Unnatural Ends, page 1
Unnatural
Ends
a novel by
Christopher Huang
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2023 Christopher Huang
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Inkshares, Inc., Oakland, California
www.inkshares.com
Edited by Adam Gomolin
Cover design by Tim Barber
Interior design by Kevin G. Summers
ISBN: 9781950301065
e-ISBN: 9781950301058
LCCN: 2021949307
First edition
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Prologue
Part One
Alan
Roger
Caroline
Alan
Alan
Alan
Alan
Roger
Roger
Roger
Roger
Caroline
Caroline
Caroline
Caroline
Mowbray
Part Two
Alan
Alan
Alan
Roger
Roger
Caroline
Caroline
Alan
Roger
Caroline
Mowbray
Part Three
Roger
Roger
Caroline
Alan
Roger
Caroline
Alan
Roger
Caroline
Alan
Mowbray
Part Four
Caroline
Caroline
Alan
Roger
Iris
Roger
Caroline
Alan
Oglander Sr.
Brewster
Lady Linwood
Davey
Miss Whistler
Sir Lawrence Linwood
Mowbray
Epilogue
Historical Notes
Acknowledgements
Grand Patrons
Inkshares
In loving memory of
David Liu
Francis Ow
Mary Ryan
Hans Schweizer
Agatha Wilhelm
Sing Keng Ng
Thomas Ow
“I knew a man,” he said, “who began by worshipping with others before the altar, but who grew fond of high and lonely places to pray from, corners or niches in the belfry or the spire. And once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole world seemed to turn under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he fancied he was God.”
—G. K. Chesterton, “The Hammer of God”
Prologue
August 1903
In the beginning was Linwood Hall, and Linwood Hall was the world.
That was how the Linwood children—Alan, Roger, and Caroline—saw it. The high tower room they’d claimed as their playroom was its centre, a remnant of the Norman ruin from which Linwood Hall had evolved, and from its windows, they could see for miles in every direction. The howling winds brought them heather and gorse and peat smoke, and there was no light but the liquid gold of the sun pouring over the ancient oak plank floors. Immediately to the east, the mossy-roofed village of Linwood Hollow nestled in a bowl-like dip in the landscape, but beyond that and all around was nothing but the wheeling North Sea gulls and the open, windswept expanse of the North Yorkshire moors going on and on and on to forever.
Any conventional means of access to the tower room had long since been lost to some ancestor’s rebuilding zeal. The only way there now was through the servants’ passage, a network of narrow corridors behind the walls, much of it unused and unexplored, to a door hidden behind one of the cabinets in the first-floor linen closet. From there, a staircase wound up through the darkness with steps worn down to a dangerous angle, to arrive finally at the sunlit glory of the tower room—Camelot.
A girl of about seven or eight was hurrying along the passage. She was a graceful child, with eyes so dark, her pupils seemed one with her irises, and long black hair swung down her back in two fat braids. This was Caroline Linwood, and she was imagining herself as the ghost of some historic Linwood, gliding soundlessly through the walls of the house. Her preferred entrance to the passage was a secret panel behind the grand staircase in the great hall, well placed for dramatic disappearances; today, however, she’d had to begin her journey from the kitchen instead, as she’d had to nick something out of the pantry for her play. The kitchen entrance was no more than an open arch—prosaic, unromantic, and no way to stage a dramatic exit—but then, the servants had no call to hide their movements from one another.
Up ahead, behind the tower door, was Roger Linwood, Caroline’s brother, a year and a half older. He was applying axle grease to the door hinges because he’d had quite enough of that door squeaking when they opened it, potentially alerting every servant within earshot. He meant to fix it just as he’d fixed the secret panel from his own room—his favourite entrance to the servants’ passage because it was his own. Caroline didn’t know this, of course. Squeezing behind the linen cabinet, she threw the door open, and the collision was quite enough to squelch any further pretence at being the Ghost of Linwoods Past.
“Oy! Watch where you’re going, you!” Roger frowned down at his sister in a perfect imitation of their father. It was widely known that Sir Lawrence Linwood’s children were all adopted, so no one expected much family resemblance; but Roger, darker even than Caroline and with a hard-to-place exoticism about his features, promised to be at least as tall as Sir Lawrence once he was grown, and his frown really was a perfect imitation of his father in one of his sterner moments. And an imitation was all it was: a moment later, it had melted into a cheerful grin. “What do you think?” he said, nodding at the door. “Smooth as silk, and not a sound. You can do nearly anything with glue and grease, I say.”
“You can do what you like,” Caroline replied, eyeing his grease-stained hands. “Only don’t touch me.”
“As if I’d want to!” Roger shoved his pot of axle grease into a corner. He’d have to return it to the handyman’s workshop before it was missed. For now, he simply bounded up the stairs to the glimmer of sunlight above, shouting to his sister, “Come on! Alan’s waiting for us.”
Alan was the eldest of the three, adopted as Roger and Caroline were, but fair and flaxen-haired. He was lodged in the west window of the tower room, where the afternoon sun outlined his silhouette in gold and made his hair shine like a halo. One long leg swung against the Plantagenet masonry of the tower’s exterior wall as he read from a tome he’d taken from the library on the way up: his favoured entrance to the servants’ passage was through a revolving bookcase there, precisely because he could snatch up some light reading—what he considered “light” reading—on his way up. He was getting too old for their usual games of make-believe, really; but that wasn’t about to stop him from pitching in when his siblings needed him. His role was that of a narrator, directing the story and filling in the bit characters; or, as he put it, “I’m King Arthur.”
“You’re always King Arthur,” Roger complained, though with an undercurrent of good humour. He caught up a bit of rag from the useful detritus of years spent playing in this private Eden and began to wipe the grease from his fingers.
Alan peered owlishly at him over the top of his book. “I was here first,” he said, “and I’m the eldest. So I’m King Arthur.”
“All right, then.” Roger tested his hands on a relatively clean section of his rag, then flung it aside and caught up an old training sword that, unbeknownst to them, ought to have been consigned to a museum long ago. “I’m Lancelot. What about you, Caroline? Guinevere?”
“Guinevere’s no fun,” Caroline said as she untied her braids. She knotted two hanks of hair under her nose and let them fall in a curtain over her mouth, like a long black beard. “I’m Merlin.”
“You can’t be Merlin. You’re a girl.”
“I can so be Merlin. I’ve got a beard.” Caroline held out the prize she’d smuggled from the kitchen: a jar of flour, which she dusted over her “beard.” The effect was slightly spoiled when the flour got up her nose and made her sneeze.
Alan laughed. He shut his book and swung both legs around inside the room. “Caroline can be whoever she wants,” he declared, and Roger acquiesced. Alan’s word was law when he took that tone of finality. “We don’t want another soppy romance, anyroad—”
“Anyway,” Caroline corrected him, then sneezed again.
“Anyway.” Alan inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement. “It sounds as though Morgan le Fay has placed a fiendish sneezing curse on her rival Merlin!”
“Zounds!” cried Roger, brandishing his sword. “The vil
Caroline sneezed, this time for dramatic effect, and they were off.
Outside, the late-afternoon sun descended towards evening, mingling gold with purple heather so even the lowliest scrub blazed with glory. There was nothing above but blue sky, and nothing between the tower and the distant horizon in any direction but the windswept moors. There was nothing outside the tower room that mattered, and nothing inside but Alan and Roger and Caroline, their laughter, and the worlds their words conjured.
Part One
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
—Genesis 1:26
Alan
April 1921
There were better reasons for coming home, Alan supposed, than Father’s funeral. Standing on the platform of the Linwood Hollow railway station, he waited until the train had chugged its way around the bend, then turned towards the village before taking a deep breath of the crisp Yorkshire air. He held it in his lungs, letting Yorkshire diffuse into his being, then expelled the air and, with it, all his previous cares.
It was just past dawn on a clear spring morning, the Monday a week after Easter. The yellow buds were thick and heavy on the gorse, as though someone had spilt an industrial quantity of Colman’s Mustard over the countryside, and their scent, reminiscent of coconuts, made Alan’s nostrils twitch. For the past two years, he’d told anyone who’d listen that it was the other way around, that coconuts gave off a scent reminiscent of gorse—of the Yorkshire moors, of home.
Yes. There were better reasons for coming home.
Linwood Hollow was nestled in what was likely the crater of some prehistoric meteor strike. Alan imagined the event as occurring in the dead of night: a flash of light in the heavens, and then a bolt of flame descending into the wild, primeval world below. The ground shook at its impact, clods of earth thrown up into the air as dust settled over the trembling greenery. Then, in the silence, a barren hole where once there had been a verdant forest, slowly turning verdant itself over the ensuing millennia. The jungle gave way to the moors; tightly furled yews twisted up from the ground within the crater, while clumps of gorse and heather spread along its slopes. And then, in time, came man: first the Celtic Britons coming up from the south to meet the Picts to the north, and then the Danes landing on the coast to the northeast.
Gazing across the valley as it was now, to Linwood Hall, that haphazard, mediaeval jumble of crooked stone walls gathered on the opposite ridge, Alan was struck by a queer sense of familiarity: not the expected familiarity of a man returned to his childhood home, but the familiarity of a parallel experience. After two years of archaeological study in Peru, he’d come to look on his own home with an archaeologist’s eyes, or a historian’s. He saw Linwood Hall as it first began: a hastily constructed military outpost as William the Conqueror harried the north. An inferior brother of Pickering Castle to the south, it consisted of a roughly square keep with an assembly ground surrounded by a wooden palisade and a short tower—Father’s study in the present day—from which the sentries then could oversee the valley. He saw the wooden palisades begin to decay before being shored up and eventually replaced with stone, under Edward I; the assembly ground became a courtyard, the keep expanded in size, and the tall tower, the Camelot of Alan’s childhood, rose up from its centre. Ivy crept over the stone as the fortress fell into disuse. The Wars of the Roses swept by, and then Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, uniting the white rose of York with the red rose of Lancaster in the House of Tudor and gifting, under some obscurely related agreement, this bowl of land and this crumbling fortress to Sir Robert Linwood. The keep expanded still further, turning into the country residence of today. Income from the attached land enabled Edward Linwood, one hundred and twenty-five years later, to obtain a letter patent from King James I, cementing the family’s place as baronets of Linwood.
Edward begat John, John begat William, William begat . . .
Alan descended from the train platform and planted his feet flat against the earth, willing this litany of the Linwoods to flow up from the ground and into his blood. Their deeds flickered in his brain like candle flames as their names flashed by. Thomas. Lawrence. Alan.
He saw the house crumble again in some distant future. The short tower, Father’s study, slid down the cliff into the valley below, the roof caved in—the tall tower remained standing because, even in Alan’s wildest flights of fancy, he could not bear to see Camelot fall.
Man would come again to wonder at this ancient edifice, long after Alan himself was no more than a single stone in a built-up wall of Linwoods. They would wander the roofless halls and emerge onto the broad terrace still clinging to the side of the cliff, and they would look out across the yew-choked valley to where the railway station once was—much as Alan himself had once looked out from Machu Picchu to the distant Urubamba. They would feel, as he did, the cold weight of the centuries bearing down on them, and the ghosts of ancient generations plucking at their sleeves to draw them back.
He could not mourn for what had yet to pass. Nor, he told himself with a sudden fierceness, could he rightly mourn for what had already passed. No. Not if he was truly a part of that litany. History lived on because he lived on. One day he’d pass the torch to his successor, and history would live on still.
Repeating all this to himself, Alan tightened his grip on his suitcase and began his descent into the valley.
Roger
The road from Pickering wound north through miles of broad, open moorland. Once clear of the town’s limits, Roger floored the accelerator and let the beast within the motorcar he’d built himself come into its own. The roar thrummed through his feet and his fingers; the noonday sun warmed every exposed inch of his face, and the wind, scented with an earthy mixture of gorse and sheep, scoured it clean. He kept up the speed, flying down the road as smoothly as through the air, until he reached the bowl-like valley in which was nestled the village of Linwood Hollow. Here, he pulled to a stop at the side of the road and got out to survey the lay of the land.
The ground fell away at his feet here, sharply down to the valley. One step further, and he’d be flying free—he had to remind himself that such a step would never be followed by another. Linwood Hall was perched on the opposite ridge, a jumble of grey stone walls pockmarked with tall, narrow windows. French doors had been punched into the ground floor sometime in the last century; they gave onto a broad terrace cantilevering over the cliff. A tall tower, the Camelot of Roger’s childhood, rose up from the middle of the house, while the uneven, crumbling wall of the courtyard swept out along the ridge to a short tower whose stone footing extended halfway down the cliff side. That short tower was where Father had his study; its one window winked at Roger now from across the valley. Caught between them, the stone houses of the village sent up lazy wisps of smoke from crooked chimneys over clay-shingled roofs dotted with clumps of black moss.
“There’s the inn,” he said, pointing to the largest of the village buildings. “The Collier’s Arms. You can just see the sign over its door from here—a pair of pickaxes crossed under a lantern. Linwood has never had anything to do with coal mining, but I expect no one cares as long as the taps don’t run dry.” He glanced back into the car. “It isn’t Mayfair, but you don’t mind, do you?”
He was speaking to Iris Morgan, the girl who would have been his fiancée if the news of Father’s passing hadn’t put a damper on his plans to propose. She was a dainty little thing, and in her natural state, it might have been said that she was plain; but Iris was never quite in her natural state. Under her cloche hat, her hair was fashionably bobbed and woven through with an artful finger curl, and her dress, though sober for the occasion, was of a smart and elegant cut. She was a bright, modern creature—cosmopolitan London to her core and as far as one could get from the muddy trenches Roger refused to remember. And if she was out of place in rural Yorkshire, that was only until Linwood Hollow caught up with the world. Modernity came for everything sooner or later.
