Wyntertide

by Caldecott, Andrew

  The doctor, privately dismissing the sentiment that soft light could ease a man’s passing and irked by an instruction from someone so low in the school hierarchy, nonetheless withdrew his hand from the gaslight. He cut a conservative figure in his three-piece suit, dark blue overcoat, brogues polished to a shine and a Gladstone bag.

  ‘You a minister?’ he asked drily.

  Trimble read the subtext: why her, and not Matron? ‘He foresaw his decline,’ she explained. ‘He called it “nature’s way”. He asked me to help.’

  ‘You have professional staff.’

  ‘And their diagnosis was “no diagnosis”.’

  The doctor did not share his puzzlement with Miss Trimble. ‘Tell me about the relapse,’ he asked.

  A week earlier Vesey Bolitho, founder of the Astronomy Faculty and mixologist extraordinaire, had been his usual irrepressible self. Whatever the mysterious illness, he had appeared to be in remission, his pulse stronger, his colour restored.

  She explained, ‘Two days ago he retired to his bed. He weakened physically, but sharpened mentally. Yesterday he wrote the inscription for his gravestone and made dispositions for his funeral. This morning he gave me a hug and closed his eyes. He’s remained mute and motionless ever since – which is not his usual state.’

  The doctor held Bolitho’s wrist and found a barely discernible pulse. ‘Any time now,’ he agreed. ‘The body is closing down. I’d offer morphine, but he seems strangely . . .’

  ‘Content,’ she agreed. Content with leaving us, she thought. Why doesn’t he fight?

  ‘Should anyone be here?’

  Again that unspoken message: the School Porter wasn’t a suitable companion for a head of department on his deathbed. But she knew the school’s web of personal relationships better than anyone – all human traffic docked at the porter’s lodge: teachers, pupils, cleaners, gardeners. Bolitho was loved by everyone, but an intimate of few, so candidates for this final vigil did not spring readily to mind.

  The enigmatic Gregorius Jones she vetoed as incapable of seriousness, and half in love with him, she could not face the complications. She had seen Valourhand grow close to the professor, despite the traditional rivalry between North and South Towers, but she had disappeared on sabbatical. Rhombus Smith, engulfed by the paper sea that preceded every new term, had already visited earlier in the day. Orelia Roc had her shop to manage, Boris would be on a charabanc run, Gorhambury would be embroiled in municipal business and Fanguin would drink.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ added the doctor before leaving. He had never removed his coat. It was that hopeless.

  After showing him out, she sat beside the bed and opened the envelope the professor had left for her. The single instruction in Bolitho’s once elegant but now stumbling hand had an unsettling directness:

  Bury me in a traditional wicker coffin in my baggiest waistcoat and trousers.

  He even left instructions for finding these clothes, right end of his dressing-room cupboard. The postscript warmed her:

  Please remember me as I will you: a flicker of light in a dark universe.

  The note bore this very day’s date, followed by the word ‘Dusk’. Outside ribbons of cloud pinkened at their lower margins. She reached for his hand. No pulse now, at dusk, as if he had planned both the day and time of his death. Such orderliness did not fit the Bolitho she knew.

  She bent her head, blew out the candle and kissed her dead friend’s forehead.

  3

  Fliers

  An anglepoise lamp in silhouette, the heron held its pose. Yellow eyes flicked open. By moonlight the reeds broke the surface of the water like tufts of hair on a scalp of glass.

  On Rotherweird’s southeastern frontier, treacherous marshland ran to a sharp escarpment carpeted in scrubby thorn where, as if ashamed by the surrounding desolation, the Rother plunged underground.

  Light, stars, temperature, what calls, what sleeps, what the stomach says, these were the heron’s timekeepers – but none had provoked this wakening. The bird did not move, because it sensed the unfamiliar. Eyes and ears reported nothing untoward – but the shadow on the water moved despite the windless night: left ahead, right to the side and in front, wheeling and slowly growing larger in a descent: a creature from another world, human in size, with leathery wings spread wide.

  The heron lost its nerve and, launching from its toes, fled west, the wing-beats frantic, towards hedgerows and cover. The bird could not resist one backwards glance – and the image bit deep.

  Never again would he venture this side of the running water.

  4

  Of Puddings

  ‘I am Gurney Thomes, Master of the Apothecaries.’ Burly in build, head almost square, with a goatee beard and piggy eyes, he wore a thin scarlet sash over the standard Apothecaries’ black-and-white costume.

  Mrs Fanguin gulped. Having followed her unsigned instructions religiously, east down Hamelin Way through the poor quarter to an anonymous side door in the Guild’s Hall, she had expected a minor functionary.

  The Master turned smartly on his heel and strode off into a labyrinth of dingy passages.

  Poverty had brought Bomber here. After Snorkel had dismissed her husband from the School for not reporting Flask’s several breaches of the History Regulations, she too had been dismissed as staff cook, despite support from a lengthy petition and the Headmaster.

  ‘No – it’s to mark the gravity of the offence,’ Snorkel had declared, gleefully rubbing his hands. He disliked not only Fanguin, but anyone who liked him.

  The Apothecaries’ unexpected letter had been headed Strictly personal, private and confidential, a good excuse for keeping the adventure from her husband.

  After a number of twists and turns, they reached a sparsely appointed kitchen with a cast-iron range and a table on which sat one pan, two empty bowls, two spoons and one small knife. A butler’s sink sported one tap (cold).

  ‘I have a signed reference from the Headmaster—’

  He cut her off. ‘We act on our own intelligence.’ He pointed to a row of glass jars lined up on a shelf like a sweetshop, their contents strikingly diverse. At a glance she identified two sorts of beans – haricot and lima? – barley, or maybe wheat; she’d need to look closer. Chickpeas sat next to dried fruit – figs and apricots – and sugar. A cruet held rosewater, judging by the subtle scent pervading the room. ‘The wherewithal,’ he added.

  Two unequal hourglasses, one marked 1 and one .33, stood like parent and child on the corner of the table. Thomes turned the largest as he left.

  So, an hour and twenty minutes, and she must time herself: a test of her integrity as well as her speed.

  She quickly confirmed the ingredients. Was she allowed to be selective? She suspected not, such was the Guild’s reputation for stringency. A vestigial memory surfaced: a recipe she had never attempted, though the unusual name had lodged in her consciousness. Noah’s pudding: how to achieve opulent simplicity when supplies are running low.

  She reached for the larger bowl. Seize the moment.

  The concoction filling the smaller bowl was tastier and more nutritious than it looked, and every ingredient had been used. She washed the pan, straightened the now empty jars and cleaned the hob. As the final grains tumbled through the neck of the smaller hourglass, footsteps could be heard, evenly spaced, click-clack, click-clack: another way of marking time.

  Master Thomes shed his public face: his tongue darted in and out and his nostrils flared, readying the senses. He dipped the spoon and held it aloft, peering and sniffing before swallowing it whole. He licked his lips, which she found disconcerting – a Puritan voluptuary – but she nonetheless forced a smile. Cooks should appreciate being appreciated.

  He placed a single page on the table. ‘A covenant,’ he said. ‘You work only for me.’ His fingers
were seashell-pink, the cuticles near invisible: a Puritan with manicured hands.

  She picked up the sheet and read. The pay was generous – more than the Town Council had ever offered – and the hours reasonable (Fanguin wouldn’t notice her absence). Promptness and secrecy were absolute. She must enter by the same side door and keep herself to this room. The facilities would be improved, for he would expect variety and finesse. She could order ingredients as she saw fit; costs would be handled by the Guild.

  He added an oral addendum: he disliked bitterness, and on no account should she ever use celery.

  Bomber signed. They had to eat, so she had no choice.

  5

  Varnishing the Truth

  Every five years the cognoscenti of the Artefacts Committee – the Assistant Head Librarian, the Curator of the Rotherweird Art Gallery (the only one of its kind in the town) and the Master of the Woodworkers’ Guild – inspected Rotherweird’s more memorable

  ornamentation: carvings, sculptures, paintings, the more ancient books and other decorative arts. With a supporting cast of

  ladder-carriers and note-takers, and a selection of telescopes, they progressed from south to north over the course of several weeks. Damp, dry rot, woodworm, bookworm, erosion, scars left by years, weather and human agency – all were recorded, cures prescribed, time limits imposed and, for the most fortunate, municipal grants dispensed. No structure of any distinction escaped their prying eyes, save for Escutcheon Place; inspecting the contents of the Herald’s place of residence would be to inspect history, and that would be unlawful.

  Most cherished a visit from the Artefacts Committee. Not so the Guild of Apothecaries.

  ‘Coffee would be nice,’ said Madge Brown, the Assistant Head Librarian.

  ‘Coffee is for Guildsmen,’ replied the Master curtly, ‘and you’ve already outstayed your welcome. We look after our heritage.’

  Madge Brown had finished working her way through shelves of leather-bound, gilt-edged scientific treatises, all immaculately maintained, while the Master of the Woodworkers admired the most accomplished old carvings in town, an odd mixture of Christian parables and emblems of scientific endeavour.

  The Curator had more joy. The town had no real-life portraits outside this room; the Apothecaries must have been powerful indeed to have secured an exemption from the History Regulations for this visual record of their ruling class. There were still limits, though, even for them: initials only, no names and no dates.

  ‘This is odd,’ said the Curator, pointing at the largest portrait, set in a most elaborate frame.

  Madge Brown followed her finger. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she agreed.

  Even Thomes was driven to admit that the Guild’s founder had acquired an unpleasantly jaundiced veneer over recent months, but his response was accusatory. ‘It’s nothing to do with us. It appeared, just like that – I blame your last visit.’

  The Curator did not rise to the bait, but she had been on the committee for a decade and had never encountered such a sudden decline. ‘It’ll take some shifting,’ she said, ‘but we have just the person.’

  ‘Expensive work, no doubt,’ Thomes responded, adding quickly, ‘I expect a full subsidy.’

  ‘My Guild never gets a penny, so yours certainly won’t,’ interjected the Master of the Woodworkers with feeling; everyone in Rotherweird knew the wealth of the Apothecaries dwarfed that of all the other Guilds.

  ‘Misers!’ Thomes interjected as he stormed out.

  *

  A week later the picture restorer arrived. She carefully manoeuvred the painting onto a specially strengthened easel. Perching precariously on the penultimate step of her high ladder, she addressed her apprentice, a callow young man of few words with fastidious hands. ‘It’s an unusual varnish, mostly copal and amber; it’ll be the devil to remove. We’ll need the Bunsen burner, the copper jug and the oil.’

  ‘It’s over the right bottom corner as well as the arms, the mouth and the eyes,’ observed the apprentice. ‘I wonder what lurks beneath?’

  ‘To find out, we start at a top corner. We use the swabs gently; we clean after every double pass, so as not to put back what we’ve just removed. And remember: we don’t press harder until we’re sure we have the measure of it.’

  They worked in relays, the demands on eyes, fingers, mind and temper uninterrupted by any show of interest or offers of hospitality from their hosts – until a young Apothecary, who introduced herself as Romilly, arrived on the third morning.

  She was dressed like the rest, her skirt and smock unrelieved black, her chestnut hair savagely pinned back under a prim white bonnet. Yet her eyes twinkled, and half-smiles came easily. She brought coffee and offered biscuits with a beguiling flavour of marmalade and chilli.

  ‘Master Thomes has a sweet tooth,’ she confided, ‘and a private cook. We’re not meant to know, still less to share, but he’s too busy to notice so she does us goodies on the quiet.’

  She ate one herself, savouring it as if indulging in sin. The apprentice wondered how she might look with her hair down, in a tighter shirt and a colourful skirt swinging from the hips.

  ‘I hear you’re cleaning up the Founder,’ she said, licking the last crumb from her bottom lip.

  ‘We’ve done the left side,’ the apprentice said, proudly.

  ‘Half is enough to tell the rest,’ she said, tracing a long aquiline nose and high cheekbones with her finger: an austere, intellectual face.

  But the portrait held more. Twenty minutes later, tiny numbers crisply outlined in gold had emerged in the right bottom corner:

  7.49

  8.49

  Lines of golden thread emerged around the upper arms of the black velvet gown, and the restorer had just caught another puzzling detail when Master Thomes strode in. When she pointed out the figures, he adopted the same accusatory tone he had used with the Curator.

  ‘They weren’t there before,’ he said.

  Romilly came to their defence. ‘They were lurking beneath the varnish, Master – I saw them appear myself.’

  ‘Odd numbers,’ he said to nobody in particular, before delivering a dazzling sequence of observations: ‘7.49, 8.49 – multiply the first two numbers of each set and add the last to get 37 and 41, two consecutive prime numbers. The difference between them is 4, which is a perfect square, and the mean number between them is 39, the second number being the cube of the first.’

  ‘Very clever, Master, how quick, Master!’ was the liturgy Thomes encouraged and expected, but the apprentice, galled by the Master’s lack of respect for his principal’s skill, went off-script.

  ‘That doesn’t tell us much.’

  Thomes glared at the whippersnapper. ‘It tells us you play with brushes while we hunt down eternal truths.’

  The restorer intervened. ‘Your founder played with letters as well as numbers,’ she pointed out. ‘The gold filigree on the right sleeve holds the word “vale”, and the left holds “sum”: “Farewell” and “I am”.’ She traced the line with a brush before pressing home her advantage with an intuitive comment. ‘I’d say it’s a prophecy of some kind.’

  *

  Two days later, to Thomes’ chagrin – it evidenced a serious breach of confidentiality by the committee – he received a most impertinent letter. Although initially inclined to ignore it, he changed his mind: anyone who presumed to educate the Apothecaries about their own artefacts deserved humiliation. He accepted the offer and made his preparations.

  6

  Two Consultations

  For all his gifts for the darker political arts, Sidney Snorkel, Rotherweird’s venal Mayor, feared the vagaries of chance. The beneficiary of this anxiety inhabited that shady hinterland where fortune-telling slips into the occult. Estella Scry’s shop, The Clairvoyancy, sold Tarot packs, Tibetan prayer wheels, English hazel dousing rods,
Indian incense and Native American dreamcatchers, alongside books on phenomena as diverse as ley lines, star signs and crop circles.

  Scry did not dress the part – no bangles, hoop earrings or trailing scarves for her; more late-middle-aged respectable bordering on the prim: pleated woollen skirts, monochrome jerseys over cream-coloured shirts and well-polished sensible shoes. Nor did she fit the obvious physical archetype: her heavy features lacked spiritual presence. Only the eyes, with acquaintance, promised mystery: deep as wells, restless, intelligent. Vocally, she had variety, switching from rich to reedy, whimsical to firm: within the conventional lurked a performer.

  Scry’s more profitable business took place on the third floor of her private premises, a pencil-thin tower in Gordian Knot, the winding alley behind The Clairvoyancy. Unlike her artfully cluttered shop, her home lacked ornamentation or decoration save for a modern sculpture in her consulting room – hoops of sharpened steel, springs and bolts like an exploded mechanism haphazardly reassembled – with a single photograph of the same piece on the opposite wall.

  A circular table overlaid with a white embroidered cloth sat between two plain wooden chairs. There were no crystal ball, cards or tea leaves here; this was a room for serious business.

  Snorkel invariably visited at seven on a Sunday evening, slipping from a rickshaw, face dipped and shrouded by hat and scarf. On this particular evening Scry noted an uncharacteristically hasty step on the winding oak staircase: a Mayor on edge.

  ‘I happened to be passing.’ His standard movement followed his standard opening line: a Rotherweird ten guinea note slid across the table, which she slipped into her sleeve like a conjuror. She knew the eloquence of silence.

  ‘Do I look anxious?’ asked Snorkel, scrunching a fist into the opposite palm.