Page 1 of I Will Steal You the Stars
Chapter One
June 1852
No one messed with the Duke.
Not runners. Not grafters. Not husbands with fast fists and tempers.
And definitely not rats who dared to step out of their gutters and into his.
‘What are you doing in my rookery, Benji?’
Benji wrestled and wriggled against the grotty alley wall, but once Seamus and Harry held a man, there was no escaping. ‘Duke’ Enzo raised his hand, as if about to deliver a blow. Like the coward he was, Benji pinched his eyes closed and shied away.
Enzo smirked, enjoying Benji’s flinch, but instead of striking, he adjusted the man’s collar. ‘You know no one does business in Wild Court Rookery without my say so,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t doing nothin’, Duke. I was only passin’ through on my way to the river. There’s a race on down there.’ Benji spoke with bravado, but a quiver clipped the edge of each word.
‘Long way around to get to the river from where you’re at.’ Enzo unbuttoned his cuff and rolled his shirtsleeve over his forearms. ‘Be faster to go through Blackfriars.’
Benji’s breath caught, before he spluttered out a stuttered explanation. Enzo nodded at Seamus and Harry, who pinned Benji’s shoulders hard against the bricks.
‘We don’t want trouble,’ Enzo said as he pulled his cuff straight at the elbow. ‘And we don’t want your sly gin, or your ill-gotten goods, or your bad ideas. We’ve got enough of our own.’
Enzo unbuttoned and rolled his other shirt sleeve. He didn’t like dispensing warnings, but rules were rules. He’d expect no less if he wandered into Benji’s part of town without permission. Enzo took a step back, his shoulder tensing as he raised his fist.
‘I’m seeing a girl!’ The words exploded out of Benji so loud and forcefully that they bounced off the close walls. ‘She lives in a place on Little Wild. Her father don’t approve of me.’
Enzo relaxed his bicep. ‘Who?’
Benji twitched. ‘Betsy Kramer.’
‘Her pa’s a smart man, wanting to keep his girl away from you. She’s a happy thing. Still cheery about the world, even having grown up in all this rot. She deserves better than a macer like you.’
‘I know she does.’ A pathetic mix of fear and affection lit Benji’s face. ‘But I don’t know how to stop it. I think about her when she’s not around. I imagine little conversations we might have when we meet up again. I see a fancy miss on the street, and all I can think is how nice Betsy would look if she were dressed the same. I’m trying to stay out of trouble. I’ve gotten a job at the docks. I thought her pa might change his mind if he thought I was a steady man.’
‘Honest work? Not smuggling or tooling?’ Enzo asked.
‘Don’t tell no-one. They’d laugh if they knew I was gone for a girl.’
‘You’re an imbecile, Benji. Love is a waste of a good man’s energy.’ Enzo gave Seamus and Harry a nod. They loosened their hold. Benji slumped away from the wall and rolled his shoulders with a sigh of relief. He exhaled a stream of jumbled thanks, and smirked, like he had won some prize. Enzo grabbed the lad’s collar and slammed him against the wall again. Benji’s body stiffened, and his cheeks, sallow like most of London’s surplus population, blanched with fear. ‘If you’re lying to me, you won’t set foot in Wild Court again, because you won’t be able to walk. And if you ain’t lying, and you treat Betsy poor, you might find yourself one day having a misstep by those docks. Can you swim, Benji?’
Benji shook his head.
‘She’s a bright girl, and I’d like her to stay that way. You don’t deserve a woman like her. Don’t forget that.’
‘I won’t, Duke. I’ll be good to her. I’ll treat her like a princess, I swear it—’
Enzo released his hold, and this time, Benji collapsed to the cobblestones. With a yelp, he bounced to his feet, brushing dirt from his palms as he stood. He lurched forward, then paused, and straightened with a sniff. Enzo tipped his head at the alley entrance in dismissal, and Benji, grinning broadly, shot into the thin light.
Fools with hearts on their sleeves. What a waste of initiative.
‘Seamus, Harry.’ Enzo gestured in the opposite direction of Benji’s departure. ‘Let’s go. We’ve got work to do.’
It didn’t matter that the close confines of the buildings combined with smoke and soot to make the alleys dense with fog. Even on a stormy day, Enzo knew every slip, crevice and side street like the creases on his palms. Haphazard and dank, every breath tainted with miasma and despair, the rookery had never been properly demolished before it had been rebuilt into some new iteration. Tenement houses overlaid centuries-old stoneroads. Disused brewery cellars were buried under floorboards. Ancient drains butted against new walls, and numbered doors led to boarded up rooms while no-name alleys stretched forever.
This was his world: The Wild Court Rookery. A few blocks north of the Thames, the rookery filled a small, squalid patch of London. Its tall tenement buildings were packed so tight with occupants, the walls hummed with the noise. Here, children grew up not speaking clearly because their noses were blocked with soot, and they were often also half deaf from going to work in factories too young. A place that the middle-class moralists endlessly wrung their hands over, and where the uppers drove past to look down their noses from their carriages, only to return when night fell. Then, under the thin curves of the moon, they’d slink into bawdy houses and gambling dens, looking to add some excitement to their pathetically monotonous lives. It was also the place where he, Enzo, watched his charges, kept tabs on comings and goings, and did his best to keep the kids out of trouble, at least until they were strong enough to run faster than it.
Failure had brought him here. Enzo was the most infamous non-graduate of the Duke Street orphanage. Founded decades before by a group of self-righteous aristos, the orphanage took in foundlings and trained them to be maids, butlers or stable boys before sending them out to work in the homes of their supposed betters. In a city thick with poverty, Duke Street somehow still attracted the attention of the rich, and toffs sponsored months where every foundling Matron took in was shackled with their name. Refusing to be moulded into a servant, Enzo had left when about 14, preferring uncertainty over a future chasing a well-turned heel. Duke Street had taught him manners. The streets had taught him how to survive. And now, at twenty-odd years of age, he had carved out a place for himself in thedilapidated slums known as the Wild Court Rookery, where he had dropped his sponsor’s surname but kept hold of his title.
