The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(2)
The boy had hoped when his blood brother, Dougan, had taught him to read, that he’d finally be able to make out what the words meant, but no such luck. They certainly weren’t English.
“So, wot’s the sigil got to do with the map?” Walters prodded, as he finished the forked lines in their exactitude, and began to etch the sigil into the boy’s raw skin.
“Nine hundred years later, King of the Danes Sweyn Forkbeard invaded Britain. Only one bridge stood over the terrain, and three heroic Anglo-Saxon warriors held that bridge with but a few of the village men, fending off all two thousand marauders. It is said they protected a secret wealth, a buried magic treasure that lent them indefinable strength and stamina.
“Thus defeated, the Danes took sanctuary on a small island, where they found a cave protected by a dragon. This dragon. Inside the cave was treasure too large to be conducted back to Denmark by a fleet of ships carrying two thousand men, can you imagine?”
“Indeed, I cannot.” Walters’s bulbous, bald head swung back and forth on something too short and thick to truly be considered a neck as he etched the words beneath the crease of the boy’s elbow.
Impassioned and a little drunk on pain, the boy barely felt the meticulous punctures anymore. “Invigorated by his find, King Sweyn attacked Maldon, and was paid off by King ?thelred the Unready to leave Britain. King Sweyn was never able to retrieve the treasure and it remains in that spot to this very day. The one marked by the dragon on this map.”
“’Ow do you know that?” Walters queried.
“Because Sweyn left this map with his daughter, but she hated and distrusted her father, and never came to look for it. So, it sat in a royal library in Denmark until recently.”
“I don’t know … these don’t look like any roads ’round here, and I’ve been all over.” Walters skeptically gestured to the strange branching lines.
“I don’t think they are roads,” the boy speculated. “The Vikings were seafarers, sailors, so it makes sense that their maps did not depict roads, but rivers.”
Walters froze, studying his work with new eyes. “Well … buggar me both ways.”
“Exactly.”
“So you’re going to ’unt this treasure when you’re released in a month?”
“I’m not going to stop hunting this treasure until I find it,” the boy vowed.
By the time Walters finished, the boy’s nerves were as frayed as a tired gallows rope, but the tattoo was some of the finest work he’d ever seen.
Packing his implements into a loose stone crevasse in the floor, Walters asked, “Are you going to tell Dougan?”
“Of course I’m going to tell him, just as soon as we are able to switch cells again.” The boy moved to the far wall, to Dougan’s pallet, and slid a stone free of its place in the wall. Reaching in, he pulled out some contraband, and then removed one more stone behind that. There lay the hideaway no one thought to look for after discovering the initial alcove. “I’m leaving this map and sigil for him. For you, and Murdoch, and Tallow. But Dougan has three years left on his sentence, so I’ll be searching while he’s still incarcerated. Maybe I’ll have found it by the time you’re all out. I’ll send word, of course. I’ll come back for you all.”
“Sure you will.”
The boy looked up sharply, ready to deliver a reprimand for the disrespect he heard in Walter’s tone. But the hint of melancholy etched into the craggy lines prominently displayed on the forger’s filthy face turned any words to ash in his mouth.
Walters had lived long enough to doubt every man’s word. He regarded the boy with pity, but no scorn. With kindness, but no faith.
“I’ll. Come. Back.”
Walters turned away. “You’ll want to wrap that before we start work on the rails in the morning. Don’t want it going putrid.”
He’d show Walters, the boy thought. He’d blow the walls of this place wide open. He wouldn’t leave his family behind.
Swallowing his frustration, the boy carefully replaced the stones over the map, placed the contraband in front of it, and then secured the outer stone.
He’d tell Dougan where to find it in the morning.
Walters blew out the candle he’d worked by, and stowed it somewhere the guards wouldn’t think to look for it.
Stretching his long body out on the pallet, the boy laced his fingers over his empty stomach and contemplated the darkness. He counted moments by the throb of his new tattoo. The acrid scent of candle smoke was a welcome temporary balm over the ever-present wreak of dank humanity clinging to these ancient walls.
Once they released him from this place, the boy decided he’d find Cutter. He’d take his oldest friend on this adventure with him. For, as Dougan had become his brother in Newgate, Cutter had always been his brother on the streets.
It was Cutter’s crime for which the boy paid, and he did it gladly. He owed him after what happened to Cutter’s twin sister.
Caroline … sweet Caroline. Gone forever …
He couldn’t say why the scuffle of the boot broke his drowsy ruminations. The night guards made rounds every hour. Maybe he heard a few boots too many. Or the twinge of violent anticipation raced like a specter through the still, humid night.
One developed a sense for danger in this place. Especially one so young as he. Unlike in the wild, predators outnumbered the prey in here, and would tear each other apart to make a meal of him.