The Silver Wind Read online

  the

  SILVER WIND

  Cover

  Praise for The Dollmaker

  Praise for The Rift

  Praise for The Race

  Also available from Nina Allan

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  part one

  THE HURRICANE

  part two

  TIME’S CHARIOT

  MY BROTHER’S KEEPER

  THE SILVER WIND

  REWIND

  timelines: an afterword

  out-takes

  DARKROOM

  TEN DAYS

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for The Dollmaker:

  “A fantastic book, revealing a zone of wonder and a world of truth”

  Andrew O’Hagan, author of The Illuminations

  “Elegant, beautiful and subtly scary”

  Daniel Kehlmann, author of Measuring the World

  “Mesmerising, richly layered and wholly original – worthy of a

  modern Grimm” Andrew Caldecott, author of Rotherweird

  “A masterful and multi-layered haunted toyshop of a novel”

  Tony White, author of The Fountain in the Forest

  “Beautifully written and deeply strange”

  Leaf Arbuthnot, Sunday Times

  “Unsettling, intricately constructed and teasingly elliptical”

  Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

  Praise for The Rift:

  “Beautifully told, absorbing and eerie in the best way”

  Yoon Ha Lee, author of Ninefox Gambit

  “It leaves the reader looking at the world anew. Dizzying stuff”

  Anne Charnock, author of Dreams Before the Start of Time

  “A lyrical, moving story” The Guardian

  “Moving, subtle, and ambiguous” Booklist

  “A wrenching read, offering a ‘missing person’ story with more depth

  and emotion than the plot normally allows” Barnes & Noble SFF blog

  “One thing you won’t find in this brilliantly ambiguous book is the

  truth, but so long as you don’t read it expecting a definitive explanation, you

  definitely won’t be disappointed” Tor.com

  Praise for The Race:

  “A unique and fascinating near-future ecological SF novel. Buy it!”

  Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Annihilation trilogy

  “Literate, intelligent, gorgeously human”

  Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space

  “An ingenious puzzle-box of a narrative that works both as a haunting

  family saga and as a vivid picture of a future worth avoiding”

  Chicago Tribune

  “Enticingly mysterious... akin to the best alternative history fiction”

  Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

  “A novel of tender nuances, brutality, insight and great ambition”

  Tor.com

  Also available from Nina Allan:

  the RACE

  the RIFT

  the DOLLMAKER

  the

  SILVER

  WIND

  NINA ALLAN

  TITAN BOOKS

  To Peter

  The Silver Wind

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789091694

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789091700

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: September 2019

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Nina Allan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Copyright © 2019 Nina Allan. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  It is now more than ten years since I first found myself writing about a character named Martin Newland. Martin originally turned up in ‘Darkroom’, which was commissioned for an anthology of slipstream stories entitled Subtle Edens. He wasn’t even real at the time – he was a figment of another character’s imagination – though rereading that story now I can still see why Martin kept pestering me, insisting that there was more to his walk-on role than I’d given him credit for.

  There are a lot of things I would change about ‘Darkroom’, were I to imagine it again from the beginning, but Martin Newland would not be one of them. Though it hardly seems fair on the other characters to say so, the most interesting thing about ‘Darkroom’ is the way it relates to the stories that came after it. My own shorthand for these is ‘the Martin stories’, which together make up the book you are holding, The Silver Wind.

  The original incarnation of this book took me four years to write. Longer than might reasonably have been expected, given the volume’s relatively small number of pages, though as must be the case with most fiction, the book that eventually appeared represented only a fraction of the material that had been written, the work that had been going on behind the scenes. What I was battling with through those years was not so much how the story should go as what narrative should be. Then, as now, I found the concept of straightforward linear storytelling difficult to justify. The novel is a uniquely flexible, perennially interesting art form, both as a means of self-expression and as a forum in which broader questions of reality and experience can and should be asked. As such, it seems normal and desirable to me that the form the novel takes should itself be interesting and flexible.

  As both reader and writer, I want a novel to do more than simply ‘tell a story’. The practical application of such an ambition still forms most of the ongoing drama of my working practice. As the writer I was then, in 2008, it felt like trying to stuff an inflated balloon through a letterbox without it bursting. Although I instinctively knew what I wanted, the technicalities involved in achieving it were more long-winded.

  * * *

  In short, I wrote a lot of stuff about Martin, and not all of it worked in the context I was providing. There was a long-running story strand devoted to his battle with the rat-catcher in ‘Darkroom’, for example – I still have an abnormal number of books on rats and the Black Death to prove it. But while there is still mileage in those ideas – Harry Phelps was a great character, and rats are fascinating creatures – I had in the end to accept that this wasn’t their story. The book I eventually settled on contained the essence of the ideas I had been playing with – about the unreliability of time when applied to memory, about sibling relationships and our own relationship with the past and future, about my personal love for H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine, about the ordinary miracles of mechanical engineering,
and of course about narrative’s natural tendency towards the non-linear – but even at the time of publication I felt painfully aware that the text as it existed was not complete.

  There were stories that did belong, but were not present, simply because of my technical difficulty – then – in making them come out the way I wanted. At the heart of that dissatisfaction lay the story of Owen Andrews’s apprenticeship in Southwark, a segment of narrative that formed much of the logistical and emotional underpinning of what came later but that I could never seem to resolve in a manner that felt in keeping with the story as a whole. When I was asked if I might write a new Martin story to celebrate the publication of this new edition, it was Owen Andrews’s missing pages that leapt immediately to mind, and I am delighted to present them – completely reworked – for the first time here.

  Also present is the story ‘Ten Days’, a straight-up Silver Wind story I wrote for the NewCon Press anniversary anthology Now We Are Ten in 2016. Originally inspired by the image of Johann Conrad Wolf ’s extraordinary watch in the form of a skull, made in Germany in 1660, combined with a reading of Leonora Klein’s 2006 study of Albert Pierrepoint, A Very English Hangman, this story too had been with me from the beginning. It was not until I realised that the narrator should not be Martin but his sister Dora that I was finally able to make it work as I knew it should.

  The result is particularly pleasing to me. Over the somewhat protracted interval of writing these stories, I have come to understand that the real hero of The Silver Wind is not Martin at all, but Owen Andrews, followed closely by Martin’s brilliant sister, Dora Newland. To find Dora’s voice fully revealed has been perhaps the greatest reward among many in revisiting these stories.

  * * *

  If The Silver Wind is a book about time, it is almost equally a book about place. All these stories – with the exception of the last one, which transports me back a decade, just as Dora is transported backwards to a pre-war Camden – were written while I was living in London, getting to know the city as a subject even as I was exploring it obsessively as a geographical entity. And so ‘Darkroom’ is my Ladbroke Grove and Kensal Rise, ‘Time’s Chariot’ my Greenwich and Blackheath, ‘The Hurricane’ my hymn to beloved Southwark. ‘The Silver Wind’ is a story as much about my own bus rides out to Shooter’s Hill and Oxleas Woods as Martin’s search for answers about Owen Andrews.

  The locations of these stories are ordinary, but I love them to my bones. Even in the half-dozen years between the imagining of ‘Darkroom’ and the publication of the first edition of The Silver Wind, London was changing rapidly. In the months immediately before I left the city, the Shard had just gone up, the area around London Bridge Station altered irrevocably from what it had been like when I drafted ‘The Hurricane’. Nicholas Morton’s house on Trinity Street is still there though, and lovely Merrick Square. As Dora says in ‘Ten Days’, even when houses, when whole streets have been torn down and built over, the old shadows remain. These are stories of a time in my life as a writer, a collation of memory. Time is strange, and so are memories. If these stories are about anything, they are about that.

  Nina Allan, Rothesay,

  Isle of Bute, August 2018

  part one

  THE HURRICANE

  He was enchanted with his room.

  Morton had shown him into it with an air of apology but for Owen the space was the realisation of all he had hoped for, or all he would have hoped for, had he dared to imagine it. At home, in the cottage, he had moved out of the bedroom he used to share with his younger brother Anthony, and made a place for himself in the disused privy, which led off the back of the kitchen. The privy had one window, high up but giving light enough to read by through the summer months. He had whitewashed the interior walls, and there was just enough room for his bed frame and the old school desk he used as a work table. His brothers and father jokingly referred to it as his study.

  The room at Morton’s was in the attic, a long, low space, the bare floorboards sealed with an opaque black varnish. A high wooden bedstead, a stained deal table beneath the single skylight. At the far end of the room a narrow doorway led to a small, windowless chamber that contained a heavy claw-footed bathtub and a tottering armoire.

  “The toilet’s out the back,” Morton said. “It’s three flights down.” He glanced at Owen’s cane and cleared his throat, plainly embarrassed. “Can you manage the stairs?”

  “It’s a fine house, sir,” Owen said. It had become his habit since he was a boy to sidestep or ignore any questions or name-calling he experienced on account of his club foot. He felt bad doing this with Morton, whose concern was genuine, but the response was automatic. Owen himself had been shocked in turn by how frail the old man seemed in person. Morton’s letters had radiated garrulous good humour and a fierce independence. He had known of the old man’s problems with arthritis – this was at least part of the reason for his coming to London to serve as Morton’s apprentice – but his mentor’s mental alacrity and professional expertise had made it easy for Owen to forget that Nicholas Morton was not far off his eightieth birthday. On arrival at Trinity Street, he had been confronted by a skinny, bent figure with wispy white hair and a voice so cracked and so quiet Owen had had to strain, at least at first, to understand him. The old man’s clothes hung in loose folds, as if he had lost a lot of weight recently. He seemed unsteady on his feet, and it had been Morton, not Owen, who had been forced to stop and rest for a moment on every landing before continuing upwards.

  Most shocking of all was the state of his hands, the knuckles swollen and reddened, the thumb joints grossly enlarged. Owen could hardly bear to look at them. How Morton had been able to carry on working up until now, he could not imagine.

  Only his eyes were as Owen had pictured them, the dense metallic blue of tempered steel. They blazed with intellect and commitment, with everything that had become familiar from his letters.

  “The stairs are no trouble,” Owen added. He smiled. “The room is perfect.”

  “It can get cold in winter. I’ve arranged to have them reopen the fire.”

  A lumpy section of green-grey wallpaper to the left of the door showed where the chimney had been boarded up. A picture had been hung there to disguise the damage, a medium-sized oil painting depicting a castle surrounded by a moat overhung by trees. An amateur work, most likely, but still fine, still interesting in a way that made you want to keep looking. Owen found himself wondering if Morton would permit him to keep the picture in the room once the work on the fireplace had been completed.

  “That’s Herstmonceux Castle,” Morton said. “Before the bombing, of course. My niece painted it.”

  “I can pay for having the fire done,” Owen said. “Or you can take the money out of my wages.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Morton said. “Come down when you’re ready and I’ll get some supper going. You must be famished.”

  He left the room. Owen listened to him going downstairs one step at a time and felt a powerful urge to go after the old man, to make sure he was all right, but resisted it. He knew Morton would no more enjoy being reminded of his limitations than he would himself. They were alike, Owen supposed, more even than he had realised. It seemed a good omen.

  He began to unpack his things. He had brought with him only the bare minimum, enough to fill the Gladstone bag that had been a gift from his mother’s brother, his Uncle Henry, who had also given him the money he needed to make a start in London. The bag had been purchased second-hand. The paisley lining was faded and the leather was scuffed in places but Owen prized it all the more for that – it showed the bag had been out in the world a year or two. There was an inner compartment that could be locked with a small brass key, where Owen kept his money, the reference that had been written for him by his school headmaster, the watchmaker’s loupe he had saved up to purchase from a clockmaker on Fore Street, Exeter. Aside from that, his possessions were few: the clothes he stood up in, plus two spare shirts, a
best pair of trousers in fine tweed, a corduroy jacket. He had packed also writing materials and two books – Cutmore’s The Pocket Watch Handbook and The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells, a Christmas present from his brother, Anthony.

  His winter coat he had been forced to carry, a burden that would have proved all but insurmountable had it not been for the extra money his uncle had given him so he could take a taxi from Paddington Station instead of using the tube. A ridiculous extravagance, perhaps, but on that evening of his arrival a necessary one. He hung the coat in the armoire with his jacket and shirts. In the depths of the wardrobe the clothes looked different, the clothes of a stranger. He placed his two books in the bedside cabinet and the writing things in the drawer of the desk. In the box with the notepaper and safely out of sight he kept the photograph of Dora Newland he had once persuaded his eldest brother, Charles, to purloin from the top of the sideboard in the Newlands’ drawing room – Charles was good friends with Martin Newland, and at their house often. It had been a mistake to let Charles know of his feelings for Dora, one he often regretted, but at least he had the photograph.

  Outside it was growing dusk. The tall houses opposite presented their closed facades, shadowy and impenetrable as fortresses, as the castle in the painting over the chimney breast. People passed along the pavement, leaving the shops and businesses of Borough High Street as they headed towards their homes in East Southwark and Bermondsey. He wished he had someone to write to, someone for whom he could describe this room, the all-night coffee stand at Paddington, the black cabs lined up like beetles outside the station entrance. Dearest Dora, he imagined writing, and then banished the thought. Later, after supper, he would write to Uncle Henry. If it wasn’t for his uncle, he probably wouldn’t be here in London at all.

  * * *

  Owen slept late. He washed quickly and then dressed. In Morton’s kitchen on the floor below, the table was laid for breakfast: bread and butter and cheese and a pot of coffee simmering on the stove. Owen ate standing up, ashamed to discover that Morton was up and about before him. He rinsed his plate and cup under the tap and then started downstairs.