Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “May I be excused?”

  “Of course! By all means. Stay awhile, though, the evenings on a ship are dreadfully dull. And once you are alone in your cabin you will remember all of a sudden that you are seasick and groan away until dawn. Have a look through my books if you like. There’s even some of the old World Spirit somewhere, if you care to dig him out from this mess.”

  So Eleanor stays, not wishing to give Smith the impression of undue haste, though her stomach won’t countenance any actual reading. With Smith’s permission she walks over to the desk instead and studies the pictures that lie there, unwrapping those that remain wrapped. Some are paintings, evidently old, looking barren without the context of their frames. Others are photographs, mounted on cardboard; others yet maps, drawings, printed illustrations. They show ships and athletes; half-naked men from distant countries; animals and insects drawn in coloured inks; a woman stark naked wearing a strange metal mask; anatomical sketches of internal organs; a pebbled beach covered in a thousand starfish, black as tar: are so varied, in fact, that it is difficult to get any sense where Smith’s interests lie. He, for his part, moves from newspaper to newspaper, reading very quickly, and sipping his coffee. One of his socks has a hole, and his big toe peeks out from under the blanket, wiggling a little from time to time. The domesticity of the moment chokes Eleanor and makes her think first of Cruikshank, then of her uncle, reading in his armchair while she tidied the house; the fire blazing, fighting their cottage’s perpetual chill. Renfrew, too, needed many a sock darning.

  Eleanor digs with renewed purpose within the piles of objects and papers upon the desk, wondering whether it is possible Smith has been careless about where he put his gun; then stops when she finds his eyes on her. And what would she do with a gun, on a ship in the mid-Atlantic, her friends lost to the line of the horizon? She turns abruptly, bids Smith good night, then takes her reawakened nausea into the hallway outside Smith’s cabin, where she bends and retches. Three steps ahead, Smith’s cabin boy darts across the corridor with two nimble steps; she calls but he appears not to hear. Back in her cabin, Eleanor accedes to her nausea, curls around it as one would around a pet. One hour, she promises herself, two at most. Then she will get up.

  There is something she must do.

  [ 5 ]

  It proves a difficult task. Not only does the sickness remain in her bones and force her to lean on the corridor walls like a drunk; and not only is there a new tremour to the sea, the swell choppier, its intervals shorter, less predictable—she also has no idea where the cabin boy is to be found. At least there is some small amount of light: every five or six steps, a lamp is affixed to the ceiling, giving off a flickering amber glow in which the corridor’s angles twist and rearrange themselves.

  Her assumption, based on very little, is that the servant cannot be lodged very far from his master: it took him but a moment to respond to Smith’s bell. But as she follows the passage to Smith’s cabin, moving from stern to bow and up a level, she sees any number of doors, all of them closed. She carries on, then stops when she glimpses movement in the semidarkness ahead. It takes a moment for Eleanor to understand that she witnessed, in the unsteady light, the opening and closing of Smith’s door; and the darting of a shadow, from out in the hallway into the cabin: a movement so quick and soundless that it seemed but part of the ship’s roll, a trick of the quivering bulbs that shuffle shadows with every dip and rise. The door is firmly closed now: is plated in metal, cold to her touch. It has no external lock, hence no keyhole through which one might spy; discloses no noise when she presses her ear to its cool surface.

  The handle gives without hesitation, and for all its weight the door swings easily on well-oiled hinges. She opens it just wide enough to admit her face. Some of the corridor’s light pours in around her, mingles with the moonlight admitted by two portholes on her right. A cluttered room crosshatched by double shadows; the smell of rice pudding still sickly in the air. There is no intruder, no sign of anything being out of place. The door to the interior cabin that houses Smith’s bed is closed.

  The sea helps her. Eleanor remains at the door, patient, sure of what she has seen. The sea rises, falls, a pulse that travels from the soft of her knees to the pit of her stomach and drains the blood from her head. The resulting sickness drops her to her haunches. Thus: a change of viewing angle, the room transformed into a fresh array of shadows. Next a lateral wave hits their starboard side, then drops them in the hole of its deep valley. It shakes her, makes her fight for balance, both knees dropping to the ground.

  It has the same effect on the cabin boy.

  At her lowered vantage point she finds herself at one height with him: he is crouching in between the table and a travel chest, his hands hanging loose between thighs. It is one of these hands that the sea forces into action. Even in his loss of balance, he is graceful: pushing a single palm against the table leg to catch his weight, and turning one foot beneath his buttock to realign his inner centre. But, minimal or not, the movement has made him visible. Eleanor has seen. He knows it, too. They squat eye to eye across the distance of a dozen feet. Then he comes to a decision and rises without haste. A finger to his lips: that’s all he does to acknowledge her. No waving her away or beckoning her closer; no whisper across the room or angry mime to go piss off and shut the door. Eleanor understands him completely. He has been caught. Nothing he does now will change this fact. She is not in his power and will do as she will do. So he might as well carry on with his work.

  He has done this before.

  This is the main thought she has as she watches him search the room, unhurriedly and in total silence. He examines all the closed containers first; opens chests and boxes, runs quick fingers through the contents. Whatever it is he is looking for is not there. Next, he turns to the pile of objects on the table. The pictures draw his interest, just as they did Eleanor’s. There is a difference: one picture, framed, arrests him, brings a stiffness to his back. She wonders how much of it he can see in the weak light. Just as she thinks this, he walks it across to the porthole, lets the moon fall on its glass. A clear night outside, no waver to the silver glow; just the ceaseless meter of the sea, rehearsing its own vastness. He stands as though petrified, out of rhythm with this movement, made clumsy by what he beholds.

  It is now she moves. Rising to her feet brings renewed sickness, a thick, furry lump that has to be swallowed down like medicine and leaves her mouth scoured by its acids. No matter, she will share her sour breath. She almost falls just before she reaches him, stumbles over a book discarded on the floor and loses her balance. He catches her before her fall can make any noise, catches her by the armpit and pulls her up against his frame. Almost an embrace, one-armed, his other burdened by the picture. The moon sits on his face, and she can see that he is angry. It’s him, the child from Balthazar’s photograph. She was not certain when she first saw him, or rather she was but dismissed the thought, dismissed the similarity between this young man’s face and that eight-year-old boy’s. The bones were the same but the expression would not fit; where the child had been hostile, the cabin boy was cheerful, servile, free of anger.

  Now that the hostility has returned to the face there can be no doubt. His Smoke confirms it: the merest flicker of it, escaping his lips while his face is close. Eleanor ignores the anger and finds, underneath, an ache, childish in its forlorn magnitude, grown spiky from going unanswered for too long. She turns her back into his chest, wraps herself into him as into a blanket, then reaches a hand for the picture he is holding, and takes hold of the right side even as he keeps his grip on the left. Again she can taste Smoke on him, contained but vicious, crawling down the nape of her neck. But he controls himself for the sake of silence and even agrees to shift with her, in a back-to-front dance, so as to improve the angle of the light. Together, they study the picture. Eleanor’s skin is clammy with her sickness and his heat.

&n
bsp; It’s a triptych of sketches, mounted side by side. She saw them earlier but attached to them no more importance than to any of the other pictures Smith had accumulated; less perhaps, for the drawings are small and faint with age, and look as though torn from a notebook not much larger than her palm. Now she studies them again. Two details, flanking a panoramic scene. At the centre, a group of men in a jungle clearing; tree trunks in the background, a tangle of hanging roots and vines, a giant fern spreading itself like a fountain. The floor of the clearing is filled with a curious flower, the same flower that is held aloft with a collector’s pleasure by the white man in the foreground. He wears baggy breeches stuffed into calf-high boots and a ruffled shirt, dark with his sweat; long flowing hair under a wide-brimmed hat. The flower itself is also the subject of the leftmost drawing. It looks something like a mixture of a poppy and a tulip, with a large, fleshy head. Back in the main drawing, standing to the man’s right and arrested in a constellation whose symmetry suggests deliberate arrangement rather than chance, is a group of natives.

  It is here that the thief’s interest is directed. He could not give a fig about the white explorer, shows no interest in his horticultural pride, and feasts instead on the sight of the savages. For savage they look, men naked but for what appears to be bird beaks strapped to their privates. They are thin, brown-skinned, fine-boned; wear feathers in their hair.

  Dress them in shirt and waistcoat and they’d look just like him: the youth whose heat pours itself into Eleanor’s skin.

  Several of these men wear jewellery around their necks. Because of the smallness of the figures, it is difficult to make it out in detail. The artist has addressed this problem by providing a third drawing. On the right panel, sketched very carefully, in finely shaded hues, stands a single native, rendered much bigger and in such a manner that the edge of the notebook cuts him in half: his left arm is missing as well as one leg, though both eyes have made it onto the picture. And thus it is as though he is peeking around the corner of the page the way one can peek into a window, curious at what lies inside.

  Peeking at them.

  This man, too, is wearing a necklace made of vine. On it—its horned back ornamented with precious stones; its legs and pincers rendered repeatedly, once in sharp outline, then as a series of ghostly echoes in what Eleanor realises with a stab of shock must be the artist’s strategy of suggesting movement—hangs a large black beetle. Alive and wriggling.

  It takes the thief a while to tear himself loose; costs him a wisp of Smoke that curls across her sight line. Then he steps past her, wrenching the picture out of her grasp, and replaces it silently within the pile of others. He allows himself a single angry glower at her, then turns away; resumes his earlier search, running fingers across the backs of books and furnishings, looking.

  The tuffet draws his interest; Smith rested his feet on it before. He removes the top cushion, finds within it a panel-covered cavity and removes the lid. Then he kneels, bends his head inside. Eleanor draws close again, crouches beside him, but his shadow obscures what he has found. There is a kind of reverence suggested by his posture: bent low, skinny bottom up, head thrown down into the cavity’s darkness. If there was anger in him before, there is nothing now: blankness, serenity. For a moment she thinks she can see something move in the depths of the secret compartment, but it is hard to be sure. The next moment the youth has replaced the lid and the top cushion and stood up. His hand shoots out, grabs her wrist, grabs it painfully. He pulls her out of the cabin, halts to softly close the door. Then he turns to her.

  There is much in his face: hostility, curiosity, the imploration that she not return and rummage out the secret of the tuffet, nor raise the alarm and betray his intrusion to Smith. A mobile face, his, auditioning expressions; a storm of Smoke underneath. His hand is crushing her wrist.

  “Don’t.”

  It’s all he manages to say—all his sentences start there. It is clear to Eleanor that he does not know what to say next: not to her, this awkward silent girl who stands too straight before his wayward face and hidden anger. He releases her arm without another word, walks off, rushing now, away from her.

  “He knows who you are,” she whispers after him. “Smith knows. You must be very careful,” she whispers. “Mowgli.”

  This stops him briefly in his tracks.

  Then he breaks into a run.

  [ 6 ]

  She looks for Mowgli the next day. She wants to warn him and something more: meet him, talk to him, make friends. They started something last night: negotiations, conspiracy, a bond. Then he crushed her wrist. It is sore this morning, will show bruises by the evening. Smith keeps to himself, though he makes sure to offer her breakfast; spends his day immersed in newspapers and ledgers. Outside, the horizon is clear of any ships; a cordon of sea birds strung along their wake, picking off the spill of their refuse.

  Mowgli avoids her. She finds him twice: once in the corridor, balancing trays of dirty dishes, which he wields like a snowplough to push her out of his path; once on deck when he hastens away as though responding to an urgent summons. Both times his face displays that same harassed mobility. He does not know in which aspect to meet her.

  So he flees her instead.

  Midafternoon Smith requests Eleanor’s company for tea. He drinks it strong, from a double-spouted urn that he refers to as a samovar. Alongside the tea, Mowgli serves a plate of jam-daubed cakes and a bowl of whipped cream; distributes napkins and saucers, every inch the cabin boy. Eleanor makes sure he is still in the room when she asks her question.

  “Where are the things, Mr. Smith, that you stole from Balthazar? The weather maps? And the photographs?”

  Smith looks at her, amused. “Stole? I bought them! Rather dearly, as a matter of fact. They’ll be somewhere in my travelling chest.”

  When Mowgli is gone—Smith makes sure of it by leaving open the door; watches him walk the length of the corridor and ascend the stairs—his expression changes and he leans forward conspiratorially, somehow quite pleased with himself.

  “So you recognised him, too! Why else ask that question? It was only during dinner last night that it occurred to me that you will have seen his picture.” He slaps his thigh with pleasure, leans closer yet, spilling tea into his saucer. “And did you tell him? No, don’t answer, you are bound to lie. Well, it’ll slip out sooner or later, I suppose. I swear I did not sleep a wink all night. I thought if you’d told him he might take it in his head to murder me. But of course he can’t. He has questions. Otherwise why take the risk and come to me like this? But how patient he is, how professional! When the captain told me he’d hired a new cabin boy, a first-rate lad, and introduced me, I almost didn’t believe my eyes. In fact, I wasn’t sure until I got the photograph back. But it’s there, isn’t it, written in his bones?”

  Eleanor watches Smith stopper his enthusiasm with a cake: he stuffs it in whole, then chases crumbs along his chin with his fingertips and tongue.

  “Why do this?” she asks, and finds that she is angry. “Why play with him? Is he an asset, too?”

  “An asset? Why yes! He knows things. As a matter of fact, he’d make a good assistant. An apprentice, even. He’s got pebbles, that boy. And he is adaptable. I’m rather impressed by him.”

  “You will hurt him!”

  “Hurt? Why would I? Ah, you mean his poor tender soul. Don’t you worry, I rather suspect he has no soul that could be violated. As I said: he is adaptable. A nonperson, almost. Or rather, he can be anyone he wants. Your Mr. Black would love him.”

  Smith pauses, swivels his head to make sure Mowgli has not returned to eavesdrop in the corridor, then parts with another of his secrets.

  “He broke in here. Sometime last night, while I was in there, two steps away, listening for him. But I heard nothing. He’s a professional, I tell you. It took me half the morning to ascertain he
’d really been at all.”

  “What did he want?”

  “I have something he covets but dare not steal. A conundrum! So he’s stuck with me.”

  “Then you wanted him to break in. You counted on it. You laid out things for him to find.”

  Smith looks over to her, surprised, shapes his lips into a whistle, thick and round and smeared in icing sugar.

  “Very clever, Miss Renfrew! Are you guessing? Or perhaps you had a look around as well! Are you, too, a thief?”

  He stabs an accusing finger at her, more playfully than in earnest. Playful or not: her Smoke is in the air. A catfish, Etta May called her, lying buried in the river mud, scaring the other fish with its inertia. Well, the thick mud just twitched. It passes through Smith like it never happened, a drum roll past a deaf man. He picks a flake of Soot off the jam, eats another cake.

  “Enough,” he says, “I’ll grow fat. Here, you have one, they’re made of buckwheat and a pound of butter, simply delicious.”

  [ 7 ]

  Over dinner, Smith lectures her on the history of the Company. Mowgli is there, serving. It makes Eleanor wonder whether he is speaking as much for his benefit as hers; if he is instructing Mowgli somehow, whom he has picked as an apprentice and a toy. Perhaps Smith simply wants to talk.

  If his purpose is instruction, however, Smith proves himself a terrible teacher. He drinks heavily and has little sense of system, reeling off dates and incidences that mean little to Eleanor and jumping countries and centuries at the blink of an eye. Thus one minute he rehearses the Company’s foundation (“Adventurers, they were, visionaries even. The dawn of a new century will have inspired them—the year reads sixteen hundred and finds a bunch of half-broke merchants with a dream. And what balls! After all, the Smoke first appeared just a couple decades later. Imagine it, pressing on, even while half the world plunged into war; Europe burning, and here they trade in indigo, spices, tea!”). The next minute he has turned to the topic of the Company’s emasculation, its loss of direction and “virility” (“I blame Pitt, I do, though I suppose it started earlier than him. Government supervision, bah! Protectionism, that’s what it was, making sure the Company could not fail. And then they had the gall to fight two wars over opium in the name of free trade. Besides, did you know that we caused the American Revolution? No, no, it’s quite true. The Tea Act! The Crown’s attempt to keep the Company from bankruptcy by giving it special customs status. Next thing they knew Boston was up in arms!”).