The Wizard of London (4 page)

“Thank
you, Sarah,” she told the child standing before her. “I’d
like you to make friends with this little girl, if she will let you. We will
see what can be done for her.”

Sarah
beamed, and it occurred to Isabelle that the poor little thing was very lonely
here. So far, she had made no close friends. This chance encounter might change
that for the better.

Good.
There was nothing like catching two birds with one stone.

***

Nan
came earlier the next day, bringing back the now-empty basket, and found Sarah
Jane waiting at the gate. To her disappointment, there was no basket waiting
beside the child, and Nan almost turned back, but Sarah saw her and called to
her before she could fade back into the shadows of the streets.

“Karamjit
is bringing the basket in a bit,” the child said, “There’s
things Mem’sab wants you to have. And—what am I to call you?
It’s rude to call you ‘girl,’ but I don’t know your
name.”

“Nan,”
Nan replied, feeling as if a cart had run over her. This child, though younger
than Nan herself, had a way of taking over a situation that was all out of
keeping with Nan’s notion of how things were supposed to
be
. The
children of the rich were not supposed to notice the children of the poor, except
on Boxing Day, on which occasion they were supposed to distribute sweets and
whatever outworn or broken things they could no longer use. And the rich were
not supposed to care if the children of the poor went to bed hungry, because
being hungry would encourage them to work harder. “Wot kind’o place
is this, anyway?”

“It’s
a school, a boarding school,” Sarah said promptly. “Mem’sab
and her husband have it for the children of people who live in India, mostly.
Mem’sab can’t have children herself, which is very sad, but she
says that means she can be a mother to us instead. Mem’sab came from
India, and that’s where Karamjit and Selim and Maya and Vashti and the
others are from, too; they came with her. Except for some of the
teachers.”

“Yer
mean the black feller?” Nan asked, bewildered. “Yer from
In’juh, too?”

“No,”
Sarah said, shaking her head. “Africa. I wish I was back there.”
Her face paled and her eyes misted, and Nan, moved by an impulse she did not
understand, tried to distract her with questions.

“Wot’s
it loik, then? Izit loik Lunnun?”

“Like
London! Oh, no, it couldn’t be less like London!” Nan’s ploy
worked; the child giggled at the idea of comparing the Congo with this gray
city, and she painted a vivid word picture of the green jungles, teeming with
birds and animals of all sorts; of the natives who came to her father and
mother for medicines. “Mummy and Papa don’t do what some of the
others do—they went and talked to the magic men and showed them they
weren’t going to interfere in the magic work, and now whenever they have
a patient who thinks he’s cursed, they call the magic man in to help, and
when a magic man has someone that his magic can’t help right away, he
takes the patient to Mummy and Papa and they all put on feathers and charms,
and Mummy and Papa give him White Medicine while the magic man burns his herbs
and feathers and makes his chants, and everyone is happy. There haven’t
been any uprisings at our station for ever so long, and our magic men
won’t let anyone put black chickens at our door. One of them gave me
Grey, and I wanted to bring her with me, but Mummy said I
shouldn’t.” Now the child sighed, and looked woeful again.

“Wot’s
a Grey?” Nan asked.

“She’s
a Polly, a grey parrot with the beautifullest red tail; the medicine man gave her
to me when she was all prickles, he showed me how to feed her with mashed-up
yams and things. She’s so smart, she follows me about, and she can say,
oh, hundreds of things. The medicine man said that she was to be my guardian
and keep me from harm. But Mummy was afraid the smoke in London would hurt her,
and I couldn’t bring her with me.” Sarah looked up at the fat,
stone bird on the gatepost above her. “That’s why Mem’sab
gave me that gargoyle, to be my guardian instead. We all have them, each child
has her own, and that one’s mine.” She looked down again at Nan,
and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Sometimes when I get lonesome, I
come here and talk to her, and it’s like talking to Grey.”

Nan
nodded her head, understanding. “Oi useta go an’
talk’t’ a stachew in one’a the yards, till we ‘adta
move. It looked loik me grammum. Felt loik I was talkin’ to ‘er, I
fair did.”

A
footstep on the gravel path made Nan look up, and she jumped to see the tall
man with the head wrap standing there, as if he had come out of the thin air.
She had not sensed his presence, and once again, even though he stood
materially before her she could not sense anything like a living man there. He
took no notice of Nan, which she was grateful for; instead, he handed the
basket he was carrying to Sarah Jane, and walked off without a word.

Sarah
passed the basket to Nan; it was heavier this time, and Nan thought she smelled
something like roasted meat. Oh, if only they’d given her the drippings
from their beef! Her mouth watered at the thought.

“I
hope you like these,” Sarah said shyly, as Nan passed her the
much-lighter empty basket. “Mem’sab says that if you’ll keep
coming back, I’m to talk to you and ask you about London; she says
that’s the best way to learn about things. She says otherwise, when I go
out, I might get into trouble I don’t understand.”

Nan’s
eyes widened at the thought that the head of a school had said anything of the
sort—but Sarah Jane hardly seemed like the type of child to lie.
“All roit, I’s’pose,” she said dubiously. “If
you’ll be ’ere, so’ll Oi.”

The
next day, faithful as the rising sun, Sarah was waiting with her basket, and
Nan was invited to come inside the gate. She wouldn’t venture any farther
in than a bench in the garden, but as Sarah asked questions, she answered them
as bluntly and plainly as she would any similar question asked by a child in
her own neighborhood. Sarah learned about the dangers of the dark side of
London first-hand—and oddly, although she nodded wisely and with clear
understanding, they didn’t seem to frighten her.

“Garn!”
Nan said once, when Sarah absorbed the interesting fact that the opium den a
few doors from where Nan and her mother had a room had pitched three dead men
out into the street the night before. “Yer ain’t never seen nothin’
loik that!”

“You
forget, Mummy and Papa have a hospital, and it’s very dangerous where
they are,” Sarah replied matter-of-factly. “I’ve seen dead
men, and dead women and even babies. When Nkumba came in clawed up by a lion, I
helped bring water and bandages, while my parents sewed him up. When there was
a black-water fever, I saw lots of people die. It was horrid and sad, but I
didn’t fuss, because Nkumba and Papa and Mummy were worked nearly to
bones and needed me to be good.”

Nan’s
eyes widened again. “Wot else y’see?” she whispered,
impressed in spite of herself.

After
that, the two children traded stories of two very different sorts of jungles.
Despite its dangers, Nan thought that Sarah’s was the better of the two.

She
learned other things as well; that “Mems’ab” was a completely
remarkable woman, for she had a Sikh, a Gurkha, two Moslems, two Buddhists, and
assorted Hindus working in peace and harmony together—“and Mummy
said in her letter that it’s easier to get leopards to herd sheep than that!”
Mem’sab was by no means a fool; the Sikh and the Gurkha shared guard
duty, patrolling the walls by day and night. One of the Hindu women was one of
the “ayahs,” who took care of the smallest children; the rest of
the motley assortment were servants and even teachers.

She
heard many stories about the remarkable Grey, who really did act as
Sarah’s guardian, if Sarah was to be believed. Sarah described times when
she had inadvertently gotten lost; she had called frantically for Grey, who was
allowed to fly free, and the bird had come to her, leading her back to familiar
paths. Grey had kept her from eating some pretty but poisonous berries by
flying at her and nipping her fingers until she dropped them. Grey alerted the
servants to the presence of snakes in the nursery, always making a patrol
before she allowed Sarah to enter. And once, according to Sarah, when she had
encountered a lion on the path, Grey had flown off and made sounds like a young
gazelle in distress, attracting the lion’s attention before it could
scent Sarah. “She led it away, and didn’t come back to me until it
was too far away to get to me before I got home safe,” the little girl
claimed solemnly, “Grey is very clever.” Nan didn’t know
whether to gape at her or laugh; she couldn’t imagine how a mere bird
could be intelligent enough to talk, much less act with purpose.

Nan
had breath to laugh with, nowadays, thanks to baskets that held more than
bread. The food she found in there, though distinctly odd, was always good, and
she no longer felt out of breath and tired all the time. She had stopped
wondering and worrying about why “Mem’sab” took such an
interest in her, and simply accepted the gifts without question. They might
stop at any moment; she accepted that without question, too.

The
only thing she couldn’t accept so easily was the manservant’s eerie
mental silence.

But
it didn’t unnerve her as it once had. She wanted desperately to know
why
she couldn’t sense him, but it didn’t unnerve her. If she
couldn’t read
him
, she could read the way he walked and acted,
and there was nothing predatory about him with regard to herself or Sarah.

Besides,
Sarah trusted him. Nan had the feeling that Sarah’s trust wasn’t
ever given lightly.

Or
wrongly.

***

“And
how is Sarah’s pet street sparrow?” Frederick asked, as Isabelle
brooded at the window that overlooked the garden.

“Karamjit
thinks she is Talented,” Isabelle replied, watching Sarah chatter
animatedly to her friend as they took the empty basket back to the kitchen in
the evening gloom. “I don’t sense anything, but she’s quite
young, and I doubt she can do anything much beyond a few feet.”

Her
husband sat down in a chair beside the window, and she glanced over at him.
“There’s something about all of this that is worrying you,”
he said.

“I’m
not the precognitive, but—yes. We have a sudden influx of Talents. And it
might be nothing more than that we are the only place to train young Talents,
whereas there are dozens who are schooling their Elemental Magicians. Still,
my
training says that coincidences among the Talented are virtually unheard of,
and an ingathering of Talents means that Talents will be needed.” There,
it was out in the open. Frederick grimaced.

“There’s
something in the air,” he agreed. “But nothing I can point to and
say—there it is, that’s what’s coming. Do you want to spring
the trap on this one, or let her come to our hands of her own will?”

“If
we trap her, we lose her,” Isabelle told him, turning away from the
window. “And while we are ingathering Talents, they are all very young.
Whatever is going to happen will not happen this week, or even this year. Let
her come to us on her own—or not at all.”

***

“How
is your mother?” Sarah asked, one day as they sat in the garden, since
the day before, Nan had confessed that Aggie been “on a tear” and
had consumed, or so Nan feared, something stronger and more dangerous than gin.

Nan
shook her head. “I dunno,” she replied reluctantly. “Aggie
didn’ wake up when I went out. Tha’s not roight, she us’lly
at least waked up’t’foind out wha‘ I got. She don’ loik
them baskets, ‘cause it means I don’ go beggin’ as
much.”

“And
if you don’t beg money, she can’t drink,” Sarah observed
shrewdly. “You hate begging, don’t you?”

“Mostly
I don’ like gettin’ kicked an’ cursed at,” Nan
temporized. “It ain’t loik I’m gettin’
underfoot…”

But
Sarah’s questions were coming too near the bone tonight, and Nan
didn’t want to have to deal with them. She got to her feet and picked up
her basket. “I gotter go,” she said abruptly.

Sarah
rose from her seat on the bench and gave Nan a penetrating look. Nan had the
peculiar feeling that the child was looking at her thoughts, and deciding
whether or not to press her further. “All right,” Sarah said.
“It is getting dark.”

It
wasn’t, but Nan wasn’t about to pass up the offer of a graceful
exit. “ ‘Tis, that,” she said promptly, and squeezed through
the narrow opening Karamjit had left in the gate.

But
she had not gone four paces when two rough-looking men in shabby tweed jackets
blocked her path. “You Nan Killian?” said one hoarsely. Then when
Nan stared at him blankly, added, “Aggie Killian’s girl?”

The
answer was surprised out of her; she hadn’t been expecting such a
confrontation, and she hadn’t yet managed to sort herself out.
“Ye—es,” she said slowly.

“Good,”
the first man grunted. “Yer Ma sent us; she’s gone’t‘ a
new place, an’ she wants us’t‘show y’ the way.”

Now,
several thoughts flew through Nan’s mind at that moment. The first was
that, as they were paid up on the rent through the end of the week, she could
not imagine Aggie ever vacating before the time was up. The second was, that
even if Aggie had set up somewhere else, she would never have sent a pair of
strangers to find Nan. And third was that Aggie had turned to a more potent
intoxicant than gin—which meant she would need a deal more money. And
Aggie had only one thing left to sell.

Nan.

Their
minds were such a roil that she couldn’t “hear” any distinct
thoughts, but it was obvious that they meant her no good.

“Wait
a minnit—” Nan said, her voice trembling a little as she backed
away from the two men, edging around them to get to the street.
“Did’jer say Aggie Killian’s gel? Me ma ain’t called
Killian, yer got th‘ wrong gel—”