The Gates of Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page B

haul them away to an antiquities dealer; that would make certain
they weren’t dumped elsewhere. She wished him well as he carted them off,
hoping he got a decent price for them; all she cared about was that they were
gone.
    Still, there was always the possibility that something
could get into the stream even now. She followed the stream down to the pond
and back, just to be sure that it ran clean and unobstructed, except by things
like rocks, which were perfectly natural; then, her brief surge of restlessness
assuaged, she sat back down next to her basket. She leaned up against the mossy
trunk of a tree and took the latest letter from her parents out of the leaves
of her book and unfolded it.
    She read it through for the second time—but did so
more out of a sense of duty than of affection; in all her life she had never
actually seen her parents. The uncles and her aunt were the people who had
loved, corrected, and raised her. They had never let her call them anything
other than “Uncle” or “Aunt,” but in her mind those
titles had come to mean far more than “Mama” and “Papa.”
    Mama and Papa weren’t people of flesh and blood. Mama
and Papa had never soothed her after a nightmare, fed her when she was ill,
taught her and healed her and—yes—loved her. Or at least, if Mama
and Papa loved her, it wasn’t with an embrace, a kiss, a strong arm to
lean on, a soft shoulder to cry on—it was only words on a piece of paper.
    And yet—there were those words, passionate words. And
there was guilt on her part. They
were
her mother and father; that
could not be denied. For some reason, she could not be with them, although they
assured her fervently in every letter that they longed for her presence. She
tried
to love them—certainly they had always lavished her with presents, and
later when she was old enough to read, with enough letters to fill a
trunk—but even though she was intimately familiar with Uncle Sebastian’s
art, it was impossible to make the wistful couple in the double portrait in her
room come alive.
    Perhaps it was because their lives were also so different
from her own. From spring to fall, it was nothing but news of Oakhurst and the
Oakhurst farms, the minutiae of country squires obsessed with the details of
their realm. From fall to spring, they were gone, off on their annual
pilgrimage to Italy for the winter, where they basked in a prolonged summer.
Marina envied them that, particularly when winter winds howled around the eaves
and it seemed that spring would never come. But she just couldn’t
picture
what it was like for them—it had no more reality to her than the stories
in the fairy tale books that her aunt and uncles had read to her as a child.
    Neither, for that matter, did their home, supposedly hers,
seem any more alive than those sepia-toned sketches Uncle Sebastian had made of
Oakhurst. No matter how much she wished differently, she couldn’t
feel
the place.
Here
was her home, in this old fieldstone farmhouse,
surrounded not only by her aunt and uncles but by other artists who came and
went.
    There were plenty of those; Sebastian’s hospitality
was legendary, and between them, Thomas and Margherita kept normally volatile
artistic temperaments from boiling over. From here, guests could venture into
Cornwall and Arthurian country for their inspiration, or they could seek the
rustic that was so often an inspiration for the artist Millais, another leader
in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Their village of a few hundred probably hadn’t
changed significantly in the last two hundred years; for artists from London,
the place came as a revelation and an endless source for pastoral landscapes
and bucolic portraits.
    Marina sighed, and smoothed the pages of the letter with
her hand. She suspected that she was as much an abstraction to her poor mother
as her mother was to her. Certainly the letters were not written to anyone that
she recognized as herself. She was neither an artist nor a