[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Meanwhile, Maud has also become pregnant, and she and Saul get married.Robbie, who is feeling increasingly isolated, becomes obsessed with the Bowdly-Smart’s name change and wealth.His route into their house is Master Snaith, who uses Robbie as assistant in the table-turning tricks he performs there.Like Mistress Summerton, Mister Snaith is accepted into the edges of wealthy guilded society, although like even the most tame and sane changelings, he must always live at its fringes.One night, goaded by Robbie’s suggestions that he’s a fraud, there proceeds a real séance, where Mistress Bowdly-Smart is visited by the ghost of her only child who died of cot-death in Bracebridge, and reveals to her upper-guilded friends her true origins.The ensuing scene, though, does not prepare Robbie for the news next morning that both of the Bowdly-Smarts have killed themselves in the night.Anna and Mark return from their honeymoon in Europe, and Sadie tells Robbie that it has been decided that she must marry the elderly Master Porrett to buttress her guild, and that they must end their affair.In this new spring, England is in deepening recession, and Mark and Anna devote themselves to various overly well-meaning attempts at encouraging the masses to revolt.To Robbie’s puzzlement, his boss, bagmaster Dodds, suddenly starts to treat him kindly.All becomes clear, however, when a hand is placed on his shoulder and he is taken to see Sadie’s father Great-grandmaster Passington.The great man seems in a sad mood, but he offers Robbie whatever he wants as a reward for his discretion, and for ending his romance with his engaged daughter.Robbie can think of nothing for himself—whatever he longs for, it isn’t quite money—but he takes a fat cheque which he gives to Maud and Saul; at last they leave London with their new baby and start work on a smallholding.Alone now in London, Robert follows the activities of Anna and Mark and their fellow activists, and also begins to attempts to trace more of the truth of whatever really happened in Bracebridge and the dark and dangerous spell which still seems to hang over it.It becomes plain to Robert that Mark’s relationship with Anna isn’t that of a normal man and wife, but he keeps quiet, and turns up to see the great display of the essential weakness of the guilds and aether which Mark has organized.The plan is to sing down an old church by reversing the chant of the aethered spell which bound its foundations, although, typically, they have chosen a building which is empty so no harm will ensue.(2 ) Still, a large crowd turns up to witness the spectacle, although their tone is mostly mocking.Mark, plainly on the edge, begins to climb the spire, setting braziers burning whilst his friends below sing out the chant they believe will unwork the spell which binds the foundations.But the building is far weaker than he imagined, and it begins to teeter and collapse even as he is still high in it.Anna manages to save him, but at the expense of Mark’s finally realizing that she is a changeling, and his own arrest and imprisonment.Being a creature of high-guilded privilege, Mark’s incarceration is in a hospital beside the walls of the asylum, where he is free to wander the grounds and write more of his endless plans for a better England.He has become self-absorbed, and Anna, when she visits him with Robert and Sadie with the truth of her life now exposed to both of them, sees her dreams of an ordinary life in ruins.Anna is also starting to show disturbing, poltergeist-like signs of her changeling nature.As summer turns, she and Robert return to find Bracebridge station, to find the town, crusted in engine ice and the beat of the aether engines slowed to a shudder.Yet the people work on regardless, as if in the grip of a deeper version of the dream which has long gripped all of England.The black haft, when they break their way down into it, tunnels beneath Rainharrow, is brittle and shrouded in engine ice; whatever spell it cast was cast long ago.There seems to be little else to find out, but Robert stumbles again on a pathetic local wandering figure from his childhood: the Potato Man.He, it transpires, is Kate’s husband, Anna’s father.He was severely injured in an accident at Mawdingly & Clawtson when he attempted to complain about the treatment of his wife, and was then banished from his guild on the accusation of neglecting his vital duties.He was also involved in leading some great young guildsman to the black haft, and he claims he could identify that man [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]