As the carriage rattled its way back to Clerkenwell, he slid across the bench so his shoulder pressed against mine.
“Did you enjoy the evening?” he asked.
I smiled. “Very much. The music was magical.”
“I’m glad.” He took my hand and pressed it between both of his. “Nell,” he said, “there’s something I ought to tell you.”
I was expecting to hear of the mistress. Couldn’t believe he was planning to admit to it with my hand sandwiched between his. But Jonathan spoke in a tentative half voice, outlining the coining enterprise he and his business partner had been operating since the early days of our marriage.
The cellar of the jeweller’s filled with silver, with copper, with scales, weights and crucibles. Moulds and tankards and bottle after bottle of aqua-fortis. For each gold necklace that had been finely crafted over the years, there was a pouch of counterfeit shillings and sixpences, put out to pay off gambling debts, or exchanged at the bank for legal white notes.
I forced a laugh. “I see.” I waited for him to break into a smile. Waiting for the confirmation that this was some wildly unamusing joke.
It didn’t come.
“Is this what you do?” I asked. “When you’re out late at night?”
Jonathan picked at a non-existent piece of lint on his greatcoat. “Mostly, yes.”
I didn’t know whether to be horrified, or relieved he had not spent our entire marriage in bed with other women.
I looked out across the coach, with its embroidered benches and gossamer curtains. Looked down at my silk gown, at the gold ring on my finger. How much of this had been paid for with counterfeit coin?
Jonathan’s eyes were on me, waiting for my reaction. My insides were churning and my skin was hot. But I knew better than to unleash my anger on my husband. Paid for illegally or not, I knew how easily that coach, that gown, that ring could be taken away from me.
“And was this your idea?” I asked, careful to keep my voice level.
“No.” As the glow of a streetlamp shafted through the window, I saw Jonathan had the good grace to look ashamed. “It was Wilder who proposed it in the beginning.”
I shifted uncomfortably on the bench seat. Even the mention of Henry Wilder was enough to make my every muscle tense. I had met Jonathan’s business partner several times in the past. An enormous man with a bald head and tiny, darting eyes, he would take my hand in his sweaty palms and press a kiss against it that made my stomach turn over. I had no difficulty imagining him in some shady cellar with a pile of counterfeit coins in front of him. Jonathan, however, was a different story.
I looked him up at down, taking in the neat contours of his face that were so familiar to me. In the half-light of the carriage, he felt suddenly like a stranger.
“Wilder asked you to be involved?”
“Yes.” Jonathan picked at the stitching on the edge of the bench seat. “As he made clear, we have both the skills and the means to run such an enterprise. It seemed rather a logical progression for our business.”
I let out my breath in disbelief. “A logical progression?”
Jonathan squeezed my fingers. “Don’t get angry, Nell. It doesn’t suit you.”
I pulled my hand out from under his. “Why?” I asked.
He turned to look out at the passing street. Streetlights glittered through the glass, painting jewelled patterns on the carriage windows.
There were money issues, my husband told me then. Debts to be settled. Bills to be paid. He gave me a strained smile. “Perhaps you ought to have foreseen such things when you married a mere jeweller.”
“Don’t be so foolish,” I said. “You’re as fine a man as any.” But I could hear the thinness to my words. For my kind and decent husband had just revealed himself to be entrenched in criminality.
“Wilder knew I owed money,” he told me. “Said he could help me make what I needed. And plenty more.”
I wished for my old ignorance. Wished to be sitting in Hanover Square with closed eyes, letting the lush arpeggios of the cantata wash over me.
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.
Jonathan reached for me again, covering my wrist with his long, thin fingers. “Because we need you to be involved.”
An expansion of their business. Thanks to contacts Wilder had curated, he and Jonathan had a seemingly endless array of apprentices, servants and cashiers across London, all responsible for handling their superiors’ money. Each would pay a fee for the counterfeit pieces, and exchange them for the genuine coins in their masters’ coffers. Send the forgeries out with the business and keep the authentic coins for themselves. There was great wealth to be made, Jonathan assured me. Wealth that would ensure we lived a life of concert halls and diamonds until the day we died.
But with he and Wilder working long hours at the jeweller’s, they needed a third person to run the coins to each business and manage the payments.
This, I realised then, was the reason for the evening at Hanover Square. The reason my tone-deaf husband had sat through two hours of wailing sopranos. It was not just to please me. It was to make me agreeable.
“You’ve plenty of time on your hands, don’t you, Nell.” It was not a question. “It’s not as though you’ve children to take care of.”
His tone of voice said it all. During the five years of our marriage, Jonathan had watched his friends’ wives produce child after child, while I had failed to give my husband an heir. Though he had never once said as much, I knew myself a failure as a wife. With each month, each year that passed, I became more and more certain he would find another woman who could give him the son he craved. Each night he returned home to me, I found myself almost surprised. I had no thought of what I would do if Jonathan left me. Running counterfeit coins across the city felt like the least I could do for the man who had saved me from facing the world alone.
And so when he looked me in the eye and said, “You’ll do this for me, won’t you, my darling?”, I found myself agreeing.
For more than a year, I skulked across the city with coins in my reticule, liaising with the apprentices, the servants, the cashiers. Each of the clients had been groomed by Henry Wilder himself; men he knew would keep their mouths shut and their eyes down in exchange for a little wealth.
Though I knew, of course, that I was breaking the law, I pushed the reality of it to the back of my mind. I told myself I was doing no more than helping my husband, as a dutiful wife should. Making up for my failures, proving I was of use.
I’d had no thought the thief-takers were following until I got back to our townhouse. They accosted me at the front door and demanded to know why I was carrying a bag of coins, and the ledger recording the businesses I had received them from.
Jonathan had made sure I had a story prepared – my husband has requested I assist with the banking – but I told it in such a pathetic, trembling voice that even the densest of men would have known me lying. And with my husband away at the jeweller’s, I could only stand and watch as the thief-takers tore the house apart, finding the counterfeit coins I was yet to bank hidden at the bottom of my husband’s desk drawer. I had no thought of which of our clients had turned us in. But I knew it didn’t matter.
With striking efficiency, I was escorted to the thief-takers’ wagon, while our staff watched wide-eyed and murmured between themselves. My terror eclipsed any hint of shame I felt at the staff seeing me this way.
In front the magistrate, I admitted to it all. I told him how Jonathan had sat beside me in the carriage and outlined his plans. Admitted I had called at each of the businesses on the ledger that day, and had been doing so for the past fourteen months. Somewhere, at the back of my mind, I knew I was likely condemning both Jonathan and myself, but I had been raised believing my job was to appease the men around me, and I told the magistrate exactly what he wanted to hear. I was hoping for lenience, for mercy. Hoping blindly to return to that townhouse in Clerkenwell with little more than a slap
on the wrist.
“Are you aware the crime of coining is considered high treason, Mrs Marling?”
I wasn’t aware. Jonathan had played down the crime I was committing. I was nothing but a courier, he’d assured me, my hands clean of the silver dust and chemicals that saw the coins churned out into the world. And he had led me to believe we would not be caught. I had accepted it because I needed to.
“Are you aware of the punishment you will likely face for such a crime?”
In a hollow, expressionless voice, he told me how I would be drawn to Old Bailey Road to face the Newgate hangman.
I heard a laugh escape me. That same disbelieving, bordering on hysterical laugh I had given when Jonathan had first told me about his coining enterprise. I heard the sound of it hang in the still air of the interrogation room. My body went cold, then hot, and I saw the world swim.
“And my husband?” I managed.
But Jonathan was never to make it to the hangman. The day of my arrest, he took a bullet to the chest in the front garden of our townhouse. The constable delivered the news to me in such a blank, matter-of-fact tone that his words barely registered. I was far too shocked to feel anything; not grief, or anger, or regret. All I could make sense of was that I would not be returning to Clerkenwell, or Hanover Square. There would be no more townhouse, and no more fortepiano. No more roses in the garden where my husband’s body had fallen.
My other realisation was that I knew who had killed him. There was no doubt in my mind that Henry Wilder had come after him to prevent Jonathan from speaking his name. Prevent him from revealing him as the architect of the enterprise.
But I stayed silent. I’d been taught never to speak out. Never to make waves. I told the magistrate I knew nothing of who the shooter might be. And with closed eyes and death hanging over me, I turned my back and let my husband’s killer walk free.
Once, back in the blissful days of my ignorance, Jonathan and I had passed a prison hulk rotting on the banks of the Thames. We were returning by boat from two days at the seaside, and the sight of the sorry vessel beached in the mud at the low tide had yanked me back to reality. Men in ragged clothes moved about on deck and I could hear shouts and groans coming from within the lightless shell of the ship.
I found myself watching, unable to tear my eyes from these men who had been reduced to little more than animals. Stripped of dignity, of privacy, of freedom, a future.
“They’d be better off dead,” Jonathan said, a hand to my shoulder ushering me away. I nodded along, forever in agreement.
And perhaps there were convicts on that hulk who wished they had faced the hangman. But when I was sent to New South Wales for the term of my natural life, I found myself sobbing with relief.
I kept to myself as the Norfolk slid down the Thames and into the English Channel. At least as best as I could with elbows in my face and women on every side of me. I couldn’t fathom that this was my life now. Somehow, engaging with the chatter, the gambling, the out-of-tune singing made my new life far too real.
I’d managed the seasickness well enough in the early days of the voyage, when the Norfolk traced the coast of Europe and slid smoothly into the Bay of Gibraltar. But in the open ocean, the ship was seized, and down in those airless, lightless quarters, we lost all sense of up and down.
Water poured in through the hatches and the sea was thunder against the hull. Most of us were too sick to stand, to speak, to do anything except huddle in our own mess, and the pool of seawater gathering at our feet. I shivered and retched, and clung to the edge of a bunk until my fingers were raw. I tried to close my eyes, but that only made things worse. I had no idea of how many days and nights had passed. All I knew was that, there in the bowels of the ship with months at sea ahead of us, I wanted to die.
With my eyes half closed, I was dimly aware of a woman weaving her way through the bunks and groaning bodies. Hannah Clapton. I couldn’t fathom how she was on her feet.
And then she was standing over me, offering me a gentle smile.
She held out a small hunk of bread. “Here, love. You ought to eat something.”
I shook my head.
“You’ll feel better for it. Trust me.”
I took the bread. Forced down a mouthful. It wasn’t like I could feel any worse.
“That’s it,” she said with a small smile. “It’ll help. Take a little more.”
She watched me like an anxious mother as I took another minuscule bite.
“Why are you not sick?” I asked. My throat was burning, and my mouth felt horribly dry.
Hannah shrugged. “Spent half my childhood on my pa’s fishing boat. Seems I still got my sea legs after all these years.” She tilted her head to look at me, chuckling to herself. “And I here I were thinking you couldn’t speak.”
I leaned my head wearily against the edge of the bunk. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve not said a word to any of us since we boarded,” she said. “Me and some of the others were wondering about whether you was soft in the head.”
I would have been insulted had I not been too sick to care. I felt shame wash over me then. Shame that came not from hunching in a corner of a convict ship with half my insides on my skirts. But from looking down upon these women crammed below decks with me.
Hannah was right; I’d hardly spoken a word since London. I’d told myself I was above them; all those dirt-encrusted women I shared a shit bucket with. I had been raised to look down on people of their kind. But with each day, my old life grew more distant, and I began to see things as they really were. What place did I have to look down on these women? What separated us other than the fact that they had stolen to feed their families, while I had carted counterfeit coins around the city? That didn’t make me better than them. It made me a fool.
When the door of the cell finally creaked open, I started at the sound. I cowered in the corner, squinting into the shaft of light from the soldier’s lamp.
“What day is it?” I asked, my voice husky from disuse. “Am I to be released?”
The soldier chuckled. “Unless you fancy another night in here.”
With a hand pressed to the wall for balance, I made my way out of the cell and into the street. I stood outside the jail for a moment, inhaling deep lungfuls of the clean, fragrant air. I stretched my arms above my head, and rolled my shoulders, my whole body aching.
It was night, but after the blackness of the cell, the lamp above the jail door made it feel as bright as morning. I walked across the bridge towards High Street. A peal of laughter rose from a group of men outside the tavern. And in that moment, Henry Wilder and Jonathan were gone. I was relieved to have escaped the dark, and the past it had pulled me into.
I walked slowly back towards the hut. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Blackwell wanted me to leave. After all, I’d struck one of his fellow soldiers.
I could see the lamp flickering through the window. It made me realise how much I did not want him to send me away.
I stood outside the door for a moment, debating whether to knock. I decided against it. That little mud hut was the closest thing I had to a home. I wanted it to feel that way.
Blackwell was stooping by the fire, stirring the embers to life. A pot hung on the hook above the grate. He looked at me for a long second, his eyes giving nothing away.
Suddenly, I was acutely aware of the grime on my skin and the blood on my hands. Aware of the stench of the cells that had followed me back to the hut. Without speaking, I went to my little pile of clothing in the corner. Took my clean dress and shift, and hurried outside, making my way to the river. I could hear the water sighing in the dark.
I took off my boots and stepped into the river. The iciness of it stole my breath, making me gasp aloud. But there was something exhilarating about the feel of the water against my skin.
With the river lit only by the moon, I stripped myself naked and stepped deeper into the river. The tide was high, and I could feel the swe
ll trying to tug me towards the sea. I kept my feet firmly planted in the mud as I scrubbed at my skin. Above my head, an owl let out its husky, jagged cry. I lifted my face to the sky, inhaling the clean air. I plunged my head beneath the surface and the sounds of the world around me fell away, leaving only a deep, sighing silence. I felt the water move around my face, the cold making my blood pump hard. I emerged breathless and shivering, but blessedly clean.
I stepped out of the water and pulled on my clean clothes. I squeezed the water from my hair and let it hang wet down my back.
When I returned to the hut, Blackwell had placed a bowl of soup on the table. He nodded towards it. “Sit down. You must be hungry.”
I paused. “What about you?”
“I’ve eaten already. I wasn’t sure if you were to be released today. But there’s enough left for another bowl.”
I perched on the edge of the chair, looking up at him. “Will you sit with me?” I asked. “I’d appreciate the company.”
Blackwell sat. Pretended not to watch while I spooned the soup into my mouth. It was thin and flavourless, but its warmth was achingly welcome after five days of bread and water. After only a few mouthfuls, my stomach felt full and slightly unsettled.
“You’re lucky you didn’t hang,” said Blackwell. “It’s a serious crime to strike an officer.”
I nodded, eyes down. I knew that well, of course. Knew who held the power in this place.
I wanted to speak; to put into words that desperate need to be seen I’d felt the night I’d gone to Marsden’s property. To be more than just a discarded convict, sent to New South Wales to be forgotten. And I wanted to speak of the wild anger that had torn through me when the soldier had looked me up and down and called me whore.
When I looked up at Blackwell, his eyes were on me, intense and dark in the candlelight. I felt seen. Unforgotten. And in that moment it was enough to be sitting at the table with another human being, feeling warm soup sliding down my throat.
“You’re right,” Blackwell said after a moment. “About Patrick Owen being untouchable.”
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