Smoke

LESSONS

They take a late-morning train. Thomas calculates they should get there well before nightfall, but they have to change twice and miss their connection at Rugby. The station is dreary and empty, the waiting room a row of wooden benches clustered around an oven without heat. A conductor tells them there will be a train within the hour, but three o’clock passes, then four, then five, before he reappears, buttoned up tight and smelling of Smoke and brandy, informing them there has been a delay.

It is eight by the time they board the train and they are frozen through. In their compartment a stack of blankets sits folded on the luggage rack. They fetch them down and wrap themselves in the plain brown wool which appears clean but gives off a bitter, funky smell, as of soiled sawdust.

Thomas and Charlie have spoken little in the past hour. The long day of waiting has exhausted their conversation and they are both busy with their hunger, having shared the last sandwich and the last apple not an hour after pulling out of Oxford, taking turns, bite for bite, each making sure he did not get the last. It left them nibbling at scraps in the end, laughing, passing the wretched piece of apple core back and forth, until Thomas swallowed it, seeds, stem, and all, and nearly choked himself with laughter. Now their silence sits with them in the compartment while, outside, high winds batter the train.

“You hungry?” Charlie asks at one point, his own stomach growling in the dark.

“No,” Thomas lies. “You?”

“No.”

“Tired?”

“Not a bit.”

“Same here.”

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They both startle awake as the train comes to a stop. Mechanically they shake off the blankets and fetch their luggage down only to realise it isn’t yet their station. It is hard to say how much time has passed. Darkness presses in on them, seems confirmed rather than relieved by a single gas flame shivering in its glass cage on the station platform. The wind is like a living thing, searching their windows for purchase, pushing fingers, tongues in through the cracks.

As his eyes adjust, Thomas comes to realise that the platform is not as deserted as he had assumed. A group of men, women, and children huddle against the wall at the far side of the building, downwind from the storm. There may be as many as a dozen of them; have formed a circle, their faces focussed on the centre. When the train starts up again, they draw level. It is too dark to read any features, but their gestures and stance speak of a violent excitement, clenched fists and wide-open mouths, the feet planted wide apart. At the centre of their man-made ring, two figures are wrestling, one atop the other, the upper stripped to his waist. They pass too quickly to say whether it is two men or a man and a woman; whether they are fighting or engaged in something yet more intimate. The whole group is steaming with a misty Smoke, snatched off their bodies by the storm and blown down-country where it will plaster a barn, a house, a shade tree with their wind-borne sin.

Then they are gone.

Charlie and Thomas go on looking out the window long after they have passed the group, though now, coated by country dark, the pane has turned into a rain-streaked mirror.

“Pedlars?” Charlie asks at last. “Circus people? Irishmen?”

Thomas shakes his head. “Who knows.”

The words are laced with a familiar flavour; the mirror shows a shadow darting from his mouth.

“A group like that,” Charlie goes on, “they infect each other over and over. Like a tiny, travelling London.” He sighs. “I wish we could find a way to save them.”

“Save them? Whatever for? Leave them in their filth. They deserve it. Isn’t that the point of Smoke?”

The words come out wrong, hard and flat and ugly. Charlie looks at him in shock. Afraid that Thomas means them, aware of the smell that’s filling the compartment. For a moment, Thomas searches for a phrase that will explain. But you cannot unsay the said. And how do you account for the yearning, distinct in his chest, to go back and join the men and women in their circle, find out what it was that those two figures did, half naked on the freezing brick of the station platform?

“We better get there soon,” he says, wrapping himself into the blanket, and leaving Charlie to worry for his, Thomas’s, soul.

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It must be past ten when they arrive at their destination. It is hard to be sure. The station clock is not working; Thomas has no watch, and Charlie quickly realises that he has forgotten to wind his. Baron Naylor’s coachman welcomes them on the platform. He is tall, bearded, half frozen, and nervous; stands muffled into a greatcoat; insists on carrying their luggage, then sets it down again after a dozen steps.

“It’s too late now to harness the horses,” he explains, both in accusation and apology. “You were expected at three. Even then, the light would have been bad. It’s quite a ways, you see.”

“Then we’ll stay the night,” Charlie suggests reasonably.

The man nods, bends for their luggage, hesitates.

“There is no inn.”

“And the waiting room?”

“Locked.”

“Then where will we—”

The man sighs, picks up the suitcases again, leads them down the platform steps and across the station yard. Here the horse stables form two shabby rows, shielded from view of the travelling public by a high brick wall. No streetlamp lights their footing here, and as they make their way down the alley in near darkness, Charlie becomes eerily aware of the animal eyes looking down at him across the stable gates, his ears alert to the shifting of hooves and the sudden shakes of horses’ heads; the exhalations of hot air; the smacking of lips and meaty tongues. When a horse bares its teeth not a foot from his ear, they catch the little light there is: crooked, yellow teeth like stubby fingers, sticking out of colourless gums. Startled, Charlie stops. Thomas bumps into him, swears, then places a hand on his shoulder.

“Spooky, eh?”

“Just lost my footing,” says Charlie, thinking that this is what it must feel like to have a brother. An older one, willing to stick up for you in times of danger.

They arrive at a door that the coachman wedges open with some difficulty. Inside, the scene is lit by a single tallow candle. The room is tiny, smells of hay and horse. Three men sit propped up against the wall, smoking cheap little pipes; two others are stretched on the freezing ground under shabby blankets, resting, sleeping, or dead, it is impossible to say. Nobody speaks: not to welcome them, not to communicate with one another.

“The coachmen sleep here,” Baron Naylor’s man informs them. “I’m not supposed to— That is, gentlemen don’t usually come here.” He sets down their luggage on the little floor space there is, unwraps his scarf to free a throat marked by an old burn scar. “But I don’t know where else—”

“It’ll do,” Charlie says, and Thomas sits down wordlessly, then spreads his coat out underneath him. The room is so small that once Charlie has joined him, they lie wedged between the prostrate men and the smokers. Charlie’s face rests not an inch from the hand of a stranger. It is a large hand, with a tattoo in the wedge of skin between thumb and index finger, and knuckles blackened by either dirt or Soot. The tattoo is some sort of picture. Charlie cannot make it out until the hand spreads itself upon the wooden floorboards like an animal seeking purchase for a leap. A mermaid, bare-chested, smiling.

“We will freeze to death,” Thomas whispers next to him, only half joking, and closes the gap between their backs so their spines can pool their bony warmth.

They lie like that for half the night, strangers coughing around them, a mermaid dancing on dirty skin, her breasts shrivelling, expanding, winking with every twitch of the coachman’s mighty hand.

By dawn, the boys are so stiff, they have to support each other as they limp into the coach. They crawl onto padded benches and drift into a state more stupor than sleep.

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The coach ride has the texture of a dream: half a dozen impressions sewn together with no reference to time. They set off in twilight, amongst undulating hills; pit towers and smokestacks dotting the horizon. The sounds of travel seem to reach them through their skins as much as their ears, clot together into lumps of noise they are too tired to unpick: the churning of the muddy wheels, the crack of the coachman’s whip, the frightened whinny of the horse when it slips in a puddle. Once, Thomas wakes to see the ruin of a windmill studded with tiny birds: the sun at its back and the coach riding through its mile-long shadow. Then, the moments miles apart but adjacent in his consciousness, separated only by the closing of his eyes, they arrive. The coach halts before the long flank of a stone building painted dark by rain. A butler runs out, umbrella in hand, and escorts them the ten steps from coach to side door, gravel crunching under their feet.

“Delighted to see you have arrived, Mr. Argyle, Mr. Cooper. You will be hungry, I presume? If you’ll follow me to the breakfast room.”

At the mention of breakfast, Charlie’s stomach growls like an ill-used pet.

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They sit at breakfast. The room is large and formal, the tablecloth starched; the chairs high-backed and stiff; the cutlery elegant silver. The table seats ten, but the boys are the only ones in attendance. They perch shabbily — their clothes rumpled, their hair unkempt, their hands all too hastily washed — afraid they’ll stain the upholstery. The butler has left them. A door to their left admits kitchen smells but has not yet produced any food; cold heavy rain running down the glass veranda doors.

Then a serving girl arrives. She may be eighteen or nineteen; casts a glance at them from large, thick-lashed eyes before kneeling in front of the fireplace and setting to lighting it. She strikes a match, holds it to a scrap of newspaper already crumpled amongst the coals, repeats the action; cowers down, still on her knees, her chin now almost touching the floor, to blow into the hearth. The boys — dazed, blurry-eyed, travel-weary — feel they have no choice but to stare at her. At her bottom, to be precise. In this position, stuck in the air with most of the skirt’s fabric trapped under her knees, it is most awfully round. When a stomach growls (Thomas’s? Charlie’s again?), it sounds pleading, forlorn. And still the girl kneels, blowing at coals.

“I believe the fire is quite lit.”

They did not hear her enter. Thomas and Charlie move as one: reflections in a mirror. Both heads swivel; both faces fill with blood. Charlie’s blush is the darker. A redhead, he is, copper-skinned. To those of his complexion, nature is not kind. It’s like a different type of Smoke, marking a different type of sin. There is no chance at all that the lady does not notice.

For she is a lady, though she is no older than they. Not tall, but holding herself as to appear it, her long, plain dress cut almost like a habit. A small face: pale, rigid, self-possessed, cold.

And pretty.

Her lips are naturally very red.

“Come here, please,” she says, not to them but past them, at the cowering form of the servant.

The girl obeys with haste but no enthusiasm, her large eyes on Thomas, then the floor. Her blouse is tight over her chest, the skirt rides up a little where it has caught at the swell of her hips.

“It appears your clothes have shrunk in the wash.”

The young lady’s voice is neither cruel, nor loud, nor yet commanding. Notes of patient sadness underlie it; humility forced into action against its will. Next to the serving girl’s large, florid frame, she appears dainty, almost fragile.

An elf, Charlie thinks.

Thomas thinks: a nun.

“It would be better if you returned to scullery duties for the moment. Until you learn to be a little less obtrusive.”

“But Lady Naylor promised me—”

“Until the New Year.”

“But she said I could—”

“Spring, then. You are excused now.”

There is a sequence to what follows. The Smoke comes first, a sudden little plume that rises from the servant girl’s chest and leaves a smudge in the starched cotton. Then tears start running, clear and silent, from dark eyes to chin. A sob follows, starts in the depth of her and shakes her frame. Next she flees, all grace forgotten, the sound of her flat shoes travelling through the closing door.

“My apologies. Miss Livia Naylor. Mr. Argyle, I presume? And Mr. Cooper. How do you do? We were expecting you last night. It is, of course, long past our breakfast time. Never mind, here comes the food. Sit. I shall keep you company.”

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They sit and eat under her scrutiny. Her gaze is all the more disconcerting for being patient, judicious, meek. Charlie finds it turns the toast to ashes in his mouth and the tea to bilge water. A well-brought-up boy, he forces himself to make conversation.

“Thank you for welcoming us so kindly, Miss Naylor. Will your father — the baron — will he be joining us this morning?”

But the girl gives him no help. “I am instructed to tell you he is unwell.”

“That’s too bad. Your mother then?”

“She has ridden out.”

Charlie feels rebuffed but is not ready yet to admit defeat. He adds with an increasing air of desperation: “I assume you’re home from school. Just like us. Not that we are at home, of course. But all the same. .”

She waits attentively, patiently for him to finish, but he no longer knows where he is going, is hiding behind his cup of tea, appalled at the noise he makes when he tries to take a quiet sip.

Thomas rescues him.

“You are not a prefect, by any chance?” he asks, his mouth full, a dangerous note to his question. “Back at your school?”

She meets his eyes calmly. “I have that good fortune. How did you guess?”

They cannot help themselves. Both boys start to giggle, furtively at first, then, their frames shaking, with blushing abandon, while she watches on, calm and meek and disapproving, until their hysteria dries out along with their appetites, and the butler reappears to see them to their room.

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“We’ll have an early dinner at five.”

These were Livia’s parting words. The only thing of substance that the butler added to their stock of information was the location of the bathroom, right across from the room in which they have been housed, and the exhortation that they “may feel more comfortable once they have had a moment to refresh themselves,” which Charlie takes to mean they stink. The room is prettily but sparsely furnished. It holds two beds, a press, and a little desk and chair. They remain on the ground floor; a large veranda door grants access to the gardens. The clock shows a quarter to eleven. When Charlie returns at eleven twenty from his bath, he finds Thomas at the open veranda door, watching a pheasant striding up and down the garden path. He leans out, into the pouring rain, and Charlie hears him count the windows along their wing of the house. He breaks off after three dozen, turns, his hair wet and his face streaming with rain.

“Is your house like this, Charlie?” He points for some reason at the marching pheasant who is on yet another of his rounds.

Charlie thinks about it.

“You mean this big, with gardens like that? Yes, I suppose it is. Grander, even.” He shrugs. “How about yours?”

“More like that.”

It takes Charlie a moment to see the garden shed through the sheets of rain, standing with its back to the dark treeline beyond.

“Do you miss it? Home?”

Thomas’s eyes turn hard. “No.” He gathers up a dressing gown and towel. “My turn for a bath.”

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Their afternoon passes turgidly. Five seems an eternity away. The rain continues unabated, making exploration of the garden impossible. When they step into the corridor instead, they find most of the doors closed, the house all but abandoned. It seems rude to climb stairs and look around in earnest, and after running into the hard stare of the butler at what appears to be the stairwell down to the servants’ quarters, they retreat, watch the clock move in painfully slow spasms. At three thirty they change into their formal attire. It is only now they realise they have forgotten to hang their clothes or ask someone to press them, and their shirts and jackets look hopelessly rumpled. Thomas’s dinner jacket is not only cut according to some long-abandoned fashion but appears to have been attacked by moths. The cloth underneath the left arm is all but worn away. This leads him to walk around awkwardly, pressing one elbow into his flank so as to hide the bald spot. When the clock hand finally twitches onto five, their nerves are exhausted with boredom. At three minutes past, the fear takes hold that nobody will come to collect them.

“We could ring for a servant,” Charlie suggests.

“She might come. Tell us off.”

“She doesn’t seem the type to answer bells. Maybe the other girl will come.”

“The one with the big—”

Thomas is stopped short by a knock on the door.

“Dinner,” says the voice of the butler. “Lady Naylor is waiting.”

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Lady Naylor is resplendent in a floor-length evening gown of velvet and silk. She gets up from a chair when they enter, shakes their hands, gives Thomas an odd searching look. Charlie does not know how to gauge his friend’s reaction: a thoughtfulness comes over Thomas that is not quite recognition. He takes his seat at the large, formal dinner table with a frown on his brow. Charlie sits across, separated by four feet of starched damask. Rows of cutlery five-deep flank their china plates.

“I trust you had a pleasant journey.”

The boys look at each other. Both remember the coachman’s waiting room with its unheated floor; the anxious look of their driver as he explained there was no inn.

“Very pleasant,” they say, almost in unison.

“I am pleased.”

Miss Naylor enters. She is wearing the same nunnish dress she wore at the breakfast table, though she has added a string of pearls. The boys rise, somewhat clumsily, dropping napkins, until she has taken her seat across from her mother. Right away a servant appears carrying a terrine of soup.

“Please,” Lady Naylor says, after a perfunctory grace, “begin. We don’t stand on formality here.” The smile she flashes highlights the absurdity of the claim. Her daughter scowls and spoons the soup with such noiseless precision that Charlie, sitting next to her, feels like a pig at the trough.

“I trust your parents are well, Mr. Cooper.”

“Very well, thank you.”

“It is generous of them to share you with us in this festive season.”

Charlie blushes. “Not at all.”

“Livia, you forgot to mention to me what a perfectly charming young gentleman Mr. Cooper is. And Mr. Argyle, too, of course.” She flashes another smile, subtle and naughty. “Her report, I must tell you, was rather libellous.”

“Mother! I really must insist that you don’t lie.” A flush of colour has entered the girl’s cheek.

“See how we live here,” her mother appeals to her guests. “Under the heavy thumb of a prude.”

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Dinner is interminable. The soup is followed by jellied tongue, followed by duck in red wine sauce, then roast pork and parsnips, plum pudding, cheese, and coffee. For all Lady Naylor’s charm, she is unable to draw more than half a dozen words out of her guests. Even her daughter refuses to be drawn into extended skirmishes. She checks herself at several points and accepts her mother’s barbs with the patience of the martyr. Charlie watches them all very closely: Thomas, awkward in his moth-worn jacket, eating little, chewing over some thought; Livia, thin, pretty, embarrassed by and for her mother; and Lady Naylor, a well-kept woman of forty, her hair piled high above her mobile, made-up face, the thin lips thickened by a rich hue of lipstick. She is speaking to him, Charlie, mostly; seems less interested in Thomas. Only now and again her eyes steal over to him, an odd sort of question in her gaze. It busies Charlie so much, this gaze, he too nearly forgets to eat.

At last the final plate is cleared away. Lady Naylor stands. Charlie and Thomas quickly scramble to their feet.

“Thorpe will see you back,” she announces. She gestures behind them. Thorpe, the butler, proves to be already in the room, having appeared from God knows where. His face is the perfect façade of lifelong service: so devoid of expression that one must assume his total indifference towards all matters grave and light. Certainly towards the comfort of guests.

“Please let him know if you require anything else.”

Lady Naylor shakes both of their hands again, again holding Thomas’s eyes for the fraction of a moment, then takes her daughter’s arm and walks away.

“Good night,” Charlie calls after them, too late to elicit an answer.

“This way, if you please.”

The butler escorts them like a jailer. Back in their room, Thorpe hands over custody to the great clock whose ornate hands will keep measure of their sentence. It is barely seven o’clock. Dinner is finished, they have been sent back to their room.

It feels worse than school.

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“What do you make of them, then?”

Charlie thinks about his answer. Why not? They have time to spare.

“The mother is all perfume and charm. And the daughter—”

“Tar soap and prayer books!”

They laugh but there is no mirth to it. The room already feels small to them, the two beds narrow and far too soft. They have opened the veranda doors and sit there freezing, facing the rain-dark night. Letting the wind in.

Just to feel alive.

“Did you recognise her?” Charlie asks, getting up and inspecting the bookshelf. There is an incomplete encyclopaedia, volumes Aa to Pe; a Bible; a chess game in a wooden box; playing cards; dust. “Lady Naylor, I mean. You looked like you might have.”

Thomas begins to shake his head, then shrugs.

“I’m not sure.”

“A distant memory? From childhood?”

“No, it’s not that. Something else.” He searches for it, pulls a face at not being able to put his finger on the feeling. “She reminds me of someone. Her face, her bearing. Someone at school, I think.”

“One of the teachers?”

“Perhaps.”

They sit for a while, get up, open the door on the draughty silence of the corridor, close it again, step out onto the veranda, get wet. No sound travels through the night. They have been abandoned even by the peripatetic pheasant. Whatever lights may be burning within the house are blocked by curtains and blinds.

Thomas closes the veranda door at last, flops onto the bed.

“It’s not how I imagined it. Coming here. I thought there’d be, I don’t know. Some sort of confrontation. Another dentist’s chair. Or maybe the opposite. My uncle explaining the world to us. Confiding secrets.” He scowls at his own naïveté. “Some kind of adventure in any case. But it looks like he has some other plan in mind. They’ll bore us to death.”

“Perhaps we are to serve as bad examples to his daughter.” Charlie rouses himself from their gloom, walks back over to the bookshelf. “Chess then? Or draughts?”

But Thomas is too disconsolate to answer.

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He wakes not an hour after they’ve gone to bed. It’s not a dream that wakes Thomas but a thought. He knows where he knows her from.

Lady Naylor.

He leaves the room in his nightshirt. His clothes are piled onto the chair, and there is a dressing gown hanging off a hook somewhere, but he does not want to wake Charlie by rummaging around.

The corridor carpet is soft under Thomas’s feet. He asks himself what it is he is searching for. Proof, he supposes; something that will turn conviction into fact. It isn’t clear what can furnish such proof. All the same: staying in the room, staring wide-awake into the darkness, alone with his thought — it is impossible. He walks slowly, shivering. After a while he realises it is not from the cold.

The house isn’t totally dark. Here and there some embers are smouldering in fireplaces. In the dining room, a gas lamp has been left burning, turned very low. In the kitchen, a shimmer of light has fought its way up from the cellar, the servants’ quarters, and carries along with it the soft, high giggle of one of the girls. He stops for a moment, savouring it: tiles underfoot now, vivid with cold.

Out in the front hall, Thomas locates the great spiral staircase. Its bannister is a sweeping black curve, reassuring to his touch. Upstairs he finds another light, brighter than the others: it draws a tidy white line underneath a door. He stands in front of it and listens; raises a fist to knock, then stops himself and turns the handle. He might be walking into Livia’s bedroom; into a toilet busy with an occupant. But to knock and don the role of supplicant (for what is a knock, if not an invitation to be turned away) is not palatable to him. Not now. The taste of his Smoke is so bitter in his mouth, he does not need to look down his nightshirt to know he is showing.

The room is a lady’s study, large and well appointed. It has no occupant but its owner is disclosed by the patterned wallpaper of purple and gold, too playful to be a man’s, too opulent to be the daughter’s. The desk confirms it, ornate rosewood inlaid with other, lighter woods. A letter opener catches Thomas’s eye, the brass blade shaped like a dagger, and heavy enough to serve as a weapon. He picks it up, sits down, insolent now, his eyes on the wall with its two dozen paintings, hung close together, crowding the wall. Sits looking at them, unseeing; Smoke rising like a mist in front of his face.

It isn’t long before the door opens and its owner enters the room. Lady Naylor appears unsurprised to find him there.

“Thomas! I am glad you are enjoying my art.”

His voice finds a timbre he recognises as his father’s, gravel rasping under heavy boots. It’s years since he has heard it, and never in himself.

“I was looking for your cutthroat, milady. And your fake whiskers. I was lying awake, trying to fathom what you did with the dead woman’s Soot.”

“Ah. So you did recognise me.” Lady Naylor is wearing a silk dressing gown; its rich colour sets off her dark hair. She looks at him intently, then drops into a chair on the far side of the desk; smoothes the fabric over her thighs. “Did you know already at dinner?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. But it was hard to believe.”

She laughs: it’s a brief laugh, almost a cough, but there is genuine humour to it all the same.

“Well, I’m relieved,” she goes on. “A boy who wears such a perfect mask of composure — no, I confess I did not like the thought.” She shakes her head, still laughing, with her eyes now rather than her voice. “And I was so very sure you knew right away. You see, I recognised you at once. Under the scaffold. You looked just as you did when you were a child. The same eyes, the same cast of the chin. Belligerent. And the face you made! Frightful! I was sure you would start screaming my name and accuse me in front of the whole mob. But then you didn’t tell anyone. Not even at school. I had you watched, you understand, worried that you’d be sullying my name. It cost me some sleep. In the end I decided to invite you here and have it out in the open.”

Thomas does not trust himself to respond. He sees her again, in men’s clothing, the hair hidden underneath a cap. The face dirty, looking boyish in its feminine grace but also old. He flinches when she gets up and draws to the wall.

“I trust you have been admiring my paintings. Fascinating, are they not?”

He shrugs, trying to fathom her, the letter opener clutched so tight it is hurting his hand.

“You don’t think so. Well, look again. Trust me, Thomas, you have never seen any pictures like these before. Tell me: what do pictures usually show?”

Her voice is oddly soothing. It slows his heart. He answers sullenly; rises, gauges the distance between them.

“All sorts of things. Landscapes. People.”

“Describe them to me. The pictures you know from school, for instance.”

“There are only a handful. The headmaster has a few, in his study. A hunting scene, I think. Gentlemen to horse. And a coastline. Sun and water.”

“And these?”

Almost against his will he steps forward, to where picture frame hangs next to picture frame, nearly hiding the wall.

“People. Street scenes. Commoners.” It dawns on him. “The city. But—”

“Yes: but. There is no Smoke.”

Thomas looks again from picture to picture. Some of them look very old. There is a market scene, people haggling over wares, a young child stealing an apple while his brother looks on. Next to it, a village square, some sort of carnival, people dancing, drinking, rolling in the dirt. Another picture shows a soldier, studded with arrows. His tormentors surround him, faces full of hate. In yet another picture, frameless, the paint thick upon a panel of wood, Jesus hangs from his cross in between two others. Thomas has seen the scene before, in a stained-glass window of his old parish church. Golgotha. There — most vivid on clear winter mornings when the slanting sun pours warmth into the glass — dark plumes rise from the shoulders of the two thieves and their cheeks are marked with two black boils of Smoke. Here they hang as sinless as the Saviour in their midst.

“How can that be?” he asks, his eyes darting amongst pictures. He flinches when Lady Naylor steps next to him.

But he does not run away.

“There are only two explanations, aren’t there? The first is that it is a matter of artistic licence. Fantasy pictures. Outlaw artists, dreaming about a different world, hiding the Smoke. Such pictures exist and I have a few in my collection. But none are hung here.

“The truth is that all pictures used to be like this. Until a certain year. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly, but I make it 1625 or 1626. No Smoke. In not a single painting. Showing rapes, tortures, war, and execution.

“Then comes a period without pictures. Thirty, forty years, and not a single brush stroke anywhere in Europe. Perhaps nobody felt moved to paint. Or they have all been destroyed, as so many of the older ones have.

“And then, after a whole generation of silence, we finally get pictures again. Nature scenes. Creeks, mountains, storm-tossed seas. It takes another generation before anyone paints people. Gentlemen, gentlewomen — not a commoner in sight. Unless it’s a religious motif. A martyr boiled in a pot: lily-white in dun water. The men firing the pot are as black as a boot, the air dark with their filth.” She smiles. “Like the air in here, I suppose. Do you mind if I open the window?”

She turns her back, slowly, deliberately, as though to taunt him who is still holding the blunt blade of a toy dagger. It’s when he raises it to place it back onto the desk that he realises his fingers are numb. He has squeezed the life out of them. She waits, patiently, for his tongue to catch up with his feelings; like a nurse leading a sick man, waiting for him to place his foot.

“You’re saying there was a time before Smoke,” he manages at last. “But it’s impossible. All the history books—”

“Were written later. By schoolmasters. University dons. Ask my husband. He wrote books like that himself.”

“But everyone would know. They’d remember, surely. People would tell their children, and they in turn would pass it on. You can’t forget something like this.”

“Can’t you? Not even if every painting was destroyed and every book burnt? If there was not a shred of evidence to support old people’s stories? If you were taught that it’s a sin to speak the truth — and burnt at the stake if you did? Almost three hundred years, Thomas: it’s a long time. A very long time. But you are right. Some people do know. On the Continent, mostly. They weren’t as thorough there. There are a few universities with some well-guarded collections. Even a monastery, in Germany, where—”

“The Bible,” Thomas interrupts her, his voice over-loud, almost shouting. “Smoke is mentioned in the Bible. It’s everywhere. Old Testament, New Testament. Every chapter and verse. And the Bible was written in — you know. The dawn of time.”

“So it was. The dawn of time. Do you remember where Smoke is mentioned for the first time?”

“Genesis,” he answers without hesitation. “The Fall of Adam and Eve.”

“Yes — Genesis 3:7. How does it go?”

Thomas quotes: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and shame filled them, and the air grew thick with Smoke. And so they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons, and the aprons turned black with their Soot.”

“Very good! I did not know you were such a scholar. Your mother taught you, I suppose. A feisty woman, a reformer. But pious.” Lady Naylor walks over to a glass-encased shelf. She opens it, waves him closer. “I have a few Bibles here. Go on, pick one. Read me the passage.”

Thomas does as he is bidden, pulls a small, brittle book down, opens it to Genesis.

“It’s in Latin. ‘Et aperti sunt oculi amborum cumque cognovissent esse se nudos consuerunt folia ficus et fecerunt sibi perizomata.’”

“Translate then. You have Latin in school, don’t you? At least I hope so. I’m paying your fees.”

He stares at the words. His voice is halting, his brain numb with what isn’t there. “And opened were the eyes of both of them. And when they realised that they were naked, they joined leaves and made for themselves clothes.” He leafs back, to the book’s beginning, almost tearing the pages. The cover print incorporates a number in Roman numerals. MDLXII.

1562.

Thomas looks up, tears in his eyes.

“They changed it, the bastards.”

“Yes, they did.”

“And everything — everything! — is a lie.”

“Yes.”

She pries the book out of his hands, lays it back on the shelf, then stands facing him, at an arm’s length, reading his face. He waits until the tears have rolled down his face, wet his lips; tastes it, his sadness, finds it tinged with Soot.

“Does your daughter know all this?”

Lady Naylor’s face grows hard. It’s the first time since she’s entered that he sees it amongst her features: that other face, the person who scraped fresh Soot off a woman’s corpse.

“I told Livia a long time ago. She says it is heresy, and my research an abomination.” She laughs, draws her dressing gown tight around her body, looks scrawny for a moment, diminished, old. “My daughter tells me that if the old books were burnt then there was a good reason. That no plague comes amongst us unless God has sent it, and no dog rips out a badger’s throat without God holding the end of the leash.” Lady Naylor pauses, calms herself. “But she has not reported me yet.”

She walks over to the desk, sits down, straightens papers.

“My daughter,” she declares abruptly, “lives like she is a china doll. Holding very still. Listening into herself, stiffly, stuck in one posture. She’s waiting. Waiting for something to break, you see, and reveal a secret reservoir of Smoke: an impurity, deep in herself, that will mark her as a sinner. You saw how she was at dinner. She tried to laugh, once or twice. But she isn’t sure how. And whether it’s allowed.” Lady Naylor waves a hand, as though to dispel the thought like a bad smell. “Enough about Livia. She’s made her own bed. How about you? What will you do, now that you know?”

Thomas feels his heart pound in his chest. The enormity of it all comes crashing down on him, squeezing the air out of his lungs. He searches for something simple, some corner of it he can understand.

“What did you do in London, Lady Naylor? What is it for, that woman’s Soot?”

“Experiments.”

“You are looking for a cure. For Smoke.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

She laughs. “How? That’s a very long story. Too much for one night.”

Panic grabs Thomas. Panic that he will wake, and it will all have been a dream. “But you will tell me, won’t you? Everything!”

“As much as I can. But not now. I need my sleep.” She looks in his face, finds a plea written there. “One more question then. Something quick.”

Thomas chews his cheek, afraid to waste his question, like those people in fairy tales who part with their wishes like fools. Then he knows.

“Sweets,” he says. “Beasley and Son. We ate some but nothing happened. What are they? How do they work?”

ф

When Charlie wakes from pleasant dreams in the early hours of the morning it is still quite dark outside. It takes him some minutes to realise he is alone. No sound issues from Thomas’s bed. Curious, he rolls off the mattress, tiptoes forward in the dark until his shin bumps into the other bed. He feels the pillow and finds it quite cold. As he stands, pondering this fact, a light passes the door. It slides through the crack like an inverted shadow, licks a yard of floorboard, and is gone.

By the time Charlie has stepped out into the hallway, the light is seven or eight steps ahead. The figure that holds it is moving briskly. It blocks the bulk of the glow and hence is visible only in outline, a darkness traced in hues of gold. Fittingly enough, this halo is most radiant around the head.

Charlie recognises her by her hair. As his eyes adjust, Livia gains solidity, transforms from lamp-sketched apparition into a more corporeal sort of ghost. If the previous day her dress was plain it is now austere: an apron worn over an ankle-length smock, both garments startlingly white. Her hair is honey-thick by gaslight. From her hand swings a porcelain jug.

Charlie follows her without hesitation and has taken three steps before even being conscious of his decision. He does so neither furtively nor wilfully announcing his presence, but simply follows, his nightshirt fluttering as he rushes to keep step.

She leads him to stairs: the main stairwell first, then — a long corridor later, lined with portraits, vases, animal heads — a narrower flight that leads them to a barren corridor under a slanting ceiling. The attic. It isn’t clear to Charlie whether Livia has noticed his pursuit. She has not slowed or turned but when she stops before a door ten steps ahead, it appears to him that she is tarrying just long enough to make sure he won’t mistake it for another. Then she disappears inside. A sound greets her, an animal braying, and slows Charlie’s step.

It is the sound of a beast in pain.

The room beyond the open door is dark, despite the gas lamp. At first Charlie thinks the walls are painted black. But when his hand brushes one side, the black smears and crumbles and leaves his fingers dark with Soot. The room is large and furnished only with some chairs, a table and dresser, and a large, iron-frame bed. On the bed lies a figure, manacled at wrists and ankles with wide leather straps. Again the strange braying sounds, filling the room. Charlie’s skin puckers when he realises it issues from this man, his arms and legs tugging at the leather binds.

“He gets agitated in the mornings.”

Livia’s voice is calm, matter-of-fact. She stands at the table between bed and window, pours water into a washbasin. Already her apron is stained with Soot. When she bends down to run a wetted washcloth over the man’s forehead, he cries again and his body exhales a dark-green burp of Smoke. Slack-mouthed, leering, he wears a mask rather than a face. Whatever features he might call his own are cancelled out by his condition.

“Mother thinks we must keep it a secret,” Livia goes on, still in the same nonchalant tone. Her eyes are on her work. All the same Charlie has the sensation of being closely watched by her, his every move registered, analysed, judged. “But I say we must accept Providence humbly, without shame.”

It is only now, as she says it, that Charlie understands.

“Baron Naylor,” it tumbles out of him. And is followed, with an alacrity that clearly pleases her, for Livia’s eyes light up within her small, finely drawn face: “How can I help?”

“We must wash and feed him.”

It proves an awkward, difficult procedure, in part because it necessitates the removal of the leather restraints. Baron Naylor fights them. He is not a young man, perhaps as much as twenty years older than his wife (though it is possible, too, that his illness has aged him, for he is thin and dishevelled, and his molars are dark within his mouth, there at the back where they are hard to clean). For all that he is as strong as an ox and the presence of a stranger appears to upset him. No sooner have they freed his right hand than he snakes it around Charlie’s wrist. Again the baron brays and thick, viscous Smoke crawls out of his skin and works its way up Charlie’s arm. A moment later it is in his nose, his lungs. He begins to struggle with the man, begins to loathe him; disgust floods Charlie and when the madman’s hand reaches up, searching for his throat, Charlie slaps it away with coarse brutality. It is only then, spitting out his anger, that Charlie realises he, too, is smoking.

Shame cuts through him, winds him, stoppers his Smoke. He backs away, to the wall, where the man’s infection does not reach; stands panting, pressing his back into the wall like a burglar caught red-handed; looks over at Livia and hangs his head.

“I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough.”

Livia returns his look. Her hands remain upon her father’s body, she is buried to her elbows in the old man’s Smoke, but her head turns and he can see how difficult it is for her, how magnificent her self-control. Her own Smoke is minimal, fine white wisps that escape her lips and colour them grey. It is as though she’s been spoon-fed ashes. Her gown is white, Charlie realises, because she wishes to test herself. Nothing must be hidden. It makes him marvel at her: a feeling not unlike fear. She, for her part, does not hide her disappointment in him; lets go of her father’s limbs and reaches over to the table where she finds a tin box and throws it across to Charlie with a quick, disdainful flick.

“Here. Mother uses them when she is up here. Take one.”

Charlie opens the tin and finds a dozen sweets inside. Clear, knuckle-sized, stamped with the familiar symbol: B&S underneath a three-pronged crown. He fishes one out, shakes his head.

“What do I do? I’ve tried one before but nothing happened. All it did was taste of soap.”

She does not turn with her answer.

“Put one in your mouth. Don’t chew it. It’ll pull the Smoke out of your breath and blood, and bind it, long before you show. Before it can infest your mind.”

Charlie does as instructed, then gingerly, not quite trusting himself, steps up to the bed. Livia has her hands full: her father is fighting her every movement, is spitting, biting, kicking. But this time Charlie’s blood remains cool and his mind clear, almost detached. He takes hold of Baron Naylor’s arms and pins them very gently, speaks to him in low, soothing words, much as one would speak to a frightened pet or an infant; takes the cloth from Livia and cleans his face, his neck and ears. Within minutes the old man calms down, becomes pliable and almost childlike, his features composed. The face that emerges is not unlike Livia’s, fine-boned, heart-shaped, and noble, if old.

“What now?” Charlie asks.

“We need to take off his nightshirt, wash his legs and — the rest of him.”

Livia blushes, points to her father’s midriff. It alerts Charlie to the whole sadness of a situation in which a mother and a daughter have become nurses to their husband and father.

“I will do it,” he says. “You take a rest.”

ф

Washing a man’s legs and body proves surprisingly straightforward once Charlie gets past the simple fact of his nudity. It is, in the end, rather like cleaning yourself. Baron Naylor is so calm now, he even lets Charlie shave him, very slowly and carefully, until five or so years of premature age have been scraped off his chin. Afterwards, the baron dressed in fresh clothes, his bedsheets changed, Charlie joins Livia by the window. Dawn is breaking, the lawn still grey with shadow, the nearby wood a black square framed by lighter fields.

“Can you see a woman out there, walking out of the woods?” Livia asks in a whisper, then carries on, not expecting an answer. “The servants, the old ones, they have a story about a woman wandering the woods. Lost, they say, living on the edge of them, half in darkness, half in light. They say she is father’s lost soul. His sanity.” She smiles sadly at the windowpane. “But I’ve never seen her, not in a thousand mornings of looking.”

She turns to Charlie then, studies him, frankly and systematically.

“You are shocked, aren’t you? Shocked and disgusted. I can see it here.” She points to where his eyebrows have knitted over the bridge of his nose.

Charlie is silent for a moment, gauging her expression. He knows it is important to give an honest answer.

“No, I am not,” he says at last. “I have been thinking. It came to me just now, looking out the window with you. This is what Smoke is, isn’t it? Smoke is madness. It’s as simple as that.”

When she answers, there is a catch of excitement in her voice. It is as though Charlie has just spelled out a long-cherished thought.

“Plato writes that evil is having a disordered soul.”

She is about to go on, but breaks off instead. She does not trust him yet.

“We never read any Plato,” Charlie tells her. “We only learned his dates.”

Livia chews her lip.

“Father has his books downstairs, in the library. In Greek. He translated some of them. When he was a professor, at Cambridge. I found his notes.”

Livia looks over at the man in his bed, shackled again, placid and vacant. Her eyes fall on the razor on the little table. Charlie has washed and wiped it, and left it open to dry. She walks over, folds it, weighs it in her hands.

“You shaved him,” she says suddenly, as though she has only just discovered the fact. In her head it’s connected, somehow, to Plato, and madness, and sin. He does not quite fathom how. “You have good hands, Charlie Cooper.”

He masks his embarrassment by shaking his head.

“Only because of this,” he says, picking the candy from out under his tongue. It has diminished in size and turned dark, almost black, and looks for all the world like a rotten tooth.

She stares at it in distaste.

“Throw it. It won’t hold any more Smoke.”

He nods, closes his fist on the candy.

“Where do you have it from?”

“Mother. The government produces it, or rather there’s a special factory that has a government contract. It used to be that it was a big secret. Only very few people were issued them, people in certain positions. Churchmen, for one. Government officials.”

“Teachers.”

“Yes. For emergencies; and to ward off infection when they are dealing with common folk. But Mother says that this is changing. Beasley and Son sold the monopoly, and the new owners, they are selling sweets, secretly of course, to whoever can pay. A black market. Mother says they even sell to commoners. Soon, I suppose, greengrocers will sell it, along with tea and soap.”

Charlie whistles. It sounds brighter than he means it to. “Or along with their liquorice and nuts! But this is good, isn’t it? It means people can fight their Smoke. Suppress it.”

She grows angry, fierce, her eyebrows knotting.

“It’s a sin, is what it is. A crime.”

She stares at him as though she holds him guilty too. In his fist the spent sweet lies sticky against his skin.

“I better go.”

Livia does not stop him. All she says, as he walks through the door, is “Merry Christmas.”

He turns.

“Already? I lost track of time.”

“Christmas Eve at any rate. Mother grew up abroad. She keeps to Continental traditions. We’ll have a formal dinner, followed by carols at the tree.”

“I have no present for you.”

“It isn’t expected.”

Her voice, when she says it, is cold and distant. It is as though the morning never happened.

ф

“Smoke is madness,” Charlie repeats to himself on the way down the stairs. “That’s why she is how she is. She is her father’s daughter. He lost his reason. So she is afraid.”

The thought is still with him when he enters the guest room and finds Thomas straddling the threshold of the open veranda door, looking gaunt and sickly in the early-morning light. Rain has soaked one sleeve of his nightshirt and glued it to his arm.

Charlie closes the door behind himself before he speaks.

“I know what sweets are. And I understand Smoke.”

Thomas looks over, water streaming down his face.

“I know more than that, Charlie. I’ve read the Bible.”

They sit down on the floor shoulder to shoulder, and explain.

LIVIA

We spend Christmas with our guests. Mother, in keeping with the customs of her family, serves carp in black plum sauce and buttered potatoes. She roundly ignores my objection that dressing fish with fruit turns a dish that should at least remind us of a fast into something sweet and gluttonous. We have guests, she says, we can eat convent food when they are gone. The evening is further spoilt when Lizzy, the kitchen maid, is caught attempting to steal a present from under the tree. It is I who have the misfortune to catch her. The silly goose of a girl gets tangled in a crude lie, then immediately bursts into Smoke. Mother has little choice but to dismiss her, and we all watch as she runs off, her thick shoes making a racket on the floor and her skirt riding very indecently up the back of her calves.

Despite this, a certain solemnity prevails throughout the holiday. I am delighted to discover that Mr. Cooper — Charlie, as he insists I must call him — has a lovely voice for carols. He is a well-mannered, even charming guest. On the morning of Christmas he surprises me by waiting outside my father’s room when I arrive. He does not explain but blushes rather becomingly, takes the jug and the washcloth out of my hands, and sets to helping me. I like him for that blush. He insists on not taking a sweet this time and humbly steps outside when the Smoke overwhelms him, until he has reclaimed his calm. Father has taken a shine to him and can be heard humming a nonsense melody as we leave. Mr. Cooper falls in with it and starts skipping down the corridor like a fool.

Mr. Argyle is a different matter. He humiliates me. There is something to his gaze, something forceful and insolent and searching that makes me aware of the plainness of my dress and hairstyle, the scuffed old shoes I wear around the house. It is not that I wish to appear prettier for him — God knows I would rather be spared his stares — and yet I have found myself donning the odd piece of jewellery for dinner and have slipped into the silk gown Mother gave me for my birthday, just to put him in his place. Not that I see much of this dark cousin of mine. Mr. Argyle spends his afternoons shut up with Mother, who is filling him with her theories. It is hard to tell whether or not he believes her: she, too, is subject to his gaze. Its force is such that it leaves his own face inscrutable. He must be a most unpopular boy at school.

However, perhaps I should be grateful for his presence. It helps me guard against complacency. Each evening I sit down after my prayers and examine my feelings. The visitors — Charlie Cooper; his presence at my father’s bedside — have enriched my life and I find myself, for once, content. But I am pleased to report that there is no joy in me when I rise in the morning to attend to my work. Joy is not a sin. But it is always better to act from duty. What one does from inclination one may do thoughtlessly. Inclination is fickle. More than that: it may lead you astray. One day, you might find yourself smoking, thinking you are doing good.

Mother says that I am obsessed; that far from dismissing Smoke, I have made it my idol. Indeed I am grateful for the Smoke. It tells us when we err. Imagine a world in which we err and nobody notices. Not even oneself. Until one goes to seed by increments and slides into the madness of villainy. Smoke eats our reason with a charcoal spoon. We measure our humanity against its darkness. It is good it leaves a mark.

On the second day of Christmas, Mother sits up late with our guests, lecturing on history. The day the Smoke came. She has sent the servants to bed. Her heresy is not for them.

Smoke, I remind her, comes from God.

So, she says, does cancer.

There is a lesson, I say, in cancer, too, and Mr. Argyle glares at me with such an intensity of anger that it makes me want to quit the room. I had forgotten his mother succumbed to that disease. Once again it is Mr. Cooper who saves the evening by suggesting a game of whist. During the game, he draws out Mother into telling stories from her time in Paris and Vienna. It is years since I have heard a laugh and, against my better judgement, I am happy.

For five whole days we are content in this manner, from Christmas Eve to the Feast of the Holy Innocents. I mark each day with a candle in the chapel. Five candles, each a foot long, wrist thick, burning at the altar of the Virgin. Then my half brother arrives. He comes on horseback, unannounced, his manservant in tow, and the next thing we know the whole house seems to be thick with him, his voice, his boisterous laughter, the chink of his spurs. He came to warn us about marauding Gypsies, he says. He brags and skulks and monopolises Mother.

I wish he had sent a letter instead.

SPARRING

He arrives while they are sitting at lunch. Lunch is a frugal affair of cold meat jellies and some kind of lentil porridge: a rebuke to the senses, Livia’s idea. Thomas chews each spoonful like the dreary ordeal it is, ignoring Charlie’s kicks under the table. The porridge has been thickened with cornstarch and has the consistency of frozen mud.

Then Thorpe, the butler, steps up to the table and whispers something into Lady Naylor’s ear. The emotions that attempt to gain purchase on her features are hard to read, but annoyance sits topmost, rules the slant of her mouth. She rises without a word, forcing both Charlie and Thomas to scramble to their feet (for one must not sit when a lady stands), then takes three long strides that carry her out of the room.

Curiosity easily defeats their lentil-smothered appetite. Already on his feet, Thomas follows Lady Naylor at once. Charlie is only a step behind. Livia remains at the table. Looking back, Thomas catches a glance of her: stiff-backed, chin tucked into her throat, resigned to this latest of humiliations.

They find milady in the front hall. She has taken up position at one of the big windows looking out onto the driveway. There, two riders have just climbed off their horses. The first is a tall, lumbering man in a greatcoat with close-cropped hair and hard, flat features. He is closer to fifty than forty but moves with the confident ease of a younger man. His cheeks are raw with wind and cold.

As for the second man: it is disturbing to see him out of school clothes and dressed instead in a gentleman’s hunting gear. Thick chequered tweeds in muddy greens with a matching cap and knee-high boots. A smudge of dark down twitches on the upper lip. Julius Spencer has been growing a moustache. He has brought a further horse, a pack horse, laden with trunks and leather-cased rifles. From his wrist a riding crop dangles by its loop.

They cannot hear Julius’s voice through the window. Judging by his gestures he is instructing Lady Naylor’s servants to help the older man lift down the trunks. He is his valet then. When a stable hand leaps forward to catch the reins Julius has tossed at him, a shadow darts out from behind the horse’s bulk and sits down waist-high to its master. Dark copper fur draped in abundant folds over a thickset body; the eyes red-rimmed and small within their face’s droop; the lips rolled back to disclose mottled gums of black and pink. The dog howls, a sound loud enough to carry indoors; is petted for its trouble, or rather cuffed across the head and snout, then leans its slavish love into its master.

“Milady!” Julius shouts, at the door not at the window, though he can plainly see her, see all of them, standing in a row, their eyes riveted to his figure. “Mother! Come greet your beloved son.”

At the word, Thomas turns away in disbelief.

“Surely—”

Lady Naylor’s face is stony.

“Indeed. My son from my first marriage. And you are my second husband’s sister’s child. I tried to work it out the other day. The correct terminus. Some manner of cousin, I suppose. In a roundabout way.”

She eyes Thomas blandly, then walks over to the door. “I see he omitted to mention it to you at school. An oversight, no doubt.”

She pauses before opening the door. “Well, unless you are dying to greet your schoolmate, I suggest you and Charlie return to your luncheon. I expect my little Jules will want to talk in private. He and I have business to discuss.”

ф

For the next few days they see little of Lady Naylor. She spends hours locked in with her son, then withdraws to her private quarters for all but meal-times, where she presides with grim politeness over a table split in half between her children and her guests.

Thomas expects to feel annoyed by her change: shut out, rejected, replaced; more than half his questions still unanswered. Instead, something else sets in, a newfound sense of freedom. For the first time since the day of their arrival, he and Charlie find themselves thrown together, with time on their hands. That, and Julius’s presence — his smug malice; his strutting grandiosity — makes it feel like a weekend at school.

More familiar now with the routines of the household, no longer worried about causing offence by poking their heads where they don’t belong, they go tearing through the estate. Initially, the explorations dispense with talk. It is a relief to Thomas. There has been so much talk since their arrival, so little time for the words to settle.

Their exploration unearths a whole series of wonders. The stables, for one thing, turn out to be a whole system of sheds, workshops, kennels, and living quarters, so extensive they feel like a roofed and rambling village all their own. Amongst the three dozen or so hunting dogs there is a Russian borzoi with a chest so deep, its fur almost brushes the ground. Farther back the body tapers into a waist so narrow, a child could encircle it with its hands. In another shed, uncaged, unchained, Lord Naylor’s mastiff whiles away its days, sleeping with both paws draped over an axe handle he has claimed, they are told, from earliest puppyhood. The dog is said to weigh one hundred and twenty-three pounds, and is kept on largely because “it’s bloody hard to shift.”

In the house itself they find bedchambers and drawing rooms that have not been used for generations, their floors made monochrome by inch-deep dust. The furniture is wrapped in sheets and blankets. In some rooms it is stacked, ceiling-high, and trussed up with ropes. It gives an odd bulk to sofas, chairs, and tables, turns them into mist-moored ships: a sea of dust tranquil beneath their prows. The boys’ feet upset this peace. Leaping backwards and forwards, hopping on one foot, they write demonic dances into the rooms’ memories, for servants to puzzle over in years to come.

Then there are cellars filled with barrels and bottles, others crammed neck-high with mighty rounds of cheese; a suite of rooms in an upper wing, in which all floors are tiled in chessboard patterns and all furniture has been removed; a big brass telescope that stands in an abandoned corner study and pokes its lens through the removable pane of a narrow window, taking aim at the winter sky.

Through some unspoken agreement, they do not venture to the attic. It is understood that the attic is Charlie’s space, Charlie’s and Livia’s, and, of course, their patient’s. Thomas does not tell Charlie that he has no need to go exploring there. He has already been. He went up to the attic the very day Charlie described his discovery to him, driven by a private need. It was the early hours of the evening. Thomas hid in the shadow of a doorway while two servants, a man and a woman, were taking their turn looking after their employer, the sound of their voices travelling into the corridor if not their words. When they left at last, Thomas walked up to the door and opened it silently; stood on the threshold, looking in. The servants had left a gas lamp behind, turned very low and hung from a hook far from the bed. It had taken several minutes before Thomas’s eyes learned to distinguish man from bedding. In the meantime, he listened to the baron’s breathing, even for the most part, a little too laboured to suggest sleep. The breathing reassured Thomas. He had come there to look into his own future: the flowering of the seed that Renfrew had detected in him and not been able to dislodge. Thomas had expected the raving lunacy of London, curable only by the rope. This was another outcome of his sickness, a calmer end.

If it comes to this, it crossed his mind, I can ask Charlie.

To help me end it.

Then the baron’s face began to peel itself from out of the shadows. First came the eyes: large white orbs, their irises dark like punctures. Moving, staring. Aware of being watched. Agitation began to shake the sick man, drenching his nightshirt in fresh black. Thomas ran away at once. He did not want to frighten the man. Nor have his last illusion shattered about the day of reckoning that will be his.

ф

On the third morning of explorations, Charlie and Thomas find the billiard room and the gymnasium. The first is a narrow, wood-panelled room, with the playing table at one end and a drinks cabinet at the other. The atmosphere is so snugly masculine — from the glass case well-stocked with cigar boxes, to the row of decanters filled with sherry and port — that it feels as though a group of gentlemen in frock coats must be standing just around the corner. Paying tribute to the ladies. Looking for excuses to return to their games.

Across the corridor lies quite a different room. Spacious and well-served by windows, it is uncarpeted and virtually unfurnished apart from four chest-high posts that form a square made more explicit by the double line of rope stretched between them. Two stools stand in the ring, in opposite corners. A long bench lines the windows and a single wardrobe leans opposite, slumped to one side, where a leg has given out with rot. On its left hangs a mirror, so corrupted by age that the dirt seems to have grown into the very glass. On its right, a daguerreotype whose glass is black with dust.

They open the wardrobe first. Inside is dirt, a pile of mildewed towels; a candy floss cone of spider’s webbing; a brass bell to ring in the rounds; and a dozen or so boxing gloves, with worn, knotty laces, split thumbs, and fraying seams. Without discussing it in the least, they set to trying on gloves, exchanging pairs, shaking out dirt and insect remains, discarding those whose torn leather might cut the skin on impact. They have no gym tights but roll up their trousers; no gym shoes, so decide on bare feet; no jerseys, so strip off their shirts and coats; stand freezing, the gloves hanging heavy from their wrists, and eye the ring.

Before they climb in, Charlie reaches up and wipes the tip of his glove through the daguerreotype’s murk. A face emerges, then a second. The first is handsome and composed, a man past the halfway point in life, but proud, well-kept, his longish hair swept back from his brow and tucked behind his ears. Livia’s face is imprinted in his features. It is by this, rather than his excursion to the attic, that Thomas recognises the baron.

The second face they do not expect to find in this place. Hence it eludes them, yet also calls to them, sufficiently so that Charlie reaches up and, still in boxing gloves, fishes the picture off its hook. They take it to the bench, lay it out flat, pore over it like over a book. The body is slender, there is no beard, and the features have the softness of those early years of manhood. It is a stage of life that still lies ahead of them but is so close now, its contours have already been sighted.

In black-and-white the man’s hair does not shine in its familiar colour of young corn.

“Renfrew,” Thomas says at last, when he is sure.

As they wipe away at the blighted glass, they find pale skin. Like themselves, the pair they see are stripped to their waists; wear gym tights and gloves, the latter raised in front of their chests. The backdrop is this very gym. The men’s shadows are thrown behind them, deep into the ring.

“Where did Renfrew go for his studies?” Charlie wants to know.

“King’s, at Cambridge. He says it’s the finest college there is.”

“Livia told me that Baron Naylor used to be a don. At Cambridge. He must have been Renfrew’s tutor.”

“Trying to knock some sense into him, by the looks of it. Shame it didn’t work.”

The joke is feeble but it helps them reconnect to the mood that made them put on the gloves. Besides, they are cold. Thomas replaces the picture; climbs into the ring. Charlie is about to follow when he stops himself, races back to the wardrobe, retrieves the bell. He rings it. The clapper is so caked in dirt that the sound resembles a clucking tongue.

“First round,” he announces.

They square off and begin to spar.

ф

For the longest time neither of them lands a punch. Instead they are shadow-boxing, keeping their distance, dancing sideways, only to suddenly lunge forward and deliver devastating hooks into thin air. When they are good and winded, Charlie races over to the bell, takes a clumsy hold of it between glove-swollen palms, then augments its sound by singing out three rings.

It takes until halfway through the second of these rounds before Thomas divines the reason for their reluctance to connect their punches. It isn’t just that they are friends, averse to causing each other pain, even in sport. Charlie, he realises, is afraid. Afraid he will wake Thomas’s Smoke; afraid that one well-placed punch will break something in him, and wake it up. The monster inside. And it isn’t just Charlie. He himself is holding back. The danger, he senses, lies not in being hit but in hitting: the joy of crushing padded leather into flesh and bone. Lady Naylor’s words about Livia hang in his head all of a sudden.

She lives like a china doll. Listening into herself.

Waiting for something to break.

The thought alone coats his mouth with Smoke.

And so he snarls, steps into Charlie, and delivers a clean hard hook into his shoulder, then follows it at once with a quick cross. His friend grunts, retreats, jiggles the arm just hit as though testing it for injury — and grins. His gloves rise, he steps forward, toe to toe, and loosens three quick jabs into Thomas’s chest, before stepping in to sling an uppercut into his stomach. A brawl follows in which shoulders are beaten meat-loaf red, and chests given a good pounding; the odd rib is rung and one lowish sucker punch leaves Thomas gasping for sweet air. They dispense with the bell, hammer away at each other until they are both breathless, sweaty, slumped over on the bench and radiant with joy. If there has been any Smoke, it has been so light, requited, and playful as to have been part of the game.

“We should come here every day,” Charlie says at last, slipping his coat over his shoulders against the window’s draught. A letter sticks out the coat pocket. He notices it, smiles, pulls it out.

“I wanted to tell you earlier. The post finally arrived. It’s from my sister. She sent it well before Christmas, but it only got here today. She says she hopes we will make it in time to join them on their trip to Ireland. She is dying to meet you.” He rubs his sore arm. “I must have given her the false impression that you are very handsome. And kind.”

Thomas returns his smile, then grows serious and begins to pull on his socks.

“You should go home, Charlie. I can’t. Not yet. I need to hear what else she can tell me. About Smoke.”

Charlie does not dispute it. It is one of his talents, Thomas thinks: not to put himself at odds with the truth. What Charlie does do is question the value of Lady Naylor’s conversation.

“When all is said and done,” he asks, “what has she told you this past week? What have you really learned?”

Thomas recognises the doubt at once. It is his own, fought nightly, when he reviews with impatience the sum of his knowledge about Smoke.

“It’s hard to say, Charlie. She never quite tells you what you want to hear. I ask about Smoke and she’ll start talking about politics. How the country used to be liberal but has swung Tory these past twenty years; how the new liberals are gaining ground but they are all terrible puritans at heart and just as bad. That and the Queen is ailing, leaving the business of governing to her civil service. But it’s not just politics. The other day she got stuck on science. The Books of Smoke are outdated, she says; they are literally riddled with mistakes. Everybody knows it, but all the same it’s illegal to change them because it would imply that we don’t have a clue as to what Smoke actually is. Then two whole hours on inventors, German periodicals, the laws of optics, reeling off names so fast it makes my head spin. Apparently there is decades’ worth of new technology Parliament has outlawed and won’t allow to be imported. Factory machinery, weapons, new photographic emulsions. It’s a total embargo: every ship’s searched for machines, blueprints, scientific papers, everything. It’s because the government fears change. The new technology might challenge social order, or something. Make new people rich. Whilst in Italy or somewhere they have a thing now called a ‘telephone,’ where you can talk to people who are miles away from you, just by speaking into a box. The box is connected to another box, by a long wire. The wire transports the words, somehow. As though by magic.”

He watches Charlie picture it. Charlie is not impressed.

“Even if it worked, what use could it be? You’d have to connect all houses in the world with wires. And that’s impossible.”

Thomas shrugs. It is hard to argue with that.

“Then there are all sorts of medical breakthroughs. Vaccinations, drugs, that sort of thing. A new type of microscope.” Thomas leans forward, lowers his voice. “She has a laboratory somewhere. Here in the house. She says she will show me. When I am ready.”

It dawns on Charlie that the past few days of exploration were not as innocent as he had assumed.

“You’ve been looking for it.”

Thomas nods, then hesitates. “Yes. But if I find it, and go inside, it’ll be a breach. Of the rules or something.” He leans back against the wall, throws one of the boxing gloves across the room, aiming for the wardrobe. “I have a feeling Lady Naylor is the type who is a stickler for rules.”

Charlie emulates his throw. His aim is better, but the glove falls a yard short. He wants to know: “Do you trust her?”

Another throw, Thomas’s turn. It hits the wardrobe door, slides down, lies on the ground, laces sprawling.

“I trust her sometimes. Other times I look at her and think she is the devil.”

“Because of London.”

“Yes. To do what she did there. .” Thomas mimes scraping a razor down the length of his tongue. “But then, of course, the woman was already dead.” His face grows hard. “In any case, it does not look like she will talk to me now, not until her son is gone.”

At the mention of Julius, Charlie throws the fourth glove. The throw is wild and it hits the picture frame by the side of the wardrobe, dislodges it, brings it crashing down. They pick the print out of the shower of broken glass. Renfrew grins at them, chin tucked, fists raised, itching for a fight.

ф

They don’t pick up the conversation again until they are back in their room. They have each taken a bath and dressed in fresh shirts; their hair damp and frizzy from being toweled dry. A game board is between them, lined with ivory figurines. Chess. It’s Thomas’s turn. He picks up his queen, twirls her in his hand.

“I still can’t believe I am related to him.”

Charlie waits with his answer until the move is complete.

“Why not? Amongst the old families, almost everyone’s related to everyone. I am sure I have some Spencers in the family tree. There may even be an Argyle somewhere.” He pauses. “Anyway, I asked around. How come Julius does not live with her, his own mother? I tried Thorpe first, but he merely frowned. Disapproving of my curiosity. So I spoke to the coachman, the one who drove us here. He says Lady Naylor married very young. A political marriage, apparently, not a love match. Her husband died less than a year after the wedding, somewhere abroad, in the colonies. When Julius was born, his father was five months dead, and she was living with his parents. He made it sound as though she was kept almost like a prisoner there. You know how it is with some of the more old-fashioned families, the women don’t really have much freedom and when there is a son involved, an heir. . In any case, when Baron Naylor began to court her, they would only consent to the match if she left the child to be raised within the Spencer household.” Charlie pulls a face. “Imagine being faced with that choice. She must have really wanted to get away.”

“Poor Julius.” There is, to Thomas’s voice, not a hint of sympathy. “You are telling me this is why he is such a turd.”

Charlie colours, nods, moves a pawn.

“Yes. Maybe.”

“And why he skulks around with a bloodhound and a valet that looks like a cutthroat.”

“Ah. About that valet. Mr. Price is his name. Here’s something else I heard, also from the coachman, though this one comes via his wife. God knows how she would know, it’s straight from the Spencer family vault. In any case, the coachman says that his wife says that the valet used to be Julius’s rook, his bond servant, back when he was a child.”

“So?”

“So? Did you have a bond servant when you were small, Thomas?”

“No. My parents didn’t bother.”

“You know what they are, though.”

“Of course. They get hired to watch over you when you are ten. It’s a ritual position. For the final year before you are held to be responsible for your Smoke.”

“Oh, it’s not so ritual as all that. They watch over you, day and night. If an accident should befall you, the same injury will befall them. It’s a holy oath: they have to take it in church. My rook, he was my first proper friend. Taught me half the things I know. For a year and a bit he was there, around me, for every breath I took. Slept right outside my room, on a sort of pallet. Picked me up when I fell off my horse. And then he was gone. On to the next job. It rips a hole in your life.” Charlie’s voice has grown hard. It is a tone so unusual in him that Thomas is startled.

“Did you ever see him again?”

“Once. A year or so ago.”

“And?”

“And nothing. We hardly spoke. He seemed coarse and stupid and overbearing. Riddled with sin. Reeking of old Smoke.” Charlie shakes his head at the memory. “The fact is, they spend their lives around children. Undisciplined, smoking, silly, ten-year-old children. It rubs off, I suppose. And at the same time, they are bodyguards. Strongmen. Mine, I remember him beating a servant girl who was teasing me. He just took her by the hair and started hitting her, laughing at me over his joke. I had to beg him to stop.”

“You are saying he wasn’t valet material.”

“No. He was a professional brute.”

“Well, it seems Mr. Price is both.”

They finish the game. Charlie wins. He mostly does with games of strategy. Thomas is better at cards: games where your strength is hidden and subject to your opponent’s speculation. He does not particularly like what this says about him.

Thomas says, “I too learned something about Julius. Something you don’t know. Last night, I followed the maid when she was fetching his hot water.” He smiles. “I know where he lives, Charlie. And guess what. His door is just like ours.” He gets up, pushes on the handle, swings it open. “It has no lock.”

Charlie is appalled. “You didn’t!”

“No. Not yet. But I think he must be speaking to Lady Naylor now. And the servants will be having their tea in half an hour. As for the dog, it’s kennelled. I checked.”

“But you can’t—”

“Can’t I, Charlie? He is my enemy. And I want to know why he came.”

ф

The room is in the west wing. If their own room is witness to sunrise and a view of the gardens, Julius’s catches the evening light spilling over woodlands and a rain-swollen brook. Like much of the house, the corridor that leads to his room stands empty and silent. Thomas wonders whether all great houses are like this: stone deserts, traversed by servants in livery at set times of the day. Within these deserts there are small islands of habitation. In their week here, he has only ever seen Lady Naylor in the context of three rooms.

They walk up to the door already feeling like thieves. Though their gait is no different than usual — or is it? — Thomas feels as if their intention is written on their skin. He sniffs the air, studies his breath, to make sure he isn’t smoking. But it isn’t Smoke that’s troubling his blood, it’s a self-consciousness bordering on shame. All the same, he feels no doubt concerning what he is about to do. Julius coming here is an act of aggression, like a move on the chessboard they have just abandoned. It requires a counter.

They arrive at the door. Thomas knocks, loudly, boldly. Charlie winces at the sound. The knock receives no answer.

“You can wait here. At the end of the corridor. Whistle if someone comes.”

Thomas can see Charlie is tempted. He is uncomfortable with this. Not from want of courage. It simply appears wrong to him, not so much a crime as ungentlemanly, against the rules of civilised conduct. Thomas wonders if Charlie would have fewer qualms if Thomas had suggested searching the valet’s room.

“Let’s go,” Charlie says at last. “If they catch us, we are in it together.”

The room is much bigger than the one they share, and more opulently furnished. There is a four-poster bed, a bureau, and several couches; a dozen artful models of sailing ships from the Royal Navy, displayed on shelving that is built into the wall panelling. Julius’s travelling trunk has been unpacked and stored at the top of the heavy chestnut wardrobe. A painting of a fox stalking a chicken graces one wall, an old map of England covers another. The washstand is lined with bottles of scent and silver-handed brushes. It isn’t what Thomas expected — a bunk and an open trunk; a pile of belongings that could be sifted in a few minutes — and for a moment he is unsure what to do. If he has fought the knowledge until now, the room puts an end to his denials. Julius is Lady Naylor’s son. He may not have grown up with her, but this is his space, has been from childhood, each sailing ship a birthday perhaps, until he tired of models and graduated to hunting dogs and rifles and cricket pads hand-tailored to his legs.

Charlie looks at Thomas and recognises his confusion. “Where do we start?”

What he is really saying is: We shouldn’t be here.

“The wardrobe,” Thomas says, walking over.

He does not expect Charlie to do any searching himself.

ф

There isn’t much that would be of any use. No diary hidden under the pillow; no papers or letters on top of the bureau, nor in its shelves, nor in the wastebasket. There is a surprising number of shirts, more than thirty in all, each freshly pressed and of such radiant crispness as to appear unworn. Thomas also finds three pairs of leather gloves; a toy foil and a real sword stick, both carelessly thrown into the back of the wardrobe; an ivory fountain pen with a gold nib. Spurs, a riding crop, a slender horn-handled penknife with a four-inch blade. But no clue, no explanation of why Julius has come there, no secret about his character revealed.

There is one thing though: a wooden box. Thomas notices it because it has the air of something that does not want to be noticed. It is kept on the night table in plain enough sight, but is stacked amidst a pile of books. Almost as though by chance. But somehow too neatly all the same.

The box is quite small and made from a curious varnished wood that shines red in the evening sunlight. It is not light enough to be empty but neither is it particularly heavy; has the wrong sort of dimensions to comfortably hold letters or papers; and emits an ever so slight smell, not unlike that of old leather. That, and it is locked. There is a small silver keyhole, and no key.

Thomas carries it over to the bureau, opens the penknife, inserts its tip into the lock. It takes some fiddling, but the lock is a simple one and turns under pressure. He can feel Charlie frowning at his back, bending forward to see. Thomas opens the box with a flourish and finds (his stomach lurches with the disappointment): cigarettes. Neat rows of them, perhaps as many as six dozen, looking pale and fragile against the lustre of the wood.

“Damn,” he whispers and closes the box.

But Charlie stops him. “Reopen it. Smell them.”

Thomas does so, pushes his nose right up to the cigarettes, then takes one out, runs it under his nose. He has never smoked a cigarette and, come to think of it, has never held one. Even so he recognises the smell of tobacco, can imagine its aroma when lit. Underneath it, though, there is another smell. Darker, tarter, hard to place. Charlie, hanging over his shoulder, has his eyes closed; is rooting through his memory for a trace of this smell.

“Like your undershirt,” he says at last, “when it came back from the laundry. When we were children, I mean. Before Discipline started. The smell of lye, there, at the centre of the chest, and between the shoulder blades, the places where the maid had rubbed away your Soot. But underneath the lye, something else — not Smoke, not sweat, a smell all its own. This smell.”

Charlie’s words take Thomas back to his childhood room and a scene precisely like this one: him sitting on the bed, naked to the waist, taking his undershirt from the clean laundry pile; sitting there, sniffing it before putting it on, sorting the flavours; a vase with flowers in the open window and birdsong. It’s a smell like mushrooms, and ashes, and rain-moistened dirt. A dangerous smell.

“These aren’t cigarettes,” he says, and immediately stuffs four or five in his jacket pocket. Charlie does not object. It is thieving, but there are so many here, a few cigarettes won’t be missed. It’s unlikely Julius keeps a precise count.

This thought catches Thomas short. He hesitates, reaches into the box for one more cigarette and breaks it in half. Some tobacco flutters out, and something other than tobacco, also brown but darker and grainy like salt crystals. He lays the broken cigarette crosswise over the neat rows underneath, closes the box lid, fiddles the lock until it snaps shut. Then he returns the box to the night table, stacks it in between the books. Charlie observes all this, the setting sun bright on his face and narrowing his eyes into dark slits.

“You want him to know.”

Thomas shrugs. “You were right all along. Breaking in here, it’s wrong. A violation. Let’s see what he does about it.”

He imagines the chessboard again, moving his king out from behind a wall of pawns.

Perhaps there is a type of chess where it pays to bluff.

ф

They take the stolen cigarettes back to their room, line them up on one of the starched pillowcases. Sit on the other bed, staring at them. After some minutes, Thomas gets up, searches his pockets, digs out a box of matches. He fetches one of the cigarettes and sits, holding it under his nose. Smelling it. His stomach cramps. It takes him a while to admit it is from fear. Thomas does not understand it. His body is rebelling against this smell. He wonders if it would be the same if you held a poison mushroom under your nose. If smelling it, your body would scream at you not to take a bite. Charlie is watching this silent struggle. It should be frightening, the fact that someone can read you like this, simply, like a book. But it isn’t. Not when Charlie does it.

He reaches over, takes the cigarette away from Thomas.

“I’ll do it. Light me a match.”

Thomas does, then sits motionless, the flame burning brightly, curling the spent wood. When he lights the second match, Charlie quickly reaches over and takes it from him, but the speed of the motion extinguishes the flame halfway to his mouth. Thomas strikes a third match, then pinches the flame dead before the cigarette is lit.

“Don’t, Charlie. It does not feel right. There must be another way of finding out what they do.”

“What other way?”

“I will ask Lady Naylor.”

Charlie nods, then frowns.

“Ask Livia,” he says. “She knew about sweets. She may know about these.”

“The little nun?”

“She’ll help us.”

Thomas repeats the question Charlie asked him earlier, concerning Livia’s mother.

“Do you trust her?”

Charlie does not hesitate. “Yes.”

“You like her?”

“She makes herself hard to like.”

Thomas accepts this. He remembers the letter that’s still sticking out of Charlie’s pocket and points to it now.

“What would your sister say about her? The one who is convinced that I am handsome.”

“Oh,” says Charlie, “she’d despise her from the bottom of her heart.”

ф

They find Livia in her own quarters. Thomas is not prepared for how playful her rooms seem, with their patterned rose wallpaper and china figurines, the rich burgundy curtains that frame the windows. Livia interprets his look and scowls. In one corner, a dark, heavy lectern stands, quite out of keeping with the rest of the furnishings. It’s a piece from a monastery dragged into a princess’s chambers. A copy of a book lies open upon it, the pages held down by a lead ruler. Thomas notes distractedly that Livia must read standing up.

She leads them to a group of sofas and chairs near the window and begs them sit down. It is as though she is about to serve tea. But her face is cold and hostile, her attention on Thomas. She is making him responsible for the intrusion.

“What can I do for you?”

Charlie speaks before Thomas can answer. “We broke into Julius’s room.” He says it like it was his idea; does not soften it or excuse it, simply presents her with the fact. “We found these.” He nods to Thomas to pass over one of the cigarettes. “They are not what they seem.”

Livia takes the cigarette from Thomas, smells it, then immediately returns it. It is clear that she has recognised them at once.

“And?”

“What are they?” Charlie asks.

“You didn’t try one?”

“No.”

“Nor you, Mr. Argyle?”

Thomas shakes his head, holds her eyes. “I was afraid.”

“Do it,” she says. “I understand the effect is not permanent.”

Again Thomas produces the box of matches, again he hesitates, his blood rebelling against the smell. Or is it? There is, mixed into his fear, the faintest thread of longing.

Again Charlie intervenes.

“I will try it,” he announces. “If Livia says they’re harmless, I will.”

She shakes her head, as though wishing to stop him, then thinks better of it.

“All right then, Mr. Cooper. Here, I will hold the match.”

Charlie takes the cigarette from Thomas’s hand; Livia reaches over and snatches up the matches. Her face, as she looks at Charlie, holds a peculiar expression. Renfrew looks like that, when he asks one of the clever boys a question that is particularly difficult. Hopeful. But expecting failure all the same. Between them, they have turned Thomas into a spectator. It sits ill with him, but he does not intervene as Charlie holds the tip of the cigarette into the flame. Charlie coughs a little, exhales the barest breath of grey, takes another drag.

“And — how do you feel?” Livia asks.

Charlie speaks very quickly.

“I feel normal,” he says. “Just the same as before.

“Good,” he says. “I feel really good.”

He gets up from the chair, starts pacing the room. Livia is not looking at him, speaks to her hands, folded in her lap as though in prayer. The words are so meek, it takes a while to digest their meaning.

“Mother says it makes boys ‘amorous.’ Girls too, but I think she is referring to something anatomical.”

Charlie frowns at this, turns away from them, paces.

Thomas, unnerved, walks over to him.

“Are you all right?”

When he places the hand on Charlie’s shoulder, his friend shakes it off with sudden violence, steps close to Thomas, presses his forehead into his.

“Am I all right?” His voice is joyous, but there is an edge to it Thomas does not like. “Never better.” Charlie leans his weight into him, pushes Thomas back a step. “You should take a drag.”

There is something to Charlie’s eyes as he turns his attention from Thomas to Livia. Something lewd, suggestive: so unlike Charlie that for a moment he is as though transformed.

“Or you should, little Miss Prim. It’d do you a world of good.”

Charlie moves the cigarette back up to his lips. Thomas slaps it out of his hand before he can inhale. Next he knows Charlie has pushed him into the wall. The strength of it surprises Thomas, knocks the wind out of him: an unfettered Charlie, his strong young body free of restraint. Three heartbeats they stand eye to eye.

Then the real Charlie returns. There is no other phrase for it. It’s his kindness, his patience, rising up again through his features. They settle around the eyes, inflect the curve of his mouth. Within another second they are followed by shame. Charlie bends to the still-burning cigarette, pinches the tip then crumples it in his fist. Livia is watching him.

“That’s like throwing away pure gold.”

But Charlie’s mind is elsewhere.

“I didn’t smoke,” he says.

Even as he speaks a shiver goes through him. He reaches inside his shirt and his hand comes back stained. It isn’t Soot and it isn’t Smoke but something in between: a black, oily smear that oozes a fine stream. Then, the very next moment, it is as though it catches fire, and in the blink of an eye, Charlie’s hand emits a tar-black breath of Smoke. The Soot that forms is a fine white ash. It scatters by his feet like flakes of chalk.

“Like pure gold,” Thomas repeats. “These cigarettes are expensive?”

Livia nods. “So I am told.”

“Who makes them? The same people that make sweets?”

She shakes her head. “No. Sweets are a government monopoly. It used to be held jointly by three or four families, before the Spencers bought it up. These”—she stabs a finger in the direction of Charlie’s fist—“are illegal. Officially they don’t even exist. Nobody knows where they are made. Or how.”

“The Spencers own the sweets monopoly?”

Thomas would like to hear more about this, but Charlie talks over him, his voice bewildered, struggling to make sense of things.

“It was like London,” he says. “Like a fever. Only it didn’t come from the outside. It came from within.” He shudders, lays his palm on his throat, as though the infection were stuck there, poisoning his breath.

“But why?” he asks, still in the same panicked tone. “Why would anyone pay money to buy Smoke? It makes no sense.”

ф

Livia explains it to them. They are sitting on the settee again. She has poured Charlie a glass of water. No glass for Thomas. But then: Thomas isn’t convalescing.

“You went to London,” she starts. “We heard about it, of course. My whole school was talking about it. Your Trip. A daring experiment for a better future. Most of the girls were jealous.”

“That’s because they don’t know what it is like,” Charlie interjects. “It was horrible.”

“Was it?”

Livia says it with peculiar emphasis. Her eyes are on Thomas. He thinks about it.

“It was horrible,” Thomas repeats Charlie’s phrase. “But also: a liberation. You could not help but sin. So you are free to behave like a cad.”

Livia nods. “Mother says, when there are government contracts for work in the cities, the gentlemen line up to do it. Of course, the official line is that it is a sacrifice they are making, ‘for the commonweal.’ Sometimes, Mother says, ladies go on weekend jaunts to London. For ‘charity.’”

There is contempt in her voice. She seems to hate hypocrisy as much as Smoke.

“That’s crazy,” Charlie insists. “It turns you inside out, the city. You lose yourself, become someone else. It makes you evil.”

“Just so. Apparently one view has it that evil has its joys. But of course one cannot risk total dissipation. Nor undo all those years of schooling the senses.”

Livia’s anger is so palpable now, Thomas almost expects her to smoke.

Almost.

“Since going to London is inconvenient, many a gentleman has looked for a more controlled way of sampling vice.”

“A cigarette’s length of sin!” Thomas shakes his head, half amused, half disgusted. “So school really works, eh? They take you in at eleven, and for every wisp of Smoke you get a black mark against your name. By the time you finish, you’ve become so very disciplined, you are incapable of letting yourself go. Oh, sure you smoke on occasion, but it’s weak, a mere hiccup. Even when you long for it, you can no longer find it, your inner pig.”

He looks from Livia to Charlie. Charlie didn’t need much schooling to become good, Thomas thinks. He was born that way.

Thomas is less sure about Livia.

“So it’s sweets when you want to avoid infection and cigarettes for leisure,” he continues. “And just like that you have mastered the Smoke! So when do they do it then? These gentlemen you’re talking about? And gentlewomen. When do they decide it’s time to take a holiday from being good?”

He has Livia’s attention now. She is unflinching. “When they want to seduce their chambermaids. Or their husband’s valets.”

“Or rob,” Thomas adds. “Or kill.”

“You could kill without Smoke,” Charlie whispers. “If it were righteous.”

It is hard to say what he is thinking about, but he looks stricken, more so than when Thomas explained to him that Smoke is a lie; that it came to them a quarter of a millennium ago; that the powers that be rewrote the past. Charlie does not want to live in a world where sin is a sport dabbled in by the rich.

“I am not sure you could, Charlie,” he says gently. “Even the executioner in London first worked up a Smoke. What do you think, Miss Naylor?”

But the girl does not seem interested in the question; turns away from them both, walks over to the lectern, and bends over her book. She reminds Thomas of her mother then: dismissing him at the end of one of their talks. If it was only Charlie there, perhaps she’d let him stay. But Charlie accepts her decision, walks over to the door. Thomas follows more slowly. He isn’t quite done yet.

“I’ve been calling you a nun,” he says, still looking at Livia. “But there is more to you than that. The nun has a brain. And teeth.”

His voice is respectful. He thinks of his words as a compliment.

Livia does not stir.

“Do you know where your mother’s laboratory is?” Thomas asks.

“Yes.” She speaks without looking up.

“Will you show it to me?”

“No.”

Thomas nods, studies her, hunched over a lectern, the ruler marking her place.

“Thank you for your help.”

Thomas closes the door behind them with more force than he had planned. He hopes it does not undo his words of thanks.

ф

One floor down, they walk into Julius’s valet. Mr. Price. The man enters the far end of the hallway just as they step off the stairs. Thirty steps separate them, muffled by carpet. They walk towards each other like two armies in the field.

Price is an imposing man, tall, broad-shouldered, not fat but massive, each limb a tree trunk, heavy with muscle and bone. A line running parallel with his hair marks the place where he habitually wears a cap: below, his face is wind- and sunburnt, brown like a root. On top, it is pale, the skin strangely tender, like a mollusc’s, living in its shell.

There is such purpose to Price’s movement that Thomas begins to wonder whether Julius has found the broken cigarette yet. He is walking without haste but with a mechanical precision that eats up the yards. It takes Thomas an effort of will not to slow his own step, defer their meeting. Instead he mirrors the man’s movement, walks chest out, at the centre of the corridor. Charlie notices his change of gait and keeps step at his side.

The closer they come, the more they see of Price’s features: the stubble-framed mouth, the blunt, broken nose, the deep dimple that marks the chin as though someone pressed his thumb in it when it was being baked. It’s a handsome face, in its own way, strong-featured and not unintelligent. But the eyes are ringed with something. Resignation. Implacability. A lifetime of violence. A sliver of red is visible where the lower lid curves around the eyeball. Not bloodshot eyes, then, but blood-lined ones: as though for emphasis, with a razor-edged pen. The brows that frame these eyes slope downward, from temples to nose. A frown splits them. It is not for their benefit, has been written there by the facial habits of a lifetime, by anger, concentration, or by pain. Five steps apart his smell becomes noticeable, of leather and sweat and an edge of old Smoke. In a moment they will push together chest to chest. Again Thomas thinks of the broken cigarette. If there is to be a fight, neither of them is the man’s match. He wonders whether he’ll be able to busy Price while Charlie runs for help.

And if anyone will be willing to help.

One step before their collision, Price veers aside. He never slows, walks past them, his heavy boots making remarkably little noise. At the end of the hallway, Charlie stops, looks after the man. His face is flushed. It has not been often that Thomas has heard his friend speak in anger.

“That man drowns kittens for sport,” Charlie says.

“Not for sport. Only when he’s told. But then he drowns them by the sackload.”

Thomas means to say it lightly, but his voice catches and a shiver runs the length of his damp back.

MR. PRICE

He calls me to his rooms late that night. Key-sar. That’s what they call him at school. Emperor-to-be. Julius Paul. Jules to his mother, after the manner of the French. To me he has always been Mr. Spencer, even when he was knee-high to a goose. I have known him half his life. I am father and mother to him, and also: his son. I see at once that he is angry. A riding crop is in his hand.

Go on, I say. Beat me if you must.

He does, works me over wordlessly, hitting my shoulders, back, and thighs, while I shield my face and eyes. We smoke together, he from anger, I from pain; breathe each other in. Far from estranging us, it affirms our bond. It’s what family is: the sharing of one another’s Smoke. Everything else is like a handshake: cold, formal, keeping a step apart. Isolation. Man is not born for such a thing.

Afterwards, still breathing heavily with the exertion, he explains it to me. That they sneaked into his room that afternoon and stole his cigarettes; that they broke one and lay it topmost, in order to let him know. He is pale with his anger. A handsome boy, always was. I run a bath for him, so he can scrub off the Soot. While he sits and soaks, I tidy the room. The cigarette case stands open. I close it and lock it away.

He does not share his cigarettes with me. Each of these, he often says to me (he likes to handle them, point with them, stab one at your face: a scarecrow’s finger, stuffed and bent, bleeding tobacco from its tip), each of these is worth two years of your salary. For five your own mother would sell you to the hangman.

I object.

I have no mother, I say.

It never fails to make us laugh.

What will you do? I ask him when I tuck him into bed. How will you punish the thieves?

Discipline, he says. A gentleman does not punish.

I wait until he falls asleep. After some time his features smooth and you can see the boy in him, one hand tucked under his cheek.

Late that night, I burn the clothes. There’s a disused kiln behind the house that’s perfect for the purpose. Mr. Spencer never wears soiled clothing. The lye, he says, makes the fabric coarse. The fire attracts birds. Rooks. My kinsmen. Cawing, they walk the perimeter of light, warming their feathers. I fall into step. They scatter when I approach, then reclaim the space as soon as I turn. It’s almost like a dance.

On the morrow, after a late breakfast, Mr. Spencer sends me to find the butler. Thorpe. Thorpe has his eyes everywhere, Mr. Spencer says. The house is his kingdom and he rules it with spies. Thorpe will know where those boys are spending their time.

Thorpe does. He tells me the boys are taking their exercise in the gym. Main house, ground floor, east wing. He is speaking for Mr. Spencer’s benefit, not mine: his eyes see through me, as through a window, to the man I represent.

I do not like Thorpe. Here’s a man who has never smoked in the company of others. A man without family or tribe.

A lonely man.

The stable hands have it different. They say he’s a man that’s buried children.

It’s an odd thing but they never say: his own.

LABORATORY

Julius enters the gym while they are still warming up. He is wearing knickerbockers and a blue jersey, and soft boots that are laced above the ankle. A little towel is thrown over one shoulder.

Before they even have time to respond to his entrance, he disappears again and runs across to the billiard room. A minute later he is back, an hourglass in his hand, beaming.

“I knew it was somewhere. It’ll help us keep time.”

Wordlessly, both Charlie and Thomas turn away from him and start climbing out of the ring.

“Mr. Price was right, then. He said you were too much of a pair of sissies to step in the ring with me.”

Charlie watches Thomas’s back stiffen at this and speaks at once. “I’ll give you a few rounds.”

Julius smiles. “Mr. Cooper! Excellent. Queensberry rules, I suppose. Though I do wonder at times what it was like in the bare-knuckle days.”

He turns his back without waiting for a response, opens the wardrobe, searches it for a pair of gloves. The pair he settles on are worn across the knuckles. A mosaic of cracks marks the old leather. He punches the gloves together and watches a cloud of dust disperse.

“Shall we say one round, for starters? Just to warm up.” Julius lifts one stool over the ropes into the ring and places the hourglass on top. “There we go. Ready?”

He turns the hourglass, watches the first few grains of sand slide through its waist, then climbs in the ring and starts circling its empty centre with rhythmic, light-footed steps. Ignoring Thomas’s warning look, Charlie nods and climbs in after the head boy.

They spar in silence. The sand shifts slowly in its glass. It is clear from the start that Julius has had training and is, in fact, a very accomplished boxer. Thankfully he seems content to prance around, blocking or dodging Charlie’s punches and landing a few soft jabs on Charlie’s forehead and shoulders. As time runs down, Charlie finds himself enjoying the exercise. It is not so very different from yesterday’s bout with Thomas.

When the sand is all but gone and Thomas is about to announce the end of the round, Julius steps into Charlie. It isn’t a very complicated movement: he simply moves his leg inside Charlie’s, drops a few inches at the knees, then pushes off from the toes and pours the weight of his body into an uppercut to the short of Charlie’s rib. Three quick body hooks follow, all hitting the same spot. As Julius dances away, Charlie crumples to the ground. It is not that he cannot get air. But each breath is agony, a sharp and stabbing pain as though bone has rent the tissue of his lung.

When he collects himself, he finds Thomas by his side, quietly raging. Julius is sitting on the stool inside the ring. He is cool and composed, not showing a thread of Smoke.

“How about three rounds, Mr. Argyle? You look like you need to blow off steam. Just give me a second to catch my breath.”

Julius grins, takes off his gloves for a moment, reaches into his pocket, and withdraws a cigarette and matches.

“Some say they are bad for your health. But I find they help me focus.”

He lights it with a flourish. The smell is unmistakable. Charlie waits for some sign of the cigarette’s effect but Julius’s face remains a picture of calm, his skin clean. It seems impossible.

There must be some sort of trick.

The motion of his jaw gives it away, the way he turns his tongue inside his cheek. A sweet. No, many sweets, tucked away at the side of his gums. Charlie wants to warn Thomas but it’s obvious from Thomas’s face that his friend has already seen it. More than that. It confirms a theory long adopted.

“It binds the cigarette Smoke the very moment it is produced,” Thomas says, quietly, but not so quietly Julius cannot hear. “He likes it there, on the knife edge of control. Vicious, but not quite barking mad. And, of course, clean as a whistle.”

Julius smiles at that, steps to the centre, raising his fists and bouncing on his toes.

“Ready whenever you are, Mr. Argyle. When you are done talking, that is.”

In his mouth his tongue is turning, redistributing sweets.

ф

Julius boxes with cool viciousness. He hits Thomas almost at will, largely with jabs, at distance. When his opponent swings at him, he slips the punch and counters, all with the same aloof air of control. Thomas, by contrast, is distracted by his own rage. He charges widely, stands flat-footed, off-balance, always a beat behind the dance. Already his breath is showing dark in front of his mouth and an inch-long line has formed between his shoulder blades like the swollen body of a leech.

At the end of the round Julius bends over the ropes that frame the ring and spits out a black rotten sweet. For a split second Charlie is transported back to school, to that initial fight between Thomas and the head boy. There, too, a blackened lump was spat across a floor. It bounced on bathroom tiles.

Back then they took it for a tooth.

They start the second round. Thomas does not stand a chance. Julius continues to box scientifically, inflicting maximum punishment. He works Thomas’s body as much as the face, the side of the ribs, and the soft of the belly, Thomas looking as though he is drowning. He smokes from pain and helplessness, staggers, rolls, slumps. It does not even occur to Charlie that he is baiting his opponent, making him careless. But when Julius shoves his reeling figure, pushing him into the ropes, Thomas suddenly straightens and out of nowhere lands a hook with such force it sends four or five sweets flying from Julius’s mouth, some dark, some still clear as crystal. They are followed by a gob of blood.

Still Julius keeps coming and still he does not smoke. He is more careful now, boxes at distance. Punch after punch hits Thomas: the flat, dry drumbeat of air being forced out of the glove. It isn’t until the sand in the hourglass has almost run clear that Charlie understands that Thomas, too, has adjusted his strategy. He is leaning into Julius; is grinning, taunting him; allowing himself to be hit.

Feeding Julius’s frenzy.

Exhausting his remaining sweets.

And then, without any warning, with only seconds left in the round, the last of the sweets is spent. Julius erupts. Smoke paints him black. It envelops Thomas who screams a viscous cloud of welcome. They go down, one on top of the other, and Julius keeps pounding Thomas, never tiring, inhuman in his strength, while Thomas keeps on screaming in pain and hatred, his chin dripping with wet Smoke and blood. The round is long over, and Charlie is in the ring, trying to pull Julius off. In vain. Julius does not even budge, kicks and elbows behind himself, all the while sending fists into Thomas’s black and bloodied face.

Again Charlie tries to pull Julius off. Again he fails, Smoke and panic in his every breath. Then an idea comes to him. He does not hesitate, throws himself flat on his stomach, searches the floor for the unspoilt sweets that Thomas beat out of his opponent. He finds one, then a second the shade of light amber; scuttles over to Julius and reaches, through his Smoke, first for his throat then his chin, his mouth, attempting to force the sweets inside. Teeth cut his thumb, his index finger, the knuckle. Then an elbow to the head sends Charlie flying onto the parquet next to them, and when he gasps for air it is Smoke that rushes in his lungs and turns all thought to madness.

ф

It works, after a fashion. The fresh sweets absorb and bind the strongest Smoke. It grants a measure of lucidity to Julius’s hatred. He rolls off Thomas — to regroup? to fetch the stool from the corner of the ring and bash in their skulls? — staggers to his feet, yells something; then stops short, staring out into the hallway past the gym’s open door. The next moment he is running. Where to does not matter to Charlie. He barely hears the footsteps, his own blood is so loud in his ears. All that matters is that Julius is gone.

Charlie retches, watches Thomas’s Smoke die out. When his friend sits up, Thomas’s outline remains on the parquet. A wood-pale shadow, as though cut into a sheet of perfect black dust. Charlie, still on his knees, draws a finger through the Soot. It is warm, almost hot, and fine like coal dust. He feels he needs to say something, anything, just to return them to normality: a world where people communicate their feelings in words. But all he can find to say is a lie.

“I have never seen anyone smoke like that.”

The truth is that he has. Both of them have. When a murderess swung from a rope in London.

Thomas’s features are unreadable under the Soot.

“Do you mean him, or me?”

Charlie closes his eyes and again sees the smoking, blackened forms of the two prone bodies intertwined, like the charred remains of lovers discovered in a burnt-down barn.

“Him,” he whispers. But what he thinks is: Either. Both.

Compelled by some strange alchemy, Julius’s and Thomas’s Smoke have reacted to produce something Charlie has no words for. He was inside their Smoke for no more than a few seconds. What he breathed in — what entered his body, took control as surely as a puppeteer’s hand shoved into a Punch or Judy — stood all truth upon its head. Over there, inside the Smoke, pain was joy and anger peace. Violence was love.

As though hoping it will rid him of the memory, Charlie rises to his feet. The moment he is up, still dizzy, he sees what Julius saw.

Livia is there.

From the look in her eyes she has been there a good long while.

She is standing out in the hallway, half a step from the door, in a frock of perfect white. And looks as though she is going to a party. Her cheeks are powdered, hair pinned into a bun behind her head. It disturbs Charlie that in a moment like this he can notice such a detail. And approve. The hairstyle suits her, underlines the slimness of her neck. In her ears, two pearls swing on silver loops.

“Miss Naylor!” Charlie raises a hand in greeting then lets it drop. All social conventions are as though swept away. His naked, blackened chest shivers with sudden cold. One side of the hourglass is dusted with Soot as though it has been witness to a storm.

To Charlie’s surprise, Livia walks into the room rather than running away. She climbs in the ring, walks past him, and bends down low to where Thomas is still sitting on the ground, the hem of her dress soiling in Soot. Her voice betrays her disgust with what she has seen. But there is something else in it, too. Pity.

It softens her words.

“You must leave this house, Mr. Argyle. He will cripple you.”

Thomas shakes his head, croaks something only she can hear. She flushes, stiffens, shakes her head.

“I can’t. I won’t.”

Another croak. This time Livia straightens. All pity is gone from her voice. “I will not show you the laboratory, Mr. Argyle. And you will leave as soon as it can be arranged.”

Only then does she turn to Charlie.

“Clean him up, Mr. Cooper, and do it fast. It’s New Year’s Eve and Mother is planning a formal dinner. We eat at six.”

ф

At dinner, Julius is composed, charming, and attentive to his mother. The bruise on his cheek is barely visible. As course after intricate course is served, his mood only continues to improve. He declines to partake in the wine. As he reminds Lady Naylor, he is, after all, still only a schoolboy; his Smoke and Ethics teacher would not approve. Julius beams at Thomas as he says it. The two are sitting directly across from one another.

Thomas’s face is red and lumpy, one eye lost behind his swollen brow and cheek. The other eye is smeared by a ring of sickly yellow that is already darkening into hues of purple, brown, and black. He will look worse on the morrow. But Charlie is more worried about the damage to Thomas’s body. The way Thomas sits, slumped to one side like a listing ship, it is clear he is in considerable pain. Charlie himself winces whenever he takes too deep a breath. His rib is so tender, he eats with one elbow sticking out far to the side, to avoid brushing his own chest.

The afternoon was spent on their trying to make themselves look respectable. Getting the Soot off took several hours of scrubbing: Thomas so sore that every contact of brush with skin brought tears to his eyes. He struggled with getting into his trousers and shirt and yet refused Charlie’s offers of help; sat for minutes over each of his socks, unable to bend down to his feet. In the end, already dressed, his cravat splayed against his chest like a broken butterfly, Thomas had crawled onto his bed and lain there unmoving while Charlie paced the room, looking for something to say.

“Next year, how about we spend New Year’s with my parents? It’s quieter there.”

Thomas did not smile at this. He may not believe he has another year.

When, at the appointed time, they head over to the dining room, they — crumpled, limping, their shoes unpolished — make a marked contrast to the splendour of Lady Naylor’s dress and the elegance of Julius’s frock coat. Livia wears a ruby pendant over a high-cut dress. It is startlingly becoming. Neither she nor her mother comment on Thomas’s appearance. When a cut on his lip opens during dinner, the baroness leans over and offers her handkerchief.

Half an hour before midnight Lady Naylor and Livia excuse themselves. They wish to be with the baron when the clock strikes: it is a family tradition. This leaves the three boys sitting there alone, at the big table. The first thing Julius does is to help himself to another slice of cake. He lifts his feet onto the chair next to his, makes himself comfortable. A moment later Mr. Price enters the room. He walks in in silence and takes up position near the wall, directly behind Thomas’s and Charlie’s backs. Charlie has the impression he is holding something but does not want to turn. Not one of them speaks. Julius’s fork scrapes across the china plate every time he scoops up another bite of cake.

The minutes creep by, midnight approaching. Charlie’s back is crawling with the sensation that any second now Mr. Price will come at them from behind. He might be holding a whip, a cudgel, a gun. Surely Julius is not as crazy as that. The very moment he thinks the thought, the memory of the boxing ring rises up in Charlie. His hand inspecting the floor after the fight. Soot fine as coal dust.

Who is to say just how crazy Julius may be?

Another minute passes. Julius discards the plate but holds on to the fork, taps his teeth with its prongs. Behind them, Mr. Price starts humming “Rule Britannia.”

At three minutes to midnight, Thorpe joins them. He walks in briskly and starts fussing over the champagne bottle that’s been cooling in a silver bucket. A tidy, closed little man, slight and fragile-looking next to the bulk of Mr. Price. But immediately all the tension goes out of the room. When Charlie lifts his glass to Mr. Thorpe’s proffered bottle, he cannot keep it from shaking with anxiety and relief. At midnight the clock in the corner gives a low chime. Into the awkward silence, Mr. Price injects a hearty, Scots-inflected “Auld Lang Syne.”

Nobody else thinks to sing along.

No sooner has Mr. Price worked his way through the last chorus than Charlie quickly rises.

“I’m going to bed.”

Mr. Thorpe puts down the bottle.

“Very well. I will light the way for you and Mr. Argyle.”

It seems to Charlie that he is under instruction to see them safely to their room.

Just as Thomas begins to push himself laboriously up from the table, Julius leans his body across its width and grabs Thomas’s wrist. His voice is quiet, untouched by anger.

“Look here, Argyle. Mother’s right. I didn’t like it when she said it, but there’s no denying it. We are kindred souls. We should make friends.”

Thomas freezes, looks him hard in the face, and suddenly spits a jet of Smoke. A foul smell accompanies it, along with a retching that imparts distress rather than anger. Julius recoils, then laughs and makes a sign to his valet to open the windows.

He is still laughing when Charlie and Thomas follow Thorpe out of the room.

ф

They do not turn off the light. Neither of them has mentioned it, but both are very conscious that their door has no lock. Thomas is lying on top of the bedding, still wearing his shoes. He might be finding it difficult to take them off.

“What if we wrote to Renfrew?” Charlie asks into the silence. “About all this. Julius. The cigarettes. And what Lady Naylor told you. He, too, is fighting Smoke.”

Thomas thinks, disagrees. “Renfrew is fighting sin. And we don’t know enough to go and pick sides.” He furrows his brow, then winces. The movement hurts his bruises. “Julius has changed, don’t you think? I mean, he was always a prick. But now. . Now he’s out of control.”

“Too many cigarettes?”

“Maybe. Who knows how many a day he smokes, a sweet in each cheek. In any case: no letters, Charlie. Not for now.”

ф

Charlie must have fallen asleep. He did not hear her knock, if knock she did, nor enter the room. It stings him for a second that she should have woken Thomas first. The two are in negotiations.

“You must leave as soon as possible.”

“You are very keen to get rid of us, Miss Naylor.”

“I tried to convince Mother to send you away. But she won’t believe me. She says it’s just two boys, having an argument. The law of the playground. She didn’t see what I saw.

“You must leave,” she says again. “Or there will be further incidents. The whole house already reeks of your darkness.”

Thomas’s voice is hard when he answers. “You know what I want.”

“If I show it to you, do you promise you will go?”

“We will,” Charlie intervenes, causing Livia to turn. “Just as quickly as we can.”

Livia nods. “Do I have your word on that, Mr. Cooper?”

“You do.”

“And yours, Mr. Argyle?”

“Yes.”

“Then follow me.”

ф

She leads them to the third floor. Charlie had some idea that the laboratory must be in a secret basement, hidden away beneath a trapdoor in some distant room, but here they are, high up within the main structure of the house, within an easy walk from all its main rooms. The door Livia stops before looks like any other. It is not even locked. Behind it, though, is a second, heavier door, upholstered in black leather.

“Only Mother has the key. I am sworn never to touch it.”

Even as she says it, Livia produces the key from out her left fist. She’s been clutching it so hard, its profile is cut into her palm. It occurs to Charlie that this is the first time Livia has ever broken a promise. If so, it does not show in her movements as she deftly unlocks the door.

The laboratory is not one room but a whole suite of rooms, lined up one after the other, like railway carriages. When Livia has closed and locked the door behind them, she lights a lamp and hands it over to Charlie.

“You may look, but don’t shift anything. You have a quarter of an hour. This is my mother’s life’s work. It may be wrongheaded. But we should respect it.” As she speaks, her lips flicker red in the gaslight. Not for the first time Charlie wonders what she would do if he kissed them.

The two boys drift into the room. There are so many tables, bureaus, and shelves that it is hard to know where to start. Livia alone remains near the door, as referee and timekeeper.

A large desk draws them. It stands off in one corner, but the pile of books and papers covering it mark it as the centre of the room’s activities. The room’s most comfortable chair has been drawn up to it, its upholstery dark with use. Topmost on the desk, perched precariously on a whole stack of volumes, lies a large, leather-bound journal stamped with the baron’s crest. Inside, the pages are covered with tiny, dense handwriting. Charlie bends to it, but is unable to make sense of the letters. The journal, if that is what it is, is kept entirely in ancient Greek.

As he picks up the volume, two pictures shift within it, each marking a place. One is the portrait of a teenage girl, a little younger than themselves. At first glance it is easy to miss the iron rings around her wrists and throat. She is in chains; her neck attached to the wall behind. Even so she has found enough space to twist her head away from the camera. It smudges her features and leaves her with two heads, one superimposed upon the other. The first faces the viewer, the second avoids him, shows her chin and eye in profile. The girl’s mouth connects the two faces, unnaturally elongated by her movement and stretched into a bitter smile. A strand of dark hair has come loose from the knot at her back and cuts across her pallor like a crack. Her features are foreign, hard to place. It is a face, Charlie thinks, that would be hard to forget.

Separated from the girl by some thirty pages rests the picture of a familiar pairing. Master Renfrew and Baron Naylor stand shoulder to shoulder on an open plain of such pancake flatness that the horizon forms a straight, smooth line. As in the picture in the gym, they are both much younger: Renfrew a university student, the baron a man of forty in a thick worsted suit. The light is so bright that the sky above the two figures appears the purest white. It is as though they are standing with their heads dunked into the void. Beneath their heavy boots, the ground is made of coarse, wild grass. There is no landscape in the whole of England as big, as flat as this. It is so barren, they might be standing on the moon.

But it is another detail that has caught Thomas’s eye. Haltingly, his fingers clumsy and swollen, each movement painful to him, he reaches over and takes the picture out of Charlie’s hand; holds it up to the lamp at a flat angle, then rubs one corner between his fingers as though testing a piece of cloth.

“Feel it, Charlie. This is not a daguerreotype. And look — when you hold the lamp close, it glows like it’s shot through with silver.”

Charlie understands him at once. “Some new technology; from the Continent. Despite the embargo.”

“New for us. But this print must be fifteen years old.” Thomas replaces the picture between the pages of the journal. “This alone is enough to land Lady Naylor in jail.”

ф

They continue looking. After a few minutes Thomas, trusting to moonlight, shifts away from the desk of papers, and limps onwards, into the next room. Charlie, meanwhile, has become immersed in what appears to be a ledger, lying open to its latest entry. He is unfamiliar with the high art of bookkeeping, but expenses and income are recorded in different-coloured ink — red and black — and as such are immediately identifiable. The sums listed for expenses are enormous. One particular item draws the eye. The figure indicated is so large, that initially Charlie thinks he must have misread it. The item is identified only as a “delivery”; a date has been added in pencil: “12 January.” Less than two weeks from now. The baroness has paid for her order in advance. A letter is attached to the page by a pin, taciturn to the point of obscurity. It, too, makes reference to a delivery and identifies the same date. “Tobacco Dock. The Haarlem (La Rochelle). Midnight. Pls collect in person & arrange for transport.” A Captain van Huysmans is undersigned.

As for the ledger’s income column, each figure in it is replicated in a separate column marked with a capital D. Charlie cannot make sense of this odd doubling until he chances on the notion that D must stand for “debt.” A name follows each sum in this column, always the same, always written out in full with such a show of fastidiousness that it takes on the flavour of obsession.

Spencer.

Spencer.

Spencer.

Spencer.

Spencer.

It is as though Lady Naylor does not want to allow herself to forget to whom she owes her money. The figure that is carried over from previous pages is already so large that the implication is clear. The Naylors must be bankrupt. For all intents and purposes the Spencers own them. Which is to say Julius owns them, the moment his grandfather dies. The man is said to be very old, and bedridden with gout.

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Charlie moves away from the ledger, continues drifting through the room. There are other mysteries. There is a desk, for instance, almost entirely covered with technical drawings. Many of them are rendered on dark blue paper of a peculiar texture. The drawings themselves are white. As Charlie tries to spread them out, a few tumble to the ground. He sees Livia wince at the noise; retrieves them, and immediately realises that he cannot reproduce their former order. The topmost shows a warren of long, intersecting alleyways: a system so complex and angular that it is difficult to picture a city built according to its principles. But perhaps the chart is showing a railway system, or an archaeological site. The only clue as to what Charlie is looking at is provided by a single word, printed in ornamental capitals along the drawing’s lower edge. A·S·C·H·E·N·S·T·E·D·T. Charlie has never heard of a place by that name. But he knows that Asche is German for ash, and Stedt very nearly the German word for city. A City of Ashes. The phrase conjures images of a thousand furnaces burning in the dark.

A hiss from Thomas snaps Charlie out of his musings and beckons him to follow. The second room appears to be the laboratory proper. The walls here are lined with pharmaceutical equipment: jars and glass tubes, rows of chemicals in dark brown bottles. Several apparatuses are set out on tables, though none are currently in use. A microscope takes pride of place on a separate desk. Thomas stands stooped near it, his hands leafing through a pile of notebooks.

“All her notes are in French. And over there, there’s a library of scientific texts. Books in German, Italian, Russian — you name it. Most of them illegal, no doubt. And then there is this.”

Thomas pulls Charlie over to a glass case in one corner. Here, too, apothecary bottles are lined up. Each of them is carefully labelled with a person’s name and a date. Each of them contains a black substance, more liquid than powder.

Soot.

Thomas opens the door of the glass case and points to a few of the bottles.

“James Hardy, remember him? No? A legal clerk. Accused of murdering his wife and children. The newspapers went wild about him. Two or three years ago, in Hexham, it was, up north. He was hanged.” He points to the label. “On my birthday — that’s why I remember it. And here, Anne MacNamara. You know about her, surely?”

Charlie does. “She burnt down a church in Ipswich. More than fifty dead. She said she got the idea from a book. I remember my parents talking about her trial.”

“Sentenced to death. I don’t remember the date, but I bet you it is what it says on the bottle. Early last summer.”

Charlie scans the many bottles. There are more than two dozen.

“You think all of them—”

“Yes.”

“And all of them criminals. Murderers.”

“Yes. She harvests their Soot when they are executed.”

Charlie winces at the word. Harvest. It’s what the devil is said to do with souls.

“What else have you found, Thomas?”

“Slides for the microscope. Soot, blood drops, bits of tissue. Grains from those cigarettes: she has sliced them open and studied the contents. Medical texts, anatomy charts. The only thing in English I saw is a handwritten treatise on some kind of surgical procedure. But it’s hard to read by moonlight. Then there’s this.”

Thomas takes the lamp out of Charlie’s hands, trains it on another shelf. Its beam finds a row of glass jars in which strange, mottled objects hang, as though weightless, suspended in a liquid too viscous to be water. It takes Charlie a moment to identify them as bodily organs. Lungs and livers feature prominently, familiar enough from the school dinner table, where offal remains a staple. Their spongy tissue looks pale and bloated in the preserving fluid.

“From humans?”

Thomas shrugs. There is no need to say it. What interest could Lady Naylor have in animal parts?

Livia’s voice carries to them from the front room. “We must go.”

“One more minute.” Thomas turns his back on the jars and pulls Charlie along, to the last of the rooms. “Just a quick glance.”

The beam of the light travels before them. They themselves never make it past the threshold of the door.

In size it is a room much like the others: square, wood-panelled, a narrow window closed upon the night. There are more desks here and more shelves; books, scientific tools, a dusty sheet that hides some bulky machine.

But what absorbs Charlie’s and Thomas’s interest is a sort of alcove or closet at the far end of the room. It is not quite big enough to be thought of as a room in its own right and is separated from the main space by a row of iron bars that turn it into a kennel. A door is worked into the bars, just large enough to admit a person. Inside stand a cot, a stool, a chamber pot. Incongruously, a thick little carpet covers much of the floor of the alcove, and its walls have been wallpapered with a design that shows the silhouettes of ladies in ball gowns, each arrested in a different posture, gold leaf on mauve. As the lamp flickers, these dancers appear to twitch and move. The cot, somewhat too short and narrow to be comfortable, is freshly made. At the height of neck, wrists, and ankles, its metal frame anchors leather restraints. A ring of steel is let throat-high into the wall.

The boys stare at this alcove for a full minute. Again and again Charlie focusses the lamp on the wallpaper, the cot, the chamber pot. It’s this chamber pot that somehow fills him with a particular horror. In the absence of a prisoner it concentrates upon itself all the evil, the humiliation of this cage.

“We must go,” Livia calls again, softly, across the darkness of three rooms.

Without a word, the boys turn around and walk back to her, their faces grim with anger.

ф

They extinguish the lamp before Livia opens the door. Outside, the long corridor lies dark and silent. She turns, locks up, tension leaving her frame. It is as though she’s stepped out of a corset.

As she curls the key into her fist and leads the way back towards their room, a light is turned on, or rather the hood is turned back on a lamp already burning, arresting them in a beam focussed by its parabolic mirror. They freeze, blink blinded into the glare, see the outline of a figure behind the lamp, ten steps away. Then, as quickly as it was opened, the lamp hood is shut. Steps move away from them, into the freshly thickened darkness of the house. It all happens so quickly that there is no time to decide between flight and pursuit. By the time their eyes have recovered enough sight for them to consider either, it is too late. They walk back to their rooms with exaggerated slowness.

“I’m sorry,” Charlie says to Livia when they part ways. Sorry they got her into trouble. Sorry they mixed her up in their felony and weren’t clever enough not to get caught.

But her face robs all force from his words, her features flitting from self-reproach to a nunnish kind of pride: pride at how thorough the punishment will be that she has already begun devising for herself.

“There will be no need to assist me with my father tomorrow, Mr. Cooper. Good night, Mr. Argyle.”

The words have all the formality of a coroner pronouncing death.

ф

They cannot find sleep. Lying in their beds in darkness, separated by two steps and the walls we all erect around our thoughts, they listen to each other breathing. Their conversation is halting, interrupted by long minutes of silence.

“Who was it with the lamp?”

“Lady Naylor. Or Thorpe, or Julius, or Price. Does it really matter? One way or another, it means she knows.”

There is a rustle in the room, as of something creeping along a linen sheet. It might be Thomas running his fingernails over the pillow or a mouse scraping at the foot of the mattress. Charlie wants to light a candle and find out. But the room is cold around him, and his limbs leaden. He speaks to say something; to silence the sound.

“What’s all the Soot for?” he asks.

“Don’t know. But she likes it fresh, from killers, the moment they are dead.”

Thomas’s voice shifts with the next breath, grows younger somehow. In the darkness it is easy to imagine him as a child, twelve years old, eyes burning fiercely with fear and defiance.

“She is collecting Soot, the blackest she can get. Then who is the cage for, Charlie?”

Charlie does not answer at once. He pictures the iron collar screwed in the wall, high above the cage’s too-short cot. It seems too slender for Thomas’s neck.

“She wouldn’t,” he says at last.

“We don’t know the first thing about what Lady Naylor would or wouldn’t do.”

“Then we must do what we promised. Leave. This very day.”

Thomas responds by lighting a candle. He holds it close to his face, shadows chasing upwards, past his swollen cheeks and brows. His voice is calm, pensive.

“If that’s what it takes, you know. . To defeat Smoke, I mean, once and for all. If all she’s missing is the last bit of Soot, the right sort of Soot, tainted from birth. . I mean, if that’s what is growing in me, and if she asked me to — I’d do it, Charlie, I would. Even if it comes with that collar. Or with a rope.”

Charlie watches the thought unfold in Thomas. He doesn’t try to dissuade him. All he says is “She hasn’t asked.”

“Maybe she’s working up to it.”

“Maybe. If so, she can write you a letter.”

Thomas’s expression is stony. Then a smile crawls over his face.

“A letter?”

“Yes. Kindly request your volunteering yourself to be killed. Much obliged. RSVP at earliest convenience.”

They both giggle. It’s the sound of relief.

“You’re right, Charlie. Let’s get the hell out of here.” Then: “Where will we go?”

“Home. My parents set off for Ireland today. But Lady Naylor doesn’t need to know that. We will have the house to ourselves.”

Thomas is quiet for a moment.

“She might not let us,” he says at last.

“No,” Charlie concedes. “But then we’ll know what she is about.

“I am a Cooper,” he adds after some thought. “Firstborn son of the eighth Earl of Shaftesbury. It’d be hard to make me disappear.”

ф

They broach the subject with Lady Naylor at lunch. They could not locate her before, ate breakfast alone in the smaller of the three dining rooms. It is Charlie who takes the word. He explains how his sister’s recent letter included a note from his parents requesting he come home with his friend; how his mother in particular is keen to meet Mr. Argyle about whom she has heard so much; and adds that his father is desirous that they come as quickly as possible so that he can introduce them to a cousin visiting from Ireland.

Thomas interrupts his flow of eloquence.

“In short,” he says, “we will leave today.”

Throughout all this Lady Naylor sits impassive, stiff-backed, her fork embedded in a piece of cold pork.

“It’ll be dark before you get to the station. The roads aren’t safe. Besides, you are too late for the express.”

Thomas is about to argue, but she has already turned to her butler.

“Thorpe, please talk to the coachman. And help the gentlemen pack. They leave at dawn.”

ф

They spend the day in their room, only venturing forth for necessities. Neither of them says so out loud, but it’s because they are scared. Scared of something going wrong, someone stopping them, thwarting their escape. When they arrived, ten days ago, the house bored them. Now it feels like a trap. As they sit, counting the hours, Charlie finds his thoughts wandering to Livia. He feels like he owes her an explanation, or perhaps she him. About what exactly, it is hard to say.

After dinner Lady Naylor asks Charlie and Thomas to join her in her study. She sits down behind her desk and makes them swear “not to speak or otherwise mention any of my research or any of the historical insights I have shared with you, on your honour as gentlemen.” The phrase is so cumbersomely legalistic that Charlie half expects her to pull a sheet of paper from her drawer and require their signatures. Before they are dismissed, she rises to press their hands.

It’s Thomas’s turn first.

“I regret you are in such a hurry to leave, Mr. Argyle. I had high hopes for you.”

“I often disappoint.”

She smiles. “I imagine so.” She looks over at a letter lying on her desk. “There is news from Parliament today. I only just received it. They held a special session early this morning. On New Year’s Day, would you believe? It’s quite unprecedented. The Speaker called for a vote on the proposed amendments to the Purity of the Realm Act. Most of the delegates were out of town, of course. The amendment has been voted down. There will be no changes to the embargo. It’s a perfect Tory triumph. I am afraid your good Dr. Renfrew will be rather crushed.” She gives them a look of pain and scorn. “We live at a fateful time, gentlemen. The future of our country hangs in the balance. And you choose to behave like children playing hide-and-seek.”

She lets go of Thomas’s hand with a brusqueness bordering on violence. It’s Charlie’s turn next. Up close her face looks drawn, almost haggard. He has not noticed it before.

“You will, I trust, refrain from mentioning any details about my husband’s condition to anyone, even your family. It might be best to suggest you never saw him. He is bedridden. Let that be enough.”

She gives his hand a final squeeze, turns away from them, reclaims her seat.

“That is all. Good-bye, gentlemen. Bon voyage.”

“We won’t see you in the morning?”

“I have work to do.”

That is the last they know of her, bent over her desk, dipping her pen into a vat of ink. In her mind they seem to have already ceased to exist.

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Outside Lady Naylor’s office, they find Livia lingering. It is obvious she has waited for them, but as they approach she suddenly starts walking, away from them. Charlie runs after her for a few steps, stops, calls.

“We are leaving at dawn,” he calls.

She turns, and at the same time starts running. A twitch cuts a wrinkle through the fine composure of her face. And then the impossible happens: a drop of Smoke, blue-grey and almost liquid, pours from her nose onto her upper lip. The next moment she turns the corner. From far away a word reaches them, muffled, though she must have shouted it.

“Adieu.”

THOMAS

I do not sleep. There is another place, of not-sleep, that I can freely enter where one may dream but find no rest. It is like a room with a door that leans open. I try to resist it, but time and again am drawn there, poke open that door, slip my face (only my face!) around its frame. Inside sits another me, an iron ring around his neck, and the wallpaper stages a ball of a thousand grandes dames dancing. Gold leaf on mauve. As the Smoke pours out of me (the other me, the one I am watching), I burn my own silhouette into the wall. It discommodes the dancers. When dawn breaks through the open curtains, I am exhausted, my face still swollen like a pumpkin. Outside, the pheasant whose steady patrol was so much a part of our stay here is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he is no longer with us. We had pheasant soup last night.

The morning does not go to plan. The coach is there, and Thorpe has sent servants to have our luggage loaded, but up on the box sits not Harrington, the coachman who drove us here, but Mr. Price, a heavy shotgun thrown across his thighs. When I ask him what he thinks he is doing up there, he spits some phrases into his muffler.

“Lady’s orders. A band of Gypsies. Sighted not ten leagues from here. Job calls for someone good with a gun. Just in case.”

He cuts himself a plug of tobacco, sets to chewing it. Thorpe opens the door for us, his face blank of emotion. Charlie climbs in first.

“In a few hours we’ll be on the express,” he says.

A jolt of envy runs through me. Charlie’s soul is knit for hope. Mine’s stuck in the mud of the things that may go wrong.

Nobody waves us off. The moment the door is closed, Thorpe turns away, climbs the stairs to the manor. The sun is coming out, chasing mist along the ground. The crunch of gravel as the wheels start turning. There is a window at the back of the carriage; both Charlie and I press a brow to it, watch us pull away. We leave a pile of horse dung in our wake. Some dogs bark, a rooster hails the morning. Then we pass the gate.

Within two hundred yards of the manor house we stop. Before we can open the door to see what is going on, we hear Price’s voice, remonstrating with someone.

“Impossible. I’m not instructed to—” and “Does your mother know?”

“Drive,” says Livia, entering the coach in a skirt and jacket made of dark wool. “I am seeing the gentlemen to the station. Quick now, or we will miss the train.”

Reluctantly, Price puts the coach in motion. Livia sits down across from us and stares at us in grim pallor.

If we expect her to explain her actions, we are mistaken. But then, it’s obvious, really. She and Charlie haven’t said good-bye. They like each other, but she’s the type of girl for whom that sort of thing is a big fuss. Only now there’s three in the coach, which is one too many for this sort of talk, so she looks at me grimly, while Charlie asks her shyly how does she do, and has she slept soundly and well. I could climb out, leave them to it, but the box only has one seat, and Price is on it, holding a shotgun as thick as my arm. So I settle into my coat and pretend to doze. I find the room without any difficulty. The door is only leaned to. I can feel the wood against my cheek, the handle in my fist. What harm can it do, just to take a peek?

I wake — if that’s what I do — when the morning sun falls into the coach window and finds my face. Blinking, I lean out, see a windmill grow out of the long stretch of its shadow and have a sudden sense of déjà vu. I have seen the same windmill in the same sort of light before, on the way to the house; then, too, in the moment of surfacing from the depths of dream, its currents and tides still tugging at my limbs. Then I realise it is not just the sun that has woken me. We have stopped.

There is a muddle to the things that follow, a violation of the laws of sequence that troubles me as much as the events. It starts with the birds, an explosion of birds, spat out of the windmill as though it is a cannon. Starlings. There must be a thousand of them, a spray of ink stains in the sky, clotting, thinning, shrouding the sun.

Then (but how can it be then and not before?) the whip-crack of a shot, followed — anticipated? — by a scream, a whinny, a sound so poised between the equine and the human tongues that I cannot place the screamer. The coach quivers, buckles; Charlie shouts and my hand can’t find the bloody handle of the door. I open it in time to see the second horse shot. The word does not capture it. It’s like a hatchet has been taken to its neck. A fist-sized chunk just disappears, is torn out in a spray of meat and bone, then the beast crumples in its harness. I see Price, leaping off the box seat and landing hard in the mud; see rather than hear him screaming to take cover. Behind him the first of the horses that was shot froths in wonder at the deadweight of its hoof dangling from a thread of skin.

Through all this I am standing half in, half out the coach. I want to ask Price why he stopped, and who’s attacking us; whether he has a second gun on him; what sort of trick it is he thinks he is playing. I am so filled with questions at that moment, all of them there, present to me all at once, that my head feels light with them, as though thoughts are air, no, lighter than air, are buoyed by the magic of balloon gas, and all the same I cannot get my legs to move, am frozen, rooted, grown into the doorway of the coach at foot and hand.

Then Price is hit. The swing of a bat, an axe, a sledgehammer: invisible, trailing a bang like an afterthought. What sort of gun is this that slams a man into the side of a coach and leaves his chest a hole open for perusal?

Then it’s my turn. I feel a punch, then heat, a branding iron plunged into my temple. My last thought is another question of sorts, mute wonder at the fact that neither Price nor I found time to shroud our fall in Smoke.

Then hard hands grab me from behind.

As metaphors of death go, this is one I can believe.