You might find it strange, Niana, in view of his exalted position, but the person I feel most comfortable with nowadays is the Greatgrandmaster of the Reformed Guild of Telegraphers, Architects and Allied Trades. He, more than anyone, and when he can find the time to muse on such abstract matters, will concede that this isn’t the Age he intended. Sometimes, he’ll say, he still awakes with a start and finds himself lost and dwarfed by his huge rooms and the extraordinary circumstances of his life. But the people still love him almost as much as they did on that day in January when he was liberated from his comfortable prison-house and borne through the streets of the Easterlies. The citizens were so happy to see him. Here, at last, was a symbol both of this new Age’s innocence, and yet also of the old. Not going to sing down any more churches, are you? they asked. Of course, George being George, he smiled and looked uncomfortable, just as he still would now if anyone had the courage to say such a thing to him. Compared to me, compared to Saul—compared, yes, even to Uppermaster Stropcock—his rise has easily been the most vertiginous. But then, he was the highest placed at the start. And marrying Sadie—well, they were already friends, they were at ease in each other’s company, and it was entirely necessary for the union of their reformed guilds. And Sadie was a respected figure herself after the fine show she had put up in defending Walcote House against what it was once again becoming acceptable to term as a mob.
I even think they were happy as a couple. Only last shifterm, I stood with the greatgrandmaster at her grave near the stables where her beloved Starlight is also buried. What? Oh, yes, Niana, her unicorn made it back to Walcote House, although he was never fit to be ridden again. But Sadie’s greatest joy for the remaining years of her life was to ride. It was how she died. Tragically early, of course, but then George and I agreed as the perilinden trees hissed in the breeze that growing old gracefully would never have been one of her strengths. The private truth of their marriage, beyond the fact that they were genuinely dedicated to each other, is something across which he continues to draw a veil. I’m sure Sadie had lovers, new discoveries, but I’m also sure that none of them supplanted her feelings towards her husband, and towards Anna Winters.
Bald and red-faced, no longer the tall young man of twenty five years ago, the greatgrandmaster now somewhat resembles a more portly version of Greatmaster Porrett. But, inwardly, I think he remains the same Highermaster George. The pain and suffering of the disadvantaged still cause him grief. Above all, he still hopes. I often think that is why his people tolerate so much in this new Age, and why, despite that failed bomb attack of last winter, they still mostly love him. I’m not sure that I ever did hope, Niana, in the way that he did, but I think that he still trusts me enough to let me warn him that his revels will soon become more common knowledge than they already are. People have a clear vision of their greatgrandmaster, and it doesn’t extend to his being the ringmaster at male orgies.
But Blissenhawk may already be publishing this news. Oddly, seeing as he started his career as a guildsman and never really diverted from plying his printer’s trade, he remains truest to the rebellious spirit of the late last Age. Believe it or not, Niana, people now actually collect old editions of the New Dawn, smudged and browned though they are, and filled with my rambling, semi-literate rants. I’ve seen them laid in glass cases. People claim that they are invaluable historical documents, and fine investments, although, in truth, Blissenhawk’s latest publications are little different. I came across an edition recently, and found it both sexually and politically offensive. It’s banned, of course, but I’m sure he would have it no other way.
Saul, of us all, has led the wisest life. In the darkest days of the old Age’s last winter, he did the many things which were probably necessary. But, as the years progressed and the disputes between rival groups of citizens became re-entrenched in the monumentalities of wealth, he was able to withdraw. In his renewed courtship of Maud, he was as patient and determined as he had been in planning the Christmas Night Revolt. But I was still surprised when he announced that they really were moving to the country. I visited them often to begin with. I was guildsfather to their first child, who must now be of an age to have children of his own. We still exchange those cards which have now become the fashion at Christmas and Butterfly Day, ornamented with brief expressions of how we really must meet in the coming year. But I’m happy to know that he’s still with Maud, with their horses and their debts and their problems with the harvest and the arthritis which I believe is coming to affect his back and hands. He no longer draws, but then, who does find the time, in this Age, to do such things?
As for me, Niana, I suppose I’ve coped well enough with this New Age. I’m wealthy, as you see, although I find it easier these days to count my numberbeads than I do my blessings, or to get good service in a restaurant. Too often, I’m drawn back into the past. Anthony Passington, for example, still often visits me in my dreams. He glides along the corridor of an impossibly vast mansion to lay a hand on my shoulder, but he’s a dark wraith; he never speaks. When I awake, the emotion which most fills me is grey disappointment that I was never able to know him. After all, he did the decent thing when he realised that the illusion of his guild’s wealth was collapsing. Even back in his youth, when he came upon that chalcedony which Mistress Summerton had forged, he already understood that aether was running out. And how could he have known that the experiment he organised to reverse that process would go so badly? What would have been gained, if he had shouldered the blame? So he carried on living instead, and the engines slowly failed, and with their failure came the lie, which he must surely have known in his secret heart would eventually be his undoing.
So in a way I miss the old greatgrandmaster who hardly spoke more than a few brief words to me, and who never was the monster I wanted him to be. The true darkmaster never was as simple as a mere human being. I know that now, although I’m sure there was a little of him in Anthony Passington, just as there was in Grandmaster Harrat, and Edward Durry and in my mother and Mistress Summerton and perhaps even Anna—and most certainly in me. He still comes to me as well. I see my darkmaster in the reflections I catch mirrored at the edge of my failing sight in the shops along Oxford Road, and in the sunken mask which gazes back at me from my many windows in the long, electric night. And I see him in you as well, Niana, and I see him in the deeds of the guilds and in all the workings of this new Light Age. For the darkmaster was aether, and it was aether which conspired, through the chain of our lives, to remake itself and become fully powerful once again. A spell to make many spells. What, at the end of the day, could be more natural?
The dark-white wyreglow of aether stalks everywhere, Niana. I see it in the dazzle of noonday and I see it in the darkest corners of the night. It prowls my memories, and the shape it most often assumes is Mistress Summerton, and I love her and I hate her for all that she was and wasn’t, just as I must love and hate you for being and not being the same.
Dimly, the wind bites through me, although I find I cannot shiver now, not even when Niana lays an impossibly cool hand across my face. Shadows swirl. My sight amazes.
‘But what happened,’ she asks, ‘to poor Mister Snaith?’
I shrug. ‘I really don’t know. When I last looked for him, he’d already left that warehouse. Some people just fall through the cracks of life ..
‘Ahhh …’ Through my skull, her fingers, the breath of the wind. ‘You’re calling him a person, now ..
‘Isn’t he?’
‘Well yes and no and perhaps. I thought he might have turned up later in the tale, in the part that you and I are still living. I thought that he might have made it to that fabled place—to Einfell.’
Einfell. The word sounds different from her. It’s still a breath, a spell.
Her fingers draw back, then caress my eyes. ‘So. This is one last thing you still believe in?’
‘Of course I do,’ I say. ‘I took the train there only last Fourshiftday …’
&n
bsp; II
EINFELL.
There it was, the word I’d dreamed of spelled out on the sign of a station in Somerset, and painted on the firebuckets and picked out in white flowers in the little bed beneath. Einfell. But I still half-expected the wooden platform to dissolve. And it was a warm day, Niana; a sunny day quite unlike this one. And there were stoneclad houses along a tufted road, and dust on the hedges, and the sounds and the smells of cattle. Einfell. The birds were singing.
To a signpost, and then another. Of the few other people who had got off the train, one, I realised with the odd awkwardness that comes on such occasions, was heading in exactly the same direction. She was just ahead of me, and seemed oddly familiar in the waddle of her walk, the scarf she’d tied around her grey hair, the stretched and faded polka dots of her dress. A plump body in a sunlit lane, with a face, warmed and reddened, which finally smiled back to me.
‘You’re going there as well?’
We walked the rest of the way together, talking absently at first about our journey here. She had a large wicker basket propped against her hip which was covered in a gingham teatowel, and I imagined that it contained food, until the towel caught on a bramble. Underneath, there were jars and packages of various proprietary soaps and cleaning fluids.
‘What’s you name? I hope you don’t mind me asking …’
‘Not at all. I’m Mistress Mather. My husband—well, he’s in there ..
As we walked to the gates of Einfell, Mistress Mather told me of how she and Master Mather had fallen out, as she put it, over her husband’s long hours at Brandywood, Price and Harper, and his obsession with his work. Stupid, really, but then that’s how it is when you’re young. She’d gone to live with her sister in Dudley, and she’d fully expected he’d come for her in a few days, or at least send a telegraph. But he was a shy man, and he’d thought she’d meant far more in her leaving than she really had. And she’d found work, and she became worried after a shifterm or two about what, if she did go back, the neighbours would say. Such are the burdens we make, eh? And then, years after, she heard about St Blate’s. But here-well this is different, isn’t it … ?
‘You come to Einfell often?’ The phrase still sounded strange on my lips.
‘Often as I can.’ We’d reached the gates, and she knew where the bell was to ring for the porter. ‘Me and my sister, we’ve moved to Bristol so I can be near him. Not that things are the way they used to be between me and him, but life’s life and you have to get on with it, don’t you?’
I could only agree that you did. Then the gate was opened, and I was detained whilst Mistress Mather was allowed to waddle up the rhododendron path towards the sunlit, flatroofed buildings.
‘We don’t permit anything containing aether in it here, sir,’ I was told, and I assured the porter that I’d brought nothing that would fit such a description until I read through the dog-eared cardboard list.
‘What about all that cleaning stuff?’
‘Mistress Mather knows to read the contents on the packet.’
Divested of my tieclip, my fountain pen, my pocket knife and my collar studs, and probably lucky to keep my shoes and jacket and still to be wearing my cologne, I finally made my way towards the main entrance. There were trees and parkland. There was a smell of clipped grass. Figures, too distant for me to see in this bright sunlight whether they were Children of the Age, were wandering. Through swing doors, I introduced myself to the nurse at reception and found that I really was expected. There were many windows along the corridors. The atmosphere was sunny. The place smelled like an exceptionally clean hotel.
We finally came to a door numbered like all the rest, and the nurse turned to me.
‘You knew her, didn’t you?’
I shrugged. ‘I used to.’
‘I mean in the past,’ she said in that half-disgusted way in which people often refer to the last Age nowadays. ‘I wouldn’t spend too much time dwelling on it if I were you. She’s not like that. She’s a saint, but she gets impatient. She only likes to look ahead.’ The nurse strode off down the shining corridor, heels clipping.
Breathless and lost, with my heart already pounding, I thought briefly about knocking, then simply opened the door.
‘Ah, Robbie …’ The sunlight was behind her as she moved around the desk. She was offering me her hand, and she was dressed in the same uniform as that nurse. There were filing cabinets, a calendar, nothing in her office that wasn’t practical. Not even a single pot plant. ‘You’re slightly earlier than I’d expected. Otherwise, I’d have ..
She was still holding out her hand. It felt rough, warm, detached. ‘This is an impressive place.’
‘That’s what everyone says.’ With the light behind her from the window, I couldn’t see if she was smiling, or quite how it was that she now did her hair. ‘Sit down.’ She moved back to her desk. ‘It’s a fair journey from London. Can I get you tea? I think we can manage something to eat.’
‘That’s all right, thank you. The, ah, station name—it came as a shock …’
‘Stupid, isn’t it? But it costs a lot of money to run a place like this. We have an official title, but the local people don’t seem to mind the name, and you sometimes have to play to people’s preconceptions before you can change them. The art of compromise—it’s not something I’m good at, but I’ve had to get used to it. Did Nurse Walters give you a tour?’
‘She brought me straight to see you.’
‘Oh? Well, perhaps later.’ Anna almost sounded surprised. Was this the first chink in her armour—the sense her employees had gained that I was different from her run-of-the-mill visitors?
‘To be honest, I came to see you, Anna. I met this woman on my walk from the station. It’s really quite the most extraordinary coincidence—’
‘You mean Mistress Mather? You forget, Robbie. It was you who took me to St Blate’s’. I made some efforts to put them back in touch. It’s worked very well.’
‘What does he do here?’
‘Just the ordinary things of life—just like all of us. As best he can.’
Nurse Walters had been right about Anna. All my plans, all the things I was going to say and do … I reached slowly into my inside pocket and extracted the strip of paper which I had made out yesterday in one of the great banks which inhabit the rebuilt edifice of Goldsmiths’ Hall. My hand shook as I placed it on the desk, halfway towards Anna. There was a pause. My eyes had adjusted somewhat to the light which poured in behind her from the grounds and I could now see that she hadn’t cut her hair short as I had first imagined. Rather, she’d plaited it up and wound it around in a tight, impatient bun. Strands hung loose. They glimmered silver, and her face reminded me now of her mother’s as I had glimpsed it long ago, although Anna was far older now than Kate Durry had been when she died; a vision of how she might have been, if her life had continued, if Anna had been born ordinary, and if she had lived with her parents in that house on Park Road. But her father was an aetherworker and mine was only a toolmaker. By the standards of Bracebridge, there would still have been an impossible distance between us.
‘This is …’ Anna took the cheque and held it close to her eyes, studying the amount. ‘Entirely unexpected. And incredibly generous..
I knew that Anna had money of her own, a sort of wealth, even if she’d probably hate the phrase. It came from Mistress Summerton’s long occupancy of Redhouse, and her acquisition of rights over that land which, in a landmark legal case which I knew George and Sadie had a large role in swaying, passed on in her estate. Children of the Age are now permitted to own property. And, Anna, officially, had never been anything more than entirely normal in any case. She must have been back to Redhouse, although she had sold every acre, and I wondered as she studied my cheque if I should mention the survival of our fountain. But that was in the past. Anna had a watch pinned to her blouse. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick went the sound of its mechanism.
‘I thought,’ I said, ‘that you could do som
ething more useful with it than I could.’
Slowly, Anna laid the cheque back down on the desk. Her hands had that scoured look which comes from being plunged for too long and too often into tubs of washing. ‘Perhaps we could. And we’re always seeking donations. But this is such a large amount. It’s just that …’ Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. ‘In my experience, unsolicited gifts always come with strings of some sort attached.’
‘It’s most of what I have.’
‘It’s certainly most incredibly generous. Although I rather expect your accounts are re-filling as we speak.’
She was right, but that was hardly the point; I’d give her all of that, as well. I’d give her everything. And outside, the glorious late spring light was sparkling over the trees and across the lawns. These grounds must go on for miles, and there were places in the distance where the copses gathered into deeper pools of forest. It required no imagination, no imagination at all, for me to see Anna moving through them at twilight, and along these corridors, carrying a lamp, trailed by strange and beautiful creatures amid wings of light.
I cleared my throat. ‘You know, Anna, Goldenwhite was never really a historical figure. I’ve paid skilled people to investigate all the records. There certainly were rebellions and outbreaks of war across the first Age, but there was no one figure, there was no one march. The burnt patch of stone in that square in Clerkenwell can only have been there for the last two hundred years. And there’s no tomb, and she never gathered her forces before they descended into London from the Kite Hills.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ She glanced down at the cheque, her eyes an emerald mist, lined by a life of frowns or smiles and perhaps even a little laughter as well. Perhaps fearing that I might mistake her gesture in leaving it there, her left hand moved back towards it.
The Light Ages Page 49