The Gates of Sleep

She felt anger rising in her. “Then get a doctor for her now!” she responded, throttling down the urge to slap him. Here she had done everything, and he had the cheek to criticize her! Why shouldn’t he stir himself to deal with these trivial problems? “Use some initiative! Must I do everything? For heaven’s sake, there’s a sanitarium just over the hill—call the doctor and send her there!”

“What, now?” he replied, looking utterly stunned.

“Why not?” It had been a spur-of-the-moment notion, but the more she thought about it, the better she liked it. “Why not? It will show proper concern on our part—our poor little niece collapsed and we send our own carriage out into the storm to get help for her! The man isn’t local, no one will have told him anything about us, all he’ll be concerned about is his fee. He can’t keep her alive long, no matter how cleverly he force-feeds her, but the fact that we’re paying for him to try will show everyone that we’re doing our best for her.”

“And if he brings her around somehow?” Reggie countered stubbornly.

“How? With magic?” She laughed, a peal of laughter echoed by the thunder outside. “Oh, I think not! And just in case those meddlesome friends of Hugh’s manage to get wind of what we’ve done, the sanitarium is the safest place she could be! No old servants to slip them inside, and even if they manage to find where she is, hidden away amongst a den of lunatics—there are guards, no doubt, meant to keep as many folks out as in.” She shook her head with amazement at her own perspicacity. “Perfect. Perfect. Take care of it.”

As he stared at her without comprehension, she repeated herself. “Take care of it, Reggie,” she said sharply. “Rouse the household! Get the carriage! I want that doctor here within the hour!”

“And just what will you be doing, Mater?” he asked, with a particularly nasty sneer.

“I,” she said with immense dignity, “will be having a truly operatic fit of the vapors. So if you don’t wish to have your eardrums shattered—I suggest you be on your way.”

And feeling particularly sadistic, she did not even give him enough time to leave the room before filling her lungs and producing the shrillest and most ear-piercing shriek she had ever coaxed out of her throat in her entire life.

She needn’t have told him to summon the household after all—she was doing that quite well on her own.

Not that it was going to help Marina. Nothing was going to help her now.

Chapter Twenty

ANDREW Pike had thought to spend his evening in his study, the room of burled walnut walls and warm, amber leather furniture that stood triple duty as his library and office as well, but found he couldn’t settle to anything. Neither book nor paper nor journal could hold his interest for long, and he found himself staring alternately into the fire, and out into the gloom, as the sun set somewhere behind the thick clouds. He felt both depressed and agitated, and had ever since early afternoon. He had been a Master long enough to know that, though he had no particular prescient abilities, he was sensitive enough to the ebbs and flows of power to intuit that there was trouble in the air. And the longer he watched and waited, the more sure of that trouble he became.

He’d done what he could to cushion his patients from whatever it was, and had strengthened the shields about the place, layering walls built as solid as those of the Cotswold limestone, the red-baked brick, the cob and wattle. Now all he could do was sit and wait, and hope that the trouble would pass him and anyone else he knew by.

Moments like these were hard on the nerves of those who had no ability to see into the future. The Earth Masters were particularly lacking in that talent; their minds tended to be slow and favor the past and the present, not the future. The past in particular; Earth Masters could take up a thing and read its history as easily as scanning a book, but the volume of the future might as well be in hieroglyphs for it was just that closed to them. Water Masters were the best at future-gazing when they had that particular gift, and even those poorest in the skill could still scry in a bowl of water and be certain of getting some clue to what lay ahead. Air Masters, known best for crystal-gazing, and Fire, who favored black mirrors, were twice as likely at their worst as an Earth Master at his best to have the ability to part the veils and glimpse what was to come. So with no more help in divining what was troubling him than any other mortal might have, all Andrew could do was wait for whatever it was to finally descend on them.

Teatime came and went with no signs other than an increasing heaviness of spirit. Eleanor felt it too, though as was her wont, she said nothing; he read it in her wary eyes, and in the tense way she moved, glancing behind her often, as if expecting to find something dreadful following. When he saw that, he increased the strength of the shields yet again, and gave Eleanor orders to add sedatives to the medications of certain patients that evening.

“Ah,” she said. “For the storm—” but he knew, and she knew, that it was not the March thunderstorm she spoke of, though the flickers on the horizon as the sun sank behind its heavy gray veils and gray light deepened to blue warned of more than just a springtime’s shower.

When the storm broke, it brought no relief, only increased anxiety. The storm was a reflection of the tension in the air, not a means of releasing it. This was no ordinary storm; it crouched above Oakhurst like a fat, heavy spider and refused to budge, sending out lightning and thunder and torrents of rain.

By now, Andrew’s nerves were strung as tightly as they ever had been in his life, and he couldn’t eat dinner. He wondered if he ought to prescribe a sedative dose for himself.

But as he sat in his office-cum-study, watching the lightning arc through the clouds, and in the flashes, the rain sheeting down, he decided that he had better not. He should keep all his wits about him. If the blow fell, and he was needed, he could not afford to have his mind befogged.

Having once shattered a fragile teacup and once snapped the stem of a wineglass when feeling nervy, he had chosen a thick mug for his tea this evening. His hands closed around it and clutched it tightly enough to make his fingers ache, and had the pottery been less than a quarter-inch thick, he was certain it, too, would have given way under his grip. As well, perhaps, that he was no Fire Master—his nerves were stretched so tightly that if he had been, the least little startlement might have sent the contents of his office up in flames.

He stretched all of his senses to their utmost, searching through the night, questing for any clue, or any sign that something was about to fall on his head. It was dangerous, that—looking out past the shields that he had set up around the walls of Briareley. But he couldn’t just sit here anymore, waiting for the blow to fall—he had to do something, even if it was only to look! Every nerve in his body seemed acutely sensitive, and the muscles of his neck and shoulders were so tight and knotted they felt afire.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck practically outside his study window—he jumped—and as the windows shook with the attendant peal of thunder, another sound reverberated through the halls.

The booming sound of someone frantically pounding on the door with the huge bronze knocker. Great blows echoed up and down the rooms, reverberated against high ceilings and shuddered in chimneys.

This was what he had been waiting for. Or if not—at least it was something happening at last—something he could act on instead of just waiting. The tension in him snapped, releasing him as a foxhound set on quarry.

He leapt to his feet, shoved back his chair, and headed for the door; ahead of him he saw Diccon hurrying to answer the summons, and poking from doorways and around corners were the heads of patients and attendants— curious, but with a hint of fear in their eyes.

The pounding continued; there was a frantic sound to it. Was there a medical emergency down in the village? But if there was, why come here rather than knocking up the village doctor?

Diccon hauled the huge door open, and a torrent of rain blew in, carrying with it two men wrapped in mackintoshes. The was no mistaking the second one, who raked the entrance hall with an imperious gaze and focused on Andrew.

“You! Doctor!” he barked. “You’re needed at Oakhurst! Miss Roeswood has collapsed!”

Andrew folded his stethoscope and tucked it into his pocket, using iron will to control face and voice. His heart hammered in his chest; his expression must give none of this away. They must not know, must not even guess, that he had ever seen Marina more than that once on the road, or all was lost.

“This young woman is in a coma,” he said flatly, looking not at poor Marina, so fragile and pale against the dark upholstery of the couch she had been laid on, but at the impassive visages of Madam Arachne and her son. Marina might have been some stranger with a sprained ankle for all that they were reacting. Oh, certainly the Odious Reggie had come dashing through the storm to drag him here—not that he’d needed dragging—but now that he was here, Reggie merely watched with ironic interest, as if he expected Pike to fail and was pleased to find his