Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“How long did you go to school?” she asks in wonder.

“Four years. Got my numbers and letters. They aren’t good for much, though. There’s no money for books.”

“And yet today you had a lesson for me.”

He smiles at that. “A time may come when we will need to understand one another. Your people and mine.”

He does not explain who these are, his people and hers. There is no need. The poor and the rich. A week ago she would have said: the corrupt and the righteous.

“I am only a schoolgirl,” she says quietly. “What can I do?”

“You are the next Baroness Naylor,” Francis answers. And then he bows to her. She did not know a bow could combine mockery and admiration. Before she can respond, he has turned around to lead her back.

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They don’t speak again until they have entered the lovers’ cave. It remains empty of people. She knows this from its sounds; the quality of the air: Francis has once again doused the lamp. Livia finds she does not mind. It is oddly comforting to have returned to the dark.

“How long have we been down here?” she asks.

“Six days.”

The number gives her a shudder. Six days buried under the earth. And yet it seems much longer to her. She must have lain down to sleep a dozen times. Catnaps; her natural rhythm when divorced from the sun.

“Is anyone looking for us?”

He answers slowly, picking his words with great care.

“Yes. There is a rumour you’ve been in the village. Someone’s spending an awful lot of money to find you. The men who know you are here, they have given us their promise. A holy oath. But it’s an awful lot of money, and some have more mouths at home than they can feed, and others have a child that wants the doctor.” A moment later he adds: “Lizzy says your friend is better. Able to stand. To walk.”

“So that’s why you came to me today! We are placing you in danger. We will go, of course.”

He presses her hand at that, lifts it up, touches his forehead with it as though receiving her benediction.

“My father will fetch you.”

She hears him walk away. Even his gait has a certain elegance to it, a gentle purpose. It makes her smile. Were he a few years younger, and a little more handsome, she might grow to like him almost as much as Charlie.

“Do you ever take her down here?” she whispers after him, gesturing sightlessly into the cavern. “Your girl. The one who won’t stop talking.”

His voice reaches back to her, so soft she might be imagining it.

“No. When the time comes. . on our wedding night — I want to share her Smoke.” Then: “There is life in Smoke, Miss Naylor. Communion. What people do down here, that’s something else.”

He says no more. And leaves her wondering what it would do to her, kissing Charlie out in the sun.

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She seeks him out soon after and tells him that they have to leave.

“As soon as possible, Charlie. We are endangering the miners.”

If Charlie is surprised, he does not show it.

“Thomas is better” is all he says. And: “We’ll have to think about where we want to go next.”

They are sitting on the floor, in a storeroom beyond the main hideaway, where they can talk without disturbing Thomas’s sleep. Their hips and shoulders are touching, get in each other’s way. It would be more comfortable if she threw an arm around his shoulder, leaned her head into his neck. She is about to, when he speaks again.

“You have changed,” he says, “down here.”

“Have I? How?”

He does not have to think about the answer: “You’re happy here.”

“I was happy before.”

“No, you weren’t. You thought of happiness as a kind of Smoke.”

It isn’t until later — after she’s gotten up and walked away in a huff — that she realises Charlie is right. And that he’s worried.

Worried she’ll change back in the light.

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She takes the thought for a walk, back to the edge of the lovers’ cave, still empty but for that laboured, slurping whistle peculiar to the space. The breath of the mine. When she reenters the sickroom some time later, it too seems emptied of people. Before she can confirm her intuition, she hears Thomas’s voice cut the quiet with his whisper.

He is not talking to her.

“Well, go on then,” he says. “After all, I owe you my life.”

There is no answer, only a sound, soft and spongy. It is followed by a giggle, then the sound of flat feet running out the door. Lizzy. At once Livia realises she’s been witness to a kiss. She does something then she has not done in all the time she has been in the room: light a lamp. Her hands are unaccustomed to it. When she finally manages to put match to wick, she sees that Thomas has sat up, hunching forward on the bunk bed. A bandage still covers his head, but it is a simple wrapping rather than the thick layers he was swaddled in before. His face is sunken, haggard; the features overlarge, as though pasted on. It makes it hard to tell a smile from a smirk.

“Listening in, Miss Naylor? How naughty of you.”

She grows angry at once: a trickle of Smoke seeping from her nostrils. Down here, she lacks the will to drown it in meekness.

“You are a cad, Mr. Argyle.”

He shrugs at that, blinks into the lamplight, raises his chin, for her to better see him.

“And tell me — have I grown very ugly?”

She locates her scorn, finds it like a garment she hasn’t worn since summer. It belongs to the world of light.

“No need to worry. The scar will make you look tough. Like a dog that’s had a good scrap. Half the ear missing. All the boys will love it.”

“Oh,” he says, “I wasn’t really thinking of the boys.”

Six days she has barely talked to him, has avoided his eyes. Now they are looking at her hard and level. She bends down to blow out the lamp.

“Better get ready, Mr. Argyle. We are leaving. Soon.”

“Good. I have said my good-byes. And I know where we go next.”

It irks Livia then that he — wounded, feeble, risen from the dead — so naturally presumes to take charge.

And even more that she is willing to follow.

Lord Spencer comes to the village the same day they ask me to go down the mine. They need me to look after an injured comrade, Mr. Mosley tells me. I know Mr. Mosley well. He’s one of the Union Men, a Voice in the Dark: the one who asked me will I join when I was only fourteen. They had use for a nurse and my father, dying, vouched for me. But then Mother sent me away before the year was out.

When we stand near the mine shaft waiting for the cage to arrive, I see a rider on the hillside, sitting tall in his saddle, looking down. Dark hair, that’s all I can see. I remember thinking: that’s what Mr. Argyle would look like, riding a horse. Thomas. It’s first names for us, now that I have washed him and sewn up his head. It wouldn’t do to kiss a “Mister.”

By the time I returned from the pit, it was the talk of every kitchen. Lord Julius Spencer, Lady Naylor’s son, come to visit us. Asking questions. And bringing news: that the lady’s coach has been attacked, and the lady’s daughter kidnapped, along with two young gentlemen. Only it might be that they’ve escaped their attackers and were wounded, lost in the wilds. Did we know anything?

They told him about the rowing boat they found smashed at the bottom of the rapids and he asked to see it; walked both sides of the riverbank, heading upstream, his dog digging its nose in the grass. It found something, near the cottage of the Mosleys. He questioned Mrs. Mosley most patiently, they said in the village pub that night. Spent a full hour in her cottage. And left her with a good bit of money. For her trouble. She put it all in the village alms box on the Sunday.