by Dan Vyleta
Indeed, why did Eleanor come? For help and information; in the hope of finding an ally in this place; to see another woman in an isolation ward for men. Because Lady Naylor owes Mowgli.
Only Lady Naylor does not seem aware of that fact.
“What is Uncle planning?” Eleanor asks. “Ursula Cooper. India. Smith. How does it all connect?”
[ 15 ]
Lady Naylor is remarkably well informed. She has, she explains, contacts within the old families that did not altogether wither away with the Second Smoke; links, also, to the scientific community on the Continent that bypass politics. A good number of those contacts and connections lead to elements within the Company and, hence, to India, the centre of the old imperial wealth.
In itself the size of Lady Naylor’s network is unsurprising, a function of blood ties so ancient they override even her treason. What is more remarkable is that Lady Naylor appears so willing to share some portion of her knowledge. True, she is at one and the same time fishing for information herself, asking questions about Smith and Ursula Cooper, neither of whom she has met. But at the centre of her willingness to share lies something other than barter; it is as though she senses something about Eleanor and Mowgli that connects them to change. It strikes Eleanor that it is this the old revolutionary hungers for: not resolution, or polity, not even justice, but perpetual motion. Lady Naylor is bored. She was a player once, a lead.
Now she’s sick of sitting in the wings.
This is the substance of what she tells them: Cooper and Smith represent different forces within the Company, forces that are defined by social class and ideology as well as by different sets of opportunity. Of Smith she knows little, other than that he is a “new man,” his sudden rise to the inner circle of Company power based on a reputation of daring and the efficient ruthlessness with which he put down a peasant uprising in southern Bihar. Last she heard, he had turned his focus to South America under the banner of diversification.
Miss Cooper, on the other hand, is part of a recent reassertion of high aristocratic interest within the Company. The Coopers (that is, mother and daughter, not the disinherited elder son); an obscure wing of the Spencers; a few minor Hounslows; and two of the Collingwood brothers have all reasserted their ancestral claims on the Raj, using their wealth to buy up new land and expand poppy production. Of these, it was the intrepid Miss Cooper who started to ask questions about something she believed had been smuggled into the country some ten years ago—some kind of curiosity or sample. It appears it came from India and was brought in by a private citizen—the son of a noble house who had been travelling in the Raj. Whatever it was, Miss Cooper must have seen considerable value in it, because all of a sudden she was throwing money at a new pet project: an expedition, assembled in secret, with orders to secure a second such sample. It appears she was blessed with success. Her people found something—God knows where—and sent it back to these shores. Only this time, the sample did not arrive. A Gale caught the ship carrying it, as it was nearing the shore—a freak accident, created by an offshore wind—and the next moment the Gale had transformed. Transformed into a Storm, that is.
“The very Storm that caught you.” Lady Naylor pauses, studies their reaction. “Well, we shall know more soon. I believe a third sample is being shipped from Bombay.”
“Thomas Argyle is in India.” Eleanor says it before she grasps her own implication: “Was he looking for the…sample?”
“Naturally. I sent him there. It’s the last thing I did before my ‘surrender’ to your uncle. I needed someone clever and relentless, someone with a personal stake. The sample and the Storms are connected, I told him. By the time I added that a Cooper was involved, he was rearing to go. I may have omitted to say which one.”
“He’s been captured.”
“So your uncle told me. He crowed about it, in his pinched and miserable way. Well, I am disappointed. I had better hopes for Thomas.”
“Uncle will have him killed.”
“I expect so. He is a danger to your uncle’s interests. And a trial would give him a platform of sorts.”
All at once, Mowgli is beside them. All this time, he has been standing in the corner, silent, staring; Eleanor conscious of his muffled anger, afraid that it would burst. Now he swoops down on Lady Naylor’s armchair and puts a hand to her throat. For a moment Eleanor thinks that he will throttle her. But it is the touch he is after. His other hand is spread over Lady Naylor’s head. Smoke pours out of his skin, straight into hers. Eleanor backs away from it, afraid that she will soil. Lady Naylor’s face has lost some of its haughty composure; something is creeping out of her, yellow and sickly. Eleanor recalls the story of her mutilated liver—Lady Naylor’s husband cut her open in an experiment to remove the organic source of Smoke—and connects it at once to her waxen sheen of skin. She is sick indeed.
Mowgli speaks. It is a voice Eleanor recognises from the Storm: very young and very angry, the eight-year-old boy who was caged like a beast, stupid with his grief.
“You—you took me,” he says. “You don’t even know from where…And here you sit…soft carpets and golden wallpaper”—this last bit despite the fact that the wallpaper is silver, with a purple pattern.
But even as he spits his confusion at her, Lady Naylor calms under his fingers; sits ups straighter; pushes him off her with one firm hand, his Soot a mask upon her face.
“What now—you would like me to apologise? Join the queue. They’re all waiting for me to apologise—my daughter most of all, though she is a hero now, almost a saint! Have you noticed how they’ve all become heroes somehow: her, Thomas, that sweet wet dishrag that is Charlie? I am a mere footnote to their epic.” She curls her lip, speaks as though she were at trial, the speech long prepared. “I was Prometheus, giving humanity fire! So what if I prefer wallpaper and carpets to spitting on the floor.”
“Was it worth it?” asks Eleanor, quiet in the face of Lady Naylor’s fervour. “Giving humanity fire?”
“It did something. Cleared away some of the clutter, killed the old gods. But somehow their altars survived. We are living in a museum, Miss Renfrew; in an echo of things past. Here; up north; overseas.”
“So what do you want?”
“What I have always wanted. To be free. If it takes another fire, I will light it myself.” Lady Naylor rises and, pushing aside Mowgli, walks in two strides to the door. “Otherwise, it would have been better not to have started with this at all. I could have spent my whole life sleeping in a comfortable bed; fresh pastries for breakfast, and good Ceylon tea.”
[ 16 ]
Back out in the corridor, it is Mowgli who leads, encrusted in his anger. Eleanor wishes to speak to him but she cannot risk their being seen together. An inverse procession, thirty steps apart, courtiers turning for her. He leads her to Smith’s rooms and appears to own a key. She slips after him once she has confirmed the corridor is empty.
“Mowgli—” she starts, but he interrupts her.
“Nil. Nothing. No-One.” His anger keeps her at four or five steps: the maximum distance the small room allows. He is digging in Smith’s papers with an odd sense of proprietorship; it is with a pang she realises he is at home in here, in Smith’s camp. At last he finds what he is looking for.
“There!”
He places the photo down on the floor, so they both can see it from opposite ends of the room. London. A dark pillar of Smoke connecting sky and Thames. The day of the Second Smoke.
“What?” she asks, though she already knows.
“The first sample,” he says, “the thing from India. It caught. My blood was the spark, Julius Spencer’s body the fuse. It quickened the Soot along the river’s banks and started the Second Smoke. And then, downriver, there”—he points, stabs a finger at the photo from afar—“a Storm started.”
“Then what—” she b
egins to ask, but the door opens.
Smith.
He is buoyant; a smudge of lipstick rides his cheek.
“Nil! And young Miss Renfrew! Arguing. And my dirty undies littering the floor!”
She runs away then, rounding him, emotion rising in her throat; her right hand busy at her breast-cage’s wheel, doing its best to shut it in.
[ 17 ]
Mowgli comes to her one more time. It is early the next day. She has slept little, the harness intruding on her comfort; fog in the bay outside, the prison ships standing murky in their reek.
He starts speaking before he has as much as closed the door, his voice flat and fast.
“I told Smith everything. The expedition, the sample in London. It connected the dots for him. Now he wants to go and find it—with the help of the photographs! He thinks the pupae will hatch there. I am to come with him. As his expert. He has me figured out, you see. He says to me: ‘You were not loved enough when you were small, and now you are seeking something, approval, only you don’t know yourself that you are seeking it. All you know is that there is a hole, right in the middle of you, so big you are hardly there. All that’s holding you together is your anger.’ He says that if I come with him, I will discover myself. My past. Banish the anger; fill the hole.”
Eleanor listens, watching Mowgli fidget. He is too agitated to stand still.
“Perhaps it is Smith who has the hole. Half his bluster is him convincing himself that he is real.”
But Mowgli only half listens. “Smith killed the elevator boy. In New York. That’s what I told him, to show I shan’t trust him, not now, not ever. And it took him a full minute to understand what I was talking about. Then it came to him at last. ‘Killed him?’ he guffawed. ‘It’s the twentieth century! I paid him off.’ ”
Mowgli raises his palms—disarmed, unfit for resistance—then drops them again.
“Screw Smith,” he says, quietly, even shyly. “Let’s go to London, you and I. I can figure out how to break into the Company stores. We will steal the grubs and run off with them. Figure it all out. I am sick of people telling me who I am.”
He reaches out a hand to her, touches the leather buckles that flank her harness. There are steel ribs and a padded corset separating his hand from her skin. Still, it’s the closest they have been. Since the Storm.
She lingers in it for just a moment. Then she says: “Don’t stand so close, Mowgli. My body…I…am attracted to you. And I mustn’t be.”
God help her, but it pleases her to see colour seep into his face.
“Come,” he says again, though he is already retreating. “Us two. Please.”
And she would like to tell him that she will come and fly with him; that together they will find all he seeks to know; that the knowledge that he wants is already there within the flavours of his Smoke and that, stripped naked both, she can show him the truth of himself and make him whole; or else that he should stay with her, and help her watch her uncle; that Livingstone is gone to learn how to bottle Gales and that Renfrew is all alone and that they can win the battle here, together. But her eyes find the prison ships drifting in the bay, and her ribs, expanded by emotion, dig painfully into their steel counterparts; and in Mowgli’s face she finds a torn urgency that fears her presence as much as it craves it.
And so she says, “No,” simply and firmly, and watches him leave with anger on his skin but no surprise. A flake of his Soot settles on her hand. She stares at it, then licks it; smothers herself with the quick turn of a wheel, and wonders, not for the first time, whether it is possible for the contraption to break her very spine.
[ 18 ]
She does not see Smith leave. The story he tells her uncle is that he, Smith, wants to inspect “his lands” while waiting for the shipment of the inoculant. On the morning he and Mowgli set off, Eleanor is disturbed by something unprecedented. There are noises in the corridor, voices, steps. She opens the door and sees a throng of people, all walking in the same direction. Doors open to rooms she thought uninhabited: curious faces, inquiring what is going on. They, too, soon join the people passing, as does Eleanor. Three long hallways and two flights of stairs: she had not realised how close she lived to the chambers of Parliament. A plain door admits them. Beyond lies a great hall, tiered seating on both sides, plain wood like church pews. The left row of benches is entirely empty. It is reserved for the opposition. But in Renfrew’s realm there is no opposition. Hence the absurd spectacle of a press of men occupying but half the room, even now, when Parliament is not in session and the Speaker’s chair stands empty, as does the Lord Protector’s seat.
Eleanor soon comes to realise people weren’t summoned but merely drifted here, the only public space in the whole Keep. In its long corridors and narrow stairwells, there is no room for this, a crowd. She sees the sons of eminent aristocratic houses in their Parisian suits, jewel-encrusted Smoke masks tucked into their belts. She sees older men still dressed in the fashion of the mid-nineteenth century in which Britain was so long frozen by embargo: heavy, sombre suits with large cravats; or hunting tweeds with riding boots and chequered flat caps. She sees burghers in shirts worn thin by too many washings in lye; former liberals, copying her uncle in dress and hairstyle, starving themselves to match his gauntness. The buzz of talk is in the air, hushed yet excited, even afraid. The crowd quiets and parts wherever she treads; closes behind the tear she makes within its fabric, the conversation resuming once she has passed. She picks a man at random, a short, sweaty, rotund fellow mopping his forehead under a top hat made porous by moths.
“What?” she asks. “Is there some news?”
He hesitates but only for a moment, too excited to still his tongue.
“The Raj,” he says. “India is in revolt! The poppy fields are burning. They say Bombay has gone up in flames.”
PRINTED LEAFLET SECRETLY DISTRIBUTED IN BIHAR AND JARKHAND (TRANSLATION FROM MAITHILI). ORIGIN OF LEAFLET HAS NOT YET BEEN IDENTIFIED. ILLEGAL PRINTING PRESS IS TO BE CEASED WHEN FOUND; AUTHOR AND PRINTER TO BE ARRESTED FOR INCITEMENT TO VIOLENCE, CREATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF ILLEGAL PRINT MATERIAL, DISRUPTION OF THE PEACE, ETC.
What is the Smoke Poppy?
– The sacred wealth of the Indian people.
Who controls the poppy fields and steals our wealth?
– The Company.
What is to be done?
– Seize control! Rise up against oppression! Burn this year’s harvest!
Today the fields will burn. Tomorrow, the Company lies bankrupt. Home rule awaits.
PROPAGANDA
[ 1 ]
This is the revolution. Heat, fear, gunshots; the great roar of ten thousand feet running riot through the city streets. The bittersweet stench of burnt poppy, mixing with the tang of Smoke. The rains bind it, plaster the smell onto the walls. Bombay’s burning—not in a single blazing wildfire but in a dozen managed fires: the Company warehouses, the police headquarters, the Central Post Office, the Empire Hotel, all reduced to rubble and ash. The Company’s troops, British and native, have been mobilised, martial law has been declared. This morning, a machine gun was fired on civilians—old men, women, and children—drawing water from a city well; many jumped inside for cover and were drowned. Last night, a bomb was thrown into an army barracks where fresh recruits lay sleeping on their bunks; another into the stables of the Bombay Officers Club, ripping the legs off a dozen polo steeds. Drowned women and the scream of horses. From here on in, it will be a fight to the death.
And yet here they sit, Singh and his two companions, waiting, doing nothing, the sea breeze lively in their faces, distancing them from the city noise. They have found shelter in a customs building that has been abandoned by its officers, and are sitting on its flat roof, biding their time. Beneath them, the harbour lies tranquil. It is no coincidence, this. The movement, though no p
uppet master, is guiding the mob’s fury, suggesting targets, theatres of action; creating pockets of comparative peace. The harbour has been designated one such pocket by special orders.
It shows on the waterfront below. The soldiers on duty are clustered around a single stretch of pier, a single ship. They, too, have special orders, two separate sets, with conflicting aims. One lot is here to guard what lies hidden in the ship’s hold and prepare its departure; the other, to ensure the ship does not sail. Both sets of soldiers are a problem. Somehow, Singh and his comrades must board the ship.
They have come prepared, are wearing sailors’ uniforms and have packed away their instruments in crates that are marked with the ship’s name and adorned with the blood-red bloom of a customs seal. They also have a contact on board who is sworn to help them, and even some forged orders, though it is hard to know whether these will be believed. Moshin, the younger of his two companions, is growing impatient. He’s been chewing paan and it is making him twitchy. “Let us go trying our luck,” he says, not for the first time. His English is thick with Urdu.
“Not yet,” repeats Singh, conscious that his own English must sound to him like the enemy’s. “Those soldiers will be called for, sooner or later. They need the manpower in the city. You’ll see.”
To pass the time, he quotes Marx at them from memory, reciting it rhythmically, like a mantra.
“A spectre is haunting India,” he says, “the spectre of home rule.” And: “The Company has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. For exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”