Unnatural Issue (13 page)

The first layer was a chemise. This was something even the poorest wore, and most of the poor used it as a nightgown too. Then came an article to which the stockings were clipped. Silk stockings, not limp cotton or heavy wool. Susanne wasn’t quite certain what other girls and women wore, but she never wore stockings in the summer, and in the winter, she wore wool ones she had knitted herself and she tied them up to a band of fabric around her waist. Nothing like this elegant thing.

Then came the wretched corset, which fitted under the breast, then hip pads, to make the waist look even smaller, objects which had given her no end of confusion. She hadn’t been certain if they were to go on the bum, like a bustle, or be stuffed into the front of the chemise to augment her bosom!

Then came a pair of drawers and then a corset cover, which made the instrument of torture look pretty and dainty. Then one or more petticoats. Then, finally, the outer garments. Small wonder that Prudence, who knew only of a chemise and a pair of drawers, had been confused by them all. “Town women,” except for very poor ones, wore corsets, but Susanne suspected that Prudence and Patience had never seen one. She certainly had not until now, except in advertisements.

And certainly Prudence had had no idea you were supposed to wear all that, and Susanne had decided that she simply wasn’t going to do so. If she got sent to this school, well, she could do it then, but not now. There was no reason to; who would see her and know? She certainly didn’t need to impress anyone here at the Manor.

That first day, with Agatha and Prudence both puzzled by all of the clothing, she had adopted that measure, much to their relief. Agatha knew what the corset was all about, of course—in fact, she probably wore one herself, since she was several cuts above a plain little Yorkshire farm lass who ordinarily wouldn’t have gotten a place at the Manor years ago, much less been pressed into service as a lady’s maid. But Agatha was extremely reluctant to lace Susanne into the thing, and poor Prudence hadn’t the least notion
how.

They tried, of course, but the results were unsatisfactory at best and excruciating at worst, and Susanne asserted her rank for the first time, ever, and said she wasn’t wearing the wretched thing. And that was that. The other two gave up with visible relief.

By then, it was suppertime, and before she could even get out of the door of her rooms to go down to the kitchen and join the others, Patience appeared with a tray, which she put down on a little table in the sitting-room. The others vanished, leaving her staring at it glumly.

She ate her supper of course, every last crumb. She couldn’t possibly be annoyed with them; after all, it wasn’t
their
fault that there were rules about how the gentry were to be treated, and it wasn’t
their
fault that her father would probably fly into a rage and dismiss anyone he suspected of treating her with anything less than servile respect. So she couldn’t be annoyed and she couldn’t blame them, and even though this was enough to make her spirits sink very low indeed, she wasn’t going to insult Cook by not eating it all.

She was just grateful that it didn’t occur to anyone that Prudence should come up here and help her get undressed. Since she hadn’t been corseted to immobility, she was perfectly capable of doing that for herself.

Her first morning as “the daughter of the house” had begun strangely. She’d slept long, but not well, with uneasy dreams she couldn’t remember. She woke when Prudence arrived with yet another tray. It seemed that since her father wasn’t going to take meals with her, and she couldn’t take them with mere servants, she was going to be fed in isolation.

She had begun picking out the first of the too-small garments to alter when Patience appeared, laden down with books and a handful of notepaper covered in careful script. Her father hadn’t forgotten those promised lessons....

She felt more than a little appalled when she looked the books and notes over. Grammar, penmanship, French, and perspective drawing in the morning; geography, history, literature, and arithmetic in the afternoon.
It is probably too late for you to learn to play the harp or piano,
he had written,
so you might as well master some smattering of plays and poetry so you may hold your own in conversation.

There were exercises, which she was expected to send back to him via Agatha. She could only stare at it all in disbelief.

But there was nothing for it; her father expected her to learn all this. So learn it she would. He would just have to be patient with her.

So she spent the entire second day bending her mind around all the lessons. The arithmetic, to her relief, proved to be nothing more arduous than what she had already been taught. And the literature was lovely. Agatha hadn’t had the temerity to borrow books from the Manor library, and by the time Susanne herself was old enough to consider doing so, she had never had any time. Between the magic and the kitchen and dairy chores, she was just generally too weary by the end of the day to read for pleasure.

So now she finally was reading something besides the simple children’s books Agatha had found in the nursery, or the hymns and Bible verses and responses at church. And despite having to puzzle through some unfamiliar words, she found herself utterly enthralled by the play he had set her to read. She could see it all in her mind, and the fact that it had Robin in it was just the sugar on the cake. She hated to set it aside to go on to the arithmetic exercises.

When Prudence appeared with her tray, she felt as if her brain had been stuffed full. And when she went to sleep that night, it was to toss and turn as bits of the lessons went round and round in her head.

By the end of this, the third day, however, she was beginning to feel rebellious.

She hadn’t been out of these rooms in three days. There was all that glorious sun and spring out there, and all she got of it was what came in through the window. The view from her window only showed the distant border of green outside the area of blight; it was not a vista that pleased. She ate her dinner with a faint feeling of being stifled, watching the sun set over the dead gardens. And just as the light dimmed to twilight, she made up her mind. She stood up and decided that she was going out.

What matter that it was late? She had never had any fear of being out after sunset, and there were times when magic had to be done by moonlight. There was not an animal on these lands that would harm an Earth Master, she was more than able to protect herself against any magical creature, and as for humans . . . well, she could summon just about anything to help her—perfectly natural animals that would have no difficulty attacking a human that threatened her. A goat or a dog would probably be the best, but any attacker could find himself beset by a swarm of bees, charged by an angry bull or cow, attacked by geese or a fox—

Oh, woe betide the man that tried to meddle with her! At the very least he’d spend the week afterwards wondering if his nether bits were going to just fall off or rot first—and wishing they would make up their mind to do one or the other.

She took off her shoes so as to make no noise as she slipped down the hallway. There was no sign of life in her father’s rooms, not even a light under the door. He seemed to keep no hours at all, much less regular ones; according to Agatha, she had just given up on providing him “appropriate” meals, because he was as likely to be eating breakfast before going to bed as he was to be eating it after he got up.

There was no one in the parlor, nor any of the other rooms that would have been used by the family had her father been leading a normal life. All of the furniture was swathed in sheets and remained that way except for the spring cleaning. There was no reason to take the sheets off; no one ever came here anyway.

For the first time in her entire life, she went out through the front door of the Manor. Servants did not do that; they were expected to use their own entrance, and until now, she had done the same. She almost expected the door to howl in protest as she set her plebian hand on the latch, but nothing happened. She had expected the hinges to shriek in protest as she opened the door, but whoever was in charge of such things had kept the hinges nicely oiled. The door swung open quietly, and she closed it behind her just as quietly.

And finally, for the first time in three days, she drew a breath of free air.

Then she undid her stockings, tucked them in her shoes, left both on the doorstep, and ran for the wood.

Once out of the blight, the air was alive with scent, and she realized how much she had missed that, stuck inside the house. Beneath her feet, the grass and earth hadn’t quite lost the heat of the sun. All around her she heard the hundreds of little sounds of things going to sleep, things waking up. The silence in the Manor was so thick it was oppressive; she had missed this, too.

She wanted to dance with the heady wine of freedom bubbling inside her. But the moment she entered her special clearing, she was swarmed by Elementals.

Fauns leaped around her, driven, as near as she could tell, by joy and anxiety in equal portions. Brownies clung to her skirts. Things she had always called “tree-girls” peered down at her from the canopy or from behind trunks. Other grotesque yet charming creatures, clothed in what looked like old leaves or dresses of feathers, with bodies round or spindly, tiny or as large as a child, scuttled around her. All of them seemed overjoyed to see her. All of them seemed fraught with anxiety. And all of them, with the exception of the tree-girls, chattered at her in a thousand voices, so that she lost any sense of what they were saying.

There was nothing for it but to sit down among them and murmur soothing things at them, dispensing a comforting aura of energy. Gradually, as she managed to get them to calm down, they settled.

But they settled around her. This was—well, this was very odd indeed. The first time, in fact, that she could ever remember something like this happening. They clung to her as if they expected her to vanish at any moment, as if she had been away for years rather than days.

“What on earth is troubling you?” she asked one of the fauns, who had cuddled into her skirt like a puppy.

As she scratched the nubs of his horns, she sensed he peered up at her. It was now dark enough under the trees that he was nothing more than a shadow against her white dress.

“You were with your father. Don’t like your father,” the little creature said laconically. “He’s dark, and he drives our kind away.”

“He brings dark things,” piped up something else from out of the shadows. “Things that hurt. Things that like to hurt us.”

“What sort of things?” she asked, but couldn’t get any kind of answer from them. They just repeated, “Dark things,” and they couldn’t or wouldn’t say more than that. It was a little frustrating, but if she was going to calm them down and keep them calm, she had to keep herself from feeling that frustration. She kept her mind centered on the tranquility of this place, the soft, warm shadows, the scent of water and crushed grass, the sleepy murmur of birds above her.

“Well, why were you so worried about me?” she asked. Subtle stirrings around her told her that the Elemental creatures, now reassured, were moving away from her, and off on business of their own. Which was a good thing because, after all, she couldn’t sit here forever. The faun was staying, however, nearly glued to her side.

“Your father . . . I remember when he was Master of the land,” the little fellow said, slowly. “He was a good Master but . . . hard. An Earth Master should not be hard. And now . . . now he is dark, and he brings dark things, and he does not care that they can hurt us.”

“But dark things happened to him,” she reminded the faun gently. “His wife, my mother, died.” The fauns didn’t really understand death; they lived entirely in the moment so far as she could tell. That was the case with a great many Elementals, actually. They could be killed, although so far as she could tell, they didn’t age or die of old age, but they didn’t seem to think about death until it happened, and then it came as an incomprehensible shock. “No wonder his thoughts are dark, and sad things haunt him.”

“Not like this,” the faun insisted. But he couldn’t be any clearer than that, and talking about it seemed to frighten him, so eventually she stopped pressing him. Slowly he relaxed.

“You will not go away from us?” he asked finally. His warm little shaggy body pressed up against her leg. “When you were in that house, it felt as if you had gone away from us. Will you stay with us always?”

“You know I cannot promise that,” she told him. “I’m just one mortal Daughter of Eve. I can’t make promises like that.”

He sighed. “Dark times are coming. Robin said. We want you here, with us, when they come.”

“But I cannot make that promise,” she repeated. “I can only promise to try.”

It seemed that was enough. He pried himself away from her and stood up.

“Be wary,” he said. “Take care.”

And then he was gone.

Alone at last, she allowed herself to sit and do nothing, think nothing at all, until she felt the smothering weight had lifted from her. Only then did she rise and make her way back to the Manor and her bed.

 

Knowing now that the Elementals could not sense her inside the Manor, Susanne decided that she was not going to stay inside. After all, why should she? The next morning when Prudence came up with her breakfast, she asked for two baskets, one empty and one with a lunch in it. Prudence went away looking baffled, and it was Agatha that returned.

“And just what will you be wanting with baskets? Miss . . .” Agatha began, then belatedly remembered that Susanne was gentry now. Evidently she had forgotten that when Prudence appeared with the request! It made Susanne laugh, which flustered Agatha further.

“I’m going to do my lessons outside,” she explained. Then added shrewdly, “The light is bad in here. I’m going to get a squint.”