The Convicts Read Online Free PDF Page A

envious,” I said, and he beamed.
    “Tell you what, my boy. I'll give you what no one gave me. A leg up, young Tom.” He turned to smile upon me from the darkness of his hood. “I'll give you tuppence for a night's work. Two big pennies for your very own.”
    I laughed. Tuppence was nothing to me anymore. But I needed something to tide me over until I found my father. I had no idea how to sell a diamond on my own. “Well, thank you, Worms,” I said.
    All evening I rode with the bone grubber, from one rubbish heap to the next. The river water soaked from my clothes to the blanket, and a steam came up from that, just as it did from the horse. For the blind man I spared no more thought. I fell asleep to the sounds and motions of the wagon, and dreamed of being rich. I drove through London in a cabriolet pulled by thirty horses. They ran abreast as I dashed along the Mall, as people skittled from my path. When I woke, the fog had cleared, and the nighttime sky shone with stars. The wagon wasn't moving, and I was all alone.
    Peggy stood beside a stone wall and a grim old church. Her ears, poking through slits in her straw hat, fluttered and twitched. Then I heard what she had heard, old Worms calling out in a harsh whisper from beyond the wall, “Tom Tin. Tom Tin!”
    I got down and went through the gate to the churchyard. For a moment, the sight of the crosses and tombstones brought back the memory of fetching my mother from a place just the same. Then Worms whispered again, and I saw him on my right. In the blackness of the graves he shimmered in a strange, unnatural light. It glowed on his chest and his hands, as though he stood before a fire that wasn't there. Then he stooped, reached into the ground, and brought up a lantern, which he held high.
    His coat and hat had been tossed atop a gravestone. All around him, the grass of the churchyard had been tornup and turned over. There was a pile of dirt, and a pile of sod, and Woims in the middle, beckoning with Ms hand. “Hurry, Tom,” he whispered.
    I walked toward him betweai the graves. I saw a shovel lying atop the dirt, and finally made sense of it all.
    Worms had dug a shaft straight down through a grave, and now stood over the opening, pointing.
    “Look in there,” he whispered. “You wont believe your eyes.”

I didn't look right away into the open grave. Worms was smiling at me, and globs of dirt were falling from his hands. They landed with plops and tiny thuds, and went rolling into the gaping shaft.
    “You were sleeping so tight I didn't want to wake you,” he said in a low voice. “But don't worry, Tom Tin, you'll still get your tuppence. The work ain't finished yet.”
    I didn't care about the work, nor about the tuppence.
    “Take a look, Tom. Quick,” he said.
    The lantern bobbed toward the grave. The shadows of the tombstones swooped hugely across the wall of the silent church.
    “You're a grave robber,” I said.
    “Shhh!” he whispered. “No, I ain't that, Tom. I don't touch their rings, their pennies, or nothing. I'm a resurrection man, It's the bodies I'm after, and lookat this one, Tom. Look down there.”
    He teached out and grabbed my arm. He pulled me forward, and I was certain that he was going to tip me into that open grave. He was going to put me in it and cover me over, and why I couldn't imagine. Then I thought of my diamond. Had he found it while I slept? But there it was in my pocket I could feel its hardness through the cloth.
    Worms pulled harder. I stiunbled over Wsshovel, right to the edge of the hole. Suddenly I was bending over the shaft he'd made, looking (town at a body in a coffin, at the shape of a corpse's head.
    Only the top bit of the coffin was open, the wood shattered away. As Worms lowers his lantern, the light flashed onto the pale face of a dead boy. There were dark coins on his eyes, a handkerchief tied below his chin. But the boy didn't seem dead at all. He seemed to be playing a pretending game down there in