The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

  ‘Captain tells us we’ll be leaving in the morning, Rose,’ he said. ‘Once we’ve set sail, the convicts will be put to work. It’s hard work – scrubbing the decks, getting clothes clean, washing pots. They’ll be exercising, too. The governors of the colony are insistent it mustn’t be a lazy voyage. They need a strong, fit cargo, ready for work at the other end.’

  I looked at him in alarm. ‘Do you mean I will have to carry out manual work, sir?’

  Oliver shook his head. ‘No. I will see to it that you are excused. You are clearly not built for physical labour, and too gentle for it. Most convicts are a tough bunch, but I should think it unlikely that you’ll be set to hard work when you arrive.’

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I could not bear to work alongside members of the prison class – Gypsies, street traders, vagabonds, &c. I knew what they were like. I’d spent six miserable months with them in Newgate.

  Oliver undressed and got himself ready for bed, then poured us each a glass of brandy. I’d never touched liquor before, but now I found it soothing and calming on my nerves. He sat beside me. After a while, he said, ‘There’s something I’ve been wondering, Rose. Would it be all right for me to ask you a question?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, because he was so gentlemanly in his request, it was very hard to refuse.

  ‘Why could your father not help you when your husband died?’

  I hadn’t intended to tell anyone the truth of my situation, but the brandy had loosened my tongue. I was growing fond of Oliver and felt I could trust him. ‘My father is in prison, Oliver,’ I said. ‘But, please – do not think badly of him for that. His crime was against the law, of course, but not immoral, though there will always be those who think it is. He was a slave trader. He travelled to the west coast of Africa once or twice a year, and from there he bought Negroes and took them on a ship to the USA or the Caribbean islands, and sold them at auctions to farmers and plantation owners. There they received food and shelter and religious instruction, and had much better lives than those they would have lived in Africa.’

  Oliver raised his eyebrows. ‘What makes you think that?’ he asked.

  I said, ‘You must understand that the African is an inferior race. Negroes are notoriously idle and improvident, and nothing but the power of master over slave will confine them. If they were left in Africa, they would run savage, but in America they are tamed and cared for by good masters.’

  ‘Is this what your father told you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘and it is true.’

  He nodded his head and said no more.

  I said, ‘I believe it is my father’s crime that sent me here. The judge did not look kindly upon a woman with a father serving a long gaol sentence. I fear he thought the criminal nature was in my blood.’

  Oliver looked at me for a long time. ‘But it isn’t?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ I told him. ‘I am a gentlewoman, a good person who has been unjustly treated.’

  8

  We left the docks eventually. No one much noticed it at first, because a ship weighing as much as The Marquis of Hastings weighed wasn’t the sorta ship to go flying off into the ocean like a whirlwind. So it set off slow from London and no one felt it at all, not even the heaving up of the great metal anchor, what I s’pose must’ve caused a fair lot of clanging about, but I’d got myself as good as deaf down there in the bottom decks. That was a trick I picked up quick – shutting down my ears to the noise and my eyes to the sights, and it come to be a way of getting by, more or less.

  Suddenly a woman shouted, ‘I think we’re moving!’ and a lot of them coarse and noisy folk stopped shouting for a while and stayed still, and everyone come to see as it were true: the waves was rocking underneath us and we was making our way, slow as could be, to Parts Beyond the Sea.

  And then some of the miserable folk started wailing harder than what they’d wailed before, and the happy folk started whooping and cheering and shouting about sun and beaches for a lifetime. ‘Anything’s better than Newgate,’ one of em called, and the rest sent up cries of joy as’d make a Christian body think a new saviour’d just been born.

  After a while of moving along slow, some man I hadn’t never seen before come down the decks, ringing a bell and letting out a barking yell for silence. I found out from other folk on board he was the master of the ship and it were up to him to make sure we all got to the other end in one piece. He were allowed to lose a few folk to typhus and the like, and he were allowed to keep himself a list of them what died of innocent causes like the pox or having a baby, but he wasn’t allowed to lose no one to nothing mysterious, and he’d be fined a lot of money for every dead body he couldn’t go accounting for.

  Once he’d got us all silent, or as silent as we’d ever get, he started reading us a list of rules for how we was meant to behave on the ship. There was a lot about how we’d gotta do our own cooking in groups, and about who was gonna wash up afterwards; and then there was stuff about how we was sometimes gonna be allowed out on the top deck for exercise; and there was some other funny rules, too – about behaving in a becoming manner all the time, and praying to the Lord, and not using bad language or stealing nothing. But them rules seemed pretty well wasted to me, because I couldn’t much see how all them coarse ladies was ever gonna stop their cursing, or how they was ever gonna go praying to the Lord, for that matter. Everyone knew the Lord wasn’t gonna listen to a prayer full up of words like bugger and such.

  And so once the ship’d set sail, it come to be the end of all that lying about on the floor like rats for us criminals. Now we was given hammocks for sleeping in, and we was being set to work all day long, and it wasn’t just a bit of sweeping here and there. All our days was s’posed to go by like this:

  5:30 a.m. Woke up by someone clanging a bell in our ears. Then half of us was allowed to go and wash our persons, but it wasn’t a very private matter, because a warden had to stand and watch us to make sure we wasn’t stealing nothing. I ain’t sure what they was expecting us to take, because all what was available was the particulars of another prisoner, and they wasn’t of no interest to me.

  6:00 a.m. We spent the next hour or a bit more doing some scrubbing of the decks – all the decks, not just the bottom decks – what meant we got to see how them officers and sailors lived, and the answer was a whole lot better than what we did. But no amount of scrubbing could get rid of the smell or the rats, of what there were many.

  7:00 a.m. Breakfast, what was a biscuit hard enough to break your teeth on if you was lucky enough to have any left, and what you’d gotta just suck if you was unfortunate enough to of lost em all. A lot of them biscuits had creatures living in em, but I learned soon enough to shut my eyes to that. After breakfast come washing up, for them folk what’s turn it was.

  8:00 a.m. We was all allowed up on deck for praying with the religious instructor, what was the man who’d got the responsibility of our morals and our souls. It wasn’t no easy job, because a ship like that ain’t much of a breeding ground for Christian morals, but it was the sorta thing the gadje folk was bothered about, so a lot of praying had to be done.

  9:00 a.m. After that we was split in half again, and one half went to the top deck for exercising and air, and the other half did their lessons. The lessons was mostly learning about God, plus a bit of spelling and adding up, because most folk on the ship wasn’t no good at neither of em and the plan was they’d get us educated before we got to Parts Beyond the Sea, and it’d come to be a kushti sorta place in the end.

  12:00 noon Dinner, what was another hard biscuit and some pickled beef. Then we swapped over for the afternoon, and the half what’d done exercising had to do lessons and the half what’d done lessons had to exercise.

  3:00 p.m. More praying.

  5:00 p.m. Another dinner.

  6:00 p.m. Evening was starting now, so we put our hammocks back up, did a bit more praying and went to bed again.

  And then there was ano
ther day.

  Right from the beginning, I decided I may as well start liking that Katie-May, even though this trouble we was in were all her fault. When your situation’s as sorry as ours was, you’d gotta take all the friends you could get. After they’d give us hammocks and we’d slung em between the walls for sleeping in, me and her took ones next to each other and often we just climbed into the same one together. It made the night easier to sleep through that way, and life on that ship come to be a lot more bearable if you was asleep.

  There was a lot of stories flying about the decks. No one knew exactly what was true and what wasn’t, but we all tried talking now and then about what was happening to us, how long it’d take to get to Van Diemen’s Land and what’d happen to us once we got there. ‘It’ll be a hard life, and that’s for sure,’ one lady said. ‘The men are all cruel drunks, but we’ll be expected to marry them and fill the country with families. And the governors’ll set us girls to work in the factories, from dawn till dusk and then a bit more. And they’ll shave our heads and make us look like men if we don’t work quick enough.’

  Another woman started talking about how there wasn’t a lot of places for us to live, and how there wasn’t much money to go round everyone in the country. She’d heard houses was gonna be offered us by our bosses, and even though they’d all want paying, most of em’d accept something other than cash for giving us a roof for our heads.

  And when she said this, I just stared and stared at her, because I knew plain as plain what she was talking about. Well, as far as I was concerned, it was all right for the gadje to go carrying on like that when they had to, but it wasn’t what a Romany girl’d go and do, not me, and not never.

  I reckoned Katie-May’d do it, though.

  Katie-May were asking for trouble. Even though the man what read us the ship’s rules said we wasn’t to swear or curse, she swore and cursed like nothing I’d ever heard before nor since. She said it was because she was angry at how unfair her life’d turned out, and I had to try as hard as I could not to swing out my arm and strike that face of hers when she’d said that, because it was me what should’ve been feeling angry with life, not her. But I weren’t angry with life. I was angry with Katie-May for the trouble she’d got us in and it seemed to me like she just wanted more and more of it.

  She done too much talking to the crew men, too, in my opinion.

  In the mornings, the crew men come and got us and took us up on deck for exercise. I s’pose they was needing to keep us in good shape ready for working when we got to Parts Beyond the Sea. A convict wasn’t no use to no one if she couldn’t get work done. Mostly, we had to run up and down the deck and jump about a bit – they didn’t much worry about decency for convict ladies. But Katie-May decided to do her own kind of exercising and instead of running and jumping, she pretended to lift her skirts, and she danced round that ship’s deck like I’d sometimes seen the ladies of old Gypsy tribes do in taverns back in England. And as she went sweeping along and twirling, it looked like the cheeky spirit what we’d lost in that courtroom’d all of a sudden got back in her, and I could hear violins and fine Gypsy music as I watched.

  She wasn’t like no miserable, filthy convict no more. She was a beautiful dancing girl. The other folk stopped their exercising and turned to watch her, clapping their hands together as she come swirling quickly past em.

  But even though she was something pretty, she was something bad, too, because she fixed her eyes on the crew men’s faces and smiled at each and every one of em in a saucy kinda way, what anyone could see wasn’t good and innocent at all.

  And it made me wonder what she was playing at.

  By the time the ship’d got as far as Cornwall, what was the last place of England we was sailing past, all them crew men’d come down the decks and took emselves a wife.

  Well, I couldn’t much believe it, and it didn’t leave me with a good feeling inside, to see them saucy-looking sailors and royal-looking officers just come and pick a lady from any old hammock they fancied. None of the girls put up a fight. I s’pose they saw quick enough how there wasn’t no choice in it for em. But there was others of em, so it seemed to me, as was wanting to get took for a sailor’s whore, and as soon as a crew man showed his face in the bottom decks, a whole lot of shouting and begging for him’d start up.

  ‘You know she ain’t got the skills I’ve got, sir,’ one woman yelled, and then she spat on the ground when someone else got took instead of her.

  And a few more of em started spitting, too, because I s’pose they was hurt on the inside and wanted to make their feelings known.

  Katie-May said, ‘You want to go off with a sailor, Miriam?’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, and it was about the truest word ever I’d spoke. I was only fifteen and not nowhere near married, and I wasn’t a girl to go rushing into that sorta carry-on. Then I looked at her and said, ‘Do you?’ and I s’pose how I shouldn’t of been surprised about it, because Katie-May weren’t a pure sorta girl.

  She laughed. ‘Course I do. You’re mad not to. Mad. You’d get yourself a bed, get away from all this mess down here, get as much food in you as you like. Everything. Just for a bit of jigging about. You can do a bit of jigging about for the sake of getting outta here, surely?’

  I shook my head and looked away from her. I wouldn’t do no jigging about for nothing or no one.

  They was giving us religious teaching off a religious-talking man what’d come along for the journey. He was meant to put God and his son Jesus Christ and maybe a few angels into the hearts of the criminal folk on board, so as to help em see the bad in their souls and make em kushti and sweet again with praying and hearing the Bible.

  I didn’t much listen to all that religious stuff, but the vicar didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t say nothing. I reckon he was so bogged down with the weight of the Lord on his shoulders, he couldn’t hardly look up at all them poor criminal faces surrounding him – all of em waiting for Jesus C and his angels to come and work their magic and take some of the hard outta their lives and outta their faces.

  Anyway, there I sat on the top deck for an hour or more, enjoying myself the rest and the air, and not taking much notice of his long old voice reading long old chunks from his long old Bible, and then all of a sudden, one of the prisoner folk shouted, ‘No more England! Wave goodbye to England!’ There was a lot of commotion and shuffling about then as we all tried to get ourselves a spot by the ship’s railings to lean over and say our last farewell to our home before carrying on to Parts Beyond the Sea.

  It were the cliffs of Cornwall ahead of us. Grey and rough they was, beaten and battered about by the waves. And I looked round at the fields and trees and hedges what went sloping over the top of em, bright and full of green, stretching on and on to the sky, and I saw how pretty they was. And seeing em all so pretty like that made my heart hurt with wanting em, so I took giant gulps outta the air, because I was thinking maybe I could swallow down some of that tree pretty and keep it with me wherever I went.

  9

  England was behind us and we were heading towards Tenerife, where Oliver said we would stop for several days in order to collect more water in the barrels, and so that the officers and sailors could rest and visit the town. When we set sail again after that, we would be heading to Africa. I couldn’t help wondering whether we’d pass the spot where my father’s ship was seized and he was arrested.

  I found it difficult to believe at times how much life could change in seven years, how there could be so much catastrophe with so little relief. Now, being at sea meant my thoughts were frequently upon my father. The pain of the memories kept on hitting me. I’d considered the events of his arrest and imprisonment to be far in the past by now. But I was coming to understand that reminders were sharp. They sprang up suddenly, and glistened like knives.

  I never wanted my father to be a slave trader. It took him away from us for months at a time and of course I couldn’t help but hear of t
he controversy and all the campaigning that went on. Half our friends refused to have sugar in their houses, or anything made through slave labour. Papa’s final voyage was scheduled at the end of October. His work would keep him until spring, and I was heartbroken at the thought of spending winter and the festive season without him, leaving me with only Aunt Emily for company. I’d begged him to stay, but he insisted and left amid prayers that he would find a good cargo.

  ‘Think of your dowry, Rose,’ he whispered, and I laughed and blushed, though I was worried by then that Will’s proposal might never arrive. He would need Papa’s consent, and now Papa was going to be away for months and I worked myself into a state of high agitation, fearful that perhaps Will did not love me as I had grown to believe.

  But I was wrong. His courtship of me continued as usual for the next two months and the proposal finally came just before Christmas. He walked with me down to the river, and spoke such tender words that tears sprang to my eyes. As soon as I found my voice again, I accepted him and when I arrived home, ran to the morning room and told Aunt Emily immediately.

  She clasped my hands. ‘That is wonderful news, child,’ she said. ‘But please sit down.’

  I took my seat in the easy chair opposite. She had such a look of anxiety on her face that for a moment I feared something dreadful.

  ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ she said, and smiled. ‘There is no bad news.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Perhaps you will think me foolish. I have just been going over my visiting book. In the past month, I’ve left cards at seventeen different addresses, and only ten of these calls have been returned.’

  ‘Certainly, that is unusual.’

  ‘Most unusual. I have no idea why it should be. But now I am anxious that word is being leaked out about your father, Rose, and people are starting to snub us. I can think of no other explanation.’