Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “You have heard about the other ship caught up in the Storm? The one carrying someone who is said to have soothed the Storm. A saint.”

  He nods.

  “And do you believe the story? They say it was Renfrew’s daughter who saved the ship.”

  “His niece. Eleanor. A remarkable girl.”

  “Then you have met her. How interesting.”

  But even as she says it, Balthazar can see that Livia is unengaged in the topic, finds only trifling significance in Miss Renfrew’s sudden rise to fame. She is not why Balthazar is here.

  “There was a third ship,” Livia carries on. “We found it shortly after we found you. A Company vessel, we think, hailing from India, not the Americas, run aground on the Welsh coast. A ghost ship, not a soul on board. The insides were as though lacquered and overgrown with a strange black fungus. It had a feeling about it. A rather nasty kind of feeling. It might have been salvageable but we left it to be smashed up by the tide. The Council was upset. The ship was valuable and I didn’t have authority.”

  She says all this flatly, unemotionally, studying his face for a reaction. But both her fists are clenched. Little fists. Like a sparrow girding for war.

  “What exactly did it look like, Balthazar? The Storm you saw.”

  “A black spar. Like a cut in the sky. Like the one you saw in London, ten years ago.”

  “How would you know what I saw?”

  “Because I had pictures. Photographs. Taken on the morning when the first Storm was set off.”

  “Photographs! How curious. But then, Aschenstaedt had a camera. Perhaps they are his.” She pauses, looks at him. “There hasn’t been a Storm in nearly ten years. And now one rages out to sea. Why there? Why now?”

  Balthazar tries to understand what she wants of him, parses her words, her questioning look.

  A Company vessel. From India.

  A Storm out to sea.

  All at once he grasps her point.

  “You think it started on that ship! The one whose insides were ‘as though lacquered’! But how…?”

  She shrugs and lowers her gaze, disappointed. “I don’t know. And I can see that you don’t either. It was worth finding out whether by chance you might. But no, I suppose you are no more than what you claim to be. A playwright, not a politician. Nor an emissary.”

  When she continues, her voice is unchanged, but Balthazar can see her interest in him is diminished. He stands unconnected to the great things that are afoot.

  Which is not to say he cannot be used.

  “I have a commission for you, Balthazar. This is a town of workers and you have been idle. I want you to ply your trade.”

  For a moment Balthazar stands reeling with the speed of his devaluation. Then the implications of this new request become clear to him.

  “A performance? Impossible! I have lost all my notes and most of my players. And those I have are frightened. The Storm hurt—”

  “Some activity will do you all good. And you can always find new players. There’s no shortage of people here happy to shirk their work in the factory in order to strut around and talk for a living. Just look at our esteemed Council members. Besides, we don’t want your old material but something new. Something suited to our people here. Something that will make them feel good about themselves. Build hope.” She delivers all this rather coldly, dismissively, her hands back in fists.

  “You want me to write propaganda plays.”

  “Ah, here it is, that prissy bourgeois scruple that our angry young men so like to shout about. Propaganda. Are you worried it will violate your artistic soul?”

  For a moment he thinks she will laugh at him or spit at his feet. But she is too self-possessed for that. Too noble.

  “Write something that matters to people. Something that helps them hold their heads up high. Something that smells of the brickyard or the sausage factory.”

  Balthazar thinks about it. “Or else you will have us starve.”

  “Or else no more free lunch. Is that so very cruel?”

  [ 13 ]

  It is Francis who dissolves the tension of the moment by inviting Balthazar to join them for some food. He has been silent all through their conversation, impassive. Now he bids Balthazar sit at the dinner table and gathers the many children together who squeeze onto a bench. The next moment a plump, handsome woman appears with a steaming pot of soup and begins ladling out bowls.

  “Mary, this is Balthazar, a playwright. Balthazar, Mary.”

  The young woman stares hard at him as she passes over the food bowl. “Is that Soot on your face and hands or just the colour you are?” she asks briskly.

  “Skin,” he answers.

  “Good. I like clean hands at the table. Here, have some bread. There’s no butter. And if some busybody asks, up above the coal”—here she cocks her chin to the ceiling, denoting the whole of Toptown—“I’m the wife and she’s our guest and that’s all there’s to say about that.”

  Balthazar sees Livia squirm at her words, not so much at the insinuation as at the coarseness of the woman.

  Again Francis takes it upon himself to mediate.

  “You see, Balthazar, our people love a bit of gossip. Two women under one roof! We are a revolutionary society, of course. But awfully conservative for all that.”

  He shrugs, bows his head before the food, puts a finger to his Mark.

  “We thank the Smoke,” he intones, quite sincerely, sitting here in his fortress made of coal. “Please don’t be bashful. Tuck in.”

  And so Balthazar eats, thinking of another rumour he has heard Topside and scanning the children’s faces, studying their features for Livia’s, or Charlie’s or Thomas’s, whom he knows from a hundred bad drawings but has never met. If their winter of love bore fruit, it is not so far-fetched to imagine the child here, mixed in with these others, anonymous. But the children all look different to him, each capable of having all sorts of parentage, and besides he is not afforded much time for his scrutiny. No sooner has Balthazar finished his bowl than Livia rises and leads him to the door.

  “Francis will see you out,” she announces, “while we women clear up. But what’s this, sticking out your pocket?”

  Balthazar stares at her confused, then fingers his coat pocket and finds the cardboard binding of a book. “I don’t know. Miss Cooper gave it to me, as a present. I have had no time to look at it.”

  At the mention of Miss Cooper, something runs through Livia’s features, too quickly to be parsed.

  “Well then, have a look.”

  Balthazar opens the binding and finds a roughly printed frontispiece and title page declaiming the book to be A History of Minetowns, dedicated to “The Miners’ Revolutionary Struggle.” It is written by someone identified only by a nom de plume and a crudely drawn tool.

  “Who the hell is ‘Shovel’?” he asks.

  Francis makes to answer but Livia shushes him.

  “We are all of us Shovel.”

  He accepts this, leafs through the book, finding pages upon pages of closely printed text, interspersed with illustrations. Whole sections of narrative appear to be rendered as sequential sketches in little panels across the page. He looks more closely and realises these wordless sections capture life within a Gale, or on other occasions when the town gives itself over to the Smoke while congregating in Ekklesia. The pictures are at once simple and masterly: eschew realism for something more direct and vital. The prose, by contrast, is turgid, overdetailed, dense with statistics and subclauses. The wonder at all this must show on Balthazar’s face. Livia misinterprets it.

  “You laugh,” she says. “You find it ridiculous, our Minetowns. Workers playing at being rulers. Costumes and symbols, like children at a mummery.”

  Balthazar is quick to shake
his head. “No, I admire it. But I find it filled with contradiction.”

  “Oh, it is. We are caught between the original union’s ideal—of darkness, smokelessness; of speaking reason in the void, each man and woman reduced to his or her voice—and that thing that we released: communion, the sharing of desires, of sins and dreams. But tell me a city that is not built on contradiction!”

  She pauses, draws herself up, five foot three and towering before him, her accent clipped and precise.

  “Do you think Robespierre liked his revolution at the end, Balthazar? Did he look out the window and swoon over the guillotine? Do you know what I think? That all he needed was just a little more time. But the people lost faith, and so they got Napoleon and another bloody king.”

  Now it is Balthazar’s turn to grow irate. “It is said your mother was fond of talking about Robespierre.”

  “Mother?” she scoffs, Smoke on her breath. “You bloody poets! Always pretending you were there. Write me a play, Balthazar, and keep Mother out of it.”

  [ 14 ]

  Write me a play. He mulls it over for the next few days until the ration cards run out, then sends down a message that he accepts the commission. Oh, he will write Miss Livia a play. A play for all of Minetowns, to be performed at Ekklesia. And for it to be the play he wants—a play for Shovel to include in the next edition of his history—Balthazar is in need of a little stage magic. And thus, on the eighth day in Minetowns, his recently acquired notebooks already filling up with ideas, Balthazar goes looking for the very man he has so studiously been trying to avoid.

  NORTHERN JOKE

  Q: How many southerners does it take to change a lightbulb?

  A: One. But afterwards it takes six inspectors to establish if the man had impure thoughts while screwing it into its socket. (suggestive Smoke for emphasis of punch line)

  SOUTHERN JOKE

  Q: How many northeners does it take to change a lightbulb?

  A: What’s a lightbulb?

   SALES PITCH

  [ 1 ]

  Eleanor Renfrew, Shy Madonna of the Storm, newly returned to the country of her birth, her chin and forehead in pimpled revolt against its island dampness, stands before a mirror flaring her mouth like a horse. Horses do it to enhance their sense of smell, Cruikshank once explained to her: peel back their meaty lips like the skin of a banana to expose the bony pallor of their gums. And so Eleanor, too, now sees fit to flay the outer layers of her mouth. She uses her fingers to pin the upper lip against the base of her small nose; pins the lower lip against the little valley between chin and mouth. The mirror watches her transformation: sees a child making faces, scaring herself with the monsters sculpted from her pliant flesh; then finds in her gaze no gleeful sense of play but the sober focus of a medical exam. She bends closer; raises her chin; looks.

  Much of what she is searching for is gone. The black forked lightning that patterned the roof of her mouth has faded. Nor is she peeing black any longer, the urine collecting thick and oddly scentless on the enamelled bottom of the chamber pot. But here, in the pale pink of her gums, some threads of it can still be seen. Mowgli’s touch.

  The beetle’s mark.

  She would like to ask him whether he, too, stared in trepidation at the black leaving his body, but their conversation—terse, frustrated, conducted by means of scraps of paper pushed under the door of this, her prison—does not extend to micturition. They survived the Storm together, flooded one another with their anger. Now distance governs their relations, a distance not imposed simply by the lock upon her door. Eleanor has thought much of late about the wedding night scene that opens so many of Balthazar’s shows. He should write another scene, showing bride and groom at breakfast on the morning when the Second Smoke had gone.

  Avoiding each other’s eyes.

  She finds it easy to forget that Balthazar is dead.

  [ 2 ]

  If it is a cell she is inhabiting, she can reassure herself with the fact that everyone else here is in one, too. The building was purpose-built, thrown up with a speed that speaks volumes for the will of its master. It is the seat of Renfrew’s government, his Parliament and royal court, but what one sees from the outside is functional and drab: a cluster of three-storey buildings, long and low like barracks, forming a five-pronged star; a squat tower at the hub; the windows small and uniform. There is a parliamentary chamber somewhere inside the structure, but most of the space is taken up by identical square rooms, built for single habitation. Pentonville: that’s one of the names for the building, after the prison used as its architectural model, the first British penitentiary to isolate its prisoners in individual cells. Smith told her this, back on the ship. He told her other names, too. The Commons. Borstal. Penitentiary. The School; the Workhouse; the Nunnery.

  The Silent Keep.

  Here families are not allowed. Each body has a cell here and all private life is reduced to desk, bed, and chair.

  No man is an island.

  Except here.

  [ 3 ]

  A prison then: a locked door. Through it comes but a single visitor, at timetabled intervals, to see to her needs. He is a servant, hard-faced and old, with lank grey hair and a spare, compact body oddly younger than his features. A dangerous man. The notion formed in Eleanor’s head on their first meeting and won’t be dislodged, though he has done nothing but bring her food and clean out her chamber pot, and dismiss all her questions with a dead-eyed stare. She listens for his steps at breakfast, lunchtime, and dinner; catches them seldom. The servant walks softly. He has not offered her his name.

  There are other communications she holds with the outside world. There is a window, for one, that she can open and lean out of, craning her neck to scrutinise the drab flank of the building. Pigeons visit her there; they must roost in the rafters above. In front of her there is a flat ridge of barren land that drops away steeply into the Bristol Channel. They are quite near its tip, but even so it must be several miles to the Welsh coast. In the water, far enough out not to be stranded by low tide, lie anchored some twenty ships, few of them seaworthy and none under steam. Figures can be seen swarming their decks, too far away to observe in detail, though the breeze carries their sounds. The impression is one of overcrowding and misery. A haze of Smoke surrounds each ship and shifts only in high winds. Around the ships the sea is dark with their effluvia.

  These, she learned from Smith when they were tugged into harbour, are prison ships. Those convicted of crimes against the order of the state are incarcerated there: women on one ship and men on the others. They eat what they catch, plus some small ration of bread and vegetables rowed out to them twice a week. It cannot be coincidence that the ships are anchored here, in plain sight of the worthy parliamentarians. They are stark reminders of the price of disorder, both political and of the soul. Eleanor has watched them for a week now. She wonders why the birds and fish keep coming to their hulls where so many of their brethren have been hooked and eaten by those who hunger inside; wonders, too, what bloody slop is dumped into the sea each morning to draw the black fins of a hundred sharks.

  She wonders what the damned do with their dead.

  [ 4 ]

  If Eleanor has made a habit of watching the prison ships—from pity and boredom, and to read their darkness as a primer to her uncle’s soul—her interest today is more urgent and specific. She woke this morning to find a fresh message underneath her door. Mowgli’s missives: twists of paper, covered in pencil and folded in half. Every night she deposits her own, hoping Mowgli will retrieve the note before the servant brings her breakfast; will herself search the gap beneath the door a hundred times each day for news from the world beyond. If her questions are detailed and wide-ranging, his answers are short and incomplete. She asked Mowgli why he does not visit her; pick the lock as surely he can. He did not respond. She has sensed him there, late in the
night, lying on the threshold of her door, listening for her breathing. But when she herself lay down on the floor and whispered his name through the gap, there had been no answer; just another scrawled pronouncement waiting for her in the hour before dawn.

  As a result, her grasp of the events beyond her cell is limited to isolated facts. She knows that Smith is in negotiations with her uncle; that he pursued Company business at first but has now changed tack and requested private meetings; that Smith, for reasons of his own, has retained Mowgli as his servant and in this function has allowed him to accompany him on many of his engagements; and that Mowgli is playing along with this in the hope of learning more about his origin and the secret of the beetle. She has learned, too, that her uncle is “thin, sick-looking”; that as recently as a few weeks ago the King, long gone into hiding, has been deposed in absentia; that Parliament is made up of an odd coalition of aristocrats, capitalists, churchmen, and lawyers, as well as a handful of commoners yearning for the stability of the old status quo.

  “Some here wear powdered wigs,” Mowgli has written, “others wear Smoke masks. There are no women in this keep.”

  It is too thin a fabric, too colourless and torn, for Eleanor to shape into reality. The cell, the servant, the black of her pee: these have weight. Everything else is hearsay. Voiceless whispers in a boyish hand.

  Until today. The promise of something different, definite and concrete. A jagged piece, ripped from the corner of a book, the pencil fighting to be visible above the printed ink. “Noon excursion,” the message reads. “Smith + Renfrew. Going out to the ships.”

  Finally, then. An event. A chance to see her uncle for herself, however much from a distance; to glean some firsthand knowledge of the workings of this place. Judging by the sun, noon is still some hours away. So she studies her gums and paces; opens the window, leans out, watches pigeons mill above her head.