WITH AUTUMN, MARION DECIDED it was finally time to leave Bewdley and take the cabin boat downriver. Noll was easy about that as he was about most things, and stood the following morning on the jetty, hands stuffed into his white coat as he watched her disappear, not bothering to wave. With a little help from Nurse Withers, he was quite capable of coping on his own. After all, as he’d said to her so many times that she’d often thought he meant something else, he’d managed the infirmary well enough before she came. She even wondered now, as the bridge tollhouse took the last view of the infirmary roof, which still dimly proclaimed Merrow’s Feedstuffs, if he really expected her to return.
The last of the town slipped away and the banks rose higher in clusters of forest, green turning effortlessly to amber and bronze. Working and travelling the Severn, she’d come to love this season above all others. Autumn hadn’t existed on the shore as it did here, where smoke twirled above the next scatter of woodsmen’s houses to join with the sky’s overarching grey. And it was possible to think of the river herself—although admittedly sometimes dangerous and capricious, a stealer of fortunes and a taker of lives—as a friend in a way which you could never think of the Bristol Channel and the open sea. Yes, she decided, this was what she’d wanted to do. This, for as long as it lasted, was where she had wanted to be.
She reached Stourport by mid-morning. Here the Severn met the Stour, and linked with the canals of Dudley and Deritend, then north towards the Trent and Preston, and south and west to the Thames and London. If ever there was a town which looked both east and west, this was it, and instead of the NO TO THE BONDING STATUTE and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE WEST posters which fluttered elsewhere across England, the walls merely advertised picture houses and dances; the ordinary pursuits of a life she was sure would soon disappear. Swirled out and on from the locks, she reached a flatter landscape of fields and small towns. In Worcestershire now. She moored at Worcester at lunchtime, with the cathedral looking down from its cliff, and headed for food, and regretted not saying more to Noll.
‘We’ve had a letter from the Church Board,’ she’d said to him last night as they sat outside on the jetty. ‘They’re handing responsibility for our entire infirmary over to some emergency committee.’
‘We can’t refuse?’
She’d shaken her head, and Noll had continued smoking his cigarette. He managed to keep himself as aloof from all the recent bad news as he did from the practical business of running the infirmary.
‘But I think,’ she’d said eventually as they both stared out it the darkly purling river, ‘that I’d like to go and see my family for a few days.’
Leaving Gloucester somewhat the warmer for a pie and a light ale, with flyboats and stageboats and joeys and tugs pulling the ubiquitous double-ended trows, Marion remembered how she had first met Noll. She’d cut her right hand on the metal of a capstan, and she’d known, as she spilled an astonishing amount of blood through an oiled rag as she stumbled up the river path towards the infirmary where he worked, that she’d been lucky he was there. She remembered his pinched, intent features as he tightened a tourniquet and sewed the brimming folds of the cut. Perhaps mainly to distract her, he’d asked her as he did so about her work, and what she’d been doing before that. It was a surprisingly long list. With her hand temporarily being of no particular use, she’d been happy to repay him by helping sort through the infirmary’s paperwork, which mostly meant throwing it all away, and then to keep an eye on the other patients.
She came to like the work, and had taken more and more command. Noll was useless at managing people, or money, or most other things apart from being a physician, for which he had a peculiar brilliance. Marion had organised the cleaning of the wards, she’d thrown away old mattresses, and made sure the food was appropriate and didn’t go to waste. The infirmary was an adjunct to one of the church missions, founded on the pious belief that anyone who worked England’s waterways was in dire need of salvation, although Noll freely admitted that he didn’t believe in anything, and took his comforts in the dispensary from the medicine chest. Marion, somewhat curious, had tried them as well. They’d produced little more than nausea, although one night when Noll suggested that they might as well do what he called the obvious thing and sleep together, she pretended to be dazed enough to accept. She enjoyed their physical intimacy—in many ways, their lonelinesses matched—and the infirmary had prospered; in fact, it was probably more Marion’s now than it was his, and scarcely recognisable from the place of old.
The longer run towards Tewkesbury took her through the afternoon. Bridges echoed. Drays heaved the other way. She sang softly to keep the trim of the boat’s engine, and lit the lanterns at prow and stern. In the quickening dusk, beneath King John’s bridge and the meet of the Avon, the river was as great as she became, and the taint of the air changed. This was as far as the wash of the tides ever reached, and seagulls bobbed in the marina as she poled in through the near-dark. The town seemed festive tonight, and Marion expected to find hurdy-gurdies and rides in the main square, but men in baggy uniforms were parading before the eyes of an admiring crowd instead. Some hefted axes, or the handles of brooms, bristles still attached, to sweep away the unwanted influence of London in the affairs of the West. A very few had guns.
She cast off early next morning. The day was greyer than ever, the trees redder. Once she’d reached the bigger wharves of Gloucester, there was no doubting the influence of the sea. Ships sailed up these channels from as far away as Thule, although it had seemed such an inland place to her when she’d first arrived. Being a shoregirl, she’d thought that she knew about water, and about boats, but the Severn’s tides were capricious and delayed. Riverfolk, though, were a friendly enough sort, especially if they had to peer at you under your cap when you asked for work to tell if you were male or female.
She’d worked day boats. She’d sailed iron and wooden trows. She’d toiled with lock-minders and tunnel-haulers, and with families and alone. She’d become—still was, for all her time at the infirmary—a rivergirl. Her cabin boat was dwarfed along the deep cut from Gloucester to Sharpness by stageboats and stationboats, and keeping out of their way was no one’s lookout but her own. Then the waters spread, the horizon unfurled. Now, there were banks to be avoided and buoys to run. The clouds brought scatters of rain as she passed close beneath the cliffs of Chepstow, and noted how much improved the castle had become. Guns, now, of the modern sort—fat, wyre-black barrels like nostrilled beasts—guarded this entry to the West. Then came the Severn Bridge, which grew and grew to a scale beyond belief as the outswing of the tide pushed her beneath. A train swept heedlessly towards Wales, and she tasted its smoke on the downpour. Then, in the clattery silence which followed, she glimpsed the gargoyles which tended the bridge worming along the buttresses like caterpillars on a cauliflower.
She was cold and wet as she turned hard towards Avonmouth, but also exhilarated by the feat of navigation which had brought her little cabin boat this far. Then the rain even stopped, and the sun blazed through turrets of cloud and across the estuary steam rose from the piers. This, she decided, was where river and sea truly met. Here, low, flat butty-boats which had travelled downstream from Shrewsbury were moored close to the spars of ships which had rounded the Cape.
When she’d first come to Avonmouth, walking up the Avon Cut from Bristol after leaving Alfies, she’d studied the chalked signs offering work to the non-guilded at cheap rates. From here, and if you weren’t fussy, you could either head seawards or upriver. Part of her had longed to journey to the Fortunate Isles. But the thought of heading upstream into a country she realised she scarcely understood had finally drawn her. All things considered, she’d rarely regretted her decision since. She didn’t now, although she lingered on the quays, where the Devon Lass was heading out on the night tide for Arawak, and looking for deckhands. She could pull her old trick of wearing a cap—they might still even take her for a lad—and lose herself and this war-gloating country entirely. Eventually, though, she lit the lanterns of her cabin boat and set off past the gloaming into the heart of Bristol.
Once she’d paid the huge rental amount for her mooring, she wandered over the bridges. This city always took her by surprise. Suddenly, it was no longer late at night but the turn of another promising evening, and Bristol was teeming, and she was flotsam on its rivers, pushed this and that way by the hawkers and the hoi polloi on Boreal Avenue. She headed past the castle, which was webbed in scaffolding, and on up the hill past the houses of the middle and lesser guilds. Western enlistment posters lolled from many of the walls, but little else had changed. Apart, that was, from Alfies. She stopped at its gate, and felt the ponderous chain. Just as she’d heard in a letter from Denise, it was closed.
After Clyst and Invercombe, Alfies’ rooms had seemed small, and its rules impossibly small-minded. Pregnancy was treated like an illness, and a sense of homesick guilt hung heavy in the air. The other girls had made decent enough companions, Marion supposed, but none of them had been at their best: they came; their babies were born in a separate wing; without goodbyes, they away went again. Their few trips down into the city were closely chaperoned, as if they might escape—but where could you possibly escape to? The question had begun to obsess Marion as her time grew near, and she became mistrustful of the late-night tea, and was pleased to find that she was sleeping far less well, and grinding her teeth through prayers, once she’d starting watering it into an aspidistra. She’d stuck so far with the deal she’d made with Alice Meynell, but had decided that she couldn’t possibly relinquish her baby.
Marion had had no real idea what to expect from her confinement. The girls were full of stories, but they were best discounted, and Mam had been no help on the one tearful occasion she’d visited, and neither had Denise. Marion had never felt more alone, nor more determined, and she’d hidden a bundle of old clothing to cover Alfies’ ridiculous uniform and to wrap her baby, and followed Master Pattison, and listened carefully to the spells he muttered at locked doorways. Then her time came, and thoughts of any kind beyond getting through the next wave of pain were an impossibility. But still she was fighting not just for the life of her baby but against everything that had brought her here, and she batted away the sponge-soaked potions Mistress Pattison tried to squeeze past her lips. Finally, there was an end to it, and in her exhaustion she’d been sure she heard a baby crying. Even as the weariness surged into her, she calculated how she might conserve her non-existent strength. The room swarmed—and here came Mistress Pattison, bearing her baby back to her after the washing and weighing. But she could tell that something was wrong.
Marion laid her hands on Alfies’ gate as that white room swarmed around her with the vividity of hallucination. She saw the dead, blue-white thing she was offered, and heard Mistress Pattison’s words. Never took a breath. Some of them, the Sweet Good Elder wants to have back right away … Her world had collapsed at that moment in a way it hadn’t through all the things which had happened before. The cold, dead child had been prised from her, and she’d fallen into feverish sleep. Three days later, and without seeing any of the other girls again, Marion had left Alfies and had walked into the city and along the Avon Cut.
Turning back towards the city now, she headed down around the edges of the empty markets she’d once wandered with Ralph and then on towards the dreamhouse where Denise worked. It was still too early for the evening’s trade, and there was a long delay before the door opened. Marion was conscious as she stood inside that the earlier rain was still drying out of her clothes, and of the riverish smell they gave off as she and Denise hugged.
‘Owen’s in Bristol,’ Denise said. Although it would have been a lot better if you’d told me you were coming. Don’t they have telegrams up in that hospital place?’
You could never say, Marion thought as they set out along Silver Street towards the Halls of the Mariners’ Guild, that Denise was unchanged. Her sister had never settled on merely being pretty—the ruffed and puffed red extravagances of this particular season’s western fashions were extraordinary—but beneath all of that, she was starting to look just a little aged. She grew breathless from the mere business of walking, and, between gales of perfume, gave off the characteristic sour-dust smell of dreamhouse smoke. Marion reminded herself that her sister was now passing thirty, just as she would soon be doing herself.
They rung at the Mariners’ gates and waited as Owen emerged from a many-windowed annexe. Of course, it wasn’t the old Owen, and Marion wondered if she might have walked by this figure, fatter now in his uniform, with his scalp gleaming through his hair, if she’d passed him in the street. And then there was the question of where a mariner, a dream-mistress and a rivergirl might choose to eat, and they settled on an artificial-looking inn on the rise of Park Street. The place was thinly busy, threaded with tinny music and smoke. Nailed on the walls for purposes which Marion presumed were decorative were many implements she recognised. There were shrimp nets, whelkers’ hoes, a half-rotted rudder, and it struck her that something shorefolk and riverfolk had in common was that their ways of life were now regarded as quaint.
‘So, Marion,’ Denise said, ‘I’m still to say you’re a nurse, am I?’
‘I’ve been at the infirmary for four years, Denise.’
Undaunted, Denise gave Marion a We-all-know-why-that-is look. ‘Don’t know why you keep hopping about so. I’m sure you’d be good at something if you kept to it. And don’t think we dream-mistresses have it all easy,’ she added.
Owen pushed and picked at his plate. The silver-buttoned greyness of his helmsman’s uniform rather stood out here in Bristol, where belonging to one of the Great Guilds was no longer the sure statement of identity it had once been.
‘Why people can’t just get along with each other?’ Denise said philosophically. ‘The number of times I’ve had to help some Master Accountant or Senior Tailor dream they’re fighting for victory in the West, I feel as if I’ve won it all already …’
‘What I can’t believe,’ Owen said, ‘is how anyone can take pride in slaving.’
‘We don’t use that word here,’ Denise hissed.
‘You haven’t seen what it’s like, sis. They still transport people in ships over from Africa. Oh, I know they say it doesn’t happen, but it does. Just board one once, and you’d never touch sugar again.’
‘Well, I doubt if that’s…’ Denise trailed off.
‘So,’ Owen said. ‘What about you, Marion? What’s your position?’
‘I don’t agree with bonding, if that’s what you mean. But I can’t see how the guilds in London can simply pass a law to remove it.’
‘The thing is,’ Owen said, laying his fork and knife around his unfinished dinner. ‘I’ve got another ship. I’ll have to travel east to London tomorrow. She’s just been refitted as what’s termed a protection vessel. She’ll be carrying guns …’
There was a long pause. Denise clicked her teeth. ‘Isn’t there something else you could do?’
‘It’s a choice I’ve had to take. If I stay here in Bristol I’ll either end up crewing something similar, or I’ll be put in gaol. It’s not…’ He chuckled grimly. ‘It’s not as if I’ve become an Enforcer.’
When they left the inn, it had started raining again and Denise, in a quandary about ruining her clothes, was in a haste to get away. Still, she offered to put Marion up for the night on one of the dreamhouse sofas, and Marion declined as she had many times before, and she and Owen watched their sister scurry off down the wet street, then walked back together towards the Mariners’ Halls. They chuckled. Always, with Denise, it was hard not to smile.
‘You could stay here as well, you know, Marion …’
She shook her head. They were standing outside the guild-house gates. ‘I have a cabin in my boat.’
‘Of course—we Mariners forget that there are other kinds of craft.’
‘Don’t forget, Owen.’
‘No.’ He gazed back at her. ‘I won’t.’ He attempted a smile. You’ll be seeing Mam?’
‘I thought I’d look in tomorrow.’
‘Send her my love…’ He made to turn. ‘I’d better be away.’
Marion laid a hand on his wet epaulettes. ‘What you were saying, Owen—I mean, about the slaver ships. You crewed one, didn’t you?’
Owen blinked. ‘The pay was so good, sis.’ She felt him shrug. ‘So I have to do something now, sis. I have to find some kind of recompense.’
‘Even if it means joining the East?’
‘Even that. I know it doesn’t sound right, but it’s the best I can manage.’
‘Good luck, then.’
‘Good luck yourself …’
The sugar factories—Bolts, Kirtlings—smelled of desertion and the wet leavings of fires. Much of Bristol had declined from the sunlit pomp of a few years before, but people still needed cheap places to stay, and it was no surprise to find that Sunshine Lodge was still in business. There was even the same smell of damp carpets in the hall. Could it even be the same old woman in the same hairnet? Marion asked for room 12A, and ascended the narrow stairs. The bed had been turned the other way, and the night’s rain was seeping a fresh contribution to the ceiling’s stains. Voices sounded through the walls. She considered rearranging the bed. It would be like the ritual elements of a spell; get them exactly right and she’d become Eliza Turner again—but Ralph would still be Ralph, and they’d still probably have that same tiff. The bed admitted her in sour creaks, and the room unspan through the stages of her weariness.
Their departure from Invercombe certainly hadn’t been the joyful thing she’d imagined. Ralph had changed in those last shifterms—or become more like his true self—although she’d imagined things between them would return to what she’d naively thought of as their natural state once they got properly away. But more and more, he’d been talking about their journey to the Fortunate Isles as some excursion from which he could return after a year or so and simply pick up his guilded life. Where would that leave her, she’d often wondered? And where would that leave her baby? The time had surely arrived for her to tell him, but she’d started to wonder if she wasn’t putting it off not because she didn’t want to make him feel tied, but because she feared he’d simply walk away. Then they’d gone to that guildhall where the pillars glittered like insects. It was the sweet arrogance of youth, Marion now supposed, which had made them think they were the first to discover—what had they used to call it, Habitual Adaptation? Clumsy phrase. Yes, she’d understood Ralph’s disappointment as he paced this room, but then he’d started talking as if proving his theory was all that mattered. Questions had tumbled in her mind, and she’d felt, it had to be admitted, nauseous. She’d needed to be alone for a while, although she’d imagined as she stumbled down the stairs that she’d return a few minutes later. After all, they still had a ship to catch.
Then she was out in the street, and not exactly breathless or tearful or running, but in a state which lay close to all of these things. The ships had been sounding, the air stirring in excited flurries, the bright posters flapping, and hawkers were selling chapbooks about the best wagon routes to take across the alkali deserts of Western Thule. The sugar factories had still been at full production in those days, and their characteristic sweetshop-and-burning smell thickened the air. It was a smell Marion would never be able to catch again without sensing a light tap on her shoulder, and hearing a well-spoken female voice.
Excuse me. It is Marion Price, isn’t it?
She’d turned unhesitatingly. Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell had been dressed in a long coat and skirt and tight boots, all of them black, which Marion had previously thought to be one colour, but which she now realised to be something of many sheens and textures and shades.
‘I’m so glad I found you, Marion. Yes, yes, I know you’re worried about time and about Ralph—but you really needn’t be. Perhaps if we could just find somewhere to talk for a few minutes?’
She supposed she could have turned and run, but the idea that she and Ralph might escape undetected to the Fortunate Isles was gone, and she sensed as she had before that this woman was not to be resisted.
‘You’re looking pale, Marion,’ she said as they sat down in a small cafe. ‘I mean, I understand as a mother how wearying it is to be in your condition.’
Alice Meynell had smiled at her. She seemed to know everything. Then she moved the condiments aside and placed a copy of today’s Bristol Morning Post before her. Marion had been dimly aware of phrases to do with Arrests and Seizures as she and Ralph passed the placards of newsvendors, but she hadn’t understood what they meant until she saw the front page.
‘I’m sorry to say that Invercombe—and my trust in that place—has been sorely misused …’
Marion had known that some sort of delivery had been due last night, although it had hardly been uppermost in her mind, but a whole ship filled with aether was a prize beyond anything she’d ever heard talk of, and it represented an enormous betrayal that the Enforcers should discover it in the process of unloading in the weathertop fog of Clarence Cove.
‘I’m afraid, Marion, that your father is amongst the men who’ve been arrested. Weatherman Ayres did not survive. The whole business is a most sorry instance of what I believe you Westerners like to call the small trade. Perhaps I’d have been able to discourage such foolhardiness if I’d have been there at Invercombe and kept a better eye on things…’
‘My father. You said—’
‘He’s been arrested, and I also hear that he’s injured, but I honestly can’t tell you how badly. Invercombe, so I gather, is no longer safe. Such waste—all those lovely gardens—and so many arrests. Not just your father, but staff at Invercombe, and shorepeople, and then all the way up through the guilds to the Merchant Venturers who apparently financed the whole project. And there, really, lies the crux.’
Despite what she’d already heard, Marion felt herself grow cold. But Alice Meynell looked more composed and beautiful than ever, and her gaze, which was always attentive, had grown almost hypnotic. No one, Marion thought, as the greatgrandmistress of the Telegraphers’ Guild explained what she thought should now happen—not her mother, nor Ralph, nor anyone—had ever looked into her eyes quite this attentively before.
Cissy Dunning was already under arrest. So was Wilkins and so was Wyatt and so were many of Invercombe’s maids. Even if the prosecutors were persuaded that they had no involvement in the use of the house for smuggling, they would have a difficult time getting further employment in their guilds. The situation was worse for the shorefolk of Clyst. After all, they had lit the bonfires and crewed the boats. Unfortunate though it was, even those not directly involved were likely to be tainted by this affair. Why, Alice understood that Marion’s brother had only just recently been inducted into the Mariners’ Guild, which was notoriously strict on such matters. Even her sister, and her plans to become—what, a seamstress?—might well become compromised …
‘What are you saying?’
‘What I’m saying, Marion, is that things are at a most unfortunate stage. Of course, I’ll use all my influence to see that matters are dealt with as compassionately as possible. Then there’s Ralph to consider. One way or another, he’s been drawn far too closely into this. I certainly don’t advocate the practice of smuggling, Marion, but my feeling is that the blame should rest unequivocally with the senior guildsmen of Bristol who funded this and many another escapade, and not with the men and women who were simply trying to make the best living they could.’
Slowly, colder than ever, still falling, Marion nodded. ‘You’re saying you’ll help?’
‘Of course I will. But I expect a little from you in return. And before you say anything else, I should perhaps remind you why you’re here in Bristol, and the deceit you were carrying out. Fraud. Impersonation. And you knew about this delivery as well, didn’t you? None of us are quite innocent in this, I’m afraid, but it’s vital that Ralph should be able to go to Highclare without further delay or interruption, and it’s important, therefore, that you accept that you should have nothing further to do with him.’
‘If I don’t?’
The blue eyes hazed. ‘I believe you’re just saying that, Marion. I mean—do you really imagine you could carry on your relationship? I do realise that this is a lot for you to absorb, my dear, but, if it’s any comfort to you, such daydreams of escape as you and Ralph toyed with are to be expected from young people. Of course, it couldn’t possibly happen, any more than my poor husband Tom probably ever imagined when he made that amusing bequest. Although I’m sure it was fun while it lasted.’ She smiled. ‘I’m not some monster. I do understand how a woman feels about her child. I also realize that the baby is partly of Meynell blood, and the last thing I’d want is for any harm to come to it.’
‘How did you know?’
Alice smiled. ‘Call it intuition. But in all frankness, my dear, I don’t think you could guarantee you could give this child the life it deserves. I want you to have it adopted.’
‘You’re asking me to give up the one thing I have left.’
‘What I’m asking you to do is to be practical. There’s a place just up the hill not so far from here. It’s called Saint Alphage’s, or Alfies colloquially. Ah—I see you’ve heard of it. I’ve already arranged funding, and I can assure you that you’ll be well treated. And once the child is born, it will be given a good home, and you’ll be free to get on with your life as you wish. So, I should add, will your brother and sister, and also, as far as I can manage, will the people of Clyst and the workers of Invercombe. The arrests and the enquiries would be kept to a minimum. Your injured father will be released on compassionate grounds. I give you my word that I will do everything which lies within my powers to ensure that the only people who suffer are the Merchant Venturers and greatgrandmasters of Bristol. And I somehow doubt that you have any great concern for them…’
Marion considered. That was the strangest thing: this woman had reshuffled her life like a pack of cards and had laid it out in this horrible new way, and yet she found herself meeting her coldly compassionate gaze and debating what was to be lost or gained. ‘If I refuse?’
‘Please don’t put me in that position, Marion.’
She tried to remind herself of what she knew about Ralph’s mother. She remembered the first time that she’d seen her wandering the shore, looking for a specific but quite useless variety of pearl, although she had no doubt that Alice Meynell had her reasons. The woman was nothing if not considered. Would she really refuse to help the people of Invercombe and Clyst simply for the sake of Marion not giving up her child? That, at the end of the day, and looking into those falling eyes, which were blue into endless dark beyond all the colours of blackness, was the one thing she couldn’t afford to doubt.
‘I’m glad you’re seeing things sensibly, Marion.’
Had she really said yes? Then Alice Meynell had settled the bill for whatever it was they had drunk and they were standing outside the cafe in blustery sunlight, and, for the sake of all the people she loved and knew, her whole life taken from her and twisted around and returned to her in this impossible new shape, Marion had started walking up the hill towards Saint Alphage’s, and nothing was ever the same.
She settled the bill at Sunshine Lodge early and was out in the ungreying morning, taking short cuts through the quarters of the city where the Jews primarily dwelt, and then the men of Cathay, and then the famine-fleeing Irish, and then the free bondsmen. She was glad, after these sorry hovels, to be piloting in her cabin boat back along Avon Cut, and let the craft submit to the currents which bore her out from the sea-locks and further down the Bristol Channel.
She’d never visited Portishead by boat before, and navigating the channels towards its little-used harbour was a task she used to keep other thoughts at bay. It was too late in the season for holidaymakers, and there were many Vacancies signs in front windows as she walked the rows of sand-swept terraces until she came to the particular house where her mother now lodged.
‘She’s in her room …’ Cousin Penelope, hands gloved in soap, gestured up the stairs. After testing several identical doors, Marion found Mam sitting at a window in a front bedroom.
‘Marion, isn’t it?’ Mam was wearing a holed shawl, and working something round and round with the fingers of her right hand.
‘I’m up from Bewdley. I saw Denise and Owen up in Bristol yesterday evening. They’re both doing fine.’
‘Owen off on some ship, then, is he?’
‘I believe it’s this very morning.’
‘So he won’t be visiting me.’
‘Didn’t he look in last Fourshiftday?’
‘Denise, now she’s a good girl. Sends me these scarves she says she’s made. Course, I can’t wear them—what use are they to me? And her downstairs has always got her eye on my things …’
Mam’s gaze wandered towards the window beside which, from the wear of the linoleum, it seemed she spent most of her time sitting. Beyond back yards filled with neglected washing and gables of houses lay a small triangle of sea. Marion sat with Mam for a while as they both stared out. She’d have held her mother’s hands, but the worrying fingers were too busy.
Afterwards, in the dull afternoon, Marion took her mother down towards the sea.
‘I’m not in a bloody handcart yet…’ Mam batted her offered arm away.
They walked round the stone jetty where a domed emporium, its paint peeled and seemingly abandoned, promised Serpents of the Deep. ‘Taken them all away, they have,’ Mam informed her. ‘Something to do with the war effort.’
Out in the channel, a white plume rose and fell. A boom, another plume. ‘Get that all the time here.’ Mam chuckled. Her fingers were turning something blue and glittery. ‘There’s a new emplacement up by the toy boating lake. Getting their range, they are.’ Boom. The sound rolled back and forth across the channel as they sat on a bench and ate fish and chips, which Mam ate one-handed as her fingers still turned and turned that shard of glass. As Marion peeled her last grey chip away from the newspaper, she found the face of Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell smiling up at her from the greasy society pages. Balling it up, she stuffed it into an over-brimming litter bin.
Back at the house, standing in the hall and refusing cousin Penelope’s less than overwhelming insistence that she stay for tea, Marion decided that she could still tell herself that her mother, if not quite happy, wasn’t entirely sad. As they kissed, she took her hands, and saw that the whole of Mam’s palm was scabbed by the endless turning of a shard of blue Bristol glass.
Marion found her own fingers were working around the tiller after she’d cast off from Portishead as she thought of Mam’s hands, that blue piece of glass. Dad’s injuries from the Proserpine’s blast, if you excluded the considerable one of being arrested by the Enforcers, had seemed slight at first. He’d been placed in Luttrell’s small infirmary to recover from his burns and a few embedded splinters of hull, and it seemed that Alice Meynell really had kept her promise when it was announced that charges would not be preferred. Marion, although she’d given up expecting Ralph Meynell to ever return to her, was beginning to feel something like genuine hope when she was first permitted to make the trip from Alfies to see her father. Dad certainly didn’t blame Weatherman Ayres for blowing up the Proserpine. He’d have done the same. Only a matter of shifterms, he kept saying, and he’d be out sailing the channel again. But the odd darkening transparency of his hands was beginning to get worse.
Marion only saw her father alive once more, and by then his skin had been blued and brittled. Blood pulsed through bottle-depths of glass, and he couldn’t speak, and all the fingers of one of his hands had already been snapped off by a careless nurse. She’d doubted, in fact, if the man who’d been her father was still there at all. There had been some talk of taking him to Einfell, but that was a place of guilds and madness; even in this state, Dad would never have wanted to go there. He died a day or so afterwards in any case—of, quite literally, a shattered heart.
Despite the changed currents, there were still a few fishing smacks at Luttrell, and the foreshore was strung with nets, although they looked as if they’d been hanging there for a long time, and a rapidly filling creek now somehow encircled the walls of what had once been the Mariners’ academy. Luttrell itself, Marion knew, had suffered in the wake of Invercombe’s decline, although she noticed as she walked up from the rough new jetty in the fading afternoon that the old lighthouse was now another gun emplacement; perhaps this war would bring it better fortune.
The shore road, which had never been a particularly fine thoroughfare, now diminished after the church, which itself looked unkempt and unvisited. How quickly things changed! Yet the sound, the smell, of windy marram grass, was entirely familiar to her. As the first buildings of Clyst unhunched themselves from the general outlines of the shore, she came to the first warning sign, although it was rusted and pockmarked. Then to a whistling stretch of fence. Another warning sign. Red lettered DANGER. But she walked on.
The wind fell back, and the rockpools ceased rippling. Night was settling, and the fences were more persistent now; near invisible barbed-wire clutched at her hands and clothes. Then there was a wooden bridge across a trench which might once have admitted vessels. This was Clyst, and yet it wasn’t, for new shapes of rock, quite unrecognisable in their uncovered strangeness, prodded from the dark where there had once been dunes. Of course, things never stayed the same for long here, but this was something more. Her memories, her old life, had been scrubbed out by the changing currents which had surged from the chaos of Clarence Cove. Here, beyond a rill, was what was left of the cottage where she’d been born, but it was a mere straggle of foundations, tumbled by waves which had only ever sprayed the windows in the worst of storms when she was a child. Nothing was the same.
But Durnock Head was a little clearer now, and she was standing, she was sure, on the stretch of shore where she’d once collected cockles for three shillings a bucket. Here, as capriciously as they had obliterated so much else, the tides had left the shapes of some of the smaller rocks by which she had unconsciously navigated entirely unchanged. The air hung blue and heavy, piled ahead into the dark. Her skin prickled. The weather here changed as quickly as it ever had, and she could taste the salt-lightning edges of a storm. There was a pulse of sound, light laddered, and for a moment she could see Invercombe as clearly as she had ever seen it, and its weathertop gleamed and the physic garden shone green and the specimen trees scrolled towards the vinery, then on and up, fizzing against her eyes, towards Durnock Head and the Temple of Winds. Then the light disintegrated, and Invercombe retreated into agitated gloom.
The rising wind pushed at Marion as she turned away. She passed the signs, the wires, the ruined houses, and then the overcrowded graveyard of Luttrell’s church. It was entirely dark, but, making swift and simple calculations of time, fuel and money as she kindled her cabin boat’s lights and edged out from harbour, she reckoned she’d be able to navigate her way back out to the channel if she stuck to the main passage. Lit water gleamed about her. She was at that point where the tide and the outrush of the Severn were held in near-equilibrium, and it was not so very hard to imagine that this boat, which had served her so well in her journey here, might just as easily take her further—out across the Boreal Ocean, far away from England and this coming war. But it would be a difficult enough journey, she finally decided, just to get herself back up the Severn to Bewdley and Noll’s infirmary and face whatever lay ahead, and that was the way she turned into the stinging rain.