‘No.’
‘It’s hulk soup: convicts’ name for greasy warm water. Call it twenty year ago, I was passing a hulk stationed afore the Defence came up; a boat was ’longside with provisions for the day; what d’ye think? With my own eyes I see the prisoners as was hoisting the grub out of the boat chuck it overboard. Was they flogged?’
He shook his head, grinning horribly.
His manners and answers shocked and depressed me, and I asked him no more questions.
‘Ain’t it rather sing’ler,’ said he, after a few minutes’ pause, ‘that there’s only one flower as ’ll grow upon a convict’s grave?’
‘Is that so?’
‘Ay. And what flower d’ye think it is, miss?’ said he, again showing his fangs.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s a nettle. If yah should care to visit the burial-ground yonder,’ he continued, with a backward nod of his head in the direction of Woolwich, ‘yah ’ll see for yourself. As if nothen would blow ower a convict but that! Of course the finger o’ nater’s in it. The finger o’ nater’s got the straight tip for most jobs. It’s daisies for the likes of you and me, and nettles for them as goes wrong.’
I was too agitated to converse with such a heartless creature as this. My mind was full of Tom. I wondered how he would greet me—how I should find him looking. We should be allowed but a quarter of an hour. What time would that give me, to whom a long summer day was all too brief in which to tell him how I loved him; how I meant to follow him; how our loyalty to one another should, if God permitted, triumph yet over the horrors and the sufferings which might lie between the now and the hour of victorious emergence!