The Wizard of London

attentively.

And Sarah, who was sitting in bed clasping her knees with her arms, shivered when she had finished. “I’m not very brave,” she said quietly. “Not like you, Nan.”

Nan snorted. “Brave enough,” she said roughly. “ ‘Ow brave is brave, an’ when does it spill over to daft? Eh? I done plenty daft things some ‘un might say was brave.”

Sarah had to laugh at that. “I don’t like to think of anything trapped or in pain, or both,” she went on. “But that horrible thing in Berkeley Square—it scared me, Nan. I don’t ever want to see anything like that again.”

“No more do I, but this thing, the well, it don’t feel like that thing in London,” Nan pointed out. Then she sighed. “Really, though, we ain’t got a choice. We’ll get to do what Mem’sab says we can.”

“That’s true, and Mem’sab won’t let us do anything that is really dangerous,” Sarah replied, brightening, and changed the topic to speculation on who was going to win the coveted expedition to the Horse Fair.

But Nan stared up at the ceiling after the candles were out with her hands behind her head, thinking. It was true that Mem’sab would normally not let them do anything dangerous…

Not knowingly. But even Mem’sab was concerned that there were hidden dangers here she could not anticipate.

That factor alone was enough to give Nan pause, and she tried to think of things that maybe Mem’sab would not, only to decide that this was an exercise in futility.

Oh, well

, she decided finally, as she gave up the fight to hold off sleep.

Things’ll ‘appen as they ’appen, like Gram used to say. Let’t‘morrow take care of itself

.

11

MEMSA’B, Nan decided, looked worried, but was hiding it well. Nan was more excited than worried, and Neville looked positively impatient to get things started.

Sarah, however, was showing enough nerves for both of them. And she wasn’t even the one who was going to be investigating the well and its haunt in the first place!

“Glaah,” said Neville, and Nan got the sense of “of course she’s nervous, she’s nervous for you!” And immediately she felt a little ashamed of herself. Besides Sarah had said herself she wasn’t “brave like Nan,” and it wasn’t nice to be scornful of her for something she had admitted to herself!

And with that thought, she shook her head at how strange her life had become. Not that long ago, would she have cared what anyone thought? Would she have cared that she herself had thought things about someone that weren’t very nice?

No, of course not. It wouldn’t have mattered. When you were going to bed hungry every night, nothing much mattered except finding a way to scrounge another bit of food. When you got thrown out in the street in the middle of winter, all that mattered was that you could find the penny for a place under a roof that night. Whether or not you thought something about someone that might hurt their feelings if they found out was so far from being relevant to how you lived—

It struck her for a moment how much her life had changed, and in her heart she apologized to Sarah for belittling her. Neville rubbed his beak against her cheek.

Beside Mem’sab were Sahib and Agansing, the latter looking entirely serene. That gave Nan heart; for Agansing was the one person she thought likeliest to sense incipient trouble before it became a problem.

Excluding the other children would have been tricky, except for one thing. The new pony had arrived, and all of them were down at the stable, being introduced, and taking their turns with him. There had been neither black ponies nor white at the Horse Fair, only varying shades of brown, which averted that particular crisis—the chosen beast was an affectionate little gelding with two white feet and a white blaze. Tommy—who had won the coveted position—immediately named him “Flash,” but Flash’s main pace was an amble, so he wasn’t likely to live up to it. He had been advertised as being trained to ride or drive, so presumably everyone was going to be reasonably satisfied with him.

But with that sort of a draw down at the stables, probably no one was going to notice that Nan and Sarah weren’t there. And even if they did, it was reasonable to assume that Sarah, raised in Africa, and Nan, raised on the London streets, hadn’t ever had ponies, and probably didn’t know how to ride or drive.

Which was, of course, true.

Nan had, in fact, encountered the pony and had not been impressed. In comparison to Neville, it came off a poor second in her opinion.

It was no hardship to either Nan or Sarah to be here, rather than at the stables with the rest.

They were all waiting for one thing: Karamjit to return from the stable, with word that the rest were all now fully involved with the pony and unlikely to take it into their heads to come back to the manor and go looking for Mem’sab, Sarah, or Nan.

And at length, Karamjit did appear, stalking around the corner of the hedge like a two-legged panther, taking his place beside Sahib. With that arrival, Mem’sab nodded at Nan, who braced herself, approached the well, laid both bare hands on the stone coping, closed her eyes, and slowly let herself “see” what was there.

There was an immediate surge of terror, but she had expected that and pushed past it. It was the reaction of that long-ago worker to discovering a corpse, and she had suspected this would be something she would sense very strongly. It was relatively recent in the life of the well, and it was powerful. With it came panic, the sense of being stifled and trapped, fleeting images of rough walls and above all, the need to get out. It didn’t last long, and she moved beyond the moment.

Then, there was nothing, for a very long time.

Well, not nothing, precisely, but only vague whispers of a thousand passing personalities that hardly left an imprint at all; merest hints of emotion, piled one atop another in a confusing heap, and nothing much in the way of images. She was used to this sort of pattern emanating from a very old object, but the well was so public a place and it was so easy for people to brush a bit of themselves on it in passing that it was like pushing her way through endless, ghostly branches in a haunted forest without an end—

Then—

A force hit her like a runaway wagon.

Damn you!

Words—oh, yes—definitely words, but impact that shook her and made her fall forward against the stone wall of the well.

The anger, the fear, the despair struck her with all the immediacy of a physical blow.

Immediately, she felt Neville push himself into her neck, as her hands clutched the rough stone, and her body reeled along with her mind. She reached for his mental presence even as she managed to raise a hand to touch his neck, and the feelings receded.

But not so far that she could not read them.

She had images now, a dark-clad body curled into a fetal ball, chained hand and foot. A man, dying of thirst, knowing he was dying, and such rage in him that the rage itself took on what was left of his life force.

I know this part, she thought. She pushed past the images and the rage. This was the ending, the last bitter moments of a life. She needed to see where it started—

More images flooded her; she let them come. She knew that the best way for her to decipher the past of an object was to allow all the images to flood in at once, and sort them out after she had taken them in.

The well had “seen” the man, but the well had no eyes, so she would never know what the man had actually looked like, other than that he was lean, and his clothing was dark and quite plain…

Another surge of emotion, more sustained this time; outrage rather than anger, and fear. Disbelief. Horror. Each of these in turn, all linked with a thought: they’re not coming back!

Who was not coming back? No answer there; only the long-ago press of emotion as a man realized that he had been forgotten, abandoned, left to a fate that had only one ending.

“ ‘E can’t believe this. Whoever put ‘im in there either forgot about ‘im or somethin’ happened,” she heard her own voice saying dreamily. “He’s hearin’ commotion an’ ‘e reckons it’s the whole household packin’ up an’ leavin’ and not knowin’ ‘e’s down ‘ere. ‘E’s been yellin’, but nobody ’erd ‘im.” More images, and then, not images at all, but