Much like my grandpapa himself, the boy in the yarn had emigrated from London during the years of the worst of the fogs, when he was about fifteen. His name was Hugo Bankcliff, and back home, he and his brothers had been linklighters, making their livings by lighting the way for people needing to pass through the fogs, which regularly came on so thick and dark that they could turn even the brightest noon to midnight. After he arrived in Nagspeake, where there was no need for linklighters, Hugo cobbled together a living doing odd jobs. He collected sea coal on the beaches where the Magothy Bay met the Atlantic; he patched sails in the Quayside Harbors; he collected orpiment and realgar and mispickel for the denizens of Ferrous Sanctus Monastery high up on Whilforber Hill. But piecing together all this work carried him all over the city, and at the end of the week, he was so tired, he would sleep away the Saturdays that were his chosen days of rest.
I myself heard Grandpapa say more than once that, as miserable as a proper London particular can be, especially to one who lives with pea-soupers day in and day out, he found himself missing the fog now and then. That was Hugo, too, at the end of his first year in Nagspeake. Despite all the coal fires the city burned, it didn’t have the right geography for pea-soupers. Nagspeake’s fogs were all of the ordinary kind, and they never made you have to light candles before noon. They didn’t kill off the camellias or stain the brickwork, and they didn’t require travelers to hire linklighters to find their ways through the murk, for it was barely murk at all. Nagspeake fogs were—and are still, for the most part—veils of gauze that lie gracefully between your eyes and the city; the true London fog is an oily velvet wrap thrown over your face, and just as hard to see or breathe through.
Even so, Hugo began to wish for a proper pea-souper, both because he was homesick and because, even with all the assorted jobs he was working, he was barely living any better than when he’d been carrying pitch-topped torches through the streets of London. He’d look fondly at the fog glasses he’d worn practically every day in his former life but that had no use here, and he’d wish to wake up just once to a thick yellow pall over the whole watershed.
One morning he left his house in the Quayside Harbors with his shovel and rake as he did every Wednesday and went along the pier to wait for the boat that carried the sea-coalers down the Skidwrack to the Magothy and, beyond that, the Atlantic. When he got to the slip where the boat came, he found the other two sea-coalers bent over a mail-order catalog that the wind had blown onto the wharf.
“Hugo,” called his best mate, another former Londoner, as he approached, “come help me try to stump the catalog here. If I think of something that isn’t in it, Pete buys lunch.”
“Can’t be done,” said the other boy, Nagspeake-born and feeling superior. “Deacon and Morvengarde have everything. That’s the whole point of them.”
“Fog,” said Hugo instantly.
“Fog!” his Londoner friend crowed with delight as he flipped through the catalog’s index. “I believe you’ve done it, Hugo. Well played.”
“Be reasonable,” the Nagspeaker boy protested. “It has to be something that can be bought and sold, obviously!”
“You said they have everything,” the Londoner argued, turning pages. “You laid the conditions for this wager, not . . .” His words died away, and he lowered the book, and the other two boys peered down at the entry he’d found. Under the Fs was the heading FOG (see WEATHER, page 316.)
Hugo’s friend looked up at him. Then they both looked at the third boy, who was trying very hard to appear as though he’d already known that Deacon and Morvengarde were in the weather-delivery business. Then the boat arrived, and that was the end of it. The three of them gathered their tools and went off to break their backs for ten hours raking up coal. Surreptitiously, Hugo folded the catalog and stuck it in his bag. The Nagspeaker boy did not buy lunch.
Hugo didn’t open the catalog at all until he’d gotten home, sweaty, aching, and tired from a day scraping black coal from the sands. On sea-coal days he usually paid extra at his rooming house for a bath; today, already thinking about other things he could do with that money, he scrubbed himself clean over the water basin in his room instead. Then, reverently, he took the catalog from his bag and opened it on his bed.
It had absorbed the salt air of the Atlantic, as did every bit of paper or porous stuff that made the journey to that stretch of sand. Turning to the index, Hugo could smell his especial beach, with its swirls of black coal and green sea lettuce and the snaking pale lines that were the record of the always-vanishing spume of the wave edges; the masses of gravelly piecemeal shells that broke up the sands here and there and the occasional flat, clear jellies without tentacles or stings that Hugo often failed to see until he was already stepping on them. But—was he imagining it?—there was another whiff of scent there, too, something that changed the combination and made it not exactly the same blend of odors that his clothes always carried home mingled with the sweat of a hard day’s work.
At first he thought it was just the aromas of the catalog’s specific paper and ink, but somehow he couldn’t let the question go. Finally, Hugo picked up
