Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“But why was he locked away?”

“Don’t let’s be naïve, Mr. Cooper. He was that which mustn’t exist. A virtuous man without pedigree. Monstrous, impossible, a threat to the realm.”

Livia listens to all this, hovering in the corridor outside, a relay station between the two boys. She gives Thomas a nod. He saunters across, into her mother’s room, quietly but without haste; leaves the door open so she can warn him if need be. Charlie, receiving Livia’s nod, hastens to carry on.

“There is something I don’t understand, Lady Naylor. You see, Grendel used to smoke. He told Livia and Thomas: that he smoked as a child. So what happened to him?”

“Impossible to say with certainty. Some kind of metabolic corruption, I suppose. A disease, one that attacks not just the Smoke glands but the whole of the affective system. It must have destroyed large parts of it. The part that governs behaviour we call sin.”

“Then isn’t that the answer? A disease that will make us good.”

Livia hears her mother grow agitated at this.

“It would not work, Mr. Cooper. The disease is clearly noninfectious. But even if we could bottle it somehow, and pass it on at will. .” She pauses, composes herself, leans forward towards Charlie. “Let me ask you this. Do you admire Mr. Grendel?”

“No. I pity him.”

“Why?”

Charlie answers at once. “He has no choice about being good.”

“Precisely. Imagine if a man like Grendel fell into the hands of Renfrew. How long before he’d start dreaming of a race of men just like him? It’s what he wants after all. A nation of choirboys. Of automata. And he’s a good scientist, your Dr. Renfrew. God knows what he might cook up in his laboratory.”

“Renfrew’s dead.”

“Dead? No, he isn’t. I asked Sebastian to make inquiries. Gravely injured, it is said. Stabbed and mauled by an intruder. There are rumours that it took ‘Continental medicine’ to save him.”

“I am glad he’s alive.”

Charlie says it slowly, after much thought, a note of wonder in his voice. Livia hears it and feels a pang of pride constrict her chest.

Then she turns away from him and watches Thomas search her mother’s room.

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The room is small and stuffy with spent air. Other than the heavy-framed bed, it holds a wardrobe, a washbowl, and a chair. Thomas stands still for a minute, lets his eyes wander. The wardrobe’s door is broken and stands open; it holds nothing but clothes, Lady Naylor’s hanging from hooks, the Grendels’ displaced onto the wardrobe floor. The bed is made; when Thomas runs his hand under the sheet he finds a negligee. A silver hairbrush is tucked beneath the pillow. Underneath the bed stands milady’s travelling valise, holding underclothes and a collection of French poetry. Its frontispiece shows a naked woman in the embrace of a swan.

The sewer maps are hidden between mattress and bed-base. Thomas unfolds them, one next to the other, slips the drafting paper out of his trousers. It is thin enough for the print to shimmer through. Copying it all would take hours. But he does not need all. He finds a line marking the river, works up from there, copying the main thoroughfares first of the “Ashton” plan, then traces the turnoffs marked only on the plan entitled “Aschenstedt.” Back and forth he works, quickly, his hands sure, listening with half an ear to the conversation outside. When he is satisfied with his copy and has replaced the plans, he looks over at Livia, sees her urging him to leave. But he isn’t done yet. Something else has caught his eye, a box, quite large but shoved to the corner of the bed frame in such a manner that its form merges with the bulk of the oaken leg. Thomas drops down onto his stomach and pictures Lady Naylor do the same, to deposit it there. The box is heavy as he slides it out; varnished wood reinforced in metal at the corners. The latches are not locked, open on a flask sunk in a satin-lined depression that precisely matches its proportions. He pulls it out, notices its weight: a squat, short-necked bottle made of tinted glass, holding perhaps as much as half a gallon. The stopper is buried with care but is mounted with a brass ring to aid its removal; the glass of the bottleneck seems inordinately thick. Thomas raises the jar, feels a viscous liquid shift inside. Livia gestures, but he won’t be hurried, casts around and finds a cup Lady Naylor has brought here from the kitchen, its bottom encrusted with a smudge of tea. It takes both hands to pour. The liquid moves sluggishly, then leaps out in a sudden gulp of purest black. Thomas holds it far from him, watches it cling to the cup, receiving his hand’s shudder and transmuting it into the ponderous slide of molten lead.

Quickly now, putting down the cup for a moment, he returns the bottle to its satin-cushioned, bottle-shaped hole, and the box to the back of the bed. At just this moment, the conversation outside hits a lull. Livia’s eyes warn him, swivel back to Charlie.

Thomas freezes and stands waiting, in his fist a liquid distillation of all the darkness in this world.

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Lady Naylor makes to rise. She mustn’t. And so Charlie detains her, with words of course, some truth he has been working towards, Livia can see it in the hot-eared earnestness of his face. It’s an answer to Renfrew perhaps, to that which he did to him, in the name of good morals and the future of the realm.

It may work on her mother just as well.

“The most difficult thing,” Charlie says, his voice rising half an octave, a boy nervous, confessing his soul, “the most difficult thing is to compromise. To sit in between, not leaning too far one way nor the other, not taking things to their conclusion. To be sensible. Boring.”

Livia’s mother scoffs at his words. But she resettles in her chair.

“Can it be that you are a coward, Mr. Cooper?”

Livia watches Charlie flush at this, swallow his Smoke. He is speaking to her, Livia, now, only to her, his words low and precise.

“Perhaps I am. A coward.”

“Oh, Charlie! It appears I have made you angry.”

“That’s why it is so hard to stand in the middle. Someone will always point their finger at you and mock.”

Her mother shrugs as though to concede the point, then props her chin up on her hands. “The problem is this, Mr. Cooper. Your compromise is nothing other than the status quo. It’s sitting on your hands and being decent. It will never change the world. But then, your parents would like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play stupid now, Mr. Cooper. You come from one of England’s great families, wouldn’t you say? By pedigree. But also by wealth. Of course, much of this wealth isn’t as ancient as all that. Two generations, no more. But wealth is like a spinster: it is impolite to inquire about its age. The truth is your family’s fortune has grown tenfold in less than thirty years, and along with it, its influence, its standing. It begs the question: how?”

All at once, Charlie’s face turns pale.

“That’s what Renfrew said to me,” he whispers. “‘Ask yourself where all the money comes from.’”

“And, Mr. Cooper, have you?”

He hesitates. “I don’t know.”

“Hazard a guess then.”

Again he hesitates. Then — eyes rising, committed to the truth — the word tumbles out of him: “Sweets.”

“B&S. Quite. Shares in the factory, up until recently. A royal licence to import the raw ingredients. Colonial holdings. Import licences. The Spencers bought up the monopoly of manufacture, of course, but the business as a whole is far too lucrative to leave to one family alone. Did you know your father was in Parliament yesterday, introducing a new bill? A grief-stricken father: he thinks you dead and blames some Irish migrants who were found with Julius’s gun. The Tory papers call it the New Isolationism. A return to purity, both moral and ethnic. Kick out all foreigners, all nonconformists. Chase off the Catholics and Jews. Limit trade to what we import ourselves from our colonies. No more foreign sin! A high-minded bill. And incidentally rather lucrative for those who hold an import licence. Your father can avenge you and line his pockets all in one quick swoop.”