Post by Lorpius Prime on Feb 1, 2008 1:18:53 GMT -5
Samuel Reynard took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and the bridge of his nose. The gesture did nothing to make him feel better nor did it cause any more words to appear on the gray sheet of paper held in the feed of his typewriter.
The sun was getting low in the sky outside his office window. Reluctantly, Sam replaced the glasses on his nose and began tapping at the mechanical keys. It was the same column he’d been writing for the past week, supporting the editors of the Jutland Post and berating Westminster for its equivocating response. But his heart just wasn’t in it tonight, and the words weren’t flowing. It would not be one of his better columns, but Sam was bitterly certain that it would soon be forgotten while his reputation would go untarnished.
Someone rapped on his office door before opening it. Sam looked up from his dull prose to see a waspish woman enter the room. Her black hair was tied back in a neat bun and she carried a clipboard topped by a stack of papers in the crook of her arm. Sam leaned away from his work.
“Hi Sam.”
“Shouldn’t you go home, Jeanine?”
“I set out the mail and any memos for Barry on his desk for the morning,” she said, fingering through the papers she held. “But this one is for you.” The secretary held up the brown envelope of a telegram.
Sam’s eyebrows shot up, “Me?” He sat up, suddenly serious, “I haven’t been using the paper’s lines for personal correspondence, Jeanine.”
She held his eyes in a hard gaze as she crossed the room and dropped the envelope on his desk. It took Sam a while to realize that she wasn’t going to leave until he’d opened it, or at least looked at it. Sam picked the envelope up and tensed as he broke off the gaze to look down.
And drew in a great deep, noisy breath.
“Yeah,” Jeanine said. And then she left, leaving Sam alone with the amazing bit of paper.
His eyes flitted to column still waiting in the typewriter.
The last week at The Times’ Europe Desk had been rotten. After the deaths of two senior members of the writing staff and the resultant collapse of a major project, the whole team had been working under a cloud. Now…
“Oh, stuff it,” Sam muttered, and he tore the unfinished, unpolished piece of work out of the machine to send to the printers.
The sun had set by the time Sam made it home to his block of flats. It had been an unusually clear day for London, but the pale white sickle of the moon was the only thing visible in the night sky, and that only through the choking coal-smog haze which filled the air. Sam remembered a trip to Virginia when he’d spent hours doing nothing but staring at the heavens. It was a sight not possible anywhere in England these days, and he had been completely absorbed by the wonder of it.
He passed into the narrow hall and stairwell leading to his flat. The interior of the building was well-kept, but no amount of care could hide the inevitable wear and grime of age. The floor creaked beneath his feet as Sam turned his key into the locks guarding the entrance of his home.
Inside, the flat was lit by the harsh yellow light of strategically placed gas lamps. Sam hung his hat and overcoat on the rack just beyond the door. Smiling, he turned around to glance about the flat, though not much was visible from the tiny entrance hall.
“I’m home,” he called out, “and I’ve got good news!”
Another voice came drifting back from one of the rooms to his right: “…oooowwwwww!”
Sam frowned and made his way toward the noise. As he turned the corner into the kitchen, he bumped into a short woman with disheveled red hair. In one hand she held a box of long matches, and she was rubbing the back of her head with the other.
“Ah! Sorry Edith,” Sam put his hands on the woman’s shoulders to steady her as she threatened to fall over, “are you all right?”
Edith groaned in obvious frustration and shook the box of matches at him, “I will never learn to use these gas stoves, Sam! Never! If it’s not one bloody thing going wrong, it’s another! Every single time!” She took the hand away from her head, crossed her arms, and looked sharply at Sam, “When are we just going to hire a real cook?”
Sam chuckled, he hoped convincingly, “But then what would you do for fun all day, Edith?” She did not soften the look she was giving him and Sam patted her shoulder and tried another diversion, “Well, let’s see what you’ve done this time.” He moved to walk past her into the kitchen.
He could see her putting her fists to her hips out of the corner of his eye, “I’ve done everything exactly as you show me, and it still doesn’t light! I think they shut off our gas.”
“They haven’t shut off our gas,” Sam responded absentmindedly, as he paused to look at the delinquent oven. To any normal person, it might have looked like a typical gas oven and stove appliance, but Sam knew that to Edith it looked like one more of the many everyday demons which were determined to ruin her life.
Sam spent a few minutes fiddling with the machine. They had bought it along with the flat from the previous owners, an elderly couple who had saved up enough money to move to a beach house in Havana. The oven had seemed to be in good working order at the time. Actually Sam thought it still was, and the problem lay more with his and Edith’s general mechanical ineptitude. His efforts came to no avail; it really did seem as if no gas was making it to the oven at all…
He took a step backward, “Oh.”
Edith stepped around to his left, “What is it?”
“I think this is my fault,” Sam took the heavy appliance by both hands to drag it away from the wall. “I closed the gas feed when we were working on this two days ago, and I think I forgot to reopen it.”
He reached behind the oven and twisted the valve on the little pipe which ran out of the wall and into the feed hose. Sure enough, it had been shut; Sam could hear gas hissing from the main into the hose.
Rubbing his hands together, Sam turned to give Edith a lopsided smile. She rolled her eyes at him.
“Cold sandwiches tonight, Sam.” She brushed passed him to head into their small parlor.
Sam sighed and followed after her. Edith dropped onto their small sofa and practically melted into the cushions, her head tilted back to stare up at the ceiling. Sam took an armchair across from her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She bobbed her head in a nod. “Yeah… just a frustrating day.”
Sam nodded back in silent agreement and leaned forward to rest his chin on his hands and his elbows on his knees. They passed a few minutes like that, not saying anything.
Sam had met Edith while she was studying at King’s College in London and he had just started a job as a junior staff editor for The Economist. She had been pursing dreams of becoming a writer herself, and Sam had found himself captivated by the stories she shared. Or perhaps he had been more captivated by Edith herself. Either way, their mutual interests had helped produce a fast friendship, and then an even deeper relationship. Sam had even helped her get published in a few literary magazines around London where he had contacts.
The end result of it all had been that, after Edith’s graduation, Sam found himself asking her to marry him. Edith had been delighted, her parents less so. They had gone back to her family’s plantation in Virginia for the wedding. During Sam’s stay there, Dale Washington had essentially told Sam that he hadn’t believed his daughter’s education in England to be anything more than a young girl’s flight of fancy. He and his wife had expected Edith to eventually return to marry one of their neighbors’ sons and inherit the family land and small cigar-rolling factory. They had been rather horrified to learn that not only did she intend to marry some plain English writer with no money or family of any station, but she also planned to move back and live in London permanently. Sam had thought his new father-in-law was going to have a stroke when Edith told him.
The worst of it was, Sam sometimes wondered if Dale had been right. Edith wasn’t adjusting well to London life. Nor, he admitted, to his salary, even now that he was reasonably well-known columnist at The Times. He just couldn’t support the kind of lifestyle she was used to, especially since her own career wasn’t blossoming the same way his own had.
Before Sam’s heart could sink any lower towards his stomach, his wife rolled her head over onto her shoulder to look at him.
“Didn’t you say you had news, Sam?”
Sam blinked and sat up. He’d managed to forget. Edith must have sensed his astonishment, because she sat up too. Sam wondered if he’d lost all sense of proportion or if he really should be that worried about his family.
“Sam?”
“I—” he shook his head, “I got a telegram, Edith. I got a telegram at the office from Jay Thomson Blake.”
“The, um,” she screwed up her eyes, “he’s the correspondent who was working with you—Oh my God, Sam, he’s the one who was killed in the crash! John Mills and Jay Thomson Blake, your partners on the project, right?”
Sam got up out of the chair and turned around, away from Edith. His hands were shaking.
“Yeah.”
“So, you’re saying he didn’t die in the crash?”
He turned back around, “Well, the letter says he didn’t die in the crash.”
Edith looked at him for a while, as if waiting for him to go on. Finally, “Well, that’s wonderful isn’t it? Lord knows you haven’t been yourself this past week.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” she snorted. “Sam, what’s wrong?”
Sam licked his lips and dropped back into the chair. He considered telling her, but in the end decided just to fish the folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket and hand it over.
Edith picked up her reading glasses from the end table beside the couch and put them on before unfolding the letter. Sam watched her eyes bulge as she read.
“Is he serious?” she looked at him over the tops of the lenses.
Sam shrugged, “I don’t know.”
“Sam!”
He shrugged again, helplessly. “I don’t know, Edith. You’re reading the same letter I did.”
“Sam, he says someone tried to kill him! That someone might have killed John too! Sam, if that’s true—”
A third shrug, “I don’t know what to tell you, Edith. I do find it very hard to believe that someone could have wanted to kill either John or Jay Thomson, but…”
“Yeah, but…” she bit her lip nervously, “Sam, what are you going to do?”
Sam looked at her for a long time before answering, taking in the concern in her eyes and wishing he knew something to say to soothe those fears. “Well, I thought I would start by going to Exeter tomorrow. Give that letter to his family.”
Edith blinked, “What? Sam, send them a telegram.”
He shook his head, “I thought about that. But, Edith, you remember what Barry did to them. Those people have had enough shocks delivered anonymously. Delivering that letter in person is the least I can do for them, and for Jay Thomson.”
“But, if what he says is true Sam…” her expression was growing even more troubled.
He nodded, “I know, I’ll think about it. And I won’t tell anyone what I’m doing, either. I’ll just take the day off tomorrow. Barry owes me that much and he damn well knows it. Er, pardon.” Sam forced a confident smile to cover his anger.
“I’m going to write my father.”
Sam flinched. “No, Edith—”
“He knows people, Sam. Maybe he can help.”
“What kind of people, Edith? I don’t really think—”
“I don’t know, but it can’t really hurt, can it Sam? And at any rate he’s more likely to know a way out of this than you are. I don’t care how good you are at your job, Sam, this isn’t your job.”
Sam took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and let it out slowly. She was right, he told himself. He was just a writer, an opinion columnist, not a detective or a spy or whatever it was that this sort of situation called for. Personally, he suspected that it mostly just called for a cool, sensible head. Unfortunately, the cool and sensible thing to do was still probably to proceed cautiously. And as much as he disliked his father-in-law, and especially disliked the thought of asking him for help, Sam had to admit that the man might have some useful advice; even if that advice was simply to recommend a good lawyer.
“All right, you’re right, it irks me but you’re right,” he grinned. “Write your father. I’m not going to worry about it for right now.” He stood up and took the letter back from his wife.
“You’re really going to go give this to his family yourself? In, where was it, Exeter?” She looked like she wanted to plead with him to stay.
But Sam nodded again, “Yeah. I still feel dirty about the whole business with the crash. I guess I’d sort of like to make up for that, a little. I suppose that’s selfish.”
Edith stood up and hugged him around the neck, “You’re a good man, Samuel Reynard. Just don’t leave me here too long, or I swear I’ll either starve or burn down the building. You’ll be back tomorrow night?”
“Or early the next day,” Sam promised. He hugged her back.
“Well then,” Edith said, letting Sam go and grinning up at him, “let’s go see about those cold sandwiches I promised you.”
After eating, Sam wondered why anyone thought they needed to bother with ovens at all.
Book One, Chapter:
-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-
-22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36-37-38-39-40-41-42-
-43-44-45-46-47-48-49-50-51-52-53-54-55-56-57-58-59-60-61-62-
Appendix: -A-B-C-
The sun was getting low in the sky outside his office window. Reluctantly, Sam replaced the glasses on his nose and began tapping at the mechanical keys. It was the same column he’d been writing for the past week, supporting the editors of the Jutland Post and berating Westminster for its equivocating response. But his heart just wasn’t in it tonight, and the words weren’t flowing. It would not be one of his better columns, but Sam was bitterly certain that it would soon be forgotten while his reputation would go untarnished.
Someone rapped on his office door before opening it. Sam looked up from his dull prose to see a waspish woman enter the room. Her black hair was tied back in a neat bun and she carried a clipboard topped by a stack of papers in the crook of her arm. Sam leaned away from his work.
“Hi Sam.”
“Shouldn’t you go home, Jeanine?”
“I set out the mail and any memos for Barry on his desk for the morning,” she said, fingering through the papers she held. “But this one is for you.” The secretary held up the brown envelope of a telegram.
Sam’s eyebrows shot up, “Me?” He sat up, suddenly serious, “I haven’t been using the paper’s lines for personal correspondence, Jeanine.”
She held his eyes in a hard gaze as she crossed the room and dropped the envelope on his desk. It took Sam a while to realize that she wasn’t going to leave until he’d opened it, or at least looked at it. Sam picked the envelope up and tensed as he broke off the gaze to look down.
And drew in a great deep, noisy breath.
“Yeah,” Jeanine said. And then she left, leaving Sam alone with the amazing bit of paper.
His eyes flitted to column still waiting in the typewriter.
The last week at The Times’ Europe Desk had been rotten. After the deaths of two senior members of the writing staff and the resultant collapse of a major project, the whole team had been working under a cloud. Now…
“Oh, stuff it,” Sam muttered, and he tore the unfinished, unpolished piece of work out of the machine to send to the printers.
* * *
The sun had set by the time Sam made it home to his block of flats. It had been an unusually clear day for London, but the pale white sickle of the moon was the only thing visible in the night sky, and that only through the choking coal-smog haze which filled the air. Sam remembered a trip to Virginia when he’d spent hours doing nothing but staring at the heavens. It was a sight not possible anywhere in England these days, and he had been completely absorbed by the wonder of it.
He passed into the narrow hall and stairwell leading to his flat. The interior of the building was well-kept, but no amount of care could hide the inevitable wear and grime of age. The floor creaked beneath his feet as Sam turned his key into the locks guarding the entrance of his home.
Inside, the flat was lit by the harsh yellow light of strategically placed gas lamps. Sam hung his hat and overcoat on the rack just beyond the door. Smiling, he turned around to glance about the flat, though not much was visible from the tiny entrance hall.
“I’m home,” he called out, “and I’ve got good news!”
Another voice came drifting back from one of the rooms to his right: “…oooowwwwww!”
Sam frowned and made his way toward the noise. As he turned the corner into the kitchen, he bumped into a short woman with disheveled red hair. In one hand she held a box of long matches, and she was rubbing the back of her head with the other.
“Ah! Sorry Edith,” Sam put his hands on the woman’s shoulders to steady her as she threatened to fall over, “are you all right?”
Edith groaned in obvious frustration and shook the box of matches at him, “I will never learn to use these gas stoves, Sam! Never! If it’s not one bloody thing going wrong, it’s another! Every single time!” She took the hand away from her head, crossed her arms, and looked sharply at Sam, “When are we just going to hire a real cook?”
Sam chuckled, he hoped convincingly, “But then what would you do for fun all day, Edith?” She did not soften the look she was giving him and Sam patted her shoulder and tried another diversion, “Well, let’s see what you’ve done this time.” He moved to walk past her into the kitchen.
He could see her putting her fists to her hips out of the corner of his eye, “I’ve done everything exactly as you show me, and it still doesn’t light! I think they shut off our gas.”
“They haven’t shut off our gas,” Sam responded absentmindedly, as he paused to look at the delinquent oven. To any normal person, it might have looked like a typical gas oven and stove appliance, but Sam knew that to Edith it looked like one more of the many everyday demons which were determined to ruin her life.
Sam spent a few minutes fiddling with the machine. They had bought it along with the flat from the previous owners, an elderly couple who had saved up enough money to move to a beach house in Havana. The oven had seemed to be in good working order at the time. Actually Sam thought it still was, and the problem lay more with his and Edith’s general mechanical ineptitude. His efforts came to no avail; it really did seem as if no gas was making it to the oven at all…
He took a step backward, “Oh.”
Edith stepped around to his left, “What is it?”
“I think this is my fault,” Sam took the heavy appliance by both hands to drag it away from the wall. “I closed the gas feed when we were working on this two days ago, and I think I forgot to reopen it.”
He reached behind the oven and twisted the valve on the little pipe which ran out of the wall and into the feed hose. Sure enough, it had been shut; Sam could hear gas hissing from the main into the hose.
Rubbing his hands together, Sam turned to give Edith a lopsided smile. She rolled her eyes at him.
“Cold sandwiches tonight, Sam.” She brushed passed him to head into their small parlor.
Sam sighed and followed after her. Edith dropped onto their small sofa and practically melted into the cushions, her head tilted back to stare up at the ceiling. Sam took an armchair across from her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She bobbed her head in a nod. “Yeah… just a frustrating day.”
Sam nodded back in silent agreement and leaned forward to rest his chin on his hands and his elbows on his knees. They passed a few minutes like that, not saying anything.
Sam had met Edith while she was studying at King’s College in London and he had just started a job as a junior staff editor for The Economist. She had been pursing dreams of becoming a writer herself, and Sam had found himself captivated by the stories she shared. Or perhaps he had been more captivated by Edith herself. Either way, their mutual interests had helped produce a fast friendship, and then an even deeper relationship. Sam had even helped her get published in a few literary magazines around London where he had contacts.
The end result of it all had been that, after Edith’s graduation, Sam found himself asking her to marry him. Edith had been delighted, her parents less so. They had gone back to her family’s plantation in Virginia for the wedding. During Sam’s stay there, Dale Washington had essentially told Sam that he hadn’t believed his daughter’s education in England to be anything more than a young girl’s flight of fancy. He and his wife had expected Edith to eventually return to marry one of their neighbors’ sons and inherit the family land and small cigar-rolling factory. They had been rather horrified to learn that not only did she intend to marry some plain English writer with no money or family of any station, but she also planned to move back and live in London permanently. Sam had thought his new father-in-law was going to have a stroke when Edith told him.
The worst of it was, Sam sometimes wondered if Dale had been right. Edith wasn’t adjusting well to London life. Nor, he admitted, to his salary, even now that he was reasonably well-known columnist at The Times. He just couldn’t support the kind of lifestyle she was used to, especially since her own career wasn’t blossoming the same way his own had.
Before Sam’s heart could sink any lower towards his stomach, his wife rolled her head over onto her shoulder to look at him.
“Didn’t you say you had news, Sam?”
Sam blinked and sat up. He’d managed to forget. Edith must have sensed his astonishment, because she sat up too. Sam wondered if he’d lost all sense of proportion or if he really should be that worried about his family.
“Sam?”
“I—” he shook his head, “I got a telegram, Edith. I got a telegram at the office from Jay Thomson Blake.”
“The, um,” she screwed up her eyes, “he’s the correspondent who was working with you—Oh my God, Sam, he’s the one who was killed in the crash! John Mills and Jay Thomson Blake, your partners on the project, right?”
Sam got up out of the chair and turned around, away from Edith. His hands were shaking.
“Yeah.”
“So, you’re saying he didn’t die in the crash?”
He turned back around, “Well, the letter says he didn’t die in the crash.”
Edith looked at him for a while, as if waiting for him to go on. Finally, “Well, that’s wonderful isn’t it? Lord knows you haven’t been yourself this past week.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” she snorted. “Sam, what’s wrong?”
Sam licked his lips and dropped back into the chair. He considered telling her, but in the end decided just to fish the folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket and hand it over.
Edith picked up her reading glasses from the end table beside the couch and put them on before unfolding the letter. Sam watched her eyes bulge as she read.
“Is he serious?” she looked at him over the tops of the lenses.
Sam shrugged, “I don’t know.”
“Sam!”
He shrugged again, helplessly. “I don’t know, Edith. You’re reading the same letter I did.”
“Sam, he says someone tried to kill him! That someone might have killed John too! Sam, if that’s true—”
A third shrug, “I don’t know what to tell you, Edith. I do find it very hard to believe that someone could have wanted to kill either John or Jay Thomson, but…”
“Yeah, but…” she bit her lip nervously, “Sam, what are you going to do?”
Sam looked at her for a long time before answering, taking in the concern in her eyes and wishing he knew something to say to soothe those fears. “Well, I thought I would start by going to Exeter tomorrow. Give that letter to his family.”
Edith blinked, “What? Sam, send them a telegram.”
He shook his head, “I thought about that. But, Edith, you remember what Barry did to them. Those people have had enough shocks delivered anonymously. Delivering that letter in person is the least I can do for them, and for Jay Thomson.”
“But, if what he says is true Sam…” her expression was growing even more troubled.
He nodded, “I know, I’ll think about it. And I won’t tell anyone what I’m doing, either. I’ll just take the day off tomorrow. Barry owes me that much and he damn well knows it. Er, pardon.” Sam forced a confident smile to cover his anger.
“I’m going to write my father.”
Sam flinched. “No, Edith—”
“He knows people, Sam. Maybe he can help.”
“What kind of people, Edith? I don’t really think—”
“I don’t know, but it can’t really hurt, can it Sam? And at any rate he’s more likely to know a way out of this than you are. I don’t care how good you are at your job, Sam, this isn’t your job.”
Sam took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and let it out slowly. She was right, he told himself. He was just a writer, an opinion columnist, not a detective or a spy or whatever it was that this sort of situation called for. Personally, he suspected that it mostly just called for a cool, sensible head. Unfortunately, the cool and sensible thing to do was still probably to proceed cautiously. And as much as he disliked his father-in-law, and especially disliked the thought of asking him for help, Sam had to admit that the man might have some useful advice; even if that advice was simply to recommend a good lawyer.
“All right, you’re right, it irks me but you’re right,” he grinned. “Write your father. I’m not going to worry about it for right now.” He stood up and took the letter back from his wife.
“You’re really going to go give this to his family yourself? In, where was it, Exeter?” She looked like she wanted to plead with him to stay.
But Sam nodded again, “Yeah. I still feel dirty about the whole business with the crash. I guess I’d sort of like to make up for that, a little. I suppose that’s selfish.”
Edith stood up and hugged him around the neck, “You’re a good man, Samuel Reynard. Just don’t leave me here too long, or I swear I’ll either starve or burn down the building. You’ll be back tomorrow night?”
“Or early the next day,” Sam promised. He hugged her back.
“Well then,” Edith said, letting Sam go and grinning up at him, “let’s go see about those cold sandwiches I promised you.”
After eating, Sam wondered why anyone thought they needed to bother with ovens at all.
Book One, Chapter:
-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-
-22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36-37-38-39-40-41-42-
-43-44-45-46-47-48-49-50-51-52-53-54-55-56-57-58-59-60-61-62-
Appendix: -A-B-C-