Morgan’s Run (35 page)

With a grand gesture Richard indicated to Jimmy Price that he was to work the pump handle, and held his dripstone to catch his three pints. The others followed, Bill Whiting bowing lavishly to Jimmy before filling his dripstone as well, while Richard’s fine voice swelled into a loud string of hallelujahs. Then off back to the table, where the six objects were set in its exact center amid many gesticulations. Richard banished his acolytes to two paces behind and spread his hands, wiggling his fingers.

“King of Kings! Lord of Lords! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” he sang. “Hosannah! O Hippocrates, receive our supplications!” After a final reverential bow, he doffed his rag, folded it with a kiss and sat down. “Hippocrates!” he yelled, so suddenly that everyone jumped.

“Christ! What was that all about?” asked Stanley.

“The rites of purification,” said Richard solemnly.

The horsey little man looked suddenly wary. “Is it a joke? Are ye gammoning me?”

“Believe me, William Stanley from Seend, what all six of us are doing is no joke. We are placating Father Thames by invoking the great god Hippocrates.”

“Is this going to happen every time ye drink water?”

“Oh, no!” cried Bill Whiting, perfectly understanding the method in Richard’s madness. He was setting them apart, endowing them with special qualities, helping to preserve them and their property. How quick he was! All this out of Jimmy’s and Lizzie’s remarks about his turning filtration into a religion. Miss Molly Sykes would get to hear of it—William Stanley from Seend was a gossip, and had all day inside Ceres. “No,” he went on earnestly, “we conduct the rites of purification only on special occasions, like entering a new place of abode. It—it alerts Hippocrates.”

“Mind you,” said Will Connelly, contributing his mite, “we use the stones every time we drink water, just not with the whole ceremony. That is for the first day of each month—and when we enter a new place of abode, of course.”

“Is it witchcraft?” asked Mikey Dennison suspiciously.

“Did ye smell brimstone and sulphur? Did the water turn to blood or soot?” Richard demanded aggressively. “Witchcraft is nonsense.
We
are serious.”

“Oh, oh!” Stanley exclaimed, brow clearing. “I forgot! Ye are mostly from Bristol, home to every Dissenter there is.”

“Ike,” said Richard, getting up, “a word in your ear.” They moved a few paces away, every eye still on them. “Confirm our story, and next time we perform join in the chorus. If ye back us we will all keep our things—and our money. Where d’ye hide yours?”

Rogers grinned. “In the heels of my riding boots. They look low on the outside, but inside—I am up on stilts. And yours?”

“One side of every box has a thin inside lining. Those of us with coins can keep them there. They cannot rattle because of lint wadding. Will, Neddy and Bill have a few, I have more than a few, but the other boxes are empty, so if any of us acquire more money there is space for it. Yon William Stanley from Seend can be bought, but the question is, will he tell Sykes?”

The highwayman considered this carefully, then shook his head. “I doubt it, Richard. If he sings, Miss Molly will get the lot. What we have to do is convince the jockey that we only have so much—Christ, I wish we had a regular visitor from London! If we did, we could explain our wealth that way. Ye’re right about the water—it is foul. My lads and I will have to drink small beer on burgoo days and I warrant yon William Stanley from Seend can get it for us.”

Richard clapped his hand to his head. “Jem Thistlethwaite!” he exclaimed. “I think I can arrange for that visitor, Ike. Are ye of the opinion that Stanley runs an efficient postal service?”

“I am of the opinion that he runs most things efficiently.”

When Richard
and his team were led on deck the next morning they understood why evacuation from the orlop had been a gradual business; Ceres had the use of a certain number of lighters, but not nearly enough, even with men jammed in, to ferry the convicts en masse to their places of work. Luckily no place of work was farther from Ceres than 500 yards, but they were water yards. The oarsmen plied their open boats with a will simply because this was better work by far than other kinds. Convicts from Censor, they were chained to the under side of the gunwales. Why do they not simply make a run for the shore and escape? Richard wondered, learning later that in days gone by they had escaped, only to be recaptured and sometimes hung.

The chief advantage of “Campbell’s academies” (as the hulks were known to their inmates) lay in the fact that they floated; very few Englishmen could swim. That fact also kept a pressed crew on board a vessel once it sailed. Richard could not swim, nor could any of his eleven friends. Which endowed them with a horror of deep water.

His belly was empty, though he had saved half his bread and cheese to eat when dawn came; the half-pint of oatmeal gruel flavored with the bitter herbs called simples he drank as soon as it had been issued to him, gone cold by then, but surely worse twelve hours later. At least Old Mother Hubbard had realized that men performing hard labor had to be fed sufficient to keep their strength up, but less than a day on Ceres had shown him that Mr. Duncan Campbell, more isolated from his superiors than Old Mother Hubbard was, cared not a rush about quality work.

The convicts destined for shore duty had already gone when Richard’s lighter ferried its complement of four dredging teams slightly downriver of the ship and somewhat closer to the shore. His dredge was the first of the four, moored by chains on both sides of both ends. It was a true barge, absolutely flat-bottomed and rectangular in shape, its hull (it had neither bow nor stern) curving out of the water at each end to make it easy to run aground and climb on and off when unloading. Being new, its interior was empty, its paintwork unsullied.

They stepped over the gunwale of the lighter onto a five-foot-wide plank platform which ran down one side of the barge only; no sooner was Jimmy Price, the last man, out of it than the lighter shoved off and headed for the next dredge some 50 yards away. After a wave for Ike and his youngsters, they turned to inspect the premises. One end of the barge was a simple shell, whereas the other had a broad deck on which stood a small wooden shack complete with iron chimney stack. Feeling the impact of men coming aboard, their keeper strolled out of his domain puffing away at a pipe of tobacco, a bludgeon in his other hand.

“We do not,” said Richard instantly and courteously, “speak the flash lingo, sir. We are from the West Country.”

“S’all right, cullies, that don’t worry me.” He inspected them. “Ye’re new to Ceres.” As no one volunteered to comment on this observation, he continued to converse with himself. “Ye’re not that young, but ye’re real strong-looking. Might get a few tons of ballast out o’ ye before ye weaken. Any of ye dredgemen?”

“No, sir,” said Richard.

“Thought not. Any of ye swim?”

“No, sir.”

“Best not lie to me, cullies.”

“No lies, sir. We do not come from swimming parts.”

“What about I throw one of ye in to find out, eh?” He made a sudden move at Jimmy, who squealed in terror, then on each of the others in the row, watching their eyes. “I believe ye,” he said then, returned to his shack, disappeared inside and emerged with a chair, upon which he sat himself, one shin resting on the other leg’s knee, pipe blowing a delectable cloud their way. “Me name is Zachariah Partridge and ye call me
Mister
Partridge. I am a Methodist, hence the name, and I have been a dredger since me youth in Skegness on the Wash, which is why I do not care for flash lingo. In fact, I asked Mr. Campbell to make sure I did not get no Londoners. Wanted some Lincoln men, but West Country ain’t bad. Any of ye from Bristol or Plymouth?”

“Three from Bristol, Mr. Partridge. I am Richard Morgan, the other two Bristolians are Will Connelly and Neddy Perrott.” He pointed each man out. “Taffy Edmunds is from coastal Wales, Bill Whiting and Jimmy Price are from Gloucester.”

“Then ye know a bit about the sea.” He leaned back in his chair. “This here establishment aims at deepening the channel by dredging out the mud on the bottom with that”—he waved his hand at what looked like a giant, gape-mouthed purse—“bucket. It runs around a chain—there at your feet now, but waist level when bucket is in—which can be shortened or lengthened according to the depth of the water. Adjusted just right for this here spot, did it meself.”

Clearly enjoying giving this oration (though there seemed to be no malice in him), Mr. Zachariah Partridge spoke on. “Ye might well wonder why this spot? Because, cullies—that be a word I have picked up local-like—the Royal Arsenal over there supplies the entire army with ordnance, yet there ain’t a tenth enough wharfage for the ordnance tenders. Your colleagues in crime on shore are building the new wharves by filling in the marshes around the Warren. And we dredgemen give them their ballast, which of course they have to mix with rock, gravel and lime, else it would all wind up back in river.”

“Thank you, Mr. Partridge, for explaining,” said Richard.

“Most folk never do, do they?” He waved at the huge purse again. “That there bucket goes in water at my end and comes up where the davit is down far end. If ye do the job right, it will hold fifty pounds of mud and muck—terrible, some of the things what come up! This here barge holds twenty-seven tons of ballast, as we dredgemen refer to it. That means ye will have to dredge up one thousand, one hundred buckets of ballast to fill it. This being winter, ye’ll work six hours—they waste two hours getting ye here and back again. A good day’s work will give me twenty buckets, which is half a ton. Subtracting”he is literate and numerate, thought Richard“Sundays and allowing for another day a week for foul weather, especially this time of year, ye should fill this here establishment with ballast in about ten weeks. When it is full it is towed to the Warren, where ye’ll shovel it out before it is towed to a new spot and ye start again.”

He loves facts and figures; he is a disciple of John Wesley; he is not from London; and he enjoys what he does—particularly because he does not have to lift a finger. How then do we burrow our way into his affections, or, failing that, gain his approval? Is the degree of labor he expects from us feasible? If it is not, then we will suffer in some subtle Wesleyan way. No brute, he.

“Are we allowed to speak to you, Mr. Partridge? For instance, may we ask questions?”

“Give me what I want, Morgan, and ye’ll have no trouble from me. By that I do not mean that I will pamper ye, and if I want, I can break your arm with this here club. But I do not want to, for one good reason. I aim to stand real high in Mr. Campbell’s estimation, and to do that I need to produce ballast. I have been put in charge of this here brand-new establishment because my dredge has always produced the most ballast. You help me, and I might be willing to help you,” said Mr. Partridge, getting up. “I will now proceed, cullies, to tell ye what to do and how to do it.”

The bucket was a thick leather bag about three feet long, with a round maw of iron a little over two feet in diameter. Fused to the iron on its underside was a steel extension shaped like an oval spoon, shallow and sharp-edged. A chain was attached to either side of the iron ring and joined in a Y to the single chain which ran, uninterrupted, in a circuit from one end of the barge to the other with sufficient slack to put the bucket on the river bottom. The chain went around a winch which dropped the bag into the water at Mr. Partridge’s end; it sank under its own weight, its leather butt tethered to a rope manipulated from the barge. A geared and pulleyed davit at the other end dragged the iron maw and its steel spoon along the bottom gathering in mud. When the bucket reached the end of the run the davit exerted a vertical pull; up it came, dripping, was swung inboard by turning the davit and hung over the ballast compartment. Then, working the rope on its butt, the bag was upended and vomited its contents. It came down, empty, ran along its chain to the winch, and went over the side again for its next meal of Thames mud.

Getting used to the job took a full week, during which Mr. Partridge did not see anything like his expected half-ton a day. He was calculating upon one bucket every twenty minutes, whereas the new team took an hour. But Mr. Partridge said and did nothing, simply sat on his chair and sucked at his pipe, a mug of rum at his feet and all the activity of the great river to occupy his attention when he was not staring contemplatively at his toiling team. A dinghy was attached to the barge by a painter, which may have meant that he rowed himself ashore at the end of the day, though he seemed to spend at least some nights on board, for he bought wood for his stove and food for his larder from two of the hordes of bum boats which plied their wares around the river; his rum and his ale came from a third.

There were knacks and tricks, his team discovered from sheer experience. The bucket was prone to lift off the bottom and had to be kept down with a pole put in exactly the right place, which was the top of the iron ring, only three inches wide. A matter of sense and feel in water owning no visibility thanks to churning mud. Four men worked the davit and rope, one man the winch, and one man the pole keeping the bucket down. The brute force was almost all on the davit, though the pole man had to be as strong as he was skillful. Mr. Partridge having done and said nothing, Richard was left to sort out the team. Jimmy Price on the winch, which required the least brawn. Bill, Will and Neddy on the davit, Taffy on the rope, and himself on the pole.