The Light Ages (50 page)

The fountain which we’d sat beside still rose in wild white plumes. I remembered a different Anna leaning back in starbursts of sunlight, the strap of her dress slipping from her shoulder. And the words! The fine and ancient words which she had learned from those sodden books in that ruined library; the spells of human love which we both, in our adult human lives, had failed in our different ways to recreate. Anna glanced back at me and tightened her scarf We kept a wider distance as we clambered into the valley.

It was more sheltered down here and the cottages were slipping back to earth more easily than the big house, shrugging off their engine ice and taking on roots and moss. But the river was doubly frozen; it hissed and crackled like an arthritic snake, and the church’s fallen spire still glittered amid the gravestones. This, as I’d guessed, was the place where Anna’s mother was buried.

KATE DURRY 51—76.

Crudely carved. As I crouched to examine it with her, I didn’t comment that this was the only stone in this abandoned plot which wasn’t comprehensively covered in dead brambles and ferns.

Mistress Nutall came to our back door that evening. She blew in on an agitated gust of cold and smoke.

‘Here
you are at last!’ She wiped the snowflakes from her face. ‘I’ve been looking all day through your windows.’ Her gaze travelled into the parlour with its many cuttings, guildbooks and newspapers, and the blanket-strewn couch where I slept. ‘I thought you might have—’

‘Done a flit?’ Anna suggested. Our rent, paid in arrears, was due tomorrow. ‘We’ve only been out.’

‘Out? In
this?’

‘But we
are
leaving tomorrow. And we’re so very grateful for all your help, aren’t we, Master Borrows?’

‘Oh? Yes …’ It still took a moment to realise that Anna meant me. Then, almost as quickly as she had come, Mistress Nutall had taken her disapproval, and our rentbook, and was gone.

‘You should go and see you father and Beth,’ Anna suggested after we’d got the fire going and had eaten what little was left in the larder.

‘What about you?’

She gave an impenetrable smile.

The snow came in screaming flurries as I walked the short distance to Brickyard Row. Perhaps the rails would already be blocked by tomorrow morning, but—with my local’s feel for the weather—I doubted it. Anna and I would get back to London—and from there … I was almost certain now that Stropcock’s wealth came from processing—I supposed
laundering
would have been something like the technical word—the illusory wealth which came from Bracebridge. Even when Grandmaster Harrat had taken me around Central Floor, stalactites of engine ice had been dripping from it, and I would certainly not have been the first to notice. The knowledge went back at least some ten years earlier, when, following that failed experiment which Harrat had supervised, Anna’s parents had died. So, eventually, had my mother. Stropcock had probably found out about all of this in the same way that we had, through that little haft, or simply by doing what he was best at, which was poking around. In any event, he’d used that knowledge to blackmail Harrat and get himself that Christmastime seat at his high-guilded table. Then, when Harrat died, that same knowledge must have been his springboard to far greater wealth and glory in London. But here, my vision blurred and faded. Stropcock must have made contact with someone—
something—
far more powerful than Grandmaster Harrat to have achieved the extraordinary leap of becoming Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart. It had to be the guilds themselves which sustained him—but that answer, as I reached the terraces of Brickyard Row where the birch trees flapped and mooed, still wasn’t enough. I needed a single person—that dark guildsman whom Harrat had mentioned, for whose empty face I had searched every photograph I’d found in Bracebridge, for whose unknown name I had scanned the endless lists, and who sometimes seemed closer than my own breath, yet remained more distant than the moon.

The wind gave a harsher scream; raw metal scraped on metal. I turned back suddenly at my old gate, but there was only the Bracebridge night, that endless, empty pounding. I beat hard at the front door of my old house until my father’s face emerged through a crack in the door.

‘Oh, it’s just
you ..

Beth was out—with her teacher friend, I guessed, from the way he wouldn’t say. He sat back in his chair in the fug and warmth of the kitchen with the wind buffeting the flames in the stove. He nodded, unsurprised, when I explained that Anna and I were leaving tomorrow.
Back to London, eh?
And the newspapers, the marches … My father sucked peevishly on a cigarette. No doubt he’d entertained his friends down at the Bacton Arms for years with stories of how well his son was doing down south, how I’d come back one day in guilded splendour. I was a disappointment to him and, much though I would have insisted that my standards and loyalties weren’t his, it mattered to me. I stood up from my stool. I told my father to give Beth my love. There was a fruitcake on the side which she’d made for me. I put a hand on the old man’s shoulders. Before he could get up from his chair and protest, I kissed the stubble of his cheek.

The wind was still screaming when I got back to Tuttsbury Rise with Beth’s cake. It looked as if Anna had been trying to squeeze into her suitcase all the heavy and practical extra clothing she’d been given or acquired here to take back to London, and then had given up some time ago.

‘There’s not much more to be done, is there?’ She sat down on her bed beside her open case. I was about to sit beside her when there came a knock at the front door below. I imagined it was Beth, or perhaps Mistress Nutall wanting her keys back early, but even when I forced the door open, my eyes were stung at first by nothing but dark and snow. Then I saw a dark, hulking figure, and my heart lurched.

‘Who is it, Robbie?’

Anna had come down the stairs behind me with the lantern. In dark plays and glimmers, its slow light revealed who was standing there.

‘Heard you were here,’ he croaked.

We both stepped back wonderingly.

He smelled like Redhouse—rankly of rot and foxes, and a little of soot, and of human filth—and his skin had blistered and greyed and crimsoned and bled into something far worse than I remembered in the years since I had last seen him. He shuffled into our paper-strewn parlour and slumped into a chair, a spill of rags, steaming with frost. When he unbound the scarves and clots of bandage which covered his head and face, it was hard to look at what was revealed. One eye was seared and dead. The other glowed like the red star I had seen hanging above Bracebridge during my mother’s final days.

‘You know who I am?’ His breath rasped and bubbled.

‘I saw you when I was young. My mother, she used to …’ But I trailed off as the Potato Man raised his ragged arm, and pointed a seared finger towards Anna.

‘I was your father,’ he said.

The Potato Man grabbed the enamel mug of tea I gave him and noisily inhaled its steam. When it had cooled a little, he lapped at it as a dog laps at a bowl of milk. He had scarcely any lips.

‘You’re saying you’re Edward Durry?’

‘No—Durry’s dead.’

‘But if
you
were there,’ I said, ‘on the afternoon the engines stopped—’

‘The past is dead as well,’ he growled. ‘You, girl …’ He slopped down his mug and gestured. ‘Come a little closer. I won’t bite—can’t you see I’ve no teeth … ?’

Anna got up from the edge of a chair. She didn’t flinch when his fingers touched her cheek, shoving her face towards the light of the fire and then away from it. ‘You’ve got a lot of Kate about you …’ He let out a bubbling sign. ‘And that other thing. What you are-one of the bloody fairy people …’ He grabbed her wrist, twisting it around so quickly that I saw Anna wince. He peered at the scab of her stigmata, then clasped a hank of her hair and dragged her face close to his own, studying her green eyes with his solitary red one. ‘But you hide it well, I’ll grant you that.’ His mouth contorted. ‘But I suppose it was the right thing, leaving you with that old witch in that crazy white house. What kind of life would you have had amid these people?’ Finally, he let go of Anna’s hair. His red gaze travelled over me and around the small firelit room.

Anna blinked and rocked back on her knees in front of him. ‘You sound very bitter.’

He took his cup and thrust it towards me. ‘Bitter’s this tea—you call this
sweet?’
I spooned in more sugar. ‘Place like this, you must have some bloody
food … ?’

There was scarcely anything left in our kitchen but lard and dry bread. Casting us wary and furtive glances from over hunched limbs, the Potato Man sucked and slobbered at it. The more the fire warmed him, the worse he stank. Anna sat quietly before him, watching, her hands folded into her lap. The Potato Man, we realised, had come here not out of any great urge to see the girl he claimed was his daughter, but because simply he’d hoped we might feed and warm him. That, far more than his terrible flesh, was the most horrifying thing.

‘What was my mother like?’ Anna asked eventually.

The Potato Man lifted clots of his clothing to lick up wet fragments of fallen crumb. ‘She was like you.’

‘But …’ She shrugged and made a small gesture. ‘You
must
remember ..

He continued picking at the remnants of the bread.

‘It’s the reason we’re in Bracebridge,’ I said slowly. ‘To find out what happened here. To our families … If you can help us …’ I thought stupidly, desperately. ‘We can give you more food.’

He looked up. We could have offered him wealth and favours and affection. But the Potato Man had lived for too long buffeted by the cold winds of Brownheath. As the night howled and the earth pounded and the whole of Beth’s heavy fruitcake, chunk by chunk, disappeared into the maw of his mouth, he told us about the man he had once been.

They were a proud lot, he muttered, were the aetherworkers of Central Floor. Much given to looking down on those who worked above them, as the old, old joke went. Fine English aether from Bracebridge, which was the best in the world. Sure, the southerners had their windmills and the Welsh had their grubby diggings, and the Frogs and the Latins across the seas had their own stuff, or so they claimed, but it travelled as badly as the reek of their cooking. So, for all intents and purposes, Bracebridge to the aetherworkers who lived there was the centre of the world. And Aethermaster Edward Durry—for no one would ever think to call him
Ted—
he’d done well, to get as far as he had, so young. That nice house on Park Road, and married to a girl who still worked in the paintshop, it was true, but who was generally conceded to be the prettiest of the bunch. He fancied himself a highermaster, did Edward Durry. And perhaps, even, for such things happened, at least in his thoughts, if not ever in a place like Bracebridge, a grandmaster after that. The Potato Man grunted a bitter spray of currants and shook his head. Edward Durry was always counting the next step, the next day, the next beat of the engines he spent his life tending. Why, even when his wife announced that she was pregnant, Durry was thinking that Board School wouldn’t be good enough for
his
lad. There’d be private tutors and posh academies where the lad would sleep away. Durry had moved from nightwork to do a few of the days by now, and he was regular gang leader on Halfshiftday afternoons. Some of his fellow aetherworkers thought that that was the graveyard of the whole term, but Durry had come to love the feel of the engines then, the almost-silence and the sense that, apart from the ever-tended engines of Central Floor directly above them, all the tuppenny outer floors were empty. The purpose of the whole factory had a purity, stripped of all the rubbish and clatter, and he liked to think with mingled contempt and pity of the other lesser guildsmen getting on with their stupid, lesser lives up top. Oh, he was a proud man, was Durry, and he’d noticed, in the time he’d worked the engines and had got to know them better than his heartbeat, a slight extra pull, a tension, not a change in the rhythm itself; you understand, but a sense, like a slightly stiffened muscle, of almost pleasurable resistance.

Then, one day, one of the toffs from one of those oak-lined offices—Grandmaster Thomas Harrat if you please—came to see him. Durry was torn as he was always torn when he was with such people between wanting to suck up and telling them that they were no better than he was. But the two men were of a similar age, and they were both ambitious, and they knew their aether. Harrat was never as direct as to say that Bracebridge was running out of the stuff. That wasn’t his way. But
extraction difficulties
were mentioned. As were
long-term production exigencies.
One evening after his shift was finished, Harrat took Durry to an iron gate, which he opened in some fancy way and led him down and along abandoned corridors to a room of leaking shelves. There, he showed him something special, something large, something bright and heavy. A chalcedony nestled amid the newspapers of a wooden casket—massive with magic. And the plan was to boost production, to make Bracebridge more than the plain little town it was. Harrat spoke easily of these things, but Durry simply stared at the stone. For the one overriding rule which was beaten into the mind of every apprentice was to Do Things In The Way They Have Always Been Done. For aether was magic. Aether was dangerous. But what, after all, Durry thought as he stared into the lovely light of that chalcedony, did the guilds know? Think of the Founder working against the laughter of his Painswick neighbours. And Christ himself– they laughed at him as well, didn’t they? Not that these things were said, not that they needed to be. The matter was swiftly agreed. There would be an experiment, an innovation. And their so-called seniors and supervisors would not be told.

There was much work to be done. To introduce the spell within the chalcedony into the production process required that it be inserted into the shackle between the three huge pistons and the fetter which gripped the rock. The existing shackle was a marvel of engineering, a yard-long cat’s-cradle of metal and the highest grade engine silk spun like the chrysalis of a butterfly, yet it could not accommodate the stone. So a new shackle had to be fashioned. The process, the secrecy, was fascinating, and Durry always sensed, that, in their secret heart, all the great guilds were looking down on their task with encouragement and approval. When a far higher guildsman than Harrat came up one day from London, and smiled and listened, and raised his hand from his dark cloak and laid it on Edward Durry’s shoulder, why, that seemed right. And the planning was a mighty work. Even if this process, this
insertion,
was done openly, you couldn’t just stop the pistons as if you were the steamaster of some poxy train. Even done gradually, with a lessening of pressure, the aether would at some point snap back all the way from the quickening pools. To get the pressure up again would be the work of several shifterms. So the insertion must take place between one beat of the engines and the next.