The Light Ages (29 page)

Mistress Summerton bowed her head slightly. She looked tired, diminished. ‘All quite wonderful. Although I’m a stranger to these things—’

‘I
know
how provincial life was in the West Country. And then in that ghastly place in the north. Or even World’s End …’ Mister Snaith gave a soft sigh. ‘But give yourself another few decades and I’m sure you’ll come to appreciate the full wonders of the capital’s arts. They bring such relief, I promise …’ In the brighter light, I could see that, as well as the rouge of his lips, there were also crumblings of face powder around Mister Snaith’s eyes. His skin was ivory white, and seemed hairless and poreless.

I sat between them, caught in the middle of this exchange. ‘And you, Robert? I gather you’re from the north?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. After all I’d heard today, I hesitated to name Bracebridge. But his lashless eyes were on me. Dulled though they were, they were filled behind their make-up with the empty hunger of tremendous age. The theatre below was emptying.

‘I know that Mistress Summerton doesn’t approve of such things, Master Robert,’ he said, ‘but I have a small gathering of fellow seekers planned for later this evening, and quite frankly, a guildsman such as I could do with an escort. It’s only a short walk, I promise.’

Had he really said
guildsman? I
could have been mishearing almost everything Mister Snaith was saying. But I was curious.

‘I’m so grateful for your company,’ Mister Snaith breathed. ‘I have a nice little cabsman I can trust. But he’s down with the flu. There’re
still
so many germs about this late in the season, don’t you find?’

He had pulled a fur-trimmed cloak around his shoulders and was tapping a silver-topped ebony cane. It was raining again, and I was carrying both his surprisingly large and heavy carpetbag and his umbrella. He was perfectly dry, but the edge of the water was dribbling down my neck. Mistress Summerton had driven off in that car of hers towards Chelsea Bridge, but something of her presence remained. Whatever Mister Snaith was, I didn’t doubt there were reasons why she had introduced me. He smelled like old wardrobes; of damp and mothballs and woodworm and lavender. Was he really a changeling, or just someone who had been born small and white and odd? My limbs ached, my mouth was dry. The half-remembered scenes of the Opera House, the dragons and nymphs and the flower-like dancers and Annalise’s music, all seemed to be swirling around us in a ghost-pageant.

‘And I couldn’t have a better escort, could I? I know—oh, don’t deny it!—that so many people decry what you marts do, but anyone who has a proper understanding of the guilds will also appreciate that you are vital to their functioning ..

‘Thank you,’ I growled. We had entered an area of finely laid streets and pretty churches, and then the large, square stone-encased houses and apartments of that most expensive part of central London known as Hyde which lies between the guildhalls of Wagstaffe Mall and Westminster Great Park. Some of these houses here looked to be almost as big as the Grand Opera House but were so stuffed with windows as to appear, as the rain glittered and streamed, to be made entirely of glass. Telegraphs dripped amid the gables—a sure sign of urban wealth. Mister Snaith steered me behind the front facade of one of the biggest buildings, and around it towards a tradesman’s doorway. He rang the bell and waited, his breath whistling in and out. A steward’s face was glimpsed.

‘There’re two of you—we most certainly weren’t expecting a—’

‘This
is Master Borrows of the Guild of, ah, Explorers. He’s my assistant ..

I kept silent as we were led up concrete stairways and along narrow and windowless corridors. Doors creaked open. There were whispers, giggles. The glimpsed surprised faces of sleepy maids. Then we reached a wider passageway which dwindled into the lamplit haze of distance. The spaces here were so large, our footsteps so muffled, that I had to look down at my feet to check that we were still moving. The steward gave a final disdainful sniff and stood to one side of a double doorway.

‘Hold this for me? Much obliged …’ Mister Snaith briefly handed me his toy ebony cane then flipped his cloak off his shoulders and turned it around so that the lining showed—a flashing silk of livid oranges and greens. Humming faintly, he then rummaged in the pockets of his jacket for his handkerchief, consulted a tiny mirror, and began, with quick, expert motions, to smear and change the make-up which covered his face. ‘Now, Master Robert, my cane?’ He fiddled with his red cravat to make it blossom. He twiddled with his sleeves.
‘Most
grateful …’ He then nodded to the steward that the doors could be opened, before, in a final flourish, he removed his toupee. The transformation was complete. When we entered the huge room, dressed in his garish cloak, tiny, bald-headed, long-featured, dark-eyed and porcelain-white, twirling the wand of his cane, Mister Snaith was a changed miniature wizard from some long-lost Age.

Gas mantles leapt and murmured, were caught in myriad mirrors. Whole constellations of guildpins, necklaces, brooches, buttons, eyeglasses, cigarette ends, beads and eyeglasses surrounded us—and there was a smell much like that which had filled the Opera House, which was of hot and expensive and slightly damp humanity. I gave Mister Snaith his carpetbag, which he lifted as if it were empty, and sat down beside the door on a slippery silk chair. The fat red sun of a large cigar winked at me. What light there was in the room was directed towards Mister Snaith.

‘Greetings to you all, my fellow seekers after truth and enlightenment …’ His slight voice carried over the rustles and whispers. ‘I am Mister Snaith. Many of you will have heard of me. Many of you will not …’ As he spoke, he rolled up his left sleeve to reveal a small left wrist, which was apparently unblemished apart from a cross and C tattoo. ‘Suffice to say that I was born in another place, in another Age, and that my parents saw what I was and abandoned me in their terror to the depths of the forest which then covered all of this realm. I should have died in the savage snows, but my first memory …’ He paused, and winced pain. ‘Is of the face of a wolf. Yes ladies, gentlemen—’ He paused again. ‘I was reared by
canis lupus,
the grey wolf, in the dark depths of a forest, and on milk and blood and savagery. You only see me here now today because I was rescued by hunters, and brought to a church, and shown the ways of the guilds and of our blessed Lord.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘Yet beyond that—beyond that, there always …’ He pressed his temples. There was another pause. ‘Lie wonders which to human eyes are unseeing. There are unanswerable questions beyond all the wisdom of the guilds …’ There was much more of this. Phrases which seemed to make sense as you heard them, then dissolved as quickly as reflections in the rain.

‘Behold!’

Now, Mister Snaith’s whole body was quivering as he spread the sleeves of his green cloak. It seemed from where I was sitting that he had actually started to rise from the floor. I peered around the flickering edges of his cloak and his carpetbag, trying to see his feet. There were gasps from the audience. All the priest’s warnings and tales must have come back to them: that changelings have lost their souls, that there is nothing in their hearts, or their insides. Trails of mist then started to weep in smoky droplets from the sleeves of Mister Snaith’s suit. The stuff was greenish-tinged, subtly glowing. It turned and roiled. Now, agitated gasps and murmurs started to rise from the audience. Furniture creaked. A woman tittered. But the fog still writhed, and Mister Snaith and his carpetbag were almost extinguished within it; he was a fly embedded in green amber. There was a long pause, interrupted briefly by the unmistakable splatter of someone being sick.

‘I have a question.’ A young man spoke from near the front. ‘I have to sit my pre-semester exams in the lesser quadrant of mysteries of the Great Guild of Ironmasters this term. Quite honestly I haven’t done a single spot of revision … And I was wondering what the questions might be.’ Pause. ‘Or the answers . . Within the green mist, his head uptilted, Mister Snaith gave a reply, but the circuitous phrases were reminiscent of the words he had uttered earlier; all smoke and camouflage without any discernible substance. It was plain that the examiners of the Ironmasters’ Guild had little to fear from Mister Snaith. He was better at answering the more general questions which followed; those about the future, and all the petty things to do with wealth and health and marriage which, it seemed, obsessed the rich at least as much as the poor. He was better, also, at advising of the state of deceased relatives, although it seemed to me that such knowledge was theologically dubious.

Eventually, the questions petered out, and Mister Snaith, amid odd thumpings and whirrings, unravelled and faded into wafts of smoke and surprisingly bandage-like appurtenances. There were smatters of applause as the lights were turned up. Doors were opened. People drifted out. As he sat down on a chair with his carpetbag plonked well beneath it, the remaining guests seemed to want to prod and squeeze him, but he took it in good heart. There were shrieks of glee when, after much bashful head-shaking, he folded back the sleeve of his shirt to show again his left wrist. But I was suspicious of that tattoo; the thickly drawn ink could have been used to disguise anything which was beneath.

I sat drained and ignored, surrounded by dozens of the tall mirrors. In my best trousers. In my dark blue jacket. In the worn-down heels of my shoes. As if such things mattered, but here-there was no mistaking it—they did. I looked almost as out of place as Mister Snaith. I noticed that I had succeeded in tearing the back of my jacket, probably on Mistress Summerton’s webs of tin cans. Somehow, I managed to look both flashy and scruffy. Everything the other men here wore was black and white—and the women, the women …

‘Hello, Master Robert Borrows …’ One of them came towards me from the many angles of several mirrors. She had dark hair, bowed lips, arched and humorous eyebrows. ‘You’ve barely changed. But you don’t even remember me, do you?’

There were diamonds at her neck and ears. Her eyes, too, had a diamonded, feverish glint. Yes, of course I remembered. How could I ever forget? Annalise’s friend, from that Midsummer night when we’d danced across the pier. Grandmistress Sadie Passington.

‘Of course I do, Sadie. You haven’t changed either.’

‘What a sweet thing to say.’ In her dress and manner, in her scent and the sound of her voice, Sadie was still almost beautiful, and certainly pretty, but there was a hint of tension around her eyes, and at the corners of her mouth. Not quite lines, exactly—she was still too young—but a sense of the flesh hardening.

She waited for a servant to find a chair on which she could perch.

‘You know,’ she said as she settled herself, ‘I still remember that season. It was one of the best.
The
best, probably, seeing as we all went our separate ways a bit afterwards. You especially. You were hardly there, but you seemed to be such a part of it …’ Her eyes travelled up and down me with a frankness I’d rarely seen in a woman, least of all one who claimed to be a guildmistress. ‘You fitted in so well.’

‘I probably misled you a little about who I was …’

She gave a shrug, showing off her fine bosom. ‘I don’t think you ever really said that much about who and what you were, Robbie. You just tagged along with Anna Winters.’

The name hung between us. Our gaze met, but it was unfocused.

‘Did you see her this evening?’ I asked. ‘Were you at the Grand Opera House?’

‘Who wasn’t? I’m not sure what people made of that tune of hers, though ..

‘I liked it.’

‘Well, so did I ..

We talked for a while longer as the room emptied. Sadie had also studied at the Academy of the Guild of Gifts after leaving St Jude’s, although she made light of it. Such things as work were, for her, not to be taken seriously.

‘And what about you, Master Robert? What are you doing?’

‘I’m … involved in publishing. We have a radical newspaper.’

‘Publishing a newspaper!’ She clapped her hands. ‘How thrilling! And you must move in the most interesting circles, to bump into, ah—Mister Snaith here.’

‘As a matter of fact, I only met him today.’

But Sadie studied me, her eyes glittering. ‘But what a
life
you must lead.’ Apart from a few servants and Mister Snaith, she and I were the only other people left in the room. ‘Now, where is it!’ Sadie began to ruffle inside her bead purse. ‘There’s this big do next termend. Some saint’s day or other, although of course it’s all in aid of charity …’ She paused and looked up at me. ‘Do you know Saltfleetby? It’s down from Folkestone …’ A card appeared between Sadie’s coral-painted fingertips. ‘Here we are. All the information you’ll ever need. And I
very
much want you to come. Think of it as a personal invitation. And as a favour to me, even if you
are
a radical and think I’m shallow and stupid and fey.’ Sadie gave me another of her direct, appraising, looks. ‘I want you to promise.’

The paper was vellum, thick as a bedsheet. The last card I’d taken from anyone which had looked remotely like this had been from Grandmaster Harrat.

The Pleasure of Your Company

is Requested

Walcote House

Marine Drive

Salfleetby

April 24th—25th 99

RSVP

‘So you will come, won’t you? ‘Will Anna Winters be there? ‘Of course she will.’

C
LUTCHING MY CARDBOARD SUITCASE
, I dodged across the main road outside Saltfleetby station. The trams here were odd devices, open-sided and with striped blue and red awnings. They posted their destinations in chalk, and chuffed and rattled on dead rails. Even the carts and drays looked different here, and the tropic palms I’d seen on postcards in London pawnshops flapped like mad umbrellas in the wind. I stumbled past flowerbeds and white shelters, down steps where the path blazed and my feet slid and sank as if in a dream. And there it was. Blue over green over grey over blue. For the first time in my life. The open sea.