The Gates of Sleep (36 page)

I must have been more tired than I thought. I just
looked at these things last night, saw the Queen’s head, and thought they
were coins. Or maybe it was just that I was working by the light of one candle.
Oh, conkers. I’m back where I started.

She sighed. She’d have wept, except that with Madam
and Reggie still gone, she had plenty of things to leaven her disappointment.
She had a real breakfast, Miss Mary Anne had been told that in absence of any
tasks that Madam had left for Marina to do (there were none, since Madam had
left in such a hurry) Marina was going out to ride this morning
and
this afternoon.

Mary Anne sullenly attired her in her riding habit and
left, ostensibly on some other task that she had been assigned. In reality
since no one seemed to have authority over Mary Anne but Madam, that was
unlikely. Marina strongly suspected that the girl would be back here to snoop
as soon as her putative mistress was gone, though. She’d probably go
through every bit of Marina’s belongings while she had the chance.

Well, I’d better dispose of these…
She
put them in the very bottom of her jewel case. If Mary Anne found them, she
would assume that they were further evidence of Marina’s faithful
church-going, which was all to the good; church activities were high on the
list of appropriate things for young ladies of even the highest ranks to do.

A quick note on menu-paper to the cook took care of
luncheon, tea and dinner, and Marina was out into the cold, flinging her cloak
over her shoulders, her hat pinned jauntily on her head at an angle that was
quite out of keeping with one in mourning.

This time, instead of placid old Brownie, Marina asked the
groom to saddle the iron-mouthed hunter Reggie usually rode, an extremely tall
gelding named Beau. She had a notion that he was all right, despite Reggie’s
assertions that “he’s a rum ‘un,” and to make sure she
started off on the best of terms with him, she brought a bread crust smeared in
jam from breakfast. He laid back his ears when he saw the groom approaching
with the saddle, but pricked them forward again when it was Marina, not Reggie,
who approached.

She held out the crust, which he sniffed at, then engulfed
with good appetite, using lips more than teeth. That was a good sign. As he
chewed it, she ventured to scratch his nose. He closed his eyes and leaned into
the caress, then made no fuss about being saddled and bridled. He stood steady
as a rock beside the mounting-block (he was so tall she needed to use one) and
then stepped out smartly when she barely nudged him with a heel. She hadn’t
even got halfway down the drive before figuring out that although his mouth was
insensitive, he neck-reined beautifully. And his manners were impeccable.

“Well, you’re just every inch the gentleman,
aren’t you?” she asked, as his ears swiveled back to catch what she
said. He snorted, quite as if he understood her, and bobbed his head.

He had a silken fast walk, and because his legs were so
long, a surprisingly comfortable trot.
No odds that’s why Reggie
bagged him,
she thought.
I ought to see if I could teach him to “bounce”
on his trot; that’d serve Reggie right.

Ah, but Reggie would probably just take it out on the
horse, which wouldn’t be fair to Beau.

She had a particular goal in mind for this morning, while
Madam was still away; she had gotten Sally to tell her the way to Briareley,
and she was not going to wait for Dr. Pike to decide whether or not he was
going to contact her at the vicarage. She was going to come to
him.
This would probably be her only opportunity to go to Briareley ever; Madam
might be back this very afternoon, and would never permit Marina to make such a
visit. It would be highly improper—they hadn’t been introduced,
Briareley was no longer a place where one might ask for a tour of the house,
she
should not be visiting a man unescorted. The notion of paying a visit to a
sanitarium where there were madmen—well, a daring young man might well
pull such a thing off on a lark, but no woman would even consider such a thing.
Marina was breaking all manner of social rules by doing this.

But this was not a social visit—this was Magician to
Magician, and as such, did not fall under any of the chapters in Marina’s
book of etiquette.

I did look,
though,
she thought whimsically,
I
tried to find even a mention of Magician to Magician protocol But there wasn’t
anything there on the subject. So the “Young Lady’s Compleate Guide
to Manners” isn’t as complete a guide as it claims to be.

The hunter trotted along briskly, while she was engrossed
in thought. Etiquette aside, she needed to be very careful with what she did
and did not say and do around this man. After all, she knew nothing about him,
except that he had a good reputation in the village. Now, that was no bad
thing; the village saw a great deal and gossiped about it widely.

But that didn’t mean that the village saw everything;
the fact that he hadn’t betrayed himself as an Earth Master proved that.

Magicians were only human, as Elizabeth had been at pains
to point out. They could be brave—or cowards. Noble—or petty.
Altruistic—or selfish.

Marina had a long talk with Sally over breakfast; she knew
already that Doctor Pike had more than charity patients—he catered to
ladies of wealth and privilege who suffered from nervous exhaustion. Treatment
for these special patients amounted to a bit of cosseting, flattering attention
to their symptoms, some nostrums, and being left undisturbed—or
pampered—as their whims dictated. And these women were probably paying a
great deal of money to have that much attention given them by a sympathetic,
handsome, young physician. So, whatever else Dr. Pike was, he was clearly willing
to pander to them in order to get those handsome fees.

Not
the altogether altruistic and idealistic
physician he might have seemed from his treatment of the runaway girl.

Caution is in order, I think, in how much I believe
about him. And caution in how much I tell him about myself. But if nothing
else, I
will
make arrangements to help him with that girl.

The hunter’s head bobbed with effort as he climbed a
hill; at a walk, not a trot; this was a steep bit of lane. She could just
imagine the hay-wains laboring up here—the poor horses straining in their
harness as they tried to get themselves and their load up to the top of this
rise. Add to that the rocks and ruts, what a hideous climb it must be.

Or perhaps not; it wasn’t quite wide enough for a
loaded wain, which must have relieved quite a few farm horses over the years.

And then they reached the top; the horse paused for a
breath, and she reined him in, looking around for a moment. And paused,
arrested by the view.

On her left, the hill dropped steeply away from the lane,
giving her an unparalleled view of the countryside. The top of the hedge along
the edge of that field was actually level with her ankle, the slope dropping
off steeply at the very edge of the lane and continuing that way for yards. The
hills and valley spread out below her in a snow-covered panorama, ending in
distant, misty hills, higher than the rest, blue-gray and fading into the
clouds on the horizon, that
might
be the edge of Exmoor.

Now, it was to be admitted that no one traveled from across
the world—or even across England—to see the views of Devon
countryside. There was nothing spectacular here in front of her, no
snow-covered peaks, no wild cliffs and crashing waves, no great canyons,
wilderness valleys. But spectacle was not always what the heart craved,
although the soul might feast on it.
Sometimes you don’t want a
feast. Sometimes you just want a cozy tea in front of the fire.

She rested her eyes on the fields below, irregularly-shaped
patches of white bordered by the dark gray lines of the leafless hedges, like
fuzzy charcoal lines on a pristine sheet of paper. The wavering lines were
sometimes joined, and sometimes broken, by coppices of trees, the nearer
looking exactly like Uncle Sebastian’s pencil-sketches of winter trees,
the farther blurred by distance into patches of gray haze, containing the
occasional green lance-head of a conifer. Some of those white patches of ground
held tiny red-brown cattle, scarcely seeming to move; presumably some held
sheep, although it was difficult to make out the white-on-white blobs at any
distance. Sheep on the high ground, cattle on the low, that was the rule.
Farmhouses rose up out of the snow, shielded Protectively by more trees,
looking for all the world, with their thatched roofs covered in snow, and their
walls of pale cob or gray stone, as if they had grown up out of the landscape.
Thin trails of white smoke rose in the air from chimneys, and in the far
distance, barely discernible, was the village, a set of miniature toy-buildings
identifiable by the square Gothic tower of St. Peter’s rising in their
midst.

There was a faint scent of wood smoke from those far-off
hearth fires; a biting chill to the air that warned of colder winds to come and
a scent of ice that suggested she might want to be indoors by nightfall. The
blazing sun of early morning was gone; muted by high mare’s-tail clouds
with lower, puffier clouds moving in on the wind.

Jackdaws shouted metallically at one another from two
coppices, and a male starling somewhere nearby pretended it was spring with an
outpouring of mimicked song. So had this valley looked for the last two hundred
years. So, probably, would it look for the next hundred, with only minor
additions.

It slumbered now, beneath its coverlet of snow, but Marina
did not need to close her eyes to know how it would look in the spring when it
came to vivid life. Green—green and honey-brown, but mostly
green—would be the colors of the landscape. The vivid green of the fields
would be bisected by the dark-green lines of the hedges; the farmhouses would
disappear altogether behind their screening of trees—or would, at most,
look like mounds of old hay left behind after harvest beneath the graying
thatch. When walls showed at all, the cob would glow with the sunlight, the
stone pick up the same mellow warmth. The hillside fields would be dotted with
the white puffs of sheep, the valley fields holding the red-brown shapes of
cattle moving through the knee-deep grass, heads down, intent on browsing as
though the grass were going to vanish in the next instant. And everywhere would
be the song of water.

For although there were few lakes, and fewer rivers, this
was a land of a thousand little streams, all gone silent now under the snow,
but ready to burst out as soon as spring came. They burbled up out of the
hills, they babbled their way across meadows, they chuckled along the lanes and
laughed on their way to join the great rivers, the Tamar, the Taw, the
Torridge, the Okement, the Exe.

And over and around the sound of the waters would be the
songs of the birds—starling and lark, crow and wren, jackdaw and robin,
bluetit and sparrow, nightingale, thrush—all of them daring each other to
come encroach on a territory, shouting out love for a mate or desire for one.
Between the songs of the waters and the birds would be the lowing of cattle,
the bleating of sheep, and all the little homely sounds of farm and land made
soft by distance.

The sky would be an impossible blue, gentle and misty, with
white clouds fluffy as newly-washed fleeces sailing over the hills on their way
to the next valley.

And the air would be soft with damp, full of the scent of
green growing things, of moss and fern, and the sweet fragrance of fresh-cut
grass and spring flowers. It would touch the cheek in a caress that would negate
the knife-flick of winter’s wind, the unkindly wind that knew no softness
but that of snow.

Marina heard all of these things in her memory, as she saw
them in her mind’s eye, as she felt them, as sure as the ground beneath
her horse’s hooves, his muscular, warm neck under her gloved hand. In all
seasons, under all weathers, she knew this land, not so different from the
place where she had grown up, after all—its waters flowed in her blood,
its stones called to her bones. Not sudden, but slow and powerful, she felt
that call, and the answer within her, to protect, to serve, and above all, to
cleanse.

Not that this land needed any cleansing.

Unbidden, the answer to that thought came immediately.

Yet.

For there was a girl poisoned, polluted, lying sick in a
room not a quarter mile from here, representative of how many others? And
worse, of how much poison pouring into the air, the water, and the soil? And
where was that blight? It couldn’t be far; if Ellen was a charity
patient, the relative who had brought her to Andrew Pike must be poor as well,
and unable to afford an extended journey. Would it spread? How could it not?
Disease, cancer, poison—all of them spread, inexorably; it was in their
nature to spread. Some day, the poison would touch this place.

She clenched her jaw, angry at her aunt, at all of the
shortsighted fools who couldn’t see, wouldn’t see, that what
poisoned the land came, eventually, to poison
them.
What was wrong
with them? Did they think, in their arrogance, that their money would keep them
isolated from the filth they poured out every day? Was their greed such that
the cost didn’t matter so long as it was hidden? Or were they willfully
not believing, pretending that the poison was somehow harmless, or even
beneficial? She’d seen for herself how some people had eagerly bought the
copper-tailings from the mines and the smelters to spread on their garden paths
because what was left in the processed ore was so poisonous that no weed could
grow in it. It never occurred to them that the same gravel was poisonous enough
to kill birds that picked bits of it up—or babies that stuck pieces of it
in their mouths to suck. Willful ignorance, or just stupidity? In the end, it
didn’t matter, for the damage was done.