The Light Ages (45 page)

‘Come in, Robbie,’ she said, just before I did so.

Anna was sitting on her bed beside a large, scuffed leather suitcase in that famously empty room of hers although, compared to what I had just come from in Ashington, it didn’t look especially bleak. There was a small dresser. A sink and a hob. A wardrobe from which all the clothes had been removed and laid in the case.

‘I don’t know how you stand the sound of that piano,’ I said.

‘That’s
one thing I certainly won’t be missing.’ She gave an Anna almost-laugh. She was wearing a grey woollen cardigan. The sleeves were a little long and she’d turned them up, although her wrists remained covered. Her face was composed, but her hair, for once, looked as if it could do with a brush.

‘You really are planning to leave?’

‘After last night, I don’t think it’s a question of planning or not planning. Here-’ She waved a letter she had scrunched in her hand. ‘You might as well read this.’

I took it to the window. The cheap yellowish paper, unevenly typewritten, had holes punched through the full stops. The heading, rubber stamped, was of the West London Sub-Office Gatherers’ Guild. It could have just been a reminder about a library book; it mentioned
discrepancies
and
minor irregularities.
And would she mind calling in at their offices, at her suitable convenience? At least it wasn’t from St Blate’s.

‘Doesn’t sound very urgent,’ I said.

‘I like that question mark—as if I could just say no and carry on with my life. But you know what these organisations are like. The more apologetic they get, the more you know they’ve got their claws into you.’ Guessing she didn’t want the letter back, I laid it down on the otherwise empty dresser beside a mark where a small spillage had blistered the varnish. ‘Oh, it’s not because of last night! Even the Gatherers’ Guild isn’t that quick. No, they’ve been sniffing around me for ages. There’s one particular character named Spearjohn—he’s called here several times but I’ve always managed to be out, or at least to pretend to be. He’s not outside there now, is he?’ I shook my head. There was nobody in the street now but a child playing hula-hoop. ‘But after what George shouted, and what Sadie saw and what everyone else heard, they won’t give up, will they?’

‘George won’t betray you, Anna—not once he’s come to his senses. And I don’t think Sadie—’

‘It’s not
them
I’m concerned about. It’s the whispers, the rumours. Oh,
Anna—
she was always a bit strange. You saw how the people drew back when George started shouting …’

I sat down on the far side of her case. That piano was still stumbling up and down the scales. I thought for a moment, in a flash so brilliant that it made me blink, of that day in Redhouse, the magical notes she had drawn from engine-ice-encrusted machine. ‘I’m so sorry, Anna ..

She gave a small snort through her nose. She didn’t want my pity. Even like this, even today, as her eyes travelled away from mine and along the gap between the thin carpet and the dusty wainscot, there was still that green fire.

‘I understand better now. All the things that Missy told me but said she hoped I would never have to learn. How it’s always been for my kind. For anyone … changed. You try to live an ordinary life. Perhaps you even start off believing that everyone is the same, or that how you are makes no difference. But little things happen. With Sadie, back at St Jude’s, there was an incident—a near-accident. She was acting the fool when we were practising archery in that way she used to when she got struck right in the shoulder. There was quite a lot of blood, but I think I stopped something worse happening. She looked at me oddly for a while after that. And then she forgot, or she thought she did. But these things pile up. Sadie’s started looking at me in the same way again. I mean—look at poor George. What did I do to him?’

‘He’s got himself all over the newspapers this morning.’

‘Has he? Good for him. That was exactly what he wanted, wasn’t it?’

‘I think he wanted the world to change.’

‘Well. Don’t we all?’

‘The tone of the press isn’t so bad. Even the
Guild Times.
It’s as if everyone in London can understand how he felt—his frustration. There’ll be a proper trial at Newgate, in public. Not a soul got hurt when the chapel fell, and the place was abandoned, so what can they possibly do to him? Chuck him out of a guild he despises … ?’

Anna’s eyes flickered back to me. ‘What happened here?’ She reached to touch my throat.

I swallowed, and felt a renewed ache where Stropcock’s fingers had dug into me. I could feel the past, in Anna’s eyes, in the memory of that strange crystal, welling up between us like the faintly mothballed air of her suitcase. ‘You know of a couple called Bowdly-Smart?’

She thought, then nodded.

‘I was at a meeting, a sort of seance, at their house yesterday evening before Sadie found me. I was there with—with Mister Snaith. You know who he is as well, I suppose?

‘I know what he is.’ Her gaze didn’t change. ‘Or what he claims to be. But, Robbie, why on earth … ?’

As we sat there in that small room with her case between us, I explained to Anna about my recognising the Stropcocks at Walcote House. ‘It was a tangled tale, with glimpses, confusions, memories, dead ends. Before I knew it, I was talking about my mother, and about Bracebridge, and Halfshiftday visits to Grandmaster Harrat’s house—things I’d told no one, not even Mistress Summerton, which led me step by step, fall by fall, and vision by vision, all the way back to that chalcedony I’d discovered in Stropcock’s attic.

Finally, not so much finished as worn out, I lapsed into silence. Even that piano had stopped its endless plonking.

‘So …’ Anna said finally. ‘You’re going back to Bracebridge?’

I hadn’t even thought, but I nodded. After all that had happened, it was the only thing to do which seemed to make any sense. ‘And what about you, Anna?’

‘Perhaps I might come as well ..

The next afternoon, Anna and I took the ferry to World’s End. It was raining heavily. The hills of engine ice guttered in rainbowed pools. The tin cans rattled their warnings. The late heavy plants bowed their stems.

‘It’s happened, hasn’t it?’ Mistress Summerton sighed, small and dark and weary, as we stood in her clattering porch and I unshook our umbrella, ‘That guildsman with the chapel who’s in all the papers—I thought I knew the name …’ She and Anna hugged, and I thought as I watched them of the strong wings of comfort which had once beaten around my mother in Redhouse, and how much Mistress Summerton had diminished since then. Finally, she drew back and busied herself with her pipe, which quickly added to the room’s steamy fug and dulled yet more of the light from the streaming windows.

‘I suppose you’d better tell me ..

Mistress Summerton remained oddly absorbed in little tasks as Anna spoke of Highermaster George and the Advocates’ Chapel and the letter from the Gatherers’ Guild. After the pipe, there was the ritual of the finding the tea, filling the kettle, lighting up the stove, the clink of spoons …

‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as you imagine, Anna,’ she said eventually. ‘That highermaster—you know how the guilds always take care of their own. Even that grandmistress will come around and remain loyal to you, if she’s the friend you say she is. Of course, I know it’s dreadful. You may have to change your address and a little of the story of the life you’ve been living. But it’s not the end.’

‘You never warned me, Missy,’ Anna said, ‘that it would be like this.’

‘I never warned you because I didn’t
know.’
One moment, she was like a bundle of old sticks. Then a flash of those dark-bright eyes. ‘I still don’t. And I knew that you would never listen in any case …

The teacups were offered. The little roof creaked and ticked.

I cleared my throat. ‘Anna and I—we’ve decided to go back to Bracebridge. There are things … Things I’ve found out, here in London. It’s all to do with what happened to my mother, and what you told me—’

‘The fact is, Missy,’ Anna said, putting down her cup, ‘that I’m sick of these years of deceit and evasion. I even hung around outside the local offices of the Gatherers’ Guild a few days ago—wondering what would happen if I simply walked in.’

‘Please, don’t do
that.’
Mistress Summerton waved her thin head. ‘Look at you, Anna. Do you think you could be here as you are now, dressed in that smart suit, those nice shoes, and still talking about taking some trip on a train with Robert here, if everything was as ruined as you pretend? I’m sorry for all that’s happened, and I’ll do all that I can to help you. But now you want to start digging up the past. Is that the best you can do, after all I’ve sacrificed for you?’

‘But that’s the
point.
These are just
clothes,
Missy!’ Anna’s eyes searched the room. ‘What difference does anything make unless I can get to the bottom of what I am?’

‘I gave you a chance to live an ordinary life. I don’t think any of our kind has ever had a better one, and you still have it unless you choose to throw it away. You’re remarkable, Anna. Remarkable in every way. Look at you—you’re beautiful, perfect. But how can you believe that there’s some special mystery that you and Robert can unearth that will make sense of your life? There is no answer to the world, Anna. There never was. The further you go along that road, the more you’ll be disappointed, and the more you’ll put yourself in danger. Whatever it is about Bracebridge that Robert thinks he’s found about your poor mothers, it’s
bound
to be dangerous if it’s anywhere near to the truth. People died there, people suffered. And you’re both young and alive. Isn’t that enough? If you go there you’ll be no safer than you are here, and probably much less so. I can help you to hide from the Gatherers’ Guild, Anna—I can help you rebuild what you’ve lost, and I can give you what’s left of my money. But I can’t do anything if you insist on blundering into the past like this. You think the guilds will relish having their old secrets upturned, you think this Stropcock character is harmless?’ Then she turned towards me through the swirls of her pipe. ‘That day at the market, I should never have let you notice me. I’ve just sent you off searching for things you’ll never find.’

‘I was searching anyway.’

‘But never …’ Her eyes flickered towards Anna as a wet gust of wind shook her little house. ‘For what you think.’

T
HERE HAD BEEN A TIME
, not long before, when the trains ran in and out of London as smoothly as the interlinked mechanisms of a single vast machine. Now, as Anna and I bumped our cases along the platform of Great Aldgate Station, you simply had to ask, and hope, and wait. The timetables had been superseded by chalked blackboard notices, which were smudged beyond understanding, and Bracebridge was too small a town to merit a twinge of recognition on the faces of guards. The only trains which had ever gone directly there were the long, slow wagons of aether caskets which arrived at Stepney Sidings.

Anna noticed the name
Oxford
first, and we hurried to a platform and squeezed down a crowded second class aisle. As we stood at the window and the carriages crawled out through London and finally began to pick up speed, I told her more about the Stropcocks—about the numberbeads, the empty warehouses, the
Blessed Damozel.
Even these last few days, I’d gone back to watch their house from my space beneath the trees. But the servants and supplies still came and went. Nothing, outwardly, had changed.

‘Why didn’t you confront him—as soon as you were sure who he really was?’

I shook my head. Now didn’t seem like the time to mention the men who’d come to Blissenhawk just yesterday, asking after someone who matched my description. The landscape greened. Fat cattle in their pens, cornstooks and flashing tunnels: these were the tracks which had borne me here. We reached Oxford before midday, where there was talk of a train that afternoon travelling in the direction of Brownheath. But there were several hours to kill, and Anna had been here once, so she could play the guide to this city which was so different to London that it scarcely seemed to me like a city at all. The stones glowed with winter sunlight. The great colleges, each sponsored by their guilds, rose around quadrangles in spires and ivy. It seemed like one endless guilday as the bells shook the frail blue air. The women marched openly here to demand change. EQUAL RIGHTS FOR GUILDMISTRESSES. They looked so proud in their boaters that you could forgive them for forgetting about us marts.
Here, sister, come and join us …!
Anna did, for a few steps, swinging her arms to the drum’s beat. If everyone could live like this, I thought, catching our reflection in the polished windows of the bookshops and the gold of Anna’s hair, there would scarcely be any need for a New Age. No wonder poor George—who was in the papers here as well, although they called him
ex-Balliol man—
had found London hard to accept. I’d have happily played the tourist, wandering beneath bridges and tossing our sandwiches to the ducks, but there was a place Anna wanted to see, and it lay outside the city where the buildings thinned across the half-frozen earth. One last house lay out amid chicken coops where the first copses of forest spread their arms. It seemed like the last house in Oxford, and it was up for sale.

The place looked much smaller than I’d imagined. Its walls were lower. Its gables and chimneys were hunched and mean. The only gate was locked.

Wait! Master, Mistress!’

The land agent almost fell off his bicycle in his hurry to reach us. He bowed and presented his card.

Mistress Summerton’s prison-house had been through many changes of use and occupancy, but the rooms, with their few random scraps of furniture, looked far bleaker than they would have done if they had been entirely empty. How many years, I wondered as the agent chattered about potential for improvement, had it been since she had clawed at these walls? The best part of a human lifetime. Perhaps Anna was wrong, and this wasn’t even the place. But I as inspected the windows I found the rusted marks of old bars and the remains of heavy shutters. The panelled walls, when I rapped them, sounded hollow.