The Light Ages (49 page)

Ahead, amid the brambles of Rainharrow which my mother had once explored in search of flowers, the cold air gleamed. White fronds, beautiful in their complexity, embroidered the dead ferns. The sarsens glittered, frozen but not frozen in the moonlight. The whole crown of this hill gleamed like a beacon, not with snow, but with engine ice. Anna was gazing south across the dim hills of Brownheath. Scarside, Fareden and Hallowfell. Somewhere down there, hidden in the darkness, was the valley of Redhouse. Here now, as well, the aether really was fading. And I was sure that the chalcedony stone had been involved in an experiment to do with its production which had been supervised by Grandmaster Harrat. And beyond him lay some other cause, and a much more powerful presence amid the guilds. It was this, the power of this high, dark guildmaster, which Stropcock had tapped into, first through Harrat himself, and then, down in London, on his own …

I went to where Anna stood amid the white jaws of the stones. ‘It explains so much,’ I said to her as we breathed the darkness. ‘Not just here and now, but that experiment with the stone—even then, the stuff was running out. They were
desperate
to get more aether … But I need to get inside Mawdingly & Clawtson to find the full truth. Everything else is just …’

But Anna seemed distracted. She flashed me, back through the moonlight, what I’d come to think of as one of her smiles. ‘I was talking to Mistress Wartington this morning. She told me that Testing seems to be coming early. The trollman’s been seen down in lowtown. He was asking questions about a woman from the south, although that person is much higher guilded than I am now, and she certainly isn’t married.’

‘It doesn’t mean ..

But to Anna, at the moment, it certainly did. I could tell that she felt that all the things which had happened in London were happening here as well, only more quickly. The nudges, the questions. People had their doubts about me, but things had been said about Anna, too, marvellous though everyone agreed that she was. It was no use pretending. And I was standing here in this strange place, spouting about changing the world just as George had done.

‘So,’ I said. ‘What do we do?’

‘We still have a day or two.’ More dimly up here, but somehow more deeply, the engines pounded. SHOOOOM
BOOM.
Huge and dark and glittering, Rainharrow seemed to exhale as well. ‘There’s a dance tomorrow night at Mawdingly & Clawtson. I think we should go, Robbie—it’s even on East Floor …’

T
HE TAPSTERS’ BALL TOOK PLACE
in that cold pause before Christmas, and was often postponed because of heavy snows, which made years such as this, when it was held, all the more welcome. Father had often gone—was going—and so was Beth. Mother used to go as well. She’d come down to me in the kitchen one evening, pleased with herself, with long black hair plaited, wearing a blue dress I’d never seen before, nor after.

Guild sashes were to be worn, which was a problem to me, albeit a little one, as Anna soon spoke to a widow in the house behind ours. A few stitches, a little borrowed silk to get rid of the mothholes, and I had something better than new. And that crimson dress which Anna had brought, which was vast and low at the front and high on the arms, and thus wildly inappropriate, was transformed, with the addition of a borrowed belt and the sacrifice of a blouse, into a tighter and more modest outfit which would have made any Bracebridge guildmistress, and this particular guildsman who walked into lowtown beside her, entirely proud.

The entrance to East Floor lay tonight through the main gates of Mawdingly & Clawtson with their twin friezes of Providence and Mercy. The other workshop floors were closed, or on skeleton duties, although as ever the work of the aether engines was powered from Engine Floor to Central Floor deep below. Hastily made signs directed those few who didn’t know their way beneath the pipework arches. The machines on East Floor, those which would move, had been hauled back. Those which wouldn’t had been decorated with ribbons, or chalked with cryptic messages. The band was already tuning up—fiddles, accordion and drums—and the people were dancing.

I felt Anna hesitate when the light and the sound struck her. Massed people—people uncontrolled and wild—was something she avoided. Touching her shoulder, I felt the rise and fall of her breath.

‘I can’t dance like this!’

People were leaping and turning and hooking arms, twirling around the machines. The whole great shed of East Floor was booming and shaking. I linked my arm into hers and steered her gently forwards. These tunes, I’d heard them all, wafting out from pubs and on the lips of guildmistresses as they lifted their washing.

‘You can do
anything,
Anna,’ I murmured close to her ear, breathing the scent of corn.

But for once, she needed my help. The half steps, the arches and processions, the hands you held on to and the hands you let go of; they all had a logic which came easily once you let the music take you. The dances in the Easterlies weren’t so very different. An extra turn, a lost phrase or a repeated one. These tunes pervaded all of England, and tonight, SHOOOM
BOOM,
the aether engines marched to the same beat.

Unlike that night in the ballroom above the Thames, people in these dances were forever changing partners. Anna, moving warily at first to my promptings, gave a shriek as she was suddenly swept off into the throng. But the next time I saw her she was hitching her skirts and twirling elbow to elbow amid the crowd, her face bright and smiling. Here was the girl who’d sat in front of me at Board School, and Beth, and then my father, even, seeing as the sexes always got mixed up by the second verse of
Lovely on the Water.
Not that anybody ever minded. In fact, colliding, getting lost—that was all part of the fun. Had I explained this to Anna as well? But when we next collided I felt laughter through the push of her bosom. Then she was gone, and then she was close to me again.

It was hard, thirsty, work. I wandered off towards the beer barrels which had been placed on a trestle not far from my father’s old lathe. A guildsman was dancing with his familiar. Others were shouting, tapping their clogs and boots. Anna was still out there, her hair fanning. The fertile custodian wavered up to me as I watched her, the latest of what looked like several recent beers in his hand. ‘Heard from London about you,’ he shouted. ‘Bugger of it is, I hadn’t got around to telegraphing them. But they did anyway.’

‘Oh.’ I took a slow sip of my beer. ‘What did they say?’

He shrugged. ‘Basically wanted to know if you were here in Bracebridge. Robbie Borrow, they said. Missed off the s and didn’t even call you a master. That’s head office for you.’

‘Have you replied?’

‘Thought I’d talk to you first.’

‘Perhaps if you could hold off for a couple more days, eh?’

He tapped his nose and sidled away. Given the choice, he’d still take my word over some jumped-up southerner’s—but Anna was right; our time here in Bracebridge couldn’t last. Even tonight, as I stood surrounded by all the swirling faces of my childhood, I could feel them dwindling back into memories. Yet here was Mistress Borrows, bright in the lanternlight, and the people were stomping and cheering. With a mock bow, she gestured to the accordion player to unshoulder his instrument. One by one the other musicians fell silent, the dancers stopped dancing. For the first time in hours, the only sound on East Floor was the earth’s pounding. Anna studied the keys. She gave the instrument a squeeze. A discordant squawk came out. Puzzlement ruffled back through the crowd. What was she doing? Then her fingers danced a run of notes. The sounds spiralled, and she filled their echo with another. The best of the fiddle players followed with a swooping glissando. SHOOOOM
BOOM.
That rhythm never changed but somehow Anna made it slow, then quicken. A flute player began to follow the melody which she had picked out. People began to clap. Soon, they were whooping, dancing. Anna’s playing went on. The tune was happy and sad. It was wild and it was filled with yearning. Then, with scarcely a hesitation in the beat, Anna lifted the accordion back into the arms of its owner, who, grinning, took up the tune. Now, this would always be the Tapsters’ Ball when a new song was discovered. It would spread out across Brownheath and the story of its making would be endlessly embroidered.

Mistress Borrows—where is Mistress Borrows … ?

People were looking about for Anna. They needed her as much as the high-guilded dancers had at Midsummer on the river. But Anna had grabbed my hand and was pulling me away from East Floor around the cold black machines. This, in the little time we had left, was our best chance to find out the truth about Mawdingly & Clawtson. But where, and how? Along dark corridors, past empty lockers. Through yards and up sets of stairs. Over to the west, Engine Floor was glowing, steaming. Work went on there with or without the Tapsters’ Ball, but it would have been impossible for Anna and I to enter such a place and take the gated lift to Central Floor. The guilds guarded their inner secrets even from each other, especially here, close to their core. But there had to be somewhere … Then we entered a corridor. It was cheap and low and dark, but suddenly entirely familiar.
Insolent little bastard, aren’t you?
Stropcock’s ghostly face, hanging over a clip of pens and a brown overall, leered before me. I tried the first door. It was a stationery cupboard. But the next—here was the office into which he’d dragged me. It had changed little in the thin strips of moonlight, with the filing cabinets jammed lopsidedly next to the cracked leather chair. And behind it, still covered by what looked like the same oil-stained sheet, was the haft which Stropcock had made me touch.

This, sonny, is my eyes and ears.

I studied it, then looked at Anna, but already she was reaching towards it. As she did so, her fingers grasped my hand, and the room vanished.

Dark sheds and empty corridors. Frozen yards. Dancers on East Floor, then the great turning axle of Engine Floor, driving into the ground. I’d seen such scenes before-they were part of my life—but, deep below, Central Floor had changed. The triple pistons still drove back and forth, but the floors, the walls, the ceiling which surrounded them, even many of the instruments, were glittering. The place was a grotto of engine ice. The great iron plug of the fetter was now a gleaming brooch, and there was no shackle attached to the engines. No wonder the engines of Bracebridge beat differently now—they were working against no pressure at all. We floated away through the aetherless rock. The whole factory lay below us now, then the night-black town; a monument to empty endeavour. How many people here knew or guessed or cared? Then we were looking down across the flat expanse of Bracebridge sidings. Even tonight, the long carriages of an aether train were being prepared to beat the snows. The wind-whipped straw; the empty caskets, and the lie that Bracebridge still produced aether would be borne down towards London. And there … I saw those laddering lines of Stropcock’s numberbeads. And the ships down at Tidesmeet, the hulk of the
Blessed Damozel;
empty, storm-hollowed for a ghost trade …

We stepped back. The tips of Anna’s fingers still glowed.

‘What … ?’

She shushed me with a swirl of light, and the creak of the desk as she leaned against it. ‘Let’s go now. I’m tired ..

It was snowing next morning and our route through lowtown blurred in wind as, on the day which Anna and I had determined would be our last in Bracebridge, we headed down towards the station. Today was a Fourshiftday, and all the ordinary work of the town went on even in this bitter weather, but Bracebridge seemed to me now like a scratched and faded photographic plate of itself; thin as glass, and equally frail. Down past the high guildhouse door from which Grandmaster Harrat had once emerged, then Anna waited as I rummaged some coal to feed the pitbeasts in their yard. Tatton Halt wasn’t
a station,
the stationmaster shouted to us through the slot of his glass arch over the banging of the waiting room doors. Hadn’t been anything there for years unless you counted the quarry, which was closed, and Redhouse, which was used up and deserted.

Across the iron footbridge, we sat on the same bench, and the track, the nearer sidings, grew and retreated through the snow whilst Anna shivered and stared into nothing from above her scarf. I was a jumble of emotions. Elated, because my suspicions about the Bowdly-Smarts seemed vindicated. Impatient, because I now wanted to get back to London. Concerned, because of Anna’s evident exhaustion. And then a little afraid. The train came. It was white, too, all steam and frosted iron, and we sat in the cold carriage as the guard shook his head in even greater wonder than the stationmaster at the pointlessness of our destination. After a shorter journey than I remembered, we stood on what little remained of Tatton Halt’s platform, beneath the weathered sign as the huffing engine rejoined the snow.

The silent ground. The invisible mountains. Wind-rattled holly and snagging bramble and browned grass beside a small, frozen river. We walked on through the shelter of the deeper woods and followed the old wall to the ruined gatehouse. Redhouse, beyond, had shrunk. Its roofs had declined. Even its engine ice had crumbled and settled, forming a glittering slurry which the wind threw into our faces. The rains had driven in, and there was a sour woodland smell of rot and foxes as Anna wandered its corridors, tugged by something like the same waves of recollection I felt in Bracebridge. But this must have been much harder. The place where she had lived and slept and played had fallen into beams and rubble. Her wonderful piano was reduced to a skeleton of grinning keys. The great glass dome of the library had collapsed, and the bookshelves had spilled their contents in a morass of pages which the wind whipped around us like smoke.

There had been a fire in the wing which contained Mistress Summerton’s old study, but, miraculously, a child’s skipping rope still hung on the same single coatpeg where it had been on that warm day at the last edge of summer. Anna explained how she’d seen a girl skipping on one of her and Missy’s furtive visits into the world of towns and houses—dancing with something which blurred around her, then became a strip of ordinary rope. She’d pestered Mistress Summerton to get her one, but, alone here in Redhouse and with only an elderly changeling for company, she’d never worked out the trick.