First Labour Call

"The gaol had been taking things from me since the day I arrived. The work bell was the first time it asked for something in return."

The bell was wrong.

I knew it before my eyes were open — knew it in the way a man knows the difference between a knock at his door and a fist against it, between a voice raised in greeting and a voice raised in warning. The morning bells I had learned across five days of confinement possessed their own vocabulary: the deep, measured toll of the count bell, the sharper chime of the visiting bell, the flat, perfunctory clang that announced the evening meal. I had catalogued them the way I had once catalogued the sounds of Butcher Street — the milk cart's rattle, the cooper's hammer, the particular creak of the third stair that told you Father was on his way down — filing each one in the ledger of my new existence, assigning it meaning, using it to navigate the hours.

This bell was none of those. It came earlier — much earlier, the window slit still black, the corridor lamp still guttering on its last measure of oil — and it came with a violence that the other bells had not possessed. Not louder, precisely, but more insistent, each stroke falling upon the last before its echo had died, the sound piling upon itself in layers until the cell seemed to vibrate with it, the very stones humming with the urgency of whatever it demanded.

I sat up. The straw shifted. The cold found me.

"Work bell!" The voice came from the corridor, a guard's voice, stripped of everything but function. "Work bell! On your feet!"

Work bell. Two words I had not heard before, though I had been waiting for them since Culpepper first mentioned labour five days ago — mentioned it casually, the way a man mentions weather, as something that simply happened and required no further explanation. I had imagined it abstractly, the way a man imagines pain before the surgeon's blade arrives: aware of its inevitability, unable to picture its specifics. Now the specifics were arriving, announced by a bell that would not stop ringing and a voice that would not stop shouting, and my body — which had learned to move through the morning's rituals with the compliance of a thing that no longer required persuasion — swung its legs over the frame and placed its feet upon the cold stone and stood.

The bucket first. The bucket was always first. I crossed to the corner with the unseeing efficiency of a man performing an act he has already excised from the category of experience — an act that simply occurs, between sleep and wakefulness, in the space where dignity once lived. The hatch opened. The bucket went through. The gloved hand took it. The hatch closed. I wiped my palms on my breeches. Five days, and the sequence had already worn a groove in me so deep that I moved through it the way water moves through a channel: without resistance, without thought, without the expenditure of any resource that might be needed later.

There was no Sunday bowl this morning. No sliver of soap, no private wash, no small concession to the fiction that I was a man worth presenting well. The door opened — not to a turnkey's bark but to the broader, flatter command of a guard I had not seen before, a heavyset man with a face like a clenched fist and a truncheon worn at his belt with the casual familiarity of a carpenter's hammer — and I was directed into the corridor with a jerk of his chin that contained, in its single, economical motion, everything I needed to know about what the morning expected of me.

The corridor was already full. Not the sparse, shuffling procession of the Sunday washing queue but a dense, compressed mass of bodies moving in one direction, the passage narrowed by the sheer volume of men it contained. They emerged from their cells in a continuous, ragged stream — some quickly, with the brisk, head-down urgency of men who knew the cost of delay, others slowly, stiffly, their bodies requiring more persuasion than the bell alone could provide. The air was thick with the immediate, concentrated stench of men roused from cells that had been sealed since the previous evening — the sourness of sleep-sweat, the acrid bite of buckets not yet emptied, the deeper, older smell of bodies that had not been properly washed in weeks and would not be, not today, not on a work morning when the schedule allowed nothing beyond the trough's thirty-second ablution.

I fell in. There was no decision in it — the current took me the way a river takes a leaf, absorbing me into its movement without pause or acknowledgement. Bodies pressed close on either side. The man ahead of me was broad across the back, his shirt darkened with old sweat between the shoulder blades, his neck thick and reddened above a collar that had long since abandoned any pretence of whiteness. He moved with the heavy, rolling gait of a man whose body had been shaped by labour long before the gaol claimed it, the muscles of his shoulders shifting beneath the thin fabric with a fluidity that spoke of years at a forge or a quay. The man behind me breathed audibly — quick, shallow inhalations through the nose, the sound of someone managing anxiety or illness or both — and his proximity was close enough that I could feel the warmth of his exhalations against the back of my neck, damp and slightly sour.

I had heard these men through walls. I had imagined them as voices — Carver's gravelled counsel, the consumptive's racking cough, the weeping boy, the man who muttered prayers or madness in the dark. Now they were bodies. Close, real, pressing, unavoidable. And the reality of them — the smell of them, the heat of them, the sheer, crowded physicality of sixty or seventy men compressed into a passage built for twenty — was overwhelming in a way the voices had not prepared me for. A voice could be kept at a distance. A body could not.

The guards moved along the column's edges, their commands sharper than I had heard them, their truncheons more visible. "Move. Move. Keep the line. Move." The words fell with the steady rhythm of a coxswain's drum, driving the column forward, compressing the gaps, tolerating no pause, no hesitation, no deviation from the channel through which we were being poured. Sunday's morning had been a stroll. This was a march — not military in its precision but military in its intent, the systematic movement of bodies from one location to another with the minimum expenditure of time and the maximum expenditure of authority.

The trough came first. The same room, the same stone channel, the same grey water, but the experience was compressed to the point of caricature. The line did not slow at the doorway; it bent, narrowed, passed through. The guard stationed at the trough's end — a different man from Sunday, younger, harder-eyed, with the coiled impatience of someone who considered this posting beneath him — did not shout next but simply pointed, the gesture repeated so rapidly that it became a blur of motion, each finger-stab driving the next man to the water and the previous man away in a continuous, relentless exchange.

I reached the trough. The water was colder than Sunday's — or perhaps it only seemed so, the absence of soap and the reduction of time making the cold feel more pointed, more deliberate. I plunged my hands in, brought the water to my face, scrubbed once at my cheeks, once at my neck, and stepped aside. The whole operation lasted no longer than the time it takes to draw three breaths. The man behind me — the audible breather — was already at the trough before I had shaken the water from my fingers. There was no moment to pause, no surface in which to catch a glimpse of the face I might or might not recognise. There was only the cold, and the wet, and the next thing.

The next thing was food.

They fed us standing. Not in the cell, not on benches, not with any of the small accommodations that the gaol's other meals had grudgingly afforded. The line turned from the washing room into a wider passage — a section of corridor that had been pressed into service as a feeding station, a trestle table set against one wall bearing a row of tin bowls filled from a cauldron that steamed faintly in the cold air. The steam rose in thin, reluctant wisps, as though even the heat wished to escape this place. A trusty — a prisoner given kitchen duties, his apron stained with the accumulation of a hundred identical mornings — ladled the gruel into each bowl with a motion so practised it had ceased to be a motion and become a reflex, his wrist turning at the same angle every time, the ladle depositing the same grey, viscous measure with the mechanical precision of a factory instrument.

I took my bowl. The gruel was thinner than the evening rations — thinner and hotter, the heat a small, unexpected mercy that I absorbed through my palms as I raised the bowl to my lips. There were no spoons. There was no time for spoons. The men around me drank straight from the tin, tipping the bowls back and swallowing in long, urgent draughts, the liquid running down chins and necks where the angle was misjudged or the pace outstripped the throat's capacity. I did the same. The taste was familiar — that flat, metallic bitterness I had come to associate with the gaol's particular interpretation of sustenance — but the heat softened it, made it almost bearable, and I drank it down in four swallows and felt it land in my empty stomach with a warmth that would not last but was, for the moment, something.

A heel of bread accompanied the gruel — harder and smaller than the evening's ration, its crust darkened almost to black on one side. I bit into it as I walked, chewing with the side of my mouth, the bread's density resisting my teeth with the familiar, obstinate determination of a substance that had never intended to be eaten and resented the attempt. I swallowed it in dry, effortful lumps. Around me, other men did the same — eating in motion, chewing as they walked, their jaws working with the grim, rhythmic persistence of cattle at a trough.

We were not cattle. But the comparison, once formed, refused to leave.

The column reformed beyond the feeding passage, the men reassembling into their rough order with the practised ease of bodies that had performed this assembly many times before. I found my place — or rather, a place found me, the current depositing me in a gap between two men I did not know and who showed no inclination to know me. The corridor stretched ahead, longer than any route I had yet walked within the gaol, turning twice at right angles before descending a short flight of steps into a section I had not seen.

The walls here were rougher, less dressed, the stone retaining the marks of the chisel that had shaped it — long, uneven grooves that caught the lamplight and created patterns of shadow and relief that looked, in the flickering light, like the work of some disordered hand trying to write a message it could not quite form. The ceiling was lower, the air cooler and damper, carrying with it a smell that was different from the gaol's interior — earthier, rawer, tinged with something mineral that I could not immediately identify. Crushed stone, I would learn. The particular, gritty smell of granite dust suspended in still air. It coated everything down here — the walls, the floor, the men's clothing — a fine, pale film that turned dark fabric grey and grey fabric white and settled in the creases of skin and the folds of cloth with the patient, inexorable thoroughness of time itself.

The column halted. The sudden cessation of movement, after the morning's constant forward pressure, felt almost violent — bodies compressing against one another as the men at the front stopped and those behind had not yet received the signal. I stumbled, caught myself against the wall, and felt the grit of stone dust beneath my palm. The man ahead of me — the broad-backed one with the labourer's shoulders — did not turn, did not acknowledge the contact, simply stood and waited with the bovine patience of a creature that had learned the difference between stopping and arriving.

We had arrived at a junction. The passage split: one branch continuing straight, its dim length disappearing into darkness; the other turning left through a set of heavy doors that stood open, admitting a wedge of grey light and a breath of air that was, after the corridor's close confinement, shockingly, almost painfully fresh. Not warm — the April morning had not yet shed its chill — but moving, alive, carrying with it the scent of open space and recent rain and, beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the salt and tar of the harbour.

Outside. Or nearly outside. The doors opened onto a covered passage — a kind of cloister, roofed but open along one side, its stone columns framing a view of the yard beyond. I caught a glimpse of grey sky, high walls, the dark points of iron spikes silhouetted against the cloud. The yard was larger than I had imagined from my Sunday glimpse through the chapel corridor gate — a broad, irregular space bounded on three sides by the gaol's towering walls and on the fourth by a lower structure whose purpose I could not determine. The ground was not flagstone but packed earth and gravel, darkened by the night's rain into a surface that looked, in the early light, like the colour of a bruise.

The column was breaking apart. Men were being separated, directed, channelled into groups by guards whose voices and gestures carried the crisp efficiency of a process that had been refined over years into something approaching choreography. Names were called. Men stepped forward, were assessed, were pointed towards one destination or another with the same impersonal authority with which a dockmaster directs cargo to its hold. Some groups moved towards the yard's far end, where a gate in the lower wall stood open. Others were directed along the covered passage towards an area I could not see. A smaller number — the old, the infirm, the consumptive among them, his frame so wasted that even the guards seemed to handle him with a kind of grudging caution — were sent back the way we had come, towards the interior and whatever lighter duties the gaol assigned to men whose bodies could no longer be profitably broken.

I stood in the diminishing crowd and waited for my name.

The man conducting the assignments was not a guard. He stood apart from them, positioned at the junction of the covered passage and the yard's entrance like a tollkeeper at a bridge. He was shorter than the guards and older, dressed not in uniform but in the plain, dark clothing of a civilian — a waistcoat over a collarless shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows despite the cold, revealing forearms that were thick, scarred, and mapped with the particular topography of a lifetime spent working with his hands. His face was weathered, deep-lined, the skin toughened by exposure to elements that had nothing to do with the gaol's interior. An overseer. A man employed not to guard but to manage, to extract from the Crown's inventory of convicted bodies the maximum return in labour.

He worked from a ledger — a battered, leather-bound book held open in the crook of his left arm, its pages marked with columns of names and annotations in a hand too small to read at any distance. He consulted it between each assignment, his eyes moving from the page to the man before him and back again with the rapid, practised fluency of someone who had been matching names to bodies for longer than most of those bodies had been incarcerated.

"Jeffries."

I stepped forward. The ground beneath my feet changed as I left the covered passage — from stone to gravel, the small, sharp stones shifting under my boots with a sound like teeth grinding. The morning air pressed against my face, cold and damp and impossibly open after the corridor's compression, and I breathed it in — a deep, involuntary inhalation that filled my chest to its limit and sent a shudder through me that was not entirely cold.

The overseer looked at me. The assessment took no more than three seconds, but I felt every fraction of it — his eyes moving from my face to my shoulders to my arms to my hands with the frank, unhurried appraisal of a man who had been reading bodies the way I read ledgers for longer than I had been alive. His gaze lingered on my hands. I saw it happen — the momentary pause, the fractional narrowing of his eyes as they took in the shape and condition of my fingers, my palms, my wrists. He was reading them the way a farrier reads a horse's hooves: not with curiosity but with professional assessment, determining what they were built for and what they could be made to do.

My hands were a clerk's hands. I knew it. He knew it. The palms were soft, the fingers long and uncalloused, the nails — though ragged now from the gaol's attentions — still carrying the shape of hands that had held quills and turned pages and pressed ink into ledger lines. They had never gripped a hammer. They had never broken stone. They had never closed around anything heavier than the brass weights on Harrison's counting scales, and the overseer saw this as clearly as if the history of their employment had been tattooed upon the skin.

His mouth moved. Not a smile — nothing so generous, nothing so wasteful — but a small, tight contraction of the muscles around his lips that communicated, with the economy of a man who had no syllables to spare, his estimation of what I was worth. It was not contempt, precisely. It was closer to the expression a carpenter might wear upon being handed a plank of green timber and told to make it bear a load.

"Stone yard," he said. He made a mark in the ledger. He did not look up again.

A guard materialised at my shoulder — not roughly, not with the deliberate assertion of force, but with the smooth, practised inevitability of a mechanism engaging. His hand did not touch me. It did not need to. His presence was sufficient to indicate the direction, and I moved, following the line of men who had received the same assignment and were now filing through the yard towards its western wall.

I saw it as I walked. The stone yard occupied the yard's far quarter, set against the highest wall, its area demarcated not by fences or barriers but by the simple, unmistakable evidence of its purpose: a heap of rough stone — granite, grey and dense and sharp-edged — piled against the wall to a height that reached the lower windows. Before it, spaced at intervals along the ground, flat stones set into the earth served as anvils, and beside each anvil a tool waited.

Not hammers. Not all of them. Some positions held hammers — heavy, short-handled, their iron heads dark with use. But others held pickaxes, and it was towards these that the newer men — myself among them, identifiable by our uncertainty, by the way we looked at the tools before touching them instead of reaching for them with the automatic familiarity of the men already at work — were being directed.

But first, the tool shed.

It stood at the yard's edge, a low, squat structure of rough timber and corrugated iron, its doors propped open to reveal an interior lined with racks from which the implements of the gaol's industry hung in ordered rows. Hammers of various weights, their handles worn to a smooth, dark patina by a thousand grips. Pickaxes with heads that gleamed dully where the rust had been worn away by use. Shovels. Crowbars. Iron wedges. Each tool tagged with a number, each number recorded in a second ledger kept by a guard who stood at the shed's entrance and checked each item out with the meticulous care of a man who understood that an unaccounted pickaxe was not merely a clerical error but a weapon untraced.

"Name," the guard said when I reached him.

"Jeffries."

He consulted his ledger, found the entry, and pointed to a pickaxe on the rack behind him — third row, second from the left. "That one. Bring it back in one piece, or you'll wish you had."

I lifted it from the rack. The weight surprised me, though it should not have — I had seen pickaxes on the docks, had watched men swing them at barrel staves and frozen earth, had registered their heft in the abstract way of a man who observes labour without participating in it. But the abstract and the actual are separated by an abyss that no amount of observation can bridge, and when the iron head swung downward as I took the handle in both hands, its gravitational pull travelling through the ash shaft and into my wrists and forearms with a force that made the muscles seize, I understood for the first time — truly understood, in my body rather than my mind — what the morning was about to demand of me.

The pickaxe was not just heavy. It was consequential — a weight that communicated, through the medium of wood and iron, the full, non-negotiable reality of what I had been assigned to do. It was not a quill. It was not a ledger. It was not a column of figures that could be corrected with a stroke of ink. It was an instrument designed to break stone, and the hands that held it were designed for nothing of the kind, and the gap between the two — between what the tool required and what my body could provide — yawned before me like the mouth of a well, dark and depthless and offering no assurance of a bottom.

I carried it out of the shed. The shaft was rough against my palms — not splintered, as I had feared, but worn to a grainy smoothness that nonetheless promised blisters before the morning was through. The iron head hung at my side, pulling my right arm downward, and I shifted my grip, trying to find a balance that would spare my wrist, and found none. The tool had its own centre of gravity, its own opinions about how it wished to be carried, and my preferences in the matter were not consulted.

The line of men moved towards the stone yard. I moved with them. The gravel crunched beneath our boots — a sound I was learning to associate with the yard's particular atmosphere, the way I associated the dripping with the cell and the jangling with the corridor. Each environment had its signature, and the yard's was this: the crunch of gravel underfoot, the ring of iron on stone, the smell of dust and sweat and cold air, and above it all the pale, indifferent sky, offering light without warmth, space without freedom, the illusion of openness within walls too high to climb.

Men were already at work. The positions nearest the stone heap — the prime spots, I would learn, where the largest and most easily broken pieces lay — were occupied by prisoners whose movements carried the fluid, unhurried confidence of long experience. They swung their hammers with an economy of motion that was almost beautiful in its efficiency, each arc calculated, each strike placed, the stone yielding to their blows with a regularity that suggested not strength but understanding — an intimate, hard-won knowledge of where the rock's weaknesses lay and how to exploit them. These were the yard's aristocracy, the men who had earned their positions through months or years of labour and who held them through a combination of skill, seniority, and the unspoken agreement of the guards, who valued a productive worker more than they would ever admit.

Beyond them, at the yard's margins, were the rest of us. The newer men, the weaker men, the men whose hands — like mine — had not yet been reshaped by the work into the instruments the work required. We were given the positions furthest from the heap, where the stones were smaller, already partially broken, the remnants that the experienced men had rejected or overlooked. The message was plain: the centre was earned, the edges were endured, and the distance between the two was measured not in yards but in calluses.

A guard pointed me to a position. A flat stone, set into the earth. A space in the line. The men on either side of me did not look up. They had their own concerns, their own stones, their own negotiations with the weight and the resistance and the relentless, bone-deep ache that I could see written in the set of their shoulders and the slow, careful way they raised and lowered their arms.

I set the pickaxe down. The iron head rested against the anvil stone with a dull, heavy clunk that seemed to travel through the ground and into the soles of my feet. I looked at my hands. The palms were already reddened where the shaft had pressed against the skin during the walk from the shed — two pink, tender lines across the base of each finger, the first faint warnings of what was to come.

I looked at the stone before me. It was smaller than those at the centre — perhaps the size of a large loaf, its surface rough and grey, shot through with pale veins of quartz that caught the morning's thin light. It sat upon the anvil with the patient, indifferent solidity of a thing that had been waiting a very long time and was in no hurry whatsoever. It did not care that I was a clerk. It did not care that my hands were soft, or that my arms had never swung anything heavier than a counting-house door, or that somewhere in Portsmouth a woman was sitting by a cold hearth wondering what her son was doing at this moment.

The stone did not care. The stone simply was. And I was expected to break it.

I gripped the pickaxe. I lifted it. The weight travelled through the shaft and into my arms and settled there, communicating its terms with the silent, absolute authority of gravity itself.

The man to my left brought his hammer down. The crack of iron on granite rang across the yard, sharp and clean, and a chip of stone flew free and skittered across the gravel. He raised the hammer again. Brought it down. Another crack. Another chip. The rhythm was steady, unhurried, as reliable as a heartbeat.

I raised the pickaxe to the height of my shoulder. My arms trembled. The morning air pressed cold against my face. The harbour salt was in my throat.

I held the tool above the stone and understood, in that suspended instant before the downswing, that the next few hours would teach me more about who I was than twenty-two years of living had managed. The counting house had measured my mind. The courtroom had measured my fate. But the stone yard would measure something else — something older, more fundamental, more honest than either.

It would measure what I could endure.