“As are a great many of my friends, which is why you got the recommendation for our school. I understand your powers, though Frederick and I do not share them.” It was Mem’sab’s turn to pause. “Nor does your daughter. Her powers are psychic in nature, as you suspected, though I have not yet deciphered them completely. She is being instructed, however, not only by myself, but by others who are even stronger in some aspects than I.”
“Haha!” said the funny little voice. “There’s a good friend!”
Cor! I wunner what this El’mental business is? Whatever it was, it was new to Nan, who was only now getting used to the idea that her “sense” was a thing that could be trained and depended on, and that she was most unusual for possessing it.
“Oh, bless!” Sarah’s mother cried. “I hoped—but I wasn’t sure—one can’t put such things in a letter—”
“True enough, but some of us can read, however imperfectly, what is written with the heart rather than a pen,” Mem’sab replied decidedly. “Then I take it you are not here to remove Sarah from our midst.”
“No,” came the soft reply. “I came only to see that Sarah was well, and to ask if you would permit her pet to be with her.”
“Gladly,” Mem’sab said. “Though I might question which of the two was the pet!”
“Clever bird!” said Grey. “Veeeeeery clever!”
Mem’sab laughed. “Yes, I am, my feathered friend! And you would do very well never to forget it!
3
A month had gone by since Nan was brought into the Harton School. 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 criminals, and most particularly the 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 procurers had tried to take one of the pupils, and had been found with arms and legs broken, beaten senseless. They survived—but they would never walk straight or without pain again, and even a toddler would be able to outrun them. Word had followed that anyone who threatened another child protected by the school would be found dead—if he was found at all.
The three fierce, swarthy “blackfellas” who served as the school’s guards were rumored to have strange powers, or 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 and 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.
She slept in the next bed over from Sarah’s, in a room inhabited by only the two of them and the parrot, Grey, and they now shared many late-night giggles and confidences, instead of leftover tea bread.
Nan also had a job; she had not expected pure charity, and would, deep down, have been suspicious if she’d been offered this place for nothing. But Mem’sab had made it clear if she was to stay, she had to work, and Nan was not at all averse to a bit of hard work. She had always known, 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 and Mala, the babies’ nurses, or “ayahs,” as they were called. Nadra and Mala were from India, as were most of the servants, from the formidable guards, the Sikh Karamjit, the Moslem Selim, and the Gurkha Agansing, to the cooks, Maya and Vashti. Mrs.Isabelle 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 adviser to an import firm; his military service in India had left him with a small pension, and a permanent limp.
And now Nan knew why the Harton School was here in the first place. When he and his wife had returned, they had learned quite by accident of the terrible conditions children returned to England to escape the dangers of the East often lived in. Relatives exploited or abused them, schools maltreated and starved them, and even the best schools ignored homesickness and loneliness, insisting that the bereft children “buck up” and “keep a stiff upper lip” and above all, never be seen to shed a tear. Children who had been allowed by their indulgent ayahs to run the nursery like miniature rajahs were suddenly subjected to the extreme discipline of tyrannical schoolmasters and the bullying of their elders.
Originally, they had resolved that the children of their friends back in the Punjab, at least, would not have to face that kind of traumatic separation. Then, as their reputation spread, especially among those with a bent for the arcane, other children were sent to them. Now there was a mix of purely ordinary children, and those, like Nan and Sarah, with more senses than five.
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 dancing Masters and cricket teams here, there was a great deal of love and care; if the furniture was unfashionable and shabby, the children were well-fed and rosy.
And for a few—those with what the Hartons called “Talents”—there were lessons of another sort, and their parents would not dream of sending them anywhere but here.
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 watercolor painting, were more valuable than a sound education in the same basics given to a boy.
Sometimes these parents learned of their errors in judgment 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 fabric, made bright with embroidery courtesy of Maya. Nan had seen the pictures of 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 semiprecious gems. But in Nan’s eyes, not one of those other ladies was worth wasting a single glance upon.