Surely she could send to Elizabeth for help, with the Undines as intermediaries—
But not until spring. Not until the water thawed again. The Sylphs might move in winter, but not the Water Elementals, or at least, not the ones she knew. And she couldn’t count on the Sylphs—in fact, she hadn’t even seen any since that odd nightmare. She could call them, but they wouldn’t necessarily come.
Hope died again, and she stopped even trying to think. She simply stared at the darkness, endured the pain of her aching head, and braced herself against the pitching and swaying of the carriage.
Eventually, snoring from the opposite side told her that somehow at least two of her captors had managed to fall asleep. She hoped, viciously, that the coach would hit a particularly nasty pothole and send them all to the floor, or knock their heads together.
But in keeping with the rest of the day, nothing of the sort happened.
Hours later, they changed horses again. By this time she was in a complete fog of grief and fatigue, and couldn’t have put a coherent thought together no matter how hard she tried. And she didn’t try very hard. In all that time she hadn’t eaten, drunk, or slept, but this time when the rude tap on her shoulder came, she asked for something to drink.
One of them handed her a flask, and she drank the contents without thinking. It tasted like cold tea, heavily creamed and sugared—but it wasn’t very long before she realized that there had been something else in that flask besides tea. Her muscles went slack; foggy as her mind had been, it went almost blank, and she felt herself slipping over sideways in her seat to be caught by one of the repellent lawyers.
Horribly, whatever it was didn’t put her to sleep, or not entirely. It just made her lose all conscious control over her body. She could still hear, and if she’d been able to get her eyes open, she’d have been able to see. But sensation was at one remove, and as she went limp and was picked up and laid out on the carriage seat, she heard the Unholy Trinity talking openly, but as if they were in the far distance. And although she could hear the words, she couldn’t make sense of them.
She heard the crowing of roosters in farmyards that they passed, and knew that it must be near dawn. And shortly after that, the carriage made a right-angle turn, and the sound of the wheels changed.
Then it stopped.
The lawyers got out.
She fought to open her eyes, to no avail.
Someone else entered the carriage, and picked her up as if she weighed nothing. She heard the sound of gravel under heavy boots, then the same boots walking on stone. It felt as if the person carrying her was going up a set of stairs, but though she tried once again to regain control of her body, or at least open her eyes, her head lolled against his shoulder—definitely a he—and she could do nothing.
A door opened in front of them, and closed behind them. “She drank it all?” asked a cool, female voice.
“Yes, mum,” replied a male voice, equally dispassionate. One of the Trinity. Not the person who was carrying her, who remained silent.
“Good. Come, James, follow me.”
The sound of light footsteps preceding them. Another set of stairs, a landing, more stairs. Another door.
She might not even be able to open her eyes, but there was nothing wrong with her nose. And by the scent of a fire with fircones in it, of beeswax candles and lavender, she was in a bedchamber now. “This is the young Miss Roeswood, Mary Anne,” said the female voice. “She’s ill with grief, and she’s drunk medicine that will make her sleep. Undress her and put her to bed.”
The man carrying her stooped—her head lolled back—and laid her on a soft, but very large bed, with a muffled grunt.
The light footsteps and the heavy went away; the door opened and closed again. Someone began taking off her clothing, as if she was an over-large doll, and redressed her in a nightgown. The same someone—who must have been very strong—rolled her to one side, pulled the covers back, rolled her back in place, and covered her over.
Then, more footsteps receding. The door opening and closing again. Silence.
The state she drifted into then was not exactly sleep, and not precisely waking. She seemed to drift in a fog in which she could see and hear nothing, and nothing she did affected it. There were others in this fog—she could hear them in the distance, but she could never find them, and when she called out to them, her voice was swallowed up by the endless mist.
It was, to be truthful, a horrible experience. Not at all restful. A deadly fatigue weighed her down, a malaise invaded her spirit, and despair filled her heart.
Finally, true sleep came, bringing oblivion, and with it, relief from her aching heart, at least for a time.
She woke with a start, the very feel of the bed telling her that yesterday’s nightmare had been no thing of dreams, but of reality, even before she opened her eyes. And when she did open them, it was to find that she was staring up into the ochre velvet canopy of a huge, curtained bed. She sat up.
The room in which she found herself was as large as any four of the bedrooms in Blackbird Cottage put together. It had been furnished in the French style of a King Louis—she couldn’t think of which one—all ornate baroque curlicues and spindly-legged chairs. The paper on the wall was watered silk in yellow, the cushions and coverlet more of the ochre velvet. There was a fireplace with a yellow marble mantle and hearth directly across from the foot of the bed, and a woman with brown hair tucked under a lace cap, a thin-faced creature in a crisp black-and-white maid’s uniform and a cool manner, sitting in a chair beside it, reading. When Marina sat up, she put her book down, and stood up.
“Awake, miss?” she asked, with no inflection whatsoever.
No, I’m sleepwalking, Marina thought with irritation. The headache of yesterday in her temples had been joined by one at the back of her head, and whatever vile nastiness had been in the tea had left her with a foul taste in her mouth. But she answered the question civilly enough. “Yes, I am now. How long have I been asleep?”
The maid allowed a superior smile to cross her lips. “You’ve slept the clock around, miss. It’s midmorning, two days after Boxing Day. But it’s just as well you were asleep,” the woman continued, turning and going to a wardrobe painted dark ochre, and ornamented with gilded scrollwork. “Madam has had her modiste here to make you some clothing fit to wear, and she only finished the first few items and delivered them an hour ago. You’re in mourning, after all, and you need mourning frocks. And those things you brought with you—well, they weren’t suitable.” A sniff relegated her entire wardrobe to something not worth using as rags, much less being fit to wear.
But the maid’s words could only lead Marina to one horrified conclusion. “You didn’t throw them out!” she exclaimed. “Not my clothes!”
The maid did not trouble to answer. Out of the wardrobe came a black velvet skirt, severely cut with a slight train, and a heavy black silk blouse, high-necked, and trimmed at wrists and neck with narrow black lace. Out of the drawers of a chest next to it came white silk underthings, black stockings, a corset, black satin slippers. All these were laid out at the end of the bed, and no sooner had Marina turned back the coverlet and stood up, then the maid pounced on her.
There could be no other description. Before Marina could make a move to reach for anything herself, the nightdress was whisked over her head, leaving her naked and shivering, and the maid was holding up the drawers for her to step into.
Marina had always wondered what it was like to be dressed by a lady’s maid, and now she was finding out with a vengeance. It was exactly like being a doll, and the maid was just as impersonal about the job as a woman in a toy-shop clothing one of the toys for display. In fact, the maid was ruthlessly efficient; before Marina had time to blink, the corset was on her, she had been turned to face the bed, and the woman was pulling at the laces with her knee in the small of Marina’s back! And she was pulling tightly, much more tightly than the dressmaker in Holsworthy.