The House of Storms (25 page)

Three lads climbed on at a station called Aust. To Ralph, what they were saying was almost incomprehensible as they sat splay-legged on the hard benches and shared a narrow-necked brown jug, but it became apparent that they were asking him and Marion where they were bound.
Got no tongue, has he, yer master?
Not particularly liking the way they were looking at Marion, Ralph assured them that he had, and the lads burst into eye-bulging, thigh-slapping laughter.
Well ark at im. Proper lush. Fancy some o this?
The reddest-faced of the lads was holding out the jug on the hooks of his fingers, which Marion took and drank from, and passed on to Ralph.

‘Go on, John.’ She wiped her chin. ‘Elder knows when we’ll have anything else.’

John?
Then he remembered. The stuff—some kind of cider, but thick and slippery—caught in his throat. What a way to travel, wheezing and patronised by boozy marts, but at least the fog slowly cleared. In lights and yards and back-to-back houses, Bristol finally arrived.

They passed beggars and wandering widows around the fringes of Templemeads Station as they debated the quickest and safest way to reach Sunshine Lodge. They trudged vaguely north. Warehouses and railings formed dead ends amid kingrats and dragonlice and slurry and mud.

‘You’ve got the tickets?’

Marion gave her coat pocket a rustling slap. A few minutes later, when at last they were amid houses, she put her hands to her mouth and scooted off down an alley. Ralph put down the bag and felt the cold city air nuzzle against his skin as he listened to the sounds of her being sick.

‘It’s that ghastly cider, Marion. You should never have accepted it.’

‘No, it isn’t. It’s …’

‘What?’

‘We’re nearly there.’

They’d the reached the street with its steeply cambered cobbles. Couples sloped past, loud and bleary. The same woman in the same hairnet unhooked the same key at Sunshine Lodge. Putting down his bag, weary beyond weariness, Ralph gave room 12A’s light switch a cautious prod. Surprisingly, the bulb glowed, although it did little to add to the look of the place. Peeling off her boots and socks, Marion slumped on the creaking bed. Ralph sat down on the other side, facing the wall.

‘I need to find a bathroom.’

Marion and the bedsprings chuckled. ‘Look under the bed. I imagine there’s probably a bucket.’

There was, but he couldn’t bring himself to use it. Feeling his way down the unlit stairs, he ended up using an outside wall which smelled as if it was solely maintained for that purpose, but told himself as he climbed back up that he’d have to get used to these things. Marion seemed already asleep, curled up and fully clothed. Not wanting to turn off the light, he lay down on top of the greasy blankets beside her, his back bowed by the droop of the mattress. This was nothing like the summer room where they had made love. Even the stains on the ceiling had changed. There was no sign of the Fortunate Isles, or any recognisable sea or continent. This was the landscape of his fever dreams, deformed by illogic. Then the light blinked out as a distant generator stopped humming and the night went black. Somewhere not far off, but much too loud and long for the sound to be happy, a woman was laughing. Marion was softly snoring. Her breath smelled of vomit and cider. He rolled over, swallowing back the urge to cough.

His skin itched. He wished he’d brought more of his notebooks. He wished he hadn’t thrown away his father’s stones. What sort of message was it, anyway—to send your son the life of a lesser guildsman, when his father had always been resolutely proud to be a telegrapher? Or perhaps there was no message, or one which he’d misinterpreted in this childish desire to avoid responsibility. Ralph sighed. The bed sighed with him. But he couldn’t go back. He was here and he was with Marion. They must face their future together.

He closed his eyes. Tried to think of white beaches and transparent oceans filled with teeming evidence; beautiful fish. He strove to sleep.

Weatherman Ayres was convinced that there was nothing to beat a good delivery, no matter how much Cissy complained. After all, she was as happy to accept the better vintages, the fresher fruit, the cash-in-hand, and to his mind, there was an essential rightness about the small trade which the ordinary stuff of life often lacked. Even the arrival of the
Proserpine,
whose sponsors and investors went all the way up to the big-noses of Hotwells, had a feeling of decency. To him, smuggling was a moral obligation, and he’d probably have done what he was doing tonight even without the substantial packet he was getting for his troubles, although admittedly that helped.

The men hallooed as he and one of Wyatt’s more reliable undergardeners rolled the barrels of explosive to the shore where a big rowboat was being readied. Someone waved a brand. They loaded and pushed out, dipped oars, and passed around a flask of the best stuff, which was sharp and tart and sweet, and just what this night needed. Ghost-like, they slipped out through the swirling dark. Weatherman Ayres trusted these men as he would never have trusted any fancy mariner. There was Scobie and Jack and Little Paul, and there was Bill Price, who was father to the girl Marion. They eased the boat into the tide’s deeper rush, certain in the knowledge that no other vessels would be about on this black a night. Back at Durnock Head, wooden hoists were being erected. Wagons would be waiting on the back road.

Deeper darkness lay ahead, although the smell of the ship was the first thing to catch their senses as they approached the rendezvous; that, and the slow throb of her engines. There she was, spars looming out of the mists, the
Proserpine,
which had been in the weatherman’s dreams since he’d held that number-bead in the Halls of the Merchant Venturers. He glimpsed faces over her side, and ropes snaking, and Weatherman Ayres told himself as he and his crew climbed aboard that this would be just like any other delivery.

The captain, a Spaniard named Convertino, hobbled out of the fog as they were stood on the tilted deck. ‘Glad to be finished with this journey, though it seems a shame to lose the ship, even if she is an old thing—sunk already according to her records …’ He had greying hair tied back from a lineless face. The sea did that to some people; puffed them up instead of etching itself into them.

‘I’m Weatherman Ayres. This here is Bill Price, Jack Petty, Pete Scobie …’

But there was no time to be lost. Immediately, they set about the business of hauling up the aether from the hold with the help of some of the crew, who proved to be a weak and subdued lot, even for bondsmen. As a rule, the weatherman disapproved of this as a way of running a ship, and he saw nothing tonight to change his way of thinking. The signs of their inexperience were in saltsores on their limbs and the scars on their hands. Still, they’d be getting a wage for this which would buy them their freedom.

The aether wasn’t in the caskets or barrels he’d expected, but big jars embossed with tongues and dragons and symbols which no English guildsman would ever recognise. They gathered on the deck like fat terracotta idols as the weatherman helped lower the explosive through the main hatch into the emptying hold. The floor was smeared with oil and bilge and the straw of packing. Ignoring the glower of the remaining pots, the weatherman propped the barrels against each of :he bulkheads, then picked off their wax bungs and tamped down their fuses. The wound strips of cordite shone like glowworms in his hands. The envelope containing their unique spell had come plastered with warnings that it shouldn’t be unsealed until the moment the fuses were to be activated, but he’d memorised those twists of phonetic hieroglyph days ago, easy as you like. They sang in him now as he climbed back up to the main deck.

A murmur in Spanish, and the anchor was raised with commendable quiet. After a brief conversation about draught and displacement, the weatherman took the wheel and pushed forward a slide valve. The engine shifted its beat, and the
Proserpine
’s list increased. If ever a ship needed sinking, this sorry vessel was it. As he eased her forward into the channels, he thought of fragrant sheaves of tobacco and gleaming bottles and the scents of oranges and bananas in cool caves on summer nights. That, not this, was the real small trade. The Mexicans ripped out people’s hearts at the tops of pyramids and offered them to the sun, for Elder’s sake. No wonder the itch to say the ignition spell was churning inside him.

The streamers of mist were still dense enough to shroud the prow, but he knew they were entering Clarence Cove from the changed smell of the water, the slip of the currents, from the echo of the silences around him. The
Proserpine
creaked. He eased back the screw to dead slow as he edged towards the swish of the caves. He signalled to ready the anchor. Even then, the sudden bulk of the cliffs surprised him. Waves sucked and washed. A voice shouted. A flaming brand was waved. Ahead was the stub of decking constructed on the lip of the largest sea cave, which would be destroyed like all the other evidence once this job was finished. The ship dragged to a dead halt. Silence now, but for the gulp and moan of her engines, then even that stilled. Then came the squeak of oars.

Crossing the deck, the weatherman watched as ropes were tossed and the
Proserpine
was berthed for last time. Rowboats bobbed in the space between the ship and the cliffs. It was a matter now of winching these pots overboard and bearing them up through the caves to the passage which opened in the middle of a field and then down to the wagons. For all of which this fog needed to hold for several more hours, although, oddly enough, it seemed to be thinning.

The weatherman tasted the air. Puzzled, he stroked his damp moustache, which was as reliable a gauge as any. He rehearsed the weathertop’s settings. The
Proserpine’s
spars were showing clearer above him now. He could even see the ragged tip of her mizzen against the nodding cliffs, and the individual faces of the men in the boats below him. But there was no wind—and the air hadn’t shifted. Odd, indeed, although he imagined it was another effect of this damn cargo. Not that it mattered as long they got the winch working and the night held, although here was a lesson to be learned that this stuff wasn’t worth all the money he’d heard mentioned at the Halls of the Merchant Venturers.
They
never risked their limbs and their freedom on darkly freezing nights such as this. Neither would he. Not again. The last thing he’d do, the very last thing, would be to cast the spell which sent this ship down to join the others which rested in this cove. And Elder bless her. And good riddance.

But the fog was definitely clearing. The wet cliffs were glinting as the ship rose and fell, and brightness was gathering at her stern out towards the entrance of the cove—gathering so strongly that he’d have said it was dawn if he hadn’t been certain it was the middle of the night. Then he heard engines, and thought for a moment that those of the
Proserpine
were somehow stirring, but now there were also flashes and shouts. The effect, he suddenly realised, came from a bigger ship’s weathertop pushing back the fog as she entered Clarence Cove. So stupid. So obvious. And not the sun’s rising, but floodlights churning through thinning scarves of white to spear the
Proserpine’s
ragged spars and the scurrying figures on her deck. Not one ship, either, but two; the gun-pricked prows of a pair of brassy white Enforcer vessels.

‘Every man off! Quick!’

No point now in stealth and silence. Even the bondsmen were running. There were gun cracks, heavy splashes in the water, the crump of bone meeting deck. The man at the prow of one of the Enforcer vessels was adding to the confused racket by shouting incomprehensibly through a loud-hailer. In the pomp of his sideburns and uniform, it could only be Enforcer Cornelius Scutt. Weatherman Ayres looked about him. The deck was already empty and the bright-lit water between the
Proserpine
and the sucking cliffs was aswarm with oars and boats and splashing limbs. He waited. The rowboats were pulling off, bodies were being hauled in or towed. Not that he imagined that there was any way of escape from this cove, but he wanted to be sure that everyone was well back before he did what was necessary.

Weatherman Ayres licked his lips. He touched his moustache. He thought of Cissy, and of Cornwall, and of evening walks with the sea-pinks waving along the gull-wheeling cliffs, and afterwards in their fire-lit cottage and the gingery smell of her flesh. But he was glad now that he’d ignored the warnings and opened that envelope, just as he was glad in his life for so many things. The phrases of the ignition spell were in him, and they were waiting. They took no effort at all to sing.

T
HE ENTRANCES TO BRISTOL
docks funnelled down through tighter and tighter conjunctions of jostling, shouting, lower-guilded humanity, and the raw grey day above stirred with conflicting breezes as the weathermen on the big ships tested their devices. Flags furled and fell, sails filled and stilled, and the chalked board above the eastern access announced that the
Verticordia
would be departing at 2:30 that afternoon, which was considerably later than Marion and Ralph had expected. Leaflets were pressed into Ralph’s hands as they pushed their way back out towards the road. The clammy print promised
New
Lives
,
Fresh Starts
,
Fine
,
Easy Work
and
Verdant Pastures
. At least half of Bristol seemed to be leaving England, or trying to. Glancing over towards the first-class access, its shining black gates topped with lions, Ralph remembered other voyages; the carpets and the panelled cabins and the greetings of the captains.

He picked at his eggs and fried sea-potato, which he’d never tasted before, and had no particular wish to try ever again, as they took late breakfast at a dockside cafe. More money, he thought, although he didn’t say it, squandered.

‘I just keep waiting for something to start,’ he said. ‘I mean,’ he studied his chipped mug of tea, ‘this isn’t what we came for, is it?’