Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  “Then the coach tilts and is swallowed by a hole. Our prince does not understand it, thinks the earth has opened for his prey. Birds in the sky. The chamber empty; the hammer falling useless; fingers too Soot-slick to reload.

  “By now the mask owns him, has grown into his skin. It is also suffocating him. It’s in his struggle for air that he manages to rip it off. Dry heaves and tears: the wind has turned, his own Smoke is stinging in his eyes. On the floor, the barrel of his rifle trips up his feet.

  “How does he get down? It might be said that he’s gone mad. Only a madman would risk the windmill’s ladder while his body is shivering with cold and shock; would walk the hundred yards clothed only in a coat of Soot; would crouch, naked, over the broken body of his man and christen it, gape-mouthed, with his snot. Our friend loses his balance when he tries to blow his nose; he falls in the dirt, faceup, and watches starlings dance dark clouds into the sky.

  “The coach, meanwhile, lies at the bottom of a steep ravine. He looks down at it, sees a threesome of figures disappear into the woods. They may have seen him, recognised him. Hence he must follow. But how? He is naked and dirty and left his horse in the stable so no one knows he ever left. Something else holds him back, a discovery. He finds that, without the mask, he is once again a schoolboy, a coward. There’s a creek on the way home where he washes his hands, his neck and face with soap of lavender and lye. Only then does he step into his clothes, the Soot so thick on his thighs and knees that it chafes raw his skin on the three-mile jog home. He slips inside through a back gate and then makes sure he is seen to emerge from his room late-morning, his usual time. Kippers for breakfast, and a potful of strong tea.

  “Do you know something? Tea tastes better, the thinner the cup. The china is so fine in this house, if you hold it up into the light it shines right through. And so she finds him, distracted, his empty cup raised into the morning sun: a servant girl, replenishing the toast.

  “ ‘Is everything all right, sir?’ she asks in her simple way.

  “Is everything all right? Have you ever tried to picture the moment, my friends, when a moth first slips the confines of its pupal prison and wonders at the colour of its new-grown wings? Sitting wet and sticky in the wind, waiting to take flight. I imagine it is terrified at first. It is only later that it begins to see itself reborn.

  “ ‘Never better,’ I say, and surprise the girl with the shy twitch of a smile.”

  ф

  And so it passes, our evening, the jug making its rounds, the liquor churning in me till I get up and vomit half-cooked rabbit. They tell me about leaving Ireland. The father who gambled; the sister they buried; the Englishman who cheated them out of shop and land. Talk is like Smoke, I discover: once in the air, it breeds with abandon. I tell them many things. My plans and secrets; my life and dreams. I talk and talk.

  It does me the world of good.

  ф

  I wake before them, with the first hazy light. I have heard about the price of consuming alcohol, but my head is clear and my blood oddly eager, embracing its fate. I do not get dressed at once. The two Irishmen made no attempt to rob me: Nótt kept watch. Besides, we are friends now. Daniel and Stephen. From Donegal.

  The knife cuts Daniel’s throat like butter. The blood spurts up, onto the mask: smears against the eyeglass, seeing red. What’s in my lungs, what’s rising up the insect’s snout and coating my mouth, has no need for sight. It guides my hands by touch. As for the boy beneath the mask, he has no wish to see.

  Stephen I beat with the barrel of my gun. He wakes on the second blow and is dead on the third. Pale green eyes; the eyelashes sticky with sleep.

  I leave them with ten silver guineas. The rifle I also leave behind, slip it loosely into Daniel’s hands so that his fingers rest on the silver butt he so admired. Two dead Irishmen with money in their pockets and a foreign gun. Show me a magistrate in England who can’t close an inquest based on evidence as good as this.

  By the time dawn proper breaks I am two miles west. Snow is coming down in thick, wet flakes. It will be rough going today. There is not a soul to be seen. It is midmorning by the time I realise I am still wearing the mask. Its buckles are stiff under my frozen fingers.

  “Abomination,” I rage as I wrestle to take it off. “Freak, monster, elephant man.”

  Soon it will own me, body and soul.

  Perhaps Mother would help me. I could still turn around.

  But there is no time.

  Charlie Cooper is spreading stories about me down the road.

  QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

  When Charlie wakes the room is flooded with daylight. He senses rather than sees it, has trouble opening his eyes. His body does not follow orders, lies leaden under the down bedding, a stranger to his will. He mutters in surprise and finds his tongue sitting dry and heavy in his mouth, so swollen he has to breathe around it. No sound will come. As he struggles against his eyelids’ weight, a soothing voice sounds close by.

  “Easy now, Mr. Cooper, take your time. There was a sleeping draught in the milk. You were in need of rest. Here, I will help you sit up.”

  The dark shadow of Renfrew bends over him, slips a second pillow behind Charlie’s back, then sits down again on the stool he has drawn up to Charlie’s bedside.

  “There, that’s better.”

  Renfrew reaches forward with a washcloth and wets Charlie’s lips.

  “You must be quite parched. It is one of the draught’s side effects.”

  Embarrassed at being the subject of such mothering, Charlie once again attempts to shake off his drowsiness or at any rate take charge of his limbs. It is then he realises his wrists are manacled to the bed frame with leather restraints. A vision of Baron Naylor shoots through him, strapped onto his bed, smoking darkly in the attic. It helps in its way.

  Fear bids Charlie wake.

  “Ah, I think you are coming round now. Very good. I was starting to be afraid I had given you too much. It’s gone ten o’clock. Not that it would have been a day for travelling. The snow has been coming down thick and fast. I imagine the road is quite impassable.”

  Renfrew places a hand onto Charlie’s forehead, checking his temperature, then slips a finger between Charlie’s wrists and the restraints, making sure they are not cutting into Charlie’s skin. The finger lingers a moment, takes Charlie’s pulse. Throughout, Renfrew’s movements are unhurried, efficient. He would have made a good doctor, or better yet, a surgeon, excising rotten flesh with a steady hand. His task accomplished, Renfrew straightens, smoothes his necktie and collar, and looks Charlie straight in the eye.

  “I must ask you again, Mr. Cooper, to relate to me all the events that led to your being attacked in a coach heading from Lady Naylor’s estate on the morning after New Year’s Day, and all events that have transpired since. We need a full accounting. It is, I’m afraid, a matter of national significance.”

  Charlie attempts to answer, but his tongue is not working.

  “Water,” he croaks, “water.”

  Renfrew sadly shakes his head.

  “Let us talk first, Mr. Cooper. Here, I will moisten your lips again. It might be small consolation, but I drank a measure of salt water this morning and have not taken anything since. There, on the windowsill: I have poured us two glasses. Let us drink together, Mr. Cooper, and quench this infernal thirst. Once we have finished our conversation. What do you say?”

  But Charlie can only stare at him and struggle against the restraints.

  “You’ve gone mad,” he manages at last, his mouth so raw it comes out as a whisper.

  “If you need to perform your ablutions,” Renfrew answers stiffly, “I can offer a bedpan for your use.”

  ф

  The hours creep past. The room’s window looks directly south and Charlie can track the journey of the sun. The window itself is frozen solid, and the sun a matte disk of orange that is being pulled across its frosted pane. Renfrew is sitting two feet from him, a pen in his hand and a lacq
uered lap desk perched on his knees. He has explained it all very patiently.

  “Please don’t think I intend to hide my actions. I even considered informing Mr. Trout this morning, but his political allegiances are somewhat unclear. It would be easy to use this situation to discredit my party. Unconscionable, of course, but very easy indeed. The facts of the matter are these. The baron is planning something—or, if the rumours are true and he has gone mad, his wife is. There is some evidence of their purchasing laboratory equipment from abroad. Don’t misunderstand me. I am a scientist myself and regard the embargo as a folly beyond measure. The old order is moribund. Under the masquerade of virtue it is trying to stop the march of science—of truth!—simply to protect its own interests and prolong its life. All the same a change is coming, a mighty change, one can smell it on the wind these days. But here is the thing, Mr. Cooper. This change—this revolution—it can take many forms. We can have order, or we can have chaos. I—my party, the men concerned for the moral future of the realm—we need to know whether to protect Baron and Baroness Naylor and their projects, or to stop them.

  “Did you know that there was a motion not long ago to have the Naylor estate placed under surveillance? Not in Parliament, of course, but in one of the parliamentary committees, the ones that dare to think outside the conventional norms. It was debated very seriously. The trouble is, we are lacking in an executive. A police force. It is said England has secret government agents, but if so, who do they work for? Who gives the orders? Oh no, Mr. Cooper! If we want virtue, it will take ordinary good men to step up and make the business of the country their own. Whatever the risk.

  “Don’t imagine then that I will not take full responsibility for my actions, Mr. Cooper. Here, I am writing a report even as we speak. I will send it with the evening mail, along with your statement. Oh, I know, you think what I am doing is a great crime. No doubt your parents will insist on my dismissal once they learn that I have detained you. They may even press criminal charges.”

  He pauses, closes his eyes, opens them again. His gaze is serene.

  “The Smoke would warn me, Mr. Cooper. If I was doing wrong.”

  A curl of grey drifts out of Charlie in response. Renfrew takes no notice. Instead, he takes hold of Charlie’s hand, helpless in its restraint, and speaks quietly at him in tender appeal.

  “I was never a utilitarian, Charlie, but for the first time I feel the force of Mr. Bentham’s argument. The happiness of the many outweighs the happiness of the few. Who are we to spare ourselves when a million souls are at stake?

  “But enough of this sulking, Mr. Cooper. It is time for you to speak. I have always known you for a boy who has a good heart. Or have your father’s interests poisoned you?”

  And Charlie looks past him, watching the slow movement of the sun across the frost-bound pane, like the fog lamp of a distant ship. In front of it stand the water jug and two filled glasses, alight with its glow.

  ф

  As the day wears on, Charlie finds it increasingly difficult to take his eyes off the water. It stands four feet from the foot of the bed. The more Charlie stares at it, the more details he sees. The two glasses are filled to precisely the same level. One has a chink in the glass that refracts the light across the water’s surface and adds texture to its shadow. The laws of optics bend the window cross directly behind: at times it is the glasses that appear flat and the window behind that bulges with volume. When Charlie struggles hard enough against his manacles to agitate the whole of the bed, the old floorboards pass on the movement to wall and windowsill and conjure a ripple: trembling water; a speck of dust suspended in the left glass sent dancing until it glues itself to the inner wall and adds its shadow to the pattern. Charlie swallows past his drug-thickened tongue, hunts his mouth for spit, finds Soot sown like grit amongst his gums, and realises he must have been smoking. When he glances over at Renfrew, he catches him, too, eyeing the water with the intensity of longing. The schoolmaster rises abruptly, walks in stiff long strides to the window and lifts one glass up to his eyes.

  “The human organism can live without water for four or five days. Longer, perhaps, in our humid climate. And yet, it isn’t dusk yet, and we are both struggling with our fast. Ah, the flesh is weak.” He chuckles softly and replaces the glass in precisely the same position. “A good lesson this.”

  When he bends over Charlie to look him in the eye, his breath is sour with his thirst.

  “Will you tell me what I need to know, Mr. Cooper? For the good of the realm?”

  “No,” says Charlie, his dry lips hurting with the word.

  “Then we must continue to suffer, in our modest little way.”

  ф

  Renfrew leaves him. For a moment Charlie has a vision of him, sitting in his kitchen, downing pint after pint of fresh water. But at once he knows this is not true. Renfrew is a man of his word. It’s what makes him so terrifying.

  Soon Charlie can hear the scrape of a spade against stone. The schoolmaster is clearing a path from door to fence. Charlie pictures him working with brisk, efficient movements, a scarf knotted high, unfurling his long, gaunt shadow away from the dipping sun. It will be dark before long.

  As the room grows gloomy and while the spade is still separating snow from stone in long, scraping shovelfuls, Eleanor steps into the doorway. She does not enter but stands with her feet level with the threshold and leans in her head. Her harness gives an odd bulk to her shoulders, as of a knight in armour. A windup knight, a round little key sticking out of her chest. It is easy to believe that, in the depths past her sternum, this key connects to a complex clockwork mechanism of interlocking wheels, weights, and lead bearings; that the whole spare body of hers is a machine. Her face, however, is pure little girl, flushed and shy. Charlie smiles at her. She recoils as though stung, pulls her nose back past the invisible line marked by the tips of her toes.

  A minute or two later, however, her head and upper chest once again invade the room. This time, Charlie’s smile does not immediately chase her away.

  “Hullo Eleanor,” he whispers.

  She mouths rather than speaks her response.

  “Hullo Charlie.”

  His name sits prettily on her childish lips.

  “Did your uncle tell you that you are not to enter the room?”

  She nods, gravely, checks the line of her toes. They have not passed the threshold.

  “What else did he say?”

  “I must not speak to you.”

  As she says it she mechanically reaches for the little brass wheel sticking out of her harness and gives it a crank. A shudder follows, a spasm of the cheek.

  “I see. I am sorry. The truth is, I need help. Do you want to help me, Eleanor?”

  The girl does not respond but holds herself very rigid, as though afraid that any motion may betray her wish. Charlie, meanwhile, struggles to keep his thirst out of his voice; each word dry and graceless as it falls from his parched lips.

  “I’m afraid if you do want to help me, you will have to disobey your uncle. I wish there was another way.”

  Again Eleanor does not respond in words but simply looks at him with clear, honest eyes. He does not rush her but simply returns her gaze. When he starts chewing on his lip in nervous need, he finds her mirroring the movement, her incisors forming bunny teeth across the pink of her chin. He screws shut one eye and finds a girlish eye screwed shut in response; slips out the end of his swollen tongue and is graced with a flash of Eleanor’s rose tip, rolling itself into a graceful little straw. He laughs then, and she laughs with him. The next instant she stops, jumps back in sudden terror and runs away, down the corridor and the cottage’s naked flight of stairs, a clatter of tiny feet.

  It is only when she reaches the silence of the carpet below that Charlie realises that the scraping of the spade has ceased.

  ф

  Renfrew returns. He appears to be thoughtful, walks to the window, stares out into the gloom. It is almost dark now, though t
he snow retains a pallid glow and sends it up into his stern and thoughtful face.

  “I saw a rider. Out by the school gates.” He turns to Charlie. “Someone to see Headmaster Trout, perhaps. But he did not enter the premises. Or is it someone looking for you, I wonder? A man with a dog.”

  “Julius.”

  Charlie mouths the name rather than saying it. All the same, Renfrew reads it off his lips.

  “Mr. Spencer? Yes, I suppose it could have been him.” He scratches his chin. His fingers remain encased in gloves: a black hand in a white-blond beard. “Did you know he is Lady Naylor’s son from a previous marriage? Yes, I imagine she will have told you. A most unhappy association. I must confess I have my suspicions about the boy. His serenity feels artificial. Have you heard about sweets? They absorb Smoke at the moment of its genesis.” He frowns. “They will need to be banned entirely. Their present proliferation, even beyond the nobility—it is like building the kingdom of heaven out of cardboard.”

  Renfrew steps over to the bed, slips his hands out of the gloves, folds them neatly on the night table. Charlie flinches when his teacher sits down at his bedside, but it is only to better see him. Renfrew has yet to light a candle. His face, in the failing light, is grave and marked by earnest concern. He might be sitting at Charlie’s sickbed, exhausted from the long hours of his vigil. Involuntarily, Charlie feels a pang of sympathy rise in him. Renfrew is following the commands of his conscience. It gives him no joy.

  “I must ask you again, Mr. Cooper,” he says now, his own voice strained by thirst, “to pass on the information so vital for the future of our polity.

  “Please, Charlie,” he adds, as gently as his dry tongue will allow, “put an end to this silly game.”

  Charlie considers it. It is difficult to say whether his words would result in harm or in good. But he gave a promise. Not just to Lady Naylor but to Thomas. To Livia.