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The high white dunes of engine ice raised plumes of rainbows
against the morning sky. My best trousers and dark blue jacket were soon
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coated with their gritty sparkle. World's End had been London's nearest aether
source before it had been exhausted in the final flowering of the famous
exhibition at the end of the last Age. Now, aether was brought in from further
afield on barges and trains from places like Bracebridge, and the engine ice
scraped from thousands of processes and machines was piled here with the dim
intention that it might one day provide enough high ground for drainage. Here,
piled in glittering mountains, was the final useless waste product of all the
magic which had been pulled from the earth to service the spells of guildsmen
since the First Age of Industry; the salt crusting around the eyes at the end
of a dream.
I strode inland for a while with the picnic families. The road here was
surprisingly wide and well-made, and still set with the weedgrown slots of
dead tramlines. We made a large enough throng, but were scarcely a trickle
compared to the waves of sightseers which had swept this way across the Thames
almost exactly a century before. Then I
turned east. Soon, after I'd clambered over a ruined turnstile, the bickering,
excited voices had faded and I was alone. No one, I thought, would bother to
come to the ruins here for the sake of the few panes of glass which probably
still needed breaking, but as I picked my way around a livid patch of
cuckoo-nettle and the main hall came into view, I gave a gasp of surprise. For
a moment, the great glass edifice loomed ahead of me, glittering perfect and
new as a soap bubble from every one of its many millions of panes. The World's
End Exhibition of an Age before this one blazed at me through the sunlight,
then sank back like a dream exhaling and I saw it for it what it was; a huge
and crazily-angled collection of disarranged girders and black-starred panes.
Fallen-roofed bandstands. Signs pointing towards
The Tropic
Wing, The Guildmaster's Rest, The Spa Rooms, The Perpetual Motion
Machine.
Great, strange plants gone wild and to seed beyond any guildsman's control
straggled upwards in leaves of every colour and shape. Then, stranger still,
patches of the landscape tamed themselves into freshly turned seedbeds and
green-shooted seed trays. An old ice-
cream vendor's stall had been used as a compost frame. There were signs, too.
KEEP OUT
scrawled in red paint, and I felt an odd, familiar, sense of resistance. This,
surely, was the place Mistress Summerton had told me about, even though her
instructions had been almost impossibly vague. As I ducked under an old
trellis, I found myself battling with clattering webs of tin cans. After that,
I was troubled by nothing but birdsong and the scent of things growing. And
there she was; Mistress Summerton neat and wizened and bare-headed, a tiny
scarecrow come to life and stooped amid cloches and seedbeds.
`Robert . . .' Slowly, she straightened up, pushing her spade into the pouch
of her apron as she moved towards me. `I'm sorry about the tins. This isn't
like Redhouse. There are children, gangs, in London. I
have to be careful. Discreet ..
I met the sharp brown gaze in its withered webbing. `But it's so quiet here.'
Mistress Summerton chuckled. `Why do you think I chose it?' Her arm, thin and
warm and faintly trembling, steered me between rows of seedlings. Beyond were
flowers of shades and shapes beyond anything you would ever see in the arms of
a flower girl on Doxy Street. They were like thunderheads, giving off a musky
deep scent which made me want to laugh and sneeze at the same time, and their
hearts were filled with wyrewhite stamens like stabs of lightning. Even this
early in the season, the rows were wondrous and huge. Flowers the size of
dinner plates, their leaves silver-furred, nodded in the sunlight over our
heads. After all, World's End in its prime had been filled with gardens. All
Mistress
Summerton had done was re-turn the soil, prune and nurture the wild bushes,
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harvest the seedheads. Just like the huge glass ruin which lay to our left,
part of this place still wanted to return to life. She plucked a black
cuckoo-weed and crumpled it bare-handed. Without her glasses, in the ragged
clothes she was wearing and the silvery dust of her hair, she looked strange
and small and dark; a sweet distillation of the shadows which fanned between
the bars of sunlight.
She led me towards a building. It was like a forester's cottage, but it was
one from a storybook, with intricate pokerwork over the eaves, green
bottleglass windows. It had plainly been part of the exhibition
perhaps a toyhouse in which children could play, although pinned to the door
now was an official-looking notice; numbered paragraphs rubber-
stamped with a cross and C. It was dim inside and smelled sweetly of tobacco
and garden loam. I watched as she produced a teapot and cups from the narrow
shelves and sniffed various tea caddies for sweetness, then pumped up the
little stove.
My mouth was dry. It was time for the obvious question. `Do you still see
Annalise?'
Mistress Summerton felt for her pipe in her pockets. `Yes . . .' A
huge puff of smoke. A long pause. In this tiny room, she dissolved, reformed.
`She sometimes visits me, although of course she has to be careful . . .'
Puff. Puff. `In fact, it wasn't so long ago that she last came.
Two shifterms before last, at the edge of spring, as I remember ..
`I met her '
`As you said.' More vague clouds. `Annalise told me. In
Westminster Great Park, at the Midsummer Fair . . .' Another lengthening
pause. The kettle began to rattle to itself. `Of course,' she said as she
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