Dan Vyleta - Smoke

Dinnertime comes and passes. I have the cook prepare the meal as planned, but Lady Naylor does not please to come to table. It worries me. I search the house, not seeming to be searching for her. Someone should write a study of the butler’s walk: an instruction manual, for those fresh to the profession. A quiet tread, but never inaudible; speculative in its range, but never lacking in direction. A science of walking. I do believe I am its master.

I do not find her at once. There is no light in her study; no movement in the boudoir; no gas lamp flicker from the keyhole of the laboratory. It is after some hesitation that I climb the stairs to the attic.

I find milady with her husband. She has slipped into bed with him, her fuchsia gown a dash of colour in the gloom of the room. There she lies, close by his side, her face nuzzled into his chest. The baron’s shackles are fastened, but he is calm, his features slack, the breathing even. I stand in the door for several minutes, watching the scene. I do not know whether milady notices me. When I am certain that she does not require my services, I withdraw. There is wet in my eyes, I will admit. It is not often that we are witness to true love. I have seen it before, when she was younger and the baron the wisest in all the land. I was his valet then, his confidant. Already the guardian of this house.

Since those days, there have been many kinds of work for me. Guard work and spy work. Nurse work and jailor work. Even spade work, once.

I was always willing to serve.

Mr. Spencer has his dog. I am the Naylors’. I shall say it with pride when I meet my Maker. There can be little doubt that I am heaven-bound. For a man of my class, I very rarely show.

Then why the dreams that douse me in hot fire?

It’s a good mile’s walk to the mouth of the pit. They walk by starlight, their faces tapestries of shadow. The air is so cold, each is conscious of walking through the others’ exhalations, white like frozen Smoke.

The path leads past fields, then up onto the ridge of a hill, crested by the twisted shape of an oak. Beneath them, in the darkness of a narrow gully, spreads the mining village. Livia is unprepared for its squalor, the long rows of cottages pressed in on one another like the pleats of an accordion, deflated of air. A rubbish heap rises at the end of the gully, patrolled by a pack of curs. The whole village is suffused in the stink of boiled turnips.

Mr. Mosley speaks without prompting. Perhaps he has noticed something in her face. Shock. Discomfort. A shudder at the thought of a life lived in the effluvium of yesterday’s lunch.

“Newton Village,” he says. “Six hundred souls, and nine out of every ten work down the mine. Men, women, children. Living hand to mouth; in hock to the grocer, who cheats on his scales. The wife always says we are standoffish. Too good for the village. But it’s the village that don’t like us living too close. I’m the foreman, see, same as my father was. Posh folk, we are.” Mr. Mosley pauses, snorts. “It’s true what the fishwives say. Money makes you lonely.”

It’s the longest Livia has heard him speak. But the night is too dark to make out his expression, and his voice too flat to guess at his emotion. He has not stopped while speaking, is striding on, his eyes on the path. Behind them Charlie has his hands full steadying Thomas who walks listing, white as a sheet. Jake and Francis have run ahead, to “make arrangements.” What these are, Livia does not know. On the horizon, visible against the sky, sits the dark shape of the pit tower, a latticed blackness cut into the glow of the night.

As they draw closer, other objects step out of the shadow of the plain. There are sheds, chimneys, furnaces; a shingled hut leaking yellow light; a copper engine bristling with levers, gauges, ladders; and the roofed holes of the two pit shafts. It is within sight of the latter that Mr. Mosley stops them. A pile of timber wood, man-high, provides them with shelter, hiding them from prying eyes. Here, close to the pit, a high, singing whistle, as of blades drawn across mirrors, has displaced all other night sounds. It is a sound calculated to creep into skin and teeth, estrange them from the rest of the body. If one were condemned to live in its presence, Livia thinks, one should go mad. She casts around for its source. At her back, attended by Charlie, Thomas has collapsed to the ground, head and shoulders swaddled in blankets, the mouth distended, gasping for air.

It takes Livia a while to connect the sound to the pit shafts, then to follow it up, along the path of two slender wires, to the whirling of two metal wheels, each crowning the giant scaffold of a pit tower that squats over its hole like a spider made of wood and steel. The wires run taut over these wheels and from there back down, towards two lean-tos at ten yards remove. Inside, great drums can be seen to spin like giant cloth spools, winding, unwinding wire at speeds that cancel out all sense of motion. Thus, for all the drums’ frenzy, there is an eerie stillness to the scene, the wires standing in the black pools of their shafts like fakirs’ ropes whose invisible movement carves slivers of sound out of the fabric of the night.

They wait. Mutely, Charlie walks over to stand next to Livia; eases her tension with a quick, shy smile. Side by side they peer into the dark. At long last, a figure steps out of the hut ahead, its door a rectangle of gaslight. It is by the man’s movements that she recognises him as Jake. He crosses the thirty or forty yards separating them with long, efficient strides, never breaking into a run but moving just as fast. Already Mr. Mosley has pulled them out of the shelter of the timber pile and is marching them towards the pit mouths. The night darkens as they step into the shadow of the bigger of the giant scaffolds. Between its splayed feet, framed by a kind of wooden porch, the pit mouth gapes, a lipless hole, red-bricked and smooth, emitting belly smells like a dyspeptic beast.

Once more the big wheel spins around its axis; once more sounds the eerie song of the wire. Then a cage is spat out of the shaft, hangs flimsy from its thread above the blackness of the pit.

“Quick now, get in.”

Jake swings open the door and one by one they step over the lip of the pit, onto the rough floor of the cage. The contraption quivers under their step, feels insubstantial; its iron frame covered by protective netting, a tin roof above, along with the rusted hook that connects it to the wire. How many men might the cage hold? It feels full enough with just the five of them, Thomas sprawled across the floor, but a picture comes to her, unbidden, of twenty, thirty men, women, and children, squeezed shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, their faces pressed against the netting, like bait used to lure whatever lives down in the deep. A sickness rises in Livia. To fight it down, she concentrates on Mr. Mosley. The miner has donned a leather cap and hung an oddly shaped lamp from his buttonhole. It isn’t lit.

“The operator won’t tell anyone?”

Mr. Mosley shakes his head. “No, he’s one of us. Besides, he never saw you. Too dark. All it is, is an unscheduled descent.”

He steps closer, makes as though to touch her, pat her on the shoulder. Then he remembers who she is. She wishes he hadn’t.

“Hold steady now, miss.”

The shaft swallows them. There is no other word for it. It might as well smack its lips. The light falls away, so fast her stomach rises to her throat, the sickness raging in her. Then the darkness becomes total, the sky a lost memory high above. For a timeless moment total stillness reigns as the cage falls cleanly in its shaft. Livia’s fear recedes, pushed aside by something else inhabiting her body, older yet than fear, and at comfort with this blank suspension in the void. Then a screech shakes their bones as the cage touches the guides that line its walls, only to return them to oblivion, a stillness so total it obliterates all thought. An eternity later, they pass a blaze of light. A bricked chamber opens before her, crowded with mine carts. Tied to the wall near the pit shaft, a pale horse stands like a ghost, its dark eyes mirroring her terror. It lasts the blink of an eye.