The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  On each side of this tremendous man, as he bore down on us with eyes rolling from side to side, were two smaller Negroes: one a scowling, bowlegged, ape-like man in a bright green coat reaching nearly to his heels—a personage whom we came to know later as the Bishop; and the other a worried-looking darky with a peculiar habit of constantly looking behind him. The worried-looking one, we afterward found, was known as the Duke because he claimed to have been one of the secretaries of the Duke of Kent.

  The towering black man and his two attendants came to a halt over the Frenchman who had been hit. He still lay where he had fallen, clutching at his throat.

  “Heah!” the huge Negro said in a plaintive, light voice, poking the Frenchman with his stick and rolling his eyes over us, “Wha’s goin’ on heah? Who stirred up all ’is whuppus?”

  I took the knife from Jeddy and tossed it beside the Frenchman. “I was told to come up here and ask for King Dick,” I said. “These Frenchmen figured on stopping us.”

  He stared at me solemnly. “Who?” he demanded. “Who tole you? ’At’s me! Ah’m King Dick. Ah’m King up here. Who was it tole you?”

  “Bagley,” I said.

  “Bagley? Ole Goat-whisker Bagley? Ole Bone-face Bagley?”

  I nodded.

  “You an’ him friends?” he persisted.

  Jeddy pushed up to him like an impertinent sparrow. “Friends!” he exclaimed. “How could we be friends? We know him too well! Hell, if he knew how to sail, he’d captain a slave ship!”

  King Dick peered at him carefully, then dropped his head suddenly on one side, half closed his eyes, and giggled as though a finger had tickled him. Jeddy laughed, reaching up to slap this black hulk on the shoulder. King Dick gave way to immoderate mirth, opening his mouth until it seemed like a yawning cavern in his face; while his two henchmen viewed us somberly. His laugh eventually died, and he scanned us again with glittering roaming eyes.

  “ ’Ese Frawgs,” he said, “ ’ey doan’ want no moh white folks messin’ up ’is prison! ’Ey was fus’ heah, an’ ’ey get snippety when ’ey’s crowded.”

  He turned and shook his stick at the Frenchmen, silently hunkered over mysterious pursuits. “You Frawgs!” he shouted at them, “you keep ’em stickers away fum mah sight, or you’ll get youahsefs into a buckus ’at no Frawg ain’t never seen nothin’ like!”

  He turned and waved his club over us benevolently. “Come on, you white folks,” he said. “’Scuse mah delay, but we been havin’ trouble wif ouah society in ’is place, so we gettin’ picky an’ choosy!”

  XXII

  I HAVE the vaguest of recollections of my first night in Dartmoor Prison; because when I was sure my men would have food and a place to sleep, I seemed to move in an ever thickening haze of drowsiness, a haze that pressed against me as heavily, almost, as water; and when my head dipped beneath its surface, as it often seemed to do, I knew nothing, though it appeared I was able to walk and talk and even eat a little while so submerged. I recall passing hordes of half-clad Frenchmen, and coming among more black men than I had ever seen together except in the West Indies. Above all else I remember the tumult; for none of these prisoners were sitting quietly, but were engaged in trades and traffickings, tending small shops, crying their wares, peddling their products, crowding around gaming tables, or operating miniature restaurants and coffee stalls. All of them, black or white, perpetually watched the movements of King Dick, so there was no doubt about the high position he held.

  He led us to the rear of the building, where one of the stalls between the stanchions had been set off from the others with strips of canvas. In this stall was a large armchair, its frame brightly gilded and its back and seat upholstered in red plush. Before it was a table at which sat two white boys dressed neatly in blue roundabout jackets, duck trousers, and varnished black hats.

  King Dick took Jeddy and me into the stall with him, the Bishop and the Duke entering close behind, as a matter of course; and indeed, unless he sent them on errands they were always trailing him like a double shadow cast by two strong lamps. As soon as he entered, the boys leaped to attention. They, he carelessly explained, were his seckataries.

  He threw himself on his red plush throne. “Heah you, Namiah!” he said to one of the seckataries, “you go git Jesus Fenton an’ Pigtail an’ Goose Huck an’ Ayun-Haid. I want ’ose boys come a-flyin’!”

  Namiah darted away.

  “You, Albert,” he said to the other, “you go tell Chickenfoot he doan’ sell no more beer, seppen to mah frien’s, ’nen git ’at plum gudgeon man an’ ’at lobscouse man an’ ’at freco man, an’ tell ’em I say come a-runnin’ wif ev’y las’ scrap in ’eir kids.”

  He nodded and winked at us as Albert hurried off on his errand. “Ain’t nobody sells no beer in ’is yah Number Foh, on’y me!” He had the proud, aloof look of the man who has reached a position of affluence and power and is telling how he did it. “You lemme ’lone in ’is prison long enough,” he said confidently, “ ’an I’ll buy it right off ’ose English white folks.”

  Negroes, singly and in pairs, pushed up to the opening in the front of King Dick’s stall to stare at us with glistening eyes. King Dick rapped the cement floor sharply with his gnarled stick. “You, Jesus,” he said to a pale Negro with thin lips and a Spanish look about him, “you git on up in ’at cock loft an’ tell ’ose Frawgs in mah boxin’ ’cademy Ah needs ’at space to-night. You tell ’em not to make no muckus ’bout it, lessen ’ey lookin’ to git sent to Plymuff wif ’ose odder Romans.”

  He explained the matter to us quickly. “’Ose Romans,” he said, “ ’ey never wore no clo’es a-tall, jus’ gamble, gamble, gamble, wussen any white folks in ’is world. Ain’t nobody can’t stan’ ’em, so we sen’ ’em down into Plymuff, so’s ’ey kin five in a hulk, all by ’emse’fs. But, mah lan’! We’s gitten mo’ of ’em ev’y day. Looks lak ’ey’s alius somebody gotta be Romans!

  “You, Ayun-Haid,” he continued, turning back to his henchmen and addressing a Negro whose close-cropped skull had a hard, metallic look to it, “you cut out sixty of ’ese new white folks an’ take ’em up into mah ’cademy in ’at cock loft an’ show ’em where ’ey hang ’ose hammicks. You an’ Jesus stay wif ’em. You heah me? You stay wif ’em, an’ doan’ go ’way till ’em hammicks is all hung, lessen you want mah fis’ bounced off yo’ pan!” He flirted his stick at Iron-Head, who at once scurried among our men, gathering his flock together.

  King Dick rose from his throne and addressed them tersely and to the point. Even in my half-conscious state I could feel, in this enormous, smiling Negro, an air of assurance and authority that would have done credit to the quarter-deck of a 74-gun ship.

  “’Ey’s close to ’leven hund’ed men in ’is Number Foh Prison,” he said, “an’ room foh ’bout th’ee hund’ed; so you do like Ah tell you, else you won’t fin’ no place to hang yo’ hammicks, not a-tall. Ah’s King in ’is Number Foh, an’ Ah likes good white folks; but bad white folks, Ah takes an’ bends ’eir jaws roun’ into ’eir eahs! You go ’long up, an’ Ah’ll sen’ up somepin foh you to chew on.”

  Seating himself, he went on with his orders: orders to Goose Huck to take one Frenchman from each of the center stalls on the second floor and bid him sling his hammock under the beams at the side of the building; then to empty six stalls entirely and scatter the occupants among the places made vacant by the single removals; orders also to Pigtail to follow Goose Huck and instantly report any insubordination on the part of the Frenchmen.

  “’Em’s mah odors!” he reminded Goose and Pigtail. “You tell ’em Frawgs Ah wouldn’t do it, seppen it’s gotta be done, an’ if ’ey make huckuss ’bout it—” He pushed out his tremendous black fist, then flicked it forward, twisting it as he did so, and somehow it had the look of a projectile that would pierce six inches of oak plank.

  It was about then that my senses began to slip from me for a minute at a time. In no way could I keep my ears or eyes open. I heard King Dick�
�s voice saying, “Heah, white boy, bite yo’ teef on ’is plum gudgeon,” but what became of the plum gudgeon I would never have known if Jeddy had not told me, when he roused me on the following morning, that I had swallowed it in my sleep. King Dick himself, Jeddy said, had peeled off my coat, found my shoulder swollen, and so had slung my hammock in his own stall, lifting me in his arms and placing me in it as easily as though I had been five feet tall and no bigger than Emily Ransome.

  Jeddy shook his head as he stood peering into my hammock. “What beats me,” he said, “is the stuff this black elephant knows. I was going to call Jotham Carr to doctor your shoulder; but the King said no. He got out a chicken bone and a feather and a piece of horsehair. Then he tied the feather onto the bone with the hair and stuck it under your shoulder and said it would be all right in the morning. How does it feel? You can’t cure anything with chicken bones, not that I ever heard of.”

  I looked at my shoulder. The soreness was gone from it, and there was a ragged shred of cloth protruding from the puncture where the splinter had entered. After I had drawn it out, the wound looked no worse than a flea bite.

  “Well,” I said, “he took a shine to both of us, and a good thing he did!”

  King Dick came hastily into the stall while I was donning my still-damp clothes. “Slip yo’ cable!” he said in his plaintive, high-pitched voice, slapping his black paws together with a smack like a longboat coming down with a run on still water. “Git yo’se’f six white folks togewer foh yo’ mess, ’nen go ’long down an’ git raidy to count out in messes. New men come in, prisoners alius count out.”

  Our mess of six included Tommy Bickford, ’Lisha Lord, Jotham Carr, and John Cromwell. We joined the throng in the rear of the prison’s first floor. After we had stood there a while, jammed in with a thousand filthy Frenchmen, Negroes, and ragged, starved-looking Americans, the doors were opened, and we filed into the rain-swept prison yard. Every sixth man got the number of his mess on a ticket, and the ticket holder, in turn, received a day’s rations for his mess from the prison cooks—two loaves of brown bread, a chunk of beef weighing three pounds, including bone and gristle, and a handful of vegetables.

  Number Four Prison had looked evil enough the night before, with its pale eyes glaring through the rain; but in the gray light of early morning its appearance put a weight like an eighteen-pound shot in the pit of my stomach. Some of the feeling may have been caused by the sour stench of the half-naked Frenchmen who slunk through the crowded yard in twos and threes. Some, certainly, was due to the perpetual drizzle of cold rain, and the barren hills we dimly saw beyond the outer walls—hills blackened as though by fire. Most of all I think I was oppressed by the granite barriers that hemmed us in; for I now perceived that the reality of escaping over those towering walls would take more study than I had ever given any problem in navigation.

  We had been in the yard less than five minutes when Jeddy spied a man with whom he had drunk a pitcher of ale at the Ship Inn in Salem when we went there to buy the North River sloop that became the Lively Lady; and in three seconds he had his arm across this man’s shoulder, the man’s name being Josiah Pettengell, a master’s mate; and the two of them were as thick together as though they had married sisters.

  Because of this we were soon surrounded by a dozen Salem men, a few in decent coats and breeches such as we ourselves wore, but most of them in strange saffron-colored roundabout jackets and trousers, marked with the broad arrow and the letters T. O. The jackets and trousers were undersized, as if made for children, so that their wearers looked half starved and forlorn.

  They shook their heads dubiously when told how King Dick had found us places to sleep.

  “You want to watch them blacks,” Pettengell said; “they’ll steal the nails out of your shoes if you ain’t careful. They was scattered all over the building when we first come here; but they got to stealing so much, they was put all together up on the second floor.”

  “I notice the stealin’ ain’t stopped,” one of the Salem men said. “Them niggers was awful handy to blame anything onto.”

  “They treated us all right,” I told Pettengell.

  “Maybe they think you got money,” he said, “and aim to gamble it out of you. You better move down with us as soon as some of our Frenchmen die off. They die off pretty fast.”

  “Well,” I said, “for a while we’ll stay where we are. What’s the matter with those Frenchmen up on the second floor?”

  With one accord the Salem men looked over their shoulders, as men do when asked for information on odious topics.

  “They’re the fellers that took the place of the Romans,” Pettengell said. “Give ’em time and they’ll be Romans.” He spat on the ground. The others followed his example.

  “What’s a Roman?” I asked, having wondered about it since hearing King Dick mention them.

  “Bad Frenchmen,” Pettengell said. “Bad! By God, we don’t know nothing about being bad, alongside those fellers. I’ve shipped with tough ones, but I never see nothing like those Romans. They never wore no clothes.”

  “At night, you mean?” I asked.

  “Hell!” said one of the Salem men, “not never!”

  “They’d freeze,” I protested.

  They laughed. “Look,” Pettengell said, “they was as hard all over as the sole of my foot from sleeping on stone floors without no bedding nor nothing. They slept nested against each other to keep warm. They rolled over on orders, all together, and never got took sick. They never had nothing the matter with ’em.”

  “No smallpox even,” one of the others said.

  “Hell,” someone said, “that was because they’d all had it before they was weaned.”

  “No, it wa’n’t,” Pettengell said. “They never got typhus, nor colds, either. They was the healthiest folks ever I see, and the worst.”

  “Murder, you mean?” Jeddy asked.

  “Murder!” Pettengell said. “Murder wa’n’t nothing! By God!” he made a hissing sound, expressive of disgust, and the others growled assent. “You wouldn’t believe it,” Pettengell said. “There ain’t nothing in the world as bad and dirty as a bad Frenchman, and the percentage of bad ones is awful high.”

  The others told what they had seen these Frenchmen doing, publicly and unashamed, and the telling made my stomach quake like a shivered topsail.

  “What’s the chance of escaping?” I asked, “or don’t you ever think about it?”

  “Escaping!” Pettengell said. “We don’t think about nothing else! Listen!” He tapped me on the chest. “Until last month we ain’t had anything in here. We ain’t had anything! Nobody had no money. Most of us didn’t have no clothes, only the rags we wore when we was took. The British wouldn’t give us clothes. Our own government wouldn’t send us clothes. Our own government wouldn’t send money. You heard about Beasley yet?”

  I said I hadn’t.

  “Reuben G. Beasley?” Pettengell persisted. “Ain’t you never heard the name Reuben G. Beasley?”

  We shook our heads.

  Pettengell’s lip drew up like an angry dog’s. “Reuben G. Beasley,” he said, “is American agent for prisoners of war in England.” He broke into bitter profanity. “When we was dying off like flies with smallpox, he came up here and wouldn’t see but one of us for fear of catching it himself. Stood and talked to one man out of all our hundreds, holding a perfumed handkerchief to his nose, and saying, ‘Oh, mercy! What a confounded stench!”’ Pettengell made his voice high and lisping, like a silly woman’s. “That’s the only time he ever come to Dartmoor; and him the American agent! When we wrote that we were starving and freezing and herded in with Frenchmen out of cesspools, he never answered our letters. When we had to lay on the stone floors of this prison with typhus and pneumonia, Beasley let us lay and die.”

  He eyed us furiously, and we stared back at him, wondering if it could be true.

  “Well,” he went on, “that’s why we ain’t made any escapes. It wa’n’t
till last month we got clothes out of Beasley—these damned yellow rags—and a prisoner’s allowance: five half pennies a day. We’re rich now. Two and a half pennies a day, we get: nigh onto seven shillings every four weeks. We can buy tools. We can keep shops and make money. We can have a quid of tobacco every day or two. Give us time and we’ll show you some escapes!”

  There was a movement among the prisoners in our section of the yard, and I noticed there were fewer than when we had come out. Pettengell looked around. “Market’s open!” he said; and with that he and his yellow-clad companions hastened away.

  Jeddy laughed defiantly. “Well,” he said, “that sounds pleasant, don’t it!”

  I left him to prowl among the French, well aware that in a short time he would know near everybody and everything worth knowing, and went back myself into Prison Number Four to see King Dick, as I had been told to do.

  I could see from the activity among the Americans in our prison house that work was no hardship to them, but a Godsend. The hammocks had been triced up against the stanchions, setting off each stall or bay from the one beside it; and in nearly every bay was a group of men at work: three or four, and sometimes even the full population of the bay, which was six.

  From the seriousness and diligence with which they labored, they might have been making jewelry or tapestries that would bring them thousands of dollars in wages: yet the majority were cutting soup bones into small pieces that would serve as planks in the fashioning of ship models—models that might take six months in the making. Some were plaiting straw into baskets and boxes; others were manufacturing lobscouse and plum gudgeons in kettles over small stoves.