by Gaelen Foley
The instant he saw the place and the overseers driving the boys, he had doubts, but since he had so few other options, in he went to learn how to make bricks. Noting his tall height and sturdy build, the overseer had quickly agreed to give him a chance.
The work of the off-bearers, he explained to Jacinda and Miss Carlisle, was simple, consisting mainly of carefully picking up the wet, newly formed bricks from the brick-master and carrying them to the drying fields a fair distance away. Carrying, carrying, back and forth, like ants in a line. It was messy work and quite precarious for gangly pubescent boys. Though the boys had not been allowed to talk to each other during work, one had quickly drawn his attention: a skinny, curly-haired charity boy in a green workhouse uniform. The puny lad could not seem to carry a brick without dropping it. Each wet brick the master gave him was soon splattered on the ground, a mud pie.
The girls laughed, listening in absorption as he described his increasing difficulty in keeping his mouth shut as the big, potbellied overseer had bullied and berated the charity boy for his ineptitude.
“But when I saw him strike the boy, something inside of me…snapped.”
The girls sobered, and his expression turned grim. He shook his head and told them how he had hurled the muddy wet brick he had been carrying at the overseer.
“It hit him square in the back, knocking him off balance, leavin’ a big muddy smear on his shirt.”
The overseer had whirled around in fury, standing two feet taller than him, but the man’s black look had not stopped Billy Albright’s charge. “Leave him alone!” he had screamed.
“I was so enraged, I could barely see straight.”
He told them of how the owner of the brickyard had come rushing out of his office and had broken up the row. The charity boy and he were brought into the office, reprimanded, and summarily dismissed.
“And that,” he said, “is how I met Nate Hawkins.”
Jacinda’s eyes widened with recognition at the name, for she had met Nate that night in Bainbridge Street.
“Nate complained bitterly against me for getting him sacked from his job,” Rackford said with a smile, “but we fell in together quite naturally, since he was an orphan and had no one and would have rather died than go back to the workhouse. In the end, the old barkeep, Sam Burroughs, hired us on as potboys to help out around the pub. He housed us in a loft in the outbuilding where the chickens and goats slept, but we were happy, for we had an easy master and there was always plenty to eat.”
Then he went on to describe how, one rainy night, three men in black greatcoats had arrived at Sam Burroughs’s alehouse.
Billy had been carrying a rack of clean beer mugs out from the back when he saw them. He had instantly recognized them as his father’s servants. They were asking old Sam if he had seen a blond, green-eyed boy of thirteen summers. Billy had silently retreated into the back, left the rack of tankards on the floor, grabbed Nate by his shirt, and fled.
After that narrow escape, they had traipsed into the heart of the city, once again on the scrounge for food. Within a few days, he had managed to get them both hired onto a Thames fishing boat, where they were assigned all the most unpleasant tasks: tarring the decks, gutting the catch, bailing out the bilge.
“Nate hated it,” he told the girls. “The captain was a decent man, but the crew were a rough lot. We were afraid of them and soon found we had good reason to be.”
After a fortnight of laboring like dogs, they had received their pay of two shillings each and were given permission to go ashore, but late that night, they ran afoul of the drunken first mate. The girls gasped as he described how the man, armed with a knife, had threatened them and demanded their pay.
“We had no choice but to give him our money. He said if we told anyone, he would gut us and feed our bodies to the fish.”
“How awful!” Jacinda exclaimed.
“We did not deem it wise to return to the boat,” he said drily. “By the time dawn came, we were once more faced with the question of how we were going to survive. It so happened that we were sitting by the river pondering our fate when we noticed the usual parade of young mud larks wading out into the water at low tide.”
These, he explained, were the poorest of the poor, beggar children who searched the riverbed each day at low tide, trying to find dropped coins, bits of coal that may have fallen off the passing barges, or anything of value they might resell for a few pennies. That morning, not knowing what else to do, Billy and Nate had rolled up their trousers and tried their hands at mud-larking. It was not long, however, before a small Cockney bruiser had come marching through the fog toward them.
“What are you blighters doing ’ere?” he had demanded pugnaciously. “I’m Cullen O’Dell, and this is my stretch of the river!”
From the first, Nate and Billy had been impressed by him. Cullen O’Dell was pure Cockney, born in earshot of the Bow bells. City-born and city-bred, he knew how to fend for himself. Though they had first encountered him mud-larking, he had made it clear that this low business was only a sideline for him. He had claimed that if a boy was smart, he could live like a king in the city. To their surprise, he had offered to help when they explained what had happened to them. He knew a good old gentleman, he said, who would give them food and a place to stay.
They had been skeptical, but without any other choices at hand, they had gone with him. The place where O’Dell had assured them they could find shelter had turned out to be a shabby, dilapidated flash house, and the old gentleman’s line of business had been training and dispatching young thieves. As long as the children under his dubious care brought back wallets, watches, silk handkerchiefs, and such, he provided them with enough bread, milk, and weak broth to subsist on, and a kind of home.
“My goodness,” the girls breathed.
“That very day, Nate and I went with a group of boys to a hanging outside of Newgate. I remember it like it was last week. The crowd that had gathered was in the thousands. I had never seen a hanging before, but Nate and I had been instructed to forget about the show up on the gallows and watch O’Dell and the other boys instead.”
He described how the other boys had dodged about, neatly picking the crowd clean. He remembered how his heart had pounded in fear that one of them would get caught, but none did. They had even made it look fun. The irony of robbing the citizenry of London even as the trio of highwaymen were being led to the gallows seemed not to have struck the young thieves, but it had certainly not been lost on Nate and him.
Their work done, the boys had all walked back together to the flash house. The others had been chattering about how pleased the old gentleman was going to be with their success, but Billy had been silent, brooding on the high consequences to be paid if one were caught.
“I suddenly asked the boys why they should hand over all their profits to the old gentleman when it was they who took all the risk,” he said to his fair listeners.
“Needless to say, the question made them rather uneasy, but I showed them that the expenses he paid to feed and house them were only a fraction of the profits the children were bringing in.”
Unschooled and illiterate, quite innocent of even the most basic mathematics, the young thieves had had no idea of the value of the goods they stole; having been hungry and destitute from the day they were born, they did not realize that the food the old man served them was meager and foul.
“The boys were angry when I did the math for them. When I showed them how much profit they were unwittingly handing over to the old man and gave them a few examples of what such sums could realistically buy, it was O’Dell who said we should not go back to the flash house, but should start our own gang. And that,” he said, “is exactly what we did.”
“Gracious!” the young ladies exclaimed.
“You were in a gang with O’Dell?” Jacinda asked.
He nodded. “He was the one with all the street smarts, while I had the education. Combined, these traits made us quite a m
enace. I would make up the various tricks and rackets to gull unsuspecting marks, and O’Dell would lead the other boys in carrying them out.”
“What kind of tricks?” Jacinda asked with a mischievous smile.
“Let’s see.” He scratched his chin. “My favorite one had us posing as a company of chimney sweeps. We would go into large homes on the pretense of cleaning the chimneys, while in fact we would be methodically casing the house for a future robbery—identifying routes of entry, where the valuables were kept, whether there was a dog. That sort of thing.”
The girls were laughing, scandalized.
“As long as our skills were balanced with O’Dell as the brawn and myself as the brains, things went smoothly. But one night, all of that changed.”
“What happened?” Jacinda asked.
He fell silent for a moment, choosing his words very carefully, for he did not wish to mar their innocence with any mention of the unnatural men that existed in the world who would use a child, even a boy, for their own gratification.
In truth, none of them had known how vulnerable they were. Fast asleep in their hideaway, an old burned-out warehouse by the river, none of the members of their little boy-gang heard Yellow Cane creep into their midst that night.
All the street children knew to stay away from the strange, predatory dandy known as Yellow Cane after the elegant yellow walking stick he always carried. He had a long, painted fingernail on his pinky from which he was always taking snuff. Billy had often seen him around the streets, in the gambling hells, and scouring the more peculiar brothels.
That night, something had made him awaken from a dead slumber. Through sleepy eyes, he had been horrified to see Yellow Cane holding a knife to O’Dell’s throat, forcing the boy to keep silent and to come with him. He still remembered his shock at seeing tough O’Dell’s face wet with tears of sheer terror.
Billy had jumped to his feet with a roar and, rather stupidly, had charged. It could have gotten O’Dell’s throat slit, but instead, it had startled Yellow Cane, giving O’Dell the chance to shove the man’s weapon hand away. Yellow Cane had tried to run, but Billy had barreled into him, diving for his knife. The fight was a blur, for his battle cry had awakened the rest of the boys. Everyone was screaming. O’Dell had picked up the infamous yellow walking stick and began clubbing the man with it. The next thing Billy knew, he had Yellow Cane’s knife in his hand. When the dandy reached into his greatcoat pocket for his pistol, Billy had stabbed him in the neck.
“Lord Rackford?” Jacinda’s gentle touch on his forearm startled him back to the present.
He looked at her abruptly, the dark shadows of the past clearing from his eyes.
“What happened?” she repeated softly.
He forced a slight smile. “O’Dell was attacked one night, and I saved him.”
Her dark eyes flickered, as though she sensed he was not telling her the worst of it, but she did not press him.
“From that point on,” he continued, “the others regarded me as their leader. O’Dell refused to forget the humiliation of having been rescued by me, since he was supposed to be the tough one. His shame turned to hatred of me. Eventually, he left us and formed a gang of his own and became corrupted, I suppose, by the hardship he had suffered all his life. The rest,” he murmured, “you already know.”
The girls glanced at each other, then at him.
Jacinda caressed his shoulder, frowning with concern. “I am sorry things have been so hard for you, Billy.”
“Me, too,” Miss Carlisle added softly.
“Well, my circumstances have decidedly improved,” he said with forced brightness. “True, I am under my father’s thumb once more, but Nate and the others are alive. That’s what counts.” He gazed off wistfully into the distance for a moment, then tried to shrug off his persistent sense of guilt. “I have hired a gentleman of business to find me some property in Australia. I intend to buy a plantation there so they can serve out their sentences in a place where at least they will be humanely treated. Unfortunately, I must remain anonymous as their benefactor. I am to have no contact with them ever again. They have all been told that ‘Billy Blade’ is dead.”
“How sad,” Jacinda murmured. “They were like brothers to you.”
“At least I managed to keep them out of the hangman’s noose. Still,” he said pensively, tilting his head back to study the wind-riffled branches above them, “it doesn’t seem enough. I get to sit here in the park with two pretty ladies while they’re in chains aboard some prison hulk.”
“You did the best you could,” Lizzie said sympathetically.
“You saved their lives,” Jacinda agreed.
“Do you know what you could do, Lord Rackford?” Lizzie spoke up all of a sudden.
“What could I do?” he asked, turning fondly to the unassuming girl.
Lizzie stared into space, tapping her lip in thought.
“Gracious, Lizzie’s got an idea,” Jacinda said in a tone of excitement. “Have I told you, Lord Rackford, that Miss Carlisle is a genius?”
“No, you hadn’t mentioned it.”
“Once you have your plantation in order, you could send a schoolmaster to educate them,” Lizzie said. “Artisans to teach them honest trades. That way, when they’ve served their sentences, they shall have the means to adopt a new way of life independent of crime.”
“Hmm. They wouldn’t want to be bothered, I’m afraid. They’re not boys anymore. The time for apprenticeships is ages past, and I’m not sure you can teach an old dog new tricks—”
“My dear Lord Rackford, when Lizzie has an idea, it usually works. I agree with her,” Jacinda said. “Actually…I can think of one motive that might be all that’s needed to inspire your fellows to change their ways.”
“What might that be?”
“Wives,” she declared. “Get them women.”
Rackford and Lizzie burst out laughing.
“Wives, Jacinda?” Lizzie exclaimed.
“Why not? Surely a man with a wife and children to look after is less inclined to risk his neck in daft criminal schemes,” she insisted over their laughter. “Give them more to lose, and I wager that within a few years, you will have molded them into upstanding citizens.”
“You know, that might actually work,” Rackford murmured. It delighted him to think of Nate, Sarge, Flaherty, Andrews, and all the rest as married men with wee ones underfoot. He looked at Jacinda, who smoothed her skirts, looking altogether pleased with herself. “I think you both are geniuses,” he said.
The girls exchanged a tickled look at his compliment.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Theirs was a friendship entwined with lust.
In the weeks that followed, Jacinda poured her efforts into civilizing Rackford—but did not really want to see him tamed. Not when she basked in his thrillingly dangerous advances. He flirted openly with her whenever he could get away with it, and though she pretended a droll annoyance, it was deliciously heady flattery to find herself the one continual object of his smoldering attentions.
She chose not to take his rakish advances very seriously, but their private flirtation had added a zest of excitement to her life that had been decidedly missing before. Whenever they were left alone even for a moment, he was always touching her, however subtly—a caress on her cheek, a playful tug on her hair, a gallant kiss on her hand. Somehow she never found much reason to protest, though she sometimes made a show of anger at his bawdier compliments. It seemed important to keep him in line.
Fortunately, Lizzie’s frequent presence helped diffuse the craving tension that sometimes made the very air between them crackle and hum. As for her governess, Rackford had charmed his way past Miss Hood with ease, but he was essentially a man’s man, and even her brothers had taken a guarded liking to him, thanks to Lucien’s vouching for his character.
Little did she know Rackford had already made his intentions known to her brothers and had procured Robert’s permission to court her….
Rackford had had no choice, really. She was under twenty-one and could not marry without her guardian’s consent, not to mention the fact that her formidable tribe of elder brothers could end his courtship before it had begun, if they saw fit. He did not want to make enemies of them. It was a great risk, but he knew that the only solution was to show his hand, prove himself, earn their respect, and thus seal his place among them from the start. In truth, he had so often willfully done wrong in his life, but this was important enough to him that he wanted to do everything right.
Boldly, he requested an audience with the duke of Hawkscliffe on a day when he had learned beforehand that Jacinda would be out shopping with her beautiful sisters-in-law and the lovable Miss Carlisle.
Perhaps Hawkscliffe had divined the purpose of his call, for when Rackford walked into the duke’s study, he found four of the five Knight brothers already arrayed before him.
Only Lord Jack Knight, the second-born, was absent. Rackford later learned that Lord Jack was quite the black sheep—and could not be expected to appear anytime soon. None of the others even knew where he was.
Fortunately, however, Lucien and Alec were there and had already decided to accept him. Hawkscliffe watched his every move with skepticism in his dark eyes; then Rackford was reintroduced to the one who had worried him the most—Lucien’s twin, Damien, the earl of Winterley. The silver-eyed, war-hardened colonel had brought his wife, Miranda, into Town to go shopping with her womenfolk. Winterley shook his hand, looking him over—indeed, taking his measure, as though he were a rather unsatisfactory new recruit of the regiment. As it turned out, however, the stone-faced warrior was prepared to give him a chance because of Billy Blade’s help so long ago in saving the raven-haired beauty Miranda.
The grueling, two-hour interview made his many hours of questioning from Sir Anthony Weldon and his Bow Street runners look like child’s play. He knew he was not the favorite—he knew he was no Lord Griffith—but he forced himself to be utterly honest with her kin.