‘Minor adjustments needed,’ replied Boris, still on his haunches.
Miss Trimble’s eyes widened.
Their colour defeated him.
‘Sod the minor adjustments,’ she said, pulling her jersey over her head. ‘Let’s make hay.’
*
Boris could not remember an hour better spent. A few minor adjustments might be needed next time, but as test flights go, this had indubitably been a success.
Afterwards, they walked through the fields, finding a wood store with logs stacked in the shape of a dragon, and a bridge over a bubbling stream with a rail carved with recognisable inhabitants of tree, water and earth – nothing fantastical here. As they rambled, Miss Trimble unburdened herself, listing the unsung duties of a committed School Porter.
‘You’ve nothing to prove to me,’ said Boris.
But nothing lasts; what is sunlight without shadow? Through the hedge they glimpsed a convoy of rickshaws flitting in and out of view. Several passengers held clipboards.
‘Bloody Strimmer!’ cried Boris.
‘Look,’ Miss Trimble added. ‘Apothecaries too.’
They ran back to the tandem. The vacuum technology had expired, but pedal-power remained.
*
‘Measure and mark,’ barked Strimmer. ‘Count windows, habitable rooms and staircases; record the aspect. Find a barn to move them to. Preferably not too close; they’re bound to smell.’
The Ferdys stood on their front lawn. Bill considered protest, even violence, but decided against it. Madge Brown kept a semblance of order: no doors were kicked down, nothing was broken, no plants were trampled; although it remained a shocking intrusion aggravated by a misplaced sense of entitlement.
‘I’m booking in,’ crowed a Town Hall employee. ‘Their kitchen’s twice the size of mine. Not bloody fair, is it?’
‘What’s in there?’ Strimmer pointed at Ferensen’s tower.
‘Dust,’ replied Ferdy.
Bill had served Hengest Strimmer many times in The Journeyman’s Gist, but now he behaved like a stranger. Strimmer seized a tape measure, but Madge Brown blocked him.
‘I said: I do the inside measuring, Mr Strimmer, and that’s all you’re entitled to, statistics.’ Strimmer protested, but to no avail. ‘I supervise you,’ she said forcibly, ‘not you me. That’s the law. I don’t want any unpleasantness.’
True to her word, Madge Brown measured the tower and the house, inside and out. The Apothecaries showed no interest in either. They split up, noting the lie of the land, the placement of hedgerows and larger trees. They took plant, rock and soil samples, looking to Bill like a swarm of mad examining doctors for whom health meant infection.
The Ferdy children stood stock-still and silent, traumatised. They huddled around their father as if facing instant eviction.
Strimmer and the Town Hall contingent, including Sly, Snorkel’s eyes and ears, peered in through the ground-floor windows. They had not expected such furniture, the carvings, the toys, the crockery and carpets. The fireback had a finely cast sun and moon overlooking a field of corn stooks.
‘They sure have been ripping us off!’ cried someone, eliciting a chorus of agreement, which overlooked the outhouses holding the loom, the kiln, the workbench, the foundry and the carving tools. Nothing had been bought; all had been fashioned by hard work and skills acquired from centuries of application and tradition.
Having reduced the Ferdys’ home to a page of statistics, Strimmer’s party trudged back to their rickshaws.
Strimmer consulted a long list. ‘On to the Guleys next!’ he cried.
*
Boris and Miss Trimble arrived too late to intervene – whether for good or ill, Bill could not decide. A roused Boris was not the usual gentle, shy Boris. He would probably have laid Strimmer out.
Instead, Miss Trimble calmed the children by treating them as adults.
‘Why was Mr Strimmer here?’ asked Gwen. ‘Why were they measuring our house?’
‘He’s standing for Mayor,’ she replied. ‘You’re part of his plans for the valley – and they are not good plans, so we are opposing them.’
‘We don’t like Mr Strimmer,’ added Ben, Gwen’s brother.
‘Nor do I,’ Miss Trimble agreed.
‘And why were the Apothecaries here? Why is our home their business?’ asked Gwen.
‘They envy you. They don’t understand the work that goes into everything here.’
‘So they’ll just take our home and let it go to seed?’ asked Gwen.
‘We’re fighting to be sure they don’t – and we’ve every chance of seeing them off.’
Bill Ferdy adding a sobering thought. ‘I’m afraid they have a point of sorts: some of us do overcharge, especially those with a monopoly. We’ve been lax as a community.’
Megan Ferdy made a wise call, banning political talk during lunch.
*
The journey home was mostly downhill and little handicapped by the failure of the vacuum technology. For no obvious reason, which made it doubly pleasurable, Miss Trimble kissed Boris on the nape of the neck as they came in sight of the town.
He responded by offering to extend her co-pilot’s brief. ‘Would you care to assist me on an even more unusual project?’ Sensing a rare seriousness, she waited until he added, ‘I refer to The Thingamajig.’
‘Boris, do explain.’
‘It’s the world’s most unconventional ballot box,’ he replied.
7
Solitary Confinement
Had Finch not been destined by birth to be Rotherweird’s Herald, the biological sciences would have appealed. He treated his incarceration as an opportunity to analyse the effects of prolonged exposure to solitude, darkness and starvation, although the latter lost point after two days when food arrived – a balanced diet of water, fruit, bread and dried meat – and at irregular intervals thereafter. With the delivery of the food, pitch-black briefly turned grey and he glimpsed the ceiling, as well as the entrance and steps cut into the rock, but they were all well out of reach.
But food ensured only physical survival. Finch reasoned that the brain handled a vast volume of data, both auditory and visual, and that deprivation of both would quickly disorientate, so he used his chiming pocket watch to keep a hold on time and reality.
He still suffered from occasional hallucinations: flashing lights at the periphery of his vision, and grotesque apparitions. To keep them at bay, he devised an exercise regime, set himself mathematical problems and pursued his penchant for nonsensical word-chains.
Life . . . force . . . way . . . point . . . blank . . . page . . . boy . . . soldier . . . ant . . .
A square hole in the floor catered for bodily functions with a mercifully long drop. The cell was cold and windowless, the walls thick.
One of his grotesque visions turned out to be real: a luminous stag beetle, a species unknown to him, which would scuttle across the ceiling before parachuting down on an extended umbrella-like membrane. Finch kept crumbs for the insect, which quickly adapted to his regime, appearing whenever the food did and waving its antlers in apparent gratitude. The friendship sustained him as much as his watch.
‘. . . a luminous stag beetle, a species unknown to him . . .’
He slept fitfully at best, sleep bringing back the horror of his abduction. Shock had disconnected the scene into fragments which replayed at random: the hag’s feathered face, her claws, her vile breath.
Days passed and silence became the new enemy. His own voice felt alien and intrusive, and even the tick and chime of the watch he now found as irritating as an unresponsive companion with a monotonous voice and only one figure of speech. He resorted to party games: ripping a button off his jacket, he would throw it along the cell floor, then kneel and search in the darkness until he found it. He repeated the process again and ag
ain to the point of madness.
The interrogation came as a relief.
*
A sliver of moonlight caught the steps above. A long tube snaked its way into his cell, although staying far out of reach. Through the tube came a gravelly voice that gave no hint of sex or age; he suspected a masking device for the Fury. Nobody on foot could cross the marsh.
‘You are Mr Marmion Finch,’ the voice stated.
‘I am he.’
‘And the Herald of Rotherweird?’
Pause.
‘A shake or nod of the head is no use in darkness, Mr Finch.’
‘I am he.’
There followed questions about his childhood, his godparents, the remoter corners of his residence, all of which Finch answered truthfully. He wanted to build a relationship. The Fury had taken him from Escutcheon Place; she had known about the black books. Whoever sent her knew the layout of his home, and his role in the town, which raised an uncomfortable but plausible explanation for these otherwise pointless questions: he might look like Finch, he might inhabit Finch’s quarters – but neither of those proved he was Finch. Maybe his interrogator feared he was Calx Bole, shapeshifting – hence the identity test. If that was the case, Bole had not sent this Fury, and a new power had arisen.
The questioning ended to a chime of his watch.
‘An heirloom, Mr Finch?’
The personal touch took the Herald by surprise. ‘Yes, from way back.’
‘Rotherweird workmanship?’
‘Certainly.’
‘It never stops?’
‘Not in my lifetime.’
‘Nor in mine.’ Finch felt a tremor of wry amusement in the voice. ‘Goodnight, Mr Finch.’
So businesslike, and a far cry from the Fury.
A sack of food and jug of water followed, together with a return to the darkness, save for the luminous stag beetle.
Two nights later the tube returned. This time the focus shifted to eminent residents: Snorkel, Gorhambury, Rhombus Smith and other prominent teachers, the priest, the town’s judge, the editor of the Chronicle, the Head Librarian. Had they been their usual selves, the voice in the tube asked; had he seen any of them with a slouching cat?
Finch fleshed out his thesis. The enemy were divided. His captor knew Bole was a shapeshifter and suspected him of taking over one of the town’s prominent characters. The cat, as pictured in The Dark Devices, had been Bole’s familiar – and, of course, find Bole, and you find the stones. He remembered the old rule: examine what’s missing, find the dog that does not bark. Bolitho, Rotherweird’s most original scientist, had arranged a funeral heavy with obscure clues, and the cause of his death had baffled the doctors. Why not ask about him? The Fury must know Bole was not Bolitho. Finch found this tangle of half-clues more restorative than his mathematical puzzles, but he made little progress unravelling them.
Finch found the wait for his third session excruciating, as if a pleasing flirtation had been abruptly broken off.
‘On the question of books . . .’ said the tube.
If the Fury has found what she sought, why waste time on this topic? he wondered, but again he answered truthfully. Perhaps in the questions he might uncover the answer.
‘Who rebinds the books in Escutcheon Place?’
‘I do.’
Asked to name the bookbinder’s tools – another credibility check? – he rummaged in his muddled mind, struggling to reconnect its damaged circuits. The questioner showed patience, and slowly the words returned with their specialist uses: pallets, gouges, brass rolls, finishing wheels, needles, the clicker’s awl and the bone folder.
‘Do you hold any other copies of Straighten the Rope?’
Finch detected a smidgen of unease at the end of this question, as if the voice feared the hand had been overplayed. He remembered the hag seizing that very book from the archivoire as it rose towards the ceiling. The enquiry suggested the Fury had pursued the right book, but found the wrong copy.
He said conversationally, ‘Only the one from Mr Wynter’s library.’
The voice acquired a judicial quality. ‘You have not dissembled, Mr Finch. You may yet serve the new dispensation.’
Then silence; this was an envoi. Desperation seized him. ‘Please . . . please . . . can we—’
The tube snaked back up the shaft and grey faded to black once more.
No more food came, which Finch could not reconcile with the Fury’s friendly last words, and this, with the loss of company, pushed him to the edge. Time’s anchor drifted; senses tangled. He saw music and heard the walls. As his wits deserted him, he grew to loathe the know-all voice of his watch, until he dropped it through the hole in the floor, punishment for regaling him with such an ambiguous chime.
Noon or midnight, he no longer knew or cared.
Old History
1645. Rotherweird.
Wider England is in turmoil; Hoy declares for Parliament, but Rotherweird maintains a studied neutrality – or rather, John Finch, her Herald and ruler, does. But sooner or later ideas slip through physical frontiers and Finch knows his power must be shared – but he will not force the pace. He prepares, and waits.
Rotherweird has burgeoned on the rich mulch of the Eleusians’ scientific gifts and the practicality of Oxenbridge’s men. Invention and craftsmanship: a sure-fire recipe for progress. Carts move faster here; cranes lift heavier weights, eased by gears developed from da Vinci’s drawings; forges burn fiercer when fanned by hydraulic bellows siphoning the power of the river; the enhanced heat gifts superior metals; and students of the invisible isolate the flammable gas which seeps from the marshes on the Rother’s eastern shore.
The Rotherweirders start to trade learning with the outside world in return for materials, while still guarding their deeper secrets. They acquire gold and silver, and their coins feature tools of science, not the Herald or his arms.
Sacheverell Vere is one such scientist. He is diligent, acquisitive, humourless, and in the matter of religion, very much of his time. A Puritan, he frowns on vestments, statues and all flamboyant distractions; the Good Book holds the Word. He is spared the troubling issue of bishops, for Rotherweird has none. He is unmarried, an unconcerned virgin at fifty. He finances municipal projects, of whose potential he is an astute judge, lending at rates just short of the sin of usury.
The town’s Master Carver, a tall, cadaverous man of similar age, pays a visit.
‘Mr Vere,’ he begins after an exchange of pleasantries, ‘I worry for your gold in these tumultuous times.’
Vere winces: his gold is nobody’s business but his own.
‘I have designed an under-floor cupboard I believe to be as good as a hidden vault. You open it with a remote device.’ He describes the mechanism and Vere is hooked.
‘At what price?’ he asks.
The figure, even to Mr Vere’s Spartan eye, is modest enough to border on the reasonable.
Within two weeks the promised coffer is installed, as secure and inconspicuous as promised. Its upper surface is indistinguishable from the floor which holds it, and the opening mechanism sits snug behind a wall panel.
As he takes his fee, the Master Carver has a new proposal. ‘I wondered if I might decorate your panelled hall with a verse or two from the Holy Book?’
‘This not a church, Mr Roc,’ Mr Vere says severely.
‘But why not let your piety inspire posterity?’
‘Which verses?’
‘These we all relate to – I had in mind a parable or two.’
Vere agrees to one, a test sample for the cost of the materials only, to be carved on a beam in the hallway roof, a reward for those who look heavenwards. The Good Samaritan, his roadside beneficiary and the insensitive ‘others’ passing by duly appear, moment frozen in oak. The scene has drama; the workmanship is vital and exquisite.
The Master Carver takes a second modest fee, then suggests, ‘Might not a single parable languish for lack of company?’
Vere scowls, but undeterred, Mr Roc continues, ‘You might even be thought a mean man, displaying one verse only, or narrow-minded with only the one virtue on view – unjustly, of course.’ He pauses. ‘I offer discounts for quantity.’
Vere accepts, on condition that the central beam should bear the legend Veritas Non Vanitas. He does not want an awkward conversation at Heaven’s Gate. The Master Carver will leave the wall panels untouched.
For many months Vere’s Great Hall is tenanted by ladders with precarious walkways running between, for Roc works on several tales at once. He eyes each beam from below and beside; he feels the wood, he even licks it – then his edged tools turn, incise, shape and contour, until the ceiling is transformed into living visual text.
Vere learns that the Master Carver is much consulted on the matter of Rotherweird’s architectural development. Not unlike his home, the town increasingly reflects the carver’s eye.
1650. Rotherweird.
In wider England, the king has lost not only his crown but his head. These are turbulent times.
The Master Carver works on, as parables spread to neighbouring ground-floor rooms. At times Vere is disturbed by their secular feel; there is often a sense of everyday events – but maybe that is the point.
While working on the prodigal son, the Master Carver broaches a new subject. ‘My Guild, the Woodworkers, has elections and a written constitution to ensure accountability. I believe the town must follow if we’re not to succumb to outside rule.’
This is a different carver from the one Vere thought he knew: this man is articulate, pragmatic and forceful. Yet the argument is appealing, and he certainly does not want his monopolies disturbed by Hoy’s acquisitive traders.
Roc continues, ‘We need a temporary Mayor before our first election. I have taken soundings. Who else but you: Veritas Non Vanitas? We have drafted Regulations to preserve the Herald’s true prerogatives.’
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