The Convicts

by Iain Lawrence

  At the mouth of the hatch, he came at me. With a cry and a leap he was there. Suddenly I was falling to the deck and he was on top of me, his fist in my hair. From his clothing he pulled a piece of glass that was long and thin like a dagger's blade. He raised it up and drove it down toward my throat.

  I wasn't strong enough to throw him off me. I wriggled sideways and jerked my neck, and Weedle missed by less than an inch. The glass dug into the deck. I heard its tip crunch and crackle, a little grunt from Weedle as his hand slipped along its edge. When he held it up again there was blood dripping from his palm, streaming down the glass. His scar twisted across his face. “Cut me?” he said. “I'll cut your throat.” And again he stabbed that thing toward me.

  I moved the other way; I turned my head. With a fizz of a sound, the glass sizzled through my hair. It broke against the deck and went skittering in little pieces across the wood. I felt Weedle's breath as he snarled and swore. At last the guards hauled him off, and down to the black hole went Weedle. There was no question how he had found that piece of glass. It could only have come from the guard's broken lantern. Straight to the hole he was taken.

  I shouted after him, the worst thing I could think of just then. “You snow smugger!” I cried, and poor Midge turned as white as a pile of salt.

  “Oh, no, Tom,” he said. “You shouldn't have said that. He'll know I told you.”

  “It doesn't matter anymore,” I said. “He's finished.”

  “You don't know him, Tom. You don't know him at all.”

  Well, I thought I did, and I felt free just then. But still I couldn't eat my supper, not with the ship all ashiver in waves that boomed at the hull. Spray from the river flew in through the grates, and the wind was an endless screech. I sat feeling dry as dust in my innards, but with sweat pouring on my skin. The low ceiling pressed toward me.

  Midgely said, “Think of Nelson, Tom. He was seasick all the time.”

  “Anchored in a river?” I asked.

  He almost giggled. “Maybe not all the time.”

  Toward the end of the day, in our last hour of sewing, there was a sort of thump, then a rattle in the timbers. Midgely looked up. “Feel that, Tom?” he said. “She touched.”

  My mouth was too dry to speak.

  “The wind's driving her toward the bank,” whispered Midge. “If it's like this in the springs, she'll nearly be ashore.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Maybe a week,” said Midge. “Not more than ten days.”

  “And how long will Weedle be in the hole?”

  He shrugged. “No one's never been there more than a week.”

  Our time was short. But that night I couldn't possibly shift -myselffrom my hammock. I held on as it swayed back and forth, nearly wishing for death to find me. Nothing could be worse than the seasickness. “Is there no way to stop this?” I asked.

  “Nelson said you should sit under a tree,” said Midge. He laughed at the cleverness of his stupid hero. “It goes away, Tom. You just have to wait.”

  It was the storm that went away. It passed with the dawn, and left the seagulls whirling in great squawking pinwheels of white. The wind fell away. The waves settled down, and my stomach settled with them, and that night we set to work with a will.

  As Midge tunneled in the chapel, I took the guard's broken cane and carefully split each piece down the middle. I scraped them hollow with a shard of his lantern glass, then rejoined the halves. I bound them round and round with strands from my rope belt. I sealed them with tar that I scraped from the hull. When I put one end in my mouth and raised the other, Midgely grinned to see what I'd made. “We can breathe through those,” he said. “Oooh, that's lummy, Tom.”

  The days passed quickly. Storm followed storm, but each one sickened me a little less. My mind wandered easily from the workroom as I imagined myself back in London, finding my father and setting him free, unearthing my diamond and spending its riches. I regretted more than ever that Midge would be left behind, and I was pleased that he never guessed it.

  We still took out his books and traveled to his islands. All around us, boys played their games of pitch-button and French and English—that battle fought on pickaback—as we met the black-skinned natives in their villages of huts. The ship was a better place without Walter Weedle.

  We sometimes heard him at night. The black hole was below us, and not far away, and we heard him at first shouting and cursing and hammering at the wood. As the days went by he began to wail, then howl like a hound. Sometimes, in the quiet of the night's middle passage, as the ship slept and I worked, I heard his voice shouting my name from the depths of his hole. “I know where you are! I'll kill you, Tom Tin.”

  There were boys who delighted in Weedle's being gone. Even some of his little gang seemed pleased, for they had no one to rob them of their meals. But much to my surprise, Oten Acres found no relief. The big farm boy kept wilting, shriveling, until he could barely turn himself from his hammock. He never ate, and I didn't believe he ever slept. If someone addressed him, he didn't answer. He stared into nothing with eyes so vacant that I sometimes doubted he even knew where he was. I saw him one morning wandering on the deck, his irons dragging as he plodded in the line. He was so hunched, so bent and broken, that the rain fell on his back, barely wetting his shoulders. It was as though he had resigned himself to death, and was only waiting for it to come.

  It was Weedle's fourth night in the hole when we reached the planks behind the frames. It was the night the moon came full, though clouds kept it hidden. The wind was high, the river wild, and we could hear Weedle howling below us. I felt the hulk swing toward the marshes. With a shudder and a bang, it settled heavily into the mud, then leaned slowly on its side. At breakfast we had to hold on to our bowls to save them from sliding off the table. Everywhere we walked we seemed to go at a slant, until, halfway through the morning—and with the most unearthly groans—the ship finally picked itself up from the bottom.

  It did it again the next night, when Midge and I were in the chapel. Midge said the tides must be at their lowest, and that if we didn't escape within the next two nights, it would be half a year before they were again so much in our favor.

  “Then we'd better hurry,” I said.

  “Or maybe not,” said Midge. “I was thinking, Tom. Maybe we should sit it out.”

  It was just like him to suggest such a thing. We were near the end of our night's work, collecting the shavings and splinters of wood. The winter nights had become so long we were doing even that in darkness.

  “We have to try,” I said.

  “But what if we can't get out?” asked Midge. “What if we makfc just one little hole all the way through?”

  I saw what he meant. A hole too small would be worse than none. It would be discovered, our work ruined.

  “The planks are rotten,” I said. The wood we had taken away was black and spongy, reeking of rot. “We must be nearly through.”

  “But maybe not,” said Midge. “You can't tell in the dark. I wish I could see them, Tom.”

  “All right,” I said. “I'll let you see.”

  I took him to clean the chapel that morning. I loosened the frames and the panel. But the old chaplain, with the worst of luck, chose that day to come back to the chapel from wherever it was he went. If he had waited another moment, he would have found us with the panel open. But he had no idea what I was doing.

  He sniffed, his nose wrinkling. “It smells musty in here, Tom,” he said. It was the rot he was smelling. “I wish there were a window; I wish there were an opening somewhere.”

  He turned away, hemming and hawing, looking all around the chapel. Tilting his head back, he looked up to the height of the altar. Then he scratched his white hair. “Tom?”

  “Yes, sir?” I said.

  “Do you notice something strange about our Lord?”

  My heart fell. I went to his side and stared up at the wooden man.

  “His ankles,” said the chaplai
n. He was squinting like a mole, his front teeth showing. “Am I not seeing properly? Has our spike fallen out?”

  “I don't think it has fallen out, Father,” I said.

  “Hmmm. Curious!” said he. “The shadows, perhaps.”

  He seemed satisfied with that, but not wholly. He bent forward and walked stooped around the room, peering under benches. I had to leave the panel as it was, very slightly ajar, until morning prayers came round, and the chapel filled with boys. The ship was resting partly on the riverbed. Its angle held the panel in place, and leaned the boys together as they sat along the benches. I was in my place, with Midge beside me and the clanking line of convicts passing, when suddenly one boy keeled over. Wan and sickly, he teetered on his heels for a moment, put his hand to his brow, and crashed to the floor. There he lay, twitching and shaking, with his eyes rolled up, his tongue a red bulge.

  All the boys stood up to gawk, A pair of guards came bashing through them. And I grabbed Midgely by the shoulder.

  I hauled him close and cracked the panel open. “Quick!” I said. “Take a took, but quick.”

  It took him only an instant. He reached inside, then fell to his place next to me, and I could tell by his face that the news wasn't good.- “Tom, we're not halfway,” he said. “It's another three or four nights.”

  I reached into the hole. The earthy smell came out, that sweetly pungent odor.

  Right in front of me, Oten Acres stood up. He was round-shouldered now, and bony. He stood as all the others sat, turning around with his big, plow-hardened hands spread open. “Fields!” he said, in a terrible moan of longing. “I smell the fields.”

  His eyes were hollow, his cheeks sunken. He turned full around and gazed at the open panel.

  “The earth,” he moaned. “The fields.”

  I pulled Midge aside and jammed the panel shut. But I wasn't quick enough that Gten didn't see the hole behind it. He was clambering over the bench, and already three guards were pushing towaM him. The little boy lay twitching on the deck j but it was Oten Acres everyone was after.

  “The fields” he said again, in that haunted voice. “Let me see the fields.”

  The guards knocked him down. Oten put up his hands to shield himself, but the guards battered him down to his knees. We heard their grunted breaths, and Oten's cries, and the wooden Jesus stared down upon us all.

  I thought the beating would be the farm boy's death. He slumped on his bench all through the service, sinking lower and lower, as though settling into his grave. But as we filed from the chapel, he came to his feet like a bull, pushing toward me. He grabbed my arm with more strength than I had ever had. “Help me, Tom,” he said.

  There was no pulling my arm from his grasp, no pushing him away. I couldn't even pry his fingers loose.

  “I know,” he said, his eyes like a madman's. “If you don't take me with you, I'll turn you in.”

  I had no choice. That night, for the first time, three of us went to the chapel. I was terrified that Oten would spend the time as he spent all his time, rocking and moaning until a guard came round to find us. But as soon as the panel was opened and he smelled the rot again, he went to work with such a fever that I wished I had brought him the first night.

  He dug with his hands, with his fingers, clawing at the wood, then slashing at the hull with the spike. Big pieces of planks fell away. Damp and riddled with holes, they felt like the honeycombs of giant bees.

  Midge had a look. “Shipworms, Tom,” he said. “That's what it is.” They had eaten tunnels through the planks. They'd gone back and forth through the wood, lining their holes with thin, brittle shells. “It might be like this all the way through,” he said.

  I was so happy that I hugged him. But he only pulled away. “Don't you see?” he said. “The worms live in the water, Tom. They swim around until they find a ship, then dig themselves into the planks.”

  “What does it matter where they live?” I said. “I just…” Then I understood. “We're digging underwater.”

  Midgely sighed.

  “When we break through, the river will come pouring in on top of us.”

  “Maybe, Tom. Maybe not.” He shrugged. “The ship's higher in the water now, ‘cause she ain't got all her guns and spars and all. But is she high enough? I don't know.”

  There was no doubt that the wetness in the wood came from the river. But we wouldn't know if the surface was above us or below us until the moment we broke through the hull. And that moment, I decided, would come the very next night.

  I went to breakfast feeling hopeful—perhaps more hopeful than I should have. With three of us at work, we could dig through the worm-eaten planks in an hour. If all went well, this would be my last breakfast on the ship.

  The decks were at a slant, the gray burgoo at a slant in the bowls. A little rush of my old discomfort came over me, until I saw Weedle sitting at the table, just returned from the black hole. He was like his own ghost, so thin and pale he was. Yet anger oozed from his every pore, and his eyes never left me. There was only one thing that could possibly make him hate me any more than he already did. And that one thing happened right then.

  My back was toward the door when the guards arrived, bringing new boys. Weedle was the first to look up. Then others did, and all did. Mouths hung open, eyes stared, and I turned around in my place.

  At the foot of the ladder, twisted and strange in the shadows, stood Benjamin Penny. On his awful, lopsided face was a look of fear. Then he saw me and cried one word. “Smashy!”

  It was as though he led the guard to my side. Hunched and scuttling, he came like a dog on a leash to squirm up against me. His webbed fingers closed on my arm. “Smashy,” he said again. “Ain't it a quiz, we fix up together?”

  It was more than a quiz. It was a dreadful bit of luck for me. Weedle's hands were in fists, his eyes blazing hatred. “So it is you,” he snarled. “You'll come a croaker now, you lying nosey, you toad.”

  His quiet fury stunned the boys. From Oten right around the table they sat still as wooden dolls. Midgely, on my right, seemed bewildered and betrayed. He kept looking past me at Benjamin Penny.

  Penny piped up. “If I was you, Walter Weedle, I'd watch my tongue.” He nudged me. “Tell Mm, Smashy. You'll finish what you started. Cut his mug clean in two.”

  Midgely tagged my arm. “Who's that?” he whispered. “What's he saying, Tom?”

  “Oh shut up, Midge,” I said. I knew what would happen next, but nothing! could do would stop it

  The boys, one by one, gave their share to Weedle. If they believed he was only a snow smugger, it made no difference. Perhaps they thought it was only an insult I'd shouted at him. Without a doubt, Weedle was still the king of his kingdom, and the others paid their share. Oten did, and Midgely did, and Carrots and the rest. Then my turn came around. “Pay up,” said Weedle.

  Penny laughed. “Pay you He ain't giving you noffink!”He grinned a frightful grin that vanished as I passed along my bowl. “What's they done to you?” he asked. “You was never cowed and womble-cropped.”

  It was his turn next. The smallest at the table, a twisted cripple of a boy, he alone stood up to Weedle. “Go hang yourself,” he said. “You thick-wit.”

  Every boy drew his breath. But Benjamin Penny just picked up his spoon and began to eat. The sounds that came from him were the snuffles and grunts of a piggery, He was loathesome but brave. He spared not a glance for Weedle.

  Penny stayed by my side every minute. All through the morning he was there, wedging himself between Midgely and me. “Shove off!” he told Midge. “Want aiiosebender?”

  I felt so sorry for Midgely. He never said a word, but always moved aside when Penny came snuffling and slouching between us. He looked sad, and my heart went out to him. I made certain that I was beside him at the noontime meal, and when Penny tried to worm in, I told him, “Go away!”

  “But, Smashy,” cried Penny.

  “Are you stupid?” I said. “Can't you see I'm not him? I
never was.”

  “You've forgot. It was that crack on the head, Smashy.” He clawed at my clothes. “Look here. I'll show you.”

  I pushed him aside. I nearly sent him flying backward from the bench, but up he got again. Weedle watched it all with his scar twitching. He was fit to kill, but Jwhat did it matter? That night I would be rid of him forever.

  The ship's bell tolled the half hours, through the longest day I'd spent on the hulk. When it rang us up from our work, the wind was rising again, the rain beating on the deck. I threw down my pieces of cloth, the last bits of wretched cloth that I would ever have to see. I rose from the bench.

  But a guard pushed me back. His cane smacked across my shoulders, and I gasped at the shock.

  There was a needle missing from our table. With the benches full of thieves and pickpockets, it could have been taken by anyone at all. I hoped it was Midgely, but he only looked at me with a frown and a shrug. Then the cane battered one of us, and then another, each of us in turn. Oten Acres folded up and wept, and Penny shrieked each time the cane whacked his twisted bones. All of us were marked for punishment in the morning.

  The thought that I would be gone by then gave me a calmness that seemed to puzzle Weedle as much as it pleased Benjamin Penny, who must have seen a glimpse of his old Smasher. A glimpse, though, was all it was. When he saw me get up and follow the noseys to chapel, he gasped.

  “You? To chapel?” he asked. “Who is it what ruined you, Smashy?”

  For the first time, Midgely asked to go with me. He pulled at my sleeves, and he wept when I pushed him away. “Please take me, Tom,” he begged.

  It was tod much for me. “Shut up,” I told him. “You're a pest, Midgely. I don't even like you sometimes.”

  I went alone. I knelt beside my closed panel, intending to pray with everyone else. But my thoughts strayed to London, to the lonely churchyard where my diamond lay, mid then to Mr. Goodfeliow, I imagined die look on his face when I met him again.