The House of Storms (6 page)

‘If you could let me have some proper toothpaste,’ Denise said, swallowing. ‘You know, the white stuff that smells like medicine. I’m sure that would sort it out. You
can
get me some, can’t you?’

Marion realised that her return home to Clyst had turned today into something approximating to the family Noshiftdays which she’d read about in newspapers. That, or the rum. For Mam was half-asleep before the fire, Dad was humming and bumbling about without achieving anything noticeable and Denise, inspired by that blouse, was doing some vigorous taking-in. Marion found even the normally industrious Owen sitting on an upturned tin bath in their open-sided lean-to, staring towards the incoming tide.

‘Congratulations,’ she said.

He glanced up at her. ‘Do you really mean it?’

‘Of course I do. Now move up.’

It was growing dark. It had been, in fact, one of those days which had never been fully light—at least outside Invercombe. Jewelled and grainy, the lights of the ships were glowing. Trade heading in towards Bristol, or out towards the entire world. To be a mariner on such a vessel, braided and buttoned and precise as the furnishing of its decks, had always been her big brother’s dream.

‘Have you been inducted?’

‘No, but Dad really
has
signed the papers. They give you this yellow carbon copy which he says he’s going to get framed. I can’t thank you enough, sis.’

‘It’s not
my
money. Dad’s been saving for years.’

‘Well…’ Owen laughed and shook his head. ‘That’s what he’s always told us.’

In every sense, Owen was the biggest of the family; prone to plumpness even on the sparse meals they often ate, with a broad face, ruddy cheeks and a shock of sticking-up brown hair. It was hard to imagine him stuffed into gold braid and epaulettes, but he talked excitedly about his new guild, and he insisted that, whilst he would always protect its secrets, he would never forget where he came from.

‘You do believe me, don’t you, sis? I mean, I really won’t change. I’ll still eat eel cake and hate the bloody Excise Men.

I’ll still throw plait-bread into the waves to keep the sea from wanting too many souls.’

‘You’re my brother, Owen. You’re a Price. When I have to remind you of that, I’ll get an oar and bash you over the head.’

It was easy to laugh into the darkness, even as the rattle of the wind on the roof became the stronger clatter of rain.

‘Just wait, love,’ Mam whispered, pulling Marion close as the whole family gathered in the darkness to wave her off. ‘We’ll get something nice fixed up for our Sally one day.’

Marion headed along the coast road as the rain worsened to sleet. There was, she knew, a quicker pathway around the headland which led by a gate up to Invercombe’s gardens, but it was never a route she could have taken, either as undermaid or shore-girl. The road tonight was awash. Keeping to its bank, slipping occasionally, she followed it until it met with the smaller lane which led towards Invercombe’s gatehouse. For a while, the sleet drove heavier than ever through the shrieking trees. Then, as if by the turning of a switch, it ceased.

E
XACTLY TEN O’CLOCK
on a warm March morning at Invercombe in the ninety-ninth of this Age of Light, and each chime and bell and gong filled a separate silence in the house until another took up the long celebration of the hour. At first, Alice had latched on to this irregularity as something she might exploit. Now, she’d come to enjoy it. Ten o’clock and she spilled the purple-stained paper bag of hellebore berries into an engraved white retort from her portmanteau. Ten o’clock and she muttered the spell, and smiled as she watched them fatten and turn a glossy, appetising sugar-red. Ten o’clock, and she put on her sleek olivine coat and checked her face for the last time in her mirror and smiled at the renewed firmness of her jaw.

Outside, on her way to find Ralph on the south-west facing patio of the top terrace where he now liked to sit, she was amused to notice that it was barely half-past nine by the shadow which the sundial cast across the warm red brick of the wall above the main hall.

At the sound of his mother’s footsteps, Ralph swung the circled image of his telescope away from the hectic stirring of a hedge where he had been watching the mating of a pair of sparrows and let the amplified gaze of his new possession, a genuine mariner’s optic which Weatherman Ayres had recently given him, focus on a silvered fringe of hair.

‘That’s not quite such a nice thing to do, darling. Looking at people as if they’re mere objects.’

‘No?’ Blinking, he removed his eye from the eyepiece.

‘Well. Never mind.’ Flicking back the rugs which covered his legs, his mother perched on the edge of his lounger.
‘Such
a pain. I’ve got to see people in Bristol.’

Ralph nodded. It was a different world out there beyond these gardens and his library. He thought of his father, of the smoky London smell which came with him down the lines as they talked on the telephone, and bought the tickly urge of a new bout of coughing.

‘I must be going.’ Standing up, she gently kissed him. Nothing ever touched her. She was always so new and fresh, and she looked lovely as ever to him today as she strode off along the sunlit terrace where the spilling heads of giant bluebells nodded in the breeze as if striking their stamens to join with the chiming of all the clocks inside the house.

Alone again, he reapplied his eye to his telescope and drew the tripoded instrument in a blurring sweep across the valley. The air was astonishingly light, and this device, aligned and machined according to the principles of pure optics, was, Ralph thought as his gaze followed the gold-green stems of the lantern-flowers and the latescent globes of moonivy, probably the only unaethered object in all of Invercombe. He had arrived, he was sure, at a new state of clarity here. For that, and for his improving health, he was entirely grateful to this new house. Weary as he had been at first, the place had seemed just the termination of another journey, and, as always, an opportunity for more reading and research. Knowledge, certainty, science had long been his bulwarks against fever, and they were also the surest evidence he had that the world—the real one of which, between fusses with blankets and bath chairs and trunks and railway stations, he had seen so little—really existed.

It had been maps which first drew Ralph. He had been an explorer as he retraced he and his mother’s journeys across the dotted frontiers of Europe, then the inland reaches of Africa and the white boundaries of the Ice Cradle until a fresh fever took and he fell into the
Terra Incognita
of nightmare. After that bout, he turned instead towards the natural world. Everything in life, he began to understand, was part of one intricate machine. The petals of a flower had their relationship with the pollinating bee which dwelt in its hive amid geometries which could also be found in the crystals of rocks. As he turned the sleek, heavy pages of the large expensive books his mother bought for him and peeled back hazy layers of protective tissue to gaze down at beautifully coloured and annotated plates, he often felt as if some real part of him had left his bed and was wandering an incredible garden. This escape, where everything could be studied and explained, was the exact opposite of his deliriums. Even his own body, the very illness which kept him weak, was part of this same pattern, and was thus neither wonderful nor terrible, but a simple truth.
Primary pulmonary tuberculosis;
it was there in the butterfly wings of the flayed lungs of its victims.

Chaos—unreason—rather than his illness, became the thing to be kept at bay, and he hunted it down with the selfish rigour of an invalid. He soon threw aside the need of the hand of God the Elder to wind the mechanism which drove every deed of nature, and with it the Biblical idea of a primal garden where every species and genus had once supposedly thrived. To him, Eden now existed only as a jumbled myth which was entirely inappropriate to this Age of Light, although the image of the first two humans, shy as fauns and naked even of their fig leaves, was somehow harder to erase. He still found himself gazing sometimes at old prints of Adam and Eve standing beside the fruit-burdened Tree of Knowledge. They were hairless in a way he knew, from veiled references in the appendices and footnotes of books on physiology, adult humans never were, although he’d never yet found any illustrations against which he could properly compare the things which were happening to his own body. They often possessed navels, too, which was surely wrong in the circumstances, and Eve also had breasts, and nipples which she didn’t always fully cover with a casually raised hand. Sometimes, between her legs, there was even the glimpse of a cleft. With his books put aside and the lights turned out and the fire flickering and the treacly darkness of spells and laudanum surging within him, she often still seemed to hang there before Ralph like the reproachful ghost of his lost beliefs. She sometimes even came to his bed to join him in an embrace as the sweet ache in his belly brought the friction of release.

But now that he was at Invercombe, everything was clear. Here, and even though many of his precious books had gone missing in transit, he was provided with a library which was even better than the huge one at Walcote, the shelves of which were crowded with far too many novels and bound annual editions of society magazines for his taste. He’d known from the instant that he opened his first book on avian life here that it had never been opened before, let alone read. He was reminded of a distant memory of the time before his illness, and of being the first to walk across a white and seemingly infinite field of snow. True, the books at Invercombe were a little old, but Ralph knew that knowledge was unchanging. And there was an odd feeling—most unscientific, but still heartening—that these pages had been waiting for him, just as had this whole house. And he could tell that his mother was excited by Invercombe as well, with its antique reckoning engine still apparently functioning somewhere down in the bowels of the house he hadn’t yet reached, and its role in the development of his guild, and even a weathertop to keep the worst vagaries of the climate at bay. Something in him was healing by simply being here. Sometimes, heartbeat by heartbeat, breath by breath, new page by new page, Ralph could literally feel his body reknitting itself from disconnected islands of pain.

To get downstairs to the library, and unaided, was surely much like the proposal which Guildsmaster Columbus had once presented to Queen Isabella about the fabled continents of Thule. There were, as he walked out from his bedroom for the first time into the swaying emptiness of the main landing, the same familiar landmarks sunk beyond the horizon, which tunnelled on in the wan light for as far as he could see. It took days of retreats and setbacks to get further, but to Ralph it all remained one seamless voyage. Just as he reached the turn which had seemed impossible at the start, there were new obstacles which no cartographer could have anticipated. Like the edge of the world, he found himself facing the vast fan of the best stairs. But he wasn’t deterred. Of course, there were murmurs of dissent from his mother, but Columbus had had the same from his crew. Stair by stair, he descended, until finally, more than a shifterm after he had first set out, Ralph found himself standing triumphant at the doorway of a library which was fully as beautiful as he had dared imagine.

For several days, the very act of sitting there and being surrounded by those tiers of unopened spines was enough. But slowly, his sense of himself expanded to possess this marvellous room. And climbing from bed, getting dressed and then heading off along the gallery and down those stairs was Ralph’s equivalent of a long country walk. Sometimes his mother even let him set out alone, although he suspected that she hung back just out of sight in case he suffered a surge of dizziness. There was often this slight sense at Invercombe, in whispers, plays of shadow, the indrawn breath of the salt air, of being watched and followed.

Guiding the telescope, Ralph’s circular gaze encompassed the thickening fruit of Invercombe’s citrus grove. He could almost smell the ripening oranges and lemons which the weathertop nourished with warmth in the garden’s most sheltered spot. Then up. Sometimes, he did that. Just let it fly and settle. Plants of incredible scent and power—red and white and green and purple, or all and none of those colours twirled together at once—glowed and frolicked from their beds. Previously, Ralph had had little concern for the wonders of plantsmasters’ art, but now he was filled with a new curiosity. After all, and no matter how far the final creation might deviate from its origins, each had its roots in some natural equivalent. Cedarstone, he imagined, must surely contain elements of the redwoods of Thule. Sallow might once have come from the common parsley, and perhaps then also the rock samphire. Then there were the creatures which arrived, special delivery, stamped and sealed
Live Cargo, Addressee Only,
from the offices of the Arthropod Branch of the Beastmasters’ Guild. Bees, flies and wasps were fine for commoner blooms, but when it came to the fiery tongues of the pyrepoppies, the trumpets of lanternflowers or fruiting moonivy, the insects of common creation simply weren’t up to the job. These giant insects, mammoth things, furred and tusked, gaudily striped, massively proboscised, were commonly known as buzzbugs.

Ralph swung his vision across a blur of treetops. And here was a hedge, and some grass with the dew still glittering. Then something blue and white. Striped, in fact. Wondering what aethered extravagance he’d now alighted on, Ralph drew in the focus. The stripes became sharper, then vanished, then snapped into view again. Cotton; he could see the weave, and Ralph inched his telescope until he saw a boot, a hem, and that striped blue blouse again.

It was one of the maids. The sudden movements, the extending of that crease across her blouse, were caused by her bending and straightening as she hung out washing. Bit by bit, circular image by image, he formed a picture of her. Dark hair, almost black, but catching in the sunlight with serrations of gold. It was full and thick, and cut to just below the shoulder, although he guessed from the repeated flash of her hand as she pushed it out of the way that she’d have wished it shorter. He couldn’t see her face—just the curve of her jaw and the glimpsed lobe of her ear which her hair quickly curtained again, but it was pleasant just to watch her. The items she was stabbing out on the line remained a white blur, but part of him sensed that it would be good to study them as well, discern their nature and stitching just as he had the criss-cross of those pinafore straps, and the sense you got of the shape of her shoulder blades moving beneath. But to concentrate on the washing would have meant losing focus on the girl herself. As another of Invercombe’s clocks started ringing, Ralph felt more and more of his consciousness passing from his blanket-shrouded body, down his telescope, riding the light.