The Alarming Career of Sir Richard Blackstone Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Doan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the author’s imagination or used factitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover illustration by Chris Piascik

  Cover design by Georgia Morrissey

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1122-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1123-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  Interior design by Joshua L. Barnaby

  CHAPTER ONE

  Henry slid across the slimy cobblestones of Fleet Street and cut around St. Bride’s Church. It had rained the night before, and the brown sludge of filth that had been pitched out of every window coated the streets and pooled in the cracks between stones.

  Henry’s mother lagged behind him. She was a portly woman, as short in body as she was short in temper. Henry’s father, on the other hand, was a tall and lanky man. A faster man. A man who gained upon Henry with every step.

  Henry weaved in and out of the hawkers crowding the street. He dodged a boy waving copies of The Tattletale and shouting the headline of the day—Her Majesty’s health was much improved. He zigzagged around makeshift tables piled high with oysters, men pushing barrows of kidney pie, and girls carrying baskets of eels and oranges.

  Henry had been living on the streets for months, desperately searching for a way out of London. Every day of those months, his parents had dogged him throughout the city. They had nearly caught him a week ago when he let down his guard while strolling along the Thames watching a ship hoist its mighty sails. Now, just when the baker had told him of a promising advertisement for work in the Hampshire countryside, his parents had spotted him again. The chase was on, and if he couldn’t lose them quickly, he would miss his chance at the position.

  He couldn’t afford to miss it. The advertisement offered a job with pay, and that meant it wasn’t an apprenticeship. He would not be bound to anybody, and those sorts of opportunities did not come along every day.

  Henry’s father was closing in, the soles of his leather boots slapping on the cobblestones behind him.

  His father yelled, “Thief!”

  Henry pumped his legs ever faster and braced himself to be tackled to the ground by citizens answering the call of thief. If they got hold of him, it would be a miracle if he ever stood again. That’s what happened to thieving boys. A constable would be brought, but by the time he arrived he would find his work had been made easy. The thief would be no more. Only, his father knew that Henry wasn’t a thieving boy.

  Henry ducked outstretched arms. He plunged down narrow alleys and flew around twists and turns, dodging behind dilapidated buildings and jumping over wooden fences. A boy who shifted for himself on the streets knew every cranny and hidey-hole. He ran toward Ludgate Hill. If he could lose his pursuers, he might be able to apply for that job yet.

  Henry glanced over his shoulder before he swung around a corner. He had lost the crowd. The address he looked for, 55 Ludgate, was straight ahead. Henry bounded up the stairs, threw the door open, and collided with a gentleman who was on his way out.

  The man, sandy-haired and in his early thirties, lay sprawled on the top step. He was richly dressed in a dark green coat with large brass buttons, breeches, and polished black boots. Struggling into a sitting position, the man peered at the overturned boxes splayed across the stone stairs. A look of horror spread over his features. “He’s escaped,” the man cried. “The Phyllobates terribilis. He’s out!”

  Henry looked around him. A small yellow toad with round black eyes sat placidly on the pavement.

  Henry scrambled to his feet. “Sorry to knock you over like that, sir. I’ll catch your toad and you’ll be good as new.”

  Henry stepped down to get a better look at the interesting creature. He had seen a picture of a brown toad in a book once, but never anything like this brilliant yellow. Of course, the only creatures a person was likely to see in the city were horses, rats, and stray dogs. Jimmy Jenkins—a boy who had actually lived in the country—had told him the country teemed with fox and rabbit and hedgehogs. Henry supposed that such a wondrous thing as this yellow toad might exist there too, even if Jimmy Jenkins had forgotten to tell him about it. He slowly reached out his hand.

  “Don’t touch it!” the man said. “It’s a frog, not a toad. A poisonous dart frog from South America.”

  Henry yanked his hand back. “Did you say poisonous, sir?”

  The gentleman dusted himself off. “I did say poisonous. He’s lovely, isn’t he? But on no account spook him. As a general rule, Phyllobates terribilis aren’t prone to being spooked. However, this particular Phyllobates terribilis finds himself in a foreign city, and one cannot guess what he thinks of it. If I were to lose him on the streets of London and he went about poisoning people, the queen would have me hanged. She’s highly suspicious of foreigners—frogs included—and would look severely upon such a creature’s owner.”

  The frog was poisonous and the man was swell enough to know the queen?

  “That benign-looking creature,” the man said, “has got enough poison on its skin to kill twenty men.”

  This was getting more complicated by the minute. It was dangerous to be standing on the street while his parents were looking for him and not far off. Maybe he should just run. He could bolt to Whitechapel and lose himself in its dangerous warren of narrow streets and dark alleys.

  But then he had an idea.

  Henry fished his tin cup from his coat pocket and ripped the top off one of the man’s paper boxes. He crept slowly toward the frog. It stared at him with big curious eyes. Henry wondered if the creature knew that it could kill him, and then another nineteen people.

  Henry gently closed the cup over top of the frog, then slid the paper underneath. He eased the cup upside down. The frog plopped onto the bottom. “Here we go, sir. We’ll just put him back in his rightful box and it will all be as if it never happened.”

  The gentleman looked over his pile of boxes. “Ah, here it is,” he said, picking up a rectangular wooden box with holes punched in the top. “I see what’s happened. The latch came loose when I stumbled.”

  Henry flinched. The man hadn’t stumbled; he had been bowled over by a street boy. Henry never could understand why kindness stung him with sadness. It had always been so with the baker; each time Mr. Clemens slipped him a penny loaf, Henry’s eyes watered.

  The gentleman held the box open while Henry gently slid the frog inside. The man snapped the lid shut and closed the latch. “Well now, no harm done,” he said. “You’re a clever chap, thinking up a solution in the heat of the moment. I imagine you’re a great help to your mother and father.”

  At the mention of his par
ents, Henry felt that familiar urge to run. Run far and run fast.

  “What is the matter, boy?”

  “Um,” Henry said, glancing behind him to be certain the recently mentioned mother and father weren’t barreling down the road. “Sadly, sir, I’m an orphan.”

  Henry had told this lie often enough. He wished it were true. Henry’s parents were cold and ruthless people. He suspected they had never wanted a child to begin with. Now, they were determined to sell him off as a chimney sweep. Henry was equally determined to escape such a fate. He had found he was not alone in that wish. There was no end of children hiding out to avoid being indentured. Some had even been bound in a contract and then escaped their masters. The boys told stories of working twelve-hour days in dark and dusty chimneys, the soot finding its way into every pore and settling into their lungs. The girls told stories from the dreaded match factory of dipping stick after stick into phosphorus until their hair began to fall out. So far Henry had eluded those horrors, but it was getting harder. His parents seemed to be getting more acquainted with his strategies for surviving on the streets and had begun appearing in the neighborhoods he frequented.

  “Ah,” the gentleman said, “so many children left to fend for themselves in this city. It’s criminal, really.” The man looked thoughtful. He stared at Henry’s cup. “I am afraid that is your sole possession, is it not?”

  “Except for my clothes, sir.”

  “And now it’s ruined. You won’t want to drink from that again. Alkaloid batrachotoxins are not to be fooled with.”

  “Alka-what?” Henry asked.

  “The poison. The poison on the frog’s skin has now been transferred to the inside of your cup.” The gentleman pulled a sack from one of his boxes. “One touch of it and you would find yourself paralyzed, your heart included. Once your heart stops, the game is up. Life has come to an end. Place the cup in here, and I’ll dispose of it safely. I’ll need to bury it somewhere.”

  Henry reluctantly let go of his cup. He had not thought of losing it when he decided to use it to capture the frog. Where would he get another one? The scraps of food and drops of drink he could scrounge went into that cup. It had taken him weeks of hard labor working for a fishmonger to earn the six pence to buy it from a secondhand shop.

  “But I’d have to know that you didn’t have any bad habits,” the man said.

  Henry realized the man had been talking while he agonized over his cup. “I’m sorry, what did you say, sir?”

  “I said, if I try you out as my assistant, I’d have to know I wasn’t bringing a hooligan into the house. Mrs. Splunket wouldn’t stand for it. It’s a risk, I know, taking in a street boy. But devil take it, there’s not a soul in Barton Commons who will do, and just now I’ve interviewed one blockhead after the next. At least you seem to know your way around a frog. I asked the last boy I interviewed if he would enjoy a job that included interesting wildlife. He said, ‘As long as they taste good.’ You may end up murdering us in our beds, but at least you’d be clever about it.”

  This was the man he had been racing to see! The advertisement by a Hampshire man engaged in scientific pursuits who looked for an assistant to help him in his work. “Sir,” Henry said, “I am not a hooligan. I will work morning and night. I will never even take a break to sleep! I will hardly eat. I will never need new clothes. And—”

  “Hold on, boy, before you make promises you can’t keep.” The man eyed Henry up and down. “You certainly do need new clothes. That coat was made for someone twice your size and has more holes than wool. You will sleep, all creatures must. And no boy eats only a little if he can help it. Still, you seem like an earnest young chap. We’ll give it a go.”

  The gentleman hailed a passing carriage. “I’ve had enough adventures on the streets of London for one day. We shall repair to The Angel and set off directly. Barton Commons is but a day’s journey out of the city.” After directing the driver to take them to the posthouse, he opened the door and stepped up into the carriage. Henry raced to gather the boxes and load them into the coach. He placed the box containing the Phyllobates terribilis onto the seat, careful not to jostle the creature.

  The man leaned out of the coach window and pointed to a small wooden box that still remained on the top step. “Careful with that one too,” he said. “That one may sit next to the Phyllobates terribilis.”

  Henry cautiously picked up the box. Tiny holes had been pierced through the wood on the top and he heard a soft scratching come from inside of it. Whatever it was, it was alive.

  He scrambled in next to the man and gently placed the box next to the Phyllobates terribilis.

  “I’m Sir Richard Blackstone, by the by,” the man said, looking intently at the two boxes that sat across from him.

  “Henry Hewitt, sir.”

  The coach started off. Henry heard a shout behind the carriage. A shout he recognized all too well. He turned to see his father jogging down the road. “Stop!” his father cried. “Stop that coach!”

  Henry sank down in his seat.

  “I don’t know that man,” Sir Richard said to the driver and waved him on. “Another lunatic carousing free in the streets, I suppose. This entire metropolis is bedlam.”

  By the time the coach barreled down Pentonville Road, Henry had the courage to peek out the window. His father was gone.

  The courtyard of The Angel bustled with hostlers wrangling horses into harnesses and passengers fighting to get off a mail coach against a sea of passengers determined to get on. Henry followed Sir Richard through the posthouse while the arrangements were made to depart London for Hampshire. Sir Richard had directed Henry that he was to carry the two boxes, one with the Phyllobates terribilis and the other containing he knew not what. A hostler would transfer the other packages, but Henry was not to let anyone touch the two boxes. He held them away from his body in case a latch might suddenly spring open and some creature make a leap at him.

  He was going to the country. The blessed country! Henry did not have any firsthand knowledge about the countryside, other than what Jimmy Jenkins had told him. When he had first met him, Jimmy had said that just as London was covered in soot, so the countryside was covered in greenery. Henry had not believed it; the whole idea had sounded fantastical. Jimmy had taken him across the city to a fancy neighborhood and introduced him to Hyde Park. There, they had run along the paths and around the trees and through acres of greenery until they were chased out by a constable. From what Henry had seen of Hyde Park, he now knew that such a landscape of green was possible; it just seemed incredible that he should be able to go live in it.

  They were led to a private room and Sir Richard ordered food. Henry carefully set down the boxes on the chair next to him and dove into sausages, slurped down oysters, and took large bites of fresh-baked bread slathered in butter. Sir Richard eyed him and said, “Yes, I see what you mean. You eat like a bird.”

  Henry slowly laid down a forkful of sausage. He had already forgotten that he had promised not to eat very much.

  Sir Richard laughed and said, “Carry on, Henry. We are not short of food at the manor—Mrs. Splunket sees to that. I expect she’ll be pleased to have somebody about the place who has a real enthusiasm for it.”

  Henry was on his way to a manor. A manor was not just a regular house, it was practically a castle. He would work for a sir, not an everyday mister. A wonderful woman named Mrs. Splunket lived there and liked a person to be enthusiastic about food. Henry guessed that he and Mrs. Splunket would get on famously.

  After Henry had demolished the rest of his sausage and ensured that the only clues that a loaf of bread had once been on the table were the tiniest of crumbs, they made their way to the courtyard.

  A smart-looking chaise pulled by four matched bay horses pulled up in front of the inn.

  Even though Sir Richard was a knight, Henry had not expected a private carriage. He had assumed they waited for the next mail coach. Sir Richard would be squeezed in with a crowd of
other people who were able to pay for the privilege. Henry would be hanging on somewhere outside. He had heard all about it from the baker. Mr. Clemens said that riding in a mail coach didn’t kill a person, it just made a person wish to be killed.

  A stocky man, squeezed into green and white livery like one of the pork sausages Henry had just eaten, tipped his hat to Sir Richard. The coachman stared at Henry.

  “Ah, Bertram,” Sir Richard said. “This is my new assistant, Henry Hewitt.”

  Bertram looked down his short, pudgy nose and eyed Henry’s coat full of holes and his grimy face. The coachman narrowed his eyes with suspicion.

  “Get on with you,” Sir Richard said to Bertram. “Yes, you highly disapprove, I can see that. Fortunately, it was never your decision.”

  Bertram seemed satisfied that his feelings were so well known without his having to speak them. He nodded and opened the door to the chaise.

  Sir Richard climbed in. Henry attempted to go in after him, but Bertram grabbed him by the collar and said, “You ride outside.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Bertram,” Sir Richard called from inside the coach. “There’s room for four people in here. I’d let you in if you weren’t driving the horses.”

  Bertram reluctantly let Henry go and muttered, “Them is leather seats in there. Who’s to be cleaning the London soot off of ’em afterwards? Only myself.”

  Henry climbed in and sat on the bench next to Sir Richard. He set the two boxes on the seat across from him and pushed them against the backrest. He picked up a blanket he found folded up in a corner and placed it in front of the boxes so they wouldn’t tumble off if the coach hit any bumps in the road.

  Sir Richard looked over Henry’s handiwork and said, “I see what you’ve done. Clever.”

  The carriage made its way through the crowded London streets. However unpleasant Bertram was, he was a skilled driver. He weaved around farmers’ carts, hansom cabs, and pedestrians, and shouted out insults when something or someone refused to move out of the way.

  Henry leaned back, making certain that his face was away from the window. He was close to a new life, but it would be quickly undone if he were spotted by his mother or father.