He nodded, and headed for his own room at a run, his steps echoing on the staircase as he made for the second floor. An apt comparison, that. Perhaps more so than Sebastian Tarrant dreamed.
Chapter Twenty-One
AS Andrew sat on the edge of his bed and depressed the plunger on a syringe containing a very carefully minimized dose of morphine, he reflected that somewhere in Scotland, his old Master was rotating in his grave like a water-powered lathe. The old man wouldn’t even take a drop of whisky for a cold; he was a strict Covenanter, and how he could reconcile that with talking to fauns and consorting with brownies was something Andrew had never quite managed to get him to explain.
Well, the old boy had a phobia about needles as well; he couldn’t stomach the sight of anyone being injected, much less someone injecting him, and still less the thought of what Andrew was doing, injecting himself. Andrew pulled the needle out of his arm, and the tourniquet off, and felt the rush of immediate dizziness as the drug hit his brain. He didn’t like doing this—he was nearly as against it as his old Master!—but it was the only way he was going to get any sleep.
Which I really should do now—he thought dimly, lying down.
Five hours later—long enough for the morphia to have worn off—Eleanor shook him awake. He had the luck to be one of those who came awake all at once, rather than muzzily clambering up out of sleep. “There’s no change, Doctor,” she said sadly as he sat up, pushing the blanket aside that someone had laid over him. He hadn’t expected there to be any change—but if only—
“But Miss Roeswood’s guardians have been wonderful,” Eleanor continued. “Mrs. Tarrant is so good with the children, and Mr. Buford has charmed the lady guests—and gammoned them into thinking he’s a specialist-doctor you brought in especially to see that they were all right.” She brightened a little at that, for the “lady guests” were especially trying to her. And, truth to tell, to Andrew to a certain extent. There was always the worry of keeping what the real patients were up to away from them, and the fuss they tended to cause as they recovered from their exhaustion, becoming bored but not quite ready to leave. “Oh, and Lady Elizabeth Hastings is here as well. She kept the telegraph office busy for a solid hour, I think.”
He nodded; that was a plus. Say what you would about the old aristocracy, but they were used to organizing things and pushing them through, used to taking charge and giving orders. That was one area, at least, that he would not have to worry about. Lady Hastings had obviously got the more mundane aspects of the situation well in hand.
And right now, he wanted to concentrate solely on the grammary he’d extracted from the old trunk he’d brought with him from Scotland. He’d even put it under his pillow for safekeeping before letting the drugs have their way with him. Now he drew it out, a dark, leather-bound volume of rough-cut parchment; it dated back to before the first James—probably to the time of the Scots queen, Mary. There were no actual dates in it, but Mary had brought courtiers with her from France and had been raised and educated there—and at that time, there was something of a fad for Satanism in the French Court. Some of the Masters of the time blamed it on the Medici influence, but Andrew was inclined to think it went back further than that. There had been enough suspicious deaths and illnesses in the French Court for centuries to make him think that there had been a dark influence there from almost the time of Charlemagne.
He pulled the book out and held it; bound in a soft leather that had darkened to a mottled brown the color of stout, it was entirely handwritten, part journal and part spell-book. Sebastian had taken one look at it and pronounced it a grimoire, rather than a grammary, which at least meant that the artist recognized it for what it was. Andrew could never think of the book without thinking of the old ballad of “The Lady Gay”:
There was a lady, and a lady gay, of children she had three. She sent them away to the North Country, to learn their grammary.
Most, if not all, scholars thought the song meant that the children were being sent to learn reading and writing. Little did they know the song spoke of the long tradition of wizards and witches of the North Country, who fostered the children of Masters and taught them the Elemental Magics that their parents could not… a tradition which Andrew himself had unwittingly replicated, though he’d gone up to Scotland rather than the North of England.
He shook himself out of his reverie. He was going to need a protector while he worked his magics, and for that, he thought, Sebastian Tarrant would be the best suited. Despite not being of the same Element as Andrew, Tarrant had more of the warrior in him than either his wife or brother-in-law. If they could strengthen Marina and pick up his duties—
He pulled on a clean shirt and went to find the newcomers—and predictably, two of the four were with Marina. As Eleanor had said, Margherita and Thomas were—God bless them!—tending his patients. Sebastian and Lady Elizabeth were at Marina’s side, and both stood when he entered.
And the moment he laid eyes on Lady Elizabeth, he knew that she would be better suited to guard his back as he scryed into the past than Sebastian.
In fact, he had to restrain himself from bowing so deeply over her hand that he looked like a fop. He did take her extended hand, and he shook it carefully. “You must be Lady Hastings,” he began. “I’m Andrew Pike—”
“We haven’t time for formalities, Doctor,” she said crisply, before he had done more than introduce himself. “What is it you wish us to do?”
He nodded gratitude, and hoped she saw it as he released her hand. “I’m going to use this to scry into the past, Lady Hastings,” he said, holding up the book that was tucked under his other arm.
“Elizabeth,” she interrupted him. “Why?”
That was when he sat down and explained exactly what he thought had been going on in Madam’s household for all these years. More than once, Sebastian and Elizabeth sucked in a surprised breath. More than once, he suspected, they cursed themselves for not seeing it themselves.
But why should they? Most of those who considered themselves to be black magicians and Satanists were pathetic creatures, more interested in debauchery than discipline, in the interplay of status than power itself. They had neither the learning nor the understanding to make use of any magic that they acquired, either by accident or on purpose. And even if they’d had the knowledge, they simply weren’t interested in anything past the moment. The few times to Sebastian’s knowledge that self-styled Satanists had warranted attention, it was the police that were needed, not the Masters or some other occultists. In fact, to everyone except the dour lot up in Scotland, Satanic worship was more of a joke than a threat. And perhaps, that was what had been the protection for the few real Satanic cults in the modern world; that no one believed in them.
It’s our protection, too, after all. When something becomes a fairy tale, the ordinary sort of fellow can look right at it and not believe in it.
“So, you’re going to go look back in time to when this book was being written and try to see what lay behind those journal entries,” Elizabeth stated, summing up his intentions nicely. “Can you do the work here?”
“It’s the best-shielded room in the place at this point,” he replied. “What I’ll need from you is guarding.” He frowned. “I hope that I don’t sound superstitious to you, but—” He was reluctant even to voice his suspicions, but if he didn’t and something happened—”Look, I know that the idea of demons is something less than fashionable among Masters at the moment, but, well, the only way I can think of for Madam to have done some of what she’s done is to have a servant or a slave that is sensitive to magic power. And as a Satanist—well—I suppose she could have attracted some of the nastier Elementals, but how would she have seen them? So what does that leave but the Satanist’s traditional servant?”