“Oh, yes—the more fool he!” Color rose in Mary’s cheeks as she spat out heated words. “He said thunderstorms made him feel alive.
He lived to watch lightning flash across the night sky. He had no one but himself to blame that such an ungodly habit killed him!”
Her anger at her late husband struck me as natural. He had been both careless and arrogant. “Sensible people are afraid of thunder and lightning, as well they should be.”
Some believe thunderstorms are sent by the devil. Others see them as an expression of God’s displeasure. Either way, almost everyone agrees that it is best to stay indoors with the shutters closed during violent storms.
“Edward thought himself sensible,” she said. “He laughed at the superstitious things people do to repel lightning.”
I nodded. Everyone knew such remedies. “I cannot see that planting houseleeks on the roof or draping mistletoe over doors and windows offers much protection.”
“And most foolish of all, or so Edward always said, is the belief that ringing church bells during a thunderstorm will drive away the devil.What more likely place, he used to say, than a church with a tall steeple to be struck by lightning? And what more dangerous occupation than bell ringer? It was his frequent observation that lightning seeks out the highest point in the landscape.”
“I suppose that is why he thought himself safe. Your house is no taller than any of those surrounding it.”
“He tempted fate. Worse, he mocked God.” Mary Sturgeon’s fingers flew faster and faster as her voice rose. Her two maidservants shrank away from her. “He paid the price for thinking too well of himself.”
Sturgeon had been accustomed to having his own way. That was true enough. He’d trampled anyone who stood in his path. By one means or another, even threats of violence, he’d forced choices upon lesser men, and upon some women, too.
I reached for the sewing basket to retrieve more thread. My nose wrinkled as I caught a whiff of singed fabric. It was not coming from the room at the back of the house, the one where Edward Sturgeon had died. Instead, it seemed to emanate from within the basket.
Frowning, I bent closer. Surely the widow would not have kept any of the clothing her husband had been wearing when he died.
“What is it you need?” The sharpness in her voice made me jerk upright.
“Thread,” I said.
She provided me with more and we all resumed stitching. It was soon after that exchange that the glazier arrived.
When Mistress Sturgeon left the chamber to supervise his work in the other room, I seized the opportunity to examine the sewing basket. The smell was as strong as I remembered and led me straight to
the roll of silk cord. I plucked it out to study more closely.
The outside was undamaged, but when I unrolled the cord, I at once found evidence of scorching. I might have attributed Mary Sturgeon’s frugal reuse of expensive decoration to her upbringing—her father had been naught but a yeoman farmer and it was said that, because of her beauty, Sturgeon married her without a dowry—had I not noticed a second oddity. A great number of pinholes showed in the fabric. The pattern they made suggested that someone had inserted dozens of them, overlapping, all along its length.
Pondering this curious discovery, I returned the cord to the sewing basket. I looked up in time to catch the maids exchanging a look. For once, I was glad of my superior birth. I had no power to enforce my will, but I could speak with convincing authority.
“You will say nothing to your mistress of anything you see me do this day,” I said. “Do you understand?”
Identical nods answered me, although one maid was short and stout and the other tall and thin.
“Do you know what happened to the pins?” I felt certain they had seen the same thing I had.
The tall girl shook her head so vigorously that she nearly lost her cap. The other young woman worried her lower lip and tried to avoid meeting my eyes.
I waited, my hands busy with the sewing but my full attention on the maids. After a lengthy silence, my patience was rewarded. The one who had been gnawing on her lip spoke in a whisper.
“Threw them down the privy, she did.”
“Why?” Pins might be a paltry expense to someone of Edward Sturgeon’s wealth, but a frugal housewife would not carelessly discard so many of them, especially one who knew what it was to scrimp and save in order to afford the cheapest sort.
“All blackened and bent, they were.” The expression of distaste on the maid’s plump face convinced me that she’d had a good look at them.
“How did they get that way?” I asked. Neither maidservant dared offer an opinion.
I felt certain that the pins were somehow connected to Sturgeon’s death, but how had they been used? I pictured in my mind the illustration that accompanied The Sorcerer’s Tale—the knight with his sword held high. Swords are made of metal, and so are pins, but how could pins draw down lightning from the sky?
I glanced toward the door through which Mary had disappeared. I had no business following her, but if I wished to examine the window before it was repaired, I had to do so at once. I set aside my sewing
and stood. If all else failed, I could use that sad old excuse of needing to use the privy. The Sturgeons, having money enough to afford such a luxury, had a small chamber for that purpose right in the house. It could not be reached by passing through the room where Edward Sturgeon had died, but that was a minor concern. I could always claim, with some truth, that I had not visited Sturgeon’s house often enough to be sure of the way.
The glazier, closely supervised by the widow, was busy measuring when I entered. Neither noticed me at first, giving me the opportunity to study the casement from the inside. It was easy to picture Sturgeon there in the opening. He’d been accustomed to stand in the center, one hand braced on either side of him. Braced, I realized with a jolt, on the lead bars that framed each section of the window.
If it was not just the height of a steeple, but the lead roof and the bells within that attracted lightning to churches, then surely it was not a good idea to touch metal of any kind during a thunderstorm. Even so, this house was nowhere near as tall as a church tower. I was still missing a piece of the puzzle.
I learned no more that day, and although I had the most dire suspicions about what had happened to Edward Sturgeon, I still did not understand the mechanics of it.
That night I read the story of The Sorcerer Knight again.
The next day, I accosted the thin maidservant as she crossed Sturgeon’s garden on an errand for her mistress.
“What else did your mistress throw away after your master died?” I asked her.
She cast a guilty look toward the house. “It means naught,” she whined.
“Let me judge that.” I resisted the urge to seize and shake her. “Rope. A length of thin, fine rope.”
“Was it blackened, too?”
She nodded, but before I could ask anything more, she fled.
* * *
That evening, I invited my neighbor to sup with me. Afterward, I sent the servants away and fixed her with a steady gaze.
“At some time when you felt certain you would not be seen,” I said, “mayhap in the dead of night, you climbed through the trapdoor to the roof and tied your husband’s sword to the chimney.Then you attached a length of silk cord, bristling with pins, to the sword, let the other end down beside the window, and fastened it to the lead frame.”
She had to swallow hard before she could speak. “What madness is this?”
“Not madness. Murder. And your victim was the one who devised the means of it. You took note of his observations about lightning and put them to good use.”
“No one will believe a word of this.” Her bravado was touching, if ill-founded.
“Perhaps not, but I might convince the church courts to charge you with sorcery.”
“You can prove nothing!” She sprang to her feet. “And in my turn, I will accuse you of foul slan
der.”
I rose, too, blocking her way to the door. “Just tell me why. Why did you want him dead?”
She started to laugh. “How can you ask? He was a cruel man who stopped at nothing to get his own way. He cheated his customers, lent money at a usurer’s rates, and mistreated women.”
I sighed. “Yes, he did.”
“He deserved killing, and it must have been God’s will that he die.” She was frantic now, determined to convince me of the rightness of her actions. “How else could a sword and a few pins smite him? It was as you said. I listened to his speculations about storms and swords and steeples and tall trees and I devised a plan.When I heard distant thunder that afternoon, I was ready. All I had to do was attach the lower end of the cord to the window. He came into the room just as I finished and flung wide the casement. In the next moment, God struck him down.”
Emotions flickered, one after another, across her pale face. Remorse was not one of them, nor was sorrow.
“I never thought it would work,” she whispered, more to herself than to me. “I expected he would beat me when he discovered that his sword was missing.”
I led her to a padded bench and tugged on her arm until she sat beside me. After a moment, I said, “You are fortunate the house did not catch fire.”
“That was God’s will, too.”
Her voice was stronger and more confident again. Well, why not? She had the right of it. I could prove nothing. She had removed most of the evidence. The rest was now firmly affixed to the sleeves of her mourning gown.
“You have nothing to fear from me,” I told her. “I have no intention of going to the justices to accuse you, or to the church courts, either. What would it avail me? No one would believe such a fanciful tale.”
“You have powerful friends.” She regarded me with wary eyes. “You could cause me a good deal of trouble. Why are you willing to forget what you know?”
“Because your husband deserved to die. He preyed on the weak-
nesses of women left alone in the world. Once one yielded her virtue to him, he expected her to yield in all things.”
She heard the bitterness in my voice and knew my truth, just as I knew hers. At first, Edward Sturgeon had offered sympathy and kindness … and a book about a sorcerer knight. But in the end he had been greedy and demanding, angling to take control of my fortune as well as my body.
Had his wife not killed him first, I’d have had to murder him myself.
MR. BO
by Liza Cody
I first met Doug Greene at a Bouchercon. His reputation for being a good guy preceded him: a friend whose opinion I respect pointed him out to me. (Could it have been in a bar? Surely not!) “That’s Doug Greene, the short story specialist,” my friend said. “You’ll like him.” He was absolutely right.
I love reading and writing short stories, but it is a limited market. So understandably I was thrilled to my bones when Doug asked me for a collection. There’s no room for bullshit or padding in a short story; it’s a very pure form that demands quite a lot from both readers and writers. I suspect they aren’t the easiest things to sell either. So I’ve got to give many thanks to a guy who specialises in publishing them, and who is also a dream to work with.
As well as publishing single-author collections he occasionally brings out an anthology which celebrates the life and work of an author he loves. I’ve been lucky enough to contribute stories specially written for a couple of those too. Both of them were launched at very posh venues in England – which is how I happen to know that, as well as all his other wonderful attributes, Doug looks really cute in a tux.
I wrote Mr. Bo as a Christmas story for Doug in 2009. I warned him that I couldn’t do anything about sleigh bells or glistening snow – I wasn’t a jolly Santa sort of writer. He seemed to know that already and he accepted the somewhat dystopian family story I offered him. Bless his heart.
My son Nathan doesn’t believe in God, Allah, Buddha, Kali, the Great Spider Mother or the Baby Jesus. But, he believes passionately in Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Wolverine and, come December, Santa Claus. How this works out—bearing in mind that they all have super powers—I don’t know. Maybe he thinks the second lot wears hotter costumes. Or drives cooler vehicles, or brings better presents. Can I second guess my nine-year-old? Not a snowball’s hope in Hades.
Nathan is as much a mystery to me as his father was, and as my father was before that, and who knows where they both are now? But if there’s one thing I can congratulate myself on, it’s that I didn’t saddle my son with a stepfather. No strange man’s going to teach my boy to “dance for daddy”. Not while there’s a warm breath left in my body. I was eleven and my sister Skye was nine when Mum brought Bob-
by Barnes home for the first time. He didn’t look like a lame-headed loser so we turned the telly down and said hello.
“Call me Bo,” he said, flashing a snowy smile, “All my friends do.”
So my dumb little sister said, “Hi, Mr. Bo,” and blushed because he was tall and brown-eyed just like the hero in her comic book.
Mum laughed high and girly, and I went to bed with a nosebleed —which is usually what happened when Mum laughed like that and smeared her lipstick.
Mr. Bo moved in and Mum was happy because we were “a family.” How can you be family with a total stranger? I always wanted to ask her but I didn’t dare. She had a vicious right-hand if she thought you were cheeking her.
Maybe we would be a family even now if it wasn’t for him. Maybe Nathan would have a grandma and an aunt if Mr. Bo hadn’t got his feet under the table and his bonce on the pillow.
I think about it now and then. After all, some times of year are special for families, and Nathan should have grandparents, an aunt and a father.
This year I was thinking about it because sorting out the tree lights is traditionally a father’s job; as is finding the fuse box when the whole house is tripped out by a kink in the wire.
I was doing exactly that, by candle light because Nathan had broken the torch, when the doorbell rang.
Standing in the doorway was a beautiful woman in a stylish winter coat with fur trimmings. I didn’t have time for more than a quick glance at her face because she came inside and said, “What’s up? Can’t pay the electricity bill? Just like Mum.”
“I am not like my mother.” I was furious.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “It was always way too easy to press your buttons.” And I realised that the strange woman with the American accent was Skye.
“What are you doing here?” I said, stunned.
“Hi, and it’s great to see you too,” she said. “Who’s the rabbit?”
I turned. Nathan was behind me, shadowy, with the broken torch in his hand.
“He’s not a rabbit,” I said, offended. Rabbit was Mr. Bo’s name for a mark.
We were all rabbits to him one way or another.
“Who’s she?” Nathan said. I’d taught him not to tell his name, address or phone number to strangers.
“I’m Skye.”
“A Scottish Island?” He sounded interested. “Or the place where clouds sit?”
“Smart and cute.”
“I’m not cute,” he said, sniffing loudly. “I’m a boy.”
“She’s your aunt,” I told him, “my sister.”
“I don’t want an aunt,” he said, staring at her flickering, candlelit face. “But an uncle might be nice.” Did I mention that all his heroes are male? Even when it’s a woman who solves all his problems, from homework to football training to simple plumbing and now, the electricity. I used to think it was because he missed a father, but it’s because you can’t interest a boy in girls until his feet get tangled in the weeds of sex.
I fixed the electricity and all the lights came on except, of course, for the tree ones which lay in a nest on the floor with the bulbs no more responsive than duck eggs. Nathan looked at me as though I’d betrayed his very life.
“Tomorrow,” I said. �
�I promise.”
“You promised tonight.”
“Let’s have a little drink,” Skye said “to celebrate the return of the prodigal sister.”
“We don’t drink,” Nathan said priggishly. He’s wrong. I just don’t drink in front of him. My own childhood was diseased and deceived by Mum drinking and the decisions she made when drunk.
“There’s a bottle of white in the fridge,” I said, because Skye was staring at my second-hand furniture and looking depressed. At least it’s mine, and no repo man’s going to burst in and take it away. She probably found me plain and worn too, but I can’t help that.
She had a couple of drinks. I watched very carefully, but she showed no signs of becoming loose and giggly. So I said, “It’s late. Stay the night.” She was my sister, after all, even though I didn’t know her. But she took one look at the spare bed in the box room and said, “Thanks, I’ll call a cab.”
When the cab came, Nathan followed us to the front door and said goodbye of his own free will. Skye was always the charming one. She didn’t attempt to kiss him because if there was one thing she’d learnt well it was what guys like and what they don’t like. She said, “I’ll come back tomorrow and bring you a gift. What do you want?”
Now that’s a question Nathan isn’t used to in this house, but he hardly stopped to think. He said, “Football boots. The red and white Nike ones, with a special spanner thing you can use to adjust your own studs.”
“Nathan,” I warned. The subject of football boots was not new. I could never quite afford the ones he wanted.
But Skye grinned and said, “See you tomorrow, kid,” and she was gone in a whirl of fur trimmings.
* * *
Mr. Bo used to buy our shoes. Well, not buy exactly. This is how he did it: we’d go to a shoe shop and I’d ask for shoes a size and a half too small. Mr. Bo would flirt with the assistant. When the shoes arrived I’d try to stuff my feet in and Mr. Bo would say, “Who do you think you are? One of the Ugly Sisters?” This would make the assistant laugh as she went off to find the proper size. While she was gone, Skye put on the shoes that were too small for me and slipped out of the shop. Then I’d make a fuss — the shoes rubbed my heels, my friends had prettier ones, and Mr. Bo would have to apologise charmingly and take me away, leaving a litter of boxes and shoes on the floor. It worked the other way round when I needed shoes, except that he never made the Ugly Sister crack about Skye. I hated him for that because although he said it was a joke I knew what he really thought.
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