Eloise was a self-taught artist. She would spend hours painstakingly copying the works of the greats, learning how they created the effects they did, working with the same tools and paint mixes, lovingly recreated with her own hands on authentic canvas, then producing her own in similar style.

When she put some of her pictures in a local charity exhibition, she was surprised they sold. And even more surprised when a man with a big smile and a fat wallet purchased much of her work.

Until she saw one of the pictures under the headline “Unknown Rembrandt discovered, worth millions.”

E.M. Swift-Hook

‘Much Dithering in Little Botheringham’ is an everyday tale of village life and vampires, from Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook.

Saturday morning, and Em was in the box seat in the window of Lillian’s house on the edge of the Brownfield Estate watching, and awaiting her moment to bring DumpCorp’s farrago of lies and half truths crashing down about the ears of its founder.
It wasn’t often she took actual pleasure in the possible discomfiture of a fellow human being, but this looked as if it might be one of those times. She rubbed her hands together and smiled what Agnes called her alligator smile.
Everything was in place and all they had to do now was wait. Tristram and his camera crew were drinking coffee and scoffing chocolate digestives in the kitchen of one of the trim little houses, while she and Ishmael sat in Lillian’s front window. The rest of her seven, having been fortified with blood tea against the sunlight – and with the exception of Ginny who was part of the ‘official’ reception committee – waited in the village hall with what Agnes referred to as ‘rent a mob’ complete with banners, flour bombs and air horns.
Ishmael smiled his smooth practiced smile. “I’m rather looking forward to this,” he said in a voice whose very mildness was a threat to whoever might be foolish enough to get in his way.
Em supposed she should have been lecturing him about civilised behaviour, but this was a special occasion so she just shrugged.
For a while, the cul de sac dreamed quietly in the morning sun but the quiet was broken by the sound of marching feet.
“What the hell?” Em craned her neck to see a bagpipe band, in full kilt regalia, marching down the road towards the simple farm gate at the end of the road, with their skirts swinging in the wind. She sniggered. “Can’t they tell Dorset from Dumbartonshire?” “It would seem not.” It was less amusing when the pipers started to tune up, as the noise stung the ears and made Em, at least, feel quite queasy. It seemed she wasn’t the only one unamused by the racket. The front door of the nearest house to the squealing, skirling pipes flew open and a large young man wearing only a pair of baggy tracksuit trousers ran into the tidy driveway. “Shut that effing noise,” he bellowed.
Needless to say nobody took any notice, but he was a determined fellow and he dashed over to where a man in a strange furry hat was waving a baton. Ishmael opened the window with the evident intention of missing none of the fun.
“Oy, you. What the bloody hell is all the noise about?”
The conductor didn’t deign to answer. He looked down his nose at the barely dressed young man in his carpet slippers and smiled a supercilious smile.
Before Em had leisure to think what a bad idea that was, the conductor felt the full weight of his own stupidity in the form of the large fist that landed somewhere in the region of his midriff. He folded in the middle like a half deflated balloon and the noise of the pipes began to draw to an untidy close.
One of the pipers said something to his mates in a dialect Em found incomprehensible and they dropped their instruments and made a concerted dash for the lad who had dropped their conductor.
It should have been simple murder, but the faultless instincts of Saturday night fighters everywhere brought hefty young men out of every front door.
As the two groups met head on, Em glanced up the road to where Tristram and his cameraman were just about capering with delight. She frowned, then shrugged her shoulders. A couple of dozen young men attacking each other with fists, feet and teeth, would probably make very good television.
One of the locals had a smallish man by the neck and was holding him about six inches off the ground.
“What d’you think you’re bloody doing waking me up on a Sat’day morning making that bloody awful noise?”
His captive seemed just about apoplectic with rage.
“Awfu’ noise is it. Ye jest put me doon and I s’ll give ye awfu’ noise.”
The fight was going quite nicely when Ishmael prodded Em.
“Oops,” he said.
Two men were coming purposefully down the road, and each led a pair of slavering German Shepherds.
“Do we think that swings the odds in favour of the Caledonian contingent?”
Of course that is what should have happened. But this was Little Botheringham and unpredictable at the best of times. The previously quiet houses up and down the cul de sac erupted into action as the women took a hand. Or rather a paw. The two men and four German Shepherds were faced by upwards of a dozen women valiantly holding the collars of a number of dogs, anything from ferocious Jack Russels upwards in size to several of a variety that made the shepherds look like chihuahuas. The GSDs didn’t fancy the odds one bit and slammed on the brakes – dragging their handlers to a halt then making a sharp about face. They fled the scene, still dragging the uniformed ‘security’ men, protesting loudly at ‘Killer’ and ‘Fang’ for unwarranted cowardice, behind them.
One of the pipers stopped stamping on the gonads of the man he was matched with long enough to whistle.
“Them,” he said reverently, “is whit ye call dogs.”
He ducked a blow aimed at his unprotected stomach and dived headfirst back into the fray.
“What happens now?” Em hissed.
Ishmael grinned. “This.” The sound of a police siren acted like magic and the fighting horde rapidly sorted itself into two groups, with the odd crossparty backslap and nod of respect and appreciation. The local men then disappeared as if they had never been outside their front doors, and the pipe band swiftly wiped each other down and collected their instruments. They marched smartly out of the cul de sac just as the police car came in….

Part 28 of Much Dithering in Little Botheringham by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, will be here next week.

This morning the world has a duvet
Of grey and pearly white
It is as if some kindly mother
Covered the fields for the night
And this morning’s lazy sun
Dilatory in the sky
Comes too late to lift the blanket
Seems not keen to try
And underneath the silver damp
Our feet make silent sound
While the dogs are splashed with silver
As they dance around
This morning the world is in muted colours
Under a muted sky
And as we look, above our heads
The silver swans fly by

©️jj 2020

Every day except Sunday, the little train climbed the vertiginous track up the mountainside from San Bernardina in the valley to the saint’s basilica high on a rocky crag. And on every day except Sunday, pilgrims crowded the carriages and formed orderly queues to kiss the feet of the Madonna of the Sorrowful Countenance.
On Sundays, twice a day, for both the morning and evening devotions, the children of the orphanage in the valley climbed the railway track to the basilica to pray. It was a harsh climb, sweatily suffocating in summer and icily treacherous in winter, but nobody ever thought to give the children a break, and they spent six hours of the day either on the climb or on their knees in silence on the stone floor of the Madonna’s chapel.
At one time it had been suggested that the children might be given a simple noonday meal in the refectory with the monks of the abbey that crouched at the foot of the basilica, thereby saving them from two of the perilous climbs. But it never happened. Father Abbot was a stern man, and a greedy one, who saw no need to share with the thin little children from the valley. So the orphans toiled in the heat of summer and the cold and darkness of winter. None fell by the wayside, because none dared, knowing that nobody cared enough to rescue them should they fall.
And that was how matters stood on a Sunday in December, when the cold was such that even the stern-faced nuns handed their charges extra woollen socks and hot stones wrapped in rabbit skin in the hope of staving off frostbite. The first climb of the day was accomplished in pitch darkness, with only the flickering lanterns carried by the nuns to illuminate the treacherously slippery railway line. To be honest, they almost didn’t make it, with one significant casualty being Mother Superior herself, who was half carried into the abbey by two of the biggest children. Even that would have gone unremarked had there not been a Hellenic doctor attending to Father Abbot’s stomach problems – and, unbeknownst to that worthy, also reporting to the Bishop on the conduct of the basilica and its satellites. This man took one look at Mother’s leg and pronounced it broken. He had the woman carried off to the sanatorium where he splinted the limb and administered laudanum for the pain.
After morning service, Father Abbot regarded the orphans with a jaundiced eye, but even he could see that it would not be possible for them to return for evening service if they went back to the orphanage now. He thought for about five minutes then sent them home with the explicit instruction that they were not to return that day. He also ‘suggested’, although the suggestion was more in the nature of an order, that the choir nuns should remain to attend evensong. He was not an imaginative man, nor a kindly one, so he didn’t see what could possibly go amiss with two novices and a lame postulant leading upwards of thirty children down an icy railway track in the snow.
So the children went, and the nuns stayed.
Night fell and the snow blew into massive drifts that groaned and sighed in the wind.
The Abbot congratulated himself on having had the forethought to send the children home, while the nuns luxuriated in the heat from the great log fires that rendered even the Abbey’s massive stones warm to the touch. Down in the valley there was also warmth, even if it was only found in the kitchens, and, for once, there was sufficient pottage for all.
But nobody gave a thought to the orphans and their minders. What would they? Nobody at either end of the track thought anything was amiss. The inhabitants of the abbey thought the children back in their bare, cold dormitories, and the two old servants left behind in the orphanage naturally assumed that some sort of human compassion had prompted the Abbot to keep the children where they were safe.
The storm raged for three days and three nights before a cold blue dawn when the wind fell away and the sun shone on a pristine scene. Soon after that dawn, the rail crew arrived to clear the tracks so the little train could once again begin its duty of carrying the faithful into the high thin air. The men were about halfway up the mountain when one of them noticed a foot sticking out of the snow that was piled haphazardly on the track and the black pines that bordered it. These men had seen death before, but even so they cleared the snow with care, uncovering the body of an elderly woman in a brown habit. One of the workers had been an inhabitant of the orphanage before his luck changed for the better, and he recognised her.
“That’s Berthe,” he said, “she’s from the orphanage. She was never bright enough to become a nun, but they kept her as a sort of unpaid servant. Wonder what she was doing out here.”
“She weren’t the only one,” came a voice from further up the track.
In the end they uncovered two more bodies, dressed in the blue of novice nuns.
“It’s almost as if,” the foreman mused, “they was bringing the kiddies back down the tracks.”
“Surely not. Surely even Father Abbot has more kindness in him than that. And anyway, where’s the childer?”
“I dursn’t think,” the man who had suffered as an orphan shivered. “But us shan’t know until us gets to the top.”
They worked on in unusually grim silence until they reached the tiny halt at the top of the tracks. One of their number trotted up the steep path to the basilica and its abbey. He returned with puzzlement writ large on his honest features.
“They won’t believe us found three bodies.”
The foreman blew out his formidable moustache.
“Won’t them? Well then us shall just take the deceased down to the valley and put them in the hands of the Constable.”
Which is what they did, and that was just the beginning. The disappearance of thirty-two children, ranging in age from four to fourteen years made worldwide news, but the children were never found. There was an enquiry, and a lot of stern-faced men made a lot of discoveries they could have made years before if they had ever looked. Discoveries that closed the orphanage and replaced the greedy Abbot with a man of grace and humility.
But it was all too late. The basilica passed out of public favour and the little trains no longer plied their trade up and down the vertiginous track.
Today, you can barely discern where the rusted rails once ran, and the basilica and its abbey are no more that tumbled piles of basalt blocks. All is peace on the mountain now, although they do say that cold moonlit nights still see a procession of small figures toiling up the track blowing on their cold fingers and stubbing their frozen toes on the unforgiving wooden sleepers…

Jane Jago

Few words divide this world as much as the word ‘moist’
It has its fans
But most do seem to cringe when on them it is foist
And call for bans.

A simple word, no harm to any has it done
Yet still they loathe
One wonders why, when others sound more harsh and some
True evil clothe.

What harm in moist when torture, agony and fear
Dwell in this world?
Why shudder at moist when heartless or hatred rear
Like insults hurled?

A word that means just damp, yet scrapes like fork on plate.
What can be done?
Replace, rephrase, or reinstate moist in a state
Of grace? Come on!

E.M. Swift-Hook

Until relatively recently, I thought I had seen just about everything in the way of persuading silly women to part with their cash.

Oh boy was I wrong…

The wife of one of the more intelligent grandsons brought it to my attention with a snort of derision. It seems she had received a birthday present list from her sister – which included specific items of ‘yoga wear’ from a company we shall refer to as X to protect the innocent. Man, oh man, do they know how to charge. We could see nothing on their webshite under fifty quid, and as granddaughter-in-law so succinctly put it she certainly don’t like her sister in the financial bracket that madam’s specific wants fell into. 

We laughed a bit and sent the offending bitch a subscription to a cookery magazine (given that she don’t cook and barely eats).

However, this piqued my curiosity so I spent an instructive hour researching ‘exercise’ clothing. 

Sheesh.

Leggings ranging in price from a hundred quid to a grand.

Tit squashing ‘support tanks’ fifty quid to the sky.

Socks at fifty quid a pair. (Somebody is gonna be so pissed off when the sock fairy nicks one of them bastards.)

Cashmere ‘warm down’ suits (whatever the feck they are) with a starting price of around £250. 

Even my friend Mavis’ favourite granny shop sells these cashmere trackies by another name… I have now checked with Mave who says she wouldn’t be seen dead as the cashmere stuff is all beige – her taste runs more to hot pink, fuchsia and tomato red. But I digress.

I quick add up on m’fingers had me reaching for a ciggy.

I reckon that to join the yoga generation you have to spend upwards of a grand on clothing, plus a yoga mat, a course of classes presided over by a stringy man whose wedding tackle seems about to escape the confines of his strangely shapeless underkecks, and a Nissan Leaf (other electric cars with slightly less silly names are available) to arrive in.

I may be old. I may be fat. But flip me at least I have never spent a young fortune in order to be miserable…

It had been the rule in her parent’s house that the last words spoken in any farewell should always be words of love.

It was a rule that Rebecca had never understood, as she complained to David when he was still her fiance: “How can you say loving stuff when you’re mad at someone? That’s against human nature.”

Years later, David forgot their anniversary and booked a business trip that day. Hurt, she had shouted hateful words at him as he left.

When she heard about the plane crash her heart broke, but never again did she break the rule.

E.M. Swift-Hook

The railroad formed the first leg of the great trek to the rich lands beyond the desert, and it was rumoured that, long ago, the tracks ran from coast to coast. Nowadays, however, the railroad came to an abrupt end in a place of cattle yards, whorehouses, and bars. Hard-eyed women, and conscienceless men, preyed on the stream of humanity that poured out of the cross-continental trains as they puffed and wheezed to a halt alongside the ramshackle platform.
A dispirited-looking Church Army Band played hymns and waved collecting tins, more in hope than expectation. Behind them, a twice life size head of General Stonejaw Johnson, with his piercing eyes and pointing finger, adjured ‘upstanding young men’ and ‘modest females’ to join the Army in its fight against Shaitan and all his works. Which might have been ironic if any of the denizens of Trail End were of a mind to enjoy irony.
The Friday train came all the away from south-eastern ‘civilisation’, and its passengers had endured the swaying, clanking ride for the best part of ten days. Those who were in the first half dozen carriages fared better than their less affluent cousins in the rest of the train – whose accommodation more resembled cattle trucks than anything else.
When the train shuddered to a halt, the doors of the rear carriages burst open and a stream of humanity walked, crawled, or fell into the merciless light of the midday sun. They were converged upon by the whoremasters, slave drivers, and purveyors of dubious modes of transport who found it worth their while to endure the discomfort of a rail-end town in the name of profit.
The unsatisfactory daughters, disappointing sons, and con artists just ahead of the law, who occupied the front carriages exited the train in a rather more leisurely fashion, and most were met by family members, pre-appointed guides, or the representatives of the wagon masters retained to carry them west. There was a good deal of hand shaking and back slapping at this end of the platform, and while the sharks of every kidney circled each other a figure slipped quietly out of the train on the opposite side.
It was a slight scarlet-haired woman, dressed in functional leather boots and a khaki frock coat. She jumped lightly to the ground and reached back inside for a sturdy leather back pack. Adjusting the straps of the pack she pulled a pair of smoked goggles over her eyes and walked purposefully away from the crowds.
She crossed the goods yard and squatted down in the shadow of a ramshackle warehouse. Pulling the hood of her coat up to cover her flaming red hair she composed herself to wait. In time, the train was pulled away from the platform while its engine was laboriously turned around on an iron turntable powered by slave labour – humans being cheaper and more expendable than horses. The woman sat, barely breathing and becoming less and less visible as the hours crawled past. As far as she was able to ascertain only one person noticed her: a tall muscular stevedore with brown skin and eyes the colour of the desert sky. He nodded just once, before dropping an eyelid in a swift wink. She wondered if he might be her contact, but as thinking about it required more effort than she was prepared to expend with a long night ahead of her, she simply withdrew her mind from the surrounding area and sat motionless.
As darkness fell, the air chilled abruptly, reminding anyone with the brain to think that winter wasn’t far away. The woman slowly uncurled herself from her crouch. She moved soundlessly away from her place of concealment and walked to where a blighted tree dominated the skyline like a rotten tooth. When she was within twenty paces of the tree a tall figure moved out of the deep blue shadow. He pushed the black Stetson back from his forehead and scratched his head.
“Miriam,” he said, “they never told me it would be you.”
“Ditto, Cuchilo. Somebody has a strange sense of humour.”
When he smiled his teeth showed very white in the moonlight.
“Somebody does indeed, although that’s for later.”
“Aye. Now we need to move.”
They jogged away, quietly and in perfect step. Cuchilo took the lead, and Mir kept station two feet back and on his right. The sky clouded over above them, and the moonlight became fitful, but Cuchilo didn’t allow a little thing like a dark sky to slow him down. After about thirty minutes of steady jogging he gestured for a stop and whistled briefly on two notes. A figure detached itself from the shadow of a clump of mesquite and came forward leading two horses. One was Cuchilo’s cream-coloured stallion, Hombre, and the other a bay gelding of unremarkable appearance. Both horses whickered a soft welcome and the boy leading them looked surprised.
Cuchilo grinned. “Hush boys.”
The horses quieted but the human boy still showed the whites of his eyes.
“It’s okay amigo. The horses know my companion quite well. This is my wife.”

You can keep reading The Redhead, The Rogue & The Railroad by Jane Jago as it is out today!

Pearls of wisdom from an octogenarian who’s seen it all…

Fireworks 

What is the effing point of effing fireworks?

At any time. 

But on Bonfire Night? You stand in someone’s muddy effing garden and a drunk man in shorts  sets fire to some stuff. In November. In the cold. Drinking iced strong lager. And then somebody offers you a jacket potato that’s raw in the middle, ditto a sausage…

The sheer waste of money and effort beggars belief – not to mention  frightened pets all across the country.

So. If you must set fire to your money please at least confine your efforts to one day.

Or granny will shove a riprap up your arse

Turning out for a dawn raid was one of the aspects of his old job as a vigiles investigator in Londinium that Dai Llewellyn had imagined would not be featuring in the elevated role he now held as Submagistratus for Demetae and Cornovii based in Viriconium. He would have been quite happy to leave it in the capable hands of his Senior Investigator, Bryn Cartivel and the small group of grim faced Praetorians on temporary secondment, under their decanus, Brutus Gaius Gallus. But orders were orders and these came from Rome.
The Magistratus had been regretful about it.
“I know you don’t want to go careering over the countryside at the moment, but this is something a bit more important than just a theft. It’s part of an Empire wide operation against a major criminal organisation and I need you there as my eyes and ears.”
It didn’t help that the Magistratus, Lucius Ambrosius Caudinus, was also Dai’s brother-in-law, thus making any excuses to get out of the duty pretty much impossible. Normally he would not have minded, but then normally he was not distracted by worry about his wife.
Notwithstanding his reluctance, after a few days of preparation he was sitting in an all-wheel somewhere along a dirt track that led to an isolated villa halfway up a mountain, sipping thermos-tea from a paper cup, whilst out in the dark and the cold his vigiles and the praetorians surrounded the building. Dai knew he was going to miss the extra security that Gallus and his men provided on operations like this. They were well armed, elite troops. His vigiles were non-citizens to a woman and man which meant they were forbidden by law to bear arms and when the praetorian detachment returned to Londinium after its six-month secondment at the end of the month, Dai would be faced with having to request armed support of a much less reliable nature.
The door opened, letting in an icy blast and Bryn stood by the vehicle, greying hair tied back and half-hidden under a knitted hat, breath condensing in the dim light. He held a satphone in one hand.
“Everyone’s in place. Just need your word to go in, Bard.”
Dai reached over and tipped the remains of his tea out of the door, onto the frozen gravel.
“Then let’s go wake Vibius up.”

From Dying for a Vacation, one of the Dai and Julia Mysteries by E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.