The House of Storms Page 20

  Deeper darkness lay ahead, although the smell of the ship was the first thing to catch their senses as they approached the rendezvous; that, and the slow throb of her engines. There she was, spars looming out of the mists, the Proserpine, which had been in the weatherman’s dreams since he’d held that number-bead in the Halls of the Merchant Venturers. He glimpsed faces over her side, and ropes snaking, and Weatherman Ayres told himself as he and his crew climbed aboard that this would be just like any other delivery.

  The captain, a Spaniard named Convertino, hobbled out of the fog as they were stood on the tilted deck. ‘Glad to be finished with this journey, though it seems a shame to lose the ship, even if she is an old thing—sunk already according to her records …’ He had greying hair tied back from a lineless face. The sea did that to some people; puffed them up instead of etching itself into them.

  ‘I’m Weatherman Ayres. This here is Bill Price, Jack Petty, Pete Scobie …’

  But there was no time to be lost. Immediately, they set about the business of hauling up the aether from the hold with the help of some of the crew, who proved to be a weak and subdued lot, even for bondsmen. As a rule, the weatherman disapproved of this as a way of running a ship, and he saw nothing tonight to change his way of thinking. The signs of their inexperience were in saltsores on their limbs and the scars on their hands. Still, they’d be getting a wage for this which would buy them their freedom.

  The aether wasn’t in the caskets or barrels he’d expected, but big jars embossed with tongues and dragons and symbols which no English guildsman would ever recognise. They gathered on the deck like fat terracotta idols as the weatherman helped lower the explosive through the main hatch into the emptying hold. The floor was smeared with oil and bilge and the straw of packing. Ignoring the glower of the remaining pots, the weatherman propped the barrels against each of :he bulkheads, then picked off their wax bungs and tamped down their fuses. The wound strips of cordite shone like glowworms in his hands. The envelope containing their unique spell had come plastered with warnings that it shouldn’t be unsealed until the moment the fuses were to be activated, but he’d memorised those twists of phonetic hieroglyph days ago, easy as you like. They sang in him now as he climbed back up to the main deck.

  A murmur in Spanish, and the anchor was raised with commendable quiet. After a brief conversation about draught and displacement, the weatherman took the wheel and pushed forward a slide valve. The engine shifted its beat, and the Proserpine’s list increased. If ever a ship needed sinking, this sorry vessel was it. As he eased her forward into the channels, he thought of fragrant sheaves of tobacco and gleaming bottles and the scents of oranges and bananas in cool caves on summer nights. That, not this, was the real small trade. The Mexicans ripped out people’s hearts at the tops of pyramids and offered them to the sun, for Elder’s sake. No wonder the itch to say the ignition spell was churning inside him.

  The streamers of mist were still dense enough to shroud the prow, but he knew they were entering Clarence Cove from the changed smell of the water, the slip of the currents, from the echo of the silences around him. The Proserpine creaked. He eased back the screw to dead slow as he edged towards the swish of the caves. He signalled to ready the anchor. Even then, the sudden bulk of the cliffs surprised him. Waves sucked and washed. A voice shouted. A flaming brand was waved. Ahead was the stub of decking constructed on the lip of the largest sea cave, which would be destroyed like all the other evidence once this job was finished. The ship dragged to a dead halt. Silence now, but for the gulp and moan of her engines, then even that stilled. Then came the squeak of oars.

  Crossing the deck, the weatherman watched as ropes were tossed and the Proserpine was berthed for last time. Rowboats bobbed in the space between the ship and the cliffs. It was a matter now of winching these pots overboard and bearing them up through the caves to the passage which opened in the middle of a field and then down to the wagons. For all of which this fog needed to hold for several more hours, although, oddly enough, it seemed to be thinning.

  The weatherman tasted the air. Puzzled, he stroked his damp moustache, which was as reliable a gauge as any. He rehearsed the weathertop’s settings. The Proserpine’s spars were showing clearer above him now. He could even see the ragged tip of her mizzen against the nodding cliffs, and the individual faces of the men in the boats below him. But there was no wind—and the air hadn’t shifted. Odd, indeed, although he imagined it was another effect of this damn cargo. Not that it mattered as long they got the winch working and the night held, although here was a lesson to be learned that this stuff wasn’t worth all the money he’d heard mentioned at the Halls of the Merchant Venturers. They never risked their limbs and their freedom on darkly freezing nights such as this. Neither would he. Not again. The last thing he’d do, the very last thing, would be to cast the spell which sent this ship down to join the others which rested in this cove. And Elder bless her. And good riddance.

  But the fog was definitely clearing. The wet cliffs were glinting as the ship rose and fell, and brightness was gathering at her stern out towards the entrance of the cove—gathering so strongly that he’d have said it was dawn if he hadn’t been certain it was the middle of the night. Then he heard engines, and thought for a moment that those of the Proserpine were somehow stirring, but now there were also flashes and shouts. The effect, he suddenly realised, came from a bigger ship’s weathertop pushing back the fog as she entered Clarence Cove. So stupid. So obvious. And not the sun’s rising, but floodlights churning through thinning scarves of white to spear the Proserpine’s ragged spars and the scurrying figures on her deck. Not one ship, either, but two; the gun-pricked prows of a pair of brassy white Enforcer vessels.

  ‘Every man off! Quick!’

  No point now in stealth and silence. Even the bondsmen were running. There were gun cracks, heavy splashes in the water, the crump of bone meeting deck. The man at the prow of one of the Enforcer vessels was adding to the confused racket by shouting incomprehensibly through a loud-hailer. In the pomp of his sideburns and uniform, it could only be Enforcer Cornelius Scutt. Weatherman Ayres looked about him. The deck was already empty and the bright-lit water between the Proserpine and the sucking cliffs was aswarm with oars and boats and splashing limbs. He waited. The rowboats were pulling off, bodies were being hauled in or towed. Not that he imagined that there was any way of escape from this cove, but he wanted to be sure that everyone was well back before he did what was necessary.

  Weatherman Ayres licked his lips. He touched his moustache. He thought of Cissy, and of Cornwall, and of evening walks with the sea-pinks waving along the gull-wheeling cliffs, and afterwards in their fire-lit cottage and the gingery smell of her flesh. But he was glad now that he’d ignored the warnings and opened that envelope, just as he was glad in his life for so many things. The phrases of the ignition spell were in him, and they were waiting. They took no effort at all to sing.

  XXIV

  THE ENTRANCES TO BRISTOL docks funnelled down through tighter and tighter conjunctions of jostling, shouting, lower-guilded humanity, and the raw grey day above stirred with conflicting breezes as the weathermen on the big ships tested their devices. Flags furled and fell, sails filled and stilled, and the chalked board above the eastern access announced that the Verticordia would be departing at 2:30 that afternoon, which was considerably later than Marion and Ralph had expected. Leaflets were pressed into Ralph’s hands as they pushed their way back out towards the road. The clammy print promised New Lives, Fresh Starts, Fine, Easy Work and Verdant Pastures. At least half of Bristol seemed to be leaving England, or trying to. Glancing over towards the first-class access, its shining black gates topped with lions, Ralph remembered other voyages; the carpets and the panelled cabins and the greetings of the captains.

  He picked at his eggs and fried sea-potato, which he’d never tasted before, and had no particular wish to try ever again, as they took late breakfast at a dockside cafe. More money, he t
hought, although he didn’t say it, squandered.

  ‘I just keep waiting for something to start,’ he said. ‘I mean,’ he studied his chipped mug of tea, ‘this isn’t what we came for, is it?’

  Marion gazed at him from her own scarcely touched plate in that odd way she’d been doing increasingly lately. ‘Perhaps things haven’t finished ending yet.’

  ‘We’ll probably look back on this in ten years when we’re in London and—’

  ‘London? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not as if we’re going to spend the rest of our lives in the Fortunate Isles, is it? We have a theory to prove, and we must return here to do that.’

  ‘What happens to Eliza and John Turner?’

  He shrugged. ‘Perhaps we’ll have finished with them.’

  There was still plenty of time before boarding—whole hours of it—and they decided to go back to the public reading rooms of the Arthropod Branch of the Beastmasters’ Guild. It was a relief, in any case, to return to Bristol’s bigger byways, with their swept streets and milling hats and carriages, and newsboys shouting something about Arrests. As before, they were admitted beneath the hall’s insect-winged pillars as Master and Mistress Turner, who happened to know the Beetle Lady.

  Their wait for the clerk’s return after they had presented the requisition forms for the dozen books Ralph imagined they might have time to look at was longer than he had expected—perhaps poor service was something else you needed to get used to when you belonged to some lesser guild. Marion sat down on a bench and began kneading her ankles. This was taking far too long, and he was just starting to worry when a more senior-looking figure emerged.

  ‘Master, Mistress Turner? Would you mind coming this way?’

  Passing the glass cases of giant insects which might have been enlarged models, or real examples of the more extravagant work of the craft of this guild, they were shown into a small office, and the guildsman who introduced himself as Highermaster Squires asked if they’d been long away from Kent.

  Ralph, unwilling to break whatever remained of the credibility of their identity, assured him that they hadn’t.

  ‘And you know the Beetle Lady? A fine student is Doctress Foot—especially for someone who isn’t a member of our guild.’

  Highermaster Squires, grey-haired, podgy around the cheeks and belly and thin elsewhere, seemed an amiable enough sort. His desk, Ralph noticed, had six legs. As did their chairs, the arms of which were carved into the shapes of maggots. Guilds, in their inner intricacies, really were the most extraordinary organisations.

  ‘Would you like tea?’

  ‘To be honest,’ Marion said, ‘we’re pushed for time. We’re taking a ship on the high tide.’

  ‘Leaving, eh? And our humble halls are the place you choose to visit. I’m flattered, I must say. Especially as you both know as much about natural science as you plainly do, judging by the books you’ve requisitioned. Both this and last time, although I can’t say I don’t think you’re wasted in the Guild of Ringwrights, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s easier than you think, you know, to tell what people are researching. You’ll be surprised at what you can pick up by looking through requisitions, and the Beetle Lady also mentioned something. Although she seems, dear soul, a bit confused about your names and rank.’

  ‘I can assure you,’ Ralph said, ‘that it’s us she means.’

  ‘Oh, good. Or mostly good anyway. But the thing is, this idea of yours, this supposition, this theory—what is it that you call it?’

  ‘Habitual Adaptation.’

  ‘I’ve heard worse.’ Standing up and jingling a key, Higher-master Squires unlocked a cabinet. Inside were books, notepads, rolls and sheaves of paper. ‘This, for example.’

  Humouring the man, Ralph took the offered book. It was small, cheaply printed. Dimly embossed on the card of its spine was the title On the Force of Natural Development.

  ‘Or this …’

  A dry ribbon-bound curl of loose pages, hand-written, illustrated with fine drawings of the eyes of insects in all their varieties. An Argument Towards a Better Understanding of the Processes of Life on This Earth.

  ‘Beautiful hand, don’t you think?’

  Another volume was merely a compendium of the varieties of bee, but someone had flagged an appendix, and then drawn a black line through each of the seemingly offending pages. And The Principle of Selection. And Life: A Query. And The Origin of the Variety of Species.

  Ah! You’re beginning to understand?’

  Ralph’s head was spinning. His chest hurt. He felt empty and weak.

  ‘In a way, I’m not so surprised that you don’t belong to one of the guilds which actually deal with the processes of life. Although I must say it’s an achievement to have got as far as you have, and yet so young. If you were to attend one of our academies, and no doubt a plantsmaster would tell you the same, the first glimmering of any thoughts in this direction would be laughed at and crossed out before they could lead anywhere. It’s a kindness, really. Although some things seep through. Hence my little collection.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s not true?’

  ‘Not sure that that really enters into it. But, since you ask, I imagine it’s probably correct that hereditary characteristics are governed by a mixture of random change and natural competitive forces, although I must admit I still have some quibbles with such matters as the appearance of chicks’ beaks at the same time as the evolution of shells, or the question of which came first, the bee or the flower.’ He shrugged. ‘That sort of thing.’

  ‘You’re telling me it’s suppressed?’

  ‘What I’m telling you, Master Turner, is that our study of how the natural world functions must reflect the real needs of human society. A hothead, for example, might use your theory to argue that we humans are descended from apes. And where would that leave the unique concept of the sacred human soul, and our beloved church, and people’s dearly held beliefs? Then again, if life is always in this state of change and flux governed by little more than who lives the longest and has the most babies, should that not also apply to human society? Where would that leave the guilds, all the succour and certainty and stability which they provide? I appreciate your disappointment. But things are as they are. I understand, for example—and if this is any comfort to you—that there are similar necessary constraints in other fields of study …’

  They left the halls. So much for Habitual Adaptation being Ralph’s unique insight, although it did at least reaffirm his conviction that he was right. Neither was he alone any more. He owed it to these others—the authors of those lost books—to do something. Back in room 12A, Ralph paced the floor and ground his fist into his palm. He remained determined.

  ‘We can’t give up now, Marion. This is all the more reason not to.’

  ‘Who said anything about giving up, apart from Higher-master Squires?’ She was sitting on the bed. The tip of her nose seemed pale, and part of him longed to touch it; to change things—magic them away.

  ‘In a way, everything makes even better sense. Yes, we can be Master and Mistress Turner, but we will also need all the power and might of my guild to force this business through when we return.’

  ‘When we return. You keep saying that today. I mean, if you want so much to be Ralph Meynell, why bother to leave England in the first place?’

  ‘We need evidence, Marion. We need to collect and collate—’

  ‘Is that all this is about?’

  He realised she was near to crying, which was hardly like the Marion he knew. It was disappointing, really, that she was reacting like this, at the time when he most needed her strength.

  ‘Listen, Marion. You’re a shoregirl—you don’t understand how these things work.’

  ‘I thought you were leaving England because you wanted to be with me.’

  ‘That as well. But what’s important at the moment is—’
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br />   Standing up, she pushed past him so quickly that the bed was still sighing and rocking after she’d slammed room 12A’s door. Ralph shook his head at the dimming of her footsteps and the bang of Sunshine Lodge’s front door; women really were quite different creatures. He didn’t do her the favour of going to the window to see her standing out in the street. Leaving rooms, the dramas of arguments in general, had always struck him as empty gestures. She’d be back soon. Was bound—would have—to be.

  He lay down on the bed. He gazed at the ceiling. Stains and blotches. Not a landscape of any kind. Perhaps there were two room 12As, and perhaps he and Marion were in the other one at that moment, joyously making love before embarking on their sunlit journey towards a chain of beautiful islands where all the workings of the world would make sense. He stared at the door, willing her to come through it. He checked his watch. Less than an hour left. The loading gates would be open already, the third-class families teeming through to get the best berths. And she had the tickets, he remembered. Perhaps she was down there already. He decided to go outside and check.

  The crowds were already gone, and the ship he imagined to be the Verticordia was in plain view across the sprawling yards. The smoke from her tall, rusted funnel fluttered and blurred. Her topsails sank and filled as if they were breathing. But there was no sign of Marion. He hurried to the ticket office.

  ‘Turner? Turner?’ A clerk ran his fingers down the boarding list. ‘Not Turton? Tyler?’

  ‘But can’t you check the issue of the tickets? They were purchased through your agents in Luttrell.’

  ‘No, no—if you had tickets, you’d be on this list. Everything’s telephoned through to us, see.’

  ‘But we have the tickets. I’ve …’ Had he ever seen them?

  ‘Our rules are very strict. If you had tickets, then you’d be on this list. We do have a few left—second class, not third.’

  Ralph stormed out of the office. Marion would surely be back in room 12A by now. His breath ragged with the taste of the sugar factories, he ran up the streets. He ascended the stairs, then had to go down again to ask the woman with the hairnet for the key, although he realised by now that that meant Marion couldn’t be there. Grabbing his bag, he stumbled back outside into the brightening street. He still had twenty minutes. Perhaps half an hour. There was this annoying sensation that Marion was either a few steps behind or ahead of him. But he couldn’t stand here, waiting for her to backtrack or catch up. He needed to buy fresh tickets to replace those which had seemingly vanished into thin air.