The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(79)

It was easy for a boy to pass through these streets. Packs of infant thieves still abounded in the alleys and outside the brothels around King’s Cross, and Holborn, for all its aspirant imperial grandeur, was as yet all fa?ade and no belly. I moved with confidence, eyed up by the coppers but not stopped, heading deeper into the city, in search of the Cronus Club. The coal-soaked air turned white stone black; even the newer buildings were already scrawled with initials and messages scraped into the dirt. But there was the passage where the Cronus Club had been, where I had first met Virginia that warm summer’s day at the height of the Blitz, and we had talked of time and protocol, and lounged between the dust sheets. There the door, and there no sign. Not a brass plaque. Nothing at all.

I knocked anyway.

A maid in a stiff white apron and hat that was three parts frill to one part headpiece answered.

“Yeah?” she demanded. “What you want?”

I lied instinctively. “Do you buy oranges?” I asked.

“What? No! Push off!”

“Please, ma’am,” I blurted. “Finest Cronus oranges.”

“Piss off, you little tyke,” she retorted and, for good measure, gave me a half-hearted prod with her foot as she slammed the door shut in my face.

I stood, stunned, in the street, staring at nothing.

The Cronus Club was gone. I looked frantically for signs, for clues, messages left in iron, in stone, hints in any form as to where it could be–nothing. Turning wildly in the street I looked up for a notch in a gutter, for any smear of a suggestion, and saw a curtain twitch overhead.

My heart froze.

But of course.

Stupid stupid stupid.

Of course, even if you’d destroyed it, you’d leave watchers on the Cronus Club to see who came out of the woodwork.

Well, I’d come out of the woodwork all right, with the intelligence of the idiot child I appeared to be.

I didn’t try to fight, didn’t try to see who was looking at me from behind the grubby brown curtain overhead. I simply put my head down and ran.





Chapter 60


I had no choice.

I slunk back to Berwick.

Back to Hulne House, back to Patrick and Harriet, to Rory and Constance. Back to where I’d come from, back where it all began.

I arrived, four days after I’d left, grimy, tired, bedraggled. A thief child who’d run away and found nowhere to run to. Harriet wept when she saw me, held me close and rocked me in her arms, sobbed until my clothes were damp with it. Patrick took me out the back and gave me the worst hiding of my life. Then, he dragged me up to the house and made me apologise, still bleeding, to Mr Hulne and all the family, who told me I was very lucky that I wasn’t being thrown out entirely, to starve like the little brat I was, and that from now on I would have to work every day and every night until I’d made it up to them, nasty, ungrateful child that I was.

I took my beating and humiliation in silence. I had no choice. The luxury, the lifeline of my last few lives had been pulled out from beneath my feet. I was six years old. I was seven hundred and fifty. I was being hunted.

The Hulnes refused to pay for me to go to school, and Patrick, humiliated by my escapade, didn’t argue the point. Harriet began dying early in this life, and I wondered if, in my way, I had contributed. I stayed by her bed to the end, feeding her poppy juice thieved from my aunt Victoria and holding her hand in silence. Perhaps my vigil gave me some credit in Patrick’s eyes, for her funeral was the first time he looked me in the face since I had run away, and after that the beatings grew less.

In the wake of Harriet’s death, and refusing to see her unacknowledged nephew grow up entirely wild, my aunt Alexandra secretly took to teaching me letters. Naturally, I knew all she had to say, but I was so grateful for the company, for the conversation, the books and the encouragement she gave me that I indulged her, a tiny compensation for her great gift. Five months in, Constance found out, and the argument between the two was audible even from the fish pond outside. Alexandra had more guts than I’d given her credit for, as her visits, in the aftermath of the argument, became even more regular. She was impressed by how fast I learned and, having no children of her own, failed to appreciate fully how abnormal my development was. As she became more a part of my life, Patrick grew less, until, by the age of twelve, barely a word passed between us, and no more seemed required.

I was biding my time and had very little choice but to do so until such time as I could pass for an adult. By my fifteenth birthday I considered that I could perhaps get away with the deceit, and, as manner is half the battle, I certainly had the bearing and intellectual capacity to pull it off. I went to Alexandra, asked to borrow some small amount of money, wrote her a letter thanking her for her kindnesses, and another to Patrick expressing the same, and left the very next day without looking back.

My task was that of a historian. I needed to learn the fate of the Cronus Club without exposing my own survival. It seemed likely that, whatever had happened to the Club, those in the know would be hiding. It also seemed likely that, no matter how determined Vincent’s reach, he could probably not influence kalachakra more than a few generations older than his own. There would have been a London Cronus Club before, maybe not in the 1900s, but possibly in the 1800s and surely in the 1700s, or even if Vincent had somehow managed to stamp out all trace of it so far in the past, there would be other branches, in other cities, which he had not affected. I had to find them.