I took it out and slipped it over my finger: it fit well enough. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I wasn’t exactly sure what was the right sorta words for a girl in my condition to say to a man bringing her a ring, but I s’posed ‘thank you’ was polite enough, and it’s true I was grateful.
‘Don’t wear it now,’ John said. ‘I still need to talk to my father. You’ll have to hide it until he knows.’
I nodded, and put the ring back in the box. There was a loose floorboard in my bedroom, and I reckoned I could keep it under there. It give me a kushti feeling inside, to know how I owned something gold, what was valuable enough to hide from any intruders what might come. And it give me an even kushtier feeling to know I’d got my gold ring in a way what was honest, and not stealing, and what wouldn’t get me in no trouble with the law. It made me feel like a rich gadje girl for a while.
John said he was gonna talk to his father that night. It was a Sunday, so I s’pose he was hoping the Reverend Sutton’d be feeling some sorta Christian compassion about his bones and his heart, because of all the hours he’d spent praying and such. I wasn’t that hopeful about how he’d take the news, and I felt lucky I wasn’t the one what had to face him. Of course I knew there’d be shame to deal with.
About the time I reckoned John’d be telling his father, Rose come up to bed. I took my ring out from under the floorboard and showed it to her. She didn’t hardly look at it, but I s’pose it wasn’t much to her – she’d had her own such rings in the past, and they’d of been much grander and more sparkling affairs than mine was.
‘I don’t suppose the Reverend Sutton will be very happy, Miriam,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t reckon so, neither.’
‘Have you and John made an alternative plan?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In case the reverend forbids the match.’
‘He ain’t gonna do that,’ I said, but I felt some panic in me, because truly it hadn’t never crossed my mind that such a thing might happen, though of course I knew he wasn’t gonna be having an engagement ball for us or nothing like that.
‘I am surprised at John, wanting to tell him,’ Rose said. ‘I’d have thought it wiser for the two of you to elope to New South Wales and start afresh there.’
Well, I didn’t much know how she was expecting us to do such a thing, when I’d got the convict stain about me for all to see. ‘Ain’t no one gonna let me go nowhere,’ I said.
‘Well, let’s just see what happens,’ she said.
And then she blew the candle out and didn’t say no more about it.
35
In December, the board met and discussed my appeal to have Arabella brought to live with me. The reverend called me to his office to tell me their decision; he said they had barely even considered it – they had refused immediately, because the laws of the colony forbade it.
‘That is ridiculous,’ I said. ‘It’s absurd that there has to be such strict adherence to laws that go against common sense and plain humanity.’
He nodded gravely. ‘I know, Rose.’ He reached out and touched my arm. ‘I am very sorry.’
The feeling of his hand against me made me shudder.
He smiled. ‘What’s the matter, Rose?’ he asked.
‘I think … Please …’ I floundered.
His hand began to move slowly up and down my arm, as though I were meant to think him gentle and tender. ‘You aren’t afraid of me, are you? You know I want you to be happy here. I want all my workers to be happy. You, and Hattie, and Miriam …’
His hand slipped away from my arm and he ran his fingers across my face. ‘I am sorry about the board’s decision, Rose. If I could, I would have changed their minds.’
I stepped back from him.
He looked at me. ‘My dear, what is wrong?’ he asked.
‘I’d rather you didn’t touch me like this, sir,’ I said, edging towards the door.
He laughed. ‘What do you mean? I thought you liked it. You sailed out on that ship a lady, after all.’
I shook my head. ‘No, sir. You are mistaken.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’
I will scream if he continues, I thought. But I wasn’t sure how wise that would be. Instead I said, ‘If you touch me again, I will inform your wife and son.’
He came closer to me. ‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ he said. He fixed his eyes on me, as though he were feasting on the sight of me. ‘How much should I pay you? I am happy to pay you.’
My voice grew loud. ‘Nothing,’ I said, feeling the familiar race of my heart as I struggled to open the door. ‘I am offering you nothing,’ I shouted and ran out of the room away from him.
I was unable to breathe properly.
‘Mrs Winter, Mrs Winter, what on earth is the matter?’
It was Mrs Sutton’s voice.
I took huge gulps of air, but could not speak.
Calmly, the reverend emerged from his study. ‘Someone must fetch Mrs Winter a glass of water. She appears to be having an attack of the hysterics. She is prone to it, I’ve heard.’
I knew then that he must have read Charles Murray’s report about me.
I must leave here, I thought. I must go.
Tuesday, 8th June, 1841
All that is good is about to be ruined. Before breakfast, when I was feeding Isabella, Mrs M came up to the top floor without any warning. I heard her coming, but could not remove the baby from my breast quickly enough.
Mrs M stared at me. There was no mistaking the horror in her face. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she cried, snatching the child from me. ‘You are not the children’s wet nurse. We did not employ you for … for this!’
I let her take the child from me and she whisked her away downstairs, leaving me on my own with Charles. We ate breakfast and then continued with our lessons well enough, but I was anxious about the consequences of the morning. There was nothing I could offer as explanation.
At lunchtime, Mrs Murray returned to the top floor again. She was calm enough. ‘Rose, I would like to speak to you, please,’ she said as she came in, rustling her taffeta over the floor.
I stood up from the table. ‘Yes, Mrs Murray.’
She looked at Charles, who was eating his lunch. ‘Not here, Rose,’ she said. ‘Let us speak in the schoolroom.’
I followed her through the wooden door and into the dreary room where Charles takes his lessons. It is small, furnished with two desks and a globe, some battered copies of Mangnall’s Questions, a bible and a children’s encyclopaedia. All of this reading matter is designed for children much older than Charles, and so I mainly have to invent methods of instruction for him.
‘Rose,’ Mrs M said. ‘I have decided to advertise for a new nanny. A suitable period has elapsed since the last one passed on, and I think Charles is ready for someone new now. You must go back to being his governess, although I am giving you notice now that we will soon be looking for someone new to teach the children, too. But the nanny is our main concern at the moment.’
I nodded, though I did not speak, and Mrs M swept out of the schoolroom and back down the stairs, with barely a glance at her son.
Her decision has depressed my spirits. It is not right that I have cared for the children from morning till night, every single day; that I could not love them more if they were my own blood; and yet still they are someone else’s, to be taken from me and handed over to another, who will not – who cannot – care for them as I do.
One day next week, when the Murrays are out on their charitable visits, I would like to hunt out the key to the door at the bottom of the stairs and I would like to lock it, and stop anyone – nanny or mother – from coming up here to disturb our little world.
I begged illness that night, and told Mrs Sutton I was unable to work. She was sympathetic enough, knowing the board’s decision and assuming my sickness to be from the disappointment.
For a long time after my encounter with R
everend Sutton, I felt shaken and ashamed, though the shame ought to have been none but his. I’d heard it said before – mostly by Miriam – that he was a frequent visitor of the Black Horse, but although I always believed him to have his faults, I couldn’t think him capable of such hypocrisy. But now I saw it. It made me wonder why Hattie had left. Perhaps now he was looking for her replacement.
Miriam was in our room when I got there. She could see something was wrong, because as soon as I walked in she said, ‘You ain’t looking good, miss. What’s the matter?’
‘The board have refused my appeal for Arabella to come and live with me,’ I told her.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ she murmured, without looking at me.
She was with child. Looking at her made me feel worse. ‘So has John Sutton agreed to marry you?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Has he spoken to his father about it?’
‘I reckon so. Or if he hasn’t, he will soon. Tomorrow, maybe.’
‘And what do you think his father will say?’
She shrugged. ‘He’ll say it’s all right. He’ll say John can marry any girl he likes, if he loves her.’
‘Does he love you?’
‘Why do you always ask me that?’
‘Because you need to be sure, Miriam. That’s why. A marriage can’t be built on wishful thinking.’
She said nothing.
I was certain the reverend was going to refuse the match, or do everything in his power to prevent it. I knew now that he was a vile man, and that the appearance of godliness was all that mattered to him. He would preserve his reputation at anyone’s expense.
Last night, I’d heard him discussing it with his wife.
‘He cannot marry a convict. It is out of the question.’
‘No. We cannot live with shame,’ said Mrs Sutton. ‘But what about the baby?’
‘These are exceptional circumstances. If Miriam is determined to tell the world that our son put the child in her, then she must have it removed. We must insist that she visits Ma Dwyer as soon as possible.’
‘But to do such a thing would be most dreadfully wicked.’
‘In this instance, it isn’t. Miriam is slandering our son. She is slandering our family. Such appalling wrong-doing is in her nature, and will be passed through her blood to the child. The child is already without hope. If it is born, the law states that it must come here to live. We cannot be stained with the association of a criminal child, one which Miriam will continue to insist belongs to our son. It must be obliterated.’
‘Do you think Miriam will agree to this?’
‘My dear, she will have no choice. None at all. If she has the baby, we will report her to the authorities and she will be condemned to gaol. She will not want that. You must tell her to visit Ma Dwyer, and then she must agree to say nothing more about it.’
‘Very well. I shall speak to her in the morning. My poor boy, to have met with such evil.’
‘It is what comes of trying to help the world, my dear. Close association with the criminal classes will inevitably intrude upon us at times. We must expect it, and deal with it, and not feel badly about it. The truth is known to us, and the truth is known to the Lord.’
Their conversation turned to other things. I left my space outside the study door, from where I had been listening, and returned to the dormitory to get the older babies ready for bed. As I washed and changed them, I felt a deep sadness in my heart. These children would soon be going to the orphanage to live, where they would see Arabella every day, without any awareness of how willingly I would have traded places with them.
36
I didn’t see John for more than a week after he give me the ring. The days kept going by, and I was looking out for him all the time, but never once did he turn up, not in the kitchen and not in the bedroom, neither.
Well, I wasn’t stupid. I knew this’d gotta mean the reverend hadn’t took the news in the way we was hoping for, and I was feeling pretty down about it. I tried my hardest to come up with plans, but I couldn’t see how anything was ever gonna work out for the best – what was the way Ma Dwyer said things always worked out, in the end.
I thought a bit about running away – sneaking out in the middle of the night and catching a boat to New South Wales, like what Rose’d said. But I didn’t hardly have no money, and I wasn’t sure what I’d do once I got away, or how I’d ever get the baby out on my own. At least I knew if I stayed in the nursery, there’d be Mrs Sutton and Rose to help me out with all that pushing and mopping up of blood, and other stuff I didn’t much want to think about.
Also, I was scared of going somewhere I didn’t know, and being away from Rose, who were my only friend in the world, pretty much, unless you counted John Sutton. And I wasn’t sure I could no more.
The only one of the family what I saw in that week was Mrs Sutton, when she poked her head round the kitchen door sometimes and asked me questions:
‘Why aren’t the dormitories as clean as they’re meant to be, Miriam? There is dust under the cots, and the blankets look as though they haven’t been washed this month.’
‘Why aren’t there enough nappies washed and folded away in the linen cupboard?’
‘Why are there no clean water bowls in the privies?’
And so on.
I admit I didn’t have a ready answer for all her questioning, but that last one was easy enough, and it was because her husband’d shit and get through clean water the way most folk breathed and got through air.
I could tell by the way she was nagging at me in an unfriendly way that she must of found out my condition and wasn’t at all happy, but I did my best to ignore her. I didn’t need no one putting more feelings of shame in me. I didn’t need no more worries, neither, and when all was said and done Mrs Sutton was the least of what I’d got on my plate.
But then she said, in a kind and meaningful sorta way, ‘How are you feeling, Miriam?’
I pretended I hadn’t noticed the meaning in her words. ‘Very well, thank you, Mrs Sutton,’ I said.
She nodded her Christian head. ‘Well, you just do what you can.’ Then she smiled, what was a thing I wasn’t expecting. ‘Why don’t you go and see Ma Dwyer this afternoon? She’ll be able to help you, and then we need say nothing more about it.’
Well, I let my jaw pretty well drop to the ground at that suggestion, coming from out the mouth of a Christian lady, and a reverend’s wife at that. We all knew Ma Dwyer’s way of helping girls in the condition I was in, and it was a wicked thing, even for folk like me what wasn’t of the Christian mind. Of course, I wouldn’t never say Ma Dwyer wasn’t a kushti woman, and I could see how making corpses of the unborn saved the mothers from drowning emselves, but I couldn’t see how a Christian lady like Mrs Sutton was ever gonna approve of nothing so wicked as cutting out a baby and throwing it on the fire, without giving it so much as a chance at a kushti life. And then I started to wonder whether Hattie’d spoke true about her, and if Mrs Sutton only pretended to be a woman of the charitable sort, and maybe didn’t have no conscience.
I can’t say I was able to look her in the face after that, so I just kept my eyes down on the worktop I was scrubbing at. ‘We’ll see, Mrs Sutton,’ I said.
*
John come back that afternoon, when I was on my hands and knees in the yard, scrubbing out the privies. It was spring by now, and the sun was starting to burn hot, so I was grateful to be working in the gloom of the outhouses.
John’d got a heavy look about his shoulders, and didn’t so much as smile at me. I s’pose it was his way of preparing me for the worst, though of course he’d already done that by not coming nowhere near me for more than a week, and I can’t say as I was feeling much like making his heavy task easy for him. So instead of saying, ‘It’s all right, John. I know your father ain’t gonna support us. Don’t worry about me. I’ll drown myself in the river in the way girls like me is s’posed to do,’ I just looked up from my scru
bbing and said, ‘Ain’t seen you for a while.’ My voice come out even colder-sounding than I was meaning it to, but I didn’t care or feel bad about it.
He sat down on the ground opposite me and crossed his legs like a cheeky sorta lad. He sighed and said, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t marry you. I need to take back the ring.’
‘Very well, John Sutton,’ I said, in a calm voice. ‘I shall get it for you this evening. I would get it now, but you can see I’m busy.’
He nodded. Then he reached into his wallet and took out five pounds, what he give me. ‘I hope this helps,’ he said.
Of course, I wasn’t gonna say no to money, so I took it off him, folded it up carefully and slipped it into the pocket of my smock. Then I looked at him. ‘That all what your baby’s worth to you, John Sutton? Just five pounds?’
He shook his head in an angry sorta way. ‘You’re not catching me like that, Miriam. You’re not. And how do I know this baby’s even mine? Truly, you were so obliging with me that I should imagine you have been with other men, too.’
Well, these was words of the provoking sort. I took myself a deep breath and held it as long as I could, because I knew well enough how losing a temper wasn’t the sorta behaviour to help a girl. When I spoke, I said, ‘I reckon as them is your father’s words, John, and not your own.’
He shrugged.
I could see there wasn’t no point in saying nothing else to him. It was clear as day he’d got talked outta his decent way of behaving and I was on my own. ‘Thank you for the money, John,’ I said.
‘Use it wisely. And know that if you say anything to anyone about this, I shall simply deny it and so will my family. You’re a convict girl, Miriam. That’s all. I am the son of a reverend.’ And he walked away.
I watched him go with a feeling of shock in my body. I s’pose the shock was the thing what saved me from being overtook by anguish, and what stopped me crying from the fear of it all.
The Night Flower Page 19