The House of Storms Read online

  Outside, on her way to find Ralph on the south-west facing patio of the top terrace where he now liked to sit, she was amused to notice that it was barely half-past nine by the shadow which the sundial cast across the warm red brick of the wall above the main hall.

  At the sound of his mother’s footsteps, Ralph swung the circled image of his telescope away from the hectic stirring of a hedge where he had been watching the mating of a pair of sparrows and let the amplified gaze of his new possession, a genuine mariner’s optic which Weatherman Ayres had recently given him, focus on a silvered fringe of hair.

  ‘That’s not quite such a nice thing to do, darling. Looking at people as if they’re mere objects.’

  ‘No?’ Blinking, he removed his eye from the eyepiece.

  ‘Well. Never mind.’ Flicking back the rugs which covered his legs, his mother perched on the edge of his lounger. ‘Such a pain. I’ve got to see people in Bristol.’

  Ralph nodded. It was a different world out there beyond these gardens and his library. He thought of his father, of the smoky London smell which came with him down the lines as they talked on the telephone, and bought the tickly urge of a new bout of coughing.

  ‘I must be going.’ Standing up, she gently kissed him. Nothing ever touched her. She was always so new and fresh, and she looked lovely as ever to him today as she strode off along the sunlit terrace where the spilling heads of giant bluebells nodded in the breeze as if striking their stamens to join with the chiming of all the clocks inside the house.

  Alone again, he reapplied his eye to his telescope and drew the tripoded instrument in a blurring sweep across the valley. The air was astonishingly light, and this device, aligned and machined according to the principles of pure optics, was, Ralph thought as his gaze followed the gold-green stems of the lantern-flowers and the latescent globes of moonivy, probably the only unaethered object in all of Invercombe. He had arrived, he was sure, at a new state of clarity here. For that, and for his improving health, he was entirely grateful to this new house. Weary as he had been at first, the place had seemed just the termination of another journey, and, as always, an opportunity for more reading and research. Knowledge, certainty, science had long been his bulwarks against fever, and they were also the surest evidence he had that the world—the real one of which, between fusses with blankets and bath chairs and trunks and railway stations, he had seen so little—really existed.

  It had been maps which first drew Ralph. He had been an explorer as he retraced he and his mother’s journeys across the dotted frontiers of Europe, then the inland reaches of Africa and the white boundaries of the Ice Cradle until a fresh fever took and he fell into the Terra Incognita of nightmare. After that bout, he turned instead towards the natural world. Everything in life, he began to understand, was part of one intricate machine. The petals of a flower had their relationship with the pollinating bee which dwelt in its hive amid geometries which could also be found in the crystals of rocks. As he turned the sleek, heavy pages of the large expensive books his mother bought for him and peeled back hazy layers of protective tissue to gaze down at beautifully coloured and annotated plates, he often felt as if some real part of him had left his bed and was wandering an incredible garden. This escape, where everything could be studied and explained, was the exact opposite of his deliriums. Even his own body, the very illness which kept him weak, was part of this same pattern, and was thus neither wonderful nor terrible, but a simple truth. Primary pulmonary tuberculosis; it was there in the butterfly wings of the flayed lungs of its victims.

  Chaos—unreason—rather than his illness, became the thing to be kept at bay, and he hunted it down with the selfish rigour of an invalid. He soon threw aside the need of the hand of God the Elder to wind the mechanism which drove every deed of nature, and with it the Biblical idea of a primal garden where every species and genus had once supposedly thrived. To him, Eden now existed only as a jumbled myth which was entirely inappropriate to this Age of Light, although the image of the first two humans, shy as fauns and naked even of their fig leaves, was somehow harder to erase. He still found himself gazing sometimes at old prints of Adam and Eve standing beside the fruit-burdened Tree of Knowledge. They were hairless in a way he knew, from veiled references in the appendices and footnotes of books on physiology, adult humans never were, although he’d never yet found any illustrations against which he could properly compare the things which were happening to his own body. They often possessed navels, too, which was surely wrong in the circumstances, and Eve also had breasts, and nipples which she didn’t always fully cover with a casually raised hand. Sometimes, between her legs, there was even the glimpse of a cleft. With his books put aside and the lights turned out and the fire flickering and the treacly darkness of spells and laudanum surging within him, she often still seemed to hang there before Ralph like the reproachful ghost of his lost beliefs. She sometimes even came to his bed to join him in an embrace as the sweet ache in his belly brought the friction of release.

  But now that he was at Invercombe, everything was clear. Here, and even though many of his precious books had gone missing in transit, he was provided with a library which was even better than the huge one at Walcote, the shelves of which were crowded with far too many novels and bound annual editions of society magazines for his taste. He’d known from the instant that he opened his first book on avian life here that it had never been opened before, let alone read. He was reminded of a distant memory of the time before his illness, and of being the first to walk across a white and seemingly infinite field of snow. True, the books at Invercombe were a little old, but Ralph knew that knowledge was unchanging. And there was an odd feeling—most unscientific, but still heartening—that these pages had been waiting for him, just as had this whole house. And he could tell that his mother was excited by Invercombe as well, with its antique reckoning engine still apparently functioning somewhere down in the bowels of the house he hadn’t yet reached, and its role in the development of his guild, and even a weathertop to keep the worst vagaries of the climate at bay. Something in him was healing by simply being here. Sometimes, heartbeat by heartbeat, breath by breath, new page by new page, Ralph could literally feel his body reknitting itself from disconnected islands of pain.

  To get downstairs to the library, and unaided, was surely much like the proposal which Guildsmaster Columbus had once presented to Queen Isabella about the fabled continents of Thule. There were, as he walked out from his bedroom for the first time into the swaying emptiness of the main landing, the same familiar landmarks sunk beyond the horizon, which tunnelled on in the wan light for as far as he could see. It took days of retreats and setbacks to get further, but to Ralph it all remained one seamless voyage. Just as he reached the turn which had seemed impossible at the start, there were new obstacles which no cartographer could have anticipated. Like the edge of the world, he found himself facing the vast fan of the best stairs. But he wasn’t deterred. Of course, there were murmurs of dissent from his mother, but Columbus had had the same from his crew. Stair by stair, he descended, until finally, more than a shifterm after he had first set out, Ralph found himself standing triumphant at the doorway of a library which was fully as beautiful as he had dared imagine.

  For several days, the very act of sitting there and being surrounded by those tiers of unopened spines was enough. But slowly, his sense of himself expanded to possess this marvellous room. And climbing from bed, getting dressed and then heading off along the gallery and down those stairs was Ralph’s equivalent of a long country walk. Sometimes his mother even let him set out alone, although he suspected that she hung back just out of sight in case he suffered a surge of dizziness. There was often this slight sense at Invercombe, in whispers, plays of shadow, the indrawn breath of the salt air, of being watched and followed.

  Guiding the telescope, Ralph’s circular gaze encompassed the thickening fruit of Invercombe’s citrus grove. He could almost smell the ripening oranges and lemons wh
ich the weathertop nourished with warmth in the garden’s most sheltered spot. Then up. Sometimes, he did that. Just let it fly and settle. Plants of incredible scent and power—red and white and green and purple, or all and none of those colours twirled together at once—glowed and frolicked from their beds. Previously, Ralph had had little concern for the wonders of plantsmasters’ art, but now he was filled with a new curiosity. After all, and no matter how far the final creation might deviate from its origins, each had its roots in some natural equivalent. Cedarstone, he imagined, must surely contain elements of the redwoods of Thule. Sallow might once have come from the common parsley, and perhaps then also the rock samphire. Then there were the creatures which arrived, special delivery, stamped and sealed Live Cargo, Addressee Only, from the offices of the Arthropod Branch of the Beastmasters’ Guild. Bees, flies and wasps were fine for commoner blooms, but when it came to the fiery tongues of the pyrepoppies, the trumpets of lanternflowers or fruiting moonivy, the insects of common creation simply weren’t up to the job. These giant insects, mammoth things, furred and tusked, gaudily striped, massively proboscised, were commonly known as buzzbugs.

  Ralph swung his vision across a blur of treetops. And here was a hedge, and some grass with the dew still glittering. Then something blue and white. Striped, in fact. Wondering what aethered extravagance he’d now alighted on, Ralph drew in the focus. The stripes became sharper, then vanished, then snapped into view again. Cotton; he could see the weave, and Ralph inched his telescope until he saw a boot, a hem, and that striped blue blouse again.

  It was one of the maids. The sudden movements, the extending of that crease across her blouse, were caused by her bending and straightening as she hung out washing. Bit by bit, circular image by image, he formed a picture of her. Dark hair, almost black, but catching in the sunlight with serrations of gold. It was full and thick, and cut to just below the shoulder, although he guessed from the repeated flash of her hand as she pushed it out of the way that she’d have wished it shorter. He couldn’t see her face—just the curve of her jaw and the glimpsed lobe of her ear which her hair quickly curtained again, but it was pleasant just to watch her. The items she was stabbing out on the line remained a white blur, but part of him sensed that it would be good to study them as well, discern their nature and stitching just as he had the criss-cross of those pinafore straps, and the sense you got of the shape of her shoulder blades moving beneath. But to concentrate on the washing would have meant losing focus on the girl herself. As another of Invercombe’s clocks started ringing, Ralph felt more and more of his consciousness passing from his blanket-shrouded body, down his telescope, riding the light.

  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.

  V

  THERE 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 thi
ngs 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.