“You hadn’t stolen a pocketbook,” Peyton said.
“No odds in the end. He’d heard me speaking Gaelic, I expect, which is evidence enough in the eyes of some. I managed to sneak the snuffbox and shillings to my brothers before the constables took note of us and they ran off. But I had the watch on my person, which he claimed as his own once it was turned out. There were holes in the lining of my coat that left my hands free when it looked like they were tucked away in my pockets. They’d found a thief, no question. There hardly seemed a point to whether it was him I’d robbed or not.”
Peyton listened to Reilly with a growing sense of unease. He could feel the story’s dive into calamity, its tragic narrative careening towards his father where John Senior would set it aright as easily as he’d piss out the fire in a tobacco pipe. The thought was profoundly disagreeable to Peyton. He had heard Cassie moaning through the door of Reilly’s tilt when Annie Boss came outside to send them away and the memory of that sound came to him again in the darkness.
There were eight men in the docket for sentencing and the sentence was repeated eight times. The law is that you shalt return from hence, to the place whence thou camest, and from thence to the place of execution, where thou shalt hang by the neck till the body be dead! Dead! Dead! When his turn was called, Reilly held the wooden rail of the docket to stay on his feet. He broke into tears and wept uncontrollably as the sentence was pronounced and the weeping most likely saved his life.
“Commuted to branding and deportation to the colonies out of consideration for my age and my obvious display of contrition,” Reilly said.
“Branding?”
Reilly held his scarred hand up in the light of the fire. “Now we’re getting to John Senior,” he said. “Patience rewarded.”
He was brought to a public square where criminals were punished in the stocks. He was placed face down and constables tied his hands firmly to a wooden post. A small crowd gathered around him in an almost prayerful silence, as if he was about to be baptized. After the charge against him and the sentence were read aloud, the letter T was burned into the flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand with a red-hot iron. At first there was a nearly painless shock, like jumping into icy water. Then the ache crawled into the bones of his hand, then his arm, then his entire right side. He felt as if one half of his body was radiating light. Glowing.
He was held in a prison ship on the Thames for seven months. Transportation to the American colonies was suspended after the revolution and a suitable replacement was still being settled on. Some of the men on Reilly’s vessel had been aboard four years and more. The ship was filthy with vermin and rats and so overcrowded that prisoners were regularly freed on the condition they would go voluntarily into exile.
Within six weeks of accepting this plea bargain Reilly was in St. John’s, penniless, walking from stagehead to warehouse to stagehead, looking for work. He was turned away each time and sometimes chased off by men wielding staves or fish forks if the brand on his hand was noted. Finally he was forced to go from table to table in the grog shops above the waterfront, begging for food, his hand wrapped in a dirty square of cloth to hide his mark. So many men intoxicated to the point of senselessness, he could have robbed them blind. He was tempted over and over and more strongly with each turned head, with each sloppy imprecation to bugger off, with the occasional whispered proposition to suck someone’s cock for a shilling.
And that’s where he found John Senior sitting alone with a bottle of rum, just in from Poole and waiting for a berth to the northeast shore. He nodded casually as Reilly approached him, almost as if he’d been expecting someone of his description. He didn’t say a word when the boy began to tell him how he arrived in St. John’s three days past and had eaten only scraps he’d managed to steal from dogs in the street in that time. Reilly took his silence as an invitation to carry on and he did so, impulsively unwrapping his hand to show the stranger his brand. He talked about his life in England until he ran out of things he could think of to say, while John Senior sat listening impassively, as if he’d paid good money for this story and was determined to take in every word. His peculiar stillness Reilly chose to interpret as a show of sympathy and instead of asking for food or spare change he asked for work, cleaning fish or cutting wood or shovelling cow shit from a byre, he didn’t care what it was or where. He stood there then while John Senior considered him.
“How old are you, Joseph Reilly?” he asked finally.
“Fourteen, sir.”
“You’ve done some honest work in your time.”
“Smithfield’s butchers, like I told you, sir. Four years up to this.”