The Light Ages (4 page)

Like so many other couples who lived along Coney Mound in the compressed lower layers of the great human pyramid of rank which still dominates England—above the poor guildless marts but precious little else—my parents had struggled though years of duty and routine. An old photograph hung above the mantelpiece in the front parlour, taken on the day of their wedding. It was so blotched by smoke and damp as to look as if they were standing underwater; and they really did both seem to be holding their breath as they posed stiffly under the branches of a beech tree beside St Wilfred’s. But that was all a long time ago; before Beth, before me. My father had no moustache then, and the saucy tilt to his elbow and the way he had his hand around my mother’s waist suggested a whole life a-waiting. My mother wore a lanternflower wreath and a dress of fine lace which billowed to the grass in foamy waves. A truly handsome couple, both still looking too young to be married even to my immature eyes, they had met at Mawdingly & Clawtson, the big aether factory on Withybrook Road around which all of Bracebridge revolved. My mother had moved to Bracebridge from the failing family farm out on Brownheath, and my father had followed his own father into the Third Lower Chapter of the Lesser Toolmakers’ Guild. They had crossed paths many times, if my mother was to be believed, before they really noticed each other, or locked eyes, in my father’s dreamier version, across the benches of the factory paintshop as he made his way through there on some errand, and fallen instantly in love.

Ridiculous though it is, I still prefer my father’s tale. I can still see my mother working on the fine relays amid all the other young women in that long dim room, dipping her brushes into the aether-laden pots, her hair drawn up and head bowed as she traced the skeins and scrolls that would ultimately convey a guildsman’s will into some tool or engine. For my father, swinging in through the doors from the roar of the foundry across the yard, it must have been like stepping into a cool garden. And my mother was delicate then, perhaps even beautiful, with her lustrous dark hair, her soft blue eyes, her white skin and that small, elegant body with those fine nervous hands. Aside from the use of her family’s guild connections, she had probably got her job in the painting room because she looked as if she could perform such an exacting task, but in fact she tended to be clumsy, making quick, brittle movements that her mind only seemed to learn about after her limbs had accomplished them. As children, Beth and I both learned to keep well away from her flying elbows. But in every sense, amid the aether drippings of her ruined brushes as the light faded into evening, my mother would have shone out.

So my parents met, they courted, they married at Midsummer, and the shifterms and the years flew by. At the time I first remember them both, they still looked far too young to be who they already were, and partly, in the stoop of their backs and the greying of my mother’s hair, much too old. Bracebridge and the huge downward pressure of England’s great human pyramid had wearied them both. My father was an inconstant man, prone to anger and enthusiasms, to interests and projects started and then abandoned in favour of something else. Once he found his ambition thwarted within the tight, secret structures of the Lesser Toolmakers’ Guild, he wore out the energy and intelligence which had probably first attracted my mother to him. More days than not he would call in at the Bacton Arms on his way home from Mawdingly & Clawtson for a swift half which easily became several long pints, and on Tenshift and Halfshiftday and feastdays he would roll up the street, crashing into the house and swaying up the stairs, laughingly circling my mother as she lay in bed and did her best to ignore him, making jokes about what some friend for the evening had done or said before he flared into spite and finally retreated to spend the night before the stove, staring into the firegrate’s glow as the alcohol seeped out of him. On ordinary nights, though, they would talk to each other as they prepared for bed in croaks and cries and calls like two keelies calling across the marshes; all those sentences married couples never finish. My father would hook his trousers by their braces across the back of his chair; then yawn and stretch and scratch himself through his vest before climbing between the sheets.

I can see them now. The oil lantern on the dresser which my father’s brought up from downstairs is still glowing, its flame clawing the air. My mother is slower to get to bed, wandering about barefoot, pulling and tugging at her hair with her big silver brush, then catching her outline in the faded looking glass and staring frozen for a moment as if surprised to find herself here. My father slaps his pillow, turns over, hugs himself, muttering. My mother puts down the brush and lifts her night-gown from its hook to shrug it over herself in grey waves before wriggling from her underthings, dragging them out from beneath the hem. Finally, she hoods the lantern and climbs into bed.

There they lie, two figures half buried in the dark of their blankets and the weight of their days, people who had once held hands, taken springtime walks, sheltered laughing under bandstands from the rain. It all seems quiet now; the families are strung weary and complete along Brickyard Row, safe in their beds as the stars shine down on the roofs and a new moon rises over the backs of the houses. No dogs are barking. The yards are empty. The last train has long gone by. A dense, fizzing silence falls in snowy waves. Then, as my father grunts and sniffs and begins to snore, a deeper sound becomes apparent. And my mother lies there, flat and still, her eyes glittering from her pillow as she stares at the ceiling, the finger of her left hand rubbing the scar on the palm of the other to that endless, inescapable rhythm.

SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.

I
SUPPOSE I WAS ALWAYS
a little different—or I told myself that I was. I cherished these inexpressible dreams. I was always looking over the rooftops, counting the stars, flying with the clouds.

So look at me now, little Robert Borrows, wandering Rainharrow with my mother on one of those rare shiftdays when we have nothing more pressing to do. I climb drifts of mining scree to squat on the topmost rise, and shred leaves and make owl calls whilst she goes in search of wild flowers. Sitting with my back propped against one of the circle of sarsens which were once placed on this hallowed spot by people like and unlike me and are now shadowed in soot and clawed by graffiti, I can see most of Brownheath spread below, rising and falling in greys and greens with bits of town and forest sprouting like bodyhair all the way to the bigger peaks of the Pennines. It can be warm here on the good days of summer, and I can see, far closer below me, the figure of my mother in her black coat and bonnet stooped amid the brambles.

Finally, she finds something and calls up to me. And I clamber down and we inspect together whatever tiny plant she’s discovered clinging to this grey collier’s earth, and reassure ourselves as we bend to uproot it to nestle in a scrunch of newspaper that it will better off taken home than left out here. We gave them local names which no guilded expert with his Latin books would have countenanced. But they were good enough. Heartsease and mugwort. Eyebright and tansy. On my mother’s lips, they sounded like music.

So we’d take our plant home and lay it in a pot and place it on the sunniest spot on the window ledge each morning, and shift it away from the frosts at night. My mother kneaded the earth with her fingers, and watered it, and breathed encouraging words to its leaves. Then one morning, faint yet inescapable over the reek of smoke and damp and humanity, an odd scent would be in my nostrils when I awoke. And I’d stumble down through the house to find my mother preening before some tiny new bloom that the plant had stooped its stem to bear, the colours paintbox-pure in a way that nothing else ever seemed to be in Bracebridge. Not that the flowers ever lasted, but those mornings, glancing time and again at the whorls and petals, and breathing the scent which left an ache behind my eyes like first snow, had a unique character.

Once or twice, she was mistaken in what she found, and we came home with a cuckoo-plant. There were many such infestations in Bracebridge, just as there were dragonlice in its factories and kingrats in the burrows by the old barges down beside the river. It was part of the ways of our town. Of course, we children knew to inspect carefully any bramble bush we might choose to pick the berries from in case they brought nightmares, and not to brush our legs against the black-tinged nettles which erupted along the paths at the back of the aether beds, for they gave a rash which could bleed and ache for terms. Our fathers knew also to pluck out any bloodivy coming up from the drains, and the women never picked the mushrooms which grew on the rivermeads. But mistakes were easily made: a spray of simple yellow flowers, looking like big buttercups and smelling sweet and creamy, or a fine stem of foxgloves rising from the bracken, even if it was far too late in the summer. Bring them back, and the smell of their rot pervaded your house like bad cabbage and their ooze could ruin a best vase or burn your mantelpiece like acid. Still, all the fussing with newspapers and the open windows and the complaints of my father were worth it for the good days, that sense of surprise and discovery when my mother called to me from across the hill, parting the windy grass to nestle in her fingers the perfect face of a flower.

So much of everything was a mystery to me then. Board School taught me nothing beyond how to read and write, which my mother had already shown me, and the guildsmen, men like my father, kept the drudgeries and secrets of their daily work to themselves and the insides of their beer glasses. Mawdingly & Clawtson was a name, a sound, a feeling, an edifice. Industry was our purpose. Aether was our god. It was as if we were all trying to turn our eyes from something vital and lay our heads on the pounding earth, lulling ourselves into a sleep which would last a lifetime of endless duty and disappointment.

Occasionally, I would risk the attentions of the cuckoo-nettles and peer through the fences at the settling pans wherein aether was catalysed and bound with ordinary matter, which thickened to blackness on hot bright days, and blazed upwards on winter afternoons like the foundations of a heaven upturned. Sometimes, crawling into the cupboard beneath the stairs out of boredom or the need to escape, I would rummage through the old rags my mother kept there made from scraps of my father’s old overalls. Within some of them, bound to the seams like the starry paths of tiny rockets, a few speckles of aether dust still clung, and shone out at me, along with the lavender scent of polish. And every autumn term, rigid as clockwork, and just after the trollman’s visit, the teachers would take out a box and plonk it down on the front desk, and beckon—or drag—some pupil to the front so that he (it was almost invariably a boy) might experience the true glory of aether.

‘Who discovered aether, lad?’

‘The Grandmaster of Painswick, Joshua Wagstaffe, sir!’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Start of the very First Age of Industry, sir. By the old holy calendar, sixteen seventy-eight.’

That was the easy bit. The box itself was scarred and old and wooden and rectangular. Its lock had a sprung iron hasp which bore the look of more recent replacement, and was secured through a hoop across, the front by an engraved bolt, also sprung. Small though it was, the engraving spoke of the guilds, and mystery, of work and the real adult world. Not quite letters nor pictures, although their shapes suggested writhing dancers, similar hieroglyphs could be seen on the plates of engines and the beams of bridges and even, crudely stamped, on the bricks of many a house. Guild to guild, these symbols were never quite the same, but I still always got the sense as I studied them of a single endless text which I would one day be able to read.

What those dancing figures told us all in that classroom was that the bolt was infused with the power of aether. During the process of its manufacture under the big roofs of some other northern town’s factories, tiny amounts of the stuff would have been introduced into the hot metal. From there, through guild mystery after guild mystery, the metal would have been shaped, pounded and moulded into the object we saw. A functional spell had been cast over that bolt, and also over the catch and the spring which held it, and then it had been boxed and crated along with hundreds of others and borne off to end up here on Master Hinkton’s desk in Class C of Bracebridge Board School.

Of course, we all thought as we froze and steamed and yawned in the perpetual schoolroom fug that we knew exactly what aether was. After all, we were the sons and daughters of guildsmen, and we lived in Bracebridge under the shadow of Rainharrow, where so much of the stuff was extracted. We could feel those engines pounding in a dull ache through the benches. But aether is like no other element, and it shuns all physical rules. It is weightless, and notoriously difficult to contain. Purified, its wyreglow fills the darkness, but spills shadows in bright light. Strangest of all, and yet most crucial to all the industries and livelihoods it helps sustain, aether responds to the will of the human spirit. A guildsman can, after the long years of apprenticeship, use aether to control whatever process is special to his guild. Without aether, the great steam engines which power England’s factories and bear the fruits of the mill and the mine would halt, or explode under their own pressure. Without aether, the wyreglowing telegraphs which thread our countryside would fall silent of the messages which telegraphers chant mind to mind to mind. Without aether, the extravagant structures of our great cities and the bridges which span our rivers would collapse. But with it, we are able to make things more thinly, more cheaply, more quickly and—it has to be admitted—often more crudely than the harsh and inconvenient rules of simple nature would ever allow. Boilers which would otherwise explode, pistons which would stutter, buildings and beams and bearings which would shatter and crumble, are borne aloft from mere physics on the aether-fuelled bubbles of guildsmen’s spells. With aether, England prospers, the guilds flourish, the shift sirens chant, the chimneys plume, the wealthy live lives of almost inconceivable profligacy and the rest of us struggle and squabble and labour for the crumbs which remain. Even lands beyond our own, caught within their own wyreglowing tendrils of aether and ridiculous myths of discovery by some other grandmaster than ours, smoke and hammer to dreams of guilded industry whilst the savage lands remain forever unexplored. With aether, this world turns on the slow dark eddies of Ages beyond conflict and war. Without it—but the very thought was impossible …