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Updated: May 7, 2025
"We want Captain McMasters, of the Polly Perkins. For God's sake, quick! There's that afoot must be caught up within the moment, do you hear!" The wherryman touched his cap and quickly made ready his boat.
In these dark massed shadows, how much might there not be of fate and mystery! Whither might not these vessels carry one! To France, to the far-off Indies, to the new-owned islands, to America with its little half-grown ports. Whence and whither? What might not one do, here at this gateway of the world? "To the brigantine beyond!" cried Will Law to the wherryman who came up.
The wherryman pawed once to spit on his hands as they neared the rush of the current below the bridge. "That was Master Cromwell with His Grace," he said. Chris looked at him questioningly. "Him with the gold collar," he added, "and that was Audley by him." The Prior had glanced at Chris as Cromwell's name was mentioned; but said nothing for the present. And Chris himself was lost again in musing.
She had followed them to the river; had mixed with the crowd that gathered there; and had heard the order given to the wherryman to pull to the Tower. That was all that she knew. "Thank God for your son, sir. He bore himself gallantly." There was a silence as she ended. The old man looked at her wondering and dazed. It was so sad, that the news scarcely yet conveyed its message.
Amongst these denizens of the country's waterways the position of the Thames wherryman was peculiar in that from very early times he had been exempt from the ordinary incidence of the press on condition of his periodically supplying from his own numbers a certain quota of able-bodied men for the use of the fleet.
The wherryman, it is true, possessed a ripe vocabulary, but the fact that it embraced only a single dialect seriously handicapped him in his race with the keelman, who had no less than three to draw upon, all equally prolific.
"The fellows do not know their fortune; they might lead such sweet meditative lives; they do not, I am well aware, for I have never heard such blasphemy as I have heard from wherrymen. But what opportunities are theirs! If I were not your father, my darling, I would be a wherryman. Si cognovisses et tu quae ad pacem tibi! Mr. Torridon, would you not be a wherryman if you were not Mr. Torridon?"
The wherryman sat down again and put on his cap. "Body of God!" he said, "there was but just time." And he began to pull again with his single oar towards the shore. Chris looked at the Prior a moment and down again. He was sitting with tight lips, and hands clasped in his lap, and his eyes were wild and piteous. They borrowed an oar presently from another boat, and went on up towards Southwark.
Will Law, understanding naught of this swift coil of events, and not daring to leave Lady Catharine behind him at the carriage, made down the stairway, half carrying the drooping figure which now leaned weakly upon his shoulder. "Pull now, man! Pull as you never did before!" cried he, and the wherryman bent hard to his oars.
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