“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.
