Tax cuts, extended public holidays – news to all. A sepulchral quiet descended as Snorkel’s appeal to self-interest wove its spell.
Orelia felt a reality check. Who could trump the wiles of this master tactician?
‘Any takers?’ asked Snorkel to the sound of falling cards.
An ambitious Sewage Sub-Committee member folded first. ‘Rotherweirders, we should heed the Mayor’s wise words.’ With an unctuous smile, he placed a glove on the table.
A second glove-holder followed suit. A man with a disappointing beard, gifted at algorithms and driven by his wife to seek social prominence, muttered, ‘I know my place,’ as he laid his glove beside the first.
Last but not least, the managing partner of Rotherweird’s most expensive solicitors, Finewad & Parchling, glided down the central aisle. A tall man, head like an apple on a stick, he spoke with rehearsed gravitas. ‘The law may rule, but she must also serve.’
In translation, another glove had been surrendered: this time for an increased share in the Town Hall’s conveyancing business. Sly had succeeded in his task, delivering the right message to the right targets: remunerative sinecures in the next appointment round. Such a pretty system, thought Snorkel. Control the gloves and you control the would-be candidates. After a nod from Sly, council staff appeared at the doors with trays holding glasses of red and white wine. He had done his sums: all gloves accounted for, save for the two lost in his father’s era, and that meant celebration time.
Fanguin was up for the fight, but he had neither glove nor support. Orelia felt numbed by the poisonous mix of apathy and anti-climax. She sat beside Valourhand, whose right hand clenched and unclenched as her head turned from the clock to the chamber and back again. She started to rise, subsided, half-rose again. She wants maximum impact and no time for another candidate, Orelia deduced; a straight fight with Snorkel would appeal.
Snorkel lifted his own glass. ‘That’s that, then – I propose to thank you all with a glass of Vlad’s finest—’
A different voice rang through the chamber, cold, and commanding instant attention. ‘Hold your horses, Mr Snorkel. Why go to all this effort for so little? Surely we deserve a contest to lighten up our winter? Your tax cuts and holidays sound like a sop to me. Are we to be bought for a glass of wine – which we’re no doubt paying for anyway? I shall conjure a far more interesting change of direction.’
Strimmer sauntered down the aisle, velvet glove dangling from his right hand.
Valourhand swore as she worked through the implications. Two candidates from the North Tower would never win the day, but Strimmer would be far worse than Snorkel. She knew the darker reaches of his personality. She watched the clock hand slip another notch as Strimmer slapped the bust.
She thrust her glove in Orelia’s lap, hissing, ‘It has to be you.’
Snorkel eyed his opponent. He had dirt on Strimmer, and while the town welcomed the revenue from the North Tower, they distrusted its scientists. Moreover, Strimmer had the wrong kind of charisma, as confirmed by the muted response to his declaration.
‘An excellent contest,’ declared Snorkel cordially, ushering in the wine. ‘May the best man win!’ This would be easy.
The word ‘man’ enraged Orelia; since the meeting’s reopening not a single woman had spoken. She strode down the aisle and Snorkel sensed a change in the atmosphere.
‘I’m standing,’ she said simply.
‘Is this possible?’ whispered Snorkel to Gorhambury. ‘Can women stand? Mrs Anyone?’
‘In these Regulations “man” means “man” or “woman” in all contexts,’ quoted Gorhambury, staring straight ahead.
Snorkel turned back to Orelia with a twinge of genuine horror. If Mrs Snorkel behaved like this – if wives generally did – where would they be? He pulled himself together and asked, ‘And what are you standing for, Miss Roc?’
Rhombus Smith’s slogan tripped into her head. ‘Ancient institutions and modern improvements!’ She seized a passing glass and improvised. ‘With busts you can see and Regulations you can read: transparency!’
‘But you need a glove,’ he said.
A smile of mock concern died on his lips as, her blood up, Orelia wrenched the glove from her pocket and slapped the bust with a violent backhand that made the real Snorkel recoil. Receptive to defiance, the Chamber oohed and aahed.
Snorkel played his last ace. ‘Gallant try, Miss Roc, but you’re too late, I’m afraid – it’s four-fifteen, and, as Mr Gorhambury forever reminds us, rules are rules.’ He pointed at the Parliament Chamber clock. It was 4.15, undeniably.
‘Indeed they are, Mr Snorkel, indeed they are.’ The reedy dryness of Gorhambury’s voice and his perfect diction, born of a phobia of misunderstanding, had a surprising resonance. ‘The clock is four minutes fast in accordance with paragraph 5(4)(a) of the Municipal Timekeeping Regulations,’ he chimed.
An isolated clap swelled to a cheer to an outburst of applause.
Gorhambury rose to his feet. ‘I declare this meeting of the Sewage Sub-Committee closed.’ He turned to the Mayor. ‘I require your chain of office, Mr Snorkel, as per Regulation 16.’
Snorkel seethed – Mr Snorkel? How quickly Your Worship vanishes! – but he graciously inclined his head. Gorhambury removed the chain and laid it lovingly on the table in a perfect oval, as for a neck in waiting. From his pocket, Gorhambury produced a second chain, less ornate but still imposing, which he handed to Snorkel. Inclining his own head, so reversing the process, he intoned the ancient oath:
‘I undertake to protect Rotherweird’s citizens during the election period. I undertake not to compromise the policies of the future or undo the policies of the past, unless strict necessity demands it. I undertake to treat the candidates with due neutrality. I accept the role my chain of office declares: in loco parentis. I declare myself clear of any illness of body or mind.’
Snorkel, given a free hand, would have prosecuted the last sentence as perjury. Instead, he attempted a humble expression, so unfamiliar an exercise that he looked both oleaginous and insincere.
Strimmer did not ‘do’ pretence. He wore his natural haughtiness, a natural Mayor-in-waiting. Orelia sipped her wine and queried her sanity.
‘I declare three candidates,’ Gorhambury intoned. ‘The incumbent, Mr Sidney Snorkel; Mr Hengest Strimmer, the Head of the North Tower Science faculty; and Miss Orelia Roc, the proprietor of Baubles & Relics. A speech-day will be held on the first of November in the Parliament Chamber. There is otherwise to be no canvassing. Candidates will answer questions from four to six on weekday afternoons at their home or place of work. The candidate with the largest number of votes wins. The Regulations have fixed this election for the Winter Solstice. The result will be announced in the Island Field at three in the afternoon. All citizens, including babes in arms, must be there. The Summoning starts tomorrow. Welcome our own when they return.’
The lugubrious cast of Gorhambury’s face, sculpted by public toil and private grief, lit up with the semblance of a smile. He had journeyed the thorny path from abject disgrace to restitution.
Outside the Crier, a born thespian, strove to do justice to the unfolding drama behind him:
‘In strides Strimmer, velvet-handed,
To flay the Mayor’s marbled face.
As Fragrance too outwits the clock:
Ms Bric-a-Brac – Orelia Roc.
A three-way contest, no holds barred,
The choice is yours, to stick or twist,
One must win from our racing card –
Mayor, trader or scientist?’
*
In an anteroom off the Parliament Chamber Snorkel debriefed Bendigo Sly, whose moon-face twitched like a dog expecting a blow.
‘Where did those bloody gloves come from?’
‘Dirty pool, dirty pool,’ mumbled Sly, his phrase of choice for a
ny hostile moves he had failed to anticipate.
‘Turn the Roc woman over – family weaknesses, dodgy genes, youthful indiscretions – and get me the lowdown on her men, women or whatever else she likes. I need ten-carat dirt.’
‘I shall trawl the subterranean streams.’
‘Cut the verbal posies, Sly. I’m not in the mood.’
‘Your Worship—’
‘Nor am I “your Worship”! I’m plain Sidney Snorkel.’
‘The imminent people’s choice,’ replied Sly, with an unctuous bow.
‘Who’s behind Strimmer?’
‘Some pale imitation of Sir Veronal?’ suggested the eavesman to cheer his master, for unlike these amateurs, Slickstone had been a real threat, and Slickstone was no more.
‘They’ll pay,’ he said, more to himself than Sly, ‘in spades.’
Old History
1572. Rotherweird Manor.
With Wynter and the eight surviving Eleusians secured, Oxenbridge’s men scour the Manor’s grounds for evidence. A windowless hexagonal outhouse boasts fresh brick the colour of ripe peaches. A chute embedded in one wall is stained with offal and behind it they can hear a gibbering chatter, a noise unknown even to these well-travelled veterans. A torch is lit and swords are drawn.
Oxenbridge, drawn by the noise of conflict, arrives too late. Corpses litter the ground and when he crouches, he sees they are child victims, not the abominations they first appeared to be. Murdered, or put out of their misery? He does not care to ask. A soldier never dwells on the forgivable mistakes.
‘Bury them with a prayer,’ he says.
*
The pidgeboy is not so far away. For all his suffering, the valley remains his home. He keeps to the hinterland, roosting in the dense slopes of Rotherweird Westwood, until, years on, Hieronymus Seer, now called Ferensen, finds him there.
‘Fortemain always said you deserved a better name,’ Ferensen told him. ‘His choice was Panjan – don’t ask me what it means. I think he just liked the sound of it.’
The pidgeboy plumps his feathers; he agrees. A man and a bird in discussion on a grassy bank: such is the strangeness of Rotherweird. Of his sister, Ferensen does not speak.
January 1572. Rotherweird Manor.
Sir Robert Oxenbridge hunches over a small oak desk mean
enough for a schoolboy. The leaded windows fracture the hook of the moon. A moth sputters up and down the glass – is it contented or trapped?
His goose quill scratches a single word on a sheet of parchment already rich in deletions and amendments: godforsaken, not an epithet to use lightly. God must be everywhere to see everything – how else could He judge fairly? Yet in this valley, even with order restored, horror stalks Oxenbridge’s every turn.
Take the attack on Geryon Wynter by his gaoler, truly unnatural in its ritualistic savagery. The violence was inexplicable – until they found the gaoler’s strangled body in a reedbed south of the town. Oxenbridge knows how to measure bodily decay after death – rigor in the limbs, temperature, the settling of the blood, which insects have arrived and which not. The gaoler was dead before his mysterious twin stripped the flesh from Wynter’s back. A scourging, Oxenbridge concluded.
Old magick; only in a godforsaken place could such devilry flourish.
His recommendations as to sentence and the valley’s future have been approved by the Privy Council. Isolated by enveloping hills, Rotherweird will be kept from the rest of England but at a price. Here the study of history will be forbidden.
Tomorrow he passes sentence on the men. One problem remains: two of Wynter’s three women have survived and come to him as penitents. They wring their hands, and will not look him in the face. Unconvinced by this actorly show of contrition, he has imprisoned them at opposite ends of the Manor’s warren-like top floor.
He blinks. Has the moon fleetingly vanished in a clear sky? He catches a scuffling on the landing and a squeak as from a swinging window, but he sees the guards below, motionless and in position either side of the outer gate. Nonetheless, he edges towards his sword.
The latch clicks and rises, a bare foot nudges the door open and one of the women, Nona, glides rather than walks into the chamber. Her eyes are shining. ‘I have a proposal,’ she says. Her shift is ruffled by a breeze – the window must indeed be open.
‘How did you get here?’
She closes the door and answers a different question. ‘I assumed you would have the room with the most commanding view and the best fireplace.’ She extends her hands to the blaze, palms up.
‘I meant, how did you elude the guards?’
‘The Manor has hidden ways.’
Her voice rings false, but Oxenbridge lets her continue. ‘We would stay, to record our story as a penance. We will preserve you and Sir Henry, and we will not spare Mr Wynter.’ She places on the bed a piece of fine-woven linen, which depicts children standing beside a wagon. Yes, he is there, and his horse, a grey, just as was. They have talent, these young women, and remembering minds. ‘When we are done, we would go to the nunnery near Hoy . . . to atone . . .’
Oxenbridge has seen tapestries before – heroes in plumed helmets, trees and plants too blue to convince, endless cornucopia, exotic animals – but this woodland scene has the vitality of truth. Still, he is torn: he knows he must not multiply records of Wynter’s evil activities – but the wagon in wool entrances him, as does his personal appearance.
She reads his anxiety. ‘We will not be literal – we would not want to be.’
‘Continue for the moment,’ he says at last. ‘Mr Finch will decide.’
She moves closer. She has the gait of a panther.
Feeling an urge to assert himself, he asks, ‘What happened to the third woman?’
‘An accident – in the other place.’
‘You were there?’
‘Mercifully not.’
There is a quick, emotional glance; he thinks this is true.
She steps into that space which mere acquaintances leave unoccupied. ‘Does the man who did this yet live?’ She traces the zigzag scar above his right clavicle. The question holds an unsettling intimacy.
‘He does not,’ replies Oxenbridge truthfully.
‘It still needs healing.’
She holds back her hair and bends her mouth to the old wound.
30 January 1572.
January, Mr Wynter’s chosen month for execution day, and everyone dances their steps as he intends: Janus, the two-faced god of endings and beginnings. From their pinched attic windows, Estella and Nona watch the procession, with the Eleusians shuffling like obedient children in a line, hands clasped behind their backs. Wynter leads the condemned, followed by Slickstone. It is dry and cold, but there is no birdsong. The stones are there too; Nona felt them in Oxenbridge’s room and she feels them now.
What is to come? Of the men, only Slickstone has previously entered the mixing-point, and he might even conquer tabula rasa. Time will dispose of the others, if the punishment does not.
Scry’s mind settles on the absentees: Calx Bole – where is the Potamus? She dislikes the easy confidence in her companion’s manner, as if everything were pre-ordained. She curls a lip. Centuries may pass before she knows the truth.
Nona takes a new skein and threads it with wool the scarlet of blood. Her needle dives, surfaces, dives. Their relationship is changing; Nona has the upper hand and now she declares it. ‘I am Penelope; waiting, waiting, waiting.’
NOVEMBER:
SECOND WEEK
1
The Summoned
Looking more like refugees than Rotherweird’s well-heeled emigrés, the Summoned huddled in the lee of the great oak as rain and wind swirled around Rotherweird Valley. There were no more than thirty men and women, less than the Town Hall had catered for. Up the hill, toiling towards them and th
e Twelve-Mile Post, came the charabanc and a convoy of bicycle rickshaws, hoods up, lamps glowing, multi-coloured umbrellas protecting the drivers. They had made the self-same journey the previous evening, but a train had been delayed somewhere in the mountains of mainland Europe and the connection had been missed.
Boris raised his goggles to consult the lodgings list compiled by Madge Brown, now acting secretary to Gorhambury in his new role. She had divided the visitors into two groups, North Gate and South Gate access, to prevent bottlenecks.
In the crowd, two figures drew the eye: a striking and intense-looking young woman, hair tied back, the face a near-perfect oval, ushered the shambling arrivals into line; while the other, a man, stood apart, ignoring the shelter of the tree. He carried a suitcase in one hand and a wooden paint-box in the other; under his right arm was a large easel. Although richly endowed with musical talent, Rotherweird lacked weight in the visual arts. Portraits were doomed to destruction on the subject’s death under the History Regulations and suspicion of countrysiders had long sapped enthusiasm for landscapes. The town had a single art gallery, close to the North Gate, home only to local work, where one painter stood out. Castor Everthorne’s work, confined to the 1920s, was neither naturalistic nor wholly abstract, but had the gift of suggestion: spirits of wood, stone and ritual.
Everthorne’s life had been troubled with periods in prison followed by an early death hastened by drink. His only son had gone abroad to promote South Tower optical products in Europe, but he too had died young, in his fifties. This man, Tancred Everthorne, must be the grandson. A stocky man with powerful shoulders, a fine if pugilistic face and dark hair worn quite long, his lone defiance of the rain would have fitted his appearance, save for a contradictory air of insecurity.
Wyntertide Page 15