He remembered the day clearly. The weather had been cold and windy, properly dreich, and still the mountain slopes had glowed with the fiery red colors of mid-autumn. He had just been brawling with a lad who had tried to settle some disagreement by calling him a bastard; hence the most vicious punches had been thrown until someone had separated them—a regular occurrence in that community, where they had had to settle after the mine accident. The men had arrived on mud-splattered horses and had sneered down at him from their saddles while his stepfather had held him before them by the scruff of his neck. His clothes had been dirty and his nose had still been clotted with blood. “You’re certain that’s him?” one of them had asked, and the other one had laughed.
“Of course. Same face as his old man and same temper, too, by the looks of it.”
He had been outraged to learn that he took after a man he had never met but loathed all the same. Meanwhile, his stepfather wasn’t objecting to him being taken but to him not getting adequate compensation. “Look at him,” he had said to the men in his nasal voice, “look how strong he is for his age. Can’t do without his wages.”
When the haggling had been done, Lucian had resisted. He had indeed been strong for his age, and he had fought like a cornered animal, inflicting bruises and kicking at soft parts with good aim until his grandmother had emerged from the cottage and trudged through the mud to reach him. She had taken him back to the kitchen and broken his defenses in ways violence never could. There was nothing for him here, she had said. Everyone in the new place knew he was a bastard and would never let him forget it. Besides, the miners died young, and in life they had nothing but the mine and their pride. His mother had tried, but being a woman had betrayed her—but he, he had a chance; if he went to London and studied, he could have better things. He had fallen to the floor and put his head on her knee and sobbed, not wanting to leave her. Then you come back for me, she had told him and stroked his hair, you come back a fine man. She had given him his grandfather’s sgian dubh and the love spoon he was to gift Harriet many years later, and sent him on his way.
He became aware of Harriet’s probing gaze and of the long pause he had allowed to stretch between them. “They came for me,” he repeated. “And I went with them.”
“I see,” she said. “But if you had a home in Kensington, why would you live … on the streets?” She whispered this, as though it were literally an unspeakable horror.
“Ah well,” he said. “The school’s headmaster wasn’t a good man.”
After barely a week of classes, the rotter had tried to put his hand between Lucian’s legs after a caning, and Lucian—prepared by the hints of the other boys—had grabbed the heavy paperweight off the desk and put it to the man’s head. He had never seen so much blood pouring out of a human, and after tiptoeing to the dorm to snatch his belongings, he had run all the way to the docklands in East London, uncertain whether he had committed homicide. Aoife had found him a few days later, starved and hiding in a corner. It was the day he had named himself Luke Blackstone and Lucian Stewart had joined the mass of missing children.
“The street didn’t suit me, either,” he said.
“Unsurprisingly, I would think,” Harriet said faintly.
“There’s hierarchies, and if you want shelter, people force you to join this group or that,” he explained. “Life is cheap there, and someone always has trouble with someone else and makes you stand with them even if you’re not interested in the trouble. Half the time, it’s stupid trouble.” The same held for more elevated underworld activities, which was why he had withdrawn from those, too, many years later, one by one while he still could without too great a cost. “I used to be good at working with wood,” he told Harriet, “doing carvings and such, so when I saw the sign in the antiques shop window, I tidied myself up and applied.”
He had risked the jail by stealing a pristine shirt and cravat off a washing line to present himself to Mr. Graham, the antiques dealer and owner of the shop. Sometimes Lucian wondered what his old mentor would say were he alive to learn that his bit of trust in the scruffy boy had been a cornerstone of said boy’s ascent to the top of London …
“Since this seems to be the hour of truth,” Harriet said, “who was the woman in the drawing room?”
Her lips were pale, but there was unexpected steel in her gaze.
“Aoife Byrne,” he said easily, thinking, Of all the things she could have asked. “We met on the street. She set my nose when it was cracked. And she saved my hide several times while we were both homeless urchins.” After which she had soon become a ringleader in the smuggling operations at London Port, but that wasn’t for Harriet to know.