The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series) (14 page)

C
H
A
PT
E
R
19
:

JACK DAWKINS, FISHER OF WALLETS

W
e pegged her the moment she glided into the new market square at Covent Garden. She was large and soft and pale and wrapped up in a bloodred silk brocade day dress that whispered
money
.

“Pretty,” Agatha whispered, clutching her ragged coat.

“Pretty easy mark, you mean,” Spinks said. Staying back a few yards, we followed her down the aisle between the stalls, snaking through the crooked tumble of carts and booths and not stopping long enough to catch anyone’s ire.

The vendors sold everything you could ever want and a lot more besides. There were bakers, butchers, and fishmongers; men selling chicken, pigeon, and duck; produce sellers with barrels of cabbages, onions, and potatoes heaped higher than our heads, and bins full of unshelled peas, watercress, and other vegetables we couldn’t name, never having eaten them before.

We eventually wound up in a corner favored by metalsmiths. And that is where we saw the woman in the bloodred dress, a matching purse dangling from her wrist, picking her way through the stalls.

Nothing in that corner should have been of interest to a plump, well-dressed society lady. If we’d been paying mind, we might have wondered what she was doing there at all and been more careful.

“I want an orange,” Agatha said. “A big juicy orange.”

“Shh, duck,” Spinks said. “You’ll get one soon enough. But first, you swoon.”

Agatha was the tiniest of us and the best actor, and it was she who would faint dramatically, as if overcome by hunger. She was skinny enough that only those with the hardest of hearts failed to believe her.

Spinks, who still looked wholesome despite his ratty clothes, was the one who would notice Agatha and shout for help.

And then I would nick the lady’s coin purse and run away before she’d noticed.

As the woman fell into a heated discussion with a glazier, we got into position. Spinks and Agatha rounded the man’s stall and I wandered up behind the lady, my hands tucked behind my back, pretending to be looking at the wares for sale.

The woman held up a purple glass disk. “I need to grind a set of lenses that can amplify the effects of this one,” she said.

“What does this lens do, exactly?” the man asked, holding it up and peering at the sky. “This glass ain’t like anything I seen before.”

“It’s…special,” the woman said. “It perceives a rare spectrum tha
t
—
”

That was when Agatha put the back of her wrist against her forehead, rolled her eyes up, and with a sad “Oh!” collapsed at our feet.

“My sister!” Spinks cried, kneeling beside her.

The woman turned and said, “The poor dear! Give her some water.” She uncinched the cloth bag on her arm, fetched out a silver flask, and held it out to Spinks.

He said, “Oh, thank you, ma’am!” Uncapping it, he tipped it and poured a clear stream onto Agatha’s face.

Agatha sputtered dramatically and said, “Is that you, Spinks?”

And that was my cue. Sidling up behind the woman, I slid my right hand into the open mouth of her bag. My fingers came into contact with a latched coin purse, small but heavy, a perfect fit for my fist.

“Oh no, you don’t,” the woman said, and she cinched the bag tight around my hand, knotting the drawstring.

I yanked but wasn’t able to pull fre
e
—
n
ot while clutching the coin purse. If I’d let go, I might have been able to slide my hand out, but the purse was fat with money, and I wanted it.

“Think you’re going to rob me, do you?” the woman said, looming over me. I could see now that this was no high-society lady; this was someone who worked hard for a living. It showed in her calloused hands and in the strength of her arms as she lifted me high above the ground by the wrist she’d knotted tight in her purse.

I dangled, my toes kicking at nothing.

“I seem to have caught myself a tiny filthy rat,” the lady announced. The vendors at the stalls bellowed with laughter.

“Please, ma’am,” I gasped. “I’m sorry!”

“Not so sorry that you let go of my purse. Had you done that, foolish boy, I might have turned you loose. But now…”

Behind her, Agatha and Spinks melted away into the crowd. They’d go to our hidey-hole off Petticoat Lane, I knew, and wait for me.

The woman lowered me so that my feet touched the ground again. I planted my heels and pulled, and she yanked back so hard that I fell to the pavement, my right arm raised above my head.

“You’re coming home with me, rat,” she said. “Either on your own bare feet, which would be easier for the both of us, or dragged through the streets. Your choice.”

She strutted off through the crowd with me in tow, my knees and shins knocking against every bump and stone on the way.

“Let me go, you fat old cow!”

She stopped in her tracks and dangled me in the air once more.

“I’d intended to only bathe you, but it’s clear now that I’ll have to scrub your insides as well.” She set off again, dropping me once more. This time I landed on my feet, and stumbled in her wake.

Our destination was fifteen minutes away: a three-story inn called the Star-Crossed Arms. By the time we got there, I was crying loudly.

“Stop your sobbing, rat,” the woman said. “You want to make a good first impression.” And then she pushed open the door.

Inside was a wide hall that split the building in two. To the left was a warm noisy pub, packed with customers. The smell of meat and potatoes drifting out made my mouth water. To the right were a clerk’s station and an office.
“
’Allo, Jenks!” called out a bald man behind the counter. “What you got there?”

“A rat I caught in the market,” she said, raising my arm again and looking me over. “Thought I might could clean it up and find a use for it.”

The bald man made a great show of eyeballing me. “You sure you want to keep this one? Doesn’t look too smart.”

“Aye, George,” said the woman called Jenks. “The church tells us to practice charity, and this sad-looking creature needs all the charity we can spare.” And with that, she at last unknotted the purse strings and slipped it off my wrist.

George sighed and grabbed a key ring. “I’ll fill a tub,” he said.

A little while later, George told me to strip and sit in a vat of hot, soapy water. He gave me a stiff-bristled brush. “See that you scrub away every spot of dirt. Trust me, you don’t want to have Jenks do it herself. She’s not a gentle one.” He shut the door.

I was in a small windowless timbered room that had only a fireplace, a trestle table, a looking glass, and a small bookcase full of books. There was no way out, and I was mortally afraid of Jenks, so I did as George had told me and worked at my skin with the brush. There was a cake of sweet-smelling soap. I sat with it at my nose for a minute, sniffing, and then I rubbed it all over until my body and hair both squeaked under my thumb. I hadn’t been so clean in years. When I went over to the mirror, I was surprised to see what I looked like.

George brought a pair of soft trousers and a cotton shirt that smelled nice. “Put these on, and I’ll take you to see herself.”

In the office behind the clerk’s counter, Jenks sat at a desk. She turned as I came in, then pointed to a table in the room’s center, where steam rose gently from a tin plate full of stew and potatoes. “Fill your belly while I fill your ears,” she said. “Just eat and listen.”

I threw myself into it like I’d never eaten that well before. Which, come to think of it, may have been the case.

“Now hear me, boy,” she told me, “you are young enough that I don’t for a moment believe you are a bad sort. You’re just a desperate child, driven by hunger to do things that God and society frown upon.”

“I’m sorry I tried to rob you, miss,” I said. “I won’t do it again.”

She waved my apology away. “I’m going to make you a proposition. I will feed you, clothe you, and educate you for the next six years, if you will agree not to run away or steal from me. Instead, you will work here with me and George, helping us run the inn.”

“A job?” I asked. “You’re offering me work? But I tried to rob you.”

“I’m offering you a
life
,” she said. “If you’d rather turn your back on this offer, so be it. I cannot make you choose the path of goodness. But if you’d like a chance to do something meaningful with your life, then you’ll find that here.”

She stood up then and walked to the exit. “Take some time finishing your dinner, and I’ll be back shortly for an answer.”

The moment the door closed, I was up off the bench and going through the desk. There were plenty of fine things in its drawer
s
—
p
ens and glass baubles that I could easily pawn. Sitting square in the center of the blotter was a fat leather-bound book. Was it valuable? I didn’t know, because I couldn’t read. I turned the pages and for the first time felt how very stupid I was.

I worried about Agatha and Spinks, but I worried about myself as well. I looked at my clean hands holding the book. They were pink and pristine and looked like new. I’d washed off more than dirt, I realized. I’d washed off my old life.

This Jenks woman would feed me. Give me a place to sleep. Educate me so that the squiggly marks on these pages would actually mean something.

Slowly, I returned the pens and paperweight to where I’d found them, then sat down at the table again.

The stew was delicious. I was thankful that the door was closed, so that no one would see my tears as I used the crusts to mop up every last morsel.

Jenks was as good as her word. Better, in fact: Over the years I worked for her, I became healthier, smarter, an
d
—
s
omething I’d never dreamed possibl
e
—
h
appy. She had me learn my letters, and within a year I was reading. “You done it, Jack,” Jenks said one Christmas, giving me an orange. “You’ve become respectable.”

I turned the orange in my hands, then I asked permission to take a leave of absence. Unfinished business, I told Jenks. I don’t know how she knew, but Jenks quietly kissed me on my cheek. “Always be coming home,” she said, and sent me off into the cold.

The hidey-hole on Petticoat Lane was through a narrow space under an abandoned building’s stoop, but no one had been there in a long while. The wind whistled through the gaps in the stones, and it was impossible to get warm. How had I survived here? I wondered. I thought to leave Spinks and Agatha a note, but then I remembered that they wouldn’t know what it said. Like the old me, neither of them could read. I believed I’d never see either of them again, but like so much I believed back then, I was wrong.

Unwinding my scarf from around my neck, I placed it on the ground, then nestled the fruit on top. I’d finally brought Agatha her orange.

It was well after midnight when I got home, and the downstairs of the inn was dark but for the gas lamp on the front desk.

The night clerk, Ruben, bade me a merry Christmas and let me know Jenks had taken the refuse out back for the raker to cart away. That was my job, but I hadn’t been there, so she had taken it upon herself.

I grabbed a lantern and rushed out back, apologies ready.

It was dark behind the inn, and I nearly tripped over our sledge. The waste barrels were still upon it, and Jenks was nowhere to be seen.

That was when I heard the sounds of fighting. Raising my lantern, I opened its blinders. The light revealed a strange scene.

Jenks was fighting three men. They’d circled her, but they couldn’t get in clos
e
—
s
he was whirling between them so fast that she blurred. The men were dressed in ill-fitting dark suits and wore bowlers, and each held a flickering sword. Jenks, meantime, had only a ladle and a stewpot lid.

At the light from my lantern, one man turned. Jenks seized the moment to smack the back of his head with the metal lid. He slumped forward.

She caught the point of the second man’s sword with the head of the ladle, then twirled it so that the man lost his grip, and his weapon spun away into the dark. She struck him with the stewpot lid as well, and then turned to the third man. “Are you going to attack me or no?” she said.

The man, seeing he faced her alone, backed warily away, then turned and fled.

“Perfect timing,” Jenks said, staring at the two unconscious men on the ground in front of her, “Come on, lad, help me dispose of this rubbish.”

We put the unconscious men into two of the empty refuse barrels, and when the raker came by with his wagon to haul away our garbage, we loaded them into the back. “Mind you take this waste far, far away from here,” Jenks told the raker, handing him a heavy coin purse.

“You’re probably wondering what it was you just saw here,” Jenks said to me as we headed back inside. “Those men came here tonight to torture me.”