Read Chapter 2: Debt of a Father

The rain had followed Jack all the way from the depot, a thin, miserable drizzle that soaked through his coat and turned the cobbles to black glass. He moved fast through the warren of alleys off Cable Street, shoulders hunched, the leather map folded flat against his chest beneath his shirt. Every few paces he glanced back. No sign of Barrow’s bruisers. Not yet. But the night was young, and a blacklisted man had no friends in the open.

His mother’s lodgings sat at the top of a crooked tenement that leaned against its neighbours like a drunk propped between two saints. Three floors up, a single tallow candle guttered behind the grimy windowpane. Jack took the stairs two at a time, his boots echoing off the narrow walls, and pushed open the door without knocking.

Mary Mullins was at the table, darning a sock by the light of that thin flame. She looked up, and the hope in her eyes died the moment she saw his face.

“You’re home early,” she said, voice flat. “That’s not good news.”

Jack shut the door behind him and slid the bolt across. He crossed the room, took her shoulders in his hands, and pressed his forehead against hers. She smelt of soap and coal smoke, as she always had. As she always would, God willing.

“They’ll be saying I stole,” he said quietly. “Barrow saw what I found, and he moved first. By morning, every foreman from here to Crewe will have my name scratched off their books.”

Mary’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t cry. She was not a weeping woman. His father had married a stoker’s daughter, and she had carried that stubborn iron in her blood. “Then we’ll eat less,” she said. “And I’ll take in more washing. It’s not the first time a Mullins has had to crawl.”

Jack pulled back. “It’s the last time, Ma. I swear it.” He tapped his chest, where the map lay hidden. “This is something. I don’t know what yet, but it’s something.”

Before he could explain, a knock came at the door. Three sharp raps, then a pause, then two more. Mary’s face drained of what little colour it had. She looked at the door, then at Jack, and her voice dropped to a whisper.

“He comes every Thursday, same time. I’ve been putting him off. I thought I’d have the money by now.”

Jack froze. “Who?”

“Mr. Croft. Since your father’s accident. Twenty pounds, Jack. It was a loan to get your father’s tools back from the pawnbroker after the fire at the works. He never got the chance to pay it back.”

Twenty pounds. A labourer’s wages for four months. Jack felt the weight of it settle on his shoulders like a yoke. He wanted to be angry at his father, for borrowing, for dying, for leaving this behind. But he remembered the fire. He remembered his father going back in for another man’s lad. That was the kind of man Patrick Mullins had been.

Jack crossed to the door, unbolted it, and opened.

Ulysses Croft was a thin, neat man in a high-collared coat that had seen better days but had been cared for as if it were a suit of armour. His hair was oiled flat to his skull, and his eyes were the pale grey of a winter sea. In his hand, he held a small ledger bound in cracked black leather. Behind him on the landing stood a man the size of a coal barge, arms folded, jaw working on something.

“Ah,” Croft said, looking Jack up and down with the ease of a man appraising livestock. “You’d be the son. Mrs. Mullins, you did not tell me your boy had grown so tall. I take it he’s come to settle the account?”

“Come in,” Jack said, stepping aside. He did not offer his hand.

Croft entered, the barge following. The room shrank. Mary set down her darning and folded her hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on the table. Croft took the only chair, unbuttoned his coat, and placed the ledger on his knee.

“The account stands at twenty pounds, principal. Interest has been… patient,” he said, with the smile of a man who knows he is being generous and will be remembered for it. “Your mother has paid what she could, but she has not cleared the arrears. I am a patient man, Mr. Mullins, but patience has a price.”

Jack leaned against the wall, arms crossed. “I don’t have twenty pounds.”

“No,” Croft said, as if confirming a weather report. “You don’t. But you have something else.”

Jack went still. “What would that be?”

Croft glanced at Mary, then back to Jack. The smile deepened. “You worked the engines for the North Kent line, did you not? And a week past they’ve begun surveying for the new Spur into the Weald. There’s a rival concern—investors in Dover—who would dearly like to know what lines and gradients that survey has settled on. Before the land is bought. Before the prices rise.”

The room went very quiet. The barge shifted his weight and the floorboards groaned.

“You’re asking me to steal,” Jack said.

“I’m offering to cancel a debt,” Croft corrected, tapping the ledger. “Twenty pounds, gone. You hand me the surveyor’s plans from their office in Bermondsey. A matter of a night’s work. You know the yards. You know their habits. No one gets hurt.”

Mary made a small sound, like a wounded bird. Jack did not look at her. He looked at Croft, and he let the silence stretch until it was uncomfortable.

“I’m a mechanic,” Jack said at last. “I fix engines. I don’t break faith.”

Croft’s smile did not waver, but the warmth behind it cooled. “And what faith did the railway companies keep with you, lad? You fired from the L&S today? Blackballed? I heard the rumours before I climbed the stairs. A man with your reputation has few friends. I am offering you a way out. You would do well to take it.”

Jack pushed off the wall and walked to the door. He opened it. “Get out.”

Croft closed his ledger with a snap and rose. He moved slowly, deliberately, like a man who never hurries because he knows time is on his side. He paused in the doorway, the barge looming behind him, and fixed Jack with those pale grey eyes.

“You have one week, Mr. Mullins,” he said. “Then I begin to take things that cannot be replaced. Landlords are understanding men when the price is right. I’d hate for your mother to lose her roof.”

He waited, letting the words sink in. Jack’s fists clenched at his sides. The barge smirked.

Then Croft reached inside his coat and pulled out a small scrap of paper, creased and grubby, and tossed it onto the table. It landed face-up, a pawn ticket for silver snuff box. No—Jack looked closer—for a silver pocket watch. His father’s watch.

“That’s yours,” Croft said, reading the confusion on Jack’s face. “Your father pawned it three months after the fire, when the doctor’s bills grew too heavy. I bought the ticket off the pawnbroker last year. I thought you might want it back. A keepsake. Consider it a gesture of good faith.”

He was gone before Jack could respond, the door clicking shut behind him. The barge’s footsteps echoed down the stairs, heavy as judgement.

Mary let out a breath she had been holding. “Jack. The man’s a snake. But he’s a snake with our neck in his jaws.”

Jack picked up the pawn ticket. It was cheap paper, soft at the edges. In his father’s cramped hand—Jack recognised the writing from old letters, kept in a drawer—was the name PATRICK MULLINS, and the broker’s stamp, dated three years gone. His father had sold his watch. The watch his own father had given him, passed down from a grandfather who had worked the first steam engines in Cornwall. It had been in the family for decades.

And Croft had held it over them like a sword.

Jack folded the ticket carefully and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. He crossed to the table and sat down across from his mother. He took her hands in his. They were rough, red, cracked from lye and cold water.

“Ma,” he said. “I’ve got something to tell you. And I need you to listen without asking questions until I’m finished.”

Her eyes searched his face. Then she nodded, slow.

Jack pulled out the leather map and spread it across the table, weighing down the corners with the candle stub and his mother’s darning. Mary leaned in, squinting at the fine lines etched into the hide. A survey map. A proposed rail route, drawn in black ink, cutting a serpentine path through open country.

“I found this inside a strongbox in a wrecked engine,” Jack said. “It’s got my name on it. Mullins. And a date from ten years ago. The year Da died.”

Mary’s mouth opened, then closed. She touched the map’s edge with a trembling finger, tracing the letters that spelled her late husband’s name.

“This is his hand,” she whispered. “He wrote the notes on the margin. I’d know that sloping R anywhere.”

Jack sat back. The candle flickered between them, casting long shadows across the map.

“Da was planning a railway line,” Jack said slowly. “Before the fire. Before the accident. He was going to build something. And someone buried this map in an engine that derailed ten years later.” He looked up at his mother, his eyes hard. “Someone who didn’t want it found. And I want to know why.”

Mary said nothing. But her hand found his, and held it tight.

Outside, the rain began to fall harder, drumming against the window like the urgent knock of a man who has run out of time.