Reserved for the Cat

Now to give a human dreams was not as easy as it might seem. The ordinary sort of human, without any magic to speak of, was singularly resistant to the any touch of the arcane. The sheer power of his disbelief was astonishing to someone who had never come up against it; the inability to See the creatures of other planes and other realms only reinforced that. This disbelief created a wall between a human mind and anything that might try to force it via magic. What a Mage had to do in order to infiltrate a human’s mind—rather than just cracking it open, which was rather damaging and not at all subtle—was to find out just what it was he did believe in.

Fortunately, in the case of Terrance . . . he believed in God and the Church. Not, of course, the kind of honest and open-hearted belief that would also have protected him . . . no, indeed. He believed in the comfortable, dozing-in-the-pew sort of orthodoxy that promised him Heaven in return for the weekly offering and an occasional high tea for the clergy. He liked his clergymen modern—that is, a fellow who would talk to him about hunting and dogs and fishing, and not about uncomfortable things like the state of the poor and the exploitation of the mill-worker, or abstract things like morals and conscience. He certainly was not comfortable with those who took too close an interest in the state of his soul, but preferred those who reassured him without actually saying anything that his soul was in good repair and a place waited for him in Heaven—a Heaven populated by Cambridge men who would see his worth at a glance and give him the respect and deference he was simply was not getting here on earth. That this Heaven would also include plebeians who would fawn over his every word and beg to serve him went without saying.

So Nina put on one of her male guises and went to visit him dressed in the clerical dog collar.

She appeared round about tea-time, knowing that if a clergyman presented himself at that hour, it was a given that he would be invited to share it by Terrance’s mother.

And so it was. Within two minutes of sending in a card, “Father Martin” was seated on the best horsehair sofa across from Mrs. Kendal and a rather bored-looking Terrance, nibbling on a watercress sandwich and drinking rather insipid tea. It was such a typical example of a stolid, middle-class sitting room that it could have been photographed and framed as a representative of its kind. The wallpaper was mauve, with great cabbage-roses climbing all over it. The woodwork was dark and shining with wax. The furniture was covered in mauve plush; there were small tables crowded with “curiosities” everywhere a table could be put, hand-embroidered firescreens, hand-embroidered cushions, hand-embroidered footstools—evidently Mrs. Kendal had a great deal of time on her hands and from the paucity of books in the room, did not care to pass it in reading. Mrs. Kendal was one of those blonde women who looked like roses in their youth, but faded rather quickly, like a printed chintz that has been washed too many times. She was thin—Nina rather suspected she lived on tea and toast and the occasional bowl of broth—her hair was now an indeterminate shade between silver and straw, her eyes were the pale blue of a sky with a thin haze of high cloud over it, and her voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.

Even her gown seemed a faded black, rather than the uncompromising color of full mourning. If there had been any less of her, she would have been a ghost herself.

Nina had long experience of reading mortals, and with the thoughts of those she absorbed, and it was easy to categorize this woman. Very pretty, by nature docile, she had been taught that was all she had to be in order to achieve the acme of all possible goals, a Good Marriage. She had been schooled and catechized within an inch of her life in the most rigid form of religion, and frightened by a nanny and teachers and clergymen into a petrified fear of ever “being naughty.” And because of this, she made a modest social success of herself. Her looks eclipsed her timidity, and her fear of practically everything was interpreted as shyness and an attractive modesty. She went where she was led, did what she was told, probably responded to her suitor’s proposal of marriage with “All right.” Once married, she was bullied by husband, parents, siblings, teachers, and son, and probably by her own servants.