The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

  After I’d stopped off at the nursery to hurt Reverend Sutton on my way out of Hobart, Rose held me up, and I didn’t leave in the night like I’d been planning to. When I woke up in the morning, there was a lot of screaming and commotion coming from over the road. I pulled up the blind – just a little way – and peered out from under it. There I saw, opposite me at the nursery, a group of four policemen. They wasn’t letting no one get past em, out of Liverpool Street.

  I watched and wished with all my bones I’d left earlier, instead of staying for a night cap with Rose. Our nerves had been bad and needed some calming down, but I’d of been better off calming em down with a long walk to the harbour, where I was gonna escape from.

  *

  Reverend Sutton was dead.

  It was Joanna what told me. She’d got the news off her last punter, what’d found it out on his way in. By the time we was together in the living room, pretty well everyone in town must of heard.

  Ma Dwyer looked shocked, like we all did, but sad in a way none of the rest of us was. ‘The police will be sniffing round for days, girls, you know that, don’t you? I hope you’ve all got alibis.’ She looked hard at all of us, one by one, like this wasn’t a matter to be took lightly.

  ‘But hardly no one liked him, Ma,’ I said. ‘There was a lot of folk wanting him dead.’

  ‘People say things they don’t mean, Miriam. There’s a big leap to be made between dreaming about a man’s death and killing him.’

  ‘How do you know he got killed?’ Joanna asked. ‘He was old enough. Maybe he fucked one whore too many and it was too much for his heart. Maybe that’s what happened. Why’s everyone talking murder?’

  ‘There’s gangs of police over the road, that’s why,’ Ma Dwyer said, ‘and they’re investigating. They’ll be over here before the day’s out, you mark my words.’

  And that was just what happened. Ma decided the best thing to do was shut the inn and the upstairs, because she reckoned it’d show a kushti sorta respect to the poor dead Christian man, and it’d be telling the police how only folk with respectable souls lived here, for all what their bodies wasn’t up to much.

  The police come at eight, knocking on the old wooden door of the inn downstairs.

  They wanted to talk to all of us at the Black Horse, one by one. But it was just a chat, they said, not nothing bad, so we wasn’t to worry. I hoped they was right and none of us was being suspected, but I admit to having a lotta fear in my bones, for all what they said.

  I sat myself in the living room with the others, while the two policemen took Joanna off and talked to her, downstairs in the bar. It didn’t do for police officers to interview a harlot in the bedroom.

  I decided I’d gotta calm my nerves down before my turn come round, so while the other girls talked in their shocked and excited voices, I stayed pretty well silent and spoke only to myself. I’d got my story ready days ago, and I said it now over and over again in my head. It wasn’t long before that story’d come to be as true as any other and once that was the case, I wasn’t frightened of the police.

  When Joanna come back, it was Ma’s turn, then Belle’s, then Louisa’s, and when each of em appeared in the living room again they was pale and shaky-looking. But I’d got myself calm enough – or maybe you’d just call it numb – and when it come to be my turn to go down and talk, the story I’d told myself was clear as anything, and I knew I’d remember it as if my life depended on the matter, what it did in a way.

  I didn’t have no idea what the others’d said before me, or what Rose or John Sutton must of told em, but as them police put all their questions to me, I started to get a bit suspicious in my heart. These wasn’t the sorta questions a man asked a girl when all he wanted was a chat.

  ‘Miriam, do you have any reason to hate the Reverend Sutton?’ one asked.

  Well, I wasn’t gonna lie. ‘Everyone’s got a lot of reasons to hate Reverend Sutton, sir, and I ain’t no different. I got big reasons for hating him. I hate him because he knew full well his son John’d put a baby in me, but he pretended to the world he didn’t know, and pretended I’d told lies and tricked them nursery folk into keeping me there, and then they got the police on me, and sent me to Cascades, where I’d gotta have my baby.’ I found my tongue running away with itself, telling em the whole story of how I ended up here at the Black Horse, and how it was the reverend’s fault. ‘They’re all the reasons I can think of at the moment for hating him, sir, but if you come back a bit later, I reckon I might of come up with some more.’ Then I told him how I wasn’t a wicked girl, for all I lived in a bawdy house, and I’d got plans to go back to my Gypsy ways and live a kushti life.

  After I’d finished talking, I reckoned I’d made it clear to them men how the reverend wasn’t the kushti man he seemed to be, but a bad one, and I was hoping they’d nod their heads like they agreed with me, and let me go, what was the thing I’d of done if I’d been them.

  But they didn’t do that. Instead, one of em said, ‘Did you hate him enough to kill him, Miriam?’

  ‘I hated him enough to kill him a hundred times.’

  ‘So last night, did you kill him?

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Then how do you think he died?’

  ‘Me? I reckon he’s a man so ugly on the inside, he just uglied himself away. That’s what I reckon.’

  And the policemen looked at each other, like they was dealing with a madwoman.

  Well, the police left for a few hours, and then they come back again, and this time they didn’t want to talk to no one but me. They wanted to search my room, too. Things’d been awkward in the Black Horse, and the other girls and Ma Dwyer hadn’t hardly spoke to me. I reckoned some things must of got said somewhere along the line, what I didn’t know about. And I come to feeling afraid inside again. While two men searched my room, another took a hard hold of my arm and walked me downstairs to the bar to wait. He didn’t much speak to me and I could tell there was trouble on its way, so I clasped my hands together under the table and said a silent prayer, and I shut my eyes and tried to believe in God with all my might.

  When the other men come down at last, they’d got serious looks about their faces, and I was afraid. On the table in front of me, they put three buttons, a metal buckle and a giant stick.

  ‘Can you explain why we found these under the floor of your bedroom?’

  ‘I can’t say, sir. I don’t know,’ I said, because, truly, this was a brothel and that room’d seen a lot of girls in it before me. I wasn’t to know where every strange thing’d come from, or how it’d got there.

  And then it started again. Questions, questions, questions; on and on and on. It was clear as anything they reckoned I’d beat that reverend clean round the head and killed him. Once they’d asked me questions, they started giving me ideas, about why I might of wanted to kill him. They come up with a lot of different things what got my heart pounding and my head aching, and what was all of em wrong. Then in the end they said this:

  ‘You didn’t mean to kill him, Miriam. You were just plotting your escape from Van Diemen’s Land. You knew you were going that night, and you were halfway to New South Wales in your head. You went over to the nursery to say goodbye to the woman who’d been your friend, and when you were there you saw the reverend. He was standing alone in the kitchen, and you remembered all the bad things he’d said about you, and the dreadful way he’d treated you, and you remembered how you’d been wanting your baby back, and how he’d sold her before you could get there. Your blood started boiling and before you knew what you were doing, you’d struck him, and then you were so mad, you couldn’t stop striking him. And then you realized he was dead.’

  By now my eyes was crying and my heart was thumping. All I wanted was for the whole thing to stop, and so I said, in a quiet-sounding voice, ‘That’s the truth of it, sir.’

  The one what was the kindest one said, ‘Can you tell us, in your own words, what you did?’

  ‘That wa
s it, sir,’ I said. ‘You’ve done it. I ain’t got nothing to add.’

  I didn’t say nothing to em about Rose.

  The other man, what wasn’t so kind, stared at me like he reckoned I was just about the worst person ever what he’d saw. Then he opened up his bag and took out some handcuffs. These was the tough, metal handcuffs for putting folk in gaol with, and not the handcuffs you put on a man to keep him still while you sucked his cock.

  He took hold of me and shoved me hard against the wall, where he locked me up in them handcuffs so there weren’t no getting away for me.

  ‘We have to take you now, Miriam, and keep you in gaol until this case can go to court,’ the kinder one said. ‘The judge will decide what to do with you.’

  ‘What will he decide?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. But you’re not going to get the freedom you wanted. You might hang for this.’

  ‘But I’ve got a baby coming.’

  ‘You should have thought of that,’ the other one said, ‘before you decided to kill a decent Christian man.’

  And together they took me off.

  So then I come to realize how it was a bad thing – a foolish sorta thing – to go confessing, or apologizing, for something you was bound to go and hang for. But there was times you got bullied into it, and then you was sorry, because once you’d said yes it was me, there wasn’t hardly a way of saying no again.

  62

  They sent her back to Cascades. Back to her solitary cell, where her only visitors were wardens. I knew from my time in Newgate that no one else would talk to her, not even the dreadful women from the crime class. There was the ordinary criminal, like them, and then there were murderers, like Miriam. No one wanted to speak to a murderer.

  The trial is starting tomorrow. Miriam has been given a lawyer to put together a defence, but I doubt whether he can help. She has already confessed to killing the reverend. Apparently, she wants to change her story now, and say she didn’t kill him, after all. She was just exhausted and confused, and wanted to escape from the questions, so she thought the easiest thing was to say she’d done it. She hasn’t mentioned me. We discussed what we both ought to say the night the reverend died.

  I should think her chances of being found not-guilty are slim.

  I went to see her for the first time yesterday, even though she’s been there for several months now. I have been busy in the nursery, consoling dear John Sutton over the death of his father, and making plans for the future. If they decide to hang Miriam, which is likely, I expect them to give me her baby. I have made it clear to the authorities that I am happy to take it, to nurture the convict stain away.

  Miriam looked at me and said, ‘Don’t let them sell it, Rose.’

  I took her brown hand in mine and held it. ‘They won’t. Your baby will have a good life with me, Miriam. They’re shutting the nursery down, you know, and re-opening it somewhere else – a bigger, warmer, more modern building, which won’t have years of damp and dirt in its walls. The board have asked John to reconsider his decision not to take it over. He has agreed and said he’ll do it, and I’m going to help him. We’ll run it together, Miriam, so I can look after the baby from the day it’s born. Next year, I’ll get my yellow ticket, and I can adopt it and make a life for it with Arabella, too. I have money, Miriam. My father has seen to it.’

  She said, ‘You sound like you want me to get hanged Rose, like it’d make all your dreams come true.’

  I laughed lightly. ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’

  She was silent for a while, then said, ‘I know you could give it a better life than what I ever could.’

  ‘Your child would want for nothing, Miriam,’ I assured her. ‘Nothing. It would always have food and never feel the cold. There would be a roof over its head, clothes and toys and luxury. And there would be love, too, if I were to be its mother.’ I was repeating everything I’d said to her the night the reverend was killed. I knew my words were powerful to a Gypsy girl who had known nothing but poverty.

  She nodded slowly. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. And I couldn’t never give it nothing much.’

  I continued to hold her hand.

  63

  When he come today, the lawyer man asked me to repeat my story, how the Reverend Sutton spread lies about me to the world and got me sent to gaol and then went and sold my baby into the bargain. I got angry telling it again. I got real angry.

  ‘Do you need anything else, sir?’ I asked when I was done and breathing more easily.

  He shook his head and smiled, but it didn’t seem like a happy smile to me. ‘No, Miriam,’ he said. ‘I don’t need anything else. I hope this will be a good defence, but I need to warn you: the judge in this case is a settled man, and he does not look kindly on convicts from England. He wants the system of transport stopped. He says it’s destroying Van Diemen’s Land, and leaving it with no hope of a future. He won’t be an easy man to get round. But let’s hold out for the jury. If we tell them your story, some might have compassion.’

  I was thinking if the convict-hating judge reckoned he couldn’t stop England sending its bad folk over here, then at least he could hang the lives out of em once they arrived if he ever got half a chance. He was getting half a chance with me, that was certain.

  The lawyer man stopped and thought a while, then leaned forwards. ‘This Rose you speak of. Did she have any reason to hate Jacob Sutton?’

  ‘Sorry, sir?’

  ‘Would Rose have thought killing Reverend Sutton a good idea?’

  I shook my head. ‘Sir, Rose don’t think a lot of him, that’s for sure, and I don’t reckon as she’ll be missing him much, but she ain’t the murdering sort. Not one bit.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  I shrugged. ‘I ain’t sure, sir.’

  ‘Did you see her after the reverend died?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Only once. She come to see me a few days ago, and we talked a while. I said if they decide they’re gonna hang the life outta me, then she’s to get my baby afterwards. She ain’t got none of her own to speak of, and she’d like one, see, and I reckon she’d be a kushti sorta mother.’

  ‘Did you see Rose before the reverend died?’

  I was quiet a minute, because I wasn’t sure why he was asking me that. Then I looked at him and said, ‘No, sir. I didn’t see her at all before he died.’

  64

  I’m ready now to do all my talking at the trial, to try and tell em all I didn’t do it, so they won’t hang me, and so I can live at the new nursery with Rose and my baby. But, of course, we did kill him, me and Rose together. We killed him because of how angry we was that he’d sold my baby away, and we wanted to stop him doing it to the next one. Rose had come to think of Emma as her own baby, see, and had plans to adopt her, even though that wouldn’t never of happened, because I was gonna get her back for myself. But Rose didn’t know that at the time.

  I started out just dreaming about killing him, but the more I dreamed about it, the more I wanted to do it, and it was an idea I couldn’t much get rid of.

  So once I’d decided on my date for running away, I thought I’d quickly get the reverend out the world so’s he couldn’t go off wrecking any more girls’ lives, and then I’d be off, with my pack on my back and my belly full of baby.

  I went over to the nursery, full of the murdering fire. I said to Rose, ‘That Reverend Sutton sold my baby.’

  She shook her head and her eyes got full of tears, because I reckon she’d truly loved my baby, and she said, ‘I know he did, Miriam.’ And she cried.

  I said, ‘I’m gonna hurt him for it.’ I said that because I reckoned she’d think I was only joking, but she took me quite serious, what surprised me. She said she’d help and keep a lookout to make sure no folk was coming to save him.

  I waited for him in the kitchen, because I knew he always used to come there late at night, to pick up his sandwiches what the servant would of left him. Mrs Sutton was in bed, a
nd the nursery was quiet enough, though of course it never got proper silent. That was a help to me, because it meant them crying babies’d cover up the noise of me bashing the reverend hard about the head with a log I’d brung in from the outhouse.

  When I knew he was on his way, I jumped up quick and stood on a chair and, as he opened the door, I smashed that log down on his head. I hit him hard, and he didn’t even scream. He just groaned a bit, then fell straight away to the ground.

  I stood there with my heart pumping like it hadn’t never pumped before, and then I called in a hoarse-sounding voice, ‘Rose!’

  Rose come to me, and she put her arms round me and said, ‘You’ve done it, Miriam.’

  ‘I’ve gotta get away,’ I said.

  Then she got down on the floor by the reverend and put her ear against his chest. ‘Give me the log. He’s not dead,’ she said.

  So that was what I did, and then she brung that log hard over his skull three more times, and then we knew for sure how dead he was.

  ‘I gotta get away,’ I said again. ‘Or they’re gonna hang me and get my baby.’

  She held out her arm. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We need to get rid of the body.’

  But there wasn’t nowhere to put it, because we was in the town, and folk was around, so we just put him in the shed in the yard and ran back to Ma Dwyer’s, quick as we could. When we got there, Rose asked Ma for a bottle of brandy and Ma said, ‘Why, what have you ladies been up to, that you need brandy?’

  ‘Nothing, Ma,’ we said.

  We sat in my room and drunk it down deep, and we kept a lookout opposite to see if the police was on their way, what they wasn’t, and not for a long time.

  ‘I’ve gotta go, Rose,’ I said.

  But she wouldn’t let me. She just kept on pouring more and more brandy into my glass till I couldn’t hardly walk no more, and I wasn’t never gonna get away then.