The Hunter (2 page)

“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.

“It’s …
Master
Ping,” Christopher said softly, staring into the pitiful flames. There wasn’t as much wood this time. It would barely last the week, and easement day only came once a month.

“Oh yes,” she said brightly, covering a sniff. “I knew that, of course.” With her worn piece of shale, she made the mark that ended another month within Newgate Prison. Her movements were stiff, almost pained. The mark she made on the wall with an oddly unsteady hand was deeper than the others, and wider. “Did you—” She cleared her throat. “Did you enjoy your time with Master Ping?”

“I did,” he answered after a careful pause. “Mum. Look at me.”

Her hand dropped to her side, palming the shale, but she made no move to turn around, pulling her threadbare gray shawl tighter across her shoulders. “Forty-eight more months, Pigeon, can you believe that?” The false bravado in her normally soft-spoken voice alarmed him. “Four more years and you and I will be free. Free to do whatever we like. I’ll get a job as a seamstress, and I’ll make beautiful lace for fine ladies. I used to be famous for the quality of my lace, you know.”

“I know, Mum,” Christopher whispered, very worried now. He’d heard these words before, but they meant little to him, as he’d never seen a piece of lace in his life and her descriptions of them made no sense. “Let me see your face.”

“And you can apprentice with a tradesman. Maybe Mr. Dockery still works at the shipyards. We’ll have rooms of our own with a woodstove
and
a fireplace with a stone hearth. We’ll never be cold.”

Gaining his feet, Christopher left the heat of the fire and padded over to his mother. He wanted to fling his arms around her long waist, but didn’t because he was still rain-soaked and it would chill her. Instead, he slid in between her and the wall, lifting his hand to brush the hair back from her face.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. Her lower lip was split, but wasn’t bleeding.

Christopher squeezed his eyes shut for a second. He was eleven now, old enough to know that it was the wounds he couldn’t see that caused her pain. It was what the guards did to her whilst he wasn’t there. What she let them do. All so he could be afforded whatever scraps they were willing to throw him.

She was pale, and her eyes were red from crying, but she was still his mother. His tall, beautiful, sturdy mother. The woman who gave him everything, from strong bones, good teeth, and hair the color of rust on the ancient iron hinges, to the last morsel of her meal and a smile that was the only beautiful thing in their gray world.

A familiar hatred surged within him and he bared his teeth. “You shouldn’t let them in here anymore, Mum,” he growled. “I don’t need a fire.”

Watery eyes, the same light blue as his own, blinked rapidly as she slicked his sopping hair away from his eyes. “Of course you do, Pigeon,” she crooned. “Just look at you. As wet as a drowned Irish rat.” Her strong, capable hands seized him and began to peel the dripping shirt from his chest. “Come over here and warm up before you catch your death. I’ll go after our tins of supper.”

She limped a little, he noticed, and his teeth banged together from sheer helpless frustration. But she was a stubborn woman, and there was no talking to her when she was like this.

They ate their meat in silence, both of them staring into the flames. Christine a little dazed and distracted, Christopher seething and fuming.

Wu Ping didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t understand. How was one supposed to quiet his love for someone like this? How did he not hate the men who used his mother? Or fear what they might do next?

It was impossible to calm emotion.

He would tell the old fool that next time he saw him.

“Christopher,” his mother whispered, pulling his gaze from the glowing coal bed. She rarely called him anything but “Pigeon,” her pet name for him. “Christopher, I want you to know that I’m all right. And that everything I do, I do because I deserve it, and because you deserve better.”

“That’s bloody bollocks, Mum, you don’t deserve to be … they shouldn’t … not for me.” He couldn’t say the words, but his cheeks burned with shame.

“You watch your tongue,” she said firmly, but then immediately softened. “My son, you don’t know what the world is like out there beyond those walls. How strange and wonderful. Beautiful and terrible. You don’t know what a real life is like. You’ve never seen a true sunset, or had a fresh meal.” Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “That’s all because of me. Because I’m a criminal.”

“That doesn’t matter,” he argued, but she cut him off.

“You’ll see someday, Pigeon. You’ll see what you’ve been denied, and maybe you’ll hate me for it.”

“I could
never
hate you,” he vowed, scooting over to settle into her side as she wrapped her shawl around his bare shoulders.

“I hope for that, son.” She perched her cheek on top of his head. “But you never know what you’re capable of until…”

“Until what?”

Letting out a beleaguered breath, she stood and tested his shirt hanging from a rusty nail. It was impossible to dry anything in this dank place, even with the heat of their meager fire. But it was good enough for her to hand to him, though the cold almost burned his skin as he slipped the shirt on.

“Time for bed, Pigeon.” The sounds of iron bars clanking together and heavy doors swinging shut as the prison locked down for the night echoed above the calls of the guards and sounds of other prisoners. A stocky, sour-faced woman came by for head count and closed their cell, and then Christopher and his mother separated to their pallets.

They used to huddle together for warmth, Christopher remembered with longing. She’d curl her body around his and sing him songs in hopes of drowning out the horrible noises of the night.

Not anymore. Not since he’d started dreaming and woke racked with a strange and burning pleasure tightening in his loins and spilling into his trousers.

She’d separated them then, laughing almost wistfully as she tried to explain growing into a man to him through a crimson blush.

Christopher didn’t want to be a man, he thought glumly. Not if they turned into rutting brutes like Treadwell, or old leathery fools like Master Ping.

He just wanted to be held.

What had begun as a gentle rainstorm turned into a tempest. Thunder shook the old stones of Newgate, and lightning slashed arcane shadows through their tiny window.

“Should we sing tonight?” his mother asked, and Christopher smiled in the darkness. He’d been secretly hoping she’d ask. The storm had unsettled him, and the noises of Newgate were particularly grotesque.

“What should we sing?” he asked.

“How about my favorite Irish tune.”

They sang.

Hush Hush in the evening,

Good dreams will come stealing.

Of freedom and laughter

and peace ever after.

Ye’ll smile while you’re sleeping.

And watch I’ll be keeping.

Hush hush now my darling

No tears til the mornin …

A terrible scraping sound reverberated through the stones against Christopher’s ear, ripping him out of a warm dream and dumping him onto the cold floor. He sat up, blinking against the darkness. The storm still raged outside, and a flare of lightning illuminated his sleeping mother. Thunder immediately boomed overhead. For a moment, he’d thought it could have been the thunder that woke him, but the sound in the stone was so singular, he only knew of one source.

The heavy iron door that separated the male prisoners from the female cells.

Deep voices filtered down the hall. Male voices. Not guards, either. He knew the sound of the guards. Their footsteps were more clipped against the stone made by cobbled boots with sturdy soles.

Christopher put his ear to the floor. These steps were shuffled. The feet were bare.

Terror ripped through him as lightning once again threw menacing shadows against the wall. But these shadows were no illusion.

They belonged to the men invading his cell.

These were no guards, that much he could tell from the brief second he’d seen them. They were filthy, even by prisoner’s standards. Frightening. Leering. Growling.

Seized by painful hands, Christopher fought like a savage. Panic hid all the teachings of Master Ping from his memory. He couldn’t find his center line from the floor. Couldn’t form a fist. He couldn’t get the weight of the man three times his size off him, no matter how violently he tried.

“Christopher!” His mother cried his name in the darkness. “Christopher, run!” Pure, paralyzing horror held him just as captive as the giant with the knee in his back, grinding his cheek into the ground.

Treadwell had made good on his earlier threat.

“Please don’t hurt my son,” his mother pleaded.

“We’re not here for the boy,” one of them snickered. “But make a noise and we’ll gut him. Now which one of us will have you first?”

Christopher fought until his captor held his cheek down by the coal beds. The orange glow turned everything past it into writhing shadows. The raging storm didn’t drown out the grunts, the moans …

His mother’s whimpers.

He came to fear the lightning. To dread the illumination of the violent depravity they forced upon the person who was his entire universe. Tears streamed onto the filthy stone beneath him. His meager supper crawled its way back up his throat, threatening to choke him. He wanted to look away. To disappear. He wanted to die. To kill.

“Look away, Pigeon,” his mother gasped.

But he forced himself to watch. To watch them as they held her down. To memorize and catalog every sneering, rutting, grunting bastard’s face with each electric slash of light. Four of them in all.

Rage ripped through him, fueled by heat and fear and youth and helplessness. His soul became as enraged as the storm.

When the man restraining him was replaced by another readying to take his turn, Christopher lunged, catching the brute in the throat, and he didn’t stop punching until he felled the man.

He dimly heard his mother’s weak and hoarse scream before pain exploded behind his eyes, and he crashed to the floor, stunned.

The world spun around him, dipped and tossed in such a way that made him want to hold on to something, to reach out and make it stop. Shadows rose and fell, doubled and then transposed. Thunder crashed, or was it the door?

Then the storm hurling itself against the roof was the only sound ripping through his pounding head.

Mother.
Where was his mother? Was she—

“Christopher?”

With herculean effort, he turned his neck to see her shadow draped on the opposite side of the quickly dimming coals. She crawled toward him on her elbows, but couldn’t seem to make it around the fire pit.

Fear chased the vertigo away and he summoned the strength to lift himself from the floor.

“Mum,” he croaked, staggering to where she’d collapsed.

“Christopher.” Her voice, barely above a whisper, mirrored his terror. “Are you hurt, my son?”

“No. I’m okay. Mum, don’t move. I’ll call the guards.” He knelt over her, afraid to touch her. Afraid to put his hands anywhere.

“There was a knife, Pigeon, did they—” She panted a bit, as though trying to catch her breath. “Did they cut you?” Her hands, usually so strong, so sure, feathered over his face, his shoulders, and down his torso.

“A knife?” He shook his head, still trying to clear it. “They didn’t cut me…”

A warm, sticky sensation pooled against his knee and he suddenly wondered if he hadn’t been somehow stabbed. But there was no pain. No cut.

A new dawning horror licked at his soul.

“Throw another log on the fire, Pigeon, it’s so cold.”

The warm liquid slid down his leg as he hastily fetched two small logs and steepled them over the coals. Lightning flashed before the logs caught flame, illuminating the most grim sight of the entire horror-filled night.