EACH MORNING AS SHE AWOKE, Marion allowed herself the lingering luxury of not knowing where she was. The fact that she always knew it was a luxury, and that there were certainly things, important things, things which, done or not done, would lead to outcomes good or dreadful, all added to its loveliness. She thought firstly of water, cool, glittering expanses of it bubbling and racing towards her. It drowned her legs and swarmed over her senses in the salt cry of gulls. And then, in another rush, came the chuckle of waves. She was lifted through marvellous warmth amid brilliant gardens, up into a high room with a single slant window and a narrow yet coolly expansive bed. And it was early, yes, for the sun was just creeping over the lintel and across these whitewashed walls, and the air smelled faintly of bleach and was inordinately, purposefully, importantly and beautifully clean. Yes, there was so, so very much to be done.
Thinking of brasses in need of polish and ash-dusted grates, Marion opened her eyes. Even though she knew this wasn’t really Invercombe, this dim room wasn’t so very different to the place where she had once slept. Sighing, she climbed up from her bed and got dressed. Half past five, and freezing cold. She took the long central stairs and headed on past dark offices to receive Chief Matron’s report. It had been a quiet night. Few deaths or new arrivals. No emergencies had necessitated her awakening.
‘That’s all?’
The matron nodded in a way which didn’t seem to mean entirely yes.
‘Something else?’
‘It’s just I was wondering if you’d heard what people are saying?’
‘What is it now?’ Marion felt tired already. ‘I’m sorry, Matron. What I mean is—’
‘No. That’s quite all right. It’s just that word’s getting back from the front that Hereford’s fallen …’
She headed down the next set of stairs, then along the main wards. Considering that Cirencester College had been a school for the Joint Guilds of Engineers three years before, it had adapted extraordinarily well to its role as a military hospital. The dorms, each partitioned alcove of four beds easily visible to the nurses, had scarcely needed changing. The perpetual cold, the echoing footsteps and voices—even the sense of suppressed loss and loneliness—had all been here long before she’d requisitioned the place. There had been probably even the same secret drinking amongst the teachers as there was now amongst the nurses.
The wounded grew used to her presence but still, as she entered the dim wards, there were cries and groans. Thump, thump, thump; that dreadful chant they took from her name and beat out with bedpans. Individual patients quietened as she approached them, but still, ringing back and forth along the hospital, there were those damn three beats. Ma-ri-on. It wasn’t her—it wasn’t anything—but she was nevertheless its cause, and it was useless to shout and rage at the sisters and nurses. The only answer was for her not to make these inspections. Then, what would she be worth?
Ruined heads turned on pillows in the burns wards. Hands which weren’t hands reached for her supposedly healing touch. Who was she, she wondered, as she heard their gagging whispers; the tired and irritable woman who was trying hard not to notice the cooked-meat smell, or the ministering angel they imagined? And word of this supposed defeat at Hereford was everywhere. Depending upon who you listened to, the West was said to be retreating, regrouping, retrenching … More work, another sleepless night, was being yawningly anticipated by the staff, but few new casualties had yet arrived apart from the usual dribs and drabs from accidents, shell shock, syphilis and food poisoning. Coldly worried, she headed out along the corridors.
Years before, in the time before the bodyguards and amulets, Marion would now have set straight out towards Hereford herself. Or at the very least, she’d have spent the day here in triage, helping deal with the carts and carriages as they arrived. Now, she was conscious that the systems she’d imposed on this and most other Western hospitals worked better without her presence. Fingers grew flustered when she was near. Kidney bowls were dropped. Soldiers tried to unstick themselves from blood-soaked stretchers so they could touch her. Ma-ri-on, Ma-ri-on. It was the last thing anyone would have wanted. And she’d never possessed sufficient vanity to imagine that things wouldn’t happen without her watching over them. Still, she couldn’t sit here idly, so she entered the main office and announced that she was going to Bristol, and would someone please find out the times of the trains?
There was chaos at the station, with relatives of soldiers crowding for non-existent news, to which Marion, by her very presence, made her own contribution as she fought her way past the pleading hands and faces into the carriage which had been set aside for her. There were, she thought, as the train pulled off, some advantages to being Marion Price. At least she had a compartment to herself, and sweet freedom to study the morning newspapers, interrupted only by the stammering requests from the guards that she sign something for their daughters, wives, mothers …
Hereford was certainly in the papers, but it was only all the usual rubbish about Brave Western resistance and The turning of the tide, and the front pages were dominated by the sinking of a French ship, which supposedly signalled a loosening of their blockade. Marion slid the papers aside. She tried to remember the heady feeling of those early advances, the times when London had seemed within reach, and she’d probably wanted to see the East cowed and defeated as much as the next Westerner, although her reasons had probably been entirely selfish. And then, with all the setbacks, it had still always seemed as if some new weapon or alliance or incarnation of peace or victory lay around the corner. Now, war had raged for three years, and even Hereford was supposedly falling. Marion’s eyes travelled back from the flashing countryside to a short column of reportage. Forces apparently led by General Meynell… War was like a fever—a nightmare gripped by its own internal logic where flashes of lost memories entwined.
She’d never sought to follow Ralph’s progress, but, just like his mother, he’d always been there, and every newspaper she’d ever picked up over the years had seemed to include his or her name somewhere in a long list of Guild Occasions. Often as not, it was so small that no one else would have noticed it, but she invariably did. But her old anger, the sense of betrayal which she had nursed through Alfies and the loss of her child and then on through her years along the river and with Noll, was gone, or had at least remanifested itself in all the energies she’d poured into her battles against stupidity, inefficiency and prejudice. More of which she would be prosecuting here in Bristol today.
She’d grown used to this city over the years, but every arrival was still tinged with the memory of taking that clattery train from Luttrell with Ralph, and the swarm and noise of a summer-hot Templemeads Station—the glorious escape of being someone called Eliza Turner. Today, though, as her train slowed and the tracks gathered in silver skeins under thickening grey skies, she could only be Marion Price, and she thought of the nearness of the Eastern army, and the route that they would take down the Wye Valley from Hereford, cutting off what was left of the West’s lifeblood. From here, and barring miracles in which she no longer believed, all that lay ahead for the West was defeat.
Marion spent her day warring amid the guildhalls of Bristol. She’d long known Greatmaster Cheney as a man rather than a poster, and one who had aged far beyond the point where he was capable of bearing the pressure of the day-to-day decisions about the conduct of the war; all he could offer her now was sympathy and a shaky cup of tea. Even one of the brothers Pike, although this was something she was one of the few to know, had suffered a nervous breakdown. Those who survived and prospered in the command hierarchy were, she was coming to think, those who were blessed with the thinnest grip on reality. But how could it be otherwise, with reality as it was now?
The greatmasters she confronted were as evasive as the newspapers about Hereford. Perhaps, indeed, what was in the papers was all that they knew. But for Marion everything was becoming clear. Not that she argued for capitulation, but it was vital that several hospitals around Ross and Monmouth were evacuated now in an orderly fashion. The alternative would be a log-jam of patients dying on jolting wagons amid the retreating soldiers and civilians, and the final collapse of the medical infrastructure which she had worked so hard to build. She was listened to with quiet sympathy in a series of impossibly grand rooms, and offered coffee, with cream, and fine moist sugar—the kind you couldn’t get anywhere these days, which she was too tired and hungry to refuse. Outside, great flakes of snow touched the windows with silent fingers. An early fall, the first of the year, and the signal that winter was here, and that this terrible war would continue through it unabated. These very halls had been the places where she had won her most significant victories as she had fought to overcome the ridiculous over-specialisation of the medical guilds, but now she felt powerless, lost…
‘Thing is, Mistress Price, if we start emptying the hospitals behind Hereford, which, by the way, is still being held as bravely as ever, it would be interpreted as defeat. Bad for our lads, to know that Marion Price is shutting up shop behind them just when they need her most. Although we do understand and admire your grasp of practicalities. Would you care for another biscuit?’
And if I issue orders for the hospitals to be moved anyway?’
‘This is war, Mistress Price. Even being who you are, that would be treason.’
There was to be a big dance in Bristol tonight. If not quite in her honour—for Marion got the impression that there were still big dances here most nights—it was certainly expected that she show her face, and there were no trains to take her back to Cirencester. She felt trapped, but at least she could see Noll, and there was the dim chance that she might achieve more here than by flustering the medics back at the hospital.
Marion was saluted and stared at by the guards as she entered the halls of the doctors’ guilds beneath their stone scrolls of occult dogma in a square just off the Horsefair. She descended the stairs into white-tiled catacombs where the smell always reminded her of butchers’ shops. Not that she of all people could afford to be squeamish, but, unlike Noll in his stained white coat, his off-white smile, his pale face, she preferred to work among the living.
‘Heard you were here today, stirring up the old ants’ nest.’ He gave her a formaldehyde hug. ‘You’re looking…’ He peeled off his rubber gloves. ‘Tired, I have to say.’
‘Have you heard about Hereford?’
He leaned against a marble slab and lit a cigarette and shrugged. ‘More cadavers.’
‘You’re not that cynical.’
‘It’s what I have to be.’
‘We’re losing the war.’ He blew smoke and shrugged again. ‘But there’s no point in fighting battles we can’t win. We should have sued for peace this summer. Enough people have died—’
‘You’ve said that before, Marion. Look—’ He smiled, gestured. ‘I’ve things to show you.’
Blued hands and feet lolled with the easy repose of the dead. As Noll showed Marion the progress he was making in refining his guild’s knowledge of the workings of the human heart, she remembered how he’d suffered and complained about all the restrictions when they’d worked together in Bewdley. Now, in this coldly important place, she was in the presence of a calmer, better Noll who could act as he pleased. He’d had a good war. So, he’d undoubtedly tell her, had Marion Price. But she’d only ever done what any other reasonable person would have done in her situation. Healing, as she’d always seen it, was essentially a matter of common sense. If you had clean sheets, mopped floors, sufficient bandages and blankets and all the regular habits of hygiene, much of the rest took care of itself. She’d never intended to give speeches, or to harangue the grandmasters when they came in their long, exquisite cars to inspect the dead and the dying. Still, no one had forced her to give those first interviews to the papers, nor to pose for the photographs, and then that first portrait, or to write those homilies on Aspects of Care which were now in their eighth reprint.
Noll had always remained in the shadows. Even this place, for all its scientific rigour, was palely secret, subterranean—a retreat. He showed her jars filled with the glowingly viscous varieties of parasite he was extracting from the cadavers and preserving, monitoring how they grew and adapted generation on generation, the weaker falling by the wayside and the stronger passing on their heritage.
‘War’s a changed environment,’ he explained, replacing a jar within which something large and white and many-horned rocked as if it were still swimming. ‘So you’re bound to get the emergence of new varieties.’
‘You’ll be telling me next that war’s a good thing.’
‘I think it’s probably an inevitable and necessary state; a catastrophe we humans strive to create now that we mostly avoid the natural ones.’ He laughed. He sounded genuinely happy. ‘Think of the advances just in these few short years which the guilds would probably never have otherwise made …’
Noll took her to his apartment, which was neatly stylish, in the wintry and abstract modern way. He undressed, still talking about the ways his thoughts and ideas were taking him. Perhaps he was expecting her to do the same, but she smiled as he laid a hand on her shoulder and suppressed a shudder as she shook her head.
‘It’s just…’
‘That’s all right.’ He gave her a peck on the cheek, then, whistling lightly and puffing on a cigarette, began putting on sleek evening clothes. Noll had always had such a glum view of the world, but now that his every worst expectation was happening, he seemed as bright as the waistcoat he was buttoning.
She looked down at her own clothes, which were a deliberate mix of the daily working attire of the various guilds involved in attending the invalid; a dowdy statement of equality. ‘I can’t go anywhere like this.’
‘People would be disappointed if you turned up looking anything other than as you are, Marion. Isn’t this how you like it, anyway—standing out?’ Smelling now of nicotine and ambergris, Noll kissed her cheek. ‘I think you’re quite marvellous, Marion. We all do.’
She’d misjudged Noll, whose appearance seemed understated compared with the rich and fortunate of Bristol who came gliding out from their carriages along Boreal Avenue in the continuing flurries of snow, but she couldn’t imagine what was essentially wrong with being well-dressed, even if the women’s make-up, as if in mute tribute to Noll’s cadavers, was bluish-pale. Or perhaps that was just the cold. And—ah, yes, look, it’s just as the late-edition headlines promised—Marion Price is back in Bristol to put things right! Whispery lines of fans and faces gathered beneath the lanterns in the glittering air. She was granted curtsies. There were frosty clatters of spontaneous applause.
Marble balconies and screes frothed overhead in the main hall’s suffocating brightness. Soon, at least if it stopped snowing, there would be fireworks. Definitely, there would be drinks. Soon as well, and even if Hereford hadn’t yet fallen, the cannons of the East would come within range of this beautiful palace, and Marion Price would be arrested by one or other side in this bloated conflict for things the real woman who lived within her shadow had probably never done or said. But already, there was dancing. Always, at least in this realm of the privileged, there was copious food. Look how the waiters and waitresses have blackened their faces in tribute to the bondsmen of the Fortunate Isles, who are fighting as avidly as the Bristolians for a freedom they’d never possessed!
‘Entre nous, what you were saying just lately about losing the war,’ Noll muttered as he guided her in, ‘probably isn’t best repeated here.’
The ballroom seemed to slope and sway, rolling the dancers to and fro to the swell of the music. The bottles, Marion noticed, were without labels. Someone laughed and tapped their nose. It seemed that all of Bristol was rejoicing in the illicit thrill of the small trade and running the blockades, but a more sombre tide was flowing for all the surface jollity and the ridiculously complex dances, and the strange wailing of the band. Amid the medals which the men wore, and the women affected as brooches in mimicry, were pinned the diamond-set faces of sons and brothers and husbands lost to some recent campaign or epidemic. Brush against them as you tried to extricate yourself from a chattering group, and treasured memories and voices breathed out at you.
Buffeted on these currents, fielding smiling or desperate faces, Marion encountered a finely made woman in silver and red striped dress with a lace ruff collar.
‘Marion …’ Denise swallowed back the last morsel of the sugared fancy she was eating. ‘You’re looking well.’
‘So are you …’
Denise licked her fingertips. ‘I only come to these dos because of business. Dreams of victory, dreams of defeat, the beloved returning in something other than a wooden box—you can imagine. Dreammistresses have never been more popular ‘People were saying this morning that Hereford had fallen.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t have thought so. It’s the West’s last redoubt and all of that, isn’t it? But I did hear someone over there saying that the Eastern commander’s been killed in an ambush, which is obviously good news.’
‘Who?’
‘He’s that one dressed in gold and blue beside the fat woman with the—Oh, you mean the Eastie! I really haven’t got the foggiest idea, Marion. They’re all the same, aren’t they, anyway? Only in it for the pillage and the blood and the virgins …’
It seemed that speeches were about to be made; Marion recognised the signs. Most likely, she’d be called upon to say a few words which she’d never prepared but which always came out anyway. And now, an amplified voice from the mezzanine was drawing the people across the floor’s shining slope as some newly created monstrosities were unfurled in their cage. Some kind of bat, but black as night, they fluttered and screeched and bared their acid fangs.
‘Why don’t we pop off to the loo, eh … ?’ Denise murmured.
In the toilets, which were cool and bright and blissfully, empty, she beckoned Marion inside a cubicle which was bigger than their entire old cottage and rustled down on the toilet lid.
‘That’s more like it.’
Marion had to agree that it was.
‘Heard anything from Owen lately?’ Denise asked as she poked about inside her handbag.
She shook her head.
‘Well, you know what post from the East’s like. He’s probably still mine-sweeping and killing our poor dolphins off in the North Sea. Somehow, I don’t worry too much about him. There’s something bouncy about our Owen, isn’t there, even if he’s gone with the East? But I can’t believe he’s involved in any of those atrocities.’
‘Have you seen Mam?’
‘Not lately.’ Denise was laying out on her lap a glass and silver syringe which was so much better made than the blunt devices Marion’s nurses had to deal with that it was a moment before she recognised it. ‘Although she is doing pretty well,’ she continued. ‘Portishead’s never been so lively—although I know that’s not saying much. And cousin Penelope’s really raking it in, what with all the gunnery officers and being kin to Marion Price and having her very own mother there on permanent exhibit…’ She gave the needle a brisk squeeze and tap to check for bubbles. ‘She probably dreads peace. Oh, don’t mind me, by the way …’
One-handed, Denise unclasped the silver bracelet around her left wrist and jabbed the needle into her Mark. This would have been a disastrous choice of point of insertion from a strictly medical viewpoint, as the scar’s residual aether contaminated any ordinary drug, but the spell Denise was injecting was strong enough for the fluid to shine dark against the white tiles and pool inside her eyes. As she slid the needle out, her gaze had already thickened. ‘Help yourself if you’d like some, by the way. I’m sure you of all people can manage the necessary.’
Marion, who’d watched Noll in not dissimilar situations, shook her head.
Settling back against the cistern, Denise smiled dreamily. ‘That’s the ticket. And as I was saying, most of us seem to be doing pretty nicely out of the war. And even if we lose, people will still want dreams. How bad can it be?’
The upper plate of Denise’s false teeth clicked lightly against the bottom as she spoke. Her smile, as it broadened, grew more and more lopsided. ‘We all have our places, don’t we? And even dream-mistresses need their dreams. Me, I like to go back to that Midsummer—you remember the one. I was Queen and bedecked in flowers at that lovely house where you used to work. And the perfect weather, and the lads all wanting me. And me saying no, no, no … I was going to Bristol, see, to be a seamstress. You must have somewhere as well, Marion. Everyone does. But things always work out. Look at Mam. Our Owen. Poor, poor Dad … And Sally. And you, Marion Price. Look at you …’ She chuckled, her eyes far away. ‘Never any need to be sad. Even that baby …’
‘What baby?’
She chuckled again. ‘Your baby, silly. It’s like I say. Always the happy ending and never the sad.’
‘My baby died, Denise.’
‘Did it? You’d be surprised, the stories you learn from inside dreamers’ dreams. Alfies wasn’t such a bad place—you always said that, didn’t you? Gave away the babies of course, but always to good homes. Had a guildslady not so long ago. Done well for herself. Thought her baby had died like yours. But then …’
Marion crouched beside Denise, gripping her arm. ‘Then what, Denise?’
‘Lots less trouble if the girls think their baby’s died, innit? Keeps them quiet. Specially the bothersome ones—which was probably you, eh, sis? Then you never go searching around and messing things up. Everyone just gets on with their lives.’
‘But I saw.’
‘Ha! But did you, eh? All tired and drugged up and not in a fit state for anything. They had this thing at Alfies, was what I heard. Like a dummy you might use to pin up clothes, only this one was shaped like a wee babbie. A few minutes, a small spell… You do understand what I mean, Marion, don’t you … ?’
Denise, in the bliss of her needle, had slid further against Marion. Hunching against the tiles, Marion settled her into some sort of balance, then debated if it wouldn’t be safer to lay her flat down on the cubical floor. But that was hardly Denise’s style. She looked into her eyes. ‘I’m going to leave you for a while now, sis. Do you understand?’
Denise nodded and exhaled. Her eyes rolled. The lids fluttered over.
Marion looked about her. The cubicle, the entire washroom, was quiet, although people would rush in here as soon as the speeches had finished. Hitching her skirts, she clambered around a gently snoring Denise on to the top of the cistern. It was some way up from there to the window, but there was a shelf-like scroll of tiles—a tangle of waves and shells—at a level to which she could just about hitch herself. She did so, straining and scrabbling, and battling the ridiculous image of the great Marion Price being found sprawled beside her drugged sister in a toilet. Even the Western papers, she thought as she worked the window’s hinges, would have a hard time making something mythical and positive out of that.
The space was scarcely big enough for her to squeeze through, and then only headlong. Perhaps thankfully, perhaps not, a rubbish-heaped skip lay directly beneath her in the darkness outside, and the only thing for her to do was to squirm through the aperture. Pushing herself through, she tumbled, crashed, into foul slippery waves, and swim-clambered quickly out and over to land jarringly on the paving of a dark alley.
Catching her breath, picking away the bigger lumps of rotting vegetable, she headed towards the sound of traffic. Tramlights and wires flickered and sprayed through the down-drifting snow, but there were few people about and, after her climb through the window and her encounter with the rubbish skip, she doubted if anything but the closest scrutiny would single her out. Beyond the whitening walls of the refurbished castle, she reached the houses of Greyshot Street where late-glowing night blooms glinted through the snowflakes beyond the softly piling railings. Aides’ gate was still chained and the wall, for all its roughness, proved much harder climbing than the toilet. She tumbled into the beds of sallow and lavender which Mistress Pattison had made her girls tend, and brushed the snow from herself and studied the house.
There were no broken windows, and just a few fallen slates. It was ridiculous that this place had been abandoned when it would have provided much-needed bed-space. The front door was locked, but she remembered the spell she’d secretly learned from Master Pattison’s mutterings. With a damp shudder, it opened. It was dark inside, but she knew the way across the hall, and studied the forbidden door which led to the birthing rooms. Only once were the girls allowed through here, and even now it felt odd to breathe the spell which opened it, and then enter a corridor where trays and implements, even the sheets, had been left as they were. Cobwebs stirred across framed photographs of babies and benefactors in the soft light of the snow. This, even more than she’d expected, was a difficult place to be.
She reached a kind of storeroom or scullery. Shelves of medicine jars glinted with engine ice as their potencies faded. There was nothing here other than that which might be expected, and soon all that was left for her to inspect was the curtained space beneath a sink. Anything secret, anything troublesome, would surely be kept better hidden than this. So why, as she reached towards those tired flaps of cotton, did her fingers tingle? Why did her heart race?
There was an old scrubbing brush with most of its bristles missing, and lumped and stiffening packets of Scott’s Universal Scouring Powder, but there was also a mannequin—a doll; the crudely made shape of a baby. Marion lifted it out. Its eyes were mere lumps of glass and its body and limbs were nothing but winds of cloth and stuffing, but her fingers, tracing its back as she cradled it, found the spiny lumps and hieroglyphs of some magic inner core. A faint glow came out of the eyes as she breathed and rocked over it, although she had no idea of the spell which would make it come sufficiently alive to seem dead.
She returned to the hall, and entered the parlour, which had also been out of bounds. She hadn’t thought before to try the lights, and blinked as their yellowish flood touched the drifts of white beyond the windows. This room, with its broad, grey-black fireplace and neatly arranged armchairs, was where the guildswomen came to collect their babies, and it was impossible not to feel a lingering sense of loss and need. Taking a poker from the fireplace, she splintered the locked bureau in the room’s corner. Its slide-out drawers were filled with forms which had been abandoned along with all the rest of the house. Proof, Marion thought grimly as she riffled through alphabetised names, that, here or in Western hospitals, no one ever read these things… Yes, she remembered some of these names. Marion Price. Lifting the form out, she recognised Nell Pattison’s scrawl, but the rest of the document was filled out in a more flowing hand. The box was ticked for Boy. He would be seventeen now. Almost a man. What street? Marion wondered. What house? What school? What life? What loves? What fears? What comforts? What hopes? What guild? The hand looked masculine. Silus something. She retraced the flowing signature. Bellingham? Bellington? Hellingson? Then, more neatly printed in a separate box, the address. Still, and for a long moment, Marion thought she must have misread. Einfell.