The Bone Quill (6 page)

‘Mattie, listen to me. You and I are going to find Zach right now. We are not doing anything else. No sightseeing. No wandering off. We’re going to find Zach.’

She kept her concentration on his breathing, shifting her calm into his mind, trailing after his thinking, loosening his stubborn feelings from their moorings.

For a few seconds, Em held Matt’s thoughts in her head, his excitement frozen, his inclination to dart off weakening. She thought she had calmed him, until he whipped his hand from hers, laughing.

‘Seriously, Em, you’re trying to inspirit me?’

Em shrugged. ‘Worth a try.’

She did her best to mask her delight from his mind. Because despite his protesting, Matt had stopped trying to charge off on his own and was scanning the busy avenue for Zach in a fairly focused way instead.

‘I see him,’ shouted Matt suddenly. ‘He’s over there.’ He pointed near the railway bridge. ‘Somehow he must have fallen from the animation before we did.’

Zach was caught in the middle of a gang of scruffy boys, many of them about the twins’ age but a few much younger. Em could sense the volatile emotions of the group. She understood that they were about to pummel poor Zach, who was not so much afraid as confused. It was clear that he was still reeling from the fact that he had fallen into a scene from
Oliver Twist
.

Help!

Finally, Em heard Zach’s cries in her head.

Run in the direction of Big Ben, Zach!

Zach dodged the first wharf rat that charged at him and dashed out into the busy avenue. But because he couldn’t hear the yelled warning from a pedestrian nearby, he sprinted directly in front of a soldier on a black horse.

The horse bucked and rose up on its hind legs, its front hooves beating the air next to Zach’s head. Yanking on the reins with one hand, the soldier swooped down and grabbed Zach’s hoodie with his other, pulling a windmilling Zach off his feet and into the air.

The gang of urchins fled in multiple directions, making it difficult for a nearby policeman to catch any of them. The soldier kept a tight grip on Zach’s sweatshirt, despite Zach’s squirming and kicking to free himself.

Zach, we’re coming
.

‘Got one here for you, constable!’

The piercing pitch of a policeman’s whistle rose above the din of the street. Within seconds, a black police wagon trundled out of a cobbled lane next to Whitehall.

‘And here’s a lesson for you, you filthy urchin! I’ll teach you not to frighten my horse.’

Zach’s pain buckled Em to her knees. The soldier had slipped his riding crop from his saddle and begun thrashing Zach, who curled up on the ground, covering his head. Em slid from the wall and howled with every lash of the soldier’s riding crop on Zach’s back and shoulders. It was all Matt could do not to run to Zach’s aid, but he couldn’t leave his sister in this state.

‘Breathe, Em,’ Matt ordered, white with rage for his friend. ‘We’ll help him. We will. But you need to be calm.’

When the soldier stopped whipping Zach, Em exhaled in a burst of air. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Matt helped her up from the pavement. The twins watched helplessly as Zach was tossed into the prison wagon, already crowded with filthy children, and driven into the flow of traffic heading north towards the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.

‘B
ut
where’s this prison wagon
going
?’ asked Matt, as he and Em raced along the muck-filled gutter of the Embankment in hot pursuit of Zach, dodging round carts, wild dogs and endless people.

‘Victorian street children were rounded up and taken to workhouses,’ she panted. ‘I’m guessing that’s where we’re going.’

She stopped, her hands on her knees, coughing and breathing hard. It wasn’t comfortable running in this thick smog. ‘We’ll never catch him at this rate. God, this place stinks.’ She scraped muck from her shoe and tried to spit the stench from her mouth.

Zach, we’re coming. I promise.

‘Can you still hear him?’ Matt asked.

‘Barely.’

Ahead of them, the police wagon was already slipping from their view, rolling round the curve of the riverbank up ahead.

‘Give me our drawing,’ demanded Em.

‘Why?’ asked Matt, fishing the page out of the back pocket of his jeans. ‘We’re not going back without Zach.’

Em smiled at what she was sure was the result of her successful inspiriting. Ducking round three nannies in crisp uniforms pushing prams as big as ponies, she dragged Matt behind a flower-seller’s cart and handed him one of the crayons.

‘What are you thinking?’ Matt asked.

‘We need to draw something that moves fast.’ She glanced down at the river. ‘I’ve got it! Come on.’

Em led Matt down the shaky jetty steps to the river’s edge. The stench was worse down here, and Matt’s eyes began to water. A rowing boat was beached on the hard, black sand, a fisherman wading by the riverbank.

Em sketched the outline of their animation first. Immediately, Matt discerned what she had in her mind and began to draw with her, sharing the image in their imaginations.

Heads touching, they scribbled across a page of paper so quickly that sparks of light and flakes of colour came popping from the tips of their fingers. A riot of black lines shot upwards, looping, linking, weaving together in the air until a sleek, dark watercraft, a jet ski, appeared on the water in front of them.

Matt jumped on the front before Em could argue and roared the throttle. Em climbed on behind him, gripping him tightly around his waist. The twins bounced out into the tide of vessels on the jet ski, leaving the fisherman watching in stunned disbelief, wondering what terrible plague had seized his brain.

W
ith
anxiety twisting in his gut and his shoulders stinging from the soldier’s thrashing, Zach watched the twins disappear from his sight through a tear in the thick black curtains that the driver had dropped over the sides of the police wagon, as if something distasteful and disturbing lurked underneath.

He shifted on to his knees and took in his surroundings. He was next to three sleeping children piled one on top of the other like sacks of flour and two boys – at least he
thought
they were boys – who looked no more than seven or eight years old. All the children had a similar look to them. They seemed terribly old.

Underneath the muck that coated each child’s body and the matted hair that hung limply against their faces, Zach sensed not fear but resignation and something else – hunger. When he focused his mind on to one of the boys nearest him, Zach also picked up a thin thread of hope that wherever they were going, they would be given something to eat.

Zach’s stomach rumbled. Jeannie had made a roast for lunch, which meant thick beef sandwiches and slices of sweet onions from the Abbey’s garden would be on the table for supper. Zach looked at the skeletal bodies of the sleeping children pressed next to him and felt guilt for his salivating.

Because Zach had been the last one picked up by the wagon, he was pressed against the door. He hoped the lock was as rusty on the inside as it looked on the outside.

Zach, we’re coming, I promise.

He had only been to London once with his dad a couple of years ago, when they had come down from Scotland to see an exhibition at the Royal Academy, so Zach had no frame of reference for where the bouncing cart was taking him. Slipping his penknife from his pocket, he huddled over the wagon’s lock. It would be easier for everyone if he escaped this wheeled cage and met Matt and Em on the road.

He jiggled, turned, and twisted the end of his knife in the lock.

Nothing.

‘What you doing?’ asked one of the boys crammed next to him.

Zach continued, unaware of the boy addressing him until the boy slapped the knife from Zach’s hand and scrambled over the sleeping children to press his filthy face into Zach’s. Another boy reached the knife before Zach could retrieve it, tossing it to the first boy, who thrust it against Zach’s throat.

‘I asked you a question.’

Although he looked younger than Zach, the boy had already lost many of his front teeth. His breath was as foul as the air in the wagon, and his eyes were dead.

Zach grabbed the boy’s knife hand and squeezed his wrist.

You don’t want to hurt me,
Zach projected into the boy’s mind.
You’re tired and you’re so very hungry and you’ll feel much better if you ignore me.

The boy’s grip loosened on the knife enough for Zach to roll away. Quickly, Zach flipped on to his back, pressed his feet against the lock and kicked with all his might. The lock snapped. He tore open the draped tarp and, without thinking about where he was going to end up, he jumped out and into the seething streets of Victorian London.

T
he
twins skimmed across the surface of the River Thames on the jet ski, Em’s eyes focused on the black-draped wagon labouring above them on the Embankment. Matt was doing his best to dodge in and out of the slow-moving barges and torpedo-shaped steam ships cluttering the river’s lanes. Two sailors yelled in astonishment from a barge, and a few tenants of a row of slum housing, lining a section of the Embankment like stacked shoe boxes, yelled for them to stop, but for the most part the twins and their jet ski might have been invisible.

I’m out! I’m heading back towards Big Ben.

Em started at the sound of Zach’s voice in her head.

Matt! Zach’s out of the wagon. Turn round. He’s running back the way he just went.

Communicating telepathically made it easier for the twins to hear each other over the roar of the traffic around them. They could also keep their mouths closed and not have to swallow the stench.

The river was sweating filth.

Matt cut the craft into its own wake, barely missing two punters dressed for a picnic with their colourfully dressed lady friends in wide-brimmed hats. The waves bounced and tipped the spluttering picnickers out of their boats and into the water.

‘Sorry,’ yelled Em, as the four shocked Victorians crawled to the safety of the riverbank, their baskets, boats, straw hats and parasols floating away from them in the strong current.