Rowan sat back on his heels. His hands were steady. His pulse, when he checked it against his wrist, was perhaps ten beats faster than normal. He noted this with the detached interest of a man watching weather through a window. The fear was there, a cold thing sitting in his stomach, but he could think around it if he concentrated. He had spent six years building the foundation of his escape, and someone had walked into this room and pulled it out like a tablecloth, and the sensible response was not to panic but to think.
So think.
He checked the hollow again. No coins had rolled into the corners. No notes had been left behind. Whoever had taken the money had taken all of it, which meant they'd had time to be thorough. They'd known about the false bottom, or they'd found it by searching. Either way, they hadn't been in a rush.
Rowan ran his finger along the felt lining. There, near the back left corner, a smudge. Dark, greasy, roughly the shape of a thumb. He brought it to his nose. Machine oil. The same mineral-and-coal smell that saturated everything in the mill, but nobody in this dormitory worked the mills except Rowan. The other boys were split between the Hospital's own workshop, where they learned carpentry and shoe-mending, and a print shop on Lamb's Conduit Street.
Machine oil from a printing press.
The supper bell rang. Rowan replaced the board, closed the trunk, and positioned the latch scratch at seven o'clock. Then he went downstairs and ate his boiled potatoes and grey mutton without tasting any of it.
Three boys from this dormitory worked at the print shop: Sam Briggs, who was thirteen and too honest for his own good. Peter Marsh, who was ten and too small to have pried up the board without leaving marks. And Alfie Crewe, who was fourteen and three months away from being apprenticed to a tanner in Bermondsey.
Rowan chewed his mutton and watched Alfie Crewe across the dining hall. Alfie sat with the older boys, as he always did, laughing at something, easy and careless. Nothing different. Nothing wrong.
But Rowan noticed that Alfie's hands, when they weren't holding his fork, stayed in his lap. And that was different, because Alfie Crewe never spoke without his hands moving. He waved and pointed and conducted invisible orchestras mid-sentence, had done it for as long as Rowan had known him.
Tonight Alfie's hands were still.
And there was something else. Alfie's trunk, visible from the dining hall doorway when Rowan glanced back toward the stairs, was sitting slightly further out from beneath his bed than it usually did. As though it had been packed in a hurry and shoved back without the usual care.
Rowan ate his mutton and thought. Alfie was not a bad sort. He was loud and a bit of a show-off, but he shared his bread when the younger boys went hungry, and once he'd taken a beating from Hargreave's predecessor rather than name the boy who'd broken a window. There were worse people in the Hospital by a considerable margin.
But Alfie was also terrified, and Rowan understood exactly why. Tanning was vile work. You stood in pits of animal hides soaking in urine and quicklime, scraping fat and hair from the skins with a dull blade, and the smell worked its way into you so deep that people crossed the street when they saw you coming. Most tanner's apprentices were dead or ruined by thirty. Alfie knew this. Everyone knew this.
Ninety-three pounds could buy a man a different life. A room somewhere. A fresh start. Enough to survive on while you found honest work or learned a trade that wouldn't kill you.
And a boy with ninety-three pounds and no reason to stay would not wait around to be caught. He would leave. Tonight, most likely. After lights out, when Patterson had finished her rounds and the dormitory was dark and the front door could be reached without being seen.
Rowan understood the temptation. He could even sympathize with it, the way you might sympathize with a drowning man who grabbed your ankle. Understanding didn't change the facts. That money was six years of Rowan's life, and he needed every shilling of it.
He waited until the dormitory settled. Twenty-four boys in twenty-four beds, breathing and shifting and muttering in their sleep. Alfie's bed was eight down from Rowan's, on the opposite side of the room. Rowan lay still and listened. At half past ten, Alfie's breathing was deep and regular.
But not the right kind of regular. There was a quality to the breath of someone genuinely asleep, a looseness, a surrender to gravity. Alfie's breathing was even, measured. Controlled. He was awake and waiting.
So Rowan waited too.
At a quarter past eleven, he heard it. The faintest creak of a bed frame shifting. The whisper of cloth. Then nothing for a long moment, as Alfie listened for any sign he'd been heard. Then another creak, and the soft scrape of a trunk being eased out from beneath a bed.
Rowan opened his eyes.
In the thin light from the window, he could see Alfie's silhouette kneeling beside his bed. A bundle was already in his hands, wrapped in a dark cloth. He was dressed in his day clothes, boots and all. He'd been lying in bed fully clothed, waiting for the dormitory to fall asleep.
Alfie stood and moved toward the door. He was quiet about it, placing his feet with the care of someone who knew which floorboards creaked. But Rowan had memorised the same floorboards over the same sleepless nights, and he was quicker.
He slipped out of bed and reached the dormitory door first.
Alfie froze. In the darkness, the two of them were little more than outlines. Rowan could hear the older boy's breathing change, the careful evenness fracturing into something sharp and fast.
"Sit down," Rowan said, very quietly. "Back inside. The window seat."
For a moment, nothing happened. Alfie was three years older and four inches taller, and Rowan could feel him weighing it. Whether to push past. Whether to shove an eleven-year-old aside and run.
"I'll shout for Patterson," Rowan said. "I'll tell her what's in that bundle. And then it won't be Bermondsey you have to worry about. It'll be the magistrate."
Alfie's silhouette sagged. He turned and walked to the window seat. Rowan followed and sat across from him. The July moonlight was just enough to see by.
"Give it back," Rowan said.
Alfie's hands tightened on the bundle. "You don't know what you're asking me to do."
"I'm asking you to return what's mine."
"Liverpool," Alfie said, and his voice cracked on the word. "I was going to get on a ship. Work passage if I had to, pay if I could. Get somewhere warm. Somewhere they don't know me, don't have a paper with my name on it sending me to scrape hides until my hands fall off." He looked at Rowan, and in the thin moonlight his eyes were too bright.
"I know."
"Then how can you sit there and—"
"Because I earned it. Six years under machines that could have killed me any day of the week. Every shilling."
Alfie's jaw worked. His hands were white-knuckled on the bundle. For a stretched moment Rowan thought he would bolt anyway, rush the door and hope the head start was enough.
Then his shoulders dropped. He set the bundle on the window seat between them.
"You'd really have called for Patterson."
"Yes."
"You've got years before they send you anywhere. I've got weeks. And you're sitting on more money than most men in this city earn in a year. What do you even need it for?"
"That's my concern. Give it here."
Rowan unwrapped the bundle. Bank notes and coins, folded and stacked with a neatness that Alfie had not extended to any other area of his life. He counted quickly. Ninety-three pounds, four shillings, and sixpence. Every penny.
The relief was physical. A tension in his chest that he hadn't fully registered until it released. Six years. Six years of crawling beneath machines that could kill him, of writing by candlelight until his eyes burned, of eating food that tasted like penance and saving every coin because the alternative was to be like everyone else in this building: stuck. Waiting for someone to decide your future and hoping they chose something that wouldn't destroy you.
"What happens now?" Alfie said. His voice had gone flat. "You report me to Patterson?"
"No."
Alfie looked at him.
"I've got the money back. If you're gone by morning, Patterson will assume you ran from the apprenticeship. Boys do it all the time. Nobody will connect it to me."
"And if I stay?"
"Then you stay, and we never discuss this again. But if you ever touch my things, I go straight to the matron. No second conversation."
Alfie was quiet for a long time. The moonlight shifted on the window glass. Somewhere in the dormitory, a boy turned over in his sleep and muttered something.
"You're not like the rest of us, Ashcroft," Alfie said. "Never have been."
Rowan took the money and crossed the dormitory in the dark. He put it back in the false bottom, replaced the board, positioned the latch scratch at seven o'clock, and sat on his bed. His hands were shaking. They'd been steady through the confrontation, steady while Alfie had been deciding whether to shove past him. The shaking came now, alone, when it was over and the adrenaline had nowhere left to go.
He pressed his palms flat against his knees until they stopped.
He spent the rest of that night staring at the ceiling, listening to Alfie's bed creak as the older boy lay down, still dressed, and eventually fell into a real sleep. By morning, Alfie was gone. His trunk was empty, his bed stripped. Patterson noticed at breakfast and pursed her lips and wrote something in her ledger, and that was the end of Alfie Crewe at the Foundling Hospital. Nobody mentioned him again by Thursday.
Rowan ate his porridge and thought about the tannery in Bermondsey, and whether Alfie would make it to Liverpool. He hoped so.