FullReads

Billy Bosistow was a very different pair of shoes. Although no drinker by habit, he fretted and wore himself down at times to a lowness of spirits in which nothing seemed to serve him but drinking, and fierce drinking. On his better days he was everybody’s favourite; but when the mood fell on him he grew teasy as a bear with a sore head, and fit to set his right hand quarrelling with his left. Then came the drinking fit, and he’d wake out of that like a man dazed, sitting in a corner and brooding for days together. What he brooded on, of course, was means of escape. At first, like every other prisoner in Jivvy, he had kept himself cheerful with hopes of exchange, but it seemed the folks home in Ardevora had given up trying for a release, or else letters never reached them. And yet they must have known something of the case their poor kinsmen were in, for in the second year the Commandant sent for Abe and Billy, and informed them that, by the kindness of a young English lady, a Miss Selina Johns, their allowance was increased by two sols a day. He showed them no letter, but the increase was paid regularly for eight months; after which a new Commandant came, and it ceased. They could never find out if the supply ceased, or into whose pocket it went if it came.

From that time Bosistow had two things to brood upon–escape and Selina. But confinement is the ruination of some natures, and as year after year went by and his wits broke themselves on a stone wall, he grew into a very different man from the handy lad the Johnnies had taken prisoner. One thing he never gave up, and that was his pluck; and he had plenty of use for it when, after seven years, his chance came.

His first contrivance was to change names with an old American in the depot. It so happened that the captain of a French privateer had applied to the prison for a crew of foreigners to man his ship, then lying at Morlaix. The trick, by oiling the jailor’s palm, was managed easily enough, and away Bosistow was marched with twenty comrades of all nations. But at the first stage some recruiting officers stopped them, insisting that they were Irish and not Americans, and must be enlisted to serve with Bonaparty’s army in Spain. The prisoners to a man refused to hear of it, and the end was they were marched back to prison in disgrace, and, to cap everything, had their English allowance stopped on pretence that they had been in the French service. Yet this brought him a second chance, for being now declared an Irishman he managed to get himself locked up with the Irish, who had their quarters on the handier side of the prison; and that same night broke out of window with two other fellows, got over the prison wall, and hid in the woods beyond. But on the second day a party of wood-rangers attacked them with guns and captured them; and back they went, and were condemned to six years in irons.

This, as it turned out, didn’t amount to much; for, while they were waiting to be marched off to the galleys, their jailor came with news that a son was born to the Emperor, and they were pardoned in honour of it. But instead of putting them back in their old quarters, he fixed them up for a fortnight in a room by themselves, being fearful that such bad characters would contaminate the other prisoners. This room was an upstairs one in a building on the edge of the ramparts, and after a few nights they broke through the ceiling into an empty chamber, which had a window looking on the roof. With a rope made of their bedclothes they lowered themselves clean over the ramparts on to the edge of the precipice over the river; and along this they passed–having no daylight to make them giddy–and took their way northwards across the fields.