The Light Ages (26 page)

Here, a moth-like creature shivered and clung to the bars; a senior ironmaster from Gloucester who’d made a serious error in some spell he was casting. And here was a captain pilot from the Mariners’ Guild, still murmuring of currents and latitudes as grey webbings of fin shaped themselves across his limbs and spines grew out of him. A hand, black-clawed, many fingered, ran like a centipede along the bars, then withdrew in a coaly flare of breath.

‘They’ve been restless this last term. Always this way in the spring …’ Warderess Northover clucked and cooed and talked to her charges. Even as I hung back, she called them by their names and referred to their old guilds, and listened to those who were capable of response, and even touched their different flesh with surprising tenderness. The days when the high society of London came in their ruffs on Noshiftday afternoons to laugh and shriek at the trolls belonged to a different Age, and, much though I’d have liked her to have been, Warderess Northover certainly wasn’t a monster. In fact, she was unremittingly jolly about her work, but then sewermen were also legend for their cheerfulness, and the corpse collectors who hauled their carts through the Easterlies on bitter winter mornings were an endless source of songs and jokes. That was the way of this Age.

The slam of a final door, a shivering echo of voices as her bobbing lantern bore me on. Spells and whispers and hisses. Whole families of lost names.

Is it him … ?

Who…?

Owd Jackkkk … ?

Or her …

Goldywhite …

Susssh …

Who…?

We’ve been waiting …

Echoes in the darkness. Then, through the bars, in a slide of links, loomed a pale new excrescence of London’s fog. Not heat, nor stains across the bloom of fresh laundry, but something huge and white and cold ballooned towards me as, lost and uncomprehending, a single coal-black snowman’s eye gazed out. I forced myself to stare back at Master Mather, but something was squeezing the breath from my lungs.
What are you doing here now, Robert?
The echo of a terrible memory came towering towards me, my mother’s changed bones creaking as the membranes of ruined nostrils twitched and my hands tensed upon the handle of a cedarstone knife.
Why are you bothering me?
And she was tall, tall. I had to turn away.

‘Don’t worry …’ Warderess Northover was sympathetic as I hunched gasping outside in the yard. ‘It’s often that way for first-time visitors. I used to try warning people, but there’s no way you can, is there?’ Her hand stroked my back. ‘Can I get you water? I’m sure we’ve got something stronger back in the office.’

Straightening up, I shook my head.

‘Well anyway. You
will
come again won’t you? And you
must
sign that visitors’ book ..

London life went on. Boys and men ridiculously dressed in white togas tramped and sang down Cheapside. The reeking chimneys of the factory off Sheep Street which produced McCall’s Universal Balsam, which you saw dustily arrayed in the windows of almost every London apothecary, still plumed. With my rent-collecting work gone, Blissenhawk found enough paid work for me to keep my head above the surface. Protest, in those difficult times, was one of the few growth industries.

There was a Fiveshiftday soon after my visit to St Blate’s in the spring of that 99th year when I went down to one of the impromptu markets which gathered, in that inexplicable way Londoners had, as an encampment of wagons and barrows on the tidal mudflats beyond the Easterlies. Here, past Greenwich, blood was boiled, carcasses were pillaged, glue was made. As I climbed out from the last tram and picked my way around the boneheaps, I almost missed the reek of McCall’s Universal Balsam until the wind from off the rank river began to play in my face.

I found myself a space and a scrap of sacking and laid out the remaining copies of last shifterm’s
New Dawn,
the third page of which contained an incoherent article about the choice between physical and moral force, on the cracked mud. Then some pamphlets.
Freedom from the Guilds
and
The Evils of Money,
but today there were no takers. Only shaken heads, disapproving glances. Some days, people would gather and talk and argue. But the majority of Londoners still thought people like me—agitators, disrupters, socialists, anti-guildsmen, as they called us—were the cause of the lock-outs and the spiralling prices rather than their answer. I could have started buttonholing them and talking the message, but I’d been in enough brawls. So I weighed down my papers with stones and wandered amid the wagons and stalls which had gathered under the bellying sky. There were sacks and blankets for sale. Woven bits of rope and leather. Old family photographs swimming through oceans of damp and dust and mould. Painstones which still gave a whisper of ease. Snuff tins, their enamel polished away. The stolen handkerchiefs which still fluttered down from Northcentral in a polychromatic rain.

I slipped into a timeless daze. I’d always liked markets, and this one reminded me of a lost Sixshiftday in Bracebridge; wandering the stalls under similarly grey skies on the day of my mother’s funeral with Mistress Summerton beside me, awnings flapping as the wind rustled the dried flowers. When I looked up and saw that a small, spectacled woman in an old leather coat was moving unnoticed amid the ragged crowds, I scarcely felt any sense of surprise. It seemed entirely right that she should be here, just as she had been there on that distant day in Bracebridge, and wrapped as ever in a scarf and gloves, that broad-brimmed canvas hat, those glasses. It all seemed so natural and innocuous that Mistress Summerton had almost turned and gone from sight before I was shocked out of my daydream.

‘Wait!’

I pushed through the crowds. Perhaps I’d imagined it—then I turned around a wagon, and there she was again, lifting the greying bits of lace which some guildswoman had cut from her dresses and pinned to newspaper-covered cushions.

‘It is you!’

She turned and smiled thinly. I sensed a wariness in the lenses of her glasses beneath the shadow of that hat, although she didn’t seem in the least surprised to find me here. And it seemed to me at first that she really hadn’t changed from the time when we had walked in a market not so very unlike this; even to the dried flower she was wearing on her lapel and the unmuddied lightness of her fine-stitched boots.

‘So … Robert …’ Although her voice sounded frailer. ‘You live in London now?’

‘Do you?’

‘Near enough. Just across the river, at World’s End. You don’t have to look at me like that. It’s true—I came here to look for seeds … Then I suppose I got distracted.’

I was much taller than she was now, and she was scarcely noticeable here in her long coat and hat. What few glances were given us as we walked together were aimed at me.
Fucking mart, telling us what to do …
And World’s End—with its ruins and white hills—meant as little to me then as my life of deliveries and meetings probably meant to her. It has hard to know what to say. Perhaps we’d drifted apart. More likely, I reflected, we’d never been close together. After all, how could we have been? The past is like that. When it finally taps you on the shoulder, it’s never the thing you thought it to be.

The tide was returning. The market vendors were departing, digging their wagons out from the mud. I rescued my papers. Mistress Summerton’s gaze when she saw them was detached, amused. I followed her beyond the thinning market to the back of a ruined shed and the unlikely object which lay there.

‘Is
this
yours?’

It was a small motor car. Open-topped, ebony-lacquered, steel-trimmed; a fine black jewel. Powered not by steam or coal but some vaporous and odd-smelling chemical, such objects were a common enough sight in certain districts of Northcentral, but scarcely here. She stroked its panels with her gloved hands, then lifted the handle of a wing-like door and climbed in. The engine barked into life. The machine began to move.

I shouted, ‘But you never told me!’

The engine stilled. She turned towards me. ‘Told you what?’

‘You promised you’d explain. Remember—that last time I saw you. When we walked beside the Withy …’

She let out an inaudible sigh as she stroked the wheel of her little car. It was darker now. I could barely see more of her face than the flash of her glasses. Why
don’t we leave the past where it belongs, Robert, and get on with the future?

I don’t know what I said next. Probably some rambled confession which started with my
fall
towards London and my struggles through the Easterlies with Saul to my recent visit to St Blate’s and the hope for the New Age which Blissenhawk had given me. Whatever it was, Mistress Summerton let me climb beside her on the leather bench of her car as she once more set the engine thrumming. We drove off, the machine chuffing and rattling in response to the things she did to a collection of levers. I’d never been in such a vehicle and its oddness almost eclipsed her presence as we passed the backs of slaughterhouses and bumped over abandoned railtracks.

‘I saw Annalise. Once. At the Midsummer Fair in the Westminster Great Park. She was—’

‘I know.’

Her words cut me off. We moved on through the gathering dark.

‘Are you free here?’ I asked eventually.

‘I told you. I was never free.’

‘But the guilds, the trollmen …’

Her black face thinned. Through her insect glasses, she gave me a pitying glance. ‘Do you think they can’t be persuaded—
bribed—
just like any other guild?’

Silenced again, I directed her towards the streets of Ashington.

‘This place where you live,’ I said as the car finally chattered to a halt on the unlit street outside my tenement. ‘World’s End. I’d like to see it.’

‘For that, all you need do is take the ferry.’ The tone of the engine rose and I looked down at the door, wondering how it opened. There was a pause. I had a sense that this was a moment when my life was dividing. Then I was standing on Thripp Street’s weedgrown paving and Mistress Summerton and her car had vanished. It was dark—and quiet, but for the screech of buffers in the nearby sidings. I hefted my papers and headed through the archway into the courtyard. Everything was territorial here. The women hung their washing in segregated lines and shrieked at the children for ruining it when they played football. I used to join in with their games—
Here, mister, knock it to me—
but over the years my returns had grown later and my risings earlier as I went to sit beside Black Lucy and worry at the never-ending threads of another article. I climbed the stairway. Physical or moral force—what, after all, was the point, the difference … ?

Maud was picking up toys whilst Saul sat with his feet up on the stove, sketching. The window was open but the air was pungent. All of Maud’s children should already have been collected by their mothers from their evening shifts, but she still had one last infant tucked under her arm. There was no need here for the bubbling vats and the dripping washlines of the old nursery off Caris Yard, nor the space. A local cart delivered nappies fresh each morning from a laundry far less grand than Brandywood, Price and Harper, and took the soiled ones away each night. To my tired eyes, the long, narrow room, its whitewashed walls ornamented with Saul’s frieze of green hills and trees, fine cattle and distant white palisades, looked welcoming and pretty. I had a small room of my own in the gabled floor above, but this, when I wasn’t asleep or working, was where I spent most of my time.

‘The wanderer returns …’

Saul stretched and yawned. He’d fleshed out in the time I’d known him. No longer the thin lad with the reedy voice, his waistcoats had grown even brighter in an affectation few other of us revolutionaries would have dared and he’d taken to smoking cheroots, although he’d kept that youthful air which people still found so appealing. His smooth cheeks creased upwards as he smiled. A narrow tube of flesh formed between his chin and top collar.

‘It’s not as if I ever know
when
you’re coming, Robbie …’ Maud made to put the child back down in one of the remade cots, then thought better of it and handed it to me. Maud’s father had been a secret gambler who’d sold his spells to a rival guild then hanged himself rather than face disenfranchisement. Evicted, she and her mother had drifted down through the Easterlies, setting up a nursery which had thrived well enough to keep them fed and sheltered, although her mother had died after from consumption in their second winter, leaving Maud to soldier on alone. A typical story of this Age. But the baby was sweet-scented, light as hope itself, golden haired and sexless. It stared up at me with grey-blue eyes.

‘By the way, Robbie. Dinner’s all gone and eaten.’

I crossed to the window. The baby squalled, settled, then squalled again. Maud got the milk saucepan and handed me a warm, rubbery-smelling bottle. It rooted and pulled, its eyes turning over and closing. At least, for now, it was happy, even if its mother was out far too late to be gutting herring.

‘By the way, citizen …’ The rasp of a match. The familiar oily smell of Saul’s cheroots wafted towards me. ‘What time do you think we should be down at the tile factory?’

‘When’s that?’

‘This Noshiftday—I told you only yesterday. I thought about noon. Nothing starts much earlier than that on a Noshiftday and we’ll have a fresh edition of the
New Dawn
to sell by then if Black Lucy keeps behaving. Bruiser Baker should be there. And all the lads from Whitechapel. Of course, the Men of Free Will, too, unless someone’s spilled to the police …’

I looked out of the window. Down over by the black mass of the allotments, a campfire was burning. The air shifted. The slightest hint of a breeze, which somehow bore through the tenement fug the waft of early jasmine, hawthorn, and the year’s new grass. The baby smiled as it drifted into sleep, falling blissfully towards whatever it is that babies dream. Perhaps summer really was coming. Here, in Ashington, stuck between the Easterlies and the impossible reaches of Northcentral, I could make out the circling gleam of Hallam Tower, and the white hills of World’s End beyond the tarnish of the river.