The Accidental Afterlife of Thomas Marsden Read Online Free PDF Page B

more day if he didn’t wish to. As he ventured farther from the graveyard and into a warren of narrow, cobbled streets, he was beginning to get the first hints of courage.
    Children younger’n him were forever being sent away, to work down mines and up chimneys, without anyone to hold their hands or wipe their sniffles, not that Silas would ever do such things. Lucy, perhaps, but not often.
    Thomas jutted his chin. Not often enough for him to miss her, to miss either of them. He’d be ab-so-lutely fine on his own. He wanted to see where he came from. He’d have an adventure, and find his family.
    Silas was always telling him to find his bones. Well, he would.
    And he would start tonight.
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    Thomas scrubbed his face and, at Lucy’s insistence, scrubbed it again. No amount of effort with soap and a rag was going to get Charley completely clean, however; Lucy soon gave up on him.
    â€œLoad of nonsense, I say,” said Silas from the corner, watching their preparations. “Fakes and fools, the lot of them.”
    Lucy turned upon him a look that would have sliced a potato clean in two. “It’s very popular, I hear.”
    Silas scowled. “Wouldn’t want to hear anything no dead folks had to say to me.”
    That, Thomas could well believe. He didn’t expect the dead had much nice to say to Silas—or to Thomas himself. For the first time, something dark and irritable fluttered in his belly. He didn’t know what they would see or hear. He didn’t know why someone wanted him to see and hear it.
    But they did. It was a clue, and besides, Thomas had a lifetime of doing what he was told.
    Up to a point. If he were to tell Lucy that he planned to sneak away tonight and demand answers from anyone he could find involved in the performance, she’d undoubtedly forbid it.
    He kept his lips firmly closed as Lucy rubbed at his cheek with her rough thumb, wet with spittle. She put a cracked mirror into his hand, and he saw the face of the boy in the grave. My name is Thistle.
    Darkness hadn’t quite fallen, but it had definitely stumbled over the horizon by the time Thomas, Charley, and Lucy closed the door on a muttering Silas and stepped out into the road.
    â€œThis is aces,” said Charley, leading the way north, up into the heart of the city. “Cheers, Thomas.”
    Aces remained to be seen. The nervous creature in Thomas’s middle flipped over once more. Lucy patted his hand.
    â€œI’m curious too,” she said. “I know as Silas never wanted to tell you, said you were ours soon as we started raising you, and that’s true enough. But I tell a lie if I say I’ve never wondered who left you there for us, a peach for the plucking.”
    Thomas swallowed. They were nearing the river now, that great, black, rippling ribbon of a thing. Boats bobbed gently on the water, stark against the sky. He had no blessed clue what he would do if finding his family was as simple as skipping into the theater and announcing himself.
    And he had no inkling as to why his true family would be messing about with this business, but it was no accident that the boy—Thistle—had been left right where Thomas would find him. Whoever had done so wanted him to have the tickets in Mam’s little cloth bag too, put there for safekeeping.
    Every curve and groove of the cobbles pressed upthrough the thin soles of Thomas’s shoes as he skipped ahead to come in step with Charley, who was grinning. “Adventure!” he said. “You know, Tom, old boy, I’ve always figured there was more to this great wide world of ours than that as we see. Stands to reason, don’t it?”
    â€œWhy d’you say that?” asked Thomas, but he had never felt alone in graveyards, and he wasn’t thinking of Silas’s company.
    â€œFolks used to think fire was magic, didn’t they? Then they thought clockwork