The Light Ages (53 page)

We’d called on Mistress Summerton since our return. The Thames was almost fully frozen now. A few more days, the coming of a Christmas which the holly sellers and the shops along Oxford Road still hawked as if it would be like any other, and we’d have been able to walk, but for now we’d had to spend money we scarcely had for tickets on the aether-braziered ferry. Hoar frost and engine ice. Those white hills, empty as the Ice Cradle. And the ruined gardens beside the great, shattered domes where the roses were blooming wildly and out of season, curving in blood-red plumes and thorns like the guardians of some ancient curse. We banged worryingly long and hard on the door of her cottage before her head extended like a tortoise’s from its shell. Her gaze had dimmed since the last time I had seen her and her fire was scarcely lit. She claimed she’d been asleep, even on this cold midday, as she bumbled about for her tea and tobacco and managed to spill both. She even had that same sour-sweet smell I’d noticed with old women, although it was bound up with many scents and herbs. Her hands lay still upon her lap and moved, lay still and moved, as we told her about Bracebridge, the aether engines, Grandmaster Harrat, the Potato Man.

‘You must have always
known,
Missy. But you never told me—you just left me to find out.’

‘Edward Durry died long ago, Anna. Didn’t he tell you that himself?’

‘Yes, but ..

Mistress Summerton could, as she gazed at us, have been looking long into the empty future, far into the lost past. ‘Did you see those roses? They’re quite out of my control. But I don’t know why I ever imagined they were
mine …’
She gave a slow, sad chuckle like water trickling through a grate. ‘But who am I to think I ever controlled
anything?
And it
has
been a hundred years, after all, give or take a season, since this place was young. I’m almost the same. The two of us are fading together …’ Her eyes travelled down to Anna’s boots, which were muddied and almost worn through, then across her socks, which we joked were more hole than wool, to the tear in her moleskin skirt and the fraying hem of her once good herringbone coat. Then her eyes flickered towards me.
This,
she sighed in a fluttering pulse,
is what you’ve done to my Annalise …
The unspoken words trailed off into the wind hissing outside through the thorns.

‘I have no money now,’ she said eventually as she poured us cool, half-stewed tea. ‘Or at least not unless I sell my car.’

‘We’re not here for your
money, Missy!’

‘I suppose you’re not. But don’t expect me to continue the tale of your poor father, either. Or that of your mother. She lived long enough to give birth to you after that terrible accident, and for that we must all rejoice. And your father’s dead—as good as. But these are things you’ve always known. You didn’t have to go to Bracebridge for them. Isn’t that enough? I once hoped …’

But Mistress Summerton never did quite say what she’d once hoped, other than that it was plainly something other than for Anna and I to be sitting here in winter with the smell of the Easterlies upon us. I could have told her about many things, about the real truth of how I could change this Age, but she was old and cold, her hands were like a frail bird’s, and the best it seemed we could do was sort out some blankets for her, and feed her fire, and commiserate with her about her madly blooming roses, which tore at our clothing as we walked back towards our ferry and the greying lights of a city which was preparing for war.

Butterfly Day was a fantasy of summer. This time, the workshops of the Easterlies were pounding to a rhythm set by no guild. Swords from ploughshares, or at least sharpened spikes from railings, and bombs from paraffin and sugar. Even guns of a sort—crude and aetherless things at least as likely to blow your own hands off as to stop a charging cavalryman, but guns nevertheless, which, like Grandmaster Harrat’s electricity, were a technology which the guilds had long known about but, apart from the boom of ceremonial cannons, repressed. Saul had a touching faith in his guns, but he wasn’t walking here in Northcentral. He’d forgotten about the power and pull of these buildings, or he’d never really known. He failed to understand what he was really fighting, which was aether and money—the true might of the guilds, which roared unabated in these streets and shone in the purring, wyreblack mass of the telegraphs which scribbled the sky, SHOOM
BOOM—
for money was magic as well. How, otherwise, could the aether engines of Bracebridge still pound the earth when they produced nothing? Anna had shown it to me through Stropcock’s old haft, so surely she of all people could understand. Mawdingly & Clawtson, by the public records, produced a little under a quarter and slightly more than a fifth of all the aether extracted in England. The French and the Saxons, they tended their own industries and mysteries and guilds, whilst aether from the wildernesses of Thule, Africa and the Antipodes was like the people of those regions; strange and wild and notoriously difficult to tame.

I’m no expert on company affairs, Anna, but I do know that all companies are owned by shareholders—and that those shareholders are mostly the guilds. And Mawdingly & Clawtson is majority-owned by the Telegraphers’ Guild. It’s a major part of their wealth, Anna! Stropcock, Bowdly-Smart, he’s just a henchman who goes through the motions of spending the income they pretend they have on imaginary cargoes and the contents of empty warehouses. But the Chairman of the Board, Anna—it’s down in black and white, and I’ve still got the page in my pocket if you don’t believe me—is Greatgrandmaster Anthony Charles Liddard Seed Passington!

All these years, almost all my life, there’s been this creature, this figure. It used to be Owd Jack who betrayed Goldenwhite. Then it was the trollman, or Grandmaster Harrat’s dark guildmaster. Up here in London, it was poverty and money, and places like this street where the guildmistresses wear white gloves to show that they never have to touch anything dirty. I’ve even
seen
him sometimes, Anna, or I’ve thought I have. He’s come out of the stuff of shadows and bad corners of my dreams. But he was none of those things—and he was every one of them. The dark guildmaster was the real, living man who went up to Bracebridge more than twenty years ago with that chalcedony in a wooden casket, and he used Grandmaster Harrat in that experiment, and he used my mother as well—and your mother and father—and many people died and suffered as a result. It’s
him,
Anna. There are records of speeches he made in neighbouring towns. He came and gave his orders and went away and took none of the blame. Even Grandmaster Harrat didn’t know who he was. But for all that, he’s just a
man,
Anna, which to be honest is almost a disappointment. But we can bring him
down.
You’ve got to understand. You’ve got to help me …

We found a small, quiet park with pale winter-bare sallow trees through which the honeyed stone of Northcentral glowed like firelight through a tapestry. In the cold shadow of its walls we walked the spotted marble paving and sat on a bench. Anna shoved her hands into her tattered pockets. The sounds of London had receded. A russet squirrel ran along a branch.

‘You’re just saying that we could ruin yet more lives.’

‘It’s
Anthony Passington,
Anna! He’s the man who destroyed our parents.’

‘But I know him. I’ve accepted his hospitality, and he’s always been decent to me. He doesn’t seem ..

‘How do you expect such people to seem?’

She shrugged and shivered. Her lips looked chafed. She had a smear of soot on the end of her nose. ‘He’s Sadie’s father, Robbie. Despite all that’s happened, I’d still like to think that she and I are friends. And it’s
her
guild, too.’

‘Why do you think she’s being forced to marry Greatmaster Porrett? The Distemperers’ Guild is one of the few which doesn’t have shares in Mawdingly & Clawtson. The Telegraphers need their wealth to keep going. That’s exactly why they’re being sucked in ..

Anna smiled. She gave her knees a jiggle. ‘And Sadie always said it was just about paint.’

‘Can’t you see it’s all part of the same thing? It’s not these buildings around us which make the guilds what they are, Anna. It’s money, and money’s all about belief England’s already in a mess, so can you imagine what would happen if everyone knew that one of its major sources of aether has failed, and that the Telegraphers’ Guild is bankrupt?’

She blew out a grey plume of air. ‘It would be a catastrophe.’

‘It would bring the Telegraphers down, Anna. And most of the other guilds, or near enough. Can’t you see?’

‘And that would be good, would it?’

‘You made that banner back in the summer. I thought you believed in a New Age.’

‘That was before a lot of things.’

‘You’ve seen what it’s like in the Easterlies. The citizens are just waiting for a signal to march towards Northcentral. This time they won’t be carrying banners. But the guilds have their spells and their soldiers and their balehounds and their cavalry. They’ll be prepared—why else do you think they’re waiting? And why do you think all the so-called great and good are heading out of London for Sadie’s wedding? By the time they get back in the New Year, all the blood will have been washed away. Saul and all the other citizens will have been killed or imprisoned, and the Telegraphers will be flush with new money. Everyone will continue just as it was, only it will get worse.’

‘You make it sound terrible, Robbie.’

‘But it doesn’t have to be that way. We’re the ones who can make sure it isn’t.’ I swallowed. The words in my head were simple now, but I needed her beside me to make them feel true. ‘Between us, Anna, we can change this Age.’

But there was still doubt and horror in her eyes as she dragged back her hair, and she’d stood up before I could touch, as I’d been longing to do all morning, the downy space at the turn of her jaw.

‘What else can I show you, Anna?’

I’d almost given up pleading.

Anna stopped in her tracks when she saw two weathercocks prickling above the winter chimneys. But her whole life had been a battle against places such as St Blate’s. As she tightened her scarf around her neck and started walking again, I think she understood that no one, now, could simply be ordinary. I pulled the bellchain. I hadn’t noticed before how covered the long high walls were in
graffiti. Freedom from rest. Out demons. Lady
(something)
is an ugly monster.
Perhaps even the trollmen were feeling the pinch now and had given up scrubbing it off. The small door within the larger gate screeched open.

They didn’t get many visitors, this close to Christmas and this late in this Age, and Warderess Northover even remembered me from my visit to Master Mather. Of course I could see him. In fact, he’d just got back from working for his old guild a few minutes before. We were led into the gravelled yard where the sea-voices washed through the blue dusk from the main wing, and an anonymous green box-carriage stood, lamps hissing and dray steaming. The driver leapt down, flat cap and smile askew.

He hoiked a thumb. ‘Just been back to the place he used to work—Brandywood, Price and wotsit … Solid gold thread curtains some dog had pissed on. Job for Master Mather here if ever there was one …’ The trollman took a half-cigarette from behind his ear and walked beside his wagon, absently banging on its side. He unbolted the rear doors and slid down a wooden ramp.

‘Come on, me dear …’ He clicked his tongue and whistled. He found a chain in the shadows and gave it a tug. ‘We’re home. Even got some nice visitors for you ..

Master Mather emerged in a trickle of chains and a huge, soft tumble of white flesh like a pile of dropped new sheets. He’d put on weight since I’d seen him, or some kind of substance. His skin had puffed up, was blister-smooth, and the features of his face had entirely vanished. Only his hands, suddenly narrowing at the wrists like a baby’s or as if an elastic band had been twisted around them, were still recognisably human in their shape, although their flesh was impossibly pale. He squealed and slithered like a huge balloon filled with warm, swishing milk. And he smelled searingly of solvents, soaps and bleaches. A cross and C, I noticed, had been branded on the taut white cushions of his flesh, although it was nothing like the size of Mistress Summerton’s, or even Mister Snaith’s; things, just as Warderess Northover kept saying, had improved.

‘You recognise your old friend, don’t you … ?’ The trollman crooned. But then, lunging on the cotton slippers which encased the paddles of his feet, Master Mather made a quick movement towards Anna, catching the sleeve of her coat. A brief, odd tussle ensued before Anna snatched her arm back and Master Mather gave a loud squeal as he tried to scuttle back into the safe darkness of his van. The moans and howls of those enclosed in the main wing rose in pitch and agitation. Even in this light, the left sleeve of Anna’s herringbone coat was suddenly cleaner. The groom yanked hard on the chain. Master Mather whimpered.

‘Does that sometimes. But we’ll make sure he knows he
shouldn’t—
believe me ..

‘Please,’ Anna said.
‘Don’t.’

The trollman pushed back his cap and nodded. There was something about the tone of her voice.

We left St Blate’s without entering the main wing and with the visitors’ book, much to Warderess Northover’s grief, still unsigned. It was fully dark now, the depths of the year. Cyclists whooshed by us on the dark streets of Clerkenwell like so many black birds.

‘And there are other such places, Robbie?’

‘Several, at least.’

‘Then yes. I’ll do it.’

Just like all the citizens in the vast army which filled Caris Yard, Citizen Simpson had a tale to tell. He’d been an upperaccountant, but his wife had been tubercular. There had been a need for money. And then … His eyes drooped as he crouched like a gargoyle on his freezing stretch of roof above the night-time mass of light and noise and stench in the yard below.

‘Well?’ Saul asked. ‘Can you do it, citizen … ?’ He took out a screw of paper and unwrapped it to reveal the small and faintly sparking stone hoop of the fresh numberbead he’d got hold of from somewhere. Citizen Simpson almost snatched the object from him, and muttered something which turned its light faintly blue. A half-recognisable song started up down below near the wall where Saul and I had once sat with Maud. I took out the papers, and Saul chuckled as he studied them, then passed them to Citizen Simpson, who smoothed them on the slates and began to mutter to himself as he clutched the numberbead.