The House of Storms (46 page)

‘It’s just…’

‘That’s all right.’ He gave her a peck on the cheek, then, whistling lightly and puffing on a cigarette, began putting on sleek evening clothes. Noll had always had such a glum view of the world, but now that his every worst expectation was happening, he seemed as bright as the waistcoat he was buttoning.

She looked down at her own clothes, which were a deliberate mix of the daily working attire of the various guilds involved in attending the invalid; a dowdy statement of equality. ‘I can’t go anywhere like this.’

‘People would be disappointed if you turned up looking anything other than as you are, Marion. Isn’t this how you like it, anyway—standing out?’ Smelling now of nicotine and ambergris, Noll kissed her cheek. ‘I think you’re quite marvellous, Marion. We all do.’

She’d misjudged Noll, whose appearance seemed understated compared with the rich and fortunate of Bristol who came gliding out from their carriages along Boreal Avenue in the continuing flurries of snow, but she couldn’t imagine what was essentially wrong with being well-dressed, even if the women’s make-up, as if in mute tribute to Noll’s cadavers, was bluish-pale. Or perhaps that was just the cold. And—ah, yes, look, it’s just as the late-edition headlines promised—Marion Price is back in Bristol to put things right! Whispery lines of fans and faces gathered beneath the lanterns in the glittering air. She was granted curtsies. There were frosty clatters of spontaneous applause.

Marble balconies and screes frothed overhead in the main hall’s suffocating brightness. Soon, at least if it stopped snowing, there would be fireworks. Definitely, there would be drinks. Soon as well, and even if Hereford hadn’t yet fallen, the cannons of the East would come within range of this beautiful palace, and Marion Price would be arrested by one or other side in this bloated conflict for things the real woman who lived within her shadow had probably never done or said. But already, there was dancing. Always, at least in this realm of the privileged, there was copious food. Look how the waiters and waitresses have blackened their faces in tribute to the bondsmen of the Fortunate Isles, who are fighting as avidly as the Bristolians for a freedom they’d never possessed!

‘
Entre nous,
what you were saying just lately about losing the war,’ Noll muttered as he guided her in, ‘probably isn’t best repeated here.’

The ballroom seemed to slope and sway, rolling the dancers to and fro to the swell of the music. The bottles, Marion noticed, were without labels. Someone laughed and tapped their nose. It seemed that all of Bristol was rejoicing in the illicit thrill of the small trade and running the blockades, but a more sombre tide was flowing for all the surface jollity and the ridiculously complex dances, and the strange wailing of the band. Amid the medals which the men wore, and the women affected as brooches in mimicry, were pinned the diamond-set faces of sons and brothers and husbands lost to some recent campaign or epidemic. Brush against them as you tried to extricate yourself from a chattering group, and treasured memories and voices breathed out at you.

Buffeted on these currents, fielding smiling or desperate faces, Marion encountered a finely made woman in silver and red striped dress with a lace ruff collar.

‘Marion …’ Denise swallowed back the last morsel of the sugared fancy she was eating. ‘You’re looking well.’

‘So are you …’

Denise licked her fingertips. ‘I only come to these dos because of business. Dreams of victory, dreams of defeat, the beloved returning in something other than a wooden box—you can imagine. Dreammistresses have never been more popular ‘People were saying this morning that Hereford had fallen.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t have thought so. It’s the West’s last redoubt and all of that, isn’t it? But I
did
hear someone over there saying that the Eastern commander’s been killed in an ambush, which is obviously good news.’

‘Who?’

‘He’s that one dressed in gold and blue beside the fat woman with the—Oh, you mean the
Eastie
! I really haven’t got the foggiest idea, Marion. They’re all the same, aren’t they, anyway? Only in it for the pillage and the blood and the virgins …’

It seemed that speeches were about to be made; Marion recognised the signs. Most likely, she’d be called upon to say a few words which she’d never prepared but which always came out anyway. And now, an amplified voice from the mezzanine was drawing the people across the floor’s shining slope as some newly created monstrosities were unfurled in their cage. Some kind of bat, but black as night, they fluttered and screeched and bared their acid fangs.

‘Why don’t we pop off to the loo, eh … ?’ Denise murmured.

In the toilets, which were cool and bright and blissfully, empty, she beckoned Marion inside a cubicle which was bigger than their entire old cottage and rustled down on the toilet lid.

‘
That’s
more like it.’

Marion had to agree that it was.

‘Heard anything from Owen lately?’ Denise asked as she poked about inside her handbag.

She shook her head.

‘Well, you know what post from the East’s like. He’s probably still mine-sweeping and killing our poor dolphins off in the North Sea. Somehow, I don’t worry too much about him. There’s something
bouncy
about our Owen, isn’t there, even if he’s gone with the East? But I can’t believe he’s involved in any of those atrocities.’

‘Have you seen Mam?’

‘Not lately.’ Denise was laying out on her lap a glass and silver syringe which was so much better made than the blunt devices Marion’s nurses had to deal with that it was a moment before she recognised it. ‘Although she is doing pretty well,’ she continued. ‘Portishead’s never been so lively—although I know that’s not saying much. And cousin Penelope’s really raking it in, what with all the gunnery officers and being kin to Marion Price and having her very own mother there on permanent exhibit…’ She gave the needle a brisk squeeze and tap to check for bubbles. ‘She probably dreads peace. Oh, don’t mind
me,
by the way …’

One-handed, Denise unclasped the silver bracelet around her left wrist and jabbed the needle into her Mark. This would have been a disastrous choice of point of insertion from a strictly medical viewpoint, as the scar’s residual aether contaminated any ordinary drug, but the spell Denise was injecting was strong enough for the fluid to shine dark against the white tiles and pool inside her eyes. As she slid the needle out, her gaze had already thickened. ‘Help yourself if you’d like some, by the way. I’m sure you of all people can manage the necessary.’

Marion, who’d watched Noll in not dissimilar situations, shook her head.

Settling back against the cistern, Denise smiled dreamily. ‘
That’s
the ticket. And as I was saying, most of us seem to be doing pretty nicely out of the war. And even if we lose, people will still want dreams. How bad can it be?’

The upper plate of Denise’s false teeth clicked lightly against the bottom as she spoke. Her smile, as it broadened, grew more and more lopsided. ‘We all have our places, don’t we? And even dream-mistresses need their dreams. Me, I like to go back to that Midsummer—
you
remember the one. I was Queen and bedecked in flowers at that lovely house where you used to work. And the perfect weather, and the lads all wanting me. And me saying no, no, no … I was going to Bristol, see, to be a seamstress. You must have somewhere as well, Marion. Everyone does. But things always work out. Look at Mam. Our Owen. Poor, poor Dad … And Sally. And you, Marion Price. Look at you …’ She chuckled, her eyes far away. ‘Never any need to be sad. Even that baby …’

‘What baby?’

She chuckled again.
‘Your
baby, silly. It’s like I say. Always the happy ending and never the sad.’

‘My baby died, Denise.’

‘Did it? You’d be surprised, the stories you learn from inside dreamers’ dreams. Alfies wasn’t such a bad place—you always said that, didn’t you? Gave away the babies of course, but always to good homes. Had a guildslady not so long ago. Done well for herself. Thought her baby had died like yours. But then …’

Marion crouched beside Denise, gripping her arm. ‘Then
what,
Denise?’

‘Lots less trouble if the girls
think
their baby’s died, innit? Keeps them quiet. Specially the bothersome ones—which was probably you, eh, sis? Then you never go searching around and messing things up. Everyone just gets on with their lives.’

‘But I
saw.
’

‘Ha! But did you, eh? All tired and drugged up and not in a fit state for anything. They had this thing at Alfies, was what I heard. Like a dummy you might use to pin up clothes, only this one was shaped like a wee babbie. A few minutes, a small spell… You
do
understand what I mean, Marion, don’t you … ?’

Denise, in the bliss of her needle, had slid further against Marion. Hunching against the tiles, Marion settled her into some sort of balance, then debated if it wouldn’t be safer to lay her flat down on the cubical floor. But that was hardly Denise’s style. She looked into her eyes. ‘I’m going to leave you for a while now, sis. Do you understand?’

Denise nodded and exhaled. Her eyes rolled. The lids fluttered over.

Marion looked about her. The cubicle, the entire washroom, was quiet, although people would rush in here as soon as the speeches had finished. Hitching her skirts, she clambered around a gently snoring Denise on to the top of the cistern. It was some way up from there to the window, but there was a shelf-like scroll of tiles—a tangle of waves and shells—at a level to which she could just about hitch herself. She did so, straining and scrabbling, and battling the ridiculous image of the great Marion Price being found sprawled beside her drugged sister in a toilet. Even the Western papers, she thought as she worked the window’s hinges, would have a hard time making something mythical and positive out of
that
.

The space was scarcely big enough for her to squeeze through, and then only headlong. Perhaps thankfully, perhaps not, a rubbish-heaped skip lay directly beneath her in the darkness outside, and the only thing for her to do was to squirm through the aperture. Pushing herself through, she tumbled, crashed, into foul slippery waves, and swim-clambered quickly out and over to land jarringly on the paving of a dark alley.

Catching her breath, picking away the bigger lumps of rotting vegetable, she headed towards the sound of traffic. Tramlights and wires flickered and sprayed through the down-drifting snow, but there were few people about and, after her climb through the window and her encounter with the rubbish skip, she doubted if anything but the closest scrutiny would single her out. Beyond the whitening walls of the refurbished castle, she reached the houses of Greyshot Street where late-glowing night blooms glinted through the snowflakes beyond the softly piling railings. Aides’ gate was still chained and the wall, for all its roughness, proved much harder climbing than the toilet. She tumbled into the beds of sallow and lavender which Mistress Pattison had made her girls tend, and brushed the snow from herself and studied the house.

There were no broken windows, and just a few fallen slates. It was ridiculous that this place had been abandoned when it would have provided much-needed bed-space. The front door was locked, but she remembered the spell she’d secretly learned from Master Pattison’s mutterings. With a damp shudder, it opened. It was dark inside, but she knew the way across the hall, and studied the forbidden door which led to the birthing rooms. Only once were the girls allowed through here, and even now it felt odd to breathe the spell which opened it, and then enter a corridor where trays and implements, even the sheets, had been left as they were. Cobwebs stirred across framed photographs of babies and benefactors in the soft light of the snow. This, even more than she’d expected, was a difficult place to be.

She reached a kind of storeroom or scullery. Shelves of medicine jars glinted with engine ice as their potencies faded. There was nothing here other than that which might be expected, and soon all that was left for her to inspect was the curtained space beneath a sink. Anything secret, anything troublesome, would surely be kept better hidden than this. So why, as she reached towards those tired flaps of cotton, did her fingers tingle? Why did her heart race?

There was an old scrubbing brush with most of its bristles missing, and lumped and stiffening packets of Scott’s Universal Scouring Powder, but there was also a mannequin—a doll; the crudely made shape of a baby. Marion lifted it out. Its eyes were mere lumps of glass and its body and limbs were nothing but winds of cloth and stuffing, but her fingers, tracing its back as she cradled it, found the spiny lumps and hieroglyphs of some magic inner core. A faint glow came out of the eyes as she breathed and rocked over it, although she had no idea of the spell which would make it come sufficiently alive to seem dead.

She returned to the hall, and entered the parlour, which had also been out of bounds. She hadn’t thought before to try the lights, and blinked as their yellowish flood touched the drifts of white beyond the windows. This room, with its broad, grey-black fireplace and neatly arranged armchairs, was where the guildswomen came to collect their babies, and it was impossible not to feel a lingering sense of loss and need. Taking a poker from the fireplace, she splintered the locked bureau in the room’s corner. Its slide-out drawers were filled with forms which had been abandoned along with all the rest of the house. Proof, Marion thought grimly as she riffled through alphabetised names, that, here or in Western hospitals, no one ever read these things… Yes, she remembered some of these names.
Marion Price.
Lifting the form out, she recognised Nell Pattison’s scrawl, but the rest of the document was filled out in a more flowing hand. The box was ticked for Boy. He would be seventeen now. Almost a man. What street? Marion wondered. What house? What school? What life? What loves? What fears? What comforts? What hopes? What guild? The hand looked masculine. Silus something. She retraced the flowing signature. Bellingham? Bellington? Hellingson? Then, more neatly printed in a separate box, the address. Still, and for a long moment, Marion thought she must have misread. Einfell.