The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  The same church–

  But the stone lighter

  Less aged

  Emptier churchyard

  Wider spaced graves

  No lych-gate

  The same square–

  But younger

  Fewer houses

  Built lower, built differently and thatched.

  In the middle of the square–

  No ancient stone cross. Instead a pile of sticks and branches

  Lashed into faggots

  Piled up like a bonfire.

  It was not a cold day.

  It was summer, and flowers bloomed around the bottom of the houses in the sunlight.

  A sweating man was unloading another bundle of sticks from an ox-cart and laughing with a young boy who stood at the foot of the pile, catching the bundles and piling them up on the fire.

  A woman walked straight through Lucy and offered them each a leather tankard of ale.

  The man drank all of his and half the boy’s share.

  They all laughed and nodded to the priest who emerged from the church.

  Then time lurched again with a sickening thump in the pit of Lucy’s stomach

  and there was a sudden crowd

  and much more noise

  and in the square the pretty flowers were being trampled as more and more people mobbed in.

  Carts had been pulled up so that those at the back of the crowd could stand on them and see over the heads of those in front of them.

  The man and boy upending wicker-wrapped demijohns of oil

  Soaking the waiting pile

  The hungry wood

  The priest stood on the now empty ox-cart at the centre of the square, in a crisp white surplice with a garland of bright cornflowers round his neck, as if the day were a holiday.

  The man beside him was, in contrast, dressed in black leather, scuffed dull with long use, as was the sword handle that hung on his hip.

  The priest looked at the man in black

  “Finder–if you please…”

  The witchfinder raised a hand and pointed at Lucy.

  And his voice cut through the hubbub of the crowd like a hatchet:

  “Bring her.”

  And again someone went through Lucy.

  Not the serving girl

  Another girl

  Pulled by her arms

  Her bare feet skidding on the ground

  Her body scarcely covered in a rough linen shift

  Her face not quite right

  Not quite adult

  Not yet a child

  Not all there

  Simple

  Unguarded

  Screaming

  Stumbling

  Caught up by the men on either side of her

  Carried through the crowd

  The mob silent now

  As if holding its tongue so as to hear her shrieks all the more clearly

  “Please!” she cries raggedly. “Mercy!”

  A gloved fist rises

  Falls through the sky

  A shriek cut off in a thwack of leather on bone

  Lucy tries to close her eyes.

  Can’t close them

  Can’t even wince

  The mouth of the man in leather

  Wet and red

  Fragments of words spilling from behind his white teeth

  “—most abhorred and unnatural creature—”

  “—abnormal and detestable powers—”

  “—affront to the godly—”

  “—friend of shadows—”

  “—damnable witch, condemned by statute, punished by custom—”

  Tongue darting forth to wet his lips

  Snake-like

  Hungry for the last

  “—most blessed and purifying fire—”

  Time slices again

  She fights the urge to vomit

  As everything goes slow.

  So slow she sees it all

  A branch

  In silence

  Dipped in pitch

  A torch now

  Now afire

  A flame

  Cartwheeling through the air

  A child’s eyes follow it above the crowd

  The only sound the no-noise of one giant held breath

  So slow she can see the torch’s smoke-trail leave a smear on the world

  Heading for the ladder in the woodpile

  The girl tied to it

  Arms above her head

  Mouth slack

  One eye bruised shut

  Leaking blood thinned pink with tears

  The other bright with the incoming fire

  The torch lands in a shower of sparks

  as

  The oil-soaked faggots

  WHUMP

  Ablaze

  The sound dam bursts

  The crowd yells

  An animal roar

  A holiday roar

  The man in black leather whoops and lifts his hand to the sky

  Conducting, exulting

  The impresario of incineration

  The priest softer-eyed, shudders, turns away, clutching his throat

  The cornflower garland breaking

  Falling

  As the girl on the ladder bucks and shrieks

  Time slices

  Out of the fire and the thick oil smoke a reaching hand

  Already a black claw

  And with it

  In terror, pure as silver

  The voice of any girl

  Any boy

  One thing from the fire

  One last word-bullet that hits the hidden everychild in each man and woman in the crowd

  Killing the holy roar dead in their throats.

  “Mummy!”

  Faces flinch

  Turn away

  And the world kicks again

  And Lucy drops to her knees, held upright only by her hand, still stuck to the pillar by the past flowing from it, like a magnet.

  It’s dark.

  The square is almost empty

  There is light from the tavern at the far end, the end where one day an apothecary’s shop will stand, and from it leaks the growl of men drinking and arguing.

  It isn’t a happy sound

  The fire is gone

  A hummock of ash sits in the centre of the square.

  The priest sits awkwardly in front of it

  Legs akimbo

  A bottle clutched to his chest

  The witchfinder walks across the square

  His son at his side.

  They reach down to help the priest to his feet.

  He waves them off.

  Mumbles something. The witchfinder says,

  “It was God’s work, Father”

  The drunk priest chokes out a bitter laugh and shakes his head.

  “No, my child–”

  He is pulled to his feet.

  He sways.

  “–it was man’s.”

  He tries to drink

  The bottle is empty

  He tosses it.

  “We have cursed ourselves, Finder Templebane. We have cursed ourselves.”

  The bottle shatters on the ground, splashing sharp fragments into the ash and breaking the connection with the past.

  Lucy’s hand came unstuck from the pillar and she knelt there, head down, panting, looking at the ground until her stomach rebelled at what she had seen and she convulsed, retching her lunch onto the cobbles.

  “Sara,” said a voice.

  For a moment she forgot her name was meant to be Sara, and just stayed where she was, on all fours, waiting to see if her stomach was going to turn any more somersaults. Then she heard the voice again and looked up.

  Georgiana was looking down at her with a mixture of shock and something close to disgust.

  “What is it?” she said. “My heavens! Are you ill?”

  Lucy spat a thin ribbon of sour bile into the gutter and shook her head.

  “Why are you here?” said Ge
orgiana, a flicker of suspicion overriding the distaste in her voice.

  “I shouldn’t be,” said Lucy. Now the past had gone and she was getting control of her own head back, she remembered the heart-stone she had seen in the other girl’s hand what seemed like centuries before, but was in fact only seconds ago. She pulled the stone out of her own pocket.

  Georgiana’s eyes widened in shock, and Lucy saw her instinctively tighten her fist over the stone she knew she held there.

  “What,” said Georgiana. “What—?”

  “I shouldn’t be here,” said Lucy, as the shadows bounced around them. She pocketed her stone. “And neither should you.”

  The light around them was not coming from either of their stones. It was coming out of the mirror on the side of the doorpost. Lucy saw it faced a matching mirror on the other side, a mirror reflecting a parallel world of infinitely receding images of itself like a tunnel. And, just as she had seen in the Murano Cabinet, the otherwise unbroken repetitiveness of those images was being walked through by a dark figure holding a bright torch in its hand as it seemed to step effortlessly from reflection to reflection, as simply as a man stepping through a door.

  “What is—?” began Georgiana, seeing the fear in Lucy’s face, but not what was provoking it.

  Lucy stared at the relentlessly approaching figure for one more breath, just long enough to see the unmistakeable shape, and then the light flared off the blade held in the man’s hand, and she was suddenly convinced it would be very bad if he was to reach the front panel of the reflections and step out into this world.

  So she tore her eyes away and did the only thing she could think of.

  She raised her leg and hacked her heel into the mirror, shattering it.

  “Sara!” yelped Georgiana. “What—?”

  “Just run!” gritted Lucy, dragging her by the arm as she ran for the narrow alley leading out of the hateful square.

  They ran.

  CHAPTER 55

  THE INVISIBLE THREAD

  Amos had walked towards the setting sun for so many days that the tinker’s pack he carried was no longer burdened with the jangling festoons of tinware and implements that it had been. He still had several knives and had kept one lidded canister in which to carry any milk that he might trade for along the way, but now the heaviest part of his burden was the knife-grinding wheel strapped to the back. Because he was getting stronger every day he walked, it was less of a weight to him than it had been, but on the steepest uphill portions of his journeyings he did still wonder about leaving it behind, or better, trading it.

  There was still enough of the Templebanes’ upbringing left in him to make him see the folly in that, because however irksome a load it might be, making the straps of the pack itch and chafe at his shoulders, it was a source of regular food, and occasionally–amongst the more well-to-do cottagers whose cutlery he honed and cleaned–income.

  Having begun his travels with no plan other than to keep moving away from London and the House of Templebane’s wide sphere of contacts, on the road he had developed an ambition. It seemed a lofty one to him, and all but unattainable without considerable hard work or cunning, but it was one of the characteristics–he felt–of a truly worthy ambition that it should be so.

  What he wanted was a horse.

  He had developed a frank envy for the confident characters who passed him on horseback, and he coveted both the speed of their passage across the landscape and the elevated viewpoint that they had of it from the high saddle. He had developed, in addition to stronger muscles and healthier lungs, a great hunger for the countryside, and a horse seemed like a good means of ranging farther and seeing more of it.

  He had once overheard a distant connection of Templebane’s who had come to the city from the depths of the West Country talking in an almost indecipherable rural burr about what sounded like the “vreedoms of the New Varest”, and of how there were wild ponies there. Amos knew the New Forest was in the west and so perhaps that, he decided, was what drew him so strongly in that direction. Maybe he was on his way to enjoy that “vreedom” and catch a horse for himself.

  It must be that, he thought as he lay on his back at dusk, swaddled and alone in the tinker’s blanket, looking up at the emerging immensity of stars overhead, because there was certainly something calling him westward: he felt it like a tug on an invisible thread which had been laced through his heartstrings.

  How he knew it he did not know, but he was convinced that his destiny lay somewhere over the distant horizon, where the sun had set.

  CHAPTER 56

  TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

  Since it was after dusk and the streets of the melancholy town had emptied, they were not stopped and asked why they ran as young girls might otherwise expect to be in the circumstances, but Lucy was still circumspect enough to know they must not draw attention to themselves, so whenever they saw groups of people she slowed down and they walked slowly, heads down, until they were past. Because of this they had to walk for most of the High Street as the shopmen were on the pavements packing up and shuttering their unwelcoming establishments for the night, but once they reached the road beyond the lights of the town she gripped Georgiana’s arm and sped into the darkness towards the camp.

  “What?” gasped Georgiana. “What is it? I can’t run as well as you! What are we running from?”

  “Something bad,” Lucy said. “And yes, you can.”

  So they did. And though for the longest time the only sounds around them were the slap of their feet on the road, the distant murmur from the canal and the occasional shriek from an early owl out hunting, Lucy felt like she was running from two things–the walker in the mirror and the final scream of the burning girl.

  Georgiana allowed herself to be swept along by Lucy’s urgency until they were about two-thirds of the way to the camp, and then she stopped without warning and folded, bending double in the middle of the road, her wind blown.

  “I cannot,” she puffed. “I have a pain–in my side–as if I have been–pierced by a hat–by a hat-pin, I swear—”

  As she bent over, something slipped from within her cloak and broke at her feet.

  “No!” she gasped. It was the bottle from the apothecary shop. She instantly bent and tried to scoop it up, saving any liquid that might remain cupped in any intact section, but there was none. She stared at the dark stain on the road.

  “Father,” she whispered. “Father will be–I must go back…”

  “The shop will be closed,” said Lucy, looking back down the way they had just come. The moon was already up and a nail-paring off full so she could see that no one else was on the road running after them. She pointed to a stile a few yards further on.

  “Sit,” she said. “Compose yourself. We’re safe, I think.”

  Georgiana stumbled to the rough wooden seat and flopped down on it. Lucy sat next to her. For a while they both sat there in the moonlight as Lucy got her breath back. She thought Georgiana was still breathing hard, but then realised that she was sobbing.

  “What?” she said tentatively.

  Georgiana shook her head, gulping awkwardly.

  Lucy knew what it was. Or at least she guessed it was one of two things–either Georgiana was ashamed at being found out as a fellow Glint or else, being a fellow Glint, she had also seen the girl being burned. That agonised scream for a mother who couldn’t come and wouldn’t rescue her from the fire, that last shout of panic and horror still rung in her own head.

  She put a careful hand on the heaving shoulders next to her.

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  And to her surprise, Georgiana, the icy and aloof Miss Eagle, choked out a deep sob and melted into a warm tear-wracked bundle in her arms.

  Lucy didn’t know what to do, so she just held her and stroked her back comfortingly, trying to calm her, as if she were a horse which had been spooked.

  “I didn’t know you were one,” she said.

  She felt the gir
l stiffen beneath her hand.

  “But it’s all right,” she said. “Really. It’s all right. I’m one too.”

  There was a tremor and she was sure the girl relaxed just a fraction. She could feel the other heart thrumming beneath Georgiana’s ribcage, right against her own.

  Lucy remembered how strange it had been when Sara Falk–the real Sara–had shown her her own heart-stone. It seemed so long ago now, but she felt she understood exactly what was going on in the other girl’s head: thinking you were the only person who could suck the past from the stones you touched was one thing–discovering there were others like you, finding out there was a name for it, that other people had found their own heart-stone that gave them strength and glowed when danger was abroad, that was a whole other thing. That was both a great relief and a terrible shock.

  She felt the dangerous rightness of this moment, this unexpected intimacy with the trembling girl in her arms and gave her a comforting squeeze.

  Georgiana pushed herself gently back a few inches as she raised her head to look at her with an expression she couldn’t read.

  “You’re a what?” she whispered with a catch in her voice.

  In the clean moonlight that illuminated the exquisite planes of her face but allowed no colour to intrude, she looked like a perfect, marble statue.

  “I’m a Glint.”

  “A… Glint?”

  Lucy nodded.

  Georgiana pushed back another inch.

  “I don’t know what a ‘Glint’ is,” she said carefully.

  Lucy had not known what she was had a name either so she saw no trap here. She tightened her grip on Georgiana’s shoulders and smiled.

  “It’s nothing to be scared of. It just happens. I mean it’s not pleasant, but it’s just in the mind, though it feels real at the time, so real that you saw me retch. But it passes.”

  “What passes?” said Georgiana, pushing further away, and getting to her feet. Suddenly her whole demeanour had changed: where she had melted and been warm she was now freezing up, nervy again like a deer about to flee from an unwelcome noise in the forest. “Why should you want it to pass…?”

  “Glinting,” said Lucy. “Wait…”

  She laughed. Georgiana took another step away from her.

  “Wait. It’s all right. Glinting, touching stone, seeing the past as if it’s real. Feeling it—”

  Georgiana stared at her.