Novels

It has often been speculated what occupied Sir Edmund during the time spanning his arrival at Moulde Hall and Tricknee’s return. There are no surviving letters or records of his activities, and therefore the fanciful and exotic opinions of any number of besotted poets and educators fill music halls and taverns, even today.

One thing is known, thanks to a single letter written by Lady Lambly Chopshire II, which contains an off-hand comment to her cousin that the windows in Moulde Hall remained uncharacteristically dark long into the hours of the night. This letter, being from a lady of property, is far more respected as a source than the folk-tales that say the gas-lights of Moulde Hall burned brightly in the windows for a full week. Folk stories are, after all, notoriously common.

Another thing that is known for certain is that the man who called early in the morning the following day was not Tricknee Rotledge.

When Enga explained the visitor was not his distant relative, Edmund sorted through every possibility in his head as to who could be calling on him so early in the morning, only two days after Matron’s death. He recounted later in one of his few surviving diaries that he was ashamed at his surprise when he discovered who it was.

It was the next morning. Edmund was certain of it. He had slept, he was positive of that too. Not because he had dreamed; he hadn’t dreamed once in his whole life. He had, however, learned to recognize the clues, such as stretches of time that he did not remember or the sudden arrival of sunlight through his windows.

Nevertheless, he did not feel rested nor prepared for a new day. He hadn’t slept in his bed for over five years. It was frighteningly familiar, even after so long a time. The sunlight struggling through the black cloud of smog that hung over Brackenburg felt different on his skin.

He knew time had passed, but he couldn’t feel the difference. Now, he was awake and staring at the blank piece of paper in his hand.

He had written it — or rather, not written it — during the night. His routine of sleeping with pen and paper in hand had produced nothing. Not a word, not a letter, not even a strange cryptic sketch for him to puzzle over until he deciphered what his slumbering mind was telling him.

First he had lost his poetry, then his nightly writings…was he even Edmund anymore?

Edmund was an orphan from birth, as was fashionable at the time.

For centuries, the upper classes had been enamored with Blood. Lineages were tracked from the present day back thousands of years, through kings, queens, and prostitutes, creating macabre nets of sex and death. Marriages, affairs, and old midwives running through darkened forests with illegitimate heirs in their arms were marked like game sightings in books passed down from generation to generation with more reverence than any holy text. It was as good a way as any of keeping score.

To be an adopted orphan was to circumvent this web entirely.

Now, with Edmund at a ripe old age of eighteen, the pendulum had swung the other way. After years of obsession over heraldry, ancestry, and exactly what shade of blue your blood was, the mystery of not knowing one’s parentage was intriguing; and while money and power held their own fascinations, what was far more important to the perpetually ennuied upper-classes at the time was intrigue.

Bit by bit, the gentry were becoming more accepting of variety. After all, some of their most amusing peers had some embarrassment or other in their family tree. The Landed Classes could handle being common, they couldn’t handle being boring.

The traditional diversion had been war, but the Great War had spoiled all that — it wasn’t as much fun to send young men and women into battle when they came home again, broken in body and spirit — so, the landed gentry began searching for other amusements. Impropriety, once feared and criminalized in the lower classes, became lauded as fascinating eccentricity. Madhouses changed from prisons to safaris. The brutal and cruel were applauded for their creativity. Shock begat awe, and the malaise of the upper-class eroded away once more.

It was an interesting time to be alive, so of course Matron had died.

Old Ozzie never Dust.

Dust.

Dust is like…

Dusted. Settling. Drifting down, and when it touches, it’s dead.

We’re all dust in sunbeams, floating drifting caught on drafts. River currents carrying us along. Alive as long as we’re in the air.

Edmund threw himself into the closest chair, and then immediately stood up again. He couldn’t sit. He couldn’t stand. He couldn’t pace. His mind was afire with consternation.

On impulse learned from his time in the trenches, Edmund glanced around the room for a drinks cabinet.

He had been asked to retire to the nearby General’s Lounge to await the Tribunal’s final verdict. Being a place for the upper-class to sit and chat, the absence of any liquor cabinet would be out of character, to say the least. He didn’t particularly care for the taste of alcohol, but he heard that it could ‘steady one’s nerves,’ and was a quite useful prop for looking nonchalant.

Edmund poured himself a glass of gin, and sipped it.

Nothing happens quickly in the military.

In the olden days, word of peace spread like molasses. When word of peace arrived in one town, time was spent celebrating and reveling, sometimes long into the night, before someone remembered they needed to send the message on. Sometimes, whole years would pass between a treaty’s signing and the last arrow loosed.

Eventually, official messengers were assigned the mission to convey the message of peace to pertinent officials. This worked only marginally better, as the messengers often times stuck around for a nip or two, just to keep the chill evening wind out, and ended up staying the night, drunk off their horse.

When newspapers were invented, word passed faster still. The Telegraph made communication almost instantaneous, but even then there were delays as Generals had just one more cigar, a glass for the road, or played one final hand before turning off the lights.

“Singing?”

“And playing games,” Edmund nodded, with perhaps more pride in his voice than he intended. He hadn’t expected it to work out so well. “Even the guards have unlocked the cells and allowed enemy prisoners to return.”

“Our prisoners?”

“And theirs. Everyone.”

Schtillhart opened her mouth, and then closed it. “Are you telling me, Lieutenant, that not one week after I was made an Acting Colonel and given command over the trenches at Harmingsdown, that my men have stopped fighting and are now singing and playing games with the enemy?”

“Sharing meals, too. I believe their chef was given a surplus of grape-leaves that needed eating.”

One day, sitting on the steps, coming down from a sizzle when Cindy stands there, leaning on the rusty fence like nothing important.

I blink her eyes back into her head. Looking at me with no red-shot eyes. No teeth. All good. Sizzle just a hiss in the back. Nothing bad.

“Hey,” she says, like nothing important. Me, I nod, because Ozzie’s polite. Wearing the girl’s jacket, like they swap. Must be serious, I think. Cindy, she just looks, and says, “Gotta favor to ask.”

Edmund stepped out into the morning light.

Was it portentous, the fact that the sun shone brightly on the brown mud of Harmingsdown for the first time in weeks, or that the piercing reflection of the white snow hurt Edmund’s eyes, forcing him to squint? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he had a plan, and he wasn’t sure it would work.

This was a new and frightening situation for Edmund to be in. After all, his entire life had been spent in the meticulous crafting of detailed plots that blossomed to fruition with only the smallest amount of uncertainty. As Matron had told him before: What use was a plan that had the potential for failure?

The loss of Pinsnip was of significant concern to Edmund, but not as immediate. The far more timely issue was stopping the Wickes from implementing their Tactical Gasses.

There were multiple ways Edmund could have done this, but his brush with the assassin had unnerved him. He needed to rebalance his humors, if not resettle his stomach, and so he opted for taking a personal hand in the sabotage.

The barn in which the Wickes Laboratory was situated was old, but sturdily built. Archaeological studies performed after the war’s end — when the importance of Harmingsdown’s role in its ending was established — place the building of the farmhouse and barn sometime after the Roman invasion of Britannia. The wooden walls were weather-hardened to the point that they were as hard as iron. The winds had blasted the walls as smooth as glass, ensuring a very difficult time for any spies who thought the front door would be too conspicuous an entry point.