Read Online The Convicts by Iain Lawrence - Free Book Online

through the darkened streets. I had never had a stomach for motion. At the age of six I had fallen from a slow-turning carousel, and a doctor had told my mother, “The boy has an imbalance in his ears.”
    I thought it was a blessing when we finally stopped, until I saw the walls of Newgate Prison like a dismal fortress in the night.
    More than once I had passed there with my father, and always with a shudder at the horrors that lay hidden behind those walls. I had heard the shrieks, the cries, the groans, and had always hurried along. But now the walls seemed twice as sheer and twice as high. I saw the iron door of crossed bars, and it looked as though it could open only once for me—to let me in, but never to let me out.
    The gatekeeper shuffled out from his place with a lamp in his hand. “Ow, it's you again,” he said. “Welcome ‘ome, young master.”
    His keys jangled as he turned the locks and drew the bolts. The door creaked. “In you go, my lad,” he said.
    I passed between walls that were four feet thick. My name was entered into the prison book, a second door was opened, and a warder led me into the depths of Newgate. It rang with the clank of iron and the shrieks of the insane. But it was even worse in daylight, when the putrid fog oozed through windows and air shafts. In the exercise yard the convicts trudged round and round. A man walked the long treadmill, his back bent as he stumbled forever uphill.
    In a ward full of boys I sat in a corner. They spent hours arranged in a circle, picking each other's pockets, applauding the quickest hands. None would talk to me, which suited me fine, yet they never stopped talking about me. “That's the Smasher,” said one.
    “He went mad,” said another.
    “He died,” said a fourth. “Them sisters tried to save him “
    It was my diamond that saved me. It busied my mind with fancies of riches, with the mystery of how it had found its way to the river. Had a smuggler dropped it on a dark night? Had a long-ago king, or a pirate, let it fall from a chest full of jewels? Or had it lain there since the beginnings of time? Where there was one, perhaps there were others, and I dreamed myself back there, searching through the mud.
    Toward the end of my third day, a turnkey arrived at the ward and called my name. “You have a visitor,” he said.
    He took me to a vast chamber, as quiet as a crypt, where enormous arches soared to the ceiling. In a little room at the center of it all, a man sat behind walls of glass. His back was toward me, but I saw right away who it was. The thin head, the thinner neck, belonged to the lawyer from the magistrate's court.
    His briefcase lay open on a polished table. He stood up as I entered, then waved me into a chair—grandly—as though the room were his private office. “Do you remember me?” he asked.
    I nodded. “Yes, sir.”
    “My name is Meel. Mr. Meel,” He sat again, bending into the chair like a folding ruler. “I have taken an interest in you, Tom, and Pd like to help.” He crossed his legs. “Will you tell me about yourself ?”
    “Where should I begin?” I asked.
    “Tell me who you are. Tell me where you live.”
    He seemed surprised when I told him I was from Cam-den Town. But he was clearly shocked to learn how my father had been taken to debtor's prison.
    “How can that be?” he said. “You told me that you owned a fortune”
    “I do, sir,” I said. “I was getting to that.” - “Then hurry, my boy,” said Mr. Meel.
    Off I went again, reliving the days in my mind. I walked through the fog toward London, down to the river where the blind man was. I saw the diamond in the mud, stooped, and picked it up again.
    “Surely not as big as that,” said Mr. Meel, staring at my fingers as they curved around the imagined stone.
    “Oh, yes, sir,” I said. “It was enormous.”
    So were his eyes just then. “And the color? What color was it, Tom?”
    “Mostly gold,” I said. “It was red and yellow,