The Light Ages Read Online Free PDF Page A

subterranean engines that were then being built to mine the deep-set aether seams. Apart from my own small upper space, there were two main rooms on each of the two floors, although the house always seemed more complicated than that, riddled with odd corners and alcoves and bits of cupboard and crisscrossings of chimney. The core, from which rose most of the heat, smell and noise which fogged my attic, was the kitchen, which was dominated in turn by the black iron range. Above it were generally strung clots of rag, shoes dangling by their laces, sage and sallow, bits of fat and ham, sagging bladders of waterapples, wet coats and anything else in need of drying, whilst the oak table glowered at it from its own darker corner; a rival, lesser, deity.
    Upstairs lay the front bedroom which my parents occupied, and my elder sister Beth’s single back room. The rear of the house was north-facing, the narrow windows admitting views only of walls and dustbins and back alleys. I was lucky, really, with my little attic at the front. It was my own private territory. Lives were pressed close together in Brickyard Row. The walls were thin, their bricks porous to smoke, smells, voices. Somewhere, there would always be a baby crying; somewhere else, a man shouting, or a woman crying.
    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