‘It’s horribly black and lonesome, but I’m content. I’d not be elsewhere.’
‘The convicts are aboard, and Butler’s one of them. I saw him and nodded. He looks well—I mean pretty well.’
I started up and cried: ‘Will, if you see him to speak to, don’t tell him I’m here. He loves me too much to suffer it. He’d betray me. He’d get me sent ashore.’
‘I don’t think so. I’ll not say a word. No chance indeed; you mayn’t talk to ’em. I can’t stop. The mate sent an apprentice here for a canvas bucket. I took the job to give you the news and see how you are. Anything you want, Marian?’
‘Nothing, Will.’
‘I forgot to tell you there’s the handle of a scrubbing brush lying near your provisions; you’ll easily get it by feeling. You’ll need it to knock with should you want to get out. Bless you, my brave old woman!’ and so, whispering, he took a stride, picked up a bucket, handed it and the lantern up, and sprang through the hatch, which immediately afterward was closed.
The news of Tom being in the ship so cheered up my heart that I could have sung aloud amid that black silence. I kept my eyes shut that I might not see the blackness, and tried to figure the interior of the prison ship. What sort of quarters had the convicts? Should I ever have a chance of viewing the ’tweendecks? I recollected that Will had told me the prison—by which I understood the cell in which the convicts would be confined for punishment—was just the other side of the bulkhead or partition. I strained my ears, thinking I might catch a sound of the felons talking. The fancy seized me to draw close to the partition; I got out of the sail and felt along it, knowing that the extremity would bring me to the bulkhead. Putting out my hands, I felt the bulkhead, pressed my ear to the solid wooden wall and listened, but heard nothing; nothing, that is, resembling a human voice. But I caught a sort of scuffling sound, very dim and weak, as though of many feet in motion; it was a wild, strange noise to listen to in that blackness.
I groped my way back to where the sail was loose, and lay down and covered myself as before. I had thought to find the atmosphere ice-like, yet I was not cold, being warmly clad, with plenty of sail-cloth to cover me besides. I kept my eyes closed to lighten the weight of the blackness upon the brain. My thoughts were with Tom, with our visit to this ship in the docks, with my home in Stepney. It was like taking a bruising load off my heart, to think of my sweetheart as having left the grim and horrible hulk for good, as having turned his back for ever upon the killing labour of the dockyard. It was as though he had taken one long step toward freedom. I shuddered, and my soul was sick with loathing when I thought of the hulk, of the four hundred or five hundred wretches imprisoned throughout the long winter’s night in her, of the squalid rows of houses and dismantled craft along shore, of the mud and drizzle and the fogs upon the flat and reeking lands and the bleak spirit of the streaming yellow Thames in all things, soaking chill to the core of whatever the eye rested upon, giving a sterner significance even to man’s deepest intent of degradation.
And then I wondered what would happen when I showed myself or was discovered. What kind of work would they put me to? Would they force me to reveal my sex? I hoped not; I prayed not: for the discovery might lead to their finding out that I was a convict’s sweetheart, and they would land me at the first port the ship touched at and ruin my scheme, and separate me, perhaps eternally, from Tom.
I fell asleep. I could not name the hour. Time had no being in that blackness. A noise awakened me. Instinct was alert even in my slumber, for the instant I awoke I pulled the canvas over my head, leaving one corner for my eye, and lay still as a corpse. The hatch was open and a figure stood under it.