Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  “You heard us talk.”

  “Yes. ‘Until I see you again.’ Not ‘good-bye.’ ” He puts a hand into the downpour outside. “Hundewetter, the Germans call this. Dog weather. That’s about all I remember from class. Isn’t it funny that they make us learn French and German but nobody’s allowed to travel? Nor to read any foreign books.”

  He turns his face and she sees his earnest, honest face. It cuts her, not with guilt but with something more complex that has its own flavour of Smoke. Your heart leapt, she hears her mother’s words. Or perhaps some other organ.

  “Dog weather,” she says and annoys herself by the cool primness of her pronunciation. “ ‘Until I see you again.’ You are worried about Julius!” The realisation helps her move past her emotion. She looks out into the street. “Have you seen him?”

  “Seen him? No. Only in a dream.” He hesitates, tilts his head with the thought. “I sometimes wonder whether I dreamt him even at Renfrew’s. The stuff of nightmares. And how he pleaded to be saved!” The next moment his eyes are back on hers. A naked gaze.

  “You are looking for Thomas, aren’t you?”

  It is she who blushes.

  “Has he gone out?”

  “He realised he needs a pencil and paper. To copy your mother’s plans. Will you believe the Grendels do not have a single pencil in the house? So he borrowed some money from Mrs. Grendel. Or stole it, maybe. When he gets back I am to distract your mother while he searches her room. He thinks she and I have rapport.” He hesitates, swallows the trace of accusation that surfaced in his last phrase. “She tried to seduce me last night, didn’t she? To her cause. I knew it but was seduced all the same. She is very clever.”

  “Yes. She tried to seduce me, too.”

  “Livia,” he continues, without transition. “Please. You and I, we need to—”

  She turns to flee. “Not now, Charlie. Later,” she whispers. “I promise.”

  But by this time she is already out the door.

  When she walks past the room a little later she sees him standing by the window, his hands shoved out into the rain.

  ф

  The rain falls hard and perpendicular, unharried by wind. Thomas is soaking wet before he finds a stationer’s. It appears London is in little need of paper. He stops at a butcher’s to ask for some wrapping paper and a stub of pencil, but the man is so suspicious of his request and accent that he won’t sell him anything, not for all the money in the world. Annoyed, but happy too to be out and about, alone with his thoughts, Thomas ventures beyond the familiar streets between Grendel’s flat and the church into a part of town unknown to him. Everywhere there is the bustle of people: noise and mud, the air oddly clean, London’s emotion picked off by the rain.

  Before long he reaches a complex of old, dilapidated buildings of such enormous size that they form a hamlet unto themselves. Like the house Grendel has made his home, more than half the structure appears to have burnt down, though here the smell of ashes has long been absorbed into the city’s stink. Despite the fire, a thousand people appear to be living in its medieval shell; have improvised walls with lumber and plaster-stiffened cloth; have opened stalls, a tailor, a carpenter, a quack selling tonics of laudanum and fermented bitters. Thomas walks the length of the building before realising what it used to house. WESTMINSTER CLOTHES AND RAGS, a painted sign proudly announces above the narrow entrance of a shop. A Jew is tending to it, wearing a fur hat, his sidelocks swinging limply in the rain.

  The post office is not ten yards from the building that used to be his nation’s Parliament. It surprises Thomas that such a thing exists at all. A guard in postal uniform is positioned outside, billy club in hand. Thomas is worried he will ask for some sort of identification papers, but all he requires of those who present themselves to him is proof of their solvency. Thomas holds up his palmful of coppers and goes inside.

  Beyond the door there lies a little pocket of another world. The floors here are made from polished marble, the ceiling recently painted if no longer clean. Gentlemen in well-cut suits are reading newspapers or are queuing to see the postal clerk. Two ladies stand in hushed conversation, their expensive dresses as of yet unmarked by Soot; both wear veils to hide their faces and have footmen in attendance, their liveries hidden under bulky coats. A few dirty messenger boys scurry around but are careful not to address their betters. It’s like Thomas has stepped through a barn door and found a ballroom inside. For a moment he stands dead in his tracks, unsure what to do. Then he shrugs and joins the queue.

  It is four deep and well-behaved. It startles him, this good behaviour, like silence after a protracted shout. Nobody grumbles, pushes, swears. They are like an unknown breed, peaceful, inoffensive: people who do not smell. Each shut up within his own intention, isolated and pure. Thomas stands amongst them and feels a pang of longing for this world of manners, the parlour-room peace of Discipline, predictable and without life. Just then a gloved hand touches his shoulder, firmly if without violence. It’s the doorman who has trailed him inside.

  “Trade goes over there,” he says, turning the touch into a push, and moving Thomas towards a different clerk, in a separate cubbyhole, hidden far away to one side. Some workmen are queuing there, or rather are jostling, laughing, trading jokes.

  Thomas moves over, listens to the men ahead and watches the gentry in their line, the well-drilled silence of the respectable. How many of them are in London on business, braving the city to look after their factories; how many for a holiday in the murk of sin? There must exist a tribe of locals earning a good living by acting as tour guides to the city’s charms.

  “Next,” barks the clerk behind the counter.

  An urchin, no older than seven, jumps the queue and gets into a shoving match with the man at the front.

  ф

  It’s Thomas’s turn. He has been skipped over twice, defended his place with an elbow, exchanged a fleck of boisterous Smoke with a half-drunk apprentice mailing a letter to his mam. Thomas asks for two pencils and five large sheets of drafting paper. The clerk grumbles but fetches them, the paper already lightly stained. While he is gone, Thomas’s gaze falls on four printed posters, nailed to the wall next to the man’s chair. Each holds the drawing of a face. Charlie is well-rendered, looking young and a little fatter in the cheek. Livia is unrecognisable, eyes lowered and shrinking into the shadow of a bonnet. He himself looks fierce, the jaw jutting, a thunder of brows. It’s Julius who is oddest, hung separately, and staring pale and startled from under a floppy fringe. The clerk notices Thomas’s stare; turns to follow his gaze, then rests his eyes on Thomas.

  “Well then,” he mutters into Thomas’s sudden terror and takes some coins straight out of his palm. “ ‘Missing. No Reward.’ It’s not like I give a shit.”

  He hands over the folded-in-half sheaves then chases Thomas with a wave of his hand. “Get, boy. Next.”

  A man has elbowed past before Thomas has recovered enough to step aside.

  ф

  Outside, Thomas sprints a good half mile then stops for breath. The rain has turned to drizzle but even so the paper he purchased is already damp. He folds the sheets, shoves them down the waistband of his trousers, then stands breathing, elated by his escape. A beggar, his back propped up against a house front, sits watching him, one leg a calfless stump.

  “You’re looking like the cat that made off with the cake,” he calls. “Spare some pennies, friend?”

  Thomas laughs and strolls over to him.

  “Anybody ever give you any?”

  “Sure they do. The good people of London!”

  “Really?” Thomas pictures it, this city of ruffians, doling out charity. “Why?”

  The man shrugs. “They just do. Sentimental, I suppose. Got themselves a heart.”

  Thomas accepts this answer and puts some pennies into the man’s cup. He crouches down so he and the beggar can speak face-to-face.

  “If you could,” he asks, his mind wandering back to th
e twin queues at the post office, “if someone gave you the power. Would you magic away the Smoke? Stop it, I mean. Make it disappear.”

  The beggar eyes him, greedy for another coin.

  “Sure,” he shouts. “Stop it, I say! To hell with Smoke.”

  “Really? You wouldn’t miss it?”

  “Then don’t,” the man backtracks. “Keep it how it is. Nuttin’ wrong with it. Only yer undies chafe a little on yer privates.”

  “And what do you think of rich folk?”

  “The rich?” Reckless now, enjoying their game. “Hang ’em! Hang ’em high.”

  “And the Queen?”

  “Oh, I like ’er! Hang ’em but save the Queen!”

  “How about love, then? Can it exist? Real love, here in the meanness of the city?”

  “Sure it does. Got a baby girl. Clutch her to my chest so hard each morn, we smoulder like embers.”

  “Here,” says Thomas, and gives him all his remaining coins. “You earned it. You may be the wisest man in the whole of London.”

  “Sure I am. And in the whole Empire besides.”

  ф

  Thomas returns late-morning. A nod and a look is enough to draw Charlie out of his melancholy. The moment is as good as any: Mrs. Grendel is out bartering for food, Sebastian is building his sewer, and Grendel has gone to tell the priest he shan’t be coming to work for a few days.

  Livia watches them assume their roles: the burglar and his assistant. A confidence man is what the newspapers would call him: someone who can charm the petticoats off a schoolma’am. The beauty about Charlie is that he does not even realise his own gift.

  And indeed it proves easy. Charlie simply enters the kitchen, sits down on the side of the table that will ensure her mother’s face is turned away from the hallway and the door to her own room. It must be, Livia finds herself thinking, that her mother is bored. It cannot be easy being stuck here, waiting, surrounded by her stroppy daughter and her friends. She could do with a bath, a walk, a horse ride around the estate. But Lady Naylor is a gaoler now.

  A gaoler cannot leave his gaol.

  “You know about Grendel,” Charlie begins, frank and guileless in his guile. “Sebastian said he told you last night.”

  “Yes, he did. I should have noticed it earlier, I suppose, but my mind was elsewhere.”

  “Aren’t you shocked?”

  “Oh, but I was! Who could have dreamed it? Though it is not entirely unprecedented.” She purses her lips, leans forward, closer to him. “Have you ever been to an asylum, Mr. Cooper? A hospital for the insane. I toured one some years ago, after my husband fell ill. These days they are constructed according to the Pentonville model. Individual cells, spread out along long, spoke-like corridors, so the inmates don’t infect each other with their Smoke. Once a week the orderlies go into each cell and scrape off the Soot, to sell it to the manufacturers of cigarettes. On the sly, of course, though the proprietors know and receive a cut. As for the inmates, some are like my husband. Others have nothing wrong with their intellectual faculties at all. They are criminals, or libertines, gentlemen who have flaunted their vice. And others yet—well, for a long time now there has existed a rumour. A whisper amongst scholars; a footnote in an article by an Oxford don. That there was a man, an inmate, down in the cellars of New Bethlem Hospital, who was just like your friend here. A freak of nature! He must have died in his cell.”

  “But why was he locked away?”

  “Don’t let’s be naïve, Mr. Cooper. He was that which mustn’t exist. A virtuous man without pedigree. Monstrous, impossible, a threat to the realm.”

  Livia listens to all this, hovering in the corridor outside, a relay station between the two boys. She gives Thomas a nod. He saunters across, into her mother’s room, quietly but without haste; leaves the door open so she can warn him if need be. Charlie, receiving Livia’s nod, hastens to carry on.

  “There is something I don’t understand, Lady Naylor. You see, Grendel used to smoke. He told Livia and Thomas: that he smoked as a child. So what happened to him?”

  “Impossible to say with certainty. Some kind of metabolic corruption, I suppose. A disease, one that attacks not just the Smoke glands but the whole of the affective system. It must have destroyed large parts of it. The part that governs behaviour we call sin.”

  “Then isn’t that the answer? A disease that will make us good.”

  Livia hears her mother grow agitated at this.

  “It would not work, Mr. Cooper. The disease is clearly noninfectious. But even if we could bottle it somehow, and pass it on at will…” She pauses, composes herself, leans forward towards Charlie. “Let me ask you this. Do you admire Mr. Grendel?”

  “No. I pity him.”

  “Why?”

  Charlie answers at once. “He has no choice about being good.”

  “Precisely. Imagine if a man like Grendel fell into the hands of Renfrew. How long before he’d start dreaming of a race of men just like him? It’s what he wants after all. A nation of choirboys. Of automata. And he’s a good scientist, your Dr. Renfrew. God knows what he might cook up in his laboratory.”

  “Renfrew’s dead.”

  “Dead? No, he isn’t. I asked Sebastian to make inquiries. Gravely injured, it is said. Stabbed and mauled by an intruder. There are rumours that it took ‘Continental medicine’ to save him.”

  “I am glad he’s alive.”

  Charlie says it slowly, after much thought, a note of wonder in his voice. Livia hears it and feels a pang of pride constrict her chest.

  Then she turns away from him and watches Thomas search her mother’s room.

  ф

  The room is small and stuffy with spent air. Other than the heavy-framed bed, it holds a wardrobe, a washbowl, and a chair. Thomas stands still for a minute, lets his eyes wander. The wardrobe’s door is broken and stands open; it holds nothing but clothes, Lady Naylor’s hanging from hooks, the Grendels’ displaced onto the wardrobe floor. The bed is made; when Thomas runs his hand under the sheet he finds a negligee. A silver hairbrush is tucked beneath the pillow. Underneath the bed stands milady’s travelling valise, holding underclothes and a collection of French poetry. Its frontispiece shows a naked woman in the embrace of a swan.

  The sewer maps are hidden between mattress and bed-base. Thomas unfolds them, one next to the other, slips the drafting paper out of his trousers. It is thin enough for the print to shimmer through. Copying it all would take hours. But he does not need all. He finds a line marking the river, works up from there, copying the main thoroughfares first of the “Ashton” plan, then traces the turnoffs marked only on the plan entitled “Aschenstedt.” Back and forth he works, quickly, his hands sure, listening with half an ear to the conversation outside. When he is satisfied with his copy and has replaced the plans, he looks over at Livia, sees her urging him to leave. But he isn’t done yet. Something else has caught his eye, a box, quite large but shoved to the corner of the bed frame in such a manner that its form merges with the bulk of the oaken leg. Thomas drops down onto his stomach and pictures Lady Naylor do the same, to deposit it there. The box is heavy as he slides it out; varnished wood reinforced in metal at the corners. The latches are not locked, open on a flask sunk in a satin-lined depression that precisely matches its proportions. He pulls it out, notices its weight: a squat, short-necked bottle made of tinted glass, holding perhaps as much as half a gallon. The stopper is buried with care but is mounted with a brass ring to aid its removal; the glass of the bottleneck seems inordinately thick. Thomas raises the jar, feels a viscous liquid shift inside. Livia gestures, but he won’t be hurried, casts around and finds a cup Lady Naylor has brought here from the kitchen, its bottom encrusted with a smudge of tea. It takes both hands to pour. The liquid moves sluggishly, then leaps out in a sudden gulp of purest black. Thomas holds it far from him, watches it cling to the cup, receiving his hand’s shudder and transmuting it into the ponderous slide of molten lead.

  Quickly now, putt
ing down the cup for a moment, he returns the bottle to its satin-cushioned, bottle-shaped hole, and the box to the back of the bed. At just this moment, the conversation outside hits a lull. Livia’s eyes warn him, swivel back to Charlie.

  Thomas freezes and stands waiting, in his fist a liquid distillation of all the darkness in this world.

  ф

  Lady Naylor makes to rise. She mustn’t. And so Charlie detains her, with words of course, some truth he has been working towards, Livia can see it in the hot-eared earnestness of his face. It’s an answer to Renfrew perhaps, to that which he did to him, in the name of good morals and the future of the realm.

  It may work on her mother just as well.

  “The most difficult thing,” Charlie says, his voice rising half an octave, a boy nervous, confessing his soul, “the most difficult thing is to compromise. To sit in between, not leaning too far one way nor the other, not taking things to their conclusion. To be sensible. Boring.”

  Livia’s mother scoffs at his words. But she resettles in her chair.

  “Can it be that you are a coward, Mr. Cooper?”

  Livia watches Charlie flush at this, swallow his Smoke. He is speaking to her, Livia, now, only to her, his words low and precise.

  “Perhaps I am. A coward.”

  “Oh, Charlie! It appears I have made you angry.”

  “That’s why it is so hard to stand in the middle. Someone will always point their finger at you and mock.”

  Her mother shrugs as though to concede the point, then props her chin up on her hands. “The problem is this, Mr. Cooper. Your compromise is nothing other than the status quo. It’s sitting on your hands and being decent. It will never change the world. But then, your parents would like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t play stupid now, Mr. Cooper. You come from one of England’s great families, wouldn’t you say? By pedigree. But also by wealth. Of course, much of this wealth isn’t as ancient as all that. Two generations, no more. But wealth is like a spinster: it is impolite to inquire about its age. The truth is your family’s fortune has grown tenfold in less than thirty years, and along with it, its influence, its standing. It begs the question: how?”