Stropcock had started this new life in London, and he had taken that chalcedony stone with him as some kind of evidence, insurance—a talisman. And I was sure by now that he was involved in something to do with the day the engines stopped, something which was still going on in the town of Bracebridge—some fraud or deception involving the fading processes of aether. But what? And how? These endless pages, I realised as I blinked awake over a list of superseded regulations, were drugged. They were like the guilds themselves, designed to draw you in and send you to sleep with promises of small glories until you awoke, still wondering, from life itself.
Beth invited me to the Board School one morning. She was nothing like old Master Hinkton, and had got the wild idea from somewhere that the purpose of her guild was education. It would be useful, she’d suggested, for the class to hear from someone who’d lived in some other part of England. It was early and the whole place steamed. Hands shot up. Had I been up Hallam Tower—could you touch the flame? Did the great guildhouses really float? From what substance were London’s pavements really made? The atmosphere, under Beth’s stern but indulgent gaze, was quite different from that which I remembered, even if the place smelled the same. I tried to talk about the Easterlies, the Westerlies, the ferries and the tramtracks—even World’s End—but you could tell they didn’t want to hear about the real city. They were almost like me at that age. London was still a dream, and the last thing they wanted was for some ordinary-looking man who’d been born on Coney Mound to explain it to them. So I mentioned Goldenwhite instead, and unicorns and wishfish and dragons—red dragons and green ones, flying around the fabled Kite Hills. And dances, yes, there were great, wondrous dances, in ballrooms which floated over the river and glowed like pearly shells. Beth regarded me from her desk, half amused and half disapproving. Behind her, I could see the scarred old box with the sprung clasp which she would use to demonstrate the power of aether.
‘They seemed to enjoy that,’ I said to her as we walked outside afterwards.
‘I’ll have to spend the next two terms telling them what London’s really like!’
‘But they need to dream a bit, don’t they? You’re a good teacher, Beth—you understand …’
She nodded. Mist had settled over lowtown this morning. Bluish, filled with a cold gleam and almost clean to breathe, it was quite different to the fogs of London.
‘What’s happened to Hinkton?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘I suppose the trollman still comes?’
‘Yes, but it’s not Master Tatlow now, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘He’s gone as well, has he?’
‘People do. If you stay in one place for long enough to see it happening.’
But her digs and asides were losing their sting. I’d heard gossip that Beth had a man-friend in Harmanthorpe. A fellow schoolmaster, he’d gone with her and Father to Skegness. They’d shared, by all accounts, the same hotel room. I was happy for her to think that she had someone, although a little sad that she couldn’t bring herself to tell me.
‘Have you heard about the day when the engines here stopped beating?’
‘Yes, but I was too young to remember, Robert. What is there to know?’
‘But you do know that was when Mother got that scar she had on her palm—you do know that was why she died?’
Beth’s pace slowed. ‘Accidents happen here. One of my pupil’s fathers broke his leg only last shifterm. He’ll probably never walk again. Why d’you need to dig up the rest?’
The fences by the settling pans exhaled a rainbowed glow into the mist, but there was a scum of algae on their lustrous surface, and the cuckoo-nettles no longer flourished beside the concrete wall at the back. ‘Beth,’ I said, ‘I ask you these things simply because I’d like to know.’
She snorted. ‘My children would come up with a better reason! And please don’t keep prodding at Father about these things whenever you see him. He’s never been the same since Mother died. But at least he’s found an … equilibrium.’
‘It’s made me realise, coming back here, that perhaps what I thought I was escaping wasn’t quite so bad.’ I’d intended the comment genuinely, but Beth gave me a what-do-you-want-now look. I plunged on. ‘My mother had a friend, they were a couple—father must have known them as well even though he denies it. They were called Durry. He was the uppermaster on Central Floor. He was in control there and he died from his injuries on the day the engines stopped along with seven other people. And his wife—well, she died eventually as well. And Mother was hurt. You must know something about all of this, Beth.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘The truth would help.’
‘The truth is, I think you should leave Bracebridge before the snows come.’ Her gaze flickered up towards Rainharrow which had briefly emerged gleaming above the roofs of Mawdingly & Clawtson. ‘And that girl, that woman—Anna. She’s not just from London, is she? And she’s not from Flinton, either. She seems a sweet enough thing and I’ve got nothing in particular against her, but there’s something odd. And I’m sure she’s not your wife. So don’t come here talking about the truth, Robert Borrows.’ She thought about saying more, but at that moment the town hall gave a muffled chime. ‘I’ve got a lesson. I must go …’
I watched my sister walk off into the mist, pacing to the beat of the aether engines.
In these days of December, the nights came in slow and early. The hills settled like smoke, grey on purple on grey. The guild signs flapped and creaked. The lamplights battled the wind. Anna and I were out walking as we often walked, but this time, in the long, safe, anonymous hour of settling darkness when she and Mistress Summerton had once come to this town, we had determined to go to the top of Rainharrow.
Hello, Mistress Borrows! Anna raised a hand and smiled through the gloom to a neighbour who was out collecting her washing before it froze, a woman with three daughters and no husband who worked at the eye-straining business of putting the lace on fine ladies’ vests. I’d come home today to the smell of sweet, delicious bread wafting down Tuttsbury Rise—stuff which crumbled to the blade and had scarcely finished steaming before most of it was eaten. Anna was becoming famous for the quality of her baking. She could make the yeast rise, I’d been told over the fence that morning, like no one else on this side of Coney Mound. I’d even met someone who swore they’d known Anna in Flinton. The life of Anna, Mistress Borrows, was blossoming beyond our control. I was coming to understand now how it must have been for her in London and St Jude’s. Even to me now, with each gust of the wind, she was, wasn’t, Mistress Borrows.
Anna walked ahead of me to the pulse of the night with that slow, slightly stooped and loping gait of hers in a long pleated tweed skirt she’d been given to replace—Oh my sirs, you can’t wear that—the flimsier stuff she’d brought with her. Anna, Mistress Borrows, hummed to herself when she was dressing, always seemed surprised when the kettle started screaming, left a rime of tooth powder each evening around the bowl in the scullery. She liked cheese which was hard and waxy, and blew on her tea before she drank it even when it was cold. I’d grown pleasantly used to the sight of her underclothes hanging dripping in the kitchen because here you didn’t hang such things on your back line, and I suppose she must have grown used to mine, too. We did our own things, the quiet things, the embarrassing things, in the times and spaces which we quietly conceded to each other, but the house was so small that we often bumped backs, clashed elbows, even occasionally grew impatient with each other. Her hair had that slightly wheaty scent which came and went according to when she’d washed it. That afternoon, as I’d sat in the Lesser Guildhalls and tried to rehearse the spell which caused a worn cog to keep its bite, I’d found one of her hairs just lying across my shoulder. I’d lifted it and held it there in a beam of sunlight. I watched it shiver in my hand to the beat of the engines.
I thought of our staying on here in Bracebridge through the deep snows, and of my
working at Mawdingly & Clawtson just as my father had done. I’d study those manuals. I’d learn to chant the spells, and the haftmarks would spread up my arms like ivy. I’d bring home a pay packet each Tenshiftday to replenish our vanishing funds. And slowly, slowly, term through term, month after month of this winter, I’d find out the truth of what had happened here … Beyond the yards, beyond that long line of aether trucks which I was almost sure now were mostly empty, the ground began to roughen and rise. A thin moon delineated the scant track which few people followed up here in winter. Anna went ahead, her breath huffing in clouds. Mistress Borrows, Anna Winters, Annalise, Anna, who could be anything, who could do anything, live anywhere, who could bake the bread which the angels ate in heaven and stop a church tower from falling … George’s trial had sunk back through the pages of the West Yorkshire Post. He’d been incarcerated at the pleasure of his guild, which meant a suite of rooms in some pretty country guildhall where he could get on with designing the perfect house for the perfect workman.
Ahead, amid the brambles of Rainharrow which my mother had once explored in search of flowers, the cold air gleamed. White fronds, beautiful in their complexity, embroidered the dead ferns. The sarsens glittered, frozen but not frozen in the moonlight. The whole crown of this hill gleamed like a beacon, not with snow, but with engine ice. Anna was gazing south across the dim hills of Brownheath. Scarside, Fareden and Hallowfell. Somewhere down there, hidden in the darkness, was the valley of Redhouse. Here now, as well, the aether really was fading. And I was sure that the chalcedony stone had been involved in an experiment to do with its production which had been supervised by Grandmaster Harrat. And beyond him lay some other cause, and a much more powerful presence amid the guilds. It was this, the power of this high, dark guildmaster, which Stropcock had tapped into, first through Harrat himself, and then, down in London, on his own …
I went to where Anna stood amid the white jaws of the stones. ‘It explains so much,’ I said to her as we breathed the darkness. ‘Not just here and now, but that experiment with the stone—even then, the stuff was running out. They were desperate to get more aether … But I need to get inside Mawdingly & Clawtson to find the full truth. Everything else is just …’
But Anna seemed distracted. She flashed me, back through the moonlight, what I’d come to think of as one of her smiles. ‘I was talking to Mistress Wartington this morning. She told me that Testing seems to be coming early. The trollman’s been seen down in lowtown. He was asking questions about a woman from the south, although that person is much higher guilded than I am now, and she certainly isn’t married.’
‘It doesn’t mean ..
But to Anna, at the moment, it certainly did. I could tell that she felt that all the things which had happened in London were happening here as well, only more quickly. The nudges, the questions. People had their doubts about me, but things had been said about Anna, too, marvellous though everyone agreed that she was. It was no use pretending. And I was standing here in this strange place, spouting about changing the world just as George had done.
‘So,’ I said. ‘What do we do?’
‘We still have a day or two.’ More dimly up here, but somehow more deeply, the engines pounded. SHOOOOM BOOM. Huge and dark and glittering, Rainharrow seemed to exhale as well. ‘There’s a dance tomorrow night at Mawdingly & Clawtson. I think we should go, Robbie—it’s even on East Floor …’
IV
THE TAPSTERS’ BALL TOOK PLACE in that cold pause before Christmas, and was often postponed because of heavy snows, which made years such as this, when it was held, all the more welcome. Father had often gone—was going—and so was Beth. Mother used to go as well. She’d come down to me in the kitchen one evening, pleased with herself, with long black hair plaited, wearing a blue dress I’d never seen before, nor after.
Guild sashes were to be worn, which was a problem to me, albeit a little one, as Anna soon spoke to a widow in the house behind ours. A few stitches, a little borrowed silk to get rid of the mothholes, and I had something better than new. And that crimson dress which Anna had brought, which was vast and low at the front and high on the arms, and thus wildly inappropriate, was transformed, with the addition of a borrowed belt and the sacrifice of a blouse, into a tighter and more modest outfit which would have made any Bracebridge guildmistress, and this particular guildsman who walked into lowtown beside her, entirely proud.
The entrance to East Floor lay tonight through the main gates of Mawdingly & Clawtson with their twin friezes of Providence and Mercy. The other workshop floors were closed, or on skeleton duties, although as ever the work of the aether engines was powered from Engine Floor to Central Floor deep below. Hastily made signs directed those few who didn’t know their way beneath the pipework arches. The machines on East Floor, those which would move, had been hauled back. Those which wouldn’t had been decorated with ribbons, or chalked with cryptic messages. The band was already tuning up—fiddles, accordion and drums—and the people were dancing.
I felt Anna hesitate when the light and the sound struck her. Massed people—people uncontrolled and wild—was something she avoided. Touching her shoulder, I felt the rise and fall of her breath.
‘I can’t dance like this!’
People were leaping and turning and hooking arms, twirling around the machines. The whole great shed of East Floor was booming and shaking. I linked my arm into hers and steered her gently forwards. These tunes, I’d heard them all, wafting out from pubs and on the lips of guildmistresses as they lifted their washing.
‘You can do anything, Anna,’ I murmured close to her ear, breathing the scent of corn.
But for once, she needed my help. The half steps, the arches and processions, the hands you held on to and the hands you let go of; they all had a logic which came easily once you let the music take you. The dances in the Easterlies weren’t so very different. An extra turn, a lost phrase or a repeated one. These tunes pervaded all of England, and tonight, SHOOOM BOOM, the aether engines marched to the same beat.
Unlike that night in the ballroom above the Thames, people in these dances were forever changing partners. Anna, moving warily at first to my promptings, gave a shriek as she was suddenly swept off into the throng. But the next time I saw her she was hitching her skirts and twirling elbow to elbow amid the crowd, her face bright and smiling. Here was the girl who’d sat in front of me at Board School, and Beth, and then my father, even, seeing as the sexes always got mixed up by the second verse of Lovely on the Water. Not that anybody ever minded. In fact, colliding, getting lost—that was all part of the fun. Had I explained this to Anna as well? But when we next collided I felt laughter through the push of her bosom. Then she was gone, and then she was close to me again.
It was hard, thirsty, work. I wandered off towards the beer barrels which had been placed on a trestle not far from my father’s old lathe. A guildsman was dancing with his familiar. Others were shouting, tapping their clogs and boots. Anna was still out there, her hair fanning. The fertile custodian wavered up to me as I watched her, the latest of what looked like several recent beers in his hand. ‘Heard from London about you,’ he shouted. ‘Bugger of it is, I hadn’t got around to telegraphing them. But they did anyway.’
‘Oh.’ I took a slow sip of my beer. ‘What did they say?’
He shrugged. ‘Basically wanted to know if you were here in Bracebridge. Robbie Borrow, they said. Missed off the s and didn’t even call you a master. That’s head office for you.’
‘Have you replied?’
‘Thought I’d talk to you first.’
‘Perhaps if you could hold off for a couple more days, eh?’
He tapped his nose and sidled away. Given the choice, he’d still take my word over some jumped-up southerner’s—but Anna was right; our time here in Bracebridge couldn’t last. Even tonight, as I stood surrounded by all the swirling faces of my childhood, I could feel them dwindling back into memories. Yet here was Mistress Borrows, bright
in the lanternlight, and the people were stomping and cheering. With a mock bow, she gestured to the accordion player to unshoulder his instrument. One by one the other musicians fell silent, the dancers stopped dancing. For the first time in hours, the only sound on East Floor was the earth’s pounding. Anna studied the keys. She gave the instrument a squeeze. A discordant squawk came out. Puzzlement ruffled back through the crowd. What was she doing? Then her fingers danced a run of notes. The sounds spiralled, and she filled their echo with another. The best of the fiddle players followed with a swooping glissando. SHOOOOM BOOM. That rhythm never changed but somehow Anna made it slow, then quicken. A flute player began to follow the melody which she had picked out. People began to clap. Soon, they were whooping, dancing. Anna’s playing went on. The tune was happy and sad. It was wild and it was filled with yearning. Then, with scarcely a hesitation in the beat, Anna lifted the accordion back into the arms of its owner, who, grinning, took up the tune. Now, this would always be the Tapsters’ Ball when a new song was discovered. It would spread out across Brownheath and the story of its making would be endlessly embroidered.
Mistress Borrows—where is Mistress Borrows … ?
People were looking about for Anna. They needed her as much as the high-guilded dancers had at Midsummer on the river. But Anna had grabbed my hand and was pulling me away from East Floor around the cold black machines. This, in the little time we had left, was our best chance to find out the truth about Mawdingly & Clawtson. But where, and how? Along dark corridors, past empty lockers. Through yards and up sets of stairs. Over to the west, Engine Floor was glowing, steaming. Work went on there with or without the Tapsters’ Ball, but it would have been impossible for Anna and I to enter such a place and take the gated lift to Central Floor. The guilds guarded their inner secrets even from each other, especially here, close to their core. But there had to be somewhere … Then we entered a corridor. It was cheap and low and dark, but suddenly entirely familiar. Insolent little bastard, aren’t you? Stropcock’s ghostly face, hanging over a clip of pens and a brown overall, leered before me. I tried the first door. It was a stationery cupboard. But the next—here was the office into which he’d dragged me. It had changed little in the thin strips of moonlight, with the filing cabinets jammed lopsidedly next to the cracked leather chair. And behind it, still covered by what looked like the same oil-stained sheet, was the haft which Stropcock had made me touch.
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