Chapter One: The Boy with the Silver Mark
The rain fell over London like a curtain of grey glass, washing the soot from the chimneys and the grit from the streets, but doing nothing at all to improve the temper of the man huddled in the doorway of Number Seven, Pemberton Lane.
Arnold Bisby was not, by nature, a patient man. He was the sort of person who tapped his foot at traffic lights, who sighed loudly when the woman in front of him at the post office wanted to discuss postal rates, who believed that the entire world was engaged in a vast conspiracy to waste his time. And now, on this cold November evening, with his shoes letting in water and his umbrella having chosen this very day to collapse into a sad tangle of black nylon, he was being forced to wait.
He was waiting for a boy.
The boy was late, of course. They were always late, these children from the orphanage. No sense of punctuality. No respect for the schedules of busy men. Arnold checked his watch for the sixth time in as many minutes, the light from the streetlamp catching the glass face. Five past seven. The appointment had been for half past six. He'd half a mind to leave, to simply go back to his warm, dry flat and tell Matron Higgins that her little project could find someone else to impose upon.
But he needed the money.
That was the simple, ugly truth of it. Arnold Bisby, who had once been a man of significance, a man whose opinion was sought and valued, was now reduced to this: standing in the rain, waiting for an orphan, because the government paid people to take these children in for the holidays. A foster placement, they called it. A chance for a disadvantaged child to experience the warmth of family life.
Arnold's family life consisted of a rented flat, a collection of empty gin bottles, and a canary that had stopped singing three years ago and now merely sat on its perch like a small, yellow accusation.
A movement at the end of the street caught his eye. A small figure, hunched against the rain, walking slowly with hands shoved deep into pockets. The boy was perhaps eleven or twelve, thin in a way that suggested he'd always been thin, wearing a coat that was too large for him and carrying a battered cardboard suitcase tied with string.
As the boy drew closer, Arnold felt a flicker of something he hadn't expected. The child's face was ordinary enough—pale, with a smattering of freckles across the nose, dark hair plastered to his forehead by the rain. But his eyes were extraordinary. They were a pale, silvery grey, the colour of storm clouds, and they held an expression that Arnold couldn't quite read. Not sadness, exactly. Not fear. Something else. Something that made Arnold feel, for no reason he could articulate, that he was being weighed and found wanting.
"You're late," Arnold said, by way of greeting.
The boy stopped a few feet away and looked up at him. The rain continued to fall, running in rivulets down his cheeks, but he didn't seem to notice.
"I know," he said. His voice was quiet but steady. "I'm sorry. The bus was delayed."
Arnold grunted. He'd expected excuses. Everyone had excuses. "Well, you're here now. Come on, then. I haven't got all night." He turned and pushed open the door to Number Seven, holding it just long enough for the boy to slip through, then followed him into the narrow hallway.
The flat was on the third floor. There was a lift, but it was broken—had been broken since Arnold moved in, three years ago—so they climbed the stairs in silence, the boy's cardboard suitcase bumping against each step, Arnold's breath growing more laboured with each flight. By the time they reached the third-floor landing, he was forced to stop, one hand pressed against the wall, waiting for his heart to stop hammering.
The boy waited, too. He didn't offer to help. He didn't say anything. He just stood there, those strange silver eyes taking in everything—the peeling wallpaper, the flickering fluorescent light, the smell of cabbage that seemed to permeate every corner of the building.
Arnold unlocked the door and gestured the boy inside.
The flat was small and cramped and looked exactly like what it was: the home of a man who had given up. Dishes piled in the sink. Newspapers stacked in corners. A thin layer of dust on every surface. The canary, in its cage by the window, opened one eye, decided the newcomers weren't worth the effort, and closed it again.
"It's not much," Arnold said, surprising himself with the admission. He hadn't meant to say that. He hadn't meant to apologise for anything. "But it's dry. And there's food. Matron said you'd be here until New Year's."
The boy set down his suitcase and looked around the room. If he was disappointed by what he saw, he didn't show it. His face remained perfectly still, perfectly neutral, like a pond on a windless day.
"Thank you," he said. "For having me."
Arnold waved a hand, dismissing the thanks. "Don't thank me yet. There are rules. You keep to your side of the flat, I'll keep to mine. You don't touch my things, I won't touch yours. The bathroom is down the hall. You get one meal a day—supper. Breakfast and lunch you can sort out for yourself. There's bread in the cupboard. Jam, too, if the mould hasn't got to it."
The boy nodded. He seemed unsurprised by these terms, as if he'd expected something like them. Perhaps he had. Perhaps this wasn't his first foster placement. There was something about him, Arnold thought, that suggested experience. Not the experience of a child, but something older. Something that didn't quite fit with the thin frame and the too-large coat.
"What's your name?" Arnold asked. He realised, suddenly, that Matron hadn't told him. Or perhaps she had, and he hadn't been listening. That happened more and more these days.
"Finn," the boy said. "Finn Merton."
"Finn." Arnold tested the name. It felt strange in his mouth. Unusual. "What sort of name is that?"
The boy's lips twitched, almost a smile. "A short one."
Arnold stared at him for a moment, unsure whether he was being mocked. Then he grunted again—his default response to anything that confused him—and gestured toward a narrow door at the end of the hall. "You'll sleep in there. It was meant to be a storage cupboard, but there's a bed. Of a sort."
Finn picked up his suitcase and walked toward the door. He paused with his hand on the handle and turned back. For a moment, his silver eyes met Arnold's, and Arnold felt again that strange sensation of being weighed, of being measured against some standard he couldn't comprehend.
"Goodnight, Mr. Bisby," Finn said. "I'll try not to be any trouble."
Then he opened the door and disappeared inside, closing it softly behind him.
Arnold stood in the middle of his dusty, cluttered sitting room, listening to the rain against the windows and the occasional gurgle of the pipes in the walls. He felt oddly unsettled, as if something important had just happened, something he ought to pay attention to. But he couldn't think what.
He shook his head, poured himself a generous measure of gin, and settled into his armchair in front of the television. By the time the news came on, he'd forgotten all about the boy with the silver eyes.
In the cupboard that was not quite a bedroom, Finn Merton sat on the edge of a narrow bed that was little more than a cot and looked around at his new home. The room was small—so small that if he stretched out his arms, he could touch both walls at once. There was no window. There was no wardrobe. There was a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and a wooden chair that looked as if it might collapse if anyone actually sat on it.
It was, Finn thought, the nicest room he'd ever had.
He set his suitcase on the chair—it held up, just—and worked at the knots in the string. The suitcase had belonged to his mother, once. He knew this because it had her initials on the inside: E.M. for Elena Merton. He didn't remember her. He'd been too young when she died. But he kept the suitcase because it was the only thing he had that had belonged to her, the only proof that he'd once had a mother, a family, a life before the orphanage.
Inside the suitcase were his few possessions: two changes of clothes, a worn copy of a book about stars and constellations, a small wooden box that he'd never been able to open, and a photograph.
He took out the photograph and studied it by the light of the bare bulb. It showed a woman with dark hair and silver eyes—his eyes, everyone said—holding a baby. She was laughing, her head thrown back, her face full of a joy so bright it seemed to shine out of the faded image. Behind her, just visible at the edge of the frame, stood a man. But his face was turned away, as if he hadn't wanted to be in the picture, and only the shape of his shoulder and the curve of his ear could be seen.
Finn had spent countless hours studying this photograph, searching for clues, for answers, for anything that might tell him who he was and where he'd come from. But the photograph kept its secrets, as it always did.
He traced his finger over his mother's face, wishing—as he always wished—that he could remember her voice, her smell, the feel of her arms around him.
"Where did you come from?" he whispered to the image. "And why did you leave me here?"
The photograph offered no answers. It never did.
Finn sighed, tucked the photograph back into the suitcase, and lay down on the bed. The mattress was thin and lumpy, and the pillow smelled faintly of mothballs, but he'd slept in worse places. Much worse.
Above him, the bare bulb flickered once, twice, and then went out, plunging the room into darkness.
Finn wasn't afraid of the dark. He'd learned, long ago, that there was nothing in the darkness that wasn't there in the light. But as he lay there, listening to the rain and the distant rumble of traffic, he felt something he hadn't felt in a long time.
He felt hopeful.
It was a dangerous feeling, hope. He knew that. Hope was a trap, a trick, a promise that life never kept. But as he closed his eyes and let sleep claim him, he couldn't quite shake the sense that something was about to change. Something important.
Something that would lead him out of this cupboard, out of this flat, out of this ordinary life, and into something else entirely.
He didn't know how he knew this. He just did.
It was, after all, the season of miracles.