Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  “Ahead, Charlie. Rapids. Quick now. Or we’ll sink.”

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  There is no way to stop it. As Charlie fights to get them out of the way of a large boulder, one oar snaps and next they know they are in a spin. The back of the boat hits another boulder, loosens a plank, the water rushing in thick and fast. Fortunately, the current has pushed them close to the grassy bank. Without discussing it with Charlie, Livia leaps, sinks to her knees in icy river and mud, takes hold of the prow and pulls it towards solid ground. They have to work fast. Thomas cannot move and the water is rising in the bottom of the boat. As they struggle with his deadweight, the entire side of the boat breaks open in a cloud of rot. They pull him through it, onto the bank, press anxious fingers into his pulse. Downriver, the water accelerates and cascades down a five-foot drop. Upriver, the sun has begun to dip. They may have put three or four miles between themselves and their pursuers.

  If they are, in fact, being pursued.

  A sound rouses her out of her thought. It is instantly familiar: cloth flapping in a breeze. Livia jumps up, rounds a row of bushes dense enough to be called a hedge. Behind them, she finds a washing line, shirts and sheets rising and falling with the breeze. Half the line is empty: a farmer is collecting clothes in her thick arms. The woman sees her the same moment; walks towards her with a leisurely roll, then catches sight of Thomas and Charlie.

  “Three of yous!” she shouts from afar. “Wet like newborn lambs. But where’s your boat?”

  Livia walks to intercept her. “Is there a village here? A doctor?”

  “A league that way.” She gestures. And adds, with a habitual weariness: “My husband, the old blockhead. Says he likes to live apart. So we do, God bless us.”

  The next instant she catches sight of Thomas’s face. Much of the poultice has washed away. Blood colours the collar of his shirt. The woman’s cheerfulness vanishes in an instant. All at once her manner is very brisk.

  “Is he alive? Then we better carry him inside.” Without waiting for an answer the woman shoves the laundry into Livia’s hands, then lifts up Thomas’s head and shoulders.

  “Well, jump to it, lad,” she barks at Charlie. “Take his feet.”

  Her cottage is not twenty yards away, but pressed into the side of a hillock in such a manner as to be almost invisible. Inside, a fire is burning in the stove. Kitchen and living room are one, the ceiling low and rutted with beams. They bed Thomas on the kitchen table. The woman fetches a bucket of water and some clean rags.

  “Rolled you in mud, did they?” she says to no one in particular as she begins to clean Thomas’s wound. “Moss, too. Well, I suppose it stopped your leaking. Nasty cut this, half the ear clean gone. And a nice deep furrow in yer skull, straight as a die, I could take a ruler to it. Nothing cracked though, not as far as I can see. Funny smell to the wound. Got yourself singed, did you? Played with guns, I take it. And they beat you, too, by the looks of it, a proper thrashing. Lord, will you look at these bruises! Black and blue you are, all the way down to the navel.” She has unbuttoned his shirt and begins wrapping a bandage around Thomas’s head. “Well, here you are, duck. Swaddled tight like a baby. If you have a rest and it don’t infect, well, you might just mend. But hello! Here you are yerself, our very own Lazarus. One eye open like a pirate at sea! Good day to you, sir, the pleasure is mine, only don’t you try to speak now, just lie back and rest.”

  Perhaps it is the pain that has woken him, perhaps it is her voice, deep and pleasant, but as Livia and Charlie bend over him, they do indeed find one eye startlingly open amongst the bandages that crisscross Thomas’s face. Removed from the context of his features, it looks less fierce than Livia remembers, and younger. Vulnerable. But then, he has just come back from the dead.

  Instantly, both Livia and Charlie start speaking, trying to reassure him.

  “You are safe,” Livia says. “You were shot but all is well now.”

  “You are safe,” Charlie says. “I will go and fetch help. There’s a village nearby—I’ll have someone ride to Lady Naylor.”

  Immediately, Thomas grows agitated, his limbs twitching, his lips moving within his bruises and the bandage.

  “Don’t, you must rest.”

  But Thomas ignores Charlie’s advice, keeps trying to raise himself, to speak. No sound will come. Livia accepts a glass of water from the farmer. Something has moved in the woman’s face. She has heard the name. Lady Naylor. The lady of the manor.

  It changes something for her.

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  The water helps Thomas. He takes a sip, coughs, licks his lips. They are so bloodless, they lie grey against his teeth. Again Thomas attempts to speak, again he fails. He has to try four, five more times before it bursts out of him, broken and insistent.

  “Tell no one.” And then again, louder, spit in his words. “Tell no one. Don’t trust.”

  Livia stares at his mutilated face. He’s not been awake a full minute. And already he’s making her angry.

  “Tell no one? He’s thinking that Mother—” She turns to Charlie. “It’s absurd!”

  Another word breaks out of Thomas, a syllable at a time.

  “Lab. Ra. Tree.”

  Livia’s temper rises in her like a dark cloud. All those years of Discipline, sent packing by a scattering of words.

  “He’s out of his mind. What—we sneaked into Mother’s laboratory and now she’s going to kill us? Do you think she put on her riding skirts and a gun and staked us out? Or perhaps she sent Thorpe, the old man.”

  “Or Julius.” It is Charlie who says it, beside her, quiet, his face open like a book.

  “He wouldn’t shoot his own valet. The man is like a father to him!”

  Her mouth is bitter with Smoke. Charlie does not respond. On the table, Thomas has slumped back into oblivion, one arm thrust into his open shirt, cradling his own chest. In the silence opened up by his faint, Livia feels herself drawn into Thomas’s doubts by her own lack of an explanation. To her side, the farmer stands, folding laundry. She has listened pretending not to listen. When Livia studies her face it is carefully neutral, the intelligence of her eyes locked away behind her half-drawn lids. It strikes Livia that this is a role at which the woman has had practice: acting dull when she’s expected to be. By her betters. The thought is new to Livia. She has lived around servants all her life but has never been in their quarters. Never in a farmhouse, never in a factory. It has not occurred to her that her whole life she has been watched by hooded eyes. Evaluated.

  “Let’s go outside,” she says to Charlie.

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  They argue quietly, five steps from the door. Her clothes remain wet and Livia shivers with cold.

  “It makes no sense,” she says again.

  “It might do. What if we saw something? In the laboratory. Something so important that it changes things. Something no one must know. No matter the price.” Charlie is calm, analytical, willing to forgive even his own murder. “Let’s think it through. The attack, I mean. Six shots, I make it. One after the other, but pretty quick. Shot at great distance. One gun or several? A marksman, in any case. If it were bandits, they’d want the horses alive. They are worth a great deal I should think.” He bites his lip. “If Thomas is right—if someone’s after us for what we know…then it’s best if nobody knows that we are here. No one at all.”

  Livia tries to dismiss his words, along with her own doubts. “Do you really think my mother would endanger her own daughter?”

  “No. But you weren’t supposed to be there. You climbed on in secret. Outside the gates.” His eyes find hers, hold them, gently and with wonder. “Why did you?”

  She wants to put him off with a non-answer, grow angry even, or prickly at least. But his face makes it difficult. It is open, like a book.

  “I wanted to see you off. My mother discouraged my coming to the station with you. We had words about it last night. I decided to ignore her request.” She hesitates before going on. “I wanted to come to the statio
n and say good-bye to you, Charlie. I even brought a handkerchief to wave.”

  “I have been wanting to kiss you.” He says it firmly, like it is simply so, a fact like the sunshine around them and the grass at their feet.

  Perhaps it is.

  They go inside, and the farmer gives them blankets and sits them near the fire. She has stripped the wet things off Thomas and covered him with a bulky feather bed. Livia wishes she had a chance to change out of her own wet clothes. After some hesitation, she slides down from the hard wooden chair and kneels close to the fire, hoping it will dry her out.

  Within minutes she is fast asleep.

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  When she wakes the men are there. There are three of them, wearing plain fustian suits. They stand around the kitchen table, looking down at Thomas. A father and two sons. The sons have the same build: tall, high-shouldered, loose-limbed, and rangy. Their father is shorter, bigger-boned, holds a pipe clenched between thick, cold-chapped lips. Together, standing elbow to elbow, hip to hip, they make the cottage feel very small.

  Livia rises quickly, coming out from beneath the blanket, her hands making sure she is decent. The movement wakes Charlie, slumped over in his chair. He leaps to his feet, sees the men, and immediately steps over to them.

  “My name is Charlie Cooper. We thank you for your hospitality.”

  He shakes hands in his simple, hearty way. The men seem bemused by the greeting but accept it in silence.

  Then their eyes turn to Livia.

  She hesitates, aware that it’s impossible to repeat Charlie’s gesture: it is unsuitable for ladies. The men don’t bow and it seems silly to curtsy. She can tell from their faces that they know who she is. The farmer has told them; she is at the stove now, watching the scene in silence. There is no way of putting the men at ease, not with the daughter of the man who owns the very land they stand on.

  Livia tries the truth instead.

  “I am Livia Naylor. We ran into trouble on the road this morning. Mr. Argyle here was wounded. At present we don’t know who…That is, we think it best if nobody knows where we are.” She pauses, straightens. “Will you help us?”

  The only answer she receives is a nod by the father. It is a thoughtful nod, only given after much contemplation. It seems to take the place of an oath.

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  Nobody asks them any questions until after dinner. The men, it seems, don’t like to speak. All Livia has learned from them is their names. The father is Bill Mosley. The eldest son, dark-haired, with thick, drooping moustaches, is called Jake. His brother, Francis, is lighter haired and finer featured. He appears to be entirely mute. The farmer herself is called Janet and will not stand for Mrs. Mosley, as she thrice repeats. She alone is chatting away, working at the cooker.

  “My men,” she explains in passing, “are miners, all three of them.”

  The moment she says it Livia sees the black crescents that mark the fingertips at the edge of their nails; the black dust that has grown into their skin at the knuckles and dyed them blue. Other than that they are scrubbed scrupulously clean.

  Dinner is a hearty affair of potato and cabbage soup, some rashers of bacon, and a tin-loaf of coarse brown bread. They have shifted Thomas from the table to a bed at the back of the cottage. Charlie gets up every few minutes to check on his friend.

  “He’s awake. I’ll try to feed him some soup.”

  Mrs. Mosley goes with him. It leaves Livia alone with the three men.

  She watches them eat. The father is already done and sits fingering his pipe. The quiet one spoons his soup with an abstracted air, turned inward, smiling to himself. His brother is busy buttering his bread with a haste bordering on anger, as though the loaf is his personal enemy and needs to be cowed. All the while he is looking at Livia. It is not a friendly look.

  “Preacher came to the mine today, Mum,” he suddenly starts declaiming, slowly and emphatically, still looking at Livia though it is his mother, behind him, he purports to be addressing. “Caught us while we were washing. No chance of escape. Always the same song. ‘Smoking is sin. Don’t think because you can’t see it, down the mine, that it is less so. God’s eyes…’ And so on and so on.” He snorts, chews, swallows. “Smoking ain’t sin. It’s a weapon. Toffs use it to keep us down. Proves everything’s just as it should be, with them on top, smug like a bunch of dung beetles rolling their lunch.”

  It is his father who answers him, calmly, in his slow thoughtful manner, laying the pipe down next to his plate.

  “I don’t know, Jake, it ain’t as simple as that. Wish that it was. But it ain’t. Think of all them regular Smokers over in the village, the ones whose Smoke is full of hate. Collins, for one. Hazard. Lawrence. Old Jimmy Becket. Each of them a right little bugger. Liars, drunks, cheats. Might as well call it sin.”

  The son bristles at this, but respects his father too much to contradict him outright.

  “It don’t matter down below” is all he says. “You know it don’t.”

  “That’s true enough,” answers the father. “It don’t matter down below.” And then he turns to Livia, screws up one eye, and asks, firmly but not unkindly, “What do you think, miss, about all this?”

  She hesitates. Truth be told she is surprised: not only by the content of the words but by the fact that these people—farmers, miners—will discuss Smoke so readily, at the dinner table, wondering at its mystery. It had been, in her mind, an inquiry conducted only by her parents and their peers. By well-bred minds, as her teachers might have put it. By those who rule.

  “Smoke is the incarnation of sin,” she says at last with all the meekness she has bred in herself through long years of practice. “It’s a dark mark from God. But it may be that we have been too eager to use it as an excuse for the sufferings of sinners.”

  The eldest son snorts at this we. It excludes him and his whole family besides. But his brother, unspeaking, nods and attempts to spear a pickle. It eludes his knife point, jumps off the plate, rolls over the table leaving a trail of vinegar. On impulse, Livia picks it up and bites on it. It is so sharp it makes her eyes water; she coughs and coughs. Somehow it takes the tension out of the room. In the end even Jake is standing, laughing, slapping her back with the flat of his hand. Ten minutes later, their dinner finished, the men get up to walk to the village, have a pint at the pub.

  There is nothing to do but hope that they won’t talk about the gentlefolk they are hosting for the night.

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  They are back inside two hours. Mrs. Mosley remains busy in the kitchen, making preparations for the morrow. Livia is at her prayers. She would like to go to bed but does not know where. The cottage seems too small to hold them all. Charlie has nodded off on a chair, his face peaceful in sleep, his mouth fallen open around a half-formed smile. The men’s entrance wakes him. His first look darts to her, his second to Thomas. Making sure they are safe. It shouldn’t, but the sequence of those looks makes her flush with pleasure.

  “Back already?” Mrs. Mosley greets her men. “And sober, like Christian men should be.” But her husband and son do not take up her bantering. “What’s wrong?”

  “They’re the talk of the town,” Jake announces gruffly, jerking his head at Livia and Charlie. “Or their coach is, shot up on the high road. Fowler went to town this afternoon. Says it’s all everyone’s talking about. Rumour says Lady Naylor herself was inside and has been abducted. And then Sutter pipes up that he found a boat, what was left of it, stuck on some rocks a league downriver. Said it had a crest. He didn’t give it much thought at the time. Now the whole village is wondering what connects them, coach and boat. And who was inside.”

  His father puts a hand on Jake’s arm. The gesture quiets him, makes him cede ground.

  “You cannot stay here,” Mr. Mosley announces after a pause. “Not if you don’t want to be found. The whole village is talking. And management always has its man in the pub. Someone’s sure to come and ask questions.” All of a sudden a scrap of Smoke escape
s him. He watches it rise, waves to disperse it. “Excuse me.”

  It is like he is apologising for breaking wind at the table. It is the only hint that he is agitated.

  “We will go,” says Charlie. “First thing in the morning.”

  The man wags his chin in thought.

  “No you won’t. That one”—he points to Thomas—“he can’t walk. Not for a while. And he’ll need a doctor, or a nurse. He ain’t out the woods yet.” He pauses, sets to lighting his pipe. “There is a place. Somewhere no one will see you. And even if they do, they won’t tell. That is, if you are serious. About disappearing for a while.”

  He looks to Charlie for an answer, but Charlie looks to her. Livia understands the look. It’s her mother who will worry herself sick over her daughter’s disappearance. And it’s her mother who might have tried to have them killed.

  It’s her decision.

  But if she gets it wrong, it’s Charlie and Thomas who will die.

  “When do we go?” she asks.

  Mr. Mosley’s expression does not change. He draws at his pipe, exhales. “Tonight. But not before two or thereabouts. In between shifts.”

  Before he can turn away, she walks over to him and looks him in the eye.

  “You don’t have to do this. Thank you that you do.”

  His face darkens. It takes her a second to comprehend it’s a blush.

  “It was Francis’s idea,” he says, pointing at his silent son. “On the way over. I wasn’t sure at first. But now I think he’s right.” He pauses, turns to his wife. “This one will need some woman things, I imagine. And some cutlery for the both of them, a jug or something of the kind, and any blankets we can spare.”

  Mrs. Mosley looks at him sourly. “Don’t you tell me what to do.”

  Her hands are already busy filling a basket. A flask goes in, two cups, and a pair of bloomers so large, Livia will have to gird them with a belt.

  “Where are they taking us?” she asks as she accepts the basket some hours later.

  The woman gives her a long, solemn look. Perhaps she thinks her men are making a mistake. Or else that Livia and Charlie are.