Rotherweird

by Andrew Caldecott

  ‘I’m the new teacher.’

  ‘I’m Bill Ferdy.’ The landlord’s handshake nearly dragged Oblong behind the bar. ‘Not ’istory, by any chance?’

  ‘Spot on,’ said Oblong.

  ‘About time – it’s in the statutes: we can’t be without one for more than a term. Anyway, thank the Lord you don’t look like that Flask fellow.’ Bill Ferdy put his finger to his mouth in a gesture of self-rebuke. ‘Whoops – mum’s the word. The first pint is on the house, Mr Historian.’

  ‘Why The Journeyman’s Gist?’

  ‘Gist be old English for foam and bubble and yeast. And the nub of things. As any journeyman wants, right?’

  Oblong nodded as Strimmer walked in with his fellow North Tower scientist, Vixen Valourhand. Strimmer elbowed Oblong aside.

  ‘Manners, Mr Strimmer, manners,’ said the landlord.

  ‘He’s a historian.’

  ‘And I’m a landlord and you’re a scientist – so?’ Ferdy placed his sizable fists on his hips.

  Rather than provoke a fracas, Oblong retreated to a far corner and tried with little success to recreate his walk in verse. At least he now had a name for his fellow historian: Flask. Between verses he caught the stare of an older man sitting in shadow at the far end of the room, though he appeared more inquisitive than hostile.

  When he next looked up, his observer had gone.

  *

  ‘They were never going to risk another Flask,’ muttered Strimmer into his beer, flicking his head in Oblong’s direction, ‘but that idiot—?’

  ‘Once bitten, twice shy,’ agreed Valourhand.

  Strimmer assumed that his former pupil, a physicist and now the most junior member of the North Tower staff, was still in thrall to him, despite his ending a brief physical intimacy with brutal abruptness. He had been attracted by her cutting turn of phrase, the green-grey eyes and russet hair, Vixen being a School nickname awarded as much for her independence of spirit as her colouring.

  ‘But why let a bloody outsider into the Manor? What’s Snorkel playing at?’ asked Strimmer.

  ‘The outsider paid through the nose. I’ve seen his car – black, shiny and big. Trough-time for Snorkel, that’s why.’

  His eyes glinted. Valourhand knew the look: Strimmer sensed opportunities.

  ‘How did Flask know an outsider would take over the Manor?’

  ‘Flask always said, “Find the past to read the future.” Perhaps he was right.’

  ‘Pseudobabble,’ replied Strimmer dismissively.

  ‘Flask also said he would take the town over, which makes sense – why else would an outsider come here? Our independence attracts him; he wants to rule.’ Valourhand saw the flaw in her own argument but kept it to herself – rule here, but to what end? He did not need the money; he did not know the people. Was it a valueless exercise in conceit? She thought not; she had glimpsed his face through the window of his Rolls Royce and he did not look that type.

  Strimmer underestimated Valourhand. She led a double life of which he knew nothing, and she had her own ambitions, albeit with no settled direction. She had had her own conversations with Flask, and had kept selected details to herself. She wondered what else Flask had discovered, and how it connected to his disappearance.

  *

  Behind the ornate walls, columns and architraves of Escutcheon Place lived Marmion Finch, holder of the town’s one hereditary office, Herald of Rotherweird. Finch after Finch after Finch had ranged through these lugubrious corridors.

  His known duties as recorded here and there in the weighty twenty-four volumes of Rotherweird’s Regulations, had an air of quaint formality. He regulated the carvings that decorated the town’s roofs, balustrades, door-knockers and weathervanes – different families had exclusive rights to different emblems – and he controlled quality too, his imprimatur being required for the elevation of any apprentice to master carver. He had a right of veto over new structures, although by convention he rarely exercised it. He kept the registers of births and deaths. He calculated the dates of feasts and rituals, a task requiring no more than a rudimentary grasp of the lunar calendar.

  And the office imposed other burdens, unknown to Rotherweird’s citizens: Marmion Finch held the town’s only copy of the Rotherweird Statute, under whose disturbing terms the valley had obtained her independence, and he alone had read it, being exempt from the History Regulations. He kept and guarded the historical records, shelves and shelves of them, in the archivoire, the great library in the heart of Escutcheon Place, which only he was

  allowed to enter.

  He stood alone in other ways too, having succumbed to his father’s insistence that he marry for social connection, not love:

  Mrs Finch had turned out to be a snob, in rapture to Snorkel’s circle. Under her influence, his son and heir had acquired similar priorities; as a consequence, his work became his life.

  On the evening of Oblong’s tour, every volume of the Rotherweird Regulations stood open, covering the six tables in the bays of the archivoire. He had scoured them all in vain for a law prohibiting the Manor’s reopening or, failing that, its sale to an outsider.

  He did not like the outsider’s showy car, or his face or the weasel motif, which had reluctantly been passed for use in the restoration. Worst of all, he did not understand Sir Veronal Slickstone’s motivation, although Snorkel’s was clear enough.

  In the gloom of the rearmost bay of the archivoire lurked a row of shelves that held two deeply contrasting collections of sixteenth-century books, one on conventional science and philosophy, neatly bound in beige leather and beside it, black-bound, an altogether more arcane mix of works on poisons, torture, heresies, assassination, breeding patterns and the philosophy of power. Both had once resided in the Manor.

  Books reflect interests; interests inform personality and personality decides a course of action. Instinct told Finch that these collections had been assembled by opposing forces, and if that were the case, the Manor had at different times been home to both the virtuous and the malevolent. He had the uncomfortable thought that its closure all those years ago must mean that the latter had triumphed and somehow remained a threat . . .

  but how?

  When flummoxed, Finch spoke out loud improvised words in nonsensical chains. It calmed him and aided contemplation, so he did so now: ‘Worm . . . cast . . . spell . . . struck . . .’

  7

  Another Point of View

  In the Manor, Sir Veronal reviewed progress. Masons, carpenters, carvers, roofers, gardeners and glassmakers had done their work admirably.

  His morning’s work at the Town Hall had also been encouraging. Rotherweird’s History Regulations prohibited both archaeology and the ownership of any historical pictures of, or publications about, the valley. Equally, nobody outside Rotherweird was permitted to write about the place, thanks to an ancient Elizabethan statute. So the greater the secrecy, the greater the secret, surely.

  Research in London’s antiquarian bookshops had uncovered one page in a small book, dated 1798, which had slipped the net. The author described himself as Ambrose Claud, The Vagrant Vicar, and had recorded his one visit to the Rotherweird Valley in these terms:

  After two pleasant days in Hoy I was unable to resist the challenge of Rotherweird. I passed two nights walking down the valley and two days sleeping in the security of her outlying woods. I had allowed my beard to grow and wore my least imposing clothes. On the following day the weather came to my aid. The rain was so torrential, I was able to slip in unnoticed before the portcullis closed. The innkeeper was warm-hearted, but wary. All I gleaned from my visit came from him. It appears that a statute in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I endowed the district with its special status. He let slip that according to legend there was a terrible reckoning between settlers and the local inhabitants from the surrounding countryside – so terrible that special measures were needed. Even today I heard one of the former dismiss one of the latter as a ‘countrysider’. The rest o
f England they regard with even deeper contempt. The origins of this sense of superiority remain obscure, save that the level of learning is peculiarly high: I found myself discussing Newton’s Principia Mathematica with a storekeeper in the market square! The next morning I was rudely ejected, despite the cloth.

  Sir Veronal turned to the Mayor’s original letter, oozing with deference and greed.

  Dear Sir Veronal,

  I write with due humility as Mayor of Rotherweird, the only self-governing town in Britain. We are obliged by law to treat history with suspicion, but have an ancient Manor House whose renewal we feel would appeal to a man of your refined tastes. I would require financial assistance to secure the necessary consents for an outsider like you, but trust this would be no obstacle.

  I must emphasise that you were brought to our attention by an impeccable source.

  I look forward to your early reply.

  Your humble and obedient servant,

  Sidney Snorkel

  Sir Veronal binned begging letters on principle and nothing here invoked an exception until that word, ‘outsider’ – it penetrated his blocked memory, although he could remember no individual outsider, only the fact that he had hated them all. This one word, in conjunction with the peculiarity of Rotherweird, had brought him here . . . slender evidence for such a huge investment.

  After an additional donation to the offshore Snorkel Foundation, the Mayor identified his ‘impeccable source’ as one Paul Marl, a disclosure of little assistance since, apart from a Yorkshire postman and a fisherman from Hull, neither of whom had anything to do with anything, no other person of that name existed in England, let alone Rotherweird.

  Sir Veronal re-read the passage from Ambrose Claud’s travelogue. He needed a source of intelligence, and the Vagrant Vicar had unwittingly shown the way.

  *

  Mrs Banter, proprietor of Baubles & Relics, lived in the smart quarter of town, some way from the shop in a house that resembled its owner in physique: solid in the body (the main building), long in the neck (the tower), with two beady eyes at the top for observing everyone below (two powerful telescopes with infrared lenses, which between them covered most of the main streets and squares).

  Occasionally by day, and invariably at night, with its enhanced potential for indiscretion, she ascended to the tower’s top floor to conduct a round of ‘observations’, recording the results of note in a growing array of notebooks. Knowledge of people bestowed power over people. One notebook was devoted to the Manor; despite the shield of its perimeter wall she tracked the progress of the chimneys, rebuilt in old brick, and the reroofing in contemporary Elizabethan tiles. She detected a fastidious mind and considerable wealth at work. She noted the convoys bringing materials in and debris out, as well as occasional visits by the shiny black engine-powered car with the gleaming radiator and the golden weasel on the bonnet.

  There would surely be an opening of the restored Manor, an occasion for her to shine, and cement her social position.

  8

  Term Begins

  Children and teachers tramped the same journey, from home to the noticeboards in the main quad of Rotherweird School, although only the former were subjected to Miss Trimble’s fastidious eye for deportment and dress.

  ‘Shoulders back!’

  ‘Socks up!’

  ‘Shirt tail showing!’

  And repeatedly, ‘Gum!’

  Oblong found his twenty-minute walk excruciating. Children dressed in black and brown emerged from doorways like bees, only to give him as wide a berth as his fellow teachers.

  The majesty of his gown brought some compensation, and at the noticeboards, as in the staffroom, Vesey Bolitho gave support. ‘You’ll feel like a moon in an asteroid belt, but in no time everything settles.’

  The noticeboards brought home to Oblong how few teachers he knew – and yet all the pupils appeared to know him. He heard the name ‘Flask’ muttered among the sniggers behind cupped

  hands.

  Form IV had sixteen pupils, eight of each sex. As they drifted in, they said, ‘Good morning, sir.’ Some even said, ‘Good morning, Mr Oblong, sir.’

  He made his opening address on the American Civil War. He did not get far. ‘Girls and boys, you cannot imagine the carnage of this war, the complexity of its causes, the width of its consequences. Guess how many young men died?’

  ‘Seven hundred and fifty thousand,’ said a girl at the front. ‘Approximately.’

  ‘Thirty per cent of all Southern white males between eighteen and forty,’ added the boy beside her.

  Oblong gulped, unsure who was teaching whom, but by the end of the lesson he had the unsettling feeling that Form IV regarded outside history as essentially fictional. They had engaged with the statistics, but not with America as a real place.

  *

  Morning drizzle turned to sleet by early afternoon and as darkness fell, the sleet thickened into snow. By the time Oblong made it back to his lodgings, the flatter roofs and more neglected pavements were white. Indulging one of the few gifts learned in his partly rural childhood, he lit a fire and worked through a pile of essays before cosying up by the hearth with an anthology of pastoral poetry, which made his own efforts seem inept. Below, the river boasted flecks of white where snow had settled on projecting driftwood. In such conditions the knock on the door was wholly unexpected.

  He admitted a stout man in his early sixties in corduroy trousers, leather ankle boots, a mustard-yellow tweed overcoat and a black felt hat with fur trim, Russian-style, which he removed as he held out his hand. Oblong recognised his observer in The Journeyman’s Gist.

  ‘Oblong?’

  He had a hearty, enthusiastic air. His eyes twinkled. His hands were never still. Throwing his coat over the back of a chair to reveal an equally tatty tweed jacket, he heaved a canvas bag onto the table, from which emerged several bottles of Old Ferdy’s Feisty Peculiar. ‘Best anti-freeze in town,’ he said with a smile. ‘Fanguin at your service, Godfery Fanguin.’

  Oblong looked blank.

  ‘Don’t tell me – Snorkel has expunged my name. Thirty-five years of loyal service and what do you get? Eternal anonymity! You see before you a veteran of Rotherweird School. Form IV is Fanguin. Fanguin is Form IV. Or rather, was.’

  Oblong shook Fanguin’s hand warmly. ‘Why give up?’ asked Oblong. ‘I didn’t ask to be Form Master.’

  ‘I didn’t ask not to be. Call it the price of an ill-judged friendship.’

  ‘Not Flask?’ blurted Oblong.

  Fanguin ducked the enquiry. ‘I’m looking at a bottle, and a bottle is looking at me. In polite society only a glass stands between us.’

  Oblong returned from the kitchen to find Fanguin dipping into the fancy notebook in which he kept his completed poems.

  ‘Not for school, I hope. Children are balladeers. They crave a rattling good metre, nifty rhymes and a grotesque storyline.’

  ‘I try to get to the bottom of things,’ replied Oblong huffily.

  Fanguin slapped his thighs and guffawed before pouring out the deep ochre beer. ‘Well I messed that one up, didn’t I! The Fanguin school of small talk – nought out of ten, bottom of the class. Talking of which, how are the little perishers?’

  ‘They’re fine.’ Oblong softened: Fanguin’s bonhomie was infectious. ‘I rather think they miss you.’

  Fanguin seized on the compliment as an opportunity to go through his former pupils, one by one, so skilfully done that Oblong had no inkling what was happening. ‘Ned Guley – nice boy, if quiet.’

  ‘Attentive,’ said Oblong.

  ‘Single child . . . I trust you’re not—?’

  ‘Well, actually I am.’

  ‘But parents alive, surely?’

  ‘Only my father, and he’s in a home.’

  And so it went on, with Oblong disclosing far more about himself than Fanguin revealed about the class, including his age, his lack of a permanent home, his literary ambitions and his limited experience o
f teaching, not to mention much else in life.

  At the end of this review, Fanguin moved from the classroom to the staffroom. Oblong’s good reviews for Rhombus Smith, Vesey Bolitho and Gregorius Jones were greeted with approving nods, likewise his less flattering notice for Strimmer.

  ‘Jones is the odd one,’ said Fanguin, whose discretion was slipping under the influence of the Feisty Peculiar. ‘He could be an outsider like you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We discovered him on a field trip in Rotherweird Westwood. He was running like a man possessed, with no apparent destination –

  primitive clothes, no money or papers, not even a name except Gorius. Rhombus took him in, upgraded his name to Gregorius, and after a year or two made him our first Head of PE – noble savage turns gym master! A coup as it turned out. Everyone likes Gregorius Jones.’

  ‘Why do you all have such outlandish names?’

  ‘Do we?’ Fanguin sounded genuinely surprised, but almost everyone Oblong had met had at least one strange name, and some two. In all things Rotherweird went its own way.

  After his eulogy to Gregorius Jones Fanguin clambered to his feet and raised his glass. ‘I give you Form IV, past and present,’ he boomed before downing what remained of his fourth bottle. Oblong, still on his second, followed suit.

  As he sat down Fanguin made an offer. ‘Can I help with anything? I do mean anything.’

  ‘What does the North Tower do?’

  Fanguin’s bonhomie waned a fraction. ‘They design weapon technologies which Rotherweird sells discreetly to the outside world. Due to our limited facilities and manpower, it’s mostly blueprints, with occasional prototypes. The South Tower by contrast designs toys and distractions, also for worldwide distribution. Strimmer regards Bolitho and his team as juveniles; Bolitho regards Strimmer and his acolytes as moral degenerates. The Town Hall does nothing to discourage the enmity: it encourages competition, which in turn increases the revenue from both.’ Oblong squirmed in his chair. ‘You’ve another question, I think.’