Unraveled (Turner #3)(34)

Robbie.

Smite’s thoughts turned instantly to Miss Darling. I’m guilty the instant a constable lays eyes on me and decides I appear out of place, she’d said. Nobody listens.

I do, he’d answered.

But he could already feel his emotions engaging, searching for an excuse on Robbie’s behalf. He knew the boy. And he knew that if he authorized a grand jury to charge Robbie, Miranda would be devastated.

Smite took a deep breath. “Your full name, young master?”

“Robbie. I mean—Robert Barnstable.”

He’d just lectured Jamison and the constable on fidelity and honor and duty. His duty in cases such as these was clear. With his emotions engaged, he had to step down and ask one of his brother magistrates to hear the evidence in his stead. The law required an impartial assessment, and Smite very much doubted that he could deliver.

“Are you going to hang me?” Robbie asked, his voice shaking.

But if he didn’t act, who would? Jamison wouldn’t listen; he had practically announced as much. He wouldn’t think. He’d simply hold the boy for days until the grand jury laid an indictment.

There was no right choice. If Smite had any integrity, he’d walk away. If he cared at all about justice, he’d stay. But he couldn’t sit here and dither over his options. And so Smite took a deep breath, checked his instinct, and came to a decision.

THE INSIDE STEPS UP to Miranda’s rooms were always cold, but today the stairwell held a particularly drafty chill. She saw why when she came to the second-floor landing.

The window was ajar and Robbie sat on the sill, legs dangling out into open space as he stared at the city. Night had come on, and fog blanketed the buildings. A street away, a few lamps burned orange holes through the mist, but everything else was shadowed.

He wasn’t smoking. He simply glanced at her as she walked by and then looked quickly away, his shoulders hunching in misery.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

His chin fell, and he contemplated the top of the adjacent building, scarcely a foot away. But there was nothing there but coal-blackened brick and, far below, brown drifts of paper-dry leaves.

“Very well,” Miranda said, and slid past him.

He let out a second, wearier sigh as she went by. Just a noisy exhalation—not even his usual handful of terse, disapproving syllables. Still, the sigh said it wasn’t nothing, and at this point, Miranda would take any form of communication she could get from him.

She sat on the steps, just behind him.

“So tell me about this nothing.”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

She’d been looking after Robbie in some capacity for seven years. His mother had been an actress—and one of the flightier ones at that. She’d attached herself to Miranda’s father’s troupe just before everything had fallen to pieces. Robbie’s mother had asked Miranda to take care of her son during the day, in exchange for a few pennies. For a few years, Miranda had watched Robbie. She’d not minded; they’d needed all the pennies she could find.

One day, long after the troupe had fallen apart, his mother had disappeared for good, leaving Robbie behind. For months, Miranda had tried to find someone—anyone—to take him. But nobody had wanted an abandoned eight-year-old child.

So Miranda had kept him. At first, she’d entertained hopes that the two of them might form a family of a sort. In books, women reduced to straitened circumstances always surrounded themselves with kind, adoring loved ones through pluck and determination.

The authors of heartwarming books apparently had no contact with actual adolescent boys. They weren’t kind. They didn’t know how to adore. They were just surly.

She’d hoped to mirror the laughing, tempestuous feel of her childhood, where family and friends merged. But instead of warmth and love, Robbie left Miranda in a constant state of near-terror. What was he going to do next? How was she to stop him?

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “What are you still doing here?” he growled. “I thought you’d finally decided to let me be.”

“I’m no good at this, Robbie. If I were your mother, I’d know what to say. I’d make you laugh and feel better, and you’d never have need to complain.”

“Sure,” he agreed bitterly.

“But I’m not. I don’t know how to be a mother. What role do you want me to play instead?”

Another shrug of his scrawny shoulders. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

His shoulders stiffened. But he didn’t look at her. After a few moments, he shrugged again. “I suppose,” he said.

Oh, that hurt. To have all her care, all her work, tossed aside in one insouciant shrug of his shoulders. Years of looking after him had culminated in this bored rejection.

“Best to get on with it,” Robbie said. But his voice broke on the last word, and his shoulders quivered. And that was when Miranda realized that he was crying—quietly, but crying nonetheless.

She stared at him, absolutely flummoxed. Surly, sullen, and…sad? What was she supposed to do?

She stood and walked down the steps to the window. “Hey, now,” she whispered. “It’s not so bad as that.”

He wiped furiously at his eyes. “Sure. Wait ’til you hear.”