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The Lost Boy

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Prologue:

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He had fled from Downton in the pale half-light of an autumn dawn. Now it was winter, and he found himself alone in London, with only the vaguest of ideas as to how he came to be there. He recalled some indistinct notion of escape - an embryonic scheme to lose himself in the tide of human flotsam that had washed up on the Thames in the wake of the great war - but in this, as in many things, he realised that he had displayed more impulse than foresight. As intolerable as his situation had seemed at Downton, to be cut-off and friendless in this bleak city - shadowed always by drink and poverty, and the memory of things far worse - had brought him to his lowest ebb yet.

The truth was that he was woefully incapable of surviving independently such as he was. His wounds had healed as much as they ever would, but his right hand was still next to useless, and his face was a twisted ruin of distorted flesh. The capital had more than enough young men freshly demobbed and clamouring for work…what hope did a disfigured cripple have of finding respectable employment? Now he had only a meagre army pension to live on, and a taste for gin that seemed to consume him more and more with each passing day. No decent boarding-house would offer him lodging, and he had pawned his service medals several weeks past in a desperate attempt to eke out his income.

It all seemed so very far removed from his former life - the life that should have been his still, were it not for...

He watched the days pass him by with only ambivalent interest. Whatever residual sense of pride he might have once possessed had dissipated along with the last of his money. He now spent his waking hours shuffling along the dockside, thin and unkempt, doing whatever small labours might earn him enough coppers to hurry to the nearest public house and buy a cheap bottle of oblivion. The city seemed to whirl beneath his feet, greying around the edges of his vision - irrelevant somehow. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. After all, he had already lost everything that a man could lose…his home, his entitlements, his family…the only things that he could now call his own were the clothes on his back, and his name.

Ah yes, his name.

He had possessed many names over the years. Back in Canada, he used to change names as often as he changed lodging houses, slipping on each new identity as easily as silk over skin. In London, however, he was Patrick Gordon, because that was the one he had decided that he liked the best. It was, after all, the name that she had once called him, and something of her memory lingered with it, like a faint imprint upon his heart. He found something strangely comforting about the anchorage of this new fixed sense of self, even if the name was not the one bestowed upon him at birth. He had been baptised anew by the daughter of an earl, in a place that seemed both far away and somehow long ago. He had thought about her a great deal during his exile in London. Indeed, there were some days that he thought of little else.

…Edith…

He knew that he would never see her again, of course. And - perhaps, he reasoned - it was for the best. He would have been shamed to his very core if she had seen him as he was then: a penniless drunken vagrant with a face that children fled from in the street. He was sorry that he had gone to Downton to tell his story. It had certainly done him no favours, and he was afraid that his actions had wounded her more deeply than he had ever intended. Better that she remember her Patrick as the foolish, doomed young man who had once boarded the Titanic, never to return.

It seemed kinder to everyone involved that he simply be forgotten.

x

The wind cut through him like a razor blade as he stumbled down the crowded street. The sky was bruised with the promise of snow, and the cobbles underfoot felt slippery with frost. Objectively, Patrick knew that the winter's were no colder here in England than they had been back in Canada, but somehow his heart did not quite believe it.

He made his way gracelessly through the swarm of dour, colourless faces; his cap pulled low over his eyes, his chin tucked firmly into his collar. His chest rattled with every inhaled breath that he forced from his lungs, and his body was wracked with fever. He was sick, he knew that - but he was out of gin, and the pounding in his head was impossible to ignore. A morning's worth of odd-jobs at the docks had secured him enough change to purchase a cheap bottle, and he stumbled through the crowd as quickly as his shivering legs would allow, eager to get home to drink himself into peaceful oblivion.

He turned a corner in the street, and in his haste failed to notice the incoming approach of a dock-worker. The docker - bent double under the weight of a unfeasibly large bag of coal - bumped into him roughly, the collision sending them both staggering backwards. Patrick simply shrugged off the contact and turned to march on, but the other man, obviously irritated, throws an angry fist in his direction.

"Oi, watch'er ya bloomin' idiot!"

Patrick glanced back at him over his shoulder, which was - he quickly realised - a mistake. He saw the look of horror unfurling on the docker's face as he froze, eyes widening to take in the ruined visage that stared back at him. His mouth hung agape, the smouldering pipe dangling precariously over the rim of his lip.

"Jesus Christ…" he muttered hoarsely, and Patrick wondered whether it was revulsion or pity that made the docker stop to lift his grimy cap and run a hand over his brow. "That face…"

Patrick had become used to such reactions, but he was by no means impervious them. He flinched, as though physically struck, and then ducked his head further down into the darkened hollow of his jacket. He turned and walked on - quicker this time; gaze fixed firmly to the ground - avoiding the eyes of the curious or the hostile that he passed.

He followed the river east, where the buildings became gradually shabbier and shabbier, until he found the familiar mildewed frontage of his lodging house. There he entered and climbed the creaking staircase, letting himself into the attic room with a key that was rusted with age. As always, he was careful to ensure that the door was locked securely after him - the other tenants were often violently drunk, and he did not allow himself to relax until he knew that the door was securely bolted - before slumping heavily into a chair and closing his eyes with a sigh. There he sat in the quiet semi-dark, and pretended for a moment that the face that he passed in the hallway mirror was not his own. A single tear escaped from his closed eyelids and traced it's way down the ruined hollow of his cheek. Then his hand reached for the gin bottle, as though of it's own accord, and he tasted salvation as the welcome sting of alcohol burned hotly down his throat.

He drank steadily into the evening. When his body could take no more, he fell into a feverish sleep, his breath rasping dryly in the cold night air. The war was over, and has been for some time, and so Patrick no longer dreamt of bloodshed. Instead he dreamt of a grand house in the country - a place that he had once foolishly believed could one day be his own - and a beautiful young girl with a smile that made his chest hurt with love.

"Edith," he murmured mournfully in the midst of his delirium. "…My dearest, dearest Edith."

x

It was his landlady that raised the alarm early the next day. She found him when he trudged up the stairs, intent on collecting his over due rent, and instead found him slumped over in an arm chair, as cold and still as an effigy in stone. He remembered nothing of the journey to hospital, nor of the frantic efforts of the doctors to save his life. It was only later, when he awoke from death's grip and the ward sister explained that he had nearly succumbed to pneumonia, that he found himself silently wishing that he had not been found at all.

x

Tbc...