Lost Acre

by Andrew Caldecott

  The Town Clerk (as Umpire) may not assist, join or otherwise assist the Municipals or any other team in any way whatsoever.

  Arguments between Guilds equalled in intensity their internal disputes as to choice of crew, skipper, colours and team song.

  Wynter smiled as amendments burgeoned. He could not have chosen a better distraction. Nobody would notice the absence of the Mayor and his select few at the Spring Equinox. He made one amendment himself, postponing the start from dawn to mid-morning: the Grand Finish and his own return should coincide.

  ‘But they’ll miss the surge,’ Gorhambury pointed out.

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ replied Wynter enigmatically.

  *

  Aggs fretted for the rest of the working day. She had heard only one word, ‘Gabriel’, whispered in a corner by Wynter to Sly after the close of the Council Meeting, but it suggested trouble. But would she be starting a wild goose chase?

  Espionage is not straightforward, she decided. By ten o’clock, her unease won through and she set off through the murk to share her intelligence with Boris.

  4

  The Temptation of Prudence

  ‘I’m surprised at you, I really am,’ growled Thomes.

  ‘We’ll look so aloof – and the Mixers will be there. Suppose they win.’

  ‘Apothecaries don’t mix with dross, and – and – Apothecaries do not do sport.’ Thomes’ piggy eyes bulged in outrage.

  Sister Prudence fought on. ‘Some of our younger acolytes would welcome the chance.’ Younger – the few with a flicker of life left, she felt like saying. ‘They have unspent energies.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ The Master hammered the table as if closing an auction.

  ‘I hear there’s an expedition,’ she said with such calmness that Thomes took it as insolence.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Miscegenation – it’s a subject I know about. I fought the mantoleon.’

  Thomes scowled at an unintended innuendo: While you were safely tucked up in bed.

  Sister Prudence tried to instil the concern she felt. ‘I studied its shell – we’re facing the unknown, Master, and who knows what else is out there? Nor do I trust Mr Wynter. Please.’

  ‘You’ll stay to mind the ship.’

  Sister Prudence accepted the rebuff phlegmatically, only for her next observation to fare no better. ‘The carvings from the tower were most peculiar: scenes from the last trump, and I’d swear done by the same hand as those in our own Great Hall.’

  Mysteries irritated Thomes. Reason must rule. ‘Poppycock. That tower is new-build. We have a copycat on the loose. You’re being very difficult today, Sister Prudence. You’d do well to remember your place on the Court is up for review in the summer.’

  A lifetime of dutiful service and obedience had left dissent a stranger to Sister Prudence; she had always played the music in front of her. Now, almost unintentionally, she launched a mischievous tune of her own. ‘At least I don’t have unscheduled meetings with a woman who’s outside the Guild.’

  Thomes’ tone turned defensive and Sister Prudence discovered for the first time the virtues of a well-timed counter-attack.

  ‘If you’re referring to Miss Brown’s sister, I met her to take soundings. As you don’t trust Wynter, you should approve.’ Thomes patted his goatee, a tic which declared machinations-in-progress or a lie just told, or often both.

  ‘I have your interests at heart, Master,’ declared Sister Prudence, as the habit of deference resumed control.

  ‘Then act like it and mind the ship,’ repeated Thomes with a nod towards his study door.

  Sister Prudence paused in the passage beyond to glance through the window at the Rother. It looked sulky, she felt, its current retarded, the surface without sparkle, still stained ochre from the flood. She wondered how a river god would look – muscles twisted like cord, a rush-green beard and a torso encrusted in shells. In her youth she had tended the Guild’s beehives in the narrow strip of land south of the rockface which housed the prison. She had known the river in all her moods. Then, alas, her cleverness and practicality had marked her for higher office and a Hall-bound existence.

  But this restlessness was new. Geryon Wynter had brought with him danger, but also opportunity. All around the status quo felt precarious. She felt sure the Master had lied to her about his so-called ‘soundings’ with Persephone Brown, but she had also lied to him.

  A crew of young Apothecary volunteers were keen to take on the town and ride the river.

  Mind the ship.

  Maybe she would do just that.

  5

  Of Webbed Feet

  ‘Yuk, this one’s all bulbous and green. Hey, stalky-eyes, ya looking at me?’ Percy Finch dangled the unfortunate spider by its one surviving leg in front of his face before tossing it into the fire.

  ‘One hundred and twenty,’ cried Percy’s friend, as if calling a darts score.

  ‘Legs or spiders?’ crowed Percy.

  The crudity of the exchanges between the two boys shocked even Sly. Mrs Finch must have a side he had overlooked. The sooner this grotesque vigil ceased, the better it would be for everyone.

  Only the fire and two tall slow candles illuminated the Great Hall. Pools of shadow hid the guards in the gallery and Sly lurking beneath the mysterious high balcony with no access. She will come that way, Wynter had said. What other way could there be, with all other doors and windows locked and fastened?

  On went the dark charade until—

  It happened in moments. A slight hooded figure slipped through the balcony window, scuttled across the wall as if on adhesive feet, dropped to the ground and advanced on the two boys.

  ‘They kill us for their sport . . .’ said the invader, menacing in the very gentleness of her delivery.

  They backed away as ordered, and with exquisite timing Sly released the cord by his right hand. The weighted net fell from the ceiling. The guards disentangled her, binding her hands, and Sly rang the servants’ bell.

  ‘We got her, we got her,’ shouted Percy. ‘We are the champions!’

  The interior door clicked at the turn of a lock.

  ‘Silence,’ bellowed Wynter as he strode in. ‘Get those boys out of here.’

  Sly tossed each of them a bag of coins.

  Percy and his friend gave the intruder a sidelong look as they were led away. Her movement across the wall had been unnatural, yet the face beneath the cowl had a rare beauty.

  Wynter walked up close to Morval and handed the box of surviving spiders to a guard. ‘Release them,’ he said, ‘well away from here. You see, dear Morval, I’ve nothing against your eight-legged friends, so long as they don’t interfere with matters their petty brains cannot possibly grasp.’

  ‘Weaving spiders come not here,’ said Morval.

  Only then did it dawn on Wynter that some elusive permanent damage had been done to his chronicler by Slickstone’s vengeance, to which he had been a willing party. But what did it matter, so long as she could record his legend with her incomparable brilliance?

  ‘Talk properly,’ he snapped. ‘You’re not a child.’

  ‘I have drunk and seen the spider,’ chuntered Morval.

  Wynter yanked back her cowl, releasing a cascade of golden hair. ‘You don’t look a day older – but that’s not why you’re reprieved. You work the paint as ever you did. And I know where your brother is hiding, so you’d best not disappoint.’ Wynter motioned to a guard to repack her paints and brushes. ‘You have your usual room, the penultimate floor, with a river view. You will join us for dinner, of course.’

  Sly recalled his master’s confrontation with the wax-faced intruder at the Unrecognisable Party. Now too he sensed the hand of a lost history returning to haunt the present.

  ‘You’ll finish off my party piece first. If you need materials, tell Mr Sly – just like Mr Bole in the old days. Now, as then, we’ll bequeath such sights to posterity, you and I.’

  Old History

  1624.
The Rotherweird Valley.

  Hugo Finch is unfashionable: he likes to walk. Men and women of position prefer horse to feet for any journey of distance, to keep their garments clean and to outrun the cutpurses who occasionally filter down from Hoy. Since there is no map and but one road, and that no more than a thread of worn-away grass, he mixes exercise with exploration.

  At the outer limits of his journeys he meets a raggedy man with burnished skin and the muscles of a blacksmith, who belies his ignoble appearance by speaking English and Latin with equal fluency. He goes by the lofty name Gregorius. In quick time this chance forges a friendship.

  Today high summer bathes the valley in warmth and a breeze so gentle it teases the skin. He finds Gregorius in the shade near the Pool of Mixed Intentions, dangling a fishing line. A pike lies in the grass, long, sleek and armed to the teeth.

  ‘River pirate,’ says Gregorius, whose hook attaches to a wooden lure in the shape of a minnow.

  ‘I’d like your advice,’ says Finch, ‘as an uninvested man. We’re laying a new square in town. The Mayor and his friends wish to bury gold coins dead centre as an offering for a prosperous future. They’re calling it the heart of the town. The carver has fashioned a wooden plug and built a cavity underground. They have a secure chest.’

  ‘I’ve known coins to be buried by bridges for good luck. I see no harm in the idea.’

  ‘Nor I, were the coins not so peculiar.’ Finch displays the coins furtively, even in this secluded place. There are seven, each numbered, including a man with a distinctive face, a strange tree infected with mistletoe and an even stranger monster. ‘I may no longer rule, but coinage remains my province. My agreement is needed, but I’d need a reason to refuse.’

  Gregorius does not like what he sees: the face is Geryon Wynter’s, a dabbler in the other place; the monster is of the mixing-point, and the tree has been laid low by poison. He senses guile and purpose, a strategy for a distant future.

  ‘They lay a trail of some kind. Why else have numbers? I suggest a precaution: add a last coin of your own design, a coin which speaks of unity.’

  Finch has a mind like his father’s, rich in good order but short on imagination. ‘Give me an image,’ he asks.

  ‘In old England they talked of an escharion, a silver instrument with two pipes and one mouthpiece.’ Gregorius embellishes a little. ‘They blew it to unite competing tribes. I can describe it for you.’

  Gregorius does so and Finch is comforted by this symbol of togetherness. He has access to the necessary gold and Rotherweird boasts a fine worker in precious metals. He will bequeath his own little secret to posterity.

  ‘Your line is tugging,’ says Finch.

  And so it is.

  1650. The Chapel of St Jude, near Hoy.

  In a small family chapel close to the Rotherweird escarpment, Ambrosia Claud the First kneels alone before the single statue of St Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Dusk has drained the light from the windows. A candle illuminates the saint’s long-suffering face.

  She accuses rather than prays. ‘You have deserted me. Have I not prayed?’

  The truth, and she knows it, is the converse: she has never prayed, save for herself, and then only for the right cards or dice or a man of looks or influence to turn his head. London has swallowed her life and fashioned her values. Her beauty has attracted fine baubles and a position at Court, but now, in its slow but perceptible decline, she must pay to stand still while the young saunter ahead, coiling their bodies around the ladder of advancement.

  So, here she is, penniless and penitent: a true lost cause. Even her cuffs and ruff wear a jaundiced look these days.

  The knocking on the chapel door is odd, two syncopated raps, delicate but insistent. Who visits a remote family chapel on the threshold of night?

  A nun is the answer, although she has a secular, business-like air. ‘Miss Ambrosia Claud?’

  Ambrosia is not in confessional mood. Even in penury, she retains her haughtiness. ‘This is a family chapel.’

  ‘I find private places of worship more piquant than the grand cathedrals, don’t you?’

  Ambrosia has studied French; it is a Court card, after all. A piquant is a quill, but has a nun ever used the word in this other sense of seductive? ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I collect for the Order.’ The smile sits in the eyes only. ‘Relics.’ The nun flicks back her cloak. A velvet pouch hangs heavy at her waist and clinks as she moves. Large coins clink, light coins tinkle. Ambrosia curses her misfortune: this is one trade she cannot do.

  ‘St Jude has travelled all the way from Siena. He is not minded to move on.’

  ‘I’m not here for your saint . . . fine though he is.’ The postscript arrives a fraction too late. Nor should a woman of the cloth say your saint in such a tone.

  But what matter? Ambrosia smells opportunity. She waits.

  ‘I’m after that slither of tree you keep in the transept.’

  ‘We guard it, Sister, under lock and key, because it’s malign.’

  ‘You’re not fit to guard it for that very reason.’

  Ambrosia cannot deny the undeniable. Within a few steps of the gnarl, that being the label supplied by its finder, Ambrose II, its loathing for its captors is palpable.

  ‘Allow me to show you,’ continues the nun, and she strides to the transept wall. Ambrosia shuffles close behind. The nun caresses the surface with her fingers and something untoward occurs. The wood’s dark presence dissipates.

  ‘This for that,’ she adds, spilling gold coins from the pouch into her hand. Ambrosia drinks in the profile of the king’s curly-haired head. It exudes power and luxury, the world she is missing.

  ‘To relieve you of your burden,’ adds the nun.

  Ambrosia unlocks the lever. She cannot turn it fast enough. A trick of the light surely, but, once released, the gnarl reaches for the nun’s hand, not vice versa.

  The nun returns the coins to the pouch which she swings into Ambrosia’s waiting palm. ‘No need to count,’ she says. ‘I have a way with numbers.’ The nun turns and hurries down the nave with the gnarl, conjoined almost – a transaction pleasing to both sides.

  The door clicks shut as Ambrosia recalls an arithmetical truth: two negatives make a positive. Does that mean the false nun shares the gnarl’s malign spirit? What has she let loose in the world? I have a way with numbers, her visitor had said. For four hundred pieces of gold, read forty pieces of silver? Has Judas supplanted St Jude?

  Ambrosia shakes off her scruples like dust. Savour what money can buy. God loves a sinner, doesn’t He?

  2016. Die Graue Katze.

  The alto saxophone rises, shudders in climax and subsides: his riff. Or is it hers? Here gender does not dictate or declare: men and women, many made up, converse and make assignations. Most are neither beautiful nor young, just happy to sever the mossy cords of convention.

  Bole alias Benedict Roc watches. In his long experience of decadence, the Stuart Court has come closest to mastery, but the Germans do have a knack.

  His new acquaintance returns from the bar with a bottle and two stemmed green-tinged glasses, a rare moment of orthodoxy. ‘Trockenbeerenauslese,’ says Herr Doktor Heinrich Flasche, physicist extraordinaire, or better still, Physiker außergewöhnlich. ‘Zey pick ze grapes individually once shrivelled to ze size of ze raisin.’

  His accent is stereotypical German English, ‘ze’ for ‘th’ and ‘v’ for ‘w’, but his vocabulary and syntax are excellent. His unbecoming body is as ideal as his remarkable mind for the game to come.

  The wine is sweet, but the balance between fruit, sugar and alcohol cannot be faulted. Bole alias Benedict Roc takes a second sip before speaking.

  For his part, Doktor Flasche, aware that his appearance and intellect could be discouraging, is cheered by the attentions of this good-looking and intelligent Englishman.

  ‘So, you’re confident that parallel worlds are conceivable,’ says Bole.

  ‘More zan conce
ivable, dear Benedict, zey are likely, if you zubscribe as I do, to ze multiwerse – and more particularly, to membrane theory. Multiple membranes, each a uniwerse in its own right, float in high dimensions. If zey collide, which is very rare, you may get a big bang, or zomething like it.’

  Bole has studied the subject long and hard. He worries that Dr Flasche’s theoretical brilliance might not match the need for practical application. ‘I offer a variation,’ he says. ‘Two membranes are joined at one tiny point. A cross-dimensional bridge occurs, the effect of a cosmic collision long ago. They share time, but not place.’

  ‘Cosmic collision is a zound explanation for dimensional shifts and gateways. But can ze connections be zevered and with vot consequences? Zat is the burning question. You vould need a shock, you see. Zis is my expertise, you might zay.’

  This mild self-compliment signs the physicist’s death warrant.

  They leave the club and walk the foreshore, hands on shoulders. Doktor Flasche explains that he holidays in Düsseldorf to get away from the university crowd in Cologne. It is a pleasure to meet a kindred spirit. He points at the Rhine. ‘In zis town ze great composer Robert Schumann wrote his happiest vork, ze Rhenish Symphony, only to hurl himself into Old Vater Rhein four years later, also in zis town. He vas rescued, but he ended his days in a zanatorium. Such is ze hair’s breadth between genius and madness.’

  These are his last words.

  It is after two in the morning. There are no witnesses. Exit Herr Doktor Heinrich Flasche, German theoretical physicist, and enter Mr Robert Flask, a historian without references and any prospect of employment save in one peculiar provincial town, where there happens to be a vacancy.

  OUT OF TOWN

  1

  Habits Die Hard

  Orelia had to break out. She could neither be seen in town nor face another dose of matronly duties in the Witan Hall. Oblong’s narrative of his encounter with Ambrose Claud had contained a detail worth following up: the Claud family chapel, assuming Oblong had not been taken for a ride.