The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds

by Ian Tregillis

  “That’s what my mum says, sir.”

  Stephenson didn’t bother to ask after the father. Another casualty of Britain’s lost generation, he gauged.

  “And why aren’t you in school right now?”

  Many children had abandoned school during the war, and after, to help support families bereft of fathers and older brothers. The boy wasn’t working, yet he wasn’t exactly a hooligan, either. And he had a home, by the sound of it, which was likely more than some of his cohorts had.

  The boy shrugged. His body language said, Don’t much care for school. His mouth said, “What will you do to me?”

  “Are you hungry? Getting enough to eat at home?”

  The boy shook his head, then nodded.

  “What’s your mum do?”

  “Seamstress.”

  “She works hard, I gather.”

  The boy nodded again.

  “To address your question: Your friends have visited extensive damage upon my plantings, so I’m pressing you into service. Know anything about gardening?”

  “No.”

  “Might have known not to expect much from my winter garden if you had, eh?”

  The boy said nothing.

  “Very well, then. Starting tomorrow, you’ll get a bob for each day spent replanting. Which you will take home to your hardworking mother.”

  “Yes, sir.” The boy sounded glum, but his eyes gleamed.

  “We’ll have to do something about your attitude toward education, as well.”

  “That’s what my mum says, sir.”

  Stephenson shooed away the ravens picking at the spilled food. They screeched to each other as they rode a cold wind, shadows upon a blackening sky.

  23 October 1920

  Bestwood-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, England

  Rooks, crows, jackdaws, and ravens scoured the island from south to north on their search for food. And, in the manner of their continental cousins, they were ever-present.

  Except for one glade deep in the Midlands, at the heart of the ancestral holdings of the jarls of Æthelred. In some distant epoch, the skin of the world here had peeled back to reveal the great granite bones of the earth, from which spat forth a hot spring: water touched with fire and stone. No ravens had ventured there since before the Norsemen had arrived to cleave the island with their Danelaw.

  Time passed. Generations of men came and went, lived and died around the spring. The jarls became earls, then dukes. The Norsemen became Normen, then Britons. They fought Saxons; they fought Saracens; they fought the Kaiser. But the land outlived them all with elemental constancy.

  Throughout the centuries, blackbirds shunned the glade and its phantoms. But the great manor downstream of the spring evoked no such reservations. And so they perched on the spires of Bestwood, watching and listening.

  “Hell and damnation! Where is that boy?”

  Malcolm, the steward of Bestwood, hurried to catch up to the twelfth Duke of Aelred as he banged through the house. Servants fled the stomp of the duke’s boots like starlings fleeing a falcon’s cry.

  The kitchen staff jumped to attention when the duke entered with his majordomo.

  “Has William been here?”

  Heads shook all around.

  “Are you certain? My grandson hasn’t been here?”

  Mrs. Toomre, Bestwood’s head cook, was a whip-thin woman with ashen hair. She stepped forward and curtsied.

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  The duke’s gaze made a slow tour of the kitchen. A heavy silence fell over the room while veins throbbed at the corners of his jaw, the high-water mark of his anger. He turned on his heels and marched out. Malcolm released the breath he’d been holding. He was determined to prevent madness from claiming another Beauclerk.

  “Well? Off you go. Help His Grace.” Mrs. Toomre waved off the rest of her staff. “Scoot.”

  When the room had cleared and the others were out of earshot, she hoisted up the dumbwaiter. She worked slowly so that the pulleys didn’t creak. When William’s dome of coppery-red hair dawned over the transom, she leaned over and hefted him out with arms made strong by decades of manual labor. The boy was tall for an eight-year-old, taller even than his older brother.

  “There you are. None the worse for wear, I hope.” She pulled a peppermint stick from a pocket in her apron. He snatched it.

  Malcolm bowed ever so slightly. “Master William. Still enjoying our game, I trust?”

  The boy nodded, smiling around his treat. He smelled like parsnips and old beef tallow from hiding in the dumbwaiter all afternoon.

  Mrs. Toomre pulled the steward into a corner. “We can’t keep this up forever,” she whispered. She wrung her hands on her apron, adding, “What if the duke caught us?”

  “We needn’t do so forever. Just until dark. His Grace will have to postpone then.”

  “But what do we do tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow we prepare a poultice of hobnailed liver for His Grace’s hangover, and begin again.”

  Mrs. Toomre frowned. But just then the stomping resumed, and with renewed vigor. She pushed William toward Mr. Malcolm. “Quick!”

  He took the boy’s hand and pulled him through the larder. Gravel crunched underfoot as they scooted out of the house through the delivery-men’s door, headed for the stable, trailing white clouds of breath in the cool air. Malcolm had pressed most of the house hold staff into aiding the search for William, so the stable was empty. The duke kept his horses here as well as his motorcar. The converted stable reeked of petrol and manure.

  Mr. Malcolm opened a cabinet. “In here, young master.”

  William, giggling, stepped inside the cabinet as Mr. Malcolm held it open. He wrapped himself in the leather overcoat his grandfather wore when motoring.

  “Quiet as a mouse,” the older man whispered, “as the duke creeps around the house. Isn’t that right?”

  The child nodded, still giggling. Malcolm felt relieved to see him still enjoying the game. Hiding the boy would become much harder if he were frightened.

  “Remember how we play this game?”

  “Quiet and still, all the same,” said the boy.

  “Good lad.” Malcolm tweaked William’s nose with the pad of his thumb and shut the cabinet. A sliver of light shone on the boy’s face. The cabinet doors didn’t join together properly. “I’ll return to fetch you soon.”

  The duke, William’s grandfather, had gone on many long expeditions about the grounds with his own son over the years. Grouse hunting, he’d claimed, though he seldom took a gun. The only thing Mr. Malcolm knew for certain was that they’d spent much time in the glade upstream from the house. The same glade where the staff refused to venture, citing visions and noises. Years after the duke’s heir—William’s father—had produced two sons of his own, he’d taken to spending time in the glade alone. He returned to the manor at all hours, wild-eyed and unkempt, mumbling hoarsely of blood and prices unpaid. This lasted until he went to France and died fighting the Hun.

  The duke’s grandsons moved to Bestwood soon after. They were too young to remember their father very well, so the move was uneventful. Aubrey, the older son and heir apparent, received the grooming expected of a Peer of the Realm. The duke showed little interest in his younger grandson. And it had stayed that way for several years.

  Until two days previously, when he had asked Malcolm to find hunting clothes that might fit William. Malcolm didn’t know what happened in the glade, or what the duke did there. But he felt honor-bound to protect William from it.

  Malcolm left William standing in the cabinet only to find the duke standing in the far doorway, blocking his egress. His Grace had seen everything.

  He glared at Malcolm. The majordomo resisted the urge to squirm under the force of that gaze. The silence stretched between them. The duke approached until the two men stood nearly nose to nose.

  “Mr. Malcolm,” he said. “Tell the staff to return to their duties. Then fetch a coat for the boy and retrieve the
carpetbag from my study.” His breath, sour with juniper berries, brushed across Malcolm’s face. It stung the eyes, made him squint.

  Malcolm had no recourse but to do as he was told. The duke had flushed out his grandson by the time he returned bearing a thick dun-colored pullover for William and the duke’s paisley carpetbag. Malcolm made brief eye contact with William before taking his leave of the duke.

  “I’m sorry,” he mouthed.

  William’s grandfather took him by the hand. The ridges of the fine white scars arrayed across his palm tickled the soft skin on the back of William’s hand.

  “Come,” he said. “It’s time you saw the estate.”

  “I’ve already seen the grounds, Papa.”

  The old man cuffed the boy on the ear hard enough to make his eyes water. “No, you haven’t.”

  They walked around the house, to the brook that gurgled through the gardens. They followed it upstream, crashing through the occasional thicket. Eventually the crenellations and spires of Bestwood disappeared behind a row of hillocks crowned with proud stands of yew and English oak. They traced the brook to a cleft within a lichen-scarred boulder in a small clearing.

  Though hemmed about by trees on every side, the glade was quiet and free of birdsong. The screeches and caws of the large black birds that crisscrossed the sky over the estate barely echoed in the distance. William hadn’t paid the birds any heed, but now their absence felt strange.

  Several bundles of kindling had been piled alongside the boulder. From within the carpetbag the duke produced a canister of matches and a folding pocketknife with a handle fashioned from a segment of deer antler. He built a fire and motioned William to his side.

  “Show me your hand, boy.”

  William did. His grandfather took it in a solid grip, pulled the boy’s arm straight, and sliced William’s palm with his pocketknife. William screamed and tried to pull away, but his grandfather didn’t release him until the blood trickled down William’s wrist to stain the cuff of his pullover. The old man nodded in satisfaction as the hot tickle pulsed along William’s hand and dripped to the earth.

  William scooted backwards, afraid of what his grandfather might do next. He wanted to go home, back to Mr. Malcolm and Mrs. Toomre, but he was lost and couldn’t see through his tears.

  His grandfather spoke again. But now he spoke a language that William couldn’t understand, more wails and gurgles than words. Inhuman noises from a human vessel.

  It lulled the boy into an uneasy stupor, like a fever dream. The fire’s warmth dried the tears on his face. A shadow fell across the glade; the world tipped sideways.

  And then the fire spoke.

  one

  2 February 1939

  Tarragona, Spain

  Lieutenant-Commander Raybould Marsh, formerly of His Majesty’s Royal Navy and currently of the Secret Intelligence Service, rode a flatbed truck through ruined olive groves while a civil war raged not many miles away. He secretly carried two fake passports, two train tickets to Lisbon, vouchers for berths on a steamer bound for Ireland, and one thousand pounds sterling. And he was bored.

  He’d been riding all morning. The truck passed yet another of the derelict farmhouses dotting the Catalonian landscape. Some had burned to the ground. Others stared back at him with empty windows for eyes, half-naked where the plaster had sloughed to the ground under erratic rows of bullet holes. Wind sighed through open doorways.

  Sometimes the farmers and their families had been buried in the very fields they tended, as evidenced by the mounds. And sometimes they had been left to rot, as evidenced by the birds. Marsh envied the farmers their families, but not their ends.

  The land had fared no better than the farmers at the hands of armed factions. Artillery had pocked the fields and rained shrapnel upon centuries-old olive groves. In places, near the largest craters, the tang of cordite still wafted from broken earth.

  At one point, the truck had to swerve around the charred hulk of a Soviet-issue T-38 tank straddling the road. It looked like an inverted soup tureen on treads but was based, Marsh noted with pride and amusement, upon the Vickers. It was a common sight. Abandoned Republican matériel littered the countryside. Most of Spain had long since fallen to the Nationalists; now they mounted their final offensive, grinding north through Catalonia to strangle the final Republican strongholds.

  Officially, Britain had chosen to stay on the sidelines of the Spanish conflict. But the imminent victory of Franco’s Nationalists and their Fascist allies was raising eyebrows back home. Marsh’s section within the SIS, or MI6 as some people preferred to call it, was tasked with gathering information about Germany’s feverish rearmament over the past few years. So when a defector had contacted the British consulate claiming to have information about something new the Nazis were field-testing in Spain, Marsh got tapped for an “Iberian holiday,” as the old man put it.

  “Holiday,” Marsh repeated to himself. Stephenson had a wry sense of humor.

  The truck labored out of the valley into Tarragona, briefly passing through the shadow of a Roman aqueduct that straddled the foothills. A coastal plain spread out before Marsh as they topped the final rise. Orange and pomegranate groves, untended by virtue of winter and war, dotted the seaward slopes of the hills overlooking the city. At the right time of year, the groves might have perfumed the wind with their blossoms. Today the wind smelled of petrol, dust, and the distant sea.

  Below the groves sprawled the city: a jumble of bright stucco, wide plazas, and even the occasional gingko-lined avenue left behind by long-dead Romans. One could see where medieval Spanish city planning had collided with and absorbed the remnants of an older empire. On the whole, Tarragona was well-preserved, having fallen to the Nationalists three weeks earlier after token resistance.

  Somewhere in that mess waited Marsh’s informant.

  Between the city and the horizon stretched the great blue-green expanse of the Mediterranean Sea. It sparkled under the winter sun. Most years enjoyed frequent winter rains that tamped down the dust. This season had been too sporadic, and today the winds blew inland, so the breeze coming off the sea spread an ocher haze across the bowl of the city.

  Farther west, whitecaps massaged the coastline where a trawler steamed out of port. Marsh was too far away to smell the fear and desperation, to feel the press of bodies, to hear the din on the docks as families clamored for passage to Mexico and South America. Those refugees not willing to risk capture in the Pyrenees while fleeing to France, and who could afford otherwise, instead mobbed the ports. For now, Franco’s Nationalists were busy formalizing their control of the country. But when that was done, the reprisals would begin.

  The dirt road became cracked macadam as they descended into the city. Marsh shifted his weight when the macadam turned into uneven cobblestones. It had been a long couple of days since he’d crossed the border from Portugal.

  His ride pulled to a stop in the shadow of a medieval cathedral. The driver banged his fist on the outside of his door. Marsh grabbed his rucksack and hopped down, gritting his teeth against the twinge of pain in his knee.

  “Gracias,” he said. He paid the driver the promised amount, a small fortune by the standards of a poor farmer even in peacetime. The driver took the cash and rumbled away without another word, leaving Marsh to cough in a plume of exhaust.

  I’d spend it quickly if I were you.

  Marsh set off for the cathedral. As far as the driver knew, it was his destination. And so he’d relate, if anybody should happen to ask him about his passenger. The cathedral loomed over the circular Plaza Imperial, and from there it was a short walk to the Hotel Alexandria. Marsh had memorized the layout of the city before leaving London. Walking massaged the ache from his knee.

  The narrow side streets were quiet and devoid of crowds, a fact for which he was thankful. He wore the heavy boots of a farmer, a flannel shirt under his overalls, and a kerchief tied around his neck in the local style. But he also wore the skin of an English
man, colored pale by years of rain, rather than a complexion earned through a life of outdoor labor. But most folks weren’t terribly observant. With a little luck and discretion, his garb would plant the proper suggestion in people’s eyes; as long as he drew no extra attention to himself, their minds would fill in the expected details.

  It was livelier on the plaza. The handfuls of people he passed in the wide open space shuffled through their lives under a cloud of dread and anticipation. Strident Art Deco placards touted General Franco’s cause from every available surface. (Unidad! Unidad! Unidad!) The Nationalists’ propaganda machine had wasted no time.

  The cathedral bells chimed sext: midday. Marsh quickened his pace. The plan was to make contact at noon.

  Krasnopolsky, an ethnic Pole born in the German enclave of Danzig, had come to Spain attached to a unit of Fascist forces supporting the Nationalist cause. What ever his work entailed, he’d done it without protest for years. Until he decided, quite spontaneously, to defect. But the Nationalists’ victory was merely a matter of time, meaning that his new enemies had the country locked up tight. Betraying them so late in the game was a bloody stupid move.

  Thus he had contacted the British consulate in Lisbon. In return for assistance leaving the country, he’d share his knowledge of a new technology the Schutzstaffel had deployed against the Republicans. Franco, moved by a fit of despotic largesse, had given the Third Reich carte blanche to use Spain as a military proving ground. In that manner, the Luftwaffe had debuted its carpet-bombing technique in Guernica. MI6 wanted to know about anything else the Jerries had developed over the past few years.

  Which was why Marsh carried virtually enough money to purchase his own steamer, if it came to that. He’d stay at Krasnopolsky’s side all the way back to Great Britain.

  The Hotel Alexandria was a narrow five-story building wedged between larger apartment blocks. Its balconies hung over the street in pairs jutting from the canary-yellow façade. The building had only the single entrance. Less than ideal.

  The lobby was a mishmash of ugly modernist décor and Spanish imperialism. It looked like the result of a halfhearted make over. Clean, bare spots high on the yellowed plaster marked the places where paintings had hung, most likely of King Alfonso and his family. Through a doorway to the left, a handful of men and women talked quietly in what passed for the Alexandria’s bar.