Smoke

THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY

It is hard to say when exactly it starts. Thomas is tired, busy with his fatigue and his wound, his thoughts about Charlie. He is lying in the corner of the train wagon, the squawk of chickens by his ear. Two steps from him the door to the wagon remains wide open. A savage wind whips at them whenever they gather speed, then relents when the train labours up a hill. There are other men in the wagon, other vagrants, a group of two and a third, a solitary man. Livia is sitting far from them, her knees tucked into her chest. It is only later that Thomas realises that she is trying to hide her breasts.

The men sniff her out all the same. It begins without rancour, witless banter about what a pretty boy she is, how creamy her skin.

“Short for ’is age,” one man ventures, shouting against the wind. “A little scrawny. But nice ’ealthy thighs.” When she gets up to shift closer to Thomas, his mate calls after her: “Don’t you worry, pet, we’re just having a bit of fun.” The little Smoke that wafts over from them is playful and oddly inclusive, as though inviting them to join their game.

It is the solitary man who changes the equation. He climbed on later, hours into their journey, running alongside the train at the steepest side of a hill. This man is not interested in Livia. It’s lunch he wants. The chickens are packed into two massive crates, sturdy enough to discourage thievery but perforated at the side to let in air. All one sees of them is a mass of feathers; the occasional blood-red beak sticking out of a perforation; a dozen unblinking eyes. They are packed in willy-nilly, literally stacked on top of each other, are restless, squawking, fighting for floor space and air. The man has hooked two fingers through one of the holes. His face is weather-beaten, the creases caked with Soot. Light, deep-set eyes. It is as though their colour has run.

He catches something, pulls back his arms, holds a chicken foot hooked between his fingers. The man continues tugging until pale pink cartilage broadens to a wedge of fine white feather. Then he gets stuck: the hole just isn’t big enough.

At first Thomas thinks the man means to cut off the leg. But it appears he has no knife. Rather he just continues pulling, his dark face growing darker with the effort. A riot of chicken squawks plays chorus to his effort.

When the blood starts flowing, the man starts smoking, and when his Smoke reaches the other two men, all that is dark in them rises up like a dog called to its master. Again they turn to Livia, and again they begin teasing her, but there is a different quality now to their taunts, something dangerous and needy, and the language soon grows coarse.

“Won’t you come over here, pet?” one of them keeps saying. “We’ve got things to show you.”

“That your sweetheart there?” the other one jumps in. “Looks in real bad shape, ’e does. No joy cuddlin’ the sick.”

Livia looks over at Thomas. It is a closed, a haughty look. It must mean she is scared. She does not ask him for his help. But Thomas is already on his feet. The Smoke wafting through the carriage helps him, gives him strength. He breathes it in with a sense of recognition; watches his body exhale a fine blue mist in response. All the same he is careful not to inhale too much. He must not get too angry to think.

“Ah, look at the pup! Chival’russ, ’e is, a proper little knight. Forgot ’is armer though, didn’t ’e?”

“Nah,” says his mate, “he’s got his lass there to protect him. What you say, bonny lad? Sit yourself down again and we’ll help you break her in.”

Thomas ignores them, steadies himself against Livia’s shoulders. From the corner of one eye he is aware of the third man, plucking feathers off a bloody lump of chicken. Ahead, the land shifts from flat to the slight incline of a hill. Livia’s ear is right in front of him, its outside clean, the inside glowing black with coal dust. Her body is shaking under his hands, or perhaps he is shaking and passing it on into her slender frame. He whispers to her.

“I’m too weak to fight them,” he whispers. “But if we stay here, I must.”

Her eye flicks back momentarily. It communicates a question.

Why?

“The Smoke,” he explains. “I’m not like Charlie. It makes a home in me.”

As he says it, he realises he is afraid to fight these men not because he will lose. He is afraid he will disappear, disappear into the Smoke, as he did when he fought Julius. One day, he thinks, he won’t find his way back.

But there is no need to explain all this to Livia. She has already understood the most important thing. They must get off the train.

“When?” she asks.

“Now.”

He has been listening for it, the moment the train’s engine clears the crest of the hill. The moment it is at its slowest, its rump tethered to a dozen wagons, gravity tugging at its nose. It is a sound the body hears, not the ears, a change in vibrations racing through the chain of wagons like a rumour: steel wheel to axle to coupling to wood.

Now.

Thomas pushes Livia with both hands, afraid that she will miss the moment; pushes too hard, perhaps, and sees her stumble awkwardly across the threshold of the door. The wind whips at her hair. Then she is gone from sight.

Him, the vagrants try to stop before he can follow. It is a clumsy charge. Thomas ducks one man’s arm, sidesteps the other’s leg, and throws himself forward. He feels himself falling through the sharp twigs of a shrub. Then the ground jumps up at him. He hits it shoulder first, feels the air pushed out of his lungs; goes head over heels, then starts rolling down a slope of unkempt grass, the world a carousel, hips, elbows, knees pummelled by the impact of each revolution.

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They are lucky, in a sense. The hill slopes gently where they leapt, and the hedgerow that parallels the tracks is free of thorns. All the same, the twigs have torn clothes and skin. They each come to rest some six or seven yards down, where a ditch welcomes them with its bed of hard-caked mud. He looks around winded, and sees Livia sitting up not far from him, her face dark with dirt, and blood seeping from a cut lip. She gets to her feet and stands over him, rubbing her upper arms and neck. He thinks she will ask him whether he is all right; whether his wound has reopened or he has broken any limbs.

“Stupid,” she says. “We should have waited for a steeper hill.”

He tries to speak but doesn’t have enough air.

“How far to London?” she asks.

He gasps, spits.

“Don’t know,” he manages. “Can’t be far.”

“Get up then.” She brushes at her clothes, her face. “We need to find water. I want to wash.”

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She won’t be talked out of it. What does it matter, he tries to explain to her, if they are dirty? In London everyone is dirty. It will help them blend in. She could wet her handkerchief with some spit, rub off the blood if it bothers her. But she won’t be swayed, glowers at his words. Something about him makes her angry. He understands this well enough. Something about her makes him angry too.

Half an hour later she finds a creek. They are walking south, keeping the tracks in sight, on an unmarked path. Already the sun is sitting low in the sky. The day has cleared, its light bright and pure, carving shades of colour out of every blade of grass. It is hard to believe that they emerged from darkness only that morning. Seven hours of daylight and already Thomas’s wonder at the world has worn thin. His head is hurting, his back, the bruises on his hips and knees. A lone crow sits in empty fields and watches him hobble past.

The creek is three feet wide and a foot deep. There is no bridge, but a fallen tree has been placed across from bank to bank. Livia climbs down to it, crouches, then looks at him expectantly.

“What?” he asks, uncomprehending.

“Some privacy, if you will.”

“You are going to strip? Just dunk a hankie in and mop your face. Be done with it.”

It’s like talking at a stone. He curses, turns away from her, shuffles ten steps down the path. The crow is still there in its field, caws hoarsely at him, picks an insect out the dirt. While he waits, impatient, Thomas makes an inventory of his pockets. There is a penknife and a handkerchief so stained with coal dust it is a featureless black. A length of yarn; a spent and broken match. A stone he picked up in some childish moment because it impressed him by its smoothness. Then he finds the cigarettes. There are four of them, each bent like an old man’s fingers. He has a memory of forcing open Julius’s little box and stuffing them in his coat. The smell leaps up to him, sticks to his fingertips even after he scatters the cigarettes on the ground. An invitation to sin. Renfrew would have been pleased to witness his fear.

When Livia finally emerges, her hair is streaming wet. She has no towel and has put on her shirt over her still-wet frame, is using the miner’s coat like a blanket thrown about her shoulders. Her face is flushed with cold. Beneath it shivers her young body, more naked than dressed. Thomas sees it and quickly turns away.

A silence descends. Behind him he can hear her wring out her hair then climb into the shoes she has been holding in her hand.

“There,” she announces at last. “Nearly dry. I needed to. . Those men made me feel dirty.”

Thomas hardly hears her. He wonders whether she saw him look. Whether he showed. He needs to say something; warn her; apologise. Her belly button showed dark through the wet cotton of her shirt; he saw the slender arches of her rib cage. You have to be careful, he wants to say. There is a curve, a hollow where her arm runs into torso, so much softer than a boy’s. I am no different than those who rode the train.

“Livia,” he says instead, his eyes on dirt and crow. It sounds sulky rather than apologetic. “What sort of name is Livia?”

Instantly, her voice turns cold.

“What do you care?”

But his mind has already moved on, slides from thought to thought without finding traction.

“I wish Charlie was here,” he mutters. And then: “He’s in love with you.”

“And you disapprove.”

He listens into himself and discovers she is right.

“Charlie is the best,” he tries to explain. “The most honest, the bravest person I have ever met.”

“While I’m a stuck-up little madam pretending to be a saint.”

“You are like me. Flawed and angry. Only you hide it better. Some day you will let him down.”

“I won’t.”

He startles himself with the sadness that rises up in him. “Who can say for sure, Livia?”

Then he adds, turning now, looking boldly in her eye. “You are pretty. I did not notice it before.”

In answer, she wraps her arms tight around her slender frame.

They resume walking. As they set off, Livia quickly, furtively crouches down to the cigarettes he has discarded and picks them off the ground one by one. She does not offer an explanation.

Thomas does not ask for one.

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She tells him later. They are walking single file, Thomas in front, Livia behind, straining to adjust her pace to his slow stumble. Her explanation has no face, therefore: just a voice, measured and even, reciting the facts.

“The name is Roman,” she says. “Livia Orestilla. An empress: Caligula’s wife. She was to marry someone else, but Caligula stole her on her wedding night. Then he divorced her after only a few days.”

“A funny thing to put into your cradle. In lieu of frankincense and myrrh.”

“That’s just what Julius said. Not the words but the sentiment. It was he who told me. About Caligula.”

Stung, Thomas turns around to her, careful to place his eyes on her face, her jacket closed now, swallowing her body.

“It is good that you hate me. I’m dangerous. I have tainted blood.”

He is surprised to see she holds his gaze. Thus far, she has always avoided it. It must be something she brought up with her, from the depth of the mine.

“So you are,” she replies, serious and not. “‘Tainted.’ ‘Dangerous.’ Why is it you think I’m walking three paces at your back?”

It shouldn’t, but it makes Thomas laugh. When they start walking, her steps fall into rhythm with his.

One pace, he thinks. Two paces at the most.

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They reach the border at dusk. The transition is gradual but also distinct. On their side, the dipping sun finds the earth rich and brown; trees tall and proud even in hibernation; hollies growing in green vigour. On the other side all growth is stunted, the soil barren, mixed with Soot, the puddles greasy with sin’s residue, the air pregnant with its stink.

The other side. The city. London.

The day has grown colder and snow is in the air. Thomas wonders whether it will fall black, over there. They stop under the shadow of a tree. It is a species Thomas does not recognise, a conifer nearly as broad as it is high, its branches growing sideways and forming a series of platforms, filtering the last of the sun. On the London side, the tree stands black, smeared in Soot, and threadbare in its canopy. He walks up to the trunk and touches the bark. Livia watches him, puzzled.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s just — I like this tree.” He talks with his back to her, so she won’t see his face. There is a catch to his voice, a hint of a younger Thomas, gentler in pitch. “What kind is it? I have never seen it before.”

“A cedar of Lebanon,” she answers without hesitation. “There is a grove of them on the grounds of my school, along with a plaque. It says an explorer brought back a handful of seeds, in the early 1600s. All British cedars descend from that handful. There was a debate in Parliament not long ago over whether they should all be cut down.”

“Why? No, I know. Because they are foreign. An outside thing.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” she says reasonably. “They do not belong here.”

“It’s beautiful.”

He touches the bark, both hands flat on the tree, lets it take his weight. There is a high, light humming in his chest. Bone music. Singing of home. Home? A tree transplanted from its native soil, planted at the edge of purgatory. The early 1600s. It came with the Smoke. Its bark warm and rough under his spread-out palms.

“Come,” Livia urges, not unkindly. “We cannot stay here. We’ll freeze to death.”

Indeed a deep chill has started to rise out of the land and pinpricks of snowflakes stand in the air, catching the sunset. Only the breeze blowing in from the south is a little warmer. It carries London to them, sewage and sin, and the dank stink of boiling cabbage.

They walk towards it side by side.

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Darkness falls just as the muddy little path they follow feeds into a cobbled road. All of a sudden there are people, dwellings, mangy dogs hunting for offal in the ditch. They are still far from the centre, in a no-man’s-land of pig farms and factories, vegetable plots, lean-tos made from wood and sackcloth. The closer they draw the less certain they become of the way, encounter sinkholes, dead ends, intersections that split the street in confusing ways. Then also, with every step Thomas’s fatigue is mounting, the ache of fever returning to his joints. It isn’t long before Livia stops him.

“We have walked all day. You need rest. There, we can find shelter in that doorway.”

Thomas is too tired to argue. The doorway is ripe with smells but deep enough to allow them to disappear into its shadow, even to lie down, using their arms for pillows. For a moment the muck that seeps through his coat and shirt makes Thomas gag. Then exhaustion wipes the feeling from his mind. What remains is the cold. Even out of the wind, heated though it is by the furnace of London’s sin, the night is near-freezing. Against their will, they are forced to huddle close, back pressed against back, each keeping the other awake with their shiver. The floor of the doorway is uneven from use. It dips at the centre. Late at night, not explaining himself, Thomas turns around to take Livia in his arms and mould his chest, knees and legs against her frame. It is warmer this way. Her hair smells of coal, sweat, and peaches. It is the peaches that trouble him as he drifts off to sleep. Dawn brings noise and the acrid smell of fresh Smoke. They roll apart like disgruntled puppies and stiffly resume the road. Behind them, their doorway remains empty, the door locked, the house unmarked and ordinary but for the lopsided contour of a cross that declares it a chapel.

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They walk in comfort with each other, two steps apart. Some truce appears to have been struck between them in the course of the night, almost a friendship, dispelling the tension of the previous day. It fills Thomas with hope. In a few hours — the next morning at the latest — Charlie will re-join them and all danger will have passed, this strange, dimly sensed trap laid for them by the road. In the meantime Thomas gives himself to London. In the thin light of morning it seems different to him than it was when he first came here. Or rather, he is different, has shed both school and uniform, become one of the crowd. Already the streets are choked with wagons and people: farmers bringing sheep to market, costermongers, morning drunks, factory workers marching to their shift. The Smoke is light yet, dissolved in yellow fog, tugs at Thomas in ways not entirely unpleasant, gives rise to unruly feelings he does little to suppress. Next to him, Livia walks more guardedly, suspicious of this haze, yet gawking, too, at this sea of people whose steady current carries them along.

They find the square by midmorning. There is no scaffold there today, no soldiers, no hangman, no rabid mob. Even so the square is crowded enough that all movement becomes a matter of negotiation, of space claimed and yielded, shoulders brushed, weights gently shifted. London is a place where people touch. It strikes Thomas as a succinct definition of its sin.

Despite the press of people, however, the square feels different today. During the execution, there had been but one crowd, focussed on a single spectacle. Today there are many centres of attention. A group of farmers have set up stalls and are selling produce to a jostling throng, their boys armed with cudgels to discourage thieves. Behind these stalls, a ring has formed around two fighting dogs; a crone with a chalkboard is accepting bets. Right next to her a man has mounted a crate and is screaming at the score of people who form his congregation. Beyond, a small tent has been set up, and a gaudily dressed youth is selling tickets to a show that, judging by the sign dangling from his neck, appears to involve a woman undressing to reveal her scorpion’s tail. Each of these groups is knit together by a mist of Smoke, light and volatile in the air, if thickening in places into dark swirls. At the borders these mists mingle or rain down in flakes of Soot soon absorbed by the ground’s black grit.

“It’s not like it was down the mine,” Livia says, disappointed. “I had started to hope that Smoke was benign.”

“And now you are shocked.”

“Well, look at it,” Livia answers. “It’s a disgrace.”

“I was just thinking the opposite. That it’s not really that bad.”

Just as Thomas says it, two women at the far end of the square start fighting, the shorter, stockier woman wrestling the other to the ground then pelting her with insults.

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They choose a perch atop a set of shallow stairs that lead up to a church. Church does not capture the building’s scale; it is very nearly a cathedral. A row of marble columns rise behind them, holding aloft a portico high above their heads. Beyond it a single tower spikes two hundred feet into the heavens, where the Smoke thins and a cloudy sky spews snowflakes that reach the earth as dirty drizzle. For all its grandeur, the building is dilapidated, its great doors leaning burnt within their frames, held aloft by a crude patchwork of timber. The windows, too, have long lost their glass and are similarly boarded shut. High up, the brickwork that peels itself out of the city’s sooty varnish shines with the pallor of limestone. The long, angular lines of the 1720s: built a hundred years into the time of Smoke. Thomas stares at the church and imagines a time when, despite it all, a decision was taken to build it here, at the heart of vice.

Morning turns to afternoon and Charlie does not come. Dawn, noon, dusk: these are the meeting times they have agreed. They shall have to leave soon, to look for food and shelter for the night. There is a water pump on the market square and though the water is grey and tastes of tin they have gone down to it repeatedly, to slacken their thirst and fill up their stomachs with something other than air. To obtain food, they will need to raise money. Or else they will have to steal. It is a problem, Thomas imagines, faced by a great many Londoners.

A man approaches the stairs. It takes Thomas some time to understand why he notices him. There have been others walking past, some openly staring at them, assessing their wealth, their station. Others yet have sought out the stairs as they have: as a place to rest. One old woman sat to feed the pigeons from a tin of dug-up grubs, cooing sweet nothings and all the while gently smoking from the shafts of her high boots.

This man is different. He moves briskly without wishing to disclose his haste, as though he is straining at the lead of his own discretion. A man in his fifties, bald, a crick in his neck that tilts chin to shoulder. But it is not this that draws Thomas’s eye. He only makes sense of it after the man has turned and darted down the alley by the side of the church. Everyone else who walked towards them, past the various islands of spectacle that dot the square, veered off somewhere, even if only for a moment. The Smoke made sure of it: it called to them as they passed, pulled them towards its centre, as though they were celestial bodies passing the weight of the sun. In his repressed hurry, walking through the siren song of sin, this man alone — the man with the bent neck — never once veered.

He is eating sweets.

There can be no other explanation. But something else tugs at Thomas, a memory older than the discovery of sweets, if not by much.

“Charlie,” he says abruptly, startling Livia out of her doze. “He once told me he saw an angel. Right here on the market square. An angel with a crooked neck.”

Livia stares after Thomas when he jumps up and runs to the alley. But the man is long gone.

“Is he important?”

“Charlie thought so,” Thomas replies. “In any case, it’s more than just chance. Two sightings on the very same square. He must have business here.”

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Soon after, Thomas and Livia are spooked off the perch by a group of respectably dressed men traversing the market in an open landau marked with bold lettering and the symbol of the Crown. There are four of them, plus a driver in livery; each so obviously a gentleman with soft white skin and brushed moustaches, they might as well belong to a different breed of human altogether.

“Who are they?” Livia whispers in the alley to which they have fled. “Magistrates? Are they looking for us?”

Thomas reads the lettering on the side of the coach. TAYLOR, ASHTON AND SONS, ENGINEERING. His relief is immediate.

“No. They are sewage men.” He repeats to her the gist of Renfrew’s explanation, given in Oxford some weeks ago. “Liberals. Social pioneers. They want to clean up London, starting with the cesspits.” He shrugs. “That’s what Renfrew was preaching to us. That we should join their ranks. He did not tell us that they’re here because they’d like to have a go at corruption and can’t afford any cigarettes.”

“Perhaps we are doing them an injustice.” Livia watches the carriage disappear at the far end of the square. “They looked like honest men.”

“They looked clean, Livia. That’s all.” He shrugs, tugs at her elbow, walks back out into the street. “I’m famished. Let’s go find some food.”

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For the second time in two days Thomas makes an inventory of his belongings and tallies up what he might sell. His penknife. His jacket, only he’ll freeze to death if they don’t find better shelter for the night. The cigarettes Livia picked out of the dirt. They are said to be worth a fortune. But who needs to buy sin in London? It’s as free as the air they breathe.

The row of market stalls on the square only sells raw meat and vegetables, and fish so malodorous even the locals seem to avoid it. They choose a street at random, follow a pair of chimney sweeps who are either the most vicious of men or are simply trailing the dirt of their trade. A bakery draws them with its smell. The penknife buys them two loaves of coarse white bread and a dozen penny rolls. They gulp down the rolls while huddled into a doorway, until a gang of urchins sets on them, begging a loaf with such dirty-palmed insistence that they have no choice but to flee.

And so they drift, strangers in a strange place. Around them the city is working, talking, seeking pleasures. It is not, in some ways, unlike the bustle of a school corridor or of a holiday fair in a respectable village. Only here, every interaction — every word spoken, every coin that changes hands — hovers at the precipice of danger, and moods can shift with the gust of the wind. They walk through arguments; through drunkenness; through laughter; skirt a billow of raw lust, a couple kissing, her hands buried in his jacket, one naked hip bone sticking out into the cold. And at every step, Smoke calls to Thomas, a dozen shades of vice.

It happens like all accidents, suddenly and without warning. Perhaps it is no accident at all but an ambush, well-rehearsed and executed with aplomb. A group of running urchins splits them (the same group as before? another?), shoves Thomas up against the wall and Livia into the kissing couple. She loses her balance and all three fall hard into the street. And even as they fall the man’s hands slip into Livia’s pockets, searching them for coin. He discovers what Thomas did a day before; that the shapeless coat hides something softer than a boy’s frame; grins, his fallen lover’s skirts tangling around his legs, licks the length of Livia’s face, jumps up, is gone, dragging his woman behind him, her cheeks painted crimson in imitation of health. All this in a breath or two, while Thomas swims against the crowd, the last of their bread spoiling in a puddle by his feet. He reaches Livia, drops to his knees, finds her head twisted into dirt, the neck strangely tilted; scoops up her chin with outstretched palms, afraid. The moment they touch a jet of Smoke breaks out of her, dark green and dense. His own skin answers. They freeze, their faces conjoined by a twist of Smoke so dense they cannot see each other. It is Livia who recoils, shaking off his touch, kicking his legs in her haste to get away.

“Don’t ever touch me!” she shouts, her Smoke still oozing out of her in stark betrayal.

Then she runs down the street and out of sight.

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Thomas searches for her, afraid he will find her, afraid he will not. The streets all seem to smell of her, peaches and Smoke; he sees her face in every girl who rushes past on her business. At dusk he returns to the church steps. Livia is already there, sitting on the topmost step, her arms wrapped around her knees, exhaustion, shame marking her wan features. She scrubbed them raw to rid them of his Soot. Spasms of Smoke keep darting out of her mouth, sudden retchings of black, each abrupt and violent, shaking her frame from head to toe. He climbs past her and sits upwind, his skin bumpy with fresh squalls of fever. A cold drizzle is falling, taunting them with the kind of proximity they resorted to during the night, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. They ignore it and sit yards apart. Even so he is conscious of her Smoke; feels it reach across the gap and tug at his very bones. It is as though he were built to drink her sin.

London is a place where people touch.

Before, he had not understood the implications of this simple truth.

They sit and wait. Thomas’s fever has returned, makes a home within his joints; knuckles and knees tender with its ache. Down on the square, the market vendors are slowly packing up their wares, all but a dentist who remains at his stall, bent low over a lock-jawed patient, his tools a bucket and pliers scabby with old rust and paint. The tooth finally gives amongst an eruption of black savoured by both dentist and patient. Then blood is spat into the bucket and the dentist paid; the tooth thrown to a pack of passing dogs who fight over it with bristling furs.

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Half an hour later, Charlie’s angel reappears. It is very nearly dark. The man acts on Thomas like a magnet, drawing his anger, his confusion, his hope. He enters from the far side and walks the length of the market square. The last of the light catches him from the front and right, his shadow thrown behind and tilted at the top, where his chin dips to his shoulder. The longer Thomas watches him, the less he is certain that there is anything special about the man. He is as dirt- and Soot-stained as any other; more downtrodden than most. No halo illuminates his bluff and common features. Only: once again the man avoids all groups and conflagrations, walks solitary, never swayed by any cluster of people nor any cloud of drifting Smoke.

As the man draws nearer, Thomas makes a point of turning away, watching him only from the corner of his eyes. Livia, four steps to his side, has slumped into exhaustion; is listing sideways and forward, her head drooping to mirror the angel’s. At the bottom of the stairs, the man swerves and disappears into the alleyway by the side of the church. For a fraction of a moment Thomas hesitates, unwilling to rouse Livia, struck by the blankness of her resting features, the thinness of her sloping neck. Then he jumps over and taps her awake with a flick of his shoe.

“The angel’s back. Let’s follow him.”

She makes to rise then drops back onto the step. “You go. Someone has to be here. For Charlie.”

It strikes Thomas that Livia fears him more than she fears being left defenceless and alone.

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There is a second entrance to the church. Halfway down the alley a narrow staircase of some four or five steep steps climbs the church wall. At its top is a door so small one has to duck through. Thomas does not actually see the stranger go in. All he sees is the door close, four feet above the ground. A moment later he himself is pulling the crude handle. Inside, a deep gloom reigns, taking little heed of the cluster of candles that burns at one end of the nave. The church is in a dismal state. Its pews are gone, robbed for their wood perhaps, and the stone floor littered with mud and rubbish. A great wooden cross rises above the altar, plain unadorned lumber, painted white.

A figure is sitting on a little stool in a side chapel. The folding table next to him holds a candle, a jug, and a cup of wine. Thomas has stepped over to him before realising the figure is not the one he followed. The priest is a smaller man, weasel-faced, his hair a patch of stubble. He looks up at Thomas and fills a second cup. Thomas ignores the gesture that invites him to sit.

“I’m looking for the man who just came in here.”

It comes out gruff, commanding. He has no patience left, no interest in this stranger. The stranger, for his part, is looking closely at Thomas, as if measuring his intent. A pale face, his; Soot-rouged at the cheeks. Broken veins thread the nose.

“Is that so?”

“Where did he go? I want to talk to him.”

“Talk to me instead. That’s what I am here for.”

Thomas frowns at this, looks about himself, suspicious of the man’s collar, his jug of wine, the long smock of his office.

“Your church is a mess,” he says at length.

The priest shrugs. “What use does the Lord have for pretty windows?”

“And you are drunk.”

“It is a failing. But I am a kindly drunk, and it does not interfere with my faith.” He smiles. “How is it that it’s always laymen who are the biggest puritans? But sit, please, I beg you. Looking up at you is like talking to the bishop, when he’s in a mood.”

Thomas reluctantly lowers himself onto a stool.

“So you really are a priest?”

“Yes, my son.”

“And this church, it’s. . open? I mean, people come here?”

“Oh yes. Do they fill the pews on Sunday? No. No pews, for one thing. Do I celebrate mass in shining vestments? No. They were stolen, actually, some months ago. But they come. Largely for that.” He points to the wine jar, then a few steps beyond it, to the plain cupboard of the confessional. “Are you that way inclined?”

Thomas shakes his head. “No, I only came in to. . But I must go now, someone’s waiting outside.” He rises, keen now to get away from this priest. “I only came because I saw a man go in. An unusual man. He has a crick in his neck.”

“And what do you want with him, this unusual man?”

“Nothing. A friend saw him. Weeks ago. He saw him and decided he was an angel.” Thomas’s voice wavers between resentment and hope. “I suppose I just wanted to make sure that he was wrong.”

“An angel? What an odd idea. Wherever did he get it from?”

“The man does not smoke.”

“Ah! He’s a gentleman.”

“No. What my friend meant: the man does not smoke at all. It’s a trick, I think.”

“A trick?”

Thomas snorts, sudden anger in his breast. “You’re a churchman. I have been told you get issued sweets. A monthly ration, so you can lie to your congregation and pretend you are a decent man.”

The man smiles. It sits surprisingly well on his narrow, weasely face.

“Ah, sweets! Yes, the church sends me two every Christmas. Two! I don’t know by what method they assess the needs of every parish. I sell them for drink. A sin, though I have never smoked during the sale. Your angel is a fraud then, and you want to unmask him.”

“I don’t know what I want. He might be a spy. Someone pretending to be an ordinary citizen.”

It sounds stupid the moment it leaves his lips. The priest takes no heed.

“Yes, a fraud,” he mutters. “Or else, a miracle. You know what most people do with miracles? Shit on them. Burn them at the stake.” He looks up at Thomas again, a sober look, the narrow face dirty and shrewd. “Are you like that, my lad?”

Thomas shudders, light-headed with fever. Talking to this man feels dangerous and liberating all at once. It is the first time in months he has spoken to a stranger — an adult — and not immediately felt judged.

“My father killed a man,” he says hoarsely and is appalled at the note of pride. “I was told I’d end up doing the same.”

The priest drains his glass. “Ah. Well. In that case, let me talk to your angel. See whether he wants to be introduced.”

ф

They find him in the bell tower, cleaning the mildewed brass of the great bell.

“We ring it on holidays,” the priest explains as they labour up the narrow stairwell, “but it’s started to sound off-key. Constipated. It’s all the dirt clogging up the bell.

“He does odd jobs for me,” he carries on as they step onto a miniscule landing. “Grendel’s the name. Tobias Grendel. Gren, here’s a lad to meet you. Violent, he says. But I think he’s got a good enough soul. Anyway, I will leave you to it. Have a chat. Shout if you need refreshments. Cheerio.”

The priest’s steps retreat back down the stairwell. It leaves Thomas alone with the stranger. He finds himself at a loss for words.

The man called Grendel has continued working, rubbing the side of the great bell with a dirty cloth, all the while watching Thomas shyly, from behind lowered lids. The crick in his neck lends something abject to him. It forever condemns him to cower before his peers.

“What is it?” Grendel says after the silence has stretched to several seconds, his voice quiet and gentle, inflected with a slight, pleasant lilt. “Some sort of trouble?”

Thomas shakes his head, steps closer to him.

“You were there at the hanging,” he says at last, unsure where to start. “At the end of November. A woman was killed. The whole square was painted black.”

The man nods, a vague fear showing in his eyes.

“Yet you did not smoke.”

Thomas reaches out with his fingers, grabs hold of the man’s collar, turns it back, aware of his imposition, of the brutal rudeness of the act. The shirt is discoloured, Soot-stained, more black than white. But the inside is grey rather than black. All the shirt’s Soot clings to the fabric’s outside: city sin, absorbed from walls and air.

“Where do you get your sweets from?”

“Sweets,” the man repeats, shaking a little.

“Don’t play stupid now.”

“The priest gives them to me.”

“The priest told me he has two a year, and sells them for wine.”

“I found them,” the man cringes.

“Enough to keep you smokeless while a woman dangles from a rope?”

Thomas shakes his head, feels an emotion fill him that he fails to recognise. Something very close to fear. Awe perhaps: a vise around the heart. It releases some Smoke in him, an iodine plume that he does his best to spit in the stranger’s face. It drifts past his cheeks, flakes as Soot onto his shoulders and neck, and draws no change from his bluff and honest features.

ф

Livia finds them. The priest must have fetched her off her stoop. She is upset, angered, frightened by Thomas’s failure to return. But even so she does not step too close to him.

“Charlie didn’t come,” she hisses. “A beggar pestered me for money.” And then: “What are you doing to this man?”

As she says it, Thomas realises that his hand is still clutching the man’s collar. The fingers of his other hand are wet. He has just finished shoving them in the man’s mouth, hunting his cheeks for hidden objects.

“He does not smoke,” he says, shaken. He tries to explain it to Livia. A part of him wants to kneel before this man. Another is angry that he seems such a fool.

Livia listens to his account without moving a muscle. At last she says, speaking to the angel not Thomas, “You are afraid.”

Then she does something for which Thomas is unprepared. He did not suspect her capable of such grace; not here, not at this moment, her lips still jet-black with her Soot.

She steps past him and embraces the angel.

The man giggles nervously. And then he starts crying.

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He takes them home. Grendel. “Just like the monster,” he says. He says it happily because Livia is holding his hand.

It’s her doing, this hospitality of his. She has taken to him in a way Thomas cannot quite explain; has stepped into his presence as though into a shelter. One of the first things she has said to the man is: “I wish my father had met you. When he was younger.” And also: “He tried to be like you, just like you.”

But Grendel had only flapped his hands in agitated denial until she desisted and started talking about their journey here and how they are waiting for a friend.

“Charlie,” she explains. “You will like Charlie. Everybody does.”

Her eyes are on Thomas as she says it, showing the only sign of anguish that will pass through them all evening.

Grendel lives a half-hour’s walk away, close by the river. Dark has long fallen and the road is treacherous. They are beset by beggars and prostitutes, by lamplighters with smoking torches, asking for tuppence, offering to see them home.

As they draw closer to the angel’s neighbourhood, the city smells grow worse, offal and mud, the stale, rotten waters of the Thames. The house he leads them to has burnt and adds cold ash to the stink. It looks uninhabitable, but Grendel leads them through the gateway to a crooked, triangular courtyard, then beyond to a sagging building overhanging the riverbank. There are a whole series of low-beamed rooms, but two hold no glass in their windows, and one has a collapsed wall that is growing a thick layer of moss. For all that it is cosy enough, with a gaily painted kitchen table and an ancient stone hearth that Grendel immediately sets to lighting.

Before they have had a chance to throw off their awkwardness and begin a conversation, steps can be heard labouring up the staircase behind them. Grendel jumps to open the door, and in comes a woman in mud-smeared boots, carrying a bucket heavy with water so dirty it resembles mud. Her arms, too, are smeared with greenish-brown filth. She is a tall woman, so thin as to appear haggard, her fine bones framed by thinning grey hair. As she stares at them, unmoved by Grendel’s explanations, the bucket begins to boil, and dark claws break the surface, along with the spasmodic twitch of an armoured tail.

“What do you know,” says Thomas. “The angel has a wife. And she’s been fishing.”

She smiles at that, an unpractised, awkward, bashful smile, rinses a fistful of crayfish in a deep, lead-lined sink, and sets to cooking them for dinner.

That night, Grendel sits up with them and tells them he is sick.

ф

“It started when I was nine. I had smoked as an infant, though never very much. An easy child they called me, good-humoured and docile, perhaps a little dull. Then the Smoke ceased. I was sick, I remember, German measles, spots up and down my body and a terrible fever. When the sickness went, the Smoke went with it. I’ve never shown since.”

They are still sitting at the dinner table, each on a stool of a different height, their fingers vivid with the smell of crayfish. From time to time, Mrs. Grendel rises and busies herself at the stove, where she is boiling up the empty shells for stock. She is humming something, listening to her husband talk; contentment in the hum, but also worry about these strangers who have burst in upon her life. Grendel, for his part, speaks simply, trustingly, as eager to shed his story as a child is to slip out of its Sunday clothes. Thomas listens to him with the heightened intensity of fever. He sits far from Livia, out of her sight; has picked a fallen crayfish leg from off the floor, black and spindly, spikey at the joints; sits rolling it within his palm, digging its edges into his skin.

“Nobody really noticed it at first. I was placid before and was more placid after. It was my clothes that gave it away, my bed linen. No stains. Not by day and not by night, for weeks on end. But it was more than that. I didn’t fight anymore. Didn’t argue. I would watch my sisters do it, get into a proper scrap, clouds rising out of them like steam from a mangle, and feel left out. It was as though I was watching them walk on their hands, or speak a foreign tongue. As though sin were a knack, and I had lost it.

“Before long the whole village realised something was wrong. The children noticed it first. They started teasing me, trying to get me to lose my temper, get into trouble, smoke. But I couldn’t. It’s not that I didn’t try. I’d go to bed thinking about it, planning out some piece of mischief: how I would take a swing at someone, or steal Granny’s hat and feed it to the pigs. Sometimes I even went through with my plan, hit a boy over the head with a log, or ripped the sleeve on the blouse of an aunt. But my heart wasn’t in it. I did it like I did my chores. The Smoke never rose.

“By the time I was eleven, the children in the village had started avoiding me. The adults too. A rumour got around that I was sick somehow, gone funny in the head. My parents tried to quench it. I was just like a gentleman, they said, an angel, a proper little lord. The village should be proud. It calmed things down for a while, but the suspicion did not cease. I was different. Separate. Not part of the fabric of life. An angel, maybe. But who wants to go fishing with an angel?

“One day, they took me to the vicar. Our village was small and isolated; we had a church but no priest of our own. He came on Sunday mornings to read us our sermon, good and salty, as the villagers liked to say, to last us the week. A thickset man with a marvellous head of curly red hair.

“He examined me in the little shed at the back of the church that served as a sort of office. I have a memory of standing before him, stripped to the waist, and his counting up the moles on my chest. ‘Dost the devil live in thee?’ he asked. I told him I did not know. One of the moles, he told me, looked like a cloven hoof. A witch’s mark, a most evil omen.

“He wrote a report, they say, and even sent it to the bishop. There was no answer. Perhaps he decided against posting it in the end. The vicar was a simple man. He did not want to invite trouble.

“In any case, it got out, the thing about the mole. The whole village took against me then. It was said that I was cursed. The Wandering Jew they started calling me. Bearing the mark of Cain. I did not even know what a Jew was then, but I’d heard about Cain. I left the village the day I turned fourteen.

“I had learned no trade but found work at an inn, some twenty miles from home. Three weeks I lasted, then the innkeeper sent me on my way. ‘You are scaring away the customers,’ he said. ‘One cannot trust a man who does not sin.’ His wife packed me lunch and gave me a pair of socks in parting. When I walked out of their gate, I saw her cross herself against my curse.

“By the time I was twenty, I had learned that it was best to hide my condition. I kept to myself, moved from town to town every few months. The Wandering Jew. Condemned to be good. Though not good, not really. Lukewarm. There is a line in the Bible, in Revelation, about God spitting out the lukewarm. He loves the hot, the cold. I am not welcome at his hearth.”

He frowns, but then his wife is there, resting her hands on Grendel’s shoulders. Her eyes are on Thomas and Livia, daring them to add to her husband’s woes. But this is not the time to be bashful. Grendel is a miracle, or else a man with a crippled soul. It is important to understand which.

“So you don’t feel anything?” Thomas asks.

“Oh, I feel,” Grendel says quietly, mournfully, reaching up to brush his wife’s arm. “I feel sadness and irritation; feel grateful to have steady work and fearful every morning when I set out across the city; relieved when the day is over and my good wife welcomes me at home. But my heart does not boil with it, and I do not forget myself. It’s as though my blood runs thinner than other men’s.”

“Don’t you listen to him,” Mrs. Grendel interjects, her face flushed dark and a hint of a shadow darting from her nostrils. “He is the best man that’s ever lived.”

“I believe you,” Livia says into her anger. She is different now that they are with Grendel, hopeful and composed, the afternoon’s terror banished from her face. “If my father weren’t ill, he would make him famous up and down the land.”

It’s only Thomas who fails to chime in but simply sits there, twirling a crayfish leg, the stump of his ear itchy with fever and sweat.

FARMER

The boy comes to my door. A young man really, ginger fluff on his cheeks. You don’t see many of his colour. Deep copper red, with copper skin. Like a ginger Tartar, but prone to blushes, hale cheeks filling with a darker hue.

Somehow it isn’t a surprise to hear his accent. His clothes are dirty but there is something to his bearing. I’m no friend of toffs but you have to like the way they hold themselves. No slouching, shoulders squared, the eye resting comfortable on yours. And for a rich sod, he’s awfully polite.

“My name is Charlie,” he says. “I am heading to London. Might I beg some food and water?”

“Beg” he says, calling it what it is. A good clear gaze on him. Puts a man in a mind to regret he does not have a son.

“You can have water at any rate.”

I draw him a measure from my well. He drinks straight from the ladle.

“As for food,” I say, “I’ve got the rot.”

I show him to my storeroom, where my potatoes lie riddled with black; break one in half and show him the deep veining, clammy to the touch.

“You’re welcome to a plateful, if you can stomach them”—I point to the stove, where I am heating my lunch—“but they may do you more harm than good, not being used to such fare.”

He wavers, clutches the broken spud I have shoved in his fist, too tired to think. When I offer him a stool, he sinks down exhausted.

“Maybe I’ll try a bite.”

Once they are boiled, I fry the potatoes in some dripping. The smell that rises from the pan is frightful, even to me, but the hole in the boy’s stomach proves bigger than his disgust. I don’t offer him seconds. I don’t have enough to be generous, and it won’t do him any good once the food hits his guts. We each have a thimble of liquor afterwards. “Calms the brewing storm,” my Mary used to say. A better use for the potatoes perhaps.

“You are dead tired, son,” I say when he rises to leave. “I can offer you shelter. A place in the barn. You won’t make London tonight.”

“I can’t,” he answers, giving it thought. “I have friends ahead, waiting for me. They’ll be worried.” And then he adds, firmly, with a simplicity I did not know existed amongst the gentry: “You are a good man.”

“Ah,” I say, embarrassed, “I smoke as much as the next sinner. But the sun is out today, and my knee’s finally on the mend. Small blessings, eh, son?”

“Are you married?”

“Was,” I say, pointing to the row of crosses that mark my wife’s and daughters’ graves. “It’s a hard life.”

“A hard life,” he repeats like it is news to him, and weighty information. “Thank you for your kindness. Good-bye. Beware of dogs.”

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I chew on this all through the night—Beware of dogs—my stomach queasy with the rotten food. At dawn the second gentleman comes calling. He is a dark one, head to toe, fine clothes shiny with Soot, as though they have been lacquered by an enterprising tailor. A young one, too, not much older than the copperhead. His dog is an odd thing: red, drooping eyes in a dark, drooping face. A beaten cur, slavish and vicious. It steps close and smells me like I am a steak.

“I am looking for a young man who passed this way,” the dark one says to me. His face lacks colour underneath the Soot. It is pale and papery, as though it has been powdered with chalk.

“You wouldn’t have seen him? Well-born, dirty, reddish hair.”

The words are well-tuned, clear, emphatic. And yet there is something odd to his delivery, as though they are strange things, found at random in a pamphlet and performed.

“Mind,” he adds, “don’t lie to me. It will throw me in a rage.”

I hesitate, a breath, two breaths, before telling him that yes, a youth that answers his description called here the previous afternoon. He drank some water and was on his way.

“Heading where?”

“To London, I suppose.” I gesture to the road.

“He did not stay?”

“He did not want to.”

The dark youth nods, then bends forward and sniffs me. If his dog’s nose, wet on my leg, is an imposition, his own, dry against my cheek, is a violation. And yet I let him, do not move. No face has been this close to mine since I kissed my wife farewell.

“It’s a chore, tracking someone who doesn’t much smoke.” He shakes his head, moves his head back, takes me in. “You though! A cowardly sort. Twice the weight as I and yet you stand here like a post. And your Smoke”—he sniffs, sampling me, the pale green haze now rising from my breath—“is limp. Weak. Boring. A defeated man.”

I do not argue with him. Indeed it is true. I should have grabbed an axe handle and kicked him off my yard. But he scares me, this youth. No man’s ready for pain, not even I, my wife and daughters buried out the back.

He has one more request before he leaves. He explains it so calmly, so sanely, that I fail to understand him until he pushes me into my kitchen and fetches the knife. He does not threaten me, never says what will happen if I decline to do what he asks.

“But why?” I ask, already seated at the table, the knife shaking in my hand. My Smoke is all around us now, thin and pale as poor man’s gruel. “It makes no sense.”

He does not answer, sits there, watching; his dog flinching whenever he moves.

“Go on,” he says. “Here, let me fetch your liquor. For courage, what do you say?”

He himself drains the last of the bottle.

“Do it. I haven’t got all day.”

All the time watching me, a mouse in a trap, tugging weakly at its stuck and broken limb.

“Go on!”

The voice lighter now, impatient and gleeful; his hand raised and stroking the air before his chin as though searching it for something no longer there, a beard, a mask, a second face.

“Go on!”

ф

I do in the end; take measure and chop. A man can live without a finger. He discards it in the bushes not five steps from my gateposts, a child already weary of its toy; his dog following, whimpering, as angry and lost as I. By the time the wound stops bleeding they are both long out of sight.

Somewhere ahead of him, the boy with the copper hair will be walking. I want to wish him well. But the dark gentleman hurt me, wounded something that goes beyond the flesh. My hand looks like it might infect. So I sit there, boiling potatoes, and curse all those who are gentle-born.

BONE MUSIC

They stay the night with Grendel. Livia is glad when he asks them to, and smiles when he shows her around proudly, leading her from room to room, a tallow candle in his hand, dripping wax on the stone flooring.

“Please,” Grendel says for the umpteenth time when they return to the kitchen where Thomas has not moved from his stool. “You must.” It is as though it is he who is the supplicant and they the ones owning warmth and shelter.

For a while Livia is afraid that Thomas will decline the offer; that she will be thrust again into his company without the protection offered by a witness. But there is after all no choice. Thomas is weak, the night cold and alive with the shouts of strangers. For her own part, Livia is free of fear as she lies down on a wooden pallet and passes over into sleep. She trusts Grendel. She has known him for four hours, and she trusts him as much as any man or woman she has ever known. It is more than a feeling; it is a matter of fact. Grendel does not, cannot smoke. There is no malice in his heart.

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When Livia rises the next morning, she finds Thomas still in the room assigned to him, curled into a blanket and radiating a clammy heat. He has not even taken off his boots. Livia watches Thomas, for longer perhaps than is decent, then accepts Grendel’s invitation to walk with him to the church. It is early, dawn not quite broken, the streets near-empty and free of Smoke. In the quiet, Livia notices how run-down the city is, how badly in need of repair. There is hardly a building untouched by decay. Walls have caved, window frames fallen, ceilings and floors collapsed; holes stoppered with rags, paper, rubbish. And yet every house seems teeming with life, each cellar hole vivid with the movement of bodies, clothed and not. Through the broken windows and doorless doorways a hundred lives stand open to perusal. A woman stripped to the waist, feeding her newborn. A gaggle of boys ringing a chamber pot, relieving themselves with the unselfconsciousness of a litter. An old man in heavy boots picking his way through the dozen sleepers, leaving between them a trail of dark mud. Grendel notices Livia’s staring and the ensuing blush.

“Too many people,” he explains. “Living on top of one another. And everyone’s always hungry. It darkens their Smoke.”

“Don’t they have work?”

“Why yes. Factory work, most of them. But the factory doesn’t pay for housing.”

“Then why don’t they leave this filth? Move into the country?”

Grendel’s voice is gentle when he answers as though he’s afraid that his words will embarrass Livia with her ignorance. It deepens her blush.

“It’s difficult, you see. When they go to a parish, looking dirty and hungry and full of sin, they get ‘pushed on.’ Concerned neighbours, rounding them up at dawn and marching them to the parish border.” Grendel grimaces as one familiar with the experience. “Of course there’s no law against going where you wish. But you can’t live without work. And there’s no work for strangers.”

Livia muses on this. “Then it’s the factories’ fault,” she concludes. “They should provide housing for the workers. Spread them out across the land. Who owns them?”

“Who owns the factories?” Grendel’s face is free of accusation. “People like your parents, I suppose. The gentry. But look, here’s our church. I better get going on that bell.”

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Charlie does not come, not at dawn, nor at noon, nor yet at dusk, when she waits for him on the steps of the church until London has sunk into darkness and people bar their houses against the night. Grendel walks home with her, the streets full now and misty with Smoke. Back in his room, Thomas lies as she has left him. Mrs. Grendel tells Livia he woke long enough to struggle into his coat and insist on heading out to meet Charlie. When she assured him that Livia and her husband were fetching Charlie even as they spoke, he collapsed back on his blankets and fell asleep at once.

“Let him rest,” Mrs. Grendel says. “He is healing. Gathering strength. It’s the last stage of illness. Two more days and he’ll be right as rain.” She speaks as one familiar with the sick. At their feet Thomas lies like a dead thing, rancid in his sweat.

Livia draws up a stool and sits with him. It is, she tells herself, an act of duty, towards Charlie as much as Thomas. And yet there is more to her gaze as she studies his curled-up form, the bold lines of his face, the blue-black mark that crawls out of the crater of his wound and insinuates itself into his cheek. She sits, feet planted a yard from his chest, the room still around her, cooking smells drifting from the kitchen. Sits, half-conscious of a question. Her hands in little fists. When she shifts, minutely, her back is stiff with tension.

The silence weighs on her, is like a blockage in her thoughts. She needs to speak to learn what she is thinking; finds comfort in the fact that he cannot hear.

“Charlie did not come today,” she says, so quietly it sounds only within her, the words a movement of her jaw. “I’m worried about him.”

She crosses her legs, uncrosses them, disconcerted by the warmth of thigh on thigh.

“And yet I was scared of his coming. Isn’t that strange?”

Scared, she thinks now, because he will bring something. The memory of the mine. The taste of his skin: two tongues at odds, sparring, breaching the guard of the other’s lips. They shook hands when they last parted.

“But I was scared of something else too. Scared that he would know.”

She holds her breath, listens to Thomas’s breath, deep if uneven, the hint of a whistle marbling each exhalation.

“Something happened, did it not, Thomas? Between us? Yesterday. In the muck of that street.”

As she says it, she knows it is true. Something did happen — not just in the alley where she lay beneath that stranger’s grope but before, on the road, at the creek, perhaps, while she was cold and wet, off guard, or later, in the night shelter of a chapel doorway, when he breathed his warmth into the nape of her neck.

Thomas noticed her.

It was an accident, unsought, irreversible. Livia has watched him struggling against it ever since, cheeks bunched, fingers picking at the scab that runs past his temple, resting his eyes on her only in moments of distraction, dark, unflinching eyes, taking her in. When his Smoke rises, as in London it must, she is there amongst its flavours, dissolved in fear and want and spite. He cannot spit, it seems, without her presence being written in the bile.

She frowns, lingers over the thought, shies at the threshold of another. For there is more to it yet. Thomas has noticed her.

She has noticed him too.

It is odd that this truth should come with so much anger.

“I am in love with Charlie,” she whispers, defiantly, and watches a skein of Smoke crawl out of Thomas’s sleeping form and hover above him like a second blanket. A boy with a dirty soul. He will spoil your dress if you step too close.

But Livia is no longer wearing dresses.

She slips off the stool, slides onto her knees, the miner’s trousers so dirty that they cushion the knees like felt patches. Thomas is a foot away, is hateful to her, a trial to which she must submit. She leans forward, stretches her neck, seeking to understand him and, in understanding, dismiss him; purge him from her thoughts. She slurps his Smoke like soup. Inhales him, tastes him, and learns nothing she did not already know. This is he: anger and strength. It’s her own Smoke that shocks her. It leaps unbidden, a little pink plume that forms a whirlpool in front of her breath, then spirals up, towards the ceiling. It’s like picking up your diary and finding you wrote a name in it over and over while you were not looking. Thomas’s name; thick and ragged, like she was punishing the quill. She recoils, jumps to her feet, disperses her Smoke with dismayed hands.

“Dinner, my dear,” Grendel’s voice calls from the kitchen. “Try to wake your friend. It’ll do him good.”

ф

They eat in anger. When Thomas learns that Charlie did not come at the appointed hour — and that Livia neglected to wake him — his mood sours and soon colours the mash he is shovelling into his mouth. Livia, too, tastes Smoke with each spoonful, though she does not visibly show. Between them, Grendel sits, unperturbed, imperturbable, a crooked-necked Jesus at supper, sharing out their meagre loaf of bread.

“You woke with an appetite!” he keeps praising Thomas. “Tomorrow you will be strong enough to meet your friend yourself.”

Despite these words, Thomas is visibly worn out by the time the last spoonful has passed his mouth and has soon retreated back to the blanket in his room. Mrs. Grendel too is soon to retire. It leaves Livia alone with Grendel. She is glad for it. She is in need of distraction, of hope. Grendel, she knows, will offer her both.

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They talk without strain, sitting at the kitchen table, tea in the pot. It’s Livia who picks the topic; something safe, simple, far from her fears.

“How about that name?” she asks. “It must have been a burden.”

Grendel answers plainly, directly, the way he told his story; unworried by truth.

“Not at all,” he says. “Growing up, you see, I simply never realised. Not until much later, here in London, when I heard someone sing the song. Have you heard it? Apparently it is very old. There are many versions. But in each of them there is a monster. Grendel. ‘It filled the great hall with its Smoke / And tore the men / Gristle from bone.’” He snarls playfully; smiles. “I doubt my father ever gave it a second thought; nor Granddad. Perhaps though, ten generations back, there was a monster in the family. Or perhaps”—his smile fades, and a frown grows into his forehead, more of wonder than of grief—“the name is like a seed, planted in my bloodline a thousand years ago, waiting to sprout in the one for whom it was intended.”

Livia reaches over and lays her hand in his. How simple, how natural it is to touch him.

“What sort of villain are you? Do you steal away at night to feast on swordsmen in their sleep?”

“What is an angel,” he answers, “if not a monster of some kind?” But he giggles as he says it and seems almost happy. “What about ‘Livia’ though? It’s a beautiful name but I’ve never heard it before.”

“A family name. It was my grandmother’s.”

Grendel nods and smiles and holds Livia’s hand.

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That same evening she tells Grendel how her father went mad. She shouldn’t, of course, it is a family secret, all their servants are sworn to it and only two of them are trusted to tend to his needs. But she wants Grendel to know about him. Perhaps they can visit him some day, stand by his bedside and hold his hands. Grendel is the miracle Father prayed for all his life.

“He wanted to be like you,” she says. “Sinless. Pure. But he wasn’t. When I was a child, I remember, he had a quick temper. I found him once, shouting at a stable boy, Smoke coming out his ears. Two mighty plumes, thick as candy floss.”

She cannot help laughing. It is a happy memory, despite the sin.

“And then he conquered his Smoke. Conquered it completely, for more than two years. We were all in awe of him: the servants, Mother, and I above all. He was like a holy man. Only he grew very thin. And then he started talking to himself. Little things, not always in English. When I returned home after the next school term, he was chained to his bed.

“I’ll tell you another secret: for the past year and more, I’ve wanted to be like him. Like he was, before he went mad. Holy.” She surprises herself by being able to laugh. “But Charlie thinks I have no talent for it.”

“Tell me about Charlie.”

“Charlie is the one we are waiting for. Thomas’s friend.” She feels herself blushing. “My friend, too.”

Soon thereafter, they each retire to bed.

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Thomas is up early the next day. His sickness has left him at last. Now he stands, itching for action. He is that hateful word found in cheap novels. Virility. It’s in his every stride and glower. No other word will do.

And yet he cannot meet her eye.

“I’m off,” he announces after breakfast and does not wait to see whether she will follow. His impatience only increases once — five steps apart, him rushing, her chasing — they reach the foot of the church. Dawn is breaking; a smear of colours in the fog.

There is no Charlie.

“Something has happened to him.”

“You don’t know that,” Livia replies, though she, too, is bowed by the same thought. Charlie is alone: detained in Oxford, or lost on the road to London; in a train compartment, on the back of a wagon, lying wounded in a ditch. They were shot upon before. When Livia closes her eyes she can hear the screaming of the horses dragging her mother’s coach over the precipice.

Charlie does not arrive at noon. She does not need to wait for Thomas to tell her what he is thinking. He wants to go find Charlie; trace him all the way to Oxford if need be. She can feel it in her pores, on the hairs of her arms. And yet, Thomas is not smoking. There must exist, then, another type of Smoke: invisible, clinging to them as surely as their shadows. The breath of their needs and worries; the truths each must assert and impose upon all others. The potentiality of sin. If so, they are all in each other’s mouths every time they speak. How dangerous then proximity, those hours and days spent shoulder to shoulder until the other’s being begins to grow into one’s own and sows its hunger in one’s furrows. How blissful, conversely, solitude, and how miraculous Grendel’s isolation. Of all the men and women in London, he alone is an island, unadulterated, himself.

“You go,” she says as much to release Thomas as to be rid of him. “See whether you can find him. I will wait.”

“It isn’t safe for you here,” he barks back, protective, resentful.

“There’s Grendel. And the priest. I will be all right.”

He thinks, nods, hesitates over how to say good-bye, then simply turns and strides off.

“I shan’t be long.”

Thomas walks as though he is leaning into wind.

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It’s well past dinner by the time Thomas returns. When Grendel dons his coat and goes to look for him out on the street, Mrs. Grendel turns from where she stands scrubbing dishes.

“Boys, eh? Hard to keep track of them. Always running off on some adventure.”

Livia cannot tell whether she is taunting her or trying to soothe her worries. Mrs. Grendel’s face does not take easily to emotion, and her interactions with Livia have been guarded and stiff.

“Here he is now.” Grendel returns, a grim-looking Thomas in tow. “Let’s find you some food, my lad. You must be starving.”

Thomas accounts for his day over a bowl of cold fish stew, eating with a crudeness, Livia notes, which speaks of a childhood running wild.

“I took the main road west. Asking whoever I could for news. A red-headed youth in dirty clothes. Well-spoken; good boots. I thought maybe somebody had met him up the road.” He grimaces, slurps stew, picks fish bones from pursed lips.

“I walked for miles out of town and talked to dozens of people. But nothing: no sign of Charlie, no word. Then I met a tinker hailing from Oxford and he told me about rumours concerning the school. He said that one of the schoolmasters had been attacked by a gang of robbers. ‘They fed him to their dogs,’ he said. ‘Can you believe it? They literally ate him up, crown to sole.’” Thomas shakes his head as though wishing to rid himself of the image. “The tinker also told me that someone came and rescued the schoolmaster’s daughter. ‘A ginger knight dressed as a beggar,’ he said. ‘Whisked the girl to safety right under the robbers’ noses. But listen to this: what the lad didn’t realise, not until he’d got her to safety, was that the schoolmaster had done surgery on her. On his own daughter! Turned her into half machine. I swear by all the popish saints.’”

Thomas pauses, pulls a face.

“But that’s nonsense. Gibberish.”

“Gibberish, Livia? I suppose so. I also met a man who told me there was a devil on the loose on the London road. A devil with a necklace made of human fingers.” Thomas stabs his spoon at the last morsel of fish. “That ‘ginger knight’ of the tinker’s story, though, that must be Charlie. And if so, something happened at Renfrew’s, something bad. And now he is lost, in between Oxford and here.”

“So what do we do? Charlie could be anywhere. And Mother’s delivery is tomorrow night.”

“We should never have split up.” Thomas curses, rises, his face flushing dark with more than blood. “What can we do? We wait.

“If Charlie’s hurt,” he adds, storming out, “I will make them pay. Your mother. The school. Everyone.”

But even here there is to the train of Smoke he leaves behind something other than his anger, something guilty, whispering her name.

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Livia sits up late, talking to Grendel. It’s that or going to bed. Worrying about Charlie. Listening to Thomas shift on the blankets in his room. It is the first night since leaving her father’s house that she wishes she had never met the two boys.

So she sits and asks questions. About Grendel’s youth. About London. About his work at the church. Then she asks Grendel about his neck. It is the only thing that’s twisted about him. One side of his throat appears shorter than the other. It bears the puckered line of a scar.

“How did this happen?”

“I did it myself. I was sitting shaving one morning. The razor in my hand. You know that sound it makes when it scrapes off the bristle. I heard it and felt lonely. Not just lonely. Alone in the world. A creature all to itself. So I thought to myself, why not end it? Or rather my hands thought it. It’s like they had reasoned it out.” He shrugs, lopsided. “I cut the muscle, largely. Missed the artery. The surgeon patched me up, only he was drunk and botched it, or so another surgeon told me when he had a look at his work. All the same, he saved my life. My wife, you see, she was the surgeon’s daughter. She looked after me while I was lying sick.” His eyes grow warm. “She figured out what I was, and she cared for me all the same.”

Livia sits still, trying to square this account with the woman whose house she has been sharing. Her life is not an easy one. She trawls the river mud each day, picks shellfish, mussels, rags, and bone, then trades her findings against meat and money at the market; a cudgel dangling from her belt to ward off rivals. Mrs. Grendel stood washing kidneys that evening, preparing them for the morrow, complaining about their price. “Two extra mouths,” she kept saying, “it is a strain on the purse.” All the while looking at Livia; the tang of urine rising from the sink.

What Livia says to Grendel is: “You must love her very much.”

He heaves a sigh. “I do. But I love her with my head. There are moments in married life when it is important that one love with other parts. That one forgets oneself and smokes.”

He stops abruptly, in doubt whether Livia is too young for such truths, and too nobly born.

“Passion,” she whispers, not looking at his face. “You are talking about passion.”

He hesitates before he nods. “I have seen it in others. It’s a kind of greed.”

“You are saying you can’t — in married life, I mean. And of course you have no children.”

He smiles shyly, looks about himself, furtive with the weight of his insight. “Oh, I can, I can. But not with that greed. It makes a difference to one’s wife.”

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It is a small step from there, in conversational terms, and yet Livia is flustered by it, feels primness return to her bearing, bland modesty to her face. All Grendel does is point into the depths of the flat.

“Is that one your sweetheart then?”

“No.”

He seems surprised by her denial.

“You like him though.”

“He’s a bully and a brute.”

He weighs her words, his gentle face grown gentler yet, speaking to her as though to a child.

“Then there is someone else. This Charlie, perhaps?”

Livia chews on this, not looking at him, struggling to turn away the lies that rise to her tongue.

“You can’t like two people,” she says at last and flinches at the fear in her voice. “Not like that.”

“Can’t you, Livia? I wouldn’t know.”

He gets up, his knees creaking, finds a bottle of port, almost empty, and pours them each a finger’s depth of wine.

ф

They sit and drink. Her mind has become stuck on the earlier word. “Passion.” Lust, really, if one looks it in the eye. There is something so illicit to the word, Livia finds it hard to let it go. Grendel’s questions have unsettled her. There is, on her lips, that strange tingling that presages Smoke. She is literally a breath away from sinning.

It makes her look at Grendel in renewed awe.

“So you really never feel it?” she asks him. “Not even a hint? That moment just before the Smoke takes hold of you? Like a drug injected into your blood?”

He starts shaking his head, stops.

“Well, perhaps. There are times, you know, quite ordinary moments, when I stumble on the stairs in the belfry, say, and I bump my head, or the neighbourhood children pelt me with garbage for sport, when I think there’s something. Just a hint, see, a buzzing in the skin.” He smiles and blushes, with pleasure. Then his smile wilts. “But of course, I cannot be sure.”

“And you would like to smoke so very much? Even though it’s evil?”

He nods, thoughtfully. “It isn’t evil. It’s human. I’d give everything. For just an hour in the Smoke.”

“Then I have something for you.”

On impulse, before her better judgement can intervene, Livia reaches into her pocket. Collier’s trousers, too large for her, her hand disappearing past its wrist. Three twigs, bent and brittle. She picks one at random and straightens it between her palms.

“Here, Grendel. Smell it.”

“What is it?”

“Sin. Packaged sin. You only have to light it. Who knows, it might just work.”

He nods, dumbfounded, then gets up to search the kitchen for matches. His fingers fail him when he tries to strike a match. Livia can see that he is shaking. She takes the box from his hand and lights the cigarette for him. His inhalation brings a blood-red glow to its tip. He holds the smoke down for as long as he can. The exhalation is a stream of grey, unspent; it curls around Livia’s face and calls to her skin. Her own Smoke is there before she knows it, white like steam. It fills her with something, light and seductive, the feeling a gambler might have the moment he turns over the cards.

“Do you feel it, Grendel?”

A shy smile creeps over his face.

“I do feel a little wicked. Do I look it?”

“Oh, very much.” Emboldened, her skin steaming, Livia proffers the curve of her cheek. “Do you want to kiss me? Go on. Your wife will never know.”

He does, quickly, shyly like a child.

“Oh, you rake!”

Through the open doorway they can hear Thomas groan in his sleep.

“It’ll be our secret,” Livia says, pulling her legs up onto the stool while Grendel continues sucking on the cigarette, staring out the crooked little kitchen window, and not a wisp of Smoke jumps from the pallor of his skin.

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Later that night, Livia goes and stands over Thomas’s sleeping body. He is agitated in his sleep, has kicked off the blanket, his rib cage rising and falling underneath his linen shirt.

“I picked up your cigarettes,” she confesses to him, a rustle in the silence of the room, “because I thought there might come a moment when I’d like to sin. I was thinking of Charlie. I was not sure I would know how to touch him, out in the light.”

She lights a second cigarette, crouches down next to him, studies the stain of coal that mars his skin, the stump of ear sticking out of his shorn patch of hair like a mouldy potato.

“Lizzy said it, down in the mine,” she whispers. “You will always be ugly.”

And then, just to try it, the cigarette curling in the corner of her mouth, she lies down next to Thomas and presses her cheek into his shoulder, and thinks of the doorway where he held her and warmed her with his shivering chest.

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He wakes long after the cigarette is spent. She herself must have fallen asleep, for he has turned and is facing her now, his eyes aglitter in the dark. Livia finds that she is crying.

“I hate you. I hate everything you stand for. I hate what I find of you in myself.”

He is unmoved by her words, knows it all already, has read it in her Smoke.

“Hold me,” he says and she does, cheek flush with cheek, and the stump of his ear level with her mouth.

In the morning they roll apart without words and get ready to meet Charlie.

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It is their fourth morning in London. The twelfth of January, the day of her mother’s delivery. A day wet and raw. Charlie does not come. They stand on the market square morning to dusk, stamping their feet, cold, guilty, calling his name.

“The Tobacco Dock at midnight,” Livia says when she can no longer bear their silence. “Charlie knows we will go. He might meet us there.”

Thomas does not answer. He flinches when she reaches for his arm.

What frightens her most is just how easy it is to picture Charlie dead.

SAILOR

He hires us in La Rochelle. A whole ship’s crew, right off the deck of our previous berth, the Lorelei, which is going into dry dock for repairs. Captain van Huysmans: a Dutchman of good repute. He comes personally, a fisherman rows him over; shakes hands with our own captain then explains his terms. There isn’t much to it, a Channel crossing, there and back. Good money for a few days’ work. There’s only one condition: no landfall for us, we are to transfer straight onto the Haarlem. The men mutter, more than half of them decline. After weeks at sea we are all weary, longing for a bath, a drink, a woman, and it seems churlish somehow, secretive, to whisk us away within sight of the harbour. Those of us who agree transfer to the Haarlem in dinghies that very night. Herring rise all around us, feeding in the light of the three-quarter moon.

The Haarlem is a big steamer, built for the open ocean and its generous swell. The icy, crabby water of the Channel seems to suit it less. She lies twitchy in the waters. At dawn we run into a freezing mist and slow to a crawl. We can’t see a thing. The hands squat in corners, play cards and dice, then quickly put the games away when the captain draws near.

He is everywhere. If I was captain with a nice, cozy cabin, I would stay there the whole journey. Lie in bed in my fancy uniform and holler for the cabin boy to fetch more food. Not so Captain van Huysmans. All night, he has haunted the deck. Going by his complexion, he must have spent time in the tropics: the pallor of freshly peeled skin, still sunburnt in the hairline. No doubt his arse is lily-white.

An odd duck, our captain. Restless, prone to nightmares when he sleeps. Fond of music, it would seem, of singing, but in some strange sour-toned manner that is hard to credit as joy. A well-behaved man, fastidious even. Most captains have one sort of manner when they deal with shipowners and quite another once they are at sea: a swear word here, a gust of Smoke there, a dirty joke. Not so van Huysmans. Stiff as a plank. A chubby man, but his heart is starched.

I complain to the cabin boy about it. Poppy. God knows how he came by the name. Poppy is a fellow of fourteen; this is his third voyage. A wide-eyed sort. The whole world is new to him. Looks up to all the sailors. I am a hero to him because at the age of forty-three I have managed to be promoted to the dizzying height of first mate.

“Our captain wants to be a gentleman,” I say to Poppy, watching van Huysmans mince around the deck.

“A gentleman!” Poppy replies enthusiastically, not catching my tone. “Imagine it! Clean sheets, nobody cussing you out or even raising their voices. No pushing and shoving. A soft world.”

I snort. “Always thinking before you speak. Inspecting your bedding in the morning. Keeping your farts in, lest they trigger something. A life lived with your arsehole clamped. Never letting rip.”

But the boy is adamant, forgets for a moment that I am his senior and prophet, his shipside god.

“What’s so great about coarseness and dirt?” he asks.

And when I don’t answer (for he’s hit upon a point, I suppose) he adds, angry now, wet in his eye: “They’ll go to heaven, sir. And you and I shan’t.”

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The first set of customs officials boards us two full leagues off the coast. His Majesty’s servants! And how thorough they are, how prim, fine gentlemen in worsted suits. Always in twos, watching each other’s virtue like hawks. They must submit reports, it is said, about each other’s behaviour. And all the same I would bet my pecker they are just as bent as that one-eyed thief that runs the port at La Rochelle. This is Britain, though. Here crookery has had a haircut, and its shirt cuffs are freshly ironed.

There are four checks in total. Each time the cargo is examined and reexamined. Seals are applied, paperwork lodged, fees paid. Each time our captain fawns and twitters; attempts small talk; offers drinks and is rebuffed. All captains are like this when it comes to customs.

But our captain is dripping with sweat.

“What are we smuggling then?” I ask when yet another pair has left the ship and we are steaming down the mouth of the Thames.

Captain van Huysmans starts.

“A joke, Captain, a joke. What’s our cargo? Spices? Flowers? Opium?”

He shakes his head, dries his forehead on a handkerchief.

“Machine parts.”

I whistle. “Special permits?”

“Of course.” Then he blanches, as though in aftershock to my comments, cocks his head like he’s heard the rumble of an approaching storm.

“If you will excuse me.”

And I swear he starts singing, shrilly and out of tune, hurrying to his cabin and trailing his handkerchief like a little white flag.

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In good weather, you can see London all the way from the mouth of the Thames. Not a plume, exactly, more like a dark mist. Some of it is the factory chimneys, though the mist is darkest near the ground. Poppy stands next to me at the railing, staring at the mist ahead. I can see him make the sign of the cross.

He blushes when I laugh.

“Is it like they say it is?” he asks me shyly. “Gomorrah? A den of thieves?”

“It’s a city. The biggest in Europe.”

“But the Smoke.”

“It’s where the sinners live. The workers, the paupers. Good people live in the country. Bad people there.

“It’s like everywhere else,” I add a little later. “Only more so.”

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We head for the Tobacco Dock. There are cheers when the captain announces that the men are to take the night off. Even the cabin boy looks happy at the news. He is afraid of this Gomorrah, this den of thieves. But he wants to explore it too. I look forward to showing him around, talking some of his fear out of him, showing him that people are people, even here, when the captain takes me aside.

“Stay. I have special orders for you,” he announces quietly.

We haggle over it for the better part of an hour. Then the sum he names gets so large I begin to worry he will withdraw the offer. I am pleased, of course, but also afraid.

What grave felony must the man be up to if he is willing to pay a dozen gulden just for my standing around?

DELIVERY

Do you think it’s midnight yet?”

“How would I know? I haven’t seen a single working clock in the entire city.” Thomas adds, thoughtfully: “They’ll have the time on the ship though, and nobody’s stirred.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“This is a steamer, built for the open sea. They need a clock to take readings. Otherwise it’d be impossible to navigate. And there is no way on and off other than that plank.”

“You know about boats.”

“Ships. I grew up near the sea. Hush now, the watchman is coming back.”

They fall silent and watch the man approach. His movements are easy to follow, even at a distance. He has lit a pipe and with every puff the tobacco glows red in the darkness of the dock and reveals a fragment of his face, deep-lined, whiskered, a clean-shaven chin. He passes half a dozen steps from them, then turns and leaves behind the sweet smell of burnt vanilla. At his turn his heels squeak on the cobbles.

Rubber soles, thinks Thomas. He is from the ship.

At the far side of his round, the man stops, his pipe momentarily obscured by the back of his head. A moment later a sound can be heard, water hitting water. The dock lies so still that the noise travels through the dark. Then, his bladder empty, the man starts humming past the stem of his pipe. The melody that reaches them is unknown to Thomas; is lovelorn and sweet. After the second chorus, the man breaks off and resumes his round. The pool next to him lies flat, black, glassy: an absence of space, too Soot-soaked to reflect the occasional fragment of moonlight peeking through the clouds.

There are three such pools, rectangular in shape and connected to the Thames by deep, iron-gated locks. All three are gigantic. The largest might fit a score of cricket fields. The Tobacco Dock holds the smallest of the three basins, though it is still large enough to berth an East India steamer. All around the basin’s rim rises a city of warehouses, of workshops, cranes, ship parts, barrels, and bollards. It is a landscape built for machines, towering husks of metal, sweating rust. A propeller stands by the side of the dock, each blade bigger than a man and twisting around itself like a broken-necked shovel. If machines had religion, this should be their cross. It is not hard to imagine a creature nailed onto its blades.

On all sides the quay is secured by a high brick wall. There is only one gate. Approaching it — passing through the crowded piers of the Western Dock just as work was winding down, then hiding behind a row of barrels until all the stevedores were gone — Thomas and Livia had found its doors unlocked, the guard booths empty, their entry witnessed only by the hinges’ squeak. Thomas suspects that this is more than an oversight. The Western Dock does not admit foreign ships and security is light. But at the Tobacco Dock foreign custom is expected. Signs warn of trespass, and dense loops of a peculiarly spiky wire crown all the walls. Nonetheless the whole site stands abandoned, as though waiting for thieves. Someone has been paid off, the guards sent home, the dog kennels emptied for the night. All that remains is this one lone watchman. A careless fellow: thanks to the pipe, they spotted him as soon as they had passed through the gate. They have been playing hide-and-seek ever since.

It had been easy to identify the Haarlem. While the two other vessels tied up at the short end of the dock are little more than river barges, the ship by whose side they are cowering must be a hundred and fifty feet stern to prow. It reeks of the open sea. There are no waves in the basin but there must be a current of some sort, down deep. Periodically the ship will either tug at the ropes that secure it to the pier or lean on the padded barrels that ride between its flank and the wall: two types of groan, one taut and creaking, the other a patient grinding. They give texture to the night.

Close up to its side, it is hard to make out the ship’s details: a confusion of masts and chimneys; the angular contours of an iron hull, sitting low in the water. They made their way there running from cover to cover, the dock a plane of overlapping shadows, deep as wells; then hid by a cluster of crates stacked man-high on the quay. The edge of the basin is five feet from their hiding place, the hull another three feet beyond. Above their heads droops a flag it is too dark to identify. Beneath, the water is viscous with the oily weight of undissolved Soot.

The watchman finishes another round. When he turns, Livia rises from her crouch and stretches. The night is raw and the wait has invited the cold into their limbs.

“Is it possible they’ve unloaded it already?” she whispers. “It could be sitting right here, stacked on the quay.”

Thomas has asked himself the same question.

“Can’t be,” he decides at last. “If it is really all that valuable there would be a cordon of guards standing right next to it. Something else — have you noticed there isn’t any crew? The captain must have sent them all ashore. Apart from that one, unless that’s the captain himself. Whatever your mother is buying, it’s so secret even the sailors mustn’t know.”

Livia appears to consider this. It is so dark he cannot even guess at her features. And yet he would know her, just by the pattern of her breath.

“Tell me again what we know about this delivery.”

Thomas shrugs. “I never even saw the ledger. Charlie read it. Midnight, the twelfth of January. The Haarlem out of La Rochelle, under a Captain van Huysmans. ‘Collect in person and arrange for transport.’ Whatever it is, it cost a fortune. Your mother must have wagered her entire estate.”

“So she will come.”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. Depends what it is, I suppose. All we can do is wait.”

But as the minutes creep by, measured only by the watchman’s regular steps, waiting becomes more and more impossible. The cold is everywhere now, has crept through the ground and the soles of his shoes, up the inside of his thighs, and from there into his chest and back, his skin so goose-bumped it shies from contact with his clothes. Then, too, doubt has begun to tug at Thomas: that Lady Naylor won’t come after all or that they have the wrong ship; that a bargain is being struck right now, deep in the hold, and a rowing boat will paddle all answers away across the stillness of the inky pool.

He speaks only after he has made his decision. Anything else would be a waste of words.

“I’ll go the next time he turns away,” he says. “See, when he passes the hut over there. You wait here and observe.”

Immediately she reaches over to detain him. Her hand on his arm. How normal it seems today for her to touch him. The thought makes him angry.

He shakes himself loose.

“Where are you going?” she hisses, too loud for the silence of the dock, though the guard does not appear to hear.

“Aboard. See what I can find out.”

She does something with her head, forgetting that he cannot see her, not here in the shadows of the cargo. A shake, a frown? That little gesture she makes sometimes — the lower lip pushed forward, a shrug of the chin, moving right to left, her eyes narrowing to almonds, tan and hard? Perhaps she is worried for him. But her objection is reasoned, matter-of-fact.

“You don’t even know what you are looking for.”

“I do. ‘Arrange for transport.’ That means it’s big. And at the same time squirreled away someplace where it didn’t attract notice. Not from the sailors and not from customs.” He touches one of the wax seals that marks the boxes they are hiding behind. “I will know it when I see it.”

He withdraws his attention from her, counts the steps of the sailor. Not the captain, he has decided. It’s too cold for that, too mindless a task, the man too bored, too unconcerned with his duty. A mate, a trusted man, or one too well-paid to simply skip out. Trailing the smell of burnt vanilla. One hundred and three steps for a full round. Nineteen while he is behind the customs booth, if that’s what it is: hidden from sight. Nineteen leisurely steps. Thomas can reach the gangway in eight, cross it in three. All he will need to do is crouch behind the railing. A darkness melting into darkness. Theirs is a world of infinite depth.

He times it well and starts moving the moment the man disappears behind the booth. Halfway there he realises that his steps have an echo. He almost turns to shout at her, then reaches back and grabs her wrist. The plank has a spongy feel, creaks and vibrates underfoot. Passing this close, the hull comes into relief: rivets like pockmarks, adorned with barnacles, seaweed, rust. A tangy smell, thick in his mouth, not unlike blood.

They hit the floor as soon as they are across. Ice-cold iron against his cheek. The plank is still moving, a regular quiver, up and down, just audible in the still of the night. Wave physics, they learned about them in school: with pencil and paper, he could work out its amplitude. Pencil and paper — and a sliver of light. Beside him Livia is the sound of her breath.

Thomas counts to fifty and nobody raises the alarm. One hundred and three steps. He counts to fifty more.

They crawl forward, reach the cabin wall, then the narrow space between two cabins, fore and aft. Two stairwells, each pointing downward, felt rather than seen. He picks aft on instinct. At the bottom, silence stretching ahead, Thomas can no longer contain his anger.

“You were supposed to wait!”

She inhales his Smoke like she is drinking him, spits back his anger.

“I am not yours to order around.”

There is something else in her breath, something roughly tender. It frightens Thomas, how well they speak without words.

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They make their way by touch. Thomas has a sense that the main holds should be down and aft, so down and aft they head. The corridors that lead them there are narrow enough to touch both walls with angled elbows. As they descend a second staircase, the quiet around them changes into something else, duller and heavier than before. They must have stepped below the waterline. At intervals a creak runs the length of the ship, urgent and pitiful, metal shifting in the cold.

They find a door. He recognises it by the heavy bar of its bolt. His hands locate the handle, the hinges, then, on a little shelf by the door’s side, a lamp and matches. Once they are through and have waited out the darkness with a dozen breaths, he dares light the lamp, the door shut and bolted behind his back. The eye flinches from the sudden light, then feasts on it. Steel engines, man-high, the swell of their sides hung with pressure meters as though with medals. A mound of coal ready for the shovelling. Levers, valves, some pairs of heavy leather gloves with greaves, dark with sweat and coal. Livia is about to speak but he shushes her, points to a cluster of pipes descending from the ceiling, each ending, face-high, in a fluted metal bell; a bouquet of trumpets.

“Speaking tubes,” he whispers, his mouth close to her ear. “To the bridge, the captain’s cabin, up to the deck.”

He bends his ear to the flaring bells. One carries a sound, rhythmic, as of fingers snapping at a distance. Confused, Thomas gestures to it. Livia’s ear proves better than his.

“Steps,” she mouths.

Now he hears it, too: someone pacing, back and forth, a pause where he turns tightly on his heels. A confined space, but bigger than most on a ship. The captain’s cabin.

Then the steps cease and, after a minute, are replaced by an eerie crackling, from which, as from a sack of gravel, emerges a voice. A woman, singing, her pitch near-perfect but subject to odd wavers, soft ululations half stuck in her throat. She is joined by an instrument, a violin, sweet, note-perfect, but similarly wayward as though time ebbs and flows for its player against the pulse of his beat. He looks to Livia for explanation but she merely shakes her head. The captain’s cabin. A singer, a fiddle, a pair of boots measuring the cabin, side to side. A copper pipe speaking through the mouth of a bell. It is like a missive from the realm of ghosts, disembodied and obscure. They smother the gas lamp before exiting the door.

A few steps from the engine room, Thomas’s hands find another bolt and, beneath it, an icy metal wheel, five turns of which open the room ahead. Only the drip of water disturbs its silence, echoes coolly in the air. A large room, then, a hold. Livia has held on to the gas lamp and now lights its wick. A scramble of shadows, then the room comes into focus, an iron-walled hall supported by girders, only half full with cargo. Crates and barrels mostly and, beyond them, an array of metal parts: articulated pipes, gear wheels, fan blades, and giant perforated disks, like overgrown pieces of plumbing, stacked into a mound and secured to the floor by heavy chains. Not waiting for Thomas, Livia walks the lamp down the length of the hold and takes an inventory, placing a palm on each item, one by one. As she walks deeper into the space, the lamp dislodges movement at the edge of its shine. A hard bony clicking, claws on steel. Livia’s movements are flushing the sounds towards him. She is walking boldly in her circle of light, her eyes on the cargo, never looking about. He supposes this means she has heard the rats, too. Her return causes a second wave of scrambling, inverted now, back into the far reaches of the hold.

“Whatever we are looking for, it isn’t here,” she reports. “All items have customs stamps. Some of them have several. Brazil, Portugal, France. England.”

“And it would be hard to hide anything down here.” Thomas scans the room again. His eyes are drawn to the giant metal parts. “Machinery. You wouldn’t think they’d be allowed to import it. Not with the embargo in place.”

“The seal on them is a different colour. A special licence, perhaps. What do you think they are for?”

“Don’t know. Come, it must surely be midnight now.”

As he says it a sound carries to them from the quay, a whistle. It reaches them faint and tinny, down here under the waterline.

“The watchman. Something’s happening.”

Without needing to discuss it, they rush to the door and reenter the corridor outside.

ф

A light has been lit. It is far away, broken up by stairwells and corridors. But as they scramble their way back down the corridor by touch — their own lamp long extinguished — and reach the first sets of stairs, they catch a hint of it, enough to suggest a direction. It seems at once foolish and inevitable that they should follow it, making haste, hungry for answers. A moment later — a corridor, a bend — and it is gone, leaving them stranded, disoriented.

Then a voice sounds. Another voice answers. They are too far away to make out either words or speaker.

“Above.” Livia whispers it, close to his ear. She must be standing on tiptoe. “They are on deck.”

“Your mother?”

“Not sure. What now?”

The light makes the decision for them. There it is again, moving purposefully now, towards them, trailing the sounds of steps. Unwilling to be caught out, they back away from it. A junction forces a decision: left or right. They choose badly, the light following and their path cut off by a door. It stands ajar. They slip through, into a room cluttered with shadows, conscious that they will be caught. There are not enough yards between them and their pursuers to find a likely hiding space. Then the light relents; pauses; slips a wedge through the half-open door, like an angular toe. It finds a carpet, and a sliver of wood-panelled wall. At the same time a voice can be heard, distinct now and foreign.

“Look now,” it says, its accent thick, tilting the vowels and giving an odd sharpness to the k, “before we go in, we must talk about the money.”

“You have been paid, and generously.”

In other circumstances it would be a shock to hear it again. Lady Naylor’s voice. A wonder of a voice, actually: composed and reasonable; at once amiable and aloof. But Thomas is busy, scanning the room for a hiding place. Shapes peel themselves from shadows. A bed, a desk, some chairs. The bed is built into the wall, the chairs too small to cower behind. At one side, two portholes glow with a lighter shade of dark. The clouds must have lifted and the moon come out.

“There have been complications. I had all sorts of problems getting past the authorities. And then the refitting costs! Do you have any idea how difficult it was to find a suitable carpenter in La Rochelle?”

“We can discuss all that once we have seen the merchandise. After you, Captain.”

A new voice this, also accented, if differently. Shy and precise. A man used to talking, but not about himself. Thomas pictures him to himself even as he finds the wardrobe, built into the wood panelling in such a manner that only its key protrudes. Livia sees it at the same time. It’s deeper than expected, but low. They cower amongst shirtsleeves, their limbs entangled, her hair in his mouth. A fingertip inserted into the keyhole, a sharp little pull, and the wardrobe door closes behind them just as the cabin door is pushed wide open and light floods the room.

ф

They take turns at the keyhole. The door is not locked and hangs open a tiny crack: they must not lean their face against it, lest it move. Then, too, the key is in the keyhole: does not quite block it but leaves to them only a curved sliver through which to observe.

Three people. The captain is plump, soft-faced, balding beneath light blond curls. He is turning away now, bending, lighting an additional lamp. White trousers underneath a short-cut pea coat. A picture-book sailor, with a wide, fleshy rear.

Lady Naylor stands close to him, looking pale and thin; handsome, thinks Thomas, a stretched, pinched version of her daughter. The third man is at the edge of Thomas’s field of vision: not old, fine-boned. An umbrella in his gloved hand. Both he and milady cast about the room. They have seen us, it comes to Thomas. Her face — backlit now, the lamp a halo at the back of her head — is taut with impatience. Somewhere behind Thomas and Livia, as though in the wood itself, a rat is scraping, digging channels into the wardrobe’s back.

“Where—” Lady Naylor begins to ask but is interrupted by the captain’s eagerness.

“This is just what I mean. It took the carpenter a month to get it right. It had to be seamless. And just like the old cabin, in case one of the customs people remembered. Some men have a surprising memory for that sort of thing. The same cabin, exactly. Only we shrank it by forty cubic feet.”

He paces nervously as he speaks. Thomas recognises the sequence of steps. Four steps, four steps. Then he stops at a machine, a little box with a fluted bell, like the head of a lily made of brass.

“I had to hire a whole new crew. Just to be safe! The old ones might have noticed something. Good men, too, hard to replace! And then the journey. Days at sea, lying here in my bunk, and the devil restless behind the wall. Played music through the nights, just to drown out the sounds. I aged twenty years, I swear.”

“You followed my instructions minutely?”

It is the man with the umbrella who asks. He has stepped closer to the wardrobe, as though sensing them there. Livia pushes Thomas’s head aside, takes charge of the keyhole. He leans back, hears again that scratching at his back, pictures the rodent squatting in the dark, its claws an inch from him, fanned out and eager.

“Yes, of course. We used the lead lining, just as instructed. And I kept a sweet in my mouth, even at night. Nearly choked on it more than once. And feeding times. .”

Thomas hears a crash and, pressing his cheek into Livia’s, catches a glimpse of the captain retrieving a stick he has dislodged from its perch. It is stout, the length of a broom handle, and has an oddly shaped metal hook at one end.

“I got quite adept with this, fending it off while pouring your concoction down its throat.”

“Him,” says the man with the umbrella. “It is a he.”

Behind Thomas, the rat scratches the wall. Then it starts screaming, a sound high-pitched, inarticulate, feral. And also: human. Thomas’s body knows it before his head has finished the thought. He and Livia react as one. They jerk away from the noise.

It pushes open the wardrobe door.

ф

It is not that they spill out and tumble to the floor like potatoes from a bust sack. But all the same the door is open and a foot is sticking out into the open. The man with the umbrella reacts first. He steps up and pulls them out, by an ankle and a shoulder. They are so conjoined that they drop to the ground together, a muddle of limbs. For all the shock their presence must cause him, the man is not interested in them. He steps over, sticks his head into the wardrobe, stands there sniffing.

“Did you smoke?” he asks them, clipped and measured, not shouting. “In the wardrobe, did you smoke?

When they don’t answer, he gestures to the captain. “Take them out of here. Quick now. You, too, Katie, if you will?” This last part to Lady Naylor who is staring at them in pale silence.

By the time Thomas has recovered his wits, the captain is holding him and Livia by their arms and is pushing them out of the cabin, all the while muttering excuses, curses, his head drawn into his body, a dog expecting to be whipped. Outside, his grip relents a little. Thomas might be able to wrench free. What then, however? Run away? Hide? They have come too far to leave without answers.

Lady Naylor saves him the decision.

“Let go of them,” she instructs the captain. Then, taking the lamp out of the Dutchman’s hand: “You may go now. Wait for us on deck.”

Captain van Huysmans hesitates only a moment before walking away, red-faced and shaking his head. He must be honest enough a man to know he has lost command of his ship. Lady Naylor shines the lamp after him until she is sure he is gone. Only then does she turn to Livia.

“You are alive!” The relief on her face is unmistakable.

All the same Livia evades the hand her mother stretches out towards her.

“You tried to kill us!” she rages, and a curl of Smoke fills the space between them.

They both stare at it, mother and daughter, while it settles as Soot on one side of the lamp and colours the light. Livia’s face shows defiance, Lady Naylor’s a mixture of puzzlement, relief, and pride.

“So you learned to sin.”

“No jests, Mother, no clever talk, no evasions. You tried to kill us. We have a right to know why!”

“Is that what you think? Why you went into hiding? That I sat in that windmill and took potshots at my own child? It makes sense, I suppose. No, I did not try to kill you, my love. I believe Julius did.”

“Because you ordered him to!”

“I didn’t.” A frown appears on Lady Naylor’s forehead, fine-etched, scrupulous. “I merely asked him to scare the boys into returning.”

Her palm rises to halt any further questions and she looks back over her shoulder, to the door of the captain’s cabin.

“Hush now, I beg you. There are more pressing things to discuss. How long were you in there? You may have done terrible, irreversible harm. And yet I am glad to see you! Strange, isn’t it? Foolish! Our one and only chance and here you may have dashed it all. When did you slip into the captain’s wardrobe?”

“We came just before you did.”

It is Thomas who answers and for the first time her gaze jumps from her daughter to him. She takes in his ear; his dirty, Soot-starched clothes.

“What’s behind the wardrobe, Lady Naylor?”

“Change,” she answers. “Revolution.” Her voice shakes with the word, as does her hand and with her hand the lamp: the corridor spinning, skirmishes of light and dark. “But I am a fugitive now. The manor has been searched, and my London house is being watched. Trout’s after me.”

“The headmaster?”

“Headmaster? Why yes! I forgot that you know him. See, your headmaster is like the rest of us: he has a past. Master Trout has returned to his old profession.”

Before she can explain further, the door of the cabin swings open and the gentleman with the umbrella steps out. Thomas has a clearer view of him now. The man is small, slight, doe-eyed; elegant in a brown wool suit and faun-coloured gloves. Unusually for a man of his station, he does not appear to have brought a hat. He speaks to Lady Naylor, not to them.

“I think it is all right, Katie. Significant weight loss and anaemia, but no sign of infection. I have put on his respirator now. We will know for sure once I have taken some blood tests.”

Thomas notes again the familiar use of the first name. Katie. Lady Naylor’s name, he believes, is Catherine. These two know each other well. From the Continent; in a different tongue, perhaps. The man’s accent is slight if distinct, the words overly clipped.

“This must be your daughter. And one of the boys you told me about. Thomas, is it? The Smoker.” He looks at them with interest. Gently, if such a thing is possible. There is no harshness to the man. “We must leave the ship now. Will they pose an obstruction to our plans?”

He turns without waiting for an answer, back into the room, closing the door behind him. His question remains with them, a problem he expects them to figure out by themselves. For a long minute, not one of them has the heart to take it on. Then Thomas speaks.

“What is he talking about, this man?” Thomas is not smoking yet, but he can feel it close, the edge of rage. At what exactly, he does not know. “Who is he? What plans?”

Lady Naylor watches him intently. He is reminded of the night when he confronted her in her study: he held a letter opener then, and searched her skin for a likely place to bury its point. He might have killed her that night. But is this true? The Smoke — visible now, curling from his nostrils, from the stump of his ear — may be darkening his memories. Even the past bristles with his anger. It must take courage for her to step close to it, lay a hand on his chest. He does not flinch.

“I promise I will tell you, Thomas. On my husband’s life. But right now we need to leave the ship before Trout catches up with us. Or all is lost.”

She waits until his Smoke dissipates before phrasing a question of her own.

“Was it you who set Trout on me?”

“No.”

“I am not accusing you,” Lady Naylor smiles. “I am just wondering what set him off.”

“Charlie,” Livia says.

Thomas has the same thought. A stab of fear in his guts, down low, beneath the navel. People talk about hearts too much, he thinks. And reaches out, Lady Naylor’s eyes following the gesture, to squeeze Livia’s hand.

ф

The man with the umbrella emerges. He is followed by a monster. Four feet high and livid with the smells of the chamber pot, its hands cuffed to a belt. Where the face should be something else reigns, not quite a blank. Smooth, hairless skin, more black than brown: taut on top then hanging slack around the cheeks and neck. Twin lenses for eyes, palm-sized, ringed in metal. A leather trunk for a mouth, trailing to its chest.

A mask, Thomas realises. A child in a mask.

The man has attached a leash to his belt and walks the boy past them in precise, urgent steps. The child himself shuffles as though drugged; shoulders stooping; hopeless. They are past before Thomas can demand an explanation. All he can do is fall in step behind.

Up on deck the captain stands quietly near the stairwell. It is too dark to see his face. The man with the umbrella passes him a purse, then turns away without a word, marching the child across the plank. On the quay he stops, takes off his long woollen coat, and carefully wraps the child in it head to toe. The next moment he has gathered him up, is cradling the boy against his body: a shapeless mass, four feet long and sagging at the centre.

“Wait here,” the man orders, then walks briskly down the quay. After five steps he is no more than a shadow. After ten, he is lost in the night.

Lady Naylor rushes to the shelter of a tollbooth, beckons to them. Thomas hesitates. “I did not try to kill you,” she told them. Thomas finds that he believes her. Does that mean she is their friend? Her steps are hasty at any rate, the boot heels loud on the empty quay. She is nervous, it comes to Thomas. Impatient. Afraid. But perhaps he is simply projecting his own feelings, his heart too large in his chest, clenching, unclenching like a swollen fist.

Again she beckons, and still he remains out in the open, Livia by his side.

“So it’s all about this child,” he calls over, taking pleasure in the noise. “Where are you taking him?” Then it dawns on him. “The cage. The cage in your laboratory. It is meant for him.” He shudders. “I thought it was for me.”

“For you?” Her surprise seems genuine. “Yes, of course. It’s Renfrew’s fault. He told you that you had murder in your heart. He scared you, did he? And true enough, your Smoke has a certain quality. It is attuned to Julius’s in quite a startling manner. A phenomenon worthy of further study. Once upon a time I might have found a use for you.”

In the dark, across the distance, all he can see is the pale oval of her face. The eyes are deep pools, devoid of expression.

“Poor Thomas. All this time you thought you were special. At the centre of events: your Smoke the key to all the secrets in the world.” The words are mocking. But her voice carries sympathy. “Here is the coach. You have a decision to make. Are you coming or not?”

Thomas and Livia look at one another. There is no need to discuss it. They can stay and remain ignorant. Or they can go along and get answers. One after the other they squeeze into the little fly that has pulled up in front of them, an unknown coachman on the box. If they had wanted to leave, they would have done so already.

The next moment they race off, down the quayside and through the metal gate, still unmanned. A quarter mile on, they slow to a less conspicuous speed. The clip-clop of hooves half drowns their conversation.

ф

“Talk! Explain yourself. Who are you? Who is the child?”

The stranger is unfazed by Thomas’s anger. He is sitting across from him, holding the child in his lap, his umbrella hooked into his elbow and tangling up their feet.

“Patience. Call me Sebastian. Here is my hand. How do you do? Mr. Argyle. Miss Naylor. You take after your mother, my dear, if you don’t mind my saying. Exquisite bones. Lady Naylor has told me all about you two, and about Mr. Cooper, too, of course. Now first things first, if you don’t mind. We have to make an adjustment to our plans.” He turns to Lady Naylor, his voice precise, even, confident. “Where are we going, Katie?”

Lady Naylor hesitates over the answer. “Are your lodgings being watched, too?”

“No, they don’t know about me yet. But it will be noticed if I bring guests. And there is no easy way of smuggling in the child. You do not have another apartment in town?”

“I have two more. But Trout will be onto them already.”

“Very well, we have no choice then. All the inns in the city will be searched, and we need shelter fast. We must leave the city and go to my country cottage. We shall leave via Moorgate.” He pauses long enough to close his eyes then open them again: a gesture more deliberate than a blink. “What about these two?”

The man’s voice and eyes remain soft. And yet there is a threat to the statement.

We know too much. Witnesses, that’s all we are to him. Peripheral. Disposable. The thought startles Thomas, recalls his earlier humiliation. All this time you thought that you were special. At the centre of events.

So perhaps he is nobody after all. An angry youth: his father’s child. But Livia’s with him, and he must protect her. There could be a blade in the shaft of that umbrella, a gun hidden in those trouser pockets. Lady Naylor appears to sense Thomas’s thought. She speaks to him rather than her daughter.

“It’s like this,” she says. “Either you betray us, and everything stays just as it is. The lies, the sweets and cigarettes, the whole hypocrisy of power. Or we end it all. Send it crumbling into dust.”

“An end to Smoke.” Livia’s voice is thick with something. Hard to say whether it is suspicion or hope. “Is that what you have been working on? A new world of virtue?”

Lady Naylor nods then gathers her daughter’s hands in hers, a scooping gesture, like pushing together the crumbs scattered on a table.

“Yes! A new world of virtue. Of justice. I am doing this for your father.”

Justice. The word is like a call to arms. It triggers a yearning in Thomas. He struggles to contain it.

“What about the child?” he asks gruffly. “Will he come to harm?”

His eyes seek out the shapeless lump of limbs and coat on the stranger’s lap; he thinks of the scratching in the wardrobe and the captain brandishing his twisted hook. It is hard not to see that the child has come to harm already.

The man who calls himself Sebastian follows his gaze.

“The child will come to further inconvenience. But not to harm.”

“Then where are his parents? You stole him. And here he is alone and frightened.”

“We had him stolen. But the place he comes from. . Please understand that his life was not a good one.”

“Would you have stolen him if it had been?”

“Naturally, yes. All the same, we saved him from deprivation. Though you will say that we imposed starvation on him all over again.”

There is something disarming about Sebastian. He appears to have no capacity for hiding behind self-deception. At the same time there is to him a calculation that reminds Thomas of Renfrew. He too has made a god of reason. Just now Sebastian’s mind is moving seamlessly from the ethics of child theft to the layout of London.

“Ah, I see we have passed Spitalfields Market. Time to alert the coachman to our new destination. Alas there are grave risks in leaving the city. The gates may already be watched. It may prove difficult to return.”

Sebastian is about to rap at the little window that separates them from the box, when Livia stops him. Her hands are still in her mother’s fists.

“We know a place. You won’t be found there.”

She hesitates, her eyes fierce with a kind of angry hope.

Don’t, Thomas thinks. We have no right.

But Livia does not seek his advice.

“We are staying with some people. A man and his wife. We met them by chance. You can trust them.” A beat, a twitch of the mouth. “If we can trust you, Mother.”

“But of course. I swore it, did I not?” Lady Naylor looks at Livia in pleasure. “These people you met — they are poor?”

“Yes, very.”

“Good. Then we can pay them. Tell us the way.”

ф

When they pull up at a corner not far from Grendel’s house, Thomas is still trying to figure it out. They set off that evening to spy on an enemy. Now they are leading her home: the only place in the world where, for the moment, they have reason to consider themselves safe. And so, in the course of a few hours they appear to have changed sides. There wasn’t even a great deal of talk to it. All Lady Naylor has told them is that she bears them no ill will. She is fighting the Smoke. And has kidnapped a child, with the help of a stranger with doe-like eyes.

It is not much to build one’s faith on.

And yet: here they are, abusing the trust of a man who suffers from kindness as though from the flu. They wait until the coach has disappeared out of sight, then rush through the dark streets, Sebastian carrying the child wrapped in his coat and slung over one shoulder. The child is unnaturally still. Drugged, Thomas surmises. Their new friends are not picky about their methods.

For all that it is a relief to step into the little courtyard behind the house’s burnt front and ascend the narrow staircase to the top floor. Livia looks tense when she knocks on the door. Perhaps she regrets her eagerness to volunteer a hideaway. Neither she nor Thomas have mentioned Grendel’s condition. If he is found out — well, what then? Thomas still has not decided whether he pities the man or admires him. Grendel is an ox in a world of irate bulls: a kind creature, given to melancholy, and fond of his food. If Lady Naylor’s future is to be a world of Grendels, Thomas can think of worse.

It is their host himself who opens the door. He sees Livia first, gets excited, flaps his hands, almost extinguishing the stub of candle he is holding.

“You are back! Come quick. You will never believe—”

Then he spies Sebastian and Lady Naylor in the dim of the stairwell.

“Friends of yours?” A step backward as he says it. Behind Grendel, someone else is rushing to the door.

“My mother,” Livia replies. “I’m afraid we will have to impose.”

Grendel nods, distracted, not moving. His eyes are on Sebastian and the bundle he is holding, wriggling now, waking up. At Grendel’s side a new face pushes itself into the sparse glow of the candle. It takes Thomas a heartbeat to recognise him. It’s not just that Charlie is thin. Something has happened to him, a loss weightier than pounds. Still he is smiling. Then the smile freezes on his lips. It might be the sight of Lady Naylor that saps his joy. But Charlie’s eyes are on Livia and Thomas, not on the threesome they have brought.

We are not even touching, Thomas thinks. It must show then, like Smoke.

A moment later Thomas has pushed past Grendel and wrapped Charlie in a hug. His friend hangs limp in his arms, a sack of bones.

CAPTAIN

They pick me up at four twenty-five, ship time. Perhaps it is chance that determines the hour, but if they want to scare a man, find him at his most vulnerable, his weakest, they could hardly have picked a better moment. The crew has not returned yet and there is no one to warn me before the hammering on the door. They refuse to let me dress. A man in his nightshirt marched down the gangplank to a coach; his bare legs flashing in the wind: what more ridiculous spectacle can there be?

The stranger in the coach is kindly and stupendously fat. We sit on the same side, and he makes such a depression in the seat cushion that I am forever tumbling towards him. The last I see of my ship is a squadron of men, swarming over its decks. Not one of them wears a uniform. Whatever they are, they wish to appear other. Gentlemen. A gentleman would have allowed me to pull on my drawers. I shiver and fret and feel ashamed for the pools of Soot that glue my nightshirt to my belly and thighs.

I rage at my captor, of course: tell him that I am a subject of Her Majesty, the Queen of the Netherlands; that this is an outrage, an outrage; that I demand to be released at once. But the fat man merely pats my shoulder and never answers, as though agreeing with me that these words need to be said, that they are part of the form of things, and that it is best to get them all out at once. The only time he interrupts me is when my protestations take on the pitch of a shout. Then he lays a finger across his lips. He is wearing gloves. It quiets me down, precisely this part, his wearing gloves. Of course it is cold, and no gentleman is fully dressed without. Still, it brings something home. The potential for violence. It is easy to picture these gloves bunched into fists. And all the time he is cheerfully silent.

When we have travelled some half hour, the man reaches into the darkness at his feet, retrieves a hood, and pulls it over my head. He might be putting blinders on a horse. I could struggle, but his touch is so deft, so simple, neither rough nor gentle, that I don’t have the heart.

At first I find I do not mind the hood. It absolves me in a way. I no longer need to shout and protest, or pay attention to the road we are taking; need not muster courage for resistance or escape. It is only when we alight and I am ushered into a building that the blindness begins to transform into fear, then abject panic. There are sounds around me, you see, sounds I cannot place. Typewriters, I think, and once a shrill little peal. Men talking at a distance in a serious manner, never laughing, nor raising their voices. A place of business. Large, it seems to me, subterranean. We keep descending stairs. A scream, not far from us, like a cat with its tail caught in a slamming door. But this is no place for cats. I am weak in the legs when they push me down upon a stool and pull off the hood.

An office. A carpet, a bookshelf, a desk at the centre, the fat man behind. No windows. A smell to the place like boiled dish towels. A coiled beast of a radiator dispensing too much heat. There are no guards in the room. My captor offers me a glass of water that he decants from a large pewter jug.

For the longest time he does not ask any question but simply sits there, reading various letters arranged on his desk. The stool I am sitting on turns out to be very uncomfortable. It is an inch or two shorter than a regular stool, and my knees jut up awkwardly when I plant my soles. I consider re-rehearsing my protestations, or at least requesting a different chair, but despite the glass of water my throat is very dry.

At long last a younger man enters the office without knocking. He is impeccably dressed, rounds the desk without looking at me, bends down to the fat man, and whispers something in his ear. Then he passes over a folder full of papers, before retracing his steps and leaving the room. His boots were muddy and he has left prints on the floorboards (he avoided stepping on the carpet). I keep looking at these prints whilst my captor studies his papers. From my vantage point, lower than his, he appears cut in half: the top half leaning forward on his elbows, the lower, beneath the desk, impassive. He has crossed his legs. Oxford shoes. Unlike his clerk’s boots they are unsullied by dirt.

When he has read and turned over the last of the papers, he closes the folder, takes a fountain pen out of his jacket pocket, makes a note in a booklet lying on his desk. For a moment he looks like a teacher. No, a headmaster. Disciplining a delinquent. I shift my weight on the stool.

Then he finally speaks.

“Here we are, Captain van Huysmans. Only, you must be wondering where ‘here’ is. What criminal enterprise is this, operating in the heart of London? What sort of robbers are these that have taken hold of you? What can you do to set yourself free?

“And then, you heard the typewriters, as we passed them in the corridor. I saw your head tilt. Typewriters, in England! Even on the Continent, I understand, only a small number of bureaucracies have adopted them wholesale. Always, always, there is resistance to innovation — even without any embargo. I find this reassuring. Human nature at its best. Afraid of the new. And yet, I approve of our typewriters. Our reports, see, they become easier to read, and by putting special paper between the pages, we can create copies even as we type the original. It is miraculous, really.

“So who are these men, who can abduct you with impunity, who have access to foreign technology, and who have use for records and reports? I will let you in on a secret, a terrible secret. England has a police force. Not officially, mind. Three times the issue has been debated in Parliament and three times it has been rejected. A police force is something for the French, the Germans! For godless countries in which the government spies on its citizens. For what is a police force if not an army of spies and meddlers? People invading the privacy of our homes! Our gentry are partial to their homes, you see. They like to be able to lock the door.

“And yet, all the same, here it is. A secret police force, created by a subcommittee for public welfare. A very tiny committee it is. Five permanent members. Not aligned with either of the parties but neutral. A pure organ of the state, if you will. One of the first things they did was to have strands of wire drawn across the land. In secret of course, underground where possible, a thin, fragile network. Seven telephones: that is all we have, after a decade of work. I took my first call a few days ago, and how foolish I felt, shouting words into the ether.

“So here we both are, at headquarters. I am not even a regular officer! Past my youth too: too old — too fat! — to go trundling after bad people. But there are so few of us with any experience, and the matter is so very sensitive and at the same time so very important. All hands on deck, and those with experience, well, one likes to do what one can, doesn’t one? For Queen and country; for the good of the state. I am sure you will understand. My remit, I am afraid, is near-absolute. I can quite literally do to you whatever I wish. Ghastly, when one thinks about it. I prefer not to.”

All this the man recites quite fluently and without any menace, his chubby hands folded together high on his chest. For the first time I see that he is wearing sleeve protectors that run black from wrist to elbow. For some reason, this detail bothers me just as his gloves did before. How different is it, I wonder, from a butcher donning his apron before stepping into the abattoir?

“We had your ship searched, Captain. The cargo, it appears, is entirely in order. None of the custom seals have been meddled with and all the contents match up to the inventory you filed with the authorities. There are a number of pieces of illegal technology on board, but all these are listed and licenced: as long as they remain on board, there can be no objection. The logbooks are in order and chart your ship’s recent voyages without any obvious anomaly. Your private ledger is similarly unremarkable, though it contains a receipt for a very sizable amount of money made out to you by the Behrens Bank of Rotterdam. Now this would be entirely your business, if it were not suspected that the money in question originates in England and was, in fact, paid to you by Lady Catherine Naylor acting as the legal signatory of her husband, Baron Archibald Naylor, and with the Behrens Bank acting only as middleman. One may well say, however, that a man may accept money no matter where it comes from. It is noted that it was paid into your private accounts rather than the company who has ownership of the ship. You are a rich man, Captain van Huysmans. I congratulate you.

“On the ship itself, there is but one anomaly. It took my men a while to see it, it has been very well masked. Somewhere along your journey you had your cabin altered. It was very cleverly done. The proportions and look of the cabin were left entirely unchanged, but a narrow, L-shaped compartment was created behind the wood-panelling at the bow and starboard sides. A foot and a half in width, if this hasty drawing my men made is to scale, and perhaps five feet long in all. Not one of the crewmen we have located on shore knows a thing about this secret compartment, Captain van Huysmans, not even your first mate whom you had performing guard duty between the hours of ten and ten to one tonight, and who was dismissed by you the moment a certain coach pulled up at the end of the quay. You will understand that we are curious about this compartment. What in God’s name were you smuggling onto our shore, Captain?”

Of course it occurs to me to lie. An animal, I want to say, a tiger. Brought from farthest Sumatra, for a collector of exotic beasts.

But I am afraid to lie.

No, not just afraid. I recognise his authority. Not as a police officer but as a gentleman. His complexion is clear, his moral imperative beyond doubt.

So I ask instead: “What will you do to me?”

“For smuggling?” He weighs it, puffing out his cheeks, then letting out the air in a silent whistle. “Technically, it is a felony. A judge would have to hear the case. He might very well condemn you to the rope.

“Then again, we don’t really want to involve a judge. Who knows what you might tell him about this, our amiable chat? Square with me, Captain. Tell me all. If you do, we won’t touch a hair on your head. You can keep your money. Of course you are done doing business in this country. All travel privileges will be revoked. You will never clap eyes on fair England again. But then, this may be inevitable. There is a bill up for vote that will mark the end of foreign trade. One of our nobility, an illustrious earl, has lost his son to Irish hoodlums. He wants the borders shut for good.”

I consider his proposition. It is a damp country, this, no more beautiful than most. I shall not miss it. And I am, as he said just now, a rich man. It would be foolish to ask for guarantees. Or have him spell out the alternative. They are the secret police. They will do with me as they please.

“What,” he resumes, “did you transport in your secret compartment, Captain? Mind now, I won’t ask again.”

“The devil,” I answer. It feels good to say it. It has lain heavy on my heart. “The devil in the body of a child.”

ф

I tell him almost everything. The letter I received by private courier more than a year ago, the meeting with an agent in Rotterdam, then the dealings with the explorer in Belém. A rough man, I try to explain, used to living in the jungle. Instructions reaching me in the New World by telegraph, terse little missives that I read in the mildewed foyer of a self-styled Grand Hotel. How well I recall them when my captor prompts me, almost word for word! On the telegrams’ instruction, I ordered repairs when they weren’t needed and had the ship brought into dock for twenty-three days. A dreary seaport, the sailors drunk and whoring, the heat of the jungle rotting the clothes off our backs.

When they finally brought it, it came in a crate. The lid nailed shut and reinforced with ropes, like they were transporting a tiger. They loaded the crate at night: a group of natives, twigs through their noses, looking scared. And all the time, there was an invisible hand behind it all, some master strategist who, telegram by unsigned telegram, pushed us around a giant draughtsboard of his own design.

I had no contact with the cargo until we arrived in Europe. We’d emptied a hold for it and there it remained for the whole of the voyage: one crate, chained to the wall, and its guardian, the scar-faced explorer. A Boer he was, speaking with the awful dialect of the settlers there; always chewing on a native leaf. I did not see him more than a handful of times during three weeks at sea. Each time he had grown thinner, sallow, hollow-cheeked. We had difficult seas.

The paperwork proved to be no problem: a bag of money changed hands, and all stamps were issued. The New World is corrupt. So is the old, only more expensively so; one pays extra for the customs officials’ sweets. It was after our arrival in La Rochelle that I finally met the man I had corresponded with all these months. I try to describe him to the policeman. Slight, clean-shaven, well-mannered. Like a bookish manager, I say, at the best hotel in town. Only later it turns out he is the owner, returning your tip without malice.

My captor is amused by this description.

“What language did you speak in?” he asks.

“German.”

“He spoke it like a native?”

“Yes.” I hesitate. “But there was something foreign to it all the same. He gave me blueprints for the secret chamber in my cabin, worked out in detail, to the tenth of an inch. And made me sole custodian of the child.”

I explain the feeding instructions I was given, the pole I hooked into his harness to keep the creature at bay whenever I cleaned out its sty. There was special food, liquid food, like sloppy porridge, I had to mix it twice a day. There was a drug in it, I reckon. A sedative. It kept it asleep, much of the time. At others, I played the gramophone, or sang at the top of my voice. Once, it bit through its gag. I had to pretend to the crew the screams were mine.

The policeman nods, takes down a note, rings a little bell on his desk. It must be an agreed signal, for a clerk appears carrying a plate with some bread and two boiled eggs. A reward, I understand. We both eat hastily, sharing the plate, left hungry by the interrogation. When we are finished, the fat man licks his fingers one by one, uncaps his pen again, leans forward.

“What name did he use, this man in La Rochelle?”

I note the phrasing of the question. As though he already knows who the man is.

“He never gave his name,” I answer truthfully. “I am sorry.”

The policeman’s face looks placid. If he is keen for this particular piece of information, only his legs show it, uncrossing themselves under the table. His weight sits low, below the belly. Like he has crammed a cushion into his crotch.

“Think, Captain. I beseech you.”

But, faced with his need, I find myself reluctant to speak.

ф

It takes me two days to answer the policeman’s question. I spend them in a cell. The room is clean and heated. Nobody mistreats me. And yet a steady feeling of dread is growing in me. It is as though the world has forgotten me. I try to pray but there is no God in this nameless place, only the cluttering of typewriters, the bustling steps of clerks. Every few hours my interrogator stops by.

“Did you think of anything else?” he keeps asking.

“I’ve told you all I know.”

“Perhaps.”

He has explained to me that he regards torture to be distasteful and contrary to the tenets of British Law. But after that little snack of bread and hard-boiled egg, there is no further food.

Two days. The length of the interval is not chosen at random. If my business partner keeps to the terms of our contract, he will have instructed his bank in Rotterdam to transfer the final instalment within forty-eight hours of delivery. I hope I can trust to his honesty as he has been able to trust to mine. I am a Dutch trader, after all. We do not cheat.

When two days have passed and the hunger starts eating into my guts, I decide that the time has come to reveal my final piece of information. Perhaps the policeman will be satisfied and permit me to leave.

“I remember now,” I tell him when he next makes his visit. “He received a telegram once, the man in La Rochelle. The porter called him over. We were having lunch at the hotel.”

“So you heard his name.”

“Not clearly. In any case, I must have misheard. You see the name was English. But Englishmen are no longer allowed to travel abroad, are they not?”

“Just tell me what you heard.”

“Ashton,” I say. “Mr. Sebastian Ashton.”

The fat man’s eyes light up. “Sebastian Ashton! Ah, very funny.”

He turns to one of his clerks who always seem to be hovering in some corner, just within earshot.

“Find out everything you can about the sewer project in the city. Check on the immigration paperwork for the whole company. And set up surveillance.”

“Am I free to go?” I call after him, as he makes to leave.

“Soon.”

ф

There is a commotion some hours later. Two men bring in a yelping dog. It is a big beast, a bloodhound. Both its hind legs appear to be broken. In between its howls, the dog tries to snap at the men. They throw it in the cell next to me, where it cowers, sniffing at the air, staring at me with blood-rimmed eyes.

The fat man appears in order to have a look at it.

“Make sure you don’t smoke,” he says to me. “It goes wild over Smoke.”

“What is it?”

He shrugs. “A related inquiry.” He reaches through the bars with a stick, touches its side. The dog whimpers, then sinks its teeth in the wood. “My men say they did not see the owner. But I think they saw him and were afraid. Of a schoolboy! There’s a rumour on the loose. . But of course, you already believe in the devil, Captain.”

“What will you do with the dog?”

He looks at me in good humour. “What we do with all our prisoners. Tame it, or kill it.”

“Am I free to go?” I ask again.

“Soon.”

At least they have started feeding me again.

SCAR TISSUE

Do you still pray?”

The words are small things, fragile: the hush of the church soaking up Charlie’s voice.

Thomas does not need to think about the answer.

“No,” he says. “It’s all a lie.”

“It is. And yet I do. Despite myself. Late at night: hands folded under the blanket, where even I can’t see them.”

“Why?”

“Habit, I suppose. There could be, you know. Something real behind all this bloody mess — but look at you flinch!”

“You swore,” Thomas complains. “Charlie Cooper swears. In church. Where God can hear.” Then adds, lightly, looking down the length of the nave. “So it appears I also still believe.”

It’s the first smile they have shared since their reunion. Perhaps they came here just for that. A night and a day cooped up at Grendel’s house. Watching Lady Naylor bustling about; Sebastian coming and going. The child in the mask. They needed air. And to see whether Lady Naylor would let them go; whether they were prisoners or free.

They found their way back to the market square almost mechanically. This is where they were meant to have met. But when Charlie arrived here, long after nightfall the previous day, there had been no one to greet him. Cold and hungry, he had sought shelter in the church. The door had been locked but the priest had heard him; had listened to his explanations; and had realised that this dirty, shivering lad was the very Charlie Grendel’s newfound friends were looking for. Next came Charlie’s introduction to the man without Smoke. It made him happy somehow: that such a thing could be. Happy — until Thomas and Livia returned, her mother in tow.

Now he casts around for words to say what he feels.

“My cousin gave me some naughty books last Christmas,” Charlie states abruptly. “Not naughty, really. Risqué. Five volumes that he found in his late grandmother’s study. All five of them romances, translated from the French. They all have the same plot: two men love the same girl. They all end in a duel.”

Thomas does not deny what Charlie is implying. His features are gaunt in the pale light. They have all lost weight these past ten days. It makes them look old. “It may be an illusion, Charlie. A lie. Borrowed emotion. Round here, it drifts on the air.” Thomas frowns, clearly worried by the thought. “In any case, she does not even like me. She hates me.”

“No, not quite hate.”

Their words sound hard in the cold, pewless nave. Suddenly, scared by this coldness, they reach out and grab each other’s hand, fiercely, like two children lost in the woods. They race out of the church, still clutching each other, back out into the square. The sun is low in the sky, and for a moment it is beautiful, London’s haze of sin, soaking up the slanting rays and unfurling in orange Smoke rings high above their heads.

ф

They walk back slowly, recounting to each other the days spent apart. They have done this before, but then there were other listeners and the tales tailored to another purpose. Charlie does not linger on Renfrew; the day he spent chained to the schoolmaster’s bed. He does tell Thomas how he got sick on the way back.

“From the stomach. Rotten potatoes and all the snow I ate tramping through the night. They never write about that in stories. Getting the runs.”

Before long the cramps got so bad that Charlie found himself unable to continue. A farming couple put him up when he knocked on their door, doubled over with pain.

“Imagine it, waking under a stranger’s roof, flailing about every time, my heart pounding, thinking I’d been chained again. Scrambling for the chamber pot, wondering whether Julius was there, watching me, lurking in the shadows. The pain passed within twenty-four hours. Then the farmer made me work off the cost of my lodgings.” Charlie shakes his head, turns up his palms, displaying blisters. “A coarse man, always swearing, complaining about rich people, the chickens, his wife.”

They reach Grendel’s house but linger outside, the breeze carrying the river to them, smelling of refuse and rotting fish.

“And after all that,” Charlie finishes, gesturing behind them and meaning the ambush, the mines, the long road to London, “here we are, back with Lady Naylor.”

“We can leave if you want. Just say the word.”

But Charlie can see that Thomas does not mean it. He knows why.

“We have to stay and protect the child.”

“You think so too, then!”

Charlie has only seen the boy for a moment. The first thing Sebastian did was commandeer a room for him, one whose door could be locked. Next thing they knew he had nailed shut the window shutters. Then he left, taking the key. When he returned in the morning, he brought a metal bolt and reinforced the door.

Later Charlie spent an hour at the keyhole, but the boy was outside his field of vision. Only his feet showed from time to time, the tips of his boots, man-sized, too large for him, nobody had thought to help him take them off. A boy of six perhaps. Younger than Eleanor. Alone, confused, slurping air as though through a straw. Once, he rose and raced to the window, his non-face pressed against the slatted shutters, drinking light.

“He does not smoke,” Charlie says to Thomas. “That’s why he is so precious to them. The mask is a respirator. Keeping him from infection.” It is a surmise, but Charlie is sure of it. He repeats to Thomas Renfrew’s account of Baron Naylor’s expedition, how they scoured the world for an “innocent.”

“They needn’t have gone to all that trouble,” Thomas observes. “Here we’ve brought them to Grendel, free of charge.”

“It’s different. The boy must be like the wild woman we met in the woods. After we were attacked in the coach. If so, the boy will smoke soon enough. He just has not caught it yet.” Charlie smiles at the memory of the shy creature who stopped Thomas’s bleeding, her Smoke seeping out of her with the unselfconsciousness of breath. “Do you think they will notice, about Grendel?”

Thomas spits. “If they haven’t already, they will before long. They are too attuned to Smoke. It’s all they think about. I suppose they must hate it.”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know, Charlie. Lately I think it’s not the Smoke that’s bad but the people underneath.” Thomas turns towards the stairs that lead up to Grendel’s rooms. “Let’s go, eh? They’ll be waiting for us.”

ф

They stop one more time before they reach the top of the stairs. They both know why. Livia. It is as though they can sense her, moving around above their heads.

“They end with a duel do they, those French novels of yours?”

“Always,” says Charlie. “The handsome one wins. Or sometimes the girl comes, stops them, and picks.”

“Know this,” Thomas replies with all the bluntness of his nature. “If she was asked. She’d have you ten times out of ten.”

“That’s just it, Thomas. One does not get to choose. Not like that.”

ф

Inside, the stink of the river is replaced by the smell of cooking. Butter-fried fish and boiled turnips: Mrs. Grendel stiff-backed at the stove. She was curt and surly when the priest brought Charlie. Another foundling. Another mouth to feed. The first thing Lady Naylor did was give her a purse.

“Here’s money,” she told the woman. “There’ll be more, much more, before the week is out.”

Mrs. Grendel took the purse quickly. But it did not improve her mood.

They find Livia sitting at the dinner table with her mother. Neither is saying a word. Before he joins them, Charlie crouches down again before the locked door of their prisoner. The keyhole is dark, as though blocked. It takes Charlie a second to understand what he is looking at. A glassy surface throwing back the door’s reflection; the shadow of a masked head, blocking out the light. There, at the centre, imprisoned by the goggle’s glass, one might imagine an eye, a pupil. Grown big against the darkness, crowding out the iris.

Scared.

Charlie scratches the door, quietly, so Lady Naylor won’t hear. The boy on the other side scratches back. Then the door jolts in its frame. At the same time a crash sounds, is repeated, two drumbeats. The child is hammering against the door. Lady Naylor comes running.

“You better get away from there. It agitates him.”

“How long will you keep him like that?”

“Not long now. Sebastian says the mask will come off tonight. He will be more at ease then.”

“Does he have a name?”

Lady Naylor does not censure his anger. “I do not know it, Charlie. He comes from a small, isolated tribe. I don’t think any outsiders speak its language, not even the man who found him and took him away.”

The child hits the door again, with his feet this time.

“Come away,” Lady Naylor says again. “He might end up hurting himself. It is best if he is calm.”

Indeed the hammering stops as soon as Charlie rises and moves away. The dinner table has been laid with an old but pretty tablecloth. A candle stands in the middle. Stools have been found and arranged around it. A family dinner. Grendel joins them, fussing over a bottle of wine he has been sent to buy, then realising they have no glasses, just chipped old cups. Livia avoids Charlie’s eyes when he sits down next to her. It isn’t anger, he reminds himself, but confusion, embarrassment. But it is hard to read anything in her features other than the stony-faced humility she perfected in her family home.

Dinner is a restrained affair. Nobody is in the mood for talking, not with the Grendels here, seeing to their food like hired servants, awkward in their own house. The rest of them resemble a family that waits for the help to leave the room so it can argue in peace. At long last Mrs. Grendel does them the favour.

“I will do dishes on the morrow,” she declares sourly, then pushes her husband out the door. “We will turn in early.”

Their movements in the back of the house are studiedly noisy: they wish to convey they are not lingering to eavesdrop. It is disturbing what money will buy you, Charlie thinks, discretion and resentment both paid for with the same coin.

The moment the Grendels have settled themselves for the night, Thomas leans across to Lady Naylor.

“Tell us again,” he says, fingering the edges of his missing ear, “why Julius shot at us when we left your house.”

Lady Naylor rehearses the same answer she gave them over breakfast. That she was afraid when they announced their departure, the very morning Julius informed her they had broken into the laboratory. Afraid of what they had seen. Afraid they would talk. That Julius, in a rage with the boys and keen to protect his investment in Lady Naylor’s project, offered to waylay them and send them running back to the manor. All she needed from them was a week of silence. Two dead horses: it seemed a cheap enough price for revolution. It was a weak plan, really. She should, Lady Naylor now says, not have been surprised that Julius decided to alter it.

Thomas wrinkles his nose at this. “What was it we saw, exactly? That had you running scared? The ledger? The cage?”

But Charlie knows different. “We saw the blueprints. London’s new sewer system, though we did not recognise it for what it was. There was a name on it: Aschenstedt. I thought it was the name of a city. But it is a man. Aschen-Stadt. Ash-town. Taylor, Ashton and Sons. Renfrew would have seen it in a heartbeat.”

Lady Naylor sighs. “Stupid, isn’t it, this play on names? Dangerous. But he’s a silly man sometimes. There is a child in every genius.”

As she says it, a key turns in the flat’s front door and Sebastian Aschenstedt steps through, cheeks ruddy from the cold.

ф

They talk in the hallway, Sebastian and Lady Naylor. It appears he is too excited to sit down. Charlie watches him closely while he listens in on their conversation. A clean-shaven man, the skin young and chafed where the razor has touched it. When he smiles, dimples dig themselves into the corners of his mouth.

“I did the tests. Three separate blood samples, all negative. He’s unspoiled.”

“When do we start, then?”

“The sooner the better. I’ll go in to him now.”

It’s Thomas who blocks Sebastian’s path. Always Thomas: the one amongst them least afraid to start a fight. Livia draws close to him, chin drooping, false-meek, edgy, small hands curling into fists.

But it’s Charlie who speaks.

“What are you going to do to the child?”

Sebastian turns to him, answers frankly, guilelessly, his hands busy sorting through the contents of his doctor’s bag.

“We will take off his György respirator. The mask. He needs to breathe freely and to eat. He has had a rough voyage. No sunlight, liquid food, sedated for much of the time. Now he is anaemic and showing early signs of scurvy. We can fix all that once the respirator is off.”

“It’ll infect him.”

“Why yes. In fact, we’ll make very sure he’s infected before we take it off. You object? He was bound for infection the moment he left his jungle tribe. It took severe precautions to preclude it until now.”

“Once he’s infected — he won’t be able to go back.”

Sebastian seems surprised by the comment, as though Charlie has said something he has failed to consider. But before he can answer, Lady Naylor intervenes.

“Before the week is out, the world will have changed. Not just London, or England, but the world! None of our truths will hold anymore.”

“Then he will be able to go back?”

Her answer is raw with emotion. “We will all be free for the first time in our lives.”

Without saying a word, Livia pulls Thomas out of Sebastian’s way. He lets her do it, his eyes on Charlie, soliciting his thoughts.

Sebastian is through the door and has locked it long before Charlie has puzzled out what his thoughts may be.

ф

One glimpse is all they get before the door closes: a little creature with an outsize head, the mask bulbous up front and smooth around the back, rubber-coating his skull. A proboscis dangling from the jawline. Eyes ringed in metal, portholes to the child within. He is sitting on the ground not on the bed, squatting really, bum on heels. His fingers are busy with an insect, pinning one of its legs to the floor, watching the bug’s body march itself around this pivot. The boy looks up when Sebastian’s shadow intrudes upon him. Then the door falls shut; the lock snaps, the key is removed. Is pocketed, Charlie imagines, the doctor’s bag put down. Thomas takes up position at the keyhole without hesitation, almost shouldering Lady Naylor aside. His report is terse. Charlie and Livia stand close behind him, Charlie conscious of her smell, her presence, and careful not to touch.

“Sebastian is talking to the boy. I cannot hear what he is saying. Now he is tying his hands. No struggle. He is attaching something to the end of the mask, to the breathing tube or whatever it is. A metal disk of some sort, like a tin of boot polish. It screws onto the end. Now he reaches for his doctor’s bag, pulling out a syringe. Big needle. It goes into the tin, not the boy. And now—”

Thomas falters, pales, stands up abruptly and starts hammering on the door. Charlie and Livia both start forward, to the keyhole. He captures it first, greedy for the horror beyond, and afraid, too, wishing to protect Livia from it, his heart beating from the warmth of her cheek next to his.

What he sees is hard to describe. The child is shaking, convulsing. Sebastian’s hands are steadying him, pressing him down to the floor. The mask appears changed, the eyeholes jet black, the rubber tube jerking as though alive. Then, around the edges of the mask, the boy appears to start bleeding: black, sticky Smoke seeping out like oil. Minutes of this, Thomas pounding the door. Then Sebastian takes off the mask, a buckle at a time; takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, dabs it with a liquid from a bottle, wipes down the exhausted child’s face, removing a glossy layer of near-liquid Soot. The boy that emerges is thin, sallow underneath his dark skin, the hair black and vigorous if cropped very short. Crooked teeth and small crinkly eyes. The moment he has regained some strength he starts pummeling Sebastian, biting and kicking. Charlie looks away in anguish. Livia takes his place. They are all speechless. Thomas has stopped attacking the door, his fists swollen. Beyond it the sounds of struggle reach them dimly.

Then Livia says, “He is not smoking. He’s angry and scared, and you’ve infected him, but he isn’t smoking.”

“He won’t,” Lady Naylor says. “There is an incubation period.”

“How long?”

Her mother hesitates. “Several weeks before he starts showing. But in seventy-two hours his blood will begin to change.”

The door opens and Sebastian emerges. Behind him the child is a crumpled figure on the bed; his head lost in its linen, exhausted and still. For a moment Charlie has the urge to hit Sebastian, Smoke black and bitter in his mouth.

But the man’s eyes dispel his anger.

“Poor child. He is exhausted. Best let him rest now. To-ka. He keeps saying To-ka. Perhaps it means Mother.”

When Sebastian locks the door it seems a mercy, not punishment. Though, of course: it also suits his plans.

“What was in the tin?” Thomas asks hoarsely.

“Soot. Very black Soot.”

“Then you found a way to bring it to life.”

“Yes, of course. Soot can be quickened: turned back into Smoke. Temporarily, partially, at great cost. It’s an inefficient process.”

“Like cigarettes.”

“Yes. The technology is decades old.”

ф

It is hard to sleep after what they have seen, hard to talk even, compare notes. They sit around uneasily, Charlie, Thomas, and Livia, on the floor of the room shared by the two boys, each of them caught in their own thoughts. Livia has pulled a bent cigarette from her pocket, one of Julius’s, and is cutting it open with the edge of a fingernail. After some minutes she stands to get closer to the lamp.

“It’s a mix of Soot and tobacco. But it’s sticky somehow, like it has been treated with some goo.”

“That’s what does it then,” Thomas suggests. “Quickens it. Makes it revert to Smoke.”

“It has a peculiar smell. And the Soot is very dark.” Livia runs her finger through it, raises it up to the eye. “And look: each little particle is different, some black, some grey.” She turns, catches Charlie’s eye, looks back at her finger. “I have never done this before. Study Soot. In school they just told us it was dead. Inert.”

She rerolls the cigarette, sticks it in her mouth, bends to the lamp. At once Charlie is on his feet. His hand is near her shoulder before it occurs to him that he no longer has a right to touch.

“Don’t,” he says.

“Why? Will it turn me bad?” She hides her face by lowering it to the gas lamp, sticks the end of the cigarette into its flame. “One puff, Charlie. We live in London. We are all inhaling fifty puffs a day.”

Charlie retreats a step, sees Thomas rise in expectation. He likes her smoking, it shoots through him before he buries the thought. Livia inhales, exhales, her cheeks flushing dark after some delay. It takes her a moment to collect herself.

“Nasty but weak,” she says. “A tingle of filth. It made me feel angry, imperious. And also a little—” She breaks off, biting her lip. “Animal functions. That’s what it speaks to. A whisper in the blood.

“But look,” she adds, stroking the cigarette’s ashes onto her palm as soon as they have cooled. “There’s no trace of the tobacco. But the Soot remains.”

“Not all of it,” says Thomas, stepping up to her, taking hold of her hand and bringing it up to his eyes. “Look, all this Soot is light. The dark stuff is gone.”

Livia starts, compares the smudge on her fingertip with the base of the cigarette that remains unlit.

“You are right. What does it mean?”

“It means that only black sin can be activated,” Charlie whispers from the sidelines. “Temporarily. Partially. At great cost. The small sins,” he says, taken aback by his own anger, “are as dead as dust.”

Thomas and Livia are still holding hands when he storms out of the room.

ф

It proves hard to find a place in which to be alone. Charlie is too restless to sit still in some corner; too haunted by the thought of Julius to take to the streets of London at night. So he wanders the flat, its hallway and landing, back and forth past the boy-prisoner’s cell. His fingers brush the walls, the doors, the windowsills, collect specks of London’s Soot grown into the paint and plaster, some chalky grey and coarse, others fine as paint pigments, the soft greys of photography. Irritation, appetite, illicit joy; the sting of want. Everyday vice: the humdrum of life. Once infectious, now sour and dead. He wipes it off against his trouser leg and continues on his rounds; brushes the walls again, searching for something, the side of his leg soon shiny with grey.

It is during these restless rounds that he catches sight of the sewer map. Sebastian and Lady Naylor have spread it on the kitchen table, are poring over it. Or rather there are two maps, one marked “Ashton,” the other “Aschenstedt.” It is hard to tell from a distance, but the second seems a denser web: a replica of the first with added lines. Lady Naylor turns it over when Charlie draws close. He feigns disinterest and fetches the pitcher from the sideboard.

“One word to the authorities,” Lady Naylor calls after him, worried. “That’s all it would take. And nothing about the world changes.”

“How do you know I care?” Charlie replies. And: “You are like Renfrew then. He too wants change.”

“No, he only thinks he does. But all he can imagine is more of the same.”

ф

Half an hour later Charlie hears her arguing with Thomas. His friend has barged into the kitchen and is demanding answers.

“Talk straight. You swore it to me! On your husband’s life.”

His voice rises further when she does not give him what he wants.

Within an hour of their shouting, milady comes to find Charlie, sitting alone outside the child’s door, listening to the silence beyond.

“I cannot talk to that one,” she says softly, then surprises him by easing herself onto the floor next to him. Baroness Naylor, Dowager Countess of Essex, Marchioness of Thomond, her bottom in the dust. She looks dignified even here.

“He is always angry. Just like my Julius. I suppose that’s the problem. He reminds me of my son.”

Her words take Charlie back to Renfrew’s. Julius’s voice rising from below the floorboards. The schoolmaster’s scream.

“Your son has changed,” he says hoarsely, his head light, chest heavy with his heartbeat. “He’s lost in Smoke. He killed Dr. Renfrew.”

“Killed him?” Lady Naylor is silent for a moment, digesting this. “Poor Julius,” she says at last. “He has been imbibing quickened Soot. Not your ordinary cigarettes but something infinitely stronger. Something he stole from me while you were playing truant.” She smiles a hard little smile. “But it’s my own fault. I introduced him to it. To cigarettes and to sweets. In the summer when he turned fifteen. Wooing him. Like a knowing bride.”

Charlie looks at her, aghast. “But why?”

For the fraction of a second she leans her head against his shoulder. Like a sister. Pleading with him. Winning him over to her side.

“He looks just like his father. My first husband. A weak man. God, how I hated him!” She jerks upright, away from him. “Our fathers had arranged the betrothal. It was good politics; two old bloodlines conjoined. My husband left for the Indies within four months of the wedding and was dead of a fever six weeks after that. Julius’s grandfather took him away from me the day he was born. He raised him to be my enemy. But I needed him.”

“You needed his money!”

“The Spencers are very rich. And I have been running up debts. So I presented Julius with an investment opportunity.”

“You mean you lied to him.”

“Naturally. The Spencers are England’s most prominent family. They have no need for revolution. Still, it’s a fair bargain. If I fail, he will own every scrap of Naylor land.”

She stands up abruptly, then walks away from him, towards the room she has elected as her bedroom. Up until yesterday the Grendels slept in there. It holds the apartment’s only proper bed.

“I should have spoken to you earlier, Charlie. You have a generous soul. One might find forgiveness there. My own children have very little of that.” She stops at the door, looks back. “Perhaps it would be best if we understood one another. Do you want to know where Smoke comes from? How the body generates it?”

“Yes.”

“Then follow me.”

ф

She makes him close the door. Immediately the room feels too small, the big lumpy bed filling it wall to wall. She sits down on it, smoothing out her skirts in front of her, puts her hands onto a particular place on her right flank. Underneath the fabric of her dress, Charlie can make out the skeleton of her corset, shaping her waist.

“Do you know what organ resides here?” she asks.

He swallows. “The liver.”

“Indeed. A vile thing really, though it makes good enough eating. Do you know what they used to say about sour-faced old women who smoked all day long? ‘She’s got an evil liver.’ This was back when I was young, in Brittany, where we went for the summers. The children used to chant it as a taunt. Many years ago I told Baron Naylor about it — in passing, really, sharing a memory, nothing more. But my husband thought there was more to the phrase than superstition. Before the week was out he had purchased surgeon’s knives. And cadavers. He got to be quite an expert at excision.”

The words sink into Charlie and transport him back to Lady Naylor’s laboratory. A glass vitrine filled with large, lidded jars. Spongy tissue floating in thick liquid, its edges overgrown by something hard and black. Next thing he knows Lady Naylor has started unbuttoning her bodice, her hands working behind her back, wrestling with hooks. Charlie turns to the door.

“Stay, Mr. Cooper. I have no designs on your virtue. Unlike my daughter, perhaps. Here, give me your hand. You may close your eyes if you like.”

He returns to her, both staring and trying not to look. She has not taken off any clothes, but simply loosened them, creating a gap near her spine. Gently, she takes his hand in hers and guides it through this gap, slipping it underneath the corset then forward towards her front.

“Smoke is produced by a gland in the liver. From there it connects to our blood and lymphic system and, ultimately, to the sweat glands and lungs. Our whole bodies are calibrated for Smoke. Unless, that is, you are like that child next door. But even as we speak his body is starting to transform.”

Charlie can hardly listen. All his senses are in his hand. He feels the smooth warmth of silk, then her skin, hot to his touch. They follow the ridge of a rib, then down, towards her stomach. Then they stop, her fingers stroking his across a long, raised, puckered line, tough like gristle.

“For a while my husband came to believe that the answer to Smoke was surgical. That Smoke could be cut off at the root. Not by excising the whole liver, naturally, merely the gland itself. But there was no way he could operate on himself.”

Sick now, Charlie wrestles with Lady Naylor, trying to withdraw his hand. But her grip is firm, pressing his fingers into the scar.

“Please understand that I accepted willingly. You see, I love my husband. More than life itself.” At last she lets Charlie go, watches him jump back and cradle his hand as though it were cut. “And he loved me. Which is to say, he did not go through with it in the end. He opened me up and sewed me shut again. In any case, it would not have worked. Aschenstedt sent us a study. From Romania. A lord there made extensive experiments on his peasants. They either died or continued smoking. All twenty-seven of them.”

Charlie watches her button up her dress again. This time he does not fight his staring. His sense of modesty is gone. All he can think of is the ridge of her scar. His breathing is loud, as though he’s been running; pins and needles down his back.

“Why show me?” he manages at last.

“I need you to understand, Mr. Cooper. What people are willing to do, in the cause of virtue. So you will help us, when the time comes.”

He grapples with this, finds it too large, her revolution, unfathomable. The stakes he understands are smaller. They dwell next door.

“Do you promise that the child will be unharmed?” Charlie asks and surprises himself by the firmness of his voice.

“I can if you like. It is the truth. But you won’t believe me. Why would you? Adults have been lying to you all your life.”

She rises, reaches past him, opens the door, standing so close he sees each tired wrinkle round her eyes.

“And tell me this, Mr. Cooper: what is he to you, this boy next door? How many boys like him have suffered and perished throughout your life without your taking the slightest notice? Back in his jungle, or on one of our royal plantations, picking precious flowers that we import by the ton?”

Before Charlie can answer, she has bent forward, put her lips to his ear.

“Talk to my Livia, Charlie. I cannot reach her. Tell her about our conversation. Tell her I am glad she is. . But you will know what to say.”

“I’m afraid your daughter and I no longer speak.”

“Don’t you? Oh, what a child you are, Mr. Cooper! What a perfectly charming child.”

ф

Charlie tells the others about his conversation later, sitting once again in the draughty room he shares with Thomas. It is cold in there, cold enough that his hands and feet grow numb, and their only light is a sliver of silvery sky that outlines the broken shutters. As he tells them of the scar, of his hands on Lady Naylor’s body, he is glad of the dark, glad he cannot see Livia’s expression nor she the rush of blood that momentarily heats his face.

“Smoke is grown in the dark of our livers,” Thomas sums it up drily once Charlie is finished. “Swinburne would not like it. His lot would be done if it were known.”

Livia disagrees. “Why? It does not change anything. Smoke is what it always was: the visible manifestation of vice. How stupid to cover up a truth that does not matter.”

Charlie can hear Thomas shift in response. A shrug, a wave of the arm. How well they know each other, precisely in the dark. For a split second they are back in the dormitory, swapping confidences.

“In any case we learned one thing today,” Thomas says after a while. “Seventy-two hours. That’s when something starts changing in the boy. Whatever it is, they want it to happen, they need it. Which means we have three days to learn the truth. It’s got to do with the sewers. We must go and have a look.”

Charlie looks into himself and finds he agrees. Only: “We don’t know where to go. The sewers, yes. But we don’t even know how to get in.”

“We need the blueprint.”

“She will notice if we steal it. And the plan is too large to copy.”

“Not if we only mark the entrances. And the bits where the two plans differ. The secret passages. The bits Sebastian must have built on the sly.”

“That’s clever!”

“It was Livia’s idea.”

In the dark Charlie can hear her rise. It’s like he has caught them at something: putting their heads together. Plotting the future.

“Good night,” she calls from the door, sounding agitated, enraged.

“Good night,” they answer, then huddle close against the cold.

When sleep comes, it comes with dreams. A black-clad figure, shadowed by a dog.

Charlie never learns whether it is Julius or Renfrew.

LADY NAYLOR

Livia storms in as I am getting ready for bed. I have loosened my hair and sit, on the room’s one rickety chair, combing it. Our hosts have no mirror and it is odd that I should feel the loss of my reflection so keenly. The hair is tangled, greasy with city Soot; the brush soon bristling like a cat in a storm. It would be nice to take a bath before Sebastian and I set off to change the world.

Livia, I am pleased to say, is in a temper. Oh, there remain signs of the nun poking through her demeanour. My long-suffering daughter shouldering the burden of her needling mother. Mostly though she is fuming, stands with her fists buried in her hips.

“You look,” I say into the breathlessness of her anger, “ridiculous in trousers. Here, I had Sebastian buy me some dresses. You can have the green one. It is a little short on me.”

She ignores my words entirely, snorts back the Smoke that’s crept out of one nostril.

“You talked to Charlie,” she manages at last. “You took your clothes off!”

“Is it that which brings you here? You are upset about my lack of decorum. But there is more to it, isn’t there? You are jealous. Jealous of your poor spent mother. It is as bad as that, then.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

I study her, feel the urge to touch her, offer peace. But it does not belong to the vocabulary of our relationship, and at any rate I am rather enjoying her loss of control. She has been prim with me for far too long.

“Poor Livia,” I say. “I saw it the moment Charlie greeted you and Thomas at the door: your whole little romance. You had convinced yourself that you had betrayed him, or some such thing. That you had shifted allegiances, once and for all, to your eternal shame. And how you scowled at him: like a fishwife at a customer. But all the same your heart leapt at the sight. Charlie — alive and in one piece! Or perhaps it wasn’t your heart so much as another organ.”

My daughter flushes, underlines her words with Smoke.

“Don’t be common, Mother!”

“Common? What do you think love is? Sonnets and a wedding ring? Perhaps it is time we had a conversation about flowers and bees.”

She flinches, seems ready to launch herself at me, this jeering heckler of her heartache. It shames me, her pain, and it occurs to me that I am afraid of my daughter, afraid of her disapproval of my choices and plans; that I’d rather have her hate me for my coldness than judge my motives and find them wanting. “I have lost my conscience,” I once wrote to Sebastian in one of those letters that prepared the way to our partnership. But it appears I have merely sent it off to boarding school. Now it has come to call in dirty trousers.

I try an approach. Rise from the chair, take a step, careful and measured, and watch her withdraw. Another pair of steps — first mine, then hers — press her up against the wall. She has changed during the week and a half I have feared for her, grown prettier, both more confident and more vulnerable. I see my own face in hers, just a few years older, the day my father told me that I was to wed. It softens me.

“Poor Livia,” I say, no longer mocking. “Do you think you are the first girl to ask herself whether she should be happy with a nice boy or unhappy with a cad? It is perfectly natural.”

For a moment she seems ready to accept my wisdom; to sit with me atop my bed and share her heartache. Then she remembers herself and slips on that mask of meekness that has separated us ever since my husband lost his wits. She speaks calmly, her face a foot away from mine, the voice demure.

“Charlie says that Father cut you open. From the hip to the ribs. It must be quite a scar.”

And just like that our roles are inverted and heckler has become heckled. She is ready to continue, twist the knife. But I do what she found impossible to do. I start crying.

It takes her a minute before she wraps me in her arms.

ф

So we end up on the bed after all. Her clothes are so dirty she leaves stains on the bedding. She smells, too, of sweat and the street. I cling to her all the same, elbow hooked into elbow. It is well when emotion aligns with strategy. I wish to secure her loyalty. Her cheek rests an inch from mine. She is scrupulous about avoiding its touch.

“How is Father?” she asks, not shifting. “How is his health?”

“As ever, I hope. Thorpe is looking after him. You see, a search was made of our house. By now, the whole of England will be talking about him, poor soul. ‘Mad Baron Naylor.’ How he would have detested such gossip!” I pause, allow my emotions to sweep me from anger to nostalgia. “Do you remember, Livia? How he used to be?”

“Of course I do. He was righteous and gentle. Almost a holy man. Like that famous count in Russia, the one who walks around in peasant smock.”

“Tolstoy? What a funny thing to say! But no. I mean before all that. When you were young.”

“Before? He was — busy. Frantic, even. I remember him sitting in his study with so many papers around him they covered the floor. Always reading and scribbling. Talking over dinner. One month it was the Greeks, then a trip he was planning to the antipodes. He got so very excited, I thought he would start smoking, right in front of the servants.”

“He never made that trip. The antipodes.” It is funny that it should make me smile. “He went to the Argentines instead. Four months and one letter home. The vagabond!”

Livia is quiet at this, caught up in the past. Her head slides towards mine. She remembers herself just in time.

“Why did he go mad, Mother?”

“You know why he did.”

“The Smoke overcame him, and he got lost.”

“No. He had given up smoking. Quite successfully it must be said.”

“Why then?”

“Just that. He had given up and decided to become a saint. It put a strain on him, a terrible strain.”

I want to say more, explain it to her: how he foreswore his experiments and tried to conquer Smoke through a sheer act of will; how he changed week by week until it was too late, driven mad by the effort to be sinless; how he abandoned me and our love. But there are things too private for one’s child. Livia sees my hesitation, slides her feet off the bed and sits up.

“I don’t know when you are lying, Mother, and when you are telling the truth. That’s the whole problem.”

It’s her sadness that impresses me, the sense of loss.

“You won’t tell us what you are up to, will you?” she continues. “This grand plan of yours.”

I shake my head. “I am just like you, Livia. I don’t know if I can trust you.”

She bristles at this. “I brought you here, Mother. I found you shelter! I pulled Thomas aside when he wanted to stop you from infecting the child. I did all this because you promised me answers.”

“Yes, you did all this. But will you tell me who hid you after Julius shot at you? Where those clothes come from?”

My daughter stands silent, head bowed.

“You see, my dear, we really are much the same.”

ф

I don’t want to let her go. She has turned around twice now, and each time I have called her back with a question, something stupid, aimless, asked only to force another moment of her time. It is the first time in years we have attempted any sort of exchange, beyond trading hurtful nothings across the dinner table. But in this specialised skill of talking to one’s daughter I feel utterly inept.

“Tell me,” I try again, inching forward onto more treacherous conversational ground. “What do you want, out of all this?”

When she looks at me in puzzlement, I make a gesture that is meant to encompass the enterprise in which we find ourselves grudging partners, but largely seems directed at the bed. It is fitting enough: not an hour ago found me flat on my knees and fumbling underneath the bed frame, hiding my secrets like some old woman afraid of being robbed. There is not a piece of furniture in the whole room that could be locked.

“Sebastian and I are changing the world,” I add. “There must be something that you want.”

To her credit I see her struggle with it. She is about to give me something pat and worthy, a nunnish answer long-rehearsed. But I have asked her earnestly and earnestness is one thing she finds hard to resist.

“I want to be certain again,” she says at length, “of who I am and what is truth. I want to be inscrutable, immovable, safe in myself. Can you do this, Mother?”

She says it softly, because she knows the answer.

“No, I cannot.”

“What, then, will you do?”

I repeat what I told her before. “I will give the world justice.”

“Virtue?”

“Justice is virtue,” I say, quoting someone my husband was fond of, one of his Greeks.

My daughter wrinkles her nose at this, turns around and leaves.

I retrieve the brush and finish with my hair.

ф

I am about to extinguish the lamp when there is a knock on my door. A soft knock, one that is careful not to be heard throughout the flat. Bemused by this string of visitors, half hoping for, half dreading Livia’s return, I open the door. Mr. Grendel is in his nightshirt and flustered; he wrings his cotton sleeping cap between work-hard hands. A strange man, shy and cringing in his movements; so diffident that I have yet to see him smoke. There are not many who would have stood at the threshold of my boudoir without giving my figure a passing glance.

“Mr. Grendel. This is hardly appropriate.”

“I am sorry,” he says, abject and whispering, his head tilted to one side. “May I. .? I saw your light was on and there is something. . You see, it’s rather important.”

“Oh, out with it!” I laugh, usher him in by his elbow, and sit him down on his own rickety chair. “Go on, speak, Mr. Grendel. It is late and I am in need of my sleep.”

ф

We talk for a full hour. As it turns out, I was wrong about Grendel. He is not diffident nor shy but that rarest of creatures: a man touched by fate who lacks a purpose. His wife has sent him to me to provide him with one.

I do my best to oblige.

PENCIL AND PAPER

Livia sleeps late, her mother’s words refracting in her dreams. By the time she emerges from her room, Sebastian is in the house and there is a new arrangement. Grendel has been made nursemaid to the child. The smokeless man smiles when he emerges from the nursery-prison, and continues smiling when, under Sebastian’s watchful eye, he turns the key in the lock. Then he notices Livia — and starts.

“Caught in the act!” he blushes then adds, as though in apology: “Mrs. Grendel and I, we were not blessed ourselves, you see.”

Grendel flashes her a smile, habitual and fleeting, and runs to do the dishes in the kitchen.

Sebastian stays, studying Livia.

“You disapprove, Miss Naylor.”

Livia shakes her head, wondering what emotion her face has betrayed.

“It’s a good idea. Grendel is a kind man.”

“You know yourself he’s quite a lot more than that! He’s a scientific wonder. At another time. . but, alas, it isn’t possible just now.” He sighs, points at his prisoner’s door. “As it is, Mr. Grendel can make himself useful. I believe he reminds the child of his people at home. Though the resemblance is superficial. In any case, he will help calm the child. The boy is bewildered by Smoke, and I am afraid we smell of it, even when we are not showing.”

Livia’s heart sinks. “So you know.”

“About Grendel’s condition? Oh, yes. He told your mother last night.” Sebastian nods enthusiastically, a man delighted about every scientific riddle on this earth and frustrated only by his own lack of time. “We have given the boy a name. Mowgli. After a recent book, set in the Raj.”

“Mowgli.” Livia too has read it. A boy raised by wolves. The animals decide to send him to the human village so he will learn to control his Smoke. Her mother had dismissed the book. She thought it sentimental; a lie. “How old is he?”

“Hard to say. I should think he was malnourished even before he embarked on his journey. Physically he could be as young as six. Eight, nine? A sullen child. Though his disposition is irrelevant for our purpose.”

Livia takes in the man’s smooth face and clever little hands playing with his umbrella; weighs his accent, the fact that he stole a child and condemned him to live encoffined in a mask. The question comes out before she can think better of it, artless and direct.

“Who are you exactly, Dr. Aschenstedt?”

This brings a grin to Sebastian’s face, boyish.

“Who am I? A scientist.”

“Mother says you are a genius.”

“I suppose I am.” He says it lightly, almost modestly. “I am also a criminal. False papers in my pocket, hiding behind an English name. Under my real name I am wanted in much of Europe. A threat to social order! They are not wrong. I’m a revolutionary, Miss Naylor. A terrorist! But I dislike bombs.” He laughs, boyish still, steps closer to Livia, and confides: “Your two gentlemen friends and I have something in common. Our alma mater. For all we know we have slept in the same beds. And listened to the same sermons. I must ask them some time, trade stories, don’t you think?”

Livia fights being drawn in by this man. A lifetime of being lied to by her elders. Charlie, chained to his teacher’s bed. A little boy stolen in the name of Theory. Emphatic lessons in suspicion.

And yet it isn’t easy.

“What are you up to, Dr. Aschenstedt? Why are you here?”

“Officially? Officially, I am Sebastian Herbert Ashton, engineer, overseeing the building of the sewers. My papers are British. Of course there is the matter of my accent. But then, the English refuse to believe that anyone can learn their tongue, not fluently, you see, so I must be a native after all, reared in some far-flung colony perhaps.” He gives a giggle, quite literally a giggle, the sort of sound some of the girls at school might make after someone has made a chancy remark. “And of course, half my men are foreign. The beauty of the embargo is that nobody receives adequate training here. It is hard to instruct engineers when the books are all censored. ‘Forbidden science,’ ‘immoral physics’—it really is quite funny! So we have Poles and Italians and Czechs and Russians. And Germans, of course. Grand engineers! Without them, London would sink in its stink. The English gentlemen on the project are largely there to supervise their morals and to make sure they finish on time. Good, earnest Liberals these gentlemen are, one and all. A great deal rides on the project, the whole of the Liberal Party’s reputation. A clean London, a moral London. Oh, it’s very ambitious in its way.” Again he giggles. “There you are. For a decade I was not allowed to enter on threat of death; now I get paid to come. But you must excuse me now, Miss Naylor. I am expected at work. Good-bye. Or rather: Au revoir. Auf Wiedersehen.”

ф

Livia watches Sebastian leave and goes looking for Thomas. But it is Charlie she finds, standing by the open window of the room the boys share. She is tempted to leave at once. In the past few days she has come to terms with Thomas’s darkness. It’s Charlie’s kindness, his forgiveness, that are difficult to accept.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” he says, his eyes on the rain outside.

“You heard us talk.”

“Yes. ‘Until I see you again.’ Not ‘good-bye.’” He puts a hand into the downpour outside. “Hundewetter, the Germans call this. Dog weather. That’s about all I remember from class. Isn’t it funny that they make us learn French and German but nobody’s allowed to travel? Nor to read any foreign books.”

He turns his face and she sees his earnest, honest face. It cuts her, not with guilt but with something more complex that has its own flavour of Smoke. Your heart leapt, she hears her mother’s words. Or perhaps some other organ.

“Dog weather,” she says and annoys herself by the cool primness of her pronunciation. “‘Until I see you again.’ You are worried about Julius!” The realisation helps her move past her emotion. She looks out into the street. “Have you seen him?”

“Seen him? No. Only in a dream.” He hesitates, tilts his head with the thought. “I sometimes wonder whether I dreamt him even at Renfrew’s. The stuff of nightmares. And how he pleaded to be saved!” The next moment his eyes are back on hers. A naked gaze.

“You are looking for Thomas, aren’t you?”

It is she who blushes.

“Has he gone out?”

“He realised he needs a pencil and paper. To copy your mother’s plans. Will you believe the Grendels do not have a single pencil in the house? So he borrowed some money from Mrs. Grendel. Or stole it, maybe. When he gets back I am to distract your mother while he searches her room. He thinks she and I have rapport.” He hesitates, swallows the trace of accusation that surfaced in his last phrase. “She tried to seduce me last night, didn’t she? To her cause. I knew it but was seduced all the same. She is very clever.”

“Yes. She tried to seduce me, too.”

“Livia,” he continues, without transition. “Please. You and I, we need to—”

She turns to flee. “Not now, Charlie. Later,” she whispers. “I promise.”

But by this time she is already out the door.

When she walks past the room a little later she sees him standing by the window, his hands shoved out into the rain.

ф

The rain falls hard and perpendicular, unharried by wind. Thomas is soaking wet before he finds a stationer’s. It appears London is in little need of paper. He stops at a butcher’s to ask for some wrapping paper and a stub of pencil, but the man is so suspicious of his request and accent that he won’t sell him anything, not for all the money in the world. Annoyed, but happy too to be out and about, alone with his thoughts, Thomas ventures beyond the familiar streets between Grendel’s flat and the church into a part of town unknown to him. Everywhere there is the bustle of people: noise and mud, the air oddly clean, London’s emotion picked off by the rain.

Before long he reaches a complex of old, dilapidated buildings of such enormous size that they form a hamlet unto themselves. Like the house Grendel has made his home, more than half the structure appears to have burnt down, though here the smell of ashes has long been absorbed into the city’s stink. Despite the fire, a thousand people appear to be living in its medieval shell; have improvised walls with lumber and plaster-stiffened cloth; have opened stalls, a tailor, a carpenter, a quack selling tonics of laudanum and fermented bitters. Thomas walks the length of the building before realising what it used to house. WESTMINSTER CLOTHES AND RAGS, a painted sign proudly announces above the narrow entrance of a shop. A Jew is tending to it, wearing a fur hat, his sidelocks swinging limply in the rain.

The post office is not ten yards from the building that used to be his nation’s Parliament. It surprises Thomas that such a thing exists at all. A guard in postal uniform is positioned outside, billy club in hand. Thomas is worried he will ask for some sort of identification papers, but all he requires of those who present themselves to him is proof of their solvency. Thomas holds up his palmful of coppers and goes inside.

Beyond the door there lies a little pocket of another world. The floors here are made from polished marble, the ceiling recently painted if no longer clean. Gentlemen in well-cut suits are reading newspapers or are queuing to see the postal clerk. Two ladies stand in hushed conversation, their expensive dresses as of yet unmarked by Soot; both wear veils to hide their faces and have footmen in attendance, their liveries hidden under bulky coats. A few dirty messenger boys scurry around but are careful not to address their betters. It’s like Thomas has stepped through a barn door and found a ballroom inside. For a moment he stands dead in his tracks, unsure what to do. Then he shrugs and joins the queue.

It is four deep and well-behaved. It startles him, this good behaviour, like silence after a protracted shout. Nobody grumbles, pushes, swears. They are like an unknown breed, peaceful, inoffensive: people who do not smell. Each shut up within his own intention, isolated and pure. Thomas stands amongst them and feels a pang of longing for this world of manners, the parlour-room peace of Discipline, predictable and without life. Just then a gloved hand touches his shoulder, firmly if without violence. It’s the doorman who has trailed him inside.

“Trade goes over there,” he says, turning the touch into a push, and moving Thomas towards a different clerk, in a separate cubbyhole, hidden far away to one side. Some workmen are queuing there, or rather are jostling, laughing, trading jokes.

Thomas moves over, listens to the men ahead and watches the gentry in their line, the well-drilled silence of the respectable. How many of them are in London on business, braving the city to look after their factories; how many for a holiday in the murk of sin? There must exist a tribe of locals earning a good living by acting as tour guides to the city’s charms.

“Next,” barks the clerk behind the counter.

An urchin, no older than seven, jumps the queue and gets into a shoving match with the man at the front.

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It’s Thomas’s turn. He has been skipped over twice, defended his place with an elbow, exchanged a fleck of boisterous Smoke with a half-drunk apprentice mailing a letter to his mam. Thomas asks for two pencils and five large sheets of drafting paper. The clerk grumbles but fetches them, the paper already lightly stained. While he is gone, Thomas’s gaze falls on four printed posters, nailed to the wall next to the man’s chair. Each holds the drawing of a face. Charlie is well-rendered, looking young and a little fatter in the cheek. Livia is unrecognisable, eyes lowered and shrinking into the shadow of a bonnet. He himself looks fierce, the jaw jutting, a thunder of brows. It’s Julius who is oddest, hung separately, and staring pale and startled from under a floppy fringe. The clerk notices Thomas’s stare; turns to follow his gaze, then rests his eyes on Thomas.

“Well then,” he mutters into Thomas’s sudden terror and takes some coins straight out of his palm. “‘Missing. No Reward.’ It’s not like I give a shit.”

He hands over the folded-in-half sheaves then chases Thomas with a wave of his hand. “Get, boy. Next.”

A man has elbowed past before Thomas has recovered enough to step aside.

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Outside, Thomas sprints a good half mile then stops for breath. The rain has turned to drizzle but even so the paper he purchased is already damp. He folds the sheets, shoves them down the waistband of his trousers, then stands breathing, elated by his escape. A beggar, his back propped up against a house front, sits watching him, one leg a calfless stump.

“You’re looking like the cat that made off with the cake,” he calls. “Spare some pennies, friend?”

Thomas laughs and strolls over to him.

“Anybody ever give you any?”

“Sure they do. The good people of London!”

“Really?” Thomas pictures it, this city of ruffians, doling out charity. “Why?”

The man shrugs. “They just do. Sentimental, I suppose. Got themselves a heart.”

Thomas accepts this answer and puts some pennies into the man’s cup. He crouches down so he and the beggar can speak face-to-face.

“If you could,” he asks, his mind wandering back to the twin queues at the post office, “if someone gave you the power. Would you magic away the Smoke? Stop it, I mean. Make it disappear.”

The beggar eyes him, greedy for another coin.

“Sure,” he shouts. “Stop it, I say! To hell with Smoke.”

“Really? You wouldn’t miss it?”

“Then don’t,” the man backtracks. “Keep it how it is. Nuttin’ wrong with it. Only yer undies chafe a little on yer privates.”

“And what do you think of rich folk?”

“The rich?” Reckless now, enjoying their game. “Hang ’em! Hang ’em high.”

“And the Queen?”

“Oh, I like ’er! Hang ’em but save the Queen!”

“How about love, then? Can it exist? Real love, here in the meanness of the city?”

“Sure it does. Got a baby girl. Clutch her to my chest so hard each morn, we smoulder like embers.”

“Here,” says Thomas, and gives him all his remaining coins. “You earned it. You may be the wisest man in the whole of London.”

“Sure I am. And in the whole Empire besides.”

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Thomas returns late-morning. A nod and a look is enough to draw Charlie out of his melancholy. The moment is as good as any: Mrs. Grendel is out bartering for food, Sebastian is building his sewer, and Grendel has gone to tell the priest he shan’t be coming to work for a few days.

Livia watches them assume their roles: the burglar and his assistant. A confidence man is what the newspapers would call him: someone who can charm the petticoats off a schoolma’am. The beauty about Charlie is that he does not even realise his own gift.

And indeed it proves easy. Charlie simply enters the kitchen, sits down on the side of the table that will ensure her mother’s face is turned away from the hallway and the door to her own room. It must be, Livia finds herself thinking, that her mother is bored. It cannot be easy being stuck here, waiting, surrounded by her stroppy daughter and her friends. She could do with a bath, a walk, a horse ride around the estate. But Lady Naylor is a gaoler now.

A gaoler cannot leave his gaol.

“You know about Grendel,” Charlie begins, frank and guileless in his guile. “Sebastian said he told you last night.”

“Yes, he did. I should have noticed it earlier, I suppose, but my mind was elsewhere.”

“Aren’t you shocked?”

“Oh, but I was! Who could have dreamed it? Though it is not entirely unprecedented.” She purses her lips, leans forward, closer to him. “Have you ever been to an asylum, Mr. Cooper? A hospital for the insane. I toured one some years ago, after my husband fell ill. These days they are constructed according to the Pentonville model. Individual cells, spread out along long, spoke-like corridors, so the inmates don’t infect each other with their Smoke. Once a week the orderlies go into each cell and scrape off the Soot, to sell it to the manufacturers of cigarettes. On the sly, of course, though the proprietors know and receive a cut. As for the inmates, some are like my husband. Others have nothing wrong with their intellectual faculties at all. They are criminals, or libertines, gentlemen who have flaunted their vice. And others yet — well, for a long time now there has existed a rumour. A whisper amongst scholars; a footnote in an article by an Oxford don. That there was a man, an inmate, down in the cellars of New Bethlem Hospital, who was just like your friend here. A freak of nature! He must have died in his cell.”

“But why was he locked away?”

“Don’t let’s be naïve, Mr. Cooper. He was that which mustn’t exist. A virtuous man without pedigree. Monstrous, impossible, a threat to the realm.”

Livia listens to all this, hovering in the corridor outside, a relay station between the two boys. She gives Thomas a nod. He saunters across, into her mother’s room, quietly but without haste; leaves the door open so she can warn him if need be. Charlie, receiving Livia’s nod, hastens to carry on.

“There is something I don’t understand, Lady Naylor. You see, Grendel used to smoke. He told Livia and Thomas: that he smoked as a child. So what happened to him?”

“Impossible to say with certainty. Some kind of metabolic corruption, I suppose. A disease, one that attacks not just the Smoke glands but the whole of the affective system. It must have destroyed large parts of it. The part that governs behaviour we call sin.”

“Then isn’t that the answer? A disease that will make us good.”

Livia hears her mother grow agitated at this.

“It would not work, Mr. Cooper. The disease is clearly noninfectious. But even if we could bottle it somehow, and pass it on at will. .” She pauses, composes herself, leans forward towards Charlie. “Let me ask you this. Do you admire Mr. Grendel?”

“No. I pity him.”

“Why?”

Charlie answers at once. “He has no choice about being good.”

“Precisely. Imagine if a man like Grendel fell into the hands of Renfrew. How long before he’d start dreaming of a race of men just like him? It’s what he wants after all. A nation of choirboys. Of automata. And he’s a good scientist, your Dr. Renfrew. God knows what he might cook up in his laboratory.”

“Renfrew’s dead.”

“Dead? No, he isn’t. I asked Sebastian to make inquiries. Gravely injured, it is said. Stabbed and mauled by an intruder. There are rumours that it took ‘Continental medicine’ to save him.”

“I am glad he’s alive.”

Charlie says it slowly, after much thought, a note of wonder in his voice. Livia hears it and feels a pang of pride constrict her chest.

Then she turns away from him and watches Thomas search her mother’s room.

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The room is small and stuffy with spent air. Other than the heavy-framed bed, it holds a wardrobe, a washbowl, and a chair. Thomas stands still for a minute, lets his eyes wander. The wardrobe’s door is broken and stands open; it holds nothing but clothes, Lady Naylor’s hanging from hooks, the Grendels’ displaced onto the wardrobe floor. The bed is made; when Thomas runs his hand under the sheet he finds a negligee. A silver hairbrush is tucked beneath the pillow. Underneath the bed stands milady’s travelling valise, holding underclothes and a collection of French poetry. Its frontispiece shows a naked woman in the embrace of a swan.

The sewer maps are hidden between mattress and bed-base. Thomas unfolds them, one next to the other, slips the drafting paper out of his trousers. It is thin enough for the print to shimmer through. Copying it all would take hours. But he does not need all. He finds a line marking the river, works up from there, copying the main thoroughfares first of the “Ashton” plan, then traces the turnoffs marked only on the plan entitled “Aschenstedt.” Back and forth he works, quickly, his hands sure, listening with half an ear to the conversation outside. When he is satisfied with his copy and has replaced the plans, he looks over at Livia, sees her urging him to leave. But he isn’t done yet. Something else has caught his eye, a box, quite large but shoved to the corner of the bed frame in such a manner that its form merges with the bulk of the oaken leg. Thomas drops down onto his stomach and pictures Lady Naylor do the same, to deposit it there. The box is heavy as he slides it out; varnished wood reinforced in metal at the corners. The latches are not locked, open on a flask sunk in a satin-lined depression that precisely matches its proportions. He pulls it out, notices its weight: a squat, short-necked bottle made of tinted glass, holding perhaps as much as half a gallon. The stopper is buried with care but is mounted with a brass ring to aid its removal; the glass of the bottleneck seems inordinately thick. Thomas raises the jar, feels a viscous liquid shift inside. Livia gestures, but he won’t be hurried, casts around and finds a cup Lady Naylor has brought here from the kitchen, its bottom encrusted with a smudge of tea. It takes both hands to pour. The liquid moves sluggishly, then leaps out in a sudden gulp of purest black. Thomas holds it far from him, watches it cling to the cup, receiving his hand’s shudder and transmuting it into the ponderous slide of molten lead.

Quickly now, putting down the cup for a moment, he returns the bottle to its satin-cushioned, bottle-shaped hole, and the box to the back of the bed. At just this moment, the conversation outside hits a lull. Livia’s eyes warn him, swivel back to Charlie.

Thomas freezes and stands waiting, in his fist a liquid distillation of all the darkness in this world.

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Lady Naylor makes to rise. She mustn’t. And so Charlie detains her, with words of course, some truth he has been working towards, Livia can see it in the hot-eared earnestness of his face. It’s an answer to Renfrew perhaps, to that which he did to him, in the name of good morals and the future of the realm.

It may work on her mother just as well.

“The most difficult thing,” Charlie says, his voice rising half an octave, a boy nervous, confessing his soul, “the most difficult thing is to compromise. To sit in between, not leaning too far one way nor the other, not taking things to their conclusion. To be sensible. Boring.”

Livia’s mother scoffs at his words. But she resettles in her chair.

“Can it be that you are a coward, Mr. Cooper?”

Livia watches Charlie flush at this, swallow his Smoke. He is speaking to her, Livia, now, only to her, his words low and precise.

“Perhaps I am. A coward.”

“Oh, Charlie! It appears I have made you angry.”

“That’s why it is so hard to stand in the middle. Someone will always point their finger at you and mock.”

Her mother shrugs as though to concede the point, then props her chin up on her hands. “The problem is this, Mr. Cooper. Your compromise is nothing other than the status quo. It’s sitting on your hands and being decent. It will never change the world. But then, your parents would like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play stupid now, Mr. Cooper. You come from one of England’s great families, wouldn’t you say? By pedigree. But also by wealth. Of course, much of this wealth isn’t as ancient as all that. Two generations, no more. But wealth is like a spinster: it is impolite to inquire about its age. The truth is your family’s fortune has grown tenfold in less than thirty years, and along with it, its influence, its standing. It begs the question: how?”

All at once, Charlie’s face turns pale.

“That’s what Renfrew said to me,” he whispers. “‘Ask yourself where all the money comes from.’”

“And, Mr. Cooper, have you?”

He hesitates. “I don’t know.”

“Hazard a guess then.”

Again he hesitates. Then — eyes rising, committed to the truth — the word tumbles out of him: “Sweets.”

“B&S. Quite. Shares in the factory, up until recently. A royal licence to import the raw ingredients. Colonial holdings. Import licences. The Spencers bought up the monopoly of manufacture, of course, but the business as a whole is far too lucrative to leave to one family alone. Did you know your father was in Parliament yesterday, introducing a new bill? A grief-stricken father: he thinks you dead and blames some Irish migrants who were found with Julius’s gun. The Tory papers call it the New Isolationism. A return to purity, both moral and ethnic. Kick out all foreigners, all nonconformists. Chase off the Catholics and Jews. Limit trade to what we import ourselves from our colonies. No more foreign sin! A high-minded bill. And incidentally rather lucrative for those who hold an import licence. Your father can avenge you and line his pockets all in one quick swoop.”

She pauses just long enough for Charlie to put his head in his hands.

“Oh, don’t berate yourself, Mr. Cooper. All the grand families are involved. In sweets and, with the more adventurous families, cigarettes. It’s a system, a network, the weave of the land. Compromise won’t change it.” She rises. “It has been a pleasure talking to you, young man, but it is getting late. Mrs. Grendel will be back any moment and will want her kitchen.”

In response to Livia’s gesture, Thomas emerges from Lady Naylor’s room. He is just in time to cross the hallway, brush past Livia, and disappear unseen.

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Dinner is toad-in-the-hole and mash, lies heavy in the stomach. Sebastian comes and leaves again, surprises them with sticky pastries that Charlie has no heart to eat. He remains morose and restless, spends an hour staring through the keyhole at the child. Grendel has found some toys for him, and the little boy sits on the ground, spinning a spindle, before picking it up and smashing it against a wall. It is eerie, watching his anger, with no Smoke rising from his pores.

Later yet, they sit together, Charlie, Thomas, and Livia, blocking the door to the boys’ bedroom with their backs. A teacup stands in front of them, not far from their feet, and a sheet of paper lies spread out on their laps. It is, thinks Charlie, like they are preparing a walking trip into the hills. For the third time now, he bends to study the crude map and for the third time fails to wrest meaning from it, seeing only its surface pattern, nothing else. Line scrawls on a dirty page; turnoffs marked; crossings circled. A map to the underworld. Legible only for the dead.

And to Thomas.

“I think it must be this.” He points, tapping his finger on a row of rectangles, a finger long. “It’s the only place that’s different; and they are in an area quite separate from the rest. And look here, this is the same place drawn in cross section. The rectangles look like they’ve been let into the floor.”

“They might be pools,” Livia suggests, thinking perhaps of the wet docks that played harbour to Mowgli’s ship. “A series of pools.”

“Could be.” Thomas points at another section of the map. “This here is the river. And this here must be an entrance. Tomorrow I will go and find it. If I can match the shape of the riverbed to the map, I should be able to locate the street.”

“What about this then?” Livia asks, pointing her chin at the cup.

“You know what it is,” Thomas mutters. “Soot. Murderers’ Soot. The kind your mother was collecting when I first saw her. The laboratory was full of it.”

He leans towards it, reluctant to touch it, then dips a pinkie in, retrieves it, holds it close to the lamp. They put their heads together, stare at its darkness. As she did the previous day, Livia pulls out the stub of a cigarette, undoes the paper, picks through its contents. It’s like comparing road grit with purest tar. There is no easy way of telling whether this Soot is quickened or remains inert.

“How will your mother save the world with this?” Thomas wipes his finger on the floor, then rubs the spot with a heel, unable to erase the mark.

“We could ask her. Press her on the point.”

“No, Charlie. No more questions, no more lies, no more oaths ‘on her husband’s life.’ The only thing worth knowing is what we learn for ourselves.”

Neither Livia nor Charlie sees fit to disagree. Instead, Livia asks Thomas, “Are we holding on to it?”

“You do it. I cannot stand to look at it.”

“Then we need a container with a lid. I will ask Grendel for a mustard jar.”

“He is spending time with your mother, Grendel is. I saw them talking just now. She talks. He listens.”

Charlie says it flatly, without insinuation, but immediately Livia is in a temper.

“He is helping Mowgli!” She makes to say more, but then jumps up and storms out, hands deep in her pockets like the urchin as whom she is dressed.

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They remain alone in silence, Thomas and Charlie, legs sprawled in front of them across the floor. It is like it was at school; a mouldy wall where bathroom tiles should have cooled their backs. It’s good this, Charlie thinks, feeling his friend’s weight against his shoulder. Familial; familiar. He is sitting by Thomas’s good ear. It would feel less of a comfort, perhaps, whispering into the wound.

“I have been thinking,” he says, “about what Lady Naylor said. She must have a hand in cigarette manufacture. There is no other way she would know: about the fact that asylums sell the manufacturers their Soot.”

“Do you think she owns the factory?”

“No. She would not need to borrow money if she did.”

“The Spencers then.”

“Them, and a few others. Cigarettes and sweets. The bedrock of Empire.” Charlie spits, feels his breath grow dark. “Funny thing about greed,” he continues. “It doesn’t generate Smoke. I imagine it’s quite a problem for our theologians.”

Thomas turns to him, puts an arm around his shoulder.

“Don’t be bitter, Charlie. It does not become you.”

Charlie tries not to be. It is difficult, he finds. He had no cause before to feel ashamed for being a Cooper.

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As they settle down to sleep, Thomas asks him one more question. He asks it gently, into the two-foot gap that separates their bedding.

“Have you talked to Livia?” he asks.

“Not yet.”

“You should.” Then: “She misses you.”

“Don’t, Thomas. I thank you. But don’t.”

Thomas’s response carries the notes of genuine wonder.

“Christ, Charlie, can’t you smell her Smoke? Can’t you smell what she feels?”

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The next morning Sebastian calls before dawn. He is in a rush, will barely come in, won’t take off his coat. All he wants is to talk. When Charlie, sleep-creased, alerted by his urgent whisper, arrives in the front hallway he is unsurprised to find Grendel to be part of the conversation. Or rather: Grendel is being spoken to, Sebastian’s hand on his wrists. The tones of instruction; too quiet to carry. Lady Naylor is there, too, holding Sebastian’s doctor’s bag. It’s heavy enough to give a list to her tall frame. In the kitchen doorway Mrs. Grendel stands. She, too, is out of earshot, at five feet’s remove. Their gazes meet, hers and Charlie’s. A moment later she beckons to him.

“What’s going on?” he asks once he has followed her into the kitchen. Her back is turned, her hand reaching into a clay pot on the sideboard.

“Lady Naylor sent me out for this,” she replies. “Yesterday. Had me walk for miles, going somewheres where they wouldn’t know me. So it won’t attract attention, me growing rich one day to the next.”

She takes hold of Charlie’s palm and deposits a brown, sticky lump in it. Sugar.

“Go on,” she says, “you need fattening, you do.”

He puts it in his mouth, speaks past the shock of its flavour, sickly and moist.

“What is Sebastian saying? Something go wrong?”

“Don’t know,” she answers, sneaking some sugar herself. “Trust in Grendel.”

But as her tongue picks through her teeth, hunting sweetness, Charlie wonders whether he can.

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Sebastian leaves soon after that. A minute later, Livia is at the front door. She slips out so quickly, Charlie has no time to think. A glance his way before the door closes. An unspoken question. The suggestion of a shrug.

Then she is gone.

By the time Charlie has his shoes on, there is no sign of her, the street outside choking with strangers, refuse, drifting fog. Back in their room Thomas is still sleeping, twitchy in his dreams.

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Livia returns just before lunch. Thomas has woken and left, in search of the sewer entrance. Charlie offered to come, but they did not want to let Lady Naylor out of their sight. It is better this way: it affords Charlie time to gather his courage. All he needs now is for Livia to return before his friend.

Charlie hears her footsteps in the stairwell. He has been waiting for their sound and slips out onto the tiny landing to catch her there. It has been raining and she is wet, her hair clinging to her head and face. It makes the ears look large, their rims delicate and pale, like fine bone china. The miner’s jacket is big around her shoulders, weighted down by water and dirt. Charlie looks and looks. He wants to tell her that all is forgiven; that he does not want to stand in her and Thomas’s way; that things are not her fault and, anyway, there are bigger things afoot. He wants to touch her, hold her hand — like a friend, a brother — rest his forehead on her shoulder.

“You followed Sebastian,” he says.

“Yes. I found out where he lives. A hotel, not far from here. I thought it might be useful to know.”

“Good idea.”

She steps up to the landing, makes to round him. But then she stops, inches away. The cock of her head is that strangest of mixtures. Modesty and strength. City grime dusting the fine down of her cheeks.

A pencil line of Smoke rises from Charlie, light and grey. He is glad for it. It will tell her what he feels.

She looks at it without flinching; opens her mouth, tasting it, tasting him; reaches out and laces her fingers into his.

“Whom do you love?”

He says it and sees Livia smile over the phrase. What would Thomas have said? But that’s just it: Thomas wouldn’t have asked.

“You,” she says. “Him. Both.”

“Yes. But you love him like a bride. And me like a sis—”

She interrupts, cheeks flushing, displeased at being told what she feels.

“It isn’t as simple as that.” She snorts, steps up, kisses him. “There! I’ve been learning to smoke.”

It’s a peck or rather a bite: his lips between hers, tugged and held for the length of a breath; a passing of Smoke, of emotion — hunger, confusion, triumph, fear — from skin to skin and lung to lung. Then Livia rounds him and opens the door.

Behind it, Grendel stands, looking flustered, Mowgli’s porridge on a tray.

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Charlie watches the feeding. The boy won’t handle the spoon himself but he will sit there, mouth open, and allow Grendel to deposit a spoonful; will chew it slowly and sigh, world-weary, his eyes screwed up and cold. When the bowl is nearly finished the boy holds a dollop on his tongue then suddenly bends forward and spits it at Grendel’s feet. It is deliberate, a test: the small brown face insolent, the body tense, ready to bolt. Grendel kneels, cleans it up, offers another spoonful from the bowl. But the child has moved away and wrapped himself in blankets. All this Charlie sees from the keyhole. When Grendel turns to leave, the boy looks after him. A curious look. Suspicion mingled with the dawning of trust. Charlie rises just before Grendel pushes open the door.

“Can I go to him?” he asks, but Grendel shakes his head. “Mr. Sebastian does not wish it.”

“Why do you follow his orders?”

“The boy is scared,” Grendel says. “You are kind, but you will scare him. With me, he knows I won’t smoke. Even when he bites. He can sense that I’m harmless. Down to my bones.”

Charlie understands what he means. Grendel radiates something. Holiness; an absence. A man estranged from sin.

“Then Livia is right. You are an angel.”

Grendel hesitates. “I fear I am one of those who stood at the edge of heaven, looking down. Dreaming about their Fall.”

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Thomas returns late. Finding the sewer entrance proved harder than he thought, his hand-drawn map of the underground and the city’s streets impossible to match. In the end he chanced upon an Ashton engineer in a company cab and ran behind it until it led him to a work site. Thomas snuck into the sewer for several hundred yards before being thrown out by a foreman. What he saw was a maze of tunnels and a mechanical pump the size of a house, pumping water down a giant bore. He got nowhere near those giant pools marked in pale rectangles upon his map.

“We are running out of time,” he keeps saying. “It’s been forty-eight hours since they infected Mowgli. Another day and he’ll start changing. We must find out what she is planning before then.”

“Then we will go tonight,” Charlie suggests. “We must take him along. In case we don’t want to return.”

Thomas and Livia are quick to agree. They are all fed up with waiting. One might start a revolution, it comes to Charlie, or thwart it, just from this, a hunger for movement, for action.

“Mowgli is locked in,” Livia reminds them. “But Grendel has the key. I will talk to him.”

They see her speaking to Grendel later. It is easy that evening to catch him alone: Lady Naylor has been much preoccupied and has kept to her room. It is a whispered conversation, private, at the end of the corridor; Livia holding her holy man’s hand. His face is so kindly, so prone to blushes and nervous smiles that it is only by the tilt of Livia’s chin they can guess at the urgency of their talk.

“Will he help us?” Thomas asks her bluntly when she returns.

“Of course he will!”

“And he won’t—”

“He gave his word,” she barks, storming off, leaving both Thomas and Charlie in the wake of her Smoke. They sniff it like the lovelorn pups they are.

“Pissy,” Thomas decides.

“But she’s pretty when she is.”

And for a moment they forget, almost, that they are to fight a duel for the favours of her heart.

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They decide on leaving early that night, but deep in the flat they can hear Lady Naylor stir and move about, so they wait until the moon is gone and the night made blacker by rain. The plan is a compromise of sorts, between Livia’s trust and the boys’ suspicion. Thomas will sneak into the room in which the Grendels sleep and see whether he can find the key to the child’s cell. If not, Livia will wake their host and remind him of his promise.

“He will help us without fail.”

But in the end there is no need to wake Grendel. When they step into the hallway, they see his wife’s shadow, sitting alone in the kitchen, the faint glow of embers in the stove behind her back. Not for the first time Charlie notes their ignorance of her Christian name. She remains, to them, a stranger. They start, crowd around her, assault her with whispers.

“Quiet,” they hiss. “Don’t be alarmed.”

And: “We need to speak to Grendel. He must unlock the child’s door.”

The angel’s wife is stony-faced. She seeks out Livia’s form amongst them, shorter than the boys’ and framed by pale hair.

“I know. He told me you had asked him. He told me everything.” The woman rises, pushes through them, pulls something out the pocket of her skirt. “There is no need to wake him. I have the key.”

The door squeaks when she swings it open for them. Charlie winces, but nothing stirs in Lady Naylor’s room across.

“Quick now,” says Thomas. “The child must not call out.”

They rush forward, into darkness, find the blankets, the bunk. Behind them, the door falls back into its frame, the lock snaps.

“I’m sorry,” says Mrs. Grendel. Her voice is dull, muffled by wood, by distance. “He said you mustn’t follow. They’ll be back before long.”

Around them the room is empty, the child long gone.

CAESAR

They capture Nótt. This happens before Mother but after Sebastian. I’m having trouble with words, with time. I’m different now, transformed. A buzzard climbing the updrafts of Smoke. My bones hollow, my body a husk: reinhabited. I, the dark twin of my former self, flesh of my own liver. I am my own father and mother; Renfrew my midwife; the mask my baptism and my last rites. Children cower when I pass them in the streets.

They take Nótt away. A man with a billy club, breaking her legs. They tie a rope around her neck and drag her; her jaws snapping, a whine in her throat, not a bark. I watch them do it, and I do nothing. It is of no consequence. Nótt is the past, my boyhood, my becoming. I trained her nose for Smoke. My own nose is better now, better than hers. I can smell your needs across the chill of a city square, can sort their flavours, weigh each urge: taxonomise. What I like, though, is to get close, inhale you like a flower. Dogs with their noses up each other’s arses. I understand it now. The bouquet of vice. Bottle it and you’ll be rich.

But, of course: I am already rich.

London is an ocean of Smoke. People float on it like scum: waterlogged, helpless, half aware of others circling in the depths. I came to it and plunged, handed myself over to its rhythms; its storms and tides; its eddies and swells. Cold, rich, salty. I plunged and I gorged. Not on food, mind. I don’t remember what I ate. Refuse, wild things scuttling in the alley; scoops of old, encrusted Soot. My head is light these days, my stomach a knot. My clothes hang from me like rags.

Here is how I pass the hours. I walk the streets. Stand in the thoroughfares, openmouthed, imbibing every current, belching it back into the air. Smoke flowing through the filter of my body. Irritation turning to anger; drunken joy to mischief; boisterousness to wounded pride: behind me a dark wake, dragging others off their paths. Whirlpools of corruption. I am Smoke’s slave and also its master; drift like flotsam yet command its tides. Dialectics. A Fritz philosopher called Hegel. I am Aufhebung: my own cancellation; a new, a higher version of myself. I am the end of history. I played dice with a gang of child thieves in Hampstead; wrestled a beggar in a ditch by Covent Garden and bit off his nose; danced the polka with a lunatic from Palestine, loused his hair and broke his face. I am a leech, a dog, a sparrow. I am a moraine eel. I am, I am, I am. I’m having trouble with words, with time, with order.

Order!

First. First I came to London. Trailing him: Charlie Cooper. Nótt and I, sharing the road: on my knees, half the time, my nose to her snout, palms in the dirt, sniffing for his trace. We lost it, both of us. He smokes too little, that one, and there were too many others, covering up. Siren songs all over the city, calling to me, moth to the flame. A boardinghouse in Clapham. An opium den in Limehouse. A mother clutching her stillborn, all alone under a bridge. Distractions. I am he: a boy in a sweetshop, blindfolded, sniffing for a single ginger nut.

Then: a trace. No, not of the one I followed. The other one. My cousin, my double. But how different his Smoke smells to me now. Where once I sensed rivalry, I now taste promise; where I saw hatred, I now divine kinship. But how weak it seems, this shred of Smoke, leeched by doubt and temperance; how distant from the moment we stood in the ring and beat paths to one another’s souls. I want to find him, wake him to his nature. Taste him, own him, crawl into his skin. Ingestion, osmosis. Cannibalism. Flesh of my flesh, Smoke of my Smoke. In pain and rage we shall become one.

Order though, order! The world of man has sequence. Cause and effect. The world of Smoke is different. Noumenon: the thing-in-itself. Kant? Cunt! I am Smoke’s avatar. I am its prophet, its priest, its monk. I am—

Order!

First. First I come to London. Then comes the trace. Too faint to follow. Chasing it, losing it. A church, the river, distractions.

Then — Sebastian. I remember where he lives. It is like floating up from the dark of the ocean: relearning the skills of men. Planning. Remembering. Thinking in sentences, in words. All against my newfound nature: my mouth level with the waterline, heart, lungs, and liver in the waves. Leviathan circling at my feet. The Regency. A hotel for gentlemen; porters by the door. Licenced sweets in their mouths. Uniforms speckled with London’s Soot. Room 14. Sebastian, Ashton, Aschenstedt. Smoke, Soot, and Ash.

There is no light in his room, no movement behind the window. No matter; I wait. Darkness falls. Sebastian returns. His Smoke has touched him, has seeped into his clothes. The faintest of traces. I could stop him at the entrance, make him talk. But it is better to wait, let him lead me to him. Sebastian goes upstairs and turns on the light. One can see it from the square. That’s when I learn there are other watchers. First two, then more, chins raised to his window. Men in long overcoats, truncheons clipped to their belts. One at each entrance to the square. They spot us soon after I have spotted them. Perhaps they have a description: Renfrew’s killer, wanted by magistrates. A gentleman and his hound. It’s Nótt they capture: they see me too but hesitate; allow me to slip away. Fear. I catch its smell and scuttle off; watch across the shoulder of the throng.

Nótt makes it easy for them. A sick dog, she is, ever since Renfrew. My smell has changed, she sniffs me with suspicion, no longer sure of her own master. Keeps her distance, always six steps behind. A cast-off shadow, chasing the memory of love. Head down, tail tucked, forlorn. I should have gotten rid of her before. But it is hard to kill old habits.

It takes four of them, converging on her, arms spread out like wrestlers. A crowd gathers at once, eager to see. It separates me from the action. I watch from afar. There is a flavour to the one with the club. He need not have broken her legs but he does so anyway, Smoke rising from his shaven cheeks like a blush that catches fire. He is fair-haired and slight, but in the cast of his mouth he has something of Mr. Price. A man with potential; sergeant to this platoon of thugs. They drag Nótt into a waiting cab. One of the men goes along, the rest resume their watching. Patient, expectant, eyes glued to his window, two floors up. I remain out of sight, cower in the mouth of an alley.

We wait.

Sebastian leaves before dawn. They all fall in line with him, strung out across the length of a street. I make up the rear. Already I know he has spotted them: a thread of Smoke following him, of fear and defiance, too weak to be visible, a beacon to my nose. How simply he gives us all the slip. He walks to work, a satchel in one fist. The sewers. I paid for them, studied the plans. A guard hutch outside a hole in the wall. It swallows him. The watchman turns the pursuers away.

There are other ways in. It takes me a while to find one that is free of guards, my mind tracing the memory of neatly drawn lines. Down below, I find what he’s been building. Iron bars stop me, I give them the slip. Mother lied to me. An investment opportunity, she said, a vineyard of sorts, ripe for the harvest. A mine, an oil well. A pit of dirt. Another lie. Another betrayal.

How many have there been?

Rage takes hold of me, breeds madness. I step beyond words. Daniel and Stephen from Donegal are walking with me, Renfrew in their midst. Mr. Price holds a lamp. Green tiling, Caracalla. A room beyond the laws of physics. Light holds no flame here; past turns to present. I bathe, I feed. My stomach bulges but my limbs are weak.

Order!

He pulls me back. I catch his scent, it carries on a ventilation draught, recalls me to the world of thought. He is here. Not close, not in this chamber, but in some tunnel far away, where the sewer meets the city above. It lures me back; a long ascent. My cousin, my mirror, my bride. Blood wedding; together we’ll be twice myself.

I leave the sewers on all fours. Dark outside, the sun long set, beggars jeering at me, then covering their faces when I pass. The trail is fresh; is sweet with courage, with desire, with doubt. His destination: a house half burnt. Soot mixing with soot. I look up the stairs. He is inside.

But so is Mother.

Her Smoke has a scent all its own, sweet and treacly like a sick man’s piss. The baron’s doing. He cut her deep, Mother showed me the scar. My fingers down her bodice. Seduction: a way of reminding me that I came from her womb. She has betrayed me, used me, given me life. I hate her, I love her. Commonplaces: every mother’s son. I am reborn, remade, a thing of her dark dreams. I am my own becoming. I am the alpha and the omega. I am. . I am not ready for her yet.

I wait. The house draws me, repels me in turn. I squat in the gateway down below. They are all inside. He. Charlie. Livia. Half sister, empress for a day. He wants her. She wants—

Mother.

I’m afraid of her.

But I shot Mr. Price. Father figure; hole for a heart. I could kill her at a hundred yards. A twitch of the finger, no need to look her in the eye. One hundred yards. But the Irish kept the gun.

I squat in the gateway, watch a tart serve clients in the mouth of the alley across. The men smoke. She does not. Only with the last one does she finally catch, converting his lust to her anger, pale silvery green. Alchemy. Like a goose eating grass and shitting gold. She pulls down her skirts and bolts. The moon rises then is lost in cloud. It rains. I stick my tongue out, each drop seeded with Soot. Sand corns in oysters. Pearls for a swine.

Time.

I am no good with time. Half the night gone in the blink of an eye. Then the door opens above and I hide. Mother crosses the yard. Behind her a man, an abomination, carrying a boy, a cripple, a blank. Two rents in the fabric of Smoke. My blood puckers. Puckers, I say: not the skin, the blood, a scrotum dunked in ice. They are in a hurry, Mother and man, walk quickly into the rain. I know where they are heading. Mother. I shot Mr. Price. If only I had kept the gun.

But first: inside. To him. Smoke wells up, consumes me. Rage. Yearning. Time. I am no good with time. A minute, an hour, just to take the first step. Put a leash on my Smoke. A game, let’s make a game of it. Savour it. Sommelier. Wine is bitter under the tongue.

At the top of the stairs: a seam of his Smoke. Old, caked in, stuck to the brick. I put my lips to it. Feeding or kissing? A bloom of mould growing up the wall underneath. Mould and Soot. London’s flowers. They should put them on its crest. Ahead, the door is locked. I stand there sniffing. Time? I am no good with time.

Order!

Who am I? Lord Spencer? Julius? Caesar. Et tu. Before (before Nótt, after London; before) I entered a church. He had been there: a trace of him on the steps by the gate. The man inside crossed himself. High Anglican: a confession box like a coffin, the priest slumping on its stool. The haste of drunk fingers. Forehead, belly, both sides of the chest. It made me chuckle. The devil, then? The devil is a schoolboy. I stare at my hands. My skin has turned grey, like ash.

A fist of ash.

It knocks gently on the door.