[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
between the gleaming furniture, she worked open the top drawer of a cabinet.
`Ah, thank God for that!' She flourished a packet of cigarettes. `Would you
light one of these for me Robert? I can't go
anywhere near that fire in this I'm told I'd combust.'
She eased herself down on a huge sofa beside a glittering tree and her dress,
in sighs and flurries of light, slowly settled itself around her.
The dazzling snow of this morning had found its way into the fabric, along, as
Sadie wearily pointed out to us here on the braiding, and up here as well
with the entwined spells of Telegraphers' and the
Distemperers' guilds. Huge and impressive, hooped and arched and aethered and
boned, it was much more than a dress, and Sadie, as it sparked and whispered
and writhed, seemed lost within its folds as she drew on her cigarette and
absently flicked ash from her bosom.
`Have you heard there's been some big demonstration in
Dudley? Twenty dead, a hundred casualties. The main telegraph route north has
been severed.'
`Does that mean messages can't be sent?'
`So sweet of you, Robert, to be concerned about the workings of my guild.
Messages don't cease to flow because one measly pylon's been brought down. But
all this pointless destruction! It's about this
Age, isn't it? Just because it's year ninety-nine, every mart and lesser
guildsman seems to think there's some great need for change. People expecting
something different every hundred years!' She gave a laugh.
`Can you imagine?'
Anna and I sat and waited. Now, I thought, she'll challenge us.
Now, she'll throw us out. But instead, Sadie lit another cigarette from the
nub of her first and began to talk about Greatmaster Porrett. Two of his
wives, it seemed, had died in stillborn childbirth, and a third was still
alive but not quite herself. He'd had a sad personal life but he was still
surprisingly young in his attitudes, once you got past the bald head and the
tremor in his hands. He even claimed to be fertile. It was part of the
contract between their two guilds, in any event, that she would have his
children. And if that didn't happen she shrugged and squinted through clouds
of smoke there was bound to be some way around it.
There always was. He'd told her over their first private meal that he enjoyed
Page 227
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
painting, and Sadie had been pleased to imagine an unsuspected familiarity
with the arts. But he really did mean painting
the sort his guildsmen did with their brushes up and down railings. The one
holiday they'd had together had been spent renovating the mildewed walls of
one of his ugly mansions. Sadie now knew the spell which would retard
permeation and blistering on a cuprous oxide mix applied to whitecast iron,
and had look, see she held out a hand across the foam of her dress,
indelible blue half moons of cobalt under her fingernails.
`And now you're both back here,' she said finally, `and looking almost like a
couple. But that's not quite your style, is it, Robbie? Nor yours, Anna. And
George's imprisoned and London's a mess and I'm getting married, and I somehow
doubt that you've just come here to celebrate. I tried, or I attempted to try,
to find out a little bit about what you are and where you really come from,
Anna. But why spoil the mystery, eh?' She lit another cigarette and ground out
the old one in the crystal ashtray she was nursing in the folds of her lap. A
few sparks flew out, glinting with her whisperjewels. `But what do you want? I
mean, really ...'
`There's no mystery, Sadie,' I began. `We're simply here because '
`No!' Anna's voice was harsh. Sadie's dress gave a louder rustle.
`No.' Anna looked at us both. But for those twin red patches on her cheeks and
a bluish tinge to her lips, her face was entirely white. `I'm tired of all
these lies. We owe you the truth, Sadie. Then you can decide what you do with
it ...'
Sadie puffed her way through the rest of her cigarettes as Anna told her about
her childhood with Mistress Summerton, and learning the small deceits which
she eventually became so good at. Then there was her life at St Jude's and
being Anna Winters, which became something she believed in as much as everyone
else. But the past had hunted her down. That was why she was here, that was
and then I, all caution gone, I began to share my own tale from my first visit
to Redhouse, and meeting Anna, who was then Annalise, and how our stories
broke and entwined from here to London to Bracebridge. Our fates were joined
even now as we sat here in the firelit room, until we came, at last, to the
experiment with the chalcedony, the death of our mothers, to
Grandmaster Harrat and the man who was once Edward Durry, and to the
Bowdly-Smarts, and Bracebridge's emptily beating engines, and the loss of
aether, and finally to the pivotal role which her father had played in all of
these things.
The firelight pulsed. Sadie looked at us. `How much of this can you prove?'
Anna thought for a moment. `Most of it.'
`My getting married no wonder it's so important if our guild really is
bankrupt! And you know what would happen if this came out
but that's why you're here, isn't it? That's why you were trying to get into
the Turning Tower ...'
`We're trying to make a better Age, Sadie.'
`Or to destroy my guild wouldn't that be another way of looking at it,
Robbie?'
But there was nothing more to say. Sadie had the truth. Now, as
Anna had said, she had to decide what she did with it.
`My father, you know,' Sadie said eventually. `He's not a bad man.
If he did something wrong, if people got hurt, he'd have had his reasons.
They would be good ones, too, and it was all so long ago. You yourself said
the experiment with the chalcedony failed, which means that no one meant what
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]