Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  There are four of them, an incongruous group, walking with the certainty of those who know the way. An old Negro, exceedingly dark of skin, a flat cap pulled low onto his brow; a girl of ten, flush-cheeked under a crown of buttercups she has weaved together by the stem; a corpulent woman of forty-five, florid of face and dull of expression; and a young man with bright red hair and copper skin who stops high on the hillcrest to hand his thin frame over to a lung-deep cough. Livingstone watches them approach and takes their measure, starts packing away the hunk of cheese upon which he has lunched, only to unwrap it again and add to it a loaf of bread he bought three days ago from a farmhouse that he passed, and a fist-sized lump of sugar. He lays them out upon a handkerchief as offerings, or bait. As they come into hailing distance, the girl darts ahead: inspects the bread—the sugar—from five steps’ distance, then runs close to Livingstone and reaches out to him with a mauve tendril of her Smoke. The touch goes unanswered. The girl is stumped by this, arrested in her step.

  “Go on,” he says to her, loud enough so that her companions will hear. “Eat your fill.”

  The girl continues eyeing him with some suspicion, more febrile Smoke wafting out of her and going unheeded by his skin. She runs back to the redhead, beckons him down onto one knee, then whispers something in his ear.

  “She is scared,” says Livingstone, “because I do not smoke. You see, I can’t. It frightens people.”

  This stops both black man and fat woman in their tracks. It is the redhead alone who dares approach.

  “Is it congenital?” he asks, as though inquiring of a lame man the reason for his limp.

  “Yes,” replies Livingstone. “Like Goodman Grendel in the stories. I am another one like he.”

  Then he pauses, as though a new thought has just occurred to him, though he is not actor enough to place wonder in his voice. “You are Charlie Cooper, are you not?”

  “So I am.”

  Livingstone taps his temple in greeting and supplication, the way he has seen farmers do at the mere mention of Cooper’s name.

  “I am looking for the Angel of the North,” he explains just as flatly as he has spoken before, “but I fear I have lost my way. Do you know where he is?”

  “You are in luck,” says Cooper. And he adds, without trying to hide his scrutiny of Livingstone’s pack horse, his pigeons and guns: “We are heading there ourselves. You can join us if you like.”

  [ 2 ]

  And so Livingstone comes to travel with the enemy, leading his horse by its bridle and offering to load it with his companions’ bags, an offer that they steadfastly refuse. It takes little art to figure them out. The Negro and the fat American belong together. He fancies himself some sort of historian or artist and spends his time peppering Charlie with questions; she is the maternal type, come along against the old man’s express wish, and much to his relief. Livingstone beholds her fatty arms and neck and listens to her drawn-out vowels and has to remind himself that they do not necessarily mean that she is stupid. The girl—Mary—is lionising the woman and infecting her with childish pranks. On occasion, the girl’s eyes will stop on him, Livingstone, cripple of the Smoke: incomprehension in her gaze, disgust and fear. The fat woman mirrors this childish gaze with something cooler. No, not so very stupid. At night he hears her whisper a warning into Charlie’s ear.

  Cooper then. He’s more impressive a figure than the caricature Livingstone has sneered at this past decade. Older, for one, a man not a boy; more considered in his manner; less the silly puppy of the stories than a hermit lately emerged from his cave. Delighting in the sunlight. Good-natured, it is true, skilled at putting people at their ease. And disgustingly patient: short of breath as he is, his handkerchief heavy with expectorate, he will answer the Negro’s questions for hours at a time, unfazed by his compulsive need for detail. Livingstone listens to the answers as he walks. They sketch the same old tale that half the world’s been telling for ten years. At day’s end, sitting around the campfire after a simple meal, Livingstone asks a question of his own.

  “Would you do it again?” he asks. “Would you summon the Second Smoke?”

  Charlie Cooper turns to study him. “I see you wish I hadn’t.”

  Livingstone finds it hard not to be brusque. “Leave me out of it, Mr. Cooper. I want to know whether you wish you hadn’t.”

  Charlie leans closer, an intensity to his kind features that is not much different from anger. “Doubt is just what I was once told Smoke is. It’s a poison, a drug. Addictive, unruly. Self-destructive.” He makes to place a hand on Livingstone’s arm, then thinks better of it and merely brushes his sleeve. “It’s best not to spread it.”

  They bed down not long after, Livingstone on the far side of the fire, a few steps from the others. Doubt is a poison. An intelligent answer, one Master Renfrew would appreciate.

  Livingstone sleeps that night with one hand on his gun.

  [ 3 ]

  As they move from the barren high moors into the mountainous, slate-rich country of the Lakes, it soon becomes evident that they are not walking alone. Other travellers are moving ahead of them, and behind. Livingstone studies their movements from afar and comes to the startling conclusion that most of them are children. Here and there an adult will walk with them; a number of groups are accompanied by a cart. Cooper notices Livingstone’s look.

  “They are heading where we are heading.”

  “Why?”

  “The Angel has called them to him. Just like you.”

  “Nobody’s called me.”

  “And yet here you are. What do you want with the Angel?”

  Livingstone has expected the question and prepared for it. Again his words are flat. He has little skill at dissimulation.

  “I have heard it said that the Angel chases Gales. That he lives in the Smoke. Perhaps he knows how to cure me of my condition.”

  “You are lying,” says Charlie Cooper, firmly but without aggression. “There is evil on your mind.”

  “If you believe that, why take me to him?”

  “I rather walk beside you than have you at my back.”

  Cooper might have said more but interrupts himself; looks up at the horizon.

  “Another Gale,” he says, loud enough for all to hear. “There, over that hill, blowing towards us fast. Come, let us all hold hands.”

  [ 4 ]

  It moves on them like a many-hued funnel of air, tall and slender like a maypole; makes their hair fly and frightens the pigeons, brings dust and sand along with its Smoke. The Gale swoops in from the west, moving along a path that defies wind direction and topography, feeding on some thread of Soot buried in the soil. One moment they stand in sunlight; then it pounces on them like the predator it is. The girl, Mary, catches first, a giggle on her lips. She explodes into bright colours: volatile Smoke, darting from her to the others, uniting them with one another and the Gale.

  Together they burn.

  Livingstone alone stands amongst them, spurned. The Smoke is scentless in his nose; the Gale an empty wind whose residue stains his clothing but leaves inviolate his soul. He watches the dance of colours; watches the girl’s giggle mirrored on the thick lips of the Negro while her shoulders droop with the weight of his old-man defeats; watches a current pass between the fat woman and Charlie that forces from them a shared sob; feels the Gale deposit grit and Soot between his teeth and stares at it as unmoved as his horse.

  Within minutes it is over. The Gale has passed on. It leaps in a giant stride to the group of children a half mile behind them and draws from them a high-pitched squeal. His companions stand shaken; unclasp their hands, rub Soot-encrusted eyes; study one another from the corners of their eyes. Livingstone has been in a Gale but three times in his life and associates their aftermath with a burning feeling of corruption; with humiliation and self-betrayal, and the
fierce sting of shame. All the more surprised is he to see the old man flash a smile at the fat woman, and the little girl draw close to them and weave her fingers into the Negro’s bony hand. They commence walking. Not one of them speaks. Cooper alone walks apart.

  He is studying Livingstone’s face.

  “I pity you,” he says at last.

  “Because I cannot feel it?”

  “Because you face alone all the ugliness within your soul, thinking that no one else could bear it. Always afraid that someone will find you out.”

  “So you think my soul is very ugly?”

  “You think it. That is enough.”

  Livingstone laughs and flushes with anger. It is then he decides that, one of these days, he will cut Cooper’s throat.

  [ 5 ]

  That evening they reach the shore of the most easterly of the Lakes. Windermere. In the failing light it shines like a shard of mirror, narrow and long. Many others are camped along its flank; they have lit campfires and can be heard singing, laughing in the quiet. A village lies some hours’ walk ahead: slate houses, the hills full of grey-fleeced sheep.

  Early the next morning, thinking himself unobserved, Livingstone scribbles a note upon a piece of rice paper and attaches it to the leg of one of his two remaining pigeons. The bird coos between his hands, then flaps away, heading south. He watches its flight. All at once the sky above the lake grows full of birds, swooping in a great flock down towards the water, then skimming its surface in playful dives. One bird darts close and alights upon the hand that only just released the pigeon, a swallow of some kind, its wings marked vivid yellow. Livingstone snatches for it, misses, has the bird circle around his head. Others join it, play a game of chase around the spare pole of his body, their wingbeat in his ear. Instinctively, his hands find his gun; take a bead upon the darting mass upon the water.

  Then Charlie is there.

  “Don’t,” he says. “It’ll wake the whole valley.”

  “What are they?”

  “Soot-swallows,” says Charlie. “They’re bunching. Like starlings in autumn.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means the Angel is nigh.”

   LETTERS

  [ 1 ]

  “I hear you attended Parliament this morning.”

  “This morning, yesterday, the day before. Uncle wants me there. There is a dress I must wear: white muslin, cut very high at the neck. I sit beside him. I have no voting rights, of course, I’m merely his nurse. I must neither move nor speak.”

  “His nurse? His mascot, his monkey! His own little Virgin Mary! But what do you know, it’s working. People here are starved for symbols. The North has its Trinity. Even an Angel in the hills! But down here there’s nothing but edicts and admonishings. Your uncle understands this. So he carts you out, to add mystique. You provide him with a religious note—don’t laugh, I’m serious. Besides, you must look very pretty in white. And all those parliamentarians are missing their mistresses. Some go as far as even to miss their wives. Half the Keep will be busy composing homilies to your virginal bosom. Two hundred humming cocks: and nobody must smoke!”

  Eleanor is having tea with Lady Naylor. If she is shocked by the baroness’s words, she does not show it. The harness gives her a similar carriage to the older woman’s; both sit erect, holding the saucer in the left and the cup in the right. Real tea, too, though no cakes. Even Lady Naylor’s reach cannot conjure butter and sugar. They make do with preserved cucumber on tidy triangles of bread.

  “Does he know you are here?” Lady Naylor resumes the conversation.

  “Not yet. I will tell him later.”

  “And why will you say you keep coming here?”

  “For woman’s company. It displeases him but he has not forbidden it yet. He will, sooner or later.”

  “Then this may be all we have. Well then, to business. What do you want from me, Eleanor?”

  “I have been reading Uncle’s correspondence. And Miss Cooper’s. Now I need to write letters of my own. I assume you have a network of communications. Pigeons, perhaps, or some private mailman of your own? Someone you bribed? In any case, I wish to write to your daughter. Minetowns must be informed.”

  Lady Naylor looks at Eleanor, haughty and amused. “Let us say it can be arranged. What else?”

  “I also need to communicate with Mowgli. I must keep him abreast of things. He’s in London, with Smith.”

  “And how on earth am I to engineer that?”

  But Eleanor has an answer ready. “You could buy off one of the Company clerks. Here, in the warehouse. They must know how to reach Smith.”

  Again that same haughty amusement. “How easily you dispatch of my wealth. Do you have any idea what it will cost? The Company prides itself on its employees’ loyalty…And why should I do all this for you, my enemy’s niece?”

  “Because you want to, Lady Naylor. It’s what you are after, isn’t it—your name in the history books, your fingers on the wheels of change?”

  “So that’s how you see me! And how coolly you attest to me my own vanity! Perhaps there’s something of your uncle in you after all.”

  “You will do it then?”

  “Will I play or sit on the sidelines?” Lady Naylor snorts, most unladylike. “Here you are lining up your troops. Like a general moving armies around on his scale map. What an odd bird you are! And what is it you are hatching? There—you blush and hide behind your harness. All right then, I will buy you your clerk. Don’t think I won’t read your letters! What, you are leaving already? I see: my audience is finished, you have other business to attend to. You try my pride, girl.”

  Lady Naylor rises along with Eleanor, walks her to the door, stops her with a hand to her elbow, the touch too firm to be comforting.

  “There’s an easier way,” the baroness says. “A cheaper way. You could kill him. The Lord Protector. From what I hear he has quite let down his guard.”

  Eleanor does not flinch from the suggestion. “I can’t,” she replies. “I care for him too much. Besides, Livingstone has his instructions. He will carry on no matter what.”

  Lady Naylor seems pleased with the answer. “Then you have considered it! Good. I’d have been rather disappointed if you hadn’t!”

  She bends closer to Eleanor, lowers her voice, her face playful and a little wicked: drawing room manners, built for gossip that the servants must not overhear. “Did you know Renfrew made a pass at me once? Oh, he did, though he would of course deny it. It was a week or two after I came here. He showed up with a ‘reprimand’: a formal document listing all my ‘crimes.’ He’d just had it endorsed by Parliament: came running fresh from his triumph, tail up and strutting.

  “I swear he read it to me like a love letter; lingering on the words. And at the end we stood just like you and me right now. Smoke in his mouth! I could smell it, though he didn’t show. ‘If only…’ he said, and for a moment we stood on some sort of precipice. And I thought to myself, if it happens, if I can seduce him or he me, I will be queen. Only I will have to kill him; or else he will kill me out of shame.” She purses her lips, intense in her reminiscence. “Though, who can say whether his manhood is even in working order? After all, he is rather diminished, is he not?”

  She lets go of Eleanor at last and unlocks the door for her.

  “That shut you up, did it? Perhaps you are too innocent to hear about your uncle’s privates. But no, it’s not that. You are thinking. Scheming. Wondering whether you’ve done enough. Well, whatever it is you are hatching, I am yours. One of your little soldiers. From vanity and something more. Curiosity. I want to know how it ends. Have you ever been to a horse race, Eleanor? I have, when I was young, in France. There’s a simple rule. It’s terribly more exciting if you have put down money on one of the horses to win. Especially if it is a
lot of money, and the horse is a drab little runt.”

  [ 2 ]

  That same day, not an hour after meeting Lady Naylor, Eleanor presents herself to her uncle in his chamber. In her arms are her bed linen, her towels, her underwear. She piles them onto his desk and stands by as he picks over them, examining every inch. The shame of her used bloomers: it bothers her less than his gauntness, the shake that affects his knotty hands. His body is eating itself. Soon all that will be left will be his resentment, and his will.

  He looks up at last, removes his reading glasses.

  “Very good,” he says, startling her by the warmth of his voice. “You have not sinned.”

  He consents to her helping him up and onto his bed; allows her to pile up pillows behind him so he is propped up.

  “It is good you came to Parliament this morning,” he continues, still in the same warm tones and as though she had had a choice in the matter. “You see, they need to be primed. In a few days, we must declare war. And ratify the use of…the new weapon. It all must come from the people’s will.” He shudders, points to the jug of water on his desk. “Would you mind?”

  As Eleanor pours the water she considers her words. She could tell him that he himself is the first to see through his own deceit; that the people’s will is a farce, as is his Parliament; that he is upholding it all not because he wants to elide responsibility but from some perverse remnant of his old liberal ideals that sit in his flesh like a stillborn child, right there in the hole left by his cut-out guts. But if she does so, he will feel the need to punish himself, and her. So she sits down instead on the edge of his bed and hands him the water glass; bends down to him and says to him with all the little love she can summon for this man who raised her like a father: