Home > From Rags to Kisses (The Survivors #11)(5)

From Rags to Kisses (The Survivors #11)(5)
Author: Shana Galen

“Which ‘alf do ye want?” she asked.

“Hmm.” He considered. This was a game they often played. It didn’t have a name, but he thought of it as Emperors of All They Surveyed. He pointed and made a slicing motion with his arm. “I’ll take this half.”

“Ye always take the Tower.”

“I can’t let it fall into the wrong hands. I left you Vauxhall Gardens, and there’s plenty of entertainment there.”

“We should go,” she said. “To celebrate.”

He glanced at her. “Celebrate what?”

“It’s spring again.” She gestured to some trees in the distance. They were beginning to bud with green. “We’ve been friends for a year now.”

Aidan didn’t quite know that he wanted to celebrate the fact that he’d been an orphan for a year. But it was a year he’d survived. He supposed that was something to honor.

“Wot would ye buy if ye ‘ad all the blunt in the world?” she asked as the shadows grew longer and the sun dipped below St. Paul’s spire.

He was hungry—he was always hungry at thirteen—and he began listing all the food he could think of. The food his mother had made him when she was alive. “Meat pies and hot cross buns and apple tart and buttered turnip mash and—”

She waved a hand. “All ye ever think about is stuffing yer potato ‘ole.”

Aidan didn’t understand how she couldn’t think about food. They’d split a rotten apple this morning and had nothing else the entire day. Hunger seemed to gnaw at him like a beast with insomnia living in his belly. But Aidan had learned that the more he thought about food, the worse it was. Jenny was right to move the topic away from all the food they didn’t have. “Very well, what would you buy?”

“I’d buy me a ticket.”

“A ticket? To Vauxhall Gardens?”

“Maybe. Or maybe I’d buy me a ticket to that big museum. The one with all the dead people.”

He had to translate that. “The British Museum and the mummies?”

She looked at him. “ ‘Ave ye been?”

He shook his head. “No, but I read about it in the papers, and we learned about the Egyptians at school.”

“I wish I could go to school,” she said.

Aidan rolled his eyes. They’d had this conversation before, and Aidan had assured her she would hate school. “You’d have to sit still all day,” he reminded her. “No talking, hands folded before you. And you’d have to wear a dress.”

“I like dresses,” she said, which was obviously a lie. He’d never seen her wear one.

Aidan thought harder. “You’d have to be inside all day.”

Jenny sighed, and he knew he’d made his point. He couldn’t picture her in school. She was like a bird who would die if caged. She loved her freedom. But he hated to think of her despondent. “I taught you how to read a little,” he said. “And do simple sums. Once you know that, you can teach yourself the rest, anyway.”

“I suppose yer right, but if I ‘ad some schooling, maybe I’d know wot this was.” She pulled a small silver piece from her pocket and held it out to him. Aidan took it and immediately placed the opening on his pinky finger. It fit just over the tip like a small cover.

“It feels too heavy for silver,” he said.

“It’s pewter,” she said. “Not as valuable.”

“The scrollwork is nice.” He admired the vines teched on the outside of the metal. “Is it a thimble?”

She shook her head. “Too long and thin. I thought it might be the top part of a long case.”

Aidan nodded. It would have been a small case to hold small items. It looked like the sort of thing a lady might own, but his mother had not been a lady. “Where did you find it?”

She shrugged. “Around.”

He gave her a long look.

“All right then. One of the mudlarks gave it to me.”

Aidan jumped up and almost lost his balance. Jenny quickly pulled him back down.

“Ye’ll fall off, ye will, and then wot will I do!”

“I wouldn’t fall off if you didn’t lie to me. No one gives away anything for free.” If he’d learned anything in a year, he’d learned that.

She sighed and held out her hand. He dropped the pewter piece back into it. “I shouldn’t ‘ave done it, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Billy said he thought it was a ‘undred years old.”

Aidan snorted. “Not likely.”

“They do find old things. Billy showed me an old coin once.”

“Billy would tell you anything if he thought he might get the chance to kiss you or feel under your shirt.” Heat flashed through him at the thought of anyone touching Jenny. Not that Aidan wanted to kiss her or touch her. He didn’t think about her that way. He’d really only started to look at girls differently. Just started to notice that Jenny didn’t look as much like a boy as she used to now that she was fourteen. But he told himself to stop noticing. Jenny was his friend, like a sister to him. But when he thought of Billy kissing her, Aidan felt more jealous than the urge to protect.

“Fat chance of that,” she said with a laugh. “ ‘e smells like a sewer.”

Aidan wondered if he smelled any better. “Then how did you get that pewter bauble?” he asked. Billy might have a soft spot for a pretty girl—and Jenny with her blue-gray eyes and black hair was indisputably pretty—but he had a boss who oversaw his work, and he couldn’t come home empty-handed unless he wanted a beating. But one of the other boys might give him one of their finds if...

Aidan’s belly rumbled. “You didn’t.”

“It was all I ‘ad besides the apple,” she said.

“You told me the baker was out of day-old bread!”

“No, I didn’t. Ye assumed that.”

It was true. When they’d met up—he with the apple and she without the bread—he’d immediately said how disappointed he was that the baker was out of the bread he’d give them in exchange for lugging sacks of flour or sweeping his shop floor. “You didn’t correct me.”

“I’m correcting ye now.”

“You traded our food for”—he gestured to the useless piece of pewter—“this!”

She stood up and swiped at her face. If Aidan didn’t know her better, he’d think she was crying. “Ye don’t understand,” she said. And then with an agility Aidan could only dream about, she’d jumped to another roof and then another, and he was left in the burnt orange of the setting sun alone.

He went after her a half hour later. There were only two places she could be. One was her parents’ house. She sometimes stopped in to see if her ma had any food or coin. But what her ma earned on her back, she spent on gin. And if she didn’t spend it, Jenny’s father took it and disappeared for days. But she wouldn’t go home with the pewter trinket. Aidan knew exactly where she’d take it. He made his way through Spitalfields, careful not to attract the attention of any of a number of groups of boys and men looking for an easy target. Aidan didn’t have any coin, but they’d beat him for the fun of it or to take his shoes or his coat. And Aidan didn’t relish going without.

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air #
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)