Page 1 of Thief of Hearts
P ROLOGUE
London 1780
H IS MOTHER’S SCREAM SLICED THROUGH the fabric of the night.
Its agonized timbre went unheeded amidst the rattling cart wheels, bawling street vendors, cooing prostitutes, and clamor of voices outside the narrow crib. The boy crouched beside a pile of quilts and pressed a rusted dipper against his mother’s lips. Brackish water trickled down her chin.
“There now, Ma. Try to drink a bit,” he urged.
As she attempted a feeble swallow, the boy’s nervous gaze flicked to her distended abdomen. Its bloated contours were an obscene contrast to her flaccid skin and prominent ribs.
She was too old to be having this baby, he thought frantically. Nearly a month past twenty-eight. Her fingernails dug into his knuckles as another bout of agony seized her. The dipper slid from his hand. He clenched his teeth against his own cry of pain and held fast to her hands, fighting the despairing litany that drowned out even her screams. Too old. Too thin. Too poor .
Her fingers slowly relaxed as she lapsed into exhausted stupor. Her silence frightened him more than her screams. It was as if she’d surrendered her last pathetic hope of relief. He was reaching to shake her awake when the door behind him burst open.
A man stumbled in, his rumpled uniform marking him as a sailor. “Molly!” he bellowed, his breath reeking of gin. “Where’s my pretty girl?”
The boy leaped to his feet. “Out, damn y’! Y’ve no right to burst in here like y’ own the bloody place!”
The boy was shocked by his own virulence. The man might even be the father of this child, he thought, before realizing bitterly that it could be any one of a dozen men.
The sailor blinked stupidly at him, more addled by gin than given to petty cruelty. “Damn your insolence, whelp! I been at sea for ten months without so much as a kiss from a comely chit.” He lifted his fist to cuff the boy out of the way. “No need to be jealous, lad. There’s ample room ’tween thighs as willin’ as Molly’s.”
Futile rage tinged the boy’s vision with scarlet. Without even realizing the gravity of what he was doing, he snatched up the paring knife his mother had laid out to cut the baby’s cord. His ears roared with the remembered grunts and groans of all the men his mother had bedded to put bread in his mouth.
He brandished the knife like a sword. “Out of here, mate,” he said softly, “before I carve y’ a new gullet.”
The sailor lowered his fist, sobered by the unflinching light in the boy’s eyes. He’d sailed in the Royal Navy for over twenty years as an able seaman, thumbing his nose at the death-spewing cannons of both pirates and Frenchies, but now his nostrils twitched as if he could already scent his own spilled blood.
Before he could retreat, a hoarse whimper, more animal than human, arose from the shadows behind the boy. The lad spun around and dropped to his knees beside the tattered quilts. The sailor peered over his narrow shoulders, catching a glimpse of sunken cheeks, stark eyes, and the tortured contractions of a swollen abdomen.
His stomach rebelled. Most of his mates were eager to spill their seed, but only too happy to be at full sail when it took root. He clapped a hand over his mouth and stumbled out of the hovel, knowing with a sailor’s instinct that he had witnessed not only impending birth, but impending death.
“The babe’s comin’, lad,” Molly whispered through cracked lips.
The intruder forgotten, the boy fumbled with the things she had commanded he fetch. A basin of cloudy water. A nest of rags. A length of dirty twine. Swallowing his fear, he drew back the sheet that covered her legs.
She arched off the quilts and bit her bottom lip until it pearled with blood, but she did not make another sound until the tiny creature spilled into her son’s waiting hands. A groan of pure relief broke from her throat.
The boy followed her whispered instructions, refusing to look at the cause of her pain, already hating it for what it Would cost him. He swaddled it in the rags, then laid it in the crook of her arm.
As she gazed into her baby’s face, the echo of a smile trembled on her lips, giving her son a heartbreaking glimpse of the beauty that must have once enchanted his father.
When he would have turned away from the sight, she clutched his arm, searching his fine features as avidly as she had searched the babe’s. “Y’re a good boy, son. Just like y’r pa. Don’t ever forget it.”
He closed his eyes against the bittersweet refrain. If his pa was so fine, why had he left them for the sea? Why had he chosen her salty grave over the adoration of a wife who would have waited forever for his return?
A wisp of a sigh rose from the quilt. He lifted his head to find his mother’s eyes as barren as his hopes. A burning knot tightened in his throat. He leaned over and kissed her cool brow.
“Night, Ma,” he whispered, gently closing her eyes.
The alien creature was beginning to squirm in her limp arm. The boy eyed it with distaste, then reluctantly reached for it as he knew his mother would have wished. It . He refused to think of it as anything else. As he drew it toward his chest, his trembling legs folded beneath the weight of responsibility.
He would have to find a girl to nurse it. He should have no trouble there. Births were as common as deaths in this twisting warren of alleys. His disgruntled gaze lingered on the thing’s face. He supposed he should wash it. It was dirty, but when had anything clean ever come from this place? It would be coughing up soot like the rest of them soon enough.
He stroked a finger down the babe’s cheek, marveling that anything so chubby had emerged from his mother’s wasted flesh. Their gazes met, the baby’s unfocused, his sullen. Curiosity overcame his disgust and he unwound the rags.
Amazed at the miniature perfection, he felt his lips twitch in bemusement. “Well, lad, it seems y’ve got all the right equipment.”
Lad. Boy. Brother .
His brother. A wave of protectiveness crested in him as his arms tightened around the tiny bundle. The poor creature had no mother. Tears of grief welled in his eyes; he dashed them away. At least he’d had a pa to give him a name. This little bugger had no one. No one but him.
From outside the crib, a roar of drunken laughter mocked his fresh emotions. He couldn’t bear another moment trapped with the empty shell that had been his mother. Cradling the baby awkwardly against his chest, he rose and ducked into the chaos of the night.
No one paid him any heed as he rushed down the cobbled alley, blindly seeking the one place where he might wash the stench of birth and death from his nostrils. The graceful spars of the docked ships soared into the night sky, drawing him like a beacon.
Was this what had drawn his father? he wondered, dropping to his knees on the rough planking. The siren song of the waves lapping gently at the pilings?
He knew what he had to do. He had to take his brother away from here. To a place where the scent of the sea wasn’t befouled by the oily stench of the river.
He drew back the rags to gaze into the puckish face God had entrusted to his care. “I’ll take y’ away, lad,” he whispered. “I swear I’ll find a place where we both can breathe.”
His little brother’s flailing fist struck him square in the nose. The boy threw back his head and laughed, his misgivings tempered by a fierce surge of joy.