Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

I took the advice of my parents and left the city for a fortnight – spending the time in a country cottage owned by my grandparents on an island south of here. I relaxed, listened to the nimble fingers of a bard chosen for me by a dear friend, and read. It was a relaxing holiday, but it did not last nearly long enough. I returned to the city just a few days ago and I learned just how dangerous that man had been…or at least how dangerous someone assumed him to be.

When I returned from my trip, I found that something had happened in my absence. While I was away, the dirty man with the amulet had managed to get himself killed. But, he hadn’t just been killed – his body had been found in the confines of the dungeons in the Sacred Cathedral, deep within the bowels of the church. A stricken acolyte is probably still in prayer, trying to scrub away the imagery of what he saw there.

I never did see the body, but I heard enough stories of what was found there. He was strung up by his palms, massive hooks, like those used to skewer meat used to grip his flesh and hold it. His body had been burned in many places with strange symbols and characters that few if any knew the true meaning of. The churchmen I talked to told me it was the work of a dark cult – the city guards said it looked as though he had done it to himself, the sloppiness of the marks.

Nothing would have been thought of myself if it were not for the note the man held, a banker’s note of patronage rewarding him with the three hundred coin I promised for his silence. Alongside the note, wrapped around his throat, was the amulet he claimed my father had stolen. I have tried since then to find the amulet but it was taken from the body when it was found and has not been seen since. I hope only that my father was the man whose hands it is in..I also fear that he might have been behind the death of the explorer. I do not know, and I would not push the issue if it were not for the marks left on my bill of patronage – a series of red markings, drawn in the man’s blood. They are surely a threat. I have no idea who they are from or what they mean, but I spent the next two days hidden away in my rooms, a deep chill set in my bones.

Two days later, I left my chambers for the first time to get some fresh air and found myself in the depths of my family’s courtyards, enjoying the cool, crisp air of the final days of summer. I turned a particular corner and stopped nearby the next to last place I would have ever expected to see a small child – beside the thorn bushes and in rags with a small package in her hands.

“Are you Sarina McConnell?”

“Yes.”

“Then this is for you.”

The girl threw a small package at me, no larger than the size of her fist and then ran, to where I have no idea. She had no place to have come from and yet away she went, a tattered young thing. I was afraid at first to open the package but did not want to let such things so thoroughly run my life so in an hour I succumbed to my temptation and tore it open to find a small letter, within a box.

It was this latter that told me to go and see Reggie, who warned me that if I wanted to continue living, I would come to see you, the only detective in this city who would have no idea who I was and no political agenda. So, here I am and I hope more than anything that you are the man your friend claims you are. 

My Fiction blog novel, Brutus weaver, online noveling, stories

I never saw her again.

At first, it was sport – a way to spend my evenings that would endlessly vex my wealthy progenitors. But, as time passed, I started to see something more in it – an exciting means by which I was able to actually do something. I started to wonder where these poor wretched fools were going when I sent them away, what they were doing after they left the Upper City for their first and likely last visit the rich quarters of the city. It was in this way that I kept myself occupied and consistently busy each evening. During the days I began to grow lonelier as the young men and women with whom I had spent my childhood pretending to be the rich barons and baronesses of the city that many of us would one day be, had started to look at me as though I was carrying the same diseases and scratching at the same sores they did. 

Needless to say, I grew reclusive and rumors began to fly. My maids and servants would bring word of what the other nobles were saying about me – that I was swollen with child, that I had killed a suitor in a blind rage, that I had begun to come down with the vapors and hardly knew my own name. They amused me at first, but soon they began to get under my skin as my reputation that I had never quite cared about started to fade away. 

My parents begged of me to see a doctor, to visit the country, to leave the city, and to most of all stop spending my time seeing the rabble with their little trinkets. There was a man who claimed he could turn salt water into drinking water with a wire plugged into a small machine with multiple turning cogs. Another man came bearing the portrait of a woman he claimed had been the Queen of the Eastern reaches before the world had been formed. She looked like my mother. 

I saw what must have been two hundred of these men and women – at least five every evening for more than a month – before he arrived. The moment he walked into the room, I knew that he had something special in his hands, that he was what I had been waiting for. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I wanted at all. 

My Fiction blog novel, Brutus weaver, online noveling

You see, the problem with the rich acting out, and the reason so many people spread gossip of the most mundane infractions is that the rich have the means by which to truly act out. When a lovelorn Baron decides he wants to cheat on his wife, no on asks him why he did it or how his wife feels. No, they want to know what he bought, how big was the fight and where he’ll be living for the coming months.

That’s not to say that I was overly expressive with my rebellion. I was just a bit…frivolous and in my frivolity I decided I would seek out a means by which to define myself within my family. Too bad for me and my family that method came looking for me instead.

I never really left my parents’ home, but I did start gathering as many men of intellectual and artistic importance as I could find. More importantly, I sought out those who no one of noble lineage would recognize. You see, my handmaid Clare visits her family in the lower city every three days when she is given leave. I sent with her a message and a small bounty. Anyone who could provide me with something no one had ever seen before would receive my favor and a residence in the upper city.

I didn’t honestly expect to find anyone with an incredibly invention or heart melting masterpiece. I just wanted to make my parents squirm as penniless wretch after wretch trudged through their drawing rooms. I admit it now…it was the poorest decision I could have made at the time. It was heartless and unnecessary. The upper city was full to the brim with men and women whose ideas would lead the kingdom into a new era, anyone of whom needed a patroness with only time on her hands.

But, my hunger for acceptance was matched by the desire to be different and so I asked for the lowlifes and the poor, giving them false hope every evening as handfuls arrived at my parents’ gates wearing the best imitation of fine dress they could find. One man, no doubt a shoemaker or carpenter by the looks of his hands, arrived dressed in a torn and stained yellow undergarment that I could have sworn I threw out myself only weeks before. The man had brought me a rather striking painting actually – a style unlike any I’d seen before, a combination of odd cube-shaped noses and swooping currents of air and water. My hypocrisy showed that much clearer when I turned the man away.

Another hopeful, a girl who could not be any older than me, seventeen at most, arrived with an overwrought version of a telescope. It was long and spindly with numerous tacked on knobs and scopes. She claimed that it would allow me to see the surface of the moon. The sun was still more than two hours from setting though and the poor girl was scratching violently at the back of her head while the servants sweated nervously behind us. I told her to come back another day, that I had pressing business that evening.

My Fiction blog novel, Brutus weaver, detective story, fiction noir, online noveling, writing fiction online

I was always a spoiled child. I know that. I never pretended I wasn’t, but the world looks at you differently no matter how well you handle your fortunes. My mother was the fourth daughter of a Countess and my father a moderately well off merchant from outside the city. The two met casually at random during some or another royal family member’s birthday ball. Nine months later I was born, Sarina Bell McConnell, forty-third in line to the throne and the daughter of the richest couple in the city beside the king and queen.

So, things were different for me compared to other children, even for the upper city. I was schooled in my father’s study by one of the premier scholars at the University, an old friend of my father’s from his long past education. I was never left alone in the city, for fear that rabble from the lower city – no offense to your home – would find me appealing and take advantage of my standing by kidnapping me…or worse.

So, I grew up in the silver plate bird cage of the city’s finest veranda’s and drawing rooms, drinking tea with the Queen’s cousins and being courted by the sons and nephews of Dukes. It was an incredibly boring life; to be blunt I was quite ungrateful for what I had been given and started acting out as soon as I was old enough to carry my own purse and command my own servants.

For me, the life of a child of privilege was stifling. However, I used those privileges to attempt my rebellion, defeating my cause before I had even begun. I was trapped in the world I was born into, eager to get out, only because I had never seen anything else. I admit I made mistakes. You must know what it is like though, being trapped in the shell of the regal hypocrisy on the hills for so long that you yearn for anything else to happen.

So, eventually I did act out. I left home and started searching for a means by which to claim an identity for myself. I was reckless and childish and the warnings I’d received for years from my tutors, parents, and servants were meaningless as I strode to see the outside world for myself. That was only 8 months ago.

My Fiction blog novel, Brutus weaver, detective story, fiction noir, online noveling, writing fiction online

Brutus lit another candle and poured an extra glass of the lacy, dark whiskey into the only other glass he owned and had the troublesome blond sit in the sturdy assessor’s chair on which he occasionally ate his dinner. She moved nervously at first, dragging her feet through the dust and tapping her toe anxiously, but eventually she settled down in the chair.
The room was small and dank, filled with ants and enough dust to take down an asthmatic horse but it was warm. That little wood stove did its job well; the heat was one of the few things Brutus was willing to admit he liked about the place. So, it didn’t take more than a handful of heartbeats settled at the edge of that chair before the woman stretched her arms behind her and started peeling the heft of the black cloak free of her back.

“Do you mind if I take this off. It’s like a furnace in here.”

Brutus didn’t say anything – maybe it was because he was still thinking about Reggie….or maybe it was the fact that a woman hadn’t peeled any piece of clothing off in his presence in far too long. He reached and took the blackened lump of wet fabric from her and did his best to look the part of a host, hanging it carefully alongside his own meager collection of clothing beside his bed.

“Much better.” And it was much better. Without the veil of that cloak, Brutus could see the sleek body he had almost immediately assumed was there. Dressed in a blood red evening gown that cut just the right amount of inches above her knees, she looked as though she had just left an uptown ball. She also looked as though she had been beaten on the way out the door. Swollen scarlet welts littered her shoulders, grouped together in fours, the impressions of a meaty hand that had gripped too hard.

“Looks like your ‘Reggie’ wasn’t very gentle.”

Her face flushed and the welts temporarily disappeared. “Oh…no, these aren’t from him,” she said, “these are…well, he said you’d help me.”

“Did he now?”

“He said you were the best detective in the city.”

“Now I know he’s a liar. Did he also tell you I haven’t had a case in over 6 months?” Brutus instinctively reached for the cigar in his pocket and stopped…it was the last one. “Or that I have a standing arrest decree on my head if I go anywhere near the upper city…where I’m assuming you just arrived from?”

“You didn’t let me finish. He said you were the best detective in the city who wouldn’t ask questions,” she fingered a fist-sized leather pouch he hadn’t seen appear. “for the right price.”
He eyed the pouch hungrily, the half empty bottle of whiskey and stale loaf of bread reminding him that he was quite willing to withhold questions if necessary. It didn’t change the fact that there was something wrong though. No, not just something. Everything was wrong with this woman. Her appearance, her story, the slender curve of the pale skin above the straps of her dress. She shouldn’t be there. But the money spoke volumes, “I’m listening.”

My Fiction blog novel, Brutus weaver, detective story, fiction noir, online noveling, writing fiction online