Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“Three, I think,” Thomas says. And then (weary, resentful, mustering the last of his will): “I’ll go.”

Charlie stops him before he can take a step. “You can’t. You are covered in blood. You’ll never make it past the doormen.” He hesitates, continues. “I will go. I can talk them into letting me through.”

Thomas sinks his fingers into Charlie’s sleeve. One sticks up funny. Hurt and fear constrict his voice.

“The last time you went off by yourself, Charlie, a man tied you to his bed and whispered about virtue. If anyone goes, I—”

“Neither of you can go,” Livia interrupts him. “It is a good hotel. A place for gentlefolk. And you both look like vagrants.”

They do not listen, caught up in their struggle over who can be trusted to risk his freedom. By the time they understand what she is saying she is halfway across the square. She turns once, to shake her head and forbid pursuit. It is Charlie who holds back Thomas. Rational, principled, disciplined Charlie. Trusting her. Treating her as his equal.

She is grateful and disgruntled all at once.

ф

The doormen never try to stop her. She raises the hem of her skirts and pushes past them, ignoring the tipping of their hats. From the corner of her eye she sees one of the watchers stir. She wonders whether there will be another one, lurking in the semidarkness of the reception hall. A concierge mans the high wooden desk. She waves him close, so she can avoid being overheard. Coquettish. And wonders did she learn it from Mother or from one of the girls in school; or is it simply in her blood?

“I am here to see Mr. Ashton,” she confides. “A surprise visit.”

The young man takes in her filthy hair and splendid dress.

“I am a family friend,” she adds.

The concierge appears reassured by this. Not the words, she realises, but the accent. The tones of the nobly born. The smell of sweet is on his breath.

“It is very late, miss.”

“Indeed. But his light is burning. I saw it from my trap.” She pauses, moves her face closer to his. “He will be most grateful that you let me through.”

The concierge shifts his sweet from one cheek to the other; locates a timbre at once flirtatious and shy.

“In that case, miss, go right on up.”

The man does not provide her with a room number, assuming perhaps that she has been there before and knows the way. But the hotel’s layout is easy enough to understand. She ascends to the second floor and then matches the door to the light they saw from down below. Room 14. Her knock is soft. Part of Mother’s outfit was a new pair of deerskin gloves.

Sebastian does not open the door at once. She can hear him shift inside, approach. A long hesitation, his breath curiously laboured. When he finally opens up and sees her, his tense face floods with relief.

“Miss Naylor!”

He pokes his head around the doorframe, squints down the corridor to see if she is hiding other callers, then yanks her in by the wrist. No sooner has he locked the door than he releases her, staggers, drops his weight into an armchair. Sebastian is wearing a paisley-patterned smoking jacket. Each of its pockets is bulging with a bottle.

“And here I thought they had finally grown sick of waiting and had come to take me away! Die Stunde der Wahrheit , ha! The pliers and the rack. But instead it’s you, wearing a dress!” He laughs, slips a hand onto one bottle, uncorks it, and takes a long swig.

“Dr. Aschenstedt. You are drunk!”

“Yes,” he beams. “Plum brandy, from Poland. And this here is laudanum. For later, you see. One cannot question a sleeping man.” He jumps up from his chair once more, strides over to her, confides. “You see, I am a revolutionary, Miss Naylor. A Robespierre! (Only better than Robespierre, because what a blockhead he turned out to be!) But alas, my dear — I am also a coward. Positively a coward. Lily-livered! It is almost shameful.” He giggles, stamps his feet. “But sit, my dear, sit. Here, why don’t you drink a little glass?”

It’s a two-room suite, fashionably furnished. The door to his bedroom stands open, the bedding is unmade. Its presence only feeds Livia’s feeling of disorientation. Not long ago this would have been unthinkable: standing in a hotel room with a man, a drunk, alone in the night. Even the week in the mine seems licit by comparison. That was an adventure. This is the stuff of dormitory whispers and banned French novels. It is, for girls of her station, the very centre of the Smoke. She picks her way through the books and papers that litter the floor and cautiously takes a seat. The fireplace is burning. Black husks of charts, letters, and notes are floating in the hot air above the flames.

Sebastian follows her gaze, jumps over to his desk, takes up a sheaf of papers and is about to feed them into the fire when something distracts him and he starts reading them instead. He catches himself, flushes, drops the papers on the floor.

“You see I have been busy. Hiding evidence! In case. . but of course, what does it matter now? Still, you never know. .” He stoops, picks up the papers once more but again fails to place them on the fire. “The trouble is, these records are precious. Letters, articles, drafts of learned essays. The next frontier of science! Besides, they’ve already searched the room. The hotel porter let them in, the swine. No man’s a hero to his valet, eh?”

He mutters to himself, totters, then looks over at her with sudden interest. “What about you though, Miss Naylor? What in the devil’s name are you doing here?”

Livia has her lie prepared; practised it on the way up the stairs and readied it for the moment he opened the door. Then Sebastian scattered it with his drunken antics. Now the words come haltingly and are belied by a blush.

“I’m afraid things have gone wrong, Dr. Aschenstedt. Mother has been arrested and you are being watched. We have Mowgli. You must tell me where to take him. It is our only chance.”

He blinks, suppresses a burp, dismisses her words with a flap of his hand.

“You are lying, of course. Your mother left with Mowgli and you are trying to follow her.” He drops back into the armchair, happy as a clam, leans over to her, grows avuncular, then sentimental, all in the space of three breaths. “But there is something else, is there? You look aggrieved. Wie ein Häufchen Elend . ‘Like a little pile of gloom.’ Come now, you must tell me.”

“Julius,” Livia finds herself saying. “He found us. There was a fight.”

Before she knows it, she has given Sebastian an account, her voice raw with the horror over the thing Julius had become. Sebastian listens intently, his hands wrapped around one of his bottles, pale and fretting now. When she is done, he shakes himself like a man wishing to shake off his doubt.

“A dark angel, you say,” he mutters even though Livia used no such phrase. “Indeed! He’s been imbibing our Soot! And did you know he stole it from us, the rogue? But then, we were all of us rogues. Your mother and I tricked him out of his money. And he ran off with half our precious harvest. Poetic justice, yes?” Without waiting for a response, Sebastian carries on, cryptically, incoherently. “What do you think, though — would you and I have taken to darkness as readily as that? You see, despite it all, I hold with Monsieur Rousseau, not dour Master Hobbes. We are born for the herd, not the jungle, eh?”

He sighs, kicks his slippers off like a schoolboy on vacation, and, content to have settled the point, slouches forward towards the fire in order to warm his stockinged feet.

ф

She pleads with him. “Explain it to me,” she pleads. “You owe us that much. What is Mother doing with the child?” When Sebastian does not answer Livia adds: “You lied to us! You said it would be three days before the infection took hold.”