Dan Vyleta - Smoke

They reach Grendel’s house but linger outside, the breeze carrying the river to them, smelling of refuse and rotting fish.

“And after all that,” Charlie finishes, gesturing behind them and meaning the ambush, the mines, the long road to London, “here we are, back with Lady Naylor.”

“We can leave if you want. Just say the word.”

But Charlie can see that Thomas does not mean it. He knows why.

“We have to stay and protect the child.”

“You think so too, then!”

Charlie has only seen the boy for a moment. The first thing Sebastian did was commandeer a room for him, one whose door could be locked. Next thing they knew he had nailed shut the window shutters. Then he left, taking the key. When he returned in the morning, he brought a metal bolt and reinforced the door.

Later Charlie spent an hour at the keyhole, but the boy was outside his field of vision. Only his feet showed from time to time, the tips of his boots, man-sized, too large for him, nobody had thought to help him take them off. A boy of six perhaps. Younger than Eleanor. Alone, confused, slurping air as though through a straw. Once, he rose and raced to the window, his non-face pressed against the slatted shutters, drinking light.

“He does not smoke,” Charlie says to Thomas. “That’s why he is so precious to them. The mask is a respirator. Keeping him from infection.” It is a surmise, but Charlie is sure of it. He repeats to Thomas Renfrew’s account of Baron Naylor’s expedition, how they scoured the world for an “innocent.”

“They needn’t have gone to all that trouble,” Thomas observes. “Here we’ve brought them to Grendel, free of charge.”

“It’s different. The boy must be like the wild woman we met in the woods. After we were attacked in the coach. If so, the boy will smoke soon enough. He just has not caught it yet.” Charlie smiles at the memory of the shy creature who stopped Thomas’s bleeding, her Smoke seeping out of her with the unselfconsciousness of breath. “Do you think they will notice, about Grendel?”

Thomas spits. “If they haven’t already, they will before long. They are too attuned to Smoke. It’s all they think about. I suppose they must hate it.”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know, Charlie. Lately I think it’s not the Smoke that’s bad but the people underneath.” Thomas turns towards the stairs that lead up to Grendel’s rooms. “Let’s go, eh? They’ll be waiting for us.”

ф

They stop one more time before they reach the top of the stairs. They both know why. Livia. It is as though they can sense her, moving around above their heads.

“They end with a duel do they, those French novels of yours?”

“Always,” says Charlie. “The handsome one wins. Or sometimes the girl comes, stops them, and picks.”

“Know this,” Thomas replies with all the bluntness of his nature. “If she was asked. She’d have you ten times out of ten.”

“That’s just it, Thomas. One does not get to choose. Not like that.”

ф

Inside, the stink of the river is replaced by the smell of cooking. Butter-fried fish and boiled turnips: Mrs. Grendel stiff-backed at the stove. She was curt and surly when the priest brought Charlie. Another foundling. Another mouth to feed. The first thing Lady Naylor did was give her a purse.

“Here’s money,” she told the woman. “There’ll be more, much more, before the week is out.”

Mrs. Grendel took the purse quickly. But it did not improve her mood.

They find Livia sitting at the dinner table with her mother. Neither is saying a word. Before he joins them, Charlie crouches down again before the locked door of their prisoner. The keyhole is dark, as though blocked. It takes Charlie a second to understand what he is looking at. A glassy surface throwing back the door’s reflection; the shadow of a masked head, blocking out the light. There, at the centre, imprisoned by the goggle’s glass, one might imagine an eye, a pupil. Grown big against the darkness, crowding out the iris.

Scared.

Charlie scratches the door, quietly, so Lady Naylor won’t hear. The boy on the other side scratches back. Then the door jolts in its frame. At the same time a crash sounds, is repeated, two drumbeats. The child is hammering against the door. Lady Naylor comes running.

“You better get away from there. It agitates him.”

“How long will you keep him like that?”

“Not long now. Sebastian says the mask will come off tonight. He will be more at ease then.”

“Does he have a name?”

Lady Naylor does not censure his anger. “I do not know it, Charlie. He comes from a small, isolated tribe. I don’t think any outsiders speak its language, not even the man who found him and took him away.”

The child hits the door again, with his feet this time.

“Come away,” Lady Naylor says again. “He might end up hurting himself. It is best if he is calm.”

Indeed the hammering stops as soon as Charlie rises and moves away. The dinner table has been laid with an old but pretty tablecloth. A candle stands in the middle. Stools have been found and arranged around it. A family dinner. Grendel joins them, fussing over a bottle of wine he has been sent to buy, then realising they have no glasses, just chipped old cups. Livia avoids Charlie’s eyes when he sits down next to her. It isn’t anger, he reminds himself, but confusion, embarrassment. But it is hard to read anything in her features other than the stony-faced humility she perfected in her family home.

Dinner is a restrained affair. Nobody is in the mood for talking, not with the Grendels here, seeing to their food like hired servants, awkward in their own house. The rest of them resemble a family that waits for the help to leave the room so it can argue in peace. At long last Mrs. Grendel does them the favour.

“I will do dishes on the morrow,” she declares sourly, then pushes her husband out the door. “We will turn in early.”

Their movements in the back of the house are studiedly noisy: they wish to convey they are not lingering to eavesdrop. It is disturbing what money will buy you, Charlie thinks, discretion and resentment both paid for with the same coin.

The moment the Grendels have settled themselves for the night, Thomas leans across to Lady Naylor.

“Tell us again,” he says, fingering the edges of his missing ear, “why Julius shot at us when we left your house.”

Lady Naylor rehearses the same answer she gave them over breakfast. That she was afraid when they announced their departure, the very morning Julius informed her they had broken into the laboratory. Afraid of what they had seen. Afraid they would talk. That Julius, in a rage with the boys and keen to protect his investment in Lady Naylor’s project, offered to waylay them and send them running back to the manor. All she needed from them was a week of silence. Two dead horses: it seemed a cheap enough price for revolution. It was a weak plan, really. She should, Lady Naylor now says, not have been surprised that Julius decided to alter it.

Thomas wrinkles his nose at this. “What was it we saw, exactly? That had you running scared? The ledger? The cage?”

But Charlie knows different. “We saw the blueprints. London’s new sewer system, though we did not recognise it for what it was. There was a name on it: Aschenstedt. I thought it was the name of a city. But it is a man. Aschen-Stadt. Ash-town. Taylor, Ashton and Sons. Renfrew would have seen it in a heartbeat.”

Lady Naylor sighs. “Stupid, isn’t it, this play on names? Dangerous. But he’s a silly man sometimes. There is a child in every genius.”

As she says it, a key turns in the flat’s front door and Sebastian Aschenstedt steps through, cheeks ruddy from the cold.