“The sea is no grief, that is evident. Irons.”
“Ye would have to have worn them for three-and-thirty months to understand how I feel without them, Mr. Donovan.”
“Three-and-thirty months! What did you do, Richard?”
“I was found guilty of extorting five hundred pounds.”
“How long did ye get?”
“Seven years.”
Donovan frowned. “That makes little sense to me. By rights ye should have hanged. Were you reprieved?”
“No. My original sentence was seven years’ transportation.”
“It sounds as if the jury was not very sure.”
“The judge was. He refused to recommend mercy.”
“Ye do not look resentful.”
Richard shrugged. “Why should I be resentful? The fault was my own, nobody else’s.”
“How did ye spend the five hundred pounds?”
“I did not try to cash the note of hand, so I spent naught.”
“I knew ye were an interesting man!”
Disliking the memories this conversation provoked, Richard changed the subject. “Tell me which ship is which, Mr. Donovan.”
“Scarborough keeping pace with us, Friendship in the lead—a snappy little sailer, that one! She will show the rest a clean pair of heels all the way.”
“Why exactly? I am not a seafaring Bristolian.”
“Because she is—shipshape. Her steering sails provide just the right proportionate area for holding in a zephyr or a gale.” He stretched out a long arm to point at Supply. “Yon sloop is rigged brig-fashion, which don’t suit her one wee bit. Since she has a second mast, Harry Ball would have done better to rig her as a snow. She’s a slug as soon as the seas turn heavy because she’s so low in the water and she cannot crowd on enough sail. Supply is a light-wind sailer, at home in the Channel, where she has had her career. Harry Ball must be praying for good weather.”
“Is that Lady Penrhyn behind the Royal Navy pair?”
“No. Prince of Wales, the additional transport. Then Golden Grove, Fishburn and Borrowdale. The two snails in the rear are Lady Penrhyn and Charlotte. Were it not for them we would be farther along, but the Commodore’s orders are specific. No ship is to be out of sight of the rest. So Friendship cannot set her topgallants and we cannot set our royals. Ah, ’tis good to be at sea again!” The brilliant blue eyes spotted Lieutenant John Johnstone emerging from the gentleman’s domain of the quarterdeck; Stephen Donovan leaped down with a laugh. “There is naught more certain, Richard, than that I will see ye some day soon.” And off he went to join the marine commanding officer, with whom he seemed on excellent terms.
Two of a kind? Richard wondered, not moving from his perch. His belly rumbled; in all this wondrous air he needed more food, but more food he was not going to get. An underweight pound of hard bread and more like half than three-quarters of a pound of salt beef a day, plus two quarts of Portsmouth water. Not nearly enough. Oh, for the days of the Thames bum boats and a good lunch!
All the convicts save the seasick or ill were conscious of perpetual, griping hunger. While he and the others from the larboard cots toward the stern were on deck, some of the starboard lazybones opposite them had manufactured a jimmy out of an iron bolt on the mainmast and levered up the hold hatches dotted at intervals along the aisles. They found no rum; they found a cache of bread sacks. But there was always a snitch somewhere. The next moment a dozen marines were piling down the after hatch to snabble the thieves as they feasted and threw the rock-hard little loaves blithely to any imploring hands or voices.
Six men were hauled onto the deck, there to face Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp.
“Twenty lashes and back into irons,” said Johnstone tersely. He nodded to Corporal Sampson, who had appeared out of the after hatch house with his cat. Not, as Mr. Thistlethwaite had once put it, a four-legged creature that said meow. An instrument with a thick handle of rope coiled around a central core and nine thin hempen strings knotted at intervals and ending in a bead of something lead-colored.
Richard’s first impulse was to bolt back into the prison, only to find that everybody was being driven on deck to witness the floggings.
The six men were stripped to the waist—twenty lashes were not considered sufficient to bare buttocks as well—and the first victim was tied over the curving roof of the after hatch house. The thing whistled, and it did not require much effort in the plying. A whip, a cane or a cudgel raised welts and a bludgeon one massive bruise; this vile implement broke the skin with its first stroke, and where the very small bulb of lead at the end of each of its nine tails struck the body, a great scarlet lump arose in the same instant. Corporal Sampson knew his job; the marines were flogged too, usually to the tune of twelve lashes but sometimes many more. Each stroke landed in a slightly different place, so that by the twentieth the man’s back was a grid of bloodied stripes and lumps the size of a baby’s fist. The victim got a bucket of salt water on the mess which set him to screaming thinly, then his place was taken by the next. While Corporal Sampson ploughed indifferently—he did not appear either to love or hate what he did—through the six, those he had finished with were fitted with locked fetters and a Ceres length of chain. No one sent them below; Lieutenant Johnstone simply nodded dismissal to his flogger and the dozen green-hued privates.
Richard’s gorge rose. He jumped off the longboat and walked quickly to the rail, leaned over it and retched. But as he was too hungry to have anything to bring up, he contented himself with staring down into the water a scant ten feet below him. Water, he noticed as his eyes focused, so pure that the translucent jellyfish everywhere in it were like delicate ghosts, umbrellaed in sheerest silk, with long trails of lustrous frilly tentacles abandoned to the tug of ship and current.
Something went “Whoof!” so suddenly that he jumped; a long, sleek, iridescent body shot past and rose clear of the sea’s surface in an arc of absolute freedom, total joy. A dolphin? A porpoise? There were others frolicking, a great band of them playing chasings with dirty, decrepit Alexander.
The tears poured down his face, but he made no attempt to wipe them away. All of this was a part of this. The beauty of God and the ugliness of Man. What place could Man have in such a gorgeous universe?
The floggings sobered everyone as Alexander continued on her way south toward the Canaries, which was just as well; John Power had learned from his friend Mr. Bones that a convict he knew slightly, Nicholas Greenwell, had been pardoned the day before the fleet left Portsmouth and was smuggled off in secret. Lieutenant Shairp had remembered the discontent following the pardon of James Bartlett while Alexander had lain off Tilbury.
“I never noticed the fucken bastard was missing at first, then I assumed he’d died,” Power said to Richard and Mr. Donovan up on deck where the wind blew their words away. “Bastard! Oh, bitch! I should have been pardoned, not Greenwell!”
Power constantly maintained that he was innocent, that it had not been he who was with Charles Young (of whose present whereabouts he knew nothing) when a quarter-ton of rare wood belonging to the East India Company was spirited off a London wharf in a boat. The watchman had recognized Young, but would not swear that Power was the second man. As usual, the jury hedged its bets by returning a verdict of guilty; best be on the safe side in case the second man had been Power, even if the watchman was not sure. The judge, concurring, handed down seven years’ transportation.
“It should have been me!” Power cried, his dark face twisted in pain. “Greenwell was a robber, pure and simple! But I ain’t got his connections, just a sick dad I am not there to look after! Bitch, bugger, fuck ’em all!”
