The Light Ages (42 page)

The black glittering prisms of Guildmaster Hallam’s great lantern flashed and turned on the oiled runners of their gantry just a dozen yards above our heads. The object must have weighed many tons but it moved with nothing more than a dull swishing like the wingbeats of a huge bird, supported on the thousands of tons of steel girder which had been erected almost eighty years before with the help of the changed Ironmaster Gardler and the Gatherers’ Guild. A dark tunnel swept into the sky above us and all of London, through the patchy mist, the pale sunlight, changed and reformed beneath. At times such as this, all I felt was the impenetrable power and solidity of this never-ending Age. It was the same when I visited the Bowdly-Smarts, where the master of the house, to show his disapproval of such shenanigans as communing with changelings, was always out on business, and Fredericksville’s bewildering rooms, on the occasions I briefly excused myself and crept about them, were filled with nothing but expensive junk.

There were strikes again in the Easterlies, and there had been trials and hangings at Newgate. Blissenhawk had taken to wearing an old military tunic and calling himself major. Rough bands of raggedly armed guildsmen paraded behind him up and down on Sheep Street whilst Saul was more secretive than ever about what he did. A literally feverish atmosphere gripped the whole city; there was an epidemic of the same bronchial ailment as had gripped me during my first London winter. This time, people had less food in their bellies, and less hope in their hearts, with which to fight it. But from up here on Hallam Tower the golden dome of the Miners’ Chapel still glowed, and the paths of Westminster Great Park loomed and receded beautifully in the tiers of chilly mist. And the people down there, with their bright hats and the strange dogs, were like spilled buttons, or those strands you got sprinkled on your ice-cream at long-lost Midsummer Fairs.

‘This ridiculous structure …’ George slapped the iron handrail and wiped the fog from his stubble. ‘All this metal and money. What’s the point of it, eh … ?’

He balanced on the tips of his boots, his red-rimmed gaze following the thin linkage of girder to girder all the way down through the mist. From here, with the effect of perspective and the fog’s changing greys, we seemed to be hanging on almost nothing. But it surprised me, as he stretched so far over that people glanced towards him and I found myself taking a step closer, that George of all people, a guilded architect looking down over brash Northcentral, should find the extravagance of Hallam Tower particularly hard to understand. For me, its purpose was as blazingly obvious as its light. The rest of these other spires and crenellations were scarcely visible from the Easterlies. So what better demonstration of guilded power could there be than to have this great, frail structure, endlessly flashing through the rooftop smog?

‘Anyway …’ Somewhat to my relief, George leaned back. ‘I just wanted to show you something. No, it’s not here …’

We trundled back down in the lift and I walked with George around the edges of Westminster Great Park where the fountains splashed and frothed as if they were endlessly trying to wash themselves of the blood of Butterfly Day.

‘I was so glad to hear that you were safe,’ I ventured. ‘I was worried that you’d—’

‘It’s around here.’ He turned quickly ahead of me along a tall, narrow passage between the halls of the Dockers’ Union and the enormous walls of the Apothecaries’ fragrant gardens. Beyond was a sort of square, although the paving was weedgrown and the place looked scarcely visited. It was faced by a building with brownish-grey twin towers. You would have said the thing was big in its own right but for the fact that it was dwarfed in height, size and extravagance by the sides and backs of all the buildings which shadowed it.

‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ George stood there, breathing hard as he looked up, a smile quivering on his face.

In fact, it looked squat and ill-proportioned; an old, fat lady wearing too many clothes.

‘It’s a church—an abbey. This whole area of Westminster’s named after it. It’s where we used to bury our kings. Perhaps that’s why they left the place standing, and didn’t doll it up with fancy new aethered stonework and give it to one of the guilds—they were frightened of upsetting the ghosts. And this bit of ground where we’re standing. This is where England used to have its parliament. Remember—I told you when we were on the Kite Hills? Of course,
that
was razed …’

He strode up to the abbey’s big doors and rattled their chains. They boomed emptily. There didn’t seem any obvious way of parting them and George plainly lacked Sadie’s knack with such things.

‘All this,’ he gestured upwards. ‘Made without a trace of aether.’ He sniffed and rubbed his eyes as a flake of rotting stone fell into them. ‘They were great, great men, the builders of this place, yet no one even knows their names. And later, in the fading Age of Kings, half London was razed by a terrible fire, and a new capital was planned. Fine, straight boulevards and tall, neat elegant buildings instead of all this bluster and confusion. Some of them were even built, but of course the guilds changed and possessed them. Did you know that there’s a dome
beneath
the dome of the Great Hall of the Steamasters? You can still even get inside it if you can find the hidden stairs and stand beneath the pure, simple engineering of great beams of solid timber. Of course, it’s been ruined on the outside by endless layers of extra gilt and coloured stone, but it’s still there beneath all the pointless extravagance—that fine and beautiful building. Pure and clean, a hymn to God instead of aether and Mammon. And
that
is how my buildings will be, in their own lesser fashion. Pure and rational and straightforward. I know you think it’s money, but for me, aether’s at the root of so much that’s wrong with this Age. And what we need, what we all really need and thirst after, is a sign, a symbol, a gesture, to make that plain to everyone. The very opposite of Hallam Tower, don’t you think?’

As I tried to imagine what the opposite of Hallam Tower could possibly look like, I found myself thinking instead of George balancing atop that fountain on Butterfly Day and shouting down to the crowds. ‘I hope you’re not going to do something …’ I was searching for the word. ‘Brave—or foolhardy.’

‘Ha!’ He slapped a pillar. ‘You mean like that poor cavalry captain? Surely you know me better than that by now, Robbie. After all, I’ve Anna to take care of me, haven’t I? Did you hear, by the way, that it was she who kindly rescued me on Butterfly Day?’

I glanced at him as we walked back across the uneven paving. I knew him well enough to understand that this was something other than male resentment. But
which
Anna had rescued him, anyway? Was it the Anna of the church hall, or the one I’d seen at Prettlewell Fountains—transformed, her eyes darkly ablaze?

‘Oh, I know that you and I both think the same about Anna,’ he continued. ‘That she’s quite marvellous and beautiful and all that kind of thing. But she’s an odd sort as well, isn’t she? And that room of hers in Kingsmeet—did you know there’s hardly anything in it? A prison cell might be more welcoming. It’s almost as if Anna disappears and ceases existing when there’s no one to watch her and … well,
feel
for her as, let’s face it, you and I both do.’

‘You have to remember that she’s an orphan, George,’ I said carefully. ‘Contrary to all outward appearances, her life hasn’t been that easy.’

He chewed his lip and nodded. ‘I even thought briefly this summer that she and I might be—well, all of the ordinary things that a man and a woman are supposed to be to each other. But that didn’t work. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Robbie. I’ve always known we were rivals of a sort. You could see that even back at Walcote, the first time I ever mentioned her name.’ He barked out a laugh as the dark old abbey receded. ‘But you’ve no need to be
jealous,
for God’s sake. I’m a useless suitor. Always have been and probably always will be. It was nothing to do with her. It was all entirely my fault. Forget about political enlightenment and the power of the masses and the essential beautiful honesty of your average working guildsman.’ He gave a sniff as we walked out from the quiet square and the proud buildings of
Wagstaffe
Mall coloured the mist with their aethered buttresses. He wiped a long dewdrop from his nose. I thought it was simply the cold that was affecting him, or one of the germs which were rife, but as I looked at him again, I saw that he was crying. We stood outside a souvenir shop not far from the looming base of Hallam Tower. Shoulders hunched, George pretended to inspect the carousels of postcard stands outside as he wept.

‘What is it, George?’ I asked, laying a hand on his shoulder. The traffic roared and receded. He tried to shrug it away. ‘What happened on Butterfly Day?’

He turned to me. His eyes were so wide and wet that I could see myself reflected in them. And I realised as we stood there that he and I were not alike at all, despite all our mutual assurances to the contrary. We might be wearing similarly ragged coats, but George, to his bones and to his soul, was sensitive and high guilded and complicatedly educated. He could never do anything without worrying about its consequences. He’d probably not even stamped on ants as a child. And I, in my jumbled accent, my stubbled chin, my roughness of manner and black, uneven nails, in the smell of cheap lodgings, of damp and smoked herring which came off me, was the ghostly image of the men who had assaulted him on Butterfly Day.

‘Look—’

But George gave a stifled sob. He turned and ran away.

L
ONDON WHITENED AND BLACKENED AND FROZE.
The telegraphs creaked and strained. Some even snapped and flailed across the pavements in a stream of disconnected voices, their messages hissing and billowing with the breath of the wondering crowds.

‘But they
believed
last shifterm, didn’t they, Master Robert?’ I was carrying Mister Snaith’s bag for him through the night streets of Northcentral towards our next appointment with the Bowdly-Smarts. ‘You saw the reaction …’

He’d become less circumspect now about what he called his small deceits. The phosphorescent stuff he used could be purchased at the same apothecaries which supplied the bandages, and wafted all the better for the addition of some taper smoke. The fragrances of heaven were available at any perfumerer’s. The knocks and bangings, the rising and turning of a table, could be made by clever use of the knees. Often enough, the seekers were so eager to be convinced that they produced effects themselves. I’d even been to one or two other houses with Mister Snaith, and witnessed scenes which were much the same. The only part of his patter which he seemed to enjoy varying was the part about his origins. After first hearing that he’d been reared by wolves, I’d since been told that his powers had been revealed when he started flying about the room on his Day of Testing, that he’d been a wizard in the Age of Kings, that he was the secret lovechild of a great guildsman.

‘Don’t you sometimes feel as if you’re laughing at them?’

He considered for a moment. ‘Believe me, Master Robert, the laughter comes the other way. I’m accepted as an eccentric sight, and the Gatherers’ Guild permits me to live here with them in Northcentral—but only just, and then only because I provide a welcome bit of eccentricity for the high guilded and perhaps scare the robbers off from stealing their old furniture. So don’t tell
me
about laughing at others. I hear it often enough at my back, and read that dreadful graffiti, and feel their stares and the chants of their children and the pelt of their stones.

‘But where did you come from really? That story you told last evening …’ He’d claimed to have been twisted into his present state when he tried to commit suicide by drinking aether when he was jilted by a lover.

‘I’m old, Robert. My memory’s fading. Are you denying me the right to have a life?’

‘Of course not. I was just—’

‘But I’ll tell you one thing. London’s not the city it used to be. It’s more dangerous. I’m not even sure I should stay. Oh, I do so miss the old days. I performed for Greatgrandmaster Penfold, you know, who was generally reckoned to be the second most prominent guildsman in England, and certainly the wittiest.’

We moved on through the submarine fog. The occasional carriage passed by, hooves and wheels muffled to near silence, lanterns glowing like deep-sea portholes.

‘Grandmistress Bowdly-Smart …’

‘What of her?’

‘She’s not who she claims to be.’

‘Well,
there’s
a surprise.’

‘The fact is, I used to know her husband back in Yorkshire, when I was a child. They had a different name. They didn’t even belong to the same guild, and they certainly weren’t wealthy. I’m convinced …’ But I still didn’t know what I was convinced of. ‘I was wondering if you could give me a little extra time on my own tonight to take a proper look around their house?’

‘What? So you can poke about even more than you have been doing?’

‘If you choose to put it like that. But I’m not a thief.’

‘You’re not, are you? But you’re one of the sort who’d love to reduce these nice residences to ghastly tenements, fill the gardens with pigs and chickens. Have us all pretending we’re exactly the same.’

‘It’s not about that either.’

‘No …’ He looked fearsome as he peered up at me from the evening’s clouded depths; the powdered white dwarf of some peculiar collective nightmare which only London could possibly have dreamed. He sighed. ‘And there is something
wrong
about that house, and about the Bowdly-Smarts. You don’t need to be me to feel that. Somewhere, there’s a darkness. I sometimes feel it watching me. I’ve always avoided communing with whoever and whatever it is that Grandmistress Bowdly-Smart claims to want to reach, because I know that she doesn’t really want it. Does that sound odd to you?’

The grandmistresses were already waiting in Fredericksville’s parlour in their black fineries, sipping sweet sherry. We bowed, shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, ate cakes. Then, it was time; Trixie was evicted, the cups were laid aside, Mister Snaith reversed his cloak and straightened his toupee. I’d thought he’d forgotten our bargain, but he paused just as the lamps were being darkened and I’d placed his carpetbag beneath his chair.