by Meg Keneally
It wasn’t as though she would have refused, given a choice. She had nowhere else to be in the evenings; knew no one in London apart from Richard Aldred, Mrs Titchfield and the women whose incarceration she had shared.
Mrs Titchfield would make her sit straight-backed, her hands folded daintily in her lap, for an hour without moving. ‘If his lordship intends to take you to the theatre, you will need to sit for longer like this,’ she said. ‘I will not have him embarrassed.’
Jenny had no intention of embarrassing Aldred. But the one attribute of a lady that Mrs Titchfield refused to teach her was the only one in which she was really interested.
‘But surely,’ Jenny said, ‘his lordship would be happier if I could read about the places he takes me to and converse with him about the books he reads?’
‘There is no requirement that you to learn your letters,’ said Mrs Titchfield. ‘You’ll be going into service eventually, I expect. Kitchen maids don’t need to read.’
‘Are the grand houses of London in the habit of employing former convicts?’ Jenny asked.
‘On his Lordship’s recommendation, some would employ the devil himself.’
It was the same every evening. Mrs Titchfield would fill a bath with scorching hot water, have Jenny lie in it, and scrub her roughly as the water wrote grooves into her skin. A clean nightdress would hang over a chair near the fire, and when Jenny was pronounced clean and dry, she would lift her arms as Mrs Titchfield pulled it over her head, as though she were a child in need of dressing.
Every time, she saw Charlotte’s arms raised towards her, demanding that she be carried. The face that emerged from the neck of the nightgown was sadder than the one that went in.
Jenny would lie in her soft bed and reach under her pillow for a small packet of leaves, a ribbon, and a lock of hair. Often, she would wake the next morning with the ribbon in one hand and the hair in the other.
It was warm on these nights, so as soon as Mrs Titchfield bade her goodnight, as soon as Jenny heard the tumblers of the lock click shut, she would throw off the covers and open the window, and then lie back against the pillows holding her relics.
She was drifting off to sleep one night when she felt the thump at the end of the bed.
The candles were out, and because of the heat no fire was set. There was just enough moonlight, though, to make out a dark shape at the end of the bed.
She sat still for a moment, following the law of the forest – wait, and watch.
The shape was darker than the blackness surrounding it, and seemed to be pulling the tiny ration of light into itself. It pulsated, stretching and contracting and circling.
Then it meowed, and Jenny laughed.
‘You stupid thing, you scared me,’ she said. ‘I thought you were a ghost. Don’t believe in them, but always hope never to see one.’
She sat forward in bed, reached out a hand and the cat padded towards it, sniffing as it went.
It stretched out its chin and demanded a tickle, which Jenny provided. Then it turned around and lay down next to her.
‘Oh, you think you get to share a bed with me?’ she said.
The cat – almost completely black in this low light – did not respond.
‘If you must. Better be off before dawn, though. Otherwise Mrs Titchfield will have you for breakfast.’
‘Get out, useless animal!’
Jenny had awoken to worse curses, but she hadn’t thought even the disapproving Mrs Titchfield would refer to her as an animal. The woman was looming above the bed, with a broom alarmingly raised, and Jenny instinctively put an arm up to protect herself.
When the broom came down, though, it became apparent Mrs Titchfield was aiming towards the end of the bed. She did get Jenny’s shins, but Jenny chose to assume that was an accident.
The cat, on the other hand, did not seem inclined to give Mrs Titchfield the benefit of the doubt. It hissed and jumped off the bed, tail suddenly twice its former size, galloping for the windowsill. Then it paused and looked around for just a moment, and Jenny could see a white belly and two small white paws amid all the black. It launched itself at the window frame, hovered on the sill, and was gone.
Mrs Titchfield turned towards Jenny, who feared that she might now be the target of the broom.
‘Really, Mrs Gwyn, we have discussed this! You must always leave your windows shut, otherwise pests like this can get in. And on your bed! I do hope there are no fleas now. It might have eaten a rat.’
‘I imagine it eats rats because that’s all that is available,’ Jenny said. ‘We would all eat roast beef, if we could get it.’
‘Thankfully for you, you can, due to the generosity of his lordship,’ Mrs Titchfield said.
‘Anyway, I knew it was in here,’ said Jenny. ‘It came in late last night, walked around in circles about fifteen times – why do they do that, I’ve always wondered – and went to sleep. It was nice, actually, to have another heart beating in here.’
Mrs Titchfield was gaping in a most unladylike way. ‘You mean to tell me,’ she said after a moment, ‘that you allowed that thing to sleep in the same bed as you? Well. I knew standards were different in the colony, and for people of a certain . . . a certain class, but that – that is quite extraordinary!’ She moved towards the head of the bed, running her hands along the sheets, perhaps hunting for fleas. Then she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘Ah, look here, you see? That thing’s already brought in some refuse.’ And she picked up the ribbon on the lock of hair, tied in a tatty sprig, and made to fling them out the window.
Before she could draw her arm all the way back, her wrist was encircled in a grip that made it clear Jenny didn’t care about how much pain she inflicted.
Mrs Titchfield became still, standing straight: her instinctive response to anything unknown or disconcerting. Jenny had sprung up from the bed more quickly than she’d thought possible to grab the woman’s wrist. Still gripping it, she moved so that she was facing the governess.
‘I want to make something very clear,’ Jenny said, surprised at the steadiness of her voice, the enunciation – the result, perhaps, of the elocution lessons Mrs Titchfield had been giving her. ‘Any possessions I have are those which Richard has bought for me.’ She saw Mrs Titchfield flinch at the familiarity, and was glad, even though his name felt strange in her mouth. ‘Apart from those pieces of refuse, as you call them, that you hold in your hand. They were not, I assure you, brought in by the cat – which, might I add, will be allowed to come and go as it pleases.’
‘That, actually, is probably worse,’ said Mrs Titchfield, rotating her wrist in a futile attempt to free it. ‘You are willing to sleep in detritus.’
‘My son’s hair, and my daughter’s ribbon. The heads from which they came now lie underneath different oceans.’
Mrs Titchfield paled slightly. ‘I . . . yes, the newspapers mentioned. I see.’
‘You cannot possibly see. Not unless you have held your child as they died.’
Mrs Titchfield said something under her breath.
Jenny inhaled, gathering the words to throw at the woman, words with which she had been peppered during every lesson and every conversation since she arrived.
‘Kindly raise your voice,’ she said. ‘Mumbling is the height of rudeness.’
‘I said, I have – held my child, as she was dying.’
Jenny slowly let go of her wrist, and Mrs Titchfield exhaled, suddenly looking pale.
‘You should sit,’ Jenny said.
And Mrs Titchfield did, on the unmade bed, possibly the first time her posterior had connected with such a messy surface.
‘My daughter, Elizabeth,’ Mrs Titchfield said. ‘Consumption. She had just turned two. She would be forty-three now. Perhaps I would be a great-grandmother.’
Jenny sat down beside her, and Mrs Titchfield handed her Emanuel’s hair and Charlotte’s ribbon, closing Jenny’s fingers around them and covering Jenny’s fist with her hand.
/> ‘One forgets, sometimes,’ she said. ‘Or tries to. And then it jumps out at you, like a thief from an alleyway.’
‘You seem to have been practically a mother to . . . to his lordship,’ Jenny said. If Mrs Titchfield preferred her to use formal titles, this was a concession she was more than willing to make for someone who had held her child and found herself suddenly holding a mere object, one incapable of laughing or wailing or returning her embrace.
The older woman looked as though she was about to cry. Then she inhaled, slowly, pushed herself off the bed, and rubbed her hands together. ‘Well, Mrs Gwyn. We had best start our day. Please ensure, as much as you can, that the feline and I never cross paths.’
Whenever Richard Aldred took her to the theatre, she drew more attention than the actors on the stage.
Aldred had been a feature of newspapers and gossip since Jenny had been released. Just when readers had begun to tire of the Girl from Botany Bay, the aristocratic lawyer, celebrated for his writing, entered the public imagination and snatched her from the gallows. And to see them together, Jenny imagined them thinking – to speak to the creature, look at her arms and try to see the sinews that had dragged a boat across oceans – what an opening gambit for the next time one ran into one’s old schoolmate at the club.
These people would come up behind Aldred and clap him on the back, laughing heartily when he turned in surprise. They would approach obliquely, seeming to bump into him by accident. Or they would barrel right up, a full-frontal attack aimed at claiming the high ground of his attention. They would ask, uselessly, who his charming companion was, and he would introduce her politely and quite simply as Mrs Gwyn. Some of them would pretend not to know of her; some would easily ask her how she was. A few would express admiration for what she had done. No one expressed regret over the death of her family, but she fancied she could see it sometimes, the shadow behind their conversation. There would, frequently, be invitations to house parties in which she wasn’t included. It would not have occurred to most of them to invite the curio along with the collector.
She sometimes heard them, as they walked away, discussing her.
‘Doesn’t look up to much, does she?’ an older gentleman once whispered to his wife. Perhaps he was hard of hearing and didn’t realise how loudly he had spoken, because his wife swatted him on the arm with her fan.
‘You mustn’t mind them,’ Aldred said in the coach on the way home. ‘You have survived what they never could. You mustn’t think they view you as less than human. Perhaps they view you as more.’
‘Or perhaps I am simply a better dressed, better washed version of the person they came to gawk at in Newgate,’ Jenny said, turning to look out the window of the coach. Hard to see much except splashes of yellow light underneath the lamps they passed, the occasional dark scurrying shape.
‘I am sorry,’ said Aldred. ‘You must not think that your attendance at these performances is the price you have to pay for living in the house.’
‘Is it not?’ said Jenny. ‘Why do you bring me, then?’
He put his head down. Then looked up at her. ‘Do you know, you are one of the most honest people I have ever met?’
She laughed. ‘I am a thief and an escapee, and I lived under a false name for months.’
‘All this is true. And those with money and influence have done worse, I assure you. They are simply better positioned to navigate around the system. And they will praise you to your face, and turn around and deride you five minutes later. At least with you, Jenny, if you think I’m an ass, you will tell me.’
‘Very well then, you’re an ass. A kind one, and an intelligent one.’
He smiled, staring at her until the coach hit a rut and he bumped his head on the window.
‘You’re right, I am an ass. Part of the reason I bring you to these things is that I know people are interested. Because I want to show you off, to remind everyone of why you are in a theatre instead of a cell.’
‘Your great mind, your love of justice.’
‘Not to put too fine a point on it, yes,’ he said. ‘That is not, however, the main reason I bring you. I am, I must say, your most devoted admirer.’
Jenny found herself blushing in the carriage’s darkness. Was this, she wondered, when he finally asked of her what she had been expecting him to ask?
‘I don’t want you to think, though, that you must come with me to go on living in the house, enjoying the tender affections of Mrs Titchfield. I wonder – have you given any more thought to finding your family?’
‘No, Richard. They’ll not want me.’
‘You can’t know that!’
‘I don’t want to know it. Ever.’
He sighed. ‘Jenny, the house is yours to inhabit for as long as you wish it. Consider me the one paying this country’s debt to you. But you belong in Penmor, and I won’t necessarily be seeking your approval if I decide to try to get you there.’
CHAPTER 35
The carriage rolled up in front of the cottage in the middle of the day, an unusual occurrence. Jenny went to the door as she always did when she heard the hoofs and wheels; she nodded and smiled at Arthur, the coachman with whom she had become familiar.
She could hear, even several feet away, Richard’s rumbling laugh emerging from the carriage. Unless he had lost his wits, he was not alone.
Arthur hopped down from his seat with a practised smoothness, grabbed his little box, put it in front of the carriage door for those inside to step down, and pulled the door open.
Richard emerged as he always did, stooping to squeeze his large frame through the carriage door and blinking a little.
The man who followed him out was blinking too, and had more of a reason to, having been deprived of sunlight for months. Richard, though, seemed at least to have arranged for fresh clothes and washing water, because his charge was plainly but respectably dressed, and clean.
This man, thin and less muscular than Jenny remembered, ignored the step and slid down from the carriage onto the road. He looked up at Jenny and smiled, and she saw he had mislaid a tooth or two in the past few months.
Jenny ran to him, nearly knocking him over with her embrace – John Carney had always been a creature of the sea, and never planted his feet too firmly on the ground.
Mrs Titchfield tried to settle them in the parlour, but Richard refused. ‘No, my dear lady, we will be perfectly at home in the kitchen. I’ll be down to the manor in a week, and I will have my fill of parlours then.’
He hadn’t told Jenny he was planning a trip to his country estate, and she found herself oddly annoyed. Of course, he was under no obligation to inform her of his movements. She had, though, grown used to his presence, his open curiosity, his unquestioning assumption that her mind was as fine as his.
‘Will you be gone long?’ she asked.
A pinched, anxious look crossed his face. ‘My wife – her illness, it seems, has worsened.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘I do hope her ladyship recovers swiftly,’ said Mrs Titchfield, placing tea things in front of them.
John stared rapt at the daintily painted teacups with gold leaf around the rim, inhaled the fragrance coming off the infusions. He wasn’t able to fit his index finger through the cup’s handle; he picked it up in both hands like an offering. ‘This brew is the finest stuff tasted since . . . matter of fact, can’t remember having tasted anything this lovely.’
Mrs Titchfield gave him a smile that stayed on her face for more than a second. ‘I am glad you’re enjoying it, Mr Carney. If it can help dull the memory of some of the horrors you have seen, I will be delighted.’
Carney beamed at her, his teeth more absence than presence.
‘I am afraid Mr Carney had to spend a little more time in Newgate than you did, Jenny,’ said Aldred, drinking his tea with a delicacy that seemed odd on such a large man.
‘Not quite as famous as you, you see,’ said Carney, grinning.
‘And what will you
do, now?’ Jenny asked him.
‘It’s an odd thing – all of these years, wishing for freedom, and now that I have it, I’m scared of it. Decisions – you get out of the habit of them. But I’m fairly certain I’ve made one.’
‘I should think so,’ said Richard. ‘We already booked the passage.’
‘I’m back to Antrim,’ said Carney. ‘For a time, anyway. Until I . . . Well, I just need to discover a few things.’ He paused.
‘Discover . . .?’ Jenny asked.
‘Whether my parents are alive, for a start. I’m not sure they know where I’ve been, these past years. They can’t read the newspaper, and word travels slowly. When I tell them I’ve been to the other side of the world and back again, I’ll probably get a clip from Da for telling lies.’
‘And you’re not worried they might reject you?’ Richard asked, looking at Jenny.
‘Yes, but they’ve suffered on my account. They at least deserve to know what became of me.’
Jenny had hoped Carney would be staying with them for a time. He had, though, been booked onto a ship leaving London for Ireland that night. Everything he owned was encased in a rough grey bag that sat, while its owner drank from a china cup, on the seat of the carriage.
And now that he was gone, Jenny felt insubstantial, ghostly. The last person she knew from her convict life, the last person who had stood on the shores of Sydney Cove with her, would soon be at an impossible remove, and would likely never appear again.
Richard must have noticed some change in her demeanour, a slumping of the shoulders or a lowering of the head, because he said, ‘That play you like . . .’
‘I’m not sure I know any, apart from those you’ve taken me to.’
‘What about the Shakespeare that marine once read to you?’
‘Oh! Yes, something involving taming, I think. And I did like it, until the end.’
‘Ah, you feel Katherine should have continued in her resistance. And maybe you’re right. She was, though, discovering that society punishes those who have within them the divine spark of independence. It is a lesson, I am sure, that is not lost on you, my dear.’
