Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  That is one thing. The second concerns your father.

  Oh, my darling, I hope so much that I am able to resolve this before the Lady calls me to her garden. My vision is so uncertain ...

  I have seen you (I know it is you, a young man coming into his own, in a fine red hat I wish I might see you wear). I have seen you dancing the Lady in, for the bees. I have seen you standing before the Lady ... and I have seen you standing before the White Cross looking so angry ...

  I no longer have the letters that came from the Seventh Army before the Fall. They were taken by your uncle that he might write. I know you dislike him: distrust him also. When one looks at it coldly you stand between him and his heart’s desire, which is to be a man of consequence. He believes the trappings of estate and wealth and title are what grants consequence. His wife has only encouraged those pretensions. She is half-deluded by her own lies.

  Do not be deceived by the folly of the world, Jemis. Those are mere ornaments. Your father was a far greater man standing destitute on the doorstep than his brother will ever be.

  I can see so clearly still the expression on your face, my son, when you opened the door to him.

  In my vision he had gone.

  Oh, Jemis. I hope you have forgiven Mr. Buchance for being there when Jack came home. Please try, for my sake and your sisters’—and your own. You need a family. You have so much to fight against ... remember always what you are fighting for.

  I loved your father more deeply than I could ever say. No matter how far he went I rested sure in his love, that I was his lodestar as he was my hearth. I waited for his return as the limes of the Woods wait for the bees. Believe me when I say when I would have waited for ever if I had not seen him dead in a vision.

  Forgive me.

  I did not realize until it was too late that the Fall gave me twisted visions. Before I always knew when the vision was true. During the Interim that, like so much else, changed.

  I was afraid for your future, son of ignominy and glory, and Benneret Buchance was a kindly man who loved me and promised to cherish you as his own. I have always been afraid I would not live to see your majority, and I wanted to make sure you had more than the accusations of traitor to sustain you.

  So much for why I remarried. When I think to that scant month between Jack’s return and his death—oh, Jemis, my heart breaks again for you, for him, for myself. I was so afraid he would ask to take you—and so afraid you would just go.

  I did not want him to leave my life again, but that is a hurt and an injury deeper than I have ever inflicted, and he is gone past my living ability to make my amends. My apology will have to wait until we are both in the Lady’s garden.

  —I must continue while I still have the strength. I am weary, so weary ... this influenza is stealing away my life.

  (I am sorry. Know that I am facing my death as befits a daughter of the Woods. Before the spring there is the winter ... but after the winter there is always the spring. In the spring of creation we will dance in the Lady’s garden together, my son ... and though my heart cracks to leave you, let it be many years from now before you join me there.)

  My son, painful as it is, I must write about those three horrible weeks. I cannot imagine what you were thinking. You were so quiet—you, my chatterbox son—quiet, and bewildered, and so very angry.

  Hold on to your anger, Jemis, and control it. Anger is like magic: uncontrolled it can do terrible things through your agency. Controlled, well-directed, known, anger can be the fire that changes the world.

  Remember that only if it is just does that lead to a better society.

  My love, seek justice.

  Your father came home to find himself misdoubted a traitor, his son disinherited, his younger brother in Arguty Manor. His wife married to someone else. We spoke of what he should do—what I should do, unintentionally a bigamist with a new family.

  We decided, your father and I, that he should go to seek the Lady’s justice in Nên Corovel. He spoke of a friend there who knew the truth of that last battle at Loe ... He spoke of his plans to no one, I think, but myself. I had a strong presentiment of danger; could feel disaster pressing every closer. One did not need to have the Sight to see that ... not when the rumours and accusations in the barony were so vicious, so continuous, so manifold. We knew someone was spreading them on purpose.

  Jack did not believe it was his brother Vorel, but who else stood to gain?

  Jack left one night to seek the Lady Jessamine. I prayed that the Lady of Spring would grant him safe travels and safe homecoming.

  His secrecy and my prayers were in vain, as you too well know.

  Jemis—there was a note in your father’s hand (how well I know it!) for you. All the evidence pointed to suicide caused by despair, but—

  Oh, Jemis, I am loath to lay this on you.

  He was found hanging in the Forest.

  He left you that note.

  He was a proud man accused of the worst calumny. A loving and beloved husband who came home to a wife forsworn and married to another. A loyal soldier devoted to his comrades accused of betraying them for the meanest reasons.

  I have no proof whatsoever except for the certainty of my heart.

  But I write you this with all the certainty of my heart: your father did not kill himself.

  You will ask why I let you believe him a suicide when that disgrace capped and crowned the rest. You will ask how I could bear to let the bravest and truest man I ever knew be buried in unhallowed ground under a crossroads. You are right to ask.

  My dear son, I wanted you to live.

  Whoever killed your father did so because he threatened them—and the only way he threatened anyone was to stand truthfully the hero of Loe and not attainted of treason.

  I can imagine how angry you must be. With me, with yourself possibly, with the world. Jemis, my son, disinherited and the stepson of a Charese merchant you are not a threat. Your father is gone past the need for human glory—

  —And when I see him in the Lady’s garden I shall have this to beg his pardon for also.

  No matter that we agreed to let the accusations and slander go without legal response until we had evidence and proof of the true state of affairs. No matter that the last thing he asked of me was to see you safe. Until I die I shall regret my complicity in that unhallowed grave. I see that vision of you before the White Cross, a splendid figure of a young man ... surely the pride of his family ... looking at the stone that pins down the most shameful slander onto the father he so deeply loved.

  Oh, Jemis, I am weary. I fear this influenza and I fear that I will see no spring. I shall leave this letter to be delivered in the case of my death, knowing it is a heavy burden to lay on you ... but knowing also that you would rather a mystery than a platitude. My dear son, I am so proud of you.

  Seek justice, not vengeance, and remember that you are loved.

  I remain always your loving

  Mama

  Chapter Twelve: Murder?

  “You’ll have to come down,” Mr. Dart called.

  I nearly fell out of the tree. As I recovered myself, I laid my forehead on the cool, damp, earthy bark of the branch I was laying on. I was in what had always been Mr. Dart’s favourite thinking place when we were younger, the great oak tree on the north side of Dart Hall. I’d fled there because I could think of nowhere else to go. I’d wanted to run, and run, and run, but was tethered by prudence and the desire to stay close to my father and the sorry sensation of a head full of congestion.

  After a few minutes I recovered from the spike of terror sufficiently to make my way safely down to where Mr. Dart stood.

  He looked in all ways the proper young gentleman, and quite as if he’d long since given up climbing trees.

  I brushed ineffectually at my garments. “That wasn’t very dignified of me, was it?”

  “Stuff and balderdash to that. I can’t get up that gap to the first branch with my arm. Perhaps by the spring.”

>   “Oh, has Hal had an idea for how to disenchant it?”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. His left hand was brushing the top fold of his sling; a breath of air washed over me, cold and damp and promising inclement weather. Finally he said, “No. I meant that by the spring my left arm might be strong enough to compensate.”

  “Perry—”

  “Don’t make a fuss, Mr. Greenwing.”

  I met his eyes squarely. “Mr. Dart. Friendship runs both directions. You keep supporting me through my various tribulations.”

  “Which are considerably more significant and interesting than my own. Jemis, your father is alive.”

  I turned away to sneeze and gather my thoughts. Was it the action of a friend to keep pressing when he so obviously did not wish to be pressed? Yet ... I did not know, had no idea, what was wrong, except that something was. “I’m sorry for saying that about Tara offering you a place. I hadn’t realized you hadn’t told your brother.”

  He played with the tassel on his sling. The one today was a dark brown, matching his waistcoat. “You don’t let it go, do you?”

  I raised by eyebrows at him. “I follow the examples set before me.”

  “My place is here,” he said precisely, letting go of the tassel to gesture at the well-tended fields and pastures spilling around us, the handsome house at our backs, the stables and the orchard and the distant banks of the river and the grey edge of the Forest. “I am well content.”

  He sounded much more pugnacious than content. He had given up a fellowship at Tara—and he could not have drawn the boundary of what he was willing to discuss any more clearly.

  “Did he read the letter?” I asked, giving in. I’d thrust it at my father when I abruptly excused myself from the room, to his and everyone’s astonishment.

  “Not out loud. He said it was from your mother ... I’m amazed that you were able to read it through at the table.”

  “Indeed, I am verily a watering-pot.” I pulled out one of my handkerchiefs, decided I needed the retiring room and a mirror to even begin to repair the damage, and said nothing about how Mr. Dart relaxed as soon as I left the topic of himself.

  RETURNING MORE-OR-LESS tidy from the retiring room, I was directed into the library by Mr. Brock before he wafted off in the general direction of the front door, where someone was knocking loudly. I hastened out of the hall, not wishing to speak to whoever might be calling on the Darts that morning.

  Hal began, “Should Jemis perhaps—”

  But his advice went unspoken, for in loud vociferation my uncle strode in past the unhappily protesting butler. “Don’t be a gudgeon, man, where else would he be?”

  At home in my little flat above the bookstore; in a brigand’s camp in the Arguty Forest; in gaol ...

  “My dear nephew,” he boomed, and fell upon my neck.

  I extricated myself with difficulty. He began searching his pockets for a handkerchief, to no avail. I supplied one of mine, reflecting as I did so that I had been using them at nearly my winter rate. My uncle daubed his eyes and blew his nose and if he were acting his relief it was the best performance I’d ever seen.

  Mind you, I could think of five reasons for him to be relieved that had nothing to do with my actual continuing safety.

  “My dear nephew, I have just received the most extraordinary communication from Sir Mattrin Terrilee, my fellow magistrate in Yellem.”

  My heart sank. “Oh?”

  “He said you were to be arrested on charges of murder!”

  I did my best to feign total shock at this pronouncement. “Murder? Sir Vorel—”

  “Uncle Vorel, my dear boy, we’ve spoken of that disastrous formality I inflicted on you when I thought my poor brother ...” He choked, had recourse to the handkerchief again, and bowed to Hal, who was haughtiness personified.

  Sir Vorel sighed heavily. He crumpled my handkerchief in his hand, face a study in woe. “If only I ... oh, my dear boy, if only I had listened to my brother when he returned ... If only I had ... But I have spoken of this already, I think.”

  Yes; and I did not for a moment believe him. There were too many years of snubs and snideness to wash over in over-emotional apologies that came only once an imperial duke was there to stand beside me. I said, “I find this question of murder somewhat more pressing at the moment, sir.”

  He chortled, good humour suddenly restored. “An entirely absurd matter. Sir Mattrin is a fine angler, a sound man for trout and salmon, but in this case he has entirely the wrong line. Why, you saved my life from that dragon!”

  I affected puzzlement, which was not difficult. “The dragon?”

  “Someone has alleged that you murdered the dragon, which is impossible under the law even if it were provable that the dragon was really an enchanted human being.”

  “Was it?”

  He patted me on the arm, jewelled rings flashing. “My dear nephew, how on earth do you imagine I should know? My dear brother—” He choked again. It occurred to me that this was a convenient method of implying emotion without having to actually say anything of import. “I am mourning his loss anew, you know. It will be seven years next Wednesday ... but of course you know that.”

  “Yes,” I replied blankly, not looking away from my uncle. Seven years gone ...

  He showed signs of imminent departure, from the subject if not the room, so I added hastily, “Sir Vorel—“

  “Uncle Vorel.”

  “Sir, what do you think I should do?”

  I was merely trying to keep his attention from straying to Jack, but at my question he swelled: literally swelled out his chest, put back his shoulders, and gestured expansively with my handkerchief like a flag in his hand.

  “My dear nephew, you may leave it all to me. Rest assured that these allegations are absurd to the point of mischief. I don’t know what Sir Mattrin is about countenancing them for an instant. Let him keep to his trout, that’s my advice. He can tie a very nice artificial fly, you know—”

  “And me?” I pursued.

  “Your father taught you to fish, did he not?”

  Out of the corner of my vision I caught Mr. Dart (safely behind my uncle) rolling his eyes expressively. I tried to marshall my features into deferential eagerness, which made my uncle pat my arm in genial avuncularity again.

  “I tease, my boy, I tease. Do avoid Yellem. They had a gaolbreak this week—a trio of highwaymen from the gang that’s running the whiskeyjack ring, I hear. Degenerate criminals, the lot of them. Sir Mattrin’s got to have some success to show before the Winterturn Assizes, and if he can get you ...”

  He left it there. Bowed to Master Dart, Sir Hamish, and Hal, squeezed my arm painfully, and swept out past his dear brother without according him a glance.

  I looked at my father. He was smiling twistedly. “Same old Vor—though hasn’t he run to fat!”

  I had never before heard any nickname for my uncle. It rattled me unexpectedly. Blustering, jovial, hypocritical, possibly murderous—all those I could see and, seeing, comprehend. But ‘Vor’, my father’s little brother?

  The betrayal crashed over me with sickening force. I turned aside, stared hard at one of Master Dart’s Collian scrolls. When I had composed myself and turned around again, my father was sober-faced and serious.

  Sir Hamish gestured us all vaguely to seats. I sat next to Mr. Dart, who pulled out his pipe to fuss with.

  “I have had a thought,” Sir Hamish said.

  My father chuckled. “Surely not?”

  “G’way with you, Jack. My thought is this: we cannot presume every visitor will be as magnificently inattentive to our guests, those degenerate and and dangerous criminals, as Sir Vorel, Magistrate.”

  “And so?”

  “And so I think we should all—most especially young Mr. Greenwing—take care to call you Jack, and identify you as the General’s aide.”

  I felt a shameful rush of relief. I could only hope it did not show on my face; and, recalling my thought about my
uncle, for once unnecessarily blew my nose.

  “Very sensible,” Ben muttered. “That being sorted, what next? A story?”

  “Perhaps it will help to come up with a plan,” I said diffidently.

  Mr. Dart blew a smoke ring, then grinned. “How very organized of you, Mr. Greenwing.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Dart.”

  He ignored this essay into sarcasm. “Well, what do you see as the central concern? Your uncle appears serious about disregarding the allegations—I am a little disappointed you are not truly felonious.”

  “Not enough whiskey.”

  “There’s not enough whiskey in the woods to turn your head, Jemis,” Hal put in.

  “The Forest,” Jack, Mr. Dart, and Sir Hamish all corrected at once.

  “It’s honey-wine in the Woods, and Mr. White’s is potent enough to turn anyone’s head.”

  “That just led you to riddle-answering and dragon-slaying.”

  I considered the carpet below my well-polished boots. I had laid the base polish myself, though this morning’s gloss was courtesy of some one of the Darts’ servants. Mention of the dragon’s riddle had placed the beginnings of a clue in my hand, like figuring out the first word of a crossword puzzle.

  “It seems possible, at least, that everything is connected to—to Jack’s apparent suicide,” I began slowly. “Yet—it might not be. Strange things have been occurring all autumn.”

  Mr. Dart blew another smoke ring. “Since you came home, in fact. Before that all the talk was on the distillers in the Forest and the new inheritance laws being mooted in Parliament.”

  I brushed aside the inheritance laws, which were only likely to affect the Baron and the Honourable Rag, if them. “To say nothing of your ducks. Things precipitated when I arrived, but apart from the dragon their existence had nothing to do with me. I hadn’t anything to do with the Talgarths or Miss Shipston.”

  I was not at all certain what Mr. Dart had told his brother about our activities, and didn’t want to misstep again. Mr. Dart frowned, but did not bring up the cult.