by Dan Vyleta
For five whole days we are content in this manner, from Christmas Eve to the Feast of the Holy Innocents. I mark each day with a candle in the chapel. Five candles, each a foot long, wrist thick, burning at the altar of the Virgin. Then my half brother arrives. He comes on horseback, unannounced, his manservant in tow, and the next thing we know the whole house seems to be thick with him, his voice, his boisterous laughter, the chink of his spurs. He came to warn us about marauding Gypsies, he says. He brags and skulks and monopolises Mother.
I wish he had sent a letter instead.
SPARRING
He arrives while they are sitting at lunch. Lunch is a frugal affair of cold meat jellies and some kind of lentil porridge: a rebuke to the senses, Livia’s idea. Thomas chews each spoonful like the dreary ordeal it is, ignoring Charlie’s kicks under the table. The porridge has been thickened with cornstarch and has the consistency of frozen mud.
Then Thorpe, the butler, steps up to the table and whispers something into Lady Naylor’s ear. The emotions that attempt to gain purchase on her features are hard to read, but annoyance sits topmost, rules the slant of her mouth. She rises without a word, forcing both Charlie and Thomas to scramble to their feet (for one must not sit when a lady stands), then takes three long strides that carry her out of the room.
Curiosity easily defeats their lentil-smothered appetite. Already on his feet, Thomas follows Lady Naylor at once. Charlie is only a step behind. Livia remains at the table. Looking back, Thomas catches a glance of her: stiff-backed, chin tucked into her throat, resigned to this latest of humiliations.
They find milady in the front hall. She has taken up position at one of the big windows looking out onto the driveway. There, two riders have just climbed off their horses. The first is a tall, lumbering man in a greatcoat with close-cropped hair and hard, flat features. He is closer to fifty than forty but moves with the confident ease of a younger man. His cheeks are raw with wind and cold.
As for the second man: it is disturbing to see him out of school clothes and dressed instead in a gentleman’s hunting gear. Thick chequered tweeds in muddy greens with a matching cap and knee-high boots. A smudge of dark down twitches on the upper lip. Julius Spencer has been growing a moustache. He has brought a further horse, a pack horse, laden with trunks and leather-cased rifles. From his wrist a riding crop dangles by its loop.
They cannot hear Julius’s voice through the window. Judging by his gestures he is instructing Lady Naylor’s servants to help the older man lift down the trunks. He is his valet then. When a stable hand leaps forward to catch the reins Julius has tossed at him, a shadow darts out from behind the horse’s bulk and sits down waist-high to its master. Dark copper fur draped in abundant folds over a thickset body; the eyes red-rimmed and small within their face’s droop; the lips rolled back to disclose mottled gums of black and pink. The dog howls, a sound loud enough to carry indoors; is petted for its trouble, or rather cuffed across the head and snout, then leans its slavish love into its master.
“Milady!” Julius shouts, at the door not at the window, though he can plainly see her, see all of them, standing in a row, their eyes riveted to his figure. “Mother! Come greet your beloved son.”
At the word, Thomas turns away in disbelief.
“Surely—”
Lady Naylor’s face is stony.
“Indeed. My son from my first marriage. And you are my second husband’s sister’s child. I tried to work it out the other day. The correct terminus. Some manner of cousin, I suppose. In a roundabout way.”
She eyes Thomas blandly, then walks over to the door. “I see he omitted to mention it to you at school. An oversight, no doubt.”
She pauses before opening the door. “Well, unless you are dying to greet your schoolmate, I suggest you and Charlie return to your luncheon. I expect my little Jules will want to talk in private. He and I have business to discuss.”
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For the next few days they see little of Lady Naylor. She spends hours locked in with her son, then withdraws to her private quarters for all but meal-times, where she presides with grim politeness over a table split in half between her children and her guests.
Thomas expects to feel annoyed by her change: shut out, rejected, replaced; more than half his questions still unanswered. Instead, something else sets in, a newfound sense of freedom. For the first time since the day of their arrival, he and Charlie find themselves thrown together, with time on their hands. That, and Julius’s presence—his smug malice; his strutting grandiosity—makes it feel like a weekend at school.
More familiar now with the routines of the household, no longer worried about causing offence by poking their heads where they don’t belong, they go tearing through the estate. Initially, the explorations dispense with talk. It is a relief to Thomas. There has been so much talk since their arrival, so little time for the words to settle.
Their exploration unearths a whole series of wonders. The stables, for one thing, turn out to be a whole system of sheds, workshops, kennels, and living quarters, so extensive they feel like a roofed and rambling village all their own. Amongst the three dozen or so hunting dogs there is a Russian borzoi with a chest so deep, its fur almost brushes the ground. Farther back the body tapers into a waist so narrow, a child could encircle it with its hands. In another shed, uncaged, unchained, Lord Naylor’s mastiff whiles away its days, sleeping with both paws draped over an axe handle he has claimed, they are told, from earliest puppyhood. The dog is said to weigh one hundred and twenty-three pounds, and is kept on largely because “it’s bloody hard to shift.”
In the house itself they find bedchambers and drawing rooms that have not been used for generations, their floors made monochrome by inch-deep dust. The furniture is wrapped in sheets and blankets. In some rooms it is stacked, ceiling-high, and trussed up with ropes. It gives an odd bulk to sofas, chairs, and tables, turns them into mist-moored ships: a sea of dust tranquil beneath their prows. The boys’ feet upset this peace. Leaping backwards and forwards, hopping on one foot, they write demonic dances into the rooms’ memories, for servants to puzzle over in years to come.
Then there are cellars filled with barrels and bottles, others crammed neck-high with mighty rounds of cheese; a suite of rooms in an upper wing, in which all floors are tiled in chessboard patterns and all furniture has been removed; a big brass telescope that stands in an abandoned corner study and pokes its lens through the removable pane of a narrow window, taking aim at the winter sky.
Through some unspoken agreement, they do not venture to the attic. It is understood that the attic is Charlie’s space, Charlie’s and Livia’s, and, of course, their patient’s. Thomas does not tell Charlie that he has no need to go exploring there. He has already been. He went up to the attic the very day Charlie described his discovery to him, driven by a private need. It was the early hours of the evening. Thomas hid in the shadow of a doorway while two servants, a man and a woman, were taking their turn looking after their employer, the sound of their voices travelling into the corridor if not their words. When they left at last, Thomas walked up to the door and opened it silently; stood on the threshold, looking in. The servants had left a gas lamp behind, turned very low and hung from a hook far from the bed. It had taken several minutes before Thomas’s eyes learned to distinguish man from bedding. In the meantime, he listened to the baron’s breathing, even for the most part, a little too laboured to suggest sleep. The breathing reassured Thomas. He had come there to look into his own future: the flowering of the seed that Renfrew had detected in him and not been able to dislodge. Thomas had expected the raving lunacy of London, curable only by the rope. This was another outcome of his sickness, a calmer end.
If it comes to this, it crossed his mind, I can ask Charlie.
To help me end it.
Then the baron’s face began to peel itself from out of the shadows. First came the eyes: large white orbs, their irises dark like punctures. Moving, staring. Aware of being wa
tched. Agitation began to shake the sick man, drenching his nightshirt in fresh black. Thomas ran away at once. He did not want to frighten the man. Nor have his last illusion shattered about the day of reckoning that will be his.
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On the third morning of explorations, Charlie and Thomas find the billiard room and the gymnasium. The first is a narrow, wood-panelled room, with the playing table at one end and a drinks cabinet at the other. The atmosphere is so snugly masculine—from the glass case well-stocked with cigar boxes, to the row of decanters filled with sherry and port—that it feels as though a group of gentlemen in frock coats must be standing just around the corner. Paying tribute to the ladies. Looking for excuses to return to their games.
Across the corridor lies quite a different room. Spacious and well-served by windows, it is uncarpeted and virtually unfurnished apart from four chest-high posts that form a square made more explicit by the double line of rope stretched between them. Two stools stand in the ring, in opposite corners. A long bench lines the windows and a single wardrobe leans opposite, slumped to one side, where a leg has given out with rot. On its left hangs a mirror, so corrupted by age that the dirt seems to have grown into the very glass. On its right, a daguerreotype whose glass is black with dust.
They open the wardrobe first. Inside is dirt, a pile of mildewed towels; a candy floss cone of spider’s webbing; a brass bell to ring in the rounds; and a dozen or so boxing gloves, with worn, knotty laces, split thumbs, and fraying seams. Without discussing it in the least, they set to trying on gloves, exchanging pairs, shaking out dirt and insect remains, discarding those whose torn leather might cut the skin on impact. They have no gym tights but roll up their trousers; no gym shoes, so decide on bare feet; no jerseys, so strip off their shirts and coats; stand freezing, the gloves hanging heavy from their wrists, and eye the ring.
Before they climb in, Charlie reaches up and wipes the tip of his glove through the daguerreotype’s murk. A face emerges, then a second. The first is handsome and composed, a man past the halfway point in life, but proud, well-kept, his longish hair swept back from his brow and tucked behind his ears. Livia’s face is imprinted in his features. It is by this, rather than his excursion to the attic, that Thomas recognises the baron.
The second face they do not expect to find in this place. Hence it eludes them, yet also calls to them, sufficiently so that Charlie reaches up and, still in boxing gloves, fishes the picture off its hook. They take it to the bench, lay it out flat, pore over it like over a book. The body is slender, there is no beard, and the features have the softness of those early years of manhood. It is a stage of life that still lies ahead of them but is so close now, its contours have already been sighted.
In black-and-white the man’s hair does not shine in its familiar colour of young corn.
“Renfrew,” Thomas says at last, when he is sure.
As they wipe away at the blighted glass, they find pale skin. Like themselves, the pair they see are stripped to their waists; wear gym tights and gloves, the latter raised in front of their chests. The backdrop is this very gym. The men’s shadows are thrown behind them, deep into the ring.
“Where did Renfrew go for his studies?” Charlie wants to know.
“King’s, at Cambridge. He says it’s the finest college there is.”
“Livia told me that Baron Naylor used to be a don. At Cambridge. He must have been Renfrew’s tutor.”
“Trying to knock some sense into him, by the looks of it. Shame it didn’t work.”
The joke is feeble but it helps them reconnect to the mood that made them put on the gloves. Besides, they are cold. Thomas replaces the picture; climbs into the ring. Charlie is about to follow when he stops himself, races back to the wardrobe, retrieves the bell. He rings it. The clapper is so caked in dirt that the sound resembles a clucking tongue.
“First round,” he announces.
They square off and begin to spar.
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For the longest time neither of them lands a punch. Instead they are shadowboxing, keeping their distance, dancing sideways, only to suddenly lunge forward and deliver devastating hooks into thin air. When they are good and winded, Charlie races over to the bell, takes a clumsy hold of it between glove-swollen palms, then augments its sound by singing out three rings.
It takes until halfway through the second of these rounds that Thomas divines the reason for their reluctance to connect their punches. It isn’t just that they are friends, averse to causing each other pain, even in sport. Charlie, he realises, is afraid. Afraid he will wake Thomas’s Smoke; afraid that one well-placed punch will break something in him, and wake it up. The monster inside. And it isn’t just Charlie. He himself is holding back. The danger, he senses, lies not in being hit but in hitting: the joy of crushing padded leather into flesh and bone. Lady Naylor’s words about Livia hang in his head all of a sudden.
She lives like a china doll. Listening into herself.
Waiting for something to break.
The thought alone coats his mouth with Smoke.
And so he snarls, steps into Charlie, and delivers a clean hard hook into his shoulder, then follows it at once with a quick cross. His friend grunts, retreats, jiggles the arm just hit as though testing it for injury—and grins. His gloves rise, he steps forward, toe to toe, and loosens three quick jabs into Thomas’s chest, before stepping in to sling an uppercut into his stomach. A brawl follows in which shoulders are beaten meat-loaf red, and chests given a good pounding; the odd rib is rung and one lowish sucker punch leaves Thomas gasping for sweet air. They dispense with the bell, hammer away at each other until they are both breathless, sweaty, slumped over on the bench and radiant with joy. If there has been any Smoke, it has been so light, requited, and playful as to have been part of the game.
“We should come here every day,” Charlie says at last, slipping his coat over his shoulders against the window’s draught. A letter sticks out the coat pocket. He notices it, smiles, pulls it out.
“I wanted to tell you earlier. The post finally arrived. It’s from my sister. She sent it well before Christmas, but it only got here today. She says she hopes we will make it in time to join them on their trip to Ireland. She is dying to meet you.” He rubs his sore arm. “I must have given her the false impression that you are very handsome. And kind.”
Thomas returns his smile, then grows serious and begins to pull on his socks.
“You should go home, Charlie. I can’t. Not yet. I need to hear what else she can tell me. About Smoke.”
Charlie does not dispute it. It is one of his talents, Thomas thinks: not to put himself at odds with the truth. What Charlie does do is question the value of Lady Naylor’s conversation.
“When all is said and done,” he asks, “what has she told you this past week? What have you really learned?”
Thomas recognises the doubt at once. It is his own, fought nightly, when he reviews with impatience the sum of his knowledge about Smoke.
“It’s hard to say, Charlie. She never quite tells you what you want to hear. I ask about Smoke and she’ll start talking about politics. How the country used to be liberal but has swung Tory these past twenty years; how the new liberals are gaining ground but they are all terrible puritans at heart and just as bad. That and the Queen is ailing, leaving the business of governing to her civil service. But it’s not just politics. The other day she got stuck on science. The Books of Smoke are outdated, she says; they are literally riddled with mistakes. Everybody knows it, but all the same it’s illegal to change them because it would imply that we don’t have a clue as to what Smoke actually is. Then two whole hours on inventors, German periodicals, the laws of optics, reeling off names so fast it makes my head spin. Apparently there is decades’ worth of new technology Parliament has outlawed and won’t allow to be imported. Factory machinery, weapons, new photographic emulsions. It’s a total embargo: every ship’s searched for machines, blueprints, scientific papers, everything. It�
��s because the government fears change. The new technology might challenge social order, or something. Make new people rich. Whilst in Italy or somewhere they have a thing now called a ‘telephone,’ where you can talk to people who are miles away from you, just by speaking into a box. The box is connected to another box, by a long wire. The wire transports the words, somehow. As though by magic.”
He watches Charlie picture it. Charlie is not impressed.
“Even if it worked, what use could it be? You’d have to connect all houses in the world with wires. And that’s impossible.”
Thomas shrugs. It is hard to argue with that.
“Then there are all sorts of medical breakthroughs. Vaccinations, drugs, that sort of thing. A new type of microscope.” Thomas leans forward, lowers his voice. “She has a laboratory somewhere. Here in the house. She says she will show me. When I am ready.”
It dawns on Charlie that the past few days of exploration were not as innocent as he had assumed.
“You’ve been looking for it.”
Thomas nods, then hesitates. “Yes. But if I find it, and go inside, it’ll be a breach. Of the rules or something.” He leans back against the wall, throws one of the boxing gloves across the room, aiming for the wardrobe. “I have a feeling Lady Naylor is the type who is a stickler for rules.”
Charlie emulates his throw. His aim is better, but the glove falls a yard short. He wants to know: “Do you trust her?”
Another throw, Thomas’s turn. It hits the wardrobe door, slides down, lies on the ground, laces sprawling.
“I trust her sometimes. Other times I look at her and think she is the devil.”
“Because of London.”
“Yes. To do what she did there…” Thomas mimes scraping a razor down the length of his tongue. “But then, of course, the woman was already dead.” His face grows hard. “In any case, it does not look like she will talk to me now, not until her son is gone.”