The Castaways

by Iain Lawrence

  “Then I’ll have no trouble finding him, will I?” With a push I was past. Silbury fell aside, and a gasp came up from the clerks.

  “Stop!” he cried. “If you don’t, I shall call for Mr. Roberts.”

  “Start calling,” I said without slowing.

  He shouted the name through the halls as I strode along. I came to the doors of Mr. Goodfellow’s office, turned the handle, and threw them open. They banged against the walls with a blow that set the gas lamps fluttering.

  Mr. Goodfellow was not at his high desk. He was seated instead in a three-wheeled chair that someone had pushed to the windows to give him a view. His back was toward me, but in a fashion that was almost pathetic to see, he shifted the chair until he faced me.

  A red blanket was drawn over his knees and his lap, and in the middle of it lay the Jolly Stone.

  He had aged a year in the week gone by. His face was haggard and drawn, his hair all limp and gray. There was a smell of sweat about him instead of perfume, and one of his hands had a tremor in it.

  “I saw you coming,” he said, cradling the Stone in his fingers. “A bone grubber’s wagon, no less. My, wouldn’t your father be proud? I believe you’ve outdone him, my boy.”

  The window toward the river was open, letting in the sounds of ships and sailors. The air, not yet tainted by fog, gave to the curtains the same tremble of Mr. Goodfellow’s hand. I could have gone to the chair and tipped him out of it, through his window and down to the street. But I saw that the diamond was already working its evil, and I liked that his end would come more slowly.

  “Damn your eyes, Tom Tin,” he said. “The Stone has a curse in it, doesn’t it?”

  “So it seems,” I said.

  He looked down at the Jolly Stone. The colors flashed up from it, glinting in his eyes. “I’ve lost two thousand guineas already. Three hundred a day since it came to my hands. It robs wealth, doesn’t it? That’s the curse of the thing.”

  He laughed a hollow laugh. “Well, thank God it robs years as well; I shan’t die penniless, Tom. I’ll still have more money than you’ll ever see.”

  I climbed up to his desk. The pardons were laid upon it, along with the note that gave me his ship. They were weighed down by a money purse made of silk from the Orient.

  “Take them, Tom,” said Mr. Goodfellow. “And the wretched ship as well. I’ve thirty other ships, you know; the one means nothing to me. You’ll find it in Limehouse Reach, provisioned and ready for sea.”

  I looked toward the door, expecting Mr. Roberts to appear any moment.

  “Don’t worry; there’s no trick,” said Mr. Goodfellow. “I’m giving you your freedom, Tom. For the rest of your life you’ll be in my debt.”

  “I owe nothing to you,” said I. “You stole my freedom, Mr. Goodfellow. You don’t give it to me; you only return it.”

  “You ungrateful little swine.” He turned the diamond in his hands, round and round like a ball of flames. “Who do you think propped you up all your life, Tom? It was I who kept your father solvent, so that you might cling to your mother’s apron strings. Well, you’ll have to stand on your own feet now, my boy, and you’ll find the world hard enough. That ship will be your prison, and one day your scaffold too, I’m sure. You were never meant to amount to much, Tom Tin.”

  He delivered these words with great bitterness, and they made me flush through and through. So he had never believed I’d bettered myself. He had never wanted me in his business.

  “Where can I find Calliope?” I asked.

  “I’ve no idea,” said he. “Nor do I care.”

  “Do you know where Midgely is?”

  “I don’t even know what a Midgely is.” Mr. Goodfellow coughed horribly, then spat into a handkerchief. “Curse you, Tom. I’m dying already.”

  I put the papers in my shirt. I stepped down from the desk and walked in front of it just as Mr. Roberts came rushing into the office in his glittering uniform.

  twenty-five

  WHAT BECAME OF MR. GOODFELLOW

  Mr. Goodfellow shouted from his chair. “Get out!” he cried. His voice, once fierce, had a quaver in it. “If I want you, Mr. Roberts, I shall call for you,” he said.

  “But, sir, the boy’s a convict. Silbury said—”

  “Silbury’s a fool.” Mr. Goodfellow could still manage a glare that would melt stone. “The boy has a pardon—from Wellington, no less. Now get out and leave us alone.”

  Mr. Roberts backed out of the office. I took one more look at Mr. Goodfellow in his chair, then turned to leave as well. I was halfway to the door when he called my name.

  “Tom, wait,” he said.

  I turned back.

  He had his eyes cast down. His trembling fingers sent ripples through the red blanket. “I keep thinking of camels and the eyes of needles,” he said quietly. “Tom, I’m scared of dying.”

  I came as close as I ever could to feeling pity for the man. He looked old and weak and sad.

  “If you want me to beg, Tom, I will,” he said. “Tell me; is there any way to rid myself of the curse?”

  I wanted to tell him that there wasn’t. But I saw him shivering below his blanket, feeling the cold from the open window and the gathering fog. Yellow tendrils were tangling now round the tallest buildings, round the dome of St. Paul’s and the lofty monument to the fire.

  “There is a way, isn’t there?” he said. “I see how you hesitate, Tom. Please, if you’ve learned an ounce of benevolence, tell me. How do I destroy the curse?”

  I had to smile to myself, and not for any gloating over the withered man before me. Benevolence was exactly what I’d learned in my travels. Gone was the selfish, coddled boy, and in his place was one who truly cared for the welfare of others. Strange as it seemed, it was all because of Mr. Goodfellow’s mean spirit.

  “Tell me, tell me!” He reached up his grayed hands, the wonderful Jolly Stone shining between them. “How do I rid myself of the curse?”

  “By ridding yourself of the diamond,” I said.

  “Is there no other way?”

  I only shook my head. I watched him cradle the Stone to his breast like a baby, and turned again to leave him. But in the doorway I heard the creak of his chair, and the soft thump of his blanket falling to the floor. I looked back to see him standing unsteadily at the window, his arm cocked back, the Jolly Stone in his fist, about to be hurled out to the river.

  “No!” I shouted.

  He threw the Stone as far as he could. It went up in an arc through the window. For an instant I saw it suspended above all the grand buildings of London, right atop the dome of St. Paul’s, as though crucified on the cathedral’s tall cross. It glistened and glowed, then started to fall. Faster and faster it plummeted down, and made only a tiny splash in the river.

  I didn’t tell Mr. Goodfellow that the Stone had to be touched and coveted by another for the curse to pass on. I didn’t want him to spend his last days searching for it. The Jolly Stone was better off where it was, lost in the mud of the Pool. There it might lie for all time.

  Oh, I supposed a dredger might find it one day, or a mud lark might stumble upon it in a very distant year when the great river faded to a trickle. But in all likelihood the Stone had run its course, and the curse would end with Mr. Goodfellow. He had bestowed upon himself the most terrible fate of all, if little King George had told the truth. “Those who go to their graves with the Stone unclaimed will walk the earth forever.”

  I took one more look round his office, and without another word I went through his door and down to the street.

  I went off in search of Midgely

  twenty-six

  I MEET THE IMAGINARY MAN

  I begged a ride on a lightering barge, along the Pool to the rusted ladder where I was sure that Calliope had borne away a frightened, shouting Midgely.

  “Watch your footing!” shrieked the bargeman’s wife, a husky woman.

  Despite her warning I nearly came to ruin. The rungs were wet from the t
ide, slick with weeds, and only a timely prod from the woman’s barge pole saved me from a dunking in the foul water. But I found my balance and climbed to the next rung, with the bargeman laughing behind me.

  “You landsmen are like cats,” he said. “All in a panic when you get your feet wet.”

  I ignored him. I made my way to the top of the ladder, then down a narrow lane between two buildings. I came out in a vast space, looking up at the buildings of London and the fog that was swallowing the spires and chimneys and roofs. The new London Bridge was being built upstream from the old one, and so both river and shore were a beehive of workers. There were bricklayers with their barrows and hods, stonemasons chiseling madly, all manner of tradesmen hammering, digging, and cursing. If a building wasn’t being put up, it was being torn down—like the Fishmongers’ Hall, with a new one rising from the ruins of the old.

  I walked to my right and turned down the first lane that I came to, only to lose myself in a maze of old warehouses. Suddenly it seemed an impossible task that lay before me, to find one little blind boy in a city that housed nearly two million souls.

  Up and down I wandered; back and forth I went. I bumped into dead ends, retraced my path, and wandered round again. When I found myself back at the river, at the top of stone steps going steeply to the water, I sat down in despair.

  I saw before me years and years of wandering, of searching every street, peering into every face. It was a terrible thought, for I now hated the city and longed to escape it. But I could never leave without knowing what had happened to Midgely.

  I looked down a canyon between the warehouses, to row after row of rooftops. I looked the other way, up another canyon that seemed identical. I might have sat there forever, looking one way and then the other, if a little scrap of white hadn’t caught my eye. It fluttered from a splintered window frame, such a useless bit of cloth that it wouldn’t have meant a thing to anyone but me. Yet I knew it at once.

  I got up and tore it away. I held it tightly. It was a shred of cloth that I had ripped from my own shirt long ago, one of the five lots that had been drawn in a derelict boat to see who would live and who would die.

  So Midgely had hung on to those lots all this time. He must have hauled them from his pocket as Calliope hauled him along this very lane, and snagged one here in the hope that I would find it.

  I found a second lot nearly right away, but try as I might I couldn’t find a third. I went half a mile in every direction I could. I searched the ground and the walls for squirts of tobacco juice. But there was no sign that Calliope King had ever passed this way.

  The fog, already, had blotted out the sun, giving evening’s darkness to the day. The thought of that yellow custard pouring into these narrow spaces frightened me, and I looked up to see it oozing from the rooftops.

  And there was the third lot, dangling from a bent nail well above my head. I had walked right beneath it half a dozen times.

  I imagined Calliope snatching Midgely to her shoulder, hoisting him up so that she might move more quickly. I kept going along, and soon found a fourth bit of cloth hanging from the upper hinge of a green-painted door.

  Here, Midge had chosen the piece that I’d marked with a knot, the one that had ruled on who would die. I took it to mean that Calliope had carried him through the doorway.

  I went after them, into a deep-shadowed stillness, where the only light came through narrow windows thick with dust.

  “Midgely!” I called, and a thousand pigeons rose from the floor and the rafters.

  The building was one large room full of coils of rope and cable. At the front, where I’d come in, it soared to the height of a ship’s topgallant, and fishing nets hung from the ceiling. At the back was a second floor, a loft that was reached by a ladder. There was a stack of paint cans, and a mountain of cork floats.

  The pigeons whirred through the air, veering away from the dangling nets and the ropes. They rose in spirals from the floor to the rafters, and settled there with a mad cooing and muttering that slowly faded.

  The room was so quiet then that I could hear the birds’ tiny claws shuffling on the wooden beams. I smelled tarry rope and tallow, pigeons and rats and rotted wood. I heard a shuffle and rustle of some sort of animal.

  The warehouse was long abandoned. The nets were so stiff with age that they might have been standing upright on their swirls and folds. They were like black columns made of rope and ancient mud, decorated with brittle shells of crab and mussel.

  I took a few steps into the building. My feet slid away from me before I looked down to see the layer of bird droppings on the floor. Stamped into them was a double line of footprints, one leading away from the door, one leading back, and both vanishing into the murky gloom of the old warehouse.

  I followed them warily, turning at every creak and flutter, looking all around with every step. They led me round the nets and ropes, past the mountain of cork, to the ladder that rose to the loft. Then they turned behind a stack of wooden crates, and ended at a door that was latched with a heavy bolt.

  The metal screeched as I drew the bolt. The hinges must not have been oiled since Nelson’s days.

  Behind the door was a flight of stairs, descending to a darkness so deep that it might have had no bottom.

  I stood at the top and called down, in little more than a whisper. “Midgely?”

  My echo might have been someone else’s voice, it sounded so timid and wary. I tried again, more forcefully. “Midge! Are you there?”

  An answer came, but not in words. There was a strangled sort of groan, and a series of taps—three in a row, and three again. It stirred the pigeons on their high rafters.

  I wasn’t eager to go down into the darkness, but knew that I had to. I fetched a fishing cork from the big pile—it was nearly the size of a football—and used it to wedge the door open. Then I looked for a lantern, certain I would find one. Only a blind man, I thought, would use those stairs without a light.

  With that, a sudden terror leapt to my mind. Down in the darkness there was not Calliope, but the old mud lark who’d wrestled me for the Jolly Stone! I was certain of it. That wordless cry had been his croaking voice. He was there in his filthy clothes, listening for me now, turning his head with that black bandage wrapped round his eyes.

  The stairs trembled. My fear doubled in an instant. I imagined him crawling toward me, creeping up the stairs like a bat.

  More frantic now, I searched for a lantern hung at the top of the stairs. I found a shelf—a nook—and then a candle and an old tinderbox. And I crouched on the floor, striking sparks from the flint, until the tinder glowed. I blew up a flame and got the candle going.

  Its light seemed to bound down the stairs. I could see four or five steps, and not a blind man upon them. I started down, and with each stair I descended, another appeared. I tensed every muscle, expecting any instant that the blind man—or Calliope King—would come flying up at me.

  Again the staircase shook. I nearly tumbled over the edge, for there was no banister to stop me. But I managed to keep my balance, and as I descended again I saw—between the steps—a person’s hand holding on to the wood.

  What a start that gave me! The fingers reaching from the blackness beneath the stairs, the arm stretching into it, might have belonged to a creature from my childhood nightmares. Gingerly, I crouched down and held out the candle.

  A face appeared in the flickering light. It was smeared with dirt. There was a bandage covering half of it, filling the mouth. But I could see the nose and the eyes and the hair, and I knew at once I’d found Midgely

  “Oh, Midge!” I said.

  I ran the rest of the way, down the stairs and around behind them. The cellar had an even greater stench of cats and rats and waste, but I paid no mind to anything except Midgely. He was tied to a post, and his hands were tied to the stairs above him. He could neither stand straight nor sit down.

  How I cursed Calliope King! I couldn’t believe she was as cruel as that,
to leave a boy who adored her tied and gagged in a cellar. I had misjudged others, but none so badly as Calliope.

  I balanced my candle on the bare earth and tore the bandage from Midgely’s face. I put my arms around him and held him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Midge, I’m so sorry. I was taken away to the hulks, and—”

  “It’s all right. It don’t matter now,” said Midge. “I knew you’d come for me, Tom.”

  I started on the ropes that bound his hands, and all the time he kept talking.

  “I’ve been waiting ages, ain’t I Tom? But I never gave up hope. And you know something, Tom? I think you’ve come in the nick of time. I really do.”

  “Where’s Calliope?” I asked as I struggled with the knots. They were good and strong; they were sailors’ knots.

  “I don’t know where she is,” said Midgely. “Did she come looking for me, Tom?”

  I thought he’d gone stupid. “She snatched you from the ship. She brought you here, didn’t she?”

  “No,” he said, in the most puzzled way.

  “Then who?”

  “Mr. Horrible.”

  The imaginary man? Now I was certain that Midge had gone off his head.

  “But you know who he is, Tom?” Midgely shook his hands as they came free from the rope. He touched my shoulders and my arms. “Mr. Moyle, that’s who. It was Mr. Moyle in that box the King brought aboard.”

  “But he drowned,” I said. “How did that castaway—”

  “He crawled himself to shore. That’s what he told me, Tom.” Midge held on to my sleeve. “He got under the dock and pulled himself along. The King and Calliope brought him aboard in that coffin.”

  I remembered how we’d all lent a hand to carry that thing. Calliope had persuaded us to leave it unopened.

  “The King told Mr. Moyle to take me away,” said Midge. “ ‘Hide him and wait for my word,’ that’s what he told him. But Mr. Moyle’s tired of waiting now. He’s gone to fetch his cleaver, and then he’s coming back. He’s going to butcher me, Tom.”

  “Mr. Moyle eats children.” So Mr. Beezley had said. But I hadn’t believed it then, and I didn’t believe it now. “He wouldn’t really do it,” I said.