Ned rises slowly, his buttocks on fire, staring into the mouth of the gun. The man behind the gun is as impassive as a weasel with a rat in its mouth, sallow and dead-eyed.
“But — but you don’t—” Ned begins, but the man merely cuffs him with the stock of the gun in an automatic and exquisitely fluid snap of shoulder and elbow, and Ned finds himself face down in the mud again. Then there’s the cold pressure of steel against the back of his neck, the cords drawn tight around his wrists, the quick itch of the burlap sack jerked over his head. The whole thing, from the initial shock of the report to the blind stuttering march across the fields, takes no more than five minutes. Through the pain in his flank and the throbbing of his jaw, Ned can make out the sniffling inebriate whimper of Boyles at his side, and in the distance, faint as the multifarious hissing of adders in a pit, the mad liquid screech of the hag.
♦ ♦ ♦
The rest is as predictable as rain in Rangoon. Squire Trelawney, determined to put a stop to the alarming incidence of poaching on his estate, sourly forgoes his dinner to sentence the pair to six hours of strappado followed by peine fort et dure, and if at that point still viable, strangulation unto death. The Squire’s brother points out, as a matter of purely theoretical interest, that as the transgressors had neither fowling piece nor pelf about them, they should perhaps be sentenced for the less flagrant offense of trespassing. Not that he wishes to circumvent his brother’s authority, mind, nor to in any way suggest that the guilty parties should be lightly dealt with, it is just that he finds the thought of torn sockets and crushed ribcages most distressing before dinner. The Squire, framed by the mounted heads of stag and boar and surrounded by his collection of seamen’s knots, hesitates a moment, fiddling with his wig and staring off into space as if ruminating over his brother’s objection. After a minute or so, his stomach rumbles mightily. “Oh, all right, Lewis, have it your way,” he grunts finally. “Twenty years at hard labor.”
There follow two months of close confinement at the base of an abandoned well, long since gone dry, but damp as a sink nonetheless. The food is poor, the incarcerees step on one another’s toes, Boyles complains incessantly. “Wisht I’d never of been born,” he groans, face to face with Ned in their cylindrical prison, barely able to move his arms without tangling them in his companion’s. “And me feet — me feet’s so wet the shoes is rotted off ‘em. Besides which, I’m cold — spring, summer, winter — it’s like the Arctic down ‘ere.”
In the daylight, Trelawney’s overseer — a vicious psychopath with a spine so twisted his head lies flat against his left shoulder— lashes them to a plow beside an arthritic ox and drives them through the clods and mire of the fields from dawn till dusk. At night, they sleep in shifts. One of them climbs halfway up the well shaft and clings to the wet rocks, while the other hunches in the slime below, napping fitfully. As Ned clutches at a willow root one night, bracing himself against the far wall of the shaft with the cramped muscles of his legs, it begins to occur to him that he may have died after all, that his resurrection at St. Bartholomew’s was nothing more than a waking in hell, and that everything that has transpired since — every ache, shin splints, stitch and cramp, every crack in the jaw and kick in the ass, every turnabout, disappointment and gut-wrenching loss — is no more than the tiniest link in the eternal concatenation of torments he must live through, moment by moment, muttering his soft savage imprecations over each, as if they were the devil’s prayer beads.
It seems he’s not far wrong.
Two months later a constable rides out from London to haul the prisoners from the well, chain them to the back of a wagon and march them into town, where they are remanded to the hulks in order to serve out the remaining nineteen years and ten months of their sentences, shoveling mud. The hulks, if anything, are closer and damper than Squire Trelawney’s well, with the added liability of constant exposure to the reeking breath, runny bowels and festering phlegm of hundreds of hardened criminals, father rapers, generalized pederasts and blood drinkers alike. It’s pretty rough. Packed in at night, three to a berth, in the leaking, creaking holds of rotted tubs perennially mothballed in the Thames and stinking of their slow transubstantiation to sawdust and mulch. Slopped like hogs on cabbage soup and gruel. Forced down into walled enclosures, thirty or forty feet beneath the level of the river, to ply the shovel, wield the pick and haul buckets of rich, reeking muck. Dredging, they call it. Backbreaking, spirit-crushing work. Lay the shovel down to wipe your brow and they lay open your back.
But just when things seem blackest, they get blacker still.
Sometime in the winter of ‘04, one of the higher-ups in the Admiralty is struck with an inspiration while staring into his eggcup. An inspiration that will directly exacerbate the sufferings of Ned Rise, Billy Boyles and hundreds like them. What with the war on and the shortage of able-bodied conscripts to man the ships and flesh out the infantry, it occurs to this lord and official that it is a shameful waste of manpower to garrison out-of-the-way-yet-still-vital posts with regular troops. Why not, he thinks, spooning up a neat crescent of soft-boiled egg, why not man those forts with convicts? They’d been used in the past for such purposes, why not conscript them again? Get some use out of the lazy vagabonds? Swear them in and put them to work? After all, they can always go back to dredging once the little Corsican has been run up a flagpole. The idea pleases this lord and official immensely. He takes it to his superiors, and they in turn take it to their superiors.
And so, in the early fall of that year, Ned and Billy are transferred from the black stinking hold of the Cerberus to the black stinking hold of the H.M.S. Feckless, and deposited, soaked in their own vomit, at Goree — Fort Goree, on the island of the same name off the coast of West Africa. Fort Goree, gateway to the Niger and bastion of rot.
♦ NOLO CONTENDERE ♦
“You’ve been lying to me. You’re planning another adventure, aren’t you?
Well. Answer me.”
“Not really.”
“Not really? Then why bring this, this colored person into my house? Why jabber back and forth with him all day like some camel peddler at the bazaar, huh?. . I said why bring this Seedy into my house? Don’t you hear me?”
“I’m just brushing up.”
“For what?”
“Listen: say the word and I’ll stay.”
“Stay.”
♦ LOOSENING THE BINDS ♦
Sidi Ambak Bubi left Peebles after a stay of twenty-seven days, eighteen hours and six minutes. He was counting. Thirty pounds sterling or no, every minute under the slate roof in Peebleshire was like a week in Gehenna. It was Mistress Park. She was like a lioness with a cub, and he, Sidi, the slave sent out to bring back an infant lion for the Bashaw’s zoo.
His assessment wasn’t far off the mark. Ailie was fierce and defensive, strident, resentful, ungracious to the point of insult. She saw the Moor as an alien and divisive presence, a thief who’d come out of the dark fastness of Africa to steal her husband from her — and she responded in kind. Dogging his every movement, her bright suspicious eyes boring through his clothing, the door to his room, the very flesh and bone of his breast, always picking, insinuating, criticizing everything from the way he lit his chibouk to the condition of the turban wrapped round his head. She served him neeps and potatoes, bacon, ham, pig’s feet. She spilled tea in his lap, swept Saharas of dust round him as he sat studying the Koran, encouraged the dog to nip at his heels and chew up his sandals. She was distressed, upset, sick unto death, and she took it out on the Moor from Mogador.