The House of Storms Page 4
‘How muck did you say you got paid for a bucket of boiled cockles?’
‘On a good day, three shilling.’
‘And how many of those sacks does it take to fill up a pot?’
‘Twelve or so.’
‘I’ll make sure you’re paid twice that much if you come and work at Invercombe.’
Putting down her sack, the shoregirl wiped her hand on the side of her coat and stuck it out. Alice, as the tide drowned the rockpool and raced over their feet, was too surprised not to shake it.
III
ON NOSHIFTDAY MORNING Steward Dunning sent word that she wished to see Marion Price. Outside the office door at the far end of a low whitewashed corridor, Marion corrected the straightness of her starched linen cap.
‘Come in! You are out there, aren’t you?’
She entered a small, cluttered room.
‘Shut the door. Chairs are for sitting on, you know.’
Marion, who was certain she’d clanged one bucket too many or unwittingly ignored one or another of the endless instructions and prohibitions which were framed on the walls of the servants’ halls, was determined to take her dismissal from Invercombe with some dignity and good grace. Things which she’d always taken for granted—the judging of each day by the smell and the feel of the dawn, the seasonal interlocking of tasks and trades, the coming and the going of catches and tides—were already starting to seem remote and bizarre. Here at this house, everything was so devoted to making each day the same, and she’d never been so well fed, or kept so warm, or realised that her existence counted for so little. Still, she tried to keep what she hoped was an appropriately solemn expression on her face as the steward sighed and her coppery, silver-threaded hair bobbed as she shook her head.
‘It’s possible,’ she was saying, ‘that I’ve been a little hard on you, girl. Of course, I didn’t ask to have you taken on. My guess is that you had no particular desire to work here, either.’
‘I’ve done my best, Mistress. I’m sorry that hasn’t been good enough.’
‘Now, now. Wait. You’re not here so I can tell you off.’
‘Mistress … ?’
‘Being shorefolk, I don’t suppose you’ve given much thought to a life in service. For me, it was what I always expected. The Dunnings have been in service in the big houses since my great-great-grandfather came here as a bondsman. Does that surprise you?’
‘I’d never thought, Mistress.’
‘There are still people who think us Negroes shouldn’t be working as guildsfolk. In places like London they’ll even preach it from the pulpits of churches.’ Her round lips thinned. ‘But anyway, you seem bright and capable enough. Fact is, I need all the help I can get to keep this place going …’
Marion’s gaze strayed around the room as Steward Dunning talked about this and that aspect of Invercombe. The walls were covered with the usual framed needlepoint injunctions—A WELL RUN HOUSE SCARCELY NEEDS TENDING. DO NOTHING SLIPSHOD—and the steward’s desk was awash with notepads and inkblocks and unspiked invoices, and a bean-shaped object of a kind which Marion had occasionally found in her wanderings along the shore. The children called them kidney beans, although they obviously weren’t.
‘You’re not listening!’
‘What? I’m sorry, Mistress. It’s just—’
‘Never mind. Maybe one day you’ll rise to cook or steward. If that’s what you want—and if you learn to say pardon instead of what.’ She smiled. ‘Fact is—and this isn’t to go past these walls—the greatgrandmistress and her lad make an odd pair. Coming here out of nowhere and with no other staff and so little warning. So much money, all that travelling, and what have they got… ?’
Marion tried to consider this odd question. The fact was, she hadn’t seen the greatgrandmistress since that day on the shore, nor the son who was also apparently staying here. ‘Everything?’
‘Girl,’ the steward didn’t even shake her head, ‘there’s no need to try to be clever. You must have heard how ill the lad is.’ She sighed. ‘And this, by the way …’ Her pearly fingertips traced the kidney bean. ‘This thing you’ve been staring at when you should have been listening to me—do you know what it is?’
Marion shook her head.
‘It’s from the Fortunate Isles. These beans are seeds and they drop from the palms and are bore all this way across the Boreal Sea.’
Thinking of white beaches, densely coloured flowers, Marion touched the kidney bean. This, she imagined, must be what a guildsperson must feel when they touch one of their own many strange devices—chalcedonies, whisperjewels, pain-stones, the spinet keys of a reckoning engine, numberbeads …
‘Some final conditions,’ the steward said. ‘Firstly, this house runs on mutual respect and duty. Every single saying which cook has had framed—and which I’ve noticed you smirking at, by the way—is entirely true. And I expect all my staff to spend time with their families on Noshiftdays.’
‘I haven’t had a Noshiftday off, Mistress.’
‘Well, you have one now. Wilkins has a wagon going up to Luttrell in about half an hour. See that you’re on it, and in your best skirt and pinafore …’ The steward’s eyes travelled up and down. ‘Remember, you’re a representative of this house, and that people will look at you and imagine, may the good Elder help them, that you’re the best we at Invercombe can manage. Your family—I’m sure they’re wondering how you’re getting on. Now you can go back to Clyst and tell Bill Price that Cissy Dunning sends her regards and says you’re doing well enough, even if you still have to buck up your ideas a bit, can’t you?’
‘Yes, Mistress.’ Curtseying, Marion realised that she hadn’t done so when she’d first entered the steward’s presence. ‘Thank you.’
‘Oh, one more thing.’ The steward slid open a bottom drawer in her desk and wheezed open a tin. She held out a brown envelope. ‘You might as well take this.’
‘Mistress?’
It felt colder than Marion had expected as she sat on a bench at the back of a produce wagon with an assortment of stable lads, apprentice gardeners and undermaids, and the road beyond the estate was deeply puddled and the bare trees were dripping. Yet if it had rained at Invercombe, it had happened so stealthily that she hadn’t noticed. She gazed back towards the weathertop. The idea that it could change the weather had been a story she’d been brought up on, then cast aside as a pleasant fantasy.
Set down at the roadside by Wilkins, Marion headed straight for the shore. After Invercombe’s fiddly sense of things constantly in need of doing, she felt her spirits physically lifting. Here, if you yelled and waved your arms, the only creatures you startled were terns and gulls. Whooping, leaping, pausing only to drag off her new boots and socks, and then again to tear off her cap, Marion sprinted through the freezing, flecking mud. The tide was a neap one, big and cold and quick, hissing away from her even as she ran towards it, and at last her feet were in it, and it was sweet, effortless agony after the pinch of those boots.
She searched amid the rockpools for a kidney bean. The odds were impossible, but she was an inveterate shore-searcher. She’d found pennies, serviceable washpans, skirthoops, brooches, gluts of seacoal, fluted bones, fantastic scraps of machinery, lurid heaps of cuckoo-wrack. Once, washed down from Severn Bridge, had come the huge and hairy corpse of one of the gargoyles which crawled along those distant gantries as they endlessly painted them grey. But all she found today were a few scraps of prettily corroded glass. Straightening up, feeling the slap in her skirt pocket of the envelope Steward Dunning had given her, she quickened her pace towards the hunched and scattered cottages of Clyst.
The Price cottage’s windows peeped beneath a low roof which was part slate and part moss. Ducking to save her head on the low lintel, Marion stepped inside. Mam was boiling up some underwear, raising it with a spoon as if to see if it was done. Then she saw Marion.
‘I knew it!’ Mam exclaimed, waving a steaming vest. ‘You’ve got yourself sacked!’
‘What happened to your old ones?’
Marion shrugged, remembering the face cook had pulled as she tossed them towards the fire. ‘I keep them for wetter weather now.’
‘Wetter? But we’ve been half-flooded!’
‘Anyway, I have to spend most of my time inside.’
‘Course you do. Now go and get your dad and brother and sister for me, will you?’
There was a knack to recognising people across the shore’s shining expanse. It came from the manner of a walk, their many different stoops and limps. And there was her sister Denise, dragging her sack and bending with that sense of surprised distaste. And there was Owen, poling across the shining mud on a wooden sledge known as a mudhorse. Marion cupped her hands to her mouth and gave an ululating shriek.
After their fishy hugs and expressions of surprise at how she looked, the three Price siblings found their father up by the little creek, polishing and restringing the fine blue glass floats of which he was so proud. By now a scatter of villagers and children had gathered around Marion. Is there lots of gold in the house to polish? someone asked. Been learnt spells? Is that steward really an escaped bondswoman ? How much have you nicked?
This, Dad announced once they were back inside the cottage, was a special occasion. He beckoned Marion to the scullery, and she held up the boards over the pit where he kept his small trade. Unstoppering one of the brown rows of label-less bottles with his teeth, Dad tested it under his nose to check that the sea hadn’t got into it. Sitting afterwards at the table, eating fried laver bread and herring, they all grew a little tipsy. Marion had never noticed before how grey their bread was, nor how diligently Dad picked at his teeth. She’d been sure enough of her family’s needs to accept the greatgrandmistress’s surprising offer, and had told herself that it was just another job, but being a maid at a big house seemed like an identity her family and the people of Clyst wanted to brand her with—and it wasn’t her.
‘All right, darling… ?’ Mam’s hand, gloved in calluses, kneaded her wrist.
‘Your glass is empty, lass.’ Dad brandished the bottle. ‘That’s the trouble.’
‘I’m fine. Did I tell you, by the way, that I’ve been paid?’
‘Well then …’ Dad banged down the bottle and rubbed his hands.
Marion knew it was the family’s money. Of course, it would have been nice to go to Luttrell’s only row of proper shops and buy Mam a new headscarf and Dad a cigar in a silver tube and Denise some perfume and Owen one of those compasses he was always eyeing—but she had a better proposal. In fact, it was the reason she’d accepted that guildsmistress’s offer on the shore so readily. As she took the envelope out and laid it on the table, it felt as solid and certain as the weight of the money itself.
‘I think,’ Marion announced, ‘that we should put this towards getting Sally a proper gravestone.’
She knew instantly from their looks that her family had never imagined such a thing.
‘That’s a lovely idea,’ Mam murmured, squeezing Marion’s wrist again. ‘Quite, quite … Lovely.’
‘The fact is,’ Dad said after the long pause which followed, ‘the whole thing’s already sorted.’
‘What has been sorted?’ Marion was surprised at the harshness of her own voice.
‘We’ve signed our Owen up for the Mariners Guild, just like I’ve always promised!’
‘You’re not upset, are you?’ Marion was asked by her sister Denise as they shuffled about afterwards in the low space above the kitchen where they had both slept.
‘Not at all.’ It was true. Buying Owen a proper apprenticeship was the best possible investment the whole family could have made. And they never talked about Sally, even though she’d only been gone a year.
‘And I’m going to be a proper seamstress. Did I tell you that? Nan Osborne’s promised to train me up, and she can get me in at this guild-accredited academy in Bristol next year.’
‘That’s a lovely idea,’ Marion said absently as she worked open a drawer and found it filled with her sister’s things.
‘You off with the quality at Invercombe and weeing into porcelain—who’d have thought it!’
‘It should have been you, Denise. I could still try and put in a word.’
‘Can you see me traipsing around with a duster and curtseying! But I do like your blouse … ’ Denise bustled forward. ‘The way it’s darted and tightened here and here.’ Her hands brushed possessively over her sister’s bosom.
‘Really? I just thought it was too tight.’
Denise’s startling blue eyes gazed at her sister with something briefly akin to wonderment. Her face, with its fine, high cheekbones, was flushed from the rum and being out on the shore, then framed with torrenting curls of blondish-brown hair. It was, Marion thought, the most beautiful face she had ever seen. At least, until she’d seen Invercombe’s new greatgrandmistress. ‘You still don’t know much about the world, do you, little sis?’
By now, Marion had forgotten what it exactly was which she’d been searching for amongst her old things. Denise would have either thrown it away or appropriated it anyway.
‘Any old scraps and buttons, Marion. Bits of ribbon like the one you’ve got unravelling from your dress. I know what those big places are like—useful stuff always getting thrown away.’
‘I’ll keep a look out.’ Although, as one of cook’s notices pointed out, BORROWING THINGS FROM THE HOUSE IS SIMPLY THIEVING.
‘But if there’s one thing above all, Marion, that you can help me with …’ Denise looked surprisingly serious as she crouched by the tiny window and beckoned Marion to join her. She opened her jaw and prodded her fingers inside her mouth.
‘Chun ya shuee?’
Blinking against a surprisingly rank smell, Marion peered down. Her sister’s back teeth were black as lumps of jet. Denise had always had a taste for sweet things. A particular passion had been Bolt’s Thunderbolts, huge gobstoppers layered like onions which changed colour as you cracked through them. Smear the red layers across your lips and it looked as if fan were wearing lipstick.
‘If you could let me have some proper toothpaste,’ Denise said, swallowing. ‘You know, the white stuff that smells like medicine. I’m sure that would sort it out. You can get me some, can’t you?’
Marion realised that her return home to Clyst had turned today into something approximating to the family Noshiftdays which she’d read about in newspapers. That, or the rum. For Mam was half-asleep before the fire, Dad was humming and bumbling about without achieving anything noticeable and Denise, inspired by that blouse, was doing some vigorous taking-in. Marion found even the normally industrious Owen sitting on an upturned tin bath in their open-sided lean-to, staring towards the incoming tide.
‘Congratulations,’ she said.
He glanced up at her. ‘Do you really mean it?’
‘Of course I do. Now move up.’
It was growing dark. It had been, in fact, one of those days which had never been fully light—at least outside Invercombe. Jewelled and grainy, the lights of the ships were glowing. Trade heading in towards Bristol, or out towards the entire world. To be a mariner on such a vessel, braided and buttoned and precise as the furnishing of its decks, had always been her big brother’s dream.
‘Have you been inducted?’
‘No, but Dad really has signed the papers. They give you this yellow carbon copy which he says he’s going to get framed. I can’t thank you enough, sis.’
‘It’s not my money. Dad’s been saving for years.’
‘Well…’ Owen laughed and shook his head. ‘That’s what he’s always told us.’
In every sense, Owen was the biggest of the family; prone to plumpness even on the sparse meals they often ate, with a broad face, ruddy cheeks and a shock of sticking-up brown hair. It was hard to i
magine him stuffed into gold braid and epaulettes, but he talked excitedly about his new guild, and he insisted that, whilst he would always protect its secrets, he would never forget where he came from.
‘You do believe me, don’t you, sis? I mean, I really won’t change. I’ll still eat eel cake and hate the bloody Excise Men.
I’ll still throw plait-bread into the waves to keep the sea from wanting too many souls.’
‘You’re my brother, Owen. You’re a Price. When I have to remind you of that, I’ll get an oar and bash you over the head.’
It was easy to laugh into the darkness, even as the rattle of the wind on the roof became the stronger clatter of rain.
‘Just wait, love,’ Mam whispered, pulling Marion close as the whole family gathered in the darkness to wave her off. ‘We’ll get something nice fixed up for our Sally one day.’
Marion headed along the coast road as the rain worsened to sleet. There was, she knew, a quicker pathway around the headland which led by a gate up to Invercombe’s gardens, but it was never a route she could have taken, either as undermaid or shore-girl. The road tonight was awash. Keeping to its bank, slipping occasionally, she followed it until it met with the smaller lane which led towards Invercombe’s gatehouse. For a while, the sleet drove heavier than ever through the shrieking trees. Then, as if by the turning of a switch, it ceased.
IV
EXACTLY TEN O’CLOCK on a warm March morning at Invercombe in the ninety-ninth of this Age of Light, and each chime and bell and gong filled a separate silence in the house until another took up the long celebration of the hour. At first, Alice had latched on to this irregularity as something she might exploit. Now, she’d come to enjoy it. Ten o’clock and she spilled the purple-stained paper bag of hellebore berries into an engraved white retort from her portmanteau. Ten o’clock and she muttered the spell, and smiled as she watched them fatten and turn a glossy, appetising sugar-red. Ten o’clock, and she put on her sleek olivine coat and checked her face for the last time in her mirror and smiled at the renewed firmness of her jaw.