All his life, Charlie had lived in dirt hovels in Mississippi, in crowded communal rooms, in the field rows themselves in high summer. He got clean in cool rivers on Sundays, before trudging the long six miles through dust to church. He’d owned only a single pair of shoes in all his years, and those shoes had gone from being too big to too small to being nothing at all.
White folk, it wasn’t just that they were rich, or talked however they wanted, or went wherever they wished to go. It wasn’t just their geldings and coaches and liveried servants. It was more than that. They walked through the world as if it was a place that didn’t have to be the way it was, as if it could change, the way a person could change. That was the difference, he’d always thought. He had to remind himself sometimes that his father must have been like that, too. And this man, this Mr. Coulton, who’d purchased Charlie a new set of clothes in New Orleans and paid for his meals and who talked to him calmly, quietly, asking nothing of him, this Mr. Coulton was no different in that respect. He just didn’t understand how everything he had could be taken from him, quick as lightning. How his life wasn’t worth a penny, once it was gone. He, too, was an innocent, when it came right down to it. Like any of them.
* * *
They’d been at sea for weeks; the train carrying them south toward London took a matter of hours. Yet the journey felt just as long. Everywhere Charlie looked he saw strangeness: deep green fields, stands of weird-looking trees, fence lines and sheep on distant hills like in a painting he’d seen once, stumbling into the courthouse in Natchez, right before his trial. Even stranger: everyone on the train platform, or shoving past in the narrow train corridor, was white, but they didn’t flinch from him, like happened back home. They just nodded, tipped their hats, went on past.
For the first hour Coulton sat with his eyes shut, his shoulders and yellow waistcoat jiggering at the rattling of the train. He wasn’t sleeping; Charlie could tell. They roared through tunnels—long clattering darknesses—then up out of the cuts, into gray daylight.
“Mr. Coulton, sir,” said Charlie at last. “Did anyone ever leave Cairndale? I mean, went away and was never heard from again?”
“Cairndale ain’t a prison, lad. You can leave it if you want.”
Charlie wet his lips, wary. “No, I mean … do you know of anyone who ever did?”
Coulton cracked one heavy eyelid, squinting in the light. “I never knew of a talent what wanted to leave it, once they got there,” he said. “But folk are free to go, if they choose. England isn’t much like your own country. You’ll see.”
Charlie watched him.
“London’s a right stew of folk. I seen every kind there. Oh, I don’t mean just the Cathays and the Moors and the like. I mean card sharps and cutthroats and pickpockets what’ll take a piece off you without your even feeling it. Aye. Heart of the bloody world, it is. And every bloody one of them is free to come and go as they please.”
He didn’t always understand what Mr. Coulton said. It wasn’t just the accent. It was also the man’s meaning. Sometimes it was like the Englishman was talking a different language.
“You don’t much look like a lad what’s killed two men,” Coulton added.
No, he didn’t always understand the man’s meaning. But he understood that.
He looked away. He looked away, in part, because he didn’t know what to say, but mostly because it wasn’t true, he wasn’t a lad who’d killed two men. That was the thing, that’s what he wasn’t telling. Stabbing that deputy in the throat haunted him, it did. He kept seeing it over and over in his mind’s eye, what happened, how fast it was, how it felt. It made him sick. But you didn’t grow up black and alone and unprotected in the Delta and get to keep your hands clean.
He’d fought his first man when he was nine years old and his mama wasn’t even two weeks in the grave. That was to keep the little cloth sack of coins his mama’d pushed into his hands as she lay dying. The man had left him bloodied and walked out of the barn with the coins in his shirt and Charlie had nearly starved after that. He was ten when he left a man pinned under a cartwheel in the rain, taking the man’s coat and a sack of his food and fleeing into the darkness. If that wasn’t killing, it wasn’t far short of it. He’d been hungry then, too, but felt so sick at what he’d done that he couldn’t eat the man’s food and when he went back two days later the man and the cart and all of it were gone.
But under the eyes of God there could be neither dissembling nor withholding and it was true, he had killed before. That was the awful fact of it. It was a boy like him, fourteen years old, a boy he was living with in a ruined warehouse, a boy who’d introduced him to drink. The boy’s name was Isaiah. He had two teeth out in front and a funny eye, but he’d had a quick sense of humor and used to make Charlie laugh. They’d finished a bottle and in the way of kids and drinking they’d got to arguing and then to fighting and Charlie had knocked him backward against a wall where a spike stuck out, some sort of harrower for the old warehouse sacking, and the boy was dead before he even knew what was what. That one broke Charlie. He never touched a bottle again, never would.
Then there came the overseer, yes.
And now the deputy.
He knew the deputy was a bad man and a cruel one and if it wasn’t Charlie he was tormenting it would be some other. He knew if he hadn’t stepped in, the man might have hurt that white lady, the one who’d rescued him, Miss Quicke. Alice. He knew this and still he felt sick at what he’d done. Taking a life was just about as dire a thing as any thing there was.
But he couldn’t talk about this to Mr. Coulton, to anyone. He kept what he felt close to his chest and he didn’t dwell on it. That was the way to get by. And so, when they arrived at St Pancras Station, in a roar of steam and smoke, Charlie stepped down and looked all around in amazement. He was tall enough to see over the hats of the crowds. The air was black with soot; the ceiling of steel and glass soared high above. He followed Mr. Coulton close through the bodies, squinting, choking, past porters in slouch caps with trunks stacked high on trolleys, past men in black silk hats, flower girls with boxes on ropes round their necks, past workmen and sweeps and beggars and out into the murky brown darkness of a rain-thick afternoon, the rain falling darkly, at a slant, the cobblestones pooling in the wet and shining blackly up, for the gaslights were already on, and Charlie stared at all of it, at the roar and crush of humanity, as if all the world were coming and going from the cobblestoned square just outside St Pancras Station. As perhaps it was.
Mr. Coulton led him directly to a cabstand on the corner and ushered him up into a two-seat hansom and leaned out to get the driver’s attention. The driver was across the square, at a food cart, clapping his hands for the cold, and he came at a run when he saw Coulton’s wave.
“Twenty-three Nickel Street West, man,” said Coulton, banging his walking stick at the roof. His cheeks were red and pitted in the chill. “Blackfriars. Make it quick, mind.” He grunted, shifted his weight, and the hansom squeaked and shivered. He grinned at Charlie. “Welcome to London, lad. Welcome to the big smoke.”
“The big smoke,” Charlie murmured wonderingly, as they lurched into motion.
The dark city swept past. Rain ran off the hindquarters of the horse in front of them in silver ropes. The hansom jolted and creaked in the busy streets.
Slowly, so slowly, Mississippi, and all its horrors, the swampy heat and the vast sky and the meanness of it all, started to fade and come apart in his mind, like newsprint in the rain.
* * *