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

Chapter Eighteen: Henry and Baby Jane

Mostly, Jack remembered being hungry at the orphanage. Breakfast – after two hours of morning prayer – was bread and coffee. On Sundays, you were allowed butter, but this slight advantage was more than made up for by the tedious church services you had to attend on that day. Dinner was boiled rice and a grey sliver of boiled meat. Supper was bread and dripping.

There were dreary lessons to go with the deadening food, and as they began to take hold, he started to decipher his mother's letters.

As it turned out, they weren't even from her. They were replies to letters that she must have written while pregnant with him, so Jack could only get glimpses of her character between the lines. Although her situation was plain enough. The letters were full of sympathy. What they were devoid of was any kind of useful help.

She must have wanted to keep her baby, but not marry William. She needed money, or some kind of employment that she could carry out while her child was sleeping. The letters were full of platitudes like 'we deeply regret your situation', or vague but sickening hints that the situation might be different if something were to happen to the child.

'Please understand,' said one of them, 'that our organization cannot be seen to employ an unmarried mother. An unmarried woman – perhaps one who had recently suffered a bereavement – might be different.'

Some of them even wondered what made her think she was qualified to bring up a child. How was she supposed to instill it with a sense of virtue when she had failed so miserably at upholding her own virtue?

Jack had crumpled up this particular letter and thrown it across the dormitory in disgust. A young child did not want a sense of virtue. It wanted its mother.

But then he very carefully retrieved the letter and smoothed it out, studied the signature and return address. Some Philanthropic Society in Ealing. He would deal with them first, when he was out.

Anyway, it seemed that Elizabeth Barrett had been determined not to be parted from her child. If the only way for them to be together was for her to marry the devil, she would do it. The date on her marriage certificate was three days after the last refusal of help.

It was from reading these letters that Jack acquired his cheerful contempt for the world. In truth, he sympathized with the letter-writers, and didn't really understand where his mother's optimism had come from. But just because he didn't understand it, that didn't mean he didn't long for it. Ever since that dark curtain of hair had fallen across his face, he had known there was goodness in the world. He didn't understand what it was, or how it worked, but he knew he wanted it.

And, at the same time, he had to protect it from people like him, who would – perfectly reasonably – try to take advantage of it.

His next task was to distinguish himself somehow. The way to avenge his mother and find the dark-haired girl was to get out of the orphanage, and the way to get out of the orphanage was to get noticed.

He learned from the letters that Elizabeth Barrett had been a piano-teacher, which gave him some small, shaky idea where to start. There was a piano at the orphanage. It was old and out of tune, and had been crammed into the pantry to save space.

At first, it had seemed like a huge, horrible instrument of torture. Jack had opened up the top and looked in at the tight threads and little hammers, and could only think about how awful it would be to be trapped in there while someone was playing.

Even as an adult, he would still have nightmares about that: strings pressed against his throat, hammers thumping on his shins, and, through it all, the din – the discordant sound of a concerto eating a little boy alive.