by Meg Keneally
Mr Arum came in after Aldred, stuffing something into his pocket. ‘All right, all right, we need everyone to leave,’ he said. ‘We have a legal representative in consultation here. Very private.’ And he began to usher people towards the door.
‘Should we clear out as well?’ yelled Harriet.
Aldred stood by the bars, bouncing on the balls of his feet. She had seen Dan do that, when he was waiting to tell of a particularly good catch.
‘I did, as I promised, bombard the poor home secretary with letters pleading for your pardon. The secretary to the colonies, too, and every lord and member of the House of Commons I could think of who might have some influence over the man.’
‘I congratulate you.’
‘You will, when you hear about the letter I received this morning.’
He lifted a piece of paper, cleared his throat, and took a ridiculous amount of time adjusting his spectacles. ‘There are some niceties,’ he said. ‘And then it says: “whereas some favourable circumstances had been humbly presented to us on Jane Gwyn’s behalf” – I need not tell you who presented those favourable circumstances, need I?’
‘No, and I’ll welcome hearing about it as soon as I know what the letter says.’
‘Very well, very well. The letter says that these favourable circumstances have “induced us” – that’s the King, although it’s really the home secretary, of course – “to extend our grace and mercy unto her” – that’s you – “and to grant her our free pardon for her crime. Our will and pleasure therefore is that you cause Jane Gwyn to be forthwith discharged out of custody and that she be inserted for her crime in our first and next general pardon that shall come out for the poor convicts of Newgate without any condition whatsoever.”’ He lowered the letter, clapped his hands and asked, ‘What do you say to that?’
‘I . . .’ Jenny backed against the cell wall and slowly slid down onto her haunches. His voice became muffled, along with the footsteps of her cellmates who were rushing to her.
She looked at him, and the satisfied grin on his face faded. He turned to Harriet. ‘See to her, if you please,’ he said. ‘Don’t let her hit her head on the stones.’
‘I wish I knew,’ she whispered. ‘Wish I knew how long it was since I was last free. Properly free, without having to pretend.’
‘Ah, that I can tell you,’ Aldred said, clearly relieved to have been given a task. He pulled a few papers out of the leather wallet he habitually carried with him. ‘Let’s see – over seven years. I can work it out to the day. If you like.’
She shook her head. ‘No need.’
‘I must say, dear girl, you don’t seem as delighted as I had anticipated.’
‘Are you absolutely certain? Am I to walk out of here, now, in my gaol clothes? And where am I to go?’
‘Well, as to the first – a few bureaucratic wrinkles to be dealt with, but you’ll walk out before too long. As to where you will walk to . . . I have taken the liberty of arranging accommodation for you.’ He looked at the ground, hands clasped behind his back, tracing the floor with the toe of his shoe. ‘I hope you don’t consider that too presumptuous.’
‘No, I don’t – thank you,’ she said absently, frowning and looking at the cell wall as though it could explain to her what it meant to be free.
She felt the skin on her lips cracking, a droplet of blood running down her chin. And she knew why. For the first time since their capture in Coepang, she was genuinely smiling.
Jenny woke up cold, as she usually did. The muted throb in her lower back was there, as it always was, the product of sleeping on a rough board or the floor.
A thin stream of light was coming in through the cell’s small window this morning, speaking of indecently bright sunshine outside. It might, then, be a blessedly quiet day. Those who might have come and stared at the Girl from Botany Bay might instead take a turn around the gardens.
She was disappointed when the door opened – she hadn’t thought herself to be such an alluring prospect that people would even shun sunlight for her. She turned towards the wall, trying to guess from the heaviness of the footsteps whether it was a man or woman.
The person entering now, walking up to the bars, was heavy, had expensive shoes, and walked with a cane.
‘Not feeling social today, I see,’ Aldred said.
She said nothing.
‘Well, I can’t force you to greet me,’ he said. ‘You are, after all, a free woman.’
Harriet called her a lucky cow. Aldred nodded to Mr Arum, who came forward and unlocked the cell door.
The shawl Aldred had brought with him, which he now draped over Jenny’s shoulders, was of the softest wool she could remember feeling. She had never even stolen such a garment. They walked towards the door at the end of the corridor, through which she had passed months ago for her hearings before the magistrate, and not since. The gaoler walked slightly ahead of them and stood aside when they got there, handing Aldred a package.
Aldred drew back his shoulders, straightened, and adopted the accent and tone she’d heard from those issuing commands in Sydney Cove. ‘Mr Arum. Kindly open the door for the lady.’
The gaoler gaped at her for a moment, seemingly wondering how anyone could refer to such a creature as a lady.
‘We are waiting, Mr Arum,’ Aldred said.
Arum gave a shallow bow. ‘As your lordship pleases,’ he said, and opened the door.
Jenny walked past him without a glance, her chin raised as she imagined a lady’s would be, with the air of somebody who was smelling something slightly unpleasant but trying not to make a fuss.
Once the door had closed, and they were standing in a courtyard she only vaguely remembered, she looked down. ‘And where am I to go, though?’ she said.
He smiled, took her hand and squeezed it. ‘You’re not to worry for a moment about that. I told you I have everything organised. Now, this bonnet . . .’ He handed her the bundle that the gaoler had given him. ‘A little small, wouldn’t you say? Understandably so, of course, but we’ll see what’s to be done about that when we get home. For now, though, I want you to pull that shawl about yourself, tight as you can. Anyone looking at your skirts will know where you’ve just come from. But we want their eyes to slide over you.’
A guard stood by the main door, leading onto the street. Aldred nodded to him, and he opened the gate with no hesitation.
Jenny stepped out into a river of people, more than she had seen in one place since trying to offload stolen clothes on the crowded streets of Plymouth. She almost expected them to stop, to point. Nudge the people they were walking with, nod in her direction, raise eyebrows at the presence of Richard Aldred at her elbow. Instead, they parted around her as though she was a rock in a stream, a momentary and quickly forgotten disturbance in the flow of their journey. Those who did glance at her, quickly glanced away again. Aldred had been right: she looked, barely, respectable from the waist up, and they were all far too busy to probe any further.
He led her down the road a little way, where a carriage was waiting. ‘This will take us home.’
‘Home – your home?’
‘No, yours.’
And now we come to it, thought Jenny. The business of payment.
She had, she realised, been looking at him with some affection. His fat-bound frame could not be more different from Dan’s wiry strength – but he was the first man, at least since Mr Corbett, to assume that she was worth something without having to be shown proof first. In the cell late at night, she had almost been able to see herself with him.
He would probably assume he had a right to her, given the service he had done her. And most men of his standing would see her as a whore anyhow.
He saw her frowning and must have guessed. ‘Your home, my dear,’ he said quickly, slightly annoyed. ‘I will then go on to my own. I assure you, they are two different places. And I can assist you, if you like, in finding your real home – in getting you back to Penmor.’
In Newgate, Jenny had imagined a weeping welcome from her sister, an enfolding embrace from her mother. Now, nothing except money – of which her companion had plenty – was stopping her from going to Penmor, and the prospect terrified her. She couldn’t bear replacing her fantasies with a turned back, a slammed door, a disavowal.
‘Perhaps – perhaps I need to get used to freedom first,’ she said.
‘Very well. It won’t be the last time I mention it, though.’
She noticed that the coachman had put down a small box for her to step on. Once in the coach, she would happily have lived in it. The dark red upholstery, trimmed in gold braid, was the softest she had felt. And she had never before seen curtains on such a tiny window, when the windows in her childhood home had been bricked up to avoid tax.
She moved the curtain slightly to the side, peering out with one eye, and he laughed. ‘You are perfectly welcome to pull it all the way back. You’re perfectly welcome to open the window and shout, if you want, although it might excite a bit of talk. But if you want to see outside, can’t say I blame you, having been deprived of any view except my beauty.’
So she hauled back the curtain, drinking in the land-bound version of the scene that had greeted her on the way up the Thames: the carts and children and dogs in puddles and rotting food and fine ladies with feathered hats and tarts against walls, some of whom waved at the coach as though they recognised it.
The coach pulled up, after a while, in front of a white cottage with broad windows and a tidy path.
‘Quite small,’ said Aldred, ‘for which I’m sorry, but certainly, I hope you’ll agree, more than adequate for now. Until we can find you something better. Oh, and Mrs Titchfield comes with it.’
Why he considered the cottage’s size inadequate, what something better might look like, who Mrs Titchfield was – none of these were subjects that he felt needed any further elaboration.
As they got out of the coach, he fished into one of the small pockets on his waistcoat – red, today – and drew out a small key. He was about to apply it to the lock when the door opened, and a thin, plainly dressed woman emerged.
‘Ah, Mrs Titchfield, remarkable woman that you are! Here already! Marvellous. I presume everything is in order?’
The woman half knelt in a curtsy. ‘Yes, your lordship,’ she said. She looked, then, at Jenny, taking in the incongruously fine shawl and the tattered bonnet, her eyes snagging on the state of Jenny’s skirts. She made no move to issue a greeting.
‘Mrs Titchfield,’ said Aldred, ‘may I present your charge, Mrs Gwyn. She will be in need of your excellent roast beef, as well as a change of clothes.’
‘Quite,’ said Mrs Titchfield, clearly feeling Jenny wasn’t worthy of a curtsy. She turned and entered the cottage, expecting to be followed.
Aldred urged Jenny forward, bending to whisper in her ear. ‘A dragon, that woman. Was my governess, if you can imagine me ever having such a thing. I’m quite ungovernable, I assure you. But not a bad sort, once you get to know her.’ The warmth of his bulk against Jenny’s back, the whisper in her ear, produced in her an involuntary shudder.
They reached a parlour, small but with window seats and panes against which heavy drapes were pulled back, and a polished table hemmed in by beautifully brocaded chairs.
Aldred pulled one out for Jenny. ‘Sit, please,’ he said. ‘You must need to, after your journey.’
Mrs Titchfield again looked at Jenny’s skirts, then at the seat of the chair, clearly fearing the light blue silk would be eternally marred by contact with such a posterior.
‘And quite a journey it was, I understand,’ she said. ‘Will you be joining us for supper, your lordship? Roast beef.’
‘I thank you – however, I have a . . . well, an appointment.’
‘And the name of your appointment, my lord?’
Aldred chuckled. ‘Only you would venture such a question, Mrs T. I suppose you’ve earned the right to it, having cleaned up after the worst of my escapades. Her name, however, will remain unsaid. But she does not appreciate waiting.’
‘And how is her ladyship, my lord?’ Mrs Titchfield asked, widening her eyes in feigned innocence.
He frowned. ‘Perhaps not as well as one would hope. She remains resting in Scotland. She has never been one for London.’
After he had left, Mrs Titchfield stood in silence, staring unashamedly at Jenny.
‘Perhaps you would feel more comfortable eating supper in the kitchen,’ she said eventually.
‘As you wish, missus,’ said Jenny. The deference stabbed at her – this woman would not have been able to survive what Jenny had. But the mention of roast beef hadn’t escaped her, and she would happily have eaten it on the street.
She sat at the kitchen table, itself larger than the table in her childhood home, and Mrs Titchfield put a plate of roast beef and potatoes in front of her. She picked up the beef and bit into it, the juices running down her chin. As delicious as it was, she would have time to taste things later; for now, she just wanted to get them into her stomach.
‘I presume,’ said Mrs Titchfield, ‘that before your . . . adventures . . . you came from a home where people did not eat like animals.’
The anger began to return, slowly at first, running warmly through Jenny, collecting in her fingertips, piling up, suddenly demanding release.
‘You know of me, of what I’ve done, of where I’ve come from,’ she said. Her voice sounded strangled, choked, and she feared to open her entire throat to it. She suspected that if she did, it would come out in a howl.
‘It is difficult to avoid mention of you at present, Mrs Gwyn. Surely you have seen the newspapers.’
‘No, I –’
‘Not much opportunity in your . . . former lodgings, I suppose.’
‘No, and anyhow, I cannot read.’
The smallest of smiles appeared on Mrs Titchfield’s face, barely a quirk at one corner, but Jenny saw it – and in it all the small smiles to come, those that would contort the edges of the mouths of all who met her. They would view her as a wild curiosity, with animal manners as well as animal cunning, and no more literate than an animal either.
Not that it mattered. She suspected Mrs Titchfield would sneer even if her new charge had the manners of a duchess. No point in trying to win the woman’s approval. Might as well revel in the sneers.
‘Do I amuse you, Mrs Titchfield?’ she asked.
‘I can assure you, Mrs Gwyn, this entire situation presents me with nothing to laugh at.’
‘Wise of you. After all, you’re alone with a criminal. A twice over criminal, whose first crime drew blood. Very few people who found themselves in such a forest would pause to chuckle.’
Mrs Titchfield drew herself up. ‘Good Lord, you seem almost proud!’
‘I simply did what needed to be done, as I will continue to. And I am no threat to you, unless you are a threat to me. Are you?’
‘I am an old woman, Mrs Gwyn, what possible threat could I be? No, I’ll take you at your word that you will not assault me, any more than you are doing at the moment from the odour coming off your dress. We shall see what we can do about that, at least. We might find each other’s company more pleasant when neither of us is thickening the air.’
CHAPTER 34
All evening, Jenny had dispensed tight smiles and said ‘hello, pleased to meet you’, extended her gloved hand to be shaken and kissed, and pretended not to notice the stares.
The play was miraculous, she thought. Fairies had interfered in human affairs for their own amusement, as she’d always suspected they did. Changing one man’s head to that of an ass – she could think of a few who deserved similar treatment.
Sitting in the box, looking down on the balding heads of the aristocrats below her, she was unable to resist constantly running her hands along the skirt of her dress. Silk, and of almost the same yellow as the dress Governor Van Dalen had given her, but far more elaborate, and far less comfortable thanks to the whalebone
s that stuck into the flesh beneath her breasts.
The dress that had encased her from Sydney Cove to Coepang to Newgate was now ashes. But she had snatched it after her first bath, as Mrs Titchfield was about to throw it on the fire, and unpicked the hem to extract the packet of tea leaves, together with Charlotte’s ribbon and Emanuel’s wispy hair.
Every so often, her hand would move to the brooch at the neck of her gown. It was a jewelled fairy with filigree wings and had arrived with the dress, and a note Mrs Titchfield grudgingly read to her: ‘I found this in the corner of a Newgate cell, and was hoping you could give it a home.’
‘Does your wife enjoy the theatre?’ Jenny whispered to Aldred before the performance.
She did not know what he was to her, or what she wanted him to be. The first was a decision that may well be out of her hands; the second was one she could not make without knowing more about this presence in the north.
Aldred cleared his throat – a trick she knew he used when he wanted a few extra seconds to think. ‘My wife has a rather delicate constitution,’ he said. ‘She would find all this rather tiring.’
‘Should you not be with her, then, if she is delicate?’
‘Jenny,’ said Aldred, ‘this is not your concern. I will say, though, that I am fond of her, and I am receiving regular word of her condition. But London is where my work is, and a marriage for, well, for someone like me is not like a convict union.’
‘And how would you know what a convict union is like?’ she said.
He frowned. ‘Shall we attend to the stage? The actors are waiting for us to finish so they can get a word in.’
This was the third such performance she had attended in the past month. Each arrangement had followed the same pattern. A footman would arrive in the morning, handing her a note to inform her she would be collected at a particular time. While the invitation was couched in the form of a request, Jenny was under no illusion her attendance was assumed.