SV - 05 - Sergeant Verity and the Swell Mob. (11 page)

The sun was at its zenith, turning the sea to molten
silver.

'Ten
thousand,' said Meiklejohn presently. 'Ten thousand on the open market, Bunker
said. That's your Shah Jehan clasp.'

Verity shook his head.

'No,
Mr Meiklejohn. I don't see it. Three villains has gone to their reward. And
there's a lot that never came to light. There's a 'ell of a sight more to this
than ten thousand. More than a heathen clasp that the stoopidest magsman in
Seven Dials would look at and run.'

'My
eyes is hurting,' said Meiklejohn plaintively. 'Looking sideways into that
square all the time! I'll have a bloody squint like two gobstoppers by the time
this lot's over.'

'It ain't just for ten thousand,' said Verity,
ignoring the complaint.

Meiklejohn lowered his voice to a growl of
exasperation.

'How can a jool be
worth more than a jool is worth?'

Verity
settled his burly shoulders. Under the tall stovepipe hat his eyes were set,
his red face round and belligerent. He puffed his black moustaches up, as if to
dislodge an insect which might have landed upon them.

'I
dunno, Mr Meiklejohn,' he said fiercely. 'I dunno why I been seen off, nor how
a jool can be worth more than it is. But I bleeding well mean to find out!'

TICKET OF LEAVE

7

Pale daylight
began to penetrate the barred portholes of the
Indomitable's
lower deck, where Stunning Joe
lay motionless and watchful in his coarse brown hammock. He knew by the
gurgling of water round the wooden hull that the tide had turned and was now on
the ebb. Two more days, he thought, and the contractor's vessel would take on
board its human cargo for Port Jackson. Then, even the familiar sounds of
Portland Harbour would be lost for ever.

The
convict decks of the
Indomitable
were each divided into two
long prison dormitories running fore and aft. They were railed off by iron bars
from floor to ceiling, like animal-cages, with a narrow gangway between in
which the warders kept their vigil. A hundred men slept in each cage, the line
of hammocks packed so closely that there was no space between them. In the
misty light some of the sleepers had already begun to stir, groaning, coughing
and yawning.

Stunning
Joe could just make out the figure of the warder in his narrow corridor, lit by
a glimmer of little lanterns fastened in a row to the bars of the two cages.
The oil-light caught the polished buttons of the dark uniform, the crowns
stitched upon the lapels, the glazed peak of the officer's cap. The warder had
put down his bull's-eye lantern and was splashing the deck around him with
chloride of lime from a tin bucket. Joe O'Meara caught the harsh acrid smell in
his nostrils. If statistics were to be believed, the third-class felons on the
lower deck would die at the rate of forty a year from what was called 'general
infirmity'. It was rare for a warder to catch the prisoners' contagion but the
officers of the night-watch took no chances.

Somewhere
overhead a deep-toned bell was struck three times. On each of the fetid decks
the warders took the bright bunches of keys which hung at their belts and drew
them jangling along the iron bars.

'All up! Turn out! Move yourselves!'

Following
his neighbours' example, Stunning Joe slid down from his hammock and began to
dress in the convict's uniform, rusty brown with red stripes in a hoop-pattern.
There was nothing to be gained by defying authority. Soapy Samuel had preached
obedience and dying to be born again. Joe dismissed the promises of Samuel, but
they were the only hope offered to him since he had come face to face with the
officers of the law at Wannock Hundred.

Between
two lines of warders the third-class convicts shuffled up the companionway to
the top deck. Each man carried his hammock, now rolled and trussed like a large
sausage. The upper deck of the old wooden ship had been built over with square
huts, the so-called 'hammock-houses' where the prisoner's bedding was stored
during the day. The masts of the
Indomitable
were cut down to a height of a
dozen feet. The stumps had been left as clothes-props between which the lines
of washed linen and bedding were hung to dry. The garments suspended there
looked as if they had been sprinkled with pepper but this was merely the
infestation of lice and fleas which prison laundering never removed.

Standing
in the single file of men, waiting to hand in the bundled hammock upon which
his number and the ship's name had been stitched, Joe looked about him. The dark
ferret-eyes measured the distance to the ship's rail and the expanse of water,
beyond which the Dorset coast grew yellow in the early sun. Warders with
carbines and short bayonet-blades attached to the barrels stood between the felons
and the ship's side. He would be dead before he could cross the deck.

With his hammock
stacked in its place, he followed the shuffling prisoners down the steps again,
to the lowest and dampest level of the old wooden ship. The first men were
already scrubbing the floor of the cage and arranging canvas cloths on the
white deal tables which now stood where the hammocks had been slung. Each table
accommodated a dozen men, sitting on benches at either side. An inverted bowl
of brick tin, polished like silver, was set at every place, a matching basin at
the table's end. 'Stand! Stand at your places!'

The
warder's hoarse shout was followed by the obligatory grace, uttered in the same
military shriek.

'Bless this food to our use and us to Thy service!
A-men!'

The
benches scraped as the men moved them to sit down and eat, under strict rule of
silence. Prisoners deputed as messmen doled out a single hunk of bread from the
laundry baskets and a ladle of rust-coloured cocoa from the tin pails. This
portion twice a day, plus a ladle of boiled meat at noon made up the diet of
the hulks. In the first few weeks Joe had endured a hunger that was like
torture to him. Now he felt only the numbness in his belly which followed the
keen torment of his initiation.

Five
minutes later the duty warder's voice came again, in a shrill yap.

'All
up! Stand at your places! Will you stand when I order you!'

Then
came the muster, each felon saluting like a soldier and shouting 'Yes sir!' as
his name was called. Stunning Joe wondered how Sealskin Kite and Old Mole could
ever have believed that they would spring him from such a crib as this.

After
the muster each cage was unlocked in turn. Under an escort of warders the men
were marched up to the top deck once more. This time they wore glazed,
broad-brimmed hats over their cropped hair as they waited docilely in line to
go down the gangway steps to the cutters below. A queue of these little boats
waited to ferry the labour gangs to the Portland quarries. Rocks broken under
their hammers were used in building the new quay and prison. The oarsmen were
first-class convicts, indicated by the two red bands round their right arms,
their black leather patches on the left sleeve. Stunning Joe looked for no
assistance from them. A first-class man had too much to lose by being
implicated in escape or mutiny. Many of them were more vicious than the most
brutal warder.

Beyond
the convict hulks, the hospital ship
Iphigenia
and the little washing-sloop
Lydney
rode at their mooring chains.
Even from these auxiliary vessels, Joe thought, there was no prospect of
escape. He sat with the other men in the cutter, cowed and despondent, while
the sun shone on the polished bayonets of the warders in the stern. Many of the
new officers wore the Alma and Inkerman clasps upon their breasts. A man who
had fought hand-to-hand in the bloody skirmishes of the Crimea would not
hesitate to use bullet or steel on a condemned felon.

Stunning
Joe's detail was marched up the hill from the quayside, through the streets of
the little town, to the stone-yards on the far side of the peninsula. The men
were halted while the contractors detonated another section of the whitish
rock-face, providing the boulders upon which the prisoners worked with their
hammers. Joe O'Meara glimpsed again the long crescent of Chesil Bank below, its
banked pebbles curving away towards the mainland and freedom.

A man
who could once get clear of the work detail might make a run for it when
darkness fell. During daylight, of course, it would be impossible. A figure on
the long stretch of pebbles connecting Portland with the coast would be as
conspicuous as a bluebottle on a whitewashed wall. The sharp brain in the neat
little head thought of darkness. Darkness, or perhaps a sea mist.

The
men worked in groups of six to a dozen, standing in a ring about the pile of
chalky boulders, swinging the heavy stone hammers and smashing them down on the
cracking masonry. In an outer ring, their carbines at the ready, three warders
faced inward, watching the men at their labour. Each officer had a notebook, in
which from time to time he made a note on a man's enthusiasm for work, or his
lack of it. On Joe's arrival, the senior officer in charge of the detail,
MacBride, had explained with relish the penalties of sloth. A warder who 'took a
shine' to a prisoner could reduce his life to a living hell. MacBride had only
to make an unfavourable page of notes for Joe O'Meara to find himself on bread
and water, in solitary confinement in the suffocating little cell which stank
of the ship's bilges, even tied to the gratings for the cat o' nine tails. Had
circumstances permitted, Stunning Joe would have gone to the gallows with a
song on his lips for the murder of Officer MacBride.

By the
end of the morning the smooth wooden handle of the hammer was slipping in Joe
O'Meara's hands. He was still a novice, only six weeks in the yard, and his
palms were not yet calloused. After several hours of labour the blisters burst
and his hands bled. It happened at the end of every morning and every
afternoon, often before the end. Mac-Bride's voice was at his ear as he paused.

'To your work, O'Meara! To your work, sir!'

The
cold blue eyes under the polished peak of the warder's cap glinted with rage,
as though the felon had offered Mac-Bride some personal insult by his idleness.
Perhaps he had. It was a rule of any warder's employment that he should be
fined a shilling of his pay every time that one of his convict detail was
caught malingering.

A noon
gun from Portland Castle was the signal for work to end. The trim cutters took
the convicts back to the
Indomitable
.
In the cages below deck there
was another muster roll before the men sat down to their silent dinner.
Stunning Joe's meal consisted of a potato and a ladleful from the tub of meat.
Like all the provisions for the hulks the meat was supplied by private
contract. Rotten before it reached the vessels, it had been boiled to a thin
stew. On three days of the week, as a measure of economy, it was replaced by
gruel, consisting of barley boiled in water without the addition of salt or any
flavouring. Salt and pepper were included in the supplies, but were used
exclusively on daily dressings applied to the backs of men who had been
flogged. It was held by the prison medical authorities that this prevented putrefaction
of the culprit's wounds.

After
fifteen minutes, the warders in the corridors between the cages began to
jangle their keys along the bars.

'All
up! All up! Stone-yard details to your places! Move! Stir yourselves, you
damned scoundrels!'

Joe
O'Meara joined the file of men. They shambled without fear or resentment. It
was MacBride's boast to new arrivals that a month of prison diet and discipline
would leave them as quiet as gelded stallions. In this, at least, MacBride had
always been proved right.

The
summer heat of the afternoon seemed to strike back at the men of the labour
details from the white surfaces of new stone. Some of the parties were
permitted to strip to their blue shirtsleeves, but not MacBride's. The sweat
ran into Stunning Joe's eyes and he felt as though his strength was draining
from him with the moisture. He knew, beyond doubt, that they were going to kill
him. Unless he fell suddenly, from a seizure in the glare of the stone yard,
he would not die at Portland. But only a fool would believe that he could
survive fourteen more years of this in Parramatta where the heat would be twice
as fierce as England in July.

Somewhen,
about the middle of the afternoon, he knew that the chief officer was making
his rounds of the details. As the senior warder approached each detail it was
the duty of the guard to shout the official strength of the party followed by
the number of men who were actually present. Sickness and the departure of
transports generally caused some discrepancy. Joe O'Meara heard the voices
getting closer.