The Wizard of London (35 page)

And
she hadn’t scrupled as to means either. According to the maids she had brazenly
hopped into bed with him practically from the time he first appeared.

“So
she’s canoodling with this feller, an’ wouldn’t you know,
next thing he’s caught cheatin’ at cards up here at the party.
There’s a big to-do, an’ he disappears in the morning, an’
his friend don’t feel too comfortable here neither, so he leaves early,
too, that same afternoon. Gal at village don’t find out about this till
they’ve both been gone two days.”

According
to the maids, there had been a “right row” about that, too, complete
with the abandoned girl in question storming up to Highleigh, demanding to see
the master, claiming the captain had promised to marry her and insisting that
the master of Highleigh make it all right.

Except,
of course, she never saw the master. The butler handled it all with an icy calm
that intimidated even the girl. He had made it clear to her that the man in
question—“no gentleman, young person, I assure you”—was
neither a friend nor even a casual acquaintance of the master, and that the
master had no idea where the cad was, or even if he had a right to the name and
title he had claimed. “She got sent away with a flea in
her
ear,” the dairymaid had said maliciously. Nan had a feeling there had
been some bad blood there…

“So
come Christmas, seems the gal has another problem, an’ by spring,
she’s got a baby an’ no husband.”

The
maids had been full of stories of how the girl had tried to seduce her way to a
marriage license with
anyone
at that point, but of course, everyone in
the village knew by that time that she had a big belly and nothing to show for
it, and not even the stupidest farmhand wanted himself saddled with a child
that wasn’t his and a wife that wasn’t inclined to do a bit more
work than she had to. She had the baby, and though her family didn’t
disown her, they made it clear that she was a living shame to all of them and
really ought to show her repentance in quite tangible ways…

She
hadn’t cared for being a housemaid. She hadn’t cared for the fact
that the baby was the living badge of her disgrace, not to mention a burden of
care that no one would help her with.

“So
the baby disappears, an’ everyone figgers she took it to th’
norphanage or the workhouse and left it there, an’ she gets to
tryin’ to find herself a husband again—”

“But
she didn’t take it to the orphanage, did she?” Sarah asked
somberly.

Nan
shook her head. “No. ‘Cause after some whiles, she was actin’
pretty peculiar, like she’s got somethin’ weighin’ on
‘er, an kept comin’ back to the river at the bridge. She’d
come there in dead of night, an’ just stand there, starin’ at the
water. Pretty soon she’s actin’ real strange, askin’ if
people can hear a baby cryin’, an’ then before Christmas, she
drownded herself. So they reckon she drownded it in the same place she done
herself, poor mite.”

“Real
strange” was a gross understatement. She’d been caught once or
twice trying to take babies out of cradles when the mothers in question stepped
out of their cottages for a moment. She had covered herself in a set of tatty,
head-to-toe black veils she found somewhere. And she had all but haunted the
bridge. Everyone knew by then that she had murdered her own child, but without
a body or a confession it was hard to do anything about her. There was some
tentative movement by the village officials to get her sent to an insane
asylum, but before anything could be done, she had already killed herself.

Sarah
shivered all over, and her eyes got a little teary. “Poor baby!”
she said finally. “What a nasty, wicked woman.”

“But
it does pretty much account for what we saw,” Nan replied. She felt
obscurely sorry for the baby—but in her part of London, so many babies
died all the time, that it was hard to get all worked up about one. Even the
ones that were wanted died so easily that a mother was likely to bury four for
every one she was able to raise. “So. Your turn.”

Sarah
nodded, and her sorrowful expression cleared. “There’s more than
one version of the Wild Hunt,” Sarah replied, licking her lips
thoughtfully. “I looked through a lot of books and Robin was right, there
were several in the library here that talked about legends and magic and things
like that. Had you noticed? There are a
lot
of odd books in that
library.”

Nan
scratched her head. “Well,” she said finally, after a moment of
consideration, “The feller what owns this house is somebody Mem’sab
kind of knows. I don’t reckon he’s one of her toff friends from
before she went to Indja. You know, mebbe he’s like one of us, and mebbe
that sort of thing runs in the family? So the library’d be full of that
kind of books.”

Sarah
nodded. “I think you’re right. In fact, you know I thought it was a
bit odd that a house this old
wouldn’t
have a ghost, but maybe
it doesn’t because the family that lives here has always made sure that
ghosts moved on.”

Nan
nodded, and hugged her knees to her chest. “I reckon you’re right.
So you found some books. What’d they say?”

“Well,
one says that the Wild Hunt is—like Robin’s people.” She
lowered her voice to whisper, as if she didn’t like to say the words too
loudly. “Elves. The Fair Folk. It says they come out of barrows at night
to hunt the mortals that drove them out of their circles and groves. That one
made it sound like these were bad Elves, though, and that they hunted people
down at night for the fun of it.”

Nan
mulled that one over. “I don’t see how that can be right,”
she said judiciously. “ ‘Cause they took that ghost. But Robin
did
call ‘em, so mebbe it is.”

“Another
couple of books said it was made up of ghosts, people who had lived violent
lives and died violent deaths.” Sarah unconsciously pulled her covers a
little closer around her. “And some of those books say that they’re
trying to make up for what they did by going after bad people. Like they are
getting a second chance to keep from going to the Bad Place.”

She
meant hell, Nan knew, though she couldn’t imagine why Sarah
wouldn’t just come out and say the word.

“But
some other books say that they’re wicked people who are keeping
themselves from going to the Bad Place by hunting down people and scaring them
to death or chasing them until they die. And some say they are already from the
Bad Place, and it opens up to let them out.” Sarah shook her head.
“I just don’t know, because 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.

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.