The House of Storms (7 page)

As well as on Noshiftdays, Steward Dunning now allowed Marion to go home on most mornings for an early breakfast at Clyst. Today, she’d awoken before four, dressed and walked swiftly out of the estate and along the main road and then across the shore to the family cottage, where the Prices were just rising.

Oh. It’s you
—as if she’d simply come from upstairs.

Then—Isn’t this the shift you get paid?

The money in her pay envelopes seemed to have shrunk. As well as Owen’s apprentice uniform, there were textbooks, special pens, special inks; special everything. The compasses she’d admired in shop windows at Luttrell weren’t apparently good enough for a genuine Mariner. The pointer of the device he finally purchased swam in a sea of fluids deep enough to bath a baby. Set with spells and calibrations, it twitched like a live fish. Denise, too, was needing financial support to keep on Nan Osborne’s best side. And Marion hadn’t been able to bring herself to take one of the fat tubes of Pilton’s Universal Tooth Whitening from the sinks of the servants’ washroom.

The hour after breakfast before Owen set out for the Mariners’ Halls at Luttrell was the time when he was supposed to study. One of the first mornings she’d returned home, Marion had found him sitting outside in the open lean-to. It was before dawn, freezing cold, and she’d been about to tell him that there was surely a better place than this to work when she saw that his big face was gleaming with tears.

‘I’m useless, Marion! I can’t even remember port from bloody starboard. This …’ He’d held up a page which looked as if it had been used to quench his sobbing. ‘It’s not even English!’

Marion prised the paper from his fingers. It was the text of a spell.

‘Owen, I shouldn’t be seeing this.’

Dad knew a thing or two about navigation, and had certainly picked up a few spells, but he would, Marion was certain, have been horrified if Owen had asked him for help. She tilted the page towards the fluttering lamp and tried to say what she thought she saw, cleared her throat, then tried again. That morning, mornings after, as Steward Dunning, and although she didn’t ask the exact reason, came to understand that Marion’s presence at home was important, Marion found the appropriate manuals on Phrase and Shape and Syntax amid the disorder of Owen’s satchel and, after striving to make sense of them herself, did her best to explain them to him.

The tides came and went across the estuary. The overwintering birds left. And Marion learned something of the referencing of maps and the plotting of courses and the origins of terms like
fid
and
buoy.
So, eventually, as their fingers went blue and their books tried to fly away from them, did Owen. In particular, there were knots to be studied. Piecing together the complex diagrams, her fingers trembling and itching and blistering as she strained to get some scraps of old and tarry cordage to perform the acts she willed with her eyes, Marion tried to get Owen to understand. There were huge, decorative knots like golden wasp nests, and there were knots so small and delicate that jewellers used them to secure strings of pearls. Then there were windknots. Without proper supplies of aether, they were particularly dry and difficult, and the endless uttering of spells hurt their throats as much as tying hurt their fingers, but sometimes there was enough residue of aether left in some ordinary bit of rope for the air around them to tense as if stirred by the passage of something huge and unseen.

It was a tiring way for her to begin a day, and it was a long walk to get back to Invercombe in time to attend prayers with cook and the rest of the maids. Even now, as Marion hung out the smalls which Steward Dunning insisted that, as part of her emphasis on self-reliance and discipline, every servant girl wash herself, her head still swam with mariner’s spells. Those gently lifting sheets could be mizzens and topgallants; her vests were spitsails. She felt her neck prickle. There was a sense of lightness like the lifting of sweat in sunlight. Although the feeling wasn’t entirely unpleasant, she was almost sure that she was being watched.

Up on the gantry of his weathertop, Weatherman Ayres caught a brassy flash. Looking down, he saw that Master Ralph was out on the top terrace, busily watching the Price girl from Clyst as she hung out her knickers on the laundry lawn, and he felt gladder than ever for giving the lad his old telescope. Fingering the dents of a ribbonspell, thinking warmly sexual thoughts of Cissy Dunning, he studied the Somerset landscape beyond Invercombe’s grounds, which was still pooled in mist whilst Invercombe already basked in sunlight. Now, after years of waiting, he had a chance to stir this machine to its full powers and prove to Invercombe’s steward that he could bring Invercombe properly to life, and perhaps gain her love in the process. Sunlight gleamed across his bald head and the weathertop’s dome as he checked temperatures and barometric pressures and considered the correct phrasing of the spell he would use to edge away the coming bank of cloud. It glinted on Invercombe’s many widows as ten o’clock finally ended in one last
bong.

T
HERE HAD BEEN SOME
minor disappearances in the shifting of their possessions to Invercombe, especially of Ralph’s books. Although, with the considerable contents of Invercombe’s library to explore, he didn’t seem to be missing them, Alice told Steward Dunning that, seeing as she was going to Bristol today, she would spare a few minutes to sort out the problem.

The Steward had levelled one of her looks. ‘These things take their own time, Mistress.’

Oh, do they,
Alice had thought. Then the train from Luttrell had been ridiculously late. In fact, the one that finally arrived at the little local station, in its livery and route, bore no obvious relationship with anything on the timetable. Still, they found a nice carriage for her, and the coffee she was served was sweet and strong and darkly aromatic, and she strode out from Templemeads and through the strange city feeling busy, happy, energised. Predictably, the knobbly phallus of the clock tower of Bristol Main Post Office announced a significantly different time on each of its six facades.

Coloured tiles inside and a huge waiting room. Long waiting benches. A smell of rubber bands. Trapped pigeons fluttering. She went straight up to the first counter and rapped hard on the bell, feigning impatience as she fiddled with the encrusted guild brooch she’d been sure to pin to her lapel.

‘We shut at one, you know.’

‘That’s all right.’ Alice glanced up at another huge clock, which hung its hands in an understandable impression of defeat. ‘I don’t have long anyway.’

‘I’ll have to get someone else to help you. This isn’t my department, I’m afraid.’

And so on.

‘Yes, Greatgrandmistress.
Most
unfortunate. We
do
understand. Have you a record of each mislayal? And do you have your petitioner’s copy of form LIF 271/A?’

And so forth.

The Postal Guild was closely allied with the Telegraphers. Although the two organisations had gone their separate ways since the traumatic turning of this Age of Light, Alice could have reeled off a dozen names of senior guildsmasters with a foot in both camps. But she’d discovered long ago that it was useless to approach these great men about the work done far beneath them. Better by far to speak direct to the clerk, handyman or mechanic who could personally deal with the thing which concerned you, and to apply your immense leverage lightly. Direct threats of expulsion or advancement only left these creatures flustered, and Alice, although she believed herself immune from common vanity, nevertheless felt that she was doing them something of a favour by granting a few minutes of her personal attention.

‘It’s well after one o’clock now, greatgrandmistress. I most deeply regret that I simply won’t be able to process this duplicate retrieval form until we reopen tomorrow morning …’ In fact, the churches and clocks of Bristol were still busily bong-ing the hour, but this uppermaster, who was supposedly in charge of lost mail in Invercombe’s postal district, was well into his sandwiches when she was shown into his office. The little room stank of potted meat, and apparently it was standard practice here for all of what were referred without any apparent conscious irony as
public services
to take half days on a roster which she suspected was entirely designed to confuse. The uppermaster twirled his carousel of rubber stamps. He touched—and she really wished that he wouldn’t, with those greasy fingers—the duplicate yellow sheets which she’d laboured to have created. Why did he stay here at all, if the place was closing? But she understood guild etiquette. This uppermaster was a sleeve-garter wearer, a wielder of those rubber stamps. It was no use asking him to wade amid catacombs filled with lost post. Anyway, he’d be useless at it. Sighing, still just about smiling, she left him to his lunch, and the empty post office halls to their pigeons.

Outside in the sunlit city, the odours of food mingled with old stone, bad drains, the frank reek of the open public urinals that the men here—and staring over the top at you—seemed suspiciously happy to use. The improbable buildings shouldered up to each other and the trams rattled high overhead and the people bustled, the affluent guildsmistresses mostly in fur coats of such nap and floss that Alice wondered if she shouldn’t be feeling cold in her own thinner attire. But it was all for display, just like those incredible glassed-in balconies of billowing coralstone which leaned out from the first floors of houses, where you could see and be seen without the bother of ever getting your shoes dirtied. London, for all its clamour, seemed orderly by comparison, and she missed the certainties of its wide thoroughfares. After Lichfield, after Dudley, after all the many adjustments which she had had to make in her life, Alice liked to think of herself as flexible, but she had to confess that Bristol and the entire west were still taking her by surprise.

She found a cake shop with huge, gravity-defying constructions of spun sugar and whipped cream piled in its windows and went inside and waited, as even greatgrandmistresses must sometimes wait, to be served. The till was a huge instrument, incredibly polished, ringing up each purchase with showy glee, and then there was all the business of wrapping and a fuss over receipts, which were written by hand with tongue-extruding attention, and thumbed into several copies. Alice tried not to remember the duplicate forms at the post office. When it was finally time for her to be served, and once she had made herself understood to the strangely spoken assistant, she chose six individual cream tartlets.

Although it was nothing like as warm here as at Invercombe, many Bristolians were taking lunch in the cathedral square, and, as Alice found a bench beside a tall perilinden tree which was just starting to unfold its silver leaves, she had to admit that there was plenty to see. There were Spaniards and Frenchmen, whom you might notice in London as well, but never quite looking this at home, and many Negroes, and a spidery familiar dancing to a hurdy-gurdy, and glimpses of ships beyond buildings, and the clamour of gulls. As certain as she had ever been in a public place that no one was watching her, Alice laid her cakebox on the bench and unpicked its knot and extracted six glace cherries from their pinnacles of cream. A squirrel slipped down from the perilinden tree and took the offered cherries from her fingers. It nibbled them with a calm delicacy which suggested it had been fed from expensive cake-boxes before, then washed its whiskers and hopped away. Alice unfurled the grease paper package from the pocket of her coat and arranged the six newly Ted hellebore berries, which looked even brighter and more luscious, in their place on the tartlets. Retying the package, she headed gaily towards Brandon Hill, where Grandmistress Celia Raithby lived.

Alice supposed this business of getting to know people in the west had been unavoidable. She had been to a dance where flocks of ugly children had been allowed to eat and drink with the adults, then to vomit copiously across the parquet. She’d taken dinner with the dashing (or so he thought himself) Master-Enforcer Cornelius Scutt, who pomaded his grey sideburns and thought himself good with the ladies even though he was covered in age spots and was past seventy if he was a day. Doctor and Doctress Foot and the Reverend-Highermaster Humphry Brown, whom she’d thought she shooed away from Invercombe, had also circled and settled back again with the persistence of flies. It was all still somewhat irritating, but Alice knew, as she eyed the tall stalagmite grotto of the frontage of 28 Charlotte Street, that webs of duty and obligation fanned from here in Bristol all the way back through her life.

She wasn’t quite sure when she’d first encountered Grand-mistress Celia Raithby here in the west, but had come to detect something beyond dumb friendliness in the grandmistress’s manner during a recent afternoon soiree in the green rooms at Hotwells, which she still hadn’t been able to get to the root of until Celia beckoned her away beneath the privacy of a leaning palm.

‘So, so
nice
that us two girls are living close to each other now,’ the woman had cooed.’
Great
grandmistress. Or perhaps I should say—’ And she really had said this, fluttering her fan and expanding her bejewelled décolletage, for she looked the sort to read cheap romantic novels. ‘—plain old Alice Bowdly!’

Even then, it still hadn’t all come back to Alice. After all, Cheryl Kettlethorpe had been as thin as this creature was fat, and it had all been a long time ago.

‘Don’t you remember, that pact we made as we sat beside Stow Pool?’

Of course, there had been no pact, but the likes of Celia—or Cheryl, as she now remembered—always liked to wrap up their demands in paddings of coy sentiment.

‘We won’t talk about it now. Not
here,
eh? But I think we girls should get together and have a proper chat. Oh, don’t look so
worried,
dear …’ She’d tapped her nose in that way which westerners liked doing. ‘I’m the absolute byword for discretion.’

Now, Alice inspected the tiled surround of the front arch for something resembling a bell pull. All she could find was what looked like a brass cheese grater. She pressed the button beneath it, and was somewhat startled when a metallic approximation of Celia’s voice crackled back at her.