‘What’s your name, boy?’
I considered giving a falsehood but the blues knew me so I told the truth, as a lie would only have damned me further. ‘Turnstile,’ said I. ‘John Jacob Turnstile. An Englishman, late of Portsmouth.’
‘Ha!’ he cried, spitting on the ground, a great gob into the sawdust, the filthy swine. ‘Portsmouth be damned!’
‘It will be, Your Magnificence,’ said I to please him. ‘On the day of judgement. I have no doubt of it.’
‘How old are you, boy?’
‘Fourteen, sir.’
He licked his lips for a moment and I was sure that I could see some of those hideous black teeth moving around that dark canyon of a mouth, threatening to loosen themselves from their holding-gums in a bid for escape. ‘You stood before me a year ago,’ said he, pointing a waxy finger at me, the type you might see on an exhumed corpse. ‘I recall it now. Another act of larceny, I think it was.’
‘A misunderstanding,’ I suggested. ‘A prank gone wrong, nothing more.’
‘You were birched for it, were you not? I never forget a face from my courtroom or a rump from my whipping room. Tell me the truth now and God might spare you.’
I thought about it. There’s a world of meaning in the word ‘might’ and little of it was of use to me. But there was no advantage to be taken in lying for the records could be consulted in a trice. ‘You remember correctly,’ I said. ‘I was chastened with twelve lashes.’
‘And not one of them excessive,’ said he, looking down and making a note on a sheaf of papers before him. ‘I find you guilty, John Jacob Turnstile, of the malicious act,’ he said then in a quieter voice, a voice that suggested he had lost interest in me altogether then and wanted his dinner. ‘Guilty as charged, you naughty boy. Take him down, Bailiff. To the gaol for a twelvemonth.’
My eyes opened wide and, I confess, my heart made a jump of horror within me. The gaol for a twelvemonth? I wouldn’t emerge the boy I was when I entered it, I knew that much. I turned to the blue, my blue, and, praise on him, he looked at me too with a frown that suggested he was regretting taking me there at all, for there was no one in the courtroom who would have thought it a fitting punishment. A birching should have been the measure of it.
‘Your Honour—’ said the blue, my blue, but Mr Henderson was gone now, stormed off to his private chambers, no doubt to receive his instructions from the lords of the underworld, and the bailiff had his hands on me and was dragging me away.
‘What’s done is done,’ he said regretfully. ‘You must be brave, lad. You must remain staunch.’
‘Brave?’ said I with a cry of disbelief. ‘Staunch? In the gaol for a twelvemonth?’
There’s a time for bravery and a time for handing a fellow a loaded pistol and allowing him to depart the world in honour, and such a time was this. My legs gave from under me and before I knew it I was being taken through the doors, to what? To a year of torment and violation? Starvation and cruelty? I hardly dared to think about it.
4
WHAT A TIME OF IT, though! I don’t mind admitting that I descended the steps from the courtroom to the cells below ground with a heavy heart and low expectations. The day had begun brightly enough but had taken on such a dark complexion in only a matter of hours that I couldn’t help but wonder what further torment fate had in store for me. I had managed to enjoy a breakfast of half a kipper and the yolk of an egg at Mr Lewis’s establishment and had wandered to the marketplace without a care in the world. The conversation with the French gentleman had been of the intellectual variety, and I am one as likes a little intellectual discourse from time to time. And that pocket-watch of his, which came into my possession so effortlessly, might easily have been the making of me, for it was a fine piece with a solid band and a healthy hue and must have cost him a few pounds at the jeweller’s; had I retained possession, I would have brought it to a one-eyed man I knew whose business is the trade of stolen items and won half a crown for it. But all was lost now. I was away to the gaol and preparing my soul for the sufferance of who-knew-how-many indignities and scourges.
Am I too proud to recall the tears that were forming in my eyes even as I sat there and waited? I am not.
The bailiff had brought me downstairs to await my transport to Hades and I found myself confined to a cold room with only the stone floor to sit upon. The blue had thrown me inside without a word of apology or excuse and who was I expected to share with, only Mr Wilberforce, him as was sentenced before me. When I entered first, the great brute was positioned on the pot, his movements creating an otherworldly stench that made me back as far away from him as possible, but the door was slammed shut behind me and I had little choice but to confront his noxiousness with fortitude. For all I knew, he might be my companion for the time hence.
‘The old bastard sent you down too, did he?’ he asked me, grinning away, as misery prefers company. In response, I sought out the furthest corner of the cell and sat there, my knees bent up beneath my chin, my arms surrounding them. A fortress around me. I looked down at my feet and wondered how long the shoes I was wearing would remain my own once I was transported to my new home. And I thought of Mr Lewis, and the trouble I would be in with him when he discovered what had happened to me; I had seen him beat boys half to death for less.
‘He did,’ I admitted. ‘And unjustly too.’
‘What did he have you for, then?’
‘I stole a watch,’ I said, unable to look at him now, for he had stood up and was examining the contents of the pot like a medic or an old apothecary. ‘But him as I stole it from retrieved it, so no harm was done. Where’s the crime then, I ask you?’
‘You told the old bastard that, did you?’ asked Mr Wilberforce, and I shook my head. ‘How long did you get?’ he followed with.
‘A twelvemonth,’ said I.
He whistled through his teeth and shook his head. ‘That’s a stretch,’ he said. ‘Oh me, oh my, that’s a stretch and no two ways about it. How many years have you, lad, anyway?’
‘Fourteen,’ said I.
‘You’ll be older than your years when you emerge a year from now,’ he told me with a deal of pleasure – a wonderful piece of positive news for me to be getting on with. ‘I were in there myself when I were no more than a year or two older than you are now and I don’t want to tell you the things that happened to me. You wouldn’t sleep if I did.’
‘Then, don’t,’ I said, glaring across at him. ‘Keep your counsel and mind your business, you old sot.’
He stared at me then and curled his lip. If we were to be transported together and housed together, I knew that I must begin our acquaintance with a surly attitude in order to have him appraised of the fact that I was not one of those boys who would be made a servant of on account of my tender years.
‘Call me a drunk, will you, you wee scut?’ he asked, standing up and placing his hands on his hips as if he was posing for a statue of himself to be placed in Pall Mall. ‘That’s a slander if ever I heard one.’
‘I heard old Henderson say much the same thing,’ I told him then, warming to my topic. ‘He sent you to the gaol for three months on account of it. And her as was outside, crying her eyes out, your wife, was she?’