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I had no way to see where we were going or any way of
escaping the vice like grip upon my clothing.
    I heard more shouts from down the street,
then the officer saying, “Hold them fast!”
    As I got my feet under me again, I tried to
plead my innocence. “But sir, I didn’t—”
    “That’s enough of your mouth!”
    He struck me across the back of the head
with something very hard. I only had time to feel the sting of it
and then the hot pavement smashing against my cheek before all went
black.
     
     
     
    I woke to ominous words. “You’ll hang for
this.”
    Curses answered this judgment, though I had
no idea who had spoken. A cacophony of moaning and belligerence
arose around me as my consciousness returned. I opened my eyes, but
had very little light available with which to see anything.
    Still, I knew two things immediately: my
head ached terribly and I was no longer out in the streets of
London. A foul mixture of sweat, blood and feces curled my nose to
the point I thought I might vomit. The sound of retching told me
somebody already was over in a corner of the room.
    I lifted my eyes toward a narrow shaft of
light running through a slit of a window nearly ten feet off the
floor. The light barely illuminated a wall of iron bars on the
opposite side of the chamber. Shock hit me as I realized my
situation. “I’ve landed in prison.”
    “Oy, greenie…who are you?” The voice had
spoken next to me in the dark. I still couldn’t make out a face to
go with it, but whoever he was he had to be near my age.
    “Where am I?” I asked.
    “My question first, greenie,” he said.
    I sighed, in no mood for games. But what
would it hurt to give my name? Nobody knew me in London anyway, and
I knew nobody. “My name is Brody West.”
    The faceless stranger inched closer to me in
the dark, scuffing shoe leather on the gritty concrete floor.
“You’re not from around these parts are you?”
    I sat up, trying to catch some details about
my interrogator’s face. “I’m from America.”
    The boy laughed heartily. “Oy, mates, he’s a
blooming Yank!” Others joined in his mockery.
    My cheeks burned. I already understood how
out of my element I was. I didn’t need this fellow grinding me
harder for it.
    I hollered over the din, feeling a bit more
aggressive. After all that had happened to me since my arrival, I
felt that I had little else to lose. The boy leaned in so that I
now saw his eyes close to my face. They sparkled like jewels—green,
no blue. I couldn’t be sure. The boy stood up and walked around me
toward the beam of light invading the cell.
    Being a little short for my age, the boy
stood a few inches taller than me. He might have been eighteen or
nineteen, but no older. When the light hit him, I recognized his
face at once. The boy I had noticed on the street, with his
friends, had followed me into prison. More likely, I was here
because of him.
    He held out his hands like a stage
performer. “You, Mr. West, are in Fleet Prison. The home of pick
pockets, thieves, debtors and murderers…at least temporarily. Eh,
lads?”
    Inmates launched themselves at the bars to
silence the young whelp. They needed no reminding of their fate. I
noticed then that our cell was smaller than first understood. We
were divided from the others by sets of bars. Unless the light hit
them, they remained almost invisible in the dark.
    The boy bowed himself, thoroughly pleased by
his performance and the rousing it had produced. I stared at him
accusingly as he sat down in front of me in his shabby moth-eaten
clothes. His wild dark hair curled out from under the brim of his
soiled fancy hat. And those ears…I had noticed them on the street.
They pointed at the top.
    “I’m in here because of you, aren’t I?” I
couldn’t keep the menace from my voice.
    He extended his hand, as though I’d just
invited him to tea. “Tom’s the name.”
    I left the hand dangling in mid-air,
refusing to shake it. “You and those other boys