With nothing but half-clues, Valourhand decided to pursue an unexplored avenue. The late hour and hideous weather offered a perfect opportunity for the visit. She pulled a wet-weather skin over her working clothes and climbed the roof outside her window. She made a difficult vault, a double, to the top of the North Tower perimeter railings and pulled herself onto the Quad buildings without mishap. Moisture swirled about her and the roof slates glistened; she felt at home.
*
Unwanted chattels littered Fanguin’s study, including a full-length mirror, whose damaged frame leaned against the wall beside his desk. An inverted human face appeared there, part-obscured by the curtains of rain. Fanguin undid the catch, allowing Valourhand to slide in like a seal, drenching the carpet. Reacting with the unflappable tolerance which had so endeared him to Form IV, he tossed her a towel.
Valourhand did not procrastinate. ‘Where’s the book Bolitho gave you?’
Fanguin fished it out of a drawer. ‘It’s a lifetime’s nature record, quite brilliant in its time, but mundane now. They traipsed all over England and ended up here. A pagan henge vanished in a storm of – I quote – “apocalyptic intensity” and they – these two monks – took it as a sign and founded our church. That’s how it ends.’ Fanguin paused before raising a troubling detail. ‘It ends this book, and it ended Bolitho’s display last night.’
Valourhand squinted at Fanguin suspiciously. How could he know, when he had never been to Lost Acre?
‘Really? How?’
‘See that word, nictitans? Sharks have a membrana nictitans, a third eyelid: it means winking. Our monk describes the henge as a winking man – and Bolitho’s disappearing rock had an eye, remember?’
‘I’ve seen the identical rock in Lost Acre. If Lost Acre and Rotherweird did emerge from the same impact, you’d expect similar rock formations. It’s slender like a stack, so extreme cold – or an earthquake – could easily shatter it.’
‘We have that word too when they describe this special storm.’ Fanguin pointed. ‘Tremor. But he doesn’t say “shattered”, he says “vanished”. And in Bolitho’s display, the henge shape went from one side of the Winterbourne stream to the other.’
‘Meaning from one world to another?’ queried Valourhand, still defeated by the multi-faceted calculations in Straighten the Rope. ‘But what would Bolitho want to transport from here to Lost Acre?’
Since his ignominious departure from the School, Fanguin had lived in permanent fear of being marginalised. ‘Any recent events I should know about?’ he asked.
Unreliable he might be, but unconventional thinking had value. She decided to share. ‘You saw our Herald is back.’
‘And shot of his ghastly missus—’
‘Pay attention, Fanguin. A Fury took him to a cave in the marsh where he was quizzed about town bigwigs – and Straighten the Rope.’
‘Which Fury – Leather or Feather?’
And Fanguin’s back, she thought. ‘Feather, he thinks. Anyway, he’s rescued by Bolitho, who’s a half-mole with an underground home: telescopes, kitchen-dining room, even his own private railway, driven by magnetic forces.’ She omitted the attack on The Agonies as irrelevant to their present conundrum.
Fanguin, under pressure to perform, shuffled the facts and examined them from all sides. A troubling question came to him: why would Bolitho devote decades to building an observatory in the marshes when he had one in town?
‘You say he has telescopes?’
‘Finch says they’re sophisticated, Cycloptic’s best. He even saw the hidden comet through a special lens.’
Fanguin waved his arms in excitement. ‘Listen: from his early days Fortemain wants to explore Lost Acre’s inverted sky – what astronomer wouldn’t? But nobody could build an observatory in Lost Acre; quite apart from the practicalities, it’s far too dangerous, and he’s on his own. So, what does he do? He plans to transport the terrestrial one.’ He patted De Observatione Naturae. ‘This was his, remember.’
‘My money’s on 1017 as the year of the vanishing henge,’ Valourhand added. ‘It’s the year in the frescoes, a millennium ago. The Chronicle entry concentrates on Midsummer, but didn’t it also talk of a terrible winter in Rotherweird? Does your monk mention any other special effects?’
‘Ice, hail and a battle of the clouds – he calls the clouds incus maior, a greater anvil.’ His finger followed the Latin.
Valourhand pointed. ‘And bruma – mist, maybe?’
‘The grammar doesn’t fit.’ Fanguin had not previously read the text with such close attention, but fragments of childhood learning were returning. Virgil’s Georgics allowed three months for planting winter barley from the Autumn Equinox to— ‘It’s a contraction,’ he added, ‘for brevissima die, the shortest day.’ He exploded into life. ‘Bzoom, bzaa! Lost Acre had its cyclical crisis on the longest day – but we have ours on the shortest, bruma, the Winter Solstice – which is the day of the election, as fixed by Regulations, which appear after Wynter’s death. I call that coincidence stretched to breaking point.’
‘But why go to so much trouble?’ Valourhand asked.
Fanguin was on a roll. ‘The election clears the way. The Regulations say everyone – everyone – has to be on the Island Field for the result.’
‘But how could they guarantee there would be an election?’
They looked at each other. They might have outsmarted Snorkel in securing the election, but had they been used in a grander design? ‘That bastard Bole is always one step ahead,’ muttered Fanguin.
Valourhand opened the window. ‘I’ll tell the others.’
Rain swirled into the room. ‘You’re barking, going out in this,’ said Fanguin, ‘and the wind’s up again.’
‘It doubles the fun.’ She gave a cheery wave and disappeared into the night.
Fanguin checked his bat detector. Nothing yet, but a foul night often preceded activity from near The Clairvoyancy. Hitherto the signal had travelled eastwards towards the marsh, but on the night of Vulcan’s Dance, the trace had headed southwest from a different part of town with no obvious suspect, unless you included Gorhambury.
Leather and feather: double the fun.
5
Paper Trail
‘Pssst!’
Oblong dismissed the hiss from the shadows as a special effect induced by the rain.
‘Psst – Oblong!’
He peered into a gloomy side street, fast-flowing rivulets breaking around his boots.
‘To the archivoire, seth he, two by two, as the finch flies.’ The cryptic, peremptory order was a giveaway.
‘Finch!’ But to Oblong’s acute disappointment, the Herald strode straight past his welcoming hand and headed towards the Golden Mean. Oblong followed Finch’s crablike route to Escutcheon Place at a distance, where, for once, the front door stood ajar. Oblong entered and closed it. The Herald’s sodden outer clothes lay draped over the banisters; his boots had been kicked across the hall.
‘Frau Finch geflogen ist,’ explained Finch, ushering Oblong into the archivoire, as ever illuminated by the great slow candle. A pair of heavy gloves rested on the central table. He gestured for Oblong to sit and delivered a résumé of his adventures. ‘Imagine a slimy prison, and a bulldozing moleman breaking through. Imagine his trench-life: boards, tunnels, telescopes, cocktails and mud.’
Oblong always found conversing with Finch taxing. ‘You met a moleman?’
‘Oblong! In The Journeyman’s Gist, remember? Miss Roc rootling out the truth? Mr Thorburn’s Plate: the mole.’
Oblong thought of his own claustrophobic journey. ‘Keep going.’
‘I met Morval Seer. They have stripped her of speech.’ Pain furrowed Finch’s face before he returned to the practical. ‘Fortemain alias Bolitho alias the moleman has an errand for you and you alone.’ He placed a particoloured sphere, little bigg
er than a cricket ball, on the table and nudged it with his forefinger. ‘Turn again, Whittington.’
The ball spun lazily, master of its own momentum, the spots of colour elongated by the rotation.
‘What does it do?’
‘I haven’t the rainiest.’ Finch pulled on the gloves, held them to the candle until the palms steamed, gripped the sphere, top and bottom and twisted in opposite directions. Faint indented interlocking lines scarred the surface like a three-dimensional jigsaw, only to vanish the instant Finch released the pressure.
‘Shut sesame. You can mark them off, the four pieces from the opening pages of Straighten the Rope,’ he explained.
‘You said an errand?’ asked Oblong apprehensively.
He was not alone; not knowing the errand’s purpose had left Finch equally uncomfortable. ‘Assume it’s dangerous.’
Paradoxically, the mention of danger enthused Oblong, keen to impress after recent setbacks. ‘I’m game,’ he said.
Finch took an exaggerated breath. ‘You’re sure?’
‘What do I do?’
‘You toss it in the mixing-point at dusk on Election Day. He was most particular about the timing.’ Finch placed the sphere in Oblong’s pocket and conjured up a bottle, two glasses and his familiar biscuit tin: prelude to an apology of sorts. ‘Rifle and rummage . . . you were right, Mr Oblong, the records do hold the key.’
Drinks poured, Finch moved to a lit alcove. Towers of books littered the table, some open, some shut, all marked with Finch’s telltale paper strips. ‘I swam with scarlet herrings,’ he started, ‘the Eleusians, Oxenbridge, the trial, Ferensen – until I encountered Rotherweird Hall, now the Hall of the Apothecaries.’ He flung out a melodramatic arm. ‘Our tale is a two-hander: Sacheverell Vere, man of means and a desiccated Puritan, meets a master carver. My sources for this drama: carving permission requests, a transformed private home, a Guild’s founding charter, the Popular Choice Regulations and my multiple-great-grandpater’s record of a meeting with a colonel from Hoy . . .’
‘Finch, just the story, please, in plain English, once upon a time . . .’
‘In 1646 the introverted Mr Vere, owner of the Hall, secures permission for a hidden coffer to protect his coin. This is how the woodcarver gains his introduction – carving permission request, left-hand pile with the blue marker. Carving requests for the Hall multiply like rabbits – witness the yellow markers. Many are elaborate in the extreme and all are morality tales: wise virgins, the lost sheep, a barren fig tree; you get the drift. The carver becomes a long-term presence in the Vere household.’
Oblong opened the books to find pages and pages of applications, filed, dated and numbered; the ink now a yellowing sepia.
Finch continued, ‘The carver sucks Vere from his shell and propels him to high office as Rotherweird’s first Mayor. Vere publishes the Popular Choice Regulations, but they’re drafted by our carver. Witness: the manuscript first draft as retained by Escutcheon Place – that’s the freestanding document in the middle there. The childless Vere founds the Guild of Apothecaries, a society of scientists of Puritan disposition, and bequeaths the Hall to them: see his will, the black marker.’ Finch deployed his supporting documentary exhibits with the manic brio of a conductor. ‘And still the carvings multiply. They come in groups – witness the red markers – and always a generation apart: 1751–9, 1814–1820, 1867–1893, 1909–1914 and 1980–1991. Religion disappears and scientific subjects take over.’ Finch slipped in the deadliest fact without emphasis. ‘They’re all by the same hand . . .’
‘Finch, come on!’
‘He leaves letters like footprints,’ Finch explained, ‘a florid capital R and an oddly tailed C, all the way through.’ He showed Oblong the letters; they did match and were distinctive.
‘This is Bole’s house style. The Apothecaries gave him a base for centuries.’
‘But Bole isn’t a carver—’
Finch impatiently drummed the table top. ‘Who was found strangled twenty years after Wynter’s execution?’
The detail had emerged at Ferensen’s celebratory dinner. ‘The carver who built this room,’ he stammered, ‘Benedict Roc, Orelia’s distant relative.’
‘Hours after his body was found, you may recall, our good friend Bole – now Roc’s spitting image – gained admittance here to remove the stones. But, question: how would Bole know where to find their unfindable compartment? Horror of horrors, Bole steals minds as well as physical shape. He absorbs his victims’ knowledge and their gifts. Bolitho’s worked this out: that’s why his dark firework consumed the others but kept their lights. That dark elusive shape was Bole.’
They sat and stared at each other.
‘He’s here now as a carver?’ Oblong asked.
Finch shrugged. ‘There’s been neither hide nor hair of him since the 1990s.’
‘What about Flask?’
‘A later victim.’
‘He changes shape at will, then.’
‘Not necessarily. The sequence we know about goes: Roc, Flask, Ferox, Vibes – and none have appeared after their successor is first seen. So, I reserve judgement.’ Finch looked careworn. ‘Bole’s cause-and-effect machine is unstoppable. We’re doomed, Oblong. I wouldn’t mind being a bat-finch. I could hang from the rafters – good for my gippy back.’
‘Nothing is unstoppable.’ Oblong’s rallying call sounded feeble. He had been infected by Finch’s depression, two solitary men seeking solace in an exercise which only emphasised their adversary’s resourcefulness.
He refilled Finch’s glass, fitting in another small brick. ‘So, the R and C stand for Roc?’
‘R and C with nothing in between – classic Bole, cryptic as ever.’
‘What about these?’ He indicated the last unexamined pile, huge volumes, roughly bound, with unadorned numbers on the spine.
‘The green strips mark Bole’s leases: always basements, always in The Understairs. The names change, but the writing doesn’t, and R and C are always the first initials.’
A mischievous wink illuminated Finch’s face as a salving idea occurred. ‘They’re all now occupied, save one, which is condemned. Fancy a stroll?’
Action alleviated depression. Oblong leaped to his feet and embraced the Herald. ‘Onwards!’ he cried.
Arms and feet squeezed back into sodden sleeves and dank boots, they re-emerged to face the storm, its savagery more evident in the gutterless Understairs. Cascades from opposite roofs pummelled the centre of Hamelin Way. Flowerpots blown down from above spattered the cobbles with orange flashes. Finch leaned into the rain, head down, like a dog on the scent.
The place turned out to be part-condemned. Slivers of light broke through the twisted shutters on the higher floors. Narrow steps slick with moss led to a half-basement and a padlocked door, the surface blistered and colourless. Finch descended, Oblong on his heels.
‘Standard municipal,’ boomed Finch dismissively through the din of the rain, producing a skeleton key and a small tin labelled Polk Multi-Purpose for Doors, Burglars and Cyclists. ‘Pick and squirt, pick and squirt,’ sang Finch to himself, and within moments the padlock gave way. The door, jammed in the architrave, succumbed to a vigorous kick from Finch.
A deep chamber greeted them. Two rough-hewn stone pillars supported the ceiling. Expecting damp, they inhaled instead the dry fragrance of old timber. Finch shook his tube-light. ‘Easy, we’re walking on dead skin.’
Layers of wood shavings, grey and curled with age, overlaid a choppy sea of broken floorboards. Finch gingerly picked his way to the centre, wood shavings sticking to his damp boots or slipping through holes in the floorboards. He pulled from his pocket a pierced pebble attached to a length of string and lowered it through the largest hole. He waggled the line and dropped it deeper until the clink of stone on stone echoed back.
After retrieving the stone, he remov
ed his boots, lay on his front, eased himself forward and cleared the broken boards. ‘Ankles!’ he commanded.
Oblong gripped a pair of stridently odd socks as Finch’s torso twisted out of sight, a tube-light clutched in one hand. The ensuing commentary was not informative – ‘Aha!’, ‘Hmm . . .’, ‘Look at that—’, and ‘My, my . . .’ The bellowed, ‘Up!’ came as a blessed relief.
Spangled in cobwebs and dust, Finch announced his findings. ‘A path below joins the tunnels one way and is blocked the other. And, dear boy, a heavy masonry hammer sits on the ground right beneath us.’ Finch’s eyebrows danced. ‘What a very busy bee our carver is!’
Finch crawled to the far corner where a rotten sack had spilled wooden pieces; on closer examination they found pieces of a tower and a sloped roof. Finch picked up a tiny carved bird on a rotating weathervane.
‘Truly a master,’ he said, spinning it. ‘This is a gift for any century. You’d earn a living all over in the world, and you’d have access to the rich anywhere.’
‘Joseph was a carpenter,’ mumbled Oblong, now alert to mystical connections.
‘We’re done here,’ Finch replied bluntly. Oblong had never worked him out: he could be avuncular, but at other times he was distant and severe.
But back in Escutcheon Place after a silent journey, Finch, a lonely man who could recognise loneliness in others, opened up. ‘I thought husband and wife were meant to say nicer things to each other than to anyone else,’ he admitted. ‘With us, it became the opposite, and that sits on my conscience like a crow.’
‘I’ve not had much success myself,’ replied Oblong. He gaped as Finch extracted – or appeared to extract – a coloured paperweight from his left ear.
The atmosphere lifted as he handed Oblong a slim book. ‘Borrow this – it’s better than it looks.’
Better – was Finch referring to content or morality?
The binding, black as coal, declared the slim volume, Conjuration and the Ancient Art of Legerdemain, to be from Wynter’s collection. Finch added a bag of props – cups, balls, a wand and the like.
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