Committee members gaped and the caucus of unreliables, Apothecaries excepted, applauded.
Fanguin unloaded his spraying equipment onto a chair before clambering up the makeshift ladder, wobbling like a circus clown. ‘Exhibit A,’ he shouted at the mystified Sewage Sub-Committee, ‘one sheet of invisibility film, stolen from the premises of Mr Boris Polk.’
A sharp yank revealed Snorkel’s bust, eyes and mouth dripping with sly intelligence. Fanguin heaved the head off the ledge, secured it under an arm and descended. He positioned it on the committee’s table so that the audience now faced two Mayors, one in flesh and one in stone.
Fanguin thrust back his shoulders; he was on a roll against his bitter enemy. ‘Would the Town Clerk read Regulation 1, sub-paragraphs 2 and 3, of the Popular Choice Regulations,’ he requested politely, while grimacing like a magician promising rabbits.
Gorhambury now knew the Regulations by heart, and in view of the public’s right to know, he could only comply.
He stood up and recited, ‘To inaugurate an election, a candidate, other than the incumbent, must slap the bust (see Regulation 5) during the challenge period (see Regulation 2) with the velvet glove (see Regulations 2 and 7).’
And next: ‘The bust must be displayed in the Council’s Parliament Chamber throughout the challenge period and the present Mayor must be present throughout the aforesaid period.’
Small words registered in the collective consciousness – election, bust, glove, challenge period – quaint details teasing at Rotherweird’s love of ritual. A hint of chicanery registered too.
‘Whose bust?’ asked a committee member.
‘His Worship’s,’ Gorhambury supplied, ‘as you see here.’
‘When does the challenge period begin?’ asked Valourhand.
‘In two minutes.’
‘And end?’ asked another committee member.
‘Noon.’
‘Whose glove?’
‘That’s history, where we cannot go,’ replied Gorhambury, ‘but they sit on the six clappers on the electoral carillon on the top floor of Doom’s Tocsin: six gloves, for a maximum of seven candidates. The incumbent Mayor can stand as of right.’
Snorkel responded by rising imperiously from his seat and opening his arms in a gesture of welcome. ‘After decades – decades! – of loyal service, I am not a little put out that Mr Fanguin has sabotaged my cheeky little surprise: unveiling myself to launch the challenge period. But sensitivity never was his strong point.’
‘Challenge period?’ asked a member of the Sewage Sub-Committee.
Snorkel kept to his principles: never use the e-word. ‘It theoretically initiates a quinquennial ritual, which is best ignored,’ he said.
Nobody spoke; the taproot of long unchallenged power ran deep.
‘Business as usual, then,’ Snorkel added smugly.
The Keeper of the Clock stood up, a respected figure. ‘I do wonder how anyone could acquire a glove if I’m not told to open up Doom’s Tocsin.’
‘Nobody asked me to ask you,’ replied Snorkel glibly.
Orelia stood up, cheeks flushed, voice wavering. ‘Nobody could – because you can’t get a copy of the Popular Choice Regulations for love or money. Why are we all in the dark, Mr Snorkel?’
The Mayor slipped adroitly from past to present. ‘The Regulations should be in the Rotherweird Library for all to read.’
Orelia noted the should be. He knew they weren’t, but whatever happened, it would not be his fault. She shook her head and the audience did likewise, shifting to and fro as if watching a tennis match. ‘The Town Hall recalled them for rebinding months ago,’ she said accusingly.
‘Poor timing,’ agreed Snorkel, ‘but is anyone interested?’
‘I’m interested,’ chimed several voices in unison, their owners having belatedly grasped the import of ‘quinquennial’.
‘There are plenty of copies,’ replied Snorkel casually. ‘Take them when you go.’
‘It’s after nine already,’ boomed Fanguin, running a rhetorical arm around the chamber. ‘Are only those with an interest in sewage allowed to stand? We need the Regulations now!’
After a token whisper in Gorhambury’s left ear, Snorkel shifted to a ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ strategy. ‘It appears there has been a most regrettable lapse by Archives. The Regulations are under lock and key. I promise a full investigation, chaired by a magistrate.’
Gorhambury intervened with Roman impartiality. ‘Regulation 11 permits an extension of the challenge period until sunset in the event of fire, storm, act of God or other disabling circumstance. And His Worship has been misled: Archives have been working hard, gathering copies of the Regulations for all.’
‘When’s sunset?’ asked a committee member.
‘Four-thirteen,’ replied Gorhambury.
‘I move an extension to four-thirteen,’ said the Keeper of the Clock.
‘Seconded,’ chipped in Valourhand.
A forest of hands jerked upwards.
‘Carried,’ said Gorhambury solemnly.
Snorkel would happily have strangled his clerk for his addiction to small print.
The Keeper of the Clock, an arch-conservative, but liberal in the defence of ancient freedoms, was warming to his role. ‘Doom’s Tocsin will summon the town to Market Square,’ he announced portentously. ‘Gloves can be retrieved by anyone who wants them.’
‘Why, pray, are these matters for the Sewage Sub-Committee?’ stammered Snorkel.
‘They’re entrusted with clearing up mess!’ retorted Fanguin.
The audience murmured approval of their new champion. Only the Apothecaries and Scry remained inscrutable.
Finger ever to the wind, Snorkel changed tack again.
‘We reconvene at two-thirty. I am most grateful to the Clerk for belatedly galvanising Archives – a most challenging task, believe me.’
The councillors withdrew as the audience, exhilarated by all this talk of rights, votes and elections, headed for Market Square.
Once into the labyrinth of rooms behind the Chamber, Snorkel ushered Gorhambury aside and hissed, ‘What the hell are you up to?’
‘Your office is at stake, your Worship.’
‘It is now!’ the Mayor snarled, before summoning his lead eavesman, a lean, sallow man with a name to fit, Bendigo Sly, and murmuring, ‘You know what to do.’
‘Two were missing.’
‘They can’t be – Doom’s Tocsin is locked day and night.’
‘Like father, like son?’ suggested Sly.
Snorkel understood Sly’s veiled suggestion – two aspiring candidates had slapped his father’s bust before being bought off – so he embraced it while cursing Fanguin and Roc for stirring up a hornets’ nest.
‘Do the needful then, Sly, and quick about it.’ Sly managed two steps before Snorkel hauled him back. ‘And don’t lose that stuff you nicked from Polk. It could be useful.’
Sly nodded, judging it a bad moment to admit that in the scrum around the Committee desk, the invisibilty film – secure, he thought, under a paperweight – had mysteriously ‘vanished’.
On reflection, Snorkel saw no cause for concern, and some cause for optimism.
If he had to face the vagaries of election, he would surely win. Nobody played the system or the people it served better than him – and with a mandate, he could expand his fiefdom. Rotherweird Prison had been underused in recent times, for starters.
2
The Velvet Gloves
In the basement, on Gorhambury’s orders, Archives had boxed hundreds of copies of the most recent edition (1688) of the Popular Choice Regulations, ready for distribution from the Town Hall steps.
The Keeper went straight to Doom’s Tocsin to find someone had been in and out before him. Fanguin had removed one glove the previous Sunda
y night, but to his dismay, the other five had vanished. An inspection revealed disturbed dust on the floor and loose tiles near the bell-tower’s upper window. Act normally and await events, he decided. The great bell struck and struck again, as its tiny relation, the Crier’s hand-bell, tinkled through the streets.
‘Challenge period expires at sundown,’ declared the Crier, adding his own call to the hustings as he followed an ancestral route, which never covered ground already trod.
‘Who’ll slap the bust in Parliament Hall?
Who will stand and who will fall?’
The progress to Market Square began, and more Apothecaries, with dark stove-pipe hats added to their black-and-white garb, made a rare public appearance. Ordinary Rotherweirders in coloured clothing made way for them: corvidae loose among peacocks.
Otherwise, normality prevailed, with countrysiders plying their weekend trade. Boris spotted Megan Ferdy on her stall behind a pyramid of cheeses and warned her, ‘Tell Bill to open early. There’s going to be a communal chinwag.’
She nodded at a knot of Apothecaries. ‘I don’t like them.’ He handed her a copy of the Popular Choice Regulations, but the worry in her face did not ease. ‘Never shake a settled barrel,’ she added.
‘Even if the dregs are on top?’ countered Boris.
‘If the whole is drinkable, yes, even then,’ she replied. ‘I’ll tell him.’
Boris respected Megan Ferdy for her earthy good sense. He had expected enthusiastic support for the democratic cause and her cautionary note gave him pause as townsfolk poured into Market Square from all sides to collect their copies of the Regulations.
A studious hush descended. Boris, Orelia and Fanguin felt like sidesmen distributing hymnals.
Only Hayman Salt and Finch ignored the Town Crier’s summons. Human business no longer interested Salt, and constitutionally, Finch could not stand – and in any case, he had other concerns.
Estella Scry mingled with the crowds, listening and watching, rich pickings in all directions.
The dense text of the Popular Choice Regulations gradually yielded the basic rules: no more than seven candidates, the need to slap the sitting Mayor’s bust with a velvet glove to declare candidacy, the Summoning – a calling-in of Rotherweird’s expatriate voters in the event of a contested election – and the fixing of Voting Day by a complex sidereal formula. The Summoning generated particular interest; many Rotherweirders worked outside or overseas, infiltrating boardrooms, universities and governments to sell the town’s science (good and bad) and to monitor outsider progress.
*
‘Get me a glove!’ Thomes issued the order to the two youthful acolytes, the favourites who usually attended him.
Scry, in an all-encompassing blue shawl fastened by a jewelled phoenix brooch at the throat, extended a restraining arm. ‘It would be wasted, Master Thomes.’
The implicit insult rendered Thomes briefly speechless. ‘Wasted? Wasted on me?’
She put a calming hand on his arm. ‘You’re not eligible.’
‘Who says?’ he snapped, flourishing his copy from the Guild’s library.
‘You’re working from the 1645 edition. The Regulations were amended in 1688, when wisdom or experience decided that mayoral office should be denied to the Headmaster, the Herald, the Crier, the Keeper of the Clock, the senior Judge and the Master of the Apothecaries. I believe they call it “separation of powers”.’
She held out the relevant provision as corroboration, but Thomes barely looked at it, such was Scry’s newfound authoritative status.
‘What about the other bastards?’ And when she raised an eyebrow, he corrected himself, ‘I mean the other sodding Guild-masters?’
‘They were not considered “powers”, presumably.’
‘Nothing but low-level manufacturers,’ he hissed in agreement.
‘Think of it as a puppet show, with the Apothecaries holding the strings.’
Thomes did not fully grasp Scry’s message, but the gist felt good. ‘So, who’s the puppet?’ he asked.
‘Patience,’ she replied.
*
The Keeper of the Clock emerged from Doom’s Tocsin and took Boris and Orelia to one side. ‘The other gloves have vanished, apart from the one Fanguin took on Sunday night.’
They assumed a pre-emptive strike by Snorkel. ‘To the pub,’ said Orelia firmly, and led the way.
She had never seen The Journeyman’s Gist so full. She distrusted pub conversation, holders-forth preaching remedies for life’s ills or repeating old stories as new to listeners too bored to dissent, but today the banter had edge as the holders-forth dithered and the listening classes pressed for explanations.
‘With great regret I’ve decided not to offer myself.’
‘Why, for God’s sake, when you’ve spent years telling us what you’d do when you got the chance?’
All around her Orelia heard tactical retreat paved with feeble excuses.
‘The office would grind to a halt.’
‘My other half wouldn’t take the pressure.’
And the best: ‘We couldn’t cope with the grandeur.’
The prevalent emotion pervading the inn like stale incense was fear: fear of losing, fear of Snorkel and his tentacular reach, fear of criticism, fear of the limelight.
Boris located Fanguin, Oblong, Gregorius Jones and Bert Polk at a corner table. Fanguin’s glove lay in the middle, unclaimed.
‘Increase the public health budget,’ pronounced Jones. ‘Compulsory yoga at seven, Pilates at noon and a five-mile run before tea.’
‘You’d kill half the population,’ protested Bert.
Orelia strove to raise the standard of debate. ‘Rights wither if they’re not exercised.’
‘As does everything else,’ smirked Jones.
Orelia shook her head, feeling deeply depressed.
Valourhand elbowed her way through the press, squeezed in beside Fanguin and came straight to the point. ‘It’s time for facts, not blather: Jones lacks brains and Fanguin application. Boris has inventions, Bert his family and Roc her shop. Finch is disqualified and Gorhambury induces coma.’
‘He spoke well in the Chamber,’ said Bert, digging Fanguin in the ribs.
‘Him?’ responded Valourhand incredulously. ‘Who’d vote for a dismissed school teacher?’
‘Mrs Fanguin,’ replied Fanguin.
‘And you?’ Orelia asked Valourhand, put out by her rudeness. ‘No shortcomings?’
‘I alone protested against Slickstone. If the town wants a radical, you have one.’
‘A radical from the North Tower as Mayor?’ queried Oblong.
‘Listen to the outsider with no vote.’
For once Oblong had a riposte. ‘In fact, the resident historian does have the vote. Read the Regulations if you’re going to stand.’ He spoke with edge to his voice, the legacy of his suffering at the hands of Cecily Sheridan.
Orelia felt a flutter of affection for the hapless historian. At last he was standing up for himself – and he was right, the North Tower brought much money to the Town, but to give them the Town Hall too? Of course, the more fundamental objection, which nobody dared articulate, was Valourhand’s essential oddness.
Rhombus Smith passed by, pint of beer in hand, musing on fictional elections. He placed a thumb on the glove. ‘Ah, the heavy hand of power!’
Boris appealed to the headmaster. ‘Your vote, Headmaster: which of my friends should stand?’
Rhombus Smith liked to answer difficult direct questions indirectly. ‘Nobody must and maybe nobody should. If anyone does, consult the English novel, where lurks the winning slogan, Ancient Institutions and Modern Improvements.’ The headmaster, a radical conservative, took a swig of Ferdy’s Feisty Peculiar, smiled and moved on.
Valourhand seized the glove and stormed out.
> Outside the leaded windows, mist began to form, indicative of gathering uncertainties.
*
Strimmer surveyed the crowded pub with disdain: narrow-minded teachers, scientists without political nous, common labourers, Oblong and his ghastly friends. The youngest head of the North Tower in living memory, he considered himself intellectually Rotherweird’s first minister, but the time-consuming grind and grime of politics had repelled him, until Scry’s cards nettled his curiosity. He felt the tide of change lapping at Rotherweird’s foundations: Sir Veronal’s letter had held out the promise of power, and the prevailing mood of dissatisfaction and indecision meant a vacuum to be filled. Levamus.
‘Hengest?’ A tug at his jacket caused him to turn as the new Linguistics teacher sidled up. She was pretty and shapely, a pleasing short-term diversion. She waved her pamphlet. ‘Have you read this?’
‘Poor man’s theatre,’ replied Strimmer dismissively.
She giggled. ‘Like what’s in your jacket pocket?’
Strimmer glanced down to see two velvet fingers peeping out. He removed the velvet glove with its embroidered ‘R’ and checked the other pocket – a Tarot card. The Emperor.
He was being used, but did he mind?
At last, he had a thread of colour in his life.
*
By three o’clock every bench in the Parliament Chamber was occupied, with standing room equally congested. Mindful of the Fire Regulations, Gorhambury had managed, with difficulty, to keep the aisles free.
Being still technically the adjourned meeting of the Sewage Sub-Committee, the same members processed in, in the same order, and sat in the same places. All eyes were on Snorkel, but the old fox let them wait.
The chairman hurried through the Annual Report before the Mayor rose.
‘Welcome to – if I may deploy a naughty word – this historic occasion, and apologies for the abruptness of today’s events. The Town Clerk regrettably overlooked his quinquennial duties.’
Even Gorhambury, that inscrutable mandarin, gasped like a newt on a riverbank at this outrageous accusation. Snorkel, unabashed, surged on, slipping into his ‘man-in-the-job’ mode. ‘Observe one of many committees at work – restoration after the fire, the reopening of The Journeyman’s Gist, the Midsummer Fair; all down to them. Do they continue? Or would you prefer weeks of paralysis? And postponement of my tax cuts and extended public holidays?’
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