The Light Ages (54 page)

‘So,’ I said. ‘How many days do we have?’

Saul considered this for a moment. A solid darkness had filled the sky. You could almost see buildings up there, whilst the blue smog and bonfire lights were like the glimmers of stars in the yard below.

‘So you’re really going to that big house?’

‘How many people do you need here? What difference would Anna and I make? All I need to know is the day you march, Saul. That, and for you to let me go …’

Citizen Simpson’s voice made a soft song and the little stone glowed in his palm, warmly gold with all the loveliness of aether. Then, as his phlegmy voice rose towards a final flourish, a swirl of new light gathered around us and spilled down across the square, shifting and glittering.

Saul gave a laugh and spread his arms.

‘Hey, look, Robbie! It’s snowing!’

T
WIN LIGHTS CAME OUT OF THE SNOW,
tunnelling our shadows as Anna and I trudged along Marine Drive. We’d taken what seemed like the last train ever out of London early in the afternoon of this Christmas Eve. Now we were finally here at Saltfleetby and dragging our old suitcases towards Walcote House. The great houses, even the walls beside them, had vanished. All that was left was this clifftop road and the dancing, battering snow. The lights grew wider in a grin of chrome. The machine was long and black and low. It gave off gusts of bitter-salty smoke. A blade was twitching across its front window.

Sadie’s voice came and went, and the driver, in a shiny peaked cap and gloves and boots, emerged to open a rear door for us. Big though it was, the machine’s cabin was far more cramped and low than any decent carriage’s. Sadie was wearing her silver-dark coat, and a hat and a scarf which matched. Her lips, when she gave us a composed smile, were astonishingly red, her hair had acquired a coppery sheen, and there was a huge greenstone ring on her left hand. It was as if she was making up for all those grey and white newspaper photographs.

‘So you decided to come after all,’ she said after Anna and I had borne in drifts of melting snow. ‘I’d still have invited you, Anna, if you hadn’t moved from Stoneleigh Road in such a hurry. You as well, Robbie—but you both vanished in the most extraordinary way … Do you like this new toy of mine, by the way? It’s my main wedding present—or it is so far. I get the driver as well, although he and it’s only any good on a decent road …’

It’s not that we haven’t thought about you,’ Anna said. ‘It’s just that—well, you saw what happened at that church with George. And I’m sorry if I’ve lied to you about who I am. But I hope you can at least understand why.’

Sadie studied us as we sat in our sodden clothes on these burnished leather seats. Anna had changed even more than I had. Her hair hung lank, her lips looked bruised, and there were tidemarks of dirt around her neck. And the Mark of her stigmata, towards which I couldn’t help notice Sadie’s eyes were travelling, was scarcely a scab.

‘There’s a lot,’ I said, ‘that we need to explain.’

‘But somehow,’ Sadie worked down the window, ‘I don’t think you’re going to.’ White specks had settled on her eyelashes when she looked back at us. ‘You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you, by the way … ?’

The gates to Walcote House, which had been open in summer, were now closed, and the driver had to parp his horn. Then four huge balehounds came dragging their uniformed keepers. Sadie pushed her window back up just as one leapt at the glass. There was a clash of fangs, a spill of drool. A lantern was tilted towards Anna and I.

‘For God’s sake,’ Sadie shouted. ‘Can’t they see who I
am?
I’m entitled to guests, aren’t I?’

The huge wrought-iron gates, which were now topped with barbed wire, shuddered back. The car moved on through the lacing white. There were more sounds of barking, the fires and structures of some sort of encampment, but it was hard to tell as the smooth white road spread and glimmered until the lights of the great house finally loomed. So much had changed here, and yet so much hadn’t. Just as in the summer, last minute arrivals were to be expected, and the servants scarcely raised their eyebrows as we were presented to them in the clamorous candlelight of the great hall, which was scented and filled to its mighty roof by a huge fir tree. It glittered and twinkled with ornaments, and the coloured flutterings of birds.

‘Oh, we always have a little
flock,’
Sadie said, almost back to her old dismissive self as a golden parakeet cocked its eye to study us from its perch atop a landscape painting. ‘How boring to have just
dead
ornaments on your tree, eh? I mean, you do have
trees
up in the north, don’t you, Anna, Robbie? Or is that something else, like soap and education and being truthful about who you are, that you haven’t quite discovered yet?

‘You two can share a room if that’s what you’d like,’ Sadie added as she was helped from her hat and coat, and the crimson dress contained within it puffed out like a flower from its bud. She gave us a frank, appraising stare. ‘Or perhaps not.’

We were up on the third floor of the east wing this time, overlooking the front. I was the fourth door down on the right, and Anna was the sixth. We passed wafts of cigar smoke from half-open doors, and children somewhere were singing carols, but the atmosphere in Walcote House tonight was essentially quiet. After all, tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and the day after that, Grandmistress Sadie Passington was getting married and two guilds would be united in their pomp and joy. I glanced at Anna along the corridor as servants hefted what was left of our dripping cases into our separate rooms. Then I closed my door. My room was sky blue and burnished walnut. Swallows almost as livid and living as the parakeets in the hall chased silk clouds across the walls. I kicked off my sodden boots and sat down on the side of my bed, massaging my frozen toes. A log crackled in the big grate. Apart from my feet and my wet clothes, the air smelled chiefly of sallow smoke and antique wood. I touched the fresh sheets. From Bracebridge, to London, to here, where-the feeling welled up within me softly and easily as this cool, dry warmth—I finally felt as if I was home. This kind of life was so seductive. Yet outside, beyond the snow which feathered against my windows, people were starving and a day of bloody revolution was being prepared. Still, it had been a long time since I had felt as warm as this, or had enjoyed the pleasure of peeling off all my clothes. I spun the knobs of the taps in the bathroom, then tilted in vials of oil and perfume. Foam, whiter than engine ice, whiter than snow, billowed up. I let out a long, blissful sigh as I slipped into it, then fell, almost instantly, asleep.

I awoke coughing in cold slippery water, conscious that I should be up somewhere, doing something—but it was still Christmas Eve here in Walcote House. I dropped armfuls of towels as I went to dry myself in front of my fire. For some inexplicable reason, a large single boot had been placed as if to warm beside the firegrate. The thing felt warm and light and weathered, was little-used, but ancient. Plainly, a servant had been in; as well as that odd boot, pyjamas which matched the blue of the room had been laid out, along with a tray with wine and crustless sandwiches. With a sudden shock, I remembered my case. I found it on top of the wardrobe, and flung it open on the floor. But, if the servants had looked inside, they hadn’t known what to do with its dripping contents, and my fingers closed almost instantly on the scrunch of greaseproof paper. I sighed and sat back, my heart still hammering. How easy it was, once you were here, to fall, literally and figuratively, asleep. I peeled back the paper and touched the numberbead. Cool figures snowed inside my head.
I knew—
I could see– but would anybody else? I balled the paper up again and stuffed the numberbead beneath my pillows. I devoured the sandwiches, and drank a little of the wine. Inside my wardrobe, there were black suits and white shirts. Nests of wing collars. Waterfalls of tie and cravat. I dressed in my pyjamas, put out the lanterns and lay down.

Silence. The tick of the settling log. The faint voice of the wind. This bed was so big, so white and empty, so warm and so cool; you could get lost forever just lying in it. I turned over. The ghost of Anna smiled at me from across the pillow and I cupped my hand across her cheek, but tonight her image wasn’t enough. I’d fallen asleep easily enough in the bath but the slick feel of my pyjamas, the glide of the sheets, were all too much. SHOOM
BOOM. My
heart thudded against the mattress. The swallows in the room were dark as bats. The warm, one-legged boot waited. Sleeplessness was a luxury I’d scarcely experienced, and it was especially ridiculous, after the day I’d had, and with what lay ahead …

Trains shooting by in the darkness. Voices coming up from the kitchen and through the walls.
Are you still awake, Robert … ?
The fire gave a chatter of sparks. The wind, the night, sang in my head. When I heard the turning of the door’s handle, the part of me which was still in Walcote House was slow to react. But it was Anna. It had to be. A shadow shifted. A shaft of light from the corridor set the swallows wheeling. I rolled over and the spin of the sheets made me feel dizzy as shadows drifted across a forest of turned and polished wood.

‘Is that you Anna … ?’ I murmured.

The sigh of something heavy being dragged across the carpet. Then the smell of woodland and cologne. I could have got up but I was frozen, and oddly enchanted, by the scene which was playing before me. A man, dressed in a softly crackling suit of dry leaves, and oddly masked, was crouching, emberlit, before my fire and fiddling with that boot. There was an almost birdlike edginess to his movements, and his eyes, as he stood up and they flickered towards me through dark knotholes in bark, were wary.
Is that … ?
But the questions were beyond asking as this strangely attired creature and I briefly regarded each other. Then he rustled back across the carpet and closed my door with
a click
of wood on wood which sent me tumbling towards sleep as if falling through giant boughs into a twilit forest.

The corridors of Walcote House filled with surprised laughter on Christmas morning.
Has
he
been? Did you see him?
My boot had a full and luxurious feel as I tumbled its contents onto my bed. A silver-spined notebook. A boxed fountain pen. Chocolates. The children, who had been up for so long that they were on their second shift of nannies, charged about, the boys with bronze breastplates, the girls in silver tiaras. The hooved and masked Lord of Misrule who came down from the moon of Christmas Eve with his cloak of leaves and his gifts of apples and nuts was a rarely heard myth on Brownheath and in the Easterlies, but at Walcote House he was legend made real. Many had found forest litter across their rugs, had smelled woodsmoke, or had glimpsed his whispering grey form. And outside, right up on the highest roofs, there were crescent prints where he had strode the pristine snow. I guessed, looking from my own window, that some servant must have risked his life to put those marks there, but here at Walcote House it was always hard to tell. The guests smiled to see the puzzled face of a stranger as, still in a half-daze, I wandered in, shaved and dressed in my crisp new clothes. Yes,
he
had visited them as well—the Lord of the Lost Seasons the children knew, and whom the adults understood to be none other than the greatgrandmaster himself—had come to them out of their dreams even in this of all years, and with so much else on his mind. But the nuts were gold. The apples were silver pomanders. And perfumes for the women, and bracelets studded with their names in tiny jewels. Cigars for the men. Hairbrushes as well, discreetly embossed, but only for those who weren’t noticeably bald. I remembered the glitter of those eyes, gazing at me through a mask of old wood. There was a precision and a thoughtfulness to these gifts, even down to my own pen and notepad, which I found both pleasing and chilling.

‘You could have warned me,’ I said to Anna when she finally emerged from her room in a crisp blue outfit as new as my own. She’d washed her hair, tying it up with studded ebony pins which I guessed had been her own stocking presents.

‘Walcote’s supposed to be about surprises. Besides,’ she glanced both ways, ‘I know you’re not so stupid as to leave anything lying about, are you, Robbie?’

The tide was against us as the guests hurried towards the smells of bacon and subtle spices, the delicate sound of sizzling, and we headed up through the house.

‘Has Sadie shown you this as well?’

We were alone at the end of an upper corridor on the central wing, staring at a blank willow-green wall.

Anna nodded. ‘She took me up when I first came here from St Jude’s. I think she does it to most people she wants to impress . . I stroked the smooth surface.

‘I was
sure
this was the right place ..

‘Oh, it is.’ She crouched down to inspect the unbroken wainscot. With her hair up like this, the silvery down at the back of her neck was revealed against the white collar of her dress. And she smelled differently, too-fresh-washed, as I leaned beside her and wondered how I could ever have been so stupid as to imagine that the Easterlies hadn’t changed her. Then she muttered something. It could have been a clock-chime, a bell, and, like a shadow cast by the snow’s light, there came the shape of a door. I reached for its outline, but then it was gone. Anna said the same thing again, and added something else. The door came more strongly this time, but it went again. There was a sensation, not so much a feel as a sound, of something grinding shut.

Anna stood up and leaned her hand against the wall. I though that she was about to try something else, but she seemed merely to be resting against it.

‘Can you do it?’

‘I don’t know.’ She took a breath. ‘Walcote isn’t just some ordinary house. This door guards the access point to one of the mysteries of a great guild. And I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat, shall we?’

Food was served in the same breakfast room as it had been that summer. The guests mingled, waving forks as they conversed, smiled and dabbed the juice from their faces with white napkins the size of sheets as light poured in from the snow-clad gardens. Some of the Christmas tree birds had found their way into here. Their feathers and chirps added to the clamour as they fluttered in search of scraps.