“How many of each kind have ye known?” asked Power, smiling to reveal strong white teeth—not a boozer, then.
“More good than bad, and none indifferent.”
“And wives?”
“Two, according to my records.”
“And of records, Lieutenant Johnstone tells me, there are none!” Power clenched his fists in glee. “Can ye imagine that? The Home Office never got around to sending Phillip a list of us, so no one knows what our crimes are, nor how long we have to serve. I intend to take advantage of that, Morgan, the moment I reach Botany Bay.”
“The Home Office sounds as efficient as the Bristol Excise Office,” said Richard as they reached Power’s cot and he climbed into it without seeming to move at all. As graceful as Stephen Donovan, whose company Richard was missing now that they were below. A Miss Molly he might be, but he was well read and not a convict, so could talk of something other than prison.
Richard walked back to his own cot in a thoughtful mood. An interesting snippet, that no one in authority had any idea of the nature of convict offenses, the time each still had to serve. . . . It might work as Power confidently expected it would, but there was also the possibility that the Governor might make an arbitrary decision to the effect that all convicts were to serve fourteen years. No one would want hordes of convicts claiming to have served their time within six months or a year of arriving. Which thought told Richard why they had been searched in Portsmouth. It cost money to buy passage home on a ship; they all knew that a return fare was not a part of the Parliament’s plan. Someone in Phillip’s retinue was shrewd enough to guess that there might be quite a lot of men and women concealing a nest egg aimed at buying passage home. Ye should have done a Mr. Sykes, Major Ross! But that brutish ye’re not, for all ye must have known. I have read ye aright: a man with a code of honor, a fierce partisan and protector of your men, a Scotch pessimist, violent-tempered, salty-tongued, not hugely ambitious, and prone to seasickness.
On the 20th of May, while Alexander frisked into a strong swell and driving rain, the convicts were brought up on deck a few at a time to have their leg irons removed. The sick went up first, even including Ike Rogers, so bad that Surgeon Balmain had put him on a glass of potent Madeira wine twice a day.
When Richard’s turn came he emerged into a minor gale; it was impossible to see anything beyond the ship and a few yards of white-capped ocean, but the skies wept fresh, wholesome, genuine, honest-to-goodness water. Someone thrust him down onto the deck with his legs extended in front of him. Two marines sat on stools side by side; one slid a broad smith’s chisel under the fetter to pin the cuff to a sheet of iron and the other smashed his hammer down on its butt. The pain was excruciating because the force of the blow was transmitted to his leg, but Richard didn’t care. He lifted his face to the rain and let it cascade over his skin, his liberated spirit soaring into the grey tatters of cloud. One more excruciating pain as his other leg came free and there he was light-footed, light-headed, soaking wet, and utterly, blissfully, perfectly happy.
Someone, he had no idea who, gave him a hand to help him up. Dizzily he wavered on feathers to get himself out of the way and come to terms with the fact that he, who had been ironed for thirty-three months, was suddenly stripped of them.
Once back in the prison he began to shiver, took his clothes off, wrung the sweet clean water out of them into his dripstone, draped them across a line between the sea-water barrel and a beam, dried his body with a rag and donned a brand-new outfit. It was that kind of day, a milestone.
In the morning he looked at his friends and tried to see each of them as he saw himself. How did they feel? What did they think about the enormity of this great experiment in human lives? Had any of them realized that home was probably gone forever? Did they dream? Did they hope? And if they did, what did they dream about, hope for? But he couldn’t know because none of them knew. If he had voiced those questions, asked them outright, they would have answered in the way men always did: money, property, comfort, sex, a wife and family, a long life, no more troubles. Well, he hoped and dreamed of all those things himself, yet they were not what he yearned to know.
All of them looked at him with trust and affection, and that was somewhere to start, though nowhere to finish. Somehow each of them had to be made to see that his own fate was in his own hand, not in Richard Morgan’s. The head man on the larboard side was perhaps a father, but he could not be a mother.
They were now allowed on deck provided that the whole prison did not appear there at one time, and provided that they kept out of the crew’s way. Though John Power, fizzing with joy, was let work as a seaman, as were Willy Dring and Joe Robinson. However peculiar Richard found it, by no means every convict wanted to go above. Those still seasick he could understand—the Bay of Biscay had felled some unaffected until then—but now that they were free of their irons others were content to lie about in their cots or congregate in groups around a table to play cards. Of course it was still squalling and blustering, but Alexander was not a hefty slaver for nothing. It would take bigger seas than she was ploughing through at the moment to swamp her decks and elicit the order to batten down the hatches.
By the time that the command came from Lieutenant Johnstone that men might proceed on deck, the weather was clearing rapidly; they had been fed and watered with the inevitable hard bread, salt beef and horrible Portsmouth water. Six marine privates were delegated to tip buckets of salt water into the prison barrels, and stiff, proper Lieutenant Shairp stalked up and down the aisles commanding slack cots to clean their decks and platforms. Secure in the knowledge that Shairp would have no complaints about their area, nine of Richard’s eleven hauled themselves through the hatch with a wave for Ike and Joey Long.
A rush to the rail, there to look at the ocean for the first time. Its grey was suffusing with a steely blue and still bore many white-caps, but the horizon was visible and so were other ships, some to larboard, some to starboard, and two so far astern that they were hull down, only their masts showing. Close by was the other big slaver, Scarborough, a magical sight with her sails filled, pennants flying in some unknown sea code, her blunt bows biting at the swell, which ran on her starboard stern beam in communion with the wind. She had a larger superstructure than Alexander, which perhaps was why Zachariah Clark, the contractor’s agent, had elected to sail in her instead. The naval agent, Lieutenant John Shortland, was another had defected; he was in Fishburn the storeship, though one of his two sons was second mate in Alexander. The other was aboard Sirius. Nepotism reigned.
As at Tilbury, Richard’s six parted company the moment they smelled fresh air and a chance to be relatively alone. Richard hauled himself atop one of the two longboats tied upside down athwart the spare masts and counted ships. A brig about half the size of Alexander was at the head of the field, then came Scarborough and Alexander, after them the two-masted sloop Supply clinging to Sirius like a cub to its mother. Behind them was a ship he thought Lady Penrhyn, then the three storeships, and those two sets of masts on the horizon. Eleven vessels if none were out of sight.
“Good day to you, Richard Morgan from Bristol,” said Stephen Donovan. “How do your legs feel?”
Half of Richard wanted to be alone, but the other half was very glad to see Miss Molly Donovan, whom he read correctly enough to think was too intelligent not to know that his sexual inclinations were not shared. So he smiled and nodded with the correct degree of courtesy. “In regard to the sea or the irons?” he asked, liking the sensation of lifting and dropping.
