The stitcher and the mut.., p.15
The Stitcher and the Mute, page 15
‘We ’ave some unsplit leathers tha’ strong.’
‘Leathers?’
‘From the cows by ’ere.’
Darmst narrowed her eyes. ‘Cows.’
The tanner turned to Samuel, who until then had been waiting in the doorway and trying not to laugh.
‘Do they not have stories of cows in the Rusting Mountains?’ Samuel said.
‘Ah, the milk makers?’ she said.
‘That’s them.’
‘They have strong hides too?’
The tanner cleared his throat. ‘Strong ’nuff. Little heavier than your… hide there.’
They left him with an order for leather that made his eyes bulge and had him calling for his sons before they’d even left his shop.
So, as many men felled many trees, Darmst stitched the hides of many felled cows. More and more hides came. So many, she had to move from the upper study where Samuel worked and into the long top gallery. She stretched the enormous hidesail along the carpeted corridor. She found the soft Perlish faces disconcerting, so worked with her back to the portraits. When Samuel found her working there one afternoon, she made him promise that her face would never be on that wall. He looked along the gallery, smiled, and made his promise. Then, he knelt and kissed her.
It was their first kiss. A fleeting kiss, little more than a brushing of lips. A thing to be cherished, but more often than not forgotten. But not by the Audience.
*
The work to clear the ground dragged on. Samuel’s father bemoaned his son’s stubborn nature, his meticulous eye for detail, and his romantic notions – all of which he apparently gained from his mother. A mother who just shook her head, knowing that her husband might as well have been describing himself rather than their son. The only thing that mollified his father somewhat was the increasing stream of stripped lumber that made its way down the mountain track from the house.
Darmst’s work was similarly proving taxing. Once the hide for the sail was in hand, she had to call upon a number of blacksmiths to work the iron for the locking mechanism and the sail’s frame. Samuel said she should summon them to Truss House rather than trudge across the Perlish countryside in the summer heat. But Darmst insisted she wanted to see each smithy at their forge. It was, after all, quite specialist work she was commissioning. Like the tanner, the blacksmiths were somewhat bemused by the little Rustan woman who came into their workshops demanding finer work than most had the skills for. But a combination of the W’oventrout purse and a willingness to show those metal-men her iron fingers and even her lockport, discreetly of course, soon won them over.
By the last days of summer, the grounds west of Truss House had been cleared of all trees, the platform had been installed to Samuel’s specifications, and Darmst had her cow-hidesail.
It was time for her to fly.
*
‘Glide!’ Darmst said, for perhaps the tenth time that morning. She was on the terrace with the whole family as they watched members of the household staff wrestle the hidesail down the main staircase. They didn’t need to be told to be careful.
‘Yes, dear, I know you’ll be gliding,’ Samuel said. ‘But allow everyone else their stories. Today they see someone fly.’
‘Everyone’ was the right of it. There was a long corridor of people all the way from the house to the platform: the entire staff, from coachmen to scullery maids to the butler; the many teams of lumber men; the tanner and his sons; the blacksmiths and their families; and many more beside who had heard tale of the flying soon-to-be W’oventrout. As Darmst appeared in the wake of her hidesail there were cheers and cries of ‘huzzah!’ as if the whole of Eastern Perlanse had taken her for their hero. A little girl broke from the lines and brought Darmst a handful of wild flowers. It was quite the spectacle.
The crowd fell in behind Darmst and her husband-to-be. Much was made, then and after, of what she wore: strong boots, tight men’s trousers, and an equally fitted waistcoat that had something shiny on its back. That was the most common story – the Perlish imagination was not quite ready for the truth of the lockport.
For Samuel, the short walk to the platform felt like crossing the whole Union. He ran over the design of the platform again and again in his head. He desperately wanted to ask Darmst of the hidesail. Had she tested each part of the frame? Was she sure of each of her stitches? Was cow’s hide too heavy after all? But he had put these questions, and more, to her in the days previous and she was happy. She would glide across the Moral Mountains valley and wait for her horse-riding husband wherever she might land.
He helped her with the hidesail. It was his hands, not those of the household staff, that locked the sail to her. The metallic snap was almost sickening.
‘Did I hurt you?’ he hurried to ask.
‘No, dear. That sound is a good sign.’ She rolled her shoulders and stretched her neck, trying her new sail. She shook her right arm, and the right side of the sail shook also. She raised her left arm and the left side of the sail rose. The crowd oohed and ahhed. She clenched her two metal fingers to her palm and the sail turned and banked. ‘It feels good,’ she said.
Samuel came to stand before her. ‘Wood and tin,’ he said. ‘Those things seem very small now.’
‘They are.’
‘Would you allow me to say I love you, Watcher Darmst?’
‘I might.’
‘This is something you have to do, something important, I know that. But now we’re here, I wish you didn’t.’
‘Would you allow me to say I love you too, Samuel W’oventrout?’
‘Tell me once you’re back on the ground.’
She pulled him close to kiss him then. The crowd roared.
He joined his parents just a little way behind the platform.
‘You two look pale as western milkmaids,’ his father said.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing, dear,’ Mother said. ‘I’ve become quite attached to our little Rustan.’
‘As have I, Mother.’
Darmst stood alone on the platform, her hidesail locked between her shoulders and sprawled out behind like an enormous, heavy veil. The crowd quietened to a silence that was almost torturous. One heartbeat. Two. He told quick stories to every member of the Audience he could think of. Stories of a happy marriage, of children, of a legend that would give them so many more stories if she just lived beyond that day. A third heartbeat, and she was off.
*
Adeline waited, half-turned on the bench and gazing at the profile of her husband-to-be. The sun had nearly dropped behind the stables of Truss House.
‘And?’ she said.
‘And what?’ Bertram said.
‘Damn you to Silence, Trout! Did she fly?’
‘Silence? But if so damned, how could I tell you?’
Adeline crossed her arms and huffed. ‘It is good that I’m marrying you for your stables and not your stories.’
‘Perhaps, as time goes on, it will be both,’ he said, failing to keep the hope from his voice. ‘I would have thought the ending of my story was obvious. I am here, am I not? My parents are discussing our marriage with your parents right now, are they not? Both my parents.’
A grin spread across Adeline’s face. She punched Bertram’s arm, none too gently. ‘You’re a crafty thing, Bertram W’oventrout. Maybe this won’t be the most boring marriage in the history of East Perlanse.’
‘Oh, I have no fear of that,’ Father said.
*
In front of the carriageway of Truss House, Bertram gave one of his harrumphs that his two sons knew so well.
‘She was right,’ Henry said. ‘It hasn’t been boring, has it?’
‘No,’ Bertram admitted. ‘I dare say what’s driving up that track of ours won’t be boring, either.’ The three of them squinted under a hot Eastern Perlish sun. ‘Trust a southerner to keep us waiting.’
Phineas turned to his father. ‘Did Mother really kill her first stag in the… Wayward fashion?’
‘So the story goes.’
He then turned to his brother. ‘Another thing, didn’t Grandfather break his promise? We have a portrait of Grandmother Darmst in the top gallery.’
‘Well, now, that is another story entirely.’
‘Henry, really!’
‘Quite scandalous, actually.’
‘That’s enough of that, boys,’ Bertram said. ‘Try to look presentable now, Phineas. Here comes your flower girl.’
Henry burst out giggling. Amongst all Father’s bellowing and blustering, it was easy to forget he had quite the wit to him.
For his part, Phineas was in no mood for wit as he watched two white horses cresting the rise of the track, and the carriage behind. He felt a churning in his stomach that threatened fire in his throat. The horses were foaming at the mouth and their flanks were sleek with their efforts. Pomp and tassels hung limply from their leathers and the carriage, all wilted by the hot journey.
‘It won’t be boring,’ Phineas said to himself, as if that might in anyway reassure him. But the truth was, he wasn’t frightened of boredom. Quite the opposite. It was the excitement that was coming up the track that scared him.
*
Vivian gestured to her son to join her at the dressing table. He had been listening to her story perched on the end of her bed, as he had done when he was much younger. She had forgone her full routine of powders and liners and rouge to tell him of the family. As far as he was concerned, she looked all the more beautiful for it.
She took her son’s hand in hers once more. ‘You see, Cecil, it is excitement that is the W’oventrout’s undoing. It always has been. From your great great grandfather to this very day.’
‘I don’t understand, Mother.’
‘I know, dear boy, but you will. I’m so sorry, but you will.’
‘But I don’t like Rustans or hunting or flowers or games or anything else.’ Cecil paused. Then, in a very small voice, he said, ‘I don’t like anything that comes from far away.’
Vivian kissed his hand. She was fighting the tears in her eyes. ‘I wish you did. I wish you did. At least then you could play some part in your own misery, rather than suffer consequences not of your making.’
He helped her from her stool and attended her as she adjusted her wig.
‘You look wonderful, Mother.’
‘Thank you, Cecil. I know you will stay gallant to the last. Devoid of excitement, but gallant to the last.’
*
Cecil drained the last of his wine, his throat hoarse from his tale. He still stood in front of the drawing room’s hearth, which had burned down to embers, and was weary beyond his own understanding. His audience were similarly encumbered. Little Florence lay curled at the end of a window settle, snoring like a Casker bargeman. Gideon and Rosamund dozed together on one of the softer sofas, their secret obvious to anyone who cared to look. But poor Edwin Adlesworth, merchant of Fenest, husband to his second wife, poor Edwin was fast asleep with an empty brandy glass fallen at his feet.
Cecil righted the glass on his way to the slumbering form of Gideon. Even in his sleep the boy was handsome. Cecil moved as quietly as he could and, holding his breath, reached down; he eased the fish knife from the boy’s pocket.
The Adlesworth family slumbered on in their new drawing room, oblivious to the fading glory all around them. Truss House was once the ancestral home to a great Perlish dynasty. Now it was a Fenestiran’s investment. But as Cecil’s mother had tried to warn him, so long ago, the W’oventrouts had no one but themselves to blame. Each one of them could have stopped the rot, stopped the decay, and saved their way of life.
It was in their power to stop the forces of change.
We all have the power to stop the forces of change.
Instead, as dawn broke over East Perlanse, Cecil W’oventrout found himself closing the door of his rightful home behind him, with a southern family in his place. He picked up his modest holdall, but in doing so noticed something small and glowing beside the main doors. He bent to get a closer look.
A little white flower greeted him like he were the sun itself.
‘Hello there,’ Cecil said. ‘You’re a long way from the lower gardens, aren’t you?’
Lo and behold, over the many years the Caskanese Plotseed had made its way from the lower gardens, through the foundations of Truss House, right to the front entrance. It had undermined the whole place, even the stables.
Cecil plucked the flower and tucked it into the lapel of his coat.
‘We’ll be all right,’ he told the Plotseed. ‘It’s the rest of them I worry about.’
Eight
The two Perlish storytellers bowed to each other, bowed to the Audience, then turned and disappeared under the balconies of Z’anderzi’s Kantina.
At once, the public gallery was a roar of noise as people started to discuss the Perlish story with their neighbour. Stories, Cora reminded herself. The pennysheets hadn’t been wrong with all their different ideas about what the Perlish election story would be. In fact, they’d all been right.
‘It was clever, wasn’t it, how the ’tellers passed the story back and forth between them?’ Jenkins said, and Cora had to agree.
With the appearance of each new relation of the W’oventrout who began the story, as the tale moved backwards in time, the ’teller gave way to their partner. The effect had been like following a river upstream to the source, every so often taking a new branch.
‘They did a good job of it,’ Cora said. ‘The way they told the story together – it was smoother than I thought it would be.’
‘They must have practised.’
‘So they can work together.’ Cora shook her head. ‘Why that realm can’t find a way to unify, I will never know.’
Those in the public gallery began to move towards the staircases, but the number of people in the tight space meant progress was slow.
Jenkins leaned against the balcony rail. ‘Perlish unification is one thing; they don’t seem keen on anyone outside the realm, either, do they? All that talk of foreigns.’
‘They’ve never been a subtle realm.’ Cora took out her bindle tin and started to roll a smoke. ‘What a message to voters: don’t let strangers in because they’ll ruin everything. Such an awful—’
‘I thought it was an excellent story,’ said the woman who’d been seated next to Cora. A thin woman whose mouth was so pursed, she looked like she was trying to suck her lips inside herself.
‘Did you now?’ Cora muttered.
‘All those southerners coming here, bringing their plague, begging in the streets. It’s disgusting.’ The woman bristled with her own indignation, clutching her handbag to her chest as if Cora or Jenkins might try to rip it from her grasp. ‘The Perlish are right – we must keep them out. It would be a black stone from me.’
‘Well,’ Cora said, ‘it’s a good job you’re not in the voting pool.’
‘Fine Fenestiran you are,’ the woman spat, pushing past Cora. ‘Don’t you read the pennysheets?’ was her parting shot.
‘Unfortunately, yes,’ Cora said, and sighed. She put the bindle tin back into her pocket. ‘Come on, Jenkins. Time to get back to the station.’
‘I would say that’s a very good idea indeed, Detective Gorderheim,’ said a voice from the shadowy gallery.
Cora peered into the gloom. Someone needed to light more lamps. ‘Is that you, Chief Inspector?’
Hearing that, Jenkins scuttled down the stairs. Cora couldn’t blame her.
‘How did you find the Perlish story? So soon after your visit to Perlanse?’ Chief Inspector Sillian said, and stepped free of the shadows.
The chief of Bernswick Division police station was a few years over fifty – Cora had never been quite sure of her superior’s age. Sillian was slim and sharp – her cheekbones as well as her tongue. She regarded Cora with a look that Cora knew only too well: scepticism blended with disappointment.
She found herself pushed towards Sillian by the press of people wanting to leave. ‘You’ve seen my report on the prisoner transport, on their deaths, I take it,’ Cora said.
‘And the local stitcher’s. It confirmed everyone involved in the transport was poisoned.’
‘I left these out.’ Cora reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the feathers found on Finnuc’s corpse. ‘A black feather and a white one, both left on the Casker’s body. Another warning about the election.’
‘The poisoner killed himself,’ Sillian said, and flicked a speck of dirt from her pristine black jacket. ‘Anyone would be forgiven for thinking there was no case here.’
‘You know what this is really about, ma’am,’ Cora said, hastily. ‘You’ve known all along. Someone is responsible for these deaths – not just the person doing the killing. And it won’t stop. Not yet.’
Sillian’s gaze dropped to the floor. Cora caught a glimpse of the white scalp that seemed to burn a neat parting line through the chief inspector’s dark hair. ‘It has to be discreet.’
‘It will be.’
‘And keep your team small.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Cora hesitated. She could leave it at that: implicit permission to pursue the case – wherever it led. But the time for chancing her luck was well behind her, and the Latecomer knew it. ‘I can only put it off so long, ma’am.’
‘Put what off, Detective?’
‘I have to speak to the Chambers.’
‘From what I saw this morning, right here in Z’anderzi’s, you’re already speaking to them.’
So that feeling of being watched earlier, before the Perlish story started – Cora had been right. She wouldn’t have guessed it was one of her own doing it.
‘I can’t help it if the Chambers come to me,’ Cora said.
