The Burleigh Town Guide

 

by Allritas

allritas@yahoo.com

 

 

 

This story was inspired by Susan Foster, Terry Pratchett, and Jane Austin – really.  Thanks to Suzanne and Atymer for their encouragement, and to BAW for correcting some historical inaccuracies in chapter one. 

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

Climbing up the attic stairs to his new office in the town hall, Blair realized that he was going to have to make a lot of house calls.  The bare wooden treads were a bit uneven, the risers were set high to make the narrow stairwell reach to the bell tower above his room, and the handrail unaccountably stopped after the first ten feet.

 

He rested at his door for a moment in anticipation, savoring the smells of scorched dust and beeswax, admiring the rafter joists, basking in the pleasure of being a newly appointed guide with his own office in his own parish.

 

In the small room, Blair found a desk, a chair, and a candlestick.  "They must think a lot of their guide here," he thought happily.  The chair was sturdy and comfortable and the little dormer window over his left shoulder lit up the broad low desk.  It had two drawers for his own possessions - a slate, chalk, his journal, two pieces of vellum, five goose quills, an inkwell and pot, blotter, his Bible, flint and steel, two tallow candles, a tin cup, and his pocketknife.

 

What else would he need?  Now that he was a settled man, he could acquire things that were not so easily carried on the back, things that were kept simply for the pleasure in it - like his new slippers - things that were too precious to chance ruining in the mud and dust of a traveling life.

 

"Just last week," thought Blair, "I had never heard of this town."  He had arrived on foot on Thursday evening at the King's Head, a mile outside of Burleigh, where the prospective guides were told to present themselves bright and early the next morning for their first round of interviews with the town council.

 

He couldn't really tell what kind of an impression he was making, but there was no time to worry, because after the first interview there followed a second, then lunch, interview number three, a whirlwind tour of Burleigh, a fourth interview, dinner, and the evening interview.  By the time he crawled into bed on Friday, his jaw felt wobbly and his tongue ached.  "Can you sprain your mouth?" he wondered, but he hadn’t worked out the answer before he fell sound asleep.

 

Saturday started out the same way – Blair didn’t think that he had any answers left in him -  but finally even the councilmen were looking bored.  At midafternoon they announced that the ordeal was over, and drove the four guides into Burleigh for a get-together with the townspeople at the village hall.

 

The guides were seated at a table on a small stage overlooking the locals, who were chatting with their neighbors while serving girls passed huge platters of food and jugs of ale up and down the aisles. More people qued up to file past the guides – asking questions, offering small gifts, and continuously replenishing their visitors’ plates and their tankards.

 

Blair couldn’t form any opinion of the other two men who had applied for the job - they had been kept mostly apart from each other - but the lone woman candidate had had too much to drink already, and she was only pretending not to agree with the lavish praise that a town elder was bestowing on her.

 

Even though he might not be chosen, again, there would be invitations to other places.  He would not stoop to boasting or acting mysterious to improve his chances.  Blair considered his talents to be different from, but no more amazing than, say, the beautiful pair of slippers that the shoemaker had just presented to him.  “Put me in a cobbler’s shop and see what kind of shoes I would turn out,” he thought, admiring the tiny even stitches on the soles.

 

Blair liked what little he had seen of this town and hoped they chose wisely. Guides and sentinels were rare and their upkeep was costly.  It was a gamble for the town in other ways, too. 

 

The guide’s talent was empathy.  He or she couldn’t read thoughts, but rather emotions, although many people couldn’t understand the difference.  Although born with their gift, the guide’s empathic abilities were weak until they reached young adulthood and were bonded with another rarity called a sentinel.

 

The sentinel’s own gift was mastery of the five senses.  “Other five,” amended Blair.  A sentinel could see a blade of grass miles away, hear an ant marching in that grass, smell game that had passed through the woods hours beforehand, feel the air as if it were alive, and taste the smallest atom of poison.

 

It wouldn’t seem obvious at first that these two extremes of mankind would be essential to each other, but they were.  A sentinel sometimes sent his very soul out exploring with his senses, and only his bonded guide could call it back to his body.  Likewise, everyone knew that a guide’s spirit stretched out all around him the way thistledown surrounded its seed.  It was how a guide could read other people’s emotions and find his sentinel’s spirit when it wandered, but it left the guide’s own spirit undefended and easily damaged.  A guide’s sentinel was his refuge and support.  “All the kings horses and all the kings men,” thought Blair distractedly, as he turned to greet another parishioner.

 

Sentinels would be coming in the spring to compete for guide and town, and the villagers would have to live with their decisions for a lifetime. For one thing, the pair acted as watchmen, with the town as both jury and appeal. Of course, guides were just as likely to be counseling bickering neighbors and grieving parents, and mostly they worked behind the scenes smoothing out difficulties before anyone had time to notice.  Village sentinels did their share of backstage work as well, having a word with abusive husbands, culling rabid animals, and warning people to batten down their shutters while thunderstorm were still miles at sea.

 

The pair had to be a good match to each other as well as their community for they would live in one place for the rest of their lives.  “Like moss,” thought Blair, “cemented to one rock.  How do the old stories go?”  The wind sends the seed in the fall and it lands on fertile soil, emerging in the spring as a green shoot, firmly planted in the ground.  It grows into a tree - usually a fruit or nut tree, depending on which part of the country the storyteller was from - but the rest was always the same.  The graceful pear or spreading chestnut shelters the land, gives of it’s bounty, and connects the earth to the sky above, while the earth nurtures and supports its benefactor. “Hmm, I think I am more of a nut man myself,” Blair decided.

 

The sentinel part of the story had a lot more variations. An owl, an eagle, any bird important in local folklore would build its nest in the tree.  Or a mouse, a mole- go figure - or a snake would burrow down close to its roots for shelter. Maybe a hunter would claim the tree, build his house in its shade, and till the soil. “Kind of literal, that one.”  In what Blair thought were much older versions, the tree’s companion was the rain or the sun.  He was lucky to have heard the sun tale from an old, old man.  It had fallen out of favor, not only because it smacked of blasphemy, but also because in this story the sun had the power of life and death over the land.  “It really is a fascinating subject.  Someone should write the old stories down.”

 

He looked up and saw an elderly couple waving their palms in front of his face. Apparently they had been trying to get his attention for a little while.  After a few minutes of the usual chatter  - weather, wheat, and the chances that Burleigh would beat its neighbor in football the following week  - he asked them if they knew any of the local folk tales hereabouts.  Their eyes lit up.  And so he spent much of the afternoon with the oldest members of the parish – who pulled up chairs on the other side of the dais and told him their favorite stories, only stopping to argue with each other about the ‘correct’ telling.  He wished he had thought to bring his journal along with him to town.

 

Finally, the last morsel of goose was finished off, the last pie sampled, and the ladies were clearing away the dishes.  Still, hardly anyone moved from their seats – and certainly none of the guides.  The council was headed outside to consider their verdict, stopping here and there to collect the last minute opinions of their fellow men.  The ladies were not consulted, but the wives had dictated many of their husband’s opinions to them earlier in the afternoon.

 

Now the hum of the crowd was growing, and nowhere was it felt quite like it was on stage.  Of course each of the candidates deeply wanted to be the one chosen but at this particular moment they were all united – in nausea.  The continuous waves of excitement from the crowd below were now tidal, overwhelming even to the unbonded guides.  And when no one came forward to lead them outside and instead a trio at the other end of the hall brought out two fiddles and a drum, Blair knew they were in trouble.

 

“Just how long has it been since Burleigh has had a guide?” Blair wondered. “Could it be that they don’t know?”  He looked to his fellow guides for suggestions.  The lady candidate was listing to one side, but otherwise seemed to be feeling no pain.  “Maybe she knew what she was doing with that liquor.”  The other two men were pasty and trembling and would have to be carried out.  “The poor bastards,” Blair thought, “they probably didn’t know what hit them.  Well I’ll just have to get us some help.”

 

Blair struggled to stand, skidding the table out and putting his hand in a pudding on his way upright.  Swaying with the beat of the music, he cleared his aching throat, pointed a dripping finger at a pretty serving girl below, announced that his nuts hurt, and passed out into a raisin pie.

 

 Chapter Two

 

The next thing he knew it was soft and dark, and he thought he must be dead because nothing hurt. “But why would heaven - or even hell for that matter - smell so much like raisins?”

 

He reached up, pulled a few of the sticky things out of his hair, and then froze, remembering just how they had gotten there.  And then his head started to hurt again.  “Well, it was nice of the town to put me up at the inn for one more night.  Very considerate,” Blair thought tiredly as he put on his shoes.  He wondered who had won the job, and whether he would ever find out, because he was going to sneak out of this town tonight and never speak of it again.

 

So it was damned unfair of them to be waiting in the hall.  “C’mon, councilmen,” said Blair, “It’s too far down from my window, and really, I’m doing you all a favor.  Just look the other way for a minute.”  Head down, he had almost made it to the top of the stairs when one of the men grabbed his rucksack, forcing him to look at them.  He needed his pack.

 

The councilmen were looking back at him the way well-fed housecats looked at cornered mice.  “OK, I guess they want me to grovel a little.  It’s time to pay for the room and board one way or the other,” thought Blair. Miller, the councilman who had taken Blair’s backpack, passed it down the line to the last of the seven men, who carefully placed it back in his room and shut the door. “Ouch.” Blair flashed them a sheepish grin, dignity not being an option right now if he wanted to get his stuff back and leave town in good health, and then he tried to pull himself together for his last interview in Burleigh.  It would have helped if his head wasn’t pounding.

 

 

Two of them were talking – to him?  He attempted to look like he was paying attention.  -GREAT HONOR- “Well of course it would have been a great honor, you jerk,” he thought tiredly.  -HARVEST RITES--AUTUMN EQUINOX-  “What are they nattering on about?  Well at least they’re still just talking me to death.  Nice kitties, nice kitties...”  -SURE TO BE BOUNTIFUL, NOW THAT THEY HAD SUCH A PRIZE-  “OK, I’ve changed my mind,” he thought.  “Hit me and shut up.  Just don’t talk any more.”

 

He was jostled out of his daze and he realized that the droning recitation had finally wheezed to a halt, and now everyone was smiling at him in expectation.  “OOO-kay, thought Blair, “I can do that, too.  See?  I am agreeing with whatever you just said.”   After a few minutes spent grinning and bobbing their heads at each other, the mayor took Blair gently by the arm and led him over to a bench in the hall. 

 

“We can’t expect our new guide to be in, um, tip-top shape just yet,” the mayor said quietly to the other councilmen.  “After all, he’s had quite a day.”

 

“Him, too?” yawned Blair aloud, and then he fell back to sleep on the bench.

 

 

Chapter Three

 

“It seems like a long time since Thursday,” thought Blair, sitting at his desk trimming some goose quills.  They wouldn’t lay still; there was a slight current coming from somewhere. “Oh, well.  The air feels good and I have plenty of time to find the hole and fill it in before winter.”  The breeze certainly wasn’t coming from the window.  Not only did it not open, it was chinked and plastered shut in a very definite manner.  What glass had escaped the extra plaster was so dirty from the outside that it gave the effect of rippled milk glass.  “I’ll have to see if I can clean it somehow.”

 

He should go out and get some cleaning and office supplies at the shops, but it was wonderful to just hide out for a while.  There hadn’t been much peace since Saturday afternoon.

 

He remembered that he had spent Sunday trapped in bed.  The troops of women who brought his meals did more to convince him that he had gotten the job than the councilmen’s words ever could.  The ladies fussed, they tidied, and they made him feel like a complete idiot.  He was ‘brave’ at breakfast, ‘sensitive’ at lunch, and ‘the sweetest thing in the world’ according to Maudie, the cheek-pinching grandma who brought gingersnaps for his afternoon tea.

 

By 5:00 he was at wit’s end.  He worried that he would explode if he ate one more little ‘something that I just happened to bake today’ and he knew he would scream if his hair were stroked one more time.  “Maybe I should cut off my ponytail and just hand out locks as souvenirs,” Blair thought.  “As long as they promise to go home and pet it.  Aargh!”

 

“Hey, where’d everybody go?” he whispered, realizing that he was unaccountably alone. As he tiptoed across the floor to see if his bedside chair would work as a doorjamb, he heard the voice of the innkeeper’s wife coming from the foot of the stairs.

 

“Master Sandburg wishes to thank all of you ladies for your kindness and consideration in making him feel welcome in his new home,” announced Mrs. Keaton.

 

“Huh?” thought Blair.

 

“Master Sandburg is sorry that he could not visit with all of you today-“

 

“What, there’s more of them?”

 

“- but he is looking forward to meeting with all of you very soon. Our guide wishes to retire early this evening-“

 

“Oh, yes!  Well done, Mrs. Keaton!”

 

“- and he is sure that all of you would understand.”

 

  

Blair understood that he would have done a tango with the innkeeper’s wife if she weren’t downstairs shooing out the last of the ladies.  He hadn’t realized that he was allowed to make announcements.  Being ‘somebody’ was going to take a little getting used to.  Humming one of the tunes from the banquet, he fetched his journal out of his pack and sat down at his bedside table, trying to remember which lady went with which name and more importantly, which dessert.

 

Monday and Tuesday he was driven all over the county during the day - meeting with farmers and mill workers, thatchers and tanners, the ladies of the almshouse, and most of the country gentlemen.  The lord of the manor house had gone up to London on business and wouldn’t be home for the foreseeable future.  Both evenings were spent dining formally at the invitations of councilmen, followed by rounds of beer at the inn with townsmen who had waited for his return.

 

This morning, he was picked up by the churchwarden and taken to morning services, followed by a huge breakfast with the Reverend Haley and his wife and children.  “I’m going to have to get more exercise if I have to keep up this pace,” Blair thought as he pushed away from the table.  “They’re feeding me like I was the Christmas goose.”  He deferred an invitation to go along with the reverend on parish visits, as he finally had an errand of his very own to run this morning.  Mayor Bodmer had told him about the guide’s office at last night’s dinner and had presented him with a key.

 

Looking around again he found another reason why he was so pleased with the little room.  It was the only thing in town that he could call his own.  No one had talked to him yet about a dower house or a salary, and he was hoping that the matter would finally come up at this afternoon’s council meeting.  If it didn’t, he would have to speak privately to the mayor.  Right now he felt like an imposter, assuming the responsibilities and privileges of a gentleman while living on charity at the local inn.  He had never owned much - checking his pockets he found five small coins and a packet of Maisie’s wonderful ginger snaps – and he was a little surprised to find how much he wanted his own home. 

 

The little gravelly voice that had been whispering in his head for the last two days butted in again. “ I don’t think the council’s oversight was accidental, my little vyusher, do you?  They’re English; it stands to reason they’d try to put you in your place.  Don’t take it too hard, chavvie,” murmured the old Uncle Bijel of his memories, “They can’t help it; it is their baxt.  And you see, it’s just like I told you - they do things by not doing them, they say anything except what they mean, they even lie to themselves.”

 

He remembered Bijel making the gestures to ward off evil over both of their heads before the caravan would enter a new town.  As a child he was not allowed to help with the bartering or even speak to the gage, even though as a foundling, he was probably one himself.  “Don’t worry about it,” Bijel would say, “You look like us, you think like us, and no Englander bastard could dance the cante jondo like you do.  Your parents were foreigners, God willing.”

 

He had lived in the caravans from about age seven, when one of the drivers found him alongside the road to Trent, until his beloved Uncle Bijel died when Blair was sixteen.  He had been too old to be accepted by the rest of the close-knit group – even at seven - and after the old man was gone, Blair had no reason to stay and only one place to go. “Oh, Bijeli, you old softie,” thought Blair, “all your warnings and just look at me now.  Hey, maybe you are.  Are you shaking your finger at me from a cloud somewhere? And were you surprised at who else they let in?”

 

Blair remembered that when he had set out on his journey, he was surprised to find the English to be very much like the rom, even down to the same prejudices.  He learned not to speak of his background if he wanted to get work, and slowly he made his way to Cambridge, hoping to be accepted at the guide school there. He had the talent, and Uncle Bijel had left him some money, but when he arrived at Cambridge he quickly discovered that it wasn’t nearly enough.  Most of the guides were sponsored by their hometowns or counties in exchange for future services and a few families could afford to send their own children but the only way Blair could see himself getting into the building was through the servants’ entrance.

 

It ended up taking him awhile to get even that far.  Starting out in the stables, he moved closer to the building as a gardener, and then finally worked his way inside, where it was only marginally warmer and dryer – Blair hated the cold – but at least he could borrow textbooks to read between errands.  “I wonder what the good people of Burleigh would think if they found out I learned most of my law and Latin in a broom closet.”  One of the professors took an interest in the industrious servant and eventually lent him the money to complete his studies.  “Six years to get a bachelor’s degree and one year of interviews after that, and I still owe Prof. Dunn for senior tuition. Yet another reason I must speak to the mayor.”

 

‘But can you manage the Englander trick of asking for money without seeming to care about it in any way?’

 

”Very funny, Uncle Bijel. Get out of my head!”

 

A quite dreadful thought occurred to Blair.  “Maybe the council isn’t dragging its heels to prove a point or because they forgot.  Maybe they have changed their minds.  The contract hasn’t been signed yet, and even though it’s usually just a formality, it’s also the first thing done after a choosing.  Did you mess up the ceremony by taking a dive into the table, or could they be using that as an excuse to reconsider?”  Oh, no.  He simply couldn’t bear to think of it.  If Burleigh backed out at this late date, he would be ruined.   No other town would consider a guide who had been chosen and then rejected.  “Could I have offended them somehow?  Did they say yes and then realize that they needed a more experienced guide?  Don’t panic, of course none of the other candidates has any experience either– yet.  Still, a guide who had grown up in the country would understand most of the local customs and taboos.  They would have participated in planting and harvest rites.  Unlike, say, you they would probably know if they were trampling all the baby turnips.”

 

All he knew of ‘farming life’, apart from his proficiency with horses, was that there was too much of it between towns, and that it sometimes provided travelers with foodstuffs fresh off the vine.  Oh, wait; he did know one of their quaint customs – the flail thing.  Any strange male caught in a farmer’s field was chased out with flails or belts or any farm implement that came to hand, not for the obvious and sane reason that the stranger had an armful of cabbage, but because the farmers believed that the chase itself – and any drops of blood the runner might be induced to part with – would guarantee abundance to the field.  Really.  They believed in that kind of muck in the country.  “And it was always me.  No matter how many of us were in a field, it was always me they chased,” muttered Blair aloud.

 

 “T’was the red hair – extra lucky,’ chortled Bijel, “Just be grateful it’s gotten darker over the years.”

 

“So, how many crop failures do you think I could have set in motion in the last two days, Uncle Bijel?  I’ve been carelessly crossing the paths of black cows and I have utterly failed to dance around the millstone three times backward in my nightshirt.  Last night was a full moon, too.  Maudie would have gotten a kick out of it.”  He spent a cheerful minute mentally dancing a gavotte in the moonlight with old Maudie - around the mill, under the bridge, and into the creek.  The thought cheered him up considerably.

 

He could try asking the farmers themselves for pointers. ‘Oh, pardon me, Squire, is that an important symbol dripping from your barn door?’  Yeah, he could just see it.  Well, if he was the town guide he had better learn the local customs fast - “Why, oh why wasn’t there a class in this stuff at school?” - and if he wasn’t, then he promised himself that he would move to a big city where cabbages were found in markets.

  

 

Chapter Four

 

Blair was brought out of his reveries by the sounds of a crash followed by yelling both coming from outside.  Hurrying down the stairs, he thought he would see what the excitement was about and also whether he could clean his window from the outside of the town hall without hanging too much of himself into thin air.   He didn’t much like heights either.

 

Blair gained a little too much momentum on the steep staircase and when he reached the bottom he grabbed the doorframe and swung out the town hall door- straight into darkness.  It was a soft, quivering, spongy sort of darkness, smelling of sheets on the wash line and lavender.  In fact, it was rather lovely.

 

Taking a cautious step back, he saw that he was, yes, holding a well-rounded pair of berks, and looking up - oh no, they belonged to the mayor’s wife. 

 

“Good morning, Mrs. Body, uh, BODMER. I am so, so sorry for my uh… Are you all right?” Blair asked.

 

“Two for the guide!” 

 

“Fast work, Master Sandburg!”

 

The noise had turned out to be teenage boys playing football in the street.  And, of course, the other noise was the mayor’s wife making little gasping sounds.  Oh!  Blair dropped his hands.

 

“Quite, Mister Sandburg.  If you will excuse me,” the lady replied, bustling around him into the hall.  Anyone out in the street would have said that she was the picture of disdain, but Blair could see the corner of her mouth turn up as she brushed past him.

 

“Oh, my,” he thought.

 

“Do you play football, Master Guide, sir?” asked the smallest of the boys, holding out a homemade ball.  The rest of the team looked at Blair doubtfully.  Five of the six were taller than he was, and all of them were built like bulls.