Tidetown by Robert Power

proportions and gambling. So, without exactly knowing the how or the why of it, Biddie became Mrs M, and Jack found a willing bedfellow and domestic. Soon Mrs M began to yearn for a child. But her husband drank and gambled and she always believed that the seed in him (the seed she accepted in the hope of a bonny babe of her own) was weakened and fallow, the life sucked out of it by all the time spent in inns and gambling dens. Then one day two mighty-sized men banged on their door, asking her to present the stumpy legs of her husband so they could break them with the hefty mallets they carried. While Mrs M, still the dutiful wife, remonstrated with the debt-collecting scoundrels, Mr M disappeared through the pantry window, huffed and puffed his way across the meadow behind their cottage and was never heard of nor seen again.
    â€˜That’s enough for me in the man department,’ said Mrs M to anyone who cared to hear her view on the subject. When the job as live-in assistant cook at the mayor’s residence became vacant she applied and was successful. True to form she worked hard and resolutely, learning quickly from Mrs Buckley, the incumbent cook. ‘Hearty food here, Mrs M,’ said Mrs B. ‘Wholesome, nutritious and plentiful.’ Meals were made up of local fare and produce: leafy greens, earthy tubers, succulent meats. She learned to make pies and tarts, soups and soufflés. On occasions, a man (a tradesman or traveller, never a house guest) would take an interest in her, but they would receive short shrift. Yet when Joshua started to appear at the kitchen door, with his quirky ways and peculiar looks, she found herself looking forward to his visits. He would arrive at varying times of day with gossip and tales, opinions and news. At first she would give him a glass of water to quench his thirst. Then it would be a tankard of porter or a piece of pie. After a month or so, quite imperceptibly at first, she found herself keeping back a delicacy or two, or a portion of a special dish, just in case he should pass by. ‘Look,’ she would say, ‘I just happen to have a slice of veal and ham pie. It has the egg yolk in the middle. How would you fancy that with a tomato and a slice of beetroot?’
    She began to notice herself paying attention to her hair in the mirror in the mornings as she got ready. She even became aware of a coquettish lilt to her laugh as Joshua told her stories of his day. But as time passed she came to realise that he was oblivious to her fancy; his talk always of the mayor doing this, the mayor saying that. And so their relationship found a level beyond any hopes of romance, settling on a comfortable complicity.

    â€˜The mayor himself has vouchsafed your release into the community,’ says the governor, sitting opposite Perch and Carp in their barren cell. She is waiting for a reaction, yet has come to expect none. They turn in unison and look at the governor with a gaze that mingles triumph with disdain, confidence with indifference.
    When she first received the letter from the Director of Provincial Gaols decreeing the twins to be the prisoners to be released on the seventh of January she was quite shocked. Following on from her first meeting with Perch and Carp she took the time to read copies of all the correspondence that had passed between them and Angelica. Their growing obsession with the ephemeral Archangel worried the governor. Their letters contradicted what she had heard from them regarding their move away from obscure cults and teachings. Even if, as she suspected, Carp was under Perch’s control, it did not diminish the potential danger of the two in the community. So she wrote back immediately, carefully, respectfully (for the Director of Provincial Gaols was a pompous man) listing her deep concerns and doubting the suitability of the twins for release. The one-line reply she received was from the director’s personal assistant instructing