Page 87 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

It was impossible, watching him fall upon the food, not to mark how much better he looked than he had the night he first came to this house. Still too thin. Still too quick to flinch at a raised voice or a sudden movement. But there was color in his face now, and he no longer eyed each kindness sidelong, hunting for the trap concealed inside it.

"How are your lessons?" I asked, once he had taken the worst of the edge off.

The grin broadened. That alone was startling. No child in the history of childhood had ever looked pleased to be asked about his education. "Good."

I waited.

"Mr. Crawley knows a lot about trains."

Mr. Crawley. The tutor I had engaged for him, and of whom I had until that moment formed only a middling opinion. Of all the answers I might have anticipated, that was not among them.

"Trains," I repeated.

"Locomotives," Will corrected me, with the firmness of a scholar defending his discipline. "And railways."

I glanced at Dawson. Dawson, for once, looked as bewildered as I felt.

"Go on."

"Mr. Crawley says railways changed everything."

"Did he?”

"He showed me drawings of the Rocket."

"I see."

"And then he explained how the steam works. The boiler and the pistons and all of it. And why Liverpool got bigger after they built the railway."

"Indeed."

"And how much iron it takes to lay a single mile of track."

I was beginning to detect a pattern and to revise my middling opinion sharply upward. Crawley was a cleverer man than I had given him credit for. He had taken a ten-year-old's passion for locomotives and smuggled an entire education inside it—arithmetic in the iron and the fares, science in the steam, history in the towns that had swelled or starved as the lines ran past them or didn't, and, improbably, the rudiments of engineering besides. He had got the boy to swallow the whole of it. And Will never once suspected it was learning, because it wore the livery of the only thing on earth he loved.

Clever. Very clever.

Will sat back, glowing with the unselfconscious satisfaction of a boy who has had a good morning. "I like him."

"That is the first encouraging thing you have said since you came into the room.”

He smirked. “And he doesn't talk like a book."

I laughed before I could help myself. It was a criticism the boy had leveled at me before, and not without justice.

Having taken the measure of my goodwill, Will returned at once to the matter that interested him. "I can help you find that man," he said around a mouthful of sausage.

"No. And a gentleman does not speak with his mouth full."

His face fell. Then, with the resilience peculiar to the young, it brightened again, lit from within by some fresh inspiration.

"I still have the clothes."

The clothes from Yorkshire. Of course he did. The very clothes I had told him we would replace. With everything that had transpired, we hadn't yet seen to his wardrobe.

"I told you they might be useful."

At the sideboard, Dawson became suddenly and profoundly absorbed in rotating the chafing dishes.