The Light Ages

by Ian R. MacLeod

  ‘I tried to heal Kate—I did my very best. I swear it. It’s what people expect, isn’t it, that our kind can cure ills, work miracles? But I couldn’t, any more than I could help or heal your mother. And Kate had been standing right beside the pistons when they burst. By the time I saw her, her bones were turning to engine ice, her very veins were glowing. Still, at least I know more about herbs than most so-called apothecaries. And I was able to bring her some ease … I’m afraid Kate faded and died. But she did at least live to see the baby she had carried, and to understand how beautiful she was.’

  ‘That was Annalise?’

  Mistress Summerton was quiet for a while.

  ‘I’m old now. But in many ways I’ve led a decent enough life. I’ve never starved. Then, out of a pointless death and the very worst of circumstances, Annalise happened. I suppose I’ve always been just like you, Robert. Although I didn’t know it, I’d been looking for a purpose. And what better one than to give this new baby the chances I’d never experienced?’

  ‘You knew what Annalise was?’

  ‘Whatever the spell was to which Kate was exposed, it must have been enormous in its power. Annalise had to be a changeling, yet was perfect—and can you imagine how the guilds would treasure such a prize! So there was never any question of taking her back to Bracebridge. Tending Annalise was a long-delayed and difficult process of education for me, but at least I did have my little money, my small investments, which I discovered had grown surprisingly in the time I’d ignored them.

  ‘So I was able to make Redhouse comfortable and secure, and to buy what was needed and take care of Annalise through the long winters and the short springs and rainy autumns of that northerly land. It’s odd, but I learned more about the ways of humanity then than I had in all my years before. And I learned endlessly from Annalise. At first, I feared the guild investigators, and of course the Gatherers’ Guild. All that first summer and winter, and even as I still tended Kate, I pictured dark and solitary figures—I hid from shadows, but for me, even in the wake of the tragedy of Annalise’s birth, and as your mother drifted from our lives and returned to her own, those were happy times. Annalise was a constant song. Her hair changed with the seasons. It was the gold of flame in the winter and it paled with the spring to the colour of sunlight. At Midsummer it was a field of wheat. She called me Missy. And I loved her, Robert, I loved the freckles on her nose and the summer peelings of her skin. Sometimes, in the evenings when she was asleep and I wandered that frozen village and watched the shadows the starlit trees drew across the lawns, I could hardly tell I wasn’t dreaming.

  ‘And, slowly, I was able to introduce her to a little of the human world. We enjoyed ourselves in places at twilight when the crowds had departed, as the last customers on boating lakes, and late walkers along river paths, the final shoppers at markets. But Annalise always understood the need to be wary. She could feel her powers. She knew that she didn’t belong to this world as any ordinary child might …’

  ‘But you sent her away from Redhouse,’ I said after Mistress Summerton had remained silent for so long as we walked beneath the trees that it seemed as if the story of her and Annalise could have ended in those twilight parks they had visited, dipping lonely oars on darkening boating lakes.

  ‘That day when you visited with your mother,’ she said, ‘I watched you and Annalise through the window as you sat talking beside that fountain and I realised that I was being selfish, that things could no longer continue as they were. I was keeping this child to myself—I was in danger, even, of doing through kindness the very thing about my own life which I most detested, and imprisoning her. Through that summer and autumn, as your poor mother suffered and died from the long-delayed effects of that accident, I came to understand that Annalise needed far more from life than I could ever provide, and we made plans.’

  The trees parted. We’d returned to the narrow track, although the sky now was darker than the branches of the trees which stretched across it. As we reached the car, the leaves above us finally began to tremble and thud with heavy drops of rain. I helped Mistress Summerton as she dithered over the complex struts which brought up the wings of a leather roof.

  ‘So,’ I asked, as she turned the car around and drove through the rain, ‘when did the tale of the aunt and the house by the waterfall come about?’

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘was mostly Annalise’s invention. But it was necessary to construct a plausible-sounding story.’ Little blades swept across the front glass window, although it was almost impossible to see more than a few yards ahead as we bumped along the rutted roads. ‘Of course, I was stricken to lose her, and there were many difficulties. After all the years of hiding and deception, it seemed odd to launch her into the human world on a ship of lies. But I wanted Annalise to have everything that I didn’t have. A chance to be ordinary. Her other choice would be to be a freak, a specimen to be analysed, used, prodded and exploited and borne about in those dreadful green vans. You shouldn’t blame her for her deception.’

  ‘And how does Annalise feel?’

  ‘About the lies? Between you and me, I think she has always enjoyed them. Life, for Annalise, has always been a bit of a game. It’s the thing about her that people find most attractive—and most infuriating. But the last thing I have ever wanted to do was to bring undue attention to her, especially now that she has made her own life … And perhaps you understand better now why I seemed reluctant to see you. And it seems to me that you probably know more about that than I do …’

  ‘And if I did?’

  ‘Then I hope you’d understand all the more the need to leave things alone.’

  The rain thinned and stopped as we drove on, but the mild afternoon felt thin and cold when we finally returned to World’s End. The white hills were now deserted. Outside the little house, the great panes of the greenhouses seemed to rise and exhale. ‘I see too little of Annalise now,’ Mistress Summerton said inside as she stoked up the stove. ‘Although her very presence is what brought me here to London. But in many ways this is as good a place as any to live, and I must still count myself as lucky. In what little time I have left, I suppose I’ve made my peace with the world. But you must be hungry …’

  I watched as Mistress Summerton peeled potatoes and opened tins with her thin and dithery hands. When the food was cooked, I bolted it all down from a plate balanced on my lap whilst she picked at her own tiny helping, then set it aside and lit her pipe and watched me. It all tasted good, and somehow faintly exotic, despite its plainness. Fairy food, I decided, when I finally wiped my plate, in this fairy house, in the huge, enchanted gardens of World’s End, although I still somehow felt hungry.

  ‘Now.’ Mistress Summerton stood up. Her smoky presence surrounded me. Her fingers brushed my hair. ‘Perhaps you would like to see Annalise?’

  Northcentral gleamed in the night air. Pallid with gaslight, built on foundations of illusion, pillars of dream, London’s Grand Opera House loomed above the traffic. Carriages were spilling their high-guilded contents onto the red carpet which bled from the entranceway in a congestion of top hats and tiaras. For a moment, I thought that Mistress Summerton and I might be heading that way. But this was some great and formal guild occasion—a time for heirloom jewellery and antique sashes. Her little car juddered along a cobbled sidestreet, and she drew me out towards the narrow door set in the building’s unornamented back brick wall.

  A youth in a low corridor scowled at our tickets and then at us, but, with a muttered word and a glint of coins from Mistress Summerton’s gloved hands, we were waved on. We climbed stairways and followed passageways until, in a widening sea-roar of light and sound, and a faint but perceptible odour of wet coats, we entered a balcony which hung almost at the very roof of the Grand Opera House’s main auditorium. I leaned over the edge, and saw the balding pates and bosoms swarming in miniature beneath, the sea-twinkle of all that jewellery. I was just wondering if anyone had ever succumbed to the desire to spit fro
m here when I sensed a small movement beside me and realised that part of the balcony was already occupied.

  ‘So this is Master Borrows.’ I took the hand which was offered me. ‘Mistress Summerton was most anxious that I found you a ticket.’ The hand felt small and cold. ‘I’m Mister Snaith. How d’you do? Has Mistress Summerton not mentioned me … ?’

  Mister Snaith smiled at me. I thought at first from his size and the odd, slurring lightness of his voice that he was a child. But his face was powder-white, his nose was long and thin, the fine lips beneath its downward curve seemed tinged with rouge, and his pink-tinged eyes were old. He wore a finely cut but somewhat tattered half-size suit in the style a master-tailor’s apprentice might have produced perhaps fifty years before, and a hat of black hair which, had the intended effect worked at all, might perhaps have been called a toupee. In that he looked like anything on earth, Mister Snaith looked like an absurdly refined and anaemic boy who had been playing in his father’s wardrobe these last several Ages. I suppose I must have mumbled something as I sat between him and Mistress Summerton. Then the whole auditorium darkened and the whispers subdued as the curtains swept open to reveal a gorgeously clad troupe.

  There were many sights and sounds that evening, but I can’t say that I paid that much attention to them. I was ignorant of the skills of the Guild of Gifts, and had little desire to be otherwise. Still, the lights were pretty. They shifted and blurred across the stage as if the music had bewitched them. And the scenes tumbled and changed from palace to tundra to woodland as the dancers danced, the actors declaimed and ranked musicians sawed at violins. All this money, I kept thinking, all this effort …

  The curtains rose and fell. Applause clattered. There were one or two attempts at what, I had to assume from the waves of laugher which crashed below me, were humour. Two actors even put on cloth caps and attempted to ape the accents of the Easterlies. A tune would occasionally emerge from the orchestra’s massed thundering, but it was soon drowned out again. I was near to sleep despite my odd surroundings when the curtains suddenly parted again on a near-empty stage.

  At the centre there stood only a piano. There was a pause, some coughing and whispering. Then Annalise emerged from the side of the stage. She was wearing a long silvery-white dress and her blond hair fell down her back in a smooth grain and shone in the moted lights as she walked towards the piano with that instantly recognisable gait of hers. She seemed small and exposed. The white keys were like bared teeth, and the audience had fallen strangely quiet. Annalise didn’t cast a glance their way. The impression was of someone who had wandered into an empty room and discovered, quite by accident, this fine instrument. The silence lengthened as she sat there with her hands raised, until it began to fill with restless shiftings.

  I remembered our Midsummer night, and that piano in the ballroom. The first chord she now played, which rippled out to fill this huge space like a premonition, seemed similar. It was strange and abrupt and wonderful. There was no tune here that a strolling guildsman could ever whistle. The notes seemed not so much to be finding a melody as seeking silence. All in all, though, it was a short piece, and there was a long pause at the end of it whilst the audience waited to see whether this was just another confusing beat of silence, and the applause was hesitant when it finally came. Annalise stood up and bowed. The curtains closed. Gaslamps were turned up across the auditorium. I made to get up, but Mister Snaith’s doll-like hand settled on my shoulder.

  ‘May as well settle here my dear,’ he said. ‘It’s only the intermission ..

  I sat through the rest of the performance in a daze, although I’m sure the second half was at least as long and elaborate as the first. My buttocks ached. I was hungry again, and thirsty. The far balconies clung to the opposite wall like golden swallows’ nests.

  ‘That was so very fine,’ Mister Snaith murmured when the last of the applause had died down. He mopped his tiny brow with a huge and handkerchief. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  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 ob
liged …’ 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.