Another week and my captors let me outside. Prescribed sunlight. They took me to a small, walled yard and let me walk around on my own like a grazing animal. The world opened up in batches. The sky was gray but stately. I smelled the river nearby. I was no longer bound with ropes, and the men, who were numerous and varied, only watched from afar as I blinked in the sunshine, smiled at the fresh air. They looked at me and I looked at them and there was no animosity between us. I felt no pain or rage. That dark, withering solitude had been a baptism, releasing me into this walled garden with a new dryness of mind where the air tasted brighter and more saturated with oxygen than my body knew what to do with. My brain felt holey and overinvigorated, as if I could scream, and on that first day outside I did. I let out an enormous, full-throated scream that woke up the morning, that ripped open the already open air and lasted until the men ran over and beat me again, bound me up and threw me back in my cell for another week, then we did it all over again.
Each week, my new life gained complexity and thus was more enjoyable—and the fact that I was already calling it my new life was enough indication alone that something had been cracked open and drained inside me, beyond easy categorization. I would count the days with tallies scratched into my cell’s stone and wood walls, filing a fingernail down to a pulpy nub to mark one day, then moving to the next finger the next day. After ten days, I’d have a fresh fingernail ready. With this structure came sophistication. I was kept in my cell, but the beatings ceased. My screaming stopped. They gave me a blanket and eventually started to leave the door to my cell unlocked, trusting me.
I went to the walled garden daily. At least one man always accompanied me, sometimes more, and as the days and fingernails passed, I began to communicate with them. They all seemed to be workmen at this house, this compound. We volleyed simple words back and forth at first:Greenwich,London,food,bird,fish,warm,cold,sleep,wash. I discovered that the words they used weren’t foreign words at all, in fact, we shared nearly the same vocabulary, just spoken differently. They had that crunchy dialect—syllables budging against each other like sliding rocks, with a rhythm and sentence structure that was slower, using words sparingly but imbuing them with more meaning, relying less on accuracy via sheer quantity (how I would sputter and overqualify each noun, stack interjection on top of interjection) and more on finding that one single word, almost like a kanji, that would encapsulate what needed to be said. After nearly a month of this, and with little warning, like a train hurtling through consciousness, we began to communicate more fully.
“Ready to go back?”
“Yes. Can I have a cup of water first?”
“Of course.”
I drank from a clay cup, grainy against my lips. Water warm and earthy. I walked back to my cell. The guard followed casually. My shadow filled the cell as the door closed and I sat on the floor, leaned back against the wall, sunken and thankful for what counted as silence in this world but teemed with cooing owls, creaking branches, footsteps over floorboards, water thrown from basins, foxes, crickets, and mice; the overwhelm of this orchestra, the gulls, flies, dogs, a horse chortling somewhere. I thought about the future as the past and the past as the present. I soaked. Perhaps unwisely, I felt a form of love.
After two months of this—yes, two whole months—there was the sense that my status as a prisoner had been cast aside into a bureaucratic nothingspace, which isn’t surprising in London. Where at first there had been only barbarism, I now saw organization and hierarchy, with myself simply part of the stock. The people who loomed over me were actually not much higher up the chain and had their own superiors to answer to. There was a warden, then a master, then another master, who reported to a lord, who was absent but hung like a cloud over every day—a man who would one day visit, who existed mostly as a rhetorical device for threats and panic, such as how would they explain this new prisoner kept under lock and key and fed their food, so they might as well put me to work, or shunt me away, or shunt me away and put me to work, or bring me out, put me away. A holding pattern was in play, no one could really make a decision.
They gave me chores to do—sweeping the courtyard, cleaning my cell. Trust was established, the tasks expanded and therefore the world. I was shown other rooms of the house: akitchen, bedrooms, a dining hall. I met cooks, day laborers, children, more hierarchies unfurling faster than I could interpret or use as a gauge to determine, theoretically, where I might fit in.
The house I was in was a large manor house near where the old Royal Naval Hospital and University of Greenwich would be in the future. It was two floors and a basement, made of brick, stone, and timber, with a tiled roof, and beyond the walled courtyard was an expansive yard that led down to a boat dock on the river, which I caught a glimpse of one day through an opened gate.
“Watch out,” said a man coming through. He pulled a wooden cart filled with heavy sacks, closed the gate behind him, and secured it with a lock. “Help me carry these to the storeroom. Do you understand?” He spoke slowly and I nodded. I had a stronger understanding of the language now—mashed up and underdeveloped but easier to grasp than a completely new tongue. I could carry on simple conversations if I had a willing participant, which I rarely had. Everyone regarded me with standoffish glances. The only words spoken to me were blunt commands.
“Take this one first. No, set that down, move it over there. Grab this one by the corners.”
I spent the afternoon helping the man move sacks from the courtyard into the house, down a narrow hallway to a storage room at the far end. Though we said little to each other, he seemed more patient than other workmen I had encountered. He was older and seemed more at my level in terms of meekness than the others. I summoned confidence in my new wayward English and took a chance. When we were nearly finished, I said to the man, “I’ve seen you here a few times, but you don’t live here, do you?” The words didn’t come out right. I had wanted to make myself sound like myself but it was hard.
“Pardon?”
I had mixed up a verb tense. I repeated myself and rearranged the wording, stumbling into greater simplicity.
“Where do I live?” the man clarified.
“Yes.”
“Over by the mill.” He heaved the last sack into place and made to leave. My small talk was too small.
“What’s today’s date?” I blurted out.
He pretended not to understand, or maybe he really didn’t, and kept walking, heading back to the courtyard. I followed him down the hall.
“Wait,” I said. “What year is it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” He chuckled. He walked faster, glancing into adjoining rooms and hallways as we passed them.
“What year are we in?” I repeated. “Like right now. Today. What is it—the year.”
He relented and mumbled over his shoulder. “Twenty-eighth.”
We stepped out into the courtyard.
“Twenty-eighth?” I said. “What do you mean twenty-eighth?” He kept walking away. “Come on, I just spent all day helping you, will you stop for a second?”
“Shhh.” The man swept dross from his cart with his hand. He wiped his hand on his shirt. He went to open the gate, looked back at the house, then at me. “Just because you’re picking up English all of a sudden doesn’t mean you can talk to whoever you want.”
“I’ve always spoken English, just not your English,” I said, as fully in his accent as I could. “What do you mean by twenty-eighth? Like sixteen-twenty-eight? Fifteen-twenty-eight?”
“As in the twenty-eighth year of King Edward,” he said. “But of course they wouldn’t teach you that where you come from. Now get your hands off my cart.”
“Twenty-eighth year...” My mouth hung open. “That does nothing for me.”
