by Dan Vyleta
I consider his proposition. It is a damp country, this, no more beautiful than most. I shall not miss it. And I am, as he said just now, a rich man. It would be foolish to ask for guarantees. Or have him spell out the alternative. They are the secret police. They will do with me as they please.
“What,” he resumes, “did you transport in your secret compartment, Captain? Mind now, I won’t ask again.”
“The devil,” I answer. It feels good to say it. It has lain heavy on my heart. “The devil in the body of a child.”
ф
I tell him almost everything. The letter I received by private courier more than a year ago, the meeting with an agent in Rotterdam, then the dealings with the explorer in Belém. A rough man, I try to explain, used to living in the jungle. Instructions reaching me in the New World by telegraph, terse little missives that I read in the mildewed foyer of a self-styled Grand Hotel. How well I recall them when my captor prompts me, almost word for word! On the telegrams’ instruction, I ordered repairs when they weren’t needed and had the ship brought into dock for twenty-three days. A dreary seaport, the sailors drunk and whoring, the heat of the jungle rotting the clothes off our backs.
When they finally brought it, it came in a crate. The lid nailed shut and reinforced with ropes, like they were transporting a tiger. They loaded the crate at night: a group of natives, twigs through their noses, looking scared. And all the time, there was an invisible hand behind it all, some master strategist who, telegram by unsigned telegram, pushed us around a giant draughtsboard of his own design.
I had no contact with the cargo until we arrived in Europe. We’d emptied a hold for it and there it remained for the whole of the voyage: one crate, chained to the wall, and its guardian, the scar-faced explorer. A Boer he was, speaking with the awful dialect of the settlers there; always chewing on a native leaf. I did not see him more than a handful of times during three weeks at sea. Each time he had grown thinner, sallow, hollow-cheeked. We had difficult seas.
The paperwork proved to be no problem: a bag of money changed hands, and all stamps were issued. The New World is corrupt. So is the old, only more expensively so; one pays extra for the customs officials’ sweets. It was after our arrival in La Rochelle that I finally met the man I had corresponded with all these months. I try to describe him to the policeman. Slight, clean-shaven, well-mannered. Like a bookish manager, I say, at the best hotel in town. Only later it turns out he is the owner, returning your tip without malice.
My captor is amused by this description.
“What language did you speak in?” he asks.
“German.”
“He spoke it like a native?”
“Yes.” I hesitate. “But there was something foreign to it all the same. He gave me blueprints for the secret chamber in my cabin, worked out in detail, to the tenth of an inch. And made me sole custodian of the child.”
I explain the feeding instructions I was given, the pole I hooked into his harness to keep the creature at bay whenever I cleaned out its sty. There was special food, liquid food, like sloppy porridge, I had to mix it twice a day. There was a drug in it, I reckon. A sedative. It kept it asleep, much of the time. At others, I played the gramophone, or sang at the top of my voice. Once, it bit through its gag. I had to pretend to the crew the screams were mine.
The policeman nods, takes down a note, rings a little bell on his desk. It must be an agreed signal, for a clerk appears carrying a plate with some bread and two boiled eggs. A reward, I understand. We both eat hastily, sharing the plate, left hungry by the interrogation. When we are finished, the fat man licks his fingers one by one, uncaps his pen again, leans forward.
“What name did he use, this man in La Rochelle?”
I note the phrasing of the question. As though he already knows who the man is.
“He never gave his name,” I answer truthfully. “I am sorry.”
The policeman’s face looks placid. If he is keen for this particular piece of information, only his legs show it, uncrossing themselves under the table. His weight sits low, below the belly. Like he has crammed a cushion into his crotch.
“Think, Captain. I beseech you.”
But, faced with his need, I find myself reluctant to speak.
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It takes me two days to answer the policeman’s question. I spend them in a cell. The room is clean and heated. Nobody mistreats me. And yet a steady feeling of dread is growing in me. It is as though the world has forgotten me. I try to pray but there is no God in this nameless place, only the cluttering of typewriters, the bustling steps of clerks. Every few hours my interrogator stops by.
“Did you think of anything else?” he keeps asking.
“I’ve told you all I know.”
“Perhaps.”
He has explained to me that he regards torture to be distasteful and contrary to the tenets of British Law. But after that little snack of bread and hard-boiled egg, there is no further food.
Two days. The length of the interval is not chosen at random. If my business partner keeps to the terms of our contract, he will have instructed his bank in Rotterdam to transfer the final instalment within forty-eight hours of delivery. I hope I can trust to his honesty as he has been able to trust to mine. I am a Dutch trader, after all. We do not cheat.
When two days have passed and the hunger starts eating into my guts, I decide that the time has come to reveal my final piece of information. Perhaps the policeman will be satisfied and permit me to leave.
“I remember now,” I tell him when he next makes his visit. “He received a telegram once, the man in La Rochelle. The porter called him over. We were having lunch at the hotel.”
“So you heard his name.”
“Not clearly. In any case, I must have misheard. You see the name was English. But Englishmen are no longer allowed to travel abroad, are they not?”
“Just tell me what you heard.”
“Ashton,” I say. “Mr. Sebastian Ashton.”
The fat man’s eyes light up. “Sebastian Ashton! Ah, very funny.”
He turns to one of his clerks who always seem to be hovering in some corner, just within earshot.
“Find out everything you can about the sewer project in the city. Check on the immigration paperwork for the whole company. And set up surveillance.”
“Am I free to go?” I call after him, as he makes to leave.
“Soon.”
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There is a commotion some hours later. Two men bring in a yelping dog. It is a big beast, a bloodhound. Both its hind legs appear to be broken. In between its howls, the dog tries to snap at the men. They throw it in the cell next to me, where it cowers, sniffing at the air, staring at me with blood-rimmed eyes.
The fat man appears in order to have a look at it.
“Make sure you don’t smoke,” he says to me. “It goes wild over Smoke.”
“What is it?”
He shrugs. “A related inquiry.” He reaches through the bars with a stick, touches its side. The dog whimpers, then sinks its teeth in the wood. “My men say they did not see the owner. But I think they saw him and were afraid. Of a schoolboy! There’s a rumour on the loose…But of course, you already believe in the devil, Captain.”
“What will you do with the dog?”
He looks at me in good humour. “What we do with all our prisoners. Tame it, or kill it.”
“Am I free to go?” I ask again.
“Soon.”
At least they have started feeding me again.
SCAR TISSUE
“Do you still pray?”
The words are small things, fragile: the hush of the church soaking up Charlie’s voice.
Thomas does not need to think about the answer.
“No,” he says. “It’s all a lie.”
“It is. And yet I do. Despite myself. Late at night: hands folded under the blanket, where even I can’t see them.”
“Why?”
“Habit, I supp
ose. There could be, you know. Something real behind all this bloody mess—but look at you flinch!”
“You swore,” Thomas complains. “Charlie Cooper swears. In church. Where God can hear.” Then adds, lightly, looking down the length of the nave. “So it appears I also still believe.”
It’s the first smile they have shared since their reunion. Perhaps they came here just for that. A night and a day cooped up at Grendel’s house. Watching Lady Naylor bustling about; Sebastian coming and going. The child in the mask. They needed air. And to see whether Lady Naylor would let them go; whether they were prisoners or free.
They found their way back to the market square almost mechanically. This is where they were meant to have met. But when Charlie arrived here, long after nightfall the previous day, there had been no one to greet him. Cold and hungry, he had sought shelter in the church. The door had been locked but the priest had heard him; had listened to his explanations; and had realised that this dirty, shivering lad was the very Charlie Grendel’s newfound friends were looking for. Next came Charlie’s introduction to the man without Smoke. It made him happy somehow: that such a thing could be. Happy—until Thomas and Livia returned, her mother in tow.
Now he casts around for words to say what he feels.
“My cousin gave me some naughty books last Christmas,” Charlie states abruptly. “Not naughty, really. Risqué. Five volumes that he found in his late grandmother’s study. All five of them romances, translated from the French. They all have the same plot: two men love the same girl. They all end in a duel.”
Thomas does not deny what Charlie is implying. His features are gaunt in the pale light. They have all lost weight these past ten days. It makes them look old. “It may be an illusion, Charlie. A lie. Borrowed emotion. Round here, it drifts on the air.” Thomas frowns, clearly worried by the thought. “In any case, she does not even like me. She hates me.”
“No, not quite hate.”
Their words sound hard in the cold, pewless nave. Suddenly, scared by this coldness, they reach out and grab each other’s hand, fiercely, like two children lost in the woods. They race out of the church, still clutching each other, back out into the square. The sun is low in the sky, and for a moment it is beautiful, London’s haze of sin, soaking up the slanting rays and unfurling in orange Smoke rings high above their heads.
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They walk back slowly, recounting to each other the days spent apart. They have done this before, but then there were other listeners and the tales tailored to another purpose. Charlie does not linger on Renfrew; the day he spent chained to the schoolmaster’s bed. He does tell Thomas how he got sick on the way back.
“From the stomach. Rotten potatoes and all the snow I ate tramping through the night. They never write about that in stories. Getting the runs.”
Before long the cramps got so bad that Charlie found himself unable to continue. A farming couple put him up when he knocked on their door, doubled over with pain.
“Imagine it, waking under a stranger’s roof, flailing about every time, my heart pounding, thinking I’d been chained again. Scrambling for the chamber pot, wondering whether Julius was there, watching me, lurking in the shadows. The pain passed within twenty-four hours. Then the farmer made me work off the cost of my lodgings.” Charlie shakes his head, turns up his palms, displaying blisters. “A coarse man, always swearing, complaining about rich people, the chickens, his wife.”
They reach Grendel’s house but linger outside, the breeze carrying the river to them, smelling of refuse and rotting fish.
“And after all that,” Charlie finishes, gesturing behind them and meaning the ambush, the mines, the long road to London, “here we are, back with Lady Naylor.”
“We can leave if you want. Just say the word.”
But Charlie can see that Thomas does not mean it. He knows why.
“We have to stay and protect the child.”
“You think so too, then!”
Charlie has only seen the boy for a moment. The first thing Sebastian did was commandeer a room for him, one whose door could be locked. Next thing they knew he had nailed shut the window shutters. Then he left, taking the key. When he returned in the morning, he brought a metal bolt and reinforced the door.
Later Charlie spent an hour at the keyhole, but the boy was outside his field of vision. Only his feet showed from time to time, the tips of his boots, man-sized, too large for him, nobody had thought to help him take them off. A boy of six perhaps. Younger than Eleanor. Alone, confused, slurping air as though through a straw. Once, he rose and raced to the window, his non-face pressed against the slatted shutters, drinking light.
“He does not smoke,” Charlie says to Thomas. “That’s why he is so precious to them. The mask is a respirator. Keeping him from infection.” It is a surmise, but Charlie is sure of it. He repeats to Thomas Renfrew’s account of Baron Naylor’s expedition, how they scoured the world for an “innocent.”
“They needn’t have gone to all that trouble,” Thomas observes. “Here we’ve brought them to Grendel, free of charge.”
“It’s different. The boy must be like the wild woman we met in the woods. After we were attacked in the coach. If so, the boy will smoke soon enough. He just has not caught it yet.” Charlie smiles at the memory of the shy creature who stopped Thomas’s bleeding, her Smoke seeping out of her with the unselfconsciousness of breath. “Do you think they will notice, about Grendel?”
Thomas spits. “If they haven’t already, they will before long. They are too attuned to Smoke. It’s all they think about. I suppose they must hate it.”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know, Charlie. Lately I think it’s not the Smoke that’s bad but the people underneath.” Thomas turns towards the stairs that lead up to Grendel’s rooms. “Let’s go, eh? They’ll be waiting for us.”
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They stop one more time before they reach the top of the stairs. They both know why. Livia. It is as though they can sense her, moving around above their heads.
“They end with a duel do they, those French novels of yours?”
“Always,” says Charlie. “The handsome one wins. Or sometimes the girl comes, stops them, and picks.”
“Know this,” Thomas replies with all the bluntness of his nature. “If she was asked. She’d have you ten times out of ten.”
“That’s just it, Thomas. One does not get to choose. Not like that.”
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Inside, the stink of the river is replaced by the smell of cooking. Butter-fried fish and boiled turnips: Mrs. Grendel stiff-backed at the stove. She was curt and surly when the priest brought Charlie. Another foundling. Another mouth to feed. The first thing Lady Naylor did was give her a purse.
“Here’s money,” she told the woman. “There’ll be more, much more, before the week is out.”
Mrs. Grendel took the purse quickly. But it did not improve her mood.
They find Livia sitting at the dinner table with her mother. Neither is saying a word. Before he joins them, Charlie crouches down again before the locked door of their prisoner. The keyhole is dark, as though blocked. It takes Charlie a second to understand what he is looking at. A glassy surface throwing back the door’s reflection; the shadow of a masked head, blocking out the light. There, at the centre, imprisoned by the goggle’s glass, one might imagine an eye, a pupil. Grown big against the darkness, crowding out the iris.
Scared.
Charlie scratches the door, quietly, so Lady Naylor won’t hear. The boy on the other side scratches back. Then the door jolts in its frame. At the same time a crash sounds, is repeated, two drumbeats. The child is hammering against the door. Lady Naylor comes running.
“You better get away from there. It agitates him.”
“How long will you keep him like that?”
“Not long now. Sebastian says the mask will come off tonight. He will be more at ease then.”
“Does he have a name?”
Lady Naylor does not censure his anger. “I do not know it, Charlie. He comes from a small, isolated tribe. I don’t think any outsiders speak its language, not even the man who found him and took him away.”
The child hits the door again, with his feet this time.
“Come away,” Lady Naylor says again. “He might end up hurting himself. It is best if he is calm.”
Indeed the hammering stops as soon as Charlie rises and moves away. The dinner table has been laid with an old but pretty tablecloth. A candle stands in the middle. Stools have been found and arranged around it. A family dinner. Grendel joins them, fussing over a bottle of wine he has been sent to buy, then realising they have no glasses, just chipped old cups. Livia avoids Charlie’s eyes when he sits down next to her. It isn’t anger, he reminds himself, but confusion, embarrassment. But it is hard to read anything in her features other than the stony-faced humility she perfected in her family home.
Dinner is a restrained affair. Nobody is in the mood for talking, not with the Grendels here, seeing to their food like hired servants, awkward in their own house. The rest of them resemble a family that waits for the help to leave the room so it can argue in peace. At long last Mrs. Grendel does them the favour.
“I will do dishes on the morrow,” she declares sourly, then pushes her husband out the door. “We will turn in early.”
Their movements in the back of the house are studiedly noisy: they wish to convey they are not lingering to eavesdrop. It is disturbing what money will buy you, Charlie thinks, discretion and resentment both paid for with the same coin.
The moment the Grendels have settled themselves for the night, Thomas leans across to Lady Naylor.
“Tell us again,” he says, fingering the edges of his missing ear, “why Julius shot at us when we left your house.”
Lady Naylor rehearses the same answer she gave them over breakfast. That she was afraid when they announced their departure, the very morning Julius informed her they had broken into the laboratory. Afraid of what they had seen. Afraid they would talk. That Julius, in a rage with the boys and keen to protect his investment in Lady Naylor’s project, offered to waylay them and send them running back to the manor. All she needed from them was a week of silence. Two dead horses: it seemed a cheap enough price for revolution. It was a weak plan, really. She should, Lady Naylor now says, not have been surprised that Julius decided to alter it.