The Gates of Sleep

She shed her rain cape and hung it, dripping, on its peg, then brought her burden into the kitchen. Elizabeth had already divested herself of hat, coat, and jacket, and Marina found herself eyeing the fashionable emerald trumpet skirt with its trimming of black soutache braid and the cream silk shirtwaist with its softening fall of Venice lace with a pang of envy. Not that she didn’t love the gowns that her Aunt Margherita made for her, but… but they weren’t fashionable. They were lovely, very medieval, and certainly comfortable, but they weren’t anything like fashionable. Plenty of magazines found their way here, and Marina had been known to peruse the drawings in them from time to time, gazing with wonder at the cartwheel hats, the bustle skirts, the PBs in their shoulder-baring gowns and upswept hair. The village was hardly the cynosure of fashion; most of the people who came to stay at the cottage were of the same ilk as her guardians. Only Elizabeth Hastings came in the feathers and furbelows of couture, and Marina’s heart looked long and enviously at its representative. She wanted an emerald suit, an ostrich-plumed hat.

But you’d have to wear corsets! a little voice reminded her. Look at her waist—think about how tight you’d have to lace them!

But oh—replied another side of her—it would be worth it to look like that, to wear clothing like that.

She shook herself out of her reverie and joined them over their hot tea.

“—and no, I am not going to prance around your farmyard in a ridiculous rig like this!” Elizabeth was saying as Marina took a seat at the table. “Honestly, if you must know, the reason I tricked myself out like a PB on a stroll through Hyde Park was so I would be treated with disgusting servility by the railroad staff. A woman traveling alone needs all the advantage that perceived rank and wealth gives her. I wanted porters to present themselves to me without having to look for them. I wanted instant service in the dining car and no mashers trying to seat themselves at my table. I didn’t want to find myself sharing my compartment with some spoiled little monkey and his or her nursemaid; in fact, I didn’t want to share it at all, and I couldn’t get a private compartment on that train. The best way to ensure privacy is to dress as if you’re too important to bother. It’s what I do when I go to suffrage meetings. No one raises his hand or voice against me when I’m dressed like this. I may get surly looks, but they’re deferential surly looks, even from the police.”

Margherita shook her head. “I can’t picture you as a suffragist, somehow.”

“I only go often enough to make it clear where my sympathies are. And I supply money, of course,” Elizabeth replied matter-of-factly. “But frankly, the Magic takes up so much of my time I can’t give the Cause the physical support I’d like to.” She shook her head. “Enough of that; if you really want to know about it, I’ll talk about it some evening with you. Now, I want you to know clearly that—exactly as last time I visited— I’m not expecting any more service than any of your other guests. I can take care of myself quite nicely, thank you, I don’t need to be waited on hand and foot by a maid, and not dressing for dinner is going to be something of a relief.”

Aunt Margherita broke into a gentle smile that warmed her eyes. “You know, I think that I had known that, but it’s good to hear it from your own lips. We’ve never had you for longer than a long weekend, you know, and a weekend guest is very different from a long-term guest.”

“True enough.” Elizabeth drank the last of her tea, stood up, and picked up her hat and jacket. “Now, since the bumping and swearing in the staircase has stopped, I think we can assume that the men have finished hauling my traps up the stairs, and I can change into something more appropriate.” She dimpled at Marina. “Then you will stop treating me as if I didn’t want to be bothered.”

All three of them laughed. “I’ll show you your room,” Marina offered, and took the lead up the stairs, the bandboxes in hand.

“Oh lovely—you gave me the other kitchen-room!” Elizabeth exclaimed as soon as she recognized what part of the house she was in. She breathed in the scent of baking bread from below appreciatively. “These are the best rooms Blackbird Cottage has in the winter.”

“I think so too,” Marina said, as Elizabeth hung her jacket up in the wardrobe and bent to open one of the three trunks. Then, suddenly shy, she retreated back down to the kitchen to help her aunt.

Elizabeth came down to join them in a much shorter time than Marina would have thought, and the plain woolen skirt and shirtwaist she wore were nothing that would be out of place in the village on a weekday. Marina couldn’t help a little pang of disappointment, but she tried not to show it.

Then came a supper that was astonishingly different because of a new face and some new topics of conversation around the table. This time, though, Marina was included in the conversation as a full equal. There was no discussion; it just happened, as naturally as breathing.

And one of the new topics was magic…

“The Naiads and I had to drive a River-horse up the Mersey, away from people,” Elizabeth said over the apple pie, as light from the candles on the table made a halo of her hair. “We don’t know where it came from, but it seems to have been retreating from the poisoning of its stream. You haven’t seen anything of water-poisoning around here, have you, Marina?”

She shook her head. “No. After I cleaned out all of the mess that had been left from before we took the land, I haven’t had any trouble.”

“It’s probably just some disgusting factory then,” Elizabeth said with a frown. “Honestly! You would think that when fish and animals begin to die, the owners would figure out for themselves that the poison they’ve dumped in the water is going to spread!” Her eyes flashed with anger. “How can they do this?”

“But it never spreads to where they live,” Sebastian pointed out dryly, though anger smoldered in the back of his eyes as well. “That’s the thing. If it was their children that suffered, coughing out their lives in black air, dying from poisoned water, it would be different. It’s only the children of the poor, of their workers. And there are always more children of the poor to take their places.”

“It’s doing things to the magic.” Elizabeth’s frown deepened. “Twisting it. Making it darker. I don’t know—if I were able to find a Left Hand Path occultist behind some of this, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised. But I haven’t, and neither has anyone else.”

“Then it has to be just a coincidence,” Thomas said firmly. “Don’t look for enemies where there are none. We have enemies enough as it is.”

Elizabeth let out a long breath. “Yes, and I should be concentrating on—and training our newest Mage to deal with—those existent enemies, shouldn’t I? Well said, Thomas.”

Enemies? We—I—have enemies?

“The least of the many things you need to teach her, and I am profoundly grateful that you are here, my dear,” Thomas replied with a smile. “I hope I have given her a thorough grounding, but your teaching will be to mine as university education is to public school.”

It is? The thought of enemies evaporated from her mind.

“Which leads to the question—when do you want to start?” Margherita asked.

“Tomorrow,” Elizabeth replied, to Marina’s unbounded joy, though for some reason, there seemed to be a shadow over the smile she bestowed on her new protegee. “Definitely tomorrow. No point in wasting time; we have a lot to share, and the sooner we start, the better.”

Chapter Four

BREAKFAST was a cheerful affair, despite the gray clouds outside. The rain had stopped at least, and one of Margherita’s favorite roosters crowed lustily atop the stone wall around the farmyard. Sarah did the breakfast cooking. She excelled at solid farm food, and her breakfasts were a staple at Blackbird Cottage. Everyone ate breakfast together in the kitchen, including little Jenny the maidservant, with Sarah joining them when she was sure no one else would want anything more.

This morning there was a new face at the table when Marina came down: Elizabeth, with her hair braided and the braid coiled atop her head, a shawl about her shoulders, cheerfully consuming bacon and eggs and chatting with old Sarah.

The cook was one of those substantial country women, once dark-haired, but now gone gray in their service. She was seldom without a shawl of her own knitting about her shoulders; plain in dress, plain-spoken, she had mothered Marina as much as Margherita, and usually was the one to mete out punishments that the soft-hearted Margherita could not bear to administer.

What she thought of the strange guests that often stayed here, she seldom said. Certainly she was plied for information about her employers whenever she went down to the village, but if she ever gossiped, no harm had come of it. And she was the perfect servant for this odd household; she was the one who found the new maidservants (usually from among her vast network of relatives) when their girls were ready for more exacting