The House of Storms (2 page)

Invercombe by then was half-ruined and seriously undermined by the swell of the sea at the cliffs beneath its foundations, but Greatmaster Porrett threw himself wholeheartedly into its repair. There were century-old records which Alice had studied recording how Invercombe’s roof was remade, its generators repaired, and the re-establishing of its terraces, and of many gardens newly landscaped. Greatmaster Porrett even shaped an ugly transmission house into the battlements of a folly-castle so as not to spoil the view. All, to Alice’s mind, a strange amount of effort to put in as a mere life tenant, but Porrett’s most extraordinary improvement was a weathertop, the brassy dome of which she could now see placed like a squat lighthouse atop a brick tower on the south side of the hill above the water race. On the decks of sail-bearing craft, master mariners employed such devices to make the best of the winds, but the idea of a landlocked device to control the climate of an entire valley struck her as ambitious in the extreme.

The car swished to a halt on a semi-circular sweep of mossy gravel. With the quick eye of one who has long grown used to new arrivals, Alice appraised the tall windows and chimneys, the elegant gables, the stone-chased intricacies of glass. The house was even prettier than she’d imagined.

Signalling the driver to wait and glancing at her wrist-watch—it was quarter to eight—she strode up to the front door and pulled the bellchain. She’d sent word a shifterm or so ago that she and Ralph were coming, but, as was her usual practice, she’d hadn’t mentioned the exact time and date. Normally at this point the shocked face of some half-dressed maid would poke around the door. In the years since she had married Great-grandmaster Tom Meynell, she had made it one of her many small personal crusades to ensure that all the properties their guild owned were properly maintained. That, indeed, was why Invercombe had first come to her attention. A relatively small estate, but the rows of figures beside it had indicated that it was sucking in money. It was that landlocked weathertop, which, it was explained to her, was too powerful to be fully decommissioned without ruinous expense. For whatever reason, for that odd device, or for a situation which seemed to guard the Bristol Channel, or for the sense of a story which she didn’t fully know, Alice had decided against condemning the place. And now she was standing at its door and Ralph was getting cold in the car and nothing was happening as the weathertop’s greenish-gold dome glowed through the bare trees. She sighed and kneaded a twitch beneath her right eye. She was about to pull the bellchain again when she heard, or rather, sensed, a presence behind her. Slowly, she turned, fully expecting to find nothing but the illusions of her own tiredness. But a large Negro woman stood there.

‘Welcome to Invercombe, greatgrandmistress,’ she said, and made a curtsey. ‘I’m Cissy Dunning, steward of this house…’

T
HE FIRST PRIORITY, ALWAYS, WAS RALPH.
She found him the best and the airiest room, fitted with barely used but century-old furniture and fine, sound-looking wood panelling. Even to Alice’s eyes, the green and gold four-poster bed’s huge mattress looked reasonably hygienic, and there were French windows to a southwest balcony with no appreciable draughts overlooking the fine gardens, and a decent fire already crackling in the grate.

She found a comfortable couch and had it shifted into Ralph’s room as somewhere for her to rest and, if need be, spend the nights. Everything had to be checked, moved, aired, settled, sorted, explained, organised. Not just hours of it, but days. But the steward seemed capable and was difficult to fluster, even if she was female and a Negro, and her staff seemed to know their work, although there was no detectable sign of any change to the frigid weather engendered by that weathertop. And those
accents.
Little aspects of their manner and clothing, and the odd, faint taste to the water, which was strangely pleasant, and even seemed to enhance the flavour of her tea. Nothing was quite the same here, and Alice almost hoped to find some severe flaw in Invercombe’s outward efficiency so that she could impose herself more easily on the people who ran it.

‘Well? What do you think?’

She was sitting on the side of Ralph’s bed. It was mid-morning, Eightshiftday, the fourth day since their arrival, and the fire was gently sparkling. All the ordinary and necessary events which she had stipulated had seemingly taken place, and she was in the odd situation of finding that there was little that she needed to attend to. Outside, although they got the best of the light here, it was yet another grey day.

Ralph smiled. He was sitting up, almost fully dressed, and he’d slept through his third good night. ‘I like it here. I like the feel of the air. When will you let me explore?’

‘Soon enough.’ Exulted, she gave his hand a squeeze. ‘But we mustn’t rush. Only two shifterms ago …’ That damn London air. Ralph muttering that his bones were burning. Even now, some of that weakness was still lingering. She leaned over and kissed his cheek, feeling the give of that new down. She smiled and sat back from him. ‘I’ll get you your books.’

Although many of the things she’d initially asked to be posted on from London had arrived, the textbooks through which she’d overseen Ralph’s education hadn’t. But long-dead Greatmaster Porrett had seemed to anticipate Ralph’s needs in the surprisingly well-stocked library. The books were old, but, breaking open their pristine spines, Alice had concluded that little of importance had been added to the sum of human knowledge throughout this Age. Studying the fine, hand-coloured prints of flowers, both natural and aether-engineered, with their detailed Latin descriptions, and the avalanching pictures of rocks, would stand Ralph in good stead when he began the proper work of his induction into the Telegraphers, although Alice had never understood this male need to catalogue.

‘Why are you smiling like that?’ he asked.

Planning ahead. Thinking
when
instead of
if.
‘I’m just happy that you’re happy.’

He studied her suspiciously. ‘As long,’ there was an up-down quaver in his voice, ‘as you’re happy as well.’

‘Of course I am.’ The local doctor, a character named Foot, had already called on her with his busy little wife, and so had the Reverend-Highermaster Humphry Brown, the parish priest. Of course, she’d go to church on Noshiftday morning just like any other respectable guildsmistress, but over the years she’d heard the chant of too many prayers and spells. She understood the stages the mothers of consumptives went through. The frantic agony of first discovery was followed by willingness to go anywhere, to do
anything.
It was often years before the guilty realisation finally came that you were simply making your child suffer more. Yes, consumption sometimes faded, but the only known way of alleviating it was rest and fresh air. Yet still you travelled and still you worried and still you paid in relentless pursuit of the finest kind of air, the purest form of rest. Your child’s crises and remissions became the star by which your entire life was navigated. In many cases, as Alice had seen in spa towns and sanatoriums across half of Europe, this pursuit lasted until the child’s death, or the mother’s infection with the same disease. But the impulse to come to Invercombe had been clear and irrevocable. She felt none of the usual doubts.

She plumped up an extra cushion to support a book on botany and left Ralph to his reading. In the corridor, she checked her watch. Already close to noon. Back in London, her husband Tom would be heading for lunch at his club. In that dense fug, which was like the London air outdoors but ten times multiplied, over red wine and snooker and endless courses of stodge, listening to the same lame jokes and smiling at the same weary faces in their high-backed chairs, much of the real work of the Great Guilds was done. She decided that she would telephone him there before he ate. But first she must make herself presentable.

She turned along the landing to her own room, which lay at right angles to Ralph’s, with windows opening to a balcony which hung giddily over the sweep of a large, secluded bay. Invercombe was disorientatingly full of such surprises, with odd angles in corridors and unexpected views of land or sea, and the house was positioned so close over the sea on this side that the damage its constant onrush was doing to the foundations scarcely bore thinking about, but it was all undeniably pleasant. She was even starting to wonder if, despite the continuing frigid air and flat grey skies, the odd comfort she felt here wasn’t some initial symptom of the weathertop’s awakening. She and Ralph had been greeted so calmly here, whereas in other places she’d experienced ridiculous fussing only to end up in beds which reeked of urine. Her suspicions of whatever it was that she suspected of Invercombe remained unfounded and unexplained.

Opening her balcony doors to the salt air, she shrugged off her green silk dress. Almost all her trunks had arrived now, and her clothes had been unwrapped and put away. Also here, a case of black lacquer set on the table beside the windows and glinting with the sea, was her gramophone. Setting the turntable spinning, she removed her earrings and waltzed, two and three, across the shining floor. She touched the steel locks of her portmanteau case and breathed the spell which triggered their release. Twin thunks—a mere emphasis of the music—and its sides unfolded on a velvet den. There was oil of bergamot from the sun-warmed sap of citrus trees. There were waxy distillation of ambergris, and special earths, and particulates of lead. Like a good wine, the contents were easily upset by travel, but as Alice unscrewed a bevelled jar of cold cream and dabbed a ball of lambswool to her face, she could feel that everything was already settling here at Invercombe. Scents of beeswax and almond and hints of rosewater mingled with the hissing sea as she turned two and three to the music in her chemise before the long mirrors of her wardrobes.

She studied herself left and right. The jaw, the neck, the profile and the timeless face and frame of a woman still entirely beautiful, if no longer quite young. Feet tiptoe light. Firm hips and bosom. Alice. Alice Meynell. Hair which had always been closer to silver than blonde, but which she could still afford to wear long. Clear, Classical forehead. Those wide-spaced blue eyes. All a matter of luck, really. Mere human flesh hung on accidents of bone.

Humming, she extracted her silver spirit lamp, struck a taper to its wick, and wiped a glass chalice with white linen. The record was clicking in its groove. Setting it playing again, then the chalice warming above the spirit lamp’s gentle heat, she added oils, dashes of spirit, tinctures and balms, then Grecian honey. Stirred with a spoon of whale ivory, the resulting goo gained a frothy lightness which made it especially receptive to the final ingredient, which was aether of the purest charm. Still humming, dancing, and lifting out a small vial from the magic depths of her portmanteau, she whispered the part of the spell which caused its wyrelight to brighten, then squeezed the pipette and wafted the glowing tube towards the waiting chalice. Now, in a fluting voice, she chanted the main verses of her spell; sounds which she had refined with the avidity of the most dedicated steamaster. A pulse of darkness. Her song ended. The droplet fell. The potion was energised.

Sitting down at her dressing table, Alice kneaded her cheeks. Then she dabbed her fingertips into the preparation and began, always working upwards, to work it into the skin of her face. The sensation was tinglingly pleasant. Crackle, crackle, went the gramophone from the end of its song, joining with the faint hiss of the tide against the cliffs far below and all the rush of life which had brought her here to this moment, to this spell, to this place. She flexed her lips and blinked at the mirror. Then she worked on her neck and shoulders, and circled lightly across her arms and towards the scoop of her breasts, although there were other magics for the body.

There. She smiled more openly back at herself, completing the picture she wanted her husband Tom to see when she telephoned him. A hint of blue above the eyes, a dash of black across the lashes, then she cleaned her tools and closed her portmanteau and whispered the phrase which froze its twin locks. In every way, she felt refreshed. Amid its many other benefits, the practice of magic was far better than a good night’s rest. She lifted her green dress back off its hanger and gauged, with a quick sniff, that it had absorbed just the right proportion of her personal scent. The record still crackled, and she realised that she was humming along as if it were still playing a tune. In fact—she cocked her head. What exactly had she been humming? It was dangerous, in any case, to murmur so carelessly when you were working with aether and the room, as she looked around, seemed caught in a stage of arrested movement. Hiss, crackle, the sound of the waves. As if, for one moment, the entire house had been breathing.

Realising that she hadn’t replaced her earrings, she leaned before the dressing table to push the gold posts through the lobe of each ear. Then something terrible happened. As she studied herself and the bright scrutiny of the coastal light fell once again across her face, Alice noticed for the first time in her life that she was developing jowls on each side of her previously perfect jawline.

The telephone booth beneath the best stairs in Invercombe’s inner hall was a small red-plush construction topped with a domed brass bell which looked as if it had been polished far more times than it had ever rang. It was part of the history of the house and her guild’s own experiments, and certainly the earliest model Alice had even seen, although the booth inside was pleasant enough, for all that it was antique. Sitting down, she was confronted by a mirror, but in the softer downward glow of an electric bulb, she could almost tell herself that she hadn’t seen what she had seen upstairs.

The bulb dimmed, and she felt the usual familiar give-and-pull resistance as she closed the connector and dialled the number of Tom’s club with the pivoted brass post. Relays engaged through hidden cables which, buried below ground here so as not to spoil the beauty of Invercombe’s grounds, broadened at that folly transmission house to head on towards the pulse and throb of a clearinghouse reckoning engine. She gazed at the mirror and felt something shiver, a break in reality. Her face dissolved, and then even the glass itself faded—or rather
widened
—and exhaled a mingled rush of male voices. She felt the sting of cigar smoke and heard the faint roar of London traffic; the portal to London was fully open.