The Secret River (3 page)

~

There was one morning every November when he woke to a quilted silence. The room was lit as from below, the split and sagging timbers of the roof, the shingles black with years, painfully illuminated. Even with his head under the blanket he knew it was there waiting for him: snow. It smoothed over the piles of filth, stopped the stinking tanneries in their tracks, covered the smells under its whiteness. These were good things.

But the winter he turned fourteen, the river froze over, stone-solid for two weeks. Down on the ice there was a frost-fair, with Irish fiddlers and dancing bears, chestnut stalls and every man and woman loose-mouthed with gin. For those without the pennies to pay for the chestnuts and liquor, though, the fair was a time of being pinched hard. With the river froze over, there was no work on the ships, no work at the tan-yards.

In the little room off Mermaid Court, the Thornhills were starving. Mary was stitching away at shrouds as if her life depended on it, her fingers too cold to work properly, but the window that gave her light had no glass, so it let in the wind as well. Lizzie, taken with the quinsy, lay abed groaning and panting, John was out trying to lift potatoes from Tyrrell’s stall with young Luke watching out, and there was Rob mooning about smiling, poor loon, when there was nothing to smile about.

It was Mr Middleton, that gloomy, though kindly man, who saved him. One more baby had died, yet another son who would not grow to learn his father’s trade and inherit his father’s business. Something had shifted in Mr Middleton, some hope finally died.
He is gone very stern, Will
, Sal told Thornhill.
Says there
will be no more babies
. After a long silence she went on:
No sons. Only
me
. He heard how she tried to keep her voice light, airy, saying words of no consequence, but he could hear the misery in it.

But then Mr Middleton told Thornhill that he would take him on as apprentice.
No thieving, mind
, he warned him.
Any thieving
and you are out on your ear
. For the sisters, Mr Middleton knew a man who needed plain sewing done, which would keep the wolf from the door.

~

On the hardest freeze of the year, a day in January when the pearly clouds themselves seemed made of ice and the air was painful to breathe, Mr Middleton took Thornhill up St-Mary-at-Hill to the Watermen’s Hall for his binding. A door led into a draughty passage flagged with worn stone, and here boys waited to be bound over. The bench they had to sit on was hard, and too narrow for a bottom, and the cold from the flagstones froze his feet in their wooden pattens, but he felt that on this day his life might lunge forward out of its rotten past. Mr Middleton sat puffing beside him from the steep climb up the hill and Thornhill felt breathless too, with the possibility of a future better than anything he could have hoped.

If he could get through the seven years of the apprenticeship he would be a freeman of the River Thames. Folk always needed to get from one side of the river to the other, and coal and wheat always had to be got to the docks from the ships that brought them. As long as he kept his health he would never outright starve. He swore to himself that he would be the best apprentice, the strongest, quickest, cleverest. That when freed in seven years he would be the most diligent waterman on the whole of the Thames.

With a trade behind him, he could marry Sal and keep her. By and by Mr Middleton would need a strong son-in-law to help him in his business and, in the natural course of things, inherit it.
All the closed doors of his life might spring open from this day forward.

The stairway was out of a dream, curving upwards like a coil of orange peel around a slender rail, towards the radiance pouring down from the skylight. At the top he hung back, had to be almost pulled by Mr Middleton into the grand room and stand on the Turkey rug under the glitter of the chandelier, feeling the fire blazing away, staring at the dark solemn pictures on the walls.

He stayed in the lee of Mr Middleton, who looked sterner than ever, his shoulders held back like one of the guardsmen at the Palace, as he faced a vast mahogany table behind which sat half a dozen men in robes. One, weighed down with a great bronze chain over his shoulders, said,
Morning Richard, and how is
Mrs Middleton?
And Mr Middleton spoke back in a wooden sort of voice,
Middling, Mr Piper, we
can’t
complain
.

Thornhill had never heard anyone address Mr Middleton by his first name, or seen him like this, tight with anxiety and humility. He saw that these men sitting behind their mahogany table were as far above Mr Middleton as Mr Middleton was above him. He had a sudden dizzying understanding of the way men were ranged on top of each other, all the way from the Thornhills at the bottom up to the King, or God, at the top, each man higher than one, lower than another.

The man with the chain asked,
Who is this lad, Richard?
And Mr Middleton answered in the same stiff way,
This is William
Thornhill, your lordship, and I am here to vouch for him
. Another of them asked,
Can he handle an oar?
And a little one on the end chimed in,
Has he got his river hands?

Mr Middleton’s voice was happier now, on solid ground as he answered,
Yes, Mr Piper, I had him row from
Hay’s
Wharf to the
Sufferance Dock and from Wapping Old Stairs to Fresh Wharf for this past
week gone
. The man with the chain cried,
Good man!
in the sort of way he might have spoken to a boy, but Mr Middleton stood
quiet, not seeming to think it cheek to be spoken to in such a way, which made Thornhill all the more apprehensive.

The flames were becoming uncomfortably hot on his behind. He had never been near such a roaring in a fireplace, had never known what it was to be too much heated, but he could feel the glow of it piercing his britches. His bottom was just about on fire, but he could not move forward without seeming impertinently close to the gentlemen in their robes. It all seemed part of the ordeal, something he must endure, along with the glances of these men who could reject him if they fancied.

Mr Piper was saying it again,
Good man
, but he was an old trembly sort of man, and it was clear that he had forgotten who was a good man, or why, patting his own arm as if congratulating himself.

Then a bald man said, straight to Thornhill,
Blisters healed yet,
sonny?
And Thornhill did not know whether to say yes or no, or even whether he should speak at all. His palms were still puffed up from all the heavy rowing Mr Middleton had been making him do, but they were no longer bleeding. He held them out without speaking, and there was a general laugh.

The bald man said,
Good lad, they have the look of a waterman’s
hands already, eh gentlemen? License granted, I would say
, and it was done.

~

Mr Middleton was a good master. For the first time in his life, Thornhill was not always hungry, not always cold. He slept on the flags of the kitchen on a straw mattress, rising and sleeping with the tide.

The tide was a tyrant. It would not wait, and if a lighterman missed the flood to get a load of coal up the river, even strong William Thornhill could not row against it, and would have to wait twelve hours to the next.

His blisters never got a chance to heal. They grew till they
burst, then they formed again, burst again, bled again. The oar-handles of the
Hope
were brown with his blood. Mr Middleton approved of that.
Only way to get your river hands, lad
, he said, and gave him a knob of fat to rub on them.

Seven years seemed a lifetime, but there was a lot to learn. The sets of the tide from Wapping over to Rotherhithe, where the tide swept onto Hay’s Roads and the eddies would drag a man down in a second if he fell overboard. How at Chelsea Reach the currents pulled and pushed at the boats because, they said, a set of fiddlers had been drowned there years before, and the river had been dancing in that spot ever since. How an oar, four times as long as a man, could take charge of its owner. How to shift the oar from the rowing crutch in the bow, canting the blade with a turn of the wrist, then running along the narrow gunwale with the oar as far as the quarter and with a quick weigh-down on the handle flinging it against the stern post.

Sometimes he forgot that he’d ever had to learn all the things he knew.

He learned other things, too, about the gentry. How they would make a meal of every farthing of the fare before they got in, arguing with long sentences full of
my good man
, and beating him down if there was a crowd of boats at the steps, and fares in short supply. How in the end he might take a fare from Chelsea Steps to St Katherine-by-the-Tower for a couple of pennies, just so as not to go home with nothing for the day. The way the actors on their way to the theatres at Lambeth dallied at the steps, keeping the boatman waiting there in the water holding the boat steady for as long as they pleased, getting in with never a glance at him, and practising their lines the whole journey as if they were alone in the world, the boatman nothing more than part of the landscape.

He discovered that the gentry had as many tricks as a rat to dun a poor waterman. He took a fellow across the water, who told
him to wait, for he would return shortly to be taken back over, and would pay him then for both trips together. Thornhill waited five hours, unwilling to lose the shilling he was owed, before he realised that the cheating shark must have cozened another waterman for his boathire back again.

Trusting gentry was not something he did twice.

But a waterman also needed to learn their whims and fancies: when they would arrive at Whitehall Stairs, wanting to be taken across to Vauxhall Gardens, and when they would want to come home again. To know when the whiting were running and they would want to go down to the Friend in Hand or the Captain, to sit out in the yard there beside the river and gorge themselves, and whether it was worth a waterman’s while to wait there or to row back up to Cornish Stairs where there might be a gentleman wishing to be taken to his country house at Richmond.

As the best prentice on the river, Thornhill had a way with the gentlemen, a loud cheery thing that he did, that rode above the plaintive cries of the others.
This way!
he roared.
Step right down
to the Hope, sir, finest vessel on the river!
He would whip off his old hat. His head of thick glossy hair was, he knew, better than any hat: with such vigorous hair, who could doubt the vitality of the rest of the system? He gestured grandly as he’d seen them do at the music hall,
Finest boat in Christendom, sir, not a boat on the river can come
to her!
and pointed to the Doggett’s badge on his sleeve, that showed he had won the apprentice’s race.
Here to
Gravesend
in four
minutes over the two hours, sir, I’ll have you to Billingsgate before you can get
your snuffbox out
.

The gentry seemed another species, more enigmatic than any Lascar, and it came upon him as a surprise that they might be driven by the same impulses as any other human animal. He was up to his thighs in the water one day, holding the boat up to the ramp, so his fares could get in without wetting their feet. He hardly glanced at them as they hailed him, being concerned only
to get enough fares for the day and go back to Mr Middleton’s warm kitchen. His legs were numbed, but the upper part of him was frozen, wet from the recent shower of rain, and whipped by the wind. He could smell his own hair, damp under his cap from the rain, a doggy sort of smell, and the wet old wool of his blue coat, and the red flannel waistcoat that had been a gift from Mr Middleton, whose frame could no longer be accommodated within it now that he had such a strong apprentice to do the work for him. The boat was bumping against his legs, driven in by the sharp wind that was whipping the surface into waves, and he was gripping the gunwale with both hands, busy steadying it, when he heard the plummy tones of the gentleman.
Be cautious, my love
, he said.
Don’t expose your leg to the boatman!

He was a white-faced, thin-chested fellow with a little pink rosebud mouth, his curls falling down his cheeks from under his hat, all care as he took his lady by the hand and around her back. His glance at Thornhill, standing in the mud and the water, his hands frozen in shape gripping the gunwale, was not so much one of scorn as of triumph.
Look at me, fellow, and what I have got!
It was a look that said that the white silk legs, and everything attached to them, were his property, in a way there was nothing in the world that was William Thornhill’s property, excepting only his black cap, shrunk in so many rains, that sat on top of his head like a pimple on an elephant’s behind.

The gentleman looked as though he would not know what to do with a female leg, and although he touched her, there was no pleasure in the touch: the woman, white stocking and silk slippers and all, was a thing he took pride of ownership in, but there was no love in that
my love
.

And there was the leg, level with the boatman’s eyes as its owner got herself over the gunwale, close enough, had he wished, to reach out and touch its silk surface. The slipper on the end of the leg was a miracle of frivolity, down here at Horsleydown Old
Stairs, on the muddy ramp. It seemed impossible that such a substantial person as this woman could be supported on two such tiny slips of poison-green silk. There was no back to the thing, but a little heel that gave her ankle a special fineness, and as she placed the slipper on the bow, the foot was turned outward so the curve of the ankle, the back of the foot, the daintiness of the heel, were all proffered for Thornhill’s close inspection.

Up past the leg was her face, and the mouth in the face said that she thanked her husband kindly,
my love
, for his care, but the face said she did not expect much fun from him, only this namby-pamby gallantry.