Savage Magic
Authors: Lloyd Shepherd
Lloyd Shepherd is a former journalist and digital producer who has worked for the
Guardian
, Channel 4, the BBC and Yahoo. He lives in South London with his family. He is the author of
The English Monster
and
The Poisoned Island
.
Also by Lloyd Shepherd
The English Monster
The Poisoned Island
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Lloyd Shepherd 2014
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
®
and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Lloyd Shepherd to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-47113-606-1
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-607-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-47113-609-2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Mum, with love and thanks
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
William Blake,
London
CONTENTS
DEAL
The ship is resting at anchor out on the Downs. She is easy to spot, having none of the splendour of the dozen naval vessels that surround her. She is fat and ungainly, her plain lines evidence of her ugly purpose. A convict ship, just returned from the southern seas, her cargo of abandoned humanity swapped for sacks of tea and a handful of passengers.
In his room at the top of the tallest hotel in Deal, Henry Lodge watches her through an eyeglass stolen from an inebriated officer of the Rum Corps more than a decade ago. There is no doubt. She is the
Indefatigable
. But is she carrying the cargo he has been watching for these past years?
The April air is clean, just washed by spring rain, and there is no sea mist. The vessels clustered between the Goodwin Sands and Deal beach look calm and settled. Local boatmen row from beach to ship to beach again, busy water ants with oars and strong arms.
Henry supposes he will have to go out into one of those boats, and as always the thought fills him with fearful memories. He hates these boats, for they remind him of the worst weeks of his life, shivering inside the sinking wreck of a listing frigate, icebergs hidden in the mist, ice spurs slicing through the cold depths, including the one which had torn into the hull of the ship and removed its rudder with apparently diabolic intent. He was not yet twenty, a convict-gardener, sent to New South Wales to try and scratch a harvest from the thin, rocky soil. Between him and Cape Town, unknown hundreds or thousands of miles of empty, ice-cold sea.
Since his own return from New South Wales, Henry Lodge has performed his little pilgrimage to Deal a dozen times. He pays a man a retaining fee to watch the ships coming and going to the Downs, and to alert him when one of those new arrivals is a returning convict transport. The money required for this undertaking is not insubstantial, but it is also affordable. He is, after all, by now a man of some means, grown rich on hops and natural cunning. But when it comes to boats, he is still a scared convict-gardener clutching on to life in a little pinnace suspended above freezing canyons.
He had survived that disaster, the rescue coming from, of all things, a whaler. With war billowing out from Paris and Europe shivering, it had seemed another petty miracle, as ordinary and as wonderful as an ice mountain trying to snatch away a rudder.
The operation runs like this: his fellow in Deal learns of a new arrival. He then despatches a messenger, post-haste, to the hop gardens owned by Henry Lodge around Canterbury. The system has become so efficient that Henry can be in Deal within a day-and-a-half of a new transport arriving. This is fast enough; the vessels out on the water are still moving to oceanic rhythms at this point, where a day is an hour and a hurried tack into the wind would look to the landlocked observer like a massive animal changing direction.
On this occasion, however, the system has not run quite so smoothly. His man in Deal was away on business in Ramsgate when the
Indefatigable
arrived, such that Henry did not learn of the ship’s arrival until three days after she dropped anchor. He is not particularly worried by this. For these vessels, three days is still barely a heartbeat after so many months at sea.
All the transports he has seen at Deal have looked like the
Indefatigable
looks now. An exhausted woman, is what she is. A silent, disregarded female approaching the end of her disappointed road.
He closes his eyeglass and takes it with him downstairs and onto the beach, where a boatman is waiting to take him over to the convict ship. The man is unpleasant and crude, and shouts at Henry as he struggles to get into the boat, reluctance biting into his bones like the gout which has, in recent months, slowly been making its jagged presence felt.
How many more times will I do this?
he asks himself as they make their way across the glassy water of the Downs.
How much longer will I care to watch for this woman?
It is an old question; one to which he has no answer.
He keeps an eye on the
Indefatigable
as they row towards her. Slowly the other vessels move away from his perspective, as the transport rises from the water, becoming bigger and altogether more impressive the closer they get to her. He imagines the three decks within, the bulwarks between male, female and sailor quarters, the tiny cots in which the convicts are chained. He imagines furtive wanderings beneath tropical skies, as female prisoners are called to the hammocks of sailors and marines, pressed into service as journeying whores, each sailor given individual permission by God and the King to take his pick of the women on board.
These are childish pictures. The decks of the
Indefatigable
will have been cleared of bulwarks and chains while she was in New South Wales. The instruments of imprisonment take up valuable space which will have been cleared for cargo on the return voyage; tea instead of desperate girls. He pictures the piles of unwanted ironware on the quays of Sydney Cove growing higher with the visit of every transport that discards its chains just as it discards its human freight.
He asks himself, as he has done times beyond counting, how a man with such a runaway fancy can possibly have become rich. He remembers why he makes these pilgrimages. To see the woman again, to speak to her. This nonsensical compulsion which he cannot deny.
Now they are alongside the
Indefatigable
. The boatman calls up to the deck, and a head pops over the gunwale.