The House of Storms (11 page)

‘And where does this air come from? Can you tell me
that?
Was it all made just so for us, and then left never to change?’ Ralph’s own breathing, Alice couldn’t help noticing with gaining alarm, was quick and shallow. ‘What about the sun, eh? The stars? Were they all just plonked around the heavens like ornaments on a shelf to make the sky look pretty by—by the hand of a supposed God?’

That
supposed
rang awkwardly in the air. In this company, you did not question the existence of the Elder, whose Son himself had been a member of the guilds; firstly of the Carpenters, and then of the Fishermen. Still, if she put an end to matters now and got Ralph reasonably quickly up to bed, the guests would all pretend that, like their stupid superstitions and rampant smuggling, they hadn’t noticed.

‘I think you should go upstairs now, dear.’ Alice knew she was treating Ralph like a child again, when the whole point of this gathering had been that he wasn’t. Still, he nodded and obediently raked back his chair and stood up. He coughed, swaying slightly, and wiped his mouth, a wet comma of hair clinging to his forehead. Then he swayed again, and leaned forward against the table, his splaying hands bunching the cloth, rattling glasses and condiments. Alice jumped up and moved swiftly towards him. This was worse than she’d feared, but still, as she caught his arm and saw the starbursts of red which had flecked across the table, she thought at first that they were spillages of wine, not blood.

R
ALPH WAS SURE
he would soon have won his argument. Even as he was helped from the west parlour, he felt a sense of exultation. He was sure, as he was peeled from his jacket and unwound from his tie and cummerbund, that he was entering a new and certain world. His ears were singing and his head was spinning, but he could almost smile up at the faces of his opponents in logic as they came and went around the huge green and gold fortress of his four-poster bed.

‘I always bring my bag with me, Mistress. A few potentially useful medicaments …’

‘Then get it.’ His mother’s voice was unusually harsh.

Time hung around him. He smelled the silk of his mother’s dress.

‘I’ll get you your painstones, darling.’

Ralph felt pleasantly lazy, lying here. Moving shadows and the voice of Doctor Foot returned. Rough, disconnected hands touched his face, then hooked into his mouth and opened his eyes. Then came the cold, familiar touch of a stethoscope on his chest, although this one seemed to be some innovative device, which was sucking out air. Bucking, coughing, he fought against it.

‘Definite signs of toxaemia, Greatgrandmistress. No, no. I wouldn’t use that painstone …’ He felt his palm being prised open. ‘… the spells might conflict.’

He smelled the doctor’s bag. He was falling towards its syrupy comforts as it opened. Endless bottles were nodding their tall cork heads and twisting their thin blueglass necks as they fluttered around him. Then something brimmed against his lips, and a sticky spillage spread dark roots across the snowfalls of his sheets.

‘It’s aethered?’ His mother’s voice. ‘A spell?’

‘I think that’s the minimum necessary.’ Doctor Foot cleared his throat. Brightness glowed into the twin moons of his eyeglasses. There was a faint rain of spittle, and Ralph felt some vapour stirring, roiling, climbing up his throat. His heart constricted. He had no energy to do so, but, once again, he was coughing. Then the spell was incanted again, and there came a kind of rest.

He found himself beached in daylight, half hanging out of his bed. His books were stepped and waiting on a bright square of carpet. Coughing, he urged his hand to reach towards the embossed leather cover at the top of the nearest pile. The book flipped and skidded. He had no idea of its contents, but he craved the cool bliss of its numbered, annotated plates. The thing was impossibly heavy. Perhaps this was the Book of Knowledge from which all others were mere extracts, its pages made from the pulped wood of that tree in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps he would soon see Eve.

Waiting for another wave of sick weariness to break and expend itself over him, Ralph finally lifted the book and prised open its cover. Then, pausing to regain his energies, he turned through pages of guild dedications and blank sheets towards the waiting truth. Insects? He smiled dizzyingly. Strange, really, that a book which encompassed everything should begin there. But every system of classification had its problems, as he knew only too well. So; Lepidoptera—butterflies. And why not? And, after all, and even in the book of everything, you had to start somewhere.

‘Ralph. You’re nearly falling out … And you shouldn’t be reading.’

He was surprised at how easily his mother could move his body back to the middle of his bed. Then there were all the other things she did for him. Summons and instructions issued by her cool fingers to which his unthinking flesh responded. Cold air and rubber and porcelain. The shock of a sponge. And new sheets, new pyjamas. All he needed was that cummerbund and tie again.

He croaked, ‘I’m sorry …’

Her lovely face loomed before him. She looked immaculate; clean and fresh. It was only the mess of the fever he could already feel leaking its way back into his body which spoiled everything.

‘You mean about the night before last’s dinner?’ Questioningly, lovingly, she tilted her head. Her cool fresh hand was stroking his cheek, and lingered there in a subtly different way. After all, he had shaved, and this sensation of touching was new and different for them both. ‘You were ill. People understand. In fact, Doctor Foot will be back here soon this morning. I know he’s a bit of a bumpkin, darling, but he seems to know his job at least as well as those expensive charlatans in Harley Street. And it’s important that we keep a proper watch over you.’ Her gaze roved his face. Those grey-blue eyes. Like diamonds. Underwater. At the ends of the earth.

He swallowed and worked drying sand back into his throat to speak, but her fingers sealed his mouth.

‘Sssh, darling.’ Her breath stirred his face. She was so close to him now that her features blurred. He felt her lips settle against his. Then she was gone.

Slipping in and out of awareness. Concentrating, between wet spasms of coughing, on breathing. Conscious that words were being said. Pages in a play.

‘I don’t care right now what your worries are, Doctor Foot.’

‘Still, Greatgrandmistress. There’s a limit to the power of the spells which might help combat his fever and ease his breathing. It’s a question of the amount of aether of this strength of charm we can use.’

‘If you’re talking about caution, about money, about the regulations of your own guild—in fact, about anything—I’m sure that I can—’

‘No, no, Mistress. It’s not like that at all. If I were to use more aether than this in a potion, if I were to introduce the amount you’re suggesting into his body, it would take him over beyond the control of any guildsman. Your son would become a changeling.’

A long pause in the dialogue. Ralph, with an effort of mind, turned the white, empty pages.

‘Would that save him?’

‘It would just mean even more agony and uncertainty. Far more, in fact, than either of us dare imagine. We’d be treating a monster. And your son would then be beyond my help …’

The light was fading. He heard the bubble of a humidifier, and tasted its herbal breath on his lips. Pains flared and were gone. The fire in the grate had been replaced by a pug-nosed creature with a glowing mouth which squatted on the tiles as if it was preparing to jump. Its tweezering legs were crawling over him. Its arid grin was searing into the foul sump of his lungs. Then came a moment of clarity, with his mother lifting him and placing water to his lips, and the agony of swallowing.

The wings of a fan brushed over him. The fire still grinned and squatted on insect legs. His lungs and the humidifier bubbled. He felt his mother’s movement, her touches and sighs. The empty moments flapped by him one by one, pure and sharp as empty pages of his endless book. Then he sensed a presence behind him, and turned the next page and laughed out loud at what he found there. For he was up on the Kite Hills, and the bitter taste of the bathing pools were still in his mouth, but all fear had gone and London slouched grey below him as its sooty breezes bore up the many kites that sailor-suited lads, watched by their adoring mummies and nannies, were flying. Big and bright, huge butterflies caught in the warm hand of the wind. Yes, this was Butterfly Day, and Ralph laughed and ignored the rawness in his throat and let the slope take him as he ran. People smiled and waved. The fact that he was wearing sweat-soaked pyjamas didn’t seem to bother anyone. Then, as if the kites had shrunk or he had become a giant, their sails surrounded him. Ralph held out his amazed hand and felt one of them settle there. Paper-dry and light, it spread its wings to the sunlight, and the part of him which had studied the blissful pages of so many books recognised the creature instantly. Not a kite or even a butterfly, but a moth.
Biston betularia,
the peppered moth, which was small and unremarkable and common, although he remembered now, with a strange push of extra knowledge which seemed to ignite some new fire inside him, how there were often two illustrations of this creature in books on Lepidoptera; a darker, blackish variety, and one which was greyer-flecked and light. This moth, here at the smoke edges of London, was of the darker kind. Ralph studied it. A sense of power and knowledge was gaining on him.

He scanned the huge slope of dry summer grass which separated him from his mother as the moth twitched its near-black wings in his palm; an emissary from the world of science and certainty which he now so wanted to share with her. Carefully, cupping the tips of his fingers over it so it couldn’t escape, he began to ascend the slope. The distance was. huge. The sunlight was blinding. Gasping, he looked along the shimmering benches, but the effort of climbing this burning space had left him confused. Smells of ice cream and tramped earth. A harsh metallic taste of dread. He coughed and tried to steady himself, cupped fingers still bearing the precious load of his peppered moth as the kites hung and the gritty sweat burned his eyes and the trees swayed. Bicycles and boaters and picnic baskets and the shouts of gimcrack sellers and all the empty faces along the benches were sinking into looming dark. But there she was! Sitting on the green wooden bench exactly where he’d left her, and wearing a silver-grey fur coat. He waved, shouted, ran, stumbling through the airless heat towards her. She was smiling. Her face was a cool flame, and the rest of the Kite Hills retreated as he approached, until her features suddenly changed, and what remained of Ralph’s rational mind saw another face—red-eyed, blue-lipped and gaunt—inside the blood-fogged glass visor of what was surely a diver’s brass helmet. The lost moment contracted. Something was wrong, and breathless fathoms of pain engulfed him until, just when he was sure that he could bear it no longer, there was no pain at all.

A
LICE FOUND HERSELF STARING
at the grandfather clock in the great hall.
Now
she understood those dull-eyed mothers she’d seen trailing across the Continent revisiting the places which had failed them, lost and black and alone. For she’d do the same. She’d visit every spa and sit in every hopeless waiting room and drink the blood-threaded phlegm of every victim until she finally possessed Ralph’s disease. Then at least—and instead of this terrible impotence which, after two sleepless days and nights, had made her flee Ralph’s room—she could share. She’d take his pain from him and make it entirely her own.

This was far too quick. Not long ago, he’d been wandering the garden. Arguing. Reading. Eating. And it had never been this bad. Not ever. She should never have come to the west, this dreadful place … She couldn’t simply stay. She knew she had to do
something.
Dry-eyed, her face hurting, Alice hurried outside.

‘Mistress … ?’

She turned and saw Steward Dunning running across the gravel towards her.

‘Mistress, where are you going?’

Alice didn’t know. But wasn’t it a simple enough request—a horse, to ride? ‘And I want nothing done here. You hear?
Nothing.
And make sure Doctor Foot stays awake. And these skies—tell Weatherman Ayres to get rid of this damn sunlight …’

Summoning a horse from a flustered Wilkins, Alice rode out from Invercombe. Already, the sky above the weathertop was greying. It looked like filthy milk as it bloomed and each clop and fall of the mare’s hooves, the tink of the bridle, was an affront to the air. Then she was struck by the odd thought that she hadn’t telephoned Tom since Ralph had fallen ill, that his father would be busy in London whilst his son, to his mind, still laughed and walked and grew better. She gave a barking laugh, and the mare twitched her flanks. The sky had drawn the light from the land, and she had no idea where she was, or where she was going. Then she came to a sign at a crossroads. Einfell—it seemed beyond all logic that this was where she was heading, but at the same time, it was something which had always lain unadmitted in the back of her mind since she’d first come here to the west. Ahead lay the realm of the changelings. Indeed, and despite everything, she almost had to smile to think that she might soon see Silus Bellingson again.

Here were big hedges of a kind which might surround any large and relatively private establishment, and then a nondescript set of gates, and she dismounted. There was silence. No birdsong. She pushed at the gates, which swung inwards. She rugged the mare’s bridle, but the previously compliant beast wouldn’t budge. Hooking the reins, she headed up the grey-white path.

On either side lay shadowed woodland, then she was facing a lake of parkland with a low building islanded at its centre. Pushing against the thud of her heart, she walked towards it. The building was of the grey concrete which had been briefly thought to be modern near the start of this Age, now weather-stained, and its brassy swing doors gave soundlessly to the pressure of her hand to an anonymous interior, and a wide, fining desk, although there was no one behind it. After all, just how desperate would you have to be to visit this place?