The House of Storms (19 page)

As usual, she was right, and whilst Ralph struggled with the distractions of Marion’s body and the afternoon beat down on them, they considered
Mutual Selection
and
Species Change
and then
Species Development
and then
Habitual Development
and finally
Habitual Adaptation,
which still didn’t seem quite right, but was at least clever in the way it played on the mean-
W&
of both habit and habitat. So Habitual Adaptation it was, and at last there was a faint haze of cloud over the cliff top towards the chimneys of Invercombe, although Ralph’s thoughts were too distracted now by the shining divide of Marion’s breasts. His fingers traced the silky flesh. Her ribs rose and fell as she chuckled and her nipples tautened as she half-heartedly pushed him away. A shiver of breeze nudged their boat. He kissed her shoulder. She tasted bitter-sweet. Of oranges.

‘Don’t you sometimes worry,’ she murmured, her face so close to his that she was a lovely blur, ‘that we’re being greedy?’

But all he wanted to do now was run his tongue around her ear. Was everything he was feeling merely base instinct? Was the joy he felt now that she’d assured him it was safe for him to come inside her merely a tingling of nerves? Nature was nature, and they were part of it, here and now, and why would they ever want to escape?

It was just possible, they discovered, although hardly comfortable, to make love in a small boat. It was partly comical as they worried about splinters, yet wonderful as well as Marion drew up her legs and the sky darkened and the sea gasped and shuddered as he entered her and the boat rocked and the air moved warm and chill across his back.

Ralph lay beside Marion when they had finished. An oar pressed against his thigh and he was stuck with pieces of pith, and the sky was almost black as a new breeze hollowed Clarence Cove. Habitual Adaptation. It would have to do. In fact, as Marion’s salty, orangey scent mingled with that of the storm and the first raindrops struck his skin, it was the only thing in his world which didn’t seem entirely perfect.

Refreshed by her virtual journey through sea and sunlight and the cool of Invercombe’s caves, Alice returned to the Bristol halls of the Guild of Telegraphers and the heat of the afternoon, but decided, as a further refinement, to attempt to delay the moment of re-entering her physical self. It proved easier than she imagined to simply hover there in the glass amid the booth’s humid brass and leather. She studied the seated form of Great-grandmistress Alice Meynell. The fine architecture of throat and neck. Blue eyes which were cool and warm and unflinching even as they gazed into the booth’s mirror, which she saw, with a shock of both surprise and understanding, was entirely empty. Alice drifted, observed. Yes, she was beautiful. Even that slight sagging of the cheeks had been entirely banished this summer. But an odd thing was happening. How could it be, in this draughtless booth, that a few silvered wisps of her hair could be seen to stir? Passing and repassing herself, she tried to make it happen again. Fine as smoke, the strands drifted to her invisible will. A further effort, although it was nothing more really than the realisation that such a thing might be possible, and Alice saw, hovering as if drawn in palest reflection from the silvered shadows within the mirror, the ghost shapes of her own hands. As she turned them, admired, the smile on Alice Meynell’s face grew yet more lovely and enigmatic.

T
OM HAD ESCAPED LONDON’S HEAT
to spend a few last listless days beside the sea at their great estate of Walcote when Alice finally came to visit him. After all his recent discoveries, it was a moment he’d been dreading, but had also been longing for. She arrived in a long green car which she drove herself, and she felt as lightly beautiful as ever as she embraced him at the top of the marble steps, linen-fresh from her journey as no one else could possibly be. It really was as if nothing had changed and she was just as she’d always been, but everything was different and he was sure he knew it meant the end of him when, later on in the red splendour of the westerly hall, she bore in a tray of cakes.

‘Try these, darling. I think we’re really getting somewhere. Even the glaze and those candied fruits contain absolutely no sugar.’

Tom looked at her as she perched on the chaise lounge. He longed to mention those papers—the papers they both knew he hadn’t signed—but it was still beyond him.

‘Well? Doubting Thomas—aren’t you going to at least try them?’

Will you as well?
The question blocked his throat. And she was so bright, so beautiful. He realised that he loved her still. Loved, when he should have hated. That was the worst thing of all.

‘Later, darling, and if there’s time, I’ll show you how our plans for the first bittersweet processing plant are going. There’s a partition in the reckoning engines which I’ve had set aside especially to recreate a three-dimensional version of the finished design. You can dial its number from any telephone booth and wander the place as if it’s already made.’

This project, he wanted to tell her, had never been what all of this was about. It was about love, and about their lives and lies. Had she come to his father in Walcote bearing something like these miraculous cakes—was that how he’d died? Tom still really had no idea of how much he knew of the truth. There was Master Pike, for example, a decent man by all accounts for all that they’d been adversaries, and that fashionable widow in Bristol, and people in Dudley and Lichfield. It seemed too much—too rich—like these cakes, but part of him now understood why she had done all of these things. For Alice only ever did what was entirely logical and necessary. Giving her body for money—well, that was always a shame upon the man rather than the girl, to his mind. Even killing his father; Tom could rationalise that as well. After all, the man had been a block to her progress, just as he himself had become now. Something had to give, and he understood it would never be Alice. But why, the thought kept coming back to him, had she had to kill poor, sweet Jackie Brumby? What crime had she committed, other than sharing his bed long before he and Alice had even met?

‘These cakes are just the start. But I was thinking, darling, we could have a bittersweet party.’ Her laugh was unchanged. ‘Now,
there’s
a phrase to conjure with! We might just set a trend.’

The
we,
Tom felt sure, was the we of their guild, to which she was entirely dedicated, rather than of the couple he’d once thought them to be. But she was making it easy for him now, with these cakes in all their glistening sweetness. She was avoiding all unpleasantness, and being entirely herself. Tom selected the cake which seemed most familiar to him, the one with a cherry and white icing of a type which he’d enjoyed as a child. He bit through soft layers and chewed and pushed the cherry around his mouth and gazed back at his lovely wife. There was nothing but melting sweetness, but as he swallowed there seemed an odd tang.

‘Try another. I’m told these vanilla slices are a great success, although they’re really not my cup of tea.’

Dutifully, Tom ate everything she suggested, and each time his mouth flooded with anticipatory saliva, although his heart and stomach remained hollow, and when he’d finished he was surprised to find that he was able to stand up and follow Alice back down the crisply echoing corridors when she announced that she had things which needed doing back in London. He walked her down the sweeping steps of Walcote and heard the sounds, distant seas, of splashing fountains and his feet on the gravel, and hugged his wife tight and hard, twisting his mouth from her offered cheek to the greater softness of her lips.

‘Are you all right, darling? Are you sure nothing’s worrying you?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

He stood on the drive long after her car vanished beyond the first silver line of perilinden trees. That bitterness was still in his mouth. It was there in the morning as well, when he awoke surprised and also somewhat disappointed to find himself still alive. But even without Alice’s help, he realised the man he was couldn’t possibly function in this world. What was to be done, he supposed, was the business which he’d read about in books called
putting one’s affairs into order.
Once he’d sorted through his desk, though, and given each of his personal servants a necktie, there didn’t seem much else to do. Life and responsibility seemed such a small thing, once you started casting it aside.

The weather was hot, and Tom took to riding the fine unicorns and sleek horses from Walcote’s stables harder than he had ever ridden them before. He rode recklessly beneath the low boughs of forests. He leapt hedges and brooks. Still, he survived. Visiting the tree in the estate where his father had been found contorted, presumed at first to have died in a fall from his horse, and then from some embolism of the brain, he discovered a nearby gravestone commemorating the body of Greatgrandmistress Sarah Swalecliffe-Passington and the unicorn she’d loved to ride. Both the Passingtons and the Swalecliffes were his predecessors in rank, if not direct relatives, and he knew the story of how Sarah’s father had committed suicide by walking into the cage of the hunt dragon when his guild’s bankruptcy became apparent. It had always seemed to Tom that there was a nobility in that act. He even considered repeating it, but the cage would have to be put up and the dragon ordered out of season, and what message, apart from his own madness, would such an exploit send?

Tom knew he should speak properly to his son, but whenever they had faced each other on the telephone, he could only ask stupid questions about Invercombe’s wondrous weather. He couldn’t tell Ralph about Alice; she was still his mother, who’d cared for him and given him life, and in their combined hands lay the future of his beloved guild. He couldn’t talk to the lad about love, either, for what the hell did he know about that? Ralph, in any case, seemed to be at least as obsessed with this theory of his as he was with that pretty young shore-girl, which was surely a misplaced priority.

It was when he was out riding and had stopped at the graveyard of Saltfleetby’s local church that the idea finally struck him. He’d hoped to find Jackie’s tomb, but he had no idea where she lay, and, thinking how the dead so easily outnumbered the living, he’d simply been wandering amid the smaller tombstones when he noticed two names etched in the stark sunlight. JOHN AND ELIZA TURNER, who’d both died before his Age of Light had even begun, but had lived a decent number of years. He didn’t recognise the seal of their guild, but the inscription as he parted the grass described Eliza as
a decent guildsmistress
and John as
a master ringwright.
Tom wasn’t sure what being a ringwright would involve, other than that it would be the respectable work of one of the simpler guilds, but as he stood up and surveyed the peaceful dead, and thought how easily people forgot what was really important in their lives until it was too late, Tom knew exactly what message he would send to his son. He remounted and rode briskly on towards Folkestone beach. It was shimmeringly empty up-shore from the beach huts and the afternoon had grown so hot that he had to wrap his hands with a handkerchief as he went picking up a dozen smooth stones.

Back in London next day, the heat was even more intense. The streets smoked and the cables of his guild buzzed and glowed between the buildings with all the traffic of commerce. He knew now what it meant to put one’s affairs into order. He had the papers he’d destroyed—which authorised Alice’s plans—reprinted and resealed, and delivered to his townhouse by puzzled lawyers in the sour heat of the evening. After he’d signed them, which he was determined would be his last act as greatguildsmaster, he noted with pleasure that the last of the bitterness had gone from his mouth.

Dismissing all his servants, he retired to his bedroom and drew up the sash windows to let in the dead air. The sky hung low and blank, and pulsed bright then dark with the circling of Hallam Tower. A storm was surely brewing, and the house lay quiet as he sat on the edge of his bed and stared at his open bedroom door whilst the dark hours slid by until finally, as the air above London stirred and cooled with incipient rain, the shape he loved and awaited began to form.

T
HAT SHIFTERM, THE WEATHER
was developing a will of its own. Weatherman Ayres had noted his readings and examined the daily reports of the Bristol Meteorographic Office and scanned the forecasts in the newspapers, although that was mainly so he could chuckle over them. Mostly, and like any good weatherman, he felt it in his bones. He’d taken in his blackboard for the season—for the weather could be deflected, encouraged, even slightly delayed, but it should never be confronted, and there was no point in making promises you couldn’t keep.

What was coming was far bigger than anything of his conjuring. He’d pictured huge banks of cloud churning up over the mid-Boreal Ocean, and had sought news of
Proserpine,
and the processes of her fitting and loading. Then came the evening when the storm reached its arms this far from the Antillian Sea and he stood out in the electric dark on the weathertop’s outer gantry as the weather front poured in across the south of England. His skin bristled, but he knew his weather-top was earthed and aethered like nothing else in Elder’s kingdom. There was no safer place for him to be standing.

His feelings about Invercombe were now tinged with the sad and happy expectation that he and Cissy would soon be leaving. After all, they were no spring chickens, and, now that they’d finally admitted to all the years they’d wasted in avoiding their feelings, it seemed the only sensible thing to do. There was a feeling, as well, that this summer was unrepeatable. Many times, Cissy had commented on how perfectly the house had run itself in recent months. The bath water always ran hot. The floors all shone. The linen was whiter, the pans brighter—every task was easier than it had any right to be, and Weatherman Ayres had had the same feeling up here in his weathertop. Levers you tried to pull the wrong way resisted, then slid in the other direction like knives through warm oil. That time when the lad Ralph had been ill, the anemometry wheels had almost taken his hands off in their eagerness to turn. But, whatever this storm was now, he urged the
Proserpine
to ride the clear breezes of her aftermath towards England for her unloading. Not that they hadn’t saved, but even Cissy, who always bridled at the prospect of a big delivery taking place near Invercombe, admitted that it would be nice to have the extra cash.