Lost Acre

by Andrew Caldecott

  The boy on the bank rushed across.

  The blubber had a human ear.

  *

  The news reached Gorhambury, who hastened to the North Gate, only to find it closed. ‘I hear there’s been a fatality. I wish to see the body.’

  ‘Mr Sly’s orders, sir: no access until it’s dealt with.’

  ‘Mr Sly has no status to give orders.’

  ‘Mr Sly acts for Mr Wynter.’

  ‘In what capacity?’ stammered Gorhambury. Established procedures governed the exercise of the mayoral prerogative, even in times of emergency. The sentry, disappointingly untutored in the constitutional niceties, maintained his immovable attitude.

  Gorhambury changed his angle of attack. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He’s been skinned from shoulder to toes. Mr Sly says there’s a new monster on the loose.’

  ‘Where was he found?’

  ‘In the river below Grove Gardens – but I can’t say any more, Mr Gorhambury, really I can’t. “Close your lips like a clam,” said Mr Sly, “or we’ll scare the populace.”’

  How unusually thoughtful of him, thought Gorhambury.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘The ears indicate Mr Norrington, the loudmouthed baker on Aether’s Way – the one who does the feisty orange macaroons.’

  Gorhambury hurried back to the Town Hall and summoned a Council meeting. In accordance with the Regulations, he notified the Mayor in writing. An amendment tabled by Madge Brown at the recent meeting called by Wynter had stipulated that the Manor should be the venue: the Parliament Chamber should not house an arm of the executive. At the time Gorhambury had nodded sagely in agreement. Now doubts bubbled to the surface. The town’s carefully calibrated checks and balances were looking increasingly askew.

  *

  Lavishly hung with Slickstone’s imported paintings, the Great Hall made an intimidating setting for the first meeting of the eleven Guild Masters, nine men and two women, who constituted the Emergency Mayor’s Advisory Council. The flickering light from the candelabra and a well-built fire accentuated the strain on their faces: pursed lips, shaking heads and fidgety hands. But they had their notes and questions prepared.

  Sly entered, accompanied by several armbanded servants. An iron circle with vertical iron spikes on its rim was lowered from the eaves; candles were impaled and lit and the device was then raised high like a halo over Wynter’s empty chair at the head of the table.

  The entourage withdrew and still Wynter made them wait. Sly returned to align with fastidious care a pen, a pad with lines of tidy notes and a small brass bell. Gorhambury, Scry and Strimmer arrived as Sly withdrew. Scry sat at a chair with its own small table, suggestive of a secretarial role. Gorhambury, surrounded by Regulations, inhabited a larger table near the fire. Strimmer lounged in an armchair beneath the main window, some way from the Council table.

  Wynter entered last and alone. He wore a white silk shirt, a stark contrast to a dark waistcoat which almost reached his knees like a chasuble: Church and State conjoined.

  ‘Welcome to the Great Hall,’ said Wynter, courteous as ever, ‘and our first Council meeting.’

  ‘Point of order, Mr Mayor,’ said the Master Baker. ‘Why is she here?’ He twitched his head in Scry’s direction. ‘If you’d been to her shop, you’d understand our concerns.’

  Wynter smiled, quite unruffled. ‘I understand some think Miss Scry too close to the Apothecaries.’ Surreptitious glances met and moved on. The Mayor was surprisingly well-informed, and his candour equally unexpected. ‘Miss Madge Brown, secretary under the Regulations to all governmental bodies not covered by the Regulations, is on compassionate leave and so Miss Scry has most kindly agreed to deputise. However, the point need not detain us.’ Wynter tinkled his bell.

  Jaws dropped, mouths gaped and hands stilled as a young woman loped in like a panther. She had a classical beauty: aquiline nose, generous mouth, tawny eyes and a lithe, graceful figure. She wore her dark hair up, exposing a slender neck. She was dressed in the colours of autumn and winter: an ochre skirt, berry-red blouse and a darker ochre shawl flecked with white and red.

  While the Mistress Milliner pondered how best to clothe such an elegant frame, the male Guild Masters affected only casual interest, each anxious not to appear voyeuristic before their peers.

  Strimmer showed no such restraint. Not since Pomeny Tighe had he encountered such a magnetic sexual presence. Her skirt was tastefully but teasingly short. In his own estimation the town’s most skilful predator, he resolved that this gazelle of a woman had to be his.

  He walked forward and pulled back her chair.

  She almost ignored him, but not quite. She knew the game. She promised a special hunt, and a special kill.

  Wynter made the introduction. ‘A few preliminaries. Mr Polk is here as Master Fireworker, but as his position is secret, he will be leaving by the rear entrance. Miss Brown’s sister, Persephone, from wider England, is standing in for her sister. She is fully briefed and a registered Rotherweirder. Thank you, Miss Scry, for helping out. I trust there are no objections.’

  Scry had had no warning, but she played this most unpleasant surprise as if she had. She rose, placed her pens in her bag, smoothed her pleated skirt over her thighs and, in marked contrast to her successor’s lightness of foot, trudged out.

  Wynter opened proceedings. ‘The South Tower is to be complimented on producing phials of antivenom to combat the mantoleon’s lethal toxins. They’ll be distributed to every household. We’ll be ready if, God forbid, there’s a next time.’

  ‘On the question of “next time”, Mr Norrington was one of our best,’ said the Master Baker.

  Wynter qualified the compliment. ‘One of our best bakers, certainly.’

  Scratch, scratch. Persephone Brown’s pen danced across the page: speaker left, utterances right, like a play script.

  ‘I have prepared a draft bulletin.’ Persephone Brown read it aloud, the voice husky but musical. ‘Mr Norrington was found in the river beneath Grove Gardens, the victim of a fatal attack by a clawed creature during the hours of curfew. His political contribution has been as noteworthy as his patisserie. Condolences are offered. Countrysiders are implicated. Counter-measures will be taken.’

  ‘Such a creature would leave tracks,’ observed the Master Baker suspiciously.

  ‘The river and the marsh have washed them away.’

  ‘Below Grove Gardens would be below the prison,’ observed Boris.

  ‘What are you insinuating?’ asked Wynter, his voice now silkier.

  ‘A monster within, or a monster without – or both. I make no assumptions. Who runs the prison?’

  ‘Mr Sly – he did much work for the late lamented Mr Snorkel. He is a steady hand on the tiller.’

  ‘Slippery, more like,’ muttered the Master Baker.

  Attuned to farming the wind of change, the Master Tanner, formerly one of Snorkel’s men, timed his entry to perfection. ‘I’m more interested in the future. The Mayor is right to focus on counter-measures. I propose increasing the Home Guard and investigating where these countrysiders hang out – how many there are of them, and what other fell creatures they’re cooking up.’

  Persephone Brown parroted the Master Tanner’s proposal, then asked, ‘Those for the motion?’

  Subject to an amendment from Boris (‘may be cooking up’), the proposal was carried unanimously.

  Strimmer meanwhile was imagining Persephone free of her berry-red shirt.

  The Mistress Milliner changed tack. ‘We’ve all seen the octagon’s strange contents. Why has the mistletoe been taken by the Apothecaries?’

  ‘Mr Strimmer?’ said Wynter, passing the question.

  Strimmer, jolted back to reality, took the opportunity to impress Persephone Brown. ‘It’s an alien and virulent species, sent to infect us. As head of the North Tower I have the expertise, and the Apothecaries have the most secure research premises. If Mr Wynter and I hadn’t moved quickly, the birds
would have got there first, eaten the berries and infected the whole neighbourhood. Imagine the consequences of that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the Mistress Milliner. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Next, we have our pending victory celebration, otherwise known as the Unrecognisable Party.’

  Unease flickered across the Councillors’ faces at this odd characterisation of Wynter’s event.

  Unabashed, Wynter continued, his cheeks reddening as his delivery grew more passionate. ‘All worthwhile victories have casualties – and ours will be toasted and celebrated. Their sacrifices will be recorded. Remember the Argonauts lost at sea, torn apart by the Cyclops. Remember Beowulf’s men, taken by the monster Grendel – they are part of legend now, and so too our brave men and women.’ Fanaticism gleamed in his eyes.

  ‘He weaves his own legend,’ Ferensen had said.

  True colours showing through, thought Boris.

  But the moment quickly passed. Wynter’s voice settled back to its usual silkiness. ‘Fennel,’ he said.

  The one-time doyenne of Snorkel’s soirées made her entrance in a priestess-like green shift with dark hair tied back and a claw from the mantoleon hanging on a gold chain about her neck.

  Persephone Brown’s pen hung in mid-air. This apparition had not figured in her calculations, nor Bole’s, she felt sure.

  Fennel Finch was staring at Wynter with near-religious reverence.

  He half-responded in kind, a stark reminder to Persephone that Wynter had a will of his own. But a new piece, even on a crowded board, provided opportunity as well as risk, the more so if its shape and reach were as peculiar as this one’s.

  She resumed her secretarial pose, eyes down and hand poised to write.

  *

  In a passageway outside the Great Hall, Scry took advantage of the fact that nobody stood between her and the nearest back staircase. She had used it as a child, as an Eleusian and later as Oxenbridge’s prisoner.

  Up a flight to the next floor, along the corridor and down half a flight and she was standing outside the master bedroom. She knew Wynter’s domestic rituals; it was too late to make the bed and too early to turn it down. She eased the latch. As on the ground floor, local furniture rubbed shoulders with Slickstone’s high-class antique imports, including the magnificent four-poster bed. Two pieces of paper had been anchored beneath the bedside lamp. Scry could make out fragments of words on the top piece beneath an image. The half-familiar handwriting was too modern and free to be Wynter’s, and the image too fine for his modest draughtsmanship.

  Did she want to know?

  Uncharacteristically, she dithered before deciding she did.

  A mirror image of two trees, conjoined by their roots, one facing up, one down, decorated the top piece, but the profile of their branches differed, as if drawn from life. The inverted tree bore an uncanny resemblance to the one in the other place. Beneath it appeared the words THY AGED GIRLS in a fumbling script. Nonetheless the handwriting closely resembled Calx Bole’s, whereas the drawing looked professional. The words’ mildly mocking tone did not feel like the description Wynter would apply to his beloved Eleusians, although the pen responsible, nib still smeared with dried ink, was lying next to the note.

  She moved to the second piece of paper. It contained the single word Doomsday, again in Bole’s writing, like the note found in Wynter’s room in the Guild of the Apothecaries on his first morning back.

  So many players on one bedside table!

  That very multiplicity, and the conjoining of the tree, raised a possibility so repellent that she could barely entertain it. She slipped downstairs and set off from the back door to the Town Hall.

  *

  In the Great Hall, Wynter had seized the initiative. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I consider it important to soothe anxiety with good news. We have recovered a tidy sum from the Snorkel Foundation, which I shall be redirecting towards structural improvements, including in The Understairs, whose young men have provided such staunch assistance in these dark times.’

  ‘Excellent suggestion, Mayor,’ said the Master Tanner, and nobody dissented.

  ‘There is one final matter,’ said Wynter. ‘We can do without baseless warnings being delivered from the heavens, as I understand occurred after the last Parliament Chamber meeting. They tell me the voice belongs to the Town Crier, who has inexplicably disappeared. We shall post a reward for information as to his whereabouts.’

  Wynter turned to Boris. ‘You’re the expert on aerial transport. Any ideas?’

  ‘The South Tower produces voice-dispersal devices. The Crier isn’t called “Portly” for nothing. He’s certainly not built to fly.’

  ‘This isn’t funny, Polk,’ said the Master Tanner sternly.

  ‘Indeed, it is not,’ replied Boris.

  With that exchange, and after a few parting pleasantries from Wynter, the first meeting of the Rotherweird Council adjourned.

  Wynter sat alone with Persephone Brown. ‘It is you. You’re so different, I did wonder.’

  ‘Test me.’

  Wynter took her to the window and pointed. ‘What was there?’ he asked.

  ‘An oak bench, and ivy festooned the wall. I liked to read Robert Recorde’s Arithmetic there in the summer. I especially liked the title of his second volume – The Whetstone of Whit.’

  Wynter smiled. ‘She was a ballet dancer, I can tell.’

  Nona’s eyes narrowed a fraction. This was not Wynter speaking. He had never seen a ballet dancer in his life. It must be Bole, or Bole’s experience. ‘A life of practice and exercise – such dull memories! But only twenty-eight years of them, and I suppress them with ease.’ She wondered quite how Bole and Wynter had merged, for her strategy had made certain assumptions.

  Wynter obligingly took the cue. ‘I write notes to myself at night. I dream of unimaginable places. Of course, my erstwhile servant is still on call to help.’

  ‘But your will is intact – you are yourself?’

  ‘I am as I look,’ replied Wynter.

  Nona detected a hint of uncertainty in his voice.

  ‘And Estella didn’t look suspicious – of me or you.’

  ‘She’s not, which is why we always preferred you, dear Nona. She’s dutiful and devoted, but ponderous.’ Wynter could not resist returning to what worried him most. ‘Did Calx share with you any plan or ambition for my return?’

  ‘Only his desire to serve you.’

  Wynter judged the reply fractionally too quick and marginally too clever. He ventured a more testing question. ‘What’s in the tower?’ he asked.

  Nona’s eyes narrowed. ‘Bole constructed it.’

  ‘Quite so, but he hasn’t deigned to share its purpose.’

  ‘I imagine,’ said Nona slowly, ‘that Bole can’t just flood your mind with knowledge all at once. Give him a little time.’

  Wynter changed the subject. ‘I have a problem with the countrysiders: they’re holed up in an inaccessible place in the woods. They’re fully stocked and watered and we haven’t enough men to force them out.’

  Persephone freed her hair, revelling in her new looks. ‘Leave it to me, Mr Wynter. I’ve spent much time in Lost Acre. It has many secrets, one of which will fix this problem perfectly.’ She gave the word ‘fix’ special emphasis.

  Wynter raised both eyebrows. ‘Just wait until my party is done,’ he said.

  She translated his condition with ease: he wanted his chronicler back first. Waiting was a small price to pay. ‘Of course,’ she said, and changed the subject again. ‘I too dislike the Town Crier speaking out of the blue. It’s presumptuous.’ Unseen voices from the heavens had a divine feel, which should not be a privilege for the common citizen. ‘However, I know how it’s done and I’m sure the North Tower and the Apothecaries can deal with it, if I might be your message-bearer.’

  *

  Scry reached the Town Hall just before closing. ‘Have the Summoned left for home?’ she asked the same unwelcoming woman on the reception d
esk, who looked down her nose and sniffed.

  ‘Most of them – they do have jobs, you know.’

  ‘What about the artist, Mr Everthorne? He looked rather a dilettante to me.’

  ‘Well, he was in a hurry,’ the receptionist admitted. ‘He didn’t check out and he left all his paints and brushes behind.’

  ‘How careless of him,’ replied Scry, as if the news were expected but also unwelcome.

  *

  Outside in Market Square, Strimmer accosted Persephone Brown. ‘As Head of the North Tower, I’d like a copy of the minutes. Why not drop them in to my rooms?’

  ‘You can inspect them at the Town Hall.’

  ‘You’re quite a contrast to your sister.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Strimmer grinned. ‘Shall I start from top or bottom?’

  ‘Tread carefully, Mr Strimmer.’ She turned and walked away, skirt swishing left and right.

  Strimmer leered after her.

  Persephone Brown smiled to herself. She had played the sibyl once and she would not do so again. He had been warned.

  She slipped into Hamelin Way and hastened on to the Hall of the Apothecaries, where, through a combination of charm, will and the impact of the unfamiliar, she gained speedy admission to Master Thomes’ study. As Madge Brown of the Artefacts Committee she had endured Thomes’ withering rudeness. As Persephone Brown, she induced a very different reaction.

  He stroked the fleshy folds of his neck and, piggy eyes gleaming, invited her to share his mid-morning coffee and raspberry buttermilk cakes. ‘I have an excellent private cook,’ he added.

  ‘Mrs Fanguin.’

  The piggy eyes narrowed.

  ‘It’s our business to know,’ she added with a winning smile. ‘I’ve come from the Council.’

  Thomes spluttered, his napkin freckling with spots of white coffee. ‘It’s an outrage excluding us – a bloody outrage.’

  ‘It’s a privilege, Master Thomes. In the Council, the Guilds must answer to each other. They don’t ask about you because if they did, you’d be entitled to be there. That lets you get on with your business – and Mr Wynter’s business – unmolested. Who wants to be accountable?’