The School for Thieves, page 13
“So who’s this?”
Tom looked up to see a blond girl of around fourteen sitting down opposite him. She was joined by two other girls and a boy, all approximately the same age, all good-looking, all with carefully styled dark hair.
“Tom Morgan, the newbie,” said Enzo. “Just moved in next door to me.”
“Thought it might be,” said the girl. Her tone was flat. She eyed Tom without blinking.
“All right?” said Tom, trying to break the silence that had fallen over the table.
“So what is it that makes you so special?” asked one of the dark-haired girls.
Tom shrugged. “I’m not special,” he mumbled.
“So how did you get in?” This was the dark-haired boy.
“Leave it, Karl,” said Enzo.
“Leave what?” asked Karl, his voice rising. “We just want to know how someone…” He paused. “How someone like him made it into Thieves School,” he finished.
“What d’you mean?” asked Tom. He could feel heat rising in his cheeks at the same rate that defensive anger was welling inside him.
“What we mean, street boy,” said the blond girl, leaning forward, “is how is it that some rat off the street has made it into Guile House when there are dozens of better candidates that you’ve somehow leapfrogged.”
“C’mon, Cassidy,” broke in Jericho. “This has nothing to do with him.”
“Why are you defending him?” demanded Cassidy. “How long have you known him? Five minutes? Six? And it has everything to do with him.” She turned back to Tom. “My little brother’s on the legacy waiting list—how did you get in ahead of him?”
“I don’t know—” began Tom.
“You’re lying,” said the other dark-haired girl, who had remained quiet until that point. “You have a twitch in your cheek. It’s a tell. You’re lying.”
“I really don’t think this is very fair—” tried Enzo again.
“Shut up, Enzo,” said Cassidy derisively. Something caught her eye over Enzo’s shoulder. “And look,” she said. “Hoffmann’s back. I heard a rumor that the street boy was taking Hoffmann’s place—but if Hoffmann’s back, why’s he here? There has to be something special about him.”
A tall, barrel-chested boy of around fifteen was clumping his way into the dining room on a set of crutches. He paused to survey the room, and his eyes met Tom’s. His cheeks flushed, and a look of pure fury—identical to his father’s—burned in his eyes. So this was Matthias Hoffmann.
Tom wondered if Hoffmann was going to confront him like the girl, but he just curled his lip, then stalked away to join some friends sitting at another table.
The Corsair had warned him that life wasn’t going to be easy at the school, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite this hostile from the start. Enzo and Jericho had given him a false impression about how welcome he was going to be.
“I have no idea how special or not he might be,” interjected Jericho, “but even if he’s only half as incompetent as Hoffmann, then he’s fine by me.”
Cassidy barked a laugh that had little to no humor in it. “Hoffmann may be completely useless, but he’s a proper Leaguer. His roots go back generations.”
“Yeah, and look what good that’s done him,” said Enzo dryly. “He’s got by on his name alone. Stop being so stuck-up, Cass. Same for you lot,” he said, his eyes darting to the dark-haired trio. “The Corsair picked Tom. You saying you know better than the Corsair?”
There was silence punctuated by eye rolls.
“Exactly,” said Enzo.
“Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s got,” said Cassidy, talking as if Tom wasn’t there. “And it’d better be something special. I’m not having him pull us down in the House Challenge just because the Corsair wants to do a bit of charity work.”
There was a loud creak as a door near the teachers’ table opened, and several elderly men and women shuffled into the hall carrying large ceramic pots and platters of food. The platters were full of bread and meats and cheeses, with bowls of salad, and the ceramic pots were filled with stew, rice, and potatoes. These were placed along the tables, and the pupils began to help themselves.
Tom had been starving when he had entered the dining hall, but his appetite had gone now. He took a bread roll and some cheese but only picked at them as the conversation carried on around him.
What did it matter? He didn’t need friends. His true friends were locked up in a London workhouse. What he needed to do was survive. Survive and thrive. He forced his anger down, lowered his eyes to his plate, and said nothing for the rest of the meal. They were a bunch of snobs. Well, let them look down on him. Let them underestimate him. He’d show them.
As the others chatted, he learned that the two dark-haired girls that had arrived with Cassidy and Karl were also fourth-grade Colts called Rimi and Meryll. It seemed that they’d just returned from some kind of camp in the woods where they’d been tasked with tracking their teacher for several days. Another group from Guile House was now out doing the same camp and would return in a day or two.
There was talk of points, presumably for the House Challenge. Artemis and Janus Houses, it seemed, were both ahead of Guile House, Artemis by some way—but none of it made an awful lot of sense to Tom. Every now and then, one of the group would glance at him, but it was like he was a curio at a freak show, some dirty attraction that was both fascinating and appalling at the same time.
When they had finished eating, the Corsair stood and banged a little gong by his chair.
“Up to your rooms!” he boomed. “Finish off any last bits of homework, and then get to bed. We’ll see you all in the morning for the run. Prefects!”
Several older pupils, aged around eighteen or nineteen, stood and began ushering the younger pupils out of the dining hall. Tom noticed that the older pupils all headed off up a different staircase at the other end of the entrance hall, to a separate wing of the house. He allowed himself to drift with the tide of younger pupils up the winding staircase, following Enzo and Jericho to the top floor.
“In your rooms, lights out in half an hour,” called one of the prefects, a tall, wiry girl with chestnut hair.
As they reached their rooms, Enzo paused for a moment. “Do you know Morse code?” he whispered.
“No. Why?” replied Tom guardedly. Was this another gibe?
“You should learn it,” said Enzo, offering a smile. “You never know when it might come in handy.”
Tom closed his bedroom door. A few moments later he heard Enzo tapping and slapping his hand on the wall—and he understood what the boy had meant. Despite himself, he tapped back to show he had heard. He would have to get Enzo to teach him how the code worked.
He kicked off his boots and sat down on the bed. He could hear calls of “good night” from the other boys and girls on the floor and the sound of doors shutting all along the corridor. And then, at last, there was silence.
He scanned the books that lined the shelves by his desk. They had the most bizarre titles he had ever come across:
The Thief with a Thousand Faces: How to Disguise Yourself for Any Occasion by Gabrielle de Winter
Lock, Stock, and Barrel: An Introduction to Lock-Picking and Safe-Cracking by Marcus Benazzi
Kansas City Shuffle: A History of the World’s Greatest Con Artists in Their Own Words collected and edited by Felix Sands and Petronella Dalrymple
It’s a Dead Cert: Gambling and Corruption—A How-to Guide by Anouk Raphael
Endless Yields: An Introduction to Basic Embezzlement and Financial Fraud by Franklin Palmer
Concise Conversations and Conclusions Concerning Conceptual Cons by Forrester D. Bellona
Can’t Catch Me! A Handbook of Escape and Evasion Techniques by “Slippery” Sam Tamburlaine
And You Thought the Sphinx Was Enigmatic: A Practical Guide to Codes and Cryptography by Celia Temple
On and on they went. He couldn’t wait to get reading… but not tonight. He felt too frazzled to contemplate reading anything right now.
He took a peek in the wardrobe and the chest of the drawers and saw all of his clothes and equipment neatly stored away. There were two fountain pens and several pads of expensive-looking writing paper on the desk.
It was like looking through someone else’s things—it still didn’t feel right, or real, that this was all his. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat. Morris’s copy of The Count of Monte Cristo was battered and fat with age and use, its cover barely attached to the pages within. Tom carefully placed it alongside the other books on the shelf.
A toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste had been set out by the sink. He had seen adverts for toothpaste before—large billboards with illustrated heads floating above a brand name, white foam billowing from their mouths. He squeezed the paste on to the end of the brush and began to scour his teeth. It tasted very odd, and it hurt his gums a little, but afterward he couldn’t deny that his mouth felt extremely fresh. He could sense the anger from dinner and the shock from his encounter with Crowe dissipating at last. Forget them all. What else had I really expected?
He folded his clothes over the chair by the desk and lay down on the bed. Switching off the lamp, he stared out the window at the moon, bright and large in the clear mountain air, casting silver light over the forested mountaintops. He had never seen so many stars in his life. He felt like he could lie there and stare at them forever.
But in less than a minute, he was asleep.
Chapter Twelve TENDER STEPS
When Tom woke up, he lay still, his breathing shallow, afraid that when he drew his lids back he’d be lying in a bed at the Rowton Houses in Camden. But then he became aware of the feeling of soft bedsheets and the thick pillow beneath his head. A bell began to toll softly somewhere in town.
He opened his eyes and saw a pale light bathing his room through the window. It was just before dawn. He could hear movement on the floors below and from next door.
There was a rap of knuckles on the wall and a muffled call from Enzo: “That was the gong. Time to get up.”
Tom threw back the sheet and climbed out of bed. He caught sight of himself in the mirror above the sink—his hair a tousled mess, his eyes puffy with sleep. He splashed water on his face, then scrubbed his teeth.
He opened the wardrobe and stared at the collection of clothes, then turned and hammered his fist on the wall. “What are we supposed to wear?” he shouted.
He could hear an indecipherable murmuring, a clomp of feet, and then the sound of Enzo’s door opening before his own was swung back.
“Morning,” mumbled Enzo, shuffling in. He stood at Tom’s open wardrobe for a few moments before grabbing a couple of items and throwing them on the bed. He pulled open the drawers and riffled through them, then threw some more clothes over his shoulder.
“There you go,” he said.
It was a similar outfit to the one Tom had worn when he and the Corsair had first gone to see Jessica Chaffinch, except this material was gray-green instead of black and was patterned a little like a tiger’s stripes. He picked up the top and fingered the thin, stretchy material. “Why is it striped like this?”
“Wilderness exercises,” Enzo explained through a yawn. “Supposed to help you blend in with your surroundings. Hurry up, will you? We’ve got to be outside in five minutes. We’re having a late breakfast this morning because of the run.”
“What run?” called Tom after Enzo as he slouched out of the room, but Enzo didn’t reply.
A few minutes later, he and Enzo were thundering down the winding staircase with all the other boys in the house. In the entrance hall they met up with the girls, and together, all dressed in matching outfits, they tumbled out onto Half Moon Street and into a cold morning, where they were met by the Corsair.
The Corsair bellowed for the last of the stragglers to hurry up and then began to lead them on a swift jog through the streets.
Chimneys puffed gently into the still morning air, and lights were glowing in many of the windows they passed as they made their way to the east end of town and the passage through the outer wall that Tom learned from Enzo was called the Grey Gate.
The guards had already opened the huge, wrought-iron gate and watched them pass through with cheerful calls of encouragement. On the other side of the wall, they ran across a wide stretch of grass, heavy with dew, before coming to a halt by the edge of the forest.
The sun had risen now, and it looked to be a bright, clear morning, but a mist lingered below the trees, and the ground where they stood was damp and spongy, the air heavy with the smell of wet soil, bark, and grass.
“Into your ranks,” commanded the Corsair. “I’ll let Master Bautista know we’re here.”
The students began to split up and organize themselves into separate groups. Tom wandered over to join Enzo and Jericho, but Enzo said, “You need to go and stand with the other Tenderfoots. We do the run in our different ranks.” He pointed back toward a group of smaller kids standing nearby.
Tom gave a limp smile before wandering back to join the other first-grade Tenderfoots. He recognized the boy Delescu from the previous day. Short and stocky with a heavy brow and watchful eyes, the French boy introduced himself by his first name, Benoît, and then introduced Tom to the rest of the group.
Michael Hornbuckle was tall for his age and gangly, with large hands and feet that gave him a clownish appearance but also suggested that, if he filled out, he had the potential to be an enormous bear of a man. Allegra Rycroft and Angus Harrison were thin and balletic-looking. Genevieve Wolf was tall and elegant with sandy-blond hair crisscrossed into a long plait down her back. Gina Lopez had large almond eyes, slightly hamsterish cheeks, and a mane of dark hair tied into a sweeping ponytail. Neha Nayyar was tall, watchful, gracefully poised, and with her hair also braided into a long plait. Cleo Phelan, who looked the oldest of the group, nearer to Tom’s age than the others, was an auburn-haired American who spoke with the heavy Anglo-French accent of the northern states. Jaroslav Schweik, tall and pale with a high brow and icy-blue eyes, was from Bohemia. He stood a little apart from the rest of the group with Zhu Jiang, a small, grumpy-looking girl who hailed from Hong Kong.
Tom was amused to see that they had all decided to copy the older kids by wearing blue headbands. Then he realized he was actually the only one not wearing a blue headband. The Corsair had mentioned something about getting his Guile House colors when he got to the house—but did he have to do something to earn them?
From across the grass, Enzo and Jericho gave Tom encouraging thumbs-ups. Over their shoulders he could see the other ranks of kids jumbled together: older, serious, strong, and clever-looking. In one of the groups near the middle he could see Cassidy watching him coolly.
“That’s my brother,” volunteered Genevieve proudly, pointing to a tall, handsome boy with dusky-blond hair at the edge of the most distant group. He was talking to James Montague, the boy Tom had met on the stairs the previous evening. “Hercule,” she continued. “He’s a sixth-grade Apprentice.”
Tom appreciated her efforts to talk to him. “What’s he specializing in?”
“Codes and cryptography.” She pulled a face. “But I think he’d be better suited to bank heists.”
Tom wanted to ask more, but the Corsair reappeared, clapped his hands together, and roared for silence. Out from the tree line behind him strode the teacher Tom supposed was Master Bautista. He was tall and whip thin and moved with the balanced grace of a dancer.
“Lines, lines!” called Bautista as he walked.
Tom copied how the other Tenderfoots around him were standing—chins up, chests out, feet firmly planted shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind their backs.
Bautista glanced at a clipboard in his hand. “You run today the following routes: Apprentices, red; Initiates, blue; Colts, orange; Fledglings, purple; Greenhorns, yellow; Tenderfoots, green. You have one hour to complete the run and get back to Guile House if you want breakfast.”
“A wash and breakfast,” added the Corsair. “Washing is the important bit. I don’t want you stinking up the house or any of your classrooms. If you only have time for one, you’re going to wash and will just have to go hungry. So be sharp about it.”
Bautista raised a whistle and gave it a shrill blast. The kids all started to move at once, leaving Tom rooted to the spot, unprepared for how quickly they had all sprung into action.
“Get going!” shouted the Corsair, watching him. “Keep up with your group.”
Tom scrambled after the other Tenderfoots, who were pouring down a path between the trees with the other kids.
They ran down the rough path for two hundred yards until the trees opened into a clearing and the path branched off in over a dozen different directions. Stakes had been hammered into the ground at the entrance to six of the paths and had been splashed with different paint colors—red, blue, orange, purple, green, and yellow.
Each group separated then and began to head off along their respective routes. Tom moved sharply to catch up with the other Tenderfoots as they headed off along the path marked with the green stake.
The path zigzagged downhill through ancient lichen-covered trees, and soon all sounds of the other groups disappeared. The Tenderfoots dipped down into a rocky gulley and had to slow to squeeze through in single file.
Jaroslav was just ahead of Tom as they forced themselves between the rocks. Tom tapped him on the elbow. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“Don’t know yet,” replied Jaroslav without turning his head. He had a strong Germanic accent. “They change the length of the course. Sometimes long, sometimes short. Today they give us only one hour, so probably not so long. Couple of miles. Maybe three.”
Tom had never been for a timed run before, but he calculated some of the distances he had run back in the city and how long it had roughly taken him. An hour to cover two or three miles seemed pretty generous, even on this rugged terrain. So why were they running with such desperation? Was there a prize for the group that finished first? Was it a race to get back to the house before all the breakfast was gone?
