The House of Storms (3 page)

A waiter leaned towards her from the distant booth to enquire to whom it was that she wished to speak, and she felt the breath of the door swinging shut as he went away, then heard the chuckle of a drink being poured—before her husband arrived and seated himself opposite her in the mirror.

‘I thought I’d find you here at the club, darling.’

‘You know me. Regular as clockwork.’ Tom’s tie, although doubtless recently reknotted, was already askew, and he smelled more of sweat than of eau de cologne. ‘How’s Ralph? I’ve been telling myself all shifterm that no news is good news, and you certainly seem to have taken enough stuff with you to that place—where is it? Inverglade?’

‘It’s
lnvercombe.
And I’ve scarcely taken anything.’ Alice looked playfully wounded as Tom gazed back at her with that familiar yearning look in his eyes. She needed his regard, especially after what she’d seen upstairs in the mirror of her vanity table. It was better than aether; a warm blaze. ‘Ralph’s settled in well. And I’m so glad we came here, even if I do miss you terribly.’

‘You were in London for such a short time. And you’ve been away so long.’ Tom’s smile almost faded.

‘Well, you know why. Needs must.’

‘Yes, yes. And Ralph—I do understand that London’s not the place for him.’

Tom gazed at her. He worked his lips. There were lines around his eyes now. He had Ralph’s thick black hair, but it was receding at the forehead and greying at the temples now, although his jaw had been a little saggy even when she’d first met him. It was so much easier for men to grow old gracefully.

‘Anyway, I’ve been missing you, darling.’ He flared his nostrils as he breathed her scent, and vague commotions and the clatter of a passing London tram touched Alice’s senses as she told Tom about Invercombe’s peculiarities: the steward of the house who was female, and Negro; the weathertop, of the effects of which she remained sceptical; the odd accents: and Ralph, who had slept well and was working his way through the surprisingly good library and nagging her about exploring the place.

‘That all sounds quite marvellous. I’m proud of you both. And tell Ralph … Tell him I’m proud of him, too. And that we’ll soon be spending a lot more time together. There are so many things I want to share with him, Alice.’

‘It’s been difficult for us both.’

‘And you seemed so gloomy when you left.’

‘But I’m not now.’

‘And you look …’

Alice, even though she hadn’t allowed her chin to droop, raised it a little further.

‘… quite marvellous, darling.’

Then they talked of business, and the news was hardly cheering. A construction contract was being delayed for supposedly technical reasons. Tom was all for allowing extra time for redesign, but Alice remained convinced they should pull out and take legal action.

‘Isn’t that a bit harsh?’

‘We have to be harsh. Wouldn’t they do the same to our guild?’

Tom nodded. He knew his own instincts were often too conciliatory, and relied upon Alice’s strength and advice. Then they said goodbye, and his image faded, and the mirror darkened, and she could feel—doors slamming in an unfelt wind—the relays closing on them all the way back to London. It was time for her to lift the connector, but for a few moments she left the line open, and the black space of the mirror seemed to widen. Looking into it now was almost like falling. With a little more effort, she felt sure she might be able to enter that space; travel along the lines as something incorporate and then emerge at some far other end. It was an idea, a risk, an experiment, which she’d long toyed with, and then always dismissed as both too ridiculous and dangerous. But what better place than here, the house, the telephone breathed to her, to try? After all, isn’t this where all this trickery with mirrors began? Releasing the connector, she sat back and watched herself reform in the glass of the booth’s mirror. Raising a hand to touch the tender flesh of the jawbone, she could feel that gravity, which pulled down mountains and rolled the moon across the sky, was clawing the flesh off her face.

Leaving the booth, pulling on a coat, Alice headed outside. It was even colder than she’d imagined. Trailing breath, she crossed the front courtyard and then the bridge which spanned the gorge-like cleft over the River Riddle, and followed the path which wound up through the pinetum towards a smell of smoke. Bald-headed, handlebar-moustached, gauntlet-gloved, Weatherman Ayres was dragging curling black masses of a form of cuckoo-plant she recognised as hellebore into the flames of a bonfire in a clearing.

‘Always have to keep pulling this stuff up, Mistress,’ he called as he saw her approach. ‘Have to drag the water race, too, at least twice in the spring.’ It was ugly stuff—purplish and studded with venomous blue-black berries—and the flames leapt up from it with a gushing hiss. Remembering her face, Alice stepped back.

‘I just thought I’d come and see how you and your weather-top were progressing,’ she said. ‘I was rather hoping we might have seen its effects by now. At the very least, for the benefit of my son …’

Weatherman Ayres tossed off his gloves and wiped his brow. Leading her up the muddy path of the gorge where pylons climbed from the wheelhouse below, he wheezed open an iron door into the weathertop’s dry, amber light.

‘Have you worked here long?’

‘Best part of twenty years.’

‘And you’ve never actually
used
this thing?’

‘Well…’ He gave a dial a thoughtful tap with a fingernail. ‘Thing is, Mistress, it’s never been turned off. So in a way it’s always been running. Or at least, idling. Machines are far happier doing the thing they’re meant to do than doing nothing.’ His moustache curled upwards as he smiled. Slapping the gantries, stroking the lion-coloured bricks, he guided Alice around each level. Barnacled with conductors, feeding on aether and electricity, rose the weathertop’s main device. This place, Alice decided, was either a humming shrine to industry or a vast confidence trick. But at least there was a shipshape sense of order. Up and up. Then at last they were at the top, and through another iron door into the cold air of the outer gantry. They were high above Invercombe’s trees, and the drop down was impressive, especially on this side of the valley which fell all the way towards the turn and flash of the waterwheel.

The dome of the weathertop was pitted and stained. It looked like the surface of a harvest moon.

‘Is it safe to touch?’

‘Best not, Mistress.’

Looking out over the treetops through the clear, solid air, she laughed out loud, for the world whitened beyond the greys and shadows of Invercombe’s valley. The fields were heaps of bed-linen. The towns and houses seemed made of paper. ‘Why, Weatherman Ayres, it’s been snowing!’

‘Never realise here, would you?’

Not a heavy fall, it was true, but enough to transform the landscape. She stroked the cold handrail. The folly—a telephone relay house—was a white palace. That way, beyond the handkerchief fields, rose the Mendips. To the north, a dim glower, was Bristol. And there, a mere contraction of the haze, lay the place known as Einfell…

In Einfell, as every schoolchild knew, dwelt the changed, the deformed, those hobgoblins of industry who had suffered from over-exposure to aether and had taken on some of the attributes of its spells. Back in Ages less civilised that this, changelings had been burnt, or chained and imprisoned and dragged around like familiars or drays under the auspices of the Gatherers Guild. Now, though, and in these modern times, such practices were frowned upon. In Einfell, the changelings, the trolls, the fairies—you could almost choose whatever name you wished—took care of their own. And the guilds conspired forgetfully to allow them to dwell there because it dealt with the problem, and was mostly in their interest, and it was easier to forget.

Alice fingered the small scab of the Mark on the inside of her left wrist, remembering how she’d once lined up with all the rest of the local offspring outside a green caravan on her Day of Testing. An odd moment alone inside that wheeled shed, which had smelled of pipesmoke and sour bedlinen, as the guildsman dripped her left wrist with some glowing stuff, which, poor as she’d then been, she’d never seen before, but which even the most idiot child knew was called aether. And there you were. Your whole arm smarting and this blazing scab which would never really heal, which was called the Mark of the Elder. Many of the high guildswomen she’d subsequently encountered ornamented their Mark with cleverly constructed bracelets, although for the rest of the world it soon became tide-rimed with dirt and everyday life. But your Mark was never quite forgotten. It proved, as long as it didn’t fade and you were careful and went to church and did all the things your guild expected of you and none of the things it didn’t, that you were still human. But as for what went on inside Einfell’s walls amid those who had changed, that remained a mystery, although, and more than most people, Alice Meynell had often had cause to wonder…

‘Most people look in that direction,’ Weatherman Ayres said, following her gaze. ‘Not that there’s much to see. Never have any dealings with them, but I’ve heard people sometimes go to them for help—cures, predictions. Though I doubt they ever get it. Place is a disappointment, by all accounts …’

She took dinner that evening with Ralph in his bedroom. The air felt warmly luxurious, yet beyond Invercombe the earth was sheeted with snow. She shared her discovery with him, and the knowledge floated over them as they played chequers. Ralph could beat her now if she didn’t concentrate. He could even chat about his latest studies in his beloved sciences as he did so. Apart from the sad truth of those jowls, she felt almost entirely happy. It was pleasant to be sitting here in this odd, old house with Ralph—sheltered from the night, the snows, and as Ralph’s words drifted and the chequers clicked, she even allowed herself to prod at the guilty thought that part of her wanted to keep him like this, trapped in a tower like a creature in those fairy stories of which he had once been so fond. But no; she really did want him to heal and to live a life away from her. She even half-believed that it could happen, now that they were at Invercombe.

Ralph grew tired, then slightly feverish. Feeling she’d allowed too much of her own restlessness to bother him, she plumped up the pillows, poured him a little more of his tincture, and watched the movement of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. Then he turned to her with the dark fluid still on his lips, and something that was not him was in his gaze.

She guarded the fire and dimmed the lights. She loosened his bedclothes and laid a cold cloth across his forehead. But he was still restless and lay awkwardly across his pillows. Such times, such feelings, were catching. Alice, who was somehow even more desperate than usual for Ralph to have a restful night, removed the wooden box containing his painstones. Polished and intricately veined, she’d avoided using them since they’d arrived here, but now she took out the third of the five strengths.

Ralph gave a bucking cough. His eyes skidded over her face. Another spasm was coming. She pressed the painstone’s cool weight into his right hand and closed his fingers around it. Letting go, checking the sheets for telltale flecks of blood, a breath of sweat surged over her own skin. So many times she had thought,
let it be me.
She thought it again now as Ralph’s breathing began to ease. Within a minute—the painstone was that quick—he was asleep.

False alarm, really. She was over-stimulated, herself. Standing up, she glanced at the couch and wondered if she should spend the night here, but Ralph’s breathing was regular, and he would take her presence as an indication that things were going backwards. When they were going
forwards.
Yes. Really … Kissing his cheek, breathing what was now the somehow indisputably male scent of his body, she left Ralph to his dreams.

Back in her own room, she avoided the dressing table mirror’s gaze as she took off her shoes and then her jacket and lay down on her bed. She heard the sounds of the house falling towards sleep: Cissy Dunning’s low, liquid voice; the maids’ footsteps and bed-time whispers; doors closing. Ralph was growing. Soon, if things went in the way she sometimes permitted herself to believe, his voice would finish cracking and he’d be thinking, in the yearning abstract sense which came at that age but never seemed to leave most men, of the frictions of passion. Perhaps he was already pleasuring himself, although Alice doubted it; they lived too close for the signs not to be apparent. But he was certainly growing, whilst she—by the same unavoidable rules of unaethered physics and nature, as if one thing can never gain without another losing—was falling away from beauty.

She remembered how the first realisation of the power of her features had come from the attentions the old gardener had started giving her in the damp old house in which she’d been raised.
Have to be careful with
those
looks, my girl,
was all her aunt had muttered when she’d limped in, her dress torn. But at least she’d began to study herself differently in the mirror. Alice had always known that her father and mother had been a handsome couple, but, by questioning her aunt at unexpected moments and burrowing through the society pages of the old newspapers, she came to understand that her father Freddie Bowdly-Smart had been a ‘notorious bachelor’, that he’d ‘played the field’ (but what sport was that?) before settling on Fay Girouard as his wife. Fay had been an ‘actress’, although Alice hadn’t then understood the implications of that description, other than to realise that her mother’s fortune had lain in her body, her face. They’d married, and Alice Bowdly-Smart been born, and one clear morning Fay and Freddie had left her in the hands of a wet nurse to go out sailing on their swish new yacht. The tides had borne their drowned bodies back to shore a shifterm or so later, and she and her parent’s money were given in trust to a maiden aunt.

The old woman had been as vague with Alice about the trust money as she was about most things, but the hints were already there in the poor state of the house and the decrepit servants and the watery food. The whole place, along with the debts which apparently went back into her aunt’s youth and a lost suitor, was an object lesson in wasting gentility. Realising there was no inheritance, and dropping the Smart, Alice Bowdly had left the house after the death of her aunt and headed for the genteel city of Lichfield, which was the furthest destination she could afford on a one-way, third-class ticket. Once there, with a flashing smile and a glimpse of leg, she managed to obtain lodgings, but soon discovered that a smile alone wasn’t enough to keep away starvation. But Alice submitted. She did whatever was necessary. Remaining detached was something she’d always been good at, and she reinvested the money she made and the contacts she gained in better clothes and better manners and, finally, a better place to live in the cathedral square.