The Last Geomancer

Scene 1: Jack Awakens

The sun rose sullenly over Cornwall these days. It took work to get over the horizon, and more work to burn through the coal smut that the Brits had brought with industrialization and mining. Not that there was much of that left. By the middle of the 19th century, the local fields were played out. Folks didn’t want to wake up so early these days, and in a world where a wish said on the right night on the right star just might come true, that didn’t hold back the sun but it made the early light angry and resentful.

The pounding in Jack Hollow’s head told him where he’d been but not where he was. The light stabbed his eyes when he tried to open them, and he winced, and that set off a new wave of pain. Dry mouth tasting like the bottom of a sock? Stomach threatening to empty itself if he so much as moved? Hangover of epic proportions.

Hard wood under him, edge close enough it was a miracle he hadn’t rolled off it. Smell of iron and damp stone overlaid with piss, vomit, and blood. A bench in a jail cell. So he was in the drunk tank, after a hard night at the pub.

Easing himself up slowly, reminding his stomach that it was already empty (it didn’t give a toss, gave a heave he fought back), Jack got enough of the crud out of his eyes to get them ungummed and open, but it didn’t do much good. The throbbing in his nose wouldn’t let his vision focus. He ran his hand over the stubble on his chin, and blinked at the dried blood that crumbled onto his fingers. Cautiously laying a fingertip to the spot where bone leaves off and cartilage takes over led to fighting back another dry heave at the new wave of pain he set off. His nose was broken. Who’d he been fighting with?

“Oh, brilliant, you’re awake,” a sarcastic voice came before a rough hand seized his shoulder and pulled him up straight. Jack’s stomach clenched; he fought back its protest once more. “Oh, we can’t have you go out to your mam like that, now can we? She’ll think we did it. Here, take this, both hands, under your beak, like that, yes …”

And his face exploded as the man’s other hand yanked his nose back into place. The rag he’d been given quickly soaked through.

“Oh, aye, that’s never going to do,” his – helper? assailant? groused. “Tom, give he your handkerchief, quick now.”

Another voice, a little higher, raspy, like a heavy smoker. “Give he your orn, I’m not having mine soaked through with blood!”

“That’s give he your orn, sergeant,” the first voice warned, leaning into the title, “and not a wise thing to say.”

Some grumbling, and then a wad of cloth poked at Jack’s hand. He swapped it in, dropped the sodden rag not caring where it landed, and leaned against the wall, tilting his head back and putting pressure on his upper lip like he’d done since his first year in grade school and that first dust-up out by the cricket field.

“Don’t let him do that!” the second voice protested. “He’ll drown in he orn blood!”

“Wives tale,” Jack mumbled, the words escaping more than being said.

“You arguing with me?” the reedy quaver demanded, approaching with the scuff of heavy boots.

“He’s right,” voice one cut in, muffled slightly as its owner turned and interposed himself twixt Jack and the second man. “If he had a bit of ice to put on orn lip, it’d work even better. Back up and give us room here.” Then, to Jack, a quick shuffle to turn about and glance down without backing away from dominance over the other man, “You ready to stand or I need pull you to your feet?”

In answer, Jack put down a hand onto the bench, gave a shove, got his back slid up the wall a few inches, reached back higher this time, shoved against the wall and levered himself onto legs that weren’t sure about this idea. A blink, another, and his eyes focused, on a broad-shouldered and irritated policeman, stripes on his upper sleeve, another officer behind him, younger and thinner, a plain navy sleeve with nowt on the shoulder.

“I’m Sergeant Davies,” the older officer informed him, in that dry, disapproving tone police have used since there was such a thing as a copper. “You might remember me as Constable Davies that time you and Johnny Head were caught picking the apples to Gray’s farm. I remember you. I said you were trouble then, and look at you now.”

Jack started to shake his head, felt the looseness in his nose not quite ready to subside, thought better of it. “Don’t remember,” he began, but Sgt. Davies dropped that heavy hand back onto his shoulder, reaching up a little now Jack was standing, and shook once, gently.

“Nar, not now, lad. Save it for your mam, she’s the one has come to bail you out, and you’ll need all your strength for that.” He stepped aside and pulled Jack into the space he’d left, getting him started toward the door.

The hallway to the front room was too short, and the light out there too bright, one of the new electric ones. The police station had been the second building in Forcette to get electricity, after the doctor’s home and before the RNLI boathouse. Jack stumbled over the iron lintel of the reinforced door he’d been on the wrong side of, and into the arms of his mother. She gave him a quick embrace, rounded arms nearly wrapping around his angular, thin frame, then held him off, scowled, fussed over the blood that had gotten on her dress, and glared up at him.

“Brawling in the pub like a navvy,” she accused him, “you were, James Kenwyn Hollow, and now here we are, paying your bail and you with a court date to answer, but first you’ll answer to me.” Her eyes narrowed, and her tone would brook no nonsense. “What can Willy Clark have said to you to get you to swing at him like that?”

It was dark in that part of his memory, and there were mice in the corners. “Willy?” he asked, his voice a croak. Lord, he was so dry.

His sister Jennifer, a head taller than her mum but otherwise the spitting image, a stout Cornish housewife to be, shook her head, then realizing her mother couldn’t see her do it standing behind her, sighed. “You don’t remember taking a poke at Willy?” she asked.

Jack shook his head, and his nose reminded him pointedly he shouldn’t do that. He glanced about, didn’t see what he needed. Didn’t see anything he needed in a police station, really. “Can we go?” he rasped, sounding like he’d been burning through more tobacco than the constable.

His mother’s shoulders slumped. “Aye, we can go, and we’ll stop at the pump down the street and wash you down a bit, get you summat to drink, you’re probably dry as Ado at Sodom.”

“Stand back when he gets the water down,” his sister warned. “It’ll come right back up, no doubt.”

“Got some papers to sign, Lowenna,” the sergeant put in, standing over by the desk. “Bail finalization, custody release.”

Lowenna waved off the possibility of her child vomiting on her, been there, done that, without a word. Jennifer watched until her mother’d taken the three steps necessary to get to the desk, then turned back on Jack with a savage snarl.

“That was her cookie money, Jack,” she hissed, keeping her voice low so Lowenna and the coppers might not hear, but loading enough rage into the near-whisper to just about kill Jack where he stood. “Fourteen years she’s been putting her pennies by in that jar with a blessing every time she picked up the lid. That and her widow’s pension was all she had to take care of her after Da was lost, and the pension runs out next year. Now all that good fortune she’d stored up has been spent on a thankless wretch like you. I hope it was worth it.”

If Jack could have sunk through the floor down into bedrock through sheer force of will, he would have then and there. “The money’ll be returned when I make my appearance,” he protested weakly.

“Oh, aye.” If Jennifer could have slapped him without knocking him down, she would have. “Minus the fines. As if that wasn’t bad enough. But all the fortune, all those years of blessings, it’s all done, Jack, and it’s your fault. You think on that.”

And then Lowenna was back and Jennifer had to let it drop. “Come on, Jack,” their mother said, not unkindly. “Let’s get you home.”

Jack followed her out the front door, down two cobblestone steps to the street, a last trace of the old building left from the renovations when the town had money, before the mine closed. Thankfully, neither woman said a thing until they’d made the stop at the pump, he’d been sluiced down, and managed to rinse his mouth and hold down a couple handfuls of water. The disapproving looks from the folk on the street were bad enough, most of them people he knew by at least a nickname and half he was probably related to.

Jennifer broke the silence. “Not only were you drunk and brawling in the pub,” she launched into him, trudging along at his side. At least she had the decency to switch to Kernewek, the old indigenous language of Cornwall, before getting personal. “You couldn’t even put up a good fight. You took a wild swing at Willy, they say, and he only hit you once.” She threatened to tap his nose with the finger she’d been wagging at him. He flinched away. She shook her head. “You had no guard to drop, Jack. One punch, laid you out like a codfish on the gutting table, flat on your back in your own blood. You ought to be ashamed of such a poor performance, at least.”

“Let him alone, Jennifer,” their mother warned, in the same language. “Boy feels ashamed enough of what he’s done. He’s no puppy you need rub his nose in the mess. And don’t think I didn’t hear you tearing into him back there, airing our dirty laundry for all the police to hear, and more of our neighbors speak the old language than you think.”

“Oh, like they didn’t already know?” Jennifer retorted.

Lowenna halted, turned round, planted herself in front of her daughter. “Jennifer Hollow, that will be enough out of you, do you understand me?” She glared up at her daughter with as much force as she’d previously used on Jack. “We’ve got enough trouble already, we don’t need to be going at each other in the midst of it. If you haven’t got an ounce of love in you for your brother, you could at least quit tearing him down in front of everyone else.”

Jennifer glanced about, at the side street they’d turned down, at the few neighbors out on the street who turned their faces away when she looked their direction, trying to give the quarreling family a trace of privacy. She flushed, dropped her eyes to her feet. “I’m sorry, mum,” she replied, a meeker, ashamed tone as she realized she’d hurt her mother as much as her wayward sibling. Any further apology was cut off by Lowenna, who took her elbow and pulled her along, two more doors down to the cobbler’s shop they lived above.

“We get the three of us home,” she said, unlocking the door at the corner of the building, and ushering her children up the steep and narrow steps, “and we sort it out. We figure what we’re going to do, like we always have. And you need to get your apron and get over to the bakery. They’re going to be wondering what happened to their shopgirl and if they might ought to find another. Go on, then, you’ve work to do, Jack needs a lie down in his own bed and clean clothes, not in that order mind you.” She kissed her fingertips, reached up and touched the horseshoe nailed up over the door, and followed them in.