All right, so this is more a sketch than a complete story. Truth is I'm really not well and don't have any energy. It's the beginnings of a short story using the characters from my Gyrford series that I may finish later when I'm not fecking dying, but hopefully you'll enjoy what's there. 

Matthew Smith had been up all night tracking a lantern-man through the woods, and he was too tired to cope with this.

  ‘Mister Dowdell,’ he said, regarding the customer who stood in the smithy with his arms folded in a stubborn mass, ‘if it’s but an elf-lock, we can comb it out this afternoon, or you can cut it off and leave it with us to pick apart and think over. We’ve cold-iron shears right here, it wouldn’t take but a moment –’

‘No, no.’ Jack Dowdell moved slow and spoke slow, and changed his mind never. ‘I’ve more to do that go back to my stables and turn about again. Do you mean to waste my time, Mister Matthew?’

‘No, no, not at all.’ Matthew tried not to rub his eyes. ‘I only fear that – well, there was the jack-o-lantern last night, I had to chase it and – I wouldn’t like to work ill for you.’

‘Do you mean a threat by that, Mister Matthew?’ Jack’s voice was no faster, but it was angrier. 

‘If you see a threat in that, you must live a fearful life,’ Matthew’s son John put in, and Matthew turned in dismay. His Johnny was a good lad of many talents, but saying the right thing for the moment was absolutely not among them. 

The trouble with Jack Dowdell was that he had an objection to Matthew: to wit, that Matthew was taller than him. Jack was no small man himself; he stood inches over most in Gyrford and had the brawn to go with it. He was a breeder of horses and liked to say, with a doggedness too factual to sound like boasting, that he’d never seen the beast that could knock him down. But Matthew was bigger and taller than everyone, and Jack felt it something of a slight to his professional skills.

Which would have been wearing enough, Matthew being by nature a shy, peaceable soul whose body had to duck through doorways but whose will to power could have been fitted into a smallish nutshell. But the other problem was that the Dowdell family held the power to decide who could and couldn’t get a license for burning charcoal. Without a supply of charcoal the smithy couldn’t function, and Matthew was on close terms with most of the colliers in their holding. If Jack decided to, he could put a lot of the Smiths’ friends out of work. 

‘Johnny!’ Matthew hissed, but Jack Dowdell refolded his arms with the air of a man buffing up his weapons and said, ‘If you haven’t leathered the mischief out of that boy by now, Mister Matthew, there’s still time. He may be growing fast, but I dare say you’re big enough to get the best of him.’

‘That’s a silly suggestion,’ John said, unperturbed. ‘If Dada ever meant to leather me, he should have learned the knack when I was too little to stop him. It’s too late now. My heart’d be more in getting out of it than his’d be in learning.’ He patted Matthew on the arm with all the blithe condescension of thirteen. ‘What I mean to say, Mister Dowdell, is that if you wish good work, and I suppose you do, then you’d best want it from a man fully awake. If you want it done now you’ll have to let me do it, and I’ve heard you say I’m fey-touched and haven’t the sense of a will-o-the-wisp. Now, I don’t quarrel with you for that,’ he added as Jack swelled a little, ‘but it’s a weary man or a touched one you’ll have to choose between today, for Grandpa’s gone to visit kin and it’s just the two of us, so you can take your choice or take your time.’

The offence filling Jack Dowden’s chest was so severe that it started to push his crossed arms open, and faced with the desperate prospect of separating them, Matthew rubbed his eyes very fast and said, ‘Now then, now then. If you mind it that much, Mister Dowdell, I’ll have a look now.’

The horse in question was a stallion called Gallant, a grey seventeen-hander with powerful thews, an expensive line of descendants, and a habit of biting. Matthew was so weary that he almost began his work before John put in, ‘Dada, you want your jacket. Mama said if I let anything take a bite out of you today she’d bite me herself and answer to God for it.’ 

‘That’s a good horse,’ Jack Dowdell said stubbornly. ‘Stud fees alone last year paid for all my dinners.’

Feeling very heavy-limbed, Matthew clambered into his jacket. The lantern-man had been a recent plague in the woods, leading travellers into thickets, and those who got trapped in the grip of brambles and thorns spent a desperate night with dancing flames fluttering insolent tatters of light around them and giggling like children. No one fire was bigger than the honest gleam you’d find domesticated on top of a candle-wick, and their notion was mostly to play with whoever their leader had got captive – but since their notion of play was to coax up the hairs and eyebrows of whoever they’d trapped and slide down them with whistling whoops of delight, singing every inch to ash along the way . . . well, there were more scorched faces and fewer eyebrows in Gyrford than there had been a month ago, and if he’d given up the hunt it was only a matter of time before someone was seriously hurt. By the time he’d got the lantern-man netted it was after sunrise, and they could still hear his crackled outrage muttering from the iron pot in the smithy corner. Mischievous light still danced behind Matthew’s lids every time he blinked. 

‘All right, lad,’ he said to Gallant, approaching as calm as he could. Stallions were usually all right as long as there was no mare to upset them, but they had their ways, and Gallant expressed both playful friendship and frustrated pride with his teeth, it was best to set a placid tone. ‘All right, my boy,’ Matthew soothed, ‘what’s been after you, then?’

Gallant was slick with sweat, that was the first thing, and it wasn’t the short trot the the smithy that had lathered him up like that. Something had ridden him hard in the night – and when Matthew lifted his mane, it was plain to see how: reins of tangles hung either side Gallant’s muscular neck, knotted into jagged puffs. When Matthew touched the roots of them, Gallant flinched, and landed a sharp nip on Matthew’s arm by way of indicating that a wise man does not touch a sore point. 

‘Must you fluster my good horse?’ Jack Dowdell demanded. ‘That’s a beast of value, Mister Matthew.’

‘It’s your voice’d fluster him more than Dada’s just now,’ John observed.

‘Johnny, if you please.’ Matthew rubbed his eyes; flames tossed their tattery heads at him in the shadows of his aftersight. 

‘I’m right though.’

‘Let’s . . . let’s all have a little hush, shall we?’ Matthew pleaded, or as close to pleading as he could come without showing any agitation in his voice to provoke Gallant.

Jack Dowdell grunted in annoyance, but he was too much a horseman not to recognise the point. Since it was a point Matthew Smith had scored off him, he took it with the air of a man tucking it into his pocket to be brooded over at a later date.

‘Good lad,’ Matthew said, stroking Gallant’s shoulder. ‘That’s my brave lad. Let’s have a look at these knots troubling you.’

Gallant nipped him again by way of showing there were no hard feelings. Light bounced around Matthew’s head. 

The knots themselves, now he held them in his hands, needed more care than he was quite confident of. To untangle an elflock without due caution would bring endless bad luck; that was why you took them to the fairy-smith. But the more he blinked, the more he had the sense that the tips of them were fluttering like flames. If he wasn’t careful, they looked ready to unknot themselves.

‘Pass me the Jacky-comb, would you John?’ he asked.

‘How’s that?’ Jack Dowdell demanded, hearing some reflection on his name.

John hopped onto a workbench, unhooked the item and jumped back down. ‘It’s only what we call it,’ he said, cheerful as if instructing a child. ‘It was Dada’s great-great-great-uncle Jacky Smith made the design of it. A Jacky-comb. It’s a pulling-comb at one end with a loop of pick at the other that you have to get the curve of just so, otherwise it hooks in the bad luck in such a way it travels up the . . . there you are, Dada. Never mind, Mister Dowd, it’s a long tale.’

Matthew took the comb, rubbed his eyes again. The flames were fraying behind them, splitting into hair-fine brushes of light.

‘Now if we want to keep ill luck off you, my boy,’ he said to Gallant through a yawn, ‘we need to know what’s amidst these.’

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 12:51 pm