Chapter 2
Edmund became a Moulde when he was eight years old, after lunch, on a day not otherwise particularly different from any other day.
Spring was coming to a close and the harsh sunlight of summer was struggling to slip through the giant black cloud that filled the sky. Edmund was sitting on his stiff bed, writing a poem about the holes that riddled the warped window shutters.
Edmund had taken to poetry. When he was seven, he read a book titled The Mechanics and Structure of Verse: a Primer to the Aspiring Poetic by Sir Peeres Ekes. Years later, after he had outgrown its novice lessons — even considering the book’s inconsistencies, overly simplistic structure, condescending view of poetry as an art-form, and multiple outright lies — he still held a soft spot in his heart for the book, considering where it led him.
Edmund had been confused at first; why would anyone write a book about words? Words were what books were made of. Every word had a meaning, and when you put them together you made a sentence. What else was there to say?
Quite a lot, as it turned out. The book was full of numbers and charts categorizing different meters and rhymes. Homophones, synonyms, and metaphors were arranged in ascending and descending hierarchies, alongside superlative connotations and alliterative denotations. Syllables were ranked according to propriety and diphthongs according to effect.
Intrigued, Edmund asked Mrs Mapleberry for a notebook.
He practiced first by writing a poem about his bed. He thought it turned out well, so he tried to write one about himself, but he didn’t know how to finish it. Finally, he wrote one about the rafters that framed the dining hall. He was quite proud of it and it must have shown, because when Mrs. Mapleberry saw him writing, (after asking the child sitting to him where he was) she took the notebook out of his hands and began to read.
She avoided him for a few weeks afterward. Edmund was happy about that, so he kept writing, and in so doing he joined the noble and respectable ranks of the worlds great scientist-poets.
He wrote constantly, filling the slim volume with tiny words about the windows, the tree, the tightly wound clock, the wood weevils and their long noses, and the orphans with their short fingers.
He was writing a poem on the day he was adopted.
To be precise, he was trying to think of a rhyme for shutter, when Mrs. Mapleberry burst into the Lads’ bedroom, slightly out of breath. She panted a moment, glancing about with desperate hope on her face followed by disappointment. As she was about to leave, curiosity got the better of Edmund and he gave a small cough.
Mrs. Mapleberry whirled around with a shriek of surprise “Edmund! There’s someone here to meet you,” the faintest wisp of hope brimmed in her large smile. “She’s a…a very nice old lady. Why don’t you come along and meet her?”
Edmund was too young to be astonished, so he settled instead for assuming he had misheard. He turned back to his notebook, and wrote down a line that ended with the word “mutter.”
“Come along!” Mrs. Mapleberry flapped her long dress in excitement. “She might adopt you! Bring your notebook, she might want to see some of your poetry.” This was most odd; Mrs. Mapleberry was always insistent that he leave his poetry in his room (preferably locked in his trunk) whenever hopeful parents were around, urging him instead to walk around with a ball or toy flute like a pantomime prop.
Sliding off his bed, Edmund followed Mrs. Mapleberry to the cramped room filled with mismatched and threadbare furniture, where prospective parents met the orphans. In the center of the room was a three-legged table that was so short, none of the chairs could fit under it.
Seated across from the door in a thin spindly chair was a thin spindly woman. She was dressed all in black and had a long hooked nose that stuck out over her mouth like a beak. Her eyes were sharp and speckled blue-green like old copper nails. Gnarled talon-like hands rested on the curved handle of a ragged old umbrella and her dress had thick ruffles that spouted out of the neck and wrists. At some point in the past the lace may have been white, but now it was lemon yellow with age.
Odder still; Edmund had never seen an adult as old as this woman. She must have been a grandmother or possibly even a great-grandmother. Great was an easy superlative to describe her; even hunched over like a shriveled bat, she filled the room with her presence.
The woman didn’t move, not a muscle, as Mrs. Mapleberry pushed Edmund towards the closest chair. For a few moments, no one said anything. Then, with a faint quiver in her voice, Mrs. Mapleberry rested her hand on Edmund’s shoulder.
“This is Edmund,” she said, her hand squeezing just a little too hard.
Silence reigned again as nobody moved an inch.
Normally, Edmund loved silence. Now, the same silence provided no comfort. Was he expected to say or do something? In eight years, Edmund had never started a conversation; he’d only ever answered questions, usually with one word. Mrs. Mapleberry hadn’t nudged or prompted him (her elbow was infamous among the orphans as an effective conversation starter) and the woman hadn’t said anything either. Maybe if he didn’t say anything, she’d vanish back into the black smog of Brackenburg and he could vanish back into his poetry. Everything would go back to the way things were supposed to be.
Her eyes were hypnotizing; they were two points of purest black on milky pearls that shimmered and flickered in the tiny room. Edmund couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being stripped down, annotated, and cataloged like an insect.
He shifted his grasp on his notebook. Did she want to read his poetry? Is that why Mrs. Mapleberry asked him to bring it? He didn’t like the idea of sharing with a stranger.
It wasn’t that he was ashamed; he was particularly proud of his third clock poem. He had written it after staring at the clock for two hours, letting the tocking of the pendulum burrow into his brain until it sounded exactly like a heartbeat. Along with that poem, he had four others about the clock, and at least five on the weevils…
That was all he had in his notebook; clocks, weevils, floorboards, and a single sickly tree in an anemic yard. The poetry he had read was about thousands of things that Edmund had never heard of. Trees of all kinds and sunlight filtering though white clouds. Fine wines and smiling friends on the hills of far off France and mysterious Italy. Emotions that the four bodily humours seemed insufficient to describe. Compared to that, everything Edmund had written was so boring.
But this was Edmund’s world. A fence, a tree, a collapsing house, and Mrs. Mapleberry. He knew every wooden slat and plaster crack. He knew every creak and every groan. He had mined every scrap of sensation out of the very air, and the only oasis of interest were the few books he could steal from the fireplace’s purifying flames.
Edmund blinked in surprise as he realized how suddenly and desperately he wanted to leave the orphanage.
With a certainty that he had never felt in his admittedly short life, he opened his notebook to the tenth page and pushed it forwards on the low wobbling tabletop.
The woman moved then, her eyes darting down like a hawk’s to stare at the notebook. Her pupils slowly rolled about in their sunken sockets, following the scribbled lines of his handwriting. Edmund’s heart beat faster. She stared for what felt like hours before her eyes shot up to Edmund’s again.
“You wrote this?” She said, her voice sharp like brittle twigs. Her tone had not made it clear if this was a good or a bad thing.
Edmund’s brain began to whir, sorting through every possible answer he could give, searching for the best available word…
“Yes,” Edmund said.
The woman’s mouth twisted further into a frown. “How old are you?”
“Eight.” This was more like it. He knew what was expected of him, now; he was supposed to answer questions.
“And are you neat? Tidy? Can you do what you’re told?”
The old woman’s meter and rhythm of speech clicked into Edmund’s mind as Mrs. Mapleberry gave a little sigh and placed her thick hand over her breast in a magnanimous gesture of matronly pride.
“Oh, Edmund is one of the cleanest lads I — "
“Be silent, you old watermelon, I’m asking the boy,” the woman snapped. Mrs. Mapleberry gasped and fell silent, giving Edmund’s brain the time to sort through his response.
“Yes,” he said.
The impact of single words on historical events is still, sadly, an under-explored avenue of academic study. There are many incidents that would have gone quite differently had a single word been replaced; a “yes” turned to “no,” or “Russia” turned to “France.” Even a haphazard “left” instead of “right” could have resulted in Duke Ferdinand Gelducky discovering the Azores islands seven years early, instead of his ill-fated expedition resulting in his running aground in Greenland,
This is to say, the impact on Edmund — and indeed the entire British Empire — of the following single word cannot be clearly or reliably quantified.
“Expound,” The woman shot back.
The gears of Edmund’s brain stuck fast. Expound? She wanted him to explain? How? In his life, he’d never needed to fit more than three words together…
She expected him to expound, so he had to try. There was a suitable pause as he examined every word in his mind, assembling an appropriate sentence. Thankfully, Edmund was a poet. …Iambic pentameter is properly British…I’ve never heard anyone speaking in rhyme…
“I don’t have much, so I can’t make a mess,” he said at last. “I think I’ve always done what I’ve been asked, but no one ever has, of me, asked much.”
“Hm,” the woman snorted. “Do you know anything about people? Politics? What’s your opinion on the labor situation in South Dunkin?”
South Dunkin? Politics? Edmund paused, struggling to translate exactly what this woman was asking him, and then again to translate his own thoughts into words. Could he get away with a soft ending? And she had stressed both South and the first syllable in Dunkin…he’d have to risk unstressing one…
“I do not know of any situation,” Edmund said. “I even don’t know where South Dunkin is.”
“It’s to the south,” the woman muttered, icily.
“I don’t know much about what lies to the south,” Edmund had only recently learned which direction south was, after his experiment with some string and an old rock he had found “but a field and the road that leads to Brackenburg.” Edmund swallowed, hoping she hadn’t been offended by his use of two neighboring anapests.
“You don’t know much of anything, do you.” the woman said.
What was the proper reply to that? Her words were in the form of a question, but her tone made it clear she was making a statement. But the statement was wrong; Edmund knew quite a lot, just not what she was asking. After quick consideration, Edmund risked keeping silent.
The woman sighed, or perhaps it was a cough. “Do you get into fights at all?”
Edmund clicked more words into place. Perhaps she was looking for trochees? “Children don’t pay much attention to me.” Edmund felt a small thrill as he succumbed to poetic whimsy, ending with an Iamb. He was starting to enjoy Conversation. He didn’t know exactly what they were talking about, but there was clear satisfaction with translating words and crafting sentences so quickly.
“Just how long are you planning on living, boy?” (It should be noted that this would have been an odd question to ask at the time, as it was years before this question became commonplace of children, after the Great War)
Edmund considered for a moment. Tetrameter seemed appropriate: “As long as I can manage it,” he said.
“Hmph.” The old woman shifted. “Show me your teeth.”
Edmund opened his mouth, as the woman’s head bobbed up and down, her eyes searching. Nodding once, she gave a sharp sniff slowly fell back in her chair. Somehow she managed to recline and yet still hunch forward like a vulture.
“Fine,” the woman nodded after a long pause. “Get its things, I’ll take it at once.”
“How marvelous!” Mrs. Mapleberry clapped her hands with glee. “I’m so glad! I’ll get the papers. Edmund! Go get your things! Quickly now!” And with that, she was bounding through the door at an incredible speed.
Edmund blinked. What things did he have to get? Hoping he’d find something, he slipped off his chair and headed for the doorway.
“Boy,” the woman croaked. “You forgot this.”
Edmund turned to see his notebook gripped in her spindly hands. He returned to the table to take it, but when he pulled, the woman’s grip was like steel. “Do we not say thank you?” she asked, her voice low and dangerous.
Edmund swallowed as Mrs. Mapleberry propriety lessons rescued him at the last moment. “Thank you very much, Madam,” he said, clearly and crisply.
“Matron,” the woman corrected.
Edmund nodded, made a mental note as he left the room with his notebook clutched to his chest.
He had only gone two steps when he was stopped by Mrs. Mapleberry gripping his shoulders like a vice.
“Do you know who that is?” She asked, her voice quivering with terrified glee. “That is the Matron of Moulde Hall! She’s the head of one of the Nine Founding Families! And to think, she’s adopting from my orphanage! You’re going to be a gentleman, Edmund! More than that; a gentleman’s gentleman!”
Edmund straightened his shirt as Mrs. Mapleberry ran off towards her office as fast as her legs could carry her. A gentleman’s gentleman? Edmund had no idea what that meant, but after thinking about it for a moment, he realized it only meant one thing to him: he was going to go outside the fence.
He returned to the Meeting room before Mrs. Mapleberry; he had no real “things” to pack. He had his three notebooks filled with poetry and science, and The Symphonic Physicium, a book about something called “chemistry.” He knew the book wasn’t his, but he hadn’t finished it yet, and if he didn’t bring it with him Mrs. Mapleberry would have simply thrown it into the fire.
He only waited for a few minutes outside the Meeting Room before Mrs. Mapleberry’s rotund form rolled up next to him, her face red and puffing, her hands gripping a small stack of papers and a pen and inkwell. She paused only a second to catch her breath before nudging Edmund inside with her shoe.
“Here we are, all ready to sign!” Mrs. Mapleberry said, her face a rictus of manic delight. “Just sign here and Edmund is all yours, forever!”
Edmund was positive the woman hadn’t moved an inch since he left the room. If he hadn’t read The Importance of Air by Lady Pern Peridotard, he might have believed she hadn’t even breathed. Her eyes followed Mrs. Mapleberry as she hobbled over to the table and deposited a sheet of paper and a thick pen, (accepted theory is that it was a Hartford Monotype, .r5 Ebony) on the table.
After the woman had brushed the pen across the paper, spreading a spidery signature along the bottom, she picked herself up out of her chair. “Get moving, boy. The carriage is outside.”
“I beg your pardon,” Mrs. Mapleberry bobbed up and down like a buoy on the ocean. “there is still the matter of — ahem — of payment?”
The woman’s turn was glacial. “Payment?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Mapleberry’s pleasant demeanor vanished. “The current rate is a pound per pound, and Edmund weighs fifty pounds at least. I’ll thank you to provide appropriate payment.”
With aching slowness, the tip of the woman’s umbrella rose from the ground until it was pointing like a sword directly at Mrs. Mapleberry’s nose. For an agonizing moment, no one spoke or moved.
“Twenty generations ago,” the woman hissed, “Patron Alphert Moulde of Moulde Hall built this house for his daughter as a wedding gift. It was passed down through my family until Patron Plinkerton donated it to the city of Brackenburg at the turn of the last century, for use as deemed required by the Mayor. You may consider one-hundred-and-ninety years of free rent appropriate payment.”
Mrs. Mapleberry had turned a stark white, her lips clamped shut. The umbrella swished through the air to poke Edmund in the side. “Move,” the woman’s voice snapped as she herded him back out of the room, down the hall, and through the front doors of the orphanage.
Edmund paused for only a moment as he glanced down the road towards Brackenburg, indifferent to the tall dark coach emblazoned with the Moulde family crest: a large red bird, its wings spread wide, its talons sharp and grasping.
The driver — a skeletal man with eyes that glittered like distant stars in the shadows of a tall top hat — helped Edmund into the plume-lined carriage after Edmund’s new mother. The inside of the carriage was no less black than the outside, dotted with silver rivets and brass trim. After a pause while the driver reclaimed his seat, the muffled sound of hooves on the dirt path filtered through the strange black wood, and the carriage began to move.
Edmund stared out of the window, watching the orphanage recede. He was leaving the orphanage. He was leaving the old clock, the rotten bookshelf, and the single sad tree in the yard. Farewell to the weevils, the bare wooden rafters, the plaster in his food, and Mrs. Mapleberry. He was going to see something new.
His whole life had been the orphanage, hemmed in by a thin wooden fence; he’d never been interested in the outside world — what could be there for him? — but now, in the form of an ancient white-haired woman, there was suddenly so much potential!
Wise readers will recognize the youthful and frankly naive sentiment common among eight-year-olds; that potential largely consists of positive things.
It speaks much of Edmund’s character, even at this young age, that this naivety lasted only for an hour and a half. To be precise, the same amount of time it took for Edmund to travel in Matron’s carriage from Mrs. Mapleberry’s Home for Wayward Lads and Ladies on Downs Hill and all the way through Brackenburg to Moulde Hall on the top of Haggard Hill in the Squatling district.
The ride to Moulde Hall was long, quiet, and breath-taking. As a scientist, poet, and — he later learned — Idealistic Empiricist, it was Edmund’s considered opinion that he needed to see as much of the world outside the orphanage as he possibly could. As such, he couldn’t bear to turn away.
Lady Pennington Gedge once famously wrote that “we all see the world through different windows” (1852). That is; the world looks different to different people largely due to differences in socio-economic status that affect the cleanliness, surrounding decoration, and even presence of windows in our homes.
To Edmund, the new world looked dark. Through neglect, thrift, or preference, the Moulde carriage had not been cleaned in years, resulting in a thick crust of black soot that fogged the windows like an industrial frost. Black spidery tendrils reached towards the dusty center of the glass, obscuring Edmund’s view so that he could barely see anything at all.
At first the scenery was nothing but countryside, Downs Hill having thus far escaped the sprawl of Brackenburg’s industry, but before long the sound of the horse-hooves shifted as the road became graveled. The window grew darker as they rode ever deeper under the omnipresent black cloud of soot, ash, and industrial superiority that completely covered the sun. As they entered Brackenburg proper, the sound of horseshoes clopping on cobblestones echoed in the carriage like a clock. It was the first piece of Brackenburg Edmund experienced.
At first, through the darkened window, all Edmund could see of Brackenburg was indistinct shapes and shadows brushed by the faint glow of the gently pulsing yellow gaslights that lined the streets. He saw dark triangles and thin rectangles. Squishy ovals floated through the darkness, waving ropy tendrils at angular ripples in the distance. Edmund had never seen an aquarium before, but he was positive the experience could not be dissimilar.
As his eyes grew accustomed, he began to note minor details. Some shapes wore tall hats, like the upper-class fathers who came to the orphanage. Others were wide-brimmed, like the mothers. Caps dotted here and there, hovering over the red glow of cigarettes and leaning against walls — yes, they must have been walls — while walking canes cut through the air like swords.
The buildings of Brackenburg rose around the pedestrians like brick topiary. Squat black buildings crouched like bitter gargoyles, dour and imposing. Dim yellow light filtered through milky windows, small beacons of warmth in the middle of a shadowed city.
Edmund wanted to stop and watch. He wanted to study the twisted iron chimneys poked up like dark toadstools from black slate roofs, dribbling smoke into the sky. He wanted to watch the shadowy figures move like weevils along the streets. He wanted to explore every cobblestone and learn every notch in the bricks.
But the carriage didn’t stop. The buildings began to grow taller and thinner. Doors became slim, to mirror their inhabitants stomachs and wallets. Swinging cranes stretched out like gallows from the tops of houses, and here and there a feeble tree peeked through rough stone sidewalks.
Edmund looked again, and again, and every time the view changed. New buildings, new people, new streets. Everything was changing, and Edmund didn’t know when it would stop.
“When would the carriage stop” soon shifted to a multitude of other questions that he had heretofore neglected to ask. Where was he going to live? Would there be other children there? What would this old woman be like as a mother? Was she married? Would there be books to read? What would having a family be like?
Mrs. Mapleberry had once told him: families were happy arrangements between parents who fed the children and children who kept quiet and stayed out of sight. Edmund had been skeptical, of course, since he had also heard the stories told by the children who came back, but Mrs. Mapleberry vouched that these were rare exceptions. Of course, this old woman was nothing like the parents he had seen walk into the orphanage before; perhaps she was an exception too?
Edmund was starting to realize that what he had seen as a world full of potential was also a world full of uncertainty. Edmund had never felt uncertain before; the life of an orphan in Mrs. Mapleberry’s Home for Wayward Lads and Ladies was one of predictability. Everyone knew what was expected and behaved accordingly if they didn’t want to be punished. Edmund never knew what these punishments were, but he knew they were designed to make children do what they were told, and if he was going to end up doing what he was told, anyway, he had always opted to avoid the punishment.
Eventually, Edmund sat back from the window; what was happening outside the carriage, while fascinating, was nothing compared to what was happening inside Edmund.
What was happening inside Edmund?
He grabbed The Symphonic Physicium from the seat next to him and flipped to Chapter Twelve, which comprised seven pages of the author’s theory of chemistry’s application to the human body. It was no A Guyde to The Humours of the Physicale Bodye, by Sir Knickle Prickleston, Ph.D, MDA, RMD, ZMA, Ph.A, AMAZ, but it was all he had.
There it was, in black in white. The human body is primarily a instrument of skin, filled with organs of multiple purpose and function, lubricated by four basic Humours; blood, phlem, and two colors of bile. It is these Humours that, when operating in concert, cause the emotions and temperaments that provide structure and character to the men and women of our fine Britannian society. Blood provides sanguinity, enthusiasm, and joy; Yellow bile provides choler, anger, and independence; Black bile gives melancholy, sorrow, and reservation; and phlegm makes one, appropriately, phlegmatic, calm, and stoic. Any other emotions have yet to be observed through scientific study, and are therefore the purview of poets, romancers, and other madmen without proper respect for the scientific process.
However, can the miraculous branch of science known as Chemistry affect these Humours in —
Edmund stopped reading, though his eyes reflexively continued to follow the words. He wasn’t feeling angry. He wasn’t feeling joy, either. Calm and stoic were obviously not right, and sorrow? What did he have to feel sad about?
No, he was feeling something beyond the scope of the physical humours. Was he sick? Sir Prickleston had been very clear that any feelings beyond those explained by the Humours were likely symptoms of powerful illness. Was Edmund about to die? He didn’t feel like he was going to die. Then again, he’d never died before, so he didn’t know what it would feel like.
Wouldn’t that be a wonderful experiment? If only he could find a way to die and come back to life again, so he could analyze and itemize the process of death. He had read a few books on the subject and death certainly seemed to be a fertile venue for scientific discovery. He’d have to start small, with animals like birds or maybe a mouse. Then he could work his way up to humans, and finally himself. Maybe there would be a laboratory at his new home that he could use to experiment on his own?
Edmund blinked as the book was pressed down into his lap by the tip of an umbrella.
“Are you trying to impress me?” Matron asked. “I should warn you, I do not impress easily and take a dim view to children who think they can deceive me by pretending to read a book.”
Edmund hadn’t even thought of trying to impress Matron; she had adopted him already.
“I can read most of it,” He carefully chose his words, sliding them into place. “Chapter twenty is a bit hard. Some of the words can be confusing.”
“Can they?” She muttered. “How old are you?”
“Eight,” Edmund repeated.
“I suppose you’d like to read something a bit easier? A book more suited to your age, perhaps? A storybook about dragons and knights?”
“No, I’ll work it out.” He shrugged. “I don’t like storybooks, because they never end properly.”
“And what, according to you, would be a proper ending?”
As Edmund was uneducated in Literary Theory beyond a few simple primers, he had to think for a few moments before he gave his answer, which flew in the face of accepted standards of the time.
“The hero need to die at the end. Otherwise, it’s not really an ending — it’s just where the storyteller got tired of telling the story.”
Matron stared at him, her eyes sharp and clear. Edmund stared back.
She was his mother.
She wasn’t what Edmund expected. Why had she adopted him? Perhaps she had waited too long to have children of her own? Maybe she never married, which he thought had been prerequisite to having a child, though Mrs. Mapleberry had blushed when he had asked if this was true.
She was obviously wealthy; her clothing didn’t look new but it was shamelessly ruffled, and that was something. Perhaps she was nobility? Maybe Edmund was going to be a Viceroy, or even a Duke. There would be lots of interesting things to read if he was a Duke. Duke Edmund…Edmund…
There was an important piece to the whole situation that was missing.
“What is my name?”
The woman’s eyebrows shot upwards so fast Edmund wasn’t sure he had seen them move at all. “Don’t you know your own name, boy?” she asked, sharply.
“My first name is Edmund,” he said. “I didn’t have a surname. Now I do, and I don’t know what it is.”
The woman’s mouth opened, and then closed. She sighed, waving a hand dismissively.
“My name is Matron Mander Moulde. You can call yourself whatever you wish, I imagine.”
Very well, thought Edmund, in that case, my name will be Edmund Moulde. He pressed his face back to the window, not certain yet whether he liked the name or not.