Christopher gaped, rain pouring into his open mouth. “How—how did you do that?”
Ping winked. “I show you tomorrow. If you don’t hit the mark, but punch through it, then power is transferred, and it must fall before you.”
“Can you show me now?” Christopher asked hopefully.
Ping shook his head. “Your mother will want you back in your cell. It is almost time for meal.”
“How do you—”
A clock chimed the lateness of the hour, and Christopher’s head whipped around toward the guard tower, flinging droplets of water into the shadowy storm. It seemed that even on days such as these, when the sun couldn’t be seen, the mysterious old man was always aware of the time.
When Christopher turned back to Master Ping, he found himself alone in the yard.
Vibrating more from excitement than from the cold, Christopher scrambled through the rain to the hallway beneath a rusted grate the prisoners at Newgate had come to know as Dead Man’s Walk. Veering through the various catacombs of the prison, he hailed a few familiar faces before knocking on the iron door that separated the male prisoners from the female.
“Who’s that, then?” A thick Scottish brogue reached through the bars above his head before the youthful round face of Ewan McTavish peeked down at him. “Well, little lad, ye’re certainly lucky ye’re back before the changing of the guard here. If Treadwell were to find ye on the wrong side of the door, he’d likely leave ye there to the nighttime mercies of the damned, ye ken?”
Christopher had been born inside these walls. He understood better even than McTavish the hellmouth Newgate Prison became at nightfall. His lullabies had been the echoes of chains, the screams and whimpers of the weak, and the dragging footfalls of the condemned who walked the long, grated hallway and never returned. His mother cried sometimes for those who marched to the gallows, but Christopher never did. A dead prisoner often meant new shoes or a belt.
The rusted iron door scraped along the stone floor with an earsplitting sound as McTavish pulled it open wide enough for his thin hide to shimmy through before pushing it shut and throwing the bolt.
“Mum always sends me to wander on easement day.” Christopher hopped from one bare foot to the next, trying to keep warm. He liked McTavish, and followed the stout, dark-haired guard around some days when he’d nothing else to do.
McTavish’s liquid eyes matched the smart dark blue of his uniform. They were touched with pity as he nodded. “Aye, lad. I know.”
“The guards don’t like me around when they bring wood for the fire or fresh tins of food. Mum says I’m in the way.”
The guard’s attention slid down the dank hall lined with iron bars. “They’re finished now,” he mumbled, not quite returning his gaze back to Christopher. “Why don’t ye find yer ma in time for supper?”
Looking forward to a fire with distinct relish, Christopher skipped up one hall and down another, flattening himself against the wall as two guards sauntered past, one adjusting his belt. Here in Newgate, it was just as important to know which guards to avoid as which prisoners.
McTavish had been right about Treadwell. The big, golden-haired oaf had cuffed him, shoved him, and caned him more times than he could count over the years.
“Bitch needs to learn a bit of gratitude,” Treadwell muttered to his companion as they passed. “I should let the real brutes loose on ’er, give the quim some perspective. Then she’ll be begging me for a toss.”
“We could throw that freckled bastard of ’ers into hangman’s row, make ’er watch them tear ’im apart,” suggested the other.
In the shadows, Christopher covered his cheeks with his hands and wiped, as though the action could rid him of the offending freckles.
“We keep records of the shackleborn now,” Treadwell spat, using the nickname given to the forgotten waifs born into custody of the prison system. “We’d ’ave to explain why ’e’d gone missing … Besides, it’s not the bastard I’m sore at, it’s the mouthy whore ’e calls a mother.”
Struck with concern, Christopher’s hands dropped from his face to his thudding chest. He stood in the puddle made by his sodden, ill-fitting clothes until the pair turned the corner of the cell hall, before scampering to the end of the women’s block he’d called home for his entire life.
A coal bed glowed beneath the grate that barely passed as a window, and Christine Argent was adding a large log to the fire with trembling hands.
Though it let in the cold in the winter and the unbearable heat in the summer, Christopher and his mother counted themselves lucky to have the opening, no bigger than a porthole, to let air filter through their tiny space. In a place that smelled foul on a mild day, a crosswind was more precious than gold.
“Mum?” Tiptoeing around the open bars, he knelt next to her, the heat from the flames instantly bringing the sting of warmth to his numb limbs.
Her long, curly auburn hair had been brushed and braided this morning; now it hung in tangled ringlets, hiding her bent face from his view.
“Oh, Pigeon, it’s you.” The smile in her voice sounded watery as her hands disappeared behind the curtain of her hair and dashed below her eyes. Pushing herself to stand, she turned before he could see her and faced the homemade calendar etched by a stone on the wall. “I thought you were out with Mister Ping.” Lifting her tattered apron, she used it to wipe at her face while her back was to him.