The Secret River (6 page)

He saw that he had married a terrier, and could only admire her, being himself in a trance of despair in which he blindly worked but could not find the will to care about a leaking roof or a stopped chimney.

We got each other
, she reminded him on the pile of rags that was their bed in Butler’s Buildings. He felt her shaking against him and thought she was crying, as she did sometimes, stormily, passionately, out of nowhere. But she was laughing.
Each other and
all them fleas, that is
, she said.
We won’t never be lonely here
, she went on.
Will we?
And was pushing up against him in the way she knew he could not resist, and finally calling out in triumph.

Butler’s Buildings was what he had known through his childhood. Having once hoped for something better, and been within reach of it, he could not face going back to it. Left to himself, he would have let himself slip under the surface of life like a man fallen into water that was too cold to fight.

She kept him going, even when hunger began to pinch. He had not forgotten how wearisome it was when the emptiness was always there. He was tired at the thought of it, would have turned his face to the wall, the way Mrs Middleton had, and given up. Had never thought that a Freeman of the River Thames could go hungrier than a prentice, could be as starving as ever he had been in Tanner’s Lane. He tried to put a brave face on it, but he knew that hunger could last a lifetime.

Sal, perhaps from innocence, treated want as a temporary accident, something two people as quick as themselves could overcome. She took a couple of eggs off a stall one day, slipping them into the baby’s shawl while everyone was watching a couple of dogs fighting. She made a good story of it to Thornhill that night:
I’d
a got three, Will, only the bleeding dogs kissed and made up too soon
. She laughed, remembering, and he laughed with her, both of them warmed with the egg in their stomachs.
Started sniffing each other’s
arses, that
weren’t
no good to me!

It was her first theft and she was as proud of it as a child.

He told her what a clever thief she was, but his heart was heavy. His life was going backwards.

From the tiny window of their room they could see the fowls in Ingram’s yard underneath them all day, scratching, bustling, flying at the crusts and peelings flung out the kitchen door by Ingram’s cook. The Thornhills would have fought the fowls for those crusts, except that Mr Ingram’s servant was always in the yard, and watched the Thornhills sourly, knowing what was in their minds.

It was Sal’s idea. It was a matter of being Johnny-on-the-spot,
she said, and keeping their wits about them. They waited until they saw the servant staggering towards the privy one afternoon, undone by liquor. Thornhill dashed down and seized the nearest hen and got it under his coat and up to their room again. They had it out and were just about to wring its neck when there were feet on the stairs, and shouts of
Thief!
But quick-witted Sal thrust the thing out the window, where it landed on the roof of the little outhouse below and stalked about there clucking while they tried to shoo it off, back down into the yard. The stupid thing stood there cackling, and they could hear the servant yelling out,
I seen a
fowl come out the window!

When Mr Ingram came in, red-faced, in search of his hen, there was nothing there, only a feather on the floor. When he looked out the window he saw the hen on the roof below. But Thornhill claimed he had just woke up, was about to go down to the port to begin work, and Sal swore blind,
He has not left the room
in the last six hours, and the damned fowl must have got up on the roof itself
,
we know nothing of it whatsoever, as God is our witness
.

When Ingram had gone, grumbling, the Thornhills laughed together. For having to be suppressed, their laughing went on longer than it might otherwise, because what was really so funny? Then there was a long silence in the room. Sal picked up a fold of her old skirt, the only one she had now, stained and patched and ragged round the hem, and said,
We are just about so our stomachs are
flapping on our backbones, Will
, and all the fun had gone out of her voice.
That is the fact of it
.

He worked, day after day, for whoever would employ a journeyman with no boat of his own. He carried the gentry to and fro and came to hate them warm in their furs, their hands deep in their pockets, their eyes almost hidden by their caps, feet snug in big warm boots, while his bare ones were freshly wet a hundred times a day and froze in between times while he waited for their pleasure.

When he could, he worked on the lighters owned by luckier men, and had only the wind and the tide to hate. With a load of coals or timber he pulled away at the oars, reduced to an animal, head down and mind blank. He felt like a man who had lost an arm, still waving the stump around. There was a great emptiness in him, which was the space where hope had been.

~

There were such things as honest watermen. The dour God-botherer James Mann at St-Katherine-by-the-Tower was one. He was steady, had his regulars who insisted on him, and did not waste money on a pipe of baccy or a mess of fried eel while he waited for fares, but cracked an abstemious walnut and made it last.

But a waterman with a wife and child could not live on what he could earn. Most watermen were thieves, although some went about it in a more businesslike way than others. Thomas Blackwood had a lighter, the
River Queen
, number 487, which looked the same as any other lighter until he raised the false bottom to reveal the compartment in which quantities of lifted objects could be spirited away.

In the general way of things only foolish men were caught—those too bold, working in daylight, or without having greased up the right men. But a man could be unlucky too. Collarbone was one of life’s unlucky ones: to be born with that bright port-wine stain over half his face was already a cruel fate. But perhaps in his case some other man made a pound or two by informing. There was no shortage of men who would do that.

Collarbone had been a watchman on Smith’s lighter at Customs House Quay, with thirty-three casks of best Spanish brandy in the hold. He went on his watch at six, and at midnight another man came to relieve him, but as Collarbone stepped onto the dock the officer of the watch stopped him and rubbed him
down and discovered the bladders in his coat pocket. Collarbone wrenched away, leaving his coat in the officer’s hands, and pelted up St Dunstan’s Hill, but another officer was waiting for him there and he was caught. Being of a fine quality, the brandy was worth more than forty shillings, so there was no argument but that Collarbone must hang.

The day before, Thornhill went to see him in Newgate. They sat together at the long table which was one of the luxuries of those condemned to die, and Collarbone told him the whole story.
Then I
pull out the
gimblet
and the tube and I says, I suppose this is what you is looking
for?
And grinned at the memory, as if it was nothing but a story.

But Thornhill could imagine it, was familiar with the choking feeling of thievery and knew it to be no joke. No matter how often he did it, there was that feeling of the breath already stopped in his throat by the fear of it, even before they got him and hanged him.

Collarbone had laughed, but now he went a greasy pale. Hid his face in his hands. When he looked at Thornhill again his eyes were wide, not seeing the man in front of him. It was as if he was trying to stare his way right out of this room, all the way back to that day two months before, when he had got up and eaten a slice of bread for breakfast, standing by the window in his small clothes, and had not yet laid a hand to the cask of Spanish brandy that had brought him to this place.

Being turned off was a nasty death but if you were lucky it was over in a trice. The executioner, having weighed you the night before and done certain sums, calculated the distance you had to drop to break your neck clean. The next morning at eight o’clock, the trapdoor opened beneath the man with the rope around his neck and he fell a short distance as if jumping into the river off Lambeth Pier. If Mr Executioner had totted up the numbers right, he jerked up short, his head snapped sideways by the knot, his neck broken.

But such quick death was no spectacle. The crowd grew
restive, threw peelings and bones at the body twirling on the end of the rope like a sack of coffee being hoisted up the side of Lamb’s warehouse.

There, in the condemned cell, Collarbone begged Thornhill to buy him a quick death, and for old time’s sake Thornhill did, doing the rounds of Warner and Blackwood and the rest, and putting half a crown in himself. He got the coins through the grille, into the outstretched hand attached to Mr Executioner’s invisible body. It was all a man could do for a friend.

Sal had pawned the stool and their second blanket to provide the half-crown but would not go to witness the hanging. It seemed right, somehow, to keep Collarbone company on his last journey, so next morning Thornhill stood with Rob in Newgate Yard in the grey light of the dawn and watched his friend take the few awkward steps up to the scaffold. Mr Executioner stepped away and Collarbone fell.

But it seemed that Mr Executioner had done his sums wrong after all, or the coins slipped through the grille were not enough. The fall did not break Collarbone’s neck, only tightened the thick rope around his windpipe. Thornhill could hear the gargling as he tried to breathe, saw how his feet kicked and kicked at the air, his shoulders writhed, his head in the canvas hood tossed desperately, twitching like a fish on a hook.

The crowd approved of Collarbone’s death.

It was Rob’s first hanging. He stared with his mouth open and when it was finished, poor Collarbone finally cut down, he turned and spewed onto a little dog pawing at its mistress’s skirt, and the woman screeched as raw as a Billingsgate fishwife in spite of all her fine silks.

Clean as a whistle, pet
, he told Sal.
Never felt a blessed thing
. She looked away quickly and did not meet his eye again, only went on darning the heel of her stocking, darning the darn over the darn. She sighed and turned the thing around in her hand so she could
come at it with the needle from another angle, and he did not know whether she believed him or not.

~

Mr Lucas was a fat man with a striped waistcoat that made the most of his belly. He was the owner of several lighters and had a foreman, Yates, to employ such lightermen as he pleased. Yates was a fair man and spread the work around.

The word was, Lucas had his eye on being Lord Mayor of London. He was a pious sort of fellow, at least on a Sunday, because that was what got a man to be Lord Mayor of London, and he took a dim view of roguery on his boats. Other masters might turn a blind eye, letting the poor lightermen have a few perquisites, but not Matthias Prime Lucas. A man whose heart was set on being Lord Mayor of London needed every penny for the buying of grand dinners and the supplying of gifts, and it did not leave much for being generous to his workers.

John Whitehead had been foolish enough to be caught at Brown’s Quay moving seventy pounds of hemp out of a lighter belonging to Mr Lucas. Whitehead had gone on his knees, it was said, and begged mercy of Mr Lucas, but Mr Lucas had spoken of making an example. Whitehead had swung.

In the beginning Thornhill was cautious, now and then helping himself to a bladder full of Portuguese sack, or a box of tea. He had one or two near misses, with the officers swooping down out of nowhere. By the time he had been three years in Lucas’s employ, he had learned the value of a moonless night and the importance of having a skiff close at hand to make away in. Whitehead had been caught because he had not slipped the marine police enough. Thornhill kept them well oiled with bottles of French brandy. The only thing a man could not guard against was the gabbers, those men who for five or ten pounds would inform.

Thornhill had his web of useful men. One of these was
Nugent at Messrs Buller & Co, Shipowners, a clerk who appreciated a few shillings extra. It was Nugent who let him know about the Brazil wood, worth nigh on ten pounds the piece, arrived on the
Rose Mary
.

So when Yates the foreman told him to go down to Horselydown, to the
Rose Mary
of Mr Buller’s line, and bring a load of timber up the river to Three Cranes Wharf, he was ready. He made sure the moon would not rise that night until near dawn, and told Rob to stand ready to join him down at the
Rose Mary
.

The evening before, he took the empty lighter down with the tide to Horselydown, arriving there at midnight. He made the lighter fast to the side of the
Rose Mary
and lay down in it for a few hours’ sleep before daylight, when he would load the timber and wait for the tide to take him up to Three Cranes Wharf.

So far, he was as innocent as the driven snow.

He enjoyed these nights on the river, the comforting sound of the water against the hull. The
Rose Mary
beside him was nothing more than another texture of blackness against the blackness of the sky, where the stars were blotted out by cloud.

A man with a clear conscience did not need to fear the dark.

He thought of Sal, tucked up in the bed with the child. She had come to him, that very morning, and told him that there was another on the way: another mouth to find food for. She had laughed at the way his eyes went straight to her belly.
It ain’t
showing yet, Will!
But had taken his hand and laid it on her pinny, over the place where his seed had planted itself, and smiled into his face.

She never asked too closely about where their money came from, was only pleased to have a loaf in the cupboard and clean milk for the child. She knew as well as he did that a lighterman who was too scrupulous was likely to starve. But he felt in her a turning-away from the truth of that, and he never shared with her
those nights on the river when he fingered something or other that was not his own.