The Crimson Shard (10 page)

B
laise was asleep when a rising chorus of gasps and cries yanked him into consciousness. He sensed movement nearby and heard something scraping along the floor. Rough men’s voices came out of the darkness, and then what sounded like a sharp slap on skin.

He lay still, huddled against the wall of the boys’ bedchamber, watching a dim light travel across its cracked surface. It vanished, and the sound of boots and bumps faded away down the stairs. Blaise slowly turned toward the boys.

One was sobbing into a pillow, and another was cursing, trying to light a lantern. A tiny light finally burst into life, and Toby held it to a candle’s wick. His forehead was creased with anguish.

Blaise whispered, “What’s going on?”

Robert and Jacob hovered above Toby like ghosts in torn nightshirts.

The eldest boy ignored Blaise and said, “Back to bed, both of you.”

“But where’s he gone?” whimpered Robert, gnawing on one knuckle as he and Jacob crawled back into their beds.

Toby could only shake his head.

Blaise leaped up and crept into the workshop to see what he could from the windows, which overlooked the square. In the light of a single lantern over the entrance below, he saw dark figures in action.

Toby stood, pale-faced, at the workshop door, the other boys behind him. “Get away from there, Blaise.”

“Not till I see what’s going on. Put that candle down on the floor, Toby, or behind something, so they don’t see me here,” Blaise said in a low voice. “There are three men and a cart with a horse. They’re loading something onto it. A sack. One of them is tying it up at the end.” He let out a hoarse cry. “One of them just hit the sack with a stone or something!”

Toby buried his face in his hands.

Blaise had a horrible feeling he knew what was inside the sack. One of the men had jumped on the cart and was holding the sack down, while the other two swung onto the driver’s seat. The cart rolled away into the night.

He jerked away from the window and herded Toby and the others back into the bedroom. “Tell me what happened.”

Toby pointed to one of the beds wrenched out of its place. The sheets had been torn away, and there was only an indentation where Will had slept.

The boys gathered around the bed, clutching their arms tightly across their chests against the chill air and the shock.

“Somebody tell me where Will’s gone,” Blaise said.

“They’ve taken him,” said Toby.

“Who has?”

“Them strangers,” whispered Gus. “They takes boys and they don’t come back.”

Blaise looked under Will’s bed. A small trunk was there, untouched.

“His things is still there,” said Toby. “But he’s gone for good. Just like the others.”

An icy bead of sweat snaked down Blaise’s spine.
The others.
How many boys had left behind dirty stockings like the ones hanging from the nail by Blaise’s bed? Throgmorton’s threat to Sunni echoed in his head.
You, too, will vanish without trace.

“Where’s he been taken?” Blaise didn’t want to know but had to ask.

“To the country.”

“Country as in forests and mountains?”

“Yes. Though I’ve never seen it.” The boy angrily scrubbed a tear off his cheek.

“But why?” Something Jeremiah had said passed through Blaise’s head.
Boys incompetent at learning are taken back from whence they came.
Will had not been incompetent. He was making copies as well as any other boy. “Did Will come from the country?”

“No, he came from Spitalfields parish, here in London.”

“I can’t believe Jeremiah Starling would send him away.”

No one answered this at first.

“Mr. Starling don’t send boys away,” Toby muttered. He didn’t have to say who did.

“Will’s a good artist,” said Blaise, his blood rising. “He shouldn’t have had to go.”

“No, he shouldn’t have.” Toby’s face twisted. “And he wouldn’t have, if it had not been for Jack Sunniver.”

The diffused candlelight emphasised the hollow shadows in the boys’ faces, hardening their features.

“She . . . Sunniver kept asking questions,” said Robert. “And Will answered.”

Gus and Samuel nodded in agreement.

“So? You were all talking! I asked you questions, too, before that.” It was all Blaise could do to avoid looking at Jacob and risk giving anything away about their conversation.

Robert’s voice dropped to the barest whisper. “But because of Sunniver, she overheard Will say that Mr. Throgmorton takes our work away through the door.”

“She?” repeated Blaise, confused. “Sunni heard Will —”

“I do not mean your friend,” whispered Robert, eyes riveted on the door.

Blaise flinched when he realized who Robert did mean.

Livia.

Sunni lay awake, listening to the sound of Mary’s even breathing — and the scratching sound coming from under her bed. Cockroach, mouse, rat? Her neck was stiff from lying so still in her muslin binding — and from the bruising Throgmorton had given her when he “guided” her back down to this dank room.

When he’d returned from hauling Blaise upstairs, he’d said, “You will no longer speak to Blaise. Not even to ask him to pass you salt at meals. If you do, I shall lock you in your bedchamber until you are removed from this house.”

Throgmorton had gone on, his face a mask of mildness. “If Blaise cares for you, he will tell me everything. If that is not enough, perhaps Livia can convince him.” He had smiled at her. “You may have noticed that Blaise is susceptible to the persuasive charms of my daughter. Fifteen-year-old boys fall very hard into love.”

Sunni had winced inside but had held herself as still as she could.

Throgmorton had moved to her side and taken the nape of her neck with one hand. Like a cat with a helpless kitten, he had pulled her up from sitting and steered her down the stairs, pushing her into her room and locking the door.

Mary hadn’t stirred, even when Sunni had tripped over something and fallen against the wall. She’d felt around for her candle and managed to light it, before rolling onto the rickety bed, fully clothed. The nightshirt she had been given smelled even worse than her shirt and breeches.

The scratching under her cot started up again, and something small and ratlike darted across the flagstones and out of the light. Sunni leaped across the room and huddled against the locked door.

“What are you doing?” Mary stared at her sideways from under a floppy nightcap.

“Something was scratching under my bed. A mouse,” Sunni said gruffly.

Mary rolled over toward the wall and sighed. “Is that all? I would never sleep if I worried about all them creatures living here.” Her voice trailed off into steady breathing again.

Sunni lay back down on the bed, her insides churning.
Would Throgmorton really get rid of me? Who was the vanished boy whose clothes Blaise was now wearing?

She heard a low rolling sound from somewhere outside the house and footsteps in the hall above. Her sharp ears caught the sound of the main door opening and a vague murmur of voices. A herd of feet ascended the stairs and went out of earshot.

When the herd returned, it was anything but quiet. A party of men seemed to half stagger along the floorboards, grunting to one another. The main door was locked behind them, and the rolling sound eventually moved away.

It no longer surprised Sunni that this house was active around the clock. Even the vermin didn’t sleep. When the scratching began again, she held the pillow tight, grappling with deeper worries.

At dawn, the boys filed into the kitchen and ate gruel made from water and oatmeal. Blaise, who hated oatmeal, gobbled down two bowls of it and three cups of weak tea fortified with sugar.

No one spoke. Gus, Samuel, Robert, and Jacob barely ate, and Toby did not even come downstairs. He had insisted on staying to make Will’s bed and tidy his clothes away into the trunk underneath it.

There was no sign of Sunni.

Mistress Biggins called Blaise back into the kitchen as he shuffled toward the stairs. She handed him a broomstick and said, “At last we have a tall boy in the workshop. Climb the stairs and get rid of all the cobwebs you see in high places. I shall take a tumble if I try to do it myself, and Mary is useless.” She tied a bonnet onto her head, took a basket in hand, and left him to go to market.

Blaise walked past Sunni’s room, his head bent under the low ceiling, and tried opening the door. It was locked. An irritated voice came from the other side.

“About time,” Sunni said. “Why do I have to wait till all the others have finished eating?”

“Sunni, it’s me.”

“Blaise! Don’t let Throgmorton see you trying to talk to me. He’s warned you, too, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah. But we’ve got to make a plan. Now.”

“Go on,” she said.

“If we don’t figure a way out soon, he’ll get rid of you. I mean it.”

“You’re not going to tell him anything about Corvo?”

“No, but I’m not going to let anything happen to you, either.” Blaise clenched his fist against the door. “I’ll try to buy us some time, but we’ll have to work fast to find another way out of this. We’ve got to try to get help from anybody we can, starting with the servants.”

“What if they refuse?”

“Then we might have to run away.”

“But the painted door is the only way home, and it’s here!”

“I know.” He paused for a moment. “Don’t ask the boys any more questions. Something horrendous happened last night —”

The floorboards creaked above his head.

“I gotta go.” Blaise scurried up to the ground floor and ran straight into Fleet and Sleek.

“Are you off for a ride on that broomstick?” asked Fleet, and Sleek snorted into his hand.

“I’m clearing cobwebs for Mistress Biggins.”

“Are you, now?” Fleet stood about two inches taller than Blaise and made a point of looking down his long nose at him.

Sleek snorted again and pointed toward the steps down to the kitchen. “Breakfast.”

“Momentarily, Sleek,” answered Fleet. “I’m rather curious about you, young sir. Which parish is
you
from?”

Blaise leaned on the broomstick. “I’ll tell you if you answer a question from me.”

“I admire your approach. It depends upon the question.”

“Do you know why three men would carry a sack out of this house in the middle of the night and take it away on a cart?”

“Does we know anything about a sack, Sleek?”

“Nay,” said Sleek, clamping a pipe between his teeth.

“Could be anything inside a sack,” said Fleet. “Laundry . . . rubbish . . . anything.”

Blaise straightened himself up. “What if there was something alive in the sack?” he asked. “The boy called Will disappeared at the same time.”

Fleet frowned. “I do not know him. ’Tis nothing to do with us.”

“I’m not saying it is. I just want to know where they would take a boy — and why,” hissed Blaise.

Sleek chewed on his unlit pipe and nonchalantly strolled up to the parlor door, giving it a soft rap. When no one answered, he opened the door and checked inside. Without a word, he tiptoed to Throgmorton’s study door and did the same. After a further swift dance along the hall, glancing at staircases up and down, Sleek nodded to Fleet.

“Well, ’tis only a
guess,
but it could be the sack-’em up men took him down to Smithfield Market,” said Fleet in a hushed voice, still looking round. “’Tis convenient for Saint Bart’s Hospital.”

“What do you mean?”

Fleet leaned close to Blaise’s ear. “There’s various drinking establishments in Smithfield where a healthy boy might be sold. To anatomists. You get my meaning?”

Blaise’s mouth hung open. “I’m not sure . . .”

“Saint Bart’s surgeons,” Fleet said breathily. “The anatomists. They needs cadavers for experiments. For cutting open to see inside.”

Pure horror hit Blaise as if an icy dissection blade had been dragged across his own chest.

All he could utter was “But Will’s not dead.”

“Yet,” said Sleek mournfully.

Blaise sagged and Fleet grabbed hold of his arm to prop him up. “The other boys said he’d been sent to the country.”

“Hear that, Sleekie? The
country
— that’s a good one,” said Fleet. “You listen, young sir. Questions get answers, and answers ain’t always what we wish them to be. But we carries on, aiming for the top of the stinking heap, and takes a lesson from the unlucky ones who fall by the wayside.”

“Aye,” agreed Sleek, one ear cocked for footsteps.

“Will wasn’t
unlucky,
” said Blaise. “He just told us a bit of information, and now —”

“There’s the lesson. Say nothing. Watch and listen.”

Blaise took hold of Fleet’s free arm. “You’ve got to help us go back where we belong. We’re trapped here against our will.”

Fleet peeled Blaise’s hand from his sleeve. “That is a rather enormous request. Our employer would not take kindly to it at all.”

“You’re right. Forget I even asked you.”

“Worry not. We keep secrets. ’Tis our stock in trade.” Fleet gazed up at the ceiling. “Spiders has been busy in the nooks and crannies. Best get on to them now.”

When Sunni was finally released from her locked bedroom, she quickly ate breakfast and climbed upstairs to the top floor. Morning sunlight poured into the Academy of Wonders, but the boys, who had already started work, seemed to be toiling under a dark cloud. At first Sunni could not make out what had changed from the night before, and when she saw the empty table and easel, confusion rolled over her. Who was missing?

She looked around the room and took an inventory of the boys. Will, the boy with bright hazel eyes, was not there. Not sure what to make of this, she moved to her place beside Blaise.

Jeremiah strode into the workshop, puffing from a swift climb up the stairs. His skin was gray and covered with stubble.

“Sunniver,” he said briskly, pointing at Will’s table. “That is where you will work from now on.”

It was as far away from Blaise as could be.
Throgmorton’s idea,
she thought.

“Where’s Will?” Sunni asked. Blaise gave her a warning glance and went back to his drawing.