by Dan Vyleta
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Soon after, Thomas and Livia are spooked off the perch by a group of respectably dressed men traversing the market in an open landau marked with bold lettering and the symbol of the Crown. There are four of them, plus a driver in livery; each so obviously a gentleman with soft white skin and brushed moustaches, they might as well belong to a different breed of human altogether.
“Who are they?” Livia whispers in the alley to which they have fled. “Magistrates? Are they looking for us?”
Thomas reads the lettering on the side of the coach. TAYLOR, ASHTON AND SONS, ENGINEERING. His relief is immediate.
“No. They are sewage men.” He repeats to her the gist of Renfrew’s explanation, given in Oxford some weeks ago. “Liberals. Social pioneers. They want to clean up London, starting with the cesspits.” He shrugs. “That’s what Renfrew was preaching to us. That we should join their ranks. He did not tell us that they’re here because they’d like to have a go at corruption and can’t afford any cigarettes.”
“Perhaps we are doing them an injustice.” Livia watches the carriage disappear at the far end of the square. “They looked like honest men.”
“They looked clean, Livia. That’s all.” He shrugs, tugs at her elbow, walks back out into the street. “I’m famished. Let’s go find some food.”
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For the second time in two days Thomas makes an inventory of his belongings and tallies up what he might sell. His penknife. His jacket, only he’ll freeze to death if they don’t find better shelter for the night. The cigarettes Livia picked out of the dirt. They are said to be worth a fortune. But who needs to buy sin in London? It’s as free as the air they breathe.
The row of market stalls on the square only sells raw meat and vegetables, and fish so malodorous even the locals seem to avoid it. They choose a street at random, follow a pair of chimney sweeps who are either the most vicious of men or are simply trailing the dirt of their trade. A bakery draws them with its smell. The penknife buys them two loaves of coarse white bread and a dozen penny rolls. They gulp down the rolls while huddled into a doorway, until a gang of urchins sets on them, begging a loaf with such dirty-palmed insistence that they have no choice but to flee.
And so they drift, strangers in a strange place. Around them the city is working, talking, seeking pleasures. It is not, in some ways, unlike the bustle of a school corridor or of a holiday fair in a respectable village. Only here, every interaction—every word spoken, every coin that changes hands—hovers at the precipice of danger, and moods can shift with the gust of the wind. They walk through arguments; through drunkenness; through laughter; skirt a billow of raw lust, a couple kissing, her hands buried in his jacket, one naked hip bone sticking out into the cold. And at every step, Smoke calls to Thomas, a dozen shades of vice.
It happens like all accidents, suddenly and without warning. Perhaps it is no accident at all but an ambush, well-rehearsed and executed with aplomb. A group of running urchins splits them (the same group as before? another?), shoves Thomas up against the wall and Livia into the kissing couple. She loses her balance and all three fall hard into the street. And even as they fall the man’s hands slip into Livia’s pockets, searching them for coin. He discovers what Thomas did a day before; that the shapeless coat hides something softer than a boy’s frame; grins, his fallen lover’s skirts tangling around his legs, licks the length of Livia’s face, jumps up, is gone, dragging his woman behind him, her cheeks painted crimson in imitation of health. All this in a breath or two, while Thomas swims against the crowd, the last of their bread spoiling in a puddle by his feet. He reaches Livia, drops to his knees, finds her head twisted into dirt, the neck strangely tilted; scoops up her chin with outstretched palms, afraid. The moment they touch a jet of Smoke breaks out of her, dark green and dense. His own skin answers. They freeze, their faces conjoined by a twist of Smoke so dense they cannot see each other. It is Livia who recoils, shaking off his touch, kicking his legs in her haste to get away.
“Don’t ever touch me!” she shouts, her Smoke still oozing out of her in stark betrayal.
Then she runs down the street and out of sight.
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Thomas searches for her, afraid he will find her, afraid he will not. The streets all seem to smell of her, peaches and Smoke; he sees her face in every girl who rushes past on her business. At dusk he returns to the church steps. Livia is already there, sitting on the topmost step, her arms wrapped around her knees, exhaustion, shame marking her wan features. She scrubbed them raw to rid them of his Soot. Spasms of Smoke keep darting out of her mouth, sudden retchings of black, each abrupt and violent, shaking her frame from head to toe. He climbs past her and sits upwind, his skin bumpy with fresh squalls of fever. A cold drizzle is falling, taunting them with the kind of proximity they resorted to during the night, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. They ignore it and sit yards apart. Even so he is conscious of her Smoke; feels it reach across the gap and tug at his very bones. It is as though he were built to drink her sin.
London is a place where people touch.
Before, he had not understood the implications of this simple truth.
They sit and wait. Thomas’s fever has returned, makes a home within his joints; knuckles and knees tender with its ache. Down on the square, the market vendors are slowly packing up their wares, all but a dentist who remains at his stall, bent low over a lock-jawed patient, his tools a bucket and pliers scabby with old rust and paint. The tooth finally gives amongst an eruption of black savoured by both dentist and patient. Then blood is spat into the bucket and the dentist paid; the tooth thrown to a pack of passing dogs who fight over it with bristling furs.
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Half an hour later, Charlie’s angel reappears. It is very nearly dark. The man acts on Thomas like a magnet, drawing his anger, his confusion, his hope. He enters from the far side and walks the length of the market square. The last of the light catches him from the front and right, his shadow thrown behind and tilted at the top, where his chin dips to his shoulder. The longer Thomas watches him, the less he is certain that there is anything special about the man. He is as dirt- and Soot-stained as any other; more downtrodden than most. No halo illuminates his bluff and common features. Only: once again the man avoids all groups and conflagrations, walks solitary, never swayed by any cluster of people nor any cloud of drifting Smoke.
As the man draws nearer, Thomas makes a point of turning away, watching him only from the corner of his eyes. Livia, four steps to his side, has slumped into exhaustion; is listing sideways and forward, her head drooping to mirror the angel’s. At the bottom of the stairs, the man swerves and disappears into the alleyway by the side of the church. For a fraction of a moment Thomas hesitates, unwilling to rouse Livia, struck by the blankness of her resting features, the thinness of her sloping neck. Then he jumps over and taps her awake with a flick of his shoe.
“The angel’s back. Let’s follow him.”
She makes to rise then drops back onto the step. “You go. Someone has to be here. For Charlie.”
It strikes Thomas that Livia fears him more than she fears being left defenceless and alone.
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There is a second entrance to the church. Halfway down the alley a narrow staircase of some four or five steep steps climbs the church wall. At its top is a door so small one has to duck through. Thomas does not actually see the stranger go in. All he sees is the door close, four feet above the ground. A moment later he himself is pulling the crude handle. Inside, a deep gloom reigns, taking little heed of the cluster of candles that burns at one end of the nave. The church is in a dismal state. Its pews are gone, robbed for their wood perhaps, and the stone floor littered with mud and rubbish. A great wooden cross rises above the altar, plain unadorned lumber, painted white.
A figure is sitting on a little stool in a side chapel. The folding table next to him holds a candle, a jug, and a cup of wine. Thomas has stepped over to him before realising the figur
e is not the one he followed. The priest is a smaller man, weasel-faced, his hair a patch of stubble. He looks up at Thomas and fills a second cup. Thomas ignores the gesture that invites him to sit.
“I’m looking for the man who just came in here.”
It comes out gruff, commanding. He has no patience left, no interest in this stranger. The stranger, for his part, is looking closely at Thomas, as if measuring his intent. A pale face, his; Soot-rouged at the cheeks. Broken veins thread the nose.
“Is that so?”
“Where did he go? I want to talk to him.”
“Talk to me instead. That’s what I am here for.”
Thomas frowns at this, looks about himself, suspicious of the man’s collar, his jug of wine, the long smock of his office.
“Your church is a mess,” he says at length.
The priest shrugs. “What use does the Lord have for pretty windows?”
“And you are drunk.”
“It is a failing. But I am a kindly drunk, and it does not interfere with my faith.” He smiles. “How is it that it’s always laymen who are the biggest puritans? But sit, please, I beg you. Looking up at you is like talking to the bishop, when he’s in a mood.”
Thomas reluctantly lowers himself onto a stool.
“So you really are a priest?”
“Yes, my son.”
“And this church, it’s…open? I mean, people come here?”
“Oh yes. Do they fill the pews on Sunday? No. No pews, for one thing. Do I celebrate mass in shining vestments? No. They were stolen, actually, some months ago. But they come. Largely for that.” He points to the wine jar, then a few steps beyond it, to the plain cupboard of the confessional. “Are you that way inclined?”
Thomas shakes his head. “No, I only came in to…But I must go now, someone’s waiting outside.” He rises, keen now to get away from this priest. “I only came because I saw a man go in. An unusual man. He has a crick in his neck.”
“And what do you want with him, this unusual man?”
“Nothing. A friend saw him. Weeks ago. He saw him and decided he was an angel.” Thomas’s voice wavers between resentment and hope. “I suppose I just wanted to make sure that he was wrong.”
“An angel? What an odd idea. Wherever did he get it from?”
“The man does not smoke.”
“Ah! He’s a gentleman.”
“No. What my friend meant: the man does not smoke at all. It’s a trick, I think.”
“A trick?”
Thomas snorts, sudden anger in his breast. “You’re a churchman. I have been told you get issued sweets. A monthly ration, so you can lie to your congregation and pretend you are a decent man.”
The man smiles. It sits surprisingly well on his narrow, weasely face.
“Ah, sweets! Yes, the church sends me two every Christmas. Two! I don’t know by what method they assess the needs of every parish. I sell them for drink. A sin, though I have never smoked during the sale. Your angel is a fraud then, and you want to unmask him.”
“I don’t know what I want. He might be a spy. Someone pretending to be an ordinary citizen.”
It sounds stupid the moment it leaves his lips. The priest takes no heed.
“Yes, a fraud,” he mutters. “Or else, a miracle. You know what most people do with miracles? Shit on them. Burn them at the stake.” He looks up at Thomas again, a sober look, the narrow face dirty and shrewd. “Are you like that, my lad?”
Thomas shudders, light-headed with fever. Talking to this man feels dangerous and liberating all at once. It is the first time in months he has spoken to a stranger—an adult—and not immediately felt judged.
“My father killed a man,” he says hoarsely and is appalled at the note of pride. “I was told I’d end up doing the same.”
The priest drains his glass. “Ah. Well. In that case, let me talk to your angel. See whether he wants to be introduced.”
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They find him in the bell tower, cleaning the mildewed brass of the great bell.
“We ring it on holidays,” the priest explains as they labour up the narrow stairwell, “but it’s started to sound off-key. Constipated. It’s all the dirt clogging up the bell.
“He does odd jobs for me,” he carries on as they step onto a minuscule landing. “Grendel’s the name. Tobias Grendel. Gren, here’s a lad to meet you. Violent, he says. But I think he’s got a good enough soul. Anyway, I will leave you to it. Have a chat. Shout if you need refreshments. Cheerio.”
The priest’s steps retreat back down the stairwell. It leaves Thomas alone with the stranger. He finds himself at a loss for words.
The man called Grendel has continued working, rubbing the side of the great bell with a dirty cloth, all the while watching Thomas shyly, from behind lowered lids. The crick in his neck lends something abject to him. It forever condemns him to cower before his peers.
“What is it?” Grendel says after the silence has stretched to several seconds, his voice quiet and gentle, inflected with a slight, pleasant lilt. “Some sort of trouble?”
Thomas shakes his head, steps closer to him.
“You were there at the hanging,” he says at last, unsure where to start. “At the end of November. A woman was killed. The whole square was painted black.”
The man nods, a vague fear showing in his eyes.
“Yet you did not smoke.”
Thomas reaches out with his fingers, grabs hold of the man’s collar, turns it back, aware of his imposition, of the brutal rudeness of the act. The shirt is discoloured, Soot-stained, more black than white. But the inside is grey rather than black. All the shirt’s Soot clings to the fabric’s outside: city sin, absorbed from walls and air.
“Where do you get your sweets from?”
“Sweets,” the man repeats, shaking a little.
“Don’t play stupid now.”
“The priest gives them to me.”
“The priest told me he has two a year, and sells them for wine.”
“I found them,” the man cringes.
“Enough to keep you smokeless while a woman dangles from a rope?”
Thomas shakes his head, feels an emotion fill him that he fails to recognise. Something very close to fear. Awe perhaps: a vise around the heart. It releases some Smoke in him, an iodine plume that he does his best to spit in the stranger’s face. It drifts past his cheeks, flakes as Soot onto his shoulders and neck, and draws no change from his bluff and honest features.
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Livia finds them. The priest must have fetched her off her stoop. She is upset, angered, frightened by Thomas’s failure to return. But even so she does not step too close to him.
“Charlie didn’t come,” she hisses. “A beggar pestered me for money.” And then: “What are you doing to this man?”
As she says it, Thomas realises that his hand is still clutching the man’s collar. The fingers of his other hand are wet. He has just finished shoving them in the man’s mouth, hunting his cheeks for hidden objects.
“He does not smoke,” he says, shaken. He tries to explain it to Livia. A part of him wants to kneel before this man. Another is angry that he seems such a fool.
Livia listens to his account without moving a muscle. At last she says, speaking to the angel not Thomas, “You are afraid.”
Then she does something for which Thomas is unprepared. He did not suspect her capable of such grace; not here, not at this moment, her lips still jet-black with her Soot.
She steps past him and embraces the angel.
The man giggles nervously. And then he starts crying.
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He takes them home. Grendel. “Just like the monster,” he says. He says it happily because Livia is holding his hand.
It’s her doing, this hospitality of his. She has taken to him in a way Thomas cannot quite explain; has stepped into his presence as though into a shelter. One of the first things she has said to the man is: “I wish my father had met you. When he was younger
.” And also: “He tried to be like you, just like you.”
But Grendel had only flapped his hands in agitated denial until she desisted and started talking about their journey here and how they are waiting for a friend.
“Charlie,” she explains. “You will like Charlie. Everybody does.”
Her eyes are on Thomas as she says it, showing the only sign of anguish that will pass through them all evening.
Grendel lives a half-hour’s walk away, close by the river. Dark has long fallen and the road is treacherous. They are beset by beggars and prostitutes, by lamplighters with smoking torches, asking for tuppence, offering to see them home.
As they draw closer to the angel’s neighbourhood, the city smells grow worse, offal and mud, the stale, rotten waters of the Thames. The house he leads them to has burned and adds cold ash to the stink. It looks uninhabitable, but Grendel leads them through the gateway to a crooked, triangular courtyard, then beyond to a sagging building overhanging the riverbank. There are a whole series of low-beamed rooms, but two hold no glass in their windows, and one has a collapsed wall that is growing a thick layer of moss. For all that it is cosy enough, with a gaily painted kitchen table and an ancient stone hearth that Grendel immediately sets to lighting.
Before they have had a chance to throw off their awkwardness and begin a conversation, steps can be heard labouring up the staircase behind them. Grendel jumps to open the door, and in comes a woman in mud-smeared boots, carrying a bucket heavy with water so dirty it resembles mud. Her arms, too, are smeared with greenish-brown filth. She is a tall woman, so thin as to appear haggard, her fine bones framed by thinning grey hair. As she stares at them, unmoved by Grendel’s explanations, the bucket begins to boil, and dark claws break the surface, along with the spasmodic twitch of an armoured tail.
“What do you know,” says Thomas. “The angel has a wife. And she’s been fishing.”
She smiles at that, an unpractised, awkward, bashful smile, rinses a fistful of crayfish in a deep, lead-lined sink, and sets to cooking them for dinner.
That night, Grendel sits up with them and tells them he is sick.
