Lost Acre

by Andrew Caldecott

  ‘Your trophy.’

  There was more cheering, but still the woman did not smile.

  High priestesses don’t smile, thought Fanguin. This is role-play. In the half-light and incongruous setting, he could not place the woman. She was neither young nor old, with dark intense hair coiling down her neck.

  Fanguin moved closer, recognising the woman as she turned, walked north up the Golden Mean and disappeared. It was Mrs Finch. Her petty snobbery had turned feral.

  Magisterially, Wynter moved among the bereaved and the wounded, offering thanks for their sacrifice and consolation. Gorhambury, unobtrusive in a grey overcoat over a grey and white striped nightgown, more escaped prisoner than Town Clerk, administered the practicalities, summoning stretchers and doctors, clearing the debris.

  *

  The next morning Jeavons placed on the Town Hall noticeboard his assay report, declaring that the seven numbered coins had been minted centuries ago, by the same hand. The eigth was of a similar vintage, but from a different smithy.

  Beneath, there appeared a meticulous drawing of both sides of the first coin, Wynter’s head on one, on the other the Roman numeral I above a strikingly realistic representation of the mantoleon, its head floating free of its body.

  All as foretold.

  IN TOWN

  1

  Checks and Balances

  Boris managed to assemble six Guild Masters for a meeting in The Journeyman’s Gist at eleven, an hour before noonday opening. The other five declined. Bill Ferdy provided coffee, the Bakers an assortment of patisserie.

  ‘We’ll get nowhere without all of us,’ said the Master Mixer. ‘Only a united front will stop the Apothecaries. I’m all for Wynter, but those bastards are riding on his coattails.’

  The Mixers had long loathed the Apothecaries for stealing their rightful name.

  Boris held fire. After the prophecy coins and the town’s deliverance from the mantoleon, Wynter had become the favoured candidate for the vacancy left by the spoiled election. If only Orelia had not disappeared. During her electoral campaign, she had listened to the Guilds, unlike Snorkel and Strimmer, and her stock remained high. Plan B required delicate presentation.

  Master Silversmith took over.

  ‘I’ve consulted the walking encyclopaedia,’ he said. ‘In time of emergency, which I take to include earthquake, a monster and an exploding ballot box, the Guilds can elect a temporary Mayor, provided ten of their twelve Courts are unanimous.’

  Boris too had consulted Gorhambury. The Silversmith, whether by accident or design, had neglected the small print. He dropped in the critical words casually as if adding a pinch of salt to a stew. ‘But only on terms which protect the people’s fundamental rights and privileges under this constitution.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked the Master Silversmith suspiciously. ‘You’re Deputy Mayor? Is that the plot?’

  ‘God forbid,’ replied Boris. ‘But we need to keep the constitutional checks and balances. Wynter is an outsider. You never know.’

  He had sown the seed. He sat back, allowing others to claim the idea, and ordered a round of Sturdy.

  ‘How about a Council with a right of veto?’ suggested the Master Baker.

  ‘There’s a problem there,’ intervened the Master Mixer. ‘The Apothecaries would dominate. You saw what happened on the Island Field. We’ll be enjoying Prim’s hospitality ourselves in no time.’

  ‘That’s a risk we’ll have to take.’ The Mistress Milliner, the only woman present, had silver hair and a mind as precise as her stitching. She turned to Boris. ‘Master Fireworker, this Council is your suggestion. What do you say?’

  ‘Wynter is an honorary Apothecary. He stays in their Hall. They provide his personal guard. The Apothecaries cannot sit on the Council.’ Boris had memorised the Regulation. ‘No person and no representative of any Guild may sit on any Committee or other body where they have a general conflict of interest and must withdraw from any vote or debate in which they have a particular interest. If we impose that condition at the outset, Wynter has little option but to accept.’

  ‘Very Gorhambury. Very right and proper,’ commented the Mistress Milliner.

  ‘What about the others?’ asked the Master Baker.

  ‘A Council without the Apothecaries! They’d be here like a shot – and all in favour – if they knew.’

  Nobody disagreed. Bill arrived with a tray of pint glasses and swapped them for the empty coffee mugs.

  Boris stood. ‘A toast to checks and balances,’ he said.

  They followed suit, hands lifted high.

  The Mistress Milliner added a salutary coda under her breath. ‘Remembering there’s theory and there’s practice,’ she murmured.

  2

  Advent Windows

  Outsiders had Advent calendars; Rotherweird had Advent windows. Every property, The Understairs included, entered the ballot for twenty-four different addresses, chosen by the spin of a barrel and then supplied in strict confidence to the appointed artist. On production of a municipal ‘Advent warrant’, the proprietor was obliged to tender the topmost window of their tower or house, where a backlit blind with a suitably seasonal illustration would be installed for display during the hours of darkness. Adults and children scoured the streets in search of every evening’s new window through to Christmas Eve.

  In recent years, however, interest had diminished, for Snorkel, fearful of satire, had appointed an artist whose saccharine images had only grown in dullness and repetition.

  For Gorhambury, in a childhood blighted by poverty, the Advent windows had acquired a near-mystical significance and he deeply resented their descent into banality. During his interregnum, he ‘retired’ the artist, Gilbert Gibbins, and appointed Ember Vine, Rotherweird’s best-known single mother and sculptress. Ember in turn engaged her sixteen-year-old daughter Amber at a guinea a day, in part to keep her from mischief and in part for her left-field ideas.

  Vine opened with a baffled dodo emerging from a speckled egg with a motto above the number 1: The last shall be first. The second of December moved operations to The Understairs, an attic window in a teetering block off Hamelin Way festooned in balconies.

  The tenant, a young Town Hall cleaner, plied Vine with coffee and advice. ‘The balcony blocks the view, I’m afraid, and we can hardly move it.’

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ said Amber, ‘this is a dimensional puzzle and you’re a sculptor.’

  In the single room, shelves bowed under the weight of home-made mechanicals, including a jack-in-a-box.

  Ember smiled. She had it. ‘Can you do me thin wire, a good spring and a clockwork timer?’

  On the following evening and thereafter every half hour from dusk to midnight, an illuminated jack-in-a-box face sprang out and over the balcony, then retracted. The features were unmistakably Snorkel’s, caught in an attitude of surprise. His habitual rudeness to the lowly had rebounded.

  Word spread and the traditional draw of the Advent windows revived.

  Number twenty-three, the top floor of a tower overlooking Aether’s Way, brought a different challenge. They climbed eight flights of bare boards to a single door on a pinched landing. Ember knocked twice without response, but when Amber tried the door, it opened. They entered a large all-purpose space: bedroom, kitchenette and study. Ember turned on the gaslights as Amber rotated on the spot in the middle of the room. She had fashioned a detection game for these visits to unfamiliar rooms.

  ‘Single occupier, female and fit . . .’ she started.

  All safe conclusions, given the row of polished shoes and the skipping rope.

  Ember’s turn; she rotated too. ‘She’s mathematical, practical, one of the Summoned, and tidy to the point of mania.’

  In support of this last proposition, she pointed to the perfect alignment of shoes and the child’s bear, nose and ears much repaired, sitting dead centre of the bed. On the study table, screwdrivers and metal pieces had been sorted by type and size like st
owed cutlery.

  ‘One of the Summoned – I challenge that,’ said Amber.

  ‘It’s the print.’

  A single etching of a German university, gothic spires illustrated in intricate detail, hung above the study table, again dead centre. It bore a date, 1684, an obvious breach of the History Regulations, which no resident would dare to make.

  Amber ran to the wall beside the door, peering at a row of horizontal pencil lines grouped close together at head height. Dates had been recorded in numerals beside them.

  ‘She measures herself every week.’ She pursed her lips. ‘I think she’s getting smaller, or at least she’s afraid she is.’ Now intrigued, Amber skipped over to the calendar beside the bed. ‘She’s ticked the days off until the twenty-first, then there’s nothing.’

  ‘The Winter Solstice,’ said Ember Vine. ‘Election and Earthquake Day.’

  ‘And she studies spheres,’ added Amber.

  Ember declined to speculate on potential connections between her own anonymous commission to sculpt a sphere and their absent hostess. She unpacked her brushes and paints, spread the white blind open on the floor and opened her mind. She liked an Advent window to reflect the room behind it.

  ‘Be a dear and brew us some coffee.’

  With pencil first, then brush, an image formed: a woman’s face, shrouded in a blue cowl, looking down with only the bridge of the nose and upper eyelids visible; the hint of an oval face.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Amber, flicking the kettle’s oscillator.

  Ember had no idea. ‘A Madonna looking down?’

  Amber gave her mother an appraising look. The previous twenty-two days of December had been unremittingly secular.

  ‘It just came,’ her mother added.

  On a shelf an exquisite porcelain rose with green stem and leaves and a carmine bloom rested on a sheet of paper.

  ‘Where’s Spring Steps?’ asked Amber.

  ‘It’s a back street in Hoy, close to the church.’

  ‘Something matters at number three.’

  The kettle started to bubble – only to stall as the temperature plummeted. Amber looked to the windows, front and back, but both were firmly closed. The tongues of gaslight dimmed. She felt an occupying presence – her bed, her bear, her shoes and her room.

  Oblivious, Ember’s brushes dipped and skipped across the blind-to-be at unnatural speed. Amber had a fleeting view of foreign landscape, black-and-white, flickering like old film. The usual disciplines, time and space, had lost their grip.

  ‘She’s here,’ whispered Amber. ‘She’s warning us.’

  Still the artist’s fingers danced. Only the image mattered: the town must know.

  All change.

  The kettle piped its song; the gas-lamps resumed a steady light. A dimensional fracture had healed.

  Ember examined her work, a young woman with enough detail to tantalise, not enough to identify.

  ‘You did feel that?’

  ‘Feel what, dear?’

  ‘You saw nothing?’

  ‘I saw what I painted.’

  ‘She’s dead, Mum, unnaturally dead. I saw her in silhouette, disappearing in mid-air.’

  ‘Say nothing to anyone,’ replied her mother.

  They hung the blind, installed the timer-light behind and, in deference to the prevailing tidiness, washed and dried their mugs.

  On Advent window twenty-three the town was divided. One camp dismissed it as obscure and bereft of its predecessors’ wit. The other lauded the cowled face as thought-provoking and refreshingly spiritual.

  The following morning Ember Vine visited Baubles & Relics to discover that Orelia Roc, her chosen confidante, had also vanished.

  Where now?

  3

  A Hollow Christmas

  Christmas, a time of healing, drew the people in. Every year Guilds and cottage industries achieved novelty from mechanicals to indoor fireworks, from high fashion to Vlad’s newest brandy. In addition to the Advent windows, seasonal carvings adorned windows, balconies and staircases inside and out.

  On Christmas night three life-sized mechanicals, bare-armed caricatures of countrysiders, each with a mattock or hoe in hand, jerked into life at the Ten-Mile Post, commencing their journey to town. Their robotic tread was scheduled to end in Market Square at dusk on New Year’s Eve. Each by tradition carried a capacious casket, filled by countrysiders with fruit, vegetables and seed: their homage to the town. Their kneecaps had a polished sheen from years of rubbing by the town’s populace in search of luck for the coming year.

  But other human rituals had been derailed. There were no last-minute visits to Baubles & Relics for stocking-fillers, and no church. Religious Rotherweirders paradoxically took this last setback in their stride as a miracle yet to be explained, but the agnostic majority, who attended only on feast days, bemoaned a lost fixture in the social calendar. The sealed octagon presented nothing but unpleasing stark modernity.

  Wynter moved among the townsfolk, amiable and austere, not pressing his case.

  Early on Boxing Day morning, Jeavons released Madge Brown’s drawing of the second prophecy coin: Wynter’s head on one side, the Town Hall on the other.

  Refuse me if you dare.

  *

  The last meeting had ended in acrimony, Wynter spared violence only by the diverting arrival of the prophecy coins. But his starring role in the mantoleon’s defeat had transformed the dynamics. The scapegoat had turned saviour and was not, in truth, an outsider at all.

  Wynter positioned himself well away from the Apothecaries this time. Gorhambury was to put the motion. Outside, Market Square was packed, with The Understairs well represented on this public holiday.

  *

  Oblong had spent Christmas at the Polks. Miss Trimble’s canoodling with Boris, not to mention their magnetic attraction to mistletoe, had irked him, mostly as a reminder of his own unattached state, although Bert’s children had provided compensation.

  He had held back his ‘exclusive’ until after lunch, as soon as the children had dispersed.

  ‘I went to The Journeyman’s Gist straight after the election,’ he started.

  ‘You breached the curfew!’ exclaimed Boris in mock outrage.

  ‘Ever so brave,’ added Miss Trimble, patting Boris’ thigh.

  ‘Geryon Wynter was there and I met him, pretty well one to one. He was surprisingly charming – well, compared to Strimmer.’

  ‘Did he give anything away?’

  ‘Only his wish to address us.’

  The subject stalled as Bert hammered the table with both fists. ‘Now, now, this is Christmas. No politics!’

  Oblong’s diary recorded these events in mundane terms (turkey and crackers, bread sauce from Miss Trimble. Beware Vlad’s plum brandy, odd hallucination). He had stayed over Christmas night in a hammock in the Eureka room. Peering from the main window he had glimpsed two silhouettes on an adjacent roof, both coated and scarfed. One was unmistakably Boris, but when the other turned, Oblong blinked and blinked again in disbelief. A wide-brimmed hat floated free of the shoulders: Boris was standing beside a man with no head.

  He opened the window for a better view and the apparitions vanished.

  4

  A Warning Ignored

  As an excitable town was heading for the Parliament Chamber for a final decision on the Mayoralty, an ominous warning sounded from the heavens in Market Square. A disembodied voice, recognisably that of the Town Crier, Portly Bowes, spoke from a clear blue sky:

  Who forged his golden coins and why?

  True prophecies can also lie,

  Guinea pigs, we spin and choose –

  Heads he wins and tails you lose.

  Despite its repetition from every corner of the Square and the ethereal quality of delivery from thin air, few gave the cryptic message weight. They suspected a South Tower trick, and, more to the point, where had Mr Bowes been when the mantoleon had struck?

  Oblong made his way to the mi
ddle tier of the Chamber. He saw no sign of Everthorne; he half-hoped the artist, with his good looks and creative energy, had returned home. More worrying, Jones and Orelia were still missing.

  Gorhambury fiddled with the knot on his tie. Wynter had engaged with the people. He had not lobbied and offered no bribes. He had put his own life on the line. Might Ferensen’s narrative be askew? Had Sir Veronal Slickstone, Sir Henry’s murderer, been the true villain all along?

  He rose to his feet. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have no Mayor. That is the background to today’s extraordinary assembly – and I use the word “extraordinary” in the meaning allotted to it by paragraph 6(5)(ii)(b) of the Procedural Regulations—’

  A familiar cry emerged from the stalls. ‘Get on with it, Bor’em-very!’

  ‘I am getting on with it, you silly man. These are matters of moment.’ Gorhambury forged on. ‘A motion has been tabled by eleven of the twelve Guilds, as follows: “To appoint Mr Geryon Wynter of no fixed address as the Mayor of Rotherweird for one year subject to terms . . .”’

  Norrington, the baker and Wynter’s opponent at the last meeting, had not lost his voice. ‘What terms? We’re handing power to a stranger. He could be anyone.’

  Gorhambury flipped the flap on his jacket pocket. His dry diction for once betrayed impatience.

  Gorhambury evolving, noted Oblong, assertive almost.

  ‘I was coming to the terms, obviously. The motion stipulates a Council of Guild Masters, excepting the Apothecaries, with a right of veto over all appointments and any change in the law.’

  Placing a tomato beside a pallid chameleon would best describe the transformation in Thomes’ complexion. He left his seat and descended to the floor wagging a finger at Gorhambury. ‘How dare you exclude us! We are the Guild. It’s grotesque, preposterous—’

  ‘That’s a challenge for the proposers to answer,’ replied Gorhambury primly.

  Poor choreography afflicted the movers of the motion: three Guild Masters stood up and each simultaneously launched a riposte.