The Whip Read Online Free PDF

he could hear his breath rattling.
    How strange it was. All that seemed to be left of this world now was breath.
    Then a sound came to him. A whistle. And fluttering…tiny flapping—orange against the blue.
    The candle next to the bed sputtered, struggling to stay lit.
    Warm blood escaped from his mouth. He sensed now, that he was a stranger to that flesh beneath, to that final intake of breath. Without fear, without surprise…the realization that in that moment he was about to die.

Six
    Boston, Massachusetts
    March 1812

    It was March of 1812, the month when wagon-ruts were filled with cold, dark puddles—the month of mud and suicide in New England. Inauspicious thunder rumbled that morning from dark, low-hanging clouds. The rain was freezing. It came down slanted. A wagon clattered up the road toward a dreary-looking institution surrounded by barren winter fields. It was the Boston Society for Destitute Children.
    From a distance the building looked bleak—somebody’s old mansion converted by committee work to a good cause. From closer up the building looked not merely bleak but stricken. Shutters hung off. Paint peeling. A child’s rag doll was disintegrating in one of the puddles that pitted the front courtyard. The granite vases flanking the stairway were broken into great pieces.
    The wagon stopped in front. A young blond woman in a dark shawl, hugging a straw basket to her chest against the rain, stepped down and hurried toward the front door. She raised her fist and pounded hard against the peeling paint. Without waiting for a response, she knelt and placed the basket down on the topmost step. She had tucked a rag poppet inside the basket with her baby. She’d left a little note with no information of any earthly use. Neither of them, baby nor mother, was crying.
    The young woman returned to the wagon and touched the back of the hand of the older man beside her. He grimaced and slapped the reins across the back of the nags.
    The door of the orphanage opened and a man, the headmaster, appeared. Seeing no one in front of him, he looked down for a baby. Indeed, there it was. Another one. He bent down to pick it up. He held it so that it might also see the wagon moving away down the road.
    “Wave good-bye to mommy,” said the headmaster. “Wave bye-bye. You’ll not see her again.”

Seven
    That night it was still raining; it had beenrainingfor days. A flash of light, followed by a deafening crash of thunder, illuminated the room revealing long rows of crude beds, each with one or more sleeping children.
    The noise awakened the baby, hemmed in by pillows on a bed. She rooted for a breast. She thrashed her little hands out and grasped nothing. The baby whimpered, then started to wail. In a moment she was screaming, hot and red-faced.
    All up and down the rows, the screaming ignited the other children, who burst with some relief into tears. How they needed to cry, those children. Some of them had not even awakened. They were crying out loud from their sleep, crying their hearts out, knotted up in their coarse white nightclothes. It seemed there was not a dry eye or a closed mouth in the place.
    A fleshy, greasy-haired woman in a soiled nightdress appeared in the arched doorway, carrying a candle. She cast a grumpy eye over the room. Her mere appearance was enough to silence the children. They buried their faces in their pillows to stifle their sobs. The general racket died down, leaving a single burred, ear-splitting wail that moved up and down the audible registers: the baby, still screaming among her pillows.
    The woman lumbered over to the bed. For an instant the baby was diverted by the flickering candle in the woman’s hand. Curious, she paused her screaming. Then she caught sight of the woman’s big face coming closer and closer to her own, and howled even louder than before…with terror this time.
    The woman hoisted the baby up like a small plank onto one rolling hip. “We’ll have none of this now,