He didn’t always understand what Mr. Coulton said. It wasn’t just the accent. It was also the man’s meaning. Sometimes it was like the Englishman was talking a different language.
“You don’t much look like a lad what’s killed two men,” Coulton added.
No, he didn’t always understand the man’s meaning. But he understood that.
He looked away. He looked away, in part, because he didn’t know what to say, but mostly because it wasn’t true, he wasn’t a lad who’d killed two men. That was the thing, that’s what he wasn’t telling. Stabbing that deputy in the throat haunted him, it did. He kept seeing it over and over in his mind’s eye, what happened, how fast it was, how it felt. It made him sick. But you didn’t grow up black and alone and unprotected in the Delta and get to keep your hands clean.
He’d fought his first man when he was nine years old and his mama wasn’t even two weeks in the grave. That was to keep the little cloth sack of coins his mama’d pushed into his hands as she lay dying. The man had left him bloodied and walked out of the barn with the coins in his shirt and Charlie had nearly starved after that. He was ten when he left a man pinned under a cartwheel in the rain, taking the man’s coat and a sack of his food and fleeing into the darkness. If that wasn’t killing, it wasn’t far short of it. He’d been hungry then, too, but felt so sick at what he’d done that he couldn’t eat the man’s food and when he went back two days later the man and the cart and all of it were gone.
But under the eyes of God there could be neither dissembling nor withholding and it was true, he had killed before. That was the awful fact of it. It was a boy like him, fourteen years old, a boy he was living with in a ruined warehouse, a boy who’d introduced him to drink. The boy’s name was Isaiah. He had two teeth out in front and a funny eye, but he’d had a quick sense of humor and used to make Charlie laugh. They’d finished a bottle and in the way of kids and drinking they’d got to arguing and then to fighting and Charlie had knocked him backward against a wall where a spike stuck out, some sort of harrower for the old warehouse sacking, and the boy was dead before he even knew what was what. That one broke Charlie. He never touched a bottle again, never would.
Then there came the overseer, yes.
And now the deputy.
He knew the deputy was a bad man and a cruel one and if it wasn’t Charlie he was tormenting it would be some other. He knew if he hadn’t stepped in, the man might have hurt that white lady, the one who’d rescued him, Miss Quicke. Alice. He knew this and still he felt sick at what he’d done. Taking a life was just about as dire a thing as any thing there was.
But he couldn’t talk about this to Mr. Coulton, to anyone. He kept what he felt close to his chest and he didn’t dwell on it. That was the way to get by. And so, when they arrived at St Pancras Station, in a roar of steam and smoke, Charlie stepped down and looked all around in amazement. He was tall enough to see over the hats of the crowds. The air was black with soot; the ceiling of steel and glass soared high above. He followed Mr. Coulton close through the bodies, squinting, choking, past porters in slouch caps with trunks stacked high on trolleys, past men in black silk hats, flower girls with boxes on ropes round their necks, past workmen and sweeps and beggars and out into the murky brown darkness of a rain-thick afternoon, the rain falling darkly, at a slant, the cobblestones pooling in the wet and shining blackly up, for the gaslights were already on, and Charlie stared at all of it, at the roar and crush of humanity, as if all the world were coming and going from the cobblestoned square just outside St Pancras Station. As perhaps it was.
Mr. Coulton led him directly to a cabstand on the corner and ushered him up into a two-seat hansom and leaned out to get the driver’s attention. The driver was across the square, at a food cart, clapping his hands for the cold, and he came at a run when he saw Coulton’s wave.
“Twenty-three Nickel Street West, man,” said Coulton, banging his walking stick at the roof. His cheeks were red and pitted in the chill. “Blackfriars. Make it quick, mind.” He grunted, shifted his weight, and the hansom squeaked and shivered. He grinned at Charlie. “Welcome to London, lad. Welcome to the big smoke.”
“The big smoke,” Charlie murmured wonderingly, as they lurched into motion.
The dark city swept past. Rain ran off the hindquarters of the horse in front of them in silver ropes. The hansom jolted and creaked in the busy streets.
Slowly, so slowly, Mississippi, and all its horrors, the swampy heat and the vast sky and the meanness of it all, started to fade and come apart in his mind, like newsprint in the rain.