“Of William Henry I will say no more than that you will never find him. He was not meant for this earth, but wherever he is, Richard, he is happy and at peace. The truly good have no business here, for they have nothing to learn. And even atheists like me can believe that sometimes these things happen because, did they not, the future would hold worse. Be glad for William Henry.”
Richard put the letter down blindly, unable to see for the tears he had never been able to shed for William Henry. The other prisoners in the felons’ common-room, including Lizzie Lock, made no attempt to approach him as he sat on his box and wept. How strange that it should be Jem Thistlethwaite who broke down the dam and let the torrent of grief flow free at last. But he was not right. William Henry would come back one day, he was not gone from this world forever.
He took up the letter again at dinner time the following day, having spoken to no one, and no one having spoken to him.
“I have carved a little niche for myself among the new breed of Whigs the presence of a young leader like Pitt has permitted.
Oligarchy, though it must ever rule in the Lords, has quit the Commons. Men of ideas abound, and Pitt, could he only find the money, would indulge them all.
“Getting to you yourself, the prospect of transportation is nonexistent. The African experiment was such a disaster that no one at Westminster has the courage—or the stupidity, miraculously enough—to revive it in any form. India has been suggested, and discarded the way a man would divest himself of a shirt made of snakes. Our outposts there are perilous and circumscribed. Though these are not the reasons behind the decision.
They
are firmly based in the opposition of the East India Company, which wants no felons jeopardizing its activities in Bengal and Cathay. The West Indies want none but negroes for indenture or slavery, and the English grip on places like Nova Scotia and Newfoundland does not allow transportation. The French hover. As do the Spanish in the south.
“So it would seem that you will serve out your time in Gloucester. Rest assured, however, that as soon as I hear anything, I will pass it on to you. Dick says that you have organized yourself with what Cousin James-the-druggist calls a ‘cool kind of passion.’ ”
His answer had to wait until Sunday, when he took possession of the end of the table Old Mother Hubbard had installed in the felons’ common-room just before the assizes and not removed after them, on the theory that it gave some felons an extra storey to perch upon when the place was overcrowded. As if it knew times of undercrowding.
A rash of visitors had broken out, envoys of a friend of Mr. Pitt’s named Jeremy Bentham, at present touring Russia with the intention of writing a legal code for the Empress Catherine, but also the author of a treatise on the virtues and vices of setting felons to hard labor on public works, and exponent of a new kind of prison-in-the-round. His envoys popped in and out of the gaol inspecting it minutely and shaking their heads gloomily, gazing at the extensions its inmates were erecting and muttering about its all having to be pulled down again. Square! Why did the minds of men think square when round had no corners?
“I would rather be in Italy than in Gloucester Gaol, Jem, of that I can assure you.
“Of Ceely Trevillian and the affair at the distillery I can say no more than that I had the misfortune to run up against a man of birth and brain with no better outlet for his talents than intrigue, conspiracy and manipulation. He belongs on the stage, where he would have out-acted Kemp, Mrs. Siddons and Garrick combined. My only consolation is that when Cave and Thorne have arrived at a settlement with the Excise Office, I will be able to pay my debts and ensure that the Cousins James are not out of pocket when they buy me more things. I am never without a new book, though reading some of them is painful, as Clifton and the Hotwells keep cropping up. Two places I would rather not be reminded of, even by an Evelina or a Humphry Clinker. Not so much because of William Henry or Ceely as because of Annemarie Latour, with whom I sinned grievously. I can see the exasperation at my prudishness on your ugly face from here, but you were not there, nor could you have loved the man I became with her. Pleasure meant too much. Can you understand that? And if you cannot, how can I make you? I was a bull, a stallion. I
rutted,
I did not make love. And I loathed the object of my animality, who was an animal too.
“In Gloucester Gaol we are all in together, men and women—and children. Though it is a place of more fucking than suckling. The babies usually die, poor little creatures. And their poor mothers, who constantly carry and bear for nothing. At first the presence of the women appalled me, but as time has gone on I have come to realize that they make Gloucester Gaol endurable. Without them, we would be a collection of men brutalized beyond recognition.
“My own woman is Lizzie Lock, who has been here since the beginning of 1783 for stealing hats. When she sees one she fancies, she pinches it. Ours is a platonic friendship, we neither make love nor rut. I protect her from other men and she protects my box of belongings whilst I am laboring. Jem, if solvency permits it, would you find a grand hat for Lizzie? Red, or red and black, preferably with feathers. It would cast her into ecstasies.
“I must go. Even my elevated status in here does not guarantee tenure of so much table for a whole Sunday afternoon. That is the oddest part about it, Jem. For some reason (possibly that I am deemed mad) I notice that I am, for want of a better word, respected. Write to me sometimes, please.”
* * *
Cousin James
-the-druggist came to see Richard in August, loaded with a new dripstone, more rags and clothes, medicines, books.
“But keep your present dripstone going, Richard, for I see no evidence that it is tainting. The more spare stones ye have, the better, and I have brought ye a good stout sack for surplus items. The Gloucester water is purer by far than any Bristol can produce, even from the Bishop’s feather off Jacob’s Well.” He was very ill at ease, talking for the sake of talking, and finding it very hard to meet Richard’s eyes.
“There was no real reason to make this journey in such hot weather, Cousin James,” said Richard gently. “Tell me the bad news.”
“We have finally heard from Mr. Hyde in Chancery Lane. Sir James Eyre got around to your petition for the King’s Mercy on the ninth of last month, or at least that is the date on his letter to Lord Sydney. He denied ye mercy, Richard, and most emphatically. There is no doubt in his mind that ye conspired with that woman to rob Ceely Trevillian. Even though she was never found.”
“The damning witness who was not there,” said Richard under his breath. “Not there, but believed.”
“So that is it, my poor dear fellow. We have exhausted all our avenues. Your reward is safe, however. It cannot be garnished because it is not related to the crime for which ye were convicted. I know ye’ve a few guineas, but when next I come I will bring ye a new box with a hollow long
side
to it—tops and bottoms are more likely to be examined than sides, I am told. It will contain gold coins packed in lint so that, no matter how hard the box is shaken or rapped, they will make no noise. The lint also sounds solid.”
Richard took both his hands and held them strongly. “I know I keep saying it, but I cannot thank you enough, Cousin James. What would I have become without you?”
“A bloody sight dirtier, Richard my love,” said Lizzie Lock after Cousin James-the-druggist had gone. “ ’Tis the apothecary gives ye your drips, soaps, oil of tar and all the rest of your popish ceremonials. Ye remind me of a priest saying Mass.”
“Aye, he is a fussy bugger,” said Bill Whiting, smiling. “It ain’t necessary, Richard my love—look at the rest of us.”
“Talking of buggery, Bill, I saw you sneaking around my sheep the other day,” said Betty Mason, who kept a flock for Old Mother Hubbard. “Leave them alone.”
“What chance do I have to bugger anybody except Jimmy and Richard my love? And they will not be in it. I hear, by the by, that all our lugging of rocks is to go for naught—Old Mother Hubbard says there is talk of a new style for the new prison.”
“I hear that too,” said Richard, sopping up the last of his soup with a piece of stale bread.
Jimmy Price sighed. “We are like whosit thingummabob who kept on having to roll the boulder up the hill but it always came down again. Christ, it would be nice to work for some purpose.” He glanced across to where Ike Rogers was hunched at the far end of the table the old brigade defended against all presumptuous comers. “Ike, ye have to eat. Otherwise Richard my love will have your soup too, the hungry bugger. I ain’t noticed the other five gallows birds off their food, nor worried much either. Eat, Ike, eat! Ye will not hang, I swear it.”
Ike vouchsafed no reply; the blustering bully was no more. Highwaymen were considered the aristocrats of criminals, but Ike could not seem to come to terms with his fate or adopt the die-hard attitude of the other five in similar case.
Richard went to sit on the bench beside him and put an arm about his shoulders. “Eat, Ike,” he said cheerfully.
“I am not hungry.”
“Jimmy is right. Ye will not go to the gallows. It is over two years since anybody hanged at Gloucester, though many have been sentenced to it. Old Mother Hubbard needs us to work to get his thirty pence a week for each of us. If we do not work, he gets but fourteen pence.”
“I do not want to die, I do not want to die!”
“Nor will you, Ike. Now drink your soup.”
“What a gloomy bugger Ike is, always mincing along in his riding boots as if he wore high heels. Jesus, his feet must stink! He even wears the things to bed, Richard my love,” said Bill Whiting the next day as they lugged their stones. “If he swings, so do I. It does not seem fair, does it? His loot was worth five thousand, my sheep ten shillings.” His demeanor was resolutely brave, but now he suddenly shivered. “Goose walked over my grave,” he laughed.
“Our geese would do more than walk over it, Bill. They would be digging after your worms.”
There were eight of them staunch friends: the four women, Bill, Richard, Jimmy and the pitiable Joey Long, who was their child. Richard shivered in his turn. Four of his seven friends might not live to see 1786 arrive.
Then three days after Christmas, all six condemned to death were reprieved, their sentences commuted to fourteen years’ transportation to—Africa. Where else? Jubilation reigned, though Ike Rogers never did recover his bombast.
The year
1785 had seen Richard a prisoner from beginning to end; its last day brought a couriered letter from Mr. James Thistlethwaite.
“There is movement at Westminster, Richard. All sorts of rumors are flying. The most pertinent one as far as you are concerned goes as follows: transportees to Africa held in all gaols outside London are to be put on the Thames hulks in readiness for shipment to foreign parts, but not across the King’s herring pond, which is the Western Ocean—on the maps, Oceanus Atlanticus. Since it is no longer his own private fishery, the rumors I hear (more strongly every day) talk of the Eastern Ocean—on damned few maps, Oceanus Pacificus.
“Not much more than a decade ago, the Royal Society and its powerful Royal Navy connections sent one Captain James Cook to Otaheite to observe the transit of Venus across the sun. This Cook fellow kept discovering lands of milk and honey during what were, I gather, nosy wanderings. Little wonder that in the end his curiosity got him killed by the Indians of Lord Sandwich’s isles. The land of milk and honey which concerns us now reminded Captain Cook of the coast of south Wales, so he dubbed it, imaginatively, New South Wales. On the maps it can be found as ‘Terra Incognita’ or ‘Terra Australis.’ How far it goes from east to west is anybody’s guess, but it is certainly 2,000 miles from north to south.
“At about the same latitude south as the new American state of Georgia is north, Cook found a place he christened ‘Botany Bay.’ Why this name? Because that obnoxious, interfering man of letters and President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, snuffled around ashore there with Linnaeus’s pupil Dr. Solander to gather botanical specimens.
“Enter a gentleman of Corsican extraction, Mr. James Maria Matra. He was the first to put the idea into official heads, who huddled in countless consultations with Sir Joseph Banks, authority on everything from the birth of Christ to the music of the spheres. The result is that Mr. Pitt and Lord Sydney are convinced they have found the answer to a hideous dilemma: what to do with the likes of you. Namely, to send you to Botany Bay. Not precisely to be abandoned ashore there, as happened in Africa, but rather to put a few Englishmen and Englishwomen in a land of milk and honey neither the French, the Dutch nor the Spanish have gotten to yet. No place that I have ever heard of was
settled
by convicts, but such seems to be the intention of His Majesty’s Government in regard to Botany Bay. However, I am not sure that the verb ‘to settle’ is the proper one to use in this context. It is more likely that Mr. Pitt’s verb is ‘to dump.’ Though should the experiment actually work, Botany Bay will end in taking our leavings for generations upon generations and two goals will have been achieved. The first—and by far the more important—is to send England’s felons so far away that they cease to be either an embarrassment or a nuisance. The second—a ploy to lull the suspicions of our ever-multiplying Do Gooders, I am sure—is that His Majesty will own a new, if exploitably worthless, colony for the Union flag to float over. A colony populated by felons and gaolers. Undoubtedly its name in time will be ‘Felonia.’