The Light Ages (56 page)

‘Of course, all this will be removed in time for tomorrow’s wedding, when there will be—ah, but here she is …’

Sadie, dressed in what looked like her riding clothes, and with bridesmaids, pageboys and servants scurrying in her wake, charged up the aisle.

‘Of course, you’ll have to walk a lot slower than that tomorrow morning, if I may venture, grandmistress. But that’s exactly why we’re here …’ He clapped his hands, gestured, pointed. The bridal procession, in today’s odd mixture of clothes, was arranged in a diminishing line. ‘Now, if you’ll stand
here.’
He grabbed a valet. ‘And if you could stand exactly
here.’

I resisted. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for the greatgrandmaster, and the groom?’

Canon Vilbert sighed. ‘That’s
why you’re
here, isn’t it?’

After all, I thought as Sadie and Anna and their entourage trooped all the way out of the chapel so they could troop back in again, Porrett’s done this three times before. And the greatgrandmaster of one of the highest and most powerful guilds was hardly likely to be troubled by something as simple as a mere, albeit extremely grand, wedding.

‘Where’s the organist? He should be here by now. You over there-go check the billiard rooms ..

I almost wished that I was back at the banquet, stuffing myself with out-of-season pears, grapes and nectarines. But it was certainly an odd sensation, to be standing in place of the greatgrandmaster himself, and waiting for my daughter Sadie, who would appear and disappear occasionally amid Canon Vilbert’s moaning instructions.
Here
not
there.
Not
that
but
this.
Sadie finally linked arms with me, then with the valet, muttering something which caused him to smile and blush. A dummy ring had to be found; a huge thing the size and weight of a doorknob which the canon provided from his own fat fingers. Tomorrow, out beyond these walls, the normal calendar of guilded work was supposed to resume. But here, it was the feastday of St Stephen. Even without Sadie’s wedding, the Christmas celebrations at Walcote House would continue, if things went as planned, all the way past New Year until something called Epiphany.

Finally—step and
pause,
step and
pause,
my dear—the canon succeeded in getting Sadie to walk sufficiently slowly up the aisle, then she and the valet exchanged vows. The canon turned to the altar. He opened a silver cupboard, extracted a chalice, genuflected, and poured himself a slosh of hymnal wine.

‘Why not the rest of us, eh?’ Sadie asked.

The canon, smiling as ever, was about to explain, but Sadie grabbed the chalice from him, drank back its contents and stomped off down the chapel.

Baths were being run. Flesh was being squeezed into outfits and appraised before mirrors in preparation for the evening’s ball.

‘What would be worse, I wonder?’ Anna murmured. ‘That we leave here and nothing has changed, or …’ She ran her hand across the willow-green wall. ‘Can’t you remember anything of what Sadie said?’

‘Can you?’

‘It was years ago for me, Robbie. Do you think I remember every spell?’

I watched and waited, glancing back along the quiet corridor. Anna said something. Nothing happened. She bit her lip. ‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, ‘I should find a pickaxe.’

‘This wall and the tower beyond it would be standing after you’d demolished every other stone in this building …’

Anna leaned to the wall, pressing her ear to it. She nodded and stepped back, rubbing at her shoulder, wincing slightly. Then, in a cracked voice quite unlike her own, she spoke a long phrase. There was a pause. The house seemed to hold its breath. Then it gave a shudder and Anna staggered back as, in a hail of plaster dust, a long crack snaked across the ceiling. But the wall still held. The door remained invisible.

‘It knows we’re here now. That’s why it’s resisting.’

‘We can’t just …’ I stopped. Whispering, squealing, something huge and white was rushing towards us along the corridor. It was Sadie in her wedding dress. Several seamstresses with pins in their mouths came in her wake, nipping and tucking around her.

‘What exactly are you two doing here? This is my private wing.’

Anna and I exchanged glances as Sadie took us in—and the crack across the ceiling.

‘I think we’d better have that talk. And
you
lot—’ Sadie shooed the clustered seamstresses. ‘—just leave me
alone!
You’ve still got the whole night to get this damn thing sorted.’

She took us to her nearby suite, where there was a chaos of clothes and presents.

‘I think the ones over there are for the wedding,’ she said airily. ‘And these here are for Christmas. Grab some if you want.’ Squeezing her dress between the gleaming furniture, she worked open the top drawer of a cabinet. ‘Ah, thank God for that!’ She flourished a packet of cigarettes. ‘Would you light one of these for me Robert? I can’t go anywhere near that fire in this—I’m told I’d combust.’

She eased herself down on a huge sofa beside a glittering tree and her dress, in sighs and flurries of light, slowly settled itself around her. The dazzling snow of this morning had found its way into the fabric, along, as Sadie wearily pointed out to us—here on the braiding, and up here as well—with the entwined spells of Telegraphers’ and the Distemperers’ guilds. Huge and impressive, hooped and arched and aethered and boned, it was much more than a dress, and Sadie, as it sparked and whispered and writhed, seemed lost within its folds as she drew on her cigarette and absently flicked ash from her bosom.

‘Have you heard—there’s been some big demonstration in Dudley? Twenty dead, a hundred casualties. The main telegraph route north has been severed.’

‘Does that mean messages can’t be sent?’

‘So sweet of you, Robert, to be concerned about the workings of my guild. Messages don’t cease to flow because one measly pylon’s been brought down. But all this pointless destruction! It’s about this
Age,
isn’t it? Just because it’s year ninety-nine, every mart and lesser guildsman seems to think there’s some great need for change. People expecting something different every hundred years!’ She gave a laugh. ‘Can you
imagine?’

Anna and I sat and waited. Now, I thought, she’ll challenge us. Now, she’ll throw us out. But instead, Sadie lit another cigarette from the nub of her first and began to talk about Greatmaster Porrett. Two of his wives, it seemed, had died in stillborn childbirth, and a third was still alive but not quite herself. He’d had a sad personal life but he was still surprisingly young in his attitudes, once you got past the bald head and the tremor in his hands. He even claimed to be fertile. It was part of the contract between their two guilds, in any event, that she would have his children. And if that didn’t happen—she shrugged and squinted through clouds of smoke—there was bound to be some way around it. There always was. He’d told her over their first private meal that he enjoyed painting, and Sadie had been pleased to imagine an unsuspected familiarity with the arts. But he really did mean
painting—
the sort his guildsmen did with their brushes up and down railings. The one holiday they’d had together had been spent renovating the mildewed walls of one of his ugly mansions. Sadie now knew the spell which would retard permeation and blistering on a cuprous oxide mix applied to whitecast iron, and had—look, see—she held out a hand across the foam of her dress, indelible blue half moons of cobalt under her fingernails.

‘And now
you’re
both back here,’ she said finally, ‘and looking almost like a couple. But
that’s
not quite your style, is it, Robbie? Nor yours, Anna. And George’s imprisoned and London’s a mess and I’m getting married, and I somehow doubt that you’ve just come here to celebrate. I tried, or I attempted to try, to find out a little bit about what you are and where you really come from, Anna. But why spoil the mystery, eh?’ She lit another cigarette and ground out the old one in the crystal ashtray she was nursing in the folds of her lap. A few sparks flew out, glinting with her whisperjewels. ‘But what do you want? I mean,
really …’

‘There’s no mystery, Sadie,’ I began. ‘We’re simply here because—’

‘No!’ Anna’s voice was harsh. Sadie’s dress gave a louder rustle. ‘No.’ Anna looked at us both. But for those twin red patches on her cheeks and a bluish tinge to her lips, her face was entirely white. ‘I’m tired of all these lies. We owe you the truth, Sadie. Then you can decide what you do with it …’

Sadie puffed her way through the rest of her cigarettes as Anna told her about her childhood with Mistress Summerton, and learning the small deceits which she eventually became so good at. Then there was her life at St Jude’s and being Anna Winters, which became something she believed in as much as everyone else. But the past had hunted her down. That was why she was here, that was—and then I, all caution gone, I began to share my own tale from my first visit to Redhouse, and meeting Anna, who was then Annalise, and how our stories broke and entwined from here to London to Bracebridge. Our fates were joined even now as we sat here in the firelit room, until we came, at last, to the experiment with the chalcedony, the death of our mothers, to Grandmaster Harrat and the man who was once Edward Durry, and to the Bowdly-Smarts, and Bracebridge’s emptily beating engines, and the loss of aether, and finally to the pivotal role which her father had played in all of these things.

The firelight pulsed. Sadie looked at us. ‘How much of this can you prove?’

Anna thought for a moment. ‘Most of it.’

‘My getting married—no wonder it’s so important if our guild really is bankrupt! And you know what would happen if this came out—but that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? That’s why you were trying to get into the Turning Tower …’

‘We’re trying to make a better Age, Sadie.’

‘Or to destroy my guild—wouldn’t that be another way of looking at it, Robbie?’

But there was nothing more to say. Sadie had the truth. Now, as Anna had said, she had to decide what she did with it.

‘My
father, you know,’ Sadie said eventually. ‘He’s not a
bad
man. If he did something wrong, if people got hurt, he’d have had his reasons. They would be good ones, too, and it was all so long ago. You yourself said the experiment with the chalcedony failed, which means that no one meant what happened to happen. The way you talk about my father, Robbie, he’s the devil personified. That’s not him. And the false accounting of that factory—is it really such a crime, to keep the people in your hometown well and happy? You make it all sound so simple, the way only someone who’s lived their life outside the guilds could ever possibly do. I mean, where did the spell in that chalcedony come from? You really think that by pointing your finger at Daddy, you’ve got to the end of the trail?’

I said nothing. All my life—or what now seemed like most of it—I’d been searching for my darkmaster. And I wasn’t going to let Sadie’s equivocating words take him away from me.

‘And do you imagine you’d end up with those monsters in St Blate’s, Anna, someone as lovely and beautiful as you? What would happen if I tried to pull that bellrope over there and called for the house yeomen?’ Sadie shook her head, inspected the empty contents of her cigarette packet and threw it towards the fire. ‘What would you do, Anna? And just how hard would you try to stop me, Robert? Have you really got it in you to kill someone?’ Slowly, with a rustling effort, she stood up. She had her hand laid across the whisperjewels at her throat. ‘Just how badly do you want this thing, Robert—whatever it is that you really want? For it isn’t you, Anna, and it certainly isn’t
me,
or anything or anybody in this house, or back in London, either …’ Slowly, she was moving towards the tasselled bellpull, when, with an angry twist of her mouth, she jerked her hand and the chain of whisperjewels parted from around her neck. One of them twinkled in her palm, then it clattered onto a low table.

‘Sadie, I—’

‘Don’t
thank
me, Master Robert. Don’t
say anything.
I’m not doing this for any reasons I’m proud of, or because of your fucking citizens—I’m doing it because I’m Grandmistress Sarah Passington, and I’m entirely bloody selfish ..

In a swoosh of white, she left the room.

It’s a trick that many guildsmen have. On the edges of some building site or outside the summer-hot doors of a foundry, we Coney Mound children would gather around a plasterer or ironsmith who’d grown bored enough to entertain us for a few minutes while the foreman wasn’t looking. He’d take a few scrapings from a jar or chalice, and then half a handful of dry earth, which he’d spit on, shape, make into something small and neat and hard in his big, quick, hands, muttering as he did so. Then, flourishing it—look, lads; a little dog, a flower, more daringly, a lady’s bare torso. Sometimes, they even let us touch the things, which felt light and hot and scratchy. Often as not, you’d have had to be told what they were, but to me they were fascinating, and the most interesting part of the performance came at the very end, when the guildsman took the little object back from us and cupped his hands around it again and blew softly as if it were an ember on a fire. Puff! He’d spread his palms and laugh as we children spluttered in a cloud of empty dust.

From something, to nothing. A puff of air, the breath of a spell—then dissolution, unmaking. That was what that numberbead and the guilds of England were to me, that Christmas night in Walcote House. Back in London, and in many other cities and towns, the signal would soon be given for the people to stir themselves and advance. Neither secrecy nor openness really mattered now. This was winter instead of Midsummer, and it would be to the back and underbelly of Northcentral and the tinder of factories and the gates of sidings and the doors of engine houses towards which these citizens would now march. Those guns of Saul’s, perhaps, would make the difference. That, or a willingness to violence which the guards and police, guildsmen themselves who had also suffered, might be slow to counter. But nobody knew. And meanwhile, those who had given their orders were preparing themselves for midnight and the Christmas Ball, which would continue, just like the bloodshed, long beyond the dawn.