Morgan's Run Page 26

  “Oh, I think that will be possible,” said Connelly affably. “I take it we eat off what we sleep on?”

  “Aye. Put your tackle right here at this middle table, it has plenty of room for twelve this end. Mats ye sleep on are rolled up under it, and that is where ye’ll stow your tackle too. One mangy blanket each two men.” He giggled. “We are in the Yankey business of bundling here, not too private if ye’re of a mind to toss off. But we all got to toss off—bum fucking ain’t popular with the troops after a taste of Mr. Sykes. Upstairs they get women in on Sundays—call ’em their aunties, sisters or cousins. Don’t happen here because we are all too far from home and them as has got money prefer to spend it on Hanks’s sixpenny gins. Robber!”

  “How can ye help us hang on to our things, William?” asked Bill Whiting, suffering two kinds of pain: one from the escort’s bludgeon, the other from Mr. Sykes’s hand and fingers.

  “I do not work, ye see. They tried me in the vegetable patch, but I got eight brown fingers and two brown thumbs—even the turnips curled up their toes. So they gave me up as too old, too stunted and too hard to keep the darbies on.” He lifted one tiny foot and surreptitiously wriggled it in his fetter until the iron band sat across his instep. “Ye might say I am the caretaker of this establishment. I run a mop around it, swill out the night buckets, roll up the mats, fold up the blankets and keep the mad Irish at bay. Though our Irish, being Liverpudlians, are not too bad. But there are two on Justitia can only speak Erse—got snabbled the day they hopped off the boat from Dublin. No wonder they run mad. ’Tis hard this side of the Irish sea, and they are soft folk. Gulled in a twinkle, drunk on a dram.” He chuckled, sighed. “Ah, ’tis good to see some new West Country blood! Mikey! Here, Mikey!”

  A young man slouched up, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with the faintly furtive air West Country men recognized as belonging to a Cornish smuggler. “Nay, not Cornwall,” he said, reading their minds. “Dorset. Poole. Seaman in the customs division. Name, Dennison.”

  “Mikey helps me look after the place—cannot do it on my own. He-me are surplus, never manage to hook up in a six. Mikey has fits—real corkers! Goes black in the face, bites his tongue. Frightens the shit out of Miss Molly Sykes.” Stanley eyed the newcomers shrewdly. “Ye’re already two lots of six, ain’t ye?”

  “Aye, and that fellow who says not a word is our leader,” said Connelly, pointing to Richard. “Just will not own up to it. Bill Whiting and I have to do all the talking while he sits back, listens, and then makes the decisions. Very peaceful, very clever. I ain’t known him all that long, but if Sykes had done that before I met Richard, I would have gone at him—and for what? A sore head as well as a sore arse. And a flogging, eh?”

  “A bludgeoning, Will. Mr. Campbell do not hold with the cat, says it keeps too many men off work.” William Stanley from Seend half-shut his eyes. “ ’Tis you I come to terms with, Richard—what was the surname?”

  “Morgan.”

  “Welsh.”

  “Bristol born and bred for generations. Connelly has an Irish name, but he is a Bristolian too. Surnames do not mean much.”

  “Why,” asked Ike Rogers suddenly, having spent most of this exchange gazing about, “is this place painted red?”

  “ ’Twas the orlop on a second-rater,” said Mikey Dennison, the smuggler from Poole. “The thirty-two pounders lived in here and so did the surgeon’s hospital. Paint the place red and the blood ain’t visible. Sight of blood puts the gunners off terrible.”

  William Stanley from Seend pulled a huge turnip watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it. “Grub up in an hour,” he said. “Harry the fucken purser will dole out your trenchers and mugs. Today being Friday, ’tis burgoo. No meat, apart from what’s in the bread and cheese. Hear the racket overhead?” He poked his pipe at the ceiling. “They are grubbing in London now. We get whatever is left. There be more of them than us.”

  “What would happen if Mr. Hanks decided to put some Londoners in here?” asked Richard, curiosity stirred.

  Little William Stanley chuckled. “He’d not dare do that! If the Irish did not cut their throats in the darkmans—that is their flash lingo for night—the North Country would. Who loves London and Londoners? Tax the whole of England drier than a bog trotter at a Methodist meeting, then spend all of it in London and Portsmouth, London being where the Parliament, the Army and the East India Company are, and Portsmouth where the Navy is.”

  “Burgoo. If I remember my Mr. Sykes correctly, that means we drink aqua Thames,” said Richard, getting up with a dazzling smile. “My friends with dripstones, I think we should conduct a little ceremony. Since ye accused me of being the leader, Will, follow my lead.” He put his box on the table, unlocked it with the key he kept around his neck, and pulled a large rag out of it. Once it was draped across his cropped head he began to hum musically; Mr. Handel would have recognized the tune, but nobody on the Ceres orlop did. Bill Whiting forgot his injuries to don a rag, then Will, Neddy, Taffy, and Jimmy followed suit, though they left the music to Richard. Out came Richard’s dripstone; the hum became a long, rising and falling aaaah. He passed his hands across it, bent to touch his brow to it, then scooped it up and stalked to the pump, his five acolytes behind him in emulation. Taffy had picked up the melody and sang a high counter to Richard’s baritone, notes rather than words. By now only those in the throes of fever were not watching, transfixed; William Stanley’s eyes goggled.

  Luckily the pump produced a series of trickles rather than gushes; they fell into a copper kettle somone had punched a few holes in. Mr. Campbell’s filtration system did serve to confine an occasional horrible lump or tiddler fish, but was incapable of anything else. From there the water dribbled into the scuttles, and so escaped bilgeward.

  With a grand gesture Richard indicated to Jimmy Price that he was to work the pump handle, and held his dripstone to catch his three pints. The others followed, Bill Whiting bowing lavishly to Jimmy before filling his dripstone as well, while Richard’s fine voice swelled into a loud string of hallelujahs. Then off back to the table, where the six objects were set in its exact center amid many gesticulations. Richard banished his acolytes to two paces behind and spread his hands, wiggling his fingers.

  “King of Kings! Lord of Lords! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” he sang. “Hosannah! O Hippocrates, receive our supplications!” After a final reverential bow, he doffed his rag, folded it with a kiss and sat down. “Hippocrates!” he yelled, so suddenly that everyone jumped.

  “Christ! What was that all about?” asked Stanley.

  “The rites of purification,” said Richard solemnly.

  The horsey little man looked suddenly wary. “Is it a joke? Are ye gammoning me?”

  “Believe me, William Stanley from Seend, what all six of us are doing is no joke. We are placating Father Thames by invoking the great god Hippocrates.”

  “Is this going to happen every time ye drink water?”

  “Oh, no!” cried Bill Whiting, perfectly understanding the method in Richard’s madness. He was setting them apart, endowing them with special qualities, helping to preserve them and their property. How quick he was! All this out of Jimmy’s and Lizzie’s remarks about his turning filtration into a religion. Miss Molly Sykes would get to hear of it—William Stanley from Seend was a gossip, and had all day inside Ceres. “No,” he went on earnestly, “we conduct the rites of purification only on special occasions, like entering a new place of abode. It—it alerts Hippocrates.”

  “Mind you,” said Will Connelly, contributing his mite, “we use the stones every time we drink water, just not with the whole ceremony. That is for the first day of each month—and when we enter a new place of abode, of course.”

  “Is it witchcraft?” asked Mikey Dennison suspiciously.

  “Did ye smell brimstone and sulphur? Did the water turn to blood or soot?” Richard demanded aggressively. “Witchcraft is nonsense. We are serious.”

  “Oh, oh!” Stanley exclaimed,
brow clearing. “I forgot! Ye are mostly from Bristol, home to every Dissenter there is.”

  “Ike,” said Richard, getting up, “a word in your ear.” They moved a few paces away, every eye still on them. “Confirm our story, and next time we perform join in the chorus. If ye back us we will all keep our things—and our money. Where d’ye hide yours?”

  Rogers grinned. “In the heels of my riding boots. They look low on the outside, but inside—I am up on stilts. And yours?”

  “One side of every box has a thin inside lining. Those of us with coins can keep them there. They cannot rattle because of lint wadding. Will, Neddy and Bill have a few, I have more than a few, but the other boxes are empty, so if any of us acquire more money there is space for it. Yon William Stanley from Seend can be bought, but the question is, will he tell Sykes?”

  The highwayman considered this carefully, then shook his head. “I doubt it, Richard. If he sings, Miss Molly will get the lot. What we have to do is convince the jockey that we only have so much—Christ, I wish we had a regular visitor from London! If we did, we could explain our wealth that way. Ye’re right about the water—it is foul. My lads and I will have to drink small beer on burgoo days and I warrant yon William Stanley from Seend can get it for us.”

  Richard clapped his hand to his head. “Jem Thistlethwaite!” he exclaimed. “I think I can arrange for that visitor, Ike. Are ye of the opinion that Stanley runs an efficient postal service?”

  “I am of the opinion that he runs most things efficiently.”

  When Richard and his team were led on deck the next morning they understood why evacuation from the orlop had been a gradual business; Ceres had the use of a certain number of lighters, but not nearly enough, even with men jammed in, to ferry the convicts en masse to their places of work. Luckily no place of work was farther from Ceres than 500 yards, but they were water yards. The oarsmen plied their open boats with a will simply because this was better work by far than other kinds. Convicts from Censor, they were chained to the under side of the gunwales. Why do they not simply make a run for the shore and escape? Richard wondered, learning later that in days gone by they had escaped, only to be recaptured and sometimes hung.

  The chief advantage of “Campbell’s academies” (as the hulks were known to their inmates) lay in the fact that they floated; very few Englishmen could swim. That fact also kept a pressed crew on board a vessel once it sailed. Richard could not swim, nor could any of his eleven friends. Which endowed them with a horror of deep water.

  His belly was empty, though he had saved half his bread and cheese to eat when dawn came; the half-pint of oatmeal gruel flavored with the bitter herbs called simples he drank as soon as it had been issued to him, gone cold by then, but surely worse twelve hours later. At least Old Mother Hubbard had realized that men performing hard labor had to be fed sufficient to keep their strength up, but less than a day on Ceres had shown him that Mr. Duncan Campbell, more isolated from his superiors than Old Mother Hubbard was, cared not a rush about quality work.

  The convicts destined for shore duty had already gone when Richard’s lighter ferried its complement of four dredging teams slightly downriver of the ship and somewhat closer to the shore. His dredge was the first of the four, moored by chains on both sides of both ends. It was a true barge, absolutely flat-bottomed and rectangular in shape, its hull (it had neither bow nor stern) curving out of the water at each end to make it easy to run aground and climb on and off when unloading. Being new, its interior was empty, its paintwork unsullied.

  They stepped over the gunwale of the lighter onto a five-foot-wide plank platform which ran down one side of the barge only; no sooner was Jimmy Price, the last man, out of it than the lighter shoved off and headed for the next dredge some 50 yards away. After a wave for Ike and his youngsters, they turned to inspect the premises. One end of the barge was a simple shell, whereas the other had a broad deck on which stood a small wooden shack complete with iron chimney stack. Feeling the impact of men coming aboard, their keeper strolled out of his domain puffing away at a pipe of tobacco, a bludgeon in his other hand.

  “We do not,” said Richard instantly and courteously, “speak the flash lingo, sir. We are from the West Country.”

  “S’all right, cullies, that don’t worry me.” He inspected them. “Ye’re new to Ceres.” As no one volunteered to comment on this observation, he continued to converse with himself. “Ye’re not that young, but ye’re real strong-looking. Might get a few tons of ballast out o’ ye before ye weaken. Any of ye dredgemen?”

  “No, sir,” said Richard.

  “Thought not. Any of ye swim?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Best not lie to me, cullies.”

  “No lies, sir. We do not come from swimming parts.”

  “What about I throw one of ye in to find out, eh?” He made a sudden move at Jimmy, who squealed in terror, then on each of the others in the row, watching their eyes. “I believe ye,” he said then, returned to his shack, disappeared inside and emerged with a chair, upon which he sat himself, one shin resting on the other leg’s knee, pipe blowing a delectable cloud their way. “Me name is Zachariah Partridge and ye call me Mister Partridge. I am a Methodist, hence the name, and I have been a dredger since me youth in Skegness on the Wash, which is why I do not care for flash lingo. In fact, I asked Mr. Campbell to make sure I did not get no Londoners. Wanted some Lincoln men, but West Country ain’t bad. Any of ye from Bristol or Plymouth?”

  “Three from Bristol, Mr. Partridge. I am Richard Morgan, the other two Bristolians are Will Connelly and Neddy Perrott.” He pointed each man out. “Taffy Edmunds is from coastal Wales, Bill Whiting and Jimmy Price are from Gloucester.”

  “Then ye know a bit about the sea.” He leaned back in his chair. “This here establishment aims at deepening the channel by dredging out the mud on the bottom with that”—he waved his hand at what looked like a giant, gape-mouthed purse—“bucket. It runs around a chain—there at your feet now, but waist level when bucket is in—which can be shortened or lengthened according to the depth of the water. Adjusted just right for this here spot, did it meself.”

  Clearly enjoying giving this oration (though there seemed to be no malice in him), Mr. Zachariah Partridge spoke on. “Ye might well wonder why this spot? Because, cullies—that be a word I have picked up local-like—the Royal Arsenal over there supplies the entire army with ordnance, yet there ain’t a tenth enough wharfage for the ordnance tenders. Your colleagues in crime on shore are building the new wharves by filling in the marshes around the Warren. And we dredgemen give them their ballast, which of course they have to mix with rock, gravel and lime, else it would all wind up back in river.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Partridge, for explaining,” said Richard.

  “Most folk never do, do they?” He waved at the huge purse again. “That there bucket goes in water at my end and comes up where the davit is down far end. If ye do the job right, it will hold fifty pounds of mud and muck—terrible, some of the things what come up! This here barge holds twenty-seven tons of ballast, as we dredgemen refer to it. That means ye will have to dredge up one thousand, one hundred buckets of ballast to fill it. This being winter, ye’ll work six hours—they waste two hours getting ye here and back again. A good day’s work will give me twenty buckets, which is half a ton. Subtracting”he is literate and numerate, thought Richard“Sundays and allowing for another day a week for foul weather, especially this time of year, ye should fill this here establishment with ballast in about ten weeks. When it is full it is towed to the Warren, where ye’ll shovel it out before it is towed to a new spot and ye start again.”

  He loves facts and figures; he is a disciple of John Wesley; he is not from London; and he enjoys what he does—particularly because he does not have to lift a finger. How then do we burrow our way into his affections, or, failing that, gain his approval? Is the degree of labor he expects from us feasible? If it is not, then we will suffer in some subtle We
sleyan way. No brute, he.

  “Are we allowed to speak to you, Mr. Partridge? For instance, may we ask questions?”

  “Give me what I want, Morgan, and ye’ll have no trouble from me. By that I do not mean that I will pamper ye, and if I want, I can break your arm with this here club. But I do not want to, for one good reason. I aim to stand real high in Mr. Campbell’s estimation, and to do that I need to produce ballast. I have been put in charge of this here brand-new establishment because my dredge has always produced the most ballast. You help me, and I might be willing to help you,” said Mr. Partridge, getting up. “I will now proceed, cullies, to tell ye what to do and how to do it.”

  The bucket was a thick leather bag about three feet long, with a round maw of iron a little over two feet in diameter. Fused to the iron on its underside was a steel extension shaped like an oval spoon, shallow and sharp-edged. A chain was attached to either side of the iron ring and joined in a Y to the single chain which ran, uninterrupted, in a circuit from one end of the barge to the other with sufficient slack to put the bucket on the river bottom. The chain went around a winch which dropped the bag into the water at Mr. Partridge’s end; it sank under its own weight, its leather butt tethered to a rope manipulated from the barge. A geared and pulleyed davit at the other end dragged the iron maw and its steel spoon along the bottom gathering in mud. When the bucket reached the end of the run the davit exerted a vertical pull; up it came, dripping, was swung inboard by turning the davit and hung over the ballast compartment. Then, working the rope on its butt, the bag was upended and vomited its contents. It came down, empty, ran along its chain to the winch, and went over the side again for its next meal of Thames mud.

  Getting used to the job took a full week, during which Mr. Partridge did not see anything like his expected half-ton a day. He was calculating upon one bucket every twenty minutes, whereas the new team took an hour. But Mr. Partridge said and did nothing, simply sat on his chair and sucked at his pipe, a mug of rum at his feet and all the activity of the great river to occupy his attention when he was not staring contemplatively at his toiling team. A dinghy was attached to the barge by a painter, which may have meant that he rowed himself ashore at the end of the day, though he seemed to spend at least some nights on board, for he bought wood for his stove and food for his larder from two of the hordes of bum boats which plied their wares around the river; his rum and his ale came from a third.