Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  ALSO BY DAN VYLETA

  Pavel & I

  The Quiet Twin

  The Crooked Maid

  Smoke

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Vyleta Ink Limited

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Cover images: skyline © Niday Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; texture © www.123Freevectors.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Vyleta, Dan, author.

  Title: Soot : a novel / by Dan Vyleta.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019008955 | ISBN 9780385540223 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385540230 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.V95 S66 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019008955

  Ebook ISBN 9780385540230

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Dan Vyleta

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dramatis Personae

  Overture

  Act I: The New World

  Theatre

  Beetle

  Talent

  Berth

  Tempest

  Act II: Empire

  Sahib

  Singh’s Story

  Glacier

  Cathedral

  Act III: North and South

  Minetowns

  Sales Pitch

  Pigeons

  In Harness

  Propaganda

  Intermission

  Act IV: Children of the Smoke

  Apprentice

  Shipwreck

  Hangover

  Dragon

  Icebox

  Birds

  Travellers

  Traveller

  Letters

  Rock

  Nursery

  Angel

  Irish Sea

  Hiccup

  Parliament

  Fathers

  Pirates

  Sugar

  Act V: Breachings

  The View from Above (Tableau)

  At Eye-Level (Sisters)

  At Eye-Level (Motorist)

  At Eye-Level (Materialist)

  At Dusk

  Elsewhere (Nurse I)

  Elsewhere (Nurse II)

  Elsewhere (Hilltop)

  Rapture

  Romance

  Nachspiel

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Lily and Ginger,

  who have the biggest smiles in all of Ontario.

  And for Boyd.

  With love and thanks, old friend.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  SMOKE

  OR,

  THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST REVOLUTION:

  A THEATRICAL CYCLE IN DRAMATIC DIALOGUE, MONOLOGUE, AND MIME

  Thomas Argyle An angry youth. Shot in the face and marked for life with a coal-dyed scar. Hero of the revolution.

  Charlie Cooper Thomas’s friend. A sweet-tempered youth. It is he who convinces his friends to complete Lady Naylor’s revolution.

  Lady Naylor A well-born revolutionary. Conceives the plan to change the world by dousing it in Smoke.

  Livia Naylor Lady Naylor’s daughter. Vows to stop her mother, then helps fulfil her plan instead. A proud, wilful young woman.

  Baron Naylor Livia’s father and a madman haunting his own attic. Former teacher to Renfrew.

  Erasmus Renfrew Master of Smoke and Ethics at Thomas and Charlie’s school. A liberal who advocates rational progress and morality. Imprisons and tortures Charlie Cooper.

  Eleanor Renfrew Renfrew’s niece. Subject to special disciplinary measures. Rescued by Charlie from her uncle’s house.

  Sebastian Aschenstaedt Scientist and illegal immigrant to Britain. Assists Lady Naylor with the technical side of her revolution and procures Mowgli for her.

  Mowgli A child innocent of Smoke. Stolen from his jungle tribe, Smoke-infected to serve Lady Naylor’s purpose, and burdened with a borrowed name.

  Grendel A man devoid of passions. Stopped smoking after a childhood illness. He adopts Mowgli and kills Julius by putting a bullet through his neck.

  Julius Spencer The issue of Lady Naylor’s first marriage. Estranged from his mother, then befriended by her for tactical reasons. A villain. Also, a victim. Shoots Thomas, wounds Renfrew, and gives himself over to the Smoke. His carcass becomes the revolution’s kindling.

  SOOT

  OR,

  THE HISTORY OF THE SECOND REVOLUTION:

  A ROMANCE IN FIVE ACTS, INCLUDING AN OVERTURE AND NACHSPIEL

  As above (barring the dead), and introducing:

  B. A. Smith A capitalist. The incarnation of the World Spirit (self-declared).

  Balthazar Black A playwright with a secret.

  Etta May Maine A member of Balthazar’s troupe. A soothing influence.

  Jagat Singh A bicycle mechanic in the Raj who has read Marx and Lokmanya Tilak.

  Godfrey Livingstone A nihilist. Servant to the Lord Protector of Britain.

  And many more!

  Darkness.

  A match is struck, a candle lit. The light reveals a card table, a simple chair; a man, still young if no longer a youth. Gaunt, upright, tall. He places a book upon the table; fishes a stub of pencil from behind his ear; opens the book to a blank page; readies himself to write.

  When he bends down over the book, the flame finds his hair and taps it for rich copper.

  PERSONAL DIARY OF CHARLIE COOPER. APRIL 1909.

  When we were young, the Smoke was simple. It was the physical manifestation of sin. It marked our bodies, left sooty shame on our linen. We lived in its shadow; were judged by it and praised for its absence; tasted it illicitly, like forbidden fruit. It structured society, aligned power with morals. Smoke was the central truth of our lives.

  Then everything changed. You have heard the story: of the three spoilt brats who took it upon themselves to understand the Smoke. Thomas, Charlie, Livia—that’s the order they always put us in, God knows why. We were young and had all the arrogance of youth. Smoke was our enemy then; by learning its truth, we thought we might defeat it.

  We unchained it instead.

  Oh, it wasn’t an accident. We had a choice. We had learned something, you see, a secret well kept. Smoke was a disease, an infection of the organs. It came to us late
in human history, in the 1600s, during that first great age of discovery. Some explorer must have brought it back; we still don’t know from where. It infected the world—well nigh all of it—and retrospectively was named eternal, God’s punishment for our Fall from Eden.

  I still remember the shock of it. Smoke was a disease, an aberration. It wasn’t meant to be. You would have thought it would have steeled our resolve to find a cure. But the more we looked for it, the more we realised something else, something subtle, no less shocking in its implication—that Smoke was a disease that made us more human, not less. It was a language of the body; a primitive tongue, animated by the deepest urges of the flesh. Ugly. Full of truth.

  And of potential.

  Imagine Smoke a whistle. All of our lives, we had been taught that the purpose of a whistle was to sound alarm. No, not just taught—we had been trained to it, like you can train a dog to bite all those who raise a stick, until every twitch of the arm caused our hackles to rise, our fur to bristle. Smoke was shrill to our ears. And then somebody came along and showed us melody. For there was music in the Smoke; a whole spectrum of emotion threading the raw need.

  Lady Naylor taught us this—Livia’s mother. She longed to teach the world. She showed us how to quicken the Soot locked within the soil, quicken it so thoroughly that it was like an orchestra rising out of the land itself: ugly and harsh in one place; playful, quiet, beautiful in another. She wished to reinfect the world. Retrain it, too, to this music of the body.

  There was a hitch to this. Lady Naylor was a villain. To achieve what she wanted, she stole a child. We christened him Mowgli, after Kipling’s hero. He came from South America, we were told, from a tribe of innocents deep within the jungle who had never been infected by the Smoke. She had him stolen and crated like an animal, then infected him deliberately once he was in her grasp. She needed his blood at the moment of change, while the disease spread through his resisting body, realigning his organs, changing him. A man called Aschenstaedt helped her, a scientist and engineer: it was his ingenuity that found the child. Aschenstaedt—and Grendel: a man incapable of Smoke, who traded his loyalty for milady’s promise that his wife and he could keep the child and raise him as their own. As for Thomas, Livia, and me—we were a mere nuisance in their plan, a complication. They bamboozled us with half-truths; manipulated us; thought us misdirected and defeated.

  And still we stopped them on the brink.

  I repeat: we stopped them. The world need not have changed. The Smoke could have remained simple.

  It was I who suggested we fulfil milady’s plan.

  And so I, too, am a villain: not just for the consequences of our actions (for we woke something unimagined in the land, a devil quick and ravenous) but for making use of that poor child’s blood. Just like milady, I made a means of him who had been so terribly abused. Milady’s son—dead of a gunshot, consumed by darkest Smoke—served us as kindling. One can hardly think of a darker conception, an uglier way of birthing a new world.

  Two moments stay with me, after all these years. Both are laced with regret. The first is Grendel, lifting Mowgli onto his shoulders, carrying him home to his wife. I thought Grendel a monster at the time—a man who could not smoke; who seemed to know no love, no horror at himself. And yet he carried the child gently, lacing Mowgli’s fingers under his chin. It was my companions and I who later failed to inquire after the safety of the boy. He was lost to history; to the chaos of the following years.

  The second moment happened earlier and is unrelated, though it, too, centres on a child abused. Renfrew’s cottage; his niece in harness. Her name was Eleanor. Renfrew had built a cage around her body so that it would straighten her soul. I did not see it then, but Renfrew was milady’s mirror image: his whole life, too, was devoted to the Smoke. He, too, took an innocent and infected her with his obsession. I rescued the child only to abandon her on the school porter’s—Cruikshank’s—humble porch. It was he who cut her out of Renfrew’s contraption. The snip-snip of his scissors: it worries my sleep.

  Of Eleanor, too, I lost sight, though here at least I did inquire. Cruikshank left the island, I was told; the New World called him, as it called so many in those years. Of the girl I found no trace.

  * * *

  —

  They say the Revolution eats its children.

  Lately I have wondered if it is not the other way around.

  Laud we the gods;

  And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, CYMBELINE

   THEATRE

  [ 1 ]

  They open with The Lovers.

  It’s a simple stage set. A bed just wide enough to suggest it serves marriage, not sleep. A vase with dried flowers; a garland on the wall. The bed is freshly made; in the air, drifting onstage from behind the curtain, Meister Lukas’s ghostly countertenor. A wedding strain. It is enough to set the scene; the faint noise of guests leaving in the background.

  The groom enters first. He is dressed in peasant finery, clean, God-fearing, and shabby. A young man, inexperienced and handsome. Two steps and he is at the bed. He stops before it, watches it as though it were a dog in a cage.

  Sleeping.

  Liable to wake.

  The groom sits down on the starched sheet, keeping his weight in his thighs, so that only his buttocks brush the pert white linen. Again that long, suspicious look down the length of the bed, nervous and fretting. Then, for a moment as fleeting as a sneeze, some other note enters his gaze and one hand spreads on the pillow to a five-pointed star. And all at once the Smoke is there. It jumps from his mouth and hangs an inch off his chin, in the cone of light of a well-focussed lamp: hangs frothy, insubstantial, many-limbed.

  Alive.

  The groom sees it, claws at it, wishes to shove it back down his throat; leaps up, aghast, inspects the linen, and finds he has made a single crescent mark. A quarter buttock of Soot. His fingers trace it as they would a scar.

  Then she is onstage. The bride. The audience have not seen her come on, transfixed as they are by the groom and allowing the light to guide their focus. That light flickers out now and a second comes alive, exquisitely timed; catches her wedding dress and makes a home in its starched cotton. She glows with her virginity, downstage, astride a low stool, tucked in behind a tiny dresser. On it stands a disk of mirror no bigger than her palm.

  Oh, she is good tonight: so full of emotion that she is on the edge of Smoke—the audience can sense it, can smell it on the air—yet so terrified, so very meek and shy, as to make all thought of Smoke impossible. She shivers; tugs at her long, unadorned sleeves; crosses, uncrosses her legs (a murmur in the audience at this; a flicker of lust, disarmed by pity); watches the little mirror. The stagehand has positioned it well: it reflects back upstage to a second mirror, tall and rectangular like a doorway. A fluorescent glow spreads from this second mirror, cold, electrical, transforming it into a gateway to a ghostly realm. The bride’s inner self. It is hemmed by a plain black lacquered frame.

  Half the bride’s face is visible on this cold slate serving up her soul: one eye, one ear, a twist of braid, and half of her delicate mouth. And next to this half-face—the laws of optics contracting the stage and folding space into a single frame—stands the bed, still unlit, a white rectangle, soft and hazy in its outlines. In its midst, just visible, like an inverted moon, is the crescent of Soot painted by her husband’s buttock.

  The bride rises, gets her dress tangled in the stool. It falls, impossibly loud, accentuated by an offstage cymbal. At the sound, the lights go up and her husband steps out of the shadows. They link hands, bride and groom; it feels daring in the sudden blaze of light. They smile. A sigh goes through the audience, of goodwill and relief. The two love each other.

  All is well.

  But for all their love the bed stands unmoved, unwelcoming
; burdens them with its suggestion; expects them, lily-white, for an act that cannot but douse them in sin.

  The lovers try a kiss. It is brief, chaste, smokeless. When the bride starts crying the audience sees it in the mirror: she has turned her back on them. The Smoke that has started to rise in the auditorium now reflects these tears. It speaks of old pain. There are many here who remember: living in a world where they were ashamed of their needs. Their wedding night. It played out differently for every couple (as awkwardness; as pain; as guilt). How often was it that the wedding sheets were burned? Not in ceremony or celebration but shamefacedly, by a husband crouching before the hearth in tears; by a wife shaken in her deepest sense of her own decency, transformed by marriage into a whore. And these two here, they are hopeless: pious and simple, brought up in a world where the inside of each bedroom in the village was whitewashed afresh during the weeks of Lent. Their bodies burning with love and need each for the other, they find themselves contracted to a sacred union that obliges them to a first coupling that must repudiate all lust. They walk to their bed like thieves, taking care to avoid the other’s eyes.

  (And then—as they stand before their marriage bed, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, not touching, not daring to scoot apart, unsure whether to sit or lie, to undress themselves or the other, fully or partially—just then, there is a pause, a hesitation, exterior to the play, like a hole within the fabric of the theatre. Within it, Balthazar can feel the audience like a living thing. It is there in its noise; in the web of its nascent Smoke. He stands at the threshold between stage and auditorium, hidden from the audience by a wooden screen. Wait, he signals to his actors and stagehands. Let frustration breed. Let them think you are lost out there, have forgotten your lines; or rather, that you have remembered yourselves: actors, not bride and groom. It will give you material that you can shape; Smoke-fabric you can weave. And then—three breaths, four—he gestures: Now.)