Smoke

IN THE WOODS

Thomas goes down hard. It’s Charlie who is pulling him. The force of it surprises Livia: he grabs him at throat and shoulder, kicks his feet out from under him. Anything to get Thomas away from the door. Out of the line of fire. On the way down, Thomas’s shoulder collides with the edge of the seat. It twists the body and makes him land facedown, his arms trapped beneath him at odd angles. He may well have broken bones. Then again, what does it matter? He is already dead. Livia saw him being hit. Something dislodged itself, some clump of him, of his face, his head. It flew through the air. She will see it to her dying day. Livia’s face is speckled with his blood.

And still it isn’t over. Another shot sounds — the fifth, the sixth? — rips a hole in the door the size of a fist. Then the whole coach buckles and leaps. It is as though even the wood and wheels are trying to get away from the shooters. For a breath it stops, gathering strength. Then it leaps again, tilts, topples. The next moment the very ground has given way and they are falling, rolling, her scream drowned out by those of the horses. The impact throws them into a tangle of limbs and breaks open the coach like a conker: sunshine above, the play of sun and cloud.

It is only when she sees the trees that she understands what has happened. She should have thought of it before: she knows this road, has ridden it a hundred times. Across from the old windmill, running parallel to the road, is a sharp dip — almost a ravine — that drops some seven or eight yards, down to the edge of a forest below. In mortal terror, the horses must have dragged them off the path. Three hang dead within the harness now, two bleeding from gunshot wounds, the third with its head twisted backwards atop its broken neck. It’s the fourth horse that keeps on screaming. Two of its legs are broken, spill out of their knee joints like limp flippers. When she starts moving, it is to get away from these screams. Next to her, Charlie is already pulling Thomas’s body out of the wreckage. It takes courage to turn and help him lift it up over his shoulder. She is glad she finds this courage and gladder yet she isn’t asked for more. They run for the trees, away from the attack, Thomas’s head, chest, and arms dangling limp down Charlie’s back.

The forest is dense. There is no obvious path and, near the edge, shrubs cut their clothing to shreds. Fifty steps in, their progress improves. There’s older growth here, tall trees that throw mighty shadows. They eat too much light for shrubs to grow along the forest floor. Dead leaves swallow their boots up to the ankles; their crackle follows them, the forest’s whisper, showing their pursuers the way. Neither she nor Charlie suggests slowing down.

They have to stop eventually. The weight of a second body becomes too much for Charlie. It is astonishing he has borne it for this long. He staggers and drops his burden; falls down next to it. When Livia slides to her knees beside him, she finds Thomas’s blood has soaked Charlie’s jacket, at the small of his back. It is impossible to think of him now as Mr. Cooper.

“Is he alive?” Charlie asks. He has to speak through his panting breath, sneaking the words out in between inhalations. It gives an odd, dispassionate quality to his voice, like he is too exhausted for emotion.

“We must feel his pulse,” she answers. “It’s easiest here. At the throat.”

Without hesitation, Charlie sticks his fingers into the blood that covers Thomas’s neck. The wound above is still bleeding. It’s the left side that’s been hit, near the ear. There is no way of telling how deep the wound is. Leaves have become stuck to it, and clumps of dirt, as though the earth is already claiming him as hers.

“I cannot feel it, Livia. My hands aren’t working.”

When she bends to slip her own fingers onto the side of Thomas’s throat, she sees what he means. Each of her fingers is drumming, her own pulse shoving blood all the way down to its tips. It is impossible to feel anything. She lets go, bends lower, presses one ear right to Thomas’s mouth. Tell me your secret, she thinks. Are you alive? Charlie bends down with her, lying almost flat on the forest floor, his eyes level with hers, his mouth three inches away. There is something to his face. She studied it all through the coach ride, as they sat there, too awkward to talk. The cast of the mouth, the wide-open eyes. The kind of face saints sometimes have, painted on the glass of church windows. A face so little guarded, so unmarked by Discipline, it taunts her, terrifies her. What sort of creature is he that he can afford to live so naked and not sin?

Something reaches her. Her ear. Not a sound: a sliver of air, like the lick of a tiny tongue.

“He’s breathing.” She lets go of Thomas, turns around, lifts her skirt and starts ripping off strips of petticoat. “He mustn’t bleed to death.”

Behind her, Charlie starts praying, his voice light and firm.

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The woman appears like a ghost. One moment she isn’t there, then she steps out of the shadow of a tree, four yards away. Charlie does not notice her. He is desperately trying to fashion a bandage out of the strips of cloth Livia has supplied. They have no water, cannot clean the wound.

“Quick,” he keeps berating himself. “We must keep moving.”

When Livia puts a hand on his shoulder, he does not react.

The woman has no colour. She wears a sort of shift made from patches of leather and cloth. Everything about her — her clothes, her skin, her hair — is uniformly grey, the shade of spent embers. Ashen. She stands motionless, her knees bent, back humped, ready to run. It reminds Livia of nothing so much as a cat watching the goings-on of the kitchen. Curious, shy, twitchy; its ears pressed back against its skull. And all the while the woman is smoking, smoking just as steadily as she is breathing, rhythmically, ceaselessly, adding dye to her ashen skin.

Charlie notices her at last. He starts. His movement is answered by the woman’s twitch. But she does not run, not even when he rises and shows her his blood-smeared palms.

“Our friend is wounded,” he says, calmly, soothingly, the way Charlie can. Evidently he has decided the woman is not their enemy. Livia agrees with his assessment. Whoever she is, she does not belong to those who shot at them. She is part of the forest. There may be a sharp stone hidden in her fist, even a knife. But not a gun.

“We need help. Water. A doctor. Are there people around?”

The woman does not answer but moves two steps to the side, to gain a better view of Thomas. Livia follows the look. The bandage sits loosely around his head and face. Already it is spotted with red. It will soak through before they have carried him a quarter mile.

Charlie risks taking a step. The woman stares at him from her grey face.

“Help, you understand. Someone who can tend his wounds.” Charlie points to Thomas’s head. “Stop the bleeding.”

She does not react but allows him to approach to within two yards. Charlie folds his hands together, an altar boy’s gesture, fingers closed, thumbs resting against the bridge of his nose.

“Please!”

The word does something to her. It is familiar; frightens her, recalls her to a moment in her past. Her head jerks down, her shoulders up, much like a cat’s when startled by a noise. Then she tries it, her lips shaping themselves around the sound. Biting it off. Tasting it. Ready to spit.

“Plea-sseh.”

Her expression does not change with the word. It is as though she has unlearned her face’s gestures. It convinces Livia once and for all that she is living here, alone in the forest, without human contact. All at once the old servants’ stories come back to Livia, about the ghost in the woods. Her father’s soul. His reason: gone missing, roaming amongst trees at dawn. But this woman is as blank as he, and smokes with equal abandon.

There is something odd about her Smoke, however, something that sets her apart. It takes Livia several moments to put her finger on it. She smokes with equanimity. Steadily, near-constantly, always the same light-grey Smoke, subtle like a mist. It clothes her more thoroughly than her rags. In summer, Livia catches herself thinking, she will walk the woods naked, dressed only in her Smoke. The thought brings a flush to her cheeks. Anger, embarrassment. Envy? A moan from Thomas cuts short the thought.

The stranger reacts to this moan. She looks over at Thomas, digs in a sort of satchel that seems sewn onto her very garment, draws forth a fistful of something green. Moss. Dry as it is, it retains an eerie emerald sparkle in the grey of her hand. But she won’t step closer, not until Charlie withdraws and pulls Livia with him, taking her hand as naturally as though he’s held it all his life.

“Please,” he repeats and with a sudden burst of movement the woman sprints over to Thomas’s side, falls on her knees, takes off the bandages and scatters them carelessly by his side. She presses the moss into the wound, starts digging between a tree root, finds a fistful of clammy mud, and smears it on top. Livia starts forward but Charlie’s hand stops her. They can see the mud caking in the cold of the air. The woman, meanwhile, is digging in her satchel, dismissing a dozen herbs, until she pulls out a dried flower and forces it into Thomas’s mouth, slipping it under the tongue. All this takes her barely a minute. As a last step, she knots the strips of soiled petticoat together and quickly slips them into her bag.

When Livia and Charlie walk over to Thomas, the woman withdraws again, crouches in the dead leaves of the forest floor. The poultice looks barbaric and like it will crumble away at the slightest touch. But the bleeding has stopped. Charlie makes to pick Thomas up, then stops.

“We need to get him to safety,” he says to Livia. “Do you have any idea where we are?”

She closes her eyes, tries to picture the forest and the surrounding land. It is hard to transfer distances from horseback to this stumbling through the woods.

“There is a village somewhere. At the far side of the woods. Near the river. But it’s several miles.”

Charlie nods, turns back to the woman, takes a slow step towards her. She does not move. His voice is very gentle when he speaks. Gentle, but not condescending. How long, Livia finds herself thinking, since this woman has been spoken to as a human being not a beast?

“We need help,” Charlie explains. “People. A village. But we don’t know the way.”

When the woman does not respond, Charlie falls to his knees, clears a patch of forest floor. He uses a stick to draw into the dirt. A house, the way a child would draw it: a box with a roof. A stickman, then another, clothed with the triangle of a skirt. When the woman still does not react he adds a clumsy river, writhing like a worm. This means something to her. She copies the picture with her fingers in the air.

“The river? Do you know where it is?” Livia’s words sound hard to her ears, after Charlie’s gentle whisper.

“Riv-ver.”

“Yes, the river. There are people there. Will you lead us?”

The woman seems to consider the request. She crouches motionless for a moment, cocking her head. In profile, she becomes strange all over again, her features foreign: the jawline strong, the small dark eye almost hidden in its thick fold. When she jerks her head to them and beckons, Charlie gives a sudden start.

“I have seen her before!”

“Where?”

“On a picture of your father’s, taken fifteen years ago. But there she had two heads.”

But he does not explain what he means by this, bends down and shoulders Thomas instead, out of whose face mud grows like a dirty tumour.

“Do you think we are being followed?” she asks him as he makes to set off.

“Don’t let’s wait and find out.”

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They walk for more than an hour. Very quickly Charlie tires of his burden and at Livia’s insistence they take Thomas’s slumping body between themselves, his arms slung over their shoulders, feet dragging in the leaves. Progress is slow and there is no way of telling how much distance they are putting between themselves and their attackers. The woman walks a good ten paces ahead, melting into the trees seemingly at will, then stepping out a few yards farther on and beckoning with her head. At long last they reach the river. They see it first as a wall of brightness cut into the dark mass of the trees: the sun is out and is hitting the water, reflecting up. It’s so tranquil it makes no sound. On the other bank the trees cluster thickly. Wherever they are, there are no people here.

But their guide has a reason for choosing this spot. She beckons them on, walking quickly along to the riverbank. Livia knows she cannot carry on much longer. Charlie too is staggering under Thomas’s weight, his breathing ragged, the head beetroot-red. There isn’t far to go: thirty steps on the woman stops and disappears in the shrubs to the side. When they reach the spot, she is gone, somewhere in the shadowy darkness of the woods. The riverbank is steep here. Swollen as the river is by the recent rains, they are walking no more than a yard above the waterline.

“Can you see her?” Charlie pants.

“No. But there is something behind this shrub. Something she wants us to find.”

It’s a rowing boat, not six feet long. The forest has very nearly claimed it. Its sides are overgrown with moss and the piece of canvas covering its top is weighed down with leaves and dirt from which grow the grey tendrils of dead weeds. When they slip off this cover, they discover two sculls lying in its bottom, along with a film of rotting water. The smell makes them gag. A bracket of rusted iron is let into each of the boat’s sides, to anchor the sculls. As she helps Charlie push the boat out into the open, Livia’s fingers unearth a carved crest within the moss at its prow. A boar, basking in the circle of a rising moon. She knows it at once. It’s her own crest, her family’s, the ancient emblem of the Naylors.

“My father used to disappear for days at a time. Going fishing. It was his one indulgence.” Livia shivers, is transported back to a distant time. Early childhood. Her father’s hand stroking her hair. “But that was many years ago.”

“Do you think it’ll float? The wood’s half rotten. But it’s tarred from underneath and the canvas kept the rain out.”

“Let’s hope it does. It’s the best chance we have.”

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Getting the boat into water proves to be hard work. The bank is too high to just drop it in, and they are forced to drag it back a whole ten yards to find a better point of access. Charlie tests it before they heave Thomas in, moving gingerly from prow to stern as though expecting to fall straight through. But the boat holds; turns gently with the slow, even current, ready to run.

There is no way of lifting the wounded boy in without both of them getting soaking wet. Livia’s heavy dress clings to her most indecently. Then, too, the boat is too small for three, and sinks low into the water as they clamber in. At last, shivering, they find an arrangement that distributes their weight, with Thomas stretched out along the bottom, prow to stern, and Livia curled next to him, in uncomfortable proximity to his mud-smeared face. Charlie sits above, manning the oars. The smell of rot is strong in the bottom of the boat and it is difficult not to associate it with the wound. Before they set off, she peeks over the side one last time and catches a glimpse of the woman crouching amongst roots two steps from the riverbank. Something connects her to Livia’s father, and Livia is afraid she will never learn what. Then she is gone, out of sight, and all there is, is the sound of the river below her, and the heat of Thomas’s body far too close. Charlie is nothing but a dark shadow above her: the sun is out overhead and burns her eyes whenever she looks up. It must be right around noon.

Time passes. The boat drifts with the current, then jerks forward with every push of the oars. At some point Livia becomes aware that they are taking on water, that the wet on her legs and back is not just the result of their earlier soaking. There is nothing to be done. She cannot bail the boat, there is nothing to bail it with. Then the sound of the river changes underneath the rotten planks. She looks up, alarmed. The sun has moved enough now that she can watch Charlie’s back rocking with the rhythm of his sculling. He is facing upstream, keeping to the centre of the river, too tired perhaps to turn and see what lies ahead. Livia raises herself to her elbow, risks a peek. The river is no longer flat and glassy. There are shallows ahead, rocks peeking through the surface, and the water is speeding up. Just as she thinks this, a scraping sounds from underneath her and fresh water seeps into the boat.

“Ahead, Charlie. Rapids. Quick now. Or we’ll sink.”

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There is no way to stop it. As Charlie fights to get them out of the way of a large boulder, one oar snaps and next they know they are in a spin. The back of the boat hits another boulder, loosens a plank, the water rushing in thick and fast. Fortunately, the current has pushed them close to the grassy bank. Without discussing it with Charlie, Livia leaps, sinks to her knees in icy river and mud, takes hold of the prow and pulls it towards solid ground. They have to work fast. Thomas cannot move and the water is rising in the bottom of the boat. As they struggle with his deadweight, the entire side of the boat breaks open in a cloud of rot. They pull him through it, onto the bank, press anxious fingers into his pulse. Downriver, the water accelerates and cascades down a five-foot drop. Upriver, the sun has begun to dip. They may have put three or four miles between themselves and their pursuers.

If they are, in fact, being pursued.

A sound rouses her out of her thought. It is instantly familiar: cloth flapping in a breeze. Livia jumps up, rounds a row of bushes dense enough to be called a hedge. Behind them, she finds a washing line, shirts and sheets rising and falling with the breeze. Half the line is empty: a farmer is collecting clothes in her thick arms. The woman sees her the same moment; walks towards her with a leisurely roll, then catches sight of Thomas and Charlie.

“Three of yous!” she shouts from afar. “Wet like newborn lambs. But where’s your boat?”

Livia walks to intercept her. “Is there a village here? A doctor?”

“A league that way.” She gestures. And adds, with a habitual weariness: “My husband, the old blockhead. Says he likes to live apart. So we do, God bless us.”

The next instant she catches sight of Thomas’s face. Much of the poultice has washed away. Blood colours the collar of his shirt. The woman’s cheerfulness vanishes in an instant. All at once her manner is very brisk.

“Is he alive? Then we better carry him inside.” Without waiting for an answer the woman shoves the laundry into Livia’s hands, then lifts up Thomas’s head and shoulders.

“Well, jump to it, lad,” she barks at Charlie. “Take his feet.”

Her cottage is not twenty yards away, but pressed into the side of a hillock in such a manner as to be almost invisible. Inside, a fire is burning in the stove. Kitchen and living room are one, the ceiling low and rutted with beams. They bed Thomas on the kitchen table. The woman fetches a bucket of water and some clean rags.

“Rolled you in mud, did they?” she says to no one in particular as she begins to clean Thomas’s wound. “Moss, too. Well, I suppose it stopped your leaking. Nasty cut this, half the ear clean gone. And a nice deep furrow in yer skull, straight as a die, I could take a ruler to it. Nothing cracked though, not as far as I can see. Funny smell to the wound. Got yourself singed, did you? Played with guns, I take it. And they beat you, too, by the looks of it, a proper thrashing. Lord, will you look at these bruises! Black and blue you are, all the way down to the navel.” She has unbuttoned his shirt and begins wrapping a bandage around Thomas’s head. “Well, here you are, duck. Swaddled tight like a baby. If you have a rest and it don’t infect, well, you might just mend. But hello! Here you are yerself, our very own Lazarus. One eye open like a pirate at sea! Good day to you, sir, the pleasure is mine, only don’t you try to speak now, just lie back and rest.”

Perhaps it is the pain that has woken him, perhaps it is her voice, deep and pleasant, but as Livia and Charlie bend over him, they do indeed find one eye startlingly open amongst the bandages that crisscross Thomas’s face. Removed from the context of his features, it looks less fierce than Livia remembers, and younger. Vulnerable. But then, he has just come back from the dead.

Instantly, both Livia and Charlie start speaking, trying to reassure him.

“You are safe,” Livia says. “You were shot but all is well now.”

“You are safe,” Charlie says. “I will go and fetch help. There’s a village nearby — I’ll have someone ride to Lady Naylor.”

Immediately, Thomas grows agitated, his limbs twitching, his lips moving within his bruises and the bandage.

“Don’t, you must rest.”

But Thomas ignores Charlie’s advice, keeps trying to raise himself, to speak. No sound will come. Livia accepts a glass of water from the farmer. Something has moved in the woman’s face. She has heard the name. Lady Naylor. The lady of the manor.

It changes something for her.

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The water helps Thomas. He takes a sip, coughs, licks his lips. They are so bloodless, they lie grey against his teeth. Again Thomas attempts to speak, again he fails. He has to try four, five more times before it bursts out of him, broken and insistent.

“Tell no one.” And then again, louder, spit in his words. “Tell no one. Don’t trust.”

Livia stares at his mutilated face. He’s not been awake a full minute. And already he’s making her angry.

“Tell no one? He’s thinking that Mother—” She turns to Charlie. “It’s absurd!”

Another word breaks out of Thomas, a syllable at a time.

“Lab. Ra. Tree.”

Livia’s temper rises in her like a dark cloud. All those years of Discipline, sent packing by a scattering of words.

“He’s out of his mind. What — we sneaked into Mother’s laboratory and now she’s going to kill us? Do you think she put on her riding skirts and a gun and staked us out? Or perhaps she sent Thorpe, the old man.”

“Or Julius.” It is Charlie who says it, beside her, quiet, his face open like a book.

“He wouldn’t shoot his own valet. The man is like a father to him!”

Her mouth is bitter with Smoke. Charlie does not respond. On the table, Thomas has slumped back into oblivion, one arm thrust into his open shirt, cradling his own chest. In the silence opened up by his faint, Livia feels herself drawn into Thomas’s doubts by her own lack of an explanation. To her side, the farmer stands, folding laundry. She has listened pretending not to listen. When Livia studies her face it is carefully neutral, the intelligence of her eyes locked away behind her half-drawn lids. It strikes Livia that this is a role at which the woman has had practice: acting dull when she’s expected to be. By her betters. The thought is new to Livia. She has lived around servants all her life but has never been in their quarters. Never in a farmhouse, never in a factory. It has not occurred to her that her whole life she has been watched by hooded eyes. Evaluated.

“Let’s go outside,” she says to Charlie.

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They argue quietly, five steps from the door. Her clothes remain wet and Livia shivers with cold.

“It makes no sense,” she says again.

“It might do. What if we saw something? In the laboratory. Something so important that it changes things. Something no one must know. No matter the price.” Charlie is calm, analytical, willing to forgive even his own murder. “Let’s think it through. The attack, I mean. Six shots, I make it. One after the other, but pretty quick. Shot at great distance. One gun or several? A marksman, in any case. If it were bandits, they’d want the horses alive. They are worth a great deal I should think.” He bites his lip. “If Thomas is right — if someone’s after us for what we know. . then it’s best if nobody knows that we are here. No one at all.”

Livia tries to dismiss his words, along with her own doubts. “Do you really think my mother would endanger her own daughter?”

“No. But you weren’t supposed to be there. You climbed on in secret. Outside the gates.” His eyes find hers, hold them, gently and with wonder. “Why did you?”

She wants to put him off with a non-answer, grow angry even, or prickly at least. But his face makes it difficult. It is open, like a book.

“I wanted to see you off. My mother discouraged my coming to the station with you. We had words about it last night. I decided to ignore her request.” She hesitates before going on. “I wanted to come to the station and say good-bye to you, Charlie. I even brought a handkerchief to wave.”

“I have been wanting to kiss you.” He says it firmly, like it is simply so, a fact like the sunshine around them and the grass at their feet.

Perhaps it is.

They go inside, and the farmer gives them blankets and sits them near the fire. She has stripped the wet things off Thomas and covered him with a bulky feather bed. Livia wishes she had a chance to change out of her own wet clothes. After some hesitation, she slides down from the hard wooden chair and kneels close to the fire, hoping it will dry her out.

Within minutes she is fast asleep.

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When she wakes the men are there. There are three of them, wearing plain fustian suits. They stand around the kitchen table, looking down at Thomas. A father and two sons. The sons have the same build: tall, high-shouldered, loose-limbed, and rangy. Their father is shorter, bigger-boned, holds a pipe clenched between thick, cold-chapped lips. Together, standing elbow to elbow, hip to hip, they make the cottage feel very small.

Livia rises quickly, coming out from beneath the blanket, her hands making sure she is decent. The movement wakes Charlie, slumped over in his chair. He leaps to his feet, sees the men, and immediately steps over to them.

“My name is Charlie Cooper. We thank you for your hospitality.”

He shakes hands in his simple, hearty way. The men seem bemused by the greeting but accept it in silence.

Then their eyes turn to Livia.

She hesitates, aware that it’s impossible to repeat Charlie’s gesture: it is unsuitable for ladies. The men don’t bow and it seems silly to curtsy. She can tell from their faces that they know who she is. The farmer has told them; she is at the stove now, watching the scene in silence. There is no way of putting the men at ease, not with the daughter of the man who owns the very land they stand on.

Livia tries the truth instead.

“I am Livia Naylor. We ran into trouble on the road this morning. Mr. Argyle here was wounded. At present we don’t know who. . That is, we think it best if nobody knows where we are.” She pauses, straightens. “Will you help us?”

The only answer she receives is a nod by the father. It is a thoughtful nod, only given after much contemplation. It seems to take the place of an oath.

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Nobody asks them any questions until after dinner. The men, it seems, don’t like to speak. All Livia has learned from them is their names. The father is Bill Mosley. The eldest son, dark-haired, with thick, drooping moustaches, is called Jake. His brother, Francis, is lighter haired and finer featured. He appears to be entirely mute. The farmer herself is called Janet and will not stand for Mrs. Mosley, as she thrice repeats. She alone is chatting away, working at the cooker.

“My men,” she explains in passing, “are miners, all three of them.”

The moment she says it Livia sees the black crescents that mark the fingertips at the edge of their nails; the black dust that has grown into their skin at the knuckles and dyed them blue. Other than that they are scrubbed scrupulously clean.

Dinner is a hearty affair of potato and cabbage soup, some rashers of bacon, and a tin-loaf of coarse brown bread. They have shifted Thomas from the table to a bed at the back of the cottage. Charlie gets up every few minutes to check on his friend.

“He’s awake. I’ll try to feed him some soup.”

Mrs. Mosley goes with him. It leaves Livia alone with the three men.

She watches them eat. The father is already done and sits fingering his pipe. The quiet one spoons his soup with an abstracted air, turned inward, smiling to himself. His brother is busy buttering his bread with a haste bordering on anger, as though the loaf is his personal enemy and needs to be cowed. All the while he is looking at Livia. It is not a friendly look.

“Preacher came to the mine today, Mum,” he suddenly starts declaiming, slowly and emphatically, still looking at Livia though it is his mother, behind him, he purports to be addressing. “Caught us while we were washing. No chance of escape. Always the same song. ‘Smoking is sin. Don’t think because you can’t see it, down the mine, that it is less so. God’s eyes. .’ And so on and so on.” He snorts, chews, swallows. “Smoking ain’t sin. It’s a weapon. Toffs use it to keep us down. Proves everything’s just as it should be, with them on top, smug like a bunch of dung beetles rolling their lunch.”

It is his father who answers him, calmly, in his slow thoughtful manner, laying the pipe down next to his plate.

“I don’t know, Jake, it ain’t as simple as that. Wish that it was. But it ain’t. Think of all them regular Smokers over in the village, the ones whose Smoke is full of hate. Collins, for one. Hazard. Lawrence. Old Jimmy Becket. Each of them a right little bugger. Liars, drunks, cheats. Might as well call it sin.”

The son bristles at this, but respects his father too much to contradict him outright.

“It don’t matter down below” is all he says. “You know it don’t.”

“That’s true enough,” answers the father. “It don’t matter down below.” And then he turns to Livia, screws up one eye, and asks, firmly but not unkindly, “What do you think, miss, about all this?”

She hesitates. Truth be told she is surprised: not only by the content of the words but by the fact that these people — farmers, miners — will discuss Smoke so readily, at the dinner table, wondering at its mystery. It had been, in her mind, an inquiry conducted only by her parents and their peers. By well-bred minds, as her teachers might have put it. By those who rule.

“Smoke is the incarnation of sin,” she says at last with all the meekness she has bred in herself through long years of practice. “It’s a dark mark from God. But it may be that we have been too eager to use it as an excuse for the sufferings of sinners.”

The eldest son snorts at this we. It excludes him and his whole family besides. But his brother, unspeaking, nods and attempts to spear a pickle. It eludes his knife point, jumps off the plate, rolls over the table leaving a trail of vinegar. On impulse, Livia picks it up and bites on it. It is so sharp it makes her eyes water; she coughs and coughs. Somehow it takes the tension out of the room. In the end even Jake is standing, laughing, slapping her back with the flat of his hand. Ten minutes later, their dinner finished, the men get up to walk to the village, have a pint at the pub.

There is nothing to do but hope that they won’t talk about the gentlefolk they are hosting for the night.

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They are back inside two hours. Mrs. Mosley remains busy in the kitchen, making preparations for the morrow. Livia is at her prayers. She would like to go to bed but does not know where. The cottage seems too small to hold them all. Charlie has nodded off on a chair, his face peaceful in sleep, his mouth fallen open around a half-formed smile. The men’s entrance wakes him. His first look darts to her, his second to Thomas. Making sure they are safe. It shouldn’t, but the sequence of those looks makes her flush with pleasure.

“Back already?” Mrs. Mosley greets her men. “And sober, like Christian men should be.” But her husband and son do not take up her bantering. “What’s wrong?”

“They’re the talk of the town,” Jake announces gruffly, jerking his head at Livia and Charlie. “Or their coach is, shot up on the high road. Fowler went to town this afternoon. Says it’s all everyone’s talking about. Rumour says Lady Naylor herself was inside and has been abducted. And then Sutter pipes up that he found a boat, what was left of it, stuck on some rocks a league downriver. Said it had a crest. He didn’t give it much thought at the time. Now the whole village is wondering what connects them, coach and boat. And who was inside.”

His father puts a hand on Jake’s arm. The gesture quiets him, makes him cede ground.

“You cannot stay here,” Mr. Mosley announces after a pause. “Not if you don’t want to be found. The whole village is talking. And management always has its man in the pub. Someone’s sure to come and ask questions.” All of a sudden a scrap of Smoke escapes him. He watches it rise, waves to disperse it. “Excuse me.”

It is like he is apologising for breaking wind at the table. It is the only hint that he is agitated.

“We will go,” says Charlie. “First thing in the morning.”

The man wags his chin in thought.

“No you won’t. That one”—he points to Thomas—“he can’t walk. Not for a while. And he’ll need a doctor, or a nurse. He ain’t out the woods yet.” He pauses, sets to lighting his pipe. “There is a place. Somewhere no one will see you. And even if they do, they won’t tell. That is, if you are serious. About disappearing for a while.”

He looks to Charlie for an answer, but Charlie looks to her. Livia understands the look. It’s her mother who will worry herself sick over her daughter’s disappearance. And it’s her mother who might have tried to have them killed.

It’s her decision.

But if she gets it wrong, it’s Charlie and Thomas who will die.

“When do we go?” she asks.

Mr. Mosley’s expression does not change. He draws at his pipe, exhales. “Tonight. But not before two or thereabouts. In between shifts.”

Before he can turn away, she walks over to him and looks him in the eye.

“You don’t have to do this. Thank you that you do.”

His face darkens. It takes her a second to comprehend it’s a blush.

“It was Francis’s idea,” he says, pointing at his silent son. “On the way over. I wasn’t sure at first. But now I think he’s right.” He pauses, turns to his wife. “This one will need some woman things, I imagine. And some cutlery for the both of them, a jug or something of the kind, and any blankets we can spare.”

Mrs. Mosley looks at him sourly. “Don’t you tell me what to do.”

Her hands are already busy filling a basket. A flask goes in, two cups, and a pair of bloomers so large, Livia will have to gird them with a belt.

“Where are they taking us?” she asks as she accepts the basket some hours later.

The woman gives her a long, solemn look. Perhaps she thinks her men are making a mistake. Or else that Livia and Charlie are.

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

THORPE

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

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

There is no trace of either of the boys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was always willing to serve.

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

Then why the dreams that douse me in hot fire?

IN DARKNESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Quick now, get in.”

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

“The operator won’t tell anyone?”

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

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

“Hold steady now, miss.”

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

They keep on falling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ф

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

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

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

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

“What happened to this place?” Livia asks.

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

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

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

She feels her skin blush in the lamplight.

“That’s sordid.”

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

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

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

ф

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fist the size of a ham hock. Black, casting a shadow over her face. But Livia feels outrage rather than fear.

“It’s illegal, that’s what it is. It’ll land you in jail.” The newspaper’s warnings come back to her, well-wrought phrases, warnings for the custodians of land and Crown. “What does it want, your union? Riots in the street, I suppose. Burnt manor houses, looted granaries, and free gin for every man, woman, and child. Anarchy! There’ll be famine before you know it.”

Jake drops his fist.

“We are fighting for proper insurance,” he answers with an odd sort of dignity. “When there’s an accident. Last month a man got cut by a snapped cable. Lost both hands. Manager wouldn’t give him a penny.”

He lifts up the lamp, opens it, blows out the flame.

“You must keep it off. There is shale gas in the area. Besides, the next shift will start soon. Light travels a long way down here, and colliers’ eyes are sharp.”

The darkness is so total the words are disconnected from their speaker. Jake no longer exists. Her own body has disappeared. All of a sudden, Livia is to herself just the breath of her lungs, the taste of her tongue between her teeth.

“No light?” she asks, her voice spilling out of her then evaporating in the dark. “How will we live?”

Jake’s answer has the simplicity of truth.

“You’ll get used to it.”

ф

Very soon she is alone.

It isn’t true, of course, but it feels like it. Abandonment. As though she has been left here to rot.

“Listen for the canaries’ movements. If they die, there’s gas in the room. But don’t worry, you’ll be just fine. I’ll send someone down to look after Thomas. At the start of the shift after next.”

It was Mr. Mosley who said it and why would he lie? But it was dark already when he spoke, and his voice had no body, no presence, sprang from no source. Like God’s, when He spoke on the day He made the world. But that’s blasphemy. No wonder though that the first thing He made was light. The dark is a lonely place. Livia has been here for no more than a thousand breaths. And already she knows it.

Of course, she is not alone. There is Thomas whom she heard being bundled into one of the beds. And Charlie, not five steps away. The wound has reopened, he has announced. Now he is busy at Thomas’s bedside, muttering to himself, trying to stem the bleeding in the dark. She fights with herself not to speak to him, distract him from his work. And so she waits, listens, drowns in the black.

The disorientation is total. She is, to her own senses, only her breath, the gurgling of her stomach. Her outside has dissolved, can be made present only by running her palms down the length of her skin, her face and neck, and (bashfully this) down the front of her dress, all the way to its hem, touching her sides, her knees, her calves, making herself real to herself and preserving her image, assembled through a hundred run-ins with a looking glass.

She bites her lip, and savours the reality of flesh and pain.

Time slips by, moves through the dark in slippered feet. In the absence of sight, other senses become vivid, fill the void with meanings true or false. At times it seems to Livia as though there are other people in the room, creeping around in silence, just inches from her, brushing her clothes, pulling faces in her sightless face. Sounds tug at her, have no origins other than the dark. It might be Thomas moaning, or Charlie’s mutter. Lovers embracing in the cave next door. A miner screaming far away as his hands are burnt by shale gas. The canaries’ brittle talons raking at the cage as they slowly suffocate.

For suffocate they must, since there is no air down here, just a cold, leaden thickness that presses on her along with the weight of the rock, hundreds upon hundreds of yards of rock, held up by some mouldy timbers, like matchsticks holding aloft the slab of a giant grave. Livia shudders, grows angry at her fear; forces herself to move, explore. She does not trust her feet, slides to the ground, needs to feel the floor with her bare hands to know it is there. On all fours then, like an animal, she crawls about, finds a wall, a shelf, a tin filled with something that might be food. Shortbread, oatcakes, hardtack? Her fingers feel stupid in the dark, unable to interpret texture, and her nose cannot make out the scent. She grabs a piece, too hard, feels it crumble and scatter on the floor. It is now that she starts crying. There is no one to see it, each sob silent, hidden, swallowed down. And yet Charlie finds her. She is alone, distraught, crumbs on her palm, sweat running down her back. The next moment his voice is in her ear.

“It’s eerie down here,” he says as though he’s sitting at the breakfast table, commenting on the porridge and toast. “Like being in a strange kind of church. One daren’t even speak.” He pauses but his voice does not change. “Are you afraid, Livia?”

“No.”

“Well, I am.”

She pictures his face as he says it, eyebrows arched in wonder at himself. Something touches her between her throat and her chest, reaches, searches, then hastily withdraws as though stung. Too late she realises it was his hand. Looking for hers. Embarrassed by what it found: the softness of her body.

It almost makes her laugh.

A moment later she reaches out herself, touches some part of him, clothed, his hip, perhaps, his knee, the narrow strip of his flank. The possibilities taunt her: how easy it would be to linger, in this absence of all sight. But she, too, withdraws her hand. They settle on a subtler sort of touch, sit leaning one against the other, shoulder digging into shoulder, until her legs fall asleep beneath her and she has lost all sense of where his body ends and hers begins.

“How long have we been here?” she asks.

“Ten minutes,” he answers. “Ten weeks. But shorter than a miner’s shift.”

A miner’s shift. How long is that? Eight hours? Ten? Twelve?

Help won’t be coming until it ends.

ф

When help does come, it bears a familiar voice. Familiar, but hard to place: calling quietly in the darkness and rousing her from sleep, Charlie’s jacket underneath her cheek and serving as her pillow. It is only when a match is lit — feeble, flickering, shielded by a glowing hand; and all the same blinding, radiant, a beacon from another world — that a face attaches itself to the voice. Immediately, all of Livia’s relief turns sour.

“You? What are you doing here?”

The voice that answers is as surprised as hers. And sulky.

“This is my home village! Half your servants hail from here.” Then: “If I’d known it was you I wouldn’t have come.”

It’s Lizzy, the scullery maid they let go for thieving on Christmas Eve. She is dressed in collier’s breeches and jacket, and is carrying a safety lamp; opens the glass and lights the wick, turns it down to a faint glow, sends it sweeping through the room.

“You are the talk of the village, you are. Ravished by Gypsies. Only some say that it was an elopement of sorts.” She sneers, is unguarded in her anger. “Who’s sick then? You look just fine to me.”

Her manner changes when the beam finds Thomas. The bandage is drenched, blood sitting on his face like a crab, red-black and many-legged, dredged up from the sea.

“It’s him! Mr. Mosley didn’t say. Just that they needed a nurse. I thought it was a collier. Or someone on the run. Hiding from the law.”

The last word is chased by a shadow: Smoke in the lamplight, falling through its beam like dust. It has no smell.

And just like that Lizzy’s anger leaves her again. She kneels by the bunk bed, begins to peel off Thomas’s bandages; wets a cloth from the mouth of a water bottle she has brought and sets to cleaning the wound. She beckons to Charlie to sit with her, asks him to hold her bag open for her.

“Quick now, Mr. Cooper. I promised I’d keep the light off as much as possible. It’s against our rules.”

Livia hovers behind them, watches Lizzy work.

“What do you know about nursing?” she asks, unable to reconcile what she is seeing with her knowledge of the girl. “You’re a maid.”

“I help out when a miner gets injured. Cuts, burns, smashed limbs. Got ’prenticed to it when my pa was brought in one night. Broken spine.”

“What happened to him?”

Lizzy’s shoulders stiffen.

“What do you think happens to a man with a broken spine?”

Again Smoke leaps from her mouth. Again it carries no smell. As it turns to Soot it joins the coal dust on the floor, the walls, their skin and clothing. Lizzy takes no notice. She turns to Charlie, and gives him instruction to fetch a bucket of water from a barrel farther down the tunnel outside; a rope is fastened to the tunnel wall and will guide his way. The moment Charlie is gone, Lizzy returns her attention to Thomas, never once looking at Livia. It is as though she has wished her out of existence. So marked is the reversal of their former relationship that Livia finds herself intrigued rather than vexed.

“Why are you angry with me? Because I caught you stealing?”

“I wasn’t stealing.”

“You were. I caught you red-handed, rifling through the pile of presents.”

“I wasn’t stealing,” Lizzy repeats. “I was wanting to add a present. Hide it in the pile.” After a moment she adds, “For him,” and points at Thomas with her chin. “And then you came in and called me a thief.”

“You are lying. I saw you smoke: thick green shrouds. It was as good as admitting it.”

Now Lizzy does look at her. It’s a hard look. Coal has caught in her lashes and lends a startling beauty to her eyes.

“I was angry, that’s all. I could’ve scratched out your eyes.”

Still Livia does not believe her. “You never said any of this. And you didn’t hold any present. Nothing of your own.”

“I shoved it down my blouse. Oh, I know, I could’ve showed it to you, and explained. But I couldn’t stand it. You’d have laughed at it, it was so pitiful next to all your splendour. And of course you would’ve read my note, and made fun of it.” Her voice drops to a hiss. “It was for him, not you.”

Livia is taken aback by the force behind Lizzy’s words.

“And he?” she asks. “Would he not have laughed? At your pitiful present and your note?”

“Perhaps not.”

At last Livia understands.

“You like him.”

Lizzy’s chin rises with the answer. Back in the manor house, Thorpe would have slapped a servant for such a show of pride.

“He looks at everyone the same. You, your mother, the servants. Not friendly, like, but the same. High and low.”

Livia considers this, remembers her own encounters with Thomas’s eyes. “He looks at one as though he means to search one. Down to one’s petticoats. Strip one of all secrets. It isn’t a pleasant look.”

But Lizzy only shrugs. “I don’t mind. I haven’t got nothing to hide.” She sighs, bends over him. “He was handsome then. He’ll be ugly now forever.”

“Hush! He might hear you.”

Again anger returns to Lizzy like the gust of a draft. “So? This one, he’s not afraid of the truth.”

She falls silent, turns back to her patient, her fingers stained with coal and blood.

As she watches Lizzy get on with her work, Livia marvels at how much the girl has seen and understood. And from what? Three or four moments of interaction. No, not interaction: less than that. Proximity. A greeting or two, a look exchanged as she passed Thomas in the corridor. And yet she has seen him more clearly than Livia ever did.

She takes a step to the side, for a clearer view, and studies Thomas. His face is laid bare. The girl is using a razor to shave the hair around the wound. Despite her efforts with the washcloth, the coal dust is everywhere and has already seeped into the open skin. It will be there forever, an ink stain blooming in his hairline and eating into the upper portion of the cheek. The top part of the ear is gone, the stump swollen and knotty. Ugly. Yes, no doubt. But for the first time Livia sees something in Thomas she has missed before. Nobility: something quite separate from bloodlines and the lottery of birth. His eyes are open, unseeing. Soon a bandage covers one of them and his head is swathed in layers of cotton, quickly turning from white to grey.

Charlie returns, laden with a six-gallon bucket, black water slopping over its rim. When Livia steps over to help him, an urgent whisper rises up from the sickbed, like the hiss of a kettle.

“Fever,” Lizzy says, dowsing the lamp. “He is talking in his sleep.”

The next instant they have returned to a darkness given texture by the ravings of the sick.

ф

As Livia soon discovers, there are no days in the dark, no nights. They eat when they are hungry, relearning the sense of taste disassociated from sight; sleep on the bunk beds when they tire; walk the dark tunnel beyond their door when they require exercise. There are other rooms down here, connected by a system of rope handrails that assist navigation. Some are filled to the bursting with food, clothes, furniture, tools, as though the miners are preparing for a siege. Two rooms hold giant water barrels; one is a communal latrine. Beyond that the tunnel leads to the sheer wall of a coal face, oddly soft to the touch.

People come and go. Lizzy does not live with them, but looks in periodically, changing the bandages and searching the wound for signs of rot. Mr. Mosley also stops by at irregular intervals, as does Jake, blandly inquiring after Thomas’s condition. At times they are accompanied by other men, known to Livia only by their voices, or by their outlines when Lizzy briefly lights a lamp. These do not introduce themselves. Nor do they ask any questions; avoid the use of names even amongst themselves. If the men are curious what they are doing there, these three scions of the gentry, not one of them puts it into words.

Listening in to their conversation, Livia gathers that they are all part of the inner circle of whatever revolution is brewing here, down in the depths of the earth. Her sole interaction with one of these “Union Men” occurs when she feels her way into the latrine and, with outstretched hands, suddenly comes into contact with a man’s face and wiry whiskers, hanging waist-high in the darkness. It comes to her that he is squatting there, trousers around his ankles. She gives a cry and recoils.

“I am sorry! I didn’t know—”

The man answers with a husky laugh.

“Sorry about what, lassie? Dark as a badger’s bum down here. We could all be running around with no clothes on for all anyone would know about it.”

She hears him rise, pull up his trousers.

“Don’t ya worry, now, I’ll leave you in peace. Guard the door if you like, make sure you’ve got yer privacy. You young ones are shy about this sort of thing.”

She hears him walk off, stamping his feet loudly, so she knows where he is. It is just as well she would not know him from Adam if they met in the light.

ф

In this sightless, featureless world in which she finds herself, the one thing that remains to her is talk: whispered conversations in the void, sitting on the floor, more often than not, her shoulders leaned back against the wall, and speaking as one does in one’s own head, with a newly found abandon. Most of the time she talks to Charlie. To her surprise, their talk often drifts into argument.

“What did you think of me when we first met?” she will ask, careless in this darkness of the vanity unmasked by her question.

“That you were stiff.”

“Stiff?”

“Yes. Stuck-up, I suppose. And pretty.”

“I suppose now that you can’t see me, I am merely stuck-up.”

“You are trying to be holy, that’s all. But it doesn’t suit you.”

“Doesn’t suit? You are saying I am bad at heart.”

He pauses over this, for longer than is comfortable. “Not bad, no. You are just yourself.”

And later: “We don’t choose how we are made.”

She moves away then, to be alone with her thoughts.

ф

Next time they speak, she finds herself punishing him for this “doesn’t suit.” It’s Charlie himself who gives her the opening. He wants to know about Thomas’s father: the details of his crime.

She does not immediately satisfy him with an answer.

“You don’t know?” she asks instead, as though overcome by wonder. “You are his best friend and you don’t know?”

“All he told me is that his father killed someone. I thought he would explain it, sooner or later. But he never did.”

It is only when she hears the hurt in Charlie’s voice that Livia realises what she is doing. And feels ashamed.

“I will tell you what Mother told me,” she offers. They are lying side by side on a blanket in one corner of the room. Their forearms very nearly touch; she can feel his hairs caress her skin. They have been doing this a lot lately: almost touch. If there were light by which to inspect, to judge herself, she would have condemned such licence. But in the dark their closeness has no censor.

“It’s like this. Thomas’s father got into a fight with one of his tenants who claimed Mr. Argyle had taken liberties with his wife. Apparently, he stormed into the public house in broad daylight and bashed in the man’s skull. He was arrested and tried, but then he died in prison before the sentencing could take place. ’Flu, Mother said. Thomas had just turned eleven.

“When the news reached her, Thomas’s mother was already sick. A growth on her chest. They were impoverished, the estate heavily in debt, but she refused all offers of help. It was thought that she had sent her son to a local school. Somewhere up north: a provincial establishment, for the children of the minor gentry. But she must have kept him instead, to look after her. He comes from an isolated place: no visitors, the closest neighbour twenty miles away. Nobody took any notice — nobody who mattered — not until she died. But when she did, lawyers got involved. Mother says they always do. The custody of the estate went to Thomas’s uncle — his father’s brother — until Thomas turns twenty-one. A Lord Wesley, of Pembrokeshire.

“Apparently Lord Wesley never went up himself. He sent a steward instead, to look after the estate. Mother says the steward found Thomas living alone on the grounds, holding court over a gaggle of village urchins. All the servants were gone. So the steward wrote to Lord Wesley who in turn wrote to Mother, and she arranged to have him bundled off to school.”

Charlie’s voice is incredulous. “I never heard a word about any of this.”

“You wouldn’t have. It was all carefully hushed up. A nobleman committing murder — impossible! Imagine the scandal, the implications if the story spread. So they bought off the witnesses and forbade all mention of the affair. Even the trial was held in secret. Mother only found out because, somewhere along the line, Thomas’s mother broke her vow of silence and sent her a letter.”

“Trout must know. Our headmaster. But he hasn’t told the other teachers. If he had, they’d have used it against Thomas.”

They are speaking in whispers, too low to be overheard. All the same, a cry issues from Thomas’s bed. When they run to his bedside, they find his face wet with blood or tears.

ф

Lizzy comes and goes. She makes little attempt to speak to Livia, and Livia finds herself avoiding her, avoiding Thomas. Moving away from them, sitting in darkness. Lizzy is the only one who always lights a lamp.

On occasion, though, Livia will linger and watch Lizzy tend to her patient, draw infection from the wound, spoon soup into the feverish boy. There is something more to Lizzy’s movements than solicitude. Even when she’s wiping off his pus. It worries, fascinates Livia.

Periodically, too, she forces herself to lend a hand in turning Thomas, or in changing his sweat-drenched bedding. When they are done, still squatting at his bedside, Lizzy makes a comb of her fingers, and runs it through Thomas’s tangled hair. Her eyes are on Livia. She speaks abruptly.

“You really don’t like him, eh? Well, can’t help your heart.” Lizzy spits, unselfconsciously, not intending any insult, merely clearing her throat. “How about Mr. Cooper, though? You’re sweet on him, ain’t you?”

“Sweet?”

The moment Livia says it she knows the tone is wrong, mistress speaking to servant. But here she is, a beggar in this house. Livia tries to summon the meekness she has spent years growing in herself. It never came naturally.

It doesn’t come now.

“He is a fine young man” is all she manages.

Lizzy snorts and for a moment Livia feels it, the commoner’s derision for a life where one does not dare put feelings into words.

ф

Thomas’s fever begins to ease. He remains weak, withdrawn, sleeping through three hours out of every four. But he’s on the mend. It forces Charlie and Livia to discuss the future. They have shied away from it thus far. Part of it is that Charlie reproaches himself. He says, “I should have stayed on top. Found out what was going on. Or made my way back to school and talked to Trout.”

Livia does not answer, hugs herself standing invisible in the blackness of the cave, a step from him, thinking: We would not know one another if you had stayed on top.

But Charlie’s thoughts remain far away.

“I could write to Ireland,” he says. “To my parents. Explain the situation, ask them for their help. The miners will post the letter.”

“Will they? Mr. Mosley would have to go to the post office in town. I doubt he keeps much correspondence. Somebody would notice. Better to keep quiet for a little longer. Lie low. Disappear.”

“Now you sound like Thomas. Suspicious.”

She wants to tell him that it is more than that. That she has found something here, in the darkness, something she does not understand yet. But what she says is: “That’s because Thomas is right. He is in danger. They shot off half his face.”

But Charlie is too honest to let it go at that.

“If he’s wrong,” he says, “your mother will be going mad with worry. For all of us, but above all for you.”

Her reply is curt. “Mother won’t miss me. I’m a disappointment to her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t really know.”

She feels an anger burn in her so rich and thick it must coat her skin in suds. The feeling is quickly smothered by confusion when she feels something soft brushing her cheek, searching it, finding her mouth. Charlie’s lips are dry on hers. She moistens them with her tongue. Livia does not realise how close they are standing until she feels her chest pressed into his. It unlocks something in her that makes itself heard in a sigh, a whelp, the sound of a pup when you touch its belly while it’s sleeping. The sound scares her. She recoils, sniffing the air; feels a greed rise through her body, up the ladder of her rib cage; finds him once more, explores him with her face, her mouth, and for the first time in her life feels the need to nip, to bite another’s skin, cram his breath into her lungs. It lasts a moment. Then she remembers herself, walks away, licking her lips, her teeth, hunting for the taste of sin and finding only Charlie: the taste of sweat and coal dust, with a hint of the cold cabbage soup they ate for lunch.

It leaves her with another riddle.

ф

It is Francis who helps her solve it. The silent son. She hears his voice for the first time when he comes to look in on Thomas and stands whispering to Lizzy. She herself is sitting some yards away, near the doorway of the sick chamber, leaning her back against the tunnel wall. She does not try to follow the conversation. Her ears are latched on to a different sound, issuing from the cracks and crevices of the rockslide that separates them from the mine proper. Beyond lies the lovers’ cave. Of late it has drawn her. Its sounds are distant; soft. Talk, sighs. Quiet laughter. And, once in a while, a smothered moan that tugs at her very skin. It takes her a while to put a name to it. The sound of letting yourself go. It is not a sound she can imagine herself ever making.

Francis approaches. His step is near-silent but she hears him all the same, can gauge the distance at which he comes to a stop. She is like a bat now, attuned to the dark.

The comparison makes her smile.

“Are you getting on all right?” he asks.

“I thought you were mute.”

“Only on top. Down here I’m a regular chatterbox.” They are speaking in whispers, are barely audible to themselves. And yet she can sense purpose underneath his banter. “I want to show you something. Out there, in the mine. But you’ll have to change into miner’s clothing.”

“Now?”

“Soon. At the end of the shift. It’ll be safest then.”

On his instructions, she locates a shirt, jacket, cap, and breeches in one of the storerooms, then changes in the dark. How odd that she can do so, not even closing the door: strip half naked, with no thought to her modesty. Francis remains where she left him, out in the tunnel near the rockslide. He asks whether she is ready and instructs her to tuck her hair beneath the cap. The next moment he has taken hold of her hand. It’s so intimate a gesture, she feels herself stiffen.

“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” he reassures her. “It’s nothing like that. I already have a girl. A real talker, just like me. Hush now. It isn’t far.”

Without further explanation he tugs her after him, first through the twisting path between the fallen rocks, then out into the lovers’ cave and the corridor beyond. Nothing stirs.

He lights his lamp, rushes almost to the point of running, tugging her down a series of corridors. Once he stops short, smothering their light, and waits for a group of haulage women to pass in the distance, each bent double and pushing their loads. Not one of them shoots them a glance.

“They shouldn’t be here,” Francis rasps. “Their shift is over. And Father tweaked the work rosters for the next shift, to make sure nobody’d be around.”

“Did they see us?”

“Let’s hope not. Management has its people in every work crew. They spy on us, make sure we don’t slack off. No politics allowed, no talking, a quarter hour for lunch.” He curses softly, rekindles the light. “Never mind. We are almost there.”

Soon after, they arrive: a long, narrow room, well supported by timbers. A dank animal smell hangs in the air; the sound of breathing, oddly heavy and many-mouthed. Much of the space is given over to a row of wooden pens. As the lamplight strafes them, it picks out the outline of a snout. Tender pink flesh frames the flared holes of two nostrils. A whinny sounds.

“Horses?” Livia asks, uncertain.

“Pit ponies. Here, let’s give them a treat.”

Francis digs in his pocket, retrieves a few carrots. He passes one to Livia. When she lifts it up to the window of the first pen, a pony’s head emerges out of the shadow, teeth bared. Its lips brush her fingers as the animal tears the carrot from her grasp. It turns to eat, like a dog protecting its bone. In the pen next door, its neighbour kicks its hoofs against the wooden gate. It has sniffed the carrots and wants its share.

“What do you think of them?” Francis asks, as he goes along, distributing treats.

“They are stunted and dirty. Their legs are bandy.”

“Mam says it’s because they get no sun.”

“You don’t take them up?”

“Rarely. The lift terrifies them. Some literally die of fright. And when they get outside, well, some of them go mad. They will run till they drop with exhaustion. Others just stand there, shivering, closing their eyes against the sun.”

She searches his face while he says it. He, in turn, is looking at her very closely, as though waiting for her verdict.

“It’s sad,” she says at length.

The young man nods. “Yes.” His eyes are expectant, waiting for her to say something more.

“Why take me here, Francis? It’s an awful risk to take, just to show me some sick animals.”

He nods, shrugs, keeps his eyes on her.

“What do you think of it?” he asks obliquely. “Our life in the mine?”

She starts answering, falters, feels herself back away from the light of his lamp. There’s a thought that has grown in her, almost without her noticing. Now it wants out.

“You’re free,” she says. “I did not understand it at first. Your love of total darkness, the reluctance to light any lamps — it’s not just fear of gas, or of discovery. It’s a way of life. Almost a religion. You are building a kingdom. Beyond the rule of Smoke.” She pauses, eyes the ponies. “And yet, it is doomed.”

He nods, keeps the lamplight on her face across the three-step gap she has opened up.

“Yes, we are free down here,” he says at last. “But man is not meant to live in the dark.”

He reaches forward suddenly, encircles with his left hand the glass of his lamp, keeps it there. Shadows fill the room, swallowing her; his hand glowing red, leaking pink at the fingers; beyond it the light sits white in his twisted face.

It’s hot, she realises, the glass is burning his skin. But why. .?

As though in answer a cloud of dark rises out of Francis, his pain converted to sin. He lets go of the lamp, steps over to her, wafting Smoke threads at her like incense. She sees it but cannot smell it; remains unmoved in her blood. All at once she is back with Charlie, mouth locked to mouth, her body tingling with Smoke.

“It does not smell, nor infect,” she whispers. “It’s as though it’s dead. But how can that be?”

“We think it’s the coal dust. It filters it somehow. So it’s everyone smoking for themselves. Unseen, unheeded. Miners dying, fighting, making love. All alone.”

“But that’s good, surely. Better than on top.” She looks for the word, finds it. “Tidier.”

“Tidier? Yes, perhaps. My brother, Jake, he has a word for our life down here. He calls it ‘democracy.’”

Democracy. She knows the term, has read its definition in one of her father’s translations from the Greek. Democracy, Aristotle says, is the rule of the many: hence of the poor. It leads to chaos, greed, and desolation.

“Will you take arms?” she asks suddenly. “Rise up?”

“How can we? Yours is a race of angels. Fair cheeks, hands like marble; linen as white as the day it was spun.” He shakes his head, in wonder not anger. “Down here we can curse you and plot revolt. But up in the sun? Oh, there too we have our jokes. We laugh and mock. But who is so coarse not to be shamed by your skin? God chose you, made you special. You rule us not by force but through this simple fact.” He leans closer, eager now that she understand him; a quiet man talking. “We must cower underground, just to learn boldness.”

His voice is so earnest, his words so carefully chosen, he reminds her of one of her schoolmasters, Professor Lloyd, who teaches philosophical theology. But Francis is a commoner, a miner’s son, unschooled in Discipline. He has never studied Leibniz’s theodicy or Kant’s Three Discourses on Smoke.

“How long did you go to school?” she asks in wonder.

“Four years. Got my numbers and letters. They aren’t good for much, though. There’s no money for books.”

“And yet today you had a lesson for me.”

He smiles at that. “A time may come when we will need to understand one another. Your people and mine.”

He does not explain who these are, his people and hers. There is no need. The poor and the rich. A week ago she would have said: the corrupt and the righteous.

“I am only a schoolgirl,” she says quietly. “What can I do?”

“You are the next Baroness Naylor,” Francis answers. And then he bows to her. She did not know a bow could combine mockery and admiration. Before she can respond, he has turned around to lead her back.

ф

They don’t speak again until they have entered the lovers’ cave. It remains empty of people. She knows this from its sounds; the quality of the air: Francis has once again doused the lamp. Livia finds she does not mind. It is oddly comforting to have returned to the dark.

“How long have we been down here?” she asks.

“Six days.”

The number gives her a shudder. Six days buried under the earth. And yet it seems much longer to her. She must have lain down to sleep a dozen times. Catnaps; her natural rhythm when divorced from the sun.

“Is anyone looking for us?”

He answers slowly, picking his words with great care.

“Yes. There is a rumour you’ve been in the village. Someone’s spending an awful lot of money to find you. The men who know you are here, they have given us their promise. A holy oath. But it’s an awful lot of money, and some have more mouths at home than they can feed, and others have a child that wants the doctor.” A moment later he adds: “Lizzy says your friend is better. Able to stand. To walk.”

“So that’s why you came to me today! We are placing you in danger. We will go, of course.”

He presses her hand at that, lifts it up, touches his forehead with it as though receiving her benediction.

“My father will fetch you.”

She hears him walk away. Even his gait has a certain elegance to it, a gentle purpose. It makes her smile. Were he a few years younger, and a little more handsome, she might grow to like him almost as much as Charlie.

“Do you ever take her down here?” she whispers after him, gesturing sightlessly into the cavern. “Your girl. The one who won’t stop talking.”

His voice reaches back to her, so soft she might be imagining it.

“No. When the time comes. . on our wedding night — I want to share her Smoke.” Then: “There is life in Smoke, Miss Naylor. Communion. What people do down here, that’s something else.”

He says no more. And leaves her wondering what it would do to her, kissing Charlie out in the sun.

ф

She seeks him out soon after and tells him that they have to leave.

“As soon as possible, Charlie. We are endangering the miners.”

If Charlie is surprised, he does not show it.

“Thomas is better” is all he says. And: “We’ll have to think about where we want to go next.”

They are sitting on the floor, in a storeroom beyond the main hideaway, where they can talk without disturbing Thomas’s sleep. Their hips and shoulders are touching, get in each other’s way. It would be more comfortable if she threw an arm around his shoulder, leaned her head into his neck. She is about to, when he speaks again.

“You have changed,” he says, “down here.”

“Have I? How?”

He does not have to think about the answer: “You’re happy here.”

“I was happy before.”

“No, you weren’t. You thought of happiness as a kind of Smoke.”

It isn’t until later — after she’s gotten up and walked away in a huff — that she realises Charlie is right. And that he’s worried.

Worried she’ll change back in the light.

ф

She takes the thought for a walk, back to the edge of the lovers’ cave, still empty but for that laboured, slurping whistle peculiar to the space. The breath of the mine. When she reenters the sickroom some time later, it too seems emptied of people. Before she can confirm her intuition, she hears Thomas’s voice cut the quiet with his whisper.

He is not talking to her.

“Well, go on then,” he says. “After all, I owe you my life.”

There is no answer, only a sound, soft and spongy. It is followed by a giggle, then the sound of flat feet running out the door. Lizzy. At once Livia realises she’s been witness to a kiss. She does something then she has not done in all the time she has been in the room: light a lamp. Her hands are unaccustomed to it. When she finally manages to put match to wick, she sees that Thomas has sat up, hunching forward on the bunk bed. A bandage still covers his head, but it is a simple wrapping rather than the thick layers he was swaddled in before. His face is sunken, haggard; the features overlarge, as though pasted on. It makes it hard to tell a smile from a smirk.

“Listening in, Miss Naylor? How naughty of you.”

She grows angry at once: a trickle of Smoke seeping from her nostrils. Down here, she lacks the will to drown it in meekness.

“You are a cad, Mr. Argyle.”

He shrugs at that, blinks into the lamplight, raises his chin, for her to better see him.

“And tell me — have I grown very ugly?”

She locates her scorn, finds it like a garment she hasn’t worn since summer. It belongs to the world of light.

“No need to worry. The scar will make you look tough. Like a dog that’s had a good scrap. Half the ear missing. All the boys will love it.”

“Oh,” he says, “I wasn’t really thinking of the boys.”

Six days she has barely talked to him, has avoided his eyes. Now they are looking at her hard and level. She bends down to blow out the lamp.

“Better get ready, Mr. Argyle. We are leaving. Soon.”

“Good. I have said my good-byes. And I know where we go next.”

It irks Livia then that he — wounded, feeble, risen from the dead — so naturally presumes to take charge.

And even more that she is willing to follow.

LIZZY

Lord Spencer comes to the village the same day they ask me to go down the mine. They need me to look after an injured comrade, Mr. Mosley tells me. I know Mr. Mosley well. He’s one of the Union Men, a Voice in the Dark: the one who asked me will I join when I was only fourteen. They had use for a nurse and my father, dying, vouched for me. But then Mother sent me away before the year was out.

When we stand near the mine shaft waiting for the cage to arrive, I see a rider on the hillside, sitting tall in his saddle, looking down. Dark hair, that’s all I can see. I remember thinking: that’s what Mr. Argyle would look like, riding a horse. Thomas. It’s first names for us, now that I have washed him and sewn up his head. It wouldn’t do to kiss a “Mister.”

By the time I returned from the pit, it was the talk of every kitchen. Lord Julius Spencer, Lady Naylor’s son, come to visit us. Asking questions. And bringing news: that the lady’s coach has been attacked, and the lady’s daughter kidnapped, along with two young gentlemen. Only it might be that they’ve escaped their attackers and were wounded, lost in the wilds. Did we know anything?

They told him about the rowing boat they found smashed at the bottom of the rapids and he asked to see it; walked both sides of the riverbank, heading upstream, his dog digging its nose in the grass. It found something, near the cottage of the Mosleys. He questioned Mrs. Mosley most patiently, they said in the village pub that night. Spent a full hour in her cottage. And left her with a good bit of money. For her trouble. She put it all in the village alms box on the Sunday.

Lord Spencer returned to us the next morning. And the morning after that, and the one after that; came at dawn, alone on his horse. He liked the village’s “prospect,” he said; was interested in the mining business. Each day, he spread more money about. Talked to the drunks, the urchins, the village roughs. Tuppence for anyone who had a tale to spare; a pint of bitter at the pub. In his purse, a more precious kind of coin for anyone who had any real information. He’d make sure to flash it wherever he went, let people hold it, to see how heavy it was. Everyone was very impressed. We had none of us handled gold before.

I doubt the young lord learned much that was of any use. He heard hints, no doubt, about the union. That’s what he’d come for, most villagers assumed. To check up on us. Though from the smile on his face, you’d think he’d come to woo the village beauties. And they came out for him, too, in their Sunday frocks, hitching their skirts up when they passed him in the street, flashing their plump calves. He doffed his hat at them, Lord Spencer did. They all talked about it for days on end.

But as to the three people we were hiding, down in the blackness of the mine, nobody said a word. Only the Union Men knew, and of them only the inner circle. I didn’t tell a soul myself; snuck down the mine, night after night, with Mr. Mosley’s help. It weighed on us though, our secret, all the more because we didn’t know what we’d got ourselves involved in. Nobody dared ask why they were hiding from the girl’s own mother. It wasn’t done to ask questions. Not down there. Against our rules and the union’s spirit. Besides, it was safer that way. The less we knew, the less we could be held to account.

All the same there were theories about our charges. There always are. An elopement, an estrangement, a fight amongst nobles. The one I heard most often (whispered, in the darkness, far from Lord Spencer’s ears) was this: that the three were running from the law. That they had committed a mighty crime, the worst crime of all. Treason Against the Crown. Now it was the noose for them. If they were found. The way these whispers made it sound, they were as good as dead already.

The thing is: sooner or later, everyone gets found. There’s not one miscreant in the village who ever gave the bailiff the slip. You can hide for a week, a month, a year. But the law don’t forget. Or so my mum always says. She would know. She has a brother in jail somewhere and an uncle that was hung.

One thing’s for sure. If Lord Spencer was trying to find me, I would be hiding too. There is something crazed about his endless ream of questions, something forced about his constant smile. The third day he came to the village, the butcher slaughtered a pig in his honour. Lord Spencer went to watch. We have all of us done it, every child in the village, from curiosity, or on a dare, or because the screams drew us there: climbed the fence and taken a peek. And we all of us smoked; got good and filthy and went home to a hiding, for ruining our clothes. There is something about blood and offal freshly raised that sets it off. It takes many months to get used to it, till you can put down a sow with the same calm you tuck in a babe. That’s what Mr. Dillon told me, who is the village butcher and once had his eye on me, though he is fifty years old and I was fourteen then and still given to blushes. It’s why Mother sent me off into service. To protect my innocence. Well, the manor house took care of my innocence soon enough.

Lord Spencer, in any case, held to village custom; showed up at the slaughterhouse in his shirtsleeves and was hastily ushered to a stool; sat, pale and sweating, a quiver in his cheek; and was seen to swallow deep when the blood poured out into the bucket. But he did not smoke, his shirtsleeves stiff with starch and lily-white.

There are other oddities, other reports. Little Beth, the Kendricks’ daughter, says she saw him crying, walking hatless down the bridle path. And old Todd swears blind he saw him out riding after dusk, wearing a devil’s face made of rubber and steel. I myself watched him whip his dog with its leather leash for straying after a squirrel or rat: his mouth moving as though in admonition, but not a sound passing his lips. He did not smoke even then.

Lord Spencer has not always been like this. I first saw him a month or two after I had been taken into service. The Naylors’ cook came from our village. She was a childhood friend of my mother’s and recommended me. I arrived in May, a six-mile walk, my good clothes folded in a basket that got sodden with rain. Milord came in his summer vacation. They made a big fuss before he arrived: the servants, I mean, not his kin. Baron Naylor was already “unwell.” I didn’t know what they meant by that word just then. When the coach pulled up, we all assembled outside, with much giggling.

I liked him, in a way. He was dark and skulking and wore tan leather gloves, even around the house. Ate a lot, especially pudding. Slept in, went hunting. Blackened his sheets more than he should’ve done, considering his station. He was very full of himself even then, but so what? He was the future Lord of the Manor. Handsome. Rakish. Always teasing us girls.

Then he started changing. It was towards the end of the summer. Talk in the servants’ kitchen was, Lady Naylor had started paying attention to him. Called him to her chambers; kept him locked in with her for hours at a time. Nobody could quite work it out: what they were to each other, how they felt. I mean, he is the fruit of her womb. But he’d been raised by her first husband’s parents, people she would not consent to see even once a year. As Mother would put it: a proper rich people’s shambles.

In the course of the summer, Lady Naylor did for Lord Spencer whatever those schools of theirs are supposed to do to all them noble-born: she chilled his blood. Beat the Smoke out of him, and put it on a leash. The few gentryfolk I have seen in my time at the manor, they always looked a little sickly. Like they had their bowels full and didn’t have no prune juice. Though, of course, the vicar says it’s the only way to get to heaven.

With Lord Spencer it was different, though. Not one of us ever saw him smoke again. Not a mark on his linen. But whatever was dark in him only kept on growin’. You could almost feel it, when he walked past you in the hallway; the way a girl knows a man’s looking at her, Smoke curling out of his skin, even if he’s ten steps behind and walkin’ against the wind. The horses felt it too, grew skittish around him, unless he’d ridden them before. Broken them in. Same with the dogs in the kennels. Only his own bitch could abide him. It’s a smell, some of the stable hands said, too fine for our human noses. It’s like his Smoke has become invisible. Scratch him, though, and I swear he’ll bleed Soot.

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Six days in our charges announce they want to leave. Quickly. Just as soon as we can get them out.

I go down with Mr. Mosley when he goes to fetch them, deep in the night, no shift due for another four hours. I asked to come, so I can change the bandages one last time. Only they don’t need changing. The bleeding’s long stopped. I just want to see him one more time. Thomas. For six days I have nursed him. And got a kiss for my trouble. I know myself he does not like me the same as I like him: it’s there in his eyes when we light the lamp. But it was a good kiss all the same. He squeezes my shoulder when we part, and I wag a finger. Sister and brother then. I can live with it. It’s better than naught.

Before they set off, the others, too, wish to say their good-byes. They line up like they are waiting for service at the grocer’s. We are still in Thomas’s sick chamber, what we so grandly call our Union Hall. I shan’t be taking the lift with them, will stay behind to destroy any trace they was ever here. Mr. Cooper goes first. He steps close to me and shakes my hand. “Thank you,” he says. He even gives a little bow. If he’d kissed my hand on top of it, I would have died laughing. Despite my best attempts, I have grown fond of Mr. Cooper. He is hard to dislike. The trouble though is that he is awfully posh. Well-bred, down to the vowels of his “Thank you.” It’s not his fault, mind, but he can’t open his mouth without it reminding me what he is. And what I am. Not of his class. A servant, a miner’s daughter. Common as sin. He tried to wash his clothes one day, in a bucket, and it was so pathetic I did it for him in the end. But only when Miss Naylor was out. The young milady.

I wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire.

But she too tries to say good-bye. Tries to pay me, in fact, taking a silver cross off her neck and holding it out on her open palm.

“For your trouble,” she says.

I suppose she’s trying to be gracious. In the dark, I might have taken it and worn it against my breast. But in the beam of the lamp I can see the stiffness of her bearing, those meek, I’m-a-saint-because-I-know-I’m-a-sinner eyes. Like she’s standing portrait for a bust of Jesus.

“Please accept it as a token of our gratitude.”

I hiss my answer.

“Can’t,” I say. “People will see and assume I’m a thief. The justice of the peace will have me flogged.”

Miss Naylor looks aggrieved at that. And also a little cross. But she fights it down, takes off the collier’s jacket she’s sporting, tears off the whole of the sleeve of the dirty blouse she wears underneath, and hands it over to me.

“It’s French lace. You can resew it. Turn it into a handkerchief, or a baptismal wrap. When you have children, I mean.”

The coal-streaked rag hangs limp from my hand. I suppose she can see what I am thinking, because she grows embarrassed, tugs it out of my grasp.

“Forgive me. I’m sorry.”

And just for a moment she sounds real. Almost a little desperate. Trying in earnest to reach across the chasm between us. God knows who’s dug it.

It makes me feel sorry for her.

“I’ll keep it,” I say. “It’s very nice.”

We share a smile. Then she quickly slips back into her jacket, so the boys cannot see her, in her state of undress. And just like that she is her old self again. Distant. Cold as the dew.

“Mr. Argyle owes you his life,” she closes our transaction. “We are all in your debt.”

I nod, wave the rag in front of her face.

“That you are. But look here, you’ve already paid.”

THE LIBERAL

Dawn breaks and Charlie thinks his heart will break for joy.

They have been walking for several hours already, tottering along in the dark, taking breaks every few minutes when Thomas grows dizzy and can no longer keep pace. Then a ribbon of predawn light appears on the horizon, hazy and pale. But what miracles are revealed by this pallid smear! They are walking on a muddy path: rectangles of fields stretch on both sides, parcelled up by enclosure walls and dotted with barren trees. Above them sits a leaden sky, so overcast that the clouds have no contours. It is a world of browns and greys. But what greys! How many shades of brown!

Charlie cannot believe his eyes; stops in his tracks, blinking tears from his eyes. Then, rising from the knolls of lowly hills, a smear of orange paints itself across the east. Theirs is not a picture-book sunup, a fire-red balloon slowly mounting the world’s edge; sitting on it; then lightly bouncing up, to scale the sky. And yet it is the most beautiful thing Charlie has ever seen. By increments the world gains in contour. And when the cloud cover breaks, momentarily, he feels the light on his face like a physical touch, searching his features. He stares down, at himself, his hands, his legs, and laughs from pure joy, marvelling at how even the sound is different under an open sky.

Only then does he turn to his friends.

It has been, for Charlie, a lonely week, stuck in a hole in the earth. He spent many hours sitting with Thomas, unable for much of the time to reach him through his fever, listening to his dark ravings, cut off even from his Smoke that appeared to have no smell in the dark, nor any power to infect, and danced aimlessly before the timid light on the few occasions when they dared to light a lamp. He talked to Lizzy, of course, but the girl was taciturn with him, jealous of sharing her time with Thomas. And Charlie talked to Livia: touched her, kissed her, took her breath in his. But even this was an adulterated joy in a world without sight; a love affair conducted by shades. In the dark, Charlie felt, they could not be fully present to one another. It was a world without smiles. Without beauty. He would wake from sleep and be beset by the fear of not having woken; would reach around himself and find no one; or a stranger; or a friend — a lover? — whose emotion he could not read.

The dark did something for Livia, though. Something important, a kind of tempering, something smiths do to their steel. Charlie looks at her now, his first look since their kiss, and finds her changed. Thinner. Dirtier, of course. Holding herself differently. It makes him shy and awkward with her, and shier yet, more awkward, when she looks back at him and does not mirror his smile.

If Livia is thin, Thomas is emaciated. Cleaner than the rest of them (Lizzy saw to that, with the constant application of bucket and sponge) and pale underneath the speckling of coal dust. Out of the lip of his bandage crawl the tendrils of a dark blue tattoo, touch his eyebrow and the corner of his eye, where coal has grown into fresh scar tissue. His face is a mask of concentration: on the muddy path, on each step, keeping himself going by a sheer act of will.

By the time dawn has given way to midmorning they see it before them: not so much a village as a train supply station. Freight trains stop here to take on goods. Apparently, one can hop on a freight car for pennies, and ride with pigs or chickens or black mounds of coal. Mr. Mosley advised them to come here; it would attract less notice, he said, than going to town. It is a place tramps come, in the hope of transport. Tramps. Well, thinks Charlie, we certainly look the part. His trousers and jacket are stiff with filth. A drizzle has started and is leaving patterns on his dirty skin. As though on command, they stop in the shelter of a hill. It is time to make decisions.

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And yet the words won’t come right away. Overwhelmed by a world without a roof, they have spoken little all morning and an odd timidity clings to them yet, as though words will put in motion something irrevocable; will put a close to one part of their lives and commit them to a new one.

It’s Charlie who accepts it first.

“Do you want to go home?” he asks Livia. “To your mother?”

The girl shakes her head. She has come this far, assuming her mother’s complicity in the attack. Now she will see it out. Charlie knows better than to argue with her.

“To London, then.”

As Charlie says it, he hears the question in his own voice. It is directed at Thomas. He is their leader. They did not vote on it, nobody picked him and yet it is true, even now — especially now — that he is wounded and weak.

“I mean, if we can’t go back to Lady Naylor’s and want to do more than just sit around, it’s the only real option. ‘The Tobacco Dock, midnight, the twelfth of January.’ That’s what the ledger said in the laboratory. ‘Collect in person’: Lady Naylor will be there. She is working on something, something important, and she paid a fortune just for this one item.”

Thomas has clearly been thinking the same thing. Nevertheless there is a hesitation to his response.

“What day is it today? We were attacked on the second, and went down the mine on the third. Six days down the mine. The morning of the ninth?”

Both Charlie and Livia confirm his calculation.

“Then we have four whole days. Time enough.” He shudders slightly, squats down on his heels, steadying himself with one hand. It comes to Charlie that Thomas is very close to fainting. That he does not have the strength even to stand.

But his voice is firm.

“What we need is to talk to someone who can shed light on everything. The laboratory, the experiments, Lady Naylor’s theory of Smoke. Fresh information; some other perspective. Without it, we will continue tapping in the dark.” He juts his chin out, his mind made up. “You two go to London. I will go and see Renfrew.”

“Renfrew! But how do you know we can trust him?”

“I don’t. But he was Baron Naylor’s student, back in the day. And he is the one who told me that I was sick with Smoke. If we are right — if that cage in the laboratory is meant for me because of what is growing in me — then, Charlie, I need to know what it is for. Otherwise, I am making choices in the dark. And I am sick of doing that.”

Charlie wishes he could tell his friend that he is wrong. That Renfrew won’t know a thing; that he will treat him as the errant schoolboy he is, scold him, lock him in a schoolroom, and make him scrub the floors in penance. But in his mind’s eye he sees him again, the Master of Smoke and Ethics, sitting in the coach back from Oxford, quietly talking to Thomas. Renfrew knows. Something. Many things.

Perhaps he can be persuaded to tell them.

“In that case,” Charlie says, looking calmly at his friend. “We will all go.”

But Thomas won’t have it.

“Too risky. After all, we don’t know whose side he is on. For all we know he is mixed up in this and working with Lady Naylor. If she is, in fact, our enemy. We need to split up. To make sure someone is there, in London. In case Renfrew detains me. Someone who knows, and can act as a witness.”

Again Thomas’s reasoning is sound. And again, Charlie draws a different conclusion.

“Then I will go.” He goes on speaking over Thomas’s murmur of protest. “If you are right — about the cage, about the Smoke in you, all of it — then it’s you who is important. Not me. So I will go.”

Still Thomas tries to argue, rises from the ground, anger in his voice, his whole body shaking with exhaustion.

It’s Livia who shuts him up.

“You can’t go,” she says to him. “Not by yourself. You’d never make it. Someone would have to come and be your nurse. So no matter what you do, you will put one of us at risk.” She speaks very calmly, dispassionately, reciting the facts.

“I don’t know this Master Renfrew, nor would I easily be able to find him. And you require an attendant. So either we all go and risk our hides. Or none of us goes. Or Charlie goes, and bears the consequences of your decision.”

She looks from one boy to the other as though weighing them up. It is, to Charlie, an uncomfortable glance.

“You have to make up your mind, Mr. Argyle.”

She adds it quietly, sadly, as though she knows he already has.

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They say good-bye once they have arranged a meeting place and time. It’s easy. There is only one place in London both boys are sure they will find. Execution square; at the foot of the scaffold. Three meeting times a day, dawn, noon, and dusk: starting lunchtime tomorrow. It’s the earliest they can imagine Charlie can make it to London. He will have to sleep at the school. Or on the road.

It is best if they don’t enter the train depot together. Whoever is looking for them, is looking for three scions of their gentry, two youths and a girl. There may be leaflets out for all they know, eyes at every train station. But they won’t be interested in a dirty tramp in stolen clothes; nor in a pit girl and her companion. Or so they hope. Charlie is to go first. A head start of three hours. Enough time not to connect the one stranger with the other two. And for Thomas to rest.

Before he goes, Charlie steps over to Livia. Thomas looks away, immerses himself in the study of his boots. Giving them privacy. Even so, saying good-bye is not easy. They don’t know how to. They have never touched each other in daylight.

In the end it is Charlie who extends his hand. Livia takes it shyly. They may have been strangers, meeting at a dinner party, only they don’t let go at once but stand there, her hand small between his fingers. Charlie considers kissing her palm. But she pulls it away before he has raised it even halfway to his mouth.

“Too dirty,” she whispers, staring at her black little hand in disgust. “Be careful, Charlie.”

“And you.”

Then it’s Thomas’s turn. Charlie walks over to him, crouches down where he is sitting on the ground.

“Look after her, will you? For me.”

Thomas nods but his look is gaunt. There is a fear there Charlie cannot fathom.

“It’s I who should be going,” Thomas says after a while.

“We decided. It makes sense.”

Thomas shrugs. “Be careful what you say to Renfrew. Don’t give away too much.”

“I will only say what I can. We gave Lady Naylor our word. Not to speak of certain things. She may be a rebel, or a villain. But our word is our word.”

Then he hugs his friend, turns, and leaves.

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Charlie need not have worried that he would stand out in the little hamlet that serves as a loading station. There are plenty of strange men milling in the street, dressed in a wide variety of costumes and rarely very clean. Women, too, young and old, and a gaggle of urchins pelting one another with rocks. Workers, traders, unemployed miners. A dandy without boots dragging a donkey by its bridle. A hulking Scot in a greatcoat shouting drunken swear words at the sky, his accent bending every vowel. A consumptive woman, thin as a rail, selling charred, bone-studded meats from a grill she has set up by the side of the road. A beggar dressed in little more than a shift, flashing the stumps of his legs at every passerby.

Where there are people, there is sin. Charlie is shocked when he catches the first whiff of Smoke. It’s been a week since he has smelled it. As he draws closer to the train station, clouds of Smoke become more obvious, drift on the wind, dusting the buildings in Soot. He breathes it in and feels himself grow irritable. It is hard, in this world, not to walk around with clenched fists.

Securing passage to Oxford is surprisingly simple. A man on the platform has made a business of it: selling tickets for a berth on the freight train. He operates out in the open, from behind a little table, just like a normal ticket seller. A group of men are in his employ, one more disreputable-looking than the next. They walk up and down the platform, discouraging customers who think they can just leap on a train without paying. “We’re conductors,” one of them keeps shouting. “No tick’t and you pays yer fare in teeth.” He himself is missing most of the latter item along with the better part of the lower jaw. It looks like it has been sliced off with a knife.

Like Thomas, Charlie lost his portmanteau along with the rest of his luggage when they ran from the ambush. Livia never brought a purse in the first place. Consequently, the only money they have between them are the few pennies Mr. Mosley gave them early that morning, counting them out into Charlie’s dirty hands.

“Won’t get far without,” he told them when they tried to refuse.

They divided the money evenly before splitting up, reasoning that Charlie had two trains to catch to Thomas and Livia’s one. Now that he faces the ticket seller, Charlie worries that it won’t be enough and holds the coins on his open palm.

“How much. .?”

The man looks at him, snorts, and swipes the lot. Only then does he ask, “Where to?”

“Oxford.”

“‘Ohx-fjord,’” the man imitates his accent. “Posh boy, eh? Runaway son of a burgher, is that it? Didn’t take to the cane. Or fell in love, what, with a lass that wasn’t suitable. Suited you though, eh?” He makes a gesture of such obscenity that Charlie finds himself blushing to the roots of his hair. “Ah, you should’ve left with fuller pockets, son. Never mind, you’re in luck. Train due in an hour. Any of the last five wagons. The doors’ll be open. If the stationmaster catches you, in Oxford like, say you’re travelling express. Won’t give you any trouble, he won’t, the man’s well paid.”

“Thank you.”

“Ah, no bother. It tickles me. Being friendly with a toff. Now off with you, I have business to conduct.”

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It takes Charlie until dusk to get to Oxford. The train is steady but very slow, huffing and puffing up every hill. Charlie spends the hours squeezed in between a row of other tramps, one of whom unceremoniously dips his hand in his pocket to search it for money, all the time smoking like a chimney from both mouth and ears. When they stop, Charlie does not recognise the station at once: they are far from the public platform, their view obstructed by a dirty brick wall. Farther up the train, he sees a number of shadows leap out of railcars and clamber over the wall. He follows their example and is spilled into a warren of backstreets and courtyards, alive with smells and noise and people. Navigating by the setting sun, Charlie heads to the western edge of town, looking for the road that will lead him to the school. A league out of town a cart driver rolls past and offers Charlie a ride in exchange for his coat, dirty though it is.

“Where you headin’?” the driver asks him.

When Charlie, too honest to lie, names the school, the man eyes him narrowly.

“Going there to beg? I shouldn’t bother. It’s half-term. No one around. Besides, they are skinflints they are. Tight as a trout’s arse. You’re better off tryin’ your luck in the village.”

Is Charlie going there to beg? Well, in a manner of speaking he is. But Charlie merely mumbles something about knowing one of the porters, speaking indistinctly, hiding his accent. The thought of Cruikshank, sour and stupid, puts a stitch in his heart.

The man lets him off near the village, an hour’s walk from school. It must be nearing ten at night. The sky is clear now and it is growing colder. None of the snow that marked December remains on the ground, but there is a smell to the wind that promises more.

Charlie hurries along until he sees the dark shadow of the school ahead. He has seen it before from this angle, in similar light: the night they returned from London. A single window is lit, high up, where Trout has his chambers. He asked Charlie to spy on the Naylors and would be keen to hear his report. But it is not to Trout that Charlie is heading.

Instead he takes a path that leads past the rugby field across the little creek, to a cottage that stands alone there, surrounded by a picket fence. Most of the teachers live in, inside the main school building itself, and leave for the holidays, to see their wives and children at home or go up to their alma maters, to stay in chambers there. But a handful of the masters — the poorer it is sometimes said, not without derision; those without good family ties or their own estates — have houses at the edge of the grounds that are rented to them year-round. This one is Renfrew’s. A lamp is lit above the narrow door, and another light shines dimly through drawn curtains. Charlie stops by the creek before he enters, dips his hands in the black and icy water, washes his face. There is not much he can do without a bar of soap, but at least he can face his teacher wide awake. The door knocker has the shape of a silver owl. Minerva, goddess of wisdom.

It may be childish, but Charlie crosses himself, before engaging its taloned feet to knock on the door.

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The knock is answered with an alacrity Charlie does not expect. It is almost as though someone had been waiting for him by the door. Indeed there is a stool in the plain little hallway that opens up to him. But no person. Charlie has to adjust his gaze, downward, to understand who worked the doorknob. Dressed in a plain grey shift, the fair hair braided into pigtails, the girl can’t be any older than eight or nine. Her face is narrow, the eyes large and scared. Her shoulders and upper body are encased in a strange metal harness. Two spokes run upwards, at both sides of the neck before they stop just under the point where the chinbone bends and charges up to the ears. At the harness’s front, at the centre of the sternum, rides a little brass wheel. She stands in the hallway, quivering, like a rabbit caught out in the open by a fox.

“Hullo,” Charlie greets the girl, and then once more, softer now, crouching down on the threshold as he does so. “Hullo there. Don’t be scared.”

The girl does not move, shivers, looks across at him, then reaches to her chest and turns the wheel on her contraption with a quick jerky movement. Next Charlie knows, her eyes have filled with tears. But she does not start crying.

“My name is Charlie,” he says, still crouching in the open door. “I am looking for Master Renfrew. I am one of his students, see. Is he at home?”

The girl shakes her head: stiffly, the chin pushed very high, avoiding the spokes of her harness.

“Then you are waiting for him.” Charlie points to the stool. “Are you his daughter? I did not know Master Renfrew was married.”

But the strange, half-mechanical girl only shakes her head again, with that same stiff gesture.

“Well, perhaps you help him keep house.” Charlie rises, pats the top of the stool. “Here, please, sit down. Perhaps I can keep you company while you wait? Yes? That’s kind of you. It’s cold outside. Do you think we should close the door? We are letting all the heat out, and you’ll catch your death, standing there in the draft.”

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Renfrew returns within the hour. They have not moved, Charlie and the little girl, are standing in the hallway, two paces apart, the stool she is too scared to use standing between them. At several points Charlie considers leaving and waiting outside. But it disturbs him, the thought of this young child alone in the house. Even though he has no success in drawing her into conversation — even though he cannot rouse from her even a single smile — he is aware that his presence soothes her; that he is not the cause of her fear but something else, some weight on her childish heart so heavy that she hardly dares breathe.

Then they hear the sounds of steps crunching on the gravel path. Charlie opens the door long before his teacher can reach the house, wishing to reveal himself to him and apologise for intruding. Dr. Renfrew wears dark leather riding gear, mud-splattered and steaming with the heat of his exertion. The horse is nowhere in sight, and must have been left with the school’s groundsman. When he catches sight of Charlie, the teacher stops in his tracks, his features registering surprise, even alarm. Then he collects himself, strides on, and shifts his riding crop from right hand to left. It frees the former for a handshake.

“Mr. Cooper. This is most unexpected! Most unexpected indeed. Do come in.”

Renfrew passes his hat and gloves over to the stiff little girl, sits down on the stool, and peels himself out of his boots.

“If you will excuse me. I have just returned from Parliament. I was asked to speak on issues pertinent to the future of the realm.”

He winces as his feet leave the long shafts of his boots and accepts the slippers the girl hastily brings out for him, each movement made oddly formal by the bulk of her contraption.

“A wretched session. Rows and rows of perfect blockheads, jabbering away about ‘tradition’ and drowning out the few beacons of science and reason in the room. It is enough to drive a man out of his mind.” Renfrew frowns. “But listen to me prattle on, when it is you who should be talking. You have a tale to tell, Mr. Cooper! Half of England is looking for you — including your father who has rushed back from Ireland and is calling for a closure of the borders! Last anyone heard you were abducted by Gypsies. Though there are other rumours even more outlandish than that! It is good to see you are safe. But out with it: what on earth happened to you?”

Charlie looks at the square, grave face of his teacher and does not know how to answer. So he does what he always does. Charlie smiles.

“I am hungry, Master Renfrew.”

Renfrew laughs. “So am I. Well, I suppose it can wait until after dinner. To table then. I see you have met my niece. Eleanor, please set another place, there’s a good girl. And here, let me wash up. You, too, might benefit from the application of soap, Mr. Cooper. Please tell me, my good boy, that you are not covered in Soot.”

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Dinner is a rather frugal affair of bread, cheese, and pickles. The bread is a few days old and there is no butter, nor any dessert. Renfrew has sat Charlie across from him and his niece by his arm. The Master of Smoke and Ethics says a short prayer before he cuts the bread, and eats in almost ritual silence. Charlie finds himself working hard not to make any noises with knife and fork. The little girl, too, eats with extravagant care and never raises her eyes from her plate. At one point she stops eating abruptly, puts down the slice of bread in her hand, and reaches to her chest to once again engage the little wheel that rises out of the harness like a growth. The action is followed by a strange, jerky shudder. Again, the girl’s eyes fill with tears. Her uncle watches all this nonplussed; he turns to her and asks her quite gently, “Did you smoke, my dear?”

The girl whispers her answer rather than speaking it, her eyes on the table.

“I thought I felt the seed of it.”

“You did well. You may go now and retire. It is well past your bedtime.”

Obediently, the girl pushes her chair back very carefully, rises, collects her plate and cutlery, and leaves the room: each action performed with an exaggerated slowness as though fighting the temptation for haste. When she has left, Renfrew, too, puts down his knife and fork and turns to Charlie.

“A lovely child. My brother’s daughter. Her parents died when she was but an infant. I have come to be very fond of her. How old would you say she was?”

Charlie thinks about it. “Nine?”

Renfrew smiles. It’s a proud smile and sits strangely on his self-denying face. For a moment the smile puzzles Charlie. Then he understands.

“She does not smoke.”

“Quite.” There is, to Renfrew, something of the glow that he had after London. “They say it is impossible to achieve self-mastery before the age of fourteen or fifteen, and even then imperfectly. But the girl is eight and has not visibly smoked in more than six months. You see, I have a pedagogic system.”

“The harness?”

“Is a small if important part of it, yes. An invention of mine as a matter of fact, modelled on something I saw during my travels. In Italy. Initially, I used it to correct her posture. But it proved more useful in correcting the soul. The wheel contracts the harness, you see, albeit very slightly. It causes a modicum of pain. Over time, she has learned to use it herself, warning her body against temptation. It will revolutionise child-rearing before too long. Assuming the government changes and permits the introduction of such innovations.”

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

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

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

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

ф

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ф

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t understand,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It amounts to the same thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You found one.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And then?”

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

“From lack of love,” Charlie murmurs.

“Love is not a scientific entity.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renfrew appears saddened by his answer.

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

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

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

ф

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

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

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

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

CAESAR

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

He is like so many of his class. Crude, greedy, and stupid. Smoke drifts out of his hairline in thin, greasy streaks; he’s hunching his shoulders, in apology, or fear.

“They be a rebellious lot,” he says for the fourth or fifth time, squinting at me. “Crim’nels in my book.”

He sounds West Country to me. An outsider here. Living his life by a handful of lies that have become true through ceaseless repetition.

“I’m a good man, I am. Salt of the earth.”

He bites the gold again, wipes snot across his beard with the heel of his palm, farts. Nervous wind, Mr. Price used to call it. He caused it in a good many people, would stand there sniffing and flash me a wink. The thought of Price lends fresh focus to my task.

Again I ask about the two boys and the girl. “Posh folk,” I say. “Gentry. One of them is badly wounded.” It is hard to explain to the man that I don’t give a toss about their dwarf insurrection. It’s not like the Spencers own the mine.

He remembers something at last. A girl has been seen, down the mine. A stranger. In the company of one Francis Mosley. A haulage woman passed them in the dark.

“Can’t have been gentry though,” he muses. “Dirty like an Arab, see. Wearing breeches. Most likely a whore. And then, a-course,” he adds after much frowning, “there was three figures on the path. Stevie Milner says he saw ’em pass. But gentry, no, that they wasn’t.” He looks at me wearily, worried he’ll lose his gold.

“Let me guess. They were dirty, too.”

“Like they was dunked in mud.”

“Take me to the place where they were seen.”

My bitch growls when he moves. Nótt: named for the Norse mistress of the night. She has taken a liking to the greasy little man, sniffs his crotch like it is made of bacon. He nearly drops his coin.

ф

I have been at it for six days now. Each morning, I get up before dawn and saddle the horse. Each evening, a supper with Mother, pale and fretting, in her eyes a question she’s afraid to ask. We have a simple relationship, Mother and I. We have replaced emotion with economics. Recently we have added crime to the ties of debt and blood.

“Are you assisting the magistrate’s search?” Mother asks the second morning I set off.

“No. I have my own ideas.”

“You have found a trace then?”

“Perhaps.”

“Please. Be careful,” she says and for a moment I think she means for myself. I look at her, my breakfast in my throat, hoping, dreading that she will force a talk.

But she says nothing further.

As I ride off her hand brushes the saddlebag bulging by my thigh.

ф

I never thought they might be hiding down the mine. But that’s where Nótt leads me, once she puts her nose to the narrow bridleway where the strangers have been sighted. The colliers stop in their tracks when I enter the work yard. The smell of snow is in the air, but nothing has fallen yet. The sky sits low against the hills. It would make a wonderful painting, Nótt crouching, long tail cocked, her ears pressed high against her head. I ride over to the pit shaft, watch it spit up a cage. A union, forming down the bottom of this hole. Talking revolution through mouthfuls of bread and dripping. All you’d need to do is cut the cable. Trap them like rats. Grandfather is right. This is a world of idiots. I wait until Nótt has emptied her bladder and then we turn, back to the bridleway. They must have left before dawn. Six hours head start. But I have a horse.

ф

They split up once they reached the train depot. It takes me a while to establish this. The men here are close-mouthed, suspicious. But no pauper can resist gold.

They remember a boy with a bandage, of course. He travelled with a girl. Heading south I am told. London-way. Cooped up with a wagonload of chickens, and some fellow cutthroats, heading home.

It’s the other boy no one can tell me about. Not until I find a man who spoke to him, the boss of a racket selling passenger tickets to freight trains. He has a band of degenerates on staff who will break your legs if you think you can catch a ride for free.

We talk at length. An enterprising man. He reminds me of my grandfather. Affable, given to whimsy. Happiest when making a profit without breaking a sweat.

“What’s he to you?” he asks once we have established he knows the boy I am looking for.

“I’m his elder brother.”

“You don’t look alike.”

“Ah, well. You’d have to talk to Mother about that.”

The man laughs. I slip him money.

“He ran away, did he? This brother of yours.”

“He is guilty of that particular folly.”

The man jingles coins within a meaty fist.

“Awful dirty for gentry,” he muses.

I smile and add one more coin to his stack. Then I call Nótt to my side. The man studies her weight, her teeth.

“Big dog.”

“Enough of this.”

He shrugs, counts up the money. “He was heading for Oxford. Got family there perhaps?”

“A kindly uncle.”

“Those are the best sort.”

ф

I am left with a choice then. London or Oxford. My inclination lies with the city. Thomas is there. He tasks me, Thomas, tender like an abscess in my throat. How deftly has he slipped into Mother’s regard, where I could only wheedle with my money. How artfully has he contrived to set a mark against my name at school, so that I have to endure Renfrew’s insolent probing. And how similar is our Smoke once woken; how seductive in its kinship; how intolerable in its rivalry. But it’ll be hard, I imagine, tracking someone in London. Too many people, too many scents, even for Nótt. Oxford will be easier. Charlie Cooper must be heading back to school. To do what, I wonder; talk to whom? How much has he seen? It is this simple question that decides me. I want Thomas. But there must not be any talk.

There are no trains to Oxford until the following day, not from this depot. I resolve to make my way by horse. It won’t be any faster that way, but after a week of waiting it feels good to be on the move.

Darkness falls early. And just like that unease descends upon me, half childish fear, half longing, my hand dipping in the saddlebag. The feeling has grown familiar in the week since Price’s death; resembles the tangle of shame and excitement that attends the first discovery of self-abuse.

In confusion then, fretting, unsure whether it is to indulge or to distract myself, I look for company and shelter; make out a farmhouse by its chimney in the distance then see the glow of a fire in a field much closer by. When I approach, I find two men sitting around a pot of boiling potatoes. Two rabbits, crudely skinned, hang skewered over the fire. The men rise, alarmed: crooked figures, thin as rails, the clothes mere rags. Underneath the dirt and Soot their complexions are fair and ruddy. Tinkers, not Gypsies. All the same, unwelcome on these shores.

“A pastoral scene,” I greet them, resolving relief into swagger. “Two Irishmen poaching rabbits in another man’s field.” I dismount. “Not my field though, so please don’t fret. I am just another traveller. Weary. Now my friends, might I share some of your rabbit, seeing that you stole it and are eating for free?”

ф

They are drinking men. I don’t usually partake in alcohol, but as I lie there, listening to their talk and laughter, I accept the bottle and take a swig, and later another, then another. It heats the stomach, and gives an odd sharpness to the night. At length I slip a sweet under my tongue and taste the liquor through its herbal tang.

As for the Paddies, they are quite at ease with me now. I am prey to them: a rich fool waiting to be robbed. I for my part am too preoccupied to disabuse them of the notion. When one of them sidles over to the pile I made of saddle and bags, it is Nótt that jumps up and pushes her maw into the soft of his tummy. I trained her to do it and hence know the feeling, of her hot wet breath soaking through one’s shirt. It feels as though one’s skin grows paper-thin. The man starts smoking, very faintly, and my bitch, she wags her tail.

“Sure meant nothing by it,” he says almost sulkily though he holds his body very still. “Just admiring the rifle. An unusual piece. Foreign design, is it?”

“And what do you know about guns?”

“Father was a gunsmith. Never learned the trade myself, mind.”

An artisan’s son, fallen on hard times. And for a moment it rises in me, the urge to tell him about this rifle and its telescopic sight, accurate at four hundred yards. A German design. Illegal. Cursed.

I am aware that it is not the desire to show off that tempts me but the lure of confession, boyish and weak; am aware, too, that within this weakness, buried like a thorn, sits some other longing yet, darker in temperament and stronger by far, which has long sketched its own outcome to the night.

“Best leave it alone, my friend.”

But the man has sensed my hesitation. As has Nótt, who has stepped back and eyes me in confusion while the vagrant, slowly but brazenly enough, kneels down next to my saddlebag and studies its bulge. Again the urge takes hold of me to self-betray.

“Go on,” I say, suck weakly at my sweet. “Pull it out if you must.”

What emerges looks (even to me, after days of familiarity) like nothing so much as a man’s face, denuded of bone and cured by a tanner. The eyes are brass-rimmed disks of glass. Where nose and mouth are to be expected, the face grows a proboscis, long and limp like a wet sock. At the far end, this snout is weighted down with something very much like the head of a watering can. For a moment a gust of wind catches the mask and fills its features with volume; then the rubber inverts and the thing hangs dead from the man’s fingers.

“What is it? Some kind of mask?”

I find the semblance of my normal voice, brittle at its edges.

“A respirator. Chap called György came up with it. A Hungarian inventor. He wished to design something that would protect soldiers from the madness of battle. It filters out Smoke. Trouble is, you can hardly breathe in it. And who ever said soldiers should be sane?” I hesitate, watch the mask watch me from brass-rimmed goggles; each breath of breeze a hint of life within its rubber cheeks. “But, you see, it works differently now. A family friend made alterations.”

The Irishman, however, has already lost interest in my explanation and picked up the drinks bladder that was stashed alongside the mask. It’s heavier than he expected, the bladder’s neck hanging flaccid from his fist; the bottom swollen like a woman’s rump. He unscrews the nozzle, sniffs at the contents, squirts a drop into the palm of his hand.

“What’s this? Tar? Soot?”

Pain, I say. Rage. Shreds of childhood. Infancy, the years unremembered. Bottled and raw.

I am no longer sure whether I am speaking aloud.

He stares, shrugs, replaces the bladder then returns his eyes to the gun, keeps looking at its angular butt, shod in finest silver. The leather sheath alone is worth five guineas.

“We aren’t thieves,” he mutters, either to convince me or to convince himself, turns on his heels and returns to the campfire to offer me another pull of his jug. “No, that we are not.”

And without further ado, kicking off his shoes and picking through his toes for clods of dirt, he launches into a song, high-pitched and morose. When he is done, his companion, silent till now, looks over to me, a blade of grass in his mouth.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” he smiles, “but you mustn’t let my brother here spoil the night with his sorry old bleating. Tell us a tale, then, something that’ll pass the time while there’s still liquor in the jug. Please do, sir, or this one, he’ll never shut up.”

“A tale?” I say, gazing over to where the mask, carelessly repacked, winks one eye-glass at the moon.

Why not?

They have seen the gun. Our fates are already decided.

And I — drunk, heartsick, on the threshold of my future — I am needful of some talk.

ф

“He set out to shoot horses.

“Imagine a young man, lying naked on a blanket high up on the dust floor of a derelict mill. Not me, mind, but someone like me: a well-born, handsome youth, the heir to a large fortune. Like a prince in a tale. He is freezing, our prince. A January morning, dawn just broken. Above him are the rusted gears once powered by the windsails. Beyond them vaults a hole-punctured roof. A streak of pale light cuts across his shoulders, another separates his hand from his arm. The window in front of him points west. All around him, in the mill’s old timbers, there nest a thousand starlings. They scattered when he first climbed up. Now, an hour later, they have returned to their home. A rifle stretches from the young man’s hand. His clothes are tied into a bundle near his feet.

“There is a bar of soap in the bundle, too, and a rough cotton towel. By his left shoulder sits a box of sweets. (You know what sweets are, my dears? Oh, I think you do!) You see, our prince, he is expecting to show, that morning. Not much — he pops a sweet in his mouth just as he thinks it — but a little. Shooting horses, it’s a different business than dropping a deer. Especially when they are in harness: dressed for work. His fingers are moist on his gun.

“It is a long wait. Time for a thousand thoughts. He smokes a cigarette. To settle himself. To get in the mood. Cigarettes and sweets: he’s been indulging himself of late. It’s changing him, little by little, on the inside. It’s as though his skin has become a soft cocoon. A new self, straining against it, denting it, stretching it taut. It is a process not without pain.

“Soon the worry grows in him. That he’s not up to it. That his hackles lie flat and his spirit is cowed. That he will fail, will miss his shot, be humiliated. A fortune in cigarette butts, stubbed out on the mill floor: and yet he can find no edge, no fire in him, feels like a match that will not catch. His teeth are aching with the sweets. He gets up, reaches for his bundle. He fetches his mask.

“It’s a new toy, this. Borrowed rather than stolen; paid for, if you want to be petty about it, by his grandfather’s coin. It’s like the cigarettes, he has been told, but also different. He has yet to try it out. It is, he understands, a simple chemical reaction. You fill up a tin-like container, then screw it onto the front of the respirator. And then, when you are ready, you inject it with a syringe. The science behind it, well now, that’s a well-guarded secret. The basis for his family’s wealth. But none of this matters to our friend. He lies, naked, a rubber mask over his head. Gooseflesh on his back and buttocks; sweat beading on the inside of the mask.

“He waits until they come into sight. A team of four, dragging a four-wheeled coach: slow on the muddy road. Two horses, they agreed, he and his man; when the coach stops. An easy target, with a gun of this precision. The telescope sits awkward against the goggles of the mask. As for our friend: he’s scared, the coward. Liquid bubbling through his bowels like he’s eaten rotten meat. It’s all he can do to press down on the syringe.

“Now all he has to do is breathe, and drown.

“In the first moment, all he feels is panic. It should be like cigarettes, the best and the strongest, dark as tar; just the same, only more so, a new kind of kick.

“But what he inhales is not like cigarettes at all, is overwhelming in its purity, wilful and alive. Dying men’s sins: handpicked and distilled. His own rise feebly to their summons, childhood pranks called to muster before Satan. The sweets in his mouth have long turned into lumps of coal.

“Their plan is simple. It’s a bad plan, really; hastily drawn up and lacking in logic, but a plan all the same. He is to aim for the front two horses. His man on the box will cut them loose; turn the coach with the remaining two; flog them half to death as he races them home while more shots are fired at the fleeing coach. An investigation will follow, a curfew, a national hunt. All this, just to convince two schoolboys to stay put. You have heard of unwelcome guests. Well, these guests are very welcome indeed. One will not hear of their going home.

“The first bullet passes clean through the horse. It is so simple. Our young man pulls the trigger here, and over there a ribbon of red flies through the air. The shot is bad, a full yard low, shatters the shin and sends a shudder through the horse’s torso, so present in the crosshairs, he could reach out his hand and feel the dance of muscles underneath the fur.

“He pauses for a moment, looks up. All around him the air is alive with the flight of birds. A thousand wings beat patterns into his rising Smoke. Little vortexes forming; sculptures of shadow, writ on the air. A moment, that’s all: the double thud of his heart. Then he takes aim at the second horse and shoots it through the neck.

“There: he has done it. The horses are down, his mission is completed. But already he’s pushed back the bolt, put another bullet in the rifle’s chamber. He is not himself, you see. He is wearing a new face.

“The telescopic sight finds the coachman. He is the young man’s servant, his confidant, his surrogate father. It may be said that the young man loves him. And yet the word beats in his ears. Father. How close have they been; how many years has the older man protected him; how many times has he offered him comfort, how many tears wiped away?

“How many humiliations has he witnessed?

“Father. A poor surrogate this: stupid, coarse, clumsy like a fool. A caricature bought to mock him; kept in service as an admonition, as a joke. The thought thickens the Smoke in his mask, flavours it with childhood. Our friend’s an orphan, you see, or something very like. His parents were a picture frame on the table by his boyhood bed. ‘This one’s a snake,’ his grandfather explained, ‘and that one was a sissy. It’s a wonder he sired you at all.’ No good-night kisses, just the heavy touch of the old man’s hand. A boy not bred for weakness. Crosshairs drawn on his father’s chest. A curl of the finger. The smoke of the gun swallowed by the billows of his personal pyre.

“Parricide. You might think it’d be enough, the wages paid, the mask satisfied. But the lad has already worked the bolt. He sights another target; a young man standing in the open door of the coach. The telescope brings him ever so close. Fun-house mirror: like a twin born to different loins. Gawking, not yet in fear; the mouth an arching O. Three shots. The third one hits him, right in the head. The whiplash of impact. By rights he should be dead.

“Then the coach tilts and is swallowed by a hole. Our prince does not understand it, thinks the earth has opened for his prey. Birds in the sky. The chamber empty; the hammer falling useless; fingers too Soot-slick to reload.

“By now the mask owns him, has grown into his skin. It is also suffocating him. It’s in his struggle for air that he manages to rip it off. Dry heaves and tears: the wind has turned, his own Smoke is stinging in his eyes. On the floor, the barrel of his rifle trips up his feet.

“How does he get down? It might be said that he’s gone mad. Only a madman would risk the windmill’s ladder while his body is shivering with cold and shock; would walk the hundred yards clothed only in a coat of Soot; would crouch, naked, over the broken body of his man and christen it, gape-mouthed, with his snot. Our friend loses his balance when he tries to blow his nose; he falls in the dirt, faceup, and watches starlings dance dark clouds into the sky.

“The coach, meanwhile, lies at the bottom of a steep ravine. He looks down at it, sees a threesome of figures disappear into the woods. They may have seen him, recognised him. Hence he must follow. But how? He is naked and dirty and left his horse in the stable so no one knows he ever left. Something else holds him back, a discovery. He finds that, without the mask, he is once again a schoolboy, a coward. There’s a creek on the way home where he washes his hands, his neck and face with soap of lavender and lye. Only then does he step into his clothes, the Soot so thick on his thighs and knees that it chafes raw his skin on the three-mile jog home. He slips inside through a back gate and then makes sure he is seen to emerge from his room late-morning, his usual time. Kippers for breakfast, and a potful of strong tea.

“Do you know something? Tea tastes better, the thinner the cup. The china is so fine in this house, if you hold it up into the light it shines right through. And so she finds him, distracted, his empty cup raised into the morning sun: a servant girl, replenishing the toast.

“‘Is everything all right, sir?’ she asks in her simple way.

“Is everything all right? Have you ever tried to picture the moment, my friends, when a moth first slips the confines of its pupal prison and wonders at the colour of its new-grown wings? Sitting wet and sticky in the wind, waiting to take flight. I imagine it is terrified at first. It is only later that it begins to see itself reborn.

“‘Never better,’ I say, and surprise the girl with the shy twitch of a smile.”

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And so it passes, our evening, the jug making its rounds, the liquor churning in me till I get up and vomit half-cooked rabbit. They tell me about leaving Ireland. The father who gambled; the sister they buried; the Englishman who cheated them out of shop and land. Talk is like Smoke, I discover: once in the air, it breeds with abandon. I tell them many things. My plans and secrets; my life and dreams. I talk and talk.

It does me the world of good.

ф

I wake before them, with the first hazy light. I have heard about the price of consuming alcohol, but my head is clear and my blood oddly eager, embracing its fate. I do not get dressed at once. The two Irishmen made no attempt to rob me: Nótt kept watch. Besides, we are friends now. Daniel and Stephen. From Donegal.

The knife cuts Daniel’s throat like butter. The blood spurts up, onto the mask: smears against the eyeglass, seeing red. What’s in my lungs, what’s rising up the insect’s snout and coating my mouth, has no need for sight. It guides my hands by touch. As for the boy beneath the mask, he has no wish to see.

Stephen I beat with the barrel of my gun. He wakes on the second blow and is dead on the third. Pale green eyes; the eyelashes sticky with sleep.

I leave them with ten silver guineas. The rifle I also leave behind, slip it loosely into Daniel’s hands so that his fingers rest on the silver butt he so admired. Two dead Irishmen with money in their pockets and a foreign gun. Show me a magistrate in England who can’t close an inquest based on evidence as good as this.

By the time dawn proper breaks I am two miles west. Snow is coming down in thick, wet flakes. It will be rough going today. There is not a soul to be seen. It is midmorning by the time I realise I am still wearing the mask. Its buckles are stiff under my frozen fingers.

“Abomination,” I rage as I wrestle to take it off. “Freak, monster, elephant man.”

Soon it will own me, body and soul.

Perhaps Mother would help me. I could still turn around.

But there is no time.

Charlie Cooper is spreading stories about me down the road.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

When Charlie wakes the room is flooded with daylight. He senses rather than sees it, has trouble opening his eyes. His body does not follow orders, lies leaden under the down bedding, a stranger to his will. He mutters in surprise and finds his tongue sitting dry and heavy in his mouth, so swollen he has to breathe around it. No sound will come. As he struggles against his eyelids’ weight, a soothing voice sounds close by.

“Easy now, Mr. Cooper, take your time. There was a sleeping draught in the milk. You were in need of rest. Here, I will help you sit up.”

The dark shadow of Renfrew bends over him, slips a second pillow behind Charlie’s back, then sits down again on the stool he has drawn up to Charlie’s bedside.

“There, that’s better.”

Renfrew reaches forward with a washcloth and wets Charlie’s lips.

“You must be quite parched. It is one of the draught’s side effects.”

Embarrassed at being the subject of such mothering, Charlie once again attempts to shake off his drowsiness or at any rate take charge of his limbs. It is then he realises his wrists are manacled to the bed frame with leather restraints. A vision of Baron Naylor shoots through him, strapped onto his bed, smoking darkly in the attic. It helps in its way.

Fear bids Charlie wake.

“Ah, I think you are coming round now. Very good. I was starting to be afraid I had given you too much. It’s gone ten o’clock. Not that it would have been a day for travelling. The snow has been coming down thick and fast. I imagine the road is quite impassable.”

Renfrew places a hand onto Charlie’s forehead, checking his temperature, then slips a finger between Charlie’s wrists and the restraints, making sure they are not cutting into Charlie’s skin. The finger lingers a moment, takes Charlie’s pulse. Throughout, Renfrew’s movements are unhurried, efficient. He would have made a good doctor, or better yet, a surgeon, excising rotten flesh with a steady hand. His task accomplished, Renfrew straightens, smoothes his necktie and collar, and looks Charlie straight in the eye.

“I must ask you again, Mr. Cooper, to relate to me all the events that led to your being attacked in a coach heading from Lady Naylor’s estate on the morning after New Year’s Day, and all events that have transpired since. We need a full accounting. It is, I’m afraid, a matter of national significance.”

Charlie attempts to answer, but his tongue is not working.

“Water,” he croaks, “water.”

Renfrew sadly shakes his head.

“Let us talk first, Mr. Cooper. Here, I will moisten your lips again. It might be small consolation, but I drank a measure of salt water this morning and have not taken anything since. There, on the windowsill: I have poured us two glasses. Let us drink together, Mr. Cooper, and quench this infernal thirst. Once we have finished our conversation. What do you say?”

But Charlie can only stare at him and struggle against the restraints.

“You’ve gone mad,” he manages at last, his mouth so raw it comes out as a whisper.

“If you need to perform your ablutions,” Renfrew answers stiffly, “I can offer a bedpan for your use.”

ф

The hours creep past. The room’s window looks directly south and Charlie can track the journey of the sun. The window itself is frozen solid, and the sun a matte disk of orange that is being pulled across its frosted pane. Renfrew is sitting two feet from him, a pen in his hand and a lacquered lap desk perched on his knees. He has explained it all very patiently.

“Please don’t think I intend to hide my actions. I even considered informing Mr. Trout this morning, but his political allegiances are somewhat unclear. It would be easy to use this situation to discredit my party. Unconscionable, of course, but very easy indeed. The facts of the matter are these. The baron is planning something — or, if the rumours are true and he has gone mad, his wife is. There is some evidence of their purchasing laboratory equipment from abroad. Don’t misunderstand me. I am a scientist myself and regard the embargo as a folly beyond measure. The old order is moribund. Under the masquerade of virtue it is trying to stop the march of science — of truth! — simply to protect its own interests and prolong its life. All the same a change is coming, a mighty change, one can smell it on the wind these days. But here is the thing, Mr. Cooper. This change — this revolution — it can take many forms. We can have order, or we can have chaos. I — my party, the men concerned for the moral future of the realm — we need to know whether to protect Baron and Baroness Naylor and their projects, or to stop them.

“Did you know that there was a motion not long ago to have the Naylor estate placed under surveillance? Not in Parliament, of course, but in one of the parliamentary committees, the ones that dare to think outside the conventional norms. It was debated very seriously. The trouble is, we are lacking in an executive. A police force. It is said England has secret government agents, but if so, who do they work for? Who gives the orders? Oh no, Mr. Cooper! If we want virtue, it will take ordinary good men to step up and make the business of the country their own. Whatever the risk.

“Don’t imagine then that I will not take full responsibility for my actions, Mr. Cooper. Here, I am writing a report even as we speak. I will send it with the evening mail, along with your statement. Oh, I know, you think what I am doing is a great crime. No doubt your parents will insist on my dismissal once they learn that I have detained you. They may even press criminal charges.”

He pauses, closes his eyes, opens them again. His gaze is serene.

“The Smoke would warn me, Mr. Cooper. If I was doing wrong.”

A curl of grey drifts out of Charlie in response. Renfrew takes no notice. Instead, he takes hold of Charlie’s hand, helpless in its restraint, and speaks quietly at him in tender appeal.

“I was never a utilitarian, Charlie, but for the first time I feel the force of Mr. Bentham’s argument. The happiness of the many outweighs the happiness of the few. Who are we to spare ourselves when a million souls are at stake?

“But enough of this sulking, Mr. Cooper. It is time for you to speak. I have always known you for a boy who has a good heart. Or have your father’s interests poisoned you?”

And Charlie looks past him, watching the slow movement of the sun across the frost-bound pane, like the fog lamp of a distant ship. In front of it stand the water jug and two filled glasses, alight with its glow.

ф

As the day wears on, Charlie finds it increasingly difficult to take his eyes off the water. It stands four feet from the foot of the bed. The more Charlie stares at it, the more details he sees. The two glasses are filled to precisely the same level. One has a chink in the glass that refracts the light across the water’s surface and adds texture to its shadow. The laws of optics bend the window cross directly behind: at times it is the glasses that appear flat and the window behind that bulges with volume. When Charlie struggles hard enough against his manacles to agitate the whole of the bed, the old floorboards pass on the movement to wall and windowsill and conjure a ripple: trembling water; a speck of dust suspended in the left glass sent dancing until it glues itself to the inner wall and adds its shadow to the pattern. Charlie swallows past his drug-thickened tongue, hunts his mouth for spit, finds Soot sown like grit amongst his gums, and realises he must have been smoking. When he glances over at Renfrew, he catches him, too, eyeing the water with the intensity of longing. The schoolmaster rises abruptly, walks in stiff long strides to the window and lifts one glass up to his eyes.

“The human organism can live without water for four or five days. Longer, perhaps, in our humid climate. And yet, it isn’t dusk yet, and we are both struggling with our fast. Ah, the flesh is weak.” He chuckles softly and replaces the glass in precisely the same position. “A good lesson this.”

When he bends over Charlie to look him in the eye, his breath is sour with his thirst.

“Will you tell me what I need to know, Mr. Cooper? For the good of the realm?”

“No,” says Charlie, his dry lips hurting with the word.

“Then we must continue to suffer, in our modest little way.”

ф

Renfrew leaves him. For a moment Charlie has a vision of him, sitting in his kitchen, downing pint after pint of fresh water. But at once he knows this is not true. Renfrew is a man of his word. It’s what makes him so terrifying.

Soon Charlie can hear the scrape of a spade against stone. The schoolmaster is clearing a path from door to fence. Charlie pictures him working with brisk, efficient movements, a scarf knotted high, unfurling his long, gaunt shadow away from the dipping sun. It will be dark before long.

As the room grows gloomy and while the spade is still separating snow from stone in long, scraping shovelfuls, Eleanor steps into the doorway. She does not enter but stands with her feet level with the threshold and leans in her head. Her harness gives an odd bulk to her shoulders, as of a knight in armour. A windup knight, a round little key sticking out of her chest. It is easy to believe that, in the depths past her sternum, this key connects to a complex clockwork mechanism of interlocking wheels, weights, and lead bearings; that the whole spare body of hers is a machine. Her face, however, is pure little girl, flushed and shy. Charlie smiles at her. She recoils as though stung, pulls her nose back past the invisible line marked by the tips of her toes.

A minute or two later, however, her head and upper chest once again invade the room. This time, Charlie’s smile does not immediately chase her away.

“Hullo Eleanor,” he whispers.

She mouths rather than speaks her response.

“Hullo Charlie.”

His name sits prettily on her childish lips.

“Did your uncle tell you that you are not to enter the room?”

She nods, gravely, checks the line of her toes. They have not passed the threshold.

“What else did he say?”

“I must not speak to you.”

As she says it she mechanically reaches for the little brass wheel sticking out of her harness and gives it a crank. A shudder follows, a spasm of the cheek.

“I see. I am sorry. The truth is, I need help. Do you want to help me, Eleanor?”

The girl does not respond but holds herself very rigid, as though afraid that any motion may betray her wish. Charlie, meanwhile, struggles to keep his thirst out of his voice; each word dry and graceless as it falls from his parched lips.

“I’m afraid if you do want to help me, you will have to disobey your uncle. I wish there was another way.”

Again Eleanor does not respond in words but simply looks at him with clear, honest eyes. He does not rush her but simply returns her gaze. When he starts chewing on his lip in nervous need, he finds her mirroring the movement, her incisors forming bunny teeth across the pink of her chin. He screws shut one eye and finds a girlish eye screwed shut in response; slips out the end of his swollen tongue and is graced with a flash of Eleanor’s rose tip, rolling itself into a graceful little straw. He laughs then, and she laughs with him. The next instant she stops, jumps back in sudden terror and runs away, down the corridor and the cottage’s naked flight of stairs, a clatter of tiny feet.

It is only when she reaches the silence of the carpet below that Charlie realises that the scraping of the spade has ceased.

ф

Renfrew returns. He appears to be thoughtful, walks to the window, stares out into the gloom. It is almost dark now, though the snow retains a pallid glow and sends it up into his stern and thoughtful face.

“I saw a rider. Out by the school gates.” He turns to Charlie. “Someone to see Headmaster Trout, perhaps. But he did not enter the premises. Or is it someone looking for you, I wonder? A man with a dog.”

“Julius.”

Charlie mouths the name rather than saying it. All the same, Renfrew reads it off his lips.

“Mr. Spencer? Yes, I suppose it could have been him.” He scratches his chin. His fingers remain encased in gloves: a black hand in a white-blond beard. “Did you know he is Lady Naylor’s son from a previous marriage? Yes, I imagine she will have told you. A most unhappy association. I must confess I have my suspicions about the boy. His serenity feels artificial. Have you heard about sweets? They absorb Smoke at the moment of its genesis.” He frowns. “They will need to be banned entirely. Their present proliferation, even beyond the nobility — it is like building the kingdom of heaven out of cardboard.”

Renfrew steps over to the bed, slips his hands out of the gloves, folds them neatly on the night table. Charlie flinches when his teacher sits down at his bedside, but it is only to better see him. Renfrew has yet to light a candle. His face, in the failing light, is grave and marked by earnest concern. He might be sitting at Charlie’s sickbed, exhausted from the long hours of his vigil. Involuntarily, Charlie feels a pang of sympathy rise in him. Renfrew is following the commands of his conscience. It gives him no joy.

“I must ask you again, Mr. Cooper,” he says now, his own voice strained by thirst, “to pass on the information so vital for the future of our polity.

“Please, Charlie,” he adds, as gently as his dry tongue will allow, “put an end to this silly game.”

Charlie considers it. It is difficult to say whether his words would result in harm or in good. But he gave a promise. Not just to Lady Naylor but to Thomas. To Livia.

“I can’t.”

Renfrew nods.

“You do not lack in courage.”

He slips a hand into his coat pocket, pulls out a flask followed by what looks like a short, wide belt with a stiff piece of tubing sewn into its leather front.

“Don’t struggle now.”

With utmost calm, Renfrew takes Charlie’s jaw into a viselike grip and slips the belt around his head, forcing the tubing between his lips and teeth. Charlie kicks, screams, gags on the tubing; feels a buckle dig into the back of his skull. Beyond Renfrew’s shoulder he becomes aware of Eleanor’s figure standing in the doorway. He wants to make eye contact, tell her not to be afraid, but all he can see is her feet, agitated, rubbing heel on heel. Charlie ceases in his struggles. They are hopeless, and he does not want the child to endure the sight.

“There,” Renfrew says, “that’s better.”

He unscrews the flask, upends the cap, and uses it as a measure.

“Don’t choke, Charlie. You have to swallow. All it is, is salt water. Keep it down, though. If you vomit, you will suffocate.”

Without the slightest hesitation the Master of Smoke and Ethics pours a measure of liquid down the tubing. An instant later it is in Charlie’s mouth, his whole body rebelling against the shock of salt, stomach heaving, dank brown Smoke drifting from his lips.

Renfrew removes the gag, disperses the Smoke with the back of his hand, then pours out another measure and quickly drinks it himself, sealing his lips against the spasm of his gag. They stare at one another, teacher and pupil, each mirroring the desperation of the other’s thirst. Beyond his shoulder, Charlie is dimly aware of soundless movement. Eleanor has slipped away.

At last Renfrew rises from the bed and walks over to the water jug and glasses. He picks up the glasses and carries them over to the night table. The water quivers as he sets it down.

“Perhaps,” Renfrew croaks, speaking against the rawness of his mouth, “perhaps I have not explained myself sufficiently. Baron Naylor and I, we were once like father and son. We made a pact, long ago, to change the world. But he won’t see me anymore and does not answer my letters. I am fighting for change, Charlie, for virtue. All I need to know is that the Naylors are doing the same.”

Charlie stares up at his tormentor.

“I don’t know,” he whispers.

“Tell me everything,” Renfrew answers, “and we will work it out together.” And then, mournfully, his cracked lips twitching with a hint of bitterness: “Why won’t you trust me, Charlie?

“Help me,” Renfrew pleads. “Help me, Charlie, to breed out sin.”

ф

There is a knock at the front door, loud and insistent, three sharp raps that echo through the house. Charlie is grateful to these raps: they save him from the need to answer. It is quite dark now but for the few rays of light that creep up the stairwell from the downstairs lamp. The room’s floorboards, too, prove porous and are outlined by the faint glow of their cracks.

When a second set of raps rings through the house, Renfrew rises, straightens his jacket, then turns back before he has reached the door. In the dark Charlie cannot see what he is doing until he feels the smooth circle of the tubing force itself back into his mouth. He is too exhausted to struggle.

“It is better,” Renfrew says quietly, “if your presence here remains a secret until we have finished our conversation. I will see who it is.”

A third set of raps hurries him out. The staircase groans under his quick step. A moment later he can be heard opening the door. The floor is so little insulated, each sound carries up with total clarity. It is as though Renfrew and his guest were standing in the darkness, at the far end of the room.

“Mr. Spencer! This is a surprise. What brings you here, my boy?”

If Renfrew’s voice is polite though strained, the voice that answers is rich with the practised insolence of master talking to servant. Even behind his gag, salt burning in every cranny of his gums, Charlie flinches at the tone.

“Master Renfrew! What a perfectly charming cottage this is. Cozy. But won’t you ask me in?”

“If you wish.”

“Oh, I do!”

Two sets of steps, and a dog’s hard-clawed paws: they pass under Charlie’s bed and walk on to the living room, on the other side of the house. From there the voices carry more dully. It’s Julius who does most of the talking.

“Ah, that’s better. Build up the fire, won’t you, Master Renfrew? The roads have been filthy today, and I am soaked to the bone. And help me out of these boots, if you will.” A moment later he adds: “Tell me, master, is there anybody else in the house? A visitor perhaps?”

Renfrew does something unprecedented then.

He lies.

“No. I am by myself. What brings you here, Mr. Spencer? I must confess it is not the most convenient of times.”

Julius sees fit to ignore the question.

“I heard you were living with your niece.”

“Yes. She is spending the holidays with her grandparents, in Herefordshire. I assure you we have the cottage to ourselves.”

“No servants, eh? Not even a valet. How awfully squalid. But never mind, it suits us, doesn’t it, this tête-à-tête? Here is the thing, Master Renfrew. I want to talk about Charlie Cooper. He came to you last night. A groundsman saw a ‘beggar’ walk up to your door. I happen to know that beggar was no such thing. Did he rush off right away or did he spend the night?”

“He left at dawn.”

The voice is confident, unhesitating, impossible to doubt. At the same time Renfrew is speaking loudly, making sure his voice will carry through the floorboards. Charlie wonders what it is about Julius’s appearance that has made such a liar out of the schoolmaster.

“But tell me, what is all this about, Mr. Spencer? Julius. You are most unlike yourself!”

“Am I? Well, all it is, I ran out of sweets. Ah, watch you blush with indignation! My family holds the monopoly now. We make the bloody things. Did you really think I would be ignorant of my own affairs?”

“By rights you should be! You are a minor.”

“I am nineteen next month and my grandfather’s sole heir. He’s been ailing of late, a growth in his bowels. He won’t see the spring. I think you will see me take my role as head of the household sooner rather than later.”

There is a pause into which Renfrew interjects something inaudible, the tone low and warning. Julius’s voice, by contrast, is rich with the volume of his arrogance.

“I believe you are mistaking the situation, Master Renfrew. I am not here as a schoolboy who can be ordered about. I need to know what Cooper has told you; what he has seen. And where he is headed.

“Have I introduced you to Nótt, Master Renfrew? Isn’t she a beauty? She is out of sorts, I’m afraid. Grouchy. Hasn’t eaten a bite since yesterday. Look at her sniffing around. It’s Cooper’s stink, she’s been primed to it. There, it must be on you, too. Hold still, will you? I’d hate for there to be an accident.

“Ah, Master Renfrew, don’t clamp up now. You don’t look well, if you don’t mind my saying. All dried up somehow. And don’t worry about your shirt — what of it, a bit of drool amongst friends, it’ll wash out. She has a good nose, though. I bet you she can smell what you had for lunch, all the way through your skin and your intestines. Meat pie, was it? Or perhaps something more frugal. Porridge? God, you really are the most disgusting prude.

“Cooper, Master Renfrew. Charlie Cooper. What did he tell you, and whom have you told? I warn you. I am not myself these days. Look here, I have acquired a second face. I swear just now, as I was coming in, I could not remember whether I was wearing it or not.

“You see, Master Renfrew, I find myself at a threshold. No longer one thing, nor yet another. A door has been opened in me, a hole, an abyss. It scared me at first, but I have been sneaking up to its ledge, taking peeks. And what horror, what wonder waits in its depth!

“But all the same I am afraid, Master Renfrew. Afraid of what lies in wait. Help me tonight. Help me remain myself. For another hour, another day. Of all your grim-faced talk of charity, this might prove your one good deed.”

As Charlie lies there, listening to Julius’s words, it is as though they surround him, standing in the darkness, not a yard away: here, the great bulk of the dog, its snout pressed into the schoolmaster’s waistcoat, a wet spot spreading from button to pocket; there, the head boy, first sprawling insolently in the armchair, then leaping up to march his strange disquiet back and forth between fireplace and door. And, superimposed on this scene, Charlie sees once again the tall, rigid form of his teacher, bending down over him, feeding him salt water.

Talk to me.

Help me.

Why won’t you trust me?

The hole in the gag affords Charlie but a spoonful of air with every breath. He lies in darkness and breathes hard through the nose.

ф

There is a change of light. The room is so dark now that its only features are the window, the door, the subtle leakage of the floor. Even so, Charlie’s senses register the change long before he can actually see her, standing by the side of the bed. Eleanor. The only part of her that has any colour is one eye, the right, which catches the night glow from the window and soaks it up into its green-and-white. She is not looking at him but into the distance. It comes to Charlie that she, too, is listening, straining to understand what is happening beneath their feet. A moment later, her hand slips into his. It happens very naturally, she simply moves forward, and searches the bedding for his palm. Manacled as he is, all Charlie can do is squeeze Eleanor’s fingers with his own. The girl does not respond.

Again the voice draws them into its spell, softer now, oddly suspended between heckling and wheedling as though two voices were speaking in unison, their timbres matching but their moods at odds.

“I know what you are thinking, Master Renfrew. ‘This cannot be happening.’ Or: ‘I will report him to my friends in New Westminster. We shall put him on trial.’ I can just see it! A week of debating the principles of liberalism. And then you put a rope around my neck. From reason, naturally, with regret. You might not even show. Do you know, Master Renfrew, that I have lain awake many a night, there in my dormitory bed, wondering what it would take to get you to smoke?

“But talk, Master Renfrew, talk, I beg you. If you keep to your silence, I must don this mask. We will both smoke then. Is that how it must be? You, my Judas, my Gethsemane? Oh, I love a metaphor these days. It’s the Smoke, speaking in pictures. Look at you frown! I bet you’ve never used a good metaphor in all your life.

“Please, Master Renfrew! You mustn’t be shy. I am your husband, you are my bride. There can be no secrets between us tonight. Tell me about Charlie Cooper. Tell me what he told you. Tell me your dreams and fears. Please, Master Renfrew, tell me.

“Tell me, or I must set fire to our souls.”

Eleanor starts shaking. Charlie feels it between his fingers first, then sees the whole of her bulky shadow, quivering in the darkness above him. At the same time, there begin to issue from her little hiccups of Smoke, one by one, clouding her teeth at every breath. And each time a pellet of Smoke breaks free from her, he can hear rather than see her free hand reaching for her harness, turning the screw upon her chest. After five such turns she staggers. She might squeeze herself to death.

Charlie tugs at her hand.

“Don’t,” he attempts to say, “don’t,” through the gag of his mouth, his own smoke shooting through the little pipe in a narrow concentrated jet. A second later he can no longer see her.

It is then he realises he has begun to cry.

“You must free me,” he shouts into his gag, “we have to run away,” and all that comes out is the sound of a man chewing his own tongue.

The girl by his side gives her screw another turn.

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She undoes the manacles. He is not sure how she has come by the decision, or what it is he might have done to sway her, but all of a sudden, without any announcement or change in her aspect, she bends down to his wrists and works open the restraints, her little hands moving with the dexterity of one familiar with the interaction of buckle and strap. When he is free and has ripped out the feeding tube, the first thing he does is hug her, draw her little body tight into his own, so that the brass wheel of her harness digs itself into his chest and bruises him. She is still smoking and crying, is limp in his arms, soundless, her lips clamped shut against her sin, the Smoke seeping straight from her skin now, from her throat and cheeks and eyeballs, dying her black.

The second thing Charlie does (holding on to the girl, her stockinged legs dangling freely at his waist) is reach for the water glass and drink. His stomach heaves when the water hits it, but he keeps it down, and a voice drifts through the floor, manic and kneedling, “Tell me, God damn you, tell me!” answered by a silence more chilling than a scream.

He must get her out of the house. This is all Charlie knows. He must get Eleanor out of the house and do so quickly, while Julius is distracted and his dog focussed on another task. The window opens easily enough in the room that was his prison, but beneath lies an eight-foot drop onto a ground bumpy with flower pots that he cannot risk, not with the girl clinging to him, fighting for breath against the grip of the harness and her fear. Snow enters the room before he can shut the window again, carried on a gust, along with the cold of the air.

He turns, walks quietly, his whole body stiff from lying still all day, out into the hallway and the room across. The light shining up from underneath is brighter here, and Charlie makes sure his feet do not stray from the dark squares of two rugs. Renfrew’s bedroom is spartan, holds a cot, a wardrobe, a washbasin, and little else. The living room is close under their feet. The sounds that issue from there have moved into a realm beyond speech. They mingle with the blood pounding in his ears. Charlie tiptoes and times his steps to his heartbeat; to the moans of a man in pain and the low growl of a dog. A snowflake has caught in Eleanor’s eyelash, melts as Charlie’s breath fans across her face.

The window is veiled in frost, disclosing nothing, but when he lifts it, carefully, quietly, it opens up over the flat roof of a shed cushioned with a foot of snow. He slides the child out first, dives after her. They swim to the edge of the roof, spilling snow. The cold is intense on his face, the roof’s edge draped in ice: it drops them onto a mound of snow at its back. From there they reach the back fence and a row of trees. Two steps bring them around the corner of the house, where a window stands brightly lit, the curtain open. Through the frost-thickened pane little can be seen other than a bit of wall across, the movement of a shadow at its utmost edge; the glow of the fire split into four tidy rectangles by the window’s wooden cross. Then it is as though someone has dumped ink into a water tank: the dark swirl of a viscous cloud takes possession of the room, drowning out the light and covering the pane until it appears to be dripping with darkness. The sound that accompanies the cloud serves to drown Eleanor’s shriek: a single protracted note so shrill it sounds as though it has been cut from Renfrew’s lungs.

Before Eleanor can shriek again, Charlie has picked her up and fights his way through trees.

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Perhaps he should go and find Trout. But Charlie’s wrists are sore from being tied, and his throat still raw from thirst. He won’t risk his freedom again, won’t trust another grown man’s judgement about what is right and wrong. And yet the little girl needs shelter, and her uncle needs help; the world a warning about a monster walking in its midst.

The porter’s lodge has a hut attached to it, too squalid to be called a cottage. It is tucked away at its back, out of view from student eyes, behind a thorn hedge four feet deep. Inside — his feet nearly in the fire, a kettle hanging from a chain by his side, his head tied into a rough scarf against the draft — sits Cruikshank, the porter. He has not drawn the curtain and sheltered as it is by the hedge, his hut’s window remains clear: one can see his dirty bed and the stacks of dishes by his sink; the crumbling dart board that hangs on one wall next to a shard of black slate that lets you mark the score. They draw close enough to touch the window and study the knotty little figure of the man, immersed in darning his socks. Charlie tries to put Eleanor down, but the girl is clinging to him awkwardly, her harness pressing into his face. Her breathing continues to be laboured. He has tugged at the contraption but has been unable to get it off.

“Go and knock on the door, Eleanor,” Charlie whispers to the little girl. “That there is Mr. Cruikshank. You must tell him who you are and that your uncle needs help. Tell him Spencer has gone mad. It’s very important that you remember. Julius Spencer. Tell him to tell the headmaster, and to fetch a club or a knife. Can you remember all that?”

But the girl won’t answer and just keeps clinging to him, each breath a struggle, her lips blue with cold and fear. He wrests her hands free, puts her down gently, walks with her to the door.

Again Charlie tries to tell her that she must knock and talk to Cruikshank, that he cannot go with her. Again she huddles back into his chest, buries her face there, shivers.

“Go on,” Charlie pleads with her. “Please. I beg you.”

She says something in response. To catch it, he has to put his ear to her lips, so close he can feel her breath against its skin.

“I’m bad,” she says. “I’m bad. That’s why the devil came to our house.”

Her hand reaches for the wheel on her chest. Charlie has to force it away.

“You are the best little girl I have ever met,” says Charlie.

Then he slips off his belt, loops it quickly through her harness and ties her to the door knob before knocking hard against its wood. The girl starts crying as he stumbles away through the bushes, but she does not shout. She may not have the breath to do it.

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Charlie lingers on the far side of the hedge for far too long, lying flat against its base, hiding in the dark. Julius might have left Renfrew’s cottage by now. He might have seen their tracks (how much has it snowed?) or gone upstairs and realised someone was staying there. His dog might have taken Charlie’s scent. It is madness to linger. He needs to run, lose himself in the snowstorm. Go to London to report to his friends.

What Charlie does do is lie flat on the ground, count the minutes. Crawl back through the bushes, back to the window. Raise his head above the window ledge and take a peek.

Eleanor is sitting on a chair, tears rolling down her cheeks, her skin glowing red from the cold. Other than the sobs that rack her frame, she is not moving at all. Her hands are wrapped around a mug of tea, demurely, in an attitude oddly like prayer. By her side, crouching and hence shorter than her by half a head, is Cruikshank, holding a big pair of scissors and moving them about her torso like a bird picking berries from a thorny shrub. Each sharp little snip cuts a leather belt on Eleanor’s harness. When one side gapes open like a bust valise, the knotty old porter moves around to the other side, facing the window. Charlie is not quick enough to duck and for a full second they stare at each other while the girl sits unmoving, warming her hands on the hot tea.

Then Cruikshank looks away and resumes his labours, and Charlie turns to run into the frozen night.

HEADMASTER

There is something objectionable about Swinburne. It goes beyond his overbearing boorishness; the wheeze of his voice; his massive, hulking, clumsy body, so much like a dead man’s brought back to life. I think it is his eyes, small, too-round eyes, tucked piglike under too many wrinkles. They are fixed on me now, studying me past the rim of the teacup he has lifted to his lips and then forgotten. His thoughts are easy to surmise. He is wondering why I asked him up here, at an unconventional hour, too hard on supper to call for tea. Other questions are churning in him, close to the surface. In the end he cannot help himself: it spills out without subtlety, the thing that bothers him most. It never ceases to surprise one how much like a schoolboy this old man really is, underneath the fire-and-brimstone bluster: a schoolboy in a cassock and a licence to spank. It is little wonder the pupils fear him so.

“It is impossible,” he says. “Out of the question. Absurd.”

I make him wait until I have dunked, bitten off, and chewed my mince pie, brushed crumbs from my lips and chin. The regret in my voice is sweetened by cinnamon and sugar.

“Cruishank tells me the girl spoke the name quite distinctly, and repeated it twice. There cannot be any mistake.”

“Then she is lying!” Swinburne scowls, looks around the room, then at the door that leads to my bedroom. “Is she here?”

“Yes. Sleeping. The poor thing is exhausted. We mustn’t wake her up.”

“Is it true she does not smoke?”

“Oh, she smokes a little. But no more than our sixteen-year-olds. Less than some. It is really quite remarkable. Renfrew ought to be congratulated.”

“Then you do believe her.”

I am amused to see how crushed Swinburne is by this notion: that his favourite pupil should be thought of as a killer. It would be touching if his concern wasn’t born entirely of vanity.

“It really does not matter what I believe. Young Spencer has been named, so he will need to be found and questioned. But there is a larger point to this. Julius is Lady Naylor’s son. He was staying with her when Argyle and Cooper were abducted. It gives the government an excuse to place Lady Naylor under investigation. And her husband, the baron. Officials will be arriving at their house this very night, with a warrant authorising a search.”

I pause, lean forward a little, making sure Swinburne takes note of what I am saying. The man has a thick skull. One has to be emphatic with him.

“You see, we had cause for suspicion before. A letter of Lady Naylor’s was intercepted some weeks ago. She was writing on behalf of the baron, communicating with a scientist on the Continent. As it turns out you know the man in question. I understand he was one of your pupils, what, twenty, thirty years ago?”

Swinburne blanches. “The apostate!”

I do my best not to laugh out loud at the word.

“No more than an errant sheep, surely? Should you not be trying to save him? Return him to the flock? As I understand he was a favourite of yours, once upon a time. You taught him Greek, I believe, at his special request.”

Swinburne’s face is bitter with rancour. “We should never have admitted a foreigner. He fooled me, fooled us all.” He adds, when his slow brain works its way from past to present: “What does the baron want with him?”

“Who can say? The letter was rather cryptic. And we have not been successful in placing a spy in the Naylor household, to provide us with information by other means.”

Swinburne seems unmoved by the idea of spies infiltrating the bosom of the families that rule the land. All he wants to know is: “How hard can it be?”

I shrug. “They have a good butler. Attentive chap.”

“Surely you could have bribed a chambermaid.”

“We would not dream of trusting anyone quite so common.” I ignore Swinburne’s wince. It is said his mother was a tanner’s daughter. There are words in his vocabulary that make the other teachers blush. “In any case, we will know more soon. The warrant was sent by special courier. The Crown is taking an interest, you see.”

At the mention of the Crown, Swinburne grows ponderous. Again it is almost comically easy to follow his train of thought.

What does fat Mr. Trout have to do with the Crown?

It nearly breaks his thick little head to puzzle it out.

“Headmaster Trout,” he ventures at last, almost shyly, “is it true that you used to be some sort of magistrate?”

“A justice of the peace.”

“A witchfinder, is what Master Barlow once told me, when he was in his cups. An inquisitor of crime.” He uses the words without reproach.

I laugh, pat my stomach. “Merely a servant of the state. I was more slender then.”

I think I have done enough to ensure that Swinburne will pass on whatever information his wooden skull can retain to his patron. He has long been the Tory Party’s ears within the school, just as Renfrew is the Liberals’. There is an interest, on the side of the Crown, in keeping the factions in balance.

“Now, if you will excuse me.”

“Of course, Headmaster.”

It is only now when he rises to leave that the thought occurs to Swinburne that he should have inquired about the victim of the assault, whatever his feelings about the man. It behoves him, as a Christian. Nonetheless, it comes out rather coarsely.

“Is Renfrew dead then?”

“Not at all. On the contrary, there is hope yet that he may live, though if he does he will be much changed. The surgeon had to remove several feet of his intestines. An Oxford man, he is, one of Renfrew’s party. I had him fetched.”

Swinburne frowns, wets his lips with the thick-veined tip of his tongue, lowers his voice to the whisper of insinuation.

“It’s unnatural. By rights he should be dead.”

“You are a suspicious man, Swinburne. We have no reason to believe that the man used any techniques or technologies he acquired illegally. And no reason to inquire. Surely you are pleased Dr. Renfrew is still with us.”

As I see the old churchman to the door, I catch a whiff of his breath. Atop the rotting smell of his dentures there sits another, cleaner smell, almost medicinal and carrying the sweetness of turpentine. My guess is that he never leaves his chambers without a sweet tucked into the pocket of his mouth. I wonder briefly how he justifies his consumption theologically. But then I realise that a man like Swinburne does not bother with justifications. Churchmen and teachers are allowed to use sweets. Other men are not.

For him, it is as simple as that.

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The girl is asleep when I enter the bedroom. There are some marks on the pillow and the bed-sheet, but they are light and grey, bad dreams become manifest. It would be churlish to call them sins. Slowly, not wishing to wake her, I lower myself onto the chair next to her, and tuck the duvet back up to her chin. She mutters something, and — still asleep — her little hand comes up to her chest and performs an odd, turning movement, as if she were placing her heart into a loosely formed fist and giving it a twist. It is a disturbing gesture, made by a mind that is disturbed. One can only guess at what the girl must have witnessed.

I did not enter Renfrew’s cottage until after he had been removed from the premises. Cruikshank had found him, he and the two stable hands he had roused in response to the girl’s warning. He’d armed them with stout clubs, he told me, and himself with an axe. They had found the door unlocked.

All three of the men had walked through Renfrew’s blood. That’s the first thing I saw coming to the cottage, bloody footprints leading away from the front door, growing fainter with every step until only their heels and bootnails showed pink upon the path from cottage to school. It had been snowing through much of the night. No other prints showed in the blanket of white.

In the squalid little hallway, the same three sets of footprints were visible on the floorboards, along with a fourth, wearing narrow riding boots and attended by a large-pawed dog. Near the door to the living room, one of the stable hands had dropped his club. He had not stooped to pick it up.

Beyond this point, the prints no longer showed. Indeed, one had to squint to make out the shadow of blood upon the blackened floorboards. It was as though a great fire had raged in the room, a fire that consumed only people and left the furnishings untouched. There had been two centres to the fire: the first an armchair, whose worn leather was covered in an oily layer of Soot, a finger deep; the second on the floor, two steps away, where a body had written a sickle of deepest black into the dark flooring. The blood had pooled there and mixed with the Soot; it formed a sort of treacle, stringy to the touch.

When people burn to death, their bodies fold into themselves, into the posture of unborn children: the knees tucked up to the chest, the fists raised high in front of the face like pugilists taking cover, the skin a black tissue above bone. It was tempting to ascribe this position to the man who had lain there on the floor, bleeding from an abdominal wound which, Cruikshank assures me, “had his innerds pokin’ through.” I have rarely seen him this upset.

I made, during my initial visit, only the most perfunctory search of the doctor’s private papers. There were a number of incriminating manuscripts, suggesting research into illegal matters, as well as a wealth of foreign correspondence, which I made sure to take along lest they fall into the wrong hands. It was only on a second visit, some hours later, that I found, tucked inside a handsome portable desk of mahogany and rosewood, a very interesting if incomplete report pertaining to Charlie Cooper, and discovered a room upstairs whose bed frame was fitted with leather manacles at either side.

One need not have been a justice of the peace to string these facts together to a narrative of sorts and endow it with a plot. All the same Cruikshank insists that the girl came to his door alone; that he looked outside and found no other tracks leading up to his home. I suppose he has a soft spot for Cooper and imagines he is doing him a favour. When we lie from sympathy, I have found, the Smoke seems fit to spare us. It is the sort of fact that keeps Swinburne up at night; runs counter to his view of things.

The girl mutters something, deep in her sleep, and summons me back from my reverie. I bend my ear down to her lips until my cheek nearly touches her nose. She makes me wait for several minutes until she speaks again, and I stand there, awkward, my fundament pushed back for balance and bending double at the waist, looking for wisdom from the mouth of babes. When it comes, the word that travels across the gap of air is fragile, foreign, unexpected.

“Asch-en-stedt.”

I wonder what it was about living with Renfrew that made her snoop around his private papers, and what it was she did to punish herself for so obvious a sin.

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A noise runs through my chambers. I know at once what it is, and yet I have never heard it before, not here, in my rooms, atop the kingdom that is my school. It cuts me to the marrow. It is a noise that must not exist. There it comes again, the shrill bleating of a bell. It jerks me upright, sees me race to the door. I lock her in, the girl, just as the third ring sounds; am by the custom-built cupboard at the fourth. It takes me three more rings to find the key; insert it (how clumsy my fingers are, how sweaty my palm!), turn it, and open the cupboard door. The ringing only stops when I take the receiver off the hook.

“Hullo,” I say, unsure of the procedure. “Samuel Trout here.” And then, blustery in my confusion, whispering hoarsely into the funnel jutting out of the wooden box: “This had better be an emergency!”

The voice that answers is so immediate, it seems to stand in the room with me. Its words pour out from the shell of the receiver straight into my ear; they have a crackle to them, as though someone were talking to you in a storm. I listen carefully, find myself nodding, before realising that it is sound that is transmitted, not motion.

When I hang up, I lock the cupboard very carefully, place the key in my pocketbook, and change into my travelling clothes. Half an hour later sees me leave the school in our fastest trap. In my carpetbag, clutched against the soft of my chest, are thirty pounds sterling, two changes of undergarments, my razor, my hairbrush, ten illegal cigarettes, and a box of sweets.

The Colt I wear in its holster. It rides high up my flank, the butt turned outward, like a doorknob growing out of the hollow of my armpit. Outside, the land lies dark under a sickle moon.