Chapter 1 #4
Having completed his task of collecting the dirty crockery from each of the cells, the abundant Warder Sims was now struggling to hoist his heavy tray onto his shoulder.
His back was turned to Jack, leaving him blissfully unaware of the fact that the boy had sidled up to him and was stealthily slipping the ring of keys off the warder’s belt.
“Here now, what the devil do ye think ye’re doing?” the warder growled suddenly, spinning about.
“Nothin’,” said Jack, casually stepping away from him.
“Open yer jacket and let me see what ye’ve got there,” Warder Sims commanded, “before I rip it off yer skinny hide myself.”
Panic gripped Genevieve. If Jack was found stealing before he had even left the prison, Governor Thomson would have no choice but to forfeit their arrangement. Jack would be lashed and thrown back in his cell to half-starve before suffering years of abuse in a reformatory school.
“Mr. Sims, watch out!” she screamed suddenly, her cry almost ear-splitting as it reverberated against the cold stone walls. “There is an enormous rat by your foot!”
Pure horror blanched the warder’s face. “Where?!” he shouted, hopping awkwardly from one foot to the other, as he valiantly tried to balance his tray. “Where?!”
“Right there!” she shrieked, pointing at his ankles.
The next thing Genevieve knew, he was flying through the air, yelping in fear, before crashing amidst a mess of gluey bowls and lumpy porridge.
“Get him off me!” he screeched, scrambling to rise.
He raced toward her with outstretched arms, as if he expected her to save him.
His foot got caught in a wayward bowl which skidded on some porridge, sending him barreling into Governor Thomson’s office, where, fortunately, the governor’s precious mahogany chair helped to break his fall.
The chair itself did not fare so well.
“For God’s sake, Sims, what the devil is the matter with you?” thundered Governor Thomson furiously. “Just look at what you’ve done to my chair!”
“Is it gone?” whimpered the warder, staring frantically behind himself. “Is it?”
“I’m not sure,” said Genevieve, searching the shadows of the hallway for Jack, who had disappeared.
“I don’t see any rat,” the boy reported calmly as he emerged from the darkness around the corner. “It must be gone.”
He strolled past Genevieve into Governor Thomson’s office. “Too bad about your chair,” he remarked, his voice edged with sarcasm. He bent over to pick up the mangled piece of furniture. “Maybe it can be fixed.”
When the chair was precariously righted upon its three remaining legs, Mr. Sims’s prison keys were lying innocently upon the floor, looking as if they had simply fallen off when he crashed into it.
“My chair!” lamented Governor Thomson, turning over the broken mahogany leg. “It’s ruined!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” apologized Warder Sims, looking forlorn. “It’s just that—I hate rats.”
“If there is nothing further, then Jack and I must be going,” interjected Genevieve, anxious to have the boy out of there before he tried to steal something else.
“Yes, fine,” said Governor Thomson, looking as if he was torn between weeping over his chair and cracking Warder Sims over the head with its shattered leg.
“As for you, young man,” he said, regarding Jack sternly, “see that you abandon your lawless ways and do everything Miss MacPhail tells you. One misstep and you will be back in this jail and on your way to reformatory school, do you hear?” He shook the fractured chair leg at him.
“I’m sure Jack understands his situation,” Genevieve swiftly replied, afraid to let the boy speak lest he offend Governor Thomson yet again. “Good evening, Governor Thomson. Warder Sims,” she added crisply, nodding at the dejected jailer, who still had gray globs of porridge stuck to his uniform.
She put her hand firmly upon Jack’s shoulder and steered him toward the door, trying not to think about what the boy had wanted with the warder’s keys.
THE PRISON WAS CLOAKED IN A COLD, DANK BLACK, and quiet except for the dispiriting sounds of human misery.
Long bursts of horrible, phlegmy coughing were intermingled with painful groans, and a soft, pitiful weeping filtered through the air from a desolate woman in one of the cells on the second floor.
They were the feeble sounds of hopelessness, the death knell of shattered people who had been cast aside and all but forgotten.
Except by the ignoble Warder Sims, who made it a point never to forget any of his prisoners.
In his rather limited view, whatever circumstances had caused these men, women, and children to end up in his prison were entirely of their own making.
And now that these castoffs of society had been relegated to his tender care, he was determined that they be made to pay for their crimes each and every minute.
Further, they had to understand that he, and not the fatuous Governor Thomson, was the man in whose hands their miserable lives now rested.
Only then could there be order in his prison.
If he were to be utterly honest, which he rarely was, he would have also had to admit that he actually relished the act of goading and tormenting his charges.
It was one of the few perquisites of being a prison warder.
This need to affirm his status as the ruler of his domain was what drew him back to Haydon’s cell soon after Governor Thomson had retired to his apartment for the evening, still mourning the destruction of his beloved chair.
There was unfinished business between this prisoner and himself, and Warder Sims did not intend to let the matter rest—not when his lordship was scheduled to be hanged the following day.
That murdering scum had dared to lay his hands upon him.
Although Sims had managed to do him some damage, before that filthy strip of a lad had jumped upon his back, the matter was far from finished.
It hadn’t helped his mood any to have been attacked by an enormous rat and sent skating into the governor’s bloody chair on a bowl of greasy porridge.
The indignity of that moment, along with the humiliation of having to endure the governor’s ire as he cleaned up the mess, had only whetted his desire to further pummel this murderer.
Especially since Sims knew his lordship was in no condition to fight back.
He opened the narrow inspection slide in the door and peered in.
The cell was dark, save for a filmy veil of moonlight trickling through the iron bars of the window.
The remnants of the demolished bed lay scattered upon the floor at one end of the chamber.
Anger surged through him as he thought of himself being thrown into it.
His lordship would pay dearly for that. His muscles tense with anticipation, he shifted his gaze to the other side of the cell.
And found it impossibly empty.
“What the hell—”
He fumbled for his key ring, grabbing the door handle as he did so, and was bewildered when the heavy oak portal swung open without the benefit of a key.
He snatched a burning lamp from the wall and stepped cautiously into the cell, studying the vacant shadows with determination.
For several long moments he stood there, searching wildly, as if he thought he might still find his prisoner if he only looked hard enough, perhaps under the narrow wooden bed, or hiding behind the chamber pot.
Finally the lamp sputtered and went out, leaving him alone in the darkness of the cell, desperately trying to think of how he should tell Governor Thomson that their most illustrious and dangerous prisoner had escaped.