The Convicts Read Online Free PDF Page B

white toes scraped at the earth, and then he was gone.
    1 didn't have time to move. Worms reached down, grabbed my shoulder, and hauled me up beside him. He stripped the clothes from the dead boy, rolling the body over and over as he pulled away die coat and the shirt and left them in a heap. Then the body, white and naked in the starlight, lay atop another grave. “Take his feet,” said Worms.
    We carried the boy to the street, past old Peggy to the back of the wagon. Worms reached underneath and worked some sort of latch. Then he pulled out a hidden shelf, revealing another body, a boy as naked as the first, but not quite whole. Squirms of maggots filled his eyes.
    Onto the shelf went my twin. Worms pushed it shut. “Up on the seat,” he told me.
    “My coat,”I cried.
    “Get up there and wait.” He gave me a push. “If a Charlie comes round, you whistle, you hear?”
    Worms went scurrying back to the graveyard. I heard his shovel clang and scrape, his breath gasp in fierce grunts. Again I thought of running away, but now I would lose my diamond. Too frightened to join him, I sat and waited, fretting on the wagon, staring up and down the street. When at last he came out he was dressed again in coat and top hat, carrying his shovel and his lantern, and my own coat beneath his arm. He opened the drawer and threw the shovel inside. The lantern he hung on a hook, the coat he tossed to me.
    I felt right away for the diamond. I turned the coat over and over on my knees, patting every inch of it. But it all flattened across my trousers, and just as I realized the diamond was gone, I saw that it wasn't my coat at all.
    “This is the dead boy's,” I said.
    “I know it,” said Worms, climbing up beside me. “Better than yours by half. Why, Tom Tin, this is your lucky day.”
    My heart sank. My riches were gone, my bubbles burst. I couldn't tell Worms why I suddenly sobbed one heartbroken cry. He thought that his gesture of kindness had pleased me. So he patted my shoulder and gathered his reins. “Put it on,” he said. “Let's see how splendid you look.”
    I thrust my arms through the sleeves; I hauled the coat around me.
    “Like royalty,” he staid. “The duke of Shoreditch sure enough” He set his hat straight and wriggled his bottom onto the seat. “Move along, Peggy.”
    As we drew away from the graveyard, I looked back. If there was any thought in my mind of leaving Worms and returning right then to that place, it was dashed on the instant. Worms closed his fingers round my arm and told me, “Sit tight. We're into this together now.”
    I would have to return to the churchyard on the next dark night, armed with my own shovel and lamp. So I studied the route we took, counting every corner, memorizing every building. I tried to use the lessons of my schooling and invent a rhyme that I might easily remember. Left at the blacking home, right at the sewer drain. Left at the corner and right once again. The verses piled up in my head until I had something nearly as long as the Iliad, and just as likely to be forgotten.
    Peggy's wooden leg tapped and banged. The wagon lurched along Tyburn Road, and I thought of the dead boy who rode in the back, behind and below me. I thought of him shaking and trembling, cuddling up to that more loathesome thing at his side Then we wheeled sharply left into a dark alley, and I ducked my head to pass below a great wooden boot that hung from a shoemaker's shop.
    I looked back at it, thinking I had found the landmark thatsnight lead me again to the diamond. Right at the boot, to the Tyburn route, I told myself.
    Peggy wheezed and panted, and Worms brought her to a stop. “Here we are,” he said. “Now, you're about to meet a gentleman, Tom, a right and proper gent So mind your p's andq's.”
    “You know a gentleman?” I asked, surprised.
    “Wal-ker!”said Worms. “I know many of ‘em, Tom, and this one's a dandy, Rubs shoulders with lords, he does—with the finest men in