The Light Ages (44 page)

But Stropcock had been right about the traffic; it had backed up both ways along Guild Parade. Somewhere, something was happening, but I had no desire to investigate. The pulse of that chalcedony stone, faint though it was, still roared out at me. Rubbing at my bruised throat as the cabs streamed and steamed, I took a short cut towards the Easterlies along the series of interlinking sidestreets behind Goldsmiths’ Hall. After the noise and bustle around Westminster, they were dark and empty. Even the streetlights, to save gas or through some oversight, were unlit. Then I heard the thud of hooves, the heavy creak of some big carriage. My blood chilled as it pulled out of the darkness and stopped beside me.

‘Where
have you
been?’ Sadie’s voice, and her face framed in silver fur, floated out. ‘Get in, get in—quickly! Are you all right, Robbie? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost …’

The driver had calls and cries which made the late evening traffic of Northcentral part for a grandmistress’s carriage.

‘It’s George,’ Sadie said. ‘He keeps mentioning your name—we thought you might be someone he might actually listen to.’

‘What is it? What about Anna?’

She sighed and lit a cigarette. She had several extra rings, now, I noticed, on her fingers. ‘Poor Anna seems to be the last person he seems to want to listen to at the moment. He’s been saying the most odd things.’

The modestly named Advocates’ Chapel, in fact an enormous church, had been standing at a crossroads on the Strand for an Age and a half As a separate guild, the Advocates no longer existed, having been swallowed by the Notaries’ Guild, and the chapel’s large but dumpy spire had long been a useless landmark, largely unnoticed by the traffic which smoked around it. But tonight, it was the centre of much attention. Theatre-goers and revellers spilled across the roads, smiling, pointing up as the fog thinned and the spire glowed. The general impression amongst the crowds as Sadie and I bundled through them was that they were witnessing some odd guild ceremony.

The chapel’s main doors looked as if they had been prised open, and George was inside amid many lanterns and much dust and smoke. Anna was there as well, and she was pleading with him, although George looked through her and through Sadie and I as well as we rushed towards him across the nibbled floor. He was stripped to the waist, ribboned with sweat and dust. In his left hand he had a rolled-up plan. In his right he was waving a crowbar.

‘Ah—
Robert …’
George seemed to notice me on second glance. ‘London’s a bog—did you know that? This whole building’s afloat on nothing but the swill of some old drains … This thing’s probably hollow.’ He struck a pillar with the crowbar. Flakes of stone flew. ‘What time is it, by the way?’

‘Close to midnight—but what are you doing?’

‘Midnight?’ He gave the pillar a push. The thing was six feet in diameter. ‘I’d hoped it would be quieter outside by now. We’ll have to stop the traffic—clear people back. I really don’t mind the involvement of the police.’

‘He’s talking about singing the chapel down,’ Sadie said. ‘Whatever that means.’

‘You’ve
got
to speak to him, Robbie,’ Anna added, her face wide and white. ‘He’s stolen the spells for this building from his guild academy. He keeps saying something about the opposite of Hallam Tower.’

‘Got to go up top again,’ George announced, waving his crowbar like a dandy with a cane. ‘Why don’t you come with me, Robbie? I can show you just what I mean …’

The tower’s spiral stairway went up and up. George paused halfway on a gantry and waited for me, absently rapping the great single bell. Dust and plaster rained down on me. The air boomed. The Advocates’ Chapel’s main spell, he explained, scampering ahead of me again, wasn’t just bound into the foundations. It wove all the way up to the spire and through the walls and around the buttresses in aethered strips of engraved copper. Once that was unbound, the entire building would become as frail as paper. But the weight of the stones still seemed impossibly solid as I peered down from the tower’s high balcony at the turning lights of the Strand. Guildhalls. Theatres. Glowing tramlines and telegraphs bound up in a vast cat’s-cradle which I thought, for a dizzying moment, might catch us as we fell.

‘There’s Anna!’ he shouted. ‘She’s outside!’ She was easily recognisable in a red beret, standing beside the silver of Sadie’s coat amid the angels in the graveyard. She looked up, her face a small white heart. George had roped lanterns around the spire to illuminate it. The night wind licked over us and London shimmered and yellowed as he showed me the verdigrised copperplate engravings which were bolted to each side of the four compass-facing pediments. I traced their swirls and felt a thrill of something heavy, musty. ‘Now—just listen …’ George spoke slowly, his voice wavering up and down a long semitone. There was a gritty rumble beneath us, like a millstone turning. ‘Now …’ He grabbed the crowbar he’d leaned against the parapet just as my fingers were snaking towards it. ‘We’d better get back down …’

To unbind the spell which sustained this ugly old building, to unlock its buttresses and foundations as a guildsman might twist open a seal, it was necessary to know the entire charm which had bound it, and which existed in its entirety, so George claimed, within the scrolled lines of the drawing he’d stolen from the libraries of his guild. But that wasn’t enough. Copper strips were buried in the rubble beneath the Portland stone facing, and the strengthening chants which long dead workmen had infused into them had to be exposed. He hefted his crowbar. A winged white marble memorial unpeeled and shattered across the aisles. George’s forehead was cut. His thin body was smeared and shining.

‘This place isn’t safe!’ I shouted. ‘Why don’t you do what Anna asks and go outside?’

‘Ha! Anna!’ The dank building gave a groan. ‘She’s always right about everything, isn’t she? And I don’t suppose I
have
been myself lately. It must have been something I’ve eaten. Clams it was, I think …’ He spat dust from his mouth. ‘God, I can still taste the foul things. Like salt and some sort of rotting weed.’ The traffic was hooting outside. A police bell was ringing. ‘Maybe they were cuckoo-clams—can you have such a thing? God knows we sluice enough aether and filth into the Thames.’

He drew me to the apex of the church, the point beneath the centre of the tower, which tunnelled up above us now like a crystal grotto as engine ice began to seep out of the stone. He swept the glittering dust away from the key-plate which bound all the other spells and lay embedded in the paving. It was circular, and the points and ornamentations were pooled with vivid enamels which rippled in the light of George’s lantern. When he touched his fingers to them, the colours were already wet. He smeared them across his face and started chanting. The phrases were convoluted and ragged. Some wooden part of the tower must have caught light from the heat of one of the many lanterns, for wafts of smoke were beginning to trail around us.

‘You’ve done
enough!’
I yelled.

George turned to me. ‘This is just the beginning.’ He spat and coughed. ‘Didn’t I tell you England needs a sign—the very opposite of Hallam Tower?’

He was empty-handed now and I grabbed his shoulders in an attempt to drag him outside, but he threw me off with an easy shrug, tossing me back across the aisles. His strength, pouring into him as the power drained from the church, was prodigious.

‘People have noticed you, George. They’ll believe and understand—isn’t that what you wanted?’

‘Tell that to the cavalry captain!’ He wiped his mouth with his paint-smeared hands. ‘Tell that to all the rest of the people who died and suffered on Butterfly Day. But you’re right, Robbie—this isn’t safe. You should go out …’ Then he raised a hand. An expression of puzzlement, bizarre in its ordinariness, crossed the paint-smeared mask of his face. ‘But wait—just one moment. I’ve been meaning to ask you something. It’s about Anna …’ A blistering wave of heat and plaster dust swept over us as an archway collapsed. ‘Fact is, I’m not sure that she’s entirely who she claims to be. Those parents of hers—there aren’t any proper records. Odd, isn’t it?’ He shook his head. ‘You’re the only person who remembers her as a child. I’ve been to her room in Kingsmeet—oh, I know it was
most
unguildsmanly of me … Nearly burnt myself on the tiny vial she keeps on the dresser. Why on earth should Anna need acid, and a pipette? And when she rescued me on Butterfly Day—it wasn’t really Anna at all. You do understand me, don’t you? You of all people. You do realise that it’s not just—’ He licked the dust from his lips. ‘—those damn clams I ate …’

‘George—Robbie!’

Anna emerged from the dust and flames.

‘There you are Anna! Just in time as always.’

‘Look,’ she began. ‘Whatever happened to you, George, it wasn’t—

‘Can’t you see?’ He spread his arms.
‘This
is what England needs.’ He turned slowly. ‘This church.
Me …’
The bell was ringing out now as the spire creaked and swayed above our heads. I glanced at Anna; it wasn’t just George who was mad to be here now; we all were. Then, in a sudden splitting of wood followed by a rending of stone, the bell dropped towards us through the tower roof.

It would have been hard for anyone to describe exactly what happened next. Even for those outside, and for Sadie who was standing just at the chapel’s doorway, there was disbelief and confusion. But the spire of the Advocates’ Chapel began slowly to collapse in on itself, puffing out, its flaming weathercock descending through the sparkling night. And the bell thundered as it fell. Then its sound changed. To those outside, it gave one last almighty
clang
which rang out far across London. For a moment, many swore that the spire actually seemed to regather itself and rise back upwards in a trail of sparks.

To me, standing beneath that collapsing central tower, that final sound from the bell was something I felt rather than heard; a peal richer and deeper than mere aethered bronze. Even George was thrown back by its blast. Then Anna was standing on the key-plate, her arms raised as the rainbow colours of the engravings blurred around her. Briefly, the entire church stilled. The flames were swirls of polished copper, and the falling bell hung just above us, its clapper frozen in mid-swing, trapped in the solid air. Then there was a gush and a rush and we were all running, driven back and out by the bellowing dust and stonework as the spire finished its collapse.

The crowd outside cheered, backed away, surged forward, then universally started coughing in the quicklime clouds from which Anna and George and I somehow emerged. The newspaper men, alerted by George’s rambling letters, were waiting. Flashtrays puffed as they clustered around him. Then the police arrived. But they were surprisingly gentle. In other situations this would have been time for the nightstick and the boot, but they knew a high-guilded person when they saw one, even when he was stripped to the waist and smeared with dust and paint. It could have been George’s finest moment, and he did make an oddly impressive figure. But he spoilt it all by struggling and shouting after a young blond-haired woman standing nearby in the crowd.

‘What is it, Anna! For God’s sake,
why
did you save me? It was the same on Butterfly Day! Why don’t you leave me alone … !’ Half-handcuffed, slippery with sweat, he lunged.
‘What
are you … !’ He shook his head and spat. His eyes blazed. ‘You should be in St Blate’s! Hey, someone grab her! Take her arm—the left one—get her to show you her wrist, the one she drops acid on! Troll! Changeling! Witch … !’

But Anna had already slipped back through the crowds, vanishing in that way she was always so good at, and the firemen had set to work.

Those jetting arches from their hoses, the crashing sighs as further walls collapsed, the drifting dust, the continuing flames, the spreading snakes of fluid—all of it added to a dream-like sense of aftermath. Sadie was talking quietly to a senior police officer. He nodded, listened, and his eyes widened slightly at the mention of some name or connection, but George was still hauled away.

‘Well,
there you
are Robbie,’ she said after the police vans had departed. ‘Pity I couldn’t get poor George unarrested. But I suppose that wouldn’t have been what he wanted.’

I shook my head. I felt lost and drained.

‘I explained to that officer that the balance of his mind had been upset,’ she continued. ‘And I told him that no one else was involved, which I suppose is near enough to the truth, when you come to think about it.’ She laughed, shook her head. ‘Near to truth is about as close as life ever gets, isn’t it? I mean with you—with Anna.’

I said nothing.

‘No wonder poor George’s been behaving oddly. And that tower, that bell. I saw enough just then, from where I was standing—but a lot of other things make sense to me now. Little things, over the years. Things you notice and forget about, or put down to the magic of the day. And you as well. You could never dance, could you? You can’t even use a knife and fork the right way…

‘You think Anna ever had any choice?’

‘No.’ Sadie eyes were reddened, and glittering. ‘Of course she didn’t. But she could have told me, couldn’t she? God!’ She looked up at the sky.
‘Me
of all people, her closest friend. I should have known! All these years! All these
bloody
years! I’ve been so stupid! And now I suppose I’m going to have to look somewhere else for a chief fucking bridesmaid ..

I watched her walk away towards her fine black carriage.

M
AD ARCHITECT BRINGS DOWN CHURCH.
The papers were full of George’s deeds in the morning. The vendors were shouting his name over the clatter of the trams, and shopkeepers were brushing up glass from the night’s minor disturbances. But the London sky was as heavy and smoke-laden as ever; the city, as I walked through Northcentral and across glorious Westminster Great Park towards Kingsmeet, hadn’t changed.

The same guildswoman who’d sent me around the corner to the institute by the church on the eve of Butterfly Day was coming out of the pebbledash apartments on Stoneleigh Road as I approached them. With a vague nod, she let me in, and then I was ascending the stairs through the smell of last night’s cooking and the sound of someone practising scales, badly, on a poorly tuned piano. Anna’s room, as I’d known for many terms, was the third on the left on the second floor. My heart felt light, then heavy, as I raised my hand to knock on the browned paint.