“I can’t stay here overnight,” she said. “Everyone will know I did, and the wizards are looking for something,anything, to discredit Lydia …” She faltered because Plan B, if discovered, would do the job far more effectively.
But Plan B was necessary. They were handling it. The bigger issue was keeping it going, finding a source of leaves to bridge the gap until the winter broke.
Peter, wading into the snow, glanced down at Main Street and came back, shaking his head. “I can’t drive in this. I don’t think it’s safe to walk such a distance, either—bitterly cold,” he said, stamping his feet and shivering. Snowflakesclung to his coat, dusted his eyelashes and painted the top of his silver hair white.
She ran to fetch her own coat. “I can get down to the general store. Maybe Mayor Croft hasn’t left—maybe I can stay there tonight?—”
“I’m sure he’s gone home.Beatrix,” he said as she stepped onto the porch, “who’s to know you’re stuck here? I’ll smuggle you out under an invisibility spell if I have to, once the roads are clear.”
She hesitated, seeing the logic in what he said but feeling, deep in her stomach, that something bad would happen if she stayed. Garrett would decide to slip in again. Or Mrs. Price, who’d once told her that ruin would follow if she continued to work for an unmarried man, would ferret out where she’d been.
Or she would finally lose her grip on the fine line—the fraying thread—between dayside and dreamside.
“Come in,” he said, taking her arm. “I’ll figure out something for dinner.”
She took a step to the door but cast one more desperate look over her shoulder toward Main Street. And then she saw it, a small figure struggling to cross the road. A child.
“Peter—look!”
He sucked in a breath. “I think that’s Anna Clark.”
They pushed into the snow, both of them trying to run and failing, Beatrix gripped by the fear that something terrible had happened to Sue Clark. After a moment Peter turned back.
“Keep going,” he yelled over the wind. “We don’t know what the problem is—I’d better have my Brown’s. And more fuel.”
She nodded, eyes on the girl. It was definitely Anna, pigtails whipping behind her. When she reached Sue’s daughter, Beatrix grasped her hand.
“Anna, what is it?”
“The baby’s coming, Miss Beatrix! It’s coming now, and we can’t get any help!”
Beatrix almost said “thank God,” given the alternatives. Sue hadn’t collapsed, she hadn’t died, she’d merely come to the moment of truth in every pregnancy. But that relief immediately faded. What was the maternal death rate during delivery, one in forty? And that was in maternity wards with doctors attending. How much worse would Sue’s odds be if they couldn’t get her to the hospital? And wasn’t this baby at least a week early?
“Come on,” she said, setting off with Anna and trying to sound reassuring. “The omnimancer will meet us there. What else do you know?”
Quite a lot, as it happened. Anna knew her mother wasn’t due for ten more days. The midwife her parents had planned to call was out of town. Her father, running to the neighbor’s to use the telephone, discovered that the hospital could not send an ambulance. And her mother was in pain, “even worse than with Evan.”
“Oh, Miss Beatrix,” Anna whispered, glancing up at her with a look of pure misery. “I don’t want her to die. Please don’t let her die.Please.”
Beatrix was twelve again, sitting by the hospital bed where her mother gave birth to Lydia.Please don’t leave me.
But the hand in hers was small and gloved, and she came back to herself and the present crisis.
“Your mother will be absolutely all right,” she said, hoping sheer will could make it true.
CHAPTER 16
He had been optimistic at first. But the county hospital, the next-door county’s hospital and the three hospitals in Baltimore all insisted that the roads were impassable. None had a wizard on staff. And though Baltimore claimed a chief, deputy and assistant omnimancer, any one of whom could deliver a doctor to his door, no one picked up the line when he rang it.
He tried the county police. The county fire department. Even the county public works department.No, sir. Sorry, sir. Can’t possibly, sir.
He put down the useless phone, escaped the sweet old neighbor it belonged to—“such a terrible to-do! My aunt went through the same thing, never the same afterward, poor dear”—and ran downstairs to the Clarks’ apartment.
Beatrix, a steaming tea kettle in hand and several towels under an arm, swiveled and hurried toward him as he came in. “Were you able—you weren’t, were you.”
He shook his head. “Tell me there’s someone in town with medical training—a nurse, an emergency-medical technician,someone.”
But he too knew the answer to his question before he got it. “No,” she said.
