Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  “Where?” she repeats at long last. “Where we all go in the end. Underground.”

  THORPE

  The news reaches us at four thirty-three by the tall Comtoise clock in the front parlour. A group of riders bring it, from town, their leader a magistrate, the others good citizens who appear to have nothing better to do. A “posse,” as one of them is heard to say. Keeping the queen’s peace.

  There is the news as it is presented to milady; and the news as it knocks on the kitchen door, carried there by a stable hand who talked to one of the townsmen’s valets while he rubbed down his horse. Same information, different words. We get the scenic version ’round the kitchen way: get the gore, the smells, words learned from penny dreadfuls. The horses “butch’red,” the coach “blown all to smithereens”; Mr. Price “slain,” his body “yawning,” belly open to the sun, its contents pilfered by crows. They left him there, this posse. Too heavy to carry; too bloody, too, no doubt, too smelly and messy to sling across one’s horse. A cart will be sent to pick him up.

  There is no trace of either of the boys.

  Milady, they say, takes it well. I am not there to see it: as luck will have it I am overseeing the annual cleaning of the silver, keeping the maids honest. Counting coffee spoons. I can picture her though, milady: pale and erect, making the man speak his thoughts in order. She has a serving girl carry refreshments out into the yard. I approve. We don’t want the men’s dust in our parlour, nor townsmen loitering in our halls.

  Livia is sent for, to be appraised of the news. It is thus that it emerges that she is missing. Her maid says she rose before dawn and put on her travelling clothes. She, the maid, thought nothing of it. Now she is in tears. I shall dismiss her in the morning.

  A search ensues. It transpires that a stable boy saw her leave the gate when it was still dark. He was relieving himself by the side of the shed. Did he wonder at her departure? The boy only shrugs. The ways of the gentry are a mystery to him. When I order him to be caned, he blanches and smokes. Ten licks of the rod will do him a world of good.

  By this time young Spencer has taken charge of the party and ridden out, to hunt down the Gypsies, as he put it. Indeed a band was seen a week ago, albeit ten leagues to the south. He takes his bitch along. It pads out of its kennel, sniffs its master, gives a howl that curdles the blood. When he pets her, a tear is seen in young Spencer’s eye and his hand is said to shake. Grief for the valet, the kitchen wench says dreamily. She has romantic notions about the boy, and has spoken before of the “grace and tightness of his breeches.” When she smokes it holds the aroma of burnt cloves.

  Dinnertime comes and passes. I have the cook prepare the meal as planned, but Lady Naylor does not please to come to table. It worries me. I search the house, not seeming to be searching for her. Someone should write a study of the butler’s walk: an instruction manual, for those fresh to the profession. A quiet tread, but never inaudible; speculative in its range, but never lacking in direction. A science of walking. I do believe I am its master.

  I do not find her at once. There is no light in her study; no movement in the boudoir; no gas lamp flicker from the keyhole of the laboratory. It is after some hesitation that I climb the stairs to the attic.

  I find milady with her husband. She has slipped into bed with him, her fuchsia gown a dash of colour in the gloom of the room. There she lies, close by his side, her face nuzzled into his chest. The baron’s shackles are fastened, but he is calm, his features slack, the breathing even. I stand in the door for several minutes, watching the scene. I do not know whether milady notices me. When I am certain that she does not require my services, I withdraw. There is wet in my eyes, I will admit. It is not often that we are witness to true love. I have seen it before, when she was younger and the baron the wisest in all the land. I was his valet then, his confidant. Already the guardian of this house.

  Since those days, there have been many kinds of work for me. Guard work and spy work. Nurse work and jailor work. Even spade work, once.

  I was always willing to serve.

  Mr. Spencer has his dog. I am the Naylors’. I shall say it with pride when I meet my Maker. There can be little doubt that I am heaven-bound. For a man of my class, I very rarely show.

  Then why the dreams that douse me in hot fire?

  IN DARKNESS

  It’s a good mile’s walk to the mouth of the pit. They walk by starlight, their faces tapestries of shadow. The air is so cold, each is conscious of walking through the others’ exhalations, white like frozen Smoke.

  The path leads past fields, then up onto the ridge of a hill, crested by the twisted shape of an oak. Beneath them, in the darkness of a narrow gully, spreads the mining village. Livia is unprepared for its squalor, the long rows of cottages pressed in on one another like the pleats of an accordion, deflated of air. A rubbish heap rises at the end of the gully, patrolled by a pack of curs. The whole village is suffused in the stink of boiled turnips.

  Mr. Mosley speaks without prompting. Perhaps he has noticed something in her face. Shock. Discomfort. A shudder at the thought of a life lived in the effluvium of yesterday’s lunch.

  “Newton Village,” he says. “Six hundred souls, and nine out of every ten work down the mine. Men, women, children. Living hand to mouth; in hock to the grocer, who cheats on his scales. The wife always says we are standoffish. Too good for the village. But it’s the village that don’t like us living too close. I’m the foreman, see, same as my father was. Posh folk, we are.” Mr. Mosley pauses, snorts. “It’s true what the fishwives say. Money makes you lonely.”

  It’s the longest Livia has heard him speak. But the night is too dark to make out his expression, and his voice too flat to guess at his emotion. He has not stopped while speaking, is striding on, his eyes on the path. Behind them Charlie has his hands full steadying Thomas who walks listing, white as a sheet. Jake and Francis have run ahead, to “make arrangements.” What these are, Livia does not know. On the horizon, visible against the sky, sits the dark shape of the pit tower, a latticed blackness cut into the glow of the night.

  As they draw closer, other objects step out of the shadow of the plain. There are sheds, chimneys, furnaces; a shingled hut leaking yellow light; a copper engine bristling with levers, gauges, ladders; and the roofed holes of the two pit shafts. It is within sight of the latter that Mr. Mosley stops them. A pile of timber wood, man-high, provides them with shelter, hiding them from prying eyes. Here, close to the pit, a high, singing whistle, as of blades drawn across mirrors, has displaced all other night sounds. It is a sound calculated to creep into skin and teeth, estrange them from the rest of the body. If one were condemned to live in its presence, Livia thinks, one should go mad. She casts around for its source. At her back, attended by Charlie, Thomas has collapsed to the ground, head and shoulders swaddled in blankets, the mouth distended, gasping for air.

  It takes Livia a while to connect the sound to the pit shafts, then to follow it up, along the path of two slender wires, to the whirling of two metal wheels, each crowning the giant scaffold of a pit tower that squats over its hole like a spider made of wood and steel. The wires run taut over these wheels and from there back down, towards two lean-tos at ten yards remove. Inside, great drums can be seen to spin like giant cloth spools, winding, unwinding wire at speeds that cancel out all sense of motion. Thus, for all the drums’ frenzy, there is an eerie stillness to the scene, the wires standing in the black pools of their shafts like fakirs’ ropes whose invisible movement carves slivers of sound out of the fabric of the night.

  They wait. Mutely, Charlie walks over to stand next to Livia; eases her tension with a quick, shy smile. Side by side they peer into the dark. At long last, a figure steps out of the hut ahead, its door a rectangle of gaslight. It is by the man’s movements that she recognises him as Jake. He crosses the thirty or forty yards separating them with long, efficient strides, never breaking into a run but moving just as fast. Already Mr. Mosley has pulled them out of
the shelter of the timber pile and is marching them towards the pit mouths. The night darkens as they step into the shadow of the bigger of the giant scaffolds. Between its splayed feet, framed by a kind of wooden porch, the pit mouth gapes, a lipless hole, red-bricked and smooth, emitting belly smells like a dyspeptic beast.

  Once more the big wheel spins around its axis; once more sounds the eerie song of the wire. Then a cage is spat out of the shaft, hangs flimsy from its thread above the blackness of the pit.

  “Quick now, get in.”

  Jake swings open the door and one by one they step over the lip of the pit, onto the rough floor of the cage. The contraption quivers under their step, feels insubstantial; its iron frame covered by protective netting, a tin roof above, along with the rusted hook that connects it to the wire. How many men might the cage hold? It feels full enough with just the five of them, Thomas sprawled across the floor, but a picture comes to her, unbidden, of twenty, thirty men, women, and children, squeezed shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, their faces pressed against the netting, like bait used to lure whatever lives down in the deep. A sickness rises in Livia. To fight it down, she concentrates on Mr. Mosley. The miner has donned a leather cap and hung an oddly shaped lamp from his buttonhole. It isn’t lit.

  “The operator won’t tell anyone?”

  Mr. Mosley shakes his head. “No, he’s one of us. Besides, he never saw you. Too dark. All it is, is an unscheduled descent.”

  He steps closer, makes as though to touch her, pat her on the shoulder. Then he remembers who she is. She wishes he hadn’t.

  “Hold steady now, miss.”

  The shaft swallows them. There is no other word for it. It might as well smack its lips. The light falls away, so fast her stomach rises to her throat, the sickness raging in her. Then the darkness becomes total, the sky a lost memory high above. For a timeless moment total stillness reigns as the cage falls cleanly in its shaft. Livia’s fear recedes, pushed aside by something else inhabiting her body, older yet than fear, and at comfort with this blank suspension in the void. Then a screech shakes their bones as the cage touches the guides that line its walls, only to return them to oblivion, a stillness so total it obliterates all thought. An eternity later, they pass a blaze of light. A bricked chamber opens before her, crowded with mine carts. Tied to the wall near the pit shaft, a pale horse stands like a ghost, its dark eyes mirroring her terror. It lasts the blink of an eye.

  They keep on falling.

  Water starts falling alongside them. Livia hears it before she feels it. First it is a patter against the roofing of the cage. Then it runs freely along the walls of the shaft, is cut up by the protective netting, its spray pinpricks of cold on the skin of her face.

  The cage stops. The arrest is so abrupt, she nearly loses her footing, bounces first against Charlie, then against Jake, whose hands, thrown out to steady her, recoil as though bitten no sooner has he touched her. Matches are struck, both he and Mr. Mosley light their lamps. Their dull light shows a bricked room, oblong and narrow, and closed off by a large metal gate. They swing open the cage door. A moment after Livia steps out, the cage is yanked away, upward, like a marionette banished from the stage. Behind them, the hole looms, too dark to offer any sense of depth. It might as well be filled with Soot.

  Charlie, pale, eyes torn open in the gloom, lingers longest at its lip.

  “How far does it go down?” Livia hears him ask of Jake who is helping Charlie with Thomas.

  “All the way? Don’t know. It’s a game we play, counting on the way down. One lad will sing out four, another six minutes forty-five. There’s no man here rich enough to own a watch.”

  He spits, pulls Charlie away from the lift shaft, points him inwards, towards the metal gate. “But this level here, we know the measure. Eight hundred and seventy feet. Quiet now, we must hurry. Here, help me with your friend.”

  ф

  The metal gate functions as a sort of air lock. Beyond lies the mine proper. Here, a different climate reigns, the air cold and clammy, tasting of mould. Only now and again a gust of warmer air catches them at intersections, furnace-hot, a relief to skin and lungs, but itself dead and heavy as lead.

  They walk along rail tracks. It takes a while for this to register with Livia, and then to grow into an image: the iron bulk of a steam engine bearing down at them from out of the dark. But as they continue walking in a drawn-out procession, nothing emerges from the tunnel ahead of them, no train, no colliers, no beam of light. The tunnel itself is man-high and sloping. Steel supports bend into Gothic arches at every fourth step: cathedral cloisters built from brick and rust. Low tunnels branch off from time to time, dark gates leading into further darkness. Strange sounds carry along these shafts, the groan of steel and timber, the rhythmic whistle of moving air. They walk steadily, their heads in a stoop: gallows birds with broken necks, patrolling the warren of their afterlives to the stench of cold rot. Eight hundred and seventy feet of rock pressing down on them.

  The train tracks end. Beyond, the tunnel narrows, the ceiling lowers. The steel supports give way to crooked timbers, the brick of the walls is replaced by sheer rock. And still they carry on, bent double now, humbled by the deadweight of the earth.

  At long last they reach a destination, or at any rate, an ending. The tunnel widens into a long chamber, then is blocked abruptly by a pile of boulders that fills it floor to ceiling. To their right, a deep alcove yawns, not four feet in height, but some thirty feet wide and ten or so deep. Its far wall is so black it swallows the light. With a start, Livia realises this is the face of the coal seam that has been hewn away by men who must have worked it lying on their sides. Now there is no sign of recent work. Instead, the beam of Mr. Mosley’s lamp catches a series of sheets that have been hung from the supporting timbers and divide the space into narrow niches, each furnished with some dirty straw. A strange noise permeates the collapsed room, a sort of slurping, as of air sucked greedily through a half-closed ventilation trap. The mine’s breathing has grown laboured, the air heavier. It sticks to the skin like Soot.

  “What happened to this place?” Livia asks.

  It’s Jake who answers. “What does it look like? Gas explosion. This whole area has been closed down. The seam runs into a fault line there.” He gestures at the rock. “Not worth the trouble.”

  “And that?” She points to the makeshift beds, each in its cubicle, filthy with coal dust. “Who comes here?”

  “Young couples. Sneaking an hour, during their shift. For privacy.” He shines his lamp in her face. “In winter mostly, when the woods are too cold.”

  She feels her skin blush in the lamplight.

  “That’s sordid.”

  “Is it now, miss? It’s hard, waiting, when you’re in love and don’t have the money to set up a house. But you wouldn’t know about that.” He snorts, turns the light away from her, and walks over to where rockslide meets wall at the opposite end of the grotto. “You’ll have to be quiet, in any case. You’ll be staying within forty feet of them.”

  She wants to ask what he means, when he suddenly disappears, swallowed up by the rock. Only his light remains visible, oddly refracted, painting shards of light onto the floor.

  “Go,” Mr. Mosley encourages her. “I will help Mr. Cooper with the sick lad. This will be hard going, this part.”

  ф

  There is a path that leads through the wall of rubble. No, not a path: a cut, so narrow she has to squeeze through sideways, and twisting in ways that suggest that the way forward is blocked off. But somehow it never is, each twist opening to another wedge of space, in between the fallen rock. The lamp ahead gives so little light that Livia has to feel herself forward with hands and feet. Her touch is slight. She fears dislodging the rubble, causing a rockslide. It is hard to shed the feeling that she is walking to her own grave.

  Then, abruptly, the rock maze ends and spills them into a low tunnel. Jake’s lamp finds a row of wooden crossbeams disappearing into the darkness, like
railway sleepers in a topsy-turvy world. They don’t follow the tunnel, however, but rather branch off left, where a narrow doorway opens on a large, square room, its low ceiling held aloft by twin rows of wooden supports. Livia’s eyes take in the tables and benches, the shelves with provisions and tools, and marvels at the sudden abundance of space. Fifty people could assemble here without feeling cramped. To one side stands a hulking structure not unlike a shelf but deeper and segmented into long rectangular boxes, coffin-sized. It takes her a moment to decipher its purpose.

  “What’s that for then? Don’t tell me it too is for trysts. Lovers don’t require bunk beds.” She is surprised at how cold her voice sounds. Unsympathetic. In judgement. “You are up to something. What is it?”

  When Jake does not answer at once, she walks over to the wall where a small wire cage has been screwed into the wall. It houses a group of limp canaries that press their beaks against the mesh. Beneath it stands a box, neatly stacked with a score of wooden clubs, each handle wrapped with rope for a better grip. A newspaper article comes to Livia’s mind, something she has read in the county circular, written by an Oxford don, worried for the body politic.

  “This is a meeting hall. You are organising the malcontents, is that it? A ‘workers’ union,’ that’s what you call it. A gang of thieves.”

  A look at Jake’s face tells her she is right. There is anger there, at the ease with which she has guessed his secret as much as at her tone. He walks over to her, holds up a hand, spreads out his fingers in front of her face like he wants to smother her. But the hand remains where it is, a five-spoked fan spread out thickly in the gloom.

  “By itself, each of these can be broken by a child.” He wriggles his fingers, then crumples the hand into a fist, the knuckles standing out white in the half-light. “Try breaking this, Miss Naylor!”