The Castaways Read online

  “Well, that’s a start,” he grunted. “Perhaps one day you’ll be able to manage the Thames.”

  I rode as far as the pilot was bound—to Blackfriars Bridge. From there I went by foot, up St. Bride’s and through the busy whirl of Holborn Circle. The street sweepers didn’t bother to sweep for me. The sellers of boiled puddings and crumpets and gingerbread nuts didn’t cry out as I passed. I must have been a strange sight: a boy in salt-stained sailor’s clothes rushing through the streets.

  I came out at Hatton Garden, where the jewelers had their shops. In the windows that I passed were rows of little diamonds that would have blushed with shame if mine had been set amongst them. The wonderful Jolly Stone would have looked like the full moon against a sky of tiny stars.

  I saw a jeweler stooped at his counter, peering through a thing that looked like the stubbed end of a spyglass. On impulse I went into his shop.

  He was leaning forward with his elbows on the counter, studying a diamond not half the size of a pea. He turned it round and round in his fingers.

  When I coughed to get his attention he let the glass drop from his eye, catching it neatly in his palm. Then he smiled at me, very kindly, with a twinkle as bright as his diamond. “Yes?” he said.

  I shaped my hand as though it held my Jolly Stone. “What would it be worth, sir? A diamond as big as this?”

  He gaped, as I’d expected he would. But then he laughed. “Get away! You’re pulling my leg.”

  “I’m not, sir,” I said. “I found one like that. Or, rather, I found it and lost it, and now I’m about to find it again.”

  He looked doubtful. “How big do you say?”

  I shaped my fist again. He squinted at it, then bent down and rummaged in the boxes below his counter. He popped up for another look, dropped down again, and finally rose with something cupped in his hands. “Is this what your diamond’s like?”

  I glimpsed something shiny as his fingers spread slowly apart, like an oyster revealing its pearl. Then the light from the windows caught that thing, and flashed back at my face from the shadows of his palms. It was very much like my Jolly Stone, but so pure that it was nearly transparent. It absorbed the colors of his skin and cast them back threefold in bands as bright as fire.

  “Is this what you found?” he said. “Something like this?”

  “Yes, sir. Very much like that,” I said. “What would you say if I brought you another?”

  At last he opened his hands completely. “I’d say you nicked your mother’s doorknob, son,” he said. For that was exactly what he placed on the counter; not my mother’s doorknob, but a doorknob nonetheless.

  “No,” I said. Into my mind came words I’d nearly forgotten, an image of a lawyer in Newgate Prison. “It will turn out to be a broken bottle, a bit of shiny glass.”

  I hadn’t trusted the lawyer then, and I didn’t want to believe the jeweler now. “You’re wrong,” I said. “It was a diamond I found. It was the Jolly Stone.”

  “Ah, the good old Jolly Stone,” he said, as happily as ever. “That old chestnut.” His eyes kept their twinkle, but the smile was replaced by a look of pity. “It’s only a story, son. Only a fancy.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said. “It must be more than that.”

  “Well, perhaps you’re right,” he said. “In a sense I hope you are. But in a sense I hope you’re not, for even the smallest diamond holds more misery than bears to be thought about. They’re made of misery, I think. Cast in the colors of tears and blood. If you find that stone, and it turns out to be real, don’t bring it to me, I beg you.”

  I looked into his eyes for some sign that he was only trying to lead me on, to steal my treasure in the end. But he looked right back with nothing but kindness. So I left his shop and carried on, wishing I’d never gone in.

  Through the city and into country, I kept seeing in my mind the jeweler’s doorknob shining in his hands. I couldn’t have traveled the breadth of the world and back, and suffered the things I’d suffered, all for a piece of glass. The idea was too cruel to be possible.

  But it plagued me through the streets, past the fields and the burying grounds. It consumed me, so that I wasn’t aware of the gathering night until I looked up and saw the stars and the bright, full moon. They might have been there to mock me.

  I had reached the corner of the street where I’d lived. I counted the doors as I passed them, for the wretched places were all alike. Then I stopped at the one I had come out from a year before.

  I paused before I opened it, scared of what I’d find.

  eighteen

  A SAD HOMECOMING

  The place was dark but not empty. A spray of light came through the bottom of the door, painting yellow on the crooked porch and the tips of my boots.

  I raised my hand to knock, then tested the door instead. It swung open at a touch.

  Inside, all was the same, but all was different. I could see the sideboard and the sofa that we’d brought in the drayman’s cart, the glass-fronted cabinet where my father had displayed his keepsakes. The same carpet was on the floor.

  But the cabinet was full of figurines I’d never seen, and on the sideboard sat many small ornaments that were strange to my eyes. In the place of our old armchair was a fine divan covered with a crimson plush.

  It seemed my mother had come up a step in the world. I felt relief and happiness, but a prick of pain as well. It hurt me to think that she was better off without me.

  I let the door click shut. I called through the darkness, into the light of the kitchen. “Mother, I’m home!”

  “Who’s that?” was the answer. Even her voice had changed.

  “It’s me. It’s Tom,” I said.

  I heard a chair shift on the floor, and then footsteps. Into the doorway came an utter stranger, a woman with a craggy face, like an old statue that had come to life.

  “You must be looking for Mrs. Tin,” she said.

  “Yes, I’m her son,” said I.

  “Well, a fine son you are, showing up at the door eight months since she’s gone.”

  “Gone?” I said. “Where’s she gone to, miss?”

  “To her great reward,” she said, with a snorting little laugh. “No one but the doctor to hold her hand. You should be ashamed of yourself! Where were you, you scamp? Down in the City, I suppose. Making merry, or making mischief, if it ain’t one and the same.”

  I shook my head, but didn’t answer. I’d been nowhere near the City then. I’d been in the hold of my father’s transport ship, sailing to Australia. It had been about that time that he’d had his vision of my mother appearing by his bedside in the Southern Ocean.

  “So why have you shown up now?” asked the craggy woman. “If you think it’s to claim her belongings, you’ve got another think coming. I paid for them outright, all legal with lawyers. It wasn’t she what owned them at any rate.”

  “I know. It was Mr. Goodfellow,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s a fact.” She looked into the front room, as though to see if I’d disturbed it. Her nose cast a long shadow on the wall. “So now you can pack yourself off again, boy,” she said. “Quick! Before I call for the Charlie.”

  I went without another word, and in utter dismay I retraced my steps to the City. Suddenly I was motherless—perhaps an orphan, though I wouldn’t allow myself to think of that. I felt that I ought to cry for my mother, but try as I might I couldn’t feel much sorrow. I barely remembered the mother I had loved more than anything. That one had died years before, replaced by the black shell of a woman who’d been turned to madness by my sister’s death. I remembered the last words she had spoken to me: “I have no son.”

  She had begged me to stay, I remembered. Like Midgely, she had grabbed hold of me and tried to stop me from leaving. She must have waited for me, and waited for Father. She must have spent all her days and nights at the window. I could imagine her there, a woman in black, in candlelight, staring out at a world as dark as her shawls.

&nbs
p; I’d abandoned my mother in a lonely house, my father on a cannibal island. Did I leave both of them wondering if I’d ever come back?

  It was all too much to bear. In a lonely churchyard I stopped and sat on the ground. In moments I was in tears, sobbing away beneath the stars and the gravestones. Chilled to the bone, frightened and lonely, I wished that someone would save me.

  Of course no one came. I cried what tears I had, and slowly my sadness was replaced by rage. I blamed Mr. Goodfellow for everything that had happened. It was he who’d brought about the death of my mother and the loss of my father, he who was responsible for my own sorry state right then. I had set out months ago to “settle accounts” with Mr. Goodfellow. I could see now that the debit side had grown much longer. So up I got, and squared my shoulders, and marched off to see the business through.

  By the time I reached the river I’d traveled nearly twenty miles, most of it on foot. I’d hopped on the back of a hackney coach, until a silly toff had cried out to the driver, “I say! You’ve got a passenger there, you know.” All I’d eaten were a few windfall apples, brown and mushy, that I’d found by the road. But I couldn’t stop, for I had only until dawn to find my diamond and take it to the ship.

  I tramped wearily along the streets to the north of the Tower. I must have crossed the path I’d taken with old Worms, but nothing looked familiar. I listened for the rattle of his wagon, for the strange clomp of his three-legged horse. But there was nothing to help me. Even the verses I thought I’d committed to memory, the clues I’d thought so clever, had vanished from my mind.

  To add to my trouble, there was a whiff of sulfur in the air, the first sign that the yellow fog would soon be thick around me. A thin dusting of coal from the thousands of fires lay on my shoulders already.

  The streets teemed with people and horses and carts and curricles. Slowly they emptied as the night went on. But they were never deserted. As the last of the gentlemen and ladies and costermongers vanished, the first of the scavengers appeared. Soon there was an army of them skulking through the streets, searching out cigar ends, tipping over dustbins, scraping up the droppings of horses and dogs.

  Round and round I wandered, trying to remember my verses. I recalled a wooden boot and the Tyburn route, and a sewer drain somewhere. When I came across a blacking house I remembered very clearly how Worms had turned left after passing such an establishment. But now, when I did the same, it only led me to another blacking house, and left me more lost than ever.

  I wished I were more like Midgely, who seemed to remember every single word that every soul had spoken to him. I wished for that and … I stopped dead in my tracks. I had told him the verses! I remembered very clearly lying beside him in the hulk, swinging in our hammocks. I had recounted those forgotten lines to keep them planted in my mind. There was a fair chance that he would remember them still. Why, it was better than fair! He might recall them word for word.

  I ran to the river, not stopping until I reached the rusted ladder where our ship had tied up. From its top I looked down—at nothing but empty water. I leaned out, dizzied by the height and the swirling eddies below me. I could scarcely believe it, but the ship was gone.

  My first thought was that the old thing had given up the ghost, that—reaching land at last—it had let go of its moorings and eased to a rest in the river mud. But the Thames was not deep enough to hide its masts, and so I gazed across the Pool. There were many vessels, large and small, and a floating forest of masts. There among them, in the gloomy shadows of the buildings, was my old ship, tied alongside a wharf.

  Even from where I stood it looked deserted, like a ghost ship in the river. It felt deserted when I finally stepped aboard, in the hour before the dawn.

  I called for Midgely, but there was no answer. I went straight to the cookhouse, only to find it empty. The little blanket that Midgely had drawn over himself every night was cast into a corner. His mug full of spoons and knives had been tipped from the table, covering the deck with cutlery that clanged and tingled as I walked.

  “Midge?” I said, stupidly. He wasn’t there; it was plain to see. No one was there. But why?

  It was easy to imagine Weedle and Boggis lured away by the city. What a hard task I’d given them to stand surrounded by all the bustle of London, and to do no more than look at it. It would have been more of a wonder if they hadn’t gone ashore.

  But I couldn’t believe Midgely would have gone with them. I had left him angry and hurt, but still… I was certain he would have waited for me.

  I went to the stern and down to the cabins, to the part of the ship I hadn’t seen since our earliest fears of ghosts and hauntings. It was tidy and clean, with such a fussiness about it that I was certain King George—and not Calliope—had done the cleaning.

  I looked in every cabin, in every space. The door to the steerage was open, and inside was the second coffin, emptied of whatever had been carried inside it. Other than that, there was little doubt that this was the home of Charlotte’s imaginary Mr. Horrible. The space had been hurriedly cleaned, but bits of food were still scattered around it, some fresh and some moldy.

  The ship was truly deserted. It had the same sad feeling that I remembered from our first day aboard. To stand on the empty deck, even in the crowded Pool of London, was an eerie sensation. It was as though the ship had rid itself of every soul, and hauled itself alongside to collect another ghostly cargo.

  I went back to the cookhouse and stared at Midgely’s crumpled little blanket. It seemed such a pathetic thing, and such a mystery all around me. I was trying to make sense of it when I heard my name being shouted, and turned to see King George hurrying up the gangway.

  He was wearing the breeches again that made his legs look like fat drumsticks. He came toward the cookhouse.

  “Have you got it?” he said. “The diamond, Tom; have you got it?”

  I didn’t care tuppence for the diamond just then. “Where’s Midge?” I demanded. “Where’s Weedle and Gaskin?”

  “Oh, Tom, there’s bad news.”

  The King stepped over the high sill, into the cookhouse. It was then the time between darkness and dawn, when the world was shades of gray. The air stank of the brewing fog.

  “Soldiers came,” said the King. “Whole troops of them, Tom. A regiment, maybe. They had the ship moved over here to the dock. Then they took away Weedle and Gaskin in chains, and—oh!—how that big one struggled. He took three of them down before they got him.”

  “What about Midge?” I asked.

  “No, they didn’t take Midgely.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “Oh, somewhere safe and sound. Don’t worry,” said the King. “He was taken away.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Who took him?”

  “Hang on, Tom.” The King tugged at his breeches. “Let’s start at the beginning. You do have the diamond, don’t you?”

  “I don’t,” I said, angered that we were already back to the diamond.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t find it without Midgely.”

  “Oh, crikey!” said the King. “There’s a turn-up for the books. There’s a sticky wicket.” He fell into a chair at the table. “Here, you’re the one who buried the Stone; why can’t you go back to the same place?”

  “I don’t know where the place is,” I said. “It’s a year since I saw it, and I was lost in the fog. I’ve forgotten how to get back. But I told Midge, and he’ll remember.”

  “You’re certain you can’t find it on your own?”

  “I could,” I said. “No, I would—if I had enough time. But it might take hours. It might take days. I’d have to blunder around for—”

  “Well, go and blunder!” said the King. “For heaven’s sake, we need that Stone before we bargain with Mr. Goodfellow.”

  I looked suspiciously at the little man. “He’s supposed to meet us here at dawn,” I said. “Did you keep your part of the bargain? Did you go to see him?”

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bsp; “Oh, Tom!” The King laughed, but it sounded false. “Goods warned of this, don’t you know. He said you’re a sharp one. ‘Watch for Tom; he’s a sharp one.’ That’s what he said.”

  “What else did he say?” I asked.

  “Well, he refused to come to the ship. Flat out refused,” said the King. “ ‘Send the boy to me.’ Those were his words. ‘Send that scamp to me.’ He asked if there was something you valued more than any other, and we said, ‘That would be Midgely’”

  “Why did you tell him that?”

  “It’s called bargaining,” the King said grandly. “We were playing our cards close to our vest.”

  “Bargaining? That’s called stupid,” I said. “He came and took Midge!”

  “Ah, that’s what he thought he would do.” The King held up a finger. “But we outwitted him, Tom.”

  Word by word the tale unfolded. The King didn’t look at me, but glanced often through the doorway as dawn brought to the sky the awful, yellow light of London’s fog.

  “Mr. Goodfellow’s no fool,” he said. “He wouldn’t trust you to hand over the diamond, so he wanted something up his sleeve. He thought he would hold something of yours for ransom. But worry not.” Red in the face from all his talking, the King leaned back in his chair. “We have the upper hand, Tom.”

  “How’s that?” The story didn’t seem to quite hang together. “Just how did you outwit Mr. Goodfellow?”

  “We saw to it that if he came to fetch Midgely he would leave empty-handed.” The King smiled at me. “Let’s put it this way, Tom. Midge was already gone.”

  “Who took him?” I asked. “You?”

  The King only smiled. I looked away, at the faint lines of ropes and masts in the fog. I couldn’t see as far as the buildings, but I heard the softened rumble of the city coming awake. Lost in its crowded streets was Midgely, and I suddenly guessed who had taken him. It was someone who’d acted before the soldiers arrived to move the ship, someone whom Midgely knew and trusted, someone strong enough to lift him up the rusted old ladder. It certainly wasn’t the King. I could think of only one person.