“D’you enjoy our play as much as I do?” Finch’s knife twisted an open wound, making Milton’s nerves scream and his body shake, forcing his brain back.
“Stay with me, boy. Don’t leave now. I need yer here, feelin’ the fine flick o’ me blade.”
Milton’s flesh was licked by fire, his insides ablaze.
“Count fer me, boy. Remember?”
As I was goin’ to St. Ives,
Upon the road I met seven wives;
Every wife had seven sacks,
Every sack had seven cats,
Every cat had seven kits:
Kits, cats, sacks, an’ wives,
How many were goin’ to St. Ives?
God, not this wicked, evil game! Milton knew the bloody answer. He’d learned it the hard way, same way he’d learned to count every wound carved into his flesh. If all were bound for St. Ives—the narrator, the wives, the sacks and cats and kits—’twas 2,801.
Instead, he held up one shaking middle finger, because only one man in that trick rhyme traveled—the narrator was the correct answer.
Finch bent Milton’s finger back until the bone nearly snapped. Nearly, because the fiend knew just how far to take a man to make him break. It’s what the devil enjoyed most.
“Ain’t no fun t’ end so soon, boy. We’ll have t’ play a different game.” And his grating, lazy voice began a new, twisted rhyme.
Sing a song of sixpence,
A bag full of rye,
Four and twenty naughty boys,
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing.
Wasn't that a dandy dish
To set before the king?
“I were set t’ make you me heir, Jasp—with your blue blood and my sharp brains, what all we could’ve accomplished… But y’ ruined that.” His face soured, the blade digging deep enough now Milton screamed.
In desperation he pictured Lizzie, willing his mind to hold fast to her sweet visage instead. He’d focus only on her innocence, her loveliness, as he took the twenty-four blows meant to filet his body—the pie’s baked crust. For he was Finch’s naughty boy, and clearly always would be. But if he held on to his wife’s warm smile, her spectacles winking in sunlight, she might become his dish, and he her one true king. She’d give him four and twenty strapping sons, birds heralding each birth, singing of futures bright, so bright…
Blight.Milton viciously kicked a stone off the pier.
It was better Elizabeth hate him.
Is that why he’d done it? Why he’d treated her and Kilpert as he had? To spare her worse hurt? He gazed out at the water, moonlight sparkling across its grim depths. How many bodies lay at the bottom of the Thames, those drowned willingly, and those tossed in, their lives cut brutally short? At least now Lizzie would cease trying. It was astonishing, really, how valiantly she’d tried to make their doomed marriage work, tried to grow affection for him. But he was a worthless cause. He could be neither reformed nor remade—by her or anyone.
Once a whipping boy, always a whipping boy.
A day later, Milton braced himself for Dr. Hollingsforth’s assessment, because Murdoch had called the doctor not for him this time, but for his Baroness, who apparently now cast up what little she managed to swallow. He’d not visited Lizzie’s chamber nor spoken to her since the incident in his parlor. Nor had he heard from Kilpert, though he’d penned the man a short letter of apology. He had no proof the scholar had done anything worse than make eyes at his wife. And one couldn’t call a man out for looking, no matter how much one wanted to.
