A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Seventeen: The Shame Academy

Camden Town, London, 1860:

It had always been about revenge, ever since he was eight years old. But back then, he'd been a lot more cheerful about it.

The night when he'd first become Jack – his first memory of being the man he would later grow into – had been that night at the church of St. Michael's, when the dark-haired girl at the altar had clasped him to her in a misguided attempt to spare him the pain of seeing his father being shot.

God knew what he had been before that. There hadn't really been time to be anything, in between the beatings and the endless string of youthful misdemeanours. He had fought and played and got in trouble and tried to shield himself from William's fists, but that had all been automatic, never really the result of conscious thought.

His first conscious thought – or, anyway, his first thought as Jack Cade – was 'I want this'.

The echoes of the gunshot that had killed his father were still reverberating round the church. The cat-faced man was somewhere behind him, maybe shaking William's dead body off his feet. And yet he couldn't stop looking at the girl with the black hair. There was something different here, something he'd never seen before – something more compelling than any murder, even William's.

He couldn't quite put his finger on what she represented. He knew he had never encountered it before, and yet he still seemed to half-remember it, as if it was encoded in his skin. 

God, what was it? Innocence? Tenderness? A human connection? And why did he want it so badly? What was it good for?

There was a sound behind them – either William's body falling to the floor, or the cat-faced man kicking it – and suddenly the spell was broken. The girl grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet, to the audible click of the cat-faced man reloading his revolver.

For a moment, Jack looked behind him, and his eyes wandered to the heap of fabric on the floor at the man's feet, but the girl pulled him away before he could make much sense of it.

"I told you not to look," she hissed, almost yanking his arm off in her haste to drag him across the church.

They were heading for the altar. There was a doorway in the shadows behind it, and for a moment, he thought they were going to run through it together. But she pushed him through and slammed the door shut behind him. Jack knocked into the opposite wall and fell to the floor.

He staggered to his feet and reached for the door handle automatically, as though it was something that had fallen by accident into his path. He wasn't aware of being scared. If there was a dominant feeling at all, it was annoyance, because he had been looking at that pretty face – he had been about to realize something important – and the stupid door had come between them.

He managed to get it open a few inches, but then something was slammed against it from the other side, so suddenly that Jack was knocked to the floor again.

He could hear the voice of the cat-faced man on the other side, ordering the girl out of the way.

"What do you think I'm doing? He's a male – he'll grow up – he'll come looking for you. You don't understand what you do to people."

There was a rustling of fabric, and the door shuddered again, as though a body had been thrown against it. Jack could see their shadows moving in the crack underneath the door, but he couldn't make any sense of it. The man was trying to push her out of the way, maybe, but she kept throwing herself back? Or maybe he'd thrown her against the door in frustration? Maybe she'd hit her head?

But he could still hear her voice. She was babbling by this point. He was only a child, she said, and a child couldn't be in love with her, could it?

Hah.