Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“Her leg was in a bad state by the time we reached her. Broken ankle, a thousand flies laying their eggs in the wound. But she was alive, awake. We watched her for a good hour: shouting, wailing, screaming at us. Not a hint of Smoke. It wasn’t just caution that kept us away. The absence of Smoke: we were not prepared for it. We were afraid to touch her.

“But in the end we realised she would die if we didn’t. So we brought her to the camp. Most of our native guides fled at once, terrified by this monster in our midst. They took most of our provisions along. We set up a hospital in our only tent and slept outside.

“The leg healed well. We ministered to the girl’s needs and otherwise kept our distance. She withdrew into herself, didn’t speak, hardly ate. Without guides or food there was no way of prolonging the expedition, so we took her home. To Baron Naylor’s manor. To observe her, and to conduct experiments.”

“And then?”

“Within three weeks of our return, she started to smoke. All through the journey we had isolated her. Nobody apart from the baron and I ever came closer than five yards to her, and we only approached her with the purest of intentions. And all the same she started showing.” Renfrew’s smile still carries the pain of their disappointment. “In any case, it was all a mistake. Chasing the Smoke. We should have realised right away that there was no virtue to the girl.” He pauses. “Baron Naylor wrote to me a few months later that the tests had been terminated. The girl had died.”

“From lack of love,” Charlie murmurs.

“Love is not a scientific entity.”

Charlie ponders Renfrew’s answer and decides not to tell him that the girl is alive and roaming the woods of Nottinghamshire. She might have escaped. But in his heart Charlie wants to believe that it was Baron Naylor who released her.

Renfrew, in any case, has run out of interest in the past. His focus is on the future.

“I note you elected not to comment on my vision. A Republic of the Virtuous. I must admit that I had hoped for more enthusiasm from you. If there is to be reform, it will have to be carried by the young. People like yourself. But perhaps you are thinking of your family interest. And share your father’s Tory politics. Change does not come easily to the powerful.”

Renfrew rises, steps close to Charlie, and pulls him up gently by his shoulder. Standing close, the man still smells of leather and horse.

“There will come a time to choose between virtue and vice, Mr. Cooper. There will be an accounting . Ask yourself where all the money comes from. The rich of the land. Your own family, too, Mr. Cooper. An audit, before the eyes of God and men. Our currency needs to be as virtuous as our thoughts.”

Charlie, unsure how to respond, simply nods. Renfrew appears to accept it as a sort of promise.

“Very well. And now, Mr. Cooper, I must ask you to lay aside your bashfulness and provide me with a full account of everything that has happened to you since you left school for the holidays. Everything the baron told you. What you have seen of his latest experiments. Or his wife’s, if the rumours about his ill health are true. I will also need to know where you were the past week, including a full list of names of the people you spoke to. Above all you must tell me what you saw that made you hide from the Naylors — oh, don’t bother denying it, why else did you not alert them to your whereabouts, you must think them implicated in the attack! You must also tell me where Miss Naylor is, and Mr. Argyle. That boy is very vulnerable. And a potential danger to those around him. In short, I have to insist on the truth. As your teacher. And as a servant of England.”

Charlie looks Renfrew in the eye. For all his insistence, there is no anger, no threat to him. He is stating Charlie’s duty, as he sees it. For a moment Charlie is tempted to oblige him. Pass on responsibility to this man who is so eminently responsible. Who watched a girl scream with pain for an hour. Who thought her a “specimen” that must be collected, and chained her to a wall.

“I am sorry, Master Renfrew. I cannot. I gave my word. As a gentleman.”

Renfrew appears saddened by his answer.

“Very well, Mr. Cooper. We must all follow our conscience.”

He turns, fetches a lamp from the table, nods towards the stairs.

“I suggest we retire. I will appeal to you again in the morning. Perhaps I can change your mind.”

ф

The guest room is small and plain but after a week of sleeping wrapped in filthy blankets the white feather bedding looks deliciously comfortable. Master Renfrew puts out a nightshirt for Charlie, and fills the washbowl with clean water, before leaving him to change in peace. For the briefest moment Charlie considers refusing the offer of hospitality and returning to the road. But it is snowing outside and even in the room the cold creeps into his bones. When he slips under the down duvet, such is the wave of well-being washing over him, he almost feels ashamed.

Charlie is about to extinguish the lamp, when the door opens once more and Renfrew walks in, still in his travelling clothes, carrying a tray with a steaming mug of what proves to be hot milk and honey.

“Here, Mr. Cooper, you look like you could use it. You must have lost half a stone since I saw you last.”

He sits at Charlie’s bedside and watches him drink it before carrying the tray back out. There is to his solicitude something so touchingly maternal that Charlie drifts into sleep with the image of his mother in his head, singing softly, tucking his duvet up under his chin.

The man who tips me off wants to tell me about a workers’ union the miners have set up. The gold sits heavy in his hand. He can’t take his eyes off the coin. Already he has bitten it three times. I should have shoved it up my dog’s arse before I gave it to him. See whether he’d like the taste then. I am sure he would not mind.

He is like so many of his class. Crude, greedy, and stupid. Smoke drifts out of his hairline in thin, greasy streaks; he’s hunching his shoulders, in apology, or fear.

“They be a rebellious lot,” he says for the fourth or fifth time, squinting at me. “Crim’nels in my book.”

He sounds West Country to me. An outsider here. Living his life by a handful of lies that have become true through ceaseless repetition.

“I’m a good man, I am. Salt of the earth.”

He bites the gold again, wipes snot across his beard with the heel of his palm, farts. Nervous wind, Mr. Price used to call it. He caused it in a good many people, would stand there sniffing and flash me a wink. The thought of Price lends fresh focus to my task.

Again I ask about the two boys and the girl. “Posh folk,” I say. “Gentry. One of them is badly wounded.” It is hard to explain to the man that I don’t give a toss about their dwarf insurrection. It’s not like the Spencers own the mine.

He remembers something at last. A girl has been seen, down the mine. A stranger. In the company of one Francis Mosley. A haulage woman passed them in the dark.

“Can’t have been gentry though,” he muses. “Dirty like an Arab, see. Wearing breeches. Most likely a whore. And then, a-course,” he adds after much frowning, “there was three figures on the path. Stevie Milner says he saw ’em pass. But gentry, no, that they wasn’t.” He looks at me wearily, worried he’ll lose his gold.

“Let me guess. They were dirty, too.”

“Like they was dunked in mud.”

“Take me to the place where they were seen.”

My bitch growls when he moves. Nótt: named for the Norse mistress of the night. She has taken a liking to the greasy little man, sniffs his crotch like it is made of bacon. He nearly drops his coin.