Sergeant Verity and the Swell Mob.

by Francis Selwyn

  Joe had no idea how long they left him like this. He judged that it was no more than half an hour before the iron grille in the door slid back and a bull's-eye lantern shone in upon him. Joe, blinking in the sudden glare, heard the voice of MacBride.

  'Ten dozen with the governor's compliments, O'Meara!

  And see if they don't cut yor focking backbon' through!'

  The iron slat crashed shut again before Stunning Joe had time to say a word. He looked about him, blinking in the darkness. A man who was recaptured after an escape was invariably flogged just before sunset on the following day. The interval was allowed for the governor to judge sentence and for the medical officer to certify the man fit. Surgeon Doyle, even when sober, had never been known to spare a man the ordeal of the gratings. Several of those who underwent the punishment died afterwards, but it was never attributed to the effects of the flogging. 'General infirmity' and 'chronic venereal infection' were the official causes of death.

  Joe O'Meara had known, without considering the matter specifically, that they would tie him to the gratings and take the skin from his back. To that extent he had been well prepared for MacBride's news. In the darkness he pondered MacBride's tone of voice. To judge by that, they were going to try and finish him. If he had known the choice, it would have been better to kill MacBride in the quarry. Then, at least, they would have had to try him for murder and he would have died like a man before the Newgate crowds.

  Presently he was aware of the tramping of men returning to the prison-cages from their afternoon labour. They would not remain in their quarters longer than was necessary for diem to wash in the buckets of water provided. After that they were marched to the chapel, a space formed on the two lower decks of the Indomitable’s stern, for an hour's religious instruction. When they had gone, MacBride and four armed officers came for Stunning Joe.

  'Prisoner O'Meara to see the medical officer!'

  The iron slat was opened first and then the main lock of the cell door. They no longer bothered to replace the leg-irons, judging the handcuffs alone to be sufficient for the short crossing to the hospital ship Iphigenia. Joe walked between them, past the barred corridor with its empty cages on either side and up the steps of the companionway at the far end. Through the wooden partition he could hear the low rumbling responses of the prisoners in the chapel to the prayers read by the chaplain. Then he stepped out into the redder glare of the summer evening.

  Across the water, the hospital cutter was being rowed towards the Indomitable's gangway. The warders held Joe where he could watch the rituals of justice being carried out amidships. A convict who was a stranger to Joe had been tied spreadeagled to the wide lattice-work of the gratings against the side of a hammock-house. Two senior warders stood to one side, where there was a bench with several pails of water upon it. Both the prisoner who was roped to the gratings and the officer who held the cat o' nine tails were stripped to the waist. From the distance of the gangway, however, the entire back of the victim seemed to be coated with an orange wash, where the water from the pails had just sluiced down his wounds. His head, which had been lolling forward as if he might have fainted, rose and then flopped forward again. The officer who held the cat held it high above him and then brought it down with all his strength. It made a sound like a butcher's cleaver going through soft flesh to the bone of a carcass. A cold sickness began to swell in Joe O'Meara's stomach.

  The victim of the torment had not moved or responded. According to prison rules, the punishment would cease when he lost consciousness. But the cold shock of sea-water thrown over his back had caused a convulsive movement of the head. In the eyes of the warders he was therefore able to endure what remained. Among the lacerated flesh, Joe glimpsed a speck of white and knew instinctively that it was uncovered bone. As the cat was raised again, he averted his eyes. The savage vengeance of the underworld and the swell mob, he thought, was nothing compared with the justice of the hulks.

  MacBride's voice spoke quietly beside him.

  'There's places on a man's back, O'Meara, places where a good aim shall see he never climbs nor walks again. See if you don't find it so!'

  But Stunning Joe felt terror no longer, only his numb disbelief at the horror which was about to envelop him. They bundled him down the gangway steps to the cutter below, placing him at its centre so that he was surrounded by the bayonets of the warders on every side. He knew that the rational course was to destroy himself now, quickly, before the threatened horror became a reality. The sharp little eyes darted from side to side, vainly seeking an opportunity. MacBride read his thoughts easily.

  'Have no fear, Stunning Joe,' he said sofdy, 'you shall be fed and watched like a baby, until your turn comes at the gratings!'

  The cutter bumped alongside the encrusted hull of the Iphigenia. At a glance, the hospital ship hardly differed from the other hulks of the prison fleet. The portholes, though somewhat larger, were as securely barred over. Two small boats rowed round and round the moored vessel, each containing its complement of red-coated riflemen, their carbines and fixed bayonets stacked in a grove of blades at the centre of the launches. Day and night, this military picket was provided by the regiment on guard-duty at Portland.

  MacBride and the escort took Joe aboard and delivered him to two duty warders on the top deck. He was signed for and marched into the upper ward where the most gravely ill of the prisoners were kept. The ward was lined with beds, rather than hammocks, each occupied by a figure in a blue-grey nightshirt and a cap with the word 'Hospital' embroidered upon it. The Iphigenia had once been a 36-gun frigate and the barred gun-ports allowed more light and air into the ward than was permitted on the main hulks.

  Joe looked furtively about him as he was marched down the length of the deck towards the surgeon's office and the surgery itself at the far end. Few of the patients here would recover from their sickness. Many were asleep, a few lay awake staring vacantly at the bulkheads or the decking above them. From the grey pallor of their skin, one or two might have been dead already.

  If anything, he thought, escape from the Iphigenia was more difficult than from the main hulks. At the entrance to the ward the entire deck was railed off from the outside world by the familiar bars of a convict-cage. Two warders stood guard, one outside and one inside the locked gate. Because of the size of the gun-ports, they had been double-barred so that a man would have to cut through several thicknesses of steel before he could make a large enough gap to crawl through. Even then, he would have to work under the eyes of the warder.

  But the arrangement of the far end of the deck made Stunning Joe's hope grow dimmer still. Beyond a further iron-barred grille was Surgeon-Major Doyle's own office, through which the prisoner and escorting warders passed to reach the surgery and examination room in the bows of the vessel. Here the portholes were smaller, too narrow for Stunning Joe to get through, even had he found the means of filing the bars. Coldly he counted up the barriers between himself and freedom. First he would have to pass back through the office, overpowering Doyle and anyone else in there. He must find Doyle's own key to unlock the grille beyond, which closed the way to the ward. Then he must either account for the two guards at the main gate to the ward, or else file through the steel bars of the gun-ports in full view of them. After that he had only to swim for freedom through a rain of bullets from the marksmen in the guard-boats. And all this was to be accomplished without a file or a weapon, and while wearing handcuffs. It hardly seemed a likely spec.

  Doyle, a hulking brute of thirty or so, watched the new arrival sullenly as Joe O'Meara was led through the office to the surgery beyond. The Surgeon-Major's dark clothes were crumpled, his Finger-nails showed half-moons of grime, and his breath carried an acid stench of brandy. Whatever decorum he had once possessed as he walked the wards as a student was now lost in the dull brown eyes and slack wet mouth.

  'Take the brute through,' he said sluggishly. 'And leave his cuffs on, damn you!'

  They bundled Joe O'
Meara into the space beyond and slammed the door upon him. A plain wooden bunk had been fixed on either side of the surgery against the lime-washed timbers. At the far end of the room the area had been curtained off. Joe sat down on one of the bunks, looked about him, and detected a movement behind the long black curtain. He was about to get up and investigate when the door opened and Doyle came in. The Surgeon-Major ignored Stunning Joe. Instead he went to the curtain, lifted it at one side and dragged out the girl who had been concealed behind it. The reason for his ill-temper was now evident. Stunning Joe and his escort had arrived just as Doyle was about to enjoy a doxy, one of those brought aboard under the pretext of a compassionate visit to a dying felon.

  The girl was eighteen or nineteen years old. She was tall and thin, her red hair cropped short as a boy's, suggesting that she might herself have undergone a recent sentence in a reformatory. The green eyes had a vicious slant and her high cheek-bones were carefully rouged. Stunning Joe had not so much as seen a girl for months but the excitement in his heart was one of recognition. The tall pale redhead was known in the Haymarket night-houses as French Claire. And Claire was one of a dozen girls run by Old Mole with the aid of his bully, Jack Strap.

  The girl was stripped to her petticoats, giving a glimpse of the shape of her narrow hips and long white legs. Though she glanced at Stunning Joe, any hint of recognition in her green eyes was quenched at once. She followed Doyle into his room, the door closed, and Joe heard the key turned in its lock.

  Having seen Claire, he knew that some plan still existed for his freedom. But unless he worked out its details for himself, it was unlikely that the girl would have any chance of telling him. A young whore like Claire would be skilful enough to keep the Surgeon-Major occupied for an hour or two, and he must make the best of his time.

  Joe examined his temporary prison. There was no, way out, except through Doyle's own room. But even if he had been able to get to the ward itself, he would have been seized at once by the guards. The timbers on all sides of him were stout and unyielding, broken only by two portholes, high up and heavily barred. Drawing a deep breath, he walked over to the curtain behind which Claire had been hidden, and pulled it back. A sudden exultation overcame his fright at the object which lay behind the black drape.

  On a trestle-table a human shape lay stitched into an envelope of sail canvas. That space behind the curtain was all that served as a mortuary for the convict hulks. Rarely a day passed without one or two deaths among the felons. Their bodies were brought here for Doyle's cursory examination and a few hours of lying in state while the details of their deaths were entered in the record for the prison commissioners. Hardly was a corpse allowed to grow cold before the shrouded form was taken on board the burial cutter. No time was allowed for the contagion of the dead to contaminate the living in the confined space of the decks. A man who woke in the morning might be fifty feet deep by the evening, his weighted shroud carried clear of the convict fleet by the fierce currents of The Race, where two tides met beyond the tip of Portland Bill.

  Still fearful of the sight, Joe stretched out his hands towards the shape within the tightly-sewn canvas, broad at the shoulders and narrower at the feet, like any coffin. At first he thought it was a dummy, but that would hardly do for the plan he was trying to envisage. His brow furrowed as he tried to read the thoughts of Mr Kite and Old Mole. He touched the canvas and his Fingers read the shape of an arm and hand folded across the breast. The chest seemed absurdly thrust out, as if the dying man had drawn a great breath to hold for all eternity. And then Joe felt the faintest warmth, seeping through the canvas as though to answer his touch. Hope and horror mingled in his heart. As he stood there, still uncertain, the shape within the shroud gave a soft groan and the inflated chest seemed to fall a little.

  Stunning Joe sprang back and let the curtain fall. He had heard of dead men's groans as the air left their bodies but the effect of it was no less appalling for that. He had no idea who the man was or why he had died. Something had been said about a convict dying in one of the quarries that morning, either by an accident or from a seizure. Composing himself, Joe lifted the curtain again.

  He thought that Claire could occupy Surgeon Doyle's attention but there was no means by which she could smuggle a prisoner to freedom from the Iphigenia. That he must do for himself, using the only means that would be likely to occur. First he tried to lift the canvas shape and found it heavier than he had dared to imagine. Abandoning the task for a moment, he ran his Fingers round it and with a sudden excitement touched something small and hard. While Doyle had hidden the half-dressed girl from the warders she had made use of the curtained space as her own place of concealment.

  It was a tiny key, exactly of the pattern carried by every policeman and prison officer in the kingdom. To the uninitiated, handcuffs were a formidable means of restraint. But a villain who knew his trade also knew that the same key would open any handcuffs in police office or prison lodge. They were made in such quantities that it was out of the question to cut different keys or make variable locks. Moreover, the routines of the police and the prison service would have been hopelessly complicated if there was an infinite variety of keys and cuffs. Most magsmen and bullies professed a contempt for handcuffs, swearing that they would generally spring them open with a good hammer-blow. That was a trick Stunning Joe had never accomplished, but with a twist of one hand he had the little key in its lock. The cuffs opened at its first turn and he laid them on the floor, rubbing the red impress which they had left on his wrists.

  As he turned to his task again, Joe's heart was beating high and fast with a new hope tempered by the knowledge that such means of escape from the hulks was very likely to be the means of his death as well. Yet his spirits rose for the first time since he had been brought to Portland. Had not Soapy Samuel promised him that he must die to live again?

  Running his fingers under the edge of the canvas shroud again he searched out whatever objects Claire had left there. One was a small pearl-handled razor. The second, which he failed to find for a moment, was a stout needle with a length of wax thread passed through its eye.

  Now he knew beyond question what it was that Mr Kite required of him. The escape at the quarry, with MacBride's apparent assistance, was still a mystery. Had they meant him to get clear? Or was it a mere device for bringing him to the Iphigenia and ensuring that he would never be sought again by the law? Perhaps Claire was present only to provide a second chance for him in case the escape at the quarry failed. If that were so, then Mr Kite and Old Mole must want him very badly indeed. He chuckled to himself with the elation of the idea.

  The shroud had been stitched by one of the other prisoners, effectively but not with great neatness. Stunning Joe opened the little pearl-handled razor and cut the canvas thread where it secured the shroud above the corpse's head. Inch by inch he wrestled the canvas down, stripping it from the stiffening form.

  The dead man's face was anonymous like all those of the Portland prisoners. Cropped hair and sallow features were almost universal among the convicts, making it harder to distinguish one man from another. In this, at least, the authorities had unwittingly aided Sealskin Kite's plan. For the first time, as he struggled with the weight of the corpse, it occurred to Joe that the man's death was no accident. Mr Kite had needed a body, and Mr Kite's power extended even into the brutal kingdom of the hulks and the labour gangs.

  He drew the rough canvas shroud clear and dropped it on the floor. Then came the struggle to move the corpse from its trestle-table to one of the bunks by the green-washed timbers. Stunning Joe paused and listened. Through the closed door he heard the harsh drunken laugh of Surgeon Doyle and the exclamation of amused vindictiveness.

  'Why, you young bitch! So you would, would you?'

  There came sounds of an amorous tussle, enough in Joe's opinion to cover the noise of his own movements. He lugged the shoulders of the corpse from the table and dragged the body to the floor. Its limbs had not yet sti
ffened completely in death. As he towed it by the feet, slithering across the planking of the deck, the arms fell to either side. The dead man was still dressed in his prison garb, his number stitched to the brown jacket.

  Before lifting the body on to the bunk, Joe took the pearl-handled razor and slit the brown jacket so that it came easily away. Then he peeled off his own jacket with his number upon it. For ten minutes he struggled to thrust the hardening arms through it, and at last pulled it down untidily over the man's torso. With a final effort, he dragged the body on to the bunk and turned it on one side, facing the timbers of the ship's side.

  With any luck, he thought, Doyle would have been too dazed by drink to recognise him when he came in. And after Claire's attentions it might be next morning before the Surgeon-Major came in and found that the man brought from the Indomitable had died of 'general infirmity'. The trick was not foolproof but it was the only hope left. Stripped to the waist, he took the fragments of the dead man's jacket and went back behind the curtain.

  It was easy enough to arrange the tapering shroud upon its trestle-table and to slide himself into its open end. While he was moving the corpse to the bunk, Joe had considered what must be done. He stuffed the mutilated jacket into the far end of the shroud, took the closed razor in one hand and the needle with its wax thread in the other. Then he slid face downwards into the faint creamy light of the sailcloth. He would have to stitch the two flaps of canvas together from the inside, a labour which he guessed would be easier if he could work with the material below him rather than reaching overhead to do the job. Of course, close examination would show that the stitching had been done from inside, but burial parties were not likely to make close inspections of a shroud. Even if they did, it would be assumed that the prisoner who stitched the shroud had begun, clumsily, with that end of it.