The House of Storms (33 page)

The doors to her balcony were open, letting in the smoke and rumble of the docks. This, really, was a quite impossible place for her to be, at this of all times. But in Alice’s experience, the eye of the storm was often the safest haven. Then it came. A tremendous wave, and she was sure as pictures slipped from the walls and her bones juddered that the entire exchange was actually taking off into the sky like some Christmastime rocket. The balcony doors flapped, and then there were no doors at all, and no balcony either. There was a tremendous sense of falling iron and masonry. The spell she had summoned was aimed at the keyplate which was embedded in the scant foundations of the Dockland Exchange which had been laid in the slippery London mud two Ages before, but as it dissolved the entire great building was coming to the shuddering realisation that the ordinary physical laws of friction, gravity and tensile strength were all that now bound it, and that they weren’t enough.

One half of the ceiling crashed in on Alice’s office. Energised, hurrying to the floor below, she found her personal staff battling storms of paperwork. Of course, they had no idea what was happening—was it just this room, this floor, was it all of London?—but she knew from the building’s blueprints that the main stairways would be blocked already, and shouted for everyone to follow her down the service stairs which spiralled tightly around the core of the exchange. The building groaned. A lift clattered by like an express train. The floors were falling in on each other now. Whatever she’d imagined, it certainly hadn’t been this.

People were already being drawn from the Easterlies and across Northcentral to witness the spectacle of the expiring exchange. It blazed brighter than Hallam Tower, and, in the fevered atmosphere which had already seen bombs in wastepaper bins at Great Aldgate Station and several high-profile kidnappings, few doubted that the terrorist agitators of the West were to blame. Fire bells and sirens started clanging. Pumps started coughing jets of water which sprayed and glittered uselessly over the first few floors of the smoking exchange. It seemed by now that everyone who was ever likely to escape had done so—and thank the Elder this was a Halfshiftday—when Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell and her ragged but surprisingly long line of followers began to emerge. The newspapermen were there already, and volleys of flashguns exploded through the murk.

Two hours later, the Dockland Exchange keeled over through the smoke-twilight, buckling midway, then circling like a Naming mace before finally falling towards the quays, crumpling warehouses, ships, then cascading beautifully into the Thames in white explosions of steam.

Alice didn’t witness that last chapter of what people were already calling the Falling. After a few interviews and a brief wandering amid the crowds, she had managed to retreat to her townhouse, and then to hobble to her bed. It was true what they said about the heat of the moment; it was only afterwards that you felt pain. She could scarcely stand, and the skin of both her arms ached and felt oddly stiff as she splashed herself with iced water. By that evening, when Ralph and Helen and the children came, she was a little feverish, and a top layer of skin had risen slightly up from the flesh almost from her shoulders to her palms. Her feet were the same. And her head was pounding. Inside though, she felt essentially happy.

‘You should see a doctor, mother,’ Ralph said as he kissed her cheek. Helen, a pale breath of lavender water, did likewise. Then came little Flora, who leaned so firmly against her left arm that Alice had to tell herself not to scream.

‘I’m fine … Just a little shocked, I suppose. Do we yet have an idea of how many people have died?’

Ralph gave a troubled shrug. Helen had picked up Gussie from the hands of the maid who’d carried him in and was holding him up from a sprawl of blankets so Alice could see, whilst Flora was stomping around the fringes of her bedroom, boredly inspecting things. Alice had made sure they’d all been safely at home when the spell struck, in that intricate little house Helen had insisted they bought because it was midway between the shops of Oxford Row and the cafes of Hyde.

‘Everyone says’—Helen smiled into the eyes of baby Gussie—‘that the sick bastards in the West did this.’

‘We mustn’t jump to conclusions,’ said Ralph, who never jumped to conclusions about anything. In this pale room, he looked more than ever like the ghost of her husband Tom. Thinner at the shoulder, and possibly more handsome. But still, Alice sighed. Her flesh tingled and itched.

‘They haven’t traced the spell?’

‘The general direction seems to have been through Reading, Newbury. From the West, although I doubt they’ll be able to narrow it down. I can’t believe how people can do these things. To callously …’ Ralph waved a hand. But his agitation, she realised, wasn’t entirely due to the horror of what had happened. He was probably acutely aware that how he dealt with this catastrophe would be the judging of him, especially with his mother abed. He still came back from work each evening and set himself an hour to study some obscure plant. Helen didn’t seem to mind; Alice doubted if they had that much to say to each other by now in any case, marriage being the lonely institution it was.
Does the world really want to deprive me of the one thing that interests and excites me?
he’d said to her with surprising vehemence when she’d raised the issue. But the truth was, yes—it did.

Alice was genuinely tired. It was past time to say goodbye to her son and grandchildren.

‘Things can’t rest like this, can they?’ he said, looking down at her after Helen and Gussie and Flora had trooped out. And I don’t mean that we just need a new guildhouse.
Nothing
will be the same …’

He kissed her, and left. Alice lay back, feeling pain and weariness wash over her. But some part of Ralph, more than merely the surprisingly brisk pressure of his lips on her cheek, seemed to linger with her. What
was
it? Something genuinely different about his mood … Alice smiled when she realised. It wasn’t just agitation her son had brought with him tonight; it was excitement. After all, he’d complained often enough about the mundanity of his day-to-day duties. But today, tonight, tomorrow and the day after, the significance of his role was no longer in doubt. London was in chaos as a result of the Falling. Yes, and almost for the first time since he’d defeated the illness which had dogged his childhood, Ralph had found a battle he wanted to fight. Perhaps, forced into a corner, he’d be more her son than she sometimes gave him credit for.

Throughout that night and on into the lurid dawn and through the pain of the second day, Alice mulled the things which had wrought her to this time, this place. Rather like the old saying, she’d have started somewhere entirely different if she’d ever felt she’d had the choice. But here she was. Between occasional near-feverish musings about the site and architecture of the new Great Guildhall of the Telegraphers—which would span a good portion of Wagstaffe Mall, preferably on the east-facing side where its glossy pediments would catch the sun in the morning—she marvelled at just how far things had gone.

Quite where, she wondered, had it all begun? Perhaps it was those pompous forms in Bristol’s post office, or having to wait in cake shops as if she was just anybody. Or perhaps it really was as the moralists claimed, and down to that ugly and continued Western colonial practice of bonding. Not that she hated the West, but part of her had long seen it, in its tangled mendacity and malpractice, as the most significant obstacle towards the progress of her own essentially Eastern-based guild. It all went back, she supposed, and just as it often seemed did so many other things, to Invercombe. Arriving there on that grey dawn, and Ralph sitting beside her in the car as the pulse of his breath grew and faded across the glass. The sense that the place had been waiting for them; for
her.
Then that glimpse of her sagging jowls in the mirror so soon after they’d arrived, and with it the first terrible realisation that she was ageing. And meeting the shoregirl, and all that had followed. Yes, Invercombe had lain at the core of things long before she had recently begun wondering where she might find a hidden source of aether of sufficient power to generate a spell to destroy the Dockland Exchange. So she’d returned, at first not physically, and had explored the turbulent gardens which lay beyond the barrings and warning signs she herself had ordered to have erected. After all, the place belonged to her guild, and the men she’d had sent there were doing no more than their duty in attempting to recover and refine the spoiled aether which had washed into Invercombe’s foundations, even if several had suffered in what was admittedly dangerous work. Raw aether—as if the place needed more magic!—but of course she’d fought legally and by all other means to ensure that the salvage rights fell entirely to the Telegraphers. Nevertheless, and like many of Alice’s small projects, it had been something she’d been almost mindlessly tending, an option retained but unexplored, until she’d come to ponder how best she might bring to a head the country’s frustratingly slow drift towards a conflict which she was certain would be of enormous benefit to her guild.

She’d ordered that the work of clearing the aethered wreckage from Invercombe’s sea foundations be abandoned, and the last of the skeleton staff dismissed. When she arrived there alone by car several shifterms after, the place should have felt entirely deserted. Of course, it didn’t, but that came as no more of a surprise to her than the leakings of its roofs and the abandonments of its furniture. She knew all these things already. She felt them as her own. Even beyond the prickly presence of its slumbering weathertop, or the whispers she seemed to hear standing amid the surging wildness of its gardens, and just like the shamans who had once danced around Durnock Head’s bloodied stones, she understood that this place had power. And what was power for, if it was not to be used?

In the aftermath of that London noon, she permitted herself a cold herb-infused bath, and ate half a bread roll and a little watercress soup. Outside, there were lynchings; anyone with a Western-sounding accent or name—Spaniards, too. There should also have been arrests, but the so-called Western authorities were still bleating about due process and the absence of proper evidence. Their attitude could not have been more inflammatory, and London-registered ships had been set aflame in Bristol’s docks.

In her room, with the doors locked and the maids sent away, Alice applied herself more avidly to the process of her healing. She consulted her portmanteau, and the fingers of her right hand picked unthinkingly at the loosening scab on her left wrist as she turned the pages of her notebooks. Her skin needed emollients now as it had never done ten or fifteen years before, and there would doubtless be a further price to be paid by her complexion for the Falling of the Dockland Exchange. Normally, she’d have put her gramophone on to soothe her ears, but the song was here already, and once again she was back at Invercombe, with the push of water over rock, the salt rush of air across sand, and the power which had called to her in her time of need … Her mind was a blunter knife these days, no denying. It wandered more easily, and she had to reconsult the spread pages of her notebooks to complete the cadences of her spell. The baby—yes, there had been a baby. An odd arrangement, really, but the creature had been half her son’s seed and—mere squeamishness when seen from this distance—she hadn’t found it in herself to organise its destruction, or even that of the girl. Marion Price—
that
had been her name, and she could tell from the lost expression which sometimes stole across Ralph’s face that he still remembered her with something less than hate.

There. Her face was done. She blinked. Frowned. She looked older. Stupid not to—for what would people say if she never changed? With slow, sad gestures, she stroked the infused wads of cotton wool across her poor arms. She dipped and dabbed, wincing, then tossed the wads into the bin. Her hands, at least, seemed to have survived the fire unscathed. So graceful. So elegant. Yes, yes. Alice. Alice Meynell. The things those fingers had touched, done, perfected. She studied them in the pale light as she sat before her mirror, smiling at first until the edges of her eyes began to web with the beginnings of surprise. It was surely quite impossible, but she could see the shining edge of the dressing table straight through her palm …

W
ITH AUTUMN, MARION DECIDED
it was finally time to leave Bewdley and take the cabin boat downriver. Noll was easy about that as he was about most things, and stood the following morning on the jetty, hands stuffed into his white coat as he watched her disappear, not bothering to wave. With a little help from Nurse Withers, he was quite capable of coping on his own. After all, as he’d said to her so many times that she’d often thought he meant something else, he’d managed the infirmary well enough before she came. She even wondered now, as the bridge tollhouse took the last view of the infirmary roof, which still dimly proclaimed
Merrow’s Feedstuffs
, if he really expected her to return.

The last of the town slipped away and the banks rose higher in clusters of forest, green turning effortlessly to amber and bronze. Working and travelling the Severn, she’d come to love this season above all others. Autumn hadn’t existed on the shore as it did here, where smoke twirled above the next scatter of woodsmen’s houses to join with the sky’s overarching grey. And it was possible to think of the river herself—although admittedly sometimes dangerous and capricious, a stealer of fortunes and a taker of lives—as a friend in a way which you could never think of the Bristol Channel and the open sea. Yes, she decided, this was what she’d wanted to do. This, for as long as it lasted, was where she had wanted to be.

She reached Stourport by mid-morning. Here the Severn met the Stour, and linked with the canals of Dudley and Deritend, then north towards the Trent and Preston, and south and west to the Thames and London. If ever there was a town which looked both east and west, this was it, and instead of the NO TO THE BONDING STATUTE and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE WEST posters which fluttered elsewhere across England, the walls merely advertised picture houses and dances; the ordinary pursuits of a life she was sure would soon disappear. Swirled out and on from the locks, she reached a flatter landscape of fields and small towns. In Worcestershire now. She moored at Worcester at lunchtime, with the cathedral looking down from its cliff, and headed for food, and regretted not saying more to Noll.