On dull autumn days, when even at noon a pock-faced moon hangs high in the sky, and the sun is so hazy it scarcely sheds sufficient light to merit the description of day – then I think I know her. As I bend over paint and paper I strain to hear the rhythmic sweeping of an old-fashioned broom, swishing across the wooden boards. At such times I don’t look up. I am almost certain, but not quite sure, I might see her then.
Of course, I did see her at Delafosse; a middle-aged woman with mouse-like greying hair, dressed in the respectable black of a widow. She stood at the fringes of groups of servants, in the dusky corners of rooms, or in the muffling darkness of the basement. I believe I heard her too, by some freak of nature, in the dripping darkness of the tunnel, running for her life.
I have no recollection of painting her into the window of Delafosse Hall: a solitary figure, waiting and watching in that vast memory-haunted building; fixed and unable to leave. I pray she is at rest now, in a Christian grave, saved from the opaque black waters at Whitelow. As an anonymous gesture I settled a sum on orphaned James Harper of Pontefract.
Bless you, Eleanor Jane Harper. I remember your sad smile of encouragement across the grey light of the landing, your colourless eyes meeting mine, and the icy returning pressure of your hand clasping mine when we finally met in the flesh.
*
These are troubled days we live in. The mood in the country is still uneasy – this war with France makes every man mistrust his fellow, spreading rumours of revolution and spies. But these shores have withstood the Terrors of France, and as we move towards a new century, we harbour hope that better days will come. And one final message did reach me from those extraordinary years. At first the letter had been sent to Delafosse, where the new owner had not known what to do with it; so it was forwarded to Nan at Skipton. Finally, the minister who helped me pay her annuity sent it to my London address.
I had thought often of Anne but had only braved a letter once, to tell her I was safe and a mother.Not even that one letter had reached her, for here was her own enquity bearing many stains, postmarks, and creases. With some trepidation, began to read, bracing myself to hear a tale of starvation and depravity.
Greenbeck Farm
Parramatta
New South Wales
5th February 1795
My dearest Grace,
I am surprised not to hear from you for so long, and hope all is well with you? Or have our letters been lost at sea? Rumours reach us of shipwreck and mutiny on board those frail vessels that traverse the globe with our precious communications. I pray that this, of all my letters, will reach you, for I have not forgotten my promise to be a good correspondent. Often as I touch the ring you gave me, embellished with your own precious hair, I recollect my visit to Delafosse and the pleasures of York in your company. I wonder how Michael is, and whether you are still improving the Hall? I wonder too, if you have yet been blessed with children?
With what joy I can tell you of a wonderful improvement in our circumstances since that first unhappy account I sent you. We have moved to Parramatta town, a most pleasant place on the river, some sixteen miles from Sydney Cove. Our region has for the first time returned miraculous harvests of wheat and maize; indeed the summer here is so long that two crops of vegetables are often harvested. Soon Jacob will be Minister and we make plans to build a church, a modern wooden building with a meeting room where I hope to hold classes for the women and children. Yet I confess, to you alone, Grace, that I think Jacob has found a greater calling in agriculture than in the ministry. Last year the Governor granted us thirty magnificent acres here on the river, and our home, though constructed only of wood, and painted white with pipe clay, is one of the finest in this neighbourhood. We keep goats, pigs and poultry – did you ever picture me as a farmer’s wife? And our dear children have a fine and free existence: Robert is a sturdy fellow of almost two years now, and my youngest baby, Grace, is a little sweetheart who I trust will be just as clever and good as her namesake in England. I should never have anticipated it, my dear friend, but I am content here. When I recall those apprehensions I had, and your brother-in-law’s warnings, I do not believe God could have been more generous in his gifts.
Grace, I must tell you that here, where there is more open land than could ever be imagined back in the seething alleys of England, we have seen the most remarkable reformation of the hardest criminals. Our own nearest neighbour was once a convicted cracksman, as the locals name a house-thief, but now his farm is an exemplar from which we all gratefully learn. And this man and his family are good and peaceable people, who I believe needed only new hope and the trust of others to flourish.
But enough, I am running through my paper and I still have a most interesting account to give you. When we were in York you asked me to search out a convict named Mary Jebb. I can tell you she was a party to a most infamous escape from Sydney Cove some four years past. In mitigation, she and her fellow escapee, Jack Pierce, did escape the colony at a time of great crisis, when the population suffered most terribly from famine, illness and by all accounts the most awful notions of abandonment by the mother country. The two of them stole a boat and at dead of night sailed away, no doubt intending to sail north to the Dutch Indies or even China. For many years they were forgotten, but I can now supply the end to this tale.
A few weeks past, a whaling master named Captain Hogan came into town with news of a certain tribal chief of his acquaintance across the straits in the savage lands of New Zealand. Having become acquainted with these peoples, Captain Hogan found himself a guest at a grand feast of a Maori tribe. It was at that feast he noticed a woman with the white skin of a European but able only to speak the Maori tongue. At close quarters he observed how proudly she wore her feathered cloak and bone ornaments, and was the wife of a warrior and mother to a brood of his pale-skinned children. In despair he spoke in English, then tried a little French and Dutch. He wondered if she had been a whaler’s wife, or a planter’s daughter, shipwrecked or otherwise stranded in that land. Then the tale of that infamous couple’s escape came to his mind. ‘Mary Jebb,’ he repeated slowly. The change in the woman’s countenance was extraordinary. She grew pale and muttered wildly, as if hearing words of extraordinary power. So moved was the whaling captain by her plight that he spoke secretly to her, offering her a passage back to the Colony should she so wish it, endeavouring to persuade her to rejoin her own Christian race. But at the frequent repetition of her name, the former convict clung to her adopted tribe and would under no persuasion be parted from them. And so she lives a pagan still, and is talked of in the colony as a byword for moral degradation. Captain Hogan informed me that when he tried to teach her to once again speak her own name she no longer possessed the skill. Try as she would to repeat the letter ‘M’ she made a jumbled mess of ‘Mary’. And also of ‘Jebb’, which she could not utter at all. And soon in frustration she spat in his face and stormed away in anger.
When I reached the end of the letter I felt for a moment the hard ground of my certainties shift – could there be two Mary Jebbs? I inspected the chain of my reasoning: the Old Bailey trial confirmed I had known a red-haired convict named Mary Jebb. Her own account of her escape with Jack had always rung as true as the gospel. And there also stood as evidence the twin copper discs of the matching Penny Hearts. The ground beneath my feet felt firm again. So if I had known Mary Jebb, who was the white woman Captain Hogan failed to rescue? Peg had once spoken of freedom bought by an exchange of muskets, I recalled. Another character had been involved – that was it – a missionary’s daughter.
I will never know her name, but wonder if everywhere Mary Jebb and her cast of false characters went, she left a discarded twin – a real Peg Blissett, formerly an alderman’s cook, and a nameless missionary’s daughter abandoned to a heathen tribe. And of course, a discarded Grace Croxon, mistress of Delafosse Hall. For a moment I experience a sisterly connection with that warrior’s wife, who chose to stay at the ends of the earth. We
have both survived, but not as we used to be – we are no longer gullible sleepwalkers. We have both clung to the mastheads of our selfhoods and not let go, while Mary Jebb raged about us like a tempest. And now we are both changed and cannot turn back into our former selves. Our victory is too hard won.
Is it possible to ever know such a character as Mary Jebb? Each time I thought I knew her, I poured my credulous trust into a figure of iron, casting a host of shadows. And when she wasn’t playing parts? I remember the vicious murder of Mrs Harper. It is the echoing unlit stage between Mary’s public performances that frightens me most.
I recollect the coroner’s remark on that corroded Penny Heart that refused to give up its secret to the end. Perhaps we are all born with a blank heart, and choose which lines are etched upon it. Mary incised hers with vengeance, but the mordant waters dissolved it away. Sometimes I even pity her. Mortality stalked her with a scythe in hand, and felled her at her moment of sweet revenge.
With five bright chimes the church across the square rings out the hour. In seventeen hours I will gladly marry John Francis. I have found my true love again, and we must snatch what remains of happiness in our span of days. I think of that sundial on the tower at Delafosse: the long shadow cast by a shape unseen, relentlessly circling the dial. In time the iron rod will rust, and the brass-bound face will crumble. Time devours all things: love and murder and secrets. And though the sun sinks, and the golden numerals fade, we must believe that our own fragile hearts will guide us, like pin-pricks of starlight through the approaching night.
Acknowledgements
This novel was inspired by the Penny Heart tokens created by convicts as keepsakes, to be left behind with loved ones when the British government transported them to ‘the ends of the earth’, as the Antipodes were described. Coins were generally engraved with the convict’s name, length of sentence and a sentimental verse or message. Much of the imagery and choice of words signifies a vibrant working class subculture also expressed on the convicts’ skin in elaborate tattoos; it was surprising to me to find that as many as twenty-five per cent of female convicts put on trial in mainland Britain carried such ‘personal marks’. Though pain at separation is the overwhelming emotion expressed on convict tokens, anger, defiance and contempt are also found. Peg’s use of a token to express a vow to return and take revenge is however, my own invention. On a few occasions I have blurred the chronology of history to write this fiction, but in the larger backdrop of crime, punishment and the position of women, I have tried to be true to the times.
A great many books, articles, people and experiences helped me in the writing of this book but the following deserve a special mention:
Michele Field & Timothy Millet, Convict Love Tokens: the Leaden Hearts the Convicts Left Behind (Wakefield Press, 1998)
Roy Porter, Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in Medicine (NPI Media, 2003)
Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale, 2003)
Prudence Bebb, Life in Regency York (1992) and Shopping in Regency York (1994) (Sessions of York)
E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin History, 1991)
David Sekers, A Lady of Cotton: Hannah Greg, Mistress of Quarry Bank Mill (The History Press, 2013)
Laura Mason, Sugar-plums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets (Prospect Books, 2003)
Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (Southover Press, 1996 [first edition 1769])
Stephen Hart, Cant - A Gentleman’s Guide: The Language of Rogues in Georgian London (Improbable Fictions, 2014). The author’s online database of Cant was also invaluable: http://www.pascalbonenfant.com
Watkins Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1789) and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, (1793) www.gutenberg.org
James Hardy Vaux, Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1812) www.gutenberg.net.au
Peg’s adventures were in part inspired by Mary Bryant (also known as Mary Broad) of Fowey, England, who escaped from Botany Bay with her husband, William. In a feat of astonishing navigation, they sailed 3254 miles in 69 days in an open boat up the uncharted coast of Australia, before being recaptured in the Dutch East Indies. Mary Bryant was a very different character from Peg and her life can be discovered in an excellent book, To Brave Every Danger: The Epic Life of Mary Bryant of Fowey (Truran, 1993) by Judith Cook, or a less authentic but entertaining film, The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant (2005).
Interpretations of the earliest collisions between Maori and Pakeha cultures in New Zealand vary widely. While I found Trevor Bentley’s Captured by Maori: White Female Captives, Sex and Racism on the Nineteenth-century New Zealand Frontier (Penguin Books, 2004) a fascinating collection of early accounts, I cannot always agree with his conclusions about the positive aspects of captivity.
Parts of this book were written in New Zealand and Australia, where my husband and I lived for almost two years on a mid-life journey accomplished by house-swaps. It therefore recalls our friends in Whakatane and Ohope, our special home for a magical year. Also in New Zealand, thanks go to Nancy King for our Creative Arts Scholarship at the eco-house at Muriwai and The New Zealand Society of Authors for a place on their mentorship programme with Joan Rosier-Jones, whose wise words and deadlines were always helpful.
The NZSA also guided me towards Peter Beatson, who gave my son and me the opportunity to write at Foxton Beach and to find his article on ‘Richard Nunns: the Renaissance of Traditional Maori Instruments’ (Music in the Air, Summer 2003), about a traditional bone flute. It also led me to the Flax Stripper Museum where I could handle and wear traditional Maori objects. Heritage New Zealand, National Trust of Australia and The National Trust all sparked my imagination, as did the generous network of libraries across New Zealand that offer wonderful materials, wi-fi, comfortable chairs and the best views in the world.
I would also like to thank the following people for their help and inspiration: Ivan Day, for the opportunity to learn about Period Sugarwork and Confectionary, consult his library and for the online bounty of www.historicfood.com.
Two writer friends, Elaine Walker and Alison Layland, continued to give me invaluable feedback, support and inspiration, and Lucienne Boyce provided advice on the legal situation of married women of property.
A retreat as Writer in Residence at Church Cottage, Clifford Chambers, came at the perfect time, thanks to Sarah Hosking of the Hosking Houses Trust.
For their crucial encouragement and belief in the novel, thanks to all at Andrew Nurnberg Associates, especially Sarah Nundy, and in the novel’s early days, Ella Kahn, while Imogen Russell Williams provided invaluable assistance.
Thank you to all at Hodder and Stoughton for encouragement and support, especially Laura Macdougall and Nick Sayers.
And finally, thanks to my son Chris and my husband Martin, both ever ready with their cameras and great ideas.
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