Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

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.

Slowly, slowly, slowly their speed increased, as did the amount of ballast in the bucket. When they achieved their twenty buckets in a six-hour day a week after they had started, a genial Mr. Partridge broke out six big tankards of small beer, a pat of butter and six one-pound loaves of fresh, yeasty bread.

“I knew ye were good when I set eyes on ye. Leave men to find their own way, I always says. I get a bonus of five pounds for every load of ballast I deliver to the Warren-ye rub my back and I will rub yours. Give me more than twenty buckets a day and I will give ye lunch-a quart of small beer and a pound of good bread each. Ye’re all thinner than ye were a week ago, cannot have that. I have a reputation to look after.” He stroked the side of his nose reflectively. “Mind, could not buy ye lunch every day.”

“We might be able to contribute funds,” said Richard. “As a Bristol man, I know the smell of that tobacco-Ricketts. Must be very expensive in Woolwich-even in London, I daresay. It may be possible for me to have some of Ricketts’s best sent to you, Mr. Partridge, if ye can give me an address. I fear that were it to go to Ceres, Mr. Sykes would have it.”

“Well, well!” Mr. Partridge looked tickled. “Find me just one shilling every day, and I will provide lunch. And send the tobacco to me at the Ducks and Drakes tavern in Plumstead.”

At firstIke Rogers and his team did not fare happily, but after a few conferences with Richard and his men they quickened their dredging and came to the same kind of arrangement with their dredgeman, a Kentishman from Gravesend.

The worst feature of the work was its filthiness. From hair of head to soles of feet, they were plastered in blackish, stinking mud; it coated the chain as it ran waist-high along the platform, it dripped from the bucket, it splashed everywhere as the bucket was emptied. By the end of that first week the brand-new barge looked the twin of any of the older rigs.

When Richard realized that once a day two of them would have to descend into the ballast compartment to shovel the gluey mud and its grisly inclusions away from the mound under the bucket, he made a decision.

“Has anybody a sore foot? A cut, a scratch, a blister?”

“Aye, me,” said Taffy. “Corn looking nasty, Da.”

“Then tonight after we wash I will give ye some of my salve, but it means that ye cannot dig until the foot is better. I am not going into that slime in my shoes. In fact, as soon as it gets a little warmer, I will ask Mr. Partridge”-avidly listening-“if we may put our shoes on his deck and work in bare feet. In the meantime, we do our turns on the shovels in bare feet.”

At least they could wash, and did so every evening the moment they were let into the Ceres orlop; for the non-Bristolians the sight of what the Thames dredge brought up was horrifying enough for them to be eager to emulate Richard-strip off, soap and wash at the pump, muddy chains, fetters and all. And they had a nice arrangement with William Stanley from Seend, who had Mikey wash their clothes during the day. Wash them all, thanks to Mr. Duncan Campbell the canny Scotch contractor.

For that worthy had issued new clothing-he did this about once a year-to the denizens of his academies four days after the men from Gloucester had arrived: two pairs of coarse, heavy linen trowsers, two checkered linen shirts of the same weight, and one unlined linen jacket. The trowsers, the Gloucester men discovered to their delight, might feel like hacksaws along their seams, but they came down past their ankles, though on Richard and Ike they were shorter. Ike’s height had shrunk several inches, but due to their newness in Ceres, no one save his Gloucester companions had noticed, and mum was the word when he switched to shoes.

Wearing trowsers, the men of ordinary height did not have to pad their fetter cuffs, and did not need to wear stockings to keep out the cold Thames winds. Richard, a dab hand with a sewing needle thanks to Lizzie Lock, obtained enough cloth off the ends of Jimmy’s trowsers to add to his own, while Ike paid Stanley a mug of gin for his offcuts and had Richard sew them on. What a wonderful invention trowsers were! Theirs were rust-colored, hard-wearing, eminently washable and differently constructed from breeches, which came only to the knees. Whereas breeches opened at the waist on a broad flap held by buttons along the waistband, trowsers opened up the front seam with buttons in a vertical row from a man’s genitals to his waist. A great deal easier to take a piss in too.

Mr. JamesThistlethwaite arrived on the second Sunday after they were admitted to Ceres. He appeared in the doorway warmly shaking Mr. Sykes’s hand, stepped across the threshold and stared at the crimson prison in disbelief.

“Jem! Jem!”

They embraced unashamedly, then held each other off to look. Close enough to ten years had gone by since last they met, and those ten years had wrought many changes in both men.

To Richard, Mr. Thistlethwaite looked mighty prosperous. His wine red suit was of the finest cloth, his buttons mohair, his head bewigged, his hat trimmed with gold braid, his fob gold, his watch gold, his black top boots absolutely gleaming. The paunch was noble, the face fuller and therefore less lined than it used to be, though the grog blossoms on his bulbous nose had flowered to an empurpled perfection. Beneath the shock, the look in his watery, bloodshot blue eyes was full of love.

To Mr. Thistlethwaite, Richard was like two men moving within each other, one surfacing briefly, the other taking his place for an equally short span of moments. The old Richard and the new, inextricably intertwined. Christ, he was handsome! How had he managed that? The stubble of hair seemed actually to have turned blacker than its old very dark brown, and his skin, weathered though it was, had the same flawless look ivory did. He was shaven and very clean, and the Sunday shirt open on his chest showed the ridges and columns of fatless muscle. Did he not feel the cold? This blood-red chamber was freezing, yet he wore no coat and seemed comfortable. His shoes and stockings were clean-oh, the fetters! Chains on patient, peaceful Richard Morgan. That did not bear thinking of. In his grey-blue Morgan eyes lay most of the change; they had used to be a little dreamy, a little smiling in a serious way, and always very gentle of expression. Now they were more directly focused on whatever he looked at, did not dream, did not smile, and were definitely not gentle of expression.

“Richard, how much you have grown! I had expected all kinds of changes, but not that.” Mr. Thistlethwaite pinched the bridge of his nose and blinked.

“William Stanley from Seend, this is Mr. James Thistlethwaite,” Richard said to a wizened, tiny little man who hovered. “Now give us some elbow room. Everybody leave us in peace, hear? I will do the introductions later. Privacy,” he said to Jem, “is the scarcest commodity aboard Ceres, but it can be obtained. Sit down, do!”