Tom Appleby, Convict Boy

Author:Jackie French [French, Jackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730491224
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

chapter twenty-nine

Sydney Cove, 20 March 1788

They took Tom to the new strong room made of rough poles dug into the ground, with more poles from the soft-wooded cabbage trees placed between them to form the walls, which were then roughly chinked with clay. The roof was made of leaves and branches plastered with clay; the door was of rough-sawn planks, but the bolt that stretched across it was strong.

There were no windows. It was the first time since Tom had left the ship that he had been made to sit in darkness. The nights now were studded with stars and he could see the moon slipping slowly through the sky.

Tom shivered as he crouched on his rough stool. Darkness couldn’t frighten him now, he told himself. He had survived worse darkness than this. Why should this dark room make him panic now? But he still had to stop himself from pounding on the door and screaming to get out.

If I am ever free, he thought, I will have a house with a hundred candles, and lamps all along the walls. I will never sit in darkness again.

Would he ever be free? Or was Private Sharman now describing how he had been attacked, how Tom had watched and not done anything? Or perhaps he even thought that Tom had killed Black Bob.

One man had already been hung in the new colony. The gibbet had been one of the first structures the English had built in their new land. Tom had watched the execution, like the other convicts, gathered by the guards so they could see what happened to transgressors.

Thomas Barret had been seventeen, six years older than Tom. He had been found stealing butter, salt pork and dried peas. He’d confessed, as Tom had done at his own trial at the Old Bailey, but unlike Tom neither his confession nor his youth had saved him.

Tom had watched the body swing from the gibbet, the dead face swollen and purple, the eyes wide and frightened as though this was just the final terror in the boy’s life.

Will that be me, tomorrow? wondered Tom. To come all this way and end like this?

But at least he would die in the daylight and not the night. At least he would see sky and sunlight, and not die in a chimney or the Scarborough’s stinking hold.

The bolt that held the door was drawn back. Light flooded in. Tom blinked and tried to see who was at the door.

It was another marine, not much older than Private Sharman. ‘Out!’ he ordered.

Tom stumbled into the sunlight. Around him the workers went on, oblivious to his miseries: the convict women hauling buckets of shells from the great mounds the Indians had left on the beach, taking them to be burnt in the lime pits; or others sitting in the dappled shade of the thin, canopied trees, thudding the puddlers in the butter churns.

‘Major wants to see ye,’ said the marine abruptly. ‘Hop to it.’

‘Which way?’ asked Tom. The

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