I went as far as the locked cage hatch over the prison deck. I could see it was dark as midnight down there, and the noise and the smell coming upward were intolerable. I couldn’t make out individual words being spoken, but it was clear there was a great deal of vile misery among the prisoners. I wondered whether their conditions were similar to those of the slaves my father transported – kept down in the dark, caged like dangerous animals. Oliver said that most of these prisoners were not dangerous and that their crimes were usually smaller ones – theft and house-breaking and suchlike – though they were all of them filthy: street dwellers, workhouse inmates, Gypsies &c.
I believed my mother-in-law must have been right, when she said the judge had imposed an exceptionally harsh sentence on me. Usually, transportation was reserved only for the country’s lowest inhabitants – ‘the nation’s rubbish,’ she called it – so that England might be free of its poor, and yet there was I, travelling with them. The judge must have been liberal in his attitudes towards slavery, and sent me away on account of who my father was. There was no other reason that I could think of why he would not simply fine me. But it did not do to dwell on the injustices of my situation.
We were heading now towards Africa. I found myself growing quite attached to Oliver, though I was keeping a careful guard on my emotions. It would not be wise to fall in love and be immediately separated at the other end. We both understood we had an arrangement of mutual benefit, which would finish as soon as the ship docked, though I was deeply anxious about how the Lord would look upon my behaviour. All I could do was pray and ask Him to understand and forgive me. I would never have behaved like this in any other circumstance.
Many of the other sailors’ and officers’ wives were young – girls of no more than fourteen or fifteen. I understood that the coarse lives they’d lived before coming here would have given them some practical knowledge, but even so, I couldn’t help fearing for them. It was made clear to us on the first day that pregnancy was a crime on board this ship. Any woman or girl finding herself with child would be punished.
A couple of weeks or so after we set sail from Tenerife, I found myself in conversation with one of the women from the convict deck. She was down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor with salt water from the sea, and she looked up at me as I walked past her and said, ‘Hello, miss. I’ve seen you round here a lot. I thought you was one of us.’
I cleared my throat. To tell a falsehood would be wrong. I said, ‘I am on my way to Van Diemen’s Land, it is true.’
She snorted. ‘Oh, you ain’t one of us. I suppose talking like you do is what gets you out of this sort of work.’
I said nothing.
‘It’s all right. I understand,’ she carried on. ‘I’ve worked for folk like you in the past, before coming here. I know you ain’t the sort of lady what can go scrubbing decks and washing convict dresses. All that dirt’d likely give you smallpox or something dreadful. We’re used to bugs and the like. Reckon we’d kill them before they ever killed us. But not your sort. You’ve got skin made by silkworms and hearts weak as glass.’
I laughed a little at this. She was friendly enough in her way of speaking, but I could hear resentment beneath the lightness of her words. ‘Will you be able to rest later?’ I asked, as a way of changing the subject.
‘Oh, maybe,’ she said, ‘but there’s not a lot to do here if you ain’t working.’ She sat up straight, then put her brush down and looked at me. ‘Why’re you here?’ she asked. ‘You ain’t the usual sort they send.’
I shook my head. ‘I was poor,’ I told her – the only explanation I wanted to give.
‘Well, there ain’t no one here’s rich, missus, if you don’t mind me saying. Wouldn’t be here if they was.’
I said, ‘Why are you here?’
She wiped her hands on her smock. ‘I’m not a convict, for all I might look like one to you. No. My husband’s the bad one in my family. He got sent over three years ago, but they say he’s behaved himself since then, and they’ve given him his yellow ticket. It means I can join him and we can try starting a new life, in a place where the sun always shines.’
‘That sounds good,’ I said. ‘You must be looking forward to it.’
‘There’s good bits and bad bits,’ she said. ‘I don’t think much of my husband. We never got along and, to tell the truth, I was pretty glad he got transported. I had my doubts about coming here, but I’m hoping he’ll leave me, once I’ve delivered some cash to his pockets. Then I’ll be free to set up business on my own.’
I tried to hide my shock. ‘What business will you set up?’ I asked, imagining a shop or a haberdashery or something of that sort.
She shook her head. ‘I had my own bawdy house in England,’ she told me, as though this weren’t something to be ashamed of. ‘A fine trade it did, too. I’ve heard there’s a lot of need for such things across the sea. Not enough women to go round, and the men are being sent wild from it. Reckon I’ll have myself a nice little business in no time.’
I nodded because I could think of nothing to say.
The woman called herself Ma Dwyer and the things she said about her husband shocked me, and made me angry, though I tried my best to fight it, for my own sake. I did not wish to become ill. But I had little regard for such a couple as they appeared to be, when my own husband had been a good, kind man, whom I had loved dearly and lost so cruelly.
‘Your father’s crime is not your own, Rose,’ he said to me when he found out. ‘You knew nothing about it, and have been badly betrayed. We will find a way to manage, though without your dowry, you must be prepared for a smaller house and a harder life than you have been used to until now.’
I wept with relief. We said nothing about my father’s arrest, but of course there was no escaping it. It was emblazoned across the newspapers for several days, and there was an outcry in the village, along with demands that our home be surrendered and the money from its sale paid as a fine. Later, after his trial, my father was forced to relinquish his money, but not our home, because he had already transferred it to his brother’s name, in case something like this should ever happen.
We were married quickly. There were plenty of people who called this folly, but Will called it love. His father helped us raise the money to buy a small cottage in the country, in a village far enough away from where I’d grown up for no one to know who I was. Will worked hard to keep us, and I cared for our home as if it had been a palace. A year after we married, our son, Jack, was born, and another year later, Clara came along, too, and I was as happy as I’d ever been. I had no need of wealth or splendour. A busy, happy home was enough for me.
But two years later, I had our twins – small and weak. When they were just three months old, there came a cholera outbreak in the village. It had begun in the town, as these things always did – sent up from the filth of the street dwellers, and passed on. We were deeply afraid. We kept our family indoors, and stuck cardboard over the letter box and the cracks in the doors to keep the illness away. Everyone was surviving well, and just as we dared to hope the cholera was on its way out, it found its way into our cottage and struck baby Maxwell, and then it struck his father, too, and both were dead within a week.
I thought my grief might kill me. It was violent and tumultuous, and kept me in bed for days. The most important thing was to make sure they had proper church burials, so I used all our savings to pay for them, and then I was broke, and Will’s parents said they could no longer help me, as they had given all they had to help us when we married. I tried my hardest to keep hold of our home but, as time went on, there was little I could do except sell the cottage and find work in order to survive. Leaving my children was the biggest heartache of my life, and yet, when I wept, my employers accused me only of hysteria and madness.
And now I was here, on a prison ship, a gentlewoman among the coarse and the wretched, little knowing how I should ever find my way home again.
12
; Well, the ship went on sailing, and the days went on passing, and the days come to be weeks and the weeks come to be months, and everything was always the same. The same old smell, the same old jobs, the same old feelings of bleak in our hearts for them ones of us what hadn’t took emselves sailors or officers to love.
It was Ma Dwyer I spent my days with, as much as I could, because even though she was a gadje lady, she was a kushti one and come with a lot of kindness about her, and I wasn’t the sorta girl to turn my back on kindness, just because it come from the gadje. I reckoned my Gypsy folk’d probably of understood that, considering these was particular circumstances of a particular sorry sort.
We spent our nights together, too, me and Ma Dwyer, because Katie-May’d gone off with the sailor, and I ain’t too proud to admit to getting sad and afraid in them hours of night what was full up of the snoring and moaning and wailing and groaning of convicts. And Ma Dwyer was a kushti sorta person to hold on to, because there was a lot of her, and although it ain’t always comfy, holding on to a big person in a hammock, it give me a feeling of being safe and that was all what I wanted.
Sometimes, though, I used to wake up before morning’d come, and I’d find myself on my own, for all what I’d fell asleep with Ma Dwyer right next to me. And then I’d worry a while about where she’d gone and what’d happened to her. But the next day, when the bell rung to get us all outta bed, she’d be there again, sleeping soft beside me, and it’d make me wonder if maybe I’d dreamed her away in the night, after all.
So the mornings kept coming round and we hadn’t got ourselves no sight of no land for longer than I could remember, and it made me feel strange inside to only be looking at the sea for ever. Once, on the day we finished off sewing the ship her new set of sails, I said to one of the sailors, ‘How far does this sea go?’
‘As far as you can see, until you reach the shore,’ he said, what wasn’t much of a satisfactory sorta answer in my opinion.
Now the new sails was all sewn we was back to our old duties of deck-scrubbing and pot-washing. One afternoon, when the sun was roasting that top deck and making us sweat like a whole lot of cows and horses, Katie-May went and stopped for a minute, just so’s she could catch her breath back, and one of the sailors looked at her and smiled in an understanding sorta way. ‘Hard work, ain’t it?’ he said.
And she smiled back at him, a weak sorta smile, because I s’pose with all the work she was having to do all night as well there wasn’t a lot of energy left in the bones of poor Katie-May. ‘Yes,’ she said.
And truly, that was all what’d gone on – nothing more than a couple of words and a watery sorta smile – when sudden outta nowhere come Katie-May’s own sailor man, and he took her by the collar and dragged her off to where no one could see her, but we could hear him bellowing at her, loud as a lion and no less fierce, neither.
When she come back after that, she didn’t speak much. She just kept her eyes on the deck and went on cleaning. But I could see her shoulders was shaking with sobbing, and I knew then that these was proper sorta tears, and not just the sort to go catching a man with.
We did get to see land again, sooner than we was meant to. The ship got itself some sorta problem – one what I didn’t much understand – and had to stop off somewhere in Africa a few days while it got sorted out and mended.
Africa was hot, and not just hot like the summers was in England. It was hot enough to bake a girl’s skin and then keep on baking her till she’d got burned on the inside, too. There wasn’t no escaping that heat. The bottom deck got hotter and hotter till you reckoned you’d suffocate with just taking yourself one breath, but the top deck wasn’t much easier, neither, because the sun up there’d beat your body to blisters.
Ma Dwyer said, ‘Stay on the top with me, Miriam. If we find the right crew men to ask, maybe they’ll let us go for a swim.’
Well, that was a kushti-sounding idea to me, though of course I couldn’t swim, but the thought of wading through all that clear-looking sea water give me the sorta feeling in my heart like what I reckoned drunkards got when they was promised more beer. So me, Ma Dwyer and Katie-May took ourselves up to the top deck and sat there among the sails, because they was a good sorta shade for us, and if ever the wind did blow a bit, they give us a nice feeling like we was getting fanned or something.
The sailors and crew men was busy with ropes and anchors and longboats and rigging and such, and Ma Dwyer was keeping her eye out for the sailor she wanted to ask about us going for a walk in the sea when, all of a sudden, one of the other convict girls what’d been resting nearby us let out such a scream, I reckoned there must’ve been a shark or a sea monster swimming about the ship.
Well, the sight what we saw was even more of a frightening one than sharks and monsters, and pretty well everyone was watching it with their mouths hanging open, even the lady Ma Dwyer’d told me about, what’s name was Rose and what got special treatment because of being a better class of person than what we was. She was staring hard and looking shocked about her face at the ship coming in beside us, full up to bursting with creatures what looked a bit like they was human beings, but their skin was so dark and their hair so black, and they was chained up in irons with such misery about their faces, it was impossible not to think as they’d just been took from outta hell itself. I wondered if that was how I was gonna end up in the next life, if I didn’t take a bit more notice of all my religious learning, so I made myself a vow right there and then that I was gonna start saying my prayers and believing proper in the Lord.
I looked at Ma Dwyer because the fear’d took hold of me so hard, I was needing some help with steadying myself.
‘Slaves,’ she muttered. ‘Getting took to America.’
They was a noisy crowd – all of em shouting and crying and screaming, even worse than the convicts down in the bottom decks. And a lot of em’d got sores round their mouths and was shining with sweat, and I couldn’t much bear to look at em, so I turned my face away and started praying hard to the Lord to keep me from turning into a creature of that sorry and frightening sort.
13
Because I was spared the hard work that the other convicts had to carry out, the sailors and officers often brought me their sewing, and it was my job to repair any holes in their uniforms or their socks. It was monotonous work, of course, but preferable to scrubbing the decks, and I was able to sit and do it quietly in the afternoons when Arabella was asleep, or in the mornings when she could sit on my lap and I could show her how it was done. She was still too young for it, but it was a skill that would serve her well in future, and there was little else to do on the ship. Most of the time, Arabella and I stayed on deck with the other officers, and she was kept entertained by those of them who were missing the children they’d left behind. She and I would also stroll along the top deck when the weather was fine – which it always was now we were sailing off Africa – though we had to block our ears to the jealous and vulgar cries of those convicts who believed we were being given special treatment. I suspected Ma Dwyer of having done more than a little resentful gossiping about me, and I was easy to spot because Oliver had excused me from wearing the brown smock I’d been given when I first came on board. I was allowed to wear my grey governess’s dresses instead. I’d despised them when working for the Murrays, but now I was grateful.
There were some suspicions on board that one of the young convict girls might have found herself with child. She’d been very quiet and pale for the last few days, and also quite ill. I had seen her several times, taking deep breaths of fresh air on the top deck, before leaning overboard and surrendering to the sickness. She was usually fine a few hours later, but sick again the next day. It was a condition I recognized and, although my heart recoiled at her behaviour, I did feel sorry for her – she looked quite out of her depth, despite the world from which she came. She was barely more than a child herself, and when she passed me in the dining room one evening, I reached out and said, ‘Hello.’
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She gave me a thin smile. ‘Hello.’
‘How are you feeling?’
She shrugged, and said nothing.
Two of the sailors, who had been sitting on the chairs near by stood up and made their way to the top deck, so I motioned to the girl that we should sit down. ‘Would you like some water?’ I asked.
She shook her head, but took a seat.
‘Where is your mother?’ I asked.
‘Dead,’ she said. ‘Been dead almost all my life.’
I said, ‘Where did you live before coming here?’
‘Newcastle.’
‘With your family?’
‘No, ma’am. I haven’t got no family. I was on the streets.’
She didn’t speak with the accent I’d have expected from someone from that part of the world, and I said so. She said, ‘I’ve lived a lot of places. That was just the last place.’
We carried on talking for a while, and she told me she’d been sent here for house-breaking and stealing gold watches and silk scarves.
‘Are you quite alone?’ I asked.
‘I come with my friend. The one what burgled with me. But she’s down in the bottom deck.’
‘Is she alone, too?’
‘Yes, ma’am. She had a mother when I first knew her, but she died of the cholera, just before Christmas.’
I couldn’t help it. My heart hardened at that. I remembered the last days of my husband’s life, and my infant son’s – how they suffered from the disease that poured into towns and villages because of the wretches that came out of the slums, passing their filth on to others. My father used to say that the people who lived in those parts of town were sunk to such a state of degradation that no high idea could ever penetrate their minds, and that they believed themselves doomed to a life of wretchedness and crime. He said they would be better off being shipped to America, as bondsmen like the Negroes. He abhorred that campaigners believed slavery so immoral. The slaves were looked after and given better lives than Britain’s poor. They were taught the virtues of hard work and Christian faith.
The Night Flower Page 7
