Free The Gates of Sleep by Mercedes Lackey Page B

poor
Elizabeth to an open cart in the pouring rain. So he had arranged to borrow the
parson’s creaky old-fashioned carriage, which meant that there was enough
room for Marina to go along.
    Marina peered anxiously out the little window next to the
door; the old glass made the view a bit wavery, and the rain didn’t help.
Finally Sebastian arrived with the carriage, an old black contraption with a
high, arched roof like a mail coach, that looked as if it had carried parsons’
families since the time of the third George. The parson’s horse, the
unlikely offspring of one of the gentry’s hunters and a farmer’s
mare, a beast of indeterminate color rendered even more indeterminate by his
wet hide, looked completely indifferent to the downpour. The same could not be
said of Sebastian perched up on the block where he huddled in the non-existent
coachman’s stead, wrapped up in a huge mackintosh with a shapeless
broad-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes.
    He shouldn’t complain; he’d have been just
as wet on the pony cart.
    Marina, her rain cape pulled around her and her aunt’s
umbrella over her head, made a dash across the farmyard for the carriage and
clambered inside. The parson’s predecessor had long ago replaced the
horsehair-covered seats with more practical but far less comfortable wooden
ones, and as the coach rolled away, she had to hang on with both hands to guard
herself from sliding across the polished slats during the bumps and jounces.
When the coach was loaded with the parson’s numerous family, the fact
that they were all wedged together against the sides of the vehicle meant no
one got thrown against the sides, but with just Marina in here, she could be
thrown to the floor if she didn’t hang on for dear life. The coach
creaked and complained, rocking from side to side, the rain drummed on the
roof, and water dripped inside the six small windows, for the curtains had long
since been removed in the interest of economy as well.
    Poor Elizabeth! She’ll be bounced to bits before
we get home!
    The station wasn’t far, but long before they arrived,
Marina had decided that their guest would have been far more comfortable in the
pony cart, rain or no rain.
    But then I wouldn’t have been able to come meet
her.
    She’d thought that she’d be on fire with
impatience, that the trip would be interminable. It wasn’t, but only because
she was so busy holding on, and trying to keep from being bounced around like
an India rubber ball from one side of the coach to the other. It came as a
welcome surprise to get a glimpse, through the curtain of rain, of the railway
station ahead of them, and realize that they were almost there. She didn’t
even wait for the coach to stop moving once they reached the station; she flew
out quite as if she’d been launched from the door, dashing across the
rain-slicked pavement of the platform, leaving her uncle to tie up the horse
and follow her.
    She reached the other side of the station and peered down
the track, and saw the welcome plume of smoke from the engine in the distance,
rising above the trees. As Sebastian joined her on the platform, the train itself
came into view, its warning whistle carrying through the rain. Marina
remembered not to bounce with impatience—she
wasn’t
a
child anymore—but she clutched the handle of the umbrella tightly with
both hands, and her uncle smiled sideways at her.
    It seemed that she was not the only one impatient for the
train to pull into the station. There was one particular head that kept peeking
out of one compartment window—and the very instant that the train halted,
that compartment door
flew
open, and a trim figure in emerald wool
shot out of it, heedless of the rain.
    “Sebastian!” Elizabeth Hastings gave Uncle
Sebastian quite as hearty an embrace as if he had been her brother, and Marina
hastened to get the umbrella over her before the ostrich plumes on her neat
little hat got soaked. “Good gad, this appalling