The Prisoner Read online

  In that previous life, the prisoner had been a cobbler, and a good one he believed, a maker of shoes for the wealthy and those who could afford not to go barefoot through the travails of life in Victorian England. In truth, he had been on his way to deliver a pair of boots to a member of the House of Lords on that evening when the Hand of the Law had reached out and plucked him from his life. The Bow Street Runner who had taken him had not believed him and, not wishing to appear to have let one of the two robbers avoid capture, had insisted he had been the second man who had escaped that baker’s shop, a pair of stolen boots tucked under one arm.

  He had seen the lead ball take the first robber in the back, seen the man fall, and not knowing the man was a robber, had knelt to give aid to the dying man. And it was during that act of Christian charity that he had been captured, manacled, and led away to a waiting Black Mariah, which had transported him to a cell beneath the Old Bailey to await his trial.

  The parliamentarian for whom he had made the boots, at the time caught up in a torrid affair with a street-girl, had not come forward to testify as to his innocence, regardless of the fact that the prisoner could name him and identify his face, and had faded into the shadows, leaving the unfortunate man to face his fate alone.

  And so he had been condemned, tried, sentenced, and led away to a rotting hulk in the backwaters of the River Thames where, in three months’ time, he was transferred, together with one hundred and nineteen male and seventy-one female prisoners, to a prison-ship, chained to the bulkhead by a short, heavy length of anchor-cable, and locked below decks. The fleet had set sail on the high tide that night, and after sixty-seven days of pounding seas and decks awash in vomit and human excreta, had reached that land far to the south, where men were regarded as of little more value than cattle, and women as no more than playthings for any uniformed man or business-suited stranger who might fancy them.

  So began, for the prisoner, a life of pain and suffering, of starvation and thirst, of torn and filthy rags to wear and bare feet that were cut and bruised by the smallest stone on which he might tread, a life of crawling spiders and black snakes that could strike a man down before he even became aware of their presence.

  But worst of all was the loneliness. Forbidden to speak to those with whom he laboured on pain of another severe lashing, locked alone in his tiny cell each night, he had not the comfort of human companionship. He lived within his own mind, conjuring up the narrow streets of the East End of London in an attempt to escape reality if only for an hour before tiredness and exhaustion took him in its arms until the dawn, when guards came, shouting and banging their truncheons on the bars of his cell to awaken him.

  A bowl of cold, lumpy gruel and a mug of weak and even colder tea were slipped through a hatch at the bottom of his door, and his day began with him sitting on a narrow ledge a few inches above the filthy water that flowed across the floor of his cell, eating what passed for breakfast with his fingers and washing the mess down with the tea.

  If he was fortunate, the guards took their time in rousting him from his cell to begin work, and he found time for a pipe-full of tobacco. If not, he went without.

  Day followed week followed month, with nary a change to his circumstances, whilst his body grew thinner, his face more gaunt, and his hopes diminished hour by hour. There was no end to his torture; there never would be, or so he thought. The remainder of his life on this earth would pass in a succession of long hours of labour and short periods of sleep, with a belly that ached incessantly for the food and nourishment denied him, and a despair that filled his heart until death itself seemed but a welcome release from this living hell on earth.

  And the only comfort he knew lay in the fact that he was but one of many caught up in the same situation which, in a way, meant that he was not alone.

  March 30th; 1822: His first year passed without his even realizing it.

  The building-site on which he laboured had changed, and now the prisoners hauled huge sandstone blocks on wooden sleds from the quarry, where they were dug and cut, to the foundations he had laboured over with pick and shovel, and pushed them into position, then dragged the sleds back to the quarry, where another immense stone block was loaded aboard. Then the line of prisoners took up the heavy hemp rope, hauled as if their very lives depended on each stone arriving at its allotted place in the shortest possible time, and pressed their combined weight against the block until it tumbled from the sled and found a new home in the ditch over which they had laboured.

  Now, when he lay in his cell each night, he found he could not lift his arms for the agonising pain in his muscles. His legs quivered from the constant hauling and heaving, and his back ached abominably.

  But stone by stone the building grew, until a day when Fate itself took a hand in his life, and his world once again underwent a change that he could not have foreseen, a change that, in a way, was better than the backbreaking routine of his present life, but in other ways, was worse than anything he could have imagined.

  And it happened on a day when the sun shone so brightly and the birds in the trees sang so loudly that all the world seemed to be trying to smile upon him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  June 11th; 1822: The boards from which the sled had been made were of hardwood, strong abnd thick and laid side-by-side. Beneath them, on either side, was a long wooden runner on which the sled sat, the huge stone shoved into place on its broad back.

  Forty-six prisoners hauled on the thick rope until the sled sat right beside the ditch where the huge sandstone block was to take its place, and the prisoners then leaned their combined weight against the stone, whilst a second rope was looped around it and another group of prisoners hauled from in front of the monolith.

  On the side nearest the foundation-ditch, the runner, on that day, fractured and broke in two, and the prisoner, first man on the hauling-rope, was dragged feet-first into the ditch because his toes could not find a purchase on the mud underfoot. As he tumbled to the bottom of the ditch, the huge stone toppled, its edge striking his left leg just below the knee, and the shinbone was crushed and shattered.

  He screamed, and several prisoners immediately leaped into the ditch and began trying to move the heavy stone by means of inserting long wooden poles beneath it and levering it upwards. An old man, one who had been on the work-gang since the site had been first cleared, seized his arms and dragged him free, but the damage was done: from below the knee to just above the ankle, his leg was twisted and mangled so severely that only amputation could save his life.

  The prisoner was laid out on the grass, where shock and loss of blood combined to render him unconscious, and the prison physician fetched. By the time the man arrived, the prisoner’s upper thigh had been bound with a length of rope and a hardwood branch passed through it and twisted. The flow of blood had been slowed to a trickle, and the prisoner lay, pallid of face and barely breathing, whilst the physician took out his instruments and set about amputating the damaged limb.

  Whilst he worked, the blade of a new shovel was heated in a fire, and when the limb had been removed, the blade was pressed against the open stump, cauterising the flesh, closing off the blood-vessels, and sealing the open wound. Then the prisoner, still unconscious, was laid on a stretcher and carried to the infirmary, some two miles away.

  June 14th; 1822: For three days the prisoner lay in a coma, alternately sweating and shivering whilst his body tried to fight the infection in the wound. As the fourth day dawned, he returned to consciousness, returned to a world of pain and suffering such as he had never known before.

  A young nurse, seated beside the prisoner all through those three long days, quickly fetched the infirmary physician, and morphine was administered, taking the patient into a world of alternate slumber and half-awake ravings and mumblings.

  It was feared that he would succumb to his wounds. But somehow, he fought off the effects of the accident and the crude and hasty but necessary surgery, and came to his senses some fort
y-eight hours later, wanting nothing more than a sip of water.

  The young nurse, who had not left his side during those five days, but dozed in a chair set to one side of his bed, tended to his needs, and cared for him as best she could. And it was principally due to her efforts and repeated doses of morphine that he pulled through, and by the end of a week, was able to sit up and take an interest in his surroundings.

  Each morning, she unbandaged the leg and cleaned the wound then redressed it, and bathed his sweating brow. She fashioned crude cigarettes for him, lit them, and held the lid of a shoe-polish tin in lieu of an ashtray, fed him, and tended him hour after hour, and gradually, he overcame his pain, and the wound became clean and sanitary.

  Then, at the end of the fourth week, a woodcarver came and took measurements of the stump and the length of the remaining leg. He scribbled down his measurements on a scrap of paper, left, and returned two days later with a wooden stump that was held in place by means of straps and a concave upper end that fitted over the stump of the leg, At first, it was ungainly and he found difficulty in balancing, but eventually the prisoner learned to walk again, albeit slowly, and aided by a crutch, A leather pad was fashioned to fit over the stump and prevent the wooden leg from rubbing on the bare flesh, and two months after that dreadful accident, the prisoner rose from his bed, laid aside the crutch, and walked across the little room.

  He would never swing a pick or shovel again. He would never drag huge sandstone blocks from the quarry to the building-site. But he was able to walk.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  August 23rd; 1822: Superintendent of Prisoners Clarence Beamish sat back in his chair and eyed the man opposite him.

  A sheep-farmer from along the Hawkesbury River, some thirty miles north of Sydney Town, he had presented a request for the appointment of three prisoners to his property to work as shepherds and a gardener. His name was William Morris, and he had immigrated to the new land some six years previously, hoping for a more prosperous life than he could manage in England.

  One year ago, he had hired a ticket-of-leave woman as a governess to his five children and employed two prisoners as shepherds, but the men had run off into the scrub and were believed to have been eaten by cannibals. And now, here he was, back again.

  “What assurances do I have, assuming I award you these two shepherds and a...gardener...that they will not flee into the wilds, as the previous two men have already done?” Beamish asked, drumming his fingers on the edge of his desk.

  Morris’ eyebrows drew down into a dark line, and his thin mouth took on a cruel twist, as he replied: “I shall keep ‘em in ankle-chains, sir. That’s me assurance.”

  “But...can they work, hampered by ankle-chains?”

  “It’ll be difficult. But they will learn. Or I’ll ‘ave the hide off their backs!” and Morris emphasized the point by pounding his fist on the desk.

  “Just so,” Beamish replied, smiling; “just so, Mr Morris. Kindness does not work with these miscreants Mother England sends us. Only the strictest discipline is of use out here.”

  “We see eye to eye, you an’ I, sir,” Morris smiled, and Beamish, watching his face, shivered.

  “Very well,” Beamish picked up his quill and scribbled his signature at the bottom of the form; “I believe I can offer you a gardener who not only willnot run, he cannot run...a man in the infirmary who has a stump in lieu of a left leg. Lost it in an accident some months ago. He would make an ideal gardener. And for your shepherds, I will give you two men who have known the lash more than once...men who are terrified of it, and fear the sight of it almost as much as they fear death itself.”

  In this second statement, Beamish was wrong: the two men of whom he was thinking did not fear the lash – they hated it, with a cold, implacable hatred that knew no boundary.

  He took out a file, opened it and ran a fat forefinger down a column, then scribbled three names at the bottom of Morris’ request.

  “There you are,” he said, rising and holding out his hand; “three men who will give you no trouble whatsoever. And I wish you the very best, Mr Morris. See to it that your standards of discipline are harsh and hard, and you will experience no troubles. Discipline, after all, should be meted out with an iron fist.”

  “Me own thoughts precisely, sir,” Morris said, rising and shaking Beamish’s hand; “me own thoughts precisely.” And he took up his authority for the three prisoners and left the office.

  Morris stepped out into the bright sunlight and walked across the compound to the Prison Administrator’s office. He waited at the desk whilst a young seaman entered an office to the rear of the building, and returned with a tall, thin man in the uniform of a lieutenant-commander in Her Majesty’s Navy, a grey-bearded man who had reached the limits of his rise through the ranks and would soon retire.

  Lieutenant-Commander Savage had dreamed of ending his career as the victor of a distant sea-battle and returning to England a hero. But an annoying habit of running ships-of-the-line aground in confined waters had ended his seagoing career somewhat abruptly two years ago, and now retirement beckoned in this backwater of the lower echelons of society, this wide green place where only the very dregs of humanity found suitable refuge.

  He introduced himself, shook Morris’ hand, and took the proffered document, glanced at the notation at the bottom by the Superintendent of Prisoners, then handed it to the seaman, waiting respectfully at his side.

  “Wait here, Mr Morris. Jenkins will fetch your servants,” the officer said, then turned on his heel, disappeared back inside his office, and closed the door.

  Jenkins donned his cap and disappeared from the building, leaving Morris standing, alone, in the anteroom. He gazed about, at the sparse, functional furniture, a tall cupboard, its doors standing open, against the wall.

  Taking a pipe from his pocket, he filled it from a battered tobacco-pouch and lit it from a candle on the desk, and smoked as he paced impatiently back and forth in front of the scarred desk.

  After some time, Jenkins reappeared and beckoned him. The pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth, he followed the young seaman outside, to where a squad of soldiers was coming through the main gates, two prisoners in their midst. As they drew nearer, he saw the unfriendly scowls on the faces of the prisoners, and noted the slovenly fashion in which they moved, as if they could not have cared less what happened to them. One was tall, angular, his hair thinning on top; the second man was shorter and heavier, with a livid scar running from the corner of his jaw to just beneath the left eye, the remnants of a knife-fight of some months ago.

  At a shouted command, the squad halted some yards from him, and a sergeant stepped forward, seized the manacles about the wrists of the first man and dragged him forward.

  “Pris’ner Simpson, sir,” the sergeant said to Morris, left Simpson standing there and returned to the squad, where he seized hold of the second prisoner by the shoulder and jerked him forward.

  “An’ this is Wallis…both of ‘em bad’uns. Ye’ll need ter be ‘ard on ‘em.”

  “I intend to. Where’s me third prisoner?” Morris asked, and at that moment a man, accompanied by a nurse and a young marine, appeared from a building across the parade-ground. Morris glanced at the wooden stump in place of a left lower leg, at the sad, almost mournful expression on the man’s face, and frowned.

  “Well, ‘e won’t be runnin’ anywhere,” he said, and led all three men to a waiting buckboard, standing in the shade of the administration building. Ordering them to get in, he waited until the first two had seated themselves and leaned forward and lifted the third man by his armpits into the wagon, and then fastened a length of chain through their manacles and back to a huge metal staple jutting out of the side of the buckboard, where he fastened it with a large padlock.

  “That’ll ‘old them til we get ‘ome,” he grinned at the seaman, climbed up on the driving-seat and took up the whip. He cracked it once over the back of the old mare harnessed to the wagon, and it
set off across the parade-ground and through the main gates.

  The journey back to the Hawkesbury River was long and uneventful. The sun beat down mercilessly on the bare heads of the three prisoners, and before they had gone a mile, all three were sweating profusely. Occasionally, Morris turned to look at his charges, but otherwise ignored them and made no attempt to offer them a drink from the bottle of cold water stowed beneath his seat, keeping it instead for his own use.

  Approximately halfway through the journey, the buckboard drew up before a small, tumbledown wayside tavern set back from the road, and Morris climbed down and disappeared inside. He was gone for perhaps an hour, then returned, burped loudly, tossed a brown-paper package to the prisoners, and the wagon set off again.

  The tallest of the prisoners opened the package, and found three meat pies, all of which had gone cold. Sitting in the back of the wagon, they ate their tasteless meal, and threw the brown paper into the bushes at the side of the road. Then they stretched out in the back of the wagon as much as the chain would allow them, and tried to relax for the remainder of the journey.

  Mile after mile, the old mare plodded on. The road was almost deserted except for the odd wagon on its way into the nearest town for supplies, and it was almost dark by the time the wagon drew up before a set of double gates closing off a winding gravel track that led to a large, single-storey house on a rise in a small clearing.

  Morris got down and unlocked the gate, took hold of the horse’s halter and pulled it and the wagon through, then locked the gate again, climbed back up on the seat, and they set off once more.

  From a distance, the house looked neat and respectable. But as they drew closer, they could see it was almost as rundown as the little wayside tavern had been, with boards missing from the walls and weeds poking up out of the gravel driveway. Torn curtains covered the windows, and as the wagon came to a halt, an old, grey-haired woman dressed in a torn and much-mended gown appeared on the porch, wiping her hands on a tea-towel. She watched as the chain was unlocked and the three prisoners climbed down and stood in a circle behind the wagon, then turned and went back inside.