The House of Storms Read online

  Her attention regathered in the dulled brightness of the mirror. Alice Meynell. Neither old nor young, but eternally beautiful. Through all her anxiety about Ralph, and although the booth had been long disconnected, it really did seem to her for a shivering moment that some kind of exchange took place.

  IX

  RALPH STRODE THROUGH THE SUMMER GRASS across Durnock Head, dwarfed by the widening horizon as he approached the Temple of Winds.

  ‘Come on!’ he called down to his mother as she struggled to catch up with him. ‘I’d say you were tired already if I didn’t know you better …’

  ‘Quite frankly, I am tired, darling.’ Alice was surprised at the spinsterish wheeze in her voice as she finally eased herself down beside him in the shade of the circular bench. ‘After all, I’m not quite as young as you …’ She smiled back at him as brightly as she could manage. Strands of windblown hair clung to her wet neck. And her bones, the bones which had always carried her flesh so well and which she had stupidly imagined would faithfully bear her through the rest of her life, were aching. Our children, she remembered the phrase from somewhere, are the messengers of our mortality. But she’d never imagined that the message would come this suddenly, or so strongly.

  Doctor Foot still urged caution, but it was apparent to everyone that Ralph Meynell wasn’t just mending—he was healed. It was no longer a matter of what he or Alice did or didn’t believe. He was fit; impossibly, yet quite demonstrably so. Her heart might be thudding, yet he wasn’t even panting, and the entire time since his recovery now felt like the climb she’d just made up Durnock Head; of trying to catch up with him and never, ever quite managing. She remembered her return to Invercombe on the grey Noshiftday of her visit to Einfell, and the sight of Steward Dunning beaming and hurrying out of the house. Dragged helplessly up the best stairs, Alice had still been entirely unable to make sense of the woman’s gibberings. But all the windows had been open in Ralph’s room. In fact, every single, simple order she’d given had been countermanded, and Alice was a moment away from striking the steward across her fat Negro face when she realised that Ralph’s eyes were open and that he was looking at her with a bemused but essentially happy expression on his face. The fever, as she laid her wondering hand on his stubbled cheek, no longer poured out of him. He truly was past the crisis. A day later, he’d been sitting up and eating with almost worrying greed. The day after that, he’d been striding about the house as he rarely ever strode anywhere. And look at him now, little more than a shifterm later.

  None of it made sense. Steward Dunning and her maids might take a mere miracle in their stride, and Ralph could put the whole thing down to his beloved science, but Alice still felt confused, as well as tired and breathless, as she sat in the Temple of Winds. He mind still wrestled with her trip to Einfell, her conversation with Silus, and her glimpse of the creatures he’d called the Shadow Ones.

  ‘I should have brought some of the textbooks up here from the library…’ He was up from the bench and pacing the boards of this windy chapel to lost gods, his renewed and deepened voice ricocheting off the domed roof. He was saying how the books often spoke of the best, most typical specimens. As if there was something wrong with all the others! As if they, too, didn’t have their story and meaning—although meaning was a word he detested almost as much as all those pious phrases about evidence of design …

  Alice, bemused and exhausted, decided she should make the most of the opportunity to rest and enjoy the view. Soon, they’d be wandering around this headland and inspecting the leaves of some trivial plant individually and in pointless detail. Ralph’s good health had come upon her so suddenly that she hadn’t had time to react. Before, she’d always taken responsibility, she had been in charge. The old Ralph had been essentially stationary. She’d known that if she left him in a room, he’d still be there when she returned, but this new son of hers was dragging her about like a dog on a leash. Sometimes, it was hard not to feel just a little resentful. And she had so many other things on her mind. Tom was floundering over this dispute with Pikes and she desperately needed to get back to London, if only for a few days, to steady the ship.

  ‘You know, you can tear out the relevant pages of the books if you need them. After all, they’re ours.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he conceded, almost frowning. ‘But the pages are arranged in a hierarchical pattern, and that pattern isn’t just in the books. It’s out there …’

  And off he went and, soon, off she went as well, out from the temple’s shade to examine each blade of grass for length and breadth and hairiness and make tedious notes. It was like unpicking some tiny, pointless knot. And meanwhile her guild was haemorrhaging influence and money. Yes, she admittedly enjoyed her own occasional early morning searches for a particular flower or plant or insect, but they were nothing like this. Most frightening of all, Ralph’s plans were blossoming. He wanted to look at shells next, and the insides of rocks.

  Alice slumped down on the billowing greensward and squinted back towards the house. Invercombe’s greens, its glistening waters, its windows and chimneys, all looked so triumphant, so solid—yet her entire world was askew. Then, looking down the north side of valley where the headland dwindled and where, beyond the parterre gardens, Invercombe’s grounds took on a more practical bent, she saw the white flap of washing, and a female figure stooping and rising, and a plan began to form in her head.

  That lunchtime, Alice went in search of Cissy Dunning. The house was cool, quiet, softly creaking and ticking, caught in its usual slur of hours. Guessing the steward would also be at her lunch and thus probably in her office, she headed straight there and entered without pausing or knocking, as was her habit with servants.

  ‘Ah, Mistress…’ Cissy half stood. Her cheeks were crumbed and greased. ‘It’s been such a beautiful morning.’

  ‘Hasn’t it?’ Alice sat down facing the steward and took a breath. ‘I’ve been up Durnock Head with my son. But you mustn’t let me stop you eating your lunch.’

  ‘I’m pretty much finished.’ Cissy Dunning dabbed her face with her napkin. The fact was, she half suspected that this beautiful, if slightly windblown, woman wanted her to continue eating because she would be at some minor disadvantage with her mouth full and butter on her face. The greatgrandmistress, on the other hand, scarcely ever seemed to need to eat. Or sweat, or excrete, either… Cissy cleared her throat and tried to meet that penetrating blue gaze. These weaselly thoughts always seemed to come when Alice Meynell was around. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the woman, who had treated her fairly, even if she seemed to relish being unorthodox. It was more as if there was some other kind of standard by which Cissy should be judging her, but which she’d never been able to put her finger on.

  Perhaps she’s an angel, she thought. Perhaps that’s what it is. After all, she looks like one. And she certainly acted the part, if that meant behaving in a way which you could never quite understand. And something had come to this house recently. Cissy, who’d always wondered what it must have been like for the onlookers outside Lazarus’s grave, now almost felt, after the shock of seeing Ralph Meynell sitting up in his bed, as if she knew.

  ‘This really is the most extraordinary time,’ she commented.

  ‘I’ve never seen Ralph this happy, this active—and I’m certainly not complaining. But I think I—he—needs some help …’ Then Alice leaned forward somewhat, and her smile grew quite dazzling.

  In what she was coming to think of as the old times, Cissy would have certainly resisted what this pale, graceful woman was now proposing. To put Ralph Meynell and Marion Price together, who, for all their vastly differing backgrounds, were of opposite sexes and almost the same age, was asking for trouble by all her normal standards. But it seemed to her now as if many of her old certainties were already crumbling.

  ‘Her local knowledge would be useful from Ralph’s point of view. That, and being fit and able and—and I think I’m right in surmising—reasonably intellige
nt. And I would guess that she knows quite a bit about the local wildlife. Certainly more than I would ever want to know.’ A small gesture of the hands. That smile again. ‘I want no opportunity to be held back from my son this summer. There will, of course, be many other summers now that he’s so plainly recovered. But, and to be frank, I doubt if they will be quite the same as this one. My husband’s a powerful man, and Ralph must move out from his shadow, if he is to prosper and thrive. This autumn, he will enrol at our Great Academy at Highclare. There will be study and duty, and he will be catching up. Catching up not just because of his illness, but because my son is the son of a greatgrandmaster and must therefore expect to exceed those he finds around him.’

  ‘You make it all sound rather harsh, greatgrandmistress.’

  ‘I don’t make it sound that way, Steward. That, I’m afraid, is how it is.’

  Cissy glanced at the kidney bean on her desk which, had it been anyone other than the greatgrandmistress sitting before her, she would now have picked up for the small comfort of its shape. But what, after all, was more natural than allowing two young people to spend this summer together?

  X

  THE TEMPLE OF WINDS was joined in dawn by the variegated tops of the specimen trees, and their greens and silvery-blues were mirrored and enhanced in the seapool. Within its still water there then came a hint of genuine movement; the flash of a shirt. Voices followed.

  ‘Every single living thing is different. That tree is shaped like no other. The splay of its branches, the pattern of its bark—everything’s unique.’

  ‘And I thought it was all the work of Master Wyatt.’

  Ralph laughed. His voice, after several months of wavering, had settled in a lower octave. ‘With or without Master Wyatt!’

  His and Marion’s reflections glowed from the seapool as they sat on its stone surround and Invercombe unfolded into full daylight. By Ralph’s standards, they were up ridiculously early. He’d wanted to make a particular study of the differing way the flowers opened their petals along the various aspects of the valley, and the effect that had on their orientation and shape, although Marion had merely shrugged at the mention of quarter past four and said she was up by then anyway. In many ways, she was hard to surprise. But then, sometimes, when he said the most obvious thing …

  ‘You know, I’d really like to get to the libraries in Bristol. There must be some decent enough facilities in the guildhalls.’

  ‘I’ve never been.’

  ‘I suppose not. The Great Guilds—’

  ‘I mean Bristol.’

  ‘Don’t you mind?’

  She shrugged and looked away. Ralph’s gaze, as they sat by the seapool, was drawn to the precision of her reflection. To the angle of her jaw, the dark gleams in her hair. To the point where the cuff of her blouse settled against her wrist, and the blue vein he could see there entwined around the glittery scab of her Mark. Every living thing, he reminded himself, was unique. But some, perhaps, were more unique than others.

  The way Ralph saw the world now, everything was inextricably linked in ascending tiers of complexity and adaptation. But the implication of this pyramidal view, starting with the dumb rocks and narrowing up in increasing specialisation through mosses and slimes and then plants towards the animal kingdom, where beasts raised themselves to their legs and began to demonstrate the abilities of reasoning, was that, somewhere, there had to be a peak. Marion Price, he thought, still staring at her image in the dark depths of the pool, could well be it.

  Apart from her breathing, she was as quiet as the seapool itself. There was a stillness about her, and then a suddenness and unpredictability to her movements. Any moment now, he thought, hoped, she will turn and look at me. But instead her left hand wandered as if with a will of its own across the lip of the pool. Her fingers dipped the water, shattering the whole valley into spreading circles of ripples. Ralph almost wanted to complain about the lost vision. But perfection has many facets, and the rise and fall of a disturbed fluid, obeying rules of surface tension with which he was broadly familiar, had never been so elegantly displayed.

  As they headed out through the swing gate from Invercombe and along the path which wound towards the shore he could feel the day warming and expanding around him. He’d seen marvellous vistas on his journeys across Europe, but had mostly been separated from them by panes of glass and the blurring sense of being ill. This was more like the instant of stepping outside from a car—the sudden bustle of a street in a strange city. The world was so bright, so large, and everything was becoming so clear. More and more now, with his gathering strength and his renewed wonder at the start of each bewitching day, he felt like the God he no longer believed in.

  He couldn’t have asked to have a better guide to the shore than Marion. She had names for every type of plant and creature, which, even if they weren’t technically correct, he even found himself using in the endless notebooks they were now compiling. Pulmrose. Witches’ purses. Cutthroats. Bootlace weeds. And she knew about habitats as well. Not in the general sense of the men who annotated the plates in Ralph’s books, but the exact type and nature of the life which dwelt in the individual rock-pools, and how and why they differed. Ralph could crouch with her for hours watching the slow growth of a worm cast, the wavering tentacles of a sea-urchin, the death-struggles of a shrimp, or Marion herself.

  Now, dark against the shore-dazzle of sunlight, she turned back towards him.

  ‘You should try walking barefoot,’ she said, hopping to demonstrate as she peeled off boots and socks. Ralph, who’d forced himself to read the odd novel as part of his education, had previously wondered what all the fuss was about women’s legs and ankles.

  ‘Doesn’t it hurt?’

  ‘Your feet’ll keep a lot dryer. And it’ll save your shoes.’

  Ralph shrugged, sat down. He’d always associated bare feet with beggars and urchins, but it felt better right away. In fact, the sense of air and sun on his bare toes was quite delicious. ‘This is much better!’ He took a few steps across the shingle, hobbled, winced, sat down again. ‘No it isn’t!’

  ‘What a fuss you’re making. Look …’ She skipped, pirouetted. Ralph, as he watched Marion Price twirling and laughing barefoot on the shore, her hair fanning, dismissed any remaining doubts that she was the pinnacle of all creation. Then she gave a yelp and collapsed on the rock close beside him and began ruefully massaging the soles of her feet. ‘Look …’ She held up a foot.

  Ralph looked. The toes were decorated with bits of sand and shell. The two big ones, he noticed as she wiggled them, pointed upwards with a happy, eager tilt. ‘Seems fine to me.’

  ‘I used to be able to walk the shore barefoot all day. It never bothered me. I suppose I’ve been wearing shoes for too long.’

  ‘That makes a difference?’

  ‘Your skin hardens. It’s like …’ She stretched her legs and gazed out towards the estuary where sails, funnels and spars were drifting on the quivering air. ‘Like the men out on those boats. Their hands get tougher than leather from working the ropes.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll never get tough feet like that. I mean, I can’t imagine the last time a member of the Meynell family walked barefoot unless it was to step into their bath.’

  ‘What are you saying—that I should have tough hands and feet because my father has?’

  As was so often the case, Marion was already ahead of him.

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, though, does it?’ she continued. ‘If we became the way our mothers and fathers are, all of my cousins at Stipley would have only three fingers on their left hand just the way their dad has.’

  Splaying his feet, laughing, the sunlit world expanding around him, Ralph felt the wet sand oozing between his toes. Marion wandered ahead. He loved the way she walked when she was on the shore, always looking, stooping, searching—so alert. She reminded him of some seabird. She found something. Lifted it, laughing.

  ‘Look—Ralph! I’ve found a k
idney bean.’

  He had no idea what a kidney bean was, but he stood up and ran towards her through the hot light to share in her discovery.

  I’ve never been, he thought, so happy.

  XI

  LONDON, ALICE THOUGHT AS SHE PREPARED to leave her Northcentral townhouse, had come as a shock. It was as if something in the west had left her amazed like some stupid bumpkin by sights she’d long grown used to. But her car was waiting, gleaming and darkening in the flash of Hallam Tower, and she let the great buildings and the morning’s traffic pass her by. Part of her thoughts were still with Ralph, but today she had other fish to fry.

  Dockland Exchange, almost old enough now to be picturesque, still soared over the docks. If the story of her guild could be rewritten, Alice would certainly have chosen a different location for its main halls. Sometimes, she even permitted herself daydreams of taking over the halls of the Beastmasters or perhaps even the upstart Toolmakers along Wagstaffe Mall, but today such hopes were far off. And she supposed, as she stepped out and looked up through the turning cranes at the great, tall edifice where her husband worked, that there were advantages to be gained in having your head office close to the real means of production. Wealth, she knew as she stepped over slippery spillages, was essentially a messy business, and had little to do with marble halls and courtrooms.

  She took the lift, but nevertheless stopped at many floors, unannounced at first, although word that the greatgrandmistress was about had soon spread upwards. Uppermasters and highermasters scurried amid the clatter of typewriters, air-tubes, message trolleys, ribbon-reads. As always, she made a special note of those most knowledgeable and hard-working; such men were useful to her guild, but then again, they could pose a threat.