The Gates of Sleep (34 page)

Odd little beggars, Brownies.
Lady Almsley claimed
they must be Hindu or Buddhist, the way they worked like the very devil for
anyone who really, truly deserved the help, and were off like a shot if you
tried to do something to thank them. “Building up good karma, or dogma,
or whatever it is,” Lady Almsley said in her usual charming and
deceptively muddle-headed manner. “I get rather confused with all those
mystical things—but it just quite ruins it for them, steals all of it
away, if you pay them for what they do, or even try to thank them.”

Of course, they couldn’t abide Cold Iron, not the
tiniest particle of it, and he’d had to remove every nail and iron hinge
in the place before they could move in to work. Thank God most of the place was
good Devon stone, and the woodwork had mostly been put together the
old-fashioned way, with wooden pegs instead of nails. Even so, he’d spent
all of his time moving one room ahead of the busy little beggars, pulling nails
and whatnot, and hoping what he took out didn’t mean parts of his new
acquisition were about to come tumbling down on his head.

Hearing what it was he was going to do with it
though—that had pretty much insured that every Brownie not otherwise
occupied on the whole island of Logres turned up to help. One month; that was
all it had taken for the Brownies to do their work. One single month. Two
months of preparation by him just to give them a place to start, and the one
month keeping barely ahead of them. He never would have believed it, if he hadn’t
seen it with his own eyes.

He suspected that they had had help as well; Brownies weren’t
noted for forge-work, and every bit of ironmongery had been replaced with
beautifully crafted bronze and copper. They didn’t do stonework so far as
he knew, but every bit of stone was as good or better than new, now. All the
wet rot and dry rot—gone. Woodwork, floors, ceilings, roof, all repaired.
Every draft, hole and crack, stopped. Chimneys cleaned and mended. Stone and
brickwork retucked (and who had done
that?
Gnomes? Dwarves? Surely not
Kobolds—though not
all
Kobolds were evil-minded and
ill-tempered). Slates replaced, stones made whole, vermin vanished. He’d
asked one of the fauns how they did it, he’d gotten an odd explanation.

“They remind the house of how it was, when it was
new.”
Though how one “reminded” a house of anything,
much less how that could get it repaired, he could not even begin to imagine.
Sometimes the best thing that an Elemental Master could do was to bargain with
the Elementals themselves, then step back and allow them to determine how
something was accomplished.

All right, none of it was major repair, it was all just
little things that would quickly have required major repair if they’d
gone on. The problem was, with a mismatched barn like this one, there were a
great many of those little things; probably why the original owner hadn’t
done anything about them. When the money got tight, it was always the little
bits of repair that got put off and forgotten. Tiny leaks in the roof that
never gave any trouble became gaping holes, missing slates let in hordes of
starlings and daws, cracks widened, wood rotted—then gave way.

Thank heavens I was able to step in before the trickle
of small problems turned into a flood of disaster.

He could never have paid to have it all done in the normal
way, no one could have. Not even one of those American millionaires who seemed
to have pots and pots of money to throw about. It hadn’t been just his
doing; every Earth Master he knew had called in favors, once word had gotten
around of what he was up to.
Bless ‘em, for they’re all going
to be doing their own housekeeping for the next ten years, doubtless.

For that was what Brownies usually did; household repair
was just part of that. Mind, only the most adamantly Luddite of the Earth
Masters still had Brownies about—people who lived in remote cottages
built in the Middle Ages, genuine Scottish crofters, folk on Lewis and Skye and
the hundred tiny islands of the coast. Folk who cooked with copper and bronze
pots and implements, and kept—at most—a single steel knife in the
house, shielded by layers of silk. Now they would be doing their own cleaning
and mending for a time.

And by the time their Brownies returned, they’d
probably had gotten used to having Cold Iron about, and all the conveniences
and improvements that Cold Iron meant, and the Brownies would never come back
to their homes. The price, perhaps, of progress?

Makes one wonder. I cannot even imagine doing without
Cold Iron, steel. Well, think of all the screws and nails, the hinges and bits
and bobs that are absolutely integral to the building alone! Let alone iron
grates in the fireplaces, the stove and implements in the kitchen all the
ironmongery in the furniture! It was only this one time, for this one reason,
that I was able to. And very nearly not even then.
It had been an
exhausting three months, and one he hadn’t been entirely certain he would
survive.

Already there was so much Cold Iron back in the place that
the creatures who were most sensitive couldn’t come within fifty miles.
Small wonder few people saw the Oldest Ones anymore, the ones the Celts had
called the Sidhe; there was no place “safe” for them on the
material plane anywhere near humans.

He drove Pansy around to the stables—ridiculous
thing, room for twenty horses and five or six carriages in the carriage
house—driving her into the cobblestone courtyard in the center of the
carriage house to unharness her, getting her to back up into the gig’s
bay so he wouldn’t have to push it into shelter by hand. Another
advantage to being an Earth Master, his ability to communicate with animals.

With the gig’s shafts resting on the stone floor of
the carriage-bay, he gathered up the long reins so that Pansy wouldn’t
trip on them and walked her to her stall in the stables. He supposed it was
ridiculous for the chief physician—and owner!—of the sanitarium to
be unharnessing and grooming his own horse but—well, there it was, Diccon
was still in the manor, probably looking after some other chore that needed a
strong back, and
he
wasn’t going to let Pansy stand about in
harness, cold and hungry, just because he was “too good” to do a
little manual labor.

And Pansy was a grateful little beast. So grateful that she
cheered him completely out of any lingering annoyance with that arrogant
Reggie
Chamberten.

But how had a girl like that gotten engaged to someone like
him? They were, or seemed to be, totally incompatible personalities. Unless it
was financial need on her part, or on her familys. Stranger things had
happened. Just because one owned a manor, that didn’t mean one was secure
in the bank. Look what had happened to Briareley.

He went in through the kitchen entrance—a good, big
kitchen, and thanks to the Brownies, all he’d had to do was move in the
new cast-iron stove to make it perfect for serving all his patients now, and
the capacity to feed the many, many more he hoped to have one day. Right now,
he had one cook, a good old soul from the village, afraid of nothing and a fine
hand with plain farm fare, who used to cook for the servants here. Red-faced
and a little stout, she still moved as briskly as one of her helpers, and she
was always willing to fix a little something different, delicate, to tempt a
waning appetite among his patients. Helping her were two kitchen maids; a far
cry from the days when there had been a fancy French cook for upstairs, a
pastry cook, and a cook for downstairs and a host of kitchen maids, scullions,
and cleaning staff to serve them.

“Where is Eleanor?” he asked Mrs. Hunter, the
cook.

“She’s still with that poor little Ellen,
Doctor, but Diccon recks the girl will be all right. He’s took up a hot
brick for her bed, and a pot of my good chamomile tea.” Mrs. Hunter
beamed at him; she approved of the fact that he took charity patients along
with the wealthy ones—and she approved of the fact that he was trying to
cure the wealthy ones rather than just warehousing them for the convenience of
their relatives. In fact, Mrs. Hunter approved of just about everything he had
done here, which had made his acceptance by Oakhurst village much smoother than
it would have been otherwise. Not that the folk of Devon were surly or
standoffish, oh, much to the contrary, they were amazingly welcoming of
strangers! During his early days here, when he’d gotten lost on these
banked and hedged lanes time and time again, he’d found over and over
that when he asked for directions people would walk away from what they were
doing to personally escort him to where he needed to go. Astonishing! So much
for the stereotype of the insular and surly cottager.

Not in Devon. In Devon, if one got lost and approached a
cottage, one was more apt to find oneself having to decline the fourth or fifth
cup of hot tea and an offer of an overnight bed rather than finding oneself run
off with a gun and snarling dogs.

But nevertheless, there was a certain proprietary feeling
that villagers had for the titled families of their great houses and stately
homes. They tended to resent interlopers coming in and buying out the families
who had been there since the Conquest. Mrs. Hunter smoothed all that over for
him.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hunter,” he said, and passed
through the kitchen after a deep anticipatory breath redolent of rabbit stew
and fresh bread. That was one good thing about buying this place. It wasn’t
poaching when you set rabbit wires on your own property. It wasn’t
poaching when you had your own man shoot a couple of the red deer that came wandering
down into your back garden. There was some lovely venison hanging in the cold
larder. Frozen, actually, thanks to the cold winter. Every little bit of money
saved was to the good at this point. Money saved on food could go toward the
wages of another hand, or perhaps even having gas laid on. At this point,
electricity was not even to be thought of; there wasn’t an electrified
house in the entire village. Someday, perhaps, the wires would come here. And
just perhaps, by the time they did, he would have the money put away to have
the house wired.

First, though, would come extra wages for extra help.

Because until he could afford to hire another big, strong
fellow like Mrs. Hunter’s son Diccon, he didn’t dare take
potentially dangerous patients.

From the downstairs he took the former servants’
stair upstairs, into the house proper.

What the family hadn’t taken or sold in the way of
furnishings, he had mostly disposed of as being utterly impractical for their
purposes. A pity, but what was the point of having furnishings too fragile to
sit on or too heavy to shift?

Damned if he was going to tear down woodwork or paint
anything over, though—even when the effect was dreadful. Some day,
someone might want to buy this barn and make it a stately home again. Too many
folk didn’t think of that when they purchased one of these places and
then proceeded to cut it up.

Besides, for all I know, the ghosts of long-gone owners
would rise
up against
me if I touched the place with impious hands.
When you were an Elemental Master, such thoughts were not just whimsy; they had
the potential to become fact. Having angry spirits roaming about among people
who were already mentally unbalanced was not a good idea.

Particularly not when those people were among the minority
who were able to see them as clearly as they saw the living.

Andrew had elected to make diverse use of the large rooms
on the first floor. The old dining room was a dining room still, a communal one
for those patients who felt able to leave their rooms or wards. The old library
was a library and sitting room now, with a table for chess and another for
cards; the old music room that overlooked the gardens was now allotted to the
caretakers, where they could go when not on duty for a chat, a cup of tea, or a
game of cards themselves. But the rest of the large rooms were wards for those
patients who need not be segregated from the rest, or who lacked the funds to
pay for a private room, or, like Ellen, were charity cases. Needless to say,
the patients ensconced in the former bedrooms upstairs were the
bread-and-butter of this place.

He checked on the two wards before Ellen’s carefully,
since it was about time for him to make his rounds anyway, but all was quiet.
In the first, there was no one in the four beds at all, for they were all
playing a brisk game of faro for beans in the library. In the second, the
patients were having their naps, for they were children.
Poor babies. Poor,
poor babies.
Children born too sensitive, like Eleanor, or born with the
power of the Elements in them; children born to parents who were perfectly
ordinary, who had no notion of what to do when their offspring saw
things—heard things—that weren’t there. He looked for those
children, actively sought for them, had friends and fellow magicians watching
for them. If he could get them under his care quickly enough, before they
really
were
mad, driven to insanity by the tortures within themselves
and the vile way in which the mentally afflicted were treated, then he could
save them.

If. That was the reason for this place. Because when he
began his practice, he found those for whom he had come too late.

Well, I’m not too late now.
Here were the
results of his rescue-missions, taking naps before dinner in the hush of their
ward. Seven of them, their pinched faces relaxed in sleep, a sleep that, at
last, was no longer full of hideous nightmares. They tended to sleep a lot when
they first arrived here, as if they were making up for all the broken unrest
that had passed for slumber until they arrived here, in sanctuary at last.