The Convicts by Iain Lawrence Page B

properly.
    “It's true,” he said. “That's how they escape.”
    “They tunnelT I asked.
    “Yes, Tom. Through the planks. Through the hull.”
    Midgely bent quickly to his work as a guard came by. He waited, then whispered again. “The ship's half rotten. The wood's like mud in places, Tom. Look where there'sh water.”
    It was some sly sort of clue, I thought. Where wasn ‘t there water, round a ship in a river? But a guard chose that moment to settle by our table, with his buttocks bulged against it, and we talked no more until the day was done.
    The guards took our needles and thread. We went down to a dinner of boiled ox cheeks, a most disgusting sight. I watched the strands of cheese-colored fat curl over themselves like wriggling worms, and pushed my bowl away. Weedle took his share, and more, and Midgely got the rest. Across the table, Oten Acres neither shared nor ate, but only sat staring glumly at his bowl.
    After dinner we trudged again around the deck, in the same weary silence. The air did me good, and I lifted my head to study the shore, thinking how I might get away. There were fishing boats in the river, and a fleet of scows and barges. In the navy yard to the south, a forest of masts grew from the wharfs and warehouses. The castle was in shadows, with the sun setting now behind it, but the marshes shone like a field of gold. There were acres and acres of grass, without a single building in sight. That was the way I would go; into the marshes and over the fields.
    I went back into the ship feeling not quite so hopeless. Even my sickness was easing, and I was rather proud to think that I was finding my sea legs. We settled for the night on the lowest deck, crowded like cattle in a pen. Oten Acres lay huddled by a tiny window, staring out at the river. I was sitting with Midgely when a line of boys went marching past.
    “Where are they going?” I asked.
    “To chapel,” said he.
    “Shouldn't we go with them?” I asked.
    He sneered. “Only noseys go to chapel, Tom.”
    We leaned against the planks, free now to talk as we wanted. In the middle of the floor, a group of boys played pitch-button with knots of thread and cloth. “Knuckle down fair!” cried one, as he might have at any playground.
    “Tom?” said Midge. He touched my arm and surprised me with his question. “Do you think heaven's a hulk. Do you?”
    “A hulk?” I said.
    He nodded. “God's got ‘em, you know. I seen ‘em, Tom.”
    I told him I didn't know what he was talking about. So up he got and went off to the side of the ship, and came back with a book—with two—held in his arms, at his chest. He put them down, then spread one open on the floor. “I nicked these from the chaplain,” he said, turning backward through the pages, past pictures of Elijah's flaming chariot, Daniel in the lions’ den, Joseph and his coat of colors. He stopped at Noah's ark and said, “There! See?”
    The ark was tossed by a tempest. Round and dark, with a shack on its deck and a stump for its mast, it did look like a hulk. Faces of animals stared from round windows. The sons of Noah huddled by the cabin, fearful of the storm. But Noah himself stood up in the wind and the lightning with his long beard and white hair as wild as the spray on the water.
    “See?” Midgely pressed his finger on the page. “That's God there, ain't it, Tom?”
    I shook my head. “It's Noah.”
    “No a what?” he asked.
    I thought he was joking, but he wasn't He had never heard of Noah, or the flood that had drowned a wicked earth. He thought that the man in the picture had to be God just because he was so wild and so frightening. “There's other puzzles here,” he said. He showed me Moses in the rushes, Bartimeus being cured of his blindness. I had to explain them all, astonished that he'd never learned the Bible. Then he showed me one more picture. He said, “Look, Tom. It'sh me.”
    He'd turned to David and Goliath. The giant was twice the height of the