Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  Renfrew studies Charlie’s reaction to his explanation with detached amusement.

  “There is no need to pity Eleanor, Mr. Cooper. She is quite used to the contraption. And with the progress she has made in the past two years, she is now allowed to take it off at night. Though she chooses not to, much of the time.”

  He rises, walks Charlie over to the armchairs by the window, and pours out two glasses of water from a simple earthenware jug.

  “But enough of this. It’s time you reveal your great mystery. Here you come to me late one evening a week after you have disappeared. Dirty as a sparrow. And looking, if you will excuse the phrase, rather shifty. What happened to you? And why are you here?”

  ф

  Charlie tells him the easy parts first: how they were attacked, their coachman killed and Thomas shot; how they ran away through the woods and were hidden by “good people.” He does not explain why they did not contact anyone after the attack; nor does he mention the wild woman who helped them staunch the bleeding; nor yet the miners and the week they spent hidden in the mine. Charlie grows even more evasive when Renfrew asks him about his time at the Naylors’ and inquires particularly after the baron’s health. His skin feels itchy where he scrubbed it with Renfrew’s soap and he feels oddly naked, sitting under the bright glare of the gas lamp, without the protective covering of coal dust. When Renfrew presses him for further details in his calm, systematic manner, Charlie pushes forward in his chair and looks him square in the eye.

  “There is much I cannot tell you, Master Renfrew. I promised I would not.”

  His teacher narrows his eyes, hesitates, purses his lips. “Then why are you here, Mr. Cooper?”

  Now it is Charlie’s turn to hesitate, uncertain how to broach the topic. He finds refuge in a question.

  “You said there were other rumours. Before, when you first saw me. A Gypsy attack, you said, only there were other rumours, too. What did you mean?”

  Renfrew gets up, puts a kettle on the fireplace. Charlie is conscious of his thinking it over, calculating how much to reveal: just the same as Charlie. Another game of chess. Thomas would play it aggressively, threaten with his queen. But Charlie knows the value of positional play. And of patience.

  By the time Renfrew has resettled himself in his chair, he has evidently made up his mind to be frank with Charlie.

  “The rumours concern the bullets recovered from the horse carcasses,” he begins, his voice clear and firm, unadulterated by emotion. “An enterprising magistrate insisted on having them cut out. It’s quite unusual, as procedures go, and raised some eyebrows, amongst the Conservatives, you understand. An English magistrate, commanding the scalpel! It smelled of Continental methods.” Renfrew allows himself a smile. “Now, the bullets that were recovered are quite unusual. They are not of domestic manufacture and were shot by a rifle that must not exist on these shores, by the rules of the embargo. A very powerful rifle. Of course all this is hard to discuss out in the open. Officially, after all, we are not to know such weapons even exist. The report was circulated privately, which is to say it entered the world of whispers. I daresay half of England’s lords are kept awake at night, longing to own such a rifle.”

  “You are saying it’s not the sort of gun a poor person would carry.”

  “Precisely. Gypsies carry blunderbusses or something similarly crude. And you really did not see any trace of your attackers?”

  Charlie shakes his head, thinking. Then he takes a risk.

  “I have heard things,” he says. “About Smoke. I came here tonight to find out if they are true.”

  “Ah,” says Master Renfrew. “I rather thought it might be something of that kind.”

  Behind him, the kettle starts whistling and summons them to tea.

  ф

  It’s Charlie’s move. He cradles the teacup between both hands, lets the warmth spread through his fingers. He says, “There was a time before Smoke.”

  Renfrew smiles, counters. “I see you spoke to Baron Naylor. How is he? He no longer answers my letters, not for many a year. It is most vexing. Suspicious, even.

  “ ‘There was a time before Smoke.’ Yes, I remember his whispering those very words to me, and how shaken I was. Like a lightning bolt hitting me out of the clear blue sky. For three whole years I could think of nothing else.

  “And the lengths the baron went to prove it! Hunting for paintings, letters, diaries. It was quite an obsession with him. ‘None of these accounts mention snow,’ he whispered to me once. ‘It’s changed our climate: all the Smoke in the atmosphere, it’s blocking out the sun.’ At times I feared he had gone mad. Before long I believed it as surely as he. We would sit together and discuss it, night after night.”

  Renfrew chuckles at the memory, fondly, Charlie thinks, a man remembering his mentor and friend.

  “What if there was though, Mr. Cooper? A time before Smoke. If it came to us in the seventeenth century, as Baron Naylor posits, by land or by sea, from some far-flung corner of this world? What difference does it make?”

  Charlie surprises himself by the intensity of his answer. “It means we can fight Smoke. Defeat it.”

  Renfrew smiles. It’s a friendly smile but also condescending.

  “That’s just what the baron thought. He declared a war on Smoke. A crusade! And threw himself into a frenzy of research, on all manner of fronts: history, archaeology, anatomy. Travelled the world, collecting evidence. Cut open a dozen carcasses, pickling their livers.

  “And to what end? To defeat a symptom. The one thing that tells us we are sick. Foolishness. It’s the one thing he never understood. Yes, very well: Smoke has a history. But so does sin! Oh, it did not come to us two hundred and fifty years ago. It’s older than that! Much older. But not”—here Renfrew rises, stands towering over Charlie, steam rising from his china cup—“eternal!”

  Charlie looks up at him, takes refuge in ignorance, only half feigned.

  “I don’t understand,” he says.

  It sets Renfrew to pacing: three steps one way, three steps back. It’s a small cottage, really, and mould blooms richly on one whitewashed wall.

  “Remember your Bible, Mr. Cooper. The holy books of the Jews, what we call the Old Testament. Genesis: the tree, the snake, expulsion from Eden. What is this book if not the record of a memory, very ancient, preserved in the form of story? A primitive people making sense of a momentous event in their past. The memory of the coming of sin!

  “Sin is a disease. A germ, as some of the Continental scientists would say. Through time, it transformed, became visible to the plain eye, materialised externally. A startling event, no doubt, but one of no consequence; merely a change of symptomology. What we must work on—scientifically, that is, pooling all our knowledge, and not hiding behind an artificial wall like the embargo—is the eradication of the actual disease. I have a scheme, you see. We need to breed it out of society. First out of the gentry. And then…Until at last, we are all the same.”

  He stops in his tracks, looks at Charlie almost frightened, whether by the greatness of his vision or by his revealing too much to a pupil it is hard to say. But a shake of his head dispels his doubts and his pacing resumes.

  “Did you know, Mr. Cooper, that there is a scholar languishing in Her Majesty’s dungeons who posits human beings have developed—evolved—from more primitive organisms? In the course of the generations, we change, according to our environment, and the habits of our lives. Thus, over time, new species form out of old ones.

  “Have you seen pictures of giraffes, Mr. Cooper? No, of course not, it’s not allowed. Well, I have seen the real thing. In the African savannah, Baron Naylor at my side. They are animals, not unlike tall deer, but patterned in brown and yellow, with necks that are five or six feet long. Quite astonishing, really. Well, the theory posits that it comes from stretching: to eat the leaves in the trees. Generations of stretching. Like doing gymnastics. And each generation passes on a little of its strength. It is a slow proc
ess, of course, taking thousands of years. What, however, if we slaughter the weakest animals? The ones with the shortest necks? Those who lack the will to change? And devise a systematic programme of stretches for all the young, a programme that starts even while they are still in the cradle, so to speak? Imagine the acceleration, the speed of progress! And then transfer this to the moral theatre.” Renfrew pauses, lowers himself back into his chair, careful not to spill tea. “God is a scientist, Mr. Cooper. We are promised a Second Coming. A Republic of the Virtuous. But we have to work for it!”

  Above them, the ceiling creaks and Charlie pictures the little girl, bending awkwardly over a washbasin, trying to clean her body underneath the contraption of steel and leather that keeps her safe from herself. But perhaps it is merely the old wood, shifting in the cold of the night.

  When Charlie returns his attention to Renfrew, the man is watching him expectantly. It is almost as though their roles were reversed, Charlie the teacher and Renfrew the pupil, awaiting a verdict on his essay on political ethics. Another boy may have taken pleasure in the situation. For Charlie, it causes a sort of ache; proof that the world has fallen into disorder.

  “Then you have travelled far?” he sidesteps the look, along with its expectation. “We saw a picture, at the Naylors’ house, of you and the baron, standing on a foreign plain. I did not recognise the landscape. Flat, open, devoid of features. With a mile-high sky.”

  If Renfrew is put out of temper by Charlie’s change of topic he does not show it. There is no frown, no pursing of the lips. But whatever was boyish in his face dies away, leaves a harder man behind. Not hard, Charlie thinks. Righteous. Rational.

  It amounts to the same thing.

  “Yes, we travelled far and wide—it was still legal then. The Continent. All the colonies. And beyond. Beyond the pale of civilisation.”

  “I think I know what you were looking for. The birthplace of Smoke. Where it came from originally. The source.”

  Renfrew shakes his head. “An intelligent surmise, Mr. Cooper, but wrong. It’s what I thought when Baron Naylor first explained his theories to me, and asked me to travel with him. It was the summer after my first year at Cambridge. I was only a little older than yourself. The baron had invited me to stay with him in the splendour of his manor. We read, went out riding, hunting, boxed. Oh, he picked me well! A scholarship student. Poor; risen above my station. In thrall to his title as much as his intellect.”

  There is something scornful to the way he says it, something rigid about Renfrew’s posture. It takes Charlie a moment to understand it. Here he is, the scholarship student, instructing the English elites at the finest school in the country. No, not instructing. Sitting in judgement. He is not in thrall to titles anymore.

  “Our first journey was to Bulgaria. Gathering evidence, in old monastery libraries. But by the next summer the baron had a new idea. Something rather more daring. If Smoke only came to Europe in the seventeenth century, he reasoned, there might be places in the world it had not yet reached. Remote places, at the very edge of things. You see, he was looking for an innocent.”

  Charlie remembers the picture. A girl chained to a wall: twisting her head, away from the camera. A girl that grew up to save Thomas’s life.

  “You found one.”

  “We found a whole people. Or at least we heard about them. A people without Smoke. Living in tiny tribes in a land of eternal ice. Hunting whales from boats no bigger than a dinghy. Eating raw seal. The tribes to the south thought of them as demons. When they saw them, they turned and ran away.

  “We had a problem then. It wasn’t just that none of our guides would take us to them. There was also the question whether contact with us would infect the tribe. Imagine destroying the very specimen we had travelled so far to collect! We spent weeks debating the problem.

  “In the end fate decided the issue for us. A local hunter caught one in his trap. By accident, mind. He was hunting for bears. God knows what had driven her so far south. A girl of fourteen. He wouldn’t go near her, but he sold us her whereabouts. Twenty pounds sterling he wanted, in gold. The baron never even haggled.

  “Her leg was in a bad state by the time we reached her. Broken ankle, a thousand flies laying their eggs in the wound. But she was alive, awake. We watched her for a good hour: shouting, wailing, screaming at us. Not a hint of Smoke. It wasn’t just caution that kept us away. The absence of Smoke: we were not prepared for it. We were afraid to touch her.

  “But in the end we realised she would die if we didn’t. So we brought her to the camp. Most of our native guides fled at once, terrified by this monster in our midst. They took most of our provisions along. We set up a hospital in our only tent and slept outside.

  “The leg healed well. We ministered to the girl’s needs and otherwise kept our distance. She withdrew into herself, didn’t speak, hardly ate. Without guides or food there was no way of prolonging the expedition, so we took her home. To Baron Naylor’s manor. To observe her, and to conduct experiments.”

  “And then?”

  “Within three weeks of our return, she started to smoke. All through the journey we had isolated her. Nobody apart from the baron and I ever came closer than five yards to her, and we only approached her with the purest of intentions. And all the same she started showing.” Renfrew’s smile still carries the pain of their disappointment. “In any case, it was all a mistake. Chasing the Smoke. We should have realised right away that there was no virtue to the girl.” He pauses. “Baron Naylor wrote to me a few months later that the tests had been terminated. The girl had died.”

  “From lack of love,” Charlie murmurs.

  “Love is not a scientific entity.”

  Charlie ponders Renfrew’s answer and decides not to tell him that the girl is alive and roaming the woods of Nottinghamshire. She might have escaped. But in his heart Charlie wants to believe that it was Baron Naylor who released her.

  Renfrew, in any case, has run out of interest in the past. His focus is on the future.

  “I note you elected not to comment on my vision. A Republic of the Virtuous. I must admit that I had hoped for more enthusiasm from you. If there is to be reform, it will have to be carried by the young. People like yourself. But perhaps you are thinking of your family interest. And share your father’s Tory politics. Change does not come easily to the powerful.”

  Renfrew rises, steps close to Charlie, and pulls him up gently by his shoulder. Standing close, the man still smells of leather and horse.

  “There will come a time to choose between virtue and vice, Mr. Cooper. There will be an accounting. Ask yourself where all the money comes from. The rich of the land. Your own family, too, Mr. Cooper. An audit, before the eyes of God and men. Our currency needs to be as virtuous as our thoughts.”

  Charlie, unsure how to respond, simply nods. Renfrew appears to accept it as a sort of promise.

  “Very well. And now, Mr. Cooper, I must ask you to lay aside your bashfulness and provide me with a full account of everything that has happened to you since you left school for the holidays. Everything the baron told you. What you have seen of his latest experiments. Or his wife’s, if the rumours about his ill health are true. I will also need to know where you were the past week, including a full list of names of the people you spoke to. Above all you must tell me what you saw that made you hide from the Naylors—oh, don’t bother denying it, why else did you not alert them to your whereabouts, you must think them implicated in the attack! You must also tell me where Miss Naylor is, and Mr. Argyle. That boy is very vulnerable. And a potential danger to those around him. In short, I have to insist on the truth. As your teacher. And as a servant of England.”

  Charlie looks Renfrew in the eye. For all his insistence, there is no anger, no threat to him. He is stating Charlie’s duty, as he sees it. For a moment Charlie is tempted to oblige him. Pass on responsibility to this man who is so eminently responsible. Who watched a girl scream with pain for an hour. Who thought her
a “specimen” that must be collected, and chained her to a wall.

  “I am sorry, Master Renfrew. I cannot. I gave my word. As a gentleman.”

  Renfrew appears saddened by his answer.

  “Very well, Mr. Cooper. We must all follow our conscience.”

  He turns, fetches a lamp from the table, nods towards the stairs.

  “I suggest we retire. I will appeal to you again in the morning. Perhaps I can change your mind.”

  ф

  The guest room is small and plain but after a week of sleeping wrapped in filthy blankets the white feather bedding looks deliciously comfortable. Master Renfrew puts out a nightshirt for Charlie, and fills the washbowl with clean water, before leaving him to change in peace. For the briefest moment Charlie considers refusing the offer of hospitality and returning to the road. But it is snowing outside and even in the room the cold creeps into his bones. When he slips under the down duvet, such is the wave of well-being washing over him, he almost feels ashamed.

  Charlie is about to extinguish the lamp, when the door opens once more and Renfrew walks in, still in his travelling clothes, carrying a tray with a steaming mug of what proves to be hot milk and honey.

  “Here, Mr. Cooper, you look like you could use it. You must have lost half a stone since I saw you last.”

  He sits at Charlie’s bedside and watches him drink it before carrying the tray back out. There is to his solicitude something so touchingly maternal that Charlie drifts into sleep with the image of his mother in his head, singing softly, tucking his duvet up under his chin.

  CAESAR

  The man who tips me off wants to tell me about a workers’ union the miners have set up. The gold sits heavy in his hand. He can’t take his eyes off the coin. Already he has bitten it three times. I should have shoved it up my dog’s arse before I gave it to him. See whether he’d like the taste then. I am sure he would not mind.