The Gates of Sleep (20 page)

“Awake, miss?” she asked, with no inflection
whatsoever.

No, I’m sleepwalking,
Marina thought with
irritation. The headache of yesterday in her temples had been joined by one at
the back of her head, and whatever vile nastiness had been in the tea had left
her with a foul taste in her mouth. But she answered the question civilly enough.
“Yes, I am now. How long have I been asleep?”

The maid allowed a superior smile to cross her lips. “You’ve
slept the clock around, miss. It’s midmorning, two days after Boxing Day.
But it’s just as well you were asleep,” the woman continued,
turning and going to a wardrobe painted dark ochre, and ornamented with gilded
scrollwork. “Madam has had her modiste here to make you some clothing fit
to wear, and she only finished the first few items and delivered them an hour
ago. You’re in mourning, after all, and you need mourning frocks. And
those things you brought with you—well, they weren’t suitable.”
A sniff relegated her entire wardrobe to something not worth using as rags,
much less being fit to wear.

But the maid’s words could only lead Marina to one horrified
conclusion. “You didn’t throw them out!” she exclaimed. “Not
my clothes!”

The maid did not trouble to answer. Out of the wardrobe
came a black velvet skirt, severely cut with a slight train, and a heavy black
silk blouse, high-necked, and trimmed at wrists and neck with narrow black
lace. Out of the drawers of a chest next to it came white silk underthings,
black stockings, a corset, black satin slippers. All these were laid out at the
end of the bed, and no sooner had Marina turned back the coverlet and stood up,
then the maid pounced on her.

There could be no other description. Before Marina could
make a move to reach for anything herself, the nightdress was whisked over her
head, leaving her naked and shivering, and the maid was holding up the drawers
for her to step into.

Marina had always wondered what it was like to be dressed
by a lady’s maid, and now she was finding out with a vengeance. It was
exactly like being a doll, and the maid was just as impersonal about the job as
a woman in a toy-shop clothing one of the toys for display. In fact, the maid
was ruthlessly efficient; before Marina had time to blink, the corset was on
her, she had been turned to face the bed, and the woman was pulling at the
laces with her knee in the small of Marina’s back! And she was pulling
tightly,
much more tightly than the dressmaker in Holsworthy.

“Stop!” Marina protested, as her waist was
squeezed into a circumference two sizes smaller than it had ever endured
before. “I can’t breathe!”

“You’ve never been properly corseted, miss,”
sniffed the maid, tugging harder. “Or you’d know that a lady doesn’t
need to puff and wheeze like a farm wench in a field. Shallow breaths, miss. A
lady looks as if she isn’t breathing at all.”

Giving a final tug, the maid allowed Marina to stand
straight up again—indeed, the corset hardly allowed any other posture.
The laces were tied; three stiff petticoats, the last one of rustling black
silk, came next. Then a chemise. And finally, the shirtwaist and skirt.

Feeling faint from lack of air, Marina was steered to a
chair beside a dressing table with a mirror above it, both painted in dark
ocher and ornamented with those baroque gold curlicues. The maid deftly
unbraided her hair, brushed it out just as ruthlessly as she had done everything
else and with a fine disregard for any pain caused when she encountered
tangles, and proceeded to put it up in one of the pompadour hair styles that
Marina had seen only in newspaper sketches. She had always longed to see her
own hair like this—the arrangements looked so soft, and so very smart.

She’d had no idea that getting her hair done up in
the fashionable style would involve being stuck so full of sharp-pointed
hairpins that she thought her scalp was bleeding from a dozen places before the
maid was through.

The maid fastened a jet cameo at her throat, and a matching
jet locket on a slender chain around her neck. “There,” she said at
last, implying
now you’re fit to be seen.

The person staring back at Marina from the mirror was no
one she recognized. The face was drawn and very white, and huge violet eyes
stared back at her, with faint blue rings beneath them. Her pallor was only
accentuated by the black silk of her blouse. Her hair had been arranged in the
upswept style most favored by the PBs, with their delicate heart-shaped faces.
It didn’t suit Marina Roeswood.

“I’ll take you down to meet your aunt now,
miss,” said the maid. “I am Mary Anne, and I will be your personal
servant here from now on.”

Giving her no choice in the matter, apparently. Personal
maid—or watchdog for her aunt?

My own personal maid. Why does it seem as if she’s
higher in consequence than I am?

Perhaps, in this household, Mary Anne was.

“What happened to my things?” she asked, in a
small voice, cowed by the icy correctness of the maid’s manner. “My
clothing—my books, my instruments, and my music—”

Another of those superior sniffs, and the maid looked down
her long nose at Marina. “Miss could not possibly expect to wear
those—frocks—in public,” Mary Anne replied. “Madam said
explicitly that they would not do, they would not do at all. Not the sort of
thing miss would wish to encounter Madam’s friends while wearing.
However, the rest of your things have been put away in your private parlor.”
She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the door. “Now, if you
will please follow me, Madam wishes to speak with you.”

As if she had a choice.

She followed the maid, who led her through that door and
into a sitting room furnished in opulent reds, with a Turkey carpet on the
floor, the whole done up in the style of the early part of Queen Victoria’s
reign. Quite frankly, Marina couldn’t think of a pair of rooms less
likely to make a Water Master comfortable. The bedroom produced a heavy
feeling, the parlor made her feel horribly warm. Together they made her feel
stifled, smothered. The ceilings in these rooms were high, they must have been
twelve feet or more, and yet she still felt closed in and overheated. And there
wasn’t a chance that she’d be allowed to redecorate, either. She
longed for her wonderful little room in Blackbird Cottage with an aching heart.

They walked for a good five minutes, going down a floor and
all the way across a series of ever-more-opulent rooms. At the other end of the
enormous house waited Arachne Chamberten, her new guardian.

Mary Anne opened a final door and motioned to Marina to
enter as she stood aside. Still breathless, still feeling that her high collar
was much too tight, Marina went in, and the door closed behind her.

In the center of a (relatively) small red room, in the
exact middle of a carpet figured in red and black that looked to Marina’s
frightened eyes like a bed of hot coals, was a large, highly-polished wooden
desk of ebony. Behind that desk sat a stunningly beautiful woman. Her hair was
as black and as glossy as the heavy black silk-satin of her gown. Her skin was
as white and translucent as porcelain. When she looked up, her black eyes
stared right through Marina, her red lips smiled, but the smile didn’t
seem to reach beyond those lips.

She stood, and held out both hands. “Ah, my niece
Marina, at last!” she said, in a sultry voice, warm as velvet laid before
a fire. “You cannot know how deeply I regret the rift your parents saw
fit to make with me; I saw you only once, at your christening, and never again.
You have certainly changed greatly since that time.”

Marina felt her lips move stiffly into a parody of a polite
smile as she walked forward. She extended one hand, intending only to offer a
mere handshake to her aunt, but Arachne drew her forward, captured the other
hand before Marina could snatch it out of reach and guided her to a chair
beside her own behind the desk. Having both her cold hands, with skin roughened
by the work she did in the kitchen and around the house, imprisoned in Arachne’s
warm milk-smooth ones, felt distinctly uncomfortable. She tried to stiffen her
own spine, and confronted Arachne’s knowing eyes. “What do you mean
when you say ‘the rift my parents saw fit to make with you?’ I
never heard of any rift,” she protested.

“And you never heard a word of me, did you?”
Arachne countered. “That is precisely what I meant. Your father, who was
my brother, and your Roeswood grandparents who were
our
father and
mother, chose to cut me off from the family because of my marriage to Allan
Chamberten. Perhaps it would be more charitable to say that it was
my—our—parents’ fault, and poor Hugh, child that he was at
the time, simply followed their example. So I bear him no ill will; I only wish
that I had managed a reconciliation before this. But who could have foreseen
that he and Alanna would come to such a tragic end?”

For a moment, Marina thought that she would reach for the
black silk handkerchief tucked into the waistband of her skirt in what could
only be a feigned show of grief. For if she had been so totally estranged from
Hugh and Alanna, how could any grief she felt be anything but feigned?

But she did nothing of the sort. She only, sighed, and
smiled, and squeezed Marina’s hands. “Well, you and I shall be
remedying that wrong, will we not? I take my responsibility as your guardian
quite seriously, you may be sure of that.”

“But I
had
guardians!” Marina burst
out, angrily. “I was very happy there!
Why
did you send those
horrible men—and policemen!—to kidnap me away from them?
They
were the people my parents chose to take care of me, not you!” She tried
to wrench her hands away, but Arachne’s grip was so strong it couldn’t
be broken.

Arachne bestowed the kind of pitying look on Marina that
might be given a naughty child who had no notion of what she was saying. “My
dear child, please. You are—at last—old enough to understand just
how foolish your parents were—and how selfish.” She shook her head.
“Just listen to me for a moment, please, and don’t interrupt. Are
you under the impression that I don’t know what they did with you? Do you
think that I am not aware that they simply deposited you in that hive of
artists and left you there? That they never, not once, attempted to see you?
That they never troubled to see to it that you received the kind of upbringing
someone of your wealth and social position should have had? And why do you
think that happened?”

Since those very questions had passed through her mind more
than once (though not, perhaps, phrased in quite that way), Marina was held
dumb, hypnotized by the questions, and by Arachne’s eyes. She shook her
head slightly.

“Now,
I
do not know, not for certain,”
Arachne said. “I know only what my inquiries have brought to light.
Alanna is—was—sensitive. Overly so, perhaps. Certainly she was of a
very nervous disposition, and your birth was hard on her—very, very hard.
Something happened then that terrified her; I have been unable to discover what
it was, but whatever the cause was, you, a mere infant at the time, were at the
heart of it, and she sent you away, as far away from her as she could manage
among her acquaintances.” Arachne shrugged, and the silk of her skirt
rustled as she shifted in her chair. “I know that Hugh considered your
artists to be friends, which was… something of a mistake, a social faux
pas, in my opinion. I know that they were visiting at the time of Alanna’s
fright, and I suspect that when the emergency occurred, your father would have
given you into the keeping of whomsoever volunteered to take you. I do know you
were literally shoved into Margherita Tarrant’s arms and sent away with
whatever could be bundled up quickly into the cart that brought them here. I
know this, because I have found witnesses among the servants who saw it happen.
Presumably they were the only ones among the group that was visiting that were
willing to accept the responsibility of an infant. For whatever reason, Alanna
Roeswood could not bear the sight of you, and my brother chose his wife’s
welfare over that of his daughter.”

The words struck her as hard as a rain of blows from a cane
Marina could only sit with her hands limply in Arachne’s. Her head spun;
this made altogether too much sense.

But what about those letters? All those letters?

“He should have found someone to care for you more in
keeping with your rank and station, but he didn’t.” Arachne’s
lips thinned. “I am not one to speak ill of the dead, but my brother, I
fear, must have been weak of will. He allowed our parents to override him in
the matter of myself, and he allowed his wife to dictate to him in the matter
of you. I am sorry, my dear, but he could not have chosen a worse set of people
to care for you. Oh, I know that they were fond of you—I know they did
their best for you! But they have allowed you to run wild, they never sent you
to a proper finishing school nor got you a governess to teach you, and they
exposed you to all manner of improper persons and impossible manners. In the
matter of your wardrobe alone—” Her lips thinned even more with
disapproval “—well, the less said about that, the better. Except
that those so-called ‘artistic reform tea-gowns’ might have been
the mode—in a certain circle—years ago, but they most certainly are
not now, and the mere wearing of them would expose you to the utmost ridicule.”

Marina dropped her eyes, her ears burning with
embarrassment, torn between an instinctive urge to protest and the fear that
her aunt was right. No matter what Elizabeth had said.

“Fortunately, by the standards of society, you are
still a child, and your reputation has not suffered the irredeemable damage it
would have if you were only a year older,” Arachne continued. “I
hope that my brother had the sense to realize that; I more than hope, I
know—indeed, some of the things among his papers informed me that he had
laid plans to bring you home before your eighteenth birthday. And certainly, by
now even poor Alanna must have realized her fears, her terrors, could not be
attached to a grown young woman. So, in order to carry out his wishes, I merely
brought them forward—realizing as I did, once his men of business told me
where you had been deposited, that you could not be left there a moment longer
without terrible damage to your reputation.” Once again, she squeezed
Marina’s hands as Marina stared down at them. Marina raised her eyes to
meet her aunt’s again, and Arachne smiled as she had before. “I
knew you would, you must object to this removal. I knew that the Tarrants would
object as well—they could not be expected to see why they were so
unsuitable, poor things. That was why I proceeded as I did, why I moved to
obtain legal custody of your person, why I sent people to remove you so
quickly, and why I did it in the rather—authoritarian—manner that I
chose.”