Wyntertide

by Caldecott, Andrew

  The consulting room is in like style, save that Picasso gives way to Chagall, floating figures in a dreamy blue.

  Dr Obern rises from his desk and proffers a hand, elegant and fastidious as you might expect for this work. His gaze unpicks her, feature by feature. In his long professional life, he has never encountered such dowdiness in a prospective client.

  ‘You would be beautiful?’ he asks, the smile sufficient to reveal perfect teeth – another service they offer.

  ‘I would be unrecognisable and inconspicuous.’

  Dr Obern blinks. A criminal on the run? It does not seem possible. ‘That will require work,’ he says.

  In his mind, his silver-tinted instruments slice, pull and stitch. Skin stretches, eyes change colour, even bones reshape.

  No one will know her in Rotherweird, not Estella, if she still lives, not even the Potamus.

  Hide in plain sight, the only way.

  DECEMBER

  1

  Avant Moi, le Deluge

  At three in the morning the rain came, instant and hard, barging into the valley. The wind would not settle, spinning weathervanes, slamming windows, soughing through the streets. In the southwest corner the miller and his sons, roped waist to waist, valiantly dismantled the sails before the gale could shatter the brake and tear the mill to pieces.

  Little penetrated the Snorkels’ first-floor bedroom. At high cost to the public purse, drainpipes had been diverted to neighbouring walls and eaves extended to protect the Mayor from ‘intrusive rain patter’ – uninterrupted sleep meant sound decision-making, and therefore, municipal health.

  Meanwhile, at 3 Artery Lane, the cacophony in Oblong’s attic bedroom was deafening as the skylight juddered and pipes gurgled and spilled. Below, Everthorne woke to the more muted slip-slap of rain on cobbles and the dull drum roll from the rickshaw taxi roof beneath his window. A job for charcoal, he instantly thought.

  At The Polk Land & Water Company, where Boris had installed a system of whistles to identify defective gutters and downpipes, a ghostly chorale added to the din of the storm.

  Elsewhere in town, water hurtled through a labyrinthine network of drains to subterranean reservoirs and, within hours, to overflows on the eastern rock face below Grove Gardens. Gargoyle faces, long masked by ferns and ivy toadflax, cleared their stone mouths and belched water onto the shore below.

  Only one citizen greeted the deluge with enthusiasm: Gorhambury’s magnum opus on the town’s exterior fittings would now be tested – though not above ground level, for the roofscape had exceeded his reach. ‘Ladders and rods,’ he muttered to himself like an excited schoolboy, ‘ladders and rods.’ In galoshes and a knee-length waterproof he summoned the Sewage and Drainage Departments for 10 a.m. sharp: a call to arms which met with modified rapture.

  *

  Wrapped in a black silk dressing gown embroidered with stars, Estella Scry sat at her bedroom table painting her fingernails a light mauve as the tempest rattled the windows. She mumbled portentous words with a common stem and shades of

  meaning:

  Vigil, a period of purposeful sleeplessness, waiting for the moment of death, and the eve of a religious feast. Her wait had been all of these: the Vigil of Wynter. Seeds sown long ago would blossom and fruit in perfect sequence, that was the dream.

  Vigilance, alertness to danger and absence of complacency.

  Vigilante, a citizen who compensates for the inadequacy of current enforcers, always self-appointed. Moulding the Apothecaries for this role had given her deep satisfaction. Her own vigilante action had also prospered: within a day of exposing herself to the telescope in the marsh and allowing the cell to be found by Fortemain, she had seen Finch in the street. His rescue confirmed Fortemain’s presence there, buried deep, exactly as Wynter had said.

  So much for the present, but pieces of the past nagged at her still: Wynter, bent over her bed holding a sheaf of Fortemain’s papers entitled in Bole’s distinctive writing Straighten the Rope; and that overheard fragment of conversation between Bole and Wynter in the passage outside her bedroom and Nona’s opposite. Tell her about the fastness. But tell whom? She had been told nothing. The Herald’s copy of Straighten the Rope contained nothing more than arcane diagrams of a four-piece puzzle sphere. Was the ‘fastness’ Finch’s cell? And if so, why did it matter?

  Fastness or not, Fortemain, having seen the rock steps, would return to investigate – so she had work to do, and quickly.

  The old resentment, that she had been kept from the ‘where’ and ‘how’ of Wynter’s resurrection, flared again. She had enjoyed disposing of Bole’s familiar, surprised on the roof of Escutcheon Place, yet she had seen no sign of Nona or the Potamus – had the Resurrection Project failed? Had the centuries sapped their will or found a way to strike them down?

  If so, she knew her duty. She would rule in Wynter’s likeness.

  The Tower struck by lightning.

  Judgement.

  The Empress.

  2

  Of Waterworks and Rocks

  The countrysiders did not come, even though they traditionally sold the week’s best produce on Sundays. In such conditions, those braving Market Square forgave the aberration.

  Mutterings on Monday turned to pithy curses when the gates opened as ever at six, but admitted nobody. Larders were developing visible gaps.

  After thirty hours of relentless rain, the Rother broke her banks and Gorhambury diverted half his workforce to clear the driftwood damming the river.

  ‘This weather is beyond coffee,’ said Ember Vine in a warm mezzo voice. ‘I’d rather be tucked up in a four-poster with a handsome man than legging the streets.’

  Orelia envied her joie de vivre; from anyone else, this might have sounded coarse, but not from the sculptress.

  Vine’s daughter, Amber, arrived, still in her dressing gown, bearing mugs of steaming beef consommé, which Vine liberally laced with Vlad’s best vodka.

  ‘We’d vote for you, if we were allowed to,’ said Amber. She had promising ugly-duckling looks and the lazy energy of the adolescent: Ember and Amber, quite a combination.

  ‘She could do with a father around,’ observed Rotherweird’s only single mother as Amber slammed the door shut. ‘As could I.’

  ‘Strange fireworks,’ murmured Orelia.

  ‘And prescient in the matter of umbrellas,’ Vine added, ‘but what do we make of the rest?’

  Orelia retreated into small talk. ‘I hear Amber carves too.’

  ‘The young are better at ambiguity. We get set with age, like it or not.’ The conversation danced around an undeclared subject, but Orelia was happy to wait. ‘Your friend Everthorne has a rich talent, although it’s not yet as honed as his grandfather’s – have a gander in the Gallery if you’ve never been. Castor Everthorne’s spatial awareness was second to none.’

  Unlike most Rotherweirders, Orelia had been to the Gallery, though only once. ‘Good thought,’ she said, and meant it; Castor’s work might fill in the detail of Everthorne’s troubled inheritance.

  Vine put down her mug. ‘Have you ever done a truly confidential sale?’

  ‘Valentine’s Day,’ replied Orelia, ‘but it’s less the present than who it’s for.’

  Vine did not smile. The effervescence had vanished. ‘But not to someone you can’t see for the fog, who disables your front door lamp, who has money to burn and who pays exactly, who wears a contraption to disguise his or her voice, who warns “all is secret on pain of death” and who collects from an obscure drop-point at midnight?’

  Orelia had an uncomfortable premonition, which Vine quickly confirmed. ‘I’ve carved unknown rocks into strictly prescribed shapes. They’re for a puzzle rather than decoration. The rock tingles in the fingers. I’m rubbish at science, but there’s energy there – kinetic, magnetic, one of those. I’m worried about wha
t the assembled whole might do.’

  ‘How many pieces?’ Orelia’s question suggested she knew something, but it had to be asked.

  ‘Sixteen. The pieces are multi-edged and quite small. Assembly was beyond me, and the interior is fiendishly complicated, but they clearly fit together to make a sphere. The curved surfaces were a giveaway. I didn’t keep copies because I was afraid to.’

  ‘Could you draw me one or two?’

  Vine’s sketches resembled doodles in the manuscript workings in Straighten the Rope.

  ‘You’ve seen them before,’ Vine added: an observation, not a question.

  ‘I have, or similar, but only in drawings – and, yes, they do have a purpose, but what that is, I’ve no idea.’

  Vine gave Orelia an appraising stare. ‘I don’t want to know what I shouldn’t, but I don’t want lies either.’

  ‘It is a sphere,’ Orelia confirmed, ‘and it spins, and when spinning, it may alter the state of things.’

  ‘What things?’ asked Vine.

  ‘Truly, I don’t know – but you’re right, it’s not going to be for the better.’

  ‘Those strange fireworks featured a cosmic impact – that’s how new rock types are made. Were they mined from beneath our feet, I wonder?’

  If only Vine were in the company; she had intuitively grasped the pieces’ significance without knowing anything. She would contribute and enrich . . .

  Vine picked up an alabaster piece from her workbench. ‘I’ll give you a memento to explain your visit – just in case I’m being watched.’ She placed the small abstract, a ball with a whorled centre, in a box lined with wood shavings. She even scribbled a receipt. ‘Carry it visibly, but not obviously,’ she asked. ‘You came to collect. “On pain of death,” the client said, and I believe him – or her. You understand my caution. I have a daughter.’

  3

  A Morning at the Pictures

  Rain still teemed from a sky dark as fresh slate; only the wind had eased.

  Up to us, then, Orelia had said, but Valourhand taught classes and Orelia had no legitimate reason for visiting in school hours, so Vine’s news must wait. By mid-afternoon, with the streets near-deserted and little prospect of business, she could at least act on the sculptress’ advice.

  Everthorne stood perched on a ladder in the hallway of 3 Artery Lane, a brush behind each ear, a third between his teeth and another in his right hand, with the paint-box balanced in his left. On opposite walls he had added the lettered messages from the First and Last Chords, exact in colouring and script, and was now painting the spinning umbrellas in the night sky above the Winterbourne stream. Everthorne had assumed the role of town chronicler.

  He removed the brush in his mouth and asked, ‘Who needs artistic licence when real events so tickle the eye?’ He had lost the dourness of the previous evening.

  ‘Are you up for a walk?’

  He descended the ladder and methodically packed up. ‘To where, pray?’

  ‘Our art gallery: you to pay your respects, I to refresh my local knowledge.’

  Everthorne dived into his room and emerged in an ancient dogtooth overcoat, collar turned up: the artist’s crafted scruffiness. ‘Grandfather’s,’ he said. ‘Sad to sully it with an embossed complimentary umbrella.’ He twirled the umbrella to display Snorkel’s personal arms embossed in gold. ‘Mayoral largesse never comes without strings.’

  She laughed and pointed the way. The rain threading off the rims of their umbrellas proved too heavy for conversation.

  Rotherweird’s leading institutions – the School, Library, Town Hall and Escutcheon Place – boasted impressive exteriors, but not her only art gallery, which had been squeezed unceremoniously into the northwestern wall.

  Ember Vine’s work dominated the reception area, the charcoal natural history studies enhanced by the sculptress’ three-dimensional physicality, but other artists did not sustain the early promise. ‘No heart,’ muttered Everthorne, as room after room offered chromatically clever but soulless abstracts, or townscapes more accurate than creative . . . until the topmost room.

  The plaque above the doorway read: Camera Castor Everthorne.

  Directly opposite, between two narrow windows, hung a large oil painting entitled Theseus Lost. True to its title, it illustrated a journey through a multitude of archways and fragmented passageways, not unlike Rotherweird’s tunnels. A fractured candle heightened the impression of odyssey and disorientation: a hero lost.

  Everthorne stood stock-still, eyes fixed on a second large painting on the adjacent wall: Incarceration. Finch had noted that the shapes were different from, but similar to, those in Escutcheon Place’s damaged copy of Straighten the Rope.

  Everthorne turned to Theseus Lost, eyes darting from one detail to another. ‘It’s a narrative – forget Theseus the hero; he’s a man all at sea. It’s a self-portrait.’

  Orelia pointed to a faint line running through the brushwork. ‘Look! Tiny Roman numerals by the doorways—’

  ‘He used a pin.’

  The numbers jumped from one archway to another with no apparent rhyme or reason. ‘From where to where is Theseus going?’ asked Orelia.

  ‘There is no place of arrival. We call it the vanishing point.’ He described art’s most celebrated example. ‘The Hunt in the Forest by Uccello shows hounds and hunters vainly scouring a dark forest, which recedes forever with the unsettling suggestion that their quarry is invisibly present in their midst.’

  As he was speaking, the Curator, a retired schoolteacher wearing a shapeless smock and highly polished shoes, shuffled in. She had a refreshing directness. ‘Few make it to the top – but then, you are the great man’s grandson.’ She shook his right hand with both of hers.

  ‘You’ve hung them well,’ Everthorne said with a charming smile.

  ‘They’re too strong for company, so they have this floor to themselves. As to why they’re up here, we have the Town Hall to thank. They disliked him because he lampooned them.’ She turned towards Incarceration. ‘He spent two weeks in solitary for disorderly conduct – if you visit the prison, you’ll find similar shapes still there. They must have inspired him.’ She pointed at Theseus Lost. ‘That, however, is a mystery.’

  Everthorne returned to Incarceration. ‘Not quite solitary,’ he said, producing a finely carved wooden mouse from his pocket. ‘This is an heirloom. According to family legend, he and the mouse became inseparable and left prison together.’

  Artistic banter continued between Everthorne and the Curator while Orelia moved between the two oils. She sensed a connection between them, but she could not articulate it.

  They returned to the reception desk, where she bought cards of Everthorne senior’s two oils. The Curator added a free bonus: a dim photograph of the cell carvings, from stock supplied by Denzil Prim.

  ‘I’d avoid cards,’ said Everthorne gently. ‘The colour is never true and the impasto doesn’t show.’ He sat down in a chair by the desk and sketched the carved mouse without a misplaced line, distinctly his grandfather’s mouse and no other.

  He gave the drawing to a beaming Curator. ‘He’s yours and only yours,’ said Everthorne. ‘May he bring you good fortune.’

  In the street Orelia patted him on the back. ‘That was kind.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do – she’s given my grandfather the afterlife he deserves.’

  The artist’s desire for permanence, she thought, one pressure I don’t have.

  The atmosphere tightened between them, both debating the taxing question of whether the mutually attracted should progress. Everthorne made the move, dousing her immediate hopes while promising a future. ‘When this weather abates, I’ve a snippet of family history to show you – art history of a sort. It requires an excursion upriver.’ He kissed her on both cheeks, his hands resting lightly on her hips, and playfully rubbed her nose
with his as he withdrew. ‘You’re good at earthing the lightning,’ he added, ‘which is a rare gift. I’ll come when the sky has colour again.’

  Slow, quick; troubled, at ease; intense, playful; razor-sharp or disengaged; she could not read him – but at least he did not do ‘conventional’.

  Frustration prompted a desire to assert herself. ‘Bring your sketchbooks!’

  He raised a hand of acknowledgment as he strode into the gloom.

  4

  Bruma

  Valourhand engaged her eidetic memory. After every night at Baubles & Relics, mulling over Bolitho’s workings in Straighten the Rope, she returned and recreated two pages, pinning the results to the driftwood decorating the walls of her room, so she could flit from one to the other, just as the author had done whenever new learning emerged.

  The puzzles had a multi-dimensional quality – by discipline (maths, physics, geology, astronomy), by detailed subject (dark matter, comets, unstable molecular activity, changing physical states, magnetism), and, most brutally, by time. The jottings followed the Zeitgeist: pages revisited as learning progressed. Topographical maps added another evolving layer. Many appeared to be of the same place, but the visible features did not fit any known part of the Rotherweird Valley. The ancients had delved into subterranean Rotherweird, so why not Bolitho? The shaded shelves looked like strata, and, according to Oblong, Ferensen had encountered Fortemain conducting underwater exploration in a self-designed diving suit.

  One thought engendered another: small numbers preceded by an ‘r’ had been placed next to many of these geological maps, together with calculations of force and resistance: Richter scale measurements for seismic waves, Valourhand surmised.