Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven (6 page)

By now, there was a brisk wind blowing, holding her skirts against her legs as she pinned up the laundry. She was glad that the wash line was on the side of the cottage away from the village. A line of washing would have told the constable there was someone home, if he looked. He
might
be too busy making a show of watching the market to look, but then again, he might not. Would he actually walk all the way out here?

Possibly. From the little she knew of constables, they were supposed to walk a great deal. “Making the rounds,” it was called. So he might not consider the long walk a hardship.

But the wind was lovely, and it finally smelled like spring, all green and growing. The sun warmed her head and arms, and even the smell of seaweed—

Wait
…

“And why are you so afraid of the new man, Mari Prothero?”
asked a voice behind her.
“He is only one man. You are an entire village. You should not be so afraid of one man no matter who he is.”

She gritted her teeth. She was
not
going to turn around. She was
not
going to talk to this… whatever it was.

But it didn’t speak again, and when she was finished pinning the wash to the line, and turned, it was to see that there was nothing there but a damp spot and a strand of weed on the cat’s favorite sunning rock. She marched back inside, her fear now slowly turning to annoyance.

Just as she was taking the dried clothing in, she saw Daffyd’s river-coracle out at sea. Although the boats could actually be carried on the back, he often took the little thing out in the surf, trusting to his skills to get it home. She waited while he pulled in to shore, and pulled the round, single-masted boat up on the shingle above the high-water mark beside the bigger sea-going vessel.

She saw he had a salmon over his back, just as he had promised. He looked up to the cottage and spotted her, and waved.

“Took the long way home,” he said by way of explanation, once he reached the bit of grass that extended out to the shingle. “Stopped in the village, sold the rest of my catch, made sure I had witnesses to my fishing to say I was in the proper waters. And did a fair lot of talking with the others.” He shook his head. “Never heard of a man making himself enemies faster than Constable Ewynnog.”

She nodded, and as he stood at the cleaning table outside and expertly dealt with the salmon, she told him what she had heard.

He pursed his lips. “Not sure what to be making of this, no, I am not. It might be that he is a pitiful stupid man, and this is all his stupidity. It might be that constables are being sent out everywhere, on account of the striking. It might be that he’s
so
stupid, so
very
stupid, that he got himself in trouble, and this is his punishment—to be sent to our little village that’s got no need of him, to live in contempt and discomfort. It might be he was sent here to be rid of him put him where the only harm he can do is to himself. And if there just happened to be mischief here, well one pair of stupid eyes is
better than no eyes at all, in the way of the thinking of our lords and masters.”

Mari thought about that as she gathered the innards of the salmon for the cat. She put it all down on the stone the cat preferred to use as his dish, and brought her da water to wash with and a platter for the newly cleaned fish.

She began to feel that—whether or not the thing that had spoken to her had been real or some disturbance of her mind, it had made sense. Constable Ewynnog was only one man. Why was she afraid of him? Neither she nor her father had ever done anything wrong. The village thought well of them. Unconsciously, she stood a little straighter, as resentment overcame her fretting.

“If he’s so stupid,” she said slowly, “what would he do, given how things are in Clogwyn? Will he let well enough alone and just try to lord it over everyone? Wouldn’t he try and make trouble, if there’s none to be found?” She could imagine him doing so, actually, and more resentment built within her.

“He might. So that leads me to other thoughts. It might be he was sent here, knowing he’d make trouble, so there would be an excuse to meddle. Maybe send more constables. Maybe more meddling than that.” Daffyd’s eyes narrowed in thought as they both walked back into the cottage. “See now, I don’t rightly know, and I expect no one rightly knows, but there is a lot of anger about the striking. The high and mighties have got their hackles up; there’s talk even of having the army in.” He shook his head. “Before this is over, there’ll be blood on the rocks and blood on the coal. Probably killings.”

Mari shivered. Something about his words… they felt prophetic. They stood like a cold shadow between her and the bright day. But it wasn’t fear that made her shiver, it was that shadow. Resentment began to blossom into defiance. If that was how they wanted it…

“Here now…” He patted her shoulder, making her jump a little. “It won’t be coming here. Mostly, if the worst comes, there will be some baddish times. People being harassed, more laws to follow.
We just need to be as clever as the stoat; we stay out of sight and out of trouble, keep out of the constable’s eye. Don’t try and make ourselves agreeable and don’t be disagreeable. That’s all.”

She nodded, but he wasn’t quite through. “See now, this is your da, and his story-telling, and this might be a story or it might not. I just try to think things through, like you do when you tell a story. So here is the third thing. It might be Constable Ewynnog isn’t stupid at all. It might be he’s clever. It might be he’s clever enough to act in stupid ways to see what he can stir up.”

Mari bit her lip, and looked up into her father’s far-seeing eyes. He was clever, was her da. He’d thought not only of the obvious, but the not-so-obvious, and the not-at-all-obvious. “So.… we do the same as we would regardless?” she hazarded. She wasn’t sure she liked that. She wasn’t at all sure she liked being passive. If trouble was going to come, she preferred to meet and fight it.

“Aye. That we do.” He smiled faintly down at her. “And for right now, lovey, we have some pie.”

Nan sighed over her best friend and shook her head. Sarah sat quietly at her dressing table while her friend tried to make some sense of her hair. “If you had your way, you’d wear the same two plain linen dresses for summer and the same two plain woolen dresses for winter. Your hair would always be in an untidy bird’s nest of a knot on the top of your head. And you would never wear a hat.”

Nan had come a very long way from the wild little cockney street-waif who could barely make herself understood. Two things had stood her in good stead in her transformation from mudlark to respectable young lady: a gift for mimicry and the dawning realization that if she sounded like a guttersnipe, she’d be treated like one, no matter what she looked like. After that, it had been an uncanny sense of what she and Sarah looked good in that had guided her. They might be unconventional in dress, but no one could say they weren’t attractive.

“I don’t like hats,” Sarah protested, as Nan finished combing out
her hair, and with deft fingers began to roll it into a fashionable pompadour.

Nan could not for the life of her understand how someone who was so pretty could be so careless of how she looked. Literally care-less; she simply did not care. So knowing that Lord Alderscroft was coming to dinner, it was Nan who dug into their trunks, Nan who extracted two dresses she rather fancied for the occasion, Nan who ran them down to the laundry and with the help of one of the Indian servants, got them presentable.

Then it was Nan that turned her attention to the bird’s nest; with a little work, she had wound it into a nice, soft chignon, and when she was done, Sarah looked quite lovely. A bit like one of those artist-women, since they both favored artistic gowns when they got dressed up, but altogether lovely.

“No lady is without a hat,” Nan said, severely.

“Are you saying my mum isn’t a lady?” Sarah countered.

“Oh honestly…” Nan threw up her hands. “You know very well your mum wears hats when she comes to England. Now hurry up and get dressed. I want Lord Alderscroft to see us and realize we aren’t a couple of hoyden girls any more.”

“Why?” teased Sarah, as she slipped into a flowing gown that completely obscured the fact that she wasn’t wearing any corset. “Have you set your cap for him?”

In answer, Nan snorted. Neville laughed.

Sarah’s gown was made of tussah silk and linen, with bands of heavy lace, in warm creams and golds. Nan’s was brocade and damask, with bands of more brocade, in more somber browns. Sometimes Nan wished she could coax her friend into something even frillier, but that would be like trying to put Neville into a christening gown. No one would be happy about the process or the outcome.

“All right then, how do I look?” Sarah turned in place. Nan smiled.

“It’s a good thing Lord A isn’t bringing any handsome young men with him or they’d be smitten,” Nan replied, and held out her
arm. Neville pushed off his perch, flapped once, and landed lightly on it. Grey flew to Sarah’s shoulder.

“Peases?” Grey said hopefully. She’d missed English garden peas in Africa.

“Memsa’b promised,” Sarah reminded her. Grey whistled happily.

Neville just chortled. He hadn’t met a food that humans ate that he didn’t like, but Nan could tell that he was looking forward to some real English cheese again. And maybe a nice bit of rare meat.

The four of them went down the stairs to the parlor set aside for Memsa’b, which was where the adults of the school ate when they were not dining with the children—the original dining room of the house having been taken over for school use. Nan preferred it for small gatherings, and she suspected Memsa’b did too; she couldn’t imagine how a small family could manage to dine comfortably in such a big room.

Maybe people who’ve grown up in houses like this are just used to it
, she thought, as Gupta, on duty at the door, opened it and announced them. The others were already seated and having an animated discussion; Memsa’b wasn’t one to enforce formal manners of waiting and going in to dine when the gathering was among friends.

Lord Alderscroft did have someone with him, but he wasn’t a susceptible young man; he was one of his older cronies from his esoteric circle. Everyone looked up at Gupta’s announcement, and the gentlemen rose. Nan flushed a little. She’d forgotten that gentlemen did that. Even… or perhaps especially… in that odd archeological household, that wasn’t the norm.
I’m going to have to get used to English manners again.

“Miss Sarah, and Miss Nan,” Lord Alderscroft greeted them genially. “Your year away has done you good.”

Sarah took Grey from her shoulder and set her on her perch next to Sarah’s chair. Nan did the same on her side with Neville. Sarah laughed. “If you mean we are both absurdly robust looking and burned as brown as gypsies, you are right, my lord. I was glad to have gone, but gladder to be home. I hadn’t realized how much England had become my home until I left it.”

Grey turned her head sideways and looked at Alderscroft with one yellow eye. “No peas,” she complained. Then she looked pointedly down at her empty feeding cup.

“Well, we certainly should not deprive the gracious lady of her peas any longer,” Alderscroft declared, which the servants took as the signal to begin the meal.

Alderscroft asked both the girls any number of questions about their experiences in Africa, while his colleague spoke quietly to Sahib and Memsa’b. Some of them were political; they couldn’t answer all of them. “That’s quite all right,” he assured them. “If you happened to hear—or sense—something, that would be useful, but if you didn’t, you didn’t. I am merely casting out my line at random, and waiting to see if the salmon of knowledge bites it.”

“I really didn’t have much in the way of psychical experiences at all in Africa, my lord,” Nan confessed. “Only in Egypt, and then…” She paused for a moment. “… then, the experiences I had were related to the far, far past, rather than the present. Truth be told, while I didn’t feel unwelcome at all, I got that sense that both in Africa and in Egypt, the local spirits were not particularly interested in
me.”

She looked to Sarah, who nodded. “I had the same impression, sir. I suppose if there had been the ghost of a European with an urgent message about, I would have been sought out, but in Africa, our local shamans were clearly the…” She sought for a word.

“Authorities?” Lord Alderscroft offered.

“That’s as good a word as any,” Sarah replied. “Like goes to like, I suppose. If we were Elemental mages, it might well have been different, but I’m not at all, and the only time Nan uses magic is when she calls on that ancient warrior she once was.”

“The only dangers we faced were disease or accident; not much call for a warrior,” Nan admitted. “There were always two native guards with us to deal with the wildlife, and hostilities were so far off we didn’t get word of them for weeks.”

“I cannot possibly say I regret that,” his lordship said gravely. “As useful as information would be on that subject, I could not
welcome anything that put my friends in danger. So now that you are back, what do you intend to do with yourselves?”