The House of Storms Page 8

  His strength was gaining. As long as he took his time, he scarcely felt any of his old breathlessness these days. This, he decided as his new patent shoes creaked down through the valley in the fading brilliance of the late afternoon, must be exactly what being well feels like. The absence of any significant ache in his chest or head or limbs was almost eerie—it was as if he’d left something vital behind. Vistas he’d previously only witnessed foreshortened through the lens of his telescope revealed themselves amid all the scents and murmurings of evening which even the finest optics could never convey.

  The lemons were yellowing, and oranges were oranging, wafting their sweetly bitter odour from the citrus grove. And there were poppies pyre, already. He cupped his hands around their petals to feel their slow warmth. It was quite impossible to tell here where nature ended and artifice—and then magic—began. The sensation, after the orderliness of his books, was giddying. The garden continued descending. He was into a territory as unfamiliar in its own way as that which he would soon have to face back at the house, but one he found much more inviting. He was beyond reach of the sunlight, which now glowed only on the weathertop and the varied greens of the specimen trees which climbed towards Durnock Head, and the air felt cool and green. He imagined the aeons it must have taken to form this valley. Water crashing down and down. He could almost see and hear it happening. His thoughts unravelled so much better out here than they did when he was reading books.

  Beyond the parterres, the garden continued descending. It was as if he’d already stepped down into deep, still water even before he glimpsed the dark gleam of the stew pool beyond a turn in the pathway. Then there was movement on its far side; a concentration of the twilight, a shifting of the grey. His mother was out walking, although in a fur coat he’d never seen her in before, and which would surely be ridiculously warm on an evening such as this. Still, he felt grateful for her presence, and yet suddenly somewhat alone. He opened his mouth to call to her, but at that moment one of his previously obedient feet chose to miss a step. He tumbled forward, skidding his hands and dirtying his shirt on the mossy path.

  The jarring taste of shock still filled his head as he climbed back to his feet, and his mother had already gone from sight. It was probably time to get back up to the house in any event; face the people. The whole sky seemed to pulse and glow—a darker, bigger weathertop—as he made his ascent.

  ‘Ralph? Darling …’ His mother’s shape emerged from the statuary. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere.’ She wafted over in a beautiful green dress. ‘And look at you.’ Plucking a globe of moonivy from a wall, she raised its soft light to inspect him.

  Ralph saw the smears of moss across his shirtfront. ‘I’m sorry—it’s just that I saw you from across that big pool a few minutes ago. When you were out walking… In that fur coat…’

  ‘Fur coat What are you talking about, darling? As if I’ve got time to be wandering about the gardens on this of all days. I should never have let you shave on your own. You’ve got a couple of specks of blood. Hold steady.’ She said something; less words than a splashing of the fountain. ‘That’s better.’ And then again, her hand on his shirtfront, and the moonivy gave an extra pulse of light. Once again, his shirt was stainless.

  ‘The guests are here. You really do look the part, I just wish you hadn’t chosen this of all evenings to decide to do your exploring …’

  The west parlour was lit by numerous candles which doors open to the faintly gleaming garden barely stirred.

  ‘Her death was so, so sudden.’ Doctress Foot, a small, busy woman, with a mind far livelier than her husband’s, put down her spoon. Her fingers toyed with a lustrous beetle brooch. ‘Celia was the sort of person I always missed when she wasn’t there.’

  ‘I seriously thought of coming to the funeral myself,’ Alice said as she signalled for the soup plates to be taken away. ‘Of course, we’d met. And I did feel an immediate affinity with poor Celia, and felt that we might have become friends. But I feared that to attend her funeral might have seemed…’ She considered her choice of word. ‘… presumptuous.’

  ‘And how are you finding the west, Greatgrandmistress?’ Enforcer Cornelius Scutt, resplendent in the blue and braid of his dress uniform and smelling somewhat of mothballs, enquired.

  ‘I’m not sure that I have found it. Or at least, not until tonight. With you, my friends, and here.’ She raised her glass, touched it to her lips. ‘I suppose I do still find the use of bondsmen which you espouse a little …’ She tilted her head. ‘… unusual.’

  ‘Your presence,’ said Enforcer Scutt, who could scarcely draw his rheumy eyes from her, ‘is more than ever welcome here in the west, Greatgrandmistress. It will help save us from the ill-founded criticisms which emanate all too easily from London and the east. People who have never visited and do not understand the colonies …’

  ‘Oh, I do realise,’ Alice said, ‘that bonding provides work and security for many who would otherwise live as mere savages…’ Through the sorbet and on into the pate, she continued to enumerate the arguments in favour of the custom she’d always thought of as pure slavery. But there was the undeniable economic need for sugar and cotton, and the labour-intensive methods which were required to produce them, whilst even the Bible acknowledged slavery as a necessary condition of mankind. And were we not all, in one way or another, bound inescapably by birth and circumstance to our role? She aimed the last question at Steward Dunning, who had come in to help supervise the changing of the table’s arrangements which the serving of lobster entailed.

  ‘Well, yes, Greatgrandmistress. Although it’s hardly for me to say …’ The steward retreated, her true opinions kept well beneath the surface, and Alice, who’d feared that her approach on the subject had been too subtle, felt sure that she had made her point. The fact was that westerners, even the freed Negroes, were instinctively defensive about bonding.

  The main course was duck, prepared over many days to cook’s special recipe. Tasting the delicate flavours and most probably illicit spices, Alice would have liked to have raised the small trade, had she not tried it before, and had seen the poor effect it had. Not even Enforcer Scutt, who was supposedly in charge of preventing it and was now studying her cleavage, was remotely comfortable on the subject.

  ‘I never realised before I came here,’ she said instead, moving on towards what she imagined was a lighter topic, ‘that Invercombe was surrounded with so many tales and superstitions. It’s almost as if the house recruited them. Although I must confess I haven’t seen any ghosts yet.’

  ‘Oh, but there is a ghost,’ said Grandmistress Lee-Lawnswood-Taylor, who was predictably over-dressed in red tulle, and was drinking her wine with a restrained avidity which, along with the barely-disguised threads of broken capillaries on her nose and cheeks, Alice had noted before. ‘Not that I should presume to say …’

  ‘Please. I’m most interested. Do go on.’

  ‘Well, it’s said that you can sometimes see the guildswoman Greatmaster Porrett was betrothed to wandering the grounds.’

  ‘Really? You mean that grandmistress he never married? But I thought she never came here. Isn’t that correct?’ They all seemed to be taking this far more seriously than Alice had intended. ‘Isn’t that the whole point?’

  ‘I think,’ Enforcer Scutt breathed to her right, ‘that that is supposed to be the whole point.’

  ‘How charming—you mean the ghost of someone who never actually came to Invercombe haunts this place!’ This time, just as she had for most of the meal, Alice avoided the enforcer’s rheumy gaze. With men like him, there was no need for conscious flirting. In fact, it would be self-defeating when she knew she already had him in her hands. ‘In London, our ghosts are all…’ She paused, genuinely searching, for once, for a phrase. She looked for assistance towards Ralph who sat at the far end of the table and seemingly at the edge of the darkness beyond the candelabra. She’d been paying him far too little attention tonight, and he seemed pa
le. ‘My son Ralph here, with all his considerable knowledge of the sciences, could perhaps offer an explanation. Couldn’t you, darling?’

  ‘I would imagine,’ Ralph said, in a voice so slow and yet oddly emphatic that she wondered how much he’d drank of the wine, ‘that ghosts, if they had to exist at all would exist, of necessity, outside what we think of as time.’

  ‘Really, dear?’ It was as if he was contradicting her, although she had no idea how or why. ‘I’d have thought, with all your knowledge of the natural world and your logical bent that you’d have—’

  ‘Or perhaps a house can be haunted as easily by things which have yet to happen as by those which already have. From what I understand of its history, Invercombe has experienced nothing more remarkable or unfortunate than many another house. And yet…’ Ralph blinked as if surprised by his own words. His face seemed as transparent as the flames which hovered over the table between them. His wide, white forehead glinted with a bony sheen. Yet, with these doors open, it was still pleasantly cool in here. The night weather, just as Weatherman Ayres had promised, was perfect, and Alice had planned a promenade along one of the garden’s many walks after dinner, but now she felt the first twinge of alarm about her son. Was Ralph simply tired? Was he just drunk? And why on earth had he been dirtying his best clothes by running about in the garden? His gaze, red-rimmed, and not quite seeming to focus, wandered the table, settling at first on the full red wine glasses, then followed the movements of a dark-haired maid who was clearing away the sauce-smeared plates. It was some moments before Alice recognised her as the girl she had encountered on the shore. Steward Dunning had done a good job; she now moved with the sort of grace you could never train into a maid if it wasn’t there already. And she was a shapely enough thing, too. Pretty, even. Ralph, Alice saw, was still watching the space by the door even when she left the room, and she felt a small surge of relief. Perhaps he wasn’t ill. Perhaps there was a simpler, easier explanation. The meal moved on. With the admittedly excellent food and wine—for cook really had excelled herself—the guests grew more voluble. These people, Alice thought, only talked about London as somewhere they visited, marvelled at, left. With the many things they would and wouldn’t discuss, and the way they ate and drank and the accent and the thinly educated veneer of their voices, they seemed to her essentially clumsy and naive. Alice had heard from Tom this very morning that Pikes had won the first round of court cases in London, and it was in Bristol that the recalcitrant contractors had their main office: of course it was. That explained so much to her now.

  The lime sorbets produced from Invercombe’s own fruit were sprinkled with a thin, chive-like herb she’d never encountered before. It was called bittersweet, and cook grew it in cold corners of the gardens because Invercombe’s balmy weather was otherwise much too mild. Sharp, irresistible sweetness flooded Alice’s mouth. She’d lost track of the conversation, and Ralph was now actually holding forth with some vehemence.

  ‘But if the Lord made the earth for mankind,’ the Reverend-Highermaster Brown then purred in denial of whatever her son had been saying, ‘why would he leave it desolate and unpopulated for all those thousands of years. Granted that current thought acknowledges that the seven days of creation may not be days in our modern understanding of shiftdays—’

  ‘Don’t you see!’ Ralph’s unsteady gaze swept the table. ‘The universe isn’t like that. We must step aside from our natural desire to place ourselves at the centre of all creation and accept the simple evidence of our senses. The natural world has changed immeasurably. How, otherwise, do you explain the clear imprints which have been found in rocks of species of plants and even of animals quite unlike those we know of now?’

  ‘Look—you have, may I say so, a point.’ Doctress Foot, who’d been quiet for most of the meal, suddenly spoke. ‘Indeed, I always say, don’t I,’ wavering, she inclined her small head towards her husband, ‘that my own small studies of the world of insects, small though they are, do show—’

  ‘But those are just beetles, my darling. It’s an interesting hobby for a guildslady and so forth, but they hardly count as evidence of anything. Permit me—’ Doctor Foot leaned forward past his wife ‘—to explain, young master. All of England was once inundated. There were probably swamps where we are now—a wild and uninhabited landscape beyond the small, fertile area which the Bible terms the Garden of Eden, and modern scholars have located within the fertile crescent of the lands of Araby. There may have been tropical birds flying above the very air where we sit. Quite possibly, hippos—’

  ‘But where did those birds come from? Why do they have wings? How did they learn how to fly?

  ‘I’m sure their mothers taught them to do so just as any good mother would. Isn’t that so, Greatgrandmistress?’ the Reverend-Highermaster Brown put in, and was swivelling his irritatingly benign gaze towards Alice when a barking laugh drew it back to Ralph.

  ‘And where does this air come from? Can you tell me that? Was it all made just so for us, and then left never to change?’ Ralph’s own breathing, Alice couldn’t help noticing with gaining alarm, was quick and shallow. ‘What about the sun, eh? The stars? Were they all just plonked around the heavens like ornaments on a shelf to make the sky look pretty by—by the hand of a supposed God?’

  That supposed rang awkwardly in the air. In this company, you did not question the existence of the Elder, whose Son himself had been a member of the guilds; firstly of the Carpenters, and then of the Fishermen. Still, if she put an end to matters now and got Ralph reasonably quickly up to bed, the guests would all pretend that, like their stupid superstitions and rampant smuggling, they hadn’t noticed.

  ‘I think you should go upstairs now, dear.’ Alice knew she was treating Ralph like a child again, when the whole point of this gathering had been that he wasn’t. Still, he nodded and obediently raked back his chair and stood up. He coughed, swaying slightly, and wiped his mouth, a wet comma of hair clinging to his forehead. Then he swayed again, and leaned forward against the table, his splaying hands bunching the cloth, rattling glasses and condiments. Alice jumped up and moved swiftly towards him. This was worse than she’d feared, but still, as she caught his arm and saw the starbursts of red which had flecked across the table, she thought at first that they were spillages of wine, not blood.

  VII

  RALPH WAS SURE he would soon have won his argument. Even as he was helped from the west parlour, he felt a sense of exultation. He was sure, as he was peeled from his jacket and unwound from his tie and cummerbund, that he was entering a new and certain world. His ears were singing and his head was spinning, but he could almost smile up at the faces of his opponents in logic as they came and went around the huge green and gold fortress of his four-poster bed.

  ‘I always bring my bag with me, Mistress. A few potentially useful medicaments …’

  ‘Then get it.’ His mother’s voice was unusually harsh.

  Time hung around him. He smelled the silk of his mother’s dress.

  ‘I’ll get you your painstones, darling.’

  Ralph felt pleasantly lazy, lying here. Moving shadows and the voice of Doctor Foot returned. Rough, disconnected hands touched his face, then hooked into his mouth and opened his eyes. Then came the cold, familiar touch of a stethoscope on his chest, although this one seemed to be some innovative device, which was sucking out air. Bucking, coughing, he fought against it.

  ‘Definite signs of toxaemia, Greatgrandmistress. No, no. I wouldn’t use that painstone …’ He felt his palm being prised open. ‘… the spells might conflict.’

  He smelled the doctor’s bag. He was falling towards its syrupy comforts as it opened. Endless bottles were nodding their tall cork heads and twisting their thin blueglass necks as they fluttered around him. Then something brimmed against his lips, and a sticky spillage spread dark roots across the snowfalls of his sheets.

  ‘It’s aethered?’ His mother’s voice. ‘A spell?’

  ‘I think that�
��s the minimum necessary.’ Doctor Foot cleared his throat. Brightness glowed into the twin moons of his eyeglasses. There was a faint rain of spittle, and Ralph felt some vapour stirring, roiling, climbing up his throat. His heart constricted. He had no energy to do so, but, once again, he was coughing. Then the spell was incanted again, and there came a kind of rest.

  He found himself beached in daylight, half hanging out of his bed. His books were stepped and waiting on a bright square of carpet. Coughing, he urged his hand to reach towards the embossed leather cover at the top of the nearest pile. The book flipped and skidded. He had no idea of its contents, but he craved the cool bliss of its numbered, annotated plates. The thing was impossibly heavy. Perhaps this was the Book of Knowledge from which all others were mere extracts, its pages made from the pulped wood of that tree in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps he would soon see Eve.

  Waiting for another wave of sick weariness to break and expend itself over him, Ralph finally lifted the book and prised open its cover. Then, pausing to regain his energies, he turned through pages of guild dedications and blank sheets towards the waiting truth. Insects? He smiled dizzyingly. Strange, really, that a book which encompassed everything should begin there. But every system of classification had its problems, as he knew only too well. So; Lepidoptera—butterflies. And why not? And, after all, and even in the book of everything, you had to start somewhere.

  ‘Ralph. You’re nearly falling out … And you shouldn’t be reading.’

  He was surprised at how easily his mother could move his body back to the middle of his bed. Then there were all the other things she did for him. Summons and instructions issued by her cool fingers to which his unthinking flesh responded. Cold air and rubber and porcelain. The shock of a sponge. And new sheets, new pyjamas. All he needed was that cummerbund and tie again.