The Light Ages (48 page)

‘I used to come to Bracebridge sometimes with Missy—on days like this, just as the chimneys of the houses started smoking,’ Anna said as we wandered further up the hill amid the long shadows of the monuments. ‘We had to go shopping for soap and flour like everyone else, although I know you find that the hardest thing to believe about us …’ Her eyes gleamed. She swallowed. ‘Missy even offered to take me here, but I dragged her away through the twilight. I didn’t
want
to know then, Robbie, about my mother, my father, about anything to do with this place. All I felt was this lost …’ She sniffed and looked up at the paling sky. The muscles in her jaw quivered.
‘Rage.
That was probably why I was so awkward with you when you came with your mother that summer to Redhouse. I knew you were part of a past I didn’t care about, a life that had been taken from me by some accident in this stupid town …’

The sun was settling beyond Rainharrow. The last gleams of its rays poured incredibly to illuminate the rooftops of Coney Mound in shades of gold and brown. I thought for a moment, just as we closed the churchyard gate, that there was a figure standing amid the far yews, but with another glance the darkness had settled. It had gone.

Past the wall where the young lads smoked and the giggling girls trailed past on summer evenings, at the better end of Coney Mound which was almost lowtown, to a house where the front was unlit, but the chimney was smoking, and the faint lights of the kitchen glowed into the parlour with glints of glass and porcelain. Anna pushed her chin down into her coat and let out a long, cold breath. 12 Park Road, with a decent bit of back lawn where you might actually grow something. This was where her parents had lived.

SHOOOM
BOOM.
The day the engines stopped—the day that Anna’s and my life had changed before we were even born into them—was a vague absence, a stillness, in the interminable library records, distinguishable by some meetings cancelled and football matches postponed, repairs to the damaged town hall, a few new buildings commemorated a year or so later to replace those which had inexplicably vanished. Beth was right—people hated digging into the past here almost as much as they detested people who were
ikey.
My few more direct enquiries about those times, even when I forced myself to stay late in the Bacton Arms and knock back slippery pints of Coxly’s, were met with blank stares or dark hostility. Anna, in her quieter way, did far better.

By asking the neighbours, she found the Stropcocks’ old house, which wasn’t so far away from that of her parents on Park Road, a thin but double-fronted grace-and-favour dwelling which the Toolmakers still owned. Yes, they’d left the town, him on a promotion which had arrived surprisingly quickly, come to think of it, with the way the lesser guilds usually worked. But no one quite seemed to know where it was that they had gone. No one much cared, either—but it
had
been in the spring of year 86, which was soon after my mother and Grandmaster Harrat had died. And they had lost a baby a while before; little Frederick Stropcock’s grave was up there in the shadow of St Wilfred’s, although the tangles of nettles told us far more clearly than all the records in the world could ever have done that the Stropcocks, the Bowdly-Smarts, never visited Bracebridge.

‘Someone like Stropcock would love to come back here and lord it over everyone,’ I said after tea one evening as I stood at the sink and scrubbed the pans with a lump of old swarf. ‘Did I tell you I saw him once when I went into Grandmaster Harrat’s guildhouse? It was through a door on Christmas evening. He was eating at their table ..

From our kitchen window, there was a view across half the valley. The settling pans were glowing, and the lights of a train were just snaking out of the valley. Behind me in the cramped room, I could hear Anna moving about, the clink of the grate, the rumble of the clotheshorse as she put up the day’s washing. The high guildswomen she’d known in London would have been appalled by this transformation. But we were happy playing at this life, or pretending that we were playing at it.

SHOOOOM
BOOM.
The sound of the aether engines had changed. I was sure of it now. The first beat was too slow, the second too quick, and the pause between each surge and strike was a moment too long. I studied the faces in the street, these busy people who had been here too long to care or notice and would happily remain forever frozen in this Age. I watched the whistling window cleaners, the street sweepers whom I was sure had never existed before, the men on ladders who scrubbed bricks and cleared gutters. The whole of Bracebridge was glancing at its shoulders, removing stray speckles of engine ice like dandruff.

Grandmaster Harrat’s house on Ulmester Street had been replaced, but the new house was swathed in scaffolding. Builders were whistling out with barrows of glittering dust which looked too beautiful merely to throw into a skip; perhaps it was taken all the way to World’s End. I’d imagined, when an aether town such as Bracebridge came to its end, that the process of its encrustation would be precise and gradual, welling up like water. But this white sparkle had no reason to obey logic; it was an effusion of magic.

I migrated from the public library to the Halls of the Lesser Guilds, which the Toolmakers shared with the Ferrous Workers and the Pressmen. In many ways the building was similar, except that the guildsmen who lounged here were allowed to smoke and their chairs were old leather and more comfortable. I was greeted by the custodian like the prodigal Toolmakers’ son I claimed to be. He was a lad I’d known at school who now had five children and another on the way. Of course, he’d telegraph the necessary forms to confirm my membership—but everyone knew who I was in Bracebridge, so why hurry? Clocks ticked. Men snored. Dust fell and rose. All of it to the same cracked rhythm. There were books of spells. Manuals for long—dead machinery. The old pages breathed up at me with a scent of rusting staples.

Stropcock had started this new life in London, and he had taken that chalcedony stone with him as some kind of evidence, insurance—a talisman. And I was sure by now that he was involved in something to do with the day the engines stopped, something which was still going on in the town of Bracebridge—some fraud or deception involving the fading processes of aether. But what? And how? These endless pages, I realised as I blinked awake over a list of superseded regulations, were drugged. They were like the guilds themselves, designed to draw you in and send you to sleep with promises of small glories until you awoke, still wondering, from life itself.

Beth invited me to the Board School one morning. She was nothing like old Master Hinkton, and had got the wild idea from somewhere that the purpose of her guild was education. It would be useful, she’d suggested, for the class to hear from someone who’d lived in some other part of England. It was early and the whole place steamed. Hands shot up. Had I been up Hallam Tower—could you touch the flame? Did the great guildhouses really float? From what substance were London’s pavements really made? The atmosphere, under Beth’s stern but indulgent gaze, was quite different from that which I remembered, even if the place smelled the same. I tried to talk about the Easterlies, the Westerlies, the ferries and the tramtracks—even World’s End—but you could tell they didn’t want to hear about the real city. They were almost like me at that age. London was still a dream, and the last thing they wanted was for some ordinary-looking man who’d been born on Coney Mound to explain it to them. So I mentioned Goldenwhite instead, and unicorns and wishfish and dragons—red dragons and green ones, flying around the fabled Kite Hills. And dances, yes, there were great, wondrous dances, in ballrooms which floated over the river and glowed like pearly shells. Beth regarded me from her desk, half amused and half disapproving. Behind her, I could see the scarred old box with the sprung clasp which she would use to demonstrate the power of aether.

‘They seemed to enjoy that,’ I said to her as we walked outside afterwards.

‘I’ll have to spend the next two terms telling them what London’s really like!’

‘But they need to dream a bit, don’t they? You’re a good teacher, Beth—you understand …’

She nodded. Mist had settled over lowtown this morning. Bluish, filled with a cold gleam and almost clean to breathe, it was quite different to the fogs of London.

‘What’s happened to Hinkton?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘I suppose the trollman still comes?’

‘Yes, but it’s not Master Tatlow now, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘He’s gone as well, has he?’

‘People do. If you stay in one place for long enough to see it happening.’

But her digs and asides were losing their sting. I’d heard gossip that Beth had a man-friend in Harmanthorpe. A fellow schoolmaster, he’d gone with her and Father to Skegness. They’d shared, by all accounts, the same hotel room. I was happy for her to think that she had someone, although a little sad that she couldn’t bring herself to tell me.

‘Have you heard about the day when the engines here stopped beating?’

‘Yes, but I was too young to remember, Robert. What is there to know?’

‘But you
do
know that was when Mother got that scar she had on her palm—you
do
know that was why she died?’

Beth’s pace slowed. ‘Accidents happen here. One of my pupil’s fathers broke his leg only last shifterm. He’ll probably never walk again. Why d’you need to dig up the rest?’

The fences by the settling pans exhaled a rainbowed glow into the mist, but there was a scum of algae on their lustrous surface, and the cuckoo-nettles no longer flourished beside the concrete wall at the back. ‘Beth,’ I said, ‘I ask you these things simply because I’d like to know.’

She snorted. ‘My children would come up with a better reason! And
please
don’t keep prodding at Father about these things whenever you see him. He’s never been the same since Mother died. But at least he’s found an … equilibrium.’

‘It’s made me realise, coming back here, that perhaps what I thought I was escaping wasn’t quite so bad.’ I’d intended the comment genuinely, but Beth gave me
a what-do-you-want-now
look. I plunged on. ‘My mother had a friend, they were a couple—father must have known them as well even though he denies it. They were called Durry. He was the uppermaster on Central Floor. He was in control there and he died from his injuries on the day the engines stopped along with seven other people. And his wife—well, she died eventually as well. And Mother was hurt.
You must
know something about all of this, Beth.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘The truth would help.’

‘The truth is, I think you should leave Bracebridge before the snows come.’ Her gaze flickered up towards Rainharrow which had briefly emerged gleaming above the roofs of Mawdingly & Clawtson. ‘And that girl, that woman—Anna. She’s not just from London, is she? And she’s not from Flinton, either. She seems a sweet enough thing and I’ve got nothing in particular against her, but there’s
something
odd. And I’m sure she’s not your wife. So don’t come here talking about the truth, Robert Borrows.’ She thought about saying more, but at that moment the town hall gave a muffled chime. ‘I’ve got a lesson. I must go …’

I watched my sister walk off into the mist, pacing to the beat of the aether engines.

In these days of December, the nights came in slow and early. The hills settled like smoke, grey on purple on grey. The guild signs flapped and creaked. The lamplights battled the wind. Anna and I were out walking as we often walked, but this time, in the long, safe, anonymous hour of settling darkness when she and Mistress Summerton had once come to this town, we had determined to go to the top of Rainharrow.

Hello, Mistress Borrows!
Anna raised a hand and smiled through the gloom to a neighbour who was out collecting her washing before it froze, a woman with three daughters and no husband who worked at the eye-straining business of putting the lace on fine ladies’ vests. I’d come home today to the smell of sweet, delicious bread wafting down Tuttsbury Rise—stuff which crumbled to the blade and had scarcely finished steaming before most of it was eaten. Anna was becoming famous for the quality of her baking. She could make the yeast rise, I’d been told over the fence that morning, like no one else on this side of Coney Mound. I’d even met someone who swore they’d known Anna in Flinton. The life of Anna, Mistress Borrows, was blossoming beyond our control. I was coming to understand now how it must have been for her in London and St Jude’s. Even to me now, with each gust of the wind, she was, wasn’t, Mistress Borrows.

Anna walked ahead of me to the pulse of the night with that slow, slightly stooped and loping gait of hers in a long pleated tweed skirt she’d been given to replace—Oh
my sirs, you can’t wear
that—the flimsier stuff she’d brought with her. Anna, Mistress Borrows, hummed to herself when she was dressing, always seemed surprised when the kettle started screaming, left a rime of tooth powder each evening around the bowl in the scullery. She liked cheese which was hard and waxy, and blew on her tea before she drank it even when it was cold. I’d grown pleasantly used to the sight of her underclothes hanging dripping in the kitchen because here you didn’t hang such things on your back line, and I suppose she must have grown used to mine, too. We did our own things, the quiet things, the embarrassing things, in the times and spaces which we quietly conceded to each other, but the house was so small that we often bumped backs, clashed elbows, even occasionally grew impatient with each other. Her hair had that slightly wheaty scent which came and went according to when she’d washed it. That afternoon, as I’d sat in the Lesser Guildhalls and tried to rehearse the spell which caused a worn cog to keep its bite, I’d found one of her hairs just lying across my shoulder. I’d lifted it and held it there in a beam of sunlight. I watched it shiver in my hand to the beat of the engines.

I thought of our staying on here in Bracebridge through the deep snows, and of my working at Mawdingly & Clawtson just as my father had done. I’d study those manuals. I’d learn to chant the spells, and the haftmarks would spread up my arms like ivy. I’d bring home a pay packet each Tenshiftday to replenish our vanishing funds. And slowly, slowly, term through term, month after month of this winter, I’d find out the truth of what had happened here … Beyond the yards, beyond that long line of aether trucks which I was almost sure now were mostly empty, the ground began to roughen and rise. A thin moon delineated the scant track which few people followed up here in winter. Anna went ahead, her breath huffing in clouds. Mistress Borrows, Anna Winters, Annalise, Anna, who could be anything, who could do anything, live anywhere, who could bake the bread which the angels ate in heaven and stop a church tower from falling … George’s trial had sunk back through the pages of the
West Yorkshire Post.
He’d been incarcerated at the pleasure of his guild, which meant a suite of rooms in some pretty country guildhall where he could get on with designing the perfect house for the perfect workman.