“Yes, your Imperial Highness,” said the cleric boldly. “It is Stracholf.”
And for the first time in his life, he spoke without a stammer.
Justice was swift and brutal. Pepin the Hunchback was arrested. Identified by Stracholf, the other conspirators were quickly rounded up. Summary execution ensued for them but Pepin’s life was spared. In warning his father that his life was threatened by one of his sons, he had, in a sense, been telling the truth, but only in order to win Charlemagne’s confidence. Instead of coming from his legitimate offspring, the threat arose from a bastard with the ill-omened name of Pepin. To establish credence, he had even hacked his own man, the innocent Werinbert, to death. The hunchback was exiled to the poorest and most austere place in the entire empire, in short, to this very Monastery of Saint Gall where I have penned this history.
There is an ironic footnote. Because it is so cold in this God-forsaken place, Pepin the Hunchback, bitten hard by the fangs of winter, spoke through chattering teeth and ended up as a fully fledged stammerer. Whereas I, Notker the Stammerer, spent so much time bent over my table as I wrote his story down that I acquired a hunchback of my own.
Don’t you think that is s-s-s-s-s-s-ignificant?
Copyright © 2002 by Edward Marston.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Notker was writing seventy years after the death of Pepin the Hunchback but much of his account has some truth in it. Charlemagne was betrayed by his illegitimate son and the plot was unmasked by a stammering cleric, though not perhaps in the way envisaged here. Alcuin’s prediction was accurate. The two eldest sons predeceased Charlemagne. Pepin, King of Italy, died in 810. Charles died the following year. Charlemagne himself died in 814 and was succeeded by Lewis the Pious, who ruled until his death in 840. Alcuin of York had already ended his days in the way that he hoped — as abbot of Tours.
The Survival of Miss Todd
by Gwen Moffat
The following story by Gwen Moffat has never before appeared in print, but it did air on BBC radio sometime in the 1960s. It should be of particular interest to the author’s fans in that its protagonist is a forerunner of her popular series character Melinda Pink. The latest book in that series, Retribution, was published in England in 2002 and is avail-able in the U.S. in large print (as are several other Moffat novels).
Miss Todd had waited a year for him to come back. She’d stopped typing for a moment and was staring across the lawn when she heard the drumming. She tried to focus on the dead sycamore but she could see only the blurred outline of its trunk. She removed her reading spectacles with shaking hands. The woodpecker was perched against the tree, his black and white back quivering with tension, his bill rattling away at the wood. Then he stopped, flew down, and inspected a hole. This hadn’t been there last April when a pair had come and prospected, and flown away. Miss Todd had made the hole herself, standing on a kitchen chair and stabbing with a skewer.
The bird pecked at the bark and Miss Todd held her breath. With the scarlet flash on his nape, the woodpecker was like a visitor from the tropics. The female appeared, and together the pair started to enlarge the hole. Miss Todd was enthralled. “Really,” she breathed, “I am most fortunate.”
The first cuckoo, the first swallow: These were events in her year eclipsing even the first primrose, but nothing could compare with a pair of great spotted woodpeckers come to nest in her garden.
Until she retired Miss Todd had been secretary to an accountant. Living with an invalid mother, her life had been busy but it lacked romance — Miss Todd’s kind of romance, that is. Through forty years of high finance and home nursing she cherished a dream of living in wild country, and when her mother died she took her small legacy and her savings and bought a croft house in the West Highlands. Then she started to write.
In ten years she wrote ten romantic novels. They were never reviewed in national newspapers but they brought in a few thousand pounds a year. Not enough for even her frugal lifestyle but she augmented her income by writing nature notes for the local paper and with illustrated lectures on the countryside.
This April morning, staring entranced at the woodpeckers on the dead tree, she saw more than two birds preparing a nest site; she saw a new sequence of colour slides for the village halls next winter, she saw all the summer’s nature notes with the woodpeckers’ progress like a serial. She even allowed herself to dream of a book: My Life With the Highland Birds, or maybe Denizens of the Glen. By the time she had convinced herself that the birds would stay, she had forgotten lunch. Empty with hunger and excitement, she drove to the village for a frozen fish pie.
The store was crowded with local wives who seethed with indignation. The telephone kiosk had been vandalised and young Willie MacKenzie — too strapped for cash to afford phone bills — going out at two in the morning to ring for an ambulance to fetch his wife, who was starting her second, had been forced to rouse the minister for the use of his telephone.
“It’s criminal!” exploded Shuna Campbell, who ran the store. “Shooting’s too good for ’em.”
The others supported her vehemently, except Miss Todd, who asked after the new baby.
“It isn’t the local lads...” Deliberately Shuna left it hanging but everyone knew what she meant. The pony-trekking centre had taken on two new hands recently: not country boys but from somewhere down south, Glasgow probably. Miss Todd thought they had unformed faces: loose and pale with blank eyes. She’d heard they drank a lot, and although she didn’t like gossip — not that kind of gossip — she’d ignored them when they thumbed her for a lift one night. They’d been holding each other up on the grass verge. She’d been disturbed, even a little frightened, because they would have a long walk home and she knew they would have recognised her old Volvo. It was the only one in the area. When she met them some days later, walking in the glen with their guns, they grinned at her but they didn’t speak. She didn’t like those grins; their eyes hadn’t changed.
Since they’d come to the village there had been a spate of incidents: telephone kiosks wrecked, cars taken and found miles away — with no fingerprints, the policeman’s wife told Miss Todd, and everyone knew from the television that people who left no prints most likely have a criminal record. The village hadn’t been the same this spring.
Some weeks went by and Miss Todd knew that her woodpeckers were sitting on eggs. The village, proud of what they called their “authoress,” followed the birds’ progress with interest.
“They must be about to hatch,” Miss Todd announced proudly to Shuna one afternoon.
“There! And how many eggs, Miss Todd?”
She drove home deploring the ignorance of folk who thought you could find out how many eggs a bird was sitting on without disturbing it. She put her shopping basket on the kitchen table and went to the living room to look at the tree.
In the grass at the foot of the trunk was a splash of black and white. She stared. Nothing moved in the garden.
She went out and approached the sycamore. The female lay dead among the withered daffodils.
She picked up the body, so small, so light in the hand. There was a smear of blood on the white feathers.
When she was thinking clearly again she went indoors and got out the chopping board and a sharp knife. Very carefully she plucked the bird, laying the feathers in a little heap. Shortly she found the first piece of gunshot.