The Wizard of London Read Online Free PDF

the magic man in to help, and
when a magic man has someone that his magic can’t help right away, he
takes the patient to Mummy and Papa and they all put on feathers and charms,
and Mummy and Papa give him White Medicine while the magic man burns his herbs
and feathers and makes his chants, and everyone is happy. There haven’t
been any uprisings at our station for ever so long, and our magic men
won’t let anyone put black chickens at our door. One of them gave me
Grey, and I wanted to bring her with me, but Mummy said I
shouldn’t.” Now the child sighed, and looked woeful again.
    “Wot’s
a Grey?” Nan asked.
    “She’s
a Polly, a grey parrot with the beautifullest red tail; the medicine man gave her
to me when she was all prickles, he showed me how to feed her with mashed-up
yams and things. She’s so smart, she follows me about, and she can say,
oh, hundreds of things. The medicine man said that she was to be my guardian
and keep me from harm. But Mummy was afraid the smoke in London would hurt her,
and I couldn’t bring her with me.” Sarah looked up at the fat,
stone bird on the gatepost above her. “That’s why Mem’sab
gave me that gargoyle, to be my guardian instead. We all have them, each child
has her own, and that one’s mine.” She looked down again at Nan,
and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Sometimes when I get lonesome, I
come here and talk to her, and it’s like talking to Grey.”
    Nan
nodded her head, understanding. “Oi useta go an’
talk’t’ a stachew in one’a the yards, till we ‘adta
move. It looked loik me grammum. Felt loik I was talkin’ to ‘er, I
fair did.”
    A
footstep on the gravel path made Nan look up, and she jumped to see the tall
man with the head wrap standing there, as if he had come out of the thin air.
She had not sensed his presence, and once again, even though he stood
materially before her she could not sense anything like a living man there. He
took no notice of Nan, which she was grateful for; instead, he handed the
basket he was carrying to Sarah Jane, and walked off without a word.
    Sarah
passed the basket to Nan; it was heavier this time, and Nan thought she smelled
something like roasted meat. Oh, if only they’d given her the drippings
from their beef! Her mouth watered at the thought.
    “I
hope you like these,” Sarah said shyly, as Nan passed her the
much-lighter empty basket. “Mem’sab says that if you’ll keep
coming back, I’m to talk to you and ask you about London; she says
that’s the best way to learn about things. She says otherwise, when I go
out, I might get into trouble I don’t understand.”
    Nan’s
eyes widened at the thought that the head of a school had said anything of the
sort—but Sarah Jane hardly seemed like the type of child to lie.
“All roit, I’s’pose,” she said dubiously. “If
you’ll be ’ere, so’ll Oi.”
     
    The
next day, faithful as the rising sun, Sarah was waiting with her basket, and
Nan was invited to come inside the gate. She wouldn’t venture any farther
in than a bench in the garden, but as Sarah asked questions, she answered them
as bluntly and plainly as she would any similar question asked by a child in
her own neighborhood. Sarah learned about the dangers of the dark side of
London first-hand—and oddly, although she nodded wisely and with clear
understanding, they didn’t seem to frighten her.
    “Garn!”
Nan said once, when Sarah absorbed the interesting fact that the opium den a
few doors from where Nan and her mother had a room had pitched three dead men
out into the street the night before. “Yer ain’t never seen nothin’
loik that!”
    “You
forget, Mummy and Papa have a hospital, and it’s very dangerous where
they are,” Sarah replied matter-of-factly. “I’ve seen dead
men, and dead women and even babies. When Nkumba came in clawed up by a lion, I
helped bring water and bandages, while my parents sewed him up. When there was
a black-water fever, I saw lots of