I’d never known such a walk to Northcentral. Hallam Tower flashed as always, a beckoning black star. We surged from Cheapside and along Wagstaffe Mall where the greatest of all the great guildhalls rose in terraces of pink Italianate stone. But the Goddess of Mercy who surmounted the final spire of the Gearworkers’ Halls had somehow acquired a hat and a scarf Even she was a citizen today, and the sunlight was spinning around her, rising with the cries of guildsmen of every kind and glinting on the vast dome of the Miners’ Chapel, where the catacombs were said to be made of carved and polished coal. But this wasn’t a time for the suppositions of old. Those high gates, these studded wooden doors, they would soon all be flung open. This was the Midsummer to end all Midsummers. This was the end of the Third Age.
There was to be no fair this Midsummer in Westminster Great Park. As the crowds teemed in from all parts of London, there were the first flurries of disappointment. After all, once the guildgates had opened and the Twelve Demands had been accepted and the Age had officially been changed, what was to be done with the rest of the day? But the perilinden trees, now that you thought of it, made for fine climbing with their knobbed silver bark and their leaves which tinkled like glass as you crawled amongst them. And all those incredible flowerbeds, the lanternflowers and the moonivy—they were good for the picking, come to think of it. Guildmistresses from Whitechapel paraded with garish topknots of petal and leaf, dancing and kissing strangers, tipsy on nothing but the wild peculiarity of the day. Those crashing fountains, they were for bathing in! Of course they were-and always should have been. Naked children and many who were old enough to know better were soon cavorting amongst the spouting dolphins.
There were banners everywhere. Placards. Flags of guild association. I searched for Anna’s glittering blue-gold creation, but Saul had grabbed my sleeve. It was time to gather with Blissenhawk near the gates of the Guild of Works where all the huge crates of our petition would be presented. It was noon. The bells and clocks began to blast. Bronze figures emerged from their clockwork doors high on guildhouse towers. The Twelve Demands for twelve o’clock. It fitted perfectly. Everywhere, now, there was a regathered purpose in the crowd.
The sound of all the clocks and bells rang clear in the magic air across all of London. The striking of a New Age, golden as this sunlight. The crowd drew back from the silver-tipped railings and gates of the Guild of Works as a wave does in the moment before it beats the shore, then drove forward again. The soot-weeping building beyond the gravelled paving and the elongated statues wasn’t the most graceful of the great guildhalls, but it was certainly one of the biggest. I was near the front of the crowd as the last beat of noon faded and every soul in England, it seemed, waited for something to happen.
When it did, it came from behind us, and we heard it first as a surprised, delighted sea-roar rippling out from some distant spot as we all craned our necks to see exactly what was happening there. Nothing at first. Then a ripple of colour over the flags and banners and the white trees. The colours swelled up, filling a corner of the sky. They were varied, changing, impossibly beautiful. It seemed as if Anna’s banner had grown and had taken flight, but it was a long moment before those of us at the front of the crowd were able to work out what this spreading rainbow really was. When we did, we joined in the cheering and laughed as the new creation of the long-neglected Arthropod Branch of the Guild of Beastmasters plumed into the air. Butterflies, just as promised, and they were huge and blue and red-golden. And in the instant of their release, in that glorious upward sigh of colour, this unique Midsummer Day had at last acquired a name. In the history books, in the songs which mothers sung over cribs, on plaques which we were sure would soon appear on the very paving on which we now stood, this would forever be Butterfly Day.
The creatures fanned out across London with a soft fluttering. The blue sky returned. The cheering ceased and joy settled back on our lips, and with it came a renewed anticipation. We looked once more towards the great gates of the Guild of Works as, in the quiet first minute of that first afternoon, the thing which we had long dreamed of, but which some nagging corner of our minds had always felt to be impossible, finally happened. With a screech and a shudder, a flash of bronze and the grinding of some hidden mechanism, the guildgates began to open. The crowds were silenced, awed. Apart from the cries of babies and querulous questions of children, apart from the hiss and clatter of the fountains and the soft tinkle of the perilinden trees back across Westminster Great Park, a deep stillness reigned. On this moment of Butterfly Day, cheering would have been wrong. We wanted to know. We wanted to see. When there was a sound, it came from within the guildgates, and from behind the wings of the great, squat building. It was the clop of hooves.
In a flash of helmets and breastplates, a nod of crimson plumes, they emerged; the cavalrymen, astride hundreds of the beautiful black horses I had glimpsed yesterday at Stepney Sidings. The two streams which came from either side of the guildhouse merged and jingled through the gates and spread out in a double line on the far side of the railings. Once more, silence reigned. I could see what would happen now. A captain with an especially large red and white plume to his helmet was already dismounting. Now, he would come forward, and, in the face of this threat of force, a delegation of citizens would soon be formed. They would go forward and the guildgates would close on them and the rest of us would be left waiting. There, inside that huge, jumbled building, there would be discussions and compromise. There would no longer be Twelve Demands, or ten or eight or six. And the old Age would continue. Still, even I had to concede that it was a brave act by that captain of the cavalry, to dismount and walk alone towards the vast line of us citizens. Even with his plume, the swing of the sheathed sword, he looked small and almost insignificant.
‘Is there anyone …’ He paused. ‘I only ask that—’
It was at that moment that the first rock was launched at him from the crowd.
Much happened after that on Butterfly Day, but most of it was blood, storm, confusion. Those who were there to witness it perhaps knew less than the many others who later claimed to have been. The severed limbs. The pounding hooves. The savage balehounds. Or that brave captain, stuck down and engulfed by the mob. But for me, in the enormous push of the crowd, my main concern was not to be trampled. I didn’t resist when I was pushed back towards Prettlewell Fountains; there, at least, there might be something solid to hold on to instead of this treacherous pavement. I’d lost all sight of Saul, Blissenhawk and anyone else I knew. Then I heard a voice I recognised. It was Highermaster George, and he was atop Prettlewell Fountains. He’d clambered up from the seething mass of bodies which had surged over the marble lip into its waters and stood high above the frothing mermaids. Dripping around him like strands of vivid blood as he shouted and waved were the torn and leaking remains of Anna’s banner.
‘Citizens!’ He balanced on the marble dome at the apex of the fountain. ‘Citizens!’ He almost slipped. ‘We mustn’t give up hope …’ But the rest of what he said was drowned out by the clatter of the fountain, and by a chorus of voices. He’s one of them … He’s not us … The unfortunate thing about George’s voice, beyond its resonant upper-classedness, was that it sounded remarkably like that of the cavalry captain who had walked towards the crowd a few minutes earlier. And red dye streamed from Anna’s banner across the marble. He looked as if he was drenched in the blood of the innocent. Highermaster George gazed down on us, and smiled in that knowing, faintly patronising way of the high guilded as he flipped back a wet lock of his thinning hair. Get him … The bastard … Let’s … Figures started to scramble up the wet statuary towards him. He slipped, tumbled, disappeared.
WHERE’S GEORGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A voice screamed out as I tried to wade through the fountain. I turned, but the crowd was surging in the pools and there was no one I could see. Then the voice came again like the rush of my own desperate anxiety as I slipped and the foul, foot jostling waters came up to sw
allow me. My head went under. I was stamped on. When I finally pulled myself up, gasping and spitting, a woman’s face loomed up beneath the churning surface, grey as the pool’s fine marble, her eyes wide and her blue lips threading a thin scarf of blood and vomit. I didn’t see any of the supposed many who were killed by the cavalrymen’s swords or the balehounds’ jaws on Butterfly Day, but I saw several who were drowned in those dreadful fountains. Choking, I struggled on through the pluming water in the direction in which George had vanished. I was surrounded no longer by individual people, but by whatever it was that people become when chaos overtakes a crowd.
WHERE’S GEORGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The voice roared at me, chill with fear. The jostling bodies around me seemed to sense it too. They shrank back and stumbled over me and stabbed at my ribs as they attempted to retreat. WHERE’S GEORGE!!!! Then I saw that it was Anna, pushing through the crowds. But it wasn’t the Anna of yesterday in that little hall, or of any other day. She was as drenched as I was, and the same spilling dye that had leaked over George had ruined whatever clothes she was wearing, and her hair was black and lank and red-flowing. But in this maddened, bellowing crowd, there was more which was strange about her. It was the burning power of her eyes, which were painful to look into, and the roar of her voice inside my skull, which, even in this awful place, sent others staggering away. This both was and wasn’t Anna Winters, and she was terrible to behold.
WHERE’S!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Then she saw me and a little of the normality of ordinary recognition crossed the white flame of her face. ‘Robbie—you’ve got to help me find George. You’ve GOT to …’
She grasped my hand with hers. It was colder than the marble, bleaker than that drowning face. But in that moment, I was more afraid of her than of anything that I had witnessed on that terrible day. In my horror, I think I might even have tried to push her away. And the crowd was still powerful, pouring back around me. ‘PLEASE … !’ Anna’s fingers weakened on me as, in the moment of my repulsion, I was swept away.
Butterfly Day; the name was perfectly chosen. Something bright and frail, which rises with the sun and only lives a few hours. I saw one of the creatures stuck to a shopfront as I wandered past the shattered facades of Oxford Road, shouting for George, for Anna, for Saul and Blissenhawk, searching for any face I could recognise. It was still fluttering, but its wings were adhered to a smear of hair and blood. And I could still hear the balehounds, the distant rattle of hooves, the slide and crash of glass. A huge grinning bear loped up to me and I shrank back, but it was only an old woman carrying a rug she’d looted. Fuck off; citizen, she scowled. This was Butterfly Day, and the shops might have been emptied, but the guildgates had held and no concessions had been made. This old Third Age would continue. Nothing would ever change.
Buildings were burning. Their smoke hung low in the air. A sort of night came, although the sky remained bright and hot. Wherever he had gone, whatever had happened to him, there was no sign of Highermaster George. I made my way back towards the Easterlies some time after midnight with the many walking wounded, the dangerous mobs of children, the weeping grown men. Fires were burning here as well, and the prominent smell was of burning rubber. I passed a balehound, captured and crucified on a lamppost, in Cheapside. I saw a severed hand lying in the gutter just past Tidesmeet. Some poor unfortunate was being beaten up by a crowd at the edge of Houndsfleet, and I walked on and did nothing. That same grey, greasy pall of defeat had settled over everything, but, apart from the smoke, Ashington remained unchanged; there was still even Midsummer bunting. There was no sign of Saul or Maud at our tenements, and no sign of Blissenhawk either, so I wandered down to Sheep Street where poor Maud, for all I knew, might still be waiting with Black Lucy for news that the Age had changed.
The door to our printing room hung at an odd angle. I froze, but then heard with relief the sound of Saul’s voice. But inside, down in the grey light and the filling smoke, the basement was almost unrecognisable. The stink of spilled solvents. Dripping scrawls of aetherised ink on the walls and ceiling.
‘Saul? Saul? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, Robbie. It’s not me ..
I scrambled through the mess, and saw the dim outline of his face behind what remained of Black Lucy. Maud was beside him, balled up and whimpering with her hands stuffed between her legs. She cowered and gave a small scream when she saw me.
‘It’s all right.’ Saul stroked her hair. ‘It’s just Robbie.’
VII
MAUD SURVIVED, BUT HER BABY DIDN’T. So did Highermaster George, although I didn’t learn what had happened to him on Butterfly Day until some time later. The tired old Third Age limped on, stale and angry and arthritic, and many pointless proclamations were made. After the long early summer of hope and preparation, autumn came in early that year. It crept into London like a foul old dog, unsanitary and dank-smelling, clotted with mud and blood, long-dead hopes, the filth of disease.
Physical force or moral force? There was no point now in argument. The idea of a benign change to society was the frail, hot dream of a summer night, lost with the chilled sweat and pain of this new, aching daylight. We moved what little remained of our printing works to a shed behind a slaughterhouse, but this time we no longer called our paper the New Dawn. In fact, it had no consistent name and was scarcely a paper at all, but a blotchy and irregularly issued series of single-sheet rants, calls to arms, instructions as to how the common domestic materials and the implements available to almost any guildsman could be made into weapons. Paraffin in bottles with a rag in the top. The sharpened spike of a stair-rail. Simple spells which would unravel the workings of a machine. Saul was more than happy to supply the illustrations. We moved from our rooms at the top of Thripp Tenements to smaller lodgings nearby, not so much out of fear as because Maud, with the pains she was still having, was no longer capable of running a nursery, and there was little business now in Ashington in any case; the women all stayed at home. This time Saul didn’t bother to decorate the lead-green walls with friezes of the countryside. He was out much of the time, on business neither I nor Maud knew of.
Once I’d learned that George was safe I put my interest in him and Anna and all the prim Westerlies aside. I remembered that ridiculous gesture of his at Prettlewell Fountains—a call to arms to make better tapestries and hand-turned chairs. No wonder, with that accent, he’d been set on by the common guildsmen he pretended to admire. And he’d escaped as well—that, too, was typical of his kind. And Anna, Annalise, Anna Winters, whoever and whatever she was—that glimpse of her I’d has as she screamed into my head through the roar of the crowd was of something alien, impossible, strange. This was an entirely false Age, and she was part of its falseness. As for Sadie, her guild, her father the greatgrandmaster, their huge houses, that ridiculous marriage, I’d fallen out of their spell. They were all in their way responsible for those black horses, the flashing sabres, the screams and the drowned faces. She even wrote to me once or twice but I scarcely read the contents of the ridiculously long telegraphs only she could have afforded to send. They were filled with all the exclamations and underlinings I’d come to expect from her kind, the same glib protestations of shock and innocence.
The thousands of posters of the Twelve Demands slipped from the walls and rotted in the gutters. But over the streets and houses, the telegraphs still burned with bilious light. This Age was like a dying patient who grows brighter and wilder and more active even as life fades. The power, the skeleton, whatever it was which kept this country functioning, was peeking terribly through the thinning flesh which had once covered it, but it was as ugly and powerful as ever. More than anything, I came to hate money. Money seemed, in its presence, in its absence, to be at the core of whatever was to blame with the wrongness of this Age. Guildsmistresses could grow so thin that the sides of their aprons met at their backs and die from terrible trollisms, but still the terror of poverty and the uncaring privilege of wealth remained. I though
t again of those laddering figures of accounts which I had glimpsed within those numberbeads at Walcote House. Something was wrong, something about this continuing Age was so hollow that I yearned to push my fist through it, but still it held, held, held.
Tidesmeet Docks had become a dangerous place to make even innocent-sounding enquiries about directions to this or that berth. For the few who were prepared to break the rules of their guilds, there was more money than ever to be made. Ships came and went in the night. Whole cargoes vanished. Bodies of the betrayed floated in the stagnant waters. Frauds such as the one which Saul and I had innocently helped commit on that bondhouse full of teachests really did seem to belong to another Age. And the Blessed Damozel lay in an abandoned wasteland of river sludge. She was nothing more than a hulk. Only the nameplate on the stern, still faintly aethered, glowing black, and the green-hung spars of her rotting sails, spoke of the fine vessel she had once been. Then there was Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart himself, whose face I glimpsed through the rain in a grand personal carriage, and who lived, I discovered, just north of Oxford Road and conveniently close to Westminster Great Park, where the blood had been washed from the paths and turf had been relaid so that the likes of his wife, in a huge hat and an improbable outfit, could exercise her extraordinary little dog beside the chatter of Prettlewell Fountains whilst a maid followed behind with a scoop.
What had they done? What was it? Their house was a blue-tiled mansion called Fredericksville on Fitzroy Street, which was in fact one of those ornate Northcentral squares which are centred around the railings of a small private garden which no one but the gardeners who tend it ever bother to enter. I stood at night beneath its dripping trees and watched the Bowdly-Smarts’ comings and goings. I’d never studied the lives of such people before, and the thing which astonished me most was just how many others were required to service their needs. Clothed in wealth, in money, the high guilded grow huge and greedy in their needs. Barrow-loading butchers and bakers and milkmen, and the produce of several grocers straight from Covent Garden were required long before dawn. Then came the laundry and service maids who lived out, and all the variously suited suppliers of endless different kinds of goods and services, most of which I couldn’t even guess at. All day, they came and went, came and went. It was as if—although the Bowdly-Smarts had no children, no family, and lived, but for that ridiculous dog and all their servants, entirely alone—their lives would collapse if some new morsel wasn’t brought to feed their back door every quarter of an hour between dawn and sunset. The plateglass windows on Oxford Road might have been broken in the tides of disaffected guildsmen, but for the Bowdly-Smarts, whatever and whoever they were, life could never have been sweeter.
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