Drowned Country

by Emily Tesh

  His hair was short now. Maybe Silver’s mother had cut it. He wore sideburns and a neat moustache instead of the full beard he had sported when Silver first met him. He was less brown too than he had been a year ago; it had been a cold and sunless winter. In fact he looked every inch the well-set-up modern man. His shoes were shined; his hair was combed; his dark coat was good quality and fitted him well. Silver detected his mother’s handiwork in that. He could not justly object. He entirely understood the urge to put Tobias’s enormous and handsome form in decent clothes; hadn’t he been generous himself, when he’d had the opportunity?

  He stood up straighter, wishing now he’d had the sense to protect at least some of his own good clothes from his self-indulgent ruin of Greenhollow Hall. He thoroughly regretted wearing the too-large tweed jacket. But if nothing else, Silver prided himself on his ability to smile and speak well: so he smiled, as if they had never quarrelled and never parted and were in fact no more than casual acquaintances in the first place, and he said, “Mr Finch. A pleasure to see you again.”

  And already some imp in his thoughts was murmuring: It has been nearly two years. Perhaps, now that he sees you—

  Silver pushed the thought down so it would not show on his face, and smiled at Tobias with, he hoped, the air of a man who had not been sulking for most of the time they had been apart. Nothing so unattractive as self-pity. But Tobias’s hazel-green eyes flicked over Silver once, and he only nodded to him. “Morning, Mr Silver” was all he said.

  A lock of his combed hair fell across his brow. Silver’s hand twitched with the unacceptable desire to tuck it back into place, and he had to glance down. Tobias didn’t seem to notice it, or the tweed jacket Silver was wearing, or anything at all; foolish of Silver, probably, to expect the man to even remember a garment he hadn’t cared to take with him two years ago. He let go of Mrs Silver’s hand to pick up her travelling case. He passed her cane to her as well. He had always been a man of few words. Who knew better than Silver how firm Tobias’s reserve could be? Who knew better that under that implacable wall of reserve he had as much feeling as a hundred more demonstrative fellows? Perhaps, if Silver exerted a little patience, he might gain access to what lay beneath the surface. It had worked before, he told himself firmly. Hadn’t it worked before?

  The sea breeze picked up a little. Silver felt it tug at his dishevelled hair, his shapeless coat. The brim of Mrs Silver’s hat bounced in the fresh air. The salt-and-fish smell of a minor harbour town rolled over the three of them. Tobias turned his back to Silver as he offered Mrs Silver his arm to help her walk up the hill.

  For a snivelling and pathetic moment, Silver considered being jealous of his own mother.

  Absurd. Embarrassing. He could do better.

  It was not, he told himself, that he expected to win Tobias back. But there was nothing wrong with putting one’s best foot forward.

  “Well, madam, I am here and I am in your hands,” he said, coming up on Mrs Silver’s other side. He did not offer his arm; her stern grip on her cane told him it would not be welcome. “Let us by all means see to the happy resolution of the peculiar case of Maud Lindhurst.”

  * * *

  The Lindhursts were a well-off older couple, living in one of the crooked houses on the hill. Their money would be in coal or cotton or wool or something; Silver had no interest in the matter. Thankfully, he barely had to speak to the pair of them. He got an impression of red-eyed helplessness from the mother, pompous terror from the father, and polite handshakes all round. Then Mrs Silver shut the three of them in the family dining room.

  It was a substantial and gloomy apartment. Between the massive table, the carvers and dining chairs, the sideboards and ornamental cabinets and overblown mantelpiece, there was scarcely room for one person to sidle in, let alone three. As if all that were not bad enough, there was also an upright pianoforte crammed into the corner. The only way a person could possibly play it would be if they were rail-thin enough to fit themselves into the miniscule gap where the stool was jammed next to the fireplace screen.

  Tobias was too big for the room. It took him some effort to squeeze himself around the far side of the table, and he knocked over a candlestick with his elbow and looked worried by it. Mrs Silver took the carver at the table’s head and sat with a little sigh of relief, setting her cane against the arm of the chair. Silver went to the window and threw open the dark green damask curtains, letting in some light if no air. This side of the house had a view of the church, squat and rather ugly, and the dark bones of the ruined abbey rising behind it like the carcass of a whale. Silver looked at it for a studied moment.

  “A romantic spot,” he remarked lightly. “The sort of place where one imagines Gothic maidens being menaced by dreadful demons. So.” He turned, with his most charming smile, intentionally not aimed in any particular direction. “Tell me about this vampire.”

  The big dining table was covered in papers; Mrs Silver’s looping handwriting predominated, but Silver could see a faded notebook full of a half-familiar scrawl, held open with a paperweight. The situation was serious if Mrs Silver had resorted to his father’s records. There were also three or four books that he recognised; his own copies were in the dusty library at Greenhollow Hall. De Stricibus et Lamiis; that was an old chestnut. Vampires, Ghouls, and Other Revenants: Some Continental Legends. Silver picked that one up, meaning to flip through it—only wanting something to do with his hands—and found it had been covering up a pile of pencil sketches. The topmost one showed the face of an older man: bald, unsmiling, strikingly hawk-nosed, with piercing black eyes. Silver raised his eyebrows and picked it up. “Is this the creature? Your sketches have improved, madam.”

  “Mr Finch’s work,” said Mrs Silver.

  Silver glanced at Tobias, surprised. He had never shown any signs of being artistically inclined in Silver’s company. He found his eyes straying to Tobias’s big hands, trying to imagine them holding anything as delicate as a pencil. “You have a gift, Mr Finch,” he said.

  Tobias said nothing. Silver watched him a moment longer, hoping. No.

  Be patient, he reminded himself.

  “The picture is a copy,” said Mrs Silver, “of a portrait which hangs in the town hall. It supposedly shows a Mr Jameson Nigel, a gentleman of Rothport some fifty years ago. And this”—she moved the topmost sketch aside to reveal another, undoubtedly the same individual or a very close relative, though now he sported a powdered wig above the piercing black eyes and wore an embroidered doublet with a lace collar—“is a copy of an oil painting belonging to a local landowner, which he claims shows either a distant uncle or an old family friend of a distant uncle—he is not sure. Nor did he know a date, but by the clothing I imagine it must be two or three hundred years old. He gave the name as Sir Nigel Julian. And then this”—a third sketch, and here were the black eyes and hawk nose under a monk’s tonsure—“comes from the church on the hill; a fresco, supposedly showing one of the early Abbots of Rothling—Abbot Julius the Black.”

  “An unsaintly looking fellow,” Silver managed after a moment. If this was really their vampire, that made him nine hundred years old at least. Older than Tobias, who had been the Hallow Wood’s servant for centuries before Silver took up its lordship. Older than anything Silver had ever met: unless you counted the Lord of Summer.

  “Its looks are not my interest except insofar as they may help to identify the creature. Which brings us to tonight’s attempt,” said Mrs Silver. “We must locate the lair. If Maud Lindhurst is still alive, she is there. You, Henry—”

  She explained. Silver reared back, affronted.

  “You brought me here to be bait?” he said.

  “Why else did you think I needed you?” said Mrs Silver. “The creature’s habits are well known in Rothport. I even interviewed some older fishermen who recalled meeting it in their youth. It has a history of accosting handsome young men.”

  “But Maud Lindhurst—”

  “—is a b
reak in the pattern,” said Mrs Silver. She did not say anything else. Silver, who had been familiar with his mother’s profession since childhood, knew as well as she did that changes in a supernatural being’s habits seldom portended anything good. In the corner of his eye he saw that Tobias had his hands knotted together on the table and his head bowed over them. He knew it too.

  Still. “I rather thought,” Silver said stiffly, “that you might need my help in some more worthwhile capacity, given my particular talents—”

  “You are a capable researcher, but so am I,” Mrs Silver dismissed him. “And any business too physically demanding for my present condition can be managed by Mr Finch much more effectively than you.”

  Silver had always striven to give his mother the impression that he was rather feeble, barely able in fact to lift anything heavier than a dictionary or perhaps his guitar, since he knew very well that otherwise he was likely to get dragged willy-nilly into activities involving a tiresome amount of running, fighting, and shooting. It was oddly irritating to find that he’d succeeded so well.

  Not that Tobias wasn’t more capable than he was. But Silver was not quite a nonentity, whatever his mother thought.

  “So,” he said, “I take it I am to stand around attractively all night, like a choice cut on display at the butcher’s—I hope you can provide me with a better coat for it? Or am I to wear only my nightshirt? And then hopefully our friendly nine-hundred-year-old man-eater will drag me to his lair, at which point the pair of you will track me down and rescue either myself and Maud Lindhurst, or myself and what is left of Maud Lindhurst, or quite possibly what is left of both of us—”

  “You can defend yourself,” said Tobias softly.

  Silver looked at him. Tobias’s head had come up and his eyes were fixed on Silver’s, for the first time in nearly two years. Silver had to suppress a shiver, an unaccountable sense that under the neat moustache and sideburns Tobias was still the same awesome and strange being whom Silver had first met. Nonsense. It was nonsense. Silver was awesome and strange; Tobias was a common mortal man. He was Mrs Silver’s employee. His serious look should not have such a cataclysmic effect on Silver’s composure.

  “Will you provide me with a flint knife?” he managed, with rather weak sarcasm, hopefully fast enough that Tobias had not noticed his effect. Silver had no hope that he could keep it secret from his mother.

  Tobias shook his head. “There’s more life in you than a vampire can bear,” was all he said. “The ones I met before, they couldn’t hurt me.”

  “The few you met in your tenure as the Wild Man of Greenhollow were, I believe, considerably younger than this ancient,” Silver said. “Younger and weaker.”

  “I’ll be there,” Tobias said seriously. He held Silver’s gaze. “He won’t have you long.”

  Silver’s breath caught. After a moment he remembered to nod.

  * * *

  The sun was setting behind the hills. Eastward it was already dark; the low roar of the sea sounded out of black nothingness. Occasionally the sky spat out a few drops of rain and then changed its mind again. Silver had tried trading the shapeless tweed jacket that he had started wearing after Tobias left for a good broadcloth coat smelling faintly of mothballs which the Lindhurst parents had found on Mrs Silver’s command, but it fit so poorly that as vampire-bait it hardly made a difference.

  And the jacket was warmer.

  Mrs Silver was not with them. She had been to Hallerton and back in less than two days, and her leg ached; she had retired to bed early. Silver had not realised until then how very much easier it was to have her there. But he gathered his courage. To walk through Rothport with Tobias Finch alone was perhaps an opportunity.

  While he was struggling to think of an opening that was suitably airy without being flippant, Tobias said, “Have you eaten?”

  “I have not,” said Silver.

  Tobias nodded and kept walking. His natural long stride was just slightly too fast to keep up with easily, but he adjusted quickly for Silver’s pace when he noticed. He must be used to it by now, Silver supposed, if he was always giving Mrs Silver his arm as she hobbled about. He set that thought aside quickly. He did not like how real his mother’s injury had suddenly become. He did not want to dwell on it.

  Tobias led them down towards the pier. In a narrow and smoky shop on the waterfront he bought them each a slice of greasy fried fish wrapped in old news sheets. Silver watched him hand a couple of coins to the heavyset fellow behind the counter, determinedly not thinking of anything. They wandered down the pier—or Silver did, and Tobias followed him—to eat the fish. The heat of the double handful of newspaper kept Silver’s hands warm; he burned his tongue on the first hot mouthful. He had not tasted anything like it in years.

  It was impossible to pretend Tobias was not there. He did not push himself on Silver’s attention, but he was simply too big to ignore. Silver half a dozen times nearly started to speak, but no line of conversation he could think of seemed right. In the end he made himself look out across the water awhile, as if he were meditating on the ocean’s glories. A part of him watched himself do it and wanted to laugh: Look at you, pretending to be so distant and unconcerned; the delightful young gentleman distracted by the splendours of Nature!

  In a competition of contemplative silences, against Tobias, Silver would always lose. “There was a forest here,” he said when his tongue simply could not keep still another moment. What an inane thing to say. Greasy scraps of newspaper still clung to his hands though the fish was gone; he peeled them away and threw them in the water.

  “The Wood?” Tobias said.

  “Yes. I suppose so.” Now Silver had brought it up, he could glimpse those islands again, hovering just beyond the edges of time; the darkness below the two of them might have been the broad waters, or it might have been the crowns of an endless expanse of trees.

  “What happened to it?” Tobias said.

  “It drowned,” Silver said. The last of the sunset was fading from the world behind him; the night was very dark. “It drowned.”

  If Tobias answered, Silver did not hear it. A moment later he shook his head hard. The Hallow Wood asked nothing and offered nothing; it only was. Silver could contemplate the drowned forest at his leisure. Possibly he could even go for a walk in it. There were no precise rules to the way time behaved beneath the trees: softening, Tobias had called it, back when Silver had felt able to ask him questions of this sort.

  But just now time did have demands to make of Silver. The likely fate of Maud Lindhurst grew darker every night she was missing. For her sake—or rather for the sake of Mrs Silver travelling overnight to ask, for Tobias with his head bowed over his knotted hands in the Lindhurst dining room—Silver would remain in this present moment, on the Rothport pier, with Tobias’s big quiet form at his shoulder, and his hands covered in the faint greasy residue of fried fish.

  He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. When he’d wiped his hands, he almost turned to offer it to Tobias, only to find that the man had his own.

  Of course he did.

  “A moonless night,” Silver said instead, to cover the moment. “Ideal for a vampire on the prowl. Mr Finch, I fear you shall have to follow me at a distance. I doubt our hungry friend will take the bait if you are hovering over it.”

  “All right,” Tobias said.

  “Loath as I am to lose the pleasure of your company,” Silver said, “Miss Lindhurst must be our first concern.”

  “All right.”

  The conversation was as painful as picking one’s way through a patch of nettles. But Silver with increasing despair could not see a way to start a better one. He had to make the attempt. “I hope,” he said, “that any quarrels we may have had in the past can be put aside while we pursue this urgent matter.”

  Tobias looked at him for a moment, and there was, after all, a crack in his reserve. Someone who did not know him might not have seen it. Silver did know him, and so he knew that l
ook. Tobias knew perfectly well that Silver was trying to wheedle his way around him, and he did not approve. His arms were folded in the gesture Bramble still copied from him, and his expression was shuttered, and Silver understood him perfectly: Enough of that.

  So, that was that. He might as well have stayed at home in his thorn-girt fortress, pitying himself. Silver glanced away, pretending to consider the shadow-town he was about to wander through. Lights at windows and from the gaslamps on the high street up to the hill picked out the outlines of it even on this dark and damp evening.

  “Keep to the shadows,” said Tobias. Silver understood it for pity—no, for kindness, damn him, a kind and firm end to any foolish fantasy of repairing things. “He’ll be in one of ’em.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Silver said.

  He set off into the dark alone. He did not hear Tobias follow after him. He had always been surprisingly soft-footed for such a big man.

  * * *

  Rothport after dark was cold and damp, and it still smelled strongly of fish. It was also not a big place. If it had not been a stopping point on the coast between the coal mines of the north and the greedy maw of the capital, it would be little more than a fishing village. Rothling Abbey was of some minor historical interest, but not nearly enough to justify the difficulty of reaching the place. Not even the most enterprising of railwaymen had troubled himself to extend the lines out this far.

  Silver walked up and down its handful of streets and alleyways, forcing himself to think of nothing, to set the sting of rejection aside. Two years he’d had to recover from this; why had he started hoping? It was only the surprise of seeing Tobias Finch again. Silver would not be undone by him, not now.

  He smiled mildly at the occasional figures who loomed out of the dark at him, but all of them were ordinary locals. When the public houses closed, the exodus of the drinkers resulted in several such meetings. One gentleman did show signs of wishing to lure Silver into a darker corner, but Silver quickly identified him as a mortal bent on personal amusement, rather than a nine-hundred-year-old hellbeast desirous of Silver’s lifeblood. At any rate, he turned positively green when Tobias materialised out of the shadows behind him. Silver rolled his eyes at the fellow’s stammered apologies to both of them and did not bother to correct his misapprehension. He nodded to Tobias, one professional to another, and set off into the dark again with a sigh.