half-blind?”
“Oh, his eyes were all torn up. The birds, you know.”
“The birds?”
“That’s right. My hawks.” And then they turned the corner and there around a large canopy-shaded aviary the pack of boys were waiting. Three of the biggest ones had hooded brown-and-white birds of prey perched on their leather gloves and forearm-guards.
Berry made a sound as if she’d taken a blow to the stomach. Her knees buckled, but the gentlemanly Count shoved her forward with sadistic relish.
“You are one bastard,” Matthew said to Chapel, his teeth gritted so hard they were about to break. Chapel shrugged, as if this were a compliment.
“Young men!” Lawrence Evans had picked up a basket and was passing it around. “Arm yourselves, please. Watch the blades, we don’t want any accidents.”
The boys, who Matthew noted had removed their colored badges so all were equal in this endeavor, were reaching in and coming up with knives. There was a disturbing variety of blades: short, long, hooked up or down, wide, thin, stubby, elegantly evil. The boys walked around sticking and stabbing the air, some delivering a brutal twist, some slashing as if trying to destroy the last vestiges of childhood before they stepped across the threshold of no return.
They all appeared to have done this before, though several-including the light-fingered Silas-looked just a bit green around the gills. But they too hacked and sliced the air with abandon.
“Your version of the professor’s gauntlet,” Matthew said to Chapel; or more correctly, heard himself say, as his face and mouth seemed numbed by frost.
“Correct. My version, utilizing a long-cherished hobby. Mr. Greathouse has been schooling you well. He’ll be out here soon enough himself, you can mark that.” He waited for Dahlgren to shove Berry into earshot, though she still looked too dazed to comprehend their fate. “Mr. Edgar? Where’s Mr. Edgar?”
“Here, sir,” said a large, stocky young man with close-cropped dark brown hair. He came forward out of the building’s shadow cradling a small lamb in the crook of a meaty arm, and in the other hand a wooden bucket that held of all things a paintbrush. Edgar had a slight limp and a pock-marked face, his eyes also dark brown and obviously nervous for he was blinking rapidly. When he reached Chapel, he glanced up and said almost shyly, “Hello, Matthew.”
Matthew was struck dumb for a few seconds. Then his mouth moved and he said, “Hello, Jerrod.”
“I heard you might be coming out. How’ve you been?”
“Fine, thank you. And you?”
“I’m all right.” Jerrod Edgar nodded. His dull eyes did not show the most intelligence in the world, but Matthew had known him as a decent fellow in 1694, when Matthew was fifteen and Jerrod twelve. Jerrod had unfortunately been the target of some of Ausley’s most frequent and intense attentions, and Matthew had watched him withdraw into himself and pull all his shame and anger into the shell with him. Then Jerrod had stolen a burning-glass that Ausley lit his pipe with during one of the punishment sessions, and afterward he was always setting fire to either leaves or donated prayer book pages or grasshoppers or his own plucked-out hair. When another boy had tried to steal it, the boy had left the orphanage for the King Street hospital folded up in a cart and obviously died there, as he’d never returned. “I guess I’m doin’ all right,” Jerrod repeated, as he gave the lamb to Simon Chapel.
“May I ask what you’re doing here?”
“I don’t know. Just playin’ with fire, mostly. It’s what I like.”
“Knife, please,” Chapel said, to no one in particular.
Matthew saw that the other boys were settling down. They had stopped swinging their blades. Their muscles were warmed up, and they were saving their energy. Matthew looked back into Jerrod’s disturbed but fathomless eyes. “Jerrod?” he said quietly.
“Yes, Matthew?”
“Are you going to kill me?”
Evans had brought a hooked knife to his master. Matthew realized it was the exact kind of slaughterhouse implement Kirby had used so well. Chapel stroked the lamb a few times and said, “There, there,” to its pitiful call for its mother. Then he drew the head up and back with one hand while the blade in the other sliced the white throat from ear to ear. The bright red blood burst out and flooded into the bucket that Evans had taken from Jerrod and now held steady beneath the torrent.
“Yes, Matthew,” said Jerrod. “I suppose I am.”
“You don’t have to,” Matthew told him.
Jerrod cocked his head, listening to the blood spilling into the bucket. The three hawks began to shiver with excitement and clench their claws on the leather gloves, scoring deep grooves even deeper. “I do,” Jerrod answered. “If I want to stay, I mean. They’re good to me here, Matthew. I’m somebody.”
“You always were somebody.”
“Naw.” Jerrod’s mouth smiled, but his eyes did not. “I was never nobody, out there.”
Then he looked at Matthew a moment longer, as the convulsing lamb emptied and the bucket filled up and the hawks stirred and made little eerie skreeling noises, and finally Jerrod went over to the basket on the ground to get himself a knife.
Matthew started to go over to stand beside Berry, to say-exactly what, pray tell?-something to her to get her mind focused, but suddenly Evans grasped his upper arm and a bloody paintbrush that smelled of old Dutch copper duits was being liberally applied to his face: forehead, cheeks, around the eyes, circling the mouth, down the chin, and done.
One of the hawks, the largest of the birds and perhaps the one that had torn the cardinal to shreds over Matthew’s head in the garden that day, twitched its hooded head back and forth and made a soft, high keening noise.
“They’re trained to go for the color,” Chapel explained, in all earnest seriousness. “Many hundreds of blood- soaked field mice and hares have gallantly given their lives. They smell the odor too, of course, which helps them home onto you, but their eyesight is simply magnificent.” He had deposited the lamb’s carcass into a black box with a lid on it that he now closed, so as not to give the birds a confusing signal. Lawrence Evans walked over, carrying the gore-bucket to paint Berry’s face with the brush. She looked at him as if he were mad, tried to kick him and then strike his head with her own, but had to relent when again Count Dahlgren seized her hair, shoved a fist against her spine, and threatened to break her back before the game even began.
“You’ll be given a running start.” Chapel walked a few paces away to a horse trough to wash his hands. The boys were striding back and forth, also eager to hunt. No one was laughing and whenever someone spoke the voice was tight and clipped. “To the first row of vines,” Chapel continued, motioning toward the sunny field some seventy yards away. “Then I’ll signal the handlers to release their birds. It’ll take them a few seconds to reach you. They’ll see your face as just another bloody little animal, though perhaps a more difficult challenge. They seem to particularly like the eyes. At my discretion, I’ll then send the boys. Everyone gets some exercise, everyone gets some experience. Everyone forges a bond to his brother. Do you see?”
Matthew was watching Berry shudder as the brush left her face bloodied in the same pattern as his own. The rings around the eyes were the worst. Billy Hodges had leaped to his death not only to escape the blades, but to escape the beaks and claws. “If we’re going to die anyway, why should we run?”
“Well, there’s no way you can get off the estate because of the wall all around, that’s true, but in several instances we’ve had young men who’ve fled from the vineyard into the woods and hidden there for a day or so. Sometimes the birds do get tired and distracted and they turn away. We have had to go into the woods on hunting expeditions. Very bothersome, but again it’s experience. Now: are you sure you want to stand there and die without resistance? Of course I would recommend that you not try to get into the woods, as it would simply prolong your inevitable deaths, but if you’re interested in perhaps spending a last night communing with your Maker before you go, or hanging on to life as we know it to be, then you will give us a good display, won’t you?”
Matthew looked at the group of young killers. Nineteen had never seemed so many. Had a few ghosts of previous failures slipped in among them, to rectify their failings? Movement at an upper window of one of the buildings caught his attention. Someone had just pulled a curtain aside and was peering out. An indistinct face. One of the instructors, perhaps? Was that their living quarters?
