The Light Ages (27 page)

I said, ‘I’m going somewhere else.’

E
XCITED FAMILIES WERE CROWDED
on the Noshiftday ferry, the children banging tin trays, the mothers sitting around the wheelhouse huddling picnic baskets, the men smoking and bragging at the prow. This morning was everything it should be, clear and fine and bright, and World’s End was a popular spot for day trips amongst the poorer guildsfolk; nearer than the countryside, cheaper than the fairgrounds and far less trouble than visiting relatives.

The ferry hooted as it approached the jetty. Hats and boaters streamed across the walkway. The marshy south side of the Thames had never been a populous place, and in this current Age, and since the closure of the exhibition which had signified its commencement, it had become even less so. On this warm spring day, with the leaves bursting from the trees and the postcard sellers shouting and the wind fresh in my face, World’s End was London’s empty cousin; the deserted room captured in a magic mirror. The distant sounds of traffic and the peal of bells carrying over the water seemed much further than a mere tuppenny ferry ride away. If I’d ever thought about the possibility of Mistress Summerton living anywhere in London, this would certainly have been the place.

The high white dunes of engine ice raised plumes of rainbows against the morning sky. My best trousers and dark blue jacket were soon coated with their gritty sparkle. World’s End had been London’s nearest aether source before it had been exhausted in the final flowering of the famous exhibition at the end of the last Age. Now, aether was brought in from further afield on barges and trains from places like Bracebridge, and the engine ice scraped from thousands of processes and machines was piled here with the dim intention that it might one day provide enough high ground for drainage. Here, piled in glittering mountains, was the final useless waste product of all the magic which had been pulled from the earth to service the spells of guildsmen since the First Age of Industry; the salt crusting around the eyes at the end of a dream.

I strode inland for a while with the picnic families. The road here was surprisingly wide and well-made, and still set with the weedgrown slots of dead tramlines. We made a large enough throng, but were scarcely a trickle compared to the waves of sightseers which had swept this way across the Thames almost exactly a century before. Then I turned east. Soon, after I’d clambered over a ruined turnstile, the bickering, excited voices had faded and I was alone. No one, I thought, would bother to come to the ruins here for the sake of the few panes of glass which probably still needed breaking, but as I picked my way around a livid patch of cuckoo-nettle and the main hall came into view, I gave a gasp of surprise. For a moment, the great glass edifice loomed ahead of me, glittering perfect and new as a soap bubble from every one of its many millions of panes. The World’s End Exhibition of an Age before this one blazed at me through the sunlight, then sank back like a dream exhaling and I saw it for it what it was; a huge and crazily-angled collection of disarranged girders and black-starred panes.

Fallen-roofed bandstands. Signs pointing towards
The Tropic Wing, The Guildmaster’s Rest, The Spa Rooms, The Perpetual Motion Machine.
Great, strange plants gone wild and to seed beyond any guildsman’s control straggled upwards in leaves of every colour and shape. Then, stranger still, patches of the landscape tamed themselves into freshly turned seedbeds and green-shooted seed trays. An old ice-cream vendor’s stall had been used as a compost frame. There were signs, too.
KEEP OUT
scrawled in red paint, and I felt an odd, familiar, sense of resistance. This, surely, was the place Mistress Summerton had told me about, even though her instructions had been almost impossibly vague. As I ducked under an old trellis, I found myself battling with clattering webs of tin cans. After that, I was troubled by nothing but birdsong and the scent of things growing. And there she was; Mistress Summerton neat and wizened and bare-headed, a tiny scarecrow come to life and stooped amid cloches and seedbeds.

‘Robert …’ Slowly, she straightened up, pushing her spade into the pouch of her apron as she moved towards me. ‘I’m sorry about the tins. This isn’t like Redhouse. There are children, gangs, in London. I have to be careful. Discreet ..

I met the sharp brown gaze in its withered webbing. ‘But it’s so quiet here.’

Mistress Summerton chuckled. ‘Why do you think I chose it?’ Her arm, thin and warm and faintly trembling, steered me between rows of seedlings. Beyond were flowers of shades and shapes beyond anything you would ever see in the arms of a flower girl on Doxy Street. They were like thunderheads, giving off a musky deep scent which made me want to laugh and sneeze at the same time, and their hearts were filled with wyrewhite stamens like stabs of lightning. Even this early in the season, the rows were wondrous and huge. Flowers the size of dinner plates, their leaves silver-furred, nodded in the sunlight over our heads. After all, World’s End in its prime had been filled with gardens. All Mistress Summerton had done was re-turn the soil, prune and nurture the wild bushes, harvest the seedheads. Just like the huge glass ruin which lay to our left, part of this place still wanted to return to life. She plucked a black cuckoo-weed and crumpled it bare-handed. Without her glasses, in the ragged clothes she was wearing and the silvery dust of her hair, she looked strange and small and dark; a sweet distillation of the shadows which fanned between the bars of sunlight.

She led me towards a building. It was like a forester’s cottage, but it was one from a storybook, with intricate pokerwork over the eaves, green bottleglass windows. It had plainly been part of the exhibition—perhaps a toyhouse in which children could play, although pinned to the door now was an official-looking notice; numbered paragraphs rubber-stamped with a cross and C. It was dim inside and smelled sweetly of tobacco and garden loam. I watched as she produced a teapot and cups from the narrow shelves and sniffed various tea caddies for sweetness, then pumped up the little stove.

My mouth was dry. It was time for the obvious question. ‘Do you still see Annalise?’

Mistress Summerton felt for her pipe in her pockets. ‘Yes …’ A huge puff of smoke. A long pause. In this tiny room, she dissolved, reformed. ‘She sometimes visits me, although of course she has to be careful …’ Puff. Puff. ‘In fact, it wasn’t so long ago that she last came. Two shifterms before last, at the edge of spring, as I remember ..

‘I met her—’

‘As you said.’ More vague clouds. ‘Annalise told me. In Westminster Great Park, at the Midsummer Fair …’ Another lengthening pause. The kettle began to rattle to itself. ‘Of course,’ she said as she poured my tea, ‘she has her own life to lead. I’m not even sure that she welcomes
my
presence here in London, any more than she would probably welcome yours, if she knew that you were still here.’

‘Why on earth should I leave?’

‘I hope, by the way, you like the tea. It’s one of my small luxuries. Best green Cathay. Can’t you almost smell those mountains, feel those distant spells?’

I sipped the hot, fragrant fluid, although the cup was so eggshell-thin that it seared my fingers. ‘I’ve kept away from her, if that’s what you mean. But
why should I
bother her? I mean—Anna Winters! She’s built her whole life on pretence ..

‘That’s something she’s had to do. You shouldn’t blame her for it.’

‘But she could have been a thousand things.’

‘Could she? What would you do if you were her? Join some guild? Try to change the world? Go off and get married? Pretend to be ordinary?’

‘Is Annalise really a changeling? She seems so …’
Beautiful? Exceptional? Ordinary?
How could I find a word to encompass what I felt? Here I was, sitting facing this wizened creature in a toy house at the far edge of London, trying to imagine that she and Annalise were somehow the same. Annalise’s eyes didn’t have the lost and odd and hungry fire I saw glinting at me through the pipesmoke. Her limbs weren’t sticks of liquorice. Annalise had blond hair instead of these few spiderweb strands. Annalise was…

We’re not all monsters, you know. Just because you choose to call us trolls and witches, that doesn’t mean that’s what we are-and just because I’m old now, and faded and ugly.

‘I’m sorry.’ I put down my cup, my fingers stinging, my tongue sore and blistered. ‘But there are so many things I don’t understand.’

‘Remember, all those years before, up in Bracebridge, when we walked by the river on the day of your mother’s funeral? Even then, you wanted answers …’ The bowl of her pipe glowed. I could almost hear the onrushing Withy. ‘You’re the same now. What, after all, is your interest in politics but another way of attempting to explain the ways in which people behave? And I’m sorry if I didn’t seem entirely pleased when you discovered me at that market. But London is a difficult place for me to be. People are prejudiced, and prejudice turns too easily to fear, and as you can see I’ve had to make my peace with the guilds.’ She sighed. ‘But the reasons you’ve wanted answers are probably the same ones which have made me reluctant to give them. But perhaps it would be better if we went out before you want to hear what I have to say. After all, this is a Noshiftday …’

She wrapped herself in her leather coat which hung from a hook by the door, and put on a hat, and found her glasses, and then her gloves and a scarf, although they were scarcely what the day needed. Still, the transformation was extraordinary. The person I followed through the ruined gardens was no longer the withered changeling I had seen moving through the cloches but once again an elderly guildswoman. The clothes, I finally realised, were incidental. Her disguise came from some inward effort.

She led me to her car, which she kept parked beneath a corrugated awning beside a dry boating lake. The car could have been an exhibit here too, and I could tell as she stroked the panels and touched the delicate arrangements of glass and brass that she was intensely proud of it. She did the things to its levers which caused it to quiver awake and we chuffed out into the sunshine. There was a gate to the road which the trees kept hidden. From there she took the way south, around the dazzling hills across which the day-tripping families now crawled and slid, through half-empty hamlets and past the ruins of old guildhouses, out beyond the straggling edge of London into the true countryside where the earth was no longer sanded white and cattle grazed in plain green fields.

As the road rose and fell, and as if there had scarcely been a pause in our conversation since we walked beside the river in Bracebridge, Mistress Summerton began to tell me how, after finally leaving her prison-house in Oxford, she had been put to use. The Gatherers were as secretive about their practices as any other guild, but, as well as the great edifices such as Northallerton and St Blate’s, there were waystations dotted about England where the so-called lesser cases such as her could be fed and housed and employed. For many years, she remained little more than the captive of a variety of trollmen, borne from town to town and factory to factory in those green vans to be presented with incomprehensible blueprints, or told to fix the malfunction of some recalcitrant and dangerous machine.

‘You were alone? You never talk about others …’

‘Aren’t we all always alone?’ She gave a bitter chuckle. ‘What do you want me to say? That we changelings are some great secret army, that Goldenwhite still lives deep under the boughs of some forest, and that we’ll all rise up like your so-called citizens and bring about the end of this Age?’ I said nothing. She’d put it simply and better than I’d have dared to have done. Yet there was genuine anger in her voice; the same lost expectation which she perhaps had nursed through the years of her childhood.

‘The guilds have always believed that there was some vital secret, some incantation or spell that my kind have always kept from them—some final song or phrase, some hidden language which would allow them to change everything about the world. They once tried to record the screams of those poor unfortunates they tortured and burned. But now all the magic has been dragged out from the ground and been stuffed into factories …’

We had driven into a wooded valley. The road had greened. Ancient oaks, their massive branches like the frozen limbs of dancing giants, leaned over us and the track beneath them became a grassy pathway, then not really a pathway at all, but almost a cave. The clatter of its engine stilled into birdless silence as Mistress Summerton stopped her car. From there, we wandered amid gorgeous drifts of fallen leaves.

This wood was old, uncoppiced. I looked about me, studying the moss-bearded faces which emerged from the bark, urging the shade ahead to become something other than the parting of more trees.

As we walked on, and the wood remained just a wood, Mistress Summerton told me how a high guildsman of the Telegraphers’ Guild had taken pity on her, and persuaded the Gatherers’ Guild to pass her into his care. Working the gardens of his Devonshire house, she finally discovered the one area of knowledge in which she truly did excel, which was to make things grow. Of course, the plantsmen hated her, but she became almost a trophy, a prize. By now, in the fifties of this Age, and because wealthy guildsmen cherished her, she even accumulated a little money of her own, although it meant little to her.

We reached a bowl in the forest where the trees clustered. Mistress Summerton eased herself down in a hollow formed by their roots. The dry ground was pillowy. The clouds were thickening. The air breathed.

‘I was trusted, as much as my kind ever are. People would comment on how
ordinary
I seemed, on how
reliable I
was—all the words you would use to describe a faithful dog. And I was happy enough tending my plants, living a small and mostly anonymous life. When I was told that I would have to move again, and this time back into the world of industry, I almost fled. But I’m glad now that I didn’t, for I was sent to Redhouse. Yes—Redhouse, which was still then a village, although it was no longer thriving, and the guildsmen who remained there had conceived the hopeless idea that I might be able to help them extract more of their failing reserves of aether. Of course, I couldn’t. The place was already glittering, fading. But it was pretty enough, and I was happy there, even as the last guildsfolk left and the waterwheel failed and I remained. This time, the Gatherers didn’t return for me. It seemed, finally, that I was free. And it was a peaceful life, to be lost and forgotten. I had long grown used to my own company, and I was already growing old. This, I decided, would be the place I would live out the rest of my life. What little power which remained in the soil helped me to keep hidden, although a few sometimes found me. Your mother was one ..