by Dan Vyleta
“Steps,” she mouths.
Now he hears it, too: someone pacing, back and forth, a pause where he turns tightly on his heels. A confined space, but bigger than most on a ship. The captain’s cabin.
Then the steps cease and, after a minute, are replaced by an eerie crackling, from which, as from a sack of gravel, emerges a voice. A woman, singing, her pitch near-perfect but subject to odd wavers, soft ululations half stuck in her throat. She is joined by an instrument, a violin, sweet, note-perfect, but similarly wayward as though time ebbs and flows for its player against the pulse of his beat. He looks to Livia for explanation but she merely shakes her head. The captain’s cabin. A singer, a fiddle, a pair of boots measuring the cabin, side to side. A copper pipe speaking through the mouth of a bell. It is like a missive from the realm of ghosts, disembodied and obscure. They smother the gas lamp before exiting the door.
A few steps from the engine room, Thomas’s hands find another bolt and, beneath it, an icy metal wheel, five turns of which open the room ahead. Only the drip of water disturbs its silence, echoes coolly in the air. A large room, then, a hold. Livia has held on to the gas lamp and now lights its wick. A scramble of shadows, then the room comes into focus, an iron-walled hall supported by girders, only half full with cargo. Crates and barrels mostly and, beyond them, an array of metal parts: articulated pipes, gear wheels, fan blades, and giant perforated disks, like overgrown pieces of plumbing, stacked into a mound and secured to the floor by heavy chains. Not waiting for Thomas, Livia walks the lamp down the length of the hold and takes an inventory, placing a palm on each item, one by one. As she walks deeper into the space, the lamp dislodges movement at the edge of its shine. A hard bony clicking, claws on steel. Livia’s movements are flushing the sounds towards him. She is walking boldly in her circle of light, her eyes on the cargo, never looking about. He supposes this means she has heard the rats, too. Her return causes a second wave of scrambling, inverted now, back into the far reaches of the hold.
“Whatever we are looking for, it isn’t here,” she reports. “All items have customs stamps. Some of them have several. Brazil, Portugal, France. England.”
“And it would be hard to hide anything down here.” Thomas scans the room again. His eyes are drawn to the giant metal parts. “Machinery. You wouldn’t think they’d be allowed to import it. Not with the embargo in place.”
“The seal on them is a different colour. A special licence, perhaps. What do you think they are for?”
“Don’t know. Come, it must surely be midnight now.”
As he says it a sound carries to them from the quay, a whistle. It reaches them faint and tinny, down here under the waterline.
“The watchman. Something’s happening.”
Without needing to discuss it, they rush to the door and reenter the corridor outside.
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A light has been lit. It is far away, broken up by stairwells and corridors. But as they scramble their way back down the corridor by touch—their own lamp long extinguished—and reach the first sets of stairs, they catch a hint of it, enough to suggest a direction. It seems at once foolish and inevitable that they should follow it, making haste, hungry for answers. A moment later—a corridor, a bend—and it is gone, leaving them stranded, disoriented.
Then a voice sounds. Another voice answers. They are too far away to make out either words or speaker.
“Above.” Livia whispers it, close to his ear. She must be standing on tiptoe. “They are on deck.”
“Your mother?”
“Not sure. What now?”
The light makes the decision for them. There it is again, moving purposefully now, towards them, trailing the sounds of steps. Unwilling to be caught out, they back away from it. A junction forces a decision: left or right. They choose badly, the light following and their path cut off by a door. It stands ajar. They slip through, into a room cluttered with shadows, conscious that they will be caught. There are not enough yards between them and their pursuers to find a likely hiding space. Then the light relents; pauses; slips a wedge through the half-open door, like an angular toe. It finds a carpet, and a sliver of wood-panelled wall. At the same time a voice can be heard, distinct now and foreign.
“Look now,” it says, its accent thick, tilting the vowels and giving an odd sharpness to the k, “before we go in, we must talk about the money.”
“You have been paid, and generously.”
In other circumstances it would be a shock to hear it again. Lady Naylor’s voice. A wonder of a voice, actually: composed and reasonable; at once amiable and aloof. But Thomas is busy, scanning the room for a hiding place. Shapes peel themselves from shadows. A bed, a desk, some chairs. The bed is built into the wall, the chairs too small to cower behind. At one side, two portholes glow with a lighter shade of dark. The clouds must have lifted and the moon come out.
“There have been complications. I had all sorts of problems getting past the authorities. And then the refitting costs! Do you have any idea how difficult it was to find a suitable carpenter in La Rochelle?”
“We can discuss all that once we have seen the merchandise. After you, Captain.”
A new voice this, also accented, if differently. Shy and precise. A man used to talking, but not about himself. Thomas pictures him to himself even as he finds the wardrobe, built into the wood panelling in such a manner that only its key protrudes. Livia sees it at the same time. It’s deeper than expected, but low. They cower amongst shirtsleeves, their limbs entangled, her hair in his mouth. A fingertip inserted into the keyhole, a sharp little pull, and the wardrobe door closes behind them just as the cabin door is pushed wide open and light floods the room.
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They take turns at the keyhole. The door is not locked and hangs open a tiny crack: they must not lean their face against it, lest it move. Then, too, the key is in the keyhole: does not quite block it but leaves to them only a curved sliver through which to observe.
Three people. The captain is plump, soft-faced, balding beneath light blond curls. He is turning away now, bending, lighting an additional lamp. White trousers underneath a short-cut pea coat. A picture-book sailor, with a wide, fleshy rear.
Lady Naylor stands close to him, looking pale and thin; handsome, thinks Thomas, a stretched, pinched version of her daughter. The third man is at the edge of Thomas’s field of vision: not old, fine-boned. An umbrella in his gloved hand. Both he and milady cast about the room. They have seen us, it comes to Thomas. Her face—backlit now, the lamp a halo at the back of her head—is taut with impatience. Somewhere behind Thomas and Livia, as though in the wood itself, a rat is scraping, digging channels into the wardrobe’s back.
“Where—” Lady Naylor begins to ask but is interrupted by the captain’s eagerness.
“This is just what I mean. It took the carpenter a month to get it right. It had to be seamless. And just like the old cabin, in case one of the customs people remembered. Some men have a surprising memory for that sort of thing. The same cabin, exactly. Only we shrank it by forty cubic feet.”
He paces nervously as he speaks. Thomas recognises the sequence of steps. Four steps, four steps. Then he stops at a machine, a little box with a fluted bell, like the head of a lily made of brass.
“I had to hire a whole new crew. Just to be safe! The old ones might have noticed something. Good men, too, hard to replace! And then the journey. Days at sea, lying here in my bunk, and the devil restless behind the wall. Played music through the nights, just to drown out the sounds. I aged twenty years, I swear.”
“You followed my instructions minutely?”
It is the man with the umbrella who asks. He has stepped closer to the wardrobe, as though sensing them there. Livia pushes Thomas’s head aside, takes charge of the keyhole. He leans back, hears again that scratching at his back, pictures the rodent squatting in the dark, its claws an inch from him, fanned out and eager.
“Yes, of course. We used the lead lining, just as i
nstructed. And I kept a sweet in my mouth, even at night. Nearly choked on it more than once. And feeding times…”
Thomas hears a crash and, pressing his cheek into Livia’s, catches a glimpse of the captain retrieving a stick he has dislodged from its perch. It is stout, the length of a broom handle, and has an oddly shaped metal hook at one end.
“I got quite adept with this, fending it off while pouring your concoction down its throat.”
“Him,” says the man with the umbrella. “It is a he.”
Behind Thomas, the rat scratches the wall. Then it starts screaming, a sound high-pitched, inarticulate, feral. And also: human. Thomas’s body knows it before his head has finished the thought. He and Livia react as one. They jerk away from the noise.
It pushes open the wardrobe door.
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It is not that they spill out and tumble to the floor like potatoes from a bust sack. But all the same the door is open and a foot is sticking out into the open. The man with the umbrella reacts first. He steps up and pulls them out, by an ankle and a shoulder. They are so conjoined that they drop to the ground together, a muddle of limbs. For all the shock their presence must cause him, the man is not interested in them. He steps over, sticks his head into the wardrobe, stands there sniffing.
“Did you smoke?” he asks them, clipped and measured, not shouting. “In the wardrobe, did you smoke?
When they don’t answer, he gestures to the captain. “Take them out of here. Quick now. You, too, Katie, if you will?” This last part to Lady Naylor who is staring at them in pale silence.
By the time Thomas has recovered his wits, the captain is holding him and Livia by their arms and is pushing them out of the cabin, all the while muttering excuses, curses, his head drawn into his body, a dog expecting to be whipped. Outside, his grip relents a little. Thomas might be able to wrench free. What then, however? Run away? Hide? They have come too far to leave without answers.
Lady Naylor saves him the decision.
“Let go of them,” she instructs the captain. Then, taking the lamp out of the Dutchman’s hand: “You may go now. Wait for us on deck.”
Captain van Huysmans hesitates only a moment before walking away, red-faced and shaking his head. He must be honest enough a man to know he has lost command of his ship. Lady Naylor shines the lamp after him until she is sure he is gone. Only then does she turn to Livia.
“You are alive!” The relief on her face is unmistakable.
All the same Livia evades the hand her mother stretches out towards her.
“You tried to kill us!” she rages, and a curl of Smoke fills the space between them.
They both stare at it, mother and daughter, while it settles as Soot on one side of the lamp and colours the light. Livia’s face shows defiance, Lady Naylor’s a mixture of puzzlement, relief, and pride.
“So you learned to sin.”
“No jests, Mother, no clever talk, no evasions. You tried to kill us. We have a right to know why!”
“Is that what you think? Why you went into hiding? That I sat in that windmill and took potshots at my own child? It makes sense, I suppose. No, I did not try to kill you, my love. I believe Julius did.”
“Because you ordered him to!”
“I didn’t.” A frown appears on Lady Naylor’s forehead, fine-etched, scrupulous. “I merely asked him to scare the boys into returning.”
Her palm rises to halt any further questions and she looks back over her shoulder, to the door of the captain’s cabin.
“Hush now, I beg you. There are more pressing things to discuss. How long were you in there? You may have done terrible, irreversible harm. And yet I am glad to see you! Strange, isn’t it? Foolish! Our one and only chance and here you may have dashed it all. When did you slip into the captain’s wardrobe?”
“We came just before you did.”
It is Thomas who answers and for the first time her gaze jumps from her daughter to him. She takes in his ear; his dirty, Soot-starched clothes.
“What’s behind the wardrobe, Lady Naylor?”
“Change,” she answers. “Revolution.” Her voice shakes with the word, as does her hand and with her hand the lamp: the corridor spinning, skirmishes of light and dark. “But I am a fugitive now. The manor has been searched, and my London house is being watched. Trout’s after me.”
“The headmaster?”
“Headmaster? Why yes! I forgot that you know him. See, your headmaster is like the rest of us: he has a past. Master Trout has returned to his old profession.”
Before she can explain further, the door of the cabin swings open and the gentleman with the umbrella steps out. Thomas has a clearer view of him now. The man is small, slight, doe-eyed; elegant in a brown wool suit and faun-coloured gloves. Unusually for a man of his station, he does not appear to have brought a hat. He speaks to Lady Naylor, not to them.
“I think it is all right, Katie. Significant weight loss and anaemia, but no sign of infection. I have put on his respirator now. We will know for sure once I have taken some blood tests.”
Thomas notes again the familiar use of the first name. Katie. Lady Naylor’s name, he believes, is Catherine. These two know each other well. From the Continent; in a different tongue, perhaps. The man’s accent is slight if distinct, the words overly clipped.
“This must be your daughter. And one of the boys you told me about. Thomas, is it? The Smoker.” He looks at them with interest. Gently, if such a thing is possible. There is no harshness to the man. “We must leave the ship now. Will they pose an obstruction to our plans?”
He turns without waiting for an answer, back into the room, closing the door behind him. His question remains with them, a problem he expects them to figure out by themselves. For a long minute, not one of them has the heart to take it on. Then Thomas speaks.
“What is he talking about, this man?” Thomas is not smoking yet, but he can feel it close, the edge of rage. At what exactly, he does not know. “Who is he? What plans?”
Lady Naylor watches him intently. He is reminded of the night when he confronted her in her study: he held a letter opener then, and searched her skin for a likely place to bury its point. He might have killed her that night. But is this true? The Smoke—visible now, curling from his nostrils, from the stump of his ear—may be darkening his memories. Even the past bristles with his anger. It must take courage for her to step close to it, lay a hand on his chest. He does not flinch.
“I promise I will tell you, Thomas. On my husband’s life. But right now we need to leave the ship before Trout catches up with us. Or all is lost.”
She waits until his Smoke dissipates before phrasing a question of her own.
“Was it you who set Trout on me?”
“No.”
“I am not accusing you,” Lady Naylor smiles. “I am just wondering what set him off.”
“Charlie,” Livia says.
Thomas has the same thought. A stab of fear in his guts, down low, beneath the navel. People talk about hearts too much, he thinks. And reaches out, Lady Naylor’s eyes following the gesture, to squeeze Livia’s hand.
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The man with the umbrella emerges. He is followed by a monster. Four feet high and livid with the smells of the chamber pot, its hands cuffed to a belt. Where the face should be something else reigns, not quite a blank. Smooth, hairless skin, more black than brown: taut on top then hanging slack around the cheeks and neck. Twin lenses for eyes, palm-sized, ringed in metal. A leather trunk for a mouth, trailing to its chest.
A mask, Thomas realises. A child in a mask.
The man has attached a leash to his belt and walks the boy past them in precise, urgent steps. The child himself shuffles as though drugged; shoulders stooping; hopeless. They are past before Thomas can demand an explanation. All he can do is fall in step behind.
Up on deck the captain stands quietly near the stairwell. It is too dark to see his face. The man with the umbrella passes him a purse, then turns a
way without a word, marching the child across the plank. On the quay he stops, takes off his long woollen coat, and carefully wraps the child in it head to toe. The next moment he has gathered him up, is cradling the boy against his body: a shapeless mass, four feet long and sagging at the centre.
“Wait here,” the man orders, then walks briskly down the quay. After five steps he is no more than a shadow. After ten, he is lost in the night.
Lady Naylor rushes to the shelter of a tollbooth, beckons to them. Thomas hesitates. “I did not try to kill you,” she told them. Thomas finds that he believes her. Does that mean she is their friend? Her steps are hasty at any rate, the boot heels loud on the empty quay. She is nervous, it comes to Thomas. Impatient. Afraid. But perhaps he is simply projecting his own feelings, his heart too large in his chest, clenching, unclenching like a swollen fist.
Again she beckons, and still he remains out in the open, Livia by his side.
“So it’s all about this child,” he calls over, taking pleasure in the noise. “Where are you taking him?” Then it dawns on him. “The cage. The cage in your laboratory. It is meant for him.” He shudders. “I thought it was for me.”
“For you?” Her surprise seems genuine. “Yes, of course. It’s Renfrew’s fault. He told you that you had murder in your heart. He scared you, did he? And true enough, your Smoke has a certain quality. It is attuned to Julius’s in quite a startling manner. A phenomenon worthy of further study. Once upon a time I might have found a use for you.”
In the dark, across the distance, all he can see is the pale oval of her face. The eyes are deep pools, devoid of expression.
“Poor Thomas. All this time you thought you were special. At the centre of events: your Smoke the key to all the secrets in the world.” The words are mocking. But her voice carries sympathy. “Here is the coach. You have a decision to make. Are you coming or not?”
Thomas and Livia look at one another. There is no need to discuss it. They can stay and remain ignorant. Or they can go along and get answers. One after the other they squeeze into the little fly that has pulled up in front of them, an unknown coachman on the box. If they had wanted to leave, they would have done so already.