The Convicts Read online

“No, we ain't!” he cried. “We go all the way across the ocean, and all the way back. That'sh how it worksh, Tom. That'sh the windsh for you.”

  He sang again. He sang that song as we worked, sang it as we ate, as we tramped around the deck. He was still singing when we settled down in the evening, below the grating where Weedle had sat before. The cold night's air blew across us, plucking at the lamp flames, and in flickering shadows the boys played at their pitch-button game.

  “How long will it take to get to Australia?” I asked.

  “Oh, a hundred days,” said Midge, as though it were nothing. “Maybe a hundred and fifty.”

  “Five months?” I groaned. It didn't seem possible. How could a ship set out from land and not touch it again for nearly half a year?

  “Sometimes it's longer,” said Midge quite cheerfully. “In the First Fleet, the Sinus took two hundred and sixty days to get to Australia, Think of it, Tom.” His voice squeaked. “Two hundred and shixshty days!”

  “Shut up!” I told him.

  He drew away with a little gasp. I saw the hurt look on his face, and was instantly sorry. When I reached toward him he cringed at what must have seemed like a blurred fist coming at him.

  “Midge” I said. “The truth is …” It was hard to admit. The boys were arguing at their button game, all standing now, suddenly close to blows. I leaned toward Midgely and said in a whisper, “I'm a little afraid of the sea.”

  “Afraid of the sea?” he echoed too loudly. “The son of Redman Tin? Your blood's salt water, Tom.”

  “Well, it feels like ice,” I said.

  “We was born for the sea. Captains’ boys and all.” There was a smile on his lips, and it made his dead eyes especially , strange. “It's like no matter what we did, we would someday go to sea.”

  Perhaps he was right. My mother had done all she could to shield me from the sea. She'd hidden me from it, as though she'd feared that Neptune himself might have stolen me away like a Gypsy or a chimney sweep. She had raised me to love the city and hate the sea, and she'd taught me so well that I'd screamed and kicked on a summer day when my father tried to put me into a paddling boat on Regent's Pond. But one turn of fate after another had seen to it that I would follow my father in his watery ways.

  “It's queer, though, ain't it?” said Midge. “You'll look straight in the face at what fears you. I'll get what I want, but I won't see a thing.” He turned his shoulders and tipped up his head. “Promise you'll be my eyes? You can tell me what it's like, the waves and the albatrosses and all. I wanted so much to see an albatross. Promise me that?”

  “I will.” I patted his hand, feeling ashamed. If a frail blind boy wasn't frightened, then why was I?

  On the Sabbath that week I didn't pray for my deliverance. I knelt in my chains and asked only for courage.

  The next morning we were off on our way. Sixteen boys were sorted out for transportation, Weedle and Carrots among them. Four boats came to fetch us, nuzzling up to the side of the ship like piglets to a filthy sow. Then the dawn broke in glorious colors, and the Overseer came to stand on his high deck. Above us, against the crimson and the yellow, he might have been the figure in a stained-glass window high in a great cathedral.

  “Lest any of you think that Fate is cruel, remember this,” said he. “You had a fair start.”

  He looked at us for so long that I thought it was all he had to say. Then the wind lifted his hair like a puff of smoke, and plucked at the ruffles of his shirt. His voice boomed out. , “Don't think that England has turned her back on you, boys. She expects you to return as men one day. Remember always that you are British. God save the King!”

  He got no answering shout, no huzza from us. We closed tightly together as the guards came to move us off. They marched us to the landing and into the boats, and I sat with Midgely in the stern of one, with a pair of men to row us. Down the river we went, the wind behind us, past the marshes and the castle. I glanced back at the hulk and saw it sitting steady in the water, the British flag streaming. Nothing in the world could have looked more awful and evil. With a shudder I turned to face the front, looking past the rowers to the Beacon Hill rising to its flat top. The dark ship was below it, and in the river's bend grew a floating forest of masts and sideways sticks.

  The waves tipped us up, tipped us down, and we sped toward the ship. The rowers chewed big quids of tobacco that bubbled yellow from their lips. Their backs bent, their amis pulled, and to my surprise we flew right past the ship. A lone sailor on the deck pulled off his cap and cheered us on.

  Midgely had his eyes closed, his hand spread atop them to shield the sunlight. I didn't tell him that we passed the ship, for I saw where we were going instead, to another just beyond it.

  If ships were people, then the first would have been a dark and beautiful daughter, and this her ugly stepmother. Older and smaller, battered and bruised, it lay by itself as though out of shame. It had two masts instead of three, and not nearly as many sticky. I looked up along the rigging, past sails like wadded bedclothes, to a familiar and wretched sight.

  At the top of the mast, curled by the wind, flew the Goodfellow flag. Its purples and greens, its gold crest in the middle, waggled against the sky as though Fate was thumbing her nose at me.

  The ship was exactly as my father had described those of the Goodfellow fleet. “Beggars of the sea,” heh&d said. “Not fit for rotten-row. A drowning man would sooner swim than climb aboard one.”

  There was a steady thumping and a run of water, a gushing like a city fountain. I'd learned its meaning well on the Lachesis—-md Midgely knew it too. “Why are they pumping?” he said.

  He started to take his hand away, but I clapped it back in place. “Don't look,” I said. “Wait till we're aboard.”

  “She ain't old and leaky, is she, Tom?”

  “No, no. She's beautiful.” I hoped to save him from his disappointment. One ship was so much like another, and his eyes so bad, that I thought he might never discover the truth. “Keep your eyes shut tight till I tell you,” I said,

  Our boat bumped against the hull, and a sailor reached down with a hooked stick to catch it. Even in our irons there wasn't much climbing to do; the deck was barely above the water.

  “My, she's sleek,” said Midge. “She must look like a greyhound, Tom.”

  “Like some sort of dog,” said I.

  “Shall I look now, Tom?”

  “No! Not yet,” I cried.

  The ship was a ruin. Littered with boxes and barrels and tangles of rope, with a huge stack of wood for a cargo, it looked like a tumbled old warehouse. Paint was peeling; globs of tar lay everywhere. Midgely held on to me with one hand, his other touching the railing and the ropes. Bits of paint flurried away from the wood, and tiny strands of rope went floating off in the sun. The entire ship, I thought, would fall apart like that, shedding its little pieces all across the ocean.

  Weedle clambered up from the next boat, and Carrots from the third. Dampened from spray, chilled by the winter air, we stood with our heads drawn into our collars, our breath making white mist.

  Way off at the front of the ship, an old man came backward from a door. He smoked a clay pipe that puffed gray clouds, and he dragged a wicker basket on the end of a rope. He paused to hoist it over the sill, gouting smoke like a steam engine. By the clanking sounds that came from his kypsey I guessed he was the blacksmith. Too frail to carry his tools, he dragged them instead, tipping forward and back as the kypsey rocked on its rounded bottom.

  Midge kept touching the ropes, up and down from one to the next. “Tom?” he said. “This ain't the right ship.”

  Before I could speak, he opened his eyes. I didn't know what he could see exactly, but he glanced back and forth, up and down, and his face crumpled. “A brig,” he said. “Just a little brig:”

  His disappointment turned to anger. His face was suddenly redr “A rotten trick, Tom. Thai Wash a rotten, rotten trick.” He let go of my arm. “Why didn't you shay it wash a
brig?”

  “How could I?” I had only meant well, so I got angry too. “I don't even know what the devil that means. I could touch the ropes till doomsday, or walk right from the front to the back and—”

  “They ain't ropes, Tom,” said Midgely. “They're lines. And it ain't the front and back, it's the bow, Tom. The bow and the stern.” He sighed through his nose. “You ain't the son of Redman Tin. That was another lie.”

  “Midge, no,” I said. But he snatched up the slack in his chains and went hobbling to the end of the line.

  The old smithy huffed his way right up to us. With watery eyes he looked into our faces, then shook his head with a deep sadness and blew half a dozen quick little puffs through his pipe.

  “It's summer down under, lads,” he said. “You'll be warm as toast in Van Bremen's Land.”

  Another puff from his pipe, a sniff from his nose, and the old man eased himself to the deck. He went to work on Midgely's irons, and a moment later—with a clang and a rattle—they fell away in a heap. “How old are you, son?” he asked. Midge said, “I'm ten,” and the smithy grunted. “You're not.”

  “Near as spit,” said Midgely. “I'll be ten in a month.”

  “Good Christmas!”

  When four boys were free of their irons, guards led them away. I watched with a pang as Midge went off with them, over a hatch and down. I felt as though we liad parted forever, and could never be friends again. When the old smithy knelt before me, he tried to jolly me out of my sadness. In a whisper he told me: “Don't fear, lad, you'll soon be at sea. Haifa gale in the Channel tonight, and we'll be clear of the land by dawn. It will lift your spirits, lad, when old Neptune rocks you in his arms.”

  He meant well, the old fool. But a gale in the Channel, no land within sight—that wasn't a thought that cheered me. When old Neptune started rocking, it wasn't my spirits he'd lift.

  My irons came away. The great weight of them—more than a third of my own—tumbled to the deck. But I felt no lighter as I trudged away in my turn, over the hatch and into a ship that made the Lachesis seem cheerful.

  The place had been washed and scrubbed. From the open hatches came light and fresh air. But nothing could cleanse the ship of a lurking sense of misery. The very wood had soaked it up, and the ship was haunted by it. It smelled of misery, of sickness and suffering.

  “Tom?” cried Midgely. I saw him kneeling by the wall, reaching out in his blindness like the Bartimeus in his Bible book. “Tom!” he called again. “I need ytai.”

  Weedle was cowered in a corner. “I never touched him!” he cried.

  I went to Midgely; I ran to him. The deck down there was studded with ringbolts, some with shackles attached, some with rusted bits of chain. There were bolts in the ceiling and bolts in the walls, and where Midgely knelt there was a long snake of a chain—fully the length of the ship—lying in curls and bends.

  Midgely held me, his anger gone. “Oh, Tom,” he said. “She's a slaver.”

  Through the day and the night we lived in that space where slaves had lain not long before. By the pattern of the ringbolts, and the scars that chains had left on the wood, I could see how the people had been packed as close as the fingers of my fist. Curled like that, front to back, they must have crossed the ocean in a solid, rippling mass.

  At every moment we expected to be sorted out in the same fashion, knocked down in our places and chained to the ringbolts. Word went around that the captain of our ship was a tyrant—a madman—who would come himself to lock us into our rows. Carrots said he had seen him peering down the hatch, his eyes white with craziness, his hand gripping a bloodstained lash.

  Through the evening and the night other boys arrived. By dawn of the next day there were sixty or more, and still they kept coming. There were boys from every prison in the land, boys from the north with accents so broad I couldn't understand them.

  I was talking to Midge when a newcomer shouted my name. In my mind I was riding in a long canoe, paddled by savages with bones through their lips, when I heard that old cry: “Smashy! HalloP’

  “It's him, ain't it?” asked Midge.

  “Yes,” I said. It was Benjamin Penny.

  “Keep him away, Tom. Please say you'll keep him away.” He sounded quite frantic. “Go and tell him we don't want him near us. He can't come into our corner.”

  I didn't want him there myself. He was already scuffling toward us, and I hurried to stop him halfway. But as bad as it was to see that boy turn up again like a—well, like a bad penny, it was worse to see who came behind him. Down the ladder, rung by rung, descended the boy I'd feared the most of all I'd met. At the foot of it he turned toward me, huge and solid. Gaskin Boggis, the giant from the Darkey's gang. Stooped below the timbers, he grinned with his rotted teeth.

  Penny ran in that grotesque way that was his. I tried to push him aside, but he only grabbed my hands as if he thought I was trying to embrace him. “Didn't think I'd see you again,” he said. “Not when they napped me on the moor.” He looked up with his eye wandering. “Smashy, they got her. They hanged the Darkey.”

  “Good,” I said, not thinking.

  “What?” cried Penny. “Somebody peached on her, Smashy.”

  Boggis was lumbering up beside us. “It was you,” he said, pointing at me. “We know it was you.”

  “Don't say it,” cried Penny. “Smashy ain't no snitch.”

  “The Smasher's dead, you diblish. I seen him,” growled Boggis. “He lay on the slab at the doctor's, the old Smasher himself. And I seen the doctor bring out his head in a hatbox and chuck it in, the Thames”

  “That ain't true,” said Penny. “Doift let him say it, Smashy. Lay it on him now.”

  He shifted round behind me, as though he meant to push me right against the giant. With my elbow I shoved him back. He stumbled on a ringbolt and sprawled across the deck, and the ship was a tingling stillness as Boggis came toward me.

  “Kill Mm, Smashy. Kill him!” Penny cried.

  How I wished for all the guards of the Lachesis with their rope ends and their canes. But there were only the boys now, and none of them moved. Midgely huddled in the corner, sobbing iny name,

  A grunt came from thexgiatit, and a deep breath that moaned through his nose. His arms swung out from his chest; his hands rolled into fists; He lumbered toward me.

  I wasn't half his weight, nor two-thirds his size. I was surely smarter, and I thought I might be quicker. But his fist swung so far and so fast that I couldn't move away. With one blow he knocked me to the deck.

  As I looked high at his troglodyte's head, I remembered the terror I'd felt in the Darkey's lair to see him looming above me. I remembered how I'd cowered from him, and I hated that person I'd been. Over me now came a rage more powerful thanthe one I had turned onto Weedle at the sight of Midgely Ypiinctured eyes. I felt my lips draw back to bare my teeth. I felt prickles on iny spine, as though hairs that weren't even tjiefe were rising intohackles, I got up and stepped forward, and Boggis moved back.

  He stood in the sunligi& below the hatch, as big as three boys together. His fists pulsed like huge hearts; his arms bulged enormously. They could crush me into bones and blood, but I was as blind as Midgely in my rage. Head down, I rushed the giant.

  It was Walter Weedle who stopped me. He flew between us, his arms spread wide to keep us apart. In a shrill voice he cried, “Don't! He'll kill you, Gaskin. He will!”

  He planted one hand on my chest and one on the giant's. “Keep away from him, Gaskin. It's him, I tell you.”

  Weedle whirled to face me. Before I knew it, his hand was in my collar, and my shirt was wrenched from my shoulder, baring my upper arm. He stared at it, and so did the giant, breathing his great breaths. “There ain't no mark,” he said.

  I pulled my shirt across, baring my other arm. There, in the little hollow below my shoulder, was a patch of hard skin, a mark in the shape of a diamond. I had been born with it, though how Weedle could know that was a mystery. It was exactly where
he had thought to find it, but on my other arm instead.

  “Poz!” shouted Benjamin Penny. “I knew it was you, Smashy.”

  “It is,” said Boggis, suddenly pale. “Living or dead, it's him.”

  The giant moved away. I could see that I had nothing more to fear from him, nothing to fear from anyone. As though my change were now complete, I had become that mysterious boy I'd lifted from his grave. Inside and out, I was the same—or a mirror image—and everyone believed that I was him in the flesh. Even Midgely believed it, as his only other choice was the impossible notion that I was really a captain's son. Why, I nearly believed it myself.

  That afternoon the ship prepared to sail. The hatch was locked down and covered with a heavy grate, and the sailors ran to sailors’ chores. Midgely lay against me. There was a smile on his young face, until Penny came to join us.

  It didn't seem that Benjamin Penny would be content to be anywhere except right between Midgely and me. He kicked at Midgely's legs to shift them from his way. “Move!” he said.

  “No,” said Midgely, kicking back. “Does your mother know ydu're out?”

  Many times I'd heard boys taunt each other with that silly question. There was only one answer, and I was surprised to hear Penny trot it out. “Yes, she do,” he said in the proper, saucy tone. “But I didn't know the organ man had lost his monkey.”

  I couldn't help laughing. Benjamin Penny had such an ugly face, on such an awful body, that it was easy to think he had neither heart nor soul inside. But to hear that funny chant come from his lips made me see him now as just a sad boy abandoned by all.

  “Sit here,” I said, patting the deck on my other side.

  I could never please one without upsetting the other. As soon as Penny sat, Midge tugged at my clothes. “Tom,” he whispered. “Tom, we don't want him here.”

  “Oh, let him sit where he likes,” I snapped. “You can't see him anyway.”

  What a terrible thing to say. Instantly I regretted it. Penny laughed, and Midge turned his back, and I—feeling rotten— listened to the strange sounds from above us. Wood and rope worked together, and one man shouted's others sang.