The School for Thieves, page 2
The bearded man looked up from his paper. “Can I help?” he asked gruffly.
“Good morning,” said Borthwick. He offered a grin, but it was little more than a baring of his teeth. One of his top front ones was missing. “Cyril Borthwick. I am a constable of this parish.”
Tom’s jaw tightened. A constable. That might be his official title, but Tom knew what Borthwick really was. A child-snatcher. A slaver. A killer. His eyes darted around, his mind whirring as he tried to judge the best moment to make a break for it.
The bearded man eyed Borthwick up and down and then gazed at the ornate silver globe at the top of the mace.
“A church constable, I presume? Not an actual officer of the law?”
Borthwick’s face stiffened, but then another toothy smile filled the small void beneath his moustache. “Indeed so. But to my parishioners, I am one and the same. A protector, a servant, a hand that keeps the peace and upholds the law.”
“Uh-huh. And how may I help you, Mr. Borthwick? I am neither of this parish, nor, I believe, in contravention of any of its by-laws.”
“Oh, my dear sir, it is not you for whom I stop. Indeed, I welcome you to our little corner of this great city and wish you well on this fine day.” Borthwick indicated Tom with the tip of his staff. “It’s this lad here I want. As one of the guardians of this community, I have been charged by the church elders, and their parishioners, to help the young and helpless in our community find new opportunities and purpose in their lives. The young and helpless like this lad here.”
The bearded man peered down at Tom. “He doesn’t look helpless to me. Making a way for himself in the world.”
“Ah, but he’s homeless and vulnerable.”
The bearded man folded his paper away and looked down at Tom. “You homeless, lad?”
Tom was about to answer, but Borthwick spoke first. “With respect, sir, I am quite au fait—”
“Nonsense. He’s performing a trade,” interrupted the bearded man. “A good little job. Practical. You’re still allowed to practice trades, aren’t you, Mr. Borthwick?”
“Yes, yes, indeed you are,” said Borthwick, beginning to get flustered. “But my job is to clean up the streets—”
“Ah, I see. So that’s it. The boy’s an eyesore that your parishioners don’t want on their picturesque streets?”
Borthwick’s tongue flicked in and out. “No, I didn’t say that. I’m here to offer him an opportunity. A roof over his head, regular meals, and a job that helps serve our society.”
The bearded man barked a laugh. “Oh, so that’s how they’re selling workhouse slavery now, is it?” He turned so that he was facing Borthwick square on, moving between Tom and the workhouse agent, his long coat sweeping around to obscure the boy from sight. Tom looked up to see that the man had crossed his hands behind his back. The forefinger of one hand extended and started to jab toward an alleyway that ran down the side of Fermian’s.
“Do you know what the true blight on this city is, Mr. Borthwick?” said the man, now stabbing the forefinger of his other hand into Borthwick’s fleshy abdomen. “It’s people like you, hiding under the guise of social justice when…”
As quickly and as quietly as he could, Tom wrapped his hat around the coins and then crammed them into his pocket and grabbed the toolbox just as the bearded man cried, “Take your hands off me, sir!”
He looked up to see the two men scuffling.
“You will move along!” roared Borthwick. “That boy is coming with me!”
The bearded man staggered backward, then regained his balance by grabbing Borthwick’s lapels, tugging them down, and forcing the agent into a crouch. As he did so, he spun to stare at Tom. “Get going, boy!” he hissed through gritted teeth. “Or it’ll be the workhouse for you!”
Tom was up and off, sprinting down the alleyway that curved around the back of Fermian’s and into a network of dank and narrow lanes beyond. Behind him he could hear Borthwick roaring and then footsteps running his way. Tom glanced back to see two other snatchers had emerged from the van and were pursuing him.
He bent his head and ran harder, ducking right and then right again down narrow alleys until he burst back onto Rue Notre-Dame. His best chance of escape was in the chaos of the busiest streets. He zigzagged, sidestepped, and pirouetted his way through the crowds, reaching up and plucking a flat cap from a passerby and jamming it onto his head. He skipped past a stall selling flowers, grabbing one of the handles and spinning the stall on its wheels. He could hear one of his pursuers swearing as he collided with the stall and was sent tumbling to the ground.
As they approached Bond Street metro station Tom saw a gaggle of smartly dressed schoolchildren marching in neat lines down the steps to the entrance. He slipped in behind them and delicately swapped the flat cap he had stolen with the spiffy blue cap belonging to a boy at the rear of the line. It was done so quickly and so smoothly that the boy didn’t notice. Tom jostled in between the children, slipping a scarf from the shoulders of one and draping it around his neck, then merged among their number as they passed through the ticket barriers.
Reaching the platform, Tom began to gently drift away among the milling throng of commuters waiting for the train, his new hat pulled down over his eyes, the scarf wrapped tight around his face. Just behind them, he saw his other pursuer push his way onto the platform and shove his way through the crowd. An expression of triumph on his gnarled features, the snatcher reached out and grabbed ahold of the boy in the flat cap, a look of utter bemusement falling across his features when he realized the child was in school uniform—a look which then turned to panic as the children’s teacher began to beat him away with an umbrella.
Tom, grinning, slunk back into the crowd.
Chapter Two RAW MEMORIES
Rain swept in over the city that afternoon, heavy and relentless and bringing with it a withering wind that stripped the last of the golden leaves from the neighborhood trees and sent brittle branches pirouetting along gutters like ships in a storm-ravaged sea. In the face of such unforgiving elements, all the kids that lived in the abandoned McVain Grains Company warehouse down by the Thames had given up their various moneymaking endeavors to return to the shelter and warmth of the place they had made their home.
Twenty-three children were now huddled close to an old iron stove as the driving rain battered the corrugated-iron walls and roof of the warehouse, and a cruel wind whipped in through the hole in the riverside wall where a sliding door had once hung.
Most of the group were sitting silently enjoying the heat, some entertained by the licking flames, others chatting softly, some lying back and listening to Daisy Blex, who was singing old folk songs once taught to her by her mother. Next to her, Emma Hay was showing a couple of kids some pickpocketing techniques; Maxine was demonstrating how to steal handbags in busy cafés by snaking a long, hooked wire along the ground to pull the bags away from under their owners’ chairs without them noticing; Grayson Clark, meanwhile, was showing three others how to play a rigged version of the card game Find the Lady so they never lost. Tom had initially been the one to teach all these skills—just as they had once been taught to him—but now others had taken to tutoring these little practice sessions. Kids joined the group from all over the city, coming from broken homes, or from other gangs, or having been orphaned by the Crimson Flu, nearly all of them having spent some time alone on the streets. Once they joined, every new member was expected to share any skills or expertise they had, pooling their knowledge to help the group, as a collective, survive. They only had one further rule: look after each other.
Tom was lying on his bed—a pile of burlap sacks stacked one atop the other—trying to read by the light of the stove. It was nearing ten now, and the night outside was deep and dark. His stomach grumbled. All the children had eaten, but it had been a meager meal. What little money they had needed to be spent carefully. With autumn soon turning to winter, they knew there would be fewer people out on the streets and fewer still—if any—who would stop for a magic show or a shoeshine or a song or any of the other performances or jobs the children offered for spare change. Soon they would have to get creative, proffering their services as chimney sweeps (a most hated and dangerous job and one suitable for only the very smallest in the group), hod carriers on building sites (hard labor and poorly paid), ratters, eelers, mudlarks, match makers, road sweepers, anything really—even begging if it came to it, although that put them most at risk of being caught by the snatchers. The likeliest way most of them were going to survive was via the skills currently being demonstrated by Emma, Maxine, and Grayson. Tom sighed. Morris would have been scared for them. By winter’s end, odds and experience suggested that at least three of them would be arrested for stealing. Some might even be dead.
Another great fear was that their home in the warehouse would be discovered. If the authorities ever found out, they would all end up in workhouses. And no one knew the horrors of those places like Tom, who had been born in one—an institution known as the Rawlock, in the east end of the city—thirteen years earlier. His mother had arrived at the gates of the Rawlock heavily pregnant—so he’d been told by a nurse in the infirmary years later—in a state of near collapse, a bullet wound in her shoulder, her labor already advanced, and had begged for help. It was not an uncommon practice for impoverished single mothers to seek refuge at the workhouse; should they perish during childbirth, the workhouse was bound by law to offer a home and an education to the child—if it survived. But the bullet wound was an unusual complication. Too complicated, as it turned out.
The Rawlock, a place that still stalked Tom’s nightmares, was dark, dank, and foreboding, the limewashed walls stained brown with damp, the tiled floors cracked and always filthy. It was run with an iron fist by a man called Haydn Garnett, known to the inmates as “the Pitbull.”
The Rawlock was a “deterrent institution” reserved for society’s detritus—alcoholics, the homeless, the destitute—who had slipped into poverty and had no other options. The life they found inside was harsh and brutal—for although the inmates were given lodging and food when they could otherwise afford neither, the standards of both were sickeningly poor, and they were expected to repay this meager generosity through backbreaking labor. The only way out of the Rawlock, as the saying went, was through the grave. And the only good thing Tom had taken from the place had been his friendship with Morris.
“Why are you always reading that same book?” asked Bernie, interrupting Tom’s reverie. He was lying near Tom on a hammock made out of an old fishing net. He was practicing his sleight-of-hand card tricks and, from the looks of things, not improving very quickly. “Don’t you get bored of it?”
Tom was only a year older than Bernie, but it felt like he’d lived a lifetime longer. Bernie was sweet and kind and wide-eyed about the world. And Tom had serious worries about that. He didn’t believe anyone could afford to be sweet and wide-eyed when they lived in a condemned building with a bunch of kids all scrapping for survival. Bernie had curly locks the color of wet sand and a plump, kind face that was soft and innocent. He had narrow shoulders, skinny arms, and a little round belly, despite how hard it was for the group to come by much food.
“It belonged to a special person I met in a terrible place,” said Tom quietly. He knew it didn’t really answer the question. “You’ve got to be smarter about watching for snatchers,” he said, trying to change the subject. “You and Maxine had no idea the van was even there. You need to keep a lookout for guys like that and be ready to move quickly.”
Bernie paused his card work. “I was asking some of the others about the snatchers. Heard some nasty stuff.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“That when they grab kids off the street, they don’t take ’em to workhouses. They kill ’em and sell their skin for black magic—”
“Give me strength,” muttered Tom under his breath. “Was it Grayson who told you that?”
“You not believe in that kind of thing?”
“They’re just ghost stories, Bernie. Grayson’s winding you up.”
Bernie looked wistful. “I quite like his stories….”
“Which ones?”
“Not his ghost ones. They’re obviously made up,” said Bernie quickly. “But I like hearing about some of the stuff he’s done. Like that sword fight he had with that detective in Covent Garden or the time he nicked a horse and rode past the palace and the emperor gave him a wave—”
“Bernie, listen to yourself,” Tom exploded. “You think Grayson actually did any of that? There’s more chance of snatchers selling your skin to some old witch than him having done even one of those things. That sounds even more ridiculous than the stories I tell about those schools—”
“Oh, I like them too!” exclaimed Bernie. He rolled to his knees, elbows up on the foot of Tom’s bed. “You’ve not told one of them in ages. Tell us one now.”
It was the perfect night for it, Tom realized. When the weather was particularly filthy, Tom would sometimes gather the other kids around the stove and regale them with one of the old stories that Morris used to make up for him in the evenings when he could still string more than a sentence or two together at a time. Amazing stories they were, about secret schools where the pupils learned to become master criminals, taught by some of the underworld’s greatest minds. And even though Tom knew that he couldn’t tell the stories with quite the flamboyance and sense of detail that Morris once had, he always had the rest of the kids in utter thrall.
He was about to begin when he caught sight of something hanging around Bernie’s neck.
“What’s that?”
Bernie reached into his shirt and pulled out a green stone tied by a shoelace.
“It’s an amulet,” he whispered. “Davie, Jane, and I all have them. Davie nicked them from somewhere in town. It’s to ward off the snatchers so they can’t… you know…” His voice trailed off until his final two words were barely audible. “… Skin you.”
Tom groaned and threw his head back. “An amulet?” he said, exasperated. “To ward off the snatchers?”
“Can’t hurt, can it?” asked Bernie, sounding both wounded and a little embarrassed.
Tom stared at the amulet around Bernie’s neck. “It’s just a chunk of green glass, Bernie. Wrapped in a bloody shoelace.”
“I added the shoelace….”
“Doesn’t matter!” snapped Tom. “It’s just a bit of tat.”
“You don’t know…”
“Yes, I do.”
“So you don’t think they skin you?”
“I know for a fact they don’t.”
“What do they do then?”
“You know what they do. I’ve told you. They take you to a workhouse, shove you in a cell at night, then make you work all day, then they shove you back in the cell again.”
“You get a bed? Food? Any warm water?”
Tom inspected Bernie. “They’re not good places, Bernie. Do you get that?”
“They don’t sound any worse than here. I don’t see no beds here. No real beds. I don’t remember eating a decent meal even once. I remember hot water at my aunt’s house, but I’ve not felt it since. I stink. You stink. This whole place stinks.”
“You have no idea…,” breathed Tom.
Bernie folded his arms, a sulky look on his face. He mumbled something inaudible under his breath. Until just a few weeks ago, he’d been enjoying a comfortable existence, living with his great-aunt in a rundown yet relatively safe part of the city. But she’d caught the Crimson Flu over the summer and had died the previous month. The authorities had been in the process of shipping Bernie off to the Guttknot workhouse when he’d run away. He’d ended up wandering down by the river and had been passing through the old, rotting warehouses of the long-defunct McVain’s Grains Company when he had been spotted by Daisy Blex.
Anyone else might have let the boy wander on or—more likely—have robbed him of his small bag of possessions and tossed him in the river; but Daisy had whistled to him, listened to him, and then introduced him to the group of kids who lived in the old offices at the back of one of the warehouses. He was part of the gang now, but he was still so naive. How could Bernie contemplate life in a workhouse being better than life outside—even this life they were living now? The Guttknot was run by people like Cyril Borthwick.
Tom shuddered as he remembered the night he had first encountered the snatcher. Morris had been weak and addled by drink, but he had put himself between Tom and Borthwick and shouted at Tom to run away as fast as he could. Tom had raced off through a warren of Whitechapel lanes but had soon turned back, unable to abandon his friend. He had returned just in time to see Borthwick beating Morris with his heavy silver mace before hauling his barely conscious body into the back of a van.
Tom was too late to do anything. The engine had roared and the van had disappeared down the road. On the cobbles, Tom found Morris’s glasses, one arm snapped clean off, the other bent into a U shape, the lenses shattered like the pieces of Tom’s heart.
He learned that Morris had died from his head injuries that night on the way to Blinker’s workhouse and his body had been dumped at the Eel Marshes for burial in a pauper’s grave. Tom had never found out where exactly the grave was and, as it was unmarked, he knew he was unlikely to ever find it.
“Borrow some wet-weather gear,” he growled at Bernie. “We’re going out.”
Chapter Three LESSONS IN THE RAIN
Tom and Bernie walked for a quarter of an hour, gas lamps intermittently breaking the darkness of the night, their low yellow glow highlighting the ferocity of the lancing rain.
They came at last to Great Suffolk Street. Soaring buildings loomed over them—meat factories and blacksmiths and a printworks—but none were as foreboding as the building towering on a curve of the road near the railway line: the Guttknot.
