Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  Hal smiled at his great-uncle, who had come striding into the hall at the Darts’ to greet us. “An unlucky step and a strained ankle is all, Uncle Ben. I’ll be right in a trice.”

  “Found a new plant, did you?”

  Hal laughed. “Three new ferns, and one of them with the most splendidly plumoso-cristatum fronds ...”

  Ben threw up his hands. “Now, lad, you know my rule: I didn’t listen to technical details about the evolutionary habits of finches from my sister, nor to technical details of the magical properties of sheep wool from my nephew, and certainly not to the special characteristics of ferns from you, duke-me-lad.”

  “And yet we’ve heard your analyses of all your battles seven times over.”

  “Privilege of age, me lad. When you reach mine you can say whatever you like to your over-entitled relations, too. Now come along, Jack, boys, there’s food on the table and plenty of news to be shared.”

  Mr. Brock came out of one of the side doors, saw the situation, and gestured sharply at an underling behind him. In short order a pair of brawny footmen had taken Hal in hand and borne him off to find a washbasin. Mr. Dart and I went to our rooms to wash and change for the meal. I had only the outfit from yesterday to exchange for my practice gear, which I’d worn for our excursion. I made quick work of my ablutions and entered the dining chamber a moment or two before Sir Hamish.

  “Well?” said my father.

  “Well!” replied Sir Hamish.

  “Hamish,” Master Dart said in admonitory toners, rather as he might have used to Mr. Dart or myself. Mr. Dart, coming in, suppressed a smile and sat down beside me. Sir Hamish merely winked at him and applied himself to his food.

  Pigeon pie, grapes from the cool room, cheese, crayfish, cornmeal cakes, a lightly spiced soup ... the Darts ate a wider variety of dishes at one meal than Hal and I had managed to cook in two weeks. Possibly even in the whole month Hal had been staying with me.

  I wondered how hard it would be to make the pigeon pie, and whether Mrs. Brock, the cook, would be willing to share her recipe. There was a faint warm spice and some sort of liqueur in the filling—nutmeg and brandy, conceivably, and perhaps a hint of orange zest, too.

  “There,” said Mr. Dart impatiently, setting down his fork. “Now may we hear what has wrought you to such a pitch of excitement?”

  Master Dart shook his head magisterially. “I shall leave you to your deliberations. You may use the library—I shall be making a call on Sir Vorel.”

  He sailed away, dignified as his butler, to my surprise and my father’s but not, it appeared, to anyone else’s. Sir Hamish grinned at Jack. “It was borne in on Tor this morning that given the general situation he may very soon be in a position to realize his ambition as the chief magistrate.”

  “Plausible deniability?”

  “It seems to work for most things. Let us remove ourselves to the library, Brock will send our coffee there—but tell me, as you know we are perishing to know, did you find the letters?”

  “We did,” Jack said, rising. He patted his waistcoat pocket, which crinkled.

  Ben held himself very still. “And?”

  “We haven’t had a chance to look at them yet. Too many distractions along the way.”

  He told Ben and Sir Hamish about the interruption of Red Myrta and the Honourable Rag and the even more extraordinary response of Hagwood the factor to seeing him.

  Ben looked speculatively at me from where he’d enthroned himself in the best chair beside the fire, but did not express his thought. “That is very curious indeed. Major, what’s your report?”

  “Besides what I’ve told you? A puzzle with too many pieces at the moment. It sounds as if you have more to add. Shall we hear that first or look at the letters?”

  He withdrew the sheaf of papers and placed them on the delicately carved table between the lot of us. Sir Hamish sat next to Ben, then Jack, then Mr. Dart, then me, and finally Hal on the other side of the fire facing his uncle. We all leaned forward as if the blankness of envelope and fold would tell us all their secrets without the bother of reading.

  What did Mr. Dart hear when he heard things speak?

  “A lot of pages for an official letter—or even two—from the Army,” Ben said at last.

  “Pish.” Jack fanned them out. “I was holding the whole stack of Vor’s secrets when we realized company was on its way.”

  I looked at the papers. Accounts ... letters ... what looked like a will ... an itemized list that was upside-down to me but seemed to be a reckoning of barrels of something-or-other ... Pages in the thin paper and elaborate inks of the Army notices, which I had only seen once but apparently had never forgotten, given my instant physical reaction to them. I pushed back in my chair, breathing hard, feeling my heart thunder. That first letter ...

  “How did you know where to look?” Hal asked.

  “My brother was always fascinated by that desk. He loved that it had a secret compartment.”

  “You knew about it.”

  Jack chuckled. “Of course. He was never as good at keeping his secrets as he thought he was.”

  “Or his accounts, it looks like,” Hal said, frowning at the top set. “I’ll need to go over this more carefully, but I’d say he’s been fudging them.”

  Of course he was, I thought, anger kindling again. Not for my own sake—the Arguty estate had never been an expectation of mine. I was angry that my father should have come home to this—and, a little more distantly, angry that my uncle had so abused the legacy left by Uncle Rinald, who had worked so hard to redeem the estate from the situation that my gambling-mad grandfather had left it in.

  “Too bad my sister’s not here—she’s a fine practical mathematician, sir.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Jack. Hal’s been running the largest private estate on the continent since he was fourteen.”

  “I have excellent advisors,” Hal rejoined.

  Ben grunted. “Speaking as one, let us leave aside the finances, intriguing though they indisputably are. Hamish—you know the people.”

  Sir Hamish smiled at our rapt attention. “We put a cat among the pigeons by showing up today with the General. At first I thought it might have been better had Mr. Greenwing been there as well, but as events turned out—”

  “Hamish, you’ve never been concise but for the love of the Emperor, spit it out.”

  “I’d forgotten how patient you are, Jack. Your son resembles you there as in so many other aspects of his character.”

  “Hamish.”

  I doubt my father’s growl had any real effect, but Sir Hamish did resettle himself into his chair, sardonic smile glinting, and begin.

  “I shall tell you this in order and with details,” he announced, “so that you may fully appreciate it. We decided to walk, it being a fine day.”

  “It was foggy,” I objected.

  “It was a fine day to walk along the Teller Road.”

  “That’s not the way to the church,” my father objected.

  “Must you keep interrupting? We were going to the Big Church. It replaced the Little Church by the Lady’s Cross down by the Ragglebridge, which was damaged in the Fall. It’s up on the knoll above the White Cross, which was convenient for the Baron.”

  “What about the Dartington church?”

  “We do not attend under the current priest.”

  “That’s changed the barony politics a trifle, if everyone goes to the same church nowadays.”

  Hamish’s smiles could be very edged, sometimes almost malicious; this one was. “You will have a grand time of it, Jack, discovering all the changes in society since the Fall. Not to mention all the many, ah, challenges, your son is making to what had been the new status quo before he came home from university.”

  “They’re not all on purpose,” I muttered, a little indignant and considerably more embarrassed.

  Sir Hamish shook his head in a manner very like the Squire’s when he’d taken his departure. “If I may? Th
ank you. We walked to church, accompanied by some of the local families, including a few of the servants from the house. After we crossed the bridge we began to meet more and more people. We thought it very odd that so many were still on the road—and then when we came to the crossroads we discovered why.”

  He paused there for effect. I refused to play into his theatrics, but Hal felt no such compunction. “Yes, and?”

  “And there at the White Cross was the itinerant knife sharpener who nearly eloped with the Honourable Miss Jullanar Ragnor.”

  It was Mr. Dart’s turn to object. “He turned out to be the Earl of the Farry March, though. What’s he doing back here in disguise?”

  “Ah! A question you were not the only one to ask but one which the man could not at first answer.”

  I glanced at Ben, who had steepled his hands and was smiling at them. He had very knobbly joints, I noticed again, swollen beyond what I thought happened with arthritis.

  Hal had said something about his great-uncle’s hands ... he’d been telling me the true story of Loe, as he’d had it from Ben. That was it. Betrayed, captured, imprisoned, General Ben had also had his hands broken. He’d been placed in a cell at the edge of a cliff, with a way out he could not pass with broken hands and freedom taunting him with every breath ... and from which my father had rescued him.

  I shivered and smiled at my father, feeling shy in his presence, in the still-rough exterior and the towering reputation that had nearly been able to withstand false accusations of treason without shattering.

  He did not see. He was still looking enquiringly at Sir Hamish. Hal leaned over and placed another log on the fire, casting up a spray of sparks and smoke. I coughed, sneezed, and sat back out of the way. There would be ... O Lady, there would be a lifetime to spend time with him.

  I hugged the thought to myself. We just needed to disentangle all these mysteries and make it safe for him to take his rightful place.

  Sir Hamish said, “It turned out that this man was the real knife sharpener. The Earl had borrowed his face.”

  Chapter Twenty: Introductions

  I ran the six miles from Dart Hall to Elderflower Books as slowly as I could manage, and wished it were longer.

  It was past dawn, but not long past, and there were people out-and-about as I loped into the market square and fumbled with my latchkey. I found the early inhabitants of the town fascinating: maids and footmen on their way to their work if they lived out, or on early errands if they did not; Mr. Inglesides the baker and his assistant, getting ready for their first customers (very often those same maids and footmen); fishermen heading out and carousers heading in.

  I was holding my boots in my hand and probably looked like one of the carousers. I had not been one of their number; I had, in fact, gone early upstairs, pleading a headache to account for my disinclination to cards or drink or cigars or any of the normal gentlemanly after-dinner pursuits.

  How dull the life of leisure was.

  I had had a bath, and tried to read one of the books in my room, and lain in bed, and all the while a cold sludge had crept along my veins as I thought about wizards borrowing faces.

  Ben didn’t care two sticks for the current prejudices about magic. He described the mess of crimes, impostures, and shocking revelations that had run through Fillering Pool during the first year after the Interim. He did not explain exactly how it had been stopped, only that Hal’s mother had somehow figured out the way. I had not realized quite how skilled a practitioner of magic the Dowager Duchess was.

  The knife sharpener, it appeared, had been met by the Earl of the Farry March and offered a summer of living like an earl in return for the tools of his trade. He had not learned until after the gold and the jewels and the fine clothes and faded away into dead leaves and dust that he had given away much more than his sack of whetstones and grit. He had lost years of his life, the respect of his fellows, and half the knowledge of who he was.

  “Oh,” I’d said, but no one had looked at me or my father.

  Sir Hamish said, “His point about losing a summer let us ask about young Mr. Greenwing’s bout of memory loss.”

  “Oh,” I’d said, even more weakly. This time they did laugh at me, as Sir Hamish listed off the various improbable activities people had given (apparently straight-faced) for my missing time.

  I wished I could be certain I had not been dancing slowly in complex circles through the Taylors’ winter wheat. Or fishing along the East Rag, the Raggle, the Tennerbeck, and the Magarran at various points of the day and night. Or doing barbarous things with Mr. Pinger’s twa-tailed vixen. Or dancing again, this time around the White Cross, which everyone agreed was a very bad idea, even if they did do strange things down in the Woods.

  The only unusual dance I knew was the one my mother had taught me, to dance the Lady in, which I had danced in the cellars under the Castle Noirell to break the curse and waken the bees. I had not been afraid of the dark and the enclosed spaces then.

  And all that was superficial froth, as was the incessant questions of why everyone cared so much about me, and just how I had managed to make multiple mortal enemies without intending to, and what I had actually been doing in the period I could not remember, and even what precisely I had found there by the White Cross in the pre-dawn.

  It had been misty around the White Cross, the sun invisible in the east, the sky lightening but not yet light. Over in the east the morning star shone like a beacon. Down on earth the pale stones of the highway were almost the same colour as the mist. Sight gave the wrong impression: made it seem as if every step should sink into cloud, should be insubstantial beneath the feet as the air was to the hands.

  The air cold on my face, though I was still warm from the run up to that point.

  The waystone, taller than I, white limestone etched with ideographs to warn and to inform and to bind.

  The concentric circles of black basalt set in iron bands marking the crossroads itself, like a spill of ink in the mist, so the tall waystone looked like one of the stones at the Lady’s Pools. No offering stone, I’d thought, looking for a place I could leave my paltry spur-week offering. I’d looked around, I remembered now, to see if there was a loose stone anywhere nearby I could use for the offering. I did not want to put it down on the ground, my flowers and wheat and candle. At a proper grave there was a shallow stone dish before the headstone. I hadn’t thought that there would not be such a thing at the White Cross.

  I’d stopped, my silk-wrapped package in my hands. Seen off on the Spinney Lane side a white lump I’d taken to be a chunk of limestone, but when I’d reached it I’d seen that it was—

  —And I was in Yellton Gaol two days later.

  —And—

  And Those fairy-trained wizards of Fillering Pool had been able to borrow (steal, surely) the faces of those who had willingly (if unwittingly, like the knife-sharpener) given permission, or those who were dead.

  No one else seemed to register this when Ben said it. There were no startled motions or stillnesses, no glances at me or my father, no awkward words or expressions. The conversation had flowed on without pause, widening to take in the various effects of magic since the Fall, and from there to current politics, to the pirates, the press-gangs, and how everyone was waiting for the whiskey-tax assessors to show up and discover what everyone else was hiding in their cellars.

  And probably it was stupid.

  It seemed incredible—surely it was incredible?—that a wizard should have found my father’s body and taken his face and gone off for seven years only to return now.

  Except that seven years was long enough for memories to fade, for a wife to die, for close friends to overlook any doubts in the surprised gladness of seeing a beloved friend alive again after all.

  For a son to lie awake the whole night through as doubt coiled cold and slimy through his every thought.

  Six miles was not far enough to run. Six hundred wouldn’t have been far enough.

  It was c
hilly, so I lit the woods stove in the front room of the bookstore before going upstairs to wash and change. I looked for a long time at the laughing man in Sir Hamish’s portrait, and did not feel any better at all. Made coffee and brought it downstairs at a quarter to nine so I could sip it between the steps involved in opening the store for the day.

  “They will not fit that direction no matter how hard you push, Mr. Greenwing.”

  I looked at Mrs. Etaris, who stood by the door so she could hang her coat on the hook. Looked back at the shelf where I was trying to stand up a handful of books a good two inches too tall for the space.

  “Put them on the counter, please. Perhaps one of today’s customers will realize they are his heart’s desire.”

  I was skewered by the words—by the idea—oh, for a heart’s desire so easily attained!—by the wish that the doubts were wrong, that the dreams were wrong, that this news was true.

  “Oh, Mr. Greenwing,” she said in a softer voice. I remained crouched where I was, one knee on the floor, hands on the too-tall books, racked.

  A few steps, not exactly light, a swish of cloth, a creak of the floor and a faint murmured complaint, and then her arms came around my shoulders. She smelled a little floral and more like nice soap. I felt a stab of envy for her children and hoped they were grateful for her.

  After a few moments she tugged me upright. “I’m sorry,” I said, fumbling for a handkerchief. My heart quailed at saying anything else. “I’m sorry.”

  She deliberately misunderstood me. She was so good about that. “Mr. Lingham was not a wholly terrible replacement, although I believe I’d prefer to hire him for my garden over my store any day of the week.”

  I smiled weakly at her, trying to convey my gratitude for all the things she said and did not say. What had my father called her? A sensible and intelligent woman? Yes: and a kind, warm, and funny one, too. I wished my mother had known her better.

  That reminded me of one of my tasks, and I turned my thoughts even more gratefully to them. “Mrs. Etaris, I received a letter from my mother on Saturday. Hal brought it to Dartington with him. Do you happen to know anything about it? Or how I might go about finding out who sent it, now, and not four years ago? In the letter my mother said she was leaving it with someone in case of her death.”