“All right,” said the smaller boy. Then he lobbed the food high overhead.
The bully pushed the girl away and craned his head back, intent on catching his prize.
The first stone caught him in the throat. The second thunked against his ear as he sprawled backwards. He was down and crying before the tomato splattered in the dirt.
The smaller boy had excellent aim. He'd ended the fight before it began.
Stephenson expected the thrower to jump the bully, to press the advantage. He'd seen it in the war, the way months of hard living could alloy hunger with fear and anger, making natural the most beastly behavior. But instead the boy turned his back on the bully to check on the girl. The matter, in his mind, was settled.
Not so for the bully. Lying in the dirt, face streaked with tears and snot, he watched the thrower with something shapeless and dark churning in his eyes.
Stephenson had seen this before, too. Rage looked the same in any soul, old or young. He left the window and ran downstairs before his garden became an exhibition hall. The bully had gained his feet when Stephenson opened the door.
One of the children yelled, “Leg it!”
The children swarmed the low brick wall where they'd entered. Some needed a boost to get over it, including the girl. The boy who had felled the bully stayed behind, pushing the stragglers atop the wall.
Seeing this reinforced Stephenson's initial reaction. There was something special about this boy. He was shrewd, with a profound sense of honor, and a vicious fighter, too. With proper tutelage ...
Stephenson called out. “Wait! Not so fast.”
The boy turned. He watched Stephenson approach with an air of bored disinterest. He'd been caught and didn't pretend otherwise.
“What's your name, lad?”
The boy's gaze flickered between Stephenson's eyes and the empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder.
“I'm Stephenson. Captain, in point of fact.” The wind tossed Stephenson's sleeve, waving it like a flag.
The boy considered this. He stuck his chin out, saying, “Raybould Marsh, sir.”
“You're quite a clever lad, aren't you, Master Marsh?”
“That's what my mum says, sir.”
Stephenson didn't bother to ask after the father. Another casualty of Britain's lost generation, he gauged.
“And why aren't you in school right now?”
Many children had abandoned school during the war, and after, to help support families bereft of fathers and older brothers. The boy wasn't working, yet he wasn't exactly a hooligan, either. And he had a home, by the sound of it, which was likely more than some of his cohorts had.
The boy shrugged. His body language said,
“Are you hungry? Getting enough to eat at home?”
The boy shook his head, then nodded.
“What's your mum do?”
“Seamstress.”
“She works hard, I gather.”
The boy nodded again.
“To address your question: Your friends have visited extensive damage upon my plantings, so I'm pressing you into service. Know anything about gardening?”
“No.”
“Might have known not to expect much from my winter garden if you had, eh?”
The boy said nothing.
“Very well, then. Starting tomorrow, you'll get a bob for each day spent replanting. Which you will take home to your hardworking mother.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy sounded glum, but his eyes gleamed.
“We'll have to do something about your attitude toward education, as well.”
“That's what my mum says, sir.”
Stephenson shooed away the ravens picking at the spilled food. They screeched to each other as they rode a cold wind, shadows upon a blackening sky.
Rooks, crows, jackdaws, and ravens scoured the island from south to north on their search for food. And, in the manner of their continental cousins, they were ever-present.
Except for one glade deep in the Midlands, at the heart of the ancestral holdings of the jarls of AEthelred. In some distant epoch, the skin of the world here had peeled back to reveal the great granite bones of the earth, from which spat forth a hot spring: water touched with fire and stone. No ravens had ventured there since before the Norsemen had arrived to cleave the island with their Danelaw.
Time passed. Generations of men came and went, lived and died around the spring. The jarls became earls, then dukes. The Norsemen became Normen, then Britons. They fought Saxons; they fought Saracens; they fought the Kaiser. But the land outlived them all with elemental constancy.
Throughout the centuries, blackbirds shunned the glade and its phantoms. But the great manor downstream of the spring evoked no such reservations. And so they perched on the spires of Bestwood, watching and listening.
“Hell and damnation! Where is that boy?”
Malcolm, the steward of Bestwood, hurried to catch up to the twelfth Duke of Aelred as he banged through the house. Servants fled the stomp of the duke's boots like starlings fleeing a falcon's cry.
The kitchen staff jumped to attention when the duke entered with his majordomo.
“Has William been here?”
Heads shook all around.
“Are you certain? My grandson hasn't been here?”
Mrs. Toomre, Bestwood's head cook, was a whip-thin woman with ashen hair. She stepped forward and curtsied.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The duke's gaze made a slow tour of the kitchen. A heavy silence fell over the room while veins throbbed at the corners of his jaw, the high-water mark of his anger. He turned on his heels and marched out. Malcolm released the breath he'd been holding. He was determined to prevent madness from claiming another Beauclerk.
“Well? Off you go. Help His Grace.” Mrs. Toomre waved off the rest of her staff. “Scoot.”
When the room had cleared and the others were out of earshot, she hoisted up the dumbwaiter. She worked slowly so that the pulleys didn't creak. When William's dome of coppery-red hair dawned over the transom, she leaned over and hefted him out with arms made strong by decades of manual labor. The boy was tall for an eight- year-old, taller even than his older brother.
“There you are. None the worse for wear, I hope.” She pulled a peppermint stick from a pocket in her apron. He snatched it.
Malcolm bowed ever so slightly. “Master William. Still enjoying our game, I trust?”
The boy nodded, smiling around his treat. He smelled like parsnips and old beef tallow from hiding in the dumbwaiter all afternoon.
Mrs. Toomre pulled the steward into a corner. “We can't keep this up forever,” she whispered. She wrung her hands on her apron, adding, “What if the duke caught us?”
“We needn't do so forever. Just until dark. His Grace will have to postpone then.”
“But what do we do tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we prepare a poultice of hobnailed liver for His Grace's hangover, and begin again.”
Mrs. Toomre frowned. But just then the stomping resumed, and with renewed vigor. She pushed William toward Mr. Malcolm. “Quick!”
He took the boy's hand and pulled him through the larder. Gravel crunched underfoot as they scooted out of
