The House of Storms (34 page)

‘We’ve had a letter from the Church Board,’ she’d said to him last night as they sat outside on the jetty. ‘They’re handing responsibility for our entire infirmary over to some emergency committee.’

‘We can’t refuse?’

She’d shaken her head, and Noll had continued smoking his cigarette. He managed to keep himself as aloof from all the recent bad news as he did from the practical business of running the infirmary.

‘But I think,’ she’d said eventually as they both stared out it the darkly purling river, ‘that I’d like to go and see my family for a few days.’

Leaving Gloucester somewhat the warmer for a pie and a light ale, with flyboats and stageboats and joeys and tugs pulling the ubiquitous double-ended trows, Marion remembered how she had first met Noll. She’d cut her right hand on the metal of a capstan, and she’d known, as she spilled an astonishing amount of blood through an oiled rag as she stumbled up the river path towards the infirmary where he worked, that she’d been lucky he was there. She remembered his pinched, intent features as he tightened a tourniquet and sewed the brimming folds of the cut. Perhaps mainly to distract her, he’d asked her as he did so about her work, and what she’d been doing before that. It was a surprisingly long list. With her hand temporarily being of no particular use, she’d been happy to repay him by helping sort through the infirmary’s paperwork, which mostly meant throwing it all away, and then to keep an eye on the other patients.

She came to like the work, and had taken more and more command. Noll was useless at managing people, or money, or most other things apart from being a physician, for which he had a peculiar brilliance. Marion had organised the cleaning of the wards, she’d thrown away old mattresses, and made sure the food was appropriate and didn’t go to waste. The infirmary was an adjunct to one of the church missions, founded on the pious belief that anyone who worked England’s waterways was in dire need of salvation, although Noll freely admitted that he didn’t believe in anything, and took his comforts in the dispensary from the medicine chest. Marion, somewhat curious, had tried them as well. They’d produced little more than nausea, although one night when Noll suggested that they might as well do what he called the obvious thing and sleep together, she pretended to be dazed enough to accept. She enjoyed their physical intimacy—in many ways, their lonelinesses matched—and the infirmary had prospered; in fact, it was probably more Marion’s now than it was his, and scarcely recognisable from the place of old.

The longer run towards Tewkesbury took her through the afternoon. Bridges echoed. Drays heaved the other way. She sang softly to keep the trim of the boat’s engine, and lit the lanterns at prow and stern. In the quickening dusk, beneath King John’s bridge and the meet of the Avon, the river was as great as she became, and the taint of the air changed. This was as far as the wash of the tides ever reached, and seagulls bobbed in the marina as she poled in through the near-dark. The town seemed festive tonight, and Marion expected to find hurdy-gurdies and rides in the main square, but men in baggy uniforms were parading before the eyes of an admiring crowd instead. Some hefted axes, or the handles of brooms, bristles still attached, to sweep away the unwanted influence of London in the affairs of the West. A very few had guns.

She cast off early next morning. The day was greyer than ever, the trees redder. Once she’d reached the bigger wharves of Gloucester, there was no doubting the influence of the sea. Ships sailed up these channels from as far away as Thule, although it had seemed such an inland place to her when she’d first arrived. Being a shoregirl, she’d thought that she knew about water, and about boats, but the Severn’s tides were capricious and delayed. Riverfolk, though, were a friendly enough sort, especially if they had to peer at you under your cap when you asked for work to tell if you were male or female.

She’d worked day boats. She’d sailed iron and wooden trows. She’d toiled with lock-minders and tunnel-haulers, and with families and alone. She’d become—still was, for all her time at the infirmary—a rivergirl. Her cabin boat was dwarfed along the deep cut from Gloucester to Sharpness by stageboats and stationboats, and keeping out of their way was no one’s lookout but her own. Then the waters spread, the horizon unfurled. Now, there were banks to be avoided and buoys to run. The clouds brought scatters of rain as she passed close beneath the cliffs of Chepstow, and noted how much improved the castle had become. Guns, now, of the modern sort—fat, wyre-black barrels like nostrilled beasts—guarded this entry to the West. Then came the Severn Bridge, which grew and grew to a scale beyond belief as the outswing of the tide pushed her beneath. A train swept heedlessly towards Wales, and she tasted its smoke on the downpour. Then, in the clattery silence which followed, she glimpsed the gargoyles which tended the bridge worming along the buttresses like caterpillars on a cauliflower.

She was cold and wet as she turned hard towards Avonmouth, but also exhilarated by the feat of navigation which had brought her little cabin boat this far. Then the rain even stopped, and the sun blazed through turrets of cloud and across the estuary steam rose from the piers. This, she decided, was where river and sea truly met. Here, low, flat butty-boats which had travelled downstream from Shrewsbury were moored close to the spars of ships which had rounded the Cape.

When she’d first come to Avonmouth, walking up the Avon Cut from Bristol after leaving Alfies, she’d studied the chalked signs offering work to the non-guilded at cheap rates. From here, and if you weren’t fussy, you could either head seawards or upriver. Part of her had longed to journey to the Fortunate Isles. But the thought of heading upstream into a country she realised she scarcely understood had finally drawn her. All things considered, she’d rarely regretted her decision since. She didn’t now, although she lingered on the quays, where the
Devon Lass
was heading out on the night tide for Arawak, and looking for deckhands. She could pull her old trick of wearing a cap—they might still even take her for a lad—and lose herself and this war-gloating country entirely. Eventually, though, she lit the lanterns of her cabin boat and set off past the gloaming into the heart of Bristol.

Once she’d paid the huge rental amount for her mooring, she wandered over the bridges. This city always took her by surprise. Suddenly, it was no longer late at night but the turn of another promising evening, and Bristol was teeming, and she was flotsam on its rivers, pushed this and that way by the hawkers and the hoi polloi on Boreal Avenue. She headed past the castle, which was webbed in scaffolding, and on up the hill past the houses of the middle and lesser guilds. Western enlistment posters lolled from many of the walls, but little else had changed. Apart, that was, from Alfies. She stopped at its gate, and felt the ponderous chain. Just as she’d heard in a letter from Denise, it was closed.

After Clyst and Invercombe, Alfies’ rooms had seemed small, and its rules impossibly small-minded. Pregnancy was treated like an illness, and a sense of homesick guilt hung heavy in the air. The other girls had made decent enough companions, Marion supposed, but none of them had been at their best: they came; their babies were born in a separate wing; without goodbyes, they away went again. Their few trips down into the city were closely chaperoned, as if they might escape—but where could you possibly escape
to?
The question had begun to obsess Marion as her time grew near, and she became mistrustful of the late-night tea, and was pleased to find that she was sleeping far less well, and grinding her teeth through prayers, once she’d starting watering it into an aspidistra. She’d stuck so far with the deal she’d made with Alice Meynell, but had decided that she couldn’t possibly relinquish her baby.

Marion had had no real idea what to expect from her confinement. The girls were full of stories, but they were best discounted, and Mam had been no help on the one tearful occasion she’d visited, and neither had Denise. Marion had never felt more alone, nor more determined, and she’d hidden a bundle of old clothing to cover Alfies’ ridiculous uniform and to wrap her baby, and followed Master Pattison, and listened carefully to the spells he muttered at locked doorways. Then her time came, and thoughts of any kind beyond getting through the next wave of pain were an impossibility. But still she was fighting not just for the life of her baby but against everything that had brought her here, and she batted away the sponge-soaked potions Mistress Pattison tried to squeeze past her lips. Finally, there was an end to it, and in her exhaustion she’d been sure she heard a baby crying. Even as the weariness surged into her, she calculated how she might conserve her non-existent strength. The room swarmed—and here came Mistress Pattison, bearing her baby back to her after the washing and weighing. But she could tell that something was wrong.

Marion laid her hands on Alfies’ gate as that white room swarmed around her with the vividity of hallucination. She saw the dead, blue-white thing she was offered, and heard Mistress Pattison’s words.
Never took a breath. Some of them, the Sweet Good Elder wants to have back right away …
Her world had collapsed at that moment in a way it hadn’t through all the things which had happened before. The cold, dead child had been prised from her, and she’d fallen into feverish sleep. Three days later, and without seeing any of the other girls again, Marion had left Alfies and had walked into the city and along the Avon Cut.

Turning back towards the city now, she headed down around the edges of the empty markets she’d once wandered with Ralph and then on towards the dreamhouse where Denise worked. It was still too early for the evening’s trade, and there was a long delay before the door opened. Marion was conscious as she stood inside that the earlier rain was still drying out of her clothes, and of the riverish smell they gave off as she and Denise hugged.

‘Owen’s in Bristol,’ Denise said. Although it would have been a lot better if you’d
told
me you were coming. Don’t they have telegrams up in that hospital place?’

You could never say, Marion thought as they set out along Silver Street towards the Halls of the Mariners’ Guild, that Denise was unchanged. Her sister had never settled on merely being pretty—the ruffed and puffed red extravagances of this particular season’s western fashions were extraordinary—but beneath all of that, she was starting to look just a little aged. She grew breathless from the mere business of walking, and, between gales of perfume, gave off the characteristic sour-dust smell of dreamhouse smoke. Marion reminded herself that her sister was now passing thirty, just as she would soon be doing herself.

They rung at the Mariners’ gates and waited as Owen emerged from a many-windowed annexe. Of course, it wasn’t the old Owen, and Marion wondered if she might have walked by this figure, fatter now in his uniform, with his scalp gleaming through his hair, if she’d passed him in the street. And then there was the question of where a mariner, a dream-mistress and a rivergirl might choose to eat, and they settled on an artificial-looking inn on the rise of Park Street. The place was thinly busy, threaded with tinny music and smoke. Nailed on the walls for purposes which Marion presumed were decorative were many implements she recognised. There were shrimp nets, whelkers’ hoes, a half-rotted rudder, and it struck her that something shorefolk and riverfolk had in common was that their ways of life were now regarded as quaint.

‘So, Marion,’ Denise said, ‘I’m still to say you’re a
nurse,
am I?’

‘I’ve been at the infirmary for four years, Denise.’

Undaunted, Denise gave Marion a We-all-know-why-that-is look. ‘Don’t know why you keep hopping about so. I’m sure you’d be good at something if you kept to it. And don’t think we dream-mistresses have it all easy,’ she added.

Owen pushed and picked at his plate. The silver-buttoned greyness of his helmsman’s uniform rather stood out here in Bristol, where belonging to one of the Great Guilds was no longer the sure statement of identity it had once been.

‘Why people can’t just get along with each other?’ Denise said philosophically. ‘The number of times I’ve had to help some Master Accountant or Senior Tailor dream they’re fighting for victory in the West, I feel as if I’ve won it all already …’

‘What I can’t believe,’ Owen said, ‘is how anyone can take pride in slaving.’

‘We don’t use
that
word here,’ Denise hissed.

‘You haven’t seen what it’s like, sis. They still transport people in ships over from Africa. Oh, I know they say it doesn’t happen, but it does. Just board one once, and you’d never touch sugar again.’

‘Well, I doubt if that’s…’ Denise trailed off.

‘So,’ Owen said. ‘What about you, Marion? What’s your position?’

‘I don’t agree with bonding, if that’s what you mean. But I can’t see how the guilds in London can simply pass a law to remove it.’

‘The thing is,’ Owen said, laying his fork and knife around his unfinished dinner. ‘I’ve got another ship. I’ll have to travel east to London tomorrow. She’s just been refitted as what’s termed a protection vessel. She’ll be carrying guns …’

There was a long pause. Denise clicked her teeth. ‘Isn’t there something else you could do?’

‘It’s a choice I’ve had to take. If I stay here in Bristol I’ll either end up crewing something similar, or I’ll be put in gaol. It’s not…’ He chuckled grimly. ‘It’s not as if I’ve become an Enforcer.’

When they left the inn, it had started raining again and Denise, in a quandary about ruining her clothes, was in a haste to get away. Still, she offered to put Marion up for the night on one of the dreamhouse sofas, and Marion declined as she had many times before, and she and Owen watched their sister scurry off down the wet street, then walked back together towards the Mariners’ Halls. They chuckled. Always, with Denise, it was hard not to smile.

‘You could stay here as well, you know, Marion …’

She shook her head. They were standing outside the guild-house gates. ‘I have a cabin in my boat.’

‘Of course—we Mariners forget that there are other kinds of craft.’