Smoke

EXAMINATION

Thomas, Thomas! Wake up!”

The first thing he does upon waking is to search his nightshirt, his bedding for soiling. He does so quickly, mechanically, still more than half asleep: runs a palm over his skin feeling for the telltale grit of Soot.

Only then does he wonder what time it is, and who it is that has woken him.

It is Charlie, of course. His face keeps changing in the light of the candle he is holding. One moment it is steady, carved into plains of white and shadow. Then it buckles: eyes, nose, lips go roaming, rearrange themselves; and the light of the flame leaps into his reddish hair.

“Charlie? What time?”

“Late. Well, early. I heard a boy say it was two. Though the devil knows how he’d know.”

Charlie leans down to whisper. The candle swoops down with him, chasing shadows across the cot.

“It’s Julius. He says everyone is to assemble. In the toilets. Now.”

There is movement all around the dormitory. Pale figures stretching, rising, whispering in groups. Haste wrestles with reluctance. There are only a handful of candles; moonlight on the snow outside the windows, their panes milky with its ghostly glow. Soon the boys move in procession, out the twin doors. Nobody wants to be first, or last: not Charlie, not Thomas, not even the handful of boys who hold special favour. Best to be lost in the crowd.

ф

The bathroom tiles are cold under their feet. It’s a large room flanked by sinks, square white porcelain sinks, their surfaces crisscrossed by a spider’s web of fissures, too fine to be traced by your fingers and as though drawn with a fine pencil. Toilet stalls line the far end; beyond them, in a long, narrow annex, hulks a row of bathtubs, square and tiled with pale green tiles. The bathroom floor slopes, very slightly so, towards the middle. It’s something you learn when you spill water there. It forms rivulets, heads for the low ground. At the lowest point, the room’s centre, there is a drain, not large, scum-covered, its square metal grille half clogged with hair and lint.

This is where he has placed the chair. Julius. The boys of the lower school call him “Caesar,” pronouncing the C as a K like the Latin teacher taught them: Key-sar. It means emperor-designate. The one who will rule next. He alone is dressed in all the room: wears pressed trousers, his half boots polished to a shine. A waistcoat, but no jacket, to draw attention to the shirt: the sleeves so lily-white it startles the eye. When he moves his arms, the starched linen makes a sound, something between a rustle and a sort of clapping, depending on how quickly he moves. You can even hear how clean it is. And, by extension, he. No evil has touched him. Julius is the closest the school has to a saint.

He places both hands on the back of the chair and watches the ripple of fear spread through the boys. Thomas feels it, too. It’s not a matter of courage, he thinks, but a physical force. Like feeling the wind on your face on a stormy day. You cannot opt out.

“We shall have a lottery,” says Julius, not loudly, dispensing with a greeting, and one of his cronies, eighteen and bulky in the shoulders, steps forward with pencil stubs, a stack of paper squares, and a large gunny sack. The type you might use to carry potatoes in; to fashion a scarecrow’s face. The kind you slip over someone’s head when you lead them to their hanging. But that’s just being fanciful, Thomas tells himself, as he accepts a piece of paper and a pencil, and marks down his name. Thomas Argyle. He omits his title. The papers go back in the sack.

Thomas does not know how Julius cheats, but cheat he must. Perhaps he has marked the papers somehow, or perhaps he simply pretends to read off the name he has picked out of the sack and substitutes it for one of his choice. The only person to vouch for the proceedings is that same loyal crony who passed out the papers. Julius has turned up his shirt sleeve to rummage in the sack, as though he were digging for sin at the bottom of a murky pond. As though it were important not to get soiled.

The first name is a surprise. Collingwood. One of his own, a “guardian,” as they like to call themselves, a fellow prefect, who holds the keys to the dorm and the trust of the teachers. For a moment his choice confuses Thomas. Then he understands. It demonstrates justice, brings home the fact that nobody is above the rules. That there is no one who has nothing to fear.

“Collingwood,” Julius calls a second time, just that, no first name. That’s what they are to one another here. Your first name is for friends, to be used only in private. And for Julius, who is everybody’s friend.

He has to call a third time before Collingwood moves. It’s not that he’s planning to resist. He simply cannot believe his ears, looks about himself for explanation. But the boys around him have long peeled away; avoid his eyes as though even his gaze carries some disease. So he steps out at last, hugging himself around the chest: a tall, gawky lad, his breath always sour from catarrh.

Seated on the chair, his nightshirt hikes up to about mid-thigh. He tries a smile. Julius returns it easily, not showing any teeth, then turns away and walks the length of the room, boys parting for him like the Red Sea. There, perching on one of the bathtubs like some cast-iron crow, is a heavy trainman’s lantern, the hooded kind that shines only to one side. He opens it, lights a match, reaches inside to put its flame to the wick. A turn of a valve, the hiss of match meeting oil, and a focussed beam of rich, yellow light shoots forth, rectangular, like a window to another world.

When Julius takes the handle and walks it across, the swing of the lamp catches bodies, tense little faces, pulling them out of the gloom and isolating them from their peers. Thomas, too, feels the beam of the lamp on him and shrinks before it; sees his shadow dart from out his boots as though looking for a place to hide. It comes to him that Julius had no need to deposit the lamp so far from the chair, that everything — his walk across to it, the act of lighting, the stately return — is part of a performance planned well in advance. As is his drawing himself up to his full height to hang the lamp from a metal hook that just happens to be hammered into the ceiling there, two steps from the chair. Julius leaves a hand on it, angles it, so that Collingwood sits in a parallelogram of light, its edges drawn as though with a ruler. The light nearly strips him, seems to flood through the cotton of his nightshirt: one can make out the dark of his nipples and the bent struts of his narrow rib cage. Collingwood’s face is tense but calm. For a moment Thomas admires him, at whose hand he has so often been punished. It must take tremendous self-possession to bear the glare of that lamp. It is so bright, it seems to separate Collingwood’s skin from his freckles: they hover a quarter inch above his cheeks.

“Shall we begin then?”

It takes Collingwood a moment to collect his voice. He answers with the ritual phrase.

“Please, sir. Examine me.”

“You submit willingly?”

“I do. May my sins be revealed.”

“That they will and that they must. We thank the Smoke.”

“We thank the Smoke.”

And then, in chorus: “We thank the Smoke.”

Even Thomas mouths it, that hateful little phrase. He only learned it upon coming to the school, not six weeks ago, but already it has found time to grow into him, taken a leasehold on his tongue. It may be it can only be excised with a knife.

The interrogation begins. Julius’s voice rings clear in the large room. His is a pleasant voice, precise, rhythmic, sonorous. When he wants to, he can sound like your favourite uncle. Like your brother. Like a friend.

“You’re a prefect, Collingwood,” he begins. It is like Julius to begin there. Somewhere harmless. It makes you lower your guard. “How long has it been now since you earned the badge?”

“A year and a term, sir.”

“A year and a term. And you are pleased with the position?”

“I am pleased to serve.”

“You are pleased to serve. An excellent answer. You discharge your duties faithfully, I take it?”

“I endeavour to, sir.”

“And how do you think of those boys of whom you have been put in charge?”

“Think of them. Sir? With. . with fondness. With affection.”

“Yes, very good. Though they are perfect little brutes sometimes, are they not?”

“I trust, sir, they are as good as they can be, sir.”

“One ‘sir’ will do, Collingwood.”

Julius waits out the momentary titter that races through the room. His face, standing to the side of the lamp, is in darkness. All the world is reduced to one boy, one chair. When Collingwood fidgets, his nightshirt rides up higher on his legs and he has to pull it down with his hands. He does so clumsily. His hands have formed fists he has difficulty unclenching.

“But you like to punish them, don’t you, your little charges who are as good as they can be. Sometimes, you punish them quite severely, I believe. Just yesterday, many a boy here saw you administer a caning. Twenty-one strokes. Good ones, too. The school nurse had to treat the welts.”

Collingwood is sweating, but he is equal to this line of questioning.

“What I do,” he says, “I do only to improve them.” And adds, with a touch of boldness: “The punishment hurts me more than them.”

“You love them then, these boys.”

Collingwood hesitates. It is a strong word, love. Then settles on: “I love them like a father.”

“Very good.”

There has, thus far, been not so much as a wisp of Smoke. Collingwood’s shirt remains clean, his collar pristine, his armpits sweat-soaked but unsoiled. And yet there is not one amongst the boys simple enough to conclude that Collingwood has spoken the exact truth. The laws of Smoke are complex. Not every lie will trigger it. A fleeting thought of evil may pass unseen; a fib, an excuse, a piece of flattery. Sometimes you can lie quite outrageously and find yourself spared. Everyone knows the feeling, knows it from childhood: of being questioned by your mother, or your governess, by the house tutor; of articulating a lie, pushing it carefully past the threshold of your lips, your palms sweaty, your guts coiled into knots, your chin raised in false confidence; and then, the sweet balm of relief when the Smoke does not come. At other times, the Smoke is conjured by transgressions so trifling you are hardly aware of them at all: you reach for the biscuits before they’ve been offered; you smirk as a footman slips on the freshly polished stairs. Next thing you know its smell is in your nose. There is no more hateful smell in the world than the smell of Smoke.

But for now Collingwood remains free of it. He has passed his examination with flying colours. Only, he isn’t finished yet: Julius. Still he stands, angling the lamp. It is as though his voice pours out along with the light.

“Your brother died not long ago, did he not?”

The question takes Collingwood by surprise. For the first time he appears hurt rather than afraid. He answers quietly.

“Yes.”

“What was he called, your brother?”

“Luke.”

“Luke. Yes. I remember your telling me about him. How you played as little boys.” Julius watches Collingwood squirm. “Remind me. How did Luke die?”

There is no mistaking the resentment in the answer. Still it comes.

“He drowned. He fell out of a boat.”

“I see. A tragedy. How old was he?”

“Ten.”

“Ten? So young. How long to his eleventh birthday?”

“Three and a half weeks.”

“That is unfortunate.”

Collingwood nods and begins to cry.

Thomas understands the tears. Children are born in sin. Most babies turn black with Smoke and Soot within minutes of being born, and every birthing bed and every infant crib is surrounded by the dark plume of shame. The gentlefolk and all commoners who can afford it employ nurses and attendants to look after the child until Good begins to ripen in it, at age three or four. Sometimes they make a point of barring the child from all family intercourse until it is six or seven: from love, and so they will not grow to despise it. Smoke is tolerated to the eleventh year: the Holy Book itself suggests the threshold before which grace is only achieved by saints. If you die before eleven, you die in sin and go to hell. But (thank the Virgin) it is a lesser hell than those reserved for adults: a children’s hell. In picture books it is often depicted as a kind of hospital or school, with long, long corridors and endless rows of prim, white beds. Thomas owned such a book when he was growing up and drew in it: drew colour, people, strange walking birds that trailed long feathers like bridal trains. It is the tradition in many of the older families to hire a bond servant when a child turns ten whose only task is to guard the young one’s life. If the bond servant fails, he is put to death. One calls them rooks, these bond servants, for they dress all in black and often trail their own Smoke like a curse.

Julius has given the boys time to digest all this, the weight of little Luke’s death. That lamp whose beam he is steadying must be heavy in his hand, and hot. But he is patient.

“Was Luke alone? In the boat, I mean.”

Collingwood speaks but his answer is inaudible. His tears have ceased now. Even though he still wears his nightshirt, he has been stripped of something these last few minutes, some protective layer that we carry on our skins.

“Come, come, man. Out with it. Who was it? Who was in the boat with your ten-year-old brother when he drowned?”

But Collingwood has clamped up and no word will pass his trembling lips.

“It appears you have forgotten. I shall help you then. Is it not true that it was your father who was in the boat? And is it not also true that he was drunk and slept through the drowning, and only woke when the servants found the boat stuck amongst reeds in a riverbank three miles down the stream?”

“Yes,” says Collingwood, having refound his tongue. He almost shouts it, in fact, his voice an octave higher than it was but a minute ago.

“And,” asks Julius, matching the shout with a whisper, “do you love your father as the Holy Book instructs us to?”

Collingwood need not answer. The Smoke does it for him. One notices it at the shoulders first, and where the sweat has plastered the nightshirt to his skin: a black, viscous blot, no bigger than a penny. It’s like he’s bleeding ink. Then the first wisps of Smoke appear, stream from these dark little spots, leaving gritty Soot behind.

Collingwood hangs his head, and trembles.

“You must learn to master yourself,” says Julius, says it very gently, angling away the light. “You may go now. It is well.”

ф

There is no punishment, or rather none that Julius need administer. The stains on Collingwood’s shirt can be washed out only by soaking them for hours in concentrated lye. The only lye in the whole school is held by the school laundry and is tightly guarded. When he hands over his linen the next morning, as he must, the shirt will be identified by his monogram; his name taken down. The Master of Smoke and Ethics will have a conversation with Collingwood, not entirely dissimilar in nature to the proceedings of this late-night court. A report will be written and sent to his parents, and sanctions imposed upon him. Perhaps he will lose his badge and the privileges of a prefect; perhaps he will be sent to scrub the teachers’ lavatory, or spend his free time in the library cataloguing books. Perhaps he won’t be allowed to join the other schoolboys on the Trip. He shows no anger as he stands up trembling from the chair, and his look at Julius is like a dog’s that has been beaten. It wants to know if it’s still loved.

Thomas gazes after him longer than most as Collingwood slinks from the room. If he was free to go he would go after him; would sit with him, though not speak. He wouldn’t find the words. Charlie might: he’s good with words, and more than that. He has a special talent, a gentleness of the heart. It allows him to feel what others feel and speak to them frankly, as an equal. Thomas turns to his friend, but Charlie’s eyes are on Julius. More boys are to be examined tonight. A second piece of paper is about to be picked from the sack; a second name about to be read.

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They call him Hum-Slow, though his real name is Hounslow, the ninth Viscount of. He can’t be twelve yet if he’s a day. One of the youngest boarders, thin but chubby-faced, the way the young ones sometimes are. As he arrives at the chair and turns to sit down on it, his fear wrests wind from his bowels, long and protracted, like it will never stop. Imagine it: the endless growl of a fart, in a room full of schoolboys. There are some giggles yet hardly a jeer. One does not need Charlie’s talent to feel sorry for Hounslow. His body shakes so, he can barely manage his opening line.

“Please, sir. Examine me.”

His voice, not yet broken, tends towards a squeal. When he tries to “thank the Smoke,” he mangles it so badly that tears of frustration roll down his plump cheeks. Thomas starts forward, but Charlie stops him, gently, unobtrusively, takes hold of him by the arm. They exchange looks. Charlie has a peculiar way of looking: so simple, so honest, you forget to hide behind your own little lies. For what would Thomas do, if Charlie let him go? To interfere with the examination would be tantamount to rebelling against the Smoke itself. But Smoke is real: you can see and smell it every day, if you like. How do you rebel against a fact? And so Thomas must stay and watch Hounslow be thrown to the wolves. Though this wolf wears white and angles a lamp into which the child blinks blindly.

“Tell me,” Julius begins, “have you been a good boy?”

Hounslow shakes his head in terror, and a sound runs through the room very close to a moan.

But, strange to say, the little boy survives the procedure without a single wisp. He answers all questions, answers them slowly, though his tongue seems to have gone thick with fear, and sticks out of his mouth in between answers.

Does he love his teachers?

Yes, he does.

Love his peers, his books, his dormitory bed?

Oh yes, he does, he does, and school most of all.

What sins, then, weigh on his conscience?

Sins too great and numerous to name.

But name them he does, taking upon himself all the weight of guilt he can conceive of, until he is quite flattened. If he has failed his Latin test this Monday past, it is because he is “indolent” and “stupid.” If he has fought in the school yard with a classmate called Watson, it is because he, Hounslow, is “vicious” and a “little brute.” If he has wet his bed, it is because he is “vile” and has been so from birth, his mother says so herself. He is a criminal, a retrograde, a beast. “I am dirt,” Hounslow shouts, near-hysterical, “dirt,” and all the while his nightshirt stays clean, its little lace ruffles free of all Soot.

It’s done in under ten minutes. Julius lowers the lamp and kisses the boy’s head, right on the crown, like they have seen the bishop do with the school chaplain. And when he gets up, there is something more that shows in Hounslow’s face other than relief. A note of triumph. Today, this night, he has become one of the elect. He has abased himself, admitted to all he’s ever hidden in his conscience (and some more besides), and the Smoke has judged him pure. If he gives Watson a bloody nose on the morrow, it will be with the sense of administering justice. Julius looks after him with proud amusement. Then he digs within the sack. And reads a third name, the last one. It won’t be Cooper, Charlie’s last name. Charlie is a future earl, one of the highest in the land. The powerful, Thomas has been given to understand, are rarely chosen for examination.

“Argyle,” Julius reads, slowly and diligently, not without pleasure.

Argyle.

Thomas’s name.

It would be false to say he did not expect it.

As though split by an oar, the sea of boys now parts for him. Charlie’s hand squeezes his arm, then he’s walking. He’ll wonder at it later, this undue haste, the absence of any real will to resist, and will berate himself for cowardice. But it isn’t cowardice that shows on his face but the opposite: he’s itching to do battle. From the way he raises his chin into the light, you would have thought he was climbing into a boxing ring. Julius notices it too.

And smiles.

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The light is blinding. Behind it, the room ceases to exist. He cannot look to Charlie for guidance or assurance, for Charlie is lost in the darkness while he, Thomas, is bathed in yellow light. Even Julius, who stands not two steps away, is but a shadow from the world beyond.

There is something else Thomas realises. The light makes him feel naked. Not exposed, or vulnerable, but quite literally parted with his clothing, every stitch so flimsy it has turned into thin air. In itself it might not have meant that much to him. At home, he stripped many times to swim the river with his friends, and when he changes every night into his nightshirt, he does so with little thought to modesty. This is different though. The light singles him out. He is naked in a room full of people who are not. He is not prepared for how angry it makes him.

“Start,” he growls, because Julius doesn’t, he just stands there, waiting, steadying the lamp. “Go on. I submit to the exam. And thank the Smoke. Now: ask me a question.” The chair, Thomas realises, slopes under his bottom. His feet have to push into the ground to keep himself stable.

Julius greets his outburst calmly.

“Impatient, are we? Though you were tardy enough about coming to school. And are slow enough about learning your lessons.”

He unhooks the lamp and carries it closer, stands over him, bathing him in the beam.

“You know,” Julius mouths, so quietly only Thomas can hear, “I think I can see your Smoke even now. Steaming out of every little pore. It’s disgusting.

“But if you are so very impatient,” he goes on, louder again, his orator’s voice self-possessed and supple, “very well. I will make it easy for you. Your examination will be a single question. Does that suit you?”

Thomas nods, bracing himself, like you do when you expect to be punched. It is Charlie who later explains to him that it is better to unclench, absorb the hit like water.

“Go ahead, then. Ask.”

“Well, well.”

Julius makes to speak, stops, interrupts himself; turns the lamp around for a brief moment and lets its beam dance over the faces of the boys. Thomas sees Charlie for half a second; not long enough to read his expression. Then the beam is back in his eyes.

“You see,” Julius resumes, “the question I want to ask is not mine. It belongs to everyone. The whole school is asking it. Every boy who is in this room. Even the teachers have been asking it. Even your friend over there, though he mightn’t admit it. It is this: What is it that is so filthy about you, so unspeakably foul, that it made your parents ignore all custom and common sense and hide you away until your sixteenth year?

“Or,” he adds, more slowly yet, articulating every syllable, “is it that there is something vile, disgusting about them that they were afraid you’d disclose and spread?”

The question hits its mark: as an insult (to him, his family, the things he holds sacred) but more so as a truth, a spectre that has haunted half his life. It punctures his defences and goes to his core; wakes fear and anger and shame. The Smoke is there long before he can account for it. It is as though he is burning, burning alive without reason. Then he knows what it marks: he has hatred, murder in his heart.

Another boy would crumple with shame. Thomas leaps. Hits Julius, headfirst, sends the lamp crashing to the floor. Its flame, unextinguished, lights their struggle from one side. To the boys who are watching they are a single shadow projected ceiling-high against the wall, two-headed and monstrous. But to them, close to the lamp, everything is crystal clear. Thomas is smoking like a wet ember. His hands are fists, raining down on Julius. Insults stream from his mouth.

“You are nothing,” he keeps on saying, “nothing. A dog, a filthy dog, nothing.”

His fist hits Julius in the chin and something comes loose from his mouth, a tooth, apparently, a black, rotten molar that jumps from his lips like a coughed-up sweet. There is blood, too, and more Smoke, Smoke that pours from Julius’s skin, so black and pure it stoppers Thomas’s anger.

Immediately, Julius gains the upper hand. More than two years older, stronger, he flips the shorter boy. But rather than hitting him, he bears down with his whole body, embraces him, clings to him, rolls him into the lamp until it tips and smothers its own light. All at once Thomas realises what Julius is doing. He is rubbing his Smoke into Thomas, and Thomas’s into himself. Later, he will claim he was sullied by his attacker; that he himself remained pristine all through their fight. Now, in the darkness, he takes Thomas’s throat and squeezes it until Thomas thinks that surely he must die.

Julius lets go, judiciously, the moment the other boys have stepped close enough to get a better picture. He gets up, wipes at his shirt, and makes a show of his composure. Thomas, crumpled, remains on the floor. Only Charlie bends down to him, soothes him, and helps him back to the dorm.

CHARLIE

There is just one thing you can do against Soot if you don’t have any lye and that’s to soak it in urine. It’s disgusting, I know, but there’s something in piss that makes it fade. And so Thomas and I sneak back into the bathroom later that night when everybody is gone, put Thomas’s shirt into one of the bathtubs (the one used by Julius when he deigns to bathe), drink pints upon pints of water from the tap, and take turns peeing on it. Destroying the shirt is out of the question. They’d know at once: all items of clothing are carefully catalogued. It’d get Thomas expelled without appeal.

I wish I could describe Thomas, capture him. He is neither tall nor short, neither stocky nor slight; his hair is neither curly nor entirely straight. But I am making him sound like a nonperson, when he is everything but. Thomas is someone you notice when he comes through the door. It’s a kind of intensity. Like he is walking around with a keg of gunpowder strapped to his chest. It’s in his face, partially. He looks at things, really looks. At people, too. Evaluates them. Not judging them exactly but rather taking them in for what they are; trying to see the truth of them. It is not something most people like. I think I may be his only friend here, and there are close to two hundred boys all told, though some live in a separate building across the yard and a handful are day students who come in from the village; rich burghers’ sons who are here for the schooling and not for the other stuff. The “moral education.” Burghers may smoke, once in a while. One does not expect better of them.

You’d think I’d hold it against Thomas. That his soul is bad. That, unless he reforms, he is bound for hell. It is true, after all. The Smoke does not lie. There is evil in him the way there are maggots in a cut of rotten meat. But you see, all that exists on one level somewhere, the level of adult reason and truths, where science lives, and theology, and the laws of the courts. But there is another level, one I have no name for, and on this other level, I am his friend. It’s as simple as that.

As for myself, when I look in a mirror I see someone tall and sort of angular; bony, my sister calls it. Red hair. Not ginger but a deep shade of copper, cropped very short. My skin is quite dark too. Some say I must have foreign blood, that hair and skin like that come from east of the Black Sea, where there are still tribes riding the endless steppe. It’s nonsense though, because my family is as English as they come. We’re an old family, actually, and rather grand. I mean very grand. There are pictures of Father going hunting with the Queen’s sons. But enough of this. Whether girls find me handsome or ugly you will have to ask them. I know I don’t like my nose very much — too big — and cannot get fat even if I eat nothing but pudding. I am hopeless at rugby but can run cross-country all day. Thomas says I am more than half deer. If so, he must be a badger. When the dogs come for him, he turns and shows his teeth. Unlike me, he does not know when to take to his heels.

We became friends very simply. He arrived in the last week of October. That’s unusual, of course. He was five weeks late for term. And then his age. Sixteen. There are transfers sometime, boys sent up from lesser schools who come here for “finishing” and to rub shoulders with the future leaders of the realm. But Thomas had not been to any other school. He was “home taught.” Nobody knew what to make of it. There was even some talk that it was illegal. Rumour had it, his parents fought his going off to school; resisted ever since he’d turned eleven. They’re poor folk, I think, though noble enough, and live in the far north of the dominion; an unruly land. The Crown’s arm reaches that far, but it does not have the same weight. And now he is here, this wild boy. Like something that’s been raised by foxes.

But he does not like to talk about himself. Even to me.

He arrived by himself: no parent to see him off, no sibling, not even a servant to help him carry his things. Climbed off the mail coach that had picked him up at the train station, in Oxford. A knapsack on his shoulders and a valise in each hand. That’s how I ran across him, in my free hour after lunch: him standing at the inner gate, chin raised, tired, listening to the porter who was talking at him in his coarse country tongue, shouting practically, asking him who he was.

“It’s the new boy,” I said. “They brought up a cot for him just yesterday. To the dormitory. I’ll take him, if you like.”

Thomas did not speak, not until we arrived and I had pointed out his bed to him. It was near the window, the least popular spot, for it meant sleeping in its draught. He put down his luggage, straightened, looked me over, and asked,

“What is it like here?”

I was about to give him some meaningless answer, something to the effect that he would feel right at home, never he worry. Then I noticed his expression. There was something in his face that said, Don’t mollycoddle me, don’t lie, don’t feed me any bull.

Or I’ll despise you forever.

So I gave him the truth.

“It’s like a prison,” I said. “Like a prison our parents pay for.”

He smiled at that and told me he was “Thomas.”

We have been friends ever since.

THE TRIP

They make him wait for his punishment.

It’s laundry day the next morning and, having no choice, Thomas throws the sodden, smelly shirt into the basket, along with the week’s underwear and bedclothes. The Soot stain has faded but not disappeared.

It is no consolation to Thomas that many a schoolboy adds his own stained clothes to the growing pile. Each transgression leaves behind its own type of Soot, and those versed in such matters can determine the severity of your crime just by studying the stain’s density and grit. This is why no classes in Smoke and Ethics are scheduled for laundry day: the master, Dr. Renfrew, spends his morning locked in his office, rooting through boys’ underclothes. The list of those found guilty of “Unclean Thoughts and Actions” is displayed in a glass cabinet before lunch, so that each schoolboy may learn what punishment has been levied on him. Two days of dining-hall service; three pages that have to be copied from the Second Book of Smoke; a public apology at school assembly. These, for minor transgressions. More serious offences require individual investigation. The boy in question will be called to the master’s study, to answer for his sins. There is a chair there, upholstered in leather, that is equipped with leather straps. The boys call it the dentist’s chair. No teeth are pulled, but the truth, Dr. Renfrew has been known to say, has to be dug up by the roots. For the most serious violations of Good Order even this procedure is seen to be insufficient. They require the calling of something referred to as a “tribunal.” So Thomas has heard. There has been no such case in the weeks since he’s been at school.

In class, Thomas sits distracted and is reprimanded when he cannot recite the four principles of Aristotle’s theory of causation. Another boy recites them with glib relish. He is not asked what the four principles mean, how they are used, or what good they may do; nor who this Aristotle was whose marble bust stands in the school hallway, near the portrait of Lord Shrewsbury, the school’s esteemed founder. And in general Thomas has found that the school is more interested in the outward form of things rather than their meaning; that learning is a matter of reciting names or dates or numbers: smartly, loudly, and with great conviction. He has proven, thus far, a very bad student.

At lunch, he hardly eats. He is sitting in the school refectory, which has the shape and general dimensions of a chapel and is dreadfully cold. December winds have pushed the snow into the windows. On the outside they are shrouded in dull white that saps the warmth from every ray of sun. On the inside, they bleed cold water from the edges of their metal frames. On the floor, the puddles refreeze and eat away at the unvarnished wood.

Lunch is a cut of hard gammon half hidden under a ladleful of lukewarm peas. Each bite tastes like mud to Thomas, and twice he bites down on the fork by accident, digging the prongs into his tongue. Halfway through the meal Charlie spots him and joins him at the table. One of the teachers held him up after class. Charlie waits until the skinny little boy on service duty has condemned him to his own piece of leathery gammon with its attendant pile of yellowing peas.

“Anything?” he asks.

Thomas shakes his head. “Nothing. Look at them, though. They are all waiting for it. The pupils, and the teachers, too. All of them, impatient. Yearning for the bloody shoe to drop.”

He speaks resentfully and even as the last word leaves his lips, a wisp of Smoke curls from his nostril, too light and thin to leave behind Soot. Charlie disperses it with a quick wave. He is not worried. Hardly anyone gets through the day without a minor transgression, and there have been days when a teacher could be seen flapping at a thread of Smoke pouring from his tongue. The students tend to like these teachers better. In their imperfection they are closer to their own states of grace.

“They can’t send you home.” Charlie sounds like he believes it. “You’ve only just got here.”

“Maybe.”

“He’ll call you into his office, Renfrew will.”

“I suppose so.”

“You’ll have to tell him how it was. No holding back.”

And then Charlie says what’s been on Thomas’s mind all morning. What he hasn’t dared spell out.

“Otherwise he mightn’t let you join the Trip.”

Thomas nods and finds his mouth too dry to speak.

The Trip is what everyone has been talking about from the minute he arrived at school. It’s a unique event: there has been nothing like it in the school’s history for close to three decades. Rumour has it that it was Renfrew who had insisted on the Trip’s revival, and that he has faced fierce opposition, from the teachers, the parents, and from the Board of Governors itself. It’s hardly surprising. Most decent folk have never been to London. To take a group of schoolboys there is considered extraordinary, almost outlandish. There have been voices suggesting that it will put the whole school in danger. That the boys who go might never return.

Thomas still has trouble finding spit for words. “I want to go” is all he manages before breaking into a dry cough. It does not quite capture what he feels. He needs to see it. The prospect of the Trip is the only thing that’s kept him going these past few weeks. The moment he heard about it was the moment he decided there might be a meaning to his coming to school, a higher purpose. He’d be hard-pressed to say exactly what he expects from their visit to London. A revelation, perhaps. Something that will explain the world to him.

The cough runs its course, exhausts itself in a curse.

“That bastard Julius. I could kill the bloody turd.”

Charlie’s face is so honest it hurts.

“If you can’t go, Thomas, I won’t—”

Thomas cuts him short because a group of teachers are passing them. They are speaking animatedly, but drop their voices to a whisper the moment they draw level with the boys. Resentment flickers through Thomas’s features, and is followed by another exhalation of pale, thin Smoke. His tongue shows black for a second, but he swallows the Soot. You do that too often, your windpipe roughens and your tonsils start to darken, along with what’s behind. There is a glass jar in the science classroom with a lung so black it looks dipped in tar.

“Look at them whispering. They are enjoying this! Making me stew in my own fat. Why don’t they just get on with it? Put me in the bloody dock!”

But Charlie shakes his head, watches the teachers huddle near the door.

“I don’t think they’re talking about you, Thomas. There is something else going on. I noticed it earlier, when I went to the Porter’s Lodge, to see if I had any mail. Master Foybles was there, talking to Cruikshank, the porter. Making inquiries. They are waiting for something, some sort of delivery. And it’s important. Foybles sounded pretty desperate. He kept on saying, ‘You’ll let me know, won’t you? The minute it arrives.’ As though he were suspecting Cruikshank of hiding it away somewhere. Whatever it is.”

Thomas considers this. “Something they need for the Trip?”

“I don’t know,” says Charlie, thoughtful. “If it is, it better come today. If they have to postpone the Trip, they might end up cancelling it altogether.”

He cuts a piece of gammon like it’s wronged him somehow, spilling peas on all sides. Thomas curses and turns to his own lunch. Leaving food on your plate is against the rules and carries its own punishment, as though it is proof of some invisible type of Smoke.

ф

They send for him after vespers.

It’s Julius who comes for him, smirking, Thomas can see him all the way down the corridor, an extra flourish to his step. Julius does not say anything. Indeed he does not need to, a gesture is enough, a sort of wave of the hand that starts at the chest and ends up pointing outward, down the length of the hall. Ironic, like he’s a waiter, inviting Thomas to the table. And then Julius leads the way, walking very slowly now, his hands in his pockets, calling to some boys to open the door up ahead.

Making sure everyone knows.

Keeping pace with Julius, trapped behind that slow, slouching, no-haste-no-worry-in-the-world walk: it’s enough to make Thomas’s blood boil. He can taste Smoke on his breath and wonders if he’s showing. A dark gown covers his shirt but he will soon be asked to remove it, no doubt, and expose his linens. He attempts to calm himself, picks Soot out of his teeth with the tip of his tongue. Its bitterness makes him gag.

Julius slows down even further as they approach Dr. Renfrew’s door. The Master of Smoke and Ethics. It’s a new post, that, no older than a year. It used to be the Master of Religion was in charge of all the moral education, or so Charlie’s told him. When they arrive at the door, Julius pauses, smirks, and shakes his head. Then he walks on, faster now, gesturing for Thomas to keep pace.

It takes Thomas a minute to understand what’s just happened. He is not going to see Dr. Renfrew. There will be no dentist’s chair for him. It’s worse than that. They are heading to the headmaster’s quarters.

There’s to be a tribunal.

The word alone makes him feel sick.

ф

Julius does not knock when they reach the headmaster’s door. This confuses Thomas, until they’ve stepped through. It leads not to a room but to a sort of antechamber, like a waiting room at the doctor’s, two long benches on each side, and an icy draft from the row of windows on the right. They are high up here, in one of the school’s towers. Beneath them, the fields of Oxfordshire: a silver sea of frozen moonlight. Down by the brook, a tree rises from the snow-choked grounds, stripped of its leaves by winter. A willow, its drooping branches dipped into the river, their tips trapped in ice. Thomas turns away, shivering, and notices that the door back to the hallway is padded from the inside, to proof it against sound. To protect the headmaster from the school’s noise, no doubt. And so nobody can hear you scream.

Julius stands at the other door, knocks on it gently, with his head boy’s confidence and tact. It opens after only a moment: Renfrew’s face, framed by blond hair and beard.

“You are here, Argyle. Good. Sit.”

Then adds, as Julius turns to leave: “You too.”

Renfrew closes the door before Julius can ask why.

ф

They sit on opposite sides, Thomas with his back to the windows, Julius facing them, and the moon. It affords Thomas the opportunity to study him. Something has gone out of the lad, at this “You too.” Some of the swagger, the I-own-the-world certainty. He is chewing his cheek, it appears. A good-looking boy, Thomas is forced to admit, fair-skinned and dark-haired, his long thin whiskers more down than beard. Thomas waits until Julius’s eyes fall on him, then leans forward.

“Does it hurt? The tooth, I mean.”

Julius does not react at once, hides his emotions as he does so well.

“You are in trouble,” he says at last. “I am here only as a witness.”

Which is true in all likelihood, but nonetheless he looks a tad ruffled, Julius does, and Thomas cannot help gloating a little over his victory. They looked for the tooth late last night when Charlie and he were trying to clean his shirt, but it was gone. Julius must have picked it up himself. It would have made a nice souvenir. But that was then and now he is here, his hands all sweaty, casting around for bravado. Waiting. How much easier it would be to fight, even to lose: a fist in your face, a nosebleed, an ice bag on your aches. Thomas leans back, tries to unknot his shoulders. The moon is their only light source. When a cloud travels across it, the little waiting room is thrown into darkness. All he can see of Julius now is a shadow, black as Soot.

It must be a quarter of an hour before Renfrew calls them in. Rich, golden gaslight welcomes them; thick carpets that suck all sound from their steps. They are all there, all the masters. There are seven of them — Renfrew-Foybles-Harmon-Swinburne-Barlow-Winslow-Trout — but only three that count. Renfrew is tall and well-built, and still rather young. He wears his hair short, as well as his beard, and favours a dark, belted suit that seems to encase him from neck to ankle. A white silken scarf, worn tight at the throat, vouches for his virtue.

Trout is the headmaster. He is very fat and wears his trousers very high, so that the quantity of flesh between the top of his thighs and the waistband dwarfs the short sunken chest, adorned though it is with fine lace and ruffles. What he lacks in hair, Trout makes up for in whiskers. His button nose seems lost between the swell of his red cheeks.

Swinburne, finally: the Master of Religion. Where Renfrew is tall, Swinburne is towering, if twisted by age. He wears the cap and smock of his office. The little one sees of his face is mottled with broken veins, the shape and colour of thistles. A beard covers the rest, long and stringy.

Renfrew, Swinburne, Trout: each of them, it is said, entangled in affairs that reach from school to Parliament and Crown. Thomas has often thought of painting them. He is good with a brush. A triptych. He has not decided yet who belongs at the centre.

It’s Renfrew who bids them sit. He points to two chairs that have been pulled up into the middle of the room, making no distinction between them. Compared to the theatricality of Julius’s examination last night, the gesture is almost casual. The masters are standing in clusters, wearing worsted winter suits. Some are holding teacups; Foybles is munching a biscuit. Thomas sits. After a moment’s hesitation Julius follows suit.

“You know why you are here.”

It is a statement, not a question, and Renfrew turns even as he makes it, reaches into a basket, retrieves something. It affords Thomas another moment to look around the room. He sees a leather settee and a brass chandelier; stained-glass windows with scenes from the Scriptures, Saint George with his lance through the dragon’s throat; sees a painting of a fox hunt under a dappled sky; sees cabinets, and doors, and a sideboard with fine china; sees all this, but takes in little, his mind skittish, his skin tingling, nervous, afraid. When Renfrew turns back to them he is holding two shirts. He places one over the back of an unoccupied chair, spreads the other between his hands, displaying the Soot stain; runs his fingertips through it, tests its grit.

And launches into lecture.

“Smoke,” he says, “can have many colours. Often it is light and grey, almost white, with no more odour than a struck match. Then there is yellow Smoke, dense and wet like fog. Blue Smoke that smells acrid, like spoiled milk, and seems to disperse almost as soon as it has formed. Once in a while we witness black Smoke, oily and viscous; it will cling to anything it touches. The variations of texture, density, and shade have all been carefully described in the Four Books of Smoke: a taxonomy of forty-three varieties. It is more difficult to establish the precise cause for each type of Smoke. It is a question not only of the offence but of the offender. The thoroughly corrupt breed darker, denser Smoke. Once a person’s moral sickness is sufficiently advanced, all actions are coloured by its stain. Even the most innocent act will—”

“Sin, Master Renfrew.” It’s Swinburne who interrupts him. His voice, familiar from the thrice-weekly sermon, has a shrill intensity all its own. He sounds like the man who ate the boy who ran his fingernails down the blackboard. “It is sin that blackens the soul. Not sickness.”

Renfrew looks up, annoyed, but a glance from the headmaster bids him swallow his reply.

“Sin, then. A difference of nomenclature.” He pauses, collects his thought, digs his fingers into the shirt’s linen. “Smoke, in any case, is easy to read. It is the living, material manifestation of degeneracy. Of sin. Soot, on the other hand, well, that is a different matter. Soot is dead, inert. A spent symptom, and as such inscrutable. Oh, any fool can see how much there is and whether it is fine like sea sand or coarse as a crushed brick. But these are crude measures. It requires a more scientific approach”—here Renfrew smooths down his jacket—“to produce a more sophisticated analysis. I spent my morning bent over a microscope, studying samples from both shirts. There are certain solvents that can cancel the inertness of the substance and, so to speak, temporarily bring it back to life. A concentrated solution of Papaver fuliginosa richteria, heated to eighty-six degrees and infused with—”

Renfrew interrupts himself, his calm self-possession momentarily strained by excitement. He resumes at a different point and in a different voice, gentler, more intimate, drawing a step closer to the boys and speaking as though only to them.

“I say I spent the morning analysing these two shirts and I found something unusual. Something disconcerting. A type of Soot I have seen only once before. In a prison.”

He draws closer yet, wets his lips. His voice is not without compassion. “There is a cancer growing in one of you. A moral cancer. Sin”—a flicker of a glance here, over to Swinburne, hostile and ironic—“as black as Adam’s. It requires drastic measures. If it takes hold — if it takes over the organism down to the last cell. . well, there will be nothing anybody can do.” He pauses, fixes both boys in his sight. “You will be lost.”

ф

For a minute and more after this announcement, Thomas goes deaf. It’s a funny sort of deaf: his ears work just fine but the words he hears do not reach his brain, not in the normal manner where they are sifted for significance and given a place in the hierarchy of meaning. Now they just accumulate.

It’s Julius who is speaking. His tone is measured, if injured.

“Won’t you even ask what happened, Master Renfrew?” he asks. “I thought I had earned some measure of trust at this school, but I see now that I was mistaken. Argyle attacked me. Like a rabid dog. I had no choice but to restrain him. He rubbed his filth into me. The Soot is his. I never smoke.”

Renfrew lets him finish, watches not Julius but the other teachers, some of whom are muttering in support. Thomas, uncomprehending, follows his gaze and finds an accusation written in the masters’ faces. He, Thomas, has done this to one of theirs, they seem to be saying. Has covered him in dirt. Their golden boy. Thomas would like to refute the accusation, but his thoughts just won’t latch on. All he can think is: what does it mean to be “lost”?

“I have had occasion,” Renfrew replies at last, “to collect three separate statements concerning the incident you are referring to, Mr. Spencer. I believe I have a very accurate impression of how events unfolded. The facts of the matter are these. Both shirts are soiled — from the inside and out. The Soot is of variable quality. But I took samples of this”—he picks from his pocket a glass slide at the centre of which a few grains of Soot hang suspended in a drop of reddish liquid—“from both shirts. I could not determine the origin.

“Both shirts,” he continues, now turning to the teachers, “also bear marks of being tampered with: one very crudely”—a nod to Thomas—“the other rather more sophisticatedly. Almost inexplicably, Mr. Spencer.”

Julius swallows, jerks his head. A crack of panic now mars his voice.

“I wholly reject. . You will have to answer to my family! It was this boy, this beast. .”

He trails off, his voice raw with anger. Swinburne rescues him: rushes up, with a rustle of his dark gown, taps Julius on the shoulder, ordering him to shut up. Up close Swinburne smells unaired and musty, like a cellar. The smell helps Thomas recover his wits. It is the most real thing in the entire room. That and a knocking, like a hard fist on wood. Nobody reacts to it. It must be his heart.

“Mr. Spencer is innocent.” Swinburne’s voice brooks no dissent. He speaks as though delivering a verdict. “I too made inquiries about the incident last night. The situation is quite clear. It’s that boy’s fault. His Smoke is potent. It infected Spencer.”

“Infected?” Renfrew smiles while the knocking grows louder. “A medical term, Master Swinburne. So unlike you. But you are quite right. Smoke infects. A point only imperfectly understood, I fear. Which is why I insist that both these boys join the Trip tomorrow.”

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the roar of shouts and voices that answers this announcement is that Thomas’s heart appears to stop: it gives a loud final rap and then falls silent. “It mustn’t be,” one of the teachers — Harmon? Winslow? — keeps repeating, high-pitched, squealing, as though giving voice to Thomas’s dismay. A moment later the door is thrown open and the small, dishevelled figure of Cruikshank, the porter, stands on its threshold. He pokes his head into the sudden silence of the room.

“Beg pardon. Knocked till knuckles are raw. No answer. Message for Mast’r Foybles. Ur-jent, like. If yous please.”

The person thus named is mortified.

“Not now, you fool!” Foybles cries, running across the room and dragging the porter out by the arm. Their whispered exchange in the antechamber is loud enough to focus all attention on the pair.

“You says, ‘At once,’ you did,” Cruikshank can be heard declaiming.

“But to burst in like that,” Foybles berates him. “You fool, you fool.”

All the same he seems elated when he closes the door on the porter and re-joins the company of his peers.

“The delivery has arrived,” he declares, beaming, rubbing his hands in triumph before the room’s atmosphere recalls him to the events that have just transpired there. Rather crushed, he withdraws into a corner and buries his face in a handkerchief for the purpose of clearing out his nasal passages. Like a compass needle momentarily distracted by a magnet, everybody’s focus returns to Renfrew, who remains standing at the centre of the room. But the outrage at his announcement has spent itself, and Thomas’s mind is clear at last.

He is lost.

But he will be going to London.

“There are objections?” Renfrew asks calmly.

Swinburne glares at him, then turns his back and addresses the headmaster.

“Master Trout. That boy is a sickness in our midst. He should be sent down at once.”

Swinburne does not even condescend to point a finger at Thomas. But Trout shakes his head.

“Impossible. He has a powerful sponsor. I will hear no more of it.”

Swinburne makes to speak again, but Trout has heaved his heavy figure out of his armchair.

“It is for the Master of Smoke and Ethics to determine the punishment. The government guidelines are quite clear. If Master Renfrew thinks these two boys will benefit from tomorrow’s outing, so be it. Beyond that—” He glances questioningly at Renfrew.

“I will work with each of them upon our return, Headmaster. An intensive programme of reform.” Renfrew’s voice sounds notes of reconciliation. “And, if it will set your mind at rest, dear colleagues, I have a list of pages here from the Book of Smoke that I shall ask them to copy. From the third volume.” He glances at Swinburne. “Passages whose findings have been confirmed by the latest research. Which is more than we can say for much of the book.”

He distributes copies of the list to Thomas and Julius, then lingers at the head boy’s side.

“One more thing, Mr. Spencer. These midnight examinations. They will stop. I alone have the authority to examine the pupils at this school.”

Swinburne is too outraged to swallow his anger. “The school has its traditions. Only a fool meddles with—”

Renfrew cuts him off. His tone, now, is cold and brutal.

“A new era is dawning, Master Swinburne. You’d better get used to it.”

He gestures the two boys up and all but pushes them out the door. Outside, in the hallway, Thomas and Julius stop for a moment, dazed. For an instant something like companionship flickers between them, the sense that they have shared a danger, and survived. Then Julius straightens.

“I hate you,” he says and walks away. Not the slightest trace of Smoke rises from his skin. It leaves Thomas wondering what it is about Julius’s hate that is sanctified, and what is so dirty about his own.

ф

“There you are! I’ve been looking all over.”

Charlie corners him just before lights-out. That’s the thing about school: no matter how big it is, there is no place to hide. Each nook, each hour is supervised. Empty rooms are locked and the hallways swarm with boys; porters in the stairwells, and outside it’s too bloody cold.

“They say there’s been a tribunal. In Trout’s office.”

“Yes.”

Charlie starts to say something, swallows it, looks him full in the face. His eyes are so full of care for him, it frightens Thomas.

“What did they do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Because how can Thomas tell him? That he’s infected. That there is an evil growing in him, so dark and ugly it frightens Renfrew. That one day he will wake up and do something unspeakable. That crime runs in his family.

That he is a dangerous friend to have.

So he says, “They are letting me join the Trip.” And also: “The delivery arrived. The thing they have been waiting for. Cruikshank came and told them.”

Charlie hoots when he hears about the Trip, from relief and from happiness that they’ll be going together. It’s a joy so simple and pure, it makes Thomas ashamed before his friend. He might have apologised — confessed — had not Charlie put a hand on his arm and said, “Let’s go see him. Cruikshank. We have a few minutes.”

He starts running, tugging Thomas along.

“He likes me, Cruikshank does. I chat to him from time to time. He’ll tell me what it is.”

And as they race down the stairs, their feet clattering, each matching the other’s stride, Thomas forgets, almost, that he is a sick boy, a walking blight, the son of a man who has killed.

PORTER

Two boys. They come to me with questions. One who strips the truth off things like he’s made of turpentine, and the other with eyes so frank, it inclines you to confession. I talk to the second, naturally, though I keep track of the first. He’s the type you don’t want sneaking up on you from behind.

“The deliv’ry?” I ask, like I don’t quite recall. It’s how you survive in this world. Play dumb, thicken your accent. Makes you invisible: one look and they dismiss you from their minds. The powers that be. But not these boys. Smarter than their teachers, they are. They simply wait me out.

“Oh, nothin’ special,” I say at last. “Sweets, you know. Tea. Biscuits. From someplace in London.”

That’s all I give them, that and the name, to see how they react.

“Nice big stamp on the crate. Beasley and Son. Impor’ and Expor’, Deliv’ries to the Crown.”

They don’t bat an eyelid, not one of them. Innocents, then. Though the quiet one looks like he was born with a knife in his fist. Like he had to cut his way out, and didn’t much mind.

“You goin’ on the Trip, t’morrow, lads?” I ask, though of course I already know.

“Yes, Mr. Cruikshank. Will you be joining us?”

Mr. Cruikshank my arse. Polite little bugger, laying it on nice and thick. Though he certainly looks like he means it. If he puts that sort of look on the right wench down in London, she’ll clean his piping free of charge.

“Oh no. I daresen’t. Too scary for the likes of me. Wouldn’t for all the world. Rather fly to the moon. Safer that.”

Like I haven’t been to London. It’s not fifty miles down the road. Two days’ walk, when I was young. Now all you needs to do is sit yourself on a train. Bring a little roast chicken along. Enjoy the ride.

Still, it’s an odd venture, this Trip of theirs. Times are a-changing. Renfrew’s been receiving letters. Three or four a month. No name on the flap but I can tell it’s the ministry writing from the postal stamp. Richmond upon Thames. You get your map out, you’ll see what you find. New Westminster Palace. The centre of power. Though there’s talk of Parliament moving once again. Farther from London: the walls are already going grey. Trout gets post from the same little post office, but the hand that writes out the address is different, round and feminine, where Renfrew’s man writes like a spider dragging its black guts. Hold it up to the light and you will see the outlines of a rubber stamp. “Victoria Regina,” a fussy signature underneath. A civil servant’s, no doubt, acting for the Crown. Bureaucrats versus lawmakers then; different corridors of power. Makes you wonder what’s inside the letters. And whether Trout and Renfrew ever care to show and tell.

I turn the boys away, in any case, ring the bell for lights-out. And in the morning the coaches arrive, all eleven of them, to carry fifty-eight upper-school boys to the train station. It’s snowed again and the horses are steaming, and don’t one of them shit just as old Swinburne goes walking past. Lovely smell that, fresh horse dung on snow. You want to bottle it and sell it to yer sweetheart.

I watch them go, wrapped in my old blanket. One of the boys looks back at me all the way to the end of the driveway. He don’t wave.

Neither do I.

When they’re gone, I go inside, shovel some coals into the stove, put on a bone for soup. By the time it’s cooked they’ll be pulling in at Oxford.

INFECTION

The country stretches before them, white and serene. The sun emerges, seeks out the snow, ignites it. Hedgerows stand out against the blaze, cut up the valleys into irregular parcels; shade trees rising black and crisp, mirroring their shadows: frost for foliage, bereft of birds. Charlie sits, his scarf tied around his ears, hanging out the window of the coach, glorying in the sights. He cannot remember another December this cold, this beautiful. A mile from Oxford one of the wheels gets stuck in a drift and the boys spill out to dig it free; throw snowballs, but make haste, too, afraid of missing the train.

Oxford itself is a row of fairy castles embroidered by college crests. The streets are full of ladies and their attendants, making purchases. They halt at the station, a procession of coaches, and the whole street stops to watch them get out: young women in fur stoles and muffs pointing them out to one another. Nervously, but also with a sense of joy, Charlie tugs at the nicely tailored jacket of his school uniform and reties his white scarf. There is something very pleasing about walking into the station and tipping one’s hat to the gentlefolk waiting at the ticket counter and watching them respond in kind. School seems many miles away all of a sudden, a thing of the past. They have reentered society and are welcomed as equals, as adults. Charlie is not alone in his reaction. All around him he can see the boys walking taller, smoothing the hair down under their caps, and abandoning all horseplay; looking about themselves with a shy sort of pride. Only Thomas appears untouched by this feeling, walks gloomy, head bowed, forever apart. For a moment Charlie is angry with him, at his inability to enjoy the morning. Then a more generous feeling wins out. He walks over to him, attempts to draw him into conversation.

“I wonder what platform it is, to London.”

Thomas looks at him caustically. Don’t pity me, his look is saying. Don’t you dare pity me.

“We are with the swine.”

It takes Charlie a moment to understand the remark. Then he sees them, a mass of goats, sheep, and pigs, standing in the filth of their excretions. They are at the far end of the station, on a platform separated from the others by a barrier and a gatehouse, and are being herded onto a series of freight cars. Once the doors are shut on them, snouts appear at the breathing holes, pale, almost colourless nostrils sucking on air. Even from the distance, Charlie can sense their fear.

“But that’s a freight train.”

“Most of it is. Food for London. But look.”

Thomas’s finger points at two passenger cars near the front of the train, recognisable by their rows of windows. Workers mill about on the platform, their chequered caps and waistcoats stained by old Soot. It is a shock to find children amongst them, some as young as nine. Puffs of Smoke trail them. One, a girl of twelve, thirteen years, is dressed only in vest and trousers, despite the cold. Her vest is so drenched in Soot, it hangs heavy off her narrow shoulders. She notices the schoolboys lining up near the barriers and flashes them a harelipped grimace, followed by a shout that’s lost in the distance.

“What did she say?” he asks Thomas.

Thomas looks at him, starts to speak, blushes. It is a startling moment, a first. Nothing else has ever made Thomas blush.

“Better if you did not hear.”

“A curse word?”

“Yes. Anatomical. The kennelmaster was fond of it. Back home.”

“Christ.”

By now, Charlie realises, his classmates have cottoned on to the fact that they are heading to the far platform. The contrast between the station behind them and what lies beyond the barrier could not be starker. On one side gentlemen in frock coats are reading The Times. On the other—

“It’s just working people,” Thomas says, as though he has read Charlie’s mind.

“Yes, but the children. .”

“They ride the train, I suppose. To London and back.” Thomas shrugs. “Not everybody can be so fortunate as to be sent to our school.”

It’s the first time all morning that Charlie sees him smile. Soon they are both laughing, laughing out loud, with the other boys looking at them like they are madmen.

Renfrew has approached the little gatehouse. He produces a letter. Even the paper it’s on looks important; a red rubber stamp circles the signature. The stationmaster reads it carefully, then performs a head count. The boys have fallen silent by now. All boisterousness has left them. As they are finally waved through the barrier, a scream sounds, from somewhere deep in the train, an animal bleating out its distress. It sounds like the train itself is screaming. The workers withdraw as they see the schoolboys coming, watch them board from afar. Grains of Soot drift in the air. One such flake settles on the sleeve of a boy near Charlie; he wipes at it but only manages to smear it.

“Master!” he calls, tears in his voice if not on his face; afraid of being punished.

Renfrew turns briefly, pushes him along.

“It does not matter,” he says.

The statement unsettles Charlie. They are entering a realm with an unknown set of rules.

They reach the train, walk alongside, towards the front. For a moment it seems to him that it has been painted a matte black. Then he realises it is literally encased in Soot. He reaches out a finger, touches it, recoils.

“Soot is inert,” Thomas mutters quietly.

Charlie is not sure what it means.

Inside, the train is freshly cleaned, cozy. They are travelling in an open passenger coach, in shape and dimensions not unlike the inside of the horse omnibuses he saw in Bath the previous summer. Sitting on the hard benches it is almost possible to pretend one is in school.

ф

It takes about a half hour until the landscape starts to change. Then the perfect blanket of white begins to give way to dark blotches of grass more black than green; puddles of meltwater reflect a murky version of the sky. Within two miles the snow stops altogether. Winter oats stand low in the fields, flanked by leafless sycamores and oaks. Everything has a stunted, sickly appearance.

“Has the weather changed?” Charlie wonders aloud.

“I doubt it,” says Thomas.

“Then London is hotter than Oxford?” Charlie chews on the idea. “All the people. And all the factories, I suppose, running their engines.”

“That. And the Smoke.”

Thomas points, and as Charlie follows his finger he sees for the first time a smear of grey in the air up ahead. Not the dark plume of a fire, nor the clean contours of a storm cloud, but more like a fog, rising out of the ground, wet and stubborn, resistant to the winds. Within a minute, the landscape around them begins to be covered by a film of dark scum. Ahead lies the city: a hazy, dark sprawl from which grow the slender spires of factory smokestacks, their outlines cleaner, sharper than anything closer to the ground. After another minute the first houses start, grime-covered brick and narrow courtyards, washing lines full of linen more grey than white. Soon the Smoke outside the window becomes impossible to ignore: it tints their vision and saps the strength out of the sun. The train has slowed to walking pace and London seems everywhere, boxing them in in the narrow chasm of its streets. Something takes hold of Charlie, an emotion halfway between fear and spite. He wants to return to Oxford. And also: put the match to this city, see it burn. He is about to tell Thomas when Renfrew gets up, walks to the front of the carriage in his deliberate step. The air above his head is oddly hazy. The Smoke has long come inside, Charlie realises, has sniffed out cracks in the windows and doors and risen through the undercarriage, seeped into their clothes, their skin, their lungs.

“Some of you can feel it already,” Renfrew begins. “The Smoke. It’s making you feel — unusual. Afraid. Aggressive. Frivolous. Vain. Your thinking is beginning to be clouded; you dwell on things. The outside world is no longer separate from you but is beginning to insinuate itself into your being. You’re feeling small, insignificant, malleable, but are ready to fight anyone who dares to say so; your little store of prudence is eaten away as though by rats. Temptation presses herself on you — to steal, to cheat, to run away. All we have taught you—all—is put under pressure. It is as though someone has run off with your coat. You stand in your shirtsleeves, and the day is cold. And this is here, in a closed train compartment, a mile yet to the station. Outside, in the centre, amongst the people of London, it will be a hundred times more intense. Some of you may feel like you must succumb. I have one word for you.”

He pauses, fixes on their faces.

“Don’t.”

The word comes down like a blade. Even the other teachers seem startled.

“Smoke is infectious. It begets itself. People are to it nothing but carriers. There is a greater density of people in London than anywhere else on these, our isles. Here Smoke rules, runs rampant, fans theft, adultery, murder. It feeds on the alcoholic, the vagrant, the prostitute; coats the very city in its Soot. Pity those you meet as you pity the sick. But as for yourselves. One word.”

He looks around for a boy who can say it with conviction. Julius obliges him. He is sitting at the front, looking pious, calm, in control of himself.

“Don’t,” he says.

Against his will, even Charlie feels uplifted.

“That’s right, Mr. Spencer. Don’t. Stay together. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t buy anything. Don’t pass out any money. And don’t give in to the infection. Fight it with every fibre in your body. If you need help, seek it. It is why I and my esteemed colleagues are here with you. To offer support.”

Charlie looks about the compartment, seeks out the faces of the other teachers. All but Trout and Swinburne have joined the Trip; as they roll into the station, back in school the lower-class boys are locked in the refectory, spending the day in silent study. Foybles, the maths teacher, sits on a bench to Charlie’s left. He is fingering a tin of sweets, nervously shoving one into his mouth. It is typical of him that he does not offer any to the student sitting next to him. Charlie, for one, could have used something to take the dry out of his throat.

ф

The doors do not open at once. At another time, in another place, this would have caused complaints and unrest, threescore students wriggling on their bottoms. But the compartment remains as quiet as a grave. Everyone is staring out the window. The platform outside is full of people. There are porters in dirty frock coats holding baggage wagons. Old men, so Soot-covered, their sweat leaves tracks on their temples and cheeks; labourers with tools slung over one shoulder. There is a woman so little dressed it makes Charlie’s blood shoot to his face. He looks away and still sees the curve of her white leg disappearing into the long slit of her dress; tastes Smoke on his tongue. Don’t, he exhorts himself.

He finds it’s easier when he speaks.

“If London is full of criminals,” he whispers to Thomas, who remains glued to the window, “and Smoke begets Smoke, would it not be better if people left the city?”

Thomas does not turn when he speaks.

“Perhaps they don’t want to leave,” he says.

“We could make them.”

“We?”

“All I mean is — if they lived in the country, in the fresh air. . They can’t all be criminals. Sinners, maybe, but not criminals. Some of them are good at heart.”

Thomas turns to him at last. It is a shock to discover how angry he looks.

“And who would work in the factories then? And operate the shipyards? That’s what London is, you know. A collection of work yards, around which there’s some housing.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Me ma,” Thomas says, a burr of accent surfacing in his voice. He shakes himself like a dog, spits a mouthful of Smoke. “She used to write political pamphlets, in protest. But look — they’re opening the doors. Let’s go.”

ф

There can be no hope of walking in formation. If the platform was full, London’s streets are packed. The din is almost as bad as the Smoke: a whole city shouting, or so it seems. Costermongers roam the streets with their handcarts, parting the stream of people like rocks in a river. They sell coconuts, ropes, and petticoats, Soot-smeared and drooping; nails, sewing needles, and hard-boiled sweets; medicine, gunpowder, and coal. Drunks and beggars line the house fronts, slumped against the plaster; they display mangled limbs and open sores, or simply sleep away their stupor. Children dart through the press of the crowd, some in play, some loaded with goods for delivery or sale. The street is made of black muck five inches deep, soggy with meltwater. It takes Charlie a while to realise that it consists of Soot, deposited over decades and centuries. It clings to his shoes as though it were glue. The house fronts are smeared with it to a height of three or four yards: above this, dark brick shines through or else the dappled yellow of sandstone.

Every few minutes the boys are jostled by some person, man or woman, elbowing their way past. Twice Charlie feels hands in his coat and trouser pockets, looking for pickings. He does not try to catch the thief. His pockets are empty anyway. Ahead Renfrew has raised a walking stick high into the air. The boys — isolated, walking in groups of two, or three, or four; drops in the wash of hostile people — keep their eyes trained on this stick. To lose it would mean to risk losing the group. The way back. As Smoke sinks into Charlie’s lungs this fear transforms into something darker. When another passerby brushes him with his elbow, Charlie pushes him away. All his weight is in the push; the man, old and walking on a withered leg, slips and collides with others. The feeling of triumph that washes over Charlie only erodes when he notices the threads of Smoke that curl out of his coat and shadow him down the road.

Nor can there be any pretence that Renfrew is choosing their route. Tall, self-possessed, formidable though he is, the Master of Smoke and Ethics is, like all of them, subject to the tidal swell that governs the crowd. For there is a definite movement to this stream of people, a movement that can be briefly resisted but not reversed. It leads them across the river, which lies beneath the bridge like a smear of tar. Foybles passes Charlie, his handkerchief pressed to his face.

“Raw sewage,” the maths teacher mutters in horror to himself. “They are pumping their cesspools straight into the river.”

Indeed the water smells like the distillation of a hundred latrines. Even so, boats and ferries part the muck, and a group of women stand on the riverbank, sifting its mud with bare hands for baubles, lost pennies, cockles, and crabs.

They arrive. It is a square of irregular proportions, large enough to hold several thousand people and filled with their heat. The haze is so thick here, it feels like night is falling, though the afternoon is young. The sun stands high above, dirty pink behind this veil of sin. But it isn’t the tinted sun that’s making people crane their necks. A platform has been erected at the centre, a good two yards off the ground. From it springs a gallows. Its noose frames an oval of dirty sky. The crowd stares at it with a reverence otherwise reserved for the cross. Even the noise is hushed here in the square.

“An execution?” Charlie whispers, not wishing to believe his eyes.

“Yes.” Thomas’s eyes look wild. His throat and face show streaks of Soot. There is no telling if it is his own. “And there’s the executioner.”

It takes Charlie some moments to identify whom he means. The crowd shares his confusion. The man who clambers up the platform is not tall nor powerfully built; wears no hood of either black or scarlet; he has not bared his chest over a thick leather belt, and no gristle frames his manly chin. In fact, he is rather slight and knock-kneed, with light, bushy whiskers that stick to his pale cheeks as though they are glued on. He is wearing a frock coat, quite clean given the circumstances, and raises his top hat shyly to the crowd.

“A gentleman?” Charlie asks, surprised and dismayed.

“His Majesty’s servant,” Thomas whispers. On his face horror mingles with expectation. Charlie feels it, too. They will watch someone die. His eagerness sickens him.

It’s the Smoke, he tells himself.

If so, it is a perversity shared by all.

The victim arrives. For the longest time nobody can see anything other than the tall hats of the guards. The crowd parts reluctantly, letting them through, along with the prisoner hidden in their midst: a jostling that is passed on, from shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, through the length and the width of the square. At long last the guards reach the ladder leading up to the platform. Smoke rises from their knot of bodies, dark and oily, like they are burning bits of rubber. Shouts are heard, the cry of pain. Then someone is lifted up, bloody and smoking, her body a sheet of paper blotched with black.

“A woman,” Charlie gasps. He staggers under the surge of people starting forward.

She is no longer young, and dressed in a white, ankle-length shift. Across the distance it is difficult to get a precise sense of her features. Big, round cheeks; a heart-shaped face; a mass of greying hair pulled back sharply from the forehead: this is all Charlie makes out. Her Smoke has stained her, face and clothes, but it is as nothing compared to what happens next. The guards position her under the noose; the executioner slips it around her head. He is talking to her, quietly and intently. They are the same age, give or take; they could be man and wife. Just then the crowd starts a chant, “Murderer, murderer”: not for him, who is about to send her to her death, but for her and the crimes she has committed. She turns to the crowd, raises her arms. And all of a sudden she seems to be burning, her skin an oil slick set ablaze on water. Black, sticky Smoke seeps from her every pore. In a moment the plain white shift is black and sodden, clinging to her chest, her hips, her legs. The Smoke slithers up the executioner’s body like a living thing. The transformation is immediate: a wolfish snarl grows over his face; his fingers, still on the noose, grab her hair and tug at it, and he starts screaming something at the crowd, triumphant and cruel.

The cloud of Smoke, heavier than air and hungry for converts, descends into the crowd. You can watch it spread by the yard. In less than a minute it has reached Charlie. It’s like breathing in a drug: his heart begins to pound in his chest, his senses open themselves to the crowd. He ceases to think in terms of good and evil, he wants to see the woman die, wants the noose to break her neck, for the sheer thrill of it. And at the same time he admires her, hopes she will drag the executioner down with her, through the trapdoor under her feet; is ready to riot, tastes his own Smoke, grey and feeble on his tongue, and for the first time in his life enjoys its flavour.

All around him the chant continues—“Murderer, murderer”—but a new note has emerged in it, as accusation transforms into salute. Charlie tries it, quietly at first, then louder and louder: “Murderer, murderer.” He feels the joy of being one with the crowd, wants to share it with Thomas, wants to link arms with him and run riot, mingle Smokes, and partake of his friend’s sin.

But when he looks, Thomas is no longer there.

ф

Afterwards, back at school, lying awake on his bed, Charlie will be pleased to realise that his concern for his friend was stronger even than the woman’s Smoke. A breeze helps him, too, blowing in from behind. It shifts the centre of madness to the other side of the square. The executioner, his features twisted into a mask of hate, is kicking the woman, then throws his weight against the lever that triggers the trapdoor. Charlie turns and breaks his connection with the gasping crowd. He hopes Thomas is behind, away from all this, in safety. But it is hard to make out any one person in this ocean of faces, all trained in the same direction, all blackened and mean. He spins, catches a sickening glimpse of her body, dancing, twisting at the end of the rope, looks in all directions and sees nothing but the heaving, shouting mass, all individuality dissolved, each face reflecting the emotion of its neighbours and retaining little feature of its own.

Then his mind snags on someone, the way a fingernail may catch on fabric. It isn’t Thomas, and he does not know him, but all the same his separateness commandeers Charlie’s attention. It isn’t immediately obvious why. The man is in his forties or thereabouts; stout but not fat; the head sloping sideways, like he’s twisted his neck. A face like a dozen others; his clothes shabby and stained. And yet he stands apart. It’s his movement, for one thing. Like Charlie’s, his eyes are not on the execution. He is slinking through the crowd, trying to exit the square unobtrusively, pushing past those who will move aside and rounding those who won’t. Something else, too. It takes Charlie the longest time to see it. He is not smoking. Smoke surrounds him, Soot clings to him in streaks and blotches. But he: he is not smoking. When he passes not two feet from Charlie, the boy, taller by some inches, sees the man’s neck, where its sideway crick exposes the inside of his collar. It is clean, though the outside is quite black. As though feeling a stranger’s gaze on him, the man pulls at his loosened handkerchief, ties it tightly around his throat. In another moment he has reached the edge of the crowd and is walking more boldly, away.

Charlie hesitates. He wants to chase the man (not chase, says the Smoke that’s coursing through his blood: hunt), but he is worried about Thomas; glances around for him with no success. Then he is gone, the man who did not smoke; swallowed up by the city.

Charlie spins and looks and pushes, all to no avail. As the press around him eases, it’s becoming less difficult to move and at the same time harder to see, bodies shifting across his field of vision. Within minutes there is a general movement outward: the crowd disperses, a strange kind of exhaustion in their faces. Charlie realises that it is over. The woman is dead, cut down from the gallows. The spectacle has run its course. Thick flakes of Soot are floating in the air like snow; living evil has turned into mere dirt. As the townspeople leave — to work? to tea? — the only figures remaining on the square are some sixty schoolboys in blackened uniforms and the small huddle of their teachers. As for Thomas, Charlie finds him on his hands and knees, not far from the scaffold, retching. He walks over to him, crouches, waits for Thomas to look up.

“Quite a Trip this,” he says at last, as lightly as he can.

Thomas nods, spits, smiles. “Yeah. Not bad.”

But his eyes are full of fear.

ф

They walk the city for several more hours, visit a bottle blackening factory, and admire the grand husk of Buckingham Palace, now locked up and abandoned. A factory bell marks the end of a shift, and Julius, against Renfrew’s instruction, stops a flower girl and buys a bouquet, then presents it back to her with a gallant bow. Not even his cronies grant him applause: the boys have withdrawn into themselves, walk in a state of nervous exhaustion. Smoke continues to waft through the air, but it is lighter now, or else Charlie has gotten used to the feel of his own meanness. There is no lunch or dinner, but neither students nor teachers complain. They have but one need: to go home.

On the way back to the train a group of men passes them, in good if Soot-stained clothing, holding rolls of charts under their arms and protected from the crowd by the ministrations of two burly servants who clear the way with the liberal use of their elbows and arms. Renfrew tips his hat to the well-dressed men, and they tip theirs, look after the boys for a moment, before moving on.

They ride the train in silence. Inside the compartment it is very dark. The gas lamps have not been lit, whether by oversight or on purpose it is hard to say. Some whispers travel, boys with their heads thrown together, in conspiracy and shame. A few boys are crying, quietly, their faces to the window. Charlie can tell because of how still they hold themselves. Thomas, too, keeps his face averted. Charlie would like to ask his friend how he is feeling; how it was that they got separated at the market square and what it was that made him sick. He would like to tell him about the miracle he, Charlie, witnessed. A man without sin; crooked about the neck. Just thinking about it makes his heart pound with hope.

But Charlie does not trust himself to speak. A trace of Smoke remains in his blood, feeds a feeling of irritation and impatience. He’s afraid it will show in his voice. There is more to it yet. Charlie’s whole sense of who he is lies disturbed and the calm that returns to him feels strange, like a mask grown stiff from want of use. When he finally does speak, his voice surprises him, is gentle, unchanged.

“We look like miners, coming back from a shift” is what he says. He has been looking at his hands. The skin beneath his fingernails seems unnaturally pale next to his blackened fingers.

Thomas turns, cheeks shiny with Soot. There are no tear tracks linking eye and jaw.

“There was someone there,” he says. “Underneath the scaffold.”

“Under the scaffold? Who?”

“Don’t know. A man. He was stripping the dead woman’s body.”

“Stripping her.” Charlie’s mind recoils from the image. “For valuables?”

Thomas shakes his head, glowers at the memory.

“For her Soot.”

He turns his face back to the window before Charlie can ask him to explain.

ф

At Oxford station the lights are burning. The boys take stock of one another. They are, each of them, splattered with sin. Renfrew and the other teachers do a head count, the third since the execution square. It is a miracle they have not lost anyone. A porter leads them to a room at the far end of the platform. Behind the double doors yawns a bathroom twice the size of the one in school. Four rows of shower-baths stand in military formation. Some gas lamps are lit but turned down very low. On a counter there sit a hundred little towels, neatly folded and piled chest high. Renfrew crosses the room, opens a metal hatch on a large stove in the corner. A fire roars beyond. The heat is so intense he retreats two steps before speaking.

“First,” he says, “you will retrieve a towel. Then: strip. Pile your clothes here.” He points to the floor. “They will be incinerated. We deposited a change of clothes for each of you there.” He points to a door marked CHANGING ROOM. “Make sure to wash thoroughly.”

A murmur goes through the room. The clothes will be burnt! No inspection; no investigation. Whatever happened that day, it will not be added to any ledger of transgression. As relief floods the students, they grow chatty, almost giddy. Clothes are ripped off bodies; cotton tears, buttons pop; boys can be seen running half dressed through the room, flicking at one another with towels. As they push into the shower-baths and scrub at their skin, their noise begins to fill the entire hall. They are sharing the wonders they beheld in London, cleansing them of fear in the process; their day recast as adventure. Charlie listens to them distractedly, his own face raised into the tepid stream of the shower.

“Did you see the Negro street sweeper? He had but one hand. He was so black you could hardly see the Soot.”

“I swear she was selling heads, that one, only they were shrunk somehow. Size of a cricket ball, each of them, tied to a stick by the hair.”

“And as I was looking at her, she opens her coat all of a sudden, and underneath she’s starkers, I swear. Only she was so dirty you couldn’t see a thing.”

It takes but half an hour until everyone is clean, kempt, dressed in fresh clothing. The teachers, too, have cleaned up in an adjoining bathroom; some have found time to shave. A servant has come and is shovelling their dirties into the incinerator with a pitchfork, much as though he were moving manure. The fire’s heat has spread throughout the room and is bringing a rosy hue to Charlie’s cheeks. Nothing is left of the delirium of London other than the vaguest of yearnings: for irresponsibility, perhaps, for some hours spent in the thrall of base instinct. He wonders briefly whether all delirium leaves you with this trace. Then Renfrew calls them together, teachers and pupils, assembles them by the door.

“Well then,” he says, gently, triumphantly. “We have survived.”

The mood is such that the phrase is met by applause. Renfrew basks in it then silences the boys with a gesture, a conductor working a willing orchestra.

“There were those who doubted that we would. And more, many more”—his gaze wanders over his fellow teachers—“who doubted we should go in the first place. Why, after all, did we have to climb down into this pit of filth and infamy; breathe the air of crime; rub shoulders with the mob; and see our blood poisoned by their lust and hate and greed?”

He pauses for effect. Charlie is watching Renfrew’s hands. They are small, handsome, freckled hands covered in fine, reddish hair. When he speaks, they dance in front of his body.

“The answer is that we had to go, because we may be called upon to do so again.”

He shuts off the murmur of ill will before it is conscious of itself.

“Two hours ago, as we were leaving the city, all of you saw some gentlemen walking through the city with charts. They were engineers, charged with remodelling the sewage system. Yes, the sewage system. The dirtiest place in a dirty city; the place where all muck and filth collects. They do so not from need, not for profit, nor because they are bound by contract. They do so because it needs doing. Because, like you, they are gentlemen from the country’s finest families. Because they see a cesspool and wish to clean it, improve it, reform it.

“To do so, they must stay, sometimes for days and weeks, in the very centre of London. They must breathe its Smoke and taste its infection. They must endure having their senses clouded, their skin stained, their clothes turned to rags. They must fight temptation, must fight weakness even in their sleep. But they are gentlemen and they are strong. And each time they go, they are stronger, better prepared. More determined, more steeled in their convictions.

“These gentlemen are you. After your studies — as engineers or as doctors, as men of politics or scholars of political science, as scientists and architects — you will be called upon to serve your country and to improve the lives of those miserable wretches we beheld today. When the day comes, do not hide from this responsibility. Do not hide behind fear, or comfort, or the claim of ignorance. When the day comes, stand proud and answer the call of duty. I know you will.”

Renfrew scans his audience’s faces. His certainty is like a force. Like Smoke. It travels through the air and settles in your bones.

“I—we—took you to London today so you would see it for yourself. Infection cannot be explained. It must be felt. Today you are afraid of it. You felt its power and quivered before it. But tomorrow — tomorrow you will face it like an enemy. Tomorrow you will begin thinking about what you can do to change things. To take up the fight. It is your duty as Christian men. As men, I say. For you return from London, no longer boys.”

The roar that follows his last statement surprises even those who stand cheering. Even Thomas falls in with it, stands next to Charlie hollering out a triple “Hurrah!” For once it is Julius who stands apart. Charlie watches him, at the edge of the circle of boys, face drawn, chewing on his tongue.

Renfrew does not bask in his glory but rather shushes them, rushes them out, onto the platform and out of the station, where their row of coaches is waiting for them. The weather is milder than it has been in days, a warm wind blowing from the west, the snow slowly melting and catching the streetlights in puddles.

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Renfrew does not ride back with the teachers. Instead he climbs into Charlie and Thomas’s coach. He takes his seat between them as though he were but another boy; butts in, lifting his suit tails, so they are forced to scoot apart. Immediately all conversation dies. The slush outside makes progress slow as each revolution of the wheels requires extra effort from the horses, and the gentle rocking coupled with the warmth of their recent bath sends them asleep one by one. Charlie feels cut off from Thomas by their teacher’s rigid form and is too self-conscious to lean across Renfrew to see whether his friend, too, has nodded off. He attempts to catch glimpses of Thomas from the corner of his eye, but all he can see are his legs, angled in front of him, the stillness of his feet, the hands that are spread out on Thomas’s thighs. He is so very motionless, in fact, and for so very long, that it comes as a surprise when Thomas speaks.

“Smoke is a disease,” he says.

It takes Charlie several moments to register the words are not for his benefit but for Renfrew’s, and that they form a question, not a statement.

Like Thomas, Renfrew speaks quietly, neither turning nor moving his limbs, his hands resting on the top of the walking stick that juts from between his knees. It occurs to Charlie that he has chosen to ride in their coach just for this, a conversation with Thomas.

“No,” says Renfrew. “Smoke is no more a disease than a fever is the flu. Both are symptoms.”

“Smoke is a symptom,” Thomas reiterates, slowly, carefully. “Either way. Smoke is not from God.”

Now Renfrew turns, bends down to Thomas, his voice warm and earnest. Charlie strains to understand, bending sideways with him, his cheek almost touching Renfrew’s coat.

“Why not?” he asks. “Measles are from God. Swinburne’s religion is outdated. Unenlightened. He does not understand that a scientist can have faith. That science is a form of worship.” Renfrew pauses. “But there is something else you want to ask, isn’t there?”

“If it is a disease. That for which Smoke is a symptom. Does it pass from father to son?”

Before Renfrew can answer the coach hits a pothole and throws them out of their seats. In a second everyone’s awake, jumbled, pushing themselves up, away from awkward contact with their teacher. Charlie waits for the conversation to resume, but it doesn’t. When he looks outside, he sees an owl sitting on a moon-washed hedge, its eyes fixed on his and ringed by fine light feathers that give its stare a look of callous wonder.

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They arrive. As they clear the last hillock, the school lies beneath them, dormitories, schoolhouse, and shed forming a black cross in the wet snow, the dark brick evading the eye’s attempt to impose details. The boys need no prompting to file inside. They head for the dormitory; some fling themselves down without undressing, an eerie silence in the room where whispers, laughter, little squeals mark bedtime on any other day. Charlie waits for half an hour after the last candle has been blown out, then gets up and sneaks into the bathroom. Thomas is already there, sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, his back slumped against the wall. Charlie slides down next to him, the tiles very cold under his bottom.

“Me first or you first?” he asks.

“You,” Thomas says. Charlie is unprepared for how weary he sounds. More than just weary. Resentful. Sick of life.

“Unless you’d rather not. It can wait till tomorrow.”

Thomas shifts enough to find his eye. “You want to talk, Charlie, and I am your friend. So let’s talk.”

He does not say: That’s the price we pay. For friendship. But it’s there in his voice.

It sickens Charlie that friendship should have a price.

THOMAS

Charlie tells me. About the miracle he has seen. And I tell him what I was up to, back there on the market square. An accounting, you might call it; honest as two Dutchmen settling up. Then we go to bed. Neither of us reacts in the way the other needs him to. Charlie wants me to be excited; to spin theories with him; devise a plan to return to London, sniff out his man.

But it is difficult to believe what he is saying. A man immune to Smoke, hook-necked and all. It’s impossible: like seeing a ghost. I don’t think he’s lying, of course. Charlie wouldn’t lie. It may be he can’t. But this was the city: a thousand people pushing, pressing, trampling one another’s feet; no air to breathe; and so much Smoke in your blood your senses are screaming. To fight, mostly, smash someone’s face in. That, and the other thing. Find a girl, I mean. Rip her clothes off. It’s like your pulse has slipped into your pants. Chaos, in other words, not just in the square but in you, rage and lust and laughter, too, a mad sort of laughter, weightless and simple, and your stomach tells you it wants food. To see a man in all that, one that doesn’t smoke, because his collar is clean on the inside, you notice it when he walks past, well—

There’re things you have to see for yourself, I suppose. It’s not a matter of choice, or even friendship. You cannot help but doubt. We are lonely creatures, Mother used to say. We live in our heads.

And when I tell him what I saw — and I do, as honestly as I can, though my stomach heaves with it and I keep spitting up black — all Charlie wants to know is, am I all right. I’m not, but that isn’t the point. Charlie saw an angel walk past. I think I saw the devil. There’s none of us going to be all right ever again.

Here’s what I tell Charlie. When the Smoke spread—her Smoke, the woman’s, the murderess’s — I pushed closer to the scaffold. What drove me there was this: if Renfrew is right, if there is a cancer of sin growing in my guts, my heart, my brain, then she is what I will become. My fate, my patrimony. So I wanted to look her in the eye. For a sign of kinship, or something. That, and there was this flavour to her Smoke, something I have noticed before but never this clearly. It tasted good. Bitter of course, sheer murder on the lungs, but good, too, like spirits I suppose, if you ask a drunk. Seductive. So I pushed ahead. Dealt out a lot of thrusts with my elbows. Earned just as many, my arms black and blue, but kept on pushing.

Right up front there was a yard-wide gap ringing the gallows: only a few people there, and those that were, were pushing back, into the crowd. It makes sense: everyone wanted to be close — see her hang by the neck, her tongue sticking out — but if you got too close, you got pushed up against the scaffold, a big wooden box, really, man-high, square, and covered with a large sheet of nailed-down canvas, somewhere between brown and black. And there, flush against its wall, you couldn’t see a thing. Even the Smoke was thinner here, travelled over your head.

So I tried to fight my way back into the crowd, charged it really, headfirst, half mad. And got kicked in the gut for my trouble, Soot and stomach juice mixing in my mouth. Next thing I knew I was on my knees in the dirt, back in the no-man’s-land near the scaffold, leaning on it as I struggled up. That’s when I noticed that there were gaps beneath the canvas, that the box that held the gallows was more lattice fence than crate. And the evil thought flashed in me that it was there, inside, where the hole would open, the trapdoor, I mean, through which the woman would fall. And — it pains me to say it, it was the Smoke, the Smoke, only perhaps it wasn’t — I wanted to see it, see her, even if it were only her feet kicking as the breath was being choked out of her, and her stiff bloated face when she was dropped through the hole once she was dead.

So while the crowd was chanting, and the Smoke got so black you could hardly see the sky above, I ran my fingers up and down the side of the scaffold, looking for a gap large enough to slip through. I found it right at the bottom, got flat on my stomach (like a worm, I remember thinking, like a nasty little worm), jimmied two nails out of the canvas cover, and scooted through.

Inside the only light came from the open trapdoor above. I was too late, I realised it at once. The body was already on the ground, cut down, the knot of the noose jutting up from her neck like a knife handle. Already her Smoke had ceased; she lay on her stomach, legs splayed, the shift so caked with Smoke it cracked like icing.

It didn’t crack by itself, mind. There was someone there, crouching by her side, his back to me. Holding a razor. He cut the shift away in two quick jerks. The naked body underneath remained as though dressed in Soot. The figure — wearing a suit, a lumpy overcoat, dirty, patched tweed — produced a jar from out one pocket, squat and wide-mouthed, its glass tinted like an apothecary’s bottle. Then he bent over the body again, razor in hand, and with its three-inch blade began to scrape away Soot.

Not everywhere, mind. The figure knew exactly what it wanted. He started at the face, unclenching the woman’s jaws, wedging open her mouth; then, with gloved fingers pulled out the tongue as though to cut it off at its roots, only to run the blade along its underside, taking shavings of the Soot trapped there, more liquid than powder, then transferring it into the jar by sliding the blade along the inside of its rim, the way you’d clean a butter knife of jam. The sound of steel on glass. It seemed louder than the crowd outside.

I watched all this silently, lying on my stomach, afraid not of the knife but of this man with a dead woman’s tongue between his fingers. He harvested Soot from two more places, the depth of both armpits, then (I turned away here: London’s Smoke in my brain and lungs, and still I turned away, could not bear it, was ashamed) from the scissor of her thighs: scraped the knife again and again against the rim of his glass, then screwed it tightly shut. All told it took him no more than a few minutes. He never turned around, worked with precision, never more quickly than the task merited, but with an efficiency that hinted at practice.

Then the light changed, down in this coffin that formed the base of London’s gallows, grew darker. It was the face and upper body of the executioner bending over the trapdoor and thus blocking much of its light. He did not say anything, but I saw the figure nod to him and pocket its jar. Immediately, the executioner rose again, barked an order at the guards, to fetch the cadaver.

I had but one thought now, and that was to crawl back out. I moved, rolled back towards the canvas flap I had pried loose. I turned once before pushing through. The figure was at the opposite side, crouching in front of a little door that served as its exit. He, too, turned. It was dark, and it was smoky, and yet I swear we would recognise one another again. An odd face, lined and old but also boyish, the chin closely shaved under a bloom of whiskers, with a fine, bony nose and graceful eyebrows; large, heavy-hooded eyes. A gentleman’s face, I remember thinking; or a gentle-born boy’s who’s been aged in his sleep. Like an evil Snow White. Then the man stepped out, closing the door, and I rolled through into the street, where the vomit jumped out of me like a living thing that wanted to get out, out, out, as though association with my body was shameful even for my half-digested dregs of breakfast.

Charlie found me there, a quarter hour later. Time to watch the guards drag the body out from underneath the scaffold by its feet, wrap it in sacking, strap it to a plank, and carry it off. That, and to wipe my mouth. My sleeves were so Soot-stained, it was like dragging charcoal across your mug.

The taste of it, though, stayed with me all the way back to school. It’s still there in the morning, when the school bell pulls me out of a dream the only part of which I remember is a snowman, its button eyes slowly sliding down the blank of its face one by one. I make it to the toilet before I am sick.

And later — later I go to see Renfrew, for the first of many such sessions. “An intensive programme of reform.” Those were his words to Trout. It’s Cruikshank who fetches me, at five o’clock sharp. Renfrew does not say anything when I enter his office. That’s all right; I don’t need instructions to know what to do. The dentist’s chair is awkward to climb into but turns out to be surprisingly comfortable: upholstered red leather, turned dark and smooth where other boys have sat and squirmed and sweated, leaving behind the hazy outline of a ghostly boy into which I fit myself quite naturally.

“Do I put the straps on?” I ask, doing my best to sound calm.

Renfrew smiles.

“That’s what all the boys ask. I think secretly you really want to.”

And I relax a little. After all: Renfrew already thinks the worst of me. That I am growing murder inside myself, the way a woman grows a child.

Nothing I can say or do will ever disappoint him.

SWEETS

School is different after London. The change is everywhere and, as such, hard to pin down. Charlie tries to make an inventory, but the more he writes down the more he feels is slipping through the cracks, the gaps between words and lines, until he throws away the piece of paper in disgust.

For one thing, the upper-school boys are having dreams. Nightmares. Not all of them, naturally, and not the same ones night after night. Actually, nobody is sure they are nightmares, because nobody remembers a thing. But they wake up, these boys, with rings under the eyes, bruises almost, their pillowcases stiff with Soot. Renfrew does not punish them. This in itself causes a stir. A gentleman never smokes. He dreams, it is said, as he lives. In the lower school, by contrast, the pale grey smears found in the bedding in the mornings continue to exact their price: the boys are disciplined, if mildly.

Then, just four days after their return — Christmas is approaching, and the boys have taken to counting days — an upper-school boy breaks through the ice while playing on the school pond. They are in the midst of a cycle of rapid melts and sudden freezes, and the boys have been warned to be careful. Charlie happens to be present: it is the afternoon break and he is returning books to the school library. The water in the pond is less than a yard deep, but the bottom is littered with rocks and discarded old junk. In summer, when the water is low and the sky clear, one can see the shape of an old bedstead rusting at its bottom, like the wreck of a steamer lost near the shore.

It’s this very shallowness that causes the injury. The boy’s skate hits something at an awkward angle, and his ankle and knee buckle. He is screaming so much, they have a hard time dragging him out of the hole and onto the thicker ice. There is blood on his trouser leg, hard to see at first, then dyeing the ice a vivid crimson. Low down on the shin, a thick, jagged spike pokes a bulge into the wet wool that nobody dares touch or even name. Worst of all is the pungent yellow Smoke that comes out of him, out of his mouth chiefly, along with his screams. It does not rise like a plume but rather crawls along at ankle-height then falls to the snow as a fine yellow powder, impossibly bright, like the jar of sulphur on the shelf in chemistry class.

It’s Charlie who beds the boy’s head on his knees until the school nurse arrives. His name is Westwood. Peter. They share a bench in Greek.

“Help me,” Peter keeps shouting up at Charlie’s face, not five inches away, and Charlie strokes his hair and promises he will be fine. By the time the nurse gets there, Westwood has passed out, his blood steaming in the cold air.

The boy is saved, but for several days the school lives in suspense over whether his leg will come off. It doesn’t. When Charlie’s trousers return from the laundry, he can trace the outline of the boy’s Soot as a faint yellow line that runs from knee to mid-thigh. Disquieted by this, Charlie requests special permission to deposit the trousers in the school’s charity box, destined for an orphanage in London. He’d rather burn the pair but this, he is reminded, is against the rules. Charlie recalls the incinerator at Oxford station. They broke the rules easily enough on their return from London.

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Then there is Thomas. He is being sick. Every morning, like clockwork, a full hour before the bell is rung. The sound travels, the toilet bowl amplifying his retching like a trumpet, sending it down the corridor to where Charlie crouches, waiting for him, a handkerchief at the ready.

“Are you all right?” Charlie asks him in what has fast become a ritual.

“Right as rain,” Thomas always responds. “Something I ate.”

They laugh, as the ritual demands. Gallows humour, one calls it. Only now that they have seen a gallows, the phrase is not one they use.

And every day, at four o’clock sharp, when the others sit down for study hall in the upper assembly room, Thomas goes to visit Renfrew. It’s part of his punishment for fighting Julius. Thomas does not seem to mind these sessions. No, that’s not quite true. He dreads them and seems eager to go, all at the same time.

Charlie asks him about what happens at these meetings. There is too much between them — too much respect, for one thing; too much trust; too many hours spent exchanging confidences — for Thomas to button up entirely. But Charlie sees him guard his words.

“What does he do to you?” Charlie asks. “Renfrew.”

Thomas shrugs. “He asks questions. I answer.”

“Do you show?”

“Very little.” Thomas seems surprised by this himself.

“What does he ask about?”

“This and that. Family, a lot of the time. My mother and father.” His face darkens, grows pensive.

“It’s the way Renfrew asks,” he continues. “In earnest. Like he really wants to know. Sometimes I almost trust him. Sitting there on his inquisitor’s chair.”

Thomas looks up, forces a smile through the tension on his face.

“He’s an arsehole, of course, a gaping arsehole. But there are worse.”

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There are other, confusing aspects to life after the Trip. For all the darkness they brought back with them, a new spirit has taken hold of the upper school, a sort of pride. It takes Charlie a while to understand it is the afterlife of Renfrew’s words, his demand that they return to London when they come of age. Students can be found standing in huddles discussing “politics.” It is time, some say, to join the movement for “reform.” Parents are criticised, not individually but as a generation, and slogans are bandied about. These are seductive and evade concrete meaning. “The return to the cities” is one of them. “Scientific theology” is another. “Meritocracy.” “Rationalism.” “Regeneration.” Even (more quietly, with guarded smiles): “Revolution.” On occasion one of these impromptu speeches results in a belch of fine, light Smoke. The boys so chastised by the emission of their bodies observe this Smoke with genuine shame. It is, they say, a judgement on the purity of their motives. They invent punishments that they impose on themselves long before Renfrew has had the opportunity to study their Soot.

Interestingly, the ringleaders of this talk are boys who have been at the periphery of things before. Not one of them is a member of the highest aristocracy. Charlie, usually popular across factions and cliques, finds himself avoided: his father is a prominent Tory. Julius, too, is sidelined, participates only by listening, an odd little smile on his face. In fact, his whole behaviour appears changed, especially as regards his treatment of Thomas. The first few days after the Trip he was his usual self: jeering, pompous, and hostile, baiting the younger boy at every opportunity. Now he is watching; seems omnipresent in fact, always at the doorway or standing halfway down the hall, his hands in his pockets, his dark eyes everywhere. He, too, is having daily discussions with Renfrew. It may be that it is these that account for the change.

Whatever the reason, it has caused considerable confusion amongst Julius’s cronies — the whole complex web of guardians, prefects, and informers that upholds the structure of the school more surely than the teachers or the bricks and mortar. They have grown unsure of themselves, less inclined to impose their authority. In the lower school in particular, Charlie hears, it leads to more horseplay, more pushing of the rules, more arguments, more quarrels, more Smoke. But then, it’s almost Christmas. Everyone will be going home soon. Perhaps it is nothing more than this.

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With Thomas busy and preoccupied, and he himself adrift between the group of “rebels” and those representing the “old order,” Charlie he finds himself with time on his hands. For a full week he searches for a sense of purpose, sits around, mopes, turns pages in books he fails to read.

Then he finds it.

It starts with a letter to his parents. The letter is overdue — Charlie is to write every Sunday without fail — but he did not feel up to it before. Even now each sentence crawls reluctantly out of his pen. The words sit on the page with a clarity that feels unearned and mock the chaos of his emotions. Part of the problem is that he does not know what to say about London. “I was very saddened to see the preponderance of sin,” he writes then crosses it out immediately. Not only is it inaccurate but it reads as though he is eighty years old and lives between the covers of a book (and a dusty book at that). “I hated it,” he tries again, but again crosses it out, because this, too, is false, inadequate, short of the mark. It takes six drafts in all for him to produce a satisfactory version. In not one of them does he mention the execution.

Near the end of the letter, in the only paragraph he writes with ease and pleasure, for it conveys well-wishes to his sister and his excitement about coming home, he includes the following passage: “A week or two ago the teachers here received a shipment of tea and sweets from Beasley and Son. Naturally this caused some interest amongst us pupils — especially the sweets! Would it be cheeky for me to ask whether a packet of B&S’s might not also find its way into my Christmas stocking?”

He finishes with a postscript asking whether it would be agreeable if he invited a schoolmate to join the family for all or part of the holiday. “I do not know what his commitments are,” he adds, punctiliously, “but am anxious for you to meet him. He is my best friend.”

He sends the letter by the afternoon mail and receives an answer with the customary promptness the day after next. Yes, the family are looking forward to his coming, his mother writes, and are planning a trip to their house in Ireland, weather permitting. Yes, he may bring home whomsoever he wishes, however obscure his family name; and all the more so if the boy in question is dear to his heart.

As to the sweets, Charlie has to read the letter twice until he finds an answer to his request. It is hidden away in a paragraph describing Christmas preparations and in particularly the tree that the servants put up “only yesterday” and whose branches are “so rich and wide that there will hardly be any space for the family to fit beside it”; “nor is there hardly any chance that Father Christmas, who in some picture books appears a rather portly fellow, will be able to squeeze his girth into the room to deliver any presents.” “It may be just as well,” his mother goes on, “that, by the evidence of your letter, you are growing up very fast and have no more need for superstitions. It is all the more important that your maturing desires, regarding Christmas presents and otherwise, be married to your discretion, both in public utterance and private.” There the paragraph ends. The next spends an inordinate number of words reminding Charlie to wear warm socks and underwear, and to dry off properly after taking a bath.

Charlie wishes that his mother could put matters more simply, but has learned that it is the nature of letter-writing that one must state things in a roundabout and somewhat poetic way; otherwise letters would become frightfully short. All the same he finds himself returning time and again to that curiously worded admonishment concerning his “desires.” It appears his mother is telling him to shut up. This is unusual in itself; as an answer to his lighthearted request it is also rather odd. More than odd.

A riddle.

It is fair to say that Charlie is intrigued.

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The following afternoon finds him setting out to the little market town about half an hour’s walk from the school. Visits there are one of the privileges he enjoys as an upper-school boy in good standing, though they are limited to a single outing a term. The day is grey and cold, the skies threatening snow. Charlie walks briskly, trying to keep warm, but there is no way to keep the frost out of his hands and feet. Town is a butcher’s, a baker’s, a greengrocer’s, and a haberdashery. There is also a public house near the river and a Saturday market, though none of the boys have been to either, their privileges extending neither to weekends, nor to pubs. In a side street, not far from the market square, there is yet one other establishment. By three in the afternoon, when the bakery’s bread is all sold out and no longer dominates the smells of the town centre, one can find it by scent alone. A sticky smell: baked apples, cloves, and cinnamon along with something darker, black treacle burnt solid on the iron of a red-hot hob. HODGSON’S SWEETS, DRIED FRUIT, AND NUTS. The sign of a date tree, stooped low under its load.

Inside the shop the smell of sugar is near-overpowering. The shop’s heat, too, rushes in on Charlie, puts a tingle in his fingers, toes, and cheeks. A young gentlewoman is there, buying candied fruit and almonds. Her waist, seen from behind, is impossibly slender and accentuated by the bundled opulence of her skirts. Attending her is Mr. Hodgson: a short, balding man with pockmarked cheeks and tidy movements. At his feet, rolled up snout to tum, lies a runty whippet, as skinny as they come. The dog appears to be sleeping, dreaming; sweeps its tail across the floor in jerky crescents and sounds quiet, high-pitched yelps. It is, it occurs to Charlie, a very good thing that animals do not smoke.

Charlie keeps to the back of the shop until the woman is finished. The schoolboys are warned not to have any contact with the opposite sex other than the school nurse, though greetings, of course, are allowed. He takes off his cap when the lady turns to leave and holds the door for her; sees her smile with pleasure. Outside, she crosses the street holding up her skirts to avoid dragging them through muddy snow: a movement to the hips underneath that wasplike waist that puts a blush on Charlie’s cheek. The shopkeeper, too, looks after her with a certain fixity, a wisp of Smoke curling from somewhere at the back of his neck.

“Corsets, eh? Like tying a belt around a balloon. You always think it’s goin’ to blow. Above. Or below.” He makes a violent gesture that brings to mind a man with a garrote. Then he recalls he is speaking to a gentleman, albeit a schoolboy, tousle-haired under his cap. “Begging your pardon, of course. I was only speaking in jest.”

Charlie is unsurprised by his sudden deference, at once strategic and real. No police, no magistrates are needed to enforce it. It is written into their complexions, the man’s Soot-coarsened, Charlie’s soft and smooth. All the same, the grocer’s comments about the lady have put Charlie in a difficult position. As a gentleman, it is his duty to reprimand the man. But Charlie is also a minor, instructed to respect his elders, irrespective of their station. That, and he is here for a purpose.

A new customer relieves him of his uncertainty. It is the vicar, come in for a tuppence-worth of humbugs. Charlie immediately cedes ground to him, stands by the door with his cap in his hand, listens to their small talk. On his way out, the vicar stops, places his eyes on Charlie, and leaves them there for longer than is comfortable. He is an old man, close-cropped white whiskers meeting underneath his chin.

“Skiving?” he asks at last.

“I have a pass. From the school.”

“Ah. A good boy then.” The vicar digs in his paper bag. “Here, have a humbug.”

His eyes won’t leave Charlie until he has put the stripy sweet in his mouth. Then the old man sniffs the air.

“It smells of Smoke in here. Underneath all the sweet. Not yours? His then. Well, his kind are meant to. Go to hell, I mean. God’s natural order. Good day.”

He says this quite loudly, even cheerfully, then walks out of the door. Again both Charlie and the shopkeeper find themselves looking out the big front window, watching after the flutter of dark skirts.

“A true man of God,” Mr. Hodgson declares, rattling the vicar’s pennies in his fist. “Righteous. If not as charming as the lady.” His tone remains oddly poised between deference and derision: accepting the truth of the vicar’s words, yet enraged by them all the same. “And what would you like then?”

Charlie has anticipated the question and has worked out his answer, word for word, on the way over; has gone so far as to try it out on the empty country road where there was no one to hear. But now, faced with this man, his wheedling manner, the coarseness of his pockmarked cheeks, and the heavy atmosphere of the shop, he hesitates.

“Sir?”

“Liquorice,” Charlie improvises. “A penny’s worth.”

“Sweet or salty?”

“Salty.”

“I’ve snails and coins.”

“Snails, please. And a quarter pound of hazelnuts.”

“Anything else?”

Again Charlie hesitates, then is grabbed by the sudden fear that the vicar will return, or some other customer, and make his query impossible.

“A tin of sweets.” He is rushing through the words so fast, he himself can hardly understand them. “Beasley and Son. If it’s no trouble.”

“What’s that?”

“Beasley and Son. A tin. Or just some loose sweets, if that’s how they come.”

The shopkeeper’s reaction is curious. The first thing he does is step away from Charlie, look him up and down. Reassess him. But he is still the same skinny schoolboy in the same tidy uniform, his collar freshly starched. Then the man looks behind Charlie, as though he suspects him of hiding a second person behind his back; then on past him, at the desolate street. His face is a mask of calculation.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” Smoke frames the words like a shroud. “You better pay and get out.”

And then, as Charlie stands counting out coins: “Who sent you here?”

“Nobody. I just— The teachers have them. I have seen the little tins. Just ordinary hard-boiled sweets. Like caramels, only clear. There was a delivery not long ago. .”

Charlie trails off, unsure how much information he should part with. The school’s affairs are private. Nobody has ever instructed him to treat them as such, but it is a rule all the same. It’s like any other family. When there are guests at dinner, certain things are not to be discussed.

“Look here,” the shopkeeper barks with particular emphasis, as though defending his good name, “if there was a delivery it wasn’t from here.”

More Smoke pours out of him, not thick but oddly smelly. It paints dark blotches on his collar. Again he looks Charlie up and down; again he stares past him, out at the street, searching it for accomplices.

“How much was there, boy? How many tins?”

Charlie shakes his head. “I don’t know. A crate, I believe.”

All at once the man is shouting, sweeping Charlie’s pennies off the counter so they scatter on the floor.

“You’re a liar, you are. Out. I will make a complaint, don’t think I won’t. Out, out!”

The noise wakes the dog. It jumps to its feet, presses its ears flat against the side of its head, arches its back, then spins on its feet, trying to identify the source of danger. But Charlie has already retreated to the door. He lets himself out, the brown paper bag with his sweets in one hand. Outside, released from the atmosphere of boiled sugar and caramelized nuts, the cold air hits him like a slap. Through the window he sees the man shouting, shaking his fist above his head. The high, quivering yelp of his dog falls in with the man and follows Charlie down the street. Then the wind picks up and scatters their noise. All the same, it’s only at the edge of town that Charlie stops running.

The road to school seems longer on his return.

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Charlie tells him everything, starting with the letter. Thomas listens distractedly at first, then with ever greater intensity, biting off pieces of liquorice from an uncoiled snail.

“So what do you think?” Charlie asks when he’s finished his account.

“These are disgusting. You should have bought sherbets.”

“Be serious, Thomas.” But he can see from his friend’s face that he is, really; that he is thinking it over.

“I don’t know,” Thomas decides when the liquorice is gone. “Some sort of drug, maybe. Like opium.”

“Can’t be. You can buy opium in any pharmacy. Or laudanum, which is the same thing.”

“Something different then. More powerful than opium. Hence: forbidden.” Thomas shrugs. “We won’t really know until we get our hands on some. Here’s the thing, though. The shopkeeper knows about it. And so does your mother.”

Charlie bites his lip.

“Yes,” he says. “I think so too.”

“So everybody knows. It’s only we idiots who are kept in the dark.”

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Two days later Trout summons Charlie. He does not send Cruikshank: it’s a note he finds in his pigeonhole, unsigned. Report to the headmaster. Seven o’clock sharp. The note is so beyond precedence that right away Charlie knows he is in trouble. There is nothing, of course, that can be done. He will have to go. Trout will ask him how he came to hear of Beasley and Son. If Charlie mentions Cruikshank, Cruikshank will get the sack. If he does not, he will be in disgrace and make acquaintance with the dentist’s chair. A tribunal seems possible. A letter to his parents will already be in the post.

As he sits at dinner, sawing forlornly at the lukewarm cutlet in front of him, Charlie watches an invisible wall spring up between him and his fellow students. Already he is set apart: they just don’t know it yet. Thomas would understand this feeling, but Thomas isn’t here. Charlie has not seen him since breakfast. There is no one to help him make sense of his fall, from good boy to pariah.

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Charlie arrives early at the headmaster’s door, then sets to pacing, up and down the long empty corridor. Dust balls attend him with the solicitude of pets, withdrawing some inches as he draws close, then following in his wake, sometimes as much as a yard. The moment he becomes conscious of this game, the headmaster’s door swings open and the fat, rosy dome of Trout’s head leans into the hallway.

“Cooper!” he calls and is answered by the prattle of footfalls.

“Here, sir.”

Charlie’s haste scatters the dust.

Past the door and the antechamber, logs smoulder in the fireplace, spreading the smell of pine. Two armchairs have been arranged before it, inclining to each other confidentially, as though they are in conversation. Trout pats the seat of one, before sitting down on the other. His weight is such that this is a delicate operation: he stands in front of his chair like a diver on the platform, his fundament thrown back and the chest forward for balance, then topples backward with a grunt. Charlie draws closer suspiciously, sits on the edge of the other chair, his weight still in his thighs. A coffee table fills the narrow gap between the two chairs’ armrests. It holds a decanter and a silver tray with glasses.

“Port or sherry?” Trout asks blandly. Behind the blandness, and the fatty half spheres of his cheeks, the headmaster’s eyes are shrewd.

“Nothing, sir.”

“Nothing? Nonsense. Some port then.” Trout fills two glasses. “Taste must be cultivated. Just like good habits. A gentleman appreciates his wine.”

Trout seems intent on waiting until Charlie has taken a sip before saying anything further: he sits with his own glass raised halfway to his lips, sniffing at the liquor. For a mad instant Charlie grows convinced that the headmaster is trying to poison him. But even if he is, Charlie has no choice but to drink. Unlike a pill, you cannot hide liquid under your tongue or in the pocket of one cheek.

“Well?” Trout asks when Charlie puts down the glass.

“It’s sweet.”

“Yes. Hints of plum. And something earthier. Truffle, perhaps.”

Charlie cannot tell whether he is making fun.

“I suppose you have guessed why I invited you here.”

Trout does not say summoned. There is no need. They both know the truth.

Charlie manages a nod.

“It is an unusual situation, Mr. Cooper. Unusual. I cannot recall the last time I had to ask a boy for such a tête-à-tête.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But then, what is to be done? After all, you are his closest friend.”

Charlie looks up, confused. “Whose?”

“Argyle’s.” Trout eyes him suspiciously. “Do I have the wrong boy?”

It takes Charlie three breaths to adjust his expectations. He tries to ward off the feeling of relief, but it is there. His body slides deeper into the armchair.

Perhaps, though, Trout is merely toying with him.

“No, sir. I mean I am. His best friend.” A new worry takes hold of him, its texture different from the old. “Is he in trouble?”

“You know he is. But perhaps you don’t understand the full extent of it. He may have been ashamed to share it.”

Trout wets his lips. Fat lips and a fat tongue; the glow of spittle on soft pink skin.

“We are worried about Argyle. There is something growing, you see. Inside him.”

“He is sick?” His own voice sounds normal in Charlie’s ears, controlled. But his stomach is a knot. No, not his stomach. His entrails, from colon to diaphragm. A knot. It will take hours to unpick.

“Sick? In a manner of speaking. There is a darkness growing in him. Corruption. No, more than that. Evil. Yes, I think we cannot do without the word. Evil. It’s like your friend is carrying a bomb. When it blows, well. .” Trout swirls the wine in his glass. “Dr. Renfrew has found evidence, you see. In his Soot. It’s scientific.”

The word is given a certain weight, a certain note. Not resentment, exactly. Wariness?

“And it can’t be stopped?”

“We mustn’t lose hope. Mr Swinburne recommends prayer. It has been known to help. For instance—”

But Charlie is not listening now. He is thinking, remembering Thomas’s conversation in the coach back from Oxford, picking through its terms. Smoke is a symptom, Renfrew said.

What then is evil?

Trout sits watching him. His tongue is restless within his mouth. Charlie can see it move around, probing his teeth, his gums, the insides of his cheeks. Or haunting them. It distracts Charlie.

“If it’s a disease,” he asks at last, forcing his thoughts into words. “Evil, I mean. Then it can be cured.”

Trout spreads his hands on his thighs. “Dr. Renfrew believes so.”

“You don’t?”

“Can we cure tuberculosis? Cancer? The common cold?”

“We might, one day.”

Trout sighs. “One day. Perhaps. But you go out there, whisper it. That there is a cure. Watch the world go up in flames.”

They both lapse into silence, each draining his glass. The heat from the fireplace is so intense, it climbs up their limbs, filling them, consuming their strength: a fat man and a boy, sprawling side by side.

Charlie fights it, sits up again, returns to the edge of the seat as though preparing his departure.

“Headmaster,” he asks, sounding adult to his own ears, “sir. Why did you call me here?”

“Ah, that.” Trout reaches into his coat pocket, produces a sheaf of papers. “Your friend Argyle has received an invitation. From his uncle, in Nottinghamshire. Asking Argyle to join him and his family for Christmas. He insists, in fact.”

Charlie stares at him, shocked.

“You open our mail?”

Trout flushes, laughs. “God, no. That’d be against the law. He wrote to me, naturally. Baron Naylor. Argyle’s uncle.” He waves the envelope at Charlie, too briefly to see to whom it is addressed. “I’d like you, Cooper, to go with him. As his friend. Keep him out of trouble. In light of things, I mean.”

A gaggle of questions rises up in Charlie. They spill out unsifted, in fragments, each word very fast.

“But I have already written to my mother to ask whether Thomas can come— Besides, won’t he want to go home— And after all, I can’t simply invite myself, can I?”

“Order, Cooper, order. One thing after the other. No, Argyle won’t be going home. It’s quite impossible, he’ll tell you so himself. And as I’ve already said, his uncle insists. So there cannot be any question of his spending the holiday at your parents’ house. As for you, all it will take is another little letter to your parents. After all, Baron Naylor is the head of one of the most prominent families in the country. Just like your father. Your people will approve of your wishing to make social connections. They will send a letter to Baron Naylor explaining that you and his nephew are very fond of each other and had hoped to spend the holidays together. All it takes is a hint. He, no doubt, will respond with a formal invitation. It’s all very simple indeed.

“Naturally,” Trout adds, so casually he does not even feel the need to look at Charlie when he speaks, “naturally, there is no need to alarm Baron Naylor about young Argyle’s predicament. His condition. Nor yet your family. It would make it harder for Ar — that is, for Thomas. Once stigmatised, it will be twice as hard for him to. . especially given his father’s disgrace. But I don’t need to go on. You understand very well how it is. Which is why I think your presence will be an invaluable asset to your friend.”

Trout heaves himself out of the armchair. The leather’s groan might have been comical under other circumstances. But the headmaster’s eyes are too shrewd to mistake him for a buffoon or a kindly relative troubled by wind. He walks Charlie to the door.

“I enjoyed our talk, Mr. Cooper, really I did. We should do it again. Perhaps after your return. You can tell me then how it went. Yes, I think that’s an excellent idea. A debriefing of sorts. Like in the army.”

Outside, at the top of the stairwell, Charlie nearly runs into Swinburne, lurking in the darkness of the landing and breathing heavily, as though he’s been running. Charlie passes him quickly, telling himself that it is merely a coincidence. No dust dances in the gaslit stairwell beneath: it’s only when the boy passes that it rises and hovers, like inverted snow.

ф

“So are you coming along as my nurse or as Trout’s spy?”

They are sitting on the bathroom floor again, making themselves small amongst the row of tubs. Above them, where copper pipes crisscross underneath the ceiling, a spider is sitting in a wedge of web. It may be dead, trapped in its own design. Then again, it mayn’t.

Charlie ignores the question. If Thomas is angry, so is he. They have both taken off their shirts, in case they Smoke. They mustn’t stain.

“You should’ve told me, Thomas,” he says. “I’m your friend.”

Thomas responds without looking at Charlie.

“Yes, Charlie, you are. But will you still be my friend when I end up killing someone? When I turn into that woman underneath her noose, and you feel your own heart blacken with my filth?” He spits, angry, the spit steaming with white Smoke. “I’m rotting. Inside. Like a cancer, growing in here.” He rubs his chest, his guts, his hand a fist that he forgets to unclench. “Renfrew says there’s a machine, on the Continent somewhere. You step behind a sort of mirror and then they can see inside your rib cage. The bones show snow white. And your Smoke shows like fog. The blacker it is, the lighter it shows.” He spits again, watches it steam. “Another year and I’ll glow like an angel with my darkness.”

Charlie does not know what to say. He has rehearsed his conversation with Trout for Thomas. There is a cure, he wants to say, but the words get stuck in his throat.

There may be a cure.

It isn’t the same thing at all.

“Do you know him?” he asks instead. “This uncle who has invited you?”

“I met him as a child. Him and his wife. I only saw them from across the room: a bald man and a woman in a fancy frock. I was too young to be introduced. You know—the childhood years of sin.”

Charlie watches Thomas spit once again, hears his own voice drop to a whisper.

“Why can’t you go home for Christmas, Thomas?”

A snort, tinged with dark. “Nobody there. Mother’s dead.”

“And your father?”

“Dead.” Smoking now, breath and skin: “Disgraced.”

“What did he do, Thomas? Tell me.”

“What did he do? He beat a man to death.”

The words are hard, curt, devoid of pity. Here I am, Thomas seems to be saying, exposed. But also: Don’t push me, not now. I might break.

Charlie hears it, fights a shiver.

“He beat a man,” he repeats, no weight in his voice. “Very good. Thoughtful of him. This way we can spend Christmas together.”

It takes Thomas a heartbeat to react. A transformation in his Smoke, a lightening, colour entering the grey; a parcel of emotions exhaled by one boy and inhaled by the other; infection: the sharing of a burden.

“Prick!” Thomas says softly, shaping a Smoke ring with his mouth.

“You’re welcome.”

Charlie waits until both their breaths have slowed and Thomas’s Smoke has cleared out of his blood. It’s like stepping inside after racing through a tempest; as such not without a sense of loss. Then he changes the subject.

“Where were you all day? I was looking for you.”

It does something for Thomas, this question, completes his transition from desolation to wry humour.

“Well, first I had to see Renfrew. Kept me for a full three hours. And then I went over to Foybles’s rooms to ask him whether he would help me with my maths.” Amusement flashes in Thomas’s eyes. “Made him rather nervous, I think. The demon boy coming to visit.”

“Maths? But you are doing fine with—”

In answer Thomas opens his right hand which has been curled into a fist from the moment they left the dormitory. Inside sit two little cubes, clear like icicles. For two heartbeats Charlie does not know what they are. Then it dawns on him and his stomach contracts with excitement and fear.

“He will know who took them,” he whispers.

“Maybe. There were five pieces left. He may not know the count.”

“He’s sure to.”

Charlie pictures it, Thomas searching the desk in Foybles’s office, while the latter had his back turned. It seems impossible. Thomas picks the thought off Charlie’s face.

And dares a smile.

“Foybles left me alone in his living room. The question I asked, it turned out to be rather complicated. He needed to consult his books. It appears Foybles has his library under his bed. At least that’s what it sounded like. Like he was moving all his furniture about. Hunting for Newton. He left me alone for a full half hour.” Thomas shakes his head in disbelief.

“Did you smoke?”

“A little. But I opened the window. By the time he came back, it was barely noticeable. And he was very focussed on the problem.”

Charlie tries not to think it. Thief. But there is admiration in the word, too. It has long been a puzzle to him how often sin aligns with pluck.

“Shall we?” Thomas asks. “Together?”

They each pick up a sweet. Held up to the light Charlie discovers a pattern stamped into one side. “B&S” underneath a stylised crown. The Queen’s stamp.

There is no smell to the little cube.

“Let’s do it then. On three.”

Thomas counts them down and they each place it on their tongues, like sugar lumps, gently pressing it against the roof of their mouths waiting for it to melt. It takes a while for the taste to spread. Lemon and the sharp herbal notes of Chlorodyne. The sweet dissolves very slowly, one has to suck on it, chew it, wear it out with one’s tongue. Charlie is waiting for something, a tingling, a giddiness, some sensation of change: a surge of strength, a sudden sleepiness, the elation of alcohol. But nothing happens, nothing at all. A look at Thomas tells him it is the same for his friend. At long last they swallow the final few shards. All that remains of the sweet is a medicinal flavour clinging to their gums, like they have just cleaned their teeth.

They both sit in silence, feeling crushed.

“So what does that mean?” Charlie asks when he can no longer bear it.

“It means,” Thomas says, “that we don’t understand anything. Not a thing.”

The spider above them quivers when they rise, in imitation of life.

SWINBURNE

The boy asks me after vespers: name of Kreuzer, Martin Herman. First year upper school. A German. Naturalised, I suppose, the whole family, for generations.

But still.

“Sir,” he asks, nervous, perhaps on a dare. “What is theatre?”

He does not smoke when he says it, so he thinks the question must be safe. I make him kneel in the pew. Sore knees. Good for the soul. He’s been reading Mr. William Shakespeare, he admits after some probing. A book of plays. Where does he have it from? This he is not supposed to say.

His crying is unbecoming.

I bring all this to Trout. His brother gave the book to him: Kreuzer, Leopold Michael, five years the elder. I remember him well. Daft little shite. Wouldn’t have thought him capable of something quite so monstrous.

“There has to be a letter,” I say. “An investigation.”

Trout won’t have it. Soft, he is, or else adaptable. Changing times: turning with how the wind blows.

“Confiscate the book,” he says, “and let it rest.”

Let it rest indeed. He didn’t hear the boy: “Please, sir. I don’t understand. Why is it forbidden?” Snot on his lip from all the crying, sitting there like a wet moustache.

I could have told him, of course, could have recited the Stratford Verdict, chapter and verse (Seeing that theatre depicteth sin and maketh it a matter of entertainment; that it maketh bad actors commit the action of sin without the sign of Smoke, and good actors inhabit sin so thoroughly that their crime showeth on the skin; that the former createth an illusion that sin be possible without Smoke, and the latter forceth paid servants to distort their souls for the sake of spectacle; that in short the whole enterprise be lewd and filthy, unbecoming to gentlemen and dangerous for the crowd; that its lessons and morals, however pious, be lost behind intemperate words and idle shouting; and theatres be cow barns plastered with Soot; for all these reasons, and by the power invested in us by the Crown, we henceforth forbid and banish the performance, circulation, writing, and reading of theatre plays, be they comedy or tragedy, history or romance, from this our realm from this day forward etc. etc.), but that is hardly the point. Obedience is. A boy must not question. A new wind is blowing indeed. Renfrew’s kind of wind. Some mornings one can smell its stench all the way from London.

There are other portents. Spencer has begun to smoke. Julius, the head boy, primus inter pares. He has been seen, coming out of Renfrew’s office, with Soot on his sleeve. A pure boy, the purest we’ve had. Corrupted by his own master.

And by the presence of that other boy. Argyle, Thomas Winfried. A child of sin. He smokes most every day, like a workman’s boy in puberty. Even the servants avoid him, the kitchen hands, the groundsman living in his shed on the south field. Noble by birth, Mr. Argyle is, if we have faith in the honour of his mother. Yet common as dirt. There is some mystery attached to his father’s name, but Trout forbade all questions and discussion on pain of suspension. Argyle must have a powerful sponsor indeed.

For now he has been summoned by one of the highest in the land. Baron Naylor, lord of Stanley Hall, Marquess of Thomond. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him for nigh on ten years. Fell out with the Queen, some say; lost her trust. Trout’s sending Cooper, Charles Henry Ferdinand. The future Earl of Shaftesbury. A redhead, more pedigree than a prizewinning bitch; his father a beacon in this, our dusk. He must be disappointed with his son.

Naturally Trout will want a report from the boy. I wonder. Is it the state’s business, or his own? And if the state’s, which corner of its civil service? There are divisions now, where there once was unity: the commonweal crumbling like a slice of sailors’ rusk.

The New Liberalism. Science. Self-Governance. Progress. Fancy words harbouring heresy. A sin turned political movement. Sitting there, in Parliament, in plain sight.

Renfrew is a liberal.

Ask yourself: who studies his linen?