Part 15 (2/2)
Also attached to the Carters Barracks was the House of Correction, home to the town's two treadmills. Everyone knew of their existence-mothers would threaten errant children with ”the step”-but this was the first time Nicodemus Dunne had seen the devices close-up. He was impressed, in a chilling way. He scrubbed his hands clean in a nearby trough.
”So we're all here for that?” he murmured to his new friend.
”Aye. Some will stay for as long as a week or even more on the wheels. G.o.d willing, you and I are out this evening-Jimmy was only given short time, for dumb insolence to his master.”
Before Dunne could ask OBannion what he himself had done, a guard waved them into silence and the patterer turned his attention to the treadmills. Looming overhead, they resembled giant, wide waterwheels. He knew that they existed not only for punishment, but also to grind corn, to compensate for the times when there was no breeze to drive the town's windmills. Each unit was reckoned to make the Commissariat 600 pounds through milling each year.
This day, both treadmills were already in operation. On the larger one, Dunne counted thirty-six men, each holding on to wooden crossbars at eye level. They climbed-and got nowhere-from one foot-wide blade to the next. They were stepping at something less than forty paces a minute. Twenty men on the smaller mill imitated these motions.
An overseer and an armed guard watched over each mill. Any man who tried to step back off was threatened with fifty lashes. Once started, the prisoner had to keep going, or he would fall off, or even slip into the gap between blades. There had been many accidents since the steps had been installed five years earlier.
”There are no women,” the patterer observed suddenly.
”Oh, aye,” agreed OBannion. ”They don't like to have them here. Like they haven't flogged a woman since '17 or '18. They'll still hang 'em, though.”
Dunne must have shown his puzzlement.
”It's the blood, see,” explained OBannion. ”Our masters don't turn a hair at the sight of a b.l.o.o.d.y back when some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d is married to the three sisters”-he used the convict-talk nickname for the flogging triangles-”and the worst that can happen with someone, man or woman, being turned off is that they'll s.h.i.+t or p.i.s.s themselves. But they don't care to take the risk with a woman here at this dancing academy. They send them to the factory instead.”
”Why not on the step?”
”Why not? Because too many of them have their moon courses while climbing. One keeper complained that they often had not a dry thread among them.”
”Oh,” said the patterer, who knew as much about menstruation as the next man. That is, precious little. Or nothing.
A batch of men had been stood down from the Great Mill for a spell, leaving empty stations.
”Come on.” OBannion nudged Dunne. ”We're on soon.”
”Won't they find out I'm not supposed to be here?”
”No, they'll not care, as long as they have a warm body to make their headcount and lists tally. You stick with us and you'll pa.s.s muster. Just answer when Jimmy's called. Remember: Bond's the name-James Bond.”
”What did you you do?” do?”
”Well, apart from those fellows in shackles-they're old lags on secondary punishment-the rest of us are only petty offenders, small beer. Like I said, we're only here for the rest of the day, until sunset. And we're free men-when we're not in places like this! You can tell that some here are soldiers, some are Emancipists, like me, and others are Jimmy Grants. They're in for things like gambling, drunkenness, c.o.c.kfighting, something like that. Me? Oh, they seized me for riding like the clappers with the hounds of h.e.l.l behind me down Castlereagh Street, having had a few too many brandies. Furious riding while intoxicated, they called it. Ah yes, I've done all this before.”
A guard hustled them toward the big wheel. Now it was their turn to climb. As they mounted their machine, taking up adjoining stations, OBannion warned the patterer, ”It's terrible hard work, but the boredom can be the worst of it. Don't try to count the steps or the revolutions of the wheel. It can make you crazed. Old hands, brave souls they are, who've done the counting, claim there are 1,440 steps an hour-not that it's really an hour; you do forty minutes then stand down for twenty. And there's an hour for a meal. Bread and gruel, that is. So, if you did an eleven-hour stretch, all told, how many steps would that be? Are you a hand at reckoning?”
Nicodemus Dunne was. He'd had it birched into him at school. With rhetoric and some Latin and Greek. Anyway, he liked numbers. He paused, then said, ”15,840 feet. At 5,280 feet to the mile-why, that's-”
”You have the right of it,” said OBannion. ”Three miles ... perpen-b.l.o.o.d.y-dicular and getting nowhere!”
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THEY CLIMBED TO that routine for the rest of the working day. Dunne and OBannion were young and fit. Still, the palms of their hands had soon become slippery on the rail, from sweat and the blood and water from burning, bursting blisters. They felt the muscles of their legs cramp and their hips threaten to seize up. They soon shed their sweaty s.h.i.+rts, but nothing could stop their inner thighs and s.c.r.o.t.u.ms being rubbed raw. The patterer now agreed with the men who called the mills ”c.o.c.k-chafers.”
At one stage, they felt the blades suddenly become stiffer and harder to depress. They had to use all their strength to make the wheels turn.
”That b.a.s.t.a.r.d!” OBannion gasped. ”He's playing with the brake.”
On each machine, a warder started, stopped and, in between, could regulate the speed by releasing or applying a screw-controlled drag on the giant drums. To torment the prisoners, this keeper was slowing the mill. As the men battled the inertia, OBannion snorted. ”Now you know why they call the b.u.g.g.e.rs 'screws'!”
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THE DAYS ORDEAL ended half an hour early for all workers on the Great Mill, but Dunne was sickened by the reason for their early mark. Like the others, he had sometimes not moved briskly enough and had been bruisingly rapped on the s.h.i.+ns as he mistimed the next descending steps. But, with the day fading, a man three stations away slipped between the steps. The wheel ground to a halt, but it was too late. The screaming man's leg was broken and mutilated. By the time the shambles was cleared, the day was over.
The names of OBannion, James Bond and the other day-men were ticked off and soon they were outside the grim gates. The patterer knew, however, that he was still far from free.
”I have to get back to the heart of the town, but every constable's eye-and every soldier's-will be wide open for me,” he said. Then he had an idea. ”Will you do me a service?” he asked OBannion.
The Irishman nodded. He believed his new friend was innocent of the crime for which he was being hunted.
”Here's threepence. It will buy you a pie at the Hope and Anchor.”
OBannion frowned. How could food from the pub help? ”You want a pie?”
The patterer smiled. ”I wouldn't say no to one, but you can have the pie-I really want the pieman.”
And he proceeded to explain his plan.
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WHILE HE WAITED for OBannion to return, Nicodemus Dunne was surrept.i.tiously busy.
He made his way to the nearby Benevolent Society asylum for the poor. Unseen, he filched, from was.h.i.+ng still laid out over bushes to dry, a large overall garment and a cap. He added what appeared to be a cape of sorts to his laundry haul. Next, from a shed at the back of the asylum, he wheeled a wooden wheelbarrow. It squeaked loudly enough, he thought, to wake the dead at the nearby Sandhills cemetery. But again n.o.body challenged him.
Back in the shadows, now by the side of the main road, he settled down to wait. He was weary from his day of fruitless walking and soon felt himself dozing off. A crackle in undergrowth brought him back to alertness. And there it was again; he could not quite pick the direction it was coming from.
”Pieman, is that you? OBannion?”
The only response was a cras.h.i.+ng blow to the back of his head. A flash like lightning, then pitch-darkness swallowed him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.
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