The Convicts
Page 5
All the feathers quivered on the Darkey's hat, and her laughter tinkled through the chamber. “You've done so well, my darling boy.”
“Bleeding battered boots!” They were tied together, and Skerritt whirled them once around his head, then sent them spinning. They thumped against the brick, and even as they tumbled to the floor half a dozen boys went running to claim them, Benjamin Penny among them.
I didn't see how it happened that Penny came out of that mob with the boots. But there were drops of fresh blood on the tops of one, and two boys remained on the floor as the others got up. One bled from an arm, and the other from a thigh, but no one paid the slightest mind. Penny came in his hurry-skurry fashion, gleaming with pleasure.
“Here, Smashy,” he said. “Your feet is all blisters.”
He put the boots on for me, and tied the laces tightly. I tried to smile to show my thanks, but the worried look returned to Penny's face. Either the Smasher never smiled, or my attempt looked very gruesome.
The Darkey left, and Skerritt followed, with the giant lumbering at his heels. The other boys settled down and went to sleep on their bench of brick. But Penny stayed with me, nursing the lump on my head, fiissing with my dead-boy's coat. The lamps burnt themselves out, but I never moved, and I never saw them lit again. In utter darkness, hours later, we crept from the chamber and up to the streets.
I decided that I would let Benjamin Penny lead me from the earth to the light; then I would turn and run. I would run and run as fast as I could, all the way to Camden Town.
Through a tunnel and a drain we went, then out through a grating above a putrid river. Thick and brown, reeking of waste, it oozed through a canyon of decrepit buildings. Logs and timbers propped up the walls, crisscrossing over the river. It had to be the Fleet. No other wretched river flowed througbsueh a slum. But that meant I was close to my father. He was surely in one of die prisons along the Fleet, maybe staring out at the same tall chimneys that I could see, with their feathers of coal smoke drifting into the darkening sky.
In a mob we moved along a street unlit by any lamps, I shuffling in the blind man's boots, Benjamin Penny lurching at my side. When at last we came to a lighted doorway, I saw us reflected in a windowpane, a ragged army streaming past. I saw jnyself shuffling, limping, and staggering, exactly like the sort of creature I was thought tebe— one of the walking dead. My boots pinched and rubbed in the wrong plaeei, and I felt as if I were trodding on coals. I had no hope of sprinting away; I could scarcely walk, let alone run.
There were more and more lights as we passed from the slums to the haunts of the well-to-do. We came from a black filth to a glittering world of carriages and white clothes. At a broad and busy street we stopped. Lamps burned on posts, over doorways, in the windows of the shops. But their light made the darkness beyond them only deeper and more mysterious, and to see the street so patched with light and black was like looking at the hands of the Darkey.
Up and down walked women in white, their long dresses pinched at the waist, their fine hats like flower boxes balanced on their heads. In the shadows of those great hats, men strolled at the ladies’ sides, at the edge of the street where horse dung lay the thickest. A corner sweeper was working madly with a straw broom, clearing his path for a woman as wide as a donkey.
In our rags and filth, we were like a group of savages at the edge of a civilized world. The boys stared; they slavered, waiting for what, I didn't know. But I saw safety and freedom among the lights and the people, and I moved to the side of our group as a carriage came by, pulled by a prancing black horse. I steeled myself to nip in behind it. But across the street—in a doorway—I-saw Jack Skerritt and the giant watching me intently. I peered down the street in the other direction, and in another shadowed nook was the Darkey.
“Look,” said a boy. Battered caps turned all in one direction. Hands came up, pointing from the ends of ragged sleeves. “Here comes a flashing cove.”
On the opposite side of the street, a dozen doorways down, a gentleman was walking byhimself. A tiny black dog on the end of a leash darted in and out between his shoes, its little legs a blur. In white trousers and black coat, the man went steadily on his way, peering in the windows that he passed.
The boys divided him up; one claimed his watch and another his purse, one his little blaek dog. I could feel a fever rising in their blood. Their eyes grew wide. Their teeth showed between drawn lips.
The gentleman kept coming, the dog weaving round his heels, and somehow that heat—that fever—leapt to me. It was frightening to feel it, but it came as strongly as the greed that my diamond had brought, and I wanted something fierce and wild to happen I muttered with the others, willing the man to stop on his way.
At a silversmith's he did. He entered its deep doorway, sinking into the shadows. The dog sat down beside him with its stub of a tail gagging. The gentleman clasped his hands behind jiis back and studied the things in the window.
A cudgel was put in my hand. I didn't see who placed it there, butronly—suddenly—felt its weight. My fingers closed on the handle as though they had known it for years.
Penny whispered to me, “Go on, Smashy. Lay it on him.”
“Do him, Smasher,” said a boy.
I didn't hesitate. I stepped forward with an eagerness that seemed to surprise nearly everyone. “It 15 him,” said a young voice. “Ain't no other,”
I crossed the street. The sweeper waiting there didn't even bother sweeping. He was a gray-haired, bearded veteran of his trade, and he must have known he would get no money from me. I rapped the cudgel on my palm.
It might have been made for my hand. As though I'd used it a dozen times before, I saw myself raising it high behind the gentlenian'sbackv then bringing it down on his head. I felt it cfush his hat, and I knew how it would jar in my hand as it met the hardness of his skull. It was alarming, how clearly Tsaw it.
The man neither turned around nor heard me coming. The dog did, but it only stood up on its hind legs, eager for a pat. The gent looked down ait it, then began to look toward me. I saw his eyebrows rise, wondering.
“Hello, sir,” I said.
I had seen the means of my escape. I couldn't outrun the boys, and I dreaded what the Darkey had in store. My only hope was to have this man protect me, and I felt safer just being near him.
But I hadn't expected him to be frightened. As he turned fully around, a look of near terror came to his face. His mouth made a little circle, and his eyebrows arched so high that they tipped back the front of his hat. Quickly, I brought the cudgel from behind my back, thrusting it toward him. “Take this,” I said.
He reeled back to the depth of the doorway, until he was pressed against the window. I stepped toward him with the cudgel, anxious that he take it.
“Help!” he cried. “Help! A thief!”
“No,” I said.
He shouted even louder, with horror in his voice. He held up his hands and closed his eyes. “Oh, help me. Help!” he shouted. The little dog whimpered. Pressed back against its master's feet, it piddled on his shoes.
From all directions, men came running. I heard the clicking buzz of a Charlie's rattle, and the cries of “Thief!” rang out and spread, taken up by men and women, by cabbies and sweepers and gents. It seemed that every person on every street took up the cry against me.
“Shut up! Take this!” I told the man, shoving the cudgel at him. But it was too late. The crowd closed around me, and a cabman drove his big four-wheeler right up to the doorway. At the last moment I tried to get away. I ducked below reaching arms; I battered through a tangle of legs. But there were too many men, and they overpowered me in a moment. There were hands on my sleeves, hands on my collar. A hand found my throat and pushed me down to the street.
A man came barging through the crowd, shouting, “Move aside!” and, “Let me through!” He came with such importance that he might have been next in line to the King. “Clear a path. Pm from the parish!” he proclaimed.
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bsp; He was a small but powerful figure, a bundle of muscles and sinew. He wore the long coat of a parish constable, hacked off at sleeves and tail, so that he looked both ragged and official. He pinned me on the ground. I sprawled at the feet of the gentleman, who held his little dog bundled in his arms now, the two of them quivering. Both were yapping wildly, but the gent was the louder of the two. “Thank God you came,” said he. “A moment later and he would have bashed my brains in.”
In a trice the constable had my hands behind my back and a rope around my wrists. Then he hauled me up and took me away, tugging with his rope as he pushed me ahead, so that I stumbled like a half-wit. The gentleman followed several paces behind, asking nervously, “Have you got a grip on him now?”
We went straight to a magistrate's court. Even then, in the dead of night, the old beak was up and about. Wrapped in a cloak of near-black wool, he sat with three old ladies and a thin man, in chairs drawn close to the tortoise stove. A little clerk with a runny nose was busy with scuttle and shovel, feeding the groaning stove lumps of coal.
They all looked up as the constable propelled me into the room. “Close the door!” they shouted together.
The thin man had his back toward me. He shifted in his chair, his arms and legs writhing like four long snakes. At his feet was a briefcase; he must have been a lawyer. “Oh, it's a boy,” he said.
“A thief,” said the constable. “He was accostin’ this nib-some gent.” He tipped his head toward the quivering gentleman, who had taken a post in the corner, holding his quivering dog.
The magistrate heaved himself from his chair. With a mighty sigh he climbed to his bench, sat again, sighed again, and said, “Bring him forward.”
With a twist on the rope, the constable hauled me to the bench. Above me, the magistrate peered down through little spectacles. He set them straight on his nose. “You've been here before,” he said.
“No, sir,” I told him.
“No?” He turned to his clerk. “Have we not seen this urchin before?”
The clerk sniffed and wiped his nose. “Many times, m'lud.”
“Indeed.” The magistrate opened a ledger. He took a quill from its ink pot and scratched on the pages. “Boy, why did you accost this gentleman?”
“I didn't, sirf I said. “I was only asking him for help.”
“Good Lord!” cried the gentleman, from the back. “He was asking with a cudgel.”
Round the stove, the women cackled. The thin whip of a lawyer rubbed his long fingers together.
“Wfeit did he steal from you, sir?” asked the magistrate.
“Nothing, exactly,” answered the gent.
“Well, vaguely, then,” said the magistrate, annoyed. “Did he take anything? Did he strike you?”
“No, your worship.”
The gentleman suddenly sounded miserable. But my spirits began to rise. I believed in the law and its truths, and saw that I would soon be free. The magistrate frowned. He closed the ledger and returned his quill to the pot All my troubles would have ended there and then if one of the old women hadn't leapt to her feet, shouting holy murder.
“Look at ‘im!” she cried. “By cracky, look at ‘im, will you.” Her arm came up; a bony finger pointed at my feet. “Those boots. Those is Arnold's boots!”
I looked stupidly at my feet, at the blind man's boots. I didn't see right away what it meant that I wore them.
“Yes, they's Arnold's.” White-haired and wrinkled, she was like a witch. Her voice seemed to set the lamplights flickering. “Ask ‘im this, your lordship. Ask the boy ‘ow ‘e come by the boots of a murdered man.”
The magistrate, the clerk, the lawyer, and the ladies all fixed me with the darkest looks. The ledger was opened again, the quill taken from the pot. “Where did you get those boots?” asked the magistrate.
“I was given them, sir,” I said.
“He's lying!” shouted the woman.
“I'm not” I snapped back. “A boy gave them to me. I know where they came from, sir. I know they belonged to a blind man, but /didn't kill him. He tried to kill me, and that's the truth. He nearly drowned me in the mud, and it was only my shoelaces that saved me. I spent my shoelace money on a Chelsea bun, and…”
I knew I made no sense. I could see it in the astonishment on the magistrate's face. Before he could speak I started again, blundering ahead.
“Please, sir, you have to believe me,” I told him. “It was another boy who was here before. The one you know, that's a different boy. He looked like me—he looked exactly like me, sir—but now he's dead, and people think I am him. The boys, the Daikey, they all think I'm him. That's why I've got the blind man's boots, sir, because Penny thinks I'm the Smasher. So that's why I went up to this gentleman, sir; to ask him to save me. I'm a schoolboy, sir; I've done nothing wrong. You do believe me, don't you, sir?”
I said all this in the most heartfelt way. There seemed no reason why the magistrate shouldn't believe me, and I was greatly pleased to see him smile.
“What a remarkable story,” said he. “Clerk, have we ever heard a betterone than this?”
“Never, m'lud,” said the clerk with a sniff.
The magistrate picked up his quill. The feather tipped and wriggled in his hand. “The prisoner will stand trial for murder,” he said.
“Oh, murder. Thank you, your lordship,” said the constable. I imagined he would earn a little more for bringing in a murderer than for a mere thief. He bobbed his head, then wrenched me away.
I called out to the lawyer as the rope pulled me backward “Help me. Please,” I said, stumbling toward the door. “I can pay you for it, sir. I've got a fortune, sir. I'm rich.”
He stared after me, Ms hands on the buckles of his briefcase. Then I passed the gentleman with the little black dog, and he put his head forward arid spat on my face.
That was nearly the end for me. With my hands bound, I couldn't reach up and wipe away the spittle. I felt it dribble down my cheek, and I very nearly cried.
I was driven to prison in a two-wheeled cart, with a guard who kept plucking lice from his hair, crunching each creature between his teeth. It wasn't that, nor the spittle, nor my own misery that made me ill. It was the violent rocking of the vehicle as it bore me through the darkened streets. I had never had a stomach for motion. At the age of six I had fallen from a slow-turning carousel, and a doctor had told my mother, “The boy has an imbalance in his ears.”
I thought it was a blessing when we finally stopped, until I saw the walls of Newgate Prison like a dismal fortress in the night.
More than once I had passed there with my father, and always with a shudder at the horrors that lay hidden behind those walls. I had heard the shrieks, the cries, the groans, and had always hurried along. But now the walls seemed twice as sheer and twice as high. I saw the iron door of crossed bars, and it looked as though it could open only once for me—to let me in, but never to let me out.
The gatekeeper shuffled out from his place with a lamp in his hand. “Ow, it's you again,” he said. “Welcome ‘ome, young master.”
His keys jangled as he turned the locks and drew the bolts. The door creaked. “In you go, my lad,” he said.
I passed between walls that were four feet thick. My name was entered into the prison book, a second door was opened, and a warder led me into the depths of Newgate. It rang with the clank of iron and the shrieks of the insane. But it was even worse in daylight, when the putrid fog oozed through windows and air shafts. In the exercise yard the convicts trudged round and round. A man walked the long treadmill, his back bent as he stumbled forever uphill.
In a ward full of boys I sat in a corner. They spent hours arranged in a circle, picking each other's pockets, applauding the quickest hands. None would talk to me, which suited me fine, yet they never stopped talking about me. “That's the Smasher,” said one.
“He went mad,” said another.
“He died,” said a fourth. “Them sisters tried to save him “
Toward the end of my third day, a turnkey arrived at the ward and called my name. “You have a visitor,” he said.
He took me to a vast chamber, as quiet as a crypt, where enormous arches soared to the ceiling. In a little room at the center of it all, a man sat behind walls of glass. His back was toward me, but I saw right away who it was. The thin head, the thinner neck, belonged to the lawyer from the magistrate's court.
His briefcase lay open on a polished table. He stood up as I entered, then waved me into a chair—grandly—as though the room were his private office. “Do you remember me?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“My name is Meel. Mr. Meel,” He sat again, bending into the chair like a folding ruler. “I have taken an interest in you, Tom, and Pd like to help.” He crossed his legs. “Will you tell me about yourself ?”
“Where should I begin?” I asked.
“Tell me who you are. Tell me where you live.”
He seemed surprised when I told him I was from Cam-den Town. But he was clearly shocked to learn how my father had been taken to debtor's prison.
“How can that be?” he said. “You told me that you owned a fortune”
“I do, sir,” I said. “I was getting to that.” - “Then hurry, my boy,” said Mr. Meel.
Off I went again, reliving the days in my mind. I walked through the fog toward London, down to the river where the blind man was. I saw the diamond in the mud, stooped, and picked it up again.
“Surely not as big as that,” said Mr. Meel, staring at my fingers as they curved around the imagined stone.