held it like an offering and the child opened its eyes. He couldn’t see their colour, but he could see this child was a plausible age. Small, underfed, but old enough to be his.
He risked all, listening to this woman. He risked more if he didn’t. He could kill this wench and the babe, but a mother with a missing child would put more players in his game than he was willing to manoeuvre. His board was already full.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know where the mother lived for they had met at another location. A flaw in his clever plan for anonymity.
So his only option was to follow this wench and step outside. He might as well be stepping into a trap. Now this was a distraction worthy of his attention. ‘Prove to me you’re not the mother and you’ll get what you came for.’
The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘I take you and you’ll pay me?’
If this mother wasn’t the woman he lain with, he’d give one clean swipe of his blade across her neck to silence her for ever. Then he’d stab and twist the knife into the heart of this traitor, so she’d feel it. Liars every one.
If the child was his, it had no place in his life. His brothers would kill it, but only after torture. If the child was truly his, and he cared at all, he’d turn around and abandon it all over again.
He had enough players on the board and more moves to make. He might not have started this particular game, but he was determined to finish it. A child had no place in his life. As for the servant, she’d be lucky to survive his blade.
He kept his gaze on the wretched woman before him. ‘If this child is mine, I’ll reward you amply.’
‘You could not have possibly done what I think you have done.’ Aliette pinched the bridge of her nose and clenched her eyes. A temporary solution to the very visible evidence she returned to after the morning’s work.
‘I didn’t,’ Gabriel said readily.
Ten years of age, his tuft of brown hair sticking up, his light brown eyes framed by eyelashes wasted on a boy. He looked innocent, but everything he said was a lie.
A good lie. She suspected he said it to ease her worries, but it was all too apparent he had indeed gone out and stolen four loaves of bread. She didn’t want it to be true.
It needed to not be true.
But it was. Just as it was true she was responsible for a ten-year-old boy whose parents have been sent to the gallows and an elderly couple, Vernon and Helewise, who were ripping into their bread as though they hadn’t eaten properly in a sennight...which they hadn’t.
She was failing them. At least Vernon and Helewise were used to it, they had been with her the longest. Before her, they had survived on their own. Aliette discovered them over a year ago, in another part of Paris, sitting on the ground in the filth of the streets. Helewise, whose bones were crooked from her ears to her toes, and Vernon, whose eyes were so clouded he couldn’t see more than shadows. They were too frail to move when slop was thrown on them.
Over the years since she’d been abandoned in Paris, she’d seen hundreds of street beggars. The old or frail were usually dead within a week either by starvation, assault or reckless carriages.
But not these two and they fascinated her. Over many weeks, she’d watched as Helewise, too crippled to walk, told Vernon where to find food. They made terrible thieves. Vernon, almost blind, was slow and Helewise’s loud verbal commands let any nimble, listening child to reach the prize first. There were no fresh loaves for them or animal-trough remains. In truth, what they scavenged was dropped by others or given by charity.
Filthy, starving, but nothing hardened their souls as it did the others, as it had done to her. They were kind to each other and shared food if they were fortuitous that day or the warmth of their bodies if they weren’t.
But her observing ended the day Vernon made Helewise laugh. It wasn’t the laugh of the privileged, full of conquering lightness. Nor was it the laughing sneer of the street. Her laugh was full of...she didn’t know. It lit up both of them and did something to her heart as well. Like warmth, only so much better.
That was the day she gave them every scrap of food she’d scavenged and they welcomed her to sit with them. Then they gave her stories. Of who they were and where they came from. Stories about legends and brave heroines and love. That was the word they used. Love.
Was love what kept their souls intact? Whatever it had been, something began that day she gave them food. At first, she thought the tightening in her chest was something foul she ate, but the feeling grew and wouldn’t let up. It was like that warmth which spread with Helewise’s laugh, but it had an achy longing about it as well.
A longing for something she knew she’d never possess. Her parents had abandoned her. No matter how much she wished for someone to love her, it wouldn’t happen. If she was capable of giving or receiving it, she certainly would have found someone in all the years since. Still, seeing love between Vernon and Helewise, she wouldn’t let it go either. Even if at times her longing filled her with sorrow and not just warmth.
She blamed that longing for moving them to where she had been living: under a small bridge. It was in an industrial area of Paris, with no private homes or residences where respectable people could potentially force them to leave because it was too near the tanners and stank.
When shelter and safety were tantamount, scents that made your eyes water mattered little. She couldn’t count the times she’d been accosted or had a weapon pointed at her. Sometimes it was to take something away from her like food or clothing. Most times, they looked at her as a threat and used a dagger, or a large blunt stick to ward her away.
Paris was a jumble of wealth and poverty and she’d learned to take advantage of the good within the bad. And there were drawbacks with the bridge, the lack of walls not much of one. The true drawback was it was far from any food and much too far for Helewise and Vernon to scavenge on their own. It was up to Aliette to feed them.
On one of these travels, she’d spotted Gabriel outside the gaol making sounds she’d never heard in her life. On the streets, there was abuse and maiming. There were harsh words and harsher fists, but the street’s survivors were bitter or angry.
Gabriel’s helpless sobs were as if his heart was cracking. As though he only just realised life contained cruelty. He cried as an innocent would cry. A word Aliette knew, but had never truly understood. She tried to be good, but she stole and lied. Her life couldn’t afford anything pure. Gabriel’s clothes, though worn, were newish and clean. And he looked soft despite the bloodied mutilated mess where his right ear used to be. He had never been born and raised on the streets as she had.
As the guards had. Guards who chatted because the sounds of a weeping child near their feet was meaningless to them. For Aliette, Gabriel’s defenceless whimpers called to her.
A few gentle questions his way and he told her of his parents’ imprisonment and their hanging scheduled the next day. How he had no one and no home. He could tell her nothing of why they chopped his ear and not given him a simple flogging. Such an extreme punishment for one so young.
His eyes were so full of grief, so full of fear. Half-starved despite the cleanliness of his clothes.
