SARAH STOVELL was born in 1977. The Night Flower was written as part of a PhD in Creative Writing at Northumbria University. She lives in Northumberland with her partner and two young children.
The Night Flower
SARAH STOVELL
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Copyright © 2013 Sarah Stovell
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First published in 2013 by Tindal Street Press,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www-tindalstreet-co.uk
ISBN 978 1 90699 421 1
eISBN 978 1 90699 496 9
Designed and typeset by Tetragon
Printed by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Bonnie and Sam
CASCADES FEMALE FACTORY VAN DIEMEN’S LAND
There’s times in here I have to check I ain’t just gone and died already. All I’ve got now is a pile of hours, and hours ain’t what folk think they are. They ain’t certain. Measuring hours ain’t like measuring water or grain, where one pint is one pint and one ounce is one ounce. Hours are slippery. They shrink or grow, depending who they belong to, and if you’re a body locked up in solitary confinement, then there ain’t no way round the fact that you’ll be getting the long ones.
The folk in charge of this place call it solitary confinement because they’ve gotta make their words come out sounding polite and holy, but what they really mean is being locked up with nothing but your own piss.
Today wasn’t as bad as some other days. Mary Hutchinson come to see me at lunchtime, and she brung me some straw, and started promising candles, too, so it won’t be long now before some of this dark disappears and I might be able to see myself again.
‘Here you are, Miriam,’ she said. I heard the rustle of straw on the stone floor, what sounded like the waft and swish of the ladies’ skirts back in England. ‘To make you comfortable until your baby comes.’
She talked like she was bringing me the earth, and all my freedom to take it.
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
She shone her candle round the cell a while, looking at the dark and the straw and the slops pot on the floor, and she sighed and said, ‘I’m not sure you’d find a room more miserable than this one anywhere on earth.’
Then she shut the door and locked it, and went away through the yard and back to the factory. She’ll spend her afternoon there shouting at the bad ladies – the ones what won’t stop misbehaving, for all they’ve got the threat of solitary confinement, or death, hanging over em. Then she’ll pray away to Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, and whatever other dead folk she feels like calling on, to help her save the convict maidens’ souls.
She don’t pray for me no more, though. My own soul’s for the devil, and ain’t got a hope left
PROFILES OF CONVICTS DUE FOR TRANSPORTATION TO VAN DIEMEN’S LAND ON BOARD THE MARQUIS OF HASTINGS, DUE TO SET SAIL FROM GALLIONS REACH, LONDON, ON THE EIGHTEENTH DAY OF MAY, 1842
NAME: Miriam Booth
NATIVE PLACE: Not known
AGE: 14
TRADE: None
OFFENCE: Burglary
TRIED: 24th March, 1842, Newcastle
SENTENCE: 7 years’ transportation
NOTES: A Gypsy of no fixed abode, who lived in Lime Street slums, Newcastle. Parents dead. A frequent thief.
NAME: Rose Henrietta Winter
NATIVE PLACE: Fourstones, near Hexham, Northumberland
AGE: 26
TRADE: Governess
OFFENCE: Theft of fourteen silver knives and forks and one gold ring
TRIED: 6th January, 1842, Carlisle
SENTENCE: 7 years’ transportation
NOTES: Wife of John Winter; widowed 1840; entered domestic service 1841. Three children still alive; appealing to take youngest with her – decision not yet reached.
Part One
1
LIME STREET SLUMS NEWCASTLE, ENGLAND WINTER, 1841
We was Gypsies. We was always getting punished, for one thing or another. They reckoned the rich folk of the land was gonna get wrecked by us if they wasn’t careful. We’d give em diseases what we caught off the streets – whooping cough and smallpox and the like. It was our own fault we was diseased, because we was dark skinned and didn’t believe hard enough in the Lord, so he saw fit to punish us with an early death and a quick journey to hell. But they didn’t see it as being right that we’d spread it to the Christians of the world, too, and when an epidemic of typhus or measles broke out, there was a lotta anger and shouting from the rich folk, and they reckoned the country oughta get rid of us, and the rest of the poor, too, for that matter.
City Gypsies was the worst. At least if we was just travelling the countryside in our wagons there wasn’t a lotta harm we could do, except robbing a few vegetables off the farmers here and there. City Gypsies was another matter. They said we was nothing but beggars and pick-pockets.
I hadn’t always been a city Gypsy, though. I was a girl what had spent years living up mountains, breathing proper clean air, and it give me a head start on getting a clean soul. I wasn’t like the rest of them filthy wretches, for all what I found myself living among em, through no fault of my own.
Before she died, Evelyn, who wasn’t my real mother but was as good as one to me, said, ‘Work hard, schej. Work hard and live a good life. Beg if you have to, but working is better. And don’t steal. Only take what’s in the ground, because that’s meant for everyone. It don’t matter who grew it. But don’t take nothing else. Look after yourself good, and keep out of trouble. They’ll hang the life outta you if you start stealing, and you don’t deserve that, because you’re a good girl, schej. A good girl.’
Of course, I made her all the right promises, because it wouldn’t do to upset a dying woman, specially not when I loved her. She’d been kushti enough to bring me up, for all I wasn’t her own flesh and blood. But truly, I don’t know how she was expecting me to get by on my own in the world, with nothing but my tarot pack and tin whistle.
Evelyn’d brung me to the city when I was twelve years old. Before then, it’d just been the two of us, travelling round the mountains of Westmorland and Northumbria, with a wagon she’d took off our tribe the day we left. We’d got a horse, too, off a trader who sold him cheap, but the horse was old and so was the wagon and in the end they both collapsed and we was left with nothing.
It was winter then. The ground was cold, and the plants and animals hid emselves away and wouldn’t be hunted. We was hungry, and although we found ourselves shelters in caves and such, the cold’d come blasting down them hills and freeze us – skin, flesh and bone – till we was stiff as the dead and not much happier, neither.
Evelyn decided how we’d be better off coming to the city to live, because there was more folk there to earn a living off – reading fortunes and begging and such – and that was what we did. After a lotta walking and a lotta catching rides with farmers on their wagons, we got ourselves to Newcastle. The air there was full of smog, but the streets was lit at night, so folk passing by could see us, and maybe toss some pennies our way, or some old newspapers, i
f they was of the rich and charitable sort.
There was a lotta folk without houses what lived on Lime Street. It were a kushti sorta place, because the River Ouse passed by there, what meant we could wash ourselves now and then if we was needing to, and there was also some bridges, and if you folded yourself up tight enough you could spend the night tucked under their arches and they’d give you a decent enough shelter from the rain, and also from the wind, what wasn’t no laughing matter in Newcastle. So that was what we did – about fifty of us, all in all, children and grown-ups together – and we huddled under the bridges and slept in the doorways of the factory, and in the daytime we all had our own ways of making a living, some what was honest and some what wasn’t.
Evelyn got money reading the tarot and telling fortunes, and by selling lucky bunches of lavender to folk what worried their luck was running out. It was me what got the most money, though – more than pretty well everyone in Lime Street slums. I played my tin whistle and I sung sometimes, too, and there ain’t nothing nicer for the rich folk of the world, than to see a hungry girl belting out a pretty tune from a doorway.
They was all hungry in the slums. Me and Evelyn’d gotta be careful about what we took back there at night. If we earned ourselves a crust of bread, or if a kindly-seeming mother’d given me a cup of milk to help put some strong in my bones, the others’d fight us for em – proper fighting, with fists and feet and kicks to the head – and we could end up beat black and blue. It hurt a lot to get beat, what was the first reason to not like it, but the other reason was because it didn’t help with making money. The rich folk was happy enough to throw their coins at a hungry girl, but a girl with black eyes was another thing altogether. I s’pose she wasn’t pretty no more and folk are happier to feed a pretty girl than an ugly one.
So if we’d got food, we used to stop in the alley on our way back to Lime Street, and stuff our faces with it, so we wouldn’t have to share it with no one and so we wouldn’t get beat. And when we got back, all them hungry-eyed children’d crowd round to see what we’d got, and we’d just shake our heads in a sad sorta way, and say we was sorry, but it’d been a bad day and we didn’t have nothing for em.
But it didn’t do to be always fighting. I made friends well enough with the other children, and there was times we did share stuff round, and also times we went off together to do a bit of stealing from the street vendors and such. To go stealing with other folk was kushti and give you more in the way of guts, and it might mean you’d come back with better stuff, like cheese or a meat pie, or some chestnuts if it was Christmas.
The bad girl had been living at the slums years before we got there, and she reckoned she was a thing or two above the rest of us because of it. She was a Gypsy like me, and her name was Katie-May – two names rolled up in one. And it turned out Katie-May was two lots of trouble rolled up in one as well, but none of us knew that at the time, and I just reckoned she was clever, because she’d got a proper thieving way about her and didn’t never get herself caught. She was fifteen years old and didn’t have no mother or father to speak of, but she knew well enough how to look after herself.
‘You eat more food than you let on,’ she said to me once.
‘I never do,’ I said.
‘Liar. If you really had as much bad days as you say you have, you’d of died months ago.’
I shrugged and didn’t say nothing.
‘You oughta share your stuff, you know. You oughta let me have some of it. If you do, then next time I rob a house, I’ll get you a blanket or a coat. And I’ll get your mother one, too, if she wants.’
Well, that was a promise I found hard to say no to. It wasn’t a warm life under that bridge, and although me and Evelyn did our best with the newspapers and old rags we found, keeping the cold out our bones wasn’t no easy thing.
So I said, ‘All right,’ and the next day, when I’d sung the breath outta my lungs and got enough coins for four hot cakes off the street vendor, plus a few bits of bread and a sausage I’d swiped when he wasn’t looking, I took em back to Lime Street to share with Katie-May.
She gobbled em down quick. ‘Tomorrow night,’ she said, ‘I’m going house-breaking with the boys. We know the place. We found it last week. It’s big, like a mansion. There’s just one lady living there that we can see, and she hasn’t been back these two nights together. Reckon she’s gone off somewhere for Christmas. So we’re gonna break in, get as much as we can, and I’ll get you something, too, to keep you warm.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, excited about the idea of being warm.
But when Katie-May come back the next night, with her cut and bleeding hands what’d got in a sorry state when she smashed the mansion’s window, she didn’t give me nothing. She made a proper show of laying out blankets and jumpers and such, so I went and sat down next to her, as a way of reminding her about her promise, but she ignored me, what I thought was rude.
In the end, I said, ‘You said you was gonna bring me a coat.’
‘I couldn’t. There wasn’t enough time. The police was on the prowl and I’d gotta get out as soon as I could. I could only get enough for me.’
‘That ain’t fair,’ I said, because I was a girl with a fair mind, even back when I was just thirteen years old, and I’d took Katie-May as being true to her word and reckoned she oughta share what she’d got equal, like what I’d done. And now when I remember that day, I reckon I oughta of seen it as being a sign of the trouble to come, and I get cross with myself for giving her another chance, and then another chance after that. But I s’pose that’s the lot of folk what have a trusting nature.
When I went back to Evelyn, I told her what’d happened and how Katie-May’d promised me a coat to give her, but hadn’t kept her word. I said I was sorry and cried a bit, too, because I knew Evelyn’d been looking forward to having some wool on her skin and I felt bad that I couldn’t give it to her, after all she’d done for me in the past.
But she just said, ‘Never mind, chey. It don’t matter. And anyway, it’s best not to go wearing stolen goods, because you never know if you might meet with their owner one day. You’d do well to stay away from thieves like Katie-May, and stick to earning a living with your pretty voice and your whistle. No one wants you going to a bad place, Miriam.’
I laughed a bit and put a kiss on her face when she said that, because of course, I knew myself to be lucky. It wasn’t everyone who’d got someone what cared if they went to a bad place or not, and I was thankful to Evelyn for keeping me, even though the tribe’d said when I was born that they couldn’t afford no baby.
I said, ‘I won’t go to a bad place, Dey.’
She said, ‘Let’s hope not, schej. Let’s hope not.’
And I reckoned when she’d been talking about a bad place, she must of meant hell, because I couldn’t think where else she meant, except maybe gaol, but a lotta folk wanted to go to gaol, for the roof it’d put over their heads, and I gotta admit, gaol wasn’t enough to stop me swiping a cake or two when I was hungry.
2
There’s always been laws meant for giving bad times to the Gypsies. Before I got born, the men in charge of England said how all Gypsy folk’d gotta get quick out the country, right there and then, and if any of em was ever found sneaking about in their wagons, they was gonna get straight away hanged and sent to the devil.
My mother, Anna, was just a child when they decided this, but it come to be the sorta thing what frightens a body for life. My old kumpania – the tribe what I’d sprung from – didn’t have no way of getting emselves the fare to some other country, so they had to take emselves off and hide for ever from the police and all them other folk what didn’t reckon much to Gypsies.
They packed up their wagons and off they went, far away from the south of England where they’d been travelling years and years round Devon and Somerset, and up into Cumberland and the Lakes. And there they headed for the mountains, because they reckoned the mountains’d be kind to em. They took
their horses and three wagons and went as high as they could go, till they reached the top and found Stoney Rigg, where there was rocks for sheltering under, and grass for lying on, and tarns close by what give em water. There wasn’t no folk for miles, and so they stayed there. And cut in a crag they found a cave what was small and dark, and they crawled inside and it was enough to hide em.
So they give up their travelling ways, and stayed for years on the mountain. They burned nettles and sage and scratched prayers on tree trunks, and no one found em and they called emselves lucky.
A lotta years’d gone by, and after her mother’d died from some strange disease the river give her, and her father’d died from some strange madness the animals give him, Anna and the ones what was still left in her tribe got joined by another group of Gypsies what was trying to get away from the murdering gadje as well. My mother’s tribe wasn’t so keen on the new ones. They was strange Gypsies of a different sort – just one family of em, what’d come from countries far away and spoke words the others couldn’t always understand. The elders of my mother’s tribe said it was all right for em to stay, but they give a warning to their own folk that no one was to get too close to em, what mostly just meant my mother wasn’t to go falling in love with the boy they’d brung.
Anna’s heart was full of lonely by then, after the years what’d took away her parents and left nothing in the way of love or good luck. And the lonely got hold of her so hard, it pretty much took the tongue outta her, and she hardly knew no more how to talk to a body.
But the new boy, whats name was Joe, took a liking to her anyway. He’d got a kushti sorta heart in him, so Evelyn reckoned, and a talking way about him, and he didn’t seem to mind when my mother never said nothing back. He used to take Anna wandering over the hills, where he taught her how to hunt for rabbits and hedgehogs, and how to skin em and cook em in a stew. He was handsome and strong, and he took away some of that old lonely at her heart, and it wasn’t long before he fell to loving her, and even though the rest of the kumpania was dead set against it, Anna fell to loving him, too, until in the end they’d fell so far, there wasn’t a hope of em ever getting up again.
The Night Flower Page 1
