The Convicts Page 3

  Worms turned around on the seat and rummaged among the boxes. ‘Yirst thing, a blanket,” he said, pulling one up. It was gray and worn, and likely crawling with lice, but I felt better to have it wrapped around me.

  “There, lad.” He patted it into place, smiled, and patted again. “Now let's find you some belly-timber.”

  His hands were black with dirt. I remembered my mother telling me that she could grow potatoes in the dirt under my fingernails. Worms could have wallowed pigs under his.

  “Ah, some cheese,” he said. “That will grease your gills.”

  It was moldy, I saw when he brought it out in his fist. He gave me that, and a toe of bird-picked bread, and a lump of green mutton falling from its bone. I tried to eat without chewing, without tasting, without looking at Worms, who grinned through his hood and watched till I finished. “That hit the spot?” he said, then clucked his tongue. “Start up, Peggy.”

  The ttoee-legged horse pulled at its harness, jolting the wagon forward. We rumbled along into die fog, and all the little decorations swayed and rattled on the horse's many-colored coat.

  “What happened to its leg?” I asked,

  “Ob, I et it,” said Worms, with a pleasant smile.

  I wasltappy to be with him as thewagon carried me away from the river. My dtwtond in my pocket, my life of riches ahead, I was quite content to ride for a while with the grub-ber. But I was careful to keep a hand on my pocket, and to do nothing that might make him think I had something of value.

  The horse swung to the right and suddenly stopped by a heap of old ask worms picked up a stick at least twelve feet long I expected him to beat the poor horse, but he only jabbed an end of die stick into the ashes. He grunted and muttered, then turned the stick neatly around with the same sort of flourish a drum major would make with a fancy baton, A little basket was tied to the stick, and Worms pushed it into the rubbish and turned it all about. The three-legged horse watched him.

  A fev moments of fishing and the tone grubber hauled in his catch: a tiny bottle with a cork; three inches of wire bent in the shape of a Q. Into the boxes went his treasures; into the wagon went his long stick. “Right-o, Peggy,” he said, and we started off again.

  Wtem brushed soot and ashes from his knee. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To the City? M said.

  “Back on the tidy dodge is it?” He winked. “Or pick a pocket, perhaps?”

  “No, sir,” I told him.

  “Well, of course you will. What else are you to do?” The wagon stopped and Worms took up Ms stick. “Who hasn't jpw a coveatumble now and then?” He tilted the stick up high and poked it into a dustbin. “I got me start that way me-self, before I became a man of means.”

  I smiled at that, to think he imagined he was rich. I decided that I would give him a bucketful of guineas, just to teach him what riches were.

  He brought in the bowl of a clay pipe and a bit of cigar the size of his thumb. This last delighted him no end. He looked like a boy on Christmas morning, his eyes shining.

  “You remind me of him,” said Worms as we rumbled along again.

  “Who?”

  “Of meself” he said sharply. “That boy I was then. The future before me. I done well, Tom Tin.”

  “I see that,” I said.

  “Yes, it's a fine life I've got. There's not a bit of Spital-fields I haven't seen between old Peggy's ears.” He clucked fondly at the horse. “I been to Trinity Square, out to Woolwich and the Medway now and then to fetch the ones from the ships—and that's a long haul for a three-legged horse, let me tell you. Oh, the things I see. It's a fine life, right enough.”

  “I'm envious,” I said, and he beamed.

  “Tell you what, my boy. I'll give you what no one gave me. A leg up, young Tom.” He turned to smile upon me from the darkness of his hood. “I'll give you tuppence for a night's work. Two big pennies for your very own.”

  I laughed. Tuppence was nothing to me anymore. But I needed something to tide me over until I found my father. I had no idea how to sell a diamond on my own. “Well, thank you, Worms,” I said.

  All evening I rode with the bone grubber, from one rubbish heap to the next. The river water soaked from my clothes to the blanket, and a steam came up from that, just as it did from the horse. For the blind man I spared no more thought. I fell asleep to the sounds and motions of the wagon, and dreamed of being rich. I drove through London in a cabriolet pulled by thirty horses. They ran abreast as I dashed along the Mall, as people skittled from my path. When I woke, the fog had cleared, and the nighttime sky shone with stars. The wagon wasn't moving, and I was all alone.

  Peggy stood beside a stone wall and a grim old church. Her ears, poking through slits in her straw hat, fluttered and twitched. Then I heard what she had heard, old Worms calling out in a harsh whisper from beyond the wall, “Tom Tin. Tom Tin!”

  I got down and went through the gate to the churchyard. For a moment, the sight of the crosses and tombstones brought back the memory of fetching my mother from a place just the same. Then Worms whispered again, and I saw him on my right. In the blackness of the graves he shimmered in a strange, unnatural light. It glowed on his chest and his hands, as though he stood before a fire that wasn't there. Then he stooped, reached into the ground, and brought up a lantern, which he held high.

  His coat and hat had been tossed atop a gravestone. All around him, the grass of the churchyard had been tornup and turned over. There was a pile of dirt, and a pile of sod, and Woims in the middle, beckoning with Ms hand. “Hurry, Tom,” he whispered.

  I walked toward him betweai the graves. I saw a shovel lying atop the dirt, and finally made sense of it all.

  Worms had dug a shaft straight down through a grave, and now stood over the opening, pointing.

  “Look in there,” he whispered. “You wont believe your eyes.”

  I didn't look right away into the open grave. Worms was smiling at me, and globs of dirt were falling from his hands. They landed with plops and tiny thuds, and went rolling into the gaping shaft.

  “You were sleeping so tight I didn't want to wake you,” he said in a low voice. “But don't worry, Tom Tin, you'll still get your tuppence. The work ain't finished yet.”

  I didn't care about the work, nor about the tuppence.

  “Take a look, Tom. Quick,” he said.

  The lantern bobbed toward the grave. The shadows of the tombstones swooped hugely across the wall of the silent church.

  “You're a grave robber,” I said.

  “Shhh!” he whispered. “No, I ain't that, Tom. I don't touch their rings, their pennies, or nothing. I'm a resurrection man, It's the bodies I'm after, and lookat this one, Tom. Look down there.”

  He teached out and grabbed my arm. He pulled me forward, and I was certain that he was going to tip me into that open grave. He was going to put me in it and cover me over, and why I couldn't imagine. Then I thought of my diamond. Had he found it while I slept? But there it was in my pocket I could feel its hardness through the cloth.

  Worms pulled harder. I stiunbled over Wsshovel, right to the edge of the hole. Suddenly I was bending over the shaft he'd made, looking (town at a body in a coffin, at the shape of a corpse's head.

  Only the top bit of the coffin was open, the wood shattered away. As Worms lowers his lantern, the light flashed onto the pale face of a dead boy. There were dark coins on his eyes, a handkerchief tied below his chin. But the boy didn't seem dead at all. He seemed to be playing a pretending game down there in the earth.

  Worms scrambled into the grave. He brushed the coins away and puHed the handkerchief off. Then lie pressed himself against the eatthjso that I might see past him. He smiled up at ine as I stared down. “Now, that's what I call a dead ringer,” he said.

  It was true that I couldn't believe my eyes. It was as though I were staring into a well and seeing my own reflection in die water. The boy in the coffin was exactly like me. He might have been my age to the very day. The
passing bell that had rung in the fog must have been tolling for him.

  “Pass me the rope there, Tom,” said Worms.

  It lay on the other side of the hole like a coiled snake. I wondered hew many bodies it had hauled from the ground.

  “Hurry, Tom,” said Worms in his low voice. He was crouching now over the broken coffin, ready to slip the dead boy out by his shoulders. “We're goners if we're caught geaching here like this.”

  I could have left him there and run away. Why I didn't I would never know, though I would often wish I had. But I'd always done just what I was told, and now I did it again. I went to fetch the rope; I bent to pick it up. Then the ground gave way at the grave's edge, and down I went. I scrambled for something to stop me, but all I could grab was the rope, and it slithered in on top of me. I landed on the coffin. The diamond in my pocket thumped against the wood, and I lay face to face with my dead twin. I gathered breath to scream.

  Worms clamped his hand on my mouth. “Easy, Tom,” he said. “Keep your wits about you, now.”

  He pulled me upright, suddenly not so kind. “Clumsy fool,” he called me. “You stay here and I'll go up. And take off your coat if you don't want to smell like a graveyard.”

  He did it for me in his anger, pulling it from my shoulders, flinging it onto the earth. Then he used me for a ladder, and his boots dug at my thighs, my chest, my shoulders before he rolled away into the starlight. I bent down to get my coat, but his head came back above me, and he snapped at me to leave it there. “Put the rope around him, Tom. Quick! Under his shoulders, now, his shoulders, boy!”

  I didn't want to stay in that grave an instant longer than I had to. So I gritted my teeth and threaded the rope below the dead boy's shoulders, though my skin crawled to do it.

  “Tie a knot. Make a noose,” growled Worms.

  I wished I had listened when my father had tried to teach me bowlines and sheet bends and whatnot. Twice I dropped the rope, and twice I stooped to pick its coils from the dead boy's chest. “A noose. A noose,” said Worms, but all I managed was a great tangle.

  “Now lift him up, boy.”

  The rope went tight at Worms started pulling. Isttaddled the dead hoy, my feet in his coffin, and scooped my hands below his shoulders, I pulled, and up he sat, his head nodding forward, Ms mouth gaping open. He seepjtd to slide himself from the ground, standing on legs that had no muscles, swinging arms that could do no work. He wrapped diem round my waist, then around my ribs. Clods of earth tumbled as he slithered up the side of his grave as though to his resurrection. He was dressed in a good shirt and a fine long coat, but his feet were bare. They were white, pathetic things to see as they went sliding past me.

  I had tipped my head, and was watching him rise to the ligbt and the sky when my knots unraveled and down he came.

  He fell into my arms, and I into his, and we leaned together in a cold embrace against die grave's sheer wall. His chin hit my shoulder, and his teeth chattered shut I thought that my mind, like my mother's, might unhinge at ttie horror

  “Stop mucking about,” said Worms. “Give Mm a boost.”

  I gained a strength from my fear and desperation. I ducked a shoulder under the boy, and straightened him up toward Worms. He rose quickly then, slipping face-first from his grave to the ground. His legs swung stiffly above me for a moment, until they too slid across the stars. His white toes scraped at the earth, and then he was gone.

  1 didn't have time to move. Worms reached down, grabbed my shoulder, and hauled me up beside him. He stripped the clothes from the dead boy, rolling the body over and over as he pulled away die coat and the shirt and left them in a heap. Then the body, white and naked in the starlight, lay atop another grave. “Take his feet,” said Worms.

  We carried the boy to the street, past old Peggy to the back of the wagon. Worms reached underneath and worked some sort of latch. Then he pulled out a hidden shelf, revealing another body, a boy as naked as the first, but not quite whole. Squirms of maggots filled his eyes.

  Onto the shelf went my twin. Worms pushed it shut. “Up on the seat,” he told me.

  “My coat,”I cried.

  “Get up there and wait.” He gave me a push. “If a Charlie comes round, you whistle, you hear?”

  Worms went scurrying back to the graveyard. I heard his shovel clang and scrape, his breath gasp in fierce grunts. Again I thought of running away, but now I would lose my diamond. Too frightened to join him, I sat and waited, fretting on the wagon, staring up and down the street. When at last he came out he was dressed again in coat and top hat, carrying his shovel and his lantern, and my own coat beneath his arm. He opened the drawer and threw the shovel inside. The lantern he hung on a hook, the coat he tossed to me.

  I felt right away for the diamond. I turned the coat over and over on my knees, patting every inch of it. But it all flattened across my trousers, and just as I realized the diamond was gone, I saw that it wasn't my coat at all.

  “This is the dead boy's,” I said.

  “I know it,” said Worms, climbing up beside me. “Better than yours by half. Why, Tom Tin, this is your lucky day.”

  My heart sank. My riches were gone, my bubbles burst. I couldn't tell Worms why I suddenly sobbed one heartbroken cry. He thought that his gesture of kindness had pleased me. So he patted my shoulder and gathered his reins. “Put it on,” he said. “Let's see how splendid you look.”

  I thrust my arms through the sleeves; I hauled the coat around me.

  “Like royalty,” he staid. “The duke of Shoreditch sure enough” He set his hat straight and wriggled his bottom onto the seat. “Move along, Peggy.”

  As we drew away from the graveyard, I looked back. If there was any thought in my mind of leaving Worms and returning right then to that place, it was dashed on the instant. Worms closed his fingers round my arm and told me, “Sit tight. We're into this together now.”

  I would have to return to the churchyard on the next dark night, armed with my own shovel and lamp. So I studied the route we took, counting every corner, memorizing every building. I tried to use the lessons of my schooling and invent a rhyme that I might easily remember. Left at the blacking home, right at the sewer drain. Left at the corner and right once again. The verses piled up in my head until I had something nearly as long as the Iliad, and just as likely to be forgotten.

  Peggy's wooden leg tapped and banged. The wagon lurched along Tyburn Road, and I thought of the dead boy who rode in the back, behind and below me. I thought of him shaking and trembling, cuddling up to that more loathesome thing at his side Then we wheeled sharply left into a dark alley, and I ducked my head to pass below a great wooden boot that hung from a shoemaker's shop.

  I looked back at it, thinking I had found the landmark thatsnight lead me again to the diamond. Right at the boot, to the Tyburn route, I told myself.

  Peggy wheezed and panted, and Worms brought her to a stop. “Here we are,” he said. “Now, you're about to meet a gentleman, Tom, a right and proper gent So mind your p's andq's.”

  “You know a gentleman?” I asked, surprised.

  “Wal-ker!”said Worms. “I know many of ‘em, Tom, and this one's a dandy, Rubs shoulders with lords, he does—with the finest men in London. A genuine doctor, he is.” Worms tugged lightly at my sleeve. “Good thing you've got a fine new coat.”

  We were not in the sort of place where a gentleman would live. The street was sloped, narrow, almost evil in its darkness. Somewhere a baby cried, and a woman laughed hysterically. But the buildings looked abandoned, every window dark save for one. A single candle flickered in a little pane below the street, down a flight of stairs.

  Worms set his hat straight He adjusted his hood, and wiped his hands on his coat. “Look sharp, Tom,” he said. “The street arabs will steal you blind here. They'll slice your throat for a farthing.”

  I watched him go—so shabby, but thinking himself so grand—straight toward the one lit window, down the steps as though into the ground. I deci
ded that the moment he went inside, I would take his shovel and head back to the graveyard. I was afraid to go alone, but afraid to stay as well; I scarcely knew which was worse. The street arabs seared me, but so did old Worms. I wanted my father, and I wanted my diamond.

  Worms knocked on the door. The sound echoed up and down, back and forth.

  I climbed down very casually and strolled to the rear of the wagon. I hadn't seen exactly how Worms had opened the drawer, so I leaned against the wood and furtively felt for the latch. In the stairwell, chains rattled and bolts creaked open. A light spilled out that wasn't much brighter than the candle. I stretched up on my toes, curious to see who would keep such a mysterious place.

  It was a mysterious man, of course. Dressed for the city, in a eape and a ruffled shirt, he had a beard like the devil's— black and pointed—but wildly unkempt hair. He seemed surprised to find Worms on his doorstep, though there was little wonder at that “Oh, Lord, not you,” he said. “Not now.”

  “Wal-ker! That's a fine welcome,” said Worms.

  The doctor peered past him, craning his neck. “I'm on my way out.”

  “I see that,” said Worms. “To the rat fights, is it?”

  “To the opera,” said the doctor, reaching his hands across the doorway.

  “Take him in,” I whispered, as though I could will the doctor to open his door, I wanted Worms out of sight when I took his shovel and fled up the street. My hand groped below the wagon. I found something thick and bent that moved when I pulled on it But when no latch clicked open, I realized that I was only tugging on the dead boy's toe.

  “A cab is coming,” the doctor told Worms. “It will arrive any moment. My friends are … They're important people. It wouldn't do for them to see you here.”