Monsieur was eating an egg.

And there was the clergyman I had heard howling out the psalm. I had pictured a craggy gray-haired hermit, but he had pie-eater's jowls and the straight floppy dark hair of a boy. "Your father has been worried for you, John," said he.

My father?

The captain's flinty eyes were on us hard like a gamekeeper on a well-known pair of poachers.

Monsieur towered silently over everyone at table, a frowning bull.

"Good morning Da," I said. I kissed him and felt the quiver of his foreign skin. He grasped my arm and I knew, he never had a son to love in all his life. Who will care for me, I thought.

"This is a big adventure for a young lad," said the clergyman.

Would he look after me?

"Your mother must miss you, John," he asked.

"My mother is dead sir."

Monsieur's nose contracted.

"A new life," said the doctor's wife, and patted my hand. Would she look after me?

"An important job," she said.

"Miss?"

"To be your father's voice. How very fine that is, John. What a privilege it is for you."

I doubt Monsieur understood a word. He bestowed on all a ghastly smile.

The doctor flicked back his doggish hair as he examined me. I smiled in the hope that he would like me.

The captain wiped his well-shaped mouth with his napkin and leaned back in his chair "What will you be doing in Australia?" He slid the sugar bowl toward my porridge and it did not rest until brought up sharp against the table rim.

I thought, He does not like me.

"Dr. Bingham," he asked, not taking his eye off me for a second, "what do you reckon of his nibs' color?"

I turned to the doctor, whose harelip showed like a sea anemone in the morning light. I thought, Please do not send me to Australia.

"He is ill," said the doctor.

"Passez-moi le sucre," interrupted the clergyman.

"Le sucre," I cried. Please do not send me to Australia. "Passez-moi le sucre."

The Frenchman squeezed my knee so hard it hurt, but he would not look at me, only at the clergyman, who did not have the sense to be afraid.

"Ah-ha!" Potter cried the clergyman. "You speak French."

"No, sir."

Reverend Potter licked his plump lips so they glistened. "I was admiring," he continued, "the way your father has his coat cut. I'm sure it is the latest thing." He cast sideways glances at the captain, blinking at me like some silly lady's dog.

"I'm just a parrot, sir," I cried, all cockney.

Potter bounced his bottom in his chair and the Marquis de Tilbot stretched his long single arm and laid it like a claw upon his shoulder.

"Et quel est le but de votre voyage?" the clergyman insisted, but he had not reached voyage before he yelped, and then I understood Monsieur, who was smiling in the most amiable way imaginable, had his hand like a gill hook in the chaplain's flesh.

Said Dr. Bingham, "You need fresh air, John."

I escaped fresh air on that occasion, but the next morning I was escorted onto the poop deck by the doctor, where I once more heard the cry of beds on deck, and this time looked down to see the soldiers raise a great studded hatch on the deck, and from this maw was produced, from the belly of the ship, a poor race of trolls and troglodytes who brought with them the most awful fetid smell. I watched in disgust and fascination as these creatures bundled their bedding up into the netting, and the boys-you never saw such boys, their eyes black as crab eyes, shrunken like grapes unwanted by the world.

When they were all assembled, clanking in their chains, pressed tight onto the quarterdeck and surrounded by the soldiers with their guns and bayonets, the Reverend Potter performed the morning prayers, and this caused several of the men and women prisoners to kneel, thus making the most horrid sound of chains rubbing on each other and falling hard onto the deck.

When we next came out for air I was afraid, not only of the sea but of that boiling black poisonous swarm, those Australians, in the nest beneath my feet. On that chill clear day they were kept below for their own safety, but I could hear the dreadful screams and shouts that went up every time the water came across the foredeck. I could not imagine who they were, except the poor creatures were in terror of being drowned.

Up on the deck, I wrapped my rabbit skin violently around me, fur in, crinkly side out. The seas rushed hugely by, sending fountains of spray to slap my face.

I held hard on to the lifeline and pressed against Monsieur.

Dr. Bingham and the reverend were close beside us. The captain was seated on a large coil of rope, once more fiddling with his pipe.

There was a Mr. Pillock, a new hand, at the wheel, and just at the moment when an unusually big wave overtook us, he allowed the vessel to broach to. In a moment the weight of all the sea, tons of it, fell upon me. It knocked the air out of me. I was drowned already, broken like a chicken wing, dragged and spun toward my death, and in the midst of that spinning sting I saw the reverend slide down the tilted deck beside me, and then Monsieur tackled the clergyman, and the coil of rope on which the captain had been sitting was washed overboard and snaked upon the sea.

I scrabbled at the deck. I saw the Marquis de Tilbot swing his strong single arm around the reverend's neck. We slid down the deck together, toward the ocean. I saw the Frenchman give the clergyman a twist, a flick like a big fish might give with its tail. As I skidded down toward my death, I stuck my bony knees into the bulwarks. I was scraped from toe to knee. At that moment I thought the Reverend Potter was also still alive.

THE CAPTAIN KNEELED over the sodden body of the clergyman.

"Poor devil broke his neck."

Monsieur held me. He poofed his lips at me. What did he mean? I was shivering, bleeding on his shirt. Was it because I said sucre he killed the chaplain? I felt the great hard sealy mass of him, his wet cold nose against my neck.

"Mon petit," he whispered, in my secret English ear, in the lethal language, in the awful stinging sea.

By afternoon bright snakes of light were waving across the wardroom and my leg was bandaged and my chest was bare and I watched Mrs. Bingham sew a mourning band onto my shirt.

At evening the chains scraped the deck like thunder and I watched the dreadful convicts marched seven times around the deck. A boy waved to me. I pretended not to see.

Next day, the day of poor Potter's burial, was the finest we had had since leaving Plymouth, a cloudless sky mirrored in the great ocean that lay beneath it like a sheet of glass. It was very cold. From the poop I saw some large fish alongside. The horror of that meal.

At the hour allotted for the ceremony, I returned to the poop deck with Mrs. Bingham. Monsieur followed and stood behind. I could smell his sticky perfume as I waited for the convicts to be brought on deck. The Frenchman sighed. The hatchway was stoutly framed so the exposed woodwork was covered with broad-headed nails, so close together they made a sheet of steel and the structure was proof against being cut. Through this armored throat the prisoners now came onto the deck, the men's heads blue and shaven, carrying with them that smell which, Mrs. Bingham said, was their own fault as they would not holystone their decks as the doctor wished. They insisted on scrubbing them with seawater and as a result the whole of their deck had a sour stink like rags left in a bucket, sweat and pee and darkness.

They wore blue-and-white neckerchiefs, gray stockings barred with red stripes, and they were all in chains. Later most of the prisoners would have their shackles removed, but on the day of Mr. Potter's burial the most fortunate were still chained on one side. I could taste the rust and steel of Australia inside my mouth.