none of those seemed quite right.”
Nan sucked on her lower lip. “Don’t seem quite right to me neither,” she said at last. “Like somethin’ is missing.”
“Well, the last book I found said that they weren’t any of those things, it said they were gods.” Now Sarah’s eyes were bright with excitement. “It said the leader was a very old god, the Horned God of the Hunt, from back before the Romans came, and that being Hunted used to be the way they chose their kings and the way they punished criminals. So when he wasn’t being worshipped anymore or making kings, he just went on punishing criminals by Hunting them when he could. The things that ride with him are the souls of those that the Hunt caught.”
Nan felt a sudden conviction that this was exactly the answer they had been looking for, though she could not have pointed to anything but feelings. “Well, Robin said he was the Oldest Old One, so it stands to reason he could call ‘em,” she said, thinking out loud. “An’ he said that he couldn’t call hell to take that ghost, an’ heaven wouldn’t have ’er, an’ she couldn’t go to that place ’e sent the little girl, but I reckon riding with that Hunt could be as bad as hell.”
Sarah nodded soberly, her eyes gone very large and solemn. “If the book is right,” she said, “it could be worse. Because you get to see the living world, but you can’t do any of the things you want to do. You’re just stuck riding whenever the Hunter feels like taking the Hunt out.”
“So what happens to you the rest of the time—”
“The book didn’t say, except that it called them ‘tormented souls.’ Maybe just being able to see and be in the world you used to live in and never be able to touch it again is bad enough.” Sarah shook her head. “It also said the worst of them get turned into the Hounds, which would probably be horrible.”
Nan thought about how the Hounds had sounded, and shivered. “I think,” she said aloud, “whatever happened to that ghost, she’s gettin’ what’s comin’ to ‘er now.”
Sarah took a long, shuddering breath. “I’m glad Robin made us close our eyes,” she said finally. “Some of the books say that just the sight of the Hunt and the Huntsman is enough to drive you mad. Some say that’s not true, but that the Hunt is horrible to look at and is sure to frighten you to where your hair turns white. I’m glad Robin kept us from looking.”
“Reckon he’d ‘ave let Mem’sab watch,” Nan said judiciously, “But I reckon he figgered we’re too young.”
“Then I want to be too young for a long, long time,” Sarah said firmly, and got a bow from Neville and a soft “Yes!” from Grey.
And Nan could not possibly have agreed more.
13
THE first experiments had been a success.
Difficult as it had been to achieve the proper depth of cold to hold the bodies in suspension, Cordelia had succeeded in exchanging the souls of two children.
She had acquired them from an orphanage, where they had been two of the scant ten percent that survived infancy and emerged into childhood. That had been an interesting visit in and of itself; she had never considered orphanages as a source of her little servants, but since she intended to let these two actually live so that she could continue to switch their souls from time to time, she had decided to create the persona of a fictional housekeeper looking for two little boys to serve as errand runners. Usually it was factories that came recruiting to the orphanages—very few couples were actually interested in adopting these waifs. After all, who would want a child whose mother was probably a whore, or if not, was without a doubt fallen from virtue? Such a child would have her bad blood, and possibly the equally bad blood of some drunken laborer, or good-for-nothing sailor, or—worst of all —a foreigner. No one ever considered, of course, that the fathers of such abandoned children might be their friends, their neighbors, or the sons of the well-to-do…
Not, of course, that it mattered.
The director of the place had trotted out the best he had to offer, and she had taken two little boys about eight years old, but small and looking five at most, with thin, half-starved faces and dull, incurious expressions. In height and weight, they were virtually identical. The main difference between them seemed to be that one hummed breathlessly and tunelessly to himself constantly and the other did not. They were not very intelligent and altogether incurious; this, too, was probably the result of being starved all of their lives.
This was not what the director would have had her believe, but Cordelia knew better, both from scrying on these places from afar in preparation for selecting one, and from the stories children who had run from the orphanages into the street had told her.
Food was scant, and poor. Generally as little as the directors of the places could get by with. Cordelia suspected that they were pocketing the difference between what they were allotted to feed each child and what they actually used to feed each child. Meat was practically unheard of, the staple diet was oatmeal porridge, thin vegetable soup, and bread. Infants were weaned onto this as soon as possible. The infants in orphanages were generally wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes and laid out on cots, as many as would fit on each cot, so that they looked like tinned sardines. In this orphanage, they were lucky, their smallclothes were changed twice a day; in many other places, once a day was the rule. They were fed skimmed milk, or the buttermilk left after butter had been churned out of it; this was cheaper, much cheaper, than whole milk. They didn’t cry much; crying took energy, and these infants did not have a great deal of that to spare.
It didn’t take very much to kill them either. A bit of the croup, a touch of fever, being too near an open window—nine out of every ten died, and were unceremoniously buried without markers in potters’ fields. They had entered the world noisily; they generally left it silently, slipping out of it with a sigh or a final gasp.
Older children fared little better, though by the time they reached the age of three or four, all but the strongest had been winnowed out. And orphanages would have made fertile ground for Cordelia to hunt for ghostly servants without ever having to kill the children herself, except that these children were either wild creatures or so utterly passive that they made Peggoty look lively by comparison.
However, with a bit of feeding, perhaps the passive ones could be enlivened to the point of becoming useful. It would be interesting to experiment with these two.
She had been told their names were “Robert” and “Albert.” Virtually every other boy child in an orphanage was named “Albert,” in homage to the late Prince of Wales. Presumably, this was in an effort to get the children into someone else’s hands by appealing to their patriotism or sentimentality.
Well, as of this morning, Robert, who was the one that hummed, was silent, and Albert, who had been the silent one, was humming. Proof enough that the transfer had been successful.
She decided that she would wait to see which of the two developed the stronger personality over the next few days, with proper feeding and access to some second-hand toys and worn picture books she had indifferently purchased from a flea-market stall. Toys were supposed to be educational, and she didn’t want to be bothered with actually sending them to school. That would be the one she would use in the second experiment to displace the spirit of the other. The displaced ghost she would make into her servant if it looked as if there was anything there worth the saving, the other she would feed for a while longer to see how he turned out. Orphanages might well prove to be an additional source of servants, when her own efforts on the streets dried up.
Provided, of course, she could keep people from noticing that all of the children she took to work for her died. The problem with using orphanages as a recruiting ground was that the people who ran them were generally busybody nosy-parkering sorts.
Well, she would deal with that difficulty later. For the moment, her experiment was going well, and she might not even
David was deep in the countryside at the moment. This was annoying, because she could not keep her eyes directly on him—but it was also something of a relief, because she was free to do whatever she chose without having to have him under her supervision.
And the cause was good. A “weekend”—which really meant a week or more—house party, at the estate of a very influential MP. Commons, rather than Lords, but in this case, that was all to the good. It was time for David to move a little out of his own social circle and into the circle that lived, breathed, and ate politics.
Not that the man was crude; it was his grandfather who had actually made the money. His father had undertaken the more genteel path of investing it prudently and skillfully. The son was a solicitor, with the specialty of estate management, and never saw the inside of a courtroom. Actually, he seldom saw the inside of his law offices; he had lesser solicitors and an army of clerks to do most of the work for him. The sole reason for becoming
