Tommo & Hawk Read Online Free Page A

and I as black as the ace of spades and big as a bullfrog! It's very confusing to other folk, but not to Tommo and me. We're twins in the heart and in the head. Whether Jew or Mohammedan, twins are their own religion.

    Anyway, Mary isn't much concerned with religion. 'Tell 'em you're Church of England,' she says when we're asked. 'Don't suppose it matters, do it? God ain't got no religion, now does he? As far as worshipping goes, it's best not to take sides.' She decided for all of us when she pointed to the mountain towering above us, 'Best off worshipping that!' She was not jesting either, for she loves the mountain. 'God lives in that mountain, right above the organ pipes!' she told us once. The organ pipes are the shafts of rocks that form a steep cliff to one side of the top of Mount Wellington.

    When we were little, Tommo and I always skirted well clear of those pipes when we climbed the mountain, just in case Mary was right and we should bump into God.

    'What would you say to God if we should meet Him up there?' I once asked Tommo.

    Tommo thinks for a moment then says right off, 'I'd invite Him to Sunday dinner.'

    'Why?' I asked.

    'Because that's the most holy place we got, silly!'

    He was right, too. Once when Mary spread her damask cloth we asked her why, and she said, 'It be our way of giving thanks to Him what keeps our bellies full. It be our altar cloth.'

    'We belongs to the White Tablecloth Religion,' Tommo once told the curate at St David's who stopped us in the street and asked why we didn't come to Sunday School.

    As for not going to church, Mary always says, 'If folk don't like it, well, that's just too bad now, ain't it? Knowing right from wrong is all what matters and I've yet to meet the preacher on this Gawd-forsaken island what does!'

    There is little doubt Sunday is important to her, though, and a special occasion. Almost every time she spreads the cloth she says, 'One day I'm going to buy us some silver, some Sunday silver!' But I don't think she ever will. Such a gesture would be much too flash for Mary and we're still eating off the same tin plates and using the most ordinary cutlery you can buy.

    Since I have come back from England with Ikey's stolen fortune, Mary could have a crystal chandelier in the kitchen if she wanted, and bone china and silver cutlery heavy enough to sprain your wrist. But Mary doesn't want people to think she's a free settler or a toff, or that she believes herself better than the rest of the lags. She isn't ashamed of who she is, a convict who has earned her ticket-of-leave and had her freedom granted after serving her sentence.

    'It's who you is when folk knocks at the door of your heart what counts,' she always said when we were young. 'Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone.'

    I remember her telling us always, 'Never give no one the power to shame you. Keep everything clear and in the open. Hiding from the past be the main business o' this cursed island, people trying to pretend they's better than other people, when they's dirt, the scrapings o' the barrel, just like what we is. Hannah Solomon be the prime example, putting on airs and graces, talking like a toff and trying to be a free settler, what she ain't and never can be.'

    Hannah was Ikey's lawful wife, but all she did was try to do him harm. Now she and Ikey's children live with a cove named George Madden in New Norfolk. Mama once taught three of Ikey and Hannah's brats, David, Ann and Sarah, when Hannah was a prisoner seamstress in the Cotton Factory. 'They was bright too, those young uns,' Mary told me.

    Mary doesn't care much for the free settlers here. 'Who'd come to this miserable place even if it were free, 'less they was third-rate to begin?' is what she says. But she is not being altogether truthful about her feelings. She'd not return to Blighty even if the governor granted her free passage. Mary loves this island, it is where she found the