The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

Charles is sick. I’m beginning to fear it might not be sunstroke as I first thought.

  No sign of Mrs M today.

  Monday, 28th June, 1841

  Charles has scarlet fever! What I thought had only been sunburn was in fact the beginning of the scarlet rash. This morning when he awoke, I saw that it had spread from his face all over his neck and down to his chest, and he was so hot it shocked me to touch him. I didn’t want anyone else to see, so crept with him downstairs to the bathroom on the next floor, where I bathed him in cool water for several minutes. But however hard I tried, it would not bring the fever down.

  After some while – I do not know how long – Louisa came in to find out what was the matter. She didn’t say, but I know she must have caught sight of me stealing away from the top floor with Charles in my arms, because she eyed me suspiciously, as though I were a villain with something to hide. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  I frowned at Charles’s little red body. ‘I thought he was only sunburned,’ I said, standing away so she could see him. ‘But this is something else.’ There was panic and fear in my voice.

  Louisa moved closer and inspected him, then gently she said, ‘Open your mouth, Charles.’

  His tongue was bright red.

  She shook her head. ‘Scarlet fever, Mrs Winter. When you’ve seen it as often as I have, there’s no mistaking it.’

  She wrapped him in a cool, wet towel and lifted him into her arms. ‘Go down and let Mrs Murray know. She’ll need to send for the doctor immediately. And the baby will need to go to another part of the house, or be sent away. She can’t stay anywhere near him.’ She stared at me, no doubt wondering why I hadn’t moved. Fear had turned me rigid. ‘Hurry!’ she barked.

  I raced down two flights to the kitchen, where Mrs M and her husband were eating their breakfast. ‘Charles is sick,’ I told them, breathlessly. ‘Nanny thinks he has scarlet fever.’

  Mrs M paled. ‘Scarlet fever! This isn’t possible.’

  Pushing back his chair, Mr M said, ‘Do not panic, Constance. I will go immediately.’

  We hurried back up to the top floor. Louisa had shut Isabella in her bedroom, where she was wailing energetically, and Charles was again in his own room. Mr and Mrs M ran in. I did not follow. From outside, I could hear them talking with Louisa in low tones.

  There was nothing for me to do except hand the care of the child back to his mother. Now and then, I heard him calling for me in his fevered state, and I longed to go to him. Instead, I took myself to Isabella, and sat on the day bed with her until she stopped crying. I prayed that her brother would be safe.

  Tuesday, 29th June, 1841

  Louisa was right. The doctor confirmed scarlet fever. Charles has been moved to his parents’ wing, and I have not seen him since. Louisa is looking after Isabella in some distant part of the house that is never used.

  Now the top floor needs to be fumigated before the children can come back. Mrs M called on Jo and Lucy to do this, as she believes them to be the toughest of all her servants and the least likely to become infected themselves. All day, they’ve been whitewashing the nursery and tomorrow they will strip the wallpaper in Charles’s bedroom. I spent the afternoon burning his bed linen and toys.

  The night after I’d overheard the Suttons discussing their plans to involve the law with regard to Miriam, Mrs Sutton came to me and said, ‘I want to thank you, Rose, for alerting me to Miriam’s familiarity with the Black Horse. My husband and I have discussed it, and come to the decision that we can no longer hide her crime from the island’s authorities. Pregnancy is a criminal offence among convict women and we must abide by the laws, just as we have done in the case of you and your daughter.’

  I nodded. ‘I think that is wise, Mrs Sutton,’ I said.

  I looked at her in sudden sympathy, wondering whether she had any idea about her husband’s true nature. It wasn’t my place to mention it. I felt myself lucky that the reverend had stayed away from me since that first encounter.

  40

  Of course, the cards’d spoke too soon. A month or more later, when I was busy putting freshly washed and dried sheets on all the nursery cots, there come a knock at the front door, fierce enough to make all the windows nearby rattle.

  I didn’t let the visitors in myself, because I wasn’t important enough for that sorta thing, but I could hear Mrs Sutton talking in a low voice to two men, and before I even knew what was happening she’d brung two police officers into the dormitory and she was pointing at me, saying, ‘This is the culprit.’

  And one of them all of a sudden snapped a pair of handcuffs round my wrists and said, ‘You can’t be staying here now, young lady. Not in a respectable establishment like this. Not in your condition. I am arresting you for the crime of being advanced in pregnancy.’

  Well, I didn’t think there was a lot fair about that, because I wasn’t no Virgin Mary and I weren’t the only one what’d got this baby put in me. If they was gonna go arresting me, then it was only fair that they’d arrest that John Sutton, too, seeing as he hadn’t played no small part in it.

  I was about to explain this state of affairs to the man, when I looked at his face and it were such a stern and cruel-looking face I thought it might not of been in my best interests to say nothing, after all. And so I didn’t.

  ‘You have five minutes to pack your things and say your goodbyes,’ he said.

  It was Sunday, and Rose’s day for visiting Arabella at the orphanage. I wasn’t interested in saying nothing to the reverend, so all I did was sling my few clothes in a hessian bag and throw the tarot deck on top of em. Even though the tarot hadn’t told me nothing about no police officer, I was still relying on it to help me earn some money in case I ever got outta this land.

  The police officer slogged me back up that hill to Cascades faster than what was right for a girl with a six-month baby in her belly. I’d gotta fight my way through the bushes myself, because he certain wasn’t gonna help me, and I thought that was rude of him, for all what I was a girl in trouble with the law.

  By the time we got to the old iron gates again, I didn’t hardly have no breath left. My body was pulling and stretching this way and that, and my ribs was sore into the bargain.

  We waited in front of the gates two or three minutes before that matron, Mrs Hutchinson, come and opened em. I could hear the breaking of stone and sawing of wood coming out the yard behind. It was gonna be me soon, working myself to death.

  For all what it was summer and boiling hot everywhere else, it was still cold as ever round that factory. The mountain above it was bright, but the valley at its base were dark and damp as winter. I couldn’t help shivering as I stood there in my smock.

  The police officer said, ‘Cold?’

  ‘A bit, sir,’ I said.

  He smiled an unkind sorta smile. ‘It’ll be worse inside,’ he said, and he looked quite pleased about that. I s’pose he reckoned I didn’t deserve no better than living out my days in a factory what never saw no sun, but I ain’t afraid to say I wasn’t gonna listen to none of that. Whenever I got in a bad way of feeling about myself and my crimes – the thieving what I done in England and what’d got me sent here, and getting up to no good with John Sutton – I just used to think to myself, ‘What would Evelyn of said to me about it all?’

  ‘Now, child,’ I knew she’d of said. ‘You ain’t always the most sensible of girls, and you probably oughta give a bit more thought to your ideas before you go and live em, but you’re a kushti girl at heart, with nothing bad about you.’

  The gates got opened up and Mrs Hutchinson stood in front of us, her thin body hard as a pole and covered up in a black dress. She looked at my face for a minute, like she was maybe trying to remember who I was. Then she stared hard at my belly full of baby and turned back to the police officer. ‘Good afternoon, constable,’ she said. ‘I take it this is the girl?’

  He sucked his breath in over his teeth, like what men do when they reckon they’re something imp
ortant. ‘The very one.’

  She took a couple of steps to the side so as to make way for us. ‘You’d better bring her in,’ she said, in a way what made it clear she wasn’t much happy to have me there.

  We followed her to the factory office, where me and Rose’d got picked as workers for the nursery on that first day. ‘Have a seat,’ she said, and I was happy and relieved at the thought of it, because my body was just about ready to pack up after all that walking. But just as I was about to sink my bones in the chair opposite her, she said, in a brisk and lemon-sharp voice, ‘Not you, girl.’ And the police officer took the seat instead, so I was left standing there, and feeling not far off a fool, neither. I s’posed this was what folk’d meant, when they told us how the nursery was a kushti place to work, because for all what Mrs Sutton’d got her faults, she wouldn’t never of left a six-month pregnant girl without nowhere to sit.

  Mrs Hutchinson said, ‘Tell me again, sir, the nature of this girl’s crime, so I can decide what to do with her.’

  The police officer sucked his breath in again, and blew it out with his sorry words. ‘Well, as you can see, ma’am, she is far advanced in pregnancy. Not only that, but she has abused the kindness of her master and mistress by concealing this fact from them for many months …’

  Well, I was about to burst in and say how I hadn’t done nothing of the sort, and how I’d told their son almost as soon as I’d realized my condition myself, but of course I come to see there wasn’t no point in saying nothing – no one was gonna take the word of a convict girl over the word of a reverend’s wife, and that was certain.

  ‘… It is not known who the father of the child is, but what is known very plainly is that this young lady – if you can call her that – has many times frequented the notorious house of ill repute, the Black Horse. Mrs Hutchinson,’ he shook his head, like he wanted to make it proper clear how bad I was in my soul, in case she hadn’t worked it out just from the words he was using, ‘we can only imagine how many men could be the possible father of this unfortunate unborn child. It pains me to think that, because of their good natures, Reverend Sutton and his wife were prepared to turn a blind eye to this girl’s immorality and not rebuke her for it. They kept the roof over her head and simply did their very best to alter her ways by being a good, Christian influence. And she repaid them with deception. It is a crime to give birth to an illegitimate child, Mrs Hutchinson, but it is even more of a crime to abuse and deceive your master in the foolish hope that you will get away with it.’

  Mrs Hutchinson nodded. ‘This is, certainly, a grave and serious offence, constable. The girl will require immediate removal to the crime class, of course. But it is my concern that the other women there – you know the ones I mean – will be of a wicked influence and, for the sake of the unborn, I would like to remove her from their evil and corrupting spirits. Therefore, I am going to place this young lady in solitary confinement until the birth of the child and after that we will decide on the most appropriate action to take. It hardly seems right to send her back to the nursery as a mother, when she treated them so badly as their servant. No, sir. We must find alternative accommodation for her and the child. Perhaps we can simply have the child adopted by settlers, if any would be willing to take it.’

  ‘An excellent idea, Mrs Hutchinson,’ the police officer said, and then he stood up, ready to leave, without so much as a sorry for telling lies about me, or for bringing me here to a bad place.

  Mrs Hutchinson saw him out. When she come back to the office, she was carrying a bundle of clothes, a bowl of water, some soap and also a carving knife. I wondered what she was about to do to me, and if I was going to get killed in a bloody and violent way for my crime.

  She looked at me a minute, then said in her barking voice, ‘Sit here.’ She pulled out her chair and I’d of been glad at the promise of a rest if I hadn’t been so afraid what she was gonna do.

  ‘It won’t work if you’re shaking, girl,’ Mrs Hutchinson said, and so I tried my hardest to stop, but it wasn’t easy.

  She took hold of a handful of my hair – long hair, it was by now – and pulled it hard. Then she picked up the carving knife and I felt her slicing away at my locks, about as close to my head as she could without cutting the skin off it. My eyes filled up with tears. I knew I wasn’t gonna have no hair left once she was done with me. Even though it was better than being killed with a knife, it wasn’t no kushti thing.

  Once she’d worked her way round my whole head, she looked at me a minute and got a smile on her face like a sneer. ‘Now follow me,’ she said.

  Well, of course, I didn’t have no choice. I went with her to yard one, what was the yard for the better convicts. The rooms they lived and worked in was built around it and there was even a couple of plants in pots growing up the walls, so they could enjoy the sight of something pretty now and then. I followed her all the way down to yard four, where the crime class lived. There wasn’t no plants or no flowers there. There was only miserable-looking women without hair, working emselves away at stone-breaking and building and such.

  None of em so much as looked up as we walked past on our way to the row of cells what was at the back of the yard. Mrs Hutchinson unlocked a heavy metal door with a great big bunch of keys she’d took from her pocket. It opened wide and threw daylight on the cell inside.

  Well, there wasn’t a lot to say about it. It was a square room with a grey stone floor and whitewashed walls, and one small window what had so many bars on, it didn’t hardly let no light in. On the floor was some straw I s’posed was meant for sleeping on, and in the corner was a bucket, what I s’posed was meant for shitting in. And that was it.

  Mrs H give me a bundle of clothes. ‘This is your uniform from now on,’ she said. And she give me a little shove, too, what put me there inside the cell, instead of just the doorway, and she shut the door behind me and locked it with the key.

  41

  After Miriam’s arrest, the reverend continued to insist that the baby wouldn’t be welcome at the nursery because of the shame it would bring to the Suttons, and because he was convinced it was a child without hope of reform.

  ‘Mary Hutchinson and the governors will see to it that the child is adopted,’ he said. ‘There will be good people of the island who want a baby to look after. We can give them Miriam’s child.’

  Mrs Sutton hesitated. I knew she had been in conversation with Ma Dwyer a few times, and Ma had assured her that although Miriam visited her frequently enough for a glass of lemonade and a sympathetic ear, she had never earned any money or offered any services to the men of the Black Horse. I was starting to see how Mrs Sutton was not a woman who could hold firmly to her opinions. She was weak and easily swayed.

  ‘But you know,’ she began, quite tentatively, because of course she was afraid of the impact her words might have, ‘this could be our grandchild.’

  The reverend turned quite red in the face. ‘It is not,’ he declared. ‘And, even if it is, it is no concern of ours. The sin is Miriam’s; it is a deep sin, one for which we cannot be held accountable.’

  Mrs Sutton said nothing to that, but I could see she was a woman suffering from great inner conflicts.

  I did not, of course, believe Miriam’s child to be beyond redemption. I was sure I could bring it up myself. It would be a wonderful thing, to have a child that I could nurture from its infancy to its adulthood, without any separation for the years in between.

  I wouldn’t have been thinking in this way if I’d believed Miriam wanted the baby herself, but she did not. She’d said as much to me, and I found it difficult to regard her in a positive light, once she’d shown herself to have such a hard, unwomanly heart.

  Thursday, 1st July, 1841

  Mrs M has taken to her bed – she says she is worn out with caring for Charles. I’ve been to see him twice, and the fever has made him unlike the boy I know. Jo and Lucy, being the hardiest (so Mrs M says), are having to carry water and coals up and down the sta
irs for him, and make sure that the room is aired to dilute the infection. The infection is tough, though. We are all of us praying for a strong wind.

  The top floor is a sad place. The servants burned pans of brimstone in every room to clear the infection, and all the walls are now newly whitewashed. Although none of the windows has been closed for days, the smell of brimstone is everywhere. It’s making even Jo sick, and she has enough to deal with, tending to Charles’s room. She spoke to me yesterday for the first time, when I asked how she was finding it. ‘It’s supposed to make you an angel, isn’t it, Mrs Winter, if you look after the sick? But I don’t see anything angelic in scrubbing sick rooms and emptying slops.’

  Still, at least she does not have to live amid the fumes. It is only me now on the top floor and, as the curtains are all downstairs being laundered, even my footsteps echo. This evening, I walked through every room. I was hoping for ghosts from the life I have lost. I thought that if I only looked hard enough, my children would be returned to me.

  Friday, 2nd July, 1841

  Scarlet fever has become rheumatic fever. We will lose him.

  Saturday, 3rd July, 1841

  Mrs M is up again, and will not let anyone near Charles. Everywhere is heavy and depressed.

  Sunday, 4th July, 1841

  Charles is close to leaving us. There is a great deal of weeping all over the house.

  Monday, 5th July, 1841

  I went up to see him today. He didn’t open his eyes while I was there, but I was able to hold his hand. This evening, I have prayed to God for a miracle. I hope He will see how unhappy this is making us all, and change His mind.

  Tuesday, 6th July, 1841

  Charles left us today. I don’t know how I will ever bear it.

  One afternoon, a few weeks after Miriam’s arrest, John Sutton came into the dormitory while I was beginning the rounds of the two o’clock feed. He sat near me as I held a bottle to the first baby’s mouth.