IV
‘Get up, Robert!’
I shifted, stiff and cold, from the uncomfortable position in which I’d been lying. I regathered the old coats that had pooled about me, then shuffled on my elbows across to my triangular attic window.
‘Come on!’ The clotheshorse rumbled in the kitchen. ‘It’s late morning!’
It was a day at the last edge of summer. For the first time that year, the lumpy glass of my window had frosted, was scrolled over with white patterns which pulsed and re-formed in my breath. I untangled my hands to touch, making circles across the pane. Swimming down below the birch trees, a distorted version of the town was clouded with gouts of smoke and steam.
‘We’re going out!’ My mother was at the foot of the stairs now. ‘You’ll miss breakfast!’
Banging around to show activity, I pulled on my trews, shirt and jumper. It occurred to me that, late though the hour clearly was, my mother might still expect me to go to Board School. Today, though, was clearly uncharted territory. I could tell that just from the sound of her voice.
I studied her warily across the kitchen table as I ate my breakfast. We had the house to ourselves, with Beth already doling out slates in her training as a teacher’s assistant at Harmanthorpe and Father at work at Mawdingly & Clawtson. She was wearing a dark blue skirt and a fresh white blouse beneath her apron. Her hair was pinned up differently, or perhaps just with greater care. She shifted and arranged things with even more than her usual air of someone whose mind was on other things. As she bustled about, I noticed that she’d grown so thin recently that the sides of her apron met around her back.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Out.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘You’ll see.’
I slid from the chair and went to visit the privy. The sky above the yard was blank grey and the air tasted coaly and dull. I studied the torn scraps of newspaper as I sat on the freezing seat, peeling them back sheet by sheet from the nail that impaled them to the wall. The ones I liked best were the bits of headlines. TRIAL. GLORY. TRAGEDY. I could pretend they were clues to what lay ahead in my own life.
Mother was waiting for me in the hall when I finally got back inside, already dressed in her coat and boots, umbrella dangled over one arm, a gingham-covered wicker basket hooked on the other. She let out a sigh as I fiddled with my laces, then snatched my hand and drew me quickly out into the street, closing the front door with a kick of her heel.
With the children at school, the men and women at work, Brickyard Row was almost empty. Thinning threads of mist pooled around the railings and hedges, forming a dim murk over the town through which a few whiter walls and bits of new roofing gleamed like dishes in a sink. A bald grey dray nosed its feedbag. An old woman sat out in her shawl on a front step, knitting. The dwarfish local chimneysweep whistled past, his familiar a tumbling sooty shadow. Further down the road, some lesser guildsmen were building new houses from the cheap single courses of brick that were commonly used along Coney Mound, making the signs and the whispers of their trade to bind the sloppy mortar.
Even in its better areas, Bracebridge was a resolutely unglamorous place. Prone to cold winters, short summers, gales and floods and droughts, the town had grown with the guilds. The grandmasters had found ways to make money out of the flow of the River Withy, then from coal and from steam and from iron, and from the precious aether which lay beneath Rainharrow’s damp and bony earth. They had re-employed the landless peasants to work in mills and factories, then changed the seven pagan-named days of old into the modern twelve-day shifterm with its full ten and a half days of labour and its little time of rest. Still, in Bracebridge they also built a new town clock, several inns, which they named after themselves and drew a healthy profit, and the large and ugly church of St Wilfred’s from which the faithful emerged on Noshiftday beaming from the visions of the hymnal wine, and which the rest of us attended with irregularity and a dim sense of foreboding.
All of these sights I witnessed on that Fourshiftday morning as my mother gripped my hand and we hurried down into the town. For all my dreamy journeys speeding south on the footplates of those night trains, the purposeful bustle of Bracebridge High Street was still a source of fascination to me. The air smelled of warm bread, dung, cabbages, mud.
Handcarts, carriages, wagons, steamwagons, horses, drays and endless pedestrians battled for space over the cobbles. There was a bigger dropping-whitened statue of the Grandmaster of Painswick, his raised right knee polished from the touch of many hands which still sought his blessing. And here, for those who could afford it, were more reliable means of alleviating the pains of existence. On cushioned display in a shop window reclined the speckled painstones I’d sometimes glimpsed rich and elderly guildmistresses clutching in their arthritic fingers. Permanent bliss (as I then imagined it) from nothing more than an egg of aether-treated granite, and chocolates next door, decorated with feathers like the wild natives of Thule. I’d have pulled my mother’s hand to slow her down on any more ordinary day, but the purposeful set of her mouth made me simply absorb what I could, stumbling and wondering as Rainharrow gazed down on us. Here, where the streets climbed up towards hightown, were the houses of the better guilds, signed like inns with their coats of arms and set behind spiked and glossy black railings. Dragged into their shadows, I looked up just as one of the polished doors swung open and a large man with mutton-chop whiskers, ordinary enough but for the exceptionally crisp cut of his brown suit, stepped out. My mother glanced up at him just as he looked down, and it seemed to me that a twinge of recognition passed between them.
We came to the bottom of the town, with its acreages of yard and factory. Even as the sun came out, the air thickened with tarry smoke and the dim, pushing sense of the subterranean nearness of the aether engines. We passed warehouses and an open yard where the pitbeasts were kept. Mother rummaged some coal from a nearby heap and pushed it through the bars. The scarred mole-like brutes lifted themselves on their rusty paddles, snuffling their snouts to take the black nuts with surprising delicacy, the dull heat of their breath like the warmth of an oven.
We approached the railway station, where the telegraph pylons clambered across embankments. The lines were busy today, glowing wyreblack against the brightening sky. Licking the coal dust from her fingers, my mother studied a timetable she took from her coat pocket, then, seeming to reach no particular conclusion, bustled me into a waiting room with dark wood panels and long lines of patient, empty benches, and an arched window giving a glimpse of a room filled with brightness and bustle. She rapped on the window with the handle of her umbrella. Standing level with the counter, I gazed up at the marvellously profuse nose-hairs of a master from the Railworkers’ Guild who, after much consulting of pages, issued us with two thick rectangles of notched card which smelled of new ink and smudged as I touched them; they seemed like the very essence of far-away, even if I’d gathered that we were only taking a local train to some barely-heard-of station.
We clanged across scrolled iron walkways. Bracebridge station was surprisingly grand, speaking of ambitions which the town itself had never quite fulfilled despite its profusion of aether. We sat waiting on a bench on the far platform whilst a few engines fussed in the goods yard. The sun grew brighter. The pigeons cooed. The settling pans, just beyond the first line of rooftops, glowed darkly at the edge of the sky. The stark rails shone empty. Mother rapped the tip of her umbrella on the rough flagstones. Tip tap. Tip tap.
‘Where are we going, anyway?’
‘You’ll see.’
The wires eventually hissed and the signals nodded as our train arrived, three low wooden carriages clacking by until the engine at the rear lay before us. It was plated red, but small and rusty and elderly, its boiler hissing and straining, leeching a salty rime of engine ice, the crystalline growth which aether exudes as its power is exhausted. It looked much nearer the scrapyard than the factory—and nothing like the sleek southbound expresses of my night-time visions. Porters hauled sacks and trolleys. The engine hiccupped and shuddered. We climbed aboard, settling on the barely padded bench of an otherwise empty carriage. I gave an inward shiver as the whistle screamed and the station began to slide away in grunts of steam. I’d have been happy for this journey to continue forever, to watch Bracebridge vanish as the thorny hedges swept by, dream-like, beyond the rippled glass, as the land rose and my mother stared out whilst I imagined increasingly complex versions of a tale in which she and I were fleeing some implacable foe and leaving Bracebridge for good.
The fields grew sparser. The backs of the bigger hills reared up, topped with versions of Rainharrow’s stone crown. Scarside, then Fareden and Hallowfell. It seemed as if our journey was just beginning—but then the track fanned off along a single line and the train slowed as the view from our window was blocked by a rusty sign: TATTON HALT.
A cold wind whipped around my legs as we stood on the empty platform and the train huffed on up the valley. Thin clouds hurried over the hills. The only evidence of humanity was the whispering line of the single telegraph that strode with the rails into the distance and the scarred remains of an old quarry.
Our feet crunched along a stone track leading east. Mother walked quickly, a brisk black figure swinging her basket and umbrella whilst I stumbled behind, unused to this big landscape where the hills barely changed their aspect. And something was different, something wasn’t right. Even the ground itself seemed … As the grass bowed and the path became more sheltered, narrowing into a gully, the realisation that we had left the pounding of the aether engines grew within me. Here, amid huge boulders and oak and holly, the wind boomed with a distant roar and the air became warmer as green and gold branches laced overhead. It gave off an implacable sense of age and clarity—and a strange, engine-less peace. Orange, red and gold berries glittered in the bushes. We came to a clearing where willows stooped beside a river and my mother flapped out the gingham towel as we settled on the greensward to eat. I unwrapped egg sandwiches from their greaseproof parcels and breathed in their homely smell, which is of farts and kitchens, then took out the angel cakes that lay flattened in the bottom of the basket like ruined oysters, vanilla cream oozing from their sides. The river flashed. My mother watched as I ate.
We walked on beside the bank. Around a bend, still following the path that had defined our way, we came across a mossy-bricked wall. It was clearly ancient and the trees had grown around it, cloaking its lower courses with crackling drifts of leaves. There was oak and birch. There were dense masses of holly. There were late dandelions, tansy and browning nettles and wild protrusions of bramble tipped with insect-eyed blackberries. The forest shade deepened as we followed the wall’s curve towards a gatehouse, twisting and ivied, and an open wrought-iron gate. The wild greensward beyond was pooled by the shadows of trees. We both hesitated. Stepping through into the grounds, there was a sense of trespass. I looked up at my mother, but her mouth was set.
We walked on, and an old house came into view. Chimneypots climbed like fingers. Roofs sagged and clambered. Diamond windows shone. The place was half-ruined, but there was such a sense of rightness, as if it had grown from the earth stone on stone and was now falling back with equal ease, that it was a long moment before I realised that it was also very odd. Like glimpsing a face in a crowd, one side beautiful, the other scarred and ugly, it remained hard for my mind to reconcile the old house’s two aspects. Along the crumbling rooflines, huge runners and veins of whitish crystal flickered like soap bubbles in the sunlight. Towards the left side of the building, the stuff lumped and gathered into warty growths, drowning the eaves. Closer to, I saw that it covered many of the walls and windows in rainbow cataracts, white on the surface but winking black in its depths, and gathered in scrolls and serrate pinecone-like growths. Of course, I recognised it—this was engine ice, the same by-product of failing aether which I had noticed leeching from the boiler of the train. But I’d never seen it on anything like this scale.
We climbed the worn semicircle of steps that led to the main door and lay beyond the influence of the growth. My mother rapped on it. The air seemed to shiver, although I could hear no sound inside until the muffled beat of footsteps came, followed by the slide of a lock. The figure standing inside could have been my mother’s age, but she was smaller, wore a plain grey dress and large, round silver-rimmed glasses. She seemed almost ordinary for a moment as I stared at her, and then, with the realisation that she wasn’t, the whole illusion of her humanity seemed to ripple. Although she was nothing like my imaginings, I knew instantly that she was a changeling.
‘I don’t know if you remember …’ my mother began.
‘Of course. Of course. Mary—Mistress Borrows! You must come in,’ she said with a wrinkly smile. In many ways, she was unremarkable. She was small and old, her skin had browned and tanned, was drumheaded across her cheekbones and thinned to almost nothing over her twig-like hands. She bore little resemblance to the trolls and witches of my night-time fears and imaginings, but at the same time there was something about her which was unlike anything or anyone I’d ever seen. That presence, and then being so thin and brown and old. It was all of those things, and everything else I couldn’t name or place, which made me sure I was witnessing something beyond the guilds, beyond my life, beyond Bracebridge.
There was a snip. I saw that she was holding a pair of secateurs in her thin fingers. Yes, she was plainly old, yet the way she moved as she beckoned us in across the huge and empty hall, still snipping those secateurs, you half-expected her to fly. She was wearing the kind of straw hat my mother might have worn if she hadn’t had on her bonnet, from which spiderweb strands of grey hair escaped, and her ears were like anyone else’s; their tips weren’t even pointed. Blink once, and she seemed ordinary. Blink again, as she stepped into the deeper shadows of the hall, and she almost seemed to vanish. Mother’s shoes and umbrella tapped. Shining tails of engine ice twinkled like dirty snow from the sunlight which drizzled in patches through the roof. My boots stubbed and rattled on the loose stonework. My mother and I seemed a ridiculous pair, arriving here at this strange and ancient house, unannounced but somehow not quite unexpected,
‘Is everything safe, Mary? Are things all right?’ The changeling’s face almost frowned. ‘You’ll probably want to see me alone?’
‘Yes. If that would be … Convenient.’
She nodded, smiling.
‘And you’re Robert, of course.’ She made my name sound enchanting. ‘Who else could you be? I’m Mistress Summerton, although your mother called me Missy when she was just about your age …
But I liked Mistress Summerton better. To me, it made an intensely pretty sound, which felt pleasant on the lips and tongue. In fact, I decided, this Mistress Summerton herself was almost pretty as well, old and wizened and changed though she seemed. Her bare, thin arms were twined with muscle like the stems of old ivy, and what inner flesh there was on her left wrist seemed unblemished, but that was only as it should be. I looked around for other creatures of myth and rumour, not just along the dim spaces, but up on along the cracked and sagging ceilings as well, and on the sills of the mostly broken windows and the branches of the nearby trees which grew through them, just in case more changelings happened to be hanging there like bats. But she seemed to live alone here-there was a child’s skipping rope hanging in a hallway, but such oddities were to be expected. Then we reached a part of the house into which ghostly piles of dandelion seed had penetrated. She opened a door along a passageway. The room beyond was cluttered with flowerpots, half-dead blooms and cuttings, seed troughs, cloudy bottles and green demijohns and what looked and smelled like a small sack of dray manure, although, at least in the piled desk and sagging chairs, the place also gave the impression of a kind of office. Beyond the desk, a tall half-circle of windows looked out on an bright garden, suffusing the air with a coloured haze. My astonishment was still growing as Mistress Summerton added to the haze by lighting a clay pipe.
‘It’s about …’ my mother began, still standing, her umbrella and picnic basket jutting out from her sides. ‘What I mean is ..
‘Annalise should be here in another moment. Then we can begin our talk.’ Mistress Summerton came over to me, her pipe clamped within her withered lips. She studied me from our almost equal heights. ‘You’ve grown so finely Robert … It is still Robert, isn’t it? You look a Robert now, although not perhaps for life ..
White smoke billowed around her. She seemed to be part of it, receding even as she drew closer and laid a hand on my shoulder which felt hot and light. Then she took off her glasses. Her eyes were brown and bright. In one sense, they were the most ordinary thing about her, but at the same time, they were too bright. The pupils were large and big and glittery as jet buttons. The whites had the gleam of wet porcelain.
Then the door opened behind me.
‘Annalise! At last! And I have a job for you.’
I turned slowly, wondering, after what I had already seen, what kind of sprite could possibly have such an affected name. I was disappointed; Annalise looked, in fact, like any other girl of about my age. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress of grubby white cotton, and even dirtier short white socks crumpled above scuffed sandals which might have been new some summers before. Her hair was pale blond, done up in tatters of velvet. She had a high forehead, and skin that would have been pale if it were clean, and eyes which were even greener than the sunlit grass outside. Her expression, as we regarded each other like cats forced to share each other’s territory, was a scowl of disinterest. She had the look of a once-treasured doll that had been left out in the rain.
‘When I say job, Annalise I mean a task,’ Mistress Summerton was saying. ‘And I hope a pleasant one. This here is Robert Borrows and I was thinking, well, I was wondering, if you two …’ Her scratchy fingers steered me towards the door. Annalise stepped back. A moment later, we were both standing alone in the long corridor.
‘Do you even know what this place is?’ she asked eventually. I shook my head.
Annalise stared at me with disdain. ‘If you want to know, it’s actually called Redhouse,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested in facts. Which I suppose you’re probably not.’
She turned and strode off. One of her sandals had a loose buckle, which jingled lightly with each step. Unable to think of anything better to do, I followed her.
‘So you’re a changeling as well, then?’
‘What do you think, little Robert Borrows?’ Perhaps deliberately, she was holding her arms tightly in at the sides. I couldn’t see her wrist. ‘Do I look like one?’
‘I don’t know. I mean no—of course you don’t. But living here, in this place …’ I was walking sideways to her as I struggled to keep up. ‘Although you seem ordinary.’
‘Why should I care what you believe?’ she muttered.
My body reacted before I had time to think. I stopped, grabbed Annalise’s arm, and spun her around. As I did so, the air was sheared by a thin, inaudible shriek.
‘Look …’ I was breathless as I faced her. The ruined corridor seemed suddenly endless. ‘I’m like you. Nobody asked me about today, about coming here. I can either go off on my own and sit somewhere and wait for my mother, or I can stay with you. In fact, I—’
‘All right …’ I was still holding Annalise’s left arm just above the wrist. My fingers tingled as, seemingly of their own accord, they let go. Beneath the grime, and but for the reddened marks made by my fingers, and to me quite incredibly, her skin was unmarked. ‘But don’t think I’m like you,’ she added. ‘Because I’m not.’
But Annalise was totally unique to me. And I suppose that in many ways I was almost equally strange to her; an ordinary lad from the ordinary world in which she seemed to feign disinterest. But I also felt, even then as she turned from me as she began to walk on, that our oppositenesses fitted together. That we made a kind of a pair. More and more of the crystal growth became apparent as we crossed into what would once have been the state rooms of Redhouse, although most of their roofs and the once-ornate plaster of many of the walls had fallen away. At first, there were just tiny grains of engine ice powdering the ruined floors. Then, larger, chandelier-like excrescences began to droop from the few remaining beams that spanned the ceilings.
‘Lots more people used to live here,’ Annalise said matter-of-factly. ‘But they had to stop. They used to work aether engines here, just like in Bracebridge ..
So she’d heard of Bracebridge! But the questions, the marvels, were coming too quickly. We had entered a room which reached all the way up through the house to the oval dome of a huge and miraculously intact skylight. It was walled with spilled and sagging cliff faces of books, tiered with balconies. The place soared far beyond my comprehension of a library, although clearly it had once performed that function. Here, also, the two quietly warring sides of the house entwined. Darkly veined, the glowing growths of engine ice clogged the shelves, dripped down the stairways in a glittering foam that broke across the floor in frozen waves. Even the glass dome was half covered like a blinking eye. I touched some of the ice. The crystal was cool and brittle. It crumbled with a fizzing, tinkling sound.
Annalise’s breath was close on my cheek.
‘I like to read here,’ she said.
‘I like reading too, or at least—’
‘—looking at the pictures, I suppose. The only problem is,’ she continued before I had a chance to deny it, ‘this whole library’s too old. The books fall apart.’
I lifted a tome which lay at the top of a pile which had spilled to the floor. The pages fluttered out like snow. It seemed a sad thing; all this dying knowledge. But when I turned to Annalise, she was smiling.
‘Come on! Bet you can’t catch me!’ She scrambled up a banister, grabbed a book from a shelf and threw it down at me. I ducked. It skidded across the tiles. The spine was ridged with crystal.
‘Looking at the pictures! Bet you can’t even read!’ Another book whizzed past.
Half angry, half laughing, I stared to climb up after her. The wood creaked and splintered. Engine ice fizzed down. Annalise fled ahead of me, slinging more books and insults.
‘Have you heard of Plato?’ she shouted, tossing out a tome from the rail above me which crashed below with the thud of a brick. ‘He was a person just like you, although a lot more intelligent. He invented aether long before the Grandmaster of Painswick, although he really just thought about it. It’s the fifth element, and it just goes around in circles when all the others travel in a straight line.’ Another book shot past me, spiralling down through long bars of sunlight, flapping its jewelled covers. More and more books flew by, their pages fluttering like birds, offering bright glimpses of their coloured plates. They rose and circled around me before sliding across the library’s distant chequered floor. I began to throw books out myself from the shelves around me, climbing from ledge to ledge as Annalise darted ahead. Finally, we reached a truce, and lay spread-eagled and breathless on the tiles amidst the wreckage of our battle. My scratched palms and knees were dusted silver-white. The huge, eerie library glowed.
‘Won’t you be in trouble for all this mess?’
Annalise chuckled. ‘Missy doesn’t care. She’s like that—she lets me do what I want.’ Close to, she smelled earthy and salty; like any other child. ‘Nobody minds about Redhouse now. Nobody wants it but us ..
Idly, I picked up the sprawled leaves of the book which lay nearest my fingers. Annalise was right, of course. It was the pictures rather than the words which then drew me. Here were ancient woodcuts from the Age of Kings, dark and swirling like the smoke of all the chimneys of Bracebridge in midwinter. Men with the heads of dogs chewed at corpses. Creatures with pendulous breasts and faces like melting lanterns flew on broomsticks through the air. The print beside it was dense, and filled with funny fs and ses. One page had a bigger illustration of what I thought at first was a flower until I saw that what I’d imagined to be the stamen was a figure writhing at a stake amid the black petals of flames.
‘What’s that you’re looking at?’ With a quick movement, Annalise snatched the book away. She studied the title on the spine. ‘Compendium Maleficarum … That’s all so out of date.’ With an effortless gesture, she tossed it so far across the library that it seemed to vanish into the moted air. Then she stood up, hands on hips, giving me a grey glimpse of her knickers. ‘Well? Are you coming?’
I followed as she pushed open a window then dropped down into the wilderness gardens outside. Here, more of the crystal piled amid the flowerbeds in the clear afternoon air, a dense foam amid which great-headed chrysanthemums nodded and roses bloomed. Annalise grabbed a peach from the bough of a tree which was like a glittering white umbrella. Knocking the encrusted fruit against a red brick wall, cracking it open like a nut, she tossed it to me. Juice flooded my palm as I bit into it.
‘You can learn all sorts of interesting things from books without having to go anywhere,’ Annalise said matter-of-factly as we sat down on a lawn beside the silvered mass of a fountain. ‘I mean, I could tell you more about that thingamajig place where you live—’
‘—Bracebridge—’
‘—from a book than you’d ever find out just by living there.’
I shrugged, plucking at the daisied grass.
‘And then of course, there’s all the other things that people get up to.’ Annalise hugged her knees. ‘Men and women, I mean. When they want to rub up against each other and make babies.’
‘I know all about that. Still,’ I conceded, ‘you can tell me if you like.’
‘Well …’ Annalise leaned back on her elbows and studied the sky, her hair falling pale gold now, almost like the foam, her dress nearly managing to be white. She was completely unembarrassed by her subject—but at the same time, she clearly understood that what she knew was well worth telling. I supposed, watching her as she talked, that she couldn’t have been totally isolated here. But, as the grass shone and the widows of the warty house glowed, as Annalise’s explanation of the act of human reproduction ranged bizarrely over the complicated terrain of some language that she had taken from those books, I didn’t want our shared afternoon to be anything other than totally unique.
‘Then the labia minor … And thus engorging the corpora cavernosa … Whilst attaching to the non-striated ..
I listened, genuinely absorbed by the sound of these, long, lovely, intricate words which spoke of rituals far more exotic than I could imagine the adults of Bracebridge—let alone my own parents—performing. Her voice was slightly breathless, high-pitched, and suffused with an odd personal accent that didn’t belong to any particular time or place.
‘Of course, the zygote ..
And as she talked, leaning into the sunlight beside that fountain which sparked and gushed in frozen waves, the off-white strap of her dress slipped from her shoulder. Her skin there looked almost clean and was flecked with golden hairs. Annalise had stopped talking. She looked at me for a moment, blinked, then yanked up her dress. She jumped up and walked off down the sloping garden, where lumpy balustrades gave way to a steeper drop. I scampered to catch up with her, grabbing branches, leaping from rock to root.
‘It wasn’t always like this,’ she called as I crashed after her. ‘Lots and lots of people used to live here. It was probably much bigger than Bracebridge …’
There had, indeed, once been a village beside the river down below this big house, although it was now half-drowned in engine ice, its tumourous roofs sagging or broken, the doors and windows draped, the pathways tumbling with froth. Our feet crunched and tinkled. We climbed to the ruins of the church, its tower fallen in a long, crusted tail, now shining and scaled, with gravestones leaning around it. It seemed colder and darker here; already edged with the beginnings of winter. But it would be good, I decided with an odd prescience as Annalise climbed over what had once been the church wall and the backs of her legs flashed white, if Bracebridge were to become like this one day; frozen in time, ornamented with engine ice.
‘You’re not afraid, are you?’ she asked me.
‘No. Of course not. Why should I be?’
At the foot of a bank, close by the river, the crystal rose in extravagant loops and claws, and the water hissed through brittle curtains which fanned like frosted weed from the shore. We came to the motionless waterwheel of an old millhouse still jutting into the frozen waters of its sluices. We climbed over ruined beams in the crackling marsh that surrounded it, glancing up, moment by moment, at the shouldering roof, the silent wheel. But for this strange frostfall, it was much like the old aether engines you found up on Rainharrow. Curtains of ancient weed fanned out, trapped within the glassy water in dense, inky waves. The sense of the past lay heavy here. In those days of the Second Age of Industry when this wheelhouse had thrived, aether could still be extracted from near the earth’s surface and the engines were mostly set on open ground like any other process of manufacturing. For eighty, perhaps ninety, years, villages such as this one had flourished too, growing stone by stone and roof by roof, burying their dead and raising their babies until they became too remote to be reached by the new railways, too high to be embraced by the canals. Then the aether started to run out. For a while, the waterwheel would still have turned as the children of the village left to find work in the big cities of Sheffield and Preston and the guildsmen struggled to keep the bearings of their outdated machinery turning, using up more and more of what aether they still extracted, leaving less and less to sell.
We walked back up through the trees, clambering over rustling falls of crystal then on through the village until we finally reached the glinting gardens of the big house again. Viewed from this side, standing by the frozen froth of that fountain, it seemed even more scaled and ruined. We wandered inside, skidding listlessly across floors, bonging gongs in empty hallways, knocking off stalactites of growth that dissolved with glassy sighs as the air filled with twilight. Annalise led me along eerie passageways to a large, dim room. Its windows were curtained with engine ice and what little light they admitted glittered on the only item of furniture, something so whitened and misshapen that I thought for a moment it was composed of nothing but engine ice. But the lid of the piano came up surprisingly easily when Annalise raised it and the keys inside were uncorroded.
I asked, ‘Can you play?’
She answered with a scatter of notes.
‘Tell me, Robert …’ More notes. ‘What’s it like in Bracebridge?’
I licked my lips. Where to begin? Where to end? ‘Well … There’s the sound, the feel. I mean, the aether engines. And we live in a row of houses. There are lots of rows of houses … My mother—I mean my father, he’s—’
The piano rang out again. ‘What I mean is, what’s it like for you?’
I thought for a moment. The room rippled into silence. ‘It’s …’ I shrugged.
‘Would you rather be here with Missy?’ Her figure was dim. Scarcely there. A shadow, receding. ‘Would you rather be me?’
‘I don’t even know what you are, Annalise.’
She gave a chuckle. Soft and bitter, not quite a laugh, it seemed to come from someone much older. Once again, her fingers stroked the piano. Dust sparkled up from the struck strings.
‘I’m really quite glad I came here,’ I said.
‘Hmm …’ Annalise was humming, scarcely listening.
‘Now I know people like you don’t just go to Northallerton.’ She closed the lid with a bang.
‘I think you’d better get back to your mother.’
I scurried after Annalise down corridors and stairways. Inside Mistress Summerton’s study, tobacco smoke hung in weary drapes around the plants. It seemed as if my mother and Mistress Summerton had long been sitting in silence.
‘We really must be going.’ My mother climbed slowly from the chair. I saw from the glistening trails that lay across her face that she’d been crying. ‘You see, there’s the last train ..
‘Of course, of course …’ Mistress Summerton stood up also, smiling with a flash of her glasses, and my mother and I were wafted from the room and back into the big main hallway where the engine ice still glimmered and sparkled through doorways with a faint inner light. I looked around for Annalise, but she had already vanished.
The two figures, my mother stooped, little Mistress Summerton as strange and alive as the house itself, regarded each other across the distance of their vastly different existences. Then, in a gesture that was rare even between people of the same family in those times of physical reserve, Mistress Summerton stepped forward and took my mother in her small brown arms. In a way, I was almost as shocked by this embrace as I was by anything I had seen on this magical Fourshiftday. And it seemed to me that the two figures merged; or rather, that Mistress Summerton encompassed them both, spreading across the hall and growing briefly vast in a beating of wings.
‘There …’ Mistress Summerton stepped back and reached to touch my mother’s forehead, muttering something more, wordless words which ran high quick and clear as a guildsman’s spell. Then she turned to me, fixing me with the gaze of her glasses, which filled with swirling light.
‘You must take care of your mother,’ she said, although her lips barely moved. I can feel a strength in you, Robert. And hope. Keep that hope, Robert. Keep it for as long as you can … Will you do that for me?
I nodded.
Mistress Summerton smiled. Her strange gaze travelled through me.
‘Goodbye.’
I looked back at the house as my mother and I walked down the white driveway. The crystal growth seemed more like the honey-glow of twilight now. And above it all, the stars were forming. One, shimmering low ahead of us in the west, was a deep, dark red.
My mother grabbed my arm.
‘Don’t tell Beth or your father about today,’ she muttered. ‘You know what he’s like …’
I nodded, thinking of Mistress Summerton’s words.
‘And take this basket—I don’t see why I should have to carry it all the way!’
I carried the empty picnic basket for my mother as we hurried to catch the last train from Tatton Halt.