Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  “You’re still angry,” he said, watching me closely. If he was himself he hid it better than my ability to decide it.

  “We’d received the letter saying you were a traitor, Uncle Rinald died out hunting, and Mama lost a baby, all within the space of a month. Yes, I’m still angry at how they treated us. At least Uncle Rinald had made sure in his will that we could stay in the dower cottage—”

  He wasn’t attending to that. He’d frozen. “There was a baby?”

  I did not often think of the baby brother, born six weeks too soon—from the shock of the news, the midwife said—tiny, perfect, and not in the world long.

  “Jack,” I said numbly. “A boy. He didn’t ... He died after only a few days.”

  “I didn’t realize you’d named him,” Mr. Dart said softly.

  I looked away, in the vague direction of the dower cottage and the hawthorn tree we’d buried him under. “He died before the naming ceremony,” I said; whispered, really, throat tight. “But yes, that was what Mama and I called him.”

  After a moment I felt a firm hand clasp my shoulder. I knew it was my father’s; his hands were much bigger and much warmer than Mr. Dart’s. And if the look on his face had been too much ...

  “Right,” Mr. Dart said briskly. “Do we need more directions, sir, or shall we just follow you?”

  UNLIKE, SAY, THE TALGARTHS’ house (famously one of the three interesting features of Ragnor Bella in Tadeo Toynbee’s Guide to the Kingdom of Ronderell; the other two were, naturally, my grandfather’s famous racehorse, Jemis Swiftfoot, and the increasingly tortuous history of Major Jakory Greenwing), or indeed the baron’s so-called castle, or even Dart Hall, the Arguty manor house—called variously Arguty Manor, Arguty Hall, or The House, depending on whether one came from Dartington, Arguty village, or the wider barony—had no pretensions to architectural merit or even coherence.

  The central block was a pre-Astandalan fortified farm, the east wing a brooding gothic thing reminiscent of the Castle Noirell, the south wing (there being no west) a mishmash of whimsical ornaments of seven conflicting periods overlaying a former barn, and in the back there was a kind of tower with a double spiral staircase and a belvedere courtesy of a not-very-distant ancestor who had had a theory about the health benefits of climbing up and down a certain number of stars each day. It was, in a word, a jumble.

  I loved it.

  According to local gossip it was riddled with secret passageways. These did not owe their existence to fashions for hiding servants (as was the case in the Talgarths’ house), nor merely to whimsy (as I suspected accounted for most of those in the baron’s castle), but because certain Greenwings past had wanted to hide priests of forbidden cults, smuggled goods and occasionally people, and, according to my father as he sketched out a rough plan for the benefit of myself and Mr. Dart, at least three illicit lovers.

  “What were they smuggling?” I asked, dividing the question between the both of them.

  “Back then? Practically everything.” Jack gestured south towards the Woods and the old Border with Ysthar. “The Noirells made their money on taxing everything and everyone coming through the Border in return for managing this side of the crossing. Any luxury item would double in price with each Border crossing—and that’s without getting into questions of merchants and other middlemen.” He glanced at me. “Your grandmother ...?”

  I shrugged. “The Marchioness only acknowledged my existence after I broke the curse on the bees and slew the dragon that had been summoned out of the magic of the Woods to test my suitability as heir.”

  He blinked. “I thought the dragon was at the Harvest Fair? That was only a month ago.”

  “Precisely,” I agreed, and resolutely walked on.

  The Beacon Door (did it need capitals? I decided it did) was a concealed entrance on the end of the east wing, which faced us. I blinked in the general direction of the sun and wondered whether I or the builders had gotten turned around; both, I supposed. We faced the end gable through a screen of huge Arcadian cedars. These were convenient for our purpose but seemed a trifle malaprop for the house’s security. Certainly they hid us from observers while Jack took out a stiff wire from his sleeve and poked into a tiny hole in the wall between two apparently unnecessary buttresses.

  Something clicked. My father removed his wire, pushed on a stone, and an irregular section of the wall pivoted smoothly on a central axis.

  “Wonderful,” breathed Mr. Dart. I was stifling an attack of sneezes as the cool, dusty air billowed out of the passageway in front of us. I lowered the handkerchief to determine they were well ahead, my father waiting with an odd expression his face. I don’t sneeze on purpose, I wanted to tell him, but saw, as I hastened into the passage, that his attention was turned inward. More to himself than to me he murmured, “Welcome home.”

  THE PASSAGE REMINDED me of the troglodyte tunnels. After leaving History of Magic under the encouragement of Lark (who in retrospect obviously did not want me learning about what she was doing), I had begun to study architecture as a subsidiary interest to complement the Classical Shaian poetry. I had gravitated to the puzzle poets and their elaborate symbolic language, and found an understudied niche in what I called architectural poetry.

  What Scholars usually meant by the term was either poetry that was about architecture (the most famous of these is probably “The Ode to the Stars,” a very lengthy description of the Palace of the Emperors in Astandalas) or that was so structurally informed that it was somehow akin to architecture as an art (the infamously complex Tikla Dor, beloved of children who missed all the allusions). I had read poems about buildings, fascinated in the inexplicable way one becomes enamoured of a certain thing by the idea that one would spend one’s poetic genius on describing other people’s artefacts.

  It had seemed as pointless as describing a painting, I’d thought at first. Those poems existed, too; but most of them were boring unless they were really about something else. Then I discovered the concept of memory palaces, and diverted my attention for a time to studying those.

  Possibly I was a flibbertigidget in my heart of hearts and doomed never to focus on any one thing; or perhaps it was the wireweed beginning its work. It was unpleasantly hard to know. I had studied the memory palaces, those imaginative constructions intended to assist the memorization of vast quantities of data, and begun wondering about what else might lie behind or between the lines of a poem on the surface merely laudatory of a building programme.

  Then Mr. Dart had written me about the Gainsgooding conspiracy, which he was studying, I had turned to the books of the poets, and there discovered the exoteric symbolism of the Second Perpendicular School of Architecture and that of the Third Late Calligraphic poets, and that was the first time I had felt the world open up to me.

  I followed Jack through the secret passages of his family home. I supplied us all with (clean) handkerchiefs against the thick dust. I considered the ways in which a poet might translate the jumbled structure of the Arguty Manor into a poem, and what it would be worthwhile to say in so doing. Some poets seemed content to let their poems simply to be, beautiful at best, solipsistic at worst, but I liked my poems both to be and to mean, preferably on several levels.

  My thoughts seemed excessively loud even to myself. I thought that, and another thought flashed by, that perhaps my newfound dislike of small dark enclosed spaces had something to do with the wireweed withdrawal.

  Except it was recent—

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so anxious at being in such tunnels and narrow passageways between walls that were not actually narrowing as I pushed along behind Jack and Mr. Dart.

  I breathed deeply through my handkerchief. Who was I fooling? A the moment I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a passage this narrow, dark, dusty, and enclosed. At the thought I sneezed.

  I muffled it with the habit of long practice (and many hours in the Morrowlea library). Jack didn’t move from his position, which
was kneeling on the floor with his eye pressed to a crack. I blinked at him, only then discerning the dim light just barely illuminating the space. Mr. Dart spoke softly into my ear. “Nicely contained, Mr. Greenwing, especially as that can’t have been the first.”

  But it was the first, I thought. My thumb went to where the ring was that seemed to suppress my sneezing. I wasn’t wearing it.

  Hal, I thought. Hal hadn’t given it back after that strange magic-divining ritual that had not gone quite as planned.

  “Here we are,” Jack said quietly. “Perry, the door. Jemis, the window. I’ll search.”

  I nodded, then felt foolish in the dark, then realized it didn’t matter, since he had spoken in his officer voice and obviously expected no response besides obedience.

  The door on this side was a carved section of the sported oak panelling (for which the manor was locally noteworthy). It opened and shut without any difficulty at all, which I confess I found surprising. The door up to the attic room in my flat over the bookstore made significantly more protest at use, and that was very frequent since Hal was staying there.

  Jack gave me a sharp look. I started, realized I was woolgathering again (what was wrong with me?) and moved over to the window. The drapes were half-drawn, so I stood within a fold where I could see outside but remain mostly hidden.

  There wasn’t much to see, as a line of evergreens had grown up to block the view. We were on a half storey above the ground, the window seven or eight feet up. A few lesser titmice were busy in the branches, pecking at Lady-knew-what. I hoped Hal wasn’t too cold and damp where we’d left him. He’d professed himself content with the array of plants about him, but a fog seemed to have settled in while we were traversing the east wing.

  “Yes,” Jack hissed softly. I turned to look at him: he was at the great wooden desk in the centre of the room, fiddling with what I guessed where the hidden latches to secret compartments. One had opened; he was pulling out papers.

  He sorted through them as quickly as shuffling a deck of cards. Stopped thunderstruck at the end; then smiled with grim satisfaction.

  This seemed far too easy.

  “Someone’s coming,” Mr. Dart said abruptly from the door. He stepped over to the panel by which we’d entered, which had closed, and began to fumble with it.

  The drawer that had revealed its secrets so readily did not want to receive them again anywhere so quickly. After a frantic motion that only served to snap the empty compartment shut, Jack cursed and handed me the stack of papers so he could open the door that Mr. Dart was still struggling with.

  As I took them a motion from the window caught my eye. The titmice, I thought first, before realizing the flash was grey and white, not blue, and too large for the little birds.

  Grey jay; and a hand gripped the windowsill.

  I pushed behind Jack and Mr. Dart. I brought the panel door to latch as quietly as possible. The papers were an unwieldy mass in my hands, and the dust tickled my throat.

  The bastard offspring of the marriage of curiosity and prudence, said Fitzroy Angursell in one of his poems about what you learn as a trespasser who becomes privy to secrets for fear of being revealed by moving.

  We waited while noises occurred in the room on the other side of the wall. I held the sheaf of papers and wondered what Myrta the Hand’s people wanted with my uncle, or his study at least.

  There was a sharp rap, seemingly right in front of me. I tried instinctively not to jump, and crackled the papers slightly.

  “There,” said a voice I half-knew. “Did you hear that?”

  “A mouse,” a very familiar voice replied dismissively. “Lady Flora can’t abide cats so the place is overrun with ’em.”

  Roald Ragnor, I thought, sounding almost like a normal person for once.

  “Cats?”

  “No, mice—don’t be a round fool, we’ve only got a few minutes before everyone gets back from church.”

  “It’s not that late, surely?” That was Red Myrta—I thought it must be her—echoing my own thought.

  “Short service, the week before the Fallowday. Surely to the Lady your folk would pay heed to that?”

  Red Myrta, alas, did not find that as bemusing as I did, for she asked nothing about it. Three was a sound of moving items—papers rustling, soft clicks or thuds as other things were set on the table or blotter or shelves.

  “Good enough?” she asked after a moment.

  Roald spoke after a pause, presumably of inspection. “Yes, I think that will do. Now, you’d better be off.”

  “Yes; I shouldn’t want you to miss your lunch.”

  A soft laugh followed, dying away as if she’d gone back out the window. I was near perishing of curiosity but prudence, along with a foot fallen asleep, kept me still.

  The other voice, or rather its owner, made a few further sounds. These seemed to me to be mostly throaty noises of amusement. Then an audible count to seventeen—and then he opened the door on us.

  The Honourable Roald Ragnor, currently—if no longer definitely—heir to the barony, blinked in what I was pleased to see was genuine surprise. “Jemis?”

  Chapter Nineteen: Factors

  Roald followed me back through the secret passageways. I gripped the papers to my chest carefully and did not have to think too hard about poetry to stop the walls being too close, the ceiling too low, the dust too thick. My imagination was too busy spinning theories for why the Honourable Rag could possibly have been there, and the explanations he might conceivably choose to give us.

  I felt incredibly happy at the discovery that there was, in fact, something going on with him beyond dissipation.

  He had not seen my companions, I realized when we spilled out into the fresh air in the dull shade of the Arcadian cedars. The mist swirled around us, revealing stretches of still-emerald grass studded with decaying leaves in rich umbers and burnished golds.

  A glance at Jack led me to taking the lead across to the edge of the Forest where the sunken road. Once under cover I turned to Roald. I did not try to hide my amusement. “Well?”

  He glanced from me to Mr. Dart, who was also grinning, and at my father, whose scowl was formidable. He did nothing like a double take, so I presumed did not recognize him.

  For a moment Roald looked actually concerned. I raised eyebrows expectantly, and, as I expected, the concern slid away to the usual smirk. The Taran drawl re-entered his voice.

  “And here I’d thought you were one of the good boys,” he said. “This is, what, the second house you’ve been in under false pretences in the last month?”

  Life is a game of Poacher. I smiled deprecatingly. “I believe this would could more as burglary, but I will have to leave the nuances to Inveragory. What of you, Master Roald? I do believe that’s the second member of a criminal gang I’ve caught you consorting with—and come to think of it, both times were in other people’s houses.”

  “Hardly do to meet them at m’father’s. Speaking of, I’m due for luncheon.”

  “Ready for the Fallowday?”

  He glanced at my hand, where I felt the absence of the ring. His face flickered, as if a bird’s shadow crossed over its wide sunny blankness. Then he grinned, touched his hat to Mr. Dart, bowed with mock formality to me, and strode off, whistling an air I recognized a few minutes later as the comic relief’s song from Three Years Gone.

  The Honourable Rag was annoyingly good at Poacher.

  HAL WAS SITTING ON the bank where we’d left him, leg stretched out with his hat as a cushion. His notebook was in his hand, but he was listening with an excessively patient expression to a man talking at him in a solid monotone.

  With a curious sense of inevitability I recognized his interlocutor as the Arguty factor.

  Hal looked at me with glad relief. “Jemis!”

  Mr. Hagwood spun around. He was narrow, weedy man, with a narrow, saturnine face. Of melancholic disposition, his monotonous voice and dull features hid a skilled understanding of the lands of
the estate and their yields. Everyone always assumed he was smuggling, but he was good enough at minding the estate that no one looked too hard into it.

  I opened my mouth to greet him. He looked past me and screamed.

  IT WAS A GOOD SCREAM: long, high-pitched, bloodcurdling, totally unexpected.

  I could not help myself. I turned around to see what was behind me, expecting—I don’t know. Another dragon? A basilisk? A manticore? A sphinx?

  My father, looming out of the mist.

  I swallowed and turned back to the factor—or rather to Hal, as Mr. Hagwood had run off into the woods. The echo of his scream lingered.

  Jack frowned at me. I wondered what he saw on my face, or if he were thinking of something else. He said, “I am more easily recognized than I anticipated.”

  My insides churned. Easily recognized by Sir Hamish and Harry Hagwood: totally unknown to his son.

  Hal said, “He was just telling me how he’d cut down Mad Jack Greenwing’s corpse from the Hanging Hill, seven years ago, and all the stories his grandmother used to tell him about those who were cursed for handling the dead. And ‘she had the green sight and the white, so you know what she said was true’—” Hal made a good imitation of Hagwood’s drone. “He was belabouring the eeriness of the grim task and trying to make me feel uneasy: he might well have scared himself into expecting the sight of a ghost.”

  I had avoided the White Cross ever since—well, ever since my father had been buried there, but even more so after I had heard a few whispered ghost stories about the unquiet dead who were bound under crossroads. Three days ago I would have believed in my father’s ghost.

  It was easier to imagine him a ghost than to accept that he was standing right there, alive, beside me.

  “Come,” Jack said brusquely. “Let us return to Dart Hall and confer. Give me your hand, Hal.”

  “HAVE WE EVER A PLENTITUDE to tell you—Hal? Whats this? Hurt?”