Dan Vyleta - Smoke

The post office is not ten yards from the building that used to be his nation’s Parliament. It surprises Thomas that such a thing exists at all. A guard in postal uniform is positioned outside, billy club in hand. Thomas is worried he will ask for some sort of identification papers, but all he requires of those who present themselves to him is proof of their solvency. Thomas holds up his palmful of coppers and goes inside.

Beyond the door there lies a little pocket of another world. The floors here are made from polished marble, the ceiling recently painted if no longer clean. Gentlemen in well-cut suits are reading newspapers or are queuing to see the postal clerk. Two ladies stand in hushed conversation, their expensive dresses as of yet unmarked by Soot; both wear veils to hide their faces and have footmen in attendance, their liveries hidden under bulky coats. A few dirty messenger boys scurry around but are careful not to address their betters. It’s like Thomas has stepped through a barn door and found a ballroom inside. For a moment he stands dead in his tracks, unsure what to do. Then he shrugs and joins the queue.

It is four deep and well-behaved. It startles him, this good behaviour, like silence after a protracted shout. Nobody grumbles, pushes, swears. They are like an unknown breed, peaceful, inoffensive: people who do not smell. Each shut up within his own intention, isolated and pure. Thomas stands amongst them and feels a pang of longing for this world of manners, the parlour-room peace of Discipline, predictable and without life. Just then a gloved hand touches his shoulder, firmly if without violence. It’s the doorman who has trailed him inside.

“Trade goes over there,” he says, turning the touch into a push, and moving Thomas towards a different clerk, in a separate cubbyhole, hidden far away to one side. Some workmen are queuing there, or rather are jostling, laughing, trading jokes.

Thomas moves over, listens to the men ahead and watches the gentry in their line, the well-drilled silence of the respectable. How many of them are in London on business, braving the city to look after their factories; how many for a holiday in the murk of sin? There must exist a tribe of locals earning a good living by acting as tour guides to the city’s charms.

“Next,” barks the clerk behind the counter.

An urchin, no older than seven, jumps the queue and gets into a shoving match with the man at the front.

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It’s Thomas’s turn. He has been skipped over twice, defended his place with an elbow, exchanged a fleck of boisterous Smoke with a half-drunk apprentice mailing a letter to his mam. Thomas asks for two pencils and five large sheets of drafting paper. The clerk grumbles but fetches them, the paper already lightly stained. While he is gone, Thomas’s gaze falls on four printed posters, nailed to the wall next to the man’s chair. Each holds the drawing of a face. Charlie is well-rendered, looking young and a little fatter in the cheek. Livia is unrecognisable, eyes lowered and shrinking into the shadow of a bonnet. He himself looks fierce, the jaw jutting, a thunder of brows. It’s Julius who is oddest, hung separately, and staring pale and startled from under a floppy fringe. The clerk notices Thomas’s stare; turns to follow his gaze, then rests his eyes on Thomas.

“Well then,” he mutters into Thomas’s sudden terror and takes some coins straight out of his palm. “‘Missing. No Reward.’ It’s not like I give a shit.”

He hands over the folded-in-half sheaves then chases Thomas with a wave of his hand. “Get, boy. Next.”

A man has elbowed past before Thomas has recovered enough to step aside.

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Outside, Thomas sprints a good half mile then stops for breath. The rain has turned to drizzle but even so the paper he purchased is already damp. He folds the sheets, shoves them down the waistband of his trousers, then stands breathing, elated by his escape. A beggar, his back propped up against a house front, sits watching him, one leg a calfless stump.

“You’re looking like the cat that made off with the cake,” he calls. “Spare some pennies, friend?”

Thomas laughs and strolls over to him.

“Anybody ever give you any?”

“Sure they do. The good people of London!”

“Really?” Thomas pictures it, this city of ruffians, doling out charity. “Why?”

The man shrugs. “They just do. Sentimental, I suppose. Got themselves a heart.”

Thomas accepts this answer and puts some pennies into the man’s cup. He crouches down so he and the beggar can speak face-to-face.

“If you could,” he asks, his mind wandering back to the twin queues at the post office, “if someone gave you the power. Would you magic away the Smoke? Stop it, I mean. Make it disappear.”

The beggar eyes him, greedy for another coin.

“Sure,” he shouts. “Stop it, I say! To hell with Smoke.”

“Really? You wouldn’t miss it?”

“Then don’t,” the man backtracks. “Keep it how it is. Nuttin’ wrong with it. Only yer undies chafe a little on yer privates.”

“And what do you think of rich folk?”

“The rich?” Reckless now, enjoying their game. “Hang ’em! Hang ’em high.”

“And the Queen?”

“Oh, I like ’er! Hang ’em but save the Queen!”

“How about love, then? Can it exist? Real love, here in the meanness of the city?”

“Sure it does. Got a baby girl. Clutch her to my chest so hard each morn, we smoulder like embers.”

“Here,” says Thomas, and gives him all his remaining coins. “You earned it. You may be the wisest man in the whole of London.”

“Sure I am. And in the whole Empire besides.”

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Thomas returns late-morning. A nod and a look is enough to draw Charlie out of his melancholy. The moment is as good as any: Mrs. Grendel is out bartering for food, Sebastian is building his sewer, and Grendel has gone to tell the priest he shan’t be coming to work for a few days.

Livia watches them assume their roles: the burglar and his assistant. A confidence man is what the newspapers would call him: someone who can charm the petticoats off a schoolma’am. The beauty about Charlie is that he does not even realise his own gift.

And indeed it proves easy. Charlie simply enters the kitchen, sits down on the side of the table that will ensure her mother’s face is turned away from the hallway and the door to her own room. It must be, Livia finds herself thinking, that her mother is bored. It cannot be easy being stuck here, waiting, surrounded by her stroppy daughter and her friends. She could do with a bath, a walk, a horse ride around the estate. But Lady Naylor is a gaoler now.

A gaoler cannot leave his gaol.

“You know about Grendel,” Charlie begins, frank and guileless in his guile. “Sebastian said he told you last night.”

“Yes, he did. I should have noticed it earlier, I suppose, but my mind was elsewhere.”

“Aren’t you shocked?”

“Oh, but I was! Who could have dreamed it? Though it is not entirely unprecedented.” She purses her lips, leans forward, closer to him. “Have you ever been to an asylum, Mr. Cooper? A hospital for the insane. I toured one some years ago, after my husband fell ill. These days they are constructed according to the Pentonville model. Individual cells, spread out along long, spoke-like corridors, so the inmates don’t infect each other with their Smoke. Once a week the orderlies go into each cell and scrape off the Soot, to sell it to the manufacturers of cigarettes. On the sly, of course, though the proprietors know and receive a cut. As for the inmates, some are like my husband. Others have nothing wrong with their intellectual faculties at all. They are criminals, or libertines, gentlemen who have flaunted their vice. And others yet — well, for a long time now there has existed a rumour. A whisper amongst scholars; a footnote in an article by an Oxford don. That there was a man, an inmate, down in the cellars of New Bethlem Hospital, who was just like your friend here. A freak of nature! He must have died in his cell.”