The Convicts Read online

  “Beyond the seas!” How terrible those words sounded in my mind. The fate was the same as being hanged, to me; it was worse than being hanged.

  I couldn't stop the groan that came to my lips. But I squeezed the railing and did not move. I stared right back at Mr. Goodfellow, though he was only a blur in my eyes. I looked at him as the men led me away, down the steps to the tunnel.

  I thought I'd be taken straight to a coach, straight to a ship, and off beyond the seas. But I had one more night to spend in Newgate, and I passed it in a wretched cell, with a wretched yellow man.

  He was my guard, my watcher. Gaunt as a skeleton, more yellow than London fog, he was bright as amber, a ghastly hue.

  He set himself up in the farthest corner of my cell, with a candle in a holder. “Don't come near me, now,” he said. “You stay over there, you hear.”

  The cell grew dark, but the yellow man never left his dim circle of light. He seemed delighted by my suffering.

  “Beyond the seas,” he said. “Good riddance, I say. It's the likes of you that done this to me. Filthy boys, you gave me the fever and the wasting disease. But I'll outlive you all.” Even his laugh sounded nervous. “Hee-hee. I'll outlast the lot of you.”

  He lay on his side, watching me. His hair was sparse, his skull wrinkled like a great lemon. Outside the prison, clock bells struck the passing hours.

  “If not the fever, the scurvy will do you in.” His fingers rubbed together like yellow pencils. “I'm dying, boy Pm rotting from the inside out, but I wouldn't change places with you.”

  He coughed and muttered, twitched and groaned, as though he would die before my very eyes. The clock bells struck ten, eleven, twelve. They counted every hpur, until the grimy panes of my one small window turned from black to gray. Then guards came in.

  They jchained me at the ankles and chained me at the waist, mid marched me through the prison to a coach that waited by the door. I sat inside it, behind barred windows, and went riding out of Newgate, into the fog that was gathering again. It tumbled from rooftops and flowed over walls, and we seemed to race it through the London streets and across the Thames to Surrey.

  We passed close to my old house, close to the churchyard where Kitty was buried, then swung by the river at a place I knew well.

  My mother had taken me there, when I was seven or eight, to watch my father sail away in a funny-looking ship. It was as though my mother sensed that it would be his last. Before then, I had watched him go to sea only from the parlor, as he hoisted up his wooden box and went whistling from the house. I had never seen him on a ship, so this was exciting and disappointing, too. It had looked like a coster-monger's cart, old and filthy. But Father had come to the side and waved at us, and Fd waved back, shouting, “Goodbye!” as he went past very slowly, toward the Isle of Dogs.

  Kitty had been with us, though she would be dead within the year. These were the last of our happiest days. I held Kitty's hand, and she held Mother's, and we walked round the docks and past the ships. We would never go walking again. We took such a long route home that Father almost gained the house before we did. Certainly his ship had already sunk, for he'd arrived before dawn, with his trousers soaked to the knees. “It was meant to happen,” he'd said. “He planned it, that… that cadger! That Mr. Goodfellow.”

  I hadn't known it then, but all our troubles had started that day. Mr. Goodfellow had lured my father into his company with promises of fine ships and long journeys. My father had leapt to it, seeing an end to all his years of waiting for a place in a shrunken navy, a relief from his work on the river, in the colliers and barges that never saw blue water. He had gone so happily to sea that last time, only to find that Mr. Goodfellow had given him a floating wreck. Old and rotted, it was destined to sink. Mr. Goodfellow had counted on that, insuring the ship so heavily that its loss made him one of the richest men in London. My father tried to expose him, to stand against him, but no one would listen. He went raving one day into Mr. Goodfellow's club, he in his old uniform among the powdered dandies with tight-fitting breeches and cinched waists, and th$ commotion he raised earned an item in the Times. All of London knew that my father had splashed a glass of brandy into the crimsoned face of Mr. Goodfellow. From that day onward, we had grown poorer as Mr. Goodfellow had grown richer. My father went back to his begging in the Admiralty halls, but Mr. Goodfellow's pull was stronger, and no ship ever came my father's way. We slipped into debt, and then into ruin. And now it was all for a slight—and a glass of warm brandy—that I was heading east in a coach with barred windows.

  It carried me from Surrey and along the road to Chatham. It rocked and lurched on the hardened mud, and I was sick as a dog from the motion. When at last it arrived at the Medway, early in the dawn, I was glad my journey was over. I had no thought for what lay ahead. Really, my journey had only begun.

  There was a mist on the river as the sun came up, nothing like the vile fog of London. White as salt, it was a cold pleasure-16 breathe as I clattered down a gangway to a small dock, to an open boat resting beside it. There were two oarsmen in the middle, a guard at the front, a boy at the back in chains. Though I didn't know him, he was instantly familiar. I had seen him a thousand times, in every painting ever done of fanners in their fields. Sunburned and muscled, in breeches stained by grass, he seemed as out of place in that little boat as a hayrick on the Strand. His big farming hands tugged at his chains, and tears streamed down his cheeks.

  The oarsmen held on to the dock as the guard pushed me into the back of the boat. It tipped with my weight, and again with his, so that I nearly spilled over the side. He pressed me down on the backseat, then sat there himself, clutching my chains, grumbling about the fog. Hie oarsmen pushed us into the stream, then wrestled with their blades in a way that sent the boat sloshing from side to side. My innards sloshed with it, giggling up toward my throat.

  The current swept us away. We went swirling from the dock like a leaf in a gutter as the oarsmen fitted their oars. Gray pilings went by, with gray birds at their tops and gray buildings behind them. Then the long blades thrashed at the water, and the fog hid everything. Each pull on the oars sent the boat surging forward and me rocking back. Each push shoved the handles nearly to my chest, so I feared that any moment might find me tumbling from the back of the boat. I thought of falling through that water, my chains dragging me down, and I huddled into a little space.

  The rowers kept glancing over their shoulders—at nothing at all, it seemed. But three times they pulled, then once they glanced, over and over, in such constant motion that it made me even more ill to watch.

  A heavy chain appeared, then others, with no beginnings or endings to any of them. They arched through the fog like strands of gigantic cobwebs, as though their only purpose was to lash the mist in place. Then a shape formed ahead, a great wooden wall. For a foot above the water it was plastered with mussels and barnacles, with weeds that trailed in the river like eels swimming by. Plank upon plank it rose, forever, it seemed, to a top that I couldn't see. There were tiny square windows, closely barred, each fitted with a wooden lid hinged at the top. A face was at one, and it scared me to see it. A ghost could have been no whiter.

  From each window came sounds of creaks and groans and coughs. From each poured a foul stench, a feeling of sadness and despair. The guard beside me covered his face with his hand, and for a moment there was pity in his eyes,

  A flight of steps appeared ahead, then vanished behind, and our little boat plowed through rafts of waste, as though we floated down a sewer. We passed the back of the ship, then came to the front of another. A wooden beak jutted above me, and I stared up at the round holes of the toilets, at the wood splattered with filth. The guard mumbled through his hand. “Here she is, boys. The old Lachesis”

  It seemed a fitting name. Lachesis was the ancient Greek Fate who measured the thread of a man's life.

  “No place like home,” said the guard.

  In the shadow of the terrible ship, th
e farm boy moaned. “No!” he cried. “God spare me!” And he began to struggle.

  He thrashed in his seat, pulling at his chains. The guard held him down, and in the struggle the boat rolled nearly to its side/One of the rowers swore at him to sit still. But the farm boy struggled harder, tipping the boat so far that water came pouring over the side. Then the guard bashed with his fists, and the rower turned in his place to help him, and the farm boy toppled face-first into the bottom of the boat. There, curled on his side, he lay weeping in the puddled water until we bumped against the side of the ship.

  The guard hauled him out and dragged him up the steps. “No! Please, oh please,” cried the farm boy as he went sobbing into the mist.

  I hobbled after him, clanking in my irons. I stepped onto the ship, over a brown bundle that lay right in my path, a bulge of cloth like a big cocoon. Three jailers waited there, all in uniform. The guard gave them a packet of papers that he drew from his jacket, then stripped away our irons and hurried down the stairs. For the first time since leaving Newgate I put my feet together and raised my hands as high as my shoulders. But I felt no pleasure doing it.

  In the white silence of the fog, the ship was a black and shabby ruin. How it would carry me across the seas I couldn't possibly imagine. It had only stumps for masts, a few tarry strings of rigging. At the front it was built up into a shadowy slum of tilted shacks. At the back was a higher level, where wicked-looking cannons aimed their mouths toward me. Up there, a bell rang. Another, in the distance, tolled at almost the same moment.

  As though the ship had been wakened by the bell, a sound swelled up from below, a steady drumming and a ringing of metal that made the very timbers shake. Then through the hatches came the convicts. By the dozen, by the score, they tramped in long, straight lines. All were silent, hunched, weighted down with chains. They were boys every one, boys of every size, boys of every age. They moved in a sound of shuffling feet and scraping metal, each carrying a brown bundle, a smaller and neater version of the one that lay by the steps.

  Guards shouted at them to “Move along!” and “Hurry now!” They beat the boys with ropes, with canes, but the boys never cried out. The lines stretched from the hatches to the wooden shacks. Each boy went in with his bundle and emerged without it, and shuffled again to the hatches. Over the sills, into the ship, they went like brown ants to their holes.

  A man with a shovel worked his way between the lines. He paused at the steps to hoist the bundle that lay there onto his shoulders, and the cloth fell open as he lifted it. A bony arm came out, the fingers drooping, and I glimpsed a pale shoulder, a thatch of dark hair—a dead boy, wrapped in canvas.

  When the -deck was empty, the jailers dragged us along. They took our clothes away and hosed us down in the bitter spray of a pump. The water blasted at my head, at my feet, at my spine and ribs as I twirled on the deck, flinching at the icy shock, ashamed of my nakedness. The farm boy lowered his face. His hands cupped over his privates, his eyes closed, he stood as still as a rock while the water sprayed from his chest in rainbows. Men scrubbed our skin with long-handled brushes that seemed to have nails for bristles.

  We were given prison clothes of the drabbest brown, patched at elbows and knees. My trousers were so big that I begged for a bit of rope to hold them up. We were given tin bowls, tin spoons, and two old rags—one a handkerchief and the other a cap. Then out from the shacks came a blacksmith, a great black man dragging chains from his hands. The farm boy dropped to his knees.

  “Please!” he cried. “Don't chain me again.” He clasped his hands together and held them above his bowed head as though in prayer. “I won't run away. I swear it.”

  A guard hit him on the shoulders with a rope end. Another used a cane, and they knocked the boy flat on the deck. In a moment the irons were on him—a chain at each leg, a chain at his waist—and the guards laughed to see him writhe on the deck like a half-stunned fish.

  It was awful to see him so humbled, so small, and I put up no struggle when my turn came. But the chains jingled— link to link—as I stood and quivered there. Twelve pounds I bore on each ankle, more at my waist. It seemed like a ton of metal;

  When I saw a man bearing down the deck in a uniform with shining buttons, I was sure he was coming to set me free. He would say that a mistake had been made. “A terrible mistake,” he would say.

  Short and stout, round as a juggling peg, he looked the picture of self-importance. He must have come straight from his breakfast, as a blot of mustard perched on his lip like a yellow boil. It was all I could look at when he stopped in front of us.

  “I'm the Overseer,” he said. “This ship is mine. You are mine. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. The farm boy merely nodded.

  “There are only two rules on my ship.” He spoke slowly, stretching his words. “Two rooools,” he said. “Behave yourselves; that's one. And don't make trouble; that's the other.”

  They seemed one and the same to me, but I didn't point it out. My hope had faded already.

  The Overseer's eyes were as hard as stones. “If you behave yourselves, you'll find me very lenient.” Leeeenient, he said. “I might strike off one of those irons; I might strike off the other. I might grant you little liberties.”

  He licked his lips, and the mustard disappeared.

  “But make trouble, and trouble awaits. Those irons will be doubled; they'll be trebled. You'll feel the cane on your back and find the black hole waiting. How you pass your time aboard my ship is up to you. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “I keep two lists.” He held up two fingers, as though to help us count. “The first is for transportation. If you're on that list, you're bound for Van Diemen's shore, off beyond the seas, perhaps never to return. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” That was the only fate I'd expected.

  “The other list recommends boys for liberty. Behave well, improve yourselves, and freedom awaits.” He winked—or twitched; I couldn't be certain. “Now, the only way you'll leave my ship is to be put on one of those lists. You work aboard and sleep aboard; you never go ashore. If you're not pardoned, if you're not transported, you'll spend every year, every hour of your sentence within these wooden walls. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said again.

  He held out his hand for the packets of paper, then shuffled through them. “Tom Tin,” he said, “you've been found guilty of murder and sentenced to seven years transportation. Oten Acres, to the same for the theft of a sheep. You'll find seven years is a very long tipie if you spend it on the Lachesis. But I'll tell you, boys; either of you could find yourselves on my list in less than six months.”

  “On which list, sir?” I asked.

  His face darkened. The gray eyes turned to black. “Did I ask you a question?” he said.

  “But, sir,1—”

  His hand shot out and slapped my face. “Silence! You speak only when you're told. Guards, take them below.”

  He turned his back as we were hauled away. The guards pulled and pushed us to the hatch, whore stairs went steeply into darkness, A fold, hot air wafted up, the breath and the sweat of five hundred beys. I heaird them down there, in a banging and a ringing that I didn't understand and didn't wish to Iqiow. A single cry echoed through the space, amoan of wretched suffering. Into my mkidcame the voice of my teacher, reading in his deep voice—from a red leather book—the words Dante had found at the gates of hell; “Allhope abandon, ye who enter here “

  “Down you go,” said tiie jailer.

  I stood for a moment, not looking into the hole, but at everything else. The fog was thinning, and I could see the whole ship, from the shacks and animal pens to the big ensign hanging limp at the back. On one side of the river was a streteh if mud and marsh; on the other a grim old castle. The Lachesis sat not quite in the middle, anchored in a row with two other hulks. High in the water, ungainly and ugly, they were chained at their moorings, as though if left to them
selves they might flee. There was a forest at the northern bend, the dockyards at the south.

  I wanted to remember it all—the way the water was dazzled by the silver light, how the forest was a smudge of green and brown, the way the redbrick buildings of the dockyard huddled in a pall of smoke.

  “Down!” said the jailer. He whacked my shoulders with a knotted rope.

  The farm boy cried out again. He braced his feet on the hatch, then grabbed at its edge. I saw his eyes—huge with terror—as the guards wrestled him below.

  There was nothing that could save me, no one who could help. In one hand I held my chains, in the other my bowl and spoon, and I knew it was all I would own for the next seven years. Down into the ship I went, down to a deck and down to another. I sank into that thing body and soul, and the very air thickened with sweat and lamp oil and filth, until I could see it swirling before me. At the lowest deck I could only barely stand upright The guards had to bend their heads, and big Oten Acres slumped in a slouch, with his neck turtled into his shoulders.

  Since the morning I had left home, I had been like a football, kicked from place to place, from person to person, rolling all the time downhill. Now I could go no deeper without sinking through the river and into the earth itself. To get out again I would have to haul-myself up. And I decided right then that I would not spend even six months on that ship.

  Massive timbers arched from the walls and crossed the ceiling from side to side. Little grated windows let in such small light that lamps flickered everywhere, and all was brown and dismal. Amid the frame of wooden bones, as though in the belly of a whale, the boys of the hulk were at breakfast. On benches, at tables, they sat in silence before bowls of food. AH were as pale and bony thin as the body that had been bundled on the deck. It seemed that rows and rows of skuUs were staring from the darkness.

  A man said, “Boys! The blessing,” and up they stood. Their irons made a single clang, their canvas clothes a single rustle. AH at once, and all together, they lifted their bowls and chanted their thanks to God.