Cinderhouse swallowed hard. He felt his own tears gathering behind his eyes. He cleared his throat and stared at the bars over Fenn’s window.
“But that came much later. I remember when I was still a boy myself and I left that cell after a month, the light stung my eyes and the air burned my skin, but I grew used to it. It was easier then. Children can grow accustomed to anything over time.”
He nodded at the boy, hoping he understood. A boy will adapt and forget what came before. Children were made to do that.
“I never stole again. And I obeyed my father. I learned his trade from him and I became a tailor and took over his business and made it so much more successful than he ever did. And when he was dying, dying at my feet, he reached out to me and he told me that I was a good boy. He knew that a boy takes his father’s place. He knew that what I had to do to him was the right thing.”
Cinderhouse thought that perhaps he ought not to have told the boy this last part of his story. Perhaps this wasn’t a lesson he wanted the boy to learn yet.
“I’m going to untie you so you can eat. If I do that, will you try to run again?”
Fenn shook his head.
“Say it,” Cinderhouse said.
“No, sir. I won’t run.”
“Good. Good lad. We can’t have you starving to death. And we can afford fruit. I have fruit downstairs for you. No plums, but a fresh ripe apple for you. Things are different now.”
The tailor realized he had muddled his own childhood with that of the boy in the bed. Fenn hadn’t stolen the plums. He frowned and reached out to ruffle the boy’s damp hair.
“Anyhow, you’ll need to eat.”
“Please don’t hit me.”
“What, you mean this?” Cinderhouse chuckled and lifted the crop from his lap. He sat back and regarded his son. “I was only telling you a story about this. I wouldn’t hit you. I’m not like my father. I’m completely unlike him.”
He leaned forward again so that his son would see the intent in his eyes and understand that the time for play had passed.
“But if you run from me again, I will use this, and the skin will fall from your back in sheets and you will stand until your feet swell and throb with pain, and you will try to sit and there will be nothing to lean against without your back feeling as if it’s aflame, and you will try to lie down and scream in agony and leap to your feet again and the torture will be unbearable.”
Fenn’s eyes were huge with fear.
“Do you understand me, son?”
The boy nodded.
“We’ll have no more of this foolishness, then, will we?”
Fenn shook his head.
“We’ll have no more running away from your dear papa, will we?”
Fenn shook his head again and swallowed hard. “No,” he said.
“No, what?”
“No, Papa.”
“That’s good. That’s a good boy.”
Cinderhouse felt his chest ache with sudden pride and love for this boy who had come back to live with him again.
“I forgive you, son,” he said.
And he began to untie the ropes so that he could embrace the boy at last.
68
University College Hospital squatted at the corner of Gower Street and Euston Road in Bloomsbury. It was an unexceptional brick and stone building surrounded by an iron fence. The hospital had been built in 1834 and had expanded twice since then, but it was still too cramped to accommodate the hundreds of patients who passed through its doors every day.
Inside it was a madhouse, with great open wards, each holding the maximum number of beds possible in long starched rows along each wall. Nurses, doctors, and white-clad assistants glided from bed to bed over the blanched and bloodstained floor.
Penelope Shaw was stationed at the open door to one of the wards when Blacker, Day, and Hammersmith arrived. She had clearly been crying, her eyes and mouth blotched and puffy, but her hair was up in a perfect swirl, her posture straight and elegant in a bright red dress. A rose standing tall among thistledown.
“Oh, Mr Hammersmith. Thank God you came. I was hoping it would be you.”
“Mrs Shaw,” Hammersmith said.
Blacker gave Hammersmith a suspicious glare, but Day grabbed Blacker by the elbow and steered him past Penelope Shaw before he could speak. Hammersmith held up a finger, asking Day for one moment alone with the victim’s wife. Day nodded and disappeared into the chaos of the ward with Blacker in tow.
“It wasn’t my choice,” Penelope said. “I mean, what I did to you. He made me do it. You do believe me, don’t you?”
“It hardly matters now, does it?”
“Will you arrest him?”
“From what I’ve heard, I doubt he’s healthy enough for me to bother.”
“What about me? Will you arrest me?”
“I haven’t made up my mind. I have more important things to worry about.”
“I’ll understand if you have to arrest me.”
“What is it that you want, Mrs Shaw?”
“I want…”
“Go on.”
“I want to be free of him.”
“Did you do this? Is he here because of something you did to him?”
Her eyes widened and she put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, no. No. How could you even ask me that? You haven’t seen him, haven’t seen what was done to him. I could never. Not even to him.”
“You have reason to want him injured or dead. You’ve just told me as much.”
“Not like that. I only hoped … I hoped that you might act against him.”
“You’ve made a mess of things, Mrs Shaw. I’ve only met your husband once. Almost everything I know about him has come from you. Right now, I have more reason to act against you than against him.”
“I know. And I don’t blame you for feeling that way. But he’s … He planned to follow you. He may even have been following you when this happened to him. He meant to do you harm.”
“What kind of harm?”
“I don’t know. He wanted to be able to stop you. You wouldn’t go away, even after he visited your commissioner.”
She looked down at her hands. Hammersmith took a step back from her and watched the nurses bustling to and fro at the end of the hall.
“I still don’t understand why he didn’t simply report the dead child. I wouldn’t even know who he was if he’d done the right thing in the first place.”
“He didn’t want it to reflect upon his reputation. Why is that so hard to understand? You threatened to cause a scandal that would have ruined his practice.”
“I never cared about him. It’s the chimney sweep I want. He’s the one who left the boy’s body there. I want to see justice done. I don’t care about scandals and reputations and all this ridiculous social claptrap.”
“Do you care about me?”
Hammersmith took a step back. He looked away toward the open door of the critical ward.
“I … I need to see your husband now,” he said. “Wait here.”
He started to pass her, then stopped and spoke without turning around, without looking at her.
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and he’ll die.”
69
Dr Charles Shaw lay on his back with pillows under his shoulders and neck. Between this arrangement of pillows there was a plank that held a shallow metal tray, there to catch the blood and pus that drained from his throat. Heavy black stitches spiderwebbed across his neck, but fluid seeped through and ran down both sides under his ears, dripping into the pan. A copper tube snaked out through a small gap in the stitches, and Day could hear air being drawn through it as Shaw’s chest rose and fell.