TWO DAYS LATER, THE MATRON BROUGHT CHARLES DOWN TO THE wharf after breakfast. Bradley arrived a few minutes later, and Fielding piloted them over to City Point. Beyond their initial greeting at the wharf, Charles and Bradley exchanged no words during the trip. Even Fielding, who had been known to chat with farm animals if no humans were available, had nothing to say.
A carriage met them at City Point, and for the first time since Aidan’s arrest, Charles was able to completely, if briefly, forget about the mess they were in. For all the carriages he had seen every day of his life in Boston, he had never ridden in one. He stepped up into the cabin and was struck at how all the street sounds were pleasantly muffled, as if he and Bradley were eggs swaddled in a straw-lined crate. A moment after he sat down, he felt a pleasant warmth near his feet, and he bent down to see a small brazier half full of glowing coals underneath the bench. Carriages had heat? He thought of all the times he had trudged through snowy sidewalks with holes in his shoes, shivering uncontrollably, and he now realized the swells in the carriages that had passed him had been warming their fine leather boots. Had they ever looked out the window and seen him? And if they had, what had they thought?
Charles was still peering into the brazier when Bradley pounded twice on the ceiling of the carriage. They lurched forward, and Charles nearly fell to the floor before he righted himself. He felt embarrassed until he realized that Bradley was so preoccupied that he seemed not to have even seen Charles fall.
Travel was slow going. Every street seemed to have an obstacle of some sort: a vendor’s cart crossing, another carriage stopping to pick up a customer, a dead horse that protruded into the street. Charles would have been happy if it had taken all day. It was a revelation to see the city from this vantage point—slightly elevated, warm and safe in their quiet cocoon, without the need to navigate or even choose where to go, all to the heartbeat of their horse’s hooves clopping on the cobblestones. He found himself seeing common things that seemed different and new: a woman lifting her long skirt to avoid a brush with a pile of manure, two men in bowlers buying oysters from a pushcart, a newsie his age hawking his last paper on the corner.
His sense of thrill and wonderment came to an abrupt end when they pulled up in front of the Charles Street Jail. Back on the island, Charles had stopped to contemplate the fact that he would be entering this place of incarceration—a place where he had briefly been a guest before being sent to Westboro—but he had told himself that it would be different knowing that he would be on the other side of the bars this time. Now that he was staring up at the gray granite building, however, that distinction seemed less compelling. Despite knowing that Aidan was inside, he wanted nothing more than to stay in the carriage and ride around the city. But already Bradley was propelling him, hand on shoulder, out of the carriage, and in less than a minute, they were through the main doors.
Through an archway, Charles could see the atrium, unforgettable in its scale and, as he now remembered, its cacophony of voices coming from cells in all directions whenever someone crossed the floor. But to his surprise, Bradley’s hand guided his shoulder not toward the atrium and Aidan but down a narrow corridor and into an office, where several adults waited.
“Sir, aren’t we going to see my brother?” he asked, trying not to reveal the panic that he was starting to feel.
“In time. First there are some people for you to meet.” Bradley looked at him for the first time today, and Charles knew that the time had come for him to start thinking on his feet again. Like the nights when he’d felt someone following him down at the Waterfront, his senses went on heightened alert, and he began taking in as much information as possible and processing it as quickly as he could.
There were three men and a woman in the room. They had all been sitting but rose when he and Bradley entered. By the way they were dressed, one of the men likely worked at the prison, and one was clearly a police officer. The remaining man and woman were dressed well and stood together, the woman’s hand on the man’s forearm. Bradley shook everyone’s hand, and they all sat down.
“This is Charles Weston,” said Bradley to the group, “brother of the accused. Charles, this is Warden Lewis, Officer Dolan, and Mrs. Pemberton and her nephew, Mr. Hanley.” Bradley stopped to clear his throat. “Mrs. Pemberton is the witness that saw the attack on her husband.”
“She didn’t,” said Charles quickly. All eyes turned to him.
“I beg your pardon, young man,” said Mrs. Pemberton, her hand digging into her nephew’s arm as her brows formed an angry furrow. “I believe I will be the judge of what I did and did not see!”
“You seen him on the ground bleedin’ right after, but you wasn’t in the alley when it happened.”
The police officer leaned forward in his chair. “And how exactly do you know this?”
“Because I was there. With my brother.”
“And you saw your brother knife Mr. Pemberton?”
“No, he didn’t do it, but we saw the mugs that did it. Two of them.”
The officer leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “This is getting to be a pretty crowded alley now. We have Mr. Pemberton and then Mrs. Pemberton, and you and your brother, plus two others. Men?”
“No, young, like us.”
“About your age, then?”
“Yes. Sir. Looked a lot like us, in fact,” he added.
The officer started to say something, but Mrs. Pemberton cut him off. “No, that’s not right.”
A feeling of horror, like ice water dripping down his scalp, descended onto Charles. Now he could see the flaw in his story, but it was too late. Frantically, he tried to think of a way around this flaw, but he came up empty.
Mrs. Pemberton crossed her arms. “There were only two boys in the alley. They had run across the street but turned when I screamed. The one I identified, he was in front with the bloodstains on his shirt. The other one I couldn’t see very well. I could only say that he was . . . well, he was blond.”
Everyone, even Bradley, looked at Charles’s hair. Charles wished he could put his cap on. Or, even better, sink through the floor.
After a moment, when it seemed that no one had any more to say about what happened in the alley, the Warden said to Bradley, “And then there is the issue of the accused’s relationship to this boy, as I wrote to you about, Mr. Bradley.” Turning to Charles, he said, “The boy we have locked up here says his name is Aidan Sullivan of the West End. This name was not familiar to your superintendent.”
All Charles could think was, Shit.
Bradley rotated in his seat to face Charles. “Explain this,” he said urgently, half angry, half pleading, in a way that made Charles feel like he and Bradley were the only people in the room. Charles’s vision tunneled. He could see one of Bradley’s eyebrow hairs angling up out of line with the others and a streak of brown in the hazel iris of his left eye. “Explain to me how Mrs. Pemberton could be wrong and why Arthur is lying about not being your brother. Convince me that everything you told me back at the school is true.”
But Charles could not.
There were visitors every day on Aidan’s corridor, but when each one had failed to be for him, he had given up hope and stopped even bothering to rouse himself when footsteps approached. So he was unprepared when Bradley arrived, and he didn’t look up from his bed until the guard cleared his throat in annoyance.
“Mr. Bradley,” Aidan said with some reverence as he stood.
Bradley’s posture was ramrod straight as he considered Aidan through the bars. “They tell me you are not who I thought you were. I came to hear this from your mouth.”
“Sir, I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“Spare me your excuses. I want to know your name.”
“My name is Aidan Sullivan, sir.”
“I see. And why should I believe this name when the previous name was untrue?”
“I have nothing to hide now.”
“Really. Tell me. Did you knife that man?”
Aidan opened his mouth to speak but stopped himself before any sound came out. What should he say? He didn’t plunge the knife into the man’s belly, but he didn’t want Bradley to think that he was proclaiming his innocence. Most of all, he was tired, so tired, of lying. He needed to say only true things if he wanted any chance of redemption.
“I am guilty, sir.”
Aidan would wonder long into the night what Bradley would have said in response if they hadn’t been interrupted by another guard bringing another visitor. At least, Aidan assumed Charles was his visitor, until the new guard opened the door and shoved Charles inside.
After the door clanked shut, the boys both stared across the divide at Bradley, who looked from one boy to the other. Had he seen Bradley’s face out of context, Aidan would have said that the superintendent was trying to mask a physical pain. Finally Bradley turned away, and with the guards trailing him he trudged down the corridor, abandoned by his straight posture, eyes cast downward.
Charles turned to Aidan and was able to say “Hey” before Aidan slammed him with his left hook.
Aidan remained in boxing stance, waiting for Charles to retaliate, but for once, Charles’s temper didn’t ignite. He rubbed the side of his face as he lay on the floor, then pulled himself to sitting and leaned his back against the wall with a groan.
Aidan stood over him. “Why the feck didn’t you tell me about me ma?”
“Jesus, Sully, I’m kinda having a bad day here. Can’t you just say hello like everyone else?” He looked up at Aidan. “Wait, how did you find out about your ma?”
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t from you back on the island, was it now?” Aidan’s brogue was free of constraint now, and it bounced harshly off the granite walls of the cell.
“I couldn’t! Think about it! I knew you’d be all broken up, and how could we explain it to anyone there? You would’ve had to pretend that you weren’t grieving her, that everything was grand! How could you do that?”
Aidan sat on the bed and looked at his hands. He couldn’t have pretended. He hadn’t thought about it like that, and now he grudgingly admitted to himself that Charles was right. His vision swam as his eyes filled with tears, even though he thought he had cried every tear he had yesterday when he got the note.
Charles got up and sat on the bed next to him. “How did you find out?”
“Really? In here? How did she even know you were here?”
Aidan wiped the corner of his eyes with the heel of his hands. “I dunno. Guess she has her sources. Knew how to bribe the guard to bring the note pretty quick, too.”
“I don’t get it. Why would she write you about your ma?”
“That’s not what she wrote me for, ya eedjit. Mainly she wanted to remind me that we agreed not to finger her for helping us get onto the island. But then at the end she mentioned that she was sorry about me ma and how she would have told me when she visited but she didn’t want to wreck the day, so she hoped you broke it to me gentle.”
“Can I see the note?”
“She told me to tear it up and eat it so nobody would see it.”
“You ate it?”
“Better than some of the food they serve in here.” Aidan allowed himself a little smile, despite everything.
They sat side by side for a while, listening to the sounds of the other inmates echoing off the corridor. Someone nearby had a hacking cough that was so constant Aidan hardly heard it anymore. Farther away, a woman cried. It sounded muffled, as if she were sobbing into her skirts. In the cell right next to them, someone started pissing into a pail.
“Jesus,” said Charles, his voice shaky, “I swore I’d never get sent back here. Being locked up . . . Jesus. I don’t think I can take this.”
“Not much choice now, is there?” But Aidan regretted his words as soon as they were out of his mouth. He wasn’t used to seeing Charles like this, without his defenses, without a plan. It reminded him of when Charles went all woozy after seeing the blood pouring out of that poor swell in the alley. “This is where you were before Westboro, right?”
Charles nodded.
“Did someone from the Charities come and see you in here?”
“Yeah, that’s right, they did. Children’s Aid. Did they come for you?”
“It’s St. Vincent’s for the Catholics, but yeah.”
“How’d that go?”
“I dunno,” said Aidan. The man who had shown up that morning, Mr. Flynn, had been friendly, but with every answer Aidan had given, the man had seemed to become more and more discouraged. Once Mr. Sutton had left the night before, Aidan had realized he would be asked about the crime in great detail, and he’d resolved that he would tell the truth about all of it. The only part that had given him pause was Charles’s involvement. As far as he knew, Charles had not been implicated, and Aidan did not want to be the one to do it. Right before he fell asleep that night, he’d decided he would relay all the details truthfully but withhold the identity of his accomplice. But Flynn was not pleased to hear his description of the events. Aidan got the impression that the man thought he was lying, and he had clearly been disappointed to learn that Aidan had no relatives to be interviewed or to provide a character reference.
Charles covered his eyes with the palms of his hands as he spoke. “When I was in Westboro, I met plenty of mugs that was there for robbing people, some for hurting other people bad in a fight, but I never met anybody that killed somebody.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “Did that St. Vincent’s fellow say what was gonna happen to us?”
“They didn’t tell you?” When Charles’s confused face didn’t clear, Aidan slapped Charles on the thigh. “Well, on this day when you thought there was no good news, I have some good news for ya. Turns out we didn’t kill that swell after all. Old Pemberton’s alive and well.”