The House of Storms

by Ian R. MacLeod

  They tumbled out, nearer than ever to shouting, laughing, or waltzing with the barrow-pushing old ladies who were heading towards Upmeet Market. They counted out what change they had left, which was mainly Marion’s. Ralph was unused to money, and he felt far more nervous entering the pillared blue ceilings of Martin’s Bank than he had at the Ringwrights’ Chambers. Here there was the busy sense of purpose and wealth and mystery. An army of clerks peered like hermit crabs from glassed alcoves before which many Bristolians were queuing.

  Babies squalled. Grandmistresses cooed to extraordinary dogs cradled in their arms. Businessmen in bright cravats frowned and studied their watches. Ralph looked around for other common guildspeople like John and Eliza Turner. There were enough here for them not to stand out, but not very many. He tried to imagine what his father had left here. Surely people like ringwrights used savings clubs or tea-caddies. More likely, perhaps, than money was a deposit box and a note which would make sense of this whole masquerade.

  ‘My name’s John Turner. This is my wife Eliza. We’ve just arrived this morning from Sevenoaks …’ He was sweating, and he knew he was saying too much, but where did you start when you had no idea what you wanted?

  ‘You have an account?’ the blond-haired clerk in high collar and long cuffs drawled.

  ‘I have my guildcard if you need proof of identity, and I was wondering—’

  ‘You want to make a withdrawal?’ His pink eyes unfocused, the clerk was already punching figures into the till-like device beside him. ‘How much?’

  Ralph had no idea. He looked at Marion.

  ‘I think we could do with three pounds and ten shillings,’ she said, then to Ralph: ‘After all, we’ve got our room at Sunshine Lodge to pay for.*

  ‘In that case, if you’ll…’ The clerk was reaching for a withdrawal slip when he noticed the till’s display. His expression changed. He glanced at Marion. He looked Ralph up and down. This was already taking longer than any of the other transactions, and the queue behind them was getting restless.

  ‘You did say three pounds and ten shillings?’

  ‘It might be useful,’ Marion leaned towards the window past Ralph, ‘if you let us know the state of our account.’

  ‘I’ll write it down.’ Even this simple process took longer than Ralph, or the people waiting behind them, might reasonably have expected. When the note was passed through to him, he understood why.

  Marion was the first to gain her composure. ‘I think in that case we might as well round that withdrawal up to five pounds, don’t you, dear?’

  It was merely necessary for Ralph to duplicate the signature he’d seen recorded in numberbead on the withdrawal slip to take the money, and then they were outside. The day had gathered an impetus of its own. After all, why not really have a room at Sunshine Lodge, now that they had the money? The place lay behind the sugar factories where the air was smoky and sweet. Asking for directions, they were sent along a wide, litter-strewn street. Spars and funnels rose at the far end. Other couples were also wandering, some trailing children or dragging luggage, others arm in arm and mismatched in age and dress for reasons which Ralph was slow to guess. Sunshine Lodge had little to distinguish it from many other optimistically entitled boarding establishments.

  ‘I wonder what Lascome’s like,’ Marion murmured, struggling to open the window after they’d been shown up to room 12A by a woman in a hairnet. Ralph laughed. He jumped on the bed, which shuddered alarmingly. There were voices from other rooms, people coughing, and a greasy, indefinable feel to the air. By rights, it should have been a dreadful place, but it was theirs. Giving up with the window, Marion came over to him. He undid the knot of her homespun shawl. He touched her hair.

  ‘Well, Mistress Eliza?’

  She leaned down to kiss him. Soon, their hands were greedily on each other and the moment was as sweet as it had ever been as they rocked and gasped and the bed rocked and gasped with them. They were alone and they were together, experiencing for the first time the pure recklessness of being in a big city where no one knew them and no one cared. Back at Invercombe, these needy times now came most often as they were outside in some quiet spot in the gardens attempting to make sense of all their data, or down in the reckoning engine’s cool darkness where Ralph grew distracted by the inner vein of her arm or the pulse in the hollow of her throat, and their love-making seemed stolen from that bigger purpose. But here everything was different, and Ralph was sure he heard other cries through the yellowed walls. The sounds of love were the spells of a guild which all humanity could share, and Marion was so, so lovely, and her flesh was an endless territory. Her nipples had grown broader and darker, he was sure, and she gasped and almost pushed him back as he took one in his mouth and felt it harden. Women, in their passions, were as changeable as this late summer weather beyond Invercombe, and it was a stormy Marion who pushed back avidly and almost angrily against him; who bared her teeth and looked at him, in the very instant when she should have been closest, from far, far away.

  They lay back, gazing up at the ceiling’s blotched, intricate stains.

  ‘Just how much is four thousand five hundred pounds really worth?’ he asked eventually.

  Marion chuckled and the bed chuckled with her. ‘Enough to buy a lifetime in this room.’

  It was a pleasant thought. A ship sounded, loud and close enough to buzz the glass of the window.

  He laid his hand upon her uptilted thigh. ‘I never thought I’d understand my father. But I think I do now. I mean—look what he’s given us. This name. This money. It’s like a door.’

  ‘My dad hasn’t earned that much in his entire life.’

  ‘It’s a lot. But at the same time …’ Ralph paused.

  Marion laid her hand across his. ‘I know what you’re trying to say. A lot to me—but not to you.’

  He had seen items of this amount recorded in guild printouts as a shifterm’s interest on a single account. But that money belonged to the Telegraphers. Personal wealth of the sort you could put in your pocket and spend was much rarer. In fact, he imagined four and a half thousand pounds was as much as his father had possessed, or at least had been able to pass on to him without anyone noticing. Yes, it was a little, but it was also a lot, at least if you were a ringwright, and he felt a growing excitement as he lay beside Marion. What his father had given him truly was a door, a way towards a life entirely different to the one which Tom Meynell himself had had to live. And he and Marion could walk through it.

  ‘Don’t you see how it all adds up? He wanted me to escape. He knew about you, and he wanted it for both of us. That’s the message in that pebble …’ Thoughts which had crossed his mind now became real. It was as if everything—Invercombe, his recovery from illness, Habitual Adaptation, their love for each other, even something his mother had said to him about having the key to his cage—had been leading to this. ‘We really could become Master and Mistress Turner.’

  ‘And where would we go?’

  Ralph gazed at the ceiling’s brown stains. There was something familiar about their scatter and shape which reminded him of his journeys across maps in the times of his illness. He was reminded, as well, of a hand of bananas cook had shown in the kitchen, and the huge, hairy-legged spider, bigger than any buzzbug but apparently a natural species, which had emerged. And then of the kidney bean Marion had once shown him on the shore. ‘We could go to the Fortunate Isles. You heard what Master McCall said. I mean—do you really want to spend the rest of your life as a maid, or even a shoregirl?’

  There they were, those islands, laid in all their intricate variety across the stained ceiling of room 12A at Sunshine Lodge. He thought of fruits and insects and birds. He thought of proving Habitual Adaptation across a canvas far bigger than the shore. The silence stretched. The shapes seemed to recede back into mere stains. Was Marion really so fond of the life she’d had, or the one she was now living? ‘I mean, we don’t have to be together. I’m not—’

 
‘No, Ralph. It’s not that. I’d love to go with you, there or anywhere. It’s just…’

  ‘Just what?’

  He heard her sigh. Propping herself up on her elbow, she laid her hand across his chest. ‘Just nothing. But there’s one place in Bristol I want to go to. And I want you to come there with me …’

  Bristol’s grander buildings—hotels, houses, shops, monuments, guildhalls, factories; it was often difficult to tell—were extraordinary. Sphinxes and lions, luridly veined or solid glass, emerged from the pluming masonry. One structure, the Great Hall of Wheelwrights, splashed and shimmered across its entire frontage with dripping terraces of fountains. Another seemed from its spewing pipework to have been built inside out. Trees of coral-stone buttressed clouds of marble, whilst down on the streets hollow-eyed beggars shouldered for space with guildsmistresses trailing black-skinned servants bearing rhubarb-red parasols. Marion led Ralph around the edges of busy markets, then on beneath washing-strung tenements. Had she been here before? He was entirely lost. They reached a gateway to what he assumed for a moment was a public park, for people were picnicking there. No London cemetery was like this.

  ‘People call this Bristol Boneyard,’ Marion said. ‘Mam was the only one who came when Sally was taken here. Seems there’s no room left in Luttrell Church, at least if you’re a Price. Apparently, it’s a common problem—not enough space …’

  Many of the grave markers on the lower slopes were tall and narrow, like stone telephone booths. Others were not particularly miniature versions of Bristol’s private and civil architecture. Monuments in the shape of flames, or formed from red crystal, or built like Cathay temples, or Egyptian pyramids, or propped by Mughal elephants, competed for sunlight and attention. Framed photographs were favoured, and skulls and bones were as popular as cherubs, but Bristol Boneyard was crowded with the living as well. Some, those who weren’t picnicking, laid flowers, or knelt in contemplation, whilst others wandered from stone to stone with what looked like nothing more than idle curiosity. There was a great deal of touching going on, as if people suspected some of the more incredible tombs really were made out of plasticine or jelly. Then Ralph noticed that whisperjewels were inset as the focus of many of these mausoleums. He crossed the greensward to touch one, and the face of a young man smiled up at him. In another, a toddler laughed. In a third, an elderly cleric cleared his throat and began to explain in measured tones what was wrong with the world.

  As they climbed, the graves grew less opulent. There was room here for Bristolian lads to play football, with leaning stone goalposts provided, and the path itself, Ralph noticed, consisted of the remains of old monuments. Inscriptions and guild scrolls came and went. With them, sometimes, came the faint pressing sense of some aethered message. Blurred faces, half-words and unknown longings tugged at him.

  They came to an area which was mostly a field, but where the raw earth was piled in one or two places as if by large and industrious moles. Here and there were a few square, modest stones. Scattered more commonly amid the grass, if you looked more closely, were wooden stubs not much bigger than the ones Master Wyatt used to mark his plantings. Marion counted left and right. She crouched down.

  ‘I know this is the worst possible place to take you after all you’ve just been through, but—’

  ‘No, I understand. But do you want me to leave you alone for a while?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what I was expecting. This is just…’

  Ralph looked about him. It was a beautiful spot, looking down at this city and the rise of Breedon Hill.

  ‘Sally was almost nine years younger than me—I don’t think Mam and Dad ever expected …’ She fanned her fingers through the grass. ‘We used to share the same bed. Everyone loved her and spoiled her. Then, one morning, she started saying she had a headache. Then she was sick. She just got worse so quickly. She was gone in a day.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Marion.’

  ‘No one ever really wanted to talk about Sally at home once she was gone.’ She stood up, brushing her hands and knees. ‘It used to bother me that there was no marker here. When I got my first wage envelope, I thought it could help buy one. It was a stupid idea.’

  ‘Listen. Some of this money—’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ralph. I don’t want it, least of all now I’ve seen where she is.’

  Ralph nodded. Back in London, a statue of Greatgrand-master Thomas Meynell was being moulded and cast in preparation for unveiling around Christmas.

  Meeting Doctress Foot at the Hotwells Pumproom had been the pretext of their journey to Bristol, although the waiter looked at them even more critically than the bank clerk had before leading them to her table. High tea, at a cost which would have bought you a whole shifterm at Sunshine Lodge, was already laid, whilst a string quartet sawed, parrots, echoes of the Fortunate Isles, fluttered overhead and a small stream made its way between the tables. The lanternflowers at Invercombe had faded, but here they were still so bright that it hurt the eyes to look directly at them. Doctress Foot was wearing a hat of a plumage which the parrots must have envied. Her small, eager face shone with excitement.

  ‘Listen—should I call you Master, or is it now correctly Greatgrandmaster?’

  ‘Ralph will do.’

  ‘Look at you! When my husband said it was a miracle, I thought he was exaggerating.’

  ‘This is …’ Ralph hesitated. ‘Marion Price. She works at Invercombe. She’s been helping me with my studies.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Her smiling eyes moved to Marion, to Ralph, back to Marion. ‘And you look well together, if you don’t mind me saying. I’m so pleased to have the chance to talk. Listen, shall I be mother… ?’ Doctress Foot poured the tea. Her own passion, she explained, her eyes still scurrying between them, was beetles. She’d collected ladybirds as a child, had drawers and drawers of the creatures now. She admired their fangs and horns, loved their characteristic beetleish independence. The problems presented in their classification were enormous. They were, by common consent, the largest of all the living orders.

  ‘Doctor Foot,’ she continued, ‘always likes to say they’re the Elder’s favourite creature because he made so many. The thing is, he means it literally. My husband thinks that God just sat there like some draughtsman and came up with this or that shape of wing. You, Master Ralph—and Mistress Marion as well—you of all people, will appreciate his skills as a physician—but he does sometimes seem to look at things in a rather—and I don’t want to say simplistic—way.’

  Ralph wouldn’t have gone quite as far as to think of this quaint woman as a fellow spirit, but he was nevertheless pleased to find how she responded to his concept of Habitual Adaptation, and how well it fitted her pinned and catalogued trays. Insects from nearby locations often had forms which were essentially similar, but varied according to the precise nature of their habitat. Further afield, continent to continent, two species of beetle which lived in essentially similar ways might have jaw parts the function of which was almost entirely identical, but which were entirely different in the details of their construction.

  ‘Listen—’ She fluttered through her handbag. ‘I’ve made notes. And these, look, are what I’ve found to be the best libraries and collections. Just mention my name.’ She smiled. Or say I’m the Beetle Lady …’

  ‘I think,’ Marion chuckled into Ralph’s ear as they left Doctress Foot and hurried back outside into the bustle of a Bristolian afternoon, ‘she’s worked out that I’m not just your assistant…’

  Camouflage, Ralph was thinking, was one of the simplest yet most extraordinary examples of Habitual Adaptation. In Hotwells, for example, he and Marion had stood out in their dowdy yet practical clothes, whereas Doctress Foot, in that hat, had fitted in perfectly. And perhaps that explained the plumage of the peacock as well, which otherwise had been bothering him. There was so, so much still to be done. At the guildhalls fey now visited, they received the anticipated stares, but, at the mention of th
e Beetle Lady, they were allowed to share hallowed rooms of dusty knowledge. The records of the Arthropod Branch of the Beastmasters’ Guild were amongst the most spectacular. Colours fluttered out from hand-tinted pages, whilst the reading room was supported by sculpted pediments of locust and tumblebug. If a configuration of insect could be imagined, it seemed that life had had a go at trying it out somewhere—but Ralph, as they filled in requisition after requisition and books were unchained from their alcoves, found himself concentrating on the varied fauna of the Fortunate Isles. They signed their chits J. and E. Turner. They promised to give their regards to the Beetle Lady.

  Ralph and Marion wandered Bristol as the guildhalls withdrew to their evening ceremonies. People were eating out, and the markets were busier than ever. Pigs and geese were being herded. There were sellers and hawkers everywhere. Walking hand in hand, they examined bags and shoes and useful things, debating what John and Eliza, fresh up from Kent, might choose to buy. That scarf for Noshiftday, that tie for evening promenades. The great ships moaned over the tram gantries as they left on the tide, and many walls were scaled with posters promising A Fresh Start, A Way Ahead. Leaving last shifterm, leaving tomorrow. All skills and ages needed. Good berths. Smoke and sails and the faint tingling stirrings of weathertops as breezes were summoned over the handkerchief-waving crowds. Bound for the Fortunate Isles, bound for Thule.