The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

  It is nice now to have her here, to hear the soft breathing of a baby’s body beside mine, and I am wondering, as I cannot help doing, what my life would be like if she and Charles really were all mine.

  In the evening, after the inspectors had gone, I wrote letters to Jack and Clara, even though I doubted that they would reply. I was certain by then that my mother-in-law was not even passing my correspondence on to them, but I had to maintain some sort of contact, even if only in my own head. To talk to them on paper of my hopes that I would be with them again went a small way to alleviate the deep grief of missing them.

  I was despairing by then of how I would ever make my way back to England, even after my seven years were over. Few convicts ever found their way home. The fare was prohibitive, and although my father was once full of promises of how he would send money when he was released and had sold our old house, I hadn’t heard from him in all the time I’d been away, and now could only assume it would never happen.

  There were always stories that drifted around the island, about convicts and the lives they might lead after their yellow tickets were issued, or after their sentences were over. Most were said to make lives for themselves as settlers, near the towns where they had been held as prisoners. Some lives turned out to be better than those they could have had in England – they settled on small farms and grew their own food and raised animals that they sold. I little knew how I would be capable of it, though, without my children. I feared I might have to let them go, but it was an impossible thought, and one that my heart rebelled at.

  In my despair, I laid on my bed and said to Miriam, ‘I’d like to run away from here. People have done it before. They take boats and row themselves away to islands where no one can find them. Shall we do it?’

  She looked shocked at the idea. ‘I can’t see as how we’d have any luck,’ she said. ‘They’d come after us quick as anything, and then we’d get thrown in Cascades.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ I said, because I was in a disagreeable mood. I could hear how cold my words sounded.

  I was aware that Miriam had been spending time recently with John Sutton. I wasn’t sure what his intentions were, but I found it difficult to believe that they might be honourable. I said, ‘How is John?’

  She wouldn’t look at me. She simply shrugged. ‘Reckon he’s all right.’

  Are you very fond of him, Miriam?’

  She shrugged again.

  ‘You need to be careful,’ I said, ‘if you are fond of him. Be sure his intentions are honourable. You don’t want to get in any bother. Remember who his father is.’

  ‘Ain’t nothing going on. Anyway, his father’s no worry of mine.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But at that moment, a wailing and shouting of voices came up from the street outside. They were women’s voices – a lot of them, like a choir of witches, starting far away but getting nearer and nearer, bursting peals of laughter that sounded quite unholy indeed.

  I sat up and lit a candle, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to see very much. I felt sure it must be some women who had escaped from the crime class. They were prone to escaping. Sometimes, one of them would climb over the wall and come down to Liverpool Street to steal alcohol and cigarettes for her companions. They were always caught and given further punishment, but this didn’t seem enough to deter them in future.

  Miriam said, ‘I s’pose they reckoned they could drink at Ma Dwyer’s place.’

  I nodded. ‘There will be trouble now, Miriam, when they find she’s closed.’

  And, almost immediately, the trouble started.

  ‘Holy Willie, Holy Willie.

  Calls himself a vicar, but he ain’t so pure.

  Holy Willie, Holy Willie,

  He’ll come a-knocking at any whore’s door.’

  I would have laughed, if I hadn’t been afraid for Miriam. But then stones started to be thrown at the nursery walls and windows. They were mostly small – just bits of gravel – but a few were bigger, and the last one thrown was a rock, which smashed one of the windows downstairs. It caused a great deal of shouting from among the convict mothers, and made me frightened now for the babies.

  Then came the deep-voiced bellow of the Reverend Sutton himself.

  We couldn’t see what was going on downstairs, but we couldn’t resist having a look at what was happening outside, so we crept to the window and there they were: the crazy mob from the crime class, dressed in their yellow prison smocks, carrying their liquor bottles and cigarettes, laughing like creatures escaped from the asylum.

  Reverend Sutton stepped outside and his voice came booming up to us.

  ‘Is the superintendent of the female factory so neglectful that he has allowed these unhallowed women out of their cells and on to the streets of Hobart to corrupt those who might otherwise be saved? The system of prison discipline in this town is rotten at the core. It produces only vice, immorality and the most disgusting licentiousness.’

  Of course, his lament made no difference. All of a sudden – together, as if they’d rehearsed it – every one of those ladies turned round, pulled up her dress, pulled down her knickerbockers and showed the reverend her naked behind, which she then smacked hard with her hands, making a very loud noise.

  Miriam couldn’t help herself, and she laughed at the sight of it. I must admit, I did find it amusing myself. I had not been impressed lately with the quality or content of the reverend’s services, and I was gratified that these women at least were letting him know what people thought of him.

  Once the noise had subsided, Miriam spoke. ‘That’s why John Sutton’s father ain’t no concern of mine. No one likes him.’

  ‘But, even so, Miriam, I think you ought to be certain that your feelings for John are returned by him.’

  ‘They are,’ she said, and I saw that I had struck her where she felt sensitive and possibly vulnerable. But her words confirmed that there was some romance developing between them, and I had to fight my feelings of jealousy. I’d have liked some romance in my own life, though I little knew where I would ever find it.

  28

  I wasn’t a girl what wanted to set a foot through the doors of the Black Horse, not never if I could help it. Ma Dwyer was a nice enough sorta lady, but I was happy talking to her in the butcher’s or the greengrocer’s, or even just the street if that was the place I happened to run into her.

  But then one morning, after I’d been in Parts Beyond the Sea about eight months or so, I got talking to her outside the fishmonger’s, and all of a sudden there come a proper commotion from one of them windows above the Black Horse, where men used to disappear with secret looks about their grubby faces.

  The sash come flying up with a clatter so loud, Ma Dwyer jumped nearly outta her skin, and when we looked there was a lady leaning out the window and she was leaning so far you could nearly see her titties, dangling out her robe in a way what didn’t do em no favours.

  ‘Catch the bastard!’ she was yelling. ‘Ma! Ma! He’s an unholy, wretched scoundrel. Catch him soon as he gets out that door.’

  Well, I didn’t have no idea what was going on, but quick as a flash, the door of the Black Horse opened and a guilty-looking man with his trousers only half done up come running out into the street. Ma Dwyer shouted some curses at him, dropped her basket on the ground and started chasing him up the road towards the town.

  The woman disappeared from where she’d been dangling out the window. Ma Dwyer wasn’t nowhere to be seen, neither, so I s’posed I’d better pick up her basket and take care of it myself, and that was what I did. I kept it in the kitchen with me till evening come down and I’d finished my work and then I reckoned as I oughta carry it over to the Black Horse, because Ma was probably thinking it’d got stolen by a ne’er-do-well, or a Gypsy, or maybe she reckoned I’d took it myself. Of course, I can’t say the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but I wasn’t the sorta girl to take stuff from a body what I knew – that was proper stealing. It wasn�
�t just the ordinary sorta helping yourself now and then what I did, from rich folk what’d already got plenty.

  So I slipped a coat on over my smock, and took myself out into the night, across the road to the Black Horse. It was noisy and I could hear folk inside talking and shouting before I’d even opened the door. When I did open the door, the smell of dirty sweat and cigars hit my nostrils and the fog got in my throat so hard I choked on it.

  I was glad no one took no notice of me as I went in. It was something I’d been worrying about – all heads being turned to me – but it was so noisy, I s’posed it wasn’t all that easy to hear the creak of the door on its hinges. The room was dark, too, for all what it’d got oil lamps on every table, and the dark and the smell made it feel like an unsavoury sorta place I’d come to. I was in a hurry to drop off Ma’s shopping basket and get myself out again.

  Ma Dwyer was standing behind the bar, or rather she wasn’t standing, but leaning over it, nodding in a sympathetic way at a man what was telling her a sorry-sounding story, or at least I reckoned it must be a sorry story, from the way he was shaking his head into his beer.

  ‘Ma,’ I said. ‘I’ve brung you your shopping. You left it behind when you was chasing that man this morning.’

  The man with the sorry story looked up from his beer. ‘You been chasing men again, Ma? Ain’t you got enough of em chasing you?’

  ‘You mind your own,’ she said to him. Then she give me a smile. ‘Thank you, Miss Miriam. I’d thought some wretched swine – from my own pub, probably – had run off with it. You’re a good girl. Take a seat. Stay and have a drink with us. I can give you lemonade if you like.’

  Well, I hadn’t never tasted myself lemonade, and I got excited at the thought of it, so I reckoned it’d do a girl no harm to sit a while in a bad place if it meant she got to drink something as kushti as lemonade. So I said, ‘Thanks, Ma. That’d be nice.’ And I took myself an empty stool and sat at the bar, where I knew Ma Dwyer’d look out for me and not let me come to no harm. Being near Ma Dwyer took a lot of the worry outta me about being in a bad place, and anyway I knew it wasn’t an altogether bad place or the police’d come and shut it down. It was just a few of the folk what come to it what was bad, and mostly only when they was drunk, what wasn’t normally at seven in the evening, though of course it sometimes was.

  ‘Here you go, lovely,’ Ma said, and she plonked down a glass of cloudy, pale yellow lemonade in front of me. I held it to my lips and felt the fizz of it on em, then I slurped some up into my mouth and got the fizz of it on my tongue, too.

  ‘There’s plenty more where that came from,’ Ma said. ‘You stay with us as long as you like. You don’t want to be hurrying back to that old vicar now, do you?’ She turned to the man with the sorry-sounding story and said, ‘She lives at the nursery. Reverend Sutton’s her boss.’

  The man laughed a strange sort of a laugh. I could see it wasn’t because he found it funny, though I couldn’t much tell how he did find it, and I didn’t ask, because my heart wasn’t all that sure it wanted to know.

  On a shelf behind the bar was a line of six bells, all tied to a piece of string, and the piece of string went up through the boards of the floor above us. All the bells was ringing pretty well all the time, and if ever one of em stopped longer than a few seconds, Ma Dwyer’d get hold of her broom and bang it hard on the ceiling.

  ‘I need to know my girls are working,’ she said. ‘They’re good girls, most of them, and I like to consider myself nothing if not a good mistress – I look after each and every one of them – but I expect them to work for their money, and there’s no mistaking that. It’s what we all have to do, in this life. More lemonade, lovey?’

  I nodded my head. I hadn’t never been in a place like this. Evelyn’d used to take me to the odd inn now and then, when we was telling fortunes and such, but they wasn’t never like the Black Horse and they was normally all run by men.

  Ma Dwyer give me another glass and I asked her, ‘Why was that lady shouting out the window this morning?’

  ‘Never you mind,’ she said, so I s’posed it was to do with the bad business what went on upstairs. I reckoned something must of gone wrong for the lady, like he’d run off without paying or something.

  But the man with the sorry story looked up and said, ‘He give her the clap.’

  Ma Dwyer boxed his ears. ‘That’s enough from you, young man, or there’ll be no more where that came from.’

  All of a sudden, a voice behind me said, ‘Miriam?’ and when I turned my head round, there stood John Sutton.

  Well, I knew he wasn’t gonna be too pleased about me being inside the Black Horse, because it was a place he frowned on, and so did his father, for all what they seemed to come here emselves often enough. I had a moment of worrying what he was gonna do now he’d found me here, and I thought maybe they’d send me out the nursery and back to Cascades, because I’d shown myself to be a girl without the right sorta morals.

  He frowned at me, but it wasn’t in an angry way. ‘What are you doing in here, Miriam?’ he asked.

  Well, I’d got a mouth, so I opened it to speak, but before my own words could come out, Ma Dwyer’s voice started talking, what stopped me in my tracks.

  ‘You mustn’t blame the girl, Mr Sutton. She helped me out this morning. She rescued my basket of shopping while I was otherwise occupied, and then she brought it to me this evening, like the honest girl she is, and so I gave her my thanks with a couple of lemonades.’

  John Sutton nodded. ‘Well, that’s kind of you. Thank you, Mrs Dwyer,’ he said. He looked at me and offered me his arm. ‘Now, would you like me to walk you home?’

  I nodded, jumped down off my stool and took his arm. I didn’t say nothing to Ma Dwyer, because I was feeling a bit afraid on the inside, but she give me a wink to show she wasn’t cross or nothing, what made me feel a bit better.

  Once we was out in the street, John Sutton said, ‘I know you were only helping, Miriam, and that is a good thing, but really: you must stay away from that place. Mrs Dwyer is a kind-hearted woman, who will always be good to you, but her establishment attracts the wrong types, and it will do you no good to get mixed up with them.’

  ‘What sorta types?’ I asked. ‘Types like you? I don’t mean to be rude, sir, but I’ve just walked out that Black Horse door with you, and that’s something what’d suggest pretty strong how you was in there, plain as plain.’

  He nodded. ‘But I am not a young lady, Miriam, and that’s the difference. I know who to mix with and who to stay away from. You don’t have this knowledge and, besides all this, it’s not at all respectable for a young lady like you to walk into an establishment like that without a chaperone. It’s dangerous, and you could be lured into a bad way of being.’

  He looked at me then, in a way what told me he was wanting to get his message across without spelling it out exactly, and I knew what he meant. I didn’t say nothing, though, because it wasn’t the sorta thing to talk about with a man what was near enough your master.

  When we got back to the nursery, John asked me to sit with him in the family kitchen, and he asked me if I wouldn’t mind making a pot of tea what we could drink together. Well, of course I made it and then we sat a while at the table, talking about this and that, and it was nice.

  He said, ‘Would you like to get married, Miriam?’

  ‘To you, sir?’ I asked, because it sounded to me like that was what he meant, and I was surprised, because a convict girl wasn’t the normal sorta choice for the son of a reverend to take for his wife.

  He laughed. ‘I mean in general, Miriam. Would you like to have a husband one day, and some children?’

  ‘Children was something I used to want, before I come here and got put off em by so much crying. I s’pose a husband wouldn’t be a bad sorta thing, if he was a kushti man, with a bit of money in his pockets. Of course,’ I added in a hurry, because I didn’t want him thinking I was a woman of the not-very-nice sort, ‘money ain’t
the only reason for marrying a man, but a girl’s gotta be realistic, and I know well enough you can’t live on love alone.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s very true, Miriam, and wise of you to recognize that. What do you think is the best way for a person to make money?’

  Well, I could tell this was a trick question. I was a convict girl, so of course he was expecting me to say, ‘Stealing from the rich folk, sir, is the best way to get money.’ So on purpose I said, ‘Hard work. Hard work, sir, and praying to the Lord.’

  He leaned back and smiled, and also looked a bit relieved to see as how I was a girl with morals, for all what I’d been caught in the Black Horse. Then he said, ‘Did you like what you saw in there?’

  I shook my head, as I knew I was meant to, and said, ‘No, sir. I didn’t like it at all.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t like it, Miriam,’ John said, ‘for that shows you are a good young lady who will grow into a good woman.’

  Well, I don’t mind saying how I reckoned this wasn’t quite right – that a body could talk so free about how the Black Horse was a bad place to go, when he went there himself. It didn’t make no sense to me, and I wasn’t a girl what’d let that sorta thing go by without saying something about it.

  ‘So if a body what don’t like the Black Horse is a good body, I s’pose that means a body what do like it’s gotta be a bad one?’ And I looked at him in a smiling way, but in a way what I knew’d get my point across.

  He said, ‘Not necessarily, Miriam. The world is divided into different sorts of people. Some, the Christians and good people, are incorruptible. They can visit bad places and leave with their hearts and minds unaffected by them. Others, like yourself, are less fortunate. Because of your difficult circumstances and because you have been brought up without the influence of Christ and His father, you are vulnerable to vice and corruption, and must steer yourself a path that takes you nowhere near them. Then there are others. The irredeemable. You have seen for yourself the natures of the irredeemable.’