And Eliza told her then, told her everything, right there in that gloomy court. It came out halting at first and then in a terrible rush and she found as she spoke that it was a relief, she had not realized how hard it had been, keeping it secret. She told of the man in his nightshirt, the candle fire in his eyes, the hunger there, and the way it hurt and kept on hurting until he was finished, and how his hands had smelled of lotion and she had fumbled in pain for her dresser and felt … something, a sharpness under her fingers, and hit him with it, and only saw what she had done after she had pushed him off her. She told about the boxcar too and the lantern that was not a lantern and how the baby had looked at her that first night, and she even told about taking the banknotes from the dead mother, and the fine clothes off her stiffening body. And when she was done, she watched Brynt blow out her cheeks and sit heavily on an overturned pail with her big knees high and her belly rolling forward and her eyes crushed shut.
“Brynt?” she said, all at once afraid. “Is it a very large reward, what they’s offering?”
At that Brynt lifted her tattooed hands and stared from one to the other as if to descry some riddle there. “I could see it in you,” she said quietly, “the very first day I saw you there, on the street. I could see there was a something.”
“Is it a very large reward, Brynt?” she said again.
Brynt nodded.
“What do you aim to do? Will you tell the reverend?”
Brynt looked up. She shook her huge head slowly. “This world’s a big place, honey. There are some who think you run far enough, you can outrun anything. Even your mistakes.”
“Is—is that what you think?”
“Aw, I been running eighteen years now. You can’t outrun your own self.”
Eliza wiped at her eyes, ran the back of her wrist over her nose. “I didn’t mean to do it,” she whispered.
Brynt nodded at the paper in Eliza’s hand. She started to go, and then she stopped.
“Sometimes the bastards just plain deserve it,” she said fiercely.
* * *
Meanwhile Marlowe, black-haired, coltish, grew. His skin stayed eerily white, a stark unhealthy pallor, as if he’d never known sunlight. Yet he grew into a sweet toddler, with a smile that could open a purse and eyes as blue as a Suffolk sky. But there was something else in him sometimes, a temper, and as he got older Eliza would sometimes see him screw his face up into a fury and stamp his foot when he did not get his way, and she’d wonder what sort of a devil was in him. At such times he’d scream and holler and grab whatever was nearest, a fig of coal, an inkwell, anything, and smash it to pieces. Brynt tried to tell her that this was the normal way of a child, that two-year-olds all went through it, there was nothing the matter with him, but Eliza was not so sure.
For there was that one night in St Georges Street, when he wanted something—what was it, a stick of licorice in a shop-front window?—and Eliza, tired maybe, or just distracted, had told him no, firmly, and dragged him by the hand away through the crowds. There was a wide cobblestone stair leading down to Bolt Alley and she dragged him to it. “I want it! I want it!” he was crying. He’d scowled at her with such darkness and poison then. And she’d felt a heat bloom in her palm and fingers where she gripped his, and she’d stopped in the middle of the cobbled stair in the faint yellow of a gas lamp above, and seen that same blue shine coming out of him, and a most excruciating pain came over her hand. Marlowe was glaring at her in anger, fuming, watching her face twist in agony. And she’d screamed and pushed him away, and there in the shadows was a figure in a cloak, at the bottom of the cobblestone stair, and it turned and stared up at them, as still and unmoving as a pillar of darkness, but it had no face, only smoke, and she’d shuddered to see it—
But then Marlowe’s anger was gone, the blue shine was gone. He was peering up at her where he had fallen in the muck, peering up in confusion, and fear contorted his little pale face, and he started to cry. She cradled her hand against her chest and wrapped it in her shawl and drew the child close with her good arm, crooning softly, feeling both ashamed and afraid, and she looked around but the thing on the stairs below was gone.
* * *
Then Marlowe was six and they had lost the theater in Wapping to the rents and were all living in a miserable room off Flower and Dean Street, in Spitalfields, but it seemed to her that maybe Brynt had been wrong, maybe it was possible to outrun your mistakes after all. It had been two years since the advertisements in the broadsheets had stopped appearing. From Spitalfields Eliza trudged all the way down to the Thames to mudlark in the thick deep gluey muck of the river at low tide, Brynt being too heavy to manage it, Marlowe still far too young. But he would run alongside the coal wagons in the foggy streets, picking up the little rocks of coal from the cobblestones, sliding under the legs of the horses and dodging the ironshod wheels, while Brynt stood behind the bollards watching him with worried eyes. Eliza liked very little about Spitalfields, it was dark and vicious, but she did like the way Marlowe survived it, the toughness in him, the way he learned watchfulness, his large eyes dark with knowing. And sometimes at night he still climbed onto the bug-riddled mattress beside her and she listened to his heart beating very fast and it was like it had been before, when he was a baby, uncomplicated and sweet and good.
But not always. In the spring of that year she had come upon him crouched in a trash-strewn alley off Thrawl Street, holding his left wrist in his right hand, and that shine started out from his hands and his throat and his face, just as had happened all those years ago. The glow was blue and bleeding through the fog. When he took his hand away, his skin for just a moment was bubbling and oozing. Then it smoothed itself back to normal. Eliza cried out, despite herself, she couldn’t help it, and Marlowe turned guiltily and pulled his sleeve down and like that the shine was gone.
“Mama…?” he said.
They were alone in that alley but she could hear the silk wagons creaking not ten paces from them in the fog-thick street beyond and the roar and shouting of men at their selling carts.
“Oh my heart,” she murmured. She kneeled beside him, uncertain what more to say. She did not think he would remember that day when he’d burned her hand. Whether he knew what he did or not, she could not be sure, but she knew it was not a good thing in this world to be different. She tried to explain this to him. She said every person has two destinies granted them by God and that it is a person’s task in this life to choose the one or the other. She looked into his little face and saw his cheeks white in the cold and his black hair long over his ears and she felt an overwhelming sadness.
“You always have a choice, Marlowe,” she said. “Do you understand me?”
He nodded. But she did not think he understood at all.
When he spoke, his voice was little more than a whisper. “Is it bad, Mama?” he asked.
“Oh, honey. No.”
He thought for a moment. “Because it’s from God?”
She chewed her lip. Nodded.
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“What if I don’t want to be different?”
She told him he must never be afraid of who he was but that he must hide it, this blue shining, whatever it was. Even from the reverend? Yes. Even from Brynt? Even from Brynt. She said its purpose would make itself known to him in time but until such day there were those who would put it to their own ends. And many others who would fear it.
That was the year the reverend started coughing up blood. A leech in Whitechapel said a dryer clime might aid him but Brynt just ducked her head, storming out into the fog. The reverend had come out of the American deserts as a boy, she explained later, angrily, and all he wanted now was to go back to the deserts to die. As they drifted slowly through the gaslit nights, his face looked grayer, his eyes more and more yellow, until he stopped even the pretense of mixing his elixirs and just sold straight whiskey, telling any who would listen that it had been blessed by a holy man in the Black Hills of Agrapur, though Eliza did not think his customers cared, and even this lie he told wearily, unconvincingly, like a man who no longer believed in his truth or their truth or any truth at all.