The House of Storms (36 page)

Back at the house, standing in the hall and refusing cousin Penelope’s less than overwhelming insistence that she stay for tea, Marion decided that she could still tell herself that her mother, if not quite happy, wasn’t entirely sad. As they kissed, she took her hands, and saw that the whole of Mam’s palm was scabbed by the endless turning of a shard of blue Bristol glass.

Marion found her own fingers were working around the tiller after she’d cast off from Portishead as she thought of Mam’s hands, that blue piece of glass. Dad’s injuries from the
Proserpine
’s blast, if you excluded the considerable one of being arrested by the Enforcers, had seemed slight at first. He’d been placed in Luttrell’s small infirmary to recover from his burns and a few embedded splinters of hull, and it seemed that Alice Meynell really had kept her promise when it was announced that charges would not be preferred. Marion, although she’d given up expecting Ralph Meynell to ever return to her, was beginning to feel something like genuine hope when she was first permitted to make the trip from Alfies to see her father. Dad certainly didn’t blame Weatherman Ayres for blowing up the
Proserpine.
He’d have done the same. Only a matter of shifterms, he kept saying, and he’d be out sailing the channel again. But the odd darkening transparency of his hands was beginning to get worse.

Marion only saw her father alive once more, and by then his skin had been blued and brittled. Blood pulsed through bottle-depths of glass, and he couldn’t speak, and all the fingers of one of his hands had already been snapped off by a careless nurse. She’d doubted, in fact, if the man who’d been her father was still there at all. There had been some talk of taking him to Einfell, but that was a place of guilds and madness; even in this state, Dad would never have wanted to go there. He died a day or so afterwards in any case—of, quite literally, a shattered heart.

Despite the changed currents, there were still a few fishing smacks at Luttrell, and the foreshore was strung with nets, although they looked as if they’d been hanging there for a long time, and a rapidly filling creek now somehow encircled the walls of what had once been the Mariners’ academy. Luttrell itself, Marion knew, had suffered in the wake of Invercombe’s decline, although she noticed as she walked up from the rough new jetty in the fading afternoon that the old lighthouse was now another gun emplacement; perhaps this war would bring it better fortune.

The shore road, which had never been a particularly fine thoroughfare, now diminished after the church, which itself looked unkempt and unvisited. How quickly things changed! Yet the sound, the smell, of windy marram grass, was entirely familiar to her. As the first buildings of Clyst unhunched themselves from the general outlines of the shore, she came to the first warning sign, although it was rusted and pockmarked. Then to a whistling stretch of fence. Another warning sign. Red lettered DANGER. But she walked on.

The wind fell back, and the rockpools ceased rippling. Night was settling, and the fences were more persistent now; near invisible barbed-wire clutched at her hands and clothes. Then there was a wooden bridge across a trench which might once have admitted vessels. This was Clyst, and yet it wasn’t, for new shapes of rock, quite unrecognisable in their uncovered strangeness, prodded from the dark where there had once been dunes. Of course, things never stayed the same for long here, but this was something more. Her memories, her old life, had been scrubbed out by the changing currents which had surged from the chaos of Clarence Cove. Here, beyond a rill, was what was left of the cottage where she’d been born, but it was a mere straggle of foundations, tumbled by waves which had only ever sprayed the windows in the worst of storms when she was a child. Nothing was the same.

But Durnock Head was a little clearer now, and she was standing, she was sure, on the stretch of shore where she’d once collected cockles for three shillings a bucket. Here, as capriciously as they had obliterated so much else, the tides had left the shapes of some of the smaller rocks by which she had unconsciously navigated entirely unchanged. The air hung blue and heavy, piled ahead into the dark. Her skin prickled. The weather here changed as quickly as it ever had, and she could taste the salt-lightning edges of a storm. There was a pulse of sound, light laddered, and for a moment she could see Invercombe as clearly as she had ever seen it, and its weathertop gleamed and the physic garden shone green and the specimen trees scrolled towards the vinery, then on and up, fizzing against her eyes, towards Durnock Head and the Temple of Winds. Then the light disintegrated, and Invercombe retreated into agitated gloom.

The rising wind pushed at Marion as she turned away. She passed the signs, the wires, the ruined houses, and then the overcrowded graveyard of Luttrell’s church. It was entirely dark, but, making swift and simple calculations of time, fuel and money as she kindled her cabin boat’s lights and edged out from harbour, she reckoned she’d be able to navigate her way back out to the channel if she stuck to the main passage. Lit water gleamed about her. She was at that point where the tide and the outrush of the Severn were held in near-equilibrium, and it was not so very hard to imagine that this boat, which had served her so well in her journey here, might just as easily take her further—out across the Boreal Ocean, far away from England and this coming war. But it would be a difficult enough journey, she finally decided, just to get herself back up the Severn to Bewdley and Noll’s infirmary and face whatever lay ahead, and that was the way she turned into the stinging rain.

S
EASONS HAD PASSED.
Tides had shifted. Creatures in bizarre outfits with windows around their faces had shuffled within Invercombe’s deepest caves. For some of them, the song the land had nurtured became a scream. Wagons came and went. Then, of all of these things except the tides themselves, there had been less and less. Were it capable of loneliness, Invercombe would almost have felt lonely, with the little attention it received, although the memories of past hopes and presences still stirred and muttered along its corridors and across its gardens, and the house was stronger than ever in its slow dreams, which now sometimes encompassed ships and far horizons, and the clouded white shoulders of mountains, and the blood-threaded cries of extraordinary spells. Sometimes, as well, a ghost amid other ghosts, it sensed the reaching presence of the same creature which had dwelt there with her one offspring in the summer of its brightest warmth. No, it was not alone.

‘Hello, you,’ Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell had said as she worked open the main door when she returned to Invercombe in her physical self.

Invercombe had not replied, but it listened and watched as she brushed aside cobwebs and straightened the occasional plate or picture frame on its rail as she moved, lightly but not as lightly as she had once done, through its rooms. Then she entered the telephone booth, and sat there as she had so often sat before. Inasmuch as it welcomed anything, the house welcomed her, and its stones and draughts and hangs of light and shadow were ready to receive her amongst the drift of all its other memories, but instead the spell which she incanted un-spilled with a complexity which gripped even Invercombe in a strange kind of awe. The land saw its history. The sun and the moon seemed to hang trembling in the skies. The tides, as well, were an aching breath, held and held and held, and joined with them was the power of aether, although the distant act of the Falling was a puny release in comparison to the strength which remained within the land.

And how the telephones sang, even as destruction rang out! In London and the East, slavery was the issue. In the West, it was self-determination and free trade. That, and money, and who really governed the colonies, and all the intricate meshing : f the interests of companies and guilds. In France and Spain and Saxony and the Lowlands, the same or similar conflicts -ere at play—fruits of a long Age of growth and extravagance
A
hich were now beginning to shrivel—and for them, just as in Ages before, England made a convenient cockpit where matters might be resolved. Trade in sugar from the Fortunate Isles had weakened on the back of several years of poor crops and a new parasitic beetle, and also with the burgeoning of a product called bittersweet, which was blisteringly sweet but strangely moreish once you had overcome your initial distaste, and grew like a weed on the poorest eastern soil. There were mutinies and riots and lock-outs and lock-ins in Bristol and Gloucester. There was piracy on the high seas. The real slaves, the impoverished Westerners came to feel in the waves of arrests and shootings and curfews which followed, were themselves. Bondsmen, after all, had guaranteed employment, guaranteed housing; a warm and simple life. The protests escalated. Families were divided. There was arson and bombings.

Like the conflict which had taken place many centuries before, this English Civil War began with seemingly unplanned skirmishes. Forces called from the East to retake Swindon from the so-called looters mutinied and further fortified the town’s defences. The predominantly Western navy blockaded Hastings until the prisoners in its jail, sugar refiners who’d sacked and razed a bittersweet processing plant, were released. The older, greyer Eastern heads urged caution, but in London, and despite warnings from Bristol that it would precipitate a final breach, a law was passed outlawing what the West termed bonding and the East called slavery. Even that might have been accepted, but—through machinations which perhaps only Alice Meynell herself could ever explain—the statute also stipulated that all products made using such labour should be impounded by the Great Guilds. Effectively, it was a demand for the West’s unconditional surrender, and the West refused. Its armies, no longer mutinous, but well-motivated, and swelled by the ranks of the unemployed and disaffected, as well as those who still imagined that the whole exercise would be an afternoon picnic, set out towards London in what was termed at first an Armed Demonstration. The plan was merely to occupy the Halls of the Great Guilds and tear up the infamous Bonding Statute; to give the East a bloody nose. London, more surprised by this sudden aggression than it should have been, met the West at Oxford with rapidly organised forces which were easily routed. With further defeats for the East at Watford and also at Peterborough as Yorkshire, siding with the West out of what some said was pure opportunism, marched south, all of England slid into protracted and bloody Civil War.

If the leaders of the East still remained shadowy—a mere expression, as they still somehow managed to see themselves of the forces of order, reason and continuance—the West became known for Greatmaster Cheney, a red-faced grandee of the old school, who had suffered years of imprisonment for the so-called crime of being involved in the smuggling of aether, which no proper Westerner saw as a crime at all. Wheezy and tweedy and gouty, white-whiskered and silver-haired, he made a good poster, and a good figurehead, whilst the brothers Pike, whose father had committed suicide in the aftermath of a ruinous dispute with the Telegraphers over a construction contract, were energetic and well organised and eloquent. The West, it seemed, had the better songs and even the better soldiers. It even claimed, and not without considerable justification, to have the more beautiful landscapes. God the Elder, of course, fought on both sides.

Invercombe. for all that it had long been fortified, was soon dismissed from the maps of Western strategists as being far too vulnerable to modern shelling to be of any practical use. In any case, wasn’t it abandoned and ruined? Once again, it found itself forgotten, and the remaining locals kept their distance from the place. The house and the land fell back into its long-established dreams. But still, it could listen. As the telephone lines which had once drawn all of England together were riven and unpicked to become the lifeblood of Western military communication, it experienced the carnage in much the same way that it had all the other deaths which had fertilised its soil. Not that it felt pain, and not that it cared. But perhaps, at last, it came to feel that it understood. For these busy creatures killed each other as willingly as they killed other species, and that was just as it had always been, as far back as the times when they had offered blood on Durnock Head.

The war was death. The war was a song—a savage drumbeat. The war came and went like the pulse of some capricious tide. The war took things in, flesh and wood and metal, and spat them out again in mangled bits. In the festering camps of the wounded, the unprepared and disorganised guildsmen and women of the healing guilds were presented with the hacked and blistered meat of battle. The minds of many were soon secondary casualties, whilst the rest retreated into dithering or sleepless cynicism, and learned to wear facemasks, and to weep and vomit quietly at the end of their shifts.

This seemed the most unlikely place for a symbol of hope to emerge, but, for the West, it did. The wounded soldiers who survived, or those who raved to others in their death throes, spoke of a particular creature, so kind and wise and caring and beautiful that she scarcely seemed like a woman, let alone a mere nurse. The guilds as well, those of the First and Second order of Pharmacists and those of the Greater and Lesser and, also, the Intermediate Chemists, along with all the dizzying varieties of Apothecaries and Sisters and Medics and Matrons and Nursemaids who made up their professions of healing, found one persistent voice calling for integration and organisation towards which, much though they would have wished it otherwise, it was hard to remain deaf. Greatmaster Cheney himself, on a ponderous tour of the Gloucester infirmaries, was accosted by her. So, on other occasions, were both of the brothers Pike. But by then, her name was already a subject for public regard and myth and speculation, and that name was Marion Price.

With the conscious blessing of the Merchant Venturers, who’d had more than their fill of the stultifying influence the guilds’ restrictive practices were having on their campaigns, she emerged from the mutterings of the delirious on to Western front pages. Songs were written about her. Pamphlets were published. As the hospital facilities continued in their failure to cope with the flood of disease and casualties which war proved effortlessly capable of producing, Marion Price was given a free hand. It was sometimes hard, as those who opposed her found to their dismay, to separate the woman from the haze of adoration and myth which came to surround her. That was part of her strength. There were Marion Price medallions and Marion Price figurines. Other hardworking nurses, gripped by the spasming hands of men falling towards death, would assure them that, yes, yes, they were her. Even as she banged her fist in fury on the cedarstone tables of meeting rooms in Bristol guildhalls, Marion’s spirit drifted on a healing breeze above the stinking, moaning beds. The very sound of her name became a reassurance, and then a battle-cry. Ma-ri-on. It sustained the march of weary boots, and shaped the cough of guns. It filled the telephone wires as well, and tumbled on old posters blown up-channel towards Invercombe to snag in the laburnum walk, and Invercombe listened. As other creatures filled with twisted murmurings crept towards Invercombe’s boundaries from nearby Einfell, the surface of its seapool gleamed in grey remembrance of summers gone.