Cracking Bank Hall - Character Journals [Spoilers]
Posted: Thu Apr 25, 2019 12:35 pm
***Background***
Old Cusa sat comfortably on the sand with his back to the warmth of the smoke house as the sun drifted nearer the South-Western horizon. "You say what? You young scamps want to hear my stories again?"
When I was young, magic had not yet returned to this world. The voices of our ancestors whispered but faintly in the ears of our shamans, and the spirits of the sea were seldom moved to grant mercy to the men and women who sailed upon it in our skin boats. The spells that had been handed down to us by the fathers of our fathers fathers beyond memory did little but teach young shaman apprentices patience.
He drew out his ivory story knife and used the flat blade to smooth out the sand in front of him. He then used the point to start rough sketches of an old two masted sailing ship.
We never saw the large steam ships, or huge airships that we sometimes see today. Instead sailing ships would sometimes visit our Islands here in the Aleutians, first it was the Russians, then the Americans. I was a very young shaman then, fully trained, but there was no place for a 2nd shaman in our tiny village. Now-a-days our spells are so useful, and the spirits that we call are so powerful, that shamen are always in great demand. But back then shamans were mostly respected for their healing and their lore keeping, and one was plenty for any but the very largest of villages.
I was traveling from village to village looking for a place that I might call home, when a whaler anchored next to the village I was at. We were fearful when we learned the ship was plagued by sickness, for we are even more susceptible to many of the white-mens' diseases than they are, however I soon recognized that their problem was merely that their water had turned bad. I had the few able men left pour out their water, scrub the barrels thoughtfully, and refill them from the village spring, while I nursed the others back to health with a tea made of bark and roots. They were extremely grateful and asked that I would join the crew for the remainder of their voyage. I did not wish to journey so far from home, so I declined, but the night before they were to sail away we celebrated and I got very drunk. By the time I came to my senses the ship had sailed far from sight of land. I was upset but they would not take me back.
Old Cuso used his story knife to draw a crude map in the sand next to his sketch of the whaling ship.
I ended up staying with the ship for another 18 months before it made it's way to it's home port. I was the ships Surgeon's Mate (and the ship did not have a surgeon), and a whale-boat commander, The whaling ship carried many whale-boats, and their sturdy wooden boats would hunt the whales not much differently than we hunt them in our skin boats. Of course the whaling ship would follow the whales, and hunt them year around, not just in the spring and fall when they pass our island. Our ship took many whales. Of course there were more whales back then.
As I said, 18 months after I joined, the whaling boat returned to where it had launched from, a place called England. In all it's voyage had lasted 3 years and it returned with it's hold bulging with barrels of whale-oil. As the ship got closer and closer to England, I could feel my connection to the Spirits grow. Like I said, back then, even the best shamen had trouble hearing the voices of our ancestors, and then only very, very faintly, and the spirits of sea and air were mostly indifferent to our plea's. But each day we drew closer to England, my ability to hear the spirits grew, what is more, the spirits became stronger and yet more willing do what I asked of them.
By the time we exited the Barerits sea for the Norwegian sea (Cuso expanded his map), I could reliably cause a spirit to manifest just about any time I wished! About this same time I had to nurse a crewman through looking glass fever as he turned into what the English call a Snark. This was still several years before Looking Glass Fever came to our islands. The whaler paid off at the London docks, and I, decided to stay a while and learn more about the magic that was flooding into that strange land. Eventually I wound up in a boarding house in Earls Court frequented by spiritual people from all over the world, men, and even women who, like I, wished to learn more of magic.There were people from India, and Africa, and from all over really. There was a military chaplain who was studying Saurid Shamins and talked frequently with them. (The Saurids are a different tale, I will tell you of the first time I met one of them some other day). Almost every night we spent hours discussing magic and learning from each other.
The people of London do not hunt or fish for their food like we do, instead they get jobs to earn money, like Mr Ivonosky at the trading post, or like you youngsters did when the last freighter came in and everybody helped unload it and they gave you coins that you traded for sweets at the trading post. I had quite a bit money from when the whaler paid off, but if I wanted to stay in London for long, I knew I needed to get a job. The English are a funny people, and have strange customs. I was not allowed to take a job as a healer because I had not taken my apprenticeship at a place they called a "university". Even after I had learned about all their strange potions and medicines I was not allowed to function as a herbalist or maker of poultices.
Fortunately, since magic was so new, when I first arrived they had not yet gotten around to making any silly laws about who could and could not practice that (though it did not take them long to start proposing such laws, actually making the laws took a gratifyingly long time). So there I was, a perfectly good healer with years of training, forbidden to do that, but they allowed me to cast spells and summon spirits, which I knew almost nothing about! In fact learning magic is the only reason I had decided to linger in London. But it turns out that almost nobody in London knew more than I did about magic back then. We just all knew different things. At first I thought the people from India knew a great deal. But it turns out that they knew as little as I did, but everything that they knew happened to be different from what I knew. So I was able to learn a great deal from them, and they were able to learn a great deal from me. And the same with the Zulu shamans and everybody else who was studying magic. Even the Christian priests got magic work, though I never figured out how. We all knew tiny little bits. And making all those tiny little bits fit together was exhilarating.
So anyway, I knew just a bit of magic. Just the lore that had been passed down from the age of legends of our fathers fathers fathers. I had gotten 4 simple initiate spells to work All the other spells that I had studied in my youth were flawed, passed down incorrectly. It took me years to learn them correctly. It also turned out that I was one of the best among my group of friends at summoning and talking to spirits. It always took the Christian priests years to learn how to talk to spirits, and most of them never really liked it for some reason. They mostly acted like the spirits of dead people should not still be on Earth, and any spirit that was still on Earth had something wrong with it. The Mages were even worse. I actually had some tell me that spirits did not exist and that I was imagining them. Anyway, I knew that I knew almost nothing of magic, but it seemed that I knew about as much as anybody and more than most. Furthermore, magic was not yet a licenced trade, so I was allowed to practice it in their country.
Of course being allowed to practice a trade, and getting paying jobs are two different things. Fortunately I was approached by the Fairaday law firm and offered a job as an investigator. I can't really explain to you youngsters what a law firm is. I will just say that you can be glad that our people don't have them and leave it at that.
People paid law firms to make problems go away. Sometimes the Fairaday people would use their laws to make the problem go away. But sometimes the Fairaday firm would pay us to investigate the problem and see if we could fix it. I had some very unusual skills, and the Fairaday people thought it might be useful to an investigator.
***Cracking Bank Hall***
My first really interesting case was to investigate some strange happenings at Bank Hall. An estate in Lancashire in Northern England. The Fairaday people hired several investigators for that case. There was me of course, the Aleut Shaman. Captain Piper Barnes, was a Snark Military Officer, I think she normally commanded detachments of marines assigned to Airships or something. I am not certain why she was on the beach (as the phrase is) but she seemed to be between ships for quite a long period of time, Without duties she had been put on half-pay and was short of funds. This left her both the leisure for and the necessity of finding short-term outside employment. An Elf named Catherine Montague was something called a "Weird Scientist", I also heard people call her a "Byron" but she would sometimes correct people who called her that, saying that she was much better than a Byron. Anyway, she was really good with Analytical Engines and machines in general.
The Law firm also introduced us to their client, named "Lady Jane". She was rich, and had just inherited a big house in Lancashire named Banks Hall. However something was wrong at the Estate. The staff were acting weird. They were evasive, and unhelpful. There was supposed to be a hall within the manor house that held a great many pieces of art by somebody named "Antonio Canova", which was supposed to be a big deal. But she could not find the hall. Imagine, the house was big enough that whole rooms could get lost within it! Lady Jane was also worried that the staff might be hiding bigger secrets.
Anyhow, she had inherited the Estate, which I learned is a big house and lands, and she kept saying that she was having difficulties settling the estate. Apparently the estate needed to be settled before the funeral potlatch could be held, and the other relatives were anxious that the potlatch should happen soon. So we were to find out why the spirits of the house and lands were unsettled, and help her settle them.
Bank Hall is in Lancashire, which is very far from London. It would have taken many days to walk there. Instead we took something called a train, which is like a steam ship, except that it is smaller, but longer and goes on land. Even then it took 2 nights to get there. Also traveling with Lady Jane and us is her friend Professor Grundal, a Dwarf Spiritualist. He says he is very taken with the history of the hall.
Cathryn Montgomery saw a body flung from the train. The conductor refused to stop. We investigated a bit, and found out that it must have been a serving girl named Mary, that she had died and must have been flung from the pantry of the kitchen car ahead of the dinning car. Nobody else seemed to care. I was young back then, and ignorant, so it did not occur to me that I could talk to ancestor spirits who were not one of MY ancestors. So I did not do that. I had also not really had time to learn what a Spiritualist was or what they could do, so I did not think to ask Professor Grundal to talk to Mary's spirit ether. Since nobody else seemed very curious as to why the young woman had been killed and flung from the train, we let it drop as well, I figured things like that just happened in England, it did not seem to have any bearing upon our own investigation.
We eventually arrived at our train station, and took a coach to Bank Hall, which is a very large house on large grounds. The main house is a huge 3 story brick building. There are many outbuildings including an observatory and a mausoleum. At the manor, we met Mr Niece, another friend of Lady Jane's. As Lady Jane had warned us, the household servants were useless. I am surprised that Lady Jane had not sacked them all already.
Lady Jane took us on a tour of the house. It was huge. I did a few Astral Sight tests, but everything seemed normal. She explained that one of the problems is that some of the doors were locked and could not be opened. These include the library, lord and ladies chambers, office, observatory and taxidermy studio. During our investigations we also found many other locked doors that the staff all claimed could not be unlocked. Most of these rooms had the new-fangled locks that were controlled by security engine, though a few old fashioned keys were claimed to be missing as well. We also located the room the House Engine was in, but that was locked as well of course. My Drury, a local Lovelace was to be in the next day, but Miss Montague wished to spend her morning studying a report the engine generated, so Cpt Barnes and I left her in the dinning room and started poking around. We decided that our first goal would be something very simple, so we tried to find our way up to the top of the clock tower. The architecture was extremely confusing, and every route we tried eventually dead-ended at a locked door. I had never been in such a big and confusing mansion before. I ended up needing to summon a spirit guide to lead us to the top of the tower. The spirit I summoned was called a House Spirit. It was weird. The spirit was not apparently an ancestor spirit of any sort. Nor yet was it a spirit of nature. It was as if the house had been there so long, that it had grown a spirit, much like a lake or a grove can attract a spirit of nature that calls the grove it's home.
Anyway, this spirit I summoned was very comical. He gave us a few cryptic hints, and eventually guided us to the top of the clock tower so that we could look around the estate. Shortly afterwards Cpt. Barnes found a note in her pocket, that the spirit might have placed there. It said "To find the truth of the matter, speak with Mrs. Esme Clarke".
Old Cusa sat comfortably on the sand with his back to the warmth of the smoke house as the sun drifted nearer the South-Western horizon. "You say what? You young scamps want to hear my stories again?"
When I was young, magic had not yet returned to this world. The voices of our ancestors whispered but faintly in the ears of our shamans, and the spirits of the sea were seldom moved to grant mercy to the men and women who sailed upon it in our skin boats. The spells that had been handed down to us by the fathers of our fathers fathers beyond memory did little but teach young shaman apprentices patience.
He drew out his ivory story knife and used the flat blade to smooth out the sand in front of him. He then used the point to start rough sketches of an old two masted sailing ship.
We never saw the large steam ships, or huge airships that we sometimes see today. Instead sailing ships would sometimes visit our Islands here in the Aleutians, first it was the Russians, then the Americans. I was a very young shaman then, fully trained, but there was no place for a 2nd shaman in our tiny village. Now-a-days our spells are so useful, and the spirits that we call are so powerful, that shamen are always in great demand. But back then shamans were mostly respected for their healing and their lore keeping, and one was plenty for any but the very largest of villages.
I was traveling from village to village looking for a place that I might call home, when a whaler anchored next to the village I was at. We were fearful when we learned the ship was plagued by sickness, for we are even more susceptible to many of the white-mens' diseases than they are, however I soon recognized that their problem was merely that their water had turned bad. I had the few able men left pour out their water, scrub the barrels thoughtfully, and refill them from the village spring, while I nursed the others back to health with a tea made of bark and roots. They were extremely grateful and asked that I would join the crew for the remainder of their voyage. I did not wish to journey so far from home, so I declined, but the night before they were to sail away we celebrated and I got very drunk. By the time I came to my senses the ship had sailed far from sight of land. I was upset but they would not take me back.
Old Cuso used his story knife to draw a crude map in the sand next to his sketch of the whaling ship.
I ended up staying with the ship for another 18 months before it made it's way to it's home port. I was the ships Surgeon's Mate (and the ship did not have a surgeon), and a whale-boat commander, The whaling ship carried many whale-boats, and their sturdy wooden boats would hunt the whales not much differently than we hunt them in our skin boats. Of course the whaling ship would follow the whales, and hunt them year around, not just in the spring and fall when they pass our island. Our ship took many whales. Of course there were more whales back then.
As I said, 18 months after I joined, the whaling boat returned to where it had launched from, a place called England. In all it's voyage had lasted 3 years and it returned with it's hold bulging with barrels of whale-oil. As the ship got closer and closer to England, I could feel my connection to the Spirits grow. Like I said, back then, even the best shamen had trouble hearing the voices of our ancestors, and then only very, very faintly, and the spirits of sea and air were mostly indifferent to our plea's. But each day we drew closer to England, my ability to hear the spirits grew, what is more, the spirits became stronger and yet more willing do what I asked of them.
By the time we exited the Barerits sea for the Norwegian sea (Cuso expanded his map), I could reliably cause a spirit to manifest just about any time I wished! About this same time I had to nurse a crewman through looking glass fever as he turned into what the English call a Snark. This was still several years before Looking Glass Fever came to our islands. The whaler paid off at the London docks, and I, decided to stay a while and learn more about the magic that was flooding into that strange land. Eventually I wound up in a boarding house in Earls Court frequented by spiritual people from all over the world, men, and even women who, like I, wished to learn more of magic.There were people from India, and Africa, and from all over really. There was a military chaplain who was studying Saurid Shamins and talked frequently with them. (The Saurids are a different tale, I will tell you of the first time I met one of them some other day). Almost every night we spent hours discussing magic and learning from each other.
The people of London do not hunt or fish for their food like we do, instead they get jobs to earn money, like Mr Ivonosky at the trading post, or like you youngsters did when the last freighter came in and everybody helped unload it and they gave you coins that you traded for sweets at the trading post. I had quite a bit money from when the whaler paid off, but if I wanted to stay in London for long, I knew I needed to get a job. The English are a funny people, and have strange customs. I was not allowed to take a job as a healer because I had not taken my apprenticeship at a place they called a "university". Even after I had learned about all their strange potions and medicines I was not allowed to function as a herbalist or maker of poultices.
Fortunately, since magic was so new, when I first arrived they had not yet gotten around to making any silly laws about who could and could not practice that (though it did not take them long to start proposing such laws, actually making the laws took a gratifyingly long time). So there I was, a perfectly good healer with years of training, forbidden to do that, but they allowed me to cast spells and summon spirits, which I knew almost nothing about! In fact learning magic is the only reason I had decided to linger in London. But it turns out that almost nobody in London knew more than I did about magic back then. We just all knew different things. At first I thought the people from India knew a great deal. But it turns out that they knew as little as I did, but everything that they knew happened to be different from what I knew. So I was able to learn a great deal from them, and they were able to learn a great deal from me. And the same with the Zulu shamans and everybody else who was studying magic. Even the Christian priests got magic work, though I never figured out how. We all knew tiny little bits. And making all those tiny little bits fit together was exhilarating.
So anyway, I knew just a bit of magic. Just the lore that had been passed down from the age of legends of our fathers fathers fathers. I had gotten 4 simple initiate spells to work All the other spells that I had studied in my youth were flawed, passed down incorrectly. It took me years to learn them correctly. It also turned out that I was one of the best among my group of friends at summoning and talking to spirits. It always took the Christian priests years to learn how to talk to spirits, and most of them never really liked it for some reason. They mostly acted like the spirits of dead people should not still be on Earth, and any spirit that was still on Earth had something wrong with it. The Mages were even worse. I actually had some tell me that spirits did not exist and that I was imagining them. Anyway, I knew that I knew almost nothing of magic, but it seemed that I knew about as much as anybody and more than most. Furthermore, magic was not yet a licenced trade, so I was allowed to practice it in their country.
Of course being allowed to practice a trade, and getting paying jobs are two different things. Fortunately I was approached by the Fairaday law firm and offered a job as an investigator. I can't really explain to you youngsters what a law firm is. I will just say that you can be glad that our people don't have them and leave it at that.
People paid law firms to make problems go away. Sometimes the Fairaday people would use their laws to make the problem go away. But sometimes the Fairaday firm would pay us to investigate the problem and see if we could fix it. I had some very unusual skills, and the Fairaday people thought it might be useful to an investigator.
***Cracking Bank Hall***
My first really interesting case was to investigate some strange happenings at Bank Hall. An estate in Lancashire in Northern England. The Fairaday people hired several investigators for that case. There was me of course, the Aleut Shaman. Captain Piper Barnes, was a Snark Military Officer, I think she normally commanded detachments of marines assigned to Airships or something. I am not certain why she was on the beach (as the phrase is) but she seemed to be between ships for quite a long period of time, Without duties she had been put on half-pay and was short of funds. This left her both the leisure for and the necessity of finding short-term outside employment. An Elf named Catherine Montague was something called a "Weird Scientist", I also heard people call her a "Byron" but she would sometimes correct people who called her that, saying that she was much better than a Byron. Anyway, she was really good with Analytical Engines and machines in general.
The Law firm also introduced us to their client, named "Lady Jane". She was rich, and had just inherited a big house in Lancashire named Banks Hall. However something was wrong at the Estate. The staff were acting weird. They were evasive, and unhelpful. There was supposed to be a hall within the manor house that held a great many pieces of art by somebody named "Antonio Canova", which was supposed to be a big deal. But she could not find the hall. Imagine, the house was big enough that whole rooms could get lost within it! Lady Jane was also worried that the staff might be hiding bigger secrets.
Anyhow, she had inherited the Estate, which I learned is a big house and lands, and she kept saying that she was having difficulties settling the estate. Apparently the estate needed to be settled before the funeral potlatch could be held, and the other relatives were anxious that the potlatch should happen soon. So we were to find out why the spirits of the house and lands were unsettled, and help her settle them.
Bank Hall is in Lancashire, which is very far from London. It would have taken many days to walk there. Instead we took something called a train, which is like a steam ship, except that it is smaller, but longer and goes on land. Even then it took 2 nights to get there. Also traveling with Lady Jane and us is her friend Professor Grundal, a Dwarf Spiritualist. He says he is very taken with the history of the hall.
Cathryn Montgomery saw a body flung from the train. The conductor refused to stop. We investigated a bit, and found out that it must have been a serving girl named Mary, that she had died and must have been flung from the pantry of the kitchen car ahead of the dinning car. Nobody else seemed to care. I was young back then, and ignorant, so it did not occur to me that I could talk to ancestor spirits who were not one of MY ancestors. So I did not do that. I had also not really had time to learn what a Spiritualist was or what they could do, so I did not think to ask Professor Grundal to talk to Mary's spirit ether. Since nobody else seemed very curious as to why the young woman had been killed and flung from the train, we let it drop as well, I figured things like that just happened in England, it did not seem to have any bearing upon our own investigation.
We eventually arrived at our train station, and took a coach to Bank Hall, which is a very large house on large grounds. The main house is a huge 3 story brick building. There are many outbuildings including an observatory and a mausoleum. At the manor, we met Mr Niece, another friend of Lady Jane's. As Lady Jane had warned us, the household servants were useless. I am surprised that Lady Jane had not sacked them all already.
Lady Jane took us on a tour of the house. It was huge. I did a few Astral Sight tests, but everything seemed normal. She explained that one of the problems is that some of the doors were locked and could not be opened. These include the library, lord and ladies chambers, office, observatory and taxidermy studio. During our investigations we also found many other locked doors that the staff all claimed could not be unlocked. Most of these rooms had the new-fangled locks that were controlled by security engine, though a few old fashioned keys were claimed to be missing as well. We also located the room the House Engine was in, but that was locked as well of course. My Drury, a local Lovelace was to be in the next day, but Miss Montague wished to spend her morning studying a report the engine generated, so Cpt Barnes and I left her in the dinning room and started poking around. We decided that our first goal would be something very simple, so we tried to find our way up to the top of the clock tower. The architecture was extremely confusing, and every route we tried eventually dead-ended at a locked door. I had never been in such a big and confusing mansion before. I ended up needing to summon a spirit guide to lead us to the top of the tower. The spirit I summoned was called a House Spirit. It was weird. The spirit was not apparently an ancestor spirit of any sort. Nor yet was it a spirit of nature. It was as if the house had been there so long, that it had grown a spirit, much like a lake or a grove can attract a spirit of nature that calls the grove it's home.
Anyway, this spirit I summoned was very comical. He gave us a few cryptic hints, and eventually guided us to the top of the clock tower so that we could look around the estate. Shortly afterwards Cpt. Barnes found a note in her pocket, that the spirit might have placed there. It said "To find the truth of the matter, speak with Mrs. Esme Clarke".