“Among my new fellow prisoners was a transferred orphan boy from the Scottish Highlands. A murderer too young for the gallows, as he was all of thirteen, and the public revolted to see anyone younger than sixteen with his neck snapped by a noose.”
Farah flinched, then stared. “Dougan,” she whispered.
“Precisely.” He finished his drink in one swallow, but made no move to pour another. “How we hated each other, at first. I thought he was a sniveling weakling ripe to be picked upon, and he thought I was a witless bully.”
“Were you?”
That provoked the whisper of a nostalgic smile. “Of course I was. I used to throw rocks at his hands while he carried buckets of dirt. Tried to make him drop things and cause his knuckles to bleed.”
Farah could feel her face hardening and a very foreign, frightening sort of anger bubbling through her blood. If Blackwell noticed, he ignored it and continued.
“One day, my rock missed his hands and caught Dougan between the legs. He fell to the ground, vomited, trembled for at least five long minutes while we all stood and laughed at him, even the guards. And then he did something quite extraordinary. He reached for the rock, stood up, and hurled it so hard at my head that it felled me. Then he leaped on me and beat my face so bloody, my own mother wouldn’t have recognized me.”
Farah set her glass back on the table as the trembling in her own hand become violent. “Good,” she forced through lips stiff with outrage. She began to detest the sight of him. What was once intriguing and dangerous was now not just her enemy, but Dougan’s as well, and that she could not abide.
Instead of taking offense at her anger, a barely perceptible softening of his features relaxed the hard line of his mouth. “I respected him after that, enough to leave him alone. Not just me, but all of us boys. He was one of the youngest among us, but the hate and violence he harbored burned the brightest. We all saw it that day, and we all feared it.”
Farah’s throat tightened. She didn’t want to hear any more of this, didn’t want their beautiful memories tainted with a confirmation of the details of his suffering. Yet, this was her penance, wasn’t it? To be faced with the consequences of the reckless actions of her youth. If Dougan’s memory deserved anything, it was to have his story told, and she would force herself to sit and listen. She still owed him that much.
Owed him everything.
“The day came when we were to be assigned to the labor lines. Initially, most of us younger lads were put in the lines to be sent to the prison ships stationed off the coast. Hellish, rotting hulks that neither the navy nor shipping companies could use anymore, with a prisoner mortality rate of more than seventy percent. We were separated into four lines, ours bound for the ships.” Here, Dorian paused and considered her intently. “None of us knew it at the time, but Dougan Mackenzie was the only one among us who knew how to read the signs or the guards’ registers. We all would have marched to our deaths had he not plucked my two best mates, Argent and Tallow, into the railway worker line. To this day, I don’t know what made him do it, but at the last moment he grabbed me, too, without a guard noticing, and very likely saved my life.”
Farah couldn’t fathom it, either, but still hadn’t recovered her voice well enough to say so.
“We were inseparable after that, Dougan and I. We formed a band of boys who worked the railways, just the four of us at first, protecting each other when we could from the older men and sometimes the guards. Teaching each other how to survive in such a place. For seven years, we gathered favors, debts, allies, and a few enemies among the boys and men who came and left Newgate Prison. We were leaders among them, young and strong, feared and respected. They came to know Dougan and me as ‘the Blackheart Brothers,’ as we both had black hair, dark eyes, and sharp fists.”
Now that Farah looked at him, really looked at him, she attempted to superimpose her memory of Dougan’s boyish features on the sculpted, cruel face of the man in front of her. Couldn’t be done. Though the hair was black, and the one eye was dark, the resemblance ended there. Swallowing, she forced her frozen tongue to form words. “How do I know you’re not deceiving me?”
“You don’t,” he answered simply. “Nor does it matter, because here’s where all this information becomes relevant to you.”
“I fail to see how.”
“Let me ask you something,” Blackwell said intently. “How do you believe Dougan Mackenzie died?”
A knot of dread formed in her stomach. “I was told it was consumption that took him, that he fell ill and never recovered.”
“And who told you that?”
“The reception guard at Newgate,” she answered honestly. “The day it happened.”
Blackwell became very still, the hand on his glass turning white. “What were you doing at Newgate Prison ten years ago on the day Dougan Mackenzie died?” he demanded, emotion coloring his voice for the first time since they’d met.
“That’s none of your business.”
“You will tell me, Farah, if I have to force it out of you,” he said through clenched teeth.
She blanched at his forceful use of her first name, but stubbornly pressed her lips together.
“Damn it, why would you go there?” he roared, surging to his feet and hurling his crystal glass into the fireplace. Farah flinched as it exploded against the stones.
He stalked to her chair, and to her everlasting shame, Farah cringed away from him in fear. He didn’t touch her, though, just towered over her, panting and raging. “Why would you set foot in that wretched place on that day of all days?”