Well, usually, that is.

At night he could hear the scratching of tiny feet, scurrying here and there. Squeaks and rustlings would suddenly still and then begin again. Mice. Or perhaps rats.

Harry hated rats.

When he’d gone to the poorhouse in the city, he’d quickly figured out that he and Da would starve if he couldn’t fight off the others to keep their ration of food. So he’d learned to fight back, fast and ruthless. The other boys and men stayed away after that.

But the rats didn’t.

When dusk fell, they would come out. The wild creatures of the countryside feared people. Rats did not. They would creep right into a man’s pocket to steal his last bite of bread. They would nose through a boy’s hair, looking for crumbs. And if they couldn’t find any leavings, they’d make their own. If a man slept too deeply, whether from drink or sickness, the rats would take a nibble. From toes or fingers or ears. There were men in the poorhouse whose ears were ragged flowers. You knew those wouldn’t last much longer. And if a man died in his sleep, well, by morning sometimes you didn’t know his face.

You could kill the rats, of course, if you were quick enough. Some boys even roasted them over a fire and ate them. But however hungry Harry got—and there’d been days when his insides twisted with need—he could never imagine putting that meat in his mouth. There was an evil in rats that would surely transfer to your belly and infect the soul if you ate them. And no matter how many rats you killed, there were always more.

So now at night, Harry didn’t really sleep. Because there were rats out there and he knew what they could do to an injured man.

Granville’s thugs had been beating him daily, sometimes twice a day, for a week now. His right eye was swollen shut, the left not much better, his lip split and resplit. At least two ribs were cracked. Several of his teeth were loose. There wasn’t more than a handspan on his entire body that wasn’t covered with bruises. It was only a matter of time until they hit him too hard or in the wrong place or until his body just gave out.

And then the rats . . .

Harry shook his head. What he couldn’t understand was why Granville hadn’t killed him at once. When he’d woken the day after he’d been caught at the stream, there’d been a moment when he had been stunned just to find himself alive. Why? Why capture him alive when Granville surely meant to kill him anyway? They kept telling him to confess to killing Will’s gran, but surely that didn’t really matter to Granville. The baron didn’t need a confession to hang him. Nobody would care much about Harry’s death or would protest it, except maybe Will.