‘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.’
III
CLUTCHING 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.
I drank a pot tea in a cafe along the seafront, and studied today’s Guild Times. At long last, a major strike had been reported in its pages, albeit with gross inaccuracy. It had been over the introduction of a cut in pay for the steamasters who maintained the engine houses which drove London’s trams. For a whole three days, the tramtracks had stood silent and the song of London had changed. The strike had been broken by the expedient of offering the steamasters a small rise on their old wages if they went back to work for longer hours, and by firing and expelling those who didn’t. As always, divide and rule. Once again, the trams were running back in London, but those three days had been a glimpse of something better and I almost regretted leaving London, if only for a couple of days.
But what time to arrive at Walcote House? And how to get there? The cafe waitress gave me vague directions and I headed west along the shining sand, past the squat liveiron pier and the families with their hired deckchairs and windbreaks. The men, barefoot, their cheeks holiday-unshaven, struggled with their newspapers. The children paddled in the foam. The beach grew quieter as I walked on and the coastline rose in cliffs of wedding-cake white. The morning sun turned hotter. Here, where the tide mirrored the towers of the increasingly extraordinary dwellings which peered over the cliff face, there were no whelk vendors or donkey droppings. The sand was white. The sky was blazing. Sweating, squinting, I climbed the steps to Marine Drive. The sea below seemed lost and distant. The houses vanished behind their walls. Footsore, I continued walking. Walcote House—I’d pictured it on the seafront, tall and wide; an elegant boarding house. But the trams didn’t run this far out from Saltfleetby and the passage of each private carriage was a separate event, signalled by a lacquered flash and the slow appearance of darkened windows.
Summer really had arrived at last. It was hot up here, and noonday quiet. Looking back along the shimmering road, I saw the glint of another carriage. It gained on me with slow ease, then drew to a halt just ahead at the roadside. The creatures which pulled it were too fine to be called merely horses. Their white coats were the same shade as the sand and seafoam. Their breathing made an edgy whistling, punctuated by snorts and the creak of harnesses as they rolled their ruby eyes. A liveried carriageman clicked his tongue and ran his gloved hand across their flanks, then, nodding in reply to a voice which came from inside the carriage, opened its door for me.
‘Well, Master Robert,’ a female voice came from inside. ‘Aren’t you getting in?’
After the brilliance of the day, all I could see at first, shining out like a porcelain mask dropped into the depths of a well, was Grandmistress Sarah Passington’s face. I sat down opposite her, as, with a queasy motion, the carriage rolled on.
‘You really should have told me. I could have got you a lift … You didn’t come on that train, did you? Stuffed with malodorous day-trippers?’ Everything that I had done to get to Saltfleetby surprised her. ‘And what are you coming as for tomorrow’s ball? What secrets have you got tucked in that—that case of yours … ?’
The carriage interior was large enough to accommodate six people but Sadie’s dress took up more than half. It was blue-grey, touched with green. There was lace at the hem and around the dark scoop of her bosom. It shimmered and rustled with the rocking of the carriage.
‘Ever been to Saltfleetby before?’
‘I’ve never even been to the seaside.’
‘The seaside! Robbie, you’re such an innocent. I bet I’ve done every single thing you’ve never done. And that you’ve done every thing I haven’t.’
‘We both live, eat, breathe ..
She smiled. ‘Well, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we?’
The angle of the sun changed. We were passing through gardens, then beside a lake. Beams of sunlight moved across the leather. One caught on Sadie’s sleeve, then the velvet choker which surrounded her neck, which had the same sheen as the pelts of the fine horses.
‘I so envy you, coming here to Walcote for the first time ..
The place which came into view certainly wasn’t a house. In fact, it was so large that there was an odd, extended impression as the carriage clopped and rocked towards it that we were getting no closer. Walcote House was white, with fluted pillars, and extended two arms like a giant marble crab to embrace a fountain considerably bigger than London’s Grand Opera House which frothed and sparkled at the centre of the oval drive.
‘Here we are,’ trilled Sadie. ‘Home!’
I lost track of her as her luggage, trunks which had the polish and substance of coffins, was lifted from the carriage and borne up the steps. Not that it mattered. The guildsmen and women who served here were used to receiving guests. This way, Master … Light though it was, my case was carried for me, and I was asked twice if I had any others. And do mind the step … I was ushered across a huge hall and up stairways and along corridors. There were flowers everywhere, giant blooms in vases and growing in pots and billowing across the walls in plaster and tapestry. There were refreshments on trays. Today truly was the start of something grand at Walcote House.
I was left in a sunlit room filled with the scent of new-laundered towels and sheets; my own personal suite. Sipping the fizzy wine which I discovered on my dresser, I prepared myself a bath. Easing myself into the scented water, I could feel years dissolving as easily as the fragrant salts which fizzed around my flesh. I was older, it was true. There was a dark flat chevron of hair now on my chest, and a white scar on my left arm where I had been slashed in a territorial brawl with the sellers of the Socialist Nation. But as I gazed at the stained-glass diamonds which poured through the steam from the window, I was back in that London hotel, with Sadie and with Annalise, preparing for the dancing which would soon begin on the pier …
Wrapped in towels, I opened windows to let out the steam. I was at the opposite side of Walcote House to the frontage, and several stories up. The gardens fanned in shaded avenues of metallic-shaded perilinden trees along which many figures were strolling. I flopped my case onto my four-poster bed. It looked far smaller and cheaper now than when I had bought it at a hardware shop. My father had had such a thing, I remembered now, which he kept for his rare trips to the Toolmakers’ Academy in York. The scent of London inside it hung in the air for a moment until it was threaded away by coloured breezes. I’d packed a new jacket, plain black after my experience of the shiftend before, along with my two best pairs of trousers, three shirts, several collars of various styles and a re-heeled pair of shoes. Now, it didn’t seem like much. On that near and distant Midsummer, Annalise had found me fresh clothes of the finest styling. Had I been expecting that, too, just as I was expecting her?
Dressed in my best trousers and new jacket, I set out to explore Walcote House. This clearly wasn’t a hotel. Nothing was properly marked or numbered, although there were clues I began to notice. Every segment of corridor had its own colour scheme. Pale blue, green, many shades of red and pink. Everything matched. Even the flowers and the fruit laid in bowls. But the main public rooms, the vast hall through which I had entered, even my bedroom, remained elusive. I was lost in that particularly infuriating way which involves passing the same places time and again. There was a painting of a classical-seeming landscape which I grew to hate. Back in the Easterlies, I’d have easily re-found my way from glimpsed spires, the different stenches and changing customs of the street …
Finally, when I was certain that I was heading in a completely pointless direction, I fo
und myself walking along a carpet which was so thick as to retain the footprints of someone with the same stride and shoe-size as me who had passed lately. I made a fresh impression beside them; it was the same. Following my footprints like a child through snow, I came to a door which looked promisingly like mine. I was about try it when Sadie came bustling around the turn in the corridor bearing an expression which changed a little too rapidly when she saw me.
‘Master Robert! I’m glad they’ve found you a nice room.’ Her hair was pinned up in silver combs. Her face was differently made.
‘I think this room is mine. But how do you tell?’
She chuckled. ‘Oh, I’m sure it is. Every door on this wing is made from the wood of a different tree. It used to be a passion of one of the past greatgrandmasters.’ She laid her hand on the swirling surface, more like marble than grain. ‘I think this one grows in Thule.’ Then she said something, a sound like which, odd though it was from her lips, I recognised as a simple guildsman’s chant. Although she hadn’t touched it, the brass handle turned, the door swung open.
‘You did that?’
‘I’m absolutely full of useless knowledge.’ Sadie was ahead of me into my room. ‘It’s the useful stuff you’ll have to go elsewhere for.’ From a pocket near her waist she produced a steel case and a lighter. She wafted the smoke towards the windows like someone shooing birds. ‘I’ve been dying for a fag. It’s something Daddy’s dead against. Says it’s unladylike and ugly …’
She offered me one. Smiling it away, closing my cardboard case and moving it from sight, I sat down on the edge of my bed and studied Sadie as she bustled around the room. I wondered if they really always lived like this—these rich, high-guilded people; clouded in restless smoke, sunlight, mystery. This place, I had to remind myself, was the very heart of all that was wrong with England. This strawberry wallpaper, that marquetry cabinet. All useless extravagance, laboured over by the masses.
The Light Ages Page 23