IT WAS THE LAST DAY of September, and the end of Marion’s old life. That morning, after prayers and breakfast with the other undermaids, she picked up her brush and bucket and went as usual to clean the grates. Ralph had taken to sleeping in later, and his mother was away, and the house seemed cold and deserted. As she bent down in the west parlour to pull out the ash tray, a wave of nausea came over her, and she was lucky to make it as far as the cloakroom by the best stairs before she threw up, even though she knew that using guests’ facilities was against all the rules. Marion rinsed her mouth and looked at herself, framed in the clarity of this ornate mirror. This, she told herself, is the life you’ve made. She returned to her duties, brushing and burnishing the grate, although today she found herself lingering over the polishing, breathing the deep, ammonia smell.
‘Penny for them, eh?’
It was Cissy Dunning, and Marion stood swiftly to execute the light curtsey which it was necessary to give senior servants when you were in the main part of the house, although her head swam a little as she did so. ‘Sorry, Mistress. I didn’t hear you coming.’
‘I wish everyone could always keep as busy as you do. You’re feeling all right, by the way? You look a little—’
‘I’m fine, Mistress. But thank you for asking.’
‘Well. That’s good.’ Cissy kneaded her hands. A clock pinged. Another bonged. Soon, it would be eight in the morning. ‘I suppose Master Ralph’ll be packing today. And I just wanted to say that I have no objection to you helping just as soon as he’s up and you’ve finished with that grate.’
‘Thank you, Mistress. But I have a half day. I thought I’d probably go home.’
‘Of course. And—well, I know that this is a difficult time for you. I do understand that. If you need to talk, now or later, you will come and see me, won’t you?’
Marion nodded. ‘I will, Mistress. And thank you.’
Cissy smiled, hesitated, then turned away. Sighing, Marion returned to the grate.
By eleven, when she had run out of duties and excuses, there was still no sign of Ralph emerging from his bed. Balling her apron into a laundry basket, she headed down the back corridor, eased open the east door and ducked through the flapping washing to the path which led towards the main gate. The wind moaned. The sky churned. She was leaving Invercombe without warning or notice. She was the very worst kind of undermaid.
Ralph awoke from some complex and unremembered dream. He rang for breakfast to be brought up to him, and picked at it before putting it aside and getting dressed. Noon, but only the weathertop seemed clear—gold-etched; a collage cut from a different painting. This was the day. Marion already had the tickets for the Verticordia, which departed Bristol for Penn Island on tomorrow’s morning tide, and they would meet at nine tonight at Luttrell Station to catch the last train.
There were two tasks of packing, and he started with the easier one, albeit with far more items, for the journey to Highclare he would never take. The new cases his mother had ordered for him smelled sweetly of leather and shop displays. Shirts and jackets. Ties and sports gear. It seemed important that the Ralph who was heading to Highclare should have everything he needed. His gaze settled on a big pelican’s foot shell on the mantelpiece. Lifting it, he wondered why it was that gastropods always unwound their shells clockwise. He put it to his ear, and smiled, and laid it on top of his shirts before buckling up his cases. Then it was all done; folded and sorted in the way which his mother had taught him through their long European journeys from hotel to hotel, and far better than could be accomplished by some ignorant porter or maid.
He dragged out a loose canvas bag from the space beneath his bed; it was something he’d found down in the house’s cellars, and perhaps even Master Turner might be expected to travel with something better, but it would have to do. What, anyway, could Ralph possibly bring with him to the Fortunate Isles? His clothes were either too smart, too small, or worn out and ruined. His books—well, he was coming around to his mother’s point of view that they were purely information, and he knew that, once he started choosing, he’d be unable to stop. The shells, the feathers, the leaves, the driftwood, yes, they had all been recorded—or, if they hadn’t, it was too late. Yesterday evening, and after days of wrestling with the decision, he’d filled this same canvas bag with his father’s stones and carried them down to the shore. The tide had been pulling out, and he’d thrown them far out across the restless water towards the cloud-swirled hills of Wales. He saved the numberbead with his father’s message until last, but he’d held it so many times now that the information had almost drained. Apart from a faint echo, it was just another stone. He, after all, was becoming the real John Turner.
Ralph opened up the bag. He flipped in a few punchcards, although he knew they were riddled with errors. At the end of the day, even bringing his hard-won notes seemed essentially pointless, when there was a new world to study out in the Fortunate Isles. He gazed at a neat annotation Marion had made. He couldn’t even remember the day they’d written this, or the particular rockpool. It was all drowned in a gleaming generality of seawater, and then of Marion leaning over to look at what he’d written. Shouldn’t we say this as well? He’d never stayed in a single place for this many shifterms before, or experienced the sense of time passing so vividly. And now it was gone. All of it. Almost at random, and somehow angrily, he stuffed in a few notebooks and clothes. The whole house was dark and quiet apart from the sound of the wind’s booming. Cloud-shadows, each one darker than the one before, careered across the sky, and the sea beyond looked dangerous and unwelcoming. There were no ships out in the channel. Where was everyone? Even in his preoccupied state about his own plans, Ralph sensed that something odd was afoot. But he must speak to his mother.
The temperature within the house was dropping notch by notch. Even downstairs within the shelter of the telephone booth, the air felt inexpressibly cold as his image in the mirror faded, and that of his mother, who always answered calls herself when she was at any of her houses, took his place. She was at their London townhouse, and the air seemed considerably warmer there, and bore faint wafts of polished woods. She was still wearing black, but in a way which was so restrained now that you scarcely noticed it. He imagined it was already becoming the colour of the season in tearooms and salons.
‘How are things going with your packing?’ she asked.
‘I’m pretty much done.’
‘What’s that sound?’
‘Oh, it’s just the wind.’ Ralph had imagined that lying to his mother would be the most difficult of all the things he had to accomplish today, but he felt extraordinarily calm.
‘Is it as cold as it seems there? I wish I’d put on a cardigan just to speak to you, darling. But I always did wonder just how much of the summer’s good weather at Invercombe was down to that weathertop, and how much was just sheer luck. There’s something about Weatherman Ayres, haven’t you always thought—a little secretive, a touch shady?’
‘… I suppose.’
‘Anyway, I should be down there by tomorrow lunchtime. If you could tell that to Cissy and cook. I thought we’d drive about halfway back in the afternoon, perhaps stop for a meal somewhere around Oxford.’
‘That would be nice.’
‘And I know, darling, just how difficult this is for you. And I don’t mean Highclare, where I think you’ll actually cope extremely well. But this is an enormous break in your life. Everything that’s happened this year—your father dying.’ She paused. Ralph could hear the distant rumble of London traffic. ‘And I know how fond of the house you’ve become. And that maid.’
Ralph nodded.
‘Oh, you don’t have to say anything. I know it’s useless me telling you at a time like this that I understand. You feel as if you’re the only person ever to experience these feelings, and in a way you are, because that’s how life works. But things move on. Time never stops. Sometimes, indeed, you have to leave something behind for a while before you can appreciate how important it is to you.’ Or isn’t.
Ralph blinked and shivered, unsure whether he’d really heard that last phrase. And his mother was dimming from him now, greying and receding like a misting mirror. She looked oddly distorted as well, less than the real woman he knew she was. In fact, a kind of wraith. Then he realised what it was: in the meeting of hot and cold air within this booth, a fog was forming.
He said, ‘I’m not sure this line is going to hold much longer.’ A sweat of condensation was gathering on the dialling handle underneath his palm. ‘Or even that this is safe.’
She chuckled. ‘But I just wanted to say, darling, that there are times when I feel as if I’ve been a bit negative about the life we high guildspeople must expect to live. You know—visits, people. But it’s also quite marvellous and privileged and thrilling. You hold influence, Ralph. You hold power. And that will never fade …’
There, though, the conversation ended, and Ralph left the booth and re-entered the gloom which had gathered inside the hall. Any other day, and he’d certainly have gone up to Weatherman Ayres to enquire about this weather, but he sensed that he wouldn’t be welcome. Perhaps it was just autumn. Perhaps it was just the house. Perhaps he was simply missing summer.
He flicked through the morning’s post. More papers to endorse, although he couldn’t bring himself to do so. Then he noticed something familiar about the handwriting on a smaller envelope and slit it open. It was from Doctress Foot, explaining all the new insights which Habitual Adaptation had given her into her collection, and how she’d do whatever she could to promote it against the forces of silly unreason, by which Ralph wondered if she didn’t mean her husband. He smiled. It was race to have an ally. In a PS, she mentioned a hitherto-unheard of species of beetle. Brown-backed and stubby-antlered, it was reported to be rampant in the cane fields of Arawak, where it was gleefully consuming all the new sugar cane shoots. Surely here, she suggested, was good evidence of a fresh adaptation of a species to a new environment? It was an interesting thought, but to Ralph this beetle’s appearance sounded too sudden. More likely, he thought, it was the work of man rather than unalloyed nature. He laid the letter back on the silver tray and went into the library. It was too dark now to read properly without turning the lights on, but he sat down for the last time in his favourite chair.
Cissy Dunning climbed the path towards the weathertop as the trees in the valley streamed like wrack in a storm. The wind pushed and pulled at her in cold, sudden swerves.
She found Weatherman Ayres striding the inner gantries, puffing a cheroot and whistling a thin version of the same song the wind over the weathertop was screaming. There were several barrels on the lowest deck, red-stamped with what, although she couldn’t read the guild’s language, had the look of prohibitions and warnings.
‘All just part of what’s necessary,’ he explained as she caught her breath.
At least it was warmer in here, but her skin crawled and itched from the electric air. ‘What on earth are you up to, Elijah Ayres?’
‘Just that delivery I mentioned to you.’
‘You said that would be shifterms yet.’
‘You know how these things change. Remember that big storm that blew out all the bulbs on the chandeliers? Well, we were just catching the very edge of it. One of the worst hurricanes in memory to hit the Gulf of Thule, and the Proserpine was caught pretty badly just as she was being fitted and loaded.’
She ran her tongue around her teeth and sighed. She’d heard this before, which was the worst of it. ‘Ralph Meynell’s still here, and he’s acting oddly. And I really should never have agreed with that mother of his that he and Marion Price should spend time together in the first place. And she’s coming in the morning, for Elder’s sake.’
‘We’ll be well done by then. And the lad won’t trouble us, not down in Clarence Cove with the sort of night I’ve got brewing. And it’ll be the last, I promise you. After that—’
‘Yes, yes.’ She rubbed her temples. ‘A whole new life.’
‘You’ll see, Cissy,’ he said, hands upon her hips now, eyes as brightly alive as the dials around him. ‘You and I, we’ll be the swank. We’ll be the gentry.’
He smelled sharp and matchy as he leaned forward to kiss her, of something more than clean oil and cheroots and electricity. She held him away. ‘You and I need to do some talking.’
‘We’ve said it a million times, Cissy,’ he murmured. ‘Now is the best time for us to leave Invercombe.’
‘That’s all well and good. The fact is, I’ve composed my letter of resignation, and I’ll be handing it to the greatgrandmistress when she comes tomorrow.’
‘That’s wonderful. Cissy.’
‘So I’m retiring, and I really do think, may the good Elder help me, that you’re the most sweet and strange and infuriating and fascinating man I’ve ever known. But what I’ve been meaning to say to you is to do with all this nonsense we’ve been telling each other about jewels and fine houses.’
‘Cissy—’
‘No. You listen and let me have my say for a change. Look at you and look at me. Look at your hand. Look at mine. Look at the colour of our skins. It might be all right for us to walk arm in arm here at Invercombe, but just how many couples like us do you see parading Boreal Avenue?’
‘That’s the—’
‘I still haven’t finished. Dreams are fine things, and so is love, but no amount of money on that ship is going to buy you and me the life of the guilded gentry. So what I’m saying is, yes, perhaps we could have a garden and maybe even a maid, but it’ll have to be somewhere quiet where people can talk as much as they want but they don’t need to bother us. A nice little cottage in Cornwall, I was thinking. I’ve always loved a rowdy sea. They mind their own business there, and Cornish-men don’t really have tails. We can wander the cliffs and talk about all the places you say you’ve been to our heart’s content. Now. How does that sound?’
The fog was thickening as Marion reached Clyst. It swirled with her into the cottage kitchen, where Mam was boiling up some more underwear.
‘Hope you’re not expecting any kind of dinner yet. Everything’s to pot, what with Owen and Denise off at the end of the shifterm—and isn’t it about time you got paid?’
Sitting down at the long family table, Marion studied the burns and the scarrings where Dad, much to Mam’s irritation, had used it as a workbench. She’d left a note back at Invercombe which Cissy wouldn’t find until tomorrow, asking to make sure her severance pay was forwarded here.
‘I went to Bristol with Ralph recently,’ she said eventually.
‘Did you, eh?’
‘We took the time to go up to the B—the civic cemetery. I found Sally’s grave.’
‘Won’t have moved on its own, will it?’ Mam was still avidly stirring and inspecting the smalls, her face wreathed in steam.
‘I just wanted to say … Well, it’s a lovely spot and I don’t think you need worry about buying a stone marker. I think you should save the money.’
‘Ha! As if we had any …’
Marion subsided. All she was doing was worrying at her own guilt. It wasn’t that Mam had given up thinking of Sally—neither had Dad, or Denise, or Owen. She was there in their silences, and the shape of a rock or a turn of the wind. She was there in Mam’s face now as she studied the laundry and licked her lips and rubbed her hand down her skirt and pronounced that it was probably time to get a bit of dinner going.
They didn’t live badly; Marion realised that now. They had food to eat, shoes when they needed them, a roof for shelter, the dignity of knowing who they were—in fact, a whole way of life. Being shorefolk really was a kind of guild, and a good deal better than many. You didn’t need the certificates and stupid oaths and daft ceremonies to believe in what you were.
She helped Mam lay the table, then Dad and Denise and Owen returned. Dad ate his food in quick pecks. Marion knew the signs; with a fog this dense, there would be a delivery tonight in which he and some other local men had been enlisted. Owen, on the other hand, was talking about all the things he’d need to do before he went off to Bristol. He seemed relaxed and confident. Now he’d reached a basic plateau of the level of knowledge required to become a mariner, he understood that the rest was mostly the window-dressing every guild put up to make their work seem more daunting than it was. Marion had still been toying with the idea of telling her family that she was heading with Ralph for the Fortunate Isles, but Dad was already leaving the table and Owen had forms to complete and Denise was working on embroidering her apprentice piece and Mam had yet more laundry to boil. It seemed a shame to disturb any of them in the purpose of their lives.
‘Things going all right at the big house?’ Denise asked her later as they sat together on her bed upstairs and she threaded last bits of crimson into a waistcoat. ‘Isn’t Ralph supposed to be leaving?’
‘His mother’s picking him up in her car to take him to Highclare Academy tomorrow.’
‘Shouldn’t you be with him, then?’ She bit through a thread. ‘Last night together, all that sort of thing?’
Marion shrugged. Her gaze travelled towards the orange box where she had buried the tickets for the Verticordia amid old clothes and bits of forgotten schoolwork.
‘Hold that candle for me, will you? There …’ Denise flattened the waistcoat out. ‘Not bad, as long as you don’t look too hard at the back. Don’t you think it’s about time, by the way?’
‘For what?’
‘Time you admitted to someone what you’re doing.’
Marion tried to frame an innocent question.
‘Just stop it, will you! A good job I haven’t got any scissors in my hand or I’d stick them in you right now, Marion Price. Dad may be too busy fretting about the small trade and Owen polishing his new badges and Mam boiling her pants, but anyone with any sense can see you’ve had a bee up your bum these last few shifterms. And do you really think I don’t take the trouble to have a good occasional rummage through what’s left of your things?’
‘You’ve seen the tickets?’
‘Of course I’ve seen the bloody tickets! But why are you calling yourself Mistress Eliza Turner?’
Marion nodded. It was a relief to be able to confess to someone, and at least she knew now that Denise could explain everything to Mam, Dad and Owen once she’d left. Still, when she’d finished, Denise continued to look at her somewhat disbelievingly.
‘It’s true, sis—you’ve seen the tickets.’
‘You haven’t told him, have you?’
Marion blinked.
‘Didn’t you take that potion? You, of all people, Marion!’
‘I think it was before that.’ She sighed. ‘It might even have been the first time. After that, we tried to be careful.’
‘How many months?’
‘Three.’
‘And you haven’t seen a physician?’
‘I’ve felt fine until recently. Now, I’m starting to dread breakfast.’
Denise chuckled. ‘They always say that’s the sign of a healthy baby. Ralph has no idea?’
‘None.’
‘That’s men for you. They only grumble as if it’s your fault when you get your monthlies. Still, it’ll have to come out if you and him are going off to this island, won’t it?’
‘I’ve thought about telling him—I’ve been so close. But he’s been through so much. His father’s died. And then, when he started talking about our going away, I didn’t want to make him feel as if he had to do it. I wanted him to feel that he was starting a life with me because he wanted to. Not because of some …’ Marion trailed off. She was still having problems with the word baby.
‘Of course, the other reason for not telling him is that it might put him off the whole idea entirely.’
‘That’s not Ralph.’
Denise sucked her teeth. ‘You’re lucky if you’re right.’
‘You don’t know how much he’s giving up to do this. I don’t think he realises himself.’
‘And if it doesn’t work out?’
‘I’m not helpless, Denise.’
It grew dark. Owen called up the ladder to say that he was going out. Dad had slipped off already and wouldn’t be back until morning. In the kitchen, Marion kissed the top of Mam’s forehead as she dozed before the fire, and worked open the cottage door. The wind outside had stilled, and the air tasted of salt and smoke. It clung to her face and clothes in greasy droplets. Faintly, up along the edge of the shore, bonfires were glowing. Nights such as this, before a big delivery, the shoremen put up as much smoke as they could to help with the fog Weatherman Ayres was creating.
She turned to Denise. ‘I hope you find everything you want in Bristol.’
Her sister chuckled. ‘They say my academy’s right beside a toffee factory. But who’d have thought it, eh? You running off with a greatgrandmaster to some tropic island. They’ll be singing songs about you, Marion, soon as word gets out. But you’ll let me know, won’t you?’
‘Of course I will.’
The two sisters hugged. More by touch than sight, Marion made her way up to the shore road. Even there, it was difficult to keep a proper sense of direction. She wondered about Ralph, but decided that she didn’t have time go back to Invercombe. She passed haggard trees and glimpses of unrecognisable walls, until she finally reached a swirl of light and lampposts of Luttrell High Street. Rousing the ticket clerk at the station, she bought two single tickets for Templemeads with what money she had left from her withdrawal from the Turner account. The platform was deserted, but there was a fire going in the waiting room. Marion sat down on the bench. She waited.
Sore and breathless, clambering towards what he thought was the shore path, Ralph found himself one step away from falling into the scummy depths of the seapool. Dull lights. A thicker smog of smoke plumes. The canvas bag banged his leg. Then, he was sure he glimpsed Weatherman Ayres hurrying out of the fog before the night closed in again. Just when he was thinking of retracing his steps, and then wondering how he could possibly do so, he found the coast road. From there, it was somewhat easier. Then, unlit, hooves muffled, a big wagon came by so suddenly that he was nearly run over. Pushing himself up from the hedge, he coughed and wiped his mouth and wandered on. Luttrell was a changed town, and his recollection of the station’s exact location was as vague as the fog itself. He passed muddy yards, the too-close moan of balehounds, then, quite literally, fell over a porter’s wooden handcart. Marion had said she’d buy the tickets, but the platform was empty, and for a moment his heart froze, but he entered a waiting room, and there she was, sitting amid its slightly brighter smog. Their clothes felt wet between them as they embraced, and she tasted like the night—a colder kind of flesh than the Marion he was used to. He was late. Loud and insubstantial, the train was already arriving, its carriage lights flickered like scenes from a cinematograph. Ralph turned unthinkingly left towards first class, but Marion took his arm and drew him towards third.
Three lads climbed on at a station called Aust. To Ralph, what they were saying was almost incomprehensible as they sat splay-legged on the hard benches and shared a narrow-necked brown jug, but it became apparent that they were asking him and Marion where they were bound. Got no tongue, has he, yer master? Not particularly liking the way they were looking at Marion, Ralph assured them that he had, and the lads burst into eye-bulging, thigh-slapping laughter. Well ark at im. Proper lush. Fancy some o this? The reddest-faced of the lads was holding out the jug on the hooks of his fingers, which Marion took and drank from, and passed on to Ralph.
‘Go on, John.’ She wiped her chin. ‘Elder knows when we’ll have anything else.’
John? Then he remembered. The stuff—some kind of cider, but thick and slippery—caught in his throat. What a way to travel, wheezing and patronised by boozy marts, but at least the fog slowly cleared. In lights and yards and back-to-back houses, Bristol finally arrived.
They passed beggars and wandering widows around the fringes of Templemeads Station as they debated the quickest and safest way to reach Sunshine Lodge. They trudged vaguely north. Warehouses and railings formed dead ends amid kingrats and dragonlice and slurry and mud.
‘You’ve got the tickets?’
Marion gave her coat pocket a rustling slap. A few minutes later, when at last they were amid houses, she put her hands to her mouth and scooted off down an alley. Ralph put down the bag and felt the cold city air nuzzle against his skin as he listened to the sounds of her being sick.
‘It’s that ghastly cider, Marion. You should never have accepted it.’
‘No, it isn’t. It’s …’
‘What?’
‘We’re nearly there.’
They’d the reached the street with its steeply cambered cobbles. Couples sloped past, loud and bleary. The same woman in the same hairnet unhooked the same key at Sunshine Lodge. Putting down his bag, weary beyond weariness, Ralph gave room 12A’s light switch a cautious prod. Surprisingly, the bulb glowed, although it did little to add to the look of the place. Peeling off her boots and socks, Marion slumped on the creaking bed. Ralph sat down on the other side, facing the wall.
‘I need to find a bathroom.’
Marion and the bedsprings chuckled. ‘Look under the bed. I imagine there’s probably a bucket.’
There was, but he couldn’t bring himself to use it. Feeling his way down the unlit stairs, he ended up using an outside wall which smelled as if it was solely maintained for that purpose, but told himself as he climbed back up that he’d have to get used to these things. Marion seemed already asleep, curled up and fully clothed. Not wanting to turn off the light, he lay down on top of the greasy blankets beside her, his back bowed by the droop of the mattress. This was nothing like the summer room where they had made love. Even the stains on the ceiling had changed. There was no sign of the Fortunate Isles, or any recognisable sea or continent. This was the landscape of his fever dreams, deformed by illogic. Then the light blinked out as a distant generator stopped humming and the night went black. Somewhere not far off, but much too loud and long for the sound to be happy, a woman was laughing. Marion was softly snoring. Her breath smelled of vomit and cider. He rolled over, swallowing back the urge to cough.
His skin itched. He wished he’d brought more of his notebooks. He wished he hadn’t thrown away his father’s stones. What sort of message was it, anyway—to send your son the life of a lesser guildsman, when his father had always been resolutely proud to be a telegrapher? Or perhaps there was no message, or one which he’d misinterpreted in this childish desire to avoid responsibility. Ralph sighed. The bed sighed with him. But he couldn’t go back. He was here and he was with Marion. They must face their future together.
He closed his eyes. Tried to think of white beaches and transparent oceans filled with teeming evidence; beautiful fish. He strove to sleep.
Weatherman Ayres was convinced that there was nothing to beat a good delivery, no matter how much Cissy complained. After all, she was as happy to accept the better vintages, the fresher fruit, the cash-in-hand, and to his mind, there was an essential rightness about the small trade which the ordinary stuff of life often lacked. Even the arrival of the Proserpine, whose sponsors and investors went all the way up to the big-noses of Hotwells, had a feeling of decency. To him, smuggling was a moral obligation, and he’d probably have done what he was doing tonight even without the substantial packet he was getting for his troubles, although admittedly that helped.
The men hallooed as he and one of Wyatt’s more reliable undergardeners rolled the barrels of explosive to the shore where a big rowboat was being readied. Someone waved a brand. They loaded and pushed out, dipped oars, and passed around a flask of the best stuff, which was sharp and tart and sweet, and just what this night needed. Ghost-like, they slipped out through the swirling dark. Weatherman Ayres trusted these men as he would never have trusted any fancy mariner. There was Scobie and Jack and Little Paul, and there was Bill Price, who was father to the girl Marion. They eased the boat into the tide’s deeper rush, certain in the knowledge that no other vessels would be about on this black a night. Back at Durnock Head, wooden hoists were being erected. Wagons would be waiting on the back road.
Deeper darkness lay ahead, although the smell of the ship was the first thing to catch their senses as they approached the rendezvous; that, and the slow throb of her engines. There she was, spars looming out of the mists, the Proserpine, which had been in the weatherman’s dreams since he’d held that number-bead in the Halls of the Merchant Venturers. He glimpsed faces over her side, and ropes snaking, and Weatherman Ayres told himself as he and his crew climbed aboard that this would be just like any other delivery.
The captain, a Spaniard named Convertino, hobbled out of the fog as they were stood on the tilted deck. ‘Glad to be finished with this journey, though it seems a shame to lose the ship, even if she is an old thing—sunk already according to her records …’ He had greying hair tied back from a lineless face. The sea did that to some people; puffed them up instead of etching itself into them.
‘I’m Weatherman Ayres. This here is Bill Price, Jack Petty, Pete Scobie …’
But there was no time to be lost. Immediately, they set about the business of hauling up the aether from the hold with the help of some of the crew, who proved to be a weak and subdued lot, even for bondsmen. As a rule, the weatherman disapproved of this as a way of running a ship, and he saw nothing tonight to change his way of thinking. The signs of their inexperience were in saltsores on their limbs and the scars on their hands. Still, they’d be getting a wage for this which would buy them their freedom.
The aether wasn’t in the caskets or barrels he’d expected, but big jars embossed with tongues and dragons and symbols which no English guildsman would ever recognise. They gathered on the deck like fat terracotta idols as the weatherman helped lower the explosive through the main hatch into the emptying hold. The floor was smeared with oil and bilge and the straw of packing. Ignoring the glower of the remaining pots, the weatherman propped the barrels against each of :he bulkheads, then picked off their wax bungs and tamped down their fuses. The wound strips of cordite shone like glowworms in his hands. The envelope containing their unique spell had come plastered with warnings that it shouldn’t be unsealed until the moment the fuses were to be activated, but he’d memorised those twists of phonetic hieroglyph days ago, easy as you like. They sang in him now as he climbed back up to the main deck.
A murmur in Spanish, and the anchor was raised with commendable quiet. After a brief conversation about draught and displacement, the weatherman took the wheel and pushed forward a slide valve. The engine shifted its beat, and the Proserpine’s list increased. If ever a ship needed sinking, this sorry vessel was it. As he eased her forward into the channels, he thought of fragrant sheaves of tobacco and gleaming bottles and the scents of oranges and bananas in cool caves on summer nights. That, not this, was the real small trade. The Mexicans ripped out people’s hearts at the tops of pyramids and offered them to the sun, for Elder’s sake. No wonder the itch to say the ignition spell was churning inside him.
The streamers of mist were still dense enough to shroud the prow, but he knew they were entering Clarence Cove from the changed smell of the water, the slip of the currents, from the echo of the silences around him. The Proserpine creaked. He eased back the screw to dead slow as he edged towards the swish of the caves. He signalled to ready the anchor. Even then, the sudden bulk of the cliffs surprised him. Waves sucked and washed. A voice shouted. A flaming brand was waved. Ahead was the stub of decking constructed on the lip of the largest sea cave, which would be destroyed like all the other evidence once this job was finished. The ship dragged to a dead halt. Silence now, but for the gulp and moan of her engines, then even that stilled. Then came the squeak of oars.
Crossing the deck, the weatherman watched as ropes were tossed and the Proserpine was berthed for last time. Rowboats bobbed in the space between the ship and the cliffs. It was a matter now of winching these pots overboard and bearing them up through the caves to the passage which opened in the middle of a field and then down to the wagons. For all of which this fog needed to hold for several more hours, although, oddly enough, it seemed to be thinning.
The weatherman tasted the air. Puzzled, he stroked his damp moustache, which was as reliable a gauge as any. He rehearsed the weathertop’s settings. The Proserpine’s spars were showing clearer above him now. He could even see the ragged tip of her mizzen against the nodding cliffs, and the individual faces of the men in the boats below him. But there was no wind—and the air hadn’t shifted. Odd, indeed, although he imagined it was another effect of this damn cargo. Not that it mattered as long they got the winch working and the night held, although here was a lesson to be learned that this stuff wasn’t worth all the money he’d heard mentioned at the Halls of the Merchant Venturers. They never risked their limbs and their freedom on darkly freezing nights such as this. Neither would he. Not again. The last thing he’d do, the very last thing, would be to cast the spell which sent this ship down to join the others which rested in this cove. And Elder bless her. And good riddance.
But the fog was definitely clearing. The wet cliffs were glinting as the ship rose and fell, and brightness was gathering at her stern out towards the entrance of the cove—gathering so strongly that he’d have said it was dawn if he hadn’t been certain it was the middle of the night. Then he heard engines, and thought for a moment that those of the Proserpine were somehow stirring, but now there were also flashes and shouts. The effect, he suddenly realised, came from a bigger ship’s weathertop pushing back the fog as she entered Clarence Cove. So stupid. So obvious. And not the sun’s rising, but floodlights churning through thinning scarves of white to spear the Proserpine’s ragged spars and the scurrying figures on her deck. Not one ship, either, but two; the gun-pricked prows of a pair of brassy white Enforcer vessels.
‘Every man off! Quick!’
No point now in stealth and silence. Even the bondsmen were running. There were gun cracks, heavy splashes in the water, the crump of bone meeting deck. The man at the prow of one of the Enforcer vessels was adding to the confused racket by shouting incomprehensibly through a loud-hailer. In the pomp of his sideburns and uniform, it could only be Enforcer Cornelius Scutt. Weatherman Ayres looked about him. The deck was already empty and the bright-lit water between the Proserpine and the sucking cliffs was aswarm with oars and boats and splashing limbs. He waited. The rowboats were pulling off, bodies were being hauled in or towed. Not that he imagined that there was any way of escape from this cove, but he wanted to be sure that everyone was well back before he did what was necessary.
Weatherman Ayres licked his lips. He touched his moustache. He thought of Cissy, and of Cornwall, and of evening walks with the sea-pinks waving along the gull-wheeling cliffs, and afterwards in their fire-lit cottage and the gingery smell of her flesh. But he was glad now that he’d ignored the warnings and opened that envelope, just as he was glad in his life for so many things. The phrases of the ignition spell were in him, and they were waiting. They took no effort at all to sing.