her without a trace of self-consciousness. “Thank
you for your help, miss,” he said easily, quite as if this sort of thing
happened every day.

She sincerely hoped that was not the case.

“I don’t know how I could have helped you,”
she replied, with a shrug. “All I did was stop when my horse shied, and
try to keep her from running off down the lane. I was afraid that if she found
a stile to get over, she’d be off and hiding, and catch her death.”

“You didn’t ride on and ignore her, you didn’t
rush at her and frighten her further, you actually stopped and got off your
horse, you even went down on your knees in the road and talked to her
carefully. If that’s not helping, I don’t know what is. So thank
you, miss. You did exactly as one of my own people would have done; you couldn’t
have done better than that if I’d trained you myself.” He smiled
warmly at her, with gratitude that was not at all servile. She couldn’t
help smiling back at him, as he wrapped his own coat around the girl. “I’m
Andrew Pike, by the way. Dr. Andrew Pike. I own Briareley Sanitarium just up
the road.”

Now she recognized who and what he was—her mother had
written something about the young doctor the summer before last—how he
had spent every penny he owned to buy old Briareley Hall when it came up for
sale, and as much of the surrounding land as he could afford from young Lord
Creighton, of whom there was gossip of high living in London, and perhaps
gambling debts.

So this was the doctor who had benefited by Lord Creighton’s
folly. His intention—which he had fulfilled within the month of taking
possession—had been to establish his sanatarium for the treatment of
mostly mental ills. He apparently hadn’t been able to afford most of the
farmland, which had been parceled out; he still had the grounds and the
gardens, but that was all that was left of the original estate.

According to her mother, Dr. Pike, unlike too many of his
ilk who established sanitariums as warehouses for the ill and the inconvenient,
actually attempted to cure people entrusted to his care. And it seemed that he
had had some success at curing his patients. Not all, but at least some of the
people put in his hands walked out of his gates prepared to resume their normal
lives after a stint behind his walls.

“I have heard of you, Dr. Pike,” she said, as
these thoughts passed through her mind in an eye blink. “And I have heard
well of you, from my late mother’s letters.” She gave him a look of
speculation, wondering what his reaction was going to be to her identity. “Since
there’s no one here to introduce me, I trust you’ll forgive my
breach of etiquette, even if my aunt wouldn’t. I am Marina Roeswood.”

She watched as recognition and something else passed across
his face. Sympathy, she thought. “Miss Roeswood, of course—may I
express my condolences, then? I did not know your parents beyond a nodding
acquaintance.”

Somehow, she didn’t want his sympathy, or at least,
not on false pretenses. “Then you knew them better than I did, Doctor
Pike,” she said forthrightly, sensing that this man would be better
served with the truth rather than polite fiction. “As you must be aware,
or at least, as you would learn if you make even casual inquiries in the
village, I was raised from infancy by friends of my parents, and I knew them
only through letters. To me, they were no more real than—” She
groped for the appropriate simile.

“—than creations of fiction?” he
suggested, surprising her with his acuity and quick comprehension. “Nevertheless,
Miss Roeswood, as John Donne said in his poem, ‘No man is an island,
complete in himself—’“

“And ‘Every man’s death diminishes me.’
Very true, Dr. Pike, and well put,” she bowed her head slightly in
acknowledgement.

“And I do mourn for them, as I would for any good
folk who were my distant friends.”

But not as much as I mourn to be separated from my aunt
and uncles.
She couldn’t help the involuntary thought; she wondered,
with a pang of the real despair that she couldn’t muster up for her own
parents, how long it would be before she could even get a letter to them.

The girl Ellen made an inarticulate cry of horror, turning
to point at nothing off to the side of the road, and any reply he might have
made was lost as he turned to her. And then came the next surprise.

She watched in astonishment as a glow of golden Earth magic
rose up around him, a soft mist that clung to him and enveloped both him and
his patient. And when she looked
closely,
she was able to make out the
shields layered in a dozen thin skins that enclosed that power cocoonlike about
them.

She felt her mouth dropping open.

What—

Brownie snorted into her hair, startling her. She snapped
her mouth shut before he could notice her reaction.

Good
gad—an Earth Master! Here!
Why had
Alanna never mentioned that the doctor was an Earth Master?

Because she didn’t know?

Had her parents ever even met Dr. Pike face-to-face? She
didn’t recall a mention of such a meeting, if they had. But surely they
would have noticed another Earth Master practicing his magics practically on their
doorstep!

Maybe not.
Those shields were good ones, as good
as anything Elizabeth Hastings was able to create. Maybe better; they were like
thin shells of steel, refined, impeccably crafted. So well-crafted, in fact,
that she hadn’t actually seen them at first.

I’m not sure I’d have seen him raising
power if I wasn’t used to seeing Earth Masters at work.

And Alanna seldom left Oakhurst, except on errands to the
poor of the village. It wasn’t likely she’d have encountered Dr.
Pike on one of those.

She heard more horses approaching, as the girl responded to
the healing power of the Earth energies Doctor Pike poured into her by
sighing—then relaxing, and showing the first evidences of calming.

Another cart, this one slightly larger and drawn by a pair
of shaggy Dartmoor ponies, stopped just behind Dr. Pike’s; and three
people, two men and a woman, carefully got out.

They were perfectly ordinary, and what was more, they didn’t
seem to notice anything different about Dr. Pike as they approached him. If
they had been mages themselves, they would have waited for him to dismiss the
energies he had raised before reaching for the girl—which they did, and
Marina had to stifle a call of warning.

“Wait a moment,” he cautioned, just before
their fingertips touched the outermost shield. “Let me get her a bit
calmer first.”

Let me take this down before you do me an injury, you
mean, Doctor.
But he was as quick to disperse the unused power as he had
been to raise it in the first place, and within moments, his shields had contracted
down to become one with his very skin.

Oooh, that’s a neat trick! I wonder how he does
it?

“Here, Ellen, look who’s come to take you back
home,” he said, carefully putting two fingers under her chin, and turning
the girl’s face toward the attendants.

Once again, although Marina would have expected her to
react with fear, the girl Ellen smiled with relief and actually reached out for
the hands of one of the men and the woman. More than that—she spoke. Real
words, and not animal keening or moans.

“Oh, Diccon, Eleanor—I’m sorry—I’ve
had one of my fits again, haven’t I?” There was sense in her eyes,
and although her hands trembled, her words indicated that whatever had turned
her into a mindless, fear-filled creature had passed for the moment.

“Yes, Miss Ellen,” the man said, sorrowfully. “I’m
afraid you did.

And we was stupid enough to have left you alone with the
door unlocked.”

Her tremulous laugh sounded like it was a short step from a
sob. “Well, don’t do that again! I’m not to be trusted, remember?”

But Doctor Pike patted her shoulder, and said
admonishingly, “It isn’t you that we don’t trust, child. It’s
the demons in your mind.”

Ellen only shook her head, and allowed herself to be
bundled into blankets and a lap robe in the cart and carried off.

Doctor Pike watched them go, then turned to Marina.

“That poor child is one of my charity patients,”
he said, and his voice took on a tinge of repressed anger. “Her cousin
brought her here—the poor thing worked in a pottery factory as a painter,
and she’d been systematically poisoned by the people who make their
wealth off the labor and deaths of girls just like her!”

For a moment, she wondered why he was telling her
this—did he know about Arachne and her manufactories?

But how could he? The villagers didn’t know; they all
thought, when they thought at all, that Arachne must own something like a
woolen mill. Surely Dr. Pike had no idea that she had heard about the dangers
of the potteries from the other side of the argument.

And I’d believe the doctor a hundred times over
before I’d believe Madam.

The doctor continued, the angry words spilling from him as
if they had been long pent up, and only now had been able to find release. “They
use lead-glazes and lead-paints—the glaze powder hangs in clouds of dust
in the air, it gets into their food, they breathe it in, they carry it home
with them on their clothing. And it kills them—but oh, cruelly, Miss
Roeswood, cruelly! Because before it kills them, it makes them
beautiful—you saw her complexion, the fine and delicate figure she has!
The paintresses have a reputation for beauty, and they’ve no lack of
suitors—” He laughed, but there was no humor in the laugh. “Or,
shall we say, men with money willing to spend it on a pretty girl. They might
not be able to afford an opera dancer, or a music hall performer, but they can
afford a paintress, who will be at least as pretty, and cost far less to feed,
since the lead destroys their appetite.”