The Gates of Sleep

A cough recalled her to her task—for it was a task, and not a meal—and she sorted through silverware again until she found the right combinations. And this time, coughs directed her through a complicated salute of knife and fork before she was cutting a tiny portion correctly.

Two mouthfuls, and again the food was removed, to be replaced by something else.

In the end, luncheon, an affair that usually took no more than a quarter of an hour at home, had devoured an hour and a half of her time—perhaps two hours—and had left her feeling limp with nervous exhaustion. She had gotten something like a meal, though hardly as full a meal as a real luncheon would have been, but the waste of food was nothing short of appalling! And there had been nothing, nothing there that would have satisfied the appetite of a healthy, hungry person. There was a great deal of sauce, of garnish, of fripperies of hothouse lettuce and cress, but it all tasted utterly pale, bland, and insipid. The bread had no more flavor than a piece of pasteboard; the cheese was an afterthought. Even the chicken—at least, she thought it was chicken—was a limp, overcooked ghost of a proper bird.

No wonder Aunt Arachne is so pale, she thought wearily, as the silent footman removed her chair so she could leave the table, if she’s eating nothing but food like this.

Her headache had returned, and all she wanted was to go back to that stifling room and lie down—but evidently that was not in the program for the afternoon.

“Miss will be coming with me to the library,” Mary Anne said, sounding servile enough, but it was very clear to Marina that there was going to be no argument about it. “Madam wishes me to show her to her desk, where she is to study.”

Oh yes… study. After that interview with Aunt Arachne, Marina thought she had a pretty good idea just what it was that her aunt wanted her to study, and indeed, she was right.

Her keeper took her to the Oakhurst library; the house itself was Georgian, and this was a typical Georgian library, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all the walls, and extra bookshelves placed at intervals within the room. There were three small desks and many comfortable-looking Windsor chairs and two sofas arrayed about the room, and a fine carpet on the floor. There were not one, but two fireplaces, both going, which kept an otherwise chilly room remarkably warm and comfortable. Someone cleaned in here regularly; there was no musty smell, just the scent of leather with a hint of wood smoke. Placed at a library window for the best light was one of the desks; this was the one Mary Anne brought her to. On a stand beside it were several books that included Burke’s Peerage and another on Graceful Correspondence; on the desk itself were a pen, ink, and several sorts of stationery. And list. She supposed that it was in Arachne’s hand.

She sat down at the desk; the maid—definitely keeper—sat on one of the library sofas. Evidently Mary Anne was not deemed knowledgeable enough to pass judgment on the documents that Marina was expected to produce. She picked up the list.

Invitations to various sorts of soirees to a variety of people. Responses to invitations issued (in theory) to her. Thank you notes for gifts, for invitations, after an event; polite little notes about nothing. Notes of congratulation or condolence, of farewell or welcome. Longer letters—subjects included—to specific persons of consequence. Nothing, she noticed, to anyone who was actually supposed to be a friend… but perhaps people like Arachne didn’t have friends.

As soon as she picked up the slim volumes on correspondence, she realized that there literally was not enough information here to perform this particular task correctly. And that was when she began to get angry. Like luncheon, Arachne had arranged for defeat and failure. And she’d done it on purpose, because she already knew that Marina didn’t have training in the nuances of society, no more than any simple, middle-class working girl.

But—but—Marina knew what that simple, middle-class working girl didn’t. She knew how to find the information she needed. For this was a library, and a very big one which might very well contain other books on etiquette. Marina knew that her father’s library had been cataloged, and recently, because Alanna had written about some of the old books uncovered during the process, and how they’d had to be moved under lock and key. So instead of sitting there in despair, or looking frantically for somewhere to start, leafing through stationery or Burke’s, she got up.

Mary Anne looked up from her own reading, startled, but evidently had no direct orders this time about what Marina was supposed to do in here, other than remain in the room. When Marina moved to the great book on the center table—the catalog—she went back to her own reading, with a little sneer on her face.

Huh! So you don’t know everything, do you? Marina thought with satisfaction.

Just as she had thought, because the person who had cataloged the library was very thorough, he had cataloged every book in the house and moved them here. This included an entire set of books, described and cataloged as “juvenalia, foxed, defaced, poor condition” filed away in a book cupboard among other similar items. No true book lover would ever throw a book out without express orders. Besides, every true book lover knows that in three hundred years, what was “defaced” becomes “historical.”

Presumably young Elizabeth Tudor’s governess had boxed her ear for defacing that window at Hatfield House with her diamond ring. Now no amount of money could replace it.

So, from the catalog, Marina went to the book cupboard where less-than-desirable volumes were hidden away from critical eyes in the farthest corner of the library. The cupboard was crammed full, floor-to-ceiling, with worn-out books, from baby picturebooks to some quite impressive student volumes of Latin and Greek and literature in several languages.

She stared at the books for a moment; and in that moment, she realized that she was so surrounded by familiar auras that she almost wept.

These were the books that Aunt Margherita, Uncle Thomas, and Uncle Sebastian had been taught from! And her parents, of course. If she closed her eyes and opened her mind and widened her shields enough to include the books, she could see them, younger, oh much younger than they were now, bent over desks, puzzled or triumphant or merely enjoying themselves, listening, learning.

A tear oozed from beneath her closed eyelid, and almost, almost, she pulled her shields in—

But no! These ghosts of the past could help her in the present. She opened her eyes. Show me what I need, she told the wisps of memory, silently, and began brushing her hand slowly along the spines of books on the shelves, the worn, cracked spines, thin leather peeling away, fabric worn to illegibility. She didn’t even bother to read the titles, as she concentrated on the task she had before her, and the feel of the books under her fingertips.

Which suddenly stuck to a book, as if they’d encountered glue.

There!

She pulled the book off the shelf and set it at her feet, then went back to her perusal. She didn’t neglect even the sections that seemed to have only picturebooks, for you never knew what might have been shoved in where there was room.

When she’d finished with the entire cupboard, she had a pile at her feet of perhaps a dozen books, none of them very large, that she picked up and carried back to her desk. Mary Anne looked up, clearly puzzled, but remained where she was sitting.

Good. Because these, the long-forgotten, slim volumes of instruction designed to guide very young ladies through the intricacies of society at its most baroque, were precisely what she needed.

That, and a fertile imagination coupled with a good memory of Jane Austen’s novels, and other works of fiction. Perhaps her replies would seem formal, even stilted, and certainly old-fashioned, but that was far better than being wrong.

Her handwriting was as good, if not better, than Arachne’s; there would be nothing to fault in her copperplate. And she decided to cheat, just a little. Instead of actually leafing through the books to look up what she needed to know, she followed the same “divination” that had directed her to these books in the first place. She ran her hand along the book spines until her fingers “stuck,” then took up that volume and turned pages until they “stuck” again.

After that, it was a matter of verifying titles with Burke’s, and virtually copying out the correspondence from the etiquette books—with creative additions, as her whimsy took her. Not too creative