The House of Storms Page 3

  Ralph grew tired, then slightly feverish. Feeling she’d allowed too much of her own restlessness to bother him, she plumped up the pillows, poured him a little more of his tincture, and watched the movement of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. Then he turned to her with the dark fluid still on his lips, and something that was not him was in his gaze.

  She guarded the fire and dimmed the lights. She loosened his bedclothes and laid a cold cloth across his forehead. But he was still restless and lay awkwardly across his pillows. Such times, such feelings, were catching. Alice, who was somehow even more desperate than usual for Ralph to have a restful night, removed the wooden box containing his painstones. Polished and intricately veined, she’d avoided using them since they’d arrived here, but now she took out the third of the five strengths.

  Ralph gave a bucking cough. His eyes skidded over her face. Another spasm was coming. She pressed the painstone’s cool weight into his right hand and closed his fingers around it. Letting go, checking the sheets for telltale flecks of blood, a breath of sweat surged over her own skin. So many times she had thought, let it be me. She thought it again now as Ralph’s breathing began to ease. Within a minute—the painstone was that quick—he was asleep.

  False alarm, really. She was over-stimulated, herself. Standing up, she glanced at the couch and wondered if she should spend the night here, but Ralph’s breathing was regular, and he would take her presence as an indication that things were going backwards. When they were going forwards. Yes. Really … Kissing his cheek, breathing what was now the somehow indisputably male scent of his body, she left Ralph to his dreams.

  Back in her own room, she avoided the dressing table mirror’s gaze as she took off her shoes and then her jacket and lay down on her bed. She heard the sounds of the house falling towards sleep: Cissy Dunning’s low, liquid voice; the maids’ footsteps and bed-time whispers; doors closing. Ralph was growing. Soon, if things went in the way she sometimes permitted herself to believe, his voice would finish cracking and he’d be thinking, in the yearning abstract sense which came at that age but never seemed to leave most men, of the frictions of passion. Perhaps he was already pleasuring himself, although Alice doubted it; they lived too close for the signs not to be apparent. But he was certainly growing, whilst she—by the same unavoidable rules of unaethered physics and nature, as if one thing can never gain without another losing—was falling away from beauty.

  She remembered how the first realisation of the power of her features had come from the attentions the old gardener had started giving her in the damp old house in which she’d been raised. Have to be careful with those looks, my girl, was all her aunt had muttered when she’d limped in, her dress torn. But at least she’d began to study herself differently in the mirror. Alice had always known that her father and mother had been a handsome couple, but, by questioning her aunt at unexpected moments and burrowing through the society pages of the old newspapers, she came to understand that her father Freddie Bowdly-Smart had been a ‘notorious bachelor’, that he’d ‘played the field’ (but what sport was that?) before settling on Fay Girouard as his wife. Fay had been an ‘actress’, although Alice hadn’t then understood the implications of that description, other than to realise that her mother’s fortune had lain in her body, her face. They’d married, and Alice Bowdly-Smart been born, and one clear morning Fay and Freddie had left her in the hands of a wet nurse to go out sailing on their swish new yacht. The tides had borne their drowned bodies back to shore a shifterm or so later, and she and her parent’s money were given in trust to a maiden aunt.

  The old woman had been as vague with Alice about the trust money as she was about most things, but the hints were already there in the poor state of the house and the decrepit servants and the watery food. The whole place, along with the debts which apparently went back into her aunt’s youth and a lost suitor, was an object lesson in wasting gentility. Realising there was no inheritance, and dropping the Smart, Alice Bowdly had left the house after the death of her aunt and headed for the genteel city of Lichfield, which was the furthest destination she could afford on a one-way, third-class ticket. Once there, with a flashing smile and a glimpse of leg, she managed to obtain lodgings, but soon discovered that a smile alone wasn’t enough to keep away starvation. But Alice submitted. She did whatever was necessary. Remaining detached was something she’d always been good at, and she reinvested the money she made and the contacts she gained in better clothes and better manners and, finally, a better place to live in the cathedral square.

  In her early twenties, she moved south, by now a beautiful, modestly prosperous woman, towards Dudley, that wellspring of Midlands wealth and production. This time, she was able to set herself up in the most elegant district of Tipton, and to promenade the Castle Gardens. The affluent sons of higher guildsmen who managed the local slaughterhouses took her out on picnics, and Alice grew moderately expert at water-colour painting and playing the piano, and discovered she had a taste for the better things, and travelled somewhat, and learned a little French. She even received several offers of respectable marriage, but none of them was good enough for Alice Bowdly.

  Soon, she was nearing thirty, and still dissatisfied, and still beautiful as ever. So she took the train to London, as Alice Smart this time, and dropped most of the ten years which were starting to weigh on her shoulders. Setting herself up in Northcentral in a small but extraordinarily expensive flat overlooking the ziggurat gardens of Westminster Great Park, and with the help of a well-placed grandmaster of the Guild of Electricians who became infatuated with her, she gained access to the all right circles. She made sure to dress and behave in an appropriately youthful manner, but still she seemed mature and compassionate beyond her years. To the men, she was everything the other society girls were not, and Greatgrand-master Tom Meynell was the biggest of all catches, and she was pleased to discover that she genuinely liked the man. Still, marriages within the Great Guilds involved monumental exchanges of power and wealth, whilst Alice could offer nothing but herself. Casting aside the grandmaster electrician, Alice glittered as she had never glittered in the summer that Tom Meynell finally proposed to her, and their marriage was the event of the season. She and Tom were happy together, and she loved the riches, the endless cars and carriages and corridors and lawns and lakes and servants, which were now all hers. She loved Tom as well, although the child which they both wanted was slow in coming. She used potions and took discreet medical advice, but she was ten years older than Tom thought her to be and her body, at the time when she most needed it, finally seemed to be betraying her. Then, after several false alarms, she was properly pregnant. She felt proud and ill, and the birth was everything she’d been dreading, but the child was perfect—a son, even—and Alice was happy as she had never been happy before. Ralph Meynell was all the good things about her, and the greatest thing of all was that he would never have to struggle as she had struggled.

  In some ways, her appearance should have ceased to matter then. Women of the Great Guilds are permitted to sag a little once they have become maternal, and their husbands are expected to look discreetly elsewhere. But not Alice Meynell. She was the epitome of grace. And she had discovered by now that she had a far greater aptitude for the affairs of guild politics than Tom. Once his father died, she became his sole buttress and sounding board, and she was often able to tilt things in her guild’s favour by using her soirees, her contacts, her smile. Alice didn’t know quite when she had started to use the powers of aether in her cosmetics—it was a far more gradual process than that—but she never doubted, just as she had rarely doubted anything throughout her whole life, that she was doing what was right, what was necessary. Her fortune, and her guild and her son and her husband, all depended upon her being the legend of languorous grace which was Great-grandmistress Alice Meynell.

  The years went by, unmeasured in her features by anything more than a refinement of her beauty. Officially, she passed twenty-five, then neared
thirty, and Ralph grew into a young lad, bright and eager and compassionate, although of course she missed the baby he had been, and would have had several more children. There were even a few false alarms. Then there was that hot afternoon on London’s Kite Hills. Ralph had been nine, and feeling it was time—overdue, indeed—that he learned to swim, she’d taken him to the bathing pools there. Not that these chlorine-scented public places would have been her ideal choice, but at least the waters of the children’s pool were shallow and safe. Or so she’d thought, although Ralph had stood rigid in the blazing water as the other children crashed and screamed around him, refusing to duck his head or strike out, and then complaining that his chest ached. He’d run off across the hilly parkland like a released prisoner when they left the pools, and she’d sat down in the shade of the trees to nurse her small disappointment. He’d started coughing when he ran back up to her. She’d been about to remind him that he should use a handkerchief when she’d seen blood gleaming on his palm, and their entire world had turned on its foundations. That same summer, Alice also realised that she was no longer fertile. Ralph—in a phrase which she’d merrily often thought without fully understanding—was everything.

  So began this time of seeking, although she never allowed it to stop her from being Alice Meynell. She was still, to all outward appearances, a woman in the full bloom to her beauty. In the guild’s great houses she even had to resort to the monthly charade of staining a few items of her laundry with blood, for she knew how gossip seeped up from below stairs, but she was Alice, Alice Meynell, and she made sure her presence was remembered as she and Ralph travelled the spas and resorts of Europe. She even discovered that distance lent her an extra sheen of myth and glamour. When she was in London, she planned her assaults on the soirees and dances with military precision. Arriving here. Not being there. Shamelessly flirting. Yes, she decided as she lay on her bed, it was more than ever necessary that she remain entirely Alice Meynell, and put a stop to these jowls which reminded her of the dreadful, dragged-down features of her ghastly, deceiving aunt.

  Invercombe was dark, quiet. Shivering slightly from the coldness of the floor, she crossed to her portmanteau and breathed open the locks and removed the stuffed pages of a fat notebook. In the electric glow of the table lamp, she spread its pages, which were torn, folded to near-separation, incomplete and stained—like a guildsman’s book of spells, but snatched, borrowed, copied or found at small or large cost—across her bed. Alice’s own neatly slanted green-inked handwriting mingled with the browned scribblings of men long dead, and scraps of eye-straining small print, and curls of hieroglyph, and fragments of strange illustration.

  Through the night she considered questions and impossibilities. She breathed fragments of spells which caused the pages, many of which were infused with the remnants of aether through thumbprints and spillages, to rustle and stir. Oh, that they might all knit into a single magic carpet to bear her and Ralph and their troubles away! But instead she settled on something from an incomplete glossary; a small addition to the armoury of charms and spells which filled her portmanteau and might—no, would, for belief was always important—chase those sagging obscenities on her jawline away. And there was a correspondence in her being here at the edge of the very tidal estuary where the glossary assured her the thing she needed could actually be found. Reassembling her notebook, closing her portmanteau, she pulled on boots and her warmest cloak and headed down through the dark house. She spent a few minutes in the library, flicking through hand-tinted pages of bivalves and molluscs until she came to the entry she was looking for and tore it out, and left the house by a side doorway.

  Invercombe’s grounds were still filled with shadow. Only the weathertop had caught a little of the early light; it gleamed through the bare specimen trees as she descended the terraces where flagstones glistened with incipient ice. A strangely pleasant scent came from a dark green patch of what might otherwise have been merely grass. On impulse, Alice stooped to fan it with her fingers and the dew which dripped from their tips tasted sharply sweet, and here, at the far end of which sallow walk and the flatter expanse of the pleasure grounds, the pathways from the garden joined, leading through a gate past the mosaic depths of the seapool which was replenished with salt water, as she understood it, by hidden sluices from the surge of sea against the cliffs of Clarence Cove beyond Durnock Head. Walking briskly on around the looming headland, she discovered that the bigger rocks towards the Bristol Channel were dusted with snow—in the vague gloom, they looked like iced buns—and that the tide was out and the distant lights of the Severn Bridge, a trail of fragile arms like floating jellyfish, were still twinkling.

  The image of the particular shell was clear in her mind, but the real life of the shore was messy and slippery and smelly. She unfolded a small steel knife from the pocket of her cloak and plunged her hand into a rockpool, which proved far colder and deeper than she’d imagined. When she lifted the first creature out, her sleeve wet and her fingers dripping, she saw from the different banding of its shell that it wasn’t Cardium glycymeris—the mollusc she was looking for. Tossing it back, straightening up and wondering how best to continue her search, she noticed something quick and dark scuttling across the rocks. She felt a momentary thread of fear, but the shape was undoubtedly human.

  ‘You there!’ she shouted, for it was important when dealing with common people to establish dominance right away. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’

  The creature straightened. It had some kind of sack in its hand, and was dragging a rake. But it didn’t move towards her, and Alice was obliged to risk her ankles on the greenish boulders which separated them.

  ‘What’s your name?’ She kept up her haughty tone, but still the figure simply watched her. It was wearing a cap and an old and sodden-looking jerkin. More surprisingly, in this frigid weather, it was barefoot. A lad of Ralph’s age or perhaps a little younger. Obviously impoverished, and perhaps dumb or simple as well. She was about to give up on the encounter when the creature blinked and licked its lips and straightened op a little more—closer, in fact, to Alice’s own height than she’d have guessed—and spoke.

  ‘I’m gathering cockles. My name’s Marion Price and this is my bit of shore.’

  So it was a girl. No Mistress or Marm. No curtsey. And my bit of shore, as if she owned the place.

  ‘My name is Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell. I’m from the big house—’

  ‘Invercombe.’

  Interrupting, even. But Alice persisted and unfolded the plate she’d torn from the book of shorelife to show the particular species of mollusc.

  ‘Well? Do you think you’ll be able to help?’

  ‘That’s a beady oyster. We generally throw them away.’

  ‘I need one like this—see. The book calls them blood pearls.’

  ‘Oh?’ The shoregirl pursed her lips. They and her cheeks were reddened from the wind and the cold, although the effect was one for which many a grandmistress would have striven. ‘You’ll be disappointed if you want to make jewels of them. They don’t last, although the children play with them happily enough.’

  As if she were not still a child herself! But, even before Alice had had a chance to assure her that the blood pearl’s very friability was the reason she wanted one, the shoregirl was hopping in a zigzag over rocks which would have shredded Alice’s own feet to bone.

  ‘You collect shells?’

  ‘Cockles. We boil them up and sell them up along the market at Luttrell for about three shilling a bucket. We keep most of the weed to make laver bread.’

  ‘You eat seaweed?’

  ‘Of course.’ Girl and woman studied each other from across the rockpool over which they were crouching, both equally amazed. ‘You’ve never tried laver bread?’

  Alice smiled and shook her head. ‘Where are you from? Is there a village nearby?’

  ‘It’s called Clyst. It’s just around that bit of headland. I live there with my mother and f
ather. I have a brother. I have …’ The shoregirl paused. ‘One sister.’

  Amid fronds of weed and the pulsing mouths of anemones, the girl’s starfish fingers moved.

  ‘And you do this every morning? Collecting cockles?’

  ‘Not every morning. We do it whenever there’s enough light and the tide’s right.’

  What a life! Dragged in and out across this estuary like a bit of flotsam.

  ‘Now this …’ The girl prised the shell off, lifted it dripping into the air with blued and wrinkled fingertips. Definitely Cardium glycymeris, but, split open with a quick twist of her stubby knife, there was no blood pearl inside.

  ‘Does your family have a guild?’

  ‘… Of course.’ A slight pause in the wanderings of her fingers.

  Alice understood. Here in the west, even the shoremen and coracle builders imagined themselves guildsmen. What light there was glowed up from the chilly water and across the girl’s face, which had an unrippled stillness itself as she worked, deep and intent. Alice found her strange accent, her animal quiet, pleasantly soothing. A few more beady oysters sacrificed their lives. The hiss of the tide was getting louder.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be going? Isn’t there somewhere further up the shore?’

  ‘This is the best place. We’ve a few minutes yet.’

  Another split, another fruitless mouth. Then, just as they were being surrounded by runners of tidal water, the girl extracted a bigger oyster. Quickly split, it revealed a wet ruby on its living tongue. Shoregirl and greatgrandmistress shared a glance of triumph.

  ‘Is one enough?’

  ‘It’ll have to be.’ The tide was chuckling around them. The shoregirl was already turning and picking up her sack and rake. ‘No. Wait!’

  The girl paused, and Alice considered her as she stood there barefoot in her ragged coat and the waters rushed between them. She had an odd feeling that this shoregirl might just add something to the workings of Invercombe. A little grit in the mill, most likely, but perhaps that was what the place needed. Having to cope with a raw new undermaid would be a suitably awkward challenge for Steward Dunning.