"This'll never work," Dutchy hissed down to Spot.
"It'll work a lot better if you shut your mouth and stop squirming," Spot whispered back.
Dutchy didn't look happy at all, but he sat back and tried to look like he rode in carriages every day. This, for Dutchy, meant sticking his nose in the air and trying to look down self-same nose at anyone he saw.
It looked ridiculous.
Spot groaned. "This'll never work."
Dutchy glared down at him. "You put me in these clothes, you put me in this carriage and you tell me to act like I'm rich. Least you could do would be to act like we'se actually gonna get away with this."
Spot just shook his head. Use your head, Race had said. So yesterday, acting on a hunch, he'd done the last thing in the world that he'd wanted to do.
It had been years since he'd seen this house. To a child, it had always looked like a giant's mansion. To Spot, it still looked disturbingly large. However, he hadn't made his way up through the newsie ranks through cowardice, so with only a slight twitching of a muscle under his eye, he walked right up to the ornate front door and knocked loudly.
While waiting for an answer, he pulled his hat off and slicked his hair back as smoothly as he could.
Ever so slowly, the door crept open to reveal a middle-aged man with thinning brown hair. "Yes?" he asked slowly, eyeing Spot. "Can I help you?"
Spot clenched his teeth, fully aware of the way this man was looking at him. He knew what the butler saw: a skinny boy in clothes that, to his epicurean eyes, were little more than rags, cold eyes, messy hair, and dirt caked under his nails.
"Yeah," Spot replied coolly. "I need to see the O'Brians."
"I see. And... who shall I tell them is calling?"
Fully aware that this man was looking for a good excuse to throw this pathetic waste of life off of the property, Spot's fists automatically clenched.
"Just tell them it's Patrick."
The butler's lips thinned until they were barely visible. "Hardly amusing. I'm terribly afraid that I have to ask you to leave. If you go right now, there need be no incident."
"You think this is a joke?" Spot snarled, unconsciously dropping his accent and standing up straighter. "If my grandparents find out that I came here and you didn't allow me access, there will be Satan to pay, so let me in and I won't mention this horrible breach of manners to them."
The older man cleared his throat angrily. "Mr. and Mrs. O'Brian mourn for their grandson every single day, boy. If I were to allow an imposter like you through this door, it would be a blotch on my spotless record."
"My name is Patrick O'Connell and I am the grandson of Mr. and Mrs. O'Brian. You honestly think that my father's son would allow himself to do something as stupid as die?"
The butler's only reaction was to try to close the door. Spot, however, having come this far, was not about to let some snooty middle-man stop him. He put his hand on the closing door and pushed back. Apparently surprised that the street urchin was stronger than he looked, the man hissed, "Go away! You're not getting into this house!"
"Like hell I'm not!" Spot shouted, having seen some movement in the house behind the butler.
"Gregory?" a lilting woman's voice floated out. "Who is that?"
"No one, madam!" the butler grunted, but his momentary distraction allowed Spot to get the upper hand in their pushing match, and the door flew open.
Spot's momentum sent him sprawling to the gleaming wooden floor. He shook his head dazedly, trying to spring to his feet with instincts honed by years of street fighting, but the butler was quicker than he looked. Before Spot could defend himself, he found himself in a headlock, his head angled towards the floor so that he couldn't look up even if he wanted to.
"Forgive me, madam!" the butler exclaimed. "Let me remove this piece of trash from your home with my humblest apologies."
Afterwards, Spot would never know what she saw at that moment. Perhaps it was his sandy brown hair, or maybe it was his piercing eyes, so like hers. Maybe it was just the defiance in his posture. Whatever it was though, before Spot could be bodily dragged from the house, she gasped, "Wait!"
"Madam?"
"Wait... Don't throw him out. Let me see him."
Reluctantly, and none too gently, the butler grabbed Spot's hair and pulled back, forcing Spot to look straight forward. He found himself looking into a face so familiar that for a moment, he actually thought that he had never run away. She looked older, more worn, but there was no doubt about it: it was his grandmother.
She seemed to recognize him too, because her eyes filled with tears, one of which overflowed and slid down her cheek, stopping in every wrinkle and line. "Jaysus," she gasped, "Let go of him, Gregory!" The butler blinked. "Let go right now!"
Although Gregory would clearly have much rather thrown Spot clear across the road, he had no choice but to comply. Spot, on the other hand, was under no such delusions of self-control, and came up swinging. He nailed the butler right in the jaw with his fist.
As Gregory went wheeling back into the wall, clutching his chin, Spot stood up straight and looked defiantly at his grandmother. "Sorry about that, Nana, but the man's a goon."
"Of course, of course," she sobbed, grabbing Spot in a tight hug. "Oh, my wee boy, I thought I'd never see you again."
Spot hung uncomfortably in her embrace and was fully aware of the man with a bruise already forming on his jaw staring daggers at his back, but managed to awkwardly pat her on the back as she wept.
After a very long moment, she seemed to regain control of herself and pulled away to look at him. "How you've grown, Patrick!" she exclaimed, and started to grow teary-eyed again. "However have you survived? Every day I've prayed that you would come home, every day!"
"It's all right, Nana," Spot muttered, embarrassed. "I'm all right."
She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. "Of course you are... Oh, look at you, you are your father's son indeed. You must have his brilliant mind – that's how you survived."
Of all people in the world, his father was the person he most didn't want to hear about. "Yeah, Nana. Look, can we—"
"Oh, but I'll have to tell your grandfather!" she said excitedly. "Cecil? Cecil! Cecil, come here!" She paused and looked at their butler. "For heaven's sake, Gregory, close the door and try to make yourself useful. Perhaps a spot of tea for my grandson?"
"It's really all right," Spot said. "I don't drink tea—"
But it was too late. She was already running up the stairs, calling to her husband. And by the time a tall, distinguished-looking older man burst through a pair of mahogany doors, Spot had already prepared himself for another round of hugging and crying. And once that part was over, they both exclaimed over his cuts and bruises and insisted that he bathe right away (though he managed to talk them out of that, at least for the moment).
Finally, at long last, both of his grandparents seemed to calm themselves enough to sit down and ask him where he had been and what he had been doing. Already worn out from all of the emotion that was being directed his way, Spot gave them a heavily abridged version of the last five years.
"You say, you were on the front page of The Sun?" his Nana exclaimed. "If we read The Sun, we might have seen you!"
"Pulitzer prints better news," his grandfather said emphatically. "He's a good businessman."
"But if we'd read the bloomin' paper, Cecil," she replied, just as emphatically, "we could have found him sooner."
"I didn't really want to be found," Spot muttered under his breath.
"What was that, Patrick love?"
"...Nothing, Nana."
"Well, it doesn't matter. You're here now. You're safe and home!"
"Nana... Grandpa... This isn't my home," Spot said. "My home is out there, with my boys."
"Nonsense!" his grandfather boomed. "I will not let my only grandson live on the streets! Isn't it bad enough that I've lost my daughter? I will not lose you again."
"What?" Spot asked, confused. "You haven't seen Ma?"
His grandmother sighed and looked into her tea. "We haven't seen our Ashleigh in years. She's still... in that place."
"No, she ain't! ...I mean, she's not," he corrected himself as his grandparents looked at him in horror. "I saw her... barely more than a week ago. She's not in the bin anymore."
"How can that be?" Nana asked. "We haven't seen her at all. If she were free, she would come home!"
Spot set his chin. "I don't know what she's thinking, but it's possible. I didn't want to come back here. Ever." He let out an exasperated sigh as tears welled up in his Nana's eyes again. "Nana, it doesn't have anything to do with you. My life, my friends are all out there. This place is not my home, and I know you want me to stay, Grandpa, but you can't keep me here."
"I can certainly try!"
"Bar the gates and I'll climb over them. Lock the door and I'll break it down. Tie me up and I'll chew through the cords, but I am not staying here."
The old man sighed, looking his age for the first time. "How like your mother you are... When she was young, she decided that she hated the park and took to climbing out onto the roof so that she wouldn't have to go. All the women were too frightened to climb out after her, and the men were too afraid of acting with impropriety, so she always got her way. At least, until she met the man who wasn't too afraid to go out onto the roof after her."
"My father," Spot replied flatly.
"Aye, your father," his grandfather nodded. "So, Patrick, if you've no intention of staying here, what did you come back for? To break our hearts again as we watch you disappear from our lives?"
"That ain't fair," Spot replied, purposefully ignoring grammar. "I had no choice. It was the streets or my father. I made my choice and I'm gonna stand by it."
"So why are you here?"
"I'm here," Spot said, exasperated, "because I need help. Maybe it was a bad idea, maybe I shouldn't've come, but that's why I came."
"Help?"
"Spot!" Dutchy snapped. "You listenin'?"
"Hell no," Spot replied. "I've had a bad week and I'm tryin' to forget I was ever born. I got no time to listen to you."
"Well, ain't that nice," the blond boy said, "and after I agreed to help with this dumb plan too."
"You didn't agree, Dutchy," Spot snapped. "Mush and Specs had to hold you down while we put the suit on you and you tried to punch me!"
"'Course I did! This is the stupidest plan I ever heard of, and I was there when Jack wanted to start the strike."
"Strike worked, didn't it?"
"That ain't the point," Dutchy exclaimed. "You show up last night with a horse and carriage and this uncomfortable suit, and you say that I gotta pretend that I'm rich while you hide by my feet, and you think this'll work? I couldn't look like I was rich if I were covered in dollar bills!"
"You just have to get me into Brooklyn," Spot reminded him, fighting the urge to break Dutchy's foot.
"Why me? Why not Jack or Blink? They do dumb things all the time!"
"'Cause the Brooklyn boys'd recognize Jack and Blink, but they ain't gonna recognize you."
Dutchy snorted. "Know what I think this is about? You were just hacked off that whatever rich people you went and begged for this stuff made you bathe. When you got back lookin' so pretty, I coulda slapped a pink bow in your hair and called you my sister."
"Shut it." Spot scowled. He hadn't wanted to bathe, but his grandparents had insisted. It was as though they thought that a bath would protect him from all the dangers of the outside world. "Listen, Dutchy, you'se my only hope of getting' Brooklyn back. And if I don't get Brooklyn back, then things are gonna get nasty. Boys are goin' to start turnin' up dead again, and they might be people we know, so shut your mouth and look like a rich man."
Dutchy pouted. He looked like he was about to say something else, but the coachman, who had been silent up till that point, turned around and drawled around the cigar in his mouth, "Yeah, you'se both'd better be quiet. Spot, get your head down and try not to breathe."
Spot's scowl deepened. He hadn't wanted Race to come along, knowing that the Brooklyn boys might recognize him, but the older newsie had insisted, and if ever there was a strength of will to match Spot's, it was Race's.
So despite his misgivings, Spot tucked his head down and held his breath as they approached Brooklyn.