Tomato Wyrm: Part 1

A short story in serial

I started writing this just as a way to keep my hands moving while I have to take a break from the heavier work of finishing a novel which is also the completion of a trilogy. So many plot threads to keep track of, like a complicated weaving. But I can’t not write, so here is what will be a short story when I’m done with it.

Beginnings

Behind the door at Number 53, Waterloo Road, a young man dreamed of tomatoes. He was turning over the pages of a seed catalog, not really focusing on the words. Just the juicy, red, vivid globes of promises the photographs made of summer harvests he was old enough to know were improbable. His mouth watered. Even knowing he was unlikely to be able to grow the show-stopping beauties the catalog displayed, he knew he’d be able to grow tomatoes ripe and luscious that summer. The thought made him hungry.

He looked up from his pleasant task and out the small window of his flat. There wasn’t much to see. A thick layer of snow covered the tiny balcony where his pots of tomatoes would stand in a few months, and he knew from trying to walk out there it was ice under the deceptive fluff. Beyond the balcony was a heavy fog, obscuring the sad fact that he did not have a view, unless you counted the wall of the next building over.

Now he dreamed of green vistas which would belong to him. A real garden, with trellises and beds, and the grass growing wildly as spring arrived. He would have peas, and carrots, and of course jonquils to brighten the walkways. He looked down at the catalog again, turning over the pages and passing beyond the realms of his tomato containers, into the idylls of potential turnips, young and crisp and apple-like in their sweetness. He sighed, and closed up the catalog and banished the unreachable to a dusty box in his mental attic.

***

Lady Cecilia Duringhurst, Sissy to her friends, put her car in park and stared through the rain-shirred windshield at the slushy mess in front of her. Driving up the long winding driveway had been all she could manage, and that only with the aid of the all-wheel drive land rover she’d been advised to rent for the trek into the hinterlands. She had a manor house. Sissy put her head on the steering wheel and took a deep breath. None of this felt real. It couldn’t be real. No one lived like this any more. It was a way of life that had fallen in World War II along with the best and bravest of England’s men.

Except, evidently, her long-lost Great-uncle, who had died at the ripe old age of 101 and left her... this. Sissy, the last of the Duringhurst line, had inherited everything. Her father had died only last year, her stepmother was a lovely flutter of a woman but not a Duringhurst, so it all fell on Sissy.

She opened the door and stepped out carefully into the slush. There had been a heavy snowfall, but it was melting almost as fast as it had fallen. The sun was still hiding its head behind the clouds and the prospect of her new home was as grey and dreary as could be. The one bright spot at the moment was looking up at a small manor house, not one of the sprawling monstrosities which would have been converted to a hospital, left behind with modern constructions, and abandoned to ruin. No, this was the house where Rhisiart Leith Duringhurst, Lord Welston had been born, lived, and died. It had been too small, too remote, for any real interest during the War, and in the long years since then her Great-Uncle’s pocket had not stretched to more than the essential maintenance, she supposed. Sissy pulled the big iron key out of her pocket and advanced toward the door with determination.

Here almost on the border with Wales, an older manor would have been closer to a keep in build, but this one, she’d been informed, was a mere three hundred years old, and so it was a sturdy rectangle of the native warm-grey stone with some brick, and only two stories tall with no tower. The windows were wide and should let in light, unlike some of the older dwellings with their arrow-slit narrow first floor windows allowing for offense and defence during the era of border raids. Sissy knew the electrics would be questionable, the plumbing nominally indoors, and the whole thing draughty.

The key turned in the door with a minimum of fuss and bother, telling her by its lack of protesting rusty screech that someone had oiled the lock for her. Which made sense, as she’d been expected. The door swung open and she stepped inside into total darkness. After a moment to let her eyes adjust for the faint light streaming through the still-open door behind her, she found a switch, and discovered that the electrics were working. Sissy closed the door and looked around.

She was in a small foyer, cluttered with a hall-stand which held boots, an ancient oil coat which had to have belonged to her Great-Uncle, complete with leather-patched elbow just visible on the side near her where the canvas had worn through. Other, less identifiable, garments hung on it as well. There was a bench with house-slippers and shoes stuffed under it. Nothing had been touched since his passing, she guessed. Doors led in three directions from the foyer into the house, and the stairs were straight ahead of her, leading upwards into shadowy darkness. The light for the upper landing had a switch on the wall at the foot of the stairs, Sissy deduced, then confirmed when she pressed it and illuminated the upstairs. A wallpaper of a bygone day, depicting pheasants and hunting dogs, lined the wall of the stairs. The foyer was papered with a chintz floral in greens and yellows, and a Oriental art nouveau design that might have been a William Morris. Nothing modern about Great Uncle’s tastes!

Smiling now, Sissy took the right-hand door and discovered that she was in the sitting room at the front of the house. Her nose told her it was stuffy and musty, even before she switched on the lights and saw that it was a small, squarish room with plastered outer walls badly in need of new paint. Overstuffed armchairs stood to either side of a small Victorian fireplace. One was piled with books. The other had a rug draped over it, and the impression that someone had sat it in it for many years leaving the outline of his body. The inner walls of the room were lined in bookshelves. One of the windows offered a deep bay seat, currently occupied by a very hairy dog bed. Sissy wondered what had happened to the dogs.

She retreated, switching off the lights, and tried the door to the other side of the foyer. This turned out to be the dining room, currently swathed in dust sheets and from the looks of them, badly needed. The dust was heavy and visible from the doorway. The china cabinets were almost opaque with dust over the glassed doors. Sissy didn’t even go all the way into the room. It was clear it had been unused for a very long time. The final door on the main floor, then was the kitchen. There was a heavy trestle table, and honest-to-god Aga stove, and through the kitchen to the left, a tiny bathroom in what might have been the still-room in ages past.

For a manor house, Sissy thought, standing with her hands on her hips staring at a refrigerator older than her parents, it was terribly small. So much better than her fears had made it. She could maintain this. Had it been a sprawling place meant for live-in servants... She shivered. The house heat, if it had central, hadn’t been put on. She would have to figure that out, if she were going to live here.

There were rooms she hadn’t yet seen. She pulled herself together, and explored further. Behind the sitting room, she discovered, was a study, fully lined with bookcases aside from the two windows. Between the dining and the kitchen was a scullery. The window at the end of this long, narrow utility room showed her a good view of the barn and stables, which had been converted to a garage.

Sissy stood at the bottom of the stairs, with her hand on the wooden newel, smooth with the use of centuries, and contemplated the deeply worn wooden steps. She could see the scratches of dog’s nails. The house smelled doggy, but faintly. Her Great-Uncle had been dead for six months. What had happened to his dogs? Had any still been living here? He’d had a carer, the solicitor had mentioned, who received a small bequest for her years of faithful service.

Sissy climbed up the stairs, with their wide, shallow design, appreciating the beauty of them. The house was well-designed. Not, she thought, a named architect, but someone practical who had planned for the place to be lived in. As she reached the top of the stairs and looked around and then down into the foyer, she had a sense this house had been loved.