The Castaways (18 page)

“Wh-what?” I stammered.

“Furthermore,” said Mr. Goodfellow, “the boy’s a convict. He escaped from a transport ship.”

I tried to argue, but it was no use. Who would have taken the word of a boy stained head to toe from robbing graves? Mr. Roberts pulled a rope from his waist, and in a moment he had twisted it round my wrists, and my hands behind my back.

“Get him out of my sight,” said Mr. Goodfellow. “Take the cockroach away.”

What happened next is too hard to be told in detail. I spent a miserable night in a London jail, and late the next day I was driven through the fog, over the river and east toward Chatham.

The driver chose London Bridge as his route across the Thames. I looked down on the Pool and saw the ship—
my
ship—faint and blurred in the fog. I saw the stairs where Calliope must have dragged poor Midgely up to the City, and thought of my little friend waiting for me. I wondered if he had already decided that I must have forsaken him.

We made no stops except those necessary for the horses. But the roads were rough, the coach was slow. The sun was near to setting when we arrived at the Medway and I looked
out again on the horrible hulk
Lachesis
. It sat chained in place, fettered to the river bottom, as black and bleak as ever.

From that first glimpse, I couldn’t take my eyes from the ship. With its masts cut to stumps, its round hull high in the water, it looked unbelievably ugly, as evil as a thing could be. It rumbled with the clank of chains as four hundred boys, all dragging their irons, tramped to their dinner. It oozed a clammy sadness clear across the river.

A boat waited at the shore to ferry me there. As I stepped into it I thought how the next time my feet touched land it would be on Australian soil.

The boatman didn’t speak to me. I sat with my lip quivering, but determined not to cry. The hulk seemed to grow bigger and darker as we rowed toward it. I heard the steady thump and spurt of water pumping from the hull, the gurgle of the river flowing past the hulk.

The oarsman misjudged the speed of the currents. We banged against the ship, then grated down its long side. There was a band of mussels and weeds and withered sponges above the water, bared by the pumping that had lightened the ship. We scraped it away with our bow, peeling off the mussels, curling the weeds, until we came to a heavy stop at the landing.

I climbed to the deck, nearly wishing I were climbing a gallows instead. Men dragged me to the pump, where I was washed naked in the icy spray of a hose. I was given the canvas shirt and trousers that I would wear all the way to Botany Bay. Then the Overseer himself came with my hammock, and he remembered me at once.

“Ah, the boy who escaped from my chapel,” he said.
“You’ll not repeat that trick, I promise you. Ten days from now you’ll be on your way again to Australia.” He had the blacksmith fit me with doubled irons. Then he clouted my ears for good measure and sent me below to the darkest and deepest part of the hulk.

The boys were at service, the hammocks yet to be hung. I went straight to the window; it was heavily barred. There I stood, gazing out on the river and the hills and the fleet of ships at the bend, all fading to purple in the sunset. I could see the nob of Beacon Hill above the village where I was born.

I worked my hand between the bars, stretching as far as I could, until my shoulder was jammed against them. My arm scraped on mussels and barnacles, but I reached farther—as far as I could—and dabbled the very tips of my fingers in the Medway I wanted to taste again the blood of England, as though it might give me strength.

I heard the faint chime of the ship’s bell marking the half hour. That sound was worse than the clanking of irons, worse than the shouts of the guards. It was the sound that would never stop, that would come twice an hour through every hour of every day. It tolled for all the time before me, seven years of hulks and ships and prison camps. I heard it, and I cried for myself in that place. How could I have let Mr. Goodfellow lead me along? I had given up a diamond that couldn’t have been cursed at all.

I kept seeing his face—in the ripples of the river, on the moon that sailed above the hills. I heard his voice.
“What a bother!”

I was still at the window when the bell rang again, and
the boys came back from chapel. I heard the tramp of their feet, the rumble of their chains, but I didn’t turn around. I knew the nobs would come straight to me, and they did. There were five or six of them, and they stood at my sides and my back, crowding me against the curved side of the ship. They plucked at my clothes and pulled at my hammock. “What’s your name, nosey?” they asked. “What you done, nosey?”

I had seen what nobs would do to a boy who didn’t fight back. I had seen arms broken and eyes punctured. I had seen boys starved to skeletons as each of their meals was stolen away. But I didn’t turn from the window. I couldn’t let them see that my eyes were red, that my cheeks were wet with tears.

“The nosey ain’t talkin’,” said one of the nobs. Another pushed me, so that my shoulder banged against the wood.

I knew I could call for a guard. There was a slim chance that one might even come if I did. He could save me then, but not later that night. When the ship was locked down, the guards deserted the lowest deck, and the nobs had the run of the ship.

Again I was pushed into the window. Next would be the punches, the fists and the feet.

“Leave me alone,” I said. “All of you leave me alone.”

“What if we don’t?” they said, and laughed. “What are you going to do, nosey?”

My tears ran right into my mouth, their taste more salty than the river. But as the nobs jostled, a rage began to grow inside me. It pushed away my sadness and my fears, until it filled me from head to toe. It was the same blinding anger
that had come before, when I’d been pushed too far by others. It was that dark, scary part of my soul that belonged to the Smasher, my dead twin.

The nobs taunted me. They pushed harder. More of the boys began to gather around, eager to see a beating or, better, a real fight.

I let the hammock fall at my feet. I pumped my hands into fists.

“Come on, nosey,” said one of the nobs. His cry was taken up by others. Then I recognized among the squabble the voice of Walter Weedle. To my surprise he wasn’t urging the others on, but trying to hold them back.

“Wait! Do you know who that is?” he said. “That’s the Smasher, he is.”

As though he’d fired a shot at circling wolves, the boys drew back. One of them said, “The Smasher’s dead.” Another said, “His grave was opened; that’s what I heard. He come out of his grave, the Smasher did.” There was much muttering, and another clear voice. “No, that can’t be the Smasher.”

“Take a look!” cried Weedle. He grabbed my shoulder, and in one move he turned me round and bared my arm, showing the diamond-shaped scar where my father had cut me apart from Jacob.

The nobs stepped back. A space opened between us, and only Weedle stayed beside me. “See, it’s him, ain’t it?” he said. “Sure as spit it’s him.”

I looked back into the faces of the nobs. I didn’t fear them, and they must have seen that. If there were still runnels of tears on my face, it didn’t matter. There wasn’t one of
those nobs who hadn’t wept into a hammock at night, muffling sobs with his hands. They were only boys, after all.

The ship’s bell rang above us. The convicts began to form into lines, ready to shuffle up to the deck where the hammocks were stored. Some of the nobs moved eagerly away at the chance, while others lingered as long as they could.

Weedle was the only one who didn’t wander off. He shouted a strange name at a boy. “You. Lumps! Bring my hammock for me.”

The lines of convict boys went marching off, dragging chains down the long groove in the deck. Weedle watched them go.

“You was going to fight them, weren’t you, Tom?” he said. “You was going to fight them all.”

I shrugged. The rage had left me then, and I was feeling rather shaky. “Thank you for saving me,” I said.

“Well, you saved me on them islands,” he said rather grandly. Then he frowned and squirmed. “Here, will you promise me something, Tom? I’m king of the nobs again, Tom. Swear you won’t tell them I was smugging snow.”

I nearly laughed. I’d forgotten that Weedle was on the hulks only because he’d stolen the “snow” of ladies’ white petticoats. I said I would never tell a soul.

He smiled at me, satisfied. “Tom, who sent the soldiers to the ship?” he asked.

“Mr. Goodfellow,” I said.

“That toff in the white coat? He came with the soldiers, Tom. More soldiers than I ever seen. They took Gaskin too.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

Weedle pointed upward with his thumb. For a horrible moment I thought he meant that Boggis had died and gone to heaven. But he told me that the guards had put Boggis on an upper deck, where the ceiling was higher.

“So we’re all here but Midgely,” he said. “Might turn out he’s the lucky one, being blind and all. Better he’s gone to his Maker without ever seeing the hulks again.”

“Don’t talk like that. He isn’t
dead
,” I told Weedle. “I don’t know where he is, but he’s safe. Calliope will look after him.”

“How could Calliope find him?”

“Why, she’s the one who took him away,” I said. “You must have been there when it happened. It was before the soldiers got to the ship.”

“Calliope?”
Weedle looked puzzled. “Why didn’t she save me and Gaskin then, Tom? And why was Midgely screaming? We was up in the bow, looking at the lights in the City, when we heard him shouting for help.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Tom. He screamed and cried and shouted your name. That was the last we heard, him shouting for you, Tom. Whoever it was, they went right up that old ladder. Gaskin was going to go after him, but the soldiers came right then.”

I sank to my knees on the deck. The thought of blind Midge being dragged away was bad enough; what had happened to make him so afraid of Calliope? But that he went shouting my name was worse. He must have felt betrayed and abandoned. I remembered the bitter words of our parting, and wished I could take them back.

Weedle stood awkwardly beside me until the boys came
down with the hammocks. As king of the nobs, he had the place nearest to the window, and he saw to it that my hammock was hung beside his. Then, in our irons we climbed aboard them, and the ship was locked down for the night. In the darkness, amid the clinking of chains and the sobbing of boys, Weedle reached out and touched my arm.

“Don’t think about it, Tom,” he said.

“I had pardons,” I told him. “That’s the worst of it. I had pardons for us all, but they’ll never be delivered now.”

Weedle lay for a few moments in silence. Then his head poked up from his hammock, his long scar standing out in a white streak, the way it always did when he was alarmed. “Tom, I don’t want no pardon,” he said. “I’m a proper nob now. If they send me to Australia I’ll be a holy terror there. I think I was meant to be a nob, Tom, like you was meant to be a sailor. Promise you’ll stop my pardon if you can.”

That Weedle thought of me now as a sailor was a small comfort in my misery. I agreed to his request, then lay on my back with the ceiling just inches above me. Before the moon had set, the nobs would go roving through the ship. The cries of the noseys would ring out from here and there, but I would be left alone. I was the Smasher. I had gone into his grave, and come out from his grave, and finally taken his place.

I thought I would be the Smasher forevermore, that this would be the end of my tale. But only six days I spent on the hulk. On the seventh morning I went to my grave again.

My sixth day on
Lachesis
began like all the others. I carried my hammock up to the deck, went down to my breakfast, and then to my work. I sewed together two pieces of cloth, over and over, again and again.

At noon I took my “stroll” along the deck, shuffling along in my place in the line, trying to hold my chains so that the shackles wouldn’t scrape the skin from my ankles. I could see Boggis trudging along ahead of me, some fifty boys between us. I had seen him then a few times, and was no longer shocked by his sad and shrunken appearance.

I ate my meals, went to chapel, fetched my hammock back. I did it all to the clear strokes of the ship’s bell, wishing I could tear the thing from its mount and hurl it to the river.

The sixth night began clear and starry. Through the window came reflections from the water, rippling on the ceiling above me as I lay in my hammock. The ropes that held it, like the ropes that held the countless others, creaked in their iron hooks. The boys coughed and sobbed, and their chains rattled.

From a deck above me I heard one of the convicts cry out. This had happened every night at the same time, the same boy crying the same words. “No, don’t!” he shouted in the most heart-wrenching tones. “No! Please don’t!”

I didn’t know what was happening to the boy who lay shrieking. I didn’t
want
to know that. It was bad enough I knew the voice. It was Gaskin Boggis. On his own deck, a group of nobs every night went at him.

“He fought back the first night,” said Weedle, beside me. “But the guards put him in the black hole, so he stopped.”

Boggis had seen the wide world. He was like Oten Acres and all the farm boys who—without their huge horizons—were always the first to waste away in the hulk. Without hope for a pardon, he wouldn’t have long for the world.

On this sixth night, like all the others, I lay rigid in my hammock, squeezing my fists so tightly that I tore the skin on my palms. “Please, stop! Leave me alone.” Gaskin’s cries went on for half an hour, between the chimings of the bell, until the heavy footfalls of a guard brought silence to the deck.

I turned my face toward the window and lay for a while staring out. All I could see was the water, the small waves painted silver by the starlight. I could hear them lapping against the wooden side of the hulk.