A heavy cloud loomed over the green hills and filled the day with the urgency of rain.
Colours receded below the overcast pall and the meadow’s lush grass was bent southward with dew. There was a storm developing in the air; a crisp burst Autumn wind pulled lowly across the ground and mischievously stole a tea towel from the hoist of the Copperpot inn as it ambled past.
It was a day on the precipice of rain.
Nine-bottles sniffed the air and shivered as speckled droplets drummed against the front windows of the Copperpot inn. His family had inherited the accountancy of this inn eight generations ago, and the neatly brushed brown and white rat felt an odd sense of pride in continuing the tradition of balancing the books accurately–of course, every accountant has to accept a level of partial inaccuracy when it comes to unimportant things such as cheese and the stocks of which that may occasionally return a check sum error.
He was happy. He had developed a pleasant accord with the owner, Errol Grangly, and he was getting along famously with the new chef, despite the initial discussions of food hygiene and his occasional naps on the soda-bread in the afternoon. He had his health, his home was tidy, and over the last five years, he had managed to decorum with the world that a badger had once described to him as being “hygge”. Yes, Nine-bottles was safe in the knowledge that he was content with life. So when the rain would patter about in distraction of ruining a picnic, or when Errol would dim the lanterns for lack of customers, the little rat would lay contentedly atop his empty pin cushion, and he would fall asleep dreaming the joyful dream of a job well done.
But today it all felt off in a way that Nine-bottles was unable to put a whisker on.
He had been running through strategies for a later game of chess against his blacksmith friend, but his thoughts were proving to be crumbly. No matter how much he concentrated, there was nagging doubt that lingered at his back of attention; it was like a faint itch that he really hoped wasn’t the beginnings of fleas.
Washing his face and paws in a puddle atop the chimney, the accountant shook his head and attempted to restart his thoughts. The tax season was done, all the columns added up to their requisite sums, the tax-collector even seemed happy. What more was there to worry about? He checked his cheese cellar, he checked the second cellar that the new chef hadn’t discovered yet, he even made the perilous scamper up to the wind vane to make sure that his ancestor’s heirloom drafting pencil was still hidden away and undamaged. Something was wrong, that much he knew.
Descending into the thatch roof and doing his best to not look at the ground, the rat accountant went through the base finances again in his head. Three-hundred-sixty days of trading with four days marked as off under cleaning; ten days taken as holiday by Errol, with none yet used by Myles…
The realisation had stuck him like a bag of marbles. Myles the chef, Myles the new employee, Myles the damn fool who had forgotten to sign the tax declaration.
The duke’s tax collector was new as well, she couldn’t have known that Nine-bottles was missing a form; but why did she pause in that curious way before giving her complements to the chef? It was an inquisitive pause, one with more meaning in its silence than the words that followed. She had an off manner to her speech that caused Nine-bottles to shiver upon its remembrance and he suddenly wondered if she knew that she had caught him. Oh dear, the little rat thought as he began to hyperventilate, there was an audit coming, what else had he forgotten?
Exactly one week later, the tax-collector had returned.
With a menacing politeness, Malissa DeGrand, booked a sensibly priced room and then asked to speak with the accountant.
‘You want the accountant?’ said Errol Garngly, in the sensibly gruff way that he answered most questions with. He had never encountered a person actually want to talk to Nine-bottles, and, unsure of the legality of having a rat perform his finances, Errol had decided to play a straight bat.
‘I will have to ask for him next time he calls,’ he lied poorly, himself having very little experience in untruths–a man that was as tall and as broad shouldered as Errol usually got by with speaking plainly in situations that required lying. Errol blinked and had a brief vision of a snake watching a rabbit caught in a snare. The tax-collector had a breathless intensity as she watched him; she considered he every word judiciously and appeared to lean upon his every sentence as if waiting for Errol to fill the silence.
‘Yes, Nine-bottles, I believe its name is.’ she began as the silence had begun to wail, ‘Don’t worry though, I know that they are a rat,’ Malissa said with distaste laboured around her pronunciation of rat, ‘I’ve delt with their type before.’
There was a tension that Errol noticed to exude from the tax collector, it was as if she were made of elastic bands and one wrong word would lead her to twang at you with the full force of the duke’s finest guardsmen. He had never been one to presume a person’s habits, but the old barman wondered if Malissa was the type who measured how much was in her ink well before she began writing.
‘I’m not one to stand in the way of the lad up in the castle, but we’ve an honest rat here at the Copperpot, Mam. He’s proud of his work and his family have been here longer than I have.’
‘That’s what I’d like to discuss with him, Mr Garngly,’ Malissa intercut with an efficiency of words that could boil water at fifteen paces. ‘It appears, Mr Grangly, that you do not own the Copperpot Inn. And if you would like to observe the current title deed, of which I have verified multiple times, a Mr Dennis Highburrow, now deceased, owns this inn.’
‘And so now it appears,’ she paused again, as daring Errol to finish the sentence, ‘that this property belongs to the Duke.’
‘Strike a light,’ Errol muttered, as he attempted to swear but was out of practice enough that he could only manage a polite exclamation–that was the problem with aging, he thought, you lose all the character of language that comes with a well-placed swear. True, he never swore much when he was a lumberjack, but he could still remember some of the words that made him blush and he became nostalgic for a time when his wife would swear the blue from a summer skyline.
And then Errol remembered Dennis. Dennis was a fidgety man of fretful panic, a botherer and a bothered. He struck Errol as the type who wore symbols of every god and looked at the shadows of a room as if imagining them to be evil. He had hired Errol to kill some rats in the basement and had taken fright when it turned out that were only playing chess. He was one that Nine-bottles politely described as having an active imagination.
‘I admit that this is unfortunate,’ said Malissa, accepting the use of a half-truth as a matter of professional curtesy, ‘but we will be closing the inn while we work through the transition. And, I will have to ask that every item in possession of the Copperpot Inn be collected and then accounted for.
‘But Myles has had a roast on,’ Errol spoke curtly, now coming to grips with the situation and seeing the weave of his future becoming unsown. ‘Pure and simple, that Dennis left this inn of his own accord, I just did what was right.’
‘What is right is not always what is written by law, Mr. Garngly. And before the law is enacted, I suggest that you speak with your accountant.’ folding her hands and bearing the punctuative look of an underlined full stop, Malissa DeGrand sat in the mid-morning light and very much resembled an iron bar that had been driven deeply into an old claim.
There was something ill placed about her presence within the country inn, she had the apparent confidence to audit the royal bank and here she was, stuck in Huxley-shire, with questions surrounding a title deed of a dead man.
Like hiring a hunter for killing the rats in a basement, Errol mused as he removed his glasses and nodded at what could possibly be his last customer.
A barman seldomly is dismissed from his own tavern, and so, as he shuffled from the room, the old innkeeper could not undo the pride of his vocation.
‘Will you be having breakfast in the morning, Ms?’
‘No,’ Malissa replied flatly, ‘I work more efficiently on an empty stomach.’
—
Nine-bottles was not one for eavesdropping.
Admittedly, the pitched roof of the tavern caught gossip like flypaper, and the sprawling nature of the central heating system let drifting voices wander about the inn as if they were trapped in an art gallery. But he had never wanted to hear to any of the conversations. He was a quiet rat of a private nature, and he would scamper off to another nook should any of the conversations around him become salacious.
This conversation did worry him though. The tax-collector’s sharp words, Errol’s failed argument. The lowest of the penny pitching merchant travellers had all failed to argue against Errol’s stony gaze and Malissa had broken it by booking a room.
If they closed the inn, if they actually shut it down, he would have to leave too. Nine generations of accountants, all dumped out with the wash-water. He couldn’t live in the forest. He couldn’t establish a new accountancy, not with the shame of failing the Copperpot. He had to find a way.
The sound of a familiar cart pulled up the lane without the clop of horseshoe. The small rat’s ears pricked as he heard the strike of an awkward conversation between two friends so obviously interested in each other that they were deluding themselves into conducting business professionally. Helga Miller! Of course, Helga would be delivering flour today, even if the rains were due and the roads were muddy. She would be travelling south to the farmsteads next; she would be passing the Daleford’s. Nine-bottles could have jumped in delight–If he weren’t already hanging on to the thatching of a roof and the ground wasn’t so perilously far down below.
He took flight across the thatch scampered down the drainpipe, forgoing his fear of spiders and ignoring any blockage that may reside within. Things were going to be ok, he thought to himself, he could hitch a ride to the Dryford farm and then he could speak to Booker…the owl.
Rats did not historically get along with owls. Something engrained into the nature of every rodent would duck low to the ground when they thought about owl-shaped shadows and the dreaded thump of talons from above played with the small rat’s mind each time that he was outside. Accountants, so far as he was aware, had a better relationship with lawyers, but the degree at which this was true was only measurable by a very, very, small ruler.
He had met with Booker before. They discussed a contract and Nine-bottles would have described it all as a fairly cordial experience, but there was a certain owlish-ness to the lawyer’s eyes that he had found disconcerting. It was as if the lawyer was watching him with a fullness of concentration. As if calculating which way he would run.
‘Just a bit too dry,’ said Helga as the precariously balanced expectations the Copperpot’s chef collapsed into a pile of failure and hope-laden dreams. Every three days he had tried a new recipe and every three days he had failed to impress the honest judgment of Helga. He could bake cake with a steamed coconut, he could roast meats and vegetables so tender that they would lose structural integrity if plated next to anything brighter than an unlit candle, he had spent his entire apprenticeship at the Highwayman’s guild and avoided lessons by volunteering in the kitchen, but still the humble scone eluded him.
‘I think you’re trying too hard,’ she continued, ‘are you counting the grains of flour again? It tastes mathematical.’
This was his chance; the humans were distracted. With a breathless eruption into movement, the little rat darted across the garden lawn, making for the cart with every effort that he could muster. His lungs ached, his every muscle rebelled and groaned in anger; he was an accountant, he hadn’t run in years.
Looking down, Myles saw Nine-bottles laying upon the ground, out of breath and languidly attempting crawl forward toward the flour cart. Stooping, he carefully picked up the unyielding creature and gently placed him upon a sack of flour as Helga watched on in confusion, ‘Nine-bottles? It’s not like you to go for a run. Did you smell the scones again?’
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 