The Light Ages (43 page)

‘Tonight, Master Robert will remain outside our circle as an independent observer. With so much deceit in these matters, I’m sure you all understand …’

With a rustle of approval, the grandmistresses settled in their chairs.

‘We come here in search of the truth …’ his frail voice began. I waited near the door until the pattern of breathing around the dim table had changed, then eased it open and slipped out into the dark hall. Trixie came trotting up to me, but a shove of my boot shooed him away. How long did I have? Mister Snaith’s communions with the spirits had the timelessness of any good theatrical performance—and that power seemed to follow me even as I picked my way around the aspidistras towards the stairs. Fredericksville had a breathing, waiting feel. I glanced back at the front door. What if Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart should return early from his guild club, that little actress he was keeping, or whatever else was detaining him? He certainly wasn’t someone to be underestimated. Guildsmen had ended up floating face down in the docks for less than this, yet still I climbed the stairway and the questioning, agitated voices from the parlour followed me.

Paintings too dark to be made out, windows into the night, leaned down at me. The top landing was further than I’d gone before. It swept both ways around the broad swell of the stairs. Fredericksville was worse than Walcote House. At least there, there had been light and space. Here, I was terrified, especially after a near-collision with a huge porcelain elephant, of causing an enormous crash which would summon far more than the dead.

The air smelled differently in this part of the house; less strongly of Trixie. Gaslight. Polish. Pot-pourri. Of lives scarcely lived in rooms seldom visited by anyone but the dusting maids. The sense of it filled my mouth with a heavy ache.
Impurities, Robert! Electricity … !
For a moment, Grandmaster Harrat’s hopeful, wavering voice boomed out at me. I could smell the acids of his experiments. Taste the marzipan of his cakes. The doors along the corridor gave easily. I was hoping to find some sort of office. Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart seemed to waft on nothing but dubious deals, quayside meetings, the stale air of abandoned ships and empty warehouses; waves of pure money. Even more of those numberbeads would have been something—this time, I’d simply pocket them, and damn the consequences. There’d always be another cabsman for Mister Snaith, whilst Saul or Blissenhawk would be able to steer me towards a disaffected member of the appropriate guild who could decipher such things.

I tried door after door. White tundras of unslept sheets whilst thousands slept under railway embankments. Peering through the curtains, I could just make out the line of waiting carriages, the soft glow of the drivers’ cigarettes. Beyond that, the fenced garden where I had often stood was an inky seepage of trees. But it seemed for a moment that someone was standing there even now. I drew back, setting a Staffordshire figure rocking. There was nothing but mist when I looked out again.

A door around the corner seemed momentarily to be locked. I was almost disappointed when, at a slight shove from my shoulder, it finally gave. The first thing I noticed about the room beyond was that it was light, and then that it was dark again. The maids hadn’t drawn the curtains here and the window looked south towards Hallam Tower’s circling blaze. I blinked and waited for the light to come again. Somehow, I could still hear the unmistakable honk of Grandmistress Bowdly-Smart’s voice from the parlour. I couldn’t make out the words, but her tone was both hopeful and pleading; she sounded more than ever like an uppermistress from the terraces of Coney Mound. The light returned. The room was a nursery, filled with plushly expensive furniture and toys. All the animals of creation were queuing to board an ark. A rocking horse gleamed on glossy black aethered runners in the bay window. The mere breath of my passage set it swaying. The room had none of the odours of childhood which I knew from Maud’s nurseries. The whole place was more like a shop display. After all, the Bowdly-Smarts had no children—not here, or even in Bracebridge—that I knew of. I slid open a big chest of drawers. Each level was filled with expensive baby clothes. Some were still inside their wrapping. All were stiff and new. But the air which escaped from the bottom drawer was ancient and frail. A tattered collection of browning baby things appeared in the next white flood of Hallam Tower. They were simply made, repeatedly repaired. I touched them, strangely moved, and heard, at that moment, the wail of Grandmistress Bowdly-Smart’s voice from the room deep beneath me.

Hallam Tower receded. The darkness drew back, scented with old talcum and kitchen bleach. A chill went over me. I was sure, at that moment, that I heard a baby crying. I slid the drawer back. When the light of Hallam Tower next swept across the frieze of dancing elephants, it did so with an audible swish, a push of memory. Even when I closed the door and slipped back along the corridor’s fresh darkness, the sense remained.
Sooh Booooo.
The air hissed and exhaled. At the furthest end of this corridor was a smaller door. I touched it with wondering fingers. It pulsed like something living, and the handle turned for me.

Beyond was a narrow upwards-leading stairway. The room at the top had slant walls which pushed into the roofspace and was piled with the wreckage of old furniture. The pale, continuing flash of Hallam Tower wafted through a skylight to stir the cobwebs and glint on splintery wood, a rusted iron bedframe. We had had a washing plunger exactly like this one in our house on Brickyard Row. Here, even, beneath a sheeting of dust and more cobwebs, was a guild certificate honouring some minor success in the production of engine silk. It was granted by the Third Lower Chapter of the Lesser Toolmakers’ Guild, stamped with the seal of Mawdingly & Clawtson, and had been awarded to Uppermaster Ronald Stropcock. I peeled off the back of the frame and pushed the document into my pocket. Proof, at last, of something I’d long known, but the attic air remained tremulous, expectant. There was a longer box in the furthest corner which looked as old as everything else here, and was even more roughly made. But it seemed too big to belong in a Coney Mound terrace. And there was something—a tug of memory which joined with the shuddering pull of the darkness.
Soooh Booooo.

CAUTION DANGEROUS LOAD. Those stencilled words amid the old washstands and cracked mirrors—and the vision I’d had long ago at Grandmaster Harrat’s; he and my mother and another woman called Kate clustered around this same rough wooden casket in the depths of Mawdingly & Clawtson. SHOOM
BOOM.
The pulse of it beat with the circling of Hallam Tower and the hammering of my heart as the casket lid shuddered open. Inside were crisped, ancient newspapers, yet the light which had dimmed that subterranean room where my mother had once stood was scarcely there when I lifted the strange object out; a roughly cut lump of crystal about the size of a human head. I knew now that such things were called chalcedonies, and that the guilds used them to store their major spells. But this one was faint; the wyrelight at its core was scarcely beating. Its power had exhaled long ago. SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM,
then silence, and I was back in London, in that dusty attic.

I laid the chalcedony back amid its newspapers. I closed the casket lid. I floated across the landings and halls. Still totally absorbed, unthinking, I reopened the door into the Bowdly-Smarts’ parlour, but inside there was light and commotion. Mistress Bowdly-Smart was howling and sobbing and Trixie was barking, whilst Mister Snaith still sat at the far table, the contents of his carpetbag still spilling out around him. Mistress Bowdly-Smart, her face streaming, let out another howl.

‘I left Freddie crying,’ she wailed in a broad Brownheath accent. ‘It’s
good
for babies to be left, ain’t it? That’s what every mother’ll tell you, and that’s what my Ronald insisted. Spoil him, Hermione, he said, and he’ll grow up like a selfish little sewer rat, but let the little blighter fend, and you’ll raise yourself a fine upperguildsman. Oh, we were so bloody happy! But you
do
leave them once in a while, don’t you, for their own benefit, even if they’ve had a wee bit of a fever—otherwise, just like Ronald says, they grow up greedy and expecting it all on a plate … It wasn’t a big house we had then, you understand. Just the two rooms up and down, the way things mostly are in Brownheath. But me and my Ronald was happy then, and I had my own sweet baby. No matter where I was in the house, and if it wasn’t for the sound of them damn engines, you could hear him breathing. But sometimes, I left him crying for the sake of his own good …’

A baby was still crying in some other room in some other house, but the sound was faint, and dulled by a distant pounding which only I and Uppermistress Stropcock would ever have recognised. Then even that faded, and there was a long pause. The other guildmistresses looked pale and shocked by the transformation which had come over their hostess. This was what was not what was supposed to happen. But, at the same time, I could tell that Mistress Bowdly-Smart’s tearful admission of a past quite different to that which she claimed was scarcely a surprise to them. They were used to brushing bits of their lives under the carpet. The silver cutlery which was really thin plate. The infidelities of their husbands. Their eyes turned instead, in anger and in blame, towards Mister Snaith. All the hope and wonder had gone from his audience, and the whispered words which were now exchanged over the cakestands were harsh. Hateful creatures like him, it—well, they were inhuman, mad, ungodly and alien. They would have been burned in a better, more sensible Age, and any God-fearing guildswoman would be happy to warm their hands on the blaze. At the very least, he should be locked up with all the other monsters in St Blate’s. In their crackling black dresses, with their hats pulled down over their set and angry faces and rigid hairdos, these fellow seekers reminded me now not so much of birds but of beetles as they scuttled for their shawls and coats.

The front door slammed as they started departing. Then it opened again.

‘Some odd commotion up around Strand,’ Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart’s flat voice boomed in the hall, ‘But what’s happened here? What’s going on?’ Still wearing his silk-lined coat, his wing collar, his red cashmere scarf, he burst into the parlour.

‘What is it Hermione?’

More mascara and powder than seemed possible had spread across his wife’s face. ‘We should never have left Bracebridge,’ she whimpered. ‘We were
happy
there, least until little Freddie died. We should have stayed and looked after his grave. And you Ronald—always promising something better. Sniffing around for something, finding bad things out. That guildsman—and look where it’s got us! And you’ve been with that tart this evening . . ‘Hermione—how could you think … ?’ He cradled her wet face in his arms whilst the remaining guildmistresses made their excuses. He glared about for the source of his wife’s anguish—at me, and then at Mister Snaith. He stalked across the long parlour, pushing low tables and cakestands out of the way. Cups flew. The glass front of a big cabinet cascaded in a glittering wave.

‘You fucking troll! I’ll pluck your sodding wings …’ He hauled back the table behind which Mister Snaith was cowering. His feet snagged on the carpetbag. ‘And just what the hell is this? And this … ? All
this …
!’ Bandages, rubber balls and tapers flew out. ‘You cheap little fraud! You’re not even …’ Mister Snaith, still wearing the coloured side of his cloak, made no attempt to resist as Stropcock threw him against the wall. His toupee went flying. His sleeves jetted tiny plumes of tinsel and smoke. For a moment, Stropcock stood over him, his breath hissing. Perhaps even he was waiting for some sign, some twist of magic. But Mister Snaith just cowered. With a roar, Stropcock grabbed him and wrapped both hands around his throat.

I tried to wrestle Stropcock off. But he was a strong man—and determined—until I jabbed him in the face. With a renewed roar, Stropcock threw Mister Snaith aside and turned towards me. In another moment, as I slipped backwards across a spillage of milk, Stropcock was on top of me, his knees driving hard into my ribs and pushing the breath out of me whilst his hands encircled my throat. I always had been a poor fighter in London brawls, and he had weight and experience on his side.

‘What makes you think … ? Little bastard like you …’

Uppermaster Stropcock was muttering the same insults he’d used all those years before in his office. And he really hadn’t changed. Age had been good to him—he’d scarcely even lost any more hair. The only thing which had receded into the past, I thought, as my arms flailed and my sight began to blur and redden, was that brown overall with its clip of pens. Then, something other than anger contorted Stropcock’s features. His eyes widened. His narrow lips half-shaped a name and, in the shock of doing so, his fingers weakened momentarily on my throat.

I skittered away from him, gasping.

‘
You … !’
He aimed a shaking finger. ‘You’re that jumped-up bastard’s son from East Floor.’ He attempted another lunge at me, but I threw a chair in his way. Whilst he was rubbing his shins and cursing, I hauled Mister Snaith out from the corner, pushed my way past the watching maids and fled Fredericksville.

‘That was all most, most unfortunate …’ Mister Snaith was muttering. His cloak was half one way and half the other. His toupee was missing. There was an angry scratch across his powdered cheek.

‘I’ll get you a new carpetbag,’ I said. ‘It was all my fault. I’ll replace everything.’

‘No,’ he sighed. ‘It always happens eventually, in one way or another. People tire of me. Next Noshiftday, they’ll all be back in church, telling the priest how foolish they’ve been. I just hope they don’t report me to the Gatherers’ Guild. Well ..

He stopped. We’d already reached the turn between the grand buildings which led to his warehouse.

‘Will you—?’

‘Oh. I’ll be fine. After all, and not so very long ago,
I did
perform …’

The little changeling walked away towards the clamour of Northcentral’s engine house, still muttering about the good, great old days when he’d been respected, feted. A sharp wind was stirring over the houses, tearing the fog into stripes of black. Glimmers of the stars and fragments of the moon were showing overhead.