The Gates of Sleep

lady’s hand is shaking too much and I don’t want tea slopped all over my saucer. Now, what will you have, Miss Roeswood?”

“For starters, I’d like to dispense with the formality, at least while the four of us are together,” she replied, telling her protesting stomach that it did not want one of everything. “Marina, please, from now on, vicar. And the same for you, doctor. Other than that—some sandwiches, tea with two, and milk, please.”

“Then it will be Andrew and Clifton,” the doctor said, handing her a cup of good strong tea, with plenty of sugar and just a touch of milk. “At least in private. We don’t want to give rise to any of those rumors you warned me of—and quite properly too—at Briareley.”

“Hmm.” The vicar made up a plate for Marina at her direction. “A very good point,” he said, handing it to her. “Your guardian mustn’t be given any excuse to forbid our meeting. Ellen, I am afraid it is beef broth and milk- pudding for you, my child.”

She accepted both with no sign of discontent. “I’d only lose anything stronger,” she said with good humor. “Oh, I feel so much better, though! I know I’ll feel bad again, but—”

“But it won’t be as bad as it was before,” Andrew told her. “And every time we do this, it will be a little better, until we’ve purged all of the poison out of you and I’ve healed what I can.”

Ellen smiled, but the smile faded. “Pardon my asking, but—then what?” she said reluctantly. “What’m I to do then? Go back to painting?”

“Good gad, no!” the doctor and the vicar exclaimed at the same time. Andrew made a “go ahead” motion to the vicar.

“You’ll come to work for one of us, Ellen, if you want to,” Davies said. “I must warn you though, that it’s no gilded life here. You’d live here and eat here, but I couldn’t afford much in wages, and it is likely to be hard work.”

Ellen was shaking her head. “I got no skill at it, sir, begging your pardon. I never been trained in service.”

“Then you’ll work for me—which is very little better, but you can start training as a nurse little by little as you get healthier,” Andrew told her. “Like Eleanor—you see, nurses are readily come by, but nurses who are Sensitives, or even magicians, are far, far, rarer. I could use you to work with the children. Would you like that?”

Ellen brightened immediately. “That’d suit me, yes it would! That’d suit me fine!”

“It’s settled then.” Both men seemed satisfied with the outcome, and certainly for someone who was a Sensitive, there really was no better place to work than Briareley, however poor the wages might be.

Well—Blackbird Cottage. But she’d have to do heavy work, just like Jenny, and I doubt she’ll ever be able to do that again. But Marina made a mental note to talk seriously with Margherita when she finally got back in touch about supplying a place or two for other former charity patients of Andrew’s who were more robustly built.

“If that doesn’t work for you, I expect I’ll need a lady’s maid eventually, Ellen,” Marina put in. “I’d rather have someone who I know that can learn what to do than have someone who might be beautifully trained but whom I don’t know that I’d have to trust. But—” she sighed. “That will have to wait for three years, until I’m of age. Until then, I have less charge over Oakhurst than you do!

Madam has charge of everything. Including me.” She finished the last bite of an exquisite little Bakewell tart, and grimaced. “I don’t even get to say what I have for tea—which is why I have made such a disgusting pig of myself over the sweets today!”

Ellen put her empty bowls aside. “Miss, I’ve been wondering—who’s this Madam? Why’s she such a hold over you, miss?”

“She’s my guardian, worse luck,” Marina sighed, and began to explain her situation to the girl. Which, of course, ran right counter to everything she’d seen in etiquette books, or been taught by Arachne. Ellen was a mere factory girl, an absolute inferior; Marina a lady of privilege. Marina should have addressed her by her last name only, and really, should not even have noticed her, much less be laying out her entire life for her scrutiny.

Madam would have the vapors. If Madam ever does have the vapors. Which I doubt, actually.

She got as far as her first interview with Madam, when Ellen interrupted her. “Now, miss—I know your Madam Arachne! I wondered, when I first heard you call her that, and I do! ‘Twas her pottery I worked at, in Exeter! ‘Twas there I got poisoned by all the glaze-dust, or at least, that’s what Dr. Pike says!”

Up until this moment, Arachne’s potteries had been nothing more than an abstract to Marina—something that hadn’t any real shape in her mind, as it were. Oh, she had thought, if she had thought at all, that they were—like a village pottery, only larger. She hadn’t even had a mental image, nor put together Andrew’s rant about the lead- poisoning with what made her guardian’s fortune. Now, though—

“Good gad,” she whispered.

Ellen held out her trembling hand and frowned at it. “She’s real particular, Madam is. Picks her paintresses herself. And she does make sure that the girls is taken care of for when the shakes start. Gives us a lay-down room so we can take a bit of a rest and still get the quota done. And she sees to it other ways. If you know what I mean.” She looked more than a little embarrassed, when the vicar and Marina shook their heads dumbly.

Andrew saved the girl from having to answer. “Let me handle this, Ellen.” He turned to Clifton and Marina. “I think I might have told you already, but if I haven’t, well—the lead kills the girls’ appetites and has an effect on the complexions. Ironically enough. their skin becomes as pale and translucent as porcelain—well, just like Ellen’s is now. So, they are thin and pale, ethereal and delicate, they have to stay clean and neat because they’re on show for visitors.”

“Madam gives us a wash-up room, and she gets a second-hand clothes woman who gets stuff from the gentry to come around and give us good prices,” Ellen put in. “And if we ain’t got enough, she has it laid by for us, and takes a shilling a week out of our wages.”

Andrew made a helpless gesture. “There you have it. Clean, well-gowned, and if they had any looks at all before, they become pretty. If they were pretty before, they become beautiful. Men who are looking for— companionship—”

Clifton turned beet-red. Marina tilted her head to the side; wide and uncensored reading, and Elizabeth’s influence had given information on what came next, if not personal experience. “Men looking for pretty mistresses may go looking among the paintresses, you mean? Ellen, is that what you meant when you said that Madam sees that the girls are cared for?”

Ellen nodded. “She lets visitors come right in the painting-room,” she admitted. “Lets ‘em palaver with us girls, and so long as the quota gets done, nobody says anything. So when they can’t paint no more, they’ll have maybe someone as is interested in other things they can do.”

“Monstrous!” Davies burst out, red-faced now with anger. “Appalling!”

“Well, what else are they supposed to do? Petition Madam to take care of them?” Andrew looked just as angry, but tempered with resignation. “Good God, Clifton, what would that get them? Nowhere, of course—she’s the one who’s poisoned them in the first place! What relations are going to care for them? Ellen’s second-cousin is the only person that has ever brought one of these paintresses to the attention of a doctor, and that is in no small part because the cousin discovered Ellen’s magical potential was being drained away from her by a person unknown. That is one case, out of how many potteries?”

“Quite a few, I would venture to say,” Marina offered, feeling an odd sort of dislocation—ethically, she was as appalled as the vicar, emotionally she was as horrified. But intellectually—she couldn’t find it in her heart to blame any girl who took such a step toward ensuring whatever future she had was comfortable. “But I suspect that would be because those doctors are disinclined to see a patient without being paid. Actually, Andrew, that’s not quite true—Madam and Reggie were discussing something about a female doctor, a suffragist, who was campaigning on behalf of the paintresses at one of her potteries. But I don’t know which pottery that was, so I can’t tell you if there’s anyone trying to do anything about the place where Ellen worked.”

“I’m glad to hear that, but it’s irrelevant to the situation we were discussing,” Andrew pointed out. “So Clifton, what exactly are these girls to do with themselves before they die? Eke out the remaining miserable days of their lives in the poorhouse? Or spend them in comfort by selling their bodies while the bodies are still desirable?”

The vicar hung his head, his color fading. “I don’t know, Andrew. A hard choice, in a hard life.”