Aiden glanced back toward the faro tables, hoping Fish would come to his rescue. “I did shoot a seal,” he said simply.
“You see! Just as I said! And then the shark attacked them!” Christopher clapped his hands together, accidentally slamming them against the bar. “Ow!” he yelped. He examined the wounded knuckle carefully. “Go on—tell us the whole story!”
“That’s about it,” Aiden said.
“There must be details!” Christopher’s eyes were blurry and he swayed unsteadily. “Our lives are dull. Give us a story!”
His friends laughed, but it was an embarrassed sort of laughter. The youngest one tugged on Christopher’s coat sleeve. “Christopher, it’s getting late.”
Christopher shrugged him off. “At least show us the tooth,” he said to Aiden.
Aiden had never thought about the lives of rich people being dull. They had books and food and were usually warm. But if this tale had come through Captain Neils or any of the crew, which of course it must have, he didn’t want to be rude. Mr. Worthington was obviously a good client, and it wouldn’t do to antagonize his son. Aiden drew open the leather pouch, took out the tooth and held it out to them on his palm.
“It’s enormous!” Christopher said, his bright demeanor restored.
“You can hold it,” Aiden offered.
The young men passed the tooth around with murmurs of admiration, noting the size and weight of it, the sharp jagged edges. They peppered Aiden with questions. How big was the shark, really? Did he think he would die? Could it take off a leg in one bite? Aiden was eager to escape but decided the easiest way at this point was just to give them what they wanted.
“The waves were high as mountains,” he said. “The unpitying beast bit so continually at our oars that the blades became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea!” He paused for dramatic effect and hushed his voice. “I could see the bluish pearl-white of the inside of its jaw, not six inches from my head.” His audience murmured with appreciation.
“I remember the sound of its body slicing through the water.” Aiden concocted what he supposed would be the proper sound. In reality, he had heard nothing but the low roar of his own panicked blood pounding inside his head. The group leaned in close like eager children. “It was of prodigious size and strength,” he went on. “It had no mercy, no power but its own.”
Christopher Worthington gave him a suspicious look.
“Then slam!” Aiden finished with an exaggerated flourish that startled a few. “I hit it with the axe. The blood poured out red as—as a—a red rose.” It wasn’t the best simile, but what else was red but roses and blood? He hurried to finish. “Then the monster vanished, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
“Wow.” The youngest boy’s eyes were wide, and Aiden could tell they were all satisfied with the story. They grew very quiet, sipping their drinks and reflecting on the brevity of life, the savagery of nature and the tenacity of the warrior hero. Or maybe not. An instant later, when a couple of the pretty waiter girls paraded by with feathers and promises of a fandango dance, the young men followed eagerly, ready for a new diversion. Except for Christopher. He watched his friends go off and gather around the stage, then turned and looked at Aiden with a slight, knowing smile.
“I’ve read Moby-Dick, you know. Have you memorized the whole damn thing?”
“No,” Aiden laughed, surprised Christopher had recognized it. “Just those bits. ‘Bluish pearl-white jaw’ is the kind of thing that sticks in the mind. I’ve read it seven times.” He took a well-earned sip of his drink. “I wasn’t mocking you, sir.”
“I’m not a ‘sir,’” Christopher said with a laugh. “I’m hardly older than you, I think. And even if you were, mocking with Melville isn’t such a bad thing, I suppose. But seven times? I did like the book—though, honestly, did it really need to be so long?”
“It was a long voyage,” Aiden said. “And a big whale.”
“True.” Christopher tossed back the rest of his drink. The bartender immediately brought him another. “And one for my friend here.”
“No thanks.” Aiden held his hand over his glass. The bartender glowered, nudged his hand out of the way and poured another one anyway. He was quick to add two ticks to the tally card.
“How are the bears, then?” Aiden asked. “Are they all right? Are they eating?”
“Oh, they’re fine, I suppose. But what a stupid showboat that was! Father owes me big, I do say.”
“What do you mean?”
“Greeting the bears! And with the ducklings in tow!”
“Ducklings?”
“The sisters. Dear sweet things. I do love them. But you saw it, didn’t you? All those nannies, and still at least one always escapes. Father was meant to go himself, of course, holding court and all that—what do I care about bears—but he came down with a bad cold.”
The younger boy pushed his way back through the crowd. “Come on, Christopher! It’s nearly ten, and you know Lawrence and I have to be back by ten!”
“Little Tom Tom, if you can’t sneak into your own house after curfew, you don’t deserve to go out,” Christopher said sharply. “Getting through your pantry window is like dropping a marble down a well.”
“But we have exams tomorrow!”
“I know the capital of Egypt!” Christopher said. “And the square root of pi or whatever. Go on without me if you want. I can certainly find my own way home.”
“Not from here!” The boy looked genuinely worried and glanced nervously back to his brother and friends, who were waiting near the door. “You’ll be murdered!”
“Go on.” Christopher shooed the boy off.
“I’m serious, Christopher,” Tom Tom said. “We will leave you.”
“Fine.”
Tom Tom turned away.
“I should go,” Christopher said, looking at his friends. “We do have exams this week, and some of them aren’t as rich as me.”
“Why does that matter for exams?”
“It means that someday they’ll have to work at real jobs, and if they’re not smart, they’ll be doomed to being minor bank managers or to sitting on the city council for the sewer department or on the commission to teach poor boys to read or something.”
“I’m poor,” Aiden said evenly. “And I like to read.”
“Well, there you have it!” Christopher gave him his brightest smile. “We can stay out all night and fail everything and not be worthless after all!”
Aiden saw Christopher’s friends apparently arguing over what to do. Lawrence craned to see over the crowd and waved at Christopher; another just shoved Tom Tom out the door, his rigid shoulders betraying a resigned frustration with Christopher Worthington’s antics.
“Ah, well. I suppose I should join them.” Christopher reached into the shabby coat and took out a fine leather wallet. The bartender brought over the bill. The total was a week’s wages in the lumber camp, but Christopher pulled out the notes as if they were play money. He got unsteadily to his feet and stumbled into a man standing nearby.
“Hey! Watch it!”
“Sorry,” Christopher muttered.
“Who do you think you are?”
Aiden stood up between them, experienced by now in defusing a fight. “No harm meant, sir. Have this with our compliments.” He slid his untouched drink to the man and steered Christopher aside. “Come on, I’ll walk out with you,” he said, grabbing Christopher’s arm and holding him up.
“Fine. If you like. But Moby-Dick was still too long.”
“Not if you live in Kansas.”
The cold night air felt good. The streets were quiet, with most of the men settled and drunk inside by now. Aiden guided the wobbly Christopher down the two stairs into the street and looked around for his friends.
“They won’t really have left you, will they?” he asked.
“I suppose they did. We came in Lawrence’s carriage. His parents are out
at some fete. If they come home and see the carriage gone, he’ll be—I don’t know—scolded.”
“Where do you live?”
“Just point me toward Pacific Street. There will be cabs there.”
Aiden paused. He certainly couldn’t let Christopher stagger off through the streets of the Barbary Coast alone, but he didn’t want to disappear without telling Fish, who was still inside playing faro.
“Wait here a minute,” he said, propping the young man against the side of the building. “I’ll be right back, and then I’ll walk with you.”
It wasn’t even a minute later when Aiden returned, but Christopher was almost out of sight, swaying drunkenly up the muddy street. The blue-coated bouncer leaned nonchalantly against a porch railing, watching him with the cool disinterest of a vulture eyeing a lame bunny, his muscled arms folded across his bulky chest. Aiden felt a rush of anger.
“What the hell are you doing letting him wander off like that?”
The man shrugged. “I’m not a nursemaid.”
“He can barely walk!”
“Bother me anymore and you won’t either.”
For a moment, Aiden considered the pure pleasure of punching the bouncer in his fat nose, but he could see a more urgent fight brewing down the street. Men were already coming out of the shadows after Christopher. This little drunken bunny was hopping straight into the stew pot. The man that reached him first started groping at his coat. Christopher barely reacted, perhaps thinking it was his own friends come back to play a trick on him, but when he saw the stranger, he ducked and pivoted away more deftly than Aiden would have expected. But the real danger was just arriving: two more thieves, one armed with a club. Aiden had not clearly seen the faces of his own attackers, but something about this man’s posture and the way he carried that stick was all too familiar. Even the initial pickpocket was frightened and took off running. They didn’t even bother trying to sneak up on Christopher—they simply grabbed him.
“Hey!” Aiden yelled. “Let him go!” The man with the club turned to meet Aiden’s charge, weapon raised. Aiden ducked, spun around and tackled the man at the knees, taking him down. The man lost hold of the club. Aiden drove the heel of his hand hard under his chin and followed with a hard punch to the gut. This wasn’t boxing. Damage was the point. It was a messy brawl, but short. Christopher managed to pick up the club and wave it around. He did not manage to actually hit either of their attackers, but his wild swings distracted them enough to help Aiden a little. Even with two against mostly one, Aiden landed more blows than he received, and when he felt the slippery warmth of blood on his knuckles, he was pretty sure it was not his own. Men came out from the nearby saloons to watch, and finally a couple of the bouncers stalked over waving their own clubs, and the two attackers gave up and dashed off into the darkness. As quickly as it had started, it was over.
Christopher Worthington sat in the middle of the road looking confused. He pulled his coat back up into place and wiped dirt off his mouth.
“Did we just have a fight?” he asked.
“Something like that,” Aiden said. The energy rush was starting to make his muscles tremble, but he felt unbroken—he felt good, actually.
“Did we win?”
“Can you stand?”
“Was I standing before?”
Aiden laughed, offered a hand and pulled him up. Christopher brushed the dirt off his coat and pants, standing fairly well now, the attack having sobered him up quite a bit.
“Did they get your purse?” Aiden asked.
“Of course not,” Christopher said indignantly, pulling out a handkerchief. “It was in my boot. I’m not entirely unacquainted with the practices of the Barbary Coast, you know.” The crowd that had gathered quickly evaporated, back to the warm interiors and ready drinks.
“You did much better this time.” A familiar voice came out of the darkness. Aiden squinted and saw the old woman and her gigantic dog standing nearby.
“Thank you, Blind Sally,” Aiden said, still panting. The old woman tapped her stick in the dirt and The Moon sat down.
“It’s nice to see you again,” Aiden said. “I have come looking for you—since that day.”
“Not at the right time, you haven’t.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Better late than never.” She held out her palm with a regal gesture. Aiden dug into his pocket for some coins.
“Who is that?” Christopher strained to focus.
“This is Miss Blind Sally,” Aiden said. “Miss Blind Sally, Christopher Worthington.”
“Is that some kind of real animal?” Christopher stared at The Moon. “Or a very shaggy piano?”
“Don’t try to make sense of it,” Aiden whispered. He placed the coins into the old woman’s palm. The skin was soft and papery. In a flash she closed the witchy fingers and stuffed the payment into her pocket. Aiden jingled a couple of other coins so she could hear.
“Blind Sally, would you happen to know where we could find a cab to take my friend home?”
ish was disappointed that he had missed the drama, but he had done well at cards, so they both came home winners. Magnus said nothing to them the next morning about their late night out, though he twitched more than usual and barely let his brother finish breakfast before dragging him off to the boat.
“We have two days in port,” he said as he stomped into his boots. “Last man on deck will be scraping barnacles!” He was out the door and halfway up the street by the time Fish got his coat off the hook.
“Maybe I will be an ordinary sailor if it gets me on a real ship!” Fish grumbled. “Hell, I’ll be a galley slave! I’ve got to find something else.”
Mrs. Neils gave him a gentle slap and said something in Swedish—clearly a scolding for his ungratefulness to his brother.
Aiden spent the morning as he usually did, walking the city, making the rounds of the laboring jobs, looking for work and coming up empty. As he headed to the cheapest of the saloons for a free lunch, he ran into Bobby O’Brian, one of the men he knew from the moving job, hurrying out.
“Hey, laddie,” Bobby said. He gave a quick, furtive glance up and down the street. “A word?” A little boy dashed out of the saloon behind him, jumped down the step, stopped and stood with his palm open. “Here you go.” Bobby pressed a penny into the child’s hand. “Breathe a word to any other and I’ll turn you inside out!” The child ran off. “Come on with me,” Bobby whispered to Aiden. “There’s a nag just gone down on Second Street by the greengrocer’s—knackerman will need hands. Hurry.”
He set off at nearly a run, and Aiden followed.
“The boy’s mum works in the kitchen there,” Bobby said. “He knows to come with news of work. He’s a fast one, but anyone can well enough see a dead horse in the street.”
The horse was not yet dead, but Aiden knew it was not going to stand ever again, despite the angry whipping of its owner. It was old, and like too many cart horses had been overworked for so long that it had finally simply given out, collapsing, still in its harness, in the middle of the road. Bony ribs still moved as the animal drew shallow breaths. The cart was blocking the street, with two other wagons and a carriage already backed up. The greengrocer was shouting at the horse’s owner. A small crowd had gathered.
“The knackermen always hire off the street,” Bobby explained. “It’s a quick job with two strong men.” There were a couple of other men heading purposefully down the street, even as they spoke. “We’ll stake our claim,” Bobby said. “You stand by the arse end. I’ll take the head.”
As they went to their posts, another man stepped out of the crowd and glared at Aiden.
“Back off, boy,” he growled. Two other men arrived and stopped to size up the situation. Bobby gave Aiden a worried glance. They weren’t really going to brawl over a dead horse, were they?
“Sir.” Aiden turned quickly to the owner. “Shall I unharness it for you?” The man stopped whipping the horse. He was sweating from
the exertion. “It’ll be quicker for when the knackerman arrives,” Aiden went on. “Then we can move your wagon over there—clear a bit of the street.”
The man spat, looked with disgust at the fallen horse and threw the whip in the wagon. “Go on, then. Goddamn worthless animal!”
Aiden made quick work of unbuckling the harness, then Bobby helped him drag the shaft out from under the beast and back the cart up. The horse lifted its head and looked at Aiden. Its eyes were sad but still luminous. Foam flecked the sides of its mouth. Dust had settled on its hide in stripes between the protruding ribs. It kicked feebly and drew its forelegs up as if to try once more to stand, but the effort was little more than a spasm. Aiden shuddered. A child in the crowd shrieked and began to cry.
“Goddammit, man—put the beast out of its misery!” the grocer yelled.
“How long before the knackerman gets here?” Aiden asked.
“Could be soon, could be an hour,” Bobby said.
“If you can bring us a gun, I’ll take care of it,” Aiden said to the grocer.
“I don’t keep a gun in the onion bin!” the man snapped. “It’s his damn horse! He should shoot it!” There were some more arguments, more cries from the crowd, more jostling for position as more men arrived wanting the work. Finally someone did show up with a pistol and handed it to Aiden. Aiden said nothing, but waited a few minutes until all the bystanders had seen the gun and understood what was about to happen. It was a job someone had to do, so Aiden did it. He knew where to shoot. You had to get the angle just right.
The knackerman arrived about ten minutes later. He was a tall, blocky man with small, piercing eyes and a head bald as the moon, oiled and polished so it glistened. The cart was brightly painted and pulled by a fine, strong horse with a plume on its head, like the ones funeral horses wore. The knackerman said nothing at first. He walked over to the dead horse and pressed on its eyeballs, checking to see that it was really dead. He looked up at the owner. The man nodded at Aiden and Bobby.
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