DESPITE THE HOUR, food was found for the new arrivals of Block Seven. Pickled fish, bread and water were served: ‘The sweetest repast I have ever taken,’ declared Roche. Each sailor had been issued with a hammock, a blanket, a pillow, rope yarns to sling the hammock, a piss pot, a wooden spoon and a three-gallon bucket. But that was the extent of the welcome. With the help of an old sailor, they walked the block in search of spaces. Lit only by the occasional candle, they passed row upon row of hammocks, sometimes slung in three tiers. Water dripped continuously from the ceiling.
‘Such a smell men make,’ murmured Joe. ‘And there must be five hundred or more in here.’
‘S’right,’ croaked the old man, stepping around the puddles of rainwater which had pooled on the floor. ‘’Nother five hundred souls upstairs, too. You’ll get used to the stink, but you don’t never get used to the cold ’n’ damp. Nor the lice neither.’
When a meagre space was found, an Eagle sailor would peel off and sling his hammock. They had walked the floor twice, but four of them – Joe, Roche, Jon Lord and Robert Goffe – still needed a berth.
‘How goes the war?’ asked the old man, leading them up a stone stairway to the first floor.
‘Didn’t you hear?’ Joe was astonished. ‘The war is done. It’s peace now. We’ll be going home.’
The old man’s weathered, deathly face showed no emotion. Joe wondered if he’d heard. He tried again. ‘They say it’s peace. The treaty was signed in Belgium just last week.’ Again, there was no reply.
They followed him to a wide landing lit with a solitary lantern, and through more doors. If anything, the stench was worse here; Lord and Goffe gagged as they breathed in the fetid air. This floor seemed warmer, thick with pipe smoke and ripe with sickness. Around them, the groans, howls and arguments seemed unrelenting.
‘No folks’ll be sleepin’ here tonight,’ muttered Roche. ‘Bedlam, more like. If anyone ain’t movin’, they’re most likely dead.’
‘That sergeant seemed to think Block Seven was a cushy berth,’ said Joe, holding his hat in front of his mouth.
‘Maybe the others are worse,’ said Roche.
‘Hard to imagine,’ said Joe, looking round. The four remaining members of the Eagle crew were on their own. ‘Where’s the old-timer gone?’
A brawl clattered past them. One of the men fighting was completely naked, the others carried bottles, whether as weapons or to sate their thirst was unclear.
‘The stairs went on to another floor,’ said Joe, as the tumult disappeared into darkness. ‘Maybe he went up again?’
The landing lamp was weak, its flickering, feeble light reaching only as far as the first few steps, but as their eyes adjusted, they climbed further. With what felt like the last of their strength, the four sailors dragged their kit to the second floor. Another stone landing, more heavy wooden doors. Goffe and Lord eased them open. Silence. No fighting. No madness. The only smell was dampness.
‘Here,’ said Joe, dropping his hammock. ‘Please, here.’
‘But why is it empty?’ whispered Goffe. ‘There must be a reason. Why don’t anyone come up here?’
Will Roche dropped his bucket and the resulting clang reverberated around the empty-sounding room. ‘Whatever the reason, it can wait till the mornin’. We have marched, fought and drank. The war is finished, but the English still have us jailed. So now we sleep.’
No one disagreed. They walked a few paces, spread their hammocks on the wooden floor and were asleep in seconds.
Joe Hill slept like a dead man. He didn’t notice daylight coming a scant six hours later or the small boy crouched by his side.
‘Mister! Mister! Wake up! You shouldn’t be here!’ Slender hands shook Joe’s shoulders. ‘You have to move, sir. They won’t like you sleeping like this.’ He kept shaking and, when that failed, he kicked Joe sharply on his shins. That worked.
‘Who are you?’ Joe managed through sticky lips, looking up into bright blue eyes and a face full of freckles under a mop of red hair.
‘Master Tommy Jackson, sir.’ Great clouds of steam came from the boy’s mouth as he spoke.
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirteen, sir. Fourteen this March 25th.’
‘And why shouldn’t we be here?’
The boy looked as though he might have a hundred answers, then decided on the best one he could think of. ‘’Cos you’ll get stabbed with knives by Mr Cobb or Mr Lane if you stay,’ he said. ‘This is their space, you see.’
‘Is that right?’ said Joe, hauling himself up and wincing; every muscle was screaming. He had a pounding headache. He put his tricorn on his head and looked round the second-floor room they had collapsed into. It was vast: two hundred feet long, fifty wide and with a high ceiling. There were tables, chairs and piles of books.
The boy nudged him again. There was no doubting the urgency in his voice. He spoke in short, nervous bursts. ‘Please, mister. You need to wake your friends.’
‘All right, Master Jackson, I get it,’ said Joe. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘And quietly,’ urged the boy.
‘Quietly,’ agreed Joe, smiling. As he tried to rouse his shipmates, the boy stood lookout by the door.
Joe gave Roche, Goffe and Lord a gentle nudge with his boot. ‘Downstairs. Clear for action.’
Sailors wake fast. Even exhausted, crapulous sailors can be fully alert in seconds if the order demands it. Their departure wasn’t as silent as young Tommy Jackson would have liked – he winced at every clank of the buckets on the stone steps – but as they stumbled on to the ground floor he seemed to relax a little. The main prison doors were open, but he steered them into the living quarters. Wooden shutters had been opened on small, glassless windows, but what light there was seemed weak and ineffectual.
‘Are we safe now?’ asked Joe.
Tommy wasn’t sure. His words still tumbled from him. ‘You can sleep here or on the first floor. But not in the cockloft.’
‘But it’s empty,’ said Roche, wiping sleep from his eyes. ‘Who says we can’t sleep there?’
The boy looked anxiously between the four new arrivals. ‘It’s orders is all.’
‘What was your ship, Master Jackson?’ asked Joe.
‘HMS Orontes,’ said Tommy, relieved to be on surer ground. ‘There were five of us Yankees on board who’d been pressed to fight for the English. We gave ourselves up when the war started. Never wanted to fight our own country.’ The boy’s eyes darted between the Eagle crew. ‘Only four of us left now. Joe Addis got the bloody flux. Buried in the graveyard outside the wall he is. With two hundred and twelve other good Americans. Maybe two hundred and thirteen soon – Mr Bloom was taken sick last week.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ said Roche. ‘So is he in the hospital?’
Tommy shook his head. ‘It’s full, so he’s here. Block Seven, floor one.’
‘So that’s why it smelled like death last night,’ said Joe. ‘It was death. We need to find a berth down here. Do the English care where we sleep, Master Jackson?’
Tommy shrugged. ‘You go where you’re told.’
‘Which block are you in?’ asked Lord.
‘I’m in Three. Been there since June 13th last year.’
‘So how come you were in Seven?’ asked Roche. ‘Do you go on patrol, lookin’ for sleepers who are out o’ bounds?’
‘No, sir. I’m the crier,’ he said, his obvious pride making Roche’s frown melt a little. ‘Mr Snow caught me in the square, asked me to check on you. And he also said you might want to come to church. I can show you, if you like.’
The four men from the Eagle laughed.
‘Church?’ exclaimed Roche. ‘They have us in English chains as it is. I’ll not listen to any more Englishmen than I must.’
‘And you can barely understand what they’re saying, anyway, can you, Mr Roche?’ said Joe.
‘Ain’t my fault they can’t speak properly,’ said Roche. ‘I’m stayin’ here, where all these happy Americans live and talk clearly. But you go, Joe, you have your cross to bear. Give me your things. I’ll find us a nice room with flowers.’ He took Joe’s hammock, ropes and buckets and dragged them off, muttering, ‘And down with the English!’ into the gloom, Lord and Goffe following behind.
‘It ain’t no English church,’ said Tommy, watching them go, ‘I should’ve told ’em.’
‘Church is church,’ said Joe. ‘Unless you have dancing girls, Mr Roche will not be attending. But I’ll come to your church, Master Jackson, if I’m not too late.’ He paused. ‘It was getting dark when we arrived, and I confess I didn’t see a church …’
‘Oh no, sir, there’s no building. Church is in Four. The cockloft of Block Four.’
Halfway down the steps to the main entrance, the sound of heavy boots interrupted Joe’s reply. Five heavily bearded men armed with cudgels and knives appeared in the doorway then took the steps four at a time. They glanced briefly at Joe and Tommy as they went past.
‘Let me guess,’ said Joe. ‘That’s who you came to warn us about?’ Tommy nodded. ‘Who are they?’ asked Joe.
‘It’s them Rough Allies,’ said Tommy in a whisper. No further information was forthcoming.
‘And who are the Rough Allies?’ Joe persisted.
Tommy, hands deep in his jacket pockets, frowned. ‘They get things done,’ he said flatly.
‘I bet they do,’ said Joe, as they walked quickly out of the block.
Freezing rain assailed them and they found shelter at the back of a crowd taking warmth from a blazing coffee stove. Joe squinted into the gale. There was no view to speak of. Low, rolling cloud blanketed whatever there might be to see. The seven prison blocks looked, if anything, even more forbidding than they had the day before.
‘How old?’ asked Joe. ‘How old are these monsters?’
Tommy shrugged. ‘They were built for the French. So six years? Maybe seven.’
‘They look ancient,’ said Joe. ‘A thousand years old at least.’ He edged round the coffee crowd to the narrow, buffeted alley that ran between Six and Seven and gaped at the monstrous edifices.
Tommy read his face well. ‘You get used to it,’ he said.
The storm had only served to enhance the prison’s unmistakeable air of menace. The blocks, it seemed to Joe, had been built to avenge a nation’s wounded pride at the loss of their America. He had survived British ships, their cannonfire, rifles and pistols, but now he wondered if it would be their buildings that would be the end of him.
‘I’ll take your word on that,’ he said, and he and Tommy made their way to Block Four.
‘Them cuts on your head,’ said Tommy, looking up at Joe.
‘What about them?’ said Joe, staring at the ground.
‘Where’d they come from, then?’
But the memories were too raw, too recent. ‘They come from bad times,’ Joe said eventually.
‘Worse than these times?’ asked Tommy, and Joe heard again the voices of the savages he had been chained to on the prison ship.
‘Worse than these times,’ he agreed.
‘Well, that’s somethin’, ain’t it?’ said Tommy.
‘Yes, I suppose.’ Joe smiled one of his almost-smiles. ‘I like you, Crier, I think we’ll be good friends.’
‘Really?’ Tommy’s face radiated pleasure. He looked, momentarily, like the thirteen-year-old boy he was. ‘Thanks, Mr Hill.’
‘Joe is fine.’
‘Thanks, Joe,’ said Tommy, sounding pleased with his morning’s work.
‘These Rough Allies,’ continued Joe, wiping rain from his face, ‘was one of them boxing last night?’
Tommy nodded.
‘Of course. The one with the wood. And you said if we didn’t move from the cockloft in Seven that a Mr Cobb and a Mr Lane would stab us.’
Another nod. ‘S’their space, so they say. In Six and Seven. They say they don’t like intruders.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Joe. ‘And was that Mr Cobb and Mr Lane we just saw? Do they have many men working for them?’
More nodding.
‘There are thugs and bullies on every ship, so it’ll be the same here. They run the place?’
‘When the Brits ain’t looking,’ said Tommy.
‘Which is when?’
‘Most o’ the time.’
They had walked past Block Six, which was set slightly further back than its neighbours, then a busy Block Five. Sailors, indifferent to the weather, huddled around fires, eating bubbling stew or smoking pipes. Tommy strode on, but Joe called him back.
‘Block Four is a Negro prison?’
‘Yessir.’
‘The Rough Allies run that, too?’
Tommy laughed. ‘No, sir.’
‘But we can go in?’
‘Yessir.’
‘How is that possible?’
The crier smiled. A proper, uninhibited, face-splitting smile. ‘It is possible, Mr Hill, ’cos King Dick says it is possible.’