Rotherweird

by Andrew Caldecott

  Orelia watched Ferensen draw back into the shadow, close to emotional collapse.

  Finch came to the rescue by bringing over a second, much smaller book. ‘This is the end game: a record of the trial of Geryon Wynter, mostly written in a code I cannot decipher. But we get good old English for an account of verdict and sentence.’ The Herald read from the closing pages, ‘We find you guilty, Geryon Wynter, of offences against Nature and against God. You have treated children and animals as the stuff of experiment. You will be taken to this lost country of yours, be hoist in one of your own cages, with the stones arranged to ensure your own vanishing. Justice will do to you what you have done to others. Then all records of the gate’s location will be destroyed. Laws will be passed to keep Rotherweird’s secret safe from the world so Man may never be tempted again.

  ‘The accused sought no pity from the Court. He said he would be back, and that vengeance would be his. He said another would come to pave the way. Yet his countenance lacked the usual arrogance. Sentence was duly carried out. The other accused, all Eleusians, were sentenced to tabula rasa et exsilium—’

  ‘Tabula . . . what?’ asked Gregorius Jones.

  Ferensen returned, still pale, but answered, ‘Tabula rasa is Latin for another effect Wynter discovered the mixing-point could have: place the stones in a particular place and you can wipe the mind. So the authorities turned it on the Eleusians, and then added exile for good measure. The defendants were left with the empty brains of a newborn baby, as good as a sentence of death, or so they believed.’

  Valourhand jumped up and down with excitement. ‘That explains everything – why Slickstone held a party, why he pumped Oblong with questions about history. He wants information to revive his memory!’

  ‘Why he stole my pub,’ interjected Ferdy.

  An image came to Orelia from late in the narrative in the Manor tapestry: a man in a cage with his head leaking coloured birds. She shivered. Tabula rasa: they had wiped his mind clean.

  Valourhand continued, ‘There must be some vestigial memory, or he wouldn’t have bought the stones. He plans to take over where Wynter left off – reacquire his book and start again.’

  ‘I fear the book was hidden in the North Tower,’ said Ferensen, ‘but I know it’s not there now.’

  Strimmer, thought Valourhand instantly, that bastard Strimmer – Flask told him and he never told me. She edited her suspicions before declaring them to the company. ‘The North Tower roof is above a colleague’s rooms – you all know him, Hengest Strimmer. He’s fascinated by Sir Veronal. I fear the worst.’

  A gloomy silence descended. Slickstone appeared to hold all the cards. They drifted back to the shields, discussing the creatures on view and their constituent parts.

  Ferensen took Finch to one side to ask why the Herald had taken such a risk.

  ‘Your letter mentioned Wynter’s book of arms – The Dark Devices. Nobody else knows of it – nor did I until the book revealed itself. So how could you? Then there’s your name. In my job you can smell an anagram a mile off, even a German one. Ferensen. Add an H for Hieronymus, jumble the letters and you get fernsehen, meaning to see into the future, which is what a seer does.’ Finch added in a whisper, ‘Good evening, Hieronymus Seer.’

  He asked how Ferensen had kept his secret, and the answer was simple: he ensured that his visits were spread decades apart, splitting Ferdy generations. He would present himself as the son or nephew of a previous Ferensen – the Ferdys had the pragmatic good sense not to pry, and the History Regulations did the rest.

  Ferensen asked the next question. ‘Is there anything else in those papers?’

  ‘Prison records, a strange assault on Wynter in prison, distressing statements about the experiments – I’ve not had time to study them all, but you’re on the list of victims.’

  ‘Does it say what they did to me?’

  Finch shook his head apologetically. What this man must have been through . . .

  Ferensen remembered nothing of the Lost Acre part of his ordeal; recall began with his return, hauling himself from the river to the north of the town, naked, his body cut with tearing wounds. From one he had removed a small hook; others had the appearance of teeth-marks. For fear of being recognised and taken back, he had crawled through the water meadows and up the slope to the woodland beyond. There he had been nursed back to something approaching health by a brewing family called Ferdy. He had never returned to town; he kept away when Wynter and his followers were arrested and gave no evidence at the trial. As the years passed and his relative immortality emerged, he travelled, wherever wheel, tide or wind took him, always returning to the Ferdy estate. There he built his tower and made his only home.

  The Finch and Ferensen discussion continued. ‘That’s my sister’s workmanship.’ He pointed at the figures hunched over the exquisite paintings of The Dark Devices. ‘They forced her to draw and paint for them. And when Fortemain eventually got word to London, they punished us all. Slickstone told me what he would do to her – he kept his promise.’

  The old man again was close to breakdown.

  Finch changed the subject. ‘They’re flagging. They need biccies and brew for the brain,’ he boomed, and from one of the cavernous cupboards he hauled up three dusty bottles, a miscellany of glasses and a large biscuit tin with a picture of Doom’s Tocsin painted on the lid. As the company enjoyed his hospitality, Finch hesitated. He had in mind one more disclosure – but should he cause pain in the interests of truth?

  His character assessment of Orelia decided the answer. He beckoned her and Ferensen into one of the bays. ‘Boris suggested hiking the price of the stones could not have cost Mrs Banter her life. He was right.’ The Herald shuffled through the trial papers. ‘The trial record lists the execution party: a “Peregrine Banter (Master Builder)” was one of them. He guarded Slickstone on that last journey to the mixing-point. Slickstone is a cruel man – what prettier revenge, generations later?’

  Orelia felt a deep wound. ‘He killed my aunt for that?’

  ‘Never forgive, never forget,’ contributed Ferensen.

  Finch turned the page over, and another name caught the eye: Benedict Roc (Master Carver).

  ‘What became of him?’

  ‘He designed this room. Hubert Finch records his death. They found his body by the island stream on the twentieth anniversary of Wynter’s execution – to the day. He’d been strangled.’

  ‘Does he say why?’ asked Orelia.

  Finch shook his head. ‘He does say his ghost called at Escutcheon Place within hours of his death – here, the very house where he had plied his trade for years. They were superstitious then.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be?’ whispered Orelia before asking the obvious question. ‘Calling for what?’

  ‘To check the mechanisms in this very room – which I now know has three secret compartments. One held the trial record, another The Dark Devices. The third was empty.’

  ‘No doubt it held the stones,’ added Ferensen.

  Orelia recalled Sir Veronal’s Breughel and visualised the scene as that artist might have done: Rotherweird’s gabled houses in the background, plumes of smoke rising straight, a foraging dog, the ground iron-hard under a leaden sky, ice fringing the river, the master carver face downwards in the snow and his incorporeal twin setting off townwards for a haunting. She felt very alone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Finch.

  ‘Enough is enough,’ added Ferensen gently.

  With the company’s capacity for attention revived by Finch’s wine, Ferensen closed the meeting. ‘You have all contributed, and we are the wiser for it. But we have made errors too. First and foremost, we must not help Slickstone in our efforts to hinder him. However, we can all do a little.’ He pointed at the company, one by one. ‘Miss Valourhand will sound out Strimmer with her usual lightness of touch. Gorhambury, being temporarily unemployed and a night bird, will be our sentry in Gems & Geology. In any event, he has to return there now to repair
the floor. We will have a roster to keep him fed and watered. We must watch the Manor like hawks. Jones – you’re in charge of surveillance. Your running habits free you of suspicion. We communicate via Boris Polk’s remarkable parrot-pigeon, Panjan, who reaches me quickest. Never trust the post. We must not forget the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. As the entry has a rustic feel, Ferdy and Salt can follow up the Green Man.’

  Ferdy nodded, and Salt muttered inaudibly in grudging acceptance of the one task he found acceptable.

  Ferensen continued, ‘Boris will perfect his invention. Orelia and Oblong will keep an eye on the Midsummer Fair. The Chronicle suggests it may have a part to play. Finch will go where his mind takes him.’

  They left, one by one, through Finch’s front door.

  Ferensen held Orelia back. ‘Do you have anything for me?’ Orelia gave him a penetrating look. Nothing got past Ferensen. ‘I’ll look after it,’ he added.

  She dipped into her bag and handed over the camera. He might find some clue in the tapestry that she could not. ‘Promise to talk me through it one day?’

  ‘Promise,’ replied Ferensen.

  ‘Who made it?’

  ‘I never came back to the Manor. Rumour says the three female Eleusians made them for Oxenbridge as a penance, to escape punishment.’

  Ferensen watched his makeshift company disperse. He sensed a change in them: they, Rotherweirders, had a chance to right an ancient wrong. A new land with limitless potential had been abused by Man – and Wynter and Slickstone had both in origin been outsiders.

  *

  Orelia looked round her shop before going to bed – all objects in transit, without owners, sentimental flotsam until reclaimed, their old past buried now – the boy who had ridden the rocking horse, the amateur explorer in his snowshoes, the scientist peering through the outdated microscope. The stones were different, forever seeking repossession by their former owners, still propelled by the malignant impetus of their past. Would an executioner’s axe do the same?

  She felt like the rest of her stock, adrift without an animating presence.

  She wondered how much Sir Veronal’s wife knew of her husband’s past and present actions.

  The next morning she suggested to Gregorius Jones that he keep an eye out for Lady Slickstone. She might be in danger. His eyes lit up.

  *

  On his return home Ferensen cleared a wall and projected the tapestry, and tears came to his eyes at the all-too-fine rendering of Sir Henry’s last years, the hunting of Slickstone’s creature and the murder. Something about the portrayal made him uneasy – apology might be there, but he read defiance too.

  His attention turned to the two wagons and the substitution of the urchins for the crop of brilliant banished children. He climbed his library steps and retrieved a slim volume by the polymath John Dee, a set of aphorisms about the special capacities of Nature, addressed to his friend, the Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator. Ferensen quickly found the one he was looking for, number XXI. Here Dee asserted that the qualities given at birth unfolded in the way in which the nature of the place of the conceiver and the surrounding heaven work and conspire together.

  Next he took down his version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as translated by the Reverend James Ingram in 1823 – a special edition prepared for his fellow antiquaries. The entry for 1017 read: Strange reports from the village of Rotherweird. A Druid priest tells that a monster came to their Midsummer Fair with the midsummer flower. All were saved by the Green Man and the Hammer . . .

  Oblong had referred to a strange flowering tree in the frescoes in the Church tower. The entry did not seem to connect with the stones or the mixing-point. The Green Man was a staple of European rural mythology, but had no obvious connection with Lost Acre. As for the Hammer . . . He sensed an older mystery here.

  He thought lastly of his drunkard of a father and the beatings they had endured. He remembered his mother’s brave efforts to shield them and her early death, stretched out on the earth floor of their hovel. Last, but not least, he recalled his sister’s astounding gifts. She could capture not only the appearance of things, but their very soul.

  He went outside to peer at the stars, which were dimming as dawn approached.

  *

  His regime had been designed to keep the past at bay: all fitness and the courtesies, avoiding intimacy lest it brought interest in his origins. Exercise kept his sleep untroubled.

  Despite the evening’s revelations, his defences against old history had by and large held. Awake and in sleep he would dismiss unwanted images – here a line of infantry, there a coracle, a stone altar spattered with blood . . .

  Only the letters could not be banished. They came as if chiselled on stone: his letters, his language.

  Druidus.

  Exercitus.

  Ferox.

  And, yes . . . Gregorius.

  *

  Oblong clambered into bed with a sense of vindication, although less for himself than his subject. History had her claws in the present and, he did not doubt, in what was yet to come.

  6

  The Morning After

  Dawn brought a dispiriting mood despite the fine weather. In centuries the town had never lost a tower. The charred beams seared the consciousness of her citizens. Soot blackened nearby roofs and walls like canker.

  Snorkel showed his better side: by breakfast scaffolders were swarming up and down ladders, clad in red safety hats and green coats and looking like beetles on twigs. By mid-morning tarpaulins shrouded the wreckage.

  And still he felt outflanked: Sir Veronal had offered financial help to affected homeowners without consulting him; this new arrogance in his manner only reinforced Snorkel’s fears about the new Lord of the Manor’s political ambitions. The man owned yachts, houses and aeroplanes – and now he desired to add a town to the portfolio. Snorkel no longer believed in the anonymous letter that had prompted him to ask Sir Veronal to Rotherweird; indeed, he suspected Sir Veronal of fabricating it himself, with an insider’s help. After all, as Snorkel himself knew, most had their price.

  He felt exposed by the one political process he could not abolish: the five-yearly municipal elections, due the following winter. His dynasty had successfully avoided elections for decades, but Sir Veronal would not hang back. After a year’s residence he would be entitled to stand as well as to vote. Snorkel would be outgunned.

  He needed to fight back.

  *

  Gorhambury remained in Gems & Geology, managing three hours’ sleep, before the library opened. To his surprise his first morning visitor was Strimmer.

  ‘Mr Gorhambury. Rock around the clock?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Joke – Gems & Geology.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Is this a secondment?’

  ‘I’m unemployed, in case you hadn’t heard. So, it’s back to learning – geology day.’

  Strimmer gave Gorhambury a suspicious smile and left. The scientist’s failure to show interest in a single book had not gone unnoticed.

  Orelia dropped in with a take-away coffee and a large pastry. Boris came later with more substantial supplies. None could explain Strimmer’s presence in the library basement. Just before closing time, Gorhambury tidily stacked his books and wrote a request to the librarian to let them be. He then secreted himself in the broom cupboard just before the library closed.

  As time passed and his vigil lengthened, to his surprise and comfort, Gorhambury developed a genuine interest in the beauty and permanence of rocks.

  *

  Valourhand had no difficulty with the concept of Lost Acre, a hidden world with isolated points of access and new physical laws. Her world had only recently discovered that electrons could freely appear in one place and then in another without visibly moving between them. Why should there not be similar phenomena to these rules of quantum mechanics operating on an even grander scale? As cells join and separate at will, the mixing-point sounded equally credible.

&nb
sp; She ranked as more disturbing the disappearance of the all-important book from the attic room above Strimmer’s study, rebuking herself for not having noticed the peculiar pitch of the roof before. Challenging Strimmer directly seemed daunting in the cold light of day; but in the event she was spared.

  As her red pen danced over exam papers about the six different types of quarks, curiously known as flavours, Strimmer sidled in. Uncharacteristically, he held a noonday cup of coffee for her as well as himself. ‘Where were you last night?’

  ‘Up and about, lighting a fire.’

  Strimmer ignored the facetiousness. ‘Returning overdue books perhaps?’

  Valourhand stared at Strimmer. How on earth could he know? Yet in his interest lay possible advantage. ‘If you know, why ask?’

  ‘I know you were there. I don’t know what you were after.’

  Valourhand gambled. ‘Your attic room begged questions. I wanted to know more.’

  Strimmer’s eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘Flask told me.’ She told the lie with bravado, and Strimmer rose to the bait.

  ‘Well, you missed something.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘My secret.’

  ‘Not if you mean The Roman Recipe Book.’

  Strimmer went pale – surely he had found the book? There had been no sign of disturbance in the thick dust. Maybe Flask had known all along.

  ‘What did you make of it?’ Valourhand added quickly.

  ‘Lines and coloured circles – pointless,’ replied Strimmer.