Buckley's Chance Read online

  A ghost.

  Come, William. It is time to give up your secrets.

  PART I

  WILLIAM ENTERS THE WORLD

  1

  SENTENCED TO DEATH; REPRIEVED; IMPRISONED ON A HULK

  It is dark and damp, the air sour with sweat and shit and rot. No point trying to stand; the ceiling is so low you can only stoop. No point trying to move; a 12-pound iron connected to a heavy chain has been bolted around one of your powerful ankles. All you can do is sit amid the filth and listen to the constant cries and whimpering.

  And hope. A man can always hope.

  Damn hard thing to do in a place like this, though. A man would have to be a saint to find a glimmer of optimism in this fetid hole. Or find himself in the grip of madness – and there is no shortage of that around here. And just where, exactly, would you even begin to find a little positive something that might give cause for hope? Try looking in the eyes of the young children, manacled and hungry, calling out for parents who will never come, all because they stole a loaf of bread. Or how about the women with bruised faces and swollen lips and missing teeth who flinch whenever the heavy boots on deck grow louder with each step? Surely not among the old men with their sunken jaws and backs whipped so often the cobwebbed scars are all that hold the sinews together.

  No. Not much here to inspire confidence in the future. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Punishment can be counted in sentences of months and years but real punishment – the sort judges are quick to hand out in these times – strips away the optimism as quickly as a leering guard can flay your skin with his knotted whip.

  You want hope? Best go searching for it on those nearby banks of Langstone Harbour, where skinny dogs nose around among the scraps with their ribs pressed tight against a thin layer of fur, wearily lifting their heads whenever they catch a faint scent of food on the breeze. That’s hope for you.

  Besides, consider yourself lucky, William Buckley. They were going to put a rope around your thick neck and hang you in front of the usual gawking crowd, until those judges handed down a last-minute reprieve before climbing into their carriage and heading back to London. Some rope it would have been, too. You’re a huge man. When they let you out each morning and allow you to shuffle on to the deck, blinking in the sunlight, sucking in air that no longer reeks, you stand, what? Six feet, six inches? Measurements of your height will vary over the years, depending on who is telling the story. Some will even suggest you nudge seven feet but they will be the newspapermen trying their best to extract a shilling or two from someone’s deep pocket. So let’s settle on six foot six and untold pounds of pure, hard muscle. It has been a cold winter and you have lost weight because you are never warm and the daily rations are never enough. But you still tower over everyone else, convicts and captors alike.

  It has always been this way. Maybe that is why you have so little to say. Everyone gets it wrong about big men, portraying them as loud and swaggering, soaked in self-belief and conviction, every pore of their skin oozing confidence and testosterone. Truth is, most big men are all too aware of their size. In crowds many of them try to shrink their presence, perhaps by bending over a little, by saying less than others. That’s what you do, isn’t it?

  Problem is, there’s just no place to hide when you’re on a prison hulk like this one in Langstone Harbour, no way to shrink into some quiet corner, no chance of slipping into anonymity. And it’s not just your height, either. There’s that snub nose and low bushy eyebrows hanging above hazel eyes. The mass of dark hair. The mole high on your left cheek. The skin pocked in places. The ‘W.B’ tattooed on one of your arms. In years to come someone will write that you are ‘just such a man as one would suppose fit to commit burglary or murder’. Well, they will get it half right. Two pieces of stolen cloth, that’s all it took to land you here. Broke into Mr Cave’s shop thinking you and your mate William Marmon would get away with it. Well, that’s what the law said. You will say you were framed. Twenty years old and hardened by a few years in the army and a battlefield wound that quickly healed. Must have left you feeling invincible.

  But not anymore, not after what you have seen in the past few months.

  For six months the routine for you and Marmon and the others has been the same. Hauled out of the dank hold at daylight along with the rest of the prisoners. A biscuit for breakfast, hard enough to crack your teeth, or a tasteless slop of boiled barley. Then you are rowed ashore to work on fortifications or clean up the putrid banks. Passers-by gaze at convicts like you and there may have been a time, back in those first few weeks, when you burned with embarrassment when you felt their stares. Now just being alive is something in which to take pride. But this is what those passers-by see when they stare, all of you working with ‘fetters on each leg, with a chain between that ties variously, some round their middle, others upright to the throat. Some are chained two and two; and others whose crimes have been enormous, with heavy fetters. Six or seven [guards] are continually walking about them with drawn cutlasses, to prevent their escape and likewise to prevent idleness … so far from being permitted to speak to anyone [convicts] hardly dare speak to each other.’

  Well, talking is hardly your strength. You’re illiterate and will always struggle for the right words. Better to let others find them for you. George Lee can do that. He’s a 22-year-old clerk who was found guilty of trying to pass forged bank notes in Worcester, just a few months before you were hauled into court. Lee is well educated and full of himself – and his life will soon become bound to yours in ways you cannot yet imagine. But he’s a handy man with words and in recent months there has been no shortage of them spilling from his quill. Imprisoned on the Portland, waiting to be transported for 14 years, Lee has begun corresponding with a member of parliament, Sir Henry St John-Mildmay. There’s a subtle shift taking place in England over the way the criminal classes are being treated, particularly in the hundreds of squalid prison hulks that are anchored in Portsmouth Harbour and line that fetid sludge of a river they call the Thames. Most of the hulks are decommissioned merchant or Navy ships, their masts removed, their sides battened down to prevent escape, floating wrecks housing nothing but despair and disease, a catchment for the spill from the country’s overcrowded prisons. Now there are murmurings that a more humane approach is needed.

  The Portland is home to 440 prisoners. About half of them, Lee writes to Sir Henry, are ‘Johnny Rays’ – ‘country bumpkins in whose composition there is more of the fool than the rogue’.

  Country bumpkins. That pompous airbag is not talking about you, is he?

  Lee trusts few on board the Portland and detests the officers in charge more than he does his fellow uneducated convicts. He writes to Sir Henry that those officers are regularly turning a blind eye to the criminality flourishing below decks, including ‘the unnatural crime’ which has become an initiation rite for new prisoners.

  ‘The horrible crime of sodomy rages so shamefully throughout that the surgeon and myself have been more than once threatened with assassination for straining to put a stop to it … it is in no way discountenanced by those in command.’

  But rape and the constant brutal violence of the guards is just the start. It will be decades before the hulk system is abandoned. Here right now at the turn of the 19th century, the mortality rate on these ships is nudging 30 per cent. Bacterial diseases, including cholera and typhus, move through the holds quickly and fatally, killing thousands. Lee has seen days when nine or 10 bodies have been hauled out of the hulk and taken to the shore – ‘pictures of raggedness, filth and starvation’. You must have seen them too.

  In the years to come you will say that during your stint on the hulks you were once put to work on the fortifications at Woolwich, the biggest arsenal in the kingdom. Workers digging in the area a few decades later will feel the crunch of human bone at the end of their shovels as they uncover one mass grave after another.

  George Lee cannot contain his outrage at the atrocities b
eing committed deep below the decks of the hulks. And his resentment over the way the guards condone what is going on will burn inside him over the next 12 months until it turns into an uncontrolled rage against all authority.

  So best leave the most colourful description of life on the hulks to another prisoner, James Hardy Vaux. He’s a true rake of his times: thief, swindler, gambler and all round ne’er do well. Hard not to like the man, though. He’s incorrigible. He’s on his way to setting some kind of record – the only man to be transported to New Holland on three separate occasions. God only knows what his father, Hardy, a respectable butler to a politician, must think of him. James fell into gambling and a bad crowd in his mid teens and has been paying off his debts by stealing and duping the gullible ever since. But his bad luck – he will marry three times – will finally turn later in life when he publishes a successful memoir and a companion volume called A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language.

  You probably know most of the words, William, all the street lingo. But Vaux’s book will become an eye-opening tome for all those upper-class swells wondering what on earth those nasty people on the streets of London are saying. Vaux will pull open the curtain on the 19th century criminal world and its unique language: spectacles are ‘barnacles’, to ‘Betty a door’ is to pick a lock, to ‘spank a glaze’ is to break the window pane of a store. Perhaps, like Vaux, you like to gamble, maybe even roll the ‘tatts’ (dice). And always, as within any ecosystem, there is a bottom feeder. And that happens to be the ‘tinny hunter’, a profession reserved for the special few lacking any empathy. They can always be found attending the many house fires around London and, under the pretence of helping the victims remove their property, plundering whatever remains of value.

  Vaux’s guide to the criminal classes is a riot of colour and detail that historians will lap up over the coming centuries. But Vaux is at his best when describing the hulks. He knows them more intimately than just about anyone else.

  On one of his stays on the Thames before another journey to New Holland, Vaux is imprisoned on the Retribution: ‘There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly 600 men,’ he writes, ‘most of them double-ironed … the reader may conceive the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin naturally produced by such a crowd of miserable inhabitants, the oaths and execrations constantly heard amongst them.’

  Vaux will always remember arriving on board, being stripped and washed in large tubs of water before putting on a suit of coarse cloth, shackled to leg irons and sent below. And there, well, who should he meet but many old acquaintances ‘who were all eager to offer me their friendship and services, that is, with a view to rob me of what little I had, for in this place there is no other motive or subject for ingenuity’.

  But it is the guards and the putrid conditions that Vaux will never forget.

  ‘These guards are the most commonly of the lowest class of human beings; wretches devoid of all feeling; ignorant in the extreme, brutal by nature, and rendered tyrannical and cruel by the consciousness of the power they possess … they invariably carry a large and ponderous stick, with which, without the smallest provocation, they will fell an unfortunate convict to the ground and frequently repeat their blows long after the poor sufferer is insensible.

  ‘If I were to attempt a full description of the miseries endured in these ships, I could fill a volume … besides robbery from each other, which is as common as cursing and swearing, I witnessed among the prisoners … one deliberate murder … and one suicide; and that unnatural crimes are openly committed.’

  They say you can smell the hulks long before you see them; at night you can hear the screams and cries and not even the rain beating down and the wind gusting across the water can muffle the despair and sadness.

  And if you listen closely enough right now you might also hear the sound of oars breaking water and the grunts of sweating men. There’s a boat being rowed across Langstone Harbour. It is coming for you, William Buckley – you and many of your fellow convicts. William Marmon and George Lee and the rest are to be taken from the hulks and placed on board HMS Calcutta, a 56-gun former Navy cruiser under orders to take more than 300 convicts, 30 wives and children of prisoners, and marines and a crew of almost 170 to the other side of the world.

  It is April in the Year of Our Lord, 1803.

  See? Perhaps a little hope lives here, after all.

  2

  BEHEADED; AND THE KING LOSES HIS HEAD

  Escaping and surviving. If there are two things you’re good at, two things you’re going to be better at doing than just about anyone else, it’s the art of disappearing. Not bad for a big man who finds it impossible to blend into a crowd, whose face and features are forever imprinted on anyone whose path you cross. Thing is, becoming a great escape artist is not about how anonymous you look, or how clever you might be at picking a lock. It’s all in the timing, isn’t it? When that opening comes, when that chance finally presents itself – often out of nowhere – you just have to take it.

  You’ve done it in the past. If you hadn’t taken chances you could still be laying bricks back in that rural village in Cheshire and siring bastards like yourself all over the countryside. Or your bones could be rotting beneath the soil of a foreign country courtesy of a French bayonet or musket ball. But there was always a moment – maybe you will call it luck – that steered you in another direction.

  Being accused of breaking into Mr Cave’s drapery … well, that didn’t turn out so well. But you can call getting out of that prison hulk a great escape by any measure and, now that you have made it out before a drunken guard belted you senseless just to make a name for himself, or a fellow convict slid a knife into your guts for the very same reason, or one of the rampant diseases claimed even your strong body, how do you fancy your chances here on the deck of HMS Calcutta?

  Not good, are they? There is an attachment of guards from the marines watching all of you shuffle aboard in your leg irons. Just before they take you below to the two big prison rooms you get a quick look around, enough to know things are going to be awfully cramped for the next six months. More than 500 of you – 300 convicts – all living and eating and shitting in a world made of oak and tar 230 feet long and 41 feet wide. That’s not much more than six square feet for each of you – a world less than half a soccer field, held together by nail and rope and more than a little of, yes, hope.

  She’s an old ship, this one, a 15-year sea veteran the Navy purchased from the East India Company a few years earlier. She has undergone a major refit for this journey to New Holland and you can smell the pine tar and turpentine and linseed oil and wonder just how long it will last before the stench of all those lives on board takes over. But her bones are solid. She was built in John Perry’s yard on the Thames and it took more than 2000 wagonloads of oak dragged all the way from the forests of Sussex to put her together. Still, it is going to be an awfully small world as it heaves its way through some of the most treacherous oceans on the planet. Not everyone is going to make it; the death toll on convict ships heading to New Holland has been appalling since the First Fleet sailed away in 1787. But look at the world you are leaving. It makes about as much sense as the one you are entering.

  Two men are losing their heads in early 1803 and they perfectly sum up the manic world of extremes England has become at the turn of the 19th century.

  London is still awash with debate about the first head; just a few weeks earlier, as rain fell on a miserably cold morning, this head had been hanging by its hair from the hand of an executioner. He had then thrust it forward, blood mingling with the icy rain, and yelled out to the 20,000-strong crowd: ‘This is the head of a traitor, Edward Marcus Despard!’

  Well, they hadn’t liked that. They began hissing and jeering and the jail warden began nervously eyeing off the six skyrockets he had been ordered to fire if public disquiet turned to insurrection. The rockets and their trail would activate hund
reds of soldiers on standby.

  Yet the squalls of rain and the sheer awfulness of Despard’s beheading had sucked all the energy and most of the anger out of the crowd. Still, 20,000 braving the conditions to witness an execution was an extraordinary number. It told you the people were restless and a suspicious man might very well smell revolt in the air. Well, there could be none of that. Even murmurings of dissent hinted at weakness and vulnerability, something Napoleon Bonaparte, plotting away in Paris and about to become the first Emperor of the despised French, could exploit and use to his advantage.

  A rare and uneasy peace exists between England and France. No-one believes this paper-thin Treaty of Amiens can last and, sure enough, within a few months, the old enemies will be at each other again. But for now, in the vacuum peace often creates, distrust and suspicion are everywhere.

  Despard’s trial exposed this. Irish born, he had fought for England in the American Revolution and then led his forces to a famous victory in the Battle of Black River, which had handed Britain control of Honduras. But Despard, spurred on by his Irish nationalism and rankled by the British parliament’s refusal to repay him money he had used to fund the Honduran campaign, had started wondering – loudly at times – about the righteousness of the French Revolution.

  People were tired of kings. Liberty – now there was an idea. In late 1802 the authorities identified Despard as a key conspirator in a plot to trigger a revolution on London’s streets by seizing the Tower of London and assassinating King George III. During his trial Despard maintained his innocence. Little strong evidence was tendered against him and he had also received extraordinary support with a character reference by Horatio Nelson.