Snuff

Sybil, who had been reading, nudged her husband without looking up from her book and said, ‘It’s customary to give Mister Coffin a penny. In the old days my grandfather kept a little charcoal brazier in the coach, you know, in theory to keep warm but mostly to heat up pennies to red heat before picking them up in some tongs and tossing them out for the gatekeeper to catch. Apparently everybody enjoyed it, or so my grandfather said, but we don’t do that any more.’

Vimes fumbled in his purse for some small change, opened the carriage door and stepped down, much to the shock of the aforesaid Mr Coffin, who backed away into the thick undergrowth, watching Vimes like a cornered animal.

‘Nice job, Mister Coffin, very good lifting of the latch there, excellent work.’ Vimes proffered the coin and Mr Coffin backed further away, his stance suggesting that he was going to bolt at any moment. Vimes flicked the coin in the air and the fearful man caught it, deftly spat on it and melted back into the scenery. Vimes got the impression that he resented the lack of hiss.

‘How long ago did your family stop throwing hot money at the servants?’ he said, settling back into his seat as the coach progressed.

Sybil laid aside her book. ‘My father put a stop to it. My mother complained. So did the gatekeepers.’

‘I should think so!’

‘No, Sam, they complained when the custom was stopped.’

‘But it’s demeaning!’

Sybil sighed. ‘Yes, I know, Sam, but it was also free money, you see. In my great-grandfather’s day, if things were busy, a man might make sixpence in a day. And since the old boy was almost permanently sozzled on rum and brandy he quite often threw out a dollar. One of the real old-fashioned solid-gold dollars, I mean. A man could live quite well for a year on one of those, especially out here.’

‘Yes, but—’ Vimes began, but his wife silenced him with a smile. She had a special smile for these occasions; it was warm and friendly and carved out of rock. You had to stop discussing politics or you would run right into it, causing no damage to anything but yourself. Wisely, with a wisdom that had been well learned, Sam Vimes restricted himself to staring out of the window.

With the gate far behind he kept looking, in the fading light, to see the big house that was apparently at the centre of all this, and couldn’t find it until they had rattled along an avenue of trees, past what some wretched poet would have had to call ‘verdant pastures’ dotted with almost certainly, Vimes considered, sheep, through manicured woodland, and then reached a bridge that would not have been out of place back in the city.³ The bridge spanned what Vimes first thought was an ornamental lake but turned out to be a very wide river; even as they trundled over it, in dignified splendour, Vimes saw a large boat travelling along it by some means unknown, but which, to judge from the smell as it went past, must have something to do with cattle. At this point Young Sam said, ‘Those ladies haven’t got any clothes on! Are they going to have a swim?’

Vimes nodded absently because the whole area of naked ladies was not something you wanted to discuss with a six-year-old boy. In any case, his attention was still on the boat; white water churned all around it and the seamen on the deck made what was possibly a nautical gesture to Lady Sybil or, quite possibly, one of the naked ladies.

‘That is a river, isn’t it?’ said Vimes.

‘It’s the Quire,’ said Lady Sybil. ‘It drains most of the Octarine grass country and comes out in Quirm. If I recall correctly, however, most people call it “Old Treachery”. It has moods, but I used to enjoy those little riverboats when I was a child. They really were rather jolly.’

The coach rumbled down the far end of the bridge and up a long drive to, yes, the stately home, presumably so called, Vimes thought, because it was about the size of the average state. There was a herd of deer on the lawn, and a big herd of people clustered around what was obviously the front door. They were shuffling into two lines, as though they were a wedding party. They were, in fact, some kind of guard of honour, and there must have been more than three hundred there, from gardeners through to footmen, all trying to smile and not succeeding very well. It reminded Vimes of a Watch parade.

Two footmen collided while endeavouring to place a step by the coach, and Vimes totally spoiled the moment by getting out of the opposite door and swinging Lady Sybil down after him.