This was nothing short of torture.
Christopher Argent’s muscles shook with uncontrollable strain. Sweat mingled with the freezing rain and made infuriating trails of moisture, mirroring the sensation of small vermin crawling down his twitching flesh. He’d have given his soul to scratch them away. Teeth clenched until his jaw ached, Christopher dared not show anything but relaxed features, for fear of the consequences.
Sliding his gaze to the man next to him, he mimicked his Sifu’s actions accurately, in a desperate attempt to keep up. Or, rather, to match the impossibly slow pace of the flowing movements Master Wu Ping guided him through with unnatural precision.
“You understand why we drilling the siu lim tao in the rain, boy?” Master Ping inquired in his thickly accented English, never once breaking form or pace. They were the first words he’d spoken to Christopher since they’d begun their lessons for the day.
It was more difficult for Christopher to speak and move correctly at the same time, such utter focus did the forms require, but he made a valiant effort.
“I am being punished,” he ventured. “For beating John and Harry…”
“And?”
Christopher heaved a breath, hoping to unburden himself from the yoke of shame, but it interrupted his actions so that he had to recover and concentrate to get back in rhythm with his sifu.
“And Hugh,” he mumbled.
Master Ping was silent for the breaths it took to move his bladed hand from an extension in front of his chest back into the protection of his body. “I am your Sifu, boy. What does that word mean in your language?”
Christopher knew this. “It means teacher.”
Wu Ping gave a short jerk of his chin in acknowledgment. “Then, it not my place to punish. It my responsibility to teach.”
Silence stretched on for what seemed like an eternity as they performed the physical drills of precision and line work Christopher had been learning for the better part of two years. Now, at eleven, he was almost as tall as the teacher who had taken him under his wing.
“Today, I teach you, boy, to be like the water.” Master Ping had always called him “boy.”
Staring ahead at the gray, wet stone of the courtyard of Newgate Prison, he listened intently. The old man had lectured on water before, but Christopher had to admit, he hadn’t listened. He would certainly listen now. Drenched as he was in the aforementioned substance, shivering, suffering, and exhaustion made a more distinctive impression.
“Water is adaptable and fluid,” Ping began. “It soft; conforming to the shape of whatever contains it, finding the lowest places and the path of least resistance. It sustains life. It easily redirected for the benefit of others. You understand?”
“Yes, Sifu.” He didn’t really, but knew he would once Master Ping made his point.
“But water also most deadly,” Master Ping continued. “It crashes with a force that not even stone can withstand. It floods. It drowns. It destroys everything in chosen path without thought. Without mercy. Without remorse.”
The old man ceased his movement, turning to face Christopher, who also dropped his trembling arms in relief. He stood looking at the small Chinaman, remembering that he once thought Master Ping looked like a sausage, round and bent and encased in tough skin. The small, gentle foreigner was simply the most dangerous, lethal man housed at Newgate Prison.
“What are the five responses to conflict?” Ping asked.
Christopher listed them from memory. “Avoidance, accommodation, collaboration, compromise, and aggression.”
Ping gave another of his short nods. “Notice that fists and force are needed only once in five times. Do you know why that is?”
Christopher looked down at the filthy stones of the yard, following a dark ribbon of grime with his eyes as it oozed toward the sewage drain. “Because I shouldn’t fight,” he mumbled.
“Wrong,” Ping snapped, but his hand was gentle as it lifted Christopher’s chin so they were eye to eye. “Because the kung fu I practice not for fighting. It for killing. And you shouldn’t use it, except to take a life, defend yourself, or protect another.”
Christopher’s teeth clenched for a reason other than cold and exertion, a familiar heat compressing his organs against his rib cage. He couldn’t keep the defiance from his eyes. “You didn’t hear the disgusting things those others said about my mother.”
“Was it true what they say?” Ping asked.
“No.”
“Then why it matter?” The Sifu shrugged.
It mattered for so many reasons, but Christopher couldn’t identify them by name, and so he kept silent and fumed.
Ping’s black eyes softened and crinkled a bit at the corners, the closest he ever came to smiling. “You already much like water, but your emotion run too deep. Too strong. Like ocean. You must learn to quiet feelings like anger, hatred, fear…” Ping put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder, an unprecedented gesture of affection. “Love.”
“How?” Christopher breathed.
“You redirect them, like a farmer would redirect a river to feed crops. Turn them into patience, logic, ruthlessness, and power. Only then can death flow from your hands with all the destructive force of raging flood.” Master Ping turned from him, set his hips, grounding his feet to the stones, and slapped the walls of Newgate Prison with an open palm. The stone crumbled beneath the blow and cracks branched from his hand in the mortar.
Christopher gaped, rain pouring into his open mouth. “How—how did you do that?”
Ping winked. “I show you tomorrow. If you don’t hit the mark, but punch through it, then power is transferred, and it must fall before you.”
“Can you show me now?” Christopher asked hopefully.
Ping shook his head. “Your mother will want you back in your cell. It is almost time for meal.”
“How do you—”
A clock chimed the lateness of the hour, and Christopher’s head whipped around toward the guard tower, flinging droplets of water into the shadowy storm. It seemed that even on days such as these, when the sun couldn’t be seen, the mysterious old man was always aware of the time.
When Christopher turned back to Master Ping, he found himself alone in the yard.
Vibrating more from excitement than from the cold, Christopher scrambled through the rain to the hallway beneath a rusted grate the prisoners at Newgate had come to know as Dead Man’s Walk. Veering through the various catacombs of the prison, he hailed a few familiar faces before knocking on the iron door that separated the male prisoners from the female.
“Who’s that, then?” A thick Scottish brogue reached through the bars above his head before the youthful round face of Ewan McTavish peeked down at him. “Well, little lad, ye’re certainly lucky ye’re back before the changing of the guard here. If Treadwell were to find ye on the wrong side of the door, he’d likely leave ye there to the nighttime mercies of the damned, ye ken?”
Christopher had been born inside these walls. He understood better even than McTavish the hellmouth Newgate Prison became at nightfall. His lullabies had been the echoes of chains, the screams and whimpers of the weak, and the dragging footfalls of the condemned who walked the long, grated hallway and never returned. His mother cried sometimes for those who marched to the gallows, but Christopher never did. A dead prisoner often meant new shoes or a belt.
The rusted iron door scraped along the stone floor with an earsplitting sound as McTavish pulled it open wide enough for his thin hide to shimmy through before pushing it shut and throwing the bolt.
“Mum always sends me to wander on easement day.” Christopher hopped from one bare foot to the next, trying to keep warm. He liked McTavish, and followed the stout, dark-haired guard around some days when he’d nothing else to do.
McTavish’s liquid eyes matched the smart dark blue of his uniform. They were touched with pity as he nodded. “Aye, lad. I know.”
“The guards don’t like me around when they bring wood for the fire or fresh tins of food. Mum says I’m in the way.”
The guard’s attention slid down the dank hall lined with iron bars. “They’re finished now,” he mumbled, not quite returning his gaze back to Christopher. “Why don’t ye find yer ma in time for supper?”
Looking forward to a fire with distinct relish, Christopher skipped up one hall and down another, flattening himself against the wall as two guards sauntered past, one adjusting his belt. Here in Newgate, it was just as important to know which guards to avoid as which prisoners.
McTavish had been right about Treadwell. The big, golden-haired oaf had cuffed him, shoved him, and caned him more times than he could count over the years.
“Bitch needs to learn a bit of gratitude,” Treadwell muttered to his companion as they passed. “I should let the real brutes loose on ’er, give the quim some perspective. Then she’ll be begging me for a toss.”
“We could throw that freckled bastard of ’ers into hangman’s row, make ’er watch them tear ’im apart,” suggested the other.
In the shadows, Christopher covered his cheeks with his hands and wiped, as though the action could rid him of the offending freckles.
“We keep records of the shackleborn now,” Treadwell spat, using the nickname given to the forgotten waifs born into custody of the prison system. “We’d ’ave to explain why ’e’d gone missing … Besides, it’s not the bastard I’m sore at, it’s the mouthy whore ’e calls a mother.”
Struck with concern, Christopher’s hands dropped from his face to his thudding chest. He stood in the puddle made by his sodden, ill-fitting clothes until the pair turned the corner of the cell hall, before scampering to the end of the women’s block he’d called home for his entire life.
A coal bed glowed beneath the grate that barely passed as a window, and Christine Argent was adding a large log to the fire with trembling hands.
Though it let in the cold in the winter and the unbearable heat in the summer, Christopher and his mother counted themselves lucky to have the opening, no bigger than a porthole, to let air filter through their tiny space. In a place that smelled foul on a mild day, a crosswind was more precious than gold.
“Mum?” Tiptoeing around the open bars, he knelt next to her, the heat from the flames instantly bringing the sting of warmth to his numb limbs.
Her long, curly auburn hair had been brushed and braided this morning; now it hung in tangled ringlets, hiding her bent face from his view.
“Oh, Pigeon, it’s you.” The smile in her voice sounded watery as her hands disappeared behind the curtain of her hair and dashed below her eyes. Pushing herself to stand, she turned before he could see her and faced the homemade calendar etched by a stone on the wall. “I thought you were out with Mister Ping.” Lifting her tattered apron, she used it to wipe at her face while her back was to him.
“It’s … Master Ping,” Christopher said softly, staring into the pitiful flames. There wasn’t as much wood this time. It would barely last the week, and easement day only came once a month.
“Oh yes,” she said brightly, covering a sniff. “I knew that, of course.” With her worn piece of shale, she made the mark that ended another month within Newgate Prison. Her movements were stiff, almost pained. The mark she made on the wall with an oddly unsteady hand was deeper than the others, and wider. “Did you—” She cleared her throat. “Did you enjoy your time with Master Ping?”
“I did,” he answered after a careful pause. “Mum. Look at me.”
Her hand dropped to her side, palming the shale, but she made no move to turn around, pulling her threadbare gray shawl tighter across her shoulders. “Forty-eight more months, Pigeon, can you believe that?” The false bravado in her normally soft-spoken voice alarmed him. “Four more years and you and I will be free. Free to do whatever we like. I’ll get a job as a seamstress, and I’ll make beautiful lace for fine ladies. I used to be famous for the quality of my lace, you know.”
“I know, Mum,” Christopher whispered, very worried now. He’d heard these words before, but they meant little to him, as he’d never seen a piece of lace in his life and her descriptions of them made no sense. “Let me see your face.”
“And you can apprentice with a tradesman. Maybe Mr. Dockery still works at the shipyards. We’ll have rooms of our own with a woodstove and a fireplace with a stone hearth. We’ll never be cold.”
Gaining his feet, Christopher left the heat of the fire and padded over to his mother. He wanted to fling his arms around her long waist, but didn’t because he was still rain-soaked and it would chill her. Instead, he slid in between her and the wall, lifting his hand to brush the hair back from her face.
It wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. Her lower lip was split, but wasn’t bleeding.
Christopher squeezed his eyes shut for a second. He was eleven now, old enough to know that it was the wounds he couldn’t see that caused her pain. It was what the guards did to her whilst he wasn’t there. What she let them do. All so he could be afforded whatever scraps they were willing to throw him.
She was pale, and her eyes were red from crying, but she was still his mother. His tall, beautiful, sturdy mother. The woman who gave him everything, from strong bones, good teeth, and hair the color of rust on the ancient iron hinges, to the last morsel of her meal and a smile that was the only beautiful thing in their gray world.
A familiar hatred surged within him and he bared his teeth. “You shouldn’t let them in here anymore, Mum,” he growled. “I don’t need a fire.”
Watery eyes, the same light blue as his own, blinked rapidly as she slicked his sopping hair away from his eyes. “Of course you do, Pigeon,” she crooned. “Just look at you. As wet as a drowned Irish rat.” Her strong, capable hands seized him and began to peel the dripping shirt from his chest. “Come over here and warm up before you catch your death. I’ll go after our tins of supper.”
She limped a little, he noticed, and his teeth banged together from sheer helpless frustration. But she was a stubborn woman, and there was no talking to her when she was like this.
They ate their meat in silence, both of them staring into the flames. Christine a little dazed and distracted, Christopher seething and fuming.
Wu Ping didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t understand. How was one supposed to quiet his love for someone like this? How did he not hate the men who used his mother? Or fear what they might do next?
It was impossible to calm emotion.
He would tell the old fool that next time he saw him.
“Christopher,” his mother whispered, pulling his gaze from the glowing coal bed. She rarely called him anything but “Pigeon,” her pet name for him. “Christopher, I want you to know that I’m all right. And that everything I do, I do because I deserve it, and because you deserve better.”
“That’s bloody bollocks, Mum, you don’t deserve to be … they shouldn’t … not for me.” He couldn’t say the words, but his cheeks burned with shame.
“You watch your tongue,” she said firmly, but then immediately softened. “My son, you don’t know what the world is like out there beyond those walls. How strange and wonderful. Beautiful and terrible. You don’t know what a real life is like. You’ve never seen a true sunset, or had a fresh meal.” Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “That’s all because of me. Because I’m a criminal.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he argued, but she cut him off.
“You’ll see someday, Pigeon. You’ll see what you’ve been denied, and maybe you’ll hate me for it.”
“I could never hate you,” he vowed, scooting over to settle into her side as she wrapped her shawl around his bare shoulders.
“I hope for that, son.” She perched her cheek on top of his head. “But you never know what you’re capable of until…”
“Until what?”
Letting out a beleaguered breath, she stood and tested his shirt hanging from a rusty nail. It was impossible to dry anything in this dank place, even with the heat of their meager fire. But it was good enough for her to hand to him, though the cold almost burned his skin as he slipped the shirt on.
“Time for bed, Pigeon.” The sounds of iron bars clanking together and heavy doors swinging shut as the prison locked down for the night echoed above the calls of the guards and sounds of other prisoners. A stocky, sour-faced woman came by for head count and closed their cell, and then Christopher and his mother separated to their pallets.
They used to huddle together for warmth, Christopher remembered with longing. She’d curl her body around his and sing him songs in hopes of drowning out the horrible noises of the night.
Not anymore. Not since he’d started dreaming and woke racked with a strange and burning pleasure tightening in his loins and spilling into his trousers.
She’d separated them then, laughing almost wistfully as she tried to explain growing into a man to him through a crimson blush.
Christopher didn’t want to be a man, he thought glumly. Not if they turned into rutting brutes like Treadwell, or old leathery fools like Master Ping.
He just wanted to be held.
What had begun as a gentle rainstorm turned into a tempest. Thunder shook the old stones of Newgate, and lightning slashed arcane shadows through their tiny window.
“Should we sing tonight?” his mother asked, and Christopher smiled in the darkness. He’d been secretly hoping she’d ask. The storm had unsettled him, and the noises of Newgate were particularly grotesque.
“What should we sing?” he asked.
“How about my favorite Irish tune.”
They sang.
Hush Hush in the evening,
Good dreams will come stealing.
Of freedom and laughter
and peace ever after.
Ye’ll smile while you’re sleeping.
And watch I’ll be keeping.
Hush hush now my darling
No tears til the mornin …
A terrible scraping sound reverberated through the stones against Christopher’s ear, ripping him out of a warm dream and dumping him onto the cold floor. He sat up, blinking against the darkness. The storm still raged outside, and a flare of lightning illuminated his sleeping mother. Thunder immediately boomed overhead. For a moment, he’d thought it could have been the thunder that woke him, but the sound in the stone was so singular, he only knew of one source.
The heavy iron door that separated the male prisoners from the female cells.
Deep voices filtered down the hall. Male voices. Not guards, either. He knew the sound of the guards. Their footsteps were more clipped against the stone made by cobbled boots with sturdy soles.
Christopher put his ear to the floor. These steps were shuffled. The feet were bare.
Terror ripped through him as lightning once again threw menacing shadows against the wall. But these shadows were no illusion.
They belonged to the men invading his cell.
These were no guards, that much he could tell from the brief second he’d seen them. They were filthy, even by prisoner’s standards. Frightening. Leering. Growling.
Seized by painful hands, Christopher fought like a savage. Panic hid all the teachings of Master Ping from his memory. He couldn’t find his center line from the floor. Couldn’t form a fist. He couldn’t get the weight of the man three times his size off him, no matter how violently he tried.
“Christopher!” His mother cried his name in the darkness. “Christopher, run!” Pure, paralyzing horror held him just as captive as the giant with the knee in his back, grinding his cheek into the ground.
Treadwell had made good on his earlier threat.
“Please don’t hurt my son,” his mother pleaded.
“We’re not here for the boy,” one of them snickered. “But make a noise and we’ll gut him. Now which one of us will have you first?”
Christopher fought until his captor held his cheek down by the coal beds. The orange glow turned everything past it into writhing shadows. The raging storm didn’t drown out the grunts, the moans …
His mother’s whimpers.
He came to fear the lightning. To dread the illumination of the violent depravity they forced upon the person who was his entire universe. Tears streamed onto the filthy stone beneath him. His meager supper crawled its way back up his throat, threatening to choke him. He wanted to look away. To disappear. He wanted to die. To kill.
“Look away, Pigeon,” his mother gasped.
But he forced himself to watch. To watch them as they held her down. To memorize and catalog every sneering, rutting, grunting bastard’s face with each electric slash of light. Four of them in all.
Rage ripped through him, fueled by heat and fear and youth and helplessness. His soul became as enraged as the storm.
When the man restraining him was replaced by another readying to take his turn, Christopher lunged, catching the brute in the throat, and he didn’t stop punching until he felled the man.
He dimly heard his mother’s weak and hoarse scream before pain exploded behind his eyes, and he crashed to the floor, stunned.
The world spun around him, dipped and tossed in such a way that made him want to hold on to something, to reach out and make it stop. Shadows rose and fell, doubled and then transposed. Thunder crashed, or was it the door?
Then the storm hurling itself against the roof was the only sound ripping through his pounding head.
Mother. Where was his mother? Was she—
“Christopher?”
With herculean effort, he turned his neck to see her shadow draped on the opposite side of the quickly dimming coals. She crawled toward him on her elbows, but couldn’t seem to make it around the fire pit.
Fear chased the vertigo away and he summoned the strength to lift himself from the floor.
“Mum,” he croaked, staggering to where she’d collapsed.
“Christopher.” Her voice, barely above a whisper, mirrored his terror. “Are you hurt, my son?”
“No. I’m okay. Mum, don’t move. I’ll call the guards.” He knelt over her, afraid to touch her. Afraid to put his hands anywhere.
“There was a knife, Pigeon, did they—” She panted a bit, as though trying to catch her breath. “Did they cut you?” Her hands, usually so strong, so sure, feathered over his face, his shoulders, and down his torso.
“A knife?” He shook his head, still trying to clear it. “They didn’t cut me…”
A warm, sticky sensation pooled against his knee and he suddenly wondered if he hadn’t been somehow stabbed. But there was no pain. No cut.
A new dawning horror licked at his soul.
“Throw another log on the fire, Pigeon, it’s so cold.”
The warm liquid slid down his leg as he hastily fetched two small logs and steepled them over the coals. Lightning flashed before the logs caught flame, illuminating the most grim sight of the entire horror-filled night.
Blood. Spreading from the prone form of his mother, threatening each wall of their tiny cell. He cried for help, clinging to the bars and pressing his face as far against the opening as he could. He called out for someone, anyone. Female voices answered from the darkness. Some concerned, some angry.
But no one came.
Breath exploding from his thin chest, he turned back to his beloved mother, now wreathed in the golden glow of their pathetic fire.
“Mum.” He knelt next to her on the side the blood had not yet reached; distressed to see how fast it crawled toward him, the edge of the red pool beveled in the light of the flame. “What do I do?” He groaned, hot tears blurring his vision. “Tell me what to do.”
“Oh, Pigeon, there’s nothing … to be done.” Tears streaked from her own eyes, but she could no longer reach for him. She sounded afraid, which intensified his own despair. He gathered her head against his chest, clutching her to him as though if he held on tightly enough, he could keep her with him.
“Don’t leave me,” he begged, not caring how small he sounded. “I’m sorry I didn’t stay still. I’m sorry. I was angry. I didn’t know about the knife. Don’t leave. I’m sorry!”
“Sing me the lullaby, Pigeon,” she whispered. “I can’t see you anymore.”
He forced the words through a throat blocked with terror and pain.
Hush Hush in the evening,
Good dreams will come stealing.
Of freedom and laughter
and peace ever after …
His mother smiled, though blood leaked from the corner of her mouth and trickled into her hair. Her skin was so cold. Waxy. But the pool in which he sat was warm. Enveloping them both.
Ye’ll smile while you’re sleeping …
And watch I’ll be keeping—
His voice caught on a sob. Then another. He couldn’t go on singing. But he didn’t have to.
She coughed. Her chest heaving. Then it deflated, hot breath hitting his skin like the words she could no longer say. Out and out and out until she was perfectly still.
Christopher couldn’t hear. Someone was screaming. Loud, long, ear-shattering peals of desperation. Screaming like their soul might escape through their throat. Screaming loud enough to wake the gods. Loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of the nightmarish place he’d called home. To be heard over the storm, and the thunder, and the silence of his dead mother.
Christopher wished the screaming would stop. But it didn’t. Not for a long, long time.
Eventually the fire died. The stones cooled the blood beneath him and turned it to ice. The shell of his mother cooled also. As the warmth seeped out of her corpse and she stiffened to a heavy weight in his young, trembling arms, all that was warm leaked away from him, as well. He felt it leaving with a mild sense of curiosity.
It felt … like water. Sitting in pool of water. It was only water. Surrounding him. Covering him. Caked to his skin. Filling the cracks of the stone. The space of his container.
Water. He understood now. He’d learned the lesson Master Ping had been trying to impart to him. There in the stormy darkness he was learning to be like water. Patient. Ruthless.
Laying his heavy mother on the slick ground, he stood, feeling as though he had no bones. As though he didn’t reside in his body. But out of it. Around it. Like the water.
All the water on the stones.
He stood facing the door, still as the stone, and began the forms he’d been drilling earlier in the rain. When the door opened he would go to Master Ping. He would tell him that he understood now. That he was like water.
Ready for death to flow from his hands.
