Lost Acre

by Andrew Caldecott

  ‘Oh yourself,’ she replied.

  Oblong conjured a spontaneous banality. ‘We had a sale for you at Baubles & Relics – we got rid of all that back stock, just as you wanted.’

  Caring for other people’s children had been hard work, suspending her grief more than assuaging it, but this knock-back to reality engaged Orelia’s old self in a true healing moment.

  ‘Who got the chair with the carved arms and the jammy leg? And the jar with the blue lions?’

  Oblong struggled for names, but he could describe most of the purchasers. His account of Valourhand’s sales patter lightened the mood, while bringing home to him just how much the shop mattered to Orelia.

  Ferensen observed the exchange and said nothing: this was the right way round, light before dark.

  Finally, Orelia asked, ‘So, what other news?’

  Oblong combined his own narrative with those of Jones and Finch. Fortemain’s death did not wholly surprise Orelia, for the woman’s scream had implied disaster. ‘But there’s no trace of Bole anywhere,’ Oblong concluded.

  ‘There wouldn’t be,’ explained Orelia. ‘Bole strangled Wynter, so acquiring Wynter’s appearance and character, while preserving his own knowledge; just as he did with Vibes and Everthorne.’

  ‘Everthorne!’

  Orelia told her story simply and well, withholding only her afternoon of passion with the false Everthorne. She had confessed this error of the heart to Ferensen and that was enough.

  ‘So it’s the two trees which connect Rotherweird and Lost Acre, or rather their roots?’ said Oblong when she had finished. ‘The hedge-priests must have discovered it and marked all the known access points with tiles.’

  ‘But suddenly they’re rerouting us,’ added Orelia. ‘Rootwork was among the words Fortemain wrote down and left for me in the observatory.’

  ‘The problem is coming out, which suggests it’s the other place’s tree which is ailing.’ Gabriel’s mellow voice and powerful physique belied his stillness. He spoke without turning his head or moving his arms and hands.

  Orelia peered at him, but Ferensen dispelled her unease. ‘He knows all we know, as did his father and grandfather before him. The white tile is on his land.’ Ferensen paused. ‘We have a more immediate problem.’ He produced a slim canister from his pocket. It contained a slip of paper, which he unfurled. ‘It’s an invitation to the Manor from Mr Wynter, whose name appears on the side when heated. It arrived via the chimney.’

  ‘The Ferdys got one too,’ added Oblong.

  ‘An Unrecognisable Party – irresistible,’ said Orelia, now desperate to return to town.

  Ferensen grimaced. They were missing the graver implications.

  ‘Did Morval read it?’ he asked.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ replied Oblong, ‘but by now she may have.’

  Ferensen prodded the fire again. With each thrust of the poker, he posed a question. ‘Who’s Wynter really inviting? He must know no countrysider will come. Who’s his aerial postman? What’s the point of such a party? Why does he think whoever he’s after might be here or with the Ferdys? And how does he know about the Witan Hall?’

  Gabriel answered the last question. ‘Carcasey Jack, most likely. He left home for town. He mutilates animals for pleasure and would do anything for the right coin. Anything.’

  Ferensen did not dissent. ‘Betraying the location of the Witan Hall is a capital offence out here. So it must be a bagful of coin. Wynter will be wary of the Apothecaries. He’ll want his own men where it matters.’

  Oblong offered reassurance. ‘But he couldn’t attack here. He hasn’t the manpower.’

  That struck Ferensen as true, and nor did Wynter know the terrain as they did. But he felt uneasy, without being able to articulate why. ‘He has eyes in the dark, though.’ Ferensen’s own eyes seemed to sink in, as they always did when remembering the experiments he had failed to prevent. This particular victim he had blanked from his mind for centuries. The falling canister had brought him back. ‘Strix, they called him.’

  ‘An owl-like bird of ill omen,’ added Oblong in his schoolmasterly voice. ‘It fed on human flesh.’

  Orelia glared at Oblong. God, he can be clumsy.

  Oblong belatedly changed tone. ‘Sorry, Ferensen, you were saying—?’

  ‘Strix was Wynter’s pride and joy. He put a local boy in with a huge owl he’d bought in London.’ He paused. ‘The point is, Strix would know if a house harboured someone who’d been to the other place. He’d be able to sense it.’

  ‘If Wynter has Bole’s memories, he knows you’re still alive,’ said Orelia, remembering Ferensen’s stand against Slickstone at the mixing-point. ‘Bole was Ferox then, and he spared us both. We know why he spared me – but why you, his arch-enemy?’

  Ferensen paused as a horrible truth dawned. It would be as in the old days. It was Morval whom Wynter wanted: she had painted for Wynter to save him then, and she would do so again now. ‘We must keep Morval away from him – he’ll do nothing of note until she’s there to record it.’

  A heavier question hung unanswered. Were Bole’s Herculean efforts merely a bid to re-run the Eleusian days? Had Wynter returned for no more than another round of experiments, another Roman Recipe Book, and in time, inevitably, another Oxenbridge to end them?

  The conversation meandered, but with a hard subtext: We cannot move because we do not yet know the game.

  Oblong, accepting Ferensen’s advice that the Ferdys’ house would be a journey too far at this hour, stayed for supper. With the children consigned to their dormitories, peace descended on the Witan Hall. By way of light relief, Oblong recounted his first arrival in Rotherweird – the tantalising glimpses of the town through the mist, his bizarre interview, Rhombus Smith’s evident dislike of Snorkel, how Miss Trimble had seemed so formidable, when in truth she was kindness itself, how Boris had greeted him with a song:

  ‘Not all those who wear velvet are good,

  My child,

  Beware those who like silver, not wood,

  My child.’

  Ferensen closed proceedings. ‘Tonight, Mr Oblong will add a new first to his expanding list. He will sleep in a hammock.’

  Old History

  1556. The Manor grounds. Rotherweird.

  These are the halcyon days before the arrival of the other children and long before Wynter. The Seers imbibe knowledge like water as Sir Henry ignites their peculiar talents.

  Today Morval has a rendezvous with a boy from the woods at the stone bridge at the margins of the Manor’s grounds.

  ‘You can call me Morval now,’ says Morval. ‘It’s my new name.’

  ‘It sounds noble to me. I liked the old one.’

  ‘You must meet Sir Henry.’

  ‘I don’t have the words, do I. Not for you neither. What are you learning in there?’ Coram Ferdy hops from foot to foot. His ragged breeches look incongruous beside Morval’s embroidered dress.

  ‘All sorts. We study botany and anatomy and—’

  ‘You speak different.’

  Morval, though still a girl, feels the pain of estrangement. He is slipping away from their present into their past.

  Hieronymus joins them from beneath the bridge. ‘Ferdy,’ he says, ‘I can show you an insect which lives underwater and uses tiny stones for armour. Want to see?’

  ‘I got to help in the fields,’ shouts Ferdy as he runs off.

  For no apparent reason, Morval cries after him, ‘We’ll look after you. Promise.’

  *

  But they do not, or cannot, ten years later, when it matters, when Ferdy’s being is twisted with the owl’s into Strix, and his mother hangs herself from the great oak at the end of the meadow.

  1563. November. The Rotherweird Valley.

  Dankness pervades the Rotherweird Valley. Trees drip, fires sputter and the prodigies turn fractious. The girls play the boys against each other. Classes suffer. Diversion and separation are called for.

  Wynter’s bl
ack library includes De La Pirotechnia, an Italian volume which betrays the secrets of gunpowder manufacture. He will lead the boys in experiments with iron tubes and a generous supply of sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre. The girls he entrusts to Calx Bole, who chooses a mounted expedition to Hoy, taking Wynter’s horse for himself and moorland ponies for the rest.

  The mist is spectral. Any old path chronicles a history of journeys. Unbeknownst to them, this one has carried Brothers Hilarion and Harfoot in and out on their first visit to the valley.

  The girls, save for Morval, giggle on discovering their destination: a chapel in a nondescript meadow on the Hoy side of the escarpment. Bole and Wynter avoided even the short climb from the Manor to Rotherweird’s own place of worship. So why here?

  ‘Have we been that wicked?’ asks Nona-to-be.

  Estella-to-be points at a leering stone grotesque. ‘It’s the Potamus!’ she cries.

  Bole ignores the barb. A verger opens the arched oak door. Darkness greets them with that distinctive cold which stone walls nurture in sulky weather. Bole distributes torches, but there is nothing remarkable until he walks down the aisle and raises his flame to the chancel arch.

  Terrifying images stare back. Men and women fall, interlaced with fire, water and frost; heads twist at unnatural angles; feet splay, and with them fall cities too, towers and arches, beams and tiles, and the earth is cracked with veins of black. There are neither demons nor angels, only a single bearded man in white, standing dead centre with His chosen few around him. Behind them an Arcadian landscape, uncannily reminiscent of their own valley, rises to the rafters.

  Morval not only sees, she hears the cataclysmic noise of final destruction.

  Nona drinks in the scene. This is ultimate power, the infliction of final judgement. Doomsday.

  ‘Consequences’

  IN TOWN

  1

  A Clairvoyant Looks Back

  A mizzling rain muzzled the town. It was a morning for firesides, board games and books. Estella Scry took advantage, commencing her investigation at the Town Hall.

  ‘Might I see the membership list for the Artefacts Committee? I may have stumbled on something significant.’

  A batty irrelevance, more like, thought the woman at Reception, who disapproved of The Clairvoyancy peddling superstition to the suggestible. Nonetheless, every citizen had a right to ask and the right to know. The woman reached behind her and opened the ledger on the counter top, revealing the names and addresses in neat alphabetical order.

  ‘Pen?’ asked the woman.

  ‘No need, I memorise,’ replied Scry.

  Madge Brown; Floor G, 1 Myrmidon Coil. Scry’s nostrils twitched: a high floor in an insalubrious backwater, hardly the natural roost for the town’s Assistant Librarian. Above Reception hung a wall chart with the name of every municipal employee adjacent to a window for presence (green) and absence (red). Madge Brown was one of the few spotted red like a sold picture.

  ‘Is the Committee Secretary on holiday?’

  ‘She’s on compassionate leave, helping out a sick relative in wider England.’

  Scry shrugged. ‘It can wait.’ She had cultivated her image for a purpose. Dressing prim and respectable kept the less well-off at bay. The Clairvoyancy attracted the disdain of the better-off for its tackiness, including those who in secret visited her rooms at night for discreet insights into their future. Only from the Apothecaries had she of late garnered attention and respect.

  Where the Golden Mean abutted Hamelin Way, at the centre of a whorl of mean houses, stood a pencil-thin tower with a wooden ball on the summit, the whole resembling an inverted exclamation mark: 1 Myrmidon Coil.

  The building had single doors on a succession of exterior landings reached by a snaking staircase. Scry judged the accommodation too pinched for family quarters, with only two windows to a floor at best. She winced at the crudity of the carvings and the rickety state of the steps.

  Floor G and its single flat nestled beneath the lip of the roof’s gutter. The curtains were drawn and the door locked.

  Scry’s handbag was an accomplished liar. It housed the natural accessories to her dress – a hand-mirror, a comb, a purse and a handkerchief from an emporium on Aether’s Way tastefully embroidered with her initials – but it also contained the burglar’s complete wherewithal. She inserted a tiny scope into the keyhole and peered through. A Quondam III, a rare pin-tumbler lock, confronted her, hardly standard security for an Assistant Librarian. She inserted a tension wrench at the bottom of the keyhole and a pick at the top. Ten minutes, more trial than error, and she was in.

  First impressions could not have been more conventional. Construct a room for Madge Brown and this would be it: dowdy clothes and sturdy shoes tidily arranged, a card index on the only table with a bookbinder’s vice and instruments beside it, shelves stacked with novels by outmoded writers from the turn of the last century remaindered by the Library Committee, and a single virginal bed. Above a mean fireplace hung a fine carving in oak, flat to the wall, of a woman with a vine climbing one leg and a leafless thorn the other.

  On closer inspection, oddities emerged. Above the door on a small shelf stood a head-and-shoulders shop dummy swathed in brightly coloured scarves and a jaunty hat, wholly alien to Madge Brown’s public mode of dress. Also incongruous for their flamboyance were the fine gold earrings shaped like pomegranates in the solitary jewellery box.

  Between two bookshelves a ladder led to a trap door, a conventional feature in Rotherweird for allowing roof repair without scaffolding. Scry put down her handbag and ascended. A generous skylight illuminated a spinney of grey rafters and a flue for the seven fireplaces below. The skylight’s frame opened outwards but also slid upwards on runners, facilitating access to the lead flashing at the tower’s rim. Scry leaned out.

  At that moment she knew.

  When her other self, she launched from human feet but returned to land on talons, pockmarking the outer rim of her tower. Here too the flashing was scored like a dart board.

  A poisonous brew of half-memories, jealousy of her erstwhile friend, loathing of Bole and unanswered questions engulfed her. Struggling to impose order on the implications, Scry staggered back onto Madge Brown’s bed – or rather, Nona’s bed: Nona, who was closer to Wynter than she, Nona, confidante of the repulsive Calx Bole, Nona her fellow Fury, Nona the agent (surely) of Wynter’s resurrection, Nona the riddler, Nona, who had somehow shed her former appearance.

  Fresh wounds opened. She recalled her exchange with Madge Brown in the Manor’s Great Hall, when Brown had avoided being left alone with Scry. The aura of the mixing-point would betray her. By the same token, Wynter must know her identity and be party to the deception.

  Rage, and a desire for understanding, impelled Scry to a more intrusive search. Within minutes secrets wriggled free of the innocent exterior trappings.

  The books had been filleted: the contents were very different to those declared by their innocuous titles: works on multi-dimensional physics, the science of the phloem and xylem, parasitology and, incongruously, mythology, both Norse and classical.

  Among the bookbinding instruments, she found fine brushes, a jar one-quarter filled with a resinous substance and a tube of paint marked ‘old gold’. Brown had tampered with the portrait of the Apothecaries’ Founder before calling her in to investigate.

  Scry scowled. I’ve been Nona’s puppet throughout.

  A desk drawer yielded a brochure, an alpine scene featuring a meadow overwhelmed with blue lupins, a modern building in traditional materials and the words The Obern Clinic: We Judge by Appearances.

  Nona must have been a unique visitor, Scry mused, a woman who wished to be dowdified. In the same drawer she found a letter from Italy with a terse message:

  It is done. Tancred E

  The writer had added a miniature portrait, a good-looking man whom Scry instantly recognised as the artist, Tancred Everthorne, the most conspicuous of the Rotherweirders from the wider
world who had been summoned for the election. What had been ‘done’ by Everthorne? Why was Brown in contact with an overseas Rotherweirder of no obvious consequence?

  She peered at the letter. Of all the Eleusians, Bole and Nona had relished riddles the most. Artists rarely sign themselves by first name and initial. She sensed a hidden layer. She shuffled the letters. Decanter emerged from Tancred E, and with it a word association: Flask had been the town’s previous modern historian and had disappeared just before Slickstone’s arrival. For decanter read Flask? If Nona and Brown were the same person, could Flask and Everthorne be so too? The image of the corpulent Bole danced in her head. To survive, he must have been immersed in the mixing-point by Wynter – but with what companion and to what effect?

  One stark fact dwarfed the plethora of questions: she had been excluded from almost everything, relegated to a tiny cog in Wynter’s great machine.

  But she left in better spirits. Nona had always underestimated her, heavy-featured Estella. Now she was on the scent and they did not know it. Only one question tortured her: was Wynter their accomplice, or another of their puppets?

  2

  Île Flottante

  North of the town where the river turned south, a small bay held a rich supply of flat stones, a favourite haunt for children who liked to skip them across the water towards the far shore.

  ‘Nine jumps,’ cried the boy immodestly.

  ‘Mine went further,’ countered his competitive sister.

  Their friend, a more contemplative personality, sat on the bank and watched. ‘The water’s gone scarlet,’ he said, pointing.

  He was right: a sliver of colour stained the shallows. Brother and sister kicked off their boots before wading out to investigate. The shape resembled a giant crimson sponge, rolling from side to side in the current. It had followed the line of the deeper water before snagging on a belt of shingle.

  The children back-stepped, arms waving in horror, lost for words.