The detective’s pen scribbled over his pad. Unwillingly, he felt a certain admiration for the late Jon Wooton’s sheer gall. To come home and beard the Squire that way... although it said something reasonably favorable about the landowner, too. If Sir James wanted to he could make living here impossible for anyone he took against, since he was the largest landowner, the major employer directly and through his tenant-farmers, and Justice of the Peace and militia captain to boot. Nobody apart from his own mother seemed to have liked Jon Wooton much either, which would have made his position that much worse.
Just then the door crashed open. A woman stood in it, dressed in black silk. It clashed horribly with her graying ginger hair, which escaped in wisps about her long and rather horsey face; she had mismatched features that might have been charming if she smiled, but he had an instant and distinct impression that she didn’t do that very often, even apart from whatever was bothering her now.
Relative of the Squire, Rutherston thought instantly. Close relative. Sister, probably.
Her eyes were red as if from prolonged weeping, but she glared at Sir James Broxby with open rage.
“You killed him, James! How could you!”
The accused man sighed again, closed his eyes for a second, and stood. “I’m rather busy now, Vigdis--”
She turned to Rutherston, who’d also stood by automatic reflex. “Arrest him! He killed Jon because he couldn’t stand the thought of my being happy, of having a home of my own--”
Something in the detective’s face stopped her; she started to weep again, then snatched something from a shelf and threw it. The porcelain shattered against a window, which broke itself; then she turned and stormed out again.
The baronet sat again. “Good God,” he said quietly. “I apologize for subjecting you to that, inspector.”
Rutherston sat as well. “No need to apologize, Sir James. In my line of work one often sees people when they... ah... aren’t at their best.”
His host rang the bell again. “Another gin and tonic, Martha,” he said. “Much gin, little tonic, nei ice. Another, inspector? Nei? Well, I need it, by God!”
He shook his head and went on: “I’ve been lucky in my wife, my sons and daughters, my brother and our other sisters... but Vigdis is, as you can see, a consummately silly woman. And Jon Wooton was rather a swine with women of all classes. Whether you believe me or not, I wouldn’t have objected if I’d thought he would give her some happiness, but... it wouldn’t have mattered if Wooton had ten thousand pounds coming in every year and a seat in the Lords.”
“Of course, Sir James,” Rutherston said; quite sincerely, on the whole.
By God, it’s a good thing that being a copper is a cure for embarrassment; otherwise I’d be dropping dead of the English Disease right here. I suspect Corporal Bramble is willing his vital functions to cease immediately.
“Now,” he continued. “Jon Wooton bought the mill two years ago?”
“Yes, and that made his brother Eric his tenant,” Broxby said, escaping to--relatively--impersonal matters with relief. “Another reason I hated to sell; Eric’s been a perfectly sound man. Jon immediately cleared out the winery equipment, and began extending the old mill building, which at least gave some of our Eddsford people employment. In fact, he swore he’d put in spinning machines as well, even power-looms.”
Rutherston snorted. He might not like Stroud, but having it close by as he grew had taught him something about the economics of the textile trade. Nobody used power-looms. Power spinning, yes, and some of the processing parts of the fine-cloth trade were mechanized, but when so many cottagers had good treadle-looms and needed work in the off-seasons of the farming year it just didn’t pay, especially when people willing to work in factories were so scarce and could demand high wages. Master-spinners put the thread out for weaving through the cooperative guilds, then bought back the cloth for finishing.
“I thought you said there wasn’t much spare power from your river?”
“None!” Broxby said, then: “Ah, thank you, Martha,” and knocked back his drink as if it were neat whiskey. “In fact, there’s a Catchment Order enjoining anyone on this stretch from building more dams or weirs. To preserve the fishing, you see. But Wooton would have it that he could install a steam engine, of all things! In Hampshire, with not a pound of coal within fifty miles! And they don’t pay for anything but pumping out mines even up the Severn, where it’s cheap.”
Rutherston started to snort again, then remembered the vicar and his Philomath Club, and the little model.
But that makes even less sense. He was nei fool, our Jon, and he knew you couldn’t get useful work out of one of those machines. Not without a coalmine right beneath it, so the fuel was free! And they took most of the coal in the Old Days; we’re working their leavings, or seams too small to be worth noticing back then.
That was the basic lesson of the Change; under the laws of nature as they’d applied since that March 17th of 1998, you couldn’t get mechanical work out of heat, not in any really useful amount. Not in an engine, not in a firearm. The detective shook his head. He’d learned the details of it in school, though it had been boringly abstract, especially the bits about electricity--you could visualize a steam engine in your head, but not force flowing in wires.
What really puzzled him was that Jon Wooton, in his own personal and repulsive fashion, was acting as if he was seventy years old and remembered the Old World, and missed it enough to keep scheming to find a way around the Change. Sir James Broxby braced his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepled his fingers. When he looked over them at Rutherston he was once again the forceful man he’d first met.
“I’m afraid we’ve presented you with a puzzle, inspector. You have to determine who didn’t want to kill Jon Wooton.”
“Starting with the District Nurse and his schoolteacher,” Rutherston said ruefully.
For a moment he wished he’d accepted the second drink.
The brow over Sir James’s single eye went up. “Them? They have been handling his business correspondence with that firm in Portsmouth,” he said. “So they can’t loathe him quite as much as the remainder of us.”
“No, not all as it seems,” Bramble said, frowning intently, as they walked back down the lane to the park gate.
Rutherston nodded. He’s been caught up in the puzzle of it, he thought, amused. Natural huntsman, I suppose.
The big noncom went on: “If Sir James was going to kill a man, he’d do it face-to-face; Jon was younger and knew how to use a blade, too, sir.”
Dueling wasn’t legal. On the other hand, it wasn’t absolutely unknown, either, in the last generation or so.
“There’s his sister,” the detective pointed out. “The most honorable of men could lose control... still...”
Bramble cleared his throat apologetically. “No disrespect to the Squire’s sister, but Jon was a man with an eye for the girls from all we’ve heard, and you’d have to be right desperate to fancy waking up next to her for the rest of your mortal days. And he was a good ten years younger.”
“Unless it was for revenge.”
“Then he wouldn’t string her along. Having it away and then dumping her public-like would be revenge in plenty.”
“Hmmm,” Rutherston said. “I see what you mean. He probably did mean to marry her then... and be a rich man here in Eddsford, with the Squire’s sister too. That might be enough to overcome Sir James’s scruples.”
“More likely one of his men’s. Did you see that butler, sir?”
Rutherston shot him a glance, and got that guileless expression once more.
“Yes, I did. Yes, you’re right, corporal, he might be the sort to quietly take care of something the master wouldn’t or couldn’t... but I don’t think he’d use poison. Quick stab to the kidneys, and then the body never found, that would be more like it.”
“Something to that. But someone did it... and it would have to have a bit of spite behind it, inspector.
He died hard, did our Jon. Very hard.”
Rutherston nodded. “That’s the way we have to approach this. Usually we look for motive and opportunity...”
“But everyone in this sodding village hated Jon Wooton, and they all had the opportunity to drop sommat in his beer.”
“Exactly. Therefore we’ll have to focus on the means. Time to go see what may be seen at the Wootons.’“
The mill was at the other side of the village; they walked back through the green and along the single long lane, since Eddsford had more length than breadth. With the harvest in the farm-workers who made up most of the people here were taking time to do repairs and tidying up; they passed half a dozen parties of thatchers, with householders tossing up bundles of the golden straw to be pegged and trimmed. The trades and crafts were busier than ever, though; they went past a shoemaker--who from the sign also repaired harness and saddles--tapping away with his family working around him, a smithy with its blast of heat and inevitable hangers-on and iron clangor, a tailor’s where the treadle-powered sewing machines hummed.
Children were running about, enjoying their last weeks of freedom before the school year started. A mob of the older boys came by kicking ,a football; one of them sent it across the path of the two men. Bramble stopped it with his foot, bounced it expertly into the air with his toe, bumped it up with his knee and then head-butted it unerringly to the gangling youth who’d kicked it to him. The tow-headed boy grinned back and then led his shouting mob down a laneway toward the water-meadows.
Rutherston caught a look of mild enjoyment on the noncom’s face before it gave way to his usual seriousness.
“You may have found His Majesty a recruit there,” he said.
“Worse things than going for a soldier, sir,” Bramble said. “If you’ve the inclination.”
“True enough.”
They passed out of the village proper; beyond it were the allotments--plots of a few acres came along with the rental of a cottage. Many of the villagers were at work there, hoeing and weeding, or harvesting vegetables and fruit into woven-withe baskets. Some of them nodded to the two outsiders; others just glanced at them.
“You or I would be grockles in Eddsford if we lived here thirty years, married local girls and were buried in the churchyard,” Rutherston said.
“Probably, sir. Not quite as bad as that where I come from; we weren’t resettled until a decade or so later. Still had new folk moving in until around the time I was born.”
A few two-wheeled carts went by, loaded high with billets of firewood cut in the coppices; this was the season to start laying it in for the winter. It was also the season for milling some of the recently harvested grain, of course, though not all of it; besides taking time to thresh, it kept better in the kernel. The tall overshot steel wheel was turning as water dropped onto the curved metal vanes from the millrace. That wound out of sight along the hillside and into a patch of dense forest.
Ah, Rutherston thought, looking at a series of heavy metal shapes, forged steel and cast iron; they rested by the newer section of the long rectangular building. That will be the parts Sir James mentioned from Portsmouth. Odd that Miss Medford didn’t mention doing Jon’s correspondence.
In mourning for a brother or no, the world’s work had to go on; as they approached, a sling full of the sacks was hoisted up to the top story, to be poured into the hopper and eventually emerge as flour--and sacks of that were being unloaded into empty wagons from a doorway lower down. The groaning sound of burr millstones turning on each other ran under the rush of the water and the rumble of the big gearwheels meshing. There was a mealy, dusty smell in the air, despite the dampness.
A tall man with thinning sandy hair was overseeing operations. He turned as Rutherston and Bramble approached and nodded at them:
“Been expecting you. I’ve a bit t’ do furst, sir.” Then he shouted upwards at his workmen: “Awroi, keep her running! Light on the lever! There’s nei way for even biyani like you t’ bugger it up now, so don’t!”
Rutherston introduced them; the miller had a hand like something carved from bacon-rind, and a gravely respectful manner that might be hiding resentment... or possibly relief. He led them into the rambling ivy-covered house that stood near the mill and offered refreshment--nammit was the word he used for the pound-cake and rosehip tea that his wife brought in and slammed down with a nervous irritation that made the husband wince.
“Where’s mother?” he said to her. “And the kids?”
“She’s in Jon’s room, with his things,” she said with a waspish note.
Eric Wooton looked surprised. “How’d she get in? It’s locked! There’s the guard! She were fussing about it all yesterday, and yelling at the so’jer.”
“The squaddie’s asleep, and she used a strip of tin!”
Oh, my, Rutherston thought, and exchanged a glance with Bramble as they both rose.
Mrs. Wooton the younger was a woman of about her husband’s age, somewhere between thirty and forty, with bright blonde hair and sharp intelligent features and tourmaline-green eyes. She went on with a snap:
“Margrethe and Sally and Tom are staying with Jenny. And that’s where I’m. going now. Call me when your Jon isn’t mucking up our lives any more. I didn’t marry him, you know.”
Eric Wooton winced as the door slammed, and went on as he trailed after the two King’s Men down a corridor toward the stairs.
“Jenny’s her sister...” he sighed, then went on: “You talked with the Squire, I suppose, inspector? Jon... ee allus was a strange boy, off alone with his books or fiddling with some bit of gearwork, but he changed when the Squire closed the fulling mill. First he goes off to sea; then he comes back with money and big plans, talking all fess about how he’d settle everyone who ever crossed him, and then he goes and buys the mill!”
“Which will be yours now, I suppose, Mr. Wooton?” Rutherston said over his shoulder, as they came to a landing.
The square Saxon face went slack. “I hadn’t thought!”
The detective blinked. He’d been on the receiving end of a great many attempts at innocence, and that was the real thing if he’d ever seen it.
And now the poor fellow has more guilt to add to the relief he’s trying not to feel, Rutherston thought; the Wootons had ratcheted up two steps on the local social ladder. Now, how to interrupt his mother...
Eric Wooton visibly put the dawning realization that he now had his beloved mill in fee simple and rent-free aside and continued:
“I didn’t think any good would come of it, nor of those friends of his.”
Aha, Rutherston thought. That’s new.
“Friends?” he said.
“Foreign,” Eric Wooton said shortly.
The problem is, foreign could just mean someone from Warwickshire, or even Winchester, Rutherston thought. I doubt they were from outside the Empire.
“And they came by night. Jon would go out and talk to ‘em, I suppose he went with them on his trips away, but he wouldn’t bring them into the house--not that I wasn’t glad of it. Wouldn’t want them around my kids. Then when they left he’d have more--”
Suddenly he stopped and sniffed the air. Rutherston did too; there was a hint of smoke, not likely from a hearth in this season, but it could be from the iron stove in the kitchen.
“Mother!” Wooton bellowed, and tried to bolt past them.
Bramble had his sword out. Rutherston made a gesture and the noncom sheathed it as they went pounding up the last flight of stairs. The trooper who’d been on guard lay slackly on the floor with a cup beside him; drugged, not drunk or asleep, but Rutherston didn’t envy him when he eventually met Corporal Bramble again in his official capacity.
The door had been locked once more; the miller rattled the handle and shouted incoherent pleas, threats, and curses at his mother. Smoke leaked underneath it; Rutherston shoulder-checked the agitated man neatly out of the way, and Bramble hit the oak planks with his shoulder tucked in. That was pract
ical, if you had a lot of bone and muscle behind the shove, and a mail-coat and padding to protect it. The lock tore out of the jamb with a crunch, and the door banged open.
“No!” a woman screeched.
That was probably Kristin Wooton; at least she was stout and middle-aged. She went for Rutherston with a creditable tackle, but he dodged aside--he’d been a very good rugby fly-half once--and picked up a jug of water by the side of an unmade bed still marked with the dried blood and fluids of Jon Wooton’s hard dying. Smoke turned to steam as he threw it into a metal box where flames ran. Behind him Bramble had the mother in an unbreakable grip-- despite her attempts to kick and gouge--and Eric Wooton was...
A wringin’ of his hands, Rutherston thought, as he opened a window and waved a pillowcase to disperse the smoke. If I had to pick a recruit for a commando operation, I’d take Eric’s mother Kristin over him any day of the week.
The basket held charred papers. And charred photographs as well. The detective picked one up between thumb and forefinger.
For a moment the shapes made no sense. Then his brows rose as he mentally untangled the interlocked limbs and saw what was going where; he hadn’t seen anything like it since a handful of pre-Change magazines were handed eagerly around after lights-out in the dormitory at Winchester College... Then the brows rose again, to, an almost painful level. Those photographs were modern, and not posed; they’d been taken at some distance, through an open window--with a camera hooked up to a telescope. It took him a moment to recognize Delia Medford, and a moment more to identify pretty Aud; facial features weren’t the most immediately apparent part of the overall composition.
No wonder his mother had wanted to burn them! Rutherston thought. And no wonder that Delia Medford was willing to handle his business correspondence... and she certainly had a motive for murder.
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