The Castaways Read online

  NOVELS BY IAIN LAWRENCE

  The Séance

  Gemini Summer

  B for Buster

  The Lightkeeper’s Daughter

  Lord of the Nutcracker Men

  Ghost Boy

  The Curse of the Jolly Stone Trilogy

  The Convicts

  The Cannibals

  The Castaways

  The High Seas Trilogy

  The Wreckers

  The Smugglers

  The Buccaneers

  To Rick and Kim

  &

  Jan and Goody

  contents

  1. All at Sea

  2. A Flock of Birds

  3. What Midgely Saw in the Offing

  4. A Sail Appears, and Then an Omen

  5. A Man in a Cape

  6. The Story of a Phantom

  7. The Castaways Come Aboard

  8. I Venture Aloft

  9. How I Plucked the Dutchman’s Flag

  10. I Look Below the Breadfruit

  11. Midgely Remembers a Tale

  12. The King Strikes a Bargain

  13. I Reach the End of My Road

  14. Benjamin Penny Does a Brave Thing

  15. On a Long Watch

  16. The Girl and Mr. Horrible

  17. I Leave Midgely Behind

  18. A Sad Homecoming

  19. Mr. Goodfellow Turns the Tables

  20. I Find the Stone of Jacob Tin

  21. Mr. Goodfellow’s Revenge

  22. My Promise to Weedle

  23. The Day of My Death

  24. The Bone Grubber’s Fright

  25. What Became of Mr. Goodfellow

  26. I Meet the Imaginary Man

  27. How I Waited in the Darkness

  28. Out on the Beam with the Bats

  29. A Last Chapter

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  one

  ALL AT SEA

  We steamed along below the stars, half a thousand miles from land. All I could see were the dim shapes of the boys, and the hulk of the engine in the middle of the boat. But up from the bow flew splashes of green, like emeralds sliced from the black sea. In our wake they lay scattered, swirled by the churning of our paddle wheel.

  All night I listened to the chant of the steam engine, the chuckatee-chickadee, chuckatee-chickadee that shook every plank and every nail. When the sun came up behind us, our smoke hung over the sea like a greasy pennant streaming from the funnel, a tattered flag that could be seen for many miles. So Gaskin Boggis pulled the fire from its box, dousing each stick over the side with a hissing gout of steam.

  Through eleven nights we’d bored through the blackness; through eleven days we’d drifted on a blazing sea. On this morning, our twelfth since we’d last seen land, it was Walter Weedle’s turn to stand watch, to keep a lookout for the black sails of the Borneo pirates. As usual, he went grumbling to his place atop the dwindling pile of firewood.

  “There’s some what never take a turn,” he said, with a dark look in my direction. “Should be turn and turnabout, that’s what I say.”

  Only Midgely bothered to argue. “No one minds what you say, Walter Weedle. You can hop it, you can.”

  Weedle’s clumsy feet knocked the logs askew. “There ain’t no pirates. We ain’t seen a pirate yet. Don’t know why we have to stop at dawn.”

  “’Cause you’re a half-wit,” cried Midgely. In his blindness he was squinting toward the engine, mistaking its shape for Weedle. “Try steering by the sun, and you’ll go in circles, you stupid. But the stars is like a compass, and that Southern Cross is the needle. Ain’t that so, Tom?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s going to lead us home. Ain’t it, Tom?”

  “Of course,” I said, as though I actually believed him. Midge thought the Southern Cross hung in the sky like a painted sign. He didn’t know how strange and pale a thing it was, so hard to find that I wasn’t certain I had ever really seen it. I feared we were already lost.

  “Tell him about them other islands, Tom,” said Midgely. “Tell him how the Cross will take us there.” He rattled off their names again, the Cocos, the Chagos, the Mascarenes. “We can’t miss ’em, can we? We’ll hop from one to the other like on skipping stones.”

  He was smiling now, proud as Punch of this notion of his. He had made it sound so simple that we’d all believed it was possible. We had tackled the oceans as only boys might dare to do, chasing the Southern Cross toward islands rich with food and firewood. But now, if we didn’t find land within the week, we would have no water left to drink, no food to eat, no wood to burn.

  The sea was too huge, the sun too hot. I felt like a candle melting away. Weedle and Boggis and Benjamin Penny were as brown as old figs, while poor Midgely—red and peeling—looked like a lobster boiled in his skin.

  He was taking shelter now as the sun climbed over the bow. He tucked himself into the shade of a sea turtle’s shell, the last remains of a beast we had slaughtered ten days before. It was nearly as long as Midge was tall, and the boy peered out from one end like the turtle itself.

  His eyes were gray, almost covered by his drooping lids. It seemed at times he had no eyes, when all I could see were the darkened crescents below his lashes. But he still smiled in his cheerful fashion. “All’s bob, Tom,” he said. “We’ll reach them islands tomorrow, I think.”

  I didn’t understand how he could never lose hope. I felt like flinging myself down in the kicking tantrum of a child, screaming about the unfairness of it all. I was the owner of a fabulous jewel, of a wealth beyond imagining. I had only to get home to London to claim it. But the Fates, it seemed, would never allow me that.

  As I settled down beside Midgely, my thoughts ran their endless circle, beginning—as always—with the notion that I was cursed by the Jolly Stone. I believed absolutely that it brought ruin to all who touched it, and I vowed that I would one day unearth the jewel from its London grave just to pass on the curse to Mr. Goodfellow. I imagined with great pleasure how his greedy eyes would glow when I put the stone into his butter-soft hands.

  Then, as always, doubts leapt in to chase this thought. How could a simple stone, a thing of the earth, carry such unearthly power? Wasn’t Mr. Goodfellow really to blame? It was he who had sent my father to debtors’ prison, and me to the South Seas in the hold of a convict ship. Give the diamond to him? Hardly! I would keep the stone for myself, and use its wealth to crush the man like a cockroach.

  But what if the Stone were cursed, I wondered; and round I went again.

  I could sometimes spend hours thinking in circles. But today I had only begun when the boat suddenly rocked, and my head banged against its ribs. Benjamin Penny shouted, “Watch where you’re going, you great oaf!” Gaskin Boggis was moving to his place beside the engine. That was where he always slept, nestled with the machinery. To him it must have been like a favorite old dog, a friend to be fed and watered by night, to be petted through the day.

  I tried to find a bit of shade behind Midgely’s turtle shell. But with each roll of the boat, sunlight flashed across my face.

  I lay on planks that were, at most, an inch in thickness. On their other side was water so deep that it made me dizzy to think of it. What manner of things lurked down there?

  With the engine silenced, I could hear the slop of water beneath the boat. My horrors paraded in my mind: man-eating fishes; serpents and leviathans; storm and tempest; and every man who’d ever drowned. Of them all, this last fear was my greatest. The splash against the planks became the thrashing of lost sailors swimming up behind us. Every scratch and tap of wood was the sound of their fingers feeling at the boat, and I dared not lift my head lest I see them reaching for the gunwale.

  I presse
d more closely to Midge. “Don’t think of ghosts, Tom,” he said. By then he knew my every thought. “Think about the Cape, Tom. Think about England. Every morning we’re closer.”

  He was such a kindhearted fellow. He never complained, and he worried more for me than he did for himself.

  “Think of this too. She’s a good boat.” Behind his turtle shell, Midge tapped the planks, giving me a dreadful start. “Solid as a rock, ain’t she? No fear there.”

  Well, he’d never seen the boat, not properly. Once as pretty as a music box, it was crumbling around us now, shaking to pieces from the thump of the engine. Trembling nails had raised their heads from the wood, and then their shoulders, as though trying to make a run for it. Planks that had sparkled were weathered and cracked, and the boat was shedding its varnish like snakeskin.

  “All’s bob,” said Midge again, with a gentle squeeze of my arm. “Tomorrow we’ll see land.”

  Above us, Walter Weedle turned lazily toward the south. The scar on his face was more livid than ever, an ugly streak on his sunburnt skin. I no longer worried that he would do me in as I slept. Weedle was cunning, but cowardly too, and it shamed me to think I had once been afraid of him.

  “It’s always me and Penny what has to be the lookout,” he grumbled. “Never Tom, and never his pet there neither.”

  He cursed little Midge. But the absurdity of a blind boy being a lookout must have occurred even to Weedle, for he muttered again and turned away. “Guess I’ll outlive him no matter what.”

  I wriggled myself between the wooden ribs. The planks were dark and wet beside me, leaking where they hadn’t leaked before. The sea was coming in, drop by drop, and our boat was slowly giving up the ghost. I thought our plight could be no worse. But then Weedle cried out, “Look there!”

  He was turned toward the north, pointing across the sea.

  two

  A FLOCK OF BIRDS

  “Look,” said Weedle again.

  I rose slowly, fearful of what I might see. If there’s a sail, please let it be white, I muttered. Even if it’s British, let it be white. I would rather be captured and put back in irons than be taken by the black-sailed ships of the Borneo pirates.

  Benjamin Penny and Boggis were standing, staring over the sea.

  “Black as death,” said Penny.

  My heart pounded as I stood and turned to the north. It wasn’t a ship at all that Weedle had seen. To me, it was even more frightful.

  The sky seemed shredded, the world split open. Black clouds tumbled over the horizon, thick and lightning-struck, as though great fires were boiling from the sea.

  “What is it, Tom?” asked Midgely. He was pulling at my ragged trousers. “Is it pirates, Tom?”

  “It’s a storm,” I said. “The storm to end all storms, I think.”

  It was terrifying to watch it coming, to feel its breaths grow stronger. First the air grew crisp and crackly, and lightning flashed on the water. Then the seas built higher and higher. The rumble of waves was like the booming of thunder.

  For as long as we could we kept at work. We stowed away the firewood, our last bits of food and water. We adjusted the towing line to our pathetic raft of firewood logs. But soon the boat began to pitch and rock so violently that we couldn’t stand upright. So we huddled in its bottom, and the rain came down, and the seas roared over the sides.

  Half that day and all that night we rode the wild waves, drenched with seawater, bailing for our lives. The boat groaned and creaked; the tiller thrashed itself from side to side. Our logs became battering rams, pounding at the hull, and we had no choice but to cast them loose. They went cart-wheeling into the blackness.

  In the morning the winds began to ease, and by noon we saw the sun. The waves smoothed at their tops but stayed as high as ever, and we sledded from one to the next, rolling the boat to its gunwales. The motion, with the sun and the spray, pleased little Midgely, who sat up with his salt-covered face in a grin. But for me it was sickening, and I lay like a pudding in the warm seawater that surged through the bilge.

  Gaskin Boggis lumbered back and forth through the boat, gathering bits of wood that had lodged themselves in the most unlikely places. More than half our supply had vanished, and what sticks were left were sodden. Boggis arranged them like fish at a fishmonger’s, spreading them out to dry.

  Benjamin Penny was the lookout. He crouched in the very bow, a horrible figurehead soaring like a witch over the high waves. But Gaskin was the first to see the birds.

  “Pigeons,” he said, pausing in his work. There was a thick piece of wood clamped in his fist. “Look, there’s a hundred pigeons coming.”

  “There’s no pigeons out at sea,” said Weedle. “One big loon, that’s all there is.”

  “Tell him, Tom,” said Boggis.

  He dropped his wood and hauled me up on my rubbery, seasick legs. All I saw was water, till we soared to the crest of a wave. Then, across the valleys of the ocean, a flock of birds came into sight. There was such a mass of wings and feathers that it seemed at first like a torn-away bit of the sea, a bubble of blue and gray.

  We tipped over the wave and into the trough. I staggered, but Gaskin held me. Then up we went again, though my stomach seemed left behind, and over the crest came the birds. They were fat and short, their wings beating madly. The whistling sound of their feathers carried me home in my mind, and for an instant I was small again, standing hand in hand with my father in a London square besieged by pigeons. The memory was so strong that I smelled the wool of my father’s peacoat and heard all the bustles of London. It made me overwhelmingly sad for a moment, with the thought of my father captured by cannibals, of me steaming away from him as fast as I could. It was hard to imagine that I was living up to the riddle of his last words: “Do what’s right by me, Tom. Do the handsome thing.”

  Boggis held me tight, as my father had held me that day in London, and I watched the birds dashing through the sky.

  In the bow, Benjamin Penny lifted his little webbed hands, as though he might touch the pigeons. Weedle snatched up a bit of wood and hurled it at the flock, and the birds veered to pass around it. There were more than a hundred, and they whistled by—now close at hand, now high above—as we tossed and fell on the waves.

  “Them’s pigeons!” cried Midgely, hearing their wings. In his excitement his voice was slurred. “Pigeonsh, sure enough!”

  We had seen albatrosses, and the menacing skuas, riding the breezes on great wings that never flapped. To see the pigeons flogging the air in their furious hurry was a sight that thrilled us all. We watched them until the sea again was empty.

  It took blind Midge to understand what the birds really meant. “They’re heading for land,” he said. “We’ve come to the islands, Tom, just like I said.”

  Well, I thought he must be right. The storm had blown the pigeons out to sea, and all we had to do was follow them back. Our need to find land was stronger than my fear of pirates. “Gaskin,” I said. “Start the engine!”

  The storm had drowned the little embers of our fire. It took the better part of an hour to coax new flames from our wetted wood, half an hour more to build up steam. But at last the engine hissed, and the pistons stretched, and off we went across the waves.

  Our smoke plumed from the stack in gray and brown, a signal to any ship for miles around. But we kept the throttle open, and the paddle wheel thumped, and the boat shook from end to end. Water oozed through the seams of the planking; every nail quivered, but we steamed for the land as furiously as the pigeons.

  Benjamin Penny stood in his place with the spray flying around him, and the boat sometimes plunged so deeply that he was up to his knees in water. But he was laughing, shouting out that we were saved.

  Gaskin bustled back and forth, round and round the boat. The door to the firebox clanked open and shut as he stoked the flames inside. Our supply of wood shrank alarmingly, but there was no need to spare it now. Low clouds appeared ahead, white and soft like cotton, shimmering
with the reflected light of solid land, of trees. Then, just before dark we sighted the first island. It was very distant, only a smudge of green and black, yet the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. In a world that had been only water, the appearance of land brought tears to my eyes.

  “I told you, Tom,” said Midgely “Didn’t I say we’d see the islands today?”

  He had to shout, though he was right at my side. The engine was a roaring dragon that gnashed the wood to embers, spitting out smoke and fire. Billows of ash spewed from the funnel, drifting down onto our skin and our clothes and our hair.

  Boggis held up a stick and shouted above the noise. “It’s the last of it, Tom!”

  I didn’t know what he meant. “The last of what?” I said.

  “The firewood. It’s finished,” said he.

  I looked around the boat, surprised to see that every stick and log was gone. We had pushed too far, too fast.

  “Burn the boat,” I said.

  He set to with our little axe. He chopped away the seats, the knees that held them, the varnished decks at stem and stern. It seemed a dreadful thing to do to a boat, to feed it to its own fire, but Boggis kept that engine running through the night, and the boat shrank as we pushed on. At dawn we could see a faint white line from surf on coral reefs.

  A most horrible thought passed through my mind that moment, as the morning sun glowed in treetops, on verdant glades. What if, somehow, we had gone in a great circle, to return to the cannibal islands? Or what if the men who ate men lived there and here and everywhere?

  I poked Midgely “Are there savages?”

  “On the Mascarenes?” he said, as though I’d asked if there were men on the moon. “They’re British, Tom, them islands. But no one lives there.”

  I longed so badly to step ashore that I was leaning forward on my seat, urging the boat to go faster, the way a horseman urges a jumper to the fence. Then I had no seat to sit on, for Boggis came and smashed it away.

  He fed the pieces to the fire. He hacked our long sculling oar into six lengths and shoved them one by one past the red-hot door of the firebox. He burned the wood chips that he’d made. He started on the gunwales.