Dan Vyleta - Smoke

Livia shakes her head, wondering what emotion her face has betrayed.

“It’s a good idea. Grendel is a kind man.”

“You know yourself he’s quite a lot more than that! He’s a scientific wonder. At another time. . but, alas, it isn’t possible just now.” He sighs, points at his prisoner’s door. “As it is, Mr. Grendel can make himself useful. I believe he reminds the child of his people at home. Though the resemblance is superficial. In any case, he will help calm the child. The boy is bewildered by Smoke, and I am afraid we smell of it, even when we are not showing.”

Livia’s heart sinks. “So you know.”

“About Grendel’s condition? Oh, yes. He told your mother last night.” Sebastian nods enthusiastically, a man delighted about every scientific riddle on this earth and frustrated only by his own lack of time. “We have given the boy a name. Mowgli. After a recent book, set in the Raj.”

“Mowgli.” Livia too has read it. A boy raised by wolves. The animals decide to send him to the human village so he will learn to control his Smoke. Her mother had dismissed the book. She thought it sentimental; a lie. “How old is he?”

“Hard to say. I should think he was malnourished even before he embarked on his journey. Physically he could be as young as six. Eight, nine? A sullen child. Though his disposition is irrelevant for our purpose.”

Livia takes in the man’s smooth face and clever little hands playing with his umbrella; weighs his accent, the fact that he stole a child and condemned him to live encoffined in a mask. The question comes out before she can think better of it, artless and direct.

“Who are you exactly, Dr. Aschenstedt?”

This brings a grin to Sebastian’s face, boyish.

“Who am I? A scientist.”

“Mother says you are a genius.”

“I suppose I am.” He says it lightly, almost modestly. “I am also a criminal. False papers in my pocket, hiding behind an English name. Under my real name I am wanted in much of Europe. A threat to social order! They are not wrong. I’m a revolutionary, Miss Naylor. A terrorist! But I dislike bombs.” He laughs, boyish still, steps closer to Livia, and confides: “Your two gentlemen friends and I have something in common. Our alma mater. For all we know we have slept in the same beds. And listened to the same sermons. I must ask them some time, trade stories, don’t you think?”

Livia fights being drawn in by this man. A lifetime of being lied to by her elders. Charlie, chained to his teacher’s bed. A little boy stolen in the name of Theory. Emphatic lessons in suspicion.

And yet it isn’t easy.

“What are you up to, Dr. Aschenstedt? Why are you here?”

“Officially? Officially, I am Sebastian Herbert Ashton, engineer, overseeing the building of the sewers. My papers are British. Of course there is the matter of my accent. But then, the English refuse to believe that anyone can learn their tongue, not fluently, you see, so I must be a native after all, reared in some far-flung colony perhaps.” He gives a giggle, quite literally a giggle, the sort of sound some of the girls at school might make after someone has made a chancy remark. “And of course, half my men are foreign. The beauty of the embargo is that nobody receives adequate training here. It is hard to instruct engineers when the books are all censored. ‘Forbidden science,’ ‘immoral physics’—it really is quite funny! So we have Poles and Italians and Czechs and Russians. And Germans, of course. Grand engineers! Without them, London would sink in its stink. The English gentlemen on the project are largely there to supervise their morals and to make sure they finish on time. Good, earnest Liberals these gentlemen are, one and all. A great deal rides on the project, the whole of the Liberal Party’s reputation. A clean London, a moral London. Oh, it’s very ambitious in its way.” Again he giggles. “There you are. For a decade I was not allowed to enter on threat of death; now I get paid to come. But you must excuse me now, Miss Naylor. I am expected at work. Good-bye. Or rather: Au revoir. Auf Wiedersehen. ”

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Livia watches Sebastian leave and goes looking for Thomas. But it is Charlie she finds, standing by the open window of the room the boys share. She is tempted to leave at once. In the past few days she has come to terms with Thomas’s darkness. It’s Charlie’s kindness, his forgiveness, that are difficult to accept.

“ Auf Wiedersehen ,” he says, his eyes on the rain outside.

“You heard us talk.”

“Yes. ‘Until I see you again.’ Not ‘good-bye.’” He puts a hand into the downpour outside. “ Hundewetter , the Germans call this. Dog weather. That’s about all I remember from class. Isn’t it funny that they make us learn French and German but nobody’s allowed to travel? Nor to read any foreign books.”

He turns his face and she sees his earnest, honest face. It cuts her, not with guilt but with something more complex that has its own flavour of Smoke. Your heart leapt , she hears her mother’s words. Or perhaps some other organ.

“ Dog weather,” she says and annoys herself by the cool primness of her pronunciation. “‘Until I see you again.’ You are worried about Julius!” The realisation helps her move past her emotion. She looks out into the street. “Have you seen him?”

“Seen him? No. Only in a dream.” He hesitates, tilts his head with the thought. “I sometimes wonder whether I dreamt him even at Renfrew’s. The stuff of nightmares. And how he pleaded to be saved!” The next moment his eyes are back on hers. A naked gaze.

“You are looking for Thomas, aren’t you?”

It is she who blushes.

“Has he gone out?”

“He realised he needs a pencil and paper. To copy your mother’s plans. Will you believe the Grendels do not have a single pencil in the house? So he borrowed some money from Mrs. Grendel. Or stole it, maybe. When he gets back I am to distract your mother while he searches her room. He thinks she and I have rapport.” He hesitates, swallows the trace of accusation that surfaced in his last phrase. “She tried to seduce me last night, didn’t she? To her cause. I knew it but was seduced all the same. She is very clever.”

“Yes. She tried to seduce me, too.”

“Livia,” he continues, without transition. “Please. You and I, we need to—”

She turns to flee. “Not now, Charlie. Later,” she whispers. “I promise.”

But by this time she is already out the door.

When she walks past the room a little later she sees him standing by the window, his hands shoved out into the rain.

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The rain falls hard and perpendicular, unharried by wind. Thomas is soaking wet before he finds a stationer’s. It appears London is in little need of paper. He stops at a butcher’s to ask for some wrapping paper and a stub of pencil, but the man is so suspicious of his request and accent that he won’t sell him anything, not for all the money in the world. Annoyed, but happy too to be out and about, alone with his thoughts, Thomas ventures beyond the familiar streets between Grendel’s flat and the church into a part of town unknown to him. Everywhere there is the bustle of people: noise and mud, the air oddly clean, London’s emotion picked off by the rain.

Before long he reaches a complex of old, dilapidated buildings of such enormous size that they form a hamlet unto themselves. Like the house Grendel has made his home, more than half the structure appears to have burnt down, though here the smell of ashes has long been absorbed into the city’s stink. Despite the fire, a thousand people appear to be living in its medieval shell; have improvised walls with lumber and plaster-stiffened cloth; have opened stalls, a tailor, a carpenter, a quack selling tonics of laudanum and fermented bitters. Thomas walks the length of the building before realising what it used to house. WESTMINSTER CLOTHES AND RAGS, a painted sign proudly announces above the narrow entrance of a shop. A Jew is tending to it, wearing a fur hat, his sidelocks swinging limply in the rain.