There Will Be Phlogiston Page 22

  It was unsettling and, to be frank, irritating. The whole business. As is the fact I seem to have misplaced my whistle, which means I am reduced to communicating verbally with the children.

  I remain,

  Your severely exasperated Jane

  My dearest Miriam,

  While I was in Altarnun, posting my last letter to you, I was feeling somewhat, shall we say, frayed, so I paid a visit to the local druggist in the hope of at least temporarily soothing my sleep-related difficulties. Apparently it is not uncommon for sensitive young ladies to suffer discombobulation as a consequence of upheaval in their personal circumstances, and admittedly, my personal circumstances have been somewhat uncertain of late, so I allowed him to prescribe me a small measure of laudanum. I was cautious at first, but I do believe it has helped. I still dream, but somehow less vividly, and the house feels less oppressive to me and the children less irritating. When I return again to the village, I must procure a larger bottle. The tiny vial I was given would barely medicate a distressed fly.

  The captain continues to treat me with a strange mixture of suspicion and curiosity. I am called to his study nearly every evening now, and sometimes during the day I catch his eyes upon me, though he acts as though it was merely happenstance that he was near me at all. The other night, as I was preparing to leave, he abruptly put out a hand as if to hold me back and said, “Do you think me handsome, Miss Grey?”

  Heaven save me. I confess I was in some eagerness to depart, for the night had closed around us like a great black hand, and it had been some hours since I had last taken laudanum, otherwise I might have leavened my response with some degree of tact. “No, sir,” I told him.

  He looked startled, while I wrestled to conceal my frustration. I mean, really. What had he been expecting? “Yes, sir, your odd behaviour and air of brooding melancholy lubricates my nethers”? Oh forgive me, Miriam, for my impropriety of expression. I have been so out of sorts of late. And, of course, being a gently reared young lady, I know nothing of nethers, nor of their lubrication. But when the captain’s bewilderment had passed, he laughed and said rather warmly, “You are a very singular creature.”

  And since that was certainly no topic I wished to discuss with him, I went on hastily. “You must forgive me, sir, I spoke too bluntly. You appear to have all your appendages in the correct quantity and configuration, and that is truly all the aesthetic judgement on the male form I may render. Good night.”

  Thankfully, he let me go after that, and I hurried to my bed. My gas lamp, which I was sure I had refilled earlier, but perhaps I had not for my sense of time is a little disturbed, sputtered out as soon as it was most inconvenient for it to do so, leaving me stranded equidistant between the captain’s ship and the house, with nothing to light my way. It is strange, is it not, how night can distort one’s perceptions of distance, for I felt the woods pressing terribly close just then, with a sort of dark weight behind them, like bodies crushed up in a crowd. And the closer I drew to the house, the closer the trees seemed to grow to me, as though we were all engaged in an on-my-part-reluctant game of Grandmother’s Footsteps.

  Except, of course we were not, for they were trees. Trees! And I have read Mary Wollstonecraft.

  Though I heard them laughing, laughing in a jangle of high-pitched voices, as I ran for the door, made it through, and slammed it closed behind me. Despite the lateness of the hour, Mrs. Smith was there in the entrance, and I almost fancied she had been waiting for me. But she simply turned away, and vanished into the shadows as though she had never been there at all.

  In her portrait, Mrs. Vanstone smiles with sharp teeth.

  Oh, Miriam, Miriam, please write back soon.

  Your,

  Jane

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  SNEAK PEEK: CLOUDY CLIMES & STARLESS SKIES

  My dearest Dil,

  I fear our lifestyle does not lend itself well to the marking of dates or rites of passage, but I cherish the night on which I first told you my story. Of my birth in Canton and my life in England, and how—at last—I escaped from it to the skies. Of my father’s attempts to make me his, and my struggle to make myself my own. Of airship and auroras, the flying pirate city of Liberty, and how I became who I am.

  I’ve tried to write it all down for you as best I can, so you may share it with me again whenever you wish.

  Happy anniversary.

  Love forever,

  BK

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  When Shadowless makes slip in Temperance, Byron Kae searches for a present for Dil. They don’t like being ashore—everyone stares, and skytowns feel enclosed with their jumble of platforms and people—but at least they have no need for care on the narrow beams and swaying ladders. Byron Kae can’t remember ever being afraid of falling, even when they had another name, before they became who they are now. They could fly, if they wanted, but they’re already wary of the way people look at them. The way Dil had once, though he doesn’t any more. Hasn’t for a long time.

  Dil can’t hide anything. Byron Kae used to wonder how he ever made much of a cardsharp until they saw him take four airmen for everything at Calumny. They had expected cold eyes and composure, like everyone else around the table, but Dil had laughed and glittered, and lied with his whole face. And, afterwards, they’d all had to run. Once they were flying, sky-safe and far beyond pursuit, Dil had put his arms around Shadowless’s neck, breathless with his own wickedness, and Byron Kae had felt the heat of him, and his fast-beating heart.

  Sometimes, oh just sometimes, on hot days, they fly even higher, where the air is thin and the aether is close, and the sun drenches Shadowless in sticky gold . . . and Dil takes his shirt off. He’s so very different from the wan, hungry-eyed boy they’d gathered bleeding from the ground in Prosperity. The boy Byron Kae had nearly lost to fever, to Ruben Crowe, to a falling world. He’s a little bit piratical now, with his longer braids, and the wiry muscles that pull and shift beneath his smooth, dark skin, but when he smiles his shiny, dimple-bracketed smile, he’s all Dil. His feet are always light upon Shadowless, and Byron Kae tastes the heavy sweetness of his sweat where it falls sometimes upon the deck.

  Jane, of course, always knows exactly what they’re up to, emerging dishevelled and disgruntled from her cabin to put a stop to it with a few sharp words. Makes them blush. Like the time she glared through a haze of opium smoke, and told them, “When I desire someone, I fuck them. It makes life so much simpler.”

  But Byron Kae can’t see how it would make anything simple at all.

  It’s been turbulent up in the blue since Prosperity fell. The kraken are restless, the airnavy patrols the skyways, and the skytowns are subject to increasing scrutiny from the authorities below. What has always been a transient life now feels fragile in other ways, and even basic resources are scarce. Books are almost impossible to find. As a commodity, they fall between the cracks of precious and worthless, and wanting them becomes its own trap. Some men would call this weakness. Certainly the pedlars, salesmen, and storekeepers must, for they always drive a hard bargain, and Byron Kae isn’t very good at haggling. Dil would probably be horrified if he ever found out the cost of his ragged, little library, but Byron Kae puts no price on his pleasure.

  They dread the day they run out of books, or Dil’s interest wanes. The end of starlit evenings, full of words and Dil’s laughing. He likes mysteries and romances best, speculating endlessly—Jane would say interminably—about what he thinks is going to happen next and which characters are going to get together, as if he has, at last, discovered all the friends his life has lacked. He wept for hours over the injustice of Vanity Fair, and “princock swells what were too far up their own arses to see folk is just trying to get on in the world and shouldn’t be subject to arbitrary moral punishment.” That last bit was all Ruben. It made By
ron Kae miss his friend and hurt a little at the same time.

  The only book in Temperance is Hard Times, and Dil is going to hate it.

  But Byron Kae buys it anyway in exchange for one of the opals strung through their hair. It’s a sad-looking, water-damaged volume, bound in olive-green cloth, with the original purchase price of five shillings rather mockingly inscribed in gilt upon the spine.

  They settle down with it that evening, and make it to chapter three before Dil starts bristling.

  “Coketown,” he scoffs. “Cos that ain’t obviously supposed to be Gaslight.”

  Byron Kae once made the mistake of telling him that Dickens had spent three months working at a blacking factory at the age of twelve, thus cementing him in Dil’s estimation as “a whiny prick what don’t know what he’s talking about. Three months, my arse.”

  It doesn’t take much longer before the misery of it all gradgrinds them both down, and they give up.

  “’Tis like he don’t see ’em as people at all.” Dil has his head in Byron Kae’s lap, spilling braids and smiles and careless heat. “Just cogs in his Great Social Message or what ’ave ye.”

  Byron Kae wants to touch him. Always, but particularly now, at the edge of day, on the cusp of night, in this time that is theirs. They imagine him sun gilded and star limned, a burnished man, and feel the curve of his spine as he shifts on the pillows he has strewn across the deck.

  “Perhaps that’s the intention?” they suggest.

  “Yeah, but it don’t make him no better than what he’s talking about. That ain’t no reformer zeal. ’Tis hypocrisy, is what.”

  It’s a fair point. “I’m sorry, Dil. I didn’t . . . There wasn’t—”

  He startles and pulls away, and the loss of him stirs the sails, and ripples through the rigging. “I didn’t mean nowt.” Cross-legged now, and facing Byron Kae, he looks at them, stricken. “’Tis still a princely gift.”

  “There’s little value in an unread book.”

  Dil reaches out and takes Hard Times from their unresisting hands. “Before you, there was only ever unread books.”

  Byron Kae isn’t sure what to say. Dil sounds oddly serious, and they’re mortifyingly distracted by the way the light gleams on his eyelashes. Dil is not unfamiliar with his assets, nor ashamed to use them, but right now there are no flutters, no dimples, just Dil’s steady gaze.

  “Thing is,” he goes on, “these ain’t the stories I want no more.”

  Oh.

  “Fuck me sideways with a—” Dil scrabbles against the deck, and just about manages to avoid being thrown into the mast. “Is that krakens?”

  “N-no. Just . . . aetherflow.” They blush. The wind dies, and Shadowless calms. But Byron Kae’s heart still beats too hard. “I understand. We . . . we’ve read a lot of books and—”

  “It ain’t about the books,” Dil cuts them off abruptly, and then tugs a bit sheepishly at a braid. He has a way of concealing uncertainty behind boldness that Byron Kae rather admires. He acts when most would hesitate, laughs when others would not, and takes, in general, too many chances. He goes on more gently, “Thing is, I want a different story. I want yours.”

  Byron Kae feels his attention like heat. Like a touch. It fills them with fear and a kind of sweet, sharp hope that is—if anything—just as painful. “Mine?”

  “Aye.”

  They look at their hands, at the rainbows on the tips of their fingers, and feel the pulse of aether beneath their skin. That’s their story. “I . . . I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

  “Popular opinion suggests, beginning’s a good place.”

  That makes them smile, and they don’t even try to hide it. Dil makes it easy to smile. “I thought you hated all that, um, nonsense about ‘what your father was called and where you was squeezed yowling out your mother.’”

  He’s so proud of his words, and grins to hear them coming back to him. “Only when I ain’t got reason to give a fuck.”

  “Well, I’m honoured to be worthy of your . . . fucks.”

  They just about manage to say it without blushing, and it’s worth it to hear Dil laugh. “I meant,” he says, “with books and shit. Nowt more depressing than settling in for six hundred pages and then stagging straightwise the hero’s four years old or sommat, and ain’t going to do anything interesting for ages.”

  “I suppose some readers might say it helps them really get to know a character.”

  “Mebbe. But life—” Dil glitters wickedly “—is lived in media res.”

  His mouth forms the Latin a little too carefully. Byron Kae hears Ruben. “Then what does my past matter?” they ask.

  “It don’t matter a damn if you don’t want to tell me. But I kinda want to know stuff about you.” Dil sounds so unexpectedly solemn, so unexpectedly uncertain, before he continues with characteristic avarice, “All the stuff.”

  Byron Kae hides their smile this time so Dil doesn’t think he’s being laughed at. But, truthfully, they like to be the subject of his wanting. “Of course I want to tell you. I’ll tell you anything.”

  “’Tis sorta interesting to me sometimes cos I got no clue about myself that way.” He settles back into Byron Kae’s lap, stretching an arm into the last of the sunlight so that it glides over his skin, honey-gold and mellow. “Parent’s could’ve been anybugger. Though I got some inkling one or both ’em weren’t perhaps entirely white.”

  Byron Kae traces a fingertip down Dil’s forearm, a pale shadow, chasing the sun. They tremble a little with the pleasure and the presumption of it, but Dil just closes his eyes and makes a deep, rough sound at the back of his throat. The truth is, Dil is full of hungers. Greedy for words and skin and the open sky. They imagine too easily how he might respond to other touches. The way he might move, the things he might say. His sly, graceful hands knowing all the secrets of Byron Kae’s body.

  “My father,” they tell him, “is Lord Wolfram.”

  A blade-swift silence.

  Then, “Ooh lah-di-dah.” Dil’s contempt for what he calls the nib folk is instinctive, but at the same time tinged by a kind of hopeless envy. Byron Kae finds it comforting to wonder sometimes whether Dil was truly in love with Ruben, or simply with the kind of life that would create someone like him.

  “It’s a very minor title. He’s a navy man. An admiral now.”

  “So, you’re a . . . a—” Dil’s eyes open, and there’s hurt gleaming in the darkness of them “—lord or . . . lady or what ’ave ye? This . . . flying about, then, ’tis just a hobby?”

  “No.” Too sharp. Too certain. Heat and aether rushes through them. “This is who I am.”

  “You ain’t no Wolfram?”

  “That will never be my name. I’m not . . . not legitimate.” Such a strange word to wear. “I’m just me.”

  Dil smiles up at them. “Ain’t no ‘just’ about it. But how you’d figure Lord Wossname for your dad? Being a by-blow and all.”

  “I was politically embarrassing.” Byron Kae wonders how to explain. “And Lord Wolfram always claims what he believes to be his. Whether he values it or not.”

  “Reckon I know the type. Dice roll any kinder for your mam?”

  “I don’t know. She passed away when I was very young. I don’t . . . I don’t remember her at all.”

  Those early years, before their mother died and after, are all in fragments. Too many different people and too many different places. Too little understanding. All muddled in a sensory haze: the scent of blood and chrysanthemum tea, red-sailed ships with watching eyes, a square white house on a hill, not like the other houses, a garden with silver water and golden fish, the sun slipping shadowless across a different sky.

  “Well,” offers Dil cheerfully, “leastways you ain’t got nowt to miss.”

  They try to smile, not knowing what to say.

  “How’d she die?”

  Touch is suddenly the wrong thing. Dil is too much, too much heat and skin and curiosity. They push him away as gently as they can.
Stand and let the wind catch their hair, shake the feathers and the beads, stir the tails of their coat.

  Over by the rail, the sky is everywhere.

  “She killed herself. When the war ended and my father didn’t come back.”

  Dil moves like a cat, so they don’t hear him. But they feel him in the shifting air, the ripple of his footsteps. “Why?”

  “Shame? Grief? Loneliness? I have no answers.” Shadowless is warm beneath Byron Kae’s hands, as familiar as their own skin, pulsing with aether and power. “I heard . . . I heard she was his housekeeper, while he was in Canton. I don’t know if he made her promises, or if she loved him; if she was desperate, or if she simply wanted a different world. I just know she . . . I just know I was alone, and nobody knew what to do with me. Where I belonged.”

  Dil pushes up under their arm and wriggles and wriggles until he’s right there, tucked between Byron Kae and Shadowless. He has to lean back a little to meet Byron Kae’s eyes, his body pulled into lines at once both tough and yielding. The scent of sun and sweat is all over him like the last of the light.

  And this time, touch isn’t wrong at all.

  “I won’t never leave you ever,” Dil promises, with all the certainty of his maybe nineteen years. “Cos we belong on Shadowless now, right?”

  They nod.

  Shadowless.

  Jane.

  And Dil.

  Whose mouth forms the shapes of untaken kisses when he stands so close and says such things.

  “Y’know—” Dil eases himself onto the railing “—why don’t you start it properwise?”

  He’s framed by Byron Kae, the horizon at his back, with only trust to hold him. “Like this?” they ask.