The Convicts

by Iain Lawrence

  ALSO BY IAIN LAWRENCE

  The Cannibals

  B for Buster

  The Lightkeeper's Daughter

  Lord of the Nutcracker Men

  Ghost Boy

  The High Seas Trilogy

  The Wreckers

  The Smugglers

  The Buccaneers

  my little brother, but a big inspiration

  1. I Begin My Adventure

  2. I Find a Danger and a Treasure

  3. The Bone Picker's Journey

  4. Into the Grave

  5. Among the Urchins

  6. The Darkey's Decision

  7. Mr. Meel Pays a Visit

  8. I Stand Before a Judge

  9. I Meet a Yellow Man

  10. My Arrival on the Hulk

  11. A Little King in a Little Kingdom

  12. The Crimes of Walter Weedle

  13. A Strange and Silent Figure

  14. The Farm Boy Buckles Under

  15. Midgeiy Has His Doubts

  16. A Very Nasty Scheme

  17. Oten Smells the Fields

  18. How My Troubles Deepen

  19. With Midgeiy in the Marshes

  20. A Lonely Christmas

  21. Beyond the Seas

  22. I Battle with a Giant

  23. Face to Face with King Neptune

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  When she was six and I was eight, my little sister, Kitty, died. She fell from a bridge, iirto the Thames, and drowned before anyone could reach her. My mother was there when it happened, She heard a scream and turned to see my sister spinning through the air. She watched Kitty vanish into the eddies of brown water, and in that instant my mother's mind unhinged.

  She put on mourning clothes of the blackest black and hid herself from head to toe, like a beetle in a shell. As the sun went up, as the sun went down, she stood over Kitty's grave. Her veils aflutter in the wind, her shawls drooping in the rain, she became a phantom of the churchyard, a figure feared by children. Even I, who had known her all my life, never ventured near the place when the yellow fogs of autumn came swirling round the headstones.

  It was a day such as that, an autumn day, when my father had to drag her from my sister's grave. The fog was thick and putrid, like a vile custard poured among the tombstones. From the iron gate at the street I couldn't see as far as the church. But I saw the crosses and the marble angels, some distinct, some like shadows, and my father among them, as though battling with a demon. I heard my mother wailing.

  Her boots were black, her bonnets black, and the rippling of her clothes made her look more like a beast than a person. She shrieked and fought against him, clinging to the headstone, clawing at the earth. When at last my father brought her through the gate, she was howling like a dog. In her hand was a fistful of dirt. She looked at it, and fainted dead away.

  We lifted her into the cart, among the bundles and the chests that represented all our goods. The drayman climbed to his seat. He cracked his whip and swore at his horse, and off we started for Camden Town.

  I walked beside my father as we passed our empty house and turned toward the bridge. By chance, the drayman chose the same route that Father took every morning on his useless treks to the Admiralty. I saw him look up at the house, then down at the ground, and we went along in silence. Only a few feet before me, the cart was no more than a gray shape. It seemed to be pulled by an invisible horse that snorted and wheezed as it clopped on the paving stones. My mother woke and sat keening on the cart.

  We were nearly at the river before my father spoke. “This is for her own good,” he said. “You know that, Tom.”

  “Yes,” I said, though it wasn't true. We were not leaving Surrey for my mother's sake, but only to save the two pennies my father spent crossing the bridge every day. We were leaving because Mr. Goodfellow had driven us away, just as he had driven us from a larger house not a year before. I believed he would haunt us forever chasing us from one shrinking home to the next, until he saw us out on the streets with the beggars and the blind. We were leaving Surrey because my father was a sailor without a ship.

  He didn't walk like a sailor anymore. He didn't look like one, nor even smell like one, and I woukhrt have believed he had ever been a sailor if it weren't for the threadbare uniform he donned every morning, and for the bits of sailorly knick-knack that had once filled our house but now were nearly gone. In all my life I had watched him sailing out to sea only once, and then in a thing so woeful that it sank before he reached the Medway That, too, had been Mr. Goodfellow's doing; that had been the start of it

  When we reached the timber wharfs at the foot of the bridge I could feel the Thames close at hand. Foghorns hooted and moaned, and there came the thumping of a steamboat as it thrashed its way along the river. But I couldn't smell the water; the stench of the fog hid even that.

  We paid our toll and started over the bridge. Father walked at the very edge, his sleeve smearing the soot that had fallen on the rail. Horses and carriages appeared before us, and a cabriolet came rattling up from behind. I had to dodge around people, and step nimbljr from a curricle's path, but my father walked straight ahead with a mind only for the river below us. Ladies on the benches drew in their feet as he passed. One snatched up a little white dog. A man shouted, “Watch where you're walking.” But Father just brushed by them all.

  I imagined that he could somehow see the water, and all the life upon it Sounds that drifted up to me as mere groans and puzzling splashes must, to him, have been visions of boatsmen and bargemen, of oars and sails at work. His head rose; his shoulders straightened for a moment.

  I had no wish to know his world, though I had been born by the banks of the Thames, where the river met the sea. We'd left the village before I was two, at the wishes of my mother. The river had taken her father, and the sea had taken her brothers, and ever since my sister's death she'd taught me to fear them both. I often thought—when I saw the Thames swirling by—that one or the other was waiting to take me too.

  It was a disappointment for my father that I had no interest in the ways of sailors. To see him now as a gray shape in the fog made me think how far apart we'd drifted. He believed that I had been badly coddled ever since my sister's death, and there may have been some truth in that. He wasn't proud of me, nor I of him.

  Behind the drayman's creaking cart we walked for miles. We crossed the Strand, and Covent Garden with its crowded stalls, and threaded through a maze of narrow streets. As we started up Tottenham Court the fog began to fade around us, until we came out into sunshine with still a mile to go. Behind us it lay over the city like a yellow grout, and only the high dome of St. Paul's and its glittering cross stood in the brightness and blue.

  The day was nearly spent when we arrived at our new home, a wretched little place squeezed into a row of others. Miles away, in the heart of London, a chorus of bells rang the hour. The drayman tossed our things from his cart and hurried away, as though he dreaded the thought of the coming night's finding him so far from the city. My mother climbed down by herself and stood in silence by the street, herself a figure of the night. There wasn't a soul in sight, and no one came to greet us.

  I picked up a chest and carried it to the house, giving Mother a dirty look as I passed, for she did nothing to help. When I stepped through the-door, a herd of cockroaches stampeded down the hall. I stood for a moment in disgusted surprise, then thundered after them with stomping boots. But Father, coming behind me, shouted, “Stop that, Tom. Those are God's creatures.”

  “They're roaches,” I said.

  “God's roaches, then.” He was carrying a chair that was almost too big to fit through the door. All I could see of him was his face above it and his feet below. “How would you like
it, Tom, if some great creature tried to squash you? he said. “They're only trying to get away. They're trying to hide. Wouldn't you do the same thing?”

  “They're cockroaches” I said.

  “Doesn't matter.” He took the chair into the tiny parlor, craning his neck to see the floor where he walked. “Find the lamps and get them lit. Light alone will drive diem off.”

  I watched the black things scurry away, pleased at least that they weren't rats. They filed into the dark dankness of our scullery, and my skin prickled at the sight and sound of the beetles. I knew that every night they would go roaming through the rooms, that I would find them thick as carpets when I rose before the sun.

  “I hate him,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Goodfeliow.”

  Father set his chair down. “Oh, we're not beaten yet, Tom,” he said. “Not by a long shot.”

  “Well, it isn't fair;’I said.

  “Even a foul wind is fair if you come about.”

  His sailorly talk always befuddled me. I didn't know what he meant.

  “Let go and haul, Tom,” he said. “We'll be coming onto a new course, is all. Loose the mainsheet, I say, and make the most of it.”

  I searched through our chests and bags and makeshift boxes until I found the lamps and the oil. I arranged them in a way that lit every corner, then hdped carry in our bits of furniture, and first of all the long settee so that my mother might have a place to lie as the work went on around her. It never bothered Father that she was such a shiftless thing, but it bothered me no end. I carried things until my arms were numb, hating that I had to do it. One day, I imagined, I would have a man whose only duty would be to carry my furniture about. “I should like the ottoman over there, James,” I would say, pointing. And he would pick it up with a nod and a “Very well, Mr. Tin.” I would have a gang of servants, a footman for my carriage. I would race through London in the smartest of curricles, with two of the finest horses. In every way, I would be better than Mr. Goodfellow.

  That dream took a bit of a turn in title morning, when I started at my new school. Father would have said, “It damned near struck its colors?’

  The school had a grand name: Mr. Poppery's Academy for Boys. But it consisted entirely of fee front room of the Poppery home, with a blackboard hung on a wall of bloodred paper, and six little chairs for the six fat boys. They were like pastry and lard, not one of them the picture of a young gentleman. Mr. Poppery himself looked like a small, homeless dog. He was thin and crooked, except for his right arm-nearly the size of a blacksmith's—with which he hammered his lessons into our backsides. We were to pay our tuition every day, dropping pennies into a wooden box as Mr. Poppery pretended to look aside. But on my first morning I hadn't a coin in my pocket, so I hung back, growing more and more distressed as the pennies chinked into the box. I was ready to pretend to drop one in, until Mr. Poppery covered the slot with his hand and told me in a whisper, with a wink, “It's taken care oft Master Tin.”

  It was a dismal school, and I hated it. But when my father came home from his business of waiting all day in the Admiralty, begging for the ship that was never his, when he brushed the soot from his shoulders and asked how my first day had gone, I lied. “Mr. Poppery's a fine fellow,” I said. “He's got a topping school.” I wasn't trying to spare my father's feelings. I was frightened that he would put me out to work or, even worse, send me off to sea.

  He only nodded as he took off his coat. He reached it up to a hook at the door, and a pencil fell from his pocket. I bent down to get it, but Father pushed me away and snatched up the pencil himself. “Go see to your mother,” he snapped.

  He was seldom angry at me; I didn't understand why he acted that way. But I felt rather hurt, and didn't go in to see Mother. I went outside instead, to sit on our crooked little porch.

  Already it was dark. It always was when Father came home in October. I looked up, surprised to see how many stars there were. It seemed that thousands had appeared where there had never been stars before. They filled the sky in a nearly solid spray of light, but over the city the fog gleamed thick and pale above all the lamps and lights that burned there. As I watched, it grew even thicker and taller. It came rolling over the farmyards, over the burying grounds and the old workhouse of St. Pancras. It filled up Camden Street and oozed across to Archer. It covered me up and swallowed the stars.

  And in the foulness of its yellow cloak, I heard the tolling of a bell.

  It was a strange sound in the fog, at once both faint and clear, both near and far away. It was such an unusual sound that it drew Father out beside me, and he said, “Good heavens!” when he saw how thick the fog had become. He listened to the bell with his head cocked. The sound was faint, yet strangely clear. “That's a passing bell,” he said.

  I knew what it was. Somewhere, maybe miles away, some poor fellow lay dying, and the bell marked the passing of his soul.

  “A child,” said Father, hearing the pattern of the chimes.

  Then the telling strokes began, one for each year of that young person's life.

  Inside the house, my motherV voice rose to a high warble. “There's no luck in hearing a passing bell,” she said.

  “No, nor harm,” Father muttered beside me. But I felt a chill as the bell tolled on—eleven times, twelve—then only twice more. The child who was dying was the same age as me.

  “No luck. No luck in that,” shrilled Mother.

  And she was right.

  In the morning they came for my father. Two burly men, thick as tree stumps, marched him down the steps mid into die fog; One at each side, pinning hii elbows, they took him off to debtor's prison.

  My mother wailed. She tried to stop them at the door, quivering in her black shawls. But the men only knocked her aside so rudely that my father roared, “Keep your filthy hands off her!” He struggled for a moment, until he saw that it was useless, then looked back as the men stepped him to thestreet.

  “We're hot beaten yet,” he said. “We shall weather this blow, as we've weathered all others.”

  “Tell tne what to do,” I said.

  His chin was turned fully to his shoulder. “You must find money, Tom,” he told me.

  “But how?” I called. “Father, how?”

  Already he was graying into the fog. He had no answer. My mother sobbed as she held me. “It was the bell,” she shouted. “It was the passing bell!”

  “No,” said Father, nearly gone now. “You see, Tom. This is what comes from crushing cockroaches.”

  I thought he was joking. I thought he was so brave to be making merry on bis way to prison. But he was really talking about himself, as I learned a moment later. No sooner had he vanished completely into the awful fog—with a final round of oaths from the men, and the fading clatter of a horse's hoofs—than another man arrived.

  His voice came first—”Ahoy the house!”—and that was all I needed to know. Only one man would speak those words in a voice like that.

  Out of the fog came Mr. Goodfellow. He was dressed to the nines, in top hat and cape, and the one he tipped up and the other he flipped back as he came up the steps to our door. “Good day, Mrs. Tin,” he said, with a nod to her. Me, he just ignored.

  “What have you done to us now?” asked my mother.

  “Why, you strike me to the quick, madam,” said he. “I'm only trying to help.”

  She leapt at him. Her fingers curled, a snarl in her throat, she went up like a panther. But Mr. Goodfellow easily held her off. He was a strong man. He was bigger and stronger and richer than I or my father. In every way he was better.

  “Now, listen,” said Mr. Goodfellow. He held my mother by the wrist, and she folded up at his feet, down to her knees on the floor. “I have taken it upon myself to consolidate the debts of Mr. Tin. Everything he owes is henceforth owed to me, and a trifling amount it is.”

  “How much?” I asked. He didn't answer.

  “How much?” Mked Mother.

  �
��Thirty-nine pounds,” he said. “Thirty-nine pounds and a ha'penny, to be exact. But the latter I'll forgo.”

  His-trifling amount was a princely sum to me. His ha'pennyalone would buy me a muffin or a cold glass of raspberryade. The balance I could hardly imagine.

  “A pittance,” said Mr. Goodfellow, with a wave of his fingers. “However, I am prepared to forgo the entire amount if Mr. Tin will agree to work for Goodfellow and company”

  “Is that what you want?” I asked. “Is that why you've hounded us for years, to get my father on your beastly ships?”

  He looked at ine, and then away. To him I wasn't worth a second glance.

  Still on her knees, ifty mother stared up at him. Her face had mce been pretty, but it hadn't seen the sun since Kitty's death, and now was ashy white. “How dare you, sir?” she aikedv “Weren't you brave enough to come while he was here?”

  “Madam…,” he said.

  “How dare you?” Mother said again, in a voice that had no fire. She managed to gather some dignity as she picked herself up and rose beside him, small and frail. “You've ruined us, sir,” she said. “All Tor reveiige, for a wound oh your pride.”

  -The whys and wherefores are between myself and Mr. Tin,” said he. “But let me tell you, madam: ruined you shall be unless your husband agrees to my terms.”

  He tipped his hat again and backed from the door. I swallowed, looking straight at him. “I will go,” I said.

  “No!” cried Mother.

  But I ignored her. “I will go in my father's place “ I told him, trembling at my courage. I thought I might faint if he took me up on my bargain. As he looked back at me, I resigned myself to a short life and an early death on the sea that I feared.

  But his only answer was a laugh, a hearty laugh that shook him all over and made those cold eyes twinkle.

  It was worse than if he had said no. I had offered him my life, and it angered me to be so utterly belittled.

  “I insist,” I said.

  He laughed even harder. “Oh, you insist,” he said, and snickered. “I need a man, young Master Tin. Why, you wouldn't last a day, not an hour, on the sea. You belong at Mr. Poppery's, boy. I've seen to it that your tuition has been paid for a year. It's already a portion of your father's debt.”