Wyntertide

by Caldecott, Andrew

  Attractive to women, Boris guessed.

  Everthorne uttered only three words as Boris shook his hand. ‘Observe,’ he said, pointing to the mosaic of yellow-brown leaves glued to the road by the rain, ‘water colours.’ He broke away to help load the luggage.

  A welcoming band attempting a medley of popular Rotherweird songs gave up as the elements prevailed. Gorhambury, chain of office round his neck, hustled from charabanc to rickshaw, shaking hands and providing contact details should any problem arise. A few he recognised; most not.

  At a stately pace, the convoy wound its way back to town. Rotherweird was reconnecting with her own.

  2

  Matters Astronomical

  Bert Polk’s eldest, Ronan, had a bedroom high in the roof, where the eaves branched in crazy directions: a cabin where a crow’s nest should be. His siblings enjoyed more generous rooms, but sharing deprived them of secrets – like the kaleidoscope, a bequest from Professor Bolitho to his old friend Uncle Boris. Kaleidoscope, according to the Greek dictionary, was for ‘the observation of beautiful forms’ – but this one offered only a blank screen. Uncle Boris had tried, his father had tried, and his mother, just as technically gifted, had dismissed it as broken.

  ‘It’s not broken,’ Boris had told them. ‘We’re just not asking it the right questions. It needs a child’s ingenuity.’ By happenstance, Ronan had returned from school at that very moment, and Boris handed the instrument over. ‘Menders, keepers,’ he added by way of incentive; not that Ronan needed any.

  The instrument had been lovingly assembled. The two interconnecting tubes, the smaller one circular and the larger hexagonal, had both been made with long matchsticks, glued together with meticulous care and held in place by metal bands with tiny screws. The larger tube turned a full circle, but the view through the eyehole remained a bare hexagonal light. The kaleidoscope didn’t rattle, which, in Ronan’s judgement, supported his uncle’s diagnosis that nothing was broken.

  Now he lay in bed and observed the small table under the skylight, where the kaleidoscope’s silhouette caught the moonlight. Talk to me, he prayed, talk to me, please. A slender logical chain came in response: a gift from one man of machines to another – machines which did things, like telescopes and charabancs – so of course it must work.

  Inspiration struck and he knew he was right before his feet touched the floor. This kaleidoscope needed darkness to shine, just like the Professor’s telescope at school.

  He aimed at the far corner of the room. Chips of light gleamed from the back of the tube. He knew the arrangement and the contrasting colours of the brightest: cold silver and a smouldering red, Rigel and Betelgeuse, ‘stars’ of Orion the hunter, the grandest winter constellation. He turned the larger, hexagonal tube and another light moved slowly though: this one multi-coloured, with the hint of a blur behind it. Rigel and Betelgeuse twinkled; the interloper did not.

  Scrabbling into a jersey, he hurtled down the oak staircase two steps at a time in search of Uncle Boris.

  *

  Rhombus Smith had ordained that, as a mark of respect, the Rotherweird School Observatory should remain locked as Bolitho had left it until the New Year: in effect, a preservation order for a scene of monumental untidiness. The astronomer had preferred the floor to table and chairs, so reducing his chosen work surface to a collage of confetti.

  Beneath this paper sea lurked the jetsam of Bolitho picnics: half-eaten crusts, dried-out bacon, rock-hard fragments of cheese and cake – staple forage for the incumbent house mouse, mus musculus. Operating a grid system, the mouse cleared several pages a night, a sufficient yield for himself and his family. He respected the vanished human occupier who, unlike his fellows, had ascended the evolutionary tree to movement on all fours. Tonight, he reached the centre of the room; no different to any other night until—

  Click. Whirr.

  The mouse’s head rose through the paper like a surfacing submarine. A crumb fell to the floor, but he saw nobody and nothing alarming: no change to the door and, more importantly, no way in for the School cat.

  Click. Whirr. Whirr.

  The long cylinder above the human’s only seat moved fractionally, and a ceiling panel retracted. Faint bars thrown by starlight spangled the floor. A steel arm lifted in a rectangular case on the opposite wall, dipped its point into a bottle of ink and moved to a spool of graph paper wound round a drum.

  The mouse, not a believer in ghosts, seized the nearest rind and scurried back behind the wainscot.

  At the narrow end of the tube a crystalline green lens slid into place and film on the longest of long exposures began to run.

  3

  A Competition Won

  Snorkel studied his list of the Summoned with apprehension. These were unfamiliar men and women, unexposed to his benign rule. They might turn vocal, or, far worse, be amateur investigators. He acted promptly. The Snorkel Foundation doubled their subsistence allowance for the electoral period. Who does not lick the hand that feeds?

  His secretary handed him a brown envelope. ‘It’s the only one this week,’ she murmured.

  The Snorkel Essay Prize had run its course, yielding nothing better than subservient platitudes, but this manuscript looked different. The letters were oddly square, but also ornate: a hint of idiosyncratic boldness. Snorkel’s knees jiggled like pistons as the opening struck home.

  The two political imperatives, power and permanence, are best secured by the judicious use of three tools – policy, patronage and pressure. These fine instruments require sound intelligence for, and in, their user . . .

  The treatise fell short of the prescribed maximum length, but had not a wasted word. Snorkel judged it a perfect pitch. Untouched by self-admiration, a quality for rulers, not subjects, in Snorkel’s judgement, the entry ended with the signature Pomeny Tighe. She was one of the Summoned from an old Rotherweird family, who reported from abroad on breakthroughs in outsider science and, as important, on its areas of continuing ignorance.

  He waved the envelope at his long-suffering secretary. ‘Interview, tomorrow, soonest.’

  *

  Snorkel read aloud his favourite sentence. ‘These fine instruments require sound intelligence for, and in, their user . . .’ He looked up at the young woman. ‘What do you mean by intelligence?’

  ‘I mean, sufficient data to identify the opposition and sufficient brainpower to read their moves before they make them.’

  A compressed answer: she spoke as she wrote. The voice fitted the oval face, demure for so sharp a message. Pomeny Tighe’s rich, tow-coloured hair bobbed just above her shoulders. The freckles on her nose added a Bohemian touch, but she was trim to a ‘t’, as good government should be, and young for such an old head – early thirties, perhaps, even late twenties?

  ‘Where do you work out there?’ he asked.

  ‘I assist Heidelberg University’s mathematics department. I keep an eye out too.’

  ‘You might stay on here after the election?’

  ‘That depends.’

  That’s enough small talk, time for business, decided Snorkel. ‘How am I to better practise what you preach?’ he asked.

  She hitched her skirt and pursed her lips. The eyes had a feline quality. ‘You have seventeen committees and one Town Clerk.’ She paused.

  Snorkel encouraged her. ‘Come on, Miss Tighe, candour is easy on paper. Tell me true.’

  ‘Your Clerk has no time.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The political arts.’

  ‘The Town Hall has a multitude of moving parts. Gorhambury oils, checks and calibrates, and in his absence, the mechanism grinds to a halt. I know this for a fact. We tried without him once.’

  ‘But who owns this marvellous clock? Who is to preserve it from fire or theft?’ Her change of tone, expansive if not poetical, took Snorkel by surprise.

&
nbsp; ‘Moi,’ replied Snorkel immodestly, before adding a painful qualification, ‘assuming the people see sense.’

  She re-crossed her legs, left over right – shapely legs, Snorkel noticed. ‘Who else is in the frame – for the prize, I mean?’

  Snorkel stood up and opened his arms. ‘Nobody – you win the Snorkel Essay Prize!’

  ‘Which is . . . ?’ Her lips parted, pink tongue darting through.

  ‘Beyond my secretary is a small office. It’s yours for the asking, with pay, pension and holiday to be notified, terminable on two weeks’ notice by either party. On my re-election, Mr Gorhambury will be . . . relieved.’

  To judge from her smile, she caught the intended ambiguity. ‘Mr Snorkel, you won’t forget this.’

  Snorkel tacitly agreed that was indeed most unlikely.

  4

  A Party Derailed

  ‘Party?’ croaked Aggs. ‘Party!’

  Oblong looked sheepish. He had his faults, but he did give credit where it was due. ‘Madge Brown suggested it.’

  Aggs’ face worked like a glove puppet. ‘About bloody time, Mr Oblong, if you’ll pardon my Austrian. You’ve had a year to bed in, the cold’s a coming and we’re all getting older. But there be parties and parties: The Fizz, The Droop and The Plain Sailing.’

  ‘The Fizz sounds good,’ stammered Oblong, cowering beneath his general person’s onslaught.

  ‘No wife, no children, no paramour – you can afford it. Bravo! Fizz means fizz; down with the plain sailors!’ Aggs flung open the outside door of Oblong’s flat and pointed at the loft space above and the landing below. ‘Furniture up, accordion and fiddle down. Party mood! It’s all about swing.’ She swayed in a mildly suggestive manner. ‘And once they’re ’ere, give ’em a burner!’

  ‘A burner?’

  ‘Bubbles, brandy and sugar lump.’

  ‘Er . . . bubbles?’

  Expensive bottles, price tags attached, flicked through Oblong’s head in multiples of twelve, to the tinkle of an old-fashioned cash till.

  Aggs ignored the query. ‘And don’t get all doomed and gloomed by refusals. Outsiders ain’t everyone’s cup of cocoa.’

  ‘If you say so, Aggs.’

  ‘I know so.’

  *

  Finch, working by candlelight, found the Elizabethan mind more accessible in the early hours. The cat had prompted this bout of research: the animal who had tried to befriend him when Bole was pursuing Slickstone. He now knew it to be Bole’s familiar from the mixing-point: a cat with fiery feet, an arsonist-cum-assassin with the gift of English. Finch had glimpsed the creature several nights in a row, peering through the glass roof-lights into the archivoire. Orelia Roc, not a witness to exaggerate, had accused the cat of trying to kill her during the fire in Deirdre Banter’s house after a negative response to the question, Do you have the book? The book could not have been Wynter’s Recipe Book, as Bole already knew the whereabouts of that volume – after all, he as Flask had left it in the North Tower as a trap for Strimmer to find.

  Escutcheon Place held the contrasting libraries of Sir Henry Grassal and Geryon Wynter, the Manor’s first two owners. Somewhere here, he suspected, must be the book Bole and his familiar were pursuing; hence his decision to return to the Elizabethan documents in their secret cavities. The more he read, the more concerned he became.

  At his trial, Wynter had actively encouraged his obliteration in the mixing-point, calling it ‘a suitable Passion’. Twice he had referred to resurrection. No less disturbing, Wynter had been viciously attacked in prison, but then his gaoler’s strangled body had been found in a ditch at the edge of the Island Field. His unspecified injuries were described as ‘unnatural’. The prime suspect had to be Bole, shapeshifting – but why would Bole attack his own master? To spare him obliteration in the mixing-point?

  When giving evidence, Wynter had played down the incident, referring to it only as ‘his scourging’, as if collecting tokens of divinity.

  He found one reference to books in Wynter’s closing speech: ‘Childless and stripped of my disciples – I bequeath my library to this Manor and, therefore I trust, to posterity. Man lives on through his learning.’

  Finch glanced at the two competing collections, rival armies of thought in the same bay, Sir Henry’s bound in beige calf above Wynter’s arcane jet-black volumes. He rubbed his eyes: three-thirty in the morning, the dead hour when even monks and condemned men sleep. He returned the trial record to its secret compartment and took out The Dark Devices, the record of Wynter’s heraldry for the Eleusians. As he examined the strange coats of arms, replete with hidden references to the work of the mixing-point, he tested an alarming thought against recent events.

  They had overlooked a yawning gap in the narrative.

  As he fretted over the implications, he heard a telltale scratching above his head.

  That wretched cat must be back.

  *

  Through the banisters of Oblong’s dingy staircase twined tiny lights that changed hue from silver to red to gold at every visiting step, a typically benign South Tower entertainment. Below Oblong’s outer door an accordion-fiddle duet delivered boulevard fare while Aggs handed out champagne cocktails.

  Fizz meant fizz.

  Orelia arrived first in order to leave early. She found the celebrity status so relished by the likes of Snorkel discomforting, being shunted to the front of shop queues and accosted in the street. She was already yearning for her former life, the richness of its casual dialogue and the freedom to choose her own company. Now she had to think before she spoke, a self-censorship alien to her nature. Even among friends the election fostered a stultifying respect . . . the two musicians nodded in deference as she passed.

  She had a subsidiary motive for arriving early: a question for Oblong with the smell of old history.

  Aggs thrust a glass in Orelia’s hand with a knowing wink. ‘Early bird catches the worm.’

  ‘Vote for me, Aggs – nobody else will.’

  ‘The words of the lowly never won nuffink, Miss Roc, but the votes of the lowly might. More to Rotherweird than you might think.’ Aggs adopted a conspiratorial pose. ‘No party fizzes with a droopy host. Cheer ’im up, ’e’s ever so nervous.’

  On cue Oblong emerged from the kitchen and Aggs thrust a glass into his hand. ‘Host shows the way,’ she said.

  ‘They were asked for seven – it’s twenty past.’

  ‘Lesson one: greet your guests.’

  Orelia pecked Oblong on the cheek, relieved that the sofa, scene of their one intimate encounter, was not on view, before launching her question. ‘Puzzles pass the time. Try this one – Shown badly behaved flirt, Royal rages in empty house – seventeen letters – three, five, four, five.’ She had launched too soon; it sounded forced.

  ‘Why me?’ replied Oblong stiffly.

  ‘We have no Royals; you do. We have no history; you do.’

  ‘Whose clue?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Shapeshifter’s.’

  Now Oblong understood. This mattered. He peered out of the doorway – still no more guests – while Orelia wrote the clue down. Badly behaved and Royal rages were anagram territory. Empty house must be the key. Empty house, empty house, empty House – he juggled the letters in his head until it felt right – it had to be. He rocked to and fro on his gangly legs and Orelia felt a flicker of affection; she had found his naïve enthusiasm attractive once.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Anagram,’ he declared, a stoop nearing a full bow, ‘of “shown”, “behaved” and “flirt” as signalled to the reader by the word “badly”. The empty house is wider England’s Parliament. The Royal is Charles: he’s raging because the rebels have scarpered. The answer is—’

  The doorway flashed with the reflected light from the string twisted around the banisters: he had a second guest, if not
a third.

  ‘The answer is. . . “The birds have flown”,’ he announced, flapping his arms and prompting an intervention by Aggs.

  ‘Hold it, Mr Oblong. One moment, you’re old droopy drawers, the next you go loco. Try settling between the two.’

  ‘Did you say “birds”?’ said Valourhand, skipping into the room. She wore a waistcoat, boots and, like Orelia, trousers. She even looked pleased to be there. Her unexpected sartorial effort cheered Oblong.

  Orelia guided Valourhand away as an influx of arrivals detained Oblong by the doorway.

  ‘Shapeshifter set a Winter Solstice crossword for the Chronicle,’ she reported. ‘One clue broke the History Regulations – and, guess what? It’s an anagram.’ She relayed Oblong’s analysis.

  Valourhand retreated to a corner, her turn to whisper. ‘I found this foul shit in the marsh – Fanguin says it’s hybrid shit – half-bird, half-human.’

  At the head of the surge was Fanguin in a familiar battered tweed suit, waving a magnum (‘be sure you keep the best to last’). Orelia coaxed him over and explained.

  Fanguin enjoyed donning his biologist’s hat. ‘Such a creature must be nocturnal to escape attention – and that means a daytime roost.’

  ‘Rotherweird Westwood has places where nobody goes,’ Orelia pointed out.

  ‘Most birds are territorial, and Westwood is miles from the marsh,’ countered Fanguin. ‘Also, Ferensen knows Westwood like the back of his hand. He’d know – he’d have said.’

  Except he’s disappeared from view, thought Orelia, before turning her attention to Valourhand. The physicist had a finger hooked in her waistcoat pocket, an oddly self-conscious gesture, but symptomatic of a general change; she was less spiky than usual.

  ‘There’s Salt, let’s ask him – he walks the riverbank.’