The Gates of Sleep (4 page)

“That would be a great help, dearest,”
Margherita replied, continuing to slice bread for luncheon. “Would you
prefer cress or cucumber?”

“Cress, please. And deviled ham, if there is any.”

“Why a Water-child should have such an appetite for a
Fire food, I cannot fathom,” Margherita replied, with a laugh. “I
have deviled ham, of course; Sebastian would drive me out of the house if I
didn’t.”

Margherita did not do all of the cooking, not even with
Marina’s help; she did luncheon most days, and tea, and often made
special supper dishes with her own hands, but for the plain cooking and other
kitchen work there was old Sarah, competent and practical. Sarah wasn’t
the only servant; for the housecleaning and maid—of—all—work
they had young Jenny, and for the twice-yearly spring and fall house cleaning,
more help from Jenny’s sisters. A man, unsurprisingly named John, came
over from the neighboring farm twice a week (except during harvest) to do the
yard-work and anything the uncles couldn’t do. There wasn’t much of
that; Thomas was handy with just about any tool, and Sebastian, when he wasn’t
in the throes of a creative frenzy, was willing to pitch in on just about any
task.

Marina stirred up the scone dough, rolled it out, cut the
rounds with a biscuit cutter and arrayed them in a baking pan and slipped them
into the oven. By the time they were ready, Margherita had finished making
sandwiches with brown and white bread, and had stacked them on a plate.

Sarah and Jenny appeared exactly when they were wanted to
help set up the table in the dining room for luncheon: more of Margherita’s
Earth magic at work to call them silently from their other tasks? Not likely.
It was probably just that old Sarah had been with the family since the
beginning, and young Jenny had been with them nearly as long—she was only
“young” relative to Sarah.

After being cooped up all morning in the studio, Marina was
in no mood to remain indoors. Rather than sit down at the table with her uncles
and aunt, she wrapped some of the sandwiches in a napkin, took a bottle of
homemade ginger beer from the pantry, put both in a basket with one of her
lesson books, and ran out—at last!—into the sunshine.

She swung the basket as she ran, taking in great breaths of
the autumn air, fragrant with curing hay. Deep in the heart of the orchard was
her favorite place; where the stream that cut through the heart of the trees
dropped abruptly by four feet, forming a lovely little waterfall that was a
favorite of the lesser Water Elementals of the area. The bank beside it,
carpeted with fern and sweet grass, with mosses growing in the shadows, was
where Marina liked to sit and read, or watch the Water Elementals play about in
the falling water, and those of Air sporting in the branches.

They looked like—whatever they chose to look like.
The ones here in her tiny stream were of a size to fit the stream, although
their size had nothing to do with their powers. They could have been
illustrations in some expensive children’s book, tiny elfin women and
men, with fish-tails or fins, except that there was a knowing look in their
eyes, and their unadorned bodies were frankly sensual.

Of course, they weren’t the only Water Elementals she
knew.

She’d seen River-horses down at the village, where
her little stream joined a much greater one, and water nymphs of more human
size, but the amount of cold iron in and around the water tended to keep them
at bay. She’d been seeing and talking with them for as long as she could
remember.

She often wondered what the Greater Elementals were like;
she’d never been near a body of water larger than the river that supplied
the village mill with its power. She often pitied poor Sarah and Jenny, who
literally couldn’t see the creatures that had been visible to
her
for all of her life—how terrible, not to be able to see all the strange
creatures that populated the Unseen World!

Her minor Elementals—Undines, who were about the size
of a half-grown child, though with the undraped bodies of fully mature
women—greeted her arrival with languid waves of a hand or pretended
indifference; she didn’t mind. They were rather like cats, to tell the
truth. If you acted as if you were interested in them, they would ignore you,
but if you in your turn ignored them you were bound to get their attention.

And there were things that they could not resist.

In the bottom of her basket was a thin volume of poetry,
part of the reading that Uncle Sebastian had set for her lessons—not
Christina Rossetti, as might have been assumed, but the sonnets of John Donne.
She put her back against the bank in the sun, and with her book in one hand and
a sandwich in the other, she immersed herself in verse, reading it aloud to the
fascinated Undines who propped their heads on the edge of the stream to listen.

When the Undines tired of listening to poetry and swam off
on their own business, Marina filled her basket with ripe apples—the last
of the season, left to ripen slowly on the trees after the main harvest. But it
wasn’t teatime by any stretch of the imagination, and she really wasn’t
ready to go back to the house.

She left the basket with her book atop it next to the
stream, and strolled about the orchard, tending to a magical chore of her own.

This was something she had been doing since she was old
enough to understand that it needed doing: making sure each and every tree was
getting exactly the amount of water it needed. She did this once a month or so
during the growing season; it was the part of Earth Magic to see to the health
of the trees, which her aunt did with gusto, but Margherita could do nothing to
supply the trees with water.

She had done a great deal of work over the years here with
her own Elemental Power. The stream flowed pure and sweet without any need for
her help now, though that had not always been the case; when she had first come
into her powers a number of hidden or half-hidden pieces of trash had left the
waters less than pristine. The worst had been old lead pipes that Uncle Thomas
thought might date all the way back to Roman times, lying beneath a covering of
rank weed, slowly leaching their poison into the water. Uncle Thomas had gotten
Hired John to haul them away to an antiquities dealer; that would make certain
they weren’t dumped elsewhere. She wished him well as he carted them off,
hoping he got a decent price for them; all she cared about was that they were
gone.

Still, there was always the possibility that something
could get into the stream even now. She followed the stream down to the pond
and back, just to be sure that it ran clean and unobstructed, except by things
like rocks, which were perfectly natural; then, her brief surge of restlessness
assuaged, she sat back down next to her basket. She leaned up against the mossy
trunk of a tree and took the latest letter from her parents out of the leaves
of her book and unfolded it.

She read it through for the second time—but did so
more out of a sense of duty than of affection; in all her life she had never
actually seen her parents. The uncles and her aunt were the people who had
loved, corrected, and raised her. They had never let her call them anything
other than “Uncle” or “Aunt,” but in her mind those
titles had come to mean far more than “Mama” and “Papa.”

Mama and Papa weren’t people of flesh and blood. Mama
and Papa had never soothed her after a nightmare, fed her when she was ill,
taught her and healed her and—yes—loved her. Or at least, if Mama
and Papa loved her, it wasn’t with an embrace, a kiss, a strong arm to
lean on, a soft shoulder to cry on—it was only words on a piece of paper.

And yet—there were those words, passionate words. And
there was guilt on her part. They
were
her mother and father; that
could not be denied. For some reason, she could not be with them, although they
assured her fervently in every letter that they longed for her presence. She
tried
to love them—certainly they had always lavished her with presents, and
later when she was old enough to read, with enough letters to fill a
trunk—but even though she was intimately familiar with Uncle Sebastian’s
art, it was impossible to make the wistful couple in the double portrait in her
room come alive.

Perhaps it was because their lives were also so different
from her own. From spring to fall, it was nothing but news of Oakhurst and the
Oakhurst farms, the minutiae of country squires obsessed with the details of
their realm. From fall to spring, they were gone, off on their annual
pilgrimage to Italy for the winter, where they basked in a prolonged summer.
Marina envied them that, particularly when winter winds howled around the eaves
and it seemed that spring would never come. But she just couldn’t
picture
what it was like for them—it had no more reality to her than the stories
in the fairy tale books that her aunt and uncles had read to her as a child.

Neither, for that matter, did their home, supposedly hers,
seem any more alive than those sepia-toned sketches Uncle Sebastian had made of
Oakhurst. No matter how much she wished differently, she couldn’t
feel
the place.
Here
was her home, in this old fieldstone farmhouse,
surrounded not only by her aunt and uncles but by other artists who came and
went.

There were plenty of those; Sebastian’s hospitality
was legendary, and between them, Thomas and Margherita kept normally volatile
artistic temperaments from boiling over. From here, guests could venture into
Cornwall and Arthurian country for their inspiration, or they could seek the
rustic that was so often an inspiration for the artist Millais, another leader
in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Their village of a few hundred probably hadn’t
changed significantly in the last two hundred years; for artists from London,
the place came as a revelation and an endless source for pastoral landscapes
and bucolic portraits.

Marina sighed, and smoothed the pages of the letter with
her hand. She suspected that she was as much an abstraction to her poor mother
as her mother was to her. Certainly the letters were not written to anyone that
she recognized as herself. She was neither an artist nor a squire’s
daughter, and the person her mother seemed to identify as
her
was a
combination of both—making the rounds of the ailing cottagers with soup
and calves-foot jelly in the morning, supervising the work of an army of
servants in the afternoon, and going out with paintbox to capture the sunset in
the evening. The Marina in those letters would never pose for her uncle
(showing her legs in those baggy hose!), get herself floured to the elbow
making scones, or be lying on the grass in the orchard, bare-legged and
bare-footed. And she was, above all else, nothing like an artist.

If anything, she was a musician, mastering mostly on her
own the lute, the flute, and the harp. But despite all of the references to
music in
her
letters, her mother didn’t seem to grasp that.
Presents of expensive paints and brushes that arrived every other month went
straight to her Uncle Sebastian; he in his turn used the money saved by not
having to buy his own to purchase music for her.

Oh, how she loved music! It served as a second bridge
between herself and the Elemental creatures, not only of Water, but of Air, the
Sylphs and Zephyrs that Uncle Sebastian said were her allies, though why she
should need
allies
baffled her. She brought an instrument out here to
play as often as she brought a book to read.
I’m good,
she
thought idly, staring at words written in a careful copperplate hand that had
nothing to do with the real
her. If I had to—I could probably make my
own living from music.

As it was, she used it in other ways; bringing as much
pleasure to others as she could.

Just as she used her magic.

If she didn’t make the rounds of the sick and aged of
the village like a Lady Bountiful, she brought them little gifts of another
sort. The village well would never run dry or foul again. Her flute and harp
were welcome additions to every celebration, from services in the village
church every Sunday, to the gatherings on holidays at the village green. They
probably would never know why the river never over-topped its banks even in the
worst flood-times, and never would guess. Anyone who fell into the river, no
matter how raging the storm, or how poor a swimmer he was, found himself
carried miraculously to the bank—and if he then betook himself to the
church to thank the Lord, that was all right with Marina. Knowing that she had
these powers would not have served them—or her.
They
would be
frightened, and she would find herself looked at, not as a kind of rustic
unicorn, rare and ornamental, but as something dark, unfathomable, and
potentially dangerous.

Her uncles and aunt had never actually said anything about
keeping her magics a tacit secret, but their example had spoken louder than any
advice they could have given her. Margherita and Thomas’ influence
quietly ensured bountiful harvests, fertile fields, and healthy children
without any overt displays—Sebastian’s magic was less useful to the
villagers in that regard, but no one ever suffered from hearth-fires that
burned poorly, wood that produced more smoke than heat, or indeed anything
having to do with fire that went awry. It was all very quiet, very
domestic
magic; useful, though homely.

And working it paid very subtle dividends. Although the
villagers really didn’t know the authors of their prosperity, some
instinct informed them at a level too deep for thought. So, though they often
looked a bit askance at the bohemian visitors that were often in residence at
Blackbird Cottage, they welcomed the four residents with good-natured amusement,
a touch of patronization, and probably said among themselves, “Oh, to be
sure they’re lunatics, but they’re
our
lunatics.”