Lost Acre

by Andrew Caldecott

  ‘And our new architectural arrivals – the tower and the octagon?’

  For the first time, Wynter looked troubled. ‘I know nothing of the tower. The octagon replaces the church, so we assume it connects to worship in some way. But neither are my doing.’

  ‘And your resurrection?’

  ‘I never died. I had a half-life. The details are distressing, but I lived through the centuries, absorbing scientific knowledge. Test me; any time, any place, anyone.’

  Fanguin hunted for an issue of little import now but significant in its day. ‘Who did Leibniz argue with about what?’

  Wynter smiled. ‘Leibniz claimed to have discovered calculus independently of Newton, not that it was called calculus then. It started as a polite debate in 1699 and twelve years later sank into mutual abuse. Both men were difficult. I can give you years, dates, and who supported whom and why and I can even tell you what the two protagonists looked like, having met both.’

  Like the twists of a kaleidoscope, presumed facts reformed, some becoming clear, others blurred and unconvincing. Fanguin felt disorientated by the welter of forbidden history. ‘Why have you chosen to tell me all this?’ he asked at last.

  ‘You’ve the intelligence to see it’s credible, and I need scientifically minded allies.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To repel the enemy. You’ve not been to Lost Acre. The dark star is disintegrating and nobody knows quite what will happen. The hedge-priest is looking for a new dominion and probing our defences. The mantoleon was just the beginning.’

  ‘Frankly, Mr Wynter, I do not believe you.’

  ‘Frankly, Doctor Fanguin, I do not expect you to – not immediately. The hedge-priest gave my servant this remarkable phial. I’d welcome your views.’

  Fanguin placed his microscope on the table, dipped a sterile nail varnish brush into the liquid, smeared a glass slide, drew up a chair, peered, shook his head in wonderment and peered again before delivering his verdict.

  ‘Imagine Brownian motion, only magnified many times over. The chips of light vanish and reappear without any journey in between – like oversize atomic particles.’ Fanguin moved to his conclusion. ‘It’s sap, the blood of a tree, but a most unusual tree.’

  Wynter gazed at Fanguin, the distinctive ear lobes and set of the eyes, and that fierce intellectual curiosity. He had liked his forbear, a quiet, studious boy.

  ‘You will appreciate Lost Acre more than most,’ said Wynter. ‘Please take the phial home, report any further discoveries and record all time spent. I pay expertise by the hour.’

  As Fanguin made for the door, Wynter gestured back at the Great Hall. ‘This house was in its time revolutionary: multiple chimneys, foreign glass, plastered ceilings, a staircase wide enough for two to pass and rooms assigned to specific activities. Someone, somewhere, always has to be first.’

  Fanguin left, half confused, half excited.

  *

  Wynter sat before the fire, savouring the wine’s taste, smell and texture, before rising to open a second alcove behind the linenfold panelling. The boxes of Rotherweird gold guineas remained neatly stacked, gathered by Bole over the centuries for the good work to come. What a servant he had been!

  He moved to the table, picked up the velvet sack from the first alcove and loosened the drawstrings. He inserted a hand and one by one extracted each elmwood human figure, followed by the ship, the two clashing rocks, the fleece, the comatose dragon and the bronze giant Talos. He never touched a face, too respectful for that, but held between thumb and forefinger the toys of his childhood. He aspired not to be an Argonaut or even the hero Jason. No, he must join the gods who played with them.

  A thought came, arriving oddly, like a posted message. Explore the garden. Candle-lantern in hand, Wynter took the rear entrance, noting again Nona’s thoroughness: dead leaves had been cleared, the late pruning done, summer’s growth tied back against the winter winds. Unlike Estella, Nona did her work without expectation of thanks or praise.

  Another prompt, another message, drew him to the hexagonal brick tower which had once housed the Eleusians’ familiars. Wynter caught a rustle, like a broom sweeping flagstones, high up, even though the tower had no upper floors. Most of the familiars had been winged; his young charges had flown them from gauntleted fists like falcons. But they could not have survived Oxenbridge, surely, let alone the ensuing centuries.

  Wynter drew the bolt and tiptoed in, lantern thrust in front.

  Tidy creatures, he thought; their dried excrement formed a sculpted tower in one corner. He looked up at the unfamiliar faces looking down, owls more than anything else. Feathery faces swivelled, eyes blinked: a hint of human expression.

  As the largest dropped to the floor, a name came.

  ‘Strix?’

  The creature’s lipped beak squawked, calling the others down like an attentive class, and Wynter guessed they could understand, but not speak, a common trait among the mixing-point’s creations.

  ‘Your time approaches, my children. But remember: never fly by daylight, and never be seen in the Manor grounds.’

  A fresh haunch of meat hung from a butcher’s hook on a pulley high on a cross-gable. Bole’s preparations had been truly exemplary.

  Wynter prided himself on his hearing and his stealth. The former gift caught the catch of heels in the gravel path; the latter caught his visitor at the main door. Dark hair like a gorgon’s coiled down to a jade dress and heavy shawl. She turned. Early forties, he guessed.

  ‘You said to come.’

  The woman who had presented the spur from the mantoleon’s leg exuded the same intensity, even without the gore. She looked taller than she was. Think Medea, one of the elmwood figures on the table.

  He showed her into the Great Hall.

  She ran a finger along the tabletop, the chairs and the banister. ‘The place is spotless. Are you served by ghosts?’

  ‘A grateful town, I imagine.’

  ‘Miss Brown goes in and out, but nobody else. It’s meant to be locked.’

  An inquisitive mind, noted Wynter. ‘And you – Mrs or Miss?’

  ‘Fennel.’

  ‘Fennel who?’

  It was like squeezing blood from a stone: front teeth chaffed her lower lip, a first sign of weakness. ‘Finch,’ she muttered defensively.

  Wynter’s predatory instincts surged: Finch the usurper. The sins of the fathers are the sins of the daughters.

  ‘You’re a Finch?’

  ‘I am not. I was married to one, a pedant, dry as a biscuit and all that’s wrong with this town. The Herald knows the past, but rules nothing. The Mayor rules but knows only the present. It was not ever so.’

  Very inquisitive, thought Wynter. ‘How do you know about the past?’

  ‘I’ve a key to the archivoire. It didn’t occur to the pedant that I might be curious. Think of that delicious, forbidden fruit – the past.’ Fennel paused. ‘I’ve frittered years away, working the Snorkel household for no return. But you, Mr Wynter . . . you are different.’ She seized his hands, inclining her head in a gesture of fealty. ‘You must . . .’ She struggled to escape the triteness of Snorkel’s social vocabulary – receptions, soirées, parties. ‘You must unleash an event.’

  ‘I understand my predecessor did just that.’

  ‘It was extravagant, but dull. People came and left as themselves. Your event will redefine them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll draft an invitation. I understand service, Mr Wynter. You ingratiate with generalities; you serve by attention to detail.’

  With that unexpected epigram, Fennel lowered her head as if before an altar and saw herself out.

  7

  Servant or Master

  Nights had hitherto brought black-out, but here, in the four-poster in the Manor’s master bedroom, his former bedroom, he dreamed.

  He is among his toys, myth and reality blending. He lifts a fleece stitched with golden prophecy coins; he sends the Argo through t
he closing rocks; he sows the mantoleon’s teeth and his enemies die – Norrington the baker, Snorkel and Thomes. He enjoys the sorceress’ embrace, Medea wearing the face of Fennel Finch.

  But the Argo’s return is not a hero’s landfall. The bay is dark with spillage: soulless towers in concrete and glass nuzzle the clouds and the inhabitants are glassy-eyed, afflicted by drift. He inhales the reek of a failed species.

  Brow freckled with sweat, Wynter awoke to a new message on a single page beside the bed in Bole’s writing, one word:

  Doomsday

  ‘Servant or Master’

  8

  Of Transport and Tears

  The guineas in Fanguin’s pocket jangled conveniently as he passed Vlad’s on his journey home. A bottle of whisky under his arm, he bounded past the amended note on the hallway table (Remains of flan in oven) and up several flights of stairs to his study. He had a theory to test.

  He divided the sap into two tiny glass cruets. The strange particles of light in the viscous liquid still shone and danced. With a pair of tweezers, he dropped an iron filing in one cruet, only for it to vanish and reappear, almost instantly, in the other. He repeated the experiment after dipping the filing in red ink. Same result.

  Conventional sap, through xylem and phloem, transported nutrients from places of production and storage to places of use, but this liquid could transport alien physical objects through glass. The oaky flavour of the whisky made a suitable toast for the revelation. He felt young again, in his prime.

  Another discovery followed: the immersed filing was emitting low-level radiation. The activity mildly increased if you placed two filings close to each other. Instinct said this mattered, but he could not articulate why.

  He reached for the whisky, then uncharacteristically paused. The sap had fragrance, not honeysuckle or rose, but something deeper; its effect was a clearing of heart and head. He resealed the cruets. An alarm bell rang, but Fanguin ignored it; his eagerness to share these breakthroughs with Wynter displaced any thought of his friends.

  *

  Scry too returned home, glad to be free of the Apothecaries and, more particularly, Gurney Thomes.

  She cut the crusty red wax sealing the scroll which identified those in town with Eleusian blood. The paper felt old and the ink had a brownish tinge. The writing, unmistakably Bole’s, had been reduced to the miniscule to accommodate the crowded names and multicoloured lines linking each to one of the numbered but unidentified blood samples. In more than five centuries the Eleusians’ bloodlines had blossomed. She had a rich cohort from which to choose her recruits.

  A few absentees reassured her – no Snorkel and no Thomes. Of those present, two names, in particular, did not surprise, such were their scientific gifts: Strimmer and Fanguin.

  Yet she remained uneasy. Genetic testing of this refinement was a recent art, and Bole could only have accessed Rotherweird’s blood bank in town. She had hunted down and killed his familiar, but she had never seen him.

  As she opened the desk drawer for a clean sheet to record her selections, a signature caught her eye: Madge Brown’s letter from October. She re-read it.

  Two numbers, 7.49 and 8.49, have appeared during the cleaning of a portrait (of their Founder) owned by the Apothecaries. As The Clairvoyancy sells almanacs and works on mystical numbers, we wondered if you might assist on their significance. Our chair thinks they may be co-ordinates, indicating the whereabouts of other lost artefacts.

  *

  The following morning Scry inspected the minutes of the Artefacts Committee at the Town Hall. They contained the barest of references to the cleaning of the Founder’s portrait, with no mention of the appearance of the mysterious numbers. She also noted a passing reference to the Manor and the unresolved issue of what to do with Sir Veronal Slickstone’s chattels after his disappearance, but nothing more.

  Madge Brown had directed her to the portrait and the clue which held the timing of Wynter’s return; she had restored the Manor to Wynter; she had addressed him with an easy informality.

  Her unease deepened. Miss Brown merited a closer look.

  9

  Without Precedent

  Gorhambury returned to his lodgings in The Understairs feeling all at sea. The Regulations did not cater for a Town Clerk’s appointment under an emergency Mayor. He liked men who eschewed chicanery, played by the book and put town before personal interest. In short, he preferred Mr Wynter to Mr Snorkel. Yet the Fury, the mantoleon, The Dark Devices in the archivoire, Finch’s abduction and Sir Veronal’s disappearance pointed to a dark past threatening the present.

  He chased the residue of his Christmas pudding around the plate. It had a crusty, unappetising appearance.

  ‘Reginald?’ said a familiar voice from the other side of his front door.

  With a sigh he ambled over. ‘Please don’t call me Reginald, not on the landing. Neighbours may misconstrue.’

  Madge Brown did not enter. ‘I’m sorry about Christmas.’

  ‘Don’t be. I had a day off.’

  Gorhambury’s Christmas dinner had been like any other Gorhambury evening meal, with the added adornment of a solitary cracker, an oddly challenging exercise with the same person pulling at both ends. He had daringly worn a polka-dot tie, his solitary gift to himself, and a strawberry-coloured paper hat with a gold rim from the cracker, whose resemblance to a crown had induced constitutional unease. Madge Brown’s failure to visit had brought mild disappointment, leavened by relief. He experienced the same ambiguous reaction now.

  ‘By way of apology I’m buying you a festive drink at The Journeyman’s Gist. No, Reginald, don’t argue – Ferdy is holding a table. It’ll all be very discreet.’

  ‘A quick half,’ he muttered.

  ‘See you there then,’ replied Madge. ‘You’ve ten minutes to spruce up.’

  Twenty minutes later, Gorhambury sat sipping his half-pint of Sturdy as if it were tea. ‘Sprucing up’ had involved dispensing with his waistcoat and pocketing a coloured handkerchief which had been his father’s.

  ‘Your amendment was a bold initiative,’ he said with a hint of rebuke. He might have said the same of her drink, ginger wine, in his experience a wolf in sheep’s clothing. ‘Your Committee hasn’t met for a good forty-nine days.’

  ‘Sorry. I should have forewarned you. But imagine the consequences of not doing so. The Snorkels refuse to leave. Mr Wynter shacks up with the Apothecaries. I acted properly, Reginald, indeed, thoughtfully . . . with an eye to the town’s best interests.’

  Gorhambury winced. ‘Please, Miss Brown, not Reginald, not here.’

  ‘And the Secretary to the Artefacts Committee has emergency powers.’

  This was true, another Regulation passed in the mists of time for reasons unfathomable.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ muttered Gorhambury.

  Twenty minutes of strained light conversation ensued before Madge Brown made a surprise announcement. ‘I shall be away for a time.’ She drained her glass with indecent abandon. ‘I’ve an ailing mother in wider England and my sister has done more than her stint. We’re swapping places. You’ll find her a different kettle of fish, but just as competent.’

  She stood up and patted Gorhambury on the crown of the head. ‘I’m off to pack. I’m sorry to go in these exciting times, but then, a change is as good as a rest.’

  She stooped and whispered in Gorhambury’s ear as she passed, ‘Watch out for Persephone Brown.’

  *

  In an alcove around the corner Oblong sat opposite his own unexpected companion.

  ‘I’m a friend of Orelia Roc’s,’ said Ember Vine.

  ‘Ditto.’

  ‘She’s missing, and I don’t know where or why.’

  Oblong’s weakness for impressing attractive women led to a maladroit choice of phrase. ‘I’m afraid I was out for the count.’ He paused before explaining, ‘I mean, the election.’

  ‘How odd; I’d expect our only modern historian to be present at such a
rare event – indeed, unique, as it turned out.’ Hide in plain sight: Ember felt at ease, surrounded by people cocooned in their own conversations. ‘I confided in Orelia my peculiar commission: to carve the constituent pieces of a sphere from some very strange rocks. And she confided in me, up to a point.’

  Oblong, not a natural spy, dropped his lower jaw at the word ‘sphere’.

  He looked like a fish at feeding time, which reassured Ember. He must know more. Candour for candour, she decided. Holding nothing back, she ended with her ghostly experience with the Advent window for the twenty-third of December. ‘I checked the tenant. She was one of the Summoned – a Miss Pomeny Tighe.’

  Oblong’s jaw sank further. With the better part of two pints of Sturdy working at his synapses, inhibitions evaporated. With Finch, Jones, Valourhand and Roc missing, they needed new recruits. ‘I shouldn’t be saying this, and I fear you will be shocked . . .’

  ‘I’m an artist. Only unnecessary shyness and deliberate untruths shock me.’

  Oblong told the story, helped by Ember oiling the relevant valves with a third pint of Sturdy.

  ‘Wow,’ she said, not doubting a word. To her artist’s eye, the disparate pieces fitted, coherent despite the grotesquery. ‘I have a potential lead from Tighe’s rooms – an address in Hoy.’ She showed him the piece of paper.

  Oblong reacted with incredulity. ‘Miss Tighe came straight from Germany. How could she know anyone in Hoy?’

  She echoed his unease. ‘It lay under a fine porcelain rose – not a Rotherweird piece. Why bring such a delicate object all this way? My daughter said Tighe’s ghost was warning us.’

  ‘I’ll give it a gander,’ replied Oblong, affecting a cavalier jauntiness. ‘Nobody notices when I leave town, not even my class.’

  Vine the sculptress and painter read well the tension lines which underpinned faces, the false smiles and the true. She stood up and took him by his forearms. ‘You need passion in your life,’ she said as she left. ‘Don’t resist when it happens. And do find Orelia.’