Virginia Henley (14 page)

Paddy went upstairs, tapped on the bedchamber door, and murmured, “Shamus.”

After a minute Himself opened the door and stepped into the hall.

“We’ve an unexpected visitor at the gatehouse. I wouldn’t disturb ye, if it wasn’t needful.” On the way over Paddy told Shamus that it was Amber and described the state she was in.

But even that didn’t prepare him for the sight of her. “Montague did this to ye?” Shamus demanded. “Why?”

The question hung in the air while Amber tried to think of a polite way to tell Shamus that she and Joseph had committed adultery. There was no way. She ran her tongue about her lips. “Joseph and I were lovers. I had nowhere else to go.”

Shamus stepped back from her as if she had stabbed him to the heart. “Joseph’s gone to Montague!”

“I know, Paddy’s told me,” she said, tears flooding over at last.

Shamus glared at her with icy blue eyes. “Troubles come in threes,” he said bitterly. He motioned Paddy upstairs to the watchtower.

“I’ll have to go to London, but it can’t be tomorrow. Kathleen will need me at the funeral. Not a word of this to her, man; she’s enough to bear.” He circled the tower room like a caged beast. “Provide for her, give her money, whatever she needs, but get the wee whore away from Greystones.”

    
F
our days later Shamus O’Toole sailed up the River Thames into the Pool of London.

William Montague was expecting him. He waited for Shamus O’Toole to come to him at the Admiralty, which lent him power and authority.

“Montague, I’ve news for my sons, where are they?” O’Toole said without preamble.

“Sit down, Shamus. My news is all bad. Your accursed son Sean fought with and killed his brother, Joseph, the first night they arrived in London.”

“Liar!” thundered O’Toole, smashing his fist onto the oak desktop.

“It happened aboard my own Admiralty ship, the
Defense.
I saw it with my own eyes, as did my nephew Jack, and my son, John.”

“A fucking Holy Trinity of liars! Where is Sean?”

“Condemned for murder and serving a ten-year sentence. Our English courts showed great leniency in not hanging him for fratricide.”

“Where is Joseph’s body?” Shamus O’Toole was shaking with the effort of keeping his hands from Montague’s throat. Killing him on his own midden would not be expedient, and life had taught Shamus to always do what was expedient.

“It happened five days ago. The Admiralty buried him close by in All Hallows Churchyard; I’m deeply sorry about this tragedy, Shamus.”

“Yer not,” O’Toole said flatly.

“Why would you say such a shameful thing to me?”

“Because I’ve seen Amber FitzGerald.”

Montague recoiled.

Shamus O’Toole stood up to leave. He couldn’t stomach this piece of English offal another minute. “I’ll tell ye this, Montague: If ye ever again set foot on my bailiwick, yer a dead man,” Shamus vowed.

    
O
’Toole went straight to the magistrates in the Old Bailey Court to find out about Sean’s trial and imprisonment. They found no record whatsoever and when Shamus explained where it happened and who was involved, he was told anything that happened upon an Admiralty vessel would be tried by the Admiralty Court.

Since the head of the Admiralty was the Earl of Sandwich, William Montague’s brother, Shamus O’Toole knew defeat stared him in the face. But only for the present. He’d be back with a plan, with bribes, with whatever it took to gain Sean’s freedom.

It took him two more days to obtain a court order to have
Joseph’s body exhumed, and then Shamus carried his son’s coffin aboard Joseph’s own schooner, the
Brimstone.
As they weighed anchor and sailed from the Thames, Shamus wondered how long his beloved son Joseph had been Earl of Kildare.
A day, mayhap.
His heart was heavy as
a
stone. He had ordered his sons to London; now he was leaving one behind and taking the other home.
How am I to face Kathleen?

    
A
mber FitzGerald wondered where she would go. Dublin was out of the question; she did not want the FitzGeralds to learn of her fate. She finally decided upon the port of Wick-low in the next county.

She knew Shamus O’Toole had been more than generous, instructing Paddy Burke to
give
her an ample amount of gold that would keep her for at least
a
year. But the thought of what she would do when the gold ran out haunted her. Never again did she want to ask for charity, not from any man breathing.

If she took
a
chance and spent all the money on
a business
, Amber knew she would be forced to make a success of
it.
With
a
flint-hard resolution she decided to gamble it all. She bought a house in Wicklow, devoting eighteen hours a day making her business
a
success, and she vowed that someday she would seek her revenge.

    
S
ean FitzGerald O’Toole had his head shorn. It was the last haircut of his imprisonment. He was issued a pair of canvas breeches, canvas shoes, and
a
cotton shirt. The day he entered the hulks was the last day he would ever be clean. As
a
new prisoner, he
was
assigned to the lowest deck, the third down, on an old Indiaman, the
Justicia
, which housed five hundred convicts.

An act of Parliament stated that convicts aboard the hulks
were
to be kept at hard labor, so they were put to work
loading and unloading vessels, moving timber, cleaning ships at the dockyard, and, the worst job of all, raising sand, soil, and gravel to keep the Thames navigable.

The convicts were infested with vermin and begrimed with filth. The food was inadequate and beds nonexistent. At night they were secured in pairs; one man was chained to the wall, the next manacled to the man beside him. Then the hatches were screwed down, burying all five hundred in suffocating, fetid blackness.

As a direct result of these unspeakable conditions, sickness, disease, and death were rife. When a prisoner died, he was buried in the nearby marsh, where the grasses soon erased all trace of disturbed ground.

During Sean’s first months of imprisonment he made seven escape attempts. Each time he was caught and beaten within an inch of his life. He stopped being rash and realized that patience and perseverance were likely the only way out. Sean O’Toole did not fear death. He wished a thousand times over that he had died in Joseph’s stead. But gradually it was borne home to him that
death
was the easy way out. It was
life
that was hell on earth. Life without freedom was worse than any death.

The deprivations, the hunger, the vermin, and the cravings affected him harder than the brutality, the filth, and the bone-breaking labor. He was so filled with rage, so consumed by hatred, that faith in a merciful God did not sustain him for long. After only a short time he began to realize that only faith in himself would see him through this ordeal.

Survival was paramount; he must survive in order to take vengeance. The elements necessary for survival were at hand. He needed only three things: food, sleep, and work. To survive he knew he must let go of everything else. There was no room in his head for thoughts other than survival. Longings for freedom, food, or love were utterly useless. All thought, all effort, must be directed toward survival.

The guards aboard the
Justicia
exercised complete physical control over him, while Sean O’Toole exercised total mental control over himself. But, oh, his dreams were another thing entirely! At first he was too exhausted to dream, but as he became toughened to the heavy physical labor, his sleep took wing. He sailed the seven salty seas, he dined upon ambrosia, and when he made love, it was usually to a woman with hair like smoke. The sex of his dreams was so highly erotic, it was like riding wild horses on a magic carpet!

    
T
he first year was the hardest. After that he was inured to everything. O’Toole grew an iron carapace about himself that protected him from all emotion save one: the need for revenge. His hatred was a burning, living thing inside him.

He controlled pain, hunger, fatigue, sorrow, and most of his thoughts, but thoughts of his family were so guilt ridden, he vowed never to think of them again until he gained his freedom. Thoughts of his enemy’s family, however, were another thing entirely. His hatred for Montague extended to every member of his family: his brother, the Earl of Sandwich; his nephew Jack; his wife Amber; his son John; and his daughter Emerald; he would take his revenge against each and every one. Like a litany, the last thing he said every night was
“I’ll get them if I have to go all the way to hell!”

    
S
ean O’Toole ate every scrap of food he could lay his hands on. He cared not if the biscuit was weevil infested, the gruel rancid, the bread moldy, or the water fetid; it was all grist to his mill. Because of his youth and strength he intimidated many of the older, weaker prisoners, and as a result he was able to steal rations from them. He did this without one pang of guilt because he no longer had a conscience.

Gradually the round, firm flesh of youth fell away with
hard labor. He was the hardest-working convict aboard the
Justicia.
He relished the toil because it made him lean, hard, and strong. After the second year he stopped being chained to the ship’s wall and chose to be chained to the man beside him. That way, at least, one side was unfettered.

By the third year he had even learned to control his anger, at least to the point where it never showed. He often made sardonic comments and witticisms so that even the guards sometimes laughed with him. The Irish traits for survival were bred into his bones; a mixture of fatalism and hope that was a curious paradox. For over six centuries Irish oppression in the form of famine, murder, enslavement, and persecution had given him the control he needed to survive. The only thing he could not control,
would
not control, was his thirst for vengeance!

It gave him the only pleasure he knew. He carried a talisman with him always to remind him: the stub of his thumb. Death was too easy for his enemies. Death was a sweet, gentle reward. It was life, made a living misery, that was a hell. Life that was a living hell on earth! He wanted them all to live long so they could endure all the suffering, all the pain, all the humiliation, he had planned for them.

His fourth year of incarceration came and went. He had now been there long enough to be housed only one deck down. His favorite job was the hardest: dredging the silt from the bottom of the Thames. He was a superb swimmer and diver who excelled at what he did. He was totally oblivious to the cold water and seasoned to the wet clothes that dried on his back.

Just as his body had become all lithe sinew and muscle, his brain was razor sharp, always looking for that one opportunity to escape. As his fifth year aboard the hulks began, escape attempts were no longer anticipated. An attempt simply was not good enough. The next escape must be successful.

*   *   *

    
S
ean O’Toole floated up through the depths of sleep reluctantly. The ever-pervading stench assaulted his nostrils and then his tongue; the smell was so rank, he could taste it. Nothing stank so foully as men incarcerated together for years. Piss, shit, vomit, sweat, running sores, rot, and human misery formed a miasma that clung to every dripping timber of the prison ship.

The familiar sounds of dawn greeted his ears: coughing, spitting and moaning, mingled with the relentless rattle of chains and the constant plash of the Thames against the hulk. He shifted slightly against the hard planks, stretching muscles that continually ached. As he stirred, cockroaches scurried away from his toenails, their nightly feast over until he slept again.

He became aware of the relentless gnawing of hunger deep inside his gut, but the flesh-chilling cold and bone-softening dampness no longer touched him. He opened his eyes to darkness, yet he saw everything; the dark was no longer a barrier to his sight. His nostrils flared wide, welcoming the familiar stench. The grating, raucous noises were music to his ears. The ache in his muscles and the hunger in his belly told him he was still alive. He had survived another day. He was one more day closer to achieving his goal.

Glorious revenge!

When the guard unmanacled him from the wretch beside him, he stood and stretched the musculature of his arms, shoulders, and legs.

“There’s a smell of spring in the air this morning,” the heavyset guard remarked.

Sean quirked a black eyebrow and breathed appreciatively. “an’ here’s me thinking that queer stink was you.”

The guard was used to O’Toole’s cutting disparagement
and took it in good part. He tucked the phrase away in his memory so he could use it later in the day.

Sean wolfed down the gruel, then without hesitation wolfed down the gruel of the man he had been chained to. The older convict seemed lethargic today and not much interested in food. As they were herded up onto the deck of the
Justicia
and assigned their work for the day, O’Toole smiled with sardonic appreciation that he would again be diving and dredging. “I’m the luckiest bastard alive; what other job would allow me to perform my ablutions while I work?”

An hour into his diving, the words he had spoken in jest proved true. Today he was the luckiest bastard alive! There on the bottom of the Thames lay a knife, begging to fit into his palm. Sean did not pick it up immediately. He surfaced first to see where the guards were. When he saw their attention was not riveted upon him, he dived to the bottom and slipped his fingers about it with an almost caressing motion.

He had been lucky enough to find the knife, but now came the gargantuan problem of holding on to it all day while he dived and dredged. He could not simply stick it in the waist of his canvas pants, because the haft would be visible. He knew he could grip it between his legs for a short time, but not all day while he labored. He thought of concealing it somewhere and retrieving it at day’s end, but because of shifting tides and because he could not bear to let it out of his possession for one moment, he dismissed that idea.