Grandmaster Harrat gave a blubbering sob and blundered towards me, a figure of flaming white. I stumbled back. I felt the touch of his hands on my chest and shoulders and ducked away. But he floundered on, tumbling through shelves. He stood for a moment amid the fog in the centre of his workroom, teetering like someone on the edge of a precipice until his slippered feet gave and he fell forward, skidding on the heels of his hands and then down onto his face and belly in shining pools of aether and acid.
He gave a gurgling sigh and struggled to get up. But already his palms were smoking, his face was melting. The rain sluiced the skylights, wyrelit and glowing as Grandmaster Harrat howled and writhed in the froth. I saw the stump of an arm glistening with flakes of aetherised glass. I saw the stripped flesh of his chest like an anatomical drawing. He was sinking, dying. His bones, white and pristine, still clawed and moved as his flesh dissolved around them.
More by touch than by sight, I stumbled to the edge of the room. Misty tendrils of light drifted up from the floor. Flakes of the aetherised glass clung to my feet. My hand, my eyes, were burning. The storm beat on. Bloody fingers slipping, I twisted on the taps of the workroom gas mantles. I tumbled into the kitchen, and up and down the stairs, falling into rooms, dragging at sheets, scattering ornaments and twisting on more gas taps. I was sobbing, groggy, half poisoned, but the darkness seemed to will me on. Finally, gasping, I saw the muddy marks in the hall that my boots had made when I entered. I dragged back the door and huge hands seemed to throw it back into its frame as I stumbled into the night.
Ulmester Street was empty, swept by rain and darkness, its curtained windows uncurious as I tumbled down towards lowtown, my clothes glimmering and acid-shredded. Then, like an intensification of the storm, came a low, deep, rumbling from behind me. I stopped and I looked back up the hill as intense light flickered over the rooftops, freezing the churning motion of the clouds. Everything that Grandmaster Harrat had stood for—the hissing gas lamps, the fires glittering in fine mirrors, the wyreglow of aether, those struggling maggots of electricity—seared my eyes in one driven surge which was followed by a crackling and roaring, and the fall of masonry.
XI
MY MOTHER’S COFFIN GLEAMED. It was good wood, paid for with guild money—the same money which had paid for the stone, freshly carved amid all the others in the Lesser Toolmakers’ section of Bracebridge graveyard. Father Francis made the signs of his guild as it was lowered into the wet earth and muttered of the welcome which my mother would already have been granted in heaven, where she would be free of her guildswoman’s burdens and labours—free to do all of those vague and happy things amid fine houses and wheatfields which I knew that, without all the commonday tasks of everyday life, she would regard as empty and pointless.
Filled with child’s boredom at this drawn-out occasion, I puffed my cheeks and looked up at the cloudy sky and down towards the lines of houses. The hymnal wine which I’d tasted today had been stale and sour. The dreams it brought were nothing more than the cold and damp and musty pages of unread Bibles. And nothing had changed. Nothing ever changed here in Bracebridge. The crooked factory chimneys still smoked. A cart clattered down Withybrook Road, rocking with empty barrels. The ground still pounded. Beth struggled with the booming wind to keep on her borrowed black hat. A few of the women, neighbours mostly, were crying, although the men’s faces could have been chiselled out of stone; even now, they would not show emotion. A gaggle of children watched us across the low wall, just as I had watched other funerals, wondering what it would be like to stand here before a hole in the ground. I was still wondering.
Already, workmen were clearing the foundations of Grand-master Harrat’s house on Ulmester Street across the hill in hightown which, solid though it was, had been ruined beyond all prospect of repair by the gas explosion. From what I had heard, there was scarcely more sense of surprise at his death than at my mother’s, nor any suggestion of a linkage. Domestic gas light was rare in the houses of the people of Bracebridge, and commonly viewed as so unreliable that, had Grandmaster Harrat known, he would surely have despaired of ever persuading us of the benefits of anything as strange and new as electricity. He hadn’t belonged in Yorkshire. He was from London, he wasn’t married, and, although I doubted if many people in Bracebridge were familiar with the word, a faint sense of the camp clung to him like the odours of eau de cologne and battery acid. Amid all of this, the fact that he invited young boys to his house on Halfshiftday afternoons would have seemed trivial, if it had been known of at all. He was dead, and that was the end of it. Perhaps he was being buried in the distant crypt of some great guild’s chapel at this very moment. For all I knew. For the little I then cared.
Father Francis finished his words and people began to drift away, heading for the hall, which was really a long shed, up on Grove Street where there would be a spread of cold meats, with ginger beer for the children, sweet sherry for the women, strong brown ale for the men. I remained standing with the last of the mourners, reluctant to let this empty moment slip away. The yew trees at the far side of the graveyard stood tall and dark, like watching figures. Then one, as my gaze lingered, changed, and became a figure, small, and half shrouded in a broad-brimmed hat and coat. It approached, picking its way between the memorials.
‘I felt that I had to come,’ Mistress Summerton said, ‘but I knew, especially after what happened, that I couldn’t possibly be seen.’
‘They’ve probably forgotten already,’ I said. ‘Or they will have by the time they’ve had a few drinks up at the hall.’
‘You shouldn’t be so cynical, Robert.’
We watched as, across the graveyard, the last of the departing mourners made their way through the church gate. None of them seemed to notice Mistress Summerton and I. Perhaps, I thought, we both look like yew trees now. We turned the opposite way, down into lowtown and the market that, today being Sixshiftday, filled the main square. We didn’t speak for a long time and simply wandered amid the stalls as the awnings flapped and the sky hurried. Despite the heaviness of her coat, Mistress Summerton’s feet were shod in delicate shoes which seemed scarcely more substantial that Grandmaster Harrat’s slippers, although they remained far less muddy than the heavy boots and clogs that clumped around us. She wore fine long calfskin gloves and her glasses flashed in the sunlight. Dressed as she was on this grey day, no one would have guessed that she wasn’t just some little old guildslady. Aether can turn both ways—I felt I understood that now as Mistress Summerton sniffed the leeks and squeezed the loaves for freshness. Just like wyrelight, it can be bright or dark. It can make fine engines and bear messages along telegraphs and stop all of England’s bridges from collapsing. Or it can be the dragonlouse; the stinging, stinking, cuckoo-plant—the terrible troll which had come to occupy my mother’s bedroom. It can be all of those things. Mistress Summerton took my hand and drew me on past buckets of buttons from Dudley and mountains of sugar brought here all the way from the Fortunate Isles and blotchy heaps of waterapples which came down the road from Harmanthorpe. We admired the dried bunches of sallow and lanternflowers in a corner where the stallholder, in an almost unheard-of gesture, gave her a free posy to pin on her lapel. I cherished these moments, after everything that had happened.
We walked to the river, and Mistress Summerton leaned on the rough parapet of the bridge which had given the town its name as the wind swept in around Rainharrow and in from the Pennines, booming and echoing in its arches, shivering the racing water, bearing dead leaves and branches, the scents of coal and mud. The dry petals of the posy stirred and rustled.
‘I wish there was some better word,’ she said, ‘than sorry.’
‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.’
‘Say what you want, Robert, but don’t damage yourself by really thinking that.’
I swallowed. The wind burned my eyes. Then Mistress Summerton turned and put her arms around me. She seemed bigger as I buried myself against the leather sm
ell of her coat. I felt warm and walled, and for a moment the day dissolved. I was floating, healed, in a different England of noonday silence, tiers of wonder, white towers … I stepped back, surprised to find myself still here, on this bridge with the wind and the river.
‘If we could all have made this land better than it is, Robert,’ she said, smiling, ‘don’t you think, after all these Ages, we’d have done so?’ She produced her clay pipe from her pocket and I watched as she struggled to light it, turning her back to the wind in the way I’d often seen men doing on their way back from the factories, but going through match after match until she finally got the bowl glowing. The spectacle of her struggling to perform such a task left me with a twinge of disillusionment. What kind of creature was she, if she couldn’t do such a simple thing? No wonder she hadn’t been able to save my mother.
We crossed the bridge and walked on the far side of river beside the half-flooded meadow. The white birds we called landgulls here in Bracebridge circled above the racing waters of the Withy.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’ve always believed in your kind. It was Northallerton I didn’t think was real. But was my mother really a changeling?’
‘I don’t like that word, Robert. You’ll be calling me one next. Or a witch or a troll or a fairy.’
‘But fairies don’t exist—and you’re here.’
She smiled, then frowned beneath those flashing lenses, brown wrinkles drawing out from the shadows and across her face. ‘You know, I sometimes wonder about even that. Look at the way the buildings rise and fall here in Bracebridge, how the tilled fields change in anticipation of the seasons—and feel that pounding! All that passion and energy and industry! My life is diffuse, Robert. The frailty of reality is always with me. It blows through my flesh. Up at Redhouse, I’m like a old dog in an empty house, growling and barking at shadows …’
‘It must be terrible.’
‘Sometimes, perhaps. But believe me, and despite everything, this is a better Age than many in which to be living. I haven’t been stoned, or burnt—not yet, anyway—and I have my small freedoms …
As we walked beneath the swaying trees and the Withy surged beside us, Mistress Summerton told me about her life. She’d been born, as best as she could reckon, nearly a hundred years before at the start of this Age, although she still had no knowledge of the precise circumstances. She took off her glasses then as we stood beside an old tree. In the half-light of the rivermeads, her eyes seemed brighter than ever. The soft brown irises seemed aflame, and the pupils were dark openings which went on forever. She even let me touch the flesh of her face and arms. It felt like thin leather, dry paper.
‘I don’t seem so odd, perhaps, now that I’m old. People who glance at me imagine I’m just antique and weathered. But when I was young, I didn’t look so very different. In fact, as far as I know, I was always this way. So it must have happened before I was born, or soon after. The Gatherers’ Guild has a Latin name for this condition, just as they have for every other one, and it seems that the change which happened to me is most common, although common isn’t the word, amongst the charcoal makers of the forests which lie towards Wales, and which supply Dudley’s furnaces. Hardly sounds like aethered work, does it, or even guildswork? But it is, and a spell can always twist against the person who makes it.’
‘But you were just a baby.’
‘So perhaps it was my mother.’ She paused. ‘In those days the guilds would pay good money for someone like me, someone who was new and young enough to be trained and used. I’ve heard that families were desperate enough to … cause an accident. But I don’t know. And at least they didn’t burn me on the hearth or put me out in the snows. So I suppose I should be grateful …’
Instead of her family and her home, Mistress Summerton’s memories of her childhood were filled with the strange house in which she was raised. It was essentially a prison, and those few who passed the lane on which it lay would surely not have known. It lay, as she was to discover eventually, at the wooded outskirts of the great city of Oxford, and had been constructed for the study of changelings in an earlier Age. With bars on its windows and bolts on its doors, hidden passageways, hatches and peepholes burrowed within its walls, it had long been empty by the time Mistress Summerton arrived, and her first memories were of the smell of damp, and the dulled murmuring of hidden voices.
‘I don’t know if you’ve heard the theories, Robert. That a changed baby such as I was will begin to speak the true language of aether if it is left alone ..
The matrons who tended her there were starched and gloved—masked, even, for fear of some unspecified damage that she might do to them—although, as Mistress Summerton grew older, there would be whole shifterms when she barely saw anyone. Food would appear each morning at her table. Mysteriously, her bed linen would be changed. Bizarrely, to her it was the ordinary humans who seemed possessed of magic.
‘But I was a strange and wild thing, too,’ she continued, ‘for what little power I have is like a kind of madness. I’m forever buffeted by the winds of the impossible—by thoughts, ideas, sensations. Little things fascinate to the point of obsession, whilst the ordinary matters of life are often dim as smoke …’ She paused, tapping out the contents from the dead bowl of her pipe, running her twig fingers along the stained ivory. She still had off her glasses, and her eyes, as she looked at me, were like the gleam of sunlight on winter fields. ‘How can I make you understand, Robert?’
But I felt. I understood. As we walked beside the Withy, I could hear the muffled voices within the walls of that prison-house in Oxford louder than the rush of the river. At night, Mistress Summerton would gnaw the wood of her bedstead, and sit rocking on her haunches, moaning and howling. She ate with her fingers even when she had been shown repeatedly otherwise, preferred everything raw and bloody, and learned to speak the obscenities which the matrons muttered behind their masks.
It must have been a strange, impossible life. As the guildsmen studied her through their spyholes, she sensed their memories and thoughts, and felt the bells and bustle of the spired city in the bowl of the forest beyond. She sometimes heard trains sweeping north, and the shout of draymen’s voices, and the rattle of carts, although she knew little of what it all meant, other than that this was real life, and she was for some odd reason separated from it. For a while, even after she had learned to speak, they persisted with silence in the hope that she might still speak some spell which was new to them. But if she spoke people’s unsaid thoughts, she was beaten. If she moved something without touching it, her fingers were burned on the glass of a lamp. And she was probed and prodded as well. There was a man who sat humming whilst he bled her with leeches. There were others who presented her with cards inside envelopes, told her to read their contents, and strapped her in a chair before feathers and weights in bell jars and ordered her to move them whilst they discussed whether her powers might be increased through the removal of her sight. Having been abused for performing similar tasks spontaneously, she never knew quite what it was that they really wanted.
Mistress Surnmerton walked on for a while, silent, as if this was the end of her story. The stale echoes of that dreadful prison-house in Oxford faded. The trees ceased their tapping at the barred windows, and the air smelled again of soot and mud and privies and cabbagestalks. At some point, we had turned back along the bank. Beyond the bridge, Bracebridge was waiting again, grey in the greying light.
‘Did you escape?’ I asked.
She stopped and turned to me and pushed back her coat. She began to undo the buttons and strings of the front of her smock. It was a bizarre gesture, and I found myself backing away, my skin chilling with fear. What, after all, was she? Here I was, on the dark bank of this rushing river with a creature who—but then I began to see. A tattoo was emblazoned on the gnarled and flattened skin of her thin chest. A cross and C glowed out from the twilight. ‘I’ve never escaped,’ she said, and buttoned herself up again. ‘England is as it is,
Robert, and the guilds control me just as they control you, and your father—and your poor, poor mother. Oh, I’m free now from my daily labours after what you’d call a lifetime of service. The Gatherers’ Guild don’t imprison us all in places like Northallerton. In fact, they’ve forgotten about me down in Redhouse, and an old fool like Tatlow is hardly ever likely to find out again ..
Despite everything, I was still filled with questions. I pictured her returning to Redhouse today. Even after what I’d heard and seen, the place I imagined on that dull winter’s afternoon was filled with joy and sunlight. And Annalise would be there. I saw her in that same dress, although it had grown cleaner, whiter …
‘I’m afraid that Annalise has had to leave Redhouse, Robert. She’s not with me any longer. She—well, she had to begin her life. Things couldn’t go on as they were for her, living with an old thing like me, and in hiding. I just hope I’ve given her the life she wanted. Of course, I miss her, and you two obviously got on so well. Things have been difficult for her. Did she tell you anything about how her life began? And has something else happened? What have you learned?’ Suddenly, we had stopped walking. Mistress Summerton’s glasses filled with the black currents of the river. She stretched her neck forward. Her body seemed to lengthen. It began to shrivel up, change, extend. I saw, unwilled, the spectacle of Grandmaster Harrat’s dying, heard the flicker and crump as his house exploded.
‘What happened was—’
‘No, don’t say!’ She shrunk back into herself; seemed, almost physically, to push me away. ‘It’s time to forget and move on. Both of us have had enough for now of terror and disappointment ..
Her charcoal hand brushed my shoulder and all the visions and questions seemed to drain from my mind. Mistress Summerton was right. Annalise had gone from Redhouse. My mother was dead, and so was Grandmaster Harrat. I still sensed that all of these events were somehow joined, but these mysteries seemed like nothing more than shadows from the past, and I still believed then that the future was something quite separate; to be moulded, changed. We walked the rest of the way back along the bank towards Bracebridge. Boatmen on the piers across the water paused in coiling their ropes and the tying of their windspells to watch our passage; this lad and a small, elegant woman in a long coat. Perhaps, I thought, they imagined she was my mother.
The Light Ages Page 12