13 Bites Volume III (13 Bites Horror Anthology) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Five59 Publishing
Published: 2015-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2. THE COTTAGE

It is a dreary damp late summer day and the coach shudders as wheels crash into pothole after pothole, the degree of depth and danger disguised by the many puddles strewn over the road surface. Lord Ferdinando Briant, pulls back a drawn curtain to glance out of the unglazed coach window. There is little to see as the mist from the fields reduces visibility to less than a few feet past the thick hedgerows. At least, he thinks, there was no low early evening sun to further ravage his ruined face, sensitive as it is to the slightest sunlight, an incurable condition from which he has always suffered. The coach judders once more as another pothole threatens to tear off the wheels and toss his Lordship from his seat. Then the coach finally lurches to a halt.

“Mud, my Lord, ‘tis naught but Sussex clay,” the coachman Handley apologises, while he and his cousin Jones lever the wheel out of the rut. “The land round here were great for growin’ forests, but when they’d cleared the trees for iron smelting, there weren’t nothin’ to suck up the rain water what now lies here, stagnant upon the clay.”

Ferdinando sniffs in reply. The air smells damp, familiarly foul with rot and decay.

“You look tired, my Lord,” Handley ventured quietly, “more than I’ve seen before. Does the time draw near for...”

“Retirement? Aye, I feel my years, John, but I’ll rest up this winter, and maybe work another five years, then we can all go home to stay.”

He consults his trusty watch, made by John Bennett of Clerkenwell, which is rarely out by ten minutes a day. He had set off ten hours earlier, but was necessarily stopped in Swainley, three miles away, for four of those hours. In six hours on the road, the coach had traversed twenty-eight miles of mud, with yet two more miles to go! Nine leagues, faster than walking, he thinks, but barely.

He had left Whitehall the day before, after lunchtime, and had happily travelled thirty-two miles on good roads before arriving at an inn by tea-time; today he would be lucky to arrive at Dellamere Manor Hall before dark. Insufferable roads, he mutters, but travel as this he must; only witches, apparently, travel by broomsticks! He had barely dozed in the bucking coach and was more than ready for a hot meal and quiet bed.

A fat honeybee flies slowly past him, going no faster than his coach has at any single time today, and settles precariously upon a Ragged Robin, gathering nectar, before wriggling free of the bloom and flying off.

Briant smiles at the bee’s movements. Ferdinando loves bees, but he can not yet return to his neglected Cornish estate and his beloved hives; his superstitious King won’t let him retire until infirmity or death renders his service useless to the Crown. Almost 70, according to his Manor’s parish records, the Lord Chief Justice Investigator feels he has earned his rest after fifty years of toil at his career.

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