The Castaways

by Iain Lawrence

  High above me, Gaskin Boggis hopped to his feet on the topsail yard. He jumped up and down on that wooden stick, shouting, “Land! There’s land!”

  Mrs. King, her cheek bulging with tobacco, flew straight to the rigging. It was a boisterous day, and her skirts, catching the wind, bulged like a bell around her white drawers. “It’s the Lizard!” she said.

  To me it was a faint speck of gray, a shard of rock that could have been anything anywhere. How I envied that she could name it, as if she had an acquaintance with every stone and sod of the earth.

  She squirted tobacco juice neatly between the shrouds. “A point to leeward, please,” she shouted down at the wheel.

  Weedle hesitated, jogging the wheel one way, then the other.

  From Charlotte came her tongue-clucking. “Leeward means to leeward, you weedle.” She pointed toward the land. “Silly goose; turn that way.”

  We passed the Lizard and ran down the Channel. With the wind in our favor, but the tide against us, we bashed through row after row of steep-sided waves. The very ship trembled, and the spray flew up from the bow.

  My home looked cold and dismal, an uninviting place. It was a disappointment after the grand vision I’d been imagining for so long. But when Midgely asked me to describe it, I said it looked beautiful.

  All day and all night we pressed along the Channel. Weedle and Boggis and Hay-yoo stood staring into the night. We all saw the lights of Dover in the darkness, the twinkle of thousands of candles and lamps. A strange feeling came over me, like the queasy sense of the seasickness. I’d thought I would be overjoyed to be home, but now I wished that I had another day, or another week, at sea. I was suddenly not sure that I wanted to go home at all.

  The King asked me, “What’s on your mind, Tom?”

  “I couldn’t really say,” I told him. “I think I’m afraid of facing Mr. Goodfellow again. Things might go badly for me.”

  “Nonsense, Tom,” he said. “We’ll watch over you like your own guardian angel.”

  We gave the Goodwin Sands a wide berth in the darkness, and sighted the Foreland at dawn. Like birds woken by the sun, a flock of boats came flying out from shore. In the distance they were little clouds of foam and spray, for they came with all sails set, racing each other to be first alongside.

  They tacked and jibed, their hulls vanishing wholly into the seas. They shot past our bow and tore round the stern, a man calling from each, “Pilot! Pilot!”

  Mrs. King chased them off. She said there was no need to lug a man “all over the blooming ocean,” and that we would pick up our pilot when we’d rounded the Foreland.

  We did that at noon. We passed the point two miles off, turned to the west, and braced the yards for a reach toward the river. There, at the mouth of the Thames, we found a bulge of brown water—a huge bubble on the blue of the North Sea. I felt a change in the ship as we punctured that bulge, crossing from blue to brown, from salt to fresh. As though from a wish to head back to the ocean, the ship slowed and veered aside, so that Boggis had to fight it with the wheel.

  Then, two miles from any shore, I put down Midgely’s bucket and scooped fresh water from the sea.

  The little King grimaced when he saw me lift it to my lips. “You’re not drinking that, are you?” he said.

  It was river water, fouled with sewage, thickened by mud from the fields. I would not have drunk it for love nor money when I lived in London. But now, at the edge of the sea, it was somehow different. I fancied that I could smell all of its parts: the rain that fell on the lovely Cotswold Hills; the spray of the Temple Fountain; the bathwater of the King in his castle; the runoff from the coppery dome of St. Paul’s.

  “It’s the blood of England,” I said. It was her essence, a potion of courage and strength.

  I tipped the bucket and drank. Then Boggis pulled it away and did the same, and the bucket went from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, sloshing over the deck as we all drank of England’s blood.

  With the current against us, and the river chopping at our bow, Calliope King finally allowed a pilot aboard. He clambered up the same ladder that had saved our loathsome castaways, that had rescued Midgely and me and the others.

  He was a grizzled old salt, bundled head to toe in his heavy cloak. He went straight to the wheel and rooted himself behind it, where the deck was spotted from Calliope’s tobacco. Only inches from the helmsman, he bellowed orders at the top of his lungs. “Larboard! Larboard! Come about!”

  I thought I would stand on the deck and not move until I saw the spires of London, until I heard the bells in the churches. But our progress was terribly slow, and it wasn’t until the next morning that the land began to narrow around us. We passed the mouth of the Medway, and I remembered my terror as I’d sailed out from there in the hold of my father’s ship, a convict on my way to Australia. I looked toward Chatham for the short masts of the hulks, but saw nothing but marshes and hills.

  Below the Beacon Hill, near the village where I was born, the land pressed close on either side. The pilot took us up with the tides, tacking back and forth. We sailed so close to the river’s edge that we could see the grasses bending in the wind, and twice we startled herons into flight. At each change to the ebb he dropped the anchor, and we waited for the current to turn again in our favor. There were times we gained fewer than five miles, when the flood was weak.

  The long hours of waiting gave us time to think and time to talk. No longer divided by watches, we could gather as we pleased. One night, as we sat out the ebbing tide, Weedle and Boggis and Midgely and I were together in the cookhouse. There was a touch of moonlight on the marshes, and I was looking out the window when Weedle began to pester me with questions.

  “What will happen when we get to London?” he said. “First thing, what will we do?” He was sitting with his back to the wall, picking at a spot of tar on his trousers. “Will we give a cove a tumble? Pick a pocket?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We have to get money somehow, don’t we? Then we’ll buy roasted chestnuts. And ices and muffins. That’s what we want to do, ain’t it, Gaskin?”

  Boggis shook his head.

  “What then?” said Weedle. “Do we go straight off to Cheapstreet?”

  I looked down at him. “You can go wherever you like, but not straight off,” I said. “You’ll stay on the ship while I go ashore and—”

  “Stuff that!” Weedle jumped up. “Why should you go ashore and not us?”

  “ ’Cause that’s the way it is,” said Midgely, glaring blindly at the place where Weedle had sat. “He’s going to get pardons for us all. Ain’t that right, Tom?”

  “You stupid toadie!” shouted Weedle. “What makes you think he’ll come back? To help you? A blind boy? He can run faster and farther without you.”

  The sudden argument left me disheartened. Through all we’d done and all we’d seen, had it been only to end as we’d started, in squabbling and shouting? I turned to leave the cookhouse.

  “Where are you going?” cried Weedle. “Tom, wait!”

  It seemed he thought I would go ashore right then, swimming through the river, crawling through the marshes. He grabbed my shirt, and in a desperate voice begged me not to go.

  “You brought us all the way here, you have to look out for us,” he said. “There ain’t no one else. I ain’t got Penny or Carrots or no one no more. You got to look out for me, Tom.”

  It was a wretched display. Weedle was so afraid of being abandoned that he came close to tears. Then shame alone made it worse, and when his voice began to blubber he pushed past me, running out into the dark.

  Boggis heaved himself up. “I better go talk to him,” he said. “I don’t like people being sad.”

  If Boggis had his own fears, he kept them to himself. But if he didn’t, he would have been the only one. The farther we went up the river, the more Midgely fretted. He thought of his mother in the dockyard, but couldn’t decide if he should go to her. “She turfed me out once,”
he said. “Don’t know why she’d want me back now.”

  Around our ship gathered barges and frigates and cutters and snows, all making their way with the tides, like a strange sort of city drifting upriver. Now and then a beautiful ship would go gliding right past us, pulled by a filthy steam tug with its side-paddles churning.

  There was no end of things to see, and for most of us that slow week on the river was endlessly exciting. We shouted back and forth with bargemen and boatmen. We gazed at people on the shore. The wiry Hay-yoo looked out on the villages and churches with the same astonishment I’d shown at the sight of jungles. Midgely never complained that he couldn’t see the wondrous things, but I found him constantly rubbing his eyes, as though he could squeeze out his blindness.

  Charlotte was in her element, playing at counting sheep and counting birds and counting barges. She made little boats that she launched from the stern, and sometimes they went sailing past us. Her laugh seemed to fill the ship.

  “Is she pretty?” asked Midgely, as we passed the steamship dock at Greenwich pier.

  “Very much,” I told him.

  “I thought so.” He nodded. “She sounds pretty, Tom. She sounds even more pretty than Lucy Beans. Angels must sound like Charlotte.”

  We were getting close to the City. The air was thickening with the smells of smoke and river stench. Marshes had given way to docks and buildings. But Midge sat wrapped in his darkness while a troop of dragoons rode by at a trot, while a toff in a top hat went weaving past on his two-wheeled dandy horse, pushing along with his feet.

  “She plays such funny games,” he said. “Has she told you about Mr. Horrible, Tom?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I heard her say the name, that’s all.”

  “She told me all about him,” he said, with a proud smile. “Every day she asks me for a bit of food for Mr. Horrible. She says he lives below, in a box in the steerage. No one ever sees him.”

  “Is he invisible?” I asked.

  “No, don’t be silly!” cried Midge, with a bright laugh. “His door’s locked, Tom; that’s all. Charlotte comes for bits of beef or the fat from the mutton. She says that’s his favorite ’cause he doesn’t have to chew it. I think she pitches it over the side, or gives it to Calliope. But she always says thank you. Like that. ‘Thank you, Midgely’ That’s why I think she’s so pretty.”

  I hadn’t realized that he’d become so besotted by the girl. It was really no wonder, for she was delightful, a little blond elf flitting through the ship. She’d kept us all laughing our way up the river.

  “It makes me sad I’ll never see Charlotte,” said Midge. “But you know what makes me sadder? I’m forgetting what you look like, Tom.” He tipped his face toward me, and his eyes were nearly closed. “I try to remember, but I can’t. I’m forgetting what you look like, and—you know something?—I’m forgetting what I look like too. It’s funny, ain’t it? But I must be all right, ’cause Charlotte seems to like me.”

  We passed the domes of the naval college, and the big docks at Greenland and Millwall. We saw the masts of tall ships in Limehouse Basin. Then, at last, we sighted St. Paul’s, and the cross at the top of its dome. That evening we anchored off the grim Tower, and I had come full circle. It was near this very place that I had pulled my diamond from the river mud and fled with the blind man on my heels.

  In the morning, Hay-yoo was gone. We supposed he’d swum ashore to the Tower Stairs, slipping into the huge city as though into a jungle. Charlotte wept, and even the King had to dab his eyes with his handkerchief. Calliope said a little prayer for the soul of Hay-yoo, as though he’d been buried at sea. Then we pressed on, and the next day found us high in the Pool. The arches of London Bridge blocked the river ahead, and all around was a confusion of construction. We had gone as far as we could go.

  seventeen

  I LEAVE MIDGELY BEHIND

  Around the Pool, buildings rose sheer from the river in cliffs of stone and brick. Here and there were iron moorings set into the walls, and we made fast to a pair of great rings. Out from the water, up the wall, rose a metal ladder black with rust, dangling seaweed and branches from every rung.

  The pilot wasted no time. As soon as our ropes were fastened he called for a boatman, then gathered his charts and his sea boots, stuffed his hat into his pocket, and stood by the rail. I begged a ride with him, so that I might strike out straightaway for my old home.

  “What, you too?” he said. “Good crikey, I should have called for a barge; that’s three of you now. Well, look lively. My boat’s on the way.”

  Calliope and Charlotte were bustling about, filling the dreadful playbox with the girl’s many things. I said a quick good-bye to Gaskin and Weedle. “I’ll be back in the morning,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t leave the ship.”

  “We won’t,” said Boggis, while Weedle shook his head solemnly. “Hurry back, Tom.”

  Next, I shook hands with the little King. He looked unusually sad. “You’re not going ashore?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’ve been forbidden,” he said, with a rueful look. “Calliope wants everything in order first. Honestly, I’m glad for some peace from that woman.”

  “Have you told her about the Jolly Stone?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” said he. “Believe me, I’ve done my best to keep Calliope in the dark, though I fear she may have gotten wind of it.” He motioned me closer, and his voice fell to a whisper. “Now don’t breathe a word of this, Tom—not to her, and especially not to Charlotte—but I believe we’ve come to a parting of the ways. When we’re through with Mr. Goodfellow, I’ll go about a landsman’s business, and leave the sea to Calliope. Poor old sea.”

  He was trying to be cheerful, but not succeeding. Finally, he sent me off with a pat on the back. “Remember, Tom,” he told me. “Bring the diamond here an hour after dawn. I’ll have Mr. Goodfellow waiting. That will be a nice touch, won’t it? Him waiting for you?”

  Last, I said so long to Midgely He came out of the cookhouse, and, holding my sleeve, walked toward the ladder. The pilot was leaning on the rail, watching his boatman row across the Pool. The little white boat was dodging barges and lighters.

  “Can’t you take me, Tom?” said Midge. “I don’t want to stay here with Weedle and the King. I got a funny feeling, Tom.”

  “I have to go alone,” I said.

  “Please?”

  “Midge, no! You’re too small, and you’re too slow.”

  I spoke so sharply that the pilot turned and looked at me. Midgely let go of my sleeve, and his lip began to quiver. “Please, Tom,” he said. “I can run.”

  “No,” I told him. “I’ve a long way to walk, Midge; I can’t carry you. Oh, Lord, you don’t see!”

  What I meant was You don’t see what I’m saying; you don’t understand. But Midge began to cry, and the pilot swore at me. “What a terrible thing to say to a blind boy.”

  Midgely, sniffing, smeared the back of his hand across his nose. “That’s something Weedle would say. Or Benjamin Penny. I know I can’t see; you don’t have to tell me.”

  “Midge, I’m sorry.” I tried to touch him, but now he pulled away from me.

  “Go on then, Tom,” he said. “I don’t care figs what you do.”

  I had no chance to explain. Calliope and Charlotte came dragging the coffin full of toys. The boatman, just then clambering to the deck, stopped with one foot on the rail. “No!” he cried. “Not in my boat, you don’t. You’re not taking a dead man in my boat.”

  Calliope spat a brown river. “It’s only toys, you idiot,” she said. “But there’ll be a dead man soon enough if you don’t give me a hand.”

  She was not a woman to be argued with. The boatman—and the pilot too—were quick to obey. The coffin was more than half the length of the boat, so they laid it sideways across the stern, and Calliope sat atop it. “Hurry up, Charlotte,” she said.

  The girl was holding hands with Midgely It seemed she had just discovered that he was cr
ying. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Why are you so sad, Midgely? Are you going to miss me that much?”

  He only nodded, too teary to speak.

  “You’re sweet, Midgely,” she said. “Will you do something for me? Will you feed Mr. Horrible?”

  He nodded. “Of course,” he said, as though he’d never had a thought for anything else.

  “Don’t forget now. If you’re frightened, just slide it under his door.” She squeezed his hands. “He’s not really so horrible. Just a bit of a weedle. Stinky too.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” said Midge. He raised his voice, to be sure I would hear. “I’m used to stinky fellows by now.”

  Charlotte giggled. “You’re funny, Midgely. I shall miss you. I shall miss you dearly.” Suddenly she leaned forward and kissed his cheek.

  Midge turned red and couldn’t talk anymore. He just stood there as Charlotte slipped down to the boat.

  “I’ll be back before dawn,” I told Midge, but he gave no answer.

  The boatman ferried Calliope and Charlotte to the nearest steps. He balanced the boat with his oars as Calliope heaved the coffin ashore.

  “Tom, I wish you were staying with the ship,” she said. “At least until I return. It would be safer all around. The city’s a dangerous place.”

  Well, it was too late for me to stay with the ship, and she didn’t have a chance to tell me more. The boatman was already shouting at me to “Shut up and sit still,” already pushing off into the river. So I only waved good-bye to the girl and her mother, until I was told to stop that as well. “You’re fanning the air,” said the boatman, with a curse.

  On I went with the pilot. The tide was in our favor, bearing us swiftly under the bridge, past the new one in the making. A strong current made for a lazy boatman, and ours only steered with his oars. “Where have you been in your ship, sonny?” he asked, turning his head. I said I had gone nearly to Australia and back, that I’d been beyond the seas, by way of cannibal islands and the Caribbean.