The Gates of Sleep

“As ever, it was a pleasure,” Margherita replied, with a cheerful smile. “With Marina all grown up, we would miss the fun of seeing children with new toys if not for this.”

“Happy hearts and warm hands; you do a fine job of tending to both ends of the child,” said parson’s wife, who came trundling up, a bundle of shawls, to take in a box of stockings.

“And we leave their souls in your capable hands,” Marina laughed.

The parson caught sight of the stack of stools, and grinned. “Well, well. Have you managed to persuade John Parkin the Younger to contribute as well?”

“It wasn’t a matter of persuading,” Marina said, laughing, each laugh coming out in a puff of white on the still air. “We told him that if he supplied the materials when Uncle Thomas promised to teach him joinery, he could keep what he made—but if we supplied it, what he made would be going out on Boxing Day!”

“Now,” Margherita smiled. “Don’t make him sound so ungenerous. I think he quite liked the idea. He certainly wasn’t averse to it.”

“And he’ll have a trade when he’s through, which is more than his father has,” the parson’s wife pointed out, in that no-nonsense way that village parson’s wives, accustomed to a lifetime of making do on the meager proceeds of their husband’s livings, often seemed to acquire. “I don’t see where he has anything to complain of!”

When the cart was unloaded, they declined the invitation to tea—the parson’s resources were strained enough as it was—and took their places in the cart again. The pony was pleased to turn around, and made brisk time back to Blackbird Cottage.

But without warning, just as they passed the halfway point between the village and the cottage, something —happened.

Marina gasped, as she reeled back in her seat beneath the unexpected impact of a mental and emotional blow.

It was like nothing she had ever felt before; a sickening plunging of her heart, disorientation, nausea, and an overwhelming feeling of doom that she could not explain.

She clutched suddenly at her aunt’s arm, fought down a surge of panic, and invoked her strongest shields.

To no effect. In fact, if anything, the sensation of dread increased tenfold.

“What’s wrong?” Margherita exclaimed, startled.

“I don’t know—” Marina choked out. “But something is. Something is horribly, horribly wrong—”

The feeling didn’t pass; if anything, it deepened, and she closed her eyes to fight against the awful plummeting feeling in her stomach, the rising panic.

“Hold on—I’ll get you home,” Margherita said, and slapped the reins on the pony’s back, cracking the whip above its ears and startling it into a trot. Marina clung to her aunt as to a rock in a flood, struggling against fear, and completely unable to think past it.

“Oh no,” the phrase, loaded with dismay, that burst from her Aunt’s lips, made her open her eyes again. They were nearly home—they had rounded the corner and the wall and gate of Blackbird Cottage were in sight—But there were strangers there.

A huge black coach drawn by a pair of expensive carriage horses stood before the gate. And the sight of the strange carriage made her throat close with a panic worse than anything she had ever felt before.

In the space of a single hour, Marina had been plunged into a nightmare. The problem was, she was awake.

She sat on the sofa in the once-familiar parlor that had seemed a haven of familiar contentment, between Aunt Margherita and Uncle Thomas.

But in the last hour, every vestige of what she had thought was familiar had been ripped away from her.

She sat, every muscle rigid, every nerve paralyzed, her stomach knot and her heart a cold lump in the middle of her chest.

On three chairs across from them sat four strangers, three of them in near-identical black suits, all three of them with the same stern, cold faces, the same expressionless eyes. They could have been poured from the same mold. They were lawyers, they said. They had come here because of her. They were lawyers who, from this moment on, were in charge of her—and her parents’ estate.

Estate.

For her parents, it seemed, had made their last trip to Tuscany. There had been a dreadful accident, which at the moment, mattered not at all to her. She couldn’t think of that; it meant nothing to her.

What mattered was that the people she had called aunt and uncle all her life were nothing more than family friends—who, because they had no ties of blood, had absolutely no rights whatsoever with regard to her, and never mind that they had raised her.

She was being taken from the only home and people she had ever known, to go to a place she had only seen in her uncle’s sketches. Oakhurst. Where total strangers would be in charge of her, telling her what to do, controlling her for the next three years. And she had no choice.

“The law,” said the tallest and thinnest of the three, “Is not to be trifled with.”

Her rigidity and paralysis broke in a storm of emotion. “But I don’t understand!” Marina wailed, clinging to her Aunt’s arm. “Why can’t I stay? I’ve lived here all my life! I’m happy here! You can’t—you can’t make me go away! I won’t go! I won’t!”

Her face was streaked now with the tears that poured from her eyes; her eyes blurred and burned, and she wanted to get the pony-whip and beat these horrible men out of the house, out of her house, and drive them back to whatever clerkly hell they had come from. For surely no one who could say things like they had to her could come from anywhere other than hell. She was not trifling with anything—they were the ones who were trifling with her, treating her like a goose that could be bundled up in a basket and taken wherever they cared to take her and set down in a new place and never notice!

“I won’t go!” she repeated, hysterically, turning to the fourth stranger in the room, and the only one standing. “I won’t! You can’t make me!”

The policeman from Holsworthy looked uncomfortable; he inserted a finger in the collar of his tunic and tugged at it, as if it was too tight. The three lawyers, however, were utterly unmoved. They could have been waxwork figures for all the emotion they displayed.

“We have explained that, miss, several times,” the one who did all the talking—the tallest, thinnest, and coldest—said yet again. He spoke to her in tones that one would use with the feebleminded. “With your parents dead intestate, that is, without leaving a will, and your nearest relative perfectly willing and able to assume guardianship, you cannot legally remain with—these people.” He looked down his long nose at Margherita and Thomas. “They have no blood ties with you, and no legal standing. Whatever your parents may have meant by boarding you with them, it doesn’t matter to the law. Your legal aunt is not only prepared to assume responsibility for you, she has sued to do so, and the court has agreed. That is the law, and you must obey it. This policeman is here to see that you do.”

It was very clear from his expression that he did not approve of her current situation; that he did not approve of artists in general, and her aunt and uncle in particular. That, in fact, he considered artists to be only a little above actors and thieves in social standing.

Marina searched her aunt and uncle’s faces, and saw nothing there but grief and resignation—and fear. There was no hope for her from them.

If she had allowed her body to do what her mind screamed at her to do, she’d have been beating those horrible, horrible men with a broom—or jumping up and running, running off to hide in the orchard until she froze to death or they went away without her.

Her heart pounded with panic, and her throat was so choked with tears she could hardly get any words out.

I’ll call up magic! I’ll call up Undines and Sylphs and I’ll drive them away!

Oh yes; she’d call up magic—call up Undines that could not function out of water and Sylphs they could not