Emberverse Short Stories Read online

  Royston Hall itself was Seventeenth Century work for the most part, a rectangular block done in pale stone and four stories high. The gray-haired butler opened the door before he could knock and took the card he offered.

  “You’re expected, sir,” he said, not deigning to notice Bramble. “If you’ll follow me?”

  And I don’t think he’s been a butler all his life, Rutherston thought. Men rarely have half their left ear chopped off in that line of work. Or get a limp quite like that.

  There was a suit of armor inside the door at the entrance to the hall, a modern man-at-arm’s outfit of head-to-toe articulated plate. The model had been Fifteenth Century, but the metal was considerably better than any available to medieval smiths.

  The detective and the corporal gave it identical considering glances as they went by. It took a good deal of effort to batter good alloy-steel armor into that sort of shape, and it wouldn’t be at all healthy for the man inside; the shoulder-flash of the Cordoba Lancers was barely visible, and the visor of the sallet helm had been cut nearly in half, which must have taken a two-handed blow with a heavy axe or a halberd. The butler led them into a room with bay windows overlooking a walled garden; they were open, and a scent of lavender and cut grass drifted in, along with a country-house smell compounded of faint traces of lamp and dog and wood-smoke, tobacco, the old walls…

  Sir James Broxby was a man of medium height, still slender and lithe at fifty, with amber-colored hair and mustache liberally streaked with gray. He would have been handsome if it hadn’t been for the slash that had taken his left eye and furrowed the brow above and the cheek below; as it was he wore the black patch with distinction, and the other eye was bright blue and shrewd beneath the shaggy brow. Rutherston heard Bramble make an mmmm sound behind him, and the same thought occurred to him as they shook hands:

  Well, that’s what happened to the suit of plate.

  “A pleasure, Sir James,” he told the baronet.

  “Mutual, inspector… just a moment… Rutherston… the Short Compton Rutherstons? The Blues?”

  “Yes, Sir James, twice. On the retired list at present, and making my way in the CID—younger son, and all that. Youngest of four sons, actually.”

  “Ingmar Rutherston… the Military Medal down in Morocco some time ago?”

  The detective shrugged. “Medals came up from the rear with the rations, and everybody deserved one,” he said.

  That brought a short laugh and a nod; not precisely agreement, but a meeting of minds on matters that others without their shared experience could never really know. Rutherston opened his cigarette case and offered it.

  “Ah, Embiricos,” Sir James said, taking one. “These alone made the cost of resettling Barbados worthwhile, and damn the Whigs and their Babbage Engine project.”

  He cocked an eye at Bramble. “You can sit too, corporal.”

  “I’ll stand, if it’s all the same, sir,” Bramble said, taking a position behind the sofa where Rutherston sat; it was rather like having a bear behind the flowered chintz, but reassuring for all that.

  “The corporal has been assisting me, and doing rather a good job of it,” Rutherston said.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  The baronet rang a bell, and a housemaid slid into the room. “Gin and tonic, please, Martha,” he said. “And you, inspector?”

  “The same, thank you. It is a warm day.”

  They made small talk—the weather (good), the state of the just-completed harvest (excellent), the trends in wheat and wool prices (deplorable), Sir James’s former command in the resettled areas of southern Spain (great potential)—until the drinks came. Rutherston sipped at his, enjoying the tart astringency, and then opened his notebook as a hint.

  Sir James sighed. “Unpleasant business this, all ‘round. I confess I wouldn’t have been even the least upset if young Wooton had come to grief somewhere abroad, but to have him murdered in my own village…”

  Rutherston nodded sympathetically. “The Wootons are an old family here?”

  The other man laughed shortly and drank, smoothing his mustache with a knuckle. “Very old. Gaffer Wooton… Jon’s grandfather… lived here before the Change. So did my family… nearby, at least.”

  Rutherston’s brows went up. That was unusual. The rescue parties had swept up selected people from all over Southern England that first year and taken them to the Isle of Wight Refuge to wait out the inevitable die-off after the machines stopped. Most had been farmers, and the others craftsmen or skilled workers of high value. Thatchers, weavers, and blacksmiths and the like… and to be sure, the families of commanders and of their soldiers and of persons of influence on the Refuge. The men in charge had saved civilization here where nearly everything on the Continent from Normandy to Iran had gone down in utter wreck… but they’d still been only human, and their power had been near absolute for a while.

  The Squire of Royston Hall sighed again. “I don’t know how much background you want—”

  “The more the better, Sir James.”

  “Well, the Wootons got the lease on the mill as soon as this area was resettled in the spring of 1999—my grandfather was commandant of the region under the Emergency Regulations and got a substantial grant of land when things were privatized, the usual arrangement. Old Tom Wooton did a splendid job; he’d been in the Life Guards with my grandfather, driving one of those… what where they called? Not automobiles or trucks, moving steel fort things on bands of metal…”

  “Tanks, I believe.”

  “Yes. One called after a sword, a ‘scimitar,’ I think. Old Tom was handy with machinery, and so he was put in charge of renovating the mill—it hadn’t been operational before the Change, just kept for appearances, they did a lot of that sort of foolishness then of course. He married an Icelandic woman—”

  Rutherston nodded; that was also common. It had been encouraged, in fact, when the refugees from the northern isles were welcomed into a land gone empty in the second and third years.

  “—And his son extended it, added a fulling section.”

  The detective closed his eyes for a second to search his memory. The mill was on the fringe of the village, but he hadn’t heard the distinctive sound of wet woolen cloth pounded by wooden hammers. At his unspoken question, Sir James went on:

  “We closed it down about nine years ago. There’s not as much weaving here as there was in my father’s time—just rough homespun and blankets, that sort of thing. The cloth trade’s been moving off to the West Country and north into your bailiwick lately and it’s cheaper to buy the finer grades. Our Rother really doesn’t have enough water power for manufacturing.”

  True enough, Rutherston thought. Though I wouldn’t call Dursley and Stroud and Chalsford our bailiwick, precisely; we just sell them our farmers’ wool and wheat and flax.

  He’d never liked the mill-towns. They were too big—Stroud was the most monstrously overgrown and had four thousand people nowadays—and they didn’t really fit into the Cotswold country he loved.

  Winchester and Bristol and Portsmouth are cities, he thought. Eddsford and Short Compton are villages. Those places are neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat.

  “I turned it into a winery instead, and loaned a few of my tenants the money for planting more vines. There we have some chance of competing, what with haulage costs from the colonies. In any case, young Jon took it hard. He’d been full of plans for making the fulling operation more efficient—even adding a spinning mill. That we definitely wouldn’t have had the water power for, but Jon was a trifle unbalanced on the subject. We had words on the matter when I pointed out that it was my property and the decision was mine. In fact, we both lost our tempers. He swore he’d buy the mill and the freehold of it and I… well, I’m afraid I laughed and said he was welcome to do it, any time he had a thousand pounds in cash about him.”

  Rutherston winced slightly, and felt Bramble do the same at some subliminal level. A thousand pounds was what Rutherst
on made in five years or a corporal in fifteen. There were places, not here in Hampshire but not necessarily right out on the frontiers either, where you could buy and stock a good farm with that much.

  Sir James looked at the end of his cigarillo, finished his gin and tonic, and then sighed.

  “Well, two years ago… by God, he did it.”

  Rutherston felt his jaw start to drop, and the Squire of Eddsford nodded.

  “Yes, quite a surprise. But I’d given my word, even if I meant it as a joke, and… there he was with a thousand in good Bank of England notes. I had absolutely nei desire to sell family land, but what could I do? It was a fair price, after all; better than fair, even if I did have to put up a new winery. I felt lucky he didn’t insist on making a public parade of it; he was always one to kick a man when he had him down, was our Jon.”

  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 wou
ldn’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.