The Light Ages (52 page)

‘Here. Take this ..

The Potato Man cradled the spilling bowl to his body, breathing heavily as he shuffled back through the chaos of papers, his clothes flapping like black flames. But what could I show him? Where was I to begin? It was useless. But then he snatched a recent copy of the
Guild Times,
which Anna and I had used to study the progress of George’s trial.

‘That’s not …’ I began, but the Potato Man was sniffing at the pages.

‘Him …’ The copperplate flurries of a dying regime. ‘He’s changed, but not much. People like that don’t change …’

I prised the page from him. Deaths and Marriages—photographs as well, and the Potato Man’s bloated finger stabbed at some ceremony to do with the final preparations for the marriage of Grandmistress Sarah Elizabeth Sophina York Passington, which was to be the event of the season down at Walcote House. Sadie was standing in an elaborate dress with her lips half framed as if to say something, and looking more formal than ever, and less herself There was no sign of the groom-to-be. The only other presence was that of her father, who had laid a proud hand on her shoulder and was standing at her side as he smiled his faint, handsome smile.

‘That’s him,’ the Potato Man said with a smudging thrust of his thumb. ‘He was the man who came to see Thomas Harrat.’

‘You’re
sure?
’

But already he was blundering away from me, out into the blowing hall and through the open door into the night.

The house was dark and empty. The lantern had guttered with the last of the oil and the coals had fallen through the parlour grate. Barring that one precious sheet of the
Guild Times,
I decided that Mistress Nutall could burn the rest of these scattered papers. But her gossip about the way we had lived, the words over fences, even the beat of the engines and the screech of the wind across Brownheath, seemed already remote. All that remained of the Potato Man was his dimming, rancid stench—and the looming answer, still too big for me to behold that night, to my question which he had finally brought me.

The house seemed a stranger to me now as we closed doors and swilled out the sink. It gazed down at us from the dark patches on its walls of the empty spaces of photographs we had never thought to fill.

‘You know, Robbie, I still don’t know what I am,’ Anna said as she stood up from raking out the parlour fire. ‘All these years, and I still haven’t got the faintest idea ..

I opened my mouth to say something comforting, but as she turned back to me from the pale glitter of the grate, I could see that her eyes were brimming. She took my hand.

‘Don’t stay downstairs tonight. You understand what I’m saying? I just don’t want to be alone.’

Gravely, soberly, we went upstairs and lifted Anna’s case from the bed. She could lie on the left where she usually slept, and I on the right. I was reminded, as I stared at the worn candlewick bedspread and wet snowflakes settled and slid down the window, of those knights of far away and long ago in the Age of Kings, who had laid their swords between themselves and the maidens they were protecting in situations perhaps not so very unlike this.

Anna unbound her hair and blew her nose. She unbuttoned her dress and smoothed her hands down her sides and unpeeled her socks and stepped from her outer clothes and laid them over the chair beside the faintly moaning fireplace. Her skin seemed whiter than her petticoat and shift, which reminded me in their cut and the bareness of the summer dress I had first seen her wearing, back in the hope and sunlight of a quite different Redhouse to the one we had visited today. She laid back the sheets on her side and gave a shiver as she slipped into bed. Then there were the dull practicalities of my own outer clothing to be removed before I lay down on my side against the cold, slightly damp cotton, and realised that the curtains were still open.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Anna said as I made to get up. ‘We need to wake up early in the morning anyway, if we’re to get that train.’

She’d turned to me across the grey-white pillow. The faint light of the snowflakes shone across her face as they pattered and slid beyond the glass. I was shivering for every reason but the cold.

‘I’m sorry, Anna. I don’t know what to say …

‘Don’t say anything. You’re here. Didn’t I tell Missy that I wanted to find out the truth?’

‘I think we’ve found it.’

‘I…’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

I lifted my hand, laid it over her wet cheek, and I felt her smile.

‘Don’t say anything more, Robbie. I’m just glad you’re here.’

I leaned a little closer to her, and smelled her hair, and her tears, and thought of wet cornfields. The curve of her chin lay just beneath my palm. My fingers met the lobe of her ear. I could feel the movement when she closed her eyes, and the change of her breathing as she fell asleep.

‘C
AN’T YOU SEE?’

Northcentral, brighter than ever in the stormgleam of a late December Sevenshiftday, roared all around us.

‘Can’t you see?’ I was shouting to Anna. ‘Can’t you
see
… !’ And Anna was shaking her head.

Capital and industry, coal and aether, import and export, money and labour, rose up around us on these teeming streets. But I’d seen it all on that cold, quiet night in Bracebridge as the snow slipped down the window in melting trails and I had lain with my hand against her face. And I saw it now, here, in the bowler hats and the eddying masses of wealth and poverty. I saw it in the tut of Anna’s tongue as she walked on from me once again. But I felt a new knowledge, a new tenderness, towards and over everything. And I was walking with Mistress Borrows, with Anna Winters, Annalise, through the continuing flood of Northcentral life, and I could smell the fog of London traffic and, still, the sweet, wet scent of her hair—and I wanted Anna to see it all as well. She was wearing her grey scarf, a red tam-o’-shanter, that herringbone coat, and she was walking with that slow, light-heavy lope of hers, and I was tumbling backwards through the crowds and not caring as I blundered into people as long as I could get her to see …

I wanted Anna to understand that the better world of which I’d long dreamed was suddenly close. It was a place I was sure I’d touched on that last night back in Bracebridge as the shadows of the snow slipped endlessly across her sleeping face. It was a world which in many outward ways resembled this one, but where everything was different underneath. More than merely just another Age or a set of puny demands, it was a place where wonder mixed with the sounds of traffic. No citizen starved, not in this New Age which was more than an Age. And the guilds would be more a tale than a memory, their statues remote as sarsens, their deeds more distant than England’s kings.

But Anna shook her head again as we walked through the bustling Northcentral morning. The truth was precious, safe, dangerous, close and near. I knew that I would soon get her to see.

We’d been staying back in the Easterlies, far from Anna’s old apartment in Kingsmeet, which I’d visited cautiously and alone on the morning of our return, and where I’d found a rubber-stamped notice from the Gatherers’ Guild pinned to her door. Then I’d headed east towards Ashington, where I was cornered in a courtyard. The so-called citizen-helpers were thinking of using their nailed clubs when a voice mentioned Citizen Saul. So it was back, not just to the Easterlies, but to Caris Yard, that I was dragged, which had become a smoke-dimmed encampment of citizens of every kind. Clots of mud were thrown at me as I was blundered past the pump on which I’d first slaked myself on London water.

Caris Rookery was now a hive of revolution rather than a haven for criminality, but, for all that, it had scarcely changed, and Saul had set himself up in the same leaky top room where we had spent our first summer. Even the view across London, as I first glanced at it, looked the same. Hallam Tower flashed. The guildhouses still rose. He’d arranged himself a desk of sorts, employing the old door we’d once used to keep out the wind. There was a firework smell now to go with that of poverty and rotten herring. In the corner, laid casually beside the yellowed remains of one of his old drawings, were several crude silver-grey tubes.

‘What the hell are you doing here, Robbie?’

I rubbed my arms as the blood tingled back. ‘I could say the same of you.’

He’d lost much of the weight he’d put on in the good years. He looked like a sharper, more wizened version of his younger self as he came to stand with me on the ledge from which we had once merrily pissed. The drop was far giddier than I remembered and Stepney Sidings were oddly quiet for mid-afternoon. Just a few trains moved like toys, gently huffing, whilst, almost directly below, some crows were squabbling over what looked like an animal’s remains.

‘Where’s Blissenhawk?

‘He’s over by Whitechapel …’ Saul gestured. ‘We’ve had our disagreements. But he’s still a citizen.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

Saul’s jaw twitched. ‘You can see what London’s like. Out there-’ He waved towards Northcentral. ‘—lies an enemy encampment. You’ve come on a train from somewhere north, haven’t you? So you’ve seen the soldiers, the cavalry. Perhaps they’re waiting for us to come to them. Or perhaps they’ll come to us first. Either way—’

‘—but—’

He raised a patient hand. The crows bickered and cawed. ‘And now you come wandering back into the Easterlies as if nothing has changed. Physical or moral force, eh? And bloody Goldenwhite.’ His face creased as he smiled. ‘And you—you mix with people who can only ever be our enemies. That blonde girl. And that old troll over in those ruins in World’s End. And Highermaster George—but at least he’s proved to have his uses ..

I nodded. One of the most amazing sights in this changed city was to see George’s name scrawled across the tidemarks of graffiti.

But Saul hadn’t finished. ‘And even that bloody grandmistress who’s supposed to be getting
married,
for Christ’s sake! You know
her,
don’t you? And then you go up north on some stupid trip, and you return with that blonde girl—what is her name?’

‘Anna …’ I hesitated.

‘There have been some pretty unsavoury types asking after you as well. They have an idea that there’s something you’re after. And now you’re standing here again as if nothing’s ever changed. So what do you expect me think?’

‘Look, Saul …’ But I trailed off—there was so much I knew now, so much I had to tell. But where to begin? ‘Can’t you
see—
don’t you still believe in the dream?’

Saul sighed, and nodded his dismissal to the citizens behind him, who looked disappointed as they lumbered down the stairs. But there was still puzzlement on his face when he turned back to me. ‘What are you talking about, Robbie?
What
dream?’

And now I was with Anna, walking backwards along the impossibly bright pavements of Threadneedle Street, and trying to explain. It was all so clear to me now. It wasn’t just about the past, or even this present moment as I tried to make her see the truth in the glint of those green and lovely eyes. Look, up here ahead, see the triumphal arch of Goldsmiths’ Hall, a rainbow of stone so big that the nearby spire of St Peter’s could fit underneath it? Gilt and glass, Anna, guild piled upon guild. And the subterranean safes of England’s monetary wealth lie below. Can you imagine anything more solid? But see that keystone, far up there in the blurring winter light? You could pluck that stone out and bring that whole building down, Anna. You could, Anna, far better than anyone. Far better than I …

In the face of Saul’s evident disbelief, which by now had changed to something resembling amused encouragement, I’d found the yearly accounts for Mawdingly & Clawtson, which were freely accessible in the domed and echoing cavern of the Public Reading Rooms. Books the size and weight of boulders confirmed that their sole operating business was the factory in Bracebridge, and that every month the same amount of aether was supposedly delivered to Stepney Sidings. No wonder Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart was doing so well. I’d given a loud sneeze as I tore out the pages. I glanced behind me through the pillars of dust and light. No one was there but I’d taken to varying my routes when I made my forays into Northcentral. I felt safer now, oddly enough, in Caris Yard. But today—today, I just
had
to make Anna see. I needed to make her understand. The truth was so obvious, in fact, that we needn’t even have gone to Bracebridge to find it and I no longer cared who saw us I waved my arms and nearly tripped over a bollard.

A passing officer of the Guild Cavalry, who had become a common sight and no longer wore plumes on their helmets, gazed down at us from his horse. He was about to rein up and ask us what we thought we were doing when the chestnut seller just ahead of us spilled her tray. His mount reared as smoking nuts scattered across the paving and Anna and I slipped into the shadows beneath the gleaming arch of Goldsmiths’ Hall.

Anna was also living in Caris Yard in a place not far from, and in many ways similar to, Maud’s old nursery. Nappies dripped, babies squalled and toddlers stumbled whilst displaced guildswomen cried and argued and lived from one day to the next. I had to share a separate shed with a farting, coughing assortment of male citizens. The elected committees were surprisingly strict about segregating the sexes.

Of course, the women loved Anna, and she seemed the same to me now as ever, but I realised as we moved with the crowds beneath that arch and the light softened the shadow of her jaw which my hand had cradled that night in Bracebridge that, to the ignorant gaze of these investors, speculators, messenger boys and company secretaries who hurried past us in their fine suits and cravats, she was starting to look more and more like some lesser guildmistress—perhaps even a mart—of the Easterlies. And I looked all the more so, although I’d learned how a rub of oil and soot and a scrap of white card could make my trousers and shirt shine enough to spend my hours in the Public Reading Rooms. But I had it all now—or almost all. The final thing I needed, as we passed back into winter sun along Threadneedle Street, was to make Anna understand …