Ripeness in Spring: a code for his prodigies, all innuendo and nothing express – Sir Henry is on his guard.
‘I like to pass on what I will shortly lose,’ replies Sir Henry, who favours an epigram to block a probing thrust.
His hair curls silver as wire; his hands are knobbled with veins and stippled with freckles, and yet the face harnesses vitality. He is in his early sixties, Wynter guesses, but not to be underestimated.
‘Such a resource,’ Wynter whispers, as if to convey his ability to keep a secret.
An ill-chosen word, Sir Henry thinks, wearying of the game. ‘The light fades. I must take leave of your excellent hospitality.’
Sir Henry is glad to have kept his cards close. As he steadies his horse, a breeze ruffles the hedge. Faces appear and disappear in the shaking leaves, faintly demonic, some with cheeks puffed out, some drawn in.
‘Mr Bole’s topiary,’ smiles Wynter.
‘Incubi and succubi,’ adds the servant with a grin, only to earn a glare of rebuke from his master. This is not the desired impression.
Sir Henry is pleased to reach the bridge to Rotherweird Island and home.
FEBRUARY
1
Slickstone’s Discovery
‘Tonight we go exploring, you and I,’ said Sir Veronal, handing the boy a coat and a notebook.
‘What do I do?’ The boy was broken in. He desperately wanted to please.
‘You note the streets, you write them down.’
The actress watched. She had never felt so superfluous. At least in her other roles for Sir Veronal she had been permitted to speak. Make your own part, said her inner thespian voice; improvise.
‘Go to bed,’ added Sir Veronal, dismissing her from the room.
They made an incongruous pair, the ramrod-straight old man and the slouching boy with a lantern. Between ragged clouds stars shone brilliantly. A thin film of frost added sparkle to pavements, roofs and cobblestones. They talked in whispers.
‘Give me the names, Rodney.’
‘On your right – Coracle Run; on your left – Blue Stone Alley.’
Sir Veronal closed his eyes from time to time as if striving to find significance in these outlandish titles. The boy sensed his master’s frustration. They hurried on.
‘Escutcheon Place,’ said Rodney. Again it appeared to mean nothing. Then, quite suddenly, Sir Veronal froze, a hound catching a wisp of scent.
‘What?’ interjected the boy.
‘Quiet,’ hissed Sir Veronal, ‘absolute quiet.’
No sound from anywhere. The old man moved right, then left. ‘This way, and not a sound.’
With a new alacrity, Sir Veronal hurried through side alleys and streets, the boy struggling to keep pace, until they emerged into one of the darker sections of the Golden Mean. Shop-signs swung in the wind. Sir Veronal stopped. ‘Lantern.’
They peered in the window at an array of strange shapes and objects.
‘Torch.’
The pencil-beam swept to and fro like a searchlight. Stuffed animals, a Zulu shield, stools, chairs and carved walking sticks appeared and disappeared.
Sir Veronal pointed. ‘There!’ he yelped.
‘Just stones,’ said the boy, now bored.
‘Such colours! I know them. I definitely know them.’
Sir Veronal spoke with an intensity that energised the boy. The stones must be rare and valuable to have this effect. ‘I’ll smash the window. Easy, easy—’
Sir Veronal struck the boy on the cheek with the flat of his hand. ‘You wait for orders, you don’t suggest them.’
For once in his life the boy did not retaliate.
‘What’s the number of this shop?’
The boy ran both ways, worked it out. ‘Twenty-two, the Golden Mean – Baubles & Relics.’
‘Relics . . .’ Sir Veronal savoured the word. ‘Maybe, just maybe. Now . . . home.’
*
For appearances the actress’s bedroom had a connecting door to Sir Veronal’s, but he had never used it, and she had never been tempted. Money and power might be a recipe for sex appeal, but not on foundations this glacial. Her lack of attachment mattered to Sir Veronal, not because it might make her available to him, but because other intimates might lure her into indiscretion.
She had attended business dinners, receptions and contract signings as Lady Slickstone. She had talked art, superficial politics and social niceties with his guests, but never probed. She always ensured she looked the part she played – the Ambassador’s Wife –
which was a dull, unstretching role, but work all the same.
In this strange town, with its carved gables, towers and soundless transport, she felt in Sir Veronal a sea-change – fresh energy, but with it, intense frustration, and what struck her as an adolescent-like lack of self-knowledge. She concluded that despite the lavish investment, Sir Veronal did not yet know why he was here.
Outside, the planting had been completed in advance of the first frost. Only the finer touches awaited the spring. She watched her fictional husband and son return across the lawn, her bedroom lights off, peering from behind the curtain. She knew from Sir Veronal’s stride that something of moment had occurred.
A dangerous but invigorating impulse seized her: the desire to investigate. She changed in the dark, opened the window and shinned down the drainpipe. She had a key to the postern gate and the security cameras were not yet operational. The pair’s footprints, as if painted green on shiny white paper, brought her to the Golden Mean and Baubles & Relics. Excitement gripped her, the thrill of going off-script.
She returned little the wiser, but intrigued. Something in this shop of eccentric curios had aroused Sir Veronal’s interest. She decided to keep eyes and ears open. Might not Rotherweird redefine her role? If Sir Veronal’s character was growing richer under the town’s influence, why not hers?
2
Oblong’s Discovery
The following night the snow returned, and Oblong had supper with the Fanguins. Although they had been introduced by first names, Oblong continued to call Fanguin ‘Fanguin’, and vice versa: this was the way in Rotherweird. Fanguin insisted on calling his wife Bomber; whether in reference to her generous dimensions or her frank way of speaking, Oblong considered it indelicate to ask. She had skin as white as flour and hair as black as coal. To accentuate the contrast, she wore bright red lipstick. With large, warm eyes and an earthy, combative spirit, she was instantly likeable, despite the forbidding effect of her colouring. She had a gift for drawing people out of themselves.
‘Damn fine risotto, Bomber,’ trumpeted Fanguin, having finished well before his wife and guest. ‘She taught cooking, but they terminated her employment with mine, for encouraging Flask in his “investigations” – when I wasn’t.’
As Fanguin had given him Flask’s notebook, Oblong was sceptical about this denial, but anxious that it might be dangerous ground for an outsider, he timidly broached a different subject.
‘This town is packed with clever people. I’m unclear why you elected Mr Snorkel as Mayor? When he’s—?’
‘—a reptile?’ suggested Fanguin.
‘Surely a toad,’ Bomber countered. ‘He rakes off squillions. Meet his wife, and you’ll understand why.’
Fanguin paced the room. ‘It’s a good question. I’m not sure we ever did elect him. He just sort of happened, just as his father did, and his grandfather before that.’
‘But we could unelect him, and we don’t even try.’
Fanguin acknowledged Bomber’s point before continuing, ‘It’s practicalities: rubbish disposal, water supply, clean pavements – plus, we all think ourselves so clever, we’d never agree on anything.’
‘You’ve missed the big one,’ said Bomber. ‘Snorkel keeps us from our past. Our independence depends on not investigating it. Snorkel knows how difficult that is. He allows the traditional festivals, but goes for anyone who pries too deep.’
‘Like Flask,’ said Oblong.
‘Like him,’ added Bomber, wagging a finger at her husband.
Emboldened by her candour, Oblong blurted out – and instantly regretted – ‘If it’s so dangerous, why give me his notebook?’
‘You’re a blithering idiot, Godfery Fanguin. You’ll be the end of us all. First it’s Flask’s job, then yours, then mine, now his.’
‘I’m a biologist,’ Fanguin protested. ‘I want to know why we are what we are. Why have we so many gifted people? Why are we alone in England left to our own devices?’
Bomber turned on Oblong. ‘If you have any sense, destroy that notebook.’
And with that warning the conversation moved to more mundane topics before Oblong said his farewells and headed home. Under fresh snow the towers looked forbidding: fingers with whitened nails pointing skywards, windowsills standing out like knuckles. In the narrow but unusually straight Lost Acre Lane a childish impulse seized him: he had to throw a snowball.
He kneaded the fresh snow, aimed at the street sign and missed. He stooped to make another, only to hear a light thump from the roof behind him. He came up slowly from his stooping position, but Lost Acre Lane was empty in both directions. He walked to the next narrow lane – Groveway – equally empty. A second light thump and a crunching noise followed, still above his head.
He feared a mischievous child had been lured onto the roofs by the snowfall and that he would have to play rescuer in a landscape of slippery slates. He cried, ‘Hello?’ in both directions, and to his astonishment a long, thin pole appeared over the roofline, held by a slight figure who planted it on the sloping tiles. The pole bent almost double, then slowly, crazily unwound. Airborne, the figure became a creature of grace, apparently flying to the roof directly above Oblong’s head. A balaclava masked the face.
‘Now look here—!’ he shouted.
The figure vaulted back, delivering a perfectly aimed snowball in midair, flush on Oblong’s upturned forehead. The impact, the residual effects of the evening’s hospitality and his natural clumsiness did the rest: Oblong fell heavily backwards. By the time he was back on his feet, the vaulter had gone.
Dazed, the letters of the street sign slipped and slid in front of his eyes: Lost Acre Lane. Lost Acre . . . Lost Acre . . .
Then he saw it: Lost Acre . . . STOLE CAR.
Flask had used a simple anagram – but what had he found in Lost Acre Lane? What of the letters and numbers beneath – ASC 1017? If he were right, they had nothing to do with a car at all, while being too high for a house number. The letters seemed random. Nor could he see anything unusual about Lost Acre Lane.
He wended his way back to his lodgings. With a cup of coffee and a spoonful of Vlad’s whisky to sharpen the wits, he sat and racked his brain for an hour, but without success. As he resealed the diary, he felt the edge of loneliness. The Fanguins had entertained him generously, but they did not offer the joshing camaraderie of a contemporary. Gregorius Jones came closest, crying ‘Hi Obbers!’ whenever their paths crossed, and joining him from time to time at The Journeyman’s Gist. Yet Jones’ hearty exterior hid an impenetrable reserve whenever any subject of substance threatened. Fanguin’s account of Jones’ origins suggested a personal tragedy, buried deep. At least he could now add to his list of close encounters the mysterious vaulter, too lissom for Jones, or any other man.
Last but not least, he could not escape Flask. He felt a failure in comparison. Flask had fought for his subject, penetrated the defences of the locals and befriended them. He had uncovered the past too, his findings presumably recorded in the missing pages of his notebook. He decided that he owed it to Flask to keep an eye out for further leads, and to the Fanguins to do so very discreetly.
Several blocks away, leaning on a chimney, Valourhand watched the burning light at Oblong’s window. Rotherweird’s roofscape was her alternative universe: she knew the take-offs, the landings and the sight-lines. She would never have thrown a snowball at Oblong’s predecessor. Unlike the callow Oblong, Flask had presence.
‘Dazed, the letters of the street sign slipped and slid in front of his eyes.’
3
Hayman Salt’s Discovery
Hayman Salt had not been back to Baubles & Relics since his sale of the stones, although he occasionally sidled past to see whether they remained in the window. He welcomed adverse weather. Without it he could not risk a visit to Lost Acre, his private fiefdom, his great and special secret. A leaden evening sky threatening snow came a close second to fog in clearing possible observers.
He wore a cape with a black hood and carried no provisions beyond his whisky flask, his idea of panacea. Rotherweird’s one cobbled road ran from the two gatehouse bridges into the surrounding hills, but there were older, less conspicuous paths.
Salt crossed the wooden footbridge at the southwestern corner of the Island Field before plunging into a tangle of branches between two pastures. Here the snow had fallen more heavily. Drifts had formed in the hollows of the exposed northern and eastern slopes, but the landscape’s loss of profile did not hinder him. Every tree remained distinctive to his botanist’s eye, as good as a signpost. He elbowed and kicked his way through dense undergrowth into an open space with a sunken road beyond. Over the centuries, sheep, cattle and human feet had worn away the topsoil. The sides of the road were steep, the earth dark, peaty and rich. Salt walked on until he reached the basin of a large bowl with a circle of ancient beeches on its rim.
In the centre of this hollow, little affected by snow thanks to the canopy above, Salt scuffed away the dead leaves to reveal a white marble tablet a metre square and incised with a single flower. He stood on it and disappeared like a flicker of old film. He felt the familiar rush of head to feet, but uniquely, his instant arrival in Lost Acre was not painless. He sank to his knees, grimacing, joints wrenched, eyeballs smarting, air squeezed from the lungs and ears buzzing with tinnitus. Instinctively he checked the tile, which was intact. There must be some disturbance to the forces
that powered it.
He slowly raised himself to standing. No snow here – the night sky sparkled with a crystalline quality undiluted by artificial light. The constellations were inverted in comparison to Rotherweird, but otherwise true to Rotherweird’s time and season. Salt took deep satisfaction in being the only human visitor, Lost Acre’s sole guardian and explorer.
He had in fact quickly moderated the latter role in the interests of self-preservation, now keeping to a square mile of grassland from the white tile to the stream below. Lost Acre’s fauna mixed and matched, blossom with teeth, finned animals, bird-winged butterflies. Many of these freaks had proved to be both carnivorous and hostile. Salt had yet to discover the cause for this bizarre intermarriage of life forms, but the consequential dangers were clear. He had once ventured over the stream to the outer margins of the forest, only to be snared in thread-like wire and attacked by a creature so monstrous that its features still haunted his dreams. On another occasion he had climbed high into the rocky uplands on Lost Acre’s misty rim, until predatory birds had driven him down.
In this chosen area of relative safety he mapped the ground botanically, lifting what he needed for his cultivars back home.
Salt had not been in for more than a month, not since his discovery of the mysterious stones. Tonight he had come for the snowdrop bulbs, with their distinctive yellow-purple spots around the neck of the flower, which would appear in Rotherweird as Hayman’s Galanthus. He had already harvested Hayman’s Croci, source of his present to Orelia Roc. Here both species were now inexplicably flowering out of season.
He used a small crystal light, anxious that a more conspicuous lantern might attract unwanted visitors, and worked away with his trowel, careful not to harm the colony’s potential for further expansion. Before long, Salt became uneasy. The grass had grown unnaturally tall when it should be dying back. He even found stalks re-flowering among unusually heavy seed-heads. He kept his gloves on. Winged seeds from the forest were everywhere, far from their
natural habitat. Some burrowed when disturbed, others snapped or flew away. He wondered whether Lost Acre’s capacity for cellular rearrangement had brought with it a structural instability.
Within ten yards of the tile he found the first clutch of eggs, stippled brown and yellow but near transparent. From what he could make of the embryonic creatures inside, they were winged. In six years of visits, Salt had never found a single nest in the grass, but it now appeared that the avian lifeforms had abandoned their traditional nesting sites in the forest. Yet Salt could see no sign of earthquake, storm or drought. The earth felt no different. The silhouettes of the trees below appeared unchanged. He concluded that these behavioural changes did not reflect past disturbance but rather, apprehension of some future threat.
His concerns did not end there. He had found the stones nestling together within a few yards of the white tile, where he could not fail to find them. He had never encountered a malignant object before. To an atheist with no belief in the supernatural, the sensation had been inexplicable. He already regretted the sale, fearing he had been manipulated into bringing the stones to Rotherweird. If that was right, some other human either lived in Lost Acre, or travelled there from Rotherweird, and had him under observation.
These anxieties provoked Salt to break a golden rule. Bagging his bulbs and pocketing his trowel, he set off across the grassland, leaving old frontiers behind. The grass snagged at his waist, occasional tree seeds snapping at his heavy trousers, but he strode on, noting another disturbing oddity. The forest, normally a chorus of squawks, howls and warbles, stood mute as stone.
An easterly wind got up. The swaying grass and the moonstruck seed-heads conjured an impression of seafoam, Salt the swimmer, sometimes with the current and sometimes against it. In the scissory swish Salt thought he heard a hissy mumbling in Latin: Et quis est, et quis est?
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