Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘You speak English?’ he asked, because I’d paused. ‘The tongue of a civilised race?’

‘We don’t speak it much out this way,’ I replied, thinking carefully as I hadn’t used my English for a while and was a little rusty. ‘I thought we were at peace, you and we?’

‘That Fodder of yours tore up the accord when he cracked m’boy on the nut,’ he said. ‘We are merely lost travellers, old stick, trying to make our way back to the warm embrace of home and hearth.’

All Villains were English, and descendants of the upper classes who had been pushed to the edges of the Albion Peninsula after the devastating Class Wars of the nineteenth century. They had preserved their culture down the years, defiant against their victors. Large houses, crab-apple marmalade and trout-kippers for breakfast, hunting, shooting, fishing, balls, society gatherings. But most importantly, they liked servants and aggressively maintained their banned titles. Almost every Villain in Mid-Wales was a duke or a lord or a baroness or some such. [55] It was rumoured that the descendants of the exiled royal family, far from residing on a large farm in British Columbia, were actually living in a rambling fourteen-bedroomed mansionette near Lampeter.

‘Is your way home through the museum?’ I asked.

He smiled.

‘I’m not going to argue the toss, old stick,’ he said, ‘you should be grateful I’m going to spare your life. A few positions have opened up in the household and someone of your youth would be perfect to learn the complexities of domestic service. Did you know there are six different types of fork, each for a specific purpose? [56] There are actually eight. I counted them later. How’s your washing and ironing, by the way? We can start you off in the scullery.’

‘Terrible – and my cleaning and cooking are not very good either.’

He grinned.

‘Excellent – your training starts as soon as we get back. Ten years should make a fine servant of you; perhaps as a pastry chef. A lifetime in the service of others is a lifetime well served.’

It wasn’t quite how I would have interpreted the saying. He took the Schtumper from me, then my Bambi. My eyes flicked from the Villain to the empty snowstorm behind, hoping for Fodder, and the Villain guessed my thoughts perfectly.

‘Your large friend will have a shocker of a headache come the morning,’ he said. ‘The larger they are, the harder they fall.’

He pushed his Bambi hard into my head and stepped closer. The scar on his face looked like an untidy weld, and the folds in his skin were ingrained with dirt. The gap where his nose had been was only semi-healed; I could see the pink of his sinuses inside – they moved when he breathed like the gills of a stranded fish.

‘Well, mustn’t dawdle,’ he said. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands. After you – I insist.’

I took a pace forward but there was a low moan, like the sound of wind when it howls around the guttering. We both stared towards where I’d heard the shuffling steps, and I heard the chortle of a bemused child. The hair rose on the back of my neck, and I could see that the Villain had heard it too.

‘Friend of yours, Novice?’

‘Not of mine,’ I said, this time in my mother tongue, ‘and not of yours, either.’

‘Well, damn and blast,’ whispered the Villain as he realised what it was, ‘I need a Gronk like I need a forty-thousand-acre estate and death duties.’

If you live on the edge of the Winter, you know what’s real and what isn’t. He dropped the Schtumperschreck and drew his other Bambi so he was holding one in each hand. He didn’t panic at all, just gritted his teeth and moved forward.

‘Now listen here,’ he said, his voice fading as he walked into the snowstorm, ‘I’ll show you how an Englishman faces de—’

When I woke up I was on my back in the snow with everything quiet, snowflakes melting on my eyelashes and running into my eyes. I climbed to my feet but couldn’t see the Villain anywhere, so followed a trail that was less a set of footprints and more a furrow where someone had been dragged. I found one discharged Bambi after about thirty feet, then another, then the Villain’s clothes. The salopettes, tea-cosy hat, and the puffa, tweed jacket, complete with stained dress-shirt, two T-shirts and a vest, all inside one another. I looked around to see where he might have gone from there, but there was nothing – I was surrounded by virgin snow with the words of ‘So Long, Farewell’ running around inside my head.

Jonesy and Toccata arrived twenty minutes later, having homed in on the pulser I had set the moment I found Fodder, just near the helter-skelter. He was covered by a thin layer of fresh snow and had a large purple bruise on the side of his face. In front of him was another Villain, also unconscious. Fodder came round first. He had a splitting headache, but was otherwise unhurt.

‘Do you know him?’ asked Toccata when they rolled the first Villain over to get a look at him. He had a cold-gnarled leathery complexion, but no-one recognised him.

‘No,’ said Jonesy while going through his pockets, ‘but this was probably the reason they were trying to break in.’

She handed Toccata a small book she’d found entitled Gibbons’ Pocket Philatelist . A bus ticket was marking the page devoted to the stamps printed during Lloyd-George’s premiership.

‘They were after a stamp ,’ said Toccata with a sigh. She slapped the Villain around the face. He groaned, blinked and sat up. One eye was milky and blind, the other bloodshot. He wasn’t much older than me.

‘You’d break our truce for a stamp?’ she asked in English.

The young Villain looked at her, then the rest of us.

‘It’s the 2d Lloyd-George Mauve,’ he said, ‘with the Anglesey cancellation. The only one in the world. But in answer to your question: yes, I should jolly well say so. Well worth it. Clearly, you have a woefully poor grasp of the value and excitement of stamp collecting. Where’s Father?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘If you don’t answer truthfully,’ snorted the Villain, ‘you might find me irked, and you wouldn’t like me when I’m irked. Devilry may ensue. Now, again: where’s Father?’

‘Same answer as last time,’ said Toccata. ‘Heading home is my guess.’

‘If you’ve harmed a hair on his head, Janus, there’ll be retribution of the blood-spilling variety – and with no apologies for absence.’

‘I’ve a better idea,’ said Jonesy, ‘why don’t you just piss off home, you odious little maggot?’

The Villain got up, looked at us all in turn, told us he had ‘never been so insulted in his life’ and walked off into the gathering dusk.

‘Did you get the other fella?’ asked Fodder once the Villain was lost to view.

‘He was got,’ I said slowly, ‘but I’m not sure by who.’

‘Whom,’ said Toccata, correcting me, ‘not sure by whom . What did he mean when he called me “Janus”?’

We all shook our heads and mumbled that we had no idea.

Toccata’s Sno-Trac had been parked next to the main entrance of the museum, and now that the snowstorm had abated, we could see the headlight cluster as eight circles of light shining through the gloom. The Villain’s carefully folded clothes were still lying where they’d been found, and Toccata examined them with interest while the others stood silently by.