Vengeance, page 24
Was he hallucinating?
He had no tools, but there was a gap where the masons had fitted the stones an inch too far apart and filled the space with mortar. In the damp of Macquarie Harbour it had never dried properly. When Ralph scraped hard, even with his fingers, the pointing yielded.
There was a long bolt fastening his fetters that protruded a good two inches past his ankle. He found that if he lay on his back and tucked in his knees, he could swing his legs sideways to strike the bolt against the wall. The pain was almost unbearable, and grit and broken mortar showered down from the gap between the stones, but he struck again, and again.
Ralph paused and listened, but on the far side of the wall the noise had stopped.
He clenched his fists, waiting. Did the guards hear? Did I imagine it?
He had almost given up when the sound came again. Two taps, precise and deliberate. A message.
Ralph answered in kind. Two sharp taps of the bolt against the wall. A clumsy language, but it said the only thing that mattered: I am here.
He was not alone.
The scratching started again, more urgent than before. Ralph changed position, flexing his legs up and down so that the bolt’s end gouged at the loose mortar.
It bruised his ankles painfully, his back was on fire but he did not care. The knowledge that there was another human being on the other side of the wall was like a rope he could cling to.
But it was agonizingly slow work.
As Ralph worked deeper into the wall, it became more difficult to get at the mortar. Time, however, so long his enemy, was now his ally. Even the pain in his back and ankles served his purpose. It reminded him that he was still alive, still fighting. And always the tap-tap-tap on the other side, spurring him on.
Eventually, Ralph had dug as deep as the bolt would go. He sat up and worked his fingers into the gap, picking away with his fingernails. Calloused as they were by years of hard labour, his fingers were soon torn and bleeding, and still he had not broken through. How thick is this damned wall? What if he never broke through? What if he had to remain alone in the darkness?
His fingers were so numb that he barely noticed the prick. Only when he felt it a second time did he jerk them back.
‘Who’s there?’
After so long, the sound of another voice was like a bucket of water thrown in his face: a shock and a delight all at once.
‘Noah,’ Ralph said, using his nickname without a second thought.
‘Please tell me that they put you in here for murdering Sergeant Jakes.’
Ralph laughed at this statement. It set his back alight with pain once again, but it was worth it. He could not remember the last time he had even smiled.
‘I wish I had,’ Ralph said.
‘If he went to hell, the devil himself would throw him back out. I should have drowned him when I had the chance.’
‘You were the pilot, the man who took the brig over the bar.’
‘For my sins.’
A pause. Ralph had almost forgotten how to speak to another person. ‘They say your name is Gonzalo.’
‘What else do they say about me?’
‘That you are Spanish. Or Peruvian.’ Ralph paused. ‘Though you do not sound Spanish,’ he added. The man’s accent was impossible to place, but his English was fluent and natural.
‘I have been . . . many places.’
There was a warning behind the words, cautioning Ralph not to ask more. But after two weeks alone in a cell, Ralph’s curiosity could not be contained. ‘Where is home?’
‘If I ever had a home, it was so long ago that I do not remember it. I do not like to think on the past.’
‘That is all I have,’ Ralph said. ‘Without the past, how can I believe that there will be a future?’
‘I gave up on the future a long time ago.’
‘Then why did you try to escape the brig?’
‘I wanted a change of scenery.’
Ralph laughed again. There was something quicksilver in the man, the way he could turn despair to dry-witted mockery.
‘I heard they caught you in Jamaica.’ Ralph remembered the speculation about the man’s origins, Jacob’s comment that he looked half African.
‘I was only passing through. The slaves there fancied their freedom; I thought I might help them.’ A sigh. ‘Of course, the British crushed them. They killed the blacks in their hundreds, even after they surrendered. Because I looked white enough, they gave me prison instead. A hulk in Bermuda, breaking rocks for the harbour.’
For a moment, Ralph glimpsed the immensity of the convict system the British state administered, its iron tentacles stretching from island to island all around the world. How many other men were caught in that archipelago, breaking rocks and cutting trees to maintain the empire?
‘I escaped from Bermuda,’ Gonzalo continued. ‘When they caught me, they chose not to hang me; they preferred to punish me more severely. It is their policy, if they recapture a man who has broken out from one of their prisons, to send him to the worst place imaginable.’
‘They did the same with me.’ Ralph saw now that it was the same inexorable fate that had brought them both here, two men who would never stop fighting to escape their chains.
‘The Medway hulks, Bermuda, even Botany Bay . . . they are all merely rungs on a ladder descending into this hell they have constructed,’ Gonzalo continued. ‘Macquarie Harbour is the bottom of it.’
There was no bitterness in his voice. Ralph thought of his own despair, curled in a ball on the prison floor. How did a man stay so calm after he had lost everything?
‘How did you break through the wall?’
‘I found a nail in the boatyard. I managed to hide it before Jakes locked me away.’
‘If you were hoping to escape again, you have come the wrong way.’
Ralph heard a dry sound from the far side of the wall. It might have been a chuckle, or simply the man clearing his throat.
‘When I walk out of here, it will not be through a hole in the wall.’
‘You are still planning to escape?’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘When I first came here, I tried to escape. They caught me. I tried again twice more after that. After the last, I decided that it was impossible.’
‘There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’
Ralph recognised the line from Hamlet: it was clear that Gonzalo was an educated man. ‘I escaped from Robben Island,’ he said, resenting the implicit rebuke in Gonzalo’s words, as if Ralph had simply not tried hard enough. ‘And I tell you, it will take more than thinking to get out of here.’
‘Robben Island?’ Gonzalo stirred. ‘Cape Town?’
‘Do you know it?’
‘I fought in a battle there.’
‘That must have been some time ago.’
‘Thirty years.’
They fell silent.
‘If we got a ship, I could get us over the bar,’ Gonzalo said at last.
‘So could I. And if we had wings, we could fly out of here.’
‘Overland, then.’
‘Overland is miles of uncharted forest, populated by natives who have been warred on for so long that they will kill a white man on sight. Even if you reached the coast, what then? By sea, we are five thousand miles from any safe harbour.’ It was the same problem Ralph had faced in Hobart Town. ‘You cannot do that in a dugout.’
‘There are ways.’
‘How?’
For a long moment, all Ralph heard was the drip of water through the roof of his cell. Then, speaking so softly that he could barely make out the words, Gonzalo said: ‘Many years ago, I was aboard a ship that sank. I was the only survivor. For three days I clung to a broken yard, more than half dead.’ He trailed off, the memory clearly painful even now. ‘I could have given up – it would have been so easy; I had lost everything – but I clung on. And just when I thought my arms had no strength left, when the spar was so waterlogged that it could no longer hold me up, a Yankee whaler found me.’
‘A chance in a million,’ Ralph retorted.
‘Our chances are better here. There are plenty of whalers and sealers that pass by Van Diemen’s Land. If we reached the coast, we could lie low until we spied a sail, paddle out to her and say that we had been shipwrecked.’
‘They would see through that lie in a moment.’
‘If they wanted to. But think of it. You are the captain of a whaler bound for Chile or Peru or America. Two men come aboard – both able sailors. Do you put your ship about, risk sending her over the bar of Macquarie Harbour, simply to enquire of the commandant if he has lost two prisoners? Or do you thank God for two extra hands, ask no questions, and continue on your passage with no one any the wiser?’
‘It would depend on the captain.’
‘Nine men out of ten would look the other way. Those are odds I would take.’
‘We would still be at the mercy of whichever vessel we went aboard.’
‘I do not care where I go, so long as it is far from here.’
‘I have a wife and son that I must get back to,’ Ralph said.
‘And I have nothing. So why is it you who are so reluctant to try to escape this hell on earth?’
Ralph thought about that. A man with nothing had nothing to lose. But if Ralph could not break out of Macquarie Harbour, he would die alone. For Ann and Harry, he might as well never have existed.
A wave of shame hit him, guilt that he had wasted so many years. But perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps fate had been holding him back for this moment, for Gonzalo to arrive and provide the key to unlock his chains.
Ten to one. A hundred to one. A million to one. It did not matter the odds: he had to try. ‘We will escape together,’ Ralph said firmly. He believed his own words.
Being no longer solitary, Ralph’s confinement became bearable.
Alone in the dark, he had felt his soul eaten away. Talking with Gonzalo recalled him to life. Even when they did not talk – and there were long hours when they sat with their own thoughts – the silence no longer troubled him. It was companionable, something shared.
Of course there was the risk of being caught, but fear was better than despair. And the gaolers never looked too hard when they opened the doors to see if their captives were still breathing. The stench kept them on the threshold of the cell.
When they did talk, Ralph and Gonzalo – like prisoners everywhere – mostly talked of escape.
‘Three years ago, five men ran from the logging camp,’ Ralph told Gonzalo. ‘Two weeks later, one of them – man by the name of Treadwell – came back. Said he’d rather take any number of lashes than live one more day in the bush.’
‘What happened to the others that went with him?’
‘Two were killed by natives, one broke his leg and was left to die. The fourth was found by a search party. He’d been cut apart.’
‘By the natives?’
‘By his own companions,’ Ralph said. ‘Treadwell tried to deny it, but in the end he had to confess. The other convicts had killed the man and eaten him.’
Gonzalo grunted. ‘Are the natives cannibals?’
‘Not that I ever heard.’
‘Then there must be enough game to eat, if a man has the wit to find it.’
Ralph considered that. ‘I lived for months in the African wilderness, eating what I could trap.’
It was, by normal standards, an intriguing statement. Any other man would surely have asked to hear the full story. Gonzalo let it pass almost unremarked.
‘Then I will not have to watch for your carving knife in my back,’ was all he said.
This was the pattern they had fallen into. On the subject of escape, Gonzalo could talk for hours. On anything that touched his own life, he was mute. Nor did he show the least curiosity in Ralph’s past. It was as though Gonzalo’s mind was locked on the future, and he was incapable of turning his thoughts in any other direction.
Perhaps, Ralph thought, with a surge of fellow-feeling, he was too frightened of what he might see if he looked back.
But in the long hours when Gonzalo fell silent, or in the portions of the permanent darkness that Ralph thought of as ‘night’, he could not help wondering about the man on the other side of the wall.
Mostly, he knew that Gonzalo had fought – many times. He had fought the Spanish in South America (though Ralph did not think he was Spanish); he had fought the slave-owners in Jamaica (though he had not been a slave); he had even fought the French in the Napoleonic Wars, which must make him at least fifty years old, maybe nearer sixty.
Where was he from, though? I was born at sea. Did he have family? When Ralph had asked the question, early on, Gonzalo had fallen silent and had not spoken again for hours.
It did not matter how much time they spent talking together, Ralph always felt the presence of a second, invisible wall between them.
There was no day or night in the cells, but the meals constituted a rudimentary clock: watery porridge meant morning, watery soup meant evening. In an attempt to maintain some kind of human rhythm, Ralph mentally divided the time after breakfast into ‘day’, and after dinner into ‘night’. As much as possible, he and Gonzalo tried to sleep only during the night.
One night, Ralph had the dream again. He was back aboard the Tiger, fighting Adam Courtney while the ship burned about them. As always, he woke drenched in sweat, the scar on his cheek throbbing.
‘Are you in pain?’ Gonzalo asked. ‘I heard you scream.’
‘I had a bad dream.’
‘About a tiger?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I heard you say it.’
Ralph wondered what else he might have said in his sleep. ‘It was a dream about a ship. The one I told you about, that sank. She was called the Tiger.’
Water dripped from the roof. Ralph wondered if Gonzalo had nodded off. When he spoke again, his voice sounded different.
‘The open boat,’ Gonzalo said. ‘You said you survived three weeks?’
‘Near enough.’
‘When? Where?’
‘Fifteen years ago. Off the coast of Africa.’
Ralph lapsed into silence, his mind drifting between the dream and everything that had come after it. He did not notice how long Gonzalo had been quiet until his companion said: ‘What is your name? Your real name, I mean?’
It struck Ralph as a strange question to be asking in the dead of night. But there was no reason, save habit, not to give it: it was written in the governor’s log book, after all.
‘Ralph Courtney.’
Again, silence stretched out in the darkness until Gonzalo said: ‘When I was a sailor, I served under Admiral Sir Robert Courtney.’
A knot of dread tightened in Ralph’s stomach. ‘He was a distant cousin of my father’s.’
‘He had a son – Adam Courtney, I think. He was a sea captain, too. Men said he would be a great admiral like his father, but I never heard what became of him.’
The knot in Ralph’s stomach was suddenly so tight that he could hardly breathe. It is only a coincidence, Ralph told himself. There was no way Gonzalo could know who Ralph had been dreaming about.
‘Adam Courtney died at sea.’
Chains rattled on the other side of the wall. The ghostly sound made Ralph shiver, though it was probably only Gonzalo settling himself.
‘I thought that must be so.’
When Ralph woke again, the knot in his stomach was still there. The conversation from the night before came back to him in snatches.
‘Gonzalo?’ he called.
There was no answer from the cell next door.
Suddenly, Ralph heard the bolt on the door start to slide open. The guards were coming – and the hole in the wall was still open. He felt for a lump of mortar to plug it, but there was none big enough to hand, Desperately, he shoved his hand into the latrine bucket and scooped out a handful of excrement. He smeared it over the hole like caulk.
‘Time’s up,’ said a redcoat, pulling the door open. ‘Sergeant says that you can come out of your hole.’
Ralph hesitated. The redcoat clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘What’s the matter? Need time to pack your things?’ He jabbed a baton at Ralph. ‘Christ, you stink.’
Ralph got up and shuffled forward. As he came out into the whitewashed corridor, he saw the door to the next cell standing open. Like him, Gonzalo was emerging, blinking, into the light.
The two men turned towards each other. Ralph longed to see the man who had kept him the right side of sanity, but even the dim light thrown by the torches that the redcoats carried was too much for his eyes. Gonzalo’s outline was blurred.
Squinting, Ralph had an impression of matted hair and a wild beard, dark skin and piercing eyes.
Gonzalo was staring at Ralph in turn, with unsettling, almost furious concentration. He is looking at my scars, Ralph realised.
Ralph let him look. He had long since stopped trying to conceal what he was.
‘Where did you get those scars?’ Gonzalo asked.
‘A sea fight.’
‘No talking!’ The butt of a rifle against Ralph’s shoulder jerked him away.
The redcoats gave the men no time to wash themselves or exchange the stinking rags that had been their clothes for anything better. A soft rain fell from the early morning sky as they were ushered around the windbreaks, past the rope walk and the sailmaker’s loft and down to the shore. After so long confined in a tiny cell, Ralph swayed and staggered, nearly tripping over his fetters. The redcoats laughed at the entertainment.
Jakes was waiting on the waterfront. Ralph tried to stand tall, to show that the ordeal had not broken him, but, seeing his condition, Jakes’ lip curled with pleasure.
‘Learned your lesson?’
Ralph nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Gonzalo stared at the ground in silence.
‘Let’s see your stripes,’ Jakes said. Before Ralph could comply, the redcoats yanked his shredded shirt down to his waist. A pale-faced man in a faded black coat came forward and peered at Ralph’s back. He was the prison surgeon, though Ralph doubted his credentials would stand much scrutiny. His main contribution to the prisoners’ health was keeping them too terrified of his care to ever admit they were sick.
