Mercedes Lackey - The Gates of Sleep

Now she had Marina’s complete interest. “Me? What—oh! Water magic?” Interest turned to excitement, and a thrill of anticipation.

Margherita laughed. “She certainly isn’t going to teach you etiquette! You’re more than ready for a teacher of your own Element, and it’s time you got one.”

The exercises that Uncle Thomas had been setting her had been nothing but repetitions of the same old things for some time now. Marina hadn’t wanted to say anything, but she had been feeling frustrated, bored, and stale. Frustrated, because she had the feeling that there was so much that was just beyond her grasp—bored and stale because she was so tired of repeating the same old things. “But—what about Mrs. Hasting’s family?” she asked, not entirely willing to believe that someone with a “terribly—terribly correct husband” would be able to get away for more than a day or two at most, and certainly not alone.

“Elizabeth’s sons are at Oxford, her daughter is married, and her husband wants to take up some invitations for the hunting and fishing seasons in Scotland this year,” Margherita said, with a smile at Marina’s growing excitement. “And when the hunting season is over, he intends to go straight on to London for his Parliament duties. Elizabeth hates hunting and detests London; she’ll be staying with us up until Christmas.”

“That’s wonderful!” Marina could not contain herself any more; she leapt to her feet, catching the book of Shakespeare at the last moment before it tumbled to the floor out of her lap. “When is she coming?”

“By the train on Wednesday, and I’ll need your help in getting the guest room ready for her—”

But Marina was running as soon as she realized the guest would arrive the next day. She was already halfway up the stairs, her aunt’s laughter following her, by the time Margherita had reached the words “guest room.”

Once, all the rooms in this old farm house had led one into the other, like the ones on the first floor. But at some point, perhaps around the time that Jane Austen was writing Emma, the walls had been knocked down in the second story and replaced with an arrangement of a hall with smaller bedrooms along it. And about when Victoria first took the throne, one of the smallest bedrooms had been made into a bathroom. True, hot water still had to be carted laboriously up the stairs for a bath, but at least they weren’t bathing in hip baths in front of the fire, and there was a water-closet. So their guest wouldn’t be totally horrified by the amenities, or lack of them.

It would be horrible if she left after a week because she couldn’t have a decent wash-up.

She opened the linen-closet at the end of the hall and took a deep breath of the lavender-scented air before taking out sheets for the bed in the warmest of the guest rooms. This was the one directly across from her own, and like hers, right over the kitchen. The view wasn’t as fine, but in winter there wasn’t a great deal of view anyway, and the cozy warmth coming up from the kitchen, faintly scented with whatever Margherita was baking, made up for the lack of view. Where her room was a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy, this room was altogether conventional, with rose-vine wallpaper, chintz curtains and cushions, and a brass-framed bed. The rest of the furniture, however, was made by Thomas, and looked just a little odd within the confines of such a conventional room. Woolen blankets woven by Margherita in times when she hadn’t any grand commissions to fulfill were in an asymmetrical chest at the foot of the bed, and the visitor would probably need them.

She left the folded sheets on the bed and flung the single window open just long enough to air the room out. It didn’t take long, since Margherita never really let the guest rooms get stale and stuffy. It also didn’t take long for the room to get nasty and cold, so she closed it again pretty quickly.

Fire. I need a fire. There was no point in trying to kindle one herself the way that Uncle Sebastian did. She was eager, almost embarrassingly eager, for their visitor to feel welcome. When Elizabeth Hastings arrived, it should be to find a room warmed and waiting, as if this house was her home.

Marina solved the problem of the fire with a shovelful of coals from her own little fire, laid onto the waiting kindling in the fireplace of the guest room. She might not be able to kindle a fire, but she was rather proud of her ability to lay one. Once the fire was going and the chill was off the air, she made the bed up with the lavender-scented sheets and warm blankets, dusted everything thoroughly, and set out towels and everything else a guest might want. She made sure that the lamp on the bedside table was full of oil and the wick trimmed, and that there was a box of lucifer matches there as well.

She looked around the room, and sighed. No flowers. It was just too late for them—and too late to gather a few branches with fiery autumn leaves on them. The bouquet of dried straw flowers and fragrant herbs on the mantel would just have to do.

She heard footsteps in the hall outside, and wasn’t surprised when her Aunt pushed the door open. “You haven’t left me anything to do,” Margherita observed, with an approving glance around the room.

“Well, really, there wasn’t that much work needed to be done; that tramping poet was only here last week.” The “tramping poet” was a rarity, a complete stranger to the household, who’d arrived on foot, in boots and rucksack, letter of recommendation in hand from one of their painterly friends. He’d taken it in his head to “do the Wordsworth”—that is, to walk about the countryside for a while in search of inspiration, and finding that the Lake District was overrun with sightseers and hearty fresh-air types, he’d elected to try Devon and Cornwall instead. He was on the last leg of his journey and had been remarkably cheerful about being soaked with cold rain. A good guest as well, he’d made himself useful chopping wood and in various other small ways, had not overstayed his welcome, and even proved to be very amusing in conversation.

“You can’t possibly be a successful poet,” Sebastian had accused him. “You’re altogether too good-natured, and nothing near morose enough.”

“Sadly,” he’d admitted (not sadly at all), “I’m not. I do have a facile touch for rhyme, but I can’t seem to generate the proper level of anguish. I’ve come to that conclusion myself, actually. I intend to go back to London and fling myself at one of those jolly new advertising firms. I’ll pummel ‘em with couplets until they take me in and pay me.” He’d struck an heroic attitude. “Hark! the Herald Angels sing, ‘Pierson’s Pills are just the thing!’ If your tummy’s fluttery, hie thee to Bert’s Buttery! Nerves all gone and limp as wax? Seek the aid of brave Nutrax!”

Laughing, Margherita and Marina had thrown cushions at him to make him stop. “Well!” he’d said, when he’d sat back down and they’d collected the cushions again, “If I’m doomed to be a jangling little couplet-rhymer, I’d rather be honest and sell butter with my work than pretend I’m a genius crushed by the failure of the world to understand me.”

“I hope he comes back some time,” Marina said, referring to that previous guest.

“If he does, he’ll be welcome,” Margherita said firmly. “But not while Elizabeth is here. It would be very awkward, having a stranger about while she was trying to teach you Water Magic. Altogether too likely that he’d see something he shouldn’t.”

Marina nodded. It wasn’t often that someone who wasn’t naturally a mage actually saw any of the things that mages took for granted—that was part of the Gift of the Sight, after all, and if you didn’t have that Gift, well, you couldn’t See what mages Saw. But sometimes accidents happened, and someone with only a touch of the Sight got a glimpse of something he shouldn’t. And if magic made some change in the physical world, well, that could be witnessed as well, whether or not the witness had the Sight.