Dan Vyleta - Smoke

The watchman finishes another round. When he turns, Livia rises from her crouch and stretches. The night is raw and the wait has invited the cold into their limbs.

“Is it possible they’ve unloaded it already?” she whispers. “It could be sitting right here, stacked on the quay.”

Thomas has asked himself the same question.

“Can’t be,” he decides at last. “If it is really all that valuable there would be a cordon of guards standing right next to it. Something else — have you noticed there isn’t any crew? The captain must have sent them all ashore. Apart from that one, unless that’s the captain himself. Whatever your mother is buying, it’s so secret even the sailors mustn’t know.”

Livia appears to consider this. It is so dark he cannot even guess at her features. And yet he would know her, just by the pattern of her breath.

“Tell me again what we know about this delivery.”

Thomas shrugs. “I never even saw the ledger. Charlie read it. Midnight, the twelfth of January. The Haarlem out of La Rochelle, under a Captain van Huysmans. ‘Collect in person and arrange for transport.’ Whatever it is, it cost a fortune. Your mother must have wagered her entire estate.”

“So she will come.”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. Depends what it is, I suppose. All we can do is wait.”

But as the minutes creep by, measured only by the watchman’s regular steps, waiting becomes more and more impossible. The cold is everywhere now, has crept through the ground and the soles of his shoes, up the inside of his thighs, and from there into his chest and back, his skin so goose-bumped it shies from contact with his clothes. Then, too, doubt has begun to tug at Thomas: that Lady Naylor won’t come after all or that they have the wrong ship; that a bargain is being struck right now, deep in the hold, and a rowing boat will paddle all answers away across the stillness of the inky pool.

He speaks only after he has made his decision. Anything else would be a waste of words.

“I’ll go the next time he turns away,” he says. “See, when he passes the hut over there. You wait here and observe.”

Immediately she reaches over to detain him. Her hand on his arm. How normal it seems today for her to touch him. The thought makes him angry.

He shakes himself loose.

“Where are you going?” she hisses, too loud for the silence of the dock, though the guard does not appear to hear.

“Aboard. See what I can find out.”

She does something with her head, forgetting that he cannot see her, not here in the shadows of the cargo. A shake, a frown? That little gesture she makes sometimes — the lower lip pushed forward, a shrug of the chin, moving right to left, her eyes narrowing to almonds, tan and hard? Perhaps she is worried for him. But her objection is reasoned, matter-of-fact.

“You don’t even know what you are looking for.”

“I do. ‘Arrange for transport.’ That means it’s big. And at the same time squirreled away someplace where it didn’t attract notice. Not from the sailors and not from customs.” He touches one of the wax seals that marks the boxes they are hiding behind. “I will know it when I see it.”

He withdraws his attention from her, counts the steps of the sailor. Not the captain, he has decided. It’s too cold for that, too mindless a task, the man too bored, too unconcerned with his duty. A mate, a trusted man, or one too well-paid to simply skip out. Trailing the smell of burnt vanilla. One hundred and three steps for a full round. Nineteen while he is behind the customs booth, if that’s what it is: hidden from sight. Nineteen leisurely steps. Thomas can reach the gangway in eight, cross it in three. All he will need to do is crouch behind the railing. A darkness melting into darkness. Theirs is a world of infinite depth.

He times it well and starts moving the moment the man disappears behind the booth. Halfway there he realises that his steps have an echo. He almost turns to shout at her, then reaches back and grabs her wrist. The plank has a spongy feel, creaks and vibrates underfoot. Passing this close, the hull comes into relief: rivets like pockmarks, adorned with barnacles, seaweed, rust. A tangy smell, thick in his mouth, not unlike blood.

They hit the floor as soon as they are across. Ice-cold iron against his cheek. The plank is still moving, a regular quiver, up and down, just audible in the still of the night. Wave physics, they learned about them in school: with pencil and paper, he could work out its amplitude. Pencil and paper — and a sliver of light. Beside him Livia is the sound of her breath.

Thomas counts to fifty and nobody raises the alarm. One hundred and three steps. He counts to fifty more.

They crawl forward, reach the cabin wall, then the narrow space between two cabins, fore and aft. Two stairwells, each pointing downward, felt rather than seen. He picks aft on instinct. At the bottom, silence stretching ahead, Thomas can no longer contain his anger.

“You were supposed to wait!”

She inhales his Smoke like she is drinking him, spits back his anger.

“I am not yours to order around.”

There is something else in her breath, something roughly tender. It frightens Thomas, how well they speak without words.

ф

They make their way by touch. Thomas has a sense that the main holds should be down and aft, so down and aft they head. The corridors that lead them there are narrow enough to touch both walls with angled elbows. As they descend a second staircase, the quiet around them changes into something else, duller and heavier than before. They must have stepped below the waterline. At intervals a creak runs the length of the ship, urgent and pitiful, metal shifting in the cold.

They find a door. He recognises it by the heavy bar of its bolt. His hands locate the handle, the hinges, then, on a little shelf by the door’s side, a lamp and matches. Once they are through and have waited out the darkness with a dozen breaths, he dares light the lamp, the door shut and bolted behind his back. The eye flinches from the sudden light, then feasts on it. Steel engines, man-high, the swell of their sides hung with pressure meters as though with medals. A mound of coal ready for the shovelling. Levers, valves, some pairs of heavy leather gloves with greaves, dark with sweat and coal. Livia is about to speak but he shushes her, points to a cluster of pipes descending from the ceiling, each ending, face-high, in a fluted metal bell; a bouquet of trumpets.

“Speaking tubes,” he whispers, his mouth close to her ear. “To the bridge, the captain’s cabin, up to the deck.”

He bends his ear to the flaring bells. One carries a sound, rhythmic, as of fingers snapping at a distance. Confused, Thomas gestures to it. Livia’s ear proves better than his.

“Steps,” she mouths.

Now he hears it, too: someone pacing, back and forth, a pause where he turns tightly on his heels. A confined space, but bigger than most on a ship. The captain’s cabin.

Then the steps cease and, after a minute, are replaced by an eerie crackling, from which, as from a sack of gravel, emerges a voice. A woman, singing, her pitch near-perfect but subject to odd wavers, soft ululations half stuck in her throat. She is joined by an instrument, a violin, sweet, note-perfect, but similarly wayward as though time ebbs and flows for its player against the pulse of his beat. He looks to Livia for explanation but she merely shakes her head. The captain’s cabin. A singer, a fiddle, a pair of boots measuring the cabin, side to side. A copper pipe speaking through the mouth of a bell. It is like a missive from the realm of ghosts, disembodied and obscure. They smother the gas lamp before exiting the door.