A Tale of Flynnigan Rider
Chapter 5

Antoine cursed again as he locked the door. It wasn't that the king was coming, it was that it was not just the king. The queen was to accompany him. He'd just had a message from his brother, who was also coming with them. And now that little strumpet sat there trying his patience. He didn't dare refuse Kay, though, not this time - not if he knew about the queen and the attention that she paid to children because she had none of her own. If the Royal brat hadn't been kidnapped he wouldn't be having this problem right now.

He seethed at Eugene under his breath. Ten years ago, Antoine had been condemned to work in this place to serve children lower than himself. It was a far easier punishment, his brother told him, then imprisonment or hard labor. His brother knew that he hated children, but Antoine did not think that his dear brother realized how much he hated children. His upstanding older brother would not have suggested such a post, he thought, if he had known that Antoine would treat the children as he did. But, he reasoned, his brother was not stifled under the same circumstances. He never had a whelp like Eugene to watch over, and he'd probably beaten plenty of cadets and urchins senseless too.

Well, no need to worry about that until tomorrow. Antoine came to the first of the long bed chambers which should be cleaned at least by this time. He heard frightened whispers as he turned the key in the lock and that made him smile. Oh how they feared him! The door opened to the girls, ranging from four years to ten years, standing at attention, waiting for him to enter. The pails and rags stood neatly by the door, waiting to be dumped and put away. He sneered. So they had finished the room already. Well, it wasn't 'already' anymore, it was very nearly noon. And he could not scold them for being lazy and taking no initiative when it had been he who had locked the door and prevented them from finding other chores.
The girls all stared down at their toes, waiting for a reprimand, an order, a dismissal; they could never tell just what the Master would do. He walked around them first, no doubt trying to find some smudge or stain or spill on their frocks, but they were too careful and clever for that. He sniffed disdainfully and crossed to the far end of the room. Not one of the girls there knew of Kay's fears, and had she been there she would have been praying that he did not see the blood stains that she had left there. He walked all of the way to the window and turned around, inspecting the floor as he went. The place had to be spotless for the king and queen tomorrow, and he would have to instill forced happiness upon the children whenever he saw them in the next forty-eight hours.

He shook the beds to test their strength. Kay's bunk was sturdy, and the one after. Suddenly a dark spot on the frame of the bed kitty-corner caught his attention. What on earth could that - he leaned against the frame to inspect the spot, but the bed creaked and leaned as he did so. He leaped back in alarm as the bed steadied itself. He would send one of the boys in here a bit later to fix it. So he continued on, grudgingly pleased with the girls' work though he would give them no word of praise. He came, after a long inspection, to the front of the room and faced the girls with his hands hidden behind his back.

"Hold out your skirts and turn, starting with you." He ordered, pointing to the youngest. Fortunately for Abby in the immediate moment, she had been in the institution for years and she obeyed him at once, stepping forward and turning slowly for him to inspect for any holes that might need patching. The rest of the girls followed, one by one, some of them still confused.

"You." He said to the third, "there is a hole in your skirt. Stand over there so I can find someone to mend it." The little girl looked shocked and confused. Unlike Abby, she had only been an orphan for little more than a month and was still not used to how things were. The oldest girl there, Candi, rocked back on her feet to get Antoine to call her out. Normally he shouted at a child for making any move that he had not demanded. This time was odd, though. This time he pointed straight to her instead of shouting and said, "You there, redhead."
"Sir?"
"This girl needs help mending her frock. It is your duty to help her." Candi nodded and stepped in immediately to draw the little girl aside as Antoine continued his inspection. She nodded to the little girl - Beth was her name - and ran to get a needle, thread, and materiel to patch things up. Candi wondered where on earth Kay had gone. Right now it didn't matter too much because the little girls' dresses would not take long and the holes or tears were obvious. Not so much on the older girls' dresses, which would be saved for later or even last. Often times they had more holes just from wear, but their owners could fix them alone. The worst was going to be whatever the boys had that needed mending, which was usually a great deal because they were boys after all. She hoped that Kay and the other big girls would be back to help them with it.

The master seemed more thorough this time in his searching than he did on a normal 'inspection' day. Five girls needed their dresses mended, and Candi, although she was certain that Kay and the oldest girls had spent all of the last two weekends in their mending, did not argue. It was safer not to. They had all seen what the master could and would do - mostly to Eugene or one of the older boys - but sometimes to the younger ones, and at times for no apparent reason. She knew that getting used to fear was not something normal to grow up with, but it would seem normal for many of them. She herself had spent most of her life in this place and barely remembered her old home, but she still remembered enough of it. Enough to know that this was no way for children or any human being to be treated. And what had the master done with Kay? She had been gone for a frightfully long time now and the other girls had started wondering about her. Maybe she had just gone out to supervise the rest of the bedding.

"How long will that take you, girl?"
"Huh? Me? Oh, probably less than an hour, sir." She blurted all at once, not used to being asked a civil question.
"Good. Get it done and I'll send in the boys who need their's mended. The rest of you girls get across the hall. I'm certain that you can help with cleaning." He grumbled, sweeping his hand in that general direction. Those girls bolted up and filed out with no need to be told again. Antoine followed them out slowly, his head down like he was thinking.

Candi did not like it. It was bad enough here on a normal day, but all of this was so strange. Not the scrubbing and the cleaning, that was done for good measure whenever the master's particular friend came to make an 'inspection' of the orphanage and its occupants. She was just as afraid of this visit as she was of any of them because any children who had spoken out in the least we're suddenly and mysteriously removed or taken ill. No one had spoken up in years. Kay was not afraid this time, though, and Candi was afraid for her. Then there was Eugene. He never said anything against the master - but he wasn't exactly the favored urchin either. More a whipping boy if you were to ask any of the children, because for some strange reason he was the one who got it whenever the master wanted to beat someone if only because he was in a foul mood. Maybe it was the circumstances of his arrival. Maybe the Master could just never separate the two, person from event.

It was a long time ago. Candi had only recently lost her own family at that time and had been there only a few months when he seemed to suddenly appear. The story was that it was a dark night in midsummer. The princess had been missing for a month then. It was dark and storming and a knock had come at the door in the dead of night. Up until now, the master, though not kind, had also not been cruel. None of the children ever guessed that this was because he did not have the freedom to be so. But now he was dragged from his bed on a rainy night to go to the door. An emissary was at the door. The princess had been kidnapped. The king had no time at the moment for visiting criminals and his sentence was for the time being set in stone, with no chance for parole until the tenth year or until the king would make his next visit. He was in a desperate search for his only child. Antoine, she imagined, had probably stood at the door, grinding his teeth and looking at the dark wet lump beside the emissary.
The lump was Eugene. Wet, bedraggled, confused. She remembered the look in his eye the first day. He did not look even as if he were alive. Antoine had shown no compassion for him that night or ever. No doubt he associated Eugene with his seeming eternity here.

What baffled Candi always was why the king, who had always seemed so kind and good when he had visited her father's mill, could allow such a horrible man to watch over children for so long. Yes, she was little more than a baby when her parents and brothers died, fallen to robbers who never saw her, but she remembered as many good things from her childhood as she could in this place. They helped her to remember that there was more in this world than Antoine's cruelty and the blackened dingy walls that she lived between. She hoped that in the end, Kay would be right. Maybe this time would be different.

Antoine slammed the door to the girls' bedroom as he left it. Ugh. Inspections, inspections, inspections! And the worst part was organizing and cleaning things for the king's coming without letting on what was happening. Perhaps they thought that he'd gotten a cleaning bug or something like that. One could hope that the urchins had not caught on, but he feared that after so many years, a great deal of them had. Eugene almost certainly knew what was up. He seemed to have a way of finding things out. Whether or not Kay knew he could not be certain, but he had no concerns about her. She was angry now, perhaps, but she was too timid a soul to carry out her threats of exposure.

Antoine hated his life here and he hated the children, but even more than that he feared the altering if his sentence. Ten years he had rotted away here in partial freedom, and another ten years was in store if he could slide by - or better still perhaps receive a parole instead. He did not want to be humiliated and treated like an animal in a prison cell. He was lucky, his brother had told him. Lucky that he had been fighting right where a few uncouth children had happened to be playing. The children were in the way, one of them was hurt in the scuffle. He had murdered his opponent who was distracted by the child, but somehow Antoine and his brother were able to convince the people that it was all done in defense of the children.

Nevertheless, he had been sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment and service for the killing. It was clear to many that there had been no need for Antoine to kill his foe. It was decided, however, that since he had the compassion to defend a young child, his sentence would be better used in service to the unfortunate children of Corona. He had been sent to this orphanage tentatively and the king was to pay two visits per year.

At first it went better for the children and harder for Antoine. But one night, when the the kingdom rejoiced in the safe birth of a princess, the joy was turned to sorrow, and Antoine's tentative reprieve from prison walls became the default of his existence. Only recently had things suddenly become hard again. The king had given up his desperate involvement in the search and left the finding of his daughter now to hope and faith and a select few of his men. The king and queen were both coming, all at Eugene's expense when Antoine's rage and frustration had been vented on the boy for a small transgression.

Eugene and Kay both thought that he had been punished for running away. No, that was the guise. And while he would still have taken great pleasure in beating him for it, the whip would not have come out. That whip had never come out against one of the children until that day. He knew that he didn't dare. It just happened this time. The anger and frustration, the confusion - all that had driven him to that same passion of rage that had caused him to kill those ten years before. Normally there was no one about. Always he restricted himself to tearing gouges onto the trunks of young trees, or the wood pile or a barren wall as he had done several times before.
This time he'd forgotten that he was punishing a boy. This time he had taken out his whip, ready to beat out his frustration out on a stall partition when he remembered Eugene standing there, hanging by his hands from a rafter with his feet barely touching the floor - just as he'd left him. He should have let him down, he really should have. But he hadn't. The boy was there still, and Antoine certainly hadn't finished taking out his anger against him.
It was too easy, too rewarding to finally beat it out on another human being, just like he'd been beaten as a young man.

The master turned quick as a demon and laid it out on the poor boy. It felt terribly satisfying, and he didn't get a drop of blood on himself - the consequence of being raised mostly by brigands. But Eugene hadn't screamed once, and that sent shivers up his spine. Something made him stop early in his rage, and he stood trembling, looking at what he had done. There was blood on the floor - and not just blood. Had he been speaking? Swearing in a rage? He'd already said too much to Eugene earlier, but God knows what he had said and admitted to in this fit of passion!
It would have perhaps been better had he not come to his wits and stopped short of killing the boy. It certainly would have been easier to throw his body to the wolves and framed him as a runaway. It would have been easier. It would not have been right. What did he care for right? He did not, not as many people do, though still even he did not bring himself to kill when his thoughts were about him, not even the first time. That he had killed in defense was true, but no defense of a child. It was defense against his own inner demons, his deranged thought of what he imagined that he saw or whether he had seen a thing.

Antoine startled suddenly out of his thoughts when he imagined that he had heard Eugene groaning all the way down that hall, but he straightened himself up again, realizing that it was just a ghost memory of the night before. No. No. There had to be some way, some grave way that Eugene was in the wrong and deserved to have the life beat out of him. There was the matter of making Bobby take his place that afternoon. Who did that boy think that he was? Some sort of vigilante? The orphan's hero? What gave him the right to decide who was to go and who was to stay? He would be hard pressed, if he survived, to live up to that standard that he had seemingly created. Could he be sure that the boy would always suffer in silence like that? He was getting older, stronger. Antoine did not know how much longer he would be able to physically control him. That was another reason for getting rid of him, probably the main reason. Eugene did not get any more to eat than any of the rest of the children, but he was not as sickly or quite thin as most of the others. He was a strange boy.

Ugh. Speaking of boys, Antoine remembered that he needed to check on them and make certain that they hadn't drowned anyone while hanging bedding. They had done enough of that for now. The girls could finish it. He needed them to clean out the stable - and now that he thought of it, he needed to clean up the stable. It would not do to have the boys find a pile of bloody straw and use it to accuse him of who knew what before the king. These souls banded together quite shockingly, especially when one of their number had been missing for more than a day. Of course, his greater fear was that the king should see it. Naturally it would be all brown and dried now, but there were few things that he could claim it as besides blood and none of them were sufficient.

The master rushed to the barn, not as if anyone would be out there in this hour, but he was so frightened of forgetting once he had now remembered. It was just as he had left it the night before. The lantern was still sitting on the sill, gone out long ago. The rope was left hanging from the rafters, frayed where he had cut it off. His whip was not out. Where was it? Where - oh, he had put it away. Yes, he had put it in its place. He had thus far never forgotten to hide his whip, fortunately.
Antoine grabbed the rope and yanked it down, coiling it around his hand as he surveyed the ground beneath it. He really didn't remember beating Eugene that bloody, but the straw on the ground was all covered in rusty brown. Thing was, he didn't have an idea of what he should do with it. The king couldn't see this. He could burn it, but the idea of burning it in his own fireplace repulsed him. He set the rope down by his lantern and picked up a pitchfork, gathering all of the bloody straw together in a heap. There was more of it than he had thought possible, and Antoine, just for a moment, cringed at the amount of pain that he had inflicted.

He enjoyed inflicting pain. He did! But sometimes the smallest part of conscience came through. He wanted to follow this pang of conscience, he always wanted to, but fear never failed to rob him of that tiniest bit of grace. Fear of suffering himself, fear of admitting to his mistakes and crimes, fear of punishment, fear of failure. The fear of being found out by the brigands that had raised them. He and his brother were not of Corona. It was to Corona that they had escaped, and to what? Employment for his brother and imprisonment for himself. Had he learned...but it was too late for that. Whenever he wanted to change he was afraid to, and he'd had many opportunities.

His brother had remained stoic, a dog for the law of this land, tempered neither by kindness nor mercy, only by justice. Ten years. Six months they had been in this country before he had condemned himself to servitude. They should never have separated, but there was no telling what would have become of them had they not. And none of this mattered anymore. He took the straw and piled it in the manure heap, hoping to hide it. That seemed to work. Then he sighed, shaking off his thoughts and squaring his shoulders. There was work for the orphans to do.