London was never this dark. Not even with the fog black as soot and thick as a toff’s curtains did it ever smother like this. Your hand is a hair away from your face yet no fingers, no palm can be seen. Open your eyes as wide as tea saucers, yet all that enters is the suffocating blackness pressing down, crushing. Like a blind man you feel only your hot, panicky breath on your skin. Go on, drag your nails over your cheek, into your forehead…It could be someone else’s touch.
Why is it so hard to breathe in absolute night?
The smell though – worse than a pig butcher’s, worse than a shite-filled gutter. The waif is still beside you – you know she is, the stench from that rotting slash on her thigh proves it, the death stink. So much stench on board this ship – it gluts your throat. At least no smell of the curse lurks. No monthly blood for any down here.
How long have you been on this ship? Weeks, months? You can barely remember wandering with the other convicts on the sun-sick deck, your chains clanking and rusty but the air salty fresh and the weather clement for that brief hour each day. How you complained, you fool! But since the tempest’s waves began to pound you’ve all been locked in the bilge. The sky must now be tar, because as soon as the hatch was sealed not a feather of light floated in – or have the guards banned the sun from entering? They’ve snuffed the lanterns and forbidden candles. At least – at least – the sailors have ceased their molestations. For now.
Oh, this blanket. Makes you wish you were back in gaol or even in the Old Bailey’s gloomy dock. Ha! You thought that was terror; but remember you had sight and light and a steady flooring there. Not this rocky, inky shadow that stifles like a strangler, battering your heart.
In the first weeks, when the sun poured through greasy cracks in the portal, you screeched of the injustice that cudgelled you onto this ship, you howled across the ocean to the Bow Street Runners and bent judges back in their comfy manor houses. You beat the air with your only weapon, your innocence. But no one listened. Your fellow inmates, murderers and robbers and whores, swore at you, scoffed. Then came the whip for your rowdiness. That shut your mouth, for a time. Nothing can be worse than this, you whimpered.
Then the storm came. It laughed and spat and refused – refuses – refuses to stop.
So much movement of darkness on darkness. Not just shuffling, despairing limbs, not just sobbing, begging, the prayers of the doomed. It’s the rats; bolder, more brazen now. They’re scuttling over wood and bodies and you scream when claws, teeth, rip at your legs. Perhaps you’ll be eaten alive; your skin crawls and you madly sweep your arms at the dead air hoping to scare the beasts. Panic twists your chest – what if the rats infest the drinking water? What if they drink it, shit in it? Shaking, you stretch your fingers feeling for the ladle, dip it into the near empty barrel, nearly spill it, bring it to your mouth and sip it carefully; try, try to keep your mind alert to the constant scurrying. Its coldness gnaws at your few blackened teeth.
Shreds of voice flicker through the gale: are sailors are singing tuneless dirges above the thrashing waves? In this tempest? Are they drunk? Or is it not sailors but their ghosts lamenting? Are all you women alone down here? You pray the vessel reaches its destination, but the devil knows you’re not sanguine and instead the horror of the New World, that unknown southern land, almost dwarfs your fear of the darkness. Do not think of the future, of cannibals and ravenous beasts and Godless deprivation. Of beatings and rape and whatever else the degenerates down there plan for you.
Perhaps – perhaps it’s better to stay like this, in the timeless black, forever.
But the black yawns and shifts again. Your head is hot, the sweat is cold, freezing. Do you sleep? Do you remain awake? Spectres snarl, moans rise and fade; hours hover.
You retch, but retch what? There’s been no food for centuries. The water is gone, you desperately need more, but calls are unheeded. Dreams of roasted spuds tear at your belly. You must get to the hold’s door, beg for sustenance. Your bowels are near to bursting, but bursting what? You try to totter on your bloody knees towards where the stairs might be, but chains cut into your shin and you pitch heavily onto something damp and soft. The softness yells and shoves you away; you’re back on your stinking pallet. As far as the chains allow you wrap yourself into a baby shape and can’t stop sobbing for Mama, Papa, as your bowels release and the stench of your filth laps around you, mingling with rancid fish and rotting wounds and the sweet-sick shroud of blood.
Ah the bliss of fainting! You’re back in the cottage, in front of a living fire with the family swathed in concerns about nothing until you suddenly awake and the world is still an engulfing ebony gel and oh how you miss those concerns.
