Dragon's Teeth Page 48

  Gray’s Ghost

  Mercedes Lackey

  When Victoria was the Queen of England, there was a small, unprepossessing school for the children of expatriate Englishmen that had quite an interesting reputation in the shoddy Whitechapel neighborhood on which it bordered, a reputation that kept the students safer than all the bobbies in London.

  Once, a young, impoverished beggar-girl named Nan Killian had obtained leftovers at the back gate, and most of the other waifs and gutterrats of the neighborhood shunned the place, though they gladly shared in Nan’s bounty when she dared the gate and its guardian.

  But now another child picked up food at the back gate of the Harton School For Boys and Girls on the edge of Whitechapel in London, not Nan Killian. Children no longer shunned the back gate of the school, although they treated its inhabitants with extreme caution. Adults—particularly the criminal, disreputable criminals who preyed on children—treated the place and its inhabitants with a great deal more than mere caution. Word had gotten around that two child-pimps had tried to take one of the pupils, and had been found with arms and legs broken, beaten senseless. Word had followed that anyone who threatened another child protected by the school would be found dead—if he was found at all.

  The two tall, swarthy “black fellas” who served as the school’s guards were rumored to have strange powers, or to be members of the thugee cult, or worse. It was safer just to pretend the school didn’t exist and go about one’s unsavory business elsewhere.

  Nan Killian was no longer a child of the streets; she was now a pupil at the school herself, a transmutation that astonished her every morning when she awoke. To find herself in a neat little dormitory room, papered with roses, curtained in gingham, made her often feel as if she was dreaming. To then rise with the other girls, dress in clean, fresh clothing, and go off to lessons in the hitherto unreachable realms of reading and writing was more than she had ever dared dream of.

  Her best friend was still Sarah, the little girl from Africa who had brought her that first basket of leftovers. But now she slept in the next bed over from Sarah’s, and they shared many late-night giggles and confidences, instead of leftover tea-bread.

  Nan also had a job; she had discovered, somewhat to her own bemusement, that the littlest children instinctively trusted her and would obey her when they obeyed no one else. So Nan “paid” for her tutoring and keep by helping Nadra or “Ayah,” as they all called her, the babies’ nurse. Nadra was from India, as were most of the servants, from the formidable guards, the Sikh Karamjit and the Gurkha Selim, to the cook, Maya. Mrs. Helen Harton—or Mem’sab, as everyone called her—and her husband had once been expatriates in India themselves. Master Harton—called, with ultimate respect, Sahib Harton—now worked as an advisor to an import firm; his service in India had left him with a small pension, and a permanent limp. When he and his wife had returned and had learned quite by accident of the terrible conditions children returned to England often lived in, they had resolved that the children of their friends back in the Punjab, at least, would not have that terrible knowledge thrust upon them.

  Here the children sent away in bewilderment by anxious parents fearing that they would sicken in the hot foreign lands found, not a cold and alien place with nothing they recognized, but the familiar sounds of Hindustani, the comfort and coddling of a native nanny, and the familiar curries and rice to eat. Their new home, if a little shabby, held furniture made familiar from their years in the bungalows. But most of all, they were not told coldly to “be a man” or “stop being a crybaby”—for here they found friendly shoulders to weep out their homesickness on. If there were no French Masters here, there was a great deal of love and care; if the furniture was unfashionable and shabby, the children were well-fed and rosy.

  It never ceased to amaze Nan that more parents didn’t send their children to the Harton School, but some folks mistakenly trusted relatives to take better care of their precious ones than strangers, and some thought that a school owned and operated by someone with a lofty reputation or a title was a wiser choice for a boy-child who would likely join the Civil Service when he came of age. And as for the girls, there would always be those who felt that lessons by French dancing masters and language teachers, lessons on the harp and in water-color painting, were more valuable than a sound education in the same basics given to a boy.

  Sometimes these parents learned their lessons the hard way.

  “Ready for m’lesson, Mem’sab,” Nan called into the second-best parlor, which was Mem’sab’s private domain. It was commonly understood that sometimes Mem’sab had to do odd things— “Important things that we don’t need to know about,” Sarah said wisely—and she might have to do them at a moment’s notice. So it was better to announce oneself at the door before venturing over the threshold.

  But today Mem’sab was only reading a book, and looked up at Nan with a smile that transformed her plain face and made her eyes bright and beautiful.

  By now Nan had seen plenty of ladies who dressed in finer stuffs than Mem’sab’s simple Artistic gown of common stuffs, made bright with embroidery courtesy of Maya. Nan had seen ladies who were acknowledged Beauties like Mrs. Lillie Langtry, ladies who obviously spent many hours in the hands of their dressers and hairdressers rather than pulling their hair up into a simple chignon from which little curling strands of brown-gold were always escaping. Mem’sab’s jewelry was not of diamonds and gold, but odd, heavy pieces in silver and semi-precious gems. But in Nan’s eyes, not one of those ladies was worth wasting a single glance upon.

  Then again, Nan was a little prejudiced.

  “Come in, Nan,” the headmistress said, patting the flowered sofa beside her invitingly. “You’re doing much better already, you know. You have a quick ear.”

  “Thenkee, Mem’sab,” Nan replied, flushing with pleasure. She, like any of the servants, would gladly have laid down her life for Mem’sab Harton; they all worshipped her blatantly, and a word of praise from their idol was worth more than a pocketful of sovereigns. Nan sat gingerly down on the chintz-covered sofa and smoothed her clean pinafore with an unconscious gesture of pride.

  Mem’sab took a book of etiquette from the table beside her, and opened it, looking at Nan expectantly. “Go ahead, dear.”

  “Good morning, ma’am. How do you do? I am quite well. I trust your family is fine,” Nan began, and waited for Mem’sab’s response, which would be her cue for the next polite phrase. The point here was not that Nan needed to learn manners and mannerly speech, but that she needed to lose the dreadful cadence of the streets which would doom her to poverty forever, quite literally. Nan spoke the commonplace phrases slowly and with great care, as much care as Sarah took over her French. An accurate analogy, since the King’s English, as spoken by the middle and upper classes, was nearly as much a foreign language to Nan as French and Latin were to Sarah.

  She had gotten the knack of it by thinking of it exactly as a foreign language, once Mem’sab had proven to her how much better others would treat her if she didn’t speak like a guttersnipe. She was still fluent in the language of the streets, and often went out with Karamjit as a translator when he went on errands that took him into the slums or Chinatown. But gradually her tongue became accustomed to the new cadences, and her habitual speech marked her less as “untouchable.”

  “Beautifully done,” Mem’sab said warmly, when Nan finished her recitation. “Your new assignment will be to pick a poem and recite it to me, properly spoken, and memorized.”

  “I think I’d loike—like—to do one uv Mr. Kipling’s, Mem’sab,” Nan said shyly.

  Mem’sab laughed. “I hope you aren’t thinking of ‘Gunga Din,’ you naughty girl!” the woman mock-chided. “It had better be one from the Jungle Book, or Puck of Pook’s Hill, not something written in Cockney dialect!”

  “Yes, Mem’sab, I mean, no, Mem’sab,” Nan replied quickly. “I’ll pick a right ’un. Mebbe the lullaby for the White Seal?” Ever since discov
ering Rudyard Kipling’s stories, Nan had been completely enthralled; Mem’sab often read them to the children as a go-to-bed treat, for the stories often evoked memories of India for the children sent away.

  “That will do very well. Are you ready for the other lesson?” Mem’sab asked, so casually that no one but Nan would have known that the “other lesson” was one not taught in any other school in this part of the world.

  “I—think so.” Nan got up and closed the parlor door, signaling to all the world that she and Mem’sab were not to be disturbed unless someone was dying or the house was burning down.

  For the next half-hour, Mem’sab turned over cards, and Nan called out the next card before she turned it over. When the last of the fifty-two lay in the face-up pile before her, Nan waited expectantly for the results.

  “Not at all bad; you had almost half of them, and all the colors right,” Mem’sab said with content. Nan was disappointed; she knew that Mem’sab could call out all fifty-two without an error, though Sarah could only get the colors correctly.

  “Sahib brought me some things from the warehouse for you to try your ‘feeling’ on,” Mem’sab continued. “I truly think that is where you true Gifts lie, dear.”

  Nan sighed mournfully. “But knowin’ the cards would be a lot more useful,” she complained.

  “What, so you can grow up to cheat foolish young men out of their inheritances?” Now Mem’sab actually laughed out loud. “Try it, dear, and the Gift will desert you at the time you need it most! No, be content with what you have and learn to use it wisely, to help yourself and others.”

  “But card-sharpin’ would help me, an’ I could use takin’s to help others,” Nan couldn’t resist protesting, but she held out her hand for the first object anyway.

  It was a carved beetle; very interesting, Nan thought, as she waited to “feel” what it would tell her. It felt like pottery or stone, and it was of a turquoise-blue, shaded with pale brown. “It’s old,” she said finally. Then, “Really old. Old as—Methusalum! It was made for an important man, but not a king or anything.”

  She tried for more, but couldn’t sense anything else. “That’s all,” she said, and handed it back to Mem’sab.

  “Now this.” The carved beetle that Mem’sab gave her was, for all intents and purposes, identical to the one she’d just held, but immediately Nan sensed the difference.

  “Piff! That ’un’s new!” She also felt something else, something of intent, a sensation she readily identified since it was one of the driving forces behind commerce in Whitechapel. “Feller as made it figgers he’s put one over on somebody.”

  “Excellent, dear!” Mem’sab nodded. “They are both scarabs, a kind of good-luck carving found with mummies—which are, indeed, often as old as Methuselah. The first one I knew was real, as I helped unwrap the mummy myself. The second, however, was from a shipment that Sahib suspected were fakes.”

  Nan nodded, interested to learn that this Gift of hers had some practical application after all. “So could be I could tell people when they been gammoned?”

  “Very likely, and quite likely that they would pay you for the knowledge, as long as they don’t think that you are trying to fool them as well. Here, try this.” The next object placed in Nan’s hand was a bit of jewelry, a simple silver brooch with “gems” of cut iron. Nan dropped it as soon as it touched her hand, overwhelmed by fear and horror.

  “Lummy!” she cried, without thinking. “He killed her!”

  Who “they” were, she had no sense of; that would require more contact, which she did not want to have. But Mem’sab didn’t seem at all surprised; she just shook her head very sadly and put the brooch back in a little box which she closed without a word.

  She held out a child’s locket on a worn ribbon. “Don’t be afraid, Nan,” she coaxed, when Nan was reluctant to accept it. “This one isn’t bad, I promise you.”

  Nan took the locket gingerly, but broke out into a smile when she got a feeling of warmth, contentment, and happiness. She waited for other images to come, and sensed a tired, but exceedingly happy woman, a proud man, and one—no, two strong and lively mites with the woman.

  Slyly, Nan glanced up at her mentor. “She’s ’ad twins, ’asn’t she?” Nan asked. “When was it?”

  “I just got the letter and the locket today, but it was about two months ago,” Mem’sab replied. “The lady is my best friend’s daughter, who was given that locket by her mother for luck just before the birth of her children. She sent it to me to have it duplicated, as she would like to present one to each little girl.”

  “I’d ’ave it taken apart, an’ put half of th’ old ’un with half of the new ’un,” Nan suggested, and Mem’sab brightened at the idea.

  “An excellent idea, and I will do just that. Now, dear, are you feeling tired? Have you a headache? We’ve gone on longer than we did at your last lesson.”

  Nan nodded, quite ready to admit to both.

  Mem’sab gave her still-thin shoulders a little hug, and sent her off to her afternoon lessons.

  Figuring came harder to Nan than reading; she’d already had some letters before she had arrived, enough to spell out the signs on shops and stalls and the like and make out a word here and there on a discarded broadsheet. When the full mystery of letters had been disclosed to her, mastery had come as naturally as breathing, and she was already able to read her beloved Kipling stories with minimal prompting. But numbers were a mystery arcane, and she struggled with the youngest of the children to comprehend what they meant. Anything past one hundred baffled her for the moment, and Sarah did her best to help her friend.

  After arithmetic came geography, but for a child to whom Kensington Palace was the end of the universe, it was harder to believe in the existence of Arabia than of Fairyland, and Heaven was quite as real and solid as South America, for she reckoned that she had an equal chance of seeing either. As for how all those odd names and shapes fit together . . . well!

  History came easier, although she didn’t yet grasp that it was as real as yesterday, for to Nan it was just a chain of linking stories. Perhaps that was why she loved the Kipling stories so much, for she often felt as out-of-place as Mowgli when the human tribe tried to reclaim him.

  At the end of lessons Nan usually went to help Nadra in the nursery; the children there, ranging in age from two to five, were a handful when it came to getting them bathed and put to bed. They tried to put off bedtime as long as possible; there were a half-dozen of them, which was just enough that when Nadra had finally gotten two of them into a bathtub, the other four had escaped, and were running about the nursery like dripping, naked apes, screaming joyfully at their escape.

  But tonight, Karamjit came for Nan and Sarah as soon as the history lesson was over, summoning them with a look and a gesture. As always, the African parrot Gray sat on Sarah’s shoulder; she was so well-behaved, even to the point of being housebroken, that she was allowed to be with her from morning to night. The handsome gray parrot with the bright red tail had adapted very well to this new sort of jungle when Sarah’s mother brought her to her daughter; Sarah was very careful to keep her warm and out of drafts, and she ate virtually the same food that she did. Mem’sab seemed to understand the kind of diet that let her thrive; she allowed her only a little of the chicken and beef, and made certain that she filled up on carrots and other vegetables before she got any of the curried rice she loved so much. In fact, she often pointed to Gray as an example to the other children who would rather have had sweets than green stuffs, telling them that Gray was smarter than they were, for she knew what would make her grow big and strong. Being unfavorably compared to a bird often made the difference with the little boys in particular, who were behaving better at table since the parrot came to live at the school.

  So Gray came along when Karamjit brought them to the door of Mem’sab’s parlor, cautioning them to wait quietly until Mem’sab called them.

  “What do you suppose can be going on?” Sara
h asked curiously, while Gray turned her head to look at Nan with her penetrating pale-yellow eyes.

  Nan shushed her, pressing her ear to the keyhole to see what she could hear. “There’s another lady in there with Mem’sab, and she sounds sad,” Nan said at last.

  Gray cocked her head to one side, then turned his head upside down as she sometimes did when something puzzled her. “Hurt,” she said quietly, and made a little sound like someone crying.

  Nan had long since gotten used to the fact that Gray noticed everything that went on around her and occasionally commented on it like a human person. If the wolves in the Jungle Book could think and talk, she reasoned, why not a parrot? She accepted Gray’s abilities as casually as Sarah, who had raised her herself and had no doubt of the intelligence of her feathered friend.

  Had either of them acquired the “wisdom” of their elders, they might have been surprised that Mem’sab accepted those abilities too.

  Nan jumped back as footsteps warned her that the visitor had risen and was coming towards the door; she and Sarah pressed themselves back against the wall as the strange woman passed them, her face hidden behind a veil. She took no notice of the children, but turned back to Mem’sab.

  “Katherine, I believe going to this woman is a grave mistake on your part,” Mem’sab told her quietly. “You and I have been friends since we were in school together; you know that I would never advise you against anything you felt so strongly about unless I thought you might be harmed by it. This woman does you no good.”

  The woman shook her head. “How could I be harmed by it?” she replied, her voice trembling. “What possible ill could come of this?”

  “A very great deal, I fear,” Mem’sab, her expression some combination of concern and other emotions that Nan couldn’t read.