'A Chess Game at Michaelmas'

This is part of a running review of Lost Estates by Mark Valentine (Swan River Press 2024)

Chess is a fascinating game at which I am very bad. Fortunately I have yet to inherit a country estate where the requirement of the lease is that I should be prepared to play chess with the King should he ever drop by at Michaelmas. This seems like a fictionalised version of one of those quirky English traditions that foreigners find charming. (A genuine tradition, the peppercorn rent, is explained by the author here.) 

As the story, unfolds, we discover that perhaps something altogether stranger and more hazardous than a quirky legal arrangement is involved. The narrator, a man of antiquarian pursuits, is called in to offer advice on the mysterious chess game, which has never actually been played. He meets both the heir to a pleasant if somewhat run-down house and lands, and a young woman with some knowledge of local folklore. 

Between them the three consider the possible interpretations of the 'lease'. On the specified date the board is set out. But will the King come to play? The answer is satisfying, taking us from the oddities of English law and custom to something deeper and more menacing. Beyond and beneath any social contract lies another implicit bargain between our species and nature. 

So, a good plot with a strong central idea. But what makes this story, I think, is Mark Valentine's knack of creating credible but unconventional characters. The narrator, traveling by train in his old army greatcoat, is the kind of peripatetic scholar I love to read about. I suppose I wish I could be so erudite and adventurous. But I'll settle for reading about such people. 

Stay tuned, if not for terror exactly, at least for my take on the next story in this collection.