The Wizard of London (31 page)

“Most
of the others—you’re thinkin’ Sarah ought to be there,
too?” Nan hazarded.

Mem’sab
nodded, but reluctantly, keeping her eyes focused on Nan’s. “Yes
and no. Yes, because if there is a spirit, she is the one most likely to be
able to speak to it. And no, because if there is a spirit, it may attempt to
take her.”

“There’s
Grey—” Nan pointed out. “She’s Sarah’s protector.
Right?”

“Ye-es,”
Mem’sab agreed, but with some doubt. “I simply don’t know how
powerful a protector Grey is. And there is also the possibility that you could
be harmed by this as well. These are all things that need to be balanced.”

With
a sigh, Nan agreed. By this point, it was pretty obvious that Mem’sab was
not going to march straight down to the well and have Nan try her power of
seeing things in something’s past right soon. It was going to wait until
the weekend, at best, which was when Sahib would be coming.

She
did, however, go tell Sarah about Mem’sab’s idea that night at
bedtime. Both Sarah and Grey listened attentively.

And
Sarah, who was sitting in bed clasping her knees with her arms, shivered when
she had finished. “I’m not very brave,” she said quietly.
“Not like you, Nan.”

Nan
snorted. “Brave enough,” she said roughly. “ ‘Ow brave
is brave, an’ when does it spill over to daft? Eh? I done plenty daft
things some ‘un might say was brave.”

Sarah
had to laugh at that. “I don’t like to think of anything trapped or
in pain, or both,” she went on. “But that horrible thing in
Berkeley Square—it scared me, Nan. I don’t ever want to see
anything like that again.”

“No
more do I, but this thing, the well, it don’t
feel
like that
thing in London,” Nan pointed out. Then she sighed. “Really,
though, we ain’t got a choice. We’ll get to do what Mem’sab
says we can.”

“That’s
true, and Mem’sab won’t let us do anything that is really
dangerous,” Sarah replied, brightening, and changed the topic to
speculation on who was going to win the coveted expedition to the Horse Fair.

But
Nan stared up at the ceiling after the candles were out with her hands behind
her head, thinking. It was true that Mem’sab would normally not let them
do anything dangerous…

Not
knowingly. But even Mem’sab was concerned that there were hidden dangers
here she could not anticipate.

That
factor alone was enough to give Nan pause, and she tried to think of things
that maybe Mem’sab would not, only to decide that this was an exercise in
futility.

Oh, well
,
she decided finally, as she gave up the fight to hold off sleep.
Things’ll
‘appen as they ’appen, like Gram used to say.
Let’t‘morrow take care of itself
.

MEMSA’B, Nan
decided, looked worried, but was hiding it well. Nan was more excited than
worried, and Neville looked positively impatient to get things started.

Sarah,
however, was showing enough nerves for both of them. And
she
wasn’t even the one who was going to be investigating the well and its
haunt in the first place!

“
Glaah
,”
said Neville, and Nan got the sense of “
of course she’s
nervous, she’s nervous for you
!” And immediately she felt a
little ashamed of herself. Besides Sarah had said herself she wasn’t
“brave like Nan,” and it wasn’t nice to be scornful of her
for something she had admitted to herself!

And
with that thought, she shook her head at how strange her life had become. Not
that long ago, would she have cared what anyone thought? Would she have cared
that she herself had thought things about someone that weren’t very nice?

No,
of course not. It wouldn’t have mattered. When you were going to bed
hungry every night, nothing much mattered except finding a way to scrounge
another bit of food. When you got thrown out in the street in the middle of
winter, all that mattered was that you could find the penny for a place under a
roof that night. Whether or not you thought something about someone that might
hurt their feelings if they found out was so far from being relevant to how you
lived—

It
struck her for a moment how much her life had changed, and in her heart she
apologized to Sarah for belittling her. Neville rubbed his beak against her
cheek.

Beside
Mem’sab were Sahib and Agansing, the latter looking entirely serene. That
gave Nan heart; for Agansing was the one person she thought likeliest to sense
incipient trouble before it became a problem.

Excluding
the other children would have been tricky, except for one thing. The new pony
had arrived, and all of them were down at the stable, being introduced, and
taking their turns with him. There had been neither black ponies nor white at
the Horse Fair, only varying shades of brown, which averted that particular
crisis—the chosen beast was an affectionate little gelding with two white
feet and a white blaze. Tommy—who had won the coveted
position—immediately named him “Flash,” but Flash’s
main pace was an amble, so he wasn’t likely to live up to it. He had been
advertised as being trained to ride or drive, so presumably everyone was going
to be reasonably satisfied with him.

But
with that sort of a draw down at the stables, probably no one was going to
notice that Nan and Sarah weren’t there. And even if they did, it was
reasonable to assume that Sarah, raised in Africa, and Nan, raised on the
London streets, hadn’t ever had ponies, and probably didn’t know
how to ride or drive.

Which
was, of course, true.

Nan
had, in fact, encountered the pony and had not been impressed. In comparison to
Neville, it came off a poor second in her opinion.

It
was no hardship to either Nan or Sarah to be here, rather than at the stables
with the rest.

They
were all waiting for one thing: Karamjit to return from the stable, with word
that the rest were all now fully involved with the pony and unlikely to take it
into their heads to come back to the manor and go looking for Mem’sab,
Sarah, or Nan.

And
at length, Karamjit did appear, stalking around the corner of the hedge like a
two-legged panther, taking his place beside Sahib. With that arrival,
Mem’sab nodded at Nan, who braced herself, approached the well, laid both
bare hands on the stone coping, closed her eyes, and slowly let herself
“see” what was there.

There
was an
immediate
surge of terror, but she had expected that and pushed
past it. It was the reaction of that long-ago worker to discovering a corpse,
and she had suspected this would be something she would sense very strongly. It
was relatively recent in the life of the well, and it was powerful. With it
came panic, the sense of being stifled and trapped, fleeting images of rough
walls and above all, the need to get
out
. It didn’t last long,
and she moved beyond the moment.

Then,
there was nothing, for a very long time.

Well,
not
nothing
, precisely, but only vague whispers of a thousand passing
personalities that hardly left an imprint at all; merest hints of emotion,
piled one atop another in a confusing heap, and nothing much in the way of
images. She was used to this sort of pattern emanating from a very old object,
but the well was so public a place and it was so easy for people to brush a bit
of themselves on it in passing that it was like pushing her way through
endless, ghostly branches in a haunted forest without an end—

Then—

A
force hit her like a runaway wagon.

Damn
you
!

Words—oh,
yes—definitely words, but impact that shook her and made her fall forward
against the stone wall of the well.

The
anger, the fear, the despair struck her with all the immediacy of a physical
blow.

Immediately,
she felt Neville push himself into her neck, as her hands clutched the rough
stone, and her body reeled along with her mind. She reached for his mental
presence even as she managed to raise a hand to touch his neck, and the
feelings receded.

But
not so far that she could not read them.

She
had images now, a dark-clad body curled into a fetal ball, chained hand and
foot. A man, dying of thirst, knowing he was dying, and such rage in him that
the rage itself took on what was left of his life force.

I
know this part
, she thought. She pushed past the images and the rage. This
was the ending, the last bitter moments of a life. She needed to see where it
started—

More
images flooded her; she let them come. She knew that the best way for her to
decipher the past of an object was to allow all the images to flood in at once,
and sort them out after she had taken them in.

The
well had “seen” the man, but the well had no eyes, so she would
never know what the man had actually looked like, other than that he was lean,
and his clothing was dark and quite plain…

Another
surge of emotion, more sustained this time; outrage rather than anger, and
fear. Disbelief. Horror. Each of these in turn, all linked with a thought:
they’re
not coming back
!

Who
was not coming back? No answer there; only the long-ago press of emotion as a
man realized that he had been forgotten, abandoned, left to a fate that had
only one ending.

“
‘E can’t believe this. Whoever put ‘im in there either forgot
about ‘im or somethin’ happened,” she heard her own voice
saying dreamily. “He’s hearin’ commotion an’ ‘e
reckons it’s the whole household packin’ up an’ leavin’
and not knowin’ ‘e’s down ‘ere. ‘E’s been
yellin’, but nobody ’erd ‘im.” More images, and then,
not images at all, but the things that had happened were happening to
her;
being lowered carefully into the well, head ringing from the blows, licking
swollen lips and tasting blood, unable to see out of one eye. Anger at being
defeated, at being caught. No words now, only feelings, emotional and physical.

There
was a kernel there that was Nan, that knew it was a little girl, that the
country was ruled by a Queen and not a King, that none of this was real. There
was the sense of an anchor, a protector, who sheltered that kernel of herself.
She had to just let it all wash over her, and not try to fight it, because
fighting would only wear her out and thin her hold on herself.

She
closed in on herself, made herself like a hard little stone, the kind you got
in your shoe and couldn’t get rid of. This wasn’t an attack, any
more than the foot in the shoe was an attack on the stone. There wasn’t
even a person behind it. This was all just idiot emotion, left behind by the
trauma of long ago. Maybe there had been a ghost at one time, howling to be
found, cursing those who passed by. If so, Christian burial, even though no one
knew what name to put on a marker, had probably put an end to the haunts.

Finally,
the little stone that was Nan dropped out of the swirling chaos of left-behind
emotions. She had come through it. She was on the other side.

She
opened her eyes, blinked twice, and sat down quite suddenly on the ground.

***

Isabelle
shook her head. “A mystery still,” she mused. “From
Nan’s description, I would guess that the man was a Roundhead, perhaps a
spy? For whatever reason, someone here decided he was a menace and imprisoned
him in the well.”

“And
didn’t tell anyone else,” her husband pointed out. “That was
where it all fell apart. We know why no one came to let him out—there was
no one here.”

Now
that they knew what to look for, they knew that as the Royalists lost ground to
Oliver Cromwell’s troops, the family here had abandoned their manor,
taken all the portable wealth they could muster, and fled across the Channel.
As it happened, they had a great deal of “portable” wealth, and
they had been able to get across the countryside and into France with no real
difficulty. Others who had waited longer had not been so lucky…

Frederick
stretched, accepted a cup of tea from Isabelle, and looked to Agansing.
“You’re certain that this wasn’t deliberate murder?” he
asked. “Clearing that well of the taint of something like
murder—”

Agansing
shook his head. “The man’s captors were hardly kind, but there is
no trace in the original thought patterns that he anticipated such a thing
here.”

“Besides,
dearest, why would anyone go to the trouble of binding and chaining him, then
lowering him carefully into the well, if they intended to murder him?”
Isabelle pointed out. “It would have take far less effort to simply knock
him on the head or shoot him and throw him in the river. If he was found at
all, it would be assumed he was another casualty of the war. It’s what I
would have done if I had wanted to murder someone at that date.”

Agansing,
for all that he knew her well, looked a little aghast. Frederick reached across
the distance between their chairs and patted her hand affectionately.
“Sometimes, my love, you make my blood run cold,” he said fondly.
“I’m glad you’re on my side.”

She
sniffed. “Really, Frederick, I am only saying what I would have done, had
I a wicked nature and been inclined to murder someone during the Civil War,
not
that I would countenance doing any such thing.”

He
chuckled; he’d been teasing her, of course, but she was a little
irritated at him. It was not the sort of teasing she enjoyed.

Well,
perhaps her nerves were irritated by being in proximity to the negative
emotions in that wellhead for so long. She sat on her irritation and went on.
“We definitely need to cleanse the place, or something might well take
advantage of the situation. You saw for yourself how readily little Nan became
absorbed; there is a great deal of energy there, and if we still have an enemy
to Nan and Sarah, that place could be used to feed and hold a truly dangerous
entity.”