“What are you talking about?” Jim threw his hands up. “I can read!”
The Ratt brothers stopped laughing, their jaws hanging open like baby birds waiting to be fed, and Lacey arched her eyebrow high over her eye in disbelief.
“You can read?” she asked, crossing her own arms, and scowling as darkly as Jim. “Prove it!”
Jim shrugged, hopped up, and walked over to the pile of potato sacks they used for a bed. He picked one up, analyzed the letters stitched into the burlap, and read aloud. “Dunning’s Potatoes of London, in operation in England since 1652,” he said and threw the bag down, smiling widely, and ridiculously pleased with himself.
“Jim!” George and the Ratts leapt to their feet. “This is absolutely brilliant! How come you never told us you could bloody read?”
“I guess I never thought about it,” Jim said, suddenly feeling very good about having such a rare talent (and once more wishing he would have paid attention to the myriad other things that he could have learned when he lived as a nobleman’s son).
“Can you write, too?” Paul asked.
“Sure can,” Jim said. “And if you want, I can teach you how to read and write while you teach me how to thieve.”
“You would…teach me how to read?” Lacey asked. Her blue eyes went wide, and all of the skepticism seeped out of her face. In those days not many women learned such things as reading and writing, but Jim wasn’t quite old enough to have been poisoned by such discriminations, and he gladly agreed.
“Brilliant!” George cried. “Well, what are we waitin’ for? Let’s go!”
“Go where?” Jim asked.
“Well, it’s like our father always used to say—” George began.
“You didn’t know our father, George,” Paul and Peter said together, but George didn’t seem to hear them.
“No better place to practice the art of thieving than the real world! That’s what he said, all right. Let’s get to the pawnshop on Barque Street and see about this necklace for ourselves!”
“I’m not so sure this is such a good idea, George,” Lacey said. “The King of Thieves seems very dangerous, even if he is going to help us escape. Besides, what good will it do for us to break into his pawnshop?”
“We’ve got Jim, Lacey,” George said. “He can read the book for us, and then we can know what the old king is up to. Now quit fussin’ and come on!”
Out the hole they tumbled into the streets, where the night grew steadily darker and colder, and where the first true snow of the year began to color the city a ghostly white, off to uncover a secret more unbelievable than any of them could possibly imagine.
TWENTY
y the time Jim, the Ratts, and Lacey arrived at the pawnshop on Barque Street, the snow had deepened enough to bear their footprints, night had fully darkened the world, and only a few streetlamps cast flickering light and wavering shadows over the empty roads.
Jim shivered as he drew close to the building. The shingle that read “Pawnshop” creaked and swayed in the cold wind, and the shutters clapped against the brick walls. Jim remembered the first time he had descended into the shadowy streets of London, and how the houses there had seemed to have faces, but now the snow, accumulating over the windows and door of the pawnshop, lent the building the frightening eyes and cruel mouth of an old man, one with bright white eyebrows and a thick mustache who hated even the sight of little children.
“George,” Lacey said with a shudder, “let’s wait until tomorrow. It will be warmer in the sun…and more cheerful.” She looked at the old man’s face on the building and shivered again. But the Ratts had lived nearly their whole lives on the streets of London, and if they saw the cruel face of man on the building they simply imagined it was another snobby lord who required their special attention and needed to be taught a lesson.
“Just think about what we could find in there,” George said. “There’s a reason the King’s looking for that medallion and I want to find out what it is. And besides, Jim’s box is in there. If nothing else, we could nick that and be on our merry way!”
That was all the convincing Jim needed. He took a deep, icy breath and tried to feel brave. His father had been brave, he reminded himself, that deep-seated feeling of being a disappointment pushing Jim all the more to break into the pawnshop and take back what was his.
“Open the door, Peter,” Jim said. “Besides, it’ll be warmer inside, Lacey,” he added with a smile.
Peter hopped in front of the door and peered into the keyhole. He cracked his knuckles, loosened his arms, pulled out his leather case of metal pins, and got to work. It was apparently a tougher lock to pick than the one on the warehouse door, but Peter was no amateur. In a few moments the latch popped and the door swung open with a long groan.
An inviting warmth blew out from inside the store, but the coals still burning in the stove splayed a sinister red light over the trinkets decorating the pawnshop shelves, and in the shadows, the jewelry glimmered like glowing eyes in a forest dark. Jim gulped hard at the memory of such eyes, but he reminded himself he was no longer going to be a coward and took the first step through the door. The others followed, and, almost by itself, the door creaked behind them, clicking shut with a loud pop.
The children jumped and huddled close together. “Sorry about that,” Paul squeaked. “I bumped it a bit, I think.”
“You think?” Lacey asked with a scowl, but after few moments no further sounds belied the presence of anyone else in the shop but the clan, and they proceeded to have a look around.
All manner of curious odds and ends, traded away by desperate Londoners for a few coins, filled the shop from top to bottom. For those who have never been in a pawnshop, they really are very sad little stores. Every object on every shelf once belonged to someone with no choice but to trade those precious items for less than half their true worth, just to scrape by for another month.
There were smoking pipes and empty satchels for tobacco, pots and irons for cooking, fine sets of silverware, and rows of teapots and cups and saucers. Lacey found a wedding dress hanging in the corner. It looked nothing short of heartbreaking to see it there, knowing that the woman who had worn it had been forced to give it away for the sake of her family. Nevertheless, Lacey imagined taking it for herself and wearing it one day. Then she pushed those thoughts out of her mind with a fierce shake of her head. She couldn’t steal that dress. For some reason it seemed wrong, even for a thief.
The boys, on the other hand, found some pistols, overcloaks, tricorn hats, and even a set of cruel-looking knives, all of which they had no problem trying on and making like a band of fearsome pirates.
“Arrgghh!” Paul growled, spinning around to reveal an eye patch over one eye, a tricorn hat upon his head, a rusty pistol brandished in each hand. The boys burst into laughter until Lacey shushed them quiet.
“Shut up, you dingbats!” she whispered rather loudly. She seemed to want to stomp her foot again but resisted the temptation for fear of the noise. “Do you want to let the whole street know we’re here? Let’s find what we want and get out of here and back home. Put that stuff away! These things belong to people as poor as we are, and that’s against the rules! Now come on!”
The boys begrudgingly put their new playthings back, George mumbling something akin to “yes, mother” under his breath, but the glow of the coals in Lacey’s flashing eyes quickly silenced his grumbling.
“I think it’s back in the rear office,” Jim said. Behind the counter and through the door at the back of the shop they crept, where another stove full of red-hot embers lit a smaller room, its walls practically shimmering like a cave of diamonds. Necklaces and medallions hung on every hook and in every corner of the room, gleaming silver and gold in the light of the stove. The Ratts’ eyes went wide and they licked their lips.
“It’s a treasure!” Peter whispered.
“Surely we almost have enough to get out of here,” said George.
“More than enough,�
� Jim said, furrowing up his brow. “If the King of Thieves traded all these for coin we’d have more than enough to sail all of us to the Far East and back again.”
“Then why don’t he do it?” Peter asked.
“I’m not sure he’s ever going to, Peter,” Lacey said, a sudden sadness sweeping over her face. “If Jim is right, then all he really cares about is this medallion, and he’s using us to help him find it.”
“And when he gets what he wants,” Jim added gravely, “I think he’ll leave the clans behind.”
“Don’t you say that, either of you,” George barked. “We are leaving here and the King of Thieves is going to take us with him! We stole a lot of this rich stuff, and it’s ours as much as his! What could be so important about one medallion anyway that he would lie to us like that?” George was so angry that in the dim glow Jim could see his hands balled up into fists at his sides.
“Maybe this could tell us,” Paul said from beside a desk by a bookshelf. He pointed at an empty inkwell, a dry old quill, a candlestick, and a thick book all resting upon the desktop before him. “Can you read it, Jim?”
“Not in this light,” said Jim, shaking his head. But almost immediately a small yellow flame glowed in the room. George had found a slender lighting stick and used it to light the candle on the desk.
“George, no!” Lacey whispered harshly. But George was upset by that point, and little boys, and even grown men, tend not to listen to reason when angry.
“Just keep a good lookout, Lacey,” George said without looking at her.
Lacey harrumphed a complaint but crept over to the window just the same to stare out of the office, straining her ears for the slightest sound of approaching trouble.
Jim stood beside the desk as the light from the candle brightened over the pages of the book. On the far page, the hand-drawn image of a peculiar medallion came into view. “This must be it,” Jim said.
“What does it say?” George asked, all three Ratt brothers leaning in close over Jim’s shoulders as he began to read the words.
“Of all the great treasures lost in the wreck of the mighty galleon, Fortune, off the coast of Spain, none was as grievous to me as the loss of the Amulet of Portunes. This charm came to me at a great cost and possesses a most unique power. The amulet holds the power to unlock anything that is locked and to unbind anything that is bound, whether it be chained, barred, locked by key, or even that which is bound by magic.”
“That could come in handy,” Peter whispered, his eyes gleaming. “Especially for a thief.”
“But I have not lost all hope,” Jim continued, “for it is said that a commoner, an able seaman by trade, found the medallion, and having wasted its powers to unlock a cabinet of whiskey, drank himself silly and lost it in a game of cards in London, where the amulet still passes from hand to hand in that town’s many streets.”
“That’s what he’s up to,” Paul said. “He thinks eventually one of us will nick this amulet of whoever for him so he can unlock anything that his heart desires.”
“But he already has all of this treasure,” Peter said, looking around again at the wall full of gold and silver chains. “What could he possibly need to unlock?”
“What couldn’t he unlock?” Jim said, secretly thinking about the fate of his father’s treasure. If the King got his hands on the Amulet, he could surely open the box, and then unlock whatever safeguards that now protected his father’s great treasure. “He could have any treasure he wanted.”
Peter and Paul’s eyes lit up with dreams of unlimited treasure, but Lacey on the other hand, didn’t believe a word of it. “Boys! I mean, seriously, have you ever heard of something so ridiculous? A magic necklace that can unlock anything? It’s absurd!”
“Well I didn’t think magic was real at all until that gypsy cursed my box!” Jim argued, snapping out of his reverie in a sore temper.
“It’s not the same thing and you know it, Jim!” Lacey crossed her arms and the two of them were about to have a real corker of a fight when Peter noticed something through the window that the arguing Lacey had missed.
“Say,” he said. “Were those footprints there just a second ago?” But the answer to his question was the loud clink of a key sliding into the keyhole of the pawnshop door.
“Hide!” George ordered as he snuffed the candle out.
“I haven’t had a class on hiding!” Jim said, on the verge of panic. But George had already thought of that and, as his brothers and Lacey disappeared behind shelves or cabinets or desks, George flung himself and Jim against the wall behind a curtain, holding a finger against his own lips to warn Jim to keep quiet.
The front door opened with a groan and shut with a clap, just as it had when the clan had snuck in themselves. Two sets of creaking footsteps made their way toward the back room. The door to the office opened, and Jim couldn’t help but shift ever so slightly behind the curtain to peek through a slit in the fabric and see what was going on.
The King of Thieves, wearing his tailored half-coat with the tails, and his silk hat still perched over his greasy black hair, walked in first. The red glow of the coals cast long shadows on his furrowed brow, his sharp jaw and his large, hooked nose. His dark eyes glimmered beneath the edge of his hat, peering suspiciously around the room.
“Are you absolutely sure you saw a light in here, Wyzcark?” the King asked, walking over to the desk upon which sat the candle and the book.
“I know vat I saw,” Wyzcark muttered, the squat man waddling into the room behind the King. “There vas a light, and shadows; I swear it.”
The king lit the candle and picked it up from the table with his long spindly fingers, holding it toward the shadows, but the children were hidden neatly enough to avoid his sight. The King arched one eyebrow over his large, dark eye and sighed. “Well, maybe it was ghosts,” he said dismissively.
“Humph,” Wyzcark said with a grunt. “Think what you like, but ve must be more careful than ever! Ve can’t afford any lapses or mistakes now, not when ve’re so close!”
“On the contrary, my little friend.” The king smiled, setting the candle back down on the table. “Once we find the Amulet, we will be able afford as many lapses as we like.”
“Don’t be so cocky, oh King of Thieves,” Wyzcark warned with just enough mockery to prick the smile off of his tall friend’s face. “Even though the amulet has supposedly been spotted, ve have yet to verify that fact. And even if ve do, ve have yet to steal it for ourselves.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Wyzcark, my skeptical friend.” The smile returned in the form of a sneer on the King’s face. “The little dogs I have running my errands may be dirty street urchins, but they have sharp eyes and sharp ears. They’re eager to please me and afraid to make me angry. I showed Big Red and his Dragons the picture of the amulet and they verified what they saw, and that the old sea salt wintering at the Wet Rock was wearing it. It all makes perfect sense! The reason we didn’t come across it by now was because the latest owner had been out to sea, and now that he’s returned, it won’t be long before those grimy grubbers have my prize, and the riches of the world will finally be opened to me!” The King’s eyes burned hotter than the coals for a brief moment, madness simmering at their edges, until the King’s fat comrade’s suspicious voice broke his trance.
“Your prize?” Wyzcark asked, trying to draw himself up as tall as he could, which wasn’t very tall, truth be told.
“Our prize, our prize, Wyzcark,” the King said, soothing his friend with his best, honey-dripped tone.
“Just remember that,” Wyzcark said, pointing a finger at the king’s chest, which stood a full inch above his head.
“Oh, I’ll remember.” The king’s tone grew so deep as to nearly become a growl. “Believe me, I’ll remember.”
The two men were about to leave when the king stopped suddenly and turned back to the table. He reached over his workbench and pulled away a false panel to the wall, withdrawing a single object from the hid
ing place there. Jim nearly leapt out from behind the curtain when he saw what it was: his box. The King also took the book from the desk and tucked it beneath his arm.
“Just in case the ghosts decide to come back, eh, Wyzcark?” The King said. The two men laughed to themselves and the king blew out the candle before leaving. The door shut behind them, and the children were alone once more.
Cautiously, they emerged from hiding, gathering together in the center of the room. Lacey checked the window and watched as the treacherous King of Thieves and his squat business partner stalked off through the snow.
“They’ve got the box!” Jim lamented, punching his fist into his hand.
“But more,” Peter said excitedly. “The Dragons have seen the necklace from the book. Some old guy is sportin’ it around the docks.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Paul added. “We’ve got to make sure and get that amu-thingy before they do!”
“No problem for us,” Peter said. “After all, we are the brothers …”
He turned, fully expecting George to jump into the performance, hat in hand, ready to pick up their cheer, but instead, the leader of their little clan was standing by the wall, his slight shoulders slumped, his thin face hidden beneath his cap, which seemed to have grown in size to hang down low over his mousy face.
“George, you missed your cue,” Paul said, but George said nothing in return.
“George, whatever is the matter?” Lacey asked, moving to stand by her friend’s side. But George pulled away and nearly ran for the door.
“Nothing’s the matter!” he snapped. “And if you sods want to keep wasting your time, be my guest. I’m going home.”
Lacey and Jim looked at each other in bewilderment, but George’s outburst seemed to come as a great blow to his brothers. Peter and Paul’s shoulders slumped nearly as low as George’s had been, and they trudged out of the store to follow him.
“Mates, where are you going?” Jim asked. “Mates?” But it was no use. Jim and Lacey walked back to the little home beneath the shoe factory in silence.
Jim Morgan and the King of Thieves Page 13