Snuff (6 page)

Vimes decided to take a look out of the grubby pub window. Regrettably, the pub was that most terrifying of things, picturesque, which meant that the window consisted of small round panes fixed in place with lead. They were for letting the light in, not for looking out of, since they bent light so erratically that it nearly broke. One pane showed what was probably a sheep but which looked like a white whale, until it moved, when it became a mushroom. A man walked past with no head until he reached another pane and then had one enormous eyeball. Young Sam would have loved it, but his father decided to give eventual blindness a miss and stepped out into the sunshine.

Ah, he thought, some kind of game.

Oh well.

Vimes wasn't keen on games because they led to crowds, and crowds led to work for coppers. But here in fact he wasn't a copper, was he? It was a strange feeling, so he left the pub and became an innocent bystander. He couldn't remember when he had been one before. It felt…vulnerable. He strolled over to the nearest man, who was hammering some stakes into the ground, and asked, “What's going on here, then?” Realizing that he had spoken in copper rather than in ordinary citizen, he added quickly, “If you don't mind me asking?”

The man straightened up. He was one of the ones with the colorful caps. “Haven't you ever seen a game of crockett, sir? It's the game of games!”

Mr. Civilian Vimes did his best to look like a man eager for more delicious information. Judging by his informant's enthusiastic grin, he was about to learn the rules of crockett, whether he wanted to or not. Well, he thought, I did ask…

“At first sight, sir, Crockett might seem like just another ball game wherein two sides strive against one another by endeavoring to propel the ball by hand or bat or other device into the opponents' goal of some sort. Crockett, however, was invented during a game of croquet at St. Onan's Theological College in Ham-on-Rye, when the novice priest Jackson Fieldfair, now the Bishop of Quirm, took his mallet in both hands, and instead of giving the ball a gentle tap…”

After that Vimes gave up, not only because the rules of the game were incomprehensible in their own right, but also because the extremely enthusiastic young man allowed his enthusiasm to overtake any consideration of the need to explain things in some sensible order, which meant that the flood of information was continually punctuated by apologetic comments on the lines of “I'm sorry, I should have explained earlier that a second cone is not allowed more than once per exchange, and in normal play there is only one tump, unless, of course, you're talking about royal crockett…”

Vimes died…The sun dropped out of the sky, giant lizards took over the world, the stars exploded and went out and all hope vanished with a gurgle into the sink-trap of oblivion, and gas filled the firmament and combusted and behold there was a new heaven, one careful owner, and a new disc, and lo, and possibly verily, life crawled out of the sea, or possibly didn't because it had been made by the gods—that was really up to the bystander—and lizards turned into less scaly lizards, or possibly did not, and lizards turned into birds, and worms turned into butterflies, and a species of apple turned into bananas, and possibly a kind of monkey fell out of a tree and realized that life was better when you didn't have to spend your time hanging onto something, and, in only a few million years, evolved trousers and ornamental stripy hats and lastly the game of crockett and there, magically reincarnated, was Vimes, a little dizzy, standing on the village green looking into the smiling countenance of an enthusiast.

He managed to say, “Well, that's amazing, thank you so very much. I look forward to enjoying the game.” At which point, he thought, a brisk walk home might be in order, only to be foiled by a regrettably familiar voice behind him saying, “You, I say you, yes, you! Aren't you Vimes?”

It was Lord Rust, usually of Ankh-Morpork, and a fierce old warhorse, without whose unique grasp of strategy and tactics several wars would not have been so bloodily won. Now he was in a wheelchair, a newfangled variety pushed by a man, whose life was, knowing his lordship, quite probably unbearable.

But hatred tends not to have a long half-life and in recent years Vimes had regarded the man as now no more than a titled idiot, rendered helpless by age, yet still possessed of an annoying horsy voice that, suitably harnessed, might be used to saw down trees. Lord Rust was not a problem anymore. There were surely only a few more years to go before he would rust in peace. And somewhere in his knobbly heart Vimes still retained a slight admiration for the cantankerous old butcher, with his evergreen self-esteem and absolute readiness not to change his mind about anything at all. The old boy had reacted to the fact that Vimes, the hated policeman, was now a duke, and therefore a lot more nobby than he was, by simply assuming that this could not possibly be true, and therefore totally ignoring it. Lord Rust, in Vimes's book, was a dangerous buffoon but, and here was the difficult bit, an incredibly, if suicidally, brave one. This would have been absolutely ticketyboo were it not for the suicides of those poor fools who followed him into battle.

Witnesses had said that it was uncanny: Rust would gallop into the jaws of death at the head of his men and was never seen to flinch, yet arrows and morningstars always missed him while invariably hitting the men right behind him. Bystanders—or rather people peering at the battle from behind comfortingly large rocks—had testified to this. Perhaps he was capable of ignoring, too, the arrows meant for him. But age could not be so easily upstaged, and the old man, while no less arrogant, had a sunken look.

Rust, most unusually, smiled at Vimes and said, “First time I've ever seen you down here, Vimes. Is Sybil going back to her roots, what?”

“She wants Young Sam to get some mud on his boots, Rust.”

“Well done, her, what! It'll do the boy good and make a man of him, what!”

Vimes never understood where the explosive
what
s came from. After all, he thought, what's the point of just barking out “What!” for absolutely no discernible reason? And as for, “What what!” well, what was that all about? Why what?
What
s seemed to be tent-pegs hammered into the conversation, but what the hells for, what?

“So not down here on any official business, then, what?”

Vimes's mind spun so quickly that Rust should have heard the wheels go round. It analyzed the tone of voice, the look of the man, that slight, ever so slight but nevertheless perceptible hint of a hope that the answer would be “no,” and presented him with a suggestion that it might not be a bad idea to drop a tiny kitten among the pigeons.

He laughed. “Well, Rust, Sybil has been banging on about coming down here since Young Sam was born, and this year she put her foot down and I suppose an order from his wife must be considered official, when!” Vimes saw the man who pushed the enormous wheelchair trying to conceal a smile, especially when Rust responded with a baffled “What?”

Vimes decided not to go with “Where” and instead said, in an offhand way, “Well, you know how it is, Lord Rust. A policeman will find a crime anywhere if he decides to look hard enough.”

Lord Rust's smile remained, but it had congealed slightly as he said, “I should listen to the advice of your good lady, Vimes. I don't think you'll find anything worth your mettle down here!” There was no “what” to follow, and the lack of it was somehow an emphasis.

I
t was often a good idea, Vimes had always found, to give
the silly bits of the brain something to do, so that they did not interfere with
the important ones which had a proper job to fulfil. So he watched his first
game of crockett for a full half-hour before an internal alarm told him that
shortly he should be back at the Hall in time to read to Young Sam—something
that with any luck did not have poo mentioned on every page—and tuck him into
bed before dinner.

His prompt arrival got a nod of approval from Sybil,
who gingerly handed him a new book to read to Young Sam.

Vimes looked at the cover. The title was
The World of Poo
. When
his wife was out of eyeshot he carefully leafed through it. Well, okay, you had
to accept that the world had moved on and these days fairy stories were probably
not going to be about twinkly little things with wings. As he turned page after
page, it dawned on him that whoever had written this book, they certainly knew
what would make kids like Young Sam laugh until they were nearly sick. The bit
about sailing down the river almost made
him
smile. But interspersed with the scatology was
actually quite interesting stuff about septic tanks and dunnakin divers and
gongfermors and how dog muck helped make the very best leather, and other things
that you never thought you would need to know, but once heard somehow lodged in
your mind.

Apparently it was by the author of
Wee
and if Young Sam had one vote for
the best book ever written, then it would go to
Wee
. His enthusiasm was perhaps fanned all the more
because a rare imp of mischief in Vimes led him to do all the necessary
straining noises.

Later, over dinner, Sybil quizzed him about his
afternoon. She was particularly interested when he mentioned stopping by to
watch the crockett.

“Oh they still play it? That's wonderful! How did it
go?”

Vimes put down his knife and fork and stared
thoughtfully at the ceiling for a moment or two, then said, “Well, I was talking
to Lord Rust for some of the time, and I had to leave, of course, because of
Young Sam, but fortune favored the priests, when their striker managed to tump
a couple of the farmers by a crafty use of the hamper. There were several appeals
to the hat man about this, because he broke his mallet in so doing, and in my
opinion the hat man's decision was entirely correct, especially since the
farmers had played a hawk maneuver.” He took a deep breath. “When play
recommenced, the farmers still had not found their stride but got a breathing
space when a sheep wandered onto the pitch and the priests, assuming that this
would stop play, relaxed too soon, and Higgins J. fired a magnificent handsaw
under the offending ruminant…”

Sybil finally stopped him when she realized that the
meal was growing very cold, and said, “Sam! How did you become an expert on the
noble game of crockett?”

Vimes picked up his knife and fork. “Please don't
ask me again,” he sighed. In his head meanwhile a little voice said,
Lord Rust tells me there is nothing here for me. Oh
dear, I'd better find out what it is, what?

He cleared his throat and said, “Sybil, did you
actually look at that book I'm reading to Young Sam?”

“Yes, dear. Felicity Beedle is the most famous
children's writer in the world. She's been at it for years. She wrote
Melvin and the Enormous Boil
,
Geoffrey and the Magic Pillow
Case
,
The Little Duckling
Who Thought He Was an Elephant
…”

“Did she write one about an elephant who thought he
was a duckling?”

“No, Sam, because that would be silly. Oh, she also
wrote
Daphne and the Nose Pickers
and
Gaston's Enormous
Problem
won for her the Gladys H. J. Ferguson
award—the fifth time she's been given it. She gets children interested in
reading, you see?”

“Yes,” said Vimes, “but they're reading about poo
and brain-dead ducklings!”

“Sam, that's part of the commonality of mankind, so
don't be so prudish. Young Sam's a country boy now, and I'm very proud of him,
and he likes books. That's the whole point! Miss Beedle also finances
scholarships for the Quirm College for Young Ladies. She must be quite wealthy
now, but I hear she's taken Apple Tree Cottage—you can practically see it from
here, it's on the side of the hill—and I think it right, if you don't mind, of
course, that we invite her here to the Hall.”

“Of course,” said Vimes, though his dontmindedness
was entirely due to the way his wife's question had been phrased and the subtle
resonances that Miss Beedle's attendance was a done deal.

V
imes slept a lot better that night, partly because he could feel that somewhere in the universe nearby there was a clue waiting for him to pull. That made his fingers itch already.

In the morning, as he had promised, he took Young Sam horse riding. Vimes could ride, but hated doing so. Nevertheless, falling off the back of a pony onto one's head was a skill that every young man should learn if only so that he resolved never to do it again.

The rest of the day, however, did not work out well. Vimes, suspicions filling his mind, was metaphorically and only just short of literally dragged by Sybil to see her friend Ariadne, the lady blessed with the six daughters. In actual fact there were only five visible in the chintzy drawing room when Sybil and he were ushered in. He was feted as “the Dear Brave Commander Vimes”—he hated that shit, but under Sybil's benign but careful gaze he was wise enough not to say so, at least not in those precise words. And so he grinned and bore it while they fluttered around him like large moths, and he waved away yet more teacakes, and cups of tea that would have been welcome were it not that they looked and tasted like what proper tea turns into shortly after you drink it. As far as Sam Vimes was concerned, he liked tea, but tea was not tea if, even before drinking, you could see the bottom of the cup.

Still worse than the stuff he was being offered was the conversation, which inclined toward bonnets, a subject on which his ignorance was not just treasured but venerated. And besides, his breeches were chafing: wretched things, but Sybil had insisted, saying that he looked very smart in them, just like a country gentleman. Vimes had to suppose that country gentleman had different arrangements in the groinal department.

There was, besides himself and Lady Sybil, a young Omnian curate, wisely dressed in a voluminous black robe, which presumably presented no groinal problems. Vimes had no idea why the young man was there, but presumably the young ladies needed somebody to fill with weak tea, suspect scones and mindless twittering conversation when someone like Vimes wasn't there. And it seemed that when the subject of bonnets lost its fascination the only other topics were legacies and the prospects for forthcoming balls. And so, inevitably, given his restlessness in female company, a growing disaffection for urine-colored tea, and small talk that would barely be visible under a microscope, Vimes said, “Excuse me asking, ladies, but what is it that you actually, I mean actually
do
…For a living, I mean?”

This question elicited five genuinely blank looks. Vimes couldn't tell the daughters one from the other, except the one called Emily, who certainly lodged in the mind and possibly also in doorways, and who now said, in the tones of one slightly out of her depth, “I do beg your pardon, commander, but I don't think we understand what you just vouchsafed?”

“I meant, well, how do you make a living? Are any of you in employment? How do you make your daily crust? What work do you do?” Vimes could pick up nothing from Sybil, because he couldn't see her face, but the girl's mother was staring at him with gleeful fascination. Oh well, if he was going to get it in the neck he might as well get it all the way down. “I mean, ladies,” he said, “how do you make your way in the world? How do you earn your keep? Apart from bonnets, do you have any skills—like cookery, for example?”

Another daughter, quite possibly Mavis, but Vimes was guessing, cleared her throat and said, “Fortunately, commander, we have servants for that sort of thing. We're gentlewomen, you see? It would be quite, quite unthinkable for us to go into trade or commerce. The scandal! It's just not done.”

By now there appeared to be a competition to see who could terminally baffle who, or possibly whom, first. But Vimes managed to say, “Don't you have a sister in the timber business?”

It was amazing, he thought, that neither their mother nor Sybil was as yet adding anything to the conversation. And now another sister (possibly Amanda?) looked about to speak. Why in the world did they all wear those silly diaphanous dresses? You couldn't hope to do a day's work in something as skimpy as that. Amanda (possibly) said carefully, “I'm afraid our sister is a bit of an embarrassment to the family, your grace.”

“What, for getting a job! Why?”

Another one of the girls, and Vimes was in fact getting really confused at this point, said, “Well, commander, she has no hope of making a good marriage now…er, not to a gentleman.”

This was becoming a tangle and so Vimes said, “Tell me, ladies, what is a gentleman?”

After some whispered conversation a sacrificial daughter said, very nervously, “We understand the gentleman is a man who does not have to sully his hands by working.”

Adamantium is said to be the strongest of all metals, but it would have bent around the patience of Sam Vimes as he said, with every syllable carefully smelted, “Oh, a layabout. And how do you go about snagging such a gentleman, pray?”

Now the girls looked as if they were indeed praying. One of them managed to say, “You see, commander, our dear late father was unlucky in the money market, and I'm afraid that until the death of Great-aunt Marigold, of whom we have expectations, there is, alas, no money for a dowry for any of us.”

The heavens held their breath while the concept of a dowry was explained to Sam Vimes, and ice formed on the windows as he sat in strangulated thought.

At last, he cleared his throat and said, “Ladies, the solution to your problem, in my opinion, would be to get off your quite attractive backsides, go out there in the world and make your own way! A dowry? You mean some man has to be
paid
to marry you? What century do you think you're living in? Is it just me, or is it the most bloody stupid thing you could ever imagine?” He glanced at the beautiful Emily and thought, good grief, men would line up on the lawn to fight one another, my dear. How come no one's ever told you? Gentility is all very well, but practicality has its uses. Get out in the world and let the world see you and it might find a new word in its vocabulary such as, perhaps, “wow!” Aloud he continued, “Honestly, there are lots of jobs out there for a young lady with her wits about her. The Lady Sybil Free Hospital is always on the lookout for sharp girls to train as nurses, for example. Good pay, very fetching uniforms, and a fine chance of snagging a skilled young physician who is on the way to the top, especially if you get your boot behind him. Plus, of course, as a nurse you inherit an amazingly large amount of amusing and embarrassing stories about things which people put…Perhaps this is not the time, but anyway, there is also the possibility of becoming matron if you reach the specified weight. A
very
responsible job, of use to the community at large and giving you at the end of a long day the satisfaction that you have done some good in the world.”

Vimes looked around at the pink and white faces contemplating a jump into the unknown and continued. “Of course, if you really want to stick with bonnets, then Sybil and I own a decent property in Old Cobblers, in the big city, which is standing empty. Used to be a tough area, but the upwardly mobile trolls and vampires are moving in right now, and the heavy dollar and the dark dollar are not to be sneezed at, especially because they'll pay top dollar for what they want. Quite a sophisticated area, too. People actually put tables and chairs out on the pavement and they
don't always all get stolen
. We could let you have it rent free for three months to see how you do and then maybe you'd have to learn the concept of rent, if only for your self-respect. Trust me, ladies, self-respect is what you get when you don't have to spend your life waiting for some rich old lady to pop her clogs. Any takers?”

Vimes took as an optimistic sign the fact that the girls were staring at one another with what could only be called a wild surmise at the prospect of not being totally useless ornaments, and so he added, “And whatever you do, stop reading bloody silly romantic novels!”

There was, however, a pocket—or possibly purse—of resistance to the revolution. One girl was standing by the curate as if she owned him. She looked at Vimes defiantly and said, “Please don't think me forward, commander, but I'd rather like to marry Jeremy and help him in his ministry.”

“Very good, very good,” said Vimes. “And you love him and he loves you? Speak up, the pair of you.” They both nodded, red with embarrassment, each with one eye on the girl's mother, whose wide grin suggested that would be a definite plus. “Well then, I suggest you get yourselves sorted out, and you, young man, would be advised to find a better-paying job. Can't help you with that, but there are loads of religions these days, and if I were you I'd impress some bishop somewhere with my common sense, which is what a clergyman needs above everything else…Well, nearly everything else, and remember there's room at the top…Although in the case of religion, not right at the top, eh?” Vimes thought for a moment and added, “But maybe the best idea, ladies, might be to take a look around a bit until you find some lad that's got the makings of a successful man, noble or not, and if he suits then get behind him, support him as necessary, help him up when he's down, and generally be around when he looks for you, and make certain that he'll be around when you look for him. Well, if both of you put your backs into it then it might turn out to be something good. It has certainly worked once before, didn't it, Sybil?”

Sybil burst out laughing and the overwhelmed girls nodded dutifully as if they actually understood, but Vimes was gratified to feel a gentle little prod from Lady Sybil that offered hope that he was not going to pay too high a price from his wife for speaking his mind to these precious flowers.

He looked around as if seeking to tidy things up. “Well, that seems to be that, yes?”

“Excuse me, commander?” It took Vimes some time to see where the voice had come from; this daughter hadn't spoken a word all afternoon, but had occasionally scribbled in a notebook. Now she gazed at him with a look somewhat brighter than those of her sisters.

“Can I help you, miss? And perhaps you'll tell me your name?”

“Jane, commander. I am endeavoring to be a writer, may I ask if you have any views on that as an acceptable career for a young lady?”

Jane, thought Vimes, the strange one. And she was. She was just as demure as the other sisters, but somehow as he looked at her he got the impression that she was seeing right through him, thoughts and all.

Vimes leaned back in his chair, a little defensively and said, “Well, it can't be a difficult job, given that all the words have probably been invented already, so there's a saving in time right there, considering that you simply have to put them together in a different order.” That was about the limit of his expertise in the literary arts, but he added, “What sort of thing were you thinking of writing, Jane?”

The girl looked embarrassed. “Well, commander, at the moment I'm working on what might be considered a novel about the complexities of personal relationships, with all their hopes and dreams and misunderstandings.” She coughed nervously, as if apologizing.

Vimes pursed his lips. “Yes. Sounds basically like a good idea, miss, but I can't really help you on that—though if I was you, and this is me talking off the top of my head, I'd be putting in a lot of fighting, and dead bodies falling out of wardrobes…and maybe a war, perhaps, as a bit of background?”

Jane nodded uneasily. “A remarkable suggestion, commander, with much to recommend it, but possibly the relationships would be somewhat neglected?”

Vimes considered this input and said, “Well, you might be right.” Then, out of nowhere, possibly some deep hole, a thought struck him, just as it had many times before, sometimes in nightmares. “I wonder if any author has thought about the relationship between the hunter and the hunted, the policeman and the mysterious killer, the lawman who must think like a criminal sometimes in order to do his job, and may be unpleasantly surprised at how good he is at such thinking, perhaps. Just an idea, you understand,” he said lamely, and wondered where the hell it had come from. Maybe the strange Jane had pulled it out of him and even, perhaps, could resolve it.

“Would anybody like some more tea?” said Ariadne brightly.