58
My chance to go over and visit the nursery come outta nowhere, or so I reckoned at first.
One evening, about an hour or so before I was due to start my night’s work, there was a knock on my door and Ma Dwyer called through. ‘John Sutton has come to see you, Miriam.’
‘How does he know I’m here?’ I said. Though, of course, it was obvious. Rose had told him – and his father, too, I expect.
Ma Dwyer shrugged. ‘I’ve told him you might not see him, but he said it’s important.’
For a minute, I imagined he was gonna give me another ring and we was gonna get married, and we could start all over again with the baby, but even as I was thinking the thought and getting a heart full of hardly-daring-to-hope, I knew full well it wasn’t gonna be the case.
‘I’ll see him,’ I said.
Ma Dwyer nodded and took herself off. A couple of minutes later, John Sutton appeared. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Sutton,’ I said.
He stared at me a minute, like he was surprised to see how grown-up I’d got. I wasn’t dressed for working yet, but I was wearing a nice enough white dress with lace at the elbows. I’d got my face painted pretty, and a black wig over my shorn head. I knew I didn’t look half bad, for all I wasn’t nothing but a harlot and a convict.
‘How came you to be here, Miriam?’ he said in a soft sorta voice.
‘I had a choice of coming here or going back to Cascades, sir, and when all’s said and done, it wasn’t much of a choice. So I took this one.’
‘Are you getting by?’
‘I certainly am,’ I told him, because I didn’t want him thinking I’d broke my heart over his lies about me.
He shoved his hands in his pockets in the awkward way I hadn’t seen in him for a lot of months. ‘I’m sorry things turned out the way they did,’ he said. ‘If I could … If I didn’t …’ He shook his head. ‘My father … I’d have done it, Miriam.’
His words didn’t make no sense, but I knew their meaning well enough, and I got a soft feeling about me. ‘It’s done, John. It couldn’t be helped,’ I said, what was maybe a bit too generous. Afterwards, I regretted having made things so easy for him.
‘What did you come to see me for, John Sutton?’ I asked.
He coughed and looked at the floor. ‘My mother sent me. We knew you were here. Rose told us she’d seen you. My mother wanted me to tell you we couldn’t keep Emma. My father didn’t want her in the nursery, so she’s been adopted, Miriam. Her new parents came and took her this morning. They live on a farm in the country. They can give her a good life.’
‘Are you lying to me, John?’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘We thought you wouldn’t mind. It’s why I came to tell you. My mother thought you had a right to know, but she didn’t think you’d mind.’
‘I don’t mind, John. Thank you for telling me. You can leave now.’
‘Are you …?’
‘You can leave now,’ I said.
And he went away and shut the door.
Well, it wasn’t like I’d ever of got her back, anyway. That was just a bit of dreaming. Rose’d of adopted her, or she’d of got took off to the orphanage at three and lived a bad life, full of too-hard work and cruel folk looking after her.
That was all what I thought after John Sutton’d gone, and after I’d thought it, I took myself over to the chest where all the salt was kept for them salt-water potions, and all them sponges, and I scooped up the salt pots in my arms, took em over to the window, and emptied em all out over the street below. Then I took them sponges, too, and spent a happy enough few minutes ripping em to shreds, before dropping the shreds in the bin.
And then I got dressed, put on my other wig, and got myself ready for my night’s work.
*
I found out that the news about my baby getting given to settlers had got to Ma Dwyer’s ears even before it’d got to mine. I reckoned that was why she’d warned me from visiting her. The next morning, Ma Dwyer come and sit with me in the living room. She poured me some gin, what I drunk quite quick.
‘John Sutton told you, did he?’
I nodded my head. ‘Yes.’
‘And how are you feeling, my dear girl?’
Well, for all what I liked being took care of, a kind and tender voice wasn’t what was needed now. I leaned back in my chair a bit and made my voice come out short. ‘Fine, thank you.’
‘Very well,’ Ma said, in a brisk sorta way. ‘The best thing to do is keep busy, dear. I can find you more work if you need it – cleaning the bar, washing the glasses, that sort of thing.’
‘No, Ma. I ain’t needing all that. I’m fine as I am,’ I said, and I give her a smile to prove it.
‘Is it true the reverend sold your baby?’ Joanna asked the next day.
‘It’s true she ain’t there no more,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know as that he sold her. I thought he’d just give her away, like having her adopted or some such thing.’
‘Trust me, Reverend Sutton won’t have given her away any more than I’d fuck him for nothing. I bet there’s people out there who’d pay hundreds of pounds for a baby, if they was rich and couldn’t have one.’
‘But it isn’t legal.’ Belle spoke them words as if they was all what needed to be said on the matter.
‘Neither’s this,’ Jo said, looking round with eyes what took in nearly the whole bawdy house. ‘This isn’t legal, but we still do it. I’d put my last penny on that man having sold Miriam’s baby. My last penny.’
And Belle turned away, like she didn’t want to say no more about it.
These days, when I’d got my punters good and ready, with cocks as hard as wood, I didn’t offer em the back of me like they was expecting. Instead, I’d wriggle underneath em, open up me legs, and grab their arses, pushing em into me far as they’d go, and then the two of us’d jiggle about a while, and it never normally took long to get him where he wanted to be. And then I’d lay there, still as anything or, if he left in a hurry and I’d got a few minutes to myself, I’d stick my legs in the air till my toes was touching the wall because I’d heard once how this was the way to do it.
Part Six
59
I thought sometimes about Reverend Sutton selling my baby. There was times at night – after my last punter’d left and I’d took myself off to bed, when it was dark and silent as it’d ever get on Liverpool Street – that I’d lie awake and remember Hattie. We could of shared ideas about the bad things we could do to the reverend and his idiot son, the boy what didn’t have no courage to fight him.
As hard as I thought, I couldn’t never come up with nothing bad enough. I wanted to hurt him big, make all his Christian followers realize how he wasn’t a Christian man, for all his preaching in that church of his.
Ma Dwyer didn’t never send him my way when he showed up at the Black Horse. He’d asked for me a few times, though. One of the other girls always got him, and though he had his favourite – Louisa – Ma Dwyer made em take it in turns, so’s the nasty work of seeing to Reverend Sutton got split up equal.
And though none of em ever said it plain, I reckoned they’d got emselves some bitter feelings towards me, because I didn’t never have to go near him and catch his bad ways.
‘What about John Sutton?’ I asked em one night. ‘Don’t he never come up here?’ That was a question I’d been wondering about for a long time, but I’d been too much afraid of the answer to go as far as asking it.
They all of em shook their heads. ‘No,’ Louisa said. ‘He never does.’
I wasn’t sure why I felt a lot of relief in me at that, because John Sutton wasn’t mine and never had been, and I didn’t much care what he got up to. But, for all that, I was glad he didn’t buy whores.
‘Everyone drinks downstairs,’ Belle said. ‘There’s not a working man in Hobart that doesn’t drink downstairs, not with everything Ma gives them at the first sight of a downturned mouth.’
‘He’s a good enough man, John Sutton,’ said Joanna,
‘but he’ll never stand up to his father. No one will.’
‘One day they will,’ I said. ‘One day, he’ll hurt the wrong person.’
And as I said them words, I wondered if there was a way of making sure that person was me.
Well, after I’d chucked out the salt and ripped up the sponges, it didn’t take long before them signs started coming again. I was looking out for em this time, and spotted em straight away, but I didn’t say nothing, even to myself, because they was early days and early babies was easily lost.
I kept it a secret, and it was a kushti secret to have. I tried not to think about the other baby what’d got given away, or sold, to rich folk in the country. When I thought about that baby, and the Reverend Sutton, it got me so angry inside I didn’t hardly know what to do with myself. I’d find myself walking up and down my floor, holding my hair in my fists and tugging at it like lunatics’d do. And I come to wonder sometimes if I might be going mad on the inside.
‘You’re not mad, lovey,’ Ma Dwyer said, when I talked about it with her. ‘The reverend’s been bad to you, and you’re carrying on like anyone would. You’ve got big feelings, and all you can do is carry on, normal as you can. Watch the feelings come and go, lovey, and in the end, they’ll go.’
I wasn’t so sure of that. ‘Be careful, Miriam,’ Joanna said. ‘It’s just what he did to Hattie. Treated her bad for years and years until it sent her crazy. But the thing is, he’s the crazy one. It’s not you, and it wasn’t Hattie, either, till he got his hooks in her.’
I hadn’t never thought of the reverend as being crazy before. I’d thought of him as just being a bad man what got dressed up as a Christian every day, and then did bad things to the real good folk of the world till they went mad instead.
‘Well, if that’s not mad, I don’t know what is,’ Joanna said.
And I reckoned she might have a point.
I kept my secret, sweet as anything, without no one suspecting nothing for weeks. In my hours between waking up in the afternoons and starting my night shift, I’d go for a walk up and down Liverpool Street, or sometimes to the valley where I’d used to go and fetch water. I reckoned it’d be a kushti thing for the baby, to get fresh air in it. When I walked, I’d put my hands on my belly and rub it a bit, because I was happy this time with what was growing there.
Of course, I knew I’d gotta get away soon enough. I wasn’t gonna end up back at Cascades, not never. I’d got some decent money in my pot now and I reckoned it’d be enough to get me to the harbour, and maybe from there I could get work on a ship what was headed to New South Wales or something. And from New South Wales, I’d find my way to the bush easy enough, where I could make myself a shelter outta the leftover gadje stuff – stuff what they dumped because they couldn’t find no use for it no more, even though it was stuff enough to make a house of – and then I could have my baby, and we’d live together like me and Evelyn’d done. Of course, we wouldn’t have no money, but I reckoned we’d be happy enough, especially if we met other folk living wild. There was always folk living wild.
I wondered if I’d find Hattie there, too. It was a long shot, but you never knew.
A little while after I’d got these plans, I started getting sick. Proper sick, not just a bit now and then in the mornings, like what I’d got last time. This was the sorta sick what never stopped coming, what stopped you working, what you couldn’t hide.
Ma Dwyer was kind enough the first week of it. ‘It’s just something rotten you’ve eaten, lovey,’ she said. ‘It’ll pass soon enough.’
But it didn’t pass. It went on and on for weeks until one day Louisa looked at me and said, ‘I think you’d better talk to Ma, Miriam, and see if she won’t get rid of it for you. You know she won’t keep babies here, or even a pregnant whore.’
But I wasn’t letting Ma do the wicked cutting what she’d done on Katie-May. I wasn’t telling Ma nothing, or asking her no favours at all. In the end, about the time I first felt a fluttering in my belly, the being sick stopped and I was fine again.
So things went on as normal for a few more weeks, and I worked and worked as many hours as I could. I told Ma to give me the afternoons, too, if there come a need for em, and she’d send me two or three men a day sometimes. The work itself was filthy as the smoke from hell, but the money kept piling up, and I knew I was getting close to leaving Liverpool Street and my bad way of living, and finding a new life as a Gypsy instead.
I’d decided on a date I was gonna say goodbye to the other girls and be off on my way. I wasn’t gonna just run away without saying nothing. I’d got a lot I needed to thank Ma Dwyer for, and I’d got plans to give her a present before I went, and to let her know what my reasons for going was, so she’d understand and find another girl to put in my place.
The date I was gonna leave was the fifth of January, because Christmas was a busy time at the Black Horse, and I needed to make the most of it. January was summer, too, what meant if I ever got myself stuck without a roof over my head then it wouldn’t be a too-bad thing. I didn’t reckon I could last much longer than January, neither, when that baby in my belly would be starting to show itself.
When I was getting my things ready, on the afternoon of the fourth of January, I picked a couple of loose-looking dresses what I reckoned’d do the trick of floating over my stomach, and I took a boa as well, just to be on the safe side. I reckoned I could make myself up to look like a rich sorta lady, and maybe the sailors and folk such as that’d offer me their helping hands to New South Wales.
I knew the dresses and the boa wasn’t really mine for the taking. Ma Dwyer’d been a kushti lady to me, so I took a few pounds outta my pot and put em in a plate on the table by the window so she could buy more to replace em.
Then I got to counting out my money, and arranging it in piles of big notes and small notes, and I was pleased to see how my pile of big notes was pretty high. Even though I didn’t have much of a clue about how much things out there in New South Wales might cost, I reckoned this pile of money’d be enough to get me a good long way. And even if it didn’t get me hardly nowhere at all, I’d got a mouth and an arse and I knew well enough how to use em these days.
60
About two months after Emma had gone, Miriam came to visit me at the nursery. I hadn’t seen her for a long time, but she stood in the street and threw stones up to the bedroom window. ‘Let me in, Rose,’ she called up. ‘Or come and talk to me for a minute.’
I relented and went outside. We strolled up and down Liverpool Street together, catching up on the events of the last few months. She had been deeply upset by the reverend’s vile and dreadful actions as, indeed, we all had. We were all of us struggling to forgive him. He, however, seemed genuinely surprised by the impact of his behaviour, and told us we must all simply ‘get over it’, as though he thought this might genuinely happen. I despised him. I had never felt hatred as violent as this before.
Although I found Miriam’s attitude to her baby difficult, my heart went out to her as she talked about it all and I couldn’t help but embrace her and tell her everything would be all right, though, of course, I had no evidence on which to base this rather optimistic claim.
‘I am having another baby, Rose,’ she said.
I looked at her in surprise. ‘Really, Miriam?’
‘Yes.’ There was an eagerness and enthusiasm in her voice, as though this was a baby she truly wanted.
She went on to say that she was running away that evening, because she wanted to keep this child for herself, and not be sent to Cascades, or back to the nursery, where it would be taken from her, or given away again.
Her plans seemed possible as she reported them to me, but I couldn’t help asking, ‘What if you get caught, Miriam?’
She shook her head. ‘I ain’t gonna get caught, Rose. I ain’t. But before I go, I’m gonna hurt that Reverend Sutton, as a punishment for all what he’s done to all them ladies and babies in Hobart.’
Her words didn
’t frighten me. I felt no need to talk her out of her plan. Indeed, it seemed a reasonable act to me, by then.
I worried for the life of her child, though. Living outside in the bush, without blankets or clothes, is not a world that a baby should be brought into.
At six the next morning, we all ate a peaceful breakfast together. John Sutton joined his mother and me at the table, bringing us some freshly baked bread from the baker across the road. It made a pleasant change from the half-stale chunks we usually ate.
We talked quite companionably. John had recently acquired a new admirer, of whom he seemed very fond. She was the daughter of a schoolteacher and it seemed likely that even the reverend himself would approve the match.
‘John, where is your father?’ Mrs Sutton asked after some time. ‘Have you seen him this morning?’
I remained silent, and decided to simply watch the morning’s events unfold.
The maid came out from the kitchen with more tea for us.
‘Have you seen my father today?’ John asked her.
‘I haven’t seen anyone, sir.’
‘Well, I’m sure he’ll turn up,’ said Mrs Sutton.
I listened for a while, then I lightly remarked, ‘Why don’t you see if he’s in the yard?’
I had to say it. Miriam was at risk of running away soon enough, taking that belly full of baby with her. My baby.
Mrs Sutton nodded at my suggestion, then went off together with her son.
I counted to thirty before I heard her screams.
61
Of course, I should of known by then how plans never turned out like they was meant to, and bad things’d come along and wreck em for you. That was exactly what went and happened this time. And when I say a bad thing, I don’t just mean it rained when I’d been banking on it staying dry, or I only got as far as the valley and had to turn back again. I mean a thing about as bad as could be, what stopped me even stepping out the Black Horse and into Liverpool Street.
The Night Flower Page 28