The Synopsis Treasury (28 page)

That evening. Mistress Summerton takes Robbie to London’s opera house. There, he sees Annalise on stage at the piano. Afterwards, the creature they have shared the balcony with, named Mister Snaith, who covers his shadowed face with makeup and also seems to be a changeling, takes Robbie to a séance, where he performs tricks of dubious magicality. Anna isn’t there, but her friend Sadie, the friend he waltzed with on the Midsummer evening, is. Sadie invites him to a shiftend gathering at her father’s great house Minera in Hastings. Minera is the height of wealth and privilege and magic, and her father—dashing, considerate, caring, charitable, universally popular, a man who has risen from small beginnings to resurrect the name of Passington—is the cherry on the icing of England’s guilded cake. Sadie flirts with Robbie there, and Robbie gets drunk and makes a fool of himself—aided, he feels, by the magical promptings of Anna, who is there also, and plainly now resents his presence. Even worse for Robbie, Anna is being courted by a slight but charming young man named Mark. One odd thing occurs, though, which is that Robbie notices a loud, ugly and wealthy couple who claimed to be called Bowdly-Smart, but the man is in fact Upper-master Stropcock, his father’s old boss at Mawdingly & Clawtson. On the final evening, after an erotic pursuit and a shared conversion about the wondrousness of Anna in the unicorn stables, Robbie and Sadie become lovers.

Robbie and Sadie’s lopsided romance continues through the winter in London, with her showering him with useless gifts and information about the engagement and marriage of Anna to Mark, which they both grieve for similar but unspoken reasons. Meanwhile, Maud has also become pregnant, and she and Saul get married. Robbie, who is feeling increasingly isolated, becomes obsessed with the Bowdly-Smart’s name change and wealth. His route into their house is Master Snaith, who uses Robbie as assistant in the table-turning tricks he performs there. Like Mistress Summerton, Mister Snaith is accepted into the edges of wealthy guilded society, although like even the most tame and sane changelings, he must always live at its fringes. One night, goaded by Robbie’s suggestions that he’s a fraud, there proceeds a real séance, where Mistress Bowdly-Smart is visited by the ghost of her only child who died of cot-death in Bracebridge, and reveals to her upper-guilded friends her true origins. The ensuing scene, though, does not prepare Robbie for the news next morning that both of the Bowdly-Smarts have killed themselves in the night.

Anna and Mark return from their honeymoon in Europe, and Sadie tells Robbie that it has been decided that she must marry the elderly Master Porrett to buttress her guild, and that they must end their affair. In this new spring, England is in deepening recession, and Mark and Anna devote themselves to various overly well-meaning attempts at encouraging the masses to revolt. To Robbie’s puzzlement, his boss, bagmaster Dodds, suddenly starts to treat him kindly. All becomes clear, however, when a hand is placed on his shoulder and he is taken to see Sadie’s father Great-grandmaster Passington. The great man seems in a sad mood, but he offers Robbie whatever he wants as a reward for his discretion, and for ending his romance with his engaged daughter. Robbie can think of nothing for himself—whatever he longs for, it isn’t quite money—but he takes a fat cheque which he gives to Maud and Saul; at last they leave London with their new baby and start work on a smallholding.

Alone now in London, Robert follows the activities of Anna and Mark and their fellow activists, and also begins to attempts to trace more of the truth of whatever really happened in Bracebridge and the dark and dangerous spell which still seems to hang over it. It becomes plain to Robert that Mark’s relationship with Anna isn’t that of a normal man and wife, but he keeps quiet, and turns up to see the great display of the essential weakness of the guilds and aether which Mark has organized. The plan is to sing down an old church by reversing the chant of the aethered spell which bound its foundations, although, typically, they have chosen a building which is empty so no harm will ensue. (2 ) Still, a large crowd turns up to witness the spectacle, although their tone is mostly mocking. Mark, plainly on the edge, begins to climb the spire, setting braziers burning whilst his friends below sing out the chant they believe will unwork the spell which binds the foundations. But the building is far weaker than he imagined, and it begins to teeter and collapse even as he is still high in it. Anna manages to save him, but at the expense of Mark’s finally realizing that she is a changeling, and his own arrest and imprisonment. Being a creature of high-guilded privilege, Mark’s incarceration is in a hospital beside the walls of the asylum, where he is free to wander the grounds and write more of his endless plans for a better England. He has become self-absorbed, and Anna, when she visits him with Robert and Sadie with the truth of her life now exposed to both of them, sees her dreams of an ordinary life in ruins. Anna is also starting to show disturbing, poltergeist-like signs of her changeling nature. As summer turns, she and Robert return to find Bracebridge station, to find the town, crusted in engine ice and the beat of the aether engines slowed to a shudder. Yet the people work on regardless, as if in the grip of a deeper version of the dream which has long gripped all of England. The black haft, when they break their way down into it, tunnels beneath Rainharrow, is brittle and shrouded in engine ice; whatever spell it cast was cast long ago. There seems to be little else to find out, but Robert stumbles again on a pathetic local wandering figure from his childhood: the Potato Man. He, it transpires, is Kate’s husband, Anna’s father. He was severely injured in an accident at Mawdingly & Clawtson when he attempted to complain about the treatment of his wife, and was then banished from his guild on the accusation of neglecting his vital duties. He was also involved in leading some great young guildsman to the black haft, and he claims he could identify that man.

Anna and Robbie return to London with yet more of Anna’s dreams in ruins, and Robbie’s obsession with Anna (which of course she endlessly senses) stronger than ever. She is yet more agitated and her eyes have grown dark, but she is determined now to destroy the mysterious guildsman who seemingly took his powers from the black haft and caused her changeling deformity and the death of her mother. The threads of their knowledge are picking up. At last, they have a signature from a book of visitors to Mawdingly & Clawtson. The name is quite illegible, but both Robert and Sadie recognize it. The master who brought about these events is, it seems, none other than Sadie’s father, the great and wonderful Great-grandmaster Passington. Sadie is shocked by the news, but agrees to help them as a way of escaping her forthcoming arranged marriage. They decide to put on their own show amid the Christmas festivities and dragon hunts at Minera to mimic all that has happened, and where they will produce the Potato Man to identify Passington as the darkmaster. There, before an audience of the great and good, they will show how this supposedly kind and charitable man used dark devices to advance himself and maim and kill many others in the process. In the fevered England of doubt and recession, it should be more than enough to bring him down.

The Christmas play in the great hall of Minera proceeds well amid gasps from the audience—they really do seem to be summoning a presence—but when the Potato Man is presented to identify him, Grandmaster Passington himself leaps on stage and gives a confession. It seems almost with relief that he announces his resignation from the guild. Next morning, beside the pen of the dragon they were to hunt, his body is found. Anna, Sadie and Robert return to London. They have destroyed the man who was seemingly responsible for everything with surprising ease, although there are many loose ends, such as the deaths of the Stropcocks. Anna’s changeling nature has finally been revealed in the process; most likely, even if she keeps the tollman and the vengeful crowds from her door, she will be treated as a freak. They go together to World’s End to see Mistress Summerton, who has been wary in becoming involved in the whole process of digging up the past. She seems tired, flustered. In her little house, Robbie notices a tideseed; exactly the same object he had seen amid the trophy clutter of the Bowdly-Smart’s house. It can only be that she visited them. This link, as facts tumble out, and the facts of the Bowdly-Smart’s blackmail of Grandmaster Passington, they realize that Mistress Summerton was in fact as implicated with everything from the start. She was never truly sheltering Anna, but was involved in the machinations which caused the death of Anna’s mother and the disfigurement of her father. This was her price for serving the dark haft—and her reward was her continued life, her wealth, her freedom, and her sanity. She begins to break down as they leave her, talking of her dashed hopes of raising a changeling who would take on the guilds and transform England, and shriveling into one of the nightmare creatures which Robbie has witnessed at the asylum, and long ago in his mother’s bedroom. Anna, distraught and with her own shadows teeming about her, wanders out to the white hills and ruins of World’s End as the tollman is summoned. There, she begins to sob and scream. And something strange and marvelous happens: the piled white hills begin to melt and slip back into the ground, transformed into aether.

In the aftermath, a new age begins. Anna’s cries, the power of a spell which only a changeling could create, are the catalyst for a new Age of Light founded on the endless reprocessing of aether from engine ice. With aether in abundance again, England prospers and the guilds shift on their foundations, yet retain all their power. Robbie becomes wealthy, and Mark, no longer the pariah in an asylum but a prophet of this new age, is released, and soon rises to replace Passington as the new Grandmaster of the Telegraphers Guild, where he can put all his great theories into practice. Sadie, although it has long been obvious that Mark is gay, marries him. Anna moves north, and buys land, and tries to foster a new attitude towards changelings in a reserve in the border forests: the wooded glades where Robbie always imagined they should live. In effect, she has become the Queen of the Fairies. Sadie, who remains unfulfilled, dies falling from her unicorn in a dragon hunt when she is just past thirty. Mark, in a land ruled more than ever by the new resurgence of aether, finds his great ideas as impossible to implement as did his famous predecessor. Only Saul and Maud, struggling amid gaggles of children to make their smallholding work, seem happy.

Robert, rich but still lonely, pays one final visit to Anna. She remains as aloof as ever, and rebuffs his clumsy physical advances with horrified swirls of magic. He leaves the wooded kingdom she is creating, returns to London, and, reaching the moment we have seen at the flash-forward at the start of the story, visits Niana. After all their discussion about what he might or might not give her, he passes her a penny, and she gives it back to him; a typical changeling bargain. He walks back around the Tidesmeet Docks towards his fine house in Northcentral. But London seems subtly changed. He only realizes why when his progress beside the Thames is blocked by two young footpads whom he recognizes as Saul and his former self. The expected tussle results, and Grandmaster Robert Borrows falls into the Thames. The story ends as he floats downstream past London’s spires and bridges, towards the sea and the ghost of the Annalise he could never possess as his life ebbs out of him.

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