The Castaways Read online

  I should not have looked back, but I did. I saw that half the bay was hidden already, and that only the tip of the pier was still in sight.

  I thought of Benjamin Penny, lying drowned in his chains. I thought of the slaves and wondered what would become of them. I imagined that I could see two or three on their knees at the end of the dock, though the distance was surely too great for that. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d deserted them, that I’d marooned them in their strange land.

  This upset me so much that I sought out Midgely, who always knew just the proper thing to say to set my mind at ease. I found him coiling lines on the leeward side, putting them all in order. The wind had freshened, giving a slant to the deck, so that his ropes lay tight against the rail, and the water leapt not far below us. I told him my fears and worries, but his response was disappointing.

  “Do you ever think of Mr. Mullock?” he said. “And that lovely Lucy Beans?”

  “Sometimes.” I tried to help him with the ropes. But I was “doing it all wrong,” he said, as soon as he touched the coil I was making. “With the sun, Tom. Coil ’em with the sun.”

  I saw what he meant. I’d turned the rope backward, putting kinks in the coil. He let it fall to the deck and started again.

  “Do you think Mr. Mullock and Lucy are still happy on their island?” said Midge.

  “I’m sure they are,” I said.

  “But they got nothing,” he said. “Mr. Mullock, he had money coming out his ears when he was a lord and all. Now he ain’t got tuppence, but he couldn’t be happier. He’s got Lucy Beans, and that’s all he wants. He’s living large on his little island, just like he says.”

  “Then he’s fortunate,” said I.

  Midgely nodded. “It’s the same with them slaves, Tom. They ain’t got nothing; they’re miles from home. But they’re happier today than they was yesterday.”

  Well, that was no doubt true. But I still didn’t understand.

  “If you could have told them slaves, ‘I’ll grant you one wish,’ what do you think they would have wished for, Tom?”

  “To be free, I suppose.”

  “Well, they are.” He hung his coil of rope from a belaying pin and went on to the next. “You gave them the most important thing. It don’t matter where they are, so long as they got what they want. That’s what I think.”

  His hands moved steadily, letting the rope fall into place. “If I was one of them slaves I’d thank my saints you came along,” he said. “Them slaves ain’t slaves no more.”

  fifteen

  ON A LONG WATCH

  We soon settled in to sea-keeping time. Leaving out Midgely, who worked all hours in the galley, we divided ourselves into three watches. Day after day, I was always on deck with the little King and his freed slave, but only rarely with Weedle or Boggis, and hardly ever with the King’s wife.

  I quickly grew to know my watchmates. I learned that King George was really George King, born near Bethnal Green. For a small man he was a big liar, as we learned not long into the voyage. In truth, he could navigate no better than I.

  Oh, he made a show of it, pointing the sextant at the moon and the sun and half of the stars in the heavens. For better than a week I believed he was a master of the strange art, and I might never have learned otherwise if not for his daughter.

  Her name was Charlotte—Charlotte King—and she was a darling. The whole ship was her playhouse, with a full complement of imaginary creatures. We were all her toys, her playthings. One moment we were animals in the ark and she was Noah. The next we were pirates and she a young Blackbeard. It meant nothing to us, as we weren’t required to play our parts, but merely to stand about as she fed us or stabbed us, according to the rules of the game. Even Walter Weedle was swept up in her play, though always at his expense. In Noah’s ark, he was the ass. Over time, Charlotte came to call anything stupid “a weedle.”

  No one loved that girl more deeply than our slave-turned-sailor. His name was unpronounceable, but Charlotte called him Hay-yoo, because those were the words everyone shouted to get his attention. But to Hay-yoo’s dismay, Charlotte saved all her charms for Midgely.

  I often found my friend seated at her little table, which they had dragged together into the cookhouse. Midgely spent hours dipping imaginary biscuits into an empty teacup, or sitting grandly still as all the tiny dishes slid back and forth with the rolling of the ship. Sometimes Charlotte would burst into fits of giggles. “Oh, Midgely, you’re pouring tea into the cream pot!” she’d shriek.

  Midgely didn’t mind at all. “Am I? Oh, gracious!” he’d say, and laugh as well.

  In the second week of our voyage—it had been three days since I’d seen Walter Weedle—Charlotte came early from her nap time and surprised her father with the sextant. I was steering the ship, and he was standing by the rail, fiddling with the little mirrors and filters, getting ready to shoot the sun. Suddenly he was whisking it behind his back, and Charlotte was clucking her tongue. “Daddy, you’re going to be in trouble!” she said.

  The King blushed. “Off with you, Charlotte,” he told her. “Can’t you see we’re busy?” He had gone back to his regal ways by then, always referring to himself as “we.” But Charlotte never curtsied to the King.

  She put her hands on her hips. “Did Mommy say you could use that?”

  “Charlotte!” he said, a little more sharply. “We haven’t time for this nonsense.”

  She clucked her tongue again, turned, and went scampering down to the cabins. A moment later she was back, and Mrs. King was with her.

  Now there was a strange woman. Calliope King—a delicate name for one so strong and manly. She liked to work aloft in her tumbling skirts, with the wind whipping at her pantalettes in the most teasing fashion. Twice the size of her husband, with a voice half an octave deeper, she was more a sailor than any of us, and not only because she chewed tobacco by the plug. Though I fancied I was in command, it was really Calliope King who decided when to reef and when to run, and when to scud before a gale.

  She was the daughter of a whaling captain. Born at sea, she’d never touched land until she was nearly five years old. I should have guessed the sextant was hers, and that she was the one who did the navigation—leaning out through the windows at the stern.

  Calliope was one who firmly believed that “children should be seen and not heard.” She had little to say to Charlotte, and less to any of the boys. She merely kept herself to herself, without being rude about it. I found this made her more interesting, and both Midge and I admired her no end.

  But the King lived in fear of his wife, for there was no love between them anymore. I never heard them exchange a kindly word, never saw one even smile at the other. They kept as distant as the ship would allow them. It was no wonder that the King nearly had a fainting spell when Calliope came storming up that day.

  She spat a stream of brown juice at his feet, and held out her hand for the sextant. The little King very meekly did as he was directed. He didn’t utter a word until she was safely below, when he suddenly found his courage. “What a woman! What a tigress!” he said. “How would you like to have her as a mother, Tom Tin?”

  I wouldn’t have minded. In fact, I’d thought about that very thing. During long turns at the wheel I had amused myself by thinking how different my life might have been if my father had married someone like Calliope. I would have grown up loving the sea instead of fearing it, sharing—not mocking—my father’s lonely dreams. But now I had to laugh, for I saw that it would have made no difference in the end. My river of fate would still have brought me to this exact spot—at the wheel of a ship in the middle of the ocean, with Calliope King as the navigator.

  So when the little King asked how I’d like to have his wife as a mother, I thought of many things, and gave a strange answer. “I hope I still have a mother.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “It’s a long story,” said I.

  “It’s a long voyage,” said h
e, with a shrug.

  I was hesitant to begin my tale. Though I’d come to like the man, he was still a slaver and a liar, not the sort of fellow I cared to trust. I heard a flutter of canvas and looked up to see the wind rippling across the topsail. Without thinking, I turned the wheel to catch the lifting breeze.

  “Are you worried that she might be dead?” asked the King.

  “Yes,” I said, surprised by his bluntness. “She was ill when I left.”

  “Does she know about the Jolly Stone?” he asked, surprising me again. I couldn’t even guess how he’d learned of that.

  “Oh, I’m not a wizard,” he said, laughing at my astonishment. “I’ve heard it all through Charlotte. Gaskin told her everything, you know—all about the diamond and the Darkey, and your father and the cannibals.”

  Boggis, right then, was lumbering across the fo’c’sle deck. He leapfrogged over the capstan with Hay-yoo at his heels, and Charlotte a bit farther behind. They were playing at Gulliver in the land of Lilliput, and it didn’t matter that Gulliver was smaller than the Lilliputians.

  “I hear your father was Redman Tin,” said the King. “Gaskin told Charlotte that he was—”

  “Is,” I said sharply. “My father is Redman Tin, do you understand? He’s still on that island, and he’s still alive, and I’ll see him again one day. We’ll sail together, my father and I.”

  “Good for you, Tom Tin,” said the King. “That’s the spirit. Never surrender, what?” He clapped me on the back. “You’ll send a ship for him, will you? Dispatch the navy?”

  I wasn’t certain what I’d do. “Somehow I’ll save him,” I said. “I’ll do what’s right by him.”

  “But first you must win your freedom. Without freedom—”

  “I’m always on the run; I know that,” I said. “It’s the same for Midgely and the others. The Jolly Stone will buy our freedom. It may be cursed, or it may not, but—”

  “Oh, it’s cursed. There’s no doubt about it,” said the King. “We’ve seen the ghost of Captain Jolly looking for his Stone, looking in the moonlight with his phantom ship at anchor in the bay. We’ve heard him wailing, Tom, and wolves sound happier, let us say.”

  It was Midgely who’d told me, long ago, about the old pirate, Captain Jolly, and the terrible curse on the diamond. But he hadn’t told me—perhaps he hadn’t known—that the curse could last beyond death. “Why would his ghost keep looking for the Stone?” I asked.

  “To lift the curse,” said the King. “Didn’t you know—that’s the fate for all who’ve lost it. Those who go to their graves with the Stone unclaimed will walk the earth forever.”

  It turned me white, the thought of that. I felt a new urgency to unearth the Stone, to pass it on to Mr. Goodfellow. I dreaded that some small accident would befall me first, and that I would spend all of eternity in restless wandering.

  “But fear not,” said the King. “Old Goods will be only too glad to relieve you of the diamond. Why, that devil—that Old Scratch!—he’d trade his soul to get it, and that’s in our favor, Tom. We have the upper hand.”

  I could see that Boggis must have chattered like a magpie. Through his daughter, the King had learned every detail about how I’d found and lost the Jolly Stone, and he’d worked out a plan that would get me all I wanted. He spelled it out as the ship hurdled the waves toward England, as Charlotte and the giant Lilliputians raced across the fo’c’sle deck.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “The moment we land, we must seek out Mr. Goodfellow.”

  “Do you mean you and I?”

  He shook his head. Impatiently, he gave up his royal “we,” jabbing a finger at my chest, and then at his. “You’ll go off and get the diamond. I’ll find Mr. Goodfellow and bring him to the ship. I’ll help you barter a trade. Remember, Tom, I know that devil’s way of business. I can drive him to his knees.”

  “What would you want in return?” I asked.

  “Nothing!” said he, as though it was an insult to ask. “Only that the diamond brings a curse to that monster. He took away my comfort and my future as he took away yours, and it’s all I want to see him suffer.”

  It was part of the curse that I’d be suspicious. The King might have been trying, like everyone else, to feather his own nest. But there was certainly no pretense in his hatred for Mr. Goodfellow. If anything, it was deeper than my own. He held out his hand on the bargain, and I shook it.

  “Here’s to the end of Mr. Goodfellow,” he said.

  I felt relieved to be sharing my burden, glad that time and sea miles had made a shipmate from this pudgy man I’d so detested. I looked at the sails, at the compass, and gave the wheel a quarter turn.

  Up by the bow, Charlotte’s hair was like a splash of sunlight. She was sneaking round the capstan, not knowing that Hay-yoo was waiting to pounce.

  “Look at her. What innocence,” said the King. “She was never afraid of the natives, you know. I was terrified, let me tell you. Dead within a week, I thought. Slaughtered in our beds. But Charlotte charmed them like a songbird.”

  We watched the girl creep around the capstan. With a shout, Hay-yoo leapt out at her, his arms held up like a lion’s paws. Charlotte shrieked happily, and raced off in the other direction as Boggis tried to grab her.

  The King laughed heartily. “He was always a fine fellow, that Hay-yoo. Almost a nanny to Charlotte.” He looked at me, then looked away. “Do you know, between you and me and the gatepost, Tom, I don’t believe there’s much difference between ourselves and the savages. It’s almost heresy to say so, but watch them with Charlotte and you see. They’re pleasant and friendly, and some are sharp as tacks. It’s a curious thing, Tom. Free a slave, and you’ve a friend for life.”

  “You told me they’d murder us all if I set them free,” I said.

  “Of course I told you that. My livelihood was about to vanish,” he said, with a toss of his hand. “Setting the slaves loose was like throwing guineas into the forest. But do you know, I’m glad to be out of it, Tom. There’s no future in slaving.”

  “It’s illegal,” I said.

  “In England, yes. That’s just what I mean,” said he. “The whole business is doomed. Like the quill pen and the flintlock, slavery’s had its day. Why not, when you think about it? There’s steam engines now, and plenty of others to do the work. You’ve got your convicts and your lunatics and your children. Why go to all the trouble of gathering slaves and carting them from hither to yon?”

  He said all this very pleasantly, as though there was nothing wrong with the notion that slavery was his right and his due. I thought I would despise any man who thought such a thing, but I didn’t feel any hatred. To my surprise, I found I’d become rather fond of George King.

  “How did you become a slaver?” I asked. “What happened between you and Mr. Goodfellow?”

  He didn’t answer right away. The ship moved along in its watery rumble, with the creaks of rope and wood, and I thought he wouldn’t answer at all. Then he sighed.

  “It was the wife’s fault, Tom.” The King turned his back and spoke into the wind. “You see, we used to carry passengers to the Orient in an Indiaman, I as chief steward—and a damned good one—and she as the captain. When Charlotte was born we settled ashore. I went to work for Mr. Goodfellow, overseeing his office boys. Well, just last year—or was it the year before?—he ventured into the slaving trade. He tried to make me twist the wife’s arm so that she’d command one of his ships. I told him I’d rather twist a lion’s tail.”

  The King laughed to himself. “Mr. Goodfellow tried the twisting himself, and you know the long and short of it, Tom. Much the same thing happened to your father. No one crosses old Goods without suffering for it, and isn’t that the truth? Within a month we were penniless. Within two we owed our souls to Mr. Goodfellow, and he packed us off to the slaving station. It was that, or be out on the streets. The wife would have chosen the streets if not for Charlotte.”

  The King fell silent. We stood
rather awkwardly, with nothing more to say, and no easy way to move apart. We both watched the sea, on opposite sides of the ship, until Charlotte scampered down the deck toward us. The King ventured another remark. “She takes all her games so seriously.”

  Charlotte came skipping to the quarterdeck. “Daddy!” she cried. “Come and help me feed my dollies. We can feed Mr. Horrible too.”

  The King laughed. “That’s her imaginary friend,” he said to me, taking her hand.

  “He’s not imaginary,” said Charlotte. “He’s real.”

  “Yes, of course he is.” The King winked at me as she pulled him away. “What a weedle you have for a father.”

  They left me alone at the wheel. I felt the slant of the deck and the pull of the ship, and I heard the wind’s song in the rigging. A sense of contentment came over me at the thought that I had found an ally.

  I should never have forgotten that the King was a liar.

  sixteen

  THE GIRL AND MR. HORRIBLE

  Watch followed watch, and day followed day. Two thousand miles or more we sailed, and while I was thrice laid flat by sickness, I was never once scared. Mrs. King charted us past the Azores and on toward England. Then she called us all on deck one morning and told us to watch for land.

  It was the first time we’d all been together since we’d weathered a storm in mid-Atlantic. Weedle looked changed, as indeed he was. Without Penny around him, he was cheerful—even friendly—and the voyage had made him a happier person. His scar would always give an evil twist to his face, but behind it, somehow, he was smiling.

  Boggis went aloft, Weedle to the wheel, and we all watched for England.

  Poor Midgely could not be included in our eager lookout. But he smelled land before any of us could see it, and he hauled me to the rail, pointing at an empty sea. “Look harder! Look harder!” he cried.