by Kim Newman
Something close to Teddy mooed, and he jumped. A cow plodded around the side of the house, wandering loose. Someone must have forgotten to close a gate. The milker shouldn’t be this close to the house.
Jimmy Starkey didn’t have many cows, so each was important. He was one of those farmers who treated animals better than anything else. He kept Vindaloo around long after he was any use and lavished such care on his livestock that they were always taking show prizes bigger farmers, who just spent money on theirs, tried all year to snaffle.
Teddy had the idea there was something wrong at the Starkey farm. Jimmy wasn’t likely to leave a gate open. He practically brought his cows breakfast in bed. And Vindaloo was not the lovably obnoxious monster Teddy had known since he was a kid.
Even the Stench was different somehow.
‘You go in an’ ask en,’ Terry said. He was just bright enough to realise Jimmy would still not be pleased to see him.
Teddy knocked on the door. His shoulder twinged again. Terry had really hurt him this time. Maybe dislocated something.
Inside the farmhouse, someone said something. The door was unlatched. It swung open.
Teddy stepped inside. Like a lot of old places, it had a low ceiling and he had to stoop.
‘Mr Starkey?’
He found Jimmy in his front room, sat in an old chair. He was in a state, hair uncombed and eyes red. Afternoon telly was on with the sound down. Some soap serial with shaky walls and smiling Australians.
‘Mind if we rat your pile?’ Teddy asked.
‘What?’
Jimmy looked up. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.
‘We’re rattin’. Shootin’ rats.’
Jimmy shook his head, understanding.
‘Yurp, of course you can shoot rats.’
With a gulp of anxiety in his stomach, Teddy noticed Jimmy had a gun in his lap. It was an old pistol, almost an antique.
‘Mr Starkey, you’m all right?’
Jimmy looked down at his gun and up at Teddy.
‘No,’ he said.
Teddy wanted to leave. He was worried about what Jimmy would do with the gun.
‘Donal Goddard offered to put ’en to sleep,’ Jimmy said. ‘But I couldn’t let en. It shouldn’t be a stranger. I should do it myself. Too sick to be any use to hisself. All he’m got in front of en is pain.’
Jimmy held up the gun.
‘But I can’t do it. I just can’t. I thought I could, but…’
Teddy understood.
‘It’s Vindaloo,’ he said.
Jimmy nodded sadly. ‘He’m has got to be put out of his misery. Teddy boy, please do it for me. Vindaloo always liked you.’
Teddy thought about it and agreed.
‘Thank ’ee, boy,’ Jimmy said. ‘Rat any time you want.’
Teddy turned away, and left the front room. He held up his .22. It wasn’t powerful but if he held it to Vindaloo’s head it should do the job.
It wasn’t pleasant but it had to be done.
As he stooped to go through the farmhouse’s low door, another jolt of pain writhed up his back. And an idea for a stunt.
It was too good to miss. Terry would shit himself.
His brother was standing in the middle of the yard looking at the rubbish, drawing beads with his gun. The loose cow was near him, chewing a tuft of grass that grew out of a rotten cardboard box.
Teddy paused in the doorway to get worked up and came out muttering to himself.
‘Rude old bugger,’ he said, ‘callin’ me filth, callin’ youm a tosser. He’m out of order completely. He’m got to cause to spit on us Gilpins. He’m no better’n us. No better ’t all.’
Terry looked at him, jaw slack.
‘We’m can’t rat,’ Teddy told him, pretending fury. ‘Bloody Jimmy Starkey ordered us off his property pronto. Says he’ll put a boot to your arse if’n he sees you again. He cuffed I round the earhole.’
Terry’s face sagged as it sank in.
‘Tell ’ee what,’ Teddy said, sharply. ‘He’m been so bloody rude, I’m gonna shoot his dog.’
Quickly, Teddy jammed the .22 barrel against the back of Vindaloo’s skull and fired. The shot was muffled. The dog jerked and was cleanly dead.
Teddy looked up as his brother goggled. He’d been right: his brother was completely whacked, eyes wide, mouth open.
Slowly, horribly, a grin spread across Terry’s face. His teeth and eyes gleamed.
‘Yeah,’ he said, raising his shotgun and aiming from the hip, pulling both triggers at once, ‘and I’m gonna shoot his cow.’
Terry’s shotgun made a noise Teddy would hear for months.
GREAT WESTERN
Cleared paths were no good for Allie. She wasn’t supposed to be after rabbits on Squire Maskell’s land. Most of Alder Hill was wildwood, trees webbed together by a growth of bramble nastier than barb wire. Thorns jabbed into skin and stayed, like bee-sting.
Just after dawn, the air had a chilly bite but the sunlight was pure and strong. Later, it would get warm; now, her hands and knees were frozen from dew-damp grass and iron-hard ground.
The Reeve was making a show of being tough on poaching, handing down short sharp sentences. She’d already got a stripe across her palm for setting snares. Everyone West of Bristol knew Reeve Draper was Maskell’s creature. Serfdom might have been abolished, but the old squires clung to their pre-War position, through habit as much as tenacity.
Since taking her lash, administered under the Village Oak by Constable Erskine with a razor-strop, she’d grown craftier. Wiry enough to tunnel through bramble, she made and travelled her own secret, thorny paths. She’d take Maskell’s rabbits, even if the Reeve’s Constable striped her like a tiger.
She set a few snares in obvious spots, where Stan Budge would find and destroy them. Maskell’s gamekeeper wouldn’t be happy if he thought no one was even trying to poach. The trick was to set snares invisibly, in places Budge was too grown-up, too far off the ground, to look.
Even so, none of her nooses had caught anything.
All Spring, she’d been hearing gunfire from Alder Hill, resonating across the moors like thunder. Maskell had the Gilpin Brothers out with Browning rifles. They were supposed to be ratting, but the object of the exercise was to end poaching by killing off all the game.
There were rabbit and pigeon carcasses about, some crackly bone bundles in packets of dry skin, some recent enough to seem shocked to death. It was a sinful waste, what with hungry people queuing up for parish hand-outs. Quite a few trees had yellow-orange badges, where Terry or Teddy Gilpin shot wide of the mark. Squire Maskell would not be heartbroken if one of those wild shots finished up in her.
Susan told her over and over to be mindful of men with guns. She had a quite reasonable horror of firearms. Too many people on Sedgemoor died with their gumboots on and a bullet in them. Allie’s Dad and Susan’s husband, for two. Susan wouldn’t have a gun in the house.
For poaching, Allie didn’t like guns anyway. Too loud. She had a catapult made from a garden fork, double-strength rubber stretched between steel tines. She could put a nail through half inch of plywood from twenty-five feet.
She wriggled out of her tunnel, pushing aside a circle of bramble she’d fixed to hinge like a lid, and emerged in a clearing of loose earth and shale. During the Civil War, a bomb had fallen here and fizzled. Eventually, the woods would close over the scar.
When she stood up, she could see across the moors, as far as Achelzoy. At night, the infernal lights of Bridgwater pinked the horizon, clawing a ragged red edge in the curtain of dark. Now, she could make out the road winding through the wetlands. The sun, still low, glinted and glimmered in sodden fields, mirror-fragments strewn in a carpet of grass. There were dangerous marshes out there. Cows were sucked under if they set a hoof wrong.
Something moved near the edge of the clearing.
Allie had her catapult primed, her eye fixed on the rabbit. Crouching, still as a statue, she concentrate
d. Jack Coney nibbled on nothing, unconcerned. She pinched the nail-head, imagining a point between the ears where she would strike.
A noise sounded out on the moor road. The rabbit vanished, startled by the unfamiliar rasp of an engine.
‘’S’blood,’ she swore.
She stood up, easing off on her catapult. She looked out towards Achelzoy. A fast-moving shape was coming across the moor.
The rabbit was lost. Maskell’s men would soon be about, making the woods dangerous. She chanced a maintained path and ran swiftly downhill. At the edge of Maskell’s property, she came to a stile and vaulted it—wrenching her shoulder, but no matter—landing like a cat on safe territory. Without a look back at the ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE VENTILATED’ sign, she traipsed between two rows of trees, towards the road.
The path came out half a mile beyond the village, at a sharp kink in the moor road. She squatted with her back to a signpost, running fingers through her hair to rid herself of tangles and snaps of thorn.
The engine noise was nearer and louder. She considered putting a nail in the nuisance-maker’s petrol tank to pay him back for the rabbit. That was silly. Whoever it was didn’t know what he’d done.
She saw the stranger was straddling a Norton. He had slowed to cope with the winds of the moor road. Every month, someone piled up in one of the ditches because he took a bend too fast.
To Allie’s surprise, the motorcyclist stopped by her. He shifted goggles up to the brim of his hat. He looked as if he had an extra set of eyes in his forehead.
There were care-lines about his eyes and mouth. She judged him a little older than Susan. His hair needed cutting. He wore leather trews, a padded waistcoat over a dusty khaki shirt, and gauntlets. A brace of pistols were holstered at his hips, and he had a rifle slung on the Norton, within easy reach.
He reached into his waistcoat for a pouch and fixings. Pulling the drawstring with his teeth, he tapped tobacco on to a paper and rolled himself a cigarette one-handed. It was a clever trick, and he knew it. He stuck the fag in his grin and fished for a box of Bryant & May.
‘Alder,’ he said, reading from the signpost. ‘Is that a village?’
‘Might be.’
‘Might it?’
He struck a light on his thumbnail and drew a lungful of smoke, held in for a moment like a hippie sucking a joint, and let it funnel out through his nostrils in dragon-plumes.
‘Might it indeed?’
He didn’t speak like a yokel. He sounded like a wireless announcer, maybe even more clipped and starched.
‘If, hypothetically, Alder were a village, would there be a hostelry there where one might buy breakfast?’
‘Valiant Soldier don’t open till lunchtime.’
The Valiant Soldier was Alder’s pub, and another of Squire Maskell’s businesses.
‘Pity.’
‘How much youm pay for breakfast?’ she asked.
‘That would depend on the breakfast.’
‘Ten bob?’
The stranger shrugged.
‘Susan’ll breakfast you for ten bob.’
‘Your mother?’
‘No.’
‘Where could one find this Susan?’
‘Gosmore Farm. Other end of village.’
‘Why don’t you get up behind me and show me where to go?’
She wasn’t sure. The stranger shifted forward on his seat, making space.
‘I’m Lytton,’ the stranger said.
‘Allie,’ she replied, straddling the pillion.
‘Hold on tight.’
She took a grip on his waistcoat, wrists resting on the stocks of his guns.
Lytton pulled down his goggles and revved. The bike sped off. Allie’s hair blew into her face and streamed behind her. She held tighter, pressing against his back to keep her face out of the wind.
* * *
When they arrived, Susan had finished milking. Allie saw her washing her hands under the pump by the back door.
Gosmore Farm was a tiny enclave circled by Maskell’s land. He had once tried to get the farm by asking the newly widowed Susan to marry him. Allie couldn’t believe he’d actually thought she might consent. Apparently, Maskell didn’t consider Susan might hold a grudge after her husband’s death. He now had a porcelain doll named Sue-Clare in the Manor House, and a pair of terrifying children.
Susan looked up when she heard the Norton. Her face was set hard. Strangers with guns were not her favourite type of folk.
Lytton halted the motorcycle. Allie, bones shaken, dismounted, showing herself.
‘He’m pay for breakfast,’ she said. ‘Ten bob.’
Susan looked the stranger over, starting at his boots, stopping at his hips.
‘He’ll have to get rid of those filthy things.’
Lytton, who had his goggles off again, was puzzled.
‘Guns, she means,’ Allie explained.
‘I know you feel naked without them,’ Susan said sharply. ‘Unmanned, even. Magna Carta rules that no Englishman shall be restrained from bearing arms. It’s that fundamental right which keeps us free.’
‘That’s certainly an argument,’ Lytton said.
‘If you want breakfast, yield your fundamental right before you step inside my house.’
‘That’s a stronger one,’ he said.
Lytton pulled off his gauntlets and dropped them into the pannier of the Norton. His fingers were stiff on the buckle of his gunbelt, as if he had been wearing it for many years until it had grown into him like a wedding-ring. He loosened the belt and held it up.
Allie stepped forward to take the guns.
‘Allison, no,’ Susan insisted.
Lytton laid the guns in the pannier and latched the lid.
‘You have me defenceless,’ he told Susan, spreading his arms.
Susan squelched a smile and opened the back door. Kitchen smells wafted.
A good thing about Lytton’s appearance at Gosmore Farm was that he stopped Susan giving Allie a hard time about being up and about before dawn. Susan had no illusions about what she did in the woods.
Susan let Lytton past her into the kitchen. Allie trotted up.
‘Let me see your hands,’ Susan said.
Allie showed them palms down. Susan noted dirt under nails and a few new scratches. When Allie showed her palms, Susan drew a fingernail across the red strop-mark.
‘Take care, Allie.’
‘Yes’m.’
Susan hugged Allie briefly, and pulled her into the kitchen.
Lytton had taken a seat at the kitchen table and was loosening his heavy boots. Susan had the wireless on, tuned to the Light Programme. Mark Radcliffe introduced the new song from Jarvis Cocker and His Wurzels, ‘The Streets of Stogumber’. A frying-pan was heating on the cooker, tiny trails rising from the fat.
‘Allie, cut our guest some bacon.’
‘The name’s Lytton.’
‘I’m Susan Ames. This is Allison Conway. To answer your unasked question, I’m a widow, she’s an orphan. We run this farm ourselves.’
‘A hard row to plough.’
‘We’re still above ground.’
Allie carved slices off a cured hock that hung by the cooker. Susan took eggs from a basket, cracked them into the pan.
‘Earl Grey or Darjeeling?’ Susan asked Lytton.
‘The Earl.’
‘Get the kettle on, girl,’ Susan told her. ‘And stop staring.’
Allie couldn’t remember Susan cooking for a man since Mr Ames was killed. It was jarring to have this big male, whiffy from the road and petrol, invading their kitchen. But also a little exciting.
Susan flipped bacon rashers, busying herself at the cooker. Allie filled the kettle from the tap at the big basin.
‘Soldier, were you?’ Susan asked Lytton, indicating his shoulder. There was a lighter patch on his shirtsleeve where rank insignia had been cut away. He’d worn several pips.
The stranger shrugged.
‘Which brand of idiot
?’
‘I fought for the South-East.’
‘I’d keep quiet about that if you intend to drink in the Valiant Soldier.’
‘I’d imagined Wessex was mostly neutral.’
‘Feudal order worked perfectly well for a thousand years. It wasn’t just landed gentry who resisted London Reforms. There are plenty of jobless ex-serfs around, nostalgic for their shackles and three hot meals a day.’
‘Just because it lasted a long time doesn’t mean it was a good thing.’
‘No argument from me there.’
‘Mr Ames was a Reformist too,’ Allie said.
‘Mr Ames?’
‘My late husband. He opened his mouth too much. Some loyal retainers shut it for him.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not your problem.’
Susan wasn’t comfortable talking about her husband. Mr Ames had been as much lawyer as farmer, enthusiastically heading the Sedgemoor District Committee during the Reconstruction. He didn’t realise it took more than a decision made in London Parliament to change things in the West. London was a long way off.
Allie brought Susan plates. Susan slid bacon and eggs from the pan.
‘Fetch the tomato chutney from the preserves shelf,’ she said.
Outside, someone clanged the bell by the gate. Lytton’s hand slipped quietly to his hip, closing where the handle of a revolver would have been.
Susan looked at the hot food on the table, and frowned at the door.
‘Not a convenient time to come visiting,’ she said.
* * *
Hanging back behind Susan, Allie still saw who was in the drive. Constable Erskine was by the bell, vigorously hammering with the butt of his police revolver. His blue knob-end helmet gave him extra height. His gun-belt was in matching blue. Reeve Draper, arms folded, cringed at the racket his subordinate was making. Behind the officers stood Terry and Teddy Gilpin, Browning rifles casually in their hands, long coats brushing the ground.
