Not in Devon. In Devon, if one got lost and approached a cottage, one was more apt to find oneself having to decline the fourth or fifth cup of hot tea and an offer of an overnight bed rather than finding oneself run off with a gun and snarling dogs.
But nevertheless, there was a certain proprietary feeling that villagers had for the titled families of their great houses and stately homes. They tended to resent interlopers coming in and buying out the families who had been there since the Conquest. Mrs. Hunter smoothed all that over for him.
“Thank you, Mrs. Hunter,” he said, and passed through the kitchen after a deep anticipatory breath redolent of rabbit stew and fresh bread. That was one good thing about buying this place. It wasn’t poaching when you set rabbit wires on your own property. It wasn’t poaching when you had your own man shoot a couple of the red deer that came wandering down into your back garden. There was some lovely venison hanging in the cold larder. Frozen, actually, thanks to the cold winter. Every little bit of money saved was to the good at this point. Money saved on food could go toward the wages of another hand, or perhaps even having gas laid on. At this point, electricity was not even to be thought of; there wasn’t an electrified house in the entire village. Someday, perhaps, the wires would come here. And just perhaps, by the time they did, he would have the money put away to have the house wired.
First, though, would come extra wages for extra help.
Because until he could afford to hire another big, strong fellow like Mrs. Hunter’s son Diccon, he didn’t dare take potentially dangerous patients.
From the downstairs he took the former servants’ stair upstairs, into the house proper.
What the family hadn’t taken or sold in the way of furnishings, he had mostly disposed of as being utterly impractical for their purposes. A pity, but what was the point of having furnishings too fragile to sit on or too heavy to shift?
Damned if he was going to tear down woodwork or paint anything over, though—even when the effect was dreadful. Some day, someone might want to buy this barn and make it a stately home again. Too many folk didn’t think of that when they purchased one of these places and then proceeded to cut it up.
Besides, for all I know, the ghosts of long-gone owners would rise up against me if I touched the place with impious hands. When you were an Elemental Master, such thoughts were not just whimsy; they had the potential to become fact. Having angry spirits roaming about among people who were already mentally unbalanced was not a good idea.
Particularly not when those people were among the minority who were able to see them as clearly as they saw the living.
Andrew had elected to make diverse use of the large rooms on the first floor. The old dining room was a dining room still, a communal one for those patients who felt able to leave their rooms or wards. The old library was a library and sitting room now, with a table for chess and another for cards; the old music room that overlooked the gardens was now allotted to the caretakers, where they could go when not on duty for a chat, a cup of tea, or a game of cards themselves. But the rest of the large rooms were wards for those patients who need not be segregated from the rest, or who lacked the funds to pay for a private room, or, like Ellen, were charity cases. Needless to say, the patients ensconced in the former bedrooms upstairs were the bread-and-butter of this place.
He checked on the two wards before Ellen’s carefully, since it was about time for him to make his rounds anyway, but all was quiet. In the first, there was no one in the four beds at all, for they were all playing a brisk game of faro for beans in the library. In the second, the patients were having their naps, for they were children. Poor babies. Poor, poor babies. Children born too sensitive, like Eleanor, or born with the power of the Elements in them; children born to parents who were perfectly ordinary, who had no notion of what to do when their offspring saw things—heard things—that weren’t there. He looked for those children, actively sought for them, had friends and fellow magicians watching for them. If he could get them under his care quickly enough, before they really were mad, driven to insanity by the tortures within themselves and the vile way in which the mentally afflicted were treated, then he could save them.
If. That was the reason for this place. Because when he began his practice, he found those for whom he had come too late.
Well, I’m not too late now. Here were the results of his rescue-missions, taking naps before dinner in the hush of their ward. Seven of them, their pinched faces relaxed in sleep, a sleep that, at last, was no longer full of hideous nightmares. They tended to sleep a lot when they first arrived here, as if they were making up for all the broken unrest that had passed for slumber until they arrived here, in sanctuary at last.
He left them to their slumbers. It wasn’t at all the usual thing for children to be mental patients.
Then again, he didn’t have the usual run of mental patients; when his people were “seeing things,” often enough, they really were seeing things.
That was why he’d had no difficulty in getting patients right from the beginning. Once word spread among the magicians, the occultists, and the other students of esoterica that Dr. Andrew Pike was prepared to treat their friends, relations, and (tragically) children for the traumatic aftermath of hauntings, curses, and other encounters with the supernatural, his beds began to fill. He got other patients when mundane physicians referred them to him, without knowing what it was they suffered from but having seen that under certain circumstances, with certain symptoms, Andrew Pike could effect a real cure.
It wasn’t only those who were born magicians or highly sensitive who ended up coming to him. Under the right—or perhaps wrong circumstances, virtually anyone could find horror staring the face. And sometimes, it wasn’t content just to stare.
There were a few of the adult patients who were under the indicious influence of drugs designed to keep them from being agitated which tended to make them sleep a great deal; those were the ones back in their beds after tea. The rest of the patients were in the parlor, reading or socializing. He didn’t like drugging them, but in the earliest stages here, sometimes he had to, just to break the holds that their own particular horrors had over them.
Ellen was on the third ward, and was fast asleep when he got there. Eleanor, the female ward nurse, was with her, sitting beside her bed, and looked up at the sound of his footsteps. She kept her pale hair pulled tightly back and done in a knot after the manner of a Jane Eyre, and her dark, somber clothing tended to reinforce that image. Eleanor seldom smiled, but her solemn face was not wearing that subtle expression of concern that would have told him there was something wrong.
Well—more wrong than there already is.
“She’ll be fine for now, Doctor,” Eleanor said without prompting. “She got chilled, but I don’t believe there will be any ill effects from it. We got her warmed up quickly enough once we got her back here.” She stroked a few stray hairs from Ellen’s brow, and her expression softened. “Poor child. Doctor, we mustn’t allow that boy Simon Ashford around her. She can see what he sees, of course; they seem peculiarly sensitive to one another. That’s what frightened her. I’ve already told Diccon not to let the child near her, but not why, of course.”
“I’ll make a note of it.” Eleanor was invaluable; one of his former patients who had decided to stay with him as a nurse and assistant when he’d helped her out of the hell that her inability to shut out the thoughts of others had thrown her into. Pike had been the only doctor at the asylum where she’d been who had understood that when it sounded as if she was answering someone that no one else could hear—she really was speaking to another person, or trying to. She was another of those cases of extreme sensitivity to the thoughts of others that came on at puberty—and thank heavens, one he had gotten to in time. It had been getting worse and before very long, all of the voices in her head would have driven her mad.