The Gates of Sleep

She heard a horse trotting briskly along the lane, coming from the direction in which she’d been riding. Purposeful sounds; whoever was riding or driving knew where he was going.

Good—maybe that’s help.

A light breeze whipped a strand of hair across her eyes and chilled her cheeks. She didn’t take her eyes off the girl, though. There was no telling whether or not the poor thing was going to bolt, or try to, any moment now. And dressed as she was, if she ran off somewhere and succeeded in hiding, she wouldn’t last out the night. Not in no more than a nightgown, dressing gown and slippers.

The hoofbeats stopped; Marina risked a glance to the side to see who, or what, had arrived. Even if it isn’t help—surely if I call out for assistance, whoever it is will help me try to catch her.

A horse and cart waited there, just on Marina’s side of the next curve in the road. A tall, muscular gentleman, hatless, but wearing a suit, was walking slowly toward them, looking entirely at the girl. But the words he spoke, in a casual, cheerful voice, were addressed to Marina.

“Thank you, miss, you’re doing exactly the right thing. Keep talking to her. Her name is Ellen, and she’s a patient of mine. I’m Dr. Pike.”

Marina nodded, and crooned to the girl, edging toward her as Pike approached from the other side. As long as they kept her between them, she didn’t have a clean escape route.

Marina tried to catch the girl’s eye again. “Ellen. Ellen, look at me—”

The wandering eye fell on her, briefly. Marina tried to hold it. “Listen, Ellen, some help has come for you, but you mustn’t run away. Stay where you are, Ellen, and everything will be all right.”

The newcomer added his voice. “Ellen! Ellen, child, it’s Doctor Andrew—I’ve come to take you back—” the man said. Marina risked a longer look at him; he was rather… square. Square face square jaw, blocky shoulders. He’d have looked intimidating, if it hadn’t been that his expression, his eyes, were full of kindness and compassion. He made the “tch-ing” sound one makes to a horse to get its attention, rounded his shoulders to look less intimidating, and finally the girl stopped staring at her invisible threat. Her head wavered in a trembling arc until she was looking at him instead of her hobgoblins. He smiled with encouragement. “Ellen! I’ve come to take you back, back where it’s safe!”

Now at this point, Marina was ready for the girl to screech and attempt to flee. By all rights, that “I’ve come to take you back” coupled with the appearance of her own doctor should make her panic. “I’ve come to take you back” was the sign that one was going to go “back” into captivity. And in Marina’s limited experience, the doctors of those incarcerated in such places were not regarded as saviors by their patients. She braced herself, and prepared to try to tackle the girl when she attempted to run.

But evidently that was not the case this time.

With a little mew, the girl lurched out of her position wedged against the roots and stumbled, weeping, straight toward the newcomer.

It was more apparent than ever that there was something physically wrong with her as she tried to run to him, and could only manage a shambling parody of the graceful movements she should have had. But the thing that struck Marina dumb was that the girl did regard her doctor as a sort of savior.

She tumbled into the doctor’s arms, and hid there, moaning, as if she was certain that he and he alone could shelter her from whatever it was she feared.

Marina could only stare, eyebrows raised. Good gad, she thought. Good gad.

As gracefully as she could, Marina got back up to her feet and walked—slowly, so as not to frighten the girl all over again—toward the two of them.

The girl hid her face in the doctor’s coat. The doctor’s attention was fully on his patient; Marina got the distinct impression that an anarchist could have thrown a bomb at him and at the moment he would have only batted it absently away. She was impressed all over again by the manner in which he soothed the girl, exactly as any sensible person would soothe a small child.

He looked up, finally, as she got within a few feet of the two of them, and smiled at her without a trace of self-consciousness. “Thank you for your help, miss,” he said easily, quite as if this sort of thing happened every day.

She sincerely hoped that was not the case.

“I don’t know how I could have helped you,” she replied, with a shrug. “All I did was stop when my horse shied, and try to keep her from running off down the lane. I was afraid that if she found a stile to get over, she’d be off and hiding, and catch her death.”

“You didn’t ride on and ignore her, you didn’t rush at her and frighten her further, you actually stopped and got off your horse, you even went down on your knees in the road and talked to her carefully. If that’s not helping, I don’t know what is. So thank you, miss. You did exactly as one of my own people would have done; you couldn’t have done better than that if I’d trained you myself.” He smiled warmly at her, with gratitude that was not at all servile. She couldn’t help smiling back at him, as he wrapped his own coat around the girl. “I’m Andrew Pike, by the way. Dr. Andrew Pike. I own Briareley Sanitarium just up the road.”

Now she recognized who and what he was—her mother had written something about the young doctor the summer before last—how he had spent every penny he owned to buy old Briareley Hall when it came up for sale, and as much of the surrounding land as he could afford from young Lord Creighton, of whom there was gossip of high living in London, and perhaps gambling debts.

So this was the doctor who had benefited by Lord Creighton’s folly. His intention—which he had fulfilled within the month of taking possession—had been to establish his sanatarium for the treatment of mostly mental ills. He apparently hadn’t been able to afford most of the farmland, which had been parceled out; he still had the grounds and the gardens, but that was all that was left of the original estate.

According to her mother, Dr. Pike, unlike too many of his ilk who established sanitariums as warehouses for the ill and the inconvenient, actually attempted to cure people entrusted to his care. And it seemed that he had had some success at curing his patients. Not all, but at least some of the people put in his hands walked out of his gates prepared to resume their normal lives after a stint behind his walls.

“I have heard of you, Dr. Pike,” she said, as these thoughts passed through her mind in an eye blink. “And I have heard well of you, from my late mother’s letters.” She gave him a look of speculation, wondering what his reaction was going to be to her identity. “Since there’s no one here to introduce me, I trust you’ll forgive my breach of etiquette, even if my aunt wouldn’t. I am Marina Roeswood.”

She watched as recognition and something else passed across his face. Sympathy, she thought. “Miss Roeswood, of course—may I express my condolences, then? I did not know your parents beyond a nodding acquaintance.”

Somehow, she didn’t want his sympathy, or at least, not on false pretenses. “Then you knew them better than I did, Doctor Pike,” she said forthrightly, sensing that this man would be better served with the truth rather than polite fiction. “As you must be aware, or at least, as you would learn if you make even casual inquiries in the village, I was raised from infancy by friends of my parents, and I knew them only through letters. To me, they were no more real than—” She groped for the appropriate simile.

“—than creations of fiction?” he suggested, surprising her with his acuity and quick comprehension. “Nevertheless, Miss Roeswood, as John Donne said in his poem, ‘No man is an island, complete in himself—’“

“And ‘Every man’s death diminishes me.’ Very true, Dr. Pike, and well put,” she bowed her head slightly in acknowledgement.

“And I do mourn for them, as I would for any good folk who were my distant friends.”

But not as much as I mourn to be separated from my aunt and uncles. She couldn’t help the involuntary thought; she wondered, with a pang of the real despair that she couldn’t muster up for her own parents, how long it would be before she could even get a letter to them.

The girl Ellen made an inarticulate cry of horror, turning to point at nothing off to the side of the road, and any reply he might have made was lost as he turned to her. And then came the next surprise.

She watched in astonishment as a glow of golden Earth magic rose up around him, a soft mist that clung to him and enveloped both him and his patient. And when she looked closely, she was able to make out the shields layered in a dozen thin skins that enclosed that power cocoonlike about them.

She felt her mouth dropping open.