Novels

Not half an hour after Wislydale left, Edmund made his way down the Moulde Hall elevator to the abandoned coal mine deep under Haggard Hill.

It had been almost seven years since Edmund had crawled through the tunnels under Moulde Hall. When he was eight, his cousin Pinsnip Sadwick had locked him away in the tunnels to starve; vengeance for Pinsnip’s failure to claim the fortune of the Moulde Family for himself.

But that was only his first foray into the depths. When he was older, and not under immediate threat for his life, (At least, not by entombment.) he spent a good length of time learning their twists and turns, and returning periodically to the tombs of the Moulde Family.

Now, he had a destination. With a speed born of curiosity, it took only a quarter hour for Edmund to climb his way through the empty tunnels. Turning left and right, he made his way through the mines to the place on the survey map where the tombs and the iron vein were closest.

As has been repeated consistently, there is very little that we have of real factual record regarding Sir Edmund Moulde, the majority of his personal writings having been destroyed in the Great Brackenburg Fire.

There is, however, one exception.

Most everything we know about Sir Edmund Moulde and his ways of thinking comes entirely from a single surviving diary. Called by historians the Sir Edmund Codex, the entire journal was saved mostly unscathed from the ashes of Moulde Hall, the only damage being a blackened cover.

It is from this single diary that the majority of theories regarding Sir Edmund and his life have arisen. Indeed, there are several years of Edmund’s life that would be complete mysteries if not for the few pages or tangential references discovered in this journal.

What follows is an excerpt from this diary, dated the 28th of March, 1881, the day of Matron’s wake:

Dear diary,

Week later? Two weeks? Don’t remember. New Kid walked into my room like tentative. Cagey. Nerves all tingling. “Hi.”

Cindy gave him the up-and-down and pointed at Binny. Sage was sitting there, eyes closed, smoke to the top. Leon wasn’t watching, the nut. Should have been, but didn’t. I brought the kid, least he could do would be to pay attention.

Kid walked up to Binny, held out a hand. Binny kept his eyes shut. Took a slow breath, like wise old frog. “You new in town?”

“Ain’t seen you before,” Ribber giggles. “You hiding from us?”

The Wake of Matron Mander Moulde, held on the 28th of March, 1881, was, in a word, awkward.

There were multiple reasons for this, each enumerated and detailed in large numbers of historical and heraldic texts. While it would be prohibitive to explain at length here, with entire chapters devoted to the food and drink, it is simple enough to say that emotions were mixed.

This is often the case when dealing with the death of someone important, and there was no one of more importance than the Founding Families. Matron was, after all, a fellow peer. In spite of the distressing behavior of the Moulde Family, coupled with their steady descent from grace, she was still due the same honors given to every head that died of natural causes: a solemn wake filled with a lingering sense that they had beat the odds.

At the same time, there were few among the guests who did not feel the world was better for having one less Moulde in it. Matron’s cutting tongue and razor-sharp mind had not won her many friends among the nobility of England, and her knack for foiling schemes of grand design seemingly by accident was uncanny.

The next day of importance for Edmund Moulde is well known to all students of Sir Edmund’s life: the 23rd of March, 1881.

This day was, in fact, only two days after his journey to Tendous Grange and five days before Matron’s wake. It is a notable day primarily because of three singular events which occurred.

The first event was that Edmund woke up from a fitful and restless sleep to find the paper he had placed under his hand during the night had been written on.

The fact that he had written in his sleep had been surprising and delightful enough. It had been almost a month since he had returned from the War, and Edmund had begun to worry that he would never write in his sleep again; that he would be forever more alone with his waking thoughts. His relief was subdued by the second realization that came from reading the scribbled words; Edmund was about to be married.

The little man gave no greeting, nor gave Edmund much consideration when he entered. Instead, he simply opened his ubiquitous briefcase and pulled out an entire ream of paper.

Edmund needed no prompting; he sat down, pulled one of his pens from his vest pocket, and began to sign as fast as he could. He did this primarily because of the size of the stack and a quick bit of mental mathematics; if Edmund had paused to read every paper before he signed, it would have taken days before he had gotten through them all.

Luckily, the War had trained Edmund well, and he had become quite practiced at reading quickly. He had also learned the benefits of a leisurely and elaborate signature, and as such, he was able to get a solid idea of what he had started signing before he finished signing it.

After an hour, Edmund paused to stretch his hand before resuming signing his name as regularly as any clock.

There were affidavits, affirmations, demands for legitimacy, and a few papers that appeared to be heavily veiled threats to governing officials. Formal denials of breaking the law, informal declarations of financial holdings, Legal acceptance of liability, refusal to name co-conspirators, acceptance of any profits while denying any losses…every t crossed and every i dotted. All of them had copies; Sometimes two, sometimes five.

Head held high as I walk back, swinging free. Old Oz, what a wiz. Pluck a Skip from the ditch-water and watch them fly.

Catch Leon on the way. Walking like a boss, running like. Thinks he’s got somewhere to be, but doesn’t know Ozzie’s news. Going to flip, I think. Like over heels.

“Oz,” he shouts at me, like I haven’t seen him. The nut, he’s walking right at me. “Oz, come on!”

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.