The Case of the Spellbound Child Read online

  Mary Watson said nothing, but began to unpack the treats she had earlier put back in the hamper, and Nan took refuge in iced cake and fresh strawberries.

  She still couldn’t feel anything but irritation for the girl they had left sobbing in her bed. Would I have been in more sympathy with her if we’d been of the same class? she wondered. Or if in addition to being an idiot, she’d had magic or psychical powers? She didn’t think so—but it was perfectly possible her irritation was a product of her own kind of prejudice.

  No, damnitall. And I would feel just as much irritation if she’d been psychical or magical, because she exhibited no common sense and no willingness to do anything but grasp the immediate pleasure without regard for consequences.

  John Watson was the first to speak when the last crumb had been eaten, and the plates and cutlery put away. He sighed heavily and fanned himself with his hat. “Well . . . I’ll put the whole wretched tale in front of Alderscroft. I don’t see any reason to try and find out who the blackguard is that abandoned that wretched wench. It won’t do any good, he’ll deny everything, and if any of it gets out, it will destroy not only the girl’s reputation, but that of her stepmother. Because people will blame that poor woman. Since he’s going to India, let us hope that Karma will see to his downfall.”

  Nan didn’t have any hope of that; in her experience men like that got away with whatever they cared to, because they were so good at escaping before their bills came due. But Watson was right about the rest of it.

  “I’ll leave it to Alderscroft to decide what to tell the cousin,” he continued, “And I thank God that’s not something I need to decide.”

  “It could have been much worse for him,” Nan felt impelled to point out. “If the poor man had actually believed what that stupid girl told him, and had gone so far as to marry her, she’d be leading him a merry dance indeed! He’s well escaped from that particular trap! And can you imagine an Elemental Master saddled with that sort of wife?”

  “It would have ruined him,” Mary said flatly. “John, I think that’s the tactic you need to take. We’ve uncovered some very sordid information that leads us to believe his Huntsman had a narrow escape from a budding adventuress. Then tell him the girl is neither psychical nor an Elemental Magician, and she’s reaping some unsavory wild oats indeed.”

  John nodded. “Well, that was certainly a sordid little mystery. Quite unlike the ones we’ve been accustomed to solving.”

  “Just a reminder, I suppose, of how privileged we are,” observed Peter. “Most of the mysteries ordinary people like Lestrade have to solve are sordid and unpleasant and terribly boring. At least ours are interesting.”

  5

  RAIN drove Ellie and Simon in from the garden, where they’d been pretending to weed while their mother milked the she-goat in the shed. Ellie didn’t really want to go in, but she didn’t want to be in the garden either. What she wanted was to be on the moor, with the goat, and not doing any kind of chore, so she lingered in the doorway, and Simon paused to loiter with her. Then lightning struck very nearby, and they shrieked, more in excitement than fear, as immediate thunder shook the stone walls, and dove in through the open door. The smell of rain followed them inside.

  Truth to tell, they’d been doing a great deal of playing and not much weeding. Ellie was ravenously hungry, but neither she nor Simon had dared to touch so much as a cabbage leaf inside the garden wall. Mother knew, down to the exact number of pea-pods, just what was in the garden, and if anything was missing when the weeding was done, she’d whip both of them. Ellie had actually thought to sample the weeds, but the roots were tasteless and woody, and the leaves bitter, and nothing had tasted satisfying.

  I druther be on moor, she thought, as Mother hurried in with her apron held over the bowl of milk. Least there be things we can eat out there. Nice things, too, sometimes, depending on their luck. Bilberries and gooseberries for instance. Her mouth fair watered at the thought of an apron full of gooseberries. Sowthistle in a pinch. Yarrow and deadnettle and saxifrage. Hogweed and chickweed and lambs’-lettuce. Most edible things were green leaves, and it took a lot to fill you up, but you could get your belly full enough that you could get to sleep before the thin provender wore off and you were hungry again. Mother’s mouth pursed up when they brought home armloads of greens to cook, because cooked down there was generally barely enough to fill four bowls, but it was food, and Ellie didn’t see any reason to turn your nose up at it. It wasn’t like they had much of a choice.

  But Mother was funny that way. Pa said she’d been brought up better than a stone cottage on the moor, and all the make-dos and shifts grieved her, but what were they to do? They were lucky that they’d gotten this cottage by way of Pa’s Ma, and it had a bit of land they could put a garden on, after Pa’d lost a hand to the machines in the mill. They wouldn’t even have the cottage in the first place, if Pa’s Pa hadn’t got all the laborers to help him on a day when all the farmers were away at the Fair, and they’d cheated a bit of freehold out of Squire by raising the cottage in a single day. Because that was the law, if you could raise a cottage, floor to roof, and have a fire burning in the hearth in a single day, it was yours, freehold, and any land it was on and you could enclose in a wall. Seemed impossible, but done it they had, and more than once, hereabouts.

  And Pa had inherited the cottage from his Ma after his accident. So when they got turned out of lodgings because there bain’t no more money, they had a place to go and a garden to eat out of. They were lucky, Pa would say, and there’s an end to it. And Mother would thin up her mouth and nod abruptly.

  Thunder rattled the shutters, and in the snug little shed attached to the cottage, the goat, Daisy, kicked her objections to it. They were lucky to have Daisy, too; Ellie and Simon had found her wandering on the moor as a kid, and no one had claimed her, and now they had her and a billy-kid, who was probably going to get traded for the services of another billy-goat when spring came around, rather than ending up in their pot. Ellie was just as glad; she didn’t want to eat him, not when she’d seen him all wobble-kneed and vulnerable right after he’d been born. But there were only two fates for a billy-kid, and this one was probably not going to end up guarding a flock of sheep.

  Mother put the bowl of milk in the very center of the table for safety. “That milk and the loaf-end’s all we’ve got for dinner,” she said, in that tight voice that meant she was upset about the lack of food. “So don’t be larking about and spilling it.”

  Mother didn’t talk like the folks hereabouts.

  “Nay, Mother,” she and Simon said together.

  “Your father should be home soon.” Unspoken was “Pray he found work,” because there wasn’t much left in the flour crock, and the rest of the stores were likewise depleted. Not many people wanted to hire a one-handed man, and especially not a man who’d gone off the moor and only returned to take over his Ma’s cottage, with a “foreign” (which meant “not from Dartmoor”) woman to wife and her with hair as black as a raven’s wing and tall and pale—and nothing like the people he’d grown up with. She didn’t talk right, to their way of thinking—they’d look at her side-eyed, and make little sounds that meant Who does she think she is? And Gives herself airs, she does.

  That wasn’t true, but it didn’t stop folk from thinking it.

  As for her looks, most people here were round-faced and blond or sandy-brown-haired. Black hair meant “Travelers” and people were slow to understand that was what she wasn’t. But things moved slowly on the moor, and that was that, and no point in asking a pig to dance, as Pa would say.

  “Sweep the floor,” Mother ordered. “And sweep the ashes from the hearth. No wasting them! Put them in the crock where they belong.”

  Ashes went into a crock with a crack across the bottom that Mother had found in the shed. It didn’t hold liquid, which was why she hadn’t used it for the milk, but the mouth was big enough you c
ould scoop ashes in there, and Mother used the ashes to make soap. The crack across the bottom was useful for that; she put water in the top and a dish under it, and the lye-water that came out the bottom helped make soap and clean, and for some reason, she used it in cooking dried peas and beans and to make bread. Mother was clever like that, she could read and write and figure and all, and she had books that told her how to do things, like make soap. Last summer Ellie and Simon had found a wild bees’ nest and come to tell her and the book had told her how to smoke the bees out, and collect the honey and wax. Ellie had joyfully expected a feast of sweets, but no, every bit, honey and wax and all, had gone to the market, and the only taste she and Simon had gotten had been the splintery licks scraped out of the inside of the tree, and they’d had to fight with ants for those.

  Ellie went to carefully collect the ashes with a birch-bark scoop and a little whisk made of gorse twigs, when she realized Simon wasn’t sweeping as he’d been told, he was galloping around the room with the broom between his legs like a hobby-horse.

  “Oi!” she shouted indignantly. “And what’d Mother be sayin’?”

  “Es be ’ighwayman!” Simon shouted. “Es be Dick Turpin! Stand and deliver!”

  “’Ee bain’t Dick Turpin, ye gurt loon!” she shouted indignantly. “’Ee be a dunderheaded dawcock!” Truth to tell she was angrier about the fact that she was doing chores and he wasn’t than that he was pretending to be a highwayman, which was a very naughty thing to do. “Gi’ un broom!” She seized the handle as he galloped past, and tugged at it. He hung onto it and tugged back.

  Soon they were fighting all over the cottage, tugging and hitting each other and calling each other names. And of all the bad luck, Mother came in in the middle of it, and shouted.

  “Helen! Simon! Stop this instant!”

  And worst luck, startled, Simon let go of the broom just as she tugged, and the brushy end swept across the table-top, hitting the wooden milk bowl and sending it flying. It hit the floor and spun like a top, spilling every drop across the flagstones, where it soaked into the porous stone. And there went half of supper.

  Mother went white as snow, then red as a sunset. In the absolute silence that followed the clatter of the wooden bowl on the floor, Ellie held her breath and waited for the explosion.

  And oh, it came.

  “Outside,” Mother said, between clenched teeth. She flung open the door, and shouted. “Out! Both of you! NOW!”

  “But, Mother, it be rain—” Simon began, his voice taking on that wheedling tone that usually got him his way.

  Not this time.

  “OUT!” Mother roared, and crossed the room in two strides to pick up the knife-strop. “OUT! Onto the moor with the both of you, you worthless, feckless, miserable brats! OUT! And don’t come home unless you bring a feast for four back with you, or I’ll beat you both black and blue from the soles of your feet to the tops of your heads, and then I’ll hold you while your Father beats you a second time!!”

  She brandished the strap and made it snap, and even Simon realized that this time they had gone too far and ran for the door before she could use the strap on him. Ellie was right behind.

  And no sooner were they out the door than Mother had slammed it shut behind them.

  “Es th-th-think she do be meanin’ it,” Simon stuttered. Ellie boxed his ear. This was all his fault.

  As they stood blinking in shock on the stoop, Ellie slowly realized the storm had been one of those short, violent ones: blown up in moments; gone again, flying down the moor, in another few moments. Blue sky and sunshine reigned once again, and a warm breeze lofted over the hills. Fat white clouds clustered like flocks of sheep, and the smell of the heather drying under the sun changed her mood from frightened to joyful, all in a moment. They were out of the cottage, freed from tedious chores, and free!

  And Mother had just ordered them to do exactly what she had wanted to in the first place. The moor beckoned and she was only too happy to answer.

  But of course, she wasn’t going to let Simon know that.

  She punched his arm. “This be ’ee’s fault,” she snarled at him.

  “Ow! That’s a lie! ’Ee started it!”

  “Nawt! ’Oo was th’ gurt fool daggling about room like asneger, a shoutin’ ‘Es be Dick Turpin’?” she countered in triumph. “Mother had owten been cotten ’ee.”

  “Aye but—” Simon realized his arguments weren’t going to hold up, and seemed to fold in on himself. “Ellie, she’s desperd angry. What are usn’s gawn to do?”

  “What she told us.” Ellie went to the storage shed—the one on the other side of the cottage, the one that didn’t hold the goat—and came back with two willow-withy baskets. “Brung back a feast.” She thrust one at him, and when he took it, marched out the gate and straight up the moor, glancing back to see that he followed. She nearly skipped, she was so happy to be out and about. The warm breeze made her feel like galloping like a moor pony. She was certain they’d have two baskets full of foraged food in no time, and come back to the cottage in triumph. Who needed stale bread and half a cup of goat milk and a few peas from the garden, anyway?

  About a hour later, she realized the major flaw in this plan.

  Every place they usually foraged was pretty picked over. All they had to show for their work so far was a couple of handfuls of cress in the bottom of each basket—quite a pitiful showing, and certainly not the “feast” Mother had demanded.

  “We bain’t got much,” Simon said, looking doubtfully down into his basket.

  “We go futher then,” she replied, her chin set stubbornly, and waved her hand around. “Nobbut a soul out here food huntin’. It’s just us an’ sheep an’ ponies.”

  “What if there’s a storm?” he asked desperately.

  “We outrun ’t,” she stated confidently. After all, they could see for miles. Little storms like the one that had just passed were easy to spot, and since there was no particular place that was any better for foraging than any other, they could just go where the storm wasn’t.

  “But what if we cain’t?” he persisted.

  “We find an ’ollow and lew.” She squared her shoulders and started marching toward the sun. It was easy to get lost on the moor, but she reckoned that as long as she kept the sun in front of her as they foraged, and behind her when they returned, they’d hit some place they recognized on the way back to give them a more accurate guide home.

  How hard could this be? It was the moor, and she was moor-wise. They’d come home with heaping baskets and Mother would admit it was better to let them “play” on the moor from now on.

  * * *

  “Cham afeerd, Ellie,” Simon whined. She wasn’t afraid, and she suspected that neither was he, but it was actually getting dark, their baskets were barely half full, and all of it was greens. Not very satisfying. Certainly not a feast.

  And she was sure that they were lost, because she’d gotten turned round about when they’d scrambled down into a rocky valley with a stream in it, hoping to find some fish to tickle, and realized they couldn’t get back up the way they’d come down. It had been a long, weary trudge that had taken them a good long time and twisted and turned them right round about before they’d found a place to climb out again. And now she didn’t know where she stood.

  She stopped where she was and closed her eyes, and thought hard. “I think we best lew,” she said. “We can ate what’s in our baskets now, and come morning, forage back. There’s bracken t’make bed with, an’ that ’ollow under blackthorn roots be nowt so bad.”

  She turned to peer at Simon in the fading light. He looked as if he was going to cry, but he nodded. Together they made their way back to the hollow, picking bracken as they went, until by the time they reached the place as the moon rose, they labored like a pair of donkeys under a pair of enormous piles of fresh-smelling greenery.

 
And she was right. The hollow, once lined with bracken, was cozy enough. No worse than their beds in the loft in midwinter; better in a way, because there wasn’t any straw poking up into them. They curled up together, and began stuffing handfuls of greenery into their mouths from their respective baskets. The mingled tastes, sour, bitter, faintly sweet, and all very green were—not entirely nice and not very satisfying. They’d have been better stewed and more satisfying fried in a bit of pig fat. But food was food, and she knew everything they’d picked was edible, so she munched on, even though right now that cup of goat’s milk and piece of bread to dunk in it was a lot more appealing than she’d ever thought it would be.

  Meanwhile, red sky, which made her sigh with relief. Shepherd’s delight, that. No storms tonight. Then darkness flooded over the moor, the sounds around them changed, and the wind changed from warm and sweet to cool and damp. Stars came out, twinkling between the leaves of the blackthorn overhead, and out into the distance over the hills. She thought she heard sheep in the far, far distance, but otherwise, nothing. And she kept putting her hand in her basket, and bringing it to her face, full of greenstuff, reminding herself that any food was better than no food.

  Before she was done she felt a bit like a sheep, but her stomach was more than full enough to let her fall asleep, which was the important part. Simon finished wearily munching his last fistful, and whimpered a little. She put her arms around him to comfort him, pulled bracken over both of them, and finally began to drowse as their bodies warmed the bracken-lined cavity under the blackthorn roots.

  As she was halfway down into sleep, she told over her nightly prayers in her head. She wasn’t sure that saying them would help—could Jesus even hear you out on the moor like this? But she didn’t want to take the chance that He couldn’t. Besides, priest said that stars were the eyes of angels, and if angels could see them, surely Jesus could.