Jim Morgan and the King of Thieves

by James Matlack Raney

  James abhorred being called like common dog, but he had to get his box back, so he begrudgingly stepped forward. The king eyed him intently and James felt the stares of a hundred wild thieves on his back.

  “What’s your name, my friend?” the King asked James with syrupy sweetness.

  “James Morgan,” James replied, trying to sound unshaken, but the tremble in his voice betraying him.

  “Well, Jim,” the King said. “Why be so formal, my boy? Down here, we’re all just friends. After all, Jim Morgan has a bit more of a ring to it, wouldn’t you say? Now, tell me, where did you steal this box?”

  “I didn’t steal it, it’s mine,” said Jim defiantly (and whether he liked it or not, the name the King of Thieves gave him stuck.) But just as soon as he spoke, Jim wished he hadn’t. There was a moment of perplexed silence, and then the entire court, the king included, exploded into uproarious laughter.

  All his life Jim had laughed at others, especially at those more common than himself. But now, here he stood, surrounded by a mob of children more common than the trees on the hills, yet it was they, not him, who were doing the laughing now. A thick lump formed in Jim’s throat, and his nose began to sting yet again.

  The king quieted the crowd down with a wave of his hand, and, still smiling his foxy smile, looked Jim and the box over. “I’m sure it is,” the King of Thieves said patronizingly. “All of us down here are simply laden with personal possessions. So if the box is yours, why don’t you just open it for me?”

  “I can’t.” Jim suddenly felt his emotions getting the best of him, and his little chin quivered.

  “Look!” Big Red pointed his big hand right at Jim’s miserable face. “He’s gonna blubber like a baby!” The court burst into ridiculing laughter again, and this time the king didn’t stop them. He let them laugh, and while they did, he leaned in on Jim’s downcast face, looking at him nose to nose.

  “Tell me the truth, boy.” All things false went away. The king spoke plainly to Jim while his whole army of feral children laughed their heads off in the background, his voice as flat and cold as the gray bricks beneath their feet. “Where did you steal this box?”

  “I didn’t steal it,” Jim whimpered pitifully. “I just want it back, please.”

  “Hmmm,” the king’s eyes were keenly thoughtful. “This is very interesting indeed.” Then the king abruptly stood back up, quieting down the raucous crowd with another wave of his hand. “Silence!” he cried, getting what he asked for in an instant. “It seems, my friends, that Jim Morgan and I have a disagreement about who owns this box.” The King looked about at his faithful followers, the glimmer of an idea growing in his dark eyes. “Now as you all know, we have a way of settling such disputes, don’t we?”

  “YEAH!” the court cried, bubbling over in excitement.

  “And what is it?”

  “THIEVIN’!” the crowd roared back.

  “That’s right, lads and lassies!” the king nodded in agreement. “In order to share and share alike, my boy, you must take what’s yours first. So here we have Jim Morgan, and he must prove he belongs. He must prove that he is one of us! Only then will he earn the right to have his box shared back to him!” The court cheered their approval while Jim’s spirits sunk lower than ever before.

  “But!” the king held up one bony finger. “Like the rest of you, Jim here needs a clan. Who will take him?”

  Jim scanned the crowd, leering back him, the looks on their faces silently screaming their choices. They didn’t want him. Not one of these bands of thieving commoners wanted any part of James Francis Morgan…the most filthy children in all of England wanted nothing to do with him at all.

  “We’ll take ’im!” a shrill voice piped up from the back and Jim’s spirits, if it can be believed, sunk even lower than a moment before. Jim had heard that voice just a few minutes before, as had every other member of the court. Their reaction was not quite so subdued as Jim’s.

  “The Ratt brothers,” the king announced, smiling. “Perfect,” he said, and the other clans once more burst into uproarious laughter.

  “Then the deal is set!” the King of Thieves announced over the cacophony. “The King of Thieves will give Jim Morgan a chance for the gypsy’s box. If he can prove he is one of us, he shall gain what he has lost, but if not…the box is mine forever!” The crowd cheered and once more the King leaned in close to Jim.

  “I don’t want anything to do with your stupid bet,” Jim protested. “I’m not a thief!”

  “Oh you will be, my son.” The king smiled a toothy grin. “When your belly starts to ache, you’ll become one real quick. And you’d better become a good one too, or you’ll never see your little box again.”

  “Why? You can’t even get it open!”

  “Don’t underestimate the King of Thieves, Jim. Gypsy magic is hardly the only sorcery still lurking about old England and certainly not the most powerful. If they were such good wizards, don’t you think they could get rid of that wretched smell?” The King laughed along with his court, walking away as his silent partner appeared from the shadows to collect their pile of treasure.

  The children of the court also slowly trickled out, still laughing and catcalling to Jim, who slumped down on the cold cobblestone in a miserable heap. At that moment, with tears threatening and not a friend in sight, he may have been the loneliest boy in all of England.

  TWELVE

  im sat there in the deepening dark of the courtyard. All had grown quiet about him and he was sure that the entire audience of children had abandoned him to his own means when a small hand gently patted his shoulder.

  “It’ll be all right,” the voice that belonged to the hand said. Jim was about to wrench the hand off his shoulder and spout some nastiness when he looked up to find himself staring into the bluest set of eyes he’d ever seen. “I still cry sometimes myself, and I’ve been here on the streets for weeks now.”

  She was a girl just a tad bit younger than Jim himself, her auburn curls hanging in a tangled mess about her dirt-smudged face, and her big blue eyes clouded over with pity.

  Jim forgot the nasty words he was about to say, but though he was secretly in need of such kindness as the girl was offering, he still remembered his pride.

  “I wasn’t crying,” Jim said with a deep sniffle. “I just got a little… upset is all. So you can stop looking at me like that if you please.”

  Suddenly, the blue eyes on the girl’s face glared quite brightly under a hot scowl. “You absolutely were crying, or just about to, Mr. Jim Morgan, and it’s absolutely the stupidest thing in the world to lie about the most obvious things. And it’s even more stupid and rude to turn away a kind person when you haven’t got a single friend in the whole wide world!” At this she stomped her foot, crossing her arms in front of her.

  Well this simply caught Jim completely unprepared. He climbed to his feet, stammering to justify himself before this completely confusing girl. “I — I have friends,” he said. “Loads of them!”

  “Well some friends they are if they aren’t even here to help you when you need them the most. That doesn’t sound like friends at all.”

  “How should you know what a friend is like?”

  “Because my mother told me. And she also told me how to be a good friend. And besides that, I have three friends while you have none!”

  As if on cue, her three comrades, who had been standing by timidly, watching the entire time, made their presence known. “Hullo, mate!” said the first. Jim glumly recognized the squeaky voice and little mousy faces of the three boys.

  “You must be the Ratt Brothers,” Jim said. He looked the nearly identical brothers over, their small heads buried under oversized hats, held up only by their ears, which stuck out like a mouse’s, and he suddenly remembered that the fate of his box, and thus his entire future, rested on their slight shoulders. Jim really did want to cry then.

  “You betcha!” said the first Ratt again, apparently unfazed by Jim’s lack
of enthusiasm as he proudly introduced himself and his two brothers. “Allow me to introduce the greatest of all the thieves in London! My brothers Paul and Peter, and my name is George. And we are: the Brothers Ratt!” They simultaneously took off their hats, bowing low before Jim. But no sooner had the three stood up than Peter angrily slapped his hat back on his head and shoved George hard on the shoulder.

  “I thought we agreed that it sounded better to say: My brothers Peter and Paul, George!”

  “It does not! That sounds awful. It’d be like saying meat-mince pie. It’s all backwards!” Paul retorted. “Besides, I definitely popped out before you did, and that puts me next in line, don’t it? So I should be before you no matter how it sounds!”

  “The priest just told you that to make you feel better about being the smallest, Paul! I’m older!”

  “A priest wouldn’t lie about that, Peter!”

  “Both of you cool your socks!”

  “Shut up, George!” Peter and Paul turned on their brother, and in a moment they fell upon one another, tumbling to the ground in a pile of punching limbs.

  “Really! Not again!” the little girl said, stomping her foot in exasperation. “Are all boys this senseless? Boys! Boys! Stop it this instant!” She then surprised Jim even further by reaching into the rumbling trio and yanking them apart one at a time like a dogcatcher pulling apart a scrapping pile of pups. Jim appraised her anew with raised eyebrows.

  “I had four cousins…all boys,” she said, catching Jim’s stare. “And all stupid,” she added with a disapproving look in the Ratt Brothers’ direction. But, noticing their crestfallen faces at her rebuke, she added with some tenderness: “But as far as boys go, they are at least as good a thieves as they say.”

  With that compliment, the boys’ exuberance returned, and they clasped arms around one another’s shoulders, smiling with faces formed of black eyes, bloody noses, and swollen lips.

  “So, how do I know who’s who?” Jim asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” the boys said in perfect unison. “I’m the good-looking one!”

  The girl rolled her eyes and quickly instructed Jim on the actual way to tell them apart. “There are two ways. First, George has three freckles going across the bridge of his nose.”

  “I do not!” George said, immediately putting his hand to his nose as if he could feel whether or not the freckles were actually there.

  “Paul really is the smallest.”

  “What!?” Paul exclaimed, but the girl immediately soothed his concern.

  “But only by a little and I’m sure you’ll grow out of it. And Peter has the curliest hair.”

  “And what’s the second way?” Jim asked.

  “By what they do of course!” the girl said, as though it were obvious. “George picks pockets, Peter picks locks, and Paul —”

  “Picks his nose!” Peter said.

  “I DO NOT!” Paul raged, and the boys immediately set upon one another once again.

  “— and Paul is a natural born con man,” the girl finished, and this time she just sighed as the boys tussled until they finally either forgot about what they were fighting over or just plain wore themselves out.

  “And what’s your name?” Jim finally asked.

  “My name is Lacey,” she said, and then turned back to the Ratts, who were now dusting one another off and praising each other’s fighting skills.

  “You have a mean right hook, Peter! An absolute earth shaker!”

  “Your chin is like an oak, Paul! Like solid oak!”

  “Men should mind their distance about us, that’s for certain!”

  “Now boys,” Lacey said, and they straightened up to listen. “We need to get home and to bed so we can start practicing tomorrow.”

  “Practicing?” Jim asked. “For what?”

  “For thievin’, mate,” Peter said.

  “We’ll need to be in tip-top form if we’re going to get your box back. The Dragons may be as big and dumb as they look, but they aren’t bad crooks, that’s for sure.”

  “You — you’re really going to help me?” Jim asked.

  “Of course we are, Jim,” George said, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’re part of our clan now. That makes you our friend, and we always help our friends.” Jim didn’t know why, but his throat got all lumpy again, but this time, to his surprise, it wasn’t an entirely sad lump.

  “So,” said Peter. “Is that box really yours?”

  “Yeah,” chimed in Paul. “Must be somethin’ important to have you take on the King himself for it.”

  Jim swallowed hard. As kind as these new friends seemed to be, he was not quite ready to share his secret. “It’s just a family heirloom, that’s all. From my father.”

  “Ah, yes,” George nodded knowingly. “I have me father’s earlobes as well. Always important to keep such things safe.” Jim was about to correct him, but George and his brothers seemed quite satisfied with themselves and, with no further discussion, turned to leave the courtyard.

  So, being completely exhausted and with nowhere else to go, Jim followed his new friends out of the court and down the street, hoping against hope that there was even a small chance of regaining his box and setting his life straight once again.

  THIRTEEN

  fter tossing and turning through one of the most miserable nights of sleep in the history of sleeping, Jim opened his eyes to a gray London morning. The only pillow he had been able to find had been a hard, flat brick, and his only blanket had been a dingy old coat one of the Ratts let him borrow. But worst of all, a nightmare had plagued Jim’s dreams, of Aunt Margarita, old Count Cromier, and that horrible Bartholomew with coal black hair and ice blue eyes, all chasing him through the haunted forest and down the streets of London. But no matter how fast or how far Jim went, the villains were forever but a few footsteps behind, and just before he awoke, when the dream could surely grow no darker, the shadowy cloaked man, raven perched atop his shoulder, appeared to block Jim’s last hopes of escape.

  Jim lay awake with his head on the brick for a few moments, trying to forget his dream by recounting the previous days horrors instead: having been robbed, beaten up, mocked, held at the mercy of the King of Thieves, and press-ganged into a troupe of pickpockets called, of all things, the Brothers Ratt. But worse than all that, Jim knew that by losing his box the night before, he had lost the only means of making all of this mess right again.

  Finally Jim hobbled to his feet, twisted to pop his back and neck back into proper position, and took a look around. As it turned out, the Ratts lived in an abandoned cellar beneath a shoe factory with a hole in the wall that acted as the only window and only door to their “house.” Although, Jim noted, as far as homes made out of abandoned cellars beneath shoe factories went, this one was only half awful. Its occupants had managed to steal enough odds and ends to give the place a sense of homeliness.

  A wooden coat rack leaned crookedly by the hole, the Ratts’ stolen caps and scarves hanging haphazardly from its hooks, and a small set of empty drawers sat nearly collapsed against the far wall. Beside the chest of drawers a rickety shelf barely stood on its wobbly legs beneath a load of stolen books the children couldn’t read. On the top shelf sat a row of various soldiers’ hats stolen off various soldiers’ heads, and on a small, plain table in the middle of the room stood a cracked vase, containing a few flowers with broken stalks and only a few sickly petals. As for bedding, the Ratts had piled bunches of burlap potato sacks in the corners of the room, one for each of the brothers and Lacey – though each of Jim’s new friends had been decent enough to loan him one sack from each of their own piles to make him a bed beside the chest of drawers.

  “It didn’t always look this fantastic, Jim,” George said, popping out of bed, a seemingly everlasting smile stretched across his small face. “Believe you me, before Lacey came along, this place was a real dump!”

  “I can only imagine,” Jim said.

  “Yes, sir!” George exclaimed. �
�She made us sweep up and even got Paul to talk an old florist into lending us that vase with the flowers, if you catch my drift…don’t go back to that corner much anymore though, he was a fast blighter for a florist. A woman’s touch, Jim, that’s all the old home front needed, a woman’s touch! And now look at it!”

  “Home sweet home, eh?” Jim tried to force a smile, turning away before his true feelings about the cellar accidentally escaped, as he needed these Ratts help to retrieve his box.

  “Yep,” George said. “A man’s home is his castle as long as he’s the king of it, that’s what our Pa always used to say.”

  “You didn’t know our father, George,” Peter said from the pile of sacks that was his bed, stretching and yawning himself awake.

  “Or our mother, for that matter,” Paul added, wiping away the sleepy goobers from his eyes.

  “True,” George said with a nod, still smiling. “But that doesn’t mean he didn’t say it, does it?”

  “True enough indeed!” Peter said, and he and Paul jumped merrily out of bed.

  Jim said nothing about it, but he was entirely perplexed at the never-ending smiles the Ratt brothers wore on their mousy faces. As far as he could tell, the three of them were disliked by their peers, had never known their own mother or father, had not a penny to their name, and lived in a cellar, however orderly a cellar it may have been. Yet Jim had seen nary a frown on their faces, even when they were beating one another to a pulp.

  “How about some breakfast, Jim?” George said. At the mere mention of food, Jim felt his insides rumble, realizing it had been quite some time since he’d had his last meal. But the instant image of he and the Ratt Brothers gnawing on old birdseed or rotten tomatoes behind a shack somewhere popped into Jim’s head, and his appetite grew suddenly dubious.