‘Then it is possible that she may have been sent to the new penitentiary at Millbank. The first women prisoners were sent, I think, around the middle of 1816. I have not yet had a chance to visit Millbank, though I hope to do so soon. At least, if she was sent there, she will have been spared the horrors of the convict ships, and if her sentence is complete, she may be free and living in England. If you would like to make inquiries at Millbank, I know of a young woman who will surely be able to assist you. Of course, if Sarah Stone has been transported, I can make inquiries of my contacts here and in New South Wales, but it might take many months to receive an answer.’
‘That would be most kind. Perhaps we could start with the young woman in Millbank?’ says Adah.
‘Of course. I should be delighted to introduce you. One of our small success stories, I may say. A remarkable woman by the name of Day: a Miss Elizabeth Day. Born into a family of convicts, and in trouble with the law from childhood onward. Yet she has turned her life around, and become a devout Christian woman and an inspiration to her fellow unfortunates. Millbank has had its troubles – it was, unwisely, built on marshy ground, and the miasma from the river has caused much ill-health. But at least the prisoners there are spared the dreadful crowding and squalor of Newgate, the barbarities of the convict ships and the depravity of life in New South Wales. You see, Mrs Flint, little by little, our treatment of prisoners is improving. There is still such a long road to walk, so much to be done, and yet, year by year, the worst abuses are gradually mended.’ Mrs Fry, as she speaks, gazes off into the distance, as though looking, not at the view spread out before them, but at some vision of a brighter future: a distant glimpse of Zion. Adah, following her gaze, notices how the clouds are gathering over the river, though the autumn sun still slants through them over the shining water meadows.
‘In Millbank,’ Elizabeth Fry continues, ‘the prisoners receive an education and are taught a useful trade, rather than being left to boredom and vice, as they were in Newgate. Have you ever visited a prison, Mrs Flint?’ And when Adah shakes her head, she adds with a gentle smile, ‘Perhaps you should do so someday. I think it important for those involved with the law to see the places to which convicts are sent. You have a kind and good face, if I may say so, and I truly believe that you might help us to bring a little light and joy to the women in Newgate if you were to join us on one of our visits.’
Adah looks down at her hands, nodding and smiling politely.
‘And this Miss Day?’ asks Raphael. ‘How can we contact her?’
‘Ah yes,’ replies Elizabeth Fry. ‘I will write you a note, and you can take it straight to her at the penitentiary at Millbank. She served out her sentence, and I first came to know her after her release, but such is her compassion and sympathy for her fellow prisoners that she chose to return, and was welcomed back by the prison officials, to work there. I believe she helps care for the patients in the infirmary.’
‘That, to be sure, is a wonderful example of a life redeemed from crime,’ remarks Raphael.
The wind is starting to rise from the river now, and Adah draws her shawl tighter around her shoulders as the sun disappears behind a cloud. Mrs Fry hurries them back towards the warmth of the house to write the note to Miss Day. As they cross the threshold into the marble tiled hallway of Plashet House, Adah hears the wrathful cries of a small voice yelling, ‘I won’t! I won’t!’ and the inaudible response of the nursemaid trying in vain to pacify a child’s tantrum, and she smiles quietly to herself.
Father Ambrose’s Story
October 1822
Greenwich
FATHER AMBROSE CARRIES THE taper into the darkness of the chapel and, moving slowly and deliberately from one side of the altar to the other, lights the candles, one by one. Gradually, the confined space of the little chapel begins to fill with a flickering glow. He performs the same ritual every morning before dawn. It is, he thinks, a symbol. Just as the flame passes from taper to candle, and the pools of light emerge from the darkness, so his chapel itself is a small flame, which may someday light others, little by little dispelling the darkness that has blanketed this country for so long.
He puts on his robes and, in the candlelight, mounts the steps to the altar again, carrying the covered chalice. He opens the big, leather-bound missal which rests on its oaken stand, and begins to recite the introit. There is no-one else in the chapel, but that is hardly surprising. It is rare for any of the small band of Greenwich faithful to put in an appearance at the weekday early morning mass. All the same, Father Ambrose loves this moment of quiet prayer at dawn. Above all, he loves the moment when Mass is over, and he steps out into the garden surrounding the chapel, where the pale early light of day catches the dewdrops on leaves and petals, and the first birds are starting to sing. The big white roses which are the glory of the garden in summer have fallen now, but the hollyhocks and asters are still in flower.
The hour after mass is the priest’s time for walking and reflection. Most days, he enters the great park and climbs the hill towards the observatory, watching the fallow deer flee into the thickets at his approach. But today, for a change, he takes a different route, out along the winding country lane that leads to Westcombe. The narrow muddy track curves between deep gullies thickly overgrown with oaks and elms whose leaves are just beginning to turn red and golden. Where the hillslope is less broken, the land opens up into farm meadows. Here and there, he glimpses a wreath of blue smoke rising from the chimney of a cottage. A milkmaid, carrying a yoke with two wooden pails over her shoulder, comes running down through the long grass, whistling to a herd of dappled cows clustered in a corner of the field.
At the summit of the lane, the priest pauses for a moment to catch his breath, perching himself on a fallen tree trunk and gazing out at the landscape that stretches below. This is his favourite spot. From here he can see the daylight gathering over the twin turrets of the Royal Hospital, and, beyond the river, the marshes and the misty outlines of the vast city. Every time he stops here, he is reminded of the scene in the Bible where Satan leads Christ up into a high place and shows him all the kingdoms of the world: “All these will I give to thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” But it is surely the people in the great smoky city below who have taken to worshipping Mammon, if not Satan himself. So much sin and disbelief; so much to be done; and Father Ambrose has reached the age now where he knows that there is little he can do to change these things.
With a sigh, he rises to his feet and starts to head down the hillside. He passes the imposing wrought iron gate of Woodlands House, and then, a little further down the track, the mellow brick wall with its small green doorway which surrounds the Farrells’ old place. The paint on the doorway is cracked, and some of the bricks have fallen from the archway above. Through the gap in the wall, he can glimpse the tall grass of the garden within. Fluffy tendrils of old man’s beard are entwined amongst the ivy that grows thickly over the wall. Less than a year after poor Mrs Farrell’s death, the place is already going to wrack and ruin.
‘Good morning to you, Father!’ cries a sharp familiar voice.
He turns to see a plump figure bustling down the lane towards him, a covered wicker basket over one arm.
‘And a good morning to you too, Mrs Corcoran. That was a fine array of flowers you made for the chapel at Michaelmas. You did us credit again.’
‘It was a pleasure, Father, a pleasure. And look what I have here,’ says Mrs Corcoran conspiratorially, sidling up to him and lifting the cover from her basket to reveal a mound of fleshy, pale brown mushrooms within. ‘Picked from the woods first thing, with the dew still on them, when they taste their best.’
‘A fine harvest indeed, Mrs Corcoran,’ responds the priest with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But mind you don’t have any poisoned ones in there now!’
‘Good gracious, Father! I’ve been picking mushrooms in these woods for twenty years or more, and never picked a bad one yet.’ She pauses. ‘Though I sometimes wo
nder if there’s others in these parts who may have been picking poisoned mushrooms, for motives of their own,’ she adds slyly.
‘Whatever do you mean, Mrs Corcoran?’
‘Her in there,’ she whispers, jerking her head towards the Farrells’ house. ‘There’s rumours, you know. Not that I’m one to speak bad of another soul. But you must admit, it’s odd. Her mistress, dying so sudden, and leaving all her wealth to the housekeeper. And what about the little girl? Mrs Farrell had a little daughter, I heard, though I can’t say I ever saw the child myself. By rights, she should have left everything to her daughter, but they say that no-one’s seen the child since the day her mother died. There’s them as thinks that housekeeper Bridie O’Sullivan had a hand in one death, if not two.’
‘Oh come now, Mrs Corcoran,’ replies the priest sternly. ‘You mustn’t go spreading these tales. As it happens, I was at Mrs Farrell’s bedside when she died, and the doctor right there beside me. There was nothing strange about her death. Nothing strange at all. Very sad, of course, her dying so young, but nothing unnatural. It was the lung fever, so the doctor said. And as for the little girl, Mrs Farrell told me with her own lips that the child had been sent away to stay with relatives. So you see, there’s no mystery about it at all. You can tell that to the people who told you this gossip. Bridie O’Sullivan’s a good churchgoing Catholic. It doesn’t do to spread stories about your fellow parishioners.’
‘But you must admit,’ persists Mrs Corcoran, unrepentantly, ‘there’s something very odd about that woman. Still living there all alone in that great crumbling house. Hardly ever shows her face out of doors, and when she does she’s still all veiled in black, and will barely give you the time of day. There’s some are saying that house is haunted.’
Father Ambrose suppresses a sigh. ‘You must excuse me, Mrs Corcoran,’ he says. ‘I’d like to stop and talk, but I have pensioners to visit at the hospital this morning. I’ll see you at Mass on Sunday. Good day to you.’
But as he heads down the lane, back towards Greenwich, he finds that the calm of the morning has been unsettled. Mrs Corcoran’s words have brought back the scene at Francesca Farrell’s bedside, when he went to give her the last sacraments. He spoke to her in Italian, which she seemed to find comforting. She was calm, even smiling, as she said to him, ‘Little Grazia will be happy. She has gone to be with her family.’ It seemed an odd choice of words to him then, and still seems so now. But by then Mrs Farrell’s mind was beginning to wander, and he could ask no more. Her last words, he recalls, were something about the King of Hungary. But perhaps he misunderstood them.
There is a certain atmosphere in Greenwich that reminds him of his years in Rome. Maybe it is the contrast between the porticos, colonnades and wide paved expanses of the Royal Hospital and the huddled, pulsing poverty of King Street and Fishers’ Alley: like Rome, with its intermingled grandeur and squalor. He misses the warm Mediterranean sunshine, of course, and choirs of sacred voices soaring into the dome of St. Peter’s. He misses the olives and the good red wine. But here in Greenwich, more than anywhere else in England, he feels almost at home.
On Saturday afternoons, he goes to take the sacraments to poor Billy Boland who lost his legs at Lake Champlain, and to Bento Joaquim, who is crippled by arthritis these days. He likes to sit with these men for a while in their ‘cabins’ in the Royal Hospital: tiny rooms crammed to the ceilings with the flotsam and jetsam of long lives on the high seas.
‘Did I ever show you this, Father?’ asks Billy Boland, after Father Ambrose has heard the old sailor’s confession, and they’ve said their prayers together.
His conversations always begin that way: ‘Did I ever show you this?’ And the old man will then swing himself up on his two wooden legs and hobble with surprising agility over to one or other of the shelves that line the room, to retrieve some memento of his long and colourful life, and then recite a yarn to go with the object in his hand: a tale which may or may not be true. Father Ambrose has learnt not to be too literal-minded in his dealings with these men.
Today it is the battered remnants of a wooden crucifix, which seems to have once been ornately carved and decorated with silver. Billy Boland sits with the crucifix grasped in his left hand, while his right hand holds the long-stemmed pipe on which he puffs intermittently as he tells his tale. His rheumy blue eyes peer out from under bushy eyebrows as he speaks, gazing at some distant spot behind the priest’s head.
‘It was at the Siege of Cattaro, in the days when I still had me own two pegs,’ he begins. ‘The sea calm as the water in a well, and twice as deep. Bottle green all the way down. Our Captain was a bit of a tartar, that he was. Ordered us to set up ropes and tackle on the slopes above the city, and haul a great 18-pounder right up to the mountain top to bombard the French. I’ll tell you, I may have had two whole legs, but I was none too young even then, and I’ve never strained and sweated as I did over that accursed gun.’
As Billy Boland tells his intricate tale of crafty Frenchmen and the valiant troops of Bishop Petar, and of a woman warrior who gave him the crucifix in return for the gift of a loaded blunderbuss with which she planned to shoot her husband, Father Ambrose gazes through the coils of blue pipe smoke at the wonders that line the shelves of Billy’s cabin, his mind wandering. There is a battered tin box which (as he knows from earlier visits) is filled with coins from every corner of the globe, a huge speckled object which Billy Boland insists is a dodo’s egg, and an ornate Indian painting of an elephant, which suddenly reminds the priest of the picture that used to stand on the lacquered cabinet in Mrs Farrell’s parlour, amongst all the other trinkets that her seafaring husband had brought back from the Orient …
‘So I turn around, and the next moment she’s unwinding this crucifix from around her neck, and is pushing it into my hand,’ Billy Boland is saying. ‘I’ll never know to this day if it was just a thank you present, or if she meant something else by it, but I can tell you I ran down the mountain away from that cottage as fast as my legs would carry me. Never did see that woman again, but I’ve always kept the crucifix by me. Not that it brought me much luck at Lake Champlain, though… Which reminds me, Father, did I ever show you this…?’
The sky is darkening by the time Father Ambrose escapes from Billy Boland’s stuffy little cabin and crosses the great courtyard in the middle of the Royal Hospital. To the east, the evening light is still clear, but a great bank of dark cloud obscures the setting sun. He should be back in the chapel already by now, hearing the Saturday confessions. The blue-coated pensioners who have been out and about, strolling in the grounds with family and friends, are hurrying back to the refectory for supper, and the lights are starting to glitter behind the tall windows.
Father Ambrose strides up Back Lane to the chapel, lights the candles, and seats himself in the little confessional in one corner, composing his mind in prayer, and waiting to see if any of his parishioners have sins that are troubling their consciences. In a place like Greenwich, you never quite know what to expect. As often as not, it’s some elderly woman whose worst peccadillo is forgetting her morning prayers or over-indulging in molasses on her porridge, but he’s also had retired pirates repenting of long past murders, and once a seaman who felt impelled to confess that he’d eaten the flesh of his dead companion when they’d been marooned for two months on an island in the Bay of Bengal.
This time, Father Ambrose sits in the silent and empty confessional for almost an hour, quietly searching his conscience for his own sins. It’s the sins of omission that trouble him as much as anything. All the things he’d planned to do and hasn’t done. When he came back to England, he was so fired with hope and energy, believing that he was part of a new wave that was bringing the Holy Faith back to his homeland. But in the end, what has he achieved? Baptised some babies, said a few thousand masses, heard a few thousand confessions. And now somehow he feels so tired. The knees ache of an evening, and he is finding it harder to catch his breath when he climbs the
hill to the Observatory …
He hears the door creak open. A penitent comes into the silent chapel and kneels down at a pew to pray. The priest waits patiently for the invisible person to approach the confessional. The slow minutes pass. Perhaps this is a parishioner, or even a stranger, who has simply come to sit in the quiet of the chapel, inhaling its odour of candles and incense, as some do. The hour for confession is almost over, and the priest wonders how much longer he should wait.
Then the hesitant footsteps approach – a woman’s footsteps, Father Ambrose notices – and the silhouette of a face appears in the half-darkness beyond the lattice window of the confessional.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ says a familiar voice, with a slight Wicklow lilt. ‘It is one year since my last confession.’
Indeed. He has been wondering when Bridie O’Sullivan, who is such a regular churchgoer, would make her next appearance in the confessional. He hasn’t seen her there since her mistress Mrs Farrell died.
He waits for her to speak, but there is a long silence. Then, quite abruptly and yet with oddly little emotion, she says, ‘God will never forgive me for what I’ve done.’
‘Hush, hush, my daughter. Never say such things,’ murmurs the priest in alarm. ‘God in His infinite mercy always forgives the repentant sinner, no matter what the sin. Only repent sincerely, and you will be forgiven.’
His heart is beating faster. Surely not, he thinks. Surely that dreadful tittle-tattle Mrs Corcoran has been spreading can’t be the truth? Surely it cannot be that this pious, stern-faced, taciturn woman killed her mistress for her money; or, worse still, killed that poor little child too.
But it seems that the sin Bridie O’Sullivan wants to confess to is something different, more complicated, for she begins, very quietly, ‘I meant only good at the start of it. She was so heartbroken, you see, the poor signora. I could not bear to see her so sad. It seemed as though she might go out of her mind with grief after the Captain was lost at sea. They had been such a devoted couple, you know. I never knew two people so in love with one another. A sight to see, indeed it was. After the news came that the Captain was gone, I believe there was only one thing stopping her from throwing herself in the river to be with him, and that was that fact that she was carrying his child. That child was her hope. “If it’s a boy we’ll call him Frederick after his father,” she’d say. She was sure it would be a boy, you see. But when the child was born, it was not to be. It was a little girl baby, the dearest wee thing you ever saw, Father. If the signora was sorry it wasn’t a boy, she never said a word about it. I can still remember the lovely smile on her face as she held that baby in her arms by the window. “We’ll call her Frederica,” she said. But in less than a week she was gone. That baby’s little life had just slipped clear away. Such a tiny thing she’d been. Too beautiful to live, it seemed. We buried her in the churchyard, near the monument the signora had put up for her Captain – for they’d never brought his body home, of course. And then, once we’d laid that little body in the ground, I was truly afraid.
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