by Dan Vyleta
“We could ring for a servant,” Charlie suggests.
“She might come. Tell us off.”
“She doesn’t seem the type to answer bells. Maybe the other girl will come.”
“The one with the big—”
Thomas is stopped short by a knock on the door.
“Dinner,” says the voice of the butler. “Lady Naylor is waiting.”
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Lady Naylor is resplendent in a floor-length evening gown of velvet and silk. She gets up from a chair when they enter, shakes their hands, gives Thomas an odd searching look. Charlie does not know how to gauge his friend’s reaction: a thoughtfulness comes over Thomas that is not quite recognition. He takes his seat at the large, formal dinner table with a frown on his brow. Charlie sits across, separated by four feet of starched damask. Rows of cutlery five-deep flank their china plates.
“I trust you had a pleasant journey.”
The boys look at each other. Both remember the coachman’s waiting room with its unheated floor; the anxious look of their driver as he explained there was no inn.
“Very pleasant,” they say, almost in unison.
“I am pleased.”
Miss Naylor enters. She is wearing the same nunnish dress she wore at the breakfast table, though she has added a string of pearls. The boys rise, somewhat clumsily, dropping napkins, until she has taken her seat across from her mother. Right away a servant appears carrying a terrine of soup.
“Please,” Lady Naylor says, after a perfunctory grace, “begin. We don’t stand on formality here.” The smile she flashes highlights the absurdity of the claim. Her daughter scowls and spoons the soup with such noiseless precision that Charlie, sitting next to her, feels like a pig at the trough.
“I trust your parents are well, Mr. Cooper.”
“Very well, thank you.”
“It is generous of them to share you with us in this festive season.”
Charlie blushes. “Not at all.”
“Livia, you forgot to mention to me what a perfectly charming young gentleman Mr. Cooper is. And Mr. Argyle, too, of course.” She flashes another smile, subtle and naughty. “Her report, I must tell you, was rather libellous.”
“Mother! I really must insist that you don’t lie.” A flush of colour has entered the girl’s cheek.
“See how we live here,” her mother appeals to her guests. “Under the heavy thumb of a prude.”
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Dinner is interminable. The soup is followed by jellied tongue, followed by duck in red wine sauce, then roast pork and parsnips, plum pudding, cheese, and coffee. For all Lady Naylor’s charm, she is unable to draw more than half a dozen words out of her guests. Even her daughter refuses to be drawn into extended skirmishes. She checks herself at several points and accepts her mother’s barbs with the patience of the martyr. Charlie watches them all very closely: Thomas, awkward in his moth-worn jacket, eating little, chewing over some thought; Livia, thin, pretty, embarrassed by and for her mother; and Lady Naylor, a well-kept woman of forty, her hair piled high above her mobile, made-up face, the thin lips thickened by a rich hue of lipstick. She is speaking to him, Charlie, mostly; seems less interested in Thomas. Only now and again her eyes steal over to him, an odd sort of question in her gaze. It busies Charlie so much, this gaze, he too nearly forgets to eat.
At last the final plate is cleared away. Lady Naylor stands. Charlie and Thomas quickly scramble to their feet.
“Thorpe will see you back,” she announces. She gestures behind them. Thorpe, the butler, proves to be already in the room, having appeared from God knows where. His face is the perfect façade of lifelong service: so devoid of expression that one must assume his total indifference towards all matters grave and light. Certainly towards the comfort of guests.
“Please let him know if you require anything else.”
Lady Naylor shakes both of their hands again, again holding Thomas’s eyes for the fraction of a moment, then takes her daughter’s arm and walks away.
“Good night,” Charlie calls after them, too late to elicit an answer.
“This way, if you please.”
The butler escorts them like a jailer. Back in their room, Thorpe hands over custody to the great clock whose ornate hands will keep measure of their sentence. It is barely seven o’clock. Dinner is finished, they have been sent back to their room.
It feels worse than school.
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“What do you make of them, then?”
Charlie thinks about his answer. Why not? They have time to spare.
“The mother is all perfume and charm. And the daughter—”
“Tar soap and prayer books!”
They laugh but there is no mirth to it. The room already feels small to them, the two beds narrow and far too soft. They have opened the veranda doors and sit there freezing, facing the rain-dark night. Letting the wind in.
Just to feel alive.
“Did you recognise her?” Charlie asks, getting up and inspecting the bookshelf. There is an incomplete encyclopaedia, volumes Aa to Pe; a Bible; a chess game in a wooden box; playing cards; dust. “Lady Naylor, I mean. You looked like you might have.”
Thomas begins to shake his head, then shrugs.
“I’m not sure.”
“A distant memory? From childhood?”
“No, it’s not that. Something else.” He searches for it, pulls a face at not being able to put his finger on the feeling. “She reminds me of someone. Her face, her bearing. Someone at school, I think.”
“One of the teachers?”
“Perhaps.”
They sit for a while, get up, open the door on the draughty silence of the corridor, close it again, step out onto the veranda, get wet. No sound travels through the night. They have been abandoned even by the peripatetic pheasant. Whatever lights may be burning within the house are blocked by curtains and blinds.
Thomas closes the veranda door at last, flops onto the bed.
“It’s not how I imagined it. Coming here. I thought there’d be, I don’t know. Some sort of confrontation. Another dentist’s chair. Or maybe the opposite. My uncle explaining the world to us. Confiding secrets.” He scowls at his own naïveté. “Some kind of adventure in any case. But it looks like he has some other plan in mind. They’ll bore us to death.”
“Perhaps we are to serve as bad examples to his daughter.” Charlie rouses himself from their gloom, walks back over to the bookshelf. “Chess then? Or draughts?”
But Thomas is too disconsolate to answer.
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He wakes not an hour after they’ve gone to bed. It’s not a dream that wakes Thomas but a thought. He knows where he knows her from.
Lady Naylor.
He leaves the room in his nightshirt. His clothes are piled onto the chair, and there is a dressing gown hanging off a hook somewhere, but he does not want to wake Charlie by rummaging around.
The corridor carpet is soft under Thomas’s feet. He asks himself what it is he is searching for. Proof, he supposes; something that will turn conviction into fact. It isn’t clear what can furnish such proof. All the same: staying in the room, staring wide-awake into the darkness, alone with his thought—it is impossible. He walks slowly, shivering. After a while he realises it is not from the cold.
The house isn’t totally dark. Here and there some embers are smouldering in fireplaces. In the dining room, a gas lamp has been left burning, turned very low. In the kitchen, a shimmer of light has fought its way up from the cellar, the servants’ quarters, and carries along with it the soft, high giggle of one of the girls. He stops for a moment, savouring it: tiles underfoot now, vivid with cold.
Out in the front hall, Thomas locates the great spiral staircase. Its bannister is a sweeping black curve, reassuring to his touch. Upstairs he finds another light, brighter than the others: it draws a tidy white line underneath a door. He stands in front of it and listens; raises a fist to knock, then stops himself and turns the handle. He mi
ght be walking into Livia’s bedroom; into a toilet busy with an occupant. But to knock and don the role of supplicant (for what is a knock, if not an invitation to be turned away) is not palatable to him. Not now. The taste of his Smoke is so bitter in his mouth, he does not need to look down his nightshirt to know he is showing.
The room is a lady’s study, large and well appointed. It has no occupant but its owner is disclosed by the patterned wallpaper of purple and gold, too playful to be a man’s, too opulent to be the daughter’s. The desk confirms it, ornate rosewood inlaid with other, lighter woods. A letter opener catches Thomas’s eye, the brass blade shaped like a dagger, and heavy enough to serve as a weapon. He picks it up, sits down, insolent now, his eyes on the wall with its two dozen paintings, hung close together, crowding the wall. Sits looking at them, unseeing; Smoke rising like a mist in front of his face.
It isn’t long before the door opens and its owner enters the room. Lady Naylor appears unsurprised to find him there.
“Thomas! I am glad you are enjoying my art.”
His voice finds a timbre he recognises as his father’s, gravel rasping under heavy boots. It’s years since he has heard it, and never in himself.
“I was looking for your cutthroat, milady. And your fake whiskers. I was lying awake, trying to fathom what you did with the dead woman’s Soot.”
“Ah. So you did recognise me.” Lady Naylor is wearing a silk dressing gown; its rich colour sets off her dark hair. She looks at him intently, then drops into a chair on the far side of the desk; smoothes the fabric over her thighs. “Did you know already at dinner?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. But it was hard to believe.”
She laughs: it’s a brief laugh, almost a cough, but there is genuine humour to it all the same.
“Well, I’m relieved,” she goes on. “A boy who wears such a perfect mask of composure—no, I confess I did not like the thought.” She shakes her head, still laughing, with her eyes now rather than her voice. “And I was so very sure you knew right away. You see, I recognised you at once. Under the scaffold. You looked just as you did when you were a child. The same eyes, the same cast of the chin. Belligerent. And the face you made! Frightful! I was sure you would start screaming my name and accuse me in front of the whole mob. But then you didn’t tell anyone. Not even at school. I had you watched, you understand, worried that you’d be sullying my name. It cost me some sleep. In the end I decided to invite you here and have it out in the open.”
Thomas does not trust himself to respond. He sees her again, in men’s clothing, the hair hidden underneath a cap. The face dirty, looking boyish in its feminine grace but also old. He flinches when she gets up and draws to the wall.
“I trust you have been admiring my paintings. Fascinating, are they not?”
He shrugs, trying to fathom her, the letter opener clutched so tight it is hurting his hand.
“You don’t think so. Well, look again. Trust me, Thomas, you have never seen any pictures like these before. Tell me: what do pictures usually show?”
Her voice is oddly soothing. It slows his heart. He answers sullenly; rises, gauges the distance between them.
“All sorts of things. Landscapes. People.”
“Describe them to me. The pictures you know from school, for instance.”
“There are only a handful. The headmaster has a few, in his study. A hunting scene, I think. Gentlemen to horse. And a coastline. Sun and water.”
“And these?”
Almost against his will he steps forward, to where picture frame hangs next to picture frame, nearly hiding the wall.
“People. Street scenes. Commoners.” It dawns on him. “The city. But—”
“Yes: but. There is no Smoke.”
Thomas looks again from picture to picture. Some of them look very old. There is a market scene, people haggling over wares, a young child stealing an apple while his brother looks on. Next to it, a village square, some sort of carnival, people dancing, drinking, rolling in the dirt. Another picture shows a soldier, studded with arrows. His tormentors surround him, faces full of hate. In yet another picture, frameless, the paint thick upon a panel of wood, Jesus hangs from his cross in between two others. Thomas has seen the scene before, in a stained-glass window of his old parish church. Golgotha. There—most vivid on clear winter mornings when the slanting sun pours warmth into the glass—dark plumes rise from the shoulders of the two thieves and their cheeks are marked with two black boils of Smoke. Here they hang as sinless as the Saviour in their midst.
“How can that be?” he asks, his eyes darting amongst pictures. He flinches when Lady Naylor steps next to him.
But he does not run away.
“There are only two explanations, aren’t there? The first is that it is a matter of artistic licence. Fantasy pictures. Outlaw artists, dreaming about a different world, hiding the Smoke. Such pictures exist and I have a few in my collection. But none are hung here.
“The truth is that all pictures used to be like this. Until a certain year. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly, but I make it 1625 or 1626. No Smoke. In not a single painting. Showing rapes, tortures, war, and execution.
“Then comes a period without pictures. Thirty, forty years, and not a single brush stroke anywhere in Europe. Perhaps nobody felt moved to paint. Or they have all been destroyed, as so many of the older ones have.
“And then, after a whole generation of silence, we finally get pictures again. Nature scenes. Creeks, mountains, storm-tossed seas. It takes another generation before anyone paints people. Gentlemen, gentlewomen—not a commoner in sight. Unless it’s a religious motif. A martyr boiled in a pot: lily-white in dun water. The men firing the pot are as black as a boot, the air dark with their filth.” She smiles. “Like the air in here, I suppose. Do you mind if I open the window?”
She turns her back, slowly, deliberately, as though to taunt him who is still holding the blunt blade of a toy dagger. It’s when he raises it to place it back onto the desk that he realises his fingers are numb. He has squeezed the life out of them. She waits, patiently, for his tongue to catch up with his feelings; like a nurse leading a sick man, waiting for him to place his foot.
“You’re saying there was a time before Smoke,” he manages at last. “But it’s impossible. All the history books—”
“Were written later. By schoolmasters. University dons. Ask my husband. He wrote books like that himself.”
“But everyone would know. They’d remember, surely. People would tell their children, and they in turn would pass it on. You can’t forget something like this.”
“Can’t you? Not even if every painting was destroyed and every book burned? If there was not a shred of evidence to support old people’s stories? If you were taught that it’s a sin to speak the truth—and burned at the stake if you did? Almost three hundred years, Thomas: it’s a long time. A very long time. But you are right. Some people do know. On the Continent, mostly. They weren’t as thorough there. There are a few universities with some well-guarded collections. Even a monastery, in Germany, where—”
“The Bible,” Thomas interrupts her, his voice over-loud, almost shouting. “Smoke is mentioned in the Bible. It’s everywhere. Old Testament, New Testament. Every chapter and verse. And the Bible was written in—you know. The dawn of time.”
“So it was. The dawn of time. Do you remember where Smoke is mentioned for the first time?”
“Genesis,” he answers without hesitation. “The Fall of Adam and Eve.”
“Yes—Genesis 3:7. How does it go?”
Thomas quotes: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and shame filled them, and the air grew thick with Smoke. And so they sewed fig leaves together, and made
themselves aprons, and the aprons turned black with their Soot.”
“Very good! I did not know you were such a scholar. Your mother taught you, I suppose. A feisty woman, a reformer. But pious.” Lady Naylor walks over to a glass-encased shelf. She opens it, waves him closer. “I have a few Bibles here. Go on, pick one. Read me the passage.”
Thomas does as he is bidden, pulls a small, brittle book down, opens it to Genesis.
“It’s in Latin. ‘Et aperti sunt oculi amborum cumque cognovissent esse se nudos consuerunt folia ficus et fecerunt sibi perizomata.’ ”
“Translate then. You have Latin in school, don’t you? At least I hope so. I’m paying your fees.”
He stares at the words. His voice is halting, his brain numb with what isn’t there. “And opened were the eyes of both of them. And when they realised that they were naked, they joined leaves and made for themselves clothes.” He leafs back, to the book’s beginning, almost tearing the pages. The cover print incorporates a number in Roman numerals. MDLXII.
1562.
Thomas looks up, tears in his eyes.
“They changed it, the bastards.”
“Yes, they did.”
“And everything—everything!—is a lie.”
“Yes.”
She pries the book out of his hands, lays it back on the shelf, then stands facing him, at an arm’s length, reading his face. He waits until the tears have rolled down his face, wet his lips; tastes it, his sadness, finds it tinged with Soot.
“Does your daughter know all this?”
Lady Naylor’s face grows hard. It’s the first time since she’s entered that he sees it amongst her features: that other face, the person who scraped fresh Soot off a woman’s corpse.