THE POWER WAS DOWN and had been that way since long before dawn, and the fine house, a mixture of styles and Ages, which had been requisitioned as Headquarters for the First and Second Eastern Armies over which Alice, in the matter of a few shifterms and by divers means, had assumed almost total control, was seepingly cold. The spells which had once been cast to keep up the plaster which frothed across the extravagant ceilings were failing. You could hear the crashes like cannon-fire each night as more of it collapsed. What furniture remained in the desolate rooms was crooked and unstable. The plumbing had failed, to be replaced by hosepipes, buckets and standpipes. The carpets squelched. The silk wallpapers were sloughing from the walls. In her previous visits to the front, she had always been aware of grey, grim military utility, but living amongst it was something else entirely.
Climbing out from her fold-up bed which lay in the clotted gloom cast by the huge red four-poster which was too damp to be inhabited, she winced, and waited for her head to stop spinning. The air swished about her. Jungle fronds of damp climbed the walls, greyly exploring the interstices of stone and wood and plaster. A shadow, a madly haired extension of the grainy light, she crept across the loosely carpeted floor. With a sag and a stagger, her portmanteau opened. Many of the jars were stuffed in places where they didn’t quite fit, or had crusted and jauntily angled lids. Pages and cuttings from her notebook had loosened to line the dim bottom like the fallen leaves of her own personal autumn. One day, Alice told herself, she would give the whole thing a proper clear-out. But in truth she had come to like the loose, powdery and jangling sense of disorder it now gave off. It was all hers, an entire spinning world, and here, at the heart of it, the star which they all orbited: a small, bright chalice of aether, which brightened still further as she lifted it out. The hissing in her head grew much stronger as well. The sense, the song, of the aether infused her. Almost regretfully, she laid it down on the nearby dressing table, then rummaged for the other preparations and powders she required to feed her small retort. She struck a match, lit the flame of the spirit, which fluttered, a rag of dark, against the aether’s continuing flare. Opening the lid of her gramophone’s silent, lacquered box, she laid the needle in mid-track. She slid the turntable forward with the tips of her fingers. A faint roar. Slid it back. A dim clamour of voices, more of the song …
An hour later Greatgrandmistress-Commander Alice Meynell emerged along the dank corridors. There were some advantages, she thought as she entered the briefing room, to living in this military way. The frank nearness of death, for example; the unflinching acknowledgement that it was a sacrifice which it sometimes became necessary for certain people to make. Killing people here was almost easier than keeping them alive. She listened to the wearying reports of divisional commanders or their deputies, and read the printouts and studied the arid insides of numberbeads. She touched her lips to the disastrous coffee.
She’s wearing odd earrings …
Her hair’s astray …
Why is she asking all this again, when we told her yesterday … ?
See, how her hands tremble in those gloves …
Mere wafts of thought from these sour-smelling men, kept well in check as they unrolled the maps and talked of the details of emplacements, and why should she care as long as they feared her? Outside in her car, doubly gloved and hated and blanketed, she acknowledged the troops as she was jolted painfully around potholes and the craters of mines. A pity, really, that the title greatgrandmistress didn’t convert into a chant as easily as the name of that shoregirl, who had recently taken the clever step of disappearing, and had thus removed herself entirely from the awkward businesses of being real. And this certainly wasn’t yet the world of blissfully glowing telephone lines and endless fields of bittersweet she’d always imagined she was creating. But England, for her, was a work in progress. Soon, everything would change.
After the desultory queues along the muddy, half-frozen roads and the confusions of engineering work, she found herself elated as she drew closer to the very westernmost edge of the East’s defence. Here, where the big guns waited, and the raveners were fed and the ammunition pointed its steel tips and the very earth remained unsafe, lay a refreshing sense of discovery and danger. Purpose, even—or the closest one got to it in wartime, and as she was led along duckboards to tents and temporary shelters, as she spoke to the gatherings of men, Alice could feel the rain-bowed spells of all this aethered machinery fountaining around her. They called and crooned.
The power was still down back at the damp house that evening, and the shadows stalked her as she hunched to her room, and opened her portmanteau, and undressed in the starlight cast by her aether chalice. After she had removed her un-matching earrings, and Jackie Brumby’s teardrop chain, and Cheryl Kettlethorpe’s thin silver bracelet, and the silver-threaded button from the shirt Tom had been wearing on the night of his death, she unstoppered the chalice and dabbed a little aether on her wrist where her Mark had been. Then, to the other wrist, and on her palms and neck, and the tip of her tongue and behind each ear, she dabbed some more, and felt it roar into her blood. The huge, red shadow of the four-poster bed leapt in the wyrelight. Smiling, humming, glowing, she returned to her portmanteau and lifted out the black, wyrebright pages of her greatest spell, and danced with them as they shone and slipped and slid. Then the light changed. At last, the electricity had come on, although the single bulb was more wan than today’s sunlight, and equally unwanted. She extinguished it with an easy glance, as, in a long, slow roar, her gramophone returned to life. Its song possessed nothing of the beauty of that which she was already singing, but she let the record play until the needle crackled and swished into the run-out groove. Yes, that was more like it. The music, the swish and sigh. Tides of light. Something vast breathing. Oceans and caverns. Lost summers reclaimed. Yes, Invercombe; or whatever lay beyond it. Alice Meynell laid herself down amid the sheets of her spell and the shadows of her presence, and fell smilingly towards sleep.