Dan Vyleta - Smoke

Renfrew chuckles at the memory, fondly, Charlie thinks, a man remembering his mentor and friend.

“What if there was though, Mr. Cooper? A time before Smoke. If it came to us in the seventeenth century, as Baron Naylor posits, by land or by sea, from some far-flung corner of this world? What difference does it make?”

Charlie surprises himself by the intensity of his answer. “It means we can fight Smoke. Defeat it.”

Renfrew smiles. It’s a friendly smile but also condescending.

“That’s just what the baron thought. He declared a war on Smoke. A crusade! And threw himself into a frenzy of research, on all manner of fronts: history, archaeology, anatomy. Travelled the world, collecting evidence. Cut open a dozen carcasses, pickling their livers.

“And to what end? To defeat a symptom. The one thing that tells us we are sick. Foolishness. It’s the one thing he never understood. Yes, very well: Smoke has a history. But so does sin! Oh, it did not come to us two hundred and fifty years ago. It’s older than that! Much older. But not ”—here Renfrew rises, stands towering over Charlie, steam rising from his china cup—“eternal!”

Charlie looks up at him, takes refuge in ignorance, only half feigned.

“I don’t understand,” he says.

It sets Renfrew to pacing: three steps one way, three steps back. It’s a small cottage, really, and mould blooms richly on one whitewashed wall.

“Remember your Bible, Mr. Cooper. The holy books of the Jews, what we call the Old Testament. Genesis: the tree, the snake, expulsion from Eden. What is this book if not the record of a memory, very ancient, preserved in the form of story? A primitive people making sense of a momentous event in their past. The memory of the coming of sin!

“Sin is a disease . A germ, as some of the Continental scientists would say. Through time, it transformed, became visible to the plain eye, materialised externally. A startling event, no doubt, but one of no consequence; merely a change of symptomology. What we must work on — scientifically, that is, pooling all our knowledge, and not hiding behind an artificial wall like the embargo — is the eradication of the actual disease. I have a scheme, you see. We need to breed it out of society. First out of the gentry. And then. . Until at last, we are all the same.”

He stops in his tracks, looks at Charlie almost frightened, whether by the greatness of his vision or by his revealing too much to a pupil it is hard to say. But a shake of his head dispels his doubts and his pacing resumes.

“Did you know, Mr. Cooper, that there is a scholar languishing in Her Majesty’s dungeons who posits human beings have developed— evolved— from more primitive organisms? In the course of the generations, we change, according to our environment, and the habits of our lives. Thus, over time, new species form out of old ones.

“Have you seen pictures of giraffes, Mr. Cooper? No, of course not, it’s not allowed. Well, I have seen the real thing. In the African savannah, Baron Naylor at my side. They are animals, not unlike tall deer, but patterned in brown and yellow, with necks that are five or six feet long. Quite astonishing, really. Well, the theory posits that it comes from stretching: to eat the leaves in the trees. Generations of stretching. Like doing gymnastics. And each generation passes on a little of its strength. It is a slow process, of course, taking thousands of years. What, however, if we slaughter the weakest animals? The ones with the shortest necks? Those who lack the will to change? And devise a systematic programme of stretches for all the young, a programme that starts even while they are still in the cradle, so to speak? Imagine the acceleration, the speed of progress! And then transfer this to the moral theatre.” Renfrew pauses, lowers himself back into his chair, careful not to spill tea. “God is a scientist, Mr. Cooper. We are promised a Second Coming. A Republic of the Virtuous. But we have to work for it!”

Above them, the ceiling creaks and Charlie pictures the little girl, bending awkwardly over a washbasin, trying to clean her body underneath the contraption of steel and leather that keeps her safe from herself. But perhaps it is merely the old wood, shifting in the cold of the night.

When Charlie returns his attention to Renfrew, the man is watching him expectantly. It is almost as though their roles were reversed, Charlie the teacher and Renfrew the pupil, awaiting a verdict on his essay on political ethics. Another boy may have taken pleasure in the situation. For Charlie, it causes a sort of ache; proof that the world has fallen into disorder.

“Then you have travelled far?” he sidesteps the look, along with its expectation. “We saw a picture, at the Naylors’ house, of you and the baron, standing on a foreign plain. I did not recognise the landscape. Flat, open, devoid of features. With a mile-high sky.”

If Renfrew is put out of temper by Charlie’s change of topic he does not show it. There is no frown, no pursing of the lips. But whatever was boyish in his face dies away, leaves a harder man behind . Not hard, Charlie thinks . Righteous. Rational.

It amounts to the same thing.

“Yes, we travelled far and wide — it was still legal then. The Continent. All the colonies. And beyond. Beyond the pale of civilisation.”

“I think I know what you were looking for. The birthplace of Smoke. Where it came from originally. The source.”

Renfrew shakes his head. “An intelligent surmise, Mr. Cooper, but wrong. It’s what I thought when Baron Naylor first explained his theories to me, and asked me to travel with him. It was the summer after my first year at Cambridge. I was only a little older than yourself. The baron had invited me to stay with him in the splendour of his manor. We read, went out riding, hunting, boxed. Oh, he picked me well! A scholarship student. Poor; risen above my station. In thrall to his title as much as his intellect.”

There is something scornful to the way he says it, something rigid about Renfrew’s posture. It takes Charlie a moment to understand it. Here he is, the scholarship student, instructing the English elites at the finest school in the country. No, not instructing. Sitting in judgement. He is not in thrall to titles anymore.

“Our first journey was to Bulgaria. Gathering evidence, in old monastery libraries. But by the next summer the baron had a new idea. Something rather more daring. If Smoke only came to Europe in the seventeenth century, he reasoned, there might be places in the world it had not yet reached. Remote places, at the very edge of things. You see, he was looking for an innocent .”

Charlie remembers the picture. A girl chained to a wall: twisting her head, away from the camera. A girl that grew up to save Thomas’s life.

“You found one.”

“We found a whole people. Or at least we heard about them. A people without Smoke . Living in tiny tribes in a land of eternal ice. Hunting whales from boats no bigger than a dinghy. Eating raw seal. The tribes to the south thought of them as demons. When they saw them, they turned and ran away.

“We had a problem then. It wasn’t just that none of our guides would take us to them. There was also the question whether contact with us would infect the tribe. Imagine destroying the very specimen we had travelled so far to collect! We spent weeks debating the problem.

“In the end fate decided the issue for us. A local hunter caught one in his trap. By accident, mind. He was hunting for bears. God knows what had driven her so far south. A girl of fourteen. He wouldn’t go near her, but he sold us her whereabouts. Twenty pounds sterling he wanted, in gold. The baron never even haggled.