Fox Estate grounds, ~2pm Sunday May 5th, 1771


Robin and Andrew had left the Bees siblings to go borrow a horse with their basketful of leftovers, confident no harm would come to Lucy and Tom on the main road of the village. The pair themselves had climbed up the hill in the road a little way, full of food and gently baked in the sun, and threaded through to the outward servants' cottages across the back of the orchard. One of Mr. Rickert's  gibbets stood near to where the path gave out onto the cottagers' gardens and root plots: two rooks, a magpie and the mostly-skinned remains of a young badger twisted slowly on their hooks as a warning to their kin.

The birds' long-stiffened wings trembled with the wind, the mammal's flesh with crawling things, only the teeth a clean white under lips shrivelled back by decay. Someone had taken the magpie's jewel-like tailfeathers. No rook nor corvid of any sort troubled the garden. Before them rose a huge and sturdy yew hedge, cutting off the outer servants' common space from the gardens in which their master might walk at his pleasure. Still, once past the gamekeep's grisly warning to pests a scent of roses could be discerned beside that of low-burning hearth fires and the dull spice of yew.

Few people were about, it being Sunday and those not lunching inclined to rest, but Granny Stone happened to be hobbling out on some errand and directed the two beyond the warding hedge's pale to another secluded spot behind a clump of exotic rhododendron. Jim Stone was to be found there, carefully and quietly sharpening shears where he sat on a log beside a compost heap. Smells of green decay reached them as they approached, but it was only the clippings laid up to improve and bank down the sharpness of horse manure and sheep droppings raked out of the lawn.

Too focused on his task to notice them at once, Jim flinched a little when they came into his peripheral vision and looked up, carefully easing the whetstone into his pail of water. His eyes slid away from their watching, and for some reason Andrew tried to match a wood to their colour, though for all his strangeness and aptitude with plants it was unlikely the lad had a wooden soul (their colour was smoked oak, perhaps). Jim sat, expectant, but did not talk.

"...?"


GM edit: neatening edges/less 3am wording.
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:32, Sat 22 Oct 2022.

Andrew smiled at Jim as he approached. ”Good afternoon, Jim. I’m sorry to interrupt your work this Sunday afternoon, but Master Yendale and I were hoping to speak with you. Just for a short time.”

Jim gave a deep frown of perplexity, since Master Sexton very much was talking to him already. He looked to Robin. "?"

"Oh, well, see, there's talk," Robin crouched, looking mostly at the rhododendron and rarely at the sharp long shears, trusting his master to save his back should his friend try to murder him. "Talk as how y'were close friend to Polly and so she'd let you near enough to murder her, so I came to ask, in case they sent constables...there'll be them, or most like troopers comen soon, now John Collins sent off. Men who won't listen right. So I came to ask ye straight, like: did you kill her?"

Jim rocked back on his stump as though he'd been pushed in the chest, shaking his head vigorously, then specifically at Andrew, then at Robin, then realising that he might just be shaking in a funny way and answering hoarsely: "...no."

"Nor caused her to be killed? That counts," Robin added, to cover possibilities.

Jim thought for a couple of seconds to be sure of the truth. "Nor that, neither."

"Good!" Robin seemed relieved, but cleared his throat. "-hm, an' might ye show us out her silver fish, an'...do ye aim to kill anyone now?"

Jim willingly brought out the treasure, a bright jointed curl on his palm as the shears laid against his knees. He tensed at the last question. "Why d'ye ask that?"

Wrens argued somewhere off behind the compost heap and a robin stridently sang. The youth on the stump was quiet, but that was not an answer.

Jim’s last answer surprised Andrew. As he brought out the silver fish, a sight that prompted a surge of melancholy, Andrew cleared his throat and said, ”I think there’s worry about the forest. The Wyzenwood. That she who lives there might be saying things to some. Urging them to do things that aren’t right.”

Jim considered this. "She han't talked to me," he concluded, then considered how such a thing as Herself in the Wood might talk. "Not as I know of."

He looked at his hands and gently moved the fish so that its weight shifted it into another serpentine shape. "If...if it were wrong...the judges have men, to kill murderers," he said, a little defensively.

"Well then, why'd ye aim to kill a murderer yourself?" Robin asked.

Jim rocked a bit on his stump, unsure how to get out of that question. "Who says I was?"

"Sounds that way," Robin pressed. "So why not tell the judges?"

"..." "..." Jim rocked some more, perhaps considering lurching into a run, but trust of Robin won out: "They'd ask on why he done it, an' I can't tell 'em. Promised."

”I am thankful that she has left you alone,” Andrew told Jim, earnest in his relief that the young man hadn’t fallen under the forest’s spell.

He paused, selecting his next words carefully. “Jim, I think many of us are less concerned with why it was done, than with making certain that it will not happen again. This person…we do not want them to harm anyone else. Can you at least tell us who it was?”

Jim's eyes flicked warily to the carpenter's hands, then looked out to the rhododendrons' exotic darkness with Robin. "No, sir, that'd be conspiracy, I knows that. The why would come out, an' that of my fault, an' I'll not break oath to the dead, nor have more hanged than myself, if ye both think it right to turn me in, at the end. As like the magistrates wouldn't believe me, neither."

He looked at the treasured fish, then set it away, in close to his heart. The others might have been on the verge of speaking when Jim finished his thoughts: "'Twill cause no end of trouble and sorrow as it is, a-killin him, witch-addled or not. Better it's set down to some mad stranger, such as they can think did for both, or to the Wood's will."

"It's someone important, then?" Robin asked. Jim considered the guess, and if such came too close to telling.

"..." He did not shake his head, only frowned, running his hand across the shears.

”Jim, I think most here in the village have come to believe the truth of things that others might reject. Like about that which lives in the Wyzenwood,” Andrew offered, “Why would you think that the judges wouldn’t believe what you told them?”

“What you saw, did it happen here on the grounds of the estate? In the gardens? Or where you store your tools?”

Jim rocked a little, looking at his hands, as though working up to shake words loose enough to cough out. "...'cause...'cause he done it subtle, done it clever, an' he is who he is, an' I go to the judges with all such as 'e did do, they'd say well there since I thought it out, I must've done it that way myself, or made up the story for the evidence."

He swallowed, struggling with so much talk. "Best ways, they'd ask why he'd go to the trouble, an' I couldn't tell them. So they'd say as a man don't set out to do all that to murder-" he cleared his throat on sudden hoarseness, his friend's death still utterly raw to him, perhaps pain sharp enough to drive an axe down to revenge. "-to murder a girl for no reason, an' I ought be branded for perjery an' fined for speakin' ill."

Robin listened with a frown of concentration, certain now his friend did know the truth. A thrush began to bash a snail to pieces on a rock beneath the rhododendron shade. Shell chipped and gradually splintered as the small beak gripped to cringing flesh.

Jim chewed his cheek at Andrew's latter questions, and assented with a nod.

The name that came to the carpenter’s mind was Master Nathan Fox. It was, after all, Fox’s property, and he was assuredly a man whose influence Jim would reasonably fear. There was assuredly no argument regarding who the judges might believe, were Jim to bring any accusations against his employer. Master Fox was highly regarded throughout the county. Perhaps even beyond it.

Andrew broke his momentary silence with a question. ”Jim, did Mistress Durbin ever have occasion to come here to the estate?”

The name flashes an image into Andrew's memory: looking up as Master Fox waded into the Wood, his fine blue coat and namesake hair bright against the darkness within. She was here, he'd said, and doubled down by making sure all heard the words that had sprung unconsciously to his lips.

They might be words loosed by the shock of finding evidence that a murdered neighbour had, indeed, been there, of course. Then again, might not a murderer be moved to express bewilderment the same way, if a corpse set up in careful tableau was not where he had left it? He hadn't turned to look at them, that coat set against the darkness like a scrap of summer sky.

"Much as anyone," Jim told his hands, then quieter, because saying so made a little bit of her exist: "I'd save weed flowers, so she could press 'em or put 'em in the paper done over again, for sketchbooks. Said I was clever, to know all the names. I don't know, I just look at a thing and remember it." I want her back was more in the curl of his right hand than his voice, but there nonetheless.

"The secret you're keepin' for her...would it hurt someone else? Other than the man as did for her, I mean," Robin said, perhaps also thinking of how easy it would be to claim some needed private errand at Goodie Wescott's and slip across the road onto the estate, perhaps only concerned at the weight they three would come to share.

Jim nodded. The thrush had quietly settled to pulling its prey apart.
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:40, Mon 02 Jan 2023.

Andrew nodded, a knot suddenly within his chest, a weight put there by the terrible knowledge he had sought, but now realized that, at least in part, he did not truly wish to know. Coupled with it was the grief of Jim Stone, whose love now had no earthly person to settle upon.

Looking to Robin, he said, ”I think we’ve kept Jim from his duties for long enough. We don’t want him to have any trouble.”

Returning his attention to the gardener, he added, ”Thank you, Jim. I know we’ve asked some hard questions and I appreciate you striving to be honest with us. I…I’m sorry. You will be in my daily prayers.”

He motioned to his apprentice that they should take their leave.

Jim looked at Andrew, mostly at his hands and shoulders though briefly at his face. He rocked briefly in thought then dropped his hand for the whetstone. Whether he understood their resoloution not to interfere or what it was to grip the will to break the sixth Commandment with clarity and open eyes it was impossible to tell, but Andrew had only gone a couple of paces before the young gardener remembered that some things needed to be spoken aloud: "...'preciate it, Master Sexton."

Robin came to heel with an enquiring look, but waited until they were past the cottages and unfortunately downwind of the gamekeep's gibbet before asking, uncomfortably: "Now what, sir?"

The patch of air they passed through smelled of sour flesh. Distantly, the pair caught what sounded like the enraged squeal of a stallion - perhaps some kind of ruckus at the stables ahead.

Andrew motioned for his apprentice to follow, making certain that Robin understood to stay behind him. Worried that the noise meant an animal, or one of their handlers, might be hurt, the carpenter made his way hastily to the stables.