Eat the Poor

IX

I was good at keeping secrets.

My mother thought I told her everything, but I'd been keeping things from her for as long as I could remember.

Like how, when I was six, Westley dragged me behind the chicken coop and held my face down in the dirt until I passed out. That's what I got, he'd said, because I dropped one of the eggs.

And like how I knew Gale used to go down to the water with the blacksmith's daughter, and one day her stomach started swelling and I told everyone that Gale and I had been fishing all those summer days.

The lie came easy, but I suppose any lie would when the blacksmith was out to kill your brother.

I kept other secrets, too. Like how when I was nine, a man in London came up to the boys playing marbles in the dirt and touched himself in front of us. Like how the next week, when he did it again, I didn't run away but stayed there and watched him.

Like how, after three years of watching, I let another man give me a coin to touch his prick in an alley. Like how I cried the whole walk home because I knew I'd done something terrible but I didn't understand what exactly.

I kept all that from her.

I couldn't bear to see the look on her face if she knew who her son really was.

And now, I had a bigger secret to keep.

Now I wasn't just a disappointment, a scrawny beggar, a whore-

I was a murderer.

I didn't sleep that night after I killed the butcher. I stayed in my cot when the others rose for breakfast. Geoff gripped my elbow and hauled me to my feet.

"Mack fires the ones too sick to work," he told me. "You aren't sick, are you?"

"Just tired," I said meekly.

He laughed. "You'll get used to it."

After the tubs were washed Geoff and I went out to the field where the guards had died and sat in the grass. He'd brought a few pieces of parchment with him, which he laid out on the grass and then dug through his pockets for an inkwell.

There were people here this time - a young man and woman eating on a blanket - but they paid us no mind.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Writing," he answered without looking up. "This is the perfect place for writing."

"Writing what?"

"Just things." He fluffed the feather of his quill and dipped it into the inkwell.

I tried to look over his shoulder but he turned away. "Is it a love letter?" I teased.

"I write for passion. I write what needs saying."

"Interesting," I mused. "I thought your only hobbies were causing trouble and slitting throats."

In a flash he clutched my arm. "Keep your voice down," he hissed. "Someone was killed last night and I would prefer not to be under suspicion."

My breakfast almost reappeared.

"Killed?" I asked, hoping I sounded surprised.

"Yes. Mr Fletcher was found stabbed outside the slaughterhouse. I've worked with the man for months. If anyone overheard us I might become a prime suspect."

Fletcher. So that was his name. I recalled how he wouldn't tell me. "How tragic," I muttered.

"Whoever done it must've caught him taking a leak," he told me. "Didn't even have the decency to let the fellow button his trousers."