Emberverse Short Stories Read online

  “You liked him, then?” Rutherston said neutrally.

  The pinched look grew stronger. “He was a detestable little boy and did not improve with age. A sneak, bullied until he got his growth, and a vile bully himself afterwards. When he was quite little he would try to look in the…”

  She flushed a little and set her cup down sharply.

  “…the girl’s privy.”

  “Unpopular?” Rutherston asked. “As an older boy, or a young man.”

  “With all but the worst element, louts and… girls of questionable taste. He had his cronies. And he would do unspeakable things to library books! I had to speak very sharply to him about that, and impose fines.”

  “Ah,” Rutherston said, with an inward sigh.

  Unpopular with the respectable element, and the village Bad Boy. Probably got a girl or two pregnant, too, or gave her Cupid’s Measles, and skipped out on some of his trips to avoid the avenging relatives and the Squire and the parish priest.

  When they’d left the clinic, the detective put his hat back on—the sun was bright in a sky with only a few piled white clouds—before he snapped the notebook shut and turned to Bramble with a silent question.

  “Bad apple, that one,” Bramble said. “Knew some wide lads like that back home, but none so bad. From the looks of the knocks he took—and lived afterwards—I’d judge he was a hard man and nei mistake, not just your High Street ruffler ready with his fists or a quarterstaff. Smuggler, probably—treasure trove.”

  Rutherston nodded. Ruins within the Empire of Greater Britain— which included western Europe to the old German and Italian borders, the Mahgreb west of the Sicilian settlements around Tunis and Bizerte, and theoretically the Atlantic coast of what had been the United States—were in law Crown property. Salvage for ordinary materials went on by firms making competitive bids for the rights to a given area, and control of exports gave Winchester influence with the King of Ashante and the Sultan of Zanzibar and his ilk.

  Certain types of salvage goods, bullion and jewelry and artwork, were still more tightly controlled. Licenses for searching the dead cities for those were dependent on good character, and the government kept the Royal Third. That made violating the law potentially very profitable for interlopers… and in the vast tangled wilderness of the Wild Lands northward and on the Continent outside the English settlements, very hard for the authorities to stop. The whole army wouldn’t be able to surround the jungled wreck of Paris or Madrid alone.

  If the wilderness hadn’t been so dangerous, with remnant tribes of Brushwood Men ready to kill and rob unwary travelers—and sometimes, still, to eat them—the problem would have been even worse.

  Bramble went on slowly: “There was something a bit odd about the way those two talked about him, sir. Miss Medford didn’t like him—not half! You could tell that, but she gave him penicillin for the clap, twice, without reporting him.”

  “That is odd, corporal. Not technically very illegal, but odd. She’d have to mention it, it would be in the NHS disbursement records…”

  Bramble frowned as they walked toward the church. “Something rum there. You don’t suppose… you don’t suppose he was having it away with ‘er, or something of that sort, sir? She struck me as a born old maid, though.”

  Rutherston started to wave a dismissive hand, checked himself, and spoke slowly in turn, stroking his jaw: “No… but you’re right, there’s more there than meets the eye.” He thought for a moment. “And by the way, do ask questions if you think it would help. I need you for another viewpoint, not just to look formidable.”

  He sighed. “The usual procedures are of little use here. Everyone had access to the victim, if it is a poisoning case. There’s no clear time element with slipping something into a man’s beer, the way there is with bashing him over the head.”

  The churchyard was well kept behind its wrought-iron fence, even the older graves from the last century. Like most here in Hampshire, the new sections started with a marble slab on a long mound for the bodies found when the area was resettled from the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1999. By then the dead in Britain had outnumbered the living by around three hundred to one…

  It bore a simple: For the unnumbered and nameless whom we could not aid: Father forgive us. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.

  The fifty-two years since showed the usual pattern, a burst in the first years of terrible struggle, then four or five annually, then more again as population built up and the last survivors of the old days approached their three score-and-ten—according to the Hampshire Gazetteer, the village had about 600 people now, and the parish as a whole twice that. A sexton in his shirtsleeves with his suspenders dangling was digging a new grave for Jon Wooton, not far from a spreading yew whose dark foliage seemed to drink the sunlight.

  The notice-board beside the doors of St. Mary the Virgin gave the times for services—Mass Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sunday mornings of course, as well as the holy days—and the usual exhortations to parishioners to make sure that they confessed and were absolved before partaking. Below that were listed meetings of the vestry, the choral society, the Harvest Festival Committee, the Mothers’ Union, the guilds—a dozen organizations altogether, some like the Sunday School chaired by the vicar’s wife.

  Rutherston and the soldier removed their headgear and walked through the open door into the cool gloom, with beams of light shining through the stained glass of the windows overhead and a small side-altar to Our Lady of Walsingham. They touched their fingers to the holy water in the font, signed themselves, and genuflected to the altar and the image of the Blessed Mother, waiting for their eyes to adjust. A half-dozen other people were in the church: the usual volunteer middle-aged women and elderly men cleaning and polishing and doing minor repairs, an organist running her fingers through a hymn with the pumps disconnected, a few at silent prayer in the pews, and the vicar himself talking to a deacon.

  The detective smiled to himself; together with the sweetness of cut grass from the churchyard it all had the wax-incense-hassocks-and-choirboy smell of Anglican Rite rural piety; not much different from St. Wilfred’s back in Short Compton, where he’d been born. He thought of himself as an unsentimental man, but the scent did take him back to the summer Sundays of his boyhood. Janice and he had been back just this Lammas, to watch the Loaf and the corn dolly being carried in and to share a niece’s First Communion.

  The priest here was a different story from old Father Johnson, though. He nodded to the deacon and came striding over, the skirts of his black cassock swirling around stout walking shoes; Father Frances Broxby was a vigorous man in his mid-thirties, not tall but bull-chested and broad-shouldered, with reddish muttonchop whiskers and an athlete’s corded neck under the clerical dog-collar.

  Squire’s younger brother, Rutherston reminded himself as they shook hands; he’d consulted Burke’s Peerage and Landed Gentry, and the Church Registry, of course. The grip was not only strong, but callused like a laborer’s or a smith’s.

  That’s a bit surprising too. This parish is a reasonably good living.

  Topped up by the major landowner, and at his encouragement by donations from the yeomanry and tradesmen. In theory the Church didn’t allow lay patronage, but in practice the bishop always consulted about local appointments with someone like Sir James, who owned about half the parish. The everyday work of the church required the leading family’s cooperation.

  Frances Broxby has an Oxford Divinity degree, too, but he’s not ambitious; he wouldn’t have married before he was ordained if he was.

  Married men could be ordained in the Anglican Rite and be parish priests, but not those who aimed at episcopal rank, or of course monastics; it was much the same arrangement as for the Ruthenian Catholics though on a vastly larger scale.

  “Come, walk with me, my sons,” the priest said. “I think I know what you wish to speak of. A painful duty grows nei easier if we put it off.”

  Rutherston blinked in the sunlight behin
d the churchyard. The long meadow there was part of the glebe—the land a parish priest used to graze his necessary horses and a milch-cow for his household, and cut hay; the sweet scent from the two fresh stacks was overwhelming. It was also the site where the militia practiced with their longbows once a week; the tattered-looking wooden target shaped like a Moorish corsair with a scimitar stood down by the hedge and bank at the end, along with a row of thick shield-shaped wedges of wood on stakes. Two Irish setters trotted up grinning and lolling their tongues; the priest bent to ruffle their ears and then led on at a brisk pace until they were on the embankment.

  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 prosperou
s 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.