The tree-lined stream-bank stood on the other side, with the Rother’s surface glittering through the willows where a few last blackbirds and song thrushes were greeting the morning, and there was a pathway along the top of the earth mound.
“I knew Jon Wooton fairly well,” Frances said. “And I regarded him as one of my major failures as a priest.”
“Bit of a wild one, Father?” Bramble said. “We get a fair number of those in the army. They do well enough, mostly, with some discipline.”
Frances looked a little surprised. “Not just that, corporal. Wild young men are common enough, as you say. It was...” he hesitated, obviously groping for words. “It was the fact that he was so intelligent. So able in many ways. And yet the character was the sticking point. Come.”
He turned and walked briskly toward the manse. Rutherston and Bramble exchanged a look that said this one would do well on a route march as they followed him to a long shed-like building behind the brick house, one with skylights of salvage glass.
Frances unlocked it and threw the door open, with a sharp sit to keep the dogs outside.
Rutherston felt his eyebrows rise; his nose tingled to strange metallic scents, oily and sharp and pungent. The inside was fitted out as a laboratory-cum-machine-shop. Shapes of brass and steel and glass shone with the gleam of well-cared-for equipment; the detective recognized lathes and drill presses, a still, racks of chemicals, draughtsman’s tables, and one corner held a library of several hundred books.
“I supervise a club for some of the parish boys--and a few girls-- who are interested in mechanical things, and in the sciences,” he said. “It’s a healthy hobby, better than drink, fornication, and poaching, or even an excess of cricket and Morris dancing, and God did not make everyone to work the soil. For that matter, all the land in this area has been taken up and there are as many laborers as there is employment on the farms. I’ve been able to find apprenticeships, and a few engineering scholarships, for some of the most able of our young people.”
“A worthy effort, Padre,” Rutherston acknowledged sincerely. “I presume Jon Wooton was one of your club members?”
“The best of them!” Frances said. “And one of the first. It was the first time he or any of his family took an interest in anything involved with the church, too.”
“Ah,” Rutherston said, opening his notebook. “Lutherans or Anti-Reunionists ?”
“Nei, we’ve hardly any Dissenters in the parish, not enough for a meeting-house, and none at all in the village. Well, there’s Jack Hordursson, our cobbler, but he’s an atheist... loudly. And the Norbits, they’re Buddhists--they got it out of a book. Nei, the Wootons are just indifferent for the most part.”
“So you were surprised when Jon Wooton joined the...”
“Philomath’s Club. Here, let me show you. This is all his work.”
He led them over to a bench. Several photographs were pinned above it. Rutherston nodded. They were excellent work; one of the priest, another a family group in front of a water mill, and still another of the District Nurse and her housemaid in front of the clinic.
“Jon Wooton made the camera, and developed the negatives. He made several cameras, in fact, some of them every bit as good as one from a factory in Winchester.”
Several model machines were racked against the wall, including a small telescope. Another had a brass tube like a miniature hot-water boiler set over a spirit-lamp, with an affair of levers and pistons in an arrangement like a grasshopper’s legs. The priest undid a cap, poured in water, lit the lamp, and worked valves. After a minute the machine began to hiss... and then, slowly at first, the levers began to work up and down, and the flywheel to spin with a smooth, alien motion.
Bramble took a step back and crossed himself, his eyes going wide. The priest smiled and made a soothing gesture. “Nothing but natural law at work, my son.”
“But... that sort of thing doesn’t work nei more! Not since the Change!”
“Actually it does, corporal,” Rutherston said briskly. “If it isn’t the type that needs high pressures. But an... what’s the phrase, Padre? I should have paid more attention in Classics... they work.”
“A Watt-style steam engine, that functions by creating a vacuum and then using the pressure of the air to push the piston--an atmospheric engine. Wooton made this himself, when he was sixteen, just from the plans in a book. And it worked the first time.”
“That’s rare?”
“Take my word for it. Very rare.”
Rutherston nodded. “There’s a few large ones in dockyards to pump out dry docks, and in coal mines up the Severn for drainage. They’re not of much use otherwise; they weigh too much and take too much fuel for the work they do. For most purposes, an ordinary waterwheel or windmill is far better.”
Frances pointed to several places where the brass rods of the little engine had been bent and then carefully repaired.
“There you have Jon Wooton’s genius, and his failing--when I told him that nei great use could be made of the engine under modern conditions, he smashed it and stormed away.”
“And who fixed it, Padre?”
Frances passed a hand over his face and sighed. “He did. I had expelled him from the club--and from the sacraments--nine years ago, for reasons which must remain confidential. Then just two years past he came back to Eddsford from his longest trip abroad. He’d made a little money, it seems, as a sailor--”
Bramble rolled his eyes slightly toward the ceiling. Too holy for his own good, this one, the expression said. Rutherston gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“--and he convinced me that he had mended his ways. Among other things, he offered to help instruct at the Philomath Club here. And did so... brilliantly. Until I found him in a compromising position with one of the girls who was a member.”
He shook his head. “And he absconded with... oh, nothing of value. Some fanciful plans he’d drawn up, and a few books--old works, on technologies that definitely do not operate since the Change.”
Rutherston nodded. “Evidently the young man was a disappointment to most people who knew him, Padre. Do you think anyone was disappointed enough to kill him?”
The priest bit his lip. “Inspector, you put me in a very difficult position.”
“Oh, I realize that you have to respect the confidences of the--”
The vicar of Eddsford surprised him by chuckling. “No, it’s not so much that. It’s that there were so many people here in Eddsford who... ah... very strongly disliked Jon Wooton. I hope I’m Christian enough to forgive those who wrong me, but my brother--”
“Frances!”
The voice came from beyond the door; a woman in a good plain dress hurried in with a leather box in her hands; it had a buckled flap with a golden cross embossed on it. “Frances! Mrs. Thordarsson--oh, pardon me.”
“Inspector, corporal, my wife Hrefna Broxby,” he said, pronouncing it more like Refna. “Yes, dear?”
“Mrs. Thordarsson is failing.”
“Ah, then I’ll have to leave you, I’m afraid, inspector,” he said briskly, taking the leather box. “Their farm is on the edge of the parish and time presses. Very much a pleasure and do feel free to call on me at any time.”
A youngster in his teens outside was holding the reins of a rather thickset horse in the shafts of a light two-wheeled carriage; it looked like a prosperous farmer’s Sunday showpiece. The priest walked out at the same quick pace, stepped into the seat, gave the other a hand up, flourished the whip, and started off at a brisk trot.
The vicar’s wife watched him leave with a smile, then turned to the two men: “Oh, detective inspector,” she said. “Sir James asked me to pass on his invitation to visit this afternoon.”
After they’d left the churchyard, Bramble nodded slowly to himself. “Think I’ve got a bit of a handle on this Wooton fellow, sir,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Well, he was a right clever lad, eh? And thought he should be a big man..
. and maybe he should have been.”
Rutherston frowned. “Then why in God’s name didn’t he leave? Miller is the best thing he could hope for here, in a settled county like Hampshire. And he wasn’t even the heir to the lease; there’s an elder brother.”
“But,” Bramble made a sweeping gesture, “he kept coming back, you see? He wanted to make his mark here; not in Winchester or Portsmouth or Bristol or the colonies, but here. Where he grew up and with all the people here, where it really counts, sir.”
“Ah,” the detective said. “Now I see your point.”
He glanced up at the sun; it was an hour or so to noon. “Let us repair to the Moor’s Head until luncheon. If there’s anyone in town who knows the gossip, it’s an innkeeper.”
“Then the Squire,” Bramble said. He smiled. “Better you than me, sir.”
The park around the manor wasn’t particularly large, probably because labor had been scarce until the last few decades, but Rutherston stopped to admire the sight of a herd of fallow deer grazing beneath a beech. They ambled away across greensward studded with crimson poppies and golden corn marigolds as he and Bramble walked in past the gatehouse; the laneway was flanked by clipped shapes of golden yew as it curved around an ornamental pool of several acres, and then through a screen of timber and over a ha-ha into the house gardens, velvety lawns and tall chestnuts and cedars, and banks ablaze with phlox, penstemon, black-eyed Susan, and more. A few gardeners stared or waved tentatively as the two King’s Men walked toward the entrance.
Royston Hall itself was Seventeenth Century work for the most part, a rectangular block done in pale stone and four stories high. The gray-haired butler opened the door before he could knock and took the card he offered.
“You’re expected, sir,” he said, not deigning to notice Bramble. “If you’ll follow me?”
And I don’t think he’s been a butler all his life, Rutherston thought. Men rarely have half their left ear chopped off in that line of work. Or get a limp quite like that.
There was a suit of armor inside the door at the entrance to the hall, a modern man-at-arm’s outfit of head-to-toe articulated plate. The model had been Fifteenth Century, but the metal was considerably better than any available to medieval smiths.
The detective and the corporal gave it identical considering glances as they went by. It took a good deal of effort to batter good alloy-steel armor into that sort of shape, and it wouldn’t be at all healthy for the man inside; the shoulder-flash of the Cordoba Lancers was barely visible, and the visor of the sallet helm had been cut nearly in half, which must have taken a two-handed blow with a heavy axe or a halberd. The butler led them into a room with bay windows overlooking a walled garden; they were open, and a scent of lavender and cut grass drifted in, along with a country-house smell compounded of faint traces of lamp and dog and wood-smoke, tobacco, the old walls...
Sir James Broxby was a man of medium height, still slender and lithe at fifty, with amber-colored hair and mustache liberally streaked with gray. He would have been handsome if it hadn’t been for the slash that had taken his left eye and furrowed the brow above and the cheek below; as it was he wore the black patch with distinction, and the other eye was bright blue and shrewd beneath the shaggy brow. Rutherston heard Bramble make an mmmm sound behind him, and the same thought occurred to him as they shook hands:
Well, that’s what happened to the suit of plate.
“A pleasure, Sir James,” he told the baronet.
“Mutual, inspector... just a moment... Rutherston... the Short Compton Rutherstons? The Blues?”
“Yes, Sir James, twice. On the retired list at present, and making my way in the CID--younger son, and all that. Youngest of four sons, actually.”
“Ingmar Rutherston... the Military Medal down in Morocco some time ago?”
The detective shrugged. “Medals came up from the rear with the rations, and everybody deserved one,” he said.
That brought a short laugh and a nod; not precisely agreement, but a meeting of minds on matters that others without their shared experience could never really know. Rutherston opened his cigarette case and offered it.
“Ah, Embiricos,” Sir James said, taking one. “These alone made the cost of resettling Barbados worthwhile, and damn the Whigs and their Babbage Engine project.”
He cocked an eye at Bramble. “You can sit too, corporal.”
“I’ll stand, if it’s all the same, sir,” Bramble said, taking a position behind the sofa where Rutherston sat; it was rather like having a bear behind the flowered chintz, but reassuring for all that.
“The corporal has been assisting me, and doing rather a good job of it,” Rutherston said.
“I’m not surprised.”
The baronet rang a bell, and a housemaid slid into the room. “Gin and tonic, please, Martha,” he said. “And you, inspector?”
“The same, thank you. It is a warm day.”
They made small talk--the weather (good), the state of the just-completed harvest (excellent), the trends in wheat and wool prices (deplorable), Sir James’s former command in the resettled areas of southern Spain (great potential)--until the drinks came. Rutherston sipped at his, enjoying the tart astringency, and then opened his notebook as a hint.
Sir James sighed. “Unpleasant business this, all ‘round. I confess I wouldn’t have been even the least upset if young Wooton had come to grief somewhere abroad, but to have him murdered in my own village...”
Rutherston nodded sympathetically. “The Wootons are an old family here?”
The other man laughed shortly and drank, smoothing his mustache with a knuckle. “Very old. Gaffer Wooton... Jon’s grandfather... lived here before the Change. So did my family... nearby, at least.”
Rutherston’s brows went up. That was unusual. The rescue parties had swept up selected people from all over Southern England that first year and taken them to the Isle of Wight Refuge to wait out the inevitable die-off after the machines stopped. Most had been farmers, and the others craftsmen or skilled workers of high value. Thatchers, weavers, and blacksmiths and the like... and to be sure, the families of commanders and of their soldiers and of persons of influence on the Refuge. The men in charge had saved civilization here where nearly everything on the Continent from Normandy to Iran had gone down in utter wreck... but they’d still been only human, and their power had been near absolute for a while.
The Squire of Royston Hall sighed again. “I don’t know how much background you want--”
“The more the better, Sir James.”
“Well, the Wootons got the lease on the mill as soon as this area was resettled in the spring of 1999--my grandfather was commandant of the region under the Emergency Regulations and got a substantial grant of land when things were privatized, the usual arrangement. Old Tom Wooton did a splendid job; he’d been in the Life Guards with my grandfather, driving one of those... what where they called? Not automobiles or trucks, moving steel fort things on bands of metal...”
“Tanks, I believe.”
“Yes. One called after a sword, a ‘scimitar,’ I think. Old Tom was handy with machinery, and so he was put in charge of renovating the mill--it hadn’t been operational before the Change, just kept for appearances, they did a lot of that sort of foolishness then of course. He married an Icelandic woman--”
Rutherston nodded; that was also common. It had been encouraged, in fact, when the refugees from the northern isles were welcomed into a land gone empty in the second and third years.
“--And his son extended it, added a fulling section.”
The detective closed his eyes for a second to search his memory. The mill was on the fringe of the village, but he hadn’t heard the distinctive sound of wet woolen cloth pounded by wooden hammers. At his unspoken question, Sir James went on:
“We closed it down about nine years ago. There’s not as much weaving here as there was in my father’s time--just rough homespun and blankets, that sort of thing. The cloth tr
ade’s been moving off to the West Country and north into your bailiwick lately and it’s cheaper to buy the finer grades. Our Rother really doesn’t have enough water power for manufacturing.”
True enough, Rutherston thought. Though I wouldn’t call Dursley and Stroud and Chalsford our bailiwick, precisely; we just sell them our farmers’ wool and wheat and flax.
He’d never liked the mill-towns. They were too big--Stroud was the most monstrously overgrown and had four thousand people nowadays--and they didn’t really fit into the Cotswold country he loved.
Winchester and Bristol and Portsmouth are cities, he thought. Eddsford and Short Compton are villages. Those places are neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat.
“I turned it into a winery instead, and loaned a few of my tenants the money for planting more vines. There we have some chance of competing, what with haulage costs from the colonies. In any case, young Jon took it hard. He’d been full of plans for making the fulling operation more efficient--even adding a spinning mill. That we definitely wouldn’t have had the water power for, but Jon was a trifle unbalanced on the subject. We had words on the matter when I pointed out that it was my property and the decision was mine. In fact, we both lost our tempers. He swore he’d buy the mill and the freehold of it and I... well, I’m afraid I laughed and said he was welcome to do it, any time he had a thousand pounds in cash about him.”
Rutherston winced slightly, and felt Bramble do the same at some subliminal level. A thousand pounds was what Rutherston made in five years or a corporal in fifteen. There were places, not here in Hampshire but not necessarily right out on the frontiers either, where you could buy and stock a good farm with that much.
Sir James looked at the end of his cigarillo, finished his gin and tonic, and then sighed.
“Well, two years ago... by God, he did it.”
Rutherston felt his jaw start to drop, and the Squire of Eddsford nodded.
“Yes, quite a surprise. But I’d given my word, even if I meant it as a joke, and... there he was with a thousand in good Bank of England notes. I had absolutely nei desire to sell family land, but what could I do? It was a fair price, after all; better than fair, even if I did have to put up a new winery. I felt lucky he didn’t insist on making a public parade of it; he was always one to kick a man when he had him down, was our Jon.”
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