The Light Ages (40 page)

‘Citizens!’ He balanced on the marble dome at the apex of the fountain. ‘Citizens!’ He almost slipped. ‘We mustn’t give up hope …’ But the rest of what he said was drowned out by the clatter of the fountain, and by a chorus of voices.
He’s one of them … He’s not us …
The unfortunate thing about George’s voice, beyond its resonant upper-classedness, was that it sounded remarkably like that of the cavalry captain who had walked towards the crowd a few minutes earlier. And red dye streamed from Anna’s banner across the marble. He looked as if he was drenched in the blood of the innocent. Highermaster George gazed down on us, and smiled in that knowing, faintly patronising way of the high guilded as he flipped back a wet lock of his thinning hair.
Get him … The bastard … Let’s …
Figures started to scramble up the wet statuary towards him. He slipped, tumbled, disappeared.

WHERE’S GEORGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A voice screamed out as I tried to wade through the fountain. I turned, but the crowd was surging in the pools and there was no one I could see. Then the voice came again like the rush of my own desperate anxiety as I slipped and the foul, foot jostling waters came up to swallow me. My head went under. I was stamped on. When I finally pulled myself up, gasping and spitting, a woman’s face loomed up beneath the churning surface, grey as the pool’s fine marble, her eyes wide and her blue lips threading a thin scarf of blood and vomit. I didn’t see any of the supposed many who were killed by the cavalrymen’s swords or the balehounds’ jaws on Butterfly Day, but I saw several who were drowned in those dreadful fountains. Choking, I struggled on through the pluming water in the direction in which George had vanished. I was surrounded no longer by individual people, but by whatever it was that people become when chaos overtakes a crowd.

WHERE’S GEORGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The voice roared at me, chill with fear. The jostling bodies around me seemed to sense it too. They shrank back and stumbled over me and stabbed at my ribs as they attempted to retreat.
WHERE’S GEORGE!!!!
Then I saw that it was Anna, pushing through the crowds. But it wasn’t the Anna of yesterday in that little hall, or of any other day. She was as drenched as I was, and the same spilling dye that had leaked over George had ruined whatever clothes she was wearing, and her hair was black and lank and red-flowing. But in this maddened, bellowing crowd, there was more which was strange about her. It was the burning power of her eyes, which were painful to look into, and the roar of her voice inside my skull, which, even in this awful place, sent others staggering away. This both was and wasn’t Anna Winters, and she was terrible to behold.

WHERE’S!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Then she saw me and a little of the normality of ordinary recognition crossed the white flame of her face. ‘Robbie—you’ve got to help me find George. You’ve GOT to …’

She grasped my hand with hers. It was colder than the marble, bleaker than that drowning face. But in that moment, I was more afraid of her than of anything that I had witnessed on that terrible day. In my horror, I think I might even have tried to push her away. And the crowd was still powerful, pouring back around me. ‘
PLEASE … !’
Anna’s fingers weakened on me as, in the moment of my repulsion, I was swept away.

Butterfly Day; the name was perfectly chosen. Something bright and frail, which rises with the sun and only lives a few hours. I saw one of the creatures stuck to a shopfront as I wandered past the shattered facades of Oxford Road, shouting for George, for Anna, for Saul and Blissenhawk, searching for any face I could recognise. It was still fluttering, but its wings were adhered to a smear of hair and blood. And I could still hear the balehounds, the distant rattle of hooves, the slide and crash of glass. A huge grinning bear loped up to me and I shrank back, but it was only an old woman carrying a rug she’d looted.
Fuck off; citizen,
she scowled. This was Butterfly Day, and the shops might have been emptied, but the guildgates had held and no concessions had been made. This old Third Age would continue. Nothing would ever change.

Buildings were burning. Their smoke hung low in the air. A sort of night came, although the sky remained bright and hot. Wherever he had gone, whatever had happened to him, there was no sign of Highermaster George. I made my way back towards the Easterlies some time after midnight with the many walking wounded, the dangerous mobs of children, the weeping grown men. Fires were burning here as well, and the prominent smell was of burning rubber. I passed a balehound, captured and crucified on a lamppost, in Cheapside. I saw a severed hand lying in the gutter just past Tidesmeet. Some poor unfortunate was being beaten up by a crowd at the edge of Houndsfleet, and I walked on and did nothing. That same grey, greasy pall of defeat had settled over everything, but, apart from the smoke, Ashington remained unchanged; there was still even Midsummer bunting. There was no sign of Saul or Maud at our tenements, and no sign of Blissenhawk either, so I wandered down to Sheep Street where poor Maud, for all I knew, might still be waiting with Black Lucy for news that the Age had changed.

The door to our printing room hung at an odd angle. I froze, but then heard with relief the sound of Saul’s voice. But inside, down in the grey light and the filling smoke, the basement was almost unrecognisable. The stink of spilled solvents. Dripping scrawls of aetherised ink on the walls and ceiling.

‘Saul? Saul? Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, Robbie. It’s not me ..

I scrambled through the mess, and saw the dim outline of his face behind what remained of Black Lucy. Maud was beside him, balled up and whimpering with her hands stuffed between her legs. She cowered and gave a small scream when she saw me.

‘It’s all right.’ Saul stroked her hair. ‘It’s just Robbie.’

M
AUD SURVIVED, BUT HER BABY DIDN’T.
So did Highermaster George, although I didn’t learn what had happened to him on Butterfly Day until some time later. The tired old Third Age limped on, stale and angry and arthritic, and many pointless proclamations were made. After the long early summer of hope and preparation, autumn came in early that year. It crept into London like a foul old dog, unsanitary and dank-smelling, clotted with mud and blood, long-dead hopes, the filth of disease.

Physical force or moral force? There was no point now in argument. The idea of a benign change to society was the frail, hot dream of a summer night, lost with the chilled sweat and pain of this new, aching daylight. We moved what little remained of our printing works to a shed behind a slaughterhouse, but this time we no longer called our paper the
New Dawn.
In fact, it had no consistent name and was scarcely a paper at all, but a blotchy and irregularly issued series of single-sheet rants, calls to arms, instructions as to how the common domestic materials and the implements available to almost any guildsman could be made into weapons. Paraffin in bottles with a rag in the top. The sharpened spike of a stair-rail. Simple spells which would unravel the workings of a machine. Saul was more than happy to supply the illustrations. We moved from our rooms at the top of Thripp Tenements to smaller lodgings nearby, not so much out of fear as because Maud, with the pains she was still having, was no longer capable of running a nursery, and there was little business now in Ashington in any case; the women all stayed at home. This time Saul didn’t bother to decorate the lead-green walls with friezes of the countryside. He was out much of the time, on business neither I nor Maud knew of.

Once I’d learned that George was safe I put my interest in him and Anna and all the prim Westerlies aside. I remembered that ridiculous gesture of his at Prettlewell Fountains—a call to arms to make better tapestries and hand-turned chairs. No wonder, with that accent, he’d been set on by the common guildsmen he pretended to admire. And he’d escaped as well—that, too, was typical of his kind. And Anna, Annalise, Anna Winters, whoever and whatever she was—that glimpse of her I’d has as she screamed into my head through the roar of the crowd was of something alien, impossible, strange. This was an entirely false Age, and she was part of its falseness. As for Sadie, her guild, her father the greatgrandmaster, their huge houses, that ridiculous marriage, I’d fallen out of their spell. They were all in their way responsible for those black horses, the flashing sabres, the screams and the drowned faces. She even wrote to me once or twice but I scarcely read the contents of the ridiculously long telegraphs only she could have afforded to send. They were filled with all the exclamations and underlinings I’d come to expect from her kind, the same glib protestations of shock and innocence.

The thousands of posters of the Twelve Demands slipped from the walls and rotted in the gutters. But over the streets and houses, the telegraphs still burned with bilious light. This Age was like a dying patient who grows brighter and wilder and more active even as life fades. The power, the skeleton, whatever it was which kept this country functioning, was peeking terribly through the thinning flesh which had once covered it, but it was as ugly and powerful as ever. More than anything, I came to hate money. Money seemed, in its presence, in its absence, to be at the core of whatever was to blame with the wrongness of this Age. Guildsmistresses could grow so thin that the sides of their aprons met at their backs and die from terrible trollisms, but still the terror of poverty and the uncaring privilege of wealth remained. I thought again of those laddering figures of accounts which I had glimpsed within those numberbeads at Walcote House. Something was wrong, something about this continuing Age was so hollow that I yearned to push my fist through it, but still it held, held, held.

Tidesmeet Docks had become a dangerous place to make even innocent-sounding enquiries about directions to this or that berth. For the few who were prepared to break the rules of their guilds, there was more money than ever to be made. Ships came and went in the night. Whole cargoes vanished. Bodies of the betrayed floated in the stagnant waters. Frauds such as the one which Saul and I had innocently helped commit on that bondhouse full of teachests really did seem to belong to another Age. And the
Blessed Damozel
lay in an abandoned wasteland of river sludge. She was nothing more than a hulk. Only the nameplate on the stern, still faintly aethered, glowing black, and the green-hung spars of her rotting sails, spoke of the fine vessel she had once been. Then there was Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart himself, whose face I glimpsed through the rain in a grand personal carriage, and who lived, I discovered, just north of Oxford Road and conveniently close to Westminster Great Park, where the blood had been washed from the paths and turf had been relaid so that the likes of his wife, in a huge hat and an improbable outfit, could exercise her extraordinary little dog beside the chatter of Prettlewell Fountains whilst a maid followed behind with a scoop.

What had they
done?
What
was
it? Their house was a blue-tiled mansion called Fredericksville on Fitzroy Street, which was in fact one of those ornate Northcentral squares which are centred around the railings of a small private garden which no one but the gardeners who tend it ever bother to enter. I stood at night beneath its dripping trees and watched the Bowdly-Smarts’ comings and goings. I’d never studied the lives of such people before, and the thing which astonished me most was just how many others were required to service their needs. Clothed in wealth, in money, the high guilded grow huge and greedy in their needs. Barrow-loading butchers and bakers and milkmen, and the produce of several grocers straight from Covent Garden were required long before dawn. Then came the laundry and service maids who lived out, and all the variously suited suppliers of endless different kinds of goods and services, most of which I couldn’t even guess at. All day, they came and went, came and went. It was as if—although the Bowdly-Smarts had no children, no family, and lived, but for that ridiculous dog and all their servants, entirely alone—their lives would collapse if some new morsel wasn’t brought to feed their back door every quarter of an hour between dawn and sunset. The plateglass windows on Oxford Road might have been broken in the tides of disaffected guildsmen, but for the Bowdly-Smarts, whatever and whoever they were, life could never have been sweeter.

I watched Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart as he stood each morning outside his front door, sniffing the air as if it were fine wine even when there was stinking fog. I followed his carriage as he set about his business and visited the offices of this or that trading company and took meals in restaurants of the kind which didn’t advertise their food. In Tidesmeet, he concluded deals beside the wind-whipped waters of quays, and shook the vine-bruised hands of the cranemen and exchanged jokes with the porters. They were wary and evasive when I spoke to them afterwards, but I found out that he was nominally a member of the Guild of Reevers and Factors, an organisation which, for all the fine turrets of its guildhouse, was essentially a shopfront from which the newly rich could buy the status they craved. His real skill was clearly buying and selling, but the truth of what he bought and sold remained irritatingly out of reach. I spoke to some of Fredericksville’s servants in a squat pub where their kind gathered, but all I discovered was that his first name was Ronald, and hers was Hermione. I even risked adding to the bodies which floated in the flooded dry docks by breaking into the offices of quaymen. But all I found were account sheets and more numberbeads; laddering figures, money and money and more money. I was no nearer to knowing exactly what Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart was, beyond the obvious fact that he was simply one of that new breed, the self-made businessman, which had come to flourish at the end of this Age. I even began to doubt my own memory and wonder whether I wasn’t in the grip of some odd obsession, and whether Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart had ever really been Uppermaster Stropcock from Bracebridge in the first place.

Unemployed guildsmen gathered at lit braziers on freezing street corners and shouted through the fog as I made my familiar way one evening around Westminster Great Park towards Fitzroy Street and the bare and dripping trees of that private garden. Tonight, the lights from Fredericksville’s windows outshone its neighbours and several carriages were drawn up outside, beside which the drivers stood smoking. I stood, too, in my freezing hiding place, and waited. Several hours later the front door finally opened. The women who emerged into the coloured light squawked and fluttered and were dressed in hats and furs. This had plainly been quite a gathering, and Madame Bowdly-Smart’s foghorn voice carried as she shouted her goodbyes. The front door almost closed, then opened again, and a last small guest scuttled out, peeping nervously both ways before heading off on foot out of the square, lugging an improbably large carpetbag. Unmistakably, it was Mister Snaith.