by Dan Vyleta
He wakes long after the cigarette is spent. She herself must have fallen asleep, for he has turned and is facing her now, his eyes aglitter in the dark. Livia finds that she is crying.
“I hate you. I hate everything you stand for. I hate what I find of you in myself.”
He is unmoved by her words, knows it all already, has read it in her Smoke.
“Hold me,” he says and she does, cheek flush with cheek, and the stump of his ear level with her mouth.
In the morning they roll apart without words and get ready to meet Charlie.
ф
It is their fourth morning in London. The twelfth of January, the day of her mother’s delivery. A day wet and raw. Charlie does not come. They stand on the market square morning to dusk, stamping their feet, cold, guilty, calling his name.
“The Tobacco Dock at midnight,” Livia says when she can no longer bear their silence. “Charlie knows we will go. He might meet us there.”
Thomas does not answer. He flinches when she reaches for his arm.
What frightens her most is just how easy it is to picture Charlie dead.
SAILOR
He hires us in La Rochelle. A whole ship’s crew, right off the deck of our previous berth, the Lorelei, which is going into dry dock for repairs. Captain van Huysmans: a Dutchman of good repute. He comes personally, a fisherman rows him over; shakes hands with our own captain then explains his terms. There isn’t much to it, a Channel crossing, there and back. Good money for a few days’ work. There’s only one condition: no landfall for us, we are to transfer straight onto the Haarlem. The men mutter, more than half of them decline. After weeks at sea we are all weary, longing for a bath, a drink, a woman, and it seems churlish somehow, secretive, to whisk us away within sight of the harbour. Those of us who agree transfer to the Haarlem in dinghies that very night. Herring rise all around us, feeding in the light of the three-quarter moon.
The Haarlem is a big steamer, built for the open ocean and its generous swell. The icy, crabby water of the Channel seems to suit it less. She lies twitchy in the waters. At dawn we run into a freezing mist and slow to a crawl. We can’t see a thing. The hands squat in corners, play cards and dice, then quickly put the games away when the captain draws near.
He is everywhere. If I was captain with a nice, cozy cabin, I would stay there the whole journey. Lie in bed in my fancy uniform and holler for the cabin boy to fetch more food. Not so Captain van Huysmans. All night, he has haunted the deck. Going by his complexion, he must have spent time in the tropics: the pallor of freshly peeled skin, still sunburned in the hairline. No doubt his arse is lily-white.
An odd duck, our captain. Restless, prone to nightmares when he sleeps. Fond of music, it would seem, of singing, but in some strange sour-toned manner that is hard to credit as joy. A well-behaved man, fastidious even. Most captains have one sort of manner when they deal with shipowners and quite another once they are at sea: a swear word here, a gust of Smoke there, a dirty joke. Not so van Huysmans. Stiff as a plank. A chubby man, but his heart is starched.
I complain to the cabin boy about it. Poppy. God knows how he came by the name. Poppy is a fellow of fourteen; this is his third voyage. A wide-eyed sort. The whole world is new to him. Looks up to all the sailors. I am a hero to him because at the age of forty-three I have managed to be promoted to the dizzying height of first mate.
“Our captain wants to be a gentleman,” I say to Poppy, watching van Huysmans mince around the deck.
“A gentleman!” Poppy replies enthusiastically, not catching my tone. “Imagine it! Clean sheets, nobody cussing you out or even raising their voices. No pushing and shoving. A soft world.”
I snort. “Always thinking before you speak. Inspecting your bedding in the morning. Keeping your farts in, lest they trigger something. A life lived with your arsehole clamped. Never letting rip.”
But the boy is adamant, forgets for a moment that I am his senior and prophet, his shipside god.
“What’s so great about coarseness and dirt?” he asks.
And when I don’t answer (for he’s hit upon a point, I suppose) he adds, angry now, wet in his eye: “They’ll go to heaven, sir. And you and I shan’t.”
ф
The first set of customs officials boards us two full leagues off the coast. His Majesty’s servants! And how thorough they are, how prim, fine gentlemen in worsted suits. Always in twos, watching each other’s virtue like hawks. They must submit reports, it is said, about each other’s behaviour. And all the same I would bet my pecker they are just as bent as that one-eyed thief that runs the port at La Rochelle. This is Britain, though. Here crookery has had a haircut, and its shirt cuffs are freshly ironed.
There are four checks in total. Each time the cargo is examined and reexamined. Seals are applied, paperwork lodged, fees paid. Each time our captain fawns and twitters; attempts small talk; offers drinks and is rebuffed. All captains are like this when it comes to customs.
But our captain is dripping with sweat.
“What are we smuggling then?” I ask when yet another pair has left the ship and we are steaming down the mouth of the Thames.
Captain van Huysmans starts.
“A joke, Captain, a joke. What’s our cargo? Spices? Flowers? Opium?”
He shakes his head, dries his forehead on a handkerchief.
“Machine parts.”
I whistle. “Special permits?”
“Of course.” Then he blanches, as though in aftershock to my comments, cocks his head like he’s heard the rumble of an approaching storm.
“If you will excuse me.”
And I swear he starts singing, shrilly and out of tune, hurrying to his cabin and trailing his handkerchief like a little white flag.
ф
In good weather, you can see London all the way from the mouth of the Thames. Not a plume, exactly, more like a dark mist. Some of it is the factory chimneys, though the mist is darkest near the ground. Poppy stands next to me at the railing, staring at the mist ahead. I can see him make the sign of the cross.
He blushes when I laugh.
“Is it like they say it is?” he asks me shyly. “Gomorrah? A den of thieves?”
“It’s a city. The biggest in Europe.”
“But the Smoke.”
“It’s where the sinners live. The workers, the paupers. Good people live in the country. Bad people there.
“It’s like everywhere else,” I add a little later. “Only more so.”
ф
We head for the Tobacco Dock. There are cheers when the captain announces that the men are to take the night off. Even the cabin boy looks happy at the news. He is afraid of this Gomorrah, this den of thieves. But he wants to explore it too. I look forward to showing him around, talking some of his fear out of him, showing him that people are people, even here, when the captain takes me aside.
“Stay. I have special orders for you,” he announces quietly.
We haggle over it for the better part of an hour. Then the sum he names gets so large I begin to worry he will withdraw the offer. I am pleased, of course, but also afraid.
What grave felony must the man be up to if he is willing to pay a dozen gulden just for my standing around?
DELIVERY
“Do you think it’s midnight yet?”
“How would I know? I haven’t seen a single working clock in the entire city.” Thomas adds, thoughtfully: “They’ll have the time on the ship though, and nobody’s stirred.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“This is a steamer, built for the open sea. They need a clock to take readings. Otherwise it’d be impossible to navigate. And there is no way on and off other than that plank.”
“You know about boats.”
“Ships. I grew up near the sea. Hush now, the watchman is coming back.”
They fall silent and watch the man approach. His movements are easy to follow, even at a distance. He has lit a pipe and with every puff the tobacco
glows red in the darkness of the dock and reveals a fragment of his face, deep-lined, whiskered, a clean-shaven chin. He passes half a dozen steps from them, then turns and leaves behind the sweet smell of burnt vanilla. At his turn his heels squeak on the cobbles.
Rubber soles, thinks Thomas. He is from the ship.
At the far side of his round, the man stops, his pipe momentarily obscured by the back of his head. A moment later a sound can be heard, water hitting water. The dock lies so still that the noise travels through the dark. Then, his bladder empty, the man starts humming past the stem of his pipe. The melody that reaches them is unknown to Thomas; is lovelorn and sweet. After the second chorus, the man breaks off and resumes his round. The pool next to him lies flat, black, glassy: an absence of space, too Soot-soaked to reflect the occasional fragment of moonlight peeking through the clouds.
There are three such pools, rectangular in shape and connected to the Thames by deep, iron-gated locks. All three are gigantic. The largest might fit a score of cricket fields. The Tobacco Dock holds the smallest of the three basins, though it is still large enough to berth an East India steamer. All around the basin’s rim rises a city of warehouses, of workshops, cranes, ship parts, barrels, and bollards. It is a landscape built for machines, towering husks of metal, sweating rust. A propeller stands by the side of the dock, each blade bigger than a man and twisting around itself like a broken-necked shovel. If machines had religion, this should be their cross. It is not hard to imagine a creature nailed onto its blades.
On all sides the quay is secured by a high brick wall. There is only one gate. Approaching it—passing through the crowded piers of the Western Dock just as work was winding down, then hiding behind a row of barrels until all the stevedores were gone—Thomas and Livia had found its doors unlocked, the guard booths empty, their entry witnessed only by the hinges’ squeak. Thomas suspects that this is more than an oversight. The Western Dock does not admit foreign ships and security is light. But at the Tobacco Dock foreign custom is expected. Signs warn of trespass, and dense loops of a peculiarly spiky wire crown all the walls. Nonetheless the whole site stands abandoned, as though waiting for thieves. Someone has been paid off, the guards sent home, the dog kennels emptied for the night. All that remains is this one lone watchman. A careless fellow: thanks to the pipe, they spotted him as soon as they had passed through the gate. They have been playing hide-and-seek ever since.
It had been easy to identify the Haarlem. While the two other vessels tied up at the short end of the dock are little more than river barges, the ship by whose side they are cowering must be a hundred and fifty feet stern to prow. It reeks of the open sea. There are no waves in the basin but there must be a current of some sort, down deep. Periodically the ship will either tug at the ropes that secure it to the pier or lean on the padded barrels that ride between its flank and the wall: two types of groan, one taut and creaking, the other a patient grinding. They give texture to the night.
Close up to its side, it is hard to make out the ship’s details: a confusion of masts and chimneys; the angular contours of an iron hull, sitting low in the water. They made their way there running from cover to cover, the dock a plane of overlapping shadows, deep as wells; then hid by a cluster of crates stacked man-high on the quay. The edge of the basin is five feet from their hiding place, the hull another three feet beyond. Above their heads droops a flag it is too dark to identify. Beneath, the water is viscous with the oily weight of undissolved Soot.
The watchman finishes another round. When he turns, Livia rises from her crouch and stretches. The night is raw and the wait has invited the cold into their limbs.
“Is it possible they’ve unloaded it already?” she whispers. “It could be sitting right here, stacked on the quay.”
Thomas has asked himself the same question.
“Can’t be,” he decides at last. “If it is really all that valuable there would be a cordon of guards standing right next to it. Something else—have you noticed there isn’t any crew? The captain must have sent them all ashore. Apart from that one, unless that’s the captain himself. Whatever your mother is buying, it’s so secret even the sailors mustn’t know.”
Livia appears to consider this. It is so dark he cannot even guess at her features. And yet he would know her, just by the pattern of her breath.
“Tell me again what we know about this delivery.”
Thomas shrugs. “I never even saw the ledger. Charlie read it. Midnight, the twelfth of January. The Haarlem out of La Rochelle, under a Captain van Huysmans. ‘Collect in person and arrange for transport.’ Whatever it is, it cost a fortune. Your mother must have wagered her entire estate.”
“So she will come.”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. Depends what it is, I suppose. All we can do is wait.”
But as the minutes creep by, measured only by the watchman’s regular steps, waiting becomes more and more impossible. The cold is everywhere now, has crept through the ground and the soles of his shoes, up the inside of his thighs, and from there into his chest and back, his skin so goose-bumped it shies from contact with his clothes. Then, too, doubt has begun to tug at Thomas: that Lady Naylor won’t come after all or that they have the wrong ship; that a bargain is being struck right now, deep in the hold, and a rowing boat will paddle all answers away across the stillness of the inky pool.
He speaks only after he has made his decision. Anything else would be a waste of words.
“I’ll go the next time he turns away,” he says. “See, when he passes the hut over there. You wait here and observe.”
Immediately she reaches over to detain him. Her hand on his arm. How normal it seems today for her to touch him. The thought makes him angry.
He shakes himself loose.
“Where are you going?” she hisses, too loud for the silence of the dock, though the guard does not appear to hear.
“Aboard. See what I can find out.”
She does something with her head, forgetting that he cannot see her, not here in the shadows of the cargo. A shake, a frown? That little gesture she makes sometimes—the lower lip pushed forward, a shrug of the chin, moving right to left, her eyes narrowing to almonds, tan and hard? Perhaps she is worried for him. But her objection is reasoned, matter-of-fact.
“You don’t even know what you are looking for.”
“I do. ‘Arrange for transport.’ That means it’s big. And at the same time squirreled away someplace where it didn’t attract notice. Not from the sailors and not from customs.” He touches one of the wax seals that marks the boxes they are hiding behind. “I will know it when I see it.”
He withdraws his attention from her, counts the steps of the sailor. Not the captain, he has decided. It’s too cold for that, too mindless a task, the man too bored, too unconcerned with his duty. A mate, a trusted man, or one too well-paid to simply skip out. Trailing the smell of burnt vanilla. One hundred and three steps for a full round. Nineteen while he is behind the customs booth, if that’s what it is: hidden from sight. Nineteen leisurely steps. Thomas can reach the gangway in eight, cross it in three. All he will need to do is crouch behind the railing. A darkness melting into darkness. Theirs is a world of infinite depth.
He times it well and starts moving the moment the man disappears behind the booth. Halfway there he realises that his steps have an echo. He almost turns to shout at her, then reaches back and grabs her wrist. The plank has a spongy feel, creaks and vibrates underfoot. Passing this close, the hull comes into relief: rivets like pockmarks, adorned with barnacles, seaweed, rust. A tangy smell, thick in his mouth, not unlike blood.
They hit the floor as soon as they are across. Ice-cold iron against his cheek. The plank is still moving, a regular quiver, up and down, just audible in the still of the night. Wave physics, they learned about them in school: with pencil and paper, he could work out its amplitude. Pencil and paper—and a sliver of light. Beside him Livia
is the sound of her breath.
Thomas counts to fifty and nobody raises the alarm. One hundred and three steps. He counts to fifty more.
They crawl forward, reach the cabin wall, then the narrow space between two cabins, fore and aft. Two stairwells, each pointing downward, felt rather than seen. He picks aft on instinct. At the bottom, silence stretching ahead, Thomas can no longer contain his anger.
“You were supposed to wait!”
She inhales his Smoke like she is drinking him, spits back his anger.
“I am not yours to order around.”
There is something else in her breath, something roughly tender. It frightens Thomas, how well they speak without words.
ф
They make their way by touch. Thomas has a sense that the main holds should be down and aft, so down and aft they head. The corridors that lead them there are narrow enough to touch both walls with angled elbows. As they descend a second staircase, the quiet around them changes into something else, duller and heavier than before. They must have stepped below the waterline. At intervals a creak runs the length of the ship, urgent and pitiful, metal shifting in the cold.
They find a door. He recognises it by the heavy bar of its bolt. His hands locate the handle, the hinges, then, on a little shelf by the door’s side, a lamp and matches. Once they are through and have waited out the darkness with a dozen breaths, he dares light the lamp, the door shut and bolted behind his back. The eye flinches from the sudden light, then feasts on it. Steel engines, man-high, the swell of their sides hung with pressure meters as though with medals. A mound of coal ready for the shovelling. Levers, valves, some pairs of heavy leather gloves with greaves, dark with sweat and coal. Livia is about to speak but he shushes her, points to a cluster of pipes descending from the ceiling, each ending, face-high, in a fluted metal bell; a bouquet of trumpets.
“Speaking tubes,” he whispers, his mouth close to her ear. “To the bridge, the captain’s cabin, up to the deck.”
He bends his ear to the flaring bells. One carries a sound, rhythmic, as of fingers snapping at a distance. Confused, Thomas gestures to it. Livia’s ear proves better than his.
