The Castaways (22 page)

“Midge,” I said. I went to get him, to take him away. But he fell to his knees and kept punching Mr. Moyle.

“I hate him, Tom,” he said. His little fists thumped at the man’s chest. “I hate him, I hate him.”

From Mr. Moyle came a groan.

To my horror, he began to move. First his fingers flexed, then his hand swept slowly out along the dirt. My first impulse was to leap away, but he was groping for his teeth!

“He ain’t a goner yet!” cried Midgely “Tom, you got to finish him off.”

Mr. Moyle groaned more deeply. He gathered his broken teeth in his hand, then shoved them into his pockets.

“He’ll come after us, Tom!” shouted Midgely. “Wherever we go, he’ll find us. That’s what he’ll do, Tom. He’ll hound us all our days.”

I had dropped the cleaver, so I went back and got it. Midgely came along like a talking shadow. “Tom, he said he would. I told him you’d come and save me and he said it wouldn’t matter. ‘I’ll hunt you down,’ that’s what he told me.”

I took Midgely to the foot of the stairs, then turned him round and sent him climbing. “Wait for me up there,” I said.

“Hurry Tom,” he begged.

Mr. Moyle was still sprawled on the floor, trying to push himself up. I looked down at his wisps of hair, at his cheek and the side of his flattened, piggy nose. I heard Midgely crying as he tramped up the stairs.

Mr. Moyle sat upright. He was stunned and shaken—toothless now—but that was all. His eyes shifted toward me. In the darkness he wasn’t much more than a shape—just a hulk of a man. But the yellow light shone in his eyes, and they seemed brimming with cunning and evil.

I threatened him with the cleaver. “If you get up, I’ll kill you,” I said.

“You?” He laughed. “I don’t think so, boy.”

A great deal of blood had bubbled from his mouth, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. There were now only splinters of teeth sticking up from his gums, and they gave him a most vicious and ghastly appearance.

“Oh, you
want
to kill me. You’d love to kill me—but you won’t,” he said. “I saved your life, so you’ll spare mine, because that’s the proper thing to do.”

“Don’t wager on it, Mr. Moyle.”

Up he got, unsteadily. He pressed a hand to his jaw and let out a pitiful groan. Then he stood upright, staggering sideways until he bumped against the wall.

I looked to the top of the stairs and saw Midgely vanish through the door. Now it was only myself and Mr. Moyle, and I knew that he was right. No matter what he had done, I couldn’t chop him down where he stood. It wasn’t because he’d saved my life in the southern seas. It was because I was not like
him
.

He was leaning against the wall, watching me with blood dripping from his mouth. “Here, give me a hand, Tom,” he said. “Help me up the stairs and out to the street, then we’ll be fair and square. You’ll go your way, and I’ll go mine.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Moyle,” I said.

I turned my back and went up the steps. It gave me the most dreadful shivers, for I could feel his eyes watching me, but I was determined not to seem afraid. I went steadily up, leaving him alone in the darkness.

I was two steps from the top when I heard him come flying up behind me.

I had never moved faster. I bounded to the landing; I raced through the door. I kicked away the cork and sent it bouncing off a stack of wooden crates. I heaved on the door, swinging it shut.

Mr. Moyle was halfway up, taking the stairs three at a time.

The door slammed with such force that the whole building seemed to shake. It made a sound like a cannon shot, and the thousand pigeons rose as one from their perches. They wheeled and circled through the building.

I grabbed the bolt and tried to slide it through the latch. But it didn’t quite meet the metal, and I had to jiggle it back and forth.

Mr. Moyle was thundering up the stairs. The pigeons were flying in frantic circles, bashing against the windows. Midgely, somewhere, was crying.

I hammered the bolt with the cleaver. I drove the tip of it into the latch.

Mr. Moyle came crashing through the door, and my cleaver went flyling.

I was thrown back against the wall, all my breath knocked out of me. Mr. Moyle staggered across the landing. He crashed into the boxes, saw the cleaver, and snatched it up. “I’ll split you down the middle, Tom,” he said.

I had nowhere to go but up the ladder to the loft. I sprang to the first rung and started climbing, and he came after me with the cleaver in his bloody jaws.

It was like the day long ago, when he’d chased me through the rigging of a haunted ship. I was faster now, but he was still right at my heels when I reached the top. I spilled out onto the loft and rolled away as he swung the cleaver. It chopped splinters from the wood beside me.

He was up the ladder before I could get to my feet. He pulled himself up to the floor, and I scrabbled away.

The loft was as crowded as the rest of the warehouse. It was full of rope and barrels, with only a twisting corridor between them. Mr. Moyle followed me toward the edge of the loft, where it dropped away to the floor far below.

Three pigeons went fluttering past, just above me. They veered away from Mr. Moyle, their wings and tails spreading wide, like Chinese fans. I saw the cleaver flashing at them.

I pulled myself up onto a drum of rope. Ahead of me was Mr. Moyle, thrashing his way round the pigeons. One of them had fallen, and was twitching now at his feet. Behind me was the edge of the loft, and the great beam where the nets were hung on hooks.

I stepped back onto the beam; there was nowhere else to go. Fifty feet of empty air opened below me.

The air was hot and foul here, at the very roof of the warehouse, and I saw that hordes of bats had made their home among the rafters. They clung to the wooden roof with their feet, swaying like little brown sacks. They reminded me of the close-packed hammocks of
Lachesis
, such a thickness of bats that I could scarcely see the roof. I thought, strangely, how much Mr. Mullock would enjoy the sight.

I walked backward along the beam while pigeons flew all around us. The wood was slick with the droppings of bats and birds. Mr. Moyle, with the cleaver now in his hand, was breathing his grunted breaths. His jaw was red with blood; his lips were cut and swollen.

Along the beam we went. We must have seemed two tiny figures at that great height, in all that space. With the birds wheeling around us, and the footing so poor, it was a most precarious spot. I stepped steadily back, though I couldn’t see where I was going. I kept my distance from Mr. Moyle, waiting for a chance to spring at him.

It seemed that my entire journey had been for only one reason—to prepare me for this moment, to lead me to this place. My river of fate had flowed me through the proper twists and turns so that I might stand where I could not possibly have dared to stand before, with a courage I had never possessed.

I watched Mr. Moyle’s feet. When they shifted forward, I moved back. When they stopped, so did I.

He swung the cleaver again. It missed me by several inches, and he followed it with a step forward. Back I went, over the hook of a hanging net.

Many of the pigeons had returned to their roosts, but
some kept flapping suddenly at our chests, as though hoping to drive us from their favorite perches. I let them flail at me with their wings, but Mr. Moyle battered them away.

We crossed half the warehouse, step by step. We crossed the mountain of cork and the heap of nets. The bats watched us with their little foxy faces. Then, right above a bare spot on the floor, I took my chance.

I waited for Mr. Moyle to swing his cleaver. It missed by barely half an inch. Then I shouted out and lunged forward.

I didn’t hit the man; I didn’t touch him. I couldn’t take the chance that he would grab me and pull me with him. I only leapt and shouted, falling into a crouch on the narrow beam.

It was enough to startle Mr. Moyle. He flinched, and the arm that held the cleaver went high in the air to give him balance. The blade brushed through the horde of bats, and a hundred of them fell from their places.

They tumbled onto his shoulders, onto his round head. They fluttered away, or clutched on to his skin, and they let out the same strange little squeals I had heard in a faraway land. Mr. Moyle plucked two of them from his throat like hairy figs, and hurled them off. He bellowed and flailed, and the more that he moved, the more bats came down from the ceiling. They covered his shoulders and head in a twitching brown fur.

He staggered backward; he reeled sideways. The cleaver fell from his hand, spinning down toward the floor, and a moment later he followed it. With a shriek he tumbled from the beam and, still tearing at the bats, landed with a terrible sound—the crushing of bones and flesh.

There was something dreadful about bats. They were vile little things, and they could quicken the stoutest heart. If I hadn’t met Mr. Mullock and his pet bat, I might have fallen from the beam that day myself. But I clung on as the creatures that Mr. Moyle had flung away went crawling across my back, across my head and my shoulders. It took a long time for all to be still and quiet again, but only then did I stand up and make my way to Midgely.

It wasn’t far from the old warehouse to the docks in Limestone Reach, where my ship was waiting. Midge and I could have walked there very easily. But we had a longer errand to run, and it began at Mr. Goodfellow’s office. For the fellow at the door, I produced the papers from my shirt.

He read them most quizzically, then went into the building and didn’t reappear for some time. He may have talked to Silbury, or to Mr. Goodfellow himself. He didn’t explain, but merely led us to the stable, where two horses stood harnessed to a curricle.

“It’s yours,” he said then. “Don’t know why, but ’tis.” I boosted Midgely into the seat, then took my place
beside him. I shook the reins. “Get up!” I shouted at the horses. At a canter, we wheeled into the fog.

Midge was soon smiling, soon laughing, as we hurtled down the streets in this fine little rig. I turned the horses toward London Bridge, and we dashed over the Thames, above the fog-filled Pool.

It was exactly what I’d dreamed of doing, though I would never be the gentleman I’d imagined. My clothes were filthy, and the ride filled me more with fear than delight. It seemed too fast, too hurried, and the crowded streets with all their noise gave me little pleasure.

Midge hung on to the seat, reeling left and right like a little wooden boy. “Where are we now?” he asked, every two minutes.

We spent a night in a field, and arrived the next day at the hulks. Midgely, by choice, stayed in the carriage while I was rowed across the river. I climbed the long staircase to the deck of
Lachesis
. The Overseer was most surprised to see me.

“No, no, it can’t be true,” he said, casting glances toward the marshes. “I saw you dead and buried. Can
nothing
hold you, boy? Not my ship; not the grave?”

He was turning to shout for the guards when I told him to wait. “Read this,” I said, and pushed my packet of paper into his hand.

If he was surprised before, he was flabbergasted now. But there was no arguing over the seals and signatures, and Gaskin Boggis was brought up and released from his irons. He gave me a crushing hug, and was soon giving Midgely another, when we all stood together on the riverbank.

I hadn’t seen Weedle, but I’d kept my odd promise. Word of our visit would have traveled so quickly through the ship that he surely knew of it already, even as we looked out on the hulk. I crumpled his pardon into a ball and threw it out onto the Medway. It sailed away like one of Charlotte’s little boats, out toward the sea.

Only a few days later we were ready to follow it, on a ship that was mine. We had a crew who sang shanties as they worked. But we had no captain then, until one stumbled along.

It was Calliope King, of course. She claimed that she just happened upon the ship, but I suspected that she’d sought it out. She must have stood on the dock for quite a while before I happened to look down from the quarterdeck.

“Hello, Tom,” she called up at me. “I was starting to think I would never see you or Midgely again.”

I didn’t give her a warm reception. I shouted down at her, though all the stevedores were there to hear. “If you’re after the Jolly Stone, you’re too late. It’s gone.”

“Well, I’m not,” she answered. “I never was.”

“You knew of it?”

“I heard a tale. I didn’t believe it,” she shouted. “I thought it was one of Charlotte’s fancies. Now, Tom, look.”

I didn’t want to “look.” I only wanted answers to the things I couldn’t explain. I leaned on the rail and shouted. “Why did you bring him aboard?”

“Who? Mr. Moyle, do you mean?” she said. “It’s not easy to explain, Tom. May I come closer and tell you?”

“You may tell me from there!” I said.

“Very well.” She kept looking up at me, holding back the
bits of her hair that the wind was trying to pry loose. “I wanted to bring an end to my brother’s slaving business, Tom. That’s what I was after. I hate every part of him, but that more than all. I thought if I could show him that I had Mr. Moyle and all the proof that I needed about his slavery, that I could stop the trade. I thought I could get justice for them both, and perhaps help you as well. That’s the truth, believe it or not.”

There was now quite a crowd of workers watching us. They turned their faces from Calliope to me, waiting for my answer.

“You could have explained it all straight out,” I said. “Why did you sneak him aboard in a coffin?”

“Tom, I don’t know,” she shouted back. “Perhaps I thought you wouldn’t allow me to bring him. Perhaps I thought you’d be too frightened. I really can’t say. I’m a woman, after all.”

There was a burst of laughter from the men. Calliope wheeled round and told them to “Stow it!” Then she looked back at me. “What more can I tell you? I don’t know what happened to Mr. Moyle, or where he is, but—”