Unnatural Issue Read online

  Peter was astonished. He’d expected nothing, and instead he had three of the four directions eliminated. “My good sir, west of here is a hundred times better direction than I had before this. I am in your debt!”

  The man actually blushed. “Na, I’d have brought anything real up before this, but the squire has enough on his plate without bits of rumor.”

  “Well this was the perfect time and place to say something,” Michael said firmly. “Here we have Lord Peter who has the nose of a ferret and the tenacity of a terrier and, moreover, the mandate from the White Lodge to get to the bottom of this. I don’t have it on my plate, he has it on his. I’d take it kindly if you could spread that bit of news about. Anyone who can give him any signs or portents at all, should. After all, he’s a citified lord who’s fair lost out here where there’s no street signs and no Harrod’s.” He winked as he said that last.

  “Oi!” Peter cried with mock-indignation. “Who’s citified?”

  “The man who had to have his tweeds aged for him,” Michael grinned. “You are caught, m’lord. Your clever work will pass muster at a distance, but not beneath the eyes of servants who handle them.”

  Peter flung up his hands. “I am crushed. And not appreciated. I shall take my maligned carcass elsewhere.”

  “So long as it’s west of Branwell Hall, Lord Peter!” Michael called after him, as he made an exit as full of drama as anything done for a panto. “As long as it’s west of the Hall!”

  Despite the frustration—and the fact that he was not looking forward to spending the afternoon staring at his water bowl without results—he found himself grinning. It was such a relief to not have to watch every word and to speak in a kind of cryptic code about anything magical. It was even more of a relief to know that he had help for the asking. The number of times when he and Garrick had been in sticky situations with no help at all did not bear thinking about.

  Not that he really expected this to turn into a sticky situation. If they did need help, it was far more likely to be something that would require many hands doing something terribly tedious. But many hands would divide the tedious task into manageable portions.

  Right now, however, there was only one set of hands that could do what he was doing, and those were on the ends of his arms. “Once more into the breech, dear friends,” he murmured to himself, and headed for the Work Room to prepare more purified and energized water.

  There were some things it was better not to entrust to any hands but your own.

  Peter had set himself up right at the southwest corner of the estate lands. Away from the Hall, of course, he had to resume his ruse of painting, since the tenants and villagers were mostly not magicians.

  “If I were you, m’lord . . .” Garrick said, his solemn expression not varying in the least as he looked at the mess Peter had made on the canvas.

  There was no point in Garrick pretending to look at birds. They were within walking distance of the village of Stype, the nearest to Branwell Hall, and every child in the village and every adult with nothing better to do was walking out to have a look at what the “painterin’ lord” was doing. Peter would get no peace to Work until they had all satisfied themselves.

  Now, he knew he was no kind of painter. And it wasn’t as if anyone was ever going to want to look at his daubs. But it was getting downright annoying that all he could manage to produce were canvases covered in varied colors of mud.

  “Well?” Peter snapped, after a long silence. Then he felt guilty about snapping. “Beg your pardon, Garrick. Didn’t mean to take your head off.”

  “No offense taken, m’lord,” Garrick replied. “The thing is . . . I believe you are not giving the paint time to dry, m’lord.”

  “But . . .” He stabbed at the canvas with the palette knife in frustration. “Hang it all, she said to lay on the paint thick with the knife or the brush and—”

  “But m’lord, all you are doing is to muddle up the colors. You’re doing the same thing on the canvas that you do to mix colors on the palette, scrubbing them all together. If I may be so bold.”

  Peter blinked. “Dash it all, you’re right. So, what do you think I should do?”

  “If it were me, m’lord, I would lay in my basic colors in big swaths, as your friend told you to do, but set the canvas aside when you have done and let it dry. Then come back to it to slice the new colors on with the knife. No mixing on the canvas.”

  “Hrrm. Well, it can’t come out any worse than it already has done.” He discarded the ruined canvas with a grimace. Another one for the fire. Then he chose the basic colors for the grass, the drift of heather across one hill, and the sky. And then he stopped. Setting the canvas aside, he started on a second and was astonished to find that the colors had already changed as the light changed.

  He finished the second and started a third. “How is my audience?” he asked, not looking up. He was feeling much more cheerful now. Thanks to Garrick’s advice he thought he was making some progress on this.

  “Growing bored, m’lord,” said Garrick. “There are only a couple of children. I should try the thumb now, if I were you.”

  “Right-oh.”

  After a great deal of holding the thumb out, walking about, squinting, peering at the canvas, then repeating the procedure, Garrick finally indicated that the last of the children had gone. He settled himself in the grass and began scrying.

  He still didn’t really expect to see anything. The “general unease” could have been anything at all, from a premonition of bad weather coming to ruin the harvest to some repercussions from what was going on over the Channel. And the first three drops he let fall into the bowl showed him nothing at all.

  But the fourth . . . the fifth . . . the sixth . . .

  Something was definitely disturbing the waters to the north and west—only a little, but the traces were there, and they didn’t disappear no matter how many more drops fell into the bowl.

  Since he had set his water and his scrying spell to look for one thing and one thing only, it was clear that Alderscroft had been right. It was not a wild goose chase.

  There really was a necromancer, after all.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, looking up and seeing Garrick’s expression of mingled shock and alarm.

  “Well said, m’lord,” Garrick replied, taking out a very white handkerchief and mopping his brow with it, in an uncharacteristic display of rattled nerves. “I could not have put it better myself.”

  8

  HER father was watching her.

  Even though Susanne hadn’t seen him since that single interview, she knew he was watching her. She practically felt his eyes on her. There was always a shadow at his window when she went out, and when she was inside . . . well, he was an Earth Master. Robin hadn’t yet taught her scrying, but she knew that all the Masters had the means of looking elsewhere—and sometimes looking into the past as well. He could be scrying her. He could also have some Elemental servant watching her. And if he had ordered that servant not to be seen, well, she wouldn’t see it.

  The feeling of being watched was so intense indoors that she had taken all her lessons outside. At least there, the sensation was diminished. Maybe he couldn’t scry her as well when she was outside the shields she had placed around the Manor to contain the blight. Maybe her own Elemental friends warned off whatever creature he had spying on her. Whatever the reason, the relief was profound. What she would do when cold weather came . . . well, she was not sure. Perhaps by then she would have satisfied his requirements, and he would have sent her away to school. She certainly hoped so.

  It had gotten bad enough after the first four days of the change in her status that she had begun to suspect he came into her room at night when she was asleep. She knew very well that just seemed insane. What possible reason could he have to do that?

  Unless it was the same impulse that made parents look in on sleeping children, just to be sure they were safe. That was possible. It could be, now that he had awakened
to his responsibilities as a parent, he was doing now what he should have been doing when she was small.

  Or she was just imagining things. That was possible too. How could he possibly come into her room without waking her? She slept very lightly; she always had. That was one reason why she hadn’t shared a room with Prudence and Patience. She didn’t think it was possible for anyone to slip into her room without waking her.

  Unless he wasn’t doing so physically . . .

  Nevertheless, it was . . . well, very uncomfortable, in a way she didn’t quite understand. Time and time again, she wondered if it was just her imagination, yet time after time she could not shake the feeling that he was brooding over her all during his waking hours.

  During the times when she was absolutely certain he had his eyes on her, it felt somehow unhealthy, obsessively wrong. Yet there was so much about her father that was wrong already that she tried to persuade herself that this was nothing more than another symptom of the terrible damage his heartbreak had done to him. After all, he had been a virtual hermit for over two decades, seeing no one but Agatha, never leaving his rooms. She tried to persuade herself that he was trying to mend and heal, and, eventually, though he would have scars, it would come around right.

  The problem was, it just didn’t feel that way; it felt as if there were a huge part of this puzzle that she could not even guess at, as if she were one of the blind men trying to say what an elephant was like when all she could feel was the trunk.

  In fact, it felt as though this was something that would never get better. Something fundamentally and deeply wrong.

  It felt so very wrong, in fact, that she just didn’t want him to know about her clearing. There was no way to prevent him from using magic to spy on her, but she didn’t have to encourage it either. So instead of going to her clearing after that first day she went outside, she took her lessons to the orchard just outside the blighted area, outside those shields she had set up to contain the blight. He would still be able to see her physically, and that should keep him from using magic to keep track of her.

  Without a telescope or binocular lenses he would not see her very well, but those white dresses stood out very well against the green grass. So he would know exactly where she was, if not exactly what she was doing—and that should keep him from going to more extreme measures.

  The first day she did this, she still felt as if his eyes were on her the whole time, but it seemed they were his actual, physical eyes, not some proxy. She did her best to ignore it; after all, she wasn’t doing anything that she was worried about him seeing, and if he chose to spend his entire day peering at her from behind his curtains, well, she couldn’t stop him.

  Since then she had gone out every day as soon as she had breakfasted. There was no reason to go back to the house until suppertime, and she was very glad of that. Agatha put up good luncheons for her, and it was actually easier for her to concentrate out here. Even without the pressure of her father’s regard, she found being stuck indoors to be stifling.

  She leafed through a new book he had sent her, one on manners and deportment. And she made a little face over it. He assumed she didn’t know any of this, and of course he was wrong. Servants had to know these things. Servants had to be even more polite than their masters.

  From here she could see the girls hanging the laundry out to dry, and she felt a stab of guilt for not being there to help. But of course, that was impossible. After the first two days, she’d actually tried to lend a hand when Prudence came up to clean her room, and Prudence had been so horrified she’d stopped immediately.

  Poor Prudence. It had to be her father’s orders, of course, that Susanne be treated “properly.” The poor thing was probably afraid that if he found out that his daughter had been cleaning grates, Prudence would find herself dismissed. And Prudence’s family needed the wages. She was the eldest of eight and the only one in service.

  She tried very hard not to hate her father for that. Suddenly, she was all alone; the new divide between her and the people who used to be her friends was extremely uncomfortable.

  I understand why this is. I don’t like it, and I don’t agree with the reasons, but I understand. We aren’t the same class. Of course, class is ridiculous, I am the same person I was before all this, and so are they. But Father is the master here in the Manor, and it is his rules we all must live by.

  After three days of being out in the orchard, she had noticed something. There were times when she felt those unseen eyes on her fade away, sometimes for hours at a time. And the curious thing was, when that happened, the birds and animals that had kept their distance from her would then move in closer, the way she was used to having them act.

  She kept a sharper watch, and finally she had the proof that it wasn’t just her imagination; the animals were reacting to something. And if the animals felt it too, then this wasn’t nerves or an active imagination; it meant that her father was not merely watching her, he was concentrating on her in a way that even a rabbit knew wasn’t healthy.

  She began to get angry at that point. There had been that lingering doubt, that perhaps she had been feeling unease about the change in her situation and ascribing that to her father, since after all, he had caused it. But . . . no. And this morning over breakfast she decided that she’d had enough. If he was going to spy on her, well, she was going to turn the tables on him.

  “I’m going to trick him,” she said to the robin that had come to sit on the edge of her rug and stare meaningfully at the basket that held her luncheon. “And serve him right, too. All these years, it has been me that has had the care of these lands, kept the earth healthy and sound. I’m the one that has taken care of all of the magic things that needed doing. And did he notice that someone else had stepped in after he ran away from his responsibilities and hid in his rooms to brood? No. Did he think to find out if anyone would? No. And now, oh, now, he uses his magic, and for what? To spy on me? He hasn’t made one bit of effort to take up his duties again! And with all this spying, has he even noticed that it’s me that is caring for everything? Has he noticed that I am an Earth magician at all?”

  Giving voice to this raised her ire rather than cooling it. Saying these things out loud made her examine the injustice of it all, and she was so angry now, she would have given her father a right tongue-lashing if he’d been in front of her. After all, she wasn’t just his daughter, she was his peer, his equal in magic, and he should have given her that much respect, instead of acting as if she were somehow feebleminded because thanks to his neglect she didn’t have the education proper to a girl of her station!

  “Well, we’ll show him,” she said to the bird. “And if he doesn’t realize what I’ve done, well, the more fool he.”

  She assembled what she needed swiftly: a clean white handkerchief, a scrap of the dress she was wearing, snipped from an inside seam, a little earth moistened with her own blood, a single hair, an appleseed. She tied it all up tightly in the handkerchief, set it down in front of her, and concentrated. She built up in her own mind the image she had studied this morning in the mirror, all the while calling the Earth’s slow power to her. She fed that power into the little packet, drop by drop, as she imposed her will and her image on it. She was a child of Earth, a Daughter of Eve. And she was going to create a reflection of herself.

  She closed her eyes to concentrate better; she’d actually done this several times in the past, when she was much younger, and she had wanted to run off to the woods to play with Robin but didn’t want to frighten Agatha. Robin had taught her how to make an image of herself, something that would repeat a single action over and over so that there was some movement and life although it wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny. She had loved to swing, so that was what she had the image do; and every time Agatha looked out, she would see what she thought was Susanne, swinging in the orchard, and be content, when Susanne was actually far, far from the Manor.

  But that only had to fool ordinary folk. This wou
ld have to fool an Earth Master, at least at a distance. It not only had to look like her, it had to feel like her. It still wouldn’t pass muster from up close, but he would never come out to look, and the others wouldn’t come disturb Miss Susanne without direct orders from her father.

  Finally she opened her eyes.

  And looked into her own eyes.

  The simulacrum stared at her, blankly. It was obvious the moment you got close and looked into those eyes; there was no intelligence there, no warmth, no real life. But no one was going to get close. Her father had put up a wall between herself and those who had been her friends, and he was not going to leave his rooms.

  “Read,” she told the thing, and it took one of the books and cast its eyes down, occasionally turning a page. She stared at it for several moments, and finally she was satisfied that it passed muster.

  Before that watched feeling could return, she ran off deeper into the orchard, pausing only long enough to scatter some breadcrumbs for the robin, who accepted them as his due.

  Once she was far enough under the trees that she was sure she couldn’t be seen from the windows, she doubled back, this time using every bit of the stealth she had learned as a child, creeping and hiding from those who would demand she return to some tedious chore, like shelling peas.

  She knew a dozen ways in and out of the Manor that did not require the use of doors, but there were only a few that could be negotiated when wearing a white dress. That was enough for now, and so she came around to the front of the Manor and all the disused rooms there, with furniture shrouded in sheets. The windows themselves were curtained heavily, and Agatha only went into them a few times a year to make sure that moths and mice were not getting into things.