The Chimes (10 page)

His gestures are familiar. They are familiar to me because I see them every day. When Lucien’s standing in the under and waiting for the tune, he does the same. Listening, divining the Lady’s tide. Yet, this man’s movements are taut with anger. And, subito, some invisible wave breaks inside of him and he steps forward and pulls an object from his belt. Silver moving in his hand. A blade. From where I crouch I see him grip the woman’s shoulder with one hand. With the other he slashes upward in a single fluid thrust. The woman looks up at him, her mouth an O as he holds up the shirt he has slit from her back and shakes it. Drops it on the ground before her in disgust.

Then he turns and he looks straight up. The sun flashes across his dark paraspecs and the whole of his body is poised and held. For a long moment he stares right where we’re hidden. I hold my
breath. Brennan tenses, as if ready to move, and I grip his shoulder hard as I can. Fear moves through me. Deep and chill.

At last the member turns away and whatever threat there was is broken. He moves on, past the stragglers and round the crosshouse. Brennan slumps beside and we sit there and I watch the wind make the trees flex and breathe. The man has dropped his strange errand and gone back to wherever he came from. Neither of us moves.

Then a sound comes out of the silence and the shuffling of the memorylost. It is a harsh scraping and it comes from inside the crosshouse. It is the sound of something hard being drawn over something rough. Arcs of it, each as long as an arm and with the full weight of a body behind.
Raaaaaaasp. Raaaaaaasp
. After that, a flurry of shorter scratches, like an animal struggling to free itself from something.

Brennan is rigid beside me. The sounds stop. Two beats more and the robed figure emerges from the crosshouse and disappears into the tangle of green of the park. When he’s out of earshot for certain, we rise without speaking. We cross the clearing and enter the small stone house.

The interior is gutted. Old rubble covers the dirt floor, and lines of black bloom along its walls. Circles of soot from many different fires, their various rings like the tidelines the river pushes up the bank and there forgets. The stone room smells of human dirt and broken things.

‘What was he doing?’ I say out loud.

‘Don’t ask me,’ says Brennan.

‘Have you ever seen a member of the Order outside the market?’

Brennan shrugs again.

‘He looked like he was prospecting for the Lady,’ I say.

‘Why in hell would he do that?’

I don’t know. He’s right. Members of the Order don’t look for it. They pay us to do the dirty work in the under. Or rather they pay the dealers, who pay us. It would make no sense for him to prospect here anyway. The Lady lives in the river.

It’s only when we leave the crosshouse that I see the member’s true leaving. We missed it when we entered because our eyes were blinded in the sudden dark. Scratched in deep across the broad back wall are two long sets of five horizontal lines, shapes trapped inside them like creatures in a cage.

I stand and stare for a while before my mind finds a way to explain what I’m seeing. Because it’s not often you see music written down, is it? And when you do, it’s on paper or parchment, not a wall. I can’t read the strange up-and-down dance of the notes, or grasp what meaning it is they protect. But even I can see that the stave is scratched in vicious and deep, with the force of anger. The song is a threat.

Before I know what I am doing, I reach into my bag and untwist the package of oatcakes left from the morning’s run, smooth out the greased paper. I burn a twig until there’s a good end to it. Then I scratch with its black onto the paper.

It takes a good long while to get the whole tune down. The notes won’t stay still in their grids. While I do it, Brennan stands by looking down at me. He waits tacet, every now and again picking a stone up from the dirt, weighing it in his hands, tossing it across the clearing. For all the world as if it’s what we do each time we come to Bow. Though I am almost certain that I have never seen a thing like this before.

We sing our way back to the strand, at last, Brennan carrying the rabbits slung across his neck in a collar of fur. The light is fading. I stand and watch and breathe a bit as the river runs. Its path is hollow, rising up and rising down, nothing to stop it filling. It’s a greedy thing, running both wide and deep. It’s that unneeding way of it that tells you how old it is. The same look in Lucien’s eyes and in other blank things.

Woodblock

It is dark and cold in the storehouse. In my quarters, there is a burberry lying on the floor under the hammock. I kick it toward the wall. Then I take out my memory bag. Its smell of linseed oil and damprot and a taint of woolfat from who knows where. I try to empty my head of thought and tune, but the roughcloth curtains are no shelter and the noises are strange. A creak in the wall beam as Clare or Abel turns in their hammock. A dry cough from Brennan’s quarters behind. A fox barks once out on the race.

I rub my palms together, listen to my breath. Try to find a still space in my head away from the pull of questions, but I can’t. I think about the three wrong notes that the last two days have sounded: the memory of Clare’s questions that throbs even now on my arm; the empty, silent field at Ropemakers; and the member’s message on the wall at Bow. Accidentals without meaning, or sign of some deeper shift or modulation I cannot read? And whose mistake is it, the awful jarred noise they make – mine, or someone else’s?

I push my hands into the mouth of the bag. Edges, surfaces, fabrics. Roughcloth, wood, paper. Nothing speaks. I push through the silent memories until I touch the bottom of the bag and feel something hard and flat pushed inside the corner. I fish it up out of the canvas and into the candlelight. A flat, square piece of wood with unsanded edges and a smooth, cool surface, the size of my hand. There is a pencil drawing on paper stuck to one side and varnished over so thick it looks to be floating above the wood. The picture is a portrait of two people – a man and a woman – drawn in blunt pencil lines gone over and over so they are doubled and tripled in places. The many lines make it look like the two people in the portrait are moving. Vibrating. Shaking. And I go down . . .

I am standing in front of a house with a red door. The house sits in the middle of a large garden, and there are fields behind that stretch into haze. I open the door and walk in.

The hall corridor is filled with light that filters through corrugated parasheeting. I walk down the hallway and into the kitchen. My mother is kneading bread dough at the oak table. She pulls the dough flat with the base of her hands and then folds it over and turns it and stretches it again. She hums while she does it, and the low tune is one that I recognise. I know she has taught it to me, but what are the words that go with it? She sees me and she smiles.

Then the light changes and I’m standing in front of the door to my parents’ room.

All is still and I don’t want to go through the door, but I must. I enter into the smell of lavender and cut bulbs. My mother lying in the tall bed, her body under the white coverlet so small.

I go and kneel beside the bed next to her and she tries to smile, but her body does not let her. It wants to stretch and grip and pull. Her neck is tight, and there are bars of muscle at her throat.

Her eyes leave again. They go from mine up to the ceiling. Her whole body goes stiff. The shapes of her legs rise under the white coverlet, as if they are floating up in water. Her fingers spread and claw while I stand there and I cannot move. I watch the spasms go through her. Her chin pulls up to the ceiling and her forehead casts back toward the wall and I neither move nor speak. I sit by her side with my hand in hers, pushing against it, trying to straighten her fighting grip.

‘I’m sorry, Simon,’ she says. ‘It’s too late.’

Then she says something. She says it through pale lips and I can’t hear, but I know that it is something about the song, the one she was singing earlier. Earlier in the day? No, earlier in the memory.

‘The ravens are flying, Netty,’ she says. Then she says the last word again to me. ‘Netty.’ And though I don’t know what that means, I understand the look in her eyes. It’s fear. Not for herself, but for me. I am looking at her and my heart is fading, and I know subito that I do not want to carry this fear with me. I want to pull my hand out of her harsh grip and run out into the fields. I am angry at the burden of her death, at the burden of a memory that her word is asking me to follow. I don’t know what the word means, but I know it holds a hard task. A risk.

My mother struggles to raise herself on her elbows, to hold her head above the water of the illness. She wants to speak again, but her lips cannot do their work and against my body’s impulse I lean towards her to catch the last notes that fall outward into that silence—

Something breaks in that is not part of it. A figure in the room where it shouldn’t be and where I am
standing
looking down at my mother’s bed.
I push it away, but it comes again, insistent. The picture becomes smaller, breaks into pieces.
Dust through corrugated parasheets.
Bread dough stretched flat and turned a half-circle. The white-on-white pattern of a coverlet.
My mother’s hands.
A hand on my shoulder, shaking, and I am between memory and present for several heartbeats.

The space I emerge into is spoiled and old – cold, flickering. I am sitting on the wooden floorboards of the storehouse. The flickering is the light of the candle, which has shrunk down to a pool of wax on its earthenware saucer, just the wick floating. I am holding a piece of wood in my hands. Shake my head and the air parts around it, chambered in wood, muffled in roughcloth.

The light moves. A candle disturbed by air. A voice has crept back into the storehouse with me. It comes out of the dark with the voice the dark has given it.

‘Tell me, Simon,’ it says. ‘The arrival in London, what was it like?’

I spin round. And he is here. Standing tall against the curtain so that it tightens my breath and pushes the blood down my arms. Lucien in my quarters. And subito I know that he has been standing watching a long while.

‘What are you doing?’ I hiss. I don’t want the others to hear. What I feel is a mix of anger and shame. Some other feeling I don’t recognise. Something like biting round my heart.

‘That is where we start.’

And there’s a blur. Lucien’s voice in two places at once. What Clare remembered and what I now see.

‘You’ve been here before,’ I say.