The Gates of Sleep

attractive to him. Maybe Arachne didn’t need Oakhurst or Marina’s fortune, but a fashionable man—about—town like her son was an expensive beast to support. Granted, Reggie did seem to have some interest in working at the potteries, but still…

On the other hand, if Arachne could get Marina married to her son, it would be her wealth that he was playing with, not Arachne’s. And if he wrecked someone else’s fortune, Arachne would not particularly care. In fact, it might be a way of bringing him to heel—if he overran himself and had to come to his mama for financial help, Arachne could impose all sorts of curbs and conditions on him.

The only way for Arachne to be sure that Marina would fall into her plans, would be to keep her niece here, completely under Arachne’s thumb, until Reggie managed to wheedle her into matrimony.

So it will have to be real letters. For which I need postage. There must be another way of finding the money for two stamps!

If only—so many little boys were inveterate collectors of stamps—if only the uncles or her father had ever been remotely interested in such things, she would probably have found a stamp-album among the old school books with one or two uncanceled specimens among the ones carefully steamed off of the letters that arrived at the house!

Then it occurred to her; this house had a nursery that hadn’t been touched since the five children left it, except to clean out the books from the schoolroom. And little children tended to collect and hide treasures. With luck, she could find them—heaven knew she had hidden enough little treasure boxes herself over the years. And with further luck, there might be a penny or two amongst the stones and cast-off snakeskins and bits of ribbon.

The thought was parent to the act; she put the writing implements away and got resolutely up from the desk.

This entailed an expedition armed with a paraffin-lamp, but now she knew approximately where everything was, courtesy of Sally. After opening a couple of doors that proved to open up onto disused rooms other than the old nursery—the nurserymaid’s room, a linen closet, and the old schoolroom—she found El Dorado—or at least, the room she was looking for. Aside from being much neater than any five real children would leave such a room it was pretty much as it must have looked when they were still using it. She put the lamp on the nursery table and went to work. She found six caches before she decided that she was finished: one inside the Noah’s Ark, two under the floorboards, two out in plain sight in old cigar boxes and one in a cupboard in the doll-house. When she’d finished collecting ha’pennies, she had exactly fourpence. Quite enough to buy postage for two letters. But by that point, it was very late, she was chilled right through, and she decided to take her booty and go to bed. Must make sure and ask that they send more postage in their return letters, she told herself sleepily, as she climbed into her warm bed after hiding her “treasure” in a vase. I think like the rest of the mines in Devon, my copper-field is exhausted… though at least I haven’t left any ugly tailings.

Arachne stared out the window of their first-class carriage into the last light of sunset, and wondered how wretched a mess awaited them when she and Reggie got to Exeter. She prided herself on her efficiency, but there were some things that no amount of efficiency could compensate for.

Such as an accident like the one that had just occurred at the Exeter pottery.

Right in the middle of her discussion with Reggie, a telegram came. One of the kilns had exploded that morning. At the moment she didn’t know what the cause had been, although she intended to find out as soon as she and Reggie arrived.

The railway carriage swayed back and forth, and the iron wheels clacked over the joins in the rails with little jolts—but the swaying and jolting was nothing compared with the discomfort of the same trip by carriage, and this first-class compartment was much warmer.

An explosion. These things happened now and again; water suddenly leaking into a red-hot kiln could cause it, or something in the pottery loaded into it—or sabotage by anarchists, unionists, or other troublemakers. If it was the latter, well, she was going to find that out quickly enough, and it wouldn’t take clumsy police bumbling about to do so, either. A few words, a little magic, and she would know if there was someone personally responsible. If there was, well—whoever had done it would wish it had been the police who’d caught him, before he died.

The main problem so far as she was concerned was that the kiln had been one of the ones where the glazes were fired, and three of her paintresses had been seriously injured, two killed outright.

Reggie would take care of the physical details tomorrow, but tonight—he and she would have to salvage what they could from the three injured girls.

At length, long after sunset, the train lurched into the Exeter station, and came to a halt with a shrieking of brakes and a great burst of steam. Reggie opened the compartment door, but the cachet (and money) attached to a first-class carriage got them instant service—one porter for luggage, another to summon a taxi. Little did he guess he would need to summon two. Their luggage went to the hotel with orders to secure them their usual rooms, but they went straight to the pottery.

At the moment, Arachne’s sole concern, as they rattled along in a motor-taxi, was the tiny infirmary she kept for the benefit of the paintresses. If the other workers wondered about this special privilege, they never said anything, perhaps because the paintresses were given the grand title of Porcelain Artist and got other privileges as well. They needed the infirmary; after a certain point in their short careers, they grew faint readily, and this gave them a place to lie down until the dizziness passed off. Being paid by the piece rather than by the hour was a powerful incentive not to go home ill, no matter how ill they felt.

She’d telegraphed ahead to authorize sending for a doctor; if the girls could be saved, it would be better for her plans.

The taxi stopped at the gates, and Arachne stepped out onto the pavement without a backward glance, leaving Reggie to pay the fare. She went straight to her office; from the gate to the office there was no sign that anything had gone wrong; the sound of work, the noise of the machinery that ground and mixed the clay, the whirring of the wheels, and the slapping of the wet clay as the air and excess water was driven out of it continued unabated under the glaring gaslights—which was as it should be. Accidents happened, but unless the entire pottery blew up or fell into the river, work continued. The workers themselves could not afford to do without the wages they would lose if it shut down, and would be the first to insist that work went on the moment after the debris was shoveled out of the way.

The main offices were vacant, and unlit but for a single gaslight on the wall, but her managers knew what to leave for her. Her office, a spacious, though spartan room enlivened only by her enormous mahogany desk, was cleaned three times daily to rid it of the ever present clay-dust. This occurred whether she was present in Exeter or not, so that her office was always ready for her. Reggie caught up with her as she entered the main offices and strode toward her private sanctum. By the light shining under the door, someone had gone in and lit the gas for her; she reached for the polished brass knob and pulled the door open, stepping through with Reggie close behind her.

The doctor—one she recognized from past meetings, an old quack with an addiction to gin—stood up unsteadily as she entered. He had not been sitting behind the desk, which was fortunate for him, since she would have left orders never to use him again if he had been.

A whiff of liquor-laden breath came to her as she faced him”Well?” she asked, shrewdly gauging his level of skill by the florid character of his face and steadiness of his stance. He wasn’t that bad; intoxicated, but not so badly as to impair his judgment.

He shook his head. “They won’t last the week,” he told her. “And even if they do, they’ll never be more than bodies propped in the corner of the poorhouse. One’s blinded, one’s lost an eye, and all three are maimed past working, even if their injuries would heal.”

He didn’t bother to point out that they probably wouldn’t heal; the lead-dust they ate saw to that. The lead- poisoned didn’t heal well.

She nodded briskly. “Well, then, we’ll just let them lie in the infirmary until they die. No point in increasing their misery by moving them. Thank you, Dr. Thane.”

She reached behind her back and held out her hand. Reggie placed a folded piece of paper into it, and she handed the doctor the envelope that contained his fee without looking at it. He took it without a word and shambled off through the door and out into the darkened outer office. She turned to Reggie, who nodded wordlessly.