The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

  The guard walked us from the gaol to the docks. Arabella held my hand willingly enough, no doubt because she was afraid of the strangeness around her, rather than out of affection for me, which I was beginning to realize would take time to return. The docks themselves were a crowded, awful place I cannot bring myself to describe. Like Newgate, they’re a memory I’ve been pushing from my mind ever since. I picked up Arabella and carried her to the ship, making sure she had her head buried in my shoulder all the way. It wasn’t difficult. The smell of the place alone was enough to wring tears from her eyes.

  For the first time, I felt anxious that I might be doing the wrong thing in taking her, and couldn’t help wondering if Aunt Emily was right, after all. Perhaps she would have had a better life if I’d followed my mother-in-law’s advice and left her in England. But she was barely three years old. I couldn’t bear the thought of surrendering the last of my children.

  Once we were on board the ship, a tattooed sailor said he would lead us down to the bottom deck where the convicts were. I could smell the stench and hear the misery of it from where I stood. It felt worse even than anything in Newgate.

  I cleared my throat. ‘I cannot go down there,’ I said. ‘I must travel on another deck.’ He gave me a smile, then a snarl. ‘Why’s that, then? Too good for it, are you?’

  ‘I must speak to the captain,’ I told him. ‘I have money. I’ll pay whatever it costs.’

  A passing officer, overhearing, stopped beside us. He was smartly dressed in black breeches and a red jacket. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘I would like to buy myself a passage on another part of the ship, sir. I have ten pounds and am prepared to pay it. I cannot expose my daughter to the horrors of the bottom deck. She is three years old and has done nothing wrong.’

  My appeal and the mention of money had the desired effect. I gave him the full ten pounds and he led me across the deck and along a short corridor, where the officers’ cabins were. I admit, I was expecting a cabin of my own, but he simply shrugged a little apologetically and said, ‘Everywhere is taken. You will have to share with me. Your daughter can sleep behind the screen.’

  He opened the door to a good-sized cabin, but there was only one bed that I could see. I was not naive enough to misunderstand what would be expected of me in exchange for this luxury. My first instinct was to flee, but the only other option was the bottom deck and here, without doubt, was the lesser evil. I prayed a silent prayer asking God to forgive me, and said, ‘Thank you, sir. I appreciate this. Where is my daughter’s bed?’

  He pulled back the curtain that separated the main cabin from a smaller space. There, a small single bed could be folded down from the wall. ‘This is where your child can sleep.’

  He told me his name was Oliver, and offered me tea and some milk for Arabella, which I accepted with gratitude. We settled ourselves down at the small table in the centre of the cabin. Arabella sat on my lap and would not talk.

  Oliver smiled at me in his kindly way and asked, ‘So, what dreadful thing did you do to get yourself sent here?’

  ‘I was poor. I stole some silver from a man who could afford to lose it,’ I said. It was as much as I wanted to share. Then quickly I added, ‘I have not always been poor, sir. My father is a gentleman, and so was my husband, but my husband died suddenly and I fell on difficult circumstances. After my employer reported my theft, we were hoping for a lenient judge, who would see that I was a woman of a good background and good character who had acted out of desperation, but he didn’t see this, which is why I am here.’

  ‘Did he give you seven years?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Oliver shook his head. ‘It’s a harsh sentence,’ he said. ‘You’re not the only one. Every time I come on one of these voyages, I meet such poor wretches who hardly seem to deserve their penalties. Some are still children – the youngest I ever saw was eleven years old. They were sending her away without even her mother to look after her.’

  I stroked Arabella’s hair away from her face before looking directly at Oliver and asking, ‘What hope have I of a decent life at the end of this voyage?’

  It was a question I’d been wondering about for weeks and was almost too frightened to ask, for fear of the answer. But he held my gaze and said, ‘A good hope. It is my job to write reports about every convict on the ship. Those who behave well, work hard and give no trouble will be recommended for the best jobs. Those who are bothersome will be recommended for more menial work. Those who are bad will simply be sent to gaol straight away and have to work their way out again. If you behave, as I am sure you will, I will write you a report that will get you a fair master and a good job.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, and blushed a little, because of the intent way he was looking at me.

  He told me about the wife and children he had left at home, and how lonely he found these journeys without them. Then he moved closer to where I sat and took my hand. Arabella buried her face in my shoulder – resentfully, I thought – but I was nevertheless comforted by his presence.

  6

  At the dockside, two men come and locked us up in irons and packed us up in little boats to send down the river a bit before we could get on the big ship. Miss Chapman saw us off without so much as a nod of the head or a kind word. She just said, ‘May God preserve you, girls, and may your souls be saved,’ but she said it in a dark sorta way, what made me think she didn’t reckon there was much hope of any of that happening.

  We got rowed off in a wooden boat by a man what had tattoos on his arms. It was still quite early in the day and as we was floating along, them chain-gangs from off the prison ships started getting on their own boats, too, so’s they could row emselves ashore and start labouring in the dockyards. And when they got a sight of us – three young girls in irons, looking like we was in a sorry sorta state – they catcalled in words what was meant as being compliments, but what I found coarse and a bit frightening.

  When we got as far out as the ship’s door, the tattoo-covered man tied the little rowing boat to a metal ladder. We had to haul ourselves up it, one by one, even though our hands was shackled together in irons. Another man appeared at the top, and dangled down his own tattooed arms to help us.

  I watched the other girls go up first. They went slow, with their dresses getting tangled up and showing the white legs underneath em until they got swung about and disappeared inside the dark of the boat.

  And then it was my turn.

  They took us down, right to the bottom of the ship, where it was stinking even worse than the smell it’d been sending out at the dockside.

  The smell made Katie-May sick straight away, but the men didn’t take no notice. They just pushed her inside a cage-like sorta room, what was full up of women and girls like us, as well as a few babies and children. I was proper relieved there were no men in with us, though there was officers and sailors above to contend with, and I’d seen already how they wasn’t all of the dignified sort, for all they might not of been convicts.

  It was dark below deck, too. Dark like dust. Dark like the earth. A few lamps burned here and there, but they didn’t give much in the way of light.

  The air here was dead. It sat heavy like it was gonna push the breath outta you. But it wasn’t quiet. It was loud with the sound of folk crying and being sick. They was sick from a lot of things, as far as I could tell – sick with being squashed up in cages; sick with breathing the bad air; and sick, like I was by then, with being sad.

  But they wasn’t only sick and sad. Some of em come proper excited about there being new folk on board and as I stood there in that grey-shadow dark, I heard ladies shouting, ‘The Lord’s brung us some new wenches … Young uns again, though, ladies. None of us ain’t got no hope of a place by the masters if all they bring is young uns.’ The booing and complaining went up, and I got tears in my eyes and a burning lump in my throat. I felt certain I wasn’t deserving all this, just for following Katie-May into a house.


  But another voice said, ‘Come and sit here, my darlings. Ignore them ones. Let me take care of you,’ and I was pleased to hear such kind words. Me and Katie-May went stumbling over a lotta convicts in search of that voice and when we got there, the woman what it belonged to said, ‘Sit down here with me, girls, and don’t take no notice. It ain’t easy, is it, being sent away from your family?’

  I shook my head, for all what I didn’t have no family of my own no more, and for all I wasn’t sure she could even see me properly in all that shadow dark.

  ‘My name’s Martha,’ she said, ‘but most folk know me as Ma Dwyer, so you just call me that. Now, try not to look so frightened, dearies. It’s not a nice place, this ship, but we’ll be off it soon enough and the world at the end ain’t half as bad as they all say it is.’

  And so me and Katie-May sat down next to her and she smiled at us like maybe a mother would and, I gotta admit, I felt a bit better about it all.

  After we’d been on the ship a while – I wasn’t sure how long, maybe an hour, maybe less – the shouting and calling started up, but this time it wasn’t angry shouting. It turned out one of the sailors from another deck’d appeared down with us.

  ‘You is looking tired, sir. Why don’t you let me elp take some of that frowning off yer ansom face, eh?’

  ‘Get me off this deck, will yer, mister? Gi me decent food, a bit of air and a bed to rest my ead on, and I promise I’ll make you the appiest man alive.’

  Then another one called out something what pretty well shocked the nerves outta me, and after she’d said it she grabbed hold of a lamp from near where she was sitting, held it to her face and then tipped back her head and opened her mouth up wide, so you could see how she didn’t hardly have no teeth, but she were saying how this’d be a good thing for that lucky sailor man.

  Well, the sailor didn’t hardly do nothing, except give em all a saucy-looking grin and say, ‘Later, ladies. Wait till we’re at sea.’ Then there was another lot of booing and crying, and then they all just give up and sulked.

  I was frightened when the sailor man started stepping over all the poor-looking ladies sitting on the ground around him, and come heading over to where I was sat with Katie-May and Ma Dwyer. I just kept my eyes fixed clear on the floor and hoped he wasn’t bringing me the sorta thing all them other ladies was wanting off him. Although there was a lot of things in the world I wanted, that particular thing wasn’t one of em.

  Luckily, he just give us some clothes to wear instead. ‘Convict uniforms,’ he said and dropped em on the floor next to us. Then he took a whole big bunch of keys from out his pockets and unlocked the irons we was bound in. ‘Get dressed,’ he said,

  Well, I didn’t do nothing, at first. I was still feeling too much shock in my bones to do much in the way of moving about and putting on new clothes. I was pleased at being able to wiggle my wrists and my hands again, though. They proper ached after all that time being locked up together, and I was glad when they said we didn’t have to wear em no more. They was just gonna lock the gate to the stairs what’d brung us down here, and that would do.

  Katie-May picked her dress up off the floor. It was a plain brown dress made outta hard, thick-looking material, meant specially for coarse folk and criminals, and there wasn’t nothing pretty about it.

  ‘I ain’t wearing this,’ Katie-May said and dropped it again.

  The sailor looked at her a while, moving his eyes slowly up from her feet to her face and also stopping at a couple of places in between. Then he winked at her, and walked away.

  Miss Chapman’d been right when she told us how we wasn’t gonna be setting sail straight away. We was at them docks another two weeks or more before we left. Boats brung a few more damp and sorry folk on board the ship – folk from the London gaols and others round the country, Nottingham and York and Reading and the like. One girl even come on board with her baby and I didn’t much think that was fair, because they wouldn’t of let no one come with me, even if I’d got someone to bring. It turned out how this girl was here for thieving a pig, what seemed like a worse crime to me than going in someone’s house, because at least knives and watches wasn’t living things and was only made outta metal, not flesh and bone.

  Then there was Lydia, what’d come with us from the reform school. Seventeen years old, she was, a milkmaid from Wessex. She’d been sent to Parts Beyond the Sea for stealing from a shop when her cows wasn’t full enough for milking.

  She did a lot of crying, that girl. She was waiting and hoping she’d get let off before the ship set sail. She got a lot of visitors and they used to fill her in on how her application for a pardon was getting on. Not very well, it sounded like, judging from the sniffing nose and red eyes she always brung to the decks afterwards.

  Quite a few folk on that ship got visitors, and they was all allowed up on the top deck to meet em – up there where the air wasn’t so stinking and dark as what it was down here. Some girls got visits from their parents, what’d sold their last possessions so they could give some coins to their criminal children in the hope it’d make their lives an easier sort, or maybe buy em a passage home after their seven years’d run out.

  Well, I was feeling a bit jealous of all these folk what got to see their mothers, and whats mothers was working to get em let off their punishment. I was proper missing Dey by now, and knew how if she hadn’t gone and died, then she would of worked herself to the grave to try and get me let off. But most of them girls didn’t get pardoned except, it turned out, for Lydia.

  About two weeks after we’d come on the ship, one of the officers appeared below the decks and rung hard on a bell to get us all silent, then he called out, ‘Lydia Dickinson, your crime has been pardoned. Please step this way.’ The girl give up such a whoop of joy and relief, and sobbed such happy tears, I reckoned she was running half mad with the happy of it.

  And so I watched her stepping over all them coarse criminal ladies lying about the floor like a lot of bad pigs, and the officer took her by the arm and she went disappearing away up the stairs, to where the world was full of light again, and it made me heavy with wishing I could be her, even with all her snivelling, stupid ways.

  7

  We stayed docked on the Thames for some time, though Oliver kept telling me that the day to set sail would soon come. I was in no hurry for it, and tried my hardest not to think about the miles that would soon slowly be spreading between my children and me. I also tried not to think of Isabella, who I’d cared for almost as dearly as if she’d been my own daughter. I knew there would be no point ever trying to contact her as she grew up. The Murrays would never allow it. May their son rest in peace, and may their burden of grief one day be lightened.

  Those early days on the ship passed comfortably enough. For a long time, I dared not venture out of the cabin, afraid of what I might see on the other side. I’d had enough of criminals, lunatics and cruel guards. All I wanted now was a chance to forget Newgate and the circumstances that took me there, and to think about my child and the future Oliver had allowed me to hope for.

  Arabella was beginning to grow used to my presence again, though it was taking longer than I’d been expecting. Often, she would hide herself behind the table legs when I tried to talk to her, or she would weep softly into her pillow when I put her to bed at night. I couldn’t help becoming suspicious of just what Aunt Emily and my mother-in-law had told her about me, and the reasons they’d given for our separation during those months after my arrest.

  In those first few evenings before the ship departed, when Arabella was asleep and Oliver carrying out his duties as officer, I often sat at the small table, writing letters to Jack and Clara in the candlelight. I had no idea whether Aunt Emily would ever give them the medallions I’d sent, but I wanted them to know that this was not a life I’d chosen, and not what I’d ever dreamed of for them. It was all simply an accident of the most appalling circumstances.

  I knew I would probably never be able to
send the letters, but my mind was bursting through thinking about the children; there were times in those first months when I was afraid such relentless thinking would drive me crazy if I had no outlet for it. My mother-in-law already believed me to be halfway to the asylum. She’d said as much in her final letter, when she sent me the money to pay my way out of the criminal deck. She was certain my mind had been turned by the difficulties of my situation, and supposed this to have been what drove me to commit a dishonest act against my employers, whom she believed to be good, kind people, simply because they carried out occasional charity work. But it was always quite simple to me. I stole out of desperation. Nothing more or less than that. If that were madness, then so be it.

  It was hard to bear. No one made any attempts to understand what it was like to lose my husband, son and home at the same time, to be forced into working for a family who treated me as nothing better than a menial servant, and who insisted I must leave my children behind me. I can still hear Constance Murray’s voice now. ‘I cannot have my home overrun, Mrs Winter,’ she said. ‘You will be employed to instruct my son – and my daughter, when she is old enough – in music, Latin, French, history, geography, religion and mathematics. It is demanding work and you must attend to their needs in detail. The costs of keeping two or three more children are prohibitive. They would need to be cared for in the nursery, and I should have to increase Nanny’s wages if she were to take on three extra charges. It is out of the question. You must find a relative to take them. You do have relatives, I presume?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said meekly, and that was that. Jack, Clara and Arabella all went to live with my mother-in-law. I spent the next ten months planning how we could all be together again, but it was not easy, on sixteen pounds a year.

  *

  The door to our cabin opened just before midnight. I laid my pen down on the table and looked up at Oliver.