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

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

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

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

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

“Heading where?”

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

“He did not stay?”

“He did not want to.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He himself drains the last of the bottle.

“Do it. I haven’t got all day.”

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

“Go on!”

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

“Go on!”

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