Chapter 1

Sir Edmund Moulde, a gentleman for whom no introduction could be either required or sufficient, is a mysterious and complicated figure. For one who so singularly affected the destiny of nations, very little is known for certain.

This is not to say we know nothing. While countless documents, diaries, and letters were lost in the Great Brackenburg Fire of 1954, every recovered document written by his hand has undergone years of study and interpretation by the great scholars of our time.

His poetry is no exception. Take, for example, what is considered by historians to be one of Sir Edmund’s first poems, entitled simply, Clock:

While the rich themes and compelling symbolism are self-evident, the debates over this poem have embroiled literary circles in intense debate for years. What is agreed on from all quarters is this: It is clear that, whatever else this poem is, it was a profound and unique starting point for all that was to come in Sir Edmund’s life.

~ Excerpt from the foreword of ‘The Final Word in Sir Edmund Moulde’s Poetry and Prose’ by Sir Loomus Kohlm, DFA, MRD, NDA

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

As with many things in England during what was then called the post-war era but what we now know as the pre-war era, fashion was dictated by ubiquity. Orphans were not uncommon in Brackenburg in the 1860s, and so it was the duty of the mayor — as it would have been of any notable public servant who enjoyed their position of prestige — to take swift, decisive, and above all visible action.

While historians are famed for their ability to write thick volumes detailing complicated chains of events that stretch from a conversation over tea to a restructuring of the entire European Monarchy three decades later; for our purposes, the result of the mayor’s actions was that Mrs. Mapleberry — at the time little more than a dependable seamstress who lived in a tiny room near the edge of the Farrows district — found herself sitting on the dais behind the Mayor as he gave his speech in front of Brackenburg’s city hall.

It was the proudest moment of Mrs. Mapleberry’s life. She didn’t mind the driving rain; traditional British precipitation gave the occasion the proper weight of solemnity and circumstance. She had worn her best hat, with the worn spot turned to the back, and spent all last evening cleaning her finest dress. The fact that the dress was entirely black did not dissuade her; black was as suitable a color for a future owner of an orphanage as any.

As she had been sat at the far end of the row of chairs, she couldn’t hear a single word of the mayor’s speech, but his back looked particularly authoritative. She read a copy of his speech later in the post. It spoke of industry and progress. It spoke of a towering infrastructure of machines, oil, and brass. It spoke of a city full of hope and duty, strength and unity. It spoke of a place which would be a beacon unto the entire world, full of light, brass, fire, and steam. It spoke of a brave new world and the brave young people that would inhabit it. After all, he conceded, it wasn’t the children’s fault; the recent war had hit the city of Brackenburg hard, leaving hundreds of homes vacant and even more children orphaned.

The fact that the recent war had occurred almost five years ago went tactfully unmentioned in the local papers and dutifully unnoticed by the citizenry at large.

The mayor hadn’t helped matters. Oh, as a patriot Mrs. Mapleberry would never have blamed him for his choices; she knew her place and wouldn’t have dreamed of offering any suggestions on how to run a city, especially one as powerful, prosperous, and prestigious as Brackenburg. All the same, she remembered a twinge of discomfort four years ago when the mayor had announced his new devotion to the Modern Metropolis. He had subsidized esoteric professors, scientists, engineers, and similar madmen in the hopes that they could propel Brackenburg into the coming century. He had spoken of industry and progress. He had spoken of oil, and brass, and strength, and duty…

Before that fateful year ended, a large sooty cloud of prosperity had grown to cover the Brackenburg skyline. Great steam engines and brass factories poured their products onto the streets, and for a brief moment the problems of the past seemed resolved.

The Nine Founding Families hadn’t reacted. This was considered odd at the time, as the Nine Founding Families never kept their fingers out of anything.

The sad truth was, while the war had been the most common cause of premature death, it was soon eclipsed by industry. Industrial accidents swept throughout the city like a plague, and what began as a cure resulted in fewer workers and more orphans. This resulted in a need for more machines, whose hasty design and thrifty construction resulted in even more deaths…and all the while, the black cloud that hung over the city continued to grow larger while vacant homes spread across Brackenburg like festering sores.

“A small price to pay for progress,” the mayor had said. “Our children will grow up knowing their parents died either to keep this country safe in war, or great in industry.”

Historians, ever eager for a clear impetus, agree things may have continued like this for decades had a letter from Lady Pandermill not appeared in, of all things, the Brackenburg Gazette. In it, she expressed sincere displeasure at the stray dogs, cats, and children that filled the streets and made her evening strolls intolerably melancholy.

Any scandal at a Lady-of-Property having a letter printed in the Brackenburg Gazette was dwarfed by the immediate and excessive reaction of City Hall. As the old saying goes, “when the rich are unhappy, the world takes notice.” It is perhaps an apocryphal tale, but newspapers at the time reported the mayor traveling to every Mansion, Villa, Grange, Hall, Court, Estate, and Manor in the Squatling district in only one week. A famous political lithograph showed the fat little man running from dapper man to stylish woman with a doctor’s bag and stethoscope, his tails flapping as he puffed with exertion. (“Oh,” cried the woman as she swooned in pain, “My constitutional!”)

It was Lady Pandermill’s letter that prompted the mayor to take the swift, decisive, and visible action that brought Mrs. Mapleberry to the dais, to wit: In less than a month, the mayor had seized every abandoned building in the city and established twenty-three of them as new orphanages to be run by any enterprising and patriotic citizens who were willing to do their duty for King and Country.

When Mrs. Mapleberry had heard the news, she had marched down to the city hall and offered her services. It was, she knew, her duty as a citizen to care for, teach, and encourage these children to grow up properly.

Progress wasn’t a bad thing, Mrs. Mapleberry knew, but the changes were happening so fast! Why, only yesterday she had heard of some new type of letter called a Telegraph, and hadn’t the first launch of…what was it called…a Zeppelin, that was it! Hadn’t the world’s first Zeppelin just lifted off from Cliffside not two months ago? The war had been bad enough, but instead of protecting Britannia from an invasion of foreigners, now the land was being invaded by the future.

Mrs. Mapleberry set her jaw firm and upper-lip stiff as she applauded at the mayor’s last few words. She noted that she was applauding louder and harder than most of the other citizens, but this only proved what she had known all along; she was a patriot, and without proper guidance these orphans might grow up as something other than British.

She watched as the mayor began to walk down the line of twenty-three new wardens, handing out the delightfully official-looking declarations. She would not allow her charges to grow up without knowing their place. She would protect them from the horrors of a changing world with a structured regime of order. She would shape them into adults that fit into their proper place in the world, like perfectly shaped puzzle pieces, or perhaps a pudding mold. They would never have to fear the future, because they would know how to behave properly.

After all — she noted as the final deed was laid in her eager hands — as far as anyone had ever told her, that was what it meant to be British, and she was nothing if not a patriot.

But a crowd was a crowd, even for a patriot, and so as the Mayor began his unsteady journey down from the steps of the city hall to shake hands with the masses, she began to shuffle her way off the dais, through the crowd, and out of the city square.

She had barely made it five steps when an unseen stranger thrust a thin newborn child into her arms from out of the swarming mass of citizenry. Had she been designed to think faster she might have caught, if not the mysterious figure’s arm, at least a glimpse of their face. Instead, the thick black eyes of the child caught her own first, and she was stunned with the swelling sense of purpose that filled her bones. It was one thing to own an orphanage, quite another to own an orphan.

Smothered with civic pride, she gripped the swaddled child to her breast and marched to her new orphanage — the only building on Downs Hill — and immediately renamed it Mrs. Mapleberry’s Home for Wayward Lads and Ladies.

She named the boy Edmund, because she thought it sounded nice.

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Mrs. Mapleberry’s Home for Wayward Lads and Ladies was falling apart, and by the time Edmund had grown it was no better.

First hand accounts, though unreliable, reported that it tended to sway in strong winds, and the ceiling would creak with effort when the dark snows of winter heaped themselves on the small roof. The faded wooden planks that made up its walls were rotted, warped, and clattered loudly in the slightest nighttime breeze, keeping the orphans awake. In the winter the building leaked, letting the dark rains drip inside and blanket the small beds with gray frost. There was a tiny yard enclosed by a thin pine-wood fence, and it contained only a single frail tree that sat in the middle of the yard like a sick flower. (Investigators report it was, fittingly, a common box tree.)

The inside of the orphanage was just as decrepit, with chunks of decaying plaster falling from the walls throughout the day like dying leaves, to be flicked by the orphans out of their food or off their clothes. Where the erosion was greatest, large support beams and rafters stuck out like whalebones. The floorboards were full of termites and wood-weevils, and they cracked and creaked when stepped on. Most of the nails had long since rusted away as well, and the floors rocked and twisted whenever a child stepped on them. Large groups of children running from one room to another was always accompanied with a cacophony of creakings, bangings, and cries of pain as the children stumbled on the shifting floors.

Edmund never ran anywhere. He was never in a hurry.

It wasn’t that Mrs. Mapleberry lacked for money; Financial records of the time prove that orphaning was a lucrative business in those days. Adoption of the unfortunate was the patriotic duty of the working class, a prestigious badge of honor for the rising class, and a trendy fad for the affluent. Three or four beds in the sleeping hall were emptied of their former inhabitants every week and filled again with new children by the next. With no shortage of orphans or adopters, there was no shortage of income.

The Mayor of Brackenburg had been quite adamant, however, in accordance with the views of the time, that any true orphanage had to be poor, dilapidated, and a miserable place for children to live; otherwise, why would they need to be adopted? So as quickly as the children came and went, so too did the money come and go through a sizable orphanage tax.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Mapleberry persevered. First hand accounts describe her as a rotund disciplinarian, full of boisterous energy and a loud voice that could reach the ears of any child inside the orphanage’s fence. She took pride in being able to perfectly pair a child to any parents who came through her doors. It was her job, after all, and she had no faith that parents had any right to select their own child without advice from an expert.

And she was an expert on her children. Through rigorous testing and education, she knew which of her children were best at standing still and holding trays, or pushing plows and holding small pigs. She knew which children had the wide eyes and charming smiles that were expected of chimney-sweeps, and which were pale and sickly, perfect for the ennui-enamored upper-class. She taught dish-washing and sweeping to some, posture and elocution to others. The cleverest were taught how to read, write, and do basic sums; the only skills that had so far managed to straddle portions of both classes like a rickety bridge.

Then, there was Edmund.

Mrs. Mapleberry had never been a quitter, but prospective mothers and fathers consistently passed Edmund by after seeing his dark sunken eyes and black matted hair. His small mouth unsettled them, and he never blinked as often as they thought was appropriate.

At first, she thought Edmund would be a good fit for the upper-class, as he was always clean and his hair never needed brushing. He had trouble with the etiquette lessons, however, and no matter how polite the greeting or clean the offered hand, Edmund would simply stare and not say a word. Besides, the clothing made him look like a poorly dressed cadaver.

Mrs. Mapleberry then considered him for the working-class; he never got sick and always did as he was told to an almost frighteningly exact degree. Sadly, Edmund was painstaking in his precision. Even dusting a single room took Edmund hours, and by the time he finished the dust had settled again. Besides, the clothing made him look like a poorly stuffed scarecrow.

Finally, in what she thought was a stroke of brilliance, Mrs. Mapleberry decided Edmund would be perfect for any professional gentlefolk that were looking for assistants. He was quiet, intelligent, and could do well as a clerk or maybe even a banker. Anyone who owned a business probably would care more about his acumen than his odd stare or tiny mouth.

Unfortunately, businesses wanted eager and ambitious children, and neither qualities were evident in Edmund. Passion was absent in his deep black eyes, and whenever Mrs. Mapleberry extolled his brilliance and cleverness, Edmund remained silent, either unwilling or unable to prove her correct. It frustrated Mrs. Mapleberry to no end because — in perhaps the most obvious display of intelligence she had ever seen — Edmund loved to read.

Mrs. Mapleberry was not an avid reader herself, only sporadically flipping through penny dreadfuls, penny romances, and penny advisers. One of these penny advisers (Proper Society and its Virtues, vol. 2, 1861) extolled the value of a well-read orphan, so she kept a sagging bookshelf in the hallway with ten or twenty ragged books sitting quietly in the dust.

Edmund had read them all, often times more than once. Not because he enjoyed them, as Mrs. Mapleberry suspected, but because they confused him so terribly. He could never understand why the wolf was still so hungry after eating an entire grandmother, or how a cat could wear boots without falling over. Worst of all, when he got to the end of the book there was never anything about what happened after. When the children found their way home, did the farm survive or succumb to a drought the next Spring? How did the farmer’s son know enough about proper governance to be a wise and just king?

The books Edmund actually enjoyed reading were the books Mrs. Mapleberry deemed Not Fit For Children and placed next to the thin fireplace for kindling. They were much thicker than the other books, so Edmund had assumed they had proper endings. One night, he stole one to read after everyone had gone to bed.

The book was titled A Guyde to The Humours of the Physicale Bodye, by Sir Knickle Prickleston, Ph.D, MDA, RMD, ZMA, Ph.A, AMAZ. The book was thick and the words were small, but Edmund flipped through anyway because there were pictures in it.

The pictures were so fascinating he started over, reading carefully from the beginning. He didn’t understand it at first, but Edmund persevered; he read words, phrases, and whole chapters again and again, sounding out words and studying contexts.

It was a book about the body. Edmund was delighted to learn that the human body was not just a bag of slightly squishy flesh, but an intricate network of tiny bits and pieces that all had their own color, shape, texture, and function: bones kept everything ordered and in its place, muscles moved everything about, blood kept everything running properly, livers, stomachs, kidneys, humours, rheums, and vitaes, all worked together so Edmund could breathe, blink, eat, or turn the page in abject fascination. He read through the book again and again until he had it memorized, word for word.

Edmund looked for new books with tiny words next to the fireplace every chance he got. He studied every book he managed to swipe, memorizing diagrams and formulas. Some books were about specific organs of the body, others discussed recipes for cures and elixirs. Others were about animals, metals, strange powders, or mechanical devices. He was astounded to learn that rocks were not just rocks, but igneous, volcanic, or sedimentary. Diagrams detailed the articulation of tree branches and the proper ebb and flow of beach sand depending on the wind. The properties of steam, springs, levers, and pulleys had so many uses he despaired of ever learning them all.

The books were Edmund’s salvation: the world was a strange and confusing place, but the books showed him how like a machine it all was. Everything had a purpose and a proper place. Everything did Something, and that was its Job. It felt right.

Edmund became so good at reading that people tended to forget he was in the room. When she thought to wonder, Mrs. Mapleberry would ask if anyone had seen Edmund around the orphanage. The children would say no, they hadn’t seen him, to which Mrs. Mapleberry would cluck in exasperation and vanish again, while the children would return to their games.

Usually, Edmund was reading in the corner of the room the whole time, but no one ever noticed, and he never thought of drawing attention to himself; he enjoyed being alone. When it was summer and most of the other children were playing outside, he would stay inside and do his best to keep out of sight. When the winter was too cold for the children to play in the yard, he would bundle himself up in his scarf, sneak out into the snow, and find a place to sit alone.

It was better than dealing with the other orphans; they would always quickly stop talking or avoid Edmund’s gaze whenever he was near. They always found themselves playing on the other side of the yard from where Edmund sat, but if you asked them they wouldn’t be able to tell you why.

The orphans always managed to make friends with each other, through shared experience that similarly unifies soldiers or laborers. When not running around in the yard, throwing balls, or chasing each other with sticks, they would huddle together, muttering and laughing about the good old days or sharing a smuggled-in cigarette.

Edmund never tried to make friends. It wasn’t that the children were cruel (although some of them were) or stupid (which several definitely were), it was just that Edmund didn’t see the point. Why bother when they could be gone in a week, never to be seen again?

Of course, that wasn’t usually how it turned out. Orphans who were adopted from the Home for Wayward Lads and Ladies oftentimes returned. Some were re-orphaned by industrial accidents, while others were returned by parents who claimed they had done quite enough of their patriotic duty, thank you. Some returned as much as three times a month.

If Edmund had one friend in the orphanage, it was Leeta.

It was difficult for Edmund to call her a friend since they never spoke, smiled, or even looked at each other, but if Edmund was able to consider her a friend, it was because she was familiar. Of all the orphans in the orphanage, she was the one who came back the most often.

Leeta was short, stocky, and had a lopsided nose from when a boy twice her age had broken it before she knocked him to the ground and kicked him unconscious. She seemed destined for the life of a dock-worker or farmer. At the same time, her teeth were straight and she was pretty enough, so she might have fetched a reasonable dowry for an upper-class family. She rarely stayed at the orphanage for longer than a week.

Then, after several weeks on the outside, she would vault over the wooden fence and behave as if she had never left. “I like it better here,” she would say before launching into a story. She always returned full of stories about what it had been like to have a family; all the re-orphaned children did. They would whisper of large homes with five floors, fifty windows, and a set of wealthy parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. They whimpered about roast chicken or duck, real gravy, proper tea, and blood pudding for dessert. They spoke of chairs that didn’t wobble, tables that still had all their slats, and walls that stood where they were put.

Leeta did not become truly important to Edmund until later in his life, when he went to school.

At the time, Edmund only partially paid attention to the stories. They all ended the same way; the children came back to the orphanage.

It wasn’t just the children who would return to the orphanage with regularity: Mr. and Mrs. Wickes were two stern aristocrats who stopped by the orphanage at least five times every year. They were a cold pair, always dressed in fine black clothing. Mr. Wickes carried a thick black cane that might have originally been a wrought-iron horse-post, and Mrs. Wickes wielded a silvery lace fan that she could snap open and closed like a whip.

They always arrived just after dinner — an unorthodox time to visit — to slowly walk through the orphanage, the loud crash of Mr. Wickes’ thick cane echoing through the hollow walls. Periodically, Mrs. Wickes would slowly bend down and stare a child full in the face, her mouth bending into something like a smile and something like a sneer.

“And what’s your name?” She would ask, as though reciting a well learned lesson. The child would answer, or more often mumble awkwardly as Mr. Wickes stared from behind his wife.

“Too short,” he would grumble. Or too thin, or too tall, or not quite tall enough. Instantly, Mrs. Wickes’s smile would vanish, her back would straighten, and they would move on to the next child.

They looked at Edmund once.

“And what’s your name?” Mrs. Wickes face leaned closer.

“Edmund,” he dutifully answered.

Mr. Wickes harrumphed behind his wife. “His head is far too large.”

“We could adjust it,” Mrs. Wickes smile twitched from the strain.

Mr. Wickes stared at Edmund with a piercing eye. “Not worth the trouble,” he said as they moved on to the next child.

Inevitably they would find someone that they could agree on, despite obvious displeasure at the deficiencies, and vanish into the city. The day they looked at Edmund, they adopted Leeta. She didn’t come back either.

The Wickes didn’t become truly important to Edmund until much later in his life, during the war.

There was no escaping the facts: Edmund didn’t have the charm for the upper-class, the focus for the working-class, or any interest in anything else, so Mrs. Mapleberry begrudgingly accepted that Edmund would probably remain an orphan all of his life.

And so, Edmund lived his days in the drearily morbid surroundings of the orphanage, dealing with the depressingly energetic Mrs. Mapleberry and avoiding the speedily rotating roster of orphans.

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