The Wizard of London Read online

  In spite of the clear and open brightness of the little girl’s thoughts, ten years of hard living had made Nan suspicious. The child might know nothing of what the dark man wanted. “Woi’re yer givin’ food away?” she asked, edging forward a little, but not yet quite willing to take the basket.

  The little girl put the basket down on the ground and clasped her hands behind her back. “Well, Mem’sab says that she won’t tell Maya and Vashti to make less food for tea, because she won’t have us going hungry while we’re growing. And she says that old, stale toast is fit only for starlings, so people ought to have the good of it before it goes stale. And she says that there’s no reason why children outside our gate have to go to bed hungry when we have enough to share, and Mummy and Papa say that sharing is charity and charity is one of the cardinal virtues, so Mem’sab is being virtuous, which is a good thing, because she’ll go to heaven and she would make a good angel.”

  Most of that came out in a rush that quite bewildered Nan, especially the last, about cardinal virtues and heaven and angels. But she did understand that “Mem’sab,” whoever that was, must be one of those daft religious creatures that gave away food free for the taking, and Nan’s own mum had told her that there was no point in letting other people take what you could get from people like that. So Nan edged forward and made a snatch at the basket handle.

  She tried, that is; it proved a great deal heavier than she’d thought, and she gave an involuntary grunt at the weight of it.

  “Be careful,” the little girl admonished mischievously. “It’s heavy.”

  “Yer moight’o warned me!” Nan said, a bit indignant, and more than a bit excited. If this wasn’t a trick—if there wasn’t a brick in the basket—oh, she’d eat well tonight, and tomorrow, too!

  “Come back tomorrow!” the little thing called, as she shut the gate and turned and skipped toward the house. “Remember me! I’m Sarah Jane, and I’ll bring the basket tomorrow!”

  “Thankee, Sarah Jane,” Nan called back, belatedly; then, just in case these strange creatures would think better of their generosity, she made the basket and herself vanish into the night.

  ***

  Isabelle listened to Sarah’s version of the meeting at the gate, and nodded gravely. She had already gotten Karamjit’s narrative, and the two tallied. Both Sarah and Karamjit sensed nascent Talent in the child; this must have been the Talent that she herself had sensed a day or two ago, and had sent out a gentle lure for. It looked as if her bait had been taken.

  Probably the little girl in question had very minimal control over what she could do; in her world, it would be enough that she had the sense of danger before something happened to her. That might well be enough… for the short run, at any rate. But her own husband had been a street boy collected from a sad and dead-end life by another Talented benefactor, and if this child was just as salvageable, Isabelle would see to it that she was taken care of as well.

  “Thank you, Sarah,” she told the child standing before her. “I’d like you to make friends with this little girl, if she will let you. We will see what can be done for her.”

  Sarah beamed, and it occurred to Isabelle that the poor little thing was very lonely here. So far, she had made no close friends. This chance encounter might change that for the better.

  Good. There was nothing like catching two birds with one stone.

  ***

  Nan came earlier the next day, bringing back the now-empty basket, and found Sarah Jane waiting at the gate. To her disappointment, there was no basket waiting beside the child, and Nan almost turned back, but Sarah saw her and called to her before she could fade back into the shadows of the streets.

  “Karamjit is bringing the basket in a bit,” the child said, “There’s things Mem’sab wants you to have. And—what am I to call you? It’s rude to call you ‘girl,’ but I don’t know your name.”

  “Nan,” Nan replied, feeling as if a cart had run over her. This child, though younger than Nan herself, had a way of taking over a situation that was all out of keeping with Nan’s notion of how things were supposed to be. The children of the rich were not supposed to notice the children of the poor, except on Boxing Day, on which occasion they were supposed to distribute sweets and whatever outworn or broken things they could no longer use. And the rich were not supposed to care if the children of the poor went to bed hungry, because being hungry would encourage them to work harder. “Wot kind’o place is this, anyway?”

  “It’s a school, a boarding school,” Sarah said promptly. “Mem’sab and her husband have it for the children of people who live in India, mostly. Mem’sab can’t have children herself, which is very sad, but she says that means she can be a mother to us instead. Mem’sab came from India, and that’s where Karamjit and Selim and Maya and Vashti and the others are from, too; they came with her. Except for some of the teachers.”

  “Yer mean the black feller?” Nan asked, bewildered. “Yer from In’juh, too?”

  “No,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “Africa. I wish I was back there.” Her face paled and her eyes misted, and Nan, moved by an impulse she did not understand, tried to distract her with questions.

  “Wot’s it loik, then? Izit loik Lunnun?”

  “Like London! Oh, no, it couldn’t be less like London!” Nan’s ploy worked; the child giggled at the idea of comparing the Congo with this gray city, and she painted a vivid word picture of the green jungles, teeming with birds and animals of all sorts; of the natives who came to her father and mother for medicines. “Mummy and Papa don’t do what some of the others do—they went and talked to the magic men and showed them they weren’t going to interfere in the magic work, and now whenever they have a patient who thinks he’s cursed, they call the magic man in to help, and when a magic man has someone that his magic can’t help right away, he takes the patient to Mummy and Papa and they all put on feathers and charms, and Mummy and Papa give him White Medicine while the magic man burns his herbs and feathers and makes his chants, and everyone is happy. There haven’t been any uprisings at our station for ever so long, and our magic men won’t let anyone put black chickens at our door. One of them gave me Grey, and I wanted to bring her with me, but Mummy said I shouldn’t.” Now the child sighed, and looked woeful again.

  “Wot’s a Grey?” Nan asked.

  “She’s a Polly, a grey parrot with the beautifullest red tail; the medicine man gave her to me when she was all prickles, he showed me how to feed her with mashed-up yams and things. She’s so smart, she follows me about, and she can say, oh, hundreds of things. The medicine man said that she was to be my guardian and keep me from harm. But Mummy was afraid the smoke in London would hurt her, and I couldn’t bring her with me.” Sarah looked up at the fat, stone bird on the gatepost above her. “That’s why Mem’sab gave me that gargoyle, to be my guardian instead. We all have them, each child has her own, and that one’s mine.” She looked down again at Nan, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Sometimes when I get lonesome, I come here and talk to her, and it’s like talking to Grey.”

  Nan nodded her head, understanding. “Oi useta go an’ talk’t’ a stachew in one’a the yards, till we ‘adta move. It looked loik me grammum. Felt loik I was talkin’ to ‘er, I fair did.”

  A footstep on the gravel path made Nan look up, and she jumped to see the tall man with the head wrap standing there, as if he had come out of the thin air. She had not sensed his presence, and once again, even though he stood materially before her she could not sense anything like a living man there. He took no notice of Nan, which she was grateful for; instead, he handed the basket he was carrying to Sarah Jane, and walked off without a word.

  Sarah passed the basket to Nan; it was heavier this time, and Nan thought she smelled something like roasted meat. Oh, if only they’d given her the drippings from their beef! Her mouth watered at the thought.

  “I hope you like these,” Sarah said shyly, as Nan passed her the much-lighter empty basket. “Mem’sab s
ays that if you’ll keep coming back, I’m to talk to you and ask you about London; she says that’s the best way to learn about things. She says otherwise, when I go out, I might get into trouble I don’t understand.”

  Nan’s eyes widened at the thought that the head of a school had said anything of the sort—but Sarah Jane hardly seemed like the type of child to lie. “All roit, I’s’pose,” she said dubiously. “If you’ll be ’ere, so’ll Oi.”

  The next day, faithful as the rising sun, Sarah was waiting with her basket, and Nan was invited to come inside the gate. She wouldn’t venture any farther in than a bench in the garden, but as Sarah asked questions, she answered them as bluntly and plainly as she would any similar question asked by a child in her own neighborhood. Sarah learned about the dangers of the dark side of London first-hand—and oddly, although she nodded wisely and with clear understanding, they didn’t seem to frighten her.

  “Garn!” Nan said once, when Sarah absorbed the interesting fact that the opium den a few doors from where Nan and her mother had a room had pitched three dead men out into the street the night before. “Yer ain’t never seen nothin’ loik that!”

  “You forget, Mummy and Papa have a hospital, and it’s very dangerous where they are,” Sarah replied matter-of-factly. “I’ve seen dead men, and dead women and even babies. When Nkumba came in clawed up by a lion, I helped bring water and bandages, while my parents sewed him up. When there was a black-water fever, I saw lots of people die. It was horrid and sad, but I didn’t fuss, because Nkumba and Papa and Mummy were worked nearly to bones and needed me to be good.”

  Nan’s eyes widened again. “Wot else y’see?” she whispered, impressed in spite of herself.

  After that, the two children traded stories of two very different sorts of jungles. Despite its dangers, Nan thought that Sarah’s was the better of the two.

  She learned other things as well; that “Mems’ab” was a completely remarkable woman, for she had a Sikh, a Gurkha, two Moslems, two Buddhists, and assorted Hindus working in peace and harmony together—“and Mummy said in her letter that it’s easier to get leopards to herd sheep than that!” Mem’sab was by no means a fool; the Sikh and the Gurkha shared guard duty, patrolling the walls by day and night. One of the Hindu women was one of the “ayahs,” who took care of the smallest children; the rest of the motley assortment were servants and even teachers.

  She heard many stories about the remarkable Grey, who really did act as Sarah’s guardian, if Sarah was to be believed. Sarah described times when she had inadvertently gotten lost; she had called frantically for Grey, who was allowed to fly free, and the bird had come to her, leading her back to familiar paths. Grey had kept her from eating some pretty but poisonous berries by flying at her and nipping her fingers until she dropped them. Grey alerted the servants to the presence of snakes in the nursery, always making a patrol before she allowed Sarah to enter. And once, according to Sarah, when she had encountered a lion on the path, Grey had flown off and made sounds like a young gazelle in distress, attracting the lion’s attention before it could scent Sarah. “She led it away, and didn’t come back to me until it was too far away to get to me before I got home safe,” the little girl claimed solemnly, “Grey is very clever.” Nan didn’t know whether to gape at her or laugh; she couldn’t imagine how a mere bird could be intelligent enough to talk, much less act with purpose.

  Nan had breath to laugh with, nowadays, thanks to baskets that held more than bread. The food she found in there, though distinctly odd, was always good, and she no longer felt out of breath and tired all the time. She had stopped wondering and worrying about why “Mem’sab” took such an interest in her, and simply accepted the gifts without question. They might stop at any moment; she accepted that without question, too.

  The only thing she couldn’t accept so easily was the manservant’s eerie mental silence.

  But it didn’t unnerve her as it once had. She wanted desperately to know why she couldn’t sense him, but it didn’t unnerve her. If she couldn’t read him, she could read the way he walked and acted, and there was nothing predatory about him with regard to herself or Sarah.

  Besides, Sarah trusted him. Nan had the feeling that Sarah’s trust wasn’t ever given lightly.

  Or wrongly.

  ***

  “And how is Sarah’s pet street sparrow?” Frederick asked, as Isabelle brooded at the window that overlooked the garden.

  “Karamjit thinks she is Talented,” Isabelle replied, watching Sarah chatter animatedly to her friend as they took the empty basket back to the kitchen in the evening gloom. “I don’t sense anything, but she’s quite young, and I doubt she can do anything much beyond a few feet.”

  Her husband sat down in a chair beside the window, and she glanced over at him. “There’s something about all of this that is worrying you,” he said.

  “I’m not the precognitive, but—yes. We have a sudden influx of Talents. And it might be nothing more than that we are the only place to train young Talents, whereas there are dozens who are schooling their Elemental Magicians. Still, my training says that coincidences among the Talented are virtually unheard of, and an ingathering of Talents means that Talents will be needed.” There, it was out in the open. Frederick grimaced.

  “There’s something in the air,” he agreed. “But nothing I can point to and say—there it is, that’s what’s coming. Do you want to spring the trap on this one, or let her come to our hands of her own will?”

  “If we trap her, we lose her,” Isabelle told him, turning away from the window. “And while we are ingathering Talents, they are all very young. Whatever is going to happen will not happen this week, or even this year. Let her come to us on her own—or not at all.”

  ***

  “How is your mother?” Sarah asked, one day as they sat in the garden, since the day before, Nan had confessed that Aggie been “on a tear” and had consumed, or so Nan feared, something stronger and more dangerous than gin.

  Nan shook her head. “I dunno,” she replied reluctantly. “Aggie didn’ wake up when I went out. Tha’s not roight, she us’lly at least waked up’t’foind out wha‘ I got. She don’ loik them baskets, ‘cause it means I don’ go beggin’ as much.”

  “And if you don’t beg money, she can’t drink,” Sarah observed shrewdly. “You hate begging, don’t you?”

  “Mostly I don’ like gettin’ kicked an’ cursed at,” Nan temporized. “It ain’t loik I’m gettin’ underfoot…”

  But Sarah’s questions were coming too near the bone tonight, and Nan didn’t want to have to deal with them. She got to her feet and picked up her basket. “I gotter go,” she said abruptly.

  Sarah rose from her seat on the bench and gave Nan a penetrating look. Nan had the peculiar feeling that the child was looking at her thoughts, and deciding whether or not to press her further. “All right,” Sarah said. “It is getting dark.”

  It wasn’t, but Nan wasn’t about to pass up the offer of a graceful exit. “ ‘Tis, that,” she said promptly, and squeezed through the narrow opening Karamjit had left in the gate.

  But she had not gone four paces when two rough-looking men in shabby tweed jackets blocked her path. “You Nan Killian?” said one hoarsely. Then when Nan stared at him blankly, added, “Aggie Killian’s girl?”

  The answer was surprised out of her; she hadn’t been expecting such a confrontation, and she hadn’t yet managed to sort herself out. “Ye—es,” she said slowly.

  “Good,” the first man grunted. “Yer Ma sent us; she’s gone’t‘ a new place, an’ she wants us’t‘show y’ the way.”

  Now, several thoughts flew through Nan’s mind at that moment. The first was that, as they were paid up on the rent through the end of the week, she could not imagine Aggie ever vacating before the time was up. The second was, that even if Aggie had set up somewhere else, she would never have sent a pair of strangers to find Nan. And third was that Aggie had turned to a more potent intoxicant than gin—wh
ich meant she would need a deal more money. And Aggie had only one thing left to sell.

  Nan.

  Their minds were such a roil that she couldn’t “hear” any distinct thoughts, but it was obvious that they meant her no good.

  “Wait a minnit—” Nan said, her voice trembling a little as she backed away from the two men, edging around them to get to the street. “Did’jer say Aggie Killian’s gel? Me ma ain’t called Killian, yer got th‘ wrong gel—”

  It was at that moment that one of the men lunged for her with a curse. He had his hands nearly on her, and would have gotten her, too, except for one bit of interference. Sarah came shooting out of the gate like a little bullet. She body-slammed the fellow, going into the back of his knees and knocking him right off his feet. She danced out of the way as he fell, scooting past him in the nick of time, ran to Nan, and caught her hand, tugging her toward the street. “Run!” she commanded imperiously, and Nan ran.

  The two of them scrabbled through the dark alleys and twisted streets without any idea where they were, only that they had to shake off their pursuers. Unfortunately, the time that Nan would have put into learning her new neighborhood like the back of her grimy little hand had been put into talking with Sarah, and before too long, even Nan was lost in the maze of dark, fetid streets. Then their luck ran out altogether, and they found themselves staring at the blank wall of a building, in a dead-end cul-de-sac. They whirled around, hoping to escape before they were trapped, but it was already too late. The bulky silhouettes of the two men loomed against the fading light at the end of the street.

  “Oo’s yer friend, ducky?” the first man purred. “Think she’d loik’t‘come with?”

  To Nan’s astonishment, Sarah stood straight and tall, and even stepped forward a pace. “I think you ought to go away and leave us alone,” she said clearly. “You’re going to find yourselves in a lot of trouble.”

  The talkative man laughed. “Them’s big words from such a little gel,” he mocked. “We ain’t leavin’ wi’out we collect what’s ours, an’ a bit more fer th‘ trouble yer caused.”