Standing there, I felt grown-up and learned, even as I felt the hotness in my cheeks again. I found myself wondering if the Dawson girls would have considered me rather fine in my new suit, quite the gentleman. I’d thought of them often. I’d catch sight of them from the window sometimes, running along their garden or being shepherded into carriages at the front of the mansions. I fancied I saw one of them steal a glance up at me once, but if she saw me, there were no smiles or waves that time, just a shadow of that same look worn by the nursemaid, as though disapproval of me was being handed down, like arcane knowledge.
So we had the Dawsons on one side; those elusive, pigtailed, skipping Dawsons, while on the other side were the Barretts. They were a family of eight children, boys and girls, although again I rarely saw them; as with the Dawsons, my encounters were restricted to the sight of them getting into carriages, or seeing them at a distance in the fields. Then, one day shortly before my eighth birthday, I was in the garden, strolling along the perimeter and dragging a stick along the crumbling red brick of the high garden wall. Occasionally I’d stop to overturn stones with a stick and inspect whatever insects scuttled from beneath—wood lice, millipedes, worms that wriggled as though stretching out their long bodies—when I came upon the door that led on to a passage between our home and the Barretts’.
The heavy gate was padlocked with a huge, rusting chunk of metal that looked as if it hadn’t been opened for years, and I stared at it for a while, weighing the lock in my palm, when I heard a whispered, urgent, boyish voice.
“Say, you. Is it true what they say about your father?”
It came from the other side of the gate although it took me a moment or so to place it—a moment in which I stood shocked and almost rigid with fear. Next, I almost jumped out of my skin when I saw through a hole in the door an unblinking eye that was watching me. Again came the question.
“Come on, they’ll be beckoning me in any minute. Is it true what they say about your father?”
Calming, I bent to bring my eye level with the hole in the door. “Who is this?” I asked.
“It’s me, Tom, who lives next door.”
I knew that Tom was the youngest of their brood, about my age. I’d heard his name being called.
“Who are you?” he said. “I mean, what’s your name?”
“Haytham,” I replied, and I wondered if Tom was my new friend. He had a friendly-looking eyeball, at least.
“That’s a strange sort of name.”
“It’s Arabic. It means ‘young eagle.’”
“Well, that makes sense.”
“How do you mean, ‘makes sense’?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It just does somehow. And there’s only you, is there?”
“And my sister,” I retorted. “And Mother and Father.”
“Pretty small sort of family.”
I nodded.
“Look,” he pressed. “Is it true or not? Is your father what they say he is? And don’t even think about lying. I can see your eyes, you know. I’ll be able to tell if you’re lying straight away.”
“I won’t lie. I don’t even know what ‘they’ say he is, or even who ‘they’ are.”
At the same time I was getting an odd and not altogether pleasant feeling: that somewhere there existed an idea of what constituted “normal,” and that we, the Kenway family, were not included in it.
Perhaps the owner of the eyeball heard something in my tone, because he hastened to add, “I’m sorry—I’m sorry if I said something out of turn. I was just interested, that’s all. You see, there is a rumour, and it’s awfully exciting if it’s true . . .”
“What rumour?”
“You’ll think it’s silly.”
Feeling brave, I drew close to the hole and looked at him, eyeball to eyeball, saying, “What do you mean? What do people say about Father?”
He blinked. “They say he used to be a—”
Suddenly there was a noise from behind him, and I heard an angry male voice call his name: “Thomas!”
The shock sent him backwards. “Oh, bother,” he whispered quickly. “I’ve got to go, I’m being called. See you around, I hope?”
And with that he was gone and I was left wondering what he meant. What rumour? What were people saying about us, our small family?
At the same time I remembered that I had better get a move on. It was nearly midday—and time for my weapons training.
7 DECEMBER 1735
i
I feel invisible, like I’m stuck in a limbo between the past and the future. Around me the grown-ups hold tense conversations. Their faces are drawn and the ladies weep. Fires are kept lit, of course, but the house is empty apart from the few of us and what possessions we saved from the burnt-out mansion, and it feels permanently cold. Outside, snow has started to fall, while indoors is a sorrow that chills the very bones.
With little else for me to do but write my journal, I had hoped to get up to date with the story of my life so far, but it seems there’s more to say than I’d first thought, and of course there have been other important matters to attend to. Funerals. Edith today.
“Are you sure, Master Haytham?” Betty had asked earlier, with her forehead creased in concern, her eyes tired. For years—as long as I could remember—she had assisted Edith. She was as bereaved as I was.
“Yes,” I said, dressed as ever in my suit and, for today, a black tie. Edith had been alone in the world, so it was the surviving Kenways and staff who gathered for a funeral feast below stairs, for ham and ale and cake. When that was over, the men from the funeral company, who were already quite drunk, loaded her body into the hearse for taking to the chapel. Behind it we took our seats in mourning carriages. We only needed two of them. When it was over I retired to my room, to continue with my story . . .
ii
A couple of days after I’d spoken to Tom Barrett’s eyeball, what he’d said was still playing on my mind. So one morning when Jenny and I were both alone in the drawing room together, I decided to ask her about it.
Jenny. I was nearly eight and she was twenty-one, and we had as much in common as I did with the man who delivered the coal. Less, probably, if I thought about it, because at least the man who delivered the coal and I both liked to laugh, whereas I’d rarely seen Jenny smile, let alone laugh.
She has black hair that shines, and her eyes are dark and . . . well, “sleepy” is what I’d say although I’d heard them described as “brooding,” and at least one admirer went so far as to say she had a “smoky stare,” whatever that is. Jenny’s looks were a popular topic of conversation. She is a great beauty, or so I’m often told.