Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  What he returns to time and again is the Indian Mutiny and the Company trade in flowers. “The government said they had to nationalise the Company because of its mismanagement of the mutiny. Too many atrocities, too much bad press. Nonsense! The truth is, the revenues from the cotton and silk trades were drying up; the saltpetre mines were not half as profitable as they had been; even the opium trade into China had become difficult. But flowers! There is no end of money to be made in flowers. It’s the most valuable crop ever harvested! Of course, the government wanted to nationalise their trade. How often is it that you spot a golden goose?

  “And so the Company had to go. It was carved up, actually, the Crown selling off its monopolies one by one. The Flower Bill, it was called. It was passed quietly, without fuss, by special committee! The public hardly noticed: as far as they were concerned the black poppy did not exist. Oh, the Times wrote a few little articles, referring to ‘new regulations pertaining to the import of Indian goods, specifically items of horticulture.’ Items of horticulture indeed! Behind that pretty little phrase lay Empire’s great secret: that it was financed by sweets. And by cigarettes, only that came a little later and was pursued even more quietly.

  “And so, ten years ago, everything was going smoothly: the Company was dead, a few old families were elbowing all rivals out of the business, and a rich vein of wealth was pumping from the Raj straight into your quaint little island. Export, my dear; Britain was keeping half the world in sweets, even as it shut its borders and kept all innovation out.”

  “Until the Second Smoke.”

  “Hah! Here I am babbling away and you tell me to cut to the chase. Your uncle’s flesh and blood indeed! And look how straight you sit! Like you’re standing on tiptoe with a noose around your neck…But you are quite right, the Second Smoke changed everything. That schoolboy revolution! It plunged Britain into chaos. Parliament disbanded, the civil service paralysed, the Queen old and dying. From one week to the next all central authority had disappeared and all sweet production had stopped.

  “The funny thing is that the chaos spread even to the places where the Second Smoke didn’t. India stayed free of it. All we received over there was a handful of telegraphs from the Continent. Chinese whispers, more rumour than truth. Then: long weeks of nothing! No mail, no fresh orders, no trade. You imagine it: a whole infrastructure of merchants and agents, half of them members of the aristocracy, third sons and disreputable cousins; the whole bloody bureaucracy of the Raj—and none of them have a clue what to do! Half of them run scared and decide to return to Albion, where they get swallowed up by history. The others sit on warehouses full of flowers, unsure what to do with them. China might want them, but China must not learn the secret of their cultivation, let alone how to brew them into sweets. The Continent, meanwhile, is having its own apotheosis with Smoke: their economies, too, have collapsed. All this and a horde of natives surrounding us, minding our children, cooking our food; cottoning on that something is wrong! And every little maharajah asking, ‘Why is there no news from Europe? Why are your soldiers not getting paid?’ Twitching for independence. So our good Englishmen do what Englishmen do best: they sit tight and try to tell their darkies all is well; take laudanum; make speeches in clubs.

  “But then something interesting happens. Private entrepreneurs step in. Some of them are minor government officials, wasting away in their posts and finding in themselves the pluck to set up on their own. Others are more colourful than that: plantation owners, local rajas, third-generation colonial coffee merchants who don’t mind so much that the periphery has suddenly turned into the centre. And so a quiet takeover begins. Families are bought out for a pittance; import and export licences are redrafted; a lot of farmland changes hands. Oh, some money is stolen, some documents are forged, here and there some people are killed. The cat’s away, after all: England’s smoking like a chimney, and colonial governance is overwhelmed, the law courts clogged with cases and open to bribery. It’s a moment of pure Darwinism; the laws of the market playing themselves out.

  “And so a score of new companies are formed. Half of them don’t know what they are doing and are soon defunct. Some of the others band together, then begin to swallow up the rest. Within five or six years the game’s played and there’s a new monopoly. They revive the old flag, resume close diplomatic ties to the new British government, and even adopt the old name. United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies. Unimaginative, really. Worse: nostalgic. And more than half of its leadership is just that: backwards-looking, dreaming of yesteryear, appealing to the remnants of the old order. Looking to turn back the clock.

  “But there are others there, too. Adventurers, visionaries. Men of the future! The true heirs of the Company’s founders. Sitting on the board of governors, looking for openings. Biding their time. There is no great rush, you see. History is on their side.”

  Smith leans back, as though exhausted by his long discourse, and for a moment sits turned inward, thoughtful, even grave. Then he remembers himself and gives an ironic little bow.

  “Now you know who I am, my dear. Feel free to laugh, of course.”

  Laugh Eleanor does not. She studies Smith’s face instead, those bluff, ruddy features, bracketed by whiskers.

  “How do you know I won’t tell my uncle? That you are an adventurer? A man who scorns good order.”

  “Oh, he already knows. He’s a prude, a Puritan, a maniac of morals. But he knows which way the wind is blowing. And besides, I’m the Company’s emissary to his little court. Bringing home his beloved niece. So what can he do but deal with me?” Smith smiles complacently, pats his stomach. “Now how about some pudding, my dear? Cabin boy, go ask the chef to steam the spotted dick. There. Let’s have some port while we wait.”

  While Smith busies himself with opening the wine, she risks a look and catches Mowgli halfway out the door. He, too, has tilted his face to look at her, the certainties of the cabin boy replaced by doubt.

  [ 8 ]

  He comes to her that night. She has been sleeping; when she wakes—because he touched her? because he made a noise?—he is standing in her room. The door was not locked. On entering, he has kept it open a crack, letting in some little light: enough to be sure of his presence but not enough to read his face. Eleanor sits up in bed, gathering the blanket to her chin, not scared but somehow worried what her nightshirt might reveal.

  “What did you mean last night?” he asks, his handsome face twisted, anger on his breath. “He knows who I am.”

  “He has a photograph of you as a child. He recognised you the moment he met you. And he knows you broke into his room. He arranged it for you. He told me so himself.”

  Mowgli stiffens, makes fists. She sees him only in silhouette. She would like to touch him but is afraid he would bolt.

  “Who are you?” he asks.

  “Eleanor. Eleanor Renfrew. My uncle is the Lord Protector.”

  He shakes his head impatiently. This much he already knew. He must have figured it out from snatches of overheard conversation.

  “Smith took me prisoner,” she says. “You and I are on the same side.”

  But the boy is doubtful. “Smith talks to you,” he objects. “He must trust you.”

  “It’s what he does: talk. It’s from a kind of loneliness, I think. He suppresses his Smoke. He suppresses his very sense of it. Then he talks away the fact that he’s all alone.” She had not articulated the thought to herself before but knows at once that she believes it; that it has grown in her all day. It springs out of her with the awkward precision that is her lot. “That and it proves to himself how important he is, how careless of betrayal. The World Spirit moves in him—he really must believe it.”

  He does not respond at once. Slight as he is, his body seems to fill the room; his anger and his youth. Before she knows it, a wisp of her Smoke reaches out to him
; she sniffs it along with him, blushes at how simple, how shameless, is its invitation.

  “Sit down if you like,” she says, pointing to the end of her bed. She says it both to cover her embarrassment and to put him at ease, he who shivers like an animal, ready to pounce or run. “Please, Mowgli.”

  He snorts, starts smoking, then contains himself. “Don’t use that name.”

  “Which then?”

  “Nil.”

  “All right then. Nil.” And when he does not respond, does not sit, but simply stands there, shivering, fighting with himself over something she cannot fathom, she adds, adds it in a whisper, bashful over what she’s asking: “Smoke, Nil, please do. Or else I won’t know you.”

  He stays another minute or two, not smoking, thinking, tasting the invitation rising out of her body.

  Then he turns and runs away.

  [ 9 ]

  Whatever it was he smelled within her Smoke, however it was that she scared him, it keeps Mowgli away for two days. They pass the time by playing hide-and-seek across Smith’s dining table while the Company man imparts one-sided lessons on the laws of rational exchange. Then Mowgli is back, standing in her cabin. She wakes to his presence without fear or surprise. He has closed the door this time and lit a lamp. There are pictures in his hands.

  “I went back to his quarters,” he states without greeting. “I found the photo you mentioned. He had left it out for me to find.”

  He passes over to her the image of his childhood self, smileless and sallow-skinned. She looks from the picture to him and back, finds the same bitterness in the angle of his chin.

  “Aschenstaedt must have taken this. The man who had me stolen. From Brazil.” He says the word like he has never before pronounced it out loud. “Before I left England, I spent three months trying to find him.”

  “To ask him where you—?”

  “That. And to kill him.” Mowgli pauses, remembers himself; places before her the other pictures he is holding. “I also took these.”

  She does not need to look to know they are the drawings that they viewed together in the dark, plundered from their frame. It runs through her that he brought them to her to share; that they are something he cannot live with alone.

  “You grew up in this place. In the jungle; amongst these men.”

  “Yes.”

  “How much do you remember?”

  He shivers a little, grows tight-lipped and grim. “Nothing. Emotions, images.”

  He points to the beetle hanging off the naked man’s neck, points to its horned wings, open like eyelids above the soft of its back.

  “I know that it’s alive. He wears it while it lives. He and it, they are…” He struggles, pauses.

  “Man and dog?”

  “Man and soul.”

  She nods as though she can make sense of the answer, urges him on. Something in their situation (she in her bed, sheets tucked against her chest; he at the bedside, twitchy on his feet) suggests a role to him, something that will hide him from her even as he probes his own past. His face unclenches; he grows softer somehow, wrinkles his nose and flashes a smile, shifts his weight from foot to foot like a helpless, hapless child. It hurts her a little, this transformation, places a distance between them that was not there a moment before. Her interest in him does not run to the maternal.

  All the same, she plays along.

  “What else do you remember, Nil?”

  “A song,” he answers, willing now. Perhaps the role is for himself, not her; helps him stare into the empty cavern of his memory with something other than despair. “About how the sky fell onto the earth a thousand years ago. Before the Smoke.”

  “Like the Fall, you mean. The expulsion from Eden.”

  “You aren’t listening. Before the Smoke. We had a word for it, see, in our native tongue. And yet I was stolen because I was an innocent. That’s how the story goes, does it not? They took me from my smokeless people; they kept me masked on the voyage to England, where they infected me and waited for my organs to change.”

  He twists his face and swallows down Smoke, a child no longer.

  “Smith must know where these pictures were drawn. But he likes his secrets. There’s a section of the hold I have not yet got to. The lock is very good.”

  “You could ask him. He is waiting for you to come to him and ask.”

  “Maybe he is. But he’ll feed me crumbs, never the loaf.” He begins picking up the pictures he laid out for her to look at, then hesitates and shyly takes her hand. The gesture is strategic: a kind of lie. She knows it as surely as she knows her own skin; the odd little divot left in her breastbone from the pressure of her harness’s screw.

  “You mustn’t trifle with me,” she says, considering his hand. “I am a catfish. A monster. I swallow other fish whole.”

  It chases him just as quickly as did her Smoke.

  [ 10 ]

  It is the midmorning of the seventh day on the ocean. Nobody has announced it but they must be drawing close to England. Their destination, Eleanor understands, is the Bristol Channel. Her uncle’s hold is strongest in the southwest.

  As morning dips into noon, a ship is sighted off the port side. She sees it early on: a speck of metal silhouetted against a wall of cloud. It soon draws nearer. Eleanor watches it breathless, only half aware of the commotion around her, sailors swearing, passing around binoculars, rushing to their posts. The sun finds colour in the ship’s bow, the dark flush of oxblood. Three chimneys, their plumes scattered by winds. The players’ ship. In her excitement, Eleanor pictures Balthazar standing in the wedge of bow, a white scarf flapping from his scrawny neck. Any moment now, they will hoist a pirate’s flag and demand the return of Smith’s prisoner.

  It is a chase now. The captain of her own ship has long adjusted its rudder and is plotting a parallel course. Behind the two vessels, a storm is brewing. It is as though a curtain has been drawn across the horizon, fusing sky and sea. The players could not have asked for a more dramatic stage. Eleanor smiles and shivers in the rising breeze; spreads herself out against it, making a flag of her flapping coat.

  Then Smith is by her side.

  “You better go downstairs.”

  She makes to respond but is flustered by his appearance. Smith is dressed from head to foot in sailor’s oils and armed with two revolvers stuck into his waistband. A cartridge belt is slung across his chest.

  It is as though he were going to war.

  “So you really want to shoot it out? Or will you hold a barrel to my head while you negotiate a price with Balthazar?”

  “Your head? Balthazar? You silly child, do you really think that ship is coming to save you? They are running for their lives. As are we.”

  He makes to rush away, hesitates, digs in his pocket and shoves a little bottle in her hand.

  “Go, lock yourself in, block off the vents. Take a swig of this, if you like. It’s laudanum. Who knows, perhaps you can sleep through the worst. Well then, bon chance, Miss Renfrew, it’s been a pleasure. I shall see you après la guerre.”

  The last thing she sees of him is a nest of broken veins, more black than blue, charging out his shirt collar up into his golden crest of hair.

  Then Eleanor turns and fixes fresh eyes upon the storm.

  [ 11 ]

  A moment later she has rushed belowdecks. Smith’s cabin, not her own. She tears through the piles upon his table, scattering pictures, books, and papers; dismisses the three-volume Hegel and that dark strip of beach overgrown with starfish, the anatomical sketches of the liver, each piece of tissue labelled in neat Latin. At last she finds the picture she wants. She falls on the way to the porthole, rips her stocking and scuffs her knee, a sticky warmth as blood soaks into wool. The window looks to port, she has to stand at a sharp angle to make out the cent
re of the storm. It is much closer now, is rushing in upon them; towers like a wall behind the players’ ship, darker, denser, than the sea beneath. She raises the picture she is holding, studies it, then returns her gaze onto the steamer, sharply outlined by the afternoon sun. It does not take long. Little by little the ship is drawn into the wall of darkness, looking tiny by comparison, a fleck of oxblood and a thin plume of steam. Then it is gone—ingested—and Mowgli is in the cabin, a crowbar slung across one shoulder.

  He looks distracted, distraught; opens the tuffet; rummages through the compartment beneath its cushion and comes up empty-handed, at a loss.

  “I finally managed to break into the secret part of the hold,” he mutters, not so much to her as to the room, as though making himself heard against the clamour of his thoughts. “Everybody’s busy on deck, so I nipped down under. Some lock, that.”

  He drops the crowbar, makes a fist, then sticks up his little finger, bends it lightly at the knuckle.

  “Like that, pale and tender, like candle wax before it has set; buried in cases full of straw. Grubs; maggots—whatever the word is. And I remember a whole forest of such fruit, bulging from the underside of leaves. Like tumours. He must have ten thousand down there, sleeping away in their little coffins.”