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Synopsis

The year is 1909. It has been ten years since Thomas Argyle, Charlie Cooper and Livia Naylor set off a revolution by releasing Smoke upon the world. They were raised to think Smoke was a sign of sin manifest, but later learned that its suppression was really a means of controlling society. Smoke allowed people to mingle their emotions and truly connect, and the trio hoped that freeing the Smoke would bring down the oppressive power structure, creating a fair and open society. But the consequences were far greater than they had imagined, and the world has fractured.

Erasmus Renfrew, the avowed enemy of Smoke, is now Lord Protector of what remains of the English state. Charlie and Livia live in Minetowns, an egalitarian workers' community in the north of England that lives by Smoke. Thomas Argyle is in India on a clandestine mission to find out the origins of Smoke, and why the newly risen East India Company is mounting an expedition in the Himalayas.

Mowgli, the boy from the jungle, whose body was used to trigger the tempest that unleashed the Smoke, now makes a living as a chameleon-like thief in New York. And Elizabeth Renfrew, Erasmus's niece, who was the subject of his cruel experiments in suppressing Smoke, is in hiding from her uncle in provincial Canada. What she endured has given her a strange power over Smoke, which she fears as much as her uncle.

Believing her uncle's agents have found her, Elizabeth flees to New York with a theatre troupe led by Balthazar Black, an impresario with secrets of his own. There they encounter Mowgli and a Machiavellian Company man named Smith.

All these people seek to discover the true nature of Smoke and thereby control its power. As their destinies entwine, a cataclysmic confrontation looms. The Smoke will either bind them together or rend the world apart.

Excerpt

Act I

The New World

(April-May 1909)

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

Laud we the gods;

And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils.

William Shakespeare, Cymbeline.

Theatre

1.

They open with The Lovers.

It's a simple stage set. A bed just wide enough to suggest it serves marriage, not sleep. A vase with dried flowers; a garland on the wall. The bed is freshly made; in the air, drifting onstage from behind the curtain, Meister Lukas's ghostly counter-tenor. A wedding strain. It is enough to set the scene; the faint noise of guests leaving in the background.

The groom enters first. He is dressed in peasant finery, clean, god-fearing and shabby. A young man, inexperienced and handsome. Two steps and he is at the bed. He stops before it, watches it as though it were a dog in a cage.

Sleeping.

Liable to wake.

The groom sits down on the starched sheet, keeping his weight in his thighs, so that only the buttocks brush the pert, white linen. Again that long, suspicious look down the length of the bed, nervous and fretting. Then, for a moment as fleeting as a sneeze, some other note enters his gaze and one hand spreads on the pillow to a five-pointed star. And all at once the Smoke is there. It jumps from his mouth and hangs an inch off his chin, in the cone of light of a well-focussed lamp: hangs frothy, insubstantial, many-limbed.

Alive.

The groom sees it, claws at it, wishes to shove it back down his throat; leaps up, aghast, inspects the linen, and finds he has made a single, crescent mark. A quarter buttock of Soot. His fingers trace it as they would a scar.

Then she is on stage. The bride. The audience have not seen her come on, transfixed as they are by the groom and allowing the light to guide their focus. That light flickers out now and a second comes alive, exquisitely timed; catches her wedding dress and makes a home in its starched cotton. She glows with her virginity: downstage, astride a low stool, tucked in behind a tiny dresser. On it stands a disk of mirror no bigger than her palm.

Oh, she is good tonight: so full of emotion that she is on the edge of Smoke--the audience can sense it, can smell it on the air--yet so terrified, so very shy and meek, as to make all thought of Smoke impossible. She shivers, tugs at her long, unadorned sleeves, crosses, uncrosses her legs (a murmur in the audience at this; a flicker of lust, disarmed by pity), watches the little mirror. The stage hand has positioned it well: it reflects back upstage to a second mirror, tall and rectangular like a doorway. A fluorescent glow spreads from this second mirror, cold, electrical, transforming it into a gateway to a ghostly realm. The bride's inner self. It is hemmed by a plain black lacquered frame.

Half the bride's face is visible on this cold slate serving up her soul: one eye, one ear, a twist of braid and half of her delicate mouth. And next to this half-face--the laws of optics contracting the stage and folding space into a single frame--stands the bed, still unlit, a white rectangle, soft and hazy in its outlines. In its midst, just visible, like an inverted moon, is the crescent of Soot painted by her husband's buttock.

The bride rises, gets her dress tangled in the stool. It falls, impossibly loud, accentuated by an off-stage cymbal. At the sound, the lights go up and her husband steps out of the shadows. They link hands, bride and groom; it feels daring in the sudden blaze of light. They smile. A sigh goes through the audience, of goodwill and relief. The two love each other.

All is well.

But for all their love the bed stands unmoved, unwelcoming; burdens them with its suggestion; expects them, lily-white, for an act that cannot but douse them in sin.

The lovers try a kiss. It is brief, chaste, smokeless. When the bride starts crying the audience sees it in the mirror: she has turned her back on them. The Smoke that has started to rise in the auditorium now reflects these tears. It speaks of old pain. There are many here who remember: living in a world where they were ashamed of their needs. Their wedding night. It played out differently for every couple (as awkwardness; as pain; as guilt). How often was it that the wedding sheets were burned? Not in ceremony or celebration but shamefacedly, by a husband crouching before the hearth in tears; by a wife shaken in her deepest sense of her own decency, transformed by marriage into a whore. And these two here, they are hopeless: pious and simple, brought up in a world where the inside of each bedroom in the village was whitewashed afresh during the weeks of lent. Their bodies burning with love and need each for the other, they find themselves contracted to a sacred union that obliges them to a first coupling that must repudiate all lust. They walk to their bed like thieves, taking care to avoid the other's eyes.

(And then--as they stand before their marriage bed, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, not touching, not daring to scoot apart, unsure whether to sit or lie, to undress themselves or the other, fully or partially--just then, there is a pause, a hesitation, exterior to the play, like a hole within the fabric of the theatre. Within it, Balthazar can feel the audience like a living thing. It is there in its noise; in the web of its nascent Smoke. He stands at the threshold between stage and auditorium, hidden from the audience by a wooden screen. Wait, he signals to his actors and stage hands. Let frustration breed. Let them think you are lost out there, have forgotten your lines; or rather, that you have remembered yourselves: actors, not bride and groom. It will give you material that you can shape; Smoke-fabric you can weave. And then--three breaths, four--he gestures: Now.)

And so: a storm breaks. Meister Lukas again, raining down a barrel of peas onto a sheet of metal. Rain as loud and hard as hail. The large mirror turns window, shows a smear of cloud approaching in a moon-bright sky. It is a crude trick, a painted scroll that can be drawn across the screen, slowly changing the scenery, bringing the cloud closer along with its curtain of rain. Not just any rain: Smoke-rain, unmistakable now to those who stood like these two, witnessing its first approach. Soon it fills the whole of the window, and--a fine effect this, perfected after much trial--begins to patter as real water onto the stage at the bride and groom's feet, then soaks their fronts, until that peasant shirt clings to his broad chest and her sodden dress discloses the woman underneath its virgin folds.

Next, the Smoke starts, pumped from beneath the stage through a crack in the floorboards, near enough the mirror-window so as to seem to blow in from outside. It isn't real Smoke but a chemical concoction. Harmless and scentless it billows around bride and groom. They breathe it; she utters a moan; he turns to her, cradles her cheek in his palm, bends down to her in a kiss that is almost a bite (a touch too much perhaps, an actor getting in the way of the pure language of the gesture).

And just like that their own Smoke--real Smoke--leaps out of bride and groom, thick and many-hued. It is caught on the draught of two hand-operated fans and carries out into the audience in rich tendrils of emotion. The lights die, are cut off all at once; the bed squeaks, as the bride slams the groom's weight into its mattress.

Then: nothing. Not the sound of their love making which would push the scene into farce; no whispers or giggles or sweetly struck strings. Rather, a blank silence falls to be filled by the audience members themselves. The drama is theirs now, played out in their heads; on their skin, and in the air that binds them. It is guided by two well-positioned Shapers and contained by Etta May, the troupe's Soother who is also in charge of the bell. Ten seconds, Balthazar has instructed her, fifteen at most, and shorter if the Smoke starts to taste wrong.

Balthazar counts sixteen. Then the bell rings and light floods the room, thick with Smoke, already dispersing in the draft created by the re-directed fans and hastily thrown-open windows. Its taste is lovely, the Smoke's, full of yearning and sadness and frisky, playful need. Ada and Victor--bride and groom--take their bows: his shirt is wide open and the hem of her skirt is in her hand, showing calf and knee. Balthazar snorts. It would be pointless to reprimand them. They are one now with the audience's Smoke. When they kiss, the applause carries envy but no resentment.

Victor's hand makes smudges on Ada's shapely bum.

2.

They take a break. Not an intermission, just a few minutes for the last of the Smoke to disperse and the auditorium's air to clear. Best to paint new emotion on a clean slate.

While the stage set is being changed--the bed exchanged for the stylised prow of a ship; stool and dresser traded for a large, barnacle-studded tub filled with stinky brine--Etta May makes her way over to Balthazar. This irritates him. It is best if the Shapers and Soothers are not identified by the audience but merge with it. Balthazar does not look up as she steps behind the screen that shelters him; feels a stiffness come into his features. It turns his face into a stone, Etta May once told him. A brittle lump of flint: sheer and angular, barely troubled by a sculptor's hand; not enough skin for too much cheekbone; the slip of the chisel for a nose. Tarred, then dry-aged in a kiln. She herself is fleshy, closer to fifty than forty, cheeks florid like a baker's wife. In the heat of the room she had shed her cape and her décolleté is heaving in her low-cut dress; the bosom Soot-flecked yet pale as yeasty uncooked dough.

"Don't scowl, Balthazar. Makes you look ugly. Scrunched like a hand-puppet. A sour negro Punch."

He flares his nostrils, already soothed, then makes a point of scowling more deeply.

"You're leaving your post, Em. What do you want? Get fired?"

"Get a raise, more like."

Etta May smiles, fishes a cigarette from one rolled-up dress sleeve and lights it with a book of matches produced from out the other. Her movements are deliberate, exaggerated. Is she nervous? No: excited. Wishing to disclose her excitement and at the same time defer its explanation; build suspense. Balthazar makes a mental note of the gesture, of the pause it imposes. It will do well in a future play.

"There is someone here," Etta May says at last, blowing cigarette smoke past his face then watching it curl and break up, so different in its movements from real Smoke it is like comparing water to quicksilver. "Someone unusual. In the audience."

"Who?"

"Can't tell, hon. Towards the back."

"A Spoiler?"

"No. More like the opposite." She hesitates. "Though that's not quite right either. Someone unusual. Potent. You may want to have a sniff around."

She takes another puff, passes over the cigarette and smiles up at him in that way she has, at once sassy and maternal. Then she navigates her hips around the edge of the screen and back into the crowd. The cigarette she has left behind tastes of her lipstick and powder. Balthazar smokes it down to a stub. His eyes are on a crack in the screen, and beyond it, on the crowd.

There are perhaps sixty people in the hall. It could accommodate five times that number but in a space like this, a market hall rich in brick and tile but poor in doors and windows, where the Smoke can rise but not disperse unless chased out by the action of some well-aimed fans, more would be dangerous, and greedy. Besides, there is no need. They can always put on more shows, raise the price of tickets. No matter how expensive they get, the performance is always sold out. Farmers paying in grain, in chickens, in pails of milk; trappers offering furs; shipping agents bringing silver, fabrics and spices, imported trinkets made of gold. The troupes that can do this, and do it safely, are few and far between. It is a question of material; and of personnel. All of it: his doing. Balthazar has written every gesture, scripted every burp of Smoke; has done the hiring, hand-picked every talent, from the actors to the stage hands and set painter, to those with whom he seeds the audience, orchestrating their response. You could say that he invented it. Smoke Theatre.

It is the art form of the age.

There are other companies, but his is the best: not just in the colonies, but anywhere Balthazar has been.

Anywhere it is allowed.

Spoiler, Shaper, Soother: these are theatre terms, specific to a practice not a decade old. Shapers are men and women one places in the crowd to guide its Smoke-response; actors whose disposition and training allows them to receive the stage emotion and magnify it. Soothers are sinkholes of a sort, slow and placid in their Smoke, and uncommonly kind in disposition. They walk the crowd looking for Spoilers: audience members whose Smoke is powerful and dangerous to the performance; who will take the love offered up by the play, or its grief, or its frustration, and have it feed their rage. It is a dangerous game, bringing scores of people together in an auditorium, dangerous, and rewarding.

It is a mystery to Balthazar how Aristotle could have written on catharsis, in an age long before Smoke.

3.

The lights are dimmed, the stage made ready for the second piece. Fishermen at Sea. There will be words this time, and the emotional palette will centre on a forlorn sort of wonder. Four men, blown off-course in the dangerous waters between Norway and the English North, cod heavy in their holds; cold-chapped fingers and wind-blown faces, clutching tin cups of hot tea. Land is in sight. It starts in camaraderie, then; in the love working men bear for each other when business is good and they have survived another day.

Then, there comes a smear, staining the horizon, a sight familiar to many of the audience but new to the men: a strange, tinted fog that rises out of the cold of the land--out of the hills and rocks and sand-blown beaches of Northumbria--and slips into the Soot-thickened sea, igniting it until each swell rolls with a hazy halo and each trough fills crest-deep with a viscous mist. The sun rises, throws the fishermen's shadows towards the darkened water; a nice effect, crudely symbolic and pleasing to the eye. One after the other, the fishermen turn and show the audience their faces. Behind them, sunwards, the way to Norway lies clear. They consider it, unsettled by the blanket of Smoke that swaddles England; then turn their backs on sun and light and sail towards it all the same, for beyond the Smoke there lie their homes. As they enter the fog, one amongst the crew, the youngest, a Welshman, starts into song, singing shyly in his native tongue. The song's melody--thin, brittle, true--fills the room with trepidation and thin silvery Smoke. Out in the auditorium it turns a lighter shade yet, and is passed from row to row like a chalice of sugared wine. People weep in the full awareness that they are enjoying their tears.

It is a short play, good-natured and pleasing, connecting past and present, old and new. Saint John: a town of immigrants, hailing from England eight times out of ten. There isn't a tale as sweet as one of home. Balthazar has used it to open and close shows in the past. They have a repertoire of more than fifty now, all one-act pieces, not really plays so much as single scenes, situations, moments-in-time. Emotions given life; Smoke summoned and disseminated. But really they are all the one play, the only story the audience wants to see and hear. Their own story: Smoke's Second Coming. To England, to the colonies: everywhere it has reached.

The troupe have tried other stories. They have revived plays Balthazar found mouldering in private libraries and converted to the theatre of Smoke. People can be made to care about doomed, lovelorn Romeo, or about Vittoria Corombona, White Devil of Padua--but it is hard work. The time of kings and dukes; power struggles amongst princes; words written before the First Smoke: they all seem distant now, unconnected to the mystery that is the present. And then, too, when staging these old plays, one has to manage their crass violence. You cut out Lavinia's tongue on stage and the auditorium turns to tar. Anger and passion, secreted as outrage on four dozen skins. On a good night. On a bad night--the wrong audience, a Spoiler in the front row, angry with his lot--it turns to hunger and want.

No, Smoke Theatre is at its best when it works quieter moments, and smaller emotions; when it captures doubt and tenderness, surprise and yearning, and leaves hatred to real life, where it breeds readily enough without Art's midwifery.

4.

While the applause still lingers, and the sailors remain linked, arms thrown around each other's shoulders, a weeping scrum of men; while the buzzing ventilators stand inverted, bringing the audience's Smoke from spectators to actors rather than the other way around, thus forging a fresh link between stage and stalls; while the room is thick with memories and fellowship, and Sashinka, the Players' cat, leaps to much hilarity onto the wooden rim of the brine-filled tub, sticking its arse in the air as it takes a deep sniff; while the room is thus self-occupied and happy, Balthazar does what he rarely thinks to do. He leaves the shelter of his screen and inserts his old, gaunt figure into the crowd. Flimsy though a barrier the screen may be, it is tall enough to encourage Smoke to pass around it, creating a pocket of almost clear air. In the crowd, Balthazar is exposed. The experience is immediate, like submerging in the sea. A loss of self; some inner fish waking, fanning its gills, like an atavism of the blood. Balthazar slips into the press, feeling his own Smoke leap in greeting, add its flavours to the mix. It is not aimless, this drifting and sharing of the self: Balthazar is looking for something, with his skin more than his eyes, an irregularity in the pulse of the crowd.

At first the only such irregularity he senses is Etta May, a quiet eddy in the current of emotion, offering repose. The two Shapers, Kolya and Pavla, are invisible to him, have blended seamlessly into the tide. Balthazar searches on, distracted now, temporarily relieved of the burden of being alone. He slows, tempted to linger in particular patches, constellations where his neighbours' Smoke is most in sympathy with his own wants. But enough is left of him--enough curiosity and self-regard; enough of his artist's sense of mission; enough discipline and force of will--to push on, ever deeper, towards the back of the room. Here: a man ripe with self-hate, temporarily at peace, disarmed by the festive goodwill of the room. There: a bent old grandmother of eighty receiving, in thin mauve billows, the raging appetites of adolescent flesh from a pink-cheeked schoolboy three steps to her left and trading them for memories of libidinal adventures half a century past (they both giggle where they stand). And then, his eyes closed now, reading the room only through his skin, Balthazar senses someone else, someone strange. Self-contained yet not a blank, shaping the Smoke in ways that are hard to make sense of. Like a whale, it comes to him. Displacing half the ocean, yet trying not to move. Lest it crush the other fish.

A talent, Etta May said.

Unusual.

Balthazar stops and opens his eyes, trying to identify who it is.

He is too late. Backstage, someone (Lukas? Edie?) has decided that it is time to open once more the market hall's ring of narrow windows, set high upon its tiled walls, and angle the fans so as to clear out the room. As the Smoke disperses, Ada's voice, surprisingly deep for her girlish looks, announces an intermission. It is too early for this: there were to be three little plays before the break. Balthazar realises it is his doing: he has abandoned his post, leaving the actors stranded without instructions. He turns, torn between the desire to reclaim control and to pinpoint the talent before all trace is gone. He has chased her to the far end of the hall, has formed an impression of who it might be. But now that the audience is in motion--heading outdoors, each taking the memory of their communion out into the street, where they will stand alone, divided by space and icy sea breeze, their hands thrust into pockets--now, in this press of bodies that have ceased to speak to one another and caught within its steady flow, it is hard for Balthazar to make sure of his impression and harder yet to give chase. He is left with a guess, a glimpse. A girl not yet twenty. Straight, auburn hair, touched by rust. A plump curve of cheek; a back held very straight.

Then she is swallowed by the crowd.

5.

Eight plays in total; two intermissions. Two and a half hours of intense emotion. The room is painted by the time they leave, with patches of Soot like shadows cast and then discarded, stuck to tiles and dirty brick.

They finish on a traditional piece, one of many belonging to a cycle Balthazar has been working on, what he has come to think of as his life's work. The cycle is far from finished. One day he will perform all its plays in sequence, or perhaps in reverse. He has chosen a title and wants to publish the manuscript; has worked out a system of Smoke notation based around the symbols used in the choreography of dance. The Rebels. A running time of seven or eight hours, perhaps more. They will have to build a theatre especially, to handle the accumulation of Smoke: in North America, or on the Continent, or perhaps even in England, if politics and Gales permit. Tonight though, the Players will present the merest fragment. Act One, Scene 3. Balthazar wrote it many years ago, after his visit to the School. A pilgrimage, really, disappointing in its details. Few of the teachers remained; fewer yet deigned to talk to him. He had walked the grounds but received no access to the buildings.

It's a quiet scene, simple and clean. The stage set shows a dormitory, a little generic perhaps, a reflection of other schools visited, to which access was easier. A row of narrow beds and of dressers. Some grass-stained rugby socks wilting on the floor. A stack of dog-eared schoolbooks, a blazer and tie tossed across the back of a chair. Daylight falls sickly through a window upstage left.

Two schoolboys run in, seventeen or thereabouts, one dressed in travelling clothes and holding a suitcase, the other in school uniform and cap. The casting was difficult. Most of the actors simply look too old and it was important to get the physical types right, familiar as they are from images and songs. In the end Balthazar settled on Ada and Geoffrey, their set painter. Ada has taken off the blonde wig she wore earlier, as virgin bride, and her short hair has been hennaed until it shines in copper tones. Geoffrey looks much as he always does, intense and sullen. Two schoolboys, one a gentle red-head, the other dark and looking more like a butcher's apprentice than the son of the old nobility.

A murmur goes through the hall. The boys have been recognised. Here there are, Saint John, New Brunswick, a town still halfway between civilisation and frontier. Shopkeepers, sea captains, the town doctor and his wife. Cowpokes, two or three natives, a gentleman dressed in his servant's clothes, worried for his reputation (or his laundry bill). One thousand miles and a revolution from the verdant fields of Oxfordshire. And yet: the boys have been recognised. Of course they have. In Britain, on the Continent, up and down the North American coasts: there is not a story more widely told than theirs. Balthazar has long puzzled over who took such care to spread it, put such colour in its details. He is a connoisseur of story and this one, it has been shaped.

There is a sudden press as the audience rush closer to the stage, as though for one mad moment they have come to believe the Players have conjured the actual persons, enticed them to return. Thomas Argyle and Charlie Cooper. Balthazar knows some songs about them that, well-sung, never fail to move him to tears; others that would make a madam blush. He would bet good money that the audience knows some songs, too.

Already, the auditorium is smoking. A curious flavour, of longing and wonder; twists of anger, of disappointed expectation. On stage, the action is limited, deliberately contained. One boy showing the other around. Charlie explains the workings of the school to the new arrival who continues to hold the suitcase in one meaty fist. The words are almost incidental but set in blank verse all the same, to lift them from the realm of the banal to that of ritual. Charlie is asking why Thomas has arrived so late in the semester; is inviting him to choose his bed. It's a trivial moment, chosen precisely for its lack of drama, until, out of nowhere, Thomas steps close to Charlie, across five or six feet of space, and juts his chin into his face. Oh, how well Geoffrey has learned that step. "Walk like you are getting ready to beat him," Balthazar instructed him. "Like you are stepping up to someone, willing to take his life." Geoffrey, it turns out, knows a thing or two about the intimacy of violence.

"What is it that awaits me here?" he asks of Charlie, flat and belligerent, blank verse be damned.

"Pain," answers Charlie. "Pain and friendship. But mostly pain." He reaches out and calmly, gently touches Thomas's cheek and ear. To the audience it is as though he marks the very spot in which, much later, Thomas will be shot and scarred.

Then: a handshake as intense as a kiss. One clean thread of Smoke rising from their joint exhalation, seemingly too fine to have much sway over the crowd. But there is a final twist to the scene, a recent innovation that Balthazar has reserved for special nights. He sees Ada's eyes on him, sees the fist she has slipped into her pocket.

Do it, nods Balthazar. They have been a good audience and the mood is right. It is the final night in the Canadas and the tour will be done after New York. There is no need to husband their resources as stringently as before.

Ada reacts without seeming to react. Balthazar watches her pocket, sees her fist harden over the vial he knows is hidden there; fancies hearing it break, a sound like a fingernail tapping a glass.

The results are spectacular. It starts with the actors. They have entered well into the moment; have summoned emotions deep and pure. The vial's contents take care of the rest. They find their Smoke and, without visibly altering it, electrify it, giving it currency and charge. Soon the entire audience is weeping, hugging, shouting. "Hear, hear," they shout (though there have been no speeches). "Revolution!" (though it has happened already, long ago, and a good half of them are unsure they like what it has brought). "Huzzah!" and "Hurray!". Some people are kissing, all sexes, young and old; a native trapper, black-eyed, weather-burned, and the old doctor's wife stand hugging cheek to cheek. Balthazar signals for the fans to be turned on. Even so it takes half an hour for the crowd to calm down.

As the audience disperse, shy now, each unto themselves, avoiding further contact, Balthazar once again catches sight of the stiff-backed girl with auburn hair and full, round cheeks.

6.

The girl with the auburn hair does not go home when the play finishes. She waits outside, in the shadow of the market hall, and watches the players spill out in a noisy gaggle. The tall man, the Negro, is amongst them, sour-faced and oddly regal. It is to him she wishes to speak. But she needs to find him on his own.

The actors head for their hotel. She has already learned that they are staying there and follows at good distance. Inside, the waiting area of the lobby is split into half a dozen booths, each bordered by a parting wall: Smoke screens, guarding against indiscrete emotion. She sits in one of these booths and endures the concierge's gaze. Always now, there is the sense of being hunted. When he reaches for the telephone, she thinks it is to call the police.

The players are already gone to their rooms. She can hear them, shouting and laughing, somewhere deep in the hotel. Other guests come to complain about the noise. Once they quiet down she will get up and ask the concierge for the number of the Negro's room. The words arrange themselves within her with the staid formality that is her lot. She has no spontaneity, not when it comes to speaking. It is one of the things that make her stand apart. She rises and sees the concierge reach for his phone; sits down again and waits for the police.

The police do not come. Instead it is the Negro--the director--who descends the lobby stairs. He is wearing a flat cap and a herringbone coat; his steps are so long it is almost as though he's running. Everyone in the lobby stops to stare as he rushes out. It makes the girl feel a pang of sympathy for him. Here is another one who has been marked out.

Outside, the air carries snow. April the nineteenth, the Canadian seaboard. Her long-johns itchy from six months' wear. She watches him retrace his earlier steps and let himself back into the market hall. An old man, thin as a rail. The dark face pruned under his cap.

Inside, he lights a lamp and steps onto the stage. She slips through the gates and, in the ring of light created by his lamp, watches him take stock of his props that stand still arranged for the final scene. It occurs to her that he is here to pack things up but he sits down on one of the dormitory beds instead and sniffs the cold air. Instinctively, she mirrors him and flares her nostrils, takes in the stink of the market hall, sea fish and offal, the sweat of working men. It isn't so difficult to imagine into this smell something of school. Soiled laundry and digestive gases; clods of dirt clinging to rugby studs. If one cocks the head a little, one can almost hear it: the noise of boys charging down the corridor and down the steps. They never walked. As a child, their constant hurry was a puzzle to her, like the height of the moon. The bed the man sits on is the one that his play designated for Thomas. She watches him while she quietly walks closer. His eyes are closed now, his bitter face un-pruned. An old man caught in reverie; stroking crumpled linen. Believing his own lies.

It makes her like him better than before.

"That's not what they looked like," she says into the silence. "The beds."

The words startle him. He leaps upright, the scowl returning to his features.

"You!" he exclaims. "The girl with the poker up her arse. Sneaking in here to steal!"

She does not respond at once but walks closer, pointing at the beds.

"They weren't this narrow. And the backs were higher, you could prop up a pillow and read."

The man seems incredulous, as much at her words as at her manner of speaking.

"How would you know?" he mutters, growing angry. Then: "How old are you, girl?"

She thinks about it, blinks, attempts humour. "Eighteen. But I have an old soul." The director does not laugh.

The next moment she has thrown herself on her knees and bent forward, slipped her palm under the edge of the bed.

"Here," she says. "That's where they carved in their letters. Come, you can feel for yourself."

She is unsurprised when he tells her to piss off.

7.

She gets him to do it in the end, through obstinacy rather than any more words, waiting out his sourness until he slides down onto one knee and bends down next to her, and allows his fingers to be guided by hers. She runs them across the unvarnished undercarriage of the bed, filling in with words that which is not there to be felt by their skin.

"The T first," she says, "big and bold, with a slant to the crossbar. The A much smaller, as if it didn't matter quite as much to him, or he was ashamed of it. And next to it, almost touching, two Cs. The first jagged, two sides of a triangle, the second smoother, almost a curve. TA, CC, side by side. Like sweethearts."

As she speaks she pictures them, Charlie and Thomas, lying flat on their backs, passing a pocket knife back and forth, leaving their mark; pictures herself on the day of her discovery at a time when the school stood closed, abandoned. The old man next to her seems caught in his own yearnings; his fingers still laced into hers. Then he catches himself and shakes loose her touch so violently that his knuckles rattle on the wood.

"Nonsense," he barks at her. "Made-up crap. It's a boys' school. On the other side of the world. You weren't there!"

His Smoke blends anger, suspicion, hope. She takes it in and returns it to him, realigned in its components. His own hope, given back to him, appears to frighten him; or perhaps it is the strangeness he can sense within her. He rises up, looks down at her, still crouching at his feet.

"Who the hell are you?"

She looks up at the prune of his dark face and decides she does not trust him yet. There is some secret in his Smoke that she finds difficult to fathom.

So she says, "I was frightened tonight. At the performance. So many people in one room, shoving, talking, jostling for space up front. I haven't been in a room with more than a handful of people, not since the Second Smoke came. And even before, only in church. It's strange, isn't it? Most people like to Smoke now, at least some of the time. But we are afraid of crowds."

She pauses for breath and finally rises, dusting off her skirts.

"Tell me," she continues. "You must see lots of places. Is it like that everywhere?"

"You don't get around much, do you?"

"No," she says, and finds her voice free of resentment. "Since coming here, I haven't gone anywhere at all."

8.

She sees him waver, between his habit of sourness and the itch of his curiosity; the urge to know this awkward, pesky girl. She waits unmoving, long seconds that they share in silence, then prompts him gently with a question. It's a familiar question, one that has been asked a hundred thousand times across the world, whenever strangers meet.

"Ten and half years ago--when the Second Smoke came. Where were you?"

"There. England. You?"

"The same."

"Then you know all there is to know."

The old man stills himself and closes his eyes. His eyelids are lighter than the rest of his skin. When he speaks again, it has the precision of a recital. He must be recalling lines long committed to memory, something from one of his plays. He speaks them quickly, dryly, without pathos.

"It came like an infection," he says, "passed from body to body like the 'flu. The land itself had caught it; sweated, shivered, stank. Here and there it bled. England was first; then the Continent, raging north to south. The Atlantic proved no barrier. Ships brought it to the New World in random little bursts. Halifax. Montreal. Savannah. The Virginias, the Carolinas, then the cities by the Lakes. The far west never caught. Then the Smoke ebbed and grew sluggish once more: everywhere but at the source. Within three months the Second Smoke was dead."

He opens his eyes and she nods her acknowledgment. It was how he said it was. She'd arrived here just when the Second Smoke had deadened. Normality soon returned. Officially, nothing had changed. Smoke was said to be what it had always been: a marker of sin. In territories like the Canadas, the same governor stayed in place, the same laws remained active. There was little news from Britain, not at first, but the Empire continued, like a chicken still running once its head has been chopped off.

It is running still.

And yet, nothing is the same. It's the people who have changed. They had tasted one another, known one another, high and low. Tinker, tailor, soldier. Beggar-man, churchman, Lord and Lady: revealed in their needs. The Second Smoke coloured everything, down to the way people thought, how they prayed and raised their children. How they loved. There were new ways of speaking now: people said less, let their Smoke do the talking; or spoke one thing with their mouths and another with their skins. Smoke irony; Smoke humour. It is not a gift the girl has found within herself. Her Smoke is not that flighty.

"I was surprised by your play," she tells the old director now. "You made the audience create it, as much as the actors. And there were so many shades of Smoke... Back when I was little, all Smoke seemed to be made of anger. Or of greed." She pauses, then carries on her awkward way. "Tell me: what has changed?"

"What now?" he sneers. "You want to talk philosophy? Smoke epistemology, eh? Who knows, girl! Some say it's the Smoke itself that's changed; others that it changed us, in our heads and down in our livers. What do I care? It feeds me well, the Smoke. And pairs well with stage-lighting and mirrors."

But the girl does not believe him. The old man's relationship to Smoke runs deeper than that.

"You have a secret," she says abruptly. "What you did at the end, the scene with Charlie and Thomas. You released something. The Smoke was different then. Quicker, suppler. Electric. Alive."

He recoils at the comment; a puff of anger jumping from his skin. She sniffs it, takes it in her blood; tastes again that strangeness she found hard to fathom.

All at once she knows what it is.

"There's another secret," she continues, not without wonder. "You are different from others."

He hides behind his anger. "How very perceptive of you! I'm the grandson of a slave. People say it does not matter anymore. That everyone's black now, much of the time. But at night they still scrub themselves white." He spreads out his hands in front of her, flips them from the pallor of his palms to the blue-black of their backs.

The girl simply shakes her head.

"No, not that. Something else. It's there in your Smoke. A kind of anger." And adds softly, wishing to be kind to him: "You're not a man."

"What, I'm the devil now?"

But she won't be put off.

"Why do it?" she asks, genuinely at a loss. "Why be angry with your body? And live your life in britches?"

"I'll live my life any goddam way I please."

The girl can accept this. "Do your actors know?"

"You think you can travel with people for months and years and they don't know how you piss?"

His Smoke is coming thick now. It rages at the girl. She stands calmly in its fury, takes it in, then returns it as something both gentler and more complex. It is like she is holding up a mirror and showing him a better version of himself. Herself.

Whatever it is the director wishes to be.

When it is over, and Soot falls around them in the lamplight, the girl reaches across the space that separates them and touches one wrinkled black hand.

I trust you, the gesture says.

But she does not say it.

9.

They are interrupted. It is a middle-aged man who announces himself with a cough, borne of an actual cold by the sounds of it but now used strategically. He is dressed rather formally in a tailed topcoat and dark trousers. A fur hat frames a clean-shaven face so stiff with cold there is little life to his features.

"Hullo! Master Balthazar? I hope I am not intruding. I made inquiries at the hotel. One of the--ah--actors said I was likely to find you here."

He pauses, stares up at them upon the stage, and at the haze of Soot still riding on the air. His eyes first on the director, then on her.

"I'm Walton. The --ah--Mayor if you please. Though don't be alarmed. This visit is entirely informal."

Again he looks over at the girl. She shies under his gaze; does not know where to look. The director notices her discomfort.

"Mayor Walton! What an unexpected pleasure. I read your attack on the theatre in the local rag this morning. Idiotic, if surprisingly literate! Though I note there was no attempt to stop our performances, not after the local burghers went out of their way to offer me this market hall as a suitable venue. I suppose your governor wanted one thing, and your townsmen another. Well, let us step into my office."

The girl watches the old director--'Balthazar!'--climb down from the stage and lead the man over the screen. He has a stool there, offers it to the mayor, then stands towering over him in a twisted stoop. There they talk for some few minutes, too low for the girl to hear. Throughout the talk, the man keeps craning his neck around the screen to peer at her. There is a question in his eyes. She turns her back and pretends she does not know the answer.

Before long their business is concluded. The director walks the mayor to the end of the market hall, then shuts the gate behind him.

"What did he want?" she asks.

"Somebody told him we had been to England recently. Recently? It's been almost a year! He asked me for my 'assessment' of the situation 'over there'. That man is a cretin. But even he is smart enough not to trust the official news."

"What did you tell him?"

He smiles, pleased with himself. "That the rumours are false, but also true. That the government is back in charge and also failing. That the Second Smoke has died, and yet haunts the land in Gales. That the country is at war, but nobody's fighting. It'll keep him up all night."

"He kept looking at me."

"Of course he did. An old stick like me and a young thing like you: holding hands in a cloud of Soot. It's more excitement than he's had in years."

"No, it's not that. He recognised me. There's a description. Maybe even a picture, it gets sent everywhere. He will go home now and think on it. And tomorrow he will start asking questions and learn that he's not the only one who's noticed me. The day after, he'll make a phone call. And then he'll arrest me and ship me home."

"Arrest you? What nonsense!" There is conviction to his dismissal but it only lasts a moment. Then she sees him recall to himself her oddity and her rummaging through his Smoke; her repeated refusal to give him her name.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Eleanor. Eleanor Cruikshank."

Cruikshank. He recognises the name, of course. The School's erstwhile porter. In the stories, he is little more than a buffoon.

"You mean that Cruikshank? I did not know he had a daughter..."

Then he finally understands. The wonder of it un-creases his whole face. He steps back and stares at her: at her hips, her back, her chest. It isn't lechery that drives him and she does not shrink from his scrutiny. He is picturing a metal corset encasing her trunk, imprinting its stiffness upon her spine; a steel dial rising from her chest, inviting self-correction.

"Eleanor! Renfrew's little niece..."

She nods. "It's my uncle--Cruikshank said he'll never stop looking for me. Now that he's found me, he will want me back."

10.

Balthazar starts packing up his props.

She had hoped for more: sympathy, an invitation; advice on how to disappear. She's placed her secret in his hands, has used a name her foster father told her to banish from all memory. 'Hamilton'--that is what they lived under; a name she has recently paid to have chiselled into stone. But the old director seems to have lost all interest. He has withdrawn into himself; is cursing as he drags the beds clanging off the stage.

"Bloody stagehands said they would be here by now. I will duct them pay!"

She watches him quietly and realises that she herself must voice her petition. But her boldness has left her; the mayor took it out with him, back to his house where he will lie in bed trying to put a name to her face.

What she asks is:

"How do you do it?"

"Do what?"

"The last part of the play."

"The scene with the two boys? I've done a lot of research."

"Not that. I mean the Smoke you released. It was... Like it was in those first days. Like being out in a Gale."

"When have you last been in a Gale, Eleanor Cruikshank?

She shakes her head.

"Then what do you know? Now, if you will excuse me, I have work to do."

11.

She leaves him, exits the market hall then wanders aimlessly into the cold of the street. They built it grandly, in grey slabs of stone. The sea is so near, even the snowflakes seem to smell of salt.

Balthazar comes running after her. Later, it will cheer her to think about his haste. He skids on the icy cobbles and nearly breaks his neck. She bends to retrieve his flat cap for him.

"Cruishank's conked it, I suppose," he says as he snatches it back.

"Yes. Two weeks ago."

She wonders how callous she must sound, answering so calmly the calculated brutality of Balthazar's question. The dead man raised and protected her; she's loved him much like a father. And yet he always remained "Cruikshank" to her, querulous and palsied. He gave her practice in dealing with the sour-tongued.

Balthazar thinks long and hard before making his offer.

"We sail tomorrow," he says at last. "For New York City. I could pass you off as one of the players. My Meister Lukas is good at forging paper work."

When she does not respond, he starts shouting at her.

"Jesus Christ, girl, isn't that why you came to me? To charm me? To convince me to get you out of town? Alright, so you've won, I'm offering passage. What now, am I not asking nicely enough? Or is New York not good enough for you?"

She pays no attention to his anger, skin-deep, free of Smoke.

"What made up your mind?" she asks.

"Nothing. You are amusing, that's all. And you have talent."

"Talent? At what?"

Balthazar ignores this, waves his hand in front of him like a magician, conjuring reasons.

"You met Charlie Cooper. If the story is true."

She nods to say it is.

His face unknots.

"What was he like?"

"I only met him the once." Then she adds, speaking so quickly it outraces her need to parse her own words: "He rescued me, you know. Like a knight."

He seems delighted at the word.

"A knight! So you're in love with him! Well, why not, half the world is, after all. And the other two? Thomas and Livia. Did you meet them?"

"No. Have you?"

"I went looking for them." He spits, dark on trampled snow. "They did not receive. Come now, better you sleep in the hotel tonight."

Later he asks,

"Why are you smiling?"

"Cruikshank always said I'd run away with the circus."

12

They leave town with the afternoon tide. The 'Elsinore', originally out of Denmark. The Captain wants to know why it makes Balthazar laugh.

That night he stands on deck with Etta May and watches the black swell.

"Is the girl all settled in?" he asks.

"Tuckered down and sleeping. I gave her the top bunk."

"Good. It's better not to talk to her too much. It's like going ten rounds with a prize fighter. Exhausting." He flashes his teeth. "What do you make of her, Em?"

"Odd bird. Lonely. And her Smoke... I am a little scared of her." She lights a cigarette, shields it from the breeze. "You know she's a risk. For the troupe. For you."

"It'll be alright, once we are back in American waters." He sees Etta May smirk at the yearning in his words. "What now? So I'm sick of the stink of Empire. And of its reach."

"And yet you dream of England." She shakes her head, openly laughing at him now. "You know they say the Company owns half of Manhattan."

"So what?"

"Where the Company is, hon, the Empire is not far."

Copyright © 2020 by Dan Vyleta

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